It's Cutting Season

Ferg's Focus Vol. 19

Author

Charles Ferguson
February 12th, 2024

Welcome back, everyone. It’s been a couple of months since the last Ferg’s Focus went out. Thanks for staying on board in the interim.

If you know me personally, you’ll know I’m a bit of a health nerd—and a proud one at that. I find it fun to experiment with the always-fresh “optimization” doctrine being touted online. Some could say that cold therapy and avoiding coffee for 90 minutes after waking up have replaced fad diets like paleo and low-carb.

These lifestyle insights are only helpful insofar as how much we question the validity of them. Personal health is not objective. There are certain daily practices, nutrition structures, and training regimens that work more for some than for others. Taking them at face value would be much simpler, yet foolish. The key is to test these different protocols and use only what works for you to construct your own long-term health philosophy.

Unfortunately, there is too much influence on our health optimization and not enough on managing information and stimulus. That’s where this edition of Ferg’s Focus comes in.

Consume Less, Think More

I had it all wrong. More information doesn’t yield more learning, at least not linearly. This is a proposal for slower information consumption.

All you have to sacrifice is bragging rights as to who listened to more minutes of Huberman Lab on Spotify Wrapped.

Mental Obesity: Gluttony for the Information Age

“Learning is not as simple as just reading or watching an interesting piece of information though. If it were, then consuming as much information as possible would be the ultimate goal—a belief that a certain sect of the productivity-obsessed community preaches. This is incorrect.

The means to a result are more important than the result itself.

The value of finishing a marathon is to learn how to prevail amid rigorous physical and mental challenges—not to slap a 26.2 sticker on a car.

The goal of improving health is to learn life-long habits to feel stronger and think clearer—not to hit a number on the scale or pop top at the beach.

The point of reading a good book is to learn something for future application—not to increase an arbitrary count from 19 to 20 for the year...”

High-Octane Fuel or Bust

Evaluate the quality of information like an elite athlete does with the quality of food:

The average healthy individual recognizes when food consumption is too close to overwhelming energy expenditure.

This type will typically respond by increasing activity output to overtake the food input. In other words, they exercise harder to eat more.

However, the high-performance athlete knows how to intentionally use input to optimize output.

The food becomes a precise source of energy, and anything unclean will surely disrupt future performance.

In most circles of life, average performers use output to justify input; high performers use input to justify output.

One Visit is Too Many

I was pleased to see my work published again over the holidays. Thank you to Intrepid Times for sharing my latest travel narrative, this one taking place on the hellish island of Chiloé.

The full story is linked below.

Haunted by Hitchhiking on Chiloé

“The island’s mythology extends to include tales of salacious trolls impregnating women (used as a scapegoat for male infidelity), seductive sirens driving islanders to insanity, and a ghost ship manned by a crew of drowned fishermen and soldiers who have been carried to the vessel via a magic seahorse. 

I had successfully managed not to stumble into any satanic rituals so far; instead, the only things that had haunted me on Chiloé were my hitchhiking failures and a bus ticket I paid three different times for the same ride…”

Thanks once again for reading Ferg’s Focus! My goal is to continue using uncomfortable experiences to learn and share meaningful lessons and insights about the world beyond the small bubble of predictability at home. To support this newsletter and its corresponding stories you can buy me a coffee (see footer), or share this newsletter with a friend via the link below.

Until the next,

-Ferg

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