Do the Opposite #47 - How to Stick to Your Own Rules, Zero Waste Life, Change Your Closet, Death on Mars

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How to Stick to Your Own Rules

I want to share with you one of my experiments that worked! In the past few months I've been drinking too much coffee at work. Coffee is very good there, and what's even better (you guessed it): it's free. So I would drink 4-5 coffees a day. That didn't have a good effect on my stomach: coffee is too acidic and I end up having heartburn and light gastritis symptoms.

I've decided then to not be such a willpower weakling and to make a rule for myself: I would drink only one coffee per day in the early morning and then drink water or tea later on in the day. That, however, while being a good intention, absolutely did not work.

I would come to work full of hope and commitment to be good and to follow my own rule. I would quickly finish the first coffee and then rationalize why I needed another one: "I've drank the first one too quickly at a meeting and didn't have the time to enjoy it", "It's still so early - why don't I have another one in an hour from now", "What's the harm in having 2 coffees? It's almost the same as having one". I'd always find a way to slide into my usual ways.

Here's what made me stick to the rule! In the beginning of this year I've filled out my Bullet Journal with various sections and one of them is "Personal Rules". When I've grown tired of my "coffee negotiations", I've written "I only drink one coffee per day, maximum.".

Then something unexpected (to me) happened. Next time I wanted to rationalize drinking a second cup, something stopped me. Like a mental block. I think it's the knowing that if I did get another cup, I would be contradicting to what I myself wrote in that notebook.

I know this sounds simple but I've never had a day after that when I had more than one coffee. The example in my case is trivial but it's one of these little habits that make up our life and health.

Extrapolate it to your own use case. Struggling with eating too many sweets after lunch? Making yourself promises to use stairs and ending up on a smooth escalator/elevator ride? Write your intentions down and see what happens!

TL;DR: How to stick to your own rules? Write them down!

P.S. Report back with your results - I would love to hear what habits you are working on! (just reply to this email)

Articles

1) "Give it Five Minutes" by Jason Fried

A great piece of advice from Jason for the hotheads among us. Anger and frustration can do a lot of damage to your personal relationship and career, if you allow yourself knee-jerk responses and emails. Take a little break or a walk before reacting to a passive-aggressive remark or negative comment. Often these seem such on the first read-through, but after taking a pause are found to be harmless.

2) "Death on Mars" by Caleb A. Scharf

This article was written in response to Elon Musk's tweets about his ambitious plans for Mars colonization. While it's a bold dream, there are some problems with actually 'living' on Mars that we still have to find solutions for. One of them is radiation and how we can protect the first Martian Earthlings from it.

3) "How Science Fiction Imagined the 2020s" by Tim Maughan

If you like science-fiction, thinking about the future, about what life and the society is going to be like in 2050 or 2080, here's an amazing article that puts some things in perspective. It explores, as the title says, the differences and similarities between how science fiction authors imagined life in 2020s would look like, and what it's actually like. Gloomy, nerve-racking, exciting, fun, good, bad and ugly future of the books is our reality.


Videos
I recommend you watch videos at 1.5X speed to save time :)

1) More Adventures in Replying to Spam | James Veitch

Watch this one and it is guaranteed to put a smile on your face! All of us regularly receive spam in one form or another, usually by email. Here's what happens if you start conversing with the spammer.

2) Change Your Closet, Change Your Life | Gillian Dunn

What's percentage of your wardrobe do you wear regularly? Gillian bets that you wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time (another nice Pareto's principle sighting in the wild). More than that: do you have a set of plates you reserve for special occasions? Do you own a candle that you've never lit? You will definitely enjoy and benefit from Gillian's talk!

3) Why I Live a Zero Waste Life | Lauren Singer

Lauren leads a lifestyle which produces practically zero waste. We all know how important ecology and caring about our Planet is, but what are we, as individuals, doing to make it better? If not better, than hopefully "less worse", minimizing the damage humanity deals to the environment.

I know living like that is a bit much to most of us (at least for now), but that's not the point. If we want to make changes on a global scale, we must start with the habits and lifestyle of every person, and each habit in our lives that we transform toward a more ecologically-friendly one, the better. These changes compound throughout society, as people share what they are up to and why they're doing that with their friends, family, coworkers and communities.

These tiny actions that expand and compound is the way all change works at scale. How did we ALL start using mobile phones so quickly (took about a decade)? At first there were some people who were getting them for fun, to play around with. Then their friends saw these and wanted to get one. It didn't take much for the network effect to catch on — now mobile phones are everywhere, and there's a high chance you are reading this from one.

That's the power of a small change you can make. You might think that using real plates at your birthday party over plastic or paper ones doesn't matter on a grand scale of things, but it is such actions that will save us.

Tweet of the Week

Ethos

Quotes

"You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than a year of conversation."
— Plato

"Culture eats strategy for breakfast."
― Peter Drucker

"People often overestimate what they can accomplish in one year. But they greatly underestimate what they could accomplish in five years."
― Peter Drucker

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Keep doing the opposite,
Alex Kallaway
Website: dotheoppo.site
Twitter: twitter.com/ka11away