#2: Your Money or Your Life
The Backpacking Trip That Got Away
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Pursuit. I spend over 10 hours each week learning about building great products and living fulfilling lives. I created "Pursuit" to share these discoveries with a larger community and connect with others who share similar interests.
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This week’s discovery:
🎧 The Importance of a Healthy Diet
📖 Five Steps to Starting Your PLG Motion
🎧 Optimizing Life for Maximum Fulfillment
📖 In Defense of the Unoptimized Life
🎧 Finding Inner Calm
The Importance of a Healthy Diet
Our food choices can have a profound impact on our health and longevity. Sleep and exercise are important, but diet is the most important fact in terms of sheer size and scale.
5 basic rules to improve your gut health:
Eat a more diverse range of plants every week: Aim for 30 different plants per week, including nuts, seeds, herbs, and spices.
Eat the rainbow: Consume brightly colored foods containing various nutrients and fiber, as well as defense chemicals called polyphenols, which are beneficial for gut health.
Regularly consume fermented foods: This can include yogurt, cheese, kefir, kombucha, sauerkraut, kimchi, and miso. Eating small amounts every day can increase gut diversity and reduce inflammation.
Give your gut microbes a break: Limit eating to a 10-hour window and give your gut microbes 14 hours of rest time to repair the gut lining and increase gut diversity and overall health.
Consume purer forms of chocolate, coffee, and wine in small amounts: These foods contain beneficial properties for gut health, but it is important to consume them in their purest form and in small amounts.
Reducing meat consumption is the most important thing we can do to combat climate change. Fish is not as beneficial as people think and is an environmental disaster. Fake fish is a big problem, and large fish can contain mercury.
🎧 60-min
Five Steps to Starting Your PLG Motion
PLG is your best bet if your product primarily targets prosumers (e.g. Evernote, Dropbox) or SMBs (e.g. Mailchimp, GoDaddy). More so, PLG is probably the only viable way to grow efficiently given the low average customer value and large user base.
📖 16-min
Optimizing Life for Maximum Fulfillment
The speaker is reflecting on a conversation with his old roommate, who went on a backpacking trip in Europe while he stayed behind to focus on his career. He regrets not joining his roommate on the trip and not embracing the idea that certain experiences belong in certain periods of life. He also mentions reading a book called "Your Money or Your Life" that helped him understand the concept of exchanging time for money and the importance of considering opportunity costs when making decisions. He mentions the idea of "net fulfillment" and how people perceive and articulate what will bring them the most fulfillment in terms of experiences. People often get caught up in the abstraction of working to make money and survive and forget about the things they want and when the best time for certain experiences is.
I found this podcast episode to be particularly profound and had to pause multiple times to bookmark certain segments. While I recommend listening to the entire episode, I've included the parts that resonated most with me for those who may not have time to listen in full.
Your Money or Your Life - 🎧 3-min
The Importance of Time - 🎧 1-min
The Difference Between Fear and Risk Tolerance - 🎧 2-min
Are You on Autopilot? - 🎧 2-min
How would you socialize without having a job? 🎧 3-min
How to Give Money Away Thoughtfully - 🎧 2-min
In Defense of the Unoptimized Life
This article truly resonated with me, despite being thought-provoking and even challenging at times. Having your values challenged continuously is important, and this piece did just that. I highly recommend reading it.
When we focus too hard on being a little better every day, we destroy the ability to be inspired. We get so caught up in the daily grind, in the pursuit of the next step of the ladder, that we miss the point of being. I think the default state of life is that we will get filled up with small things. Whether small productivity improvements or minor inconveniences, it doesn’t matter. Either take away our chance to focus on something more.
📖 5-min
Finding Inner Calm
Isn't it amazing when things just seem to fall into place? This week, I had a bit of a tough day at work, but the very next day, one of my good friends called me to tell me all about his amazing experience at a Vipassana retreat, which he highly recommended. And, as if that wasn't enough, this great episode also landed in my inbox. I love it when things align like that!
How Do We Deal With Our Emotions? - 🎧 4-min
The Negative Seeds of Self-Hatred - 🎧 1-min
The Art of Forgiveness - 🎧 3-min
Tunes for your 👂🏼s:
Music can bring good vibes to your life, making it feel oh-so-fulfilling. It's not always about getting better and better; sometimes, it's just about feeling good and grooving to the beat. You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, and Organic Electronic here 👇🏼
I would love to hear from you! If you could take a moment to leave a comment and let me know which part of this week's edition resonated with you the most, it would be greatly appreciated. Your feedback will help me better understand and serve this community. Thank you! ♥️