Category: Life

How do you define wealthy?

When I was 13, I remember a friend telling me that his dad earned £30,000 per year. I remember this because, to me, his family was wealthy. My friends dad was a contractor and had people working for him, they had a new fast car, a large detached house, and my friend had all the fashionable clothes like a Helley Henson Puffer Jacket and a Kickers Boat shoes (it was the 90s). Growing up, In my head, £30,000 per year was what you needed to earn to be well off in the towns of rural England. It was my mental benchmark for the income level for a good life, where you did not have to worry about money.

Corrected for inflation £30,000 in 1998 is now equivalent to around £47,000, which is more than 86% of UK earners. For context, the average University Lecturer (including Lecturer and Senior Lecturer) earns just over £45,000 per year (84th percentile), and the average individual UK income is £24,400 (50th percentile). High income is considered to be the top 5% of earners at £76,800 per year.

The estimated take-home pay (‘disposable income’) for someone earning £47,000 after Income tax and national insurance is £35,600 or just under £3,000 per month.

An introduction to persuasive writing

Most of the time, we try to make writing complicated or create an outline without considering the outcome we are trying to achieve. Next time you write something, try and first think about what you want the reader to do with the information and put it at the top of the page. 

Next, try to limit your writing to the three most critical points that the reader needs to know to take that action. Keeping the number of points to three helps the reader remember them, keeps your writing concise, and makes you spend time doing more in-depth analysis on what matters. Note down the three points and supporting evidence as bullet points in an order that flows.

Good ideas ought not to be dressed up in bad prose.

Barbara Minto

Once you have the call to action and the main points written down as notes, turn them into full sentences. You can use Grammarly to help you with your language and polish the piece without spending much time on editing. Evaluate the work once it is written to make sure it fulfils the original purpose of making the reader take action, if not, revisit your three points and make them stronger.

Great wirting is talking edited

Steve Crescenzo

Use a final read-through to read it out loud and pick up any issues with flow. If it is easy for you to read it out loud, then it will be easy for someone to read it in their head. Correct anything you need to, and then you are done.

The four simple steps to writing persuasive arguments

  1. Put down what you want the reader to do 
  2. note the three most important things the reader needs to understand to take that action 
  3. Write 
  4. Ask yourself: If I was the reader, would I take action based on what is written? 

Free markets, Liberalism, and Moral Hazard

Over the last few years, there has been a rise in trading platforms that allow affordable access to financial markets for regular working people. Over the last year, many more people have joined these platforms to trade while furloughed or working from home. Trading stocks and bonds were once expensive and carried out through a third-party with large commissions, but the internet has made it possible to learn about what to buy and sell and then execute these trades with minimal costs. 

However, this week, financial companies and independent traders had clashed when a hedge fund attempted to make a risky bet against an American high-street retailer. Melvin Capital decided that GameStop stock was overvalued and made an enormous bet that it would reduce in value. A group of individual traders on a Reddit subforum coordinated an effort to buy this stock, raising the price significantly and costing Melvin Capital billions of dollars.

It is not clear who the winners and losers are yet as Fidelity and BlackRock already owned large numbers of GameStop shares, other hedge funds also bet against the retailer and lost heavily. Additional funds will have profited in the chaos. What is clear is that government intervention into trading is likely to result from the situation. If they choose to protect the risk-taking financial institutions, this may hurt the recent increase in individuals accessing the stock market and encourage these financial institutions’ risk-taking. 

Free markets

A free market allows the voluntary exchange of goods and services, guided by supply and demand, without government intervention. People are free to trade with whoever and whenever they want and produce goods based on what people want to buy at a cost that allows them to make an income. In a real free market, government intervention is restricted to protecting personal property rights, upholding the rule of law, and maintaining the national currency’s value. 

The current systems in most western countries, however, are not pure free-market systems. Governments intervene to regulate and provide insurance to prevent large adverse outcomes and maintain stability. They prevent individual companies in a market from becoming too big to promote innovation and competition. Governments also provide some public goods and services such as education, roads, a national military, and police. They redistribute wealth, and they correct for externalities that are not priced in production such as pollution.   

Most people agree that a pure free-market system is not desirable. Some government intervention is positive, mainly to help those who find themselves in a negative situation for no fault of their own. For example, most western countries provided universal healthcare free at the point of use and paid for through general taxation. It is hard to argue against giving healthcare to people who needed it without the worry of direct costs; however, government involvement can produce a lack of competition, so the system’s quality and efficiency may suffer. 

Liberalism

There is a lot of debate in politics about how much intervention is needed, and the negative consequences of a particular intervention are more significant than the benefits it brings. The promise of liberalism, according to The Economist newspaper that was set up to promote free-market ideas, is the commitment to individual dignity, open markets, limited government and a faith in human progress. However, the criticism of liberalism is that although it has been the most successful political approach in history, the benefits have been distributed unevenly. The uneven distribution and lack of dignity for many groups have led to significant government intervention in all areas of peoples lives, from increased regulation that limits freedom, restrictions on speech and so ideas, and taxation that creates distorted incentives and outcomes. 

Much of this intervention has created positive outcomes, providing the promise of liberalism to a more significant number of people and balancing some of the inequalities created by a somewhat free market. A significant negative consequence, however, is that of moral hazard.

Moral Hazard: In economics, moral hazard occurs when an entity has an incentive to increase its exposure to risk because it does not bear the full costs of that risk.

Wikipedia

An oversimplified description of Moral hazard is enjoying the positive consequences of your actions while passing the adverse effects on others. This increased risk-taking level is not always deliberate, but the presence of insurance can lead to a flawed calculation of risks involved. It may also occur when the entity taking the risk understands the situation more than the entity paying the cost of the consequences or evaluating the risks being taken.

To use our previous example, some critics of universal healthcare argue that the state’s health insurance may encourage some people to be less concerned with their health and make poor decisions around diet, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption. The same people make arguments about longterm welfare benefits making returning to work less attractive or financially rewarding, leading to a loss of purpose and dignity. Moral hazard can be seen in the workplace where people are rewarded through bonuses for successes but have no direct consequences for losses, leading to excessive risk-taking. At the national level, as we saw in the banking crisis in 2008, some financial companies take on very high levels of risk, profiting when it goes right and relying on government bailouts when it goes wrong.

Moral hazard and Melvin Capital

Both the US and UK financial regulatory agencies have commented about the instability caused by the Malvin Capital and Game Stop situation. Some financial leaders have uncharacteristically been calling for regulation to prevent the problem from happening again. What happens next with regulation is essential for delivering on the promise of liberalism to all and for moral hazard. 

Will western governments live up to the liberal ideal and protect retail investors’ right to trade and benefit from markets or will they act on the side of risk-taking billionaire hedge funds reinforcing moral hazard and setting the economy up for even more significant problems in the future?

Regulators may move to restrict the way individuals are allowed to trade to protect the risk-taking of financial companies in the name of stability and protecting these individuals against themselves and the chance of losses if they bought GameStop the peak at $469.24 hoping to make money, but this misses the point. This action called the bluff of a hedge fund taking a risk that they believed no one would question. Regulators should continue to allow this type of activity that caused short term volatility for the long term stability it will bring. 

Strength Standards and Assessments

I am currently reading Dan John’s excellent book Interventions. Dan John is one of the worlds top strength and conditioning coaches and presents his ideas in easy to understand and entertaining ways (think Yoda with dad jokes). The book lays out Dan’s approach when first working with a client, by first identifying a goal, then assessing where they are now, finally finding the shortest route between them.

A foundation for strength and conditioning, ideally developed at school and before 18 years old should contain the following:

  • The kettlebell foundation: Swing, Goblet Squat, Getup—  
  • The Barbel foundation: Military Press, Front Squat, Power Clean, Bench Press 
  • General Movement and mobility: Hurdle Walkovers, Farmer Walks, Cartwheels, Forward Rolls, Tumbling, Shoulder Rolls
  • Final stage: Deadlift, Back Squat, Sled Work, Prowlers and Car Pushes 

Dan also recommends that everyone should learn to swim, ride a bike and tumble and play as many sports, games, and movements as possible. These are skills that you learn once should stay with you for life. If you cannot do anything listed so far, that is what you need to work on before moving on.

For most people, those who are not professional athletes or special forces soldiers, their focus needs to move to keep the body as young as possible for as long as possible. Building and maintaining lean body mass (less fat and more muscle) and joint mobility should be the focus. The challenge is to do what you need to do in the gym rather than what you want to do. You can use two tools to keep you focused on what you need to do; a coach and constant assessment. You should assess mobility via the Functional Movement Screen (FSM) or alternative once every six weeks and assess strength every two months.

Absolute strength is the glass. Everything else is the liquid inside the glass. The bigger the glass, the more of everything else you can do.

Brett Jones

Dan provides some strength standards for enough strength so that strength is never the limiting factor in any physical pursuit. The standards are relative to bodyweight and so are extremely relevant to endurance athletes like runners, cyclists, and triathletes. It is tough to get big and lean if endurance athletes eat intelligently and programming strength and conditioning on building strength rather than size, they will find that they end up leaner and faster than those that skip weights in fear of putting on size.

The book Interventions list the six fundamental human movements, push, pull, hinge, squat, loaded carry, and the sixth movement (everything else). A good strength and conditioning programme should include all six of these movements and target achieving the expected standards in each of the exercises first, and then working towards the gamechanger standards.

Dan John’s strength standards for men

  1. Push 
    1. Expected = Bodyweight bench press
    2. Game-changer = Bodyweight bench press for 15 reps 
  2. Pull
    1. Expected = 8–10 pullups
    2. Game-changer = 15 pullups
  3. Squat 
    1. Expected = Bodyweight squat
    2. Game-changer = Bodyweight squat for 15 reps
  4. Hinge
    1. Expected = Bodyweight to 150% bodyweight deadlift
    2. Game-changer = Double-bodyweight deadlift 
  5. Loaded Carry
    1. Expected = Farmer walk with total bodyweight (half per hand) 
    2. Game-changer = Bodyweight per hand 
  6. Getup: One left and right, done with a half-filled cup of water

For those of us who like to challenge ourselves with endurance events, the overwhelming message from top coaches including Dan John, Charles Poliquin, Percy Cerutty, and Pavel Tsatsouline, is a solid base of strength is essential to performance, health, and injury prevention. Start working towards the ‘expected’ standards for strength at a minimum and have a long term plan to reach the game-changer standards and you will find that strength is never the limiting factor in any physical activity you do.

Dan John has a weekly newsletter, a weekly youtube Q&A, many excellent books (I would start with 40 years with a whistle) and articles, and a workout generator website that allows you to enter the equipment you have available and the days per week you want to train, and it will provide you with a strength programme.

You can find the extended standards with regressions for additional milestones and the woman’s benchmarks on Dan’s website.

Efficiency and effectiveness


According to the Oxford languages site (the one Google search uses for definitions), efficient comes from the Latin efficere meaning ‘‘accomplish‘. It is defined as ‘achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expense..’

Efficiency is the (often measurable) ability to avoid wasting materials, energy, efforts, money, and time in doing something or in producing a desired result. In a more general sense, it is the ability to do things well, successfully, and without waste

Wikipedia

Oxford languages define effective as ‘successful in producing a desired or intended result.’ It comes from the same Latin word efficere meaning ‘‘accomplish‘. 

Effectiveness is the capability of producing a desired result or the ability to produce desired output. When something is deemed effective, it means it has an intended or expected outcome, or produces a deep, vivid impression.

Wikipedia

In a world full of people chasing efficiency, be a person who is effective.

The moving University; Learning on your commute

We have had snow here in Leicestershire, England. My wife has been using my car recently and asked me to drive her to and from work. It turns out that a 3-litre supercharged rear-wheel-drive car is not the easiest thing to navigate slippery roads. While driving home and then back again on my own, I got the chance to listen to an audiobook. 

I used to have a 40-minute commute that gave me 80-90 minutes five days per week. I don’t miss the commute, but I do miss this learning time. There is something about listening while driving particularly on regular routes when you are almost on autopilot. I still listen to audiobooks on the turbo trainer or while doing housework, but something about driving seems to help me retain the information. 

Audiobooks for myself and other listeners do not tend to replace reading but rather augments it. Nielsen Book and The Publishers Association suggest that audiobooks listeners tend to be those who do not read much such as 25-44-year-old urban-dwelling males or audio is used for convenience, and when print reading is impossible. Audiobooks, and podcasts, are an art in their own right and can be more engaging for reluctant, struggling, and developing readers as listening to a human voice provides a stronger emotional response.

The genuine love for reading itself, when cultivated, is a superpower.

Naval Ravikant

Research from the National Literacy Trust suggests that audiobooks benefit children’s reading skills and enjoyment by widening their access to books. Listening to the books performed, deepens their understanding of tone, pronunciation, accents, and dialect. Further studies on reading comprehension in adults found no statistically significant differences in comprehension and recall between audiobooks and text ebooks either immediately after reading or two weeks later. However, reading dead tree versions of books is has shown to be slightly better for understanding, but more research is needed to know why. This difference is possibly due to the visual cue of how far you are through a narrative not present with digital books, or that print words are located in a specific place on a page to help people remember it.

Learning with Audiobooks

  1. Listen at normal speed don’t speed it up to get through the book quicker, be selective in your reading, give you brain space to process the words, and enjoy the experiences. 
  2. Listen to selected parts such as the introduction and conclusion if the book is bloated, you don’t have to listen to the whole book.
  3. Use Audible across multiple devices – mobile, kindle, laptop app etc. and use the Wisperlight feature between an audiobook and kindle version.
  4. Make some notes or set a bookmark once it is safe. Write a book summary once you have finished. Recalling the ideas, and putting them down in a document helps you retain the information.
  5. Share what you learn and have a conversation about it to reflect on what you’ve learned. Playing with the ideas in different contexts helps you not just remember the information but better understand it.

The Worlds Poorest Need Money

GiveDirectly is a charity that gives money directly to people living in poverty. The non-profit believes that by giving these people cash instead of other forms of aid, they can make choices that improve their lives. GiveDirectly’s research suggests that instead of buying alcohol, these people purchase medicine, livestock, schooling, clean water, renewable energy generators, and some use the money to start businesses. With no strings attached, cash is better for people living in extreme poverty in the most deprived places in the world. It allows individuals to get what they need rather than rely on international organisations to make educated guesses based on national or regional needs. Allowing cash to be spent in local businesses has so far shown to improved the economy with very little inflation.

GiveWell is an independent non-profit that lists the most high-impact and cost-effective charities that save or improve lives. GiveWell suggests supporting cash transfers for extreme poverty through GiveDirectly is one of the nine most impactful ways you can donate. They report that $83 of every $100 donated goes directly to participants of the charities programmes and that research shows this money improves recipients lives. You can read a full report into the charities impact on the GiveWell website.

GiveDirectly’s funders and partners include UK Aid, USAID, Google.org, Givewell, Good Ventures, and The life you can save. Current cash transfer programmes include:

The Basic income project is the largest and longest-term Universal Basic Income (UBI) experiment globally and is run in partnership with researchers at MIT and Princeton University. The project is working in rural Kenya with 295 villages in the Western and Rift Valley region. There are four groups; a long term and a short term group that is given $0.75 per adult per day monthly for 12 years and two years, a lump sum group was assigned the same amount as the short term group but in a single one-off payment, and a control group. So far, the cash transfers recipients have shown improvements to well-being measures including hunger, sickness, and depression and have so far weathered the pandemic better than the control group. 

It is important to note that this is a study on the long-term effects of giving cash to people living in some of the world’s most impoverished areas and not studying how UBI might work in more prosperous regions like the UK. I am interested in the impact of the project, and I want to support it financially. The idea of giving money to those in extreme poverty over other types of aid makes sense intuitively, and I like that such a detailed study is being carried out to understand if this is a better way to end poverty.  

You can contribute to the project on the GiveDirectly website. Alternatively, you can donate to GiveWell’s Maximum Impact Fund, and they will give your money to where they believe it will help most.

Social norms

Social norms are incredibly impactful on our behaviour and happiness, and a person’s social network creates these. The impact of social norms can help us understand why people behave the way they do and have adverse outcomes counter to their goals. Deliberately cultivating your social network allows you to create social norms to help you live the life you want.  

Research carried out on the Framingham Heart Study, covering 12,000 people over 30 years found that obesity, smoking, and happiness levels appear to spread through social ties. The researchers wanted to know how social factors affected the spread of behaviours friends, siblings, spouse, and neighbours. The research found substantial impact, not only in a person’s immediate network but also across three degrees of separation in social networks. 

In the study of the spread of obesity, researchers found clusters of obesity that could not be explained by overweight people selectively choosing to be in networks with overweight individuals. The study suggested that your chances of becoming obese increase by 57% if you have a friend who becomes obese. The effects did not appear to be related to the levels of obesity in neighbours or people in the same geographical location. Interestingly the influence was more substantial when the social connection was with a person of the same sex than from someone of the opposite sex.

Follow up study looking at the person-to-person spread of smoking behaviour concluded that social ties had a similar effect on smoking. The study suggested that whole groups of people were quitting together, a person’s chances of quitting were improved by 67% if their spouse stopped, 25% if a friend stopped, and 34% if a coworker stopped smoking. Again, the effects did not seem to be impacted by neighbours. Education levels did affect smoking behaviour changes, clusters of more educated friends having more influence on each other.

The same researchers then used a subset of the data to ask if changes in happiness spread within social networks. The study found that an individual’s happiness depends on the happiness of people in their network. The effect was again seen up to three degrees of separation, meaning your happiness is impacted by the friends of your friends’ friends. Changes in happiness are affected by your social network within your immediate geographic location and are reduced time and geographical distance.

People around us have an enormous impact on our behaviour due to the social norms created by members of this group. Social norms are the collective behaviours we perceive as acceptable, both in the actions people in our social group show us and the group’s approval in reaction to that behaviour. If people in our friendship group normalise behaviours like weight gain, smoking, or happiness, then it changes how we think and what we feel we should do. This can help explain why some people find it hard to lose weight, save money or exercise even when they know it is the right thing to do and desperately what to do it. 

It is important to note that we are an active part of the social networks we belong to. We should make deliberate choices in all aspects of our lives to create social norms that align with what we want in life by selecting the groups of people we interact with most and our reactions to their behaviours. 

Thirteen tips for getting better sleep

I go through stages of having issues sleeping. I usually find it easy to go to sleep, but either dance around like a fish out of water or wake up between 2 am and 4 am and then don’t get back to sleep. If you sleep like a baby, ignore these and keep doing what you are doing, but one or more might help if you have issues like me.

  1. Have a sleep routine: go to bed and get up at the same time each day, even on weekends to take advantage of your natural circadian rhythm.
  2. Sleep for between six and nine hours every night: The amount of sleep you need is dependent on several factors, set a fixed wake-up time and move around your sleep time depending on how you feel each morning until you find the duration you need.
  3. Get as much sleep before midnight as possible: research suggests that this is when the best quality sleep happen. Set your bedtime between 9:30 and 11:00 pm.
  4. Get light outside for at least 30-60 minutes per day: Getting out right after you get up will help anchor your master clock that controls your circadian rhythm. A lack of Vitamin D affects sleep, so supplement if you don’t get exposed to a lot of sunshine, particularly in Winter.
  5. Don’t eat anything after 8 pm: Leaving time between eating and going to bed will allow your insulin levels to get back to normal.
  6. Have a wind-down routine: have a hot bath, write a todo list to get things out of your head, do some light relaxation stretches, listen to relaxing music, read a book (use a Kindle Oasis with no blue light)
  7. Avoid screens for at least an hour before you go to bed: blue light from screens will trick your brain into thinking it is daytime and make it harder to get to sleep.
  8. Don’t drink coffee after 1 pm: Caffeine can affect people for up to six hours after a coffee. If you can, only use coffee for those times when you need a cognitive boost.
  9. Make your bedroom a cave: keeping your bedroom dark, quiet, and at a cool temperature (between 18C and 24C) to help you get to sleep quicker.
  10. Eat more protein during the day and carbs at night: Protein is a mild stimulant and carbs activate the orexin pathway that makes you sleepy. 
  11. Take a ZMA supplement 30 minutes before sleep: The magnesium specifically aids sleep but prepare for some strange dreams the first few nights. 
  12. Exercise but not too much: Staying active throughout the day is essential for your general health and insulin responsiveness, but training twice per day or long and intense cardio sessions will negatively affect sleep. Consider regular movement breaks if you work at a desk all day and strength training three times per week between 3 an 6 pm.
  13. Track your sleep and monitor things that affect its quality: I wear my Garmin running watch at night to monitor my sleep duration and quality during periods where I don’t sleep well. I find I get good sleep duration but low quality with minutes of deep sleep in the single figures. Tracking your sleep will help you learn which of these tips you can ignore and which you need to follow.

Goal setting for inspiration

I have been reading Sir Chris Hoy’s ‘How to ride a bike’ over the last few days. The book is an excellent training manual that I highly recommend it for any cyclist. Hoy starts with the basics, including choosing a bike and road safety but quickly moves to training details. As one of the most successful British athletes of all time, winning Eleven World Championships and six Olympic gold medals, some training methods, such as the clown bike where Hoy would do short high cadence intervals at 320+ rpm are not for the faint of heart. There is no referenced research on the methods to satisfy the more geeky time trialist, but it makes it an easier read and Hoy was at the cutting edge for most of his career, and at the hight of British Cycling’s rise, so the methods have provenance.  

Later in the book, Hoy writes about setting and managing goals. He suggests setting a massive goal that you would love to do, that is a bit beyond you, and is a little scary such as riding a tour du France mountain stage in l’Etape du Tour or targetting a national age-group title. You can then spend time analysing precisely what is needed to achieve the goal and compare them to where you are. You can then create a ‘recipe for success’ planning out exactly what you need to do in your training, recovery, nutrition, and equipment to bridge the gap. Finally, Hoy quotes advice given to him by Chis Boardman, if you are not excited when you read through the plan, then rip it up and start again. 

The big goal acts as a motivation to carry out each day’s plan and develop discipline in your training. Hoy suggests you close your eyes, imagine doing something that excites and gives you goosebumps, then write it down, plan out how you can get there an, and then do it. 

How to choose and manage your cycling goals

  1. Choose a big scary goal so large that you are almost embarrassed to tell people. 
  2. Research and map out each aspect of what it will take to achieve the goal, such as a required power to weight ratio and equipment needs.
  3. Map out where you are now against the requirements to identify what you need to do.
  4. Create a long term plan to bridge the gap between where you are now and where you need to be.
  5. Create a detailed plan for the next four weeks.
  6. Execute the plan flawlessly, ‘controlling the controllable.’
  7. Review at the end of the four weeks to assess if the plan achieved the intended outcomes.
  8. Repeat steps 7-7 until the big scary goal is complete.