Good morning friends! 😀
This week has been quite hectic with work and also getting things sorted for Christmas. Thankfully, I think I have bought all my gifts for this year, which is a big stress off my shoulders now. 🎁
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So, I have just finished reading Atomic Habits by James Clear (affiliate link). Very late to the party, I know.
Without going all “self-development bro” on you in this article, I want to discuss one interesting idea I took from the book regarding how the environment can affect our habits.
James argues that relying on simple willpower is not the easiest nor the most sustainable way to build a new habit or break a bad one. He says that “environment often matters more.”
A good analogy from the book is how Europe and Asia experienced three times the agricultural growth over the centuries compared to Africa and the Americas.
The landmass of Europe and Asia is wide and thin, however, this is the opposite for Africa and the Americas. The climate conditions are more stable when going east-west than north-south. Just think about how different the temperature between Ottawa and California is.
As a result, Europeans grew more food and increased their population size, leading to larger armies and better technology. Of course, this is just a single reason why Europeans had better infrastructure than most of the world for a considerable amount of time.
The parable of this story is that the farmers in Africa and the Americas were probably not better than the farmers in Europe and Asia, it was simply their environment that allowed them to excel.
We can apply this concept ourselves to help us when starting or breaking a habit.
These are some of the ways I am priming my environment to help develop better habits and break some of my existing ones:
My book is now at my bedside to encourage me to read at night.
My YouTube gear is always out, which reduces the friction in filming a video.
Deleting social media apps from my phone to reduce ‘doom scrolling.’
Logging out of my blog, YouTube channel, and newsletter to avoid compulsively checking my stats.
I place my phone on the desk when going to bed, so when my alarm rings, I have to get out of bed to turn it off.
I encourage you to try some environmental tricks for any habits you are struggling to maintain. It’s really all about increasing ‘friction’ for bad habits and reducing it for good ones.
What’s Been Cooking 🥘
Some tasty stories this week:
DeepMind’s Gemini - The hottest story this week was Google’s DeepMind releasing their highly anticipated multimodal LLM, Gemini. The model appears very powerful having three different versions and beating the state-of-the-art models in 30 out of 32 benchmark tests.
AI Alliance - IBM, Meta, and numerous other organisations and universities have launched the AI Alliance to ensure AI safety.
Grok Available For X Premium Users - Grok, Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI LLM, has been integrated into X (formerly Twitter) for premium US users.
Weekly Favourites ❤️
📚 Book - We Are Bellingcat by Eliot Higgins. My current reading is about a group of internet sleuths using ‘open-source intelligence’ to investigate global events where the official story is not what it seems.
🎙️ Podcast - What Now? - Sam Altman. Pretty sure this is the first podcast that Sam Altman has done since the whole OpenAI fiasco. He is coy with many details regarding his controversial sacking, but is very forthcoming on his views on AI and where he sees OpenAI heading. An interesting listen.
🗞️ Newsletter - The Debug. My colleague Steve has recently launched a newsletter to share his 15+ years of experience as an engineer. What I really like about it, is that it's not solely focused on technical topics, but delves into the often-overlooked 'soft' skills and intangibles that are useful for successful engineers and managers
(PS: Some links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from with no extra cost to you 😎)
Great issue Egor! I think I will start doing this one too: "Logging out of my blog, YouTube channel, and newsletter to avoid compulsively checking my stats" haha