Week #3

Sleep can be a superpower

Welcome back, friends!

🤔 Philosophy

• Reasons and Persons: The case against the self (~15 minutes)

  “You want to go to Mars. There’s a machine that will scan and destroy all the matter in your body, send the locations of every atom to Mars, and then recreate it.

  Does this transport you to Mars? Or does it kill you, and create a new copy?”

😴 Sleeping Well

• Not drinking coffee at all

  When you sleep well, you don’t need it in the first place

• Working out before dinner but at least a couple of hours after lunch

  (extra productivity tip1)

• Waiting a couple of hours after dinner before lying down
• Scheduling 9 hours of sleep plus at least 30 minutes of bedtime

  You always turn off the screens later than you plan and sleep less than you plan, so schedule more ambitiously

• No screens during bedtime, books are good, music is better
• Waking up without any kind of alarm clock (maybe just natural light)

  If your lifestyle requires you to wake up at a certain time,

  • don’t try to naturally get into the habit of waking up at the same time without an alarm clock, you could lose all your progress in one night
  • instead, try to change your lifestyle so that you’re not required to wake up at a certain time anymore
  • in the meanwhile, use gentle alarm sounds (smart bulbs would be even better), snooze to allow yourself to wake up gradually (at most twice), and drink some water every time you snooze

💶 Finance

You don’t want to become one of the latter. In general, you want to make both decisions that are good for your present self and your future self.

When it comes to money, a great decision you can take when you’re young is to leverage all the time you have ahead by investing (no matter how little) and letting compound interest do its job. Your future self will thank you.

🎞 Movies I watched this week

• Contempt

  ⭐️ 3 /5

  Makes you ponder about irrationality. 60s photography, love it or hate it.

• Angel-A

  ⭐️ 4 /5

  Simple yet deep. Teaches how to find your inner self with a nice story and good photography too.

🛠 Projects I’ve been working on this week

• Yearbook NFT

  Imagine if, in high school or college, you and your friends could invest in each other. Maybe there will be people willing to pay very high to have a 1-hour conversation (or any other non-fungible activity) with you in 10 years. So we’ve been brainstorming about how we could make this work.

• Schollunch

  Every day at my school, after everyone has arrived, one of us walks through the classroom to take orders for the lunch from each of us, then gives it to the guys who make the sandwiches, who then bring us lunch at break time. With my classmates, we intend to make this process a bit smoother with a simple app. We were about to make a platform strictly specific to our high school when we realized we could make something that has the potential to scale too, something that could easily work for any school that wishes to use it.

• Byteens

  Last year with my classmates we made this collection of services and resources aimed at improving Italian teenagers’ lives. Soon we’ll start a podcast so we’ve been researching and planning this week. Working on this project we realized that we may be good at creating stuff but we have a lot to learn about how to get it into people’s hands.

🦉 Quotes of the week

(+ 📚 Book Recommendation)

Anyone who isn't embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn't learning enough.— Alain de Botton

That's all any of us are: amateurs. We don't live long enough to be anything else.— Charlie Chaplin

I don't believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it!— Dave Grohl

I'm an artist, man. Give me a tuba, and I'll get you something out of it.— John Lennon

When people realize they're being listened to, they tell you things.— Richard Ford

I've never had any connections that weren't a natural outgrowth of doing things I was doing anyway. Too many people waste time and energy trying to make connections instead of getting good at what they do, when being good at things is the only thing that earns you clout or connections.— Steve Albini