These popped up all over our neighborhood this week. They were effective with my family.

Your senior prom has gone up in smoke, your summer job fell through and you’re sitting at home with your parents.

What to do?

Get your life under the control of your own choices.

• This isn’t going to blow over.
• Nobody’s coming to save you.
• Time to self rescue by creating optionality in your life.

Defer college => it’s likely to be a mess, at short notice, this fall

16-months until the 2021/2022 academic year begins => learn something useful => for example, Lambda School – 9 month, 40 hours per week program.

Get ridiculously strong => no access to a gym? Gym Closure #1 and Gym Closure #2.

Own your #1 time waster => stop it, today.

Wake up first in your household, get your training done before breakfast => do this every single day for 500 days.

500 days is the distance between now and the start of the 2021/2022 academic year.

What one habit would change everything?

Take advantage of the opportunity of time.

Lockdown Weight Gain, AKA Feeling Free to Ignore My Irrational Beliefs

For the first month of lockdown, I felt like I was gaining weight each week.

I sensed weight gain was happening on the weekends, when I back off and recover from my program.

Weekends are ~15,000 steps per day => I’m not inactive, it’s the constant grazing that creates issues.

Anyhow, I went back to basics (link is to my nutrition strategy):

• Cranked my intake of veggies – extra fine green beans from CostCo and broccoli => use them as a base on my meals and dropped the amount of quinoa I eat
• Substitute salt for cheese

1/ I also gave myself some context by checking in with reality. My BMI moved from 22 to 23 => so my feelings of being gigantic and bloated, while real to me, are not grounded in reality.

2/ An interesting thing about body image is I’ve always looked different when I see myself in a picture, rather than a mirror. Probably has something to do with what part of my brain is doing the assessment.

Regarding 1 & 2, I pay attention when “irrational” views persist.

Self knowledge helps me (a) resist the urge to take decisive action on irrational views; and (b) frees me to take my opinions less seriously.

Worth repeating – take my thoughts less seriously and be comfortable not taking bold action in a time of great uncertainty.

Fits in nicely with my goal of becoming more patient with my kids.

Investment Strategy

Thinking about Buffett/Munger sitting on cash and not taking action. A reminder to myself that there’s no rush to move from my current position.

Not changing minimizes switching costs and preserves the option to change later.

Not choosing can be a choice to avoid an unforced error.

Meditating on this observation is useful in a world that seems “far too expensive” relative to how screwed up it is!

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Quick Links

University of Victoria Home Learning Guide

Yesterday I mentioned that Colorado’s rate of daily positives had popped. Digging deeper into the data (slide down), the increase happened in line with Colorado’s testing capacity doubling.

Gates interview on Vox.

Vail resorts took the wind out of the class action suits and addressed my concerns about next ski season. I’m impressed with them as an organization. They know what I want, better than I do. I’ll probably buy a set of Epic Passes – thereby helping to preserve their business model.

My neighborhood “howls” each night at 8pm => first people, then their dogs.

I achieved 6 out of 7 goals for April. Decided to let go of my plan to move the kids ahead in math => wouldn’t have made anyone happy.