LifeScore Chronicles #10: Wave in, wave out 🌊 🌊
Hi there! First official benchmark: #LSC is hitting the 10th edition, yay! Will we make it to 50?
As a heads up, in case you just landed here or you have been forwarded this newsletter, expect to find some content on personal growth, health hacks, interesting content, and productivity tips, always with an easygoing approach. Nice, right?
So, let's get into it!
Today’s summary:
🌊 Everything is a wave
🧩 The exposure therapy: Challenge yourself
🏄♀️ Barbarian Days: Unmapped worlds, unborn language
🦑 The Deep Sea: An interactive infographic
🌊 Everything is a wave
Remember that everything in life comes in waves. Feeling down is always followed by feeling up. A challenging period is always followed by something easier. Change is inevitable, so just maintain a positive attitude in life.
Read this quote this week and it came exactly at the right moment. I don’t have that much to add, but wanted to break it down a bit. We often find ourselves chasing this idea of eternal happiness, but let's face it, that's like trying to catch a unicorn – sounds cool but not very practical. If happiness was a continuous state, how could we value it?
We value things precisely because they're not forever, and it’s only when they’re gone that we realize how important they are. You’re all probably thinking about good things but this also applies to the bad ones. It's only when we've weathered the storm that we appreciate the sunshine, and vice versa.
There is a lot of literature around it, not discovering the wheel here. You all know that “calm-before-the-storm” feeling, right?
I’d say, in summary, that change is inevitable, and the more we embrace it, the more at peace we can be with ourselves.
🧩 The exposure therapy: Challenge yourself
And since I’ve started with this Embracing-The-Change speech, let’s move onto a life hack that for me has been a truly character test.
Did you ever hear about the Exposure Therapy? In a nutshell, it is about forcing yourself to little (or big, that depends on you) discomforts, as a means to build resilience. Think of it as a mental boot camp.
But why, you’re asking? Well, in a way, the more you force yourself to do something that’s causing you some discomfort, the more resilient you become, and the easier will be then face real-life challenges. Of course, it’s not that by taking cold showers today you could then climb up the Everest tomorrow, but in a way, if you force yourself to do things that you know you’re gonna suffer from, they end up becoming not that complicated anymore.
This can be applied to health-related stuff, for instance, this mentioned last 10 seconds of cold water in the shower, or practicing an OMD (one meal a day) fasting every now and then, but also to other areas of your life.
Take my cleanliness and tidiness obsession, for example (my partner suffers from it, God bless her). So I’ve been trying to make it more manageable by letting things go not perfectly. Of course, not tending to chaos, but I'm learning to let go of the need for everything to be spotless, and, little by little, I brought this state of mind to other areas (as stupid as stopping running at 9.90 km instead of running around the block until I hit the 10kms mark, or stop reading a book in the middle of the chapter, or not putting the dishes in the dishwasher following an established order…).
Did this help me in any capacity? Hard to say (my OCD is still here), but it made me embrace challenges and changes with a different perspective – as tests rather than threats.
🏄♀️ Barbarian Days: Unmapped worlds, unborn language
There is this book I started reading right now (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life). I would love to say that I am an expert surfer who’s traveling the world chasing always bigger waves following my passion, but the closest I’ve been to surfing (besides singing Surfin U.S.A. in the shower) is a course I did in Brazil, where the longest I was standing on the board was right by the shore, getting instructions by a coach that was as bored as I was.
But, there is something beautiful in the book. Some sort of a zen philosophy that is captivating. The obsession to chase endless waves and live an eternal summer, never growing old or at least never stopping exploring, the intense bond formed between man, board, and water… I would translate this to finding your passion and approaching life with the attitude of a child, finding a playground in every corner.
Also, it seems the book won the Pulitzer Prize (in the Biography category), so it might well be that the book is actually good, hold on.
🦑 The Deep Sea: An interactive infographic
And well, after riding the wave of our previous topics (see what I did there?), I've got something special for you, an interactive infographic, ‘The Deep Sea’, that showcases all the different documented underwater creatures, depths and benchmarks.
It is pretty cool and I was surprised to see that the deepest a human has dived is a mind-boggling 332 meters, or that there is a type of shark, the megamouth shark, that dives as deep as 4600 meters. Or that more people have been to the Moon than the Hadal Zone.
And it’s simple and well-designed (perhaps because it is supposed to be for kids?), which is something I appreciate. If you can create simple and beautiful things, you're already halfway there!
📊 Data Dive
And as always, let’s close this #LSC10 with a little look at the previous week’s performance:
111 Subscribers → Little by little…
0 Unsubscribed → Hopefully even more little by little here!
69.43% Open rate → Seems that even with the little growth, we’re stable at 60-70%
And just before leaving, a farewell gift for you: the world's largest-ever surfed wave, at Praia do Norte in Nazaré, Portugal, a 26.21 meters beauty.
Also, if there is something you want me to talk about, feel free to reply to this email, always nice to hear from you all.
And that’s a wrap! Until next week, take care and recommend LifeScore Chronicles to your friends and enemies (How was that? Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, right?)
Stay safe and healthy!