Hi there! Welcome to another milestone edition of the #LSC—the 30th edition, yay!
Wondering what you'll find here? If you've been here for a while, nothing new: a collection of content, resources to boost your health and productivity, and some tips designed to improve your life, one step at a time. Sounds cool, right?
So, let's dive in!
Today’s summary:
🥇 Excellence is mundane
🔢 The happiness matrix
📹 Summarize.tech: AI-powered video summaries
📚 Instantly catalog your personal library
🥇 Excellence is mundane
I read an article this week (I’m always reading articles, what’s wrong with me?) about a sociology professor who spent years researching the qualities of elite swimmers.
The article itself was a bit boring (not gonna lie), but there was a part I really liked about what creates excellence.
It basically said that swimmers’ superlative performance is a confluence of dozens of small skills and activities that have been mastered individually and piled up, where everything, from innate capabilities to consistent work, fits together into a synthesized whole.
Interestingly, there is nothing extraordinary or superhuman in any of these actions, just the fact that they are done consistently and correctly, leading to excellence.
Imagine this: when swimmers learn the proper way of flipping turns in freestyle races, they swim a bit faster. When they learn how to push off the wall, they swim a little faster. When they know how to place their hands in the water to minimize resistance, how to lift them over the water, even when they know which swimsuit to choose, which food to eat to improve their performance, how to strength train… and on and on, guess what? Yes, they swim a little faster with every new mastered thing.
Each of these tasks seems small in itself, but collectively they allow swimmers to swim really fast. Consistently practicing and mastering these tasks together over time can even make them compete in the Olympic Games.
So here’s my takeaway: It’s the little things that compound. Sometimes we see successful people and have no idea what to do to achieve even a fraction of their success, right? In this case, don’t overcomplicate things. Start by choosing just one thing you can improve on, practice it as much as you can, and progressively add other things you can (and want to) improve on. At some point, you’ll realize you’ve come pretty far already. Of course, this won’t make you the next (add here someone who’s amazingly good at what they do), but it’s the little steps that compound over time!
🔢 The happiness matrix
So, since we’ve discussed excellence, what could be better to talk about now than happiness? Always an interesting topic, right?
This week’s content recommendation is a short clip that packs a lot of wisdom into just one minute: Hillel Einhorn on Happiness. In it, Hillel Einhorn (one of the most important psychologists in the behavioral decision field) shares an experience he had at a Chinese restaurant (nothing bad can come from this), where he read a fortune cookie that said that rather than focusing on what one wants but lacks, it’s better to focus on what one doesn't want and doesn’t have.
Right after that, Einhorn (unicorn in German, totally unrelated but wanted to show off my limited German skills) created a 2x2 matrix (see below) to think about the things we want and have, want and don’t have, don’t want and have, and don’t want and don’t have.
He then discovered that we often overlook the importance of not wanting things we don’t have when considering our happiness, and these things have a significant impact on our overall contentment, much more than commonly recognized.
This might sound vague, but if I try to apply it to my reality, I see that, for instance, I don’t have and don’t want a car, which frees up a lot of mental space. Of course, this is a stupid example, but if you try this exercise and fill in the matrix, you will realize that you can take action on the quadrants that I find more important: the things I have and don’t want (get rid of them!), the things I don’t have and want (work for them!), and the things I don’t want and don’t have (don’t spend a single minute thinking about them!).
📹 Summarize.tech: AI-powered video summaries
After the initial AI boom, it seems we're left with some useful tools and techniques to go about our lives, right?
AI has been quite a blessing for me on several fronts. It helps generate copy for UX/UI projects, polish texts, correct grammar issues and typos, and even assists with Excel tasks. Thanks to AI, I now spend less than half the time on mechanical tasks like summarizing and outlining content, for which I'm incredibly grateful (there’s no joy coming from fighting with an Excel formula or summarizing an article).
One task that used to be both annoying and time-consuming was creating video summaries. I consume a lot of content, and there are always good ideas worth noting down. However, if I'm not able to write them down at the moment (and sometimes that’s hard as I basically listen to content while running), they slip away. And rewatching videos to capture key points is quite a hassle.
That's where this tool comes in handy. While I found many similar tools, most were either limited in functionality or behind a paywall. This one, however, seems to be both free and sufficient for my needs: it can extract key ideas from a video and generate a summary.
I know, it might not win any design awards, but it gets the job done, and that's what matters most, right?
Once I have the summary generated, I run a quick prompt via ChatGPT like this:
"I've generated a summary of a video using an AI summarizing tool. However, the summary is a bit chaotic. Could you organize and polish it to make it easy to digest? Here's the summary: [summary generated with the tool]."
With this, I can summarize ideas from videos of any length or format in just two minutes. It's like magic, isn't it?
📚 Instantly catalog your personal library
And since we’ve introduced an AI tool, here’s another trick taking advantage of all the technology out there.
Here’s the thing: We have a lot of books at home, both in the living room and the bedroom. Also back home in Barcelona. Sometimes, I’m not sure if I still have a certain book, and if I do, I have no clue where it might be. This also applies to our music records (I have more than 5000 CDs at home, thanks to those years spent working at a music shop). But, thanks to this little trick, that’s no longer an issue. You can quickly and easily index every book or CD on every shelf in just a few minutes by taking a photo of the bookshelf itself.
After taking pics of all your bookshelves, just wait a few minutes for your phone to process and index all the text from the spines of each book. Then, open your photos app and search for any book title or author. Your phone will show you exactly where the book is located on your shelf by highlighting the text found in the photos. This method worked perfectly on my iPhone, and I assume it will work on Android too, but let me know if it doesn’t! (Not that I can fix it, just out of curiosity).
📊 Data Dive
Let’s take a little look at the LSC performance to start closing this #LSC edition:
296 Subscribers → Last week we were 295. Not what I’d call rocket growth but hey, little by little…
1 Unsubscribed → We lost 1 subscriber last week
58% Open rate → The goal is to keep this, as you know, in the 60-70% range. Need to try one-two new things to see if I can improve this number.
And to close this #LSC30, a little farewell gift: The history of earth in a 24-hour clock. I love data visualization, and this little image explains the impact (quite bad if you ask me) we’re having on Earth, considering we came right at the end of the party. The best thing, though, the comments: people are the best and the worst at the same time!
Before leaving though, there are a few things you can do to help me:
Share this newsletter with someone you think will like it.
Reply to this publication. Say whatever you want to say.
If you’re on Substack, like this publication, re-stack it, move it around… sky is the limit!
And now, for good: Keep an eye out for the next LifeScore Chronicles—something exciting is just around the corner. 🚀
Until next week, stay safe and healthy!
I didn’t know the Einhorn matrix and I love it!