Where’s the Beef

Here’s an interesting question to ponder: what aspects of normal life today will future generations look back upon as moral failures on our part, much as we look back upon things like slavery in the past?

The list is, sadly, probably quite long, as we don’t seem to learn the lessons of history particularly well. As a young Jew attending Hebrew school, I was shown more Holocaust films than I can count, yet I’ve taken essentially zero action to help prevent the wholesale slaughter of nearly a half million people in Syria in the past few years.

Recently, I’ve been studying up on the effective altruism movement, and thinking about things I can do – small and large – that would positively impact the world. And while I have a number of other ideas brewing, I wanted to share at least two small things I’m going to try to do differently in 2017:

First, I’m going to eat only humanely-raised animals (and only eggs from humane egg farms).

Second, I’m going to eat less chicken, and more beef instead.

For over a decade, I’ve followed – albeit rather loosely at times – a Paleo / ancestral approach to diet. Meat plays a part in that diet (though, often, a smaller one than a caricature of the approach might imply). So inherent in my diet is killing animals.

While I’ve considered becoming a vegetarian for ethical reasons, I don’t believe that diet is optimally healthy. Nor do I believe, for most people, that it’s sustainable. After 18 months, about 85% of vegetarians and vegans return to eating meat, which is why the percentage of vegetarians in the US has held steady at about 5% for the past thirty years.

But I do think that, if I’m going to eat meat, I should do it in a way that kills as few animals as possible, and that leads to those animals being raised in the kindest way possible.

While most packaged food descriptions are so loosely regulated and third-party verified that they’re essentially meaningless (e.g., ‘natural,’ ‘free range,’ or ‘humanely raised’), a number of independent organizations now exist to ensure that animals raised in farms that achieve their designations live much better lives. In particular, the Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane, and Global Animal Partnership (especially with ratings of 4, 5, or 5+) are now fairly widely available, and hold farms to very high standards. Yes, these animals are also killed, but, as rancher / activist Joel Salatin puts it, they get to live good, healthy lives in accordance with their animal nature, and then have one very bad day.

Or consider eggs. In factory farms, chickens are painfully de-beaked, then confined in cages and filthy, overcrowded barns. Conversely, a producer like Nellie’s Free Range Eggs (which earns a Certified Humane rating) has no cages anywhere, ample space in clean, well-ventilated barns, high quality feed without hormones or antibiotics, gentle handling, and much greater full-time access to the outdoors and grass. A dozen Nellie’s eggs at my local grocery store costs about a dollar twenty more than factory-farmed eggs. And, in short, I’d rather eat a few eggs less each week from a producer like Nellies than use my dollars to support animal cruelty for a few more.

Secondly, as I said above, I’m going to try to eat less chicken, and more (humanely-raised) beef. The reason is simple: you have to kill many, many more chickens to get the same amount of meat as you get from a single cow. In fact, the beef from a single steer is equal to about 200-250 chickens. Which means that, simply by switching from chicken to beef, in a year of my standard meat consumption, I can be responsible for a single death, rather than several hundred.

Additionally, by choosing grass-fed beef, I can get healthier food (the high omega-3’s of grass-fed beef fat are far healthier than the omega-6 laden fat in chickens or grain-fed beef), and help the environment (as, due to carbon sequestration by the grass in areas they fertilize as they graze, grass-fed cows are carbon-neutral, whereas methane emission from factory-farmed animals account for some 10-15% of all carbon increases annually).

Here, too, grass fed beef costs more. But, again, I’d rather eat less of something I can feel good about, rather than simply default to supporting something terrible with my dollars and then trying not to think about it too much.

Sure, it’s not helping slaves escape by the underground railroad, or hiding Jews during the Holocaust. But it’s something small I can do, day in and day out, that helps make the kind of change I want to see in today’s world, and that I think future generations will look back on with respect.

January 10, 2017

2017-01-09

Yiddish phrase of the day: “Itlecheh shtot hot ir meshugenem.” Every village has its idiot.

January 9, 2017

Totally Random

With the start of the New Year, I’ve been trying to audit my approach to productivity, thinking about ways in which I can be more effective in the year to come.

I tend to tag my tasks with relative priorities, and I keep a log of completed work from each day. So, last week, I sorted through the log entries for 2016, to see if I could find any patterns to my efficiency.

In that analysis, something quickly emerged: my daily efficiency had a clear barbell distribution, with stretches in which I banged out huge volumes of work (including my most important tasks), and then stretches in which I barely got anything done (and what little I did accomplish tended to be menial, low-priority stuff).

Thinking back to the floundering, low-productivity days, I could highlight at least one obvious, unproductive behavior: I’d look at my list, feel overwhelmed, and then simply procrastinate by avoiding my list entirely for much of the day. Whereas on days in which I was able to get cranking, I’d simply hop in and get to work, moving directly from one task to the next.

The problem, then, appeared to be one of momentum. Once I was getting things done, it was easy to keep getting things done. But if I felt stuck, I had a hell of a time getting unstuck.

This morning, I was clearly in that ‘stuck’ mode. So, picking up an older idea from British productivity author and tinkerer Mark Forster, I set out to try what he calls the ‘random method.’

In short, I went over to the Random Integer Generator, and created a table of 100 random numbers from 1 through 16. (The 16 there being somewhat arbitrary – it’s my lucky number.)

The first number on the table was an ‘8,’ so I started at the top of my list, and counted down to the eighth task. Whatever it happened to be (in this case, processing a pile of paperwork), I hopped in, did it, and crossed it off the list. Then I went back to the table – this time a ‘6’ – and counted six more tasks down, and did that task next.

If my count took me to the end of the list, I’d simply loop back and keep counting from the top. And if I landed on a task that had already been crossed out, I’d ‘slide’ down until I reached the next uncrossed task.

In that way, I randomly looped my way through a first dozen tasks by noon, accomplishing more this morning than I thought I’d likely get done all day.

I’m not entirely sure why this works, though I suspect it has to do with removing the element of choice – if I had to decide what I wanted to do next, I could simply avoid making a decision and do nothing. But if the integers ‘told’ me that I had to do something, that was just enough external pressure to spur me into action.

Admittedly, this is a slightly ridiculous approach. I’m not sure if it will similarly be able to jump-start me on future ‘stuck’ days, and it’s certainly more cumbersome than simply trying to choose the next most important or appropriate task on days when I don’t need the extra push.

But it’s something I’ll certainly be testing out over the weeks ahead. On the chance that you, too, sometimes avoid your to-do list entirely in favor of scrolling through Twitter or diving into the rabbit-hole of Wikipedia, perhaps it’s worth similarly giving it a try.

Blue Collar Work Ethic

Like basically every other entrepreneur and self-improvement nerd in the world, I rolled into 2017 reading Tim Ferriss’ excellent new book, Tools of Titans, a collection of bite-sized insights and lessons from 200 podcast interviews with top achievers in a slew of areas.

In his first episode on the podcast, elite gymnastics coach Christopher Sommer talked with Tim about the first seminar that he held for adults, back in 2007: an all-day training for top CrossFit athletes and coaches.

We tried to do entry level plyometric work. The stronger the athlete, the faster they went down. […] We had 15 minutes on the schedule to stretch. [That] stretch took an hour and a half to complete. There were bodies lying everywhere; it was like we were in Vietnam. [And I said to my staff,] “what the fuck am I supposed to do now? They failed warmup. They failed warm-up.”

Funny enough, I was at that seminar, and I always remember, just before the lunch break, Sommer rounding us all up to say, “I’ve never seen such strong people do such terrible gymnastics.”

Today, gymnastics-based training is a much bigger part of my (and Composite’s) approach, and I’d like to think Sommer would be (at least a bit) less appalled by my technique. But gymnastics training – like so much of fitness – is often slow, frustrating going. So I hugely appreciated the email he sent to Tim, when Tim was similarly struggling with learning a challenging new gymnastic movement:

Hi Tim,

Patience. Far too soon to expect strength improvements. Strength improvements [for a movement like this] take a minimum of 6 weeks. Any perceived improvements prior to that are simply the result of improved synaptic facilitation. In plain English, the central nervous system simply became more efficient at that particular movement with practice. This is, however, not to be confused with actual strength gains.

Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process.

The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home.

A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise.

And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end.

Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best.

Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes.

If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

Tools of Titans, definitely worth the read.

January 3, 2017