Brendon Burchard is a high performance coach who did something useful: instead of trading purely in anecdote, he ran one of the larger quantitative studies of high performers, surveying tens of thousands of people to find what distinguishes sustained excellence from burnout. The result is “High Performance Habits” and its six practices: seek clarity, generate…
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Brainwaves are the electrical activity generated by the brain, which can be measured using an electroencephalograph (EEG). Different brainwave states are associated with different mental states and levels of consciousness. The main brainwave states are: It’s important to note that brainwave states are not fixed and can change depending on the person’s mental and physical…
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Marty Lobdell taught psychology at Pierce College for decades, and in 2011 a recording of one of his lectures, “Study Less, Study Smart,” quietly became one of the most useful hours on the internet. Millions of students have watched it, and the advice has aged extremely well. His points are concrete. Study in chunks of…
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Wim Hof — “The Iceman” — is a Dutch athlete who has built a career on doing things human physiology supposedly doesn’t permit: climbing Kilimanjaro in shorts, running a barefoot half marathon on ice, sitting in ice baths for hours. He holds a stack of records, but the genuinely interesting part is that scientists took…
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Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a biomedical scientist whose postdoctoral work with Bruce Ames focused on micronutrients and ageing. Through FoundMyFitness she has become one of the more rigorous science communicators in the wellness space — long-form, citation-heavy, and notably willing to say “we don’t know yet.” Her recurring themes are worth knowing. Micronutrient insufficiency as…
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The butterfly effect is a term used to describe the phenomenon in which a small change in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes in a complex system. The name of the effect comes from the idea that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could, in theory, lead to a chain of…
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Bill Gates co-founded Microsoft, spent years as the world’s richest person, and then redirected his attention and most of his fortune toward global health through the Gates Foundation — work focused on malaria, polio eradication, sanitation, and vaccine access. The habit worth stealing from Gates is structured thinking time. For years he took “Think Weeks”:…
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Joseph Murphy was a New Thought minister and author whose 1963 book “The Power of Your Subconscious Mind” has sold millions of copies and never really left the shelves. His thesis: the subconscious accepts whatever the conscious mind repeatedly impresses upon it, and then quietly organizes your behaviour around it. Strip away the metaphysics and…
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Viktor Frankl was a Viennese neurologist and psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz and three other Nazi camps, lost almost his entire family, and emerged to write one of the most important books of the twentieth century. “Man’s Search for Meaning” has sold tens of millions of copies and is less a memoir than an argument. Frankl’s…
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Hal Elrod was hit head-on by a drunk driver at 20, died clinically for six minutes, broke eleven bones, and was told he might never walk again. He walked. Years later he was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive leukaemia and survived that too. Out of all this came “The Miracle Morning,” one of the…
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