Happy Friday

Here are 4 things I learnt this week:

1. It’s really healthy to go off-grid sometimes. I’ve been lying very low as I’m trying to get as much of my book, Metamorphosis, written as possible before our new pup Charlie arrives next weekend. I’ve been off Instagram, off Stories, and off Facebook as they’re huge time thieves. I feel so much better for knuckling down and, to quote Stephen Covey, keeping ‘the main thing the main thing’. I’m handing over the first quarter of the book to my copy editor on Monday and I’m planning to self-publish it in Q1.

2. The power of habits. I seem to be drawn to books about habits at the moment. Top picks: The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey & Atomic Habits by James Clear (I haven’t read the last one yet but listened to him on Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Radio podcast here. Top conclusions: (1) Our life is run by habits, so we may as well become aware of them and set up the right ones. (2) Habits take willpower to build but then run themselves. (3) This makes building out new, healthy habits very scalable. (4) Our chances of success in any area of life are really driven by our ability to implement and execute on good habits, day after day.

3. The science that backs up acupuncture. In many ways, Eastern medicine seems to have been millennia ahead of us. Take acupuncture. If you map out our energy meridians, which acupuncture was traditionally intended to unblock, they lie in the same places as our major fascial planes. Fascia is the connective tissue that holds pretty much everything together under our skin, and it’s therefore the biggest source of input into our nervous system. Because of its high collagen content it’s highly electro-conductive, and acupuncture works by stimulating this. You can read more about fascia in my blog post on TRE (tension / trauma release exercises) here and I really recommend this interview with acupuncturist Jill Blakeway, author of Energy Medicine (which is on my reading list!) here on the Goop podcast.

4. The only belief that matters: is that you can improve yourself in any way. This is according to Tom Bilyeu, whom I heard interviewed on Mark Hyman’s podcast, The Doctor’s Farmacy. Bilyeu, who’s worth c.$400m, claims he had no natural entrepreneurial instincts and had to learn them all. He argues that it’s critical if you want to help others to build a growth mindset, you need to start with kids. Your chances of success are closely linked to the number of positive words you hear before you’re 5 (which presumably drives your self esteem and growth mindset). Inner-city kids hear 2 million words before the age of 5, of which 70% are negative, and middle-class kids hear 5 million of which 70% are positive. 

Have a great weekend

Sara