[TT 006] POP writing, measuring flow, topsoil, endurance, cake face
Happy Thursday Thrivers,
Hard to believe another week has gone by. Time is an absolute mystery to me because sometimes it feels like I have plenty and other times …
This past week has been a whirlwind of activity in many different directions. I hosted another rendition of Full Moon Tea (one of my favorite yet!) and published my first piece on Tea. I launched the sales page for my first cohort-based course, I turned down an (entirely unexpected) offer to be Corporate Director of IT at a 400-person company, and I even shipped poop in the mail (don’t ask).
With an exhausted sigh of relief, on to Thriving Thursday.
On what makes writing POP
🪶 🎉 I’m deep in the Write of Passage gauntlet of creation and I am thoroughly impressed with some of the material. The team has done a really stunning job of supporting all the fledgling writers while also challenging and leveling up the more experienced folks.
I am especially appreciating the various frameworks and lenses through which we are encouraged to read and, ultimately, write. My favorite so far is POP Writing.
I’m reading a lot of other’s people’s writing right now, and I can see how big a difference it makes when there is a healthy balance of all three pillars. And, from first hand experience, how awkward it can feel to force each quality where it doesn't naturally fit (as I did in the thankfully edited down first draft of my maiden Tea post).
The other piece that I am really enjoying is teasing apart the ingredients and spices that make for nutritious and nourishing online writing. There are personal micro-moments in time, hyper-specific evocative details, turns of phrase, unexpected endings, thematic wrappers, emergent ideas, sentence rhythm and cadence, and so much more.
I am a humbly naive student entering a vast new domain of creative expression. Beyond a caveman-worthy “me likey” and “nuhhh”, I’ve never turned my analytical mind to dissecting the specific qualities of writing voice and style that resonate with the writer I seek to become. It’s been stimulating, challenging, and illuminating in all the right ways.
And … me likey.
On measuring flow states
📏 💦 A lot has been written extolling the virtues of “flow state” and how it can enable and unlock peak performance. The concept was first popularized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi who did a tremendous amount of research on the topic and literally wrote the book.
I haven’t read enough of the academic literature on this front to be fully satisfied that I understand the qualifiers and mechanics at play. But I do know, from first hand experience, that flow is a powerful and enjoyable state of being. For that reason alone, I seek flow states in most aspects of my life.
So the data nerd in me was really happy when a reader pointed me to Susan Jackson’s Flow State Scale. It’s used primarily for athletes, but reading through the questions reminded me A LOT of my years dancing Argentine tango.
This concept led me down a path to see what other tools and techniques are used to measure flow. A lot of it is focused on filling out self-reported interviews, diaries, and surveys, though there are absolutely scientists veering into the more objective realms of neural imagining and biometrics.
My favorite study so far included poking and prodding unfortunate souls enjoying a game of Tetris. Ahh, so when I ignoring my AP Stats teacher in high school to play Combat Tetris with my table mate on our TI-83 calculators (silver edition, thank you very much!) I was just testing the hypofrontality hypothesis of the neuromechanics of flow. Makes sense.
Interestingly, the research on the biometrics and neuroscience of flow is very young and there is no clear consensus. There appears to be a curious interweaving of the parasympathetic and sympathetic systems, which may help explain both the deep relaxation and acute alertness of flow states, but different studies report different outcomes based on the flow task.
Still much more to learn here, and this is a burgeoning area of research that I’ll happily flow through for many years to come.
On the catastrophic loss of topsoil
🚜 🌾 Verlyn Klinkenborg recently wrote a beautiful piece explaining some mind boggling ecological research coming out of UMass. The study authors concluded that:
the A-horizon has been completely removed from 35±11% of the cultivated area of the Corn Belt.
Verlyn puts that in absolute stark clarity
It’s worth being clear here. The authors aren’t talking about reduced soil fertility or loss of mineral nutrients. They’re talking about the complete removal of the medium in which crops are grown — the utter bankruptcy of the organic richness that lay for centuries under the tallgrass prairie.
I am becoming more and more aware of the deleterious effect of Big Ag and monoculture industrial farming practices, and this is just another nail in the coffin of the region’s previously rich soil health.
Thankfully, there are ways to build back up the top soil with regenerative and no-till farming practices. This takes time, skill, and (one of my least developed qualities) patience. But it’s possible, and I intend to learn how wherever my family may land.
Verlyn’s conclusion is chilling
It’s easy to blame the old farmers — the ones who broke the prairie and their immediate descendants — for not farming in a way that conforms to what we know now. But we ourselves aren’t farming the way we now know we should. Who do we blame for that?
In Sapiens, Yuval Harari makes a compelling argument that each generation of farmers, all the way back to the transitional stages from hunter gatherers, was only trying to do right by their families and communities by growing more food. So I have no interested in pointing a finger at “who to blame” - instead, I’m laser-focused on pointing a finger to the future of a healthy, sustainable, and Thriving ecosystem to support diversity and Life.
In Years 3 and 4, I’ll be digging into this a lot further.
On the physiology of endurance and healthspan
🏃🏻 🏅 Dr. Peter Attia recently did a podcast interview with Alex Hutchinson, author of Endure. I found this interview interesting for a handful of reasons.
First, I was interested in Alex’s life story. He got his PhD in Physics, then went back to school for a degree in journalism. All the while, from early childhood, he was a competitive runner and even made it to the Olympic Trials in 1996 and 1997. So he is especially qualified to talk about the science of running, and in a very thoughtful and palatable way.
Second, they clarified a concept I’ve heard but never really understood: VO2 Max. I appreciated the discussion regarding normalized metrics and what this often-cited metric actually means in terms of practical applications. This will be helpful as I start ramping my marathon training.
Most importantly, they talked about having a portfolio of different kinds of movement traditions to counteract the natural decline of muscle mass and balance as we age. One of the most striking bits of data from the talk had to do with the terrible impact from 1 week of bed rest. We rapidly lose muscle mass and our bodies decrease sensitivity to insulin (which induces fat accumulation). It’s a double whammy, and it only gets worse the older we get.
Another interesting thing I took away is how important lifting weights is to our lifespan. The really fascinating thing is that it is much more important to be functionally strong (read: do stuff with our muscles) than to have a lot of muscle mass (read: look really buff). Peter had a good example:
When an elderly person slips on the stairs, if they have the strength to catch themselves on the rail, it can turn a potentially catastrophic event into an unfortunate event.
This advice is not just for elderly people. When we regularly work our bodies (with any type of strenuous movement, doesn’t have to be in a gym lifting weights), we change the structure of our ligaments, tendons, muscle fibers, and even the mitochondria in our cells. This is a big deal for current performance as well as later in life when our bodies invariably begin to atrophy. And this advice becomes especially important in the current sedentary way of life of so many desk-bound professionals (me!!).
If you need some inspiration, my wife turned me on to Youtube workouts with MadFit Maddy. My goodness is that woman fit. And she structures some really wonderful 10, 20, and 30 minute high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts, many of which are only body weight and do not require any jumping or equipment.
Thanks Maddy, for helping me live longer.
On optical illusions of the body
👩🏼🎨 🍰 A couple weeks about I wrote about Dain Yoon, an incredible makeup artist doing optical illusions on her face.
Well, the Feed Gods of the Google pantheon are now keyed into my stupefied joy at wacky makeup jobs. Enter Mimi Choi, a Canadian artist that taught Pre-K before she went pro status on screwing with my sense of time and space. Her instagram is epic.
Her cracked face and food work is astonishing. Just wow.
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I hope your next week is full of quantifiably biodynamic flow, at least on a super-facial level. And if you hangout with Maddy, tell her I say hello.
Yours with a POP,
~Henry