Chase Sagum

If you’re like me, you constantly struggle to find motivation for working out. The book ‘Spark‘ by John J. Ratey will help motivate you. It links the relationship between working out and your brain. You’ll learn things in this book that will forever change your outlook on and motivation for working out. See my notes below:

• The point of exercise is to build and condition the brain
• Exercise increases levels of serotonin, norepinephrine, and dopamine – important neurotransmitters that traffic in thoughts and emotions
• Serotonin: lack of it is associated with depression
• Toxic levels of stress erode the connections between the billions of nerve cells in the brain
• Chronic depression shrinks certain areas of the brain
• Exercise unleashes a cascade of neurochemicals and growth factors that can reverse this process, physically bolstering the brain’s infrastructure
• The neurons in the brain connect to one another through “leaves” on treelike branches, and exercise causes those branches to grow and bloom with new buds, thus enhancing brain function at a fundamental level
• In October 2008 researchers from Duke University made the New York Times with a study showing that exercise is better than sertraline (Zoloft) at treating depression.
• Aerobic activity has a dramatic effect on adaptation, regulating systems that might be out of balance and optimizing those that are not
• The brain is made up of one hundred billion neurons
• Serotonin: often called the policeman of the brain because it helps keep brain activity under control. It influences mood, impulsivity, anger, and aggressiveness
• Norepinephrine: often amplifies signals that influence attention, perception, motivation, and arousal.
• Exercise balances neurotransmitters
• BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor)
• Neurotrophins such as BDNF build and maintain cell circuitry – the infrastructure itself
• A memory, scientists believe, is a collection of information fragments dispersed throughout the brain
• Patterns of thinking and movement that are automatic get stored in the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and brain stem
• Delegating fundamental knowledge and skills to these subconscious areas frees up the rest of the brain to continue adapting
• Neurogenesis: a process of the neurons dividing and propagating
• Neurogenesis is clearly involved in our interactions with our environment, both emotionally and cognitively
• Neurons are born as blank-slate stem cells, and they go through a development process in which they need to find something to do in order to survive. Most of them don’t. It takes about twenty-eight days for a fledgling cell to plug into a network.
• If we don’t use the newborn neurons, we lose them.
• Exercise spawns neurons, and the stimulation of environmental enrichment helps those cells survive.
• BDNF gathers in reverse pools near the synapses and is unleashed when we get our blood pumping.
• BDNF is produced within the brain and promotes stem cell division
• BDNF seems to be important for long-term memories
• The body was designed to be pushed, and in pushing our bodies we push our brains too
• Exercise:
  • 1: optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention, and motivation
  • 2: it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information
  • 3: it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus
• Blood flow shifts back almost immediately after you finish exercising, and this is the perfect time to focus on a project that demands sharp thinking and complex analysis
• The more we build these networks and enrich our stores of memory and experience, the easier it is to learn, because what we already know serves as a foundation for forming increasingly complex thoughts.
• Your regimen has to include skill acquisition AND aerobic exercise
• This is why learning how to play the piano makes it easier for kids to learn math. The prefrontal cortex will co-opt the mental power of the physical skills and apply it to other situations
• Chronic stress results from the brain getting locked into the same pattern, typically one marked by pessimism, fear, and retreat.
• Stress seems to have an effect on the brain similar to that of vaccines on the immune system. In limited doses, it causes brain cells to overcompensate and thus gird themselves against future demands. Neuroscientists call this phenomenon stress inoculation.
• Stress sparks brain growth**
• Norepinephrine arouses attention, then dopamine sharpens and focuses it.
• The brain: consumer of glucose, using about 20% of the available fuel even though it only accounts for about 3% of our body weight. It has no capacity to store fuel.
• Chronic stress: the HPA axis of the brain is guzzling all the fuel to keep the system on alert, thus; the thinking parts of the brain are being robbed of energy.
• Cortisol can erode neurons
• Being alone is not good for the brain
• In the brain, the mild stress of exercise fortifies the infrastructure of our nerve cells by activating genes to produce certain proteins that protect the cells against damage and disease.
• Both stress and inactivity: play big roles in the development of arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and other autoimmune disorders.
• Anxiety: cognitive misinterpretation of the situation
• Patients with anxiety disorders have a learning deficit.
• BDNF might be an essential ingredient in combating anxiety, probably because it helps wire in positive memories that create a detour around the fear
• Teaching the brain that we can survive is crucial to overcoming the anxiety
• By making a decision to act in the face of anxiety, we literally shift the flow of information in the brain, forging new pathways
• Exercise immediately elevates levels of norepinephrine
• Exercise also boosts dopamine
• Chronic exercise increases dopamine storage in the brain and also triggers the production of enzymes that create dopamine receptors in the reward center of the brain.
• Omega3 supplements are proven to have antidepressant effects
• The combination of challenging the brain and the body has a greater positive impact than aerobic exercise alone.
• The cerebellum: just 10% of the brain’s volume but contains half of our neurons
• Walking as few as three days a week for six months increased the volume of the prefrontal cortex in older adults.
• Addiction = an out-of-control reward system
• Marijuana, exercise, and chocolate all activate the same neurotransmitters in the brain
• People are more impulsive when they feel lousy
• The more fit you are, the more resilient you are
• Exercise rebuilds the alcoholic brain by increasing neurogenesis
• Self-efficacy = confidence in our ability to change ourselves
• When we look at addiction as a neurological malfunction rather than as a moral failure, it suddenly takes on the form of something that can be fixed.
• From an evolutionary perspective, exercise tricks the brain into trying to maintain itself for survival despite the hormonal cues that it is aging.
• Omega-3 fatty acids: for mental acuity and strengthening our bones
• Having diabetes gives you a 65% higher risk of developing dementia, and high cholesterol increases the risk 43%
• Starting at about age 40, we lose on average 5% of our overall brain volume per decade, up until about age 70.
• The most common form of dementia is Parkinson’s disease
• The most consistent risk factor for cancer is lack of activity
• Physically active = 50% lower chance of developing colon cancer
• If you’re overweight, you’re inflicting damage to your brain.
• Omega-3s = lower blood pressure, cholesterol, and neuronal inflammation. And they elevate the immune response of BDNF levels.
• Vitamin B: improves memory and processing speed
• Activities that involve bouncing or jumping help to strengthen your bones
• Anything that keeps you in contact with other people helps you live better and longer.

A good friend of mine who is a BI Analyst recommended this book to me last year and it didn’t disappoint! ‘Super Forecasting‘ by Phillip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner help you explore the concepts and principles of forecasting. This book helped me a ton during my time as CMO at BestCompany.com. Here are my notes:

• Chaos theory: a lone butterfly in Brazil could flap its wings and set off a tornado in Texas
• We make mundane predictions routinely
• We constantly encounter predictive operations on the internet
• Unpredictability and predictability coexist uneasily
• How predictable something is depends on what we are trying to predict, how far into the future, and under what circumstances
• Forecast, measure, revise. Repeat.
• It’s a never ending process of incremental improvement
• It is the product of particular ways of thinking, of gathering information, of updating beliefs
• Even superforecasters who are card-carrying mathematicians rarely use math
• They tend to be news junkies
• What matters most is how the forecaster thinks
• Open-minded, careful, curious, self-critical, demands focus
• Commitment to self-improvement to be the strongest predictor of performance
• At its core, the forecasting I study involves subjective judgment
• There’s a difference between mimicking and reflecting meaning and originating meaning. That’s a space human judgment will always occupy. (give this more thought)
• It’s human nature. We have all been too quick to make up our minds and too slow to change them. And if we don’t examine how we make these mistakes, we will keep making them.
• Cargo cult science has the outward form of science but lacks what makes it truly scientific
• The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.
• The only alternative to a controlled experiment that delivers real insight is an uncontrolled experiment that produces merely the illusion of insight.
• The Cognitive Reflection Test
• System 1 follows a primitive psycho-logic: if it feels true, it is
• System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence
• Like everyone else, scientists have intuitions
• Trained to be cautious
• Alternative explanations must get a hearing
• They must seriously consider the possibility that their initial hunch is wrong
• Experiment designed to prove the hypothesis is false
• Attribute substitution: when faced with a hard question, we often surreptitiously replace it with an easy one
• Be prepared to accept that what seems obviously true now may turn out to be false later.
• To avoid confusion, the terms they use should have designated numerical meanings (p. 56)
• Vague thoughts are easily expressed with vague language but when forecasters are forced to translate terms like “serious possibility” into numbers, they have to think carefully about how they are thinking, a process known as metacognition
• The wrong-side-of-maybe fallacy
• Calibration
• Brier Scores: measure the distance between what you forecast and what actually happened
• When hedgehogs in the EPJ research made forecasts on the subjects they knew the most about – their own specialties, their accuracy declined
• Aggregating the judgments of an equal number of people who know lots about lots of different things is most effective because the collective pool of information becomes much bigger.
• Regression to the mean
• The big jumps in intelligence and knowledge are from the public to the forecasters, not from forecasters to superforecasters (p. 109)
• What would have to be true for this to happen? (CTQ)
• Break the question down
• What information would allow me to answer that question?
• What would it take for the answer to be yes?
• What would it take for the answer to be no?
• The Base Rate: how common something is within a broader class
• The Outside View
• When we make estimates, we tend to start with some number and adjust. That number should be the outside view.
• Coming up with an outside view, an inside view, and a synthesis of the two
• For super forecasters, beliefs are hypotheses to be tested, not treasures to be guarded
• Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
• On Wall Street, math wizards are called quants
• The best forecasters use little math, and focus quite a bit on subjective judgement
• People tend to translate “high probability” into “this will happen”
• One of 20th century science’s great accomplishments has been to show that uncertainty is an ineradicable element of reality. Uncertainty is real.
• “Maybe” has to be subdivided into degrees of probability
• Granularity predicts accuracy
• Science sticks to “how” questions that focus on causation and probabilities
• “WHY” directs us to metaphysics. “HOW” sticks with the physics.
• The more a forecaster embraced probabilistic thinking, the more accurate she was.
• A forecast that is updated to reflect the latest available information is likely to be closer to the truth
• The brain likes things neat and orderly and once it has things that way it tries to keep disturbances to a minimum
• Units of doubt
• Super forecasters not only update more often than forecasters, they update in smaller increments.
• Try, fail, analyze, adjust, try again.
• Learning to forecast requires trying to forecast
• Fortune favors the prepared mind
• Vague terms like “probably” and “likely” make it impossible to judge
• Hindsight bias: once we know the outcome of something, that knowledge skews our perception of what we thought before we knew the outcome
• Groups that get along too well don’t question assumptions or confront uncomfortable facts
• Precision questioning
• Teams were 23% more accurate than individuals (p. 201)
• (EMH) efficient market hypothesis
• (AOM) active open-mindedness
• Diversity trumps ability
• “In war, everything is uncertain.” – Helmuth von Moltke
• Moltke trained his officers not only in military training, but also in Critical Thinking (p. 214)
• “The first criterion in war remains decisive action.”
• Mission Command (p. 216)
• Commanders were to tell subordinates what their goal is but not how to achieve it.
• “Plans are merely a platform for change” – IDF slogan
• In 1982 “mission command” became part of official American doctrine
• Good judgement requires intellectual humility. Not self-doubt.
• The Black Swan: a metaphor for an event so far outside experience we can’t even imagine it until it happens
• History is not just about black swans
• Consider that an average of 1% annual global economic growth in the 19th century and 2% in the 20th turned the squalor of the 18th century and all the centuries that preceded it into the unprecedented wealth of the 21st.
• Every 4 years, congress requires the DoD to produce a 20-year forecast on the national security environment.
• Effective learning from experience can’t happen without clear feedback, and you can’t have clear feedback unless your forecasts are unambiguous and scorable.
• The End Result System (p. 255)
• Numbers are tools, nothing more.
• Numbers must be constantly scrutinized and improved
• If we ask many tiny but pertinent questions, we can close in on an answer for the big question.
• The answers are cumulative. The more yeses, the likelier the answer to the big question is “This is going to end badly.”
• Bayesian question clustering (p. 263)
• What qualifies as a good question? It’s one that gets us thinking about something worth thinking about
• The smack-the-forehead test

This is a must-read if you are helping to build a company or startup. ‘Delivering Happiness‘ by Zappos founder Tony Hsieh gives you an in-depth look at how Zappos was started, what struggles it went through, and how it innovated and took over the online shoe market. Great book! Here are my notes:

• necessity is the mother of invention **
• you’re in your best negotiating position if you don’t care what the outcome is and you’re not afraid to walk away
• “Vest in Peace”
• Financials
  • always be prepared for the worst possible scenario
  • go for positive expected value, not what’s least risky
  • make sure your bankroll is large enough for the game you’re playing and the risks you’re taking
  • play only with what you can afford to lose
  • remember that it’s a long-term game. You will win or lose individual hands or sessions, but it’s what happens in the long term that matters
• Strategy:
  • Don’t play games that you don’t understand, even if you see lots of other people making money from them
  • Figure out the game when the stakes aren’t high
  • Don’t let yourself go “on tilt.” It’s much more cost-effective to take a break, walk around, or leave the game for the night
• Continual Learning: don’t be afraid to ask for advice
• Culture: Look for opportunities beyond just the game you sat down to play.
• I learned that the most important decision I could make was which table to sit at
• From my poker experience, I knew it was never too late to change tables
• “A great company is more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little.” – Packard’s Law
• “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” – Shunryu Suzuki **
• Important to note: Zappos began growing during the .com bubble burst **
• Author has a life philosophy of valuing experiences over things
• Never outsource your core competency **
• The Zappos Library: shelves of recommended books for employees to take home **
• Zappos starting with dropshipping, but removed this altogether in 2002 even though it was driving a ton of revenue for them. It didn’t align with their “why”
• Customer Loyalty Team **
• Ask Anything: a tool to get feedback from employees
• Zappos three key areas:
  • Customer service
  • Culture
  • Employee Training and Development
• BCP: Brand, Culture and Pipeline
• The Culture Book: written by many of the Zappos employees
• They replaced marketing costs with great customer service costs ***
• the telephone is one of the best branding devices out there **
• increase LTV of a customer by creating more positive emotional associations with the brand through every interaction that a person has with it **
  • we do surprise upgrades to overnight shipping
  • 24/7 warehouse
  • warehouse located just 15 minutes away from the UPS Worldport hub
  • we don’t have scripts (on the phone)
• Create a WOW experience
• Make customer service a priority for the whole company
• Don’t measure call times
• don’t hide your 1800 number
• view each call as an investment in building a customer service brand **
• Serendipitous employee interactions **
• Your culture is your brand **
• All employees, regardless of position start on the phones
• At the end of the first week of training, we offer everyone $2,000 to quit ** page 153
• pursue growth and learning (core value) **
• developing your gut (initial core value)
• continuous incremental improvement (initial core value)
• willing to laugh at ourselves (initial core value)
• we wanted a list of committable core values that we were willing to hire and fire on
• develop interview questions for each and every one of your core values **
• The Zappos Mission = to live and deliver WOW **
• imagine if every employee made just 1 small improvement in regards to your core values each week, where you would be as a company in a year **
• If embracing constant change is part of your culture, then your competitors will never be able to catch up to you **
• Create a core values document **
• Think about what it means to improve by 1% every single day! **
• That’s not 365% increase. It’s a 3,640% increase!! ** (compounds) **
• When people say they dread going into work on Monday morning, it’s because they probably know they are leaving a piece of themselves at home (no passion)
• When was the last time you broke the rules/policy to get a job done? (interview)
• Tell me about a time when you solved a problem that was outside of your job duties (interview)
• problems are just mile markers. Each one you solve means you have gotten better **
• if your business ever gets too easy, look for a tide of competitors coming your way **
• The role of a manager is to remove obstacles for his/her direct reports so that they can succeed **
• Do more with less = core value
• Zappos makes sure to be extremely quick in responsiveness when it comes to their partners and their vendors. Both with email and phone calls **
• The Extranet = this gives their vendors complete visibility into their business **
• they host an annual vendor appreciation party
• The Pipeline = a strategy they use to constantly recruit and build talent **
• The Pipeline = comes with an intense training program **
• Think 5-7 years out **
• Obsess over customers, not competitors **
• Happiness is really just about four things: **
  • perceived control
  • perceived progress
  • connectedness
  • and vision/meaning
• “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” – Harry S. Truman