PHILOSOPHY 101 by Paul Kleinman

• The word philosophy means “love of wisdom.”
• In a very broad sense, there are six major themes philosophy touches on: Metaphysics: The study of the universe and reality Logic: How to create a valid argument Epistemology: The study of knowledge and how we acquire knowledge Aesthetics: The study of art and beauty Politics: The study of political rights, government, and the role of citizens Ethics: The study of morality and how one should live his life
• While Socrates is widely regarded as one of the wisest men to have ever lived, he never wrote down any of his thoughts, and all that we know about him is based on the written works of his students and contemporaries (mainly the works of Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes).
• Socrates believed that in order for a person to be wise, that individual must be able to understand himself.
• Socrates is perhaps most famous for his Socratic method.
• By continually asking questions, Socrates was able to expose contradictions in the way an individual thought, which allowed him to come to a solid conclusion.
• By using the Socratic method, students are able to start thinking critically and using logic and reasoning to create their arguments, while also finding and patching up holes in their positions.
• One of the key ideas of existentialism is that the meaning of life and discovering oneself can only be attained by free will, personal responsibility, and choice.
• Aristotle breaks down how things come to be through four causes: The material cause: This explains what something is made of. The formal cause: This explains what form something takes. The efficient cause: This explains the process of how something comes into being. The final cause: This explains the purpose something serves.
• According to the tripartite theory of knowledge, knowledge is when a true belief is justified.
• Hard determinism is the philosophical theory that, because every event has a cause, all human action is predetermined and therefore choices made by free will do not exist.
• Hard determinism asserts that nothing happens without a cause, that no act is free from the law of causality.
• Consequentialism is the philosophical view that an action is morally right when it produces the best overall consequences.
• There are two basic principles to consequentialism: An act is right or wrong based solely on its results. The more good consequences created from an act, the better and more right that act is.
• Immanuel Kant is one of the single most important philosophers to have ever lived. His work forever changed the shape of Western philosophy.
• In philosophy, idealism refers to the various notions that share the belief that the world is composed not of physical things, but of mental ideas.
• There are three major types of dualism:
• Substance Dualism: Substance can be broken down into two categories: mental and material.
• Property Dualism: The mind and body exist as properties of one material substance.
• Predicate Dualism: In order to make sense of the world, there needs to be more than one predicate (the way we go about describing a proposition’s subject).
• In act utilitarianism, only the results and consequences of a single act are taken into account, and an act is deemed morally right when it creates the best (or less bad) results for the largest number of people.
• While act utilitarianism looks at the results of a single act, rule utilitarianism measures the results of an act as it is repeated through time, as if it were a rule.
• Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge comes from sensory experience.
• Rationalism is the theory that reason, not the senses, is where knowledge originates.
• Descartes is most famous for his statement “Cogito ergo sum,” translated as “I think; therefore I am.” According to Descartes, the act of thinking is proof of individual existence.
• Hobbes believed that basing philosophy and science on the observations of nature alone was too subjective because humans have the ability to view the world in many different ways.
• Hobbes believed that factionalism within society, such as rival governments, differing philosophies, or the struggle between church and state, only leads to civil war. Therefore, to maintain peace for all, everyone in a society must agree to have one authoritative figure that controls the government, makes the laws, and is in charge of the church.
• Intentionality is defined as the particular mental states that are directed toward objects or things in the real world.
• Metaphysics focuses on the nature of being and existence, and asks very complicated and profound questions relating to God, our existence, if there is a world outside of the mind, and what reality is.
• In metaphysics, existence is defined as a state of continued being. “Existence exists” is the famous axiom to come out of metaphysics; it simply states that there is something instead of nothing.
• In metaphysics, identity is defined as whatever makes an entity recognizable.
• Actions are considered to be unpredictable and are not caused by external events; rather, they come from us. In order for there to be free will, there must also be alternative possibilities, and after an action has been performed, the notion that it could have been done a different way must be present.
• The Enlightenment refers to a radical shift in thought that occurred in Europe (particularly France, Germany, and Britain) during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This movement completely revolutionized the ways in which people viewed philosophy, science, politics, and society as a whole, and forever changed the shape of Western philosophy.
• The introduction of the scientific method, which is based on observation and experimentation, allowed scientists to explain various theories through the use of reason and logic, and removed tradition from science.
• One of the most significant philosophical changes that came about during the Enlightenment was the embracing of rationalism (the notion that we gain knowledge independent of the senses).
• Nietzsche believed that there is always a need for people to identify a source of value and meaning, and he concluded that if science was not that source, it would appear in other ways, such as aggressive nationalism.
• Meanings of words are not fixed or limited. The meaning of a word can be vague or fluid and still be just as useful.
• There are two ways to value art: intrinsically and extrinsically. Those who believe art has an extrinsic value appreciate art as a way to express a recognized moral good and to educate the emotions, while those who believe art has intrinsic value believe that art is valuable in and of itself.
• Language is cultural (and can differ from culture to culture), and therefore, its effects on thought must be considered cultural effects.
• Language (which is affected by culture) has great influence over our thought processes, and therefore, it also affects our perception.
• Emotions are not only fundamental to culture; they are fundamental to being a mammal
• Ethical and moral systems are different for every culture. According to cultural relativism, all of these systems are equally valid, and no system is better than another.
• The basis of cultural relativism is the notion that no true standards of good and evil actually exist.
• Voltaire was greatly influenced by John Locke and the skeptical empiricism that was occurring in England at the time.
• There is evidence that there are certain cultural, linguistic, and cognitive universals among all people, regardless of their specific group, and the existence of these universals goes against descriptive relativism.
• The philosophical principles of Buddhism are based on the Four Noble Truths (the truth of suffering, the truth of the cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering, and the truth of the path that frees one from suffering).
• Put simply, the demarcation problem is how one can distinguish between science and non-science (this question also deals with pseudoscience in particular).
• FALSIFIABILITY: In order for a hypothesis to be accepted as true, and before any hypothesis can be accepted as a scientific theory or scientific hypothesis, it has to be disprovable.
• According to inductive reasoning, if a situation holds true in every observed case, then it holds true in all cases.
• Pseudoscience refers to those theories and doctrines that fail to follow the scientific method. Essentially, pseudoscience is nonscience that poses as science.
• The most significant argument against theism is known as “the problem of evil.”
• According to Epicurus, there exist four possibilities: If God wishes to prevent evil and is not able to, then God is feeble. If God is able to get rid of evil but does not want to, then God is malevolent. If God does not wish to get rid of evil and is not able to get rid of evil, then God is malevolent and feeble, and therefore, he is not God. If God wants to get rid of evil and is able to get rid of evil, then why does evil exist in the world, and why has God not gotten rid of it?
• There are three main types of arguments for the existence of God: ontological, cosmological, and teleological.
• Ontological arguments use a priori abstract reasoning to claim that the concept of God and the ability to speak of God implies that God must exist.
• Ontological arguments are flawed, for they can be used to show the existence of any perfect thing.
• The cosmological argument claims that since the world and universe exist, this implies that they were brought into existence, and are kept in existence, by a being. There must be a “first mover,” which is God, because an infinite regress is simply not possible.
• The teleological argument, which is also referred to as intelligent design, claims that because there is order in the world and universe, the world must have been created by a being that had the specific purpose of creating life in mind.

THE JOY OF X by Steven Strogatz

• numbers are wonderful shortcuts.
• Sure, they are great timesavers, but at a serious cost in abstraction.
• Just as numbers are a shortcut for counting by ones, addition is a shortcut for counting by any amount.
• The right abstraction leads to new insight, and new power.
• Subtraction can generate negative numbers.
• in many real-world situations, especially where money is concerned, people seem to forget the commutative law, or don’t realize it applies.
• Roman numerals may look impressive, but they’re hard to read and cumbersome to use.
• Roman numerals are only slightly more sophisticated than tallies. You can spot the vestige of tallies in the way Romans wrote 2 and 3, as II and III.
• Ten is marked by a position—the tens place—instead of a symbol. The same is true for 100, or 1,000, or any other power of 10. Their distinguished status is signified not by a symbol but by a parking spot, a reserved piece of real estate.
• All numbers can be expressed with the same ten digits, merely by slotting them into the right places.
• Any calculation involving any pair of numbers, no matter how big, can be performed by applying the same sets of facts, over and over again, recursively.
• With place-value systems, you can program a machine to do arithmetic.
• But the unsung hero in this story is 0. Without 0, the whole approach would collapse. It’s the placeholder that allows us to tell 1, 10, and 100 apart.
• All place-value systems are based on some number called, appropriately enough, the base.
• In the past few decades we’ve come to realize that all information—not just numbers, but also language, images, and sound—can be encoded in streams of zeros and ones.
• Algebra, for example, may have struck you as a dizzying mix of symbols, definitions, and procedures, but in the end they all boil down to just two activities—solving for x and working with formulas.
• Solving for x is detective work.
• Working with formulas, by contrast, is a blend of art and science.
• In fact, you never get back to even when you lose and gain by the same percentage in consecutive years.
• Complex numbers are magnificent, the pinnacle of number systems. They enjoy all the same properties as real numbers—you can add and subtract them, multiply and divide them—but they are better than real numbers because they always have roots.
• a grand statement called the fundamental theorem of algebra says that the roots of any polynomial are always complex numbers.
• So multiplying by i produces a rotation counterclockwise by a quarter turn.
• Electrical engineers love complex numbers for exactly this reason. Having such a compact way to represent 90-degree rotations is very useful when working with alternating currents and voltages, or with electric and magnetic fields, because these often involve oscillations or waves that are a quarter cycle (i.e., 90 degrees) out of phase.
• By looking at an extreme, or limiting, case, we can see that that answer can’t possibly be right.
• relationships are much more abstract than numbers. But they’re also much more powerful.
• Today, algebra is less beholden to geometry and we regard the positive and negative solutions as equally valid.
• A mathematician needs functions for the same reason that a builder needs hammers and drills. Tools transform things. So do functions.
• Power functions like these are the building blocks that scientists and engineers use to describe growth and decay in their mildest forms.
• Exponential growth is almost unimaginably rapid.
• it’s useful to have tools that can undo the actions of other tools.
• We perceive pitch logarithmically.
• In every place where they arise, from the Richter scale for earthquake magnitudes to pH measures of acidity, logarithms make wonderful compressors. They’re ideal for taking quantities that vary over a wide range and squeezing them together so they become more manageable.
• The Pythagorean theorem tells you how long the diagonal is compared to the sides of the rectangle.
• EVERY MATH COURSE contains at least one notoriously difficult topic. In arithmetic, it’s long division. In algebra, it’s word problems. And in geometry, it’s proofs.
• What’s important is the axiomatic method, the process of building a rigorous argument, step by step, until a desired conclusion has been established.
• Parabolic curves and surfaces have an impressive focusing power of their own: each can take parallel incoming waves and focus them at a single point.
• This focusing property of parabolas is just as useful when deployed in reverse.
• Mathematicians and conspiracy theorists have this much in common: we’re suspicious of coincidences—especially convenient ones.
• Sine waves are the atoms of structure. They’re nature’s building blocks.
• The key to thinking mathematically about curved shapes is to pretend they’re made up of lots of little straight pieces.
• Calculus is the mathematics of change.
• Roughly speaking, the derivative tells you how fast something is changing; the integral tells you how much it’s accumulating.
• Change is most sluggish at the extremes precisely because the derivative is zero there. Things stand still, momentarily.
• The optimal strategy, however, is to stop playing the field a little sooner, after only 1/e, or about 37 percent, of your potential dating lifetime. That gives you a 1/e chance of ending up with Dreamboat. As long as Dreamboat isn’t playing the e game too.
• In all cases, the business of theoretical physics boils down to finding the right differential equations and solving them.
• things that seem hopelessly random and unpredictable when viewed in isolation often turn out to be lawful and predictable when viewed in aggregate.
• The normal distribution can be proven to arise whenever a large number of mildly random effects of similar size, all acting independently, are added together. And many things are like that.
• Power-law distributions have counterintuitive properties from the standpoint of conventional statistics.
• Events don’t have to follow their probabilities;
• And just as everything is composed of atoms, every number is composed of primes.
• Like straight lines in ordinary space, great circles on a sphere contain the shortest paths between any two points.

23 THINGS THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM by Ha-Joon Chang

• Being critical of free-market ideology is not the same as being against capitalism.
• Human decisions, especially decisions by those who have the power to set the rules, make things happen in the way they happen,
• We do not live in the best of all possible worlds.
• 95 per cent of economics is common sense made complicated, and even for the remaining 5 per cent, the essential reasoning, if not all the technical details, can be explained in plain terms.
• There is no such thing as a free market
• The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them.
• Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
• We accept the legitimacy of certain regulations so totally that we don’t see them. More carefully examined, markets are revealed to be propped up by rules – and many of them.
• Breaking away from the illusion of market objectivity is the first step towards understanding capitalism.
• Companies should not be run in the interest of their owners
• Shareholders may be the owners of corporations but, as the most mobile of the ‘stakeholders’, they often care the least about the long-term future of the company (unless they are so big that they cannot really sell their shares without seriously disrupting the business). Consequently, shareholders, especially but not exclusively the smaller ones, prefer corporate strategies that maximize short-term profits, usually at the cost of long-term investments, and maximize the dividends from those profits, which even further weakens the long-term prospects of the company by reducing the amount of retained profit that can be used for re-investment.
• Running the company for the shareholders often reduces its long-term growth potential.
• Limited liability means that investors in the company will lose only what they have invested (their ‘shares’), should it go bankrupt.
• Most people in rich countries are paid more than they should be
• The wage gaps between rich and poor countries exist not mainly because of differences in individual productivity but mainly because of immigration control. If there were free migration, most workers in rich countries could be, and would be, replaced by workers from poor countries. In other words, wages are largely politically determined.
• We should reject the myth that we all get paid according to our individual worth, if we are to build a truly just society.
• What an individual is paid is not fully a reflection of her worth.
• Most people, in poor and rich countries, get paid what they do only because there is immigration control.
• The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has
• In perceiving changes, we tend to regard the most recent ones as the most revolutionary. This is often at odds with the facts.
• The emergence of household appliances, as well as electricity, piped water and piped gas, has totally transformed the way women, and consequently men, live.
• We vastly overestimate the impacts of the internet only because it is affecting us now.
• Human beings tend to be fascinated by the newest and the most visible technologies.
• Assume the worst about people and you get the worst
• Self-interest is a most powerful trait in most human beings. However, it’s not our only drive. It is very often not even our primary motivation.
• Greater macroeconomic stability has not made the world economy more stable
• Hyperinflation undermines the very basis of capitalism, by turning market prices into meaningless noises.
• However, there is actually no evidence that, at low levels, inflation is bad for the economy.
• The experiences of individual countries also suggest that fairly high inflation is compatible with rapid economic growth.
• Moreover, there is evidence that excessive anti-inflationary policies can actually be harmful for the economy.
• However, the truth of the matter is that policies that are needed to bring down inflation to a very low – low single-digit – level discourage investment.
• Anti-inflationary policies have not only harmed investment and growth but they have failed to achieve their supposed aim – that is, enhancing economic stability.
• Another sense in which the world has become more unstable during the last three decades is that job insecurity has increased for many people during this period.
• Free-market policies rarely make poor countries rich
• With only a few exceptions, all of today’s rich countries, including Britain and the US – the supposed homes of free trade and free market – have become rich through the combinations of protectionism, subsidies and other policies that today they advise the developing countries not to adopt.
• Free-market policies have made few countries rich so far and will make few rich in the future.
• Virtually all of today’s rich countries used protectionism and subsidies to promote their infant industries.
• To sum up, the free-trade, free-market policies are policies that have rarely, if ever, worked.
• Few countries have become rich through free-trade, free-market policies and few ever will.
• Capital has a nationality
• People migrate in search of a better life, sometimes literally to the other side of the world,
• A business will do what it has to do in order to increase its profit, even if it means hurting its home country by shutting plants down, slashing jobs, or even bringing in foreign workers.
• As long as the company generates wealth and jobs within its borders, the country should not care whether the company is owned by its citizens or foreigners.
• In short, few corporations are truly transnational. The vast majority of them still produce the bulk of their outputs in their home countries. Especially in terms of high-grade activities such as strategic decision-making and higher-end R&D, they remain firmly centred at their home countries. The talk of a borderless world is highly exaggerated.
• Different activities have different potentials for technological innovation and productivity growth, and therefore what you do today influences what you will be doing in the future and what you will get out of it.
• We do not live in a post-industrial age
• We may be living in a post-industrial society in the sense that most of us work in shops and offices rather than in factories. But we have not entered a post-industrial stage of development in the sense that industry has become unimportant.
• The US does not have the highest living standard in the world
• The average US citizen does have greater command over goods and services than his counterpart in any other country in the world except Luxemburg. However, given the country’s high inequality, this average is less accurate in representing how people live than the averages for other countries with a more equal income distribution.
• The US is not the richest country in the world any more. Now several European countries have higher per capita incomes.
• There is no simple way to compare living standards across countries.
• Africa is not destined for underdevelopment
• Having more detailed information does not guarantee better decisions – it may actually be more difficult to make the right decision, if one is ‘in the thick of it’.
• The reality is that winners are being picked all the time both by the government and by the private sector, but the most successful ones tend to be done in joint efforts between the two.
• Making rich people richer doesn’t make the rest of us richer
• Despite the usual dichotomy of ‘growth-enhancing pro-rich policy’ and ‘growth-reducing pro-poor policy’, pro-rich policies have failed to accelerate growth in the last three decades.
• The problem is that concentrating income in the hands of the supposed investor, be it the capitalist class or Stalin’s central planning authority, does not lead to higher growth if the investor fails to invest more.
• Even when upward income redistribution creates more wealth than otherwise possible (which has not happened, I repeat), there is no guarantee that the poor will benefit from those extra incomes.
• However, the trouble is that trickle down usually does not happen very much if left to the market.
• Simply making the rich richer does not make the rest of us richer.
• US managers are over-priced
• US managers are over-priced in more than one sense.
• American managers are not only over-priced but also overly protected in the sense that they do not get punished for poor performance.
• worker pay in the US has been virtually stagnant since the mid 1970s.
• Markets weed out inefficient practices, but only when no one has sufficient power to manipulate them.
• People in poor countries are more entrepreneurial than people in rich countries
• People who live in poor countries have to be very entrepreneurial even just to survive.
• What makes the poor countries poor is not the absence of entrepreneurial energy at the personal level, but the absence of productive technologies and developed social organizations, especially modern firms.
• In contrast, most citizens of rich countries have not even come near to becoming entrepreneurs.
• most people from rich countries spend their working lives implementing someone else’s entrepreneurial vision, and not their own.
• The point is that what really makes the rich countries rich is their ability to channel the individual entrepreneurial energy into collective entrepreneurship.
• Even at the firm level, entrepreneurship has become highly collective in the rich countries.
• We are not smart enough to leave things to the market
• People do not necessarily know what they are doing, because our ability to comprehend even matters that concern us directly is limited – or, in the jargon, we have ‘bounded rationality’.
• The world is very complex and our ability to deal with it is severely limited.
• Most of us create routines in our life so that we don’t have to make too many decisions too often.
• More education in itself is not going to make a country richer
• There is remarkably little evidence showing that more education leads to greater national prosperity.
• The importance of apprenticeship and on-the-job training in many professions testifies to the limited relevance of school education for worker productivity.
• mechanization is the most important way to increase productivity.
• In many lines of work, what counts is general intelligence, discipline and the ability to organize oneself, rather than specialist knowledge, much of which you can, and have to, actually pick up on-the-job.
• Education is valuable, but its main value is not in raising productivity. It lies in its ability to help us develop our potentials and live a more fulfilling and independent life.
• What is good for General Motors is not necessarily good for the United States
• Despite the importance of the corporate sector, allowing firms the maximum degree of freedom may not even be good for the firms themselves, let alone the national economy.
• not all regulations are bad for business.
• what is good for a company, however important it may be, may not be good for the country.
• Despite the fall of communism, we are still living in planned economies
• Capitalist economies are in large part planned.
• The fact that communism has disappeared for all practical purposes does not mean that planning has ceased to exist.
• In most capitalist countries, the government owns, and often also operates, a sizeable chunk of the national economy through state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
• Equality of opportunity may not be fair
• Equality of opportunity is the starting point for a fair society. But it’s not enough. Of course, individuals should be rewarded for better performance, but the question is whether they are actually competing under the same conditions as their competitors.
• Big government makes people more open to change
• A well-designed welfare state can actually encourage people to take chances with their jobs and be more, not less, open to changes.
• A weak welfare state was not such a big problem before, because many people had lifetime employment. With lifetime employment gone, it has become lethal.
• Financial markets need to become less, not more, efficient
• The problem with financial markets today is that they are too efficient. With recent financial ‘innovations’ that have produced so many new financial instruments, the financial sector has become more efficient in generating profits for itself in the short run.
• Labour services are expensive in high-income countries (unless they have a constant supply of low-wage immigrants, as the US or Australia), making everything more expensive than what the official exchange rate should suggest
• What makes financial capital necessary for economic development but potentially counterproductive or even destructive is the fact that it is much more liquid than industrial capital.
• A financial system perfectly synchronized with the real economy would be useless. The whole point of finance is that it can move faster than the real economy. However, if the financial sector moves too fast, it can derail the real economy.
• Good economic policy does not require good economists
• Good economists are not required to run good economic policies. The economic bureaucrats that have been most successful are usually not economists.
• Economics, as it has been practised in the last three decades, has been positively harmful for most people.
• To begin with: paraphrasing what Winston Churchill once said about democracy, let me restate my earlier position that capitalism is the worst economic system except for all the others.
• The profit motive is still the most powerful and effective fuel to power our economy and we should exploit it to the full. But we must remember that letting it loose without any restraint is not the best way to make the most of it, as we have learned at great cost over the last three decades.
• Likewise, the market is an exceptionally effective mechanism for coordinating complex economic activities across numerous economic agents, but it is no more than that – a mechanism, a machine. And like all machines, it needs careful regulation and steering.
• Second: we should build our new economic system on the recognition that human rationality is severely limited.
• The fundamental problem is not our lack of information but our limited ability to process it.
• Third: while acknowledging that we are not selfless angels, we should build a system that brings out the best, rather than worst, in people.
• Material self-interest is a powerful motive.
• Fourth: we should stop believing that people are always paid what they ‘deserve’.
• People from poor countries are, individually, often more productive and entrepreneurial than their counterparts in rich countries.
• Fifth: we need to take ‘making things’ more seriously. The post-industrial knowledge economy is a myth. The manufacturing sector remains vital.
• Sixth: we need to strike a better balance between finance and ‘real’ activities.
• A productive modern economy cannot exist without a healthy financial sector.
• Seventh: government needs to become bigger and more active.
• Eighth: the world economic system needs to ‘unfairly’ favour developing countries.

SQUAT EVERY DAY by Matt Perryman

• Any practitioner, whether we’re talking the line technician who keeps the phone lines working or the MD who keeps you healthy, has more knowledge than is immediately evident from their educational background and formal training. There is an unspoken ― and unspeakable ― element in the Doing. The term for this is tacit knowledge.
• Some things are going to remain fuzzy, and you’ll have to make judgment calls based on necessarily incomplete information.
• If doing everything wrong works better than doing it by the book, is it really wrong?
• Take the lifts you want to improve and, perhaps, a bare minimum of assistance work, and hammer it as often as you can.
• This is a trend among top weightlifters ― lots of pulling and squatting, then more pulling and squatting, leads to a strong squat.
• Strength sports aren’t bodybuilding. Strength means lifting things.
• A central theme of this book is that there’s more than one way to get strong.
• The “bulk and power” method, effective as it can be, is not for everyone, and probably has little place outside brief and occasional growth spurts.
• Paraphrasing Vladimir Zatsiorsky, the idea is to train as heavy as possible and as often as possible while staying as fresh as possible.
• Whatever you want to call it, the idea is to get as much exposure to heavy weights as you can stand.
• If you want more than modest results ― if doing it all “right” hasn’t worked out for you ― then you should be open to new kinds of training instead of resigning yourself to being a genetic reject.
• Circumstances matter. The people around you, the people in your gym, the atmosphere of your gym, what you read about training, who you talk to about training, what you believe about training ― this all matters, and I believe it is key to making any type of training effective.
• What you’re going to find in this book is affirmation of the basics: squatting, picking up, and pressing heavy weights on the regular.
• Strength training is Not That Complicated. The hardest part is showing up and putting in the effort. If you can do that, just about anything will work.
• Seek to lift gradually heavier weights and over weeks and months and years those tiny increments eventually add up to a respectable number. This is the fundamental principle of exercise: to stimulate physical fitness, we must present our bodies with ever-increasing challenges.
• For most of us, progress doesn’t happen in a straight line.
• Progress fluctuates. Progress is nonlinear.
• Muscle mass will always determine the upper limits of strength, but only in terms of potential strength. The more muscle available to contract, the more potential for generating force and torque around joints.
• You become what you do.
• Hebb’s rule, as this came to be, says that “cells which fire together wire together”. Nerves learn through repetition.
• The more you practice a skill, the better you become at that skill. Practice enough and the skill hardwires itself into your brain.
• A skill is just a movement. Once you learn it, you’ve learned it.
• In principle, the more practice you get with an exercise ― not just the gross movement, but the weight and technical conditions of that weight ― the better you get at it.
• To get good at lifting heavy things, you must practice lifting heavy things.
• It’s hard to draw a line between too much training and just being out of shape for what you’re doing.
• A high work capacity allows you to handle the volume you need to improve.
• The more quality work you do in training, the more your whole body ― muscles, nerves, organs, everything ― experiences a demand to adapt.
• More workouts mean more opportunities to practice under weights without the boredom and exhaustion of three-hour workouts. You get in shape through sheer repetition and consistency.
• Strength is about skill, teaching your brain how to handle both a movement and a maximum weight, but it’s also about building your body’s capacities.
• Progressive overload and neurological adaptation tell us that, at least in principle, the more you do, the stronger you can become.
• In principle, more frequent training should add up to more progress.
• Getting strong is not what the cliques would have you think, but neither is it complicated.
• If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.
• Exercise science defines intensity as a physical measure: your output relative to your maximum capability. In strength training, intensity is given as a percentage of your one-rep maximum (1RM).
• Stress has a specific meaning: the biological response to a threat encountered by a living being. Stress is your body’s reaction to a threat.
• Train hard, then rest and recover.
• Supercompensation is all about timing.
• The supercompensation model dominates the way we think about exercise. Train hard, then take time off to recuperate. You grow outside the gym, not in it.
• Think patterns, not pieces.
• Muscles heal, and they heal fast ― especially if you’ve got a background of training.
• No single measurement can describe you as “recovered” or “not-recovered”.
• “Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears.” ―Marcus Aurelius
• Fatigue is just a fancy way of saying that you’re tired and not operating at peak capacity.
• We’re often physically capable of doing much more work, at a higher effort, than we typically do, but from a survival standpoint, voluntarily working to a point of catastrophic failure isn’t the best idea.
• the brain is receptive to physical signs of fatigue as well as being the site of mental fatigue.
• CNS fatigue is nothing more ― or less ― than “getting tired” during training.
• The more you exert your will and train your attentional focus, the better you get at staying focused and in control.
• The survival systems in your body are dumb. They can’t distinguish between a deliberate exercise program and physical labor that might kill you. Your body treats conditions as they come without concern for the intent behind them.
• Reactivity can be thought of as how sensitive or numb you are to this environmental noise.
• Top lifters are natural intensity responders.
• Practice builds proficiency with lots of repetition at the edge of our limits.
• The lesson is that if you don’t find that “less” works for you, then you might be better served by upping the amount of work you do.
• High volumes of tissue-damaging exercise can, like infections and trauma, trigger a feeling almost like a mild form of depression.
• A prepared body can handle more than an unprepared body, differences in reactivity and constitution aside.
• Scaling back the stress of heavy lifts by way of periodization is certainly one way to address recovery.
• Exercise is supposed to be uncomfortable.
• Nothing says you have to train to deliberately maximize the discomfort.
• With repeated exposure to the stresses of heavy weights, lifters become better able to handle those stresses.
• The link between mental well-being and physical health is becoming clearer by the year.
• Your mind follows your thoughts.
• Every single thing you do, everything you encounter, every event or activity that elicits a response from you can influence the way your genes express themselves.
• Practice, however, is not just a matter of logging hundreds of uninspired hours. According to “expert on experts” K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State University, what defines the high performers is how they practice.
• You become an expert by pushing outside your comfort zone and working on those things just outside your grasp.
• Consistent practice working through not-so-great genes yields athletes who are still well above average.
• So that’s our target: to think of training as deliberate practice instead of another round of beating ourselves to paste.
• The brain, as we know, is particularly sensitive to the intensity of physical sensations, and when you exercise, fatigue in heart and lungs and muscles begins competing for our attention.
• Forcing yourself to pay attention, to reflect on and honestly evaluate each set, adds information that percentages and sets can’t quite capture, and this helps you keep your work sets dialed in to that zone of quality.
• To get good at lifting a really heavy weight one time, you need to practice lifting really heavy weights one time. Singles let you do that.
• Fatigue, not weight, causes injuries.
• That’s all autoregulation is: adjusting the next set based on the set you just did. You plan on the day, not in advance.
• A black swan is an event that appears unlikely in the extreme, at least according to our forecasting methods, but actually has a substantial probability of occurrence.
• Your body is the outcome of a few million years (at least) of mammalian musculo-skeletal evolution.
• Your training (and eating) gains no benefit from over-analysis and detail-fixation. Good enough isn’t just good enough – it’s all there is.
• Your body needs the kick provided by environmental stresses; it just needs them at the right levels.
• Lots of small doses and occasional extremes can create better long-term results than a gradual, incremental process.
• As we know by now, your mental and emotional condition is a crucial part of stress, and it’s also key to workout performance.
• Learning to relax in the rest of your life is as critical to this process as what you do during training.
• When you go hard, go hard. Push your weights, add more volume, and lift all the time. When you rest, don’t half-ass it by saying you’re “deloading” while hitting the gym for a couple of PR attempts. Rest. Stay away from the gym. In fact, donft think about the gym. Eat bad foods and drink beer.
• “If it’s worth doing, do it every day.” ―Dan John
• Experimenting costs you very little, but it has a potential for large payoffs.
• Don’t be afraid to tinker around and see what suits you – and if you feel like hitting a different lift, hit that lift. Be volatile.
• The “dead” in deadlift refers to the starting position: the bar sits on the floor, and you have to lift the weight from a dead stop.
• To summarize the two approaches: Squat a lot and limit deadlifts to fast pulls or one hard deadlift day. Or pull a lot, limit squatting, and cycle the daily training intensity and the range of motion (by pulling out of the rack or off blocks).
• When you squat every day, it will hurt no matter what weights you lift. Frequency has it’s own break-in curve.
• In my experience, losing your motivation for training and falling out of the habit is the hardest thing to recover from, and preventing that is always better than trying to fix it later.
• The people who focus on the doing, rather than the achieving, tend to get better results.
• Success happens when you do for the sake of doing. Success happens when you see outcomes as a result of effort, practice, and consistency, rather than the exclusive province of natural talent.
• Going through life as an unfocused zombie with an unsharpened mind. That’s dangerous.
• Act with intent. Focus your attention on the task at hand and cultivate self-discipline. Make the effort without making it effortful.