Notes from the Masterpiece book "Breaking Out of Homeostasis", Ludvig Sunstrom.

 PFC activation:

1. Augustus. 2. 4 pillars. 3. What falls asleep. 4. Inventory. 5. Habituation vs Motivation. 6. Sunstrom’s Rule. 7. De-doping. 8. Hormones.9. Program.

We are biologically programmed to avoid delay, the long way, the tiring course, thinking, and doing painful and scary things. We seek quick rewards, shortcuts, energy savers, habituation, comfortable, safe things. 

What does this mean? HOMEOSTASIS = reward, shortcut, energysaving, habituation, comfort, safety, speed, feel good, fit in, maintain, avoid change, instinct. 

What you THINK is best for you is almost certainly not good for you at all, because the patterns you recognise are shaped. 

Right action: find the course of action with the highest expected value (sacrifice, potential for enlightenment, relationship, character growth, money) and commit. Your current physiological state does not support this!!!

It’s hard. It’s hard to change your life. Most people talk and don’t do it. Most don’t think, exert effort, sleep; change requires we think, make effort, and wake.  Many quit when it seems hard boring scary painful. Change requires we balance metacognition and discipline: there are no manuals or copying, you must do your own thinking. Hence biographies.

A homeostasis dweller:

• gets upset by new random stuff 

• Keeps routine 

• Offended

• Pop culture - love revenge coolness sex 

• Commercial media

• TV games fiction 

• Talks about future 

Our instincts are an outdated autopilot. Instinct cannot guide right action because we evolved to live in a savannah and now live in a metatechnological megasystem of competing malincentives amidst a memetic war over meaning. 

Instinct is a disastrous guide for how you should live your life: many times a day it tricks you. 

Ads, shops, games, internet, phones, tv - all are made with the intent to appeal to primitive instinctive programming.

Any area of excessive comfort, of ease, routine, and relaxation, can be used hijack and redirect instinct.

From the evolutionary perspective, the anti-capitalist monopoly of big tech exerts a eugenic pressure on its host populations. As the standard of comfort outstrips the standard of living, a global caste system develops of “those who live in perpetual comfort, slaves to instinct gratification; without discipline, coherent attention span, and autonomy of mind” (Sunstrom), versus the tiny percentage who do not.

Awake people, arhats, focus on business, statesmanship, and science, on learning how to use their brain, and on discipline and metacognition. 

Pain plateaus

Spiritual - mental - physical.

Neurotic - indecisive - weakling

Spiritual - can you do what you say and complete your goals?

Mental - can you force yourself to focus after losing concentration?

Physical - can you do another rep?

Socrates exemplifies pushing through the plateau 

Everything worthwhile in life is on the other side of a plateau

A plateau is stepping outside your comfort zonet

Plateaus: fasting, exercise, working, reading, thinking, meditation, cold shower, hot sauna, socialising, isolation, exploration, polyphasic sleep. 

Xxx

Learning and PFC

Learning is compounding association to first principles, using senses emotions and challenge, with learning transfer. Learning transfer is repetition in practice in public games with the help of accomplished persons. One practices by actively working with discomfort, visualising, measurement, and summarisation. 

The secret of motivation is: introduce rogue elements through the 4 pillars of wakefulness.

Boredom happens when meaning falls asleep.

STEP TEN: just for today, how do I practice all 4 pillars of wakefulness on a tiny scale?

City life is MONOTONOUS because we evolved for NATURE.

Art and culture is a COPING MECHANISM for city dwellers.

Most people can’t handle their LEISURE TIME.

What is your art and culture habits a coping mechanism for?

Attention economy - the attention of the poor harvested by the rich for profit, competing with each other to offer the dumbest consumption stimulus. A race to the bottom of human nature.  

Attention economics: the attention of the poor harvested for profit by the rich who compete with each other to offer the most vulgar consumption stimulus.

The essence of mastery is to learn to CONCENTRATE while staying STILL to minimize FAILURE. Concentration increases Success and Goal Orientation by TEN TIMES. C = X10 G + S. 

Concentration and mental rehearsal are SUPERPOWERS. 

What does the PFC do? Awake, conscious, anti-autopilot.

How to wake PFC? Variation, Novelty, Randomness, Goal-orientation. 

Only self-discipline governs the world, and you gain self-discipline only by your own effort. - Andrew Carnegie.

Most though is not PFC, its RECYCLED.

Most people do deep thinking each day LESS THAN 30 MINUTES

The 8 functions of PFC are: learn, curious, initiate, lead, discipline, focus, visualise, plan

The 8 signs of weak PFC are: crave, comfort, bored, meaningless, unmotivated, distracted, stuck, shallow, cheap thrills. 

HOW TO CREATE STREAKS OF SUCCESS:

Success involves avoiding failure long term. 

The causes of failure are distraction, habituation, autopilot, confusion, dullness, apathy.

The causes of success are concentration, clear goals, stillness, variation, measurement, and deliberate practice.

Concentration and stillness is a deliberate meta-practice of success. 

Tips to concentrate: warm the brain up (walk, read, write, pray, shower, breath, prime, stretch.); segment work and celebrate each segment; block calls for hours; conceal tech; start with 90 minutes, then expand to 4.5 hours; have a day without any tech at all. 

How to activate your PFC:

GOAL-ORIENTATION: set quarterly weekly daily goals, think on paper first actions, write the project for tomorrow out day before, break the weekly goals into daily projects. 

VARIATION: never do the same habit the same way twice. 

Actionable Methods To Activate the PFC:

1. Set 20-40 goals for the next 3 months. Write them on flashcards as first person affirmations. Start with 5. Use the existing list. Write what weekly you would see if you were making definite measurable progress towards your goals. Then write what actions will produce that progress if done every day.  Then plan when where and how you will do those daily actions. 

Who are my heroes to include in my Dunbar number?

Napoleon.

Hitler

Alexander

Montaigne

Bacon

Edison 

Plato

Aristotle

Caesar

Seneca

Epicurus

Plutarch

Maritain

Mortimer Adler

Etienne Gilson

Pattern Recognition

No concept = no pattern recognition

Recognition = mental model + priming + emotional commitment + recently learned.

How to master expert pattern recognition. Select a field, highly transferable, save money, spot an opportunity.

Engineer your life around the 4 pillars of wakefulness as you age.

Reality = pattern recognition. New patterns therefore = new reality.

RAS - reticular activation system. Survival, maintenance, goals. 

Experts versus Novices: activity-specific habits make multiple steps one step; experts act reflexively; experts use cognitive filters to chunk off useless information; experts notice small differences. Experts essentially filter and chunk information to notice differences and exclude noise. 

Expert Pattern Recognition is a superpower. Novices use rules of thumb; experts use recognition. Experts in their domain can go with their gut. Novices cannot trust their reflexes. 

Experts know many things by heart before they can go with their gut. You crack the expert code by detailed domain knowledge. 

It’s hard to get expert pattern recognition in a domain; it’s easy to become successful after that.

Pattern recognition THINKS and DOES; novice knowledge thinks and tries.

Pattern recognition gives proper cognitive weight to the critical factors of a decision.

Sometimes success is just expert pattern recognition.

How to active the RAS:

1. Make up your mind specific detail. 

2. Make up front commitment. Burn the boats.

3. Definite goal, timeline, milestones, measurement,

4. Learn something new each day towards your goal to prime.

5. Review your field commonplace each day to prime.

6. Read biographies of experts in your field to prime.

Break a skill into processes.

Learn process step-by-step until fluent. 

Repeat process until focus is steady.

Move onto another process.

Focus on key components - start simple add complexity

Learn basic building blocks, learn to string them together, more complexity, higher competence - expert. 

The Gateless Gate: you can’t get past it then suddenly you’re on the other side: chunks get assimilated while you sleep.

Rule of thumb: let learning simmer before sharing it. Write a draft then give it a week to rest. 

Pattern recognition is damaged by pop culture. Avoid trends, politics, human interest, news.  

The more primed, relentless, conscious clear emotional committed our goals are, the more we perceive relevant information and patterns. 

Looking at information through mental models lets you see new patterns and creates a new reality. 

Mental models chunk and filter reality, which makes expert ability.

How are you controlling attention? If you aren’t consciously controlling attention then someone else is. 

What could you do if you could double your control of your attention? Attention control makes learning exponential. Reward yourself for curiosity, creativity, and long term investment.

Attention moves through perspectives, first, second, third persons. First is evidence supporting your ideas. Second is your opponents ideas. Third is what you’re missing. Use attention to spot patterns in movies, books, the street, the clouds, peoples faces.

Contrarian attention economy: skip tv, causal internet, media, news, one idea books. Read history, biography, science, training pattern recognition. Commonplace books for re-reading notes. Spent 4% of the book reading screening books.

Write lists of 7 items. Multiple times a day. 

Amygdala Management

GUTS. Initiative and boldness leapfrog’s 90% of the competition. 

People are afraid to stand out, challenge social norms, and do something unconventional. Initiative and differentiation is the easiest way to outcompete. A student takes the initiative to speak with guest lecturers and get referrals for good jobs. 

IQ drops significantly in important situations if you don’t manage your amygdala.

Unlock the genius of boldness through Dunbar’s Number, Fear Hacking.

The more emotional you are the more likely you will learn fast. Putting social status on the line helps you learn. 

The Iron Rule: you get what you put up with, and everything is up for negotiation.

Reward System

If your reward system aligned with your goals?

Anticipate sex to raise dopamine

Be around beautiful women and drink their image in visually.

Most people are not in the loser effect, but stuck in autopilot and a crappy reward system

Never put your hands in your pockets again: walk like a winner.

Dopamine and testosterone reinforce one another .

The Winner Effect.

The best way to get into a winner effect is to break tiny records consistently, with novelty and variation, and huge regular rewards before and after.

Joke: Two things I hate, racism and black people. Two things I hate, people who hate things and people who don't hate things.

The world is getting more addictive. To acquire the taste for exercise, health, meditation, work, constructive criticism, and deliberate practice, avoid overstimulation, choose the best inputs, and remove from your environment the good and bad inputs.

Evaluate action by psychological impact: If I lived today every day for a year, would I be in a winner effect or loser effect? Every act is a rap. Every day is a workout.

I’m risk-averse and in a loser effect, so I must rely on motivation and long term commitment more and overweight towards the positive.

The best way to achieve a goal is to get yourself addicted to the stimuli and activity leading to its fulfilment.

To go from to a winner effect can be a long, long plateau.

Generally, maximise the new and minimise the old; stack new habits on existing habits; and, reward promptly after the right thing.

Eat plain food to lower stimulatory threshold. Avoid SMM2.

Gradual change is easiest with behavior modification: the replacement method:

• Minimise a bad habit

• Replace it with a less negative habit

• Minimise the new habit

• Replace with a positive habit

Resistance to doing goal actions is homeostatic response.

Check: do I have positive emotions associated with your goals? If not, you’re in a loser effect.

Always do something meaningfully productive before relaxing or rewarding yourself

Intermittent rewards are the most powerful

Fast, cold shower, induce mild pain on purpose

Deprive yourself of rewards on purpose at unexpected moments

Set up environments for winner effects with declutter, hero pictures, cleanliness, and dressing schmick

Avoid interactions with negative or stupid people

Brainwash yourself to your goals consistently and persistently

Set recurring reminders of your commitment to attaining a Winner Effect. Phone, calendar, on the wall

Track progress on a whiteboard, ONE metric.

Chunk larger goals into smaller milestones to achieve records in small milestones.

Set up a consistent streak of small victories to build confidence.

Be mindful to avoid demoralising actions - Hitler and soccer.

Inject variety with smaller weird records of challenges to gain more dopamine: how long you can stand on one foot. How long you can hold your breath. Whatever.

Compensate for low risk tolerance and a loser effect by having an out-sized, monomaniacal sense of your abilities.

If you can’t get a winner effect for your main goal then get one for the side.

Hormonal Problems

Testosterone below 300 ng/dl

Estogen/estradiol above 61 pg/ml

T/E ration of 5

Low vitamin D

If you have any of these bad numbers you must take immediate action.

How to get addicted to working out.

Go same time

Songs only for gym, varied occasionally: listen and get into body. Get calm and realise youre about to relax.

Lots of coffee, raw cacao, ginseng.

Use mirrors to reinforce

Break records in reps or volume decreases soreness

Sit in the sauna and have an ice bath.

Eat a big meal right after

Pack gym bag for next time after getting home.