Alleviating Back Pain, Free Sous-Chef, Avoiding Misery, & Getting Unstuck

Hello friends, happy New Year and welcome back to Life Reimagined, a free weekly elixir designed to make you feel good and live better. A special welcome to the 452 subscribers who have joined since last time.

Before we get to the meat and potatoes of this week's newsletter, I wanted to share a few changes I'm making to Life Reimagined in 2023.

✋ What to Expect in 2023

Life Reimagined is entering its 6th year of life, and I've been thinking about how I can reimagine the newsletter to make it endlessly fun to create and more valuable and enjoyable to consume. So far, I've converged on three changes to achieve this aim.

1. I'll be sending the email weekly, instead of twice a month. I sent the newsletter weekly during years 1-3, and I think that cadence leads to better ideas.

2. The information will be more snackable, actionable, and exploratory. I'll leave the long-form ideas and content for my podcast and website.

3. I'm experimenting with new, possibly recurring categories – things like health discoveries, creativity practices, life and money hacks, book recommendations, useful websites, art I'm enjoying, and more. These will evolve over time.

This week is the first edition with the new flavors and textures. As this chapter of the newsletter unfolds, let me know what you're enjoying or not enjoying. In part, I'm making these changes to bring new life to a project that I hope continues over the next few decades, and knowing more about what you think is an important piece of the puzzle.

And if the new vibe no longer works for you, feel free to say see ya later. No hard feelings, of course. Alright, that's enough housekeeping. Let's get to the meat and potatoes.

🧘‍♀️ I. Getting Rid of Back Pain

I've had acute and chronic back pain since my late teens. Over the years, I've seen doctors, chiropractors, PTs, masseuses, and acupuncturists, and experimented with many forms of training to try to prevent and mitigate the pain. Some of these things have helped, but eventually, my back gives out again.

After my back completely locked up while surfing a few months ago, a friend recommended this 12-minute foundations routine, which focuses on strengthening and realigning the lower back, hamstrings, and glutes.

I've done it 2-3x a week for a couple of months, and it's been life-changing. I've paired this workout with my regular lifting, stretching, and surfing regimen, and so far, I've been pain-free and had noticeable strength and posture improvements.

So if you're one of the fellow back-pain people out there, especially if you have problems when working out or sitting too long in a chair, the foundations routine is worth a try.

👨‍💻 II. Tool Worth Checking Out

If you ever visit a website with a paywall for an article you want to read, you can put the link into Archive.Today and bypass the paywall. This is really useful if a friend shares an article on a website you don't subscribe to and you want to read it without any hassle.

💬 III. Speech I'm Revisiting

Charlie Munger, the legendary investor and partner of Warren Buffet, gave a wonderful speech at Harvard in 1986 that I recently re-read. In “How to Guarantee a Life of Misery,” Munger uses the clever and underutilized technique of inversion to teach you about simple ways to avoid a miserable existence.

📚 IV. Book for Unblocking Your Creativity

I listened to Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg over the holidays. If you’re a writer or someone who enjoys journaling in any form, this is a fun and inspiring book that will help you get out of a rut and feel more connected to the craft.

I enjoyed listening to this book because Natalie reads it and provides commentary on each chapter a decade after she wrote the book. So you end up getting her insight on what she originally wrote and how her ideas have changed over time.

Bonus reading: I read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin this week, and it was an enjoyable story about friendship, coworkers, and love.

👨‍🍳 V. Using AI as a Sous-Chef and Mentor

I did not enjoy cooking for the first 29.8 years of my life. But in the last couple of months, I've caught the cooking bug and am focused on improving my skills in 2023 👨‍🍳.

One thing that's always irritated me about cooking is how difficult it is to find simple information about how to cook various foods. If you google "how to sautee broccoli," you get taken to cooking blogs with memoir-length stories, ads, and other irrelevant information. Only at the end of the article do you find how to sautee the damn broccoli. This is good for the SEO and ad revenue for blogs, but it sucks as an aspiring chef.

Thankfully OpenAI's ChatGPT solves this problem for me. Let's say I have a ribeye steak laying around and want to learn how to cook it without following a complicated recipe. I can ask ChatGPT "how to pan fry ribeye steak" and get the essential information I need.

As someone who does not like following recipes or sifting through cooking blogs, this has made me a happier and better cook. What's cool is that you can ask it much more specific questions than how to cook something, get detailed recipes if that's your thing, and even get meal ideas based on what you have in your fridge. Once you start using ChatGPT in this way, it's hard to imagine going back to Google for cooking queries.

As I'm learning to become a better cook, I'm thinking of ChatGPT as my sous-chef and mentor, a tool to help me move up the learning curve with more grace.

🌊 VI. Art I'm Enjoying

Southern California has been hit with historic swells over the last week, and I've been spending a lot of time in the ocean surfing some of the biggest waves I've encountered and watching other people surf waves that I'm not yet ready to tackle. It's been fun and scary and an immersive lesson about the beauty and power of the sea.

That's why it was very fitting when this week I rediscovered Under the Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai, a Japanese ukiyo-e artist of the Edo period. At points over the last week, I've felt like the canoe facing off with a wave that may crush me or provide the most rewarding experience of my life.

🧠 VII. Something I’m Thinking About

👋 VIII. In Case You Missed It

Steph and I published our annual review episode on the podcast: The Best Sh*t We Learned in 2022. We break down the year into 8 categories, which include best new ideas, best new life hack, best new experience, best/worst purchase, best/worst trend, best personal win, #1 goal for the new year, and predictions for 2023.

That's all for now. See you next Sunday.

 — Cal

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🌎 Three other things you might enjoy

1. Doing Time Right: Everyone wants to get more done in less time. This course will show you exactly how to do that with the eliminate, automate, delegate, and iterate framework.

2. Foundations Looking for good books to read? Check out Foundations, a growing digital notebook with notes & lessons from 100+ timeless books.

3. Listen to the Podcast: Feel like school didn't prepare you for adulthood? The Sh*t You Don't Learn in School podcast exists to help make up for this societal failure.