Freediving, Love, and Marriage

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🎙The Podcast is Back!

In May, Steph and I took a break from the Sh*t You Don't Learn in School Podcast. We had decent traction (~20,000 listens/month after our first year), but we weren't aligned on the vision for the podcast.

So we took a hiatus, and after 4 months away, we now have a shared vision that we're both excited about. The podcast will be similar in nature to our first year of content, but we're hoping to cover an even wider range of topics in a more fun way.

As a starting point, we launched a 3-part (soon to be 4-part) series on love, marriage, and relationships this week.

​You can listen to that series and our other episodes here.

Make sure to subscribe on your podcast player of choice so you don't miss out on new episodes 😉. And if you have any topics you'd like us to cover, feel free to reply to this email and let me know!

🤿 Freediving

Over the last few years, I've channeled a lot of my time and ambition into becoming a good surfer. Like everything in life, progress in surfing is non-linear. There have been many periods where I've plateaued and even felt like I was regressing.

When that happens, I try to figure out what's going on. Sometimes, I just need to wait out a slow period of progress and let time take care of the problem. But other times, I've needed to change my focus and routines to develop new skills that allow me to reach the next level of surfing.

For example, getting a surf skate – a skateboard that operates like a surfboard – was a big unlock for helping me generate more speed and smoother turns on waves.

Instead of waiting for the surf gods to give me good waves to practice on, I was able to get on the surf skate everyday and practice the skills that needed work. That routine alone probably saved me at least a year of frustration in the water.

More recently, I've realized that I want to surf bigger and faster breaking waves. The problem is that anytime I end up in surf that's 6ft+, I end up spending most of the session terrified and simply hoping to survive.

The thing that's holding me back is not my ability to surf a larger wave, but rather, my fear of dying on big days. One of my theses is that I can reshape my relationship with larger waves by improving my water survival skills.

For example, if I can learn to hold my breath for longer periods of time, I won't be as scared of drowning when getting pummeled by large waves.

As one avenue for increasing my comfort spending time underwater, I decided to start learning about freediving. Freediving is a relatively new and fast-growing form of diving where you take a single breath and go underwater for as long and deep as you want. Some people go hundreds of feet deep and spend 5+ minutes under water with a single breath.

That may sound crazy, but with the right training, most people can somewhat easily hold their breath for 4+ minutes.

So a few weeks ago, I took a 3-day basic freediving course. The first day was spent in the classroom learning about the human body, safety measures, and how to freedive. The next day was 8 hours in a pool, practicing static and dynamic breath holds. And on the final day, we went into the open ocean to put our skills to the work.

I came out of the experience with a lot of valuable knowledge about my body, mind, and how to safely navigate spending more time than I was comfortable with under water. These skills will definitely help me with my surfing goals, but one unintended consequence of the course was a deep curiosity about the ocean and the limits of my body and mind.

From my 3 days in the course, it became clear that the biggest limitation to my underwater survival skills was my relationship with my mind. That was a surprising learning, and I'm excited to lean into this new knowledge.

Over the next month, I'll be doing various breathing and mind exercises to improve my breath hold. I'll also be consuming books and other forms of content to learn more about freediving. I have no idea where this initial seed that's been planted will take me, but it's the first time in a while where I've been this curious about a new practice.

If you're even remotely interested in learning more about the ocean or freediving, I really enjoyed Deep by James Nestor. It's a well-told story about a journalist who immerses himself in the world of freediving.

Through his journey, he teaches you about freediving, the ocean, and how you can better understand and connect with the place we all came from.

🧠 Ideas I'm Exploring Right Now

1. The relationship between happiness and ambition

2. Using AI to increase writing quality and output

3. Balancing energy between local impact and impact at scale

4. When quitting helps vs. harms you

5. Developing proactive health protocols in a reactive health system

— 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.