Badass Workout Music Cooperative

The biggest motivator to my workouts is music. Science shows that having a properly intense song improves performance in strength and endurance. I believe in science and I want you to do some science with me.

I’ve tailored a few playlists with music ideal for maxing out in weight lifting and for beating my mile time. I don’t spend a whole lot of time discovering new music, however, so these playlists are getting stale.

I’d love to have people contribute badass workout music. I set up two collaborative playlists on Spotify, one for lifting and one for running. If you have any songs that help push you to be crazy strong or crazy fast, drop them in here:

I got the playlists started with the workout music I currently listen to. I grew up on rap, so you’ll see a lot of Eminem and Beastie Boys.

I won’t do any curating in the collaborative playlist so that anyone can pick out songs they like. I will, however, pick the songs I like and add them to my personal, non-collaborative playlists:

I’m pretty picky with workout music, so those personal playlists are highly tested. Even if I hear a song I think might work, I won’t make it a permanent part of the list until I’ve tried it at the gym. If I don’t feel like it’s pushing me, I’ll cut it from the list right away.

(There’s no order to the music. I like to shuffle, but that’s neither here nor there.)

A guide on: Using Blue Light to your Benefit

During my first year of law school, I started to struggle with sleep. I had trouble falling asleep, waking up, and always I felt tired. When you have infinity cases to read and hypothetical hooligans to defend, that begins to be a problem.

Stanford Hospital’s awesome sleep specialists diagnosed me with sleep apnea and delayed sleep phase syndrome (that same month, I was also diagnosed with TMJD and a chronic sinus-infection that required surgery, but those are not sleep related, so I’ll save those stories for later). I became very proactive about improving my sleep and I learned quite a few tricks along the way.

I feel it would be selfish to keep this knowledge to myself. Given the amount of work and stress common to law school, I’ve seen many of my classmates similarly struggle with sleep. In an effort to help, I’m writing up guides that other students might find useful. If you’re a student having problems with sleep, I’d love to get your feedback. Feel free to reach out here or through Twitter.

See the guide in the IFrame below.

(I wrote this guide on Evernote, but have had significant problems importing it into Tumblr’s rich-text editor. Fortunately, Evernote’s “share” feature takes notes and renders them perfectly online, so I’ll leave the note in an IFrame until I can find a better text-editing tool for Tumblr. You can go to the Evernote page directly if the IFrame gives you trouble)

Source: evernote.com

You, too, are terminally ill

People are disturbed by a determinate lifetime.

That’s the lesson I’ve learned this week after I posted the “Life by Months” tool which lets people enter their birthday and get a quick glimpse of the months they’ve lived and a view of the months ahead. Many expressed that the spreadsheet had made them feel unnerved.

I got a few people who responded with “memento mori,” or “remember your mortality.” As important as that is, I don’t think the awareness of mortality is what unnerves people. More than death, it seems to be the quantification of a lifetime that is unsettling. It’s an unusual insight. Time is quantified every day — we’re dominated by clocks and schedules and we’re paid by the hour. Why is this schedule more disturbing than the others?

It’s not unusual practice. When someone gets diagnosed with a terminal disease, doctors will give an estimate of how much longer that person will survive given the particular disease. Their time is quantified and their days are numbered. They get their affairs in order. They confess their love and settle their differences. They know that if they don’t get it done within that time frame, they will never do it. They stop wasting time on the trivial. They quit the job they hate and double park at the grocery store. The terminally ill don’t have time to waste.

The rest of us go along, doing things we hate, holding grudges, not telling that cute girl that she’s cute. We can wait until the time is right, and we’ll do all the important things then. For now, we can tolerate the trivial. We’re healthy. We have time to waste.

Except that we don’t. At birth, we get an estimate of how much longer we’ll survive, but because we don’t get labeled with a disease, we go on forgetting that we, too, need to get our affairs in order. It’s a luxury that those with a diagnosis don’t have. They’re told that they’re terminally ill and they never forget. Tragically, the healthy forget that, although there is no diagnosis, they, too, are terminally ill.

Which is why I made that spreadsheet. I’m a healthy, terminally ill person. I wanted a diagnosis so that I wouldn’t forget.

In the original post, I listed the reasons why I feel it is important to quantify my life in this way, but I thought it might be helpful to expand on each of my reasons so that others might understand why this isn’t an exercise in negativity.

  1. Life is finite: As elastic as time can seem, it moves at a constant pace and I can measure it. Therefore, it is divisible. Each moment is wholly unique. I should appreciate it, enjoy it, and take advantage of it.
  2. I know when I am mostly likely to die, given the vast amount of data on mortality: I have the ability to plan with the likely date of my death in mind.
  3. I am fortunate to have lived as long as I have: Each cell that goes gray was a whole month in which I had the great fortune to work, fail, look at the moon, see that one cute girl, embarrass myself, listen to music, think, and live.

I was expecting people to acknowledge the gray cells as a positive. Each is a little memento of good and bad times gone by. Surprisingly, none of the comments indicated that anyone appreciated their ocean of gray. I was disappointed by that result.

This month, shortly after his fifth birthday, a boy in my home town died of cancer. His parents would have done anything to see him grow into the many little gray cells that manage to unnerve the rest of us when we look at the vast fortunes that are our lives.

My Life by Months Visual

Time is difficult to grasp, especially when we think about it in months or years. I couldn’t get a solid idea of how long my life has felt, so I decided to make a visual to show me just how long of a life I’ve had and how much time I have left (assuming a 75 year life expectancy).

I created a spreadsheet with 900 cells (12 months x 75 years). Each cell is labeled with a month, starting at my birthday in August of 1989. When the current month passes, the spreadsheet grays that month out.

Life by Months Screen

Many find the idea disturbing, but the visualization helps me remember a few important things.

  1. Life is finite.
  2. I know when I am mostly likely to die, given the vast amount of data on mortality
  3. I am fortunate to have lived as long as I have.

I posted a screenshot of this spreadsheet to Facebook and I got some positive feedback so I decided to make it available and easier to use.

Life by Months

Download from the link above and open the file in Excel. You should see a cell with the date August 21, 1989. Click that cell and type in your own birth date (in that format or in the MM/DD/YYYY format). The sheet should fill in all the cells starting from your own birth date and gray out up to the current month.

I made the sheet “protected” in order to avoid unwanted editing to the formulas, but you can change that setting under “Tools” in Excel.

I would love any feedback or comments on this. You can find me at @erikpavia.

(Update: Someone more enterprising than I saw this over Twitter and decided to make a website that does the same thing in a more elegant manner. You can find it at lifegrid.co. Thanks to Erik Johnson for making this more accessible than I ever could have)