Everything's a Puzzle to Solve
Solve it, Take Help or Give up. Choice is yours !!
“Nothing whets the intelligence more than a passionate suspicion, nothing develops all the faculties of an immature mind more than a trail running away into the dark.”
― Stefan Zweig, The Burning Secret and other stories
“My back is killing me” said Ahmed (a friend of mine)
I asked, “What are you doing about it?”
“Can’t do anything man. Just surviving on painkillers. Guess I’m getting old.” said Ahmed
This conversation got me thinking about back pain. Is it a permanent situation, or chronic in nature or is it solvable? If it’s permanent, then he’s on the right path, and maybe pills are his only remedy. But very few things are permanent in life, as permanent as death and taxes.
But if it’s chronic or temporary or benign, then it is solvable and one ought to solve this puzzle, instead of giving the agency of one’s own wellness to some pharma company abroad or a generic manufacturer back home. I am currently reading the book ‘Bottle of Lies’ which covers the fraud and deceit committed by the Indian generic pharmaceutical giant Ranbaxy. This book will make you cringe about your own blind faith in the pharmaceutical industry.
The unconscious habit of popping a pill isn’t a solution to all problems. It’s a band-aid on a bleeding wound, but it doesn’t guarantee that the clotting process will work just fine. And if it doesn't, then the band-aid will only stop the blood from pouring out but the systems only getting messed up inside. But the habit of popping pills has taken extreme proportions for 2 reasons -
Patients want a quick fix since they have a job to do, money to earn, status in society to achieve, and projects to deliver on time. And most find reading, researching, or experimenting a boring or a tedious process. Only dopamine-inducing activities warrant any attention, long term games excite very few. It’s like the childlike imagination of figuring things out has abandoned the adults en masse.
Doctors also have an incentive bias and endowment bias when dealing with patients. Incentives make them prescribe drugs and procedures that generate revenue for the clinic, hospital, insurance vendor, and all parties involved in the supply chain dynamics of a medical facility. Endowment bias makes them stick to processes and procedures they have spent their whole lives learning about, without opening up to the possibilities of nutrition science, fitness, alternative therapies, biohacking and so many more tools that have been researched extensively today.
I don’t mind reading or researching, and the curiosity about back pain got me thinking about the experiments my friend can conduct, to open up the possibility of a cure or a method that heals him. He is just 40 years old and 40 is young according to me, especially when I believe that living till 100 is so achievable. More on that in some other blog in the future.
I will spare you the details that I read, but let’s look at a few important points related to back pain. Even if you are not suffering from one, you just might in the future as it tends to show up as you age, or you may know someone that is suffering from it currently -
54% of the people experiencing low back pain, spend the majority of their day sitting. When working in a sedentary office job, lower back pain can develop from physical inactivity, incorrect posture, or a poorly designed workspace.
Chronic low back pain prevalence increases linearly from the third decade of life on, until 60 years of age.
Back pain affects 1/3rd of your sleep quality, work productivity, and exercise ability.
95% of people reported recurrence of the pain in a few months, 20-44% have a recurrence in less than a year and 5% of them will develop chronic back pain.
Other factors that may cause office back pain include stress, an unhealthy lifestyle, and lack of exercise.
If you dig into these points in detail, you would realize that there are many pieces of the puzzle to solve separately. Eventually, maybe one of the pieces becomes the key to solving the backpain issue or it may need more than a few pieces together.
Ergonomics
If 54% of people are ailing because of sitting for the majority of the day, then the solutions to be experimented with would be -
Better designed chairs (and I have seen some crazy ones during my biohacking trips and conferences)
Better organized workspaces
Posture
Better Posture can be worked upon consciously or with the help of devices like Upright GO (I have one and it’s pretty cool a device to work with)
You could even ask someone to point out when your posture is slacking. Maybe you reward that person every time he points out. No one likes losing money every day, or every hour :)
Work Design
Regular breaks from work to walk around a bit (e.g. 2-3 mins of a walk after every 45 min session on the desktop)
You could set up an alarm for every 45 mins to take a short break
You could do a lot of meetings over a walk instead of sitting down (Steve Jobs preferred walks over anything else)
Stress Management
Good sleep is key to having weight control, a healthier heart, a mood boost, better immunity and so much more. All these elevate your own standards for operating on a daily basis, allowing you to win this fight against aging issues.
Adequate sun exposure builds better bones, contributes to good sleep, which in turn contributes to the benefits pointed above.
Eating well cannot be overemphasized. It mainly would keep your weight in control and give you the adequate energy needed to carry out your daily chores with ease.
Staying Active in any form that suits you is fundamental to fighting the issues brought upon us due to our sedentary lifestyles. We were not built for sitting on a chair all day long. So don’t let your economic choices adversely affect your biological traits. Choose swimming, Microsoft Kinect Go Games, Table Tennis, Walks, Work Outs, Badminton, or any other medium that works for you. These contribute to you becoming a Supple Leopard, as Dr. Kelly Stewart would like to term it.
Everything mentioned above was the result of a few days of reading and loads of curiosity. This is where the journey just begins, but trying out various methods enlisted herein would take weeks, months, discipline, few purchases, and a brave commitment to solving this puzzle once and for all.
If Arnold & Sylvester could figure out living healthy lives even beyond 70, then you and I surely can, especially when we haven’t stressed our bodies with intense work outs, travels and supplementation as they would have in their Hollywood careers.
But at the core of this treasure hunt, lies the curiosity that we used to have once, the vibe of a kid who wants to crack the jigsaw puzzle, the rubrics cube, Word Bogle (my favorite), or the simple Crossword Puzzle. How else would you explain the multi-billion dollar breakthroughs by college dropouts (Bill Gates), the revolutions brought up by simple men (M.K. Gandhi), or the COVID Vaccine puzzle solved by a 10-year-old firm called ‘Moderna’.
Every scientist, engineer, innovator, creator, founder, entrepreneur, athlete, father, mother, student, professional, businessman, industrialist, and almost everyone else has solved some problem, challenge, adversity and eventually survived, some even thrived to reach the pinnacle of their domains.
When my father’s business went bust, my mother had to figure out ways and means to earn enough money so that I and my sister didn’t have to starve. She chose to wear many hats - real estate broker, referral agent for jewelry designers, grocery and sweet shops, and also as a proxy player in Gymkhana card games. I have immense respect for her for cracking the puzzle and contributing to our upbringing and value system.
You and I may not be Albert Einstein or Steve Jobs, but we surely can take on life and its challenges as a puzzle to solve. If it’s been done before, then you too can. But the puzzle got to fascinate you, got to be important to you, got to matter to you in the scheme of things.
I started writing about investing because compounding my money handsomely over a long period of time is a sure shot way to a multi-million dollar generational wealth. And it became important to me when I got to experience firsthand what life without money feels like. Till my early 30s, I was barely surviving, experimenting with various industries and professional paths. Now I’m in my early 40s and life’s way more comfortable, but it’s time for this new puzzle - 20% p.a. + returns over 20 + years. Let’s call it 20 in 20.
Every book I read, every newsletter I subscribe to, every training or course I buy into leads to solving the puzzle of 20 in 20. This puzzle alone has many mini-puzzles to solve -
Equity vs Debt
Fundamental vs Technical
Bitcoin vs Ethereum
Global vs India
Growth vs Value
Tangible vs Intangible
Independent Thinking vs Copycatting
Besides the mini puzzles related to investing, there are others related to longevity -
Keto vs Vegan
Workouts vs Cardio
Bodyweight vs Machines
Supplements or Natural
Intermittent Fasting or Full day fasting
8-hour sleep vs 6-hour sleep
4-hour workout week or 5 days work out week
I got to find ways to stay healthy and alive long enough to create cherishable memories with my family & friends, enjoy my accumulated wealth, and even see it being used for making an impact on society. I might steer towards child education more than anything else.
Though the philanthropic puzzle is decades away from being taken up, that too shall be dealt with in the same manner.
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery each day. - "Old Man's Advice to Youth: 'Never Lose a Holy Curiosity.'" LIFE Magazine (2 May 1955) p. 64” - Albert Einstein
The above pic is a snapshot of my Kindle Reader collection. It has 555 books purchased, 100s of samples downloaded and I may need 3 lifetimes to finish this collection along with the physical books I have at both my homes i.e. Dubai & Mumbai. There are 33 newsletters I have subscribed to, 3 courses related to Investing, Valuation & Leverage that I am enrolled in, annual biohacking conventions Europe and 1-2 hours of daily podcast consumption - these form my consumption habits around content, knowledge & research.
Besides the written word and training videos, my podcast & Audible consumption would make up for 14 hours a week. I am not stressing hard while listening to them but I choose to be the fly on the wall while smart people are talking. It has a very subtle way of transforming your thinking. You can’t say which talk made a difference to you, but you know that you are fundamentally changing as a person.
My conversations and the write-ups on my Substack, my reputation along with the results in my profession are a direct outcome of all these consumption habits over the years.
I cannot exactly fathom how my future will shape up to be, what does excite me though is that I’m busy solving puzzles that excite me to no end. This is how Andy Dufresne would have felt while digging a tunnel for 20 years in the movie‘ Shawshank Redemption’. While he was imprisoned, he continued to remain calm, steady, and at peace, knowing that he will be out someday.
I’m too gonna be out someday, from the haze of numbing cacophony of capital markets, from the naivety of believing every word spoken by management and Investing gurus, from the emotional grip of personal biases, from the greed and fear manias that are damn successful at sucking in anyone close to it.
The joy of breaking through excites me day in day out. My mom pulled through successfully, so did Gates, so did Einstein, so did Moderna, so will I, and so can you.
No better person to sum up the context of today’s post than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself -
“My mind," he said, "rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense them with artificial stimulants. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation. That is why I have chosen my own particular profession, or rather created it, for I am the only one in the world.”
Instead of taking that pill today, try getting to the root cause of the issue and start piecing the puzzle together. I urge you to be brave enough to take the onus of solving it, you ought to 👍🏻 If needed, I am just an email or a call away.
Recommendations for the week #
Why Investing feels like Astrology? - This is a brilliant article and it also inspired me to write my own piece today. The article covers the distinction between fundamental analysis and flow-based investing. It paints the picture of today’s frothy valuations in the most succinct manner one can.
Ishmohit Arora is a highly respected Youtube influencer with thousands of followers to his investing channel across various social media channels. It’s his course on Investing that I have enrolled for and its helped me immensely in getting a good grip of the investing landscape in India. His write-up on Watchlist is apt for all investing in Direct Equity.
Invest Like the Best Podcast with Philip Rosedale & Bill Gurley. If metaverse economy intrigues you, then this is a MUST LISTEN. It covers gaming, Oculus, FB, Zoom, Web3, Crypto, and many other technologies and companies that will be central to this theme.
Brilliant! Curiosity keeps our brain alive...