Room of Jake

0:00 If you don't need to, but you want to, just for the fun of it, or you're just so inspired to do something, I think you can do more than a few hours of work. But the secret is the variance, the dynamic, that you don't do the repetitive thing too long, and you can switch from one topic to another, which is completely different. So you actually, kind of way of recouping while you're doing the other thing. So if there's like a really hard problem to solve in a way that it doesn't take time, it takes the idea, and it's just not coming. So if you're jumping to do something which is more mechanical, and allows actually time to prove that idea, and switching between these type of things, I think you can put quite a many hours if you want to, but obviously if you don't need to, that's totally fine.

0:53 So a few hours a day, yeah, focused work. That's the way to go. This is a long game usually, so I wouldn't be too harsh on the fact that whether you're doing enough in a weekly basis, daily basis, it's more likely that you move when you start to exercise whatever that it is that day already winning. Of course it's good to have some kind of a regime and keep doing it, but I would say that the variety is also good. Doing a little bit of stretching, doing a little bit of exercise, a little bit of yoga, don't underestimate sort of, which doesn't feel like sweating and sports. So even walking is really good for your endurance and your heart probably as well. And I say it elsewhere as well, heart monitor is a good thing.

1:42 It's a friend of yours. I'm also looking to recovery. Basically if you have some kind of a way of monitoring the recovery, that's something you cannot usually just... by the feel, get it right. So get some hard facts whether you actually fit to do something or you need more time to recover. I have simplified stuff over the years. So nowadays it's basically only the garments recovery, which I get immediately after the exercise. And then I'm checking the heart rate monitor more or less. There are a few other stuff, but usually what I have noticed is that the heart rate deep at night is pretty good. So I can check the heart rate, the heart rate indicator, what's happening and also the overall pulse rate.

2:33 But then basically the general feeling, how am I doing and yeah, those are the ones I'm nowadays using. Used to be a lot more, but that's what I'm settled. If you can know the answer to that question, then you basically know everything. You can look backwards and walk forward by looking backwards. Looking how your, how the steps led you to that place where you're standing at the moment and the people who were walking before you. Or you can turn around and start to look the other direction. And obviously you don't see anything there because you haven't walked there yet. But in a similar way, all the steps you're taking will lead to certain paths. And the peculiar thing is that many times people were rushing around the world 100 years, 200 years ago to the patent office exactly the same day.

3:26 And having the same idea. So if one of them didn't do it, the other one did it. So in some of the occasions, the individual didn't matter that much. The history would have still figured it out that way. But in some cases there has been a dark turns, twists, sometimes probably good turns as well, just by accident or some weird coincidences or by happenstance. So interesting times. And to give you less cryptical answer, here's a classic, probably seen it, but Richard Feynman and the magnets. The reporter asks a question, why does the magnets do the thing what they do? And then he goes to a tongue and in a really nice way, but you can say, well, it looks like he's a bit irritated, but he nicely and politely explains.

4:21 And I will not spoil it if you haven't seen it before, but that's another one. Another way of answering to the question, not exactly the same way, but you get the sentiment out of that one. And in a similar manner, David Deutsch was also, I think, in his book saying that it doesn't matter where you start, you start to pull a string from a pullover and eventually there's no pullover left. Because no matter which corner you start to ask these questions, eventually you need to explain everything.