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1,000 Years of Relationship Wisdom
Welcome to Effective Habits, a weekly newsletter where I share evidence-based strategies and tools to help you live a happy, healthy, and productive life.
Today at a Glance:
1,000 Years of Relationship Advice
The Best Type of Exercise for Longevity
102 Lessons from the 102 Books I Read This Year (Productivity)
“What you’re supposed to do when you don’t like a thing is change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it. Don’t complain.”
1,000 Years of Relationship Advice
Sahil Bloom
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Over time, a clear pattern emerges when relationship wisdom is gathered deliberately rather than casually. By regularly asking couples who have been married for 40, 50, or even 60+ years what advice they wish they could give their younger selves, a body of insight begins to compound. Collected year after year, across many long marriages and well over a thousand combined years of lived experience, this approach reveals how consistent relationship lessons become when viewed from a long time horizon. What follows is a synthesis of that accumulated perspective, which isn’t drawn from theory or trends, but from people who have lived it and reflected on it decades later.
🎬Action!
Never keep score in your relationship. Treat love as a partnership, not a competition.
Strengthen your love like a muscle. Expect your relationship to be tested and use those moments to grow stronger.
Keep dating your partner. Continue courting each other, no matter how long you’ve been together.
Take care of yourself so you can care for your partner. Identify your daily needs and make sure they’re being met.
Do one quiet act of service every day. Help without announcing it. Small actions compound.
Keep conflicts between the two of you. Don’t involve friends, family, or coworkers in disagreements.
Address issues promptly. Have difficult conversations early instead of letting time pass.
Allow space for sadness alongside love. Accept that vulnerability and pain are part of deep connection.
Choose “wonderful” over perfect. Appreciate what works instead of chasing flawlessness.
Adjust effort as needed. It can’t always be 50/50, so accept that the balance shifts, as long as together you give 100%.
Default to love when uncertain. Choose kindness and generosity in moments of doubt.
Let go of the need to be right. Prioritize the relationship over winning an argument.
Let go of trivial annoyances. Ask whether it will matter in a month. If not, let go of it now.
Start every day with physical affection. Begin with a hug or a kiss to reaffirm connection.
Keep doing the small romantic gestures. Notes, surprises, and affection never lose their power.
Embrace complementarity, not just compatibility. Let each partner lead in their strengths.
Remember that your love is yours. Focus on embracing each other and accept that not everyone will understand or agree.
Genuinely enjoying each other’s company. People make these long lists of traits they want to find in a partner, but so much of life just comes down to being kind and pleasant to be around.
Model the qualities you want in a partner. You attract what you put out into the world.
Express appreciation every single day. Say it out loud, whether it’s big or small, because unspoken appreciation is where relationships quietly break down.
The Best Type of Exercise for Longevity
Dr. Rhonda Patrick & Brady Holmer
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Public exercise guidelines, such as those from the World Health Organization, typically assume a simple trade-off between intensity and time, implying that one minute of vigorous activity equals two minutes of moderate activity, a rule derived from calorie and energy-expenditure estimates rather than long-term health outcomes; however, newer evidence using wearable-device data suggests this equivalence substantially understates the health impact of intensity. By analyzing accelerometer data from tens of thousands of adults in the UK Biobank and linking real-world movement patterns to outcomes like mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer, researchers found that vigorous activity delivers far greater “health value” per minute than moderate or light movement, which is often equivalent to four to nine minutes of moderate activity, and in some cases dozens of minutes of light activity. These findings highlight two limitations of traditional guidelines: their reliance on self-reported exercise, which misses short but intense bursts of daily movement, and their focus on metabolic equivalence rather than disease risk reduction. The broader implication is not that light or moderate activity lacks value, but that intensity matters more than previously acknowledged, even in very small doses. Brief, hard efforts—whether structured workouts or spontaneous bursts like climbing stairs quickly—appear to have a disproportionate association with long-term health, suggesting that future guidelines and wearable metrics may benefit from weighting vigorous activity more heavily and recognizing short bouts as meaningful contributors to overall health.
🎬Action!
Each week, deliberately include short bouts of vigorous activity, such as hard intervals, sprints, heavy lifts, or fast climbs, where your breathing is rapid and effort is near your personal limit. These minutes deliver outsized health benefits per unit of time and confer protective effects—against mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and some cancers—that moderate and especially light activity cannot replicate, regardless of how long they are performed. However, remember that light and moderate activities are still important.
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
As part of a year-long personal foundations project, Scott Young read just over one hundred books spanning academic texts, textbooks, popular science, and self-help, organized around themes like fitness, productivity, money, food, sleep, focus, connection, and service; from this wide reading, he distilled a set of practical lessons intended to translate ideas into action rather than summary. They reflect patterns, principles, and behaviors that consistently surfaced across dozens of books, rather than any single source or viewpoint. While the reading volume itself is not especially rare, the emphasis here is on synthesis: extracting repeatable, real-world actions from diverse material and pressure-testing them against daily life. The following actions are focused on a productivity subset.
🎬Action!
Prioritize happiness over pressure, as it cultivates positive emotions at work, because well-being drives productivity more reliably than stress.
Create visible progress every day, since feeling forward momentum is the strongest driver of workplace satisfaction, even if it’s often underestimated by managers.
Use checklists for critical tasks, especially in complex or high-stakes environments, because they dramatically reduce errors.
Track both lead and lag metrics, as they define the outcome you want (lag) and consistently measure the behaviors you can directly control (lead).
Notice when work energizes you, recognizing that people often experience more focus and flow at work than during unstructured leisure.
Manage your energy, not just your schedule, by aligning demanding tasks with times when you feel most alert and capable.
Treat procrastination as an impulse-control issue, and reduce temptation and friction rather than blaming perfectionism.
Ignore speed-reading hacks, because biological limits on eye movement and neural processing cap reading comprehension at about 500 words per minute.
Read more to read better, building prior knowledge that improves comprehension, retention, and enjoyment.
Stop trying to multitask, and instead design your work to minimize task switching. People who believe they multitask well usually perform worse than they think.
Keep phones out of sight during focused work and conversations, as mere proximity reduces cognitive capacity and perceived attentiveness.
Declutter by category, not location, so you can see how much you truly own and make clearer decisions.
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FUN FACT
The strongest animal in the world is the Savannah elephant, which is capable of lifting 6,000kg, roughly its body weight from lying down. Even their trunks can lift over 200kg, thanks to over 40,000 muscles bundles. Though elephants may be the strongest in terms of weight, the humble Ant is capable of lifting objects many times its bodyweight, and in 2010, an Asian weaver ant was recorded lifting an object 100 times heavier than its own body.
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Disclaimer: The information provided in this newsletter is for informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult a medical professional for advice, diagnosis, or treatment. We are not liable for any risks or issues that may arise from using this information.
