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How to Make Life Feel Richer
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:
Viscerality
102 Lessons from the 102 Books I Read This Year (Health)
Make Something Heavy
“I’m increasingly convinced that the willingness to change your mind is the ultimate sign of intelligence. The most impressive people I know change their minds often in response to new information. It’s like a software update. The goal isn't to be right. It's to find the truth.”
Viscerality
Simon Sarris
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
Pleasure begins in the senses, and yet modern life, for all its miracles, quietly trains us to feel less: we live inside climate-controlled bubbles, fill our homes with objects chosen for ease rather than affection, reserve beauty for “special occasions,” and forget that every day is all there is. Convenience is a gift, but overused it thins our contact with the visceral world, narrowing the range of touch, temperature, texture, sound, and attention through which delight enters us. Pleasure, like any skill, must be cultivated: using fine silver on an ordinary meal, drinking coffee from a cup that feels right in your hands, noticing the rasp in a voice or the worn softness of an old rug. These are not luxuries but acts of presence. True luxury is not event-based or brand-based; it is fork-based, cup-based, season-based, attention-based. Some pleasures require inconvenience: heat you cannot escape, fruit you must wait for in season, objects that age and bear the thumbprint of life. Detachment promises serenity, but deep attachment—learning to adore what you touch every day—offers a richer satisfaction. The world is extravagantly sensual if we allow it to be, and the task is not to sanitize our lives into ease, but to choose, deliberately, a fuller band of experience: to keep gardens worth cultivating, literal or not, and to find, wherever we are, the sweetness found only by leaning in.
🎬Action!
Choose to live viscerally, not conveniently. Regularly ask yourself whether a choice brings you closer to the texture of life or further into abstraction, and be willing to accept a little inconvenience in exchange for depth, sensation, and presence.
Upgrade one object you touch every day. Identify a daily-use item (mug, fork, notebook, towel) and replace it with one you genuinely enjoy using. If it isn’t special, remove it.
Turn nutrition into ritual. At least once a day, eat or drink something slowly, with attention to setting, texture, and context (where you sit, what you use, what you notice), not just calories and macros.
Let seasons govern some pleasures. Resist constant availability. Wait for certain foods, temperatures, or experiences, and then indulge fully when they arrive.
Cultivate attachment, not detachment. Invest attention and care into places, objects, routines, or relationships rather than keeping everything interchangeable.
Practice deep sensory noticing of people and places. Pay deliberate attention to textures, sounds, voices, movements, and atmospheres. Pleasure grows in proportion to attention.
102 Lessons from the 102 Books I Read This Year (Health)
Scott H. Young
🔦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 health subset.
🎬Action!
Deliberately schedule movement and exercise into your life, since your body won’t naturally push you to exercise enough on its own. Yet, it can reduce your risk of early death by up to 40% and act as a mood regulator and a legitimate treatment for depression.
Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous cardio each week.
Combine aerobic exercise and strength training: prioritize cardio for longevity and strength work to protect bones and prevent frailty.
Skip stretching for injury prevention, but use it selectively if your goal is improving range of motion.
Strengthen your core and spend less time sitting, especially if you experience chronic lower back pain.
Don’t avoid running out of fear for your knees, as recreational running strengthens bones and tendons over time.
Follow established dietary guidelines, rather than chasing constantly changing nutrition trends.
Eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and seeds, with moderate fish, low-fat dairy, and lean protein. Stay low on processed meat and saturated fat.
Accept that weight gain comes from consuming more calories than you burn.
Design your environment to limit overeating, knowing your brain is wired to fear starvation more than excess weight.
Choose any diet you can stick to long term, since all effective diets work by reducing calories.
Use targeted supplements as insurance (not replacements for food), especially as you get older.
Avoid very low-carb diets if you train intensely, since insufficient glucose forces the body to break down protein and increases injury risk.
Protect sleep to support memory, immune function, brain health, and neural recalibration.
Avoid even mild sleep deprivation, which impairs cognition as much as alcohol intoxication and chronic sleep loss weakens immunity and increases cancer risk.
Limit bright light before bed and seek bright light in the morning, especially natural sunlight.
Make Something Heavy
Dr. Anu Atluru
🔦Lights, Camera, ...
We instinctively equate weight with value—gold feels precious, solid furniture feels trustworthy, heavy doors feel safe—and yet we forget this online, where the internet rewards speed, scale, and frictionless output over depth and permanence, pushing us to make more, faster until our work weighs nothing. Light work has its place: it keeps culture moving, builds skill, and lets us experiment, but it rarely shapes us, because creation isn’t just output, it’s a process of becoming, and heavy work—the book, the company, the film, the object, the idea wrestled into form—changes the maker as much as the audience, demanding time, struggle, care, and intention. Memes, posts, and short bursts have their place, but no stack of light things ever quite adds up to one heavy thing, which is why creators eventually feel the quiet hollowness of constant motion without mass, dopamine without durability, and begin searching for something that can survive silence, time, and neglect. Heavy doesn’t mean big or scalable, just defining and durable, and sooner or later everyone gravitates toward it, because weight is what stills ambition, quiets doubt, and leaves a real imprint behind. So, if there’s one endgame worth choosing, it’s this: make something heavy.
🎬Action!
Commit to building one “heavy” project: choose a single piece of work that cannot be finished quickly or posted casually—a book, product, body of research, craft, or idea—and protect long, offline stretches of time to work on it with care and struggle, measuring progress not by engagement or speed but by whether the thing gains density, durability, and would still matter if you went offline for a year.
TOOL TIP
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FUN FACT
Here are some fun facts from Wikipedia’s 25th-anniversary data:
Size: Wikipedia has grown from just a handful of pages in 2001 to over 66 million articles across all languages.
Audience: Across the last decade, Wikipedia articles have been viewed about 1.9 trillion times, which equates to an average of roughly 508 million views per day, with English articles making up nearly half of all that traffic.
Most-Viewed Pages: Over the past 10 years, the 3 most-viewed articles were on Donald Trump (295 million), Elizabeth II (196 million), and Elon Musk (183 million). The top 3 most viewed in a single month were on Charlie Kirk (40 million), FIFA World Cup (30 million), and COVID-19 (28 million).
Most Edited: The articles that have been edited the most include pages on WWE personnel (59,000), the United States (53,000), and Donald Trump (51,000).
Single-Day Records: The page about political activist Charlie Kirk set a record for the most views in one day (nearly 15 million), while the article covering the July 7, 2005 London bombings saw close to 2,857 edits in 24 hours after the event.
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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.
