Write everything down.

Our world is a cacophony of undeterred, unending, unrelenting stimuli. We are shaped by a barrage of interesting shiny things that plot to steal our attention and usurp our focus.

Our phones are permanent free refills of mostly meaningless but sometimes important shards of hope and interest and desire, blue-glowing beacons that shine through any brief pause or thoughtful moment to gently but firmly keep us watching.

The explosion of media and mediums has so tightly ensnared our executive functions that we’re helpless but to listen and nod and swipe up and keep going. Everybody and everything is talking to us, shouting at us, whispering to us, always. We’re hardwired to listen. We’re built to pay attention. Some ancient part of our snake brain is tuned into these messages like they could prevent a misstep into quicksand or the lurking claws of a hiding tiger.

So we listen. And watch. And keep listening and keep watching.

But there is a mismatch between all this input and its antipode, the creator storyteller thinker tinkerer inside that wants out, wants to try things, wants to leap rather than look. It’s that part that we can nurture by paving our environment with opportunities to come out.

Look around your environment: your home, your office, your bedroom. Television, phone, computer, radio. TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. A gigantic doomscrolling hamster wheel that we happily and obliviously keep spinning. A funnel that where the small end is pointing at us like a loaded gun and a firehose of titillating, novel, nonstop stimulus is bursting at the seams 24 hours a day.

Push against this with output. Keep it simple: paper and pen. Lots of papers and lots of pens. Create a minefield of opportunities to have thoughts and write them down. To brainstorm. To sketch. To take some of the ricocheting pinballs in your mind and commit them to a physical surface. To liberate your anxiety by naming it.

Ikea makes these clever little fabric boxes that zip up into shape from flat storage. I fill these with notepads and pens and Johnny Appleseed them throughout my home and office. My goal is to make it effortless to jot down a thought or a note. To reduce that tiny friction between having an idea and acting on it. Even through merely writing it down doesn’t constitute completion, it is action. It is step 1 instead of step 0.

And even if 90% of these thoughts are mundane to-do list entries like “cook sausages” and “download tax documents,” as soon as they are liberated from my head, I have more room for better and more interesting thought. More space to create and think and wonder.

My threshold for “is it important enough to write down” is virtually nonexistent. If it can be thought, it can be written. If it can be written, it can be done. Or intentionally not done – which is very different from forgetting.

Writing down your thoughts is sorcery. It’s taking the ephemera from between your ears and committing it to physical matter. From energy to matter. The electrical fizzing and chemical burps percolating behind your eyes can be tamed, captured, and even loved by giving them form on paper.

Another key aspect of making it easy to get things out of your head is whiteboards. I swear by them. I have two in both my offices (home & work), with a gigantic 8’ wide board in my office. I prefer magnetic so I can get paperwork and notes up there with the scribblings.

An invaluable tool to boost the utility of whiteboards is Rocketbooks beacons, which are little orange triangles with an adhesive back that you stick to the 4 corners of a whiteboard. Then, using the Rocketbook app, you launch your camera phone and it detects the whiteboard by the orange registration triangles. In a few seconds you have a JPG or PDF of your whiteboard on its way to Dropbox or email or whatever. These things keep my whiteboards totally useful so I can scrub than at anytime to make room for a new project or brainstorm.

Give your toes some breathing room.

For some reason, most contemporary shoes seem to be constructed for non-human feet. They tend to taper from the mid-foot to the toe, narrowing the toe box and squishing the toes together. I’m sure there is a historical reason to explain this bizarre fact, but it took me 30 years to cotton on to this. I started with Vibram five fingers “toe shoes,” which are excellent for weightlifting and cross training, if you’re not doing too much running in them.

But then for day to day, I transitioned to toe socks in wide shoes. This has been a solid recipe for reclaiming some of the natural space my toes should have to provide a stable footing throughout the day.

I will also use pedicure toe separators at home or during leisure time to buy back some of that critical breathing room that is snuffed out by most footwear.

There is something empowering and liberating about feeling the entire surface of your foot make contact with the ground, where your pinky toe is actually a valuable part of your balance and gait, rather than getting slowly absorbed under the rest of your toes and diminishing your balance and power generation capabilities.

Eat more protein and fiber.

Find exercises you like doing and do them.

Create trusted buckets and store your tasks & reminders in them (instead of in your head).

People are judging you way less than you think. Mostly they are thinking about themselves.

How to lose weight.

Ultimately weight loss boils down to arithmetic: take fewer calories in than you expend and the net result is weight loss. Remember this fundamental tenet in the face of a million fad diets and gurus preaching silver bullet formulas, magic concoctions, and miracle supplements.
Track everything. It took me decades to figure this one out. For the longest time, I hated tracking food. It was such a chore to try and remember reach thing I had eaten and then try to calculate the nutrition. Then I used Noom for several months with appreciable and positive results. But Noom’s tracking is very basic – I hungered for more, if you’ll excuse the pun. More information, more levers to pull. Eventually I discovered Cronometer, which has made it dead simple to track everything I eat. It is still annoying and it still requires constant vigilance, but Cronometer provides an amazing top-down view of all your macro and micro nutrients, as well as calculating calories remaining reconciled against energy spent, and lots more. Give it about 2 weeks of tracking to develop the habit. Wierdly, one of the hardest things about tracking is honesty. Even though I’m just tracking for my own benefit and I’m the only one who sees it, I still find it uncomfortable and challenging to admit “in writing” when I have pigged out. But with some time and patience, you learn that these feelings are fleeting, and you can perform some mental judo: instead of giving in to the shame and guilt as you’re cataloging the night’s misbehavior, you learn to methodically tally up each slice of pizza and donut, and even thought you’re 1,800 calories over, the moment you SEE those numbers, they are in the light, exposed, not lurking in the scary shadows of your guilty mind. And once they are illuminated, you can think about these things and make decisions about them. You can learn from them. Instead of going to bed thinking “ugh, what a pig, I probably ate 2000 extra calories, I feel so shitty,” you can go to bed thinking “damn, that was really tasty and fun to let loose, and even though I was overboard by 2000 calories, this is just one day, and it gave me pleasure, and that’s a good thing. And tomorrow is a new day that will start with a fresh reserve of discipline and momentum.”
The scale is for tracking over time. It WILL go dramatically up and down day to day, and oftentimes its glowing blue results will seem capricious and random. But remember that it’s purpose is to evaluate on a scale of months, not weeks, and certainly not days. Weight loss is a gradual process that is wildly complicated by hormones, sleep, activity, stress, and so on. So although the bottom line is always calories in vs. calories out, the stair steps will go up and down unexpectedly.
You can’t outrun your mouth. Physical activity and exercise is key to feeling good and important in weight loss, but it is absolutely not a substitute for tracking and managing incoming calories. We burn far fewer calories exercising than seems fair. Limiting caloric intake is easily 80% or more of what it takes to lose weight. All the other stuff is great, but you will never out-exercise the amount of calories you can consume without realizing it. Especially eating the SAD.
Go for high protein and high fiber. Reduce sugar, dressing, sauce, bread, pasta, and oil.
Don’t be afraid to doctor or reconfigure take-out or restaurant food. Examples:

Teriyaki chicken: forget the rice, extra salad, add several cups of shredded coleslaw under the chicken.
Burritos or tacos: at home, use your own low-carb tortillas – scoop the good stuff into your own tortilla and cut a ton of carbs out while increasing fiber.
Sandwiches: replace the bread with Keto bread or a low-carb tortilla.
Replace any kind of rice with cauliflower rice, shredded cabbage, or Konjac noodles.

Protein will make you feel fuller. If you hit that high protein level daily, you will naturally want less snacky, sugary foods.
Learn about your hunger. Get to know it beyond the very simple “oh shit I’m hungry must eat” and “oh shit I just ate a bunch.” There is a Japanese concept called “Hara hachi bun me” that means eating until you are 80% full. This makes a lot of sense, when you realize it takes quite a while for your “I’m full” feelings to catch up from your stomach to your brain. For me it can take easily 20-30 minutes to feel full after eating a meal – and those are 20-30 minutes that are incredibly easy to fill with snacking, desserts, or another serving of the meal. So instead of eating until you feel full, stop about 3/4 of the way there, and see how you feel in a half hour. Chances are, you will be full. Go beyond that and realize that it’s okay to feel hungry and not eat. It’s okay to feel hunger and not immediately become a slave to your instincts and go directly to feeding. Because we have food available 24/7 it seems obvious to “eat when you’re hungry.” The problem is that it’s so bloody easy to overeat, that following that guidance will leave us overfed every time.
Figure out high-satiety snacks. These are snacks that actually help nourish and reduce hunger rather than just ringing the pleasure and taste bells. Some of my go-to high-satiety snacks are:

Natural catch tuna + 1 tbsp lite mayo on a piece of Keto bread
An entire apple
One Isernio’s chicken sausage
Slice of keto bread with 1 tbsp peanut spread and zero sugar jam
A package of shameless chewy candies
Small turkey sandwich on Keto bread, with pickles