Running to Work in Summer Heat – Update #16


In this update:

  • Running to Work in California Summer Heat
  • Reading A Guide to the Good Life
  • Writing and Publishing the 22nd edition of Torrey’s Weekly Report
  • Thinking about Reducing Friction for Healthy Habits

Running to work in California Summer Heat



Strava stats for Commute Run #10.
Screenshot of Actifit snapped upon arrival. 20,148 steps.


Reading A Guide to the Good Life








Writing and Publishing the 22nd edition of Torrey’s Weekly Report




Thinking about Reducing Friction for Healthy Habits





What do you think?

Thanks for reading and as always,

Have a great week!

Passion Fruit vine flower in my backyard.

How to Ditch the Car and Run To Work

Tomorrow will be the third time I leave the car at home and use my feet to get to work. I’d like to explain my methods for successfully and safely getting there. It’s about 11.5 miles from my home to my office. This guide will be most useful for office workers.


  • shower at destination
  • gym bag and space to store it at work

Preparation the Day Before:

While getting dressed, grab an extra outfit. Include a pair of everything. Throw it in your bag along with towel, toothbrush, razor, deodorant, hair product, or whatever else you need to get ready in the morning. Double check to make sure you have a towel. Trying to shower without a towel is awful, I have learned that lesson once and the hard way.

Bring your bag to work and store it. It will stay overnight. I leave it under my desk.

Before going home at the end of the day, store everything essential and don’t bring home anything you need tomorrow. If you bring home a laptop today, it will be challenging to bring it back with you tomorrow.

When you have a free moment, start planning your route. Use Google Maps directions in walk mode. Select a route that avoids neighborhoods that make you feel unsafe. And make sure the distance is achievable for you. Also consider the total travel time. It will be less than the estimated walking time (you are running).

Coordinate a ride home for the next day. Depending on the distance, it may not be reasonable to run home. I’m not a fan of running through the city in the dark. I ask a friend to pick me up. Alternatively, you could hail a ride from Uber/Lyft.

Preparation Day of:

Wake up early, you need a lot more time to commute today. The first time, it took me 2.5 hours to travel 11.5 miles.

Put on your running outfit.

Pack light. Bring essentials like your ID, credit card, medical card, emergency cash, phone, ear buds. I like to shove all this stuff into an arm band. Running belts also work, or a zipper pocket in your outfit.

Eat a light snack and drink some water. If you skip this step and run a long distance you will regret it. I learned the hard way. Carry extra just in case.

Turn on your fitness tracker app such as Strava or RunKeeper.

Run! Have fun!

When you arrive, grab the bag you stored and hit the showers. Without the shower, none of this works. It’s socially unacceptable to be sweaty and smelly all day. Don’t do that to your coworkers.

Three Truths


TLDR; Three Truths

Bring Joy


Compete Against Yourself


Help Others




Bring joy. Bringing joy makes a huge impact.





To be your best self you have to compete against yourself.



Help others. Helping others provides meaning and fulfillment.

TLDR; Three Truths

Bring Joy


Compete Against Yourself


Help Others


How to Write Better Emails

Elon Musk, during a recent interview, described corporations as cybernetic collectives of people and machines. Corporations vary in size and market cap. Why are some corporations more effective than others? I think Communication is a huge part of it.

For example,’s unique communication style. Meetings begin with carefully prepared 6 page memos, read silently by attendees before beginning discussion.

How do most people in corporations communicate? In many cases, they communicate by sending lots of email messages. So, writing more effective emails makes you more effective and helps the rest of the team, too. Your job as a writer of emails is to save the reader’s time.

Five practical tips for being an effective emailer:

  1. Name your target
  2. Just get out with it
  3. Write shorter emails
  4. Make a phone call
  5. Avoid detective games

1. Name your target

When you’re making a request, you must have a person or person(s) in mind who can fulfill your request. Don’t be shy, name them. These people are your target.

Try not to make requests to “somebody” or “anybody” because you will end up with a response from “nobody”. Highlight or tag (@name) the name of your target to grab their attention.

2. Just get out with it

Just get out with it. State your request first and provide detailed context later. People are lazy readers, they can read the first sentence and decide whether to continue reading.

It feels unnatural to skip the build up, but do it anyway. The reader can dig into the meat if they want. Take it to the next level by making the request very succinct.

3. Write shorter emails

Write shorter emails. Try to get it done in 3 sentences or less. Most people are lazy readers, they’re not going to carefully read your wall of text. So, you’re wasting keystrokes typing all of it.

4. Make a phone call

When there is a lot of back and forth, stop using email and make a phone call. Exchanging paragraphs of text back and forth may be a signal a 10 minute phone or in-person conversation would be more effective.

5. Avoid Detective Games

If you’re referencing a document or web site or anything, hyperlink directly to what you’re talking about. Or include a screenshot/image. Better yet, draw a red box around the part of the image you’re talking about.

Don’t make me (the reader), play a game of figuring out what you’re referencing. Save me as many clicks as possible by giving me a hyperlink. Doing this makes it easier for me to understand and reply. We both get better results.

How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others

Most of us do it. It’s human nature to compare ourself to other people. Sometimes it’s inferiority (she is better than me) and other times it’s superiority (I am better than him). Either way, it’s not very effective to dwell on those thoughts because you have very little control over the traits of other people. What has personally helped me get off these complaints is a concept I call compete against yourself.

The Circle of Influence

Stephen R. Covey, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, explains how many of our concerns fall outside our circle of influence. We have no control over those outcomes. To be highly effective, one must focus on concerns/outcomes inside the circle of influence.

Comparing yourself to others has one foot inside and one foot outside the circle of influence. Thoughts like ‘she is better than me’ or ‘I am better than him’ are concerns where you can only control one side of the equation and not the other. You have no control over she or him. You also can’t control what people think about you. You only have control over you. Your thoughts and your actions.

Compete Against Yourself

What has greatly helped me get off these concerns is to drop the ‘she’ and ‘him’. She has 10 more years experience than you, anyway, so it’s not useful to compare apples to apples. He just started out so of course he finishes the task slower, with lower quality. That comparison isn’t so useful either.

What is useful is to know your own personal best, what you are capable of. And then try to top your best. Become 1% better than you were yesterday. It’s highly effective because you have 100% control over your own decisions, thoughts and actions. Compete against yourself!

How to Stop Complaining

I had an interesting conversation with my peers this week, where we discussed the topic of recurring complaints and acceptance of circumstances. I want to take a few words to re-share my thoughts. In the past few years, two concepts have greatly helped me get off my complaints. They are extreme ownership and going to war.

Taking Extreme Ownership to Stop Complaining

My favorite example of Extreme Ownership is this. At any moment a meteorite can fall from the sky, hit my house, and kill my whole family. Most of us decide to accept this and do nothing about it. The person who takes extreme ownership seeks out the astrophysicists working hard every day to solve this problem (tracking near-Earth objects) and donates time or money to their cause. Extreme ownership means getting over complacency and taking action.

This concept can be applied to many different situations at home and at work. If you work in a team you have likely seen breakdowns caused by a lack of clear ownership. It’s in you to like an owner, take ownership of the problem and see it through to resolution.

A simple example of how I apply this every day is meetings. Since we are a global distributed team, we make heavy use of video conferencing. Sometimes, you walk into a meeting room a few minutes early. A few people are already sitting and chatting, and the conference call isn’t connected.

The meeting host is running several minutes late from a previous meeting. You take ownership and set up the conference call, so it’s ready to go when the host arrives. By doing this you save everyone’s time. Under extreme ownership, when the meeting host is missing, you are the meeting host.

Retired Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin taught me the concept of extreme ownership through their book titled Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win.

Go to War to Get Off Your Recurring Complaint

When making recurring complaints, people often give up after the first attempt to take action. The complaint persists, and sometimes it persists for a lifetime.

During our home remodel two years ago, a pile of trash was left in our driveway for nearly a week. The contractor failed to remove the demolition waste. We declared war on the pile of trash. Eventually, the battle of the trash was won.

One, it’s really useful to reframe annoying problems as battles. It also makes it easier to laugh when it’s over. How ridiculous does the “battle of the trash” sound?

Two, when you’re at war you stop complaining and get to work. It’s a crisis. You use all the resources at your disposable to win the battle. You send in your cavalry, infantry, navy, air force, whatever it takes to ensure victory. You attack from every angle. When battle is on you keep fighting for what you believe in.

To win the battle of the trash we talked to the crew leader. Then we called his boss. When he didn’t answer we kept calling. We called every day until the trash pile was gone. We told them it was unsafe (rusty nails were poking out of the pile).

Fortunately, days later our neighbor was getting a new roof. The roofer brought a big truck to haul away the roof waste. After several phone calls to the guy in charge of our project and some on-site coordination, we worked out a deal. The roofing crew came and scooped up all the junk. The battle of the trash was won. Huzzah!

If we did nothing and just complained, who knows how long it would’ve taken to fix. Before long, new problems and new complaints emerge.

What I learned about momentum from Will Smith and the wall metaphor




The wall metaphor is powerful for a few reasons:

• Breaking down impossible goals into manageable pieces.

• Building habits and creating momentum.

Breaking down impossible goals into manageable pieces




Building habits and creating momentum






What I learned from wanting lifestyle changes but failing to commit

Image from Pixabay:





Why is ‘maybe’ a weak response?





It Works






Photo of roses from our front yard.






What I learned about Engineering from Elon Musk and the Fluffer Machine

During an investor conference call earlier this year, electric car company Tesla shared insights into assembly line optimizations. One stand out story involves the fluffer machine.

Edited Transcript of TSLA earnings conference call or presentation 2-May-18

“Like so we had fluffer bot, which was really an incredibly difficult machine to make work. Machines are not good at picking up pieces of fluff, okay. Human hands are way better at doing that. And so we had a super complicated machine using a vision system to try to put a piece of fluff on the battery pack. That same — and one of the questions asked was, “Do we actually need that?” So we tested a car with and without and found that there was no change in the noise volume in the cabin, so we actually had a part that was unnecessary that was — of course, the line kept breaking down because fluffer bot would frequently just fail to pick up the fluff or put it in like a random location. So that was one of the silliest things I found.”

So, they had this crazy complicated fluff machine. And a bunch of really smart people spent days trying to make it work. But no one, at least initially, questioned whether the machine was needed at all.

When the question was finally raised, the engineers challenged their assumptions, tested the theory. And they concluded the whole step of the process was unnecessary.

They scrapped the step, and the machine. Avoided getting stuck in the sunk cost fallacy. And moved on without regret.

The Lesson

Optimizing steps in your routine matters less than removing unecessary steps. Don’t waste your time over-optimizing activities you can stop doing altogether.