We all have greater wisdom inside of us than we think we do, so just to hop straight into it, this is a practice that’s helped me unlock the right answers to whatever I feel stuck on, whether it’s a fight with a loved one, the next project to focus on, or simply how to have a productive day.

It’s all some variation of asking yourself, “What would X person do at this moment?”

This is a short list of who I think about, and versions I’ve seen come up over and over, but certainly not exhaustive.

1. “What would my 80-year-old self tell me to do right now?”

This is a great question to ask if you feel you might need a broader perspective on a situation. I find if my wife and I are in an argument and I take a beat to ask this question, and Evan at 80 comes onto the scene, he says, “Look at how beautiful and young she is. I wish I could be there to hold her and experience our younger years together again. Why are you wasting your time fighting? Go over and hold that woman! Talk about meaningful things like what you want the next 10 years to look like. Not ‘if I said what I thought you said, and my reaction to your reaction to my reaction…’”

My 80-year-old self also tends to want me to start things today. He usually says, “One of my regrets is waiting. If I didn’t wait 10 years to start writing that book, I could have written 10 years more worth of books!”

2. “What would I coach myself to do right now?”

I, and I’m assuming you, really like thinking about what we think other people should do. We’re so good at it! If only more people would take our advice, right?

But we, and especially I, don’t tend to turn that super-power inward as often as we should, perhaps. I’ve been practicing this one more and more, but if I simply imagine I’m not myself, and I’m giving advice to someone else in my situation, and I simply follow that advice, my days are much more life-giving and productive.

3. “What would (insert smart person you follow and respect) say to me?”

I’ve often felt stuck and taken the time to write an email to someone I respect who has a certain skill-set, or who is farther along than me in an area I want to improve in, to ask for advice.

And I’ve found if I take the time to read that email, and imagine what they would say in response, the answer has actually been fairly obvious.

I used to send these emails without too much introspective when I was younger, but the older I get, the more and more I delete these emails after some thought and have a clear path forward.

I noticed many people use one of these variations. This has been interesting to me to observe and practice. Often we have a lot more wisdom locked up inside of us that goes unused. These are just a couple of tactics to get out of our own way and unlock what we already know.

I normally score in the 90-100% range on my apple watch for my sleep so I thought I’d include my top practices for the best sleep. (and I only don’t score 100% if I don’t follow 1 or more of these 5 things).

And these ARE listed in order of importance, 1 being the most impactful.

Bonus Tip #1: Track your sleep. This is really the tip to rule them all. I won’t count this as an actual tip because it doesn’t directly affect sleep. But it truly is eye opening to see what things affect your sleep and to what level. Each person has their own unique quarks. Something that works for one person might not work for another, and data and experimentation is the only way to know for sure what works for you.

Bonus Tip #2: Heart rate is king. The best metric to look at (and most sleep tracking apps prioritize) is your heart rate. It’s the #1 indication your body is shutting down and resting properly. Most of these tips work because they help your heart slow down or reduce activities that speed your BPM up artificially.

1. Don’t drink alcohol, or if you do, as far away from bed as possible. Most people think, because alcohol is a depressant, it serves as a calming function on the body. But in actuality alcohol increases your heart rate quite a bit, and stops your body from shutting down at night. Hangovers are primarily a factor of bad sleep.

2. Eat your last meal as early in the day as possible. Food in your stomach causes your heart to pump extra blood to the stomach to do its digestive thing. This causes your heart rate to go up until all that food is processed. This is especially true if you have a carb heavy diet that spikes your insulin. I can usually get away with a small protein heavy snack close to bed, but not much else. If you do intermittent fasting consider dinner the meal you skip (most people skip breakfast). I try and eat my last meal by 5pm at the absolute latest if I get dinner with someone, but my ideal time is 2pm. Feeling hungry 1-2 hours before bed is a good indication for me I’m eating at the right time and my stomach won’t be digesting anything (and raising my heart rate) while I sleep.

3. If you want to supercharge your sleep take a hot shower, as hot as you can stand without burning yourself 60-90 minutes before bed. Your body associates cooling down with shutting down. Heating your body up causes it to start up it’s cool down processes so counterintuitively, heating yourself up before bed causes your body to go into shutdown mode. And of course the inverse is true. If you want to wake up taking a cold shower causes your body to go into heat-up mode, causing a greater sense of wakefulness.

4. Watch the sunrise and sunset outside. I got this from Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist who posts a lot of great content on youtube. He talks about this a lot, but the reason why this works is our body, just like most of the animal kingdom, is very attuned to the sun. Having triggers for your brain in both the morning and evening to tell your brain “The sun is rising” and “The sun is setting” tells your body it’s time to wake up or time to shut down respectively. The sunrise and sunset specifically aren’t necessary, but our brain can recognize the different light waves the sun makes in the morning and evening, so the closer you can view those events, the better. 3-10 minutes is about all it takes for a minimum effective dose, the cloudier it is, the longer, the clearer the sky, the shorter.

5. Hydrate well on the front end of the day so you can stop drinking liquids 3 or more hours before bed (this pairs nicely with tip #1). This stops you from waking up in the middle of the night (which often happens subconsciously ). It’s both important to hydrate well on the front end of the day, because hydration makes it easier for your heart to do its thing, and also to stop before bed so your bladder isn’t working when your body should be sleeping.

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Would you be happier if you were richer?

The answer to that question is: probably, to a point. Previous studies have found that as people make more money, they do become happier. However, this happiness boost from money fades off at about $75,000/year.

Or it did. I’m sure that number would be higher now if studied again given inflation. But even back then that number was by no means a complete picture. $75,000/year means vastly different things depending on where you live.

If you lived in NYC or LA on $75,000 you were below the poverty line. You were comfortably middle class in a small to mid-sized city in the South East on that same salary.

So it’s not an absolute dollar amount that matters. But what does?

Choice and control. How dependent are you on other people and how much agency do you have over your time?

For me personally, the most unhappy I’ve ever been is when I’ve felt stuck. I’m a fairly stoic, content person. But I’ve worked at desk jobs I didn’t like and felt I couldn’t leave which gave me chest pain and anxiety. And they were pretty cushy jobs. Not hard, I didn’t have a bad boss, co-workers were fine, made decent money. I just felt stuck, not in control, like I didn’t have a choice.

Achieving a certain amount of money or cash flow can give you that control over your life. You don’t have to work at something or for someone you dislike just because you need it. You can pursue purpose-filled work only you could do.

However, that’s only true if you have enough at the end of the month to give you more choice and control. This is why “absolute income” is not a complete picture. The cost of living is higher in certain parts of the country and lower in others, so the same amount of money doesn’t buy you the same choice and control.

The irony and danger of money is buying more stuff that adds drag to your life, not freedom. And every new thing can unnecessarily reduce what stays in your bank account. Even more insidious, every new thing you buy and add to your life creates a tiny fractional complexity. It is one more thing you need to clean/organize/consider/maintain. It takes physical care and takes up mental bandwidth. But as these things add up and accumulate over time, they turn into a complex life that distracts from what you could do with your life. Now you’re spending hours as a caretaker of your own estate instead of time that could be spent as an active agent in the world.

Additionally, if you aren’t “there” yet in terms of choice and control, a focus on purchasing things can keep you stuck where you are longer. Or indefinitely.

Similarly, if, as you earn money, you spend more money at a similar rate, you really aren’t advancing yourself in any way. The more you have stuff that requires a certain income level, the more chained you are to that income level. A “rich” person with a mansion that is at the top end of their means can ironically be in just a dead-end stressful position as a Mcdonald’s worker. Neither feels like they have a choice to leave. This is basically the premise of the book “Rich Dad Poor Dad.”

In so far as money can earn you choice and control, I think it can buy happiness. But beware of the dark side of building yourself a new prison of things and lifestyle.

The main litmus test for all of this is: how much of your time do you own? Our only non-renewable resource in this world is time. What does it matter if you make a lot of money but work an 80-hour week most of the year? Or… a 40-hour week? That might hit a little harder.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti-work. On the contrary, if you read my last post, I’m very pro-work. Hard work with long hours. But work on your terms building something towards your big thing in this world.

My wife and I left everything behind and left on a 6-month road trip, living all over the US (mostly out west). This is still an experiment for us, and I hope to learn a lot, but so far not having much “stuff” hasn’t impacted my life or happiness. It’s put the things that actually matter to me in focus. And we can do this because we’ve focused on earning our time back, and we can spend it working on what we want, where we want, when we want.

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I was reading a newsletter from one of my favorite creators, a board game designer, and publisher, who talked about a recent experiment he ran creating a product many of his fans had asked for. And almost no one bought it.

This reminded me of the famous quote from Henry Ford, “If I asked people what they want, they would have said faster horses.”

I spent a lot of time thinking about product design in my old company Tokyn.

One of the core tenants of product design is: don’t take direct solutions from your users. Your job is to hear people’s feedback and understand the underlying problem. People often are bad at coming up with a solution, but they are really good at talking about their problems. Which Henry Ford understood over a century ago.

People wanted to go faster, and all they knew was horses. His product solved the pain point, but not the recommended solution.

Product design follows this loop. Find a pain point → try to solve pain point → test with users → learn your solution kind of sucks → iterate → test with users → it sucks a little less → iterate, and on and on forever. At some point in there, you have a product that sucks little enough you can launch into the world, but the iterative process never stops.

What does product design have to do with purpose?

When I think of purpose, I think, “What do I want to build in this world that has a meaningful impact?” And even more personally, “Who do I want to become to have a meaningful impact?”

Our life and our work are products: things we want to impact others around us in meaningful ways. And what we do and who we are doesn’t just need to be meaningful to others, it needs to be meaningful to ourselves (otherwise why would we be doing it?) therefore we are also consumers of that product.

And we have the opportunity to impact the design.

Or put more bluntly, we’ll have a bad product of our life if we don’t intentionally test with ourselves and others to learn, and iterate.

You’ve probably heard this referred to as different flavors, something like “Lifestyle design.” I think what’s often missed in the conversation is that, in a product design cycle, BOTH the designer and the consumer are wrong in the beginning. It takes testing something in the real world and it takes iteration to arrive at a product that doesn’t suck.

Writers know this: your first draft always sucks.

Game designers know this: your first prototype is shit.

Product designers know this: people never use your thing the way you think they will on the first iteration.

Movie and TV studios use test audiences.

But I think most people have an idea of what some big thing they want to do is and are waiting for this perfect moment when they are free to do it. However, if it isn’t something you’ve tested, it’s only your first iteration, your first draft, your first prototype, it’s probably actually going to suck and it won’t live up to the ideal you have in your head.

So my caution is: the longer you wait to try, the longer you’re delaying those first cycles of it not being that great. Or even worse, you realize it’s the wrong thing and have a (insert your fraction here) life crisis.

Here’s an example of how I’m doing this:

I like having 1 on 1 conversations. Put me in a room full of people I don’t know and I will last about 15 minutes before I peace out. Get me in a conversation with any 1 person we can have an enjoyable, meaningful conversation for an hour.

I've always loved interview-style podcasts, thought I’d enjoy trying it myself, get to meet interesting people and uncover interesting insights for others along the way.

Before I started Tokyn, I experimented with interviewing publishers in the board game space about new games they released. Pretty quickly I realized I hated it. I realized I didn’t like this iteration because I was more covering new information like a journalist, not really as a conversation.

A couple of years later I tried again interviewing real estate investors. The second time around I liked it! I had great conversations, met great people, but realized I wasn’t doing anything new. There’s A LOT of real estate content out there. And there were a lot of people I wanted to talk to but wouldn’t quite fit in the box I put myself.

My next iteration is a podcast focused on interviewing people on how they successfully found creative freedom: meaning how they orient their life in such a way they could meaningfully focus on a craft and build cool things in the world.

You’re probably smarter than me, but I never seem to get it right on the first try. But I get closer with each iteration.