Just Start: 7 Cheat Codes For Life

When I was (much) younger, cheat codes for video games were ubiquitous, but also necessary. Back then, game design was often bad and save points were non-existent: and so if you, the game designer, wanted to let players see your carefully-crafted later levels, you had to give them an easy way to get there. Now, cheat codes are rare for the same reason: most good games are balanced carefully enough so that basically any persistent player can get to the end of them, either by practicing or grinding until they level up or just turning the difficulty down.

Some people will tell you that life is like an old videogame: unbalanced, unfair, and impossible for most people. Others will try to convince you that it’s more like a modern one: with enough grit or grinding, anyone can make progress. I don’t have a definitive answer either way, but one thing I know is that some things are enough like cheat codes that it’s madness not to use them. Here are all the ones I can think of.

(Note: to qualify as a proper cheat code, I think something has to be easy to do instantly, almost immediately beneficial, and something a lot of people aren’t aware of. No ‘start a workout habit’ or ‘read all the Western canon’ in here.)

Starting work, then walking away from it
I’ve talked about this a bit before, but it’s the most science-backed thing that most people still don’t do. It’s always tempting to put off big projects until you’ve got a big, glass-flat slab of time to devote to them, but this is almost completely the wrong thing to do, ensuring that you have to do all your thinking at your desk (and feel like you’re wasting time if you get stuck). I’m doing a big writing project at the moment (more soon!), and every day, I skim through the parts I’m going to work on, write at least a sentence or two, think about what I’m going to do for the day…then go and take my dog for a walk, with no headphones or phone-checking. It’s almost miraculous.

Going for long walks (in greenery, if possible)
Even if you don’t have a big project on, going on long walks is incredibly overpowered: something about the slowly-moving scenery helps you ruminate on problems and work things out, and you’re also doing a form of exercise that’s hugely beneficial without jacking up your appetite. There are proven mental health benefits to doing it in green spaces, so if you can find a few routes that hit them, even better.

Taking a deep breath
I’ve been a big booster of box breathing for years now (picture a square box, and visualise yourself travelling along the sides of it as you take a deep breathe in, hold it, breathe out, and hold again), but you don’t have to overcomplicate things. I like how Visakan Veerasamy puts it:

‘you can take an extra deep slow breath at any time. it’s completely legal’

Honestly, do it right now.

Splashing cold water on your face
There are complicated biological reasons why this seems to work (it activates your parasympathetic nervous system, which shuts down your fight-or-flight response), but you don’t really need to understand them unless you want to. The key thing is, if you’re having an emotional reaction to a situation (something went wrong at work, you’re having an argument, you want to yell at somebody but you know you shouldn’t) and you have access to a sink, this is the way forward.

Counting back from 100 in 7s
Listen: I think crying is fine. I cry all the time! I come close to crying every time I read Julia Donaldson’s Paper Dolls, and I almost cried at Middlemarch the other day. But if you’re in a situation where you don’t want to cry for a short space of time (say, you’re giving a speech), then doing this somehow works like a miracle: I believe it’s to do with your brain switching over to calculating mode and away from its more emotional one.

Asking “How am I supposed to do that?”
This is something I got from Chris Voss’s Never Split The Difference, and it’s one of the best open-ended questions you’ll ever ask for getting people on-side. The wording doesn’t have to be exactly this, but the spirit should be that you’re genuinely trying to understand how you and the other person can work together. It works on salesmen (“I really want to get this car, but I can’t come up with a way to meet what you’re asking”), and it works on children (“I want to play boardgames, but how am I supposed to do it when your floor’s covered in stuff?”). It’s amazing (you should read the book.

Going to bed early
I have the same resistance as everyone else against going to bed early: post-10pm is the one time of day when my time is totally my own, I don’t feel like I need to be working, nobody else needs anything from me, and I’m free to do whatever I want. But also, by not going to bed early, I’m…sort of stealing life and vitality from tomorrow me? To be honest, the way I got around this was to start treating ‘having an early night’ as another way to treat myself, like I might do with ‘reading an excellent book for half an hour’ or ‘watching a third of a film’. If you’re reading this and it’s past 10:30 wherever you are, please go to bed.

And have a great weekend!
Joel x

Stuff I’ve done

🎥 Video - Why You're Always Tired (And How To Fix It)

I found Byung Chul-Han’s Burnout Society very persuasive but a bit meandering — and obviously, he doesn’t actually prescribe anything to fix the burnout he’s describing. Here’s my best attempt to summarise it all and suggest some solutions, with bonus footage of my dog.

Stuff I like

📝 Article - The White Lotus Is the First Great Post-‘Woke’ Piece of Art

I didn’t really enjoy White Lotus season 3 — it wasn’t as straightforwardly funny as the other seasons, and suffered a bit from not having Jennifer Coolidge — but this from Helen Lewis is excellent on the ways that it defies the modern trend of having neat little morality plays and teachable moments woven into every episode (and the fact that this probably comes from it having one writer/director/producer, rather than a whole roomful).

📝 Article - The Strange And Twisted Life Of Frankenstein

I knew the bare bones of the Frankenstein origin story before I read this — bored in a mansion, terrible storm, newly-acquired knowledge of galvanism — but I had no idea that 18-year-old Mary Shelley was pregnant with her second child when she started writing it, after her first died. This piece also gets into the ‘enduring condescension’ of people suggesting that Shelley simply pieced together ideas from her husband and fellow poets, rather than creating something from her own unique perspective and experience. Really good.

🎥 Video - Glenn Gould on how Mozart became a bad composer

I’ve watched this a couple of times: I think it really articulates a feeling I always had about Mozart, which is that he’s obviously brilliant, but not the most interesting composer to listen to. Also, obviously, Gould is fantastic on piano, so he intersperses his arguments with dazzling little bursts of virtuosity that really get the points home.

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