The L.A.T.E. Equation for a Great Life
The L.A.T.E. Equation for a Great Life
Discover the hidden road to happiness
Photo of me applying the equation
Short summary
For a great life, you should:
focus attention on what you choose, not react to outside stimuli
control your time and invest it with intention
create plentiful energy to do whatever you want to do
Full text
We all want to live well. Better means a lot of things: more success, more happiness, better health, better mood, better relationships, great experiences, working towards a purpose, and so on. All of these are complicated and hard to achieve.
But there is an equation that determines 98% of what it takes to achieve a great life:
Life quality = Attention + Time + Energy
Let’s decompose it.
A is for Attention
Where you direct your attention determines who you become.
We hear a lot of talk about being distracted by the Internet and social media. And how it drains our productivity and steals our time. But it’s even worse, because attention shapes who we become.
Humans can only do single tasking.
This means that you can pay attention to one thing at a time. Add up everything that you pay attention to and that’s all the information that influences your model of the world. It determines who you are.
If someone took a child, locked him up in a cellar and only gave him information from Flat Earthers, there is no doubt that child would believe the Earth is flat. If that child never received information that showed the Earth is round, he or she would never arrive at this conclusion.
Of course in reality we have access to information. But it’s too much information in fact. Much much more than we could ever process. So attention becomes the deciding factor about which information reaches us, and in turn shapes us.
Do you control your attention?
Most people don’t. Most people let themselves react to the world. Read the news, get flooded with email, scroll social media.
When you give up control of your attention, you give up control of your life.
Step 1 of Better Life: control your attention
Create rules for when and how information reaches you. Here I wrote in detail how to control information. The gist is:
Make information gathering active, not reactive. Limit notifications both in quantity and time intervals.
Filter your sources of information to only get quality and relevant stuff
Spend time without explicit external information, so you can think and process
In the process of doing this, you will also start getting the second element: time.
T is for Time
Average lifespan across the globe is 73 years. Assuming you are now 30 years old, and sleep 8 hours per night, you have 251,000 hours left to live. That might sound like a lot, but it is not.
Time is precious. What you do with each of these hours of your life is important.
Yet often we waste time. We squander it on fleeting entertainment. We throw it away on petty worries and anger. We burn it on work.
Then one day discover you are old and regret not doing more with your life.
Our big mistake is we confuse being busy with time well spent. And we confuse having available time with boredom and unsuccess. There are numerous stories of exceptionally successful people who prioritize not being busy.
Step 2 of Better Life: make time
Take a hard look at how you spend your time. Cut out everything that is unnecessary: vapid entertainment, futile feelings and tasks that don’t matter in the long term. Even relationships if they are harmful.
You will be surprised how much time you get by doing this. At first you might be confused what to do with this time. The first instinct will be to fill it with other temporary activities.
Don’t.
Give yourself time to be bored.
Take walks. Look out the window. Experience some solitude. This is critical to find what you want to do. To find a purpose (excuse the cliché, it’s true).
Then you can invest the time wisely. Think like a miser. Any choice you make with your time has a cost. A cost of opportunity. If you spend 30 minutes on Facebook, that’s half an hour you will never get back. It’s gone forever.
Also this period of doing nothing is great healing for your attention. This will allow you to choose how to spend your time, rather than react to external stimuli.
E is for Energy
Neither attention, nor time, have value without energy. When we think of energy we tend to make two crucial mistakes: we think only of physical activity and we think conserving energy is how you get more energy.
Energy is not only physical
You need energy to run a marathon. You need energy to work in a construction job. But you also need energy to deal with a conflict with your partner. You need energy to solve a cognitive problem. You need energy to learn something instead of scrolling Facebook. You need energy to resist the temptation of the cookie, beer, drug, whatever addiction. You need energy to direct your attention intentionally.
Quick info on the biology of energy. At a cellular level mitochondria produce energy. All processes in your body use this energy. Thinking and feeling are neuron activations which use the same energy. Digestion uses energy. Breathing uses energy. Movement uses energy.
Intense physical activity uses more energy. Intense emotional activity also uses more energy. This is why you feel drained after a fight. Decisions also use a lot of energy.
The prefrontal cortex is the seat of executive function. It’s how you decide not to follow the impulse and desire of the moment in favor of an action with long-term benefits. It’s not eating the cookie. It’s doing the hard thing.
The prefrontal cortex is the most energy-intensive part of the brain. It’s also a nice-to-have for survival. It does not help you avoid immediate death, but only make better long-term decisions. This is why you cannot use it a lot. You unconsciously limit its use to conserve energy.
So if you have less energy overall, then you are less able to make good decisions.
Every good decision costs energy.
How can you increase your energy? Not by being a miser with it.
You lose energy by conserving energy
If you have 1,000 dollars in your wallet, then if you spend less, you have more left. We think of our personal energy in the same way. We think that if we don’t do much, then we have more left to ‘spend’.
This is true in the short term. If today you ran a marathon in the morning, then you will be more tired in the afternoon. If you made difficult decisions in the morning, then you will be less able to make difficult decisions in the afternoon. And so on.
In the long term the reverse is true.
The more energy you spend, the more energy you will have.
Why? Because the human body adapts. The more physical exercise you do, the more your mitochondria develop. They become better and more numerous.
When you run a marathon, you have less energy that day. But you have more energy in many following days. Your body becomes better at producing energy.
Step 3 of Better Life: Produce more energy
If you have more energy, you live more. It’s that simple. There are several ways to increase your energy:
Physical exercise
Sports increases mitochondria and thus your energy for everything, not just physical exercise. Of course you need proper recovery each time. And you have less energy right after the physical exercise. Long-term it’s how you increase your energy.
Solve chronic problems
Some of us suffer from chronic issues. These continuously drain our energy.
Health problems are the obvious offender. Suffering from a chronic illness reduces your available energy because your body has to constantly fight that illness. Sometimes this illness is hidden. If you feel fatigued often, you should investigate your health. You might be suffering from a hidden illness.
These chronic problem can also be emotional in nature. For example if you have an ongoing conflict with your boss at work. That’s a constant drain on your energy.
Any recurring emotional, or cognitive, toll will reduce your energy.
Identify and solve chronic problems.
Get proper rest
All of the above is useless without proper recovery. Sleep is the key here. High quality and sufficient volume sleep is the cornerstone of life. It is how your body repairs and regenerates. Without quality sleep, you will forever be energy deficient.
Then there are moment of rest throughout the day. Breaks from work. We are not robots, we need these breaks.
Yet too often our breaks are energy draining instead of energy-filling. Pausing work to scroll Instagram is not a break. It’s another type of work. Practically all digital activities are work: they necessitate processing a lot of information, making decisions, activate stress responses, triggering dopamine release and so on. They are not rest.
Proper breaks are those that actually give you recovery. Talking a walk. Looking at nature. Doing some light stretching. Reading a book. A nap. Doing meditation. Non-sleep deep rest protocols. All of these provide proper recharge.
That’s it. It’s simple really.
L.A.T.E.
If you want a great life, you need to:
focus attention on what you choose, not react to outside stimuli
control your time and invest it with intention
create plentiful energy to do whatever you want to do
The ideal life is easy when you know what you need,
Victor
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