Cold Showers

"I feel tired" I said. "Then stop feeling", he said. 

This is one of my fondest memories of my first job. My mentor just casually slipped it in, but it's a constant reminder that I have a choice.

-

Cold showers. The Internet says it's healthy for your skin. Huberman adds a bunch of biology and says it gives you a 4 hour dopamine effect. But more than anything, I say it's your mind's win over your body.

It's been half a year now, but every day I step in to the shower, my body doesn't want the cold water. It sends signals to my brain saying this too much, this is too cold. I start with my feet, go up to my hips. And then my body begs me not to pour any over my chest. My innermost fears of visualizing a shark in deep waters surface the moment I close my eyes. Every single day.

And yet when I pour the cold water all over me, I feel great. I realize I can just decide the water isn't cold. And then it isn't. I don't shiver, I truly enjoy what it feels like all over me. And after a while, the water isn't cold any longer. Maybe it's my body heat, but I start to feel the water is far warmer than when I stepped in. And that's that. The mind conquers the body's impulses.



Like most things worthwhile in life, I don't enjoy cold showers, but I love having taken them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Hardest Thing To Do

Image
Of course I'm not just gonna give it right away. That'd make this a boring read. I'm going to put in a whole lot of adjectives and verbs creatively thought out to describe exactly what one feels when doing this particular sequence of actions, rarely performed by many. It's this mind bending, limb stretching, mental limits pushing, pain barrier breaking, ass hurting, barehands crocodile fighting, body wearying, physically draining, hand taxing, thigh numbing, psyche perspiring, soul drudging, power grinding, back breaking, torso drenching, chassis soaking, frame wetting ability to do burpees* be consistent, at anything. To just have robotic-like consistency in anything you do. The hardest part of living in my opinion is getting yourself to do something, anything. It's to convince your mind, to motivate yourself to do more than just the bare minimum to survive. Now, there are a set of things you're almost forced to do - going to school, waking up for wor...
Continue reading »

The interviewer asked the elephant to climb that tree

Image
TL;DR: Being a good interviewer is difficult; but it'll earn you a lot of bonus points and send you to heaven. As an interviewer you're practically shaping the near and even possibly far future of the interviewee. The very fault of every interviewer is to ask what he expects candidates to know, not to extract what the candidate knows best . Just as with enough make-up and wigs all air-hostesses are made to look identical, interviewers treat candidates from all walks of life as the same factory produced robots. This is exactly what happens. Horses, dogs, elephants and fish are treated the same. The lack of ability of an interview to mould himself to find the very best in every new candidate is what makes traditional interviews a terrible failure! Any professional worth his salt should be much like a psychologist, he should be able to pick up in the short duration he spends with you whether you're fit for the role you applied for, and even be able to suggest wher...
Continue reading »

Notes from the Zurich AI Conference 2025

These are notes from when I went to The Zurich AI conference 2025. This was the first time I've attended a conference solely for networking. Here's what I learned/experienced: The people Of the ±200 people that attended, I interacted with very few product/startup people, researchers / engineers, and especially no engineers from big tech. There were primarily 2 types of people:  Business hunters / leads of consultancies and agencies, Management at traditional businesses (insurance, data companies). It seemed like many traditional businesses are actively trying to find use cases for AI, and so when I asked them what they're doing with AI I got one of two responses: It's confidential. Long complicated sentences that I couldn't make simple sense of. This might be naive, but it sounded to me like they're forcing AI use cases or trying to shoe horn it into their businesses, rather than having a solid business use case for it. I live in a small ecosystem at Big Tech. I...
Continue reading »