Ever since I was a child, I have had this strange obsession with putting everything into the context of numbers. While other children were busy doing normal things, my brain was usually occupied with questions like, “How many ants do I need to stack to reach the moon?1” or “How many kilograms of food have humans eaten since the beginning of time?2”

One of the side effects of this lifelong obsession3 is that I can now approximate pretty much anything. It is a trick I still use to surprise my fiancée, who routinely (and unsuccessfully) tries to stump me with impossible questions.

You know those infamous hedge fund or Big Tech interview questions? The ones that most candidates find either scary or dumb, like, “How many golf balls fit inside a Boeing 747?” or “How many windows are there in Tokyo?”4 While they are a nightmare for most people… To me, this is just a fun Tuesday afternoon.

Being pathologically good at estimating is not just a party trick; it is a legitimate skill. It takes a world that is usually blurry and qualitative and snaps it into sharp, quantitative focus. It is one of the most versatile mental tools you can master.

So today, I want to map out exactly how this works. If you spend enough years putting numbers on things, you realize the math is actually the easy part. The hard part is knowing how to break the universe down into pieces. Here is how you can take a massive, blurry universe and approximate practically anything in five steps.

As a bonus, once you are done internalizing your new skills, I made a mini-game to go with this post. Head over to the Bonus 1 section to test yourself.

1) Know your Anchor Numbers

You can’t navigate the dark without lighthouses, and you won’t be estimating anything if you don’t have a few hard facts to anchor your math to reality.

There is no magic trick to acquiring these. You just have to cultivate a habit of being a little too curious. You become the kind of person who occasionally Googles, "What is the diameter of the Earth?" or "What is the total GDP of the world?" while waiting in line for coffee.

The golden rule here is that the order of magnitude is everything, and exactness is useless. You don’t need to know that the population of the United States is exactly 334,914,895. "330 million" is great. "About 300 million" is perfectly fine. But if you think it is 3 billion, you have accidentally annexed several continents, and your math is doomed. You just want to be able to put reality into the right buckets5.

This habit alone already gives you an instant upgrade to your bullsh*t radar. For instance, if someone, say the president of a major North American country for the sake of example, were to claim they generated $10 trillion in new investment in just six months, you can call bullshit on the spot. Since you know the annual economic output of the entire planet is $100 trillion, you know this guy probably didn’t just casually manifest 10% of the world’s economy over the summer.6

Here are a few essential "Anchor Numbers" you should permanently memorize:

(Note: I put together a master cheat sheet of the 100 of the most important Anchor Numbers to help you estimate anything. Scroll down for the full visual list and a PDF download link at the bottom of this post)

2) Master the Simple Estimations

The second step is getting very good at estimating simple things. Just like anything else, you train this muscle by doing it regularly. You just start quietly putting numbers on your surroundings: How many people are crammed into this coffee shop? How many windows are on that skyscraper? How many dogs live in my apartment building? How big is the GDP of Tanzania?

Make a quick, educated guess, and then immediately check reality to see how wrong you were.

What you are doing here is calibrating your brain. You are developing an estimation “taste” or “instinct.” The exact number still does not matter. You just want to reach a point where you can look at the physical world and instantly fire off a reasonable, order-of-magnitude ballpark guess.

The best part is that this creates a compounding flywheel. Every time you figure out a random quantity, like the daily foot traffic of a coffee shop, it gets deposited into your mental library as a brand new Anchor Number. The more you estimate, the richer your baseline reality becomes, you start reusing old estimates to build new ones, making every future calculation exponentially faster and more accurate.

3) Break the Complexity Down into Simple Parts

If someone asks you an absurdly broad question, many people freeze unable to find a good angle. But a complex estimate is usually just a few simple estimates stacked together.

Let’s say you want to figure out: How many people will do pushups in Paris today?

If you try to guess that outright, you are just throwing darts blindfolded. But if you deconstruct it into a funnel, it just becomes a series of easy guesses:

1. The Base: How many people live in Paris? (Anchor Number: ~9 million)

2. The Active: What percentage of them exercise? (Simple estimation: ~50%7)

3. The Routine: Of that group, what percentage do strength or bodyweight training? (Simple estimation: ~30%)

4. The Pushup: Of that group, what percentage actually do pushups? (Simple estimation: ~50%)

5. The Frequency: How many days a week do they do them? (Simple estimation: About 2 days a week)

By breaking it down, you have taken a hopelessly broad question and turned it into five very simple ones. You just need to figure out those smaller estimates, and the big answer will reveal itself.

4) Crunch the Numbers

The fourth step is to actually crunch the numbers.

You take the funnel you just built and start plugging in the values. Use your Anchor Numbers wherever possible. When you are missing a piece of data, use your simple estimation muscle to bridge the gap.

You do not need a math degree for this part. The beauty of this framework is that the math itself is aggressively simple. You will never need a complex formula. 99% of the time, the entire problem can be unlocked with just basic, back-of-the-napkin addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.

For this specific funnel, you literally just multiply down the chain. Let’s run the math on our Paris example:

9 million (Base) × 50% (Active) × 30% (Routine) × 50% (Pushup) × 30% (Frequency) = ~200,000 people.

Just like that, you pulled a highly specific, totally plausible number out of thin air.

Math tip: Round aggressively. The goal here is being roughly right, not perfectly accurate. If your funnel asks you to calculate 12% of 8,300, just find 10% of 8,000 and move on. Leave the exact math to the accountants.

5) Sanity Check the Result

The final step is to sanity check your work.

You must always verify your final answer against common sense. Do not trust your numbers blindly. If you are not careful, small estimation errors can compound into an absolutely absurd final result. This is where your Anchor Numbers come back to save you.

The best way to do this is to build a sanity range in your head. You just ask yourself what the absolute lower and upper bounds could possibly be before the number becomes completely illogical.

For example, look at our Paris pushup estimate. If your final math spit out 20 million, something is clearly broken since your Anchor Number for the entire population of Paris is only 9 million. On the flip side, if your estimate was 100 people, that also completely fails the smell test for a major metropolis.

A logical lower bound might be 1,000 and a realistic upper bound might be 2 million. Since our estimate of 200,000 sits comfortably inside that range, the math passes the sanity check.

A Practical Example: The Global Forest

Let us put it all together with a question about the natural world:

How many trees are there on Earth? 🌳🌲🌴

Guessing that outright is just throwing darts blindfolded. But if we use our framework to break the complexity down into simple parts, the answer will reveal itself.

• The Base (Anchor Number): What is the total surface area of the Earth? You pull this straight from your mental library: ~500 million square kilometers.

• The Land (Simple Estimation): We know Earth is mostly water. Land makes up roughly a third of the surface. That gives us 150 million square kilometers of solid ground.

• The Forest (Simple Estimation): What percentage of that land actually grows trees? Picture a globe. You have to subtract Antarctica, the Sahara desert, massive mountain ranges, the frozen tundra, and endless grassy plains. A reasonable guess is that maybe a third of the remaining habitable land is heavily forested. Call it 30%. That leaves us with 50 million square kilometers of forest.

• The Density (Simple Estimation): This is the missing link. How many trees fit in a single square kilometer? To visualize this, picture walking through a typical woodland. How far apart are the tree trunks? Some are clustered, but to give the canopies room to catch sunlight, an average distance of about 4 meters apart feels right. That means one average tree claims a 4-by-4 meter patch of ground, or 16 square meters.8

Crunch the Numbers: Now we do the math. One square kilometer is exactly 1 million square meters. If we divide 1,000,000 by 16, we get roughly 60,000 trees per square kilometer.

Then, we just multiply that by our total forest area: 50 million square kilometers × 60,000 trees = 3,000,000,000,000.

So the answer is:

There are roughly 3 trillion trees on Earth.

Fun fact: The mass of trees and other plants makes up about 82% of the mass of all living things on Earth. Meanwhile, all 8 billion humans combined account for just 0.01%. We like to think we are the main characters of this planet, but mathematically speaking, human civilization is basically just a rounding error in a giant wooden empire.

Last but not least, sanity check the result. Three trillion might sound completely made up at first. But if we verify it against another Anchor Number (the global human population of ~8 billion), it works out to about 400 trees for every person alive. Given the sheer, sprawling size of places like the Amazon, the Congo basin, and the Siberian taiga, that ratio actually feels incredibly grounded.

And if you check the hard data, a massive 2015 study from Yale University using satellite imagery arrived at almost the exact same number: 3.04 trillion.

In Defense of Overthinking It

I think this ability to deconstruct complex ideas into simple quantities is the real reason I love approximating. People often assume that quantifying everything makes the world cold, robotic, and stripped of its magic. But it actually does the opposite.

When you learn to approximate, the universe stops being an intimidating, opaque blur. Big, complex, impossible-to-grasp things suddenly become approachable. You realize that everything, from the macroeconomics of a metropolis to the micro-habits of your friends, can be deconstructed, understood, and wrangled into a manageable concept.

You don’t need to be perfectly accurate. You just need a decent Anchor Number, a bit of logic, and the right order of magnitude.

The universe is a lot less intimidating when you realize you can just put a number on it. And usually, it is a lot more entertaining, too.

Now it is your turn. Go look out a window and put a number on something. Have fun!

Bonus 1: The Estimation Game

I built a quick interactive game to test your new capability. You will be faced with a series of random questions where the goal is simply to guess the correct order of magnitude.

Head over to satpugnet.com/playground/estimation-game/ if you want to test your abilities.

Bonus 2: The Cheat Sheet

Full pdf downloadable here:

Anchor Numbers

121KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

We tend to think of our lives as a collection of private experiences; our memories, our feelings, our wins. A curated archive of the self.

But your impact on the world is not defined by what happens to you. It is defined by the operating policy you write that others will copy. You are a manual to be used, more than a diary to be read.

Scalable Character

If that framing is true, then character is not just personal. It is replicable.

You are a prototype of a “way of being” that will be partially cloned by:

• Your friends

• People who hear your stories or see your work

• Your kids / students / younger founders you mentor

• Future AIs trained on humanity’s traces, including yours1

What really persists from you is not your memories or your feelings. It is the algorithm of how you respond to reality: how you handle fear, power, love, money, truth, status, boredom, failure, etc.

And because humans learn by imitation and culture transmits by copying, that algorithm will get copied, mixed and amplified.

Once character is something that gets copied, it stops being private. It becomes a system with feedback. An outer loop.

The Outer Loop

Many operate with a myopic metric of impact, focusing on the direct visible outcomes. But “success” in the contemporary sense is a flawed metric: it captures results, not the rippling effect of character through the network. The true consequences are governed by a distant, external feedback loop. This shift in perspective has further implications:

1. Your worst moments are high-leverage training data. We are trained by both our victories and our failures, but the “edge cases” carry the most weight. It is easy to broadcast a clear signal when you are winning. It is much harder when you are afraid or humiliated.

When shit hits the fan, the gap between the character you want to have and the reaction you actually have is at its widest. That is why the recording light goes on. Everyone around you, and the models ingesting that data, is watching: “So, this is how we handle disaster.”

That recording gets reused. How you bridge that gap during a crisis becomes the manuscript for how those around you will handle their own storms. It evolves from a reaction into a trait, and that trait becomes a signal that others copy when they face their own storms.

2. The Arc of Invisibility. The biggest consequences of your life are invisible to you because of the lag between the signal and the result. You rarely get to see the true “outer loop”. A person who met you once might have shifted their trajectory by a mere 3° because of an interaction with you.

But in navigation, the 1 in 60 rule dictates that a 1° error results in being a mile off course after 60 miles. Over a lifetime, a 3° shift changes the destination by a continent.

Consider Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847, he was ostracized for suggesting doctors wash their hands. He died in an asylum, believing he was a failure. He never saw the millions of lives his protocol would eventually save. A single degree of character hides a continent of consequences.

3. You are upstream of billions you will never meet: We exist in a matrix of connections where the complexity is too high to calculate. Books, tweets, gossip, a single introduction, a norm you set in a small group; these propagate like code in a giant distributed system. You are the node where the signal originates, but you do not control where it runs.

Engineering the Signal This is why it is critical to prioritize the person over the outcome alone. The chain of cause and effect in human networks is too chaotic to predict. You cannot engineer the butterfly effect2. You can only engineer the signal you emit into the storm. Harmonize it.

Harmonizing the Signal

One of the highest forms of character is working on harmonizing the signal you emit to the world. You are continuously emitting data into a complex matrix of humans (and now AIs). Every interaction, a text, a meeting, a moment of stress, is a transmission.

The discipline of character is to ensure that this signal actively improves the system it enters. This is done in two distinct ways:

1. Filtering the Noise (The Subtractive). First, identify the weak links in your history, the static, and refuse to extend them. Consider a moment of high friction, like a heated disagreement with a friend. The default path is to transmit the signal exactly as you received it: reacting to stress with snap judgment, defensive sarcasm, or looking for someone to blame. The harder discipline is to act as a noise-canceling wave. You absorb the shock entirely. You stop the cycle of emotional chaos before it passes through you to the next node.

2. Refining the Tone (The Additive). But damping the noise is only one aspect. You must also refine the quality of what you do broadcast. It is about intentionally adding coherence and grace to the network.

• You want to represent and emit the values that you stand for. Whether it is integrity, courage, temperance, humility, wit, generosity, or curiosity or any of the hundreds of existing values. Walking the talk, or rather the ethos you uphold, is how you can add a positive resonance to the world.

• And there are millions ways to do this: do the thing you fear. Show up when it’s inconvenient. Tell the truth when a lie would be smoother. Apologize quickly. Keep your word. Stay generous under stress etc.3

You are the architect of your own frequency. Work on the signal until it is clean enough, true enough, and elegant enough to be worth repeating. You want to be the force that harmonizes the resonance, not the one that amplifies the dissonance.

Rippling Through the Sands of Time

So if you remember one thing, remember that you are not just a node in the network of humans; you are a signal repeater. The quality of the signal is up to you.

Optimize for being copy-worthy, not comfortable. Live so that if it scales to millions of copies, the world gets better, not worse. Build a character worth echoing into the future.

Three weeks ago, I got weirdly obsessed with bees.

Not bees as in some clever AI acronym, or some obscure math theorem, just regular buzzing bees. It started innocently enough: I stumbled upon a suspiciously attractive book cover about beekeeping, picked it up out of curiosity, and suddenly found myself waist-deep in a 600-page manual. Just like that, I had accidentally become a bee expert1.

But you clicked expecting fractals, not bees, so let me quickly explain myself.

My little bee detour made me realize something important. From afar, bees seemed straightforward; small, simple insects doing small, simple things. But the deeper I dug, the more layers of surprising complexity unfolded. Every new detail uncovered yet another layer beneath. A seemingly endless complexity.

Later, while sipping tea and staring thoughtfully into space (as one does after too much bee reading), it hit me: this endless complexity is not the exception, it is the rule.

Why had this surprised me?

Probably because the common mental models we use for knowledge do not capture this never-ending depth well. Think about it yourself. When visualizing knowledge, what comes to mind?

A tree? Yes, this one is rather common, but it does not capture the complexity idea to my liking.

A map? I like this one too. It does a good job at highlighting chartered territory coarsely, but lacks the depth dimension.

A coral? A Venn diagram? A graph? They all feel slightly off.

All of the common representations seem to really be missing something essential.

You know that annoying thing your brain does, grabbing onto a random idea and refusing to drop it until you get to the bottom of it? This was one of those times.

So as is usual for me, I started to fixate on this idea. What is the perfect mental model for knowledge?

I have always liked to build mental models. They are the cornerstone of effective thinking. Refining mental models is a daily habit for me. Good system thinking should always start from a good mental model. I have some for finance, some for technology, some for AI, some for physics, and even some meta mental model for the relationship between mental models themselves.

When building mental models, you always want to make them as simple as they can be but not simpler. Mental models are like a reality compressor: they filter out noise and distill complex systems down to their clearest patterns.

The model I am sharing with you today is one that I particularly enjoyed thinking about. Simple, elegant and representative of its underlying idea. And while rather abstract it is still a useful tool to add to your mental toolbox.

After a few days of frustration, the answer came to me from the sky. Literally from the sky, or rather, the clouds. I was walking back home, observing a funny-looking shape in the sky, when suddenly it came to me!

A fractal!

Knowledge is just a fractal!

Fractals, if you are unfamiliar, are infinite rabbit holes; zoom in, and you just discover more rabbit holes, each with its own rabbit drama.

Fractals perfectly capture the infinite richness and complexity that is present in any topic, no matter how small and simple it may seem from a distance.

It felt like I was onto something.

Quick Detour: Fractals fun

Plus, conveniently, fractals are cool. There is even a principle in physics (the Dirac aesthetic criterion) that states that when picking between competing theories, the most elegant one usually wins2. And fractals certainly feel elegant.

I am gonna shamelessly seize this chance to shove some truly gorgeous fractals into your eyes.

Did you know that 3D fractals existed? I certainly did not.

There is some dramatic tone to this last one. It seems to be mimicking nature.

Alright, back to business.

Tea: Just Hot Water, Right?

Despite my attempt at bribing you with enticing visuals, you might not be as convinced as I am… yet. Fair enough. Let’s ground this in reality with an actual example.

Take tea, a recent personal addiction of mine (thank my girlfriend). Tea probably sounds pretty straightforward. You throw some leaves in hot water, right? Simple stuff. Do we really need fractals for tea? Feels overkill.

But imagine you have decided to become the world’s leading tea expert. Your goal: learn everything there is to know about tea.

Let’s visualize this journey with our fractal model.

First, you would tackle the basics: tea-making processes, brewing techniques, and the main ingredients. So far, nothing crazy.

But as a tea world expert, you cannot stop there. You would have to master every single tea variety3. Suddenly, your simple plan expands dramatically.

But surely we are now getting to the bottom of it, there is not much more to dig into. Is there?

Well, it turns out you also need to learn about the logistics of tea; how tea leaves get from farms in China or India to your local café. Another can of worms. Probably a few thousands of hours to learn about it all. And this is being optimistic.

And we haven’t even touched on the chemistry of taste yet. What happens chemically inside your brain when tea hits your tongue? That’s a whole new fractal universe of neuroscience and sensory biology.

Hopefully, you are starting to see why a fractal is more appropriate to model knowledge. Beneath even the most trivial-seeming topic lurks dizzying, fractal complexity.

But we do not have to stop there. We can keep going. To become ever sharper on the topic, we could probably also learn everything about the history of tea. In each region of the world and since its creation 3000 BC. How did humans discover tea? Who drank the first cup around 3000 BC, and why? Historians probably disagree (as historians love to do), so you would have to dive into their debates too, more complexity.

And since we have touched neuroscience, why stop at taste chemistry? Now you are neck-deep in brain science and human perception.

And once we are done with this, we should probably start looking into the business side of tea. How many tea businesses exist? How long have they been around? What are their strategies? How do new global warming regulations affect them? etc…

We will pause here. I think you get the point. Infinite complexity hides beneath absolutely every topic.

But don’t just take my word for it. Try it out for yourself! Pick a random topic. Choose something as dull as you can. And see how long it takes you to unfold the hidden complexity.

Bonus Perspectives (Because Why Not?)

Now that I have (hopefully) reassured you that this is not just an elaborate excuse to stare at fractals, but actually a meaningful idea worth pondering together; let’s expand on this groundwork by discussing a few complementary ideas.

Fractals are awesome. But they miss a crucial aspect of reality on their own. Knowledge is not static! All knowledge is dynamic. And while some evolve slowly (think classical Latin grammar), while others mutate rapidly (like modern pop music), every topic is constantly shifting and growing.

But fear not, there is an easy fix. Just imagine fractals as living, organic shapes, continually morphing instead of static snapshots.

Another interesting angle: subjective vs objective knowledge. If the fractal represents absolute knowledge then how to best represent subjective knowledge? The simplest solution: imagine varying levels of resolution, or clarity, within different regions of the fractal; some sharp and defined, others fuzzy and indistinct.

For instance, imagine (purely hypothetically, of course) that I have spent a few weeks playing chess, and despite trying really hard to raise my ELO, I keep getting humiliated on Chess.com4. In this scenario, my personal “chess fractal” would be blurry and unclear.

Now imagine that I spend years diving deep into my newfound bee passion, learning everything there is to know about it and unraveling endless honey-making secrets. For me, the “beekeeping” region of the fractal would become incredibly sharp and detailed, revealing subtle complexities invisible to others5.

This also neatly illustrates proximity bias; anything viewed from a distance looks simpler than it truly is.

Many other ideas fit neatly into this fractal framework. Take the Dunning-Kruger effect6, which describes how new topics first seem trivial, then overwhelmingly complex as you dive deeper. The fractal captures that beautifully.

We could keep going but we will stop there for the complimentary ideas. There are about a zillion intriguing directions we could wander off into here, but I will leave the delightful rabbit-hole exploration to you.

So, Any Catch?

Before we wrap up our fractal voyage, let me poke a few holes in our new model and see where it leaks.

First problem: fractals are annoyingly complicated to sketch. If you’re anything like me (i.e., artistically challenged), you can probably doodle a decent map or tree diagram in a few minutes. But fractals? They spiral quickly into scribbly nightmares.

Second, knowledge is not neatly organized into separate, isolated branches. It is more like a messy, tangled web. Math, for instance, pops up everywhere in the fractal, as part of countless unrelated topics. To truly reflect reality, the fractal would require lots of repetition. But maybe that’s fine; perhaps the most elegant way is to imagine these repeated sections as hyperlinks all pointing back to the same core structure? Maybe any mental model that tries to fully capture this messy interconnectedness is doomed from the start.

There are probably other holes we could poke, but these two were the biggest and most obvious ones that came to mind. Ultimately, though, I could not find any serious catch, just some minor fine print that seem easy enough to ignore.

Fractal Farewell

There is no conclusion; mental models are meant to open up new perspectives and invite exploration. They are a new lens to look at the world, add this one to your toolbox and pull it out whenever it helps you see something differently.

Should you stand humbled in awe at this endless depth of knowledge? Should you never dismiss a topic as trivial again? Should you simply stay mindful of your own limitations? I will leave that reflection to you.

Play around with this idea and come up with your own conclusions. Twist it, reshape it, or adapt it into something totally new. Whatever clicks.

And next time you’re confronted with something seemingly mundane, ask yourself: what hidden fractal awaits beneath the surface?

I have presented how fractals beautifully capture the essence of knowledge, but it does not end there. It can certainly be applied to other concepts such as ideas or experiences.

Maybe the old story got it wrong. Perhaps reality is not turtles all the way down after all; maybe it is fractals, endlessly spinning into themselves.

Congrats on diving this deep, fractal adventurer. Your reward? Here is a fractal generator to play with and a Mandelbrot explorer to plunge even deeper.

Closing meta-note: If at some point you started noticing fractals not just in the ideas but in the very structure of this post, that’s definitely a coincidence. Because obviously, I would never deliberately structure a post to mirror its own topic. That would be ridiculous. (Right?)

Subscribe now

My approach is very scientific and recommendations are based in research, not beliefs.

In this post, I will concentrate on the 80/20 set of actions for longevity. In subsequent posts, I might delve deeper into sub-topics.

1. Sleep 💤

Sleep is crucial to longevity. Opt for 8+ hours of rest in a pitch-dark room, aligning your sleep with the sun’s rhythm. Ensure a steady bedtime and a room temperature of 19°C. Avoid eating or drinking 5 hours before sleep and limit screen exposure to at least 3 hours prior. Abstain from caffeine, alcohol, and sugar before heading to bed. Monitor your sleep with tools like the Oura ring for optimal results.

2. Food 🍛

Avoid sugar, dairy, and meat, opting instead for plant proteins like tofu, lentils, nuts, seeds, and quinoa. If muscle gain is your goal, consider increasing protein intake — albeit in moderation for longevity’s sake. Explore intermittent fasting routines, such as a day-long fast weekly or 16-hour daily fasts; the optimal fasting pattern is still under research.

Protein sources, in order of preference, are plant protein > fish > chicken > pork/beef. Aim for a moderate caloric intake (~2000 for men, ~1800 for women), just enough to quench hunger without overeating.

Learn about and include superfoods in your diet — Berries, Green Tea, Legumes, Nuts and Seeds, Garlic, Olive Oil, Ginger, Turmeric, Salmon, Avocado, Mushroom etc. Additionally, choose whole-grain bread, pasta, and rice to help control glucose spikes, contributing to heart health.

3. Supplements 💊

Supplements can be an effective way to fortify your longevity-enhancing regimen. Here’s a list of some key supplements:

• Vitamin D3 (4500 IU/day): This is generated by our body when exposed to sunlight, essential for numerous internal processes. Supplements help cover sunlight deficiency. (https://tinyurl.com/4dhh7d37)

• Fish Oil (1g/day): Contains omega-3, crucial for brain, heart health, and more. Available in direct oil form or capsules. (https://tinyurl.com/4e8y9fva)

• Resveratrol (1g/day): Found in red wine, it aids various biological mechanisms and reduces heart attack rates. (https://tinyurl.com/4kekxjm9)

• Creatine (5g/day): Naturally produced in the body, beneficial for brain function and muscle strength. (https://tinyurl.com/7s3auy8k)

• NMN (1g/day) or alternatively NR (less expensive): Shown to reverse age-related effects in numerous animal studies. With promising results in the first human studies over the past few years. (https://tinyurl.com/a4cjdrp2)

• AG1 (1 scoop/day): A mix of vital vitamins, minerals, and probiotics. (https://tinyurl.com/mr3ed6np)

• Whey: While not significantly impacting longevity, it doesn’t seem to harm and aids muscle development. (https://tinyurl.com/33fep3us)

4. Exercise 🏋️‍♀️

All forms of exercise can contribute to overall health, but High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has been proven particularly beneficial for longevity or, more generally, any type of exercise triggering a high heart rate for a short amount of time. Regular stretching, too, is a key part of maintaining flexibility and preventing injuries (https://tinyurl.com/4y52t4vr). For optimal benefits, aim for at least 45 minutes of exercise four times a week (https://tinyurl.com/yf3dn524).

5. Hydration 💧

Stay hydrated, aiming for 6–8 glasses of water (2–3 liters) daily.

6. Temperature Exposure ❄️🔥

Get regular exposure to both cold and heat. Practice cold exposure through methods like cold showers or plunges. Similarly, seek regular dry heat exposure, ideally through sauna sessions three times a week for approximately 15 minutes each.

7. Environment Monitoring 🖥️

Maintain a healthy environment. Keep CO2 levels below 1000ppm and humidity between 45%-55%. Consider tools like Aranet4 for accurate monitoring (https://tinyurl.com/az36a46s).

8. Self monitoring 📊🔍

Keeping track of your health metrics is invaluable. Use devices like Oura for detailed sleep monitoring (https://tinyurl.com/2wsyx44v), Apple Watch for heart rate and various health statistics (https://tinyurl.com/mppdy6d7) A Whoop can be used for granular activity-related measurements (https://tinyurl.com/bde28jf6). You can also use a glucose monitor to discern your body’s unique blood sugar reaction to diverse foods (https://tinyurl.com/yd4xtnze), the goal being to avoid spikes of glucose which have been associated to decrease in longevity.

9. Regular Medical Checks 🏥🔁

Stay vigilant about your health by scheduling regular eye exams to gauge screen impacts, dental checkups for oral hygiene, and hearing tests.

Opt for regular blood tests and upload them to services like InsideTracker for deeper insights (https://tinyurl.com/yzbehwub). Don’t neglect comprehensive body health and fitness tests for overall wellbeing.

10. One-off Medical Checks 🥼

Consider some one-time procedures for preventive health and longevity. Stem cell extraction could offer future therapeutic benefits. Opt for a genome analysis (https://tinyurl.com/8wyhcey3) to identify any predispositions to certain diseases.

Lastly, testing with companies such as Tally can help establish your biological age versus chronological age (https://tinyurl.com/58zkcyd2).

11. Body 🚶‍♂️

For maintaining a healthy back, remember to keep a good posture, specifically, a straight back. For ear health, prioritize using headphones over earphones, and control the volume.

For skin care, ensure regular sun exposure while using sunscreen to guard against UV-induced DNA mutations that can accelerate aging. Limit unnecessary exposure to X-Rays when possible, such as during airport checks.

Put in place a basic skincare routine for the face including moisturizer and, optionally, oil, toner and serum (https://tinyurl.com/2k2rwads). For overall wellness, aim to reduce stress and maintain a healthy body fat percentage — ideally, a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9.

12. Phone 📱

To avoid undue distractions and minimize stress, curtail the attention-grabbing ability of your phone. Automate the ‘Focus Mode’ to minimize notification windows daily.

Restrict any unnecessary alerts and consider moving unavoidable notifications to batch alerts, preferably scheduled for one batch in the morning and one in the evening. Set a daily time limit on social media and entertainment apps.

To reduce eye strain, ensure your screen is always set to night mode.

13. Work Setup 🖥️

Set up your workspace to minimize strain and improve posture: a split keyboard (https://tinyurl.com/yc4kr6pw), a standing desk paired with a foot mat (https://tinyurl.com/4nrzx4dz), and a monitor positioned at eye level for blood circulation and posture.

Opt for a high FPS (60+), high-resolution screen to lessen eye strain. Employ the night mode setting on all devices to further alleviate eye fatigue.

14. Drugs and Alcohol 🥃

Limit alcohol and smoking. Also, minimize caffeine consumption, especially before sleep.

Conclusion

This concludes our short 80/20 walkthrough for longevity. Keep in mind that this is an ongoing research area and a lot of those advice are subject to change. But hopefully most of it remains relevant and helps you grow older healthier.

Recommended Readings

https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.co

https://www.amazon.com/Lifespan-Why-Age_and-Dont-Have