Where did this "enuff" idea come from?
A winding, and potentially too detailed, journey about how this newsletter came to be.
It was Friday night, October 9th—seven months into the COVID-19 pandemic and 25 days before the 2020 Presidential election. I was writing up a newsletter for my day job that goes out every Sunday morning. It highlights a few articles from across the internet that provide interesting connections or metaphors to the K-12 education world.
National Geographic had resurfaced an article from 2018 about the science of sleep and the magical journey the brain goes through when we're out cold. My editor informed me the next morning that the article was actually gated content and our readers would not be able to access it without a subscription (oops).
Because what I had written up wasn't bound by the exact things written in the Nat Geo article, I simply searched for another "science of sleep" piece of content that I could use as a replacement. I chose a talk given by Dr. Matthew Walker, author of Why We Sleep, but I needed a quote I could use for the newsletter.
I listened to about seven or eight minutes of the talk, found a nice soundbite, made the changes to the newsletter, and scheduled it to go out the next morning. But, this Walker guy was spewing a load of fun facts (something I'm prone to eat up all day regardless of the topic), so I watched the whole thing.
"Fun facts" might not be the most appropriate way to describe it because the focus was on all the terrible things that happen to the body and brain when we don't get enough shut-eye. Nonetheless, it was worth the hour.
Two very important things struck me after I finished the video:
I needed to up my sleeping game; and
Simple advice (even when I believe it to be true) is incredibly difficult to follow, but it becomes a bit easier to follow when I take the time to learn the evidence behind the advice.
This wasn't an earth-shattering insight, but it made me ask a very important question: When we hear things like "eat healthy foods, exercise 30-minutes a day, drink water, and sleep 7-9 hours per night," why are we so good at doing everything but those things?
The dominos began falling very quickly over the next 24 hours.
I had been in a creative rut for months and had been itching for something that would command my attention (that wasn't connected to my day job). I didn't know where my mind was headed, but it was off and running.
"Ok," I thought, "What if I began chipping away at these universal truths about living a healthy life and built habits that would honor their wisdom? And, what if I shared my journey with others?
A very unoriginal idea, no doubt, but I was intrigued. Over the previous two weeks, I had started slipping into a bad habit of staying up later than usual and forcing myself to wake up at 6am to jump straight into my work day.
I was averaging less than seven hours of sleep per night, and I kept feeling its effects in the early afternoons. I needed to get that straightened out.
"Ok, I'll start with building my sleep routine."
I let that percolate for a few hours while watching BLACK BOYS and Moonlight.
This is where the story takes a weird turn—because I'm choosing to provide too much detail. I don't like telling true stories without the "real life" moments built in.
It's now 4pm on October 10th. I'm sitting in my bed in my van on the side of a cliff just outside Badlands National Park. We are getting pounded with 30+ mph wind gusts and abort to Rapid City where we set-up for the evening in a Cabella's parking lot.
I know, I've done no explaining about the life I currently live, so the short of it is that I live in a van—Ram Promaster 3500—and my partner and I work remotely.
Once we got settled in for the evening, I started passively playing around with domain names at Namecheap. I type something in like "liveyour(dot)life" and see that I can offer a company $5,000 for it (yikes). With each new domain name, I imagine what the website might be about.
And, in the background, I continue thinking about these two-word axioms: Eat well, exercise daily, etc.
Then, a new question hits me: What prevents us from making the best choices the easiest choices?
For quite some time, I've always held the position that societal change cannot happen if the change itself is not incredibly easy to make. Take recycling, for instance.
A staggeringly small percentage of what we put in a recycling bin ends up being recycled. Why? One reason is our decision (in the US) to use single-stream recycling. We don't think people will sort their glass, metal, paper, etc., so we claim the recycling companies can take care of it for us. Put everything in one bag and we'll do the rest (not so much).
To take that reasoning further, what we are really saying is that in order to have an effective multi-stream recycling program that everyone abides by, the sorting (and cleaning) process would need to be automated in each individual home.
That's the belief I've held onto for years—if you want everyone to make the best choice, you need to make it the easiest choice.
But, something shifted for me as I continued chewing on my sleep habits. I started wondering: What makes a choice easy to make?
After having a mountain of evidence laid before me about the negative impacts of neglecting natural sleep, I instantly became motivated to provide myself the best sleep possible.
You see, the perceived easy choices at night are to continue doing the thing you are already doing (i.e. watching tv, surfing the internet, etc.). But, "perceived" is the key word here. That choice only seems easy because the negative impacts of the choice you are making are unknown (or at the very least ignored).
That's when it hit me.
In our minds, we have an irrational choice-making measurement system that assigns "hard" and "easy" without assessing the long term impacts of those choices. Said another way, we have a wildly incorrect definition of "easy."
If my mind says continuing to watch television is the easy choice, then it is claiming that choosing to disrupt my circadian rhythm (which leads to increases in cardiac events, decreases in natural killer cells (cells that attack cancer cells), and so much more) is an easier choice than choosing not to disrupt my circadian rhythm.
And, to state the obvious, that's simply not true. When I know the negative impact of disrupting my circadian rhythm, the easy choice is to do whatever I need to do to not do that (e.g. stop watching television two hours before going to sleep).
As my idea became clearer, the domain names I came up with started having some sing to them. Eventually, I landed on "enough(dot)com" and it's many variations (all taken), so I decide to change the spelling to "enuff." Lo and behold, "enuff(dot)life" is available and very cheap ($2.80 per year).
But, I'm not really trying to buy a domain and build out a website. What about Substack? I'm subscribed to a few newsletters there and really like the set-up. And, it's free.
Cool, let's set-up an account. Oh, I can sign-up using my Twitter account. Let's do that. Oh, it wants to know if I want to use my Twitter bio as my Substack bio. No, let's change that on both platforms:
"Striving to live the #EnuffLife. Sleep well. Eat right. Move some. Breathe often."
At this point, in my head, Enuff was going to be all about what it means to do "enough" of life's basic necessities.
As I continue setting up my Substack account, I start seeing the ambiguity (which means opportunity) of Enuff. This could point to consumption (e.g. minimalism), politics (having "enough" of the political climate), work-life balance, and so on.
Do I want to focus or do I want to go broad and play with it until something seems to stick?
Well, who am I doing this for? Me.
Ok, cool, let's go broad.
But, just for the sake of marketability, let's choose at least one message:
"Making the best choices the easiest choices."
Sunday, October 11th rolls around and we're driving seven hours to Colorado. I drive the first two hours and do nothing but think about the possibilities of this Enuff idea.
Headlines and themes are coming to mind left and right. I imagine how I might structure my writing and what guardrails will keep each piece focused enough so that I don’t turn a single newsletter issue into a book. I can tell this idea really has some legs.
I don’t get quite enough figured out before the weekend ends and it’s back to the work grind.
By Wendesday, October 14th, I finally start writing up this story and getting it out the world. As it stands, I’m going to keep things divided in two categories:
Scientific/Practical
Theoretical/Philosophical
The first category will allow me to explore questions like “how much sugar is enough for my body?”
The second category will allow me to explore questions like “how much productivity is enough to feel satisfied?”
We’ll see where we go from here. But, you better believe my first official piece will be about sleep. Until then, I wish you a restful evening.
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