Exercised and Studied Productivity

11:55 PM

I think today was a good day. Again, I really barely remember any of it. Last night I said I was going to go to the gym, but that turned out to be a lie. I ended up not going to the gym. Maybe I'll go to the gym tonight? We'll see. Nope. I just asked my dad for the key to the gym, and he said no, it's too late. He says he'll walk with me tomorrow morning though and also go to the gym.

I then asked him some math questions, because we were watching some math related videos earlier. Well, it started with exercise videos, showing him videos of Chinese seniors doing their impressive for their age exercises. Prior to that actually, I was showing him a video of Lou Corona, who has been a raw vegan for 52 years, and is 73 years old. He was in an interview video today where he did this crazy plank on his wrists, which is just insane. Then on a similar topic of seniors exercising, we pivoted to Chinese seniors doing exercises, since there are lots of videos on those for some reason, and then Chinese students doing math.

There's this video of Chinese students waving their arms in the air to do mental calculations, and we also saw this video of Chinese students adding 100 3-digit numbers to get the sum of 66948. 100 numbers. In their heads. They were adding up 100 3-digit numbers in their head. It took them an instantaneous amount of time to get the sum, or close to it, as the voice took like a minute to read out all the numbers. The numbers were read very quickly, and they had to answer immediately after the last number. Even I couldn't do that math, and I practice mental math every day, I'm rank 2 in this one mental math app called Quick X Maths, and these are kids doing this feat I can't do, at like 10 years old.

Anyway, then I asked my dad some basic math questions after asking him for the gym key and he said no. This all happened like 5 minutes ago. I'm 30 years old by the way, and I'm writing about asking my dad for permission to do things. I actually don't need his permission to go out and do whatever, but he has the key for the gym, so yeah. I asked him a very simple question like 12 x 12, which is 144. I think this is common knowledge, it's just memorized by most people I think, but he doesn't know it. So I asked him 12 x 10, he said 120. Then I asked him 12 x 11, and he could not answer it, he answered with 112, which doesn't make sense.

Anyway, I shouldn't really disparage my dad, but I do know his intellectual ability, and he wasn't able to help me in any of my math homework once I got to 6th grade. It was all beyond him at that point. He can do long division, he was able to help me with that. I think anything beyond that, like a simple algebra equation, he isn't able to do. And he has a medical degree from the Philippines, he was a medical doctor in the Philippines. The curriculum is definitely not as strong there than in the United States, of course.

I think a lot of first world Americans and Europeans, think that everyone else in the world is educated similarly as the States. Nope. I can attest that you learn a lot more complicated subjects in the U.S. compared to the Philippines, in terms of math, writing, history, even languages, and music, and art, based on the 3 or so years of schooling I had in the Philippines. I can't say the same about other Asian countries though. I had a Vietnamese classmate who transferred to my high school along with his brother in 9th grade. He aced every math class and was the top math student in the whole school.

There was this other Indian student who had to go to the local community college to take math courses, because he already passed all the ones taught in high school, but I think my friend was even better in math than him, he just didn't have that same opportunity to sign up for harder courses. He is a graphics card engineer or something today, the work he does is extremely complicated, extremely math and logic heavy, and beyond anything I can even imagine.

We were very close friends. I went to his house a few times, I think he's been to my place a few times. He told me he never studied. He just did the homework assignments, which I would count as studying, but he says he never studied. He scored pretty high on the SAT. I don't even remember what score I got, I don't remember what he got either. Anyway, yeah.

There's one thing that confused me about this one video we also watched, it was on random Chinese being asked math questions, the video is called something like "Are the Chinese really good at math?" They all were asked the same math questions like 18 x 18, and they would all get it, even though they were asked initially if they were good at math, and all of them said no. One question that got me was they were asked what is the square root of 256. Everyone got it. I know the answer myself because I've had to calculate 16 x 16 mentally a few times and I just have it memorized that 16 x 16 is 256. But how did they know 16 was the square root?

I don't know the calculation for determining square roots, except for manually multiplying numbers to get to it. I don't know the reverse method of it, of just being given a number, and finding its square. How did they all do that mentally? They literally all got it. One of them did the calculation verbally, and I just remember them saying 79. What does 79 have to do with determining the square root of 256?!

Anyway, my day today was pretty okay. I fell asleep at like 5 AM last night, and woke up at 10 AM. I did my brain training, which includes doing some mental math, as well as solving the NYT puzzles Wordle, Strands, Connections, and the Mini. I also do Impulse, Peak, and Elevate. So I use 5 brain training apps total, and it takes me about an hour to do them all. I'm in the 99th percentile in all of them basically. Yeah, I reached the 99th percentile on Peak already, my Peak Brain Score is 819 right now.

The Peak Brain Score is basically this calculation that changes depending on how well you do in the different brain training exercises. If you do really well and reach a certain score in a game, your PBS goes up, like by one. If you do badly the next time, it could go down by one, or more. It is sort of performance based, but it is also difficulty based. You increase the game's difficulty once you pass certain thresholds, and you score higher points in the higher difficulties. You aren't able to pass those thresholds depending on your performance, so you won't be able to score as high. I honestly think a lot of the games could be harder, I think there could be 3 harder difficulties that can be added that adds even more difficulty to the games. I'm at the top level in some games and it feels easy to me.

I have seen some reviews, where people have played the game for months, and have never breached 600 PBS. They gave it a negative review, saying "why is there a requirement to get 600 PBS? I have been playing for 6 months and haven't gotten it" or something like that. I can attest it is extremely hard to raise PBS. At many points I have thought that I peaked, and my PBS wouldn't go up anymore. I think I thought that when it was at 600 PBS, when it was at 650, and so on.

Even when I breached 800 PBS, and I got to 801 PBS, I was like, yeah, this is probably my peak. I didn't think I would improve anymore, but it kept improving. I'm at 819 PBS right now, which is insane. They have a ranking system too, and it shows that I am in the 99th percentile. I think I reached 99th percentile once I passed 789 PBS, prior to that I was 98th percentile and below.

As I write this, my confidence is pretty low that I can improve my PBS any more. Yet I know it'll go up some more. Right now I think it's an impossibility to reach 900 PBS, but I kinda think it'll happen. I actually don't know if it'll happen, but I wouldn't be so surprised if it did, even though I think it's pretty much impossible.

So yeah, I did the brain training, and then I did some vegan activism on Twitter fol like 30 minutes. Then I ate a little bit, and then went out to the gym to exercise. I don't feel any sore after exercising, but I didn't do multiple sets of anything. I just did one set of basically every arm dumbbell exercise though. The reason I didn't do multiple sets, is because I did knuckle push ups first, and doing knuckle push ups hurt my knuckles, so I decided to just do one set of those. That mindset infected every other exercise I did and so I just did one set of each.

I listened to some summarized audiobooks during that time. Last night I bought a lifetime subscription to HeadWay for $45. It's normally like $89 for a year's subscription, so yeah, I took this lifetime subscription offer. I also have a year's subscription to Blinkist which will end in a few months. I didn't even start using Blinkist until just last week or something, even though I've had the subscription for a while.

After using the two, I think Blinkist is much better than HeadWay. It's like no comparison really. I think the Blinkist summaries are not only better, they're read aloud better, and they have far more options. It's weird, I saw a HeadWay vs Blinkist comparison video prior to buying the lifetime subscription, because I had never used HeadWay before, and it said HeadWay was comparable and was better because it was $10 cheaper per year ($89/yr vs $99/yr). But now, I have used both of them, and I would say definitively in every way, Blinkist is better than HeadWay. But it's still not a bad option, it's just not as good.

I only had a short 5 day trial of ShortForm, another competitor in the book summary space, and it's the priciest at $189 per year. I don't have that yearly subscription, but I would say that Blinkist's summaries are still better. ShortForm definitely has longer and more detailed summaries, but I think those summaries can be too long and too detailed, so long and so detailed in fact, that it really seems like AI generated summaries. Blinkist on the other hand, is pretty concise and to the point, it is not as detailed, but it does quickly summarize books and their main ideas pretty well.

So I did that in the gym, and then I went home. Before going to the gym actually, I shaved, because my mom said to, saying that my beard makes me look older.

After the gym, I changed clothes, and then waited for a bit. Then we went to fill up gas in my mom's car, also went to fill up the tire that keeps leaking air. It turns out she ran over a nail and it was lodged right into her tire, which caused the air leakage. After that we went to Wal-Mart where we bought a bunch of food, all vegan of course.

At home I ate a bunch, and then watched a productivity course, like 20 minutes of it. It said to write down some goals on a piece of paper, so I write down that I wanted to lose 5 pounds by Thursday, so that I can take good pictures in Chicago, that I would exercise every day, and that I would catch up on organizing a lot of stuff.

I would have watched more of the course, but I got distracted when I went to my parents for something. And then when I came back, I was on Munecat's stream for a while, and then I switched over to Eric's stream on his street activism in Puerto Rico. I was there for most of both streams, but I also did some window shopping on eBay while listening to the streams and taking part in their chats.

I'm currently paying $10 a month for a CapCut subscription, and I'm not even using it since I'm not making any videos at the moment. I think it's a waste. So anyway, I went online and tried to look for a wireless microphone. I could go with a really cheap one like $56, but there are some fancier ones for $399. The fancier ones just look so much more aesthetically cooler looking, even though the performance difference probably wouldn't even be noticeable to be honest.. Anyway I just window shopped since I ended up not buying anything.

Anyway that was basically my entire day, and after all this, I went to my dad and we watched Lou Corona, and then the Chinese seniors, and so on, which I already wrote about above.

I still want to do better in life. I think I spent today better than yesterday. I think that's all that counts. Tomorrow, I want to do even better than today. The main way I can do that, is if I don't eat any junk food tomorrow. I ate a bunch of chips today, because my mom bought some, and I couldn't help myself. If I eat no chips tomorrow, then tomorrow is a much better day than today. That's what I'll focus on, while also doing my brain training and the physical exercises.