1.5 billion heartbeats in a lifetime

1.5 billion heartbeats illustration: showing how mammals share broadly the same number of heartbeats from a shrew to an elephant

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For almost all mammals, 1.5 billion heartbeats, more or less, is how much you’ve got. From the teeniest, tiniest shrew weighing just a few grams to the largest whale — passing through animals as diverse as robins, monkeys, sea lions, and giraffes — each mammal has broadly in the region of 1.5 billion heartbeats.

Beyond just heart rate, knowing a mammal’s weight can help predict several other fundamental aspects of its life. A tiny mammal will likely have a heart that goes like crazy, live only briefly, and reach maturity quickly. A large animal, in contrast, will have a slow heart rate, a long life, and take its time to adulthood.

The most significant outlier is us, mainly because, in recent years, we’ve significantly extended our lifetime from what would be expected from Nature.

This gem, and many other fascinating insights about size, scale, Nature and physics, from the book Scale by Geoffrey West .

Also see: The square-cube law

Published 29 Jun 2019

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Rivers and buckets

John Muir quote illustration with a Sierra Nevada lake and distant mountains with a mountain chickadee bird on a branch in the foreground and the quote "As soon as we take one thing by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe."

Hitched to everything else in the universe

Too many interesting articles to read? Too many places to visit? Too many projects to work on? Too many podcasts to listen to? Too many interesting things to learn? Try thinking of each as rivers, not buckets. Oliver Burkeman shared a beautiful and powerful metaphor to reframe the bucket list of everything we want to do but can't possibly get done. There's an endless stream of books to read, programs to watch, and things you may want to get done. Instead of a bucket list to get through, try thinking of it as a river where attractive options drift by. Rather than feeling pressure to clear out the bucket or tick off all the items, instead, you can choose from the river what interests you in the knowledge that more will always come along. This reframing resonated with me when I considered everything I wanted to read or the emails in my inbox. When you have too many emails, you find you answer the ones that really need answering. There will always be more. Growing up with a scarcity mindset regarding photos, I used to carefully trim each photo I didn't want after a weekend away or travelling. It was a revelation to me to consider selecting the ones I liked instead of worrying about removing every one that I didn't. Maybe you do have to get through everything at work, but this mindset doesn't need to apply to your personal life. Don't beat yourself up. It's impossible to keep up with everything. Consider thinking of areas of your life like rivers, not buckets. Oliver explains rivers not buckets in "Treat your to-read pile like a river". Or listen to Oliver reading the short essay in the Waking Up app. Also see: The four pillars of too much, Lifetime reads, Tsundoku…Too many interesting articles to read? Too many places to visit? Too many projects to work on? Too many podcasts to listen to? Too many interesting things to learn? Try thinking of each as rivers, not buckets. Oliver Burkeman shared a beautiful and powerful metaphor to reframe the bucket list of everything we want to do but can't possibly get done. There's an endless stream of books to read, programs to watch, and things you may want to get done. Instead of a bucket list to get through, try thinking of it as a river where attractive options drift by. Rather than feeling pressure to clear out the bucket or tick off all the items, instead, you can choose from the river what interests you in the knowledge that more will always come along. This reframing resonated with me when I considered everything I wanted to read or the emails in my inbox. When you have too many emails, you find you answer the ones that really need answering. There will always be more. Growing up with a scarcity mindset regarding photos, I used to carefully trim each photo I didn't want after a weekend away or travelling. It was a revelation to me to consider selecting the ones I liked instead of worrying about removing every one that I didn't. Maybe you do have to get through everything at work, but this mindset doesn't need to apply to your personal life. Don't beat yourself up. It's impossible to keep up with everything. Consider thinking of areas of your life like rivers, not buckets. Oliver explains rivers not buckets in "Treat your to-read pile like a river". Or listen to Oliver reading the short essay in the Waking Up app. Also see: The four pillars of too much, Lifetime reads, Tsundoku

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