#084: Learn Anything in 5 Months, Lowering Your Resting Heart Rate, Effective Vibe Coding

Hi All!

We are pleased to welcome you to this week's edition of Undiscovered, a newsletter with exclusive resources and insights expanding from the material found on our main site - becketu.com.

This week, we will take a look at how to lower your nighttime resting heart rate, how to effectively vibe code, and how to create a 5-month plan to learn any skill in the world you want.

Let's dive in:

Lowering Your Nighttime Resting Heart Rate

Human biohacker and 'Don't Die' movement founder, Bryan Johnson, recently said that your resting heart rate before bed is the single most important health marker you can optimize for. He says it's the strongest predictor of your sleep quality, which determines will power and if you'll exercise, which determines if you eat well.

Johnson succinctly lays out the top pieces of advice to lower your RHR before bed:

This is all relatively simple stuff, but as a perennial couch-sleeper I know I could be doing more to improve this health marker. I probably won't be changing all my lights to red and amber mode, but I can decide to eat my final meal of the day a little earlier, make an effort to relax before bed, avoid alcohol, and be consistent with what time I go to bed.

Johnson also shared the advice in a chart format and expands on it more from a post shared a little over a month ago.

Vibe Coding...This Time For Real

Each week I come across more and more excellent resources for 'vibe coding'. It's essentially the skill of creating apps without coding in the traditional sense, but this week I noticed a few posts that all tied around the central theme of something I hadn't seen emphasized before: effective vibe coding.

The best, most comprehensive thread I found on Twitter came from user @seconds_0, who started off by saying "I am generally more successful at vibe coding than other people because I spend an enormous amount of time upfront scaffolding because I've spent my career telling engineers to build things." The entire thread can be read in under 2 minutes, and is an extremely useful place to start to see the high-level roadmap for a vibe coding project.

The first step in that thread, however, is to build something called a Product Requirements Document, also known as a PRD. @nurijanian had a thread of his own saying "When execs say 'just whip up the PRD by tomorrow' most junior PMs say yes...and immediately set themselves up to fail...Here's the 4-part framework I wish I had on day one". It's a slightly longer read, but full of useful information and context missing from the first thread. This is important as the foundational piece because it sets up how thorough the whole project will be.

Once you've done that, you're ready for a little real-world application. Follow the simple format Sherry Jiang used for her app peek.money, which follows this exact stack:

How to Build a Brand

​Caleb Ralston is a brand expert who has spent the last 16 years scaling multiple brands to 30M+ followers. He just released a six hour 'course' on how to build a brand from scratch. It's available as one really long YouTube video, so don't worry about needing to buy anything.

The video is broken down into four sections:

1. Brand
2. Content
3. Team
4. Monetize

Each section is broken down into further subsections with useful pieces of advice. Most of the video skews towards the fundamentals of starting out in brand building, but there are pieces such as "Full-time employees vs Contractors and Agencies" or "Remote vs In Person vs Hybrid" which handle slightly more complex topics.
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Overall, its a solid watch and I can't wait to finish it.

Effects of Deliberate Practice & Structured Study Plans

It may seem obvious, but in order to get better at anything, there is no substitute for practice. Justin Skycak from Math Academy is one of the top experts in the world when it comes to talent development. He recently shared a couple examples of students that are studying in an effective manner, as well as how to create a solid path for 'upskilling' in any domain.

In the first example, Justin breaks down two study sessions. The first one is a YouTube stream from Jarrett Ye. Skycak mentions three critical points that make this an effective study session:

• Jarrett is locked in the whole time, no distractions, moving with purpose but not rushing
• The he problems require plenty of of scratch work, and he often has to slow down and think carefully, but he still gets through a high volume of problems.
• He carefully reads the slides containing contextual information and studies the worked examples. He gets the vast majority of questions right, but when he misses a question, he carefully inspects the explanation to pinpoint his mistake.

In the second example, Justin breaks down a study session of Justin Whitmore where he works on problems at the sweet spot of being easy and hard. They require his full attention, he often has to slow down and think deeply while getting through a high volume of problems, and he is able to recover from his 'snags' while it pushes him to think critically without getting overwhelmed.

This is all great, but where do you start if you're interested in a skill outside of math? Raphael Traviss recently shared how he used Deep Research + The Math Academy Way to generate a structured, custom plan for improving his painting skills. According to his peer group of professional artists, he improved more in the last five months practicing this way for 10 hours/week than he had in the last five years of watching YouTube videos. Here's a link to Raphael's main actionable tweet, where he includes the prompts which gave him the plan.

How to Ask for Advice

Here is a helpful framework for asking for advice, from @Altimor:

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Always wishing you the best,

J.B.