Hey - Kody here

Welcome to 50 new members this week! Happy to have you 😄

Yesterday I turned 27. (On the 27th!)

And if I’m being honest, all I want for my birthday week is to cross 500 subscribers. (Currently sitting at 445)

So if you enjoy this, or any of my past Habit Examples, I will love you forever for forwarding this email to a friend.

And if you’re that friend who this was forwarded to, you can subscribe free right here!

On another quick note, my new friend Virgil has literally made millions building & selling high-value courses online - and now he’s giving away his best kept secrets every week in a free newsletter so you can do it too.

habit example

IQ scores in the US have dropped for the first time since 1932.

But Northwestern Universtity claims "this doesn't mean people are less intelligent".

Excuse me? 😂

Kids are consistently scoring lower in:

• logic/reasoning
• problem solving/analogies
• mathematics/computational

They say the tests simply "favor older generations and not newer ones".

And they're entitled to their opinion.

But with a little common sense, you and I can recognize something is shifting:

• Instead of figuring something out, planning, and reasoning for the best solution... we default to google (and now chatgpt) 99% of the time
• Instead of solving problems... people play victim and demand someone else fix their problems for them
• And math... well, I'm not a math guy myself so I can't say much here 😅

In all seriousness though, the more we enable laziness and lack of skill, every generation will be more lazy and less skilled (myself included).

We can't turn the world around from where it's going, but there's great news:

We don't have to.

All we have to do is control what's in our own homes and our own lives.

In my college Biology class, our professor would make us practice using our brains instead of Google.

He'd show a picture of some bizarre natural phenomenon and have us come up with our own ideas of what caused it.

A lot of our ideas were wrong. Some were right. The point was exercising our mind's ability to reason.

Plug this principle into your life and you'll never be stupid.

try it

Just like muscles, if you stop reasoning, your reasoning muscles get weak.

Even if (or especially if!) you love using AI tools and technology (like I do), practice engaging your mind in other tasks, games, or projects to reason and problem solve.

For me, as much as I despise house projects, it keeps pushing me to solve problems and think creatively in entirely different ways than I do in my job or anything else I'm involved in.

There's even apps you can download just for keeping your mind sharp! (sudoku, anyone?)

Choose to own responsibility for what happens in your life.

It's no one else's fault, and you are 100% capable to change (almost) anything about your life.

In a world obsessed with making things easier, purposely doing hard things and solving your own problems could make you smarter and wiser than anyone you know.

(and sure... try, like, not using a calculator once a year or something...)

inspiration

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”

- Albert Einstein

actual quote from my 4-year-old 😂

me: *playing PacMan on an arcade machine at my in-laws house* 🕹️

her: If you eat all the dots, I’ll give you a hug.

If you don’t eat all the dots, I won’t give you a hug.

I really believe in you dad!

me: *gets eaten by ghost* 👾

her: sorry dad… I promise you’ll eat all the dots when you’re older…🤷‍♂️

Thanks for reading!

- Kody

P.S. Rap songs about babies just hit different. You'll love this one.

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