Why My Workouts and Investments Are Boring—And Why ChatGPT Might Be Your Next Therapist
The hidden power of boring exercise and investment strategies, and how ChatGPT is making its way into mental health.
Life is awesome, irrespective of the cards you’ve been dealt by circumstances. I build businesses with people I like to pursue a rich emotional and financial life. I share lessons I learn along the way.
Here are this weeks insights:
I Want My Workouts To Be Boring
I Want My Investment To Also Be Boring
Here Is How ChatGPT Can Become A Great Therapist For You
You can access previous editions of my weekly emails here. Let’s begin!
(1) I Want My Workouts To Be Boring
Exercising should be like flying a plane. Checklist style. Pilots do not say “today let’s do things differently. Let’s start with the flaps down and let’s increase the speed to more than the optimal level.” No matter how good and experienced the pilots are, they follow the same damn checklist every single time to ensure that the plane gets from point A to point B. There are no exceptions. And when there are exceptions, disasters happen.
I don't want variety or novelty at the gym. I want the minimum effective dose. I want to utilize every minute to its fullest to get the result I desire.
What are these results?
My objective isn't to be in the top 3 in the world. It is to do enough to be in the top 3% of my age cohort. This just requires the right exercises and consistency.
I got my gym sessions down to just two variations. One is an Upper Body workout and one is Lower Body workout. They hit every muscle group. This is what they look like.
Upper Body Workout
HORIZONTAL PUSH - Bench Press
VERTICAL PULL - Pull ups (overhand pronated grip)
VERTICAL PUSH - Overhead Press (standing dumbbells)
HORIZONTAL PULL - Any Rows (Dumbbell Rows)
BICEPS - Curls
TRICEPS - Pushdowns
Lower Body Workout
FIRST PAIR
Leg Press
Leg Curl
SECOND PAIR
Deadlift + Romanian Deadlift
Lunges (front and back) (Kettlebells in both hands)
Rules
10-min run to warm up
20-min stretches
Each set is 5 sets x 10 reps
Dead Hang for a count of 100 at the end of the workout
Progressively load the weights till you can’t do the weights. When you can’t lift the weights, hold for a count of 10. Then drop to a lower weight and complete the remaining reps till you have 10 for the set.
Do the workouts in this exact order because if you work the smaller muscles before the larger ones then by the time you get to the larger ones, the smaller muscles will be too tired to support the weight.
Use machines wherever you have a lot of weights involved to prevent injury. For example I prefer doing a 100 kg machine Leg Press versus a 100 kg Squat because in the machine if I can’t take the weight anymore it won’t fall on me.
Slow controlled cadence is best for muscle growth. It is all about time under tension.
Injury prevention is a priority. If I injure anything, even a toe or a pinky finger, everything stops because I won’t be able to workout holistically.
I asked ChatGpt to analyze my workout
Yesterday when I was doing my Upper Body session I told ChatGPT that I want to get a bit buffed in 2025 and whether this split workout would give me the result I desire. It said that this workout covered the whole body but it would not give me the result I desired because I was doing each workout every two weeks. According to AI muscles recover within 2-3 days and should be stimulated frequently for growth. I have been doing one workout every weekend alternating between Upper Body and Lower Body. The gap between each workout is too long to build muscle.
I told ChatGPT that I don’t have time to do two Upper Body sessions and two Lower Body sessions every week. But what I could do is add a mid-week session so that I am doing both workouts every week. Would that make me add muscle by the end of the year? It said that doing one session of both workouts every week would make me get bulky but not as big as I could get if I did 2x the quantity.
Great! Slow and steady wins the race. Let’s do what is possible - two workouts a week, one of each.
2025 Goal
Do the same damn boring workouts on Wednesdays and Saturdays. One Upper Body. One Lower Body. The rest of the days walk 10,000 steps. Try to squeeze in a 5 km run on one of the days. Let’s see how buffed I can grow.
(2) I Want My Investment To Also Be Boring
I got this message from a friend. His money multiplied 10 times by investing in an index fund.
The great Warren Buffett who has created tens of thousands of millionaires by picking stocks also recommends investing in index funds. Here he is in this video stating that if you had bought an index fund in 1942 and never looked at a headline or stock information again, then a $10,000 investment that reinvested dividends would be worth $51 million today.
It is the same advice I heard in this podcast - The Top 7 Money Making Hacks for 2025 That Are PROVEN To Work.
In this podcast, Morgan Housel, the author of the the amazing book The Psychology of Money says “I keep it as painfully simple as I possibly can. My entire net worth is cash, a house and index funds. I think it is extremely hard to beat the market and very few people will do it. I think there are really smart people who could do it, and people I know who I could invest with. The reason I don’t is not because I don’t think it can be done. It is because the variable that I want to maximize for in my investments is endurance. If I can just earn average return for an above average period of time, it is literally going to lead to an amount of success that would put me in the top 5% of investors.”
So Am I Investing In Index Funds?
No. I remain invested with Marcellus. I believe that beating the market is difficult but the Marcellus team and philosophy should outperform the indices if I have the endurance to stay invested for an above average period of time - 10, 20, 30 years. Marcellus also uses checklists to filter which stocks have above average potential. Over the last few years, Marcellus portfolios have shown mixed results (which is normal!). But in this long marathon, the race hasn’t even reached the half way mark for me. I like the team, the approach and the candidness with which they share their mistakes and successes. Worse case, I expect to get what the indices have given - around 12% per year or 3x my money every ten years. But a good outcome would be 18% or 5x.
Irrespective of whether you invest in index funds or Marcellus, your approach should be boring! It should be as boring as watching grass grow or paint dry. It is definitely boring for me. I am not looking for thrills. I already take enough risks in my businesses. So in my investing I a look for a simple, repeatable, boring process that is highly likely to make me financially independent.
(3) Here Is How ChatGPT Can Become A Great Therapist For You
I was listening to Tim Ferriss speak with Greg McKeown, the author of Essentialism and Effortless. At one point Greg was sharing a story and said to Tim:
“To go from confusion to clarity to creation, write onto a page knowing that it will be thrown after you scream out your thoughts on it.”
He was sharing the story of someone who went through those steps without meaning to do that. “The noise in her head was so loud, so overwhelming, that she needed to let it out somewhere. But that process of screaming into the page. Of letting it all out, separated her from that internal state. Because it helped her to go from prisoner to observer. And once she started observing she was better able to become a creator.”
INSIGHT: Write your thoughts onto paper knowing that it will be thrown out so that you can give your mind an outlet without worrying that someone will read your internal thoughts and judge you.
He then said something which made me go WOW! He said to ask yourself three questions:
“What is it? So what does it mean? What now?
You can record your answer and upload it into ChatGPT. It surprisingly does a good job to give you good advice and suggestions. Tell it to respond like Carl Rogers would, the man who introduced the idea of empathetic listening. This helps de-layer the stuff which isn't the real issue. Most people don't have the courage to listen like this. A lot of people end up healing themselves by understanding what's going on inside of them.”
INSIGHT: You can use ChatGPT to be an empathetic listener who allows you to get to the real issue as you peal the layers inside your head.
I have not tried this. I am a pen and paper guy. But I know that if someone just listens you can end up healing yourself. Apparently ChatGPT can be a better listener than your best friends. If you do try this, let me know. I’d be curious to learn how it went.
Harsh Batra (LinkedIn)
Thank you for reading. If you’re curious about the businesses I build, here they are:
iDeals VDR - If you are running M&A transactions, planning an IPO, or sharing anything confidential online, you won’t find a better Virtual Data Room partner than us. Here is a 90 second video of iDeals. Companies like Pfizer, Mercedes and Tata trust us. Thousands of investment bankers, lawyers and insolvency professionals use us everyday to run their due diligence processes. If you have a need to share anything sensitive online, send me an email on harsh@idealscorp.com. I’d love to work with you.
Happy Ratio - I founded Happy Ratio because I am immensely passionate about health. To get the most out of life you need to be healthy. To be healthy you need to eat the right foods and drink the right beverages. But this is not always possible or easy. Happy Ratio provides clean, tasty and healthy foods and drinks. Check out our menu on Zomato and Swiggy. Or visit us at our quick service restaurant at CyberHub in Gurgaon. We serve employees from Deloitte and Marks & Spencers and do events for companies like Samsung and Oppo. If you want us to do an event for you reach out to us at ops@happyratio.com.
Marcellus Investment Managers - I am a Marcellus client because their investment philosophy resonates with how I think about investing. Their approach to investing in clean, honest and cash flow positive businesses can yield stupendous results over time. I trust them with my savings and evangelize their approach. Investing comes with inherent risks so please do your own due diligence before deciding where to put your money. I am also an Independent Financial Advisor with Marcellus.