Modern Makers #45 - How to Breathe Better
👃🏻 Learn how to breathe better - 💰 Automation tool n8n raised $12M
Welcome to issue #45 of Modern Makers
This week in the agenda:👇
👃🏻 How to breathe better - 5 learnings from James Nestor’s book
💰 Berlin-based automation tool n8n raised $12M
🤖 Nobull makes it easy for you to connect Webflow and Airtable
✅ JotForm has launched a new Approvals feature
Enjoy.
Welcome to the new makers who have joined us this week.
My apologies for the late sending of this edition. We have a bank holiday weekend here in England so use my Sunday to rest a bit (and read a lot).
I told you a few weeks ago about Typedream. A tool that allows you to create websites with a block construction very similar to what Notion offers. Putri from Typedream used their platform to recreate the Modern Makers landing page. I have to admit that the result looks great, what do you think?
Typefully is a tool I've been using for a few months to schedule some of my tweets and to write threads on Twitter. A PRO version will be released soon - allowing you to publish your tweets at the perfect time and to get some analytics on the performance of your posts.
I've also started testing Causal - a spreadsheet tool that speeds up the creation and visualization of data models. Here is an example by the Youtuber Ali Abdaal of what you can build with Causal.
If you enjoy the content I create each week, I invite you to share my newsletter.
📚 Book of the week
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
Author: James Nestor
Release date: 2020
No matter how ambitious you are and how many things you want to accomplish, you won't go far if you neglect your health. Our diet and exercise are always identified as the main factors influencing our health. After reading this book, it will be clear that breathing is a missing pillar of health. I never really paid attention to it before. This is the kind of book everyone should read this year. It will force you to be more conscious about the way you breathe. And transform it forever. Here are my 5 learnings:
👌 The perfect breath - The most efficient breathing rhythm occurs when both the length of the respirations and total breaths per minute are locked into perfect symmetry. Breathe in for about 5.5 seconds, then exhale for 5.5 seconds. That’s 5.5 breaths a minute for a total of about 5.5 liters of air. That's the perfect breath and you should try practicing this breathing for a few minutes, or a few hours a day. The more the better. I'm now doing this perfect breath one minute every working hour as well as before every Zoom call. In the evening, I also do it for 10 minutes before my reading time.
👀 The impact of our partial attention on our health - A vast majority of office workers suffer from something called continuous partial attention. We switch from emails to checking Slack, to reading our Twitter feed. By doing so, we don't focus on any specific task. This behavior impacts our breathing as it will become shallow and erratic. In that state, we can spend more than half a minute without breathing. Scientists call this phenomenon email apnea. And it can contribute to the same diseases as sleep apnea. Try to get up every hour, get away from your screen and take the opportunity to breathe properly.
👃🏻 Inhale through the nose - nearly half of the population are chronic mouth breathers. Which makes them stressed and exhausted as a result. In the book, James talks about an experience he ran to prove how bad mouth breathing is. He put silicone plugs in his nose for 10 days to only breathe through his mouth. His blood pressure increased very quickly and he had trouble concentrating at work. As soon as he removed the plugs, his blood pressure stabilized and his stress decreased. We can force ourselves to breathe through the nose during sleep time by using a stamp-size piece of tape at the center of the lips. If you're a big snorer, it will dramatically decrease your snoring time.
🦴 The importance of chewing - contrary to what we may sometimes think, our ancestors had better quality dentitions than we do today. They spent several hours a day chewing, grinding food with their mouths. For many decades, our diet has become soft. The result? Our mouths are smaller, which prevents us from breathing properly. By chewing more, we generate more stem cells. This will trigger an increase in bone density and growth and help us breathe better.
🔢 Some key stats
the up-and-down movement of our diaphragm occurs some 50,000 times a day
90% of us is breathing incorrectly, causing or aggravating chronic diseases
45% of adults snore occasionally
25% snore constantly
15% of the American population -- more than 50 million people -- suffer from an autoimmune disorder
Moderate exercise like walking or cycling can boost lung size by up to 15 percent.
For every 10 pounds of fat lost in our bodies, 8.5 pounds of it comes out through the lungs.
Finding the best heart rate for exercise is easy: subtract your age from 180
I also invite you to listen to this episode of The School of Greatness podcast.
No matter what we eat, how much we exercise, how resilient our genes are, how skinny or young or wise we are—none of it will matter unless we’re breathing correctly.
To breathe is to absorb ourselves in what surrounds us, to take in little bits of life, understand them, and give pieces of ourselves back out. Respiration is, at its core, reciprocation.
Three other content that caught my attention this week:
🚀 Side hustle: From idea to full-time business in 1 year - Zapier - The 4 steps to turn a side business into a full-time business in one year. From the validation of the need to the distribution and promotion of your product through the creation of an MVP (with no-code tools of course)
✍️ The Computers Are Getting Better at Writing, Thanks to Artificial Intelligence - The New Yorker - an article that looks at the future of writing and GPT-3 technology. Something both exciting and terrifying at the same time. Maybe in a few year's time, artificial intelligence will be writing this newsletter for me while I'm drinking a cocktail
🚨 What really happened at Basecamp - a very good article that comes back in detail on the Basecamp story that made a lot of noise these last days. Several employees already left Jason Fried and David Heinemeier's company. What do we now think of these two iconic tech leaders?
🌎 What’s new in the world of no-code
Berlin-based startup n8n has announced a $12M Series A. n8n is an automation tool, a competitor of Zapier and Integromat. This new round of financing comes just over a year after a $1.5M Seed round. Since then, n8n has added more than 130 apps to its catalog and now has over 16,000 users.
n8n is available in open-source mode and also in a cloud version with a Start plan priced at €20 per month. This plan allows up to 5,000 runs of workflows (with 20 active workflows). As the tool is only a couple of years old, the catalog of available applications (just over 200 apps) is much more limited than those offered by the competition. This new funding round will allow n8n to hire more people and continue to develop its platform.
Finnsweet introduces Nobull, an Airtable application that will allow you to connect the Webflow CMS with an Airtable base. The main interest is to be able to update the items of your Webflow CMS directly from Airtable or to create new records.
You will need to retrieve your API Key from your Webflow account. No need to worry about the security of this connection, as your API Key is stored directly on Airtable's servers.
As a reminder, you need a PRO account ($20 per month) on Airtable in order to use the apps available in the Airtable marketplace.
JotForm has launched Approvals, a new feature that allows you to create automation paths from the answers obtained in a form and to add human validation steps. An example: a candidate applies on your website by filling in a form created with JotForm. The HR manager studies the candidate's profile and validates the application. This then triggers a message to the person in charge of the job interview. If this person also validates the candidate's profile, an email is automatically sent to the candidate with the good news.
If you want to know more about this feature, you can :
register for this webinar which will take place on Wednesday 5 May
watch this video demo
try JotForm Approvals for free
watch this video by Gareth Pronovost
📦 And also…
Discover all the latest apps available on Zapier
A huge collection of open-source icons and illustrations
Adalo now lets you monetize your mobile apps with Google AdMob
Codemap 2.0 is a marketplace that helps you find no-code freelancers for your projects
Weglot makes it easy to translate your Softr website or app into multiple languages
Here's how to use Rows to identify the most popular tweets on a particular topic
Notion's web clipper is available on Safari
Notion again: you can now pay your subscription with Apple Pay and Google Pay
Here are some templates of business apps built with Glide
Discover the latest product updates on Landbot (including an integration with Airtable)
As always, if you're enjoying Modern Makers, I would love it if you shared it with a friend or two. You can send them here to sign up. I do my best to make it one of the best emails you get each week, and I hope you're enjoying it.
I also invite you to contact me if you have questions or need help with no-code tools. Feel free to use the button below for those of you who want to organize a call to get to know each other better.
Have a great week and keep learning.
Martin,