Notes — Tejasvi Soi

I have been working out for the last four years and have had the same cult membership for five. For most of that time I had been pretty consistent and had managed to build my life around work, gym and everything else in a way that just worked.

When I moved to Bangalore four years back my office was about 3 kms away. I would wrap up work around 5, head to the gym which was another 3 kms out and then ride back home which was roughly 3 kms from there. It made this neat little elliptical path and I would just bike the whole thing. It was one of those routines that felt effortless because everything was close enough that nothing felt like a detour.

That changed about two years ago when my work situation shifted and I started having to commute. Two hours back and forth every day. Suddenly the gym was not fitting in the way it used to. I tried going in the mornings, tried the evenings, tried different days but nothing was sticking consistently. At some point I just accepted that the only real solution was to bring the gym home.

1. I was lucky to have a guest room that I could dedicate to this so I started looking into what I actually needed. I have been following Julian Shapiro's muscle training guide for a few years now in terms of how to build and maintain muscle and most of those exercises are built around dumbbells and free weights. That made things simpler because I did not need a full setup, just the right weights.
2. After some research I found that Cult makes adjustable dumbbells that go up to 24 kgs which was more than enough for everything I wanted to do. The adjustable part was important because it meant I was not buying ten different pairs of dumbbells and filling up the room.
3. A bench was a straightforward decision. A lot of the exercises I wanted to do needed one and it was not something I could improvise around so I just got it.
4. The last thing was gym mats. I did not want to risk damaging the floor with the weights so that went on the list too.

The whole setup came to around 18k and I can now do about 90 percent of my workouts from home. The commute problem essentially solved itself after that.

What a Typical Week Looks Like

I work out four to five times a week. Four of those days are strength training and one day is kept for something more active like cardio, pickleball, a hike or a trail run depending on how I am feeling that week.

On the nutrition side I only eat lunch and dinner so I try to make both count. At least one of those meals is protein heavy, usually chicken, pulses or egg whites. During the windows when I am not eating I try to keep the protein intake up through a shake I make daily. It is 30 grams of Cosmix protein powder which I find much easier to digest than whey, blended with one banana, 30ml of milk, 90ml of water and a lot of ice. I also take 3 grams of creatine every day alongside that.

It is not a complicated setup but it has been consistent and that is what has made the difference over time.

S, my girlfriend, just moved to Bangalore. She found a pretty great place, well located, close to everything that matters. I went over to help her set up and honestly I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Lately I had been really drawn to anything that involved fixing or building things with my hands and this weekend just fed into that perfectly.

1. S had this Bosch drill that I had been wanting to get my hands on for the longest time. We used it through the day for the TV mount, wall shelves, utensil racks in the kitchen. At some point I realised I had been holding it wrong the whole time. I kept pressing harder thinking that would help but it was actually the opposite. Light grip, keep it straight, use the other hand to hold the body steady. The holes came out much neater after that.
2. At some point we noticed the bedroom fan was spinning the wrong way. Clockwise means it pushes air up toward the ceiling instead of down at you. The electrician who set it up had just got it wrong. I did not want to call someone back for something this small so I looked it up on Reddit. The capacitor is what decides which way the fan spins. It creates a phase shift in the motor's starting winding and if you flip the connections the direction flips too. Got the ladder, swapped the wires and it was sorted. Also came across something interesting while reading — in colder climates people actually do this on purpose in winter. Running the fan clockwise at a low speed helps with air circulation in the room.
3. We had also picked up these IKEA RISBYN pendant lights which looked really nice. They hang from a ceiling hook and the wiring was just line and neutral, nothing complicated. The only thing I did not have was the right hanger and nothing nearby was going to work. I bent a metal wire into one instead and it actually ended up being better because I could decide exactly how much length to give it. The bulbs were light enough that the wire held them without any trouble.
4. We called an electrician to mount the fans since they were heavy and I did not want to mess around with that. While he was working he got confused about the switch connections and could not figure out why the regulator was not responding. Turned out the light had been connected to the regulator by mistake so it was acting like a dimmer instead. I looked it up on YouTube while he was at it. The live wire runs as one main line through all the points on the switchboard and the regulator shares the same wire that goes from the switch to the fan. Once I understood that it was easy to explain and we fixed it quickly.
5. Somewhere in the middle of all this we realised we did not have a level. With all the gear we had managed to gather, that one basic thing was missing. So we just did it by eye. One person holding the thing in place, the other stepping back and calling out left or right until it looked right. Most of what we were hanging needed a rough balance anyway — the kitchen rod, the TV — so it was less precise work and more about feel. Turned out a trained eye gets you pretty much the same result. I am happy to report the TV is not crooked.
6. At some point S had to send some things back to her hometown and one of them was a heavy steel almirah. We had booked a porter assuming a couple of people would show up but only the driver came. Instead of cancelling and waiting for more help I just told S I would pitch in. The almirah was roughly 100 kgs. Me and this guy ended up lifting it out from the second floor, manoeuvring it through the door and slowly sliding it down the staircase to the truck. The whole thing made me realise that having good glute and back strength genuinely matters for this kind of work. Deadlifting 100 kgs in a gym is actually much simpler than trying to move an 8 foot almirah through a 7 foot door. The gym version is just straight up and down. This was awkward, heavy and required figuring it out as we went.

It was a good weekend. S's place was coming together and I had picked up more than I expected along the way.

A Note on Setting Up a New House

Having gone through this I think there are a few things that are genuinely worth having before you start and not something to figure out midway.

1. A ladder comes up more than you think. Fans, lights, shelves — there was always something just out of reach.
2. A drill makes most of the physical work faster and cleaner. The Bosch worked really well and I would not want to do this without one.
3. A wire cutter and stripper is something you will need the moment any electrical work comes up and in a new place it always does.
4. Pliers, masking tape and electrical tape are small things but I kept reaching for them through the day.
5. On the hardware side it helped to have a hammer, drill bits in different sizes, screws, nails and wall plugs ready. The worst part of any task was stopping midway because something basic was missing.
6. Building some baseline strength genuinely helps. Moving into a place means lifting and shifting things more than you expect and if you do not want to be calling for help every time something heavy needs to move it is worth being able to handle it yourself. Nothing extreme, just enough to lift, carry and manoeuvre without it becoming a whole ordeal.

India is the world's third-largest solar producer, 143 gigawatts installed. And yet coal still powers nearly half the country every single day.

Turns out the problem isn't the panels. It's timing. Solar only generates between 6am and 6pm. Peak demand hits at 7–10pm when everyone gets home. No storage means the solar just gets wasted, and coal plants stay on standby to cover the evening. India's actual solar contribution to daily power is around 10–15%. Not the 27% the installed capacity numbers suggest.

The fix is batteries. And India has a massive gap — the government wants 50 gigawatt-hours of storage by 2030, but today there's only about 4–5 gigawatt-hours. That's literally a 10x gap in five years. Rough estimate: ₹2–4 lakh crore needed to close it.

Other countries have figured this out already. Australia built one big battery project and paid it back in under two years, just from selling grid stability services. California mandated storage procurement and went from nothing to 10 gigawatts in a few years. China just does it at scale.

India's blockers aren't really technical. State utilities are drowning in ₹5 lakh crore of debt and can't sign long contracts. The rules for how batteries actually earn money in India are still being written. Domestic manufacturing is almost nonexistent — nearly every battery cell gets imported from China.

Which is exactly where the opportunity is. Financing structures, policy design, grid software, local manufacturing. The solar race is mostly run. The storage race is just starting.

Sources: Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, Central Electricity Authority National Electricity Plan 2022–32, NITI Aayog India's Energy Storage Mission (2021), AEMO Hornsdale Power Reserve Year 1 Effectiveness Evaluation, ICRA DISCOM Financial Analysis 2024, BloombergNEF Battery Price Survey 2024, IEA India Energy Outlook 2021.

I was listening to the Huberman Lab episode on neuroplasticity and kept pausing it to write things down. I was trying to understand why changing habits feels so much harder as you get older, and this episode answered a lot of that.

From ages 1 to 25, your brain is essentially learning and pruning at the same time. Connections that aren't reinforced get dropped. After around 14 or 15, neurogenesis becomes very rare. I was surprised to learn it mostly only happens in the olfactory bulb and hippocampus. So the idea that you can just grow new neurons as an adult is largely not how it works.

What you can do is add or strengthen synapses. That means you can unlearn emotional and traumatic experiences by replacing them with something else. But the catch is that after your early years, you have to be deliberate about it. As a kid you do it automatically because your neural connections are still consolidating. I was trying to understand why adults need so much more intention to change anything, and that was basically the answer. Later in life the brain does release certain chemicals when it self-recognises that change is needed, but you cannot add new connections, only replace what's already there.

The part I found most interesting was the two neurochemicals involved in learning: epinephrine, released from the locus coeruleus only in high focus states, and acetylcholine. Both get released across multiple sites in the brain and highlight the specific circuits responsible for change. I was trying to figure out how to actually trigger this deliberately. Turns out you have to genuinely pay careful attention. The brain needs to register that something matters before it will bother encoding it.

Mental focus follows visual focus. When we are relaxed, our eyes move slightly inward and this triggers epinephrine release. One thing I want to try is spending 60 to 120 seconds focusing hard on a small object before a work session. Huberman says it genuinely increases brain activity for focus. Also interesting was the nicotine bit. Nicotine receptors are involved in hyper-alertness, which is why some people reach for it before they need to concentrate. Too much, though, and the brain dissociates from the effect entirely.

For building the actual conditions for change he talked about fixing sleep, using accountability partners, using shame by posting publicly, or dedicating the effort to someone you care about. Basically come up with a fear or love-based reason to be alert and present for the task.

Still want to look into: Keller theory, and the David Nobel Prize neuroscience experiment.