125: Creativity x Fitness – Consistency, Classics, and Crane Kicks (3 links)
Musashi: chances are, you’re not the best in the world
- You can’t tell who’s rich in Silicon Valley: They might be wearing a hoodie. Some might be wearing suits. Paul Graham talks about what cities whisper. New York says you should be rich. Silicon Valley says you should be powerful.
- You don’t have to travel anymore to make your riches: If you press the keys on your laptop in the right order over time, you can make millions on the internet. Or at least make a living.
- But it still might be worth traveling to another city: Environment design is powerful for shaping your own behavior. The biggest part of your environment? Probably the people you’re around. Yes the whole “you’re the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with”.
- What you look like has some effect on how you feel: And it certainly affects how other people perceive you. What you wear is not necessarily who you are. But it’s a part of it. If you’re completely unaffected by your own appearance, more power to you—it’s probably a good mindset to have. For the rest of us, look good feel good. (I’d guess Steve Jobs felt like his turtleneck looked pretty good.)
“You must start from first principles. Every ecosystem has a default culture. (In Silicon Valley, our baked-in cultural elements range from casual dress to employee owners to long hours.) Don’t just blindly adopt it. You may be adopting an organizing principle you don’t understand. For example, Intel created a casual-dress standard to promote meritocracy.” — Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture
Rick Rubin: 3 creativity lessons
Continue until it’s possible
Rick Rubin: “That’s the way I like to work. I go in with kind of a blind belief that something good will happen. Until it’s proven impossible I will continue banging my head against the wall.”
Rubin is optimistic that good things will happen if he keeps working on a project. His book, for example, wasn’t easy but it was an unraveling of his process over 6-7 years.
He started to take notes after sessions with artists. When he got home he would:
- Describe the problem the band ran into
- Describe the solution they came up with
Over many different sessions, he was able to codify the process.
In a year, he can work with a handful of artists. A book provides leverage—people around the world will be able to apply some of his methods to their own projects.
You might not get a grammy in the end, but it might help you stop banging your head against the wall.
Iteration
Rick Rubin: “I would never assume … because you put more time in something it’s getting better.”
It’s accepted that revisions improve work.
Tim Ferriss popularized the idea of “two crappy pages” as a daily writing goal. You can’t revise something that doesn’t exist yet.
But there’s diminishing returns on revision.
And sometimes the first go is actually the best.
Still, it’s essential to go through multiple iterations if you want to end up with the best product. Even if it’s just to validate that the first attempt was best—you need multiple iterations to compare the first iteration to.
This reminds me a little bit of the Crazy 8s sketching exercise. Yes, the 6th, 7th, and 8th sketch are harder to get to and that’s when you’re really stretching and getting creative.
But sometimes they’re not as good as the first thing you jot down.
From “Sprint” by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky
Sometimes Crazy 8s leads to a revelation. You might come away with several new ways of looking at your ideas. Other times, it feels less productive. Sometimes that first idea really is the best idea.
Sometimes obvious is best.
Everyone is a creator
In the book, Rick Rubin says creativity isn’t limited to a select few. From “The Creative Act: A Way of Being”
“Creativity is not a rare ability. It is not difficult to access. Creativity is a fundamental aspect of being human. It’s our birthright. And it’s for all of us.
Creativity doesn’t exclusively relate to making art. We all engage in this act on a daily basis.
To create is to bring something into existence that wasn’t there before. It could be a conversation, the solution to a problem, a note to a friend, the rearrangement of furniture in a room, a new route home to avoid a traffic jam.”
We get real creative real fast when we think of reasons to skip a workout or to hit snooze on the alarm instead of getting up to do the work.
The Source vs. The Resistance
Steven Pressfield has The Resistance. Rick Rubin has The Source.
The Source is out there. A wisdom surrounding us, an inexhaustible offering that is always available.
We either sense it, remember it, or tune in to it. Not only through our experiences. It may also be dreams, intuitions, subliminal fragments, or other ways still unknown by which the outside finds its way inside.
The Source itself isn’t enough to fight the resistance. He compares the Source to clouds. It’s a shapeshifter.
You can absorb The Source and then it’s up to you to harness it and make your art.
MrBeast: 3 creativity lessons (Lex Fridman interview)
Notes from MrBeast’s interview with Lex Fridman.
Consume a lot (and filter with taste built through obsession)
MrBeast talks about his obsession and building taste and how he thinks of new ideas. He compares his mind to a neural network. All of the things that he’s taking in help to inspire him, and that’s where he finds the inspiration for future videos.
“You need just a constant stream of ideas. And the only way I’ve really found that I can consistently come up with a hundred million view videos is to intake inspiration and then see what my brain outputs.” — MrBeast
Lex asks if he’s generating the video, the title, the thumbnail, all of that jointly in his head.
And I think that’s the interesting part here as far as being specific to Mr. Beast, is that he thinks with these three components in mind. Someone whose life has been spent making music, that they’re thinking in different components.
Someone aiming for traditional media, they’re not thinking in thumbnails and short videos.
They’re thinking bigger in scope.
That said, what makes Mr. Beast different is that the scope of his videos has become huge. The productions for his videos rival that of traditional studios in TV and movies further on
Lex: the video, the title, the thumbnail, jointly, Right?
MrBeast: Exactly. And that only comes because I spent 10 years of my life just obsessively studying all that stuff.
From “Laws of Creativity” by Joey Cafone
…however it makes sense, begin to amass a targeted library for the task at hand. As you do so, keep in mind the following principles,
Volume: Gather a lot. Don’t find two examples and move on. Instead, grab dozens. The more you find the better (as long as it is in the literal sense, inspiring).
Contrast: Make sure that you don’t just gather many things, but many different things. The more unrelated and varied, the better.
MrBeast talks about this, he’s just taking in so much stuff.
The variety that YouTube has helps nail this volume and contrast aspect of things.
All of that goes into his mind where he’s built taste and thinking in the components of a YouTube video.
As Lex said. The video, the thumbnail, the title, and then that gets compressed into an idea. Then he writes a bunch of those ideas down and then continues to do that filtering again.
Just starting out? Make 100 videos (and improve something with each one)
First he addresses this idea that some people come out flying out of the gate.
MrBeast: There are very freak cases like Emma Chamberlain who have really good personalities and it doesn’t take them so as many videos and it’s just like people who are seven, five and making the NBA like, yes, there are freak cases you can find, but for the average person like us, you know, who don’t have these exceptional personalities and you know, backgrounds in filmmaking, just make 100 videos, improve something each time. And then talk to me on your 101st video.
I thought this was the best actionable advice from the podcast as far as doing anything. Specifically for if you want to create something online, is start making things.
He’s talking about this common case where people will plan and plan and plan. You want your first video to be a hit. But the first video is really not going to get any views.
You have to get the repetitions in. Just make 100 videos. Improve something each time.
The book I’ll recommend here is “The First 20 Hours” by Josh Kaufman. It’s a book about learning. And he goes through how he tried to learn a few different things and comes up with this framework and he says, these are the five steps to learning something.
1.) Deciding exactly what you want to be able to do.
2.) Deconstructing a skill into the. Smallest possible = sub-skills.
3.) Learning enough about each sub skill to be able to practice intelligently and self-correcting during practice.
4.) Removing physical, mental and emotional barriers that get in the way of practice.
5.) Practicing the most important sub-skills for at least 20 hours
Or for 100 videos.
If we step right back through this, deciding what you wanna be able to do, make videos, you can deconstruct it into sub-skills of making videos: scripting, filming, editing, and learning about each sub skill.
That’s the great thing about creating things online, you have this opportunity to pick a sub skill and then learn that
number four, removing physical, mental, emotional barriers. This is good because Mr. Beast talks about how a big hangup for creators is going to be,
hey, you’re gonna get negative feedback.
It’s not gonna happen instantly. This is something that you’re gonna try to learn with the hundred videos is one. No one’s gonna watch so you have to learn to be okay with that.
Number two, once people do start watching, you’re gonna start to have videos that don’t do as well as your earlier videos and you have to deal with that.
And then negative feedback. Comments. Learning to detach from that… be able to look at that feedback and figure out what you can learn from it and apply to your future videos.
Back to this First 20 Hours framework, practicing the most important sub skills for at least 20 hours. Mrbeast says 100 videos… That’ll take way longer than 20 hours. You’ll be able to practice the subskills.
The part that I really liked in this interview is Lex says,
Lex: You say make a hundred videos and improve something each time. Improve something each time is the tricky part. How would you do that?
And then Mr. Beast just starts firing off different ways, rapid fire.
MrBeast: The second one, just, I don’t know, put more effort into the script. The third one, try to learn a new editing trick. The fourth one, try to figure out a way that you can have better inflections in your voice. The fifth one, try to, you know, study a new thumbnail tip and implement it. The sixth one, try to figure out a new title.
There’s so many different elements that are involved, which can be exciting and figuring out which ones you wanna focus on. It is nice to know that there’s always going to be some element that you can improve.
When thinking of video ideas, figure do-ability later (focus on whether it would make a good video)
This last takeaway coming up with future ideas and this idea of feasibility in a video. It used to be just talking to the camera.
As his channel has grown, he’s invested more and more into his videos and now it’s millions of dollars that go into a video. He has to reduce risk. He has to be able to release a video and have the confidence that it’s gonna be viral.
Starts with a brainstorm. Lex Fridman was invited to one of the brainstorms to observe and he talks about going how he found it so interesting.
Lex: One of the questions is, is this even doable? Right?
MrBeast: Yeah. First off, come up with ideas you think would do well, and then ask yourself later if they’re doable. Yeah. Because there’s, there’s different ways you can accomplish something.
He can’t film something on Mars. He can’t film something on the moon.
But maybe he can do something with that idea of space.
This reminds me of creative work once you’re starting to work with a team on larger projects. In building software the three approaches to it are is it viable, is it usable? Is it something consumers would want?
In “Creative Selection” by Ken Kocienda. Ken talks about his time at Apple. He he was responsible for the first iPhone keyboard.
But he talks about a project before the iPhone and iPad and they were working on the Safari web browser. Of course later versions of this mobile version is in the hands of hundreds of millions of people.
He was working on the beginnings of that. He talks about a teammate where they weren’t sure if something was doable, so they had to try to build that.
From “Creative Selection”
Next, Richard resolved to produce a result on the shortest possible schedule. He downloaded an open source project that held genuine promise, the Konquerer code from KDE a browser that might well serve as the basis for our long-term effort in getting this code running on a Mac. He decided to make the possible approximation of a real browser that was feasible on his short schedule. He did, he identified three features: loading webpages, clicking links, and going back to previous pages.
He gets this thing working and it’s enough to prove the idea. This is kind of like one step after the brainstorm.
Back to what MrBeast said, first, off, come up with ideas you think would do well, and then ask yourself later if they’re doable.
What you can do is take that idea and break it down into smaller pieces. You can look at that and see, hey, which pieces of this idea are doable? Which pieces of these ideas Be the basis for a video that people would be interested in.
That can be one way to start testing how doable your idea is.
Check the full interview out. It’s one of my favorites for the year, even though it’s like six days in it’ll stand the test of time just as far as the future of entertainment and understanding the process of making videos and thinking through ideas.
The Psychology of Money x Home Gym
“The Psychology of Money” was the best book that I read last year.
My home gym was collectively the best purchase that I made last year. In “The Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel explains our sometimes odd financial behavior through stories from recent history.
In my home gym, I try to work out between checking my phone a gazillion times. Let’s take a look at this purchase through The Psychology of Money’s chapters.
1. No One’s Crazy (even if their home gym looks like a commercial gym)
Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.0 0 0, 0 1% of what’s happening in the world and maybe 80% of how you think the world works.
LeBron James spends a million dollars on his body every year. It’s crazy, but he’s LeBron James and it’s not crazy for him.
We’re not all LeBron James, but it doesn’t mean that we should spend $0 on our body every year.
For some people home gym makes sense. For others, it looks crazy for some people.
Going to a luxury gym makes sense. And for other people it’s crazy.
I’ve tried all sorts of different gyms. I’ve had the home gym. All of them have made sense in different ways.
2. Luck and Risk (it’s super convenient to work out and even easier to stop and walk back to the couch)
When I was researching what equipment I should buy the most useful videos were the ones where people had had their gym for a year or two years, five years, and then talked about their experience with it.
I’m excited about mine. I think it’s been a great purchase, but, that also is like recency of it.
One of the downsides of the home gym that seemed to be a pattern across these different videos, was that the convenience of it is great.
But that has a downside because as easy as it is to walk in, get the workout in,it’s just as easy to walk out and then go sit on the couch.
3. Never Enough (you can always add more equipment)
The internet, as mentioned, makes it possible to see home gyms around the world.
And an important thing to remember is that everyone has a different situation. So I probably shouldn’t compare what I have to someone like a CrossFit competitor, and then it’s also a good reminder that it really doesn’t take that much equipment.
I follow a few people that just use kettlebells. That’s what I started with was a few kettlebells. And that can be all you need, or even just body weight and a track or something like that.
You could get a lot done with no equipment at all. So that’s been a good reminder that the internet has provided.
4. Confounding Compounding (it’s almost always worth it if it’s better for your health)
In finance, the compound effect is huge. Same thing with fitness. It is the other side of the coin though. We tend to have this negative compounding that we let our health slide. Sit in chairs all day and then eat snacks.
For me, the home gym made sense because it would hopefully, hopefully, hopefully… you know, it’s not gonna prevent me from snacking, but it will hopefully help me get at least a small workout in every day.
5. Getting Wealthy vs. Staying Wealthy (optimize for a space that motivates you enough to be consistent)
Good investing is not necessarily about making good decisions. It’s about consistently not screwing up.
That’s huge. That applies directly to fitness. But it does help to justify this purchase.
You can’t just have one excellent workout for the month and then not work out the rest of the month. The consistency matters and spending money on. Equipment that will hopefully motivate me to come out here and work out.
Will help me get into that mode of consistently not screwing up.
[Note: I just sort of skipped a couple numbers because they didn’t quite relate to the home gym in the moment. I’ll try to re-do the video in a few months when I’m better at making videos.]
7. Freedom (financial freedom isn’t immune to poor health)
Controlling your time is the highest dividend money pays. Controlling your health is just as important and even more important because if you have financial freedom, all the time in the world, but you don’t have your health you’re not mobile, then that can take away some of the freedom.
Fitness is one thing that money can’t buy.
It can help, but it’s not going to put the work in. I haven’t put the work in. I haven’t put enough work in.
Unfortunately, my own discipline matters at this point. Actually using this equipment.
8. Man in the car paradox (you won’t impress anyone with fancy equipment so get stuff you’ll actually use)
I’m under no impression, especially compared to the rest of the internet, that any of this will be impressive on that level. Pretty normal setup, like a rack and then kettlebells and barbells.
The more important thing to me was just that it would be this motivating space for myself.
The bigger thing for me was getting these lights set up. It made the space feel much better. It was kind of dingy and like dark in here initially which could feel cool, but that wasn’t really what I was going for.
It is nice to have good lighting here or at least have it be very bright so that it was a space that I would want to walk into.
9. Wealth is what you don’t see (reversal: you can actually watch a bunch of people work out now)
A reversal here is nice. You used to not really be able to see the work people put in behind the scenes. But now pro athletes have podcasts. Bodybuilders have vlogs. You can see other people working out and build up that motivation.
I’m not sharing like workouts publicly, but I do have a group chat and it’s been fun to be able to show each other, our workouts, that we are working out that day and having that motivation from friends and that social component.
10. Save money (fitness is as simple as building wealth but our brains make it hard)
What I was hoping to accomplish with the home gym was being able to make fitness something that was more in my control. That the weather or a gym being closed or these other outside factors wouldn’t be things that would make me want to cancel my workout for the day.
With finance, saving money is one of the only things that matters. With health it’s like three big components, at least for physical health.
It is your movement, what you’re eating, and then your sleep.
Those are three big components and I wanted to make this one component more in my control with the home gym.
11. Reasonable Over Rational (You don’t actually need all that much stuff to get fit at home)
With finance, aiming to be reasonable works better than trying to be coldly rational. You can optimize things in the spreadsheet, but if they don’t work in practice, then it doesn’t matter in the end.
Figuring out like what equipment I wanted, you have endless decisions. What I just looked at was what I have done in the past, what equipment and I’ve actually used in the past.
Because I was thinking, should I get a rower or a bike or a better treadmill?
I got the things that I knew I’ve used in the past, and I’d be more likely to use in the future.
I’ve never really consistently used a rower. So I ended up not buying that . Got a bike because I’ve gone for longer periods biking regularly, than using a rower, so it seemed like a more reasonable purchase.
And then another thing with reasonable… In more recent years I’ve thought aiming to be reasonably fit—and that’s the name of a different podcast—but that seems to be a good goal.
And I was thinking, okay, what equipment do I need to be reasonably fit? And I think I’m having barbells for lifting and then a bike for a harder cardio and then a treadmill desk for long slow cardio.
It seemed like all the equipment that I needed to be reasonably fit.
12. Surprise (and trying to avoid it with fitness)
Actually, I kind of wrap this up in the previous one. It can be that you don’t want to use history for the things on a macro scale.
There was a nice reversal here for me — I looked at my own history of fitness and bought equipment I’ve used in the past that I would use in the future.
One decision I made was to get a full cage instead of a squat rack. It added a little more peace of mind for me.
Injury is one of the worst kinds of surprises. For the first few months with the rack I chose not to use it much because I had golfer’s elbow.
13. Room for error (the absolute best thing about a home gym is that it makes you more flexible)
The most important part of every plan is planning on your plan not going according to plan.
That by far is the best reason to have workout equipment at home. The flexibility and proximity of it make it possible to fit into the rest of the day, even if the rest of the day is chaotic.
More recently, I did get that bike and that has really helped for those days where it’s getting towards the end of the day and I’m feeling kind of unmotivated to try to fit a workout in.
It becomes kind of mindless, which I like. The trainers are there. You can outsource your motivation a little bit. I know I just need to put the shoes on, clip in and then get going and that will fit into a chaotic day.
14. You’ll change (but fitness principles rarely do)
I know I’ll change. Even in just a few months that I’ve had it, I’ve changed what my goals are, but not by much. I want to lose weight.
Over the course of years, the fundamentals of fitness won’t change. This equipment will still be useful then.
But maybe my mood will change that. I’ll want to start doing workouts outside. Going to a gym. I still have that option in the future, but having a flexible option at home will never not be useful.
15. Nothing’s free (and man I didn’t realize I’d have to vacuum so much)
If I were comfortable posting a shirtless picture of myself I would’ve done this thumbnail
- Left side: Before the home gym
- Right side: After the home gym
And I’m the same on both sides because the gym doesn’t do the work for you.
It can be cool to look at all this equipment that other people have but yeah it was important to remember: it’s not their equipment that they’re putting way more work in.
That was the idea with a lot of the purchases is just whatever would get me to work out more.
Everyone’s different, context matters. I felt like at this time in my life having the home gym would help me do the work and I have been definitely more consistent with working out.
Another thing is the hidden work of maintaining the gym. It seems to be constantly cluttered and even though my dog doesn’t go in there often her hair is always there so I shop vac it multiple times a week.
16., You and Me (Beware the envy of looking at gyms of sponsored fitness influencers)
This is the whole thing of making equipment decisions based on people who aren’t doing the same types of workouts that you’re doing.
I don’t do CrossFit myself, but I loved watching CrossFit competitors and seeing the crazy setups that they have.
But it was more entertainment than anything. I know that I’m not going to do the same workouts that they’re doing. They’re playing a different game.
The more useful stuff was trying to find people that more closely represented my goals of losing some weight, seeing what they bought, and then that helped me pick out equipment.
[Note: similarly skipped Number 17 here…]
18. When you’ll believe anything (appealing fictions and using narrative on yourself)
Rocky has motivated more people to work out than any replicated double-blind study.
That’s the power of narrative. It was something that I wanted to use. It was all about motivation.
The narrative that I bought into is that if I build out this home gym, I’m going to want to work out more. I will. And then I will have better health.
We’ll see if that plays out in the future.
Also now I’m more motivated by this vision of being mobile in older age and that has become the more important narrative to me than how I look at the beach. Which I will never show a picture of.
19. All together now
In the last two chapters of “Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel gives some guidance for what people should do with their own money.
Reasonable principles that will last for a long time. A lot of it is switching your thinking to the long-term thinking, saving and using the compound effect and remembering how effective that is over time.
The guidance that seems common across all the different workout and nutrition plans:
- Eat whole foods
- Walk a little bit every day
- Lift weights a few times a week
I seem to have enough equipment to do those last two things. Now I need to use it and eat better.
20. Confessions (the psychology of my own home gym)
In the final chapter of “The Psychology of Money”, Morgan Housel talks about why he paid off his mortgage.
We’re so far committed to the independence camp that we’ve done things that make little sense on paper. We own our house without a mortgage, which is the worst financial decision we’ve ever made but the best money decision we’ve ever made. Mortgage interest rates were absurdly low when we bought our house. Any rational advisor would recommend taking advantage of cheap money and investing extra savings in higher-return assets, like stocks. But our goal isn’t to be coldly rational; just psychologically reasonable.
The independent feeling I get from owning our house outright far exceeds the known financial gain I’d get from leveraging our assets with a cheap mortgage. Eliminating the monthly payment feels better than maximizing the long-term value of our assets. It makes me feel independent.
It doesn’t make sense on a spreadsheet. He should just pay off the loan according to schedule, but it frees up so much psychologically for him that he found that it was worth it.
Good news: I did my heaviest weighted pull-up the other day.
Bad news: It’s because I weigh my heaviest right now.
At this point, everything that moves the needle in the positive direction for my health seems worth it. So the home gym feels worth it.
(At the same time, some other things that would move things in the positive direction require no money at all: eating less, drinking less, and sleeping more.)
I’m hoping I can find a reasonable approach to fitness in the future that will be something that I stick to.
This home gym is a part of it and I’ll keep sharing as I go along.