Active Recall!

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Keep the page turned

“It’s easy to say you’re turning the page, but it’s much harder to control the negative thoughts that want to drift back into your mind. Like everything else, it’s a skill—one that we practice every day.” (Ben Bergeron, Chasing Excellence)

It was all going so well the start of the year. I was more consistent than I had been in years: 3 workouts a week, progressive overload, etc. just really on track.

May hit. Started going to open houses. Found one we loved. Somehow it’s July now. Have done maybe one workout with weights in that time. And then basketball a handful of times. But that’s about it.

Time to get back on the rails now. All the house stuff is done. Well at least the admin is, clearly not the unpacking as the photo shows.

So I’m going to just try to turn the page.

As Ben Bergeron writes, it’s easy to say I’ll turn the page. Hard to keep that page turned. Negative thoughts and all that.

But I’ll try. A kettlebell workout here. 15 minute rides there. Sometimes throw the ruck on when I walk Bubs.

Gotta remember it’s like savings rate with personal finance. Just gotta always try to stay above baseline. Some days will be better than others.

Working out in this garage without the rack setup makes me nostalgic for, well, when we first moved into our last house. For a while I think I just had 1 or 2 horse stall mats. I had one out on the patio and one in the garage. Did the very aesthetic workout with a glass of iced coffee on the patio.

Anyway it’s 4 years since then.

I feel the same physically, I think? I know I’ll have less time. But I’ll make the most of it.

Keep the page turned.

An idea for what I might try to make next: How do people transform?

I’m on sort of a break from making YouTube videos or any videos at all really. I kind of accepted I don’t have the time in this season. It’s been about a month since I posted anything to YouTube or TikTok.

Conclusion: man I miss making stuff.

But I’ve been thinking about what to make next. What would actually work? I think it’s some intersection of:

  • Fitness: because I’ve been focusing on hitting my workouts, eating better, and overall just getting healthier this year.
  • Code: because I do still like making things online. I’ve always loved prototyping different tools and vibe coding makes this just about the best time I can remember for actually doing that.
  • Videos: because I’m still interested in creativity and creators as a general topic. I haven’t exactly cracked how to make good videos. I’ve certainly consumed enough information about it.

(Far) more importantly, I just need to get back to making videos.

One idea in that intersection of fitness & videos is to break down different transformations people have gone through. I’m a sucker for basically any fitness transformation video.

The idea I had was to just break down lessons from different people’s transformations. The Psychology of Transformation.

The key thing I’d want to show: there are many ways to win.

Then, of course, have my own insane transformation where I get down to 8% body fat and grow 6 inches taller.

Carve out time away from (crappy) flow

So the warrior element in how you relate to time is how “violent” a swordsman you are going to be before your day begins. How much uninterrupted time will you carve out for yourself?
— “Time Warrior” by Steve Chandler

Alright so lately I’ve been trying to carve out time where I can. It’s definitely harder as a dad and mostly I look back to, say, 5 years ago, and wonder what I was doing with all that free time. Then I look back to 10 years ago and really really wonder what I was doing with all that free time.

But hey can’t look back too much!

I’m always tempted by a good “Why I wake up at 4 AM” video. And when I do the math, I could reasonably do

  • In bed by 10 PM and asleep by 10:30 PM
  • Wake up at 5:30 AM

And that’d be 7 hours. Then I can play with that +/- and get 8 hours or shift things to 6 AM or 6:30 AM. It makes sense on paper but ends up tough to execute in practice. Still worth striving for though.

Sometimes I do wake up that early but don’t start out, as Time Warrior suggests, as a violent swordsman.

Instead I very quickly grab my phone and go into “shitty flow”, a term I learned from Brad Stulberg in “The Way of Excellence”

The psychologists David Pizarro and Paul Bloom coined the term shitty flow to describe the experience of being in flow but in ways that do not encourage or, even worse, work against your values and goals. Shitty flow is particularly common “when your days are filled with bullshit like emails and administrative meetings and then you’re just tired, and this is the time when you should be doing something [meaningful], but all you want to do is sit and browse Reddit or maybe YouTube on your phone,” explains Pizarro.

There are times where I actually do manage to have 1-2 hours completely free. The most alarming thing is how quickly it can disappear into “shitty flow”.

Sometimes I’ll try to catch 25 minutes to nap before the family heads out for the day. I know if I can fall asleep in 5 minutes then 20 minutes will be great for feeling refreshed. That 5 minutes can be gone in a few blinks if I open up social media.

I need to be a violent swordsman when it comes time to sleep. Carve out undistracted time to feel the sleepiness in the first place.

Anyway, I wrote this on the treadmill during a 25-minute session. Maybe not a good post. But I’m glad I wrote it. If anything, it’s 25 minutes of time I’ve carved out away from shitty flow.

Switching it up: CrossFit and the welders of Rogue Fitness

On the welding floor, no one works on one kind of job for more than half a day before switching to a batch of something different. If you don’t vary the task, he says, “you wear people out.” — Learning to Breathe Fire by J.C. Herz

Just finished this book on a flight today. Last night I did a chest workout and did some bench presses in the home gym. I have the same setup my brother and a bunch of friends ended up with during lockdown and the few years after.

A Rogue rack, Rogue barbell, Rogue plates, etc. (I do have some mismatched plates and a bunch of kettlebells from Rep Fitness.)

Oh yah but the book. It has a good history of a few different characters involved in the early days of CrossFit.

I knew Rogue sponsored CrossFit in some way but didn’t know the founder of Rogue had a CrossFit box. The first product was a set of Olympic rings for CrossFit workouts. Eventually they’d build rigs and then home racks and then just about everything you’d need for a home gym.

It’s not necessarily an intentional connection, but it sounds like the welding jobs vary day to day much like a CrossFit workout varies from day to day. Workouts are intense but interesting.

Part of the appeal of CrossFit is the slot machine aspect. Yes, they’re thought through from the coach’s end. And I’m sure more experienced CrossFit people see the patterns from week to week.

But early on while on the receiving end of those workouts, I get that anticipation walking in and seeing what’s on the whiteboard.

One certainty: I’ll touch something made by Rogue. Beyond that, there’s one main question.

In what way will I be punished today?

Can’t wait.

Musashi: the age we live in (or something)

“We live in an age when a clever publicity seeker can rule the roost, at least as far as ordinary people are concerned.” (Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi)

One reason Musashi is known as the greatest swordsman ever is that he wrote about being a great swordsman. I’ve done the cursory reddit search and the overall vibe seems to be that, no, he wasn’t the greatest swordsman ever.

But, hey, a portion of the world thinks he is so that’s still an accomplishment.

Persuasion was and will always be powerful. Even in the age of AI, some of the problems stem from an LLM response being pretty good at checking boxes for persuasion even in cases when facts are wrong.

Today everyone can be a clever publicity seeker. And more ordinary people than ever are seeking publicity. Clever ordinary people even realized they could rule the roost by highlighting just how ordinary they are.

There seemed to be a vacuum when Hubs life fulfilled the very ordinary dream of leaving the ordinary 9-to-5 for full-time content creation. And you likely know at least one person who’s a full-time content creator. So even that is becoming somewhat ordinary.

So how do you rule the roost today?

Define your own roost with a purple cow swimming in a blue ocean.

Or something.

The Four-Pack Revolution: What sets off your snacking?

When it comes to unhealthy eating, what sets you off? Do you start focusing on everything that needs to get done and end up feeling stressed as a result? When you are bored, do you use food as a distraction? Or has eating become a hobby you share with friends? Almost every cue or trigger fits into one of the following five categories.

— “The Four-Pack Revolution” by Chael Sonnen

Alright so abs are made in the kitchen and all that.

I was tracking my food closely for a couple months… a couple months ago. So I basically haven’t been tracking.

I was losing 1-2 pounds a week for a couple months. You’ve probably guessed (correctly) that it was during those first couple months when I was tracking.

Still, even without tracking I know one thing for sure: I’m snacking too much. Even when I was tracking my food, one of the main benefits of doing it was that it gave me a nice hard signal at night that it was time to stop snacking.

Right now if I could magically remove all the snacking I’d guess I’d be under my goal of 1800 calories on some days, if not most days.

Here are the 5 categories of snacking cues/triggers Chael Sonnen lists and how they end up showing up in my life.

  1. Location: There’s free food at the office. The meals, totally fine. The snacks I pass by every time I walk to a meeting or go to the bathroom… it gets tough being tempted 20 times a day.
  2. Time: Even if I can make it through the work day, the breakdown can happen before or after dinner. If I ate clean during the day, I think my mind starts getting into “Well, I can reward myself now” mode. (One trick for stopping this: eat dinner immediately so there’s no snack before, then floss my teeth immediately because I don’t want to floss twice.)
  3. Emotional state: I’ve realized that the problem isn’t necessarily that I snack when I’m stressed—which I do. It’s that I also eat unhealthy when I’m feeling good and celebrating something. So basically I turn to food no matter what emotional state I’m in.
  4. Other people: One thing I noticed moving from New York to San Francisco—and this also is just me and the different friend groups getting older as well—is that people drink less. Now I’m rarely at a gathering where a majority of people are drinking. So that’s good. Though I don’t exactly have a food version of that because I really enjoy food and reading about food and watching videos aIbout food. And a bunch of friends here also share that interest. That said, it’s not like all of them struggle with overeating. They show restraint at the same gatherings. I don’t need to be the person finishing all the remaining food.
  5. Actions: I’ve heard a rule along the lines of, “Don’t eat standing up”. As mentioned, I snack between meetings. I grab a snack before getting to the desk. I snack when I get home. I snack to fit something in before I brush and get ready for bed.

So now that I’ve written all that above, what would uncle Chael recommend?

Break the cycle, replace with a new behavior, and condition the new behavior.

Gotta drill it. For like… 2 days I was replacing snacking with making tea. I can probably drill it a bit more. But also tea just might not be quite satisfying enough to replace snacking. I also tried baby carrots. Yes, I should probably replace it with something that isn’t going in my mouth.

But, hey, one step at a time. Hopefully a few weeks from now I’ll update you with the great replacements I chose and drilled.