I kicked the newsletter off last week. This makes it two weeks in a row, likely tying the longest streak from last year.
Podcast recommendations —
Like last week, I’ll write about some podcasts that we talked about on the show. If you like some of the things we talked about on the show, you should check these out.
Pat Flynn Show: Dan John on Measuring what Matters: We’ve talked about the Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income on multiple episodes. This podcast is from a different Pat Flynn (the one that runs Chronicles of Strength). I’ve been binge-ing pretty hard on it lately and I wrote a post about his generalist philosophy.
I’ve also been getting into kettlebell training in the past few months. If you’re learning about kettlebells, you may be familiar with Pavel Tsatsouline. (I learned about him through an interview he did with… guess who… Tim Ferriss!) If you’ve bought a few books on kettlebells, I’d guess one is by Pavel and one is by Dan John.
Dan John invented the goblet squat. Great thing to have on your resume.
Anyway, on this episode, Pat Flynn and Dan John talk about generalism and how to apply it to different areas of your life. Rough summary of generalism: specialize in something until you get good at it, then focus on something else and specialize in that. “Good” does not mean elite.
When you stack those skills, the overlap becomes extremely valuable.
Last year, I became bad at many things, including podcasting, blogging, and making videos. This year I still want to do those things but I’ll modify the approach to get good at one at a time.
MFCEO: How to 100% Guarantee Success in Anything: Wally recommended this and it’s all about goals. Just do it. Something I really liked in this episode is his section about the hashtag no-days-off folks. Focus on being effective. Don’t focus on trying to do things in every waking moment and in every blink of downtime. That’s a great way to do a lot of things, poorly.
Jocko Willink #100 with Tim Ferriss: I’m still working through this. If you want another way to listen to Jocko, his latest book is available in audio format on your favorite streaming services. (I listened on Google Play Music. Here it is on Spotify.) If you’ve ever thought, “You know, I have a hard time waking up so It’d be great to have a Navy SEAL to talk about how lazy I am.” then it’s the perfect thing. It’s effective, I can say that much.
Art of Manliness: Motivation myth Jeff Haden: I’m recently finished Michael Hyatt’s “Your Best Year Ever“. Something it reminded me to do is to think about setting up if-then plans for goals I have this year. If I can’t make it to the gym… then I’ll do a kettlebell workout at home. Not a perfect replacement but it’s a step forward.
This episode of Art of Manliness goes over the fact that you’re going to lose motivation. So if you lose motivation… then what?
Check the episode out for how you can accomplish what you set out to do this year.
(Another tip from “Your Best Year Ever”: make it easy to remember why you’re doing it in the first place. If that’s not enough to get you going, you might need a better why.)
Active Recall: Resolutions (Ep. 30): We’ve got to plug ourselves! Here’s the format we went with this week: (1) Podcast recommendations: the above podcasts, (2) Book-of-the-week: Subtle Art of Not Giving a F— by Mark Manson, and (3) The Magic Window: Our favorite arcade games.
(We talked about The Simpsons arcade game and Time Crisis 2.)
We had a really good time with this format so we’ll try it again for a few more episodes.
A few other things—
Here are some videos I made this week:
- How to handle negative beliefs (first, recognize them!) — Book Notes for “Your Best Year Ever”: Notes on the book I mentioned above, Michael Hyatt’s Your Best Year Ever.
- How to make a presentation with an iPad Pro: I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. I had this idea of making a video of the making of the video. And at the end you’d realize you were watching the making of that video and your mind would be blown.
I… didn’t even get close. Still, it might be useful. I think I can re-use a lot of the video for shorter videos. The overhead time lapse of my hand while I draw is fun to watch. I made the great decision to make it the size of like a thimble if you’re watching on your phone.
This is one of those where I really need to buy into the idea that you’ve got to put bad stuff out to learn and eventually put good things out.
- Enter the Gungeon: Life lessons: Oh yeah, I’m mildly addicted to Enter the Gungeon. I got a Nintendo Switch last year. I played maybe an hour each of Zelda and Mario Odyssey. I put some good time into Mario Kart. And… not much else. (Oh yah a little bit of Puyo Puyo Tetris.)
But I picked up Enter the Gungeon last week and have played it every day for about an hour. Not a full blown addiction but the most consistent I’ve played a single player console game in a while. Really fun. Great characters.
So I made a video about how you can apply lessons from the gungeon to your life.