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The combo to strive for

“Carmack knew well and good what he enjoyed—programming—and was systematically arranging his life to spend the most time possible doing just that.” — Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner

The goal is to find what you enjoy doing in life as early as possible and then find ways to add more of that to your life.

Find people you’ll love spending time with for the rest of your life.

Find work you enjoy enough to enjoy doing it for the rest of your life.

Your love for these things might change, but the default tends to be spending too much time working on things you don’t want to work on.

If you can find an overlap working on stuff you enjoy with people you enjoy being around… Congrats, and be grateful.

Just Do It (and you might find out it wasn’t all that much work)

Check out the full notes for “The More You Do the Better You Feel” by David Parker

You get a task.

You dilly dally on it. Find other things that you need to work on.

But that task sits in the back of your head, draining a little bit of your energy over a long period of time.

Eventually, you get to it and then you kick yourself because that huge task wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

From “The More You Do the Better You Feel” by David Parker:

However, as soon as that warm glow of satisfaction began fading, in its place I began reviewing, examining and criticizing the efforts that had brought that job to a close: “Why didn’t I finish it sooner?” “It really wasn’t that difficult, was it? Why am I so dumb?” “What’s wrong with me?”

Don’t spend more time planning and worrying about something than it will take to actually do the thing.

Which reminds me of this quote I saw on Instagram the other day.

“The best use of imagination is creativity, the worst use of imagination is anxiety.” — Deepak Chopra

Imagination goes in.

Up to you to decide what comes out.

10 Life Lessons: Leon Edwards knocks out Kamaru Usman

Okay it’s really 2 lessons:

  1. Never give up
  2. Do a walk off KO if you can

For various reasons, I was watching this at McDonald’s and trying to do some gesture drawings—lots of trying to draw Usman pushing Edwards up against the fence. I was wrapping things up and ready to head home when the 5th round ended.

Then Usman crumpled to the mat.

When I first started watching boxing & MMA, I believed the whole thing that “Oh anything can happen at any time.” Which is what people have said after this fight.

There’s truth to it. Anyone can win at any time with a KO or submission. But if a fighter is way up, they have the option to turtle up, hop on the bicycle, and just make it to the end of the fight to win by the judges’ decision.

They’ll usually take that win.

Wins out of nowhere are memorable because they don’t happen very often. One requirement: the losing fighter doesn’t give up.

As for the walk off KO, it just looks cooler. You’re showing a little more discipline than the fighter dropping a hammer first on an obviously unconscious opponent. (Though I would never say that to Ngannou’s face.)

How does this apply to actual life?

Discipline throughout your day means that you’ll finish the work you intended when you start the day. You won’t feel rushed in the afternoon and evening. You can do you shut down routine and truly recharge and be present in your leisure time.

(For more advice on walk off KOs, check out some Mark Hunt highlights. For more tenuous lessons between MMA and life, check out my post with 9 takeaways from Mark Hunt’s autobiography.)

 

 

Development diary

Check out the full notes for “The Making of Karateka: Journals 1982-1985” by Jordan Mechner

“Start keeping a development diary. Write a little in it each day, explaining what you’ve been working on, justifying your design decisions, and vetting tough technical or professional decisions. Even though you are the primary (or only—it’s up to you) audience, pay attention to the quality of your writing and to your ability to clearly express yourself. Occasionally reread old entries, and critique them. Adjust your new entries based on what you liked and disliked about the old ones. Not only will your writing improve, but you can also use this diary as a way to strengthen your understanding of the decisions you make and as a place to refer to when you need to understand how or why you did something previously.” – The Passionate Programmer by Chad Fowler

I’m reading “The Making of Karateka” by Jordan Mechner. It’s pretty much a development diary. Or at least partly. Outside of development, Jordan writes about films he’s watching, attending Yale, and generally just what’s going on in life.

I mean I guess it’s just a normal diary.

Anyway, the thing I’m enjoying is seeing the sways of energy and enthusiasm for different projects that he’s working on. He’s working on something called Alphabet which sounds tedious but that pays well.

He’s excited for Deathbounce but the enthusiasm wanes as he gets closer to finishing it.

He’s super pumped as Karateka comes together.

July 23, 1983: It’s been a Karateka day. I Versa’d and DRAXed all twelve BLOCK shapes. It really is a joy to work on something I enjoy working on. It seems too good to be true after Alphabet. I can’t wait to get up tomorrow morning and work on it some more.

But then he returns to school and real life beyond programming gets exciting. He’s not thinking about programming all day. He might be waking up excited for the day, but it’s not excitement to program like it was in the summer.

September 7, 1983: I’m not working on Karateka. This is dangerous. At this moment, computer programming seems boring compared to a lot of other things. If I don’t jump back in soon, I may not want to.

The entries above are six weeks apart.

That can be the flow of creative work.

Steven Pressfield talks about The Resistance and how it can show up strongest as you’re getting toward the end of a project.

Starting is easy when you just need to start sketching game ideas without worrying about the software and hardware constraints to come.

It makes Resistance at the end of a project that much harder to deal with. You’re starting to think about what your next project will be after finishing the current one. You can even start planning that next one. Or maybe sketch out ideas for 2 or 3 other projects.

You can get sucked so deep into the fun nascent stages of the next projects that your enthusiasm wanes for your current project.

This can get so bad that you never finish it at all.

Elon Musk: Monkey playing Pong with Neuralink | Note: Full Send podcast

One thing I always laugh with my brother about is how I would think I was playing Double Dragon with him and his friends but my controller wasn’t even plugged in.

Anyway, this explanation about how they got a monkey to play Pong with its brain is fascinating in how straightforward it seems: record signals coming from the brain to figure out how to map paddle movements to brain signals, unplug the controller but let the monkey continue to use it, then send the monkey’s signals to the game instead of the controller directions.

A little switcheroo and you’ve got Planet of the Apes beta.

(Obligatory link: Tim Urban’s fantastic blog post aka book on Neuralink.)

Listen to the whole Full Send interview. While I’m not quite as old as Elon, I grew a few more gray hairs hearing this exchange:

Elon: I grew up playing very primitive video games. Because I’m 51 so that’s no spring chicken.

Steiny’s response:

So like Super Smash?

 

Elon Musk: Early Life on Mars | Note: Full Send podcast

Elon describes life on Mars.

It’s always been his ultimate goal:

“Musk speaks about the cars, solar panels, and batteries with such passion that it’s easy to forget they are more or less sideline projects. He believes in the technologies to the extent that he thinks they’re the right things to pursue for the betterment of mankind. They’ve also brought him fame and fortune. Musk’s ultimate goal, though, remains turning humans into an interplanetary species.”

— Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

Anyway this Full Send interview is great because they’re just asking questions people probably want to ask Elon: what are your parties like, who are your enemies right now, what are your thoughts on aliens…?