Active Recall!

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Project50 Day 10: Re-focusing

Just doing a quick update on the different pieces here.

  • Wake up early: I have a couple hacks going here where I’m jetlagged from an international trip and also have a dog to wake me up with no regard for what day of the week it is or how many hours I’ve slept. Those mornings are definitely peaceful though.
  • Morning routine: I’ve got into a good routine where I’m taking Booster out for a walk immediately and then I do my workout in the morning. Will continue doing this.
  • Read 10 pages a day: I’ve been reading between all of Robert Greene’s books “48 Laws of Power”, “33 Strategies of War”, and “The Daily Laws”. It’s building up my motivation to make videos with notes about the different books.
  • Eat healthy: I’ve been hitting my 150g protein number each day. Protein shakes help a ton here. And I’ve noticed that I’m focusing more and more on high protein options.
  • Work out: I listened to a Mind Pump episode at the start of Project50 and the idea in it has been really helpful since then. With a home gym, you’re able to do 10-15 minute workouts throughout the day if you need to. I’ve been using that mindset to fit in a warm up and heavy barbell set in the middle of the day.
  • Practice learning a new skill every day: I’ve been making a YouTube Short every day and it’s been probably the thing that Project50 has changed the most. First I wanted to do something about Project50 every day. I made one but then I thought it’d be good to just experiment a bit with the videos and have been posting NBA and MMA videos with book highlights since then. (Highlight+Highlight). I think it’s knocking me out of a creative rut I’ve been in for a while.
  • Keep progress: in a journal I can see now why there’s a Notion template for this that’s a bunch of checkboxes and one long text field for thoughts. I’d love to write something like this post every day but there might be more useful things to work on.

Let’s keep it going!

Project50 day 2: How to use your inevitable failure for good

“REALISM A gambler once said to the Master, “I was caught cheating at cards yesterday, so my partners beat me up and threw me out of the window. What would you advise me to do?” The Master looked straight through the man and said, “If I were you, from now on I would play on the ground floor.” This startled the disciples. “Why didn’t you tell him to stop gambling?” they demanded. “Because I knew he wouldn’t,” was the Master’s simple and sagacious explanation.” “One Minute Wisdom” by Anthony De Mello

I know I’m going to check Instagram at some point today. Or like at 100 points today. So I’ve set up a quick automation in Apple Shortcuts:

  • When app is opened: Instagram
  • Then open app: Kindle

I used something similar a few months back to open The Drafts app for micro journaling anytime I opened up Coinbase or Coinbase Wallet. (As you might have guessed, those apps have become much less addicting after losing something like a Model X in a few months.)

You’re supposed to focus for an hour in the morning. I could avoid my phone entirely but I’m also trying to just design a better digital environment for myself. And that means setting up a few mattresses to catch me when I fall through a trapdoor.

I open social media apps when I’m bored and now it redirects to Kindle where I might be able to knock out a page or two instead.

I’ve already started noticing small moments when I should just be okay being bored. In particular, every time I leave the office I get the urge to check my phone. This is dozens of times during the day—lots of drinks, lots of bathroom trips.

Where you know you’ll fail, set up a shortcut in the right direction.

Lose yourself in it (instead of talking about it)

“Today, we’re more apt to talk about work than lose ourselves in it. We like to make a big show of it on social media. We spend a lot of money acquiring the right tools or setting up a fancy office.” — Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday

It struck me at some point putting together the garage gym that I was spending more time reading and watching more content about garage gyms than I was actually working out.

The same goes for work on some days. I think about work and worry about work and complain about work instead of sitting down to do the work. Then it isn’t quite so bad when I’m actually doing it.

Discipline is Destiny feels like it is coming to me at the right time. I’ve lost a lot of discipline this year and want to make sure to end the year strong.

We have a Europe trip coming up and my first thought was that I’ll hunker down after the trip. Reading this book reminded me that I don’t need to wait until after.

I shouldn’t wait until after.

I can enjoy the food without eating until I’m hurting. I can follow a daily bodyweight routine in the hotel rooms in the morning.

I can make the important things a priority.

Book Notes: “The World of Warcraft Diary” by John Staats

“The news of the first leak of WoW broke at the turn of the year. Someone from the friends-and-family alpha test broke the NDA and had distributed the client package of WoW. Screenshots and movies of people running around the game were available online. This was something we were prepared for, but the time it took to track down the culprit (it was someone in QA) had slightly distracted the programming staff. Since most of the zones of the world had been kept secret, the leak dampened our ability to provide reveals or exclusive screenshots, as well as showed off the world we’d worked on for five years in a very humdrum way.” — “The World of Warcraft Diary” by John Staats

I absolutely loved this book. Finished it in something like 5 days—a couple long flights helped here. I picked it up after reading Jordan Mechner’s development diaries for Karateka and Prince of Persia. There’s something comforting in seeing the ups and downs leading to success.

Some quick lessons that come to mind from “The World of Warcraft Diary”

  • Games aren’t exactly fun until near the end of development: The nuance he mentions is that this is specifically when the game involves also building the engine instead of using an existing engine. Because so much of development is really getting the engine in place. For much of World of Warcraft’s development, the only game that you could play was controlling a character and walking around a world. You could swing your weapons but they wouldn’t do damage. Many objects could be walked through. Combat and quest design came a lot later in the process than I would have guessed.
  • Leaks suck for the development team: I read this around when news broke about leaks of GTA VI source code and Diablo IV footage. There was a leak for World of Warcraft leading into one of their big announcements with game footage. Trailers and what the teams show are highly produced. Even if it’s actual game footage, a lot of thought is put into how to present and introduce things. When gameplay is leaked, particular for an MMO where there’s plenty of time spent just walking around, it can be really deflating for the development team. Their work is received poorly and they’re often already in crunch time and the goalposts move again.

“Allen Adham had long maintained it was amateurs who felt compelled to be original. These were the guys trying to impress journalists with novelty and who rarely asked themselves if their new approach was better. For years Blizzard had shrugged off accusations that we never invented anything. We treated games seriously, as a business, not as an opportunity to be avant-garde.”

  • Best is better than first: Being the first to create something that becomes popular is good. The approach Blizzard took was to create the best of something that is proven to be popular. Too often you end up being the first to create something and that thing is either bad or unpopular.

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.