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11: Designing your life

Still figuring out a publishing schedule but I’m thinking we’ll do Fridays for the audio. A week later, we’ll update the post with more detailed show notes. Every Friday there will be audio for that week and detailed show notes for the previous week. We’ll see though!

We’re talking about some principles from Designing Your Life, by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans.

0:00 Show intro
3:49 This week’s book: Designing Your Life
10:14 The three paths
25:15 The five mindsets
43:45 Closing: How can we improve the podcast?

 

The Ugly First Draft

I’m reading Everybody Writes by Ann Handley and she says it’s important to just go ahead and finish a TUFD, the ugly first draft:

Producing The Ugly First Draft is basically where you show up and throw up. Write badly. Write as if no one will ever read it. (Stephen King calls this “writing with the door closed.”)

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott calls it the down draft.

A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

The idea is the same, you want to get the ideas down on paper. The sentences won’t be beautiful. They won’t flow from one to another. Large portions will eventually be cut out.

But first, you’ve got to get it down.

Wait, sorry. In making this video I realized it’s her friend that calls it a down draft. Anne Lamott just calls them the same as the chapter name: Shitty First Drafts.

Tim Ferriss has a similar phrase: two crappy pages. In episode 84 with Chase Jarvis, he tells a story about IBM salespeople. They lowered their measure for success and it allowed each salesperson to get small wins to build momentum. Here’s Tim:

I was told at one point, “Your goal should be two crappy pages per day.” That’s it. If you’ve hit two crappy pages each day, even if you’ve never used them, you’ve succeeded for the day. Alleviating that performance anxiety about putting down ten pages of good material, which inevitably, I think, you’re going to fail two or three times each week, allows you to overshoot that goal. And continually succeed. And sort of build that confidence and momentum.

Tim applied that kind of thinking to his writing. He would aim for two crappy pages a day. That’s it.

In another episode, he interviews Mike Birbiglia, who has his own name for it:

I call it a “throw up pass” . I would go to coffee shops in the morning. My minimum is 3 hours. I stick myself in a coffee shop with no internet. No email, no anything. If it’s going well, 5 hours. If it’s not going well, I stop at 3 hours.

In response to that, Tim says he tossed a few drafts of the Four Hour Work-Week and then he re-wrote the first chapter in an email compose window. That worked.

Again, from Everybody Writes

By the way, this show-up-and-throw-up phase is often where many bloggers end the process. But you won’t do that—because you have respect both for your writing and for your reader.

But first, I need to find some readers of my own.

10: Wired to Eat

We aren’t close to peak condition on any of the four pillars described in Wired to Eat: food, fitness, sleep, and community. But we can still talk about it!

00:00:00 • Intro: four pillars of health starting with food

00:13:20 • Fitness

00:21:49 • Sleep

00:31:22 • Community

Below is a post I wrote earlier this year about Robb Wolf’s book, Wired to Eat.

After reading Tools of Titans earlier this year, I wanted to prioritize my health. If I really want to prioritize health, my daily choices should go toward that. Including media consumption. I’m trying to read and listen to less about productivity/career/business and more about fitness/nutrition/meditation.

A great place to start is Robb Wolf’s latest book, Wired to Eat: Transform Your Appetite and Personalize Your Diet for Rapid Weight Loss and Amazing Health. It builds on guidelines he popularized in The Paleo Solution.

Wired to Eat is about finding out what works for you. In his podcast appearances, he says he used lean closer to there being One True Way. But he saw more and more that the answer was often “it depends”.

The best I’ve felt was when I was eating around 80-90% paleo. Then I tried white rice out and seemed to digest it pretty well. It became part of my mental model of paleo. Then things got off the rails because I can eat a lot of rice, and I did.

White rice is my best example of “it depends”. I can digest it well, but now I know it’s something I’ll eat way too much of.

Wired to Eat has a great chapter looking beyond nutrition. Your food is one pillar of four. The other three are movement, sleep, and community.

Move move move

Nutrition and fitness go hand in hand. Here are some guidelines from Wired to Eat:

Most days: Get out and move. As much as you can, doing as many things as you can. You don’t need to exhaust yourself. Make it fun and “leave a little in the tank” so you are not so tired and sore that you either do nothing for a week or give up entirely.

I’ve been walking more. I’ve tried different activities while walking to make walking without a destination an activity itself. When there is a destination, the walks feel shorter and are more enjoyable.

I re-joined my old gym because it’s the nicest gym I’ve been a part of. It’s not a chore to go there. I sit in the sauna as a reward for lifting weights. They have basketball courts so I enjoy shooting around once in a while. Once in a while I play pick-up. (And am sore for a longer while.)

I’m trying to work yoga back into my schedule because it’s hard, I learn a lot each time, but it also lets me keep something in the tank.

I’m trying a lot of things to find a lot of things I enjoy so that I’ll move more.

Eight hours is good, but you can do more

I’ve generally been pretty good with sleep. We have blackout curtains the bedroom, I have blue blocker goggles, I spray myself with magnesium after a shower at night (learned that from Shawn Stevenson’s Sleep Smarter), I have apple cider and honey before sleep, and on and on.

Im doing a lot of small things but miss a big one: I often don’t sleep early enough. From Wired to Eat:

You may think sleeping midnight to eight A.M. is as good as ten P.M. to six A.M., but studies show this is not the case.

I’m going to work on this. I know 10:00am might not be realistic, but my goal is usually midnight which often means 12:30am or 1:00am. Shooting for 10:45pm will work well.

Make some friends

From Wired to Eat:

Some are pretty active, others less so, but the key point is that you like the activity and enjoy the community: yoga, martial arts, CrossFit, a walking or running group, an art class, a language class, volunteer work, etc. I don’t know what the right fit is for you, but I strongly encourage you to find ways to improve your social connectivity.

I want to apply this in some way and have been trying a few different things. I’ve mentioned that I started doing yoga. I haven’t gone back to the studio in a while (my ClassPass subscription ended). I tried Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu a couple times. I’m still trying it out to see if it’s something I want to keep trying out long term.

That might be hard to find, but it might be worth the search.

I took a few yoga classes earlier this year. I’ve taken CrossFit. I’ve taken a couple Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu classes. I’ve been playing basketball every few weeks. I don’t know which one I want to do regularly. Basketball is highest on the list as far as which activity I enjoy. It’s also the one that’s the least in my control—I could play pick-up at the gym but then it becomes an activity I don’t enjoy. (I’m short.)

I’m also thinking about non-fitness communities. In 18 Minutes (check out my book notes), Peter Bergman describes some steps to figuring out your best activities.

Look at the activities you do alone and figure out if you can (and want to) do them in a way that includes other people. For example, join a garden club. Or a reading or meditation group. Or write something that other people read. If you can (and want to) make them activities that include other people, keep them on the list. If not, then cross them off.

Along with media input, I know my own output is important also. If you’re writing about something, you end up thinking about those concepts a lot. I’m going to try writing more about being healthier and happier.

I can’t wait to show you my future six pack and the happiness I gained in the journey there. (Affirmations, baby!)

09: Looking back, looking forward

(Check us out on iTunes!)

0:00 • ARWGF 9: Looking back, looking forward

4:55 • We’ll be talking about goals

16:49 • What’s been your favorite episode so far?

26:55 • Lead measures and lag measures

40:49 • active-recall.com @activerecall @walteramedia

Podcast notes: The power of gratitude with The 5-Minute Journal

A lot of planners help you plan your work so that you can make it efficient and free up time to squeeze in more work so that you can make it efficient and free up time to squeeze in more work so that…

The 5-Minute Journal helps you start your day with gratitude. Pat Flynn interviewed the creators of the 5-Minute Journal, UJ Ramdas and Alex Ikonn.

(Check out the full interview on SPI 271: An Interview with The Five-Minute Journal Founders UJ Ramdas and Alex Ikonn – it’s better than this post!)

The power of gratitude

Why gratitudes?

I’m not quite a type-A personality, but Tim Ferriss definitely tips the scale. Tim talks about why he uses The 5-Minute Journal in Tools of Titans:

“It’s easy to obsess over pushing the ball forward as a type-A personality, which leads to being constantly future-focused. If anxiety is a focus on the future, practicing appreciation, even for 2 to 3 minutes, is counter-balancing medicine. The 5MJ forces me to think about what I have, as opposed to what I’m pursuing.”

(This episode also has them talking about how they met Tim Ferriss. He’s become one of biggest promoters of The Five-Minute Journal. I first learned about it on Tim’s podcast.)

How can I apply it?

They talk about creating the 5-minute Journal for themselves. Like many people, they were information junkies but they knew how much a difference it is to read something and actually apply what you’re learning.

“But in reality I didn’t really care, because I just wanted to have this product in my own life, because I wanted to use it and practice it. Because I knew the power of doing this on a daily basis. Especially in writing.”

The journal is centered around gratitudes. They’d read the books and seen the research on the power of daily gratitude. They wanted to make something that would make it easier to capture their gratitude daily. There were plenty of planners out. These were the ones that allow you to be efficient with your work to fit even more work in to make efficient to fit even more work in.

A journal for gratitudes didn’t exist, so they made it.

My use of the 5-Minute journal

I downloaded a 5-Minute Journal quick-start PDF explaining how the journal works and it included a few sample pages. I imported one of the pages into Notability and then just copied and pasted it and filled it in.

Then each day I would duplicate and clear the page. I had the same Rick Rubin quote every day.

“On their deathbeds, people don’t think about their work or their life experiences or the items remaining on their to-do list. They think about love and family.” — Rick Rubin

I bought the app after a couple weeks of that. I’ve put an entry in probably 4 days a week ever since. For a couple months, I recorded a voice note going through the 5-Minute Journal template on my walk to work. It’s a little harder to go scroll back through voice notes, but those really capture the mood of the day.

Something different in the app is the daily photo entry. It’s great to just scroll through that. You know how people say it can be bad scrolling through your friends’ highlight reels? Scrolling through your daily highlights is better and probably healthier. It reminds you of all the things you’re grateful for day to day, not just tropical vacations.

How can I apply it? Part II

Last year I read a book a week. This year, I’m on about the same pace with reading and have increased listening to 2-4 each month. I haven’t been applying it all, though. UJ Ramdas and Alex Ikonn created the 5-Minute Journal to make things easier for themselves.

“With all these books you read them, but what about the follow through? How do you actually implement all these things into your daily life?”

“Prototyping” might be overstating things, but I’ve been trying to create one-page PDFs that I can fill out to remember to apply things I’m learning from books. So far I’ve got two. One is a W.O.O.P sheet to apply something from Barking Up the Wrong Tree. The second is a Stretch + S.M.A.R.T. sheet to apply something from Smarter, Better, Faster.

I want to create a few more and start sharing them. Then maybe someone will use them like I used the one page PDF sample of the 5-Minute Journal.

Picking activities

Some Creative Pages will turn into full posts. This one seems like a pretty good outline for a full post.

I’ve been reading about writing again. After listening to a bunch of Psychotactics stuff I’ve started reading content by a few copywriters. I started with The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza (who makes Psychotactics) then I got Everybody Writes and Content Rules by Anne Handley.

I’ve been thinking about how to write things that help other people. It’s better in a lot of cases to be direct with the reader. Too often, I write about how I’ve tried applying things. Which is useful as part of a post, but it should only be a part of it. If it’s going to be useful, the directives should be clear.

This year, I’ve continued reading about happiness. I’ve seen some common themes between books and wanted to boil that down to a few steps. Your day-in day-out activities mean a lot more than some random goal.

For example, if your random goal is to own a Ferrari, at least make sure you drive it when you get it.

Here are some steps to picking your daily activities:

  • Write down all of your activities
  • Put them in buckets
  • In each bucket, rank the activities against each other
  • Schedule the top activities
  • Purge the bottom activities

My full post would detail these steps with incredible stories to make them sticky.

First, I need to become a better writer.