Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

02: Grit

This week we talk about Grit, by Angela Duckworth. (Check out my full book notes here.)

  • I’m in California and Wally is in San Diego. We decided to record on a Wednesday morning to accommodate schedules. Not sure that matters since we haven’t really picked a day to consistently publish.
  • Our podcast is on iTunes now. I think it actually has been for the entire week. I thought there was an approval process or something. Now that it’s on there it feels sort of official. I have that iMessage drawing of Frankenwalt the Frankenstein monster. It feels a little too casual.
  • Tim Ferriss talks about how the average podcast only lasts like 3 or 6 episodes. I bet a lot of them thought “It’s the audio that matters” or that silliness is a part of it. By week 12 I want to make sure the listing and landing page looks way better. Actually I need a landing page at all.
  • I was scrambling to buy the Zoom H1 because I wanted to record in the hotel room. Then I remembered Tim Ferris’s rule for podcast audio: make it mono and make it loud enough. The EarPods are fine.
  • I bought the Zoom H1 but was recording on the EarPods. I’d love to see a chart of my success rate on Slickdeals with finding a good deal plotted against how many times I check and refresh the site. Truly a slot machine.
  • One day later I actually was walking over a highway. And yes, it was super sketchy. All to get In-N-Out. All worth it. On the off chance that you care what I think about In-N-Out vs. Shake Shack: both are great. Shake Shack’s beef is better. It’s also more expensive.

01: Flow

First of all, welcome and thanks for checking out the first episode of Walter & Francis. We’ve been talking about recording a podcast together and finally got around to doing it. If you’re checking this out, well, I probably know you by name. We recorded last week but this should be the first one that appears in iTunes.

(Ok ok on to the show notes — I’ll try to keep the blogging about podcasting in the weekly newsletter.)

Here are some topics we go over in this week’s episode.

Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi — 

I finished reading Flow a couple weeks ago and thought it’d be good to pick up Csikszentmihalyi’s other book. Speaking of…

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (also) by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi —

Great book. It’s from 1990 and things have probably gotten worse as far as distractions go.

Deliberate practice —

If this is the 1000th time you’ve heard the phrase deliberate practice and you’re rolling your eyes, you’re exactly the audience we’re looking for. At least if you’re anything like me. I can’t get enough of this echo chamber!

We did it without mentioning K. Anders Ericsson or Malcolm Gladwell. (To be clear: I’m calling that out as an oversight, not an achievement.)

5 Whys and 5 Hows —

Judging by the results when I searched for 5 Hows, it’s not exactly an original idea. That’s fine.

Each week we’ll discuss topics from one book. I’m hoping one idea sticks out that I can write more about. If not, I’ll recap a few ideas. We got lucky this week and a topic came up: autotelic and exotelic activities.

Autotelic and Exotelic activities

A couple weeks back, I put a video and post together about mapping activities to a grid based on 1.) enjoyment and 2.) whether it goes toward a goal or not.

I created the grid by stealing ideas from a few places. Mapping ideas came from Designing Your Life and Stealing Fire. The two factors of the matrix likely came from reading Flow, which talks about autotelic and exotelic activities.

Autotelic activities are things we do for the experience of doing them. Exotelic activities are things we do that go toward a goal. If it’s completely exotelic, we likely wouldn’t do them if that goal was no longer relevant.

It’s a spectrum though, so things fall in between. Let’s look at weightlifting and running. Both are exotelic because they go toward health goals. Between the two, I’d say running rates higher on the autotelic scale. In my unscientific estimate, it’s more likely that someone would run to feel runner’s high than for someone to lift weights to feel the pump.

Let’s take a look at how you can move things along the spectrum.

Get so good they can’t ignore you

You can do autotelic activities and get good enough that you get paid to do it.

But you probably need to turn it into an exotelic activity first.

For example: playing basketball is one of my favorite things to do. It’s a guaranteed flow state a few times a month. If I want to do that professionally, I’ll need a time machine, different genetics, a different upbringing, luck…

…bad example. But let’s hang on to that time machine and rewind…

For example: reading is one of my favorite things to do. It can be entirely autotelic if I’m reading fiction and get engaged in the story. Nobody will pay me to do that. How can you get paid to read novels? You can understand the story deep enough to explain it simply to other people.

Jason Concepcion writes the excellent Ask The Maester column at The Ringer (and at Grantland prior to that). He understood the Song of Ice and Fire books deeply enough to explain things simply. He also had career capital as a writer to use that knowledge to be paid as a Game of Thrones expert.

When he read the first book, it was likely entirely an autotelic activity. When the sixth book in the series comes out, he’ll experience it both as an autotelic and exotelic activity.

Get good enough that you can ignore everything else

You can do exotelic activities and get good enough that you do them just to experience it. The transition reminds me something from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

In other words, my muscles are the type that need a long time to warm up. They’re slow to get started. But once they’re warmed up they can keep working well for a long time with no strain.

Throughout the book he relates running to writing. With experience, it’s easier to fight through the strain because you know what comes after. Your body will warm up and the run becomes enjoyable.

Playing an instrument isn’t very fun after the initial novelty wears off. It becomes almost entirely exotelic for a while when you can only fail and learn a little bit at a time. With practice, you get through that, become competent, and can experience flow through playing music.

Then you can toggle the experience between exotelic and autotelic. You switch between practice and performance. (Even if the performance is jamming out in your bedroom.)

Sum up

It’s helping me think about the different activities in my life. I’ll remind myself that reading self-development books shouldn’t be an entirely autotelic activity. Otherwise, that time would better be spent reading a novel with a better story that doesn’t have to be loosely tied to some productivity principle.

It’s important to make reading an exotelic activity by applying what I’m learning. One way to do that is to write my own notes:

  • Autotelic activities are things we do for the experience itself
  • Exotelic activities are things we do for a goal beyond the activity
  • It’s a spectrum, so it’s rare for something to be strictly autotelic or strictly exotelic

See you in a week, where we’re planning to talk about Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth.

Activities — Do you enjoy it? Does it go toward your goals?

Stealing ideas from Stealing Fire. In Stealing Fire, Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal write about flow and other states of ecstasis. They lay out steps for “hedonic calendaring”, where you end up with a schedule of your best activities that happen daily, weekly, monthly, or annually. Part of it is ranking activities you enjoy:

“Step Two: Use the Ecstasis Equation (Time X Reward/ Risk) to rank this list for value. Think daily sun salutations versus an annual ultramarathon, or a ten-minute meditation versus a trip to see a Peruvian shaman.”

Some other inspiration: In Designing Your Life, Dave Evans and Bill Burnett also suggest listing out your activities to create a gauge in four life areas: health, work, play, and love.

Making a list at all is a good exercise. Seeing everything on one page can be eye-opening. Some things look more wasteful when you see them side by side with a productive, fun activity that you’ve told yourself you don’t have time for. With limited time, it’s important to be deliberate about picking activities. (And scheduling them to take it a step further.)

With free time in the morning, I’ve been thinking about how to spend it and the factors involved. I’ve been using a different equation that’s narrowed down to a couple questions:

  • Do I enjoy it?
  • Does it go toward my goals?

It’s a simple grid for ranking activities. Let’s take a look at the four quadrants of the grid.

Things you like doing that go toward your goals: Do these more. This is where you want to spend most of the day. Think harder about this too, because some leisure activities might be very much going toward a goal of building a great relationship.

A solid example for me is playing basketball. I enjoy it (even if I’m not very good) and it’s good for my health. Though this does make me think of the risk factor from Stealing Fire. In that I can’t do this all day or even every day because then I’d have no knees.

Things you don’t like doing that don’t go toward your goals: Don’t do these. Easier said than done, but knowing what’s here in the first place is the first step toward not doing them.

One example for me was reading Hacker News. It’s an incredible resource and a great community. Those things also make it very addicting.

For me it was having a highlight reel effect similar to feeling like all your friends are always traveling or partying when through other social networks. You can only read about so many mega-successful startups before you start feeling like you’re not working hard enough or you don’t want it enough.

I was spending hours on HN and content found through HN. So I stopped.

You might be spending time in this quadrant and not realize it.

Things that go toward your goal that you don’t enjoy: This is an important area. Time spent here probably goes most toward your goal. I’d also describe this as the “I don’t enjoy doing it but I enjoy having done it” area.

Doing some deliberate practice? You’re probably in here.

You grow here but it’s also important not to spend too much time here.

It’s like those RPGs where you lose HP walking through poison gas but you know there’s a treasure chest somewhere there. As long as you don’t spend too much time there, you’ll be rewarded.

You can also find a way to make these activities more enjoyable.

Things you enjoy that don’t go toward your goal: These are your activities that are purely leisure. You have to stretch pretty hard to explain how they might go toward a goal. In a way, they go toward all goals because they help you recover.

It’s important to watch out for spending too much time in this area and the previous area. Too much time working on purely productive will lean to burnout. Too much time here might mean you’re not moving toward any goals.

A lot of productivity advice suggests cutting TV and video games out entirely. I’ll defend video games pretty hard (it’s a reliable place for finding flow and keeping in touch with long distance friends), but even TV has its place. Again, the key is making sure not to watch too much of it.

That’s the grid. I don’t have a name for it. Make your own:

  • Write a list of 20 activities you did this week
  • Map them against each other based on how much you enjoy them and how much they go toward your goals

(If you don’t have goals in mind, well, that’s another post.)

I’ve got a few more thoughts on this that I might write about, like changing activities to go more toward the top left. One example: if weightlifting alone isn’t super enjoyable then CrossFit might make it more fun with he same goal. Another example: if the shows you watch don’t go toward any goals maybe you should watch something more productive.

Or don’t, because giving up Game of Thrones to watch more TED talks just seems wrong.

Coming soon, but for now I’ll spend some time playing Xbox. You know, deliberate practice. Or was it for my goal to keep in touch with out-of-state friends, or was this just a leisure thing…?

Catch you next week!