Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Pull-ups for your brain, studying effectively, and skill before passion: Cal Newport and Pat Flynn — Active Recall Sketched

Cal Newport is the author of Deep Work, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, and How to Become a Straight A Student. In his interview with Pat Flynn, Cal goes over lessons from each book and goes a little bit deeper on Deep Work. Cal says that his books follow his life. As his career progressed he wrote about what he was going through.

Pat asks Cal when he started thinking about performance. Cal says he knows exactly when it was and it was sophomore year of college. When writing How to Become a Straight A Student, Cal interviewed top students and looked for patterns between them.

His main takeaway: active recall is the single best way to study. Re-reading a chapter? Waste of time. Active recall is the whole ball game.

(Yes, this is where I got the title of these videos and the podcast!)

Cal wrote So Good They Can’t Ignore You early in his career as a professor. It’s a book about starting your career and picking something to pursue with your work. It takes a stance against the popular idea of following your passion. Instead, Cal argues that you should first focus on skill. Becoming very good makes you passionate about it. In turn, you’ll really enjoy your work.

When thinking of things I’ve changed my mind about in the past few years, this book comes to mind. I was pretty deep in the camp of following your passion and doing what you love.

There’s something to the idea of working on things that interested you when you were younger. However, it’s difficult to have a thriving career doing things you love and enjoy the entire time. Getting there requires a little more than faith and passion. Surfing in your free time is a lot different than teaching surf lessons to Wall Street guys on vacation.

(I also like what Derek Sivers has to say about balance. You can pursue both money and art but keeping them separate might be a very good idea.)

Cal’s most recent book is Deep Work. Last year, I read a book a week but Deep Work actually affected my life the most. I learned to evaluate work I spend time on and identify which are most important.

I also started thinking about focus as a skill rather than a trait that we’re born with or not. I became more aware of how addicting technology can be. I started finding blocks of time for undistracted work. I’m still working on improving this. It’s the one thing I can do to increase my effectiveness.

Cal describes deep work as a skill not a habit. You start with shorter blocks of deep work. Then you can increase the amount of time until you’re able to focus for long blocks of time.

One trick to help with this is scheduling your distractions. Pat points out that it’s like a cheat meal when dieting. You can push on a little further without giving into a distraction. There’s a set time when you’ll be able to check your phone, check your email, or check social media.

Sum up

Here are some tips for every step in your career:

  • Use active recall if you’re learning something new (and hey, use Active Recall as well!)
  • Understand the connection between getting good at something and being passionate about it.
  • Find undistracted blocks of time to do deep work in. it is a skill not a habit or a trait you are born with.

As a form of active recall, I’m making videos and podcasts. I’ll try deepening my knowledge while sharing it with other people. 

Have fun, help others, and meditate: Lessons from Drama and Lewis Howes — Active Recall Sketched

I recently started listening to Short Story Long, a podcast by Chris ‘Drama’ Pfaff. Drama is the founder of Young and Reckless and also appeared on MTV’s Fantasy Factory and Rob & Big.

I only know him as Rob’s assistant and cousin on Rob & Big, and I’m not the only one. He talks about that on this episode. “People think I’m an idiot.” It only takes a few minutes listening to his podcast to see that he’s smart, driven, and insightful.

Lewis Howes hosts a podcast called The School of Greatness where he interviews top performers. He also has a laundry list of business and athletic accomplishments.

Lewis Howes has hosted his podcast for a few years now and right away flips it and sort of interviews Drama. He asks how it’s been in the months since Big Black passed away.

“Life’s tough, but you’ve gotta have fun.”

A few months ago, he had Big Black on as a guest on Short Story Long. That’s a great episode also. Particularly if you watched Rob & Big. Or even just know what the show was.

On his appearance, Big says that he promised himself he’d do the show until it wasn’t fun. It stopped being fun so he finished the season and was out of there. He had a kid and moved his family out of Hollywood.

Helping others and maturing in motivation

Drama and Lewis talk about how their motivation changed as they got older. Doubters are the best motivators. So many people are driven by trying to prove people wrong. It can be satisfying. The first few times.

Then it’s draining. You can’t just go from one chip on your shoulder to the next. Well, Michael Jordan could. What I’m saying is it’s probably not a good idea to be fueled by negativity.

When they got older, Drama and Lewis focused on helping other people. That eventually led to opportunities later where other people helped them. But don’t keep score. It’s not transactional. You build an audience by helping others. You make connections by helping others.

Meditate, visualize, and express gratitude

Lewis flips it on Drama again and has him talk through his goals for the next year. Then he asks what the biggest obstacle in the way is. Drama’s answer? “My brain.”

Meditation is one way to handle that obstacle. Lewis has meditated for many years and Drama has picked it up more recently. He says it’s helped him alleviate some anxiety.

Lewis also visualizes his day. He thinks about what challenges the day might bring and pictures the conversations he might have. It’s good preparation for going through the day.

To end his day, he expresses gratitude. I really liked this idea: you can be frustrated and grateful, but not at the same time. It’s good to be aware of that, so if you catch yourself feeling frustrated, you can express gratitude. Lewis says he and his girlfriend tell each other what they’re grateful for right before sleeping.

Sounds like a practice worth trying out.

Recap

Let’s make this long post short:

  • Have fun because it’s one of the best ways to get through tough times.
  • Look at where you might have negative motivation and think about how you might be able switch to positive, extrinsic motivation.
  • Be aware that your thoughts can be obstacles. They are also just thoughts and there are tools to deal with the destructive ones.

I’ll be listening to a lot more episodes of Short Story Long and School of Greatness and I recommend that you do too. Thanks for checking this out and make sure to check the video!

04: The Slight Edge

(Check us out on iTunes!)

Wally and I renamed the podcast to Active Recall. I explained some of the reasoning in this episode and in my previous newsletter post. This week, we discussed The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson. Amazing book. Here are some other links:

Some additional notes about the book

This excerpt gives a good sense of what The Slight Edge is about:

The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters. Successful people just do the things that seem to make no difference in the act of doing them and they do them over and over and over until the compound effect kicks in.

Everything adds up. even the small things. Particularly the small things. Even if you don’t know think about the slight edge it still has an effect on you and has had an affect on you your entire life. This book brings awareness to the small things that you do everyday. These are the decisions you don’t think about often. 

There’s often a bad habit where a good habit might be. If they’re bad then you can work to change them or remove them completely. You can structure things and change your environment so that you make good decisions without thinking.

These daily habits complement deliberate practice. Deliberate practice means you’re trying to improve the skill efficiently. You work at it for a few hours each day. It’s hard and it it should stretch you. The Slight Edge talks about the time outside of your deliberate practice. Professional athletes work hard in practice. It’s structured and deliberate. The rest of the day is structured to do the small things right. It all adds up.

There’s a book called Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? I haven’t read it, but I did read a summary on Blinkist. It’s about creating a focusing question. It’s by a member of the Men’s Rowing Eight team that won gold at the 2000 Olympics. “Will it make the boat go faster?” could be asked throughout the day to make the right decisions, even for the small things. If you have a goal in mind then you can think of a focusing question that will help guide you to make the small choices that matter day in and day out.

You can set big goals for the future but you only get there one step at a time. Once in a while they’ll be giant leaps, but they’ll usually be baby steps. Make sure they’re going in the right direction.

03: Barking Up the Wrong Tree

Check out the full notes for Barking Up the Wrong Tree

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Wally and I discussed Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker. We focused on the first chapter, which explains filtered leaders, unfiltered leaders, and the environments they succeed in. Filtered leaders get filtered through school, more school, and then the corporate ladder. These are your valedictorians. The only issue? They end up successful, but they aren’t the world changers. Unfiltered people shake things up. They make their own ladder and come in through the window. So you should quit your job and aim to be unfiltered to really succeed, right? Well… Barking Up the Wrong Tree reminded me to think about what success really means. The first chapter talks about unfiltered leaders changing the world. A few chapters later you see unfiltered people going too far to succeed. They aren’t happy and they can make the people around them miserable. Maybe a filtered approach is better in the long run. I’d bet the answer is somewhere in the middle. Which, of course, gives us a lot of choices. I loved this line from the book:

“Here’s the problem: We love

having

choices. We hate

making

choices.”

Good choice: reading this book. If reading alone led to results, I’d be captioning a sponsored post of my 8-pack for fitness IG instead of writing this. Good choice: applying principles from this book.

  • You: Learn who you are so you know which pond to swim in
  • Your friends: Be grateful for the friendships you have with good people
  • Your work: Align your work with your values

Easier said than done, but the effort will lead to success. However you define it.

As far as the podcast goes, we’re applying some advice from the book:

“Good enough is good enough.”

It’s a great book and this episode doesn’t do it justice. I want to do another episode down the line when we get more reps in and are better at this. I tried out using podcast chapters to help jump through parts of the episode. Then I learned that Apple’s Podcast app stopped supporting chapters a few versions ago. I’ll list them out here:

  • 0:00 – Wally talks lengua and Ces talks podcasts
  • 5:40 – Do you remember your graduation walk?
  • 7:34 – Ces sends Wally a book: Barking Up the Wrong Tree
  • 16:11 – Sorting out the clip mic situation
  • 20:26 – One book at a time or many?
  • 33:04 – Getting back to the book
  • 39:09 – Ces talks Drama

And some links from the show.

Next week we’ll be talking about The Slight Edge. Thanks for listening!

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.