Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

4 Lessons from “Four Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Burkeman

What’s the last crazy thing you saw on the internet?

It was probably within the past day. Maybe the past hour. There are so many interesting, short, shareable things online. You can (and probably have) filled hours of a day sucked into your phone reading tweets, watching videos, refreshing for new threads, looking for comments.

At the end of a thorough session, you might have some regret. Even in the middle of it when you catch yourself going to open Instagram while you have Instagram open already, you still can’t pull yourself out of the loop.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

It’s a safe bet that none of those three million people woke up that morning with the intention of using a portion of their lives to watch a watermelon burst; nor, when the moment arrived, did they necessarily feel as though they were freely choosing to do so. “I want to stop watching so bad but I’m already committed,” read one typically rueful comment on Facebook.

It takes pretty conscious effort now to start trimming the fat out of your information diet. (And there’s for sure an interesting TikTok video explaining why fat is not the enemy, but you know what I mean.)

Add some buffer time (good rule, sometimes)

There are always going to be unexpected things that come up with long projects. So it makes sense to plan a little more time for it.

But be careful because work fills up the space you give it.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

In other words, even if you know that a given project is likely to overrun, and you adjust your schedule accordingly, it’ll just overrun your new estimated finishing time, too. It follows from this that the standard advice about planning—to give yourself twice as long as you think you’ll need—could actually make matters worse.

Use the rule when it’s worth it.

A key thing from Ali Abdaal’s PTYA course that I’ve kept in mind is that it’s important to focus your energy on getting a video out a week.

Lower your bar if necessary. Don’t expect it to be a good video each week.

But also don’t keep expanding the time you give to any one video. You’ll certainly fill the extra time up with more effort. Whether it leads to a better video is less of a certainty.

Better to put that effort toward the next video.

If it’s a feature film you’ve been working for three years on, sure, add a few more weeks to polish things.

But it’s not.

(Someday I hope to upgrade “kept in mind” to “actually applied and gained 1000s of new subscribers…)

When you think about the epiphany moments in your life…

… few of them were planned. That’s what made them so significant.

Now, you can’t live your day to day trying to optimize for random epiphanies. But it might at least remove some of the desire to control and time box every 15-minute block of your day.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

Whatever you value most about your life can always be traced back to some jumble of chance occurrences you couldn’t possibly have planned for, and that you certainly can’t alter retrospectively now. You might never have been invited to the party where you met your future spouse. Your parents might never have moved to the neighborhood near the school with the inspiring teacher who perceived your undeveloped talents and helped you shine.

If you want to have some luck, allow yourself to leave some things up to chance.

3 principles: accept problems, solve them slowly, and stay on the bus

Those are some steps toward being patient and reaping the benefits.

(1) You won’t get rid of every problem in life. There’s always going to be something that’s an issue. If your ideal vision of a future day to day is one without problems, that itself is a problem that may never go away.

(2) You might not be able to solve some problems all in one go. You can’t complete that book in a day. Take it a bite at a time. Sometimes a radically small bite at a time.

From “Four Thousand Weeks”:

The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism. The psychology professor Robert Boice spent his career studying the writing habits of his fellow academics, reaching the conclusion that the most productive and successful among them generally made writing a smaller part of their daily routine than the others, so that it was much more feasible to keep going with it day after day.

(3) If you’re trying to finish a large project, figure out the steps that lead there, then just keep walking that path. Unless you’re doing something radically innovative, there are validated paths toward finishing nearly everything. Even in innovation work, there are at least well-trodden sub-paths to stay on.

You just have to stay on that path.

Take a small step. Over and over.

Then you just keep going.

(And avoid your phone.)

5 lessons from Ali Abdaal and David Perell

Ali Abdaal has a thriving online business.

David Perell has a thriving online business.

Ali and David have a great video together where they talk about their paths to sort of the same place. Ali did it mainly through videos on YouTube. David did it mainly through writing on his blog and on public platforms.

Some takeaways:

The main part of their business is courses: As in, most of their millions of revenue are made in courses that they’ve created. Ali has one for building a YouTube channel. David has one for writing online.

But content is the engine for building an audience: You don’t build your audience for your course by starting with creating a course. (I’m guessing there are methods with ads and things but that wasn’t their path.) The students came from the audience of their work that’s available free online.

Waves to ride: Writing on a blog nobody goes to will not work. You can hitch a ride on someone else’s wave: David had posts good enough that they were shared by Tyler Cowen, who has the most popular economics blog on the internet. Ali studied the changing wave of the YouTube algorithm: he looked at what topics other successful channels did and made versions through his lens of interests. You can ride the wave of emerging platforms. You can ride the wave of topical trends.

Videos vs. writing – feedback: Ali points out that videos make it difficult to get feedback on drafts. Instead, his approach has been to get feedback on published videos to apply to the next video. However, you don’t want to fall into the trap of pressuring yourself to make every video better than the last.

Videos vs. writing – POP works for both: POP is one of David Perell’s frameworks for writing. It should be personal, observational, or playful. (Or some combination.) That works well for videos as well. A big portion of Ali’s video course is about writing your video scripts or outlines, so there’s a ton of overlap.

Those are just a few ideas and there are plenty more in the video. It’s about 40 minutes long so check it out

It takes more than a leg drop for your complete transformation

All it took was a leg drop.

In Guy Evans’s “Nitro: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner’s WCW”, there is of course a nice section on Bash at the Beach 1996. In a few seconds, Hulk Hogan goes from hero to villain.

Seemingly out of nowhere, with his unsuspecting devotees enveloped in celebration, Hulk backed up to the corner. With the coldness of a serial killer, the once-honorable hero shockingly shoved referee Anderson, and executed his patented finishing move—the leg drop—to the helpless Macho Man below.

On the bright side, It takes more than a few seconds to turn yourself into a heel.

(Or, okay, the version of yourself you don’t want to be.)

That said, we tend to default to unhealthy things: staying up late on our phones, eating junk, sitting instead of working out. So you’ll get there if you don’t take the effort to do a little good for yourself each day.

  • In Atomic Habits, James Clear describes daily habits as votes for your future self. If you want to become that image of yourself, a little over a long time is the path to get there.
  • In The Slight Edge, Jeff Olson describes a beach bum with no direction in life and the other a business success. Spoiler: they’re the same person at different times in life. The “after” comes after the person decides to make small positive changes every day.

Creator lesson: Remember that it’ll take more time than a Hulk Hogan leg drop to turn into the bizarro evil Hollywood version of yourself. Little positive actions each day (training, saying your prayers, eating your vitamins) will keep you running toward the good hulk version of you.

Small creative acts over time add up: 250 words a day, write ten video ideas a day, write down one new idea you came across each day, DM someone and let them know you enjoyed something they made…

It all adds up.

Snacking on workouts

I came across an article about the importance of being active throughout the day for older adults. I am now basically an older adult. Or at least getting there fast.

In any case, there’s a lot of good reasons to get in the practice of doing shorter workouts.

This was one of the main mental shifts that 75 Hard taught me. 45 minute workouts 2X a day isn’t exactly workout snacking. But the program does allow one of those workouts each day to be brisk walking outdoors.

I didn’t get through the program but doing it for a couple weeks (aka a few days) I saw the mental shift knowing that walking was progress.

Courtland Allen, founder of Indie Hackers, talks about a post-it note he has in his office that he tries to avoid looking at but inevitably looks at. It’s not a dreaded programming task. It says “push-ups”. The rule: when he sees it, he does push ups.

Pat Flynn and Dan John, fitness coaches, have an episode with “back pocket workouts”. These are workouts when you have some constraints.

  • If you’re constrained on time, have a full body workout that you can do in 10 minutes + 5 minutes for warming up
  • If you’re constrained on equipment, have a body weight workout (Men’s Health had these basically every month for you hotel jetsetting business execs out there)

You should figure out back pocket workouts that you enjoy and can memorize. Some ideas:

  • Just a pull up bar 1/4 Murph: 1/4 mile run, 25 pull ups, 50 push ups, 75 squats, 1/4 mile run
  • Just 15 minutes: 5 minute warm up, 10 minutes kb swings

I’ve been trying to figure out some good 25 minute workouts (5 minute warm up + 20 minute workout). I like this because

  • The pomodoro time block is a familiar time block
  • It can fit in between meetings w a little buffer to get to the home gym or apartment gym without rushing
  • It reminds me that I should warm up

It’s all a nice reminder that time shouldn’t be an excuse for skipping workouts. And practicing being flexible with these workout snacks now when I have time will make it easier in the future with kids and less time.

The Ramblings: Back on the treadder edition

Just trying to make it a habit to write daily. I’ve bombed Ship 30 for 30 again but there’s always the next cohort to give it a shot. Why write elsewhere when I have a sweet sweet empty void of my own right here?

Some lessons from the week.

  • Maybe you don’t have to work out for 90 minutes before writing: In Sean Anthony’s video about “The Golden Hour of Money” he talks about figuring out his morning routine. Which does mean going through a bunch of other routines and learning what doesn’t work. Movement is good, but a few minutes stretching gets the blood flowing enough. The more important piece is getting a focused block of writing in. For him, it’s a daily email. For you, it might be working on your novel, a video script, a blog post, etc.
  • Tim Ferriss is still the best at asking what the audience wants to ask: He went ahead and asked Cal Newport about his routine from as big as the environment down tot he 0.5mm Uni hall micro pen.

Because even if you say museum, if you’re in a city, there are multiple museums you could choose. So how did you choose a particular place? And then when you are working on some larger problem or project, what does that actually look like? Is it just pen and paper? Is it laptop where you’ve knocked out the Wi-Fi? If you could give maybe one or two real-world examples, that would be super helpful.

  • One physical notebook trick for both of them: each new book they write gets a dedicated notebook. It’s similar to Twyla Tharp keeping new dance routine contents in a banker’s box. Each project gets a box.
  • Tiago Forte points out that maybe you don’t want your note taking system to work like a brain: Our brains can be distracting for a reason. One mistake you’ll see following Evernote, Roam, Notion, etc. is that some people advocate as if there’s only one solution and that they’ve found it. (That goes for plenty of things beyond note taking apps, of course.) Ali Abdaal has returned to simple Apple Notes. Tiago is back to Evernote. David Perell still uses Evernote in his process. And many people get plenty done with Google Docs. Simplicity on the other side of complexity. (If I were writing this in a zettelskan I would write that I heard that phrase from Ali Abdaal.)
  • Speaking of, he did a webinar with David Perell leading into the next Write of Passage cohort. His main takeaway from when he took Write of Passage? POP writing. Remember: Powerful, observational, playful.

Alright enough rambling for today. (Aka I hit 45 mins on the treadmill.)

Lessons from Draymond Green (The Old Man and the Three)

Some lessons from Draymond Green on JJ Redick’s “Old Man and the Three”

  • Your window isn’t closed: Okay this is more of a timing thing, but he admits to JJ Redick that he did think that the championship window closed. Klay has a major injury and you know that KD’s going to leave. You have a terrible losing season.
  • You can be among the best in the world and not love what you’re doing: Draymond talks about how few people understand and love basketball in the NBA. (And he mentions Durant just absolutely loves basketball. He’ll watch 10 year olds play.)
  • Behind Ja’s highlights are instincts showing high basketball IQ: We all love seeing Ja’s game winners and dunks. Even his missed dunks are great. But Draymond talks about how Ja is showing really high basketball IQ in how he plays.
  • Clippers were front runners (but not JJ Redick): If we hit them in the mouth, they’ll fold. He doesn’t name people, but he does say JJ was one of the people who wouldn’t fold in those circumstances.
  • Modern player empowerment began with The Decision: LeBron and team might’ve done some things differently with the announcement, but the decision to join the Heat was a good one. Players realized the negotiation power they have and the platforms that they have.