Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Nov 2021 Goals: End of month recap

Well, I have my midpoint dark night of the soul.

Quick goal recap:

  • 10-chins
  • 164 lbs
  • 1000 YT subs

I’m writing this on the 28th, but let’s see…

Goal: 10-chins — Actual: a double chin

Couldn’t resist. Actual is more like 6 or 7. The last pyramid I did was 5,4,3,3,2. In hindsight, I set this goal without knowing what my base was to start. I thought it was already at 5 but it was more like 3.

And a hard 3 reps, at that.

What went well: Using Pavel’s fighter pull-up program. Pretty much daily pyramids. It worked like a charm. When I did it.

What didn’t go well: Skipped 5 days during a road trip. I definitely could have found a chin-up bar somewhere in the area or gone to a playground. But I didn’t.

What to try next: Next time I go on a road trip I’ll take my door bar with me.

  • December 2021 updated goal: 11 reps

Goal: 164 lbs (-8 lbs) — Actual: 172 lbs (-0 lbs)

What went well: Maybe a small victory in not completely blowing it during a taco filled road trip.

What didn’t go well: I mean, the same thing where I do well and then blow it on the weekends.

What to try next: Bringing the extreme rule back. The no holds barred, Iron Man, submission only rule of: one pound of broccoli daily.

  • December 2021 updated goal: 164 lbs

Goal: 1000 subscribers — Actual: 689 subscribers

What went well: I did upload four videos. So the creation was there.

What didn’t go well: I didn’t share the videos anywhere even though I could have at least mentioned them on Twitter or done a thread version. I also could have done some iPad and MacOS things.

What to try next: Maybe a video like “turning my Home Screen into a goals dashboard” with Things, Drafts, Shortcuts, and Readwise.

  • December 2021 updated goal: 1000 subscribers

Let’s go. The reason I’m writing this post is because I do want to make a goals video. And I was trying to think “where could I write the outline so that I remember to make a video later?”

Blog posts should be my default intermediate packet. All the other notes apps are ambiguous as far as whether I’m writing privately or publicly.

The blog is low friction and, importantly, obviously public.

The courage to be normal

PHILOSOPHER: You are probably rejecting normality because you equate being normal with being incapable. Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority.
YOUTH: Fine, I acknowledge the danger of aiming to be special. But does one really need to make the deliberate choice to be normal?
“The Courage to Be Disliked” by Ichiro Kishimi

I read something recently—and I’m actively trying to remember what it was, typing this out just to stall hoping it’ll come back to me…. drat—about how success is being able to do nothing and feel no guilt about it.

Actually, it might be Nassim Nicolas Taleb. One sec…

Yep, here it is:

“You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.”
—“The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (Incerto Book 4)” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I’ve gotten to the point where, if i have a free day on the weekend, I make plans to make stuff. It’d be great if I then actually made stuff. But often I end up not making stuff and feeling guilty about it.

Ali Abdaal also has talked about this, though I can’t remember if he coined a phrase for it. But basically he’ll recognize a day might be going astray and he’ll just lean into it and be deliberate about it just being a leisure day.

You can get a lot done in one day. But what kind of life have you designed if you can’t afford to take one day off?

Ramblings: Accepting that I can’t make a video in an hour

“Moderate-intensity exercise, practiced for a moderate length of time, improves our ability to think both during and immediately after the activity. The positive changes documented by scientists include an increase in the capacity to focus attention and resist distraction; greater verbal fluency and cognitive flexibility; enhanced problem-solving and decision-making abilities; and increased working memory, as well as more durable long-term memory for what is learned.” — The Extended Mind: The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain by Annie Murphy Paul

Getting back to basics and writing this on the recumbent bike after doing a 25 minute kettlebell routine (5–4–3–2–1 pyramid, 3 rounds of swings/squats/push-ups).

I was feeling blocked creatively and I think it’s because I’m trying to make too many things in too short of a time. I keep having this hunch that I can make a video in like 90 minutes.

In my head I’ve done it before. (1) I’m probably wrong about how long it took and (2) it probably wasn’t one of the good ones that Ive done.

Making a video worth watching takes longer than that.

It’s like trying to get all the results in a single short workout. It takes more than that.

I do the podcast and videos. I want one of them to be the creating thing and one to be the documenting thing. Or I don’t know if it’s a vice versa thing. I can use the podcast (and this blog) to document this new focus on making videos + share any creative lessons.

What would this week’s creative question be?

  • I don’t have writer’s block but I have trouble finishing work near the end when I realize I don’t have everything in place to do a final recording until I’m midway into recording, what should I do?

Okay that might capture it. Taking a step back and pretending this isn’t me… Time for some checklists before recording.

  • I know that having book quotes ties things together.
  • I know I can add visuals in editing.
  • I know that things need to be moving on screen or else the video looks dead when a quote is sitting there static.

That’s a start. And then maybe I can add a motivational quote or something here. About how the resistance shows up at the end.

In Nobody Wants to Read Your Shit, Steven Pressfield talks about putting the work in over the years and still looking at the work and it’s still not good enough to get over the hump:

And yet you’re learning. You don’t know what. You can’t say how. But the months and years, the millions of keystrokes and erasures go into the bank somehow. The cells remember. Something changes.

Keep going.

Updated podcast and videos archives

I updated the podcast archives and video archives — again, there’s something satisfying about whipping out some PHP and CSS and spending way too much time on something that would probably take an expert 10 minutes.

video archives.png

I also updated the single post pages for podcasts and videos. Podcasts now have a list of episodes in the left sidebar and videos have a list of videos in the left sidebar.

Screenshot of archives

 

I’m hoping this will somehow encourage me to add all the missing episodes and videos to these pages. And that will somehow help with SEO in some way.

Fixing the digital garden a little bit at a time.

Sketch of a homepage

I want to improve the homepage for this site so I started sketching this thing out.

I think this is within reason for me to build in WordPress at some point as a project. I do want to try building it with TailwindCSS and I know there might be a time sink trying to get that to play well with whatever other stuff I’ve jammed into my WordPress installation and forgot about.

I keep, as always, coming back in circles to what I want to build long term. And now I’m back in the phase of “The website should be the home for everything.” And I can clean up the podcast archives, create a better video archive, a home for Twitter threads, etc.

We’ll see how this goes.

3 ideas from visual experts

I often talk about my gadgets and tools along with thoughts on creativity. The tool talk is very specific, the creativity is very abstract. I’m starting to see a gap in the middle where I should probably write about actually making visuals.

First up, three of my favorite sources of visual inspiration.

Jack Butcher: use constraints so you don’t need to make the same decision 1000 times

There are different reasons constraints are good for creativity. One is that a constrained set of tools means you don’t need to pick your tools out every day.

What if a barber, every single day, could pick from any set of blades and scissors and whatever other tool barbers might use… they’d eventually come in and narrow the set down and re-pick the same tools. But it’d take a little bit of thought. Because mayyyybe they want to try out some other tool. Or mayyyybe that one customer will come in today and I’ll need some other widget.

If you come in to make a visual without a design system and tools you’re familiar with, some of your energy will be spent on that.

If you come in, your tools are set and your guidelines remove many choices, then you can focus your energy on translating ideas to visuals.

Dan Roam: Ping pong from words to visuals to words to visuals

A technique Dan Roam recommends is taking a bunch of words you want to represent visually and then drawing them in nearly a straight translation. No big abstraction. Nothing clever. Just draw visual representations of the main words in the idea.

Then write a description of what you drew. Then draw words from that description. With each round of this there will be fewer words and visuals will be combined and simplified.

Repeat until satisfied.

Carl Richards: Get to where you can fire yourself

You want to fire yourself.

Not as the designer. But as the critic. In whatever ways possible, find someone else to give feedback on your work. For Carl, editors at The New York Times we’re happy to tell him something doesn’t work and pick from the options he provided.

For others, this is where online platforms become critical. The faster you start hitting publish on your work and sharing it with the world, the faster you’ll be collecting data to reflect on. Slowly, at first. But if you keep it up you’ll soon have an idea of what’s working and what’s not. You can predict if something works or not and then compare it to the data later. That helps you build your intuition.

And if you’re worried that’s too robotic, you can also try to compare the work you do completely for yourself and the work that may be pandering to the audience (or the algorithm).

If you’re doing it entirely for yourself, for creative expression, that’s fine too. But don’t get frustrated if you don’t have an audience.