Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

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.

Nov 2021 Goals: 10 chin-ups, 164 lbs, 1000 YT subs

Just posting some public goals for November. But, you know, on here instead of Twitter because that’s too public for my liking.

While I do have a “Goals” category set up on this site, the only other post is this one, which fits nicely in a blockquote:

Here are some public goals for the month

Making stuff: 3 videos, 3 podcast episodes
Weight: 163 lbs
Website: Add show notes pages for previous episodes

I’ll write more about each goal in the future, but just wanted to write them down.

I did not follow up with a post going through each of the goals. So I’ll catch up now with the June goal result:

  • 3 videos: I published 14 videos (hit a groove of Shorts)
  • 3 podcasts: I published 4 episodes
  • Add show notes pages for previous episodes: missed
  • Weight – 163 lbs: missed

Okay so the goals for this month. (And I’ll write some thoughts inline this time.)

  • 10 chin-ups: I can only do 3 right now, apparently. And by apparently I do mean that I tried to do more than 3 today and couldn’t. Getting weaker and gaining weight is a terrible combo for doing chin-ups. So I’ll run Pavel’s fighter pull-up program (6 days a week) this month to get up to 10
  • 164 lbs: The struggle continues. This would be about ~2 lbs a week right now. Which is probably not really going to happen so I’ll need the help of the bloat gods to get to 164. Let’s say 166 would be okay here also. Or even, really, a solid 168 lbs. How will I get there? 4-5 days of weights weekly + lots of walking. Less volume with eating + higher fiber + higher protein. I’ll build up some better rules through the month.
  • 1000 YouTube subscribers: I’m not sure I’ve ever really written this kind of thing down. Mostly because I wanted to focus on input in my control (videos made) instead of output out of my control (subscribers). But maybe this sort of thing will help me think a little bit more about “Who am I even making content for?” Always a good question to start with.

That’s that. Ideally, I’ll make a podcast episode talking through these. Then I can check back in each week as a podcast segment. That said, I’ll write that down as a goal. A website exclusive because there’s not a bunch of room left on the index card.

  • 4 podcast episodes: This is my favorite thing to make so I need to get back to making it.

Some episode ideas, in case I think I don’t have any in the following weeks:

  • Goal review episode: As mentioned above, just talk through the goals for the month + some goal setting / habit book quotes
  • The Sovereign Individual: Do some book notes (aka talk about just how often I was reminded that I don’t know anything about government or politics)
  • Dune life lessons: Some scene + some self development lesson applied, repeat 5-7 times
  • 2021 reading update: I finally updated my book log so I’m sure I can go over some lessons from recent books
  • 7 takeaways: Different podcast takeaways from recent listens. I’ve been increasing my listening time lately.

(This goal posting is inspired by Neville Medhora, who posts his goals each month and keeps them pinned to his site’s sidebar for the month.)

Podcast Notes: David Perell on the Neville Medhora podcast

On a recent episode of Ryan Holiday’s “The Daily Stoic”, he mentions the idea that you never step in the same river twice. You should re-read great books because you’ll pull new things out since you’ve likely grown from the first time you came across a book.

It was good to listen to David after reading his work and taking his course, Write of Passage. Some things have changed and some remain as true before.

  • Changed: he’s stopped doing his podcast – Early on, it was a great way to explore a lot of different interests. It gave him a reason to reach out to experts and gave them a reason to say yes to having a one hour conversation. But you can only do so much, and he shifted his focus entirely to running his cohort based course.
    Changed: he’s stopped tweeting as much – He does say he wants to increase this, but there was a time where he was tweeting 20 times a day and really trying to grow his audience. But it got addicting and crossed a negative threshold. Now he uninstalls during the day and installs at night to catch up.
    Same: still using Evernote – It just works just well enough. When I took WOP in 2019 it seemed like there’d be a chance he’d switch entirely to Roam or entirely to Notion. He uses Notion for running things with the team but Evernote for his personal note system.
    Same: still focused on his cohort based course – He compares the live sessions to concerts. You get the same content but something about the live nature of it changes things. Students are more engaged. It’s more memorable. A culture and community is built knowing others are doing the same thing at the same time. (Neville does a mix of recorded content and live feedback sessions.)

And some other quick tips:

  • Scroll through people’s “likes” to see recent content that you’re probably interested in but from people you don’t follow directly
  • Create lists for different moods (Neville has a science list and David has a golf highlights list)
  • Don’t use acronyms in your Twitter bio (they do rapid feedback on bios at the end of the episode)

He also compared Julian Shapiro to the San Antonio Spurs. If it looks like Julian is doing something wrong with his marketing, you’re probably witnessing some new technique.

Main takeaway: find the Spurs of whatever it is you’re doing and learn from them.

Dune: 3 ways of learning

Lessons on learning from dune. There are some movie spoilers here. So this is a warning and also recommendation. Go see Dune.

Number one: if you want to learn, you can start with books.

Books capture information and knowledge from experts who have been studying these things for years, decades, centuries. In Dune, we see Paul learning from pretty much watching videos, listening to audio books.

Number two: learn from a teacher.

Paul has a bunch of different teachers. One of them is Thanos who comes in and teaches him hand-to-hand combat and how to use shields.

Number three: find someone that’s just a little bit ahead of you in whatever it is that you’re doing.

Duncan Idaho goes ahead of everyone else to Arrakis, finds the Fremen, lives with them, gains that experience, and then is able to share it with the Duke and Paul and the rest of them when they arrive on the planet.

Scott Dikkers: comedic vs. dramatic

I came across this in my Readwise highlights and the comparison also reminded me of Twitter vs. other types of media. To build an audience on Twitter, it’s rarely through showing your three dimensional self.

It’s a platform for engagement so you succeed by turning things up a notch. The short format doesn’t leave a lot of room for nuance.

You want to be a pro wrestler on social media and then show your full self through longer form content. David Perell describes his newsletters as digital postcards.

Digital postcards help your audience see a richer picture of you.