Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

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.

Digital gardening with WordPress

Just jotting some quick thoughts after fixing a few things on the site. I updated some of the CSS on the single book notes page to better differentiate the individual posts. And I fixed some heading styling that was off. And I added the individual posts’ feature image which I forgot to include in the template I wrote months ago.

A bunch of small things that add up to a little bit of a better reading experience.

But the reason I mention it is that, for whatever reason, I feel like I accomplished something. Especially compared to the likely alternative of scrolling Twitter repeatedly or refreshing NBA and MMA reddit.

In his book Creative Quest, Questlove talks about maintaining his hard drive of mp3s—tagging, correcting titles, de-duping files, etc.

When I’ve had the opportunity to do that, or when I have met people who do that, they find it immensely gratifying. They notice things they wouldn’t ordinarily notice. Their senses sharpen. Their heart rate slows down. Many mornings, I try to do something equally Zen-like, and most of the time that means going into my MP3 catalog and pruning it. I notice song titles. I notice how things are organized. That starts me toward thinking about my own work in a structured creative context.

A little bit of digital gardening.

It’s a form of gardening, maybe: Is that a better metaphor? To end up with beautiful flowers and healthy plants, you have to be in regular contact with them. You have to prune. You have to tend. That’s the duty of the curator.

Nearly every day.

Maintaining the collection defines most of my days. When I wake up in the morning, I spend about two hours scaling down and cataloging. (Even as I am writing, I’m Shazaming all the titleless “Track 1” files in my collection—almost nine hundred at the moment!)

In today’s stream-everything world, maintaining mp3s seems like an archaic practice.

In today’s social-everything world, editing some CSS (and guess-and-checking a PHP template) on a personal blog seems like an archaic practice.

But it’s satisfying.

(Check out some book notes here.)

Podcast Notes: Ali Abdaal on “The Daily Stoic”

  • Podcast
    The Daily Stoic
  • Episode Title
    Ali Abdaal on the Keys to Productivity and Re-Defining Success | Take This Motto To Heart
  • Episode links
    Apple Podcasts • Spotify

Ali Abdaal is a YouTuber and former doctor (and formerly a doctor who did YouTube on the side, which he talks about). Ryan Holiday asks Ali about his writing process (he’s currently writing a book), identity and tying it to career, delegating and figuring out what you can do, choosing to do the fun things in a project, and the endless pursuit of even more autonomy.

  • You always want more autonomy: They talk about different people they’ve come across. Ali knows a lot of successful doctors who are trying to find a second career. Ryan knows successful startup founders who want to write books instead. Ali knows YouTubers who are beholden to their personal brands and the content treadmill. It goes on and on. 

Ali Abdaal: Even with, you know, creators like YouTubers, influencers… in a way you get into it because of the autonomy. But then you realize, oh crap, I’m continuing on this hamster wheel of content. And I’m so entrenched in it now that I would love to build a brand that’s actually outside of me.

Ryan Holiday: Yes. Well, you want to be able to scale what you’re doing, so it’s not so dependent on you, but then you just built it as your name and you can’t.

  • Do the fun parts: Ali talks about trying to design his life and work so that he’s doing fun things. He realized a lot of people would want to get to where the main thing they needed to do was would be the creative work on a YouTube channel. At a certain point, he was delegating that away to his team, even though he enjoyed it and was uniquely good at it. He realized he was taking that for granted and switched things up to be more involved in the creative thinking again. This reminded me of something Courtland Allen talked about on Indie Hackers—he optimizes to do the fun parts. Particularly with the podcast, Courtland got to where he pretty much just does notes to prep and shows up for the interview. Scheduling and editing and show notes are done by his team.

Ali Abdaal: I found that actually just optimizing for what’s fun has been the single biggest hack for my productivity ever.

  • Writing notes and a book: Ali talks about how different it is to write something that won’t be released for a couple years compared to the instant gratification that YouTube gives you. Ryan talks about his note-taking process and how the extra (and tactile) steps to create a single note in his notecard system mean he just interacts with ideas more from the start. His gripe with digital notes are that you have huge quantity with the tradeoff of time spent with the idea you’re capturing initially.
  • Ali’s using Apple Notes: For all the content he’s made about productivity and tools and systems… he’s back to using plain Apple Notes for a lot of his writing. It’s fast and reliable. Ryan mentions skepticism with some of the elaborate digital note systems that people have. Ali concurs: you can do all of those things but they don’t erase the need to sit down and do the hard work. For him, right now, it’s writing the book.

Ryan Holiday: People set up these sort of Rube Goldberg machines instead of just getting to the fastest thing, which is–yeah–just sitting down and doing the work. The writing sucks or whatever, making the video or coming up with the idea. That’s the hard part.

So I think sometimes we add all this stuff on top of. I don’t know why, but we do.

  • The daily highlight: Ali says if he could only give one piece of advice about productivity to someone who’s trying to get things in order, it’d be to do the daily highlight described in Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky’s Make Time. Write down one thing you want to accomplish. That’s usually enough for a day.

Two modern masters of content who are very deliberate about designing their lives. Great listen.