Active Recall!

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Rickson Gracie on teaching children

“If you push kids too hard, too young, they will quit forever. Parents should never burden their kids with their unfulfilled ambitions, frustrations, anxiety, or any other form of emotional baggage. The parents’ support must be consistent. The most important thing is that the child gets the experience—win, lose, or draw—without judgment.”— Breathe: A Life in Flow by Rickson Gracie, Peter Maguire

The Gracie family did some unconventional things. At a certain point, Carlos and Hélio (Rickson’s uncle and dad, respectively) decide to father as many children as they can. 21 boys of 30 children with 8 different mothers.

So you might assume that they also took a Marv Marinovich approach to training the children in Jiu-Jitsu. But there’s an emphasis on picking yourself up when you lose and also having fun.

My dad was a tough and demanding teacher, but he never pushed us the way I see some parents push their kids in Jiu Jitsu today. Why would a kid want to train if his dad yells at him the whole time? My father understood this, and his message was always, “If you win, great! But if you don’t, stand up and try again!” My earliest memories of Jiu Jitsu are fun, even playful.

Some things this reminded me of

  • László Polgár teaching his daughters chess
  • Tim Grover and the book Winning which I’m reading right now. There are different levels of having a winning mentality. Would you be okay being on a team of assholes if you win championships? Top level winners would think that was a rhetorical question.
  • Courtland Allen, on his Indie Hackers podcast, said he sometimes thinks with the constraint: what if I only did the fun parts? It can’t be applied to the entire business and through the entire life of a business. But he’s at a stage now where he’s able to apply it to the podcast. He does the research and outline + the actual interview. That’s what’s fun for him. He doesn’t do audio editing, titles, show notes, transcripts, etc. his team takes care of that and it probably helps him stay consistent and enthusiastic about doing the podcast. Which then likely has a positive effect on the energy in an interview.

Takeaway: if your kid is choked out at 5 years old, don’t yell at them.

Michael Jordan, consistent

“We kept every game day consistent—trained the same muscles, did the same kind of workout, accounted for every component that might affect his shot and his endurance, eliminated as many of those variables as we could, so his body became prepared to play under the same conditions, regardless of the game schedule.” — Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by Tim S. Grover

I am, of course, walking on a treadmill and not winning my 6th NBA championship.

In any case, I started reading this book as I’m sort of doing 75 Hard (which, of course doesn’t actually suggest “sort of” doing it or you’re not doing the program at all). Part of the program is reading ten pages every day.

I decided to pick this one up because I’ve already read Can’t Hurt Me and wanted something new to tell me how soft I am.

I picked this quote about consistency because I’m trying to get back into doing small things for the long haul.

Sometimes the issue with writing is picking what to write about. Or picking a specific quote. Or transcribing a podcast clip. Basically a bunch of stuff that isn’t actually writing.

So my small daily writing goal can be grabbing a single book quote and writing a little bit about it. This will…

  • Help me keep track of what I’m reading day to day
  • Allow me to write a little bit without needing to think of a topic

Then when I record the podcast every week I can try to just open this blog and talk about some of the posts I’ve written.

And if I do this a few times a week, I’ll finally win 6 NBA championships.

Young Bill Gates would have been an NFT degen

I’ve been reading “Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire” by James Wallace and Jim Erickson. Overlapping with my time reading this, I started learning about the curious world of NFTs. Which leads to this list of tenuous connections between Bill Gates and NFTs.

Bill Gates would be comfortable using the world computer

Bill Gates used a teletype machine in his early days learning to program. You needed to purchase computer time for the teletype systems.

Today? Popular NFTs have their related contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. An ELI5 explanation describes it as a worldwide computer. And, similar to purchasing computer time, you do transactions that cost different amounts of gas.

The Lakeside Mothers Club would likely be raising money that had a chance of being blown trying to mint NFTs without understanding gas fees.

(Bill definitely would’ve understood how to get the MetaMask settings right, though.)

Bill Gates was using the computer so much that his parents grounded him

Young men addicted to The Machine had no sense of limits, he said. They had tunnel vision, unable to see the real world.

He was… pretty much fine with it. He had plenty of other curiosities to follow.

In NFT-land, you’ll see plenty of people with interests outside of crypto. Because NFTs can involve skills from different fields, those outside interests can be valuable in building up a broader perspective.

And who doesn’t enjoy a Lindy walk?

He knew how to flip things

There are the stories out there of people trading up from some random 0.01 ETH pfp all the way to a Cryptopunk. That takes some hustle and timing.

Gates had an eye for this, like in the above story where he’s able to see the novelty value for memorabilia of a dropped candidate.

Revenge to 159: 6 of 9

Alright so the check in:

  • Current weight: 169 lbs
  • Initial goal: 159 lbs
  • Adjusted goal: 164 lbs
  • Weeks left: 3

Not great but picking up some momentum.

What’s been working: two a days for the mindset

As mentioned in the last update, aiming for two workouts daily has helped mentally. It’s just a nice way to bookend the days. I previously looked forward to my morning workouts. Adding the night cardio has been good in a few different ways.

  • Getting reading in: the night cardio makes it clear that I can read while walking on a treadmill. It’s often time I’d waste on the couch on the phone anyway. So I think it’s helping clean up the info diet a bit as well.
  • Getting writing in: I’ve been building up the journaling habit (using the 5 Minute Journal app) and have been getting back to blogging the past few weeks. It seems to be good for my head even if there are no extrinsic results. I’m not going viral or building the audience with these blog posts. But I’m probably being a little more present with reading and retaining information through writing. Good for the long game, maybe?
  • Getting the pre-bed routine started
  • Maybe some metabolism benefits (?) though this might backfire because there’s probably some mental thing of “oh I can eat a little more because I’ll do my cardio later…”

Also, just a note: writing makes the cardio time just disappear. Writing generally just makes time melt away for me. I love it when it’s on the treadmill or bike. I absolutely hate when time melts away while I’m sitting at a desk on a weekend.

Here I’ll just post that quote from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years as a reminder.

I only say this because part of the reason my life had become uninspiring is I’d sat down to earn a living. Literally, I sat in a chair and typed words. And that’s fine, because I like the work, and it pays the rent. But Jordan was right: my life was a blank page, and all I was putting on the page were words. I didn’t want to live in words anymore; I wanted to live in sweat and pain.

I already have a career behind a desk. I don’t want to spend the leisure behind it as well.

The “one workout must be outdoors” rule of 75 Hard is having some effect on me as well. I’m looking for more opportunities to get outside when possible.

What can be improved: After dinner snacking

There was a time in my life where I didn’t understand dessert. That’s exaggerating, but I usually reserved dessert for restaurant outings.

Now it’s as if I need to top the day off with dessert. I want to get that mentality out. Because it just seems so wasteful to eat well through the day and then toss it out the window with a little too much after dinner.

I’ll just throw a Bigger, Leaner, Stronger quote in here for some motivation. Michael Matthews describes the crystal ball of delusion:

be on the lookout for the lure of future virtue justifying today’s vice. Avoid the trap of viewing Future You as some abstract entity whose emotions and desires will be different than Present You’s. Realize that, when tomorrow comes, the chances of actually following through on what you didn’t do earlier are slim. More often than not, you’re going to find yourself in the exact same state of mind as previously, and you’re going to sell yourself a little further down the river.

Which reminds me of something Tim Urban said in a Q&A: he doesn’t back the car into a parking spot, but it’s probably worth doing. You can do your future self a little favor by backing into parking spots.

I nearly always default to backing into parking spots. Not as a metaphor for life, but maybe I should start thinking of it that way.

What to experiment with: Bigger, Leaner, Stronger

Dan John has a saying along the lines of: it’s going so well, do you have suggestions for how can I screw it up? We get bored with boring things that work.

Doing RPT training 3X a week was working pretty well, but I want to switch it up a bit. Mostly for the sake of wanting to switch it up a bit.

Actually, there’s a little more reason: I’m making the time to work out daily so I should add some more weight sessions in if possible.

The argument against: you shouldn’t spend life in the gym. The argument for: time in the gym makes life outside of it better.

Or something.

Anyway, I started reviewing the 5-day program from Bigger, Leaner, Stronger and will try to use it in these last three weeks before my next NYC trip.

I did actually see results from it when I was doing it late last year. But then the gym shut down and I couldn’t reasonably replace the weight routine with lighter kettlebell equivalents without it just being an entirely different program altogether.

But I’m back to it, so I’ll let you know how it goes.

Info diet check in (Monday — September 20, 2021)

Scriptnotes: 10 Year Anniversary (podcast)

I always enjoy a good podcast anniversary episode because it’s often a podcast about podcasting. In this one, John and Craig are interviewed by Julia Turner and they talk about starting the show and how it’s affected their lives.

They know that people listen to it while still finding the numbers hard to believe—you could fill a college football stadium with the number of people that listen to each episode.

They didn’t expect such a broad audience: they expected to have LA listeners because it can be a really industry-focused show. But plenty of people listen from around the United States and around the world. And plenty of listeners have no intention of writing screenplays but just find writing and the development of TV & movies interesting.

“Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire” by James Wallace (book)

Finished reading this earlier this week and have really enjoyed it. Sometimes I try to avoid reading books related to tech because I don’t want to think about work during leisure hours. But I think I’m just very interested in tech which is what got me into my career in the first place. I’m finding older tech history books to strike a good balance of exploring my curiosity without directly thinking “Oh how do I apply this to some very specific, very current work problem…?”

(Game development books are another outlet for me because they’re tech & design related—but not about SaaS products.)

Oh yeah so thoughts on the book itself—this really gave me a better understanding of how Microsoft came to be Microsoft. It also made me realize that, growing up in the 90s, the company was it was already. I didn’t really know the history. Bill Gates was the first richest person from whenever I could understand what it meant to be the world’s richest person.

He talks about that rapid ascent: one year he’s a millionaire, the next he’s got 10 million, the next he’s got 100 million.

Toward the end of the book, he’s become a billionaire. And I actually believe him when he says it’s not about the money and he doesn’t worry too much about the stock price, knowing then that software stocks would be extremely volatile. (I believe him more than many people today who say they don’t care about money but then their company’s purpose is some combo of buzzwords + humanity.)

Fun fact: First version of Excel was for the Mac

The Danny Miranda Podcast: Andrew Warner

Danny’s been podcasting for a year and Andrew’s been podcasting for ten years. This one was great in a bit of a Socratic method sort of way—Danny asks questions about how to interview well and Andrew’s thought deeply about it for years.

  • Hunter-gatherer interviewing: They discuss Joe Rogan’s effectiveness as an interviewer. He’ll poke at different topics with a guest and if there’s nothing there he’ll be happy to move to a different topic. Once there’s some substance then he’ll be able to go deep with them on that topic. Guests have fun. Listeners have fun. Everyone benefits.
  • Heroes and goats: People hit game winning shots or the grounder bounces between their legs. Society rarely cares about the people in between because we want black and white stories. But it can be good to take a look at both sides. When did heroes fail and what can you learn from that? What helped goats rise to prominence in the first place before their fall and what can you learn from that?
  • Change the voice in your head:  You’re the average of the five people you’re around the most. Your thoughts work in a similar way depending on what you’re putting in your head.

These are a couple good voices to have inside your head. Danny’s coming on one year now with podcasting and it’s inspiring to see his tenacity with it. He’s  got me wanting to turn the mic back on and get to recording.