Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Info diet check-in (August 13, 2021)

This morning, I bought a book based on Tim Ferriss’s recommendation in his newsletter to just buy it without reading the description or reviews.

Lesson: the most important part of an email isn’t the subject line, it’s the “from:”

Maybe these info diet check ins can be my minimum effective dose for writing.

    Build a bit of awareness: It might help me notice that all I listen to is My First Million and Not Investment Advice, but I already knew that. It’ll be good to capture the other things that I’m listening to or reading.
    Practice writing short descriptions: I’ve always enjoyed Polina Marinova Pompliano’s The Profile and how good she is at two core newsletter elements: curiosity in the link title + succinct descript of why you’ll want to read the full profile. Maybe I can get reps in with these info diet posts.
    Reduce churn in my own writing: I pretty much write a private version of these posts anyway, scattered across Roam, Evernote, and Drafts. It’s not too big a step to write with publishing in mind.

Okay on to these links.

My First Million: Why you need a chief automation officer (w/ Steph Smith)

Invest in yourself: Shaan and Steph acknowledge this is a bit of a cop out answer to “what do you invest in?” so she goes further into what investing in herself actually means. Buy anything education related: currently taking a Python automation course. Never look at the market. Invests in her own time.

Bike metaphor: If you’ll do a big goal, it’s a cross country trip. Lay the map out. Eliminate all the stuff that’s unnecessary. Get an electric bike. Eliminate, automate, delegate.

Underrated – job shadowing: More people should be shadowing others in their jobs. First, it’s a great way to learn how to do a job. Second, it’s a great way to identify places to automate pieces of other people’s jobs.

All in vs. side hustles: The podcast was Shan’s hobby while he was at Twitch. He doesn’t think the part time approach will work for full on businesses. He’s big on mindset, so working on something part time that needs full time conviction is a recipe for failure.

Okay I was going to write more episode notes but I didn’t expect that intro to go so long.

Next post will be after this trip, back in SF.

5 creator lessons from The Suicide Squad

“Oh so that’s what they were trying to do with the first one.”

I watched The Suicide Squad last night and saw that comment somewhere on reddit or Twitter. I really enjoyed it. So here are some lessons if you’re a generalist creator.

(Light spoilers ahead.)

1.) Just run it back!

It’s sort of a reboot, except Harley Quinn’s character continues on from the first movie. It’s hard for a story to get that kind of shot again in Hollywood.

But you’re not in Hollywood!

You’re writing threads on Twitter or making videos in a single day.

Take advantage of the medium and that you don’t need permission from a studio. Get a lot of reps in and find a way to get feedback, then get even more reps in.

2.) Do it the long way

James Gunn shared on Twitter so this isn’t a huge spoiler: King Shark rips a man in half.

Vertically, the Kung Lao way. (Or the Bone Tomahawk way if you’re familiar with very very disturbing scenes. Though that’s probably another lesson: if you want to make it stick, just give a glimpse and the thud of guts. But please don’t.)

Oh yah so back to King Shark. Gunn mentions that the body ripping was a practical effect. (Though King Shark is CG added in later.)

Gives it a different look.

Same goes for doing something by hand, like morning pages. You’ll write fewer words than you would with a keyboard. But the words will be different. Your thoughts will be different.

3.) Get focused (even if you have to kill a few darlings)

There are a couple scenes where characters die earlier than expected. Built up pretty nicely then gone the next moment. Nice way to keep the audience on their toes.

When writing, it can be tempting to add a ton of examples to support the point you’re trying to make. Each additional example dilutes the rest. Sometimes 1 or 2 will get the point across. Kill the rest. (Or stick them in a parking lot to use later.)

4.) Put an explosive in your neck (or just remove your backspace key)

In Suicide Squad, the criminals each get an explosive put in their neck. If they desert the mission, the government can blow them up remotely. It’s, of course, very effective.

You don’t need to go that far.

When doing creative work, you’ll go through diverge-converge stages: drafting to revising, clown brain to editor brain, mind map to outline.

If you’re in a diverge stage, find ways to put that explosive in your neck. (I often use Cold Turkey Writer which locks me into a draft until I hit a word count or time count.)

Stay focused and don’t turn back.

5.) Storytelling is about creating contrast

Suicide Squad is all about contrasts. Bad guys as good guys. Peace through killing. B characters as star characters. A shark on land.

Every good story has these contrasts. Matthew Dicks explains this in Storyworthy:

Contrast is king in storytelling, and laughter can provide a fantastic contrast to something authentically awful.

Without jokes and things being over-the-top, Suicide Squad would just be murderers continuing to murder other people in disgusting ways for their own freedom, all organized by a murderous government.

No contrast, just depression.

Practice building up contrast in scenes and in your overall story.

Book Notes: Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters

I started listening to the book this morning and am enjoying some of the reframes David Kadavy presents.

Attempting to summarize what I’ve read so far in 3 sentences: David wrote a few books and realized his best writing was done as a nomad. He travels to Medellin to work and to also try to figure out exactly why his best work is done there. He writes the book and recognizes patterns and differences between cultures that can inform how to approach creative work.

Build an understanding of the diverge-converge flow of creative work

He knows that he’ll have the best chance of finishing his daily work if it’s first thing in the morning. I liked an analogy he shared: work is similar to airports. Airports start fresh each day, so morning flights have fewer delays than later flights. Because they’re less affected by any chain reactions. Same with the mornings—they’ll be more predictable and interruption free.

But how do you use that time best? Start with divergent work (get the draft down) and then switch to convergent work (revise a draft for publishing). Whether you do this all in the morning or not, in can still be useful to sequence these on whatever time scale.

If you just diverge-diverge-diverge without a balance of converge-converge-converge then you’ll start way more work than you can actually finish.

Clock time vs. Event time

Americans tend to run on clock time: I’ll eat lunch at 12:30pm. Clock time is good for work efficiency.

Kadavy noticed people in Colombia running on event time: I’ll eat lunch when I’m hungry. Event time is good for creative effectiveness.

The rebuttal that comes to mind is that whole saying that I’ll butcher right now: I’ll write when inspiration strikes and that usually happens at 6am when I’m writing.

So it’s about balancing the two in some way. Some novel connection will hit you when you aren’t at the desk in front of a keyboard. Those things might happen on walks. But you can plan for walks and have a process ready in case that kind of connection happens.

Preparation, Incubation, Illumination, Verification

David describes the four stages of control aka the four stages of creativity.

  • Prepare at night by researching for the following morning
  • Incubate during sleep
  • Illuminate in the morning by writing a draft
  • Verify later in the morning or in the day by revising a draft

This reminds me of a few other frameworks for creative work.

Tiago Forte’s building a second brain methodology has similar steps to move from information diet to notes to intermediate packets all contributing to final projects.

Roy Peter Clark describes steps for writing in Writing Tools:

In other words, the writer conceives an idea, collects things to support it, discovers what the work is really about, attempts a first draft, and revises in the quest for greater clarity.

(Emphasis mine.)

In each of these there’s some sequence of diverge-converge.

Sleep is when short term moves into long term, you’re only working with long term in the morning

I’ll need to straighten out the science here but the idea seems to be that you have limited short term memory and only a certain amount of bandwidth for moving that information from short term to long term memory.

And it’s going to be sort of random. If you stuff your short term memory to the brim, you can add more. But something’s going to just drop off and disappear forever. It isn’t exactly going to be last-in-first-out or first-in-first-out.

“As you’re trying to connect concepts to generate ideas, it’s like you’re pulling actors onstage to act in scenes. But the more actors you have on the stage, the more difficult your scene becomes to follow. So at some point you need to send some actors offstage.”

— Mind Management, Not Time Management: Productivity When Creativity Matters by David Kadavy

Be a little more diligent about what goes in and it’ll be more predictable what gets remembered. It’ll be waiting for you in the morning.

That’s that for now. I’ll keep adding to this as I continue reading.

Info diet check in (August 11, 2021 Wednesday)

Writing this post in a Starbucks in Kalispell, Montana. Finally actually did one of those @macrobarista drinks: the killer caramel cold brew. Great account solving a straightforward problem: I’m on a diet but want to have those dessert-like coffee drinks.

The Pat Flynn Show: The Importance of Setting Goals Beyond the Gym w/ Dan John

One of my must-listens each week, along with My First Million and Not Investment Advice. MFM and NIA keep me tuned into what’s new in business, tech, and the internet. Pat Flynn and Dan John keep me tuned in on things that will still matter and be roughly the same a decade from now: stay healthy through movement and healthier eating. Technology might give us some advances, but it’s hard to imagine that working out regularly now will not pay off in the long run.

Some ideas from this episode: aligning fitness goals to something outside of the gym (working out for a specific trip has worked better for me than aiming for a general summer body), rolling dice during the paleo diet (1st roll for food quantity, 2nd roll for workout), randomness in workouts (Dan doesn’t need his workouts to be fun but understands it’s helpful for others), and the weekly kimchi purchases (1–2 gallons each week with oatmeal).

Long term, sustainable approach to eating: practice fasting (different from starving) and learn to appreciate hunger. Vegetables with every meal. Water for most hydration. And remember: it’s hard to eat it if it’s not there. (Aka don’t bring snacks into the house.)

New Teeth by Simon Rich

I’ve read all of Simon Rich’s books and will continue reading all his future books. This collection of short stories is about parenthood. Again, he does a great job of writing from different (wacky) perspectives. What if cartoon pirates raised an infant on their ship? What if a toddler was a detective? These aren’t questions that would have ever come to mind so I’m glad that Simon Rich could think them up.

Indie Hackers: 221 – How an indie hacker is competing with Buffer with Samy Dindane of Hypefury

What makes an effective MVP? Samy noticed that there wasn’t a tool available for Twitter threads. He built a tool in 3 days then shared it with a Telegram group of other builders. Didn’t have a landing page and was just manually signing people up to it. Eventually he saw that some people were using the tool more than he was. Good sign that there was something to it. He eventually added billing and got 20 customers paying $20 in the first few days (How’d it feel? “Fucking amazing man.”) Eventually looked for a co-founder to handle growth. From there they’ve grown it to $20k MRR.

Also, Courtland shares an analogy that’s making me very hungry: chicken-fried steak is not really available in Seattle even though it’s delicious—word spreads slower than you think and sometimes it doesn’t get far at all even if the product is great.

Ikigai: Hara hachi bu (aka maybe you don’t need to crush that plate of beef)

Check out the full notes for “Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life” by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia

I finished reading Ikigai on the flight from New York to Montana.

Actually, real quick note: we had to sprint to catch our connecting flight and made it a minute before the doors closed. If we didn’t make it, we’d have a 4 hour wait in the airport and land around 3am. Making it on the flight was peak happiness but it’s definitely fleeting.

Ikigai is about finding sustained day to day happiness through a combination of things: finding work you enjoy enough to do the rest of your life, spending time with friends, and keeping healthy.

One step toward sustained health: eating less. I was raised on the idea that finishing your plate was one of the pure virtues along with not sitting too close to the TV.

How to eat healthier: aim for satisfaction with a bit of hunger instead of the pleasurable pain of reaching your stomach’s absolute limit as frequently as possible. Or, hara hachi bu:

One of the most common sayings in Japan is “Hara hachi bu,” which is repeated before or after eating and means something like “Fill your belly to 80 percent.” Ancient wisdom advises against eating until we are full. This is why Okinawans stop eating when they feel their stomachs reach 80 percent of their capacity, rather than overeating and wearing down their bodies with long digestive processes that accelerate cellular oxidation.

I started reading this for more on finding the intersection of things I’m good at, contribute to society, can get paid for, etc. but it’s a good reminder that building and maintaining a healthy body is in even more control + has more immediate effects.

And it also makes it easier to sprint to catch your flight. All good things.

Info diet check in (August 09, 2021 Monday)

I’ll write some of these posts whenever I don’t have a topic in mind to write about. Maybe checking in with my info diet will somehow be useful or trigger some other ideas.

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Francesc Miralles and Hector Garcia

I’ve had this book for a while but finally started reading it. For some reason I thought it’d be fluffier than it is. But so far it’s presenting a wide variety of research supporting the idea that it’s worth finding a purpose in life and work that supports that purpose.

Maybe the ultimate thing in life isn’t just retiring and doing nothing.

Sometimes I think I’m not too far away from ikigai. I really do find joy in building skills (writing, podcasting, making presentations making videos) that an independent career could be built on.

The current configuration of projects those skills are applied to isn’t quite aligned well in the what you love, you’re good at, the world needs, you can be paid for Venn diagram.

With a few shifts (not easy or short term), I’m optimistic I can get there.

Rewatchables Superbad

I just love The Rewatchables. I wish I could do something like that for a solo books podcast. (Though “solo” automatically removes a good amount of the fun of The Rewatchables.) You get a recap of the movie, the best lines from the movie, then different fun, repeating segments to further break the movie down. The hosts love movies. That love is different for each of the hosts—some watch for entertainment, some watch as film experts, some can switch back and forth depending on the movie.

As for Superbad, I was a Michael Cera stan because I loved Arrested Development. Glad that he was part of a comedy classic. And I’m still always amazed that they wrote most of the movie in high school and just held on to it forever.

It was a great couple of years when Superbad, Knocked Up, Pineapple Express, and Tropic Thunder all came out. (I definitely need to double check the years.)

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

I listened to this leading up to officiating a wedding. I thought maybe learning and doing some mental exercises would help. It went smoothly, though it’s probably more from experience (my third time) than the mental exercises. But I did try to picture myself delivering it all well. And if it helped even 5%, I’ll take it!

I’m going to continue listening to this and trying to visualize a few other things in life: presenting designs to a team, getting into a focused working state, getting out of bed and starting the day with intention.

Also, some quick tips if you’re nervous about officiating a wedding: it’s an honor to take seriously but at the same time not to stress out too much about. It’s public speaking, but you’re totally okay just reading straight from notes in a book. If you time it, and they’re doing their own vows, your actual speaking time is maybe 5 minutes max. And no one actually cares about you, they’ll be focused on the bride and groom.