Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Info diet (Thursday, September 23)

My current routine has been to walk Booster first thing in the morning, which is like 15 minutes of listening time. I don’t know if jamming as much 1.5X or 2X listening time into my day as possible is the best way to go to learn.

But I don’t know if it’s the worst way either.

Charli Marie with Chris Do (podcast)

  • Pride in your work: Charli gets offers all the time to just throw videos together in some outline and then call it a course. She always turns those down because, if she’s going to charge her audience for a course, she wants to give it more care than that. She sets a bar for herself and keeps it.
  • Day job and freedom in building personal brand: I liked how Chris structured the interview, making sure to be precise in asking about the day job and then all the other stuff Charli does. It helped to bring out the benefits and tradeoffs of keeping them separate. One clear benefit of not needing to live off income as an online creator: no need to pander 100% to the audience’s requests. If a video topic she found out she’s not that interested in happens to be popular with the audience, there could be a temptation to rabbit hole into that just to run the numbers up if primary income is tied to it. Instead, she can take more of a “some videos for them but more for what i enjoy making” approach
  • Connection to Courtland Allen’s “what if i only did the fun parts” approach: This has been on my mind recently. Courtland uses this approach for making his podcast. His team does everything outside of prepping notes and doing the actual interview. Talking to people is fun for him, so he focuses on that.

A couple other things I listened to today (but I took too long on the above notes so I won’t be getting to these notes quite yet):

  • Proof podcast: DC Investor & Kevin Rose (podcast)
  • Jack Butcher and Greg Isenberg in their (Twitter spaces)

Why the steak photo? No good reason other than that’s what I was doing while listening to the Proof podcast episode. Not much better than a grilled steak. Which I also talked briefly about at the very end of the last podcast.

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.