Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Cal Newport: Why he loves watching movies

From Cal Newport’s interview on the Rich Roll podcast (YouTube)

I wrote about that in the book that learning a lot about movies helped my writing.

Because if you study what makes movies great, that process is not intimidating because I’m not a director. So it’s just interesting. And oh, this is great. Look at these directors and they have this vision and you’re just being exposed to raw creative impulse.

I found that was helping me in my writing. I was getting inspired by what people were doing in this other art form. And then that was giving me ideas about taking risks in my writing.

Whereas if I was just directly studying writing, it’s harder because now it’s uncanny valley. You’re studying people who are kind of doing what you’re doing, but a little differently. All the stresses of your job as a writer kind of getting involved in it. So I found studying an unrelated creative art completely from a hobby perspective, re-energize the art I do for a living.

I’ve done something similar in the past few years in studying an unrelated creative art. I make my living in UX design, but consuming UX-related content outside of work starts to create an opening for the stress of work to leak through.

Instead, I lean toward game design content. It seems to be the right balance for me. A lot of creative principles are there and applicable to UX design. Sort of. At least to the abstraction of “Hey here’s the creative process we used to build software”. The connection between God of War level design and enterprise UI is sometimes thin, I admit.

Then I can learn from creatives and instead of thinking about work, I tend to think about games I grew up playing.

I’m also trying to just start watching more movies. Going to the theater has the modern bonus of being a place where you deliberately won’t use your phone for a few hours. (Unless you’re a monster.)

For my second viewing of “Dune: Part Two”, I did a solo trek to an SF Metreon 70mm IMAX showing. I did the same for Part One a few days after watching it on HBO with friends on a TV and then reading post after post on Reddit about how you have to see it in theaters.

BTW, Cal Newport’s book “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” is out. Great so far and I’ll be sure to write some notes here.

“Feel Good Productivity” Book Summary: Takeaways from Ali Abdaal’s first book

(The video above is more focused on using the book principles in fitness. Just wanted to point out it’s different content from the text below so check it out if you have a minute!)

I’ve followed Ali Abdaal’s journey on YouTube for a few years now. While not one of the earliest subscribers to his medical school content, I was there when he started to make content about the iPad. I was also making content about using an iPad and his content was much better. It’s been cool to see how he’s evolved as a creator and now an entrepreneur and author.

My main guidance if you’re thinking about reading “Feel Good Productivity”: if you want to learn more about his journey as a YouTuber, you probably won’t find it in this book. I don’t know if it was a personal choice or on guidance from the publisher. But there seems to be more credibility in sharing stories as a doctor and from scientific studies. I kept hoping for more about his journey as a creator in and out of niches from medical student to doctor to tech to productivity to entrepreneurship to being an author through traditional publishing.

I’m left still hoping for that.

What remains, though, is an excellent book about, well, the cycle of joy that can lead to more productivity that can lead to more joy. If harnessed correctly.

If anything, I’ll remember this one question:

What would this look like if it were fun? I stuck the note to my computer monitor and went to sleep.

Feel Good Fitness (a personal case study aka how I’m applying some of the tactics from the book)

And it’s certainly a book full of tactics. They’re labeled “experiments” to try. “Feeling good” and “being productive” will vary from person to person. Some people try to maximize productivity, unfortunately putting off “feeling good” forever. The best way to accomplish that awful outcome is to put the two at odds.

I’ve dabbled in many fitness programs. The dabbling is probably why I don’t get results. Anyway, one philosophy I like is StrongFirst’s, especially around intensity. Most training session should leave you feeling good afterward. This is directly opposite of other approaches, where the main goal is to obliterate yourself and be lying in a pool of sweat by the end. Find joy in the pain.

Feel Good Alter Ego (you only have to be Goggins for an hour)

World of Warcraft is probably a more entertaining setting than my garage with virtual windows everywhere

Ali describes his character in World of Warcraft:

I’ve always been Sepharoth, the tall, handsome Blood Elf Warlock with billowing purple robes and an army of demons at my command.

I’m guessing he’s also a Final Fantasy VII fan? Video games show that we’re willing to learn new and pretty hard things for the sake of entertainment.

(On the other hand, I’m less willing to learn to play new games these days. I think there’s a lot of rust for me to shake off and I’m always a little frustrated when I take a couple weeks off of a game and come back to it and realize I don’t know the controls anymore. It makes me feel very very old.)

Games can be an escape. They can sometimes be more entertaining than the real world. The character in your virtual world might carry more prestige within those virtual walls than you might feel you have in the real world.

You can try to have fun with building an alter ego in the real world. Or a part of the real world both in location and time. When you walk into the gym, you can build up a different mindset. Paraphrasing what Shaan Puri says: you don’t have to be Goggins all the time, you just have to be Goggins for an hour a day. That’s enough to get get the movement required for good physical shape. (The kitchen becomes the hard part at that point.)

I am not quite a tall, handsome Blood Elf Warlock. But in time I’ll have an army of demons at my command.

Our devices are bringing our physical and digital worlds closer and closer together. It’s going to become easier and easier to create and hop into different alter egos. Maybe someday soon I’ll be able to just embody some digital Goggins with his hater’s mixtape pumped directly into my brain.

Sincere not serious

You can’t make every part of work a game, but you can probably adjust some parts of your process to bring some aspects of games in. But even games aren’t always fun, depending on the mindset that you bring to it.

The trick is simple: when you feel like your work is draining or overwhelming, try asking yourself, ‘How can I approach this with a little less seriousness, and a little more sincerity?’

Poker with friends comes to mind. The right amount of stakes makes it fun. In college, this was like a $10-20 buy-in. Winner gets $200 and the rest don’t feel too bad about losing.

High stakes takes the fun away. There’s too much seriousness. If you’re playing for, I don’t know, your house. Oh, it’ll be engaging. And I’m sure it’ll feel great if you win. (And presumably win your opponent’s house to turn into a rental property.) But it probably isn’t all that fun during it. Even if you win you’ll be drained at the end of it.

Zero stakes also takes the fun completely out. There’s no sincerity. There’d be times where we’d think “Oh poker is fun, let’s play.” but not everyone would want to play for money. So then we’d try to play without money. “Okay it’ll be fun just because of the competition.” But removing the stakes removes the sincerity of it. Everyone just goes all-in way earlier than they would’ve if money is involved.

In your work you’ll want to find the right balance. You can burn out in either direction. If you’re taking it too serious then every day will be draining. If you’re not taking it serious at all then you’re probably working without purpose.

To reduce the seriousness, it might just take a bit more deliberate recharging. Something to remind you that work isn’t everything—you’ve got things outside of it. To increase sincerity, look at it as a training session—if you have to do this tedious work anyway, you may as well try to get better at it so you can get it over with faster.

(TO BE CONTINUED… my pomodoro timer went off and I’m feeling good still. I’ll come back to this post in a bit. Writing this a little bit at a time or I’ll never finish.)

Apple Vision Pro (The Sometimes Device): Book Notes

I got an Apple Vision Pro. My history with Apple products is that I once was proud of this mountain of empty white Apple boxes that I kept under the bed. I bought the first iPad on launch day. I didn’t buy the first iPhone. I had an iPod Nano (probably forever my favorite design for a thing). I had an iPod Shuffle. A bunch of MacBooks. Etc. etc.

Conclusion: I’m keeping it and alternate between “man this is so cool” and “man this is an expensive browser”. I’ll keep it to continue trying new VisionOS experiences as they come out. I also have this idea that at some point in my life I’m going to learn to program again. (Once upon a time I was paid to write pretty good CSS combined with spaghetti jQuery.) And I think it’ll be fun to trying to make some widgets for the Vision Pro.

I want to make a video looking at the Vision Pro through the lens of books about the history of Apple.

But first, I’ll need to grab highlights from the books about the history of Apple. I was about to start a doc and realized I should slowly write a growing blog post instead. So here we go.

Apple Vision Pro - brain.fm and Notes

Is the Vision Pro wonderful? (sometimes!)

“Make Something Wonderful” compiles Steve Jobs’s thoughts into a book, in his own words. Here’s an example of what he’d describe as wonderful:

“And when we sit down to design products [at Apple], we don’t think, “Oh, well, our target audience is fifteen to twenty-nine, male.” We don’t think that way. We think about making a great product for just about everybody. And the beauty of the products we make is they can be tailored with software to do almost anything.

So we weren’t thinking, in the iPad, of any specific audience, but we’re thinking about everybody.

We don’t have to go home at night and tell our kids when they say, “Well, what do you do? What did you do today?” “Well, I worked on our next-generation server, you know, that’ll be powering something or other.” We can say, “I worked on our next-generation iPad. You know, the ones that you use in school.”

And that’s a really wonderful thing.”

I’m excited to see how the software evolves. Sometimes the Vision Pro makes it possible to see the future. “Sweet I can look at this 3D scan I took last year and it brings me right back to that meal. Imagine when it’s going to be able to…”

Sometimes you hit a brick wall in the OS. I got pumped by David Sparks’s virtual writing cabin setup turned my environment to 100%, set up the bluetooth keyboard, played Brain.FM up in Safari, pulled the Notes app up to write, pinched to tap “Hide others” and was ready to go…

The music went out.

It was a little unexpected with how “Hide others” would work on MacOS. And VisionOS is closer to iPadOS which doesn’t have “Hide others”. So I had the MacOS expectation and it wasn’t met.

“Make Something Wonderful” highlight might be more like “I worked on our next-generation Vision Pro. You know, the ones that you use in _____” and I’m curious what the blank will be filled in with as time goes on.

Some thoughts from Cal Newport

For years, people wondered if Apple was going to release its own TV. A giant display with tvOS built in. Squint and the Vision Pro fulfills that need.

Here are Cal Newport’s thoughts on it (full video):

I don’t know that everyone yet is still on the same page that I’m on, which says the whole reason why Apple is investing in the Apple Vision Pro, the whole reason why they’re doing this is because you don’t need to, once this technology is sufficiently advanced, you don’t need to own separate screens.

Once you can fit an Apple Vision Pro into a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, I don’t need a phone and an iPad and a laptop and a TV and an office computer. I just need these glasses, which can put similar-sized screens wherever I happen to be, so why buy all those things?

It’s a huge industry.

The consumer electronics industry is huge. Apple’s profit comes almost entirely from building physical screens in nice brushed metal boxes.

If those all go away, Apple’s in trouble, so they want to own the virtual screen future, and I’m still convinced that’s where we’re going to end up.

If I want to make a phone call, I put a screen in front of me projected by my glasses.

If I want to watch TV, there’s a screen put on the wall projected by my glasses.

If I want to write, a screen comes in front of me at the coffee shop projected by my glasses.

I don’t need to own other bits of electronic.

I just need whatever drives those glasses.

Like the iPad, it looks like it’s going to fulfill entertainment consumption needs before it fulfills productivity needs.

(TO BE CONTINUED…

… I want to chip away at this post. I’ll add a book quote at a time until… I guess until the posts feels done?)

Meal prep ideas from Bart Kwan

I’m always up for a good meal prep video.

Bart walks through meal prep with sirloin steak, rice, and the normandy vegetable mix.

I’ll try this pretty soon and he points out that the sirloin is really pretty tender and doesn’t know if it’s a Costco thing or what. From what I understand, it is a Costco thing—they blade tenderize their meat. Which I remember being pointed out in some other video as a bad thing but can’t remember what it was exactly. Certainly it wasn’t a big enough deal to stop me from buying sirloin from Costco. It really is a great cut.

I had some good progress in January 2024—I was working out on most days and also tracked food for something like 28 of 31 days in the month. Then I stopped tracking food and started to miss more workout days here and there.

No excuses.

(But if you happen to be interested in my excuses!…  Been pretty busy at work, family staying over, planning to host, health, etc.)

But I’m ready to get back on it.

I’m writing this on the treadmill. I won’t get quite to 10,000 steps today. Need to go spend time with said family staying over and not hide in the garage.

I’m working out again. Got a few days of a streak going. Hit the last day of the sets of 7 for the Fighter Pull Up Program. (A couple days off then 8-7-6-5-4).

I took Booster on a long walk today. She’s gotta get her steps in too.

And of course, I’m feeding some meal prep content into my info diet.

The Ultimate Vader

Fun fact I hadn’t heard before:

“There were two major candidates for the role of Big Van Vader, who was going to be the monster foreign heel, one being White and the other being Jim Hellwig. Hellwig signed with Titan Sports and of course became The Ultimate Warrior just before the decision as to which one of the two was supposed to be Vader, although the original Vader drawings called for a large muscular man built more along with likes of Hellwig.” — The Wrestling Observer Yearbook ’93: The Year of Major Beginnings and Major Endings (Wrestling Observer Newsletter 1) by Dave Meltzer

There are a bunch of these Wrestling Observer Yearbooks on Kindle Unlimited. No brained if you’re a wrestling fan. Each is organized by topic and then the articles are curated by topic in chronological order. It’s great. Just tons of small details about my favorite periods in wrestling.

The Vader and Ultimate Warrior fact above is an example.

Another is that, yes, I had read that Sid and Arn Anderson got in a fight with scissor stabbings. But the chapter in The Wrestling Observer is where I first heard the specific type of scissors: round tipped safety scissors instead of the sharp tipped kind. The latter probably would’ve lead to someone dying.

What’s the tenuous creativity lesson I should pull from here? Not sure other than that it’s fun to read old magazines.

And don’t run with scissors (even if they’re round tipped).

Neville Medhora and Noah Kagan: old school web

Noah is doing the rounds on podcasts for his book launch and was on Neville’s show. Always fun to listen to close friends talk because of how good the chemistry is.

Especially with the idea of “doing the rounds” in the first place. That implies you’ll hear some of the same stories across a few different podcasts. Repeat the narratives that work.

With close friends, you know they probably won’t be sticking to the usual questions.

Anyway, Neville mentioned that he’s been quietly posting to his blog again. That inspired me to open up WordPress in bed right before sleeping. (Really just delaying my sleep actually.) And to quietly write this post.

I was journaling then realized I should start shifting my daily writing habit more toward public writing. Add to and tend the garden here.

Noah’s company makes millions promoting software. But he sticks to a few relatively basic tools like spreadsheets instead of an array of the latest startup tools.

Oh yeah, his book. I just started it and I’m pretty sure the one takeaway I’ll have is “Now, not How.”

I know your inner negotiator may be saying, “That sounds great, but MY idea needs more time.” Stop! Power comes when you automatically implement NOW, Not How in everything you do. So no more negotiating with yourself. You’re just a doer. Say it to yourself: NOW, Not How.

A reason I think it’ll be good to make writing my daily content is that, well, I can do it from start to finish from my phone. I can take an idea and write a post Now (not How do I script this, how do I represent this in visuals, how do I make this fit in a minute….)

Short form vertical video made it easier to be consistent with video because you can shoot it with your phone. You just have to find a topic and format that works that’s an easy lift.

“Just.”

The short form format I chose takes a bit more work. (Not implying it’s elevated or better, it just takes a bit more in editing.) Recently I’m often using a few different apps. Figma and Descript and Screenflow. Even for a short I’ll frequently end up opening all 3 at some point.

Even more recently I’ve been using a Vision Pro. POV sharing seems to be a way that might work for me to live the holy-grail-of-consistency “Document, Don’t Create” life. POV over the shoulder stuff documenting the process of creating… something each week. Using web apps. Could be interesting!

Descript editing in the Vision Pro and Safari might be a good video idea. We’ll see.

Otherwise, I’d like to increase the amount of writing I post. If anything, as mentioned in my previous post, I can just share a few thoughts about a podcast I listened to that day. As long as I remember, I’ll aim for a post a day.

Sometimes in the middle of the night in my bed.