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Arnold Schwarzenegger: Picking a gym

Check out the full notes for Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder

You walk in and sort of know where things will generally be but you still need to do some orienting.

New grocery store?

Good guess but in this case I’m thinking of new gym.

I’m writing this on the treadmill at a gym I joined this morning. It’s somewhere in between the two extremes Arnold presents here.

Depressed vs Relaxed:

Every gym makes me miss Chelsea Piers Fitness, which had the perfect blend of energy (sounds of competition from the basketball and volleyball courts) and relaxation (super clean, wide open spaces).

No sense longing for a gym on the other side of the country or a metabolism from a decade ago. I’ll be able to get my work done here.

As for the highlight about traveling and home gyms, I like both opposing ideas:

  • Travel creates commitment
  • Convenience creates commitment

Having the home gym is great and probably better if you can only pick one. In James Clear’s Atomic Habits framework, a useful question is “How can I make this easy?”

Some other questions that help you find answers:

  • How can I make this convenient?
  • What if I threw money at this problem?

Something I was running into with the apartment gym was just total weight available.

Yes, I wish I could say it’s because the dumbbells only go to 120 lbs so my chest presses were maxed out.

But it’s more like 50 lb and I just need to squat more.

Yes, you can and should get creative and work with what you have.

But another option was available: join a gym nearby.

I can save the creative thinking for creative work.

We’ll see if it changes anything.

David Epstein: Generalism, debunking 10,000 hours | Podcast Notes

  • Podcast
    People I (Mostly) Admire
  • Episode Title
    35. David Epstein Knows Something About Almost Everything
  • Episode links
    Apple Podcasts • Spotify • Homepage

We sometimes trust our intuition a bit too much and are unwilling to budge. David Epstein (author of Range) values a willingness to budge:

If there’s anything identified with being a good generalist it’s epistemic humility. You have to be humble and ready to update your models. These questions that I’ve written about in my book: the balance of nature and nurture in developing a skill, how broad or specialized to be. Everyone has these conversations explicitly or implicitly—and usually only with their intuition.

  • “I’m in the beer industry, not the software industry”: Epstein and Levitt talk about how students sometimes can’t see how lessons in one industry can be applied in another industry.
  • Building storytelling taste: Epstein says he’ll lean toward following his curiosity. This helped early in his career to make a shift at Sports Illustrated. Pursue what’s interesting and exciting to yourself.

Epstein and Levitt use stories to share nonfiction ideas. The reverse is useful as well—a writer can use nonfiction expertise in their fictional stories.

Epstein shares an example in Range:

Fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss began studying chemical engineering in college, which “led to a revelation that chemical engineering is boring.” He then spent nine years bouncing between majors “before being kindly asked to graduate already.” After that, according to his official bio, “Patrick went to grad school. He’d rather not talk about it.” Meanwhile, he was slowly working on a novel.

  • Back of the envelope estimation: Learning to do some back of the napkin estimation helps you improve gut instincts. Guesstimate.

From Range:

The professor later explained that these were “Fermi problems,” because Enrico Fermi—who created the first nuclear reactor beneath the University of Chicago football field—constantly made back-of-the-envelope estimates to help him approach problems.* The ultimate lesson of the question was that detailed prior knowledge was less important than a way of thinking.

They also talk about the 10,000 hour rule and their conversations with Malcolm Gladwell.

  • 10,000 hours (or not): Epstein talks about following his skepticism here. There’s a wide range depending on what you’re trying to learn. His own experience came in his training for 800-meter races. He was a walk-on athlete in college and excelled in his Junior year after a few years of training. One narrative could be that he worked harder than his more talented peers. But he says he was likely an example of low-baseline high-responder. There was more room for improvement.
  • Debating with Gladwell: Epstein and Gladwell shared the stage a couple times at the Sloan conference—2014 and then again in 2019. (I’ve listened to the 2019 one but I’ll listen to the 2014 one soon.) In 2019, Gladwell talks about how he conflated two things: lots of practice (true) + early specialization (false). In any case, both Epstein and Levitt talk about the importance of being willing to learn and willing to update your models.

How do you be a good generalist? Be willing to learn and update your models. How do you be a great generalist? Share what you learn and help others update their models:

So the highest goal I have is: can I bring some stories and research to those conversations and make them more interesting and productive. And help people update their mental models. I’m certainly going to keep updating mine, and that’s kind of the best I can hope for.

Epstein’s done a great job of it with his books.

A skill worth putting 10,000 hours into: high brow infotainment. Read research, wrap ‘em up in stories.

The ultimate writing machine (Cold Turkey Writer)

I rarely see Cold Turkey Writer in the wild but when I do, I know that person probably goes through similar struggles focusing on writing.

For writing sessions that don’t involve research, Cold Turkey Writer gives you everything you need:

  • Nothing

You’re locked into a text editor and get to set (1) a timer or (2) a word count goal.

You get one text file to write in. You get some text settings to restrict a few more things while writing.

Bells & whistles: rain and coffee shop soundtracks.

Screen Shot 2021 07 10 at 6 38 08 AM

I love it. Almost as much I love to come up with reasons not to use it.

  • I forget it’s there: It’s not quite front and center for me when thinking of tools to write in. Probably because it’s definitely not a quick capture tool. I’ve been using Drafts for that lately after years using Evernote.
  • I sometimes don’t end up using the things I write in it: I do have an automation set up with Hazel: when a new file is made from Cold Turkey Writer, copy the text to a new note in Evernote.
  • I find “gooood reasons” to use other apps: I’ll need to look something up while writing, I’ll need to add backlinks to other things, I’ll need to create a table, I’ll need rich text for images…

(For all those things: placeholders work fine.)

Anyway, this was written in Cold Turkey Writer (12 minute timer, rain + coffee soundtrack on) and it was a nice reminder that I really don’t need much at all to start writing.

4 takeaways from “Decoding Greatness” by Ron Friedman | Carousel

Check out the full notes for “Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success” by Ron Friedman

I put this carousel together with some takeaways from Ron Friedman’s “Decoding Greatness”, which I picked up after listening to his appearance on The Art of Manliness.

(Check out my podcast note post here.)

Here’s the carousel and I’ll update this post with some extended notes on each of the takeaways.

Notepod #22: “Arnold”

Check out the full notes for Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder

I finished reading the biography portion of  “Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder” and wanted to share some thoughts about the book.

Some quotes I mentioned in the podcast. First this one about visualizing the lift and how if you don’t think you can do it, you definitely won’t be able to do it.

There’s no two ways about it, because they’ve done all the training, their bodies are ready; now it’s only the mind. The mind must carry through. If a man stands there and thinks for one-tenth of a second, “Maybe I can’t lift it,” it’s gone. He will not make the lift.

Then there’s this quote about being backstage before the competition, hearing 1960s bro science flying around as fast as possible. Overwhelming—and even more so since he wasn’t fluent in English.

Backstage before the contest I heard endless theories. Some guys were talking about taking saunas before competition as a way of wringing the last bit of water out of their systems. Some were claiming that tensing and flexing helped promote great definition and vascularity. I kept hearing new things right and left. I understood only enough English to get it in snatches, which made it even more confusing.

Have a vision for the future

It can be a very specific vision. In fact, it can be a very specific person. For Arnold, it was Reg Park.

From then on in my mid-teens, I kept my batteries charged with the adventure movies of Steve Reeves, Mark Forrest, Brad Harris, Gordon Mitchell, and Reg Park. I admired Reg Park more than the others. He was rugged, everything I thought a man should be. I recall seeing him for the first time on the screen.

The hedonic treadmill of biceps

Arnold mentions a few metrics in the book. The two that stick out: 250 lbs and 20-inch arms. He tried packing mass on and had 250 lbs in mind early on. Then the arm size was important. (He also points out that triceps are half the battle here.)

Bodybuilders were becoming better and better. I’d seen the sport improve by leaps and bounds in the few years since I’d begun training. In 1962 Joe Abender, the Mr. Universe winner of that year, had 181/2-inch arms. The same with Tommy Samsone in 1963. But now the 19-inch arm wasn’t even big enough to get you in the top five. I’d come in second with 20-inch arms.

I mentioned this Khe Hy tweet

The 4-minute mile (for weightlifting)

Throughout the book, Arnold mentions the importance of mindset in many different ways. One way is just in knowing something is possible at all.

Proof of my point is that for years weight lifters could not lift more than 500 pounds. Nobody could. They did 4991/2 but never 500. The reason was this supposedly insurmountable mental barrier that had existed for years. They stood in front of the weight thinking, “No one has ever lifted 500 pounds. Why should I be the one?” Then in 1970 Alexiev of Russia lifted 501 pounds. He broke the barrier. A month after that, three or four guys lifted 500 pounds.

Something incredible about Arnold’s story is that, while he envisioned a lot of these things, there probably weren’t many models for foreigners coming into Hollywood and becoming the biggest movie stars.

The original influencer

To spend time in America, and California specifically, he needed a bit of support. For his first extended stay, he traded a bit of influence for a roof and transportation.

My part of the agreement was to make available to Weider information about how I trained. He agreed to provide an apartment, a car, and to pay me a weekly salary in exchange for my information and being able to use photographs of me in his magazine.

This playbook is available more widely today, in fitness and beyond. Build up an audience, get sponsored to represent and recommend products, sell some information in books or courses.

Look good feel good play good (but for non game days, make sure you can move)

Not much feels better than heading to the gym in a brand new color-coordinated workout outfit.

Or maybe just sweats and a cotton shirt are fine.

If you start worrying about how your clothes look while you’re in training, then you’re already training for the wrong reason.

(Also, he’d drop the sweats and go with shorts to always reveal the weakness in his calves until he eliminates it.)

And a link to that Bill Burr bit about how ridiculous Arnold’s life is

Reverse engineering Gladwell, Obama, and other creatives

Check out the full notes for “Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success” by Ron Friedman

  • Podcast
    The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience
  • Episode Title
    How to Reverse Engineer a Bestseller with Award-Winning Psychologist Ron
    Friedman
  • Episode links
    Apple Podcasts • Spotify • @KeltonReid

Want a great tool to tunnel through writer’s block? Try some copy work.

Ron Friedman is the author of “Decoding Greatness” and he discusses the book on this episode of “The Writer Files”. Some of my takeaways:

Original work → Copy work → Original work

He references a study done in Tokyo where the participants created work for 3 days. One group did original work all three days. The others copied other people’s work (here’s the study) during day 2. What does copying do?

From “Decoding Greatness” by Ron Friedman

The process of copying—of carefully analyzing a particular work, deconstructing its key components, and rebuilding it anew—is a transformative mental exercise that does wonders for our thinking. Unlike the experience we get when we passively consume a work, copying demands that we pay meticulous attention, prompting us to reflect on both subtle details and unexpected techniques.

Copy work is often something you’ll see recommended for copywriters who are starting out. Grab some classic ads, then re-write them by hand. You’ll get a feel for good persuasive writing this way. It can feel like magical osmosis, but writing it longhand makes you slow down and actually consider writing sentence by sentence.

Switching back and forth helps to keep things moving so that you (1) keep from rabbit holing in a silo and (2) keep from copying too much to the point that you’re really just ripping something off without putting your own twist on thigns.

Story → Study (How to be Gladwellian)

A phrase that Friedman uses in the podcast episode is “Gladwellian”. If you’ve read a nonfiction book from the past decade, you’ve likely come across. If you’ve read a bunch of nonfiction books from the past decade, you already know what’s meant by this structure for writing.

One sec, I’ll sketch it out.

UntitledImage

From “Decoding Greatness” by Ron Friedman

Certain patterns are obvious. There is the story-study-story-study structure that is now a fixture of popular nonfiction, the novelistic flair used to bring central characters to life, and the sticky simplicity with which complex ideas are communicated, transformed from lifeless data into irresistible dinner party ammunition.

It’s effective and it’ll be effective for as long as humans are interested in information and storytelling.

Obama the storyteller

On the podcast, Friedman also mentions that Obama needed to shed some of the lecturing style he picked up as a law professor before reaching greatest successes as a politician.

From “Decoding Greatness” by Ron Friedman:

By the time Obama declared his candidacy for the US Senate just a few years later, his speaking style was transformed. Instead of communicating in abstractions, he was now telling stories, quoting the Bible, and using repetition to drive home his points. But it was more than just his words; it was also the way he was delivering them. Obama had learned to speak loudly at some points and softly at others, to modulate his tone and subtly convey emotion, to emphasize important arguments with a calm, deliberate pause. By adapting techniques commonly used in churches and importing them into the political arena, Obama was able to evolve his speaking style and establish himself as a unique political force.

Learn, unlearn, re-learn.