Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Brainstorming book notes podcast segments

I’m trying to think about how to do book notes episodes better and I think it’s by starting with questions that can lead to somewhat more interesting answers. I’ll update this post with more questions.

Intro/overview ideas

  • What’s the overarching story of the book?
  • What’s the overarching theme of the book?
  • How would you explain the book to… your childhood self?
  • How would you explain the book to… an alien?
  • How would you explain the book to… a friend?

Middle ideas

  • What was your favorite scene?
  • What are your 3 favorite quotes from the book?
  • What are 3 mental models from the book?
  • What was surprising about the book?
  • What was unsurprising about the book?
  • Who was your favorite character in the book?

Conclusion ideas

  • Did this book change your mind about anything?
  • What are books that are similar or related?
  • Is there a different book you’d recommend reading instead of this book?
  • For fiction books: what would the nonfiction version be like? (Musashi →  Mastery)
    • Musashi example: How to master the sword, kill effectively, and mentor (without going crazy!)
  • For nonfiction books: what would the fiction version be like? (Mastery → Musashi)

Arnold, ballet, and being a curious novice

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

This morning I’m trying a mushroom coffee with powdered MCT oil. I rarely do hot coffee but I’ve also been drinking way too much coffee so maybe going hot for some will slow it down a bit. Let’s see how the writing goes.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I want to go through good material more rather than trying to find more new material. But I also just haven’t really nailed down what I want to focus on learning. Doing a little too much exploring.

There are benefits to generalism and exploration. But there’s always a second part to it.

Explore then exploit. Generalize but with short term specialization.

It could be worth switching a few times before focusing. From David Epstein’s Range:

For professionals who did switch, whether they specialized early or late, switching was a good idea. “You lose a good fraction of your skills, so there’s a hit,” Malamud said, “but you do actually have higher growth rates after switching.” Regardless of when specialization occurred, switchers capitalized on experience to identify better matches.

Arnold Schwarzenegger knew the posing routine was critical to winning bodybuilding competitions. He wanted to look graceful. He had one of the smoothest posing routines among his bodybuilding peers, so he looked elsewhere to learn more about posing technique.

What’d he specialize in? Ballet.

From Arnold:

I went to a dancer at UCLA and started taking ballet lessons to further improve my posing. This dancer showed me how to move my hands gracefully, when a hand should be opened and when it should be closed. We talked about what a fist represents, what an open hand represents, how you should move for the greatest impact, using your hands as a signal. For instance, if you start a circular movement you should open your hand, and if you come down in a sweeping movement you should close it in a fist.

If you’ve seen Pumping Iron, the documentary about the 1975 Mr. Olympia competition (spoiler: Arnold wins), you might remember brutal workouts and Arnold being sort of a jerk (but a charismatic one!) to his competitors.

But the very first shot is of Arnold and Franco Columbu with ballerinas.

From “Pumping Iron”. Another awesome movie they both appear in is Terminator, where Lou makes a cameo as a Terminator in the future and infiltrates a human base and blasts everyone to smithereens.

Arnold became the best bodybuilder in any room of bodybuilders. So he looked for other rooms where he could be a curious novice.

Curious Novice Topic for July: Fat loss

Quick post before heading to the gym.

In light of my last post, I thought it’d be good to pick a topic and try to focus on it for a month. A month is pretty short but it’s also a good amount of time to focus on a single topic.

I’m taking some inspiration from what Matt Ragland did with his Ship 30 for 30 essays. He did the 30 essays during the cohort (which is the hardest part, I imagine) and then compiled them, revised, formatted them nicely, and started selling the collection as an eBook along with a video course to accompany it.

30 short essays on a single topic is good amount of time being a curious novice. You’ll, at the very least, be 30 days ahead of someone just starting out. You can guide them.

So that’s what I’ll try for July, but on this blog. Which, of course, goes against the whole thing Ship 30 for 30 is about. (Lesson 1: Don’t start a blog. Write on public platforms first.)

Oh yeah, so fat loss. Why?

This is a little bit of just-in-time learning. I’ve been trying to lose the same 10 pounds for 5 years. I think it’d be helpful for me to get very focused on it, including in things I read and write about.

I have been tracking things in my Road to 159 tag but, you might notice, the numbers haven’t been moving down very quickly.

First book quote I’ll share, from Fat Loss Happens on Mondays by Dan John and Josh Hillis:

Your two most important ‘workouts’ each week are— Journal Review, Meal Planning, and Shopping for Food Preparing, Cooking, and Portioning Food

It’s a great book that helps reframe time you’re allotting to a fat loss goal. If you have an hour 5 days a week, you can be tempted to do 5 one hour workouts. But if you’re not explicitly setting time aside for your food journal and for food prep then you’re not going to get results.

Dirty bulks can be effective. Dirty cuts… not so much.

Stillness is the Key: Get rid of your stuff

Check out the full notes for “Stillness Is the Key” by Ryan Holiday

One of my favorite chapter titles in all of Ryan Holiday’s books is “Get Rid of Your Stuff” in “Stillness is the Key”. Grab a bag, fill it up with stuff you don’t need, and get it out of the house.

A good lesson from living in New York was that I didn’t need all that much space. There were certainly times when I could’ve used more space. But my now-wife and I got by fine.

In California, I’m starting to feel some of what Ryan Holiday calls comfort creep. From “Stillness is the Key“.

There is also what we can term “comfort creep.” We get so used to a certain level of convenience and luxury that it becomes almost inconceivable that we used to live without it. As wealth grows, so does our sense of “normal.” But just a few years ago we were fine without this bounty. We had no problem eating ramen or squeezing into a small apartment. But now that we have more, our mind begins to lie to us. You need this. Be anxious that you might lose it. Protect it. Don’t share.

Sometimes I love the comfort and convenience of owning a car. Other times I very much miss the careless life in New York.

(But as I write this, I got a flashback of rainy, cold subway commutes. Maybe some comfort creep is okay…)

New Tiny Habit hook: After returning home from walking booster…

Check out the full notes for “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg

I walk Booster at least twice a day, so I come home that many times

This is a pretty reliable hook that I should add more to. I sometimes will take the trash out at this point every day. (On a side note, tonight I realized that it’s probably worth it to remove garbage at 3/4 full of it means there will be a fresh start the next morning.)

In Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg describes this with “After I…”

After I (ANCHOR), I will (NEW HABIT).
After I flush the toilet, I will do two push-ups.
After I pull the car over, I will write down the most important task of the day.
After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth.

I always listen to something, so I can try to capture that

I pretty much don’t leave the house to walk Booster without listening to something. (Yes, this can be problematic because it creates some inertia picking something to listen to, but I’ll deal with that in another blog post.)

During the walk I’ll try to take some notes or clip podcasts here and there, but I rarely go back and review them in any way. This new hook could help me with that.

I’ll do 3 minutes of writing about what I listened to

Three minutes seems doable. It’s not quite tiny but it’s not overwhelming at all. I set a three minute timer for this post, but only got through the first question. It did create the momentum to keep going, so that’s good.

I’ll try to capture this in an iOS shortcut to:

  • Start a 3 minute timer
  • Run the “Topics” automation in Drafts

At the very least, I’ll have a quick and dirty outline that I can fill out later.

Road to 159: week 4 of 8

Progress

  • Starting weight: 170 pounds
  • Current weight: 168 pounds
  • Goal: 159 pounds

What went well: Got the workouts in

What went well was actually getting these workouts in. Think that is the thing I’m happiest with from just the past four weeks is that I have been consistently getting three weight workouts in each week.

I’ve also been doing a decent job with the food journal. It’s been a straightforward text file that I’ve been adding to in the Drafts app. The speed of input is really helpful but at some point I’ll probably need to start using something like MyFitnessPal if I want to really evaluate my macros and food choices.

What can be improved: social eating, restaurant choices

I still very much have a treat yourself mentality. A couple things will be helpful for me to keep in mind. First, I regularly listen to Pat Flynn and Dan John and Dan has a phrase: “Eat like an adult“.

Second, this tweet from Dan Go:

At this point a lot of this is really winning the mental game and removing that connection of looking to food as a reward or as comfort. Because then it becomes used in both very good situations and in very bad situations.

I’ve also tended to have a very low bar for what to celebrate with food. Things like “Making it to Friday”.

How did the previous experiment go? (Protein shake + Greens powder lunches)

I’d go with: not great. I think the whole “starve yourself and then eat dinner” works well for some people but not for me so far. I think it hinges on not eating 3 meals worth of food in that single meal. But I like to eat until I hurt.

On the other hand this does work pretty well for hunger for a few hours. I still want to keep this in the routine in some way, so I may do it for the afternoon snack. Or it can really start to become my go-to snack—previously, this has been things like So Delicious ice cream bars or dried mangoes.

Next Experiment: Bringing the shocking rule back – Sauerkraut and Sardines

Last year I tried out some shocking rules, a concept from Ben Horowitz’s “What You Do is Who You Are”. (Check out my post here.)

One of them to try again is sauerkraut and sardines. I actually use mackerel more but sardines provides a nice alliteration. So I could call it Kraut ‘n’ Kerel it’s pretty catchy as well.

In any case this would be about adding some daily food choices—this fish and fermented food combo would be for healthy fat and gut health.

A list of daily things that I can try to take in:

  • AM
    • Vitamin D & Fish oil
  • Anytime
    • Sauerkraut
    • Sardines (or other canned fish)
    • Broccoli (1/2 lb lunch, 1/2 lb dinner)
  • Before bed
    • Magnesium

A book quote to share

This one is from “Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success“.

The second best practice is to aim for balance in the types of metrics you collect. One example of balance is tracking a combination of behaviors and outcomes. For some, there is a temptation to focus only on behaviors because behaviors are controllable, while outcomes, in many cases, are not. That’s a mistake. The only way to find lead indicators is to record both actions and outcomes and work backward, uncovering hidden drivers.

Actions and outcomes. I currently have been posting the outcome metric (weight) in these posts. I have been tracking food (in the Drafts app) and weight workouts (in the Strong app) but it could be worth posting all of those in some way here as well.

(And, yes, the scale number isn’t as useful as accurate fat % and lean muscle, so I’ll try to get those in the next 8-week cycle.)

Let’s keep it going!