Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Write of Passage: Digital postcards

One thing that’s been helping me think about content is David Perell’s idea of digital postcards. He views his newsletters as digital postcards—life updates that are easy to put together because consistency is so important with a newsletter.

Easy compared to the heavy lifts of essays that can take days, weeks, months.

I continue to fail with newsletter consistency because I try to include a section that takes too long to write. Curating links + a quick here’s-what-I’m-up-to dispatch is enough if I’m doing my main creative work somewhere else.

And this doesn’t just need to apply to newsletters. (And often the newsletter is the main thing, so you can do the dispatch somewhere else.)

It can’t all be hard, heavy lifts.

Reading Log: “Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder”

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

I picked up “Arnold: The education of a bodybuilder” yesterday after seeing it in David Perell’s newsletter. He said he devoured it in a few days. I started reading it and can see why. Very fun read so far. Some quick ramblings.

  • It was published before the internet was a thing — The book was published in 1993 and he’s writing about the 70s so it just doesn’t resemble today at all. There’s just things like how he’s in London for a bodybuilding competition and he can barely speak English so he just repeats the hotel name over and over. (He gets to that hotel but, of course, there’s another with the same name that he’s supposed to go to.) Cell phones solve a lot of problems. But not back then.

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  • Arnold had a vision and a mission: become Mr. Universe — He becomes obsessed with bodybuilding early on and has the goal to become Mr. Universe. He tried team sports and different individual sports but didn’t love them the way he loved lifting weights. And then with lifting weights, he also tried Olympic limping but didnt’ love it the way he loved bodybuilding.
  • A lot of hard work (and of course some luck) — He acknowledges that he was blessed with good genetics: a “perfect metabolism”. But he worked incredibly hard pretty much from the start of his bodybuilding career. 8-mile trek to the gym when he lived with his parents, 6 hours of working out in the army, then his AM/PM split with each workout being 2 hours.

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  • Learning mindset: you don’t know what you don’t know — Early on he mentions reading as much as he could from magazines. Learning about American bodybuilders who become movie stars. Then he learns from the older men he started lifting weights with. Then on his trip to bodybuilding competitions he tries to absorb what he can with limited English. The main lesson he learns: he has a whole lot more to learn.
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I tried to sketch a pose of Reg Park, one of Arnold’s idols. Then I pasted the photo in to see if I got at least the proportions right. It’s…. okay. Anyway the lesson here is that I can redraw this a few times and make changes so quickly. Arnold looked at photos like this and knew it’d take years of dedication to achieve and that inspired him rather than deterring him. To add some definition I just need to add a few lines here and there. For Arnold, it meant months to add muscle and then some more weeks to cut and chisel it.
  • His body is a sculpture, shaped over years — A part that sticks out to me is that he’s super happy about gaining 5 pounds in 3 months. This is a bodybuilder Mt. Rushmore guy and that’s the type of growth he is happy about. You’d probably be able to find that kind of promise on a magazine cover. It just made me think about the ridiculous expectations I have with results when working out vs. how long it actually takes. (That said, I definitely don’t work out hard enough and use age and injury prevention as a little too much of an excuse. Gotta find the right balance.)

Oh yeah he also had this quote:

“People who would never benefit from what I told them kept taking my time. They paid and came to the gym. But it was a disgusting, superficial effort on their part. They merely went through the motions, doing sissy workouts, pampering themselves. And there was so much I wanted to do with those wasted hours.”

It was great because I read it while walking on a treadmill at 3.0 (but with a 1% incline baby!!!!)

Video Outline: iPad June Journal

Here we go, here’s the outline that I made for a “How I used my iPad in June 2021” video. I can see this thing blowing up already. I mean “blow up” as in bloat, not in popularity. I think the key thing will just be to gloss over all these items for a few seconds rather than getting too into any single thing. Otherwise even if each node here was 20 seconds it’s already something like 6 minutes.

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I already sunk some time into this that might go wasted, other than to show the progress I made. I started making some slides in Figma for the video.

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The idea I always have is that if I make them in Figma then it might take a while up front but then I can re-use a bunch of the pieces for future videos, especially with components and styles.

Eventually, I forget the whole long-term vision of using it and then switch to MindNode (or quit altogether). Maybe I’ll pick this back up.

The real combo that might work could just be

  • A-Roll: Me drawing something, maybe following along with another Jim Lee tutorial
  • B-Roll: Shots of me using the iPad, which I’ve already recorded

Then I just add an audio track where I talk about different topics. Sort of inspired by watching some of Sneako’s old videos and it reminded me of how popular it was (still is?) to do videos where A-Roll is gameplay footage but completely unrelated to whatever topic the person is talking about. Then the B-Roll is simple image stills here and there.

(And I do somewhat hate using the phrase A-Roll/B-Roll because it’s a foot toward overthinking this whole thing and making it bigger or more serious than it is. It should be as simple as: I had fun using my iPad in a few different ways last month, here’s what I did.)

BASB: Intermediate packets, attention residue (and Brian Scalabrine)

At some point this week, you’ve probably been distracted by something while working. Getting back into your focused state might’ve been easy or hard or hard enough that you didn’t get focused again for the rest of the day.

Intermediate packets might help.

It’s a concept from Building a Second Brain to describe a form of expression (E in the C-O-D-E framework).

Reading a book from cover to cover is difficult. Writing it straight through would be nearly impossible. Instead, it helps to compose the book from intermediate packets.

The internet makes it possible to share intermediate packets and create feedback loops as you go along.

If the first thing you share for feedback for a 250 page book is a 350 page draft, you’ll only be able to get high-level feedback from people with patience to read 350 pages of unpolished work.

If you share an idea as a tweet, then 3 pages here, a full section there, you’ll be able to get more diverse feedback.

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Another benefit of intermediate packets is that they’re things that you can start and finish in a working session without creating an open loop that drains your energy the rest of the day.

Unfinished work can create attention residue that pulls your attention from the work in front of you right now. From Cal Newport’s Deep Work

The problem this research identifies with this work strategy is that when you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task. This residue gets especially thick if your work on Task A was unbounded and of low intensity before you switched, but even if you finish Task A before moving on, your attention remains divided for a while.

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The reason I started writing this post was because a friend sent a link to this Brian Scalabrine interview where he talks about playing against amateurs.

I wanted to share it in some form but felt some friction. I’d want to grab a quote from it but didn’t want to transcribe it immediately since I wanted to listen to the entire thing first.

I didn’t really have an idea for a full post to write about it or where it might fit into a bigger post.

I didn’t want to just throw the link into Evernote either. (David Allen jokes that Evernote is Write-only for many people. I fall into that category more often than not.)

And it just reminded me of the BASB lesson about intermediate packets and that the goal is to know what to work on based on context, usually time and mood.

  • Malcolm Gladwell writes in the morning. He loves running but feels it’d be a waste of all that cognitive energy available in the morning if he used it for a run.
  • Ryan Holiday reads and writes in the morning and similarly loves running. He’ll run in the morning only if he knows that he won’t be able to make the time for it later in the day.
  • Shea Serrano often tweets “prime writing hours” after 11pm-ish

It’ll be different for everyone.

In my case, I don’t quite have an answer for “I just want to share a quick link and a quote”. But I can use this blog as my home for intermediate packets of all sizes.

Share a link + some thoughts. (This post got longer than expected.)

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In Deep Work, Cal Newport writes about counter examples: CEOs of large companies who live lives wading through distraction while still being effective:

Why? Because the necessity of distraction in these executives’ work lives is highly specific to their particular jobs. A good chief executive is essentially a hard-to-automate decision engine, not unlike IBM’s Jeopardy!-playing Watson system. They have built up a hard-won repository of experience and have honed and proved an instinct for their market. They’re then presented inputs throughout the day—in the form of e-mails, meetings, site visits, and the like—that they must process and act on. To ask a CEO to spend four hours thinking deeply about a single problem is a waste of what makes him or her valuable.

Which does have a connection to Brian Scalabrine. To play in the NBA, you need to be a hard-to-automate decision engine. Scalabrine talks about playing amateurs 1-on-1 on Duncan Robinson’s podcast:

In the NBA you’ve got to be so on top of the reads.

It’s not… it’s not speed.

You can’t look at me and say my brain is slow. My brain is fast. My body might be slow. But you have to read whether a guy’s going to shoot, drive, go to the middle, go to pass.

If you’re not reading those things, you’re not playing in the NBA. There’s countless guys—6’10” athletic, strong—and they don’t read the intricacies of the game. They don’t see a hesitation dribble. They don’t move until the ball is passed.

Duncan, I’m moving when the ball is on the gather. If I’m not, I’m dead. I’m dead in the water.

Me having to analyze the game like that. It allows me to play a guy 1-on-1, I can literally, in the middle of his inside-out move, think what I’m eating for dinner and still challenge his shot. It’s not like I’m doing this against high-level people.

He’ll also remind you: when it comes to basketball skill, he’s much closer to LeBron James than you are to him.

Ramit Sethi: Scrape the meat off the bones

I buy too many courses. That became pretty obvious last year and I’m finally taking a little bit of action.

Hopefully I can

  • Actually finish the material from some courses
  • Apply some of the material

I’ve been spending some time the past couple days getting organized with all the different course links and files. (Using some of the organization ideas from Build a Second Brain.)

I need to make the courses easier to consume. (Sean D’Souza’s courses often touch on the importance of easy consumption of courses.)

And the reason I mentioned “meat off the bones” is it’s a module title in one of Ramit Sethi’s courses. Basically: squeeze all the value you can out of the courses and other info products you buy.

I’ve often heard the advice to go through material, re-read a book, watch the videos, etc. 10 times.

10 times to really absorb the concepts and give yourself a chance to try applying the concepts.

So that’s what I’ll be aiming to do: going back through courses, sharing as I go along. (Maybe the gimmick can be doing a notecard for different lessons.)

Scraping meat off different bones.

Eventually mixing them together.

Then I can take the bones as fundamentals and re-create the same animal, different beast.