Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

iPad & Procreate: 10 tips to staying in flow

Going to put this outline here and will update it with text and images until it’s the ultimate guide to staying in flow in Procreate.

  1. 4 fingers to hide menus
  2. Pinch to rotate and scale
  3. Double tap Apple Pencil for eraser
  4. 2 finger tap for undo
  5. 3 finger tap for redo
  6. Long press to switch colors to a color on the canvas
  7. Radial menu → Switch brushes
  8. Radial menu → Copy canvas → Paste on MacBook with universal clipboard
  9. Radial menu → New layer
  10. 3 finger swipe down → Cut and paste (aka move to separate layer)

Sam Parr: The playbook for a 21-year-old

  • Podcast
    My First Million
  • Episode Title
    Greatest Hits #6 – Sam Tells All, Again – Selling for 10s of Millions after Making Millions with an Email Newsletter
  • Episode links
    Apple Podcasts • Spotify

“If they’re 21 today, start blogging. And when I say start blogging, I would say: learn one new, interesting thing each week. And then just blog about what you learned. Do that every single day, every week for a year. Try to get 2000 to 3000 people a day coming to your site through search.

The way you find out what to write about is you go to ahrefs.com and you buy a subscription. And that will teach you what to write, because it will tell you what people are searching for.

Try to rank for those words, build up an email list of 5,000 people, and then create a course and sell it to them.”
— Sam Parr

Okay so this episode got me fired up to… keep blogging. But to do it with a little more thoughtfully.

It also did give me some solid numbers to hit. Which basically would mean finding a way to increase daily traffic by 100x by next year. Sam was a high school and college track athlete and that reminded me of the whole 4-minute mile thing. If he put those numbers out there, then I have it in my head that it might be a reasonable thing to hit from scratch in a year.

I also am wayyyyyyyyyyyy past being a 21-year-old. And not in a “Gary V telling a 23-year-old they’re still young” way past. I’m more on the “it’s time to switch to the less risky ETF” end.

Still, there’s enough time to go for the long game.

One post at a time. (But hopefully a a slightly smarter post per day.)

Building my second brain

I started going through the material for BASB and thought I’d try to share some of the concepts as I go through the modules.

Information overload to information exhaustion

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The world’s information is at our fingertips. That’s not always a good thing. The cost to share thoughts has gone to zero so… a lot of people share their thoughts. Not all of them are going to be as refined as a great book from 50 years ago.

Processing the firehose

We carry a portable firehose with us everywhere and the default is set to full blast. It’s worth taking the time and energy up front to build a system to process this information.

First, by being more selective with information sources coming in.

Second, making sure that everything has its place and then automating the flow of information to the proper places.

Third, by practicing connecting and synthesizing information for sharing, when necessary.

Firehose of information

Casting nets instead of being a spear fisherman

You can take the slow way of building your systems and enhancing the background processing of your first and second brains. This is like slowly weaving a fishing net together. (Which is nice because it works well with Charlie Munger’s latticework mental model analogy.)

Or you can try to spear a specific fish every single time. Much harder. (But, hey, prety satisfying if you can do it!)

Spear fish

Making this blog my default

Check out the full notes for How to Change

The ideal solution to any problem stemming from our inherent laziness is a single-dose solution—a default. If you can “set it and forget it,” whatever change you’re trying to create will be quite easy to make.*

“How to Change” by Katy Milkman

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My goal with this blog is to make it my default for creative output. The issue I run into most frequently is wanting to work on different things in different states: podcast episodes, videos, filming b-roll sawdust for later (that I rarely use), Twitter threads, and making visuals on my iPad or Figma for all of these things.

That creates a lot of indecision.

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I want the blog to be the launchpad for my work.

  • If I’m making a video, I should start with writing a blog post that doubles as a rough script or outline.
  • If I’m doing a podcast, I should start with a book notes page or from recent blog posts
  • If I’m making a Twitter thread, it should be some version of a blog post

The exception might be Instagram, where I’ll just try to schedule out different desk photos and things like that.

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In any case, the default can always be:

  1. Grab a quote from recent reading or listening
  2. Write about it

If I do that day in and day out, good things will happen.

Todo: Write a post about quake episodes

There are quake books: books that change your view of the world.

Ryan Holiday mentions it in a blog post:

My reading was much different when I was younger. I would more likely intensively engage with some important book totally full of new ideas. Hayek. Parfit. Plato. And so on. There just aren’t books like that left for me anymore. So I read many more, to learn bits, but haven’t in years experienced a “view quake.” That is sad, to me at least, but I don’t know how to avoid how that has turned out. So enjoy your best reading years while you can!

I don’t read nearly as much as Ryan Holiday, so there are plenty of quake books left for me to uncover.

A couple that come to mind: Getting Things Done for helping me understand the importance of next actions before starting my career, How to Win Friends and Influence People for teaching me not to try to change minds of friends who argue for sport, Moneyball so that I could understand why people always mention Moneyball.

Here’s what Tyler Cowen has to say about quake reading:

Maybe Rene Girard was the last “view quake” author I read.  On the upside, greater context means that many more books are interesting than was the case before.

Which, of course reminds me of Luke Burgis’s Wanting, which is an approachable overview of Girard’s mimetic theory. (Check my notes out here.)

And the best quake book that also happens to involve Quake: Masters of Doom.

ANYWAY, the reason I mention all that is that I want to write a post about quake podcast episodes. There are probably a few podcast episodes that changed my perspective or actually got me to take action on something.

One that comes to mind: one of the Naval interviews, either on Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss’s or The Knowledge Project, but it’s where he talks about just jumping between books, doing lots of skimming. I started doing this and it was both good and bad for me. Mostly that I started buying a ton of books and reading more broadly but at the same time somewhat sabotaging my ability to actually focus on any single book while reading.

Okay yah so this is the pre-post where I share that idea and I’ll follow up (someday) with an actual list of 5-7 podcast episodes. (Another that comes to mind: Bill Simmons’s ESPN.com 20th anniversary episode where he just talks through his career progression that grew as the the internet grew.)