Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Road to 159: week 2 of 8

Previous weeks: Week 1 or just go to the Road to 159 tag for all the posts.

Progress

  • Starting weight: 171 pounds
  • Current weight: 170 pounds (-1 pound)
  • Goal: 159 pounds

Okay yeah so I need to be doing some kind of averaging to account for water weight. BUT that won’t leave me the option of dehydrating myself in the last week to “hit” my goal.

Anyway, things are slow moving but they’re moving so I’ll take it.

I’ll buy into that idea that the longer it takes to take it off, the longer it takes to gain it back.

What went well: RPT and consistency

Just getting the movement going consistently has been good. I started using the Strong app again and I have a pretty simple setup. Four workouts:

  • Incline/squat
  • Incline/DL
  • Press/squat
  • Press/DL

While the apartment gym doesn’t have a squat rack, it does have a barbell so I can do some deadlifting. For incline presses, I’m using dumbbells. For squats I’m doing double KB squats. For the press, I’m doing single KB presses.

We’ll see if this is enough volume and if it’s heavy enough.

Since it happens in the kitchen, something that worked well was Kevin’s paleo microwaveable meals. Aka chicken breast + sauce. Tastes good and is super easy.

Also: getting a plastic container of mixed greens and shoveling some in my mouth before meals. Tastes terrible and is super easy.

What can be improved: social meals, as always

Maybe I need to eliminate “as always” from my vocabulary. Or something.

Anyway, we had a lot of meals out toward the end of the week. Pasta, pizza, rice cakes…

Really good but maybe I can just focus on reducing volume and increasing activity. I wrote another post and mentioned trying a schedule to have heavy days on Friday and Sunday rather than the usual Sat/Sun rest days.

What to try in the upcoming week: Buena Vista hikes

It’s about 2.5 miles up and back. If I write for 15–20 minutes at the top then it’s a nice way to spend an hour. Gonna see how it goes doing that this week.

I did try it on a heavy lifting day and it was just too much. I’ll probably burn out or just straight hurt myself if I try to do that every single day.

Info diet x fitness and nutrition

Pat Flynn & Dan John, as always. I wish I still lived in New York so I could do the RKC cert. Though I’d fail the test at this point so maybe it’s better that I can’t go to it.

Then there was a nice recap episode on Shawn Stevenson’s podcast with a bunch of useful tips.

And also Pat Flynn had Mike Matthews on and that was really great for an up to date explanation of what Mike does for his routine right now.

It also fired me up to get back to reading more. (Mike reads for 60–90 minutes a day, split into AM and PM sessions.) The AM session is in the sauna first thing in the morning. The PM session is a way to wind down the work day before heading home to spend time with family.

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.