Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Daigo Umehara: Daily routine

Daigo has one of the most interesting daily routines so I made this video about it and also just talked about other lessons from his book “The Will to Keep Winning”.

The routine reminds me of The Cultural Tutor interview with Ali Abdaal where he talks about his own start-of-his-day routine, which sounds like it starts in the late afternoon or early evening:

Cultural Tutor: “So I get dressed and then the first thing I do is I’ve got to get outside and not do anything in particular. Just to get a coffee. I’ll drink a coffee at home and then just go outside and see what’s happening. Just walk around for a bit, like 5 p.m. and see what the weather’s like and let my brain slowly emerge.”

Different ways to win.

Seth Godin: Flow is a symptom

From “The Practice”

If we condition ourselves to work without flow, it’s more likely to arrive. It all comes back to trusting our self to create the change we seek. We don’t agree to do that after flow arrives. We do the work, whether we feel like it or not, and then, without warning, flow can arise. Flow is a symptom of the work we’re doing, not the cause of it. 

Without looking, I’m sure that I’ve written about this highlight on the blog before.

Right now I’m trying to work without flow and at the very beginning of what I hope will be a common practice.

  • Set a timer for 10 minutes
  • Grab a book highlight
  • Write for the rest of the time

I don’t know that it’s going to lead to great writing, but I need to practice publishing more. And I’m sort of okay blogging into an empty void at the moment. My thinking is that it makes some ideas a little more real than just throwing it in a notes app. In Tiago Forte’s terms, it’s a better “intermediate packet”. From “Building a Second Brain”:

That system is your Second Brain, and the small pieces of work-in-process it contains I call “Intermediate Packets.” Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work. For example, a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call.

I’ve been writing in various notes apps and text editors daily for… it seems like forever. It’s mostly private. I started aiming to write 1000 words this year after hearing Nathan Barry talk with Ali Abdaal about how life-changing 1000 words a day can be. Now I’m trying to shift that more toward 1000 words a day published.

The first idea: write a 1000-word post every day. No matter what, that seemed sort of difficult to make interesting. I hadn’t even started and I was already overhtinking: what kind of format, should it be a link roundup, should it be around a single topic, etc.

I didn’t pursue that idea and just sort of forgot about writing publicly.

Today while talking in the car (to the Otter app, which has become a bit of a habit), I realized I could break the 1000 words up into multiple posts daily. Take one highlight from something and then write about it. If a connection comes up, it probably means there’s another post that I can write about.

I don’t need flow to write one of these posts. But sometimes in the middle of writing a few posts, it arrives.

Cal Newport: Why he loves watching movies

From Cal Newport’s interview on the Rich Roll podcast (YouTube)

I wrote about that in the book that learning a lot about movies helped my writing.

Because if you study what makes movies great, that process is not intimidating because I’m not a director. So it’s just interesting. And oh, this is great. Look at these directors and they have this vision and you’re just being exposed to raw creative impulse.

I found that was helping me in my writing. I was getting inspired by what people were doing in this other art form. And then that was giving me ideas about taking risks in my writing.

Whereas if I was just directly studying writing, it’s harder because now it’s uncanny valley. You’re studying people who are kind of doing what you’re doing, but a little differently. All the stresses of your job as a writer kind of getting involved in it. So I found studying an unrelated creative art completely from a hobby perspective, re-energize the art I do for a living.

I’ve done something similar in the past few years in studying an unrelated creative art. I make my living in UX design, but consuming UX-related content outside of work starts to create an opening for the stress of work to leak through.

Instead, I lean toward game design content. It seems to be the right balance for me. A lot of creative principles are there and applicable to UX design. Sort of. At least to the abstraction of “Hey here’s the creative process we used to build software”. The connection between God of War level design and enterprise UI is sometimes thin, I admit.

Then I can learn from creatives and instead of thinking about work, I tend to think about games I grew up playing.

I’m also trying to just start watching more movies. Going to the theater has the modern bonus of being a place where you deliberately won’t use your phone for a few hours. (Unless you’re a monster.)

For my second viewing of “Dune: Part Two”, I did a solo trek to an SF Metreon 70mm IMAX showing. I did the same for Part One a few days after watching it on HBO with friends on a TV and then reading post after post on Reddit about how you have to see it in theaters.

BTW, Cal Newport’s book “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” is out. Great so far and I’ll be sure to write some notes here.

“Feel Good Productivity” Book Summary: Takeaways from Ali Abdaal’s first book

(The video above is more focused on using the book principles in fitness. Just wanted to point out it’s different content from the text below so check it out if you have a minute!)

I’ve followed Ali Abdaal’s journey on YouTube for a few years now. While not one of the earliest subscribers to his medical school content, I was there when he started to make content about the iPad. I was also making content about using an iPad and his content was much better. It’s been cool to see how he’s evolved as a creator and now an entrepreneur and author.

My main guidance if you’re thinking about reading “Feel Good Productivity”: if you want to learn more about his journey as a YouTuber, you probably won’t find it in this book. I don’t know if it was a personal choice or on guidance from the publisher. But there seems to be more credibility in sharing stories as a doctor and from scientific studies. I kept hoping for more about his journey as a creator in and out of niches from medical student to doctor to tech to productivity to entrepreneurship to being an author through traditional publishing.

I’m left still hoping for that.

What remains, though, is an excellent book about, well, the cycle of joy that can lead to more productivity that can lead to more joy. If harnessed correctly.

If anything, I’ll remember this one question:

What would this look like if it were fun? I stuck the note to my computer monitor and went to sleep.

Feel Good Fitness (a personal case study aka how I’m applying some of the tactics from the book)

And it’s certainly a book full of tactics. They’re labeled “experiments” to try. “Feeling good” and “being productive” will vary from person to person. Some people try to maximize productivity, unfortunately putting off “feeling good” forever. The best way to accomplish that awful outcome is to put the two at odds.

I’ve dabbled in many fitness programs. The dabbling is probably why I don’t get results. Anyway, one philosophy I like is StrongFirst’s, especially around intensity. Most training session should leave you feeling good afterward. This is directly opposite of other approaches, where the main goal is to obliterate yourself and be lying in a pool of sweat by the end. Find joy in the pain.

Feel Good Alter Ego (you only have to be Goggins for an hour)

World of Warcraft is probably a more entertaining setting than my garage with virtual windows everywhere

Ali describes his character in World of Warcraft:

I’ve always been Sepharoth, the tall, handsome Blood Elf Warlock with billowing purple robes and an army of demons at my command.

I’m guessing he’s also a Final Fantasy VII fan? Video games show that we’re willing to learn new and pretty hard things for the sake of entertainment.

(On the other hand, I’m less willing to learn to play new games these days. I think there’s a lot of rust for me to shake off and I’m always a little frustrated when I take a couple weeks off of a game and come back to it and realize I don’t know the controls anymore. It makes me feel very very old.)

Games can be an escape. They can sometimes be more entertaining than the real world. The character in your virtual world might carry more prestige within those virtual walls than you might feel you have in the real world.

You can try to have fun with building an alter ego in the real world. Or a part of the real world both in location and time. When you walk into the gym, you can build up a different mindset. Paraphrasing what Shaan Puri says: you don’t have to be Goggins all the time, you just have to be Goggins for an hour a day. That’s enough to get get the movement required for good physical shape. (The kitchen becomes the hard part at that point.)

I am not quite a tall, handsome Blood Elf Warlock. But in time I’ll have an army of demons at my command.

Our devices are bringing our physical and digital worlds closer and closer together. It’s going to become easier and easier to create and hop into different alter egos. Maybe someday soon I’ll be able to just embody some digital Goggins with his hater’s mixtape pumped directly into my brain.

Sincere not serious

You can’t make every part of work a game, but you can probably adjust some parts of your process to bring some aspects of games in. But even games aren’t always fun, depending on the mindset that you bring to it.

The trick is simple: when you feel like your work is draining or overwhelming, try asking yourself, ‘How can I approach this with a little less seriousness, and a little more sincerity?’

Poker with friends comes to mind. The right amount of stakes makes it fun. In college, this was like a $10-20 buy-in. Winner gets $200 and the rest don’t feel too bad about losing.

High stakes takes the fun away. There’s too much seriousness. If you’re playing for, I don’t know, your house. Oh, it’ll be engaging. And I’m sure it’ll feel great if you win. (And presumably win your opponent’s house to turn into a rental property.) But it probably isn’t all that fun during it. Even if you win you’ll be drained at the end of it.

Zero stakes also takes the fun completely out. There’s no sincerity. There’d be times where we’d think “Oh poker is fun, let’s play.” but not everyone would want to play for money. So then we’d try to play without money. “Okay it’ll be fun just because of the competition.” But removing the stakes removes the sincerity of it. Everyone just goes all-in way earlier than they would’ve if money is involved.

In your work you’ll want to find the right balance. You can burn out in either direction. If you’re taking it too serious then every day will be draining. If you’re not taking it serious at all then you’re probably working without purpose.

To reduce the seriousness, it might just take a bit more deliberate recharging. Something to remind you that work isn’t everything—you’ve got things outside of it. To increase sincerity, look at it as a training session—if you have to do this tedious work anyway, you may as well try to get better at it so you can get it over with faster.

(TO BE CONTINUED… my pomodoro timer went off and I’m feeling good still. I’ll come back to this post in a bit. Writing this a little bit at a time or I’ll never finish.)

Apple Vision Pro (The Sometimes Device): Book Notes

I got an Apple Vision Pro. My history with Apple products is that I once was proud of this mountain of empty white Apple boxes that I kept under the bed. I bought the first iPad on launch day. I didn’t buy the first iPhone. I had an iPod Nano (probably forever my favorite design for a thing). I had an iPod Shuffle. A bunch of MacBooks. Etc. etc.

Conclusion: I’m keeping it and alternate between “man this is so cool” and “man this is an expensive browser”. I’ll keep it to continue trying new VisionOS experiences as they come out. I also have this idea that at some point in my life I’m going to learn to program again. (Once upon a time I was paid to write pretty good CSS combined with spaghetti jQuery.) And I think it’ll be fun to trying to make some widgets for the Vision Pro.

I want to make a video looking at the Vision Pro through the lens of books about the history of Apple.

But first, I’ll need to grab highlights from the books about the history of Apple. I was about to start a doc and realized I should slowly write a growing blog post instead. So here we go.

Apple Vision Pro - brain.fm and Notes

Is the Vision Pro wonderful? (sometimes!)

“Make Something Wonderful” compiles Steve Jobs’s thoughts into a book, in his own words. Here’s an example of what he’d describe as wonderful:

“And when we sit down to design products [at Apple], we don’t think, “Oh, well, our target audience is fifteen to twenty-nine, male.” We don’t think that way. We think about making a great product for just about everybody. And the beauty of the products we make is they can be tailored with software to do almost anything.

So we weren’t thinking, in the iPad, of any specific audience, but we’re thinking about everybody.

We don’t have to go home at night and tell our kids when they say, “Well, what do you do? What did you do today?” “Well, I worked on our next-generation server, you know, that’ll be powering something or other.” We can say, “I worked on our next-generation iPad. You know, the ones that you use in school.”

And that’s a really wonderful thing.”

I’m excited to see how the software evolves. Sometimes the Vision Pro makes it possible to see the future. “Sweet I can look at this 3D scan I took last year and it brings me right back to that meal. Imagine when it’s going to be able to…”

Sometimes you hit a brick wall in the OS. I got pumped by David Sparks’s virtual writing cabin setup turned my environment to 100%, set up the bluetooth keyboard, played Brain.FM up in Safari, pulled the Notes app up to write, pinched to tap “Hide others” and was ready to go…

The music went out.

It was a little unexpected with how “Hide others” would work on MacOS. And VisionOS is closer to iPadOS which doesn’t have “Hide others”. So I had the MacOS expectation and it wasn’t met.

“Make Something Wonderful” highlight might be more like “I worked on our next-generation Vision Pro. You know, the ones that you use in _____” and I’m curious what the blank will be filled in with as time goes on.

Some thoughts from Cal Newport

For years, people wondered if Apple was going to release its own TV. A giant display with tvOS built in. Squint and the Vision Pro fulfills that need.

Here are Cal Newport’s thoughts on it (full video):

I don’t know that everyone yet is still on the same page that I’m on, which says the whole reason why Apple is investing in the Apple Vision Pro, the whole reason why they’re doing this is because you don’t need to, once this technology is sufficiently advanced, you don’t need to own separate screens.

Once you can fit an Apple Vision Pro into a pair of Ray-Ban glasses, I don’t need a phone and an iPad and a laptop and a TV and an office computer. I just need these glasses, which can put similar-sized screens wherever I happen to be, so why buy all those things?

It’s a huge industry.

The consumer electronics industry is huge. Apple’s profit comes almost entirely from building physical screens in nice brushed metal boxes.

If those all go away, Apple’s in trouble, so they want to own the virtual screen future, and I’m still convinced that’s where we’re going to end up.

If I want to make a phone call, I put a screen in front of me projected by my glasses.

If I want to watch TV, there’s a screen put on the wall projected by my glasses.

If I want to write, a screen comes in front of me at the coffee shop projected by my glasses.

I don’t need to own other bits of electronic.

I just need whatever drives those glasses.

Like the iPad, it looks like it’s going to fulfill entertainment consumption needs before it fulfills productivity needs.

(TO BE CONTINUED…

… I want to chip away at this post. I’ll add a book quote at a time until… I guess until the posts feels done?)

Meal prep ideas from Bart Kwan

I’m always up for a good meal prep video.

Bart walks through meal prep with sirloin steak, rice, and the normandy vegetable mix.

I’ll try this pretty soon and he points out that the sirloin is really pretty tender and doesn’t know if it’s a Costco thing or what. From what I understand, it is a Costco thing—they blade tenderize their meat. Which I remember being pointed out in some other video as a bad thing but can’t remember what it was exactly. Certainly it wasn’t a big enough deal to stop me from buying sirloin from Costco. It really is a great cut.

I had some good progress in January 2024—I was working out on most days and also tracked food for something like 28 of 31 days in the month. Then I stopped tracking food and started to miss more workout days here and there.

No excuses.

(But if you happen to be interested in my excuses!…  Been pretty busy at work, family staying over, planning to host, health, etc.)

But I’m ready to get back on it.

I’m writing this on the treadmill. I won’t get quite to 10,000 steps today. Need to go spend time with said family staying over and not hide in the garage.

I’m working out again. Got a few days of a streak going. Hit the last day of the sets of 7 for the Fighter Pull Up Program. (A couple days off then 8-7-6-5-4).

I took Booster on a long walk today. She’s gotta get her steps in too.

And of course, I’m feeding some meal prep content into my info diet.