Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

A little bit of blog housekeeping (with the code hammer)

Been feeling a little more focused the past few days. We’ll see how long this feeling lasts, but things seem clear to me right now.

I’ll focus on making content about books I’m reading.

Some of this focus might be from getting a few days off work and off Twitter to think. We did a road trip to Joshua Tree, Palm Springs, and LA.

Tons of driving. Tons of listening. Tons of thinking.

(And tons of food—hit an all time high on the scale when I got back. Eye opening. But that’s for another post.)

Another source of inspiration: Alex and Books. I’ll link to his Instagram. That’s where he’s got his largest audience.

He just shares a bunch of notes on stuff he’s reading. He’s got a good social media approach to repurpose content across platforms.

I suspect I read enough (not quite as many as Alex) books to have things worth sharing.

I also go through a number of them fast and sloppily enough that I better be writing notes if I want to retain anything at all.

I rolled up my sleeves and did some coding.

Very light PHP and CSS changes. For someone who knows PHP at least. Which I do not. So it took a good amount of searching but I got the system set up.

I can now set up a page for each book I start reading. I can then do individual posts about the book (a single quote, for example) that have their own permalink.

Each of those links to the parent page, which has all the posts related to the book.

Did you need code? Couldn’t you have just done this with categories or tags or parent and child pages?

There are small issues with each approach. I didn’t want to have a new category for every book. Tags don’t provide hierarchy without plugins. And something seemed very heavy about pages and sub-pages.

That last one is more of a mental thing, but I did just like the idea that I’d still be able to use posts instead of sub-pages for writing a single book note at a time.

Anyway, check it out.

Here’s a parent page for How to Change

And here’s an individual note post

I did this before on my other blog a few years ago. I wrote these posts on Console Wars and was happy with the end result.

It’s really just a mental trick. Writing a bunch of random posts seems fruitless. It’s hard to see it add up.

Writing some kind of mega post with a whole bunch of excerpts then leads to feeling some pressure to tie it all together elegantly. To weave in and out.

That gets stressful. And usually means I won’t post anything at all.

I know I can write about one or two book highlights every day. It’s like the good old days of link blogging. Grab a highlight, add some commentary. Hit publish.

Continue to scroll through Google Reader endlessly.

If I collect a few into a post over time as I read a book, by the end the book page will be something worth sharing.

I also started cleaning up the podcast page.

This part was inspired by two podcasts: My First Million and Copyblogger. Each has been on a year lately by taking their podcasting efforts more seriously.

My First Million has been very focused on growth. They’re setting it up nicely as the pillar of The Hubspot podcast network.

Tim Stodz at Copyblogger has talked about recently doing the necessary things: show notes, transcripts, clip repurposing, etc. to improve the show experience for listeners.

I want to focus on making podcasts and videos about books I’m reading. And I want to improve that experience for the (small) audience I have. First step will be to add proper blog posts for every past podcast episode.

And in the future I’ll publish the blog post with the episode and start doing more proper show notes and descriptions and all that.

This is all a side project. But I want to take it a little more serious.

(One aside: I wrote this entire post on my phone. Set up a couple new book notes pages on my phone as well. This will get me one step closer to the Marc Lore esque “I only work from my phone” life.)

How to make pain fun (it already sort of is)

Check out the full notes for Year Book by Seth Rogen

Seth shares some advice from Mark Pooley:

There’s nothing less funny than hearing about the stuff you have fun doing. Fun isn’t funny. Comedy is pain. It’s struggle. So, when thinking of what to write about, don’t ask yourself, “What’s funny to me?” Ask yourself, “What bothers me? What frustrates me? What do I wish I could change? What can I just not fucking stand?!”

This reminds me of something similar that Seinfeld told Tim Ferriss: he’s just constantly annoyed.

Some comedians fear getting older, growing up, mellowing out. Less to be annoyed about.

Nah uh. Not for Seinfeld.

As long as he has a family there will always be new and evolving things to be annoyed about.

Which can be very valuable for a comedian.

Change coffee shops (instead of reconfiguring your brain)

Check out the full notes for How to Change

January 1st and many many other days can act as good beginnings for fresh starts. But you can also try changing environments.

Yet, unlike calendar dates, these fresh starts don’t contradict the predictions of economic theory, because they actually change our life circumstances—they don’t just shift our perspective.

The big lesson for me: if you happen to be moving between states or countries (with a global pandemic improving, for example), that’s a great time to adjust your routines. You’ll have a fresh set of cues to work with.

If you aren’t, at least find a good coffee shop.

Tool: Change your environment

Trying to make writing light and easy (250 daily)

This excerpt is from a 1984 interview with Jay Leno by Judd Apatow (~17 years old at the time), from his interview collection Sick in the Head:

Judd: Is most of your humor worked out on the stage? Some people work it out on paper, and they think about it—

Jay: Oh no, I don’t have anything on paper. I’ve never written anything down. I suppose I should. Everybody says, Oh, you should make notes. I seem to remember the funnier stuff and forget the stuff that isn’t that funny. Once in a while I forget a funny one, but no, I don’t write anything down.

I finished reading Jon Acuff’s book Soundtracks and Greg McKeown’s book Effortless in the past couple weeks. (Audiobooks while working out make “reading” effortless—I’ve been trying to write about them to try and cement the ideas in my head a bit.)

A lesson in both books: There’s more than one way to do things. Whatever it is you’re doing, it’s worth taking time asking if there’s an easier approach with the same results.

Jay Leno says he didn’t write things down. This contrasts with that striking visual from Jerry Before Seinfeld where his old writing on yellow legal pad sheets is laid out on the street.

Both had remarkably successful careers. Both have people who love them and hate them. Both had iconic TV shows that came to memorable ends.

They had very different approaches.

Building a career in comedy isn’t easy, notes or not. It’s a matter of choosing which hard parts you’ll keep and which might be easier.

You can use this question: What if things were “light and easy”? From Jon Acuff’s Soundtracks:

Imagine if the hardest thing you have to do at your job was light and easy. Instead of dreading the year-end report you prepare for the leadership team, what if it felt light and easy? What if the budget you had to present at the sales conference was light and easy? What if standing on the scale was light and easy? What if the parent-teacher meeting for your high schooler was light and easy? Take anything challenging in your life and think what would happen if you retired the frustration you have about it and instead replaced it with a soundtrack that said “light and easy.”

Podcasting is light and easy for me. Writing on my blog is light and easy.

Writing essays on Twitter has sometimes felt dark and difficult. So I’m going to try writing posts on my blog where it feels light and easy, then re-posting on Twitter.

Starting with this one.

The Notepod: “Soundtracks” by Jon Acuff

Check out the full notes for “Soundtracks” by Jon Acuff

In a “Build in public” sort of approach, I’ll share some of the process while making this podcast episode. I’ll see if it’d be worth doing for future episodes as well.I do a bunch of private writing that’s pretty structured that probably wouldn’t take too much to make into something useful that’s public.The idea here is that this will evolve to the show notes page for a finished episode. I’d usually write this outline somewhere and then forget about it. But I can already feel the “Write in the editor” effect working. Writing it in the WordPress editor means I’ll be maybe 5x more likely to actually publish it.

Okay on to the podcast episode… First, the outline

Grabbing a few quotes from the book to talk about while writing. Aiming for three.

“One of the greatest mistakes you can make in life is assuming all your thoughts are true.”

A lot of these thoughts are formed pretty early from parents and slowly the influence transfers from parents to friends.

A side quest…

“My life is dope and I do dope shit.”

This is not Jon Acuff’s quote (though he does have a cool life writing books and then talking about them). It’s from a Jimmy Fallon interview with Dave Chappelle where he talks about something Kanye said to him.

“I’m watching sketches that no one’s seen before. Because my life is dope and I do dope shit.”

(P.S. go take a moment to listen to Kanye’s “The Food” performance. And then his “Everything I Am” performance on SNL when he messes up and freestyles the rest.)

Okay I only meant to spend 8 minutes on this outline grabbing quotes but it’s one of those where connections come to mind. The Roots are Jimmy Fallon’s show band.

Questlove from The Roots has a book on creativity called Creative Quest. And here’s what he says about his other gig, DJing live shows. (I went to one of his sets at Brooklyn Bowl on Valentine’s Day when I was single so that was awesome/not awesome.)

Questlove talks about moving people with his music:

And in the same way, this is the sort of thing you can learn to do with your inner voice.

“I’ve got a wave of dread scheduled for this Saturday at 2 p.m.!” Is that what you did, or did those thoughts just show up unexpectedly, not at all connected to anything else you were doing at the time?

Those are called broken soundtracks, negative stories you tell yourself about yourself and your world. They play automatically without any invitation or effort from you. Fear does not take work. Doubt does not take work. Insecurity does not take work.

Retire Replace Repeat

Three actions to remember.

There are three actions to change your thoughts from a super problem into a superpower:

  1. Retire your broken soundtracks.
  2. Replace them with new ones.
  3. Repeat them until they’re as automatic as the old ones.

Retire. Replace. Repeat.

Similar to a bad habit, it’s hard to just turn the thing off cold turkey. You need to recognize it happening and then replace it. What’s triggering your negative thought and what’s a different true thought you can replace it with?

Something that’s been useful for me is changing “I don’t have time to work out” to “A little bit is better than none. What movement can I do with the time I have?”

Recording this episode

Talking about re-framing is helpful because I’ve been trying to re-frame my thinking around things that I’m making.

In particular, this podcast.

It’s the most fun creative outlet for me. Just writing this outline and adding links and things reminds me of the joy that I had growing up with a WordPress blog. Sharing random things that come to mind and massaging them a little bit so that they’re a little less random.

Some types of writing are hard. This type of writing is energizing and fun.

And I’m remembering something that Jack Butcher talked about in a Visualize Value office hours a few weeks ago. Hard work does not mean something is valuable. And fun, light work does not mean it’s not valuable.

Podcasting is fun, light work for me. There’s value in that itself. But to make it valuable for the audience means I do need to take a couple things more seriously.

  1. Actually having an audience — I’ll need to share the podcast more but that also means that…
  2. … I need to make the package better — I say package because a podcast isn’t just the single audio file. That’s the core thing, but it needs to be packaged with show notes and other things to make it more discoverable and better when people do actually give it a shot.

Which is why I’m doing these show notes and sharing the process as I try to build a better podcast.

Reframe: It takes too long to write show notes → Show notes are a multiplier of the value from the previous time spent

Bad analogy: You’re in a BBQ competition and then forget to bring the tray to present it to the judges and you get DQ’d.

(I’m sure they’d be able to provide you with a tray, but anyway…)

If I write show notes it’ll increase the likelihood that anyone will check the episode out. It will also just lead to a better episode if I start a show notes page right from the start as the outline for the episode.

I already do that writing anyway so I may as well make it public.

Okay the export is done so that’s enough. Thanks for reading (and possibly listening!)