Active Recall!

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The “before” story (aka before I hopefully manage to shed some of this fat)

I guess this will be an experiment in learning in public. And public accountability and all that. I started buying a few nutrition books and am going to get back to kettlebells. But first, a quick Q&A on this…

  • Why are you trying to lose this weight?

I got married last weekend (4/3/21) and had an amazing time. Looking back at the photos this week, I could see the amazing time very clearly. What wasn’t clear was my jawline.

  • Wait, aren’t you supposed to diet leading up too the wedding?

I won’t do the “no excuses but blah blah blah”.

I’ll just point out my excuses: got a puppy so I was sleep deprived in jan, bronchitis for in feb, stress leading up to the wedding, and 25 days of travel (SF -> NYC) in March

The wedding was wonderful and it was great coming home to our (much larger) dog. It was all worth it, but I’d love to have skipped the bronchitis. Especially the few days before testing negative where I was definitely sure it was COVID.

  • Wait, couldn’t you have worked out and still watched what you ate during all of that?

Yes, that’s why they’re excuses and not actual good reasons.

But here we are!

  • What’s the actual output goal?

It’s tied to another wedding. In August, I’m officiating my wife’s cousin’s wedding. I’d like to look better and feel healthier for that.

The goal is 150 lbs by August 1. So it’d be trying to lose 20 pounds in 17 weeks. I’d say the first few pounds is travel bloat that can come off somewhat quick then I’ll be trying to lose a pound a week.

It’s a bit of a stretch but maybe if I blog about it then it’ll help me get there…

I’m at an age now where I really mean that feeling good is just as important (and not just something to say to not seem vain). I just haven’t felt healthy this year.

  • What motivated this?

As mentioned, wedding photos.

Then Naval, in a way.

One of my favorite things to do when we lived there was walk around Central Park and listen to audiobooks and podcasts.

I got a chance to do that a couple times during the wedding trip, so I listened to the Navalmanack.

It reminded me of one of my favorite tweets about happiness:

A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought – they must be earned.

We’ve got a good start to the house full of love.

I overthink and have work to do on having a calmer mind.

But the one that’s a disaster right now is “a fit body”.

Hearing that during a long walk and realizing how rare it became for me to have that level of activity was a slight epiphany moment. Or a rain check on the epiphany moment which I’m cashing in now. I wasn’t going to pass up indulging a bit (ok, a lot) with my family and best friends in the city for the event.

  • And what else?

Writing this reminded me of Tim Ferriss writing about putting health first in Tools of Titans

I’m currently typing this at 1:55am so I should go to sleep soon. I’m also typing it on my phone in bed (without my blue blockers on, drat!) so I should work on my sleep hygiene.

  • Whats the general approach going to be?

Food-wise: It’ll probably look paleo-ish. Still working this out, but I’ve started cutting sugar and grains. Only in the past few years did I start to always look for something sweet after meals.

I’ve done paleo with very good compliance before. I always joke is that the worst thing is that it works so well. I definitely felt my best doing it. But it comes with knowing that my favorite foods to eat are also the least healthy.

I’ll do more cooking. One of my favorite fitness re-frames comes from “Fat Loss Happens on Mondays”: if you’re blocking time for 5 workouts each week, it could be better to block time for 4 workouts and 1 grocery + meal prep session.

It’ll also involve some fasting. I already do a 16-hour fast most days. Which might be the only reason I’m only trying to lose 20 pounds and not 50. I’ll continue that eating schedule.

Movement-wise: Kettlebells, walks, rucks, hikes. I’ll aim for daily, but lower intensity.

  • OK, what’s next?

This is a good start to logging this. I’ll aim for a weekly update on this. I’ll share progress and resources. It’ll likely be more useful for me to write it than it will be for any readers. (Unless, of course, I do actually succeed and it becomes a good source of motivation for others starting a health journey.)

Brainstorming possible MMA threads

I was listening to My First Million this morning. At this point, it’s the one podcast that’s stood the test of time over the past year when my listening has gone from probably 4 hours of listening daily to maybe 1 hour per day. It’s the only one I’m still listening to every episode of.

Anyway, on today’s episode “#167: Answering Your Questions On Investments, Businesses and Life” (Spotify), they get a question:

What do you not get a chance to talk about (either because it’s off-topic/lower priority) that you wish you could?

Both Sam and Shaan mention UFC and sports.

I keep up with the UFC so I thought it’d be cool to try to write some threads about mindset and business lesson from the UFC.

The first step to writing these threads would be to brainstorm. And I’ll just try to do that here rather than in Evernote or Roam, which I love to write in but then never publish the things.

So here we go… some rough connections between MMA and mindset things that Shaan and Sam have talked about on the podcast or in their newsletters.

  • Anderson Silva and Chael Sonnen and how you can do everything right and still not win in the end (“Sometimes, someone pulls an armbar out of nowhere”)
  • Being the very best in the world at Tai Chi and how important it is to pick the right game to be the very best at (“The best base for MMA is…”)
  • Dive into BJJ for a few weeks and you’ll learn a bunch of different things the same way as diving into creating content (“You’ll learn a ton as a white belt in content creation”)
  • Be the best at fighting, the best at talking, or a good mix of both. Skill stacking.
  • Your requirements for success can’t be both being the best at standup and the best on the ground. (Don’t make your success criteria to be two very difficult wins.)
  • The Diaz brothers and never winning a belt (You don’t need to be a champion to be popular.)
  • Knockout. TKO. Judges. (There’s more than one way to win.)
  • Flyweight fights. Heavyweight fights. (Understand the kind of fight that you’re in.)
  • Conor McGregor the boxer (The money might be somewhere else)
  • Uriah Faber with the elbows after breaking both hands (Get SCRAPPY!)

Okay 10 sounds good for now.

And I guess something about fighters who can switch stances and how doing this post to think of Twitter ideas is sort of the reverse of the more common path of using Twitter posts to test blog post ideas.

Fungible name, non fungible sentence

Check out the full notes for “Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal and Redemption” by Ben Mezrich

From Bitcoin Billionaires by Ben Mezrich

“Dread Pirate Roberts was the online name Ulbricht had given himself, after the Cary Elwes character in the movie The Princess Bride. In the movie, he’s a mythic character who, it turned out, is actually multiple pirates, the name being handed down from generation to generation.”

Haven’t thought of anything beyond pointing out that NFTs are non-fungible and some of the history of early applications of cryptocurrency involved a site run by someone claiming that he was just the latest iteration of a fungible character.

Though now I realize I have no understanding of the nuance of the word ‘fungible’. I basically think of it as not tradeable or swappable 1 for 1 but I’m guessing there’s more to it than that.

Anyway, a couple other things that came to mind.

  1. Is James Bond the same James Bond across all the movies? It is across movies of the same actor but it’s not clear if it’s across all the movies. (Chuck Klosterman has talked about whether movies exist in movies. Conclusion: some movies yes, some movies no.)
  2. What if Fake Diesel and Fake Razor Ramon worked? When Kevin Nash and Scott Hall went to WCW, the WWF still owned their actual characters so they brought them back out with different wrestlers.

Anyway, Bitcoin Billionaires has been fun to listen to so far. Pairs well with American Kingpin. They’ve given me not much more understanding of the underlying technology (Tor is explained in a paragraph) but they’ve given a good glimpse into characters involved.

Which, of course, is usually what makes things fun.

Reading some crypto books

I want to make this blog the home base for everything I’m making. I got distracted the past few months with some things that weren’t getting distracted by and some things that very much were worth focusing on: a puppy and getting married (just a few days away!)

Currently in New York and have gotten some miles in walking. Still one of my favorite things. Current topic of choice for things to listen to: crypto/blockchain. I definitely feel late to the party, but then I’m reminded of James Clear’s interview with Polina Marinova where he talks about starting his blog in 2012. Blogs had been around for a decade.

It wasn’t early, but it wasn’t too late either.

Blockchain seems like a big shift for the future, so I thought it’d be good to start learning.

So it’s definitely not early (and good for the bazillionaires who were truly early to it) but it’s not too late to learn about something that will be around for a while.

The gateway for me was NBA Top Shot to NFTs to my go-to: audiobooks. Currently listening to Bitcoin Billionaires and The Infinite Machine to understand some of the history and culture of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Will continue to share as I learn. Here, hopefully. If I don’t get distracted by social media.

Drumline, approval from a distance, and playing without reading (PCxCP vol. 7 of 52)

There’s a scene in Drumline where Nick Cannon (is hilarious) is doing late night tryouts. The unofficial signal comes from the current drumline parked off in the distance. If you play the rehearsal piece and they honk their car horn, they’re signaling approval.

This is what writing online can feel like sometimes. You write your thing and send it off into the void and then someone way off gives you their approval.

I’m not saying NOT to do that. I’m just saying not to ONLY do that.

Also in the movie, he’s able to play without reading notes. He just watches other people play and can pick it up quickly.

Watching other people working can be incredibly effective for learning. Exposing yourself to how an expert in your indstry works will teach you things they wouldn’t think to teach. Because they forgot some incredibly valuable nugget is even worth teaching in the first place.

Even if that expert chooses to teach what they know, there’s a bottleneck in how well they’re able to teach. So a lot of knowledge is just locked up but you’d be able to soak it in if you watched them work.

Luckily there’s a growing number of people streaming their work process or otherwise documenting as they build in public.

That said, take the time to read books. Figure out the good ones with principles standing the test of time. Not being able to read music catches up to him eventually, but this line sets him on the right path:

If you don’t have the honor and discipline to learn your craft, then quite frankly you don’t deserve to be here.