Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Interstellar and figuring out the time warps to avoid (PCxCP vol. 4 of 52)

A lesson from Interstellar: Good god don’t waste your time

You’re walking around taking measurements, shin deep in water. You look up and a 1000-ft wave is approaching. All you can see is a wall of water.

You are, of course, on Miller’s Planet. You escape (with a little less cargo!) but when you return to your ship, you realize just how long you were on that time-warped planet.

Years evaporated.

Don’t let that happen to you. Figure out your time sinks and avoid them.

For me, lately, it’s been Twitter. Don’t get me wrong, it can be a great tool. Same with all other social media and social news sites. I haven’t set myself up for it to be a great tool, so it’s become an incredible time sink.

I just logged off of Twitter right before writing this, but I should really just have someone change my password for me and stay off it for a longer period of time.

It’s an ongoing thing where I’ve been trying different things to stop using it. But it can be so tempting to see what other people are thinking, what they’re making, and checking to see if anyone liked that thing I posted. 

I can do it for hours at a time just checking the same thing over and over.

It might be a different app or site or activity for you. But figure out what the Miller’s Planet of productivity is for you. Where time melts and you have no work to show for it.

Then do everything you can to avoid it.

What is NBA Top Shot? (Remove the game, remove the shoes)

Made this video about NBA Top Shot and a hunch about why it’s popular: people hate standing in lines but love to talk about standing in lines. It’s really cool packaging for gameless loot boxes. (Also: People love money.)

NBA Top Shot allows you to stand in a digital line to get a digital pack of digital highlights. The packs are limited. Rare highlights can be resold at a much higher value.

Digital collectibles were made popular through computer games. You could buy different items, skins, that sort of thing, and then resell it for real money.

NBA Top Shot allows you to do that without the game.

Number two: NBA Top Shot removed the shoes. You used to stand in line outside of a physical store to get in on a drop, buy shoes, and then you could resell those. Some people were building up their collections, but the value comes from reselling and the reseller market.

That experience became digital through things like the SNKRS app, where you could stand in a digital line to get physical shoes.

NBA Top Shot removed the shoes from this. You stand in the digital line to get a digital good that you can resell without having to go to the post office.

NBA Top Shot removed the game and removed the shoes.

Tony Stark and starting with a bang but going through a cave (PCxCP vol. 3 of 52)

A lesson from Iron Man: Remember that you’ll go through a cave

Okay so after 11 years, everyone comes through the portal and it’s the greatest live theater moment in decades.

But it all started with a bang. The first scene of Iron Man has Tony Stark riding in a truck that explodes. Then he’s locked in a cave.

You’re going to need to work through a cave at some point in your creative work.

Shaan Puri, host of My First Million and just one of my all around favorite internet people, often talks about the importance of mindset. With some experience, he learned one of the most important things when starting a new business (but this can be applied to your creative work too).

There’s going to be a plateau.

It’s like being in that cave. Tony Stark was able to get out of it without preparing beforehand because he’s a generational genius and could MacGyver right outta there.

You’re not a generational genius.

So you’ll just need to remember that, with any project, you’ll probably start off with a bang. The enthusiasm is there. But you’ll need to go through the cave. The plateau.

If you know it’s coming, you can prepare for it.

If you don’t, you might never leave the cave and go on to save the entire MCU. (Or at least come back to write your next page.)

Inception and realizing your superpower (PCxCP vol. 2 of 52)

A lesson from Inception: Realize your superpower

There’s a scene in Inception where Ariadne becomes aware she’s in a dream. She starts creating and moving huge objects in the world. She can manipulate the world on her own.

She’s realized her superpower.

You have one, too. And when you realize it you can start leaning into it.

I often think of Seth Godin’s Linchpin where talks about the idea that everyone is an artist*. Whatever you do at work that can be easily done by other people, that’s not art. But the tasks that only you can do: that’s your art. 

That’s your superpower.

Some people’s superpowers involve business, running meetings, a/b testing ads, presenting to groups.

Once you figure out what that is—even better if you enjoy it—then you can:

  • Develop that skill further
  • Increase the amount of time you’re doing it
  • Figure out ways to apply it to the rest of your work
  • Teach your art to other people

Then, like Ariadne, you can create doors from nothing and open them to new opportunities.

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[*] I also appreciated Bob Iger’s answer to a question about creativity in an interview. The interviewer asks if he looks at himself as a bit of an artist—one of those business is more art than science sort of things. He basically says, no, the people writing Marvel and Pixar stories are artists. Wouldn’t want to compare mysef

The Joker plans a lot, you don’t always have to (PCxCP vol. 1 of ????)

A lesson from The Dark Knight: Don’t overplan

At some point this year I want to sell an eBook. I thought I’d try to fire off a bunch of posts to practice writing and then  compile those into something and illustrate them and sell the eBook.

I’m tempted to overplan.

(In fact, I’m writing this first post just hoping that something pop-culture-y will come to mind about overplanning or underplanning or just getting started.)

Okay something came to mind… my favorite movie.

There’s the intro scene in The Dark Knight where The Joker robs the bank and manages to kill the rest of his team so that he gets all the money.

It’s clearly very meticulously planned out and necessary. 

Because he wasn’t writing a casual eBook!

He was, as mentioned, robbing a bank and getting his teammates to murder each other.

Writing can be hard but not that hard. So I’m going to just get to writing this thing.

Working title: Pop Culture x Productivity (PCxP) — 50-ish lessons on keeping your creative practice.

Do the same thing (for beginners and experts)

Alright Booster’s finally street legal so we took her on a walk while going to grab some coffee. I can get used to this!

One of my favorite videos about making things is by the artist Struthless:

Basically, do the same thing every day (in his case, drawing the same type of bird) and you’ll find creative ways to not do the same thing every day.

One lesson…

  • Constraints create room for creativity

Because I’ve been missing New York lately, here’s a quote from Shane Snow’s Smartcuts about the power of constraints in city planning:

Constraints made New York City an architectural marvel. Manhattan Island’s narrow shape forced the city to build up, to rethink and renew; it impelled architects to reinvent stone buildings into steel skyscrapers.

And they built down too, with the subway as the main form of public transportation.

One connection…

  • Repetition is valuable for experts also

Jack Butcher has had a few tweets recently about the power of repetition. Here’s one:

Most famous people are known for maybe like 1-3 huge things. And they’re known for those things because they did them over and over and over and over.

Repetition: Just do it.