Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

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.

“Think Again” (Reading Log 2/23/21)

Check out the full notes for “Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know” by Adam Grant

Just got back from a walk with Booster. She’s street legal now but it doesn’t mean that she won’t eat everything. 1.3 miles in 50 minutes, let’s GO.

I’ve been listening to Adam Grant’s “Think Again”. On today’s walk I got to a part where he talks about sports rivalries. He mentions this commercial with a couple kissing while wearing Ohio State and Michigan sweaters.

“Without sports, this wouldn’t be disgusting.”

Further on, he talks about how things can backfire when you try to change someone’s mind (in this case, on measles vaccines):

This is a common problem in persuasion: what doesn’t sway us can make our beliefs stronger. Much like a vaccine inoculates our physical immune system against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies our psychological immune system. Refuting a point of view produces antibodies against future influence attempts. We become more certain of our opinions and less curious about alternative views. Counterarguments no longer surprise us or stump us—we have our rebuttals ready.

Logic and facts can’t always overcome emotions.

I roll my eyes when people are proud that they don’t watch sports and lay out how illogical it is—waste of time, rooting for rich people to play a game, why would you care about this when there are so many actual issues in the world, etc.

And they probably roll their eyes back at the other side of the argument. But, but, but. The emotion!

What’s the takeaway here? If you’re going to change someone’s mind, remember that you might need more than logic to do it.

Batch shallow work, mega batch the deep work

Alright so 7 minutes to write something and then 7 minutes to draw something could be something that I can keep up daily. 

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Again, I’ve fallen into the temptation of doing something daily. Likely reading too much Ben Settle—not a bad thing, in my book.

The key to making sure this doesn’t backfire is to overload on the days where I have more time and to schedule things out. And to try to keep things short.

Usually if I write enough then some book quote comes to mind that’s related and I can pull it up. So there’s definitely something about batching here.

I’ll just go with a leap of faith search and see what Evernote and Readwise send back to me.

Evernote and Readwise

Oh my god, it worked.

Okay so here’s what I got.

From Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis:

It requires discipline to maintain boundaries and not let other kinds of work spill in, but batching is a masterful way to protect creative work from the day-to-day interruptions that feel urgent but actually aren’t and can easily wait until you’re ready to deal with them.

One nice thing that this points out is that it’s important to treat the non-fun tasks with the same mindset. Definitely batch those things because, left unbatched, they’re the things that will interrupt the fun-time batches.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport characterizes certain things as shallow activities:

I build my days around a core of carefully chosen deep work, with the shallow activities I absolutely cannot avoid batched into smaller bursts at the peripheries of my schedule. Three to four hours a day, five days a week, of uninterrupted and carefully directed concentration, it turns out, can produce a lot of valuable output.

I’m guessing randomly checking Twitter every 27 seconds counts as a shallow activity.

Lastly, in Free to Focus, Michael Hyatt explains that he doesn’t just normal-batch…

I used to research and record one new episode a week. It was sometimes hard to drum up the mental energy to produce. What should have taken me an hour or two would sometimes kill an entire day. But I found my team and I could prep in advance and batch record a whole season’s worth of shows over a couple of days.

This is where I reveal that I’ve been mega batching and I actually wrote this post in 2015, but that’s not the case. I did schedule this out a couple days ahead though (writing this on Saturday and scheduling it for Monday).

Time’s up! Good luck batching today!

Procreate how-to video outline

Usually I’d pound some jug of cold brew to mask the sleep deprivation, but we’re completely tapped out. I usually have a bag of Trader Joe’s instant grinds as back up, but we’re completely tapped out of that too. So I dipped into the mushroom coffee packs this morning. And that’s what I want to talk about today… having BACKUPS and always being ready to be ready even when you’re not READY.

Just kidding, today I’m going to jot some ideas down for a future video…

First, a quote about editing from Edit Better by Jeff Bartsch:

Stick to one function at a time. Do your foundation work, THEN coverage, THEN music, THEN titles, THEN audio, THEN color, etc. Don’t try to do everything at once. But does that kill creativity? Some people will say, “This is personal. You’ve got to do whatever works for you. Doesn’t this assembly line thing take out all the creativity?” Heck no. On the contrary, focusing on a single process promotes creativity.

The function right now will be drafting sections of videos.

Some title ideas

  • How I use Procreate in 2021
  • Setting Procreate up for FLOW
  • How to animate with Procreate

A roll idea: I can try to do another “Follow along with a Jim Lee stream” session and record that. Usually takes 30-60 mins but also creates that exact amount of footage which is super useful to have. Now that I think about it, one of the more popular videos I have is just me drawing and then talking over it:

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#The footage here took exactly that amount of time to film. Probably worth doing this again.#

Then these could be some of the sections—I won’t worry about ordering these right now. Just want to capture some of the ideas.

UntitledImage

  • Something about setting up the radial menu

I’ve enjoyed using the radial menu and my hunch is that more people would use it if they tried it out. You get 6 slots to customize in the menu. I give 3 to different brushes and then the remaining 3 for: Previous color, New layer, Duplicate layer

You can also now create different sets of menu settings to swap between. I want to set that up eventually (one for animating, one for wireframing, etc.) but haven’t done it yet.

animation books
#A couple books that I need to actually read instead of thinking I’ll absorb them through osmosis by way of them sitting on the shelf very close to my desk.#
  • My animation settings

Note: I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m sure there are reasons the defaults are to show a bunch of onion layers at that opacity.

But I usually do one onion layer at the default opacity.

I could also do a couple very simple animations to show the workflow here.

  • Procreate sawdust

Procreate generates some very nice cutting room floor stuff. You always, always have the timelapse video available. Layers can be brought into Figma to create a carousel.

And that’s that for the outline. Three sections seems like a good amount. I’ve been writing this for way longer than I planned, so I gotta hop. (Video to come!)

Midnights with Booster (Ramblings vol. ???)

Got Boostie Boost right next to me and the Cold Turky Micromanager + MarsEdit mega write-in-the-editor combo to keep me on task. And the task is to just write some random thoughts. Easy enough!

  • Just got a MacBook Air M1 — I bought a MacBook Air M1 on launch day and then ended up returning it to just keep my 16” MacBook Pro, thinking that I really needed the larger screen. I noticed that I really just ended up not using my laptop much at all anymore because I just didn’t want to lug it around and it’d get so hot in my lap. And those extra few seconds it takes to turn on and start thinking made me long for the sweet, sweet M1 experience. So I’m back and loaded it up a bit more to a 1TB and 16GB version. We’ll see how this goes and if I’ll have envy once the Pros are announced later this year. In any case, I’m immediately happy with the purchase so far.

Here’s my disaster of a desk, mid unboxing

Desk

  • I want to focus on this blog again because I don’t want to get further addicted to Twitter — I think Twitter’s great. In Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about the utility of online platforms and evaluating the tradeoff of doing some task at the cost of losing a bunch of focus. For some it can be very much worth it. (An example that resonated was that a college student that learns about real-life events mainly through Facebook probably should keep using it. Or I guess used to resonate, because of the pandemic and also because I am very much way too old to resonate with a college student learning about real-life events and going to them, not having social anxiety, etc.)
  • … I digressed — Okay so I think Twitter’s great for all sorts of reasons: you can find people with similar interests, share your work with others, build up an audience, etc. BUT I’m very addicted to it. For many of those good reasons, but even when I read a bunch of good stuff from people I admire, I still inevitably find myself in some replies rabbit hole. I rarely feel good after. (Which I acknowledge has plenty to do with my mindset, but in any case…) I’ve even switched my password to something much harder to type and removed it from my password manager so I have to type it in manually with the vow to only use 3rd-party tools to write threads so that I don’t see the feed. What happens is that I’m becoming very very good at typing the 28-character password to log back in. It’s madness. So I’m going to just write into the void on my blog for a bit until the urge goes away. (I guess?)

Okay I found the quote from Deep Work:

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

In short: it wasn’t bringing me happiness. I had some mild success that maybe could build up in the long run. But the negative aspects could build up also in the long run, too. So I’m pausing to re-evaluate. 

The books say I should always end with some CTA but I don’t really have anything in mind right now. Instead I’ll just share one link and the next thing that I might write about.

One link: Really enjoyed these two episodes of Magic the Gathering: Drive to Work Podcast: #809: Arabian Nights with Richard Garfield, Part 1 and #810: Arabian Nights with Richard Garfield, Part 2. (And here’s an older episode I need to give another listen: #737: Richard Garfield.) All the early Magic the Gathering card (or I guess particularly in the early days) has a story to how it came to be. Things are probably more systematic 3 decades later. Anyway, Garfield about using Arabian Nights for flavor with a sprinkling of Neil Gaiman for “City in a Bottle”, based on Sandman #50. 

The next thing that I might write about: A quick post about my current book rotation. Right now I’m reading Musashi (Kindle version), Junior (a copywriting book, Print version), Steph Smith’s eBook: Doing Content Right (which has a convincing argument about SEO still being underrated—it very well might be the reason that I’m writing on the blog again right at this moment.), Adam Grant’s Think Again (Audible, but I did that thing again where I was listening only when I could pay attention but thennnn one time listened when I couldn’t pay attention and now I’ve lost my place where I need to go back to where I was definitely listening and paying attention so I’ll listen to the whole thing over again).

Okay that all went much longer than I expected. I need to set a timer next time and stick to it.