Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Reading Ramblings: “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis

Check out the full notes for “How to Get Rich: One of the World’s Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets” by Felix Dennis

Using Cold Turkey Micromanager & MarsEdit to try to write in the editor and get something up on the blog without overthinking it.

I just finished reading “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis this morning. Thought I’d just write some ramblings about it afterward.

  • Building a moat with PSX demo discs (lesson: copy earlier or it might be too late) — These weren’t part of Dennis Publishing (Felix Dennis’s company) but he talks about a competitor that had a novel idea for their Playstation magazine. They went directly to Sony to strike a deal to do their official magazine and each month the magazine would come with a demo disc. Eventually, Dennis Publishing tried to do something similar but the official magazine had exclusive rights to the good games. The free disc in the plastic bag was more important than the magazine. They lost because the games on their discs were worse.This reminded me of The Innovation Stack, which talks about the importance of copying things you can copy to be able to focus some energy on innovating.

    Growing up, my parents bought two subscriptions for me and my brother: EGM and Game Players. Reading about how he built a magazine empire reminded me of the joy of getting those magazines in the mail each month. Whoever picked up the mail got first crack at it. I’d jump to the reviews to see what got game of the month, skim the reviews, then jump back to the front to read the mailbag.

  • Parallels between lessons in the book and Andrew Wilkinson’s approach to business — I picked this up after hearing about it on the My First Million podcast, either on an episode with Wilkinson or an episode where they mention him and the book. Or I’m misremembering entirely. But he does have a Twitter thread talking about the book. Anyway, while reading the book I did see some links between the book and what Wilkinson is doing—of course, these aren’t ideas unique to this book or anything but it’s what I was reading. (1) Local newspapers make good business (2) Learning lessons through building a successful media company (Wilkinson ran a successful Apple news site for teenagers as a teenager) (3) Actually, that’s a pretty direct parallel itself: Dennis Publishing had many early successes with technology magazines, including one focused on the Mac and personal computing (4) Wilkinson actually did apply those lessons successfully in the startup world, which Felix says was something he missed the boat on as far as paths available to get rich (5) Focusing on execution and hiring talented operators.

Okay gotta run, but some other things I need to post about in the future: Re-purposing content (Dennis and a partner wrote a Bruce Lee biography in the 70s and they were able to use all the interviews and other research for a Kung Fu magazine), understanding the sacrifice required to get rich (and he does mean like helicopter rich, categorizing $1-3 million as “comfortably poor”), and of course, that getting rich won’t make you happy (but that the most effective way to learn this is to get rich).

Video log – How to design your environment (for better habits)

I just posted a video about habits and designing your environment. I tried relating the environment to different things in Mario and using visuals from the game to illustrate some tips about environment design.

I planned to use examples from multiple games when I started. But as I was making the visuals it just sort of worked out to where I was just using one game. And now the retro…

What went well?

  • I put the visuals together in small parts during the week. I remembered to record draft run-throughs along the way. This always helps to see if the structure makes sense and if I need more examples or if I can start cutting things down. One big thing was realizing I needed way more stills since I wasn’t animating anything.
  • Just publishing again was good. Trying to get back into the groove of publishing regularly.
  • Got some extra motivation after recording a podcast with Wally this week and creating a mini challenge for ourselves to do 3 videos this month
  • Using stills and not doing transitions between the slides might be worth the trade-off of losing some slightly interesting visual elements. The upside is being able to clean up all of the word gaps in the audio really quickly. I was able to use Descript to remove the gaps without worrying that I would be cutting the clip in the middle of a transition.
  • I tried to spend a little more time on the thumbnail than I usually do. Some of that was inspired by listening to MrBeast interviewed by MKBHD on the WVFRM podcast. He talks about spending hours thinking of thumbnails and titles.

Tracing thumbnail

 

What could be improved?

  • The visuals aren’t great. There are moments in the video where it’s just sitting on a single visual for longer than I’d like.
  • I didn’t put any book quotes in here at all. I could have pulled some in from Designing Your Life or Atomic Habits or any of the habits books really. We’ll see how the videos does. Pulling the quotes in afterward can take long because it requires hunting them down and then deciding between a few different ones to reflect the idea that I’m talking about.
  • The premise just could have been better. I do wish I used more examples from different games. Something like Super Mario Maker clips could have been better (since it’s all about directly designing environments), but it’d take much much longer to make the video if I used actual game clips. Maybe something to try for a future video.

What will you try next time?

  • I want to continue with doing the visuals in Figma. It’ll make it easy to re-use parts from different videos and copy and paste things. It’s a little cumbersome inserting or arranging slides since they’re Figma frames. That’d be really easy in Keynote or Slides, but I’ll get faster at doing it in Figma so I’m not too worried about it.
  • I think this could be one of those decisions that compounds over time. If I can build up a library of reusable pieces for presentations for the videos, then I’ll be able to do things like create component for three slides that show a timeline. I could do that with themes and styles in Keynote but it’s just not as lightweight a system as components in Figma.

74: We’re back (pt VII) x 2021 Goals

Okay we hit RECORD again finally. Kicking off 2021. We talk about some of our goals

  • Fitness goals
  • Creation goals
  • Personal goal

We’ll be making videos in 2021 and sharing our progress as we go.

Video log – How to stay creative (when low on time)

I just posted a video about habits. I thought it’d be good to do I retro for each of the videos I make. I’ll just start with one before I get too crazy about doing this for every single video. First, here’s the video: “Staying Creative While Low on Time”

What went well?

I made this in pieces — That went successfully for the first time in a while. The definition of success here is just finishing it at all. I’ve done this before where I try to make a video and chunks and then do different pieces and sometimes I’ll even put some of it together before eventually abandoning it.

Stuck to 3 quotes and that was it — I can often go a little overboard trying to find enough quotes and examples for different topics. This always leads to bloat and makes it less likely that I’ll finish the videosI’m trying to make. Even with just three, this video is probably 2 or 3 minutes too long.

I drew one set of 8 images in 15 minutes sessions — This was good for just working towards something where I can find time to contribute to a larger project every day. 15 minutes is a good chunk.

This is a quote from Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis, way talks about the 5-day process:

Instead, stick to a simple, repeatable process:
Day 1: Finish one piece of creative work today, without judgment—whether it’s a story, a photo, or a minimum viable product. Just complete the work, create it quickly, and be good with it.
Day 2: Iterate on the work you did yesterday. Do a new draft or update the old one. Put the photo into Photoshop and make it better, add some polish to the lines of yesterday’s poem; just take yesterday’s baseline and make it better.
Day 3: Repeat Day 2.
Day 4: Repeat Day 3.
Day 5: Decide it’s good enough and move on. It’s not perfect, not ideal, but damn, it’s pretty good, right? Good enough to put out into the world.

What could be improved?

There was a time that I got a comment and I skimmed it and I saw the word “mate”. What I thought as someone was addressing me as a mate with some encouragement but then when I actually read the comment it said that I should have some yerba mate tea.

This video kind of has that issue as well. I recorded in kind of a low-energy state while sitting. I’ll probably be more wary of that next time. I want to bring too much energy but I need to bring some energy.

What to try next time?

First, I’ll try to record standing. I’ll also continue to try this format with 8 panels. I do want to do something where I take the blue vector imagery I’ve been experimenting with on Twitter and try to do a video in that style.

I also will try to get back to a weekly cadence for videos. I want to not care about metrics and things like that. At the same time it would be nice to get to 1000 subscribers. I think that’d be a nice number to feel like I’m not quite shouting into the void.

And it’s a good time to link to MKBHD’s video where he is so grateful to have 74 subscribers after 100 videos. One of the best ways to show my 500 subscribers that I’m grateful is to make more videos of higher quality.

Oh yah…

Another thing that went well was introducing Booster, our new puppy.

Midnights with Booster

I’m just going to free write here real quick until I figure out something to draw tomorrow. It should be a single idea worth sharing from something in my information diet recently.

Maybe it could be that writing advice about being able to both paint a character in a corner and also give them a way out. It’s from The Connect, where they talk about Training Day and Denzel is a bully moments.

But it’s about the scene with the shotgun and the bath tub. There seems like no way out for Ethan Hawk.

This came to mind when I was catching up on The Mandalorian and Oberyn gets caught in the cell.

So maybe I can draw The Mandalorian in a cell with a pen or pencil or something representing writing to get out of there. Or Houdini in the water trap with only a typewriter to escape.