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The Notepod #1 – “The Fighter’s Mind”

Quick note: The transcript of the audio is below. It took a while to transcribe and I’m not sure it was worth the time vs. recording new episodes or just writing new show notes with corrected quotes and links about things mentioned in the episode.

(Ideally, both notes and a transcript would be available, but I only have so much time. After writing this out it does seem like notes would be better than a the transcript. I’ll keep experimenting!)

Transcript

Welcome to the Notepod: Episode 1, which is just another name for these solo episodes. Wally and I will have more episodes in the future, but right now just doing a solo episode, book notes.

Anyway, I’ll just get to these notes. The book that I’m talking about today is “The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game. A look at the mental strategies of fighters, extreme athletes, and those on the edge.”

It’s from 2010. It is by Sam Sheridan, author of “A Fighter’s Heart“. I did an episode on that — which I probably should have listened to before I started doing this one, but check that out.

I’ll have to add a link in show notes.

Here’s his bio from the publisher’s website: “Sam Sheridan is a Harvard graduate and the author of the books “The Disaster Diaries”, “A Fighter’s Heart”, and “A Fighter’s Mind”. He’s been a boxer, mixed martial arts fighter, sailor, cowboy, south pole construction worker, and merchant marine.

And then the book description: “In ‘The Fighter’s Mind’, Sheridan explores the mental discipline required of an elite fighter. In his training shared heard time and time again that fighting is 90% mental, half the time. What does that mean, exactly? To uncover the secrets of mental strength and success Sheridan interviewed dozens of the world’s most fascinating and dangerous men.” And then, yeah, it lists a bunch of people that are mentioned in this book.

The first book was more about his journey into amateur training. I think he might’ve done a profile, but he did… He talks about like moving to Thailand to do kickboxing and training in Muay Thai. But in this book, “The Fighter’s Mind.” — So that’s “A Fighter’s Heart” — “A Fighter’s Mind” is additional profiles.

So he did… he did profiles in the previous book, but he also does profiles and focuses mostly on these profiles here. As mentioned, it focuses on the mental game of fighting and what that means.

Really enjoyed this. Finished it this morning and want to get back into doing book notes.

I’ll stop talking about what I’m going to do and just do this.

The opposite of the 4-minute mile (Freddie Roach finally gets hit)

First quote that I have here—one of the people he profiles is Freddie Roach, trainer, of course, to Manny Pacquiao, and a lot of other people. He was also a professional fighter when he was younger.

He says:

Because I had a hundred and fifty amateur fights and twenty-seven pro fights before I got knocked out. I was never even hurt by anybody—I was invincible. Then one day I never saw the punch coming, and I woke up on the floor.” Freddie laughs, smiles, and eyes me sideways through his thick glasses. “I got up, the guy rushed me and put me down again, and fuck, and then the ref stopped the fight.” He shook his head, deeply amused by his younger self’s chagrin. “From that point on, I knew I could be knocked out and that changed my whole game. My attitude. Before that, I would go in reckless. I would take a couple to get mine off, too. But then I knew what could happen, and it made a huge dent in my fighting career. I wasn’t fearless anymore. It put a question mark in my head.”

This is just kind of the opposite of… there’s another side to the story of… also mentioned in this book is the four-minute mile where Roger Bannister runs a four-minute mile, changes everyone’s mindset that something is possible and then inspires everybody to also run the four-minute mile in the following year.

There’s plenty written about that and whether that’s like a true story or not, or if that’s really like the reason, this mindset thing, but it’s definitely a good concept, and I think is a true concept…. where…

You see someone else do something, it makes it possible, more possible for you to do it.

But there’s the downside to this where you realize… you think you’re invincible… you realize you do have vulnerabilities.That changes your mindset, and then that can change your behavior.

So goes to show the power of the mind. Putting fear into someone else’s mind.

And that’s a lot of what this book is about is the mind games between two people in a ring.

I’ve been playing Brood War a lot lately. Have been losing to, friend of the pod, Jason a lot.

Now I can see it’s in my head, very difficult to get past that, thinking you’re going into a game you can’t win.

So that can be the first step to switching things up… to find that belief that you can win. I believe I can make a good podcast.

Anyway. Next quote.

Learning through video (Mike Ciesnolevicz on DVDs and seminars)

This is about Mike C, but this is in the chapter about Marcelo Garcia, who’s a jujitsu legend. And this is about Mike Ciesnolevicz, hopefully I’m pronouncing that close to correct anyway. Here’s a description: 205 pound fighter at Pat Miletich’s gym in Iowa, and one of the better grapplers at the camp. He remembers the first time he rolled with Marcelo and then basically just talks about Marcello dominating him.

But further on he talks about the DVD set that he picked up. So he said… he’s talking about Marcelo:

“‘He has a whole series of back attacks. I’ve been following his DVD series. I’ve got all four sets.’ Mike is talking about the common practice of famous guys putting together instructional DVDs as a way of making money. It’s the old school way to learn MMA: to buy DVDs and study your heroes. To go to seminars.”

What I loved about this is just… it’s a reminder of, again, how amazing the internet is, how amazing these resources we have are, and something good about this book is that it mentions all these different fights, and probably when it was originally released… not as much footage of this stuff was available. Clearly not as easily available as it is now.

But now you can pull up these different stories from the book and there’s just video online of a bunch of these different things.

There’s a chapter in the book about Renzo Gracie, where he talks about this fight in Brazil where people gathered around the cage and they were all supporters of his opponent.

And then if you got near the cage, they would like, it sounded like they would just like punch, punch you through the cage in a way and push you back towards the center and eventually a riot breaks out.

And then there’s this footage of this on, on YouTube. Great to check out and great to just see like, “Oh wow. Like this is a pretty crazy like fight, environment.”

Anyway, yeah, this whole thing of watching DVDs to learn something, study things that people put out… I think that’s great that in fighting, the experts share their knowledge and it’s great to see that that’s available in different fields.

Maybe not every field, but I definitely learned a lot of programming just going online. Same with design. Something with design that I learned was… there’s a lot more to design than just the hard skills. It’s a lot of soft skill stuff. How you talk to people in other disciplines, how you talk to other designers.

I picked up a lot of that, I would say, from Design Details. It’s a podcast.

And it depends on what field, but there are some… like programming, design, startups…. where there’s all sorts of podcasts about these things, and then you can really hear how these people talk to each other. With hours and hours of conversation.

Just as a side note, I saw this great post on Listen Notes, it’s this podcast search engine. But it’s made by one person. And he has this blog post about how he uses podcasts as his main informal learning.

He calls it his new Wikipedia.

Anyway, just was reading a forum with reactions, and there’s a lot of very odd objections to podcasts that come to mind.

And someone said like, “Oh, you can’t learn from podcasts, because the way I like to learn is… I like to really, you know, read the material and then apply it and the you can’t really learn just by listening passively.”

And it’s totally different thing. This is what I would argue is that… that’s not what I’m using a podcast to learn. It’s not like… I’m not trying to learn a specific programming concept just by listening and then thinking by absorbing it I’m going to know how to write the code .

This idea that you can’t learn by listening is so ridiculous to me.

Because it’s like, why would you even have a conversation? You’re saying like, at a certain point, if someone else is talking for more than three minutes, you think that you’re not learning anything from them?

Maybe I’m pulling it to like a different extreme.

Anyway, that’s, I’m, I’m getting into like ranting at this point, back to these DVDs.

A lot of resources online, whatever you want to learn.

I love that there’s streaming communities where people show step-by-step how they’re doing things.

Back to StarCraft, a decade ago, maybe even like more than a decade ago.

We would try to find and download these Korean VODs with people playing StarCraft with commentary over it. And then you just see like, Oh, these are like these techniques from a different country where… it was using the units in very creative ways. And just working within the constraints of the game is another thing.

Constraints are a big thing in “The Fighters Mind”, the different rule sets in can change the mentality.

There’s a few chapters about wrestling and how wrestling is different from fighting. It’s much more constrained. So a lot of times that’s where the strongest mental… you need a very strong mind for wrestling, is kind of what it was getting at.

I think it was in this book, but there is… maybe it’s a Dan Gable? No, no, no, no. I think it might’ve been like Randy Couture. I forget. But, it’s about these wrestling practice sessions where everyone would pair up and then you wrestle the same person for 90 minutes, and then you could see people breaking during that session.

Anyway, go get some DVDs.

So some of my favorite DVD sets… WrestleMania. My brother got this from for my birthday once, so it was just like, I think the first 20 WrestleManias on DVD. A training one: Better Basketball.

We actually did buy that set, which was like… it seemed like some kind of fortune back when my brother bought it. I think it was a few hundred dollars. Which is not cheap for DVDs, but, yeah, definitely helped us work on our post games.

The end goal doesn’t need to be a championship (being entertaining will build your fanbase as well)

Next quote says

“That’s the bottom line for promoters. People want knockouts, vicious exchanges, and bloody wars, and not necessarily the best fighters in the world. Especially the casual fans. They just want to hear that they’re watching the best in the world.”

So do you fight exciting or fight to win?

This is great. With the larger professional sports — basketball, football, baseball — you can get a lot of respect, just, you know, you win whatever style it is, win a championship. All people really care about, in a way is that you are the best in the world.

There are some boring styles that, and of course more exciting styles will get you further— maybe this isn’t too separate from MMA. There are exciting teams that have, they can stand the test of time without winning the championships. But it does seem like fighting is different where you can be very exciting and then have… they’re probably pretty, pretty similar actually.

If you have an exciting style in any sport, then you’ll have some kind of cult following. But people do want to see these fights that are action packed. I’m a casual fan of MMA. I can’t say I know that much. I’ll put it on, scroll through Reddit while I’m watching. That’s about it.

And yeah, I definitely do like exciting fights.

One thing that I did was… I did maybe like eight weeks of… and I’ll mention it all the time, brazilian jujitsu. And it wasn’t going eight weeks every day. It was maybe once or twice a week. So this was roughly like not training at all. But it was enough, I think, to get some appreciation of just how insane the ground game is. And what I’m looking at, look, I mean, I don’t understand it still when I watch it, but… a little bit.

I at least could get a sense of if someone can’t move on the bottom—they’re just getting smothered. That was pretty much like every time I went to a class, it was just like, I’m just getting smothered. “Here’s Francis, pair him up with the smallest person we have here, and then I would just get dominated the entire time.”

And then pair me up with someone better and I’ll just frustrate them because I don’t know what I’m doing.

So back to this, though, the importance of excitement and creating excitement as a fighter.

There’s another chapter where Kenny Florian is profiled. He talks about just the self awareness that he had. He knew, Hey, I’m not going to be… there’s levels to this.

Most people just by definition, you’re not going to be the best in the world. You can train as hard as you want. It’s going to be some combination of talent, hard work, and that kind of thing.

And he recognized, you know, there’s GSP, Jon Jones, I don’t think he mentioned… I forget exactly who he mentioned, but just mentions the best of the best in the world where they are just, it’s a different level.

You’re not going to get there.

And he recognized that, and that didn’t mean, okay, I’m not going to be the best fighter in the world, it’s not worth doing this at all.

That’s not, that’s not what he did.

He thought, okay, I’m not going to be the very best in the world, but I can be the best in some aspect.

And it can even be this aspect where GSP can watch me and be impressed by what I’m doing because he couldn’t do that specific thing.

And then similarly you can be known for having these bloody wars, having this excitement as a fighter. You can be the most exciting and not win a championship, and people will love you for that.

So it reminds me of, I guess, Gladiator where you know: “Are you not entertained?!”

And just goes… okay well he was pretty entertaining.

Overtraining is a myth (that I fully believe in!)

Next quote, here we go. This is about David Horton. So one of the… a couple of chapters aren’t about MMA fighters. One of them’s about an ultra runner, that’s David Horton.

Then another chapter is about Josh Waitzkin, who’s a chess prodigy, but he also did Tai Chi and Brazilian jujitsu, so he is fighter.

But here, about David Horton, he described him: “Horton once out of the Appalachian trail record, that famous trail that runs 2,175 miles from Georgia to Maine. He’d run it in 52 days, 9 hours, where other people would take like four months.”

And then further on, it goes… the author asks Horton

“‘Do you feel that over-training is a myth?’ I asked him. ‘Yes, overtraining is a myth.’ He said, ‘The harder you train, the more you train, the better you’ll do. World class athletes train on the verge of injury. A guy I know who finished second in the Trans America race said he took a leave of absence from his job for two months in preparation averaged 50 miles a day.'”

That’s the end of the quote.

I definitely… I think overtraining is real. I don’t think it’s myth. But I do think that you can kind of psych yourself out. I think I’ve leaned way too [far] on the very, very cautious end where I’ll think anything is overtrained.

Like if I’m sore the next day I’ll think, I must be overtraining, time to take a couple of days off.

I think it is these two things where the people that are able to push through it, overtrain and then they just think everyone else who doesn’t push that hard is weak.

I think that’s wrong.

But then I think where I was was wrong too, that like, Oh, you shouldn’t push at all in, in a way. That I would be very, very careful of overtraining. I think I could work out harder to be frank.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I did hurt my back doing some kettlebell swings. This was not an overtraining issue.

Once you’re over 30, start warming up. Start warming up earlier [than 30]. Just made that a habit. I finally experienced why everyone says your body changes after 30. Warm up. That’s, that’s my takeaway here.

Mastering your mind (Frank Shamrock takes names and meditates)

Next, there’s this quote from a chapter on Frank Shamrock. Ken Shamrock’s… not blood brother, but they were from the same, I think it’s the same orphanage. They didn’t quite get along perfectly all throughout their life.

Anyway, both of them, great fighters.

One of them, great WWE legend, but that’s the other brother.

This one is about Frank. [Great name.] He says in this book, the author writes,

“Frank taught himself to meditate in hotel rooms in Japan. ‘The logic wasn’t there of a way to beat this guy.’ He says, ‘And I had so much fear and anxiety, had to try something. I got inside myself just trying to calm down. I was sitting in the hotel thinking, Oh my God, what am I doing? When I realized I had to relax, so I worked on it. Deep breaths, eyes closed, just thinking about individual techniques. I relaxed and it worked. I started to do technical visualization.

Then I went out there and Funaki kicked the shit out of me.”

That’s the end of the quote. I love this. Just as a reminder that, you know, you can master the mental game, get better at the mental game. There’s still other aspects that will be important. You should practice the hard skills.

That said, the mental game… if that’s not there, you have no chance of success and it’s still important.

But yeah, just the idea that you’ll be able to overcome everything just by mastering your mind. Not quite. You still have to put the work in. The actual, physical work. The mental can help you train, help you push through that, but it’s not magic either.

Great chapter. Just a great book overall about how fighters think.

You’re playing chess. It starts pouring rain on you. What do you do? (Josh Waitzkin on being calm by embracing chaos)

This last one, this last quote is about Josh Waitzkin.

They’re talking about this chess tournament, and he would just, it was, I forget exactly where it was, but every month… or it would be this weekend tournament, ann every year it would get rained on at some point where competitors are caught outside.

I don’t think they’re playing chess outside. I forget exactly, but… you see the rain and then he’ll just watch how everybody reacts.

There’s basically two camps, he says:

“If they put their hands up and run, they’re controllers. So over the chess board, you take a critical moment and make it chaotic, out of control. Make it so they have to embrace the unknown to perform.

But if they stand and just get wet and enjoy the rain, then maybe they embrace chaos. That was the kind of player I was. So for them, you create a position where it takes painstaking, mind-numbing calculation to succeed.”

This is someone that has mastered his mind. He’s mastered his opponents minds. Just want the top chess prodigies. He’s who “Searching for Bobby Fischer” is based on. His dad wrote the book about his life as a child chess prodigy, but then he became great at Tai Chi, which he talks about in “The Art of Learning”. Great at Brazlian jujitsu. Now he’s doing, I think it’s paddle boarding at a high level.

But this I put in here because it reminded me of a different thing that’s good for mindset. He was on the Tim Ferris podcast. He’s on Tim Ferriss’s podcast, it seems like once a year, or once every other year. Always great episodes. But there’s an episode in there where he talks about raising his son. And he wants to make sure that his son doesn’t let… he wants to instill this idea that the environment shouldn’t control your inner manner…

I’m really butchering this description, but your state of mind shouldn’t be…. you can protect that, shield that from your environment.

The example he gives is that a lot of people—this isn’t just kids—a lot of people let the weather bum them out. It’s rainy outside, it’s terrible outside, I’m going to have a bad day.

They’re resigned to that from when they wake up. But he says what he’s taught his son is that whenever it rains, whenever it’s a storm, they put their rain gear on, they splash in the rain outside. It’s something to look forward to. It’s beautiful. Love it.

And it is this real reframe… he’s just teaching like, Hey, rainy day: good thing. It’s not… my day’s not ruined at all. I’m sure he applies this in a bunch of different ways. And I think it’s something worth thinking about and closing on.

That today can be a good day.

I’m just stealing from this book, “Tiny Habits”. He has the Maui habit. It’s BJ Fogg. He talks about the Maui habit.

What it is: wake up, you say, “Today’s going to be a good day” or “Today is going to be a great day”.

And then if something comes to mind at that point where you realize like, hey, today might not be a great day because of such and such reasons. Maybe it’s raining out and you had a beach trip planned. Anything, anything that comes up.

Instead you add one thing to it, and you say, “Today’s going to be a great day, somehow.”

I’ll close with that and I’ll try to make good episodes in the future, somehow.

Thanks for listening. This is The Notepod: episode 1.

More to come.

Reading Log: The Fighter’s Mind

Check out the full notes for “The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game” by Sam Sheridan

I finished reading Sam Sheridan’s The Fighter’s Mind this morning. I’m reviewing some highlights and thought it’d be worth sharing a few with thoughts. (For context, I read half the book earlier this year and last year and the other half after picking it back up a few weeks ago.)

I mentioned the book previously in these posts:

This first highlight is about belief and the power of thinking something is possible in the first place.

Imagination is a crucial component, oft overlooked. If you can’t imagine running a four-minute mile, how can you ever run it? Gandhi said, “Men often become what they believe themselves to be. If I believe I cannot do something, it makes me incapable of doing it. But when I believe I can, then I acquire the ability.”

I’ve written about Anthony De Mello’s book Awareness previously and the story that sticks with me from that book the most is in the foreward, mentioning a story from his other book Song of the Bird.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.”

Now, if this were a Disney movie, that’s when the chicken-eagle would rise up and lead the chickens to fly and become an eagle-like flock themselves.

But it’s not.

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.

I’m mentioning this because The Fighter’s Mind has a lot about what different fighter’s think when they enter fights. What they think about their opponents going in. Underestimating and overestimating things.

One great way to lose a fight is to think you can’t win it in the first place.

One of the people profiled in The Fighter’s Mind is Greg Jackson, who’s trained some legends. He deeply believes in the growth mindset. Even mental toughness can be learned:

“Sure, some people are already tougher and some folks just won’t get tough, but those are the novelties, on the statistical fringe. Most people are of average toughness and can get tougher. I saw it all the time as a kid. There were these guys who were supertough growing up. I looked up to them because they could take a crowbar to the face and keep fighting. But as I grew up, they stayed the same level. They were scrappers to the core, don’t get me wrong, but they never got any tougher. It was from their environment and they never worked on it. I could outdo them, outwork them, and they’d tire and break. It was a real revelation to me, that you can train mental toughness and work harder, that it doesn’t have to be born into you.”

I’m guessing plenty of fighters would disagree with that. I imagine people think you’re just born with it and it can’t change.

Which reminds me of the arguments around working very long hours. (Which I go back and forth between the camps of you can’t and it’s harmful (vs.) you definitely can and should if you want to be successful.) You can make your mind stronger but at the risk of burning out if you extend for too long.

Okay gotta run, more highlights later.

Free writing an outline for a solo episode

1) The goal

My plan for this post:

  • Free write for 25 minutes
  • Try to get to 7 links

That will be an outline to talk about as a solo episode where I can talk about each of the things for 3 minutes so it’ll be about a 21-minute episode. There is, of course, the thing that this won’t be good the first time around. Which could be okay, assuming that’s the path toward making things actually are good.

I’ll need to vary these things in some way. Maybe in the future. Anyway. Let’s renumber that as bullet #1 to talk about.

2) UFC lately

Okay so some things that come to mind, UFC lately. There’s that whole decision making thing where Dan White took a lot of heat leading up to these live events but it seems to be paying off. The events are entertaining. It doesn’t seem like everyone’s getting sick. That said, I’m not an expert in this at all. I’ve looked forward to the fights and that’s my takeaway.

What can I link to here? I wrote about some book quotes from different fighting books this week.

3) Counter-Strike thoughts

In that post I linked to Mark Hunt streaming while playing Counter-Strike. I’m just always pumped to hear about some celebrity playing Counter-Strike. Which is popular but it never had a place in popular culture like Call of Duty or Fortnite. It’s just not as easy to pick up.

My first impression playing CS (1.3 briefly but probably spent most of my time playing 1.4 or 1.5) was that I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t deathmatch right away.

A bunch of my favorite memories in high school involve playing Counter-Strike. That said, the very best memories involving Counter-Strike were in-person interactions. Aka we’d seatbelt our towers and monitors and have LAN parties at each other’s houses. It was great.

4) Streaming thoughts

Seeing streaming take off has been really fascinating in the past decade. I wrote about it in this post about Tobi Lutke — I used to download Korean VODs to watch Starcraft with commentary. But I never thought watching other people playing games would become as big as it has.

I watched an Animal Crossing stream for half an hour the other night. It was just someone visiting islands talking about what he liked and didn’t like. Nice, relaxing content.

5) Transitioning off my ultrawide

Hot take: didn’t like my ultrawide! Can’t see how people use the super large ones. I can see people using what I had, a 34″.

I found it too big to get focused on things in most cases. But I was able to focus enough to see how it could be really useful in most cases for many people.

But those 50″ monitors… I’m very very very skeptical that it helps productivity. Unless you’re doing day trading or something like that. I guess you could have Spotify open off to the side or something like that.

Again, I’m not saying dual monitors or smaller ultrawides aren’t useful. Writing code in one and having the output in the other is a natural workflow that clearly benefits from having multiple monitors.

But the ones that end up being like 3 or 4 side by side where you need to turn your neck to even read anything on the far ends…

I feel like I’m being a hater now. Next bullet.

6) Fixing my focus

Working directly on my laptop has helped quite a bit. I’ve also started using the 27″ that I had and that’s been keeping me focused also. I’ve got a long way to go though. There’s some value to blocking sites but the eventual thing is that I then find some other distracting site to visit all the time. I blocked Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, CNN, ESPN, Slickdeals and then started checking Macrumors and Daring Fireball all the time. Initially this was to keep an eye on 16-inch rumors, then the launch info, and then to read different reviews about it. But I just stuck to the habit after all of that.

I think I’d be better off refreshing ESPN over and over instead of tech news.

There are some digital environments where I can stay pretty focused though. Docs and Figma usually work pretty well if I can get past the first few minutes of wanting to distract myself from other things.

Writing longhand on my iPad with GoodNotes is another way for me to get focused. Procreate as well.

But something I’ve been thinking about is that I can absolutely focus on a Starcraft match. Just 15-30 minutes (and 45-60 minutes once in a while) of pure focus. I’m not checking other things. Not thinking about checking other things. And when there’s a lot of activity going on, I’m not thinking about anything else at all.

I wonder if that’s a good thing.

It’d be great if I could apply that kind of locked in focus in other things that I do. Breaking it down I think there are a few things:

  • There’s always something interesting to be doing. The first minute has some waiting around for peons to build but after that you can pretty much keep moving the entire time.
  • There’s an agreement that you can’t pause the thing until the games over. Things can wait. Which is true for many other things in life. That email can wait. That text can wait. Rarely are things as urgent as they can seem.But not every task has the agreement that a timed game has. You can get back to life after the game is over, or the other thing is important enough that you quit the game to get to it. It’s much more clear than shifting your attention to some other thing for a minute to spray the fire with a little bit of water and then you’ll get back to it later.

I wrote the above 1000 words in a focused 25 minute block (in Docs on my laptop with no external monitor, for what it’s worth).

I’ll keep working at it.

(Now to record this thing!)

Book Notes: “A Fighter’s Heart”

One of my favorite books that I read this year. I’m a casual MMA fan. I follow the subreddit but couldn’t tell you who, like, the Bellator champions are.

Share knowledge with other people, from one domain to another

It is one of the more interesting facets of MMA: the democracy. In MMA, there are no grand masters, no belts, no fixed ranking system. Knowledge is shared, so good strikers work out with good grapplers, and they teach each other. Far superior fighters like Tony gave me help all the time, and then, sometimes I would tell him about something I’d seen Thai fighters do in Thailand, and instead of dismissing me, he and the others listened carefully. They were willing to take knowledge from anywhere.

Read, listen, but practice to know it intuitively (Directness)

And there is a tremendous difference between knowing something by having read or been told it, and knowing something, by having it become clear to you through intuition.

Feeling through fighting

Fighting is a way to feel, an anti–video game, a way to force some-thing to happen. That’s what brought me back to it, because when I’ve fought someone, I know something has happened. How many days of your life pass you by that you could take or leave? When nothing really happened?

Gameness

  • Good video of Masvidal 9 years ago with Ariel Helwani and they’re talking about Masvidal getting choked out
  • He gives credit where its due and talks about re-watching it and what he would’ve done differently

once someone realizes that his position is untenable, he’ll resign. In this way, if your dog is losing badly but still game, you should pick him up, because you can breed him on. If he hasn’t quit, pick him up. Real dogmen don’t need to see a dog die. “If you’ve got a decent dog, you would never let him die—it ain’t about winning, it’s about not quitting,” John said. “If I got five generations of something that won’t quit, I might get something.”

71: “Work Clean”

Check out the full notes for “Work Clean: The Life-changing Power of Mise-en-place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind” by Dan Charnas

We’re back (and probably need to stop starting every episode with “we’re back for real this time!”) talking about Work Clean, one of our favorite books from last year and maybe a top-10 all timer.

Some concepts we talk about from the book

  • Daily plan
  • Clean as you go
  • First actions

Work Clean

Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind is really one of the top books for me and Wally if you’re rating it by “I read this book and changed some behavior in my life immediately.”

Some things I’ve written previously about Work Clean

Here’s what I wrote about Work Clean in my 2019 reading list:

It was also refreshing to read a book in this space with similar lessons and completely different stories than you’d usually see in business books. I’ve also had a casual interest in cooking or at least a high interest in being entertained by watching other people cook. So it kept my attention. I continue to want to find books like this: work adjacent. Books with lessons at the right level of abstraction, helping me improve in the work I do without directly thinking about the work I do.

I also wrote about Work Clean in a separate reading log post. Here’s what I wrote about Work Clean then:

  • Pay attention to your movements — There are different movements that slow things down over time. If your arm is going across your body multiple times during prep, you might be able to move whatever it is you’re reaching for over to the side where your arm is. It’s a small change but they add up. Can you cut a movement out of your workflow to reduce friction? Can you automate something that takes 30 seconds that you do multiple times a day?
  • Pay attention to your workspace — For me, this has made me think a lot about how cluttered my digital workspace is. While I can get away from a messy desk by heading to a coffee shop, the digital workspace comes with me. This book makes me think I need to be more honest with the time it takes to keep things organized. And really believe it’s worth it to keep things clean a little bit at a time every day so that I don’t need to do huge audits every once in a while.

An example of my Figma disorganization

In the episode we talked about cleaning up messy spaces, including messy digital spaces.

Like my Figma files. Here’s one with some notecards from blog posts.

figma-notecards

I can just get pretty disogranized. I like pasting stuff into pages as references. After reading Work Clean, I started to see that it caused some dysfunction in my system because those things just pile up. The idea is that I could batch the cleanup later and tidy up.

Gooooood idea. Bad execution.

It’ll end up being this thing where I have a bunch of these scraps of things on the Pages and then going through each piece I sometimes forget why I had it there in the first place and tidying up is more energy than it should be.

Clean as you go is one of the mindset shifts that has stuck with me since reading the book. It’s something I did pretty well already in terms of cooking dinners and things like that so that a good amount of the pots and plans used for cooking are already cleaned by the time we start eating.

It’s something I didn’t apply as much outside of the kitchen. Since reading the book I’ve been trying to be more mindful about deleting these scraps as I continue on with what I’m working on.

Do you have a spot for your keys?

We talked about whether or not you have a single spot for your wallet and keys. I mentioned a technique Cal Newport wrote about called The Phone Foyer method. Here’s a separate post where I wrote about my experiencing with leashing yourself, which I should have titled Leash yourself, UNLEASH YOUR MIND!

Okay that’s it for now

I’m working toward slowly re-organizing the site. Tidying things up a little more here to make sense of all the content. There’s about 250 posts published on this site right now, we did 70-ish podcast episodes, and I have 133 videos that are barely represented on this site at all.

I want this site to tie things together so that all this work can start working together. It won’t be an overnight thing but starting with writing notes for new podcast episodes is a good step forward.

Spider mines and more

Check out the full notes for “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg

The joys of a spider mine. This is also the result of some Siege Tanks firing at the same time. This was from about half an hour ago and not like a decade ago.

Some quick links…

  • Ryen Russillo has Nick Bilton on to talk about American Kingpin — Off the top of my head, top 3 of my favorite audiobooks. (And Bilton’s other book Hatching Twitter might be right up there also.) Russillo also had Tom Wright on last year to talk about Billion Dollar Whale. Bill Simmons mentioned in some episodes this year that he’s trying to read 75 books this year. Would love if Simmons and Russillo discussed those books and brought the authors on, or had Klosterman/Gladwell/Michael Lewis doing Rereadables episodes.
  • I’m continuing through Sam Sheridan’s The Fighter’s Mind and finished the chapter on Josh Waitzkin this morning. Always good to read more about Waitzkin, beyond his book The Art of Learning and his appearances on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. When The Fighter’s Mind was written (2010), Waitzkin was still a brown belt. From chess to push hands to BJJ to hydrofoiling. An expert at becoming an expert.

Here’s a quote from Josh Waitzkin in The Fighter’s Mind. He’s talking about a small, high-level chess tournament and the area usually gets rained on at some point during the weekend. He watched how his chess peers reacted.

“If they put their hands up and run, they’re controllers. So, over the chessboard, you take a critical moment and make it chaotic, out-of-control. Make it so they have to embrace the unknown to perform. “But if they stand and just get wet and enjoy the rain, then maybe they embrace chaos—that was the kind of player I was. So for them you create a position where it takes painstaking, mind-numbing calculation to succeed.

Which reminds me of something else he’s talked about, in raising his son. One of my favorite ideas that I’d love to use down the line when the time comes. When there’s a storm, he takes his son out to go play outside in it.

I don’t think we’ve missed a single storm, rain or snow from going outside and romping in it. And we’ve developed this language around how beautiful it was. And so now whenever it’s a rainy day, Jack says, “Look Dada it’s such a beautiful rainy day,” and we go out and we play in it.

I wanted him to have this internal locus of control; to not be reliant on external conditions being just so.

You can ruin your day just worrying about what’s coming.

Or not.

It’s up to you.

Here’s something from BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, where he talks about starting the day with his ‘Maui habit’—saying “Today will be a great day.”

If you do the Maui Habit and feel that it won’t be a great day, I advise you to still say this phrase. I say it even on mornings when I feel exhausted or overwhelmed or anxious about the day ahead. In that moment, sitting on the edge of my bed, I try to feel optimistic. But if this feels phony, then I adjust the phrase and my intonation as I say, “It’s going to be a great day—somehow.”

That somehow can be throwing your rain gear on and stomping in the rain.

Okay so the connection I’ll pull together here with Starcraft is that Waitzkin has talked about using an efoil to get a lot of paddleboarding reps in without needing to wait around for the environment to participate.

Starcraft lets you get rep after rep of thinking about building an economy and then directing your attention to different things. Whether that skill can transfer directly to other disciplines is another question. Tobi Lutke (foudner of Shopify) has credited Starcraft with helping him learn concepts he’s later applied to business.

Not to say it’s all because of Starcraft.

Just that games can be really good. What have I been learning? I do actually think playing Starcraft has made me a little bit better at directing my attention to the right places when I’m in Figma. To stay moving when working on a user flow instead of narrowing down too early.

Macro for the long run.