Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Bill Simmons on oversimplification

In an attempt to get back to basics, I’m setting a timer to transcribe one podcast quote and writing some thoughts…

Bill Simmons on how the NBA Playoffs are dissected. Starting with a little bit of mimicking:

…” You had some harsh words for Anthony Davis two nights ago, but he really proved you wrong.” And then it’s like the next thing, Stephen A., you talked about how Anthony Davis should’ve stepped up today and he didn’t. 

And then Stephen A just going Defcon 1 with like, “He was atrocious. He was so bad. He’s got to play better than that.”

Look, guys are going to go up and down. Anthony Davis is the most “he’s going to go up and down” superstar we’ve probably ever had. 

And so is Harden. Harden was really bad in game three. It was going to be interesting to see how he came back from it, but I’m not shocked by how he came back.

I’m really trying to be careful with our podcasts not to do this. Not just the ones me and you are doing together, but even just all week. Cause it’s so easy to overreact game to game and go too far. 

I really, I try not to do that. 

But it feels like the dissection of all these games now is all about the two big stars on each team and how they. Either “they didn’t do well and they gotta do better” or “they did great and they should play like that all the time”. 

That’s like 90% of the dialogue now. I watched the whole countdown show today. There’s so many interesting things about this series that I wanted them to talk about. Right? Like how does Philly get Maxie more involved while also keeping these two guys? What are the Celtics going to do? They’re going to play smaller lineups. Can they play two bigs together? How are they going to try to unleash Tatum and Brown at the same time. They can’t get both of those guys… 

There are all these questions that I thought were really interesting. And then it turns into: is James harden going to show up today? Which I guess is just the dialogue now. I don’t know.

Russilo makes the point that, intellectually we probably like to think we want something different from these oversimplifications. But in the end maybe the oversimplification has come about because it’s what people actually want to consume.

There’s no room to say “Hey they’re up and down, we’ll see.”

Here’s how it relates to being a digital creator.

It depends is often the the right answer. Should you start creating content on YouTube or Twitter or Instagram or…?

It depends what type of audience you want to have.

It depends what type of content you enjoy making.

It depends on if it’s 2008 or 2023.

But “it depends” is unsatisfying for someone looking for someone else to tell them what they should do. Instead, what’s more engaging is the person saying you definitely should start on THIS platform because X, Y, Z. And there’s a version of that person for each of the platforms.

Then what’s engaging is having them debate the different sides. 

(Preferably in a talking head TV format…)

Ramblings: Writing at Philz edition

Always, always write in the editor.

That’s the conclusion I come to over and over and over. I write notes and record audio across all sorts of apps. Docs, Evernote, Notion, Otter, Descript… I’ve even added the somewhat cringe thing of recording video journals (cool for Will Smith in “I am Legend” but he was trying to save humanity) so there are a bunch of thoughts on various SD cards around the house. (So untouched by the cloud…)

Anyway. I should get to some book notes.

From “Ego is the Enemy” by Ryan Holiday:

Let’s flip it around so it doesn’t seem so demeaning: It’s not about kissing ass. It’s not about making someone look good. It’s about providing the support so that others can be good. The better wording for the advice is this: Find canvases for other people to paint on. Be an anteambulo. Clear the path for the people above you and you will eventually create a path for yourself.

Just want to capture that I had to look up anteambulo. It’s a forerunner. Let’s see how Midjourney handles this…

I think it turned “

Okay at first I thought it turned it into “fantasy team” or something. No idea why it turned it into some kind of UI.

Here it is with a little bit of a description of someone running toward a screen like the 1984 Apple commercial.

Alright I better just move on to another book highlight. Let’s see what else I can get going here.

I’m currently at Philz, writing on a 25 minute timer. So here’s a highlight from “The 3 Alarms” by Eric Partaker

I recommend taking frequent breaks during creative time; otherwise, you may feel your energy and focus begin to wane. I work in hour-long blocks of time, setting a timer for fifty minutes to prompt a ten-minute break after each period of work. Then my afternoons are used for manager time or simply interacting with others.

Pomodoros seem to work pretty well for me but everything seems to work in different scenarios. Everything also seems to not work.

I’m realizing I’m covered in dog hair right now. When I’m at home, it’s like I don’t see it and then it takes a few minutes outside to realize it. Or not just outside—I can actually not notice the hair on myself if I’m on driving or walking with Booster.

But once I’m around others without dogs around, it starts to become very apparent.

That said, no one actually cares. I was listening to David Senra on the “My First Million” podcast this morning. They talk about how little other people think about anyone other than themselves. Even if something’s cringe, it’s only a moment.

The internet does make it possible to make people cringe at scale, though.

But on the other end of things, David points out that even if someone is your absolute hero… you still maybe think about them for like maybe a minute during the day.

With a podcast, you’re in someone’s ear for 30 to 90 minutes each week. That’s more than most people talk to anyone in their lives that they don’t share a roof with. Their best friends, their family. And they/re very much opting in to listen.

Okay I need to order some more beans and get out of here.

Last highlight. To set it up—a few hours from now I’ll be on a plane to head to my mom’s retirement party. Time flies.

Time melts even faster when staring at screens. More and more I’m noticing I’ll end the week and, even if I spent time out of the house away from the screen, a lot of my thoughts are still about things that are happening on screens. Projects I need to be chipping away at.

I don’t want a decade to go by and think that it all just melted away while I stared at screens.

(I write as I type this outside of the house but very much at a screen. Covered in dog hair.)

So here’s Jordan Mechner in “The Making of Karateka”, reminding himself in his journal to savor a period in life, college, that very much has an end date. He writes this because he was experiencing screens melting time away in the 1980s. A pioneer.

Savor the changeover, J., savor it; you only get four years at Yale, and you’ve already done two.

My goal: savor this weekend.

Book Notes: “How to Calm Your Mind” by Chris Bailey

Savor the here and now

From “How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times”:

“Neuroscientists like Lieberman refer to the calm network inside our brain as the “here-and-now” network: it’s what lets us enjoy ourselves and allows us to feel a satisfying presence with what we’re doing. It’s the mode you enter into as you savor your morning cup of coffee at the cottage, the mode that’s activated as you become mesmerized by the campfire at night. If the dopamine network is all about maximizing our future, the here-and-now network reminds us that our work is done; that it’s time to slow down, rest, and savor what the present has to offer.”

Bailey gives some of his own savoring examples: reading novels, splurging on a macadamia latte, and taking a walk in the forest he lives near.

I’m listening to “How to Calm Your Mind” while walking Booster next to a forest. This probably means I’m not savoring the book or time with my dog or the forest.

It does still feel like a better use of time than some alternatives in my day to day. Which all are some version of looking at a screen.

I need to savor a few more things in my life or add more things in that are worth savoring.

This book and podcast interviews with Chris Bailey are combining to convince me to start doing more analog things. Especially when there’s a choice between analog and physical (journaling comes to mind immediately), I’ll sacrifice speed of writing and increased word count in favor of… well just spending less time looking at a screen.

But I’ll also practice savoring the slower thinking and review. I tend to review pages in analog notebooks more than I do with digital notebooks.

As for physical books, I buy a bunch but need to start actually reading them.

I bought a tiered book holder to build out an analog corner. (Pictured in the header image.) It’s been useful so far even if it’s been a place to put my digital tablets away.

I don’t want to be an internet person. Which is in direct opposition to that I love being an internet person. (Or at least defaulted to being an internet person through most of my life.)

It’s true though, the best moments in life rarely happen staring at glass.

Even then, it was better to do that together at a LAN party.

Giant cup of coffee

Maybe I don’t need 600mg of caffeine?

From “How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times”:

Finding calm at the end of the reset, my mind didn’t put up a fight to finish small tasks. I felt less guilty about taking breaks from work, because my mind was more settled. And I craved distraction less, too.
Caffeine stimulates the release of dopamine, which can lead us to engage in additional dopaminergic behavior. (If you’re curious to test this out, try consuming more caffeine than usual, and see if you crave more distraction at the higher stimulation height.)

When I say “you” of course I mean me. I was regularly buying those Starbucks jugs from the grocery store and it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to finish one throughout a day. Mix in some Coke Zero and Celsius here and there and there and there and there…

I was having 400-600mg of caffeine every day. I haven’t gone cold turkey but am trying to limit things to 200mg.

I’m also trying to wait until at least 90 minutes after waking to have my first cup of coffee. (Shout out to Andrew Huberman for that tip.)

I miss the coffee, but also am seeing that a lot of the time I’m just bored and a decaf coffee does the trick just the same.

I also actually think it’s been better for my focus in the morning in trying to stay one one task.

Readwise Ramblings: just trying to build momentum

Right now I’m just trying to get some thoughts down to try and build a daily publishing practice. I’ve been writing every day but it’s still ended up being mostly just private writing. I want to build up the muscle of writing daily. I’ve built up a habit of reviewing highlights in Readwise so I thought I could use that as a cue to add to.

Recently I’ve felt like I need to be taking more action on all the information I’m consuming, even if that means just writing up some notes for things.

So here goes nothing.

“Where there is work to do, turn your hand to it first; the men will follow. Some of you, I see, have erected tents. Strike them at once. We will all sleep as I do, in the open. Keep your men busy. If there is no work, make it up, for when soldiers have time to talk, their talk turns to fear. Action, on the other hand, produces the appetite for more action.”

— Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

That’s sort of what I’m trying to do here. My tent, my hiding place, is often in all of that private writing. In all the different notes and docs that I have where I’m procrastinating by planning.

Jon Acuff ttalks about hiding places:

“If you ever have to do a complicated, multistep explanation to say why what you’re doing is valuable, it probably isn’t. You’re probably actually camping out in the kind of hiding place that masquerades as productivity.”

— Finish: Give Yourself the Gift of Done by Jon Acuff

I’m not a perfectionist but I still have that fear of sharing things a little too early. (Not on this blog, though, clearly.)

I often want to share some idea that I heard in a podcast and then the noble obstacle that gets in the way is trying to find the verbatim quote instead of just paraphrasing. I don’t want to misrepresent the person’s idea.

Hunting down a specific quote from a podcast becomes 10-100x more difficult if you don’t excerpt it immediately.

And I sort of can’t stop sometimes. I remember a few nights where I just got plastered to the couch for 2-3 hours going through old podcast episodes on my phone trying to find some idea and not exactly remembering who said it or what podcast it was on.

A specific example: this idea from Nick Santora about 5 weekends a year:

“I’ve had a conversation with my oldest daughter multiple times where I’ve said the difference between winners and losers is five weekends a year.

And it’s 5 weekends… it’s 10 days. And it’s not working all day, every day. It’s 12 hours each day. So it’s 120 hours a year… Is the difference between a winner and a loser.

I write many weekends a year. I do it early in the morning before my kids are awake. And that’s the difference between having one job and having one job and getting a book out.”

— Nick Santora

A couple years ago I took forever trying to hunt this quote down.

Anyway, the “difference between having one job and having one job and getting a book out” reminded me of Matthew Dicks talking about finding time for yourself.

He talks about a woman who was more interested in finding excuses not to write than to find time to write:

“I’d like to tell her that she doesn’t actually want to write. She wants to “have written.” She’s fond of what she imagines the writing life to be — midmorning visits to the coffee shop to splash a few hundred words on the page before enjoying a late lunch with friends — but she’s not prepared to do the actual work required to produce something worthy of people’s time and money, nor is she passionate enough to engage in the craft in those less-than-ideal moments. Writers can’t help but write, I want to tell her. They don’t wait to write. They are compelled to write.”
— Someday is Today by Matthew Dicks

Okay so that’s that. A little bit of action.

A little bit of time outside of my weather-proof, comfortable tent of “planning”.

“Physical: 100” group suffering (and what you can do for 10 years)

From “Can You Go” by Dan John:

That’s why group training has such a big impact on long-term success: People do things they might not do otherwise, even with the best intentions. And we humans have this odd ability to handle more suffering if we do it as a group.

We finished watching “Physical: 100” a couple days ago so it’s still top of mind for things when I’m trying to connect some creativity lesson to some other thing.

(Similar to generative art making some people question whether they should be learning certain skills if they can just achieve an end result with a text prompt… I’m definitely questioning some time spent practicing making connections between things when a text prompt makes it possible to make a dozen of those connections in a couple seconds. But that’s for another post.)

I’ll add some better version of this post to my post about it eventually, but I wanted to capture this thought. Most of the competitors wouldn’t have lasted as long in any individual challenge if they didn’t have other people around to suffer with.

It’s not the same as distributing the suffering: Sam asks Frodo to share the load. That kind of suffering is finite and can be rationed out.

In this group suffering, the suffering is infinite. The larger the group the more total suffering there is. And with more people, each person can handle more.

The other people in the group don’t even have to be teammates.

In one challenge, the competitors have to hold a fake (but heavy) boulder above their heads for as long as possible. Muscular endurance and all that.

(I’ve thought of simulating this by loading a 135-pound barbell and just standing as long as possible. Then I remember that that’s a dumb idea.)

The last two go for over two hours standing right next to each other. They push each other. They definitely wouldn’t go that long if they were in separate rooms with no idea how long the other person was going.

So sometimes I do question my effort when working out in my home gym. I know I’d push more in a group class. But I’ll work out in the home gym far more frequently.

Is the tradeoff worth it?

We’ll see, I guess.

AND HERE’S HOW IT RELATES TO CREATIVITY…

Just kidding. Sort of.

Okay actually a relation to creativity did come to mind.

I recorded an episode of the podcast with Wally today. (About “Physical: 100”.) It was way way more fun to record that than to record it on my own. It’s probably more fun to listen to as well.

David Senra (of the “Founders” podcast) has a question worth asking yourself when you’re trying to figure out what you want to work on.

  • Can you do this for the next 10 years?

That’s a great question. I have a hunch I could do the podcast alone for the next 10 years.

But I’m sure I’d enjoy it more doing it with Wally.

Good to be back.

Physical:100 lessons (for creators)

(SPOILERS AHEAD.)

Now some creativity lessons from Physical:100 for creators. This is the sort of thing that is going to be basically automated at some point in the future, so there’s probably some meta lesson for myself here.

In any case…

Challenge 0: Strengths can backfire

In the case of the first challenge, or technically challenge zero, it’s strength itself that backfires. Sort of. It’s more just the weight required for that strength. The strongest competitors are also the heaviest. That becomes a major disadvantage when hanging from rafters.

For creativity, it can be useful to be mindful of when your strengths might backfire. In my case, I practiced and became faster at coming up with ideas and connections at a high level.

(aka: whip up an outline for how Physical:100 relates to creativity so that you can justify your guilty pleasure show even though deep down you know it’s actually a way better use of time than the one true alternative: scrolling mindlessly on my phone.)

I’m glad I can do that, but then it leads to a lot of work in progress that is never finished. The bottleneck comes later, all the shiny new ideas become a distraction, and then every few weeks I come to the conclusion that I just can’t finish anything.

Challenge 1: You can choose your environment (and that includes people)

In the first actual challenge, the top 50 competitors get to choose their opponent in a 1-on-1 match. They also get to choose the arena. The open arena favors strength. The playground arena favors speed.

In creative work, you get to choose the environment you’re in. It’s often good to have different environments for different “opponents” or whatever form of resistance comes at different stages of work.

In the beginning stages, it might be good to go somewhere without internet to go distraction free and to avoid diving into research too early. You might have a specific setup when editing work. You might like writing in loud coffee shops (like Malcolm Gladwell).

People become important at different stages as well. Feedback helps you get to great work. But friends and family who have no experience in your craft might not be able to provide the type of feedback that you need.

On the other hand, if you’re just getting started with your creative work, encouragement might actually be all you need to get the ball rolling. In that case friends and family are great. Even better would be to add a few other people at your level to take the journey on together.

Here’s a quote from the great Chael Sonnen (where he’s quoting the great Frank Costello):

There is a memorable line from the movie The Departed, where Frank Costello says, “I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.” Wonderful line, but for good and bad, we are influenced by where we grew up and even today, your environment continues to influence the person you are.

Challenge 2: Do the basics well (so you set a good foundation)

In the second challenge, the competitors form teams and need to build a bridge and then carry sandbags over the bridge.

They highlight one of the competitors who used to work in stunts and knew the importance of securing things properly for safety. She builds a very secure bridge while the other team constantly has to stop carrying sand to adjust the planks on their bridge.

In creative work, it’s important to understand the basics of your craft and to make sure you know how to do the basics well.

The Physical:100 competitors didn’t exactly have time to understand which parts are the basics since it was a brand new game. In hindsight, securing the planks was really important. During the game, it seemed worth it to sacrifice some security to simply build the bridge as fast as possible.

Luckily, in your work you’ll likely be able to learn from experts, books, interviews, and peers to know what basics you need to nail down.

In “Creative Confidence” by Tom Kelley and David Kelley, they describe someone asking Yo-Yo Ma if he even needs to practice anymore, now that he’s a master:

The question hung in the air for a moment before Yo-Yo Ma delivered the bad news to Erik. Long after ascending to the top of his field, Yo-Yo Ma continues to practice as much as six hours a day.

I’ll do the rest in a future post

but I figured out what my own lesson is as far whether it’s worth it to write this post even if it’ll be automated away in some near future — There’s still beauty in humans doing things. Maybe me writing this post isn’t exactly going to be one of those things in the future. But the best example is Chess. It’s already been decades of humans being unable to beat the best AI. Still, it’s entertaining to play against others humans. And it’s entertaining to watch the best humans against one another.

There’s a difference between watching the Madden simulation of the Super Bowl and the actual Super Bowl.

(At least for now.)