Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Workout Log (4/8/2020) — Black belts for presenters, selling Cobra Kai at a basketball court, and mac ad slots in high school

Eventually I want these workout posts to look different from the other posts. But I can already feel the temptation to spend time creating a custom layout and all that and then end up never using it. Instead, I just made this black notecard in Figma.

In any case. Some quick notes from each of the things. One goal I’d like to aim for is to make some connection between the things that I read, watch, and listen to in the morning.

Yes, it’s going to be a stretch sometimes. Or maybe more often than not. But it’ll be practice.

In this case it’s not too much of a stretch.

I guess the theme here would be TIMING.

  • In the portion of Black Belt Presentations that I read this morning, there’s a mention of running a live event and getting experience asking for contact information. The presentation sets it up and you should ask when people are starting to relax and exhale knowing there’s no new information that they need to be paying close attention to.  But it should be before the very end because they’ll just be antsy to leave.
  • In Cobra Kai, Johnny goes to a basketball court and tells the guys there (“BROHAM!”) about the karate studio he’s running and that they should check it out. Great example of wrong place, wrong time, wrong everything to try to sell something to people. (Who likely wouldn’t be interested even if he wasn’t so bad at talking to people.)
  • In that episode of Venture Stories, Andrew Wilkinson talks about how he got started in business in high school without really thinking about it being business. He ran a successful site (MacTeens) as a teenager that eventually got big enough that he was managing other teenagers writing articles for it. He’d sell ad slots and negotiate with businesses while still in high school. But he thought of it more like he was the lead editor of a team of writers, not someone running a business.

That reminds me of a comment I saw on a mixtape of KG in high school. (Can’t remember the exact video but something similar.) The comment was along the lines of, “Imagine finishing up AP chem and then having to guard Kevin Garnett a few hours later.”

(I don’t have a varsity basketball game to get to but I do gotta run. Catch you tomorrow!)

Workout Log (4/7/2020) — Tiny Habits and Cobra Kai

Walked 60 mins

Simple and Sinister
– 10×10 20kg two-handed swings
– 10×1 20kg get-ups

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Read: Tiny Habits (mostly, but also opened Atomic Habits and some random ebooks)
Watched: Cobra Kai (episode 2)
Listened: Didn’t listen to anything this morning

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Okay so this past weekend we played Codenames. We’re not good at it so it was ambitious to try to get 2 or 3 words to connect. Definite stretches. Which is what I’m going to do now trying to connect what I read with what I watched.

A little bit of morning writing practice…

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Cobra Kai has Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso as adults. Summary: both of them live in the past and are tied to their high school identities. Because it’s a show, the characters are going to evolve episode by episode. Not in a single moment.

What identities are YOU stuck to??? Are there any you want to change???

You don’t change it in a single moment. You might watch a Jocko motivational video, get to bed early, set the alarm on your T66801, and finally get up early for your workout. But that doesn’t make you a morning person.

Yet.

If you do it the 2nd day, 7th day, and 50th day, then you’ve changed your identity. But it’s slow and over time.

If you want to be a better writer, or anything, remember that you become the noun by doing the verb.

If you want to be a faster writer, you’ll want to practice by writing fast every day.

Having a sensei can help. Even if your sensei is a free PDF.

So download WRITE FIRST WRITE FAST NO MERCY

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(Was on wax off until tomorrow!!!)

Workout Log: 2020-04-06

Walked 30m

Simple & Sinister

  • 10×10: 20kg one-handed & two-handed swings
  • 10×1: 16kg get-ups

Read: Obviously Awesome

Watched: Laracasts Vue intro videos

Listened to: Asian Not Asian

Workout Log (4/2/2020) — The joy of movement (even when stuck indoors)

Alright so I’m going to just have a log for workouts here. The idea, hopefully, is that I’ll be able to make these visually interesting at some point. And my web development skill will progress enough that I can organize this all in a decent way, even if it mostly means hiding most of the fitness log stuff. I don’t want to split this all up into different sites and platforms, because I’ve had multiple sites before and don’t like having to decide where I’ll post something.

Here I am blogging about blogging again.

Anyway. Today’s workout:

  • Simple & Sinister (10×10 swings, 10×1 get-ups) — while watching Cobra Kai
    • 20 kg two-handed swings
    • 6 kg kettlebell for the get-ups.
  • Treadmill walking (while watching Westworld)
    • 20 mins with Nike Reacts on
    • 15 mins with Xero Prios
    • 10 mins with Nike Reacts

I’ve been trying to get 90 minutes of movement in every day during quarantine. I’ve done some very unscientific tracking but it’s pretty clear that days with workouts are better than days without.

Which reminds me of something Kelly McGonigal (author of Joy of Movement) says in her interview on The Unmistakable Creative:

”You should not expect, when your alarm goes off, to crave getting out of bed and putting on your sneakers and going for a walk. You should expect, that a couple minutes into it, you’re going to be so glad you did. And you have to learn to trust that process and be familiar with it. Even someone like me, I love movement. I’m like in love with what it’s done for me and my life. And I don’t want to do it when I wake up in the morning. That paradox is real and I don’t let that be a decider.”

I know that I’ll feel better after working out. The day will be better in almost every way. And still I need to convince myself to get started in the morning.

But I’m learning to trust the process.

Anyway, I really want to clean up my form on the swings. Going to practice some hip hinging.

I have a 28 kg kettlebell on the way so I’m going to need to practice some patience when it arrives. I’ll keep it to the kettlebell progressions (deadlift, hike, single-rep swings) for some number of workouts before using it for two-handed swings.

It’s been great having the kettlebells around during quarantine.

Procreate and the cutting room floor

One thing I really like about Procreate is that it creates cutting room floor material.

In Show Your Work Austin Kleon talks about sending out a dispatch of in-progress work:

Once a day, after you’ve done your day’s work, go back to your documentation and find one little piece of your process that you can share. Where you are in your process will determine what that piece is. If you’re in the very early stages, share your influences and what’s inspiring you. If you’re in the middle of executing a project, write about your methods or share works in progress. If you’ve just completed a project, show the final product, share scraps from the cutting-room floor, or write about what you learned.

I was recording a sketching session for illustrating this week’s newsletter issue and shared that time-lapse:

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-m-cFlHVGl/

There are a couple cutting-room-floor-related things that I love about Procreate:

  • Time-lapses are on by default. I can pull up any drawing in the entire time I’ve used Procreate on any one iPad and then watch the timelapse for it. I can export those and speed them up or slow them down however I want.
  • There’s always layers to share. Any sketch longer than 5 or so minutes always leads to a few different layers. If I want to share a sketch, I can usually toggle layers on and off and share different stages of a drawing. None of it is great on its own but they’re a little more interesting together.

Some day, when I actually know how to draw, I’ll be ready to explain the drawing process better. In the meantime I’ll keep sharing the cutting room scraps.