Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Write jokes the way a photographer shoots

Check out the full notes for “How to Write Funnier: Book Two of Your Serious Step-by-Step Blueprint for Creating Incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing” by Scott Dikkers

In “How to Write Funnier”, Scott Dikkers compared the practice of daily joke writing to a photographer’s process:

Photographers routinely take dozens and dozens of photos in order to find a good one. Everyone seems to understand this process when it relates to photography. The photographer’s peers understand it, and they happily offer feedback, pointing out which photo among the pile are keepers. Despite the fact that only a tiny percentage of the photos are deemed acceptable, at no point does anyone question the photographer’s skill at taking good photos.

It’s similar to the analogy with the pottery teacher or whatever kind of teacher you’ve heard for that story. But I like the scope of this photography comparison. It focuses on a single creative session for a photographer. A single shoot where shoot a whole lot more than you end up using.

(Yes, there are probably some lessons to learn from film photography and considering each shot carefully and understanding what you’re doing, but let’s stay focused on making piles of garbage because that’s a specialty of mine.)

This is a bit different than building your skill up over a school semester by making pot after pot. The photography session matches better when thinking about day tight compartments.

You’ll make some junk today, but there’s a shot or two that you can use. You can get to a good joke today if you blaze a path of bad jokes.

And it still works for the longer term, because the photographer will improve over time. Both in setting up the shots and then in building up taste in getting feedback picking the selects.

Reading Log: Pocket Full of Do

Check out the full notes for Pocket Full of Do by Chris Do

Update Feb 2021: Re-reading “Pocket Full of Do” so I made another video on one of the chapters about how you should read called “Read to Teach”.

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https://www.instagram.com/tv/B6J-w55nr9l/

I made this IGTV video last night1.  It’s about Chris Do’s book Pocket Full of Do.

Reading it made me want to go and make something.

To go and finish something.

Instead of planning and thinking and wanting to make something and making an outline of something and buying gear and shooting video that stays on an SD card for weeks or dictating text that I never edit and on and on.

If you enjoy the content from The Futur (YouTube), you’ll enjoy this book.

Some links I mentioned in this video (that I should also write about separately):

  • Chase Jarvis: Harmony > Balance with Jason Calacanis — I mentioned this because Pocket Full of Do has a chapter where Chris Do writes about his path through the agency world and his path teaching. He was able to combine them in The Futur to create something really fulfilling by spreading his knowledge of design and marketing to more people through educational content.
  • Here’s the quote I butchered in the video: “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have. —Maya Angelou

Reading Log: 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

I started listening to the audiobook version of Work Clean: The life-changing power of mise-en-place to organize your life, work, and mind by Dan Charnas. Still listening to it but wanted to practice sharing notes for books as I go along. (Vs. thinking I’ll write mega-posts about books after I finish and then not actually writing those posts or even finishing the books.)

Great book about being organized while working. I’ve never worked in a kitchen but have watched a lot of other people cooking on TV. That’s been enough for the chef stories in this book to be fascinating. It reminds me of every time Anthony Bourdain talks about the discipline of a professional kitchen being the contrast he needed from the chaos in his life in his younger days as a cook.

  • 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.
  • Pay attention to your time — This book hammers home some of the lessons from The Checklist Manifesto with specific examples of what chefs do. They design prep timing with a bunch of different dependencies between dishes. They also block the time off for prep work and cleaning as they go. This reminded me of the opening of Andy Grove’s High Output Management, which reveals the complexity involved in cooking breakfast (at scale!).

Work Clean might be going in my regular re-read rotation with books like Masters of Doom and Anything You Can Imagine. These are books that are sort of related to what I do professionally but far enough that they don’t actually make me think about work.

Lean toward learning and meaningful relationships (Adam Grant on the Tim Ferriss Show)

Here are a few parts from this episode that I wanted to share. The whole thing is great so find some time to listen to it if you’re interested in organizational change, finding strengths, and increasing effectiveness through the lens of attention management (instead of time management).

Tim Ferriss skews toward learning and building meaningful relationships.

Adam Grant: That’s so compelling because what it says to me is you decided that learning and relationship building are the two leading indicators of success.

But also they’re worthy ends in and of themselves. And so even if they don’t drive success, you’re still going to be glad you invested in something that sort of formed a meaningful connection or taught you something.

That is such a clever work around the problem of: do I know whether I’m accomplishing anything?

Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I wish I had come to that conclusion sooner, quite frankly. Because if you approach things with that lens, at least in my experience so far, eventually you’re gonna win. As measured or determined by the outside world, if that makes sense, right.

It’s like you can continue to acquire skills and deep relationships with people you care for who are also incredibly good at what they do— you will… Success cannot be kept from you indefinitely.

Adam Grant points out that this was part of how he looked at deciding to start a podcast when the spaces was already crowded:

Adam Grant: It’s something… It resonates a lot with me because I got into the podcast world much later than you did and felt like, you know, it was by that point, pretty crowded.

There are a lot of interesting people having interesting conversations. So I was pretty hesitant about it at first and then eventually said, okay, my biggest problem is I’ve spent the past five years getting invited into some of the most interesting organizations on earth and telling them things I already know mostly.

And I’m not learning anymore.

So even if the podcast completely fails, I am going to pick the people in the places that I want to learn from. And then I’m going to come away with new insights on the back end that in some format I will share.

It was extremely valuable. I mean, it gave me all kinds of ideas for articles and books and for research projects I wanted to take on. And, it would’ve been great even if we didn’t do a season two and beyond. And I think that… I think you’re right. I think there, there are ways to structure new projects so that even if they don’t achieve conventional success, you still gain more than you invested in them.

This all reminded me of a couple other things:

  • Naval Ravikant’s How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky — Naval stresses the need to think long term. Ten years not 10 days. Relationships and learning will compound. If you can learn to create media and learn to create with code and you can create a lot of leverage.
  • Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game — This is a book about long term thinking at both the individual and organizational level. “Nothing and no one can perform at 100 percent forever. If we cannot be honest with one another and rely on one another for help during the challenging parts of the journey, we won’t get very far.”

Do the simple thing first (whiteboards don’t scale and that’s okay)

Tool: Do the simple thing first.

I always feel a little bit smarter after listening to Invest Like the Best. On this episode, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger talk about taking Instagram from an idea to an exit to successfully scaling it up in a large company to leaving it behind. (They also talk about what they’re up to now.)

They talk about the early days of running ads:

V1 of our auction system was literally a whiteboard with a calendar that was drawn in Sharpie. Basically maybe March 5th would say: Banana Republic, they’re running the ad that day. And in the morning the engineers look at and be like, all right, we got to make sure Banana Republic is running that day. Which on one hand is what we’d call Clown Town. But actually it was like a great example of doing the simple thing first.

If that ad system didn’t work, meaning people weren’t interested in buying those kinds of ads on Instagram, why would you have spent a year building the perfect auction model? And when it worked, then you go build the thing that lets thousands and thousands of different kinds of ads be running on Instagram at any given time.

It’s easy to forget how different Instagram was in the early days. Tags and things didn’t work. People posted to their mainf eed multiple times a day without considering that they might become excommunicated from society.

This was a good reminder to start with the simple thing first (or: do things that don’t scale) if you’re trying something new. It can be really easy to optimize prematurely.

Quick example from this blog: I spent entirely too much time trying to get WordPress to run locally to get these podcast summary cards in a box:

podcast-summary-card

I started thinking about how the template would work and whether or not I knew how to use custom fields in WordPress and a bunch of other stuff that would make these things more systematic.

Anyway, I ended up not being able to get WordPress running locally so I just went with a simpler solution by writing CSS inline. And I have a MarsEdit formatting shortcut to paste the markup into each post. For the podcast name, title, and episode links, I copy and paste them in like a farmer.

It’d be nice to write a script for this but it’s working right now. And it’s definitely not the bottleneck for me writing posts regularly.

An example disagreement (between very smart people)

I just bought Ray Dalio’s Principles. Well, a physical copy. I listened to the audiobook around when it first came out but after seeing the physical copy in store it definitely seemed worth re-visiting.

I wanted to pour a little bit of concrete over something I listened to on this episode by sharing it here.

Reid Hoffman has a lightning round question:

  • “Artificial intelligence fills you with hope or dread? Pick one.”

Ray Dalio picks dread.

They talk it through:

HOFFMAN: So by the way, in radical transparency, I actually have hope. And unfortunately just because of time, because I do want to get through the Lightning Round questions, to our next conversation we’ll go into the AI stuff a little bit more.

DALIO: But let me ask you the question: Do you agree with the principle I just said? In other words if… Lets just chat a minute, because this is invaluable because I’d love your opinion, ok?

This reminded me of What You Do is Who You Are  by Ben Horowitz1. Because Ray Dalio wrote a book on principles and using them for decision making. But then you can hear in this discussion that he really walks the walk and brings principles into the discussion.

Agree on principles and then work from there. Reid Hoffman then also explains the importance of considering context.

In any case, it’s good to hear two smart people discuss something they disagree on2. Dalio for dread, Reid for hope.

(Also, I made a page where I’ll try collecting lightning round questions, starting with this one.)