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F06: “Anything You Can Imagine”

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Book of the week:

“Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth” by Ian Nathan

( 03:51 ) Room 1: Kitchen with an orc

( 10:41 ) Room 2: Virtua Fighter 2 Pool Fight

( 21:00 ) Room 3: Matrix and Peter Jackson

The 5 Ms, explained with quotes from ‘Rounders’

In this episode, I use Rounders quotes to talk about creativity. Specifically, I talk about Brian Koppelman’s answer to a listener in one of his Q&A episodes.

His listener’s question (at 23:10) “How do you keep nourishing yourself to keep the spark alive?”

Brian Koppelman: That’s related and it’s also back to those things I said earlier: the meditation, morning pages, long walks, cardio, listening to music, reading, watching movies. I want to keep stoking the flame by taking in great work. I want to engage with that great work and ask myself questions about it and let myself get stirred up. As you get older it gets harder to allow yourself to get stirred up emotionally by art. But it remains really worth it.

In honor of Wrestlemania, I’ve gimmick-ized the steps to the best of my ability by…

  • Combining music/reading/movies so that it’s 5 items, good to count off on one hand
  • Shoehorning each thing into something that’s starts with the letter M

1. “Uh, you know what? I got my five grand here. That’s just fine by me. I’m going home.” (Morning Pages)

A drawing of David Chang
I type more than I write longhand. When I write longhand it’s usually on an iPad. This is one of the times I can remember writing longhand. I was writing out quotes from podcast episodes and trying to sketch people in it. (I should try this again.)

Okay so this was an actual M in his description. I’ll summarize the version described by Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way:

  • Write three pages of free form writing by hand
  • Burn the pages

Keep your hand moving across the page. Tim Ferriss describes it as clearing the cobwebs out.

Writing longhand is the prescribed method. But typing seems fine here especially if the actual alternative is that you won’t do it at all. (Really, I’m just defending the fact that I type these and don’t do it longhand.)

After you get through the initial friction, it can be very enjoyable to just free write. I used the quote about walking away when you’re up to capture Julia’s thoughts about whether or not you should continue beyond three pages.

Julia Cameron: “No! To write more than three pages is to invite self-involvement and narcissism. The pages are therapeutic, and three pages is the ideal dose.”

(Of course, Mike McDermott doesn’t end up walking away. But you’re just trying to get your day started.)

2. “Vegas huh? (Yep.) Good luck man.” (Meditation)

The Vessel but with eyes
I’m still working on making meditation practice. Until then I’ll share this picture from one of my morning walks on the High Line. This is The Vessel, looking skeptical when I talk about the benefits of meditation.

I used this quote because I’d guess meditation is the one that you’re least likely to already have in your routine.

This Rounders quote represents the skeptics. In Rounders, people are skeptical when Mike says that poker is a game of skill. Plenty of people are skeptical about meditation. Research, testimonials, and all of that can sway some people into believing it’s effective. But still, it’s “not for them”.

That said, I’m still trying to make it a regular part of my day. My first step will be adding a sauna session to the days when I make it to the gym. Which is at least sitting in silence.

(Also, check out this early episode Dan Harris’s 10% Happier: Brian Koppelman.)

3. “Hanging around, hanging around. Kid’s got alligator blood. Can’t get rid of him.” (Move slow)

Here’s a self portrait from one of my walks. (And also the portable podcast recording studio.)

This is where I start jamming these things into words that start with M. “Move slow” represents the long walks.

I’ve mentioned it here before, but go check out Koppelman’s thread from New Years Eve. I associate it so much now with walking in Central Park, where I’ll try to do a long walk a couple times a week. Here’s a tweet from one of those earlier this year…

For the day to day walking, I aim for 5 miles (but am not maniacal about it or anything so I won’t pace around my living room before bed if I’m at 4.5 miles).

Lately I’ve been adding a stroll first thing in the morning. I’ll set a timer for 15 minutes, start walking and then walk back when the timer goes off. It goes by quick. My guess is that it’s because it’s out and back.

Bonus: I can get a few minutes on the High Line and at that time of the morning it’s pretty empty except for, you guessed it, runners.

Or if you need to describe what they’re doing with a letter M for whatever reason you might instead say that they’re moving fast…

4. Move fast — “15 grand in five days? I can do that. I’ve gone on rushes like that before”

Living room with kettlebells
On good mornings, I move the coffee table and pull the rug away, revealing a gym. Or a rubber mat. Then I move a few kettlebells over from the corner and do swings (move fast) and get-ups (move slow). I fill out the day’s entry in the 5-Minute Journal app on the iPad and then start an interval timer to go through the workout. As I’m typing each item out, I’m realizing it sounds more and more like self-development parody.

Koppelman mentions cardio. Down jackets are disappearing and lawns are opening around the city. This signals that it’s time for my spring tradition. Which is trying to get into running and only doing enough sessions to finish listening to Haruki Murakami’s “What I Talk about When I Talk about Running”.

I’m not a runner or cyclist, so the version of “move fast” that’s been working for me is doing kettlebell workouts. Right now that means two movements: the swing and the get-up.

The swing is fast. The get-up is actually pretty slow but I think the important part of “move fast” is that it’s a workout and more strenuous than what you do in the “move slow” section.

5. “In my club I will splash the pot whenever the fuck I please” (Movies, music, and books)

Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle Earth
I didn’t know “production bios” was a genre but I picked up “Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & The Making of Middle-Earth” and have really really enjoyed it. It reminded me of how much the Lord of the Rings trilogy stirred me up in high school and college. I’ve started watching movies again.

Stories make humans human. Take other stories in.

This M is about consuming art that moves you.

While it doesn’t necessarily have to be movies, I have started watching more movies since listening to the episode of The Moment. (Rounders being one of them, along with The Big Short, Tropic Thunder, The Fellowship of the Ring, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Which I’ll be happy to pull quotes from to ham-handedly explain future topics.)

This will help in your craft, as well. As Stephen King says in On Writing, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

I have the Teddy KGB quote to close this as a reminder of ownership. He owned that club. You own this process. You can define what a successful day looks like.

Empty your mind, strengthen your body, fill your mind.

Do the work and nobody can take that away from you.

6. The bonus M: Make time for people you love

One metric to rule them all: Meals shared with people you love.

This last M is a reminder of why it’s worth doing these other things in the first place. You might not be present if you’re always worried that your creative spark will disappear.

Do your morning pages, meditate, move slow, move fast, watch some movies and get stirred up by stories.

Then go experience your story with other people.

Podcast Notes: John Skipper and the early days of ESPN.com

The Bill Simmons Podcast: “Catching up with John Skipper”

Great episode with Simmons and Skipper giving an overview of their careers working together in sports media. One theme that comes up a few times is content formatting.

This includes when they first worked together during the dial-up days of ESPN.com. John Skipper says he came in thinking the site should be treated more like a magazine (around 17:30):

John Skipper: It had a couple of people running it. It wasn’t going great. Actually it wasn’t very good. It was sort of HTML text and, you know, it did scores.

Bill Simmons: The entire internet was pretty bad back then though. It’s not like anyone was running away from the pack.

John Skipper: No everything was ugly. Everything was ugly. I do think one thing that John Walsh and I brought to it was a magazine sensibility. I immediately went in and said we’ve got to have photographs and we’ve got to have typefaces and we have to have layouts so the thing looks good.I was met by a bunch of guys who came in with data and said, “You know how long this will take to load on dial up?” And I’m like, “I don’t really care.” I said they’re gonna figure out that technological problem out at some point. And we’re gonna win because it’ll look great, we’ll do photographs, and we’re gonna hire good writers.

Simmons mentions that Grantland was designed for desktops — I always loved the layout of this Grantland piece: “One Hundred Years of Arm Bars“. It’s fine on mobile but it’s so cool on desktop. They talk about how written content on the web transitioned from desktop to mobile and how live broadcasting is making that transition.

Don’t overreach — John Skipper: “You just keep getting bigger and bigger. And the company was extraordinarily successful financially. It was in people’s lives. We’re starting new channels. And overreached in a couple areas. People don’t really need to eat at ESPN. That was a bad idea, ultimately. You don’t need to eat there.”

Okay, sometimes overreach — They also overreached creating the ESPN phone (The Sanyo MVP). However, some good things came out of it. They built new infrastructure for the network that the phone ran on, which set them up nicely moving into a sports world that was delivered digitally more and more.

It’s over an hour and they definitely touched on plenty of other great topics:

  • Buying up all the live rights to pretty niche sport events (live sports remain valuable in the on-demand streaming world)
  • Content strategy (30 for 30 cost $500,000 per episode / $15M total but it was entirely worth it so that HBO wasn’t the only place for sports documentaries)
  • The ups and downs of success (the jobs that are most fun aren’t likely to be when you’re responsible for the biggest group of people — but fun isn’t the only factor in a good career)
  • Professional relationships having their ups and downs (Simmons and Skipper step through their falling out and what they would and wouldn’t do differently)

(I always enjoy listening to Simmons talk about his early days on the web. Check out this earlier post for more.)

F04: Walk, Listen, Talk — “Digital Minimalism”

In 2006, Cal Newport released a book called How to Become a Straight-A Student. Here’s an excerpt about procrastination:

That little procrastination devil on your shoulder is an incredible salesman. If you give him even a glimpse of an alternative to your work, then he will close the deal. To neutralize this devil, isolate him.

In the 13 years since then, that devil’s feasted on our attention and become more powerful. We also decided it’d be great to carry him around in our pockets and check in like every 7 seconds.

The latest solo episode is about Newport’s latest book, Digital Minimalism. His previous books have been pretty influential for me. So Good They Can’t Ignore You changed how I viewed careers. (“Follow your passion” works great if you excel at your passion and it involves valuable skills. You’re going to have to put the work in.) Deep Work changed how I block time off each day and how I set up my environment for getting work done.

Room 1: Kitchen with a Las Vegas buffet set up

Here’s a summary of what digital minimalism is:

Digital Minimalism A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.

If you’ve read Deep Work, you might remember his description of the farmer and his tools. If there’s some value in a tool, that doesn’t automatically make it worth the cost. For a farmer, there are more things to consider than just the monetary cost of a tool. The same goes for how you use technology. Assuming these things are pretty much all free, the cost is your time, attention, and energy.

I get a lot of value reading subreddits about government policy and educational reform. Ok so it’s actually r/NBA and r/MMA. The content there is entertaining and pretty self-contained. There are highlights and I’ll check out a few of the top comments and then I’ll get out of there. I try not to get too sucked into reading too far into the comments.

I try avoiding anything that presents a bunch of articles. Not that I don’t think the content is good. It’s really just too much of a good thing. There’s always going to be a handful of links to open up if I check Twitter and then a dozen if I open up Hacker News. If I read all of that, it’s an hour lost. If I see all of that and don’t read it, it’s a little more FOMO to carry through the day.

Instead, I’ve created an echo chamber in my email inbox that I’m addicted to. I’ll work on that, but let’s move on…

minimalists don’t mind missing out on small things ; what worries them much more is diminishing the large things they already know for sure make a good life good.

Alright so you see the prime rib at the other side of the buffet. Someone’s carving it up and passing it out. Actually he’s going pretty fast. It’s toward the end of the night so you know it might be the last few juicy slices.

But you stop at each station on the way there to grab like a mini slice of pizza, a scoop of pasta, a couple pieces of spicy salmon. Hey there’s a charcuterie station.

Of course, the prime rib station closes.

Should’ve gone there first.

Fill your plate with analog interactions. Put the effort in to schedule and spend time with people in person. Make time to call people. Live across the country from a friend? Start a podcast with them even if you have no listeners!

Room 2: Living room filled with smoke, cigarettes, and your friends

Newport talks about technology being addicting.

Addiction is a condition in which a person engages in use of a substance or in a behavior for which the rewarding effects provide a compelling incentive to repeatedly pursue the behavior despite detrimental consequences.

Look at all these kids on their phones all the time. Actually look at everybody on their phones all the time. (Thanks to The Big Picture, you can see this around the world.)

I’m addicted to my phone and have thought it’s a bad thing for a while. I’m guessing some people know they’re addicted to their phone but don’t think it’s a bad thing. And then there are probably people who don’t think they’re addicted to their phones.

If you’re at least aware you’re addicted, you’ll find a ton of value in Digital Minimalism. If you don’t think the excessive technology use is bad, it might change your mind a little bit. If you do agree it’s bad, then the tactics in the book should help. (Intermittent fasting, but for your phone.)

Room 3: Swimming pool filled with bells, chimes, and broken glass

I sort of skipped explaining why I put broken glass in the room for this memory palace. It was to represent our shattered attention.

The urge to check Twitter or refresh Reddit becomes a nervous twitch that shatters uninterrupted time into shards too small to support the presence necessary for an intentional life

All the distractions throughout the day make it challenging to be intentional. Deep Work opened my eyes to just how fractured my attention was. (And still is.)

I had a classmate in college (“Back in my days…”) that mentioned to the class that she’s addicted to her email and gets a twitch when she can’t check it. It seemed kind of extreme at the time. Now, an NFL team gives its players cell phone breaks.

Check out Digital Minimalism and I’ll now go and do things that are definitely not checking my email.

Podcast Notes: Jim Collins on rating your days (Tim Ferriss Show)

On the Tim Ferriss Show, Jim Collins talks about his spreadsheet for tracking days:

And so what I started to do is I started creating a code, which is plus two, plus one, zero minus one, minus two. And the other thing I put in — and the key on all this by the way is you have to do it every day in real time. You can’t five days later look back and say, “How did I feel that day?” And what this is, is a totally subjective “How quality was the day?” A plus two is a super positive day.

This is a good reminder that our memory isn’t all that great.

What’d you eat for dinner last Thursday? Are you sure? If you don’t have a system for either planning it beforehand or recording it afterward, you’re probably not sure.

This reminded me of something from Bill Burnett and Dave Evans’s book, Designing Your Life. In it, they talk about the Good Time Journal:

Bill was surprised that coaching master’s students, the students he likes and spends the most time with, was such a drain on his week. After journaling a bit on that subject, he discovered two things: (1) he was trying to coach in a bad environment (the noisy graduate studio) and (2) his coaching interaction wasn’t effective—his students weren’t “getting it.” Those two observations resulted in a redesign of his Tuesday-night class environment (he changed classrooms) and a shift in the coaching structure from meeting one to one with each student to coaching in small groups, so students could help one another during the interactions.

(If writing about a book is any measure of it being a favorite, then Designing Your Life is definitely up there. Wally and I talked about it on a podcast episode, I also mentioned it on our very first episode, mentioned the ‘bias to action’ mindset in another podcast post, and I mentioned it when writing about LeBron James conserving energy.)

Their scale of energy and engagement is something I think of often. However you score your day or activities, it’s good not to wait too long.

The surprising spots can be the most valuable. You can only find the surprises when your memory of something being positive contrasting with it actually being negative. (Or the opposite.) Those surprises act as good starting points for adding more of what makes your day better or removing things that are draining.

Then you can take your days from [puts sunglasses on] good to great.