Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Play pick-up basketball, sell your company to Amazon for $13 billion

You’re play basketball with some friends regularly. You find out one of them has money and is into healthy food. Well, you happen to run a health food store. He invests. Fast forward a few decades and you’re selling your company to Amazon for $13 billion.

You might be John Mackey. He tells some early investment stories on the How I Built This with Guy Raz: “Whole Foods Market: John Mackey”

Here’s John Mackey (at 13:30):

I began to hustle anybody I knew that had money. I’d already… people that knew people that I met. There was a guy I was playing basketball with. One day we’d finished playing pick-up basketball and he got into like a BMW and drove off. He was the same age as I was and I said, “Wow what does Jay do?” And they said Jay doesn’t do anything. Jay’s a millionaire, he inherited a bunch of money from his parents.

Well, I gave Jay a call the next day. It just turned out that Jay had had kind of his own food consciousness awakening and started shopping at Safer Way, he loved Safer Way. And Jay said he would put $50,000 in.

I was like, “Wow, okay.” I went back to our board and I said, “I’ve got a guy that’s gonna put $50,000 in.” They were in shock. Several of them decided they wanted to kick more money in as well.

I enjoy hearing these moments of luck

Yes, you make your own luck and all of that:

  • He had to be into basketball
  • He had to have a good enough reputation (friendly, smart, whatever combination it is) that the guy would want to do business with him
  • He had to have a store to invest in in the first place

But it’s still luck:

  • He had to play basketball with this group that happened to have a millionaire in it
  • That guy happened to be into health foods in that period of time

Pairs well with…

This story reminded me of Ryan Holiday’s “Ego is the Enemy”:

With success comes the temptation to tell oneself a story, to round off the edges, to cut out your lucky breaks and add a certain mythology to it all. You know, that arcing narrative of Herculean struggle for greatness against all odds: sleeping on the floor, being disowned by my parents, suffering for my ambition. It’s a type of storytelling in which eventually your talent becomes your identity and your accomplishments become your worth.

Here’s a formula for keeping ego in check.

  1. When planning, plan to work hard (maybe some luck will fall your way)
  2. When reflecting on success, you’ll probably be quick to credit your hard work so remember to be grateful for the lucky moments

Jason Fried: No one should listen to me about how to start a business

Chase Jarvis had Jason Fried on his podcast recently: “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work With Jason Fried” (iTunes, Google Play)

I really enjoyed the self awareness Jason Fried shows when he talks about advice (at 46:30):

I want to say one other thing about this, because part of me doesn’t like what I’m saying. Because I don’t think it’s fair. In that—I shouldn’t be giving a 23-year-old advice, because I’m 44. It’s too far. I’m too far removed. Like I don’t think I should actually be… no one should listen to me about how to start a business. I haven’t started a business for 20 years.

I can talk about how to run a business. I can talk about how to build a profitable business. And how to hire people and how to market and how to build products, how to make decisions… because that’s what I do everyday.

But I haven’t started a business for 20 years. I haven’t been 23 for 20 years.

So I kind of think advice has an expiration date. It certainly does. If you’re starting a business, you’re probably better off talking to someone who just started one six months ago. I don’t care if they’ve made it or they haven’t or they don’t know yet. Doesn’t matter. But they’re much closer to the thing.

A couple other parts I enjoyed

  • Good ambition would be to aim to get to where you enjoy every day. Fried doesn’t like the idea of ambition being getting your name on a building, having the biggest team, and working the most hours. Every single day won’t be good, but it’s something to aim for.
  • Likes Gary Vaynerchuk even if he disagrees with some of his message. Fried acknowledges that they have completely different views on amount of time spent working. Basecamp leans toward 40 hours a week being enough to run a successful business. Gary V, of course, works all the time, takes pride in it, and has built a huge audience around that message. What I like is that Fried acknowledges that each message might work for some people and not for others. As always: it depends1.

I’ll end with this note from Jason Fried and DHH’s book, “It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work” (Check out some notes I wrote about it here.)

We decided that if the good old days were so good, we’d do our best to simply settle there. Maintain a sustainable, manageable size. We’d still grow, but slowly and in control. We’d stay in the good days—no need to call them old anymore.

Aim for the good days and stay there when you find them.

David Goggins: Things I don’t want to do

David Goggins was on Joe Rogan’s podcast again recently. (Episode links: YouTube, iTunes)

David is a retired Navy SEAL, runs ultramarathons, and previously had the world record for pull-ups in a 24-hour period (4000+). Working out has been a huge part of his success in life.

But he says he doesn’t do it for the physical benefits (At 17:45):

Rogan: That’s such an important point, when you talk about the working out. A lot of people, when they think about working out, they think of it as being a physical thing.

Goggins: Right. No, no. I did it for mental. People always say, “My god.” No, don’t, don’t look at it like—I didn’t care about losing weight, I didn’t care about being the fastest person. I wasn’t making the Olympics. I wasn’t going to pros. I could barely read and write when I was a junior in high school. I wasn’t going anywhere. I saw working out as a way to build callouses on my mind. I had to callous over the victim’s mentality.

I watch these movies. I talked about Rocky last time I was on here. I always equated training to mental toughening. It always looked brutal. People waking up early and doing all these things. It looked horrible. I was like, “Wow, I’ve got to start doing that.” Not to get better, bigger, and stronger. But that is what’s going to build me. That looks uncomfortable. That looks brutal. Getting up early, I don’t want to do that. So I made this long list of things I don’t want to do. Through that I found myself.

(There should be a better term for working out to separate what he does from the 20-minute thing I’ll do later today and pat myself on the back for.)

I like how James Clear puts it (check out my notes on his book “Atomic Habits” here) when he describes casting a vote for yourself. Each time you do the good habit you’re trying to build, you’re casting a vote for yourself. You’re one step closer to being the person you want to become.

Even if you’ve finally accepted you won’t look like an action figure, there are so many other benefits to exercise. I’ll often consider the benefits it has for energy and for focus. What Goggins reminded me of is that you can build mental toughness.

The next time you hit your limit, go on just a little bit further. Callous your mind.

Weekly Deck — Issue 001

Books mentioned:

Podcasts mentioned:

Working undercover or just tracking books: Keep it simple

Check out the full notes for “The Rescue Artist” by Edward Dolnick

The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece (by Edward Dolnick)

I’m working on a couple goals: (1) posting regularly and (2) focusing on 1-3 books at a time instead of jumping around in like 5-7 books. To keep things simple, I’m going to share one excerpt each day from one of the books I’m currently reading with some thoughts.

In the spirit of keeping things simple…

Here’s a quote from The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick:

Hill’s dislike of guns also reflects hostility toward technology in general. He can manage a cell phone or send an e-mail, but that is as far as he goes. The function of mechanical contrivances is to betray their user at the worst possible moment.

Hill in this is Charley Hill, the undercover cop Norwegian police hired when The Scream was stolen in 1994.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. If something isn’t going wrong with your gadgets while you’re undercover, it’s just waiting for the perfect moment to stop working.

The Rescue Artist gives a look into a few worlds: high-end art, the criminal underworld, and the world undercover cops. It’s fascinating.

I had a familiar thought: I should read more books like this

And the last time I had that feeling was when I was reading The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly. (I wrote about it earlier this year—check that out.) That book came to mind because I was really enjoying The Rescue Artist and trying to think of what made it special. I think that it’s a departure from the usual “Here’s sort of how to get rich but, you know, with meaning” books I read.

In any case, I’m almost finished with this book and haven’t decided what the next book will be. I ordered a few hardcover books: New York 2140 (fiction), On Grand Strategy, and Choose Wonder Over Worry. I’m hoping that hardcover will help me focus but I suspect it will also just end up being inconvenient and I’ll read less.

I also still need to finish Maverick, which is also in hardcover. I’m more than halfway through so I might do that. I’ll apply the snowball debt method to books to finish the books that are nearest to completion.

Someday I’d like to have a better format for this

In keeping things simple, I’ll stick to a bulleted list. The problem for me isn’t that the technology breaks, it’s that I end up in a tinkering black hole. I want to change some style in WordPress, then get the IDE set up, then think well maybe I should make a custom template, then…

Okay so the current reading list

  • The Rescue Artist by Edward Dolnick: See above
  • Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman: This will definitely be the next Kindle book I read. I bought it last year but didn’t finish it. I’ve been bingeing on William Goldman interviews and videos so I thought it’d be good to start reading his book again. It’s great.
  • Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks (audiobook): I wrote a post about Matthew Dicks’s appearance on The Art of Manliness the other day (check that out here). I went ahead and picked up the book. I’m about an hour in and it’s got some good tips on storytelling. Some themes so far are that you don’t have to live an insane life to have good stories, if you pay attention you’ll see stories in your life, and telling stories is different from acting out a play.
  • Snow Crash (audiobook): I’ve been sick the past few days so I’ve just been putting this on in the background. I’m realizing how enjoyable it is to put a book on that I’ve listened to already. It’s like opening Netflix and throwing Friends on. I can turn my focus off and relax.

Alright stay tuned. In the meantime I’ll press publish on this thing and hope that technology doesn’t betray me.