Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

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.

Podcast note: How to beat writer’s block

Treat writer’s block like Mario Hezonja treats a Giannis block attempt:

Pretend it doesn’t exist. Believe it doesn’t exist. Then step right over it.

Richard K. Morgan was on The Writer Files podcast recently. I enjoyed what he had to say about when asked about writer’s block (at 30:50):

Nahhhh—there’s no such thing. There’s writer’s block in the sense that, yeah, there are days where you sit down and you just don’t feel like it. Or you can’t—you’re writing and what you’re writing is shit. But that’s not writer’s block. That’s just—you’re having a bad day.

I do think it’s—the whole concept of writer’s block is a bit self indulgent. Because you can write. Okay so you’re not writing up to the standard you’re happy with. What you’re writing, you don’t especially like. Tough. Get on. Write it. You can always go back and revise it at a later stage.

The rest of the episode is great, too. He’s grateful that he can write full-time and doesn’t like the notion that writing full-time is this incredibly difficult, painful occupation. If you have another full-time job and are working into the night to work on your novel on the side, struggling to get published, then that can be tough. But he makes it sound like a pretty sweet gig once you’ve made it. Especially when you consider all the other things in the world you could be doing for work.

If you have writer’s block, write anyway. It reminded me of how Seth Godin compares writing and speaking. You never have talker’s block:

The reason we don’t get talker’s block is that we’re in the habit of talking without a lot of concern for whether or not our inane blather will come back to haunt us. Talk is cheap. Talk is ephemeral. Talk can be easily denied.

Turn the mic on. Lower your bar. Start writing.

(Just also want to point out that Giannis did this later in the same game. He doesn’t believe in getting blocked either.)

Podcast note: How to tell better stories

Matthew Dicks knows how to tell stories. He’s a 5-time Moth GrandSlam winner and he was interviewed on The Art of Manliness: “Podcast #462: How to Tell Better Stories”.

Ever since reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits” (check out my notecards), I’ve been considering small things I can do daily (instead of medium things done every other day or large things done weekly).

What’s one daily habit Matthew Dicks has to build his storytelling muscle? (at 8:01):

All I do is at the end of every day, before I go to bed, I sit down and ask myself, “What was the thing that made this day different than any other?”

Everyone has stories. Something happened to you today that was different from yesterday. Start collecting them. Then you can look at the collection and really start seeing which things are story-worthy.

Where does he keep track of these daily moments?

I use a spreadsheet. I’ve got two columns in my spreadsheet. I’ve got the date on one side and then I stretch that second column all the way across the screen. And in there I write what my story is. So I can really write only two or three sentences a day about that moment.

That’s one constraint that he talks about in the podcast. Slowing down and summarizing something that happened to you so it fits in a few sentences takes a little bit of effort.

Another constraint he talks about is working with real life in the first place. He also writes novels so he also knows how to write entirely fictional stories. He looks at telling stories from real life as a puzzle. You can only work with things that actually happened, so you have to figure out how to organize the moments and cut parts out to make it an interesting story.

Why is it worth keeping a record of these (sometimes benign) moments?

We just have these moments where we have a beautiful, or a terrible, or a memorable interaction with another person. Or we see something and it suddenly changes our mind in some way. The problem is we just take these moments and throw them away like trash.

I’m going to start asking myself “What was the thing that made this day different than any other?”

My answer today:

  • I got a hot coffee instead of iced coffee for the first time in a long time.

I’ve set the bar pretty low so I’m thinking something more interesting than that will happen by the end of today. And if not, that’s okay too.

Book Note: The Bullet Journal Method

Check out the full notes for “The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future” by Ryder Carroll

What if you had the power to do most things? What if you had the power to do one specific thing nobody else could do?

Superman can do just about anything. But mayyyybe you just need to fit into a very tiny space.

Alright, so we’re talking about productivity, not superhero powers. There might be some downsides to software, as Ryder Carroll explains in The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future:

Another reason we use notebooks? Flexibility. Software tends to be either so powerful that its wealth of features is buried to all but the most intrepid explorers (think Excel) or so specific that it sacrifices features for increased usability, essentially doing few things very well (think mobile apps).

The solution, of course, is an analog notebook.

Notebooks, in contrast, are beholden to their authors. Their function is limited only by the imagination of their owner.

Some of the friends I have with bullet journals are the same people who would say “oh I can’t draw”. They feel okay being creative within the confines of a journal. It’s a safe space.

Technology makes it too easy to do some things

Jotting a note down? Easy in an analog notebook. It’s also easy on a digital device.

Sending it to the cloud so you can access that note on all the devices you have anywhere in the world? Having its contents searchable so that you can pull it up from your pile of other notes? Easy on a digital device.

Too easy. To the point that we can become a little thoughtless about what we put in that pile. It’s hard to review an infinite pile of notes.

There can be value in a little bit of friction. If it takes a little more effort to summarize your thoughts before writing them into a notebook, then you’ll do a little bit of filtering up front. Less to review means you’ll be more likely to review it.

Keeping a longhand notebook, digitally

You can get some of the benefits of slowing down by doing longhand writing digitally. Since reading the book, I’ve been keeping an analog journal for work and for everything else I keep a digital journal in my iPad.

It’s not the same. I knew that going in, but now I have a better sense of what the differences are.

Keeping a digital notebook is like having a 3-ring binder. There are pros and cons.

You’re not forced into the permanent linear order of an analog notebook. When you’re combining a collection of your work and other research and want to keep it organized in different categories, digital tools shine.

For something like a bullet journal, a lot of the pleasure comes over time as you open the notebook up day after day and build up your spatial memory of where things are. You can’t use a search query but you can flip to your monthly log in a few moments.

One of the advantages physical books continue to have over eBooks is that rifling through pages is easier. The Kindle app has improved here to where you can skim pages without losing your place in a book. But flipping back and forth between 2 or 3 pages is still easier with a physical book, keeping your place with your fingers.

The bullet journal review process is easier with an analog notebook.

Longhand writing, slowing down, and calmness

If you’ve heard of bullet journals, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of morning pages. It’s a form of journaling but quite different from the bullet journal. Instead of summarized bullets, you let it all out unfiltered. Three pages a day, longhand.

In The Miracle of Morning Pages, Julia Cameron answers the question “Must I really write pages longhand?”

Again, yes. Pages must be done longhand. The computer is fast—too fast for our purposes. Writing by computer gets you speed but not depth. Writing by computer is like driving a car at 85 mph. Everything is a blur. “Oh, my God, was that my exit?” Writing by hand is like going 35 mph. “Oh, look, here comes my exit. And look, it has a Sonoco station and a convenience store.”

The same reasoning applies to bullet journals as well. It’s calm.

It’s one of the best things about keeping a bullet journal. The great thing is that it’s one of the things that translates best from analog to digital. Longhand writing with the Apple Pencil is a pleasure.

Just turn your notifications off.

(And think espresso, not coffee)