Podcasts, videos, and iPad art
Recapping our first 8 episodes in a speed round format (80 seconds each). Podcast recommendations: Short Story Long (w/ Tamara Dhia), Knowledge Project (w/ Barbara Oakley), and Industrial Strength (Joe DeFranco)
( 00:05:38 ) Speed rounds: First 8 episodes
( 00:20:24 ) Q: You can’t break necks easy?
( 00:24:38 ) Cool thing #1 : Tamara Dhia (Short Story Long)
( 00:31:46 ) Cool thing #2: Barbara Oakley (Knowledge Project)
( 00:33:42 ) Cool thing #3: Triple H (Industrial Strength)
Do you have an hour every day to work on something? No? Okay how about fifteen minutes.
It will add up. Slowly, but it will.
In Founders at Work, Jessica Livingston interviews startup founders. There’s a lot of business wisdom and all that, but the best parts are those unpolished early days of companies. A lot of the companies are what you’d imagine watching HBO’s Silicon Valley or just from reading enough blog posts about tech.
It’s been a few years since I read the book, but one interview that’s been sticky over the years is the interview with Joshua Schachter, who created the bookmark manager del.iciou.us.
Break things into small chunks: Schachter broke things into small enough chunks that they’d fit on one screen and he could finish what he wanted to do in 15 minutes.
Figure out what you’re doing quickly: Don’t plan to revise your entire manuscript every time you sit down to work. Leave in the middle of something so you know where you’re starting.
“If I didn’t have time. I didn’t have time.”
That’s such a rare mentality these days. Usually it’s more like, “If I don’t have time… oh no.” Then it’s time to panic.
Why am I sharing this right now? In the past few weeks I’ve felt the urge to start working on this blog again. I started picturing what it could look like 5 years from now if I work on it consistently (and slowly). That all reminded me of the above excerpt. So I’ll start working on this again. One chunk at a time. One post at a time.
(This is Ces.) I forgot I couldn’t record with Wally this week so I recorded a solo episode. I tried to talk through some ideas for future gaming life lessons videos.
This week we’re talking about Daniel Pink’s latest book When: The Secrets of Perfect Timing.
If you’ve ever watched one of those whiteboard timelapse videos, there’s a good chance it was inspired in some way by the whiteboard video of Pink’s talk about “Drive”.
When has the answers to these questions.
Thinkers 50 named him one of the top 15 thinkers in the world. He had one of the top 10 most watched TED talks ever. And now upwards of twenty people will read about his book as Active Recall’s BOOK OF THE WEEK.
I took this chronotype questionnaire. Go check it out. It took less than five minutes and asks what times you do certain things and how you feel about certain times. I was a 61 which falls in the moderate-morning category.
An example question: If you had a workout partner that wanted to work out at 10pm, how would your workout go? This was particularly relevant when I took the survey because I did my workout the night before. I don’t usually do night workouts and it was a struggle. And the usual energy boost that leads to a good day instead led to trouble sleeping. That said, I can see getting used to it if I made it a regular thing.
You know what an afternoon slump feels like. Whether it’s from that enormous burrito you had for lunch or if it’s just the rhythm of the day, afternoon’s can be a slog. It’s the midpoint of our day and midpoints can have drops in quality. You don’t have the full tank of energy when starting something and you don’t have the motivation of seeing the finish line.