Active Recall!

Here’s a weekly look at things I made.

It looks like the new version of WordPress auto… something’s these links. You know what, I like it. I’ll try it out for this newsletter. So here are a bunch of links to stuff that’s on this site.

First, here’s podcast episode that me and Wally did last week.

http://activerecall.wpengine.com/musashi-stop-worrying-ep-31/

We tried sticking to the format that we came up with the week before. But we ran out of time so it’s mostly just podcast recommendations. We didn’t get the magic window like we hoped.

We talked about Dale Carnegie’s other book, How to Stop Worry and Start Living. Since the episode, I’ve finished listening to the book and I really, really like it.

Dale Carnegie, smart guy!

Here’s some wisdom from the book about books themselves:

If we only applied those two proverbs—instead of snorting at them—we wouldn’t need this book at all. In fact, if we applied most of the old proverbs, we would lead almost perfect lives. However, knowledge isn’t power until it is applied; and the purpose of this book is not to tell you something new. The purpose of this book is to remind you of what you already know and to kick you in the shins and inspire you to do something about applying it.

http://activerecall.wpengine.com/day-tight-compartments/

Speaking of videos. I made a few more in the past week.

Trader Joe’s: Keto items and options (grocery haul): Thought it’d be fun to put a video together with the groceries I got from Trader Joe’s. I started following a keto diet so I’ve still got the New Year’s enthusiasm going. I’ll probably write some posts about this as I go on.

Street Fighter II: Life Lessons (Models of practice pt. 1 of 3): I had fun making the Enter the Gungeon video so some ideas came to mind for other gaming + productivity videos. I’m leaning pretty hard into this. We’ll see how it goes. I think me and Wally might talk about this on the next podcast.

Super Mario Bros. 3: Life Lessons (Skip the Whistle!): Wally and I talked about this idea a couple times on the podcast. Enjoy the journey and don’t just use that super shortcut to get to the last world.

Starcraft: Life Lessons (Models of practice pt. 2 of 3): Another in the same series of models of practice. A lot of these videos come from discussions on different podcast episodes. (Here’s the episode we originally talked about it on: Talent is Overrated)

Counter-Strike: Life Lessons (Models of practice pt. 3 of 3): Third in the series. (I really should’ve shoehorned Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike into this.) These videos were pretty fun to make, which is why I’m planning to make more.

Making a “Gaming Life Lessons” video (Notability Timelapse): Just a straight timelapse of a screen recording. I might start adding more of these because I think there might be an audience for them and they don’t take much time at all to make. (I just need to remember to press record.)

Rapid Skill Acquisition (Gaming Life Lessons): This is based on on Josh Kaufman’s The First 20 Hours. (We did a podcast episode on that book too!)

I don’t plan to make 7 videos each week. It’s not sustainable. If I do, I’ll make sure to schedule them out next time. That’ll make things sustainable and consistent. Here’s what I wrote then (June 10, 2017):

I want my hard work to be learning to present thoughts clearly and improving at storytelling. The other things are unimportant and I can try my best to make them easy. That way I have more time to focus on the important hard things.

It’s a good reminder of what I wanted to focus on when I started this site, the podcast, and the channel.

I want to share my thoughts clearly through storytelling.

I had it so clear months ago and it slowly blurred.

I already knew what to focus on. It looks like every once in a while I need a kick in the shins.

I kicked the newsletter off last week. This makes it two weeks in a row, likely tying the longest streak from last year.

Podcast recommendations —

Like last week, I’ll write about some podcasts that we talked about on the show. If you like some of the things we talked about on the show, you should check these out.

Pat Flynn Show: Dan John on Measuring what Matters: We’ve talked about the Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income on multiple episodes. This podcast is from a different Pat Flynn (the one that runs Chronicles of Strength). I’ve been binge-ing pretty hard on it lately and I wrote a post about his generalist philosophy.

I’ve also been getting into kettlebell training in the past few months. If you’re learning about kettlebells, you may be familiar with Pavel Tsatsouline. (I learned about him through an interview he did with… guess who… Tim Ferriss!) If you’ve bought a few books on kettlebells, I’d guess one is by Pavel and one is by Dan John.

Dan John invented the goblet squat. Great thing to have on your resume.

Anyway, on this episode, Pat Flynn and Dan John talk about generalism and how to apply it to different areas of your life. Rough summary of generalism: specialize in something until you get good at it, then focus on something else and specialize in that. “Good” does not mean elite.

When you stack those skills, the overlap becomes extremely valuable.

Last year, I became bad at many things, including podcasting, blogging, and making videos. This year I still want to do those things but I’ll modify the approach to get good at one at a time.

MFCEO: How to 100% Guarantee Success in Anything: Wally recommended this and it’s all about goals. Just do it. Something I really liked in this episode is his section about the hashtag no-days-off folks. Focus on being effective. Don’t focus on trying to do things in every waking moment and in every blink of downtime. That’s a great way to do a lot of things, poorly.

Jocko Willink #100 with Tim Ferriss: I’m still working through this. If you want another way to listen to Jocko, his latest book is available in audio format on your favorite streaming services. (I listened on Google Play Music. Here it is on Spotify.) If you’ve ever thought, “You know, I have a hard time waking up so It’d be great to have a Navy SEAL to talk about how lazy I am.” then it’s the perfect thing. It’s effective, I can say that much.

Art of Manliness: Motivation myth Jeff Haden: I’m recently finished Michael Hyatt’s “Your Best Year Ever“. Something it reminded me to do is to think about setting up if-then plans for goals I have this year. If I can’t make it to the gym… then I’ll do a kettlebell workout at home. Not a perfect replacement but it’s a step forward.

This episode of Art of Manliness goes over the fact that you’re going to lose motivation. So if you lose motivation… then what?

Check the episode out for how you can accomplish what you set out to do this year.

(Another tip from “Your Best Year Ever”: make it easy to remember why you’re doing it in the first place. If that’s not enough to get you going, you might need a better why.)

Active Recall: Resolutions (Ep. 30): We’ve got to plug ourselves! Here’s the format we went with this week: (1) Podcast recommendations: the above podcasts, (2) Book-of-the-week: Subtle Art of Not Giving a F— by Mark Manson, and (3) The Magic Window: Our favorite arcade games.

(We talked about The Simpsons arcade game and Time Crisis 2.)

We had a really good time with this format so we’ll try it again for a few more episodes.

A few other things—

Here are some videos I made this week:

• How to handle negative beliefs (first, recognize them!) — Book Notes for “Your Best Year Ever”: Notes on the book I mentioned above, Michael Hyatt’s Your Best Year Ever.
• How to make a presentation with an iPad Pro: I’ve been thinking about doing this for a while. I had this idea of making a video of the making of the video. And at the end you’d realize you were watching the making of that video and your mind would be blown.

  I… didn’t even get close. Still, it might be useful. I think I can re-use a lot of the video for shorter videos. The overhead time lapse of my hand while I draw is fun to watch. I made the great decision to make it the size of like a thimble if you’re watching on your phone.

  This is one of those where I really need to buy into the idea that you’ve got to put bad stuff out to learn and eventually put good things out.

• Enter the Gungeon: Life lessons: Oh yeah, I’m mildly addicted to Enter the Gungeon. I got a Nintendo Switch last year. I played maybe an hour each of Zelda and Mario Odyssey. I put some good time into Mario Kart. And… not much else. (Oh yah a little bit of Puyo Puyo Tetris.)

  But I picked up Enter the Gungeon last week and have played it every day for about an hour. Not a full blown addiction but the most consistent I’ve played a single player console game in a while. Really fun. Great characters.

  So I made a video about how you can apply lessons from the gungeon to your life.