Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Day-tight Compartments

I made this video about day tight compartments after hearing about it on the Tim Ferriss Show when he interviewed Terry Crews. It’s a phrase from Dale Carnegie’s book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living.

What I urge is that you so learn to control the machinery as to live with ‘day-tight compartments’ as the most certain way to ensure safety on the voyage.

Tim talks about how much he likes that book and that he has it face out on his bookshelf. (I think another book he’s mentioned that’s like that is The Magic of Thinking Big.)

Terry Crews proves how much of a book junkie is by bringing up the phrase “day-tight compartments” from memory.

I started reading the book and I can see why he remembered day-tight compartments. It’s a powerful concept. It’s a great reminder that you should focus on things you can control.

That’s the easy part. The harder part is not worrying about the things that you cannot control.

What are day-tight compartments?

The book has a story about Sir William Osler. (It’s an old book so it’s nice to hear stories that aren’t the same behavioral science studies that you see in books from the last decade or two.)

Osler organized the Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine and was knighted by the king of England in the late 1800s. In a speech to Yale students he talks about being on an ocean liner and seeing the captain with a bunch of buttons.

Each button isolated each watertight compartment. If something happened and water started coming into the ship, the captain would be able to seal off that leak so that the ship wouldn’t sink.

In life, it’s useful to seal today off from the future and the past

This doesn’t mean you don’t have a plan for the future. It doesn’t mean you don’t learn lessons from the past.

It means you trust that plan for the future so that you aren’t constantly worrying about it. The only way you can change the future is by the actions that you take today. It means that you don’t put the regrets of the past on repeat in your head.

Like a lot of things, it’s simple but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. You’ll have to practice to add it to your mental tool belt as something you can rely on.

If you need a quick reminder, you can start by remembering this quote, also from How to Stop Worrying and Start Living:

Everyday is a new life to a wise man.

Resolutions (Newsletter issue 2)

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.

How to find the best way to practice

Josh Kaufman in “The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything . . . Fast!”:

“Rapid skill acquisition is not rocket science. You simply decide what to practice, figure out the best way to practice, make time to practice, then practice until you reach your target level of performance.”

Pat Flynn and generalism yesterday. With generalism, you specialize in many things, but never at the same time.

You’ll aim somewhere lower than world-class and specialize as long as it makes sense. That means practice.

Josh Kaufman suggests 20 hours of (proper) practice to get to a useful level. This does not mean you can get a job doing it.

If a programming expert (let’s say they’ve taught before, too) sat down with you for an hour and taught you the basics, you’d be able to do basic math and some string manipulation.

It might not stick. But if you continued for 19 sessions you’d be able to build a small project. More importantly, you’d be at the point where you could teach yourself. You’ll be far ahead of someone who is 20 hours in without an expert to guide them.

That expert will help you avoid the rabbit holes.

Many early programming bugs will just be typos. Fixing that can take anywhere from a minute to hours (really) if you’re inexperienced and it might be somewhere in many files.

You learn from fixing these. Up to a point. Then it’s just time where you’re frustrated. An expert can help you skip through that frustration time so it can be used for learning more valuable concepts.

There are tons of good resources online for learning on your own. There are also bad ones. Even if you only have 1 hour with an expert instead of 20, they’ll be able to point you to the best resources to get going.

They’re there for step 2 in the above excerpt, helping you figure out the best way to practice.

30: Resolutions, Subtle Art, Arcade Games

We’re back! New year, new you! Trying out this format, building on some of the things from late last year (podcast recommendations and the magic window) and the bulk of our first 20 episodes (book of the week).

I’m really enjoying this format. Here are some things we talked about.

Podcast recommendations

Book of the Week: Subtle Art of Not Giving a F-

  • Stop caring about unimportant things so that you can focus on the important things
  • Maybe being a digital nomad isn’t the answer
  • Creating things because it’s fun for you

The Magic Window: Arcade games

Talking about a couple games we played growing up

  • The Simpsons: Is this game overrated?
  • Time Crisis 2: How it ties into the 4-minute mile

Learning about generalism

I’ve been binging pretty hard on the Pat Flynn podcast. Not that Pat Flynn. The other Pat Flynn. The one that writes about kettlebells.

(Check out his episode with Dan John, inventor of the goblet squat.)

At least that’s how I learned about him. I thought the podcast would be about that but now I’m learning it’s actually more about his approach to a lot of things. (Fitness is just one of them.)

He calls it generalism. It’s really resonating with me and a lot of the stuff me and Wally talked about on our podcast last year.

In particular, we talked about the book “The First Twenty Hours”, which explains that it’s important to start off on the right foot. If you start practicing something, you want to practice it right. That way you can get proficient as quickly as possible.

With generalism, Pat Flynn isn’t saying to avoid specializing in things. It’s the opposite. You should specialize deeply but aiming to get to 80%. Then move on to something else.

You don’t have to be the best writer in the world for writing to be valuable. Or the top 95%. You can get proficient to where you can mix it with some of your domain knowledge and write something interesting.

It’s not just for professional skills either.

You don’t have to be the best in the world at riding a bike to have fun riding a bike.

Once you’re proficient, that skill goes in maintenance then you shift your focus and specialize in something else.

Then you’ll be good at many things and great at some. Getting from 80% to 99.999% is much harder than getting from 0-80. It’s why we admire those outliers. It’s also why some of them have done terribly in other dimensions of their life.

Ric Flair is one of the most influential wrestlers but he was never around when his kids were growing up. In 500 years, the Nike swoosh may very well still be around. But one thing Phil Knight writes about in “Shoe Dog” is how he also wasn’t around enough for his kids.

(So never have kids! Just kidding but just be aware of how your energy is spread out.)

Last year I was interested in writing, podcasting, and making videos. I went deep on them for a few weeks at a time. I could have benefited from staying deep for a few weeks longer on some.

This year I want to go deep on videos. But then I just wrote all of this. I’ve got some work to do. In the meantime, I’ll be listening to more Pat Flynn episodes.

Some kettlebell notes

I took a kettlebell class today. I thought it’d be good to just start sharing some notes. Actually I mostly want to write these down so I remember them. If they add up over time, great.

Here was the rough program as far as I can remember:

  • Deadlifts 3×10
  • Rack hold walk, 3 push presses per side, 3 rounds
  • Swings, 1 minute
  • Push-ups
  • Farmers walk with uneven bells
  • Squats 5, 3 reverse lunges per side
  • Heavy bell hold 1 min, 3 rounds

With various planks in between some exercises. I definitely didn’t remember it all exactly but I hope I captured some of it.

Here are a few things the coach corrected me on.

  • Swings: exhale at the bottom—I was exhaling at the top of the swing but you should exhale when starting the movement.
  • Rack hold walk: hold kettlebell below collar bone—I was holding the kettlebell too low.
  • Heavy bell hold: don’t focus on grip and forearms—pay attention to tightening the rest of your body. Flex your glutes, keep your shoulders back, engage your traps.

That’s that! I also joined and will be trying to focus more on kettlebell training this year. Along with something else that starts with “ket-“. You guessed it. (And if you didn’t, it involves lots of fat.)