Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Covers for upcoming videos

I wanted to share some covers I drew for upcoming videos. I’ve been making two or three videos each week. I’m trying to get to where I can make a video in an hour from start to finish. That’s from brainstorming (start) to having a video scheduled for release (finish).

It’s rushed but I think it’s worth trying to get it down to that amount of time. There’s some batching that I can do as well.

I’ve made about 50 videos. It’s a decent sample to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. The most successful ones aren’t the ones that I spent the most time on. (Those actually haven’t done well at all.)

Most important is subject matter. My most popular videos have been about books. The single video with the most views was about Barking up the Wrong Tree, by Eric Barker.

It makes sense. People are searching for videos about new books. I saw a similar success with videos about the Power of Moments.

 

One video that’s promising is one I made early on about Tim Ferriss and Chase Jarvis. It was notes about one of their podcasts together. I focused on one idea from an interview that was over an hour.

It focused on the question “What might this look like if it were easy?” and looking at things to decide how to make it sustainable and consistent.

That question has been something I return to when making these videos. At the time, I was thinking more about how to make a podcast easy. I wouldn’t be as consistent if I knew every video would take 4 hours to make.

Finishing things replenishes your motivation. When I was trying to write longer posts last year, I noticed I wasn’t as present through my normal day. I’d think about that long post and how different parts fit together.

I like videos because there’s a nice hard end to making a video. It’s harder to fix some small mistakes which makes it a little more forgiving as a platform. I don’t worry about fixing those small mistakes. Where with writing I can worry about those small mistakes because I do have the opportunity to fix them.

Oh yeah I was supposed to talk about the covers. I’ve been thinking about what to spend time on with the videos. Would be better to spend 4 hours making 4 videos or 4 hours making 1 video? I talked about this on the podcast and I think that at this point I should just be making as many as possible.

The cover images are worth spending a more time on because they’re a big part of branding and the first impression that others might have of anything I make.

Important to me: They’re fun to make. They’re fun to draw and I don’t have to worry about how it might fit in with the other slides.

I might start doing these before making videos just to have ideas for titles.

I’ll try to share more about the process of making these videos.

I’ve got a long way to go and they aren’t exactly models to follow.

Eventually I’m aiming to get the quality up with practice. It’d be nice if I could make a system people might learn from. In that case, it’ll at least be interesting to you have these early looks at how I made videos.

I’ll have some good “What not to do” insight and that can be really valuable, too.

32: How to practice (according to games)

What follows isn’t quite a transcript. Just some notes from before the episode and during the episode.

The ever-changing, ever-evolving format

We’re trying something new. We’re going to try to have one theme going through the entire  podcast. I think we had a good thing going a couple episodes ago where we did (1) recommendations, (2) a book of the week, and (3) The Magic Window.

Last week we tried to do that again and it came off a little too random. The book of the week used to tie things together pretty well but we just couldn’t read that many books. Now we’ll try having a theme to tie things together.

We’re going to do recommendations but this time we’ll open it up beyond podcasts to videos or blog posts or whatever. We’re still going to do a book of the week. We’re still going to do The Magic Window. And we’re going to try to tie it to one theme.

The theme this week is practice.

Yes, AI, we’re talking about practice

Practice

I made a bunch of videos last week. A lot of them are about practice. I started to niche down into gaming life lessons. I’m kind of motivated by this because it’s fun to make. I also think that there’s an audience for it. This is that idea that I would be interested in it so there’s probably other people in the world that would be interested in it.

I’m going to try to make a bunch of these. I made this outline a long long time ago to try and write something very long. I might just try to make a bunch of videos as a rough draft.  We keep coming across this connection in different episodes. I made videos about a couple of the ideas that we talked about multiple times. I made a video about the whistle in Mario 3 and how you shouldn’t just skip through the entire middle part to jump to the end or else you’ll miss out on a lot of good things.

These will be my recommendations for the week. I made 3 videos about the models of practice so we can talk about that it. We actually talked about this awhile ago in one of the earlier episodes.

Going to group some of these videos together.

  • Street Fighter II: Life Lessons (Models of practice pt. 1 of 3)
  • Starcraft: Life Lessons (Models of practice pt. 2 of 3)
  • Counter-Strike: Life Lessons (Models of practice pt. 3 of 3)
  • Who are you practicing with? (Gaming life lessons)

Book club: The First 20 Hours

Again, the theme is practice. The book this week is actually a book we did an episode on the floor it is called the first 20 hours. We talked about different aspects of that book and that episode. Just talked about the 10 steps of Rapid skill acquisition. Mostly because I made a video about that also.

  • Rapid Skill Acquisition (Gaming Life Lessons)

Magic window: Do you remember the first time you practiced something? Were you applying the models of practice?

Wally: Prayers

Ces: Chess

Pivot to video (Newsletter issue 3)

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.

I enjoyed the book so much I made a video about 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.

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.