Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Review your beliefs (your future self will thank you!)

I’ve been reading Michael Hyatt’s Your Best Year Ever. I made a video about some of about the first third of it. I’m planning to finish it this week.

Here are some of the things I go over in the video:

  • Look at your past year: It’s important to reflect on the past. You can reflect on what went wrong, see what lessons you learned, and apply that to the future. You can also be grateful for all the things that went well. It’s easy to overlook.
  • Beliefs are powerful: You might have some negative beliefs that are holding you down. Take a look at the beliefs you have in your life. They come from many places. Maybe you grew up with that belief. Maybe you think the world is falling apart because you check the news 10 times a day. Maybe you think you’re the only person without a perfect life because you check social media 100 times a day.
  • 4 Rs: Use these four steps to process those beliefs: recognize, record, review, reframe (or REJECT).

It’s a new year and I’m planning my own year out.

I read a lot of books last year and was thinking of how to combine this and that with that and this to come up with an annual planning method.

Instead, I’m going to work through the steps in this book and trust the process. (Okay I might try to do some 12-Week Year scoring, too.)

One of my goals this year is to focus on videos. (The old pivot-to-video!)

I wrote about this in the last newsletter: Making videos helps me get out of my head more than writing does. A short video is more engaging and energizing to make than a short post is. And writing long posts makes me really less present in the days that I’m in the midst of it.

I’ll write short posts to go along with the videos. I also want to start putting some posts together as I learn to draw.

Last year I tried to move away from writing about writing, blogging about blogging, all that meta stuff. I enjoy that though, so I’m going to go ahead and do it but make sure it isn’t just about writing. It’ll at least be writing about drawing or writing about making videos or writing about podcasting. 

Writing about things that are fun to me. (One step toward my best year ever!)

Kicking Things Off (Newsletter issue 1)

I’m starting the year with a newsletter. I set the timer for 25-minutes. Last year I learned I don’t really have a handle writing anything long. (Mostly from trying to write about Bill Simmons’s writing from college.)

Instead, I’ll write a bunch of short things. Here are the podcast recommendations from me and Wally from our latest episode.

Joe DeFranco 142 (Mickey Gall): Turning Setbacks into Comebacks —
You might know Mickey Gall as the person who destroyed CM Punk in his UFC debut. I was rooting for CM Punk. I’ve been a casual MMA fan for a few years. Watching this fight and hearing Overeem commenting on CM Punk’s BJJ experience pre-fight (something like “What is he a purple belt?… Oh he’s blue? Oh boy.”) really opened my eyes to the gap created by experience in MMA.

Oh yeah, this episode. It’s about failure. Mickey Gall lost his most recent fight. It’s his first UFC loss. They talk about going through a loss and Gall talks about the steps he took to get over it and the steps he’s taking to start bouncing back.

Art of Manliness #363: Budgeting Doesn’t Have to Suck —
Wally recommended this as a good discussion on budgeting and personal finance. I recommended the app Clarity Money. Last year I wanted to save more so I installed Prosper Daily to keep an eye out. That app was discontinued and users were recommended to transfer to Clarity Money. It works really well also.

Tribe of Mentors: Jocko Willink – Discipline Equals Freedom —
Jocko in Tim Ferriss’s book, Tribe of Mentors: “Look at the situation and assess the multitude of problems, tasks, or issues. Choose the one that is going to have the biggest impact and execute on that. If you try to solve every problem or complete every task simultaneously, you will fail at all of them. Pick the biggest problem or the issue that will provide the most positive impact. Then focus your resources on that and attack it.”

The Tribe of Mentors podcast has guests giving answers to the questions in the book with some commentary and they also answer a few extra questions. It reminded me that you can learn a lot through podcasts. (Which will lead to me and Wally probably shifting our focus from books to podcasts.)

Knowledge Project: Is Sugar Slowly Killing Us? (Gary Taubes) —
Wally recommended this. It’s a good one for your New Year’s health goals. Stop eating sugar. Or at least so much of it. Speaking of, here’s another thing I wanted to mention: Martin is back at Leangains and the site is refreshed. If you want to learn about intermittent fasting, go there.

For a good sample of his writing, check out his classic F-arounditis: “It might sound tedious to keep doing the same movements every week and the appeal of ‘mixing it up’ can seem strong. However, the tediousness will soon be replaced by the much stronger joy you get from seeing your lifts go up on a weekly basis.”

I should probably read that every single week.

Active Recall: Tribe of Mentors (ep. 28) —
I’ll be sending out a newsletter whenever Wally and I release a new episode. It will have links to our latest episode and some podcast recommendations. I mentioned that I don’t have a handle on writing long things.

I’m also learning that it might not be the best thing for me right now. I get super distracted in the midst of it. I’ve noticed I’m not present when I’m writing long posts. With practice I bet you can learn to turn it off and on. But it’s probably lots of practice. Right now, I’d rather make short things and finish them. Videos are better for that so I’ll be working on videos. (Check out the channel!)

Here’s a photo for the week. If you’ve got some resolutions, go do them!

NewImage

Posting some training notes

Ok started the new year off with a kettlebell workout. I signed up for Strong ON mostly because I listened to a couple of Pat Flynn’s podcast and liked his approach to things. Good first impressions go a long way.

Kettlebell workouts feel good in the way running feels good. I mean I guess that’s the cardio aspect of it.

When doing Simple & Sinister I really needed to be tracking my progress to make sure I was making any progress. It’s always a good workout when I actually do it. Especially as it was getting heavier.

I’m program hopping again. Though I’m at least keeping the kettlebells.

Simple & Sinister seems very much sustainable and consistent. It fulfills the whole “What might this look like if it were easy?” mindset also. Though Strong On also fulfills that in that you log on and it tells you what to do. The workouts themselves aren’t easy but they are compared to when I started last year with one of those magazine workouts meant for 19 year olds experimenting with every chemical possible. I got sick after two days of like 45-set workouts.

I’m not looking for intensity. This goes with “it depends” being the answer for everything. Intensity might be key for what you do. I’ll keep with the idea that you can ease off the intensity if you increase the frequency. It’s somewhere in Simple & Sinister.

(Same goes for writing. I’ll keep this journal as I go along. I’ll tag it “training notes” or something like that.)

Know who you are

Yuval Noah Harari, in Tribe of Mentors: 

So you have no choice but to really get to know yourself better. Know who you are and what you really want from life. This is, of course, the oldest advice in the book: know thyself.

The answer for everything: it depends.

Okay, so what does it depend on? You!

What’s the best food to eat? It depends what your goals are and how well your body can process certain foods. (That said, vegetables are a good starting point.) What’s the best work out? It depends also on your goals and what you’ll actually do consistently. What’s the best way to build a habit? It depends on what’s causing friction in the first place.

(Check out a post I wrote about Harari’s book Sapiens and the stories we believe in.)

It’s important to know yourself to know the best way to approach things that come up in life. 

You might be on the right path and doing the right things that worked for someone else that might not work for you. One of the reasons I really like Tribe of Mentors (and Tools of Titans before it) is that it provides glimpses of what a lot of different people do.

You’ll see conflicting information between people who were interviewed. It worked for them. Parts of what they do will work for you. If you know yourself well, you’ll be able to pick and choose techniques that will be effective for you.

Speaking of conflict, Tim Ferriss even talks about how his approach now is a lot different than it was when he was younger. He had a high pain tolerance so he pushed through things when he was younger. Plenty of people have that mindset. You’ll often see success attributed to that. (Work hard through everything. Run to the end zone with a broken leg!) Now he knows some of the pain wasn’t necessary.

Now he asks: what would it look like if it was easy?

Tell good stories (even for nonfiction!)

I’ve been reading Write. Publish. Repeat. by Seann Platt, Johnny B. Truant, and David Wright. (I wrote about one of their other books a couple days ago. Check it out!)

They’re primarily fiction authors but have a few nonfiction books about storytelling, writing, and publishing. I liked what they had to say about storytelling and nonfiction:

But if you’re a nonfiction author, take heart! We’re nonfiction authors, too (evidence of this is in your hands or on your screen), so we have a ton to say about nonfiction as well.  If you’re a nonfiction writer and find yourself in the middle of a section detailing series novels or story narrative, we suggest you keep reading. The best nonfiction is full of story.

When you think of the 10,000 hour rule you think of Malcolm Gladwell. You might be quick to point out that it’s based on other people’s studies or that other people wrote about talent and hours also. Still, that rule is tied to him because he told the best stories about talent and practice.

Still, even Gladwell looks up to other writers. He’s said that he’s amazed by the stories that Michael Lewis is able to put together. Gladwell says he himself can take a a topic and stretch the story over a chapter but Lewis can take a topic and keep the narrative interesting over the course of a book.

Here’s a common trope in nonfiction reviews: someone says the book could have been an outline but the publisher probably forced the author to write 200 pages. So it’s filled with fluff. (Sometimes it is!) The best nonfiction books have stories that make the ideas stick. In most cases, you can get the gist of the book in the introduction. You can capture the main ideas in an outline. You can consume an outline in ten minutes and forget about it by the next hour.

If you have an idea worth spreading, your best bet is to spread it through a good story. Not to say they all need to be 200 pages, but it’s worth learning how to wrap your message in stories.

It’d be great if you could read outlines, look at the Nike logo on your shirt, then go and just do whatever the outlines said. Eat less, work out more. Close your browser, write more. Put your phone away, be present.

Eat less because you’ve seen that the story can lead to immobility and low energy. Write more because all the authors you look up to wrote a ton and stacked up rejection slips. Put your phone away because you know we’re slowly turning into the couch potatoes from Wall-E. (Or Idiocracy—whichever one will be more likely to make you put your phone away.)

Plug-ins, greasing the groove, and keeping it simple

A few years ago, I got good results1 using Phrak’s Greyskull variant. I bought the actual Greyskull book this time around to learn about the program in more depth and understand why there were variants in the first place and how that might’ve come about.

It’s one of the more entertaining fitness books I’ve read. It feels like someone very strong who knows more about lifting weights is talking to me. It’s fun, no-nonsense the same way Pavel Tsatsouline’s books are entertaining. (If you don’t like the tone of those you might not like these either. I’d say it’d be worth sticking with it because the information is good.)

Here are some highlights, hopefully giving a sense of how the program works.

I like to use a software analogy here:  the base set of ideas being the fundamental ‘software program’, and the other layers being ‘plug ins’ that can be added or removed based on the individual needs of the trainee.

There’s a base program that you then can add things to. A lot of experts know they’re better at programming than someone learning will be so they advise that you don’t tinker with programs. They’re right, because if you stick to a decent program consistently month in month out you’ll get results.

On the other hand, if you’re willing to learn on your own, you might also have that urge to tinker with your program. The Greyskull program handles that urge with plug-ins. The framework provides the right amount of constraints. You’re able to make your modifications without deviating entirely from the program.

The Frequency Method is a very effective technique for building muscular endurance as well as strength and size. It involves doing multiple sets, never to failure, throughout the day each day of the week (taking one completely off) and accumulating a ton of volume over the course of the week/month.

I first heard of this as “greasing the groove”. (No doubt there are tons of other phrases for it as well.) I need to start working this into my life2.

There is a lot of money to be made in making things a lot more complicated than need be. This practice of making things “proprietarily complex” as I like to say, is rampant in the strength and conditioning industry.

And many other industries. People want to pay for secret ways to do this or that in a way that’s quick, simple, and easy.

At the same time, there’s an expectation that there’s some complexity to that secret, otherwise it’d be easier to share and not quite a secret anymore.

In a lot of cases, you already know what works, you just have to execute. (Very big “just”.) I used to read intermittent fasting threads and the responses to newbie questions were always pretty straightforward: you’re asking about timing (because it seems like that secret) but you’re really just eating too much.

Greyskull LP makes it simple. Simple is different from easy. But the resets and max-rep sets help keep you motivated on the program.

I’ll update you in 6 months when I show my sick “after” photo and sell you on very weird tricks like lifting a little bit more every session and maybe not eating that 4th plate at the buffet.