Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

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.

Some lessons from buying a bunch of infoproducts

Lesson 1: Take action. If you take action on something in a free PDF you’ll be one step ahead of someone who  reads the content in a $3000 package without taking action. 

(In other words: Pause the cassette.)

(In other words pt. II: Just Do It.)

I haven’t done a good job taking action. One tiny step will be sharing some lessons that appeared in multiple courses that I bought.

  • Talk to experts. One of the courses starts with this early on. You need to reach out to an expert in your field and talk to them. They don’t have to be #1. (And probably shouldn’t be, because their time really is too valuable to spend with someone who doesn’t know what they don’t know.) So go for like #10. They can help you just as much. Talking to an expert accomplishes a few things. (1) You’ve done enough research to know who the expert is, (2) to talk to one expert you’ll likely need to reach out to multiple and experience rejection—and see that you can survive it no problem, (3) you’ve done research to make sure to ask them good questions to make sure you don’t waste that time.
  • Meditate. This came up in multiple courses, usually when it got to some module about focus. Increased focus seems to be the meditation benefit that works best on performance-oriented people who are skeptical about meditation. I wouldn’t call myself performance-oriented (okay I don’t think anyone actually does so maybe I could’ve used Type-A or workaholic or something like that) but increased focus is one of the reasons I want to practice meditation more next year. That, lower anxiety, and force projecting my body.
  • Share with others. All of the courses had some community aspect. I didn’t participate in most of them. Surprise: the course that I got the most out of was the one where I participated in the community. Next year I’ll participate more in communities. There’s a phrase called “Plus, Minus, Equal” or something like that. Anyway you should find someone who’s better than you (to teach you), someone who’s a few months behind you (to teach them), and people who are equal to you (to share the journey with). Communities help you find that entire range of people.

That’s pretty much a list of things that I should’ve stopped the cassette for and didn’t. I’ll make next year different.

Pause the Cassette Now

The post title is taken from one of the chapter titles in “Iterate and Optimize” by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant with David Wright:

But there were always sections in those audiobooks where the narrator asked me to “pause the cassette now” (yes, cassette) and do something. Like making a list of my strengths, weaknesses, aspirations, or goals. Those parts were annoying. I just wanted to get to the later parts where they told me how to make money.

With the year winding down I’m realizing that I didn’t pause the cassette enough.

Not pause as in meditating or anything like that. (Though I should do that more.) Pausing as in stopping the intake of information and taking action on it.

Earlier this year I spent—okay let’s just say hundreds of dollars—on a course about performance. (Mostly aimed at knowledge workers.) You can figure out which course it was. The content is great. My execution was poor.

That title is from a book I started reading by the creators of The Self-Publishing Podcast. I bought their book “Write. Publish. Repeat.” and bought “Iterate and Optimize”. That’s the 1st and 3rd in their nonfiction series and I’m sure I’ll end up buying the 2nd.

The first book I bought by them was an audiobook called “The One with all the Writing Advice”. It’s about storytelling on the TV show Friends. (Ross and Rachel’s series-length story arc, why Joey stopped cooking bolognese, etc.) That book is just one of the entryways the team has into their funnel. It’s great that the internet has created a culture of transparency. Readers benefit by learning from experts and experts benefit by building a global audience.

“Stop the Cassette Now” is about how Johnny used to listen to self help gurus back when they were on cassette tapes. You still see this in a lot of books where it says you need to pause here and actually go through the activity.

I weighed a lot of options, made pro con lists, and then bit the bullet on that $497 course. That was at the beginning of the year. At the end of the year I bought a similar course on habits without thinking about it much at all.

It’d be great if I could tell you that for $97 I can tell you the secret that got me to be a baller in only 10 months. But that didn’t happen. I got sucked into this vortex of info products.

It wasn’t entirely a waste of money. (Just partially.) I have a couple in mind that I’ll get next year, otherwise I’ll be re-doing some of the courses that I bought this year. This time around I’ll pause the cassette.

29: P-Rex and a return to The Magic Window

Sun’s up, what’s up! That won’t be changing. Some of the show will be changing though. We’re going to try something new. Instead of one book a week we’re going to try switching our focus to podcasts. A podcast about podcasts.

What’s the new format?

Here’s the new format:

  • Opening: We’ll start with the usual intro and then say something like “So whatcha listening to?” or like “Heard anything cool lately?” and get into it.
  • Recommendations: We’ll each recommend 2 podcast episodes (so 4 total)
  • Borrow a segment: From one of the podcasts, we’ll try using one of their segments.
  • The magic window: The last segment will be the magic window where we’ll talk about that 9-12 year old range and come up with some kind of favorite thing from then.

What wasn’t working with the old format?

We did a lot of book-of-the-week episodes. Like 24 of our episodes were about a book. Some were better than others. Here are some things that didn’t work:

  • We can’t read a book every week: The best episodes were the ones where we all read the entirety of the book and we outlined things and were ready to go. It was also when we actually talked about the book itself. Sometimes we would take high level themes from the book.
  • We didn’t connect with authors at all: I never felt comfortable even as much as sharing something in a tweet with an author because, as mentioned, we didn’t actually talk so much about the book in every case. This is a bit ridiculous because (a) it’s unlikely they’d even see the tweet at all and (b) I mean we did sort of talk about the book so if someone was sort of talking about something I made I’d probably find it interesting at least.
  • It wasn’t exactly the right niche: I listen to a lot of podcasts and none of them are about discussing nonfiction books. People writing those books actually do interviews on podcasts to promote their books. That’s more interesting than listening to a book summary. I always wanted this podcast to be a non-interview one because some of my favorite podcasts have been non-interview podcasts with 2-3 friends. (Half-baked Ideas with David Jacoby and Kevin Wildes, TADPOG: Tyler and Dave Play Old Games, Joe Rogan when he has Joey Diaz on, Bill Simmons with Cousin Sal or Joe House.)

We aren’t as accomplished or entertaining as those people but I want to aim toward that instead of aiming toward the great interviewers. (Some of the people mentioned are also excellent interviews.)

What the magic window episode revealed

More of my friends commented on the magic window episode than any others. (Which is to say that any commented at all.) My guess is that it was just more interesting to hear about than a self-development book that you’d need to spend money on to read.

At the same time, if we do want to talk about a book, we can talk about a podcast that the author appeared on. I didn’t count it up but I’m sure 80% of the books we talked are written by authors that appeared on some podcast.

I’m hoping this will tie in better with the videos I make and the posts I’m writing. This year was sort of unfocused just trying different things. It’s not wasted time. I have a better idea of what I enjoy making and what I enjoy having made. Making the podcast is the most fun of the different things, probably because talking to a friend is fun. Making the videos actually can be a little bit of a grind but it’s rewarding because strangers actually watch them. Writing posts is rewarding in a weird way because I do enjoy writing even though nobody reads them. And I’m okay with that.

We’ll try this for 8 episodes and see how it goes.

(We will also stop calling podcast recommendations P-Rex because once was enough.)