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Book Notes: Four Seconds

Here are some thoughts on a few of my highlights from “Four Seconds” by Peter Bregman.

First, remember that good enough often beats perfect.

“To get your most important things done without losing your mind, stop trying so hard and aiming for perfection. Instead, try racing as quickly as you can through the next phase of work. Spending less time on it might just make it better.”

I’ve been thinking about first drafts lately. For the past year I’ve bought into the idea of writing two crappy pages, the down draft, the vomit draft, and every other name it has.

Still, I don’t think I had the right speed in mind. Sometimes I’ll write a draft and do some minimal editing as I go along. I’m going to try removing even that amount of editing. Then I’ll have revise and rewrite at least once.

The above excerpt also reminds me of the recommendation that you can capture your voice better if you’re writing quickly. I experimented with writing emails daily and practiced by just sending them to a friend. Re-reading them, it’s clear that I wrote different.

It was some combination of (1) writing quickly, (2) writing casually in an email compose window, and (3) intentionally hamming it up while writing.

Speed can help.

Here’s another idea I’ll try to keep in mind as the new year approaches:

Fight the urge to fill every empty moment in your day, especially if you need to be extra-productive or creative for a task. Our best ideas typically come to us when we are being unproductive.

Take more showers, some long walks, and some time to not do anything at all. There was a New York Magazine article last year on productivity that I need to dig up and re-read.

It pointed out how ridiculous productivity culture has become. You make your work efficient to free up time to fill up with more work and now you have more to make more efficient.

To what end?

So the question is, Have you structured your environment—your life—so that you are more likely to accomplish your most important priorities?

Through reading many body-dysmorphia inducing male fitness magazines through the years, I’ve seen how effective changing your environment can be. (Put a mirror in your kitchen and 6 other weird tricks!)

I ate pretty strict paleo a few years ago and the biggest takeaway is that you need to remove items completely. Or you’ll eat them eventually. I always took weird joy in seeing my kitchen bare of any bad snacks. As a result, I didn’t eat bad snacks at home. (That was when I was at my healthiest.)

The other aspect of the above passage is that you need to know what your most important priorities are in the first place. (And also to recognize that the plural “priorities” is a contradiction.)

I’ll be reflecting as the year comes to end. I’ll see what I can do to create an environment that encourages terrible (but quick!) first drafts.

Stories we believe in

Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.

What are some stories we believe?

One of the best things in Sapiens is that it points out the stories we believe that we don’t even realize are stories at all.

Bitcoin is a hot topic right now. Most people don’t actually know how it works. (Not that I do, either.) Most people can wrap their head around the idea that Bitcoin is a story. If you’ve followed along you’ve seen it’s value rise from nothing other than the belief that it will someday be used widely. (Or just the belief that enough other people believe in it.)

What you might not wrap your head around as quickly is that currencies around the world are also just stories. That $1 bill in your wallet is only worth anything because the world collectively believes in the story.

The world economy is built on the stories of debt and credit.

In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane points out that he doesn’t believe in the story of money. His financier has zero power over him.

You might believe that the month you’re born in has an effect on your personality and place in life. That’s because of a story.

But which story?

Is it the story told by horoscopes tying birth months (roughly) to different personalities? Or is it the story Gladwell tells where birth month determines how big you are when you start competitive sports? (Slightly older kids are also slightly larger, get more of a coach’s attention, and then become part of a reinforcing cycle.)

What stories do you believe in?

Book Notes: Basketball and Other Things

I finished reading Basketball and Other Things by Shea Serrano. (I loved it.) It reminded me of how fun it was to go through the FreeDarko books years ago. Shea takes the weird thoughts and conversations you and your friends might have and goes deep on them. For example, everyone has a memory hero:

A memory hero is, in most (but not all) cases, someone who you remember as being way better than he or she actually was. Most times, the talent inflation happens because the memories were formed when you were a child or young person, and so since children and young people don’t know things and are very bad at placing things in context,

I loved this section. Shea shares answers from his writer friends.

The memory hero concept reminds me of a Steven Yuen interview where he talks about the magic window where you’re 10-12 years old and there are things you experience that just become your favorite things.

I had the privilege of listening to a Frank Darabont conversation earlier on during The Walking Dead, and he kept on talking about this “magic window” — I think it’s from maybe ages 10 to 12 — when you watch a movie, and it moves you. It just becomes one of the greatest things in your life for the rest of your life.

Screen Shot 2017 12 23 at 10 33 30 AM

One of my memory heroes is Jeff Hornacek. I’d play NBA Live ’951 against my brother Dan.

Dan’s 4 years older than me which isn’t as much as adults but in elementary school it made him my nemesis. He rooted for Jordan which left me rooting for Barkley then Malone. 

Usually my brother was off playing his season alone, but ask to play once in a while. One time we played he really thought he was Phil Jackson and was making a bunch of pre-game tweaks to his starters and then when the game started he paused it to tweak some more options for his team.

At this point I thought he was just messing with me so I told on him.

I can’t remember if it escalated slowly or if it all happened at once. What I do remember is that my mom ripped the cartridge out of the SNES. Raw strength because she did it without pressing the eject button. Not good but potentially not terrible—the cartridge and console would probably be okay.

Then she spiked it on the floor as hard as possible.

Okay so the console would probably be okay.

Dan couldn’t save his season progress after that. You could shake the cartridge and hear something moving around in there. Our theory is that the battery or whatever storage thing was in the cartridge must have exploded internally.

There’s not great lesson here: don’t tell on your older brother? Don’t spend 5 minutes setting your roster to beat your little brother?

Oh yeah so I just thought Jeff Hornacek would never miss in real life because he was some guy I could pass to in the game and he would make 3s.

That was his first year in Miami, and the general tone surrounding him and the Heat was that he was a bad guy for leaving Cleveland and the Heat were the bad team for Voltroning up with him and Bosh, and so of course him losing that year allowed for people who didn’t like LeBron to stare at his lackluster stat sheets and masturbate furiously.

Guilty. One of the best things reading this book is that it skips everything before the merger. The book’s history starts with Bird and Magic. I was too young to remember that decade, but I’ve read a couple books about it. More importantly, my dad kept a bunch of VHS tapes around from whatever the NBA’s equivalent of NFL Films or Coliseum Video was. I remember one of them being about how to play basketball by Larry Bird.

These legitimate tapes sat next to things that said like 120 Minutes on the face and on the edge there’d be a sticker with some sharpie written on it saying “Bulls Lakers Game 3”. One of the chores me and my brother had was learning to use the VCR to set recordings. And to make sure to switch tapes out so that the basketball games don’t record over the recurring Tonight Show tapes. For many years, I’d wake up and make a bowl of cereal while my dad drank coffee and watched Jay Leno2.

Anyway, I remember a lot of the things mentioned in the book. They were players I rooted for in high school. They were the players that retired and signaled to me that I wasn’t young anymore. And of course the current talent.

The passage above reminded me of how much I was in the camp of people rooting against LeBron. (Then rooted for him when he re-joined the Cavs.) And the book reminded me of where I was at different points when LeBron moments happened. I was in UW’s Electrical Engineering lab when he had the 48-point special.

I think I had NBA league pass at the time but you couldn’t access it on a phone. I was in Vegas for a bachelor party when he hit the game winner against the Magic. And I experienced the entire Heat/Mavs series in a 3-week hotel stay for a work trip to D.C. Yes, just waiting for bad stats. Which seems incredibly petty now but it was just that time in basketball history.

For all of the other parts of this book, each chapter is treated as a single question, and each answer for each question is carefully considered and worked through thoroughly. It was important to me for the book to move that way because in situations like these—situations where you’re trying to convince someone of something—people are far more receptive to receiving an answer (even one that they might disagree with) if they can see how you arrived at your conclusion.

I couldn’t put the book down. It was fun to read. I wrote a post about Bill Simmons and the Holy Cross Crusader archives that was sort of built around one of his podcasts when he had Chuck Klosterman on as a guest.

One point in there is that I’d love to write like Bill Simmons and Chuck Klosterman. Not necessarily about the same things because I’m not nearly as big a sports fan as either of them. But mostly I’ve always had fun reading things by Simmons and feel in some way smarter when I follow Klosterman through one of his thought experiments. (A recent favorite I read was a scenario where you can perform actual magic—as in like sorcery—but the extent of your skill is street magic. You can really make that card disappear. How do you feel about this?)

My point here is that I’d love to write like Shea Serrano also. This book is packed with these scenarios. (Which NBA player would be best as a group leader in The Purge?) He also has a great handle on his voice. I’ll continue to do terrible impressions of all these writers until I have a handle on my voice and can turn ideas into good premises for writing.

Utility of fiction

I finished reading City of Thieves. Really moving book.

(Check out some of my thoughts from when I started it.)

I picked it up after seeing it mentioned in Tribe Of Mentors, recommended by Brian Koppelman:

And, lastly, City of Thieves by Benioff. This book is just a joy. Fiction has a real utility, and it’s one I think high achievers sometimes forget, and that is: fictions stirs you up inside, unsettles you, forces you to engage with that which isn’t easily solved. This book does all that and delights along the way. I’ve given it to 100 people.

It was funnier than I expected.

Here’s a passage I enjoyed from City of Thieves:

In certain ways I am deeply stupid. I don’t say this out of modesty. I believe that I’m more intelligent than the average human being, though perhaps intelligence should not be looked at as a single gauge, like a speedometer, but as a full array of tachometers, odometers, altimeters, and the rest.

My dad once asked my brother and me, “For being so smart, how can you be so dumb?”

I don’t remember the exact situation, but I remember how it made me feel. (It made me feel smart and dumb.)

I’m reading through Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman and came across something similar about how a lot of movie stars don’t have education beyond high school:

Now, this doesn’t mean they’re not bright. I’ve never met a star who wasn’t clever and shrewd and loaded with more street smarts than I’ll collect in a lifetime.

No doubt you’ve come across people who are book smart and that’s just about it. I had a friend growing up who probably should have been held back a grade or two. He couldn’t focus on schoolwork at all. It always blew my mind that he could give complete attention to any RPG he was playing.

I don’t know what I’m getting at with this. Maybe it’s that people write off reading fiction as a waste of time. As Koppelman says, you really can learn a lot reading fiction.

A lot of the world’s great thinkers are great writers. You won’t find all their knowledge in the self-development shelf.

Notes after making a video about two Mr. Harts

This is an outline I made for a video I made: The Two Harts. It’s something I almost certainly wouldn’t have made if I didn’t wasn’t reading Bret and Kevin Hart’s biographies at about the same time. Here are some thoughts about making this video. I’m going to write more of these in the future so that I can improve in making these videos.

I go back and forth about how valuable it is to write about writing. This is a baby step removed. It’s writing about making videos.

  • Good enough is good enough. I’ll learn more by moving on and making the next video. There are times to polish things over and over. Right now, good enough is good enough. This took about two hours to make from writing to outlining to drawing to grabbing clips and then recording and posting.
  • What would this look like if it were easy? What parts of this took too long? Drawing the outline took longer than it would take to just write it out. There are parts here that aren’t as important. I can re-use the drawn outline though and it helped me think things through.
  • Speed matters. Down the road, quality will mater more. Right now, quantity matters. I’ll learn more getting end-to-end reps with new videos than I will from trying to precisely edit the clips. I’ll start timing different stages of making the video so that I don’t get caught up working on things that don’t matter. Aka so I don’t get caught up browsing YouTube.
  • What would I change next time? After finishing the video, it would’ve been better to have something that hints at The Rock at the end. That might be the only strong connection in the video. Everything else about career progression could probably be applied to just about any performer.

Book Notes: The Creative Habit

I’ve been reading The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp. She’s a world class dancer and choreographer. You might think that kind of life doesn’t relate to you, but she knows what it takes to do creative work. She learned the principles of creativity through dance but she writes about how you can apply it to writing, drawing, film, and on and on.

Here are a few of my highlights.

The box is not a substitute for creating. The box doesn’t compose or write a poem or create a dance step. The box is the raw index of your preparation. It is the repository of your creative potential, but it is not that potential realized.

I read Save the Cat by Blake Snyder last year1 and one part of it is about “The Board”. (There are a lot of terms like that in the book.) It’s outlining with index cards. Snyder even warns against overplaying at this stage because it’s pretty fun and it feels like the real work. You should start writing before you write that outline in granite. From Save the Cat:

In fact, I always like to start writing when I’m coming up on the end of finishing The Board, just before it gets too perfect. Like a Jell-O® mold that’s not quite set, you wanna start before it hardens.

Tharp hammers the point home. It isn’t the real work. You can outline and outline and outline but you’ll eventually need to research, compile, and write about every bullet you’ve put in that outline.

You can read about nutrition and workout programming all you want, but you eventually need to put the fork down and put the work in.

I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things: the people you meet and the books you read.

I took a few online courses this year about fairly general self-development topics: success, motivation, building habits, focus, etc.2

My main takeaway: if you want to succeed in a field and short-circuit that success, find an expert who you can talk to regularly. That’s easier said than done. Start reading about how to do that.

In any case, talking to an expert will help you skip common dead ends that can take up so much time early on that don’t teach any useful lessons.

And it’s not just mentors you’ll want to find. Remember: plus, minus, equal. Find someone better than you. Find someone a few months behind you who you can teach. Find someone at the same level as you to share the struggle with.

Depending on the field, you’ll have some number of books written by those experts. You can find mentorship in books. It will be good but don’t mistake it for a replacement. For any logistical or tactical thing, the internet will be your friend, especially with video so readily available.

metropolitan-museum-of-art

If I’m struggling for an idea, I often find myself leaving my studio, walking across Central Park, and ending up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Museums are my favorite field trips, and working in museum-rich Manhattan, I would be a fool to ignore the local resources.

Every time I go to The Met I feel like I should go there once a week. It’s invigorating. It’s humbling. You’ll have a hard time walking through there without feeling inspired in some way.

Go to your local museums and get inspired.

(This really is just a note to myself to go to museums more.)

Pope Leo X heard that Leonardo da Vinci was experimenting with the formulas for varnishes instead of executing a painting. He declared, “This man will never do anything, for he begins thinking about the end before the beginning of his work.” However, Leonardo understood that the better you know the nuts and bolts of your craft, the more fully you can express your talents. The great painters are incomparable draftsmen. They also know how to mix their own paint, grind it, put in the fixative; no task is too small to be worthy of their attention.

This reminds me of Ryan Holiday’s canvas principle that he wrote about in Ego is the Enemy. Don’t ever think of yourself as being above a task. To master a craft, you need to know the small parts of it.

There was a time I saw a friend practicing layups while warming up. He was the friend that was the best at basketball. I was in middle school when he was a senior in high school. All the uncles knew him and how good he was at basketball.

By this time we were older and old enough that we had the same group of friends. He looked over while doing some layups and said this is how you get good. It looked so boring and I realized I never really practiced layups by myself in my life. That’s why I’m terrible at basketball.

So what does this have to do with Leonardo da Vinci? There’s something about tooling here. Okay, well, what I mean to say is you should make sure you can do a layup before you try the artistry of switching hands in traffic.

To force myself to let my creations go, I’ve developed a ritual that gives me satisfying closure: I name the piece. Attaching a name to the work is always the last thing I do. It’s a signal to myself that I finally understand it. As Tracy Kidder wrote in The Soul of a New Machine, “Good engineers ship.

I’ve been writing a lot in the past few months. Some of this is because one of the courses mentioned above was an article writing class. I’ve just been writing articles in private and I also just do a lot of free writing. I’m practicing letting my creations go. Like this post.

Some of that starts with writing with the intention that it’s going to be something I share. A lot of times I kind of sort of think that maybe I’ll share something I’m writing. But then when it comes to sorting through all these miscellaneous pages of writing I don’t feel like going through picking out things intended for sharing or not. And then thinking through whether I already wrote about that idea or not.

I’m just going to go ahead and let things go and try to develop a small ritual around it. The good thing is that these posts need titles too so that can be part of the ritual. So here we go, I hope you enjoyed these book notes on Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit in this post titled “Book Notes: The Creative Habit”.