Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

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.

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.