Active Recall!

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Brain bruises and the power of words

Bret Hart talks about living with a severe concussion in his biography Hitman.

Again, he told me it was all part of the concussion: my brain was like the squares on a soccer ball and the square that triggers pleasure had been bruised.

Bret Hart told his bosses at WCW that he had a concussion but he still had to go out and perform. Other wrestlers didn’t believe him. Hitman was published a decade ago. This was before mainstream discussion about concussions and CTE.

Through the NFL, we’ve learned just how severe an injury a concussion is. Mostly because, if I’m to believe everything from that Will Smith movie (“Tell the truth!”), the NFL didn’t want the long term effects of minor concussions to get out in public. Former players are getting CTE and have really poor quality of life because of their mental issues.

Growing up I would hear about so and so getting a concussion. My mom had migraines, so I just suspected a concussion was some kind of super migraine. It seems silly now, but it was a time when players would regularly get concussed and then go back out a few plays later.

If you sat a game out because a concussion, you’d be ridiculed as soft by fans.

I didn’t really know what a concussion was until hearing Dave Dameshek talk about it back when he had an ESPN show. He said people wouldn’t take them as lightly if they were called what they were: brain bruises.

A bruise is a much better mental model for you to use. You’ve had a bruise. You’ve had a charley horse or been punched in the arm by a friend. You’ve probably had much worse in your life. Imagining that the same thing is on your brain, then it’s understandable why you might want to take the game off. And perfectly understandable why you wouldn’t want to go out and take a steel chair to the head.

Sympathetic links between ideas

I made a few videos a couple months ago where I talked about a practice I was calling the 9 connections. After some thinking, I realized that connecting ideas in interesting ways is important for creating interesting content. I was watching a lot of Nerdwriter videos and that’s part of what sets him apart.

The 9 connections exercise was my attempt to make a deliberate practice routine around connecting ideas. I’m seeing some of that practice pay off in this week’s exercise. 

I’m working through the Psychotactics.com article writing course. One takeaway from this week’s assignments is that you can connect anything to anything.

Recency bias can be strong so I’ll try to take advantage of it now. I wouldn’t make the following connection if I wasn’t reading The Name of the Wind at the same time that I was doing this week’s exercises. 
The Name of the Wind is a fantasy novel. I can’t explain much or spoil it because I’m not that far in. There’s magic though, called sympathy. And the magic seems to revolve around linking things.

That’s in theory. In practice, it feels like you’re lifting three drabs. No sympathetic link is perfect. The more dissimilar the items, the more energy is lost. Think of it as a leaky aqueduct leading to a water wheel. A good sympathetic link has very few leaks, and most of the energy is used. A bad link is full of holes; very little of the effort you put into it goes toward what you want it to do.

It’s like connecting ideas while writing. If you sit and think about it long enough, you’ll find a connection. Whether it’s good or not is an entirely different matter. 

If you create a bad connection, it’s full of holes and your readers will need to spend a lot of energy following it. A good connection requires little energy to follow. A great connection creates energy and makes readers more interested. You can create momentum for them to keep reading. 

In this week’s writing assignments, I thought of a good connection relating baby carrot processing to the writing process. I created a terrible connection relating teaching to a story about the invention of the crockpot. (A literal crockpot, not the “oh that guy is a crockpot” kind of crockpot.)

For instance I tried linking a piece of chalk to a glass bottle of water. There was very little similarity between the two, so even though the bottle of water might have weighed two pounds, when I tried to lift the chalk it felt like sixty pounds. The best link I found was a tree branch I had broken in half.

The more you practice, the more you’ll improve this skill in two ways.

First, identifying good connections. You’ll grow to have a feel of whether the connection is good or not. Either right off the bat before wasting time connecting the ideas. 

Second, speed. You’ll be able to connect anything to anything quickly. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself with a good connection that you didn’t see before trying.

Whoa!

We got our question up on Ask Pat! 

AP 0977: Do You Write Posts Based on Your Podcasts or Vice Versa?

If this is your first time here, I’ll share these three links if you want to poke around. 

  • Podcast journal of our first 8 episodes: These are a little different from show notes.  It’s a collection of diary-style entries I wrote the day of or day after recording the podcast. Mixed in are recommendations of some of my favorite podcasts. 
  • Better Than Before (Ep. 17): This was our most organized episode. We’ve had highs and lows and this was one that came together pretty well. We talked about Gretchen Rubin’s book Better Than Before
  • Grit (Ep. 2): A personal favorite episode of ours. We talked about Angela Duckworth’s book Grit and we showed a little bit of grit ourselves. We had to get scrappy because I was traveling and forgot to bring my equipment. It would’ve been easy to just skip that week but we knew it would set a bad precedent if we missed our personal weekly deadline only two weeks in. 

Thanks for checking this out and thanks a ton to Pat!

Are you picking the right goals? (And my quick foray into competitive Counter-Strike)

Jessica Abel in Growing Gills:

For example: While making a living as a cartoonist will definitely include making comics, there may be a lot less of this than you might imagine and a lot more entrepreneurship, including building your audience, marketing, and sales.

Something that’s stuck with me from listening to many hours of Tim Ferriss’s podcast is the notion that you might want to think twice about turning your leisure into a job.

“But I’d never work a day in my life!”

Maybe. You might also never do that thing for fun again in your life.

Tim’s example is that someone interested in surfing might want to make a career out of surfing. If they’re not good enough to be a professional surfer, they might end up teaching various vacationers how to surf day-in and day-out.

If you like teaching, great. If you don’t, well…

I experienced a small version of this. In high school, more and more you’d hear about people getting paid to play games. Streaming wasn’t a thing yet, so it was through sponsorships and tournaments. I did a tryout for a Counter-Strike clan that was in CAL-IM. Think of this as a good rec league. We’re not even talking minor leagues.

I did one scrim with the team and played pretty well. Then the guy said okay we’re going to do this tomorrow but it’ll be 4 scrims. Each was about 45 minutes.

I was out.

Getting paid wouldn’t really increase the amount of fun that comes with taking something fun very seriously.

It applies to more than surfing and games. It also applies to more traditional work. Let’s say you want to write. (I do!)

Jessica’s book has a lot of great questions you’ll want to ask when thinking through your creative goals.

What do you want to write? Do you want to get paid for it? Would you do it if you weren’t getting paid for it? How does getting paid for it affect the content you’ll make?

I’m thinking through some of these now. Lately I’ve felt a lack of focus. There are a few things I’m working on which means most of them aren’t the most important things to work on.

Quick things this reminded me of:

  • In Designing Your Life Bill Burnett and Dave Evans take this idea of envisioning your life and turns it up a few notches. You essentially create a prototype of your future life to try out.
  • In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport writes about the opposite case of this. I wrote about growing out of love with something you’re passionate about because you turned it into work. He writes about becoming passionate about something you didn’t love at first by becoming very, very good at it.
  • Derek Sivers talks about a great way to make money and do what you love: don’t mix them up.

22: We Can’t Make This Up

  • Send your questions in on Twitter
  • Weekly fitness update: my weight isn’t great! But I’ve started going Simple & Sinister. Trying to do a daily workout. The approach is that it’s moderate exertion instead of some programs where failure is pretty much the goal for each workout.
  • Wally has some mimosas at a bridal shower

Laughing at the hardship

From I Can’t Make This Up:

“In life, you can choose to cry about the bullshit that happens to you or you can choose to laugh about it. I choose laughter.”

Have you ever been bullied or have you been the bully? Kevin Hart says he was bullied as a kid but knew that it was important to stand up for himself. Even once. Take the beating and then move on. They’d rather find someone who won’t put up a fight at all.

We’ve both been bullied. I talk about when I was sort of bullied. Wally talks about when he was definitely bullied.

Bully by association. There was a time that I was sort of the bully, but not really.

Take action!

  • Try to laugh at it. It won’t work for everything. But think back to the hardships you’ve been through in the past that you laugh about now. You can find strength in that. Hopefully it gives you some perspective
  • Stand up to that bully. If you’re one of our very young listeners and you’re being bullied, remember to stand up for yourself. Now that I think about it, it’d be better if I didn’t give this kind of advice. Talk to your parents about this.
  • If you’re the bully… grab the other kid’s bag and throw it over the fence. Just like Wally’s bully did. It sounds like a very strong move.

Our parents were right

From I Can’t Make This Up:

“It turns out that the things I hated most as a child are the same things that serve me the most as an adult.”

Keep a schedule. Kevin Hart says that his mom would maintain a very strict schedule to make sure that he was in the right places at the right time. She would rather take the bus 2 hours than ask for a ride. Hart learned how valuable this mindset was.

Find a group of people who you meet with regularly. It doesn’t have to be church, like me and Wally went to growing up. 

Take action!

  • Be like my dad: run, sit in the sauna, eat beef broth. I’m slowly turning into my dad, as we all are. My dad was in the Navy so he established the habit and can’t really go a day without working out. He loves that routine. I started using the sauna to relax after hearing Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss mention it more than a few times. I should’ve just listened to my dad.

Kevin Hart is persistent

From I Can’t Make This Up:

Persistence: More than anything, my willingness to be persistent is responsible for the success I’ve had. My mindset is: It’s okay to fail, but it’s not okay to quit. Struggle, rejection, failure, and doubt break most people. Your goal is to learn from these challenges without letting them diminish your motivation. The secret to accomplishing this is simple: Let yourself be driven by your will to succeed rather than your fear of not succeeding.

We talked a lot about persistence in our Grit episode. This book is great because you get to see how many obstacles he runs into and how he overcomes them. Wildly successful people make it seem easy. It never is as easy as it seems. Hart knows he’s lucky. He also knows he works very hard to keep a lot of irons in the fire.

Take action!

  • Remember that the answer to ‘Luck vs. Skill’ doesn’t matter. Kevin Hart says he got lucky. He also says he worked hard to get lucky. If you’re frustrated when comparing yourself to other people’s success, remind yourself that it takes luck. If your head has become humongous because of your success, remind yourself that you got lucky. In either case, go work hard again.
  • Remember that this moment builds into the next moment. Hart gives a lot of insight into the television industry. He talks about his experience with TV pilots. He started learning that auditions matter even when you know you won’t get the part. Because there’s a chance that someone watching you will see you again. If you can make a good impression the first time it can help down the road.