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23: The Power of Moments

We’ve missed a few weeks but we’re back! We’re talking about the The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. You should also check out our earlier episode about Made to Stick by the same authors.

In this episode we cover a few different topics from the book. We talk about:

  • Good and bad customer service experiences
  • First days of work that we remember
  • Moments that are crystallizations of discontent
  • Moments that affected our lives that have had a long-lasting effect

Stay with it until the end where we do a short  scripted section that we wrote from the book.

My Year of Running Safely

I just finished My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman. Does two make a list? If so, here’s my current list of great audiobooks for running:

  • My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

(I’d call it the list of great audiobooks for ‘runners’ but then you might mistake me for someone who can run for a mile without getting winded.)

When I say “just finished” I mean like just a few minutes ago. And I just finished a run as well.

It wasn’t a dangerous run like you’ll find in Foreman’s book. I’m guessing he does more than I just did for a warm-up.

I started running about a month ago. I was walking to a Blink nearby which I’m a member of strictly because there was a Blink very close to my old apartment and I haven’t gotten around to canceling it. While walking to that gym, I realized I could get to my regular gym in about the same amount of time if I ran.

So I picked my pace up and headed to my regular gym.

That began my year of running safely. (I think. I mean it’s been a month now and I’ve been jogging 2-3 times a week. I know that a month isn’t a year and that runners probably don’t consider what I’m doing running.)

Oh yeah, the book.

Foreman used to be a long-distance runner in his younger days. He picks it back up after his daughter asks if he’ll train for a marathon with her. Foreman shares his thoughts about running, family, work. It also has chapters that are diary-style entries about different runs.

Those sections really get you inside his head and are the best part of the book.

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Murakami has a similar section about running the original marathon course in Greece. (That might need a capital-M Marathon.)

I’ve mentioned twice that I wouldn’t call myself a runner. I also don’t call myself a writer.

When can write about my runs and make it 1/10th as enjoyable as Foreman or Murakami make it, then I might start calling myself a writer.

Today I laced my shoes up and headed out the door. I use a futuristic elastic fanny pack to hold my keys and phone. Years ago I had an arm band to hold my phone which was inconvenient for jotting down workout notes between sets. (But great for feeling like the Predator.) Then I ran for 20 minutes.

I’ve got work to do.

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.