Active Recall!

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This week’s book-of-the week is Better Than Before, by Gretchen Rubin. On the show, we talked about a few topics from the book:

• Four Tendencies
• Four Foundational Habits
• Convenience, environment, and the 20-second rule
• The Strategy of Pairing

First though, we got a listener question (Thank you!):

How you deal with self-sabotaging thoughts?

Jason uses music to get into a positive mindset. Wally talked about Kevin Stirdivant’s appearance on Short Story Long. In that episode, Kevin Stirdivant gives 3 Rs for handling the incorrect stories you tell yourself:

1. Recognize
2. Realize
3. Re-create

I said awareness is the most important part of handling self-sabotaging thoughts. That aligns with recognize. Recognizing a self-sabotaging thought is a great first step. By seeing a thought as self-sabotaging, you know it’s not helpful and that it’s just a thought.

If only it was just a thought, right? Inception is an entire movie about the power of a single thought.

So what can you do? Remember that a single thought can be just as powerful for positivity. There are different tools to try. Stoicism helps with recognizing them as just thoughts. Meditation really is practice in recognizing any thoughts and steering your focus away from them.

You’ll have to try some of the tools and see which ones work for you.

Here’s a very specific exercise. After a self-sabotaging thought, try making your immediate response “Good.” I learned this from Jocko Willink’s chapter in Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans:

“Now. I don’t mean to say something clichéd. I’m not trying to sound like Mr. Smiley Positive Guy. That guy ignores the hard truth. That guy thinks a positive attitude will solve problems. It won’t. But neither will dwelling on the problem. No. Accept reality, but focus on the solution.”

Take action! Think of a negative thought and think “Good.” right after it.

I have less than 10 views on a majority of my videos. Good. I really am willing to practice without immediate outer rewards.

I’ve been trying to lose the same 10 pounds every year. Good. I didn’t quit. And it didn’t turn to 20 pounds and then 30 pounds over the years.

Awareness is also important for habit change.

Four Tendencies

Know yourself. In Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin explains different personality groups and uses them throughout the rest of the book. It must have resonated with a lot of people, because she ended up writing a separate book about these four tendencies:

Everyone falls into one of four distinct groups:

• Upholders respond readily to both outer expectations and inner expectations.
• Questioners question all expectations, and will meet an expectation only if they believe it’s justified.
• Obligers respond readily to outer expectations but struggle to meet inner expectations (my friend on the track team).
• Rebels resist all expectations, outer and inner alike.

Which of the four tendencies do you align with most?

On the podcast, Jason pointed out that all three of us were parts of military families and are first generation Americans. I want to be a questioner, but I probably fall back to being an obliger more often than I’d like.

Wally talks about taking a hip-hop dance class recently.

Let’s say you want to get good at hip-hop dancing:

• If you’re an upholder, you can probably find online videos and maybe an online class and actually follow through on it.
• If you’re a questioner, you’ll ask why you’re doing it and question a coach’s methodology. If you’re convinced, you’ll become a stout defender of it.
• If you’re an obliger, you should probably sign up for a bunch of classes. And probably with a friend.
• If you’re a rebel, you’re probably a better dancer than all three of the people above.

Take action!

• Get to know yourself. Think about which of the four tendencies you align with. Then you can create an environment that’s customized to your needs.

Four foundational habits

We discussed sleeping, exercising, eating right, and uncluttering. These make up the four foundational habits from Better Than Before:

Foundation habits tend to reinforce each other—for instance, exercise helps people sleep, and sleep helps people do everything better—so they’re a good place to start for any kind of habit change. Furthermore, somewhat mysteriously, Foundation habits sometimes make profound change possible. A friend once told me, “I cleaned out my fridge, and now I feel like I can switch careers.” I knew exactly what she meant.

The life-changing magic of tidying up, sleeping enough, eating right, and moving your body.

Which of the foundational habits have you found most useful and which do you need to improve on?

Wally talks about the idea of how small things are important because they reinforce a positive mindset. You make your bed and you can take on the world. You lift weights and slowly see the weights increasing over weeks, months, and years. You’re really practicing discipline and patience.

I mentioned something from James Abel, who hosts the Fat-Burning Man podcast. I really enjoyed his book, The Wild Diet. In a chapter on fasting, he talks about how it really gets you thinking about what you’re actually capable of:

I don’t really know how to explain it, but there is a fascinating phenomenon that often kicks in when people try fasting. Once you find that you can in fact go without food for some or most of the day with great energy, you ask yourself: “What else am I capable of?” That’s where life gets interesting.

I’ll offer my own example. In my first two years of regular fasting, I went from a struggling musician with a desk job to a multiple-award-winning talk show host, bestselling author, and millionaire at the reins of the hottest food app publisher in America. With the extra time, clarity, and confidence you get from fasting, you might find that the entire trajectory of your life changes.

Take action!

• In the spirit of knowing yourself, pick one of the four habits that’s most behind and start working on improving in that area.

Starting, stopping, and the 20-second rule

In Better Than Before, Gretchen Rubin talks about convenience:

One thing that continually astonishes me is the degree to which we’re influenced by sheer convenience. The amount of effort, time, or decision making required by an action has a huge influence on habit formation. To a truly remarkable extent, were more likely to do something if it’s convenient, and less likely if it’s not.

What’s a bad habit you stopped or a good habit you started?

• Jason stopped snoozing and started working out. Have you heard of the trick where you put your alarm clock across the room? He builds on that by putting it across the room and also underneath some workout clothes.
• Wally stopped smoking by using nicotine gum. Yes, he then needed to wean off the nicotine gum. Then off of chewing gum. Then off of chewing plastic stirrers. Then off of

I’ve been writing more in the past year. I’m not a good writer, but I can sit down and write a little bit every day. People already write daily and don’t recognize it. We send so many emails and texts. I made writing something creative as easy as writing an email. Now I need to structure it so that I’m practicing the right things when I write, but that’s another story for another book for another episode.

Take action!

• Think of how you remove 20 seconds of friction before a good habit. (Meal prep!)
• Think of how you can add 20 seconds of friction before a bad habit. (Take that addicting app off your phone!)

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Sort of show notes, sort of book notes

Chip and Dan Heath are coming out with The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact next, so I thought it’d be good to re-read Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.

I don’t know exactly when I read Made to Stick but it was closer to its 2007 publishing date than to now. I listened to the audiobook this time around to prepare it to be our podcast’s book-of-the-week. Here are some themes we talked about in this week’s episode:

• 6 elements for sticky ideas
• Schemas to learn and to teach
• Simple stories with imagery

Don’t take drinks from strangers, check your Halloween candy, and don’t eat ketchup because it’s blood

Made to Stick opens with the urban legend about the kidney heist. Take a drink and wake up with lots of ice and fewer kidneys. The book lays out 6 principles that make an idea stick:

1. Simplicity
2. Unexpectedness
3. Concreteness
4. Credibility
5. Emotions
6. Stories

You don’t need all of the traits to have an effective idea, just some. From Made to Stick:

The Kidney Heist, too, shares many of these traits. A highly unexpected outcome: a guy who stops for a drink and ends up one kidney short of a pair. A lot of concrete details: the ice-filled bathtub, the weird tube protruding from the lower back. Emotion: fear, disgust, suspicion.

Before Snopes, it was pretty hard to fact-check these things. In our episode, Jason says that he avoided ketchup because his older sister told him it was blood. Simplicity: it’s blood. Concreteness: it’s blood. Credibility: it’s coming from your older sister and you’re 6.

In our episode, Wally says he thought turning the TV off would mean that the shows were paused. It reminded me of something I read in Chuck Klosterman’sEating the Dinosaur. In a chapter about sitcom laugh tracks, something that stuck with me was his childhood belief that the laughs weren’t only real, they were live:

…my hypothesis was that this was the sound of thousands of other TV viewers in random locations, laughing at the program in their own individual living rooms. I thought their laughter was being picked up by their various TV consoles and being simultaneously rebroadcast through mine. As a consequence, I would sometimes sit very close to the television and laugh as hard as I could, directly into the TV’s speaker.

Kids think the darndest things.

Know thyself, know your audience, and use the right schema

Schema are the generic properties of a concept or categories. We go through life recording memories and building up different schema to understand the world. We can only count to 10 after building up an understanding of 1. Learning “zero” is another thing. You can’t say it’s the opposite of 1 if they don’t know what “opposite” means.

The Heath brothers explain that the 6 sticky principles are a guideline. You don’t need all six to have a sticky idea and all six don’t guarantee an idea will stick.

It’s like discussing the attributes of a great basketball player. You can be pretty sure that any great player has some subset of traits like height, speed, agility, power, and court sense. But you don’t need all of these traits in order to be great: Some great guards are five feet ten and scrawny. And having all the traits doesn’t guarantee greatness: No doubt there are plenty of slow, clumsy seven-footers. It’s clear, though, that if you’re on the neighborhood court, choosing your team from among strangers, you should probably take a gamble on the seven-foot dude.

Basketball provides the schema here. The effectiveness of the schema you use will be different based on the audience. That description wouldn’t work if you don’t know what basketball is. If they wrote a version of this book for NBA fans, they might be more specific and swap the generic outlier descriptions for Isaiah Thomas and Greg Ostertag.

There’s a basketball analogy in Steven Kotler’s Rise of Superman. It’s an excellent book about flow and action sports athletes. Kotler writes about Alex Honnold (who climbs very large things without a rope) and shares a quote from Jimmy Chin, a director and fellow climber:

“The route Alex chose wasn’t impossible for him. He could do the moves. But it’s such an exhausting mental game. And with the hardest moves near the top, it’s the equivalent of an NBA basketball player, under last game of the finals pressure, having to execute 1,000 free throws; step back to the three-point line and shoot 100 three-pointers; and then, after all that physical and mental exhaustion, step back and shoot one half-court shot. And this isn’t about winning. All the shots have to go in, because any miss is fatal.”

The schema backfires for me here. It’s a great visual, but even in the vacuum of practice the best shooters don’t routinely make 100 three-pointers in a row. What he described is a hairline from impossible. Which, I understand, is the point. But that hairline makes a difference.

In The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis wrote about the lives of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. A lot of their collaborative work is captured in Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow. In a New Yorker review of The Undoing Project, metaphor comes up. Tversky didn’t like metaphors.

Early in his career, Tversky was a “mathematical psychologist,” which meant that he used formal models to characterize human behavior. He didn’t care for metaphors: “They replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.”

I had to look up what ‘semantic ambiguity’ means in the dictionary (.com). So you can probably guess that I prefer metaphors over formal models. Mostly because I’d have to toggle back to my browser and search for ‘formal models’ to know what those are exactly.

It’s an important point though. Understanding something through analogies shouldn’t be misconstrued for fully understanding that something. It’s a good starting point, though.

In this episode, we talked about the book’s example of describing a pomelo. You could give a description or you can say it’s an oversized grapefruit. Or you can say it’s like the ball that comes with a Nerf hoop. Or you can say it’s the size of the ball of a small kettlebell. If you’re manufacturing a gift box to sell it as fancy perfect fruit in Asia, you’ll probably want more formal schema like measurement ranges. And definitely not in inches.

Luck vs. hard work and the stories that make us believe either one is right

On the podcast, we talked about luck vs. hard work. Jason talked about following Joe Wicks (@thebodycoach) when he had less than a thousand followers on Instagram. With social media, there’s always some amount of luck in having influencers stumble on your work. But you can put the work in to make something they find worth sharing.

The question of luck vs. hard work isn’t specifically from Made to Stick, but we can look at why luck and hard work can each be sticky.

You make your own luck. It’s simple and it’s concrete: don’t wait for luck, do the work and make it. It’s good motivation if you want to get moving on something. It backfires if your expectation is that sleep, neglecting relationships, and will absolutely lead to creating the next big thing.

You’re still going to need some luck along the way.

I recently read about someone accidentally clicking a link on a website. It’s the start of an idea and has one element of stickiness: it’s concrete. We’ve all clicked something on accident and opened up something we didn’t care about. But we’ll need more than one sticky element. Let’s sprinkle in the element of unexpectedness: it was a record exec accidentally clicking on a video of a kid singing for his church. And? It was Justin Bieber.

I read about it as a story about luck. There are plenty of others from apples picking a genius’s head to fall on to lightbulb moments in bathtubs to finding the right filament for literal lightbulbs. You can explain away other people’s success by attributing it all to luck, but it’s rarely ever just luck.

Sheer luck would be the first material tested working as filament. But Edison tried hundreds, thousands of filaments. He made his luck. The apple hive mind sent thousands of apples to people’s heads before nailing Newton’s noggin.

Justin Bieber still had to ask his mom to take him to some building and sing for music execs in person.

Use stories to make things stick

In the episode, I followed this up by butchering the parable of the farmer and his horses. Here’s part of a better version of it by Derek Sivers:

A farmer had only one horse. One day, his horse ran away.

His neighbors said, “I’m so sorry. This is such bad news. You must be so upset.” The man just said, “We’ll see.”

A few days later, his horse came back with twenty wild horses following.The man and his son corralled all 21 horses.

One of the horses kicks his son and breaks his legs, but it keeps him out of the war. It goes on and on. It’s perspective. That’s where I land on luck vs. hard work. People who think it’s all hard work and people who think it’s all luck have one thing in common: they’re both wrong. From reading all of these self-development books, the only thing that’s for sure is it depends.

In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron writes about how our brains crave stories. Why are stories effective?

Simply put, we are looking for a reason to care. So for a story to grab us, not only must something be happening, but also there must be a consequence we can anticipate. As neuroscience reveals, what draws us into a story and keeps us there is the firing of our dopamine neurons, signaling that intriguing information is on its way.

There’s a scene in Game of Thrones where one character explains his horrible experience, “She strapped me down on a bed. She stripped me naked.” There’s a consequence to this story, but someone interrupts, “Sounds alright so far.”

The kidney heist is going pretty well and we anticipate the consequence. It makes the story interesting. That story combined with the unexpectedness of losing organs instead of, like, a wallet makes it stick. We anticipate every consequence and payoff in the farmer story. It’s twist after twist.

In Shoe Dog, Phil Knight writes about the ups and downs he experienced. Please humor me as I shoehorn Phil Knight into the farmer parable:

Phil Knight creates Blue Ribbon and distributes Onitsuka Tigers with exclusive selling rights in some regions. Great!

We’ll see.

The relationship doesn’t last forever, but his company starts making his own shoes to sell. Great!

We’ll see.

One partner dreams up the idea of using the name Nike for their company. Knight doesn’t love it but it’ll be ok for now.

We’ll see.

Bank issues and legal issues and bank issues and legal issues. Oh no.

We’ll see.

Nike weathers the storm, it’s a darling story of entrepreneurship!

We’ll see.

Knight misses moments with his kids as they grow up but he’s created an eternal brand.

We’ll see.

When I become a better writer, I’ll make this fit like a pair of Nike Frees.

Key takeaways

Here are some key points from Made to Stick

• Use these six elements to make ideas sticky: . Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotions, and Stories
• Use schemas to learn and to teach. Map small gaps in knowledge to larger known quantities. But be careful not to mistake fully understanding an analogy for fully understanding the actual subject.
• Use simple stories with imagery to make ideas stick. Remember that complicated urban legend that teaches you why it’s important to understand the intricacies of financial markets? Of course not.

And one takeaway from our episode.

• Whether you believe in luck or not, focus on the work: Dave Chappelle likes Coke better when he’s sponsored by Coke and Pepsi better if he’s sponsored by Pepsi. If you need motivation, then it’s all hard work. If you beat yourself up by comparing yourself to billionaires, remind yourself it took many lucky breaks to get there. Then get back to work.

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Weird Arcade: 3 Models of Practice

You stumble into an arcade. Didn’t they turn this into a pizza place a decade ago? What games are around? Why does that other room have PCs set up? You’re about to wander to that room but something else grabs your attention. There’s a group huddled around a standing cabinet.

It’s Street Fighter II. Someone tells you to grab the joystick, he’s gotta run. Sweet. You move the joystick over to pick Ryu but it’s locked. That guy picked someone before running off.

Anyway. You’re Zangief.

You look at the other half of the screen, it’s Dhalsim. Who’s sharing the machine with you? You see hands at the joystick and follow the arms back. And back. And back. It’s also Dhalsim, playing as Dhalsim.

You start wrapping your head around this but the cabinet starts yelling, “…nd one. FIGHT!”

Talent is Overrated describes three modes of practice: music, chess, and sports mode. Artifacts relating to each of these are sheet music, chess position strategy books, sweat, and Gatorade.

In the classical tradition, a musician knows what he or she is going to play; the music is written down. What separates the greats from the rest is how well they perform that music.

You felt good seeing the Street Fighter II machine assuming you’d be able to play as Ryu. You did your music mode practice growing up. Through every game in the series you practiced combos. First in magazines, then in strategy guides, then on GameFAQs, then the games started putting in training modes that rewarded you for completing combos.

Your sheet music looks joystick positions and buttons. Timing is something you learn from trial and error.

You did none of this with Zangief.

Maybe another mode of practice might have helped you up to now. What about chess mode?

The practice routine is to study a particular position and choose the move you would make, then compare it with the move chosen by the master; if they’re different, figure out why and which is better.

Oh yeah! You’ve looked through enough resources and strategy guides through the years. You can close the space with that green hand thing. And the input for that was…

You look up at the machine marquee again. Unfortunately the marquee ends at “II” and doesn’t start with “Super”.

You’re down to your last mode of practice: sports mode.

The other category of practice is working on specific critical skills—batting a baseball, throwing a football, hitting a golf ball out of the sand. A characteristic that many of these skills share is that they must be performed differently every time because the situations in which they’re encountered are never the same.

Zangief is in excellent physical shape.

With sports mode you’ll be able to just practice the combo in the situation with a friend who is countering you as dhalsim.

Luck is still a force in the world. Dhalsim the arcade entity is not great at playing as Dhalsim the character. Or great at playing at all, really. He’s standing 40 feet away from the machine, seemingly as amused by his arms as you are. You spam lariats and dispatch him.

Next up, a kid picks Ryu and does that jumping roundhouse trick that works against the CPU. That kid did his chess mode practice. It also works on you. Zangief’s lifeless corpse is floating horizontally.

At least you beat Dhalsim. On to the next room. Looks like some people are playing Starcraft. What’s the approach now…?

I put together some video book notes also. (I’ll try to do more of these!)

Here are some thoughts I jotted down while reading.

Meeting in odd places, old school correspondence

Phil Knight met one of his girlfriends while on Mt. Fuji.

It reminded me of an Aziz Ansari bit where he talks about breakups in the digital age. All you want is to not think about someone. It’d be like being in the 70s and when you broke up someone mailed you a box with every happy photo ever of the two of you.

Instead, Phil Knight slowly stopped receiving letters from her altogether until the breakup one arrived. He sent a letter asking to stay together. Now that’s an odd waiting period. Maybe he got a few envelopes in the middle with giant drawings of three bouncing dots.

Luck is so important

More than once, Nike (or its predecessor Blue Ribbon) is in some kind of sales or legal bind that could end the company. Then they get out of it by someone giving them a chance.

In the NBA draft, team’s pick in an order determined by a draft lottery. This luck (or lack of) is then transferred to the players coming out of college. Some team organizations are known for building up players, others have a reputation for players ending up injured.

Founders at Work has interviews with startup founders and there are plenty of lucky moments for them also. This reminds me of one story of a company where potential acquiring company came by to see the office. Paul Graham in Founders at Work:

When that first giant company wanted to buy us and sent people over to check us out, all we had in our so-called office was one computer. Robert and Trevor mostly worked at home or at school. So we borrowed a few more computers and stuck them on desks, so it would look like there was more going on.

Carpe Diem bands

Remember when yellow carpe diem bands got super popular and everyone was wearing them? Of course not. What about Livestrong bands? “Carpe Diem” was one of the proposed ideas along with Livestrong.

In high school, a lot of  my friends wanted baller bands the summer they were released. This was I think a few months or a year before the Livestrong version. Ordering things online was still a little odd. Whenever a friend went on a summer trip to another city they’d keep an eye out for stores that had them to bring back a few packs.

Phil Knight preferred the name “Dimension Six” for the shoe brand. And it wasn’t “Dimension Six” vs. “Nike”. They were deciding between “Dimension Six” and “Falcon”. “Nike” came to one of them in a dream. Phil Knight didn’t like “Falcon”. Nobody else liked “Dimension Six”. Knight knew that brand names should be one or two syllables, so “Dimension Six” probably wouldn’t cut it. Nike it is.