Just trying to make it a habit to write daily. I’ve bombed Ship 30 for 30 again but there’s always the next cohort to give it a shot. Why write elsewhere when I have a sweet sweet empty void of my own right here?
Some lessons from the week.
- Maybe you don’t have to work out for 90 minutes before writing: In Sean Anthony’s video about “The Golden Hour of Money” he talks about figuring out his morning routine. Which does mean going through a bunch of other routines and learning what doesn’t work. Movement is good, but a few minutes stretching gets the blood flowing enough. The more important piece is getting a focused block of writing in. For him, it’s a daily email. For you, it might be working on your novel, a video script, a blog post, etc.
- Tim Ferriss is still the best at asking what the audience wants to ask: He went ahead and asked Cal Newport about his routine from as big as the environment down tot he 0.5mm Uni hall micro pen.
Because even if you say museum, if you’re in a city, there are multiple museums you could choose. So how did you choose a particular place? And then when you are working on some larger problem or project, what does that actually look like? Is it just pen and paper? Is it laptop where you’ve knocked out the Wi-Fi? If you could give maybe one or two real-world examples, that would be super helpful.
- One physical notebook trick for both of them: each new book they write gets a dedicated notebook. It’s similar to Twyla Tharp keeping new dance routine contents in a banker’s box. Each project gets a box.
- Tiago Forte points out that maybe you don’t want your note taking system to work like a brain: Our brains can be distracting for a reason. One mistake you’ll see following Evernote, Roam, Notion, etc. is that some people advocate as if there’s only one solution and that they’ve found it. (That goes for plenty of things beyond note taking apps, of course.) Ali Abdaal has returned to simple Apple Notes. Tiago is back to Evernote. David Perell still uses Evernote in his process. And many people get plenty done with Google Docs. Simplicity on the other side of complexity. (If I were writing this in a zettelskan I would write that I heard that phrase from Ali Abdaal.)
- Speaking of, he did a webinar with David Perell leading into the next Write of Passage cohort. His main takeaway from when he took Write of Passage? POP writing. Remember: Powerful, observational, playful.
Alright enough rambling for today. (Aka I hit 45 mins on the treadmill.)