The Notepod

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Tool: Share those notes with friends (Chris Hutchins on the Ali Abdaal podcast)

You’ve probably planned a vacation and had a bunch of notes you never used again.

Your friends might find them useful. Chris Hutchins (from the “All the Hacks” podcast) was on Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal and says that if he hears that a friend is going on a trip to somewhere he’s been to, he’ll send them the notes from his own trip there. They’ll probably find something useful in there.

Even if it’s a lot of the same things you’d find browsing Yelp and TripAdvisor and Reddit, you’ve already spent the time curating the list and checking some of the things out in person.

Then there’s the personal filtering that happens when you’re sending your own notes. You’ll probably have a sense of their preferences e.g. “Hey they really liked the noodles here and I know they’re picky about noodles…”

Tools from “Giannis” by Mirin Fader (for CREATORS)

I’m writing book notes again to try to publish something every day. I’ve been aiming to write 1000 words daily and I’d like to make some of that published words on this blog at the minimum. Then I can go from that to the podcast to Shorts or something like that. And I’ll start with this Giannis biography that I’m really enjoying so far.

Tool 1: Find joy (even if you don’t have 5 brothers to play basketball with)

When Giannis was a kid, the family would travel to work as street vendors in different villages:

They’d drive for five hours, ten hours, during summers. Giannis would look out the window, see areas he had never heard of. Then they’d spot a beach. For an afternoon, they’d sit on the sand under the sun. Just get to relax for a few hours. Not worry about money for a few hours. Feel their toes in the sand, jump into the cool blue water. They swam and laughed, and the water glittered a deep blue green. They were able to have fun. Let go.

Then they’d go to the next village, sell, sleep. Travel, sell, sleep. Miles and miles away. Travel, sell, sleep. But even through these struggles, they found joy.

They always found joy in each other. It’s good to notice joy in your workflows. Making content and putting it online isn’t a fight for survival or anything close to the difficulty that Giannis’s family faced in Greece. It’s a stretch of a comparison.

But you should try different topic + format combinations and see which ones you enjoy. It might not be the entire workflow that’s enjoyable, but you should definitely start by avoiding content you absolutely hate creating in the first place.

Tool 2: Look at your existing skill stack (even if you’re not a Gumby-like elite athlete)

Giannis loved playing soccerso that seems like the most likely path to being scouted as a kid. 

But he was playing tag.

From a Vice article about Spiros Velliniatis:

“I stumbled across three other kids who were playing tag on the Tritonas team’s court. I was stunned by what I saw. It was Giannis, along with two of his brothers, Kostas and Alexis. At that moment, I realized I was in the presence of one of the biggest basketball talents in the world, right in front of me.”

Velliniatis was a local coach at the time. He noticed the length, energy, and focus. From “Giannis”:

What he saw was Giannis’s long limbs, his Gumby-like arms. What he noticed was that Giannis never seemed to tire, running, running, running. He was just having fun, but there seemed to be a seriousness about him, a focus to him.

Length, energy, and focus transfer well to other sports. While length is hard to have control over, energy and focus can be worked on.

As a creator, look toward your current skills and knowledge to see if there’s something you can add to your content.

On the off chance that you had a prior life as a professional tag player, you certainly have some stories to tell. You have knowledge of fundamentals that are boring to you but really interesting to people new to the sport. And if you’re still playing, you have an offline journey that you can document and share online.

(Reversale: Keep things separate — MKBHD is a professional ultimate player and doesn’t sprinkle that into every tech review video he does. David Senra seems to have as much knowledge about Game of Thrones as he does about business history, but compare everything to Westeros history.)

Tool 3: Practice, practice, practice (even if you’re talented)

Giannis practices dunking:

Something burned in him to fly. Rise higher and higher to the basket. He’d start at the free throw line and practice his steps, trying to get his rhythm down. He failed and failed, struggled to even grip the ball. For the next five days, he leaped and failed, leaped and failed. Wouldn’t leave until he dunked.

Giannis practices instead of hydrating:

What was clear was that there was an edge to him. A hardness to him. He ripped down rebounds fiercely. He’d practice moves he couldn’t master over and over rather than drink water during breaks.

Giannis practices some moves from the internet:

Finding Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant changed everything for Giannis, though. He wanted to be as creative as Kobe, as hardworking as Kobe; as versatile as Durant, as long as Durant. He began to idolize Durant especially, who was just budding into a star for the Oklahoma City Thunder. Giannis would study him every day after attending classes at 53rd High School in Sepolia.

He’d practice Durant’s moves, especially dribble crossover pull-ups. “He’d do it at practice and call out [Durant’s] name,” says Kamperidis, who would often watch highlights with him.

Giannis practices some calisthenics:

Giannis didn’t even know what a muscle-up was. Teammates Brandon Knight, Khris Middleton, and Chris Wright showed him, each completing five in a row. Giannis couldn’t get his chin over the bar, his feet still touching the floor. His teammates were laughing so hard as Giannis struggled, twitching. “He almost flipped over the bar,” Wright says. “He was just really uncoordinated, but you could just tell he was working at it so hard.”

Whatever it is you’re creating, fall in love with practicing. Practice writing titles, Practice writing video scripts. Practice writing hooks. Practice storytelling. Practice being on camera. Practice finishing your work. Practice starting your work. Practice that tedious workflow (and find ways to remove steps). Practice focusing.

Getting back to reading, then back to hard reading

From “The Making of Karteka” by Jordan Mechner:

An interview with George Miller in Starlog – “Anyone who wants to understand Star Wars should read The Hero With A Thousand Faces” – prompted me to buy the book. It’s hard reading; the guy [Joseph Campbell] is so erudite, his prose so ornate, his footnotes frequent and long. But it’s amazing stuff. I like it, I like it.

I’ve started reading regularly again, particularly when I wanted to make a bunch of Shorts about “Elon Musk” by Walter Isaacson. It wasn’t quite hard reading page to page, but it was just a long book. Not overly long, I was looking forward to each long session reading it. Just, I mean, it was a lot of pages.

Before that I read “Hyperion” by Dan Simmons. A little bit harder—I’m out of practice of reading science fiction books. And already pretty bad with names. But I also enjoyed it quite a bit.

I guess I’m actually trending toward easier reading. The most recent book I finished was “Be Useful” by Arnold Schwarzenegger. I enjoyed it and it was easy reading. Breezy stories, clear lessons, in and out of there in 200 pages.

But I know that if I look back at the past few years of reading, it’s the harder books that stick with me with time. Maybe because reading through them just took longer in the first place. I loved, loved, loved the Martha Wells Murderbot novellas but now mostly remember the first few books as a combined experience.

“The Sovereign Individual” was probably the hardest book I’ve read in the past few years. At the same time, in those circles Naval’s “How to get rich” thread is probably as influential and much easier to read. The Bitcoin white paper is harder to read but much shorter.

I don’t know what I’m getting at here. Mostly I wanted to mention I’ve been reading again.

The finish line is also the starting line (and why the secret to a good morning routine is floss)

“Question tradition. Who says you have to keep your vitamins in the kitchen or floss in the bathroom? Maybe your vitamins need to be next to your computer. Or maybe flossing works best when you keep floss next to your TV remote. You’re a Habit Ninja, not a conformist. Find what works for you.” (BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits)

I keep some floss in the kitchen and in our living room.

It removes just enough friction that I’ll floss earlier in the night. Flossing is the part of my wind down routine that I look forward to the least, so I took it out of the wind down.

I just floss sort of whenever, sometime after dinner.

It’s the end of eating for the night, because I definitely don’t want to have to floss twice. There’s a bonus there because sleep is improved when not completely stuffed.

Then there’s just getting to bed in the first place. The friction of walking to the bathroom and flossing stood no chance against the frictionless behavior of lying on the couch with the TV on while scrolling on my phone.

I wouldn’t want to floss, so I’d stay up later, the night routine starts later, I’d sleep later, then get up later the next day.

Keep floss in the kitchen, wake up energized.

The absolute dead simple way for me to actually write something and publish it

Three steps

  • Open Readwise and browse for a highlight that I have some thoughts on
  • Paste it into Drafts and write and use an action to create a draft in WordPress
  • Publish in WordPress (sometimes adding a photo)

I can write a post in 15 minutes vs. agonizing over it when I’m publishing to Twitter. Maybe it’s the idea that people might actually see and hate what I’m writing there. (Always delusional, because I don’t actually have enough followers to make that something to worry about.)

Book quotes give me some borrowed credibility. Readwise makes it easy to pull book quotes to use.

Drafts helps me focus on just writing. It loads up super fast and is pretty distraction free.

And WordPress just keeps chugging along.

Overnight success is rare (but you can definitely have an overnight failure)

“When I was training for contests, I’d sometimes be so psyched up mentally I thought I didn’t need a warm-up. I’d go directly into a heavy workout. Without fail, I’d pull muscles needlessly and set myself back two or three months.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold: Education of a Bodybuilder”

Consistent good work will help you be great over time. (Better put here: How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably).

Part of that is doing the right amount of maintenance so that you can keep showing up every day.

  • Before: Make sure to warm up
  • During: Don’t go so hard one day that you can’t show up the next day
  • After: Find ways to wind down and recover

It’s pretty straightforward for exercise and often people skip the before and after steps because they’re out of time or it’s just boring.

I started making a rule to count the warmup whenever I’m estimating how long a workout will take. This was after throwing my back out with a kettlebell. (Luckily it wasn’t too bad. I wasn’t bed-ridden or anything. But I was definitely scared to do kettlebell swings for a while after that. And probably am still a bit scared of them because I know I haven’t cleaned my form up enough.)

Here’s how it relates to creative work.

You should have some ways to warm up for your main work in some way.

  • Before: Do a typing test — I heard this from Captain Sinbad, who I think mentions he got it from Ali Abdaal. A big part of their work as YouTubers is to write scripts for video. So this should work well for others writing at a computer. You do a typing test so that you can mindlessly get your body going. You embody the activity and eventually your brain will catch up to you. Is this scientific? No idea. But I can’t imagine it hurts to get your fingers moving if you’re about to start writing.
  • After: Shutdown routine — Cal Newport suggests having a shutdown routine at the end of the day. This helps to create an official end to your workday. Having a concrete end prevents different pieces from lingering through the rest of your evening, when you should be using to recharge in different ways.
  • After: Take a walk — In short, get away from screens for a while. I like to do gym workouts after work so that I can create some space away from the screen.

Choosing to stop to rest is okay but do what you can to avoid being forced to stop.