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Arnold gave up his girl, what will you give up?

In “Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder”, Arnold (Schwarzenegger, if you didn’t guess by now) talks about meeting someone really special.

Then in 1969 I met a girl who changed my thinking. Her name was Barbara; she was a waitress in Zuckie’s in Santa Monica, working there during the summer to help pay for schooling at San Diego State. I asked her out and was impressed immediately by something I felt about her, something that was different from most of the girls I had been dating. I could describe it as an inner warmth, the wholesomeness one associates with a hometown girl.

But not special enough:

“Gradually a conflict grew up in our relationship. Basically it came down to this: she was a well-balanced woman who wanted an ordinary, solid life, and I was not a well-balanced man and hated the very idea of ordinary life. She had thought I would settle down, that I would reach the top in my field and level off. But that’s a concept that has no place in my thinking. For me, life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.” — Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder by Arnold Schwarzenegger – https://a.co/6lZsPy1

A little harsh, and it’s definitely a case of “not special enough… for that point in his life”. He’s the best bodybuilder in history and is about to go shift the movie industry with a few other super jacked action stars.

A couple questions that can be helpful:

(1) What do you want right now?
(2) What will you sacrifice for that thing? (And are you willing to make that sacrifice?)

Yes, I do want to drop 10 pounds. What do I have to sacrifice?

More than just time, because I was already carving the time out for workouts.

Not sleep, because that will go counter to the goal, especially when framed in terms of overall health and sustainability.

The joy of food. Yes that’s one thing. So I need to remind myself that that particular joy is fleeting.

The social connection of shared meals. This is a big thing where my beliefs are wired wrong. I can still join in on social meals. I don’t need to eat the most. Finishing the remaining food at the bottom of the container doesn’t make the friendship deeper or bring the money back.

I’m also past the time in life where most of my friends are going out every weekend. So I kind of have it easy!

Being consistently hungry in this goal means literally being consistently hungry and being okay with that feeling.

Info Diet (Jan 26, 2022): Ali Abdaal, Oliver Burkeman, and “The More You Do The Better You Feel”

Check out the full notes for “The More You Do the Better You Feel” by David Parker

Okay just popping the editor open and writing. Back to basics. Kindle notes on the left. WordPress editor on the right.

Instead of having a to-do list that, you take a blank page, write one thing to work on, finish it, cross it off, then write the next thing that you’ll work on. I’m still reading the book but I jumped around to find a description of the technique. From “The More You Do The Better You Feel”, the “Just one thing” method:

You work on the task immediately after writing it down. And these tasks can be super easy. (Example from the book: “Put DVD away”.) In Stephen Curry’s MasterClass, he talks about how he doesn’t come into the practice gym and start bombing threes. He starts with lay-ups and works his way out. The J.O.T. method is like getting right back next to the hoop and building your confidence back up. If you’re a well oiled productivity machine, you don’t need to resort to the J.O.T. method. But if you’ve found yourself completely distracted for days on end, start feeling bad about how little you’re getting done, then ending up more distracted because you’re feeling bad… …time for lay-ups. Some other things that this could help with:

  • You can skip prioritizing and overthinking things that you need to do. Take care of that when you’ve built up a little confidence.
  • You can get some reps in with seeing how short or long things take. One of the all-too-familiar scenarios he describes is choosing to go out and buy disposable plates and utensils because it’s easier than washing dishes. This takes 40 minutes. Then—you do eventually have to wash the dishes—he sees that it takes much less time than expected.

Anyway. Listen to Ali Abdaal and Oliver Burkeman, then go read “The More You Do the Better You Feel” to get some ideas for becoming productive again, then come back to “Four Thousand Hours” to remind yourself that productivity isn’t the ultimate goal. (So you don’t end up feeling too badly when you’re in an unproductive phase.)

Maker’s schedule, manag–oh shoot I should check this other tab out

“Graham embraced this insight and created a company culture at Y Combinator that now runs completely on a maker’s schedule. All meetings get clustered at the end of the day. To experience extraordinary results, be a maker in the morning and a manager in the afternoon. Your goal is “ONE and done.” But if you don’t time block each day to do your ONE Thing, your ONE Thing won’t become a done thing.” – “The One Thing” by Gary Keller

I’ll share something from Deep Work as well, because I’ve been particularly distracted lately. Here he describes someone adjusting their environment to get those beautiful beautiful maker hours in:

A newfound devotee of deep work, he rented an apartment across the street from his office, allowing him to show up early in the morning before anyone else arrived and work without distraction. “On good days, I can get in four hours of focus before the first meeting,” he told me. “Then maybe another three to four hours in the afternoon. And I do mean ‘focus’: no e-mail, no Hacker News [a website popular among tech types], just programming.” Deep Work by Cal Newport

You might not have the perfect environment or schedule for this, but it’s worth working toward.

That said, Polina Marinova recently wrote about the opposite: sometimes life is truly hectic and you just might need to learn to type with one hand for hours on end.

But here’s the shocking answer to the question above: I do have time to write because I make time to write. I work in 2- to 3-hour spurts and write one-handed on my phone in the middle of the night as I feed the baby. (Fun fact: This exact paragraph was written at 3:18 a.m.)

No matter how many times I come across this schedule advice, I check my phone first thing in the morning and don’t start making until maybe right before I’m supposed to sleep.

I’m writing this on the treadmill after a PM workout.

Trying to make it work.

Course Notes (Jan 19, 2022): Credibility as a Beginner, Buy Carrots, Write+Meditate+Run

Some notes as I go through modules of various courses out of order. If I’m not actively applying things, I can at least try to summarize ideas for others (including my future self).

  • Building credibility as a beginner (Ship 30 for 30): A lot of people get hung up on their lack of expertise in an area that they want to write in. Yes, you should study masters in whatever field it is to learn what they do—Dickie Bush talks about wanting to write about writing so he studied successful copywriters and bloggers. Combine that with stories about what you’ve recently done as a beginner. Dickie would write about starting his writing habit. (Shaan Puri has a good phrase for this: be a curious novice.)
  • Buy those carrots (Matt D’Avella’s Master YouTube): He talks about going the extra mile for his videos. And it’s not surprising since he’s known for the quality of his videos. The example he shares is heading to the grocery store to buy carrots specifically to use in a video. It’s a pretty small thing—anyone could do it really. But few people actually do. They’ll just stick to using things around their house. Take the extra step: buy the carrots.
  • Write, meditate, run (Captain Sinbad’s course): Find some activities that you can always return to. For Captain Sinbad, he knows he’s always able to return to writing, meditation, and running. If he hits a creative block, he knows he probably isn’t writing enough (at one point his goal was 2 hours of writing every day). If his mind and body aren’t quite in the right place, he can choose deliberate stillness (meditation) or deliberate movement (running). This combination keeps him centered.

As for me, I can always write 3 notes from courses, books, or podcasts. So this just might be my sort of daily practice. Maybe it’ll add up.

Whatever color you want

Check out the full notes for “Now You See It and Other Essays on Design” by Michael Bierut

From “Now You See It”:

From my earliest days as a designer I loved black and white. Such authority, such decisiveness. To this day, any collection of my favorite personal projects — posters, book covers, packaging — marks me as a follower of Henry Ford, another enthusiast for wheels who famously told buyers of his Model T that they could have whatever color they wanted as long as it was black. Every now and then, I dip my toe in the vast rainbow-hued sea. It usually comes up with no more than a little bit of red and an even littler bit of yellow. I admire people who can use color with authority. To me, they seem to be able to swim like fishes.

This isn’t quite a misery loves company thing, but just that it’s good to know that you can become one of the most successful graphic designers ever without having complete mastery over an important element of graphic design.

(I also assume he probably is at some junior mastery level with color but it’s enough for him to know what grandmasters can do. Or something.)

A few other examples of this

  • Team sports has this: basketball players who can hit 3s and defend but can’t create off the ball, freak athlete defensive backs with bad hands, designated hitters…
  • Individual sports as well: excel enough in stand up and you’ll never have to fight on the ground

On the other hand, creators who want to live off their art must learn a bunch of non-art skills: marketing, sales, copywriting, networking.

But mastery isn’t required.

Podcast: #28: Info Diet Recap (January 2022) | Now You See It, Four Thousand Weeks, How the Internet Happened, How to Read a Book

Books mentioned:

Transcript

Welcome to the Notepod. I’m going to do a three plus one episode. Pretty much an info diet recap, and this time it’s all books. It’ll be three books that I’ve read recently. Three books this week, “Now You See It”, “Four-Thousand Weeks” and “How the Internet Happened” are books that I’ve finished or I’m currently reading.

The fourth one, “How to Read a Book”: this is one I’ve read in the past.

I’ll get to it with the quotes.

First one is this book called “Now You See It”

The author of this is Michael Bierut. He. Is a graphic designer at pentagram. There was like a Netflix show about designers in different industries. I think it’s the Paula Scher episode and she’s one of the other partners at Pentagram. And so Michael Bierut is a partner at Pentagram. He also created the blog Design Observer. This is a collection of essays that he put on that blog. Here’s the quote from it. It is about logo design and often what you think is: that looks so simple a five-year-old could do it.

In this case, he talks about the UPS logo.

He did a proposal that wasn’t picked and it went to another agency. He talks about why that agency was able to get the work.

“But FutureBrand had done something that we and the others had failed to do: they had convinced the client to accept their solution. The basic starting point of Graphic Design Criticism as a Spectator Sport is “I could have done better.” And of course you could! But simply having the idea is not enough. Crafting a beautiful solution is not enough. Doing a dramatic presentation is not enough. Convincing all your peers is not enough. Even if you’ve done all that, you still have to go through the hard work of selling it to the client.”
— “Now You See It and Other Essays on Design” by Michael Bierut

This goes to the importance of soft skills. Being able to talk about your work, do some storytelling around the visuals, and ultimately convince the client that this is going to be an effective mark.

That all is very difficult to do. That’s where the competition part comes in between different agencies. It’s the whole art of the pitch and creating a compelling story. That goes far beyond just the logo mark.

Alright, this next quote it is from a book called “Four-Thousand Weeks” by Oliver Berkman

It is a book about time management and kind of the opposite of what you would expect when hearing it’s a book about time management.

Often you’ll think it’s going to be goal-setting, figuring out your priorities, breaking your year down into quarters, into months into weeks, days, hours.

Figuring out how you’re going to get that work done that day. Four-Thousand Weeks is a book about kind of how futile that can be. In a lot of ways it can be beneficial to sort of surrender to the idea that you don’t have control over all of this time.

It can still be useful to make plans. Of course. But that you might be able to reduce some of your anxiety around it. If you accept that you’re not going to be able to get that list of a thousand things done.

Here’s the quote

His reluctance to use that word is understandable, since it’s come to signify something slightly pathetic; many of us tend to feel that the person who’s deeply involved in their hobby of, say, painting miniature fantasy figurines, or tending to their collection of rare cacti, is guilty of not participating in real life as energetically as they otherwise might.
– “Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals” by Oliver Burkeman

He’s talking about hobbies here and the modern day thing. With influencers. With the internet. With it being so easy to spin up a website and to start selling things. Everything can become a side hustle. You can sell to a hyper niche audience, a hyperlocal audience. That you’re wasting your time with a hobby if you’re not finding a way to monetize it in some way.

That said I did really enjoy this Basque cheesecake that we got last year. A friend bought it through WeChat which was, I think, tied to this Instagram account. Excellent. So it’s great that this stuff is possible.

But there’s downsides to it when you’re trying to have a hobby, that’s just a hobby.

Austin Kleon talks about this. I think it is in his book, “Show Your Work” but just this idea that you go to a potluck, you bake lemon bars, some other thing, take it there. People love it. Oftentimes the highest form of compliment is, oh, you should sell these. You should find a way to, to solve this.

This of course is very prevalent in creating content. I read this in December and was definitely thinking about like, oh, what are my goals for all the things that I’m making in the next year? Is all of this, a creative outlet or is it supposed to be the first steps toward some kind of post-work life.

I go back and forth on that and almost all the time end up in a bad middle. It should be a creative outlet, this form of leisure that is energizing, engaging.

But then I think, “Well, that’s kind of dumb. It’s not going toward creating a side income side hustle sort of thing.”

Then I’ll try to shift to that sort of thing and then it just does not become all that fun. Instead of being energizing and engaging, it’s probably a little bit engaging, but more of a drain of energy.

Wondering if it’s the right things that I’m doing. If I’m reading the right books, writing the right things, and then not really hitting publish on anything.

So… I don’t have a solution. I just want to share that that’s what I’m thinking of. Those are the kinds of questions that are raised in this book “Four-Thousand Weeks”.

Alright. Next quote. It’s a book called “How the Internet Happened” by Brian McCullough.

This is kind of like a modern history book. I don’t know what the phrase is for that. Just goes through the different phases of the internet and different products, different companies that came and went through these different areas of the internet.

Really fun book. Especially having lived through a lot of that. In middle school, high school. Things like Napster. Going through different early search engines. Getting the AOL discs and not really understanding at that stage, like, what’s the difference between this and what my parents have bought.

Eventually like a couple of friends get broadband lines and you see how their usage of the internet is different. Usually it was that their dads were doing some sort of retail trading. And probably at times felt like geniuses and then likely went through the crash just the same as everyone else. And probably felt some of that.

But I was a kid. I didn’t really know what was going on.

So here’s the quote. This one is about Napster and how it changed behavior:

“Napster was the first signal that the web had changed consumer behavior in a fundamental way. Today, we live in a world where consumers not only expect, but demand, infinite selection and instant gratification. Amazon had first introduced the concept of infinite selection, and now Napster was training an entire generation to require the instant gratification. Shawn Fanning had been right from the very beginning: digital really was a better way to distribute music.”
– “How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone” by Brian McCullough

That is a theme through the book: infinite selection and instant gratification.

I remember when Netflix started online streaming and there’s a chapter on Netflix as well. It had terrible selection. I think there was like “Species” not even 2. I think it was like “Species III” was one of the front page popular movies.

The thing was, it was just so convenient. It was virtually infinite. Like there, there were probably hundreds or thousands of things to pick from. You couldn’t watch all of them. So it, in some sense it was infinite. But what was initially sacrificed was quality.

So you have infinite selection, instant gratification. At the time, it was kind of like infinite selection of not that great of shows and movies. But you do have instant gratification.

People had Netflix with the DVDs. And that was like, truly this infinite selection. Pretty much any movie was there, it seemed. You would slowly hear about friends. “Hey, are you going to cancel the DVD selection?” And that was kind of a thing.

As the streaming selection got better and better then more and more people were kind of canceling the DVD side of things and would only have the streaming side. Especially I think it was the NBC shows were on there. That seemed to be a big turning point that I remember. Of course I’m probably remembering not that well. It was maybe something else.

But quality can often be the thing that is sacrificed. Eventually the quality improves.

This is the same thing with the rise of Spotify.

Instant gratification. Just the convenience of it. Hey, it has pretty good amount of songs. I don’t need to go pirate these things anymore. Especially for me, I wasn’t on the hunt for brand new music. So it was definitely good enough. And then the library got better. The quality, of course, the algorithm that auto-generated playlists became the thing.

I could kind of outsource quality to other people too. There was Hipster International and that was a big— I forget what book this was, but just that, that had a big effect on their growth. You just outsource your playlists creation to someone you trust.

Of course the creator of Napster had one of the most popular playlists on Spotify decades later.

The last quote here is from a book called “How to Read a Book”

I want to read it again this year because I bounce around from book to book and.

Right now, I feel like I have a lot of analysis paralysis, decision fatigue. Something I heard recently was to just pick the book that is solving the problem that’s right in front of you. If your goal is to read for education and not entertainment.

Reading for entertainment and education can be kind of confused. Sometimes I think that I’m reading to learn something, but really I’m just trying to pass the time. Then you start to read these different business books, marketing books as entertainment.

You’re not really applying anything. But this is about how fast you should be reading.

Here’s the quote:

“With regard to rates of reading, then, the ideal is not merely to be able to read faster, but to be able to read at different speeds—and to know when the different speeds are appropriate.”
– “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer J. Adler

I’ve thought of this with reading, with podcasts with audiobooks — those are kind of the three different things that make up most of the things that I consume. And then hours and hours of scrolling Twitter, which is never all that energizing, but it pays off every once in a while. You find an article to something really good. So that keeps the loop going.

I’ll often see these videos and articles about how someone used to read 50 books, 100 books a year. Now they’re cutting it down to 12 or 20 or whatever it is. They talk about how dumb it is to try to read as many books as possible.

This is similar to when someone mega rich says money won’t make you happy. Or that you don’t have to be a workaholic to get there, even though they were a workaholic to get there.

It feels like it’s one of those things where you have to go through it to understand why you don’t need to do it.

There is probably value in speeding through a bunch of books, having a year or two where you’re trying to read a ton. Because it helps you build your own taste. Then you start to see why people say, “Oh, you should just read some of these older fundamental business books and everything else is kind of a rehash of it.”

You kind of have to like read a few different rehashes of. Uh, say like “Effective Executive” to understand that all of these productivity books are kind of saying the same thing.

These things are captured in books from the 80s and centuries before. Of course the rise of Stoicism shows that these are often like centuries old lessons that are being retold with modern stories. It’s like all those like 90s romcom remakes of Shakespeare stories. It’s just in a form that’s more digestible for an audience today.

Anyway, definitely check this book out: “How to Read a Book”.

In the future, I want to see how that can apply to the different things that I’m listening to. How to listen to a book, how to listen to a podcast. Maybe that is a way to he’s my time really well when listening to these things and to retain more information, and that sort of thing.

On the other hand, going back to “Four-Thousand Weeks”, it may be better to accept that I do a lot of these things just for entertainment and leisure and it’s totally fine to do that. It may not be worth the stress that worrying about using that time poorly can bring on.

Oftentimes the listening is just layered on top of something else that I don’t need to give a hundred percent focus to. Just doing chores around the house or taking a walk or working out.

Anyway, thanks for listening to this. I hope you’re in a dark room with noise, canceling headphones on, giving this 110% focus. I appreciate it.