The Notepod

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Book Notes: “Never Finished” by David Goggins

Above is a 6-minute video with some of my takeaways.

Working on a rat animation.

3 sentence summary: Goggins is still an uncommon man among uncommon men. From what I understand, Goggins started with audio for the first book and it was massaged into a book. This follow-up book seems more structured than that. It has its pros and cons.

But for Goggins, cons are pros.

On to some takeaways (and YouTube Shorts)

Some are born winners, some are born losers (who then fight to become winners)

…I was born a loser. There are a lot of born losers out there. Every day, babies are born into poverty and broken families, like I was.

Goggins went through abuse of all types throughout his life.

The main enemy: his dad

Your demons don’t die with you. They try to carry on. If the demons are strong enough (and they often are), they’re passed on to family members.

This makes it doubly important to work through your own demons: once for yourself and again for the people in your life.

This reminds me of another person I very much never want to fight: Mark Hunt. From his biography, “Born to Fight”:

I try to remember any light, fun moments we shared as kids, but it’s hard to find anything. If there were any board games, or holidays, or trips to the movies, or the rugby, or the museum, or anything that parents and little kids do together then I don’t remember them. All I remember about that house is a shitload of beatings and what felt like endless days of hunger.

(Yes. I definitely feel how soft my life has been and become when I come into the book looking for motivation to think up 1 second hooks for short-form videos and then read about a dad alternating beating his son in front of his mom and beating his mom in front of his son.)

The 2 Rats

They swam their hearts out…for an average of sixty hours without any food or rest. One swam for eighty-one hours.

Goggins shares a story about research in the 50s with two groups of rats. Both get tossed in water. The first set drowns within 15 minutes.

The second set get rescued and dried off, returned to normal. Saved.

They then return to water and are able to survive far longer than 15 minutes.

Some attribute it to hope. Goggins says it’s belief.

Hope is fleeting. Belief built from resilience is his ultimate fuel.

The mixtape (of hate)

Some people avoid reading comments at all. Goggins records himself reading them and listens to them when he’s down.

I loved those comments. I loved them so much I made a mixtape. I printed them all out, recorded myself saying each one, and then I looped it. Whenever I have a bad day, I listen to it. Sometimes, I walk around the house savoring it in full stereo.

One of my favorite books on self talk is Jon Acuff’s “Soundtracks”, where he relates the voice in our head to music. And a lot of what we listen to all day is negative broken records.

From “Soundtracks”

Your brain builds on overthinking’s habit of negativity by doing three additional things: (1) Lying about your memories, (2) Confusing fake trauma with real trauma, (3) Believing what it already believes

Goggins leans into other people’s negative talk and learns to cringe at his own negative self talk.

The lesson here: whether you’re focusing on negative (like Goggins) or trying to sway things to the positive (like Acuff), it’s incredibly powerful and worth learning to focus on controlling your self talk at all.

(While grabbing the cover for this post, I realized I bought the clean edition. I knew something was off. Off to Amazon to re-buy the proper edition.)

Alright I’m back with the parental advisory version.

It’s okay to quit (just don’t rage quit)

It’s not always the wrong move to quit. Even in battle, sometimes we must retreat. You might not be ready for whatever it is you’ve taken on. Perhaps your preparation wasn’t as thorough as you’d thought. Maybe other priorities in life need your attention. It happens, but make sure that it is a conscious decision you’re making, not a reaction. Never quit when your pain and insecurity are at their peak. If you must retreat, quit when it’s easy, not when it’s hard.

Quitting often makes sense, but you want to make sure that it isn’t just a reaction to something.

In “Grit”, Angela Duckworth talks about her own family’s 3 rules for hard things. One of them is that everyone in the family has to do a hard thing—the Duckworths aren’t doing 100-milers in the desert but they have pursuits that require daily deliberate practice. Another rule is that each member picks their own hard thing.

The last rule, similar to what Goggins advises, is that you can’t just rage quit.

From “Grit”:

This brings me to the second part of the Hard Thing Rule: You can quit. But you can’t quit until the season is over, the tuition payment is up, or some other “natural” stopping point has arrived. You must, at least for the interval to which you’ve committed yourself, finish whatever you begin. In other words, you can’t quit on a day when your teacher yells at you, or you lose a race, or you have to miss a sleepover because of a recital the next morning. You can’t quit on a bad day.

In other words: You must make it to the finish line but that’s when you can choose not to do another race.

118: The Psychology of Fitness: 1, 2, 3

Transcript

All right. I’m going to workshop this idea called the psychology of fitness. I wanted to write like a blog post or something like that. It’s been a while. It’s always been a while. Going to try to get back on a regular cadence. I say that every single time, but anyway, maybe I won’t make any promises here.

I hope everyone’s having a good holiday. Heading into December. I heard this rule from Dan, John. He’s a fitness coach. He invented the goblet squats. So if you’ve done a goblet squat, he. Is the person that named it helped to popularize it. Add. He has this rule called or like this goal that sounded dumb too. If he acknowledges it sounds a little unconventional and.

Yeah, a few years ago, I was like, ah, that seems like a dumb goal. Not dumb, but it seems too easy.

Now it really applies. And I wish I had followed it. His rule is. Try to lose one pound a year. Basically, don’t let it tick up over the decades. It adds up very slowly, but those years can go fast. Heading into 2023, of course, going to try to. Clean things up, especially in December This time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is crucial because it can feel like the holidays, but.

There’s three holidays. Let’s say for, so let’s count Christmas Eve. For me, of course I do celebrate this thing. So Thanksgiving, Christmas, Eve, Christmas day. New year’s Eve new year’s day. So five but then. Certainly in some years, I’ve just been like it’s the holidays. And then just eat crazy.

want to clean it up for December. That’s why I’m thinking. A good thing to focus on would be psychology of fitness and what I’m going to do. I’m just going to set a timer for four minutes for three ideas. And then eventually my goal would be to get through 20. Maybe that can be my goal for December or something like that.

So I’ll do let’s call it a four minute timer for each of these ideas and just to be clear. The w the source of these quotes will be. This book called the psychology of money by Morgan Housel. I’m guessing it’s like one of the best-selling books of the last few years for like non-fiction I think

There’s a few so that there was of course, like subtle art and then atomic habits. And I think David Goggins book is some insane bestseller as well. Of course, plenty of other books, but Psychology of money by Morgan Housel is one of these on personal finance and great book if you haven’t checked it out, but it’s yeah. Different chapters and he just talks about

Some principle about or I dunno the principal, but Just, he tells stories about. Money and then relates it to personal finance and why we all have these different views of finance and how you should invest your money, spend your money, save your money. Anyway. I’ll take a quote from that.

And then trying to relate it to fitness. I think a lot of it is just like psychology, how you approach fitness and health and eating?

Because we all know, like it is. Somewhat as simple as move more, eat less, but it’s never as simple as that. And the thing to remember, or The thing that often gets lost is that. Eating it like, oh, abs are made in the kitchen. That’s a pretty common thing. But that’s why it’s the hardest thing is that.

It’s somewhat simple, straightforward, almost easy to. If it, all it took was to work out for an hour a day. And that was the only thing you needed to do. That’d be great, but you have to. For 23 other hours of the day, you have to eat right and not snack and do all these things. So good to talk about that. I’ve been talking for four minutes already.

I was hoping to make this intro one minute, but maybe this is good for introducing the idea of catching up. A little bit on what’s going on. I’ll talk about maybe like my home gym as I go along with this. Like those different things. Let me just get started. Okay. Sending this timer four minutes.

Times three. So these first. Three things. Psychology of fitness. Number one. Y everyone is doing everything wrong. Nobody’s crazy. And these are the subtitles from the psychology of money. So here’s the quote he says. No one is crazy. We all make decisions based on our own unique experiences.

That seemed to make sense to us in a given moment. In the buckets basically your parents teach you money values early on. And a lot of that can carry through. The rest of your life. And you’ll eventually get like more and more influences from there, but I don’t want to talk too much about like the fitness acts.

Or the finance. View of this ideas how this applies to fitness.

There’s so many different approaches to it. So so many different beliefs about. How to exercise properly. How to eat properly, what you should be eating. And a lot of it does come. From our parents to begin with this does remind me of the book. Wanting by Luke Burgess, where he talks about memetic desires and that the order of.

That you become influenced in like pickup. The things that you want first it’s from your parents and then it’s from your friends. And then eventually like more and more it’s by The media that you’re consuming. So if you are.

Scrolling through social media. Then that’s going to influence like the things that you want and.

And yeah, it is the thing that like personal experience just starts to shape different things. So this is why you get so many different opinions, so many

You just grab like a group of your friends and they’ll all have probably like somewhat different. And maybe some extreme. Differences between them. But here we go. I wrote a list of examples. So if you’ve hurt yourself doing CrossFit, you might have sworn it off. This was a personal experience of mine. I had, I didn’t swear it off. Actually. I tried it like three or four times.

Always would get injured within few months, but I still think it’s good. I think it was one meat, like it’s on me to just be better. Like not lifting as heavy. Or not trying to push it too much or practicing my form. But then. Other times it was just like what I would see is like a very good coach that but let it, and then, or owned the gym.

And it does that good coaching doesn’t necessarily always trickle down. Yeah. Or just trying to do it, just trying to do too much. That’s on my end. Once you get like that unlimited. Membership, you want to make the most of it, then you go on like multiple days in a row.

When you, your body’s really not ready for it, you haven’t progressed up to that. Okay. So more of them. If you’ve lost weight. Doing Quito then sometimes it’s it can seem like everyone. Not doing it is nuts. Like why wouldn’t they want to like, do this? It’s so fun to eat steaks and that sort of thing.

I’ve lost weight doing that. And then the thought like, wow, everyone should do this. If you’ve gained weight back doing keto, then you might think that everyone else on it will eventually gain it back. And that’s not true either. If you’ve maintained good health running daily. You might never understand why people lift weights. So this example is.

My dad always asks like me and my brother, like w

How we expect to be healthy at all, if we’re not running, because running has been like a core aspect of his life and more and more, I think he’s right. Like I should probably do more cardio. And that’s something that I will add in, but I won’t swap it out entirely for running or for yeah. Swap out like weightlifting for that.

And he doesn’t lift weight. And my dad doesn’t lift weights has good energy though. And it does just become like the trade offs that you want to

Except. So then another one, if you’ve maintained good aesthetics while weightlifting, you might never consider cardio for health and. This is. I guess the stereotype is probably if you’re in college, twenties, you care more about aesthetics. And if you. Are able to get to the physique that you want with weights. Then maybe you don’t consider cardio for health and you don’t understand why anyone would do it.

And yeah, just seeing this, like in my own life, just. All these different beliefs through every year of my life. And every decade where I think five years ago I was thinking, oh no, I just want to. Or even like, when I started this podcast, it was oh, I just want to feel good.

But then over like the past couple of years, I’m like, Oh, no, I should probably add muscle while I can, before. I get into an age. I’m probably almost there now. It was like before I get into an age where it’s extremely hard to put muscle on there’s just like a lot of leverage to. I don’t know if leverage is the right word, but like a lot of value to putting muscle on early.

When you can, and then you can it’s easier to maintain that through your life than to try to add it on later. Okay. I went over the timer there. So this next one, maybe this will be short. Psychology of fitness. Number two. I call this the weak bodybuilders, the wind powerlifters, the frail marathon runners.

And the subtitle here, luck and risk. Nothing is as good or bad as it seems. And here’s the book. From psychology of money. But more important is that as much as we recognize the role of luck, And success. The role of risk means we should forgive ourselves and leave room. For understanding when judging failures, nothing is as good or bad as it seems.

The story he tells in there is that. Bill gates had this wild success and had a lot of things going his way early on his parents and his neighbor. Say like neighborhood or like where he grew up. What his parents did. Set him all up. And that was a lot of luck, but the other side of that was risk and he had a best friend who passed away, had this kind of the same upbringing. And because of that

Wealthy upbringing. He was able to go, I think it’s like mountain climbing. So that’s a part of his life and then died during that. And that’s just like the opposite, like the, or like the reverse of luck that like the chances of that happening were as low as the chances of war. Four. Bill gates to become.

The richest person on earth. So how does this apply to fit there? So I’m trying to become elite in a sport is probably not the healthiest thing.

Even though playing sports regularly. Is one of the healthiest things you can do. It’s movement you’re with other people. So there’s the community aspect, but too if your a goal growing up is to be an Olympian and you don’t really like when you’re a kid, you don’t understand how hard that is.

And if you make that your singular goal and you don’t reach it, it’s very unlikely. Just percentage wise that you’ll reach it. And if that was what you’re dead set on and you think you’re, you have nothing to go. To turn to after that, that would be a pretty unhealthy thing.

Then there’s this. The more common thing is like, Everyone. That’s not everyone, but if you’re the best basketball player in your high school, you can get to college. You might start thinking like you might have a shot at the NBA, but it’s impossibly hard to like, Make it to the NBA.

But if you make it the goal Hey, I just want to get like a full ride through college. That’s great. And don’t put all of like the. Like your singular goal to. Making it to the NBA. Because yeah, Loxo genetics play a role, not the entire role. For SLA. I like fitness things like bodybuilder steroids play a role, not the entire role. There’s a ton of hard work and

They do have to just work out four hours a day. Yes. Drugs, help them recover, but they’re still like putting all the work in. And especially when it’s say bodybuilding where it’s like fair play, everyone else is doing that then. Yeah. Yeah. Like they know what game they’re playing.

Then. Let’s see. What else? What else did I have here?

Here we go. People with the six pack and this idea of Would you sacrifice all the good food that you eat? And the main question is how much are you willing to sacrifice? A lot of people are willing to sacrifice it. Like I said, the hour working out every day.

Because it can feel good to do that. In the moment or even But in the moment, maybe there’s like some pain in it, but if you’re playing sports, like it feels good to do that. And then after there’s the after glow of it but. Avoiding good food. He loved eating that’s just like painful.

Most of the time. So that becomes pretty difficult and then eating all that junk food. Say like someone that is out of shape. So an example I’ve seen is like Warren buffet, drinks, like regular Coca-Cola. I think he has a can a day, maybe multiple cans a day. So you can look at that and say like eating all that junk food is unhealthy.

But how unhealthy. Am I to like obsess over food. All the time and not that. I do but it is the thing of probably better to Relax. Have that Coke then too. Obsess over not having it for the rest of the day. I’m seeing, this is why I was saying like, I’m workshopping this. I don’t know that this all applies to luck and risk anyway. So working out at 4:00 AM every day can seem like torture. So that’s

The downside of it, but the feeling of discipline. Can be carried through the rest of the day. This is of course like Jocko, Willink talks about the importance of. Of discipline. And then he takes a picture of his watch many days, 4:30 AM doing his workout. Next up psychology of fitness, number three.

Never enough when rich people do crazy things. This is a book quote from psychology of money. Number one, the hardest financial skill is getting the goalpost to stop moving. Number two, social comparison is a problem here. And you see this in fitness that like Good health is one goal, but then if you.

You have like social media and you keep seeing like these people with perfect bodies over and over and over. And it’s oh no, you know what? Like maybe feeling good. Isn’t good enough. Maybe I need to look better. And then Oh, I look pretty good, but then like you start comparing it to the.

The entire rest of the world. And this is where the social comparison can be a problem that like, oh man I can look even better. And you can see like someone online did it faster. And the comparison used to be like to magazines. Like I’m not getting it done fast enough. This said I could get it like six pack and 12 weeks. But.

Actually, I couldn’t, there’s no six pack under there. Just. Should have focused on adding more muscle and then feeling good throughout the day is enough until it isn’t you want more and more. And I guess this also applies, I would say to the home gym. I’ve thought like they do joke about once you start the whole journey, you just will continue to add to it.

I used to always think, oh yeah. If I got Yeah, kettlebells enough to get a good workout. And so I got a few different kettlebells and then now I was like, oh no, you know what? If I get like a rack with a barbell, then I can do everything with that. And then, yeah, it just becomes comparison. You start looking at like different home gyms and I’m like, oh no, I need like a perfect lighting in there. Now I need a bike. I need some cardio equipment just adds up. And then I remember like when I was picking out like what rack to buy, just the ridiculousness of spending more time looking like each day for a couple of weeks, probably where I was just like looking at different home gyms for a longer.

In each day, then I was actually working out. So this was a thing of like priorities and getting that straightened out. With fitness. There’s never enough. It seems you can always do more. And. That’s. For this episode and next week, or hopefully like through the rest of December, I’ll keep working.

On these ideas, psychology fitness, definitely check out psychology of money. If you haven’t. It’s a great book.

Ramblings: Some questions to answer on this site

I’ve been thinking about evergreen content and how I might be able to use this site for rough ideas. Going to brainstorm some questions.

Things I did 5 years ago that I’ll still do 5 years from now…

  • Listen to a bunch of podcasts (though I might not ever beat the listening time that a NYC subway commute gives)
  • Work out (hopefully at some point I’ll actually lose that 10 pounds)
  • Read books (hopefully a little more fiction than I usually do)
  • Write somewhere online (and mayyybe there will be some form of an audience at some point)
  • Design/draw (being employed is a good thing!)
  • Watch videos/TV/movies

So if I turn each of those into questions…

  • Listen → How can you learn from listening?
  • Work out → How can you finally lose 10 pounds?
  • Read → What books are worth reading?
  • Write → How can you build a writing habit?
  • Design → How can you visualize ideas?
  • Watch → How do you tell good stories with video?

There are some useful intersections between all of those things.

3 Takeaways: “Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games” by Cliff Bleszinski

Check out the full notes for 3 Takeaways: “Control Freak: My Epic Adventure Making Video Games” by Cliff Bleszinski

I grew up playing video games and computer games. I have some hazy NES memories, but mostly SNES to Xbox 360. Then I just sort of stopped for 10 years. I’d pick CS:GO and Starcraft back up here and there for a few weeks. I got curious about the Soulsborne series (a coworker would take a day off on every release day) and eventually tortured myself with Dark Souls III for about a month. That’s the last single player game I beat.

Gears of War was one of the last games I was playing as video games slowly left my life.

I mention all of that to say that I have video game memories but read this book with no preconceived notions about CliffyB. A quick Twitter search and I learned he’s polarizing, to say the least.

He has incredible insight into what it’s like making games in different eras. (Yes, he loves Lamborghinis and a good name drop.)

Anyway, I loved his book and will recommend it alongside The Making of Karateka, The Making of Prince of Persia, The WoW Diary, and of course, Masters of Doom.

The power of a live demo (when others demo things held together with duct tape)

And I was going to play it live. Which is just not done. Not when your microphone can shut down. Or your controller can fail. Or the monitor you’re playing on can go on the blink.

Cliff was the face of Epic Games and one of his biggest demo’s was the Gears of War demo at E3 (18:20 in this MTV documentary).

A lot of demos were pre-rendered without actual gameplay. Some had gameplay but they were recordings. Cliff practiced and played it live. A lot can go wrong: a bug could show up, you could just mess up and die instead of making it to the end of the stage, it might just be boring, etc.

But he demo’d perfectly and it built up to a chainsaw kill.

Nothing better than an engaging live demo.

The feeling of getting something (anything) moving on the screen

My little Thunder Burner game had a helicopter that scrolled upward and took out enemy aircraft carriers and supporting ships. It was crude, but it gave me that same excitement of manipulating things on the screen, except now I was making them.

Always cool to hear about the early days of personal computing.

There’s a recent Neal Stephenson interview with Steph Smith where Stephenson talks about how there was a period where one person could create something as impactful as large companies. Tooling got better, team workflows got better, and now a single person can’t create at the same scale as a AAA game studio. (Yes, indie hits can sell better than a AAA flop, but the games will just be entirely different in scope.)

This reminded me of learning HTML. I wish I could remember exactly what I was reading to learn. But I remember feeling excited to change the page background and then get some text to show. I ran to my aunt (I’d go to their house after school) and pulled her to the room to show her and she wasn’t quite as mind blown.

That’s probably how some of the generative AI things will go for a bit. They’ll be amazing for people who are familiar with how hard it is. For the rest the AI will just be creating somewhat interesting images.

Dogfooding (endlessly)

Getting Jazz Jackrabbit ready to ship that summer required endless patience and a devotion to perfection. The only way to find all the bugs, errors, misspellings, and glitches was to play it. Endlessly.

One pattern through all of the game development memoirs is that playing your own games is just a known part of the process.

I did an internship one summer writing technical documentation for a database (DB2 for z/OS, to be exact) and wrote it without having an emulator to actually see the interface. We would translate very technical documentation to less technical documentation.

There must be great joy in building a game and having fun playing that same game.

That said, there’s also something similar to learning game testers aren’t exactly having fun playing the games—dogfooding the game in its early stages often isn’t fun.

For example, in the World of Warcraft diary, John Staats says things like combat and quests weren’t added until many many months into development. So you just have characters that can move but not do much around a world that exists but doesn’t have much.

Still, it sounds way more fun than inputting dummy text in a a form over and over and checking that the right things were sent over the network.

Money, money, money

All of us already had our own magic number that corresponded to a percentage of whatever went into the bonus pool, so I quickly did the math. After taxes, I wasn’t going to be a millionaire, not yet, but I would be able to pay off my mortgages and have a tidy six-figure sum left, and the game was still selling! So this is it, this is happening, I thought. I knew how it felt when life changed suddenly in a tragic way. But this, I told myself, this is what it feels like when life changes in an incredible way.

For whatever reason, this was surprising. I just assumed leading design and being the face of the studio when Gears of War came out would mean millions already. (That did come pretty soon after, along with much more money.)

He’s also another example where you work all your life on some craft but your biggest windfall comes from some investment later on. (Though you need the initial work to set yourself up to (1) run into the opportunity and (2) be able to afford to invest.)

He made the Gears of Wars games and started his own studio but the big payout came through an early investment in Oculus, which of course Zuck bought a few years later.

Sloppily tying things together, I started listening to The History of the Future, a book about VR and Oculus. In it, there’s a story about Palmer Lucky and how excited he was that John Carmack wanted one for demo-ing at E3. Carmack was really gracious in how he did it—he gave Palmer a heads up that he would make sure to mention that it was Palmer’s headset, not his, but invariably (and he was right) some of the press would get it wrong and credit it as Carmack’s headset.

Years before all of that, Cliff was studying Carmack and Romero, masters of rocket launcher feedback:

Carmack and Romero had perfected gibbing. I mean, it was the first time a rocket strike would explode someone into chunks of flesh. To this day, that’s one of the most satisfying ways to take someone out in a first-person shooter. It’s also one of the most misunderstood elements of gaming.

Check out Control Freak, it’s a fun read.

117: Karateka, WoW, and “Discipline is Destiny”

Transcript

Here we go. Microphone is on. I’m just recording. It’s been a long time. We’ll see if I even post this. Anyway, so I’m just gonna go with the most basic plan for recording a podcast. I always think when I sit down and think about how I should do this, it is that I should write some book notes on different book quotes.

Throughout the week and then record once a week. I sometimes come to this conclusion that I should record a little bit each day, do like five minutes a day. What ends up happening when I’ve done that in the past is I repeat myself over and over and over. Um, and yeah, it’s, it’s, it made me realize how easy it is to just like forget and how quickly it is to forget that I’ve talked about something.

So the first book I’m going to talk about is called the making of Karate or Karate. Kraka, Um, not sure exactly how to pronounce it, but it’s by Jordan Ner. He is also the creator of Prince of Persia. He has these two books, Making of Kaotica, Karate Tika, and also the Making of Prince of Persia, their development diaries.

I have been really enjoying these types of books. Another one that comes to mind is, Not development, but more of like a production diary by Robert Rodriguez. He wrote a book called Rebel Without a Crew, where he talks about not the making of Desperado, but of El Mariachi the movie that he made before Desperado and just captures like his rise to fame.

Anyway so the making of Karate Rodika. From its journal was 1982 to 1985, and it’s just him talking about his freshman year, I think it is at Yale. And if he just talks kind of like week to week, he’ll just have different diary entries about what he did. Um, and it’s not, I, I think it’s not necessarily about.

Karate. Like he didn’t start writing his diary to capture that, but a lot of it is related to that because that was his main project during those years. But there’s just stuff about like what he’s doing at Yale, what he’s doing when he returns home, what he does as he begins, like exploring, working at large game companies on the West coast and.

And, and the thing that is, I guess comforting in a way, not exactly mis real love’s company, but um, just to see something relatable is, and that he can, is that he was still successful even though he went through different periods. You can see the indecision in some things about he questions. Path he should pursue.

He’s very interested in film, so he is considering like, Oh, should he just stop making games, go into film? Should he still pursue that? Um, and then you also see some of the overlap in, because he’s so interested in films, filmmaking visual storytelling, he’s able to integrate that into some of. Game development that Asia does, the game design and karate is one of the first games, maybe the first game with in Game Cinematics, of course it’s like it’s the eighties, so it’s still images with some text, but it does create this sort of, um, different storytelling then games before it had done and probably started.

A legacy that lives on today as far as having cinematics and games and getting the game play to become more cinematic over the last few decades. And here here’s a book quote. He says, July 23rd, 1983, it’s been karate, K day I v Versa, and d racked all 12 block shapes. It really is a joy to work on something I enjoy working on.

It seems too good to be true. After Alphabet. I can’t wait to get up tomorrow morning and work on it some more. That’s the end of the quote, and it just captures how excited he is to work on karate. This is July, and then he returns to school. Real life beyond programming gets exciting. He’s, he, he, he, he’s, Capturing like all his dates and that sort of thing.

But he will mention if there’s a girl at school that he’s interested in or someone that he met and just captures like, Oh yeah, real life was happening. So in the summer he’s waking up excited and in September, so in the fall, he wakes up excited, but not necessarily in the same way. So this entry is from.

Six weeks later, seven September 7th, 1983. I’m not working on karate. This is dangerous at this moment. Computer programming seems boring compared to a lot of other things. If I don’t jump back in soon, I may not want to. That’s the end of the quote. So yeah, July. It’s a joy to work on something I enjoy working on.

Can’t wait to get up to Mor tomorrow morning and work on it some more, and then six weeks later. I don’t know if I’m interested in doing this, and I know that it’s important to get back to it, or I may never pick it back up again. . So, yeah, that’s why I like this book. Enjoyed it and it, it, he does eventually release it.

It’s up and down throughout, and just seeing that that is something that can happen in the pursuit of creative project, any project. Um, it’s not gonna be that excitement forever. Even if you do find something that you. Love doing. If it’s on one single project, it’s hard to stay that interested in a single project.

Some, so probably in a single craft you can do for your entire life. But if you were very interested in playing the guitar, but then had to only work on one song your entire life, you’ll, you’d probably start to lose some interest. Um, this next quote is from a book called. The more you do, the better you feel by David Parker.

I heard about this book through an interview that Ali Ab Do, Did. He’s the, he’s a YouTuber. You makes videos about productivity. Um, Ali Ab Do was a doctor and then became a YouTuber. where he would talk about medical school and then eventually went full time to YouTube. And now, um, I think most of his business is in building courses for people who want to create YouTube channels.

Um, but he interviewed another author Oliver Berkman, who wrote a book called 4,000 Weeks. And he also used to write, I think it was like a weekly or monthly, um, Call him about kinda like productivity topics and that sort of thing. So he’s seen all the techniques all Oliver Berkman, and he wrote a book called The Antidote, which is kind of about like anti productivity.

And same thing with 4,000 weeks where it, it’s not entirely like a criticism of trying to be productive, but it is, um, more a criticism of thinking you can. Become perfectly productive. You can perfectly plan things and execute things and kind of like bend the world to your will. My main takeaway from that book 4,000 Weeks is this idea that just.

You need to at some point accept, there’s comfort in accepting that you can’t control everything. You can plan certain things, but if you want to live a life with relationships and friendships with other people, to build things with other people, it’s going to require time with other people. And you have no control over their schedules, um, or at least much less control over their schedules.

And to think that. Um, you can somehow control that. That would be a, a fools errand. That’s kind of, um, what, 4,000? My, my favorite takeaway from 4,000 hours. Anyway, so he, in this interview Ali Ab Doll asks him like, Okay, you’ve seen all these productivity techniques, Which one actually works for you?

And he says, he, that’s where he mentions this book. The more you do, the better you feel by David Parker. And the method in the book is called Jot, j o t, just one thing. , it, it sound, and even as he’s explaining, he’s like, it, it does sound so simplistic. Um, maybe dumb even, but it, it has worked when he’s tried it.

And what it is, is you only write, you have a list. You don’t have a to-do list. You just start with an empty blank sheet of paper. You write down one thing that you’re gonna do next. And then once you do that, cross it off, write down the next thing that you’re gonna do. Do that thing, cross it off. So you always only have one thing that is not crossed off on your list.

That’s the thing that you should be working on and. Um, then by the end of the day, if you follow this, you have a full paper of things that you were doing. What this does is it, it’s like getting a bunch of layups in you. You get those small wins, you build some momentum, you see that you’re completing things.

And the examples in the book are, I, I think it’s from like the early two thousands. Um, Things like put the DVD case away or put the DVD back in the DVD case. Um, and there’s some more like work related examples, but they are very small tasks and the idea is that you can. Start with like as small of tasks as you need to, to just build that momentum.

Later on you can start to do larger tasks. Keep track of larger tasks, but you never turn it into a to-do list. You keep that separate somewhere else. You’ll have a project list, task list somewhere else, but the main thing is to have a running jot. List. Just one thing, one active thing. I found it helpful.

I’ve tried it during the workday. I found it helpful for, um, I’ll just get distracted and then at some point I will look at the list and remember like, Oh yeah, that was the thing that at some point in my day I decided is the most important thing before I got distracted with this other stuff. Um, so here we go.

This is a quote from the book. The more you do, the better you feel. he says. However, as soon as that warm glow of satisfaction began fading in its place, I began reviewing, examining, and criticizing the efforts that had brought that job to a close. Why didn’t I finish it sooner? It really wasn’t that difficult, was it?

Why am I so dumb? What’s wrong with me? That’s the end of the quote, those different questions that come up. Um, and I, I’ve. I, I think everyone has experienced this. I’ve experienced it recently where I’ve put off projects for a while or like tasks for a while, days, weeks. And then once I actually sit down to do it and like review what I needed to do, it’s like, Oh, okay.

That task was not as large as I thought. It was not as hard as I thought it was. Sometimes it’s harder sometimes, like there’s of course cases where you sit down to do the thing and it, it’s just as hard as you thought it would be. But there are those situations where you sit down and do the thing and then realize like you have spent maybe like 10 times more energy worrying about it.

then it would’ve actually taken to you just go ahead and do it. So start using that. The just one thing list, I found it helpful. Um, and he also includes this other quote from Deepak Chopra. The best use of imagination is creativity. The worst use of imagination is anxiety. All right let’s see. So.

That’s the second book, the third book that I’ll mention that I finished really fast as far as my reading goes. Um, it was something like 400 pages. I finished it within a week. I had some long flights, so we flew to New York and back. So there’s a lot of time to read. It’s this book called The World of Warcraft Diary by John Stotts.

This is another development diary game design diary. John STAs was. Game designer, level designer who worked on World of Warcraft leading up to its original release. So he was working at Blizzard. It was actually the first team that he joined. So that’s interesting. Just it was interesting to hear him joining Blizzard.

Coming onto, like during the interview, he’s not really told what game he would work on, and then I think not until maybe the middle of his first day or like first week. I think it’s the first day. Um, Someone like pulls ’em in and says like, Hey, do you even know what you’re working on? Let me show you.

And then it’s very, very, very early version of World of Warcraft. Um, I never played World of Warcraft. I, in hindsight, I don’t know if this is actually true now, like, you know, it’s been almost 20 years, but my memory of it was I played a lot of StarCraft, I played a lot of counter Strike. I had seen some friends get very addicted to text based RPGs.

Um, and then I saw World of Warcraft was gonna come out. I hadn’t played an mmo. Um, I think like, kind of to this day I haven’t really played an MMO with any like seriousness. Um, but I saw, yeah, okay. World of Warcraft is gonna come out. It is. Looking awesome. Like gonna, it’s gonna look, I mean, it looks awesome.

It looks like a lot of fun, but I’m also going to start college and maybe I don’t want to start playing what looks to be a very, very addictive game. Um, and I don’t know I just ended up, that was kind of the reason I remember like not playing it. So I’ve never played the game and reading this book, I wish I had, I wish I had spent like some amount of hours playing this game because it sounds like it was such a great experience for the people who played it.

God knows, I, I had time in college, so, um, Yeah. Which was probably spent play StarCraft instead. So like, I could have just been playing World of Warcraft. Um, and yeah, it’s, it’s just a great book about I wrote down some takeaways. Games aren’t exactly fun until near the end of development. The, there’s a nuance here where he talks about Blizzard makes their own.

Game engines. So that’s where it’s like most of the development of the game is in building the engine. So for years he talks about like, I think it’s like one or two years. I think it’s like even up to two years where the game is just a world where you can run around. Even like most of the collision detection isn’t there.

Um, There’s no quests. So Quest got added later. No objectives, no combat. MEChA, like no combat. There’s animations to like swing your weapon, but um, the characters that don’t have any stats, so you’re not able to damage things. Nothing, Nothing is built into the game to make it fun. It’s just a world that you can explore.

Um, But he loved that he loved game design and he would, how he got the job. He talks about like he, his portfolio was, um, these levels he made for quake on the side and that’s what he applied with and was able to get the job. And he just loved making, um, designing levels and. Um, it does remind me of like what I mentioned earlier, that karate quote where he’s talking about like, you know, working on something you’re excited to work on in the morning.

And it sounds like John STAs was pretty much excited and happy to work on level design for years. And, um, he, he does talk about the amount of hours that they worked and it is a big contrast to today where work life balance is so emphasized. And even back then, it was kind of emphasized. He talks about like, Oh, we’re, we’re doing crunch, like, crunch hours, but it’s not as bad as StarCraft.

Blizzard learned you can burn out the team beyond repair. With StarCraft they were doing crunch hours, but for World of Warcraft we’re only doing two days a week. So Mondays and Wednesdays you have to come in and work late and you get Tuesdays and Thursdays to recover. And then, um, Yeah, it maybe you come in on weekends, um, and work a full day then and that’s, that’s kind of like what it is.

That’s what’s, what’s, what’s expected. And then they have the crunch month leading up to different releases, different big dates. Um, Anyway, Excellent book. I it was, yeah, just like fascinating to learn about how a game is put together. I have some understanding of like how software is put together with new parallels to like a game development team.

Not exactly the same, but understanding there’s like engineers working on different things designers working on different things. The difference is probably there’s artists, like a large team of artists, and then. Product manager is similar to game development. There’s the producers. It sounds like they have similar roles.

I haven’t done game development, so I don’t know if like, I, I’m guessing this is like pretty similar. Um, and here we go. Here’s the quote that I have here. Alan, Adam. Had long maintained. It was amateurs who felt compelled to be original. These were the guys trying to impress journalists with novelty and who rarely asked themselves if their new approach was better.

For years, Blizzard had shrugged off accusations that we never invented anything. We treated games seriously as a business, not as an opportunity to be AvantGuard. That’s the end of the quote. This is from world. The World of Warcraft Diary by John Stocks. What he’s talking about there is, um, Alan, Adam, he’s, I think one of the founders of Blizzards or, or of Blizzard or, um, I, I should look it up.

Um, let me see. I’ll do a quick pause. Here we go. Okay. A Adam is an executive producer and one of the original founders of Blizzard Entertainment. And yeah, so. Um, yeah, the reason I highlighted that was probably just, um, in thinking about creativity and what that means and that oftentimes it’s combining things that exist.

And if you are trying to create something entirely original, that can be difficult. But there is the balance of, um, how much you are combining from different things. If you’re only. You know, taking like 90% of something that exists and then combining it with like 10% of something else, maybe that’s not enough to, um, be like adding value to the world.

But this mindset of creating the best of something that exists is, has worked for, or worked for Blizzard back then. I have not followed games as closely these days, but um, I did see like people were mad about like Diablo being like mobile or a mobile version of Diablo and now everyone’s waiting for Diablo for hopefully they can get back to their roots.

I have no, um, say in the matter, I haven’t followed it much beyond, um, beyond that. That’s like kind of what I know. Um, and it does remind me of say, Apple and how the iPod was not the first MP3 player, but it became the best one. Um, and now the last book this last quote is from, I’m reading this one pretty, pretty quickly as well.

Um, have the audio book and yeah, I’ve just been like listening to it. Fittingly, like while working out. It’s called Discipline Is Destiny, The Power of Self Control by Ryan Holiday. One of my favorite authors, I, I’d listen to the Daily Stoic podcast and have read a number of his books. Um, And yeah, if, if you like, ego is the enemy and Obstacle is the way or any of Ryan Holiday’s, books, I think you’ll really enjoy discipline, his destiny, the power of self control.

I’ve really enjoyed it. I think it’s, um, just a good time for, I, I was really like looking forward to it, probably more than any of his other books and more than any, Book that I can think of like recently and say like the past year for like a non-fiction book, like , like waiting, waiting for it to release.

Like the week of like, Oh, I hope I can’t wait to start reading this thing. And then of course like thinking my head okay a little bit, like I know it’s not true, but then there’s always that feeling of. I’m gonna read a book, a book about discipline, and then become perfectly disciplined after. And then, um, you know, live a perfect life after that.

And I know that’s not true, but hopefully I’ll be able to apply a little bit of discipline. I, I feel like, um, this year there, there was just a lot. We did, um, the house hunt at the beginning of the year. That was like the first three months and then the next six months it was hard to. Footing because it’s like trying to settle into the house and then every month there was a wedding, um, some months, multiple weddings, and it was just a lot of traveling.

Um, and yeah, lot of traveling and yeah, just, it does become hard to. I’m making it is an excuse, um, or like a reason, but it does become, you know, you’re, you’re with friends. There’s a lot of social events for these trips. Get the mindset of like being on vacation. Um, and I say their excuses because it’s clearly like, Oh, I could have approached it as, um, Time to double down.

Like I’m gonna take a trip. That means I have to be diligent about working out, like in the hotel or whatever it is. Making sure to set up some rules to follow and eating with friends and, um, and all of that. And, um, hopefully I can do that in the future. But just didn’t do it this year. Um, Have at least been like pretty consistent, I think with working out, but it was, Oh, also I had like elbow pain.

There were just a lot of reasons, but I’m hoping I can build some discipline, get back on track, um, and the year, right. Um, in better health, better shape. Um, and yeah, whole, I I didn’t even talk about the book yet, so, um,

Here’s a quote and one I think I want to keep in mind. We’re gonna go on. Trip in a couple weeks to, or actually next week to Europe. So it’ll be a nice time for me to try to stay healthy. Don’t let myself go entirely. And this is the quote from the book, Discipline is Destiny. The body is stupid. You have to understand, and our en, our temperament has to save it from itself.

The body wants to eat until it is full, but it ends up way past that point. The body wants to drink until it is drunk, but we only feel that way when we’re well beyond drunk. The body wants to be numb. It can put up with horse piss if it works. As Kennedy said, the body wants what it wants now, it can deal with the consequences later.

That’s the end of the quote and yeah. Really enjoying the book, and it’s, it has probably like what you expect it to have. He talks about practice has some descriptions of musashi and muhi practicing with a sword Lou Garrick and his practice. And, um, just that resilience to be able to show up every day.

You don’t have to. Lift mountains every day. You kind of just need to show up, do the work. It’s not always gonna be great work. Um, and it reminds me of workouts where, um, I listened to Pat Flyn and Dan John. They have a podcast together. Um, each of them has a podcast and they’re big on kettlebells. Dan John invented the goblet squat, so, um, Maybe wasn’t the first to squat with a go, like with a kettle bell, but um, definitely is credited for popularizing it, naming it.

Um, and yeah, they have this term called punch the clock workouts. These are, um, the ones to keep in the back pocket. You. Come in, you know, even if your mood’s down, you’ll be able to do something worthwhile in like 10 minutes to 20 minutes and come in, punch the clock, get out, and you’ve improved yourself a little bit on that day.

And that’s something that I’ve been trying to do. The past week the past month or so I’ve been doing, like getting back into barbs. But um, for the past week I’ve been like, leading up to this trip. I just wanted to start to. Into, I, I was missing daily workouts, the barbells, it was every other day. Um, and then I was just not really enjoying the days off in, not, not in a no days off sort of thing, but I do feel better when I workout.

So I was trying to think of like, let me just start doing, finding like a daily workout. So I’ve been doing like a 30 minute workout with Kettlebells. It’s. Written on the wall. Nice thing. Easy to follow. Have been doing that and I’ve just found it is something I look forward to. And after I’m done, I feel good.

Um, anyway, so hopefully I can build some discipline, hopefully. Um, I’ll record more podcasts in the future. I think I let things get away from me. I guess like create in the like side projects, creative work, um, because like actual work was getting like kind of hard also. So, um, thanks for listening this far.

Um, Podcast is still alive. I think at some point I’m going . I I did buy the url, active-recall.com. I need to switch it back. The reason being, I’ve started to make some YouTube shorts and I really don’t want to change the name. I have like youtube.com/active recall. So I’m just gonna make it, bring it all back to Active Recall and then me and Wally, at some point we’ll record again, as usual.

Thanks a lot. Thanks for listening. Read on or something. Go, go read a book.

Book Notes: Mamba Mentality

I bought Mamba Mentality a while ago but I’m finally getting around to reading it now. I decided I needed a world-class mindset built around greatness to truly crush it while sitting in my chair writing and editing videos.

Here are 3 takeaways from Mamba Mentality

Do you (actually) want to be great?

A lot of people say they want to be great, but they’re not willing to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness.

They have other concerns, whether important or not, and they spread themselves out.

That’s totally fine.

After all, greatness is not for everybody.

This is one of the most important things: everyone wants to be great but they don’t actually want to, because it comes with a lot of other things. And it often doesn’t come with happiness.

Kobe sacrificed a lot. We probably don’t know the depths of his sacrifice. People with kids can probably feel what it’s like to miss time with them. That’s on the path to greatness. Once you’re there, it’s probably impossible to get a feel for what it’s like to not be able to spend time in public with your kids. In peace.

Sacrifice Sleep (BUT NAP)

“I wasn’t willing to sacrifice my game, but I also wasn’t willing to sacrifice my family time.

So I decided to sacrifice sleep, and that was that.”

Now, before you go and set that 4 AM alarm… I definitely want to point out this quote from Phil Jackson: “I could go on listing records and accounts of his scoring prowess, but that was really a side note to Kobe’s evolution as a player. My staff would meet at 8:30 AM at our facility before a practice or game to prepare for the coming day. More often than not, by the time I pulled in, Kobe would already be parked in the car next to my designated spot, taking a nap.”

“Sometimes, as part of that, I’d be so tired I’d need a quick nap at some point during the day.

Whether before practice or a Finals game, on the bus or trainer’s table, five hours before tip or 60 minutes, if I was tired I would doze off.

I always found that short 15-minute catnaps gave me all the energy I’d need for peak performance.”

Watch and learn

From Mamba Mentality:

“From a young age—a very young age—I devoured film and watched everything I could get my hands on.

It was always fun to me.

Some people, after all, enjoy looking at a watch; others are happier figuring out how the watch works.

It was always fun to watch, study, and ask the most important question: Why?”

And he talks about watching what’s in front of him to evolving and watching to look for what’s missing. What could have gone better? What was another option?

Alright that’s it for now. I’ll do another video as I continue reading. I’ll leave you with this last quote from the book…

The only way I was able to pick up details on the court, to be aware of the minutiae on the hardwood, was by training my mind to do that off the court and focusing on every detail in my daily life. By reading, by paying attention in class and in practice, by working, I strengthened my focus. By doing all of that, I strengthened my ability to be present and not have a wandering mind.

If you want the opposite of practicing focus, please go watch my 7-15 second shorts