Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Andrew Huang: Make a lot of stuff

From “Make Your Own Rules: Stories and Hard-Earned Advice From a Creator in the Digital Age”

The thing that really made me better was just that I worked. A lot. There was no substitute for time spent on my craft. I should’ve known this from my experience with piano lessons, and from seeing the regimens of the virtuosos at York, but I had never felt that level of drive for mastering a particular instrument. I had the mistaken understanding that practice was mainly about physical training—getting your fingers or your voice to respond with nimbleness and accuracy. The truth is that it’s just as much about your mind. I eventually realized that writing and production were my deepest musical passions, but also that they could be practiced. Of course they can: after writing your hundredth song you’ll be a better writer than you were when you wrote your tenth.

I loved Ali Abdaal’s “Feel-Good Productivity” but wish it had more about his journey on YouTube. I love Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” but it had stories about specific artists he’s worked with. Luckily, each of them has a podcast where they share more of those sorts of things.

Andrew Huang’s book has similar themes and he does talk about his journey making stuff online. I grew up on the internet in a similar time, so of course I’m really enjoying the stories about late 1990s/early 2000s internet. Putting a site together with HTML and FTPing things to servers.

He has a deep deep understanding of music. I made awful rap songs with my friends in high school. We would hop to whatever the best free audio host was at the time (SoundClick sticks out in my mind) and join forum tournaments to try to win some prize: usually a drum machine or something like that.

My friend won a smaller tournament and won a GameCube, then the tournament hosts said it got lost in the mail or something like that. I don’t remember exactly other than the fact that he won but never got the GameCube.

Okay anyway. I’m loving the book so far. One chapter motivated me to make… something tonight.

Create every day, judgment free. Make it a point to set time each day (it could be fifteen minutes, it could be all evening, whatever is feasible to you) to buckle down and create. Do just the creating—no editing, no polishing. That means no revisiting yesterday’s work to try to make it better—or at least not during this judgment-free window. Let brand-new ideas happen without worrying about them being complete, perfect, or even good.

And this post is it.

Robert Greene: remember that you used to have stress

From “The Laws of Human Nature” by Robert Greene:

Most of us remember a golden time of play and excitement. As we get older, it becomes even more golden in our memory. Of course, we conveniently forget the anxieties, insecurities, and hurts that plagued us in childhood and more than likely consumed more of our mental space than the fleeting pleasures we remember.

Journaling is great for remembering that it wasn’t perfect. These days I do try to skew toward positive things happen when I’m journaling. But it’s not as highlight reel-y as a social media feed.

Sometimes I’ll flip back through old notebooks. (Usually when I’m supposed to be decluttering or something.) It’s not so much that I see either flawlessly happy periods or any dark nights of the soul.

Instead, and I’ve heard this isn’t uncommon so I don’t kick myself too much for this anymore, I see that I’m worried about a lot of the same things I still worry about today. How I’ll finally lose 10 pounds. I’ll finally focus on a side project. Maybe this time.

Or I’ll see some work thing that doesn’t matter at all years later. It’s at least a good reminder that any single specific work thing today won’t matter in the long run.

Some things really turn golden over time that weren’t golden at all in the first place. When I moved to New York, for 5 weeks I hopped from Airbnb to Airbnb to Airbnb to Craigslist sublet to finally a formal sublet. This wasn’t squalor, but it was one of the most stressful periods in my life.

Now all I remember is the excitement.

Daigo Umehara: Daily routine

Daigo has one of the most interesting daily routines so I made this video about it and also just talked about other lessons from his book “The Will to Keep Winning”.

The routine reminds me of The Cultural Tutor interview with Ali Abdaal where he talks about his own start-of-his-day routine, which sounds like it starts in the late afternoon or early evening:

Cultural Tutor: “So I get dressed and then the first thing I do is I’ve got to get outside and not do anything in particular. Just to get a coffee. I’ll drink a coffee at home and then just go outside and see what’s happening. Just walk around for a bit, like 5 p.m. and see what the weather’s like and let my brain slowly emerge.”

Different ways to win.

Seth Godin: Flow is a symptom

From “The Practice”

If we condition ourselves to work without flow, it’s more likely to arrive. It all comes back to trusting our self to create the change we seek. We don’t agree to do that after flow arrives. We do the work, whether we feel like it or not, and then, without warning, flow can arise. Flow is a symptom of the work we’re doing, not the cause of it. 

Without looking, I’m sure that I’ve written about this highlight on the blog before.

Right now I’m trying to work without flow and at the very beginning of what I hope will be a common practice.

  • Set a timer for 10 minutes
  • Grab a book highlight
  • Write for the rest of the time

I don’t know that it’s going to lead to great writing, but I need to practice publishing more. And I’m sort of okay blogging into an empty void at the moment. My thinking is that it makes some ideas a little more real than just throwing it in a notes app. In Tiago Forte’s terms, it’s a better “intermediate packet”. From “Building a Second Brain”:

That system is your Second Brain, and the small pieces of work-in-process it contains I call “Intermediate Packets.” Intermediate Packets are the concrete, individual building blocks that make up your work. For example, a set of notes from a team meeting, a list of relevant research findings, a brainstorm with collaborators, a slide deck analyzing the market, or a list of action items from a conference call.

I’ve been writing in various notes apps and text editors daily for… it seems like forever. It’s mostly private. I started aiming to write 1000 words this year after hearing Nathan Barry talk with Ali Abdaal about how life-changing 1000 words a day can be. Now I’m trying to shift that more toward 1000 words a day published.

The first idea: write a 1000-word post every day. No matter what, that seemed sort of difficult to make interesting. I hadn’t even started and I was already overhtinking: what kind of format, should it be a link roundup, should it be around a single topic, etc.

I didn’t pursue that idea and just sort of forgot about writing publicly.

Today while talking in the car (to the Otter app, which has become a bit of a habit), I realized I could break the 1000 words up into multiple posts daily. Take one highlight from something and then write about it. If a connection comes up, it probably means there’s another post that I can write about.

I don’t need flow to write one of these posts. But sometimes in the middle of writing a few posts, it arrives.

Cal Newport: Why he loves watching movies

From Cal Newport’s interview on the Rich Roll podcast (YouTube)

I wrote about that in the book that learning a lot about movies helped my writing.

Because if you study what makes movies great, that process is not intimidating because I’m not a director. So it’s just interesting. And oh, this is great. Look at these directors and they have this vision and you’re just being exposed to raw creative impulse.

I found that was helping me in my writing. I was getting inspired by what people were doing in this other art form. And then that was giving me ideas about taking risks in my writing.

Whereas if I was just directly studying writing, it’s harder because now it’s uncanny valley. You’re studying people who are kind of doing what you’re doing, but a little differently. All the stresses of your job as a writer kind of getting involved in it. So I found studying an unrelated creative art completely from a hobby perspective, re-energize the art I do for a living.

I’ve done something similar in the past few years in studying an unrelated creative art. I make my living in UX design, but consuming UX-related content outside of work starts to create an opening for the stress of work to leak through.

Instead, I lean toward game design content. It seems to be the right balance for me. A lot of creative principles are there and applicable to UX design. Sort of. At least to the abstraction of “Hey here’s the creative process we used to build software”. The connection between God of War level design and enterprise UI is sometimes thin, I admit.

Then I can learn from creatives and instead of thinking about work, I tend to think about games I grew up playing.

I’m also trying to just start watching more movies. Going to the theater has the modern bonus of being a place where you deliberately won’t use your phone for a few hours. (Unless you’re a monster.)

For my second viewing of “Dune: Part Two”, I did a solo trek to an SF Metreon 70mm IMAX showing. I did the same for Part One a few days after watching it on HBO with friends on a TV and then reading post after post on Reddit about how you have to see it in theaters.

BTW, Cal Newport’s book “Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout” is out. Great so far and I’ll be sure to write some notes here.

“Feel Good Productivity” Book Summary: Takeaways from Ali Abdaal’s first book

(The video above is more focused on using the book principles in fitness. Just wanted to point out it’s different content from the text below so check it out if you have a minute!)

I’ve followed Ali Abdaal’s journey on YouTube for a few years now. While not one of the earliest subscribers to his medical school content, I was there when he started to make content about the iPad. I was also making content about using an iPad and his content was much better. It’s been cool to see how he’s evolved as a creator and now an entrepreneur and author.

My main guidance if you’re thinking about reading “Feel Good Productivity”: if you want to learn more about his journey as a YouTuber, you probably won’t find it in this book. I don’t know if it was a personal choice or on guidance from the publisher. But there seems to be more credibility in sharing stories as a doctor and from scientific studies. I kept hoping for more about his journey as a creator in and out of niches from medical student to doctor to tech to productivity to entrepreneurship to being an author through traditional publishing.

I’m left still hoping for that.

What remains, though, is an excellent book about, well, the cycle of joy that can lead to more productivity that can lead to more joy. If harnessed correctly.

If anything, I’ll remember this one question:

What would this look like if it were fun? I stuck the note to my computer monitor and went to sleep.

Feel Good Fitness (a personal case study aka how I’m applying some of the tactics from the book)

And it’s certainly a book full of tactics. They’re labeled “experiments” to try. “Feeling good” and “being productive” will vary from person to person. Some people try to maximize productivity, unfortunately putting off “feeling good” forever. The best way to accomplish that awful outcome is to put the two at odds.

I’ve dabbled in many fitness programs. The dabbling is probably why I don’t get results. Anyway, one philosophy I like is StrongFirst’s, especially around intensity. Most training session should leave you feeling good afterward. This is directly opposite of other approaches, where the main goal is to obliterate yourself and be lying in a pool of sweat by the end. Find joy in the pain.

Feel Good Alter Ego (you only have to be Goggins for an hour)

World of Warcraft is probably a more entertaining setting than my garage with virtual windows everywhere

Ali describes his character in World of Warcraft:

I’ve always been Sepharoth, the tall, handsome Blood Elf Warlock with billowing purple robes and an army of demons at my command.

I’m guessing he’s also a Final Fantasy VII fan? Video games show that we’re willing to learn new and pretty hard things for the sake of entertainment.

(On the other hand, I’m less willing to learn to play new games these days. I think there’s a lot of rust for me to shake off and I’m always a little frustrated when I take a couple weeks off of a game and come back to it and realize I don’t know the controls anymore. It makes me feel very very old.)

Games can be an escape. They can sometimes be more entertaining than the real world. The character in your virtual world might carry more prestige within those virtual walls than you might feel you have in the real world.

You can try to have fun with building an alter ego in the real world. Or a part of the real world both in location and time. When you walk into the gym, you can build up a different mindset. Paraphrasing what Shaan Puri says: you don’t have to be Goggins all the time, you just have to be Goggins for an hour a day. That’s enough to get get the movement required for good physical shape. (The kitchen becomes the hard part at that point.)

I am not quite a tall, handsome Blood Elf Warlock. But in time I’ll have an army of demons at my command.

Our devices are bringing our physical and digital worlds closer and closer together. It’s going to become easier and easier to create and hop into different alter egos. Maybe someday soon I’ll be able to just embody some digital Goggins with his hater’s mixtape pumped directly into my brain.

Sincere not serious

You can’t make every part of work a game, but you can probably adjust some parts of your process to bring some aspects of games in. But even games aren’t always fun, depending on the mindset that you bring to it.

The trick is simple: when you feel like your work is draining or overwhelming, try asking yourself, ‘How can I approach this with a little less seriousness, and a little more sincerity?’

Poker with friends comes to mind. The right amount of stakes makes it fun. In college, this was like a $10-20 buy-in. Winner gets $200 and the rest don’t feel too bad about losing.

High stakes takes the fun away. There’s too much seriousness. If you’re playing for, I don’t know, your house. Oh, it’ll be engaging. And I’m sure it’ll feel great if you win. (And presumably win your opponent’s house to turn into a rental property.) But it probably isn’t all that fun during it. Even if you win you’ll be drained at the end of it.

Zero stakes also takes the fun completely out. There’s no sincerity. There’d be times where we’d think “Oh poker is fun, let’s play.” but not everyone would want to play for money. So then we’d try to play without money. “Okay it’ll be fun just because of the competition.” But removing the stakes removes the sincerity of it. Everyone just goes all-in way earlier than they would’ve if money is involved.

In your work you’ll want to find the right balance. You can burn out in either direction. If you’re taking it too serious then every day will be draining. If you’re not taking it serious at all then you’re probably working without purpose.

To reduce the seriousness, it might just take a bit more deliberate recharging. Something to remind you that work isn’t everything—you’ve got things outside of it. To increase sincerity, look at it as a training session—if you have to do this tedious work anyway, you may as well try to get better at it so you can get it over with faster.

(TO BE CONTINUED… my pomodoro timer went off and I’m feeling good still. I’ll come back to this post in a bit. Writing this a little bit at a time or I’ll never finish.)