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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

Project50 Day 10: Re-focusing

Just doing a quick update on the different pieces here.

  • Wake up early: I have a couple hacks going here where I’m jetlagged from an international trip and also have a dog to wake me up with no regard for what day of the week it is or how many hours I’ve slept. Those mornings are definitely peaceful though.
  • Morning routine: I’ve got into a good routine where I’m taking Booster out for a walk immediately and then I do my workout in the morning. Will continue doing this.
  • Read 10 pages a day: I’ve been reading between all of Robert Greene’s books “48 Laws of Power”, “33 Strategies of War”, and “The Daily Laws”. It’s building up my motivation to make videos with notes about the different books.
  • Eat healthy: I’ve been hitting my 150g protein number each day. Protein shakes help a ton here. And I’ve noticed that I’m focusing more and more on high protein options.
  • Work out: I listened to a Mind Pump episode at the start of Project50 and the idea in it has been really helpful since then. With a home gym, you’re able to do 10-15 minute workouts throughout the day if you need to. I’ve been using that mindset to fit in a warm up and heavy barbell set in the middle of the day.
  • Practice learning a new skill every day: I’ve been making a YouTube Short every day and it’s been probably the thing that Project50 has changed the most. First I wanted to do something about Project50 every day. I made one but then I thought it’d be good to just experiment a bit with the videos and have been posting NBA and MMA videos with book highlights since then. (Highlight+Highlight). I think it’s knocking me out of a creative rut I’ve been in for a while.
  • Keep progress: in a journal I can see now why there’s a Notion template for this that’s a bunch of checkboxes and one long text field for thoughts. I’d love to write something like this post every day but there might be more useful things to work on.

Let’s keep it going!

Project50 day 2: How to use your inevitable failure for good

“REALISM A gambler once said to the Master, “I was caught cheating at cards yesterday, so my partners beat me up and threw me out of the window. What would you advise me to do?” The Master looked straight through the man and said, “If I were you, from now on I would play on the ground floor.” This startled the disciples. “Why didn’t you tell him to stop gambling?” they demanded. “Because I knew he wouldn’t,” was the Master’s simple and sagacious explanation.” “One Minute Wisdom” by Anthony De Mello

I know I’m going to check Instagram at some point today. Or like at 100 points today. So I’ve set up a quick automation in Apple Shortcuts:

  • When app is opened: Instagram
  • Then open app: Kindle

I used something similar a few months back to open The Drafts app for micro journaling anytime I opened up Coinbase or Coinbase Wallet. (As you might have guessed, those apps have become much less addicting after losing something like a Model X in a few months.)

You’re supposed to focus for an hour in the morning. I could avoid my phone entirely but I’m also trying to just design a better digital environment for myself. And that means setting up a few mattresses to catch me when I fall through a trapdoor.

I open social media apps when I’m bored and now it redirects to Kindle where I might be able to knock out a page or two instead.

I’ve already started noticing small moments when I should just be okay being bored. In particular, every time I leave the office I get the urge to check my phone. This is dozens of times during the day—lots of drinks, lots of bathroom trips.

Where you know you’ll fail, set up a shortcut in the right direction.

Lose yourself in it (instead of talking about it)

“Today, we’re more apt to talk about work than lose ourselves in it. We like to make a big show of it on social media. We spend a lot of money acquiring the right tools or setting up a fancy office.” — Discipline Is Destiny: The Power of Self-Control by Ryan Holiday

It struck me at some point putting together the garage gym that I was spending more time reading and watching more content about garage gyms than I was actually working out.

The same goes for work on some days. I think about work and worry about work and complain about work instead of sitting down to do the work. Then it isn’t quite so bad when I’m actually doing it.

Discipline is Destiny feels like it is coming to me at the right time. I’ve lost a lot of discipline this year and want to make sure to end the year strong.

We have a Europe trip coming up and my first thought was that I’ll hunker down after the trip. Reading this book reminded me that I don’t need to wait until after.

I shouldn’t wait until after.

I can enjoy the food without eating until I’m hurting. I can follow a daily bodyweight routine in the hotel rooms in the morning.

I can make the important things a priority.