The Notepod

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Ramblings: Intensity and other things

Sometimes it seems like the only thing that matters for me when it comes to actually publishing anything is to write in the editor. So I’m back in MarsEdit writing this post and also back on the treadmill after a few days leaving it idling.

I’ll try this combination:

  • MarsEdit for writing to the blog
  • RH Timer for keeping a timer on the screen
  • Roam Research for some book highlights

First up, from “Sicker in the Head” by Judd Apatow — he asks Amber Ruffin about her time practicing comedy in Amsterdam.

Amber: Almost everyone was there for two years.

Judd: That’s so long. Do you get better at what you do in that environment?

Amber: You become untouchable when it comes to writing, but it’s a lot of short-form comedy. That’s not everyone’s favorite form, but that’s all you need, fundamentally. All I need to do is be able to come up with a punch line under pressure; that’s all any comedy is. So, once you are doing nine, ten, eleven shows a week over there, you are sharpened by the audience. One time, I was performing for three hundred Italian sailors, and English was their third language. I realized if I could get them to laugh, then I can do anything. An experience like that knocks the fear right out.

I’m a sucker for any description of work intensity. In practice, though, I’ve leaned more toward trying to avoid burnout. Which is probably why they have successful comedy careers and I’m writing in MarsEdit on a treadmill.

Anyway, I’m enjoying “Sicker in the Head” and still crack open “Sick in the Head” here and there to re-read some wisdom from comedians.

Let’s see if I can find another “here’s a time I worked very hard” quote from a book…

Okay there’s that Arnold Schwarzenegger one about squatting in the forest.

So once a week I took a training partner and drove out into the country with the weights. We limited ourselves to one exercise for a particular body part.

I remember for the first day we carried 250 pounds out into the forest and did squats for three hours straight. I began by doing twenty repetitions with 250 pounds; then my partner did whatever he could. Then it was my turn again.

We ended up doing something like fifty-five sets of squats each.

The last hour seemed endless. But it worked. Our thighs pumped up like balloons.

That first day we gave our thigh muscles such a shock that we couldn’t walk right for a week. We barely could crawl. Our legs had never experienced anything as tough as those fifty-five sets.

He goes pretty hard. Again, I’m a sucker for any description of workout intensity. And, again, I’m writing this on a treadmill.

But I did get some kettlebell work in right before this.

Some wisdom from Dan John:

I have said the following about 10,000 times: Everything works. Everything works for about six weeks. In 10 years, there are a lot of “six weeks”.

So now I’ll be on six weeks of daily kettlebells, walking, and pull-ups. And mix in weekly running at the track.

Ramblings: The gym is coming along slowly

I wanted to get the home gym going as soon as possible, but it is currently a mountain of cardboard. I want to keep the paper moving on it though otherwise I could see it being in a 5% state for forever.

It took me a bit of time to draw a plan and figure out that 6 4’x6’ horse stall mats can be a 12×12 square. Yes, it probably shouldn’t have taken me like 20 minutes of sketching to figure that out.

Anyway, then I’ll just need 4 sheets of 4’x8’ plywood to set the plywood up properly and there will still be an un-wooded corner. I can live with that, at least in the short term.

I’m hoping all the posts from this week will provide a nice “before” set of things as I write about this garage gym build and eventually make a series of overwhelmingly popular videos.

In the meantime, I’ve been working out with kettlebells either outside or in the garage. My portable courage corner.

I’ve been enjoying the AM outdoor workouts more than I expected. I put the stall mats out on our patio to air out the rubber tire shop smell, but now I’m considering keeping a couple out there all the time to keep outdoor workouts in the regular routine.

I’m trying to emphasize getting the workouts in even when the conditions aren’t perfect. And now I’m starting to see that I definitely don’t need a garage gym with a power rack and other equipment. It’ll be nice and I’m still planning on doing it.

But these workouts have been great and are reminding me of why I was so interested in kettlebells a few years ago. I just feel better when I’m working with kettlebells regularly.

From “Simple & Sinister”:

Another vital reason to keep the rep count low, per set and per training session, is to leave enough energy for other things—practicing sport skills, being ready to fulfill your duty on the battlefield or just enjoying your day and not dragging your tail through it.

Get the reps in. After years of using (or, not using) pull-up bars that hang on door hinges, I’ve finally ordered one that requires an actual drill to install. My days of searching Amazon with “no drill required” are over.

Once I mount that thing in the office, I’ll have a pretty good grease-the-groove setup: pull-ups on the bar, walking on the treadmill, and enough open space in the office to do some bodyweight or kettlebell work.

When I want to go heavy, I’ll have to walk over through the kitchen into the garage.

Can’t wait.

Ramblings: I drilled a hole into the wall

“You’ve probably heard the old saying, “people don’t buy the drill; they buy the hole.” Well, I think you need to drill down deeper than that! What they want is not the hole in the wall; they want their wife to stop bitching at them because they haven’t hung that picture yet. They want their kid to be happy because they were able to put the nice neat hole in the front of the birdhouse or make the holes to bolt the jungle gym together.” — Jim Edwards in “Copywriting Secrets”

This is the whole “Five whys” sort of thing.

Anyway, I literally drilled a hole into the wall tonight. It’s my first time actually drilling into a wall. I’m not counting the times where I’ve used a screwdriver and pressed down very hard to then get an anchor into the wall.

I bought a drill and level and all sorts of other stuff that wasn’t entirely necessary. But now I have some holes in the wall.

I’m happy to hire people to do things around the house.

Or I was. But after buying a house, we started paying $100 here, $200 there to do some things that amounted to, well, mostly just drilling into walls.

Now I’m happy to hire some people to do things around the house.

Let’s just say I was much more satisfied paying the plumber to crawl into the crawlspace to cut into the floor and run a water line to the fridge vs. paying the electrician to drill a couple holes to mount a wifi doorbell.

Both jobs were about the same price!

It was all good work. So the unhappiness isn’t toward the people. Just toward myself for not knowing how to drill into a wall. I’ll be useless when the zombies come.

I saw a video on Instagram of someone making fun of the person he hired to mount a TV. The comments, as you might guess, was filled filled with people disparaging the guy for having to hire someone to mount a TV in the first place.

I don’t want to be that guy. (I at least don’t go around making fun of the people doing the work.)

I’m feeling some of the IKEA effect with this new shade: I’m much happier with it than I should be just because I put some of the work in. Like cracking a couple eggs to mix into the cake mix.

Anyway, here’s a book quote that has nothing to do with all of this except that it mentions IKEA. Mark Hunt with a nice analogy about the uselessness of instructions depending on context.

“Yoshida locked in one of my arms and it looked like he was going to get me in an arm bar, but I managed, with pure instinct, to get my knee on his face and out of that position. There was more yelling from my corner, but it was like having Ikea instructions read to you in the original Swedish. As it turns out, it’s pretty much impossible to undertake high-level Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu remotely.” — Mark Hunt in “Born to Fight”

And some puppy tax:

Info Diet: Steph Curry & Draymond Green

Writing on the treadmill again. I finished a kettlebell workout and a short run. Actually, today I do have a book quote. I was about to go dig it up but maybe for these treadmill writing sessions I should have some sort of rule: don’t mix up research and writing.

Or I need to set a timer to search for quotes. Anyway, I can just paraphrase the quote I have in mind. It’s not a specific one either so that’s probably where I’d get stuck when looking it up, deciding which one best captures the idea I was thinking of.

Okay so the idea is from Dan Pink’s book “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing”. There are milestones when it can be good to start something new. Obvious ones are January 1 and the first day at a job. He points out there really are a whole lot of others you can use as well: start of a week, start of a month, etc.

A great period to really shift things is when you have a completely new environment.

Again, starting a new job is good because you have a different office. Or you did, before everyone started working at home. But you probably have a new digital environment.

Anyway, we’re still in the first month of moving into a new house. It provides dozens of new cues.

Whether you use cue-routine-reward or obvious-attractive-easy-satisfying, moving is always a good time to rewire your habits. Here’s my current routine:

  • Wake up
  • Make coffee
  • Take Booster out, play with Booster
  • Feed Booster
  • Kettlebell workout

All of this leading up to work.

Writing this out, basically my dog’s routine is my routine.

Anyway, here are a couple questions from podcasts I listened to this morning.

Would Steph Curry give up the 2017 & 2018 titles to have won the 2016 title, sealing the 73-9 season with a championship?

Source: The Draymond Green Show: “Steph Curry”

Short answer: No, but mannnnn….

Draymond talks about the prep he did for the podcast and I’m glad he took whatever time it took to come up with that question.

You can feel Curry’s sigh when he hears the question.

It’s the sound of a few years of subtext.

  • Would you give up the KD titles to have won the championship?
  • How much does the “Warriors were up 3-1” thing hurt?
  • How much does a single game difference matter? (72-10 Bulls vs. 73-9 Warriors)

Curry does pause to explain his thinking. “Let’s check the resume.”

  • Reality: 3 championships, but losing the 72-9 season
  • Hypothetical: 2 championships, one of them with a 72-9 season

I think if you flesh it out even more, then reality definitely seems better.

  • Fleshed out reality: 3-1 in Finals, losing the 72-9 season
  • Fleshed out hypothetical: 2-2 in Finals, winning the 72-9 season. But then losing to the Cavs twice in the first 2 years with the KD Warriors.

J.R. Smith grabs the rebound, dribbles out, and hits a game-winning turnaround at the buzzer and the Cavs sweep the Warriors for back-to-back titles…

Ramblings: House stuff

I’m writing this on a treadmill right now. I haven’t published anything in what feels like forever. There are a few things that I want to make but then I just end up playing Starcraft or trying to tidy up the house. Unfortunately I’m doing the bad version of tidying up, where I don’t actually get rid of anything. So I just move things from boxes to plastic bins with some future hope that I’ll organize things and get rid of stuff.

There’s just a lot of stuff. It baffles me how we fit it into our smaller apartment. It’s like those mattresses that come compressed so they can be shipped and once you rip the box open everything sort of very slowly expands out.

Anyway, the house is coming together slowly. I could write something about how the house buying process went, but have a fear that someone will point out mistakes we made and that maybe we overpaid by some very large amount of money. Which would be helpful the next time we buy a house but it’d really be helpful if we were doing that any time sooner than years from now.

Okay so on a positive note, I mentioned I’m writing this on a treadmill.

One of the splurges I made shortly after moving in was to just get a treadmill with foldable arms so that it can go under a walking desk.

Here’s my current view:

Having a separate office in the house is great, especially after 10 years of studios and 1 bedroom apartments in New York and San Francisco.

I’m also working on building out the gym but currently just have before pictures. (To go along with like 20 years of “before” body pictures with no good “after” photo in that same stretch of time.)

Here’s a photo of the current setup.

If I flipped the camera around you’d see my face and also like 300 cardboard boxes.

And here’s the current outdoor setup for kettlebells.

I have six horse stall mats. Which do fit in the back of a RAV4 pretty well:

And, yes, they do smell like a tire shop and quickly made the garage smell like one. So I’ve pulled them out around the perimeter of the house to bake in the sun for a few weeks while I work on getting rid of the cardboard mountain.

There’s not really a book note here, but I just wanted to share some current shots of the office and gym in hopes that someday there will be good “after” photos.

And I wanted to get in the habit of writing posts on the treadmill.

So this is that.

 

We’re just a leisurely afternoon (so what?)

From “The Dark Forest” by Cixin Liu:

Two centuries was far too short for any visible change to come to these rocky mountains. What was the human world like in the eyes of the mountains? Perhaps just something they saw on a leisurely afternoon. First, a few small living beings appeared on the plain. After a while, they multiplied, and after another while they erected structures like anthills that quickly filled the region.

My wife and I are finally hopping on the Euphoria train. One of the episodes has a few different lines about memory and high school and the legacy of it all.

I’m old enough now to see that you do just forget most of the stuff that happened in high school. There are some peak moments. Some of the friends you stay in touch with. A few you actually do still see regularly as adults.

It doesn’t make the time unimportant. It’s a high leverage point in life where a lot of your future beliefs are going to be shaped. Even if it’s by interactions with people you’ll never talk to again after graduation.

“Whenever I try to remember friends from high school, friends from college, or even just friends from five years ago, my memory always creates the illusion that we were together constantly, just like those kids on Saved by the Bell. However, this was almost never the case. Whenever I seriously piece together my past, I inevitably uncover long stretches where somebody who (retrospectively) seemed among my closest companions simply wasn’t around.” — Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto by Chuck Klosterman

Now, I’ve been reading a lot of “how to write on the internet” sort of stuff lately. There should always be a CTA. Even if you’re not selling something, you should at least give the reader some sort of action to take. If you tell a story, there should be an answer to the reader’s “so what?”

So what do you do if you can’t tie something to an action the reader can take? I don’t know. Maybe remember that we’re all just a leisurely afternoon to the mountains. And the mountains are a leisurely afternoon for a galaxy.

And then hit publish anyway.