Active Recall!

“Question tradition. Who says you have to keep your vitamins in the kitchen or floss in the bathroom? Maybe your vitamins need to be next to your computer. Or maybe flossing works best when you keep floss next to your TV remote. You’re a Habit Ninja, not a conformist. Find what works for you.” (BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits)

I keep some floss in the kitchen and in our living room.

It removes just enough friction that I’ll floss earlier in the night. Flossing is the part of my wind down routine that I look forward to the least, so I took it out of the wind down.

I just floss sort of whenever, sometime after dinner.

It’s the end of eating for the night, because I definitely don’t want to have to floss twice. There’s a bonus there because sleep is improved when not completely stuffed.

Then there’s just getting to bed in the first place. The friction of walking to the bathroom and flossing stood no chance against the frictionless behavior of lying on the couch with the TV on while scrolling on my phone.

I wouldn’t want to floss, so I’d stay up later, the night routine starts later, I’d sleep later, then get up later the next day.

Keep floss in the kitchen, wake up energized.

Three steps

• Open Readwise and browse for a highlight that I have some thoughts on
• Paste it into Drafts and write and use an action to create a draft in WordPress
• Publish in WordPress (sometimes adding a photo)

I can write a post in 15 minutes vs. agonizing over it when I’m publishing to Twitter. Maybe it’s the idea that people might actually see and hate what I’m writing there. (Always delusional, because I don’t actually have enough followers to make that something to worry about.)

Book quotes give me some borrowed credibility. Readwise makes it easy to pull book quotes to use.

Drafts helps me focus on just writing. It loads up super fast and is pretty distraction free.

And WordPress just keeps chugging along.

“When I was training for contests, I’d sometimes be so psyched up mentally I thought I didn’t need a warm-up. I’d go directly into a heavy workout. Without fail, I’d pull muscles needlessly and set myself back two or three months.” — Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Arnold: Education of a Bodybuilder”

Consistent good work will help you be great over time. (Better put here: How to Be Great? Just Be Good, Repeatably).

Part of that is doing the right amount of maintenance so that you can keep showing up every day.

• Before: Make sure to warm up
• During: Don’t go so hard one day that you can’t show up the next day
• After: Find ways to wind down and recover

It’s pretty straightforward for exercise and often people skip the before and after steps because they’re out of time or it’s just boring.

I started making a rule to count the warmup whenever I’m estimating how long a workout will take. This was after throwing my back out with a kettlebell. (Luckily it wasn’t too bad. I wasn’t bed-ridden or anything. But I was definitely scared to do kettlebell swings for a while after that. And probably am still a bit scared of them because I know I haven’t cleaned my form up enough.)

Here’s how it relates to creative work.

You should have some ways to warm up for your main work in some way.

• Before: Do a typing test — I heard this from Captain Sinbad, who I think mentions he got it from Ali Abdaal. A big part of their work as YouTubers is to write scripts for video. So this should work well for others writing at a computer. You do a typing test so that you can mindlessly get your body going. You embody the activity and eventually your brain will catch up to you. Is this scientific? No idea. But I can’t imagine it hurts to get your fingers moving if you’re about to start writing.
• After: Shutdown routine — Cal Newport suggests having a shutdown routine at the end of the day. This helps to create an official end to your workday. Having a concrete end prevents different pieces from lingering through the rest of your evening, when you should be using to recharge in different ways.
• After: Take a walk — In short, get away from screens for a while. I like to do gym workouts after work so that I can create some space away from the screen.

Choosing to stop to rest is okay but do what you can to avoid being forced to stop.

The Lakers eliminated the Warriors last night. Stephen Curry points out that being a championship team is a fact that is eventually proven or not.

“No competitor believes [you’re done] until you’re proven you’re not a championship team. And that’s what getting beat in a playoff series is.”

If you don’t win the championship team, you’re not a championship team that year.

Belief can take you a long way…

Steve Kerr: “We came close to recapturing what we had, but we didn’t quite get there. We didn’t feel like a championship team all year, but we had the guts and the fortitude to believe.”

…just not all the way.

Here’s how belief comes up as a creator.

Encouragement helps you get started. Knowing something is possible is a start. Roger Bannister inspired people by breaking the 4-minute mile, but no one was couch-to-4-minute-mile the following year. All the runners who broke it the year after that had running experience.

Experience solidifies belief.

From “Growing Gills” by Jessica Abel:

In our individualistic society, which says that “believing in yourself” is both a sign of strength and an innate trait rather than a learned skill, wanting outside encouragement may feel “weak.” That dynamic is one of our biggest shame triggers-because it feels like a sign that you’re not cut out for this, and that you’re not the independent free spirit you wish you were.

But you can’t talk yourself into self-belief. To own that confidence and feel it authentically, you have to repeatedly act in a way that builds up your trust in your own creative impulses over time. In other words, you have to make your work.

In “The Creative Habit”, Twyla Tharp writes about how mastery means you can start a new project with optimism.

More than anything, I associate mastery with optimism. It’s the feeling at the start of a project when I believe that my whole career has been preparation for this moment and I am saying, “Okay, let’s begin. Now I am ready.” Of course, you’re never one hundred percent ready, but that’s a part of mastery, too: It masks the insecurities and the gaps in technique and lets you believe you are capable of anything

There’s a different type of optimism knowing something is possible because you’ve seen other people do it (which is good too) vs. knowing something is possible because you’ve done it in the past.

In “The Creative Act”, Rick Rubin writes about how belief can backfire. The belief that any project will be the defining project of your career can be motivating. But it can push you toward perfectionism

It can be a sudden loss of faith in the project. Deciding it’s no longer good enough. We find flaws that don’t really exist. We make inconsequential changes. We sense the distant mirage of some better creative option that hasn’t been discovered yet. And if only we just keep working, it might arrive someday.

When you believe the work before you is the single piece that will forever define you, it’s difficult to let it go. The urge for perfection is overwhelming. It’s too much.

In 2019, Klay tore his ACL and KD tore his achilles. It was the career-defining run for the Warriors. That was the end. 

Until 2022.