Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

24: Edit Better

We opened by talking about UFC 217. We will not niche down to MMA, but we just might start getting down to making videos and vlogging. Wally and I both make videos on our own. They’re very different, but the media is roughly the same.

In light of that turn, this week’s book is Edit Better by Jeff Bartsch.

We had this idea that we’d take some of the lessons in this video editing book and see how we could turn it into general life advice. Actually, here’s the convo where I ran through some ideas with Wally (by “convo” I mean it’s me writing paragraph texts):

That text followed the format we had in mind more than this podcast did.

People then respond with righteous indignation, “I will make my own choices because it’s a personal thing and I am going to be me and I’m going to create my own editorial reality and who R U to tell me how to make my own personal choices you stupid big obnoxious judgmental person you stop judging me stupid judger I shall now post sarcastic yet contextless updates about you on social media.”

This is something I lean on too much. I want to do things my way. In every case, I’m wrong. I didn’t want to do what some podcasts with higher production value do. When I did start adding some of those elements (structure with some audio signposting, adding some music), the episodes improved.

Video-wise, I’ve been trying to skip some necessary steps for making videos. In the making-of videos I’ve seen, people making whiteboard videos always start with a script. I’ve been trying to start with an outline and it leads to problems.

I’m okay with this, though. I’ve learned some things about making videos quickly that I think will pay off in the long run. (Contrasted to skipping standard podcast procedure that just led to worse podcast episodes with no benefits in the long run.)

I mentioned some YouTube channels that I really like:

  • PictureFit: Short animated videos on just about every fitness and nutrition topic you can think of. He also did a great livestream Q&A where he shares how he grew his channel.
  • AsapSCIENCE: Similar to PictureFit but instead of fitness and nutrition it’s about a broader range of topics. ‘Science’ is in the title but there are videos like “What if Everyone Lived Like Americans” and “Introverts vs. Extroverts“.
  • Extra Credits: I started watching I think around when they just started expanding into other topics like history. I’m excited to see they started doing sci-fi videos. When I first got my iPad I looked to Extra Credits for inspiration for simple, engaging visuals. In the past year they’ve grown the team and now the illustrations and animations are more elaborate. It’s great.
  • Nerdwriter: Some of my favorite content on the internet. Evan Puschak 1.) has interesting ideas and 2.) is good at presenting them in interesting ways. I’d love to have a handle on just one of those two things. If you’re all caught up in Game of Thrones, check out his side by side cut of one of the battles in the latest season against clips with similar shots from other classic movies. That reminded me of the side-by-side of the “Let Your Game Speak” commercial with the original shots.

Another section in our episode was about the editorial planning rules:

Determine your Desired Outcome

Determine your Message

Determine your Market. Who is your audience?

Determine your Media

Determine your Method, the driving idea or unifying concept behind your project

If you’re making videos, check out Edit Better. It’s great.

If you want tenuous connections between video editing advice and life, hit play on our podcast episode!

Book Notes: This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better

Don Draper taught us a little bit about how to be terrible human beings and great copywriters. In This Book Will Teach You How To Write Better, Neville Medhora helps improve your copywriting without betraying your family and spiraling into darkness.

“No one cares about me, they care about themselves…” “No one cares about me, they care about themselves…..” “No one cares about me, they care about themselves…….”

One scene I still think about today is when he’s in the elevator with Ginsberg, aka the Superstore guy. Ginsberg thinks Don isn’t a good person and says that he feels bad for him. Don’s reply? “I don’t think about you at all.”

It was a huge lesson for me: people don’t think about you that often. Even if something happened between you and one other person, good or bad, they aren’t thinking about you.

They’re thinking about themselves too much to worry about you. Think about your end. Even if you’re thinking about them, it’s actually in relation to how it affects you.

When writing copy for an audience, don’t talk about you. They’re not thinking about you. They’re thinking about themselves so tell them how you can help them.

Waaayy too many websites/emails/letters incessantly talk about themselves first. Kind of like: Welcome to Ace Tennis Coaching. We are dedicated to serving our customers. We have been focusing on quality service for years, and have a dedicated staff to help fulfill your tennis needs. Our team is focused on quality coaching and delivering great training. We aim to serve our customers needs blah BLah BLAH.

We we we. It should be about you you you. We’re great because we do this. Well how about you’ll feel like you have Andre Agassi’s mullet after going through a session.

Don Draper didn’t talk about Kodak. He made you feel the importance of preserving your memories. What if you could re-watch your life? You can’t put a price on them. (But Kodak can!)

It’s easy to say what you’ve done. But focus more on what you’ll do for the customer. If someone comes to your house for help with something you wouldn’t walk them straight to your trophy case. Pass by it and let them notice the rec league championships on their own. Jump right into how you can help.

This is actually a shockingly easy task to do, and I’m going to reveal how…right now on the next page: Write casual copy! ….that’s it. That’s the whole secret!

I don’t do this enough. I’m trying to do this now and I still have a hard time doing it. Something that’s helped me is writing an email draft.

While I was reading this book, I subscribed to a few copywriting mailing lists. Because they’re good at their jobs, I also now have been sold a bunch of copywriting Info products.

Anyway, while reading this, I sent a daily email to a friend. I let him know it was just practicing writing more casual posts. Writing in iOS mail or the Gmail app helped a lot. It’s a different environment which gave me a different mindset.

iOS Notes and Evernote have everything and I sometimes get the feeling that I won’t publish things I write in these apps. It might be that percentage-wise, most notes are a few sentences (or even a few words) that are never intended for publishing. Too casual.

Ulysses and Google Docs are on the opposite end of the spectrum. They’re not casual enough. I feel like I need to polish things there.

Writing emails brings out the right amount of casualness. I also know that my friend (my podcast co-host Wally) actually reads the emails. They say you should have a reader in mind so I literally had a single reader in mind.

23: The Power of Moments

We’ve missed a few weeks but we’re back! We’re talking about the The Power of Moments by Chip and Dan Heath. You should also check out our earlier episode about Made to Stick by the same authors.

In this episode we cover a few different topics from the book. We talk about:

  • Good and bad customer service experiences
  • First days of work that we remember
  • Moments that are crystallizations of discontent
  • Moments that affected our lives that have had a long-lasting effect

Stay with it until the end where we do a short  scripted section that we wrote from the book.

My Year of Running Safely

I just finished My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman. Does two make a list? If so, here’s my current list of great audiobooks for running:

  • My Year of Running Dangerously by Tom Foreman
  • What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami

(I’d call it the list of great audiobooks for ‘runners’ but then you might mistake me for someone who can run for a mile without getting winded.)

When I say “just finished” I mean like just a few minutes ago. And I just finished a run as well.

It wasn’t a dangerous run like you’ll find in Foreman’s book. I’m guessing he does more than I just did for a warm-up.

I started running about a month ago. I was walking to a Blink nearby which I’m a member of strictly because there was a Blink very close to my old apartment and I haven’t gotten around to canceling it. While walking to that gym, I realized I could get to my regular gym in about the same amount of time if I ran.

So I picked my pace up and headed to my regular gym.

That began my year of running safely. (I think. I mean it’s been a month now and I’ve been jogging 2-3 times a week. I know that a month isn’t a year and that runners probably don’t consider what I’m doing running.)

Oh yeah, the book.

Foreman used to be a long-distance runner in his younger days. He picks it back up after his daughter asks if he’ll train for a marathon with her. Foreman shares his thoughts about running, family, work. It also has chapters that are diary-style entries about different runs.

Those sections really get you inside his head and are the best part of the book.

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running Murakami has a similar section about running the original marathon course in Greece. (That might need a capital-M Marathon.)

I’ve mentioned twice that I wouldn’t call myself a runner. I also don’t call myself a writer.

When can write about my runs and make it 1/10th as enjoyable as Foreman or Murakami make it, then I might start calling myself a writer.

Today I laced my shoes up and headed out the door. I use a futuristic elastic fanny pack to hold my keys and phone. Years ago I had an arm band to hold my phone which was inconvenient for jotting down workout notes between sets. (But great for feeling like the Predator.) Then I ran for 20 minutes.

I’ve got work to do.

Brain bruises and the power of words

Bret Hart talks about living with a severe concussion in his biography Hitman.

Again, he told me it was all part of the concussion: my brain was like the squares on a soccer ball and the square that triggers pleasure had been bruised.

Bret Hart told his bosses at WCW that he had a concussion but he still had to go out and perform. Other wrestlers didn’t believe him. Hitman was published a decade ago. This was before mainstream discussion about concussions and CTE.

Through the NFL, we’ve learned just how severe an injury a concussion is. Mostly because, if I’m to believe everything from that Will Smith movie (“Tell the truth!”), the NFL didn’t want the long term effects of minor concussions to get out in public. Former players are getting CTE and have really poor quality of life because of their mental issues.

Growing up I would hear about so and so getting a concussion. My mom had migraines, so I just suspected a concussion was some kind of super migraine. It seems silly now, but it was a time when players would regularly get concussed and then go back out a few plays later.

If you sat a game out because a concussion, you’d be ridiculed as soft by fans.

I didn’t really know what a concussion was until hearing Dave Dameshek talk about it back when he had an ESPN show. He said people wouldn’t take them as lightly if they were called what they were: brain bruises.

A bruise is a much better mental model for you to use. You’ve had a bruise. You’ve had a charley horse or been punched in the arm by a friend. You’ve probably had much worse in your life. Imagining that the same thing is on your brain, then it’s understandable why you might want to take the game off. And perfectly understandable why you wouldn’t want to go out and take a steel chair to the head.

Sympathetic links between ideas

I made a few videos a couple months ago where I talked about a practice I was calling the 9 connections. After some thinking, I realized that connecting ideas in interesting ways is important for creating interesting content. I was watching a lot of Nerdwriter videos and that’s part of what sets him apart.

The 9 connections exercise was my attempt to make a deliberate practice routine around connecting ideas. I’m seeing some of that practice pay off in this week’s exercise. 

I’m working through the Psychotactics.com article writing course. One takeaway from this week’s assignments is that you can connect anything to anything.

Recency bias can be strong so I’ll try to take advantage of it now. I wouldn’t make the following connection if I wasn’t reading The Name of the Wind at the same time that I was doing this week’s exercises. 
The Name of the Wind is a fantasy novel. I can’t explain much or spoil it because I’m not that far in. There’s magic though, called sympathy. And the magic seems to revolve around linking things.

That’s in theory. In practice, it feels like you’re lifting three drabs. No sympathetic link is perfect. The more dissimilar the items, the more energy is lost. Think of it as a leaky aqueduct leading to a water wheel. A good sympathetic link has very few leaks, and most of the energy is used. A bad link is full of holes; very little of the effort you put into it goes toward what you want it to do.

It’s like connecting ideas while writing. If you sit and think about it long enough, you’ll find a connection. Whether it’s good or not is an entirely different matter. 

If you create a bad connection, it’s full of holes and your readers will need to spend a lot of energy following it. A good connection requires little energy to follow. A great connection creates energy and makes readers more interested. You can create momentum for them to keep reading. 

In this week’s writing assignments, I thought of a good connection relating baby carrot processing to the writing process. I created a terrible connection relating teaching to a story about the invention of the crockpot. (A literal crockpot, not the “oh that guy is a crockpot” kind of crockpot.)

For instance I tried linking a piece of chalk to a glass bottle of water. There was very little similarity between the two, so even though the bottle of water might have weighed two pounds, when I tried to lift the chalk it felt like sixty pounds. The best link I found was a tree branch I had broken in half.

The more you practice, the more you’ll improve this skill in two ways.

First, identifying good connections. You’ll grow to have a feel of whether the connection is good or not. Either right off the bat before wasting time connecting the ideas. 

Second, speed. You’ll be able to connect anything to anything quickly. Sometimes you’ll surprise yourself with a good connection that you didn’t see before trying.