June 2016 – Page 2 – Francis Cortez

Happy Money

In Happy Money, Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton explain the best ways to spend money to increase happiness, based on behavioral science. I really enjoyed it and have been trying to apply the lessons ever since I read it. Here are some I enjoyed:

Research shows that experiences provide more happiness than material goods in part because experiences are more likely to make us feel connected to others.

I’ve tried putting this into practice as an adult. I really value travel, will gladly save up for a trip, and never regret it. That said, it’s nice having a down jacket and experiencing not freezing to death walking to work.

We are happy with things, until we find out there are better things available.

Most people recognize this. The harder part is turning those feelings off. There’s always more. Always. I still struggle with this. Sure, this down jacket is warm, but they look warmer in the Canada Goose. And if I get that, then I’ll want the one with OVO stitched on it. And so on.

People who spend more of their money on leisure report significantly greater satisfaction with their lives.

It’s important to be deliberate about leisure and relaxation. Just like it’s good to schedule time for relaxing, it’s good to set aside money for leisure. It’s good to step back from the day to day stress and consider why you’re putting yourself through it in the first place.

You can probably afford some kind of leisure right now. And you can take take it a step further than a trip to a movie by following these guidlines:

The experience brings you together with other people, fostering a sense of social connection.

The experience makes a memorable story that you’ll enjoy retelling for years to come.

The experience is tightly linked to your sense of who you are or want to be.

The experience provides a unique opportunity, eluding easy comparison with other available options.

Pick experiences that are: shared, memorable, personal, and unique. (“Well I’ll never have the chance to do this again” leads to spending $20 more on odd things the further away you are from your comfort zones.)

By consistently asking yourself how a purchase will affect your time, your dominant mind-set should shift, pushing you toward happier choices.

Growing up, I never ever ever thought I’d pay to have my laundry done. I never did a thorough cost comparison or anything like that. It didn’t seem to be stupid. It just never crossed my mind that I’d need to do it. Or want to.

Then I moved to New York. And I found a sublet in Chelsea. The building’s basement seemed like there was a mouse army setting up a siege on the cockroaches on the other side of the wall. It happened to be where the washing machines were. I wanted to stay far far away from that.

That’s a little extreme, but even now in an apartment where things aren’t a horror movie, I’ve continued using drop off service. For probably $10 more than it would cost do it myself, I can buy two hours of my life back.

Friday Links Issue 01

Inspired by Tim Ferris’s weekly newsletter of five things, I’ll start putting together lists of five links that interest me. Maybe bi-weekly. Because if I’m going to get to 100 posts in 100 days then there are going to have to be a few repeated topics. So here are some things I enjoyed reading¹.

Also, I saved a couple bookmarks with Pocket. They’ll push to pinboard but I sort of forgot that I also have IFTTT pasting things to a Google Doc. That might help me put together a weekly link roundup.

Sorry, You Can’t Speed Read

that does not mean that you can somehow magically read parts of a page that you don’t look at, or process all the words in a superfast sequence.

I’ve always wanted to read faster. It’d be great to read, say, a book a day. More often, I’m hearing people say that they’re becoming okay not finishing books. Books sometimes appear over-anecdoted and fluffy because they are. Something about book sizes and airport book stores. Publishers want a certain book size and book stores do too. Mostly so that it looks like a book.

I can’t remember who I first heard it from, but someone pointed out that if you can get one great insight as a takeaway then the book is worth it. Related, someone else (unless they were the same person) said that for, say, $12 you can get years of someone’s knowledge distilled down. I’m feeling less guilty about skimming through parts of books². Especially when I recognize the same study being referenced.

In (praise of) Process

But it’s also important to remember that small follow-throughs are what big follow-throughs depend on, and that a “finish line” is actually the last of a series. You have to cross many before you can cross the final one.

It’s about the journey. That’s my biggest takeaway from my time involved in TechStars. You can’t always focus on the end result. The journey is the interesting part. The fun part. It reminds me how important systems are. And focusing on the system and building a system that you enjoy going through. Or at least don’t hate going through. The system makes the journey more enjoyable and will get you to the payoff. I need to read this article probably.

In my effort to write daily, I’m seeing how consistency comes completely from the processes in place. If I have a good system for looking forward to the morning, then I’ll wake up when I want to ready to write. If I have a good system for writing then I’ll have a completed draft to edit. If I have a good system for editing and posting, then I’ll post consistently.

RIght now, I have systems in place for each of those steps but there’s a lot of room for improvement. In particular the editing and posting part. I get distracted by things like file directory organization.

Let’s sleep on it

Studies of human learning provide tantalizing evidence that sleep helps us retain new memories, but they don’t provide information about how it does so.

I recently read Sleep Smarter and enjoyed it. I thought I knew a good amount about sleep hygiene (I’ve got my blue blockers and a tub of Natural Calm in the kitchen), but there were a lot of new things and it was a good reminder of the things that I knew.

Some of the new things were that magnesium comes in a more effective cream form. And that working out at night isn’t great for sleep. I always thought that working out makes you tired and and, in turn, sleepier. But working out energizes you and can make it harder to sleep. Working out in the morning is great because it gives you energy in the morning and later at night helps signal when you should go to sleep. The book has citations. I’m citing the book.

There’s a chapter about meditation, which I really want to start practicing. I’ve done it maybe two or three times in my life. I listened to 10% Happier and thought it was one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to. Then I didn’t meditate. Too many smart people meditate and there’s too much science backing it up to ignore it.

Paul Stamatiou: 10 years blogging³

I’ll be here pumping out one ridiculously-long article or photoset at a time, keeping my little corner of the Internet tidy and well-stocked.

I can’t remember how I started reading Paul Stamatiou’s blog. It was shortly before he stopped blogging regularly and started writing very long, in-depth articles. It’s great to read about his journey through the different stages that blogging has gone through. In particular, it’s a journey of both writing and tinkering on the blog itself. He made a huge transition from WordPress to Jekyll.

His photography site was a big inspiration behind a design sprint article I wrote. I saw his photography site and wanted to do something similar for my Spain trip. Then when I was putting out page layouts for photos, I thought what I had was clunky. And that’s when it hit me that it might be worth doing a design sprint to look at possible solutions.

I wrote about the sprint and that was a huge step in my career as a designer. It reminded me of the reach that’s possible through blogging. I wrote a few more things about design and blogged about them. Some were read a lot. Some were barely read at all. And writing this now reminds me of how valuable writing is. And tinkering.

In high school, I set up phpBB for my friends to mess around on. I also set up (gray matter), b2, and WordPress for me to mess around on. I didn’t make it quite to 10 years straight. I stopped after 5 or 6. But I’ve looked at that WordPress installation recently and it has 1500 posts.

Blogging is amazing and it seems to be having some kind of a revival, especially if we’re counting Medium.

Bill Simmons Breaks Free

Great profile on Bill Simmons in The Hollywood Reporter. I’ve read Bill Simmons since he was on ESPN Page 2. Not quite since he was on AOL. But for a long time. I went to a Book of Basketball signing. I forwarded his article about the Dooze to my crush during college and she said she loved it but didn’t understand all the sports references. I’ve listened to his podcasts from when it was kind of weird to have a podcast.

Something he would say (or maybe said one time in one podcast) is “You’ve gotta get your reps in”. He did that with his writing. Then with his podcast. He’s become an amazing interviewer. And now he’s got a TV show and the beginnings of a media empire. My brother and I took that as a mantra and say it to each other every so often in conversation. You’ve gotta get your reps in.

I wrote most of this post on a plane. I’ve been trying out writing in 30 minute blocks and breaking those blocks into smaller intervals. I’m thinking of them as sort of writing sprints—until I think of a better name or find out a name for this type of thing already exists. For this post, I gathered 4 links to write about. Then I did 2 minutes for each topic, cycled back and did 4 minutes on each topic, then tried polishing things with the remaining 6 minutes. ↩
This reminds me of Effortless Reading, a book about reading. It talks about a book rotation: something you’ve read already, something new, something classic, a biography, fiction, non-fiction. ↩
I was trying to find this link and first searched for “10 years blogging”. It wasn’t the first result and it wasn’t even on the first page of results. I’ll try to go through a collection of those posts to see what some of the common takeaways are. ↩

Japan Trip 04 of 10: As seen on TV

Aka Places we visited with better things you can watch online.

Osaka in general — No Reservations

We watched this episode on the flight to Japan. I wish they just had all Anthony Bourdain Japan-related episodes of various shows¹.

We didn’t go to any specific place he visits on the show in Osaka. Actually, we did go to one of those places that has a bunch of battered and fried stuff. The episode was from 2006 and man I can’t believe it’s been 10 years.

We had similar food though. The battered and fried sticks mentioned above and also takoyaki. And we saw the street with the statue that people take pictures with.

Tsukemen place from Mind of a Chef — Mind of a Chef

Watch: Lucky Peach: Inside Tokyo Ramen Street’s Rokurinsha

There it is, right in the subway station. What isn’t shown on Mind of a Chef is that the shop is part of a line of restaurants in the station nicknamed ‘ramen row’. The wait was about 25 minutes and when you’re near the front you’re pulled out of line to order at the vending machine.

They’re very good about storing your luggage while you eat. The noodles are good and the broth is amazing. I said no to a bib because I believe in myself. Then I proceeded to cover my shirt with broth droplets.

After you finish the noodles, they add hot water to your tsukemen broth so you can have it like soup.

Also, while trying to find the Mind of a Chef clip of this, I saw that YouTube has a similar Lucky Peach episode. Then I remembered on the Bill Simmons podcast, David Chang mentions his foray into TV with Lucky Peach. They shot footage and then it was cut into some episodes of Mind of a Chef. The Lucky Peach episode is like watching the red band trailer of a PBS show. F-bombs abound.

Lawson — appeared on Parts Unknown, but in an Okinawa episode, which we didn’t visit

Anthony Bourdain is better with words than I am. On Lawson:

But there’s… one thing that still has an unholy grip on me. For no reason I can gather, it’s the convenience store, formerly of near-Akron, Ohio, that mutated into a massive Japanese chain. Behold, the wonder that is Lawson. What exactly about this place has its tentacles so deep into my heart and my soul?

I experienced it and love Lawson too. Growing up, we had a convenience store right off base. I think it was a 7-11 but I can’t remember for sure. What I do remember is that it was the pre-field-trip ritual. My mom would drive me there and we’d pick some snacks up. Usually that meant a rice ball and what then didn’t have a name but now we know as Uncrustables.

On this trip, we went to Lawson just about every day. 7-Eleven was another option, specifically when I needed an ATM. We would stock up on water for the hotel room at Lawson. Japan also has the game sort of locked on canned or bottled ice coffee.

I was also able to find Real Gold, though it comes in a Red Bull type can now instead of the small glass bottle that I imagine is what Elixir would be kept in if Final Fantasy were real life.

Also, me and my brother talk about how we used to always drink so much Real Gold when we were kids. And have guessed that it probably had a bunch of caffeine or nicotine or something so it never made it to the US market, even though it’s a Coca Cola product.

I remembered that David Chang has as segment in Lawson. I was scrolling through the Mind of a Chef episode descriptions, then I remembered it was from a No Reservations episode about Cook it Raw. He like, really loves Lawson.

We watched a couple other food-related shows available on the flight. It reminded me how good a host Anthony Bourdain is. Watching the other shows was so cringe-y. ↩

Seth Godin and Stephen King's pencil

Maybe this writing project will just turn into recapping podcasts I enjoyed. Who knows.

Either way, this post is about Seth Godin’s appearance on the Tim Ferris podcast. I mentioned it in an earlier post I wrote at Dunkin Donuts but couldn’t recall whose podcast it was on.

Along with the excerpt, here are some other things I enjoyed while trying to find¹ his thoughts on writing rituals.

Bad ideas: Seth says daily blogging is one of his top 5 best business decisions, because it leaves a trail and he can continue doing it forever. Seth says he writes probably five posts a day, but stresses he has no ritual. Sometimes he’ll look at his queue and feels like he can write something better, so he does. But he says any good writer, if they’re being honest, will tell you they write a lot of bad things before getting to the good.

Write right: He writes right in Typepad, the blogging platform he uses and has been using for years. He shares a story about learning something from Chip Conley, who he went to business school with:

He got five of us together, and every Tuesday night we met in the anthropology department for four hours. And we brainstormed more than 5000 business ideas over the course of the first year of business school.

…He picked the anthropology department because he knew someone there and could get the conference room. He said, “This is the only place we will ever do this. And the reason is because when you walk into this room, you will associate this room with what we do here.

It only happened in that location and location is an important thing. The significance of writing in Typepad is not that it’s the best editor or anything, it’s that it’s the location where he goes and knows exactly what he’s there for and what he should be doing. I’m trying to find my location².

Stephen King’s pencil: Tim asks about Seth’s writing ritual. “What time? Do you write in the morning?”

It’s not interesting to me to talk about how I do it because there’s no correlation that I have ever encountered between how writers write and how good their work is. So they should move on because it doesn’t matter.

I will now write ten more posts about how I write.

My dream is to be considered a good writer so I can tell people that I write in cafes. And I drown out the cafe sounds with headphones playing scientifically focus-approved cafe sounds. And that I use a Dr. Grip.

I tried listening at 3x but have found that 2x is good for finding things and 1.5x is good for listening. ↩
I’m currently at one of the coffee shops around the corner. The coffee is better than Dunkin’ Donuts (possibly), but it feels weird being the only one sitting in the shop. It seems like they know every customer and have conversations with everyone that walks in. There are regulars. Which is what I’d like from a coffee shop. And exactly what I don’t want for a writing location. They look over once in a while. Are they wondering what I’m writing about? I’m certain the people at Dunkin’ Donuts don’t wonder about me at all. It’s great. ↩

Japan Trip 03 of 10: Airplane food

I read Andy Greenwald’s food diary and it reminded me that 1.) I don’t write as well as he does but 2.) I can try to eat as well as he does. (I’d love to capture a night out as well as he writes about attending a wedding and the aftermath.)

I think you’re supposed to take notes. Which I didn’t do. But I did take pictures. So I’ll have to just go off those when my memory fails me. Which is right about now.

The first meal we had was at a yakitori place a couple blocks from our hotel. Wait, I’ll get back to that. I think the first thing really was the airplane food.

The thing about airplane food

Japan Airlines served food three times on the flight. A 14 hour flight is longer than it sounds. I mean, I did NY to JFK flight a week before and that’s six hours and that already feels long. Once you hit six hours and see that there’s still a full day of work worth of time you start realizing just how long the flight is. Then you think of how long a full day of work is and that even with work to do there’s still time to stare at the clock.

But this is about food. They start with full lunch service. I picked the pork katsu curry. Which I mean sort of says it all. It’s delicious. And it’s on a plane. Right now I’m fine not knowing the adjectives to describe fancier food. This isn’t that. [I don’t know that something breaded and deep fried can ever deserve all the adjectives that I don’t have knowledge of.] Basically, its pork katsu curry on a plane. If you’ve had the two separately, you can imagine them together.

I’ve fully enjoyed housing three bags of popcorners on domestic flights. So you know this was better. And you know the basic palette I possess.

The real enjoyment is in the bento setup. In three other boxes, there’s a potato salad with smoked salmon, mixed fruit, and tofu with pickled vegetables. And a salad. Then they come around with tiny cups of Haagen Dazs.

That set the bar high. Then they teleported me in from 3rd grade to put together a ham sandwich for the second meal.

After watching Concussion, various episodes of No Reservations and other worse travel shows, sleeping, reading a book about writing, writing a little bit, and watching half of The Martian, breakfast came. Shrimp congee, yogurt, crackers, and fruit.

Now for a bait and switch. If you came to read about yakitori, this post is getting too long so I’m separating it into its own post. I’ll update this link when that’s written.

Japan Trip 02 of 10: DIY Mos Burger

I wanted to write ten posts about Japan. That would hopefully be more focused than the initial random thoughts post. Each of the ten posts will probably have one picture and some thoughts related to that picture. We’ll see how that goes.

Here’s a burger from the Japan Airlines flight.

"Mos Burger"

It’s a meal from Mos Burger that you assemble on your own. I wish I took a picture of the instructions sheet. Before Japan, I heard that Mos Burger is known for their rice and veggie burgers. I wasn’t too keen on trying it, because what I think is a pretty open mind for food shuts down when it comes to fake meat products. And we didn’t stop in when we passed by them on the street.

This was one of the meals on the flight back. And it was delicious so now I wish we tried out the real thing while in Japan. There’s always next time.

At Dunkin Donuts

"Dunkin Donuts"

I’m writing this longhand at Dunkin Donuts. I’m still a little jetlagged. Actually I’m probably a lot jet lagged. But I’m also resigned to the fact that I’m flying back to Pacific Time (Seattle) in a few days and it might be better to just stay adjusted to this current pattern.

I was just going to get a drink but on the way out I grabbed my notebook. I thought it might be good to try writing at Dunkin Donuts. Bill Simmons has mentioned that he wrote a lot of his old posts longhand at Dunkin Donuts. And he’s known for very high word counts so he was spending good time at Dunkin Donuts. Why not try it out?

Then I was immediately reminded of a podcast Seth Godin appeared on¹. Someone asks what his routine is for writing daily. He says something along the lines of: you can ask the best writer in the world what pen they use but that’s beside the point. The best thing for someone else won’t be the best thing for you. (He does say he writes right in Typepad.)

That said, I’m trying to figure out what exactly works best for me. Which means trying out a few different things. So longhand at Dunkin Donuts it is. For this morning at least.

There are some good things. Being at a coffee place keeps me mindful that I came to write. Where at home I’m mindful of all the other things I could be eating, watching, or cleaning. There are a few other coffee shops in the immediate radius of my apartment. Good wifi isn’t necessary (if I’m continuing with the longhand experiment), so that adds more flexibility².

I think I can try writing longhand for an hour and then type and edit for an hour. Though I know two hour blocks are a little unrealistic to plan for. Maybe 45 minutes and 45 minutes³? Also, I had plans to write about Japan this morning but now I’ve mostly written about writing. I’ll continue the Japan posts tomorrow. At this rate, I’ll pretty much only write about the writing itself. Which might not be entirely a bad thing. Just mostly bad.

While lying in bed this morning I was thinking about how I could go back to sleep. I did the exact worst thing and checked my phone. I had some tabs still open from last night to, again, some Seth Godin posts and James Clear posts. (Both current inspirations for building up a habit of publishing consistently.)

One of them had a Lorne Michaels quote from a Harvard Business Review interview:

What’s the secret to being creative on a deadline?

Knowing the deadline is real. That focuses people’s thinking. We don’t go on because we’re ready. We go on because it’s 11:30. There’s no getting out of it.

I don’t post because it’s ready. I post because it’s _______. I need to create a deadline for myself so that I can fill in that blank. Something important from that quote is knowing the deadline is real.

Creativity can flourish with constraints. But it’s better if those constraints are real. I can give myself all sorts of fake deadlines. And I have. But nobody is keeping me accountable. I don’t think I can get an NBC show to write for so I’ll have to do some thinking about how to create more real deadlines. I might try emailing drafts of posts to a friend every day.

Until I have anything resembling a readership, having one single person expecting this might be real enough.

I realized in earlier posts that looking up excerpts and links adds a _lot_ of friction when initially writing. Maybe I can just have a list of links and excerpts to look up later and have a weekly round up? That’s a little lazy but if it’s the difference between posting daily and not, then I’ll go with it. ↩
“coffee wifi” is one of my favorite suggested Yelp searches. Lots of places in New York don’t have wifi or have no-laptop seats and things like that. ↩
Update after typing this up: I set a timer for 25 minutes and was able to type the page up with a few edits. Maybe I can get it to something like 40 minutes longhand and 20 minutes typing. Also, this post length represents two longhand pages. Good to know. ↩

Japan Trip 01 of 10: Five quick thoughts

I’m back from my trip to Japan. There’s a lot to process — including literally processing photos. Well, the 2016 sense of “processing”¹ meaning toggling things in Lightroom but wishing I just had Instagram filters instead.

Anyway, here are five unsorted thoughts² about the trip to Japan³.

Man, the food. It’s so good. I’d say especially on the lower end. Having good bowls of ramen, udon, and curry around for $6 or $7 was great.
I’m realizing I don’t know enough about sushi to say much more than that I enjoyed it there. I’ve enjoyed it in New York and Seattle and plenty of other places and will continue to. I’ve heard and read that sushi is about the rice (aka I’ve watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi like everyone else). But, I mean, it still seems like it’s about the fish.
Cash only and no tipping. I like it. Get a debit card that refunds any ATM charges and then withdraw at 7-11s.
Convenience stores and vending machines really really are everywhere.
A lot of what I liked reminded me to appreciate living in New York. We have nearly the same amount of convenience.
Bathrooms are everywhere⁴. If I’m walking around New York, I know that finding a bathroom won’t always be easy. And any of the common choices (read: Starbucks) will have a line. With all the drinks to try from convenience stores and vending machines, it was always good knowing a restroom was nearby.

But not the 2016 sense of *literally*. Is this how *nonplussed* changed its definition? ↩
Probably inspired by the AV Club Game of Thrones recaps with extra thoughts at the end of longer articles. Except I’m starting with the random thoughts and can’t promise anything well thought out. ↩
Was scrolling through the autocomplete in Webstorm for list-style-type trying to reset to the default dot. Then I saw hiragana. I’ll take it. But then I realized it’d change things globally if I Update it in the CSS file. Then I tried putting \

↩
I’m an aisle seat guy when booking plane tickets. ↩