Journal 18: The Duel

Welcome to the first edition of this newsletter that I’m actually sending out to subscribers. I was thinking of different names so that it wouldn’t just be called Francis’s Newsletter.

My content has been centered around three things: walking, drawing, and shooting. Maybe I’ll call it The Duel. I can look at the name and remember what’s important.

The duel is against myself. When I walk, I clear my mind by silencing my negative thoughts. When I draw, my pencil battles against forces trying to keep creativity stagnant. When I shoot, I open up a third eye that sees new worlds outside and within.

GRAB YOUR WEAPON… WELCOME TO THE DUEL!!!

I’m gonna go ahead with Francis’s Newsletter.

Treating my blog like a blog

My March experiment will be returning to writing single posts with ideas from multiple books. I’ll move away from writing multiple posts about single books. I think this will get me away from the guilt of a (virtual) pile of unfinished books.

I’m also trying more voice recording. I’ve tried writing strictly with dictation and it never really works out. I can generate a lot of text that nobody wants to read by rambling. I’d never edit it down.

Instead I’ve been using Just Press Record. It’s less stilted than when I dictate because I don’t have to say the punctuation and things like that. It transcribes the audio and what comes out is, well, text without punctuation and things like that.

While the wall of text is useless on its own, talking things out gives me a good sense of what my main point is. Also, timing myself speaking is more effective than timing myself writing. If I set a timer for three or five minutes then I only talk for that amount of time. And I’ll really talk the entire time.

If I set that same timer for writing it could be that I think and then self edit and only have a few sentences by the end of it. I might not have even figured out what I want to say.

Naval Ravikant on reading books like blogs

I’ve been reading through the transcript for Naval Ravikant on the Farnam Street podcast . It’s 46 pages and I’ve gotten through about a quarter of it and am going to listen to the rest. It reminds me of just how much content podcasts have.

Ravikant says he doesn’t really consider books a cost. It’s more of an investment in himself. I have the same approach to books as far as not feeling guilty about buying books. I think it comes from how my parents treated books.

Growing up, I had a weekly allowance but my parents would pay for any book without taking it out of my allowance. On weekend mall trips, I’d always look forward to Waldenbooks. I would go to game stores, book stores, and then the arcade.

Ravikant says he treats books like they’re blogs1. I like his comparison to blog archives. You wouldn’t just read an archive from start to finish. You would look and try to find the most interesting posts. In the same way, he goes through books and reads the most interesting sections.

Ravikant estimates that he reads about $20 of every $200 of book purchases. I’m at around $120 of every $200 of book purchases. There are good and bad things going either way. My percentage read is higher but I bet his totals are much higher. I might be reading a lot of things that aren’t all that valuable.

He calls out the societal idea that we need to finish reading books from start to end. If I’m reading nonfiction from cover to cover, I could probably afford to skip around more. If the table of contents looks like a blog archive, I should consider skipping through different parts of it rather than treating it like a novel.

Unless it’s a Michael Lewis book. He maintains a single deep narrative with lessons woven throughout. It’d be great if he weren’t the exception and more books were like his.

Instead, I’ll try skipping when I come upon the seventeenth person’s interpretation of the marshmallow study.

A map from the gist

Ravikant treats books like they’re blogs—I’m gonna try treating my next few audiobooks like they’re podcasts. I’ll jump around or skip forward if the chapter isn’t interesting.

I tried this with The 12-Week Year and was able to get the gist of the book on my first listen. One advantage of listening this way is being able to see all the connections between ideas. One disadvantage is I got the gist and only the gist. I’ll have to re-listen to understand it deeper.

The book in three sentences (took this idea from James Clear): Make 12 week plans instead of annual plans. Execute on your weekly plan. Score each week.

I liked the emphasis on trusting your weekly plan. You don’t want to create plans from scratch every week or else your weekly plan will always look like a list of urgent things. Not all of them are important for long term goals.

This is something I fall into. I don’t look at my monthly or yearly plans often enough. My weekly planning often resembles how I used to do daily planning: I move all my unfinished things from last week into this week.

Here’s a very rough 12-week plan for this blog.

  • Big goal: get to my first 1,000 subscribers: I want to double the number of mailing list subscribers each week. That would get me to 2048—which seems entirely out of reach right now. So I’ll try for 1,000.

That’s measurable. So then grouping a few of the weeks.

  • Weeks 1 to 4: 8 posts, 10 subscribers — Redesign the front page and single posts.
  • Weeks 5 to 8: 16 posts, 100 subscribers — Start sharing content on Instagram and Pinterest.
  • Weeks 9 to 12: 32 posts, 1000 subscribers — Write an eBook with links to a mailing list sign-up on every other page.

That last one is a joke, god I hate when I see that. I don’t have a weekly plan yet but I do have one idea in mind.

  • Every week: Share a post with one person I haven’t shared content with before.

Oh yeah, and a lot of reviewers say that the book ignores the fact that companies already plan this way and they’re called quarters. The Quarter Year isn’t as catchy. I liked some of the ideas in the book so I’ll give it a re-listen.

Trevor Noah on using language to fit in

I finished listening to Born a Crime a couple weeks ago. If you want to get into audiobooks it’s probably good to start with a comedian you enjoy who narrates his own book. This has never failed me.

A lot of what Trevor Noah talks about in Born a Crime revolves around language. One of the themes is how knowing so many different languages helped him in many situations. He says it’s one of the quickest ways to connect with another person. It also depends on the context.

He says that growing up he wasn’t a popular kid and he wasn’t an outcast. She could be a part of any group as long as they laughed together. He could drop by, tell a few jokes and then leave before wearing out his welcome.

In this way he described himself as a chameleon.

This concept of using language to fit in is really powerful. It’s also important to know some of the pitfalls that can happen. If you try to fit in using someone else’s language then it becomes very apparent if you fumble something. In a way it could be worse than not knowing the language at all.

Language doesn’t have to be foreign language either. If you work in some specialization you’re probably speaking a certain language. Slang or jargon you use day-to-day is part of some kind subsection of language.

If you’re trying to fit in and you say oh man I can’t wait for this football match, hopefully you’re in Europe and not a Steelers bar.

  1. This is great because with the rise of self-publishing, a lot of people are treating their blogs like they’re books. Nothing like a mailing list link in the introduction to make you more aware that you’re somewhere in their cross channel marketing funnel.

Journal 17: More Things I Learned

(Then even more things I learned, then scary things to learn in the dark, etc.)

I didn’t draw as much this week. I did write a few posts:

  • Podcast Notes: Cal Newport and Pat Flynn — I’ve been reviewing Cal Newport’s Deep Work lately. His appearance on Pat Flynn’s podcast was a nice surprise. I wrote some notes about their discussion.
  • Book Notes: The Alchemist — I finished reading the alchemist last week and wrote some notes for it I haven’t quite posted to the front page because I don’t have a drawing related to it right now. My book notes expand on the blurb about The Alchemist that I wrote in my last journal post: passion isn’t everything (Hey hey, Newport and Flynn talk about that on a certain podcast), but affirmations do have a lot of power.
  • Book notes: What I Talk About When I Talk About Running — I listen to this audiobook in a day or two. I’ve been doing this more often just walking around listening to audiobooks in a few days. It seems much more effective than when I read through but very quickly and and mostly skimming it. Getting through large chunks of books in one go that makes it easier to see connections. It’s like binge watching a TV show over a weekend versus watching the season through normal weekly releases. I imagine the same negatives come with that as well. Oh yeah, the book. It could basically be called what I write about when I write about writing. There’s so much insight into how he approaches writing and what it means to live his life as a writer. There are pitfalls and there are great things about it and he’s able to explain that and related to his other interest: long distance running.

This week, I’ll try again with notes from three different sources. Last week it was all books. It won’t be that way every week. I want to mix some podcast notes, YouTube videos, and any other thing I might find some inspiration from.

(As I’m writing that I’m realizing this is just about the standard newsletter format.)

Laughing every day

In the past year, I’ve read a handful of books about writing comedy. Unfortunately (for me), you wouldn’t be able to guess that by my writing. I started another one, Comedy Writing Secrets by Mark Shatz and Mel Helitzer. Here’s one of the early suggested exercises:

List your ten favorite comedians and humorists, and use the Internet to search for jokes or quotes by each of these individuals. After you amass twenty jokes, write each joke on an index card. On the back of each card, identify the subject or target of the joke, and explain why you think the joke is funny. This exercise will help you become aware of the format of successful jokes and provide you with insight into your own comedic preferences.

I’m realizing just how little I’ve actually executed on the different exercises offered up in all the comedy writing books. My takeaway from all of those books and any interview with comedians is that it can be learned but it’s very hard work. Then I proceed to not do any of the hard work. I haven’t tried creating association lists or anything like that.

I used to have a template for daily journaling. It had the usual things like gratitudes and picking out most important tasks. I also wrote one thing that made me laugh every day.

By far, those laugh sections are the best reason to go back and read those old journal entries. It best captures how much there is to enjoy day to day. A lot of the entries would be about some dumb thing a friend texted. And I’m able to remember how I felt reading it.

I suspect doing this would have a similar effect to writing gratitudes every day. I’ll try that on my own and also try explaining why I found it funny. Because jokes you have to explain are the best kind.

Daily decrease

I read Declutter Your Mind last week and came across this Bruce Lee quote:

“It’s not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.”

In college I managed to lock down a single room at one of the dorms my sophomore year. I heard they were small, but then I opened the door and saw this.

It redefined what a small room was to me. Now that I’ve experienced New York apartments, it doesn’t seem so bad. In either case, spending a year in that dorm room showed me how much I needed to live comfortably. The answer: not much. I did a pretty good job avoiding acquiring stuff throughout the years. I did a suitcase-only move to New York.

In the past couple years I’ve really been able to start applying that type of thinking to other aspects in life. I’ve been enjoying just walking around for the sake of walking lately. Which is taking advantage of the city and taking it for granted at the same time.

I also ordered an iMac earlier this week and canceled and then ordered it again. I still like stuff, so I know I’m not quite ready to turn into a ball of plasma and join the energy stream. But maybe I can increase meditation sessions to 15 minutes.

Wearables

I’ve been reading Snow Crash and I came into it thinking it was a super serious book about VR. I didn’t expect so much hilarious writing. Descriptions here and there keep making me chuckle. I’ll have to read more Neal Stephenson books. Here’s a description of gargoyles, who attached computers to themselves to become advanced PIs but look more like human surveillance systems:

Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society.

It’s a perfect description of so many contemporary things. I used to use an armband with a slot to slide your iPhone into during workouts. When I wanted to change tracks I’d tap some things on my bicep or tricep depending on how much the armband moved around. It was just a few taps away from the Predator trying to blow up Arnold and the jungle.

Technology and startups are cool now. They’ll always be able to trace their lineage to some calculator pouch. I’ll always trace my lineage to weekends looked like this:

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Haruki Murakami writes about his life and how running has always been a part of it. The audiobook is a little over four hours. I really enjoyed it. I’m not a runner but I enjoy learning about how writers go about their lives. Throughout the book he explains relationships between running and writing.

Stop when it’s getting good. My familiarity with Murakami was mostly seeing people reading IQ84 on the subway and thinking “Well that’s a huge book.” That wasn’t written in weeks. It took months, years to write. Running endurance takes months, years, to build up.

How do you show up every day? By choosing the right time to stop:

“Right now I’m aiming at increasing the distance I run, so speed is less of an issue. As long as I can run a certain distance, that’s all I care about. Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run. The point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day.

This is the same sort of tact I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more.

Murakami acknowledges this is similar to Earnest Hemingway’s approach to stopping “where you still have your juice“.

Training focus. Murakami talks about talent and says there are people with overwhelming talent. He says there are a handful of writers through history who were born for it but that he’s not one of them. The good news is there are still plenty of great writers and it comes through practice. You practice prose and other writing concepts, but Murakami says it’s important to train your ability to focus:

“You’ll naturally learn both concentration and endurance when you sit down every day at your desk and train yourself to focus on one point.”

“In private correspondence the great mystery writer Raymond Chandler once confessed that even if he didn’t write anything, he made sure he sat down at his desk every single day and concentrated.”

More and more I’m learning how important it is to practice concentrating. Practice focus. Practice deep work.

Learning about meditation helped me understand this further. You don’t really stop and think about how many thoughts are racing through your head. Through meditation, you learn to recognize thoughts, acknowledge them, and return to your breathing.

You can’t expect to meditate for an hour straight right off the bat. It might be harder to focus on work for an hour straight right off the bat.

Clear red lights. He says one of the reasons he runs regularly is that he gains weight easily. He’s optimistic about this, though. He says that there’s probably a benefit to having a clear red light. If he didn’t gain weight, there’d be no signal to his body that he needs to take better care of it.

You’re going to get older, you’re going to get slower, and it’s okay. Murakami seems to always think long-term. He knew running every day will build a healthy foundation for his later years. He also seems comfortable getting older, even if things become slower and slower.

“Changes that used to take a month and a half now take three. The amount I can exercise is going downhill, as is the efficiency of the whole process. But what are you going to do? I just have to accept it and make do with what I can get. One of the realities of life. Plus, I don’t think we should judge the value of our lives by how efficient they are.”

I love this. In college, I was all about productivity blogs and todo lists and organizing projects by context so at every moment I could have a way to be doing something useful and increase my efficiency. That of course means mostly feeling guilty throughout the day in different contexts for not doing something you’ve deemed productive.

It’s easy to value efficiency for the wrong reasons. We complete tasks quicker to free up time for more tasks that we can work toward completing quicker. And on and on. It reminds me of Oliver Burkeman’s article at The Guardian—”Why time management is ruining our lives“.

That article is great in its entirety, but something that’s stuck with me is Burkeman’s description of sleep. There seems to be wider acceptance that we can’t run on 4 hours of sleep week after week. But Burkeman wrote that the rise in its acceptance is focused on efficiency:

“Even rest and recreation, in a culture preoccupied with efficiency, can only be understood as valuable insofar as they are useful for some other purpose – usually, recuperation, so as to enable more work. (Several conference guests mentioned Arianna Huffington’s current crusade to encourage people to get more sleep; for her, it seems, the main point of rest is to excel at the office.)”

Make sure to get really good sleep so you can do really good work.

Write, run, relax. Murakami’s daily routine is built around sleeping early and waking up early. Before writing novels, he ran a bar, which meant keeping the exact opposite schedule.

In the morning he writes for 3-4 hours. The middle of the day is for things requiring less concentration, including running. At the end of the day, he reads, listens to music, and takes it easy.

I’ve always been one of those people who doesn’t really get running. I couldn’t imagine enjoying running long distances. In What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami explains what running means to him. It’s a lot more than just runners’ high. What does he think about what he thinks about running? Nothing in particular.

“As I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”

After finishing this book, I went for a short run. Mostly I thought about how different parts of my lower body hurt. When things were going good, though, I could see flashes of the void at the end of the tunnel.

Podcast Notes: Cal Newport and Pat Flynn

Cal Newport was recently on Pat Flynn’s podcast talking about Deep Work. If I could pick one book from last year to read it would probably be Deep Work. I still don’t have a book notes post on it because I was planning to write some kind of epic post then, of course, that fell through the cracks.

Instead, I’ll start with some podcast notes.

Deep work is a skill, not a habit . When you’re seven years old, flossing is something you practice for like three days. After that it’s a habit you need to maintain. There isn’t a ton of room for improvement, though dentists disagree. Playing the guitar, on the other hand, takes practice. I don’t think anyone expects to be proficient after a few days practicing it.

You should approach deep work like a guitar, not a yard of floss. When you start doing it, you’ll concentrate for part of your blocked off time. At this point you might just say it’s not for you. It’s important to push through that and continue trying and improving at it. Over time, the sessions will improve.

It’s similar to meditation. Cal has his own version of that.

Active training and passive training. Athletes go to the gym to train. They lift weights and will do drills or skill work. This is active training, isolated to a few hours a day. For deep work, Cal says that one form of active training is productive meditation.

Here’s the description in Deep Work:

“The goal of productive meditation is to take a period in which you’re occupied physically but not mentally—walking, jogging, driving, showering—and focus your attention on a single well-defined professional problem. Depending on your profession, this problem might be outlining an article, writing a talk, making progress on a proof, or attempting to sharpen a business strategy.”


If your mind wanders, you bring your attention back.

Athletes make decisions outside of the gym that affect their performance. Tom Brady sleeps for 12 hours some nights. This is passive training. For deep work, it’s important to practice de-wiring your brain from stimulation throughout the day.

The example I practiced immediately after reading Deep Work was being conscious when I’m standing in a line at the grocery store. The default here was to check my phone. Look around the next time you’re in line somewhere, at this point it’s weirder if you’re not doing this. So be the weirdo.

It’s not for the sake of being present at that specific moment. You don’t need to take in the surroundings and appreciate the colors of Whole Foods. You just need to tell your brain that it’s okay that there’s nothing to do right at this moment.

Because when you’re in a deep work session, there’s going to be an urge to check your phone. Don’t.

Could you train a recent college graduate to do this in a couple weeks? If your answer is yes, then you probably have something more valuable to work on. Identify your skills that can’t be taught in a few weeks. Then make time practice deep work using those skills.

Deep work isn’t easy—you’ll be pushing your brain to focus without distraction for long periods of time. It’s important to apply that effort to the right work. You don’t want to spend hours, weeks, and months honing deep work skills and find out it was to become the best tooth flosser in the world.

Active recall. At the beginning of the podcast, Pat asks about Cal’s earlier work writing books about studying. If there was only one tip, what would it be?

Cal says it’s active recall. Re-reading book sections, re-reading your notes? Nope, it pales in comparison to trying to explain what you just learned out loud.

This post started as a voice note recording where I tried summarizing different topics that Cal and Pat discussed. I wanted to try active recall to see if it would help in writing a podcast notes post.

(But mostly I wanted to try drawing Arnold Schwarzenegger again.)

Morning dictation

I did some morning dictation. I put some book quotes in the left then talk through some thoughts on the right.

In the past I’ve used dictation and then generated pages and pages of text, just rambling. It becomes too much to want to wade through so I never end up using it. There’s probably something useful from speaking through things in the first place.

It might be good to give it some pre-structure before talking things through so that I can give myself swim lines for wading.

Here’s a quote from Bruce Lee in a book I’m reading about decluttering your mind:

“It’s not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.” – Bruce Lee

With voice dictation, I’m able to generate a lot of text. It’s inessential text. So I need to figure out how to hack away at it. Give it some structure.

I’m starting to think more and more about what is essential in this blog. What makes me happy to work on it every morning? What doesn’t? What will others like?

 

A decision in action

I bought an iMac even though the macrumors buyer’s guide said don’t buy. It seems pretty clear that there will be some kind of update in the coming weeks but they probably aren’t form factor updates. Also the deal was 600 below the refurbished retail price so there’s definitely nothing that can match that unless they drastically cut the price. 

Book Notes: The Alchemist

In a previous post, I wrote about how The Alchemist aligns (or doesn’t) with some of my beliefs:

It’s essentially about following your dreams and the law of attraction. However you feel about those things just about sums up whether you’ll like the book or not. Meaning I’m somewhere in the middle. Passion isn’t the end-all for picking a career, but I think affirmations work.

We should be cautious weighing passion so heavily in picking a career. Derek Sivers’s says separating your job and your art is a good solution for being happy. I often reference the hypothetical person who loves surfing. He quickly realizes teaching 7AM classes to Wall Street guys on vacation isn’t quite as fun. In So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport writes about a woman trading an advertising career to start a yoga practice for pregnant women and kids. It doesn’t go well.

Let’s say you have a business that is going well, you want it to grow as fast as possible right? Maybe not. The boy in The Alchemist helps a crystal merchant get more sales. The boy has a plan (sellTeaInCrystalShop-ver3.pptx) to accelerate that further.

“[…] If we serve tea in crystal, the shop is going to expand. And then I’ll have to change my way of life.”

“Well, isn’t that good?”

“I’m already used to the way things are. Before you came, I was thinking about how much time I had wasted in the same place, while my friends had moved on, and either went bankrupt or did better than they had before. It made me very depressed. Now, I can see that it hasn’t been too bad. The shop is exactly the size I always wanted it to be.

This reminds me of the Basecamp founders, David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried. They write often about the perils of growth. (Here’s DHH’s latest: Exponential growth devours and corrupts.) (Check out some notes I wrote about DHH when he was on the Tim Ferriss show.)

More and more I see why “it depends” is always the answer. Becoming a millionaire is no use if you torch all your relationships to get there. Early retirement is no use if all your joy and motivation comes from work. Generally, I’d like this blog to be bigger, but I need to spend more time thinking about why.

A handful of strangers reading my stuff? Great! Oh, blogs can have hundreds or thousands of readers? Well, that handful seems a lot smaller now. The crystal merchant has always been happy with his sales look nice until he sees that they could be doubled or tripled:

Today, I understand something I didn’t see before: every blessing ignored becomes a curse. I don’t want anything else in life. But you are forcing me to look at wealth and at horizons I have never known. Now that I have seen them, and now that I see how immense my possibilities are, I’m going to feel worse than I did before you arrived. Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don’t want to do so.”

The first stand-up special I remember is Chris Rock’s Bring the Pain. I was at an age where I understood some jokes but missed the subtext. One joke I did understand was Chris Rock saying Bill Gates would jump out of a window if he woke up with Oprah’s money. Everything is relative.

In the past year I’ve tried practicing gratitude daily. Someone asked if being content is the same as being happy. (Or if being content is required to be happy.) You can break your brain thinking about that. You can be happy and strive for more. Though I imagine the happiest people never think about questions like this.

Oh yeah, the crystal merchant. He decides to sell tea with the boy, sales explode, and the merchant hires two more employees, and they begin importing a whole lot of tea. “You brought new feeling into my crystal shop.” he tells the boy.

Which sort of ckntraxics my points about growth being bad. Time for him to take that hockey stick chart to some VCs.

The Alchemist has a lot of other useful parables. In some ways it seems like there were some generic morals to share and the story is written around them to fit them in. That’s to say: a lot of crazy stuff happens in the book. Just like one thing after another and if nothing is happening then it’ll just skip month or even a year. 

Follow your dream and you’ll find your treasure. Sometimes I believe that completely. Sometimes I wish I believed it more. Reading The Alchemist made me believe just a smidge more. That’s enough to make is worth reading. 

Journal 16: Things I Learned

 

Another week in the books. I tried drawing Jerrod Carmichael a bunch. I wanted a drawing to go along with my podcast notes post for Carmichael’s appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show. It felt like I regressed. I couldn’t draw his face at all. A lot of attempts ended looking more like 2Pac.

It was just rep after rep of drawing and I didn’t seem to be getting closer. I bought Alphonso Dunn’s Pen and Ink Drawing: A Simple Guide. I don’t expect it to be a magic bullet or anything. It’s not instantly going to drop me into deliberate practice, but I’m hoping it will help me move toward useful practice.

If you’re at all interested in learning to draw, check out Alphonso Dunn’s YouTube channel. Throw a random video on and draw along with it.

Along with Pen and Ink Drawing, here’s what else I’ve been reading and listening to.

  • Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson — I’m picking this up again after nearly a year away from it. I’m always amazed when reading sci-fi books and then looking at the publish date. This is from 1992 but so many aspects could be from today. The main character pulls his VR goggles on in the passenger seat. This is for sure going to happen with middle schoolers and their parents.
  • The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho — I hadn’t read it before. I didn’t even really know what it was about. I always thought it was one of those 600 page tomes but it’s a pretty quick novel. It’s essentially about following your dreams and the law of attraction. However you feel about those things just about sums up whether you’ll like the book or not. Meaning I’m somewhere in the middle. Passion isn’t the end-all for picking a career, but I think affirmations work. (Very long shrug.)
  • Stealing Fire by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal (audiobook)— In The Rise of Superman (check out my notes), Kotler wrote about action sports athletes and how they’ve unlocked the shortcut to flow. Stealing Fire continues on and explains how people are unlocking that state without jumping off cliffs or into gigantic waves.
  • Born a Crime by Trevor Noah (audiobook) — If you haven’t started listening to audiobooks, I always recommend picking one that’s written and narrated by a comedian you enjoy. This was great. I haven’t traveled much internationally. Noah takes you on his journey growing up in South Africa. I’m about the same age as him and there was more to relate to than I expected. Street Fighter II and was one of the first kids he knew with a CD burner.
  • Wired to Create by Scott Barry Kaufman and Carolyn Gregoire (audiobook) — It’s right smack in the middle of the bubble I’m trying to avoid this year. I’m really enjoying this—which is how I ended up in this bubble in the first place. They write about the science behind creativity and how can nurture our creativity day to day.

More notes for those are on the way. Here are things I’ve learned from some other books I’ve been reading and listening to lately—and some drawings to go with them.

A farmer and his tools

I’m re-reading Deep WorkCal Newport writes about the importance of focused blocks of time. Ideally the no-internet, away from people, in a shack in the woods type of focus. Since that isn’t possible for most people, he explains how knowledge workers can move toward that kind of focus.

Instead of a shack in the woods, you can at least have a closed door. Instead of being away from people, you can try to work away from your desk. (Headphones don’t exactly do the trick.) Instead of having no internet (though you can probably achieve this), don’t use the internet for entertainment.

One major way we use the internet for entertainment is social media. There’s some value to social media as a tool. Long story short, I have my current job because of a tweet I happened to see one day through someone else retweeting it. I might have a similar job but this specific one was a result of social media.

Newport explains the tool use by sharing some thoughts from Forrest Pritchard, a farmer in Virginia. Pritchard explains why he doesn’t make his own hay.

“Let’s start by exploring the costs of making hay,” Pritchard said. “First, there’s the actual cost of fuel, and repairs, and the shed to keep the baler. You also have to pay taxes on it.” These directly measurable costs, however, were the easy part of his decision. It was instead the “opportunity costs” that required more attention. As he elaborated: “If I make hay all summer, I can’t be doing something else. For example, I now use that time instead to raise boilers [chickens meant for eating]. These generate positive cash flow, because I can sell them. But they also produce manure which I can then use to enhance my soil.”

Newport abstracts these principles and calls it The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection. Tools should be used if positives far outweigh negatives.

Social media has had positive impact for me. I’ve also spent hours and hours scrolling through endless streams looking at interesting things. It’s entertainment. It’s leisure, which is good. Infinite leisure probably isn’t good.

I try minimizing my time using social media because it’s a great tool for minimizing your time.

Regressing to the mean

In The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis writes about psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (author of Thinking, Fast and Slow), who collaborated through a couple decades. If you haven’t directly read any of their work, you’ve likely read something based on their work. Or rooted for a team who picks players using principles based on their work.

Earlier in his career, Kahneman worked with the Israeli air force, helping in training pilots. Some instructors thought criticism led to better performance.

“The pilot who was praised always performed worse the next time out, and the pilot who was criticized always performed better. Danny watched for a bit and then explained to them what was actually going on: The pilot who was praised because he had flown exceptionally well, like the pilot who was chastised after he had flown exceptionally badly, simply were regressing to the mean. They’d have tended to perform better (or worse) even if the teacher had said nothing at all.”

This seems straightforward when it’s pointed out. From reading The Undoing Project and recently listening to Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath, it’s becoming clear that we make these mistakes constantly. We want to see patterns, so we’ll make them up and they take hold. Whether the pattern is real or not.

The Warriors weren’t going to follow up a 9-loss regular season with a better record. It didn’t matter if they were entirely praised or entirely criticized through the entire summer. It didn’t matter if Kevin Durant would mix in well or not. All that matters is that it’s unlikely that you’ll follow up the best performance in history with an even better performance.

Let walking be the destination

In Declutter Your Mind, S.J. Scott and Barrie Davenport write about decluttering different aspects of your life: thoughts, obligations, relationships, and environment. Part of decluttering your environment involves being mindful in your activities. Including walking:

Wherever you are walking (either indoors or out), whatever your destination, pay attention along the way. You don’t have to hustle along with your eye on the outcome. Let walking be the destination.

This could double as a metaphor for life and enjoying the journey and so on. But I’m sharing it at face value because I’ve been interested in walking lately.

(Some posts from recent walks: Central Park/The Met and The High Line.)

I bought a couple more batteries for my Fuji X100. I’ve also been shooting with the Nexus 5X so I might just keep doing that. My commute is a walking commute now. I’m trying to do what I can to take walks more frequently. Somehow capturing my walks and thoughts while walking might become a big part of this blog.

Now I just need to find some woods nearby.

Weekly Walk

I took a walk today around for probably a couple hours. A lot of it was getting more uniform. And then I went to Madison Square Park.

They talk about walking meditation

 

Mind of a Chef garbage

Shout out to my old street corner for showing up in this Mind of a Chef episode about garbage. This is attached to a Key Foods. I walked by this literally every day. 

Podcast Notes: Jerrod Carmichael on the Tim Ferris Show

I refreshed my Instacast feed and was delighted to see that Jerrod Carmichael was a guest on The Tim Ferriss Show. When reading Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head, I was hoping Carmichael would be in it. I also should have checked the table of contents instead of thinking he might just appear a few hundred pages in.

Ferriss is a fan of comedy. He’s had a few comedians as guests and has mentioned that he enjoys seeing earlier sets to see how comedians work on an unfinished product. After reading Tools of Titans and Sick in the Head one after the other, I wrote a couple posts connecting the two. Jerry Seinfeld does something similar to star-gazing and Michael Che and Jocko Willink keep positive perspectives even if their situations are much different.

Successful comedians have a great toolbox. Comedy writers have great efficiency with words—they craft sentences in the right way to get people to laugh. Stand-up comics place little bets in every performance and become some of the best public speakers.

Still, even the greats bomb. Carmichael says he bombed the very first time he was on stage. How’d he deal with it? He says he lied to himself and said it wouldn’t happen again. Don’t dwell. He shares a lot of other wisdom in the podcast.

Don’t be a bad comedian with an excellent website
Or: don’t be Kwame Brown trying to palm two basketballs. (Michael Jordan was unimpressed.) Rookies probably don’t need to worry about poster poses. Startup founders probably shouldn’t be telling the designer “Two pixels to the left” if they can instead be talking to customers. I should probably be drawing instead of configuring digital brushes.

Carmichael says to focus on the content and to focus on exactly what you’re putting out.

People focus on the wrong things. There are a lot of comedians who aren’t funny at all or who don’t have stage presence. But have excellent websites. You know, they have excellent websites. And the shiniest business cards and the headshots are impeccable. And… who gives a fuck? You know what I mean?

It’s about the work. He says that he’s always had that mindset, even when selling shoes at Footaction. He approached it thinking okay this is my job, let me see what it’s like to try and be the best at this.

Don’t waste time on decisions that don’t matter
Fewer decisions means you can focus more energy on the important decisions. Personal trainers take the decision-making out of workouts (and also why you should be picky). Morning rituals help remove decisions also (Carmichael has eggs and blueberries). He also used to wear a uniform.

I was wearing the same… I bought a lot of the same… white sweatshirt, gray pants… Timberlands. Everyday. Every day. It worked in any place that I went. That’s what I liked. It worked everywhere. I’ll go to your wedding in this thing.

Wearing the same thing is another step toward reducing your decisions. Lately it’s been popularized by Barack Obama and Steve Jobs. In the past it was popularized by those kids in school who didn’t care what they wore. He says he doesn’t currently wear a uniform—his show requires wardrobe selections so he thinks about clothes and clothes can be fun.

I’m slowly getting into a uniform myself. A couple weeks ago I got a Uniqlo oversized shirt and a pair of their khaki joggers. A couple days later I got another set. I’m thinking of picking up two more sets to get a good rotation going. Soon I’ll just have Doug’s closet.

Don’t start your day with bullshit
Ferriss mentions that Carmichael in person isn’t as dark as he is in his stand-up. Here’s some proof: he starts most of his days in the least dark way imaginable: he calls his mom.

“I don’t want to start my day with bullshit. I don’t like noise. You know? I don’t like too much noise. My mom has a great spirit. One of the purest people that I know. She doesn’t over complicate anything.

I’ll talk to her for a few minutes and then I’ll do other calls. But you want to start it in a peaceful place, and then yell about marketing for an hour.

Maybe you don’t have someone to start every day like that. (He also calls his sister if his mom isn’t available.) The point is centering yourself in some way.

Don’t listen to anybody
Ferriss asks him about bad advice that’s given out frequently. Carmichael says to watch out when advice begins with “You gotta…”

It’s usually people who aren’t where they want to be. The person who just readily hands out advice is usually not where they want to be. You know, busy people aren’t just around in the back telling you what you gotta do next.

You gotta listen to this podcast!

Weekly Walk: The High Line

I took a very long walk two days ago. When I walked out the door I was aiming to be out for 4 hours and it stretched over 6. In my first post this year, I said I’d take more photo walks. Daily seemed unreasonable, but I didn’t think it’d take a full month before doing it. I also know 6-hour walks are unreasonable. It’s a long weekend so I went on another walk.


Today’s walk was shorter. I was aiming for an hour and it was good to see that an hour is plenty of time. (It stretched to a couple hours.) Now I’m thinking of different routes I can take that would be between 1-2 hours.

I started at the less popular end of the High Line around 30th street. It starts narrow then opens up closer to 14th St.

The High Line is where I decided I would move to New York. Four years ago, I had this idea that I’d try and move to New York. I had never been so I tried and finally got an interview so I had a reason to visit.

I met up with a friend that had just moved to New York with his wife and he said we’d get some pizza then go out. He took me to Artichoke Pizza, we got a few of their giant slices, and went up to The High Line to eat them. We sat at one of the tables and someone was playing the cello. I knew this combination of things wasn’t really something every city has to offer. My friend asked about the interview.

The interview went well until after lunch when we sat down and the founder said, “Now let’s talk some code.” (Later that day he said “Good shit today” in an email. I’m guessing that’s not one of the canned responses but still… I kind of knew my fate.)

I told my friend you know what, it might take a little longer but I’m gonna figure out a way to get out here. I still think of that when I walk on The High Line. There are a few other High Line memories that I’ve added since then.


I was really worried when people started touching this guy in his underwear.


From a distance, I was completely sure that he was an actual person. One of those people who stay frozen and are usually painted in silver or gold. I thought this was the next generation. Someone that made themselves look like plastic. Nope. Just a statue.

Then I made it to the other end of The High Line.

This weekend was unusually warm for February. It reminded me of spring and how gorgeous New York is.

I did my first photo walk, took a month off, did another photo walk, took one day off, then did this walk. When will the next one be? A month or a day? Let’s go with my favorite combo answer: it depends… somewhere in between.

Journal 15: Working on a new layout

I started working on a simplified layout for posts after writing my pseudo-live walking blog. (The first of what I hope will be many.)

I’ve been drawing again and haven’t ever quite figured out a good way to share sketches. Most people will be looking at this on a phone so I need to remember that and work toward a good format. I don’t think I’ll start sketching in 600px boxes, but I just might be sharing it that way.

Inspiration
This week I read an ESPN feature with Hollywood screenwriters writing a story for the Warriors season. I saw it on my phone and liked how it looked. I figured it’d have some sort of responsive design treatment so I hopped on the computer to take a look.

I was surprised at how straightforward it was. The header image went wide but everything else just had a max width of 600px. (Which, if you opened this post up in developer tools, you’ll see I’m trying nearly the same setup for this first iteration.)

Sort of a breath of fresh air and it just reminded me of the pleasant time in web development when it wasn’t tooling hell. (I’ll also acknowledge that the same tooling is what helped me put a first version of this layout together in an hour.)

 

Why?
This always feels a little uglier than I’d like. I’m a designer by day but you probably wouldn’t have guessed looking at the state of my site. I wanted to focus on the writing and drawing. I still do, but I know I can put 20% effort into the design and development of the layouts and it can go a pretty long way.

What’s with the farmers?
I’ve been reviewing my notes from Deep Work. It’s one of my favorite books from the last few years. I wrote a bunch of notes to do some kind of epic post I had in mind and I of course never got around to it.

I want to write some book notes posts for it though. One thing that’s stuck with me is the story he tells about a farmer and his tools. The point it is getting across is that useful tools might not be worth it. Particularly because the resources for that tool could potentially be used to get a better tool.

The resource is time and the tool he’s arguing against is social media. I’ve found a lot of value through Twitter. My current career wouldn’t be the same without Twitter.

Now is a different season though. It doesn’t provide as much value. Especially weighed against the amount of time I lose using it. There’s a lot of interesting stuff that I find through Twitter. I can and have spent entire days just reading cool things on Twitter.

Kotler and Flow, again
I re-listened to part of the Joe Rogan Experience episode with Steven Kotler through this clip about creativity and flow states. Kotler says he wakes up and wants to be writing within minutes.

For me it’s, wake up at 3:30, 4:00 AM. And I like to be… I like to be writing before my brain is awake. I want to be writing within 4 minutes of getting out of bed.

“Whoa.”

He goes on to explain that he wants to keep his brain waves in the creative phase.

For more from Kotler, check out my book notes on The Rise of Superman.

What’s with the people at brunch?

I was thinking of drawings I could do for my book notes for We Learn Nothing by  Tim Kreider. A major theme through the book is that we worry too much about things that aren’t so important in the big picture. Namely, work and careers. They’re important but we take for granted how important spending a day with friends is.

I started trying to schedule posts in really rough states. It was supposed to act as a forcing function to finish posts. Surprisingly, it worked. Along with those We Learn Nothing notes, here are three other book notes posts I wrote in the past week:

I’m slowly converging on the proper mix of writing, drawing, consistency, and ease in the system. In writing, drawing, editing photos, editing drawings, and adding them all to a WordPress post, there are just a lot of places where friction exists. Bit by bit, I’m removing inessential things from the system and posting things I’m happy to share with others.

Weekly Walk

Weekly is a bit ambitious, but I’ll aim to do something like this once a month.

9:10 AM
Ok I’m trying something right now. Based on Tools of Titans I’m going to take a walk. I’m aiming for 4 hours. With breaks. So I should be out the door at 9:15 and will be done at, let’s say 1:30.

Some quick thoughts before starting.

  • Bringing my camera
  • Trying to take a break on the hour to write one page and add one photo
  • Coffee, then water throughout
  • Have a few things on the way to stop at. Aka foot locker.
  • Wearing Metcons instead of Vans—hoping it’s just as good for foot mobility

I was thinking there could be like one hour of photography (I brought my camera), one hour of audiobooks (I bought Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime, one hour of phone calls (I’ve got a friend in mind), and one of hour silence () if possible.

I’m realizing this is basically an urban hike

This is where I search for my digital watch and sit on my bed scratching my head trying to figure out how to turn on the hourly beep.

Ok I’m actually out the door at 9:35.

10:05 AM

I’m trying to stop on the hour. I stopped in Cascade Cafe on 8th ave. Got some water and used the restroom.

Here’s the description straight from a chapter about ketogenic diets and fasting in Tools of Titans.

On Friday (and Saturday if needed), drink some caffeine and prepare to WALK. Be out the door no later than 30 minutes after waking. I grab a cold liter of water or Smartwater out of my fridge, add a dash of pure, unsweetened lemon juice to attenuate boredom, add a few pinches of salt to prevent misery/headaches/cramping, and head out. I sip this as I walk and make phone calls.

Ferriss does this during a 3-day fast. I’m not doing this as part of a fast, but I’m doing this as part of a half-hearted ketogenic diet. Let’s just go ahead and say I’m following it to a T.

I didn’t really have a destination in mind. My current plan is to walk to Central Park and do a lap. Then maybe I can go to The Museum of Natural History to draw a little bit. Another chance to be the guy drawing on an iPad in the museum. Then Ineed to return something at Foot Locker.

I can end the walk at Gong Cha and get a coffee with milk foam. We’ll see how this goes. Oh yeah, so far Trevor Noah has jumped out of a moving van. (A van that’s moving not a van that movers use.)

Ok that’s the bottom of this iPhone page. Let’s keep it popping.

11:30 AM

Needed to use the restroom again and my wandering took me to the east side of Central Park. Instead of the Museum of Natural History I went to The Met. Took me forever to find the restroom in this place. The a lot of the bathroom doors are hidden flush against the walls.

While I’m here it’s probably a good idea to try and draw something. I’ve glanced at other people’s sketches. Without fail, they’re better at drawing than I am. Young, old, doesn’t matter.

Meanwhile, people will think I’m one of those people making beautiful sketches of the statues. Before I start, I’ll leave you with something I overheard:

“We went to… armies and armor… medieval .. Oceania—remember it had the thing with the big penis? (the group nods in acknowledgement and not even a hint of a chuckle)—now we’re in the Greek stuff… next we can do Egyptian.”

I like drawing at The Met.

12:08 PM

Ok that was like 40 minutes of drawing. How’s that for flow? How’s that for cutting into walking time? Adjusting the walking goal to walk until 2:30 since I just sat for 40 minutes.

Let’s keep it popping. Time to get out of the museum.

Oh yah the drawings. I tried drawing this guy over and over. I really should’ve set a timer to make sure I was giving myself the same amount of time for each attempt. Otherwise I can’t really build on something I already knew: the better sketches are the ones I take more time on. I also should’ve tried overlaying a photo over the sketches to see what I’m getting wrong.

During these sessions, people stopped to look at the statue and I started thinking it’d be good to try doing quick motion sketches of them. One woman covered her mouth and looked shocked.

I realized that I hadn’t read the caption myself and never stopped to think about who this guy was. I guessed right: it was his children around him. What I didn’t guess is that he’s contemplating starving or eating them.

1:25 PM

I switched from Born a Crime to Wired to Create by Carolyn Gregoire and Scott Barry Kaufman. Within half an hour, there was a Mihály Csíkszentmihályi mention and I was reminded of the echo chamber I stay in. I really need to work on a bingo card for this: Csíkszentmihályi, 10,000 hours, growth mindset, kids eating marshmallows, etc. If I hit bingo, then I should switch to another book.

I’m somewhere in Central Park. My feet are feeling it. I wonder what the balance is. Should I stop? Keep going? I think I’ll walk to the subway then take it to Gong Cha and then return these shoes. I like this walk. I heard something recently in Declutter Your Mind by Barrie Davenport and S.J. Scott:

“The walk is the destination.”

An update on the attempt to do one hour of photography, one hour of audiobooks, one hour of calls, and one hour of silence. I’ve been taking pictures intermittently the entire time. I listened to a good portion of Born a Crime and was able to give it enough attention to follow along. I called a friend. I learned that Foot Locker won’t accept returns from other stores if they don’t sell the product. I’ve even burned probably like… 47 calories.

2:11 PM
I’ve had days started by reading Twitter, opening a bunch of links, seeing a few hours go by just lying down reading on my phone. Then I head to a couch and check some stuff out on my laptop. A video here, a video there. An hour here, three hours there. It’s the bad kind of flow. Then the day is gone. Some people call these days zero days and there are online communities for avoiding them.

This walk made time feel similar: it accelerates slowly at first then it seems to disappear. However, the time doesn’t feel wasted at all. My legs and feet are feeling it but my mind is really clear.

I can get used to this. I’m getting hungry though. Time for the last stretch then I’ll return these shoes and eat. I’ll get my coffee with the foamed cream and grass jelly. Can’t wait.

3:23 PM

I’ll call this the end of it. Went to Gong Cha and the line was too long. Went to Kung Fu Tea instead. Still gotta drop by Foot Locker and eat a snack. Then I have dinner with a friend. It’s a good day so far. My legs hurt.

4:06 PM
Home now. Next time I’ll aim for 3 hours and hopefully it’ll be a 4 hour outing. This time was aiming for 4 hours and somehow it’s been 6.5 hours.

Here are my steps.

I like the idea of aiming to live an unrushed life. How can I measure that? One measure is counting walks where the walk is the destination. Here’s the first one.

Epilogue

Later that night I ate kalbi. I went to an all you can eat place and ate all I could.

We Learn Nothing

I learned about We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons by Tim Kreider through Tim Ferriss’s Tools of Titans. There’s a chapter by Kreider called “Lazy: a manifesto”. An earlier version is available at The New York Times titled “The ‘Busy’ Trap”.

Ferriss produced the audiobook of We Learn Nothing, which I bought alongside the Kindle version immediately after I noticed I was highlighting large swaths of text in Kreider’s chapter.

Last year, I read Deep Work by Cal Newport and Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Both guided me toward thinking about eliminating busy work. They highlight the importance of identifying and focusing on what’s important. It’s a big ship to steer in a different direction, but I’m glad I’ve started.

“The ‘Busy’ Trap” is a great reminder of why it’s worth it to free up time in the first place. Increasing work efficiency to free up time only to fill it up with more work is a bit backwards. In We Learn Nothing, Kreider expands on the value of these regular good days. Some of that wisdom is expressed in a chapter about alcohol:

I’m more productive now, and more successful; for the first time in my life I’m supporting myself by doing what I’ve always wanted to do. But I laugh less than I used to. Drinking was, among other things, an excellent excuse to devote eight or ten consecutive hours to sitting idly around having hilarious conversations with friends, than which I’m still not convinced there is any better possible use of our time on earth.

Spending time with friends is a luxury we can likely indulge in right now. I’d wager that we don’t do it enough.

Jumping back to the other Tim, Ferriss’s 4-hour Work Week helped spread the idea that elements of a life of luxury is more attainable than you think. Delaying gratification until you’re too old to enjoy it seems backwards. When I think about my mom still not being retired, it sure makes retirement age seem far away.

It’s important to enjoy our normal days. Ferriss says he likes the feeling of being unrushed. I’m seeing that I value that also. Day to day, working toward being unrushed seems like a good way to approach things.

I notice that no one who works in a hospital, whose responsibilities are matters of life and death, ever seems hurried or frantic, in contrast to interns at magazines I’ve known who weren’t even allowed to leave for lunch lest they be urgently needed.

A lot of friends I grew up with work in hospitals now. Nurses, MAs, and a couple doctors. I can’t remember a time that they complained about work. If they did it was probably about not wanting to go back after having 6 days off.

In a previous job, I dialed into 2am conference calls to make sure holiday shopping links were working. That’s an extreme example, but urgency is always magnified by your bubble. If your day is spent at a desk, it’s never life and death. It’s rarely even a matter of being employed or not.

In living an unrushed life, one of the greatest enemies is a false sense of urgency. It’s not great to pull all nighters for weeks to reach a deadline only to learn the work won’t be relevant for a month if ever.

In the excerpt above, Kreider talked about drinking to express the values of spending time with friends. Here, he uses it as a way to consider our perspectives:

But I would suggest that an ideal human life lies somewhere between my own defiant indolence and the rest of the world’s endless frenetic hustle. My own life has admittedly been absurdly cushy. But my privileged position outside the hive may have given me a unique perspective on it. It’s like being the designated driver at a bar: When you’re not drinking, you can see drunkenness more clearly than those actually experiencing it. Unfortunately the only advice I have to offer the Busy is as unwelcome as the advice you’d give the Drunk.

It’s important, but sometimes hard, to look at your situation from an outsider’s perspective. If you’re stressing out about something, there’s value in asking, “How important is this really?”.

My senior year I had a couple partners for an assignment in some EE analog class. We hit a wall and were sitting in the lab stuck for about an hour already. We took the final already, but our final assignment was due the day after. In so many words, I thought “How important is this really?” We were walking for graduation literally the next day. I brought it up to my teammates.

“Let’s look at the syllabus.”

The assignment was 3% of our total grade and I knew we’d get at least an F+ on this. Maybe it was the sun shining through the blinds. Maybe they remembered they had jobs lined up already.

“Have a great summer!”

It worked.

 

The Joy of Less

I listened to The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up and read Spark Joy. Marie Kondo’s books are popular for a reason. Her system works. Lots of reviews comment on the anthropomorphication of your stuff. She suggests touching everything and saying thank you before tossing it. You’re in or you’re out.

If treating your things like beings isn’t your thing, you might enjoy The Joy of Less by Francine Jay. The concepts are similar. The key for organizing seems to be knowing what you have in the first place. You need to take everything completely out of their current spaces, sort through similar things, then put them back.

I bought the audiobook of The Joy of Less and put it on in the background while de-cluttering. (My girlfriend and I just moved to a new apartment.) Maybe I don’t need that 500GB external hard drive from ten years ago that’s been broken for seven of those years.

In any case, here are some tips that stuck with me.

  • Gather all similar things, then sort: Grab all your books from wherever they are. In my case they were in three or four different places. Putting them all together made it clear that I didn’t need those 2011 JavaScript books.
  • GTD-like sorting, everything gets a category: You label every single item with next actions (keep, toss, or donate) or put it in a someday/maybe (a box that you throw away in 6 months).
  • Take pictures of sentimental things, then toss: Your friends won’t care that you threw away their save the date card. Especially when they just celebrated their 2nd anniversary.
  • Your things are worth way less than you imagine: For proof, take some stuff to your favorite local we’ll-buy-your-stuff place. For me, it’s Book-Off. Whether it’s a Star Wars novel or that guitar I didn’t learn to play, they just seem to roll a 6-sided die in the back to determine how much to pay you.

Lately I’ve been reading /r/simpleliving. The minimalism sub is more about minimalist design. This seems to infuriate simpleliving members who consider themselves minimalists. They think it’s hilarious to fetishize “minimalist” furniture that costs thousands of dollars. They’d rather live in a cabin with no electronics. Or have their own farm.

I’ve seen that Narcos episode. Farms are hard work. Nobody living on a farm has time to make fun of minimalists.

I actually do like the simpleliving sub. There’s good content about being happy with what you have. Content-content, if you will. (You won’t, I know.) I just got irked by a thread with a bunch of people calling a minimalist YouTuber not a true minimalist, just someone cashing on a fad by… getting rid of a lot of her material things. Other members defended her, though, so hope isn’t lost.

Actually, just go to organization sub. If you like what you see, you’ll also probably like The Joy of Less.

Decisive

Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work is by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. If you read business books, you might be familiar with their other books, Made to Stick and Switch. The format is similar. Speaking of format, I started with the Kindle version but quickly remembered I’m supposed to be listening to these books. I got the audiobook and listened to it over a few days during some very long walks.

Decisive describes decision-making techniques, explains the research behind it, and has many anecdotes showing how it can be applied. People sometimes get annoyed with books filled with stories. Stories help get the point across. If stories weren’t useful, novels wouldn’t exist and we’d only be reading Cliff Notes and $0.99 self-published eBook summaries.

One story that resonated is one of the simpler ones. (Simple story for a simple mind.) A guy is deciding between speaker systems and one is $300 more than the other. The salesman says, hey, what if you got the cheaper one and instead bought $300 of albums? Option C is something the customer never considered.

We don’t consider alternatives all the time. Particularly when comparing two options. He probably went with option D: higher quality speakers and pirated music.

I read Decisive to help in my quest to improve my focus. I want to be better about deciding what to focus on. It didn’t unlock anything major for me immediately. It’s given me some ideas though and I need to apply what I learned. When weighing future decisions, I’ll try actively viewing them from a distance or some other perspective.

Back to my decision to switch from eBook to audiobook. What would option C look like?

  • Buying both: I’ve done this a few times thinking I would jump back and forth listening and reading. Or listen to it then review my notes in the Kindle version. It hardly pans out that way.
  • Buying neither: For some books, if you really just want to avoid story upon story, there’s probably a TED talk. Authors also usually do the rounds on different podcasts. It could be worth searching for their appearances to get a sense of what the content will be like.

Would I rather have listened to Decisive or hours podcasts instead? I’d wager that I learned more from this. The podcasts would be more entertaining. Is learning more important than entertainment? There’s your answer.

That would’ve been a great, snooty way to say “of course learning is more important”. What I mean is: it depends. For me, learning is for morning and entertainment is for night when I need to wind down. Audiobooks for the morning commute and podcasts for the evening commute.

A few weeks ago, I finished The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis’s book about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The duo inspired so much of today’s business and self-development books with their published work about decision making.

Decisive is part of the writing inspired by Kahneman and Tversky’s work. Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow referred to at the start of the book and one of the first suggested readings at the end of the book. It’s about time I move Thinking, Fast and Slow up my book queue. Long overdo.

10-10-10

Something I need to write about longer or add to my book notes post on Decisive is the 10-10-10 technique. When making a decision to do something or not, think in terms of 10-10-10.

  • 10 minutes from now, how will I feel? Probably relieved that you took action on it at all.
  • 10 months from now, how will I feel? In a lot of cases, it might not matter.
  • 10 years from now, how will I feel? If it goes well, the benefits might outweigh the negatives if it doesn’t go well.

The example in the book is about asking a girl out on a date. It probably really depends on the situation, but it’s a good technique to have in the toolbox.

Back on the Chromebook

When writing directly in WordPress, my Chromebook really, really does the trick. I re-read my first impressions of the Chromebook and a lot of it still holds up. It’s great to take around. I even had a picture from using it while sitting on a bench at a park. Right now, there’s snow on the ground so those sure seem like really pleasant days.

The WordPress app for the iPad is the same as the iPhone app and designing for the iPhone clearly took priority. Using my MacBook for the WordPress console still tempts me to tinker with HTML/CSS. Or think about if I should be writing in Ulysses instead.

It’s just really pleasant writing on the Chromebook.

Scheduling posts

Looking back at old posts, I realized my favorite posts involved both writing and drawing. Lately I was only writing so last week I focused on drawing. That skewed a little too far the other way. I’m not good at writing, and I’m worse at drawing. So a post with just drawings certainly can’t stand on its own. 

Combining okay writing with okay drawings is… well I don’t know if that’s exactly a winning combination either. Putting mediocre ingredients together gets you to like your local diner. Which, I mean, gets regular customers in and everyone seems friendly with each other and enjoys their time there. 

Who would want that when you can be the Yelp diner with a cramped pseudo line out the door to get into the formal line to get the privilege of waiting for an hour to get in to most likely get some kind of omelette and some kind of waffles or French toast.

I started scheduling some posts. My Ulysses drafts was getting out of control. The app makes writing really pleasant so I end up writing in it a lot. My morning pages were going in there. Sometimes with morning pages, I add headings that I intend to move into their own posts eventually. Then, unsurprisingly, I never take the time to pull them out of the morning pages.

I needed to get back to my habit of finishing posts. Writing right in WordPress helps. Environments matter. Even digital environments. It’s why Seth Godin writes his daily post right in Typepad. I need to steal repurpose the idea and call it the Write Right Principle then write a $0.99 eBook about it. 

I’ll try leveraging some other features in WordPress (scheduled posts) to focus on finishing posts. Right now I’ve got three book notes posts scheduled. They’re nowhere near where I’d like them to be for posting. (One is a hodgepodge of clips from the various morning pages I mentioned earlier.)

I’m hedging though. They’ll first get published to this micro section. It’s somewhat hidden in that none of the navigation goes here.

It’s an experiment, but it seems to be working already so I have a feeling it’ll be a long-term experiment.