Francis – Page 3 – Francis Cortez

18 Minutes

In 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done, Peter Bregman writes about focus, distraction, and getting things done. The title comes from his daily steps for focusing on this. Summarized:

5 minutes: Start your day by planning what you’ll focus on
8 minutes: At the start of every hour in an 8-hour work day, ask if you’re working on the right thing
5 minutes: Review your day by figuring out what went well and what could be improved

I haven’t tried following it completely yet, but I did turn the MacOS notifications back on to announce the time. It’s helped me stay on track.

I liked the format of the book. Each chapter is built sort of like this:

Story as a metaphor to introduce a problem
How the problem applies to work-related things
Solutions to that problem at work
Applying the principles to that solution to the introductory story
Directive

I call the end directives, as in how Derek Sivers has a “Do this.” takeaway from all his reading. 18 Minutes explicitly has a box at the end of each chapter with one or two sentences explaining exactly how to take action. For example:

The first element is your strengths. Over the coming year, play the game that is perfectly suited to your strengths.

Nice and tidy. I need to go back and just look at all the directives again.

This is yet another productivity book. It references all the hit studies—kids eating marshmallows, good samaritans, monkeys and hoses, and more.

It’d be a great book to start with if you don’t read a lot of productivity books. Otherwise, you may have already read longer versions of each chapter.

The directive above is part of a chapter talking about four things to do to have a good year:

1. Leverage your strengths. 2. Embrace your weaknesses. 3. Assert your differences. 4. Pursue your passions.

In terms of this blog, I’ll run through these four things.

Leverage your strengths: I read a lot, I have a good hour each day to work on this, I can design, I can program.
Embrace your weaknesses: I’m not great at drawing. I’ll need to learn to leverage this. What are the pros of this? I have a beginner’s mind, which is a great time to write about learning to draw. I can have more empathy with other people learning to draw than someone who’s been doing it for 20 years does.
Assert your differences: I can’t be the best writer, I can’t be the best reader, I can’t be the best at drawing, so I’ll need to figure out how I’m different. This one isn’t as straightforward to me. I draw almost entirely on an iPad. That’s… not so original but it’s something to work with.
Pursue your passions: What do I do with my free time? Productivity books have become a guilty pleasure. Which can’t make me sound lamer. It means I give my friends a lot of unsolicited advice. Which goes over about as well as you might think. It could be good for this blog, though.

Look at the activities you do alone and figure out if you can (and want to) do them in a way that includes other people. For example, join a garden club. Or a reading or meditation group. Or write something other people will read.

This might be my biggest takeaway from the book. Last year, I wrote 100 posts in 100 days (and am approaching 100 times that I’ve mentioned it in subsequent posts). When I think back to it, fun and enjoyable aren’t exactly the first words that come to mind.

Grueling and rewarding, yes. I sense that if I wrote 25 posts in 100 days with a friend doing the same and reviewed our progress, that’d be at lot more fun.

This year, I’ll share my writing more. I have a couple friends and we’re thinking about doing weekly or bi-weekly calls. I’ll look for other ways to turn solo activities into group activities.

Someday/maybe. This is a list I got from David Allen, who wrote the bestsellers Getting Things Done, and it’s where I put things to slowly die.

Nursing home for project ideas. It goes back to the principle that there’s not a finite amount of creativity. The more creativity you exercise in life, the more you’ll have. If a project isn’t enough to prioritize now, and you’re constantly thinking of new ideas, what are the chances that letting it sit in the someday/maybe list will make it more attractive a project than any of the new ideas you’ll think of?

The someday/maybe list is not a wine cellar where project ideas become more refined, it’s just a musty basement where dust layers up.

Distraction is, in fact, the same thing as focus. To distract yourself from X you need to focus on Y.

I’ve never thought of it this way. This is never more apparent than when you see a friend going through a breakup. It’s why we tell our friends (here’s that unsolicited advice again) to go to the gym, surround yourself with people, dive into your work. You need to distract yourself from your own thoughts by focusing on anything else.

We’d probably be wise to apply that thinking more often. If you’re burning out on work, don’t look at seemingly unproductive things as distractions. Look at them as ways to focus on recovery.

I roll my eyes when people suggest giving up TV entirely to be more productive. If you’re watching hours and hours every night, ok yeah maybe give that up. But it’s become one of the best places to see creativity. It’s a good way to turn your brain off.

I was watching the WWE Network for an hour a day during some of my most productive months. (To look smart in a meeting just wait for a statistic to be dropped then say well is that correlation or causation?) Correlation or causation? Watching pro wrestling let me turn my brain off to a notch most people don’t have on their dials. It was like the difference between restarting your browser and re-installing your OS for a fresh start.

To be successful, watch some wrestling!

Or don’t. But check out 18 Minutes, because Bregman’s got better ideas than I do.

Journal #14: Back to drawing

This week, I finally got back to drawing. Going to get back to believing in the process. If I show up and draw, I’ll get better at drawing. Reading about deliberate practice won’t be as good as actually practicing drawing, even if that practice doesn’t 100% fit the guidelines for what makes it deliberate.

I finished reading The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis. I really enjoyed it. It’s about Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow, and his friendship with Amos Tversky, his collaborator for many years. It touches on relationships, academia, credit, military duty, and thinking.

I also finished reading Tokyo Vice by Jake Adelstein. It’s another book I really enjoyed.

Waiting for a haircut

I’m waiting for a haircut and I thought I’d try writing something in this micro section on the go.

I don’t know why I’m calling it a micro blog. That’s what Twitter is. This really is just a regular blog. The category should be like “casual” or something.

I’m still thinking about if I’m going to take pieces from here and revise them for a weekly post. That could be one way to go.

I’m almost done with Tokyo Vice. Really glad I read it. I was thinking that I like it because it’s written with each section as sort of a narrative. Or there are narrative elements at least. It’s based in reality though.

A running thread is how what actually happened differs from what he ended up seeing in the newspaper.

I read once that one of the best lessons you can have is to experience something that ends up being reported in a newspaper. Or to at least only be one degree removed from it. You can see how things get left out or described differently than what happened.

Then you step back and realize that happens for every article.

I’ve been thinking maybe I should just read a straight up crime novel. I wonder how big a difference it would be reading a nonfiction narrative with outrageous things happening to a fiction novel based in reality.

Oh yeah I also dipped into the next book I plan to read. I of course didn’t use the book list I said I would use. Up next was supposed to be The Alchemist.

Instead, I picked up Decisive. It’s by the same people who wrote Switch and Make it Stick. I remember when it originally came out, it just didn’t sound interesting to me. Making decisions wasn’t something I felt like I struggled with.

Now that I’ve been working on focusing, I’m finding that one of the things I struggle with is deciding what to focus on in the first place.

There are a few solutions to not knowing what to work on next. On one end is deciding quickly and having, say, a 25% chance that it’s the best thing to work on.

You can decide slowly and have a 80% chance that it’s the right thing to work on.

You can decide very very slowly to try to get to 100% but by the time you get started you could’ve done a couple 80% decisions.

Or something.

Supposed to be a Yakuza guy

Morning sketching

I paid money for a focus course. I’m realizing that I’m already okay at blocking off time. During that time, I’m even able to pay pretty good attention to whatever I’m working on. What I need to work on, though, is picking the right thing to focus on.

I also paid money for a top performer course. With design work, one of my strengths is learning how to use design tools. It’s a hard skill. (Hard as in the opposite of soft skills, not hard as in difficult.) Hard skills can be taught in a workshop and practiced. Hard skills are the ones that you can really do deliberate practice on.

However, soft skills separate the top performers.

“Someone once said that education was knowing what to do when you don’t know.” — One of Daniel Kahneman’s students

I’ve learned that experienced designers know what to do when they don’t know. I need to focus on learning how to do this. Sometimes I don’t know the answer. I won’t find the answer no matter how well I know to work with nested symbols in Sketch.

I’ve prided myself on being able to prototype. If you have enough knowledge to know the design won’t work in the first place, there’s no need to prototype it at all. This, of course, needs to be balanced. Less you become one of those pessimists that people build prototypes for to prove wrong.

Anyway, enough about thinking about this from a design perspective.

A more general soft skill that’s important is knowing what to focus on. If I break down what I’ve blogged about before, here’s what I’ve focused on.

Writing and posting quickly: This, of course, is another reference to writing 100 posts in 100 days. It was a useful thing to focus on. I focused on finishing. Quality took a hit, though.
Images and text, together: When bought my iPad a few months ago, I had a goal in mind to use images and text together to explain things I was learning or describe what I’ve been up to.
Writing drafts: I bought Ulysses and started skewing things back to writing more and drawing less. I was doing a little more revising and focusing on book notes.
Blogging about blogging: I’m doing this literally right now. It’s tempting because it doesn’t take as much thought as writing book notes. It might also be the least valuable thing to put effort into.

The posts I enjoy looking at were made when I was being deliberate about using images and text together. I’m going to spend February narrowing down on that. Yesterday and today, I drew for a good amount of time.

There’s some value in curation. Finding a good quote in the first place has some value. I don’t need to try and fail to write some brilliant thoughts to go with it. Instead I’ll lean toward matching that good quote with a mediocre sketch and hope it’ll turn into great quotes and good illustrations.

With practice, of course.

Notability storyboards

I was doing morning pages in Notability last week. Now I’ll try to review some and see how I can use them. I wrote a breakdown of 18 Minutes chapters.

It starts with a story to introduce a problem. The middle has details explaining how to fix things with some loose research to back it up. It ends with a callback to the story. Then it really ends with a small boxed summary that’s pretty close to what Derek Sivers calls a directive. No metaphor, just direct speak for what you should do.

There once was a guy who rambled and he got hit by a truck because he was rambling and he never got to the point.

Steven Pressfield tells interesting stories with lessons about creativity. 18 Minutes has somewhat less interesting stories with possibly more useful lessons. Either way, it’s a good format. It’s essentially a blog best-of in book form.

I am the rambler. The truck is a metaphor. It’s the ID4 dump truck and it’s driving my readers to better websites.

Directive: use directives to drive my writing.

I’m thinking I shouldn’t just re-type what I wrote in Notability.

De-cluttering and deep work

Last year I made a doc with all my highlights from Cal Newport’s Deep Work. I copied and pasted them all from my Kindle Highlights page. Then I set a one minute interval timer to go through each of them and write thoughts for a minute each.

After doing that exercise, I thought it’d be good to do that more often for every book I read.

A year later, I wish I followed through on that because the highlights are good to read through.

I wrote about de-cluttering and also shared some tips that stuck with me through reading a few tidying books. One of them was to learn to be okay getting rid of sentimental things.

I finally tossed a bunch of work notebooks. Some were from last year around the time I originally read Deep Work. I flipped through them and almost kept a couple because there were some good examples of scheduling blocks of time for deep work. Out with the old, though.

Still, I can’t toss one journal of mine. I wrote in it from probably 2004-2008. I didn’t fill it. It captured some of my thinking from college. I also had enough awareness at the time to comment on how dumb some of it would seem in the future.

It’s still easy to get caught up in, though, no matter how aware you are. Though that’s probably the first step.

Some of the things that stuck with me from Deep Work: practicing being bored, making the internet less of a source of entertainment, and working on single problems for longer blocks of time.

My problem now is picking the right thing to work on. Cal has mentioned The One Thing and Essentialism as good books for narrowing this down.

25% thoughts on Tokyo Vice

I thought it’d be good to capture some of my early thoughts on Jake Adelstein’s Tokyo Vice. It’s about an American reporter working for one of Japan’s national newspapers. I read a sample chapter sometime last year and enjoyed it but didn’t buy the full version until now.

I read 18 Minutes last week. I got away from my books spreadsheet and that was a little bit of a guilty pleasure. Productivity books are probably the lamest possible guilty pleasure. The story-per-chapter format works well for Steven Pressfield’s trilogy on creativity. It also works well for Peter Bregman’s 18 Minutes.

I enjoyed it but it reminded me of why I wanted to get away from reading these kinds of nonfiction books. It had a chapter on the marshmallow study. A mention of the study where you’re more likely to follow through if you set a date and time. Growth mindset? Check. 10,000 hours? Check.

In the middle of reading 18 Minutes I realized that nearly everything made me think of work. Which isn’t exactly the best thing for casual reading outside of work.

I’ve been a little focused on the takeaways from a book. What will I remember a year from now? I need to reconsider that reading for leisure means enjoying the book during leisure time. I don’t go to dinner with friends thinking about what takeaways will stick a year from now. I go because it’s enjoyable in the present and probably the best possible use of my time that can take place with any regularity.

Reading can be a getaway. That’s why I’m really happy so far with Tokyo Vice. It’s so far removed from the productivity and creativity books that I filled last year with. Not only is it a different country, it’s a different time. The culture is so different and Adelstein captures his perspective so well. You get a sense of what being an outsider in Japan is like.

I’m going to try continuing with my rule: if there’s no narrative, I’ll listen to the audiobook.

My early directive for Tokyo Vice: learn as much as you can about the culture you’re trying to be a part of while understanding that you’re still an outsider. There are also some advantages to being an outsider so figure out how to use those.

This micro blog will pretty much be a blog about what I’m currently reading.

Journal Issue 13: The Blog of Five Things

My progress on this blog reminds me of Seth Godin’s concept of The Dip. The total effort is accumulating but the results aren’t increasing. A dip can come before a breakthrough. If there’s no breakthrough coming, it’s not a dip it’s just a dead end. The trouble is that they look similar. Is this a dip or is it a dead end?

If I read the book maybe I could take a look at my situation and answer that in a few minutes. But I haven’t, so I’ll just assume the breakthrough is coming.

A template for five things

I’ll continue a rough format of five sections. Earlier posts that were more fun, both to write and read. They involved drawing. I haven’t drawn at all in over a week and haven’t been drawing regularly in a month.

I want to get back in the drawing habit. One of the best things I did regularly a couple months ago was was use storyboard templates for brainstorming.

In my effort to get back to that, I made a storyboard template that moves everything into one column to follow the blog post format better.

Each page has five of the blocks with a place for a doodle and a few lines below it. Here’s a look at a rough explanation of Warren Buffet’s goal-setting technique.

Eventually I would write a post about focusing and one technique for happiness is not focusing on becoming a billionaire like Warren Buffet.

Writing through the book backlog

I’ve still been reading. Writing book notes increases the value of the book for me quite a bit. It’s a no-brainer to continue them. I can read a book faster than I write the posts, though, so a backlog continues growing.

Here are books I’ve finished in the past couple months that I want to write notes for:

Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler
Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow
We Learn Nothing by Tim Kreider
Momo by Michael Ende
The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis

When the year started, I increased the frequency of listening to an audiobook. There’s a backlog for them also:

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin
Joy on Demand by Chade-Meng Tan
Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan
Live Right and Find Happiness (although beer is much faster) by Dave Barry
The Mindful Athlete by George Mumford
The Joy of Less by Francine Jay

I can’t write 3 posts for all of these books. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by the backlog. I need to work on a solution somewhere int he middle.

The first thought is to stop reading as much and write more. Except I can’t exactly. Reading time isn’t equivalent to writing time. Reading can be done in smaller chunks of time. It’s not ideal but it works better than trying to write full posts in smaller chunks of time.

I know you were waiting for a bad food analogy—don’t worry I’ve got one.

Reading in chunks adds up. It’s like making a crepe cake. Which I’ve never done. But you add a layer a time. 10 pages here, 10 pages there. Soon you’ve got the full cake and read the entire book.

Writing in small chunks is more like adding chunks of butter to a stew. What kind of stew it is that you add butter to, I don’t know. The small pieces disappear.

I have a few better options:

I can write single posts with collections of shorter thoughts. That at least helps give me the mental checkmark of completely finishing a book. I can move on and write about the next book. If I write 3 posts for a book, take it as a sign that I really enjoyed it.
I can skip writing a book notes post altogether. I’ll probably just give some brief thoughts in one of these journal posts.

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

I never knew how big Steve Martin was until reading Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head. Here’s how Apatow describes Steve Martin:

When I was young, I loved him without even understanding the premise of his act. I didn’t realize that he was poking fun at the self-importance of showbiz personalities, or the clichés of comedy. There was this whole meta thing going on that was completely over my head.

In Born Standing Up, Martin describes different points in his career and you see the development of the meta aspect of his act. He goes from being a magician doing someone else’s act to doing his own magic act to removing the magic and then realizing people are laughing at some parts that aren’t exactly part of the act to honing in and focusing on that.

Audiobooks and podcasts

Back to Sick in the Head. Key and Peele talk to Judd Apatow about improv and how it compares to stand-up. Peele talked about working with Key:

“The best moments I’ve ever seen in improv are funnier than the best stand-up bits that I’ve ever seen. There’s something that can only happen between two people collaborating, and I just think that two people with the same vision is better than one.”

The best moments from podcasts are funnier than the best audiobook moments. If you asked me a few months ago, I would’ve said audiobooks are a better use of time. I’ve changed my mind on that. Especially when listening for leisure. I’m more likely to laugh at a conversation between two people when they’re laughing.

Look out for my future post “17 ways podcasts are better than audiobooks except buy these audiobooks with the affiliate tag“.

Flexibility

A lot of my earliest memories involve watching my brother play videogames with his friends. They all seem to just have the blurred faces of memories or at least a tendency to never look at my memory camera. I remember them playing Street Fighter II over and over trying to it beat it with every character. It took them hours to beat it with Dhalsim. That’s my very first memory of yoga.

I’ve been telling friends “I started doing yoga”. I don’t know if taking an intro class counts as starting. “Starting” implies that I’ll be continuing.

A couple years ago I realized I couldn’t touch my toes anymore. This was never an issue until I went probably a decade without every trying it. Then it was an enormous struggle. I knew mobility was a part of CrossFit so I went with my normal pattern of joining a CrossFit gym and attending until I injure myself.

I’m going to try the combination of yoga and whatever meathead strength plan sounds good for the month at the local Globo gym. I’m 3 classes in and day to day I’m feeling pretty good.

Flow junkes

Action sports are often marketed with adrenaline up front. The athletes are adrenaline junkies, living in a rushed state. The Rise of Superman explains that it’s far from the truth:

But they are all flow junkies—the difference is critical. And chemical. The fight-or-flight response—a.k.a. the adrenaline rush—cocktails adrenaline, cortisol (the stress hormone), and norepinephrine. It’s an extreme stress response. The brain switches to reactive survival autopilot. Options are limited to three: fight, flee, or freeze. Flow is the opposite: a creative problem-solving state, options wide open.

It reminds me of Alex Honnold, likely the best free climber in the world. The 60 Minutes feature “The Ascent of Alex Honnold” has footage of one of his climbs with another climbing expert explaining what’s going on. It’s methodical. The climbs can take hours. Honnold says that if he’s feeling that fight or flight response then something’s wrong.

Instead, he’s in flow. You can be in that state for long periods of time. If you enter a flow state doing sports can it help in other aspects of your life? Maybe:

People report feeling extraordinarily creative the day after a flow state, suggesting that time spent in the zone trains the brain to consistently think outside the box.

That’s not entirely scientific but I’ll take it.

If you can get into a flow state then you can learn to ride that wave for some time after.

I don’t have a wing suit and a cliff handy every day, so I’ve been interested in other ways to get into flow states. Team sports and group fitness classes seem to be a step in the right direction. Sitting still might help also.

High level meditators can achieve brain wave activity similar to a creative session in a flow state. “High level” means many years of practice. Someday it’d be nice to have a flow switch. In the meantime, I’ll continue working on the hodgepodge recipe of workouts, meditation, and standing on one leg in just this particular way. Whatever it takes, flow is worth it.

Note for Sick in the Head

I wrote a post for Sick in the Head and still want to write more about how the top performers have similarity to the guests in Tools of Titans. In a 1984 interview with Garry Shandoing, Judd says this.

Judd: This is the comedy interview program that talks serious about comedy.

This describes the book well. I read a few books about comedy last year. One thing was clear: making funny things takes serious work. Also, it’s a craft like others. There are people who grew up in the exact situation where things look like natural talent. For the rest of us, comedy can be learned.

All the great stand-up comedians did a ton of stand-up. All the great writers did a ton of writing. Some did both.

It’s cool to see different perspectives. Some people think it’s good to turn over your entire act. Others are fine doing old bits knowing most of the audience hasn’t heard it.

Momo book quote

I have a lot of book highlights. I highlight too much. I have a backlog of books that I finished reading in December and January that I want to write book notes for but have procrastinated on. Part of this micro blog goes along with the idea of taking the least action on something. If I can just post a highlight with rough thoughts on it, it’ll help build momentum to writing the full book notes post.

Here’s one from Momo.

True, they earned more money and could also spend more. But they had morose, exhausted, and even bitter faces with unfriendly eyes.

It’s a children’s book from the 70s but it resonates so well today with all the focus on productivity and work efficiency. People succeed at saving time in some task only to fill that new free time with some other task.

This reminds me, I need to write something about Cal Newport’s Deep Work. It’s been a year since I read it so it’d be a good time to review it because I probably changed my approach to things more based on that book than any other last year.

Welcome to the micro blog

This should be sort of hidden for right now. This is where the roughest things will go. I’ll put those one-off sketches here. Things like that. Single links and book notes posts.

I wanted to give myself a place to share daily without feeling like I’m spamming people. I have a Twitter account but it’s always been pretty focused on UX things I’m up to.

Shout out to Wally who I’ll give this link to.

These will probably be rough drafts of sections of larger posts that I’ll eventually write. Daily wisdom or something like that. So right now here are a few things to share.

Pause-button mentality — Precision Nutrition
Cool infographics here showing different dials for movement, nutrition, and wellness. Works toward building systems instead of sprinting toward things. It’s important to understand how the daily changes add up over time.

I’ve also started reading The Undoing Project. It’s about Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky.

Danny was a pessimist. Amos was not merely an optimist; Amos willed himself to be optimistic, because he had decided pessimism was stupid. When you are a pessimist and the bad thing happens, you live it twice, Amos liked to say. Once when you worry about it, and the second time when it happens.

I haven’t read Thinking, Fast and Slow but I’ll get to it this year.

Flow and Animal Chin

I heard about this book through The Joe Rogan Experience #873, where Steven Kotler was a guest. Rogan talked about playing pool and mentions a term called "stroke". Being in the zone. You're hitting shot after shot without thinking about it.

Once you realize you're in stroke, you're knocked out of it.

If you think about flow you'll get knocked out of it. Which could be frustrating if you're chasing flow. Especially trying to achieve flow at a desk. There's less physical activity to keep your focus away from deliberate thoughts.

In Sick in the Head, Kotler writes about The Search for Animal Chin, a 1987 skateboarding film with a bunch of legends. People were able to see the top level of the sport and practice the tricks on their own. One of the first steps to doing something is knowing it's possible in the first place.

Skate videos through the 80s and 90s let people see what was possible. Now it's a little easier to see top level performers.

Any smartphone or tablet computer opens these same possibilities up to everyone. Want some Animal Chin in your own life? Join an online community. Watch videos. Read stuff. Get smarter. Try stuff. Get into flow. Use flow to do something amazing. Post videos. Teach others how you did it. And repeat. That’s what action and adventure athletes did, that’s one of the main reasons they went so far so fast.

One of the chapters talks about Danny Way jumping over The Great Wall of China. Just a few taps and you can see it online.

If you're learning anything, YouTube probably has something useful to watch. When I was learning to draw¹, I searched for artists drawing at comic conventions.

Some things don't make as much sense to watch in process, like writing². But you can watch interviews with writers. Even long form ones from book tours. One of my favorites is a discussion between George RR Martin and Stephen King. I wrote more about it in an earlier post.

The internet connects so many people. You can see top performers and you can teach people out there who you're further along than. Take advantage of it.

While you're at it, check out Animal Chin in its entirety. No need to ask your buddy to mail a VHS tape across the country.

I still am learning to draw, so I'll get back to this. ↩︎
A couple years ago, James Somers made Draftback to replay Google Docs revision history. This did of what skateboard videos did. I watched some of it and an immediate takeaway was seeing him use a TK in place of someone's name. I learned it in seconds and still do that to this day. Using placeholders helps a lot for staying in the same context, which in turn helps you stay in flow. ↩︎

Journal Issue 12: Still making, showing, and learning

“In that really enthusiastic moment I decided I’d do a 1-hour photo walk every day. I’ve since decided that’s definitely unsustainable but I might be able to do 3-4 times a week. I’ll post every Sunday. Starting, like many goals, on January 1st.” — Me in my last post, definitely more than a few Sundays back

Bill Simmons categorizes some teams as the best of the bad teams. If all excuses for not writing are bad, then mine is at least a one of the better bad reasons. I’ve been moving. Which mostly means I’ve been packing and unpacking. The move itself was miraculously only a couple hours.

I’ve wanted this blog to be sustainable. I’ll probably need more structure. Here’s what I’ll try this week

1 update

1 book excerpt

1 link

1 photo set

1 drawing

You’re reading the update. It should be some kind of dispatch. Aka where I write about writing. Blog about blogging. Shoot about shooting.

Book excerpt

I’ll stop quoting Tools of Titans. Someday. A lot of tools work that I’ve started using. I finally tried one that didn’t quite work. It involves getting to sleep:

Have trouble getting to sleep? Try 10 minutes of Tetris. Recent research has demonstrated that Tetris—or Candy Crush Saga or Bejeweled—can help overwrite negative visualization, which has applications for addiction (such as overeating), preventing PTSD, and, in my case, onset insomnia.

The problem with 10 minutes of Tetris is it’s enough to remember how fun Tetris is. It snowballed quickly. After a few games, I bought the premium version. Then it was 2am. Then I was sleepy the next day.

Link

I liked what Tim had to say in this reply when someone asked about giving advice:

Speak from experience
Detailed specifics
Suggested next action.

I gave some detailed specifics. My suggested next action based on my experience: pick a worse game.

Photoset: It’s my last week in East Village

I haven’t been posting but I have been writing drafts. I wrote this before my move while I was in the process of packing.

I’ve taken my goal down from doing a photo walk every day to taking my camera with me regularly. That seems to be working. I remind myself that posting some pictures from the week doesn’t mean I need to take hundreds each day. It’s hard for one photo to stand on its own. To think I’d be able to take a dozen or more good photos in a week is a little too ambitious.

It reminds me of some of career advice by Scott Adams (2007)

In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare.

That’s why I’ll be accompanying mediocre pictures with mediocre writing. Be like the traffic director. Work the intersection.

Oh yeah the pictures. Well a little more a do. Here are some things I have in mind for making this photo walking thing work:

I need a minimal workflow: I’ve stopped shooting RAW. Less thinking.

I’ll use Google Photos to edit: I stick my SD card in my MacBook, drag and drop to Photos, then move the files to an external hard drive. That’s enough backup for me right now.

(Disclaimer — I work at Google. Photos is one of my favorite digital products in the last few years.)

I’ll write in Ulysses and post with WordPress: I started using Ulysses a week or two ago. I’ve been using albums in Google Photos to sort out which ones I want to post.

I’ll edit on my iPhone and iPad: It’s fun.

And now, another photo story. I’ll start with 5 photos. Before leaving East Village, I was working through an East Village bucket list. There are plenty of better places by all sorts of measures. This isn’t representative of “real” New York. I’m a transplant. Here are places I like.

Boba Guys — I had a teammate at my old job and we’d get McDonald’s Frappes on Friday mornings. One tradition I miss. I took it back to work once and felt pure shame walking through the office with it. Never again. No domed lids and no big straws.“C’mon Frank.” But that was work. I can get them all I want when I’m at home.

I shot this blurry picture on one of the snow days before wiping the lens.

Cafe Matcha Wabi — Great matcha. Lots of shiba inu owners on the weekend.

Takahachi — I got a chirashi dinner for takeout here somewhere around once a month. I’ll usally go on runs where it’s once a week then I’ll cool off for a bit. Always reliable.

Sunny & Annie’s — My favorite deli. I went a few times through the years then probably weekly for the last couple months. Pho #1 on a wrap hits the spot in nearly every situation.

Oh yeah a drawing

I drew Jocko Willink and Michael Che earlier this week for a post about thinking positively about seemingly negative situations. It’s a book notes post for Sick in the Head.

I hadn’t drawn in a couple weeks so it did seem like the beginning stages of when a hobby ends. Drawing these made me remember how fun it is. Which is a weird thing to forget. It’s like bowling as an adult—always fun but then I forget about it after a day or two.

We’ll see where this goes.

Flow levels and entry points

Rise of Superman is about flow and action sports athletes. They achieve high levels of flow with regularity not seen in other fields. Steven Kotler explains how we can apply theirl techniques to reach flow in normal day to day work.

Why would you want to, anyway? For one, flow signals activities that go a long way toward happiness¹.

In fact, when Csikszentmihalyi dove deeper into the data, he discovered that the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.

I’ve had after-dinner programming sessions where I look up and all of a sudden it’s 2am. Getting into flow at a desk takes a combination of things: a distraction-free workspace, headphones to block out noise, an interesting problem to work on, and on and on. Sometimes you get in flow, sometimes you end up scrolling through Twitter.

You can try that hit or miss approach or you can jump off a cliff with a wing suit on.

Different methods will get you to different levels of flow. I’m not planning on jumping off even a jungle gym anytime soon. What else can I try? It might just take picking a ball up.

Kotler points to traditional sports and includes a quote from Bill Russell:

“My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt then that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart but all the opposing players, and that they all knew me. There have been many times in my career when I felt moved or joyful, but these were the moments when I had chills pulsing up and down my spine.”

You don’t have to be on the Cetics, either. This made me think of times when I’ve been in flow in the past few years. A pretty reliable method was playing basketball—poorly. Luckily there are plenty of other people at the same skill level.

When you’re running around the court you’re not usually consciously stopping and thinking about where on the court you need to go. Unless you’re setting a play up. Which is rare because, again, I don’t play at a high enough level.

I did a group rowing class recently would say I was in flow for parts of it. Particularly the end when it was timed for distance. At one point, the instructor was speaking to me directly and it took me about 15 seconds to realize she was even standing right next to me.

Being around a team or other people working toward the same goal helps you at least gets you out of your own head. I imagine this is part of why group cardio classes are popular.

Flow is worth searching for. I’ll start with looking for it at a local gym before jumping off ledges.

I’ll probably read one of Csikszentmihalyi’s books next. His name pops up everywhere when learning about performance and happiness. ↩︎

Tools of Titans (of Comedy)

I started reading Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow when Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss came out. For a few days, I switched back and forth between them. A couple times, I’d forget which one I was reading because they’re both books of interviews. The comedians Apatow interviews are top performers, much like Ferriss’s guests.

There were some connections in what they do day to day. For my Tools of Titans notes, I wrote about something Ferriss does that relates to something Jerry Seinfeld does—I promise it’s not about writing an X on a calendar.

Writing notes for Sick in the Head gives me a chance to write about another connection between people in the two books. This one connects Jocko Willink and Michael Che

Jocko Willink has a chapter in Tools of Titans explaining why his response is “Good.” His response to what? Everything. It forces you to find the silver lining in things. Well, maybe the kevlar lining:

“Now. I don’t mean to say something clichéd. I’m not trying to sound like Mr. Smiley Positive Guy. That guy ignores the hard truth. That guy thinks a positive attitude will solve problems. It won’t. But neither will dwelling on the problem. No. Accept reality, but focus on the solution.”

There’s always a lesson in challenges.

Apatow interviews Michael Che in Sick in the Head. Che talks about his first night at the Comedy Cellar:

“So you know, Chappelle’s onstage. He’s killing for like forty-five minutes. Uncharacteristically gets offstage after like forty or forty-five minutes; everyone assumed he was going to be up there all night. So the next comedian to get onstage is Chris Rock. He gets onstage, and does like forty minutes. And the next comedian that gets onstage is me. I’m like, Fuck you.”

Do you remember this dunk? (YouTube link)

Maybe, and only as a reference to performing after someone else did something amazing. It was immediately after Vince Carter’s 360 windmill in the 2000 NBA Dunk Contest—a legendary dunk¹. Jerry Stackhouse’s 360 was fine but the crowd responded like he did a layup.

Che explains how he felt performing right after two legends:

“But you know what? It was good. And you know why? Because that crowd had seen ninety minutes of the best comedians in the world. I could not ruin their night. There was nothing I could say that was ever going to wipe that smile off those faces, man.”

“Good.”

It’s the best in dunk contest history. If you can name a handful off the top of your head that were better, I’m either on your lawn or you need to get off mine. Whenever Kenny says the dunk contest is back he’s thinking about Vince Carter tearing down Oracle. ↩

Make, Show, Learn Issue 11: How to increase your readership 2100%

The key is to start with 4 viewers.

I posted a few things last week:

Well, I mean I posted them here but also finally shared a couple somewhere else. (Twitter and Hacker News.) Readership went up 2100%. Something tells me (that something is called common sense) that isn’t sustainable.
It made me wonder, is this blog a “Yes” or a “HELL YEAH”? I first heard that prioritizing question in Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. He recently wrote this post: How to do what you love and make good money

People take “and” to mean one thing that takes care of both. It’s certainly possible, but the success rate isn’t so high. Another problem is that sometimes you start making money doing what you love and then stop loving it because of what it takes to make money.

Derek points out that it’s two separate things, so it’s worth treating them as two separate things:

For both of them, I prescribe the lifestyle of the happiest people I know:

Have a well-paying job

Seriously pursue your art for love, not money

Through this blog, I’m trying to satisfy #2. Derek explains some advantages of being able to work on your art without needing for it to sell.

You don’t need to worry if it doesn’t sell. You don’t need to please the marketplace. No need to compromise your art, or value it based on others’ opinions.

You’re just doing this for yourself — art for its own sake.

Not every post I’ve written has been a “HELL YEAH”. Definitely not in terms of quality. As far as value to me, I’ve learned to sit down and write and finish things. So it’s at least a “yes”. Which is great because that’s the right direction toward “HELL YEAH”.

Moving in the right direction

Some posts are very fun to write. Some can feel like slogs. The posts that I put together last week about reading and writing unfortunately were closer to the latter. I knew I’d be sharing them, so a lot of times I was wondering “will other people like this”? Which is a good way to ensure the answer is “no”.

I put together a post with some photos of food I ate in 2016. It was fun to go through that. I also read an annual recap of things I did in 2013, which was fun to look back on. I went further back to a post from 2008 just recapping a weekend with friends. Like many blogs from back then, mine was pretty much a public journal. I captured mundane day to day things that grow more interesting with time. For the sake of having captured what that time is really like¹.

These personal blogs captured that time differently than social media does. It’s fun to check out a “This day 5 years ago” feature in social networks, but it’s different than the posts I used write.

I would write not really caring what other people thought. Similar to early social media when I didn’t worry about polluting feeds with my dumb writing. I knew nobody cared what I wrote. It’s freeing. Now I think people might care what I write. Which is silly because they’d have to read it in the first place, and that’s not happening yet.

I used to write small blurbs about pictures showing what I did during a week or a month.I had fun writing those things regularly over a few years. To move the creation of this blog to “HELL YEAH”, I should get back to having that kind of fun while writing.

Of course, I’ll need pictures. So I took a walk.

#NYENYCSTROLL

I brought my camera along. I can’t remember enjoying taking photos like this in a long time. Years probably. Even when I was first in New York I was still trying to take long exposures at night. You need gear. You need to set it up. I was happy with the results but it wasn’t exactly a process I learned to love.

Instead of hauling gear, this time I would just take my camera, put an audiobook on, walk around and take some pictures. Here are some things I saw.

Seeing these balloon guys reminded me that I won’t always see things like this. But I’ll never see them if I’m in my apartment all the time. Walking around will remind me of why I moved here in the first place.

If I ever think there isn’t anything to take pictures of, I’ll remind myself that I’m a moron. I live in the middle of Manhattan. I don’t subscribe to it being the center of the universe, but it’s certainly photogenic. If anything, you’ll always see new people.

Also, if I’m not feeling inspired, I can remind myself that I just need to put the camera over my head and pretend I’m accepting an Olympic medal. I don’t have to lug a piano around to do my art.

It’s too easy to think there won’t be anything interesting to shoot. As if it’s the city’s responsibility to provide something to take pictures of. It’s like that saying about being interesting to talk to by actually being interested in what the other person is talking about.

I also need to figure out what I’ll write to go along with pictures. This bagel is from Tompkins Square Bagels. They’ve got a new location that’s slowly becoming just as busy as the original.

Katz’s is less than a ten minute walk away. I’ll just have to pick out some default places to walk to and try my best there. I can rely on Katz’s for a couple more weeks then I’m moving up a couple dozen streets.

I’m guessing I thought the delivery guys getting ready was interesting. Down the road, this might be the kind of picture I’ll simply leave out.

I was considering using this for the main image at the top of the post. I shot it looking up at The New School.

As mentioned, I’ll be moving out of East Village soon. Meaning I’m trying to hit some of my favorite spots in the next couple weeks. Today we went to Minca for some ramen.

I’m reading through Momo right now. It’s about a town where a group of gray men come through and offer everyone the opportunity to save your time at a bank. You lose it today but sometime down the road you can use it. It’s a novel for children (by the same author as The Neverending Story) with a lot of good lessons about what’s important.

The photo above reminded me of a part where Momo finds a Barbie doll and one of the book’s gray men encourages her to play with it:

“You see?” the gray man went on. “It’s all very simple. You just have to keep buying more and more, and then you’ll never get bored. But maybe you think that the complete Barbiegirl will one day have everything and that she’ll become boring again? No, little girl, don’t worry! We have the perfect companion for Barbiegirl.”’

Dark and heavy.

On a lighter and lighter note, walking and shooting was fun I figure pretty healthy. In that really enthusiastic moment I decided I’d do a 1-hour photo walk every day. I’ve since decided that’s definitely unsustainable but I might be able to do 3-4 times a week. I’ll post every Sunday. Starting, like many goals, on January 1st.

January 1st-ish

You might notice the post date is January 2nd. I tried hopping on the wagon and fell off the other side immediately. It’s okay. I’ll be okay posting a day late or missing a week. Once it gets to two weeks missed, then I’ll worry.

If I’m burning out just to post on time, then I’m doing this for the wrong reason. It’s supposed to be a fun outlet. I want to stretch myself but I don’t want to add something stressful as a hobby.

These walks won’t be daily, but I’ll find out what I can do

Walking daily is healthy. Shooting daily would be good to get my reps in. These can work together. I enjoyed this post by Eric Kim: Walk Your Camera

Walking gives me a reason to shoot and shooting gives me a reason to walk. If I don’t feel like doing one then I can remind myself of the benefits of doing the other.

I’ll see how this goes. I’m still thinking through what exactly this format will be. I’ll be sure to share those thoughts soon. In any case, I hope you’ll follow along this year.

I always think back to Facebook in college. I wish I had a screencast of using it for ten or so minutes back then. Just a regular daily activity but it’s hard to remember exactly what it was like. Before the news feed, did I just do some cycle of searching by people’s names? ↩︎

Food I ate in 2016

Like plenty of people, I take pictures of my food. A friend asked once, “Do you ever even look at those pictures later?” Well, now’s my chance. I looked at each month and picked a picture from a meal I enjoyed. Here we go.

January: Toki Underground — Washington D.C.

Man I want these noodles again. For all the food in New York and all the noodles we had in Japan, this bowl was probably one of the best things of food that I had this year. We had a D.C. trip in the works and added this after seeing it on Michael Pollan’s Cooked on Netflix. Just kidding, it was on Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.

February: BBQ — Nashville
My girlfriend pulled the Master of None move on me and surprised me with tickets to Nashville the day before the flight. Just like it looked on the show, Nashville was a lot of fun. There’s live music everywhere, and the performers are good.

March: Roberta’s — Brooklyn

Roberta’s has a separate take-out location right next door. In 2015, we had both never been to Roberta’s and thought the take-out location was the main location. We got a (great) pizza at the take-out counter and ate it on some seats set up outside. We enjoyed the meal, left, and had no idea we weren’t at the main location.

Weeks later we were looking at reviews and noticed the pictures of the place looked much different. We went back to experience the actual restaurant and it was again a great meal.

April: Smorgasburg (the Prospect Park one) — Brooklyn

I love Smorgasburg. I don’t go often enough. People love taking pictures of food here, so I fit right in. Lobster rolls seem to mark good points in my time in New York. Probably because it means someone’s visiting and we’re eating outdoors.

May: Rokurinsha — Tokyo

Just amazing. We saw this on Mind of a Chef. There was so much good food in Japan. I’d love to go back. I like going back to places I enjoy maybe more than I like going to the places for the first time.

Like my 2nd time at a good restaurant is really enjoyable. You know what to order. You can also order that thing you saw other people order that looked good the first time around. There’s no anxiety of having picked the restaurant and hoping to god that the friends you’re with enjoy it and respect you as a person for picking that restaurant. God help you if they don’t like it.

I could have written entire posts about what I ate in Japan. And I did!

June: Crab at home — Oak Harbor, Washington

I grew up in Oak Harbor and there’s a lot of Dungeness crab. It’s not known for it or anything. I somehow didn’t realize what kind of luxury this was growing up. There are just a lot of families that crab and they usually have a surplus of crab so they give it away or sell it for very cheap. (Say $5 per lobster.)

When it’s in season, my parents usually have some for me if I visit. There are few things I enjoy more than laying out a bunch of newspaper, pouring some vinegar to dip in, then ripping the top shell off and cracking the steamed corpse in half and having the off yellow fat drip on top of a bowl of fresh steamed rice. It’s further enhanced when I use the clean pinky on one hand to hit play on a random on-demand episode of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives.

Bliss.

July: Random Korean dishes with friends — Financial District

I have a group of friends from California who moved to New York around the same time I did. With some of their other friends, we all became a small family to spend our orphaned holidays together.

A running half-joke was that some of them were constantly a few months away from moving back to LA. Then they’d say “We decided to stay one more year” and we’d celebrate the decision. Some of them are actually making the move out of New York now so I’ve been in the midst of the reminiscing.

Some more my best memories in New York are with them. We hang out less frequently than we used to but when we get together it’s a blast. Almost always followed by a hangover.

Bonus food place: Per Se — I wrote about this here. One of the best meals of my life.

August: Shuko — New York

Great sushi and a not so stuffy environment. They played a lot of Drake. I love this place.

September: Very Fresh Noodles — Chelsea Market

I go to Xi’an Famous Foods regularly. I might like Very Fresh Noodles better. It used to be my go-to meal after any weekend gym trips.

October: This steak — My humble abode

I love steak. For a date night in, I splurged on one of the $25-ish per pound cuts at Whole Foods. The pan was too small to hold it. Did what I could, crossed my fingers, and it turned out pretty good.

As mentioned before, lobster rolls signal good outdoor memories. These pricey steaks now make me think of great times indoors. Another time I did this was my first month in New York, away from family. It was my first time alone on Christmas Eve. Which sounds kind of sad but for some reason is a good memory almost entirely because I had an enormous steak to eat.

November: Wataru — Seattle

I was with my favorite people in the world eating amazing sushi¹. Add in some sake and it’s my favorite meal this year.

December: Cleavers — Philadelphia

I spent an hour or so reading about cheesesteaks trying to pick a few places to try. Ingredients and health wise, it’s nearly the same as saying “Yeah, let me get 3 double cheeseburgers.” It’s awesome.

We were only in town for a couple days so we didn’t have many meals to spare on this. I considered the classics and read multiple top-cheesesteaks lists. Then we went to the most mainstream of the bunch.

This is not a hole in the wall local find. It’s downtown, clean, three floors, with polite service. They even have the gimmick touchscreen soda fountain with apparently every syrup to make your own creations that you usually only see in theater lobbies. Most importantly, they make a mean cheesesteak.

We went again like 12 hours later. I love Cleavers.

I’ve written previously about enjoying going to nice places but maybe not having a sophisticated palate. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s worth paying for high-end sushi. For myself, I mean. I think it’s totally worth it if you enjoy it. This meal was different. The difference was clear. I’ve had toro before but I really tasted the difference this time. ↩︎

What I learned from reading and writing in 2016

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” — Stephen King in On Writing

I read and wrote more this year than any year before. Here are some things I learned and how I’ll change my approach in 2017.

(Check out my full reading list of 52-ish books, my ten favorite books, and a recap of my writing for 2016.)

Lessons from reading

It’s okay (and probably a good idea) to quit on a book
I set a goal to average reading a book a week. Some were great, many were good, but some weren’t any fun and I wasn’t learning. I’d like to avoid those as much as possible.

Next year:

I’ll use the 25% point in a book as a checkpoint to consider whether I should continue or not. That’s enough to get a good sense of what the rest of the book will be like. It’s not so far that I’ll think “well I’ve gotten this far I may as well finish”.

I’m reducing my goal to reading 30 books instead of 52. I don’t want to feel pressured to finish for the sake of finishing.

It’s worth taking more time selecting books
Books take several hours to read, but I would take maybe a minute picking the next book. That ratio was way off.

Next year:

I’ll use a spreadsheet to plan my reading. Each book will have a sentence explaining why I want to read it. Reviewing the list before moving to a new book will keep me from reading too many of the same kind of book.

I won’t move to the next book until I’ve written about the recently completed one. Instead, I’ll re-read books about writing that I enjoy: On Writing by Stephen King, The Elements of Style by Strunk & White, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and On Writing Well by William Zinsser.

I’m hoping this will motivate me to write about the books, which is important because…

…it’s worth thinking about what I just read
Writing about each book forces me to really think about it. After looking at my full reading list from this year, one thing stuck out: I wrote notes for the books I enjoyed most.

It makes sense that I’d write about books I enjoyed. In part, the books are more valuable because I captured my thoughts about them.

One of the worst uses of time is reading a nonfiction book¹ without applying the principles. It’s easy to tell myself “At least I’m learning something.” I’ll agree with the conclusion then take exactly zero action based on the principles in the book.

Next year:

Before starting, I’ll think about what I’m hoping to learn through reading.
When finished, I’ll write about how I’ll apply the principles.

Fiction is fun and that’s valuable
Some people don’t read fiction and go as far as saying it’s a waste of time. I’ve always thought it was a good use of time but my actions didn’t reflect that. I read maybe one fiction book per year from 2011-2015.

I’m glad I made an effort to read more fiction this year. I’d rather laugh out loud reading one of Simon Rich’s short stories than read another conclusion based on the marshmallow experiment.

Next year:

I’ll read more fiction without worrying about applying anything at all.

Lessons from writing

Finish the first draft quickly
It has different monikers—down draft, vomit draft, two crappy pages. All serve as good reminders to keep your editor hat off. You have to generate a lot of ideas to get to any good ideas.

Next year:

I’ll do my best to avoid editing while writing. I started setting up a folder structure (in Ulysses) with subfolders named vomit draft, revision, and finish and publish.

Revising is where learning happens
At the start of the year, I sent out a newsletter explaining why I wanted to write more. It holds up better than most of the writing I did the rest of the year. Why? Well, you can’t edit newsletters after the fact, so I spent a lot of time revising it.

I could write mindlessly for 10 minutes then post the raw output every day². My writing wouldn’t improve much by doing that. Malcolm Gladwell describes it like this:

Writing is not the time consuming part. It’s knowing what to write. It’s the thinking and the arranging and the interviewing and the researching and the organizing. That’s what takes time. Writing is blissful, I wish I could do it more.

Blank pages are bliss and pressing ‘Publish’ is satisfying. Combined, it’s very easy to skip re-writing and editing.

Next year:

I’ll let my drafts sit for at least a day and revise everything that I post.

Consistency is key, but it doesn’t have to be daily
Posting daily was hard. I tried for 100 days and won’t do it again. I learned to enjoy the process but the output didn’t provide value to anyone. Hitting ‘Publish’ on a rough draft didn’t magically make it less rough.

When I reviewed the whole project, it struck me that 75 posts in 100 days would’ve been fine too. Even 50, because nobody’s going to read all of it. It’s hard enough to get someone to read any of it.

Next year:

I’ll try posting twice each week. That feels sustainable. If I have more time in a week, I’ll add to a backlog for the weeks where I have less time.

Good writing takes thought. It’s hard to think when in a full sprint. You can do a lot of thinking when taking a stroll.

In 2017, I’ll continue following King’s advice to read a lot and write a lot. By the end of the year, I might even be a writer.

By nonfiction, I mean business/self-development books that are specifically suggesting you take action in some way. ↩︎
When publishing daily, I did this on way too many mornings. ↩︎