Francis – Page 4 – Francis Cortez

Reading 52 books in 2016: Recap

In 2016, I tried to read a lot and write a lot. (I explained why in my post about writing in 2016.) “A lot” is relative, of course. My goal was to finish 52 books in the year¹. Before getting to the full list, here are some thoughts from completing this goal.

(Also check out my recent post about my ten favorite books from the year.)

I should be pickier with the books I read. It’d be better to read half as many book chosen with more care. Not all the books were great. A few weren’t very good at all. There’s a certain type of self-published book that I’ll try avoiding next year.

Immediate sign: links in the book to “more content” that open up to pages blocked by mailing list sign ups. It’s a little too transparent. If you won’t put a ghillie suit on your marketing channel at least toss a camouflage shirt on it.

I should read more broadly. The books that strayed from my usual reading topics² were the ones that I enjoyed most. Particularly fiction and narrative nonfiction. It makes sense that those were the most entertaining because they’re written to be entertaining.

I should take the time to write book notes. Along with being pickier, I should take the time afterward to review what I read. I’ve found so much value in writing thoughts about books during or after reading. Being active in thinking about what I’m reading increases my enjoyment of the books.

If I don’t write things down, it’s hard to remember any specifics from a book after a few months. Sharing these thoughts (hopefully) helps create value for others.

(As for extra value, carrying the zero… I made $0 from affiliate links in 2016 but I’ll keep the dream alive for 2017.)

30 minutes here or there adds up. Something that struck me when I first started browsing through Audible was the time estimates. Most books clocked in under 10 hours and were sometimes as low as 4 or 5 hours. Reading is much faster than listening so it wasn’t too hard to find enough time in 30-minute blocks through the week.

A minute here or there adds up… poorly. Nearly every book I buy is in Kindle format so I read on the iOS app often. Sometimes that means reading a page or two while standing in a line. It’s useless compared to reading that page or two while undistracted as part of a larger block of time.

How to read a book. Check out this PDF by Paul N. Edwards. After practicing some things there, I was a much more effective reader. Next year I’ll continue trying to be more thoughtful during reading.

I can continue the pace. I don’t read quickly. I tried reading instead in place of the time that would have gone to social media or social news. Which was way more time than I would’ve guessed.

Listening to an audiobook feels different. I listened to more this year than in past years, but didn’t count them in the full count of 52 books. Listening to audiobooks is just different. It doesn’t go as fast but you can just have it just go on for hours at a time.

It’s better for certain books and worse for others. I like shorter books that I can listen to repeatedly. Essentialism and 10% Happier are books that I’ve listened to multiple times. Same with Eat that Frog. This year I listened to Grit by Angela Duckworth 3 or 4 times.

I tried a couple novels³ but I think they’d probably be better for long highway commutes instead of walking commutes. Long-form podcasts are good here because of the rambling. You can go in and out of podcast conversations. It’s like being at a group dinner at a very long table, sitting between a few different conversations.

Here’s the full list of books that I read this year. Highlighted titles link to book notes. Also check out my ten favorite books from this year.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose by Nicole Fenton, Kate Kiefer Lee

About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, Christopher Noessel

Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris

Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton

Wireframing Essentials by Matthew J. Hamm

User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product by Jeff Patton, Peter Economy

Work The System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less (Revised third edition, 4th printing, September 1, 2014) by Sam Carpenter

Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover, Adewale Oshineye

Dark Force Rising: Star Wars Legends (The Thrawn Trilogy) (Star Wars: The Thrawn Trilogy Book 2) by Timothy Zahn

Disrupt Yourself: Putting the Power of Disruptive Innovation to Work by Whitney Johnson

The Wild Diet: Get Back to Your Roots, Burn Fat, and Drop Up to 20 Pounds in 40 Days by Abel James

Smarter Faster Better: The Transformative Power of Real Productivity by Charles Duhigg

Nobody Wants to Read Your Sht by Steven Pressfield

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More & Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier

Game Over: How Nintendo Conquered The World by David Sheff

The Miracle of Morning Pages: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Most Important Artist’s Way Tool: by Julia Cameron

Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz

Sleep Smarter: 21 Essential Strategies to Sleep Your Way to a Better Body, Better Health, and Bigger Success by Shawn Stevenson

The Elements of Style by William Strunk

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers

Kettlebell Simple & Sinister by Pavel Tsatsouline

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (A Song of Ice and Fire) by George R. R. Martin, Gary Gianni

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

The 4-Hour Chef: The Simple Path to Cooking Like a Pro, Learning Anything, and Living the Good Life by Timothy Ferriss

Save the Cat by Blake Snyder

Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV by Joe Toplyn

The Umbrella Man and Other Stories by Roald Dahl

The Last Girlfriend on Earth: And Other Love Stories by Simon Rich

Spoiled Brats: Stories by Simon Rich

Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg

You Don’t Know JS: Up & Going by Kyle Simpson

Ant Farm: And Other Desperate Situations by Simon Rich

Free-Range Chickens by Simon Rich

Elliot Allagash by Simon Rich

Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

You are a Writer by Jeff Goins

Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual by Michael Pollan

Hard Thing About Hard Things by By: Ben Horowitz

But What If We’re Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past by Chuck Klosterman

The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth by James Altucher

The Total Money Makeover: Classic Edition: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness by Dave Ramsey

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis

The Serious Guide to Joke Writing by Sally Holloway

What in God’s Name: A Novel by Simon Rich

The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics by Freddie E Ii Williams, Brian Bolland

The DC Comics Guide to Pencilling Comics by Klaus Janson

The DC Comics Guide to Creating Comics: Inside the Art of Visual Storytelling by Carl Potts, Jim Lee

How to Write Funny by Scott Dikkers

Show and Tell: How Everybody Can Make Extraordinary Presentations by Dan Roam

Shut Your Monkey: How to Control Your Inner Critic and Get More Done by Danny Gregory

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy by Judd Apatow

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss, Arnold Schwarzenegger

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Incerto) by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons by Tim Kreider

It wasn’t exactly a book each week. Varying lengths made it so some took around 3 days and others were a couple weeks. Also, I would have 2 or 3 going at a time. Ideally that was one non-fiction and one fiction book. In reality though, it was pretty much two pop-psychology books at a time. ↩︎
They’re likely to be displayed cover-out in airport bookstores. I love reading these books the same way I love reading productivity blogs. It feels like I’m accomplishing something just by reading. In 2017, I’m going to be more proactive about actually applying ideas from what I read. ↩︎
People seem to frequently recommend novels for audiobooks. That’s how I was first introduced to them. Actually it was my coworker in 2008 recommending books on CDs. I never gave it a shot. ↩︎

Writing in 2016 and looking toward 2017

“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

In 2016, I followed this advice. I wrote a lot¹. I read a lot². He’s right, my writing improved. I’m horribly aware that I’m still not a good writer. I’m becoming disciplined, though. I can sit down and write. It’s like getting to the battle in the first place. Good enough for Joaquin, good enough for me.

Here’s a recap of my writing in 2016, month to month.

January: I had a mailing list for design sprints and sent out a couple newsletters. I was inspired by Julie Zhuo’s Write in 2016. The first one captures why I wanted to write so much this year. I already wrote regularly—and privately. My goal was to publish in 2016.

The second had links to things organized under headings reflecting the design sprint process.

I stopped because my days are filled with design and I didn’t want to try filling every nook of free time with it either. It also took forever to edit, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to edit after sending to subscribers. Unsurprisingly, in re-reading these newsletter issues I’ve found they’re better than most of the stuff that I’ve written lately. Likely because they’re more focused and I spent more time editing.

February, March, April: I was writing things here and there. Mostly I tinkered with a web app that cycles through my book highlights on an interval timer and lets me free write thoughts about that highlight. A lot of time went into this so it might be worth revisiting. Or at least sharing screenshots. It was a good way to get into a flow state but probably not worth the sheer number of hours³ I was spending here when I could’ve got 80% of the effectiveness with separate tools.

May: I started my goal to write 100 posts in 100 days. Then I went to Japan for two weeks and didn’t post. It was like spotting The Resistance a couple touchdowns. Traveling to Japan gave me plenty to write abou—like getting to see the Ricochet vs. Will Ospreay match.

June: I tried out different writing systems and learning what worked for me. I tried timing things, using different text editors, different pens and notebooks, and whatever other tools were out there. Just about every week I decided I found the absolute best method possible and the search could end.

July: The dust settled on my system and I was mostly writing in Google Docs and converting them to Markdown for a Jekyll blog. (The end result can still be seen if you hit index.html directly.) I outlined some posts and actually actually went through editing and revision for some posts.

August: My deadline for 100 days was in August. Over the course of the previous two months, there were a bunch of unfinished drafts. I also had posts I wanted to close out with that seemed important in my mind. I mostly just finished the unfinished drafts. Then I never got around to the ‘important’ posts.

I finished the 100 posts and haven’t stopped patting myself on the back for it. Individually, none of the posts are any good. Collectively, well it’s not good either. Still, I’m proud of it.

September: I took a few weeks off posting, then I tried daily posts for a few days. Some just had a few pictures. And it wasn’t like it was a profound image or anything. (This Mise En Place post was okay though.) Oh yeah, and I moved things from Jekyll to WordPress, here’s why.

October: Make, Show, Learn. I bought an iPad and started drawing. I started writing weekly posts to track my learning progress with the idea that I’d also do a weekly video. I got away from that. I’m not exactly sure why and I’ll re-evaluate soon. Making short videos still seems very much worth putting effort toward.

November: More weekly posts and I think I had some good things going here. Particularly the Michael Jordan to Gucci Mane sequence. These posts were taking multiple hours to put together. Though I think they were the most fun I was having with my writing this year. And fun is something I should prioritize heavily considering this is a side project that I want to be sustainable.

December: Continued with weekly posts but I also broke topics into standalone posts. This let me create single posts from book notes instead of having them as sections in the weekly post. For example, here’s one for Tools of Titans.

I like where I’ve landed in December and I’m going to continue with this in 2017. I haven’t shared my work beyond like a dozen close friends, so my entire readership is 3-4 of them.

2016 was a year of finishing and posting my writing. 2017 will be my year of sharing more effectively⁴. I’ll have to learn some promotion. But I’ll also keep doing what’s been working: reading a lot and writing a lot.

Compared to previous versions of myself, not compared to Stephen King. He likely deleted more words this morning than I wrote this year. ↩︎
Again, compared to previous versions of myself. Some people read a book a day. ↩︎
Probably a few dozen hours. I wouldn’t say they were wasted though. I was trying to learn a JavaScript framework so, I mean, it was good for learning. ↩︎
I’m going to re-read Show Your Work in search of sharing ideas. ↩︎

No idea? Unimportant idea? Obvious idea? Write anyway

Tim Ferriss says one of the best things about building his podcasting platform is that it allows him to meet and talk interesting people. (Joe Rogan says the same.) They’re top performers in their respective fields, but many guests write in some form. Ferriss often digs into their approaches to writing. Here’s some advice in Kevin Kelly’s chapter:

Write to Get Ideas, Not to Express Them “What I discovered, which is what many writers discover, is that I write in order to think. I’d say, ‘I think I have an idea,’ but when I begin to write it, I realize, ‘I have no idea,’ and I don’t actually know what I think until I try and write it. . . . That was the revelation.”

(Check out Kelly’s 1000 True Fans.)

I’ve seen this principle in other fields—in design you sketch to generate ideas. Design sprints have activities like crazy 8s¹. There are always people who think they’ll have nothing to draw. No way they’ll have 8 things. Sure enough, the timer starts and ideas come out.

Sometimes it doesn’t seem as clear that writing anything is one of the best ways to generate ideas for writing.

Write even if you have something unimportant to say. On 10 Minute Writer’s Workshop, Tom Gauld is asked “What’s the worst advice?” He was quick to answer:

“There was a British playwright who said ‘Never write unless you have something important to say.’ Which I just thought maybe if you’re really a confident person full of opinions that’s a great piece of advice. But I think most writers are constantly worried that what they have to say isn’t worthwhile. And I think you just have to try saying it and hopefully something will come together.”

Sometimes you’ll find something important to say after writing a couple pages of unimportant things. Other times something unimportant to you is really important to other people. Derek Sivers wrote about this in Obvious to You, Amazing to Others:

But I continue to do my work. I tell my little tales. I share my point of view. Nothing spectacular. Just my ordinary thoughts.

One day someone emailed me and said, “I never would have thought of that. How did you even come up with that? It’s genius!”

(Check out my other post about that Sivers link.)

This blog wouldn’t exist² if I only wrote when I have something important to say. One day I hope people find something amazing in it.

Fold a piece of paper a couple times and then once the other way and you’ll have eight boxes. Set an interval timer for one minute and draw a different idea in each box. ↩︎
Bringing up the eternal question: does this blog exist if it has no readers? ↩︎

My favorite books in 2016

I hit my goal of reading one book every week in 2016. I’m writing a post about the good and bad things about doing that. I wrote about my progress 6 months in and 9 months in.

Here are ten of my favorite books this year. Here’s the rough criteria:

Which books do I want to re-read?
Which books did I follow through on with my actions?
Which books did I enjoy reading the most at the time?

Finally, you know what they say: don’t judge a book by a blogger’s poor drawing of the author.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
by Cal Newport

I started the year reading this book. It got me thinking about the importance of blocking time. It also set me off into being a lot more conscious about how I use social media, how I deal with boredom, and thinking about focus as something to practice.

All of that led to action this year. I took breaks from social media and social news. I started meditating and will continue practicing that next year.

Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
by Michael Lewis — (My notes)

I picked up Flash Boys because I listened to a Malcolm Gladwell podcast and he said he admires Michael Lewis as a storyteller. Looking at my full list, the books I enjoyed most were the ones that weren’t business/self-development related.

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
by Angela Duckworth — (my notes)

I listened to Grit 3 or 4 times and it’s reminded me how beneficial the practicing difficult things is.

Spoiled Brats: Stories
by Simon Rich

I spent a few weeks reading every book Simon Rich has published. I heard him as a guest on James Altucher’s podcast and checked out some of his stories in The New Yorker. I laughed out loud regularly while reading Rich’s work. I’d love to have that ability someday.

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms
by George R. R. Martin

During a Game of Thrones season, it’s so easy to eat, breathe, and sleep theories. Dunk and Egg are referenced often so I thought it’d be good to actually read the book with their story. Can’t recommend it enough. Particularly if you want a taste of George R. R. Martin’s writing but don’t want to commit to reading the main series.

Sick in the Head: Conversations About Life and Comedy
by Judd Apatow

I bought this thinking it’d be something I read in short chunks over the next year. Instead I’ve been setting aside hours at a time to read it. It’s a collection of interviews by Judd Apatow. The fascinating thing is that the interviews range from recent ones to all the way back to when Apatow was in high school. We know how these people turned out. It’s great to see them talk about their dreams before they happen.

But What if We’re Wrong: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past
by Chuck Klosterman — (my notes)

Westworld started a few weeks after I finished reading But What if We’re Wrong. So I basically haven’t stopped thinking about simulation theory. Add in a percentage of Joe Rogan podcast discussing how our brains work and I don’t know what to believe anymore. Our minds are powerful. That’s just a few pages of the book and the rest is just as good.

How To Write Funny: Your Serious, Step-By-Step Blueprint For Creating Incredibly, Irresistibly, Successfully Hilarious Writing
by Scott Dikkers — (my notes)

I read a few different how-to comedy books this year. This was the most recent that I read but I also think it was the most relevant to what I want to do. All the books have the same conclusion: writing jokes is hard work. Next year I’ll really sit down and try applying the methods from the books.

(I also really enjoyed Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV. When I was growing up, my dad used to watch Jay Leno every morning taped from the night before.)

Ego is the Enemy
by Ryan Holiday — (my notes)

The Obstacle is the Way really helped me a couple years ago. I was stumbling while trying to reach some career goals. It helped me look at setbacks as challenges to learn from. Ego is the Enemy has been helpful for my current stage of career goals.

Anything You Want
by Derek Sivers — (my notes)

I admire Derek’s views on work, business, and happiness. When picking people whose footsteps I’d like to follow, he’s near the top of the list.

My book notes make up the majority of things I write for this blog. It’s almost entirely inspired by Derek’s book notes.

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance
by Steven Kotler

Flow means things are going right—adrenaline means something has gone wrong. This book is about action sports athletes and flow. First, action sports make for good stories. I don’t have aspirations to be one of those athletes, but it’s been valuable knowing how to reach flow and understanding how it can improve work in all fields.

Honorable mentions

I finished Save the Cat, which I put on hold for probably a year. It really made me think about structure in any writing and how systems and formulas fit into anything creative.
I started being a less dumb with money this year and some credit goes to Happy Money. It explains the best tactics to spending money with a focus on increasing happiness.
Smarter Better Faster got me to really set high level and low level goals. It’s not the first book to talk about it but it resonated this time around and now am quick to remind myself to review a high level goal when I’m stuck during a low level goal.
10% Happier is the best audiobook I’ve listened to. It got me to try meditating and it’s one of the things I’ll really focus on next year.
I’m finishing up Tools of Titans. It’ll probably be at the top of next year’s list.

Make, Show, Learn Issue 10

I’m at The Met right now¹. I thought it’d be good to try a change of environment. On Saturday, I spent most of the day at home. It was snowing outside but I wasn’t snowed in or anything. I spent a few hours writing about the tools I’ve started using from Tools of Titans.

Friday night, I tinkered with the site². I added feature images to the front page along with book covers for some of the book notes posts.

I probably should’ve done that a while ago. I also added a mailing list signup so feel free to be my first subscriber.

What will I send out to the mailing list? It won’t be every single post. I need to build up the courage to post those to Twitter.

When I was posting daily, I could always rely on two weekly posts to add shorter things to: Friday links posts and the Sunday journal.

These weekly issues are basically the Sunday journal. And I can definitely find five links to write about each week. The mailing list should capture new things I added to the site for the week.

Ten thousand, one thousand, but first, ten. Here are three links I’ve linked to before). They’re top of mind again after seeing two of them referenced in Tools of Titans.

First, Ten — Seth Godin

1,000 true fans — Kevin Kelly

The ten thousand reader rule — Shawn Coyne

All of them talk about audience sizes to aim for. They work together. You won’t reach 1,000 or 10,000 people without finding 10 willing to share. When you reach 10,000 people reading for free, not all of them will be willing to pay. When you can find 1,000 people willing to pay for anything you make, you can quit your day job.

But for me — first, one.

Oh yeah, I’m at the Met
I brought my iPad to draw some things. My drawing has been aimless the past few weeks so I started reading Keys to Drawing again. I’m still practicing sizing things properly. It’s something I can at least evaluate on my own by comparing to a photo.

I was drawing some of the statues in the American wing. I realized if I’m practicing sizing, the shapes can be pretty simple.

I looked up and noticed the left-most statue was way too short.

I’m still having a hard time drawing what I see. Adding on to fix that.

I tried drawing Cleopatra.

Well, a statue of Cleopatra.

I was a little self conscious drawing on an iPad in public. Then I realized I probably would’ve been self conscious with a sketch book too.

Then I remembered the eternal words of Don Draper:

“I don’t think about you at all.”

And I remembered the tourists aren’t thinking about what I’m doing at all. So many things are insignificant. It can be sad or it can be freeing. It’s up to you. Jerry Seinfeld has some tips for dealing with that.

Some other drawings
I’m writing a post going over my ten favorite books from the year and am trying to draw each author. Some have come out better than others.

That’s all for this week. One Sunday post left for this year! I’ll also try to finish a couple more Tools of Titans posts and the top-10 books post I mentioned above.

If I really push, I’ll finish a post about reading 52 books in 2016. It wasn’t as hard as I expected. Most people could do it by changing time spent reading whatever feeds or social news sites into time reading books. It also wasn’t as valuable as I expected. A lot of books weren’t great and I finished some for the sake of finishing them. I’d rather spend more time picking 26 books and digesting them properly.

Well, I at least started writing this there. But I’m finishing it at home instead of in front of sculptures. ↩︎
Maybe I shouldn’t mention I spent Friday night staring at a screen to wind down after a week of work staring at a screen. ↩︎

Tools I’m using

Note: I’m writing a few posts about Tools of Titans. Check out the rest.

I finally finished Tools of Titans after a couple weeks. It’s a quick 700 pages if there ever was such a thing. If you like Tim Ferriss’s podcast you’ll like the book. Each chapter is a summary of wisdom from his podcast guests. Ferriss took about an hour of content from each guest and distilled the conversation into 2-4 pages of actionable material.

A complaint I see often about nonfiction books—specifically business or self-development—is that they take 20 pages of actionable here’s-what-you-do content and then stretch it out with 180 pages of anecdotes¹. Tools of Titans is the opposite. It’s packed with here’s-what-you-do and has some shorter anecdotes. Longer stories remain in the hundreds of hours of podcasts.

By the end of it, I had over 200 highlights. I reviewed my highlights² and starred my favorites and got it down to 23 highlights.

For older book notes post, I used to pick five highlights and write a blurb about each. I was always worried about over-excerpting. And 23 would be way too many excerpts for a single post.

More recently I’ve picked three highlights and written separate posts for each. I can go a little deeper on individual ideas.

Tools of Titans has so much I want to share. I’ll try both approaches. I’m working on 3 individual posts around single quotes. This post will be the collection of shorter blurbs. Here are a few ideas from the book that I’ve started using in the past couple weeks.

If you’re replaying some bullshit in your head and notice it, just say, “Thinking, thinking” to yourself and return to your focus.

Done consistently, my reward for meditating is getting 30% to 50% more done in a day with 50% less stress. Why? Because I have already done a warmup in recovering from distraction: my morning sit.

Picking meditation back up: Adding some more percentages, the first time I practiced meditation with any ounce of seriousness was after listening to 10% Happier by Dan Harris.

Eventually I got a headspace account and got a decent streak going. But one skipped day here and there turned to three skipped days.

Tools of Titans has recommendations of all kinds. Enough people in the book meditate (78 results in the book for ‘meditation’) that it’s lifted into power tool status among the rest of the toolbox.

I’ve begun meditating daily again. This time I’ll have a few more tips that I can put in place to help it stick.

Kelly elaborates on the rationale of zero drop: “Don’t systematically shorten your kids’ heel cords (Achilles) with bad shoes. It results in crappy ankle range of motion in the future. Get your kids Vans, Chuck Taylors, or similar shoes. Have them in flat shoes or barefoot as much as possible.”

Wearing my Vans again: While meditation is like a forklift in being a power tool, some recommendations are more like Command hooks. Advice as simple as “wear these”.

The forklift takes practice, but I can grab the Vans from my closet and put them on today. You’ll likely find a lot of small things from the book that you can apply immediately.

Wim takes cold to terrifying extremes (his retinas froze once while swimming in a lake under sheets of ice), but you can start with a cold water “finish” to showers. Simply make the last 30 to 60 seconds of your shower pure cold. Among others in this book, Naval Ravikant ( page 546 ), Joshua Waitzkin ( page 577 ), and I now do this.

Finishing showers cold: At the end of showers I’ve started finishing with cold water for about a minute. I’ve started looking forward to it. In the morning, it wakes me up. At night, it signals that it’s time to wind down. If anything, it makes the minutes getting dressed afterward pleasant because everything feels so freaking warm in comparison.

One frequent pattern is listening to a single track or album on repeat, which can act as an external mantra for aiding focus and present-state awareness.

Tools of Titans has a lot of internal links. It’s easy to jump back and forth in the Kindle version. If someone else does something similar, there’s a link to that other person’s chapter. If the pattern is prevalent enough—like meditation—it gets its own standalone chapter. These chapters were among my favorite.

I’ve listened to a single track on repeat while working in the past. So I started doing it again lately and went back to the same song I used to use: Weezer’s “Only in Dreams”. Which apparently is one the band’s most hated songs.

The A.V. Club’s Kevin McFarland wrote about this along with an excellent description of the song itself:

Restarting from the initial crawling pace at the song’s beginning, the sound builds, and relentlessly keeps building—the band slowly but surely moving up a mountain toward the summit. First the guitar strumming picks up, then Sharp’s bass shifts into double-time, and then Wilson’s ride strikes on every beat. Two guitar lines emerge, pushing and pulling off each other, both awash in distortion, rising louder, the tension drawing out seemingly forever, until finally Wilson slams his loudest five snare hits, and the greatest Weezer guitar solo emerges, an avalanche anchored by the ever-present bass line

It’s perfect for working to.

Even if you consider yourself a terrible writer, writing can be viewed as a tool . There are huge benefits to writing, even if no one—yourself included—ever reads what you write. In other words, the process matters more than the product.

Continuing with morning pages: I actually started again after reading How to Write Funny a few weeks ago. Tools of Titans mentions morning pages a few times. Morning pages have helped me get there.

My current ideal solo morning is a workout followed by morning pages. Something from The Miracle of Morning Pages (my notes) is the importance of stopping after filling three pages. Anything over is indulging.

The key is being disciplined in that hard stop. It means it’s time to get more focused. My hard stop is 25 minutes. I start a text file on Monday each week and write in it freely.

I review the pages for ideas to write about. This goes against the original Morning Pages guidelines—best that they’re not read by anyone, including yourself. However, it’s been working well for me in trying to write 2-3 posts each week.

If I sleep poorly and have an early morning meeting, I’ll cancel the meeting last-minute if needed and catch up on sleep. If I’ve missed a workout and have a conference call coming up in 30 minutes? Same. Late-night birthday party with a close friend? Not unless I can sleep in the next morning.

Working toward prioritizing health: Ferriss really captured what it means to prioritize something. Health in my head has been a top priority but my actions haven’t reflected that. Instead of exercising, I was more likely to write, read, or stay in bed.

Since started this book, I’ve been more consistent with morning workouts. In the next year I’ll remind myself to take a look and see if my actions are reflecting the priorities I set in my head. Health will be near the top.

Tools of Titans is a perfect book to end the year with. in preparing and planning out next year.

I think 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing.

2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing. 2017 will be amazing.

(Another tool in the book: affirmations, baby! Though the titans would probably advise that I be a bit more specific.)

I don’t share this complaint mostly because stories provide so much value. They’re entertaining and are really what make lessons stick. This is why you need to learn things firsthand sometimes. You don’t think that problem you had hasn’t been written about? Of course it has, and there’s probably good information for preventing it in the first place. But you wouldn’t have paid attention anyway because you needed a more powerful story, your own failure, to align it to. I just watched Arrival and there’s a part where she’s trying to explain her point and then just ends up telling a proverb and the military guy is like “ohhhhhh”. ↩︎
I highlight pretty liberally. This is a rare time that I went back through all my highlights from a single book and reviewed them. I really need to do it more often to digest things. I did it during one session on a stationary bike. Now that’s… a valuable exercise! ↩︎

Star gazing

In Tools of Titans, a couple of Tim Ferriss’s guests mention the benefits of looking at the sky once in a while. I liked BJ Miller’s description:

“Then you start looking at the stars, and you realize that the light hitting your eye is ancient, [some of the] stars that you’re seeing, they no longer exist by the time that the light gets to you. Just mulling the bare-naked facts of the cosmos is enough to thrill me, awe me, freak me out, and kind of put all my neurotic anxieties in their proper place.

Ferriss himself says “star therapy” is part of his nightly routine.

In Sick in the Head, Judd Apatow has his collection of interviews with comedians—titans in their own right. Apatow talks to Seinfeld about feeling irrelevant compared to everything else going on in the world. Apatow asks how he gets over feeling like a drop in the ocean. Seinfeld embraces it:

You look at some pictures from the Hubble Telescope and you snap out of it. I used to keep pictures of the Hubble on the wall of the writing room at Seinfeld. It would calm me when I would start to think that what I was doing was important.

What situations and decisions seemed very serious in the past ten years? A lot. College finals seem magnitudes more important than they actually ended up being.

Years later, how many of these situations had repercussions matching the perceived weight at the time? A few. A few end up laughable in hindsight. There’s value in striving for excellence daily, but not to the point of anxiety.

Too many moments in too many days seem overwhelming. They’ll be forgotten in a few weeks, not to mention months or years. Just completely forgotten. You can’t get upended by everything. There’s value in recognizing a thought and letting go if worrying won’t help—in most cases it won’t. You can practice that.

That practice can start by looking at the stars.

Make, Show, Learn Issue 9

The year is coming to a close. If I stick to posting issues on Sundays, there are 3 left: December 11th, 18th, and 25th.

I want to do some annual recap posts. Those can be long and should be written in parts. So I’m trying something this week. Every day I’ve been trying to do morning pages. I just keep everything in one file and add to it every morning for at least 25 minutes. Right after getting to the gym.

It’s because I read about morning pages again in How to Write Funny (check out my book notes). Everyone has slightly different takes on morning pages. I’ve started writing them with some idea that I’ll review them in the future for ideas.

Sundays are my time to review the morning pages from the week to figure out what I’ll take through to rewrite, revise, and post in the following week. I’m supposed to pick two topics.

I’m writing this on Thursday, so I have a few days of morning pages. It currently says 3038 words.

Here are some things I wrote about:

Cheesesteaks (I was in Philadelphia last week)
Flow (Still in mind because I read Rise of Superman a few weeks ago)
Tools of the Titans by Tim Ferriss
Healthy, wealthy, and wise (a life audit)
Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow and how it’s sort of been like tools of the titans of comedy
There are a few topics to write about from Sick in the Head: Make it shorter, make it funnier; Jon Stewart; Different time periods; Jerry Seinfeld and insignificance
As long as you get 7 hours of sleep
10 favorite books of 2016
Reviewing morning pages
Mental diet part 2
Do I have the discipline to write about one or two things each week?

If I follow my plan, I’ll grab a couple of these topics to turn into full posts. Some of the morning pages sections are longer than the others. I’ve really been diving into Sick in the Head. I thought I’d buy it and just open it up over the next few months and read an interview here and an interview there. But I can’t put it down.

So I should write some book notes for it. Particularly a Jerry Seinfeld excerpt where he talks about looking at photos taken but the Hubble telescope to remind himself how unimportant he is. We’re drops in the bucket.

I should also post something I wrote sort of as a letter to myself. If I get 7 hours of sleep then I should go to the gym first thing in the morning. This post explains why.

I should keep the 10 favorite books of 2016 in mind for a couple weeks from now. I’d like to close out with a recap of all he books I read in 2016.

I’m gonna go ahead and drop some cheesesteak photos here instead of separating it into a different post.

Here are some progress shots from my drawings this week.

Shannon Briggs drawing. This was for my post about the importance of our mental diet.

Tim Ferriss drawing. This is for Tools of Titans. I’ve drawn Tim Ferriss before so it was good to see my progress.

I’m not improving as quickly as I’d like. I need to get back to reading Keys to Drawing. I also just need to draw more. I’ve been setting time aside to write. I need to do the same for drawing.

Arnold Schwarzenegger drawing. This is also for Tools of the Titans. My drawing seems to have skipped leg day.

Lion drawings.

I wanted to draw something to represent the low roar of the city in describing walking around with Bose QC35s. I wrote a review after a couple weeks of use.

The second diet

Meta description for when I add this feature to my site—Podcast note: Shannon Briggs on the Joe Rogan podcast

Shannon Briggs was on the Joe Rogan podcast, and they discuss two diets in part of the episode. Briggs is a boxer and Rogan trains in MMA, so it’s very clear to them that what you put in your body is fuel. Briggs talks spending $100 to $200 each day at Whole Foods to feed himself and his family.

On the other end, they discuss the importance of monitoring what goes into your mind. If it’s all bad news, violence, and negativity then there can’t be good effects from that.

Mental diet is important—making good choices about what you read, what you listen to, and what you watch.

This blog acts as a bit of the best things from my mental diet. Hopefully I’m sharing meals that taste good and are good for you. Of course, it’s a highlight reel. I read and listen to a lot of stuff that isn’t as good.

A lot of it isn’t varied enough. I started stepping out of the echo chamber of tech startup, design think piece, growth hacker, productivity type of things.

Books take up a lot of the time when I’m reading. I read a book a week this year. Some were great but I was alarmed by how many weren’t memorable at all.

Podcasts take up a lot of my listening time. I’m still in that echo chamber most of the time, but Joe Rogan’s guests vary a lot in their backgrounds. What’s shared is that they’re interesting.

Shorter things, including articles and videos, come through social media and social news sites. It’d be great to somehow compare time spent reading articles and time spent reading books and the value I get out of each. I can’t make a quick guess of which ones lead to me actually changing in positive ways.

Maybe it’s more important to think holistically. As long as I keep a steady stream of good things coming in over the long haul, I’ll be in good shape. Next year, I want to be deliberate about what goes into my mental diet. I’ll be sure to share the good stuff.

Make, Show, Learn Issue 8

I’m writing directly in the WordPress editor again. Right now I have a few stray ideas in iA Writer along with a few stray drawings. I’m missing any sense of the bigger picture, though. So I’m trying to lay that out in WordPress.

In the past few weeks I’ve considered abandoning the weekly format.

I eventually want to write longer pieces that are about one topic. My approach was writing long posts made up of disparate topics. That’s what these posts have been. Then I’d slowly learn to weave things together until I really was writing about one topic each week. That doesn’t seem to be working.

Instead, it might be better to go the other way. Return to shorter posts focused on single topics. If I can’t get good at that then I won’t ever be good at writing a good section of a bigger piece.

Publishing every day earlier this year nearly burned me out. It reminds me of something I read in Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head:

“This idea that your generation has about ‘you have to burn your material and start fresh every time’—it’s just so self-important. Not everybody’s watching everything you do, you know.” — Jerry Seinfeld to Amy Schumer to Judd Apatow

The difference between 75 posts and 100 posts isn’t actually much. Nobody is going to read everything. Even if they’re following closely, it’s the difference between writing 3 posts every 4 days and writing 4 posts every 4 days.

Nobody will be upset by the off day, especially if each post is of higher quality.

Even the difference between 50 and 100 isn’t much.

Here’s what I like about posting weekly:

I can handle once-a-week. Even if I’m busy during the week I know I’ll be able to pull something together and have a post ready on Sunday.

Nice mile markers. Even now, I enjoy going week by week and seeing how things are evolving. My drawing is improving. (My writing less so.) I have a good sense of how long a week is. It’s just nice to think in weeks.

Here’s what I don’t like about weekly posts:

I stopped creating book notes posts. Instead, potential book notes posts are sections in each of the weekly posts.

They’re too long. Even when actively trying to make them shorter, they just end up long. There are too many thoughts that the posts just come off a little scattered. Each post lacks focus. The long length also turns me off to editing at all.

I’m forgetting what’s in each post. When I had 4 issues, I knew what drawing was where. Now that I need two hands to count, I’m losing track of where that Gucci Mane drawing was.

It’s hard to share. It’s hard to do the ‘show’ part of Make, Show, Learn. Hard might be the wrong word. It’s still just a share button away. I’d love to be able to link directly to my thoughts on DHH and his appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show. I can do that with anchor tags to jump to the middle of the page, but it doesn’t feel quite right.

Here are some scattered ideas for what I can do moving forward:

Continue writing a weekly post. Blogging about blogging. If you’re not interested in that, you can skip it. The good thing is it gives me a dumping ground for any meta discussion. Without that, I tend to litter my other writing with those thoughts. The weekly post can be one giant footnote.

In the same weekly post, write about drawing. Weekly posts are nice mile markers. I can compile all the scraps and sketches and progress shots for any illustrations.

Write book notes posts each week. I already do the time-consuming part by reading the book. I even highlight a lot. It’s worth taking one extra step to really finish the book. I’ll go through the highlights, dedicate space to thinking about what I learned, and distill knowledge to share with others.

Write a podcast show note each week. I’m always listening to things, so I may as well share the good stuff.

I followed it a little bit this week. I finished 3 book note posts for How to Write Funny. Focusing on one idea at a time was really nice. I don’t get so tempted to jump from section to section. And I can truly put the book away mentally.

I like it a lot for writing. Now I just need to get back to drawing.

Bose QuietComfort 35 Impressions

For the last couple weeks, I’ve been using Bose QuietComfort 35 wireless headphones (thanks to my girlfriend!). Here are some early impressions. Summary: I only wish I had them sooner.

Some background: I’m not an audiophile. Possibly the opposite. I have no interest in accurate sound. I must be in some lower percentile of amount of music I listen to. And that’s almost always through speakers.

I mostly listen to podcasts and various tracks from apps claiming it will help me focus.

I’ll start by describing different situations I’ve used the headphones. I’m hoping you can find one that relates to you.

While walking around my neighborhood: I noticed I could listen to podcasts at a much lower volume. Then I went to cross the street and noticed that I didn’t really look both ways as actively as I usually do. Mostly because it will nearly always sound like approaching cars are far away or silent. From now on, going one-ear out when walking.

Walking around the city: I tried them out walking through soho on a rainy night. I’ve seen cocoon used frequently in other reviews for the headphones, and now I understand. They quiet the city and make me realize how loud the city is in the first place.

I pulled them off to hear outside for a few seconds, then put them on. It’s basically the in-store test, except in the wild. I’m guessing any new owner does this a couple dozen times each week. The city has a low roar.

The QC35s are built to silence those kinds of constant hums and whirs. Voices and sirens are quieted. Union Square at rush hour sounds like a side street. Everything seems just a little more calm.

In the office: My past experience was with some Audio Technica headphones. I only tried those in an office. I stopped using them when I realized they basically become tiny speakers for my coworkers to hear. No complaints so far with the QC35s.

While working out aka officially becoming that guy: I always thought it looked funny when people wore over-the-ear headphones at the gym. It still does. I’m just one of them now. There was initial shame but now I just feel a little dumb for being so judge-y. The gym is one place where you should feel comfortable doing just about whatever.

While at home: Completely silences the air conditioner. So that I can replace it with artificial air conditioner noise tracks. That’s what focus sounds like.

Battery life is good: Never been in a situation where I was running low on battery. And they leave the port exposed. This will sound stupid but maybe half the time with the cheap headphones I didn’t bother charging them because of an annoying rubber flap I needed my nails to open up.

I imagine someday it’ll bite me and I’ll be out and about without a charge, but day to day my phone will die way before the headphones do. And I rarely have issues with my phone’s battery life as it is.
The Game Gear’d version of myself would be so happy to hear about the future state of batteries.

Pairing works well: The QC35s pair quickly, have a hardware switch, and can connect to two devices at once. Now that I have a great pair, I’m realizing how bad my previous bluetooth headphones were.

There have been a few hiccups when paired to my laptop. Mostly because I leave stuff playing on my laptop sometimes and I need to walk over to pause it so my phone can take priority on the headphones.
I still see value in the ease of use the Apple/Beats W1 chip headphones will have. But I wouldn’t say it bugs me that I don’t have that.

Otherwise, I’ve quickly gotten used to the pairing process. I can do it and get out the door without much thought.

The microphone is an added bonus. I didn’t know the QC35s had a microphone at all. I’ve done quite a bit of testing with dictating through my iPad and iPhone’s keyboard and Google Docs on my laptop. Both work really well.

Being free of wires here is great. I have a Blue Snowball that I like but always feel like I need to get pretty close to it for accurate dictation. I also had a headset with a mic, but the cable gets in the way sometimes.

I also enjoy the obnoxious image of taping around my apartment pondering my great ideas as I speak freely.

Taking calls: I FaceTimed with a friend while I was sitting on a bench at The High Line. Then I put my friend’s face in my pocket and walked through the city. We continued with a clear conversation. I’m never confident in mics that aren’t sticks in front of my mouth. The QC35s seem to do the trick.

They’re wireless: Duh, but I do want to talk about it. I started using generic $16-ish Bluetooth earbuds a few months ago. That gave me a taste of what the wireless life would be like.

Then there were all the bad things. Battery life was a couple hours, I’d forget to charge them, pairing was a mess.

The QC35s solve all of that and let me stand up and walk away from my desk with…

Do I do it?

… no strings attached.

Well don’t stop now.

You can…

Go for it.
…kiss those wires…

Now. NOW

…bye, bye, bye.

Funnier morning pages

Like other creative pursuits, writing a few good jokes starts with writing a bunch of bad jokes. Dikkers lays out a few exercises for generating ideas.

The first exercise is the Morning Pages: Write for a half hour
every day, without stopping, no matter what you’re writing—and no matter how bad you think it is.

I’ve tried Morning Pages in the past in many forms. I tried 750words.com, doing it longhand the prescribed way, and just typing freely.

Dikkers suggests looking back and reading old morning pages to see if any ideas are still good. This goes against the prescribed method, which would have you burn the pages before re-reading them. The point being that you’ll be deeply honest in the pages knowing nobody will read them—even yourself.

If the goal is to write jokes, you should be honest while actively thinking about what’s amusing in all these things.

I’m writing this first draft on a bus right now. Everyone looks the same. Five people in dark down jackets looking at their phones. What’s amusing about this? What would people be doing fifty years ago? What would an alien think of this? How can I exaggerate this completely?

It reminds me of Infinite Jest in how I find myself truly staring at a phone for an hour at a time, stuck on my couch. Just scrolling and reading news mindlessly.

The only funny thing right now is probably how hard you might be rolling your eyes because I just referenced something in Infinite Jest.

I’ll keep reading so I can learn how to take ideas from the walls of text that Morning Pages generate.

Something about how walls in Magic: The Gathering are the most boring cards. I haven’t seen walls this boring since I played Magic! Okay that’s a bad one. The book never says it’s easy.

The Clown vs. The Editor

Scott Dikkers was an original founder of The Onion, which has made me laugh a lot through the years. I’ve read a few comedy books and it’s always better when I have an idea of what the author’s humor is like. I really enjoyed Dikkers’s book, How to Write Funny. Now I need to put the reading into practice. This probably won’t be funny.

Throughout the book, Dikkers refers to The Clown and The Editor. It’s great imagery for remembering the different hats to wear. Or horrible because The Clown really does just make me think of It.

In Clown mode, you churn out ideas without worrying about quality. Quantity is all that matters.

The Clown, being an irresponsible clown, hands this pile of scraps to The Editor and expects him to get to work. It’s better if the scraps have been sitting for a few days. Otherwise The Editor is aware that he’s actually me, except with much less face paint.

I put my Clown hat on this week and tried thinking about anything funny about creativity. Let me get some scraps down.

There’s something funny about wanting to get in flow but never acknowledging it or it’ll knock you out of flow. There’s something funny about all the people inspired by The War of Art who write blog posts (ahem) and books that are worse versions of The War of Art. OH. The War of Art is one letter away from The War of Fart.

The Editor starts every morning wondering if he should light the scraps on fire or use it as kindling to light himself on fire.

“This probably won’t be funny.” — Me, like 40 seconds ago.

Subtext

This is part of a set of book notes posts for How to Write Funny by Scott Dikkers

Dikkers talks about subtext and its importance in writing jokes. He explains subtext and provides a bunch of examples showing the subtext of different jokes:

Fun Fact: If you stretched out your intestines they would reach all the way to the cabin in the woods you were murdered in.

SUBTEXT: It’s a little unsettling when people point out how long our intestines are.

Throughout the rest of the book he continues pointing out subtext in jokes. With good subtext, you’re in a good spot. You can work from there.

Subtext applies to other creative things. What’s the subtext of this blog? I’m trying to improve creatively but foolishly think I can shortcut my way there.

What’s the subtext what’s the subtext what’s the subtext. That can be my mantra when writing jokes. Or writing anything.

Steven Pressfield wrote about something similar in Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t:

When you as a writer carry over and apply this mode of thinking to other fields, say the writing of novels or movies or nonfiction, the first question you ask yourself at the start of any project is, “What’s the concept?”

He describes it as concept and subtext seems to be concept applied to jokes.

Let me try finding subtext to a joke. I went to a Chuck Klosterman talk today and he re-told a Mitch Hedburg joke. Someone asked if we should still be motivated looking for answers if we’ll probably be very wrong anyway.

You shouldn’t just stop because you know the ending will be bad. It’s like one of Mitch Hedburg’s jokes.

“Why do you drink, Dont you know you’ll get a hangover?”

“Yeah. At the end.”

It’d be like not eating apples because you know there’s a core.

How much can an ending really ruin the rest of the journey? Lost fans might chime in here.

The subtext is that people rarely consider consequences. Well, they do, but it’s hard to have the right perspective in comparing experiences if one is happening right now and the other is later on. Would anyone drink if the cost was having the headache before drinking?

Well, yes. Probably. Bad example.

Maybe the subtext is simply that people love alcohol.

What other jokes come from the consequences subtext? What’s worth doing something horrible for?

It’s the opposite of exercising, where you intentionally feel like garbage to feel better the entire rest of the time.

Make, Show, Learn Issue 7

I was in Seattle and Vancouver this past week. I took a week off from drawing, instead showing my girlfriend the majesty of my hometown. Meaning showing that I wasn’t joking about Wal-Mart being one of the prime places to spend time at. And taking the 40-minute trip to the nearest mall.

To keep things running this week, I had a post pretty much ready to post once I got back. I didn’t have it scheduled. I wanted to add this short dispatch section to keep everyone tuned into what I’ve been up to. Here are a few quick updates.

I finished a book this week — The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler. It’s about flow how it helped action sports progress rapidly in the past few decades. I enjoyed getting away from my usual echo chamber. It’s got me thinking I should be a lot more deliberate in the books I choose to read.

Anyway, it feels like the first time in a while that I finished a book in a week. Flights help with that. I took a quick look at my reading in the past couple months and realized I hit my goal of 52 books this year. Longer recap to come.

Thanks to my girlfriend, I now have a pair of Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones. I’ll write some thoughts about my first week with them. After a couple days using them, I only wish I had them earlier.

I also have these drawings of Conor McGregor and Mike Tyson. They had to do with something Joe Rogan said about knockouts.

What you see happen in the ring is only the beginning. Recovering from that is something that can take weeks and months. Eventually I’ll write something comparing this to burning out mentally. By the time you realize you’re burned out, it’s going to take a bit of time to recover from it.

I wish this was for a better topic, because I liked how this illustration turned out. (Though my struggle with faces continues.)

I’ve already started on a few drawings for the next post. A few will be expansions of the quick updates above. We’ll be back to the regularly scheduled program this Sunday.

What I’m Reading: What in God’s Name

I finished What in God’s Name a couple weeks ago. It was the last of Simon Rich’s books that I hadn’t read. In the book, God is a CEO and heaven is his company. Angels are employees and are able to make things happen on earth.

A few of the scenes involve a server that stores all of history. You can search and watch things like it’s YouTube.

That got me thinking about what places I would want to check out if I had access to the server.

The pyramids
I was very interested in the pyramids as a kid. Anytime I had a choice of topic to do in a school project, I tried doing something on the pyramids. I’d tell everyone I knew that they’re set in the earth following Orion’s Belt. There’s still speculation about how they were built and who built them. It’d be great to just go and see for myself.

Feudal Japan
I grew up in Japan (sort of). It’d be cool to see what it was like when samurai were prevalent. What in God’s Name describes the server as showing things that end up underwhelming. People aren’t as beautiful as the legends say. I have a feeling this is what it would be like without any specific battle to go to. I’d just see them practicing a lot.

The coliseum
Another cool time and place would be Ancient Rome. A lot of things in the server end up being reminders that modern cities are really great in many ways. One big landmark from then is the coliseum. This wouldn’t be as fun as watching Gladiator.

Things seemed to be getting more and more violent and I don’t handle gore well. Time to lighten things up a bit.

Macho Man proposal
The coliseum lives today through sports stadiums. It’d be great to go back in time to buzzer beaters, walk-off home runs, or successful hail marys (maries?). But those are a thousand times better if they’re for teams you root for. Nothing sticks out all that much for teams I root for.

But I’ve definitely rooted for babyfaces in wrestling. And plenty of things stand out. Macho Man proposing to Elizabeth would be a great non-violent palate cleanser.

(Or the Ultimate Warrior returning to help Hulk Hogan. Steve Austin returning to help Mankind would’ve been great too.)

2001 Slam Dunk Contest
Back to sports. I do root for Team USA. The 2008 final against Spain could be cool to see as an entire game. Then I remembered Vince Carter jumped over a guy a few years before that, which would be very very cool to see in person. Then it hit me that the 2001 dunk contest would be great to see from end to end.

I remember watching it live. I remember re-watching it in my dorm room with a few guys on my floor a few years later. And I don’t remember all the individual times I’ve re-watched it in the YouTube spirals after that. I just know I’ve seen it a lot. Seeing it live would be great.

Now I’m realizing I’ve mixed this up a bit. The server in the book lets you watch things like YouTube. It doesn’t let you jump into the place. And I can already watch these modern things on YouTube.

Consider the first three good answers and the wrestling and slam dunk ones answers if we’d be able to have some kind of VR experience of the event.

And of course
You have to see you parents when they were younger, right? There was a Sinbad special I used to watch over and over. One of his bits is reminding us that our parents used to be cool. We’re the ones that made them uncool.

My favorite Tim Ferriss Show episodes

I’m excited for Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss’s 4th book, coming out in December. I want to set some time aside to devour it, then write and draw a book notes post.

His first three books are all related in that they’re not quite what their titles suggest. The 4-Hour Chef isn’t really about cooking, it’s about meta learning. The 4-Hour Body is really about trying things yourself and seeing the results. The 4-Hour Work Week is really about systems.

Ferriss published the audiobook version of Daily Rituals. He loves getting into the actionable aspects of other people’s day to day. From things he’s said leading up to its release, it seems like he’ll be making a tome of knowledge from the podcast.

Tools of Titans will be over 700 pages. I’m guessing it will cover the routines and systems of world-class performers. But it will really be about practical application of that knowledge. I’m guessing Tools of Titans will be something like Daily Rituals, except with his podcast guests replacing the historical figures.

The Tim Ferriss Show has a lot of significance for me and this blog. Earlier this year, Ferriss talked about writing two crappy pages as his goal. I started aiming to write two crappy pages each day.

Then I tried posting daily for 100 days. After finishing that, I turned my attention to drawing. Which led to the current form this blog has taken: I write a weekly post with some drawings to accompany it.

A lot of the posts I wrote were basically show notes of his podcast episodes. Here are five of my favorite episodes from the past year.

Chase Jarvis: This is the episode where he talks about two crappy pages. Ferriss talked about starting the podcast and not worrying about the equipment or insanely high audio quality. He knew people would be listening while doing other things. Audiophiles don’t test setups with podcasts.

He made sure it was easy to do. Podcasts are a great format for that because he could go long with minimal editing.

Through this year I’ve continued working on reducing any barriers in creating posts. I had a pretty good system. Then I started drawing and now I’m modifying my system.

David “DHH” Heinemeier Hansson: This probably has to do with me writing about the episode and drawing him. It was the first episode I wrote about in one of the Make Show Learn posts. I admire Basecamp’s view on work life balance being a part of a sustainable business.

Sustainability and consistency have been themes for me this year.

Malcolm Gladwell: This came out right in the middle of my 100 posts project. He talks about writing being blissful (check out my post about that). In the sense that most writing isn’t actually writing. It’s planning and editing. When he can really sit down and just write, that’s bliss.

Derek Sivers(That’s a transcript): Before the current iteration of this blog, I had random book notes posts. When I was in the 100 posts phase of this blog, a lot of times I was just trying to mimic what Derek Sivers had in his book notes section.

He shares a lot of great stories on the Tim Ferriss show. All with good lessons. He found success while making an effort to stay small.

Mike Birbiglia: I’m all-in on episodes with people talking about writing habits. Birbiglia goes to a coffee shop first thing in the morning and writes for at least three hours. Sometimes five.

Like other writers, he starts by getting words on the page with minimal editing. Everyone has different names for it. He calls it his throw-up pass. (See The vomit draft).

Most of the posts I wrote during the 100 days, 100 posts weren’t very good. I wrote about a quote Birbiglia talks about: Only emotion endures. It’s one of those 100 that I’m actually happy with in hindsight.

Make, Show, Learn Issue 6

“I’m gonna try something” — Captain Jimmy Wilder

Being mindful of word count worked well last week. Each week, one section goes on much longer than the others.

I’m getting close to abandoning the single-post-each-week format. It often ends up being a hodgepodge of ideas baked to different temperatures. It makes sense to separate some things into their own post. Particularly when it’s about a single book.

A close friend called me on FaceTime earlier this week. I haven’t seen him in a few months. After talking about things that actually mattered, I mentioned that I started drawing. I showed him some of the work things from the last month.

It was good to see some improvement. There are still times when I wonder if this is something to pursue long-term. In the past, I could see myself saying, “Nope! Must not be passionate enough.”

This time, though, I remind myself of the end I have in mind. A year from now I’ll have 40 weekly posts with illustrations and writing. Issue #4 was better than issue #1. Issue #40 will be better than issue #4.

It won’t be fun every single time. It will be worth it every single time.

I had a plan this week. On Monday, I made five separate files (one for each section of the post) in iA Writer. I was going to fill them in, add drawings as I went along, then have a post ready to go. I pull the posts together on the weekend. By Friday, I had five sections filled in, but only one that I liked.

Something else I had was more ideas. I tossed my plan out along with a few of the sections. I’m separating the one that I liked into a separate post.

I’ll have a varying amount of time to work on each weekly post. I’ll need a system for moving the extra time into weeks where I have no time at all. This upcoming holiday week will be my first test.

I’ve been brainstorming in Notability. It’s one of my favorite things to do. There’s a template I’ve been using that’s a vertical storyboard. Actually, here’s what it looks like:

I’ve been trying to write down the text side and then sketch things out on the left side after that. Here’s a look at some other pages I’ve done.

I wanted to try presenting things like that in a post. On Saturday, I tried things out in HTML/CSS and then converted it to WordPress. Actually, let me do a quick demo.

Images on the left. Text on the right. (One column on mobile.)
I didn’t say it was going to be mindblowing or anything.

In hindsight, I’m frustrated with how long it took to figure this out. The solution was more straightforward than I thought. Sometime in the next few months I need to sit down and learn WordPress.

Doodle from last week’s post
Last week I wrote a description of Joe Rogan talking about motivation always fading with time. The sketches were each done on a five minute timer. Before that, they were even rougher. I scribbled them down the side of one of the storyboard pages in Notability.

The voice in my head is an asshole
Dan Harris says that was one of the working titles for his book, 10% Happier (check out my book notes). It came to mind while reading The Creative’s Curse (blurb below). We say so many things to ourselves that stop us from being creative.

Anyway, that’s the end of the demo. It won’t be the last time you see it. I’ll also keep thinking of other layouts.

What I’m reading: A peek into the echo chamber

Remember, ‘stalagmite’ has a g in it so it’s on the ground. Note to self: use a different color for cave next time.

Last week a lot of us became a little more aware of the echo chambers we’re in. Over the past year I noticed that authors I liked were showing up on a bunch of podcasts I listen to. I’ve made an effort to consume media from more perspectives.

This week’s reading was not the best example of that effort. (Neither is my podcast rotation that’s basically only Joe Rogan, Tim Ferriss, Bill Simmons’s friends, or TADPOG.)

The Creative’s Curse by Todd Brison
I enjoyed The Creative’s Curse. You can get a sense of what the book will be like by reading Brison’s latest blog posts.

I’m guessing people read The War of Art and realize it’s like a collection of blog posts. Steven Pressfield says his nonfiction started as a bunch of separate essays in Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t.

People with their own collection of blog posts eventually try putting something similar together. The Creative’s Curse reminds me of those books, but it’s a hell of a lot better than other self-published eBooks I’ve read.

How to Write Funny by Scott Dikkers
Dikkers was a founding editor of The Onion. At the beginning of the book, he talks about writing about writing comedy.

A lot of people who write books about how to write humor feel a pressure to make the book funny.

The book captures someone very good at comedy trying not to be funny. It’s the exact inverse of my blog.

The One Thing by Gary Keller
I read this a couple years ago. I got the audiobook after hearing it recommended by Charles Poliquin on the Tim Ferriss Show.

For a few months I was using a couple templates from the book to plan my weeks. You take different areas in your life and figure out the one thing that’s most important in that area. Then plan your week to focus on those few things.

It becomes two things: 1.) the most important long term goal and 2.) the immediate task you can do to move toward it.

The challenge is picking both of those. (Check out my post on Angela Duckworth’s Grit to see her exercise for picking top-level and mid-level goals.)

The Systems Mindset by Sam Carpenter (Free eBook)
Last week I wrote about The Checklist Manifesto. The stories were great but it didn’t quite get down to making the checklists. The Systems Mindset does a great job complementing that book.

Carpenter explains that the first step is recognizing that systems are everywhere (that earth/ramen photo from earlier is supposed to be earth with clock internals). There’s an example of the system we have for drying towels. It’s automatic. You don’t ever think about it. You hang it up and never think about it.

When you recognize the systems then you can pick them out and improve the ones that aren’t working. You can then design systems for problems you run into.

What I’m drawing

Instead of commenting on drawings inline, I’ll try separating them into a different section and this section will go at the end. I want to be thoughtful about what I’m drawing each week. That way I’ll have a better way to see progress.

Vince Carter
This is a drawing for next week’s post (though I thought I was going to post it this week).

I took a screenshot of this to get the grid around it. I don’t know how much this is considering cheating and if it’s going to hurt or help my learning.

Even with the grid right in front of me, I needed to remind myself to just trust the grid. Some things didn’t seem right, like his leg seemed like it was too long or the shape of his left calf looked odd. Once it was all together, though, it was alright.

That’s a lesson in trusting what I see and not what I think I see.

The only problem with my drawing of Vince Carter is that it doesn’t look like Vince Carter. I can’t get his face right.

Vince Carter, pt II
I haven’t been coloring things in like I was the first couple weeks. It’s fun. When drawing, there’s a lot of thinking. When inking and coloring I can just go without thinking. I’m using those terms very very loosely because I know what I’m doing is a naive version of the actual inking or coloring process.

No thinking while inking. I can see why adult coloring books are a thing.

See you in a week! In the meantime I’ll be working on fixing his face. While we’re at it, let me color another one.

Make, Show, Learn Issue 5

Welcome to issue 5!

What I’m up to

Welcome to issue 5. Last week went well. I’m slowly finding my voice, but it’s going to take a while.

The end of October ended my ban on tinkering so I did small layout updates and will continue with small updates each weekend. I want to focus on creating enough content to warrant a redesign.

Looking at the rest of the year, I could potentially have 11 issues. If there’s a week to take off it’s going to either be Thanksgiving or Christmas. Ten issues seems like a good time to take a week off, redesign, and promote what I have so far.

Each post is still way too long. 1.) It’s not a great reading experience and 2.) it takes hours to gather passages and drawings from the week to finish the post.

The previous post could have been split up into two or three posts. Eventually I’ll need back up posts for weeks off so I’m going to look for good opportunities to make separate posts.

This week, I want to see if being mindful of the word count will help the post in any way. I’m shooting for 1250 words. Which is 250 words each day.

At first, that sounds way too short, because I’ve been successful in the past hitting 750 words in a single day. All I need to do is remind myself that those words collectively weren’t very good.

I also need to remind myself that writing shorter posts is entire point. I write too much so I’ll try to write less.

What I’m shooting: The size of El Capitan

Adding on to last week’s topic of climbing, I’ve been fascinated with the size of El Capitan. A quick search gives answers in gigabytes. Thank you Apple.

Comparing heights, what percent of the Empire State Building do you think El Capitan would be?

Having been to the observation area in the Empire State Building, things looked pretty freaking high.

Couldn’t imagine anyone climbing that high, so when I read the question I guessed 75%.

Depending on if you include the needle or not, El Capitan is 2-3 times higher.

I’ve been taking photos to clearly illustrate the size of The Empire State Building. That way I can unclearly illustrate the size of El Capitan.

What I’m reading: finished a couple

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

It’s been a while since I finished a book in a week. I went into this book with the wrong expectations, which was both good and bad.

I didn’t realize Gawande was a surgeon before starting the book. There are a bunch of surgical operation descriptions. They’re vivid, fascinating, and terrifying. We know a lot about the human body.

The book has me completely sold on the effectiveness of checklists across fields. Great stories sell things.

As for practical steps for making effective checklists in different fields, look elsewhere. I’m pretty interested in reading his books that are entirely about the operating room.

Shut Your Monkey by Danny Gregory

I mentioned this book last week and finished it this week. At the end of the book, Gregory recommends Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. Pressfield wrote three books centered around a concept called The Resistance, which is a close cousin of Gregory’s monkey.

In Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh*t, Pressfield says his nonfiction books started as piles of writing that he would hand to his editor. His editor would re-pile them to tell a better story for a first draft.

Shut Your Monkey is similarly 1-2 page chapters. Gregory says the book came together a thought at a time and he likens it to building a mountain one spoonful at a time.

Going the other way, he talks about breaking big things into pieces.

How do you eat a whale? One bite at a time.

I originally heard it as “How do you eat an elephant?” I imagine it’s pretty popular with different animals

A few months ago, I started seeing authors I liked showed up on multiple podcasts I listen to. It made me very conscious of one echo chamber I’m in. I’m guessing I’m in many more.

To step out, I’ve been trying to read and listen to people writing and speaking from (at least slightly) different perspectives.
Joe Rogan provides a point of view that I don’t have with people I’m around day to day. He talks about the importance of friends with perspectives that don’t match your own.

I wanted to see what Rogan thought about Tony Robbins. He mentions him in episode 846 with Michael Shermer. He thinks Robbins does a very good thing by giving people positive motivation. At the same time, he wonders what Robbins has done other than motivate people.

Rogan’s personal experience with motivation and things like that is that he’s been there. He knows what it’s like to go to a seminar or read a book and be completely inspired or motivated for a week.

You’re ready to take on the world. You wake up at 5:30 and do the road work for two weeks. Now you’re ready to take on a different route.

On that route, you get to 6 am and the light flickers on.

Hot, fresh donuts. Maybe you resist it in the morning. Maybe the entire day. But the next day? Week 3? Week 4? The inspiration fades as temptation rises.

Motivation and inspiration are temporary. Self development is an industry for a reason.

Rogan says it’s too easy to slide back into your old ways. They’re comfortable. You can’t turn your decades old ship around in a day. You need that inspiration and motivation every day for years.

The internet makes it more more available now than it ever was. (Maybe too available.) There are videos, articles, books, podcasts, webinars, live streams, online courses, and more.

I was reading Julian Shapiro’ guide to building muscle and there’s a section on motivation with this video embedded: How Bad Do You Want It?

It’s got 39 million views and I’m guessing 50 of them are from me over the past few years. Based on my double blind study, 1000% of people who watch this the first time work out the very same day.

On the 100th view, you no longer want to run through a wall. Variety helps with motivation. Different stories with the same takeaways can inspire you at different times.

Inspiration from Shut Your Monkey is still pretty fresh. In a week or two it’ll begin fading. In a month or two I’ll only remember the core lesson: create things, finish them, and create more things.

It’s the only way to fight the monkey.

What I’m listening to: TADPOG (Tyler and Dave Play Old Games)
I’m strangely addicted to TADPOG. Each podcast episode is a little over an hour. Each is centered around a specific game but a lot is random banter and returning segments: quizzes, reading from Wikipedia, voicemails.

Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been putting it on in the background like some people put regular season baseball on. Lately I’ve been a lot more interested in very long podcasts like this one. It’s easy to put something on and let my focus go in and out.

Some of their listeners describe it as hanging out with friends. Tyler and Dave don’t quite remind me of any friends. I just enjoy their humor. It reminds me of the internet in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Some of the jokes are very very specific. When you understand the obscure reference it hits in just the right way. They were talking about Streets of Rage and how things flash on the ground and if you drop the item a couple times it flashes and disappears.

One of them talks about if that happened in real our iPhones would be long gone.

The best thing is the game discussion. They call out all the ridiculous things in old games. Like conveyor belt stages in beat em ups.

Tyler and Dave aren’t over-the-top like a lot of other retro game personalities. (Who always seem to be angry.)

Anytime they talk about experiences with video games growing up, nostalgia takes over. Like sitting in school zoning out thinking about coming home to play a new game.

Here are some episodes I’ve listened to:

What I’m drawing

I’ll send you off with some drawings from this week. This week I didn’t draw as much as I would’ve wanted. Next week I’ll get back to applying lessons from Keys to Drawing.

This starts with a couple Chrono Trigger characters before going off into random territory.

(Through TADPOG, I learned about the connection between Chrono and the main character from Secret of Mana. I couldn’t believe I never noticed the resemblance.)

See you in a week!

Make, Show, Learn Issue 4: Speaking of faces

Welcome to issue 4! As always, I’ll be trying new things. October was supposed to be my tinker-free month so I’m doing a few layout updates today.

More and more this seems like this is becoming a way to share what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching. With drawings related to those things. I’ll be more explicit about that format here. But first, a few inches that will likely affect issues to come.

What I’m up to

I exchanged my 9.7″ iPad Pro for the larger one. This was a little impulsive, done a couple days after seeing someone with the big one at a conference then another person with the big one at Smorgasburg.

Of course, the main reason to upgrade was for drawing. The 9.7″ sometimes felt cramped when any UI elements were on screen. Now that I’ve experienced the 13.1″, it’s like I didn’t know just how cramped I felt. There’s so much more room to breathe.

As for other things, the writing experience is better. The 13.1″ Smart Keyboard is way better to type on than 9.7″ keyboards—I tired both the Smart Keyboard and Logitech’s Create.

The larger device is great for creating content but consuming content is worse. Sometimes you get a mobile site that doesn’t scale to this large a screen. Depending on type settings, Kindle books look like science journal PDFs or books teaching kids how to read. (Though landscape with two pages displayed is actually pretty nice.)

What I’m reading: Create, create, create

So what have I been reading in this giant Kindle view?

Keys to Drawing by Bert Dodson

Continuing reading this and working through the exercises. Last week was focused on measuring properly and I’m still practicing that a lot. This week there’s been more on fundamental shapes and shadows.

Show and Tell by Dan Roam

Roam writes a lot about using drawing in a business setting. This is about storytelling to put presentations together. I’ll probably check out some of his other books about sketching ideas.

Create or Hate by Dan Norris

A nice, easy read providing the right kick-in-the butt to go make something. Hate is the force that keeps people from creating things. It’s similar to The Resistance from Steven Pressfield’s books.

Shut Your Monkey by Danny Gregory

The Resistance and Hate are aggressive forces actively working to stop you from creating. Gregory talks about overcoming The Monkey. It’s a more lighthearted enemy but it stops you from creating all the same.

Word of the day: anthropomorphism. That’s also the title of my future post talking about the various enemies of creativity.

What I’m watching: Free solo

A friend visited New York a couple weeks ago with his girlfriend. Talking to them about climbing (they climb, I don’t) led to me watching some climbing videos. The one video to watch is his appearance on 60 Minutes: The Ascent of Alex Honnold

I checked my main reference source, the Joe Rogan Experience, and found an Alex Honnold interview.

Rogan asks him about being scared of what might happen if he falls from so high up. After about 90 feet, the result of falling would be the same. You’ll explode like a water balloon at 500 feet the same way you would at 1000 feet. What you don’t want is to fall below 90 feet, break all your bones and bleed out.

Cool.

As I reattached my carabiner to my keys and shifted my learning aspirations from free-soloing back to drawing, I thought about how this lesson could be abstracted. If the consequences are the same at a certain threshold, go as big as possible?

Maybe climbing thousand foot rock faces shouldn’t be compared to drawing.

Speaking of faces. Actually, hold that thought. Let’s talk bodies.

I’m still working through Keys to Drawing and I recently read a section about the foundational shapes:

Even the human figure can be seen as a series of cylinders.

I tried applying this by drawing Alex Honnold

And again in a different position.

Thinking this way was really helpful. It’s a lot easier to visualize two cylinders connecting than it is to think about arm anatomy.

Speaking of faces! I’ve continued with trying to draw faces. I tried drawing without reference photos.

I’m getting better at drawing eye shapes when the face isn’t facing directly forward. At least relative to my life to this point where I thought it was impossible. To draw a face, first you draw an egg.

I’m always amazed that programming allows you to create so much by writing and combining text files. You can build a world.

Now I’m appreciating something similar with drawing. These faces aren’t great, they don’t have stories, and they aren’t particulary interesting. But they came from my head. Now they exist in this virtual sketchbook.

What I’m listening to: DHH on the Tim Ferriss Show

SNFPTAM: a sketched edition!
I’ll continue thinking of pronounceable abbreviations for show notes for podcasts that aren’t mine. I start probably every fifth sentence in conversation with “I heard this on a podcast…” I may as well write notes for them. It gives me something to write about.

We can’t multitask like we’d hope. It’s usually just rapid context switching. If there’s something I can do that looks like the idea of multitasking, it’s listening to a podcast while drawing something about what I’m hearing.

Speaking of faces! Here’s David Heinemeier Hansson, who you might know better as DHH.

He’s a co-founder of Basecamp and a proponent of work-life balance. Some things in work are critical, but so much can wait.

DHH recently appeared on the Tim Ferriss Show. They went for three and a half hours—long even for a Tim Ferriss podcast. As you can imagine, they covered a lot of topics. Here’s a drawing of Tim Ferriss from issue 1. (And a guest appearance from a Seattle legend.)

In the context of startup founders, they discuss goals sometimes being out of line with the journey to get there. Out of line is an understatement. Startup founders compress (aka nearly exhaust themselves to death) for 7-10 years.

All to possibly hit the jackpot and a vision of relaxation and rest and escaping the rat race. Then they go sit on a beach for a couple weeks and it’s not for them. So they start another company and, since luck is involved, they aren’t as successful. It’s not the best formula for happiness.

Well, it’s not quite happiness

In talking about happiness, DHH says tranquility might be key. He wrote about this in The Day I Became a Millionaire’:

If anything, I began to appreciate even more intently that flow and tranquility were the true sources of happiness for me all along. It was like I had pulled back the curtain on that millionaire’s dream and found, to my surprise, that most of the things on the other side were things I already had.

If you don’t have things that make you happy now, a bunch of money might not change that. (Assuming you can afford to eat and have a roof.) Ferriss talks about practicing being rich.

If you want to be good and hope to enjoy all these things and have fun when you have money, you have to practice these things before you have money.

Stone Cold Steve Austin is one of the most successful wrestlers ever. He was his real life persona with the volume cranked to 110%. You can get this amplification without being a pro wrestler.

Ferriss points out that one way is through alcohol and that money works similiarly. You’ve gotta be ready for it. Thinking through what you would do with a lot of money is a good step to finding tranquility without becoming a millionaire.

People love things they usually have some access to without money. If can’t afford to travel freely, you might have access to some aspects of traveling. Try a new restaurant. Check out an unexplored part of your city.

This made me think: If money weren’t an issue, what would I do? Spend as much time with family, my girlfriend, and friends as possible. Which also means traveling. In my alone time I’d blog about how drawing on my yacht being wobbly but enjoyable.

Diversification

Mark Cuban hit the jackpot like many others during the dot com boom. Unlike many others, he stayed rich through diversification.

DHH suggests being mindful about diversifying your interests. If programming were his only interest and it was taken away, he might feel empty. But it’s not. If you took programming away from DHH, he’s still got his family, race car driving, and photography.

He’d rather go 80/20 in his interests to become very good at a few things instead of giving it 100 for a chance to be the best at one thing. He compares it to NBA players. You can live a good life as a mid-tier NBA player or you can have a completely awful chance at being Michael Jordan.

What this completely awful drawing of Michael Jordan represents is expectation. If my goal was to be the Michael Jordan of drawing Michael Jordan, clearly I’d be forever unhappy.

If we change the expectation from being a good Michael Jordan drawing to being a bad drawing of someone else, let’s see what we can do.

We’ll start with Kama, a wrestler whose gimmick was being a shoot fighter. Which is like being his persona with the volume turned to 7.

(Kama found extreme success a few years later with a different gimmick. As a pimp. I don’t know what lesson to pull from that.)

Why Kama? Well, we want to take MJ’s rings and melt them down, like Kama did to the Undertaker’s urn to make them into a chain.

Anyway, let’s melt down some of those rings:

Then throw that chain on.

And that’s how you draw Gucci Mane.

It’s always your fault

Startup success requires some amount of good luck. Though there’s the idea that you make your own luck and prepare yourself for opportunities. On the other hand, it’s important to then also accept there isn’t bad luck. You need to take responsibility for things that go wrong.

DHH says you can’t just stop at attributing things to bad luck. Something caused it. A lack of preparation often looks like back luck. DHH and Ferriss discuss stoic principles and Tim brings up a very important question.

How are you complicit in creating the conditions you say you don’t want?

This really stuck with me and I’m sharing it here partially to remind myself of it in the future.

What I’m coloring

DHH talks about letting kids binge on candy or letting them use an iPad for an entire day. They’ll learn firsthand why it’s not the best idea to overdo things. I’ve been on this iPad for most of the day now and am learning that same lesson.

Here’s a colored version of the bike — see you in a week!

Make, Show, Learn Issue 3

Three years from now if I looked back and thought about what I learned over the last three years, is this what I want to be doing? — Me, naval gazing

Welcome to week three! I’ll continue with these dispatches. Blogging about blogging. My lesson from week one was twelve topics was too many. Even with five, the post got way too long. No idea is good enough to save for some better day. If my writing and drawing improve to a point that I’d be able to tell a shockingly improved story with the same raw material, well, I’ll just re-tell it.

Right now I’m still working a little haphazardly. I have notes in Notes.app, Notability, Procreate, Google Docs, probably strips of post its.

The final form is a WordPress post. But the bulk of writing and editing is in Google Docs. Editing in WordPress is mostly fixing typos.

This week’s big takeaway: It starts with words.

Last week, I mentioned that I bought three DC Comics Guide to… books. This week I’ve been reading through them. I don’t plans to make a comic, but the deepest stories told through images and text are probably in comics. Each of the DC Comics Guides has some reminder that that comics start with words. Art is based on the script.

I finished reading The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics. A lot of it details using Photoshop to create comics. I enjoyed this image of some wireframing of text.

I also enjoyed some of the career advice in The DC Comics Guide to Pencilling Comics:

You may be multitalented, but it’s important to keep your portfolio simple and direct. If you feel that you want to be a penciller, inker, and colorist, you may certainly present a portfolio that showcases all of those skills.

I’m trying a lot of different things on this blog. And I’m at the opposite end where I’m multi-not-good-at-this-yet. Eventually I’ll pick a style to focus on. I’ve still got a years-long road of learning fundamentals.

Speaking of…

This week I learned

I’ve continued reading through Keys to Drawing to keep learning. The main lesson from this week has been measuring midpoints and estimating sizes. Dodson describes drawing a small thing in the middle of a giant page or drawing a person and cutting their shins in half to fit the feet on the page.With practice, this is preventable. To start with, you can measure things by holding your pencil (or

Pencil) out in front of you. The midpoint acts as a great reference for drawing other parts of whatever you’re drawing. I’ve been trying it. This is one of those things you can just always keep improving.

Evaluating your own work: Until I have an audience giving feedback (it might be a while), I’ll just need to get better at evaluating my own work. This early on it’s easy to critique fundamentals. Sizes are pretty objective. Especially if I make sure to take pictures of things or share the reference photos. Here’s a venti iced coconut milk latte. It’s borderline for max number of syllables I like to order.

The straw is way huger than I estimated. You’d think I drew this before the lesson because everything is so off.

This guy in lotus position is better measured.

I have that Dr. Strange drawing (that my brother said looks like Khal Goro) and have drawn it a couple times. It struck me that I’m just copying. Which is fine for learning. Eventually I want to draw things from my imagination. I’ll storyboard this and hopefully be able to have the camera rotate around him over a couple panels and then have him stand up. It might be good to draw this sequence once a month to track my progress. Here’s my first go at it.

A few thoughts on audiobooks

This year I’ve been trying to read one book each week. I don’t count audiobooks, but I do listen to them. They digest differently. It never feels like I’ve quite read the book. Listening can be a passive activity. The first listen is never quite as satisfying as the first read.

Podcasts are great for this because they’re so rough. A lot of them are free flowing conversations. People don’t make their points quickly. Usually this is bad, but if you’re not paying full attention then it’s fine to miss some things and just listen to the rest.

Audiobooks are books first. Authors have taken time to revise and edit over and over. They think about economy of words. If you zone out for a minute or two, you may have missed key information.In fiction, given enough time, I didn’t know what was going on at all. I tried listening to fiction audiobooks and that’s when I realized my attention goes in and out. It might be better suited for a driving commute. Not walking.

I stick to nonfiction. Sometimes I rewind chapters, but often I just let it run. The key is knowing I’ll listen to an audiobook way more times than I would re-read a book. In the end, multiple listens might be better for retaining information than reading deeply through it once.

A couple books I’m listening to

The two audiobooks currently in rotation have depictions of brains on the cover. One is made by very long computer cables. The other is made of broccoli.

The books are Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions and Brain Maker: The Power of Gut Microbes to Heal and Protect Your Brain–for Life. I’ll be sure to write up some notes for each. After a few more listens, of course.

Some miscellaneous drawings

I also just drew a lot in Starbucks this week. And on planes because I was traveling. I’m going to save it for next week. This week’s motto will be There’s always next week. No need to press right now.