Francis – Page 8 – Francis Cortez

Friday Links Issue 08: More Rich

Simon Rich Picks His 9 Favorite Obscure Saturday Night Live Sketches He Wrote

With FXX’s Man Seeking Woman returning for its second season last Wednesday, we asked the show’s mastermind Simon Rich to look back on his years as a Saturday Night Live writer and pick the most obscure sketches he penned.

Another set of links, another Simon Rich interview. I read Ant Farm this week, which has some pieces from when he was editor of the Harvard Lampoon. They’re not as polished as the stories in his latest book, and it’s inspiring.

It’s not exactly like looking at work in progress. It’s not a discarded legal pad, but it’s a look into how his storytelling has evolved. In Ant Farm, you’re dropped right into a scene, with the title and a couple sentences explaining the context.

In Spoiled Brats and The Last Girlfriend on Earth, he weaves those jokes into a larger narrative and the payoff is better.

I got a Hulu account to watch his show Man Seeking Woman, and it takes the storytelling even further. Elements of his short stories are put into the scenes, or sometimes brought wholesale into a scene.

Each scene could stand alone as a single sketch but they’re all part of a larger narrative. You get attached to characters. Again, the payoff is even bigger.

Even if that kind of writing ability is decades away for me, it’s great to see the steps he took to get there.

How I Used a Vacation Timer to Write a Book (or, Why I Shut Off the Internet at 9PM)

For years, I tried to start a daily writing habit. See, I had this crazy idea to write a book, and I knew I’d need a lot of time and practice to get it done. But with kids and a full-time job, there was no way I could find big blocks of time during the day.

My trouble lately has been trying to get out of the bed in the morning instead of reading a lot of Internet. I don’t actually have all that much trouble using the laptop at night.

Waking up early isn’t the problem, but reading internet right away is. Maybe I can put my phone in an electric safe and then connect that to a vacation timer.

I can also daisy chain it to all the cardboard cutouts to stave off the wet bandit.

Why Self-Help Guru James Altucher Only Owns 15 Things¹

It was around 10 a.m. on a sun-drenched summer morning, and James Altucher, perhaps the world’s least likely success guru, was packing his worldly possessions, about 15 items, into a small canvas carry-on bag. “If I were to die, my kids get this bag,” Mr.

I’m a big fan of James Altucher. I like this idea that biographies are a good way to learn. Not everything will work for everybody, and there’s no point in trying to follow footsteps completely. A lot of luck comes in the play. But you can cherry pick different things as long as you make sure that you try them out and review of that working for you.

I’ve recently started his idea generating system. And it’s giving me a lot of ideas as it should. But it’s true that once you get to ideas seven or eight it starts to get hard and thinking hard to get the last two to finish up at 10 is good daily exercise for your brain. And whatever the creative muscle is.

The Best Fictional Basketball Shots Ever

I pose to you a simple question: What is the most impressive fictional basketball shot that has ever happened? Think of a movie or a TV show or a music video or anything, really, in which you saw fictional basketball being played. Think of all the shots that happened during those scenes.

Shea Serrano is one of my favorite writers. I would love to write things like this. His writing has a distinct voice. It’s just plain fun to read.

I should note that I got this link through Tim Ferriss’s 5-Bullet Friday newsletter. Which of course is where I stole this idea of creating Friday links posts in the first place. ↩

Spark Joy

In Spark Joy, Marie Kondo explains further how to apply the principles from The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.

When I was a kid, my parents would have different levels of clean. The highest for me and my brother to strive for was “party clean”. Aka guests are coming over. We’d clean and clean then tell our dad we were ready for inspection, which we never seemed to pass the first time through. Probably the entire point of the whole thing, looking back.

When cleaning my bedroom, I’d do fine until I hit the pile of Game Players and EGM magazines. If I read Spark Joy back then, I probably would’ve been very confused, then finished cleaning faster, treating magazines like books:

To avoid wasting the entire day reading them, the trick is never to open them. Check for joy by simply touching them.

When I visit my parents’ house, a handful of those videogame magazines are still on the bookshelf. Right below the World Book encyclopedia and the teen and children supplemental books. I’ll have to confirm the next time I’m over, but I’m sure touching them would spark joy.

I really like this tip for dealing with food scraps:

Consequently, my kitchen never smells like raw garbage. So what do I do with the kitchen scraps? I keep them in my freezer. I set aside a corner of the freezer for kitchen scraps and, after thoroughly draining them, I plop any fruit and vegetable peelings, chicken bones, etc., in a bag as I cook. Twice a week, on regular pickup days, I remove the bag of scraps.

I do a C-minus version of this. I don’t usually have much actual food in my freezer so it’s usually just empty containers from Seamless deliveries from the week. Or last two weeks. Or…

Anyway, she also takes labels off of as many things as she can:

The more textual information you have in your environment, the more your home becomes filled with noise.

My pet peeve is when people leave stickers on TVs and laptops. Those would probably drive Kondo up the wall. She takes things a step further by removing labels from laundry detergent and other household bottles.

The book also has some advice for the digital world. In particular, photos:

Since the advent of the digital camera, people take endless photos but rarely look at them more than once.

I took the time to organize my photos and have found that I look at them a lot more. While I can’t bring myself to delete large swaths of photos, I did some organizing locally then uploaded them all to Google Photos.

Probably one of my favorite products¹ of the last five years. Can’t recommend it enough if you were like me, used an SLR and other cameras along the way until phones caught up and now you take so many but never want to plug the external hard drive in to look at the old photos.

Until there’s technology to magically handle all the other piles of clutter in life, it might be a good idea to follow some of the guidelines in Spark Joy.

Disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer ↩

Magic: The Gathering R&D Principles

Netflix has a documentary about Magic: The Gathering. It’s a great look at the history and current state of MTG. I enjoyed the look at Wizards of the Coast, where the sausage is made. One clip shows a poster with their principles for R&D (clear image on the MTG Tumblr):

We are the stewards of Magic: We want Magic to last forever and be better tomorrow than it is today

We are passionate about Magic: We love Magic. We love playing, talking about it, and reading about it

We believe Magic makes a difference: We cherish that Magic is a meaningful part of people’s lives

We focus on growing Magic’s Audience: We want to remove obstacles to enjoying Magic

We believe in discovery, surprise, and strategy: Magic is a game of exploration, and we believe providing depth is essential.

We listen: We involve and engage our community in what we do.

We improve: We believe in perfecting our processes, our games, and ourselves.

We collaborate: Teams are the basic building blocks of our processes.

We debate: We believe vigorous and constructive disagreement is the most efficient way to discover the best ideas.

We are inclusive and respectful: We never dismiss viewpoints that are different from our own.

We expect greatness: We want teammates who embrace the responsibility of making Magic.

That’s great. I tried picking a few out to see how I can apply them to building this blog up:

We improve

I’ll build systems and processes to focus on writing.

We are passionate about Magic

I’ll write about things I’m passionate about.

We focus on growing Magic’s audience

I’ll work toward creating content that makes people think, makes people laugh, or makes people feel deeply (stolen from the principles Jimmy V lays out in my favorite speech ever). Someday I’ll write things that do all of those things.

10% Happier

In 10% Happier, Dan Harris¹ tells the story of how he became a regular meditator. He opens by saying his preferred title was “The Voice in my Head is an Asshole”. The best thing about the book is that Harris was probably more skeptical about meditation than most people.

If you told me when I first arrived in New York City, when I started working in network news, that I’d be using meditation to defang the voice in my head, or that I would ever write a whole book about it, I would’ve laughed at you.

Until recently, I thought of meditation as the exclude province of bearded swamis, unwashed hippies, and fans of John Tesh music.

Just in the past couple years since the book was released, meditation has taken further steps toward mainstream. Still, many people who could get the most benefit from meditation dismiss it as “not for them”. Their reasons are the same as Harris’s:

Moreover, since I have the attention span of a six month old yellow lab, I figured it was something I could never do anyway. I assumed, given the constant looping, buzzing, and fizzing of my thoughts, that clearing my mind wasn’t an option.

A lot of times, the busiest knowledge workers (a term I took from Cal Newport—you might be a knowledge worker² if most of your day is spent at a desk) got so busy by chasing productivity. Those tips and tricks work, and you can do things faster and fit work into smaller spaces, jamming every nook and cranny of the day. There’s no room for ten minutes of seeming inactivity.

What really sold me is the idea that it’s an investment. Time exercising is rarely questioned. We understand the benefits go beyond the time in the gym. The arguments come through choosing what’s best during that time.

So you invest twenty minutes into meditation and reap the benefits through the other hours in the day.

Awful metaphor attempt: let’s start with the jar from that parable about the jar. Filled with rocks and pebbles and sand. Now let’s say the rocks and pebbles and sand are being shot at you. You’ll grab what you can and stuff it in the jar. Meditation lets you practice slowing that down so you can pick and choose what should go in the jar in the first place.

Unconvinced? I would be too at this point. Let’s move on.

Maybe you left this page, went to a better source with more persuasive reasoning for meditation, then you closed that tab and realized this page was still up. Then just maybe you’d give this a glance to see if I had anything on how to meditate. You’re in luck, Harris’s brief explanation of how to meditate is as good as any I’ve read:

Whenever your attention wanders just forgive yourself and gently come back to the breath. You don’t need to clear the mind of all thinking, that’s pretty much impossible. True, when you are focused on the feeling of your breath, the chatter will momentarily cease. But this won’t last too long.

The whole game is to catch your mind wandering and then come back to the breath over and over again.

It’s simple, but like many simple things, it isn’t easy. Eat less and workout more while you’re at it. And like many things that aren’t easy, it’s worth it.

Despite its difficulties, though, meditation did offer something huge: an actual method for shutting down the monkey mind, if only for a moment. It was like tricking the furry little gibbon, distracting it with something shiny so it would sit still.

If you practice sitting still, the monkey mind will do the same.

Harris is the best narrator I’ve heard in an audiobook. He’s a news anchor that’s worked at the top level. It was one of the first audiobooks I listened to. ↩︎
You might be a redneck knowledge worker if… the sticker on your Aeron chair says “My other chair’s in a John Deere”. You also might be working for a startup in 1999, where these jokes would be more comfortable bombing. ↩︎

Only emotion endures

“Only emotion endures.” — Ezra Pound

I heard this quote and it made me think of the idea that our memories are faulty in details, but pretty good for remembering feelings.

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”— Maya Angelou

Maybe you’ve read a few of my posts and you see that I’m starting with profound quotes. “Maybe he won’t be writing about another podcast he listened to that day.” Wrong. Okay, well maybe it won’t be from the Tim Ferriss Show. Wrong.

I heard the Ezra Pound quote on a Tim Ferriss Show episode with Mike Birbiglia. He says that he keeps mind writing slogans around to remind him what’s important when writing. It’s easy to get caught up trying to make a cultural reference work in a scene. A lot of those things go away and the work won’t stand the test of time:

What is this about? It’s about friends. It’s about a group of friends coping with what it’s like to be in their 30s and confront the idea that they might not be successful in their life the way they thought they would be successful in life. Whenever it would veer into something that was like a cultural reference I would be like no no, let’s pull it back into it’s about friends.

That works now. If it’s good, people will relate a decade from now. Which reminds me of something Simon Rich said on the James Altucher Show about writing with emotions in mind:

The way I try to write about it is by coming up with a very high stakes usually supernatural premise which will get across how extreme that emotion feels. I try to write about emotions that I’ve experienced, not in the way that they actually occurred, but in the way that they felt.

A couple days ago I wrote that his stories are somehow both absurd and completely relatable. That somehow is by starting with something relatable…

When you meet somebody knew and it goes well, that’s a pretty low stakes, boring story. But when you’re in it, when you’re living in it, it feels about as high stakes as anything can be.

… and magnifying the emotions with the power of absurdness:

So that’s why that character gets a congratulatory call from the president, because that’s how it feels, to him.

This marks the end another post. Someone pour the Gatorade on me.

You are a Writer

In You are a Writer, Jeff Goins explains why you should call yourself a writer. He then explains the area to make sure you’re backing up your words.

I’ve always and still do shy away from titles. There’s still a tiny twinge when I say I’m a designer. I felt it just now. This might have to do with having worked at a fashion company. “Designer” with nothing else in front meant you were designing clothes—which was the core business.

I think I’d all out cringe if I said I’m a writer. But I enjoyed all the guidance on walking the walk. If I’m learning anything in this 100 days, 100 posts project, it’s learning how to finish. Jeff writes about finishing:

Cancel all backup plans, pick a project, and move forward. It doesn’t matter what you pick. Maybe it’s a book, an article, or whatever. Write it. And finish it. Because once you learn how to finish, you’ll be able to start again. You’ll start another great project and finish it. And another. And another.

In the first few weeks of this project, I’d get almost to the end of a post but didn’t want to do the grunt work. With a list of future post ideas, it was easy to start working on the next post. That’s also more fun.

Something else I need to improve on is editing. I knew that from the start of this project, and I still haven’t improved as much as I want here. Jeff talks about the importance of editing:

Let’s face it: The “genius” stuff happens in the editing process. Most successful writers go through a tedious process of drafting and shaping their content to get something worth sharing. How do they do this? They write every day. They write a thousand terrible words to find a hundred words worth using. They share their work with a close friend. They edit, tweak, and then ship. But they have to have something to start the process with. And so do you.

I’m getting pretty good at generating a bunch of raw material. I can get to two crappy pages faster, but they’re still crappy pages. Still, it’s improvement. If I can get the marble at the quarry quicker than I’ll have more chances to practice chipping away at it to make shapes. Eventually I’ll learn to make statues.

One of the important things is getting to the quarry in the first place. Here’s Jeff on creating that raw material:

Commit to writing something—anything—today. Maybe it’s just a sentence or a title. But get it on paper (or screen). Write it just to get it out. Right. Now. You might have a nugget of something that was inspired at 3 a.m. But write free. Keep your fingers moving.

It might feel like a waste, but it works: Write more, so you can edit more. Starting with raw thoughts then slicing down your fluff to the core essentials is how you get to genius.

I’m also practicing showing up. Professionals show up. Not that my aim is to be a professional writer, but if I want to improve then I need to show up. Professionals do it in the open:

They practice in public. They show up, every day, without excuse or complaint (okay, maybe some complaint). They perform. They go to work. They stop stalling and playing around and actually get stuff done. Writing is no different. Look, it’s easy to dump words on a page and tuck it away in a drawer. But to be a real writer, you have to take some risks. You have to put your work out there. Throw it against the wall, and see if it sticks.

I’m getting better at throwing things against the wall every single day. Soon, and slowly, I’ll work on making things stick.

Book note on Spoiled Brats: Write lots of jokes

I finished reading Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich. (A couple weeks ago I finished The Last Girlfriend on Earth.) All of this was after listening to his appearance on The James Altucher show. James mentioned that he rarely laughs out loud while reading and Simon’s books got him laughing.

I laughed multiple times while reading The Last Girlfriend on Earth and the same thing happened reading Spoiled Brats. Each of the best stories from the books are available online at The New Yorker:

Unprotected: This is written from the perspective of a condom
Sell Out: A pickle-factory worker is brined in 1912 and pulled out a century later, where he gets to meet his great-great-great grandson.

The Last Girlfriend on Earth is about love and relationships. Spoiled Brats is mostly about destroying millennials. The stories are absurd and completely relatable. It’s an amazing combination that I imagine is difficult to pull off as a writer.

One of my favorite parts of Spoiled Brats was the interview at the end. (That interview happens to be online also.) He’s worked at a very very high level in professional comedy writing: SNL, Pixar, a weekly TV show, and of course these these short stories published in The New Yorker. It’s encouraging to see Simon say that what he does can be learned.

Even the most experimental abstract expressionists have to stretch a canvas, right? I mean, there’s a lot of technical busywork that goes into the construction of any creative medium. But it’s learnable. It’s not that hard. I’ve got about five or ten rules of thumb that I keep in my brain as I’m writing.

It’s encouraging because comedy is a field that people probably thinks comes naturally. Everyone has a few funny friends in mind and it just seems natural to them. But writing it down and working it over and over to make sure it’s funny to a wider audience is hard. You have to work at it:

I occasionally will suddenly have an idea out of nowhere—in the stereotypical Hollywood way, inspiration will strike—but that probably accounts for 5 or 10 percent of all my published work. The rest is the result of brute force.

He writes every day and generates a lot of material that doesn’t make it to the final piece:

How many pages do you think you wrote that didn’t end up in the final piece?

Oh, hundreds. But that’s typical for me. I throw out most of what I write. But percentage-wise, what I kept for “Sell Out” was definitely the lowest.

Like many other crafts, you create and create and most of it gets tossed until you’re left with something good.

I’m writing 100 posts in 100 days—I don’t expect any to be good yet. A few feel okay. And that’s fine, as long as I’m improving. Compared to when I started, I’m more disciplined and actually finish posts before starting new ones. I learned how important this was to make sure I don’t get buried in unfinished drafts.

Sunday Journal Issue 05

Where I write about writing.

Saturday — August 6: The past couple weeks involved a lot of social events that I was happy to put aside writing for. I was falling behind but I didn’t worry too much about getting in too deep a hole to write myself out of. I knew the upcoming weekend and week would be pretty free. Slowly I’ve settled on a routine that’s working. I can finish posts.

I’m still keeping my goal of 100 posts in 100 days, ending on August 23rd. Today was one of the big catch up days. I worked through a backlog of posts that were in (very) rough draft states and finished them.

Sunday — August 7

9:40 AM: Yesterday was really good so I want to try to get similar results today to make sure I can reach 100 posts. Right now, I just came back from the laundromat and put clothes in the washer. It’s been a couple years since I washed my own clothes in New York. Since I’m starting meditation, washing my own clothes will probably bring me a step closer to transforming into a beam of energy.

This morning I finished Simon Rich’s Spoiled Brats. A few weeks ago I also finished The Last Girlfriend on Earth. I’ll write a book note post on this today. Particularly on an interview at the end of Spoiled Brats that I thought was one of the best parts of the book that also happens to be from an online interview. He gives some thoughts on writing, like how he started taking writing seriously:

But I think it sort of shifted around when I was 17. That’s when I started writing every single day, whether or not I had an idea. Until then, I would only sit down and write a story if one occurred to me, and then I started to wake up every single day and write for a few hours whether or not I had anything worthwhile to say.

Along with that book notes post, here are the other things I want to finish today¹:

Friday Links Issue 7: I picked the links out and have written a few passages. This is probably about halfway finished.
Japan trip – More as seen on: It’s the last of the ten posts I wanted to write about my trip to Japan. It’s been sitting in my drafts, haunting me.
Vomit draft: I was listening to Mike Brubiglia on the Tim Ferriss podcast and they talk about the “vomit draft”. ~~Where people take turns selecting their favorite vomits to build a team of best vomits~~. Of course, it’s another name for two crappy pages and other phrases people use. I always find it interesting how different writers approach their first drafts.
*Book note #3 on *Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV: I’ve written a couple so far and I want to finish the book and write a third post today.

And I also have the rest of this post to write.

10:43 AM: I finished the post about the Japan trip: More as seen on TV. Back to the laundromat to take the clothes out of the dryer and fold them.

11:58 AM: Jesus that took long. Took clothes out, folded, brought them home, put them away. I’ll stick to dropping off my laundry and I’ll let my brother know I won’t be entering the energy stream after all.

12:55 PM: Ordered food and banked on the delivery taking at least 45 minutes to get some writing in. Turned Focus@Will on, started a 25-minute timer, started writing. Then a couple minutes in, the door buzzer went off. Time to eat.

Actually. Hot soup should stay hot for a good amount of time. I’ll power through this time block.

Post-time block update: That post was more complete than I thought and I finished it — Friday Links Issue 07: Write themselves.

Now time to eat.

9:55 PM: I ate, then I napped for a very long time. I eventually got up and went to The Bean to read more of Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV. I’m really enjoying being more deliberate about reading. I wrote and finished a post—Book note on Comedy Writing: Semi-scripted.

Including this post, I’ll have finished four posts today. (I didn’t get around to finishing writing about the “vomit draft”.)

I still have some drafts that are more than halfway done, so finishing 2-3 posts in the next few days should be possible.

100 posts in 100 days, still on track.

If the links are working on the posts, then I actually did finish the post today. ↩

Friday Links Issue 07a: Write themselves

Somewhere inside, I partially expected these posts to write themselves. Save a link. Grab an excerpt. Write a paragraph on the train. Repeat throughout the week. The key to that system is following that system. I guess that’s the key to any system.

Guide to mindfulness and meditation — meditationSHIFT

I found this on reddit while reading comments about Headspace. Some people think apps or even guided meditation itself isn’t the way to start. (I’ll leave a rant about people that are vehemently against Headspace in the footnotes¹.)

If you are an athlete, you practice so you can perform well in the game. “Practice” is meditation. “Performing” is mindfulness. “The game” is daily life.

I’ve told a few friends that I’m trying out meditation. I told my brother I’m beginning my journey and I’ll see him when he re-joins the mana stream with me.

I’m overcoming the idea that meditation is sitting in a room doing nothing. Slowly. I’m not sure I believed myself the first couple sessions. But then I noticed how focused I was in the following hours. It’s practice.

One of the better analogies I read related it to exercise. You don’t just say you’ll start exercising regularly then quit after three sessions and say it isn’t for you.

Ok plenty of people do that. Couch to n/m I’m OK.

Still, most people that quit exercising understand there would be benefits if they kept it up. It takes more than a few sessions to get used to and then more than a few to see the benefits.

How to Think About Your Career — Julie Zhuo

I was particularly interested in Julie describing her affirmations:

Many years ago, when I was frustrated by all the things I struggled with and felt unequipped or scared to do in my job, I started a list of what I wished a future me would one day be able to waltz in and easily accomplish. This list is titled One Day, I will…

She’s kept her list updated through the years. Earlier ones, like being comfortable speaking in bigger meetings, are complete. These are some incomplete items she has:

Succinctly and clearly be able to make the point I want to make in 3 bullets.

Regularly be able to weave compelling stories and analogies into verbal explanations.

Host large events where people have fun and I am not really stressed out.

Julie’s better able to explain her goals than me. I’d like to be succinct and clear but it’d take me a page to explain that. And I’d also like to be a better storyteller. I’ll try to do that by following her advice in her post “Write in 2016”.

Set a writing goal that is purely about the mechanical act of doing. Maybe, like me, it’s Hit the publish button every third Tuesday, Maybe it’s Write 3 journal entries a week. Or maybe it’s Write 500 words a day. (In case you wonder how all your favorite authors complete their novels, I have it on good information that pretty much all of them do it via daily word-count/time-spent-writing goals.)

One post each day.

List of Tips from The Pragmatic Programmer

It’s a giant list of directives for programmers to follow. I’m interested in how some of them can apply to the crafts I’m pursuing: design (at work) and writing (here).

Prototype to Learn: Prototyping is a learning experience. Its value lies not in the code you produce, but in the lessons you learn.

Prototyping is pretty embedded in design culture. As for writing, I’d like to write longer pieces and tell better stories. Each of these daily posts acts as a prototype to learn from. I’ll see what I find the most value writing about and then I can go deeper on that.

It’s Both What You Say and the Way You Say It: There’s no point in having great ideas if you don’t communicate them effectively.

I’m working on communicating effectively, but how do I start thinking about those great ideas? Reading more and writing more seem like good steps to get there. We’ll see.

Don’t Live with Broken Windows: Fix bad designs, wrong decisions, and poor code when you see them.

On the blog side, there are some things I still need to fix. Typography is a mess right now. On the writing side, I’ve done a pretty good job of fixing my blog workflow so I can focus on writing.

Finish What You Start: Where possible, the routine or object that allocates a resource should be responsible for deallocating it.

One major form of a broken window with writing is the unfinished draft. Or the collection of them. Really tracking things in a spreadsheet made a big difference. I have a good sense of which unfinished drafts will actually be finished. Then I can jump in and finish them up if I have extra time in a day.

Happiness Formula (2007) — Scott Adams

Scott Adams talks about writing a book about happiness:

On page one would be this top formula.

Happiness = health + money + social life + meaning

The rest of the book would be nested formulas that further explain each component of happiness. For example…

Health = sleep + diet + exercise

And then down another level…

Sleep = schedule + technique

And down another level until it starts getting practical…

Sleep Technique = consistent bedtime and waking time + no reading or TV in bed + no booze or caffeine…

And so on.

He ended up pretty much writing that book and releasing How to Fail at Almost Anything and Still Win Big in 2013². His formula didn’t change much — here it is in a New York Post article:

To get to where you want to be, try this sequence: Eat right. Exercise. Get enough sleep. Imagine an incredible future (even if you don’t believe it). Work toward a flexible schedule. Do things you can steadily improve at. Help others (if you’ve already helped yourself). And reduce daily decisions to routine.

Take care of yourself, practice affirmations, continually learn things, help others, and use systems where you can to do all of these things.

Headspace appears to be polarizing. Some people disagree with people making money (?) creating a product that teaches meditation principles. And the odd thing in those cases is one of their points is that Andy Puddicombe, Headspace’s founder, is already rich so he shouldn’t “cash-in” on meditation. It’s a great product. I’m actually meditating. There’s a part of the app that shows how many people are currently using Headspace. I’ve usually seen it around 27,000. It’s a great onboarding to meditation. ↩
I’ll write notes on this before my 100 posts are complete. It was one of the first books I read where I really actively applied learnings from. ↩

Beginning meditation

As I mentioned a few days ago, I’m giving meditation another shot. I first really got interested in actually meditating after listening to the 10% Happier audiobook.

10% Happier by Dan Harris

I’m listening to it again this week. As a meta point, it’s the best narrated audiobook I’ve listened to. It also happened to be one of my first Audible purchases. I mistakenly thought all audiobooks were of that quality. Dan Harris speaks for a living at a very high level.

I’m bookmarking and writing notes as I listen this time around. His perspective is shared by a lot of others. He was skeptical of meditation and waded through different types and communities to come find a practice that works.

Headspace

I’m going through the introductory Take 10 series on Headspace. Ten minutes for ten days. I tried it last year, fell asleep the first day, and quit after the second. This time I’m acknowledging that meditation needs to be practiced.

I read Cal Newport’s Deep Work to start this year and it made me think about how uneasy we are with being bored these days. Boredom can’t go where our phones go. The same goes with focus. Cal Newport talks about is practicing focus so that you can focus deeply on whatever problem you’re working on.

I believe in growth mindsets and deliberate practice. If meditation can be practiced, then I’ll can approach it that way. 10 minutes each day.

I used to think: Time meditating is literally doing nothing. Is that better spent elsewhere?

The answer: Probably. That’s if you think time meditating really is literally doing nothing.

This time around, I’m thinking about it as brain training. People don’t question the benefits of exercise and the benefits outside of the actual time spent working out. I’m hoping meditation will be similar. With 10 or 20 minutes every day, I’ll see the benefits during the entire rest of the day.

Early session impressions

I’m improving on focusing on single tasks. I tried time blocking in the past. Focusing for 25 minutes shouldn’t be hard. Still, I’d end many sessions with the timer ringing and me realizing I trailed off into the internet somewhere in the last few minutes of the work session.

It’s been really helpful on days when I didn’t have enough sleep the night before. Healthwise, it’d be a trap to think it’s really making up for lost sleep. But it’ll be a good tool to have if it can make those days feel less zombie-like.

This week of focus has been great. If it’s from some kind of placebo effect¹, that’s fine. If meditating makes me think meditating works, then, I mean, that’s enough. it’s literally all in the mind.

The brain is weird.

Creating a placebo for meditation for meditation studies has its own complications. ↩

Book note on Originals

In Originals, Adam Grant talks about creating many ideas to get to the good ideas¹:

“Original thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends, and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas—especially novel ideas.”

It reminded me of the story of the pottery class being graded either on 1.) quantity of completed pieces or 2.) quality of a single final piece. I don’t know where I originally read it. It might have been from Jason Kottke or Derek Sivers.

My best guess, though is that I read it on Coding Horror. Jeff Atwood blogged about the story from the book Art & Fear. Digging into his other posts, he gives some advice on blogging consistently:

My schedule was six posts per week, and I kept jabbing, kept shipping, kept firing. Not every post was that great, but I invested a reasonable effort in each one. Every time I wrote, I got a little better at writing.

As for subjects, Jeff tried to avoid blogging about blogging:

I’ve avoided the incestuous nature of blogging about blogging until now […]

I haven’t!

Thinking of it as a single quantity/quality scale doesn’t quite work. I can’t arbitrarily move to the quality end—I’m not a good enough writer. More time spent on the quantity side lets me slowly get further on the quality side.

There’s a better metaphor, but feel free to read this bad one. Let’s say you arrive at a canyon. One side is quantity and the other is quality. At first you spend most of your time in the quantity end to gather materials. Once in a while, you’ll build part of the bridge out toward quality. And you can get further and further out to the quality side, but it still requires quantity. As the bridge goes out, you can then pick and choose exactly where you want to spend your time.

I’ll continue chopping trees down on this side of the canyon.

This excerpt is pretty much a quote from someone else. ↩

Per Se

Compared to Brooklyn Fare: My other 3-star Michelin experience was at Brooklyn Fare. It’s sort of like comparing apples and oranges. But like very expensive apples and oranges you would gift in Japan. I mean, if you couldn’t compare apples and oranges then people wouldn’t have favorite fruits.

I really enjoyed both. Per Se had more traditional fare.

I always wanted to go to French Laundry. I was saving up to go in 2008 when I had an internship at IBM in San Jose. Then I just never went.

That means when I moved to New York, I always wanted to go to Per Se. I just never went. It was nice to get to Per Se. (My girlfriend took me for my birthday—no need for me to save up this time.)

Oysters and Pearls were amazing. Here are some pictures of that and some other dishes:

They close out with dessert. A lot of it.

It’s the best service I’ve had. One of the waitresses described their movement as “the Per Se dance”. The job seems to be some mixture of not being noticed most of the time and looking great when you are noticed.

It’s not stuffy in there at all. It’s great. They seem to understand it’s a special occasion for many people and help to make it feel special.

One of the best meals of my life.

Why didn't I start doing this sooner — HN

I was reading an HN thread about “why didn’t I start doing this sooner?” It seems like these were popular:

Meditation
Fitness
Nutrition
Sleep

I’ve been pretty good about the last three in the past (except meditation). Lately I’ve let each slip a little bit and I can feel it. My energy’s not where I want it to be.

Here are the steps I’m taking to get my mind and body back in shape. It’s not ideal trying to establish multiple habits at the same time. However, I’ve worked out consistently before, eaten clean before, and had good sleep hygiene before. It’ll be as simple as hopping back on three wagons at once.

Fitness: Compound weights in the morning. Otherwise, follow the couch to 5K program. 3 miles is pretty much the upper limit for the amount of cardio I’d want to do. Cardio makes me feel good in the euphoria sense. Weightlifting makes me feel accomplished. Running will be as much for the mental benefit ast it is the physical. (Weightlifting seems better for physical health. Aesthetics are probably 90% in the kitchen and 0% on Seamless.)

Nutrition: Speaking of. I’m going to eat and drink less. Again, I know what’s worked for me in the past. I know what to do here, I just need to execute.

Sleep: I’ll aim to work out in the morning. During the day, I’ll lower my caffeine intake. At night, I’ll swap screens for blue blockers earlier. Then spray or drink magnesium. And read fiction.

Then there’s a fourth wagon that’s currently a bunch of plywood right now. I’ll learn how to meditate. I’ll start with Headspace. I listened to 10% Happier last year, which got rid of my skepticism of meditation. Now it’s time to actually apply it.

Oh yeah, ‘writing regularly’ showed up in a few responses. Gladly I can say it’s something I currently do which I’ll continue.

Sunday Journal Issue 04

Monday — July 25: Set up posts for the week. Created docs with Jekyll headers. This is a step beyond the spreadsheet and will help me focus. It’s taking the first step for every post this week.

[…]

Sunday — July 31: Okay creating all the docs didn’t work as well as I thought. It ended up creating the situation before where I would get posts 90% of the way and not finish it. I think I end up wanting to jump to the next post because it’s ready to jump into.

It sounds stupid but creating the Jekyll headers makes for good start and end points. It’s more fun to start posts than to refine and finish them. If I’ve set up seven files ready to just blab into, it’s tempting to go ahead and do that before finishing things I’ve started.

I also just had a lot of very fun birthday events. Which I have no qualms about prioritizing over this writing project. In lieu, of actual posts¹, here are some pictures from different celebrations. First, a birthday dinner at Per Se:

I’ll write a separate post about Per Se (spoiler: I loved it). It was a treat² from my girlfriend. Our birthdays are a week apart so we had a joint celebration at Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club in Brooklyn:

It’s such a cool space. We played one pretty serious game of shuffleboard as people were trickling in. It’s a great game if you’ve got competitive friends. Then the friends came in, drink bracelets came on, and any serious competition goes out the door. Along with any notion of seriousness at all. Great time.

And not a celebration at all but I walked by this Suicide Squad takeover:

So well done.

The celebrations continue so this week might not be much better for sticking to the writing schedule. I feel good about making it to 100 posts in 100 days — it’ll just take a little bit of catching up after these next few days.

If you’re going through the archive, there are posts dated this week but they were posted a few days after. ↩
‘Treat’ being a severe understatement. ↩

Friday Links Issue 07: Routines

The key isn’t the routines but having a routine at all. My theme this week seems to be looking at more routines. Mostly triggered by reading this post on time management at Khan Academy. From David Hu’s response¹:

I start by journalling 1 page on: why, what, and how. I come up with 1 “wildly important goal” that I schedule my day around.

I’m pretty sure I met David in 2012. We happened to be eating next to each other at Work at a Startup. I remember realizing after the fact that I had read a few posts he wrote. The one that was probably fresh in memory was about his experiment in daily idea generation.

That reminds me of James Altucher’s concept of becoming an idea machine.

Take a waiter’s pad. Go to a local cafe. Maybe read an inspirational book for ten to twenty minutes. Then start writing down ideas. What ideas? Hold on a second. The key here is, write ten ideas.

I’ve tried this on and off. I always enjoy the results and will think about making it more of a point to do this regularly. The ten ideas can be about anything. And if I’m out of list ideas then I can write out a list of ten ideas for future lists. There’s always something.

David also encourages blogging, particularly for interns. He shares his mentor’s thoughts on the benefits of blogging:

raises the market value of interns

great practice for shipping work into the real world – blogs are mini products, and getting familiar with moving past the “it’s not ready to ship” inertia is invaluable”

possible that a community will spring up around the post – might be invited to speak at a conference as a result

Blogging has been good for me. It’s still early to see where this current blogging project will go, but in the past it’s definitely been helpful professionally. Lately I’ve been writing about books I read, so this last link is Paul Edwards’s guide on reading: How to Read a Book (PDF).

Edwards explains his approach to reading non-fiction while making sure to understand and retain the information.

Instead, when you’re reading for information, you should ALWAYS jump ahead, skip around, and use every available strategy to discover, then to understand, and finally to remember what the writer has to say. This is how you’ll get the most out of a book in the smallest amount of time.

I had a sneaking suspicion that reading one page at a time on my phone randomly throughout the day isn’t optimal. I’m going to try reading a book with these tips in mind. I’ll probably write some book notes and something tells me they’ll end up on this blog in some form.

I met David in 2012. We happened to be eating next to each other and we shook hands at Work at a Startup. I remember realizing after the fact that I had read a few posts he wrote. ↩

Brain vomit

I’ve been trying to pick out directives when reading books. If I’m going to continue writing about podcasts, I’ll try writing about a directive that I got from an episode.

Source: Mike Birbiglia on The Tim Ferriss Show
Directive: Get the whole thing down quickly

I enjoy Tim Ferriss’s podcast because he’s curious about routines and rituals. Especially when it comes to writing and what people do first thing in the morning. Mike Birbiglia was a guest recently and he talked about his writing routine. He says it’s helped him just get a draft out quickly:

[…] I call a “throw up pass” . I would go to coffee shops in the morning. My minimum is 3 hours. I stick myself in a coffee shop with no internet. No email, no anything. If it’s going well, 5 hours. If it’s not going well, I stop at 3 hours.

Tim says he tossed a few drafts of the Four Hour Work-Week and then he re-wrote the first chapter in an email compose window¹. That worked.

Mike usually writes around 7am in a coffee shop (drink of choice: cappuccino). He writes for three hours minimum and up to five hours if it’s going well.

I spent nine hours in a coffee shop once. I was wondering if I was bugging the employees but then the afternoon shift started. Then I was wondering if I was bugging a new set of employees by staying there for so long.

I try following these guidelines if going to a place to write and not quite for the coffee: one drink every 2 hours and a $2 tip. I read some form of that (I’m guessing on a Bill Simmons podcast years ago) but it’s stuck with me that way.

Mike says he’ll sometimes write longhand. I was trying this earlier in my 100 posts project and I want to get back to it, because the end results seemed better than most other posts. Probably because I was forced to re-type things to go through a real revision.

Quick first drafts aren’t a new concept or anything, but Mike’s description of it resonated with me. The first draft is not a precious thing—the important part is getting it out at all.

I remember seeing a tweet from a designer that said they wrote drafts in Gmail. Then they’d take it to Docs. I searched and searched and couldn’t find it. ↩

Obvious to you, amazing to others

I was looking into a Derek Sivers quote¹: “What’s obvious to you is amazing to others.” I found this video from a set of videos he made as previews for Anything You Want.

Obvious to you. Amazing to others. — Derek Sivers (Video)

I’d love to make 1-2 minute videos like this. Digestible. It’d give me a project to apply different things I want to learn.

In Apprenticeship Patterns, one of the patterns involves having a personal project. You can apply programming concepts on something you’re personally invested in. It’s in application that you really learn things.

Here are some of the different things I’ve wanted to learn that I could practice by creating short videos like this.

I’ve wanted to learn illustration and animation. I can’t currently draw and animate, so I can start with Keynote presentations and animations.
I’ve wanted to learn to tell better stories. Short videos would need nice, tight narratives to be interesting.
I’ve wanted to learn to improve as a writer. The videos would need to start with writing. Whether it’s dialogue or descriptions of what will show up. It starts with words.

Someday it’d be nice for any of those things to be obvious to me.

And some things that are obvious to me that might be amazing to others:

My workflow going from Google Docs to Jekyll for blog posts
The logistics of moving to New York — this process still isn’t obvious to me but I at least have the clarity provided by hindsight
Making GIFs — some people have absolutely no idea how

I’ll keep thinking about this because god I hope that isn’t the full list.

I heard this quote on Goins’s podcast in episode 111: Unlikely Sources of Inspiration. He talks about the echo chamber we can be in. ↩

Stray book notes

I keep hearing about this approach to writing, though it’s slightly different from person to person:

Tweet: Ideas they’re thinking about writing about
Blog posts: The most popular tweets become blog posts
Book chapters: The most popular blog posts become book chapters

I’m not currently active on Twitter and I don’t have any plans to write a book. All I’ve got is these blog posts, baby!

I have a bunch of Kindle highlights. Some are from books where I plan to write full book notes posts. Others, not so much. And some are somewhere in between. I’m going to try writing short notes on a few different books.

It’s sort of like starting with other people’s tweets. If I finish writing about that excerpt and still feel like there’s more to say, then I might bump that book up my queue of full book notes to write.

Highlight: Someone else’s good idea that they already wrote about that I’m thinking about writing about
Blog post: The highlights I enjoy writing about most become full blog posts.
Book chapter: lol

Let’s see how this goes.

Here’s one from Creativity Inc.:

As Joe Ranft said at the time, “Better to have train wrecks with miniature trains than with real ones.

Pixar’s miniature trains are a little different. This wreck, in particular, was a two million dollar short film to put a children’s book author through a bit of a try out. It might not always be called prototyping, but the same underlying principle is everywhere: creating a safe environment to take risks and fail. You can learn without using up as many resources as a full project.

That gets to the idea at the start of this post. A tweet lets you gauge an idea. If it turns out to be an awful idea, you can always just tweet through it.

A blog post doesn’t require the investment of a book chapter. Even if you’re revising over and over (or not¹) and using a copyeditor, it still won’t take up the resources a book chapter would take to write. And it won’t mess up the larger narrative of a book.

Here are some thoughts on blogging from Scott Adams (creator of Dilbert) in How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big:

The main reason I blog is because it energizes me. I could rationalize my blogging by telling you it increases traffic on Dilbert.com by 10 percent or that it keeps my mind sharp or that I think the world is a better place when there are more ideas in it. But the main truth is that blogging charges me up. It gets me going. I don’t need another reason.

Posting to this blog is slowly becoming something I look forward to each day. I’ve written consistently in the past and looked forward to it—but it was mostly private. Knowing I’ll share things I’m writing forces me to be a little more thoughtful as far as structure goes. And writing something that might be helpful, interesting (on a good day), or both (when the stars align) to others.

I’m energized when I start writing and a little drained by the time I finish a post for the day. It’s never quite where I want it to be, but I know it’s time to move on (or it’s already the next day entirely). Looking at the collective whole of the past couple months, written a little bit at a time, and knowing there might be a tiny bit of good in there—that’s what charges me up.

http://franciscortez.com ↩

What would this look like if it were easy?

I was listening to the Tim Ferriss podcast today, in an episode where he discusses caging his monkey mind along with many other things. (He’s being interviewed rather than interviewing someone else.)

He talked about the success of the podcast and mentions it as part of his long term vision. Speaking with and learning from top performers probably doesn’t get old.
He says at a certain point it’s sort of ridiculous for him to think that he needs to interview more people. There’s certainly enough information in the first 150 interviews to learn from and apply.
Hypothetically, he could crowdsource questions then send the best questions and a microphone off to the person he’s interviewing. Then they’d record and send it back. He’s actually pretty much done this and some of the results have been very good.
He discussed whether he would create a book or something similar that would compress the knowledge shared through his podcasts.
This made me think about the books I’m reading. A lot of the books have the same information and the studies cited start showing up across multiple books. It’s similar to noticing an author is doing the rounds on different podcasts.

As for a single takeaway from the episode, he says he constantly asks himself this question:

What would this look like if it were easy?

That’s how he got to the crowdsourced podcast idea. Most of his interviews aren’t on that extreme end, but they’re still very streamlined. He said a lot of people get to two episodes and quit. He knew if he tried to create a slick, heavily produced podcast, he’d probably stop at two episodes also. A podcast where it’s two people talking pretty much just needs to be mono and loud enough.

This episode sounds like audio pulled off a video recording and that had minimal effect on how informative it was.

Each podcast has a structure. He allows the conversation to flow but he asks similar questions. He’s interested in rituals. He’s curious about what people do first thing in the morning. If they write, what their process is. If they’re particular about nutrition or fitness, he digs for the underlying principles.

He mentioned something I heard in Grit about routines¹: there’s some overlap between routines but there isn’t one single best routine for everyone. The key is having a routine at all.

(And probably meditation.)

What would this blog look like if it were easy? For starters, the writing would be better and it would write itself.

Until then, I’ll keep chipping away at the hard things.

In Grit, Angela Duckworth talks about the book Daily Rituals. The audiobook version of which was produced by… Tim Ferriss. ↩

Sunday Journal Issue 03

In last week’s Sunday journal, I wrote longer on Sunday because I didn’t write every day. This week, I wrote most days and remembered to write thoughts down here on some of those days.

I think it’d be good to track my reading somewhere, and I might actually start doing that in the Friday link posts. But here’s an update on my current reading.

Currently reading: The Umbrella Man and Other Stories, Originals, Comedy Writing for Late-Night TV
Finished last week: The Last Girlfriend on Earth, Grit (audiobook), You are a Writer (audiobook), Do you Talk Funny? (audiobook)
In limbo (paused reading but still plan to finish): The 4-Hour Chef, Snow Crash, Star Wars: Dark Force Rising

I’m trying to follow the advice of reading non-fiction in the morning and fiction before bed. Since I’ve been writing on the bus in the morning lately, I haven’t been reading nearly as much as I had been earlier this year.

Tuesday — July 19: Planned to write a second post about Grit. I just didn’t finish it.

Wednesday — July 20: Finally added pictures to one of the last Japan trip posts sitting in a to-do state: going to the New Japan Pro Wrestling show.

Thursday — July 21: Wrote a quick post about Muji notebooks. It’s a shorter post with a few images. It was a rare post that I finished pretty much in one sitting. Didn’t jump in and out of the post. Didn’t mark TKs to finish adding images at a later time. There isn’t much text at all. This is where I wish I had some way currently to quantify whether a post is good or bad.

I mostly just said that I like the notebook but you can’t buy them in America. I think it’ll be valuable for reference in future posts where I’ll share sketches from these notebooks. Instead of explaining what kind of notebook I used each time, I can just link to that post.

Friday — July 22: I’m realizing I’ve been doing most of my writing at home or on the bus this week. It’s made me really look forward to the bus commute. I almost always have a seat. If I remember to set things up when on my laptop, then writing on my phone is kind of pleasant.

If I don’t have some kind of outline ready, then I use the time to type out excerpts from podcasts and audiobooks.

The bus is good because there’s just about nothing else to do. Commute time (25-35 minutes) is just the right amount for focusing.

Saturday — July 23:

I wrote three separate posts for Grit:

With separate posts, I could focus on one concept from the book and try to hone it down to a page. Collectively, I think this is better than a single post with say, five concepts. Both for reading and writing.

With multiple posts, I can go a little deeper on each topic and use multiple excerpts about the same concept. I always feel rushed trying to write a book notes post with multiple excerpts if I’m trying to finish it in an hour or two.

Sunday — July 24:

Two weeks ago, I was trying to post 2-3 times each day to make up for missed days. I wanted to keep up the 2-post pace to completely catch up on missed posts. Instead, I burned out a little and I missed a few days of writing last week.

This week, I focused on one post each day and it’s been pleasant. I look forward to writing in the morning. My system is solid enough that I don’t feel the urge to tinker. It was a major distraction early on. I can keep this pace.

To hit 100 posts by August 23 (marking 100 days), I’ll need to do 11 days with 2 posts. And I’ve got 31 days left. So that’s about every third day. I’ll schedule 2-post days on days when I know I’ll have the time for it instead of trying to force them into already-busy days.

Four weeks left. Not quite the final leg but if this were a mile run I’d be starting the final lap. Here we go.