Category: Newsletters

I’ll probably put this at the top of every newsletter for the next 70 weeks: Check out Active Recall on iTunes! It’d be great if you could leave a review. (Shout out to Jerry with the first review.)

I managed to continue with the goal of making one podcast post and one video post. If, in a  year, this site has 52 podcast episodes and 52 videos capturing things I learned from a year, then it’ll be beyond worth the time and effort being put in.

Active Recall ep. 5 — The Obstacle is the Way

iTunes link

We’re going strong! Also, Wally recorded an episode with a friend of the pod: Jason. We’ll edit that and add it as a minisode. We might start experimenting with some short episodes. Because we only have like 5 listeners to alienate. And two of them are me and Wally so it’s only like 3.

We went over Ryan Holiday’s The Obstacle is the Way which introduced me to stoic principles a couple years back. They helped me get through a somewhat rough (well, first-world rough) time and those principles continue to be valuable tools.

One recommendation of Ryan’s that we didn’t follow: Please, Please, For The Love Of God: Do Not Start a Podcast

Make it easy, sustainable, and consistent: Tim Ferriss and Chase Jarvis — Active Recall Sketchnotes

YouTube link if you just want to see the video (and subscribe!)

I just looked at a post from a couple weeks ago that goes over the same episode: Make it Easy. I’m not sure if I thought I kept that in Evernote or what, but now I have two posts about the same topic. Oh well.

I read through Mike Rohde’s Sketchnote Handbook and have been taking inspiration from that. I’ve also been skimming the AsapSCIENCE book. I picked it up at Amazon Books, which just opened in New York a couple weeks ago.

If you like bookstores from the past you’ll like the bookstore from this future.

And now, a link from the internet

The Shop Featuring LeBron James, Draymond Green, 2 Chainz And Guests —

This entire thing was way better than I expected. I was expecting some kind of extended Bud Light commercial.

That link should open up to Maverick Carter talking about Bill Belichick loving the process, not the outcome. There’s a lot more in the video. I mean, it’s half an hour. Some other things that stuck out:

1.) Draymond Green says he’s the type to remember every play from every game but Game 7 last year was a blur.

2.) LeBron talks about a college team and them running the flex offense the entire game. He said ‘flex offense’ like everyone would be familiar with it like a pick and roll. I don’t think more than half the people in the shop knew what a flex offense was. I didn’t know what it was, so I checked out what Coach Daniel had to say about the flex offense. (He got a great shout out on the B.S. Report last week.)

3.) They talk about best athletes of all time and whether or not a football player can be it. They’re one person on an enormous roster. But that’s not the issue LeBron has with it. He points out that a quarterback doesn’t play both sides of the ball. Tom Brady doesn’t play for half of every game.

4.) They discuss the music industry and independent artists like Chance the Rapper. They mention No Limit, Cash Money, and a lot of other people who were successful without signing with major labels. They don’t get the credit. They point out that Chance might get the credit, but for first more people need to succeed with his model.

2 Chainz explains why people still sign traditional deals, no matter how awful it is in the long run. It wasn’t a dream to create something sustainable long term. The dream was one million dollars, all at once. It was to get a record deal.  

That’s a wrap. Up next week…

I’ll try sticking to the plan for another week.

• Podcast: Creative Confidence — Wally and I will be going over Creative Confidence, a book about design thinking. 
• Video sketch summary of a podcast: Austin Kleon and Chase Jarvis — I’ll be summarizing takeaways from an episode of CreativeLive

Here are some things I made this week and some thoughts about making them. I hit my goal to have one podcast post and one video post.

Active Recall Podcast, ep 4 – The Slight Edge
Still the most fun I’ve had making something for this blog. Wally and I keep on with the book-a-week format and discuss The Slight Edge, by Jeff Olson.

Active Recall Sketchnotes, ep 1 – recapping lessons from Drama and Lewis Howes
I did some sketchnotes summarizing things I learned from listening to an episode of Long Story Short. It’s Drama’s podcast and he had Lewis Howes on as a guest. I’m trying to figure out how to title these things. I definitely don’t want to mislead people into thinking I actually talked to Drama or Lewis Howes. (Though it’d be great if I actually did.)

I want to share podcast episodes I like with other people. Of course, it’d be great if the people from that podcast checked out the video and amazing if they shared it with their audience. If I keep making one each week for six months, I’d estimate one of the podcasters would share it with their audience.

Totally fine. I want to get better at distilling information and making videos that can keep people’s attention. Podcasts are a good source of new content to pull that information from.

The pitch: It’s like Tools of Titans, but way worse, in video form!

I’m working on the accompanying post, but here’s a video I made the other night: Pull-ups for your brain (YouTube link). It’s about an episode of Pat Flynn’s podcast with Cal Newport as a guest.

Making worse videos, consistently –

I’ve figured out logistics for the podcast, but not the sketchnotes. Wally and I have a decent process. We’ll at least be able to record audio and share it with others. Whether it’s good or not is the harder part. As for the sketch videos, I’m figuring things out.

Each video looks like it will take 2-3 hours to make, including the initial listen. Right now I make a slide deck instead of a script and use the deck to remember talking points. It’s part of the reason the videos end up longer than I want. It opens up opportunities to ramble and I make the most of those opportunities.

The videos themselves are just too long right now. I’m aiming for 3-5 minutes and they’re more like 6-8 minutes. It might just mean trying to pull one single topic to talk about instead of 3 or 4.

I did a tiny bit of research of other people making similar videos. Aka I looked for behind-the-scenes videos of ASAPscience and PictureFit. They start with a script and audio and do the visuals after. (Oh yah, there are tons of whiteboard videos that outsource to places that animate fake hands drawing clip art. I don’t want to do that.)

I’m trying to remember the same focusing question I’ve used for the podcast: what would this look like if this were easy?

I’ll try starting with a script. It’s stepping toward not-easy but the trade offs might be worth it. My goal is to be consistent and good enough.

New things from the past few weeks —
I’m back from California. I skipped sending the newsletter for a couple weeks, but I’ve been adding content. I’ve been using Evernote more and more and following what Josh Waitzkin said he does in the morning: free writing and then tagging it after he’s done. It’s slowly building up and I’m starting to connect ideas that share similar tags. It’s helping me generate ideas regularly and leading to more content.

• Journal: Starting a podcast right as it’s becoming uncool to start a podcast — I didn’t get around to sending this to mailing list subscribers but it’s a newsletter. I started a podcast with Wally and this post goes over some of the thinking: reasons for starting it, the format we chose, and goals. 
• Walter & Francis ep. 2: Grit — We made it to episode two so that’s an accomplishment. We even managed to stick to the format and talked about Grit, by Angela Duckworth, as our book of the week. Quick thought: it’s extremely fun making them. I set a 5:30am alarm and was excited to record so that’s a good sign. 
• Make it Easy — I wrote this as sort of a marker to it being one year since I did my first post for the 100 days, 100 posts project. ( http://franciscortez.com/100-days-100-posts ) The podcast I wrote about in this post is a Tim Ferriss episode with Chase Jarvis where they talk about creativity. 
• Don’t Listen to Me ep. 3 — I’m working through some solo podcast ideas. Not in a superkick-Marty-Jannetty-in-a-barbershop way, because Wally would clearly be our Shawn Michaels. More like the Mega Powers where each of us is still working solo matches. This episode isn’t great but it talks about a great Joe Rogan episode. Go listen to that instead.

I’ve stayed pretty gung-ho about podcasting. I bought a Zoom H1 portable recorder and am thinking through use cases for it. Pacing around the apartment talking into it seems to be a pretty good use case for looking pretentious (read: an asshole).

How I started listening to podcasts —
When I think back to how I started listening to podcasts, it was my brother telling me to check out Bill Simmons’s podcast. At that point, I had read all his columns but didn’t listen. Then Dameshek was on as a guest. And Carolla. And on and on from there.

Simmons has become an excellent interviewer over the years and his discussions with Kevin Durant and Aziz Ansari stick out for me for more recent episodes.

He didn’t always have interviews, though. From what I remember, his earlier episodes were usually chats with Cousin Sal, House, Jacko, and Dameshek. Like an interview, it’s two people but he’s known them for years.

We got feedback and we recorded —
A handful of people have listened to the podcast and given feedback. We tried to improve from all the feedback that we got and then ended up with an episode that’s not as good as the first two. Hopefully it’s a case where it feels like it’s bad but it’s actually better than I have in mind. Still need to edit it though.

Just saw this on season 2 of Love:

This is turning into a journal of ideas that I’m enthusiastic about that changes every week. I was talking to a friend about that and was reminded that it’s completely okay. I want to be a special snowflake but bouncing from idea to idea is not a problem unique to me. Writing about it is good because there’s a chance that someone else can relate.

So what am I enthusiastic about this week?

Starting a podcast, this time with a friend —
I’m more excited for this than any of the other projects I’ve done on this blog. I’ve been recording a lot of audio notes for the past couple months. It was my way of doing active recall for different things I was reading, watching, or listening to.

Here’s a link to the episode: 001 — Walter & Francis: Autotelic Exotelic

Which sounds like some kind of science podcast. I can promise it’s dumber than that.

There are posts on this blog that I’m happy with, mostly going by how often I share each with other people:

• Book notes for What if We’re Wrong?: I tried to develop a few of my own ideas instead of simply writing down reactions to different excerpts. 
• Book notes for Tools of Titans: I was probably just happy that I read the book so quickly. 
• Make Show Learn: Issue 4: One of my favorite posts to go back to. If I could bang these out every week I’d love that, but I remind myself that it probably took at least 8 hours counting the for all drawings.

Creating the first episode of the podcast took less effort and I’m as happy with it as I am with some of those posts above. Recency bias plays into that but I think that will remain true as we record more episodes.

I often think about what this blog’s content would look like in a year if I stayed with this or that approach. We plan to post every week so in a year we’d have a few dozen hours of recorded conversation. Even if we don’t hit 50 listeners, that’ll still be really fun for me to go back and listen to.

I’m grateful I can have balance and that I’m in no way trying to make this my main gig. This podcast was by far the most fun I’ve had creating content for this blog. Recording Test episode was also fun. That’s enough reason to keep doing it.

The format we have in mind: Talk about a book and write an accompanying post —
This might change. I might even bet on it changing. But it seemed to work well with the first one so we’re going to give it another shot next week. We’re trying to figure out possible segments and we’re starting broad and trying to figure out which ones work and which don’t.

I read a lot of books in the past year or two and I’ve written about some of them. I know a lot of the content well enough to talk about it.

The plan: each week I’ll review my highlights for a book I’ve already read. Wally will listen to it or read it for the first time. Then we’ll discuss it.

This week we talked about Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and the concept that stuck out was autotelic and exotelic activities. Next week we’ll talk about Grit, by Angela Duckworth.

Books often have activities to run through so we’re going to try to pull some of those out to talk through while recording. For example, this week we did the 5 Whys.

We’re hoping one or two concepts will stick out. I’ll write an accompanying post that goes a little deeper on that topic. (Along with the usual links you’d expect in show notes.)

Goals: Record one podcast a week with the 12th podcast having 1,000 downloads —
Our goal is to post one podcast each week and get to 1,000 downloads for the 12th episode.

I’m embarrassed because I looked back to a post where I wrote about 12-week goals. That was 8 weeks ago when I said my goal was to get, guess what, 1000 mailing list subscribers.

Let’s just say I probably won’t get to 1000. My main lesson? At the time, I realized I was just creating content without sharing it. I had a plan to share on other outlets but mostly just created more content that I didn’t share.

This is another opportunity to steer things in the right direction. I’ll keep sharing the process. Thanks for following along!