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How to save the day

Check out the full notes for “The Daily Stoic” by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman

“You know that feeling you get when you haven’t been to the gym in a few days? A bit doughy. Irritable. Claustrophobic. Uncertain. Others get a similar feeling when they’ve been on vacation for too long or right after they first retire. The mind and the body are there to be used—they begin to turn on themselves when not put to some productive end.”

— “The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living” by Ryan Holiday & Stephen Hanselman

I woke up feeling very doughy.

As I talked about in my post from earlier today, I blocked 90 minutes to get something done and got very little done except a couple paragraphs talking about that.

Even worse, it’s a Sunday. It’s supposed to be a day of rest and leisure.

So I’ve been trying to save it and am feeling better about the day a few hours later.

  • Got brunch with my wife: There’s a Scandinavian cafe down the street so we got some cured fish, eggs a few different ways, and a couple lattes. Food isn’t the answer but it can be part of the answer.
  • Called my dad: Oh yeah and it’s Father’s Day. We both had half our gaze beyond FaceTime on the phone toward the Suns & Clippers. Still, a good convo. I’m grateful to have grown up in a home where basketball was on frequently.
  • Went for a run: Okay a jog and speed walk and normal walk once I got uphill. Went up to the top of Buena Vista, which I used to do multiple times each week before getting Booster the puppy. Can’t wait until she’s big enough (and I’m good enough at walking her) to take her up here.
  • Listened to some Anthony de Mello: aka the other melo’ Anthony. Tim Ferriss mentioned the book again on a recent Q&A episode so I thought it’d be good to get a bit of a refresher.
  • Listened to some Daily Stoic: probably came to mind because I wrote some notes on a Daily Stoic podcast episode with Ryan Holiday and Malcolm Gladwell. Thought it’d be good to give the book a bit of a refresher as well.

I mentioned Buena Vista and actually am still up here typing this. It wouldn’t be the worst routine to come up here and write a post a couple times a week.

A little bit of mind work. A little bit of body work.

Reduce wasted movement

Check out the full notes for “Work Clean: The Life-changing Power of Mise-en-place to Organize Your Life, Work, and Mind” by Dan Charnas

I blocked off 90 minutes and all I got was this single book note post.

And a lot of wasted movement.

From “Work Clean”:

Chefs save motion to save time. Conserving motion conserves the time it takes to move. Conserving motion also conserves a tremendous amount of human energy, both physical and mental, as in refining a task by finding a better process or transforming motion into an automatic reaction so the mind can be free to think other things.

I’ve been adjusting my desk setup to record working sessions.

This mostly means I’ve been able to record hours of wasted movement. In my case, wasted movement is the combination of these things

  • Blocking time to work specifically on things I intend to publish
  • Not publishing those things

The time spent is wasted. The draft work is wasted.

Here’s a screenshot of my wasted movement:

UntitledImage

Took notes on the iPad, sketched some stuff, decided it’d be good to try and make something in Figma for some reason, ran out of time, instead just wrote the post you’re seeing now.

Hopefully, being a little more conscious of that will help me reduce the wasted movement.

Podcast Notes: Malcolm Gladwell on “The Daily Stoic”

I started listening to this first thing in the morning during my first walk with Booster. Very first question: Ryan Holiday asks about when Gladwell writes.

I run in the afternoon, always have. Never in the morning.

Never, like not even when you’re traveling?

Never.

So you write first and then run?

Yes. Morning is thinking time. So it’s creative time. It seems crazy to put a run in the middle of the most cognitively valuable stretch of the day.

They also discuss working on their own ideas first thing in the morning before tainting it with other people’s most recent thoughts.

Maybe a good argument against my habit of waking up and throwing the Airpods on and picking whatever’s near the top of my podcast feed.

This inspired me a bit to go and draw some notes at a coffee shop. Feels good that the backpack load out is becoming a more frequent activity.

Anyway I’ll paste the rest of these notes below and then go for a run. I mean. Gotta get that BDNF.

From John J. Ratey, MD’s Spark:

Early on, researchers found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing the same structural growth required for learning—and causing me to think of BDNF as Miracle-Gro for the brain.

Oh yeah, the rest of the notes I sketched out:

“Don’t read Ryan. Don’t read Gladwell.” Instead just read a dozens original books written by actual Stoics or read 100s of original research papers that Gladwell uses. (Or, actually, read Ryan and Gladwell.)
Gladwell’s progression as a writer: writing in a loud news room at The Washington Post, writing a series of big-idea books, then starting a podcast and learning audio storytelling, and finally giving a full narrative nonfiction book a shot. (He mentions Michael Lewis as being the master of narrative nonfiction and eventually wanting to write his own.)
They discuss the effect where, if you’re an expert, you’ll notice an incorrect detail in an article and you can subsequently dismiss the rest of that article. But then you’ll move on and read the other articles taking things at face value, even though they might similarly have incorrect details. It sounds like Gladwell has sort of changed his thinking on this and knows it’s important to consider the audience. If it’s an intro to professional runners, he’s not the audience because he’s deep into running. It’s for a lay audience. A small incorrect detail is bad but the article as a whole can still serve as a good gateway.
They don’t talk about putting a meal together, but it came to mind for me. They discuss the criticism they often get: “You’re just a popularizer.” It’s supposed to be a bad thing. But, yes. That’s the intent of writing the books: to popularize good ideas. And so the meal idea for me is that you start with raw ingredients (books from stoics, research papers) and you can combine those and create a delicious plate of food (a single book, in their case). There are exceptions: a steak is a single ingredient that tastes great. Plenty of non-delicious plates of food. Just as there are great, approachable ancient books and entertaining research papers, there are also many many bad books.

First draft foundations

Just finished reading Wanting by Luke Burgis. In the final section, he writes about first drafts:

Girard believed that the best novelists read their first drafts and see right through them. They see that the first draft was a “put-up job”—an unconscious attempt to deceive their readers and themselves about the complexity of their desires. (Stephen King has written that the most important thing he learned from Carrie White, the lead character in his first horror story, is that “the writer’s original perception of a character or characters may be as erroneous as the reader’s.”)

I came across this highlight Zen in the Art of Writing about drafts. The other drafts will change, the characters will evolve. But the first draft does lay the foundation down.

You’ll get a different shade of gray if you start 90% dark and 10% light.

Two Stephen King stories with a similar theme: teenage revenge.

Carrie uses telekinesis to murder everyone in a fire.

Lardass Logan eats a bunch of pie and throws up on everyone at the pie eating contest.

Different mix of light and dark.

Wanting: Naval on desire

Check out the full notes for “Wanting” by Luke Burgis

“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want,” he said. Ravikant is drawing on the perennial understanding of numerous spiritual traditions about the link between desire and suffering: desire is always for something we feel we lack, and it causes us to suffer.

You can focus on what you lack or you can focus on what you have.

Not much in between.

This is why gratitude journals are recommended so often. And why the guidance is often to just write down small things, the trope example always being morning coffee.

But I am grateful for my morning coffee, in its different forms.

At the same time I can see some wanting when I think of my various morning coffee routines.

I miss the Upper West apartment where I first set up an iOS shortcut to order an iced quad from the Starbucks around the corner.

I miss the midtown apartment where my now-wife and I would take our Dunkin Donuts refillable cups to get them refilled.

I miss the East Village apartment where I would alternate grabbing a coffee from the corner store or the fancier place with terrible paper straws.

And when I lived in New York I would miss Philz Coffee, which now I can get a few minutes away. But I’d have to drive.

So yeah, I want that to be closer.

But I’m also grateful for my mornings pouring a cup of bottled cold brew with Booster at my feet, glancing at my wife rubbing her eyes walking to the bathroom, chugging the glass, saying “ok! let’s go.” and heading out the door for a walk.