Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Posting just to post

I am in a rut.

That much is clear. The path out is less clear.

I put The Compound Effect on the other day and listened to some random spot in it It’s a similar book to The Slight Edge (the authors of each have a mentor/mentee connection if I’m remembering right). I enjoyed The Slight Edge more, but there’s no audiobook version of it.

Anyway, one similar story in the books is the diverging paths of separate people.

One makes a bunch of tiny positive choices over a long period of time.

The other makes a bunch of tiny negative choices over a long period of time.

The kicker of the story, of course, is that the person with the diverging paths is the same person, just at different points in life.

A couple years ago, I think I had an okay flywheel going. It wasn’t the most cohesive thing where it’s greater than the sum of its parts. But it was a bunch of different parts in motion—videos, blog posts, the podcast. It wasn’t all aligned and I’d often just blog about blogging and talk about being unaligned.

But, again, it was something in motion.

That seems to have ground to a halt this year.

For the record, in case you’re stumbling upon this post a few years from now, it’s 2020.

Tough year! But plenty of people in similar situations took the new situations that 2020 presented them and became even more productive.

I didn’t. That’s okay. But I can own it and start turning the ship back around. Slowly.

So here’s a quote from The Slight Edge:

What’s more, it’s one that the majority follow their whole lives. Someday, when my ship comes in … Someday, when I have the money … Someday, when I have the time … Someday, when I have the skill … Someday, when I have the confidence … How many of those statements have you said to yourself? Have I got some sobering news for you: “some day” doesn’t exist, never has, and never will.

One of my favorite phrases from Shawn Stevenson (author of Sleep Smarter and host of The Model Health Show) is: don’t live on Someday Isle.

One post at a time and all that. I’ll write, draw, talk, make videos, and work my way off of Someday Isle and out of this creative rut.

Weblog

Really enjoyed this Zach Lowe article on LeBron vs. Jordan. He goes through different arguments about where LeBron falls short. Then points out that Jordan had similar shortcomings or that some of the negative perception of LeBron’s career aren’t actually backed up by the numbers.

Pippen dismisses the numbers as merely proof that LeBron has played too many close games. “I like winning by 10,” he says. “LeBron is not the guy that wants to take that last shot.” Nichols gives it one more try: “But he’s done it more than the other guy!”

That’s from this clip of Pippen and McGrady discussing how clutch LeBron is (or isn’t). The numbers just don’t matter to people when their most important metric is “You can just feel it”.

Advice to Steve Kerr: Bring a lot of stuff (Reading Log: “The Victory Machine”)

When 2020 started, I had this idea that I’d take Steve Kerr’s team value of “joy” and try applying it in my life. 2020 made that pretty tough, but it’s still a value worth working toward.

Anyway, I’m about 1/4 through “The Victory Machine” and am enjoying the backstory of the team I rooted against so hard. One of my favorite things so far is Flip Saunders’ advice for Steve Kerr:

“I worked with Flip at TNT, he did a few games with Marv and me years ago,” Kerr said. “I asked him the same question and he said, ‘Just make sure when you sit down with an owner, you bring a lot of stuff.’ And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean a lot of stuff?’ He goes, ‘I don’t know. It could just be a binder of a bunch of plays, but the main thing with owners was to have them look at a bunch of stuff because then they think you’ve really really put a lot of time into it.’” — From Ethan Sherwood Strauss’s

The Victory Machine

To be the coach inside the victory machine, you need to get the job first. Bring a lot of stuff.

Reading log: The hot hand vs. The gambler

Steph Curry makes a shot. Then another. Is he more likely to make or miss the third shot?

(Or like Anthony Davis last night in game 2 of the Finals.)

Feed the person who’s hot!

Now go to a roulette table. The last four spins were black. Is the next spin more likely to be black or red?

“The Hot Hand: The Mystery and Science of Streaks” by Ben Cohen goes into the hot hand, the gambler’s fallacy, and more in exploring how we think about streaks.

If you like Moneyball and basketball, you’ll enjoy The Hot Hand. There’s also a few stories about video games and game development weaved in, so it’s even more in my enjoyment wheelhouse.

I’ll try to do a notepod episode on it but, for now, I’ll share some links to videos of players with the hot hand (whether it exists or not):

  • Klay Thompson’s 37 in a quarter — This is one of those videos I’ve watched plenty of times and it just seems like it doesn’t add up. Still unbelievable.
  • Kevin Love 34 in a quarter — Kyrie doesn’t believe in the hot hand.
  • T-Mac with 13 in 33 seconds — I didn’t catch the Klay Thompson or Kevin Love games but I definitely remember watching this Rockets game. It probably sticks out because of the setting: I was eating in the dorm lobby my freshman year. We would try to go near closing because the asian place would give bigger servings to get rid of the rest of the food. Anyway this game was on the TV there and it’s one of those that you don’t think anything of and it’s not a playoff game or anything so there was no way to guess you’d see something historic.
  • Nick Young with 3 threes in a minute —One of my personal favorite games (big bandwagon Lob City fan).

I hope to have the hot hand with some consecutive blog posts, a newsletter, and getting back to the podcast in some form.

Podcast Note | Sahil Lavingia: Minimize surface area to maximize polish

  • Podcast
    Makerpad
  • Episode Title
    Episode: #22 – Sahil Lavingia – Founder & CEO of Gumroad
  • Episode links
    Apple Podcasts • Makerpad

Sahil Lavingia talks about simplicity and polish:

I had a tweet yesterday. That’s like basically minimize surface area to maximize polish.
And that spurred because I noticed we were starting to do more and more things. And it just became incredibly expensive, you know, because every time we would launch a new thing, it’d have to work with all these other things that we had, right? So it’s not just adding one hop of complexity. All the things that you built now have to work with that thing and that feature.
So it’s kind of like a factorial. It’s like N+1 factorial not + N in terms of adding complexity.

This is the tweet he mentioned:

This can apply to people as well. From Jason Fried and DHH’s It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work: 

What is it with three? Three is a wedge, and that’s why it works. Three has a sharp point. It’s an odd number, so there are no ties. It’s powerful enough to make a dent, but also weak enough to not break what isn’t broken. Big teams make things worse all the time by applying too much force to things that only need to be lightly finessed.

The problem with four is that you almost always need to add a fifth to manage. The problem with five is that it’s two too many. And six, seven, or eight on a team will inevitably make simple things more complicated than they need to be. Just like work expands to fill the time available, work expands to fill the team available. Small, short projects quickly become big, long projects when too many people are there to work on them.

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I’m trying to get back to writing short posts and will be more deliberate about using these short podcast note and book note posts in future Active Recall episodes. This is an attempt to make the podcast the #1 thing I make between the podcasts, videos, and blog posts. A rough idea that’s forming: The podcast is the thing I make, the blog posts are notes for future episodes I make or notes about podcasting, and the videos will be about how I make those things. And there will be less podcasting about podcasting. This, of course, is likely to change. But we’ll see!

Podcasting Log: Aaaand we’re back

Alright so Wally and I got back to recording this past weekend. It was good to get back to it, really. And we’ve sort of got the process down. Not the whole thing of it being quality content or anything, but just outlining and recording things.

Maybe we’ll need some better designed segments in the future or something to help improve it.

That said, if the goal really is to just do something because it’s fun to catch up with each other each week: mission accomplished. And the approach of switching things up so it’s around some pop culture thing and then bringing the book highlights in does seem to be working well.

It seems like it’s in a decent place to where we can build up some consistency and then with that we’ll get more reps in and improve things.

This week we talked about Magic: the Gathering. Some broad categories that we can pull from off the top of my head:

  • Our dads’ favorite movies
  • Movies we’ve watched with our SOs
  • Random Smallville episodes

And on and on.

I had this idea also (after listening to some episodes of the 3 Clips podcast) that we could probably do some recurring segments. One of the ones that came to mind immediately was The Nonfiction Gauntlet or something like that.The idea would be that, well, we have some guiding books that we went over in early episodes, and we could just run whatever pop culture thing it is through those lenses.

For example, how does Marty McFly…

  • Make small changes that lead to big changes? (The Slight Edge)
  • Deal with the dark night of the soul? (Obstacle is the way)
  • Demonstrate grit? (Grit)
  • Go against conventional wisdom? (Barking up the Wrong Tree)
  • Build some routines and habits (Better Than Before or Atomic Habits)

Actually, we should do that next time. That can be the next segment.

Anyway, that’s the log for this week’s episode. Be sure to check it out!