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Book Note: The Bullet Journal Method

What if you had the power to do most things? What if you had the power to do one specific thing nobody else could do?

Superman can do just about anything. But mayyyybe you just need to fit into a very tiny space.

Alright, so we’re talking about productivity, not superhero powers. There might be some downsides to software, as Ryder Carroll explains in The Bullet Journal Method: Track the Past, Order the Present, Design the Future:

Another reason we use notebooks? Flexibility. Software tends to be either so powerful that its wealth of features is buried to all but the most intrepid explorers (think Excel) or so specific that it sacrifices features for increased usability, essentially doing few things very well (think mobile apps).

The solution, of course, is an analog notebook.

Notebooks, in contrast, are beholden to their authors. Their function is limited only by the imagination of their owner.

Some of the friends I have with bullet journals are the same people who would say “oh I can’t draw”. They feel okay being creative within the confines of a journal. It’s a safe space.

Technology makes it too easy to do some things

Jotting a note down? Easy in an analog notebook. It’s also easy on a digital device.

Sending it to the cloud so you can access that note on all the devices you have anywhere in the world? Having its contents searchable so that you can pull it up from your pile of other notes? Easy on a digital device.

Too easy. To the point that we can become a little thoughtless about what we put in that pile. It’s hard to review an infinite pile of notes.

There can be value in a little bit of friction. If it takes a little more effort to summarize your thoughts before writing them into a notebook, then you’ll do a little bit of filtering up front. Less to review means you’ll be more likely to review it.

Keeping a longhand notebook, digitally

You can get some of the benefits of slowing down by doing longhand writing digitally. Since reading the book, I’ve been keeping an analog journal for work and for everything else I keep a digital journal in my iPad.

It’s not the same. I knew that going in, but now I have a better sense of what the differences are.

Keeping a digital notebook is like having a 3-ring binder. There are pros and cons.

You’re not forced into the permanent linear order of an analog notebook. When you’re combining a collection of your work and other research and want to keep it organized in different categories, digital tools shine.

For something like a bullet journal, a lot of the pleasure comes over time as you open the notebook up day after day and build up your spatial memory of where things are. You can’t use a search query but you can flip to your monthly log in a few moments.

One of the advantages physical books continue to have over eBooks is that rifling through pages is easier. The Kindle app has improved here to where you can skim pages without losing your place in a book. But flipping back and forth between 2 or 3 pages is still easier with a physical book, keeping your place with your fingers.

The bullet journal review process is easier with an analog notebook.

Longhand writing, slowing down, and calmness

If you’ve heard of bullet journals, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of morning pages. It’s a form of journaling but quite different from the bullet journal. Instead of summarized bullets, you let it all out unfiltered. Three pages a day, longhand.

In The Miracle of Morning Pages, Julia Cameron answers the question “Must I really write pages longhand?”

Again, yes. Pages must be done longhand. The computer is fast—too fast for our purposes. Writing by computer gets you speed but not depth. Writing by computer is like driving a car at 85 mph. Everything is a blur. “Oh, my God, was that my exit?” Writing by hand is like going 35 mph. “Oh, look, here comes my exit. And look, it has a Sonoco station and a convenience store.”

The same reasoning applies to bullet journals as well. It’s calm.

It’s one of the best things about keeping a bullet journal. The great thing is that it’s one of the things that translates best from analog to digital. Longhand writing with the Apple Pencil is a pleasure.

Just turn your notifications off.

(And think espresso, not coffee)

Thrashing

I joined Seth Godin’s The Podcast Fellowship and learned about the idea of “thrashing around”. There are other phrases for just getting started (bias to action, Just Do It), but thrashing really captures the idea that you’re going to be bad when you start—and that’s okay.

Yesterday I was trying to make a list of the books I read this year. One that I enjoyed near the start of the year is The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth. In it, he says that doing is everything:

The idea is not to be paralyzed in the face of uncertainty. If you do something and it works, great! If you do something and it fails, maybe even better. You do, you fail, and you learn. You do again, you fail again, and you learn some more. If you are mindful about what you have done, failure is a teacher. With a little luck, after enough failures you will succeed. In many cases this is a much better approach than a long, drawn-out investigation into the right way to proceed.

I over analyze things. I’ve done these drawn-out investigations. I still do them. Maybe a little bit of IF-THEN will help here.

  • IF I notice I’m over analyzing how to create content, THEN I’ll open a up a new WordPress post

Start thrashing.

Turn the microphone on and start thrashing around.

Hit record on your camera and start thrashing around.

Start a new text file and start thrashing around.

Or in my case, it’s opening the WordPress app and thrashing around.

Book Notes: “This is Marketing” by Seth Godin

Hulk Hogan told millions of kids to eat their vitamins. Stone Cold didn’t. They were both wildly popular wrestlers. I learned everything I know about marketing by watching 90s wrestling.

I should probably learn more, so I picked up Seth Godin’s This is Marketing this week.

Here are some takeaways.

Find a focus and ignore the rest

I took my first physics class in college. Going over the syllabus, I learned about the bell curve for grading and standard deviation. It didn’t really matter because I bombed the exams and barely passed.

Anyway, good to see a standard deviation curve that isn’t showing me how terrible I’m doing. Seth explains that a part of the curve (left of where most people clump together) represents neophiliacs. Focus on them. And what about the rest of the curve?

From This is Marketing:

Good marketers have the humility to understand that you shouldn’t waste a minute (not of your time or of their time) on anyone who isn’t on the left part of the curve.

You can’t change their mind. What you make is not for them.

That’s okay. Spare your energy.

Most people don’t know most people

“I don’t think about you at all.”

It’s one of my favorite lines from Mad Men. I try to remember it whenever I worry that I said something dumb in front of a group. Or when I think someone might be upset with me.

Ok so that’s not exactly the point of this section, I just wanted to share that. Mad Men itself is the point. Or the popularity of Mad Men. Or, one more try, the lack of popularity of Mad Men, depending on how you looked at it.

At its peak, it seemed like every pop culture critic wrote about or referenced Mad Men. Which is great but it didn’t mean that everyone beyond that was actually watching Mad Men.

From This is Marketing:

Today, though, popular culture isn’t as popular as it used to be. Mad Men, which was hyped by the New York Times in dozens of articles in just one season, was only regularly seen by 1 percent of the U.S. population.

On Tim Ferris’s podcast, Seth points out that most people don’t know Tim Ferriss. Of everyone you walked past today, 99 out of 100 people don’t know who Tim is. Still, he’s wildly successful. (Same goes for Seth.)

NBA players are really popular on social media. Until you start comparing them to global soccer stars.

Here’s the good thing. You don’t have to be nearly that popular to have an audience to build a career around.

Mad Men didn’t need to be seen by as many people as Johnny Carson. You don’t need to be known by as many people as Tim Ferriss.

You can start by aiming for something much smaller.

SEO is one thing, but it’s better for people to be searching for you

I used to be the first image search result for “machete costume”. It was a fun icebreaker when joining a new team.

SEO is useful, but It’ll be a long, hard battle if you’re trying to make it to the first match of any generic search term.

Why try showing up for “blog” when you can have people just search for your name?

From This is Marketing:

The path isn’t to be found when someone types in a generic term.

The path is to have someone care enough about you and what you create that they’ll type in your name. That they’ll be looking for you, not a generic alternative.

Yes, you can find my blog by searching for “blog” in Google.

But I’d rather have you search for “Seth” instead.

How do you get there? It’s simple, not easy: be good enough. You get good enough by showing up frequently and building trust.

(I also just want to explicitly acknowledge that “first image search result for ‘machete costume’” isn’t exactly the same in value as being the first search result for “blog”.)

What brands are around you? Why? (You probably like them.)

A brand isn’t just a logo. But a logo can be an important element.

From This is Marketing:

Here’s a simple exercise: Make a list of five logos you admire. As a consumer of design, draw or cut and clip five well-done logos.

Got ’em?

Okay, here’s my prediction: each one represents a brand you admire.

I looked around at the different things around me while writing the first draft of this. I wrote it at a gym. It wasn’t Equinox but if I said I wrote this at Equinox you might have a picture in your head of what my environment looks like. Their brand is clearly more than just their logo.

Oh yeah, the things around me.

I had multiple Nike things on. Easy to draw that logo from memory.

I was drawing on an iPad. I know the logo is an apple with a bite in it but I had to look at it to draw it. I had AirPods with me. Which are clearly apple and again go to show that brands go beyond logos.

Then there were a few other things with logos I couldn’t have drawn from memory at all.

I had a Uniqlo jacket and pants. Couldn’t describe the logo to you except that it’s geometric.

GORUCK has a logo but it’s not anywhere on the outside of my backpack. That said, I notice when other people have the same bag. And I always assume they must like their bag as much as I do.

I also had a logo on that I couldn’t draw from memory but can recognize on someone across the street: the Carhartt wave (?) on a beanie.

Give stuff away. If it’s good enough people will pay for your paid stuff.

This post is free.

I don’t sell anything.

If enough people read enough of my free things then some day I can sell something. (And hope that I’d be mentally strong enough to deal with some backlash.)

Anyway, many things you pay for are likely to be connected to something else that was free.

Ever watched a chef on TV?

From This is Marketing:

When a chef gives away her recipes, or appears on a podcast, or leads an online seminar, she’s giving her ideas away for free. It’s easy to find them, engage with them with frequency, and share them. But, if you want to eat that pasta served on china on a white tablecloth at her restaurant, it’s going to cost you twenty-four dollars.

The last artist you saw at a concert probably has a song for free on the radio. (Or there’s somewhere online where you can listen after skipping through a commercial.)

Did you ever have a Windows computer with one level of Doom on it? Free. If you beat it then you could pay for more levels. And it was completely worth it.

Podcast hosts have free interviews with people, but those people are often showing up to spread an idea. And you can get the premium version of that idea by buying their book.

Write 7000 posts

Why did I pick up “This is Marketing”? I trust Seth’s advice. I don’t know him but I’ve read and listened to a lot of his work. I’ve written a few times about how important his idea of “write in the editor” has been for me for finishing work. (He writes his daily blog post directly into TypePad. Because when he’s in there, his mind knows what to do.)

That trust was built up over time by reading his work regularly. He shares new things regularly. You don’t get to 7000 posts by posting 1000 posts a day for 7 days. You get to that by posting consistently year after year.

Show up. Finish. And show up again.

All I know about marketing I learned from pro wrestling

“Oh. Give me. A hell yeah!”

If you recognize Stone Cold Steve Austin you might have read that in his voice. He built that recognition by showing up.

Wrestlers show up. It’s fake fighting, yes.

People will say “it’s fake fighting” in a disparaging way. But imagine how hard that is.

There’s a stadium with 10s of thousands of people. Now go make that entire place pop.

With a fake fight.

And they do it. Night after night.

They’re serious athletes going through grueling work. They show up and travel town to town to put on a show. Night in and night out. They build trust with the fans. With that frequency.

Beyond the importance of frequency, here are some other ways wrestling applies concepts from “This is Marketing”:

  • Brands and logos: It’s not a logo, but whenever I hear a glass break in the kitchen when I’m sitting in a restaurant, I picture Stone Cold walking into the room.
  • Not for everyone: Stone Cold was for the kids who grew up and decided they’d start washing down their vitamins with a Steveweiser. If you were still saying your prayers and believed only in 100% good and 100% evil, he probably wasn’t for you. And that was fine by him.
  • Some free, some paid: You could see him on TV week in and week out. Want to see him fight for a championship? Fork some cash over for a pay-per-view. (And nowadays, The Network.)
  • Status: Pro wrestling is not an elite thing. The people that care about wrestling don’t care about what outsiders think. Outsiders don’t get it. But they do care about status relative to other fans. People that soak in New Japan Pro Wrestling shows and cruiserweight tournaments are different from the fans that are completely absorbed in mainstream storylines. If one of your favorite guys from the indie scene makes it big, then your status is raised for being an early adopter.

I’ve scratched the surface but check out “This is Marketing” for more.

While you do that, I’ll pat myself on the back for showing up today. Then I’ll start thinking about how to show up tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day.

And I’ll say my prayers and express gratitude that the next days don’t involve taking chair shots to the head.

Use nature’s eyes (or the Hubble telescope) to remember your insignificance

We’re tiny.

The first time I saw Powers of Ten (1977) was in either middle school or high school.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, it can be useful to remember how small you are. In the big scheme of things, whatever it is that’s stressing you out just might not be all that important. Remember stressing out about a test in a class in the past? Did those results stick with you? Probably not.

I had a teammate once who had a personal mantra for work: “we aren’t saving babies here.” Always a good reminder it’s rarely worth burning out and sacrificing mental health. There’s always tomorrow to work on endless todo lists.

Here are some quotes that might help you feel uplifted by the insignificance of everything.

Nature’s eyes

From “Principles” by Ray Dalio:

However, when we look down on ourselves through the eyes of nature we are of absolutely no significance. It is a reality that each one of us is only one of about seven billion of our species alive today and that our species is only one of about ten million species on our planet. Earth is just one of about 100 billion planets in our galaxy, which is just one of about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And our lifetimes are only about 1/ 3,000 of humanity’s existence, which itself is only 1/ 20,000 of the Earth’s existence.

If you don’t change the world today, that’s fine. If you don’t change the world this year, that’s okay. And in your career, no worries.

Focus on being a good person in the day in front of you. Help another person today. That adds up a lot better than feeling like you missed on a home run swing day after day.

Seinfeld’s other techniques

In self-development books, people often refer to Seinfeld’s technique of writing jokes every single day and keeping the chain going in a calendar. The Principles quote above reminded me of something I read in Judd Apatow’s Sick in the Head (amazing book, by the way).

Seinfeld shares his technique for staying grounded:

Judd: How do you get over that hump?

Jerry: 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.

It might be time to put a picture of the stars next to that wall calendar with all the Xs on it.

You aren’t that special

Ginsberg: “I feel bad for you.”
Don Draper: “I don’t think about you at all.”

That’s one of my favorite lines from Mad Men. We grew up thinking we were special and each and every one of us would go on to do amazing things. It can’t pan out that way. If everyone were amazing, nobody would be.

Remember that people don’t think about you all that often. Remember that what you do isn’t that significant in nature’s eyes.

And remember that this can be a great thing.