Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

An example disagreement (between very smart people)

I just bought Ray Dalio’s Principles. Well, a physical copy. I listened to the audiobook around when it first came out but after seeing the physical copy in store it definitely seemed worth re-visiting.

I wanted to pour a little bit of concrete over something I listened to on this episode by sharing it here.

Reid Hoffman has a lightning round question:

  • “Artificial intelligence fills you with hope or dread? Pick one.”

Ray Dalio picks dread.

They talk it through:

HOFFMAN: So by the way, in radical transparency, I actually have hope. And unfortunately just because of time, because I do want to get through the Lightning Round questions, to our next conversation we’ll go into the AI stuff a little bit more.

DALIO: But let me ask you the question: Do you agree with the principle I just said? In other words if… Lets just chat a minute, because this is invaluable because I’d love your opinion, ok?

This reminded me of What You Do is Who You Are  by Ben Horowitz1. Because Ray Dalio wrote a book on principles and using them for decision making. But then you can hear in this discussion that he really walks the walk and brings principles into the discussion.

Agree on principles and then work from there. Reid Hoffman then also explains the importance of considering context.

In any case, it’s good to hear two smart people discuss something they disagree on2. Dalio for dread, Reid for hope.

(Also, I made a page where I’ll try collecting lightning round questions, starting with this one.)

Leash yourself (to turn values into actions)

Last week, I bought a physical copy of Ray Dalio’s Principles. I listened to the audiobook around when it was initially released but want to revisit it in text form. I want to come up with some set of principles to refer to and dig into on this blog. None will be original but the set and prioritization could be useful. A few that come to mind:

  • bias to action (instead of over-thinking, over-planning, and over-discussing)
  • it depends (but pick a side)
  • 80/20 (and 64/4)
  • easy and sustainable (to do hard things consistently)
  • get your reps in (or choose your favorite version of the ceramics professor story)
  • aim for daily (because your day to day adds up to your life)
  • listen, learn, and move (mental stillness through body movement and mental movement through physical stillness).

Something like that.

It’ll probably just end up being d.school principles with Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin mixed in. That could be fine.

Anyway, having those principles and values is useful, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how values would translate to action. Mostly because I finished reading Ben Horowitz’s book What You Do is Who You Are recently and he writes about creating “shocking rules”:

Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years:

It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture.

It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?”

Shocking rules turn company values into individual actions day to day.

On a personal level, you can have shocking rules to translate your own life values into action. And it helps to check the daily rules you have for yourself right now to see if they align to things you say you value.

I say I want to put health and fitness first. Some mornings I wake up, zombie walk to the couch and then get stuck looking at newsletters and deals on my phone. I’ve been trying to put a shocking rule in place: only use the phone when it’s charging on our entryway stand. (I learned about the technique in a Cal Newport post.) It’s like putting your less-present, auto scrolling self on a leash.

To put health first, I want to make movement the very first thing in my day. The workout I think I could do on most days would be:

  • 100 kettlebell swings
  • 10 kettlebell get-ups
  • 30 minute walk/jog/run

(You might recognize the 100 swings, 10 get-ups as Simple & Sinister.)

It really is pretty straightforward, but I’m still thinking about removing the friction involved in it. Sometimes I need to pack my bag to go or need to do some other things that aren’t movement and then I eventually get stuck to the couch scrolling away.

Find the medium that you’ll be most consistent in

Found this really inspiring. Matt Ragland talks about the importance of consistency in putting his channel together.

  • He tested out different mediums. He ended up focusing on video because of how much he enjoyed it creatively. He found he was way better at connecting to people on video than in podcasts or through text.
  • He didn’t fuss around on quality all that much. The time that it takes is way less than some of his friends. (He mentions a friend spending 30 hours for each video.) He knew that wouldn’t work for his own situation so he aimed for a system that helped him with stay consistent.

Over the past couple years (and over the past couple weeks, even) I’ve bounced around from trying to do audio, or text, or text and audio, or video, or timelapses, or a newsletter or every combination of those things. Now I’m trying to get back to good old blogging because it’s the place that lets me share with the least friction. (On this episode, Ragland mentions working the “consistency muscle”.)

I liked what Darrell (host of Copyblogger FM) shared: consistency will take you much farther than passion will.

I’m making up these numbers, but I’d say it’s worth the tradeoff to lower the quality, say, 30% if it results in being 300% more consistent.

Plan right in the editor (how an editorial calendar is helping me be more consistent)

I started using a WordPress plug-in that gives you a calendar view of your posts:

This is another step toward writing in the editor by default. Asking ‘why’ a couple more times:

  • Why write in the WordPress editor if it’s easier to just write in Ulysses, Evernote, Cold Turkey Writer… (all tools I also really like)? I’m writing with the intent to publish posts regularly. There’s a little more friction up front to writing in WordPress: if I’m just waking up, it’s a lot easier to open up iOS Notes and start writing there. No need to think. It delays the friction. Once I think something is shaping up then I need to move it over to WordPress at some point anyway. Some integrations make this seamless so that I could skip going into WordPress at all. At some point I do end up with two copies: the published version and the text editor version.
  • Why are you trying to publish posts regularly? I write just about every day. A lot of times it is with the intent to publish, but with the above process I end up not actually transferring things over to WordPress. I end up not publishing anything. Writing in a frictionless text editor where I also write 1 word or 3 sentence notes for things means I’m kind of used to writing in a brainstormy way. (“Nobody’s going to see this anyway.”) Lots of ideas can be good until they start to look like evidence that you don’t finish things. One way to ward off that negative lens is to also have a lot of evidence that you do finish things.
  • Why do you want to be someone who finishes things? That’s too far up the ‘why’ chain. Emotions are involved. Let’s get back to this editorial calendar.

Okay so the good thing is that I can plan out posts and stick to the schedule. I can build trust in some past self that deemed this order of content the proper order of things. If I have something that’s really exciting to me at the moment, then I can bump it up sooner but at least do a quick check to rank it against other ideas I wanted to write about.

There’s also a view for opening up a small text-only editor. It’s the right amount of space for me to jot some topics down and add a quote. At the same time, it reminds me not to go too deep into the post yet.

If I’m good about things, I’ll always have a book quote and some bullet notes ready to write about first thing in the morning. Then I can create before consuming.

Summary: Having a calendar is helpful, who would’ve thought???

Create before you consume (and maybe stop consuming some things altogether)

I’m reading Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis (I’ll write a book stack update tomorrow). I’ve listened to Chase Jarvis’s podcast for a few years and his appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast is one of those episodes that, if it were a book, I would put face out on the bookshelf. I was excited to see that he released an actual book.

It’s got a lot of practical advice for living a creative life and building creative practice into your day. One good time to try out: first thing in the morning. One way to make this work: aim to create something before you start consuming things.

If the first thing you do each day is pick up your phone and cruise all your favorite creators and entrepreneurs for inspiration, you probably end up feeling anxious or depressed that you’re not far enough along. The simple act of creating something with intention first, before consuming the work of others, alters the dynamic.

In Stillness is the Key, Ryan Holiday writes about the importance of protecting your mind from all of the inputs of the outside world.

The way you feel when you awake early in the morning and your mind is fresh and as yet unsoiled by the noise of the outside world—that’s space worth protecting. So too is the zone you lock into when you’re really working well. Don’t let intrusions bounce you out of it. Put up barriers. Put up the proper chuting to direct what’s urgent and unimportant to the right people.

You have stillness when you wake up.

There are a few things you can do to maintain that stillness1. One thing you can do is create something without any inputs—journal, draw, take some pictures.

Once that’s done then you can get on with the millions of things you do that break that stillness.

October Book Stack Progress

My October book stack currently looks something like…

  • Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday—He wrote The Obstacle is the Way (Wally and I discussed this book in one of our earliest episodes) and Ego is the Enemy (which I mentioned in this post about keeping your ego in check). I read this about half with the physical copy and half with Kindle. I think this book will convince a few people to slow down, sleep a little more, and check in on news 50 times a day instead of 500. Some action I took immediately as a result of reading the book: I started writing in a Moleskine again along with writing in Five-Minute Journal app every day.
  • Creative Calling by Chase Jarvis—Jarvis’s appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast is one of my all-time favorites. (Check out my notes on that episode here. And this video I made about their focusing question: “What might this look like if it were easy?”) Some action I’ve taken: I suspect the last few blog posts I’ve written have been because the book has got me itching to publish smaller things more consistently. In the same vein as “love is a verb”, being consistent is one of the best ways to express passion for whatever your art is1. It’s a feedback loop: you do it frequently, you get better at it, you grow more passionate about it, and you can continue to do it frequently.  2

Those notes got a little long so I’m going to just list out other books and send this off into the world.

I’ve started these recently and am still deciding on which to continue on with this month:

  • A Fighter’s Mind by Sam Sheridan
  • Dark Matter by Blake Crouch
  • Insanely Simple by Ken Segall
  • The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda

Some things I’m re-reading (aka re-skimming) or which I’m not counting toward the 4. Worth mentioning because they’re some of the things I’m thinking about but I’m not giving them deep reads:

  • Bigger, Leaner, Stronger by Michael Matthews
  • Lean vs. Agile vs. Design Thinking (I finished this but it was a 45m audiobook so I’m not counting it toward the 4 for the month)