Yes I took some time arranging this mess for the photo

Dear future self, remember this

How I’m practicing the classic “Read more, write more” advice

Active Recall!
Sep 1, 2018 · 28 min read

You tap, hold, then drag across that sweet sweet e-paper.

Then you do it again to remove like a few words after the period that you accidentally caught. Or it’s a glass screen. (Or you’re traditional, an intellectual, or farmer so you’re using a highlighter.)

In any case, your intent is to remember that in the future.

I tried out Readwise this week and have really enjoyed it. Their home page says “Readwise sends you a daily email resurfacing your best ebook highlights.”

Every day it’s been like getting a few notes from my past self. You thought these were at least a little bit important at some point in your life.

Oh yeah, the daily practice I meant to talk about

Here’s what I’ve tried for each of the past 5 days:

  1. Receive and review the digest of highlights (seems like you get 5 each day)
  2. Paste into a text file
  3. Set a timer for 10 minutes (sometimes ended up being 15–30 minut)
  4. Write

It’s like auto-generating an outline to fill in.

Before sharing the writing from this exercise, here are some thoughts on just the exercise itself. The results have been… mixed.

🍏 Just seeing old highlights makes it worth it: Which means you can probably get a lot of value just from step 1 (read your old highlights).

🍏 Getting the email is better than my past systems: A couple years ago I tried building a highlight review and writing tool for myself with Vue. (Trying to get some geek cred here.) But I never automated grabbing my highlights so I stopped using it. I’ve also tried just having the Kindle Highlights page open to review things, but then you’re seeing (A) Too many things and (B) Those things have recency bias because your most recently read books float to the top.

🍏 It’s extremely rewarding to make a connection between two of the quotes: There’s no way that connection would be made other than staring at random quotes side by side that you have at least passing familiarity with. The best is when a theme shows up early and you can use it to glue the remaining quotes and your own thoughts together.

(And I guess a red apple since, I don’t know, these negatives are still learning experiences.)

🍎 You start forcing connections: Sometimes you just aren’t able to make any good connections. You can kind of sort of relate them in the given time you’re clearly stretching. That’s okay though because it’s still practice.

🍎 The end writing isn’t very cohesive: It’s expected since it’s just a step above free writing. The excerpts are random and they seem to be in random order. I don’t re-arrange them at all. I’m going to share them below after giving this context that it’s a writing exercise. Without that, I probably wouldn’t post the raw text after doing the exercise.

🍎 You’re constantly reminded that you buy too many books and “read” them too quickly (sacrificing the joy of reading and actual understanding for the fleeting satisfaction of sort of finishing the book)

Alright so below here I’m going to paste 5 days of my writing exercises. Things formatted in code blocks are supposed to be meta thoughts about the exercise itself.


Okay Chrono Trigger would be in here if I didn’t sell it in 8th grade.
Day 1I set a ten minute timer and the idea is that I’m going to take the five quotes from Readwise and try to think of some connections between them. I’ll just start with the first one and trying to remember why I highlighted it in the first place. I guess I can always use that to start. Then see where it goes.

First up, a book about one of my favorite games growing up.

Chrono Trigger by Michael P. Williams

The first act is an adventure game that creates the illusion of choice and the ability to affect events through time. The second half, a game of puzzles and nonlinear sidequests, makes this power to change history a reality.

I’m pretty sure I highlighted this thinking about how this actually reflects real life. There are situations where there’s illusions of choice.

There’s also the opposite: the illusion of non-choice. Ramit Sethi calls these invisible scripts. You have no choice: you have to go to college, you have to get a corporate job, a house, and on and on.

Here’s another good book on mindset.

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Every person who wins in any undertaking must be willing to burn his ships and cut all sources of retreat.

At a certain point in Chrono Trigger, you have to decide to fight Lavos. There’s no turning back once the battle starts. One interesting thing about the game is that you actually do get to decide when to fight Lavos. You get different endings depending on when you beat Lavos. There’s the option to fight Lavos right away in New Game+.

The ONE Thing by Gary Keller, Jay Papasan

Most assume mastery is an end result, but at its core, mastery is a way of thinking, a way of acting, and a journey you experience.

Nothing in particular comes to mind about when I highlighted this. Other than I probably pictured it as a motivational Instagram post. In any case, I do still believe in the journey-not-just-the-destination mindset. Your life is going to have more journey days than destination days. (Okay, so sometimes the destination is an entirely new journey.)

In any case, let’s think about New Game+ again.

Okay so I always refer back to Super Mario 3 and the trick where you use two warp whistles to get to the final world. Is the game as fun? Of course not. You’ve skipped the entire journey. What if you had New Game+ the very first time you load up the game. You’re powerful and you can go fight Lavos and win. Great. You missed out on so much more. You didn’t experience the journey.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

A point I could have more than afforded to concede. But that’s not the way I… that’s not the way a real player plays. With respect and due effort and care for every point. You want to be great, near-great, you give every ball everything. And then some. You concede nothing.

Speaking of Instagram motivational quotes…

Don’t worry, I have a physical copy along with the Kindle copy so that I can leave it hanging around the coffee table when people come over.

I don’t remember these lines from the book at all, which is probably the beauty of this daily email. I like it already.

I want to play the way a real player plays.

That's time.


Day 2Okay I’m trying this out. I like how it turned out yesterday, particularly in approaching it knowing it’s a daily practice. It combines two things: (1) re-reading old highlights to create value out of highlighting all these things the entire time that I’ve been reading on a Kindle and (2) daily connection practice. Timing it means that I try to keep up the pace as I work through writing about the excerpts.

Coders at Work by Peter Seibel

There’s bound to be stuff where this would have gone faster if we’d had unit tests or smaller modules or whatever. That all sounds great in principle. Given a leisurely development pace, that’s certainly the way to go. But when you’re looking at, “We’ve got to go from zero to done in six weeks,” well, I can’t do that unless I cut something out. And what I’m going to cut out is the stuff that’s not absolutely critical. And unit tests are not critical. If there’s no unit test the customer isn’t going to complain about that. That’s an upstream issue.

I really enjoy the “at Work” series of books. Of the blog posts anyone has read in my life, the one I wrote about “Founders at Work” is a top-10 most-read. Again, that’s from things I’ve written. I’m guessing it’s because the book’s content is good and that I took some time adding images of the old websites.

That above quote is from Jamie Zawinski’s interview in Coders at Work. (I broke a rule in this exercise and looked it up — I’ll just drop the “TK” in there time because that ate up a chunk of time and I also wasn’t careful to triple check who it was.)

There are camps of unit-test everything and also the reality that people don’t enjoy writing tests.

The logic is that over time, the unit tests will speed things up down the road. It’s hard to argue with, but the argument mostly becomes when in the road you see the payoff.

How you do anything is how you do everything. That concept seems to apply here.

Because I’m already reaching the end of my shallow programming knowledge, how does this apply outside of code?

Loosely relating this to working out — what if you could build a system that took a little extra time every day but meant you didn’t need to take a week off from injury a year from now?

Being diligent about writing tests is sort of (ok barely) like warming up before every warm up.

Down the road, you’ll be able to fix things more quickly and know exactly what’s broken in your chain. Instead of stopping workouts entirely because you don’t know what’s wrong.

Ok anyway, next excerpt. (That also ate up the 10 minutes so I’ll just set another timer.)

The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth

FULFILLING OTHERS’ EXPECTATIONS One of the hardest things can be to follow a path that’s different from what your family or society expects of you. It’s very possible that you were expected to join the family business, or have the same career and life trajectory as your parents. And maybe that would make you happy — and maybe it wouldn’t.

(This clearly relates to the invisible scripts from above. But I wrote these on different days and missed the connection.)

The note I wrote when I highlighted: “I was just listening to something about someone not wanting to join the family business.”

I’ve since forgotten what that something was.

Actually, if I had to guess it might’ve been Vince McMahon and Shane McMahon. Shane was a part of the WWE then he went off to do his own thing for a few years before coming back for appearances here and there. (Jumping from 20 ft cells here and there.) But Triple-H and Stephanie are going to be running the business after Vince.

Growing up, my parents wanted me to be an engineer. Or probably a nurse, but they knew I’d be more interested in being an engineer.

I didn’t rebel or anything. But I did want to make things on the internet. (I just over the years had to convince my parents it was a type of engineering.)

Anyway. The only time I really stepped off the path they had in mind was when I quit a government job to work with early startups for a stipend for a few months. Quitting a full time job for something that had a hard end date was a terrible move in their eyes.

It worked out though. I had a job lined up after it ended.

But, hey, it also might not have worked out. I appreciate their concern here.

The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth by Chris Brogan

First, there are some musts. You must be able to pay your bills. You must invoice people so they pay you (or collect money from them in some way). You must create something to sell (even if it’s a service). Without that, you don’t have a business; you are just being creative or you have a hobby.

Okay so about this blog and the YouTube channel — last year I think I kind of sort of wanted it to be a business. Over time I’m realizing that having it as my hobby as an outlet for creativity is enough. At least for this season of my life. I don’t want to think about funnels and offers and all that.

Maybe some day, but just not right now.

Maybe that’s just The Resistance talking…

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

The sign of the amateur is overglorification of and preoccupation with the mystery. The professional shuts up. She doesn’t talk about it. She does her work.

I was listening to “The Writer Files” and there’s a couple episodes about things serious writers do. (Part One, Part Two)

One thing: they show up.

Also I started reading The Wise Man’s Fear again and there’s a part where the protagonist explains being a musician. Or more like “I’m a musician.”

The implication being that he’s a professional and that he doesn’t need his muse or special routines or anything mystical to get to work on his music.

Bringing that back to “Coders at Work” — programming is creative. You make something out of nothing. But you don’t hear about coder’s block as often as writer’s block.

Programmers have their routines. They might even say “I don’t have it today”. But they don’t just skip the day.

They know they can at least work on other things. Review design documents, pair with someone else, review the backlog. Whatever it is. Writers and other creative workers have more than just the blank page or canvas that they can work on.

Anyway, do what you can to keep the paper moving.

Show up. Do the work.

Happy Money by Elizabeth Dunn, Michael Norton

The trouble is that when a pleasurable activity is always available, we may never get around to doing it, thereby missing out on a relatively inexpensive source of happiness.

Note attached to highlight: “I should take advantage of all the great things in New York that I take for granted.”

It’s an ongoing theme for me. I don’t think I’ll live in New York for more than ten years. (As that farmer with the son and the new horse says: we’ll see.)

I don’t want to leave and think “Oh I should’ve done…” I’d like to think “I’m glad I did the things I enjoyed doing while I was there.”

So I have a list of things I want to do more: museums, eating at new restaurants, hanging out at the parks. I just need to get back to doing them.

MONEY Master the Game by Tony Robbins

“What has been very successful for me through my whole life is to not be arrogant about knowing, but to embrace the fact that I have weaknesses; that I don’t know a lot about this, that, and the other thing. The more you learn, the more you realize you don’t know.

On another note, Readwise adds an excerpt from another book based on your books. So this is the one.

Growing up, “I told you so” was a big thing in my family. I loved telling my brother “I told you so.” Our parents loved telling each other “I told you so.”

One of the best things I learned during college was to just say “When I’m wrong I say I’m wrong.” Which isn’t exactly the opposite of “I told you so.” But it’s related.

To continue learning throughout your life, it’s important to switch from “I know everything” to “There’s a lot that I don’t know.” Then you can fix those gaps in knowledge.

That’s way beyond time (30 minutes instead of 10 minutes) — but this is proving to be an engaging exercise.
Alright so this isn’t how I played Final Fantasy V originally. I wonder what my 8-year-old self would think if I told him that one day you’ll understand what the story is because it’ll be translated to English and also that you’ll be able to play it on a controller with no cords and also that you’ll be able to play it on a glass panel computer and also you’ll own a big TV of your own that isn’t restricted to your parent’s living room.
Day 3Ten minute timer started. Let’s go. Re-phrase, connect.

The Brain Audit by Sean D’Souza

Let’s start at the top: how do you create a profile? Step 1: Start with a demographic Step 2: Choose a real person from that demographic Step 3: Speak to that person and find out their list of problems (with regard to a product/service) Step 4: Choose one problem then expand it Step 5: Use a real person to get feedback.

Know your audience — that seems to be the biggest lesson from reading marketing books. It’s also a big theme in user experience. Know your users. Same for writing. If you write a book proposal and say that it’s a book for everyone, it’s going to be a book for no one.

It’s always an eye opening experience to actually talk to real people about something you’re working on. You can be familiar with that type of person and have a general sense of how they’re going to react, but the specifics that come out of a discussion with them become the pieces of gold you’re looking for. That’s how you’ll be able to differentiate yourself in their eyes.

In Westworld, fidelity comes up as a theme. The fidelity of the hosts continue to improve. From being advanced things that Imagineers make all the way to basically being humans.

There’s a limit to the fidelity of a mental model you have for one person in your audience. Speaking to a real person fitting that profile will always be valuable.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly by Matt McCarthy

Once again I marveled at all I was expected to master. Beyond the medical knowledge and procedures, beyond writing clear, informative notes and interacting with a wildly diverse hospital staff, I had to understand bioethics. I had to be familiar with court cases and legal precedents. I needed to know what to do in situations I’d never considered. The professional expectations were breathtaking.

Speaking of marketing (it’s top of mind because I just finished recording a podcast episode about The 1-Page Marketing Plan), you should be able to identify pain points. If you’re known for fixing those things, then people will come to you.

I really enjoyed The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly because it captures the feeling of being a doctor in residency. You feel like you’re in his shoes. People come to you to fix their symptoms. Early on in the book he has to pick a specialization. You don’t go to a neurosurgeon for an ear infection.

Be the person people come to for something specific.

As far as the quote above from the book — one lesson I’ve learned in my career is that soft skills become really important. You’re going to delve into other subjects to succeed. You don’t directly learn a lot of these and some things you can’t learn without being on the job. You can’t quite simulate a software development team in a classroom project.

Well, you can, but again it’s a matter of fidelity.

Sprint by Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, and Braden Kowitz

For now, don’t make decisions and don’t debate. Just capture anything that might be useful.

One of my favorite things about Sprint is the focus on the day in front of you. A design sprint is broken up into 5 days and they’re focused on different themes. Again, with The 1-Page Marketing Plan in mind, there are 3 phases. You can focus on the most relevant phase in front of you. It’s not effective to focus 90% of your effort thinking about referrals if you have zero customers.

Same with design sprints. You start out general and get more and more specific. But you don’t mix the phases up. You don’t start deciding on the best idea while you’re still generating ideas. You don’t backtrack after deciding on the idea to move forward with. Trust the process and that you picked that idea for the right reasons. Switching will create its own issues and you might just feel the need to backtrack again.

Final Fantasy V (Boss Fight Books) by Chris Kohler

Die Hard Game Fan itself was simply the publishing organ of a mail-order video game store of the same name in Tarzana, California. (Location 348)

Just want to call this out: this is one of the best video game books I’ve read. If you like JRPGs at all you’ll like this book.

I highlighted this because I had no idea the magazine originated from a video game store. It reminds me of all those ads in the back of gaming magazines with mail-in offers so that you could get like seven games for seven bucks each.

Something in The 1-Page Marketing Plan is the idea that you shouldn’t get clever with your business name. You’re not Nike. If you have a plumbing service, put the word plumbing in it.

So for naming, Die Hard Game Fan leaves pretty much no questions about their niche. I don’t think “casuals” was even a term back then.

Anyway, I don’t remember having a subscription to Die Hard Game Fan — pretty sure were we had EGM and Game Players subscriptions. (Game Players newsletters were some of my favorite things to read growing up.)

Deep Work by Cal Newport

I felt that I still existed despite not having shared documentary evidence of said existence on the Internet.”

Just want to point out that this writing exercise has been great for getting into a deep work mode. You gather the research you need in the form of these random quotes. Then you think about connections and write. It really can be an offline activity after grabbing the quotes.

Cal Newport’s next book is Digital Minimalism and you could see the seeds of it in sections of Deep Work. I’ve always been one to de-activate and re-activate various social media accounts but reading Deep Work led to being more mindful about things beyond just social media. Social news sites, for example. And pretty much everything with a feed.

Anyway, I still post food pictures once in a while and actually probably enjoy those the most of some of the things I see on social media.

Bill Burr has a joke about how we got technology right and then took it too far. He misses dumb phones. As far as social media goes, I think we sort of had it right and then took it too far.

It was probably the like button that did humanity in. It’s hard to even remember what my internet use really, really was like in any particular year. I can barely imagine browsing the internet on a BlackBerry at this point but I must’ve read hundreds of thousands of words on the thing.

Which reminds me of Red Mars — the first in a sci-fi book series about colonizing Mars. One thing I remember from it is that they figure out ways to live much longer but then you still have the same human body so they find out the limits of things like your brain.

Basically, in the story, people fill up their brain with memories and then just start forgetting large swaths of their life. (Which, of course, is one of the actual scary things about getting older.)

How to Write Short by Roy Peter Clark

The poet Peter Meinke talks about the power that comes from focus, wit, and polish. Focus is the unifying theme. Wit is the governing intelligence. Polish creates the sparkle that comes from careful word choice and revision.

This was a suggested book from Readwise but I’ve actually read this book as well. As you can tell from this post, I haven’t quite mastered the lessons in it.

Short writing is more and more important. We write a lot in short bursts. Texts, emails, tweets, Instagram descriptions.

Anyway, I need to keep some of those things in mind when I write these posts. They’re supposed to be short exercises but they’ve been going over time. I think this one took about 20 minutes instead of ten. But hey, that’s practice.

Drawing digitally when I’m not trying to read more and write more
Day 4Okay I’m trying this out again. It’s become a delight seeing these in my inbox every day. This is my daily reading and writing practice.This first book is a recent one. It’s always really fun to receive a highlight from some book I forgot I read, but it might be more useful to get highlights from books I’ve read recently so that the rest of the context of the book is still somewhat fresh.

How to Make Sense of Any Mess by Abby Covert

Las Vegas carpets are busy and colorful to disguise spills and wear and tear from foot traffic. Gamblers likely enjoy how they look because of an association with an activity that they enjoy.

This is a good book about information architecture written in plain language. Anyway I highlighted this thing about Las Vegas carpets mostly because I didn’t know about this part of casino design. I had heard about how there are no clocks and that they pump oxygen into the rooms to keep people at the tables and machines longer. But this carpet design is new to me. And very familiar.

Growing up, my parents would take us to Vegas for one of the weekends during summer vacation. I’ve read that in the 90s, there was a push to make Vegas a family destination. Every summer it seemed like there were fewer and fewer arcades. Then I got to where I was going there for bachelor parties and only a handful of casinos had anything kids might enjoy. But those colorful carpets remained. Thinking about them also makes me think of the smell of cigarettes. Anyway.

What Got You Here Won’t Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith and Mark Reiter

He not only listened, he made me feel like I was the only person in the room.

Right now I’m reading Marshall Goldsmith’s other book Mojo which has similar themes. You’re chugging along at work and you want to improve at what you’re working on every day.

I have a feeling that quote is about Bill Clinton, because that’s always what people say about Bill Clinton.

I’m going to actually check this. One sec…

Okay it’s about Bill Clinton: “This is what happens when we listen without showing respect. It’s not enough to keep our ears open; we have to demonstrate that we are totally engaged. Bill Clinton was the absolute master at this.”

Bringing this back to information architecture, it’s good to remember that communication is a two-way street. (With an infinite number of intersections.) If you want to organize information, it’s good to listen to the people who will be using that information. Figure out who your audience is, talk to some of them, be engaged, and then use that to improve whatever you’re working on.

The DC Comics Guide to Digitally Drawing Comics by Freddie E Ii Williams

Then I started digitally drawing tight breakdowns for every page, which evolved into very tight structure drawings (which I call wireframes) for my pencils.

I bought this book a little bit after getting an iPad Pro. I always go back and forth with drawing. Sometimes I want to practice and try to improve. Sometimes I go weeks without drawing at all. Right now I should just set a small goal of drawing for like ten minutes a day.

Anyway, this was a good book for learning how professional artists use digital tools to help improve their analog workflows. (And how some use digital tools entirely.) It was also an introduction into the process of working on a comic book.

In a few interviews I’ve listened to of Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about how important his journalism background has been in writing books. Writing in a news room, you learn to ship. (Tim: “Take off your beret, put down your poetry, you have a job to do.”)

Without a deadline, writing and drawing is never done. Newsrooms create deadlines. The classic monthly comic schedule creates deadlines. You come in and finish a page each day.

Thirty years later, you get to stream yourself drawing to thousands of people on Twitch.

On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition by William Zinsser

Some didn’t write anything. Some crumpled their paper. They began to look like writers. An awful silence hung over the room, broken only by the crossing out of sentences and the crumpling of paper. They began to sound like writers.

This is about a workshop that Zinsser conducted with school principals to help them improve their writing.

I’m typing this right now in an email compose window. This gives it a different feel compared to writing in a dedicated writing app. Which has a different feel compared to writing in Evernote. And all of those are more similar to each other than they are to writing with the Apple Pencil on an iPad. Which mimics but doesn’t entirely capture the feel of writing on paper.

“They began to sound like writers.” reminds me of Chuck Palahniuk’s appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast. Joe asks him about his writing process. Chuck mentions that he uses his laptop mostly on airplanes and at airport gates. Joe asks something like so you only write on planes? And Chuck says oh that’s not writing. That’s typing. I type on planes. Writing happens in notebooks where you can scratch things out and draw arrows to this and that.

Let Go by Pat Flynn

In 2011, someone else left a lengthy comment on one of my blog posts. In the comment, which must have been almost a thousand words long, he called me all sorts of names: unqualified, a liar, a con artist, and many other hateful things. I decided at first to just ignore it. But then he started leaving the same comment on dozens of other websites. Soon, friends and colleagues were emailing me, asking what was going on.

I have a story that I’ve told on the podcast before but I’m not sure I’ve written down. I spent hours and hours (and hours) working on a blog post once. Looking at the Medium stats, I can say tens of thousands of people at least opened it up in their browser.

I checked Twitter. Plenty of people had good things to say about it. Then one single person (whose ebook I had just bought) tweeted out “Boring as hell”. That was fine. Well, sort of fine. I think I could take that. What bummed me out was how many people liked his comment. Which would be fine except I’d hover over their faces to see the names and it was a bunch of other people I looked up to.

I’d like to say that I’ve learned from it and grown from the experience.

I’d like to say now I’d know to be a great stoic. “Good.” — “At least people read it” — “Some people liked it” — “Now I know what to improve” — etc. But really, if something like that happened again, I’d probably be just as bummed out.

The Myth of the Garage by Dan Heath and Chip Heath

“In purchasing a piggy, you’re basically paying $10 in hopes of protecting $22 in spare change from your own hands. Life is full of these piggy-bank situations,”

This was recommended to me by Readwise and it also happened to be $0.00 so I bought it today. Anyway, this reminds me of Vegas in the 90s again. I would roam around the upstairs loop of Circus Circus. Sometimes the trapeze artists would be doing their set. There’d be these vending machines to get balloons.

I’d always lean toward playing games for tickets or for stuffed animals. Playing the actual arcade games was more fun in the moment. Time Crisis and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 are going to be more fun than dropping a quarter in a machine hoping it pushes other quarters in a sea of quarters off the edge. (So that you get tickets in return.) But the peak of winning something was probably higher. You played to get something out of it. Pretty much always a stuffed animal. Which didn’t matter a few months later.

This reminds me of my approach to reading. I lean toward reading things that are in some way productive. They’ll save time. Help make money. Make me happier.

A (growing) part of me is starting to think that it’d be better to read more fiction, enjoy the stories, and take the lessons from fiction as they come. As Chip and Dan Heath say, stories are stickier.


This will make sense soon.
Day 5Okay I set a 15 minute timer this time and I’m writing in iA Writer instead of in a compose window. I wonder if that’ll change things. With the quotes, it already starts at 500 words. So let’s see where I can get it to.

First up, the writer that’s made me laugh out loud reading things more than any other.

Spoiled Brats by Simon Rich

But when Ben saw the crucifix in the lobby, his eyes turned black and the walls wept blood. Why was Ben behaving this way? There was only one logical explanation: attention deficit disorder.

First, go read Rich’s Sell Out (free on The New Yorker) if you haven’t yet.

Alright I opened the book to remember what the story was about. What if a baby was actually a demon but the parents went on and raised it like a normal kid. (They can’t accept that their kid is a demon so it must be something else like ADD.)

The subtext being something like, hey, there are people that are generally bad, rude adults. At some point they were kids. (Joe Rogan talks about something similar. Just the general idea that it’s weird when you really think that every single adult you know, good and bad, used to be a baby who knew nothing.)

Tools of Titans by Timothy Ferriss

My Rapid-Fire Questions If you ended up sitting next to a Nobel Prize winner or billionaire, what would you ask them? If you only had 2 to 5 minutes and they were willing to talk, how could you make the most of it? (Location 10883)

For whatever reason, I tried reading Tools of Titans really fast when I got it. I don’t read quickly but I just carved out large swaths of my free time to read it. I don’t think that was the best way to go about reading it. It’s good to grab, read a chapter or two, learn something or get inspired, then put back.

Anyway, the book is full of good questions. If I was sitting next to a Nobel Prize winner or billionaire, I’d probably ask something like…

… okay this is probably painted by last night. I went to a Drake concert. He did a bunch of songs from Scorpion.

I promise there’s a point here…

I wrote this quote on an index card a few months ago so I wonder if that’s why it came to mind now. Maybe the whole notecard for retention thing works.

Look I’m going to just go ahead and put the line here: “There’s times when I wish I was where I was. Back when I used to wish I was here.” It’s not like some crazy wordplay or anything, but it does take a few seconds to parse.

That’s along the lines of what I’d ask a Nobel Prize winner or billionaire. Nobel Prize and super rich abstract out to basically “a successful person” at different extremes. (Oh you think money doesn’t equate to success? What about helping the world?)

So yeah, I’m always curious about day-to-day life and how it actually changes when reaching milestones of success. I’m getting long winded here.

Here’s what I’d ask:
“What do you miss about being a regular person? What did you take for granted?”

Which is really saying “Hey tell me what I should be more grateful for right now not being a billionaire and not having a Nobel Prize.”

Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton

Here is the reality, at least as I see it. Even if we think we know at the outset what the product needs to be, in nearly all cases its definition changes, or is significantly -refined as we progress. This may be because of insights that we gain along the way, or because the market has changed in the interim, or both. Hence, our process must be designed to accommodate such changes as the norm, and be tailored to uncover them as early as possible, which is when learning, mistakes, and fixes are the least expensive

The more I try writing the more I see what my go-to comparisons are. I’ll compare things to design, writing, fitness, and sports (I’ll lump pro wrestling in here). Not that I excel at any of those things but they’re what I think about.

Anyway, taking this design quote and applying it to writing… you don’t know exactly what your book is going to look like. (Not that I know about writing a book. But I’m pretty sure that’s true.) With a blog post, unless it’s very long, you probably have a decent idea of what it’ll look like. But zoom out a bit and think about what the blog as a whole with all your posts looks like a year from now.

It’s fuzzier. Feel free to plan something out but know that things will change along the way.

Here’s the tool: Just get started.

That’s 15 minutes and about another 500 words but I’ll set another timer and keep going.

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt

Is that all you see? asks Vermeer. Now the girl studies the dress more intently. No, she says, it has flecks of green and brown, a bit of silver on the edge from a nearby reflection, specks of black where openness of the weave shows the garment underneath, darker yellow where the shadows of the folds of the dress fall, and so on. When the girl first sees the dress, she reports merely that it is “yellow.” Vermeer challenges the girl to see the world as he sees it: full of marvelous complexity and rich, subtle nuances. That’s the challenge we all face — to see the world that way and to continue to see that world — and ourselves — fully.

Some context: This chapter is about going beyond expertise and continuing to learn. And one of the most important aspects of learning is to be aware. Of yourself and of the environment.

I wrote a note with this highlight connecting it to another great book, Visual Intelligence (Amy E. Herman). In Visual Intelligence, Herman presents different pieces of art and you note your initial thoughts. Then she explains different details that you almost certainly missed which often have backstories to the artists themselves. All of that then gets related to the present day environment and how important it is to be aware of your environment. To really notice things fully.

I like the notion in Pragmatic Thinking and Learning that we should also notice things in ourselves fully. One of my favorite books is Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker and a core theme in it is “Know yourself”. Which I’m sure shows up in plenty of philosophies.

But it’s worth repeating: know yourself. (By asking other people.)

Okay quick story: One time I took this true colors test with one of my old teams at an old job. It’s a personality test and anyway I thought I was like a friendship-first and emotion guy (hence, Drake concert).

But then everyone else basically rated me as a robot.

Knowing that you don’t know yourself can be useful too.

The 5 A.M. Miracle by Jeff Sanders

The results of one of my podcast audience surveys revealed that most people want a life where they work hard and then play hard. Most noted that they did not want a life of mediocrity, sameness, or consistency — they wanted variability.

Variability is good. The difficult thing is that when you work hard you get satisfaction and want to double down on that. Then the only way to do that is to drop the “play hard” part. You stop playing at all. The contrast becomes working hard and working extra hard.

The result of one of my podcast audience surveys is that we need more listeners.

And now for the book that Readwise recommended to me.

Naked, Drunk, and Writing by Adair Lara

“You can’t just come out and say what you have to say. That’s what people do on airplanes, when a man plops down next to you in the aisle seat of your flight to New York, spills peanuts all over the place (back when the cheapskate airlines at least gave you peanuts), and tells you about what his boss did to him the day before. You know how your eyes glaze over when you hear a story like that? That’s because of the way he’s telling his story. You need a good way to tell your story.”

I did end up buying this book. We’ll see if I find a better way to tell stories.

I used to fly Southwest a lot so you pick your seat when you’re on the plane and all that. (I’ve since stopped but mostly because there are hardly any direct flights from New York to west coast cities.)

Anyway I used to look forward to trying to talk to whoever sat next to me on the plane. I don’t usually think living in New York has changed me as much as just the general moving and living in another city at all has changed me. (Here comes the…) but I’ve pretty much stopped talking on planes. My hunch is that it’s the built up skill of not making eye contact on subways. A plane is similarly a vehicle with a lot of people.

Alright so I bought the book but from that last paragraph you might have guessed I haven’t started reading it yet. Let’s use that as a baseline for my storytelling ability. (Hey, charts should start at zero and all that.)

Alright that’s the other 15-minute timer and another 500 words.

Okay and that’s the end of those five days of writing practice. Thanks a lot for checking this out!

Active Recall!

Written by

Trying to write more — Francis Cortez

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