Re Human Day 20

Re-inventing ourselves is the most important skill nowadays. I’m reinventing myself by improving in 15 areas at a time. This post is part of my Re Human project.

Daily Habits

Books: Today I had the idea of sharing my book notes as I’m reading them, here. I think this is cool for at least three reasons. 1. This can create the feeling in people that they’re reading the books with me (almost). 2. people reading these posts will be able to get high value from the books I’m reading, without having to spend much time. 3. Will help people decide if they want to jump in and read the whole book, look into the concepts more, or just read my book notes when I’m done with the book.

Today I finished “FLOW: living at the peak of your abilities” and it resonated so much — highly recommend it. I think the world would be incredibly better if everyone read this book. I was surprised by how spiritual the book actually is (although there was no mention of spirituality, but I just recognized a lot of spiritual concepts I’ve learned). Some concise value from the book:

You can create your own flow, in almost any activity. Create:

8 components of enjoyable flow activities:

• knowing exactly what you want to do
• knowing whether what you’re doing means you’re improving or not. Constant feedback.
• Challenges of activity match your abilities
• Feeling of focus or concentration
• Everyday frustrations disappear
• Feel like control is possible. Like you’re in control.
• Losing a sense of self-consciousness. Stopping worrying what everyone else thinks of you.
• Sense of time is transformed. Hours become minutes. Seconds seem minutes. Time adapts itself to your experience.

The rest of my notes on the book are here.

Then I listened to like 3 podcasts and I’m in the middle of a long one. They were all amazing. You can see them in my Breaker profile (in recent likes).

Fitness: Today I trained with my friend Paul in Palo Alto. I really like learning how other people that are good at things do those things, so I followed his training today. It was a “push day” — so chest, shoulders, and triceps. Learned so much from Paul. He has a great post on his blog on why physical training is a key component of a life well lived.

Writing: This post, code, and two daily thoughts. One daily thought I wrote in my train ride back from Palo Alto to SF. One is about reflecting vs mindless and the other one is basically what I wrote up there ^ of my idea for sharing my book notes as I read them. I like that my “daily thoughts” are in my Notion (my n̶o̶t̶e̶s̶ digital brain app). That way I can easily write thoughts as I live through my day.

Piano: Today in Flowkey I finished continued learning their Chords beginner course, learned the last parts of a “rock ballad” song.

Re Human Extended Activity: Saturdays is Digital Drawing & Painting and Music Production.

Digital Drawing & Painting

I thought I was going to be able to paint in my train ride from SF to Palo Alto in the morning, but there was enough movement that it didn’t make sense. So I mostly watched videos on Procreate tips and then played around with the app to get a feel for the tips I learned.

These were the useful videos:

Music Production: spent some time in Logic Pro, then some time finding sounds in Splice, then watching two videos from the Deadmau5 Masterclass on music production. I still feel like I’m very far from making stuff I like.

Meditation: 20mins in morning.

Soccer trick juggling: Focusing on fundamentals. Feeling progress on juggling. Something I internalized more today: attention is very important for improving, and once you’re very good, you can switch your attention to other things. But fundamentals go first.

Connections, takeaways and Ideas for tomorrow

Today I had a “system” idea for my weekly recaps. I’m going to think of Sundays as the beginning of the week, so the weekly recaps will be from the past Sunday to Saturday. This will allow me to include the recap in the newsletter, if I write the recap on Sunday morning or Saturday night.

Read the next post (lessons learned over the whole week). Read the previous post.

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