Active Recall!

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Program hopping… into CrossFit (and realizing I’ve been qualified age-wise for “Masters” divisions for a few years now)

In the first round of a WOD like “Kelly” (a 400-meter sprint, 30 jumps onto a 24-inch box, then 30 wall balls, five rounds), you think, “Why am I doing this? I could be watching TV on a treadmill.” Your rationalizing brain still works well enough to have thoughts like this. By round four, your ability to formulate alternative scenarios is completely gone.

— “Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness” by J.C. Herz

A few weeks ago a buddy told me he’s been working out every day for a couple months. For part of that he’s been using ClassPass to try out different classes. I did a ClassPass trial so I could join him for a few classes. A Barry’s class ripped through most of the trial credits, but I still had some left so I thought I’d try out CrossFit.

(Also the coaches were super welcoming even though sometimes I do overthink if they’d rather not have ClassPass people coming in or if it’s really not meant to be used more than a couple times and the expectation is that I join for real etc. continual overthinking etc.)

First workout was:

  • 2-mile run
  • 100 cleans

Or it might’ve been 50 cleans (100 total because it was a partner workout)

The weight doesn’t matter other than that it was very light for internet standards. But definitely enough for me to be toast by the end. I mean the run left me toast already because I’m not in shape.

(I’ve read enough self-development books that I know I should be saying “I’m not in shape… yet!” but anyway yeah I’m not in shape.)

I looked deep in my email to see how my CrossFit experience went in the past. Looks like I did it for 3 months in 2013 in New York and then for 2 months in 2016, also in New York. And I did a few classes in 2011 in San Diego.

I usually ended up tweaking something and stopping. So check back in a few weeks to see if I’ve suffered the same fate. Hope not! The main way I’m trying to avoid that is keeping the frequency pretty low initially.

This time I’m aiming to go 1-2 times a week (instead of 3-4 times a week I had in mind in the past) for these first 6 weeks. There’s a trip to Hawaii and a small chance at some point I’ll be shirtless in front of family. So it’d be nice to be a few pounds down.

And I know yadda yadda yadda, it happens in the kitchen and all that and workout wise 2 hard workouts will not do the trick. But it’s fun, there’s a little bit of chit chat, and I sometimes get the mere-mortal non-olympic version of the feeling described in the quote that opens the book above (which is a history of CrossFit that I’m enjoying quite a bit.)

At the peak of tremendous and victorious effort, while the blood is pounding in your head, all suddenly becomes quiet within you. Everything seems clearer and whiter than ever before, as if great spotlights had been turned on. At that moment, you have the conviction that you contain all the power in the world, that you are capable of everything, that you have wings. There is no more precious moment in life than this, the white moment, and you will work very hard for years just to taste it again. —YURI VLASOV, RUSSIAN OLYMPIC WEIGHTLIFTER, THE FIRST MAN TO CLEAN AND JERK 200 KG

The white moment is why doing 100 cleans is more interesting than a few sets on the functional trainer.

“Tiny Experiments”: The 1-1-1-1-1 pact

Microwaving another bag of broccoli

That was the 1 habit I wanted to work on.

The rest of the 1-1-1-1-1 pact

  • 1 habit
  • 10 pages
  • 100 reps
  • 1000 words
  • 10000 steps
    Which adds up to 11,111 and maps to
  • Habit building
  • Reading
  • Weightlifting
  • Writing
  • and Walking
    Initially I’m aiming for 500 days but I want to do these daily for the rest of my life. Which means the intensity is lower than other challenges you might come across. Which are great, which I’ve definitely tried and strayed off of.

The PACT idea is from Tiny Experiments. You decide “I will ACTION for DURATION”

It stands for

  • Purposeful: it’s about the daily behaviors
  • Actionable: I know these are doable
  • Continuous: I’m going for daily for… hopefully decades
  • Trackable

I already do most of these on various days but now I’m trying to be deliberate about getting all of those in every day.

So what’s with the broccoli?

1. One habit every 21 days?

This is probably Video-idea Driven Development.

I’ve long wanted to do some kind 10k, 1000, 100, 10 thing but could never figure out how to round out the “1”

  • 1 minute meditating?
  • 1 gratitude?
  • 1 video posted?
    But last week I realized 1 could be a flexible thing I could use to represent an experiment to try. The 1 also reminds me of the BJ Fogg thing of “Floss 1 tooth”:

“Think of it this way: You can keep many tiny plants alive by giving them a few drops of water a day. It’s the same with habits. There are still days when my motivation is unusually low for flossing. On those days, I floss only one tooth.”

I want to document this whole thing through vlogs so, yes, I did think this might be a way to make the videos a littttle less repetitive.

I’ll be able to align the “1” to some shorter-term goal I have. Right now? Lose some weight. It starts in the kitchen, etc. so I want to eat a bag of broccoli every day.

Why this goal? First, it’s not an all-day goal. All-day goals become hard.

  • Tracking food every day takes a lot of effort initially and I always fall off.
  • Avoiding snacking is another all-day thing
  • Avoiding anything as a whole is an all-day thing
    So with these habits I’ll aim to make them things I add to the day and can very clearly say “I’m done”

With the broccoli I can cook it, eat it, say “I’m done”, then feel slight discomfort for 2 hours because I should probably split it into 2 meals.

2. We don’t have walrus meat so we need to add hard things (10 pages)

Earlier this year I read The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides. It’s about Captain James Cook. It was an extremely hard life with not so great food on the ships:

Midshipman George Gilbert had stronger words for walrus flesh. He described the elaborate procedure the men improvised to make the “disgustful” meat palatable. “We let it hang up for one day that the blood might drain from it,” Gilbert wrote. “After that, we towed it overboard for twelve hours, then boiled it for four hours, and the next day cut it into steaks and fried it. And even then it was too rank both in smell and taste to make use of except with plenty of pepper.”

But Captain Cook loved it because of the goal: make maps of the world

He was finally doing what he loved and knew best: serious cartographic fieldwork, on a big scale, in an unfamiliar place. There wasn’t time for laying down much precision—the minute details would have to be filled in by later explorers—but the general idea of Alaska, its outline, was coming into focus.

Anyway, it was a reminder that life can be kind of easy compared to centuries ago. We seek out these hard things because we don’t have to hunt for food anymore. Shaan Puri had a great phrase for this sort of content: “toughness influencers”

So anyway. Speaking of books, that’s what the 10 represents: 10 pages of reading every day.

I want a daily practice for building back my ability to focus and concentrate. I know I’ve read consistently in the past. I can do it again. So I’m aiming to read 10 pages a day. A 300 page book every month.

3. “Wake up at 5am and work out”: James Altucher & Sahil Bloom (100 reps)

It is why the first thing I say, whenever a young person comes to me looking for life advice, they’re feeling lost is wake up at 5am and go work out for 30 straight days.

That’s Sahil Bloom, author of The 5 Types of Wealth, on the James Altucher podcast.

I’ve worked out regularly for more than a decade. But you wouldn’t be able to tell!

I’ve spun my tires for too long. As mentioned I want to lose some weight and I’ve bought into weightlifting being an important part of that.

I did sort of shoehorn it into the “100” here because I wanted weights to be a part of this. It sort of works:

  • 100 kettlebell swings is 100 reps
  • 5×5 w/ warmup sets is around 100 reps
  • 100 burpees in a hotel room
    100 reps is flexible.

I am not. So maybe I need a 100-rep mobility routine.

4. Amplify patterns (1000 words)

The 1000 is for 1000 words and it’s a writing habit. Good things seem to happen creatively during periods where I’m writing regularly.

From, Tiny Habits, Anne-Laure Le Cunff talks about amplifying existing activities:

Finally, for activities that are already part of your life but which you wish to engage in more regularly, a three-month pact helps reinforce and amplify patterns so you can collect better quality data to guide your journey. Incidentally, three months is roughly the length of the #100DaysofCode challenge and my own challenge of writing 100 articles in 100 workdays at Ness Labs.

She amplified things with 100 articles in 100 work days.

I already write daily in private. These are just journal entries or notes on my info diet. I don’t know if journal is the right word either. Anyway I write in Obsidian or Google Docs or Evernote or whatever app I’m using at the time is. Many days are already 1000+ words.

I want to amplify it by measuring it and steering the writing more to writing I’ll publish. Scripts for these videos or for Shorts or for blog posts.

Daily writing is great in so many ways so I want to keep it up.

5. Distract the distraction with another distraction (10,000 steps)

10,000 is for steps. You’ve probably heard of walking 10,000 steps as a goal already. You might have paced around the room trying to get 100 more steps before trying to do this sort of thing.

Walking is good for mind and body so I want to have that as a habit. I also can’t do 10,000 reps weightlifting or read 10,000 pages in a day. I might be able to blab into a microphone all day to write 10,000 useless words.

One thing I really want to use walking for is to relieve stress.

In The Comfort Crisis, Michael Easter writes about Dr. Trevor Kashey suggesting he replace food as a reward with light exercise.

He recommended that I distract the discomfort of reward hunger with another form of discomfort: light exercise. “Find some ‘calorie negative’ ways of dealing with stress,” he said. “Walking is my number one. It relieves more stress and is health promoting. It leads you to burn calories rather than onboard them. And it removes you from the situation and adds time for reflection, where you can realize that you weren’t really hungry.”

Walking is the greatest thing to pair other things with.

I have a treadmill desk set up. If I use it and just brain rot with the laptop, I still don’t feel as bad as I would have if I was melted on the couch doing the same.

But usually I do find myself actually reading and writing when I’m on the treadmill. I can type totally fine.

10,000 steps is also a nudge to get outdoors.

All 5 of the things in this 1-10-100-1000-10000 plan are daily nudges toward something broader in the long term. I’ll do another video on that later. Like, subscribe, but most important: get your reading/writing/walking/lifting in!

Thanks for checking this out.

“The 5 Types of Wealth” by Sahil Bloom: Book Notes

You’re already wealthy.
At least in some of the ways that Sahil Bloom explains in “The 5 Types of Wealth.”
Sahil left a life in finance for life as a writer. He built an audience through Twitter threads and expanded from there, eventually publishing his book.

T-shape can be good for a skillset, but it might not be great for the different types of wealth. Finance provided him a T-shaped life where he was making a lot of money but with sacrifices in other types of wealth.

What are they? Let’s take a look.

1. TIME WEALTH

“Everything I do is for the 17-year old version of myself” — Virgil Abloh

Good news: You’re a billionaire.
A TIME billionaire.
You have at least a billion seconds left in your life. It’s actually something many actual billionaires might not be able to say. Warren Buffet would probably trade some of his money to guarantee more time.

To check if you’re spending your day to day, think about your 10-year-old self and 80-year-old self.

My 10-year-old self might wonder why I stopped playing video games. Maybe it’s something that brought me joy that I could revisit.

My 17-year-old self would be happy to know I’m still making things on the internet.

I imagine my 80-year-old self would happily pay $1000 to take Booster on a walk again.
It makes me feel grateful every time I can take her on a walk.

2. PHYSICAL WEALTH

Of all things, a fit body is one of the ones that money can’t buy.
It certainly helps to afford healthy whole food, access to fitness equipment, and coaching. But you can get in shape without a ton of money.

You also can’t compress this.
And there’s only negative outlier events here. You strength won’t increase ten-fold overnight after some period of consistency.

BUT you can definitely injure yourself and set yourself back weeks or months.

Of all things, a fit body is one of the ones that money can’t buy.
It certainly helps to afford healthy whole food, access to fitness equipment, and coaching.
But you can get in shape without a ton of money.

The bare minimum workout for the day for me?
A walk with Booster.

3. MENTAL

Billionaires can go to space.
And it might be the only place they can go for the other kind of space: mental space.

Often they have multiple businesses.
Or a very large single business that may as well be multiple businesses.
Basically: something’s probably on fire.

Don’t have the same issue but still want a little more mental space?
The biggest bang for your buck might be re-thinking your phone.
It’s a solid slab hammering away at your brain all day.
Just when you think you’ve put it away, you realize it’s liquid metal that can ooze into the nooks and crannies of your attention.

There are plenty of methods to try for reducing screen time.
I like a combination of:
(1) The foyer method that Cal Newport talks about: charging your phone in a different room while at home
and
(2) Using the grayscale filter to make the phone less interesting.

When in doubt: walk with Booster.

4. SOCIAL

Jason McCarthy drove to nearly every state in the early days of GORUCK.
He had a couple thousand GR1s and couldn’t sell any.
But he had his Labrador with him to cheer him up.

He describes that as the minimal community: a human and a dog.

Of course, you’ll probably want some other humans around too.
As Sahil writes:

“You may need food, water, and shelter to survive, but it is human connection that allows you to thrive.”

One action:
Find a recurring activity that you and a friend would do alone anyway and do it together.
Group workouts are a common example.

When in doubt, I can always walk Booster.
Sometimes with a friend!

5. FINANCIAL

Money isn’t everything but not having it is.

One tip that stuck out for me:
Don’t splurge on everything and don’t cheap out on everything.

This doesn’t also mean to be in the middle on everything.
Think more like a barbell.
Splurge on the things you really love in life.
Be frugal with things you don’t care about.

My dumb examples:
I’ll splurge on nice cuts of steak because I enjoy cooking and eating steak.
But I also give myself haircuts because I’m not super particular about my hair and like the time savings.
For many many things, I’ll just buy whatever the “good enough” result is on Amazon.

When in doubt…
Well okay, walking Booster doesn’t do much for financial wealth.
But it’s a nice reminder that money isn’t everything.

WRITING STASH

Warren Buffet’s money got long because he got in the game when he was 10 and stayed in the game the entire time.

How?
Of course, the money is nice.
But he also just enjoyed the process itself.

“I also want to assure you that I have never felt better.
I love running Berkshire, and if enjoying life promotes longevity, Methuselah’s record is in jeopardy.”

“Tiny Experiments” book note: My PACT (10000 steps, 1000 words, 100 reps, 10 pages, and 1 habit)

10,000 steps, 1000 words, 100 reps, 10 pages, and one… something. This is a list of daily things that I’d feel good about if I repeated it for years. Walking, writing weights, and reading. It’s the one that I’m trying to think through and come up with for a pact. An idea from Tiny Experiments that stands for Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable. I might just use the “1” for a 30 day PACT each month to experiment with a new habit and practice breaking it down into something very small. Like I will meditate for one minute for 30 days. I will post one short for 30 days. Or I will share one book note for 30 days trying to figure it out.

“Tiny Experiments” book note: How to stop procrastinating

The section I read today was about procrastination and the issue can be a head problem, a heart problem, or a hand problem. If you think that the task is not important, then that can be a head problem, and what you need to do is look at your strategy and then either reinforce that the task you’re working on is important or pick a different task that goes more toward your overall vision. If it is a task that feels like it’s not exciting, that can be described as a heart thing, and in that case, you want to find ways to make the task more enjoyable to do. You can pair it with something, work with someone else, even just remind yourself of the importance of it towards the overall vision. And then the last one is if you find that the task is just too hard, that’s where it’s a hand problem. You need to find a way to improve, just come back to it and focus more on leveling up in that skill.

Info Diet: 10/6/2024

I heard something somewhere about how facts can be the best cure for writer’s block. If you get stuck on something, back up and start writing facts down.

Similarly, I think reviewing my content diet and sharing some of it each week could be a good way to (1) get past writer’s block and (2) create a base to generate ideas for the upcoming week. It seems like a sustainable thing and something I can time box.

I need to accept that this list won’t be comprehensive. If I don’t share a link to everything I found interesting that week, that’s okay! Alright I better just get to this list.

Books I’m currently reading

  • “I am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes: Great so far, but also I’m only like 50 pages in of 600-ish. A friend recommended it to me after I told him I started reading “The Terminal List” series. This year I’ve read a lot more fiction than usual—Jack Carr and Don Winslow making up a bunch of it. And my only wish is that I had been reading way more fiction in the past.
  • “The Jaws Log” by Carl Gottlieb: I love these books. Production diaries? I think there are a few different terms. Sometimes they’re director memoirs. Or some memoirs are more about the things the person worked on rather than their personal goings-on. Anyway, the main takeaway so far is that filming a shark and having an animatronic shark were pretty new so that was a huge part of the puzzle when making the movie. And the genius of not showing the shark through most of the movie was driven by constraint of how hard it would have been to show the shark throughout the movie.
  • “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” by Ed Zwick: I started this and skipped and read the chapter on “The Last Samurai” because it’s one of my favorite movies. But I’m back to where I was and will read the entire book. What I learned: if Tom Cruise says yes to your movie, you now have an unlimited budget. Need to do a research trip in Japan? Sure. Need to house and transport 100s of extras for the battle scene in New Zealand? No problem.

Alright that’s it for now

I had a shorter time to write today. I want to time box this to an hour but today I had 20 minutes. And I’ll accept that as god enough for now.