(you can also watch on YouTube)
This week I kept chipping away at the 1-1-1-1-1 Pact:
1 Habit (every 21 days)
10 Pages Read
100 Lifting Reps
1000 Words Written
10,000 Steps
Here's a snapshot of how it went.
🥦 1 Habit: Broccoli Every Day
From The Comfort Crisis by
:"Of utmost importance, it requires that we embrace the discomfort of hunger. We must recognize that occasionally going without food up to 24 hours is a normal and even beneficial human state. And we must also understand and adapt to the fact that much of our hunger isn’t real physiological hunger. Rather, it’s often a cheap coping mechanism to comfort us against the discomforts of modern life."
The idea was simple: eat a bag of broccoli every day for 21 days. But I learned two things by about day 2:
One pound is a lot to eat in one sitting
It’s not exactly stopping me from snacking
I don’t have a reliable place where I’m tracking this
Might need a reminder to update the habit log
Not sure if the habit will always be nutrition related, but it’s a good one to start with.
Some forms of broccoli I’ve been trying:
Sheet pan roasted – Super easy, tastes great, big serving.
Part of these microwave Kevin’s bowls – These are good enough and healthy. As long as my expectation isn’t that this will be super tasty, then I’ll take it.
Frozen and microwaved – I’m realizing this just tastes really bad and it might be just as convenient to have fresh roasted broccoli. In one case I wash a bowl. In the other I wash a sheet pan.
📚 10 Pages Reading
From Stolen Focus by Johann Hari:
"For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience—you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall."
Reading 10 pages daily has opened my eyes to the fact that I don’t really read regularly all that often anymore. I went through a bunch of audiobooks last year when I was running regularly. But I rarely sit down and read for 30 minutes or a full hour anymore. So it’s been nice to actually open up a book and read on the treadmill.
I remember trying 75 Hard and thinking that reading 10 pages daily was the easiest thing because I was always reading at least 10 pages daily. At some point, that was no longer true. I stopped reading.
I started to have a goal to turn at least one idea from the 10 pages of reading into a Short. So I keep that in mind while reading.
I'm working on a good setup for the overhead desk shot to be able to film book note shorts quickly.
I learned that I can just plug in the DJI Osmo Pocket 3 with a USB-C cable and have a webcam.
I thought this required some other software that I was too lazy to look up and go through installing or opening up every time I wanted to use it as a webcam.
But nope. Just plug it in and select Webcam and now I can use it with OBS.
I like recording with OBS to just not have to fuss with the SD cards and file transfer and organization.
It’s only removing a little bit of friction but it could be the difference between making a video or not, so I’ll take it. I think some of these things can add up in the long run.
🏋️ 100 Lifting Reps
From Arnold: Education of a Bodybuilder:
"I’ve found that, generally speaking, home gyms can have a negative effect on concentrated training. Your kitchen and living room are too close. You find yourself thinking, “Should I do another set or should I watch television?” There are too many temptations. But if you make the commitment of traveling to the gym for half an hour, you will most likely decide that you’re going to put in some work so you won’t have gone there for nothing."
Well, I got a new adjustable bench for the home gym.
It’s definitely true that there are a lot of temptations. But right now I don’t have as much time to travel to a gym, so I’m happy to have the home gym.
I'm doing the StrongLifts 5x5+ program. I was substituting some exercises but decided I better just do it as prescribed. I was missing incline bench and dips, so I ordered an adjustable bench and the dip station for the rack.
I did my 3 workouts this week. I’m tracking in a couple ways:
Strong app – I have 600+ workouts tracked so I liked the idea of keeping things going in there. I also do have the timer in there and it’s great for keeping track through the workout itself.
Spreadsheet – This is to track things week over week. You get some of these views in the Strong app but it’s nice to have a desktop view of everything. I can see what things I’ve been missing and can glance to see how weights are progressing. It’s definitely satisfying to highlight a bunch of cells and turn them green.
Similarly, when I was running last year I used the combo of Strava and a Spreadsheet. So it’s nice to have something during the workout itself and something for planning.
✍️ 1000 Words Writing
I've started diving in more with Obsidian.
A couple years ago I was pretty into Roam Research and have of course tried everything else: Notion, Evernote, Docs, Apple Notes, etc.
Here’s a quick walkthrough of my Obsidian setup:
Nothing too crazy here.
High level:
I have all my Kindle highlights sync’d through Readwise
That said, I’ve started using Chat in the Readwise web app to grab highlights for each of these things.
I use a weekly page for my daily writing. I don’t really use this for GTD or any other system where individual daily pages would work better.
For writing this newsletter:
3 vertical panels:
1 for random things to open up notes, so I’ll open up an individual book here or my weekly note
1 for the week’s outline which I use for both a video script and newsletter
1 that I have split horizontally into 5 panels with quote collections for each of the sections in the newsletter
I like this, but also it’s only week 2 of using this so we’ll see if this is how I continue doing the outline.
It’s optimized for a goal: grab 5 quotes and fill out the outline.
For a sense of how long it takes: This outline is 1200 words and took about an hour to write.
🚶 10,000 Steps
From Arnold: Education of a Bodybuilder:
"Sometimes you’re forced to jog indoors, where you just stay in one place and imitate running to get your heart going. You should do this only when you’re traveling or on winter days when it’s impossible for you to go outside."
Mark Manson had a podcast episode explaining the end of his current format of the podcast. For the past couple years he’s had an interview show. He realized that it fell into a very dangerous zone:
It’s working
He doesn’t like doing it
It’s easy to quit something that isn’t working and you don’t like
It’s easy to keep going on something that is working and you like doing
It’s when you only have 1...
The gap: you like doing it but it isn’t working, you might want to keep going until it works
Uh oh: it’s working but you don’t like doing it
People will tell you it’s crazy to quit doing it
The podcast is working for him financially and networking wise
Luckily he has the freedom to not really need either of those things
Instead he’s going to do more documentary-style things
It’s not entirely unmotivated by financial and audience factors. He thinks documentary-style videos will be where the puck is heading, so he wants to start getting good at it now.
Where does this leave me and this 1-1-1-1-1 pursuit...
These videos aren’t working (yet?), but I do like making the videos.
More important in the long run: I like the individual practices of the pact.
So I'm sort of just having some faith in the Ali Abdaal thing of:
“If you make 1 video weekly for 2 years, it’ll change your life.”
If I do the practices every day for 20 years, it’ll change my life.
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