Mental Pivot #24: Coach V, Rethinking, Podcast Discovery
A simple formula for a good day, “Think Again” by Adam Grant, and three solutions for podcast discovery.
Some days creativity flows, I’m firing on all cylinders, and the ideas come effortlessly. Other days it’s the opposite, motivation is low, focus is fleeting, and inspiration feels nonexistent. When I can’t gin up sufficient intrinsic motivation to get myself going, I sometimes turn to external sources for an added boost.
One inspirational go-to I keep tucked in my bookmarks folder is a link to a YouTube video of Jim Valvano’s 1993 speech at the ESPY Awards.
For those who weren’t alive in the 1980s, Valvano was an American college basketball coach. In 1983, Valvano (aka “Jimmy V”) led NC State to an improbable national championship over top-ranked Houston (a team featuring not one but two future hall-of-famers: Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon).
In 1992, Jimmy V was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Just weeks before succumbing to illness at the age of 47, Valvano was honored at a special awards ceremony (the ESPYs). During the ceremony, Valvano delivered a poignant speech in which he offered choice bits of wisdom in his effervescent fashion.
My favorite excerpt from this speech is Valvano’s simple formula for a good day:
When people say to me, how do you get through life or each day? It's the same thing. To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. No. 1 is laugh. You should laugh every day. No. 2 is think. You should spend some time in thought. No. 3 is you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heckuva day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special.
If you can spare a moment, watch Jim Valvano’s 1993 ESPY Award Speech. Witnessing his optimism and zest for life never fails to inspire or reinvigorate me. As an added bonus, there’s a good chance that Coach V will get you to tick off all 3 things while watching a single video.
Now onto the updates...
What’s New on the Blog:
1. Book Notes: “Think Again” by Adam Grant
Every individual possesses cognitive tools and accumulated knowledge that they regularly rely upon. But we rarely question or consider this knowledge which includes beliefs, assumptions, opinions, and prejudices. In his newest book, organizational psychologist Adam Grant (Give and Take and Originals) explores these mental shortcomings at the individual, interpersonal, and institutional levels and offers an antidote he calls “rethinking.” Rethinking, broadly speaking, is the process of doubting what you know, being curious about what you don’t know, and updating your thinking based on new evidence. It’s an important message in a time of increased polarization and intractable ideologies.
Despite Grant’s compelling premise, but I have mixed feelings about the book. On one hand, it’s hard to knock a book that preaches the importance of curiosity, open-mindedness, flexible thinking and empathy. On the other, I found myself eager to finish the book as quickly as possible; something about the presentation struck me as superficial and tedious. I file this under the category of books with interesting premises that don’t quite deliver but are nevertheless worth thinking about, i.e. I appreciated it, but didn’t enjoy as much as I had hoped.
It is possible that I didn’t read it with enough of the kind of mindset Grant advocates, so I might need to rethink my position on his book.
2. Three More Solutions for Podcast Discovery
Finding interesting new podcast content is far more difficult and fractured than it should be. No single service has solved the problem and many enthusiasts (like me) must cobble together their own bespoke discovery solutions from a host of channels like word of mouth recommendations, featured listings in podcast apps, directories, forums, and newsletters.
Here are three options to add to your arsenal for podcast discovery:
Podchaser: The IMDB of podcasts features user ratings, reviews and curated lists. This is a great reference tool.
Podz: Offers a TikTok type experience. Tell Podz what genres you enjoy and Podz gives you 15-second excerpts in rapid succession. Swipe up if you want to hear another excerpt or play an episode if your curiosity is piqued.
Syncify: Social listening. Get recommendations from individuals or see what’s trending in the general community. App isn’t publicly released, but podcast enthusiasts can signup to join the beta.
Articles & Podcasts of Note:
Best Story Wins: Morgan Housel on the power of narrative: “Great ideas explained poorly can go nowhere while old or wrong ideas told compellingly can ignite a revolution.”
Book Review: Why We’re Polarized: Solid summary of the 2020 Ezra Klein book by Scott Alexander (of Slate Star Codex). Presents the broad strokes of what led to the current political climate in the United States.
The Case Against STEM: We frequently conflate science with technology, but is this a good idea? M. Anthony Mills warns against constraining science or valuing it primarily by its technological utility (Matt Ridley offers a similar warning in How Innovation Works). Lest you misinterpret, these are pro-science arguments (i.e. science for its own sake).
I Spy (podcast): Foreign Policy Magazine’s series about the true stories of spies is awesome. Each episode features one former spy discussing a real operation. The recent episode about ATF agent Jay Dobyns infiltrating the Hells Angels is a great intro to the series.
Nir Eyal: Mastering Indistraction (podcast): Conversation with the author of Hooked and Indistractable about regaining control of our attention from technology. I think about this often; my attention is as scattered as anyone else’s as all the links in this newsletter can attest.
Paying for News: Benedict Evans discusses the problems with paying for link to newspaper websites and the potential unintended consequences regulatory subsidies—a possibility under proposed legislation in Australia (which precipitated the startling preemptory moves from Facebook to disable news for their Australian users this week).
User Engagement is Code for Addiction: I appreciate the author highlighting the “Dark Triad of Web UI Design Choices”: relative timestamps which creates immediacy, infinite scrolling which creates perpetuation, and fake internet points (e.g. likes) which promotes addiction.
Why ‘Trusting the Science’ Is Complicated: Interesting thoughts on the demarcation between science and pseudoscience and the challenges with the principle of falsification (for one: how do you know when you’ve properly falsified a theory?).
Odds & Ends:
Audiblogs: Listen to any web article in your podcast player. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. I don’t get too excited about new apps, but this one is really cool. Via a Chrome plugin or their iOS Testflight Beta, users can identify text-based articles to turn into audio files which can be played in just about any podcast player (except Spotify, Sticher, and a few others). The audio conversion is quick and the sound quality is excellent despite being computer generated. The service employs natural language processing (NLP) wizardry to make the audio sound more human than you might expect.
Aside: I’ve previously used a service called Audm which provides audio versions for popular articles. However Audm requires a monthly subscription, the narrators are boring, and the supported catalog of articles is limited. It will be interesting to see how the Audiblogs machine solution fares against Audm’s human one (unfortunately, it looks like the machine will win this one).
Mike Yingling’s Calvin and Hobbes Search Engine is a wonderful tool for running keyword searches on Bill Watterson’s beloved comic. For copyright reasons, Yingling cannot display the artwork, but search results yield strip transcripts, newspaper publication date, as well as other published collections in which they can be found.
While Yingling’s tool only gives you half the equation, the other half (the comic strip itself) can be obtained via the GoComics archive of Calvin and Hobbes. Pretty much any published comic is available given the well-designed urls which encode the publication date as part of the string:
Example: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/2021/02/19 (where the end of the url represents year, month, and day respectively)
Should you desire the Calvin and Hobbes comic originally published on February 2, 1987, just change the url to: https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1987/02/02
GoComics is owned by the syndicate that publishes pretty much all the well-known newspaper comics and political cartoons, so you can dig into the archives of many other classics like Peanuts, Doonesbury and more.
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