While looking for an e-book to read on the train commute home, I found the book Engineering the Alpha. I bought it a few months ago after I heard Andrew Warner of Mixergy interview with author John Romaniello.

I’ve had weight issues for my whole life, and I’ve never found a fitness routine that I could stick with long term. I know about nutrition and exercise but I’ve never stuck with them. Aside from thinking about my long term health, my energy levels, and feelings of self-confidence, I found a spreadsheet where I tracked my weight 3 years ago, and I was at exactly the same dissatisfying level then. Lots of time where I patted myself on the back for trying real hard, giving an honest effort, blah blah blah, and I made exactly 0 progress in three years. Engineering the Alpha presented a compelling new motivation to try again.

The Book

The book is divided into three parts: the psychological foundation for changing your life, a scientific explanation for the diet and exercise program, and the program itself. The first part uses the Hero’s Journey to explain the phases you go through, from being a normal person to being the hero of your own life. It’s both inspring and rational.

The scientific explanation is very thorough. It focuses on the importance of changing levels of different hormones and how that improves your strength, energy, alertness, etc. The different parts of the program increase or decrease specific hormones to achieve the desired effect. I was a tiny bit skeptical at first because there were no footnotes or references, but in another review of the book, the author explained that the references were cut for space. But let’s be honest, I either believed the authors or not; I wasn’t going to read the research papers.

The diet and exercise section are very detailed, broken to four different programs for one month each. Every other review of the book I read started with “So I made a Google spreadsheet…”, and I did too. It’s tedious and helped me see a lot of the value that a personal trainer provides. I list some of the time, money, and planning I spent to comply with the program.

The basic nutrition program is that first, sugar and carbs are bad. You’re given a formula for calculating how many grams of protein, carbs, and fat you should eat per day (your macronutrients) and calories from each, based on your weight and body fat percentage. Second, spans of time where you are not eating are good for your body. This method, called intermittent fasting, means that you only eat during an eight hour window each day. He recommends noon to 8pm, but you can shift it to whatever works for you.

The exercise program varies from month to month. I don’t remember the details of the following months, but the first month (Prime) is four different workouts, done in a different order each week. Each is two or more circuits of 3-5 exercises that complement each other. They’re hard workouts, no doubt about that, but you can survive them and feel stronger afterwards.

Why Did I Follow It

I’ve complied about 80% with the workouts and diet, which is way more effort. I also spent a bunch of money and time when I could use more of both of those. What motivated me to put in the effort? In short, the authors make a very convincing argument for getting outsized results from following a specific program. They claim that changing your hormones lets you compete on a different level; your body becomes your ally instead of your enemy.

If what they claim is true, then their program is the key to succeeding where I’ve failed before. Given my lack of success with my health throughout my adult life, acting on a convincing argument is not the worst thing I could do. I was at a time when I felt the need to try again, and this gave me enough hope of success, enough to make a serious, concerted effort to test the program.

So far, through one month, it has been a great experience. Lots of observations and thoughts below, but the short answer is that I’ve lost 9lbs, I feel stronger and more confident, and I have hours more energy a day. We’ll see what happens over the next three months and beyond, but I have accepted the call and I’m on my way to becoming my own Alpha.

Thank you John and Adam!

Thoughts on Month 1: Prime

Nutrition

• You have to eat some dang tasty food to get enough protein and fat to hit the macronutrient goals
• When I hit the macronutrient goals, I’m not hungry and I have no problem resisting other foods
• When I hurt my muscle, I decided to try a cheat day, and the sugar crash from donuts, milk, birthday cake, bread, and pizza dropped me like a Vulcan Neck Pinch
• I’ve eaten basically the same 5 meals for the last 4 weeks. The monotony has not gotten to me, because a) the meals are really good, and b) they greatly reduce craving and increase satiety
• Typical meal: 8oz chicken (or other meat), 2 oz shredded cheese, 2 oz salsa, 5 strips of bacon, 3-4 oz vegetables, 1oz butter
• Fasting breakfast is not that hard if you ate your protein and fat the previous day

Exercise

• The workouts are hard but well designed. I workout more of my body with less rest than I did on sports teams as a teenager
• The workouts are long – 45-60 minutes. I’ve had to shorten them because it takes too long during the work day once I add in walking to/from gym and showering
• To shorten, I’d recommend cutting # of reps of each circuit rather than cutting out whole exercises
• It’s old-school – mostly dumbbells, bars and plates, and body weight. The only machine I’ve used is a lat pulldown because I can’t do pull-ups yet
• After workouts, I feel like I played sports, not lifted weights
• Workouts focused on core, legs, lower back, etc. When I lifted as a teenager, it was all biceps/chest/shoulders
• I took two workouts off because of a pain in a shoulder muscle.Not working out made nutrition compliance harder

Planning, Cost & Time

• I bought a fancy electronic scale to measure and weigh food. This has been invaluable.
• It took me hours to come up with a few days worth of meals that hit the macronutrient targets. I tried the resources recommended in the book and really, really didn’t like them, so much that I’m not going to look up their names or mention them. I found the meal planner in the paid version of Daily Burn Tracker to be much better
• I use the GAIN Fitness app. It’s free but I spent about $24 on their “packs” that add extra exercises to complete the workouts outlined in EtA. It’s worth it because it a) is very easy to use quickly in the gym to update rep count, weights, b) it’s a great way to keep pace for circuits, rest, timed exercise (planks!), and progress in different exercises across workouts, c) has visual and text representations of the exercises in the app.
• The cost of the book, scale, workout packs, etc was about $100. I’ve spent more on groceries but far less on restaurants because it’s hard to get exact macronutrient numbers without planning beforehand
• My gym membership is $69/mo. There were cheaper gyms (including the one in my apartment complex) but I paid more for the one close to where I am at the time of day I wanted to work out
• The biggest cost by far is the time I’m spending at the gym and cooking and measuring food – probably 8 hours a week (more laundry time too). This huge (comparative) investment made spending on the scale app a no-brainer
• I spent about 4 hours setting up the workouts in GAIN Fitness, including finding the same exercise but with different names, finding reasonable substitute exercises where there isn’t a match, and copying the text and images from the book so I remember what they are and how to do them when the app prompts me to do the substitute. I expect to have to spend a similar amount of time for each of the 3 parts of the program left.
• For timed exercises, make the rest for the previous exercise equal to the rest + the time for the next exercise
• Right now you can only edit workouts in the GAIN Fitness app, not on their website

Results

• I lost 9.5 lbs the first week, 1.5 the 2nd week, gained 3 the 3rd week, and ended up down 9 lbs for the month
• Until I crashed on cheat day, I hadn’t realized how much extra energy I’ve had every day since I started the program
• The weight I used for exercises increased by 50-80%, although I started from pretty low weights since I haven’t lifted weights in years
• I’m walking straighter and with better posture – I feel about an inch taller
• My energy is so much more and steadier throughout the day. Before I would crash in the afternoon and be useless by 10:30pm. It was the crash in the afternoon that was part of my plan – I wasn’t getting anything done at work during that time so I thought I’d go to the gym instead
• I haven’t done any measurements (inches or body fat %), but clothes that barely fit a month ago are comfortable now, and clothes that were comfortable a month ago are pretty loose
• My arms and legs actually feel muscular now, and if you dig your fingers down far enough, you can feel my abs

Full disclosure: David Lang (and OpenROV) was one of the first friends I made after moving to the Bay Area last year. This review is completely, hopelessly biased.

I supported David’s Kickstarter to write this book, I’ve read it on the web in pre-release, I’m getting the ebook from the Kickstarter, and I’m buying a physical copy because this book is that important. This is the kind of book that you can’t wait to recommend to someone when you find out they’re interested in the subject.

As the Maker movement grows around the world, more and more people are becoming inspired to create things. Anyone at any level of skill can learn from this book. David has been in the center of many different branches of the Maker movement and reports on them all – hackerspaces, electronics, Arduino, learning from scratch, sharing, finding ideas, working with others, community, writing, promotion, Kickstarter, Maker Faire, licensing, starting companies, etc.

But this book is not just for Makers. It is an outstanding guide for building your own skills and presence in ANY creative field. The pattern, told through a Maker lens, is:

1. Find something you’re interested in and want to learn
2. Find people doing that thing
3. Ask them what they’re working on and what they recommend learning
4. Do some project involving the thing you want to learn
5. Share your results (good or bad) and solicit feedback
6. Based on experiences and feedback, return to step 1 and repeat forever

It’s also well written and delightful to read because of David’s writing skill and the breadth of his Maker experiences.

Conclusion: This book will grow to be a cherished and work fixture on the shelf of anyone who loves learning and making. There’s no substitute for doing, but this book will guide your doing in the right direction. Whether you’re a pro or completely new, learning for fun or inventing a new career, making your first prototype or turning a project into a business, David will give you confidence and clarity as you move forward. Don’t let the title fool you, you’re never done becoming a Maker.

PS I’ve posted a bunch of my favorite snippets of the book to Twitter at #zerotomaker.

I just finished reading the book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution by Chris Anderson.

tl;dr version: It’s a well written, entertaining read, it covers some exciting possibilities, but while it describes some society-wide changes, I think those will take 15-20 years. Most of the benefit in the short term will be to individuals and companies who enjoy making things.

Long version:

[Read more…]

Every few months I get in the mood for intense learning and saw-sharpening. Inspired in part by Cal Newport’s Textbook Technique, I’m writing and summarizing things I learn to make them easy to reference later.

I decided to start by getting to know the Chrome Developer Tools better. I always like to find a broad overview when I study something, and I found a great video by Ben Orenstein of Thoughtbot. It’s a 22 minute video that goes over all the major features and common usage patterns of the Chrome developer tools. It’s $15 but Ben was kind enough to let me watch it for free in exchange for a review.

As far as tutorial videos go, this is exactly the style I prefer. He started with a summary of what he would cover, kept the sections to no longer than a few minutes, and each section includes a description and an example. He covered all the basic usage, and threw in some cool advance tricks too. And for things he mentions but doesn’t go into depth about, he shows where to find more documentation.

I’ll share the three favorite new things I learned. First, clicking on a color in the right-hand CSS pane of the Elements tab gives you a color picker – no more RGB hunting! Second, the right hand pane of the Elements tab includes an Event Listeners section, so you can see which Javascript events an element responds to. Matching elements to Javascript code is one pain-in-the-rear problem that I’ll be happy to avoid. And third, the Page Speed add-on gives you a score, prioritized recommendations, and links to documentation for all the parts of your page that affect speed.

At $15 for a 22 minute video, it’s more expensive per minute than other programming screencasts like WatchMeCode.net, Peepcode, Destroy All Software, and more, but it’s tight, broad, and well done, making it still a great value. Frankly, I think high quality screencasts are waaaaaay underpriced and this is a step in the right direction. If producers could sell a 1hr screencast for $50 instead of $12, there would be more competition and more, better material. So I support Ben’s price.

I’d especially recommend it if you’re new to web programming or to Chrome – more experienced developers will already know a lot of the material. It also has me interested in the other screencasts that ThoughtBot has released – maybe tmux is next. I use screen all day, every day but people are always saying how tmux is better.

Thanks Ben and please, more Thoughtbot training videos!

More links on Chrome Developer Tools:

• Modern Web Development – Part 1 – The Webkit Inspector
• Things I Didn’t Know About the Webkit Inspector
• Hacker News discussion on the above article

 

I’ve been putting off an item on my TODO list for years. Years! I had an insight about a Laws of Physics style Definition of Business that would help technical types understand that building a great product isn’t enough, and that they also need to engineer their marketing and sales. I never found the right way to phrase it, but it was something like this:

“Business is when a customer is convinced that you can solve their problem for less cost than the pain of the problem, and you can do so profitably.”

Even though it’s not perfect, it stuck with me because it was a sentence you could mine for insights:

• Building a product is not enough, customers have to know the solution exists
• Customers being aware of you isn’t enough, they have to be convinced of your claims
• Solving a customer’s problem is not enough, you have to do it a profit that lets you justify continuing to work
• and more.

To anyone experienced in business, all of these are “duh” insights. To a young, inexperienced, myopic nerd turned slightly outgoing engineer, they were blindingly eye-opening.

I no longer need to to write that blog post, because Michael Ellsberg’s book The Education of Millionaires covers these topics oh so much better than I would have.

[Read more…]

[EDIT: I’m a dork – there’s already a transcript on Michael’s Forbes blog: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3]

It’s no secret that I have a man-crush on Michael Ellsberg’s writing, and being a modern writer, he has a book, a website, a column in Forbes, and some videos of talks he has given. One of the talks he calls out is his counsel to young geniuses from the Thiel Fellowship Retreat. As expected, I loved it and took time-stamped notes so that others can benefit as well.

One note: the video is a little shaky and the lighting goes in and out. Don’t let that get in your way! The conditions were not ideal for producing a video: they’re in a room with bright windows, and Michael, the Thiel Fellows, and the cameramen all move around so it takes time for the focus and exposure to catch up. THE CONTENT IS STILL GOLDEN!

[I tried to embed the video but WordPress defeated me]

Michael Ellsberg at the Thiel Fellowship Retreat from Michael Ellsberg on Vimeo.

00:00 Explode the myth that you need to go to college to get an education
00:20 People hate Peter Thiel because he suggests that smart young people should not go to college
01:50 Education is hanging around smarter, wiser people and learning from them
02:00 College is one way to do this because there are brilliant people there, but it’s often inefficient because many professors haven’t accomplished anything in the real world
05:00 At college, some amount of learning and mentorship is given to you on a silver platter, so you don’t learn how to find them in the real world
05:40 The mentors you want in the real world don’t have office hours or published contact info
06:20 How do you find mentors?

07:10 The best thing you can do to recruit mentors is to GIVE to them
08:40 What do you have to give

08:50 FIRST THING TO GIVE: Advice. How can you give great people advice? You know things that people you want to meet want to know about
10:25 MYTH: Accomplished people have nothing left to learn; REALITY: You have valuable knowledge and accomplished people learn a lot
11:00 Ellsberg’s experience with copywriting
11:45 Entrepreneurs know and need to learn lots of areas of expertise
12:20 Youth is a valuable area of expertise that people pay consultants millions to know
13:30 Technical skills should never be underestimated
14:15 Beginning of interactive portion discussing how to connect to potential mentors
15:35 Start with chit-chat, move to inquiry about what they’re working on and ways you can add value, then offer
16:10 Role-play of how to connect with someone at a networking event – connect by giving. Ellsberg plays the role of seeker
20:55 Steer the conversation to areas where you can add value, then offer it
21:10 Givers gain, givers get
22:30 When you help someone get closer to their goals, they’re more willing to help you
23:10 Proactively look for ways to add value – people rarely admit or profess their weaknesses. That’s why you steer to ways you can help
23:50 “All the world loves a giver, all the world hates a taker”

24:55 SECOND THING TO GIVE: Connections
25:55 Giving a connection takes a couple minutes but can change someone’s entire business – it’s a highly leveraged activity
26:25 Key: it has to give value to both parties being connected
29:30 You can’t give with strings attached – people can tell. Trust that goodness will come back to you. Don’t be a used car salesman
30:40 Connections don’t need to be business only – they can be social, romantic, etc
31:50 Role play on making a connection
34:40 Connections are a network game – the rich get richer, so the sooner you grow your network the larger and more valuable it will be
35:40 Networking had a bad rap because most people do it poorly, as takers
36:25 Focus on giving. It’s not totally selfless because you’re choosing to give to powerful, valuable people, but in that context, give liberally
36:50 Measuring time taken – half of Ellsberg’s time was spent networking. One connection can completely transform your business and your life, so the time is highly leveraged
37:55 Put yourself in the right environment – i.e. business conferences like the Summit Series – and the returns can be tremendous
39:00 Social Networking – the non-useful ways are just entertainment. FB/Twitter/RSS people that you want to connect with – that is valuable and worthwhile
40:20 When your business grows, other people will be doing work for you, and your role will be the rainmaker, so there’s never too much networking
41:20 The best contacts/clients/investors/partners come through referrals

42:35 THIRD THING TO GIVE: Willingness to bust ass putting their advice into practice
43:00 Successful people want to leave a legacy, want to see more people use what they learned
44:40 The wrong way is to leach off of successful peoples’ knowledge and effort
45:05 Right way: do your homework, Google them, read news about them, read their Twitter feed, find connections, read their book, etc
46:00 When you contact them, have a SPECIFIC reason. NEVER say “I want to pick your brain” And it should be a question that they are uniquely positioned to answer. Their effort to answer is multiplied by your willingness to put it into action
47:40 Old models of education are crumbling, 22% of people with BA’s under 25 are unemployed, another 25% are doing jobs that don’t require a BA
49:30 These tools will help you get the teachers and mentors that will give you the education that will give you the success you want

BONUS ELLSBERG!

Michael also gave a great interview on Mixergy. It’s worth reading or listening to the whole thing, but he gave two calls to action for people that want to improve their direct response copywriting skills.

1) Create a separate email address and sign up for copywriting newsletters(alternate: Create a sub address in gmail and create a filter for it)

• Eben Pagan: has a $30 million a year info marketing business, absolute master copywriter
• Dan Kennedy: master copy-writer, extreme hard sell
• Matt Furey
• Marie Forleo: brings in a more feminine touch to the art of copywriting and does it totally different style
• Jonathan Fields: much more of a soft sell, a master at very sweet, authentic, like you would, there\’s just no sleaze with him at all

Get on all these lists. It\’s free and read what they send you. These people are masters and you can just read their e-mails and see how they do copywriting.

2) Read these books:

• Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples ~$9 A legend in advertising for more than 60 years, John Caples’s classic work has been updated to retain all of the candid analysis and invaluable award-winning ideas from the original while bringing it up to date on the many changes in the field.
• Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins ~$7.50 or $1.99 on Kindle – Claude Hopkins expresses powerful, statistically tested truths about “salesmanship in print” which remain relevant through the decades and across all media – including today’s internet marketing.
• On Advertising by David Ogilvy ~$17 – “Advertising is salesmanship.”
• Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz – $lots (expensive because out of print) – “The person who should get this book is the person who would like to create a million-dollar business with an idea, a product, or a division of an existing business. There is simply no other resource that will show you how to do that with marketing.”

Expensive workshops are just people regurgitating the material from these great old books.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Michael Ellsberg for being inspring at a time I needed it.

I just read the first issue of a new magazine called Distance. In their own words:

Distance, a new quarterly publication featuring long-form essays about design and technology.

There’s a lot of writing about the hows and whats of design, but we wonder where the whys are. So much of the writing about why we design, and the ramifications of our work, lacks the research and analysis that is critical to any serious discourse. We want to change that.

I just finished reading the first issue and I wanted to give feedback, both on how the magazine measures up against its goals and what I personally thought of it.

Distance does a great job of measuring up against its goals. The articles were thorough, long (~15-20 pdf pages), and well researched. There was empirical, historical, and reference data to support or refute any claims made. These are definitely not opinion pieces. Any of these articles would be a useful reference or starting point for further research into a topic. For instance, I know a lot about the rise of Zynga and modern social gaming because I was very plugged into that industry as it was developing. Ben Jackson’s article in Distance #1 covered the important points in that story, both historical and critical. If all Distance essays are held to the same standard of research and documentation, I would have no problem trusting them.

My own personal opinion of the magazine is not so rosy, but that’s because I’m not the target market. Like any scholarly material, you have to really care about the topic to read the much denser, less narrative material. I’m not a designer, so the specific topics (research as part of the design process and local design community organization) were not very interesting to me. The writing and research was of the same caliber but I was less invested in the subject. Also, since the goal is research and analysis, the writing isn’t necessarily entertaining. Given the goals of the project, that’s a feature, not a bug. But don’t expect a page turner.

Finally, I’d like to offer Nick Disabato (creator of Distance) praise for a job well done and the following advice:

• Consider switching from footnotes to end notes. There were a ton of footnotes on every page and it chopped up the flow of each article. For electronic versions, jumping back and forth between text and endnotes is super easy. (I read the pdf version)
• Require an abstract for each article. These are too deep to summarize with a title or sentence, and too long to skim. It will also make Distance a better research source.
• As the number of articles grows, have all the abstracts on the site and a searchable index of the articles on the site. Then you can provide different options for accessing single articles.

If you wonder about the “Whys of design”, you should subscribe to Distance.

I read. A lot. In fact, I’d probably write more if I read less. Blogs have a special place in my heart, because reading a few special blogs back in the mid aughts guided me to where I am professionally today.

Three classic tech blogs were especially influential on me:

• Joel on Software – most of my understanding of the software business comes from Joel or things Joel linked to. It’s also interesting to see his evolution, given his early emphasis on slow, Ben and Jerry growth and desktop software, to heading a VC funded Amazon-style monetize later service like Stack Exchange and Trello. He defined many terms that people use to describe the software business today.
• Paul Graham – full of powerful, challenging ideas. He has about half of the entries on my list of “Life-changing, perception-altering quotes.” Again, interesting to see how he changed his leverage from spreading ideas through writing to spreading ideas through investing, mentoring, and execution.
• Raganwald – doesn’t have as many “big idea” posts that stand out in my memory, but his writing felt closer to home. Unlike Joel and pg, Raganwald always felt like a programmer, exploring issues that programmers cared about. Joel and pg felt like something else, but Raganwald seemed like a better version of what I could become.

Even though they’re 5+ years old, you’d still be better off today reading their old essays than most of what’s new. None of my three favorites still write much, but there’s so much gold on the table already.

I’m in a very different place than I was in 2005, 2006 when I started reading blogs. The cutting edge thoughts and ideas from back then have spread and in many cases become common knowledge. So I want to mention three new writers that excite me the way Joel, pg, and Raganwald did back then:

• Ramit Sethi – I came across Ramit’s blog several years ago and I thought he came off as a cheesy hustler. His cockiness and attitude kept me from believing his savings tactics. I wrote him off until a few months ago he came onto my radar again, and it’s different between us now. Now he dives deep into the psychology of high performance, how to make changes when most people fail, and more. Very strategic things. Now I think Ramit’s writings are some of the most exciting things for an ambitious person to read. Here’s a good recent post about mastering the game being played around you.
• Michael Ellsberg – Speaking of exciting, I can’t get enough of Michael Ellsberg since I heard him on Mixergy. He covers a lot of the same ground as Ramit but in a different way. Ramit seems to dance around the point more and use sales and persuasion techniques like testimonials a lot, but Ellsberg just attacks like a tiger wielding Thor’s hammer. I believe Ramit because he’s convincing, but I believe Ellsberg because he’s so aggressively open and confident. My favorite example of this is his article about his brand promise – to shatter limited thinking.
• Venkatesh Rao (also has a book called Tempo)- While Ramit and Ellsberg cover a lot of the same ideas, Venkatesh is completely off the wall. He explores history, technology, psychology, culture, business, and whatever he feels like, and he does it in a way unlike anyone else I’ve read. I don’t always agree with or understand everything he says, and I’m never sure if it’s because my thinking is too limited or if he’s off in left field. But there’s no one else today who has repeatedly reshaped my perception of things I didn’t even know I didn’t understand. Good places to start are his articles about leaving the middle class and a brief history of the corporation.

Give these writers a try and maybe they will reshape your mind forever too!

Discussion: Who do you think is writing the best stuff right now?

I’ve had my ipad for a couple months now and I love it! This is the first long thing i’ve typed on it so it’s taking me a while and I’m having to fix a lot of typos. But other than that, it’s great!

Most of the obvious things have been said already, so here are some things I’ve noticed but haven’t heard:

1) I bought a DODOcase and it is a wonderful iPad case!It looks great, feels much more comfortable in my hand than the iPad by itself, and it had kept my iPad looking brand new. My only complaint is that the corner foam pads don’t hold the ipad in very well when you’re laying down and the case is vertical or facing downwards.
UPDATE 8/12/2010: DODOcase mailed out a new set of corner pads. I haven’t put them on yet but apparently they are listening 🙂
2) there’s not a great pdf reading solution that i’ve found. Any pdf that’s formatted with wide margins is a problem. iBooks doesn’t preserve zoom across pages so you have to rezoom every page. Goodreader preserves zoom but doesn’t turn the page the same way when the pdf is zoomed. Converting PDFs to epub with calibre can mess up page formatting and stick page headers and footers in the middle of pages (this is probably because the ebb and PDF pages wre different sizes.)
3) My kids love it. Of course they love the Dr Suess books and games, but their absolute favorite? The Elements, especially the song at the beginning. No more “Twinkle twinkle”, their lullaby starts out with “there’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium…”

There’s lots more to say but it has already been said. If you use a computer to entertain yourself, then an ipad will entertain you even better and I would recommend without hesitation that you buy one.