I’m feeling quite inspired by that Joe Rogan “how to workout smarter” interview with Firas Zahabi. Firas believes in volume over intensity when it comes to workouts, particularly when optimizing for sports performance. He points out that the Russian school of wrestlers, who win more consistently than the Americans, follow this theory – and it reminded me of Pavel’s ladder – the idea of greasing the groove by doing as many reps as you possibly can.
Some points that Firas made:
– You never want to be sore. Once you’re sore, you can’t work out again. And that diminishes the total amount of time you can spend working out. There’s something here that’s similar to the speedrunning ideas in the previous post. What are you really optimizing for?
– Volume over intensity. The nature of intensity is such that, by definition, you need to rest after you do it. If you’re pushing yourself hard every day, you’re not really pushing yourself as hard as possible. If you can do a rep after your “one rep maximum”, then that wasn’t your one rep maximum. A maximum effort should wipe you out. So “I’m pushing myself to the brink every day” is definitely a lie, and I’m guessing it’s a lie that people use because they like the story that it allows them to tell themselves about themselves. It might be a masochistic sort of liking, or a guilty or shameful sort of liking, but it’s some sort of attachment nevertheless.
So now I’m thinking about these word vomits, and the story I have in my head about what I’m doing here. I know why I set out to write a million words – I did that because I believed that I would be a better writer at the end of it. (I’m feeling some deja vu here, I’ve definitely written about this before – and this feeling has definitely prevented me from writing before, and I’ve definitely also written about how I should deal with that feeling by deciding to repeat myself if I have to, because that repetition will be valuable information for me down the road when I’m reviewing this whole thing).
Quick aside: I’ve been tweeting a lot lately. And I’ve been getting pretty good at it. And a big part of how I’m good at twitter is my ability to thread old tweets. I tread old tweets by figuring out what the common topics are, what the common phrases are, and so on. I know what I’m thinking, I know what I’m talking about. In a way these word vomits are maybe too long for me to figure out what the fuck I’m trying to say. It could be that at the end of my word vomit project, or maybe even right now, I should start tweeting and threading so that it all makes more sense. I don’t want to end the project with a massive junkyard and then have to slowly start another project of making sense of the whole goddamn thing. I want to make sense of it as I go. I want it to be a living, breathing document. Part of that means tagging. Part of it means maybe rewriting, editing.
What I need to commit is the time.
Circling back. When I committed to writing these vomits, I was implicitly committing to the keystrokes. The average word is about 5 words long. So I’m committing myself to something like 6 million keystrokes, if you consider pauses and punctuation and whatnot. How long would it take me to tap on a keyboard 6 million times? How long does it take me to write a single vomit? I think realistically, practically, it takes me somewhere between 30 minutes to an hour to write a word vomit. It should be less, but I’m including procrastination time. An hour a day for a thousand days is… a significant commitment. Yet I definitely have spent that much time on other things. On social media, for sure. Which… as a writer, is something that has helped me become a better writer…
Pause. Let’s not get muddied up. Let’s speedrun. What am I optimizing for? I want to finish this project. I’m writing this to clarify that I want to further integrate Firas’s perspective into my own. He believed that you should be excited to exercise, you should be addicted to exercise. And part of that means knowing when to stop. I find myself thinking that, lately, I’ve been wanting to figure out my “one day maximum” for the most number of word vomits I can write in a day. That is not a smart idea. I’m subconsciously scared and overwhelmed of that idea. On the other hand, last November I consistently wrote almost 2000 words a day for the entire month, finishing 50,000 words in the month. That was because I had a daily commitment, and it was fairly small, and I could feel good about myself when I was done! If I wrote 3 word vomits in a day now, I’m not so sure I’ll feel so good about myself if I’m still thinking in terms of “what’s my one day maximum”.
So yeah, volume over intensity. I need to go back to doing a little bit of a thing each day. So this is today’s word vomit. I need to put it on the calendar. I need to write a word vomit a day. How am I going to do this? I think I’m going to start doing searches and roundups. I’m going to commit to about an hour a day. My brain immediately replies with “What? An hour a day? But you can do more! There were days where you were spending 4 hours a day playing video games!” – but like Firas says, that’s going away from flow, that’s going towards anxiety. If I’m done with an hour, I could maybe spend a few minutes planning out what I’m going to do in the next couple of days, to make those writing exercises something that I can look forward to.
So. Shall we end each vomit with a prompt for the next one? Tomorrow, I think it would be cool to have a word vomit that looks back on older vomits. It doesn’t need to cover everything. It just needs to be a light dive. Like retweeting a couple of other tweets. Let’s just walk through visakanv.com/1000 like a tourist and see what we see, see what we think. There, that’s somewhat exciting. That’s something to look forward to. Goodnight, good sir