Transcript
Brett McKay:
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the AoM Podcast. We all have things you’ve always wanted to know how to do, but have never gotten around to learning. Speak a foreign language, play an instrument, write a book, take up surfing. Maybe you’ve even started one of these pursuits a few times, only to drop it after a couple of weeks.
My guest calls this collection of abandoned or deferred desires, your invisible list, and is the author of a book of the same name. Today on the show, Ravi Gupta presents a plan for tackling the things in your invisible list by picking one hobby-like activity each year and working your way to an intermediate level in it. He explains the different categories these pursuits can fall into from the liftoff project, the mental marathon, to the skilled radical, and how to pick the right one for your season of life. We also discuss how camps for grownups can make skill acquisition more enjoyable, why you should consider taking up an adult appropriate sport like tennis, why Ravi decided to take the MCAT even though he doesn’t plan to become a doctor, and how working on your invisible list can give your life chapters and over a course of a decade turn you into a renaissance man, badass.
After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/invisiblelist. All right, Ravi Gupta, welcome to the show.
Ravi Gupta:
Excited to be here.
Brett McKay:
So you got a new book out called The Invisible List. We’re going to talk about what the Invisible List is today, but you start the book off with how you were going to friends’ weddings, you were getting married, and there was one wedding you went to in particular that you realized, I’ve got this invisible list, which is stuff I’ve wanted to do my entire life, passions, hobbies, but I never got around to doing. Why did these weddings get you thinking about that?
Ravi Gupta:
Well, at the time I was running a network of schools down south and I was twenty four seven for my students, my teachers and families. And it’s such a cliche to say and to open a self-help book to be like, I was burnt out, but there’s no other way to open it because it was true and I was gaining weight. I’m 43 now. I look back to then when I was in my late 20s and early 30s, and I look older then than I do now. But like anything else, you’re not completely aware of what’s going on with you. And the interesting thing about a wedding is it’s an opportunity to check in with people who haven’t seen you in a while and they notice right away. And I was going to these weddings and I was hearing all kinds of things, including my buddy Sam, who was like, “Hey, are you on drugs?” And I wasn’t on drugs.
I was just completely hopelessly spent and not taking care of myself. And that was kind of the genesis of a lot of changes I needed to make in my life.
Brett McKay:
I think one thing you talk about is you wanted to dance because there’s dancing at weddings and you’re like, “I’ve been wanting to take salsa dancing, but I never got around to it.” That’s one of those things on my list of things I’ve wanted to do, but I’d never made time for.
Ravi Gupta:
Well, that is a big impetus behind this book in general. So at the wedding, I see people salsa dancing and doing other kinds of dancing. I’m like, “You know what? I’ve picked up and put down salsa dancing so many times and I never followed through.” And it went all the way through that wedding to other weddings. There were a couple of weddings a couple years later where I just kept having this experience where I’d just be like, “I tried. I didn’t follow through. It’s not because I couldn’t do it. It’s because I wasn’t dedicated enough and organized enough.” And there are a bunch of things like that. You hear somebody speaking a language you want to speak or there’s a screenplay that’s a little similar to what you wanted to write. And these things accumulate in your head and they bother you. I imagine a lot of people listen to this have all kinds of examples of this and it eats away at you and your confidence.
And if you don’t start to pull those things off the list and nurture them, you can grow into a very cranky, regret-filled person. And my whole book is about how to be the opposite, to be somebody who feels like there are endless possibilities even as you get older. And that’s really the journey I started right around then.
Brett McKay:
So what other things were on your invisible list? You had salsa dancing. What else was on there?
Ravi Gupta:
It’s hard to go back and remember everything that was on there, but certainly all kinds of writing. So I had been picking up and putting down a memoir of some sorts to write about my experiences growing up in Staten Island and then working in politics and in schools. And I would start it, I would stop it. I didn’t have confidence to write. I had all kinds of writer’s block. I would tell myself that it was indulgent to do that. Surfing was certainly on the list. I’m sure we’ll get to that. Break dancing was on the list, something I did as a kid and then stopped, which I, for many reasons, have still not pulled off my list. And languages of all kinds have been on the list. And so there are a ton of different things, flying airplanes, some things that I have never gotten to even till this day.
And my list was growing and growing and growing and I just kept telling myself, you know what? That’s not me. I’m a responsible adult now. And that’s for dilettantes and rich people and Tom Cruise. That’s for people who have endless time and money.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, I’ve got my list of things. One of them that I’ve started and stopped multiple times is drawing, like pencil sketching. That’s one. Another one is language. I used to speak Spanish fluently, but I haven’t done it in over 20 years. And I’m always thinking, I should probably get back to speaking Spanish again. And then I make these sort of attempts, but then I abort mission a couple weeks later. What else has been on my list? Oh, piano, that’s another one. So I took a piano class in college. I enjoyed it and I was a decent beginner for a semester of piano in college. And I’ve always like, I should get back into doing that. And I’ve picked up some beginner piano handbooks and I’ll do it for a week and then stop.
Ravi Gupta:
Yep. And those are actually very common. What you just named, piano and languages are very common. And I think what’s fascinating about those two is that those are two things that people are forced to do as kids usually and they don’t enjoy them. And you often, unless you have a tiger parent, you don’t follow through on them. And for me, languages has been that too. I picked up and put down Italian so many times and I really, really want to be fluent one day. And I know that that will be a hallmark of one of my years.
Brett McKay:
How is an invisible list different from a bucket list?
Ravi Gupta:
Bucket list to me is like, I want to go to Paris. I want to see the Eiffel Tower. I want to see the Northern Lights in Iceland or whatever. So it can include things, and this is also somewhat true of the Musogi concept in Japan, is things that are almost one-off things that you could cross off just by a short sprint period of time, either just going to the right place, going to the right restaurant. When people talk about bucket lists, for example, in New York City, it’s like go to Central Park during the day and read a book or something like that. It’s not this ongoing investment usually the way people talk about bucket lists. Whereas the invisible list, it’s really about tackling things that are hard and that require a year to become at least intermediate at. And the whole process is all about creating themes to your years to say, okay, this is not just about one thing you did that year, but about a process you went through the entire year and a skill or hobby that you’ve acquired that year that you can either take with you into future years or say, Hey, I am glad I did that thing, but I’m never going to do it again.
But it really is a whole different level of commitment than what people typically talk about when they talk about bucket lists.
Brett McKay:
Okay. So an invisible list, it’s more skill focused, hobby focused, and these are hobbies that require commitment. And then like you said, the way you approach your invisible list is you’re laying out a process that you have to commit at least a year towards. Because I think when most people, I’m a perfect example of that, when I’m like, I want to learn this new skill, I like the idea of it. And then I’ll kind of take sort of half steps towards it and then I give up after maybe two or three weeks. You’re saying no, you have to give yourself a year to do this thing.
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah. And there’s something powerful about a year for a few reasons. One is it’s long enough that you can go from beginner to intermediate in almost anything. And two is it also allows for a little bit of trial and error. Every year pretty much I have this middle period of time in which I hit a slump of some form, whether it’s an injury or writer’s block or lack of confidence or just this middle period of learning where you’ve gotten through all the easy wins and now each new sub skill within your area takes a lot longer to learn. So a year is a good period of time for that, but the year also has a couple of other benefits. And I think the most important is it gives you chapters to your life and you don’t have to do calendar years. Some people will start theirs in September alongside their kids going to school, for example, or they start on their birthdays.
It really doesn’t matter which date you pick. I happen to pick January 1st. So I’m able to say, oh, 2020 was the year I learned to surf. 2021 was the year of tennis. And you think about all the people you met, the places you went. And so you have these themes to your years and that combats this sort of lack of definition that tends to come as you get older. Because when you’re a kid, you’re like, oh, third grade, that was Mrs. Williamson and I was in this building and I had these friends and I read these books. You could remember to this day, most people. But if you think about, oh, when I was 26, what’s the difference between 26 and 27 or 32 and 33? And the older you get, the less definition you have and that’s demoralizing. And it’s also demoralizing looking ahead because I’m 43 and I’m looking ahead and I’m like, oh my God, I’m going to be 50 one day.
And you could be scared and you’re like, it’s coming quickly and sooner or later I’ll be closer to 50 than I will be to 40. And you could either be scared at that or you could reframe it and say, you know what? I’ve got seven more years till I hit 50. And by the time I get to 50, I will be a badass. I’ll be flying airplanes. I’ll speak Italian. I’ll have made a movie, whatever your crazy ideas are. And you can picture all those things that you will do each of those years and it actually makes you excited about the prospect of getting older instead of dreading it.
Brett McKay:
I love that idea that devoting a year creates chapters in your life because you’re right. If I look back at my life, I can see chapters in my life through my childhood, high school years, and then it ends at law school. And then after that, it’s been kind of the same. Yeah, I’ve had kids and there’s chapters to that, but once they hit, I don’t know, eight or nine or 10, they’re pretty self-sufficient and you start losing that. And my work, there’s been different phases and projects that have added texture to my memory, but a lot of it’s been years of the same thing, just doing the same thing over and over again.
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah. And with your kids, I think it’s interesting. I hear from people who have kids and then they’re married. And the often thing I hear from people is, I have to be about them. I have to be about my kids. I don’t have time to be indulgent and learn pottery or whatever. And I can only share my experience, which is my dad left when I was a kid, but before he left, every now and then he’d show up to my games, my football games and stuff. Now, it was cool to see him there from time to time, but looking back, my dad was very unfulfilled in certain ways. And that’s part of the reason why he left. And if I could go back in time, I’d be like, it’s okay if you don’t come to my game if you’re doing something that makes you excited and happy because that’s what it means to be a great dad.
When I see you fulfilled and happy and actually learning things and trying hard things, that’s inspiring to me. But also you’re happy. So when we see each other, you’re a different kind of person. And I feel like that for so many parents I see and so many spouses, it’s like it is okay. Obviously, there are plenty of things you have to do and you want to do, but there’s also a real value in showing your kids that you’re learning new things, that you’re taking risks, that will inspire them. And often you could pick things that enrich them and your spouse. For instance, you could learn to cook extravagant meals and cook them for your family, for example. And also for your spouse, your wife or your husband, they’ll think you’re sexy when you’re taking on these new things. It gives you this sort of glow that will make you a more captivating person for the people around you.
So I do think making room for this actually helps people around you as well.
Brett McKay:
Yeah, that point about it makes you attractive to your spouse. I mean, you think about that, your wife married you because you probably had some sort of ambition when you were in your 20s of things you were going to do. That was attractive. And then you hit 30 and 40 and you’ve kind of settled. There’s a virtue to having a routine and kind of being established, but seeing a person do new and exciting things, that’s also incredibly attractive still, even if you’re 40 or 50 years old.
Ravi Gupta:
And you could do it within the structure of a routine. So strong couples communicate well. So a lot of people I coach through this, they’ll be like, and sometimes I have both couples who are going through this process and I’ll be like, okay, somebody’s a night person, somebody’s a morning person. So the morning person, if you’re writing your novel, you’ll get that time in the morning while your spouse is making breakfast and getting the kids ready for school and then you flip it at night. And there’s all kinds of things like that that you could do or you could do it alongside each other. There’s all kinds of stuff you could do to fit that time in. I also think that people exaggerate the constraints in their lives. My mom raised three kids with two jobs in the ’90s and she still managed eventually to break out and tackle her own passions when we left.
But most people have fewer constraints than her and then fewer constraints even than the people I write about in this book. Some of whom are battling cancer, lupus, had a spouse die and they’re in their 70s or 80s and then they go back and learn to cook because their wife would cook for them and they want to honor that memory, but also take care of themselves. There are people with all kinds of constraints. One woman I profile literally cannot leave the cottage in the back of her parents’ house, but still is basically going through a Bob Ross journey of painting. So we exaggerate the constraints we have and how little time we have. I think most people, if they think about how much time they spend on their phones or watching Netflix or doing things they don’t need to do, you could eke out that time to at the very least tackle the lowest lift items on your list.
And then as I talk about in the book, one of the cool things about getting your list down is you can categorize them. And in the book, I give people frameworks for how to categorize different things that are on their lists according to the resources they would demand. And you could say, okay, there’s this big thing I want to do eventually and I can’t do it now, but just knowing I have it on my list, I can picture it. Maybe it’s when my kids go to college, maybe it’s when I retire, maybe it’s when I’m on sabbatical, or maybe it’s when I get laid off and I’ll tackle it then.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. We’re going to talk about these categories because I think it’s really interesting. The benefits of pursuing your invisible list, it feels good. They’re just enjoyable to do in and of themselves. It can strengthen relationships. You can be a good example to your kids. It can add texture to your life. So you’ve got rules for following your invisible list. There’s five of them. What are they?
Ravi Gupta:
And I might get the five out of order or wrong here, but one is it’s one new item a year. This is really important. So it’s tempting to be like, I’m in the middle of my year, this is my cooking year, for example. And you can wander into a Mu Thai boxing place and think, oh, well, what’s the harm?This isn’t going to crowd out my cooking year. It’s really important that you take on one new thing a year and no more than one new thing a year because you really have to honor the time and commitment it takes to really get good at that thing in that year. And two is you often use expiration of new items and the thrill of that newness as a form of procrastination. So I literally had this pull the other day when I wandered into a Mu Thai place because I was having a hard time with my cooking, but I didn’t quite clock it.
So I went in there and I was like, oh, this is just for fitness. And then I go in there and I’m starting to think through, oh, I’m going to sign up for five classes a week and I’m going to get a personal trainer. And then I stopped myself. I was like, no, I’m doing this to get that thrill because I’m not getting that thrill from cooking right now because I’m in the messy middle. I’m going to pause. I now have a little data. If I want to take on Mu Thai boxing next year, I will, but this is pulling me away from what I should be doing right now, which is learning cooking. It’s procrastination. So one new item a year. Now, secondarily, you could still pursue the other items from prior years, and I still do pursue a lot of the items from prior years, but you don’t have to.
And you could pursue them as long as they don’t crowd out your exploration of your new item. And often they don’t because you can pick complimentary items. Three is that it has to be a year, right? You have to devote yourself to that year, which means when you pick your item for that year, you have to see it through. Even if you’re a couple weeks in and you’re like, I hate this. You have to honor that. You have to be the equivalent of the parent. And I love when parents say this to their kids. It’s like, look, I’m not going to tell you what to do, but once you commit to something, you’re going to see it through. So if you’re committing to a sports team, you’re going to do that whole season. If you’re committing to an instrument, you’re going to do a whole year of that instrument or whatever the period of time is, the amount of lessons you committed to or whatever.
I think that’s a good form of parenting because it’s not saying, Hey, I’m going to be the tiger parent and dictate everything you do, but I’m going to teach you the value of consistency and finishing something. So you have to do that to yourself. Another rule is meta learning, this idea of learning how to learn. You could take a few weeks on the front end to read the books about the thing you want to learn. So for instance, in languages, there’s a great book called Fluent Forever, all about learning languages. You could read about these things, you could watch YouTube videos, you can consult experts, et cetera. But for me, it’s three weeks. No more than a month. You have to start moving. You have to do the thing. And then you could fit in the meta learning between the doing, but you really have to get moving really fast because if it’s March and you’re supposed to be learning swimming, but you haven’t been in the water, then we have a real problem.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. You mentioned that your aim with this one year of focusing on a skill or a hobby is to get to an intermediate level. Why that level? Why not aim to be an expert?
Ravi Gupta:
So why intermediate? One is because it’s a year and I think it’s unreasonable for most people to get to expert in that year. You could shoot for it, but it’s hard to get to in a year unless you’re truly all in on just that thing and you have very few professional and personal obligations for that year, or you’re some kind of phenom. I also think that, and I talked to Oliver Berkman, the writer about this, for type A folks, which I imagine a lot of people listen to this podcast, you’re not comfortable being less than excellent at something. And I want you to get used to that. There’s a beauty in not being a Picasso level painter or being a professional level athlete, but just being somebody who could show up to a pickup game and have fun or to write something that doesn’t win the Pulitzer, but that is enjoyable for you to write and enjoyable for people to read and taking the pressure off to reach these levels that take some people a lifetime will teach you to think differently about these pursuits, that it’s not about the external validation, it’s not about being perfect, but it’s learning that domain sufficiently that you can enjoy it.
And that’s why I like intermediacy.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And I think it’s doable in a year. I think most skills are. I mean, you can talk about power lifting here in a bit, but yeah, I started power lifting 15 years ago or so, and within a year I was an intermediate level power lifter. And then it’s taken 10, 12 years to get. It just gets harder and harder after you get to an intermediate level and you reach a certain point where there’s diminishing returns and you’re like, “Well, do I really want to go all in on this or am I just going to enjoy this?” And I decided just to enjoy it and I’m not pursuing big giant PRs anymore because it’s just too hard.
Ravi Gupta:
It’s also a kind of thing you could maintain very easily. So often people ask, “Okay, what are the things that you keep doing in your years and which did you put down?” And I mentioned power lifting as a good example because it really doesn’t crowd out anything else because I’m going to be lifting weights no matter what. So it’s like, how am I lifting weights? I would have been lifting weights before and after. Now I just have a cannon of lifts that I pay attention to and I track. And in many ways it made me more efficient with my working out because power lifting is really three lifts and once you know how to do them really well, they give you a huge bang for your buck. And so I’m in and out of the gym. It’s such a small part of my life because I’m not competing anymore.
So it’s weird to say that I even keep doing it in a weird way because I spend so little time thinking about it, but obviously it still impacts my life. All
Brett McKay:
Right. So the first thing you recommend to people, if they don’t have an invisible list yet, they probably do. They just haven’t really articulated. They haven’t written it down, but write it down and just go crazy with it. Just think of all the things you’ve wanted to do your entire life, but have been putting off, put it on that list. And then once you’ve made that list, you recommend going through and using this category framework that you mentioned and slotting them into different categories. So what are the big categories that you slot your invisible list into?
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah. And one important thing you said I want to underscore, which is you have to take the time to get the list down. And I recommend people take a physical piece of paper, get away from their technology and give it a whole hour at least. Because what will happen is there are a few things that will pour out of you right away, but you should really be staring out into the distance, digging deep to be like, “What are things that I’ve just been telling myself are not possible? What is innately inside of me that maybe I haven’t even figured out about myself? What’s the big bad thing that I would feel almost embarrassed to tell somebody about?” For me, that’s making a movie. I feel weird telling anybody I want to make a movie because it’s super expensive usually. I mean, it’s getting a lot cheaper.
And it seems like such an ambitious project that would require so many things to go right. And it sounds goofy to say, and it took me so long to give myself permission to even say that out loud. Now, as for the categories, so basically these frameworks and each chapter in the middle of the book is centered around each one of these archetypes, I call them. And I organize them according to the place in life you will be in, in order to pursue them and relatedly, what kind of resources you have at your disposal. So one of them is called the anywhere, anytime passion, which is what it sounds like, which is a passion that is for the busy years. Maybe you have a newborn or something or you just took on a new demanding job and it’s the kind of thing you could do from anywhere with relative low costs and with a minimal amount of time investment.
So writing and creative projects tend to be good examples of anywhere, anytime archetype. So screenwriting was one for me where it’s like, okay, I can spend 30 minutes at a Starbucks in the morning every day knocking out another part of a scene. And if I do that every single day for the year and then mix in some meta learning and longer writing periods of time when I have bigger blocks, I will have achieved what I needed to achieve by the end of the year versus the exact opposite of that, which is what I call the big one or a skill battle, which is something that is a kind of stop the presses, I have to go somewhere or I have to have huge blocks of time nearly every day to pursue this thing because it requires a whole different level of commitment. And those are great for people who are recent retirees, people who are between jobs or they sold a company or their kids left to go to school or whatever.
You have more time than you though. For me, it was surfing because surfing is the kind of thing you have to do it every day. You have to be somewhere where you could surf and New York City has surf breaks, but it’s not a great place to learn every single day. And so for certain people, it could be, for instance, another skill battle I took was this year around cooking. I went to Tuscany to learn how to cook and I went to Naples to learn pizza. Cooking could be a anywhere, anytime skill if you treat it in a very narrow way or it could be a skillbatical if you want to go completely all out on it. So those are two archetypes. A third is a mental marathon, which is something where you train your mind the way you train your body. So most people listen to this have friends who’ve done an Ironman or a marathon or whatever, or even now high rocks is very popular, but you probably don’t have too many people who did the equivalent for their brain.
And so I give people a ton of examples in the book. For me, I took the MCAT one year, which is I think it’s seven to nine hours or something like that of biochemistry, general chemistry, organic chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, critical reading, physics. And you have to learn all these subjects and then you have to apply it in this very rigorous way. And by studying for it and then taking the test, I had to upgrade my memory. I had to upgrade my reasoning skills. I had to learn how to learn again. And then I had to learn to extend my attention span so that I could sit for an exam for nine hours. And so those are all ways to improve my brain. So that’s the mental marathon. I have what’s called the giving year, which is where you learn something to give back to the people around you.
So you could do community service projects, you could do cooking, you could frame cooking around that if you do it to cook for the people in your life. And then I have what’s called a liftoff year, which is I often recommend doing this early, but for me, power lifting was this. It’s kind of the mirror image of the mental marathon. This is a year where you do something to improve your physical health, your non-mental health, which obviously there’s overlap in improving your physical health to improve your mental health. But for me, this was power lifting. For some people it could be training for hybrid athletic competitions like high rocks. It could be training for a marathon. I interviewed a woman who was learning how to do pull-ups her year. So those are some of the archetypes. And when you’re getting your list down, you just get your list down first.
And then I say, go in and tag your years to say, oh, what kind of year is that? What kind of archetype is it?
Brett McKay:
Well, let’s dig into some of these years or these archetypes you highlight in the book. Let’s talk about that launchpad one.You talked about how you used power lifting for a launchpad or a lift off passion pursuit or passion year. And I think you’re right. I think physical fitness is a great way to get into this whole idea of I’m going to dedicate myself to an entire year of a skill or a passion because fitness, you can do that in a year. You can get to an intermediate level in a year and you can actually see it. You can see it in real time, which is motivating, which keeps you doing it. That’s been my experience at least.
Ravi Gupta:
For sure. And it’s a cliche to say, but all roads lead through your physical health. So I personally, I had put on a lot more weight than I was used to. I didn’t feel confident in myself. You go to this death spiral where when you don’t feel good about your body, you get depressed and then you eat more and then you feel less good about your body, you don’t move, you don’t go out there. So I said to myself, “I have to get this right.” And I didn’t completely understand what was going to come after because I was still kind of getting into the flow of what this process would look like. But if I look at the years that came after it, I think about, for example, screenwriting or I think about especially surfing, tennis, even cooking, feeling better about my body made me, number one, so much more likely to do those things, but also better at those things.
So it really did help on so many different levels.
Brett McKay:
So when you set out this year of power lifting, how did you determine what was an intermediate level? How did you decide if I reach this metric, I know I’m an intermediate?
Ravi Gupta:
So for me, I looked at power lifting and said, okay, this is three lifts. It’s the dead lift, it’s the back squat and the bench press. And each one of those has certain metrics that are associated with it. And you can come up with a number that says, I am at a certain level. Now with AI, I am sure you could talk to the AI and be like, “Here’s my age, here’s my weight. What would an intermediate level be?” And you could talk to the AI about it. For me, I had listened to a podcast from this guy, Ryan Flaherty, who at the time was at Nike training athletes for things like the NFL combine. I’m a huge Buffalo Bills fan and he trained Josh Allen to get a good 40 time. And I remember him describing this hex bar deadlift, which the hex bar deadlift, we don’t need to go into this, you and I could geek out on it.
It’s not exactly a power lifting lift, but I was very captivated by his description of what your body weight was relative to how much you could hex bar deadlift and how that translated into your speed. And so he had all these numbers about, okay, if you can do 2.5 times your body weight in a deadlift, it means this. If you do 2.75, it would mean this. If you do three, you’re an elite athlete or whatever. So I picked a number and it was actually a fairly advanced number, but I knew myself at that point and I said, “Okay, I’m aiming for this number.” And then I added a few other things like a competition I wanted to enter, et cetera. And I hit my number for the most part that year, but more importantly, I started competing. And then in subsequent years, I competed in a power lifting competition.
And this gets to your point about expertise. I hit an expert level straight bar deadlift in a competition. And in the competition, I had the highest deadlift for my weight class. So I got the gold in that competition for that lift. And that’s where I topped out. I’ve been nursing injuries every year since. I’ve hurt my arm three times in the past two years and I just tore my bicep surfing. So I’ve been basically out of the game for competing in power lifting. But that was my sort of apex. That was my Al Bundy. I scored four touchdowns in the high school football match moment.
Brett McKay:
And then what you did too, you talk about with this process of starting power lifting, you did spend a month or a few weeks doing this meta learning where you just read up about power lifting, watched YouTube videos, listened to podcasts. You’re just learning all you can about the thing. But like you said, you have to get going and start with the program as soon as possible.
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah. The key is to figure out a domain. And to me, it does not matter in fitness what you pick. If it’s high rocks, which seems to be compelling a lot of people now, and for people who don’t know, high rocks is this thing where you do, I think 10 or eight events that are these CrossFit-esque things where you might push a sled or do a thousand meter row or whatever, and then you run, I think one kilometer in between each event. It’s hell, I did it once. It is challenging and I might focus on it more in a future year, but that’s very popular for people now. You could do a Tough Mudder, you could do Spartan Races, you could do Iron Man, Marathon, whatever you pick, do a little bit of research to say, okay, what does it mean to be intermediate in that thing?
And then say, okay, that’s my baseline. And then you could say, here’s my stretch goal. Intermediate might mean X and whatever the next rung is could be Y, and then shoot for it. Start going, start moving.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. And what’s nice about power lifting, as I said earlier, you can see your progress. Is the weight going up on the bar? Some other skills, it’s harder to see progress like, well, am I actually getting better at speaking Spanish fluently? But with weightlifting, you can actually see this, which is I think motivating. And then the process of seeing that growth, you start learning about how you learn and how you develop skills. And then you talk about an important skill you picked up in this sort of skill acquisition is the skill of journaling your progress. When you did that with power lifting, you had your weightlifting log and you’re able to see here’s how I’m making progress. Here’s where I’ve hit this plateau, what was going on with the plateau. You start making notes and then you start making adjustments and you took that skill of journaling and your power lifting skill acquisition to your other skills as well.
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah. I can’t remember. I saw a video of Arnold Schwarzenegger talking about when he was in Austria and building the foundation for what allowed him to be this elite level bodybuilder. And he was basically like, I would have a wall and I would have all my lifts and I would just have a line that would indicate a set or whatever. And I would just fill the wall with that. And it just gave him this immense satisfaction. And then I saw Alex Hannell, the free solo climber, and I watched a documentary on him and he was taking these meticulous notes about, okay, this is what I felt at this time, right when he comes down from whatever climb, I use this grip on this thing, it worked, it didn’t work, I felt this way, blah, blah, blah. And he takes these meticulous notes. And I don’t know if this is a term of art and I can’t imagine I’m the first one to use it.
I think of it as performance journaling as opposed to this emotional like, here’s how I felt today, which is no problem with that. Here’s how I felt. Here’s what my spouse said to me. I’m feeling depressed, I’m feeling good, whatever. I just think of it more as like a precise awareness of what you’re doing, what your output is in a way that could be motivating and then a meticulous sense, and this is going off of Hano, of what’s working and what’s not. And that stuff gets really valuable over time. And then the funny thing about that is actually through the performance journaling, you get at the emotional. So surfing and tennis were perfect for this where at a certain point, the obstacles became my emotional state. Am I getting frustrated when I’m getting tight? Am I getting angry at myself? Am I scared to go out on waves because I’m nose diving?
And what is my internal talk? What did it feel like to get pulled under the water and did I overcome it or not? Did I panic? Did I exhaust myself more? And then you can get some profound self-reflection off of that, but it kind of starts with the precise, almost unemotional recounting of what you did and then can quickly turn into some really important mental growth that you exhibit on the page. And when I compare the extensions of that performance journaling and when it became full bloom in some of these areas and compare it to my journaling outside of that where I’m trying to intentionally tap into my emotional state, often the performance journaling reflects back a more astute and deep understanding of my mental state than when I’m intentionally trying to get there.
Brett McKay:
All right. So we’re going to do metal learning. We’re going to do this performance journaling. You also recommend using immersive experiences to turbocharge your passion pursuit. What did that look like for your power lifting?
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah, it’s kind of a fancy term for adult camps. So I’ve been to so many adult camps. It’s wild. I was just writing them all down the other day. But my first camp was in the power lifting year. I went to a place called Power Monkey Fitness Camp, which is in the remote corners of Eastern Tennessee. And it’s run by this wonderful couple. One was an Olympic gymnast, Dave Duranti, and then Sadie Duranti, his wife, who was like a Cirque du Soleil style aerial performer. And they’ve collaborated with a bunch of Olympic lifting Olympian champions and national champions. And it’s this fitness camp in the middle of the woods where you go through these stations where they’ll be like, “We’re going to focus for two hours on the back squat. We’re going to focus for two hours on the clean and jerk.” And they even had two hours on jump roping and kettlebells and they bring in the foremost expert on whatever that thing is.
The captain of the South African row team was teaching me how to row on a row irk. So it’s like this super elite level instruction. But what’s cool about it is the campers come from all walks of life. You have some people who are CrossFit competitive athletes and champions alongside a 70 year old grandmother who’s just coming through this for the first time. And it was really a beautiful experience and you bunk, you go out to the fire and roast marshmallows. I mean, it was a cool experience. That was my first immersive experience. And yes, you level up on the skill, but you make a ton of friends. So I didn’t know Sadie and Dave back then, but now we’re super good friends and we also live not far from each other. So I see Dave and Sadie pretty much every week now. And so they’re super close friends of mine.
And this has happened in so many camps I attended. I’ve been to so many tennis camps, for example, and I’ve met tons of friends through those. And two of my really good friends in New York City are two doctor friends who live uptown, who I met at tennis camp when I was all by myself and I was put into a group with them. We started talking at lunch because you have to sit next to each other at lunch and make small talk. And they’re now friends with Sadie and Dave. They come over for dinner at my place. I go over for dinner theirs. I went and saw Keith’s band play the other day when they were playing in the East Village. So the coolest thing is not the skills really, it’s these friends. And it’s so hard to make friends later into life, but when you do these immersive experiences, you make these friends in such a durable, exciting way.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about the skillbattical. So you mentioned for yours, this was learning to surf in Costa Rica. So you took a year off to do this?
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah. It wasn’t a full year intentionally. And I was still doing some work, but essentially to put you in the frame of it, this was right after the 2020 election. I had worked on that election and I was burnt out from politics again. I wasn’t crisp, burnt to a crisp like I was after running schools, but I was all in on that effort. And I booked a trip to go to Costa Rica to surf and I went and this was a year where I bet my rules a little bit and started a little earlier because I had finished the previous year’s skill earlier. And so I go to a surf camp in Costa Rica and I was only planning to be there for two weeks just to get me started. I hadn’t really though through what it would mean to really see through a surfing year.
I loved it so much. I stayed. It also was the, I think it was the Delta or Omicron COVID wave was going on in New York and there was really nothing to go back to. I would’ve been going back to a cold New York. I had some money saved and I said, “You know what? I’m just going to stay in Costa Rica.” And I kept extending and I wound up staying for six months in Costa Rica. And my coach at this surf camp was starting his own surf coaching company and took me on as his first student. And so he started filming me and coaching me and every day I would go out and surf. And so I did that sort of intense six month experience. And because surfing being what it is, you really do it in the morning. And I had certain professional obligations that would linger in the afternoons, but they didn’t really crowd out my surfing.
I was able to really give my all to surfing in the mornings, do that for six months, come back to New York, and then for the next six months, find opportunities to surf in New York and take surf trips to other places. And that was what I call skillbatical. And for people who are doing it intentionally and you know you have that time off, you can plan it more purposely than I did.
Brett McKay:
Could you do something like a skillbatical if you don’t have six months or a year to devote to it completely? Let’s say you’re not retired or you can’t take time off for work for a year. Is it possible to develop something like it? I mean, could those immersive experiences you talked about, could that substitute as a skillbatical?
Ravi Gupta:
For sure. I actually think the immersive experiences and skill batticals sometimes align, but sometimes the immersive experience is an opportunity to rescue a year where you’re struggling. So let’s say for instance, you’re trying to learn tennis, but you’ve been hitting a plateau or haven’t been getting out there to play as much as you’d like. Booking a week long tennis vacation at a tennis camp or even a few weekends. We live in New York, for example, there’s this place, Total Tennis Upstate where they do two and a half to three day tennis camps. Booking a couple of those or even one, it could be your opportunity to play cleanup on your own learning for that year. Or if you’re just steady as they go on an anywhere, anytime or one of the archetypes I forgot to mention is a adult appropriate sport. So it’s basically for me, tennis was this.
I subbed out basketball for tennis. So whatever your sport is, you could say, “I’m not taking off six months, but I have a week off or I have a weekend off.” And you could find often an immersive experience or a camp-like experience within those shorter timeframes. Yeah.
Brett McKay:
I’ve been noticing more and more companies offering skill-cations for adults where you can just go for a week to learn tennis, learn cooking, learn surfing. So there’s definitely more opportunities for that than there were maybe even 10 years ago.
Ravi Gupta:
Totally. This is a huge growing trend. I think it’s a great trend. And people are in different phases of life. Sometimes I take a vacation where I just want to read a book and stare at the ocean. I think that’s totally cool. Absolutely love that. But sometimes you want to get a vacation so you can move. You want to move, you want to learn, you want to meet new people. And I’m super pumped that there are so many examples of this. I’ve done cooking schools, I mentioned. I did a pizza school in Naples. I did a pasta making school in Luca. I did tennis camp in upstate New York. I’ve done tennis camp in Spain and France. I’ve done writer’s retreats. I actually just did a writer’s retreat this weekend that I hosted myself. I’ve done surf camps. I did the lifting camps. I mean, these are some of the most enjoyable experiences I’ve had and I can’t recommend them enough.
Brett McKay:
Something you mentioned with your surfing is you had a coach. And that’s another thing you talk about throughout all these skills. Sometimes it is appropriate to get a coach or a teacher to walk you through this stuff and give you feedback. And just like there’s lots of opportunities to take skillcations, there are coaches for pretty much any skill you can think of and you can find them easily on the internet.
Ravi Gupta:
For sure. And this is an area where you just have to be honest about your level of resources. And I have a whole section of a chapter about where you are. Are you a penny pincher or are you somebody who has unlimited resources? And obviously, depending on where you are on that spectrum, you can go bigger or smaller. I tend to think in the age that we live in now, you can get a lot done cheap in a lot of skills, especially given the quality of AI, for example. You could go to a cooking school like I did, or you could watch a ton of YouTube videos and you could upload your dishes every step of the way to Anthropic or GPT and get great feedback that you wouldn’t have been able to get before. And so one is essentially free and the other is pretty expensive and you have to be honest about where you are on that.
Now, for most people, if you’re somewhere in the middle, you might have a little bit of resources to devote to actual coaches, whether it’s a tennis coach you meet once a week or a couple times a month, or somebody review drafts of your writing and give you feedback like I did. And you could do that through certain websites like Fiverr or whatever.
Brett McKay:
So you mentioned one of your years was to acquire a sustainable or age appropriate adult sport and you chose tennis. Why do you think it’s important to find an age appropriate sport for someone to pursue in adulthood?
Ravi Gupta:
I think for some people you could probably keep doing the same thing you were doing as a kid, depending on what it is. I have friends, for example, who play basketball pretty late in their lives, but I had basketball as my main sport and I just kept getting injured. So I did some research and I was like, “Oh, tennis has all this incredible data about how it improves your longevity. It seems like a lot of fun.” I had a ton of friends who played it. I go to these tennis clubs and I see people super old playing tennis. So I’m like, “Whoa, that seems like a great thing to sub out. And I can get a lot of the enjoyment I got from basketball.” It trains your body in a lot of the same ways. It’s a fun way to get cardio, but it’s not all this stop and start where you can get as many non-contact injuries as you do in basketball.
So that was an easy one for me. For instance, if you did gymnastics or something at a certain point, or for me, break dancing, those are things that you could conceivably do for the rest of your life. For me, I think of my life as having a risk budget, and if I can do things that are enjoyable at lower risk that bring me about as much enjoyment or as much, I try to sub those things out. And what turns out I actually like tennis more than I did playing basketball in my later years.
Brett McKay:
Yeah. When I read that, I’ve been thinking about tennis too. I haven’t had a sport for. I mean, I have power lifting, which is kind of a sport, but I want a sport where I interact with other people and tennis has been on my list, so this inspired me. Maybe I should start taking tennis lessons.
Ravi Gupta:
I quote Matthew McConaughey in the book. I forget his exact quote, but he’s basically talking about learning tennis. He was like, “I feel guilty at how much I love this.” He’s like, “It shouldn’t be this fun.” That’s how I feel about tennis. Tennis is awesome. And what’s cool about it is the culture of tennis in the United States is really dominated by intermediate people. There’s this huge concentration of people who are in the 3.0 to 3.5 range, which is squarely intermediate, which you can get to in a year. And once you get there, you access tennis adult culture. When you go to these tennis camps, the vast majority of people are in those numbers. And actually the funny thing about tennis, adult tennis culture is that if you get too good, you’re almost a pariah because they don’t want to play you because you’re too good.
If you get to 4.0 and beyond, you’re now in this smaller circle of people and it’s almost annoying to play you because you’re too good. So actually it really pays to be in that 3.5 range.That’s where all the action is.
Brett McKay:
Let’s talk about your mental marathon year. This is the one where you studied for and you took the MCAT, which is the test you got to take to get into medical school. I don’t think you had plans on going to medical school, but you decided to do this anyway. And you talked about how you had to relearn a lot of things. You haven’t been in school for over 20 years. Tell us about what sorts of skills you had to relearn in order to take the MCAT, because I think they apply not only to other kinds of mental marathons, but to learning all kinds of new skills as well.
Ravi Gupta:
This is alternatively the quirkiest chapter, but I think is my favorite because it taught me so much that I thought I had already known. I come at this as somebody who ran schools and thought I was an expert on education. And then I went through this process where I had to learn all these subjects, some for the first time and some for the first time in 20 years, which is essentially the same as doing it for the first time. I had to really acquaint myself with the experience of young people learning today. I found out that learning today is wildly different than it was when I was a kid. When I took college level chemistry when I was in college, they would assign you one textbook. Often it was the textbook written by the professor, which often meant it wasn’t the best textbook. And then maybe as in my case, the library would have four or five other textbooks, but they would all be checked out immediately because there are 400 kids in your lecture and every one of the gunners is grabbing that textbook.
So essentially what it means is you have one explanation for each of the sort of key aspects of the material. And if that explanation doesn’t stick with you or if it’s imperfect, you’re screwed. But back then, the good thing was we had our attention spans. We didn’t have all these digital distractions. YouTube didn’t exist when I was in college. Facebook didn’t exist when I was in my first few years of college. We just didn’t have all those digital distractions, so it was give and take. Now, when I was relearning these or in certain cases learning these subjects, you have an infinite amount of amazing explanations for glycolysis, the Krebs cycle, kinematics, acid-based equilibrium, whatever difficult concept you want. And you have adaptive modules so that you can get unlimited practice problems and they’re adaptive so they get harder as you get better or easier. If you need better understandings, you could interface with AI, which was starting to get better a little bit into my year for the MCAT where you can talk to the AI about, “Hey, why did I get this problem wrong?” All this kind of stuff.
I mean, you had all these incredible tools. And so I learned quickly that you had this amazing just universe of material. Number two is I learned that this sort of science of learning, it may have been mature in some form back when I was in school, but we weren’t aware of it. Now you have this incredible awareness of advanced techniques for how do you memorize things and/or grasp difficult concepts. I’ll give you two examples. One is spaced repetition. Back in the day, we would copy our notes, recopy our notes, do flashcards, but we had no sense for how often do I go back to my notes and what’s the most effective way to recount material that I’d already been exposed to before? But now we have knowledge of space repetition, which is this fancy way of saying there’s actually algorithmically effective ways to dose out your review of material.
And the way it kind of goes is you learn something, then you review it the next day, then you might wait three days, then you might wait a week, then you might wait a month. And actually there’s an algorithm to how often you go back to it. That means that at the end of the process, it sticks better than if you did it every single day. And there’s also a way to go about it so that you’re actively recounting it so that instead of just looking at a flashcard, you’re writing out the thing from memory and challenging yourself to actually do something with that material as you’re recounting it, and that makes it stick more. So that was one area that I thought was modern and very fascinating, and there’s all sorts of tools available there. The other is there’s this thing called the Feyman technique, which we had known about for a while, but now in modern discourse, there’s a healthy, robust discussion of what it looks like.
And essentially it means that the best way to learn something and make it stick is to teach it to people. So if you’re in college, the easy way to implement this is do study groups where you’re kind of dominating the study group and you’re actually seeking out people who are kind of stragglers who are not as advanced as you so that you can teach it to them or tutor them because the art of explaining it reinforces the concept for you. Now, if you’re an adult and you don’t have those kinds of study circles at your availability, what you could do is what I did, which is I started to just audio tape myself and in some cases videotape myself, explaining it to myself and just pushing myself to have to explain the material to a beginner. And that really reinforces your learning. So
Brett McKay:
What’d you end up scoring on the MCAT?
Ravi Gupta:
I scored a 514. I think it was a 514 or 518, whatever the number is in the book. It’s the fact check number, but it was a 89th percentile, whatever my number was. My goal was to get an 80th percentile because that’s basically the gating mechanism to be competitive for medical school. And so mission accomplished. I did what I needed to do.
Brett McKay:
This chapter, it inspired me. So I’ve kind of been thinking about this for a while. So I went to law school 20 years ago, graduated law school, but I didn’t take the bar exam. And every year I’m like, “Man, should I take the bar exam?” But this chapter really cemented. Maybe I should buy some Barbery review and start studying for the bar exam, even though I don’t plan on practicing.
Ravi Gupta:
What state do you live in?
Brett McKay:
I live in Oklahoma.
Ravi Gupta:
Oh yeah. You should do it. I’ve thought about it too, the bar exam. And what’s interesting about the bar exam? The one thing it doesn’t have going for it is it’s a little bit less skill-based than it is knowledge-based, which there’s nothing wrong with that. But I like to combine where it feels like an athletic experience where you’re like, okay, the cool thing about the MCAT is yes, you have to memorize a ton of stuff, but you also have to do things like kinematics problems and acid-based equilibrium problems and things like that. And although there is some version of that on the bar exam, from what I understand, of having to reason through things, a lot of it’s just regurgitating information. The sweet spot is, is there something where you have to. You almost get sweaty trying to figure it out. It’s almost like learning a dance maneuver or something.
You have to whip out a sheet of paper and really challenge your mind to think creatively. And those are cool experiences.
Brett McKay:
I’m drawn to it just for the challenge of it. Just relearning everything I learned in law school 20 something years ago.
Ravi Gupta:
I think you should do it. I actually had friends who did the old version of Barbri and actually said they really enjoyed the experience because you get these mini lectures from actually in some cases really good at professors talking about different aspects of the law.
Brett McKay:
Alright. Well, Ravi, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
Ravi Gupta:
Yeah. So people can search for the Invisible List wherever they get books. And you could also go to our website, which is readinvisiblelist.com. And on the website, I actually have an opportunity for people to take an extra step if they want to join what I call the Invisible Posse, which is people who want to not just read the book, but implement the ideas in the book alongside others. So the Posse has all kinds of stuff. So you can check that out at readinvisiblelist.com or just get the book wherever you get your book. We have audio book, we have Kindle, we have the regular book, and then it’s going to be available also in a bunch of different countries as well. Awesome.
Brett McKay:
Well, Ravi Gupta, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
Ravi Gupta:
Thank you.
Brett McKay:
My guest here is Ravi Gupta. He’s the author of the book, The Invisible List. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.
