The Mix Tape, Vol. 82

Mar 12, 2021

Welcome to this week’s Mix:

🏃Sprint essays
🤪Here’s to the weirdos
🪙Discovering the Shiny Dimes
☀️This week’s Florida photo

Sprint essays

The four things I’d do if I were starting a fitness regimen today
Spoiler alert: it doesn’t include long cardio sessions

How to build mental endurance with exercises that don’t wreck your body
Push through your desire to quit and get mentally stronger with short and difficult exercises

Forget “feel the burn!” Focus on adaptation in your workouts.
Take the long-term view to maximize your fat loss

Here’s to the weirdos

Photo: Tom Pennington/Getty Images

Tyler Glasnow, rising pitching star for the Tampa Bay Rays, on the team’s unconventional approach to helping pitchers thrive:

Glasnow said the Rays like to find outlier pitches the guys throw to help them develop, and to ignore the traditional ideas of what pitchers should do, and do what works for them, and it builds confidence.
“They find guys who are weirdos!” Glasnow said. “The black swans of baseball.”

The underdogs—like startups, strapped-for-cash sports teams, or content creators looking to break through—must cultivate and accentuate the weird.

Just imitating everyone else, but with fewer resources, won’t work.

The unusual is the underdog’s advantage.

Discovering the Shiny Dimes

One of the most useful concepts in Write of Passage the idea of the Shiny Dime.

We often feel we have to take on huge and wide-ranging ideas in our writing. And in the empty void of this endless idea expanse, we get lost. We give up.

Instead, focus on writing about Shiny Dimes: small, gleaming ideas that can be deeply explored:

Ideas for Shiny Dimes are everywhere and appear in unexpected places:

Whatever your topic of interest, there are people posing questions, pouring their hearts out in reviews, and making observations you can use as jumping off points for your writing.

The Shiny Dime: A million dollar idea for more effortless writing.

This week’s Florida photo

From a nature hike on a brilliant and crisp Sunday morning:

Please hit reply if you have questions, comments, or open rebuttals. (Or just want to say hi.)

Thank you for reading and sharing.