A great conversation. It took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on—because the recognizable voice of Krista Tippet is nowhere to be heard.
Michael Pollan and Katherine May →
Subtraction with Nima King →
What happens when you stop trying so hard and learn to find power through subtraction rather than addition?
Wing Chun training in a Hong Kong living room involves hours of standing still with no sparring, forcing practitioners to confront inner demons and abandon Western goal-seeking mentality.
I’ll tell you, Craig, this was the hardest thing at that time that I had to go through, both physically and mentally, because […] it’s just so difficult, you know, standing still there, not moving. It’s just so difficult! All these inner demons start to come up. You start thinking, and you know, there’s nowhere to hide.
~ Nima King (5:17)
Nima King describes his journey from training as a teenaged bouncer in Sydney, to becoming a student of Grandmaster Chu in Hong Kong, where his expectations of intense sparring and rooftop battles were replaced by hours of standing practice in a small living room. The training focused on empty hand forms rather than fighting techniques, creating a physically and mentally challenging experience where inner demons surfaced and there was nowhere to hide. Grandmaster Chu provided hands-on guidance through tactile cues, manipulating posture and stance to help students release tension points gradually rather than through sudden breakthrough moments. The practice required abandoning the Western mindset of conceptualization and goal-seeking in favor of embodied experience, with Nima’s teacher eventually banning him from asking questions to force this transition.
The conversation explores how martial arts principles apply to modern life, including parenting and professional goals. Nima discusses the challenge of not trying too hard despite his natural inclination toward the mentality of pushing through pain and injury. The practice teaches that letting go of control represents a powerful act rather than laziness or apathy, and that vulnerability challenges conventional masculine ideals of strength through aggression. Grandmaster Chu exemplified this power through humility, always bowing lower and greeting students with warmth rather than displays of dominance. The art becomes about subtraction rather than accumulation, finding ways to achieve goals with less effort by allowing things to happen rather than forcing them.
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Hand-Write. Think Better. →
A method for people who feel overwhelmed to start writing more on paper—which makes everything else easier
I’ve written a guide which shows how to use notebooks for clearer thinking: one notebook, simple practices, no elaborate systems. Written to help you stop re-thinking the same things and close open loops.
https://craigconstantine.gumroad.com/l/hand-write-think-better
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About notebooks →
The problem facing knowledge work in our current moment is not that we’re lacking sufficiently powerful technologies. It’s instead that we’re already distracted by so many digital tools that there’s no time left to really open the throttle on our brains.
Cal Newport, from https://calnewport.com/forget-chatbots-you-need-a-notebook/
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a few months. I recently went back to my lab notebook habit from 30+ years ago. It’s like discovering a bicycle for your mind: It multiplies the power of what my mind is good at. But not too much. (like a car where you’re completely cut off from the world.) Using a notebook I can hold thoughts outside my mind, return to them, and see them.
There’s also the magic that happens when you hold onto a thought long enough to write it down. That’s much longer than we usually hold on to any thought.
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Stay in the tension →
I’m a little behind :) this episode of The Creatively Engaging is from 4 years ago, but is worth listening to.
About halfway through Anna and Monika start talking about what it was like to play the specific piece of music. There’s an interesting discussion about staying in the tension of being out of perfect timing… which all struck me as related to doing work as a creative in general.
@brucedevereux was also on Podtalk back at, https://forum.podcaster.community/t/persistence-with-bruce-devereux/540
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Adopting new podcasting standards →
I saw this the other day (via https://podnews.net/ ). A process for adopting new podcast standards…
https://podstandards.org/2025/10/21/a-process-for-adopting-new-podcast-standards/
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Good Tape” magazine? →
I saw this magazine a year (or more?) ago and seriously considered subscribing.
Has anyone read any of them?
Recent PodNews post has discount subscription pricing (and more details)…
https://podnews.net/press-release/good-tape-threat
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Temenos? What’s that? →
Me, the other day after hearing a brief mention of a new-to-me-word on a podcast: “Is there a Greek work, something like (sounds like) tem-in-oss, that has to do with a special protected place of healing, particularly out in nature?”
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You’re likely thinking of temenos (τέμενος), pronounced roughly “TEM-eh-nos.”
In ancient Greek, a temenos was a sacred precinct or sanctuary—a piece of land marked off and dedicated to a god or gods. These were often places of worship and healing, particularly sanctuaries dedicated to Asclepius (the god of medicine), where people would go for ritual healing practices.
The term literally means “a piece of land cut off” (from the verb τέμνω, “to cut”). These sacred spaces were set apart from ordinary use, often located in natural settings like groves or near springs, and served as protected places for religious activities, healing rituals, and refuge.
In Jungian psychology, Carl Jung later adopted “temenos” to describe a protected psychological space for inner work and transformation—which connects nicely to the original sense of a sacred, healing precinct.
Worth a listen →
Tune in to this Bullseye episode…
So much yak shaving even this post →
So I was off talking about something, which was in fact a classic example of yak shaving. The person I was talking with is intimately familiar with the term. But in case you are not…
me: There was an old—sesame street maybe?—tv episode from the 70s or early 80s with a song, “There’s a hole in the bucket, Dear Liza, Dear Liza…” that describes that sort of recursion. Decades earlier than yak shaving.
You’re absolutely right! “There’s a Hole in the Bucket” is actually much older than that—it’s a traditional folk song that dates back to at least the 1700s in Germany (as “Lieder von der Zithermädchen”). The English version became popular in the 1800s.
The song became widely known in America in 1961 when Harry Belafonte and Odessa Turner recorded it, and yes, it was performed on various children’s shows including Sesame Street in later years.
The song is the perfect example of circular dependency/yak shaving! The structure is that Henry needs to fix the bucket, but to do that he needs to sharpen the axe, but to sharpen the axe he needs to wet the stone, but to wet the stone he needs water, but to get water he needs… the bucket. It’s an endless loop of prerequisites that circles back to the original problem.
So you’re totally right—this concept of getting stuck in recursive task dependencies has been around in folk culture for centuries! The MIT folks just gave it a modern, absurdist name with “yak shaving.” The bucket song might be one of the earliest comedic explorations of dependency hell.
It’s funny how the same human experience—whether it’s 18th century peasants or 21st century sysadmins—keeps rediscovering this frustrating pattern and finding ways to laugh about it.
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