Episode 81: Hanging Doors and Rubik's Cubes

Transcript

this may be short although it's like the curse right every time i've ever started a meeting
with this might be short that's like the longest meeting of the day i've learned to do two things
recently within the last two to three months maybe just two months i'm not sure probably
i can't remember if this started in august or september but anyway in the recent past here
two things i've never done before i learned to solve a rubik's cube and i learned to hang a door
now i'm going to qualify both these things a little bit um and start with the door the door
i didn't pull the whole uh door frame out and actually do a full door frame swap that is still
on my bucket list i suppose i just haven't had to i haven't come across the occasion where i needed
to do that in this case you know i live in a little bit of an older house not turn of the century or
anything but but you know 60s and so the door sizes have changed since then and all the doors in this
house were pretty cheap and looking pretty rough and old a lot of them were cut on one side or the other
and cut unevenly and whatever so i took it upon myself that i wanted to swap a couple doors a few
things come along with swapping a door even if you're not swapping the whole frame in some ways
i would i suspect that a contractor who does this stuff every day would probably find it easier to
swap the full door in frame than actually retrofit a new just you know door part of the door
into an existing frame because door sizes change over time so if you're trying to take a new door
from like a home depot and fit it into an existing frame you have some shaving to do usually and it's
not an exact science especially if the door you're taking off has been chopped and cut and splintered and
broken over the years and might have different hinge patterns than we're used to on modern doors and
whatever else but i did it i swapped two doors i had to shave i have also uh learned in the process to
use um a tool which i now wish i had had for decades um which is a uh you know an electric hand planer
if you ever find yourself having to smooth out you know warped wood or make very small sliver
cuts on things and you're finding it annoying and difficult to always be using either a table saw
or a circular saw try getting one of these you know dewalt electric hand planers this thing was
awesome i've done a lot of house renovation type of work throughout my life i mean i was never i never
did it well i guess i did it briefly professionally but i barely count that but i've done a lot of it
over you know course of my life i like doing that kind of work but for whatever reason i had just never
come across the occasion or the need or whatever to replace a door and so it came up and i figured it
out i'm staring at one of them now as i record i did i i i am really bad with a wood chisel
so the hinges are like the hinge cutouts um i might have to get a uh like a jig
next time uh they're a little jagged but unless you're looking for it i don't think you'd ever
know i bet a little silicone would take care of that i also learned to solve a rubik's cube
i've actually learned to solve a rubik's cube uh at least two different ways maybe three depending
on how you count them when i was a kid i had a i had i had a rubik's cube like an old you know an
old style one regular one uh that got scrambled along the way and i never was able to figure out
how to how to get back to normal now i'd never sat down and spent tons of time on it but you know i
definitely never either way whether you know i didn't spend enough time on it or was too complicated
or i was too young or whatever you know never figured that out now you know with the age of
the internet of course you can look up how to do this stuff and that was a really interesting
experience you know there's this whole not just how to solve a rubik's cube but this whole like
speed cubing culture where there's competitions around it and how fast can you do it and all this
kind of stuff i am not anywhere near a competition but i i figured out how to solve a rubik's cube both
using the very beginner method and then sort of the offshoot of the beginner method but still a pretty
beginner-y method and then uh using what they call the beginner cfop method i have not yet moved on to
the more advanced levels of cfop but the beginner one i figured you know i learned that and it's
really fun i found it oddly rewarding it's like a very it's kind of like a much more productive
fidget spinner because you are using your brain your memory at least when you're learning it you're
memorizing things after a while your muscle memory does start to kind of take over but there are a lot
things to remember and memorize that even the very first you know learning sort of the beginner method
is it's just a different way to think about how things work and i do believe and i don't have any
research to back this up but i do believe that it probably exercises some spatial part of your brain
it probably also helps with things like um hand coordination right but this was something that you
know i'll i never forgot about my scrambled rubik's cube as a kid i never figured out how to solve that
damn thing and you know here i am many several decades later and now i could go back and do that
i'm sure the toy is long gone but if it ever popped up again i could solve that cube
i bring these items up because you never know well the first thing is any day week month or year
but particularly day or week any day or week that you learn something new is probably a pretty good week
i don't necessarily in this case i don't mean this in the kind of is pejorative the right word
the kind of uh the the the silly way right where people you know someone hears a random factoid they're
like up you learn something new every day that's not quite what i mean what i mean is when you are
actively working to figure something out and you gain a new however you want to think about it life
skill or hobby skill or just something you've always wanted to do or whatever but it has some
it's consequential at least to you any day or week you do something like that is probably a pretty good
day or week and if you flip that around on itself it would stand to reason that if you want to have a
good day or week a pretty good path to that is to actively try to figure something out that's new to
you the other reason i bring this up
is because it's always worth keeping in the back of your head that when you meet someone new or you
maybe someone not new there's someone you've known for a while you don't know what they might be really
into at that moment you don't know what kind of hidden things about them that you just never thought
to ask and this plays into and i picked this up from uh merlin man he had an episode of podcast at
some point and he was ranting a little bit about what he was trying to make a concerted effort that when
he met someone new not to ask the basics and what are the basics right like like hi how are you is
probably fine but then not to just immediately go into what do you do for a living do you have kids
where are you located like the basics right the easy knee-jerk ones and he was trying to make a
more concerted effort to ask questions that maybe got to some more interesting conversation and one of
the ones that he posed was he was trying to ask people hey what are you really excited about right
now and that always stuck with me and i i i'm not the best at doing this partly because i probably
don't meet a lot of new people but beyond that you know it is easier especially if you you know
it's just a casual kind of thing it is so much easier to just be like oh what do you do
but every time i do that i try to think to myself oh could i ask a different question instead
by the way i'm also terrible at small talk but i think it would be interesting to run into someone
and you're like oh you know what are you really excited about right now and they're like you know
i just learned how to hang a door and that was really cool and let me tell you about the things
that i learned about hanging a door or hey i just learned to solve a rubik's cube i can do it
my best time is 58 seconds that's really really slow by the standard of someone who's good at this
stuff but you know what for me it's pretty good i don't know what are you really into right now what
are you excited about right now what's the last thing you learned that was like really interesting
maybe something that you you always wanted to learn and you just did or the next time you meet
someone maybe think about that you know think about asking them instead what are you really excited
about what have you done lately i think there's some more interesting questions to get to get
through to to to real conversation instead of just you know what do you do for a living
or how's the wife and kids there's other interests probably more interesting interests