Bookworm Transcripts

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You like my new glasses, Mike?

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They look great.

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You have completed the nerd look now.

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It's totally true.

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It's totally true.

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For those who can't see me at the moment, go check my Instagram.

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There's a picture of me with them on.

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My wife picked these up for me for Christmas.

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So I have now jumped into the world of computer glasses

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and have a set of Felix Grace.

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So no more blue light in the ice.

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That's the theory, right?

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That's how this works.

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Nice.

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I've never heard of that company before.

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So they are specifically blue light glasses.

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All right.

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Our friend of the show, Josh,

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I have seen his and I'm a fan.

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You know, I've worn him for a few days now.

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And I can't say I've had any like groundbreaking changes

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as a result of wearing them,

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but I know that my eyes don't seem to be straining as much,

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which makes me wonder if that was part of some of my headache,

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migraine issues that I've had in the past.

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Just curious.

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Yeah, could be.

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But yours are blue light, right?

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I don't believe so.

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These are Warby Parkers.

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And I paid for the reflective coatings,

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but I did not pay for the blue light filtering.

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I do not think.

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That's right.

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I was thinking you did something with that,

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but maybe do you use like the, was it flux

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or something along those lines?

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Oh, yeah.

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Love flux.

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Yep.

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Although I've been doing a pretty good job of

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not using my computer at night.

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So I don't see it active all that often.

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I don't.

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I regularly use my computer before the girls go to bed.

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Thus the glasses.

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Gotta love it.

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Follow up.

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I don't have any to report on,

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which means it's up to you, sir.

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We got.

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I didn't take a stand for anything.

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Happy New Year.

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That's not saying a stand.

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Not entirely true, probably.

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But I have basically been off the grid

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since publishing the last episode.

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I scrambled to get that one out the door

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on Christmas Day,

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and then basically didn't do anything

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until we record this on New Year's Day.

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So I haven't had a ton of opportunity

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to do that sort of thing.

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I've been thinking about this.

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And I, this isn't exactly the spirit of the action item,

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but one of the things I've been thinking about

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is this whole concept of hustle.

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Because there's a lot of anti-hustle messages

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in the productivity space right now,

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which I agree with the spirit of those.

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I know that the term hustle is typically associated

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with somebody like Gary Vee.

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And that's not what I aspire to be.

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But also I wrote a book called Thou shalt hustle.

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Sure. I'm in the process of updating that to a 2.0,

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and not just a 2.0, it's going to be significantly expanded.

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I basically developed a whole bunch of mental models

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and things like that since I put that out.

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I want to make it something I'm proud of.

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And I am working on that,

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and I've been thinking about do I just give up on that title,

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or do I double down on it?

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Sure.

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And I feel like if I were to give up on it,

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that would be in some way kind of the taking a stand against something,

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saying I don't want to be associated with hustle anymore,

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but that's not how I define hustle anyways.

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So I could lose a bunch of people who see the word hustle in the title

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and say, well, that's not really appealing to me.

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But I think I've kind of made my piece with

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I'm just going to own this term and stand for what I think it really means.

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Not getting up at 5am, staying up till 2am hustle then.

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Yep.

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People associate with some people on the internet.

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And I know I'm never going to win the overall war for redefining that term,

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but I think it's okay.

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And so this action item, even though it was not at all what I was talking about,

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that's kind of the outcome from it.

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Sure.

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Yeah.

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If that makes any sense whatsoever, but my brain works in mysterious ways.

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Well, I know that like there's been a lot of folks talking about hustle online lately.

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I don't know why that is.

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I don't know what has caused that.

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But the thing that I've noticed is the people who are bemoaning hustle and saying,

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you shouldn't do it or the ones who went through it and have come out

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successful on the other side.

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That's true.

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Yeah.

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So it's interesting to me that they'll tell you, this is not the way to do it.

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But they can only say that because they did it and had success as a result of it.

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So I struggle with that particular piece.

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I think I would agree that you don't want to be up till 2 a.m.

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working on something up at 5 a.m. to start working on it again.

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Like that I wouldn't agree with, but I do hustle a lot.

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When we were talking before we hit record, like I'm or maybe it was after I've been up,

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you know, working on a computer till nine o'clock and then going to bed at 9.15, 9.20.

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So like that messes with you a little bit when you're on a computer doing work at that time.

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So I'm aware of that.

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It's just a sacrifice I'm willing to make right now.

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So I don't know.

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Yeah.

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I think the thing is that like if you listen to Gary V, the predominant message that he's

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saying, and I think Jaco kind of ventures into this territory too, is like, just shut up and do the work.

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And the problem with that is that if all you do is work, you can bring yourself out and there's

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no guarantee that just doing the work will get you where you want to go anyways.

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It's more important to be effective than it is to be efficient.

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And the number of widgets cranked does not have a direct correlation to the quality of life improved.

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Yeah.

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So I get, you know, people's resistance to it and I don't think you have to

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sell your soul in order to get any sort of level of comfort in designing a life that you want to live.

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But yeah, I don't know.

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Maybe when I update that book, we'll cover it up a book where we can unpack my how I define it and stuff like that.

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Sure.

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I don't know. I follow Gary V on a number of platforms and

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I hesitate to tell people to follow him because he is so far over the top.

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But I've noticed that if you follow him and listen to what he says for an extended amount of time,

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you'll pick up a little little subtleties from him.

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There's nuance there. Yep.

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Yeah.

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And it seems pretty common that people will say like, well, how do I, how do I get started and all this stuff?

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He's like, just do the work, like show up, do your thing.

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Yeah.

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And the more like one of the subtleties is you could burn the candle on both ends.

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He does in so many ways.

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And yet he will like the subtle pieces that you'll get out what you put in

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is the concept there.

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So if you want to get things up and running quickly, yeah, go for it.

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If you're willing to, you know, maybe build a more sustainable lifestyle that's going to take a

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little bit longer to get things up and going just because you're not pushing, pushing, pushing,

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like what Gary V does. So I don't know.

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I think if you were to sit down and talk to Gary V, he would say the stuff that people think about,

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the casual observers opinion of Gary V, he would say, no, that's not right.

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That's not really what I mean.

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Right.

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But also, I mean, he's kind of wired that way.

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Yes.

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You should go listen to the 10% happier podcast episode that he's on.

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It did.

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Yep.

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That is hilarious.

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It's basically them trying to, it's Dan and a meditation expert trying to get him to shut

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up long enough to lead him in like a three minute meditation.

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Right.

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And he just won't go along with it.

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Not like he says he's going to, but he's just 100 miles an hour.

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And at the end, he's like, yeah, that was powerful.

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It didn't do anything for me, but I can see how this could be.

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It's so true.

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Because they take, if you listen to it, there's like 12, 15 minutes of them trying to start

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the meditation.

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Yep.

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Yep.

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And he's just like trying to, like, so what do I, you know, and how do I, and whenever that's,

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and then, you know, oh, yeah.

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And this reminds me of this and he's just nonstop.

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Oh, Gary V.

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Yeah.

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How do we get on this?

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My action item.

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Oh, yeah.

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Hustle.

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Yeah.

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I've also one other thought related to this.

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I've been thinking about the whole faith-based productivity thing.

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And I've got some stuff percolating that I want to start publishing shortly on, like,

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the whole idea of faith and kind of the contrasting idea of fear.

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And so faith-based productivity, anybody who follows me knows who I am and what I stand for,

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and how my Christian faith is a big part of who I am and what I do.

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But as I am thinking about these two terms, I actually heard them defined by somebody,

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and it's the same definition.

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They defined fear as the belief that what you can't see is going to come to pass and faith as the

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believing what you can't see is going to come to pass, whereas faith is a positive and fear is a

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negative.

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And I like that a lot.

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And so I just been thinking about that and like, what does that practically look like?

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How does that influence your day to day if you are acting in faith or acting in fear?

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And the real takeaway from this, I think, again, more to come in the blog posts and the newsletters.

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But if you are being limited by fear, you're not actually that far off.

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You just have to have a little bit of a perspective change.

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And the thing that was negatively motivating you to do nothing can positively motivate you

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to do something that you are passionate about, that you care about going back to like Seth

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Godin in the practice and all that stuff.

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So stay tuned.

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We'll do.

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I think I'm on that newsletter already.

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Yeah, I haven't sent anything yet.

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I've got to finish this newsletter ninja book, but I've gotten some pretty decent ideas about this.

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Sure.

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And I want to make sure that the newsletter itself is entertaining and adding value and not just

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something like a lot of people view a newsletter as like a button that you pushed when you launch

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something to get money.

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Right.

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I don't want it to be that.

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It's so true.

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I want it to be something, you know, I mentioned, I think last episode, one of my words for 2021

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is community.

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I view this as like a big piece of the community building that I want to be doing.

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And I just want to make sure that I wrap my head around it.

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And I'm doing it the right way.

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And I'm doing it in a way that like I'm committed to and is sustainable kind of like what I've

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done with the sermon sketch notes.

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I don't want it to be something that like I try and then I can't quite figure it out.

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So I gave up on it.

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I did that last time.

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Sure.

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Yeah.

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No, it makes sense.

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It does.

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It does.

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Well, shall we, shall we jump in here today?

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Let's do it.

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So today's book is lead yourself first.

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Inspiring leadership through solitude by Raymond Kethledge.

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Also, Michael Erwin is on this as well.

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And I will say this was, I think exactly what I thought I was getting into.

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In that I fully expected a handful of stories and an explanation of how solitude can help

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you understand how to be a good leader.

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And that is exactly what I got.

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Plus a little bonus at the end, which I'm very grateful for.

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And we will talk about a little bit when we get there.

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Yeah.

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What were your first impressions on this, Mike?

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This is not exactly what I had anticipated, but I didn't pick the book either.

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The first experience with this was when I opened the Amazon package and held it in my hands.

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I like the approach.

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There's some really great stories in here.

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There is not much I thought on the idea of practicing solitude until the very end.

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He's got some practical stuff, but I don't know.

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I feel like along the way there was opportunity to interspers some of that.

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But overall, it's a really cool book.

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And some of these stories I had heard versions of these before, but never

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anything close to the level of detail that they gave for some of these famous people.

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And so that made this really, really entertaining and really fun to read.

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It inspires me that when I write a book, I want to include a bunch of really cool stories like this.

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I know that that's going to take a ton of research in order to

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deliver anything close to the quality of what they did in this book.

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But then again, this is the very best that I can recall storytelling that I have ever seen.

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And there's a lot of it.

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Yep.

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Because there's...

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Well, I think I would say this entire book is just stories.

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Pretty much.

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Yeah.

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There's not much between it.

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So it's broken up into four parts.

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We don't have a three part book this time, Mike.

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We do not.

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So it's a four-parter.

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Plus a fifth.

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Plus a fifth, like an ending of sorts.

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And I really appreciated that ending solo chapter.

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It's only eight pages.

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But I remember, I listened to an interview at one point by Johnny Cuff.

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He was talking about some of the direction that Dave Ramsey gave him when he was writing his first

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book.

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I don't even remember what the first book was.

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Start, maybe?

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And Dave Ramsey told him that if you're going to write a motivational book, make sure you have

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practical how-to's that come with it.

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That way people can take that motivation and actually do something.

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And I'm trying to remember what the phrase was.

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It was motivation without application is useless.

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It was something like that.

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A phrase that's similar to that.

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But it was encouraging Johnny Cuff to put an application aspect to his book at the end of the

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book after he had motivated people to do something.

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And that way they're not just left out trying to figure out what to do.

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That's exactly what he does here, where there's a massive amount of motivation to it.

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But then there's eight pages at the end where there's some form of application.

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I wouldn't say it's very practical, but it's like a philosophical, here's the concepts that you need

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to try to put in place.

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And we'll get to that and what those actually are when we get towards the end of this.

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But the four parts are clarity, creativity, emotional balance, and moral courage.

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It doesn't actually name the parts.

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This is the name of the first chapter within those parts.

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That was weird, I thought.

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Yeah, it was a little bit strange.

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It made sense, I think, once you got into it, because what was it?

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Two between two and three chapters behind each of those, explaining various aspects or specific

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stories about that specific concept.

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So I think structure-wise it made sense, but it was weird to not name the parts.

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It's just part one, two, three, four.

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Yes.

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And I don't know why they did that.

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I mean, there's these four different parts which they could have combined into some sort of formula,

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but they didn't.

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And because they didn't, it's kind of weird that part one, for example, which is titled

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clarity, goes into the chapter one on clarity.

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Oh, by the way, I did actually find in the first introduction part, he mentions these four different

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pieces and how those were going to be essentially the names of the four parts.

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So my mind-note file actually says like part one clarity, chapter one clarity,

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which is kind of goofy.

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The table of contents you're correct does not actually list those things.

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But essentially that's what he's doing is he's breaking these down into the individual

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components.

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But if you skip the introduction, you wouldn't even know that's the approach they're taking,

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which is kind of puzzling. Why would you not, I don't know, that seems very counter to a lot of

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the productivity type books that we read.

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I think me specifically, I like to think in terms of systems, but I think a lot of productivity

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authors, that's what they sell is these dots that we've heard about before packaged into a

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little bit different way of thinking about them that they brand as their own system.

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It feels like just from a marketing perspective, there's an opportunity that was missed here.

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But I really don't understand it from a reader's perspective either because if you skip the

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introduction, this is just kind of confusing at the beginning.

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Yeah, I could see that. And I will say like as I was going through this, one of the things that

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I struggled with was connecting things. I kept forgetting that the core was about solitude.

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And some of that's because he's so good at telling stories.

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Like, okay, let's hear about Dwight Eisenhower.

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Awesome. Oh, right. Why are we going down this path again?

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I struggled with that somewhat. He always ties it together at the end, but it's hard to see

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because some of the stories are so elaborate and so long that you sometimes disconnect what

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what the purpose of it was. So if I've got a critique on that particular format, that would be it.

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But on that note, I mean, as I was taking notes here, I found myself looking for that

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common thread throughout because it's my node file. And this is the part on clarity. So

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what does this section in chapter three on the stillness of intuition have to do with clarity?

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And he's such a good storyteller. It feels a lot of times like he loses the plot, you know,

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because he's so enamored with some of the details that he's sharing. Sure. And some of the times I'm

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going through this story and I'm like, well, that's cool detail, but I don't want to write that down.

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That's cool detail. I don't want to write that down. And then I'm like, okay, so how long has it been

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since I wrote something down? Like, where are we? I need a map. Yes. Yes. And I feel like, again,

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that's easily provided if we have that system at the beginning. I hate the word system to being

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used here because I don't think it really is a system, but really just bringing us back, re-centering

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us on this is the core message. Like that part is suspiciously absent. And I feel like the book

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suffers a little bit because of that. Yeah, I think that's fair. That is fair.

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Let's dive into these points. But before we can do that, I feel like we have to talk about

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solitude itself, which he doesn't do. Exactly. Which I thought was interesting.

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Because the first four parts here are talking about the results of solitude. Now, granted,

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as he tells the stories, there are various types of solitude that are discussed. And

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then you get to see the results of that solitude. So you kind of pick up what solitude is as you go

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through it. But I feel like for the sake of this conversation, it's not going to make sense

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unless we talk about it point blank, which I didn't put in the outline. And I realize that only just

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now because Joe ADD. Well, I would say you won't pick it up as you go because I didn't realize

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until chapter 10 when he's talking about Doug Kona, the former CEO of Campbell Soups,

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how he would reflect every morning and he had those different areas. Sounds a lot like the wheel

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of life. And then they mentioned every couple of months he does a deeper dive and I'm like,

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oh, that's a personal retreat. Doug, solitude, personal retreat. And then at that point,

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I'm like, oh, I should go back to the beginning and reread this.

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Sure. So chapter 10 is when I made that connection. And I like to think that I'm

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a little bit smarter than the average bear. Like, I feel there didn't need to be that long before

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that light bulb went on in my head, but they just didn't really make it clear at the beginning what

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they were going to be doing, you know, basic marketing. They tell you, say what you're going to tell

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them, tell them, then tell them what you told them sort of a thing. Yep. There's absolutely none of

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that in here. Right. Right. Which at the same time, I have to say that I appreciate to a degree.

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I don't know. I haven't really decided quite yet how this fits into the spectrum because

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I also appreciate books that assume a base knowledge because they don't spell everything out for me

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because sometimes that tell me what you're going to tell me, tell me and then tell me what you told

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me that whole concept that drives me up a wall sometimes. I'm not a third grader. I know they

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tell you to write at a third grade level or a second grade level, but I hate it. I hate reading

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it whenever they do that. Like, make me feel like I'm an intelligent person. You don't have to speak

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to me like I'm a child. But do tell us why you're telling us. Correct. You're telling us. Like,

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what's the point of these stories other than they're fun to listen to? Yep. So there's there

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needs to be a more legitimate chapter zero here, I think, because like, and tell me what your

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perception of solitude was. So this is so for me, what I picked up going through this is there's a

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whole variety of versions of this. Some of those can be going for walks on your own,

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going on something like a personal retreat, which would be multiple days.

00:22:59

Meditation is brought up, you know, a simple 10, 15 minutes journaling. Yep. Journaling is in

00:23:06

there. Like there's there's a bunch of these. You're taking time by yourself in silence. That

00:23:12

seems to be the overarching concept here is time by yourself in silence. And that time frame can

00:23:19

vary from five minutes to months. So it really depends on the level of clarity and the level of

00:23:29

well, I'm jumping into part one there, but it depends on the level of difficulty that you're trying

00:23:35

to overcome will dictate the type of solitude and the length of solitude that you've got to have.

00:23:42

I feel like most of the stories that he shares, especially in the initial chapters in the

00:23:51

sections, where he's not highlighting a historical figure per se. Those are basically telling what

00:24:00

other people do in order to practice this undefined solitude. So they're different

00:24:08

applications of the concept of solitude. But again, like we don't have an anchor of this is what you

00:24:14

are going for. It's basically just, yeah, I was going through a rough patch and this is the thing

00:24:20

that kept me sane. And they tell a whole bunch of different ways of doing that transcendental

00:24:24

meditation, running marathons, yada, yada, everything that you have ever heard of. You'll hear somebody

00:24:30

who has done that successfully. But the problem with that approach is that unless you've

00:24:35

tinkered with this and experimented on yourself, you don't know which one of those could be the

00:24:41

thing that will work for you. And there's no real step by step on how to apply any of them.

00:24:49

Which is fine. I mean, that's probably not what they were going for. But I could see if you are

00:24:56

coming to this book, not having read the 109 that we have before this, you're like, oh, that's an

00:25:03

interesting concept. I never heard of that before. But I still don't know what I can do right now

00:25:08

in order to move me in that direction. I just know what this other person did. And again, like

00:25:19

maybe it's just a stylistic preference. I don't really like that though. I felt like I was kind

00:25:27

of left hanging on some of this stuff. And so I think for a newbie coming to this, you're definitely

00:25:32

going to feel left hanging. And I feel like that's a little bit of a it's the author's responsibility

00:25:39

to answer the questions that will arise from the reader as they engage with their material.

00:25:45

I feel like this is kind of like having a conversation and not caring what the other

00:25:51

person is going to say, just moving on with what you want to say.

00:25:54

There's one point I want to contradict you with or argue with you on in that what we're talking

00:26:03

about here is he's not giving us the foundation of what is solitude, right? Like you have anchored us.

00:26:11

But if you think about the stories and what the results of solitude are, part of me wonders if

00:26:21

the intention here is that you are inspired enough to try solitude as you're reading this

00:26:27

in order to understand it more. Because this first step, this first part on clarity, there's a lot

00:26:36

of stories in there where people took time to themselves in order to understand a situation more.

00:26:41

Like that's a lot of what that part is about is how do I get clarity on what's going on,

00:26:47

whether it's an analytical decision or I don't even know. So business decision, like there's so

00:26:52

many things trying to make a decision. Like there's a lot of clear thinking and such that

00:26:59

you're trying to find by getting away and being on your own. If you apply that to the book itself,

00:27:06

I wonder if because I didn't. So I can't tell you the results of that. But if we had, I wonder what

00:27:12

what the outcome of that would have been would we have had that same feeling? Or would it

00:27:20

be putting the book into practice as you read the book? I don't know. Just an interesting concept

00:27:26

I've been mulling over. My question for you is what is this book about?

00:27:34

It's fair. It's a fair question. Because I would argue that this book is actually about leadership.

00:27:41

It is not about solitude. It is about leadership. Solitude is the vehicle that gets you to the

00:27:49

leadership, the effective leadership that you, what's the first word? Lead yourself first.

00:27:55

So if that is the case, they should explain to us what we're shooting for with this solitude.

00:28:04

Yeah, that's fair. But again, you have a good point. It's more about leadership, which is valid.

00:28:10

I think maybe that's a misfire, maybe on my part, of focusing on the solitude side of it.

00:28:19

When the bulk of the book is about leadership, and it is the first word in the title,

00:28:24

and it's inspiring leadership through solitude. So leadership is the forefront. I guess if you

00:28:29

follow those two, but solitude is the method. So I focus on the method.

00:28:34

Exactly. So it's an interesting point.

00:28:37

Yeah. I mean, the four components here, this is really, we've got clarity, we've got creativity,

00:28:47

we've got emotional balance, and we've got moral courage. Really, those are defining what effective

00:28:54

leadership looks like. Those aren't components of solitude. But solitude is directly tied to the

00:29:02

quality of those four different characteristics. So that's the part where I think we need a little

00:29:10

bit more to go off of. Sure. But I don't know, maybe we should just get into the different sections

00:29:17

here and maybe we'll, maybe my concerns about the lack of defining solitude will be alleviated

00:29:23

as we talk through this. Sure. Yeah. Well, the first part is about clarity.

00:29:27

I kind of alluded to that already. And I would say, this is of the four parts, I feel like this is

00:29:37

exactly the right one to start with. Primarily because whenever people think about going off on

00:29:43

their own, it's to clear their head. Like that's probably the number one reason people would do

00:29:49

that. Myself included, like I use my commute to and from my day job in silence to just

00:29:58

create a clean transition between the different modes of action that I'm engaging in. And

00:30:06

it becomes a very clean way for me to, again, shift my mindset from one set to the other. But

00:30:15

I don't do that very well if I've got a podcast playing in the car or music or I don't do well

00:30:22

when I have that I've been in tune with that enough to know that if I sit in silence

00:30:28

for that 10 minutes, it makes a huge difference on both sides morning and evening. So

00:30:36

having that time to clear your head, taking that space, you know, in my case, that would be 10

00:30:41

minutes a couple times a day that I know I can count on. But I know that there are other benefits

00:30:47

that would come from doing the same at other intervals, like a whole day or a weekend, like

00:30:54

your personal retreat thing. So having more time would in retrospect give you more clarity for

00:31:02

bigger things as well. Yep, absolutely. And what's interesting about this section is that

00:31:11

there is a couple different spotlights for lack of a better term. One on chapter two

00:31:17

on analytical clarity, where they talk about Dwight Eisenhower. And then chapter three,

00:31:23

they talk about Jane Goodall and that talks more about intuition. Backing up a little bit,

00:31:27

chapter one is titled clarity. And they use a phrase here. They say leadership is not letting

00:31:36

the immediate take precedence over the important. That sounds a lot like important versus urgent.

00:31:43

That's what I thought too. Yield Eisenhower matrix. So very appropriate, I think, going into

00:31:50

chapter two, talking about Dwight Eisenhower, although they never actually talk about that matrix

00:31:55

specifically. They do talk in that section about how Dwight Eisenhower had to make some

00:32:01

really tough decisions. And in order to make them effectively, he would basically

00:32:07

embrace solitude as much as he could. They use a lot of really cool personal examples,

00:32:14

letters that he was writing to his wife, where he says, even when I think I have a couple of hours

00:32:19

to myself, something always happens to upset my plans. Yeah, stuff like that. But the thing I

00:32:26

found interesting about Dwight Eisenhower specifically, because this is analytical clarity, which they

00:32:30

make the point that this is the hardest kind to get. He had a habit of thinking by writing.

00:32:36

Does that remind you of anything? The artist way. Yeah, that was the first one that came to mind.

00:32:41

Morning pages, exactly. Now, I think I have given up entirely on the practice of morning pages.

00:32:49

Oh, I gave up on that one a long time ago. I do not have the time for that. Yeah,

00:32:54

especially anymore when I've been focusing more on sleeping, save last night. But, you know,

00:33:00

focusing more on sleep, by getting up in the morning, trying to do my Bible reading, trying to,

00:33:05

you know, do a morning kickoff on my bullet journal, getting breakfast for the kids, all the things.

00:33:09

I don't have time. I don't like it takes 30 minutes or more sometimes to do that. It's like,

00:33:15

I it's just not that important. Yeah, but I think there is a connection to be made there.

00:33:21

And essentially, that's what Dwight Eisenhower is doing. Although he's not doing it maybe in the

00:33:26

morning. He's doing it whenever he can find some some time. And so there is, I think,

00:33:32

a little bit of an incentive there for me to start trying to think through things by writing.

00:33:38

I don't know exactly what that's going to look like for me yet. I don't have an action item

00:33:44

associated with that specifically. But that's an example of the kind of thing we were just

00:33:48

talking about where it's like, okay, there's a real connection here between him writing to

00:33:52

untangle his thoughts. Julia Cameron is the artist way, which I'm sure they're familiar with. And

00:33:57

they just kind of leave us hanging of like, this is what Dwight Eisenhower did. He wrote all these

00:34:00

letters. Yeah. I don't want to write letters. So how do I apply this? If I hadn't read the artist

00:34:06

way, I have no idea what morning pages are. Like, where do I even begin with this? Right,

00:34:10

right. You know, and it'd be really easy to say, Oh, in the artist way, Julia Cameron says,

00:34:14

just stream of conscious writing. So you sit down and you write whatever comes to your mind,

00:34:18

and that's a wave on tangling things. Boom, done. You know, a sentence or two. And now we've got

00:34:22

something solid that we can build off of. But yeah, there were there were a couple things

00:34:28

that I noticed that we're overarching across the book. Number one, they have a fascination with

00:34:33

the Civil War. Yes, they do. I'm okay with that. I'm fine with that. But they just,

00:34:40

there's an inordinate amount of stories from that period. The second is that a lot of people from

00:34:48

that time period processed and thought on paper, which we don't do. We do it sometimes we do it

00:34:55

through keyboards, but we don't do that on paper very often. Yep. This is where I, of course,

00:35:01

gravitate towards that as somebody who runs a membership site called analog Joe. So,

00:35:08

and that's part of what we're going to we're getting ready to talk about. Let's see, as this

00:35:11

releases, it's in another this next Wednesday as this releases. We're going to be talking about

00:35:17

like new year stuff and processing your thoughts and reflecting on paper. Like that's what we're

00:35:22

going to talk about exactly. And this was like fueled with the fire for that, because so many

00:35:27

people in here process like you're saying on paper and wrote things out. And that's how they got

00:35:31

their thoughts together. And what how's the phrase go thoughts disentangle themselves over

00:35:36

lips and pencil tips? Like that's there's something to that for sure. This is partly why we have

00:35:42

bookworm. We can process it out loud. So yes, there's a lot of writing. It's like, I don't do that.

00:35:49

I don't. Maybe I should. I don't know. It's it's inspiring to at least maybe try it.

00:35:55

But you know, going back to our point of, you know, what are you supposed to get from these

00:36:00

stories? Some of me wonders if they don't want to set you up for that so that you can gravitate

00:36:06

towards the ones that fit you. Maybe. Sure. I would love for them to just say that it would take

00:36:13

three sentences and you'd be done. But it is it is interesting. So yeah, that's one of them that

00:36:19

stuck out to me and like, okay, should I be doing this? I'm probably not going to take the time for

00:36:23

it, but probably should. Well, the other interesting thing about this, I think, is you write a lot of

00:36:28

people that they focused on obviously did this paper pen. But 2020 was the the year of the Zettel

00:36:37

Caston. Yeah. And it's an understatement. Whether you are a room research fan, there it is.

00:36:46

I knew it was coming. Yeah, I was trying to figure out a way to walk around that one, but I couldn't.

00:36:51

So now we've talked about it. I think this is part of the value of applications like

00:36:57

Roman obsidian. And I think we're going to see this more and more in other note taking apps is the

00:37:03

ability to go back and resurface in the appropriate context, things that you had written previously.

00:37:11

Because I think there is value in the stream of conscious writing, getting it out of your head

00:37:18

onto the paper. But also once you've gotten it onto the paper, in this case, digital paper,

00:37:23

being able to see that again and see those things pop up over and over again. I think there is

00:37:28

insight to be had from that too. So like just getting it down is sort of level one. And then

00:37:34

being able to see all of your thoughts on this thing at a time and look at all those dots and

00:37:40

how they connect, that's kind of level two. And that has a lot of benefit to not just this first

00:37:49

section clarity, but also the next one, which we're going to talk about creativity. Before we get

00:37:53

there though, just real briefly, chapter three, I talk about intuition. I think it's worth calling

00:37:58

out here how intuition and analytical clarity are kind of like two different sides of the coin.

00:38:03

And how analytical clarity, this is the one where you get away and you think about things and you

00:38:09

get really focused on the problem you're trying to solve. But intuition actually kind of works

00:38:14

the opposite way. You still need the solitude, you still need to get alone. But instead of having a

00:38:19

focused approach, it's more like the panoramic view. And you see, but sometimes without even

00:38:25

being able to clarify what you're seeing the big picture. And then you're like, yeah, I just

00:38:30

don't feel like this is the right decision to make it. So you do something else instead.

00:38:33

Right. Right. Yes. So let's let's go ahead and step into the creativity side of it. I feel like

00:38:39

this is maybe one that we've heard a lot of in the past. If you can't come up with a solution to

00:38:47

something, go off on your own and it'll come like that. I just summarized three chapters. But the

00:38:53

well, two chapters. Oh, that's right. This one's too. Yeah.

00:38:56

I will say this is one that I use a lot in a very, very small way. But it's very common for me to be

00:39:06

stuck on say a code project. I don't know what the answer is to how to solve that.

00:39:12

But I step away from whatever it is I'm doing, go for a walk, do something else that involves

00:39:18

working with my hands, always by myself. And I come back to it and I almost always have an answer

00:39:24

and can solve whatever it was I was stuck on. That's exactly what we're talking about here.

00:39:30

In that if you are trying to come up with a solution to something that you don't currently

00:39:34

have that solution, implementing some solitude will not always, but in most cases, at least get

00:39:42

you on the path towards a solution. Yeah. Absolutely. And they make the point in chapter four here

00:39:50

that solitude is where we find revelation. That's kind of what you were just talking about.

00:39:53

One other thing from chapter four specifically that I thought was interesting is they talk about

00:40:02

that people try hard to copy what other people do because there is so much information available

00:40:07

to us. I never really thought of this this way. We have mentioned many, many, many times,

00:40:13

steal like an artist by Austin Cleon. You have. I've never read this. So we're going to have to

00:40:19

read it. You should pick that book. But the basic idea there is you don't have to be worried about

00:40:26

ripping somebody off because all those dots you collect, they're going to be synthesized in your

00:40:31

head and they're going to come out as something original anyways. But this kind of completes the

00:40:37

picture for me because it's basically saying that in order for that to happen, you do have to have

00:40:42

the solitude. You will end up just mimicking somebody else if all you're doing is consuming

00:40:50

information. You can get the information and you can spit it back out, but in order for it to

00:40:58

really become something that is authentically you, there needs to be this solitude piece

00:41:05

for the creative process to work. It's not even something like do X, then Y, and you'll get Z.

00:41:14

It's really just get solitude and then your brain will take care of the rest,

00:41:18

which I think is kind of cool. Yeah, it really is. It's absolutely right. How many times have you

00:41:26

heard the stories of people who failed or rejected hundreds or thousands of times before they had a

00:41:32

success? You hear those stories? How many times do we hear that story in the books that we read?

00:41:38

So it's very common. You hear it a lot. I think that plays into this. If I'm consuming RSS feeds

00:41:47

and just scrolling Twitter and scrolling Facebook and all the things, like you're consuming all this,

00:41:51

yes, you have a lot of ideas. You can research things to the nth degree and collect the dots,

00:41:56

that you can then connect later. But you're not going to create an original dot,

00:42:02

per se, unless you're regularly creating and it's when you create the original dot that things

00:42:09

really blow up. Yeah, and you won't even really have the ideas, I would argue, until you have some

00:42:15

built-in solitude. So this is something I've been thinking about because I've been thinking about

00:42:20

like time tracking and the work that I do at the sweet setup. And that time where I'm just

00:42:28

letting my brain connect things, how do I track that time? Is it like research time? I'm not really

00:42:37

researching. And if you have to think of the work that you do through the lens of defining to somebody

00:42:45

what you are working on, how do you say this solitude piece where I was spending four hours

00:42:52

just thinking that's actually part of the process? They're like, well, I don't want to pay you for

00:42:57

that. Yes. Yeah. I struggled with that when I was doing contracting all the time. I figure out

00:43:04

how to solve your problems while I'm mowing the lawn, but you for sure will not be paying me to

00:43:09

mow my lawn. Yeah. I can't bill that time, but that's where I solve your problem. So how do I

00:43:16

incorporate that? Usually it's by upcharging 25%. So like you do something like that to make up for

00:43:24

when you're actually working off hours. So it's messy. It really is. And how do you do that on a

00:43:30

regular basis? You can't go mow your lawn every single day. No, no. But if that's the solitude,

00:43:38

that if that's the place where things click, you should be looking to do that, I would argue

00:43:45

more than once a week. Right. So I've been thinking about that and I don't have any specific answers

00:43:52

yet. But I empathize for people who are in a situation where you're being measured by what you

00:44:02

are able to produce because there's a tendency to be like, Oh, well, you wrote that article. Well,

00:44:07

that took five hours to write that article. But you didn't see the 25 hours of noodling that

00:44:13

needed to happen before the five hour article got written. Right. And I guess as I'm reading this,

00:44:20

I feel less bad about that being my process because it, I'm not weird.

00:44:25

There are more like me. Yeah. But I still don't have anything solid. I'm like, well,

00:44:32

what do I call that time? And how do I incorporate that into my regular time blocking? I'm not quite

00:44:38

sure what to do with that yet. But I recognize that it's an important piece of my creative process

00:44:44

going forward. Yeah. This is actually a big reason I've stepped away from a lot of contracting and

00:44:51

commission work because trying to bill it is such a mess. I get that it can be lucrative. You can

00:44:58

make good money at it. But because I was somewhat forced out of it and now have been trying to

00:45:04

rebuild some things outside of that concept, it's significantly freeing to be able to work on

00:45:14

content. But then it doesn't matter how like, if you can do the recurring passive thing,

00:45:18

because then that doesn't matter. You know, yes, you get paid whenever you kick out content and

00:45:24

such. But you have the freedom to step away, do some solitude, mow the lawn, blow snow. Like,

00:45:34

one of the things that they've tried to get me to offload to somebody else at my day job is my

00:45:41

weekly process of tearing down the stage and rebuilding it for the next week from a sound system

00:45:48

stance. Yeah. And because they don't like paying me to do that because, you know,

00:45:53

any, you know, a high school student could do that. You are absolutely correct. But I want that task.

00:46:00

Because it takes about an hour and a half, maybe a little bit more. It takes a little bit of time

00:46:07

to do that. And as a result of that, I get a lot of clarity on the projects I'm working on because

00:46:14

of it. So yep, I want that time. Don't take it from you. And that hour and a half, I mean,

00:46:23

you have some other stuff that you're maybe getting clarity on too at the same time. So maybe

00:46:27

that's where it gets a little bit sticky. But from a boss's perspective, they're probably thinking,

00:46:32

oh, well, we can get back an hour and a half of Joe's time by removing this task. No, you

00:46:38

probably just stole three hours from Joe because you're not letting him think through the work that

00:46:43

he's doing. Yes. Yeah. You're going to take that task from me and to replace it, I'm going to walk

00:46:50

the building for an hour and a half. Or you're just going to sit down and try to do what you

00:46:55

need to do and you're going to be stuck. Correct. And I'll be stuck for five hours.

00:46:59

I mean, it's a delicate dance, isn't it? I mean, it really is. It is. And I think everybody is

00:47:06

unique in what you need to do and how much time you need to make things click. But I wish there was

00:47:16

a way to just make it simple. Right. Right. This is time spent in this category. And this is how

00:47:25

much benefit I got from it. It's not easy to say, well, this random idea I had that I haven't tested

00:47:31

or done anything with yet. I have no idea how valuable that thing is. So I can't say this is

00:47:37

what you're getting in return for the hours that I spend doing this. Right. Right. So we've got the

00:47:44

two points here, clarity, and then creativity. The third one is emotional balance. And

00:47:50

this one and the next one are a little bit harder to, I guess, quantify the first two are pretty

00:47:58

straightforward. I'm going to go off of my own, get clarity on the specific situations so I can

00:48:02

make a better decision. I can't solve my problem. I'm going to go off and spend some time by myself.

00:48:07

We're doing something else that way I can get some, some better potential solutions for that.

00:48:14

Emotional balance is a little harder to, I guess, quantify in this case because it's, if you have

00:48:23

an extreme emotion, fear is probably a big one or angst or anxiousness. Like those are worries.

00:48:30

Like those are big issues that could be overwhelming. But they're making the argument through these

00:48:38

stories, I would say, that again, being willing to separate from the situation, I think about some

00:48:44

of the worst scenarios where it's very dire, the situation that they're looking at, the general

00:48:52

steps away from it and can, you know, let all the emotion subside and then step back into the

00:49:00

situation with a clear head. That's a lot of what they're talking about here. At least that's

00:49:04

the way I understood it. So again, emotional balance, whenever you've got the overwhelming

00:49:10

emotions, giving yourself time for that solitude can give you a better, you know, it's kind of a

00:49:16

messy line there too between clarity too. Like it can help you get some clear thinking on what's

00:49:21

going on, but they're calling it emotional balance because of the situation that you're

00:49:24

trying to get clear thinking on, it can go either way. Yeah, this one is complicated. They

00:49:31

mentioned in the chapter on emotional balance specifically that the fact that your emotions get

00:49:41

out of whack is not necessarily a bad thing. They mentioned that every leader has their emotional

00:49:46

limits, there's no shame in exceeding them. What distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective

00:49:50

ones is their ability to restore their emotional balance. And that helps them make appropriate

00:49:55

decisions. One of the chapters I talk about here, Abraham Lincoln, General Mead, he's got General

00:50:02

Lee cornered, the Potomac River is flooding, so they can't cross it. The bridge has been blown up.

00:50:10

He's basically a sitting duck if they capture him, the war is over, but they had just fought the

00:50:14

battle of Gettysburg and all his men were burned out. And he was burned out and he's listening,

00:50:21

me inserting details here. He's probably listening to his men being upset about the guys that they

00:50:26

lost. And even though they outnumber at least troops and they can end this thing right now,

00:50:31

they don't recognize the opportunity as before them. Lincoln's like, "Hey, get your butt over there

00:50:36

and finish this." And they wait and they wait and they wait and then they decide to go finally

00:50:42

and they had crossed the river like three hours before. And they lost their chance. They had escaped

00:50:47

to Virginia. And there's a bunch of lessons to be learned from that specifically. The thing there,

00:50:55

I think that they don't really address is that General Mead had he been a more emotionally balanced

00:51:01

leader. Maybe he recognizes the fact that they lost a bunch of men in the battle of Gettysburg,

00:51:07

but quickly is able to write that and say, "I know this is terrible, but we have an opportunity

00:51:13

here, guys. Let's just get this over with." That didn't happen. And then Abraham Lincoln, that's

00:51:19

the one that they focus on. He's really, really upset that this didn't end. And instead of

00:51:26

berating this guy, he writes a letter, puts it in an envelope and says, "Not signed, not sent."

00:51:31

Which that's pretty brilliant, I think. And again, is one of those things where like,

00:51:38

that's a tactic that you could use, but they don't really describe how this might look in modern

00:51:44

day. They're just focused on telling Abraham Lincoln's cool story. But I think this is something

00:51:50

that I used to beat myself up about is the fact that I would get upset about things. And he's

00:51:57

basically saying like, "Well, that's normal. It's just how quickly you bounce back." And I'm thinking

00:52:03

back specifically to a couple of years ago when I found myself getting let go and not knowing what's

00:52:11

going to happen and being pretty upset about the whole situation. Being able to navigate

00:52:20

through that and come out kind of like a better person, that is actually a huge win.

00:52:29

There's a topic in this section called post-traumatic growth, which I had never heard before,

00:52:36

heard of PTSD. And that's obviously the negative application of this trauma. And I'm not negating

00:52:45

that that's a very real thing. But I feel like there's a valuable perspective shift that can happen

00:52:52

here when you recognize that I'm in this trauma. I don't want to be here, but there's an opportunity

00:52:58

to grow because of this. And I can say that I guess because I went through that and it was a pretty

00:53:05

tough financial time for my wife and I. I got pretty depressed about it, to be honest. I don't

00:53:14

really talk about the details of that with really anybody. But I look back at it now and I can realize

00:53:21

that I was not in a great place. But stuff happened and I made it through and like with the whole

00:53:29

COVID-19 thing and the economy. And I don't want to be little the things that have happened. But

00:53:36

the stuff with the economy specifically, I know a lot of people lost their jobs. And I was thinking

00:53:44

about that myself when it all happened is like, well, what's the worst thing that can happen

00:53:50

here from an economic perspective? Specifically, it's like, well, you can lose your job. I'm like,

00:53:54

oh, Ben, they're done that. Is that the worst?

00:53:56

Right. Sounds bad.

00:53:58

Yeah. I got that. Like, what else?

00:54:02

And so that was kind of a point where I recognized that I kind of went through this post-traumatic

00:54:10

growth. And their definition of this post-traumatic growth is when you come out of the experience of

00:54:15

more plastic, gentle, positive person. And I think that in a small way, that has happened to me

00:54:24

because of that specific scenario. And so I think this is a very real thing that I didn't have a

00:54:31

term for before reading this. And I like that section. They also say running is cheaper than

00:54:36

therapy. And I can 100% agree with that.

00:54:39

That is a very valid point. It's way easier to go outside, go for a walk, run through the woods,

00:54:47

hiking, all those things. It's way, way, way, way cheaper than talking to a psychologist.

00:54:52

Just saying. One visit will pay for your shoes. The last part here, because I want to spend a

00:55:00

little bit of time on the little practical piece, but the last part is moral courage.

00:55:07

And this is where there's conversations around Martin Luther King.

00:55:10

That concept where you're trying to make decisions or trying to get your head around

00:55:15

a decision or an action that needs to be taken, that is very likely to have a lot of pushback,

00:55:23

will have a lot of people upset because you made that decision or taken that action.

00:55:27

So you're gathering the courage through your solitude and trying to get, again, clarity on

00:55:35

what that decision or action should be. But you're ultimately trying to build up the courage to

00:55:41

act on your morals in that case. You have a better way to explain that. This is another one of those

00:55:47

that's a little bit messy to get your head around. I don't really have a better definition,

00:55:53

but I'll try off the cuff here. They mentioned that some decisions bring consequences that are

00:56:00

more than professional. So essentially, moral courage is taking a stand for something and knowing

00:56:09

that you are probably going to get a more than reciprocal negative response for doing so.

00:56:18

So you mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. That's one of the chapters in here.

00:56:24

I really liked the chapter in this section on Winston Churchill. The TLDR here is that Neville

00:56:32

Chamberlain went to Munich to try to prevent Hitler from declaring another World War.

00:56:41

And basically just bent over backwards and gave him everything that he wanted regarding Czechoslovakia

00:56:49

and then came back and everybody hailed him as a hero saying, "Hey, you did it." Even though all

00:56:56

he did was say, "Yes, sir." Everything Hitler wanted. You avoided the war. And a couple days later,

00:57:03

Winston Churchill gets up in the meeting and he says, "This is a very bad thing. We're going to

00:57:10

pay for this down the road." And everybody's like, "How could you say that?" And obviously,

00:57:15

he was right. Because Hitler changed the terms again and again and again. And then,

00:57:21

"Yeah, he's Hitler. He's a crazy guy. You're never going to appease him. We do not negotiate

00:57:28

with terrorists." Churchill was very good at figuring out what people's motives were. We knew that.

00:57:34

And that's the definition of that term we talked about in, "What was that book?"

00:57:42

The Chris Vos book. You do actually negotiate with terrorists. But basically, this guy was so

00:57:49

irrational that you couldn't come to an agreement and be like, "There, now those parameters are set."

00:57:54

Like, he was always going to change the rules to try to get more. And no one recognized that

00:58:02

except for Churchill and when he pointed it out, he was not popular, shall we say.

00:58:09

Right. At least at first, never split the difference. Never split the difference. That's it.

00:58:13

Yeah. He was not super popular at first. People don't realize that. I think, "Oh, Churchill,

00:58:17

not well loved from the get-go." But again, Churchill had a lot of practices

00:58:23

that helped him get some courage to stand up and to intuit what's going on. I guess that's a

00:58:32

term we haven't talked about much, but they do reference intuition quite a bit through these

00:58:37

parts that whenever you can step away a lot of times, you may not be able to articulate what

00:58:45

you think. Moral courage maybe has more of this than some of the others. So you may not be able to

00:58:52

verbalize your action rationale, I guess, would be the term for it.

00:58:57

Sure.

00:58:58

But you have that intuition to where you know. Like, you know that this is the right move.

00:59:04

You just can't tell anybody why, which is sometimes hard. No, you just have to listen to me.

00:59:09

Or maybe not even be able to tell people why, but not being able to assign proper values to the

00:59:21

reasons behind it. No one can really understand why this thing is so important to you.

00:59:26

That's the gist of the story on Martin Luther King Jr. They basically get to the point in

00:59:33

that story where he's kind of a reluctant participant in all of this stuff.

00:59:41

And in the back of his mind, he's like, my wife and my daughter are going to suffer

00:59:47

because of my involvement in this. And then he's getting death threats. These people say,

00:59:54

we're going to blow up your house in a couple of days if you don't knock this off.

00:59:57

And that night, like he's up all night praying. And when he the next morning, basically,

01:00:04

he's got he's got it resolved in his heart. He's like, okay, I'm going all in with this.

01:00:11

And from that moment forward, he's kind of like, I don't really care what the costs are.

01:00:15

That from this point forward, I am 100% involved with the cause. And that's really the

01:00:22

the thing that people remember when they think of Martin Luther King Jr.

01:00:27

Is that post all night prayer session when he resolved like, this is what I need to do.

01:00:36

The story that they tell up until that point, he's kind of like, well, I don't know. I mean, I guess,

01:00:41

isn't there someone else? And my, how history could have been very different if he would have just

01:00:50

gotten to the point where he was like, this is enough. I don't need to do this anymore. Let

01:00:55

somebody else without a wife and a kid at home, let them make that sacrifice because I don't really

01:01:02

want to do that. Yes. All right. So these are the four parts, clarity, creativity, emotional balance,

01:01:08

moral courage. Like we've talked about, these are all stories with very little connecting and

01:01:15

very little explanation in them and around them. But there is this last eight page section,

01:01:23

embracing solitude where there's like a practical, here's what you should do.

01:01:30

Kind of I preface that because it's not cut and dry, I would say, as far as like, what you should do.

01:01:37

One, in the beginning part of this, and I pulled it up here so I could see it, but

01:01:44

I haven't seen this, but people often refer to the information age. Yeah. And he used another term

01:01:50

for it, the input age. Yeah, true. Which I hadn't heard that term before. And it made a whole lot

01:01:58

of sense to me. Like I prefer that over the information age, just because there's so much

01:02:03

stuff that you see and read that really isn't information. Like it's just junk.

01:02:08

So there's things just trying to grab your attention and it's an input, but it's not necessarily

01:02:13

information. So yeah, I do like that, that different terminology for it. So I'm probably going to stick

01:02:18

with that one. But he does have a solid point there just in that very brief section that because

01:02:25

of that constant input, the constant flood, we don't do the solitude practice. As much as we

01:02:33

used to, like we were talking earlier, people used to process on paper, we just don't do that

01:02:37

anymore. You know, even if it's over a keyboard, it doesn't matter. Like we just don't do that.

01:02:43

Maybe the zettel cast and thing will take over, but I don't expect it to be so widespread that

01:02:48

it will change the culture as a result of a zettel cast. But this section starts off with

01:02:55

a conversation about creating solitude at work. And in my head, all I saw was deep work,

01:03:04

deep work, deep work, deep work. That's what I saw. Yeah. As he was explaining all this, you know,

01:03:11

setting expectations so that other people know what you're doing, finding space for it. Like,

01:03:16

this is, it's Cal Newport through and through. That's, that's what I saw there.

01:03:20

It is Cal Newport through and through. It's not just deep work, though. I think there's a time

01:03:25

blocking piece to this. Oh, sure. Page 182, he says, scheduling a leader's time is a zero-sum

01:03:30

game. But again, no mention of time blocking. Correct. Yes. Cal Newport's latest book is the

01:03:38

Time Block Planner, which is actually pretty cool. I have one. I am not going to use it because I

01:03:45

still time block my day old school in my fancy notebook. Sure. But that's the big idea here

01:03:51

from creating solitude at work is finding space for the solitude by scheduling it during your day.

01:03:56

And I don't like the definition of this as creating solitude at work. This is just creating

01:04:01

solitude. Yeah, it really is. The work piece, I get that if you're in an office environment,

01:04:07

maybe this is a little bit harder to do. But maybe it's even more important. I don't know.

01:04:12

Maybe it's even more valuable to give people some step-by-step on how to do this, which is

01:04:18

noticeably absent here. But I don't know, that distinction, I feel like is artificial.

01:04:26

So the other thing I want to mention here regarding the Zettelcaste and the input age,

01:04:32

you mentioned a little bit ago, I feel like the Zettelcaste in popularity is directly tied

01:04:41

to the information overload that people are experiencing. And they define in this book,

01:04:47

people are looking for more meaning between all of the inputs in their lives. I am putting my flag

01:04:54

in the ground right now though, that a year, two years, five years from now, there will be

01:05:01

so many people who say, "Yeah, the Zettelcaste and stuff just doesn't work." And the reason it's

01:05:07

not going to work is because no one has turned off the firehose of useless information. There are

01:05:14

going to be tons of people who try programs like Rome and Obsidian and all the other backlinking

01:05:21

stuff. And they're going to say, "There, I got backlinks. I got a Zettelcaste." No, no, what you have

01:05:26

is a bunch of linked garbage. You have to have the right things go in and you need solitude in order

01:05:33

to identify what those important things are, which is why I really like my hybrid system where the

01:05:39

paper stuff forces me to slow down and the stuff I capture there, not all of it gets actually into

01:05:46

my Rome database. And that's a good thing because it means the stuff that's in there is more

01:05:50

valuable. And so I think there's going to be a huge flood of people who are right now

01:05:54

because every application out there is adding these sorts of features to connect things.

01:05:59

They're going to connect all these things and they're going to say, "There, I connected things,

01:06:02

but I still don't have any more ideas or any better ideas." Well, I guess this thing just doesn't

01:06:09

work. And they're never going to realize that really they are the problem. It is user error.

01:06:16

Well, I've already been going down this road. You've known me in this area. I've been telling

01:06:24

people for a little while now that you don't need a Zettelcaste. I mean, people sing its praises,

01:06:29

but I've been saying, "You don't need this." What I've been offering and what we've talked about,

01:06:35

it's kind of an undertone in some of the, I don't mean to keep bringing up analog Joe,

01:06:39

but some of the webinars we've done for analog.com. We've had this weave through. It's like,

01:06:45

"Okay, having a Zettelcaste isn't necessarily the right answer. It has more to do with turning off

01:06:51

Twitter, turning off the news feeds and creating things." That's what it comes down to. Now,

01:07:02

creating is a very, very loose term whenever we talk about it. It has more to do with just

01:07:08

being willing to make either things in physical realms. You're doing woodworking or you're

01:07:16

re-plumbing a house. I don't know what it is. Something along those lines. You could be making

01:07:22

content online. It's easy for content creators in general have full control over their schedule

01:07:29

generally. They're going to talk about things like Zettelcaste and the tools that they use,

01:07:34

because they have full control over it. I don't. My schedule and who has access to me and what

01:07:41

tools I use, I don't control 100%. I am forced to use things like Microsoft Teams.

01:07:47

I still think it's garbage, but I still use it. Which is fine. This is kind of a discussion

01:07:55

then about the tools. I do think the Zettelcaste is an effective tool. It is an effective tool for

01:08:00

thinking and connecting thoughts. However, just because you have a tool doesn't mean that you know

01:08:07

how to use it. That's the thing. Funky mosquito mentions in the chat that people follow trends,

01:08:13

and that is what is happening here. But I guess what I'm saying is that embracing the tool

01:08:20

without the perspective renders the tool useless. People are going to write off this tool as useless

01:08:31

and they're going to have no idea what they actually had in their hands.

01:08:35

And you don't need the Zettelcaste in to your point in order to be creative. You can use other

01:08:42

tools. You can use other things to capture notes and develop them. There are other things that you

01:08:47

can use to develop ideas. My maps are a great thing for that. I've kind of cobbled together

01:08:54

my own system with all the different pieces. Ultimately, that's what you got to figure out how to do.

01:08:59

But it just kind of makes me, on one hand, it makes me sad. On one hand, I kind of laugh.

01:09:05

We're like, I see all these people who are trying all these backlinks and they're like,

01:09:10

"There, I got my Zettelcaste." I'm like, "No, no, you really don't. You have backlinks,

01:09:14

drafts that you have to manually connect. That's not the same thing." And then even if they do

01:09:19

add the automatic backlinking, then like, "There, I got my Zettelcaste." I'm like,

01:09:24

"Well, what is all in your database?" And I see all these grocery lists and things. And I'm like,

01:09:29

"No, no, that's not it either." The quality of the ideas is really what we're after here.

01:09:38

And I think that that is relevant to this whole discussion of leadership and solitude too.

01:09:44

Some of these stories, which we didn't really talk about, like Lawrence of Arabia back in chapter

01:09:50

five, he came down with a sickness and had to sit in his tent for 10 days. And then he had this

01:09:58

crazy idea which ended up winning the war for them. And it was sort of the same thing with

01:10:05

Ulysses S. Grant, how he's sitting in his room at the Magnolia for days. And then he comes out with

01:10:12

this crazy plan and everybody's like, "I don't think this is going to work." And then it ends up

01:10:17

working and turning the tide of the war. I mean, you can have those ideas and without the solitude

01:10:26

piece, you don't even recognize what you have. The solitude, in my opinion, what it does is it

01:10:35

helps you to see things for what they really are. And I kind of hesitate to even think about

01:10:44

all the ideas that I've had that I never really gave much thought to and just quickly dismissed

01:10:50

and forgot about them and they're gone forever now. Like, what all did I get rid of?

01:10:56

In my haste, you know, in my hesitance to embrace solitude and margin, I think, is relevant to

01:11:05

this discussion too. That's another form of this, I feel. So this is definitely something that I am

01:11:14

a champion for the cause at this point. When it comes to embracing solitude after reading this book,

01:11:21

however, going back to this last section, what are they even telling me to do here?

01:11:26

Think about things, identify my first principles, find a higher purpose. I don't know. Does this

01:11:37

strike you as odd that this is like a bullet list at the end? Now I should, I guess,

01:11:43

preface this by saying I actually have a course for faith-based productivity, which is 20-something

01:11:50

videos on this specific topic. So I feel a little bit slighted that they're trying to just cram

01:11:55

this in at the end at the beginning probably. Well, having, you know, having gone through that,

01:12:03

it's weird that they bullet pointed at the way they did at the end. I would agree with you,

01:12:07

that was kind of strange. But you know me, I tend to generalize things. And with this sort of book,

01:12:15

I feel like it does very well. Like the way my brain operates connects with this, I think

01:12:20

significantly better than what yours does. Just from listening to you, I'm making that

01:12:25

assumption and putting words in your mouth. But to me, like, I'm seeing all these potential benefits

01:12:32

from solitude. Solitude might mean something like a personal retreat. It could mean the 10

01:12:38

minutes I've got on my drive. It could mean once in a while, whenever I can't think clearly,

01:12:43

going for a walk in the woods, like it could mean a lot of different things. To me, I felt like I

01:12:47

came out of this with, I don't have an action plan. I have no action items for this. But I expect

01:12:54

that having gone through this, I'm probably going to be implementing solitude more often without

01:12:59

realizing that this book is the result of that. Sure. So I feel like there's a bit of a,

01:13:06

this is one of those that yes, there's a lot of motivation here. There's very little application

01:13:11

at the end that's kind of hard to get your head around. If you want a practical, tactical

01:13:17

step and system, I don't know that they need a system for it. But that's why I feel like it's

01:13:24

kind of hard to grasp what's going on. Sure. They don't really want to give you a system.

01:13:29

I'm kind of getting into style and rating here. So they're not wanting to go into that. At least

01:13:37

I didn't feel like they wanted to give you that. They want it more open-ended so that you can

01:13:43

make decisions about what's important to you. And in my case, I think that that's a good thing

01:13:50

that they did that because I have mentally, I've extrapolated it out into a lot of different

01:13:57

minor scenarios. Even some that they don't talk about at all, like minute systems, like

01:14:04

whenever I'm trying to write something or I'm trying to code something and such, I generally

01:14:10

want to do that at a standing desk scenario. The reason being it's common for me to write a

01:14:14

sentence and a half, not have the right word, and then I step away from my computer and take a

01:14:19

couple steps back and forth and then I step back to it and then I keep going.

01:14:23

And it's that 15 seconds there, which I would call solitude in a way, but they don't really talk

01:14:31

about that type of thing at all. That's not discussed. So there's another way that that can be

01:14:37

brought into this. So anyway, I think I have expanded it a little bit from what they intended

01:14:45

because they didn't give me the specifics there. So I don't know. I would say that's a positive

01:14:50

thing. But again, for the average person, the average Joe, I don't know how that would pan out.

01:14:57

I can't speak to that one. The fact that you have no action items from this book

01:15:03

proves its failure as a book, in my opinion. Sure. Not saying that, Joe, you really need some

01:15:13

solitude. But I feel like the message here is so important and it's so critical. And the whole

01:15:23

idea of leadership, even if it's just a small team or even if it's just your family or even if

01:15:28

it's just yourself, this is like, we are who they are trying to speak to. And the fact that they

01:15:38

spoke to you, they made their arguments. You're not quite sure what to do. And so you do nothing

01:15:44

at them. I'm not faulting you. I totally understand how people can have that approach after reading

01:15:51

this book. But that just makes me sad because there is, I feel like a bunch of gold in here.

01:15:57

There's a bunch of stuff that we didn't even talk about regarding leadership that I think is

01:16:03

is really, really good. Like they talk about leadership as consensual interdependence. You

01:16:07

can't just command people. Leaders choose to depend on their followers and their followers choose

01:16:12

to depend on their leaders. Like there's so much stuff like that that's just so good in here.

01:16:18

And I agree with you that because there's no, well, this is how you do this sort of thing.

01:16:24

The easy thing at the end is just to be like, well, let's put that one on the shelf and move on.

01:16:30

I'll figure this out on my own later. But we both know that like, that's not going to happen later.

01:16:36

Maybe it'll have like you were the standing desk example. That's a really good one. So I'm

01:16:40

glad that you at least have like thought through that sort of thing. But I really like what I'm

01:16:45

sad about as I'm talking through this is like missed opportunity here for championing the cause

01:16:50

of of solitude. It's almost like you attend a conference and you see somebody who's presenting a

01:16:56

talk that you've done a bunch of research for, but they've got a really big audience and a really

01:17:02

big following. And so you're really excited that they're talking about this thing. And you go

01:17:07

attend the talk and they just kind of like tip toe around the real issues and

01:17:11

just kind of lands with a thud. And you're just like, I could have done a better job.

01:17:16

Not saying that I would have done a better job, but at least like there's that thing inside of

01:17:23

me that's like, let me try. Yeah. Let me see if I can write something about Sal didn't give Joe an

01:17:29

action item. Yeah. Now I will say, since we're talking about action items, I don't have

01:17:37

anything that I wrote down. But I think some of that is because I haven't practiced the thing that

01:17:43

they're promoting in solitude. Because my sense is like it's it's a chicken and egg scenario for me

01:17:50

right now in that I feel like I need to do some form of an extended solitude period so that I could

01:17:57

get my head around what to do with solitude. Like that's kind of how I feel right now. Sure.

01:18:03

Thus no action items because I haven't had the time to process what those should be. So I don't.

01:18:10

And the problem there is when is that gonna happen, right? I mean, as the person who wrote

01:18:15

the personal retreat handbook, it's easy for me to say, we'll just get away for a day, do a

01:18:19

personal retreat and you'll figure it out. In the busyness of the day to day, I understand why

01:18:25

that's not feasible for a lot of people. My day job won't let me do that. Exactly. So what does

01:18:30

somebody like Joe do right now? What's one thing they can do from this book to start regaining solitude?

01:18:36

Well, you know, if I want to be, you know, devil's advocate on myself here, the thing that you that

01:18:43

I could do, I'm probably not going to choose to do this right now. But I could give up some of the

01:18:50

work I do at night after the girls go to bed and just spend that hour, hour and a half on my own.

01:18:56

I could easily do that. I could go for a walk that time at night. It would be cold, probably good for

01:19:00

me, but I could do that, but I don't. And I don't plan to start running with me. I'm not running

01:19:05

to Meno to Wisconsin just to go running with you. That'd be a long run. You're running me,

01:19:10

I'll run to you, I'll meet in the middle. I went running in the snow the other day. This is

01:19:14

totally a side tangent, but I got these called the act tracks. They have little metal springs

01:19:19

and metal spikes on them so you don't kill yourself when running on the ice. And they work really,

01:19:24

really well. Nice. I feel like I would somehow sit on the side of my shoe and it would,

01:19:31

I would just beef it. Oh, we should do style and rating. Hold on, I got a couple action items here.

01:19:40

You do? There's nothing in the outline. Sorry, I forgot to update the outline. I've been

01:19:44

unsybatical before this. That's my experience. Got it. Got it. Okay. They're not major. I do have

01:19:50

a couple. In chapter one, they shared an example of somebody who was color-coding their journal entries

01:19:58

based on their emotional response. Do you remember that story? It was like, if I feel good about

01:20:05

this thing, I'm going to color code it green. If I feel bad about this when it happens, it's right.

01:20:08

If I'm not sure I'm going to make it purple. Yep. I don't know exactly how to do this inside

01:20:14

of Rome research, but Rome is what I'm using now for all of my journaling stuff. Why would you put

01:20:19

it in Rome? I have a whole article for you. Yes, I do. I actually just published this.

01:20:25

The link there that talks about the ways that I'm using Rome research and I started using it

01:20:32

with the daily questions because I had a specific pain point I was trying to solve.

01:20:37

And that was I had all these things regarding the prompts inside of day one, but I have to go to

01:20:44

the journal, tap on an entry. It's in a markdown table. So I tap another button in order to render

01:20:48

the code. And now I can see the table with my responses. And if I was going to review those,

01:20:54

which I want to do as part of the personal retreat, I have to open up every single one,

01:20:58

go back, open the next one, go back, open the next one. I can't see them in line.

01:21:01

So what Rome does is it allows me to use metadata and just get all of these things linked on like

01:21:07

the daily questions page. I open them all up and you can kind of see that in the link that I shared.

01:21:13

But I also watched Drew's video on using Rome for journaling and he inspired me to do a couple

01:21:20

other things. So I've started using it for daily gratitude and then also journal entries,

01:21:25

which I'll do typically when I finish something that I feel is kind of substantial. So like when

01:21:31

we finish recording this episode, I will make a journal entry just one or two sentences about how

01:21:36

it went, how I'm feeling, whatever. And then I'll put all of that stuff on the daily notes page,

01:21:42

the daily notes page is kind of the anchor. And what I love about Rome is that I can see all

01:21:46

that stuff in line without having to worry about where I'm sticking it. I don't have to say this

01:21:50

goes in this journal, this goes in that journal. It's just this metadata, click the link, boom,

01:21:54

there's everything. So that's why I'm doing it in Rome. Although I would argue that Rome is not

01:22:02

the right place for probably 90% of people who are looking for a journaling solution.

01:22:10

Regarding journaling, though, the thing I'm trying to figure out is this color coding.

01:22:14

I know you can do like highlights. I'm not sure I want to do highlights inside a room. I could do

01:22:19

tags. I really don't know if this is something that will stick for me, but I do kind of want to

01:22:26

try this out and see if there's a way for me to implement this, which is kind of timely for me

01:22:32

anyways, because New Year and I've been spending a lot of time, I wrote that article thinking about

01:22:38

the ways that I want to journal more regularly in 2021. I've got another one which is related

01:22:46

and that is get more regular about journaling. Actually, that's kind of happened already,

01:22:51

but I want to continue the motivation that I have with this consistent journaling.

01:22:58

Again, in that article, I make the case that I feel I just couldn't do it with the

01:23:03

tool I was using and Rome kind of removes that friction for me, but we'll see. Maybe I'll hit

01:23:08

another snag. Those are my two action items and they're very minor. Neither of them are really

01:23:15

related to solitude, which is why I said what I said at the beginning about like there's tons

01:23:22

of action items to be had here. Just you need some more context in order to apply anything from

01:23:29

this book. One thing I have a complaint about with you trying to put things in Rome,

01:23:35

I'm convinced people are using Rome with the whole collector's fallacy. They're just dumping

01:23:41

tons of stuff in it and there's not really anything they get out of it. I've been asking a lot of

01:23:46

folks that tell me they're big into Rome. I'm like, "Okay, you're putting all that into Rome.

01:23:50

What are you getting out of it? When do you go through that? What is your schedule for getting

01:23:54

value out of that stuff you're dumping into it?" I would challenge you to do the same thing.

01:23:58

It's part of my personal retreat. It already is. If you're going to dump all your emotional

01:24:03

tracking stuff in there, I hope you have a process for pulling it back out. I would also

01:24:09

argue something like that is very data heavy and putting it into a writing tool is a terrible idea.

01:24:16

There's the thing. Rome is not a writing tool. I've tried to use it for writing. It is not a good

01:24:21

writing tool. You know what I mean? No type. I don't mean long form writing. I mean,

01:24:28

I get what you're saying. I agree that that's totally where this falls down for

01:24:32

99.99% of people. I am the personal retreat guy. That's my anchor. That's why I started

01:24:40

putting stuff in there in the first place. I wanted the ability to go in there for the last three

01:24:44

months and see my journal entries in line as part of my personal retreat, which I just went through

01:24:51

that process. I know it works for me. That's another thing where they mention it for that one guy,

01:25:00

the Campbell soup's guy, the whole idea of the personal retreat. I was upset when I read that.

01:25:07

I was like, "Oh, personal retreat. That should have been prevalent throughout the whole thing,

01:25:14

in my opinion. You want to be an effective leader. You got to have a system like a personal retreat

01:25:20

for getting away every couple of months and just re-centering. You don't have to follow my format

01:25:25

for it, but you do need solitude." That was my big takeaway from this entire book was the value

01:25:31

of solitude and crystallizing for me why the personal retreat worked so well. Before I reading

01:25:38

this, I was like, "Well, I know it works. I think I know why, but I really can't explain it."

01:25:43

After reading this, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, solitude." Sure. Makes sense. All right,

01:25:49

I look forward to you reporting back on how your Rome experiment goes. All right, we'll do your

01:25:54

journaling stuff. Stiling, right? We've talked about the style stuff quite a bit here, and I don't

01:26:00

want to reiterate things. Quick summary, he's a good writer. They are good writers. Stories are

01:26:10

amazing. They are very well written. I feel that this is a collection of stories around a topic.

01:26:19

And it's hard to, like we've been talking about, it's hard to gather like, "Okay, what's the

01:26:23

purpose and what do I do with it?" It's motivation without application to use those terms again.

01:26:29

Yes. So all of that said, it could be better, I think. It is fairly short for a book like this.

01:26:37

They have room for it. They could have put in chapter zero. They could have put in a part five,

01:26:43

probably, and spelled it out. They could have, but chose not to, or ran out of time, one of the two.

01:26:50

And it could have been there. So from a rating, I'll put it at 3.5. There's some good stuff in here.

01:26:57

I mean, it's really good, but it could be a lot better, I think. So 3.5.

01:27:04

It's an incredibly powerful message, mistold through excellent storytelling.

01:27:12

That's how I feel about this. Now, from a bookworm perspective, maybe that doesn't matter so much.

01:27:18

Maybe you're sick of hearing us talk ad nauseam about all of these different morning pages,

01:27:25

journaling, and meditation, and all the stuff that's in here. So from a bookworm perspective,

01:27:31

if you have any sort of experience in the rest of the productivity genre, and you have

01:27:36

outside reference from, if you were to read this and you have those other books to draw on,

01:27:42

going all the way back to how to read a book by Mortimer Adler, you're able to

01:27:47

read this through the lens of I've read these other books on these topics, and I can kind of

01:27:52

fill in the holes that way. This is a great book. I am really glad that we read this. All my criticisms

01:28:00

from this are in isolation to this book specifically. But in terms of, do I recommend you read it,

01:28:07

I think absolutely. If nothing else, you will hear some really cool stories.

01:28:11

You'll be motivated to figure out, maybe you won't spend a whole lot of time doing it.

01:28:18

You'll be motivated by the idea. You'll at least have the thought, you know, I really should try

01:28:22

to figure out if I can get some solitude in my daily routine. I'm going to rate this at 4.0

01:28:29

because as much as I railed on the lack of action items in the book, again, I'm viewing this as

01:28:38

like a valuable addition to my collection. If you read any other books, which our bookworm

01:28:45

audience probably does, then I think there's more value to be had here than if you read this book

01:28:50

and just read this book. Also, I feel that these are the best stories I have ever read in any of

01:28:58

the books that we have covered for bookworm. Excellent, excellent storytelling. And the more

01:29:06

that I read books, the more I realize the value of stories, and I feel like the stories and the

01:29:16

details that they give me in this book, these will come back to me. I just don't know how yet,

01:29:23

and it's going to be valuable. Being able to recall Abraham Lincoln's emotional tirade in his room

01:29:32

before writing that letter and never sending it adds more detail to the next time I hear a story

01:29:38

about Abraham Lincoln and the next book that we read or whatever. And I don't know, again,

01:29:44

I don't know how you put a value on those sorts of things. So I'm just going to say, since I don't

01:29:50

know what to assign to that, I'm going to just assume that that's good and round up.

01:29:55

Sure, no, it makes sense. Would you say the stories here are better or

01:30:00

better written than Ryan Holidays in Stillness is the key? Because we said the same thing

01:30:07

about that one. We just loved his stories because he was bringing out things we'd never seen or

01:30:12

heard before. How does this compare? Hmm, that is a good question. I would have to look at

01:30:20

Ryan Holidays books to respond appropriately. But my recollection is that he told great stories,

01:30:28

but he focused on just the pieces that supported the argument that he was making. So

01:30:35

that's great for trying to persuade somebody to your point of view. That's not really the

01:30:44

approach they took in this book. In this book, it was just here's kind of the struggle that

01:30:49

they're going through and some really cool details that kind of give you an inside look into like

01:30:54

their character and what's going on in their life. And then you're left to make your own judgment

01:30:59

from those those stories. And I don't think one is better than the other. If I had to pick one that

01:31:07

I personally liked better, I think maybe I liked this approach and lead yourself first better.

01:31:16

Simply because I've got a large enough collection of dots to fall back on in making my own judgments.

01:31:21

But if you want somebody to like tell you what the big takeaway is, you're going to be disappointed

01:31:27

with these stories. You'll like Ryan Holidays better. Sure. Yeah, I think I would prefer Holidays.

01:31:32

That's just me though. All right, I'm good with putting this one on the shelf. So we got a 3.5

01:31:38

and a 4.0 shelf it. What's next, Mike? Next is discipline equals freedom by

01:31:45

Jackal Willink who is going to convince us to get up at 4.30 AM and work out every day.

01:31:50

False, false, false, false. Good luck on that one.

01:31:55

It would be hilarious if he can encourage us to make an adjustment in one of those areas.

01:32:05

I would say it's a success on his part if he can do anything along those lines.

01:32:12

Let's see if Jackal can get Joe to have an action item. Yeah, let's see. We'll see.

01:32:17

Following that, we discussed this before we jumped on to record the organized writer by Anthony

01:32:27

Johnston. Mike and I have both been diving more into the writing space. So we'll see. See how it

01:32:35

pans out. I've seen this one make the rounds for a while now. Multiple years, it's been out for a

01:32:42

while, right? So yeah, looking forward to that one. It should be good.

01:32:46

I'm actually, I think this has not been out for a while. I pre-ordered this book.

01:32:52

How long has it been out? Maybe there was a version of this that was released a while back,

01:32:56

but this was a pre-ordered book that I got maybe six weeks ago, eight weeks ago.

01:33:02

Maybe I'm thinking of something else. So it's fairly new. But Anthony Johnston has been

01:33:07

around for a while as a writer for sure. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of.

01:33:11

Could be. This one should be fun though. I've started this one. I think that there may be

01:33:20

some lively discussions from this. Chat tells us that at 4.30 a.m. there's a lot of solitude.

01:33:26

True story. There you go. You got any gap books, Mike? You've had some time off? It's the holiday

01:33:35

realm. I have. I don't know how to pronounce the author, but I am finishing up newsletter ninja

01:33:41

and mentioned at the beginning, I am verbally committing to doing a regular newsletter.

01:33:50

But I want to do it in a way where I know that I can stick with it and that I'm not doing it just

01:33:56

to sell stuff. I want to figure out basically what are the things that people want to hear

01:34:04

from me. So if you have any ideas or anything you'd like to share, you can @bobbleheadjo on Twitter.

01:34:10

I would love to hear that sort of stuff. But I'm thinking through that stuff now. This is a

01:34:14

great book though in terms of talking through the logistics and what you should do and the best

01:34:21

practices for creating that community based newsletter, not the sales based newsletters.

01:34:29

I don't have a better term for that. Sure. Makes sense.

01:34:32

Well, I'm not doing a technical gap book, but I am leaning pretty heavy into Charles Dickens

01:34:38

tale of two cities lately. So all right. Still a good one. I know it's fiction.

01:34:44

Since you like stories, Mike, I do. I like real stories.

01:34:48

Real stories. All right. Great fun. Great fun. All right. Well, thanks to all of you who have been

01:34:55

in the chat. I know we don't always interact with those in the chat because we're actually

01:35:01

recording at the time, but it is kind of cool to see some of the comments and sometimes we do bring

01:35:06

them up. But we're also extremely grateful to those of you who have been bookworm members,

01:35:11

bookworm.fm/membership. And it definitely helps. Helps keep the lights on, helps us get the hosting

01:35:18

fees and stuff, buys a coffee and a book for us once in a while. So huge thanks to anyone who is

01:35:25

a part of that club. And when you join though, like you do get some perks. It's not just paying

01:35:32

for hosting and stuff. Like there are all of Mike's mind node files. He's got his new Rome

01:35:37

thing. What is this thing? It's a link that apparently I can access without an account.

01:35:42

It's a public graph and basically migrating all of my book notes over from my personal

01:35:48

database into the bookworm one. So what you get are pages for all the bookworm episodes

01:35:55

and then pages for all of the individual books. Not everything's in there. I was working on it

01:36:00

actually before we hit record here today. I think it's through like episodes 83 through 109 are there

01:36:07

right now. But I also am entertaining the idea of giving edit access to this

01:36:16

for bookworm club members. If that's something people are interested in, and that would allow us

01:36:23

to build off of the notes that I take. That's what a lot of people do with the mind node files.

01:36:29

I've discovered is they download them and they use them as a starting point when they read the

01:36:33

books. And I think that's pretty cool. And so what this allows us to do is build a big bookworm

01:36:39

wiki of all of the books that we've covered for bookworm. Sure. If you were ever to export

01:36:45

that out, could you do anything with it? Yeah, I exported it out of my database and imported it

01:36:50

into that one. It's all markdown based, but outside of Rome, I would think so. I mean,

01:36:56

haven't tried it. I know that those are PDF files that are embedded in there. Sure. And the rest of

01:37:01

it is just a markdown, markdown formatted bullets. So interesting. Yeah, and just curious and being

01:37:08

a snot. That's all. So anyway, for members, they're a handful of perks. And you can get into the

01:37:17

bank of perks, bookworm.fm/membership. That'll take you over to club.bookworm.fm.

01:37:23

And where you can sign up for that membership and get access to those things. So thank you to all

01:37:28

of you who already do that. All right. So thanks, everyone, for following along. If you are reading

01:37:35

along, pick up Discipline Equals Freedom by Jack O'Willink. And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.