Bookworm Transcripts

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How you feeling Joe Bueleg?

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Doing pretty well.

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I think so anyway.

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Everybody thinks I'm dying, but I'm not.

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I promise.

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[laughter]

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Yeah.

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Well, for those who haven't been following you on Twitter,

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you're not feeling the greatest, but you're muscling through

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for the Bookworm fans, so we appreciate that.

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It's true.

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This past weekend, I started to cough and got a fever

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and a few things and thought,

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those sound very familiar for symptoms.

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Joe's a positive person though.

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That's what I've been telling people,

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is I'm a positive person.

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And I had to cancel a couple things this week

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and had been slowly catching up.

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Trying to figure out what all's going on in the world

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that I've missed since I kind of just hibernated in red books.

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Not that there's anything wrong with that.

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Absolutely not.

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I'm now emerging for the first time since all of that began.

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And we're here.

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I think I might sound a little funny, but other than that,

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I feel fine.

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I don't really have any symptoms to speak of at this point.

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So that's good.

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That's kind of where I sit.

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I'm glad you're feeling better, but now if we go a little bit

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off the rails an hour into the episode, people know why.

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Yep, exactly.

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So if Joe starts to ramble incoherently, now you know why.

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That is it 100%.

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Well, I am glad to be recording this episode with you.

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I am looking forward to talking about today's book.

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Before we do that, we've got a little bit of follow up

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that we should touch on here.

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Did you make your working procedures?

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Started to.

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I started to put together some--

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and I specifically did this for my work stuff.

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And that has been--

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the nice part is that I started doing that last week

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and worked with my assistant to put those together.

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And we were in the process of check listing some things.

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And then Joe disappeared every week.

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And he was able to just take those and run with them.

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I really haven't been consulted at all this week

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as a result of that.

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We even had a couple folks step in who had never done some

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events and never done some different pieces.

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And they did really well with it.

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Having not ever touched certain hardware,

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and we're able to work the checklists and systems

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and follow the things and be in pretty good shape.

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So I would call that a success.

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Now, obviously, there are a lot of procedures

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that are yet to be documented.

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I don't think we'll ever get done with that.

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But it's encouraging to see that it at least helps in one arena.

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Now, there are a lot of other arenas,

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personally, that I want to do this for.

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But Joe's motivation and energy level has been a little subpar.

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So we're not there, obviously.

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So is what it is.

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Well, the fact that nothing completely blew up

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while you were gone, at least to your knowledge,

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I consider that a huge win.

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Yep.

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Yep.

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There was an event that happened last night

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that they moved into a different room, which

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meant that I had to have a sound tech for it.

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And I didn't really know anything about it

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because they just took care of it, which is exactly what

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I wanted to happen.

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So I'm not going to argue at all.

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Beautiful.

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All right.

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Your second one here is the general operating principles.

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The GOPs.

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Is that kind of related, or is this something

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separate you can report on?

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I think on that one, you could probably just

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draw a line through it.

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All right, because Joe, I didn't even attempt this.

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I looked at it on the list, and I thought, that's cool.

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No, we're not going to go there.

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That's just nothing.

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So it's not a thing I even attempted

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because the more I thought about it, the more I thought.

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This is a cool idea.

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I understand the intent behind this.

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I just don't think it's going to be something

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that's going to work out for me.

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At least in the short term.

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It might be something for the long term,

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but I don't have enough people involved with what I'm doing

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to make that worthwhile.

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Right now, like from work, it's me and one part-timer

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underneath of me for the stuff I do online.

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It doesn't really go beyond me.

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I mean, maybe we could do it for Bookworm,

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but that seems excessive.

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But no, I didn't even touch this one.

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I didn't even attempt it.

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I looked at it once and thought, uh-uh.

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Well, if you wanted to do this for Bookworm, I'm fine with that,

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but I feel at this point, we know what Bookworm is.

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Yeah.

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And some people love it.

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Some people wish it was something different

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and I had some different stories to tell.

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Correct.

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But I'm working on it.

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I'm working on it.

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We've gathered feedback over the years at this point.

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And most of the time we review the feedback.

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And when we do, that's cool.

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Or it's probably more so that Joe comes up

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with some random ideas like,

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maybe we could change the format and do this.

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And Mike's like, but then people wouldn't get this.

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And I'm like, well, yeah, you're bright.

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Well, I'm the grandpa who doesn't like change, so.

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That is what it is.

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I force you in to change once in a while.

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Like we're live streaming on YouTube right now.

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So I do force you into it occasionally.

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Yep.

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Video was never a thing that I would have agreed to

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when we started this.

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Yep.

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It's true.

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It's true.

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And yeah, here we are.

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And it's turned out really well, I think, so.

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It's true.

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Hey, on the topic of feedback, by the way.

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And not, or blind all the time.

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There is one person in particular,

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if you look at the Bookworm Club,

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who represents, I don't know, half a dozen fiction authors,

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who is just desperate to get one of them on the show.

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Correct.

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It's not gonna happen.

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Yes.

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I rather enjoy, like, this is maybe the sick twisted part

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of my brain in that there are a number of people

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who send us these, like these people send us these things

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all the time.

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And I rather enjoy skimming them.

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I don't ever actually read them,

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'cause they're way too long.

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But they're entertaining at least, to read.

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It's like, oh, please read my memoir

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and share it with your audience.

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No.

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No, you're not Steve Jobs, I'm not gonna do that.

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The best part is all the follow up messages.

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Oh, yeah, definitely.

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It's kind of implied that you're gonna at least

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get back to them, and then when you don't,

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they kind of don't know what to do.

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It's like, oh, you must be really busy.

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Or no, sorry.

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Yep, still not gonna respond.

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It's usually three or four though.

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It's at least, we know it's at least two

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that you'll hear from every one of them.

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Sometimes you get the third, sometimes you get a fourth.

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I feel bad for those people,

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'cause I used to have to do that, but.

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Sure, there are some that make it into,

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like, my personal email spam filters,

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'cause there's another email address that I used to have

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on the site that would forward into that.

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But I don't ever respond to those either.

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So there are more even than what we see

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through that system, like, which is, wow.

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Saying something.

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(laughs)

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On the topic of fiction though,

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bombshell, breaking news,

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Mike is going to read a fiction book.

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You have been trying to get me to read fiction

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for a long time. (laughs)

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Recently, David Sparks has also been trying

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to get me to read fiction.

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Kindred spirits.

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And we have the relay members special

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that we have to record for Focused.

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So David floated the idea of reading a fiction book,

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and I said, well, if we're gonna do that,

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I gotta include Joe on this,

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because this has been his drum

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that he's been banging for the last several years.

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Yes.

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So we are going to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

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and talk about it for the Focused Member Special,

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which will go out to all the relay FM members.

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So you don't need to be a member of Focused specifically,

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but if you are, then you will also get that special episode.

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It will not be part of the normal feed.

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And I am a little bit terrified, Joe.

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I have no idea what to expect.

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I feel like I can walk in one of these bookworm recordings

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and just off the cuff talk about anything in my mind node file.

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I have no idea what reading a fiction book

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is going to do to this workflow. (laughs)

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I think we're gonna force you to get in touch

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with your emotions.

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Mike, also, I just wanna point out some comments

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in the chat here and the earth is ending.

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Now I have to watch out for flying pigs at work.

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(laughs)

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These are the things in the chat at the moment.

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So this is a big deal and I'm excited for you.

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I'm nervous for you, but I'm excited for you.

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I think this will be fun.

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It'll be a good time.

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That's for sure.

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But regardless, this is something Mike texted me and said,

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"Hey, we have this idea about reading a fiction book,

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"are you in?"

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Like, "Obviously, why would I not?"

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Like, all the things line up, all the stars have aligned.

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And here we are with Mike volunteering himself

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to read a fiction book.

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And that's why I said that earlier.

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It's like, this is not a thing where I pitched something

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that would offer you the opportunity to read a fiction book.

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This was you reaching out to me saying,

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"Hey, here's this idea."

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Like, obviously I'm a yes, I'm all in.

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(laughs)

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- And it was really instigated by my kids

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because we were watching the Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy

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movie not too long ago.

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We love that movie and I know it's based on those books.

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And my kids were looking for something to read over the summer

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and I'm like, "Hey, would you be interested in reading?"

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There's a whole series of books that this movie is based on.

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Like, "Yeah, that'd be awesome."

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So we got the whole set from Amazon.

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We're just gonna read the first one

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for the special episode.

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- Yep, yep.

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- So my 11 year old Joshua,

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he is cranking through the first one.

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He's almost done with it already

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and he wants to talk to me about it too.

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So, I have internal pressure.

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I have pressure from all the sides to read fiction.

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- Good for you, good for you.

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It's good to know that more than one person is willing

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to pressure you into a more enjoyable experience

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with books, right?

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- Well, that is to be determined, but we will see.

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Well, we did just do an episode, by the way,

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I'm not sure if you listened to it, but--

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- I haven't yet, I saw it, but I haven't.

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- Yeah, reading and learning.

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I did not see this, but David had a lot

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of complimentary things to say about Bookworm.

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He basically said, "This is how he decides

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what Book's to listen to."

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So that was super cool to hear.

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I also got some great feedback from a couple of people

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about the Work the System episode.

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One person in particular said that they just love

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the conversational aspect of it and got a lot out of it,

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but also like agreed that maybe the whole book

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wasn't worth investing the time to read.

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Just get the gist of it, don't maybe buy that one,

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just download the PDF, whatever.

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So I guess we're staying true to our accidental mission

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of being the filter for people deciding

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what Book's to read.

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- It's so true.

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I look back on that sometimes and I'm amazed

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that we missed that.

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- Yeah.

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- Do you ever realize that?

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We started this as something that we thought

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people would join us in reading this,

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reading books in two weeks, and then we'll talk about it

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and then we could have a discussion with those

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who have read it online.

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That was kind of our thought process when we started this

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and didn't realize that we would be the not very short

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version of Blinkist.

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So here we are.

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- We should have known, Joe Buelegg,

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that people would be looking for a more effortless

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path to knowledge acquisition.

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- Ooh.

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- Which leads us into today's book.

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- Nailed it.

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- Which is Effortless by Greg McKeown,

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a follow up to Essentialism,

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which I think was one of both of us,

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one of our favorite books that we've ever read.

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And just kind of the right thing at the right time,

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which maybe is a little bit unfair to this book

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because I don't know how you follow up Essentialism

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with another book as good as Essentialism.

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But we're gonna get into that in a minute here.

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The format of this book is, of course, three separate parts.

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Part one is Effortless State,

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Part Two is Effortless Action,

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Part Two is Effortless Results.

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I have issues with the way these are broken up.

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There are exactly five chapters in each of these.

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And it seems like he kind of made these

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because he wanted those charts at the end of each section,

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which was kind of the summary.

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Some of these are definitely stronger than others.

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What were you thinking prior to diving into this book

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and then what was your initial impressions

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through the beginning of it?

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Were you, oh yeah, this is exactly what I expected.

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Were you kind of skeptical

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because there's no way he can follow Essentialism

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or you kind of let down

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'cause it wasn't as good as he thought it was gonna be?

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- Where do I land on all of it?

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- Sure.

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So the thing that was interesting to me

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is that we came off of Work the System into this.

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And we had Sam Carpenter kind of running

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his telephone business at us

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and was explaining how you put systems together

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and how you can optimize them

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and how everything is a system.

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And we came off of that into this, right?

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And in my head, because I had Sam Carpenter's mantras

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floating around in my brain whenever I picked this up,

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the first thing I thought of whenever I read the word,

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effortless, the tagline is make it easier

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to do what matters most.

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And in my head that meant systems

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because we came from Work the System

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and worked into this one.

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And that's fine.

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But I don't know that Greg McEwen would say

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that his book on effortless is about systems.

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I mean, he probably would if you tried to define a system

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into like general working on tasks and projects.

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I think he could probably get there,

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but I don't think that was his intent there.

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But that's what I came into it with.

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So knowing essentialism and having read that

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and appreciated that, this, having worked the system

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in the background and also your explanation of it

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whenever you first introduced it of his background

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and why he wrote it and how he got to this point

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in putting this book together,

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because of all that background,

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it ended up being pretty much what I expected

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'cause it does fit a lot of that.

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I don't know that there's any specific point

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at which I was surprised.

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But at the same time, like there's a lot of good nuggets

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in this one, I think.

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So I don't know if that answers what you're after.

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No, that's exactly what I was going for

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because I agree that work the system tainted this one

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to blood over.

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But I do feel that this one kind of feels more

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like a natural follow up to work the system

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and it does essentialism.

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It does.

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Which that maybe is an unfair statement to say

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because you're kind of in a tough spot as an author.

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You wrote this book, "Essentialism,"

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which completely blew up

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and if he would have kept referring back to it.

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As I said in essentialism,

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we probably would have-- - Why hate that?

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- Docked him for that, right?

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So he's gotta just leave that behind

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and go to the new thing, whatever that happens to be.

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I will say at the very beginning here,

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I don't think he knocked this one out of the park

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like he did essentialism.

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But I don't know how you can.

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Maybe essentialism is that lightning in a bottle

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once in a lifetime sort of a thing that,

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there's no way you're gonna be able to follow up

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to that sort of thing.

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I think very few authors are able to follow up with a book

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like that with another book that is as good.

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Probably the closest that I've seen is Cal Newport

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in all the stuff that he's written following up

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with deep work.

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But even those, they don't resonate on the same level

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for us anyways, like deep work did.

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But I use him as an example

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because there are several books by him that I really enjoy

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including so good that they can't ignore you,

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which I would argue maybe is my favorite,

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even above deep work.

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We talked about that when we did the draft episodes

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back in the day.

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I think it was episode 50 when we picked our favorite

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non-bookworm books.

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People wanna hear us talk about that

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when they should go vote for it in the club by the way.

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So yeah, this book, I mean the very first chapter,

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they have like this little tagline associated with it

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and it is, is there an easier way?

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So let's jump in here to part one, Effortless State.

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I really don't know exactly how to define

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what he's talking about with Effortless State.

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This is kind of like the fundamental building blocks

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in my opinion, kind of like the perspective stuff.

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You need to understand, but the term state,

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I get this picture of somebody like sitting on a rock

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meditating and I don't think that's really what he's,

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he's going for with this.

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Really is trying to get us to think about the things

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that we do, the things that are essential

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and then how do we make those essential things easier to do?

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Because we really only have a couple of options

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when we can't do all of the essential things.

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We can let some essential things fall through the cracks

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and not do them or we can make those essential things easier

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so that we have more resources to devote

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to the other essential things.

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I think that is the insidious backstory to this book.

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That he doesn't explicitly address but is right there

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is what he's doing with this book is enabling people

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like past me who want to just squeeze in one more thing.

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Because you justify it by saying,

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"Well, I made the other stuff easier,

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so yeah, now I can fill that space."

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And if I were to go back and tell past Mike,

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one thing it would be do not touch that space.

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You leave that space alone, that is sacred.

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That's what we call margin, you should hold on to that, sir.

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Exactly.

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I don't think I had this reaction.

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I think effortless state made a lot of sense to me.

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But it's because this is horrible.

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Systems thinking, that's what crossed my mind when I went here.

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And I don't know if this is a testament to how well Sam Carpenter

00:19:22

put that book together or just the place

00:19:25

that we are comparing it to effortless against.

00:19:28

But in my mind, he's talking about my mind

00:19:33

and the way that I process inputs, I guess,

00:19:39

and the way that I view the work that I'm doing,

00:19:42

the tasks, the things I'm choosing to act on.

00:19:45

But the piece here that's maybe a little difficult to

00:19:50

get my head around on it is that he doesn't ever point out

00:19:58

what aspect of life he's referring to.

00:20:02

And I think maybe that's why you're having it.

00:20:05

Because he doesn't say that we're going to talk about how we use our time.

00:20:08

He's not talking about how we use our actions.

00:20:11

He's kind of floating amongst those two plus your mental state

00:20:17

and the way that you choose to take care of your body.

00:20:21

And he doesn't ever actually say, this is the realm that I want to focus on.

00:20:26

He bounces all over and doesn't seem to have a dedicated path of working through those.

00:20:31

Maybe he does. I just didn't see it. That's very impossible.

00:20:34

That he had a path and I just didn't recognize it.

00:20:37

But that's not one that I noticed anyway.

00:20:42

So he doesn't ever nail it down.

00:20:45

Yeah, there's not a clear path forward for this.

00:20:48

But I will say he does talk about the two ways to achieve all the work that really matters.

00:20:53

Those are his words, all the work that really matters.

00:20:57

Sure.

00:20:57

All right, so right there.

00:21:00

I think I have issues with this.

00:21:02

But his two options are gain superhuman power so we can do all the impossibly hard

00:21:07

but worthwhile work or get better at making the impossibly hard but worthwhile work easier.

00:21:14

And I think that is important, but that is only applicable up to a certain point.

00:21:20

And the image is that he draws here.

00:21:25

I think don't do that justice. He's got a picture of a giant snowball that you're pushing uphill

00:21:33

and it says maximum effort and then tiny results.

00:21:37

And then flip that over instead of pushing it uphill, if you're pushing it downhill,

00:21:41

tiny effort and maximum results.

00:21:43

And in a best case scenario, yes, that is true.

00:21:48

I think asking that question, what if this could be easy is really important and powerful

00:21:56

and he calls that effortless inversion.

00:21:57

That's the whole gist of this first chapter invert.

00:22:00

But I also think it has limited application.

00:22:03

And I'm trying to reconcile him.

00:22:06

I had the things that he is telling me here in this book and all of the things that I have

00:22:10

heard for a very long time, which I am questioning.

00:22:13

Think again by Adam Grant, right?

00:22:15

But if it's worth doing, it's going to be difficult.

00:22:19

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

00:22:21

I think there's a little bit of truth to that.

00:22:24

So I don't believe that it's simply I haven't discovered the effortless path to some of the

00:22:33

things that I'm doing.

00:22:34

I think some of the things that I'm doing are difficult.

00:22:38

And that's okay because they're worth doing anyways.

00:22:41

I think there's a lot of parallels you could draw there.

00:22:45

Some of the obvious ones would be with parenting.

00:22:47

I think Bookworm is definitely an example.

00:22:50

I mean, we don't really make money from Bookworm.

00:22:53

This is the definition of a passion project.

00:22:55

And it takes a lot of hours to read the books and to edit them and to publish them.

00:22:59

Like the reason there aren't a bunch of other podcasts like this is because it's a ton of work

00:23:06

and who's crazy enough to do that.

00:23:07

Yeah, there's, I mean, there's a lot of things that I think around this one.

00:23:13

Growing up on the farm, you tended to agree, right?

00:23:17

It's only the hard stuff that really matters.

00:23:20

The simple stuff, the easy stuff doesn't get corn to grow.

00:23:25

Like that was kind of the perspective that was passed, at least to me.

00:23:30

Now granted, in today's farming world with the size of equipment and how much automation

00:23:36

they've done, I think it's crazy simple to be honest.

00:23:40

But when I was starting, it was not filling a corn planter meant carrying 50 pound bags of

00:23:48

seed around and tearing the tops off and manually dumping them into buckets.

00:23:52

Now they just take a big tube and they fluke a switch and it fills the big center hopper and

00:23:57

they sit there and drink a Coke while they fill it up.

00:23:59

So that's how it goes now.

00:24:01

Anyway, all that to say, you know, there's, there's a thing here where

00:24:06

if it's worth doing, it's difficult or anything that's worth, you know, if it were easy,

00:24:15

everyone would do it that whole concept.

00:24:17

I think Greg would probably say that there might be some truth to that.

00:24:23

I don't think he would say it's absolutely false, but I think the piece that he would

00:24:28

add into that is that it means that we simply haven't thought about it the right way.

00:24:34

That's, I think we're each coming out with this effortless state in that,

00:24:37

yes, it's difficult.

00:24:39

At least on the surface, it's difficult.

00:24:42

But that either means that the task itself isn't being, like it's being done too well.

00:24:50

Like there was the story of the videography team that was asked to put together the recordings for

00:24:57

a professor.

00:24:59

That's a great story.

00:24:59

Yep.

00:25:00

And basically the professor asked this gal to record some of his lectures.

00:25:07

And in her mind, she immediately went to full on multi-camera videography team that's then doing

00:25:14

the animated graphics and stuff to build these so that they could be reused multiple times in the

00:25:20

future.

00:25:20

That's where her brain went.

00:25:21

She asks the professor, what is your intent with these?

00:25:26

Oh, well, I have one student that's in sports and can't make the class and wants to catch up.

00:25:30

Hey, guess what?

00:25:32

It's not multi months of work.

00:25:34

It's somebody sitting there with their phone kicked on.

00:25:37

Like this is world's different.

00:25:40

And I think some of what this effortless state part, part one here, is just helping us to step away

00:25:50

from our assumptions with these things.

00:25:52

Because it's easy to jump into big, overblown, massive projects.

00:25:59

Like that's where my brain goes a lot of times.

00:26:00

People ask me for a recording, a video recording, and I'm thinking about setting up lights.

00:26:05

I've got these fancy, like, I've got like a $12,000 video camera over there.

00:26:09

Like I've got those, all the video, like audio gear, like that's where my brain goes

00:26:14

whenever they ask me about trying to record a video.

00:26:19

But a lot of times they just need to share a video with like two people.

00:26:23

It's like, oh, we'll just set up your computer, turn on the webcam, hit record.

00:26:26

You don't need this big thing.

00:26:29

But that's where my brain goes.

00:26:30

And some of what I think Greg is trying to encourage us to do is

00:26:33

don't jump to the big, complicated pass.

00:26:37

Think about the simplest, most straightforward way to get the job done.

00:26:42

And oftentimes that means it is easy.

00:26:46

So the concept of if it were easy, everyone would do it.

00:26:50

If getting the results was easy, then everyone would do it, right?

00:26:55

But I think the actions that get to those results can be easy, but I think you have to

00:27:01

think about them differently and be willing to not go the 10 extra miles in a lot of cases.

00:27:08

So again, you're probably right.

00:27:10

There is some validity in it, but I think there are some ways to shortcut it at the same time.

00:27:16

Yeah, well, that story in particular, I like that story, but it also bugs me

00:27:21

because I am also guilty of overthinking things.

00:27:26

But that is an example of, I don't know if they were getting paid for this or if they're doing it as

00:27:32

a favor, whatever.

00:27:33

If you're doing it as a job, then on one level, you probably don't care how complex things get

00:27:40

because you're going to get paid for the complexity.

00:27:42

You're the professional, right?

00:27:43

So assuming it's a favor, then what you're doing is you're trying to figure out a way to

00:27:49

accommodate all these people who are asking you to do things.

00:27:52

And that I have fallen into the trap of more than once, and it always bugs me when I do.

00:27:59

And I do have that approach, I think, of when someone asks me to do something.

00:28:03

If I do want to accommodate them, I do tend to overthink it.

00:28:07

But what's even simpler is just saying no.

00:28:09

So again, he wrote essentialism.

00:28:13

So I know he gets this, and I feel like this is kind of lost in the translation.

00:28:17

If you just look at this book in isolation, though, is, well, yeah, maybe this particular thing went

00:28:26

from a thousand hours worth of effort because it was a thousand hours when they were talking

00:28:30

about it initially to a couple of hours.

00:28:33

But what does that simplification, what sort of behavior does that encourage going forward?

00:28:40

More accommodating of people who just want you to solve their problems?

00:28:44

No, thank you.

00:28:46

But if you apply this in a personal sense, then this is something completely different than the

00:28:51

story that he's telling.

00:28:52

Because now what you're trying to do is make something, let's say, because that's probably the

00:28:59

angle you and I would come at this with as creators.

00:29:01

And with a creator, yeah, there are ways that you can simplify things, but only to a point,

00:29:07

like the farmer example that you mentioned, if you have the machinery and can automate stuff,

00:29:11

like that's cool, more power to you. But at some point, you still have to plant the seed in the

00:29:17

ground, like you can't automate that part. I can't automate the creation of a podcast episode.

00:29:24

I can't have a robot sitting here and record this conversation with you, nor would I want to,

00:29:28

because the quality would not be there.

00:29:31

And in the example of the class lecture, the quality doesn't matter.

00:29:37

So I think there's lots of different variables here, which completely change this scenario

00:29:43

when I apply it in any way that resembles my life.

00:29:45

And I don't really know how to reconcile that.

00:29:49

Well, in this particular case, she was like the head of media at the school.

00:29:53

So that was a lot of her job is doing that sort of thing for professors and

00:29:58

employees of the school.

00:30:01

Sure, sure.

00:30:03

It's her job, really, to do that. But she's choosing what her teams work on at the same time.

00:30:10

So there's a lot of dynamics in that one, I think.

00:30:14

Yeah, yeah. And that's fine. That story in isolation, just kind of bugs me,

00:30:20

because I have so many questions about what would you say in this scenario, Greg?

00:30:24

Yep.

00:30:25

He doesn't get into it. In some ways, this book is kind of short. I mean, he's got a lot of visuals

00:30:31

in here, and it's 215 pages or something like that.

00:30:35

But there's lots of charts and things where he's restating things that he's already said.

00:30:40

It could have been quite a bit longer. And I feel like a lot of this stuff,

00:30:44

he just doesn't get into it nearly as deep as he could have.

00:30:47

This next part, though, with enjoy, what if this could be fun?

00:30:51

I think this is the one that really resonates with me.

00:30:55

I think there's a lot of opportunity here for me. One example of this that I thought of

00:31:02

pairing something essential was something that's enjoyable.

00:31:04

I've got this rowing machine, which Blake encouraged me to buy.

00:31:09

I don't really have any sort of... I don't really watch YouTube videos,

00:31:14

but I know that there are a lot of things on YouTube that I kind of want to watch.

00:31:18

But I haven't really engaged with it because I just don't have the time to do it.

00:31:22

Well, I can reinforce the essential activity of working out if I pair it with something that I

00:31:29

want to do, which is watch these YouTube videos, so I can pull up a queue.

00:31:34

And now the rowing machine, that becomes my YouTube time.

00:31:38

And there's lots of other ways that you can do this sort of thing.

00:31:41

He uses an example in the book of how they were trying to get everybody to clear the table

00:31:47

after dinner. Everybody just takes off and I've got homework and they disappear in their rooms

00:31:51

or whatever. So what they did is they tried to make that more fun and now they just sing

00:31:57

Disney tunes at the top of their lungs while they're cleaning the dinner table.

00:32:01

That's a cool example, I think. And it has me thinking about what are the...

00:32:06

He calls them building blocks of joy that I can add to my own rituals, which is a whole

00:32:12

another section here. And I thought this was kind of cool. We've read lots of books on habits,

00:32:16

right? But rituals are kind of like groups of habits and he defines them as the habits are the

00:32:22

what you do, but the rituals are the how you do it. And I feel like that's a really cool way to

00:32:28

to think about it. And it's probably a lot more approachable than something like habit stacking,

00:32:33

although like the technical stuff that we read about in atomic habits and tiny habits.

00:32:39

For the average person, the rituals of like how you get the things done, that I think opens itself

00:32:46

up to a lot more. What he's trying to get people to do, you know, where you apply some flavor to

00:32:52

this, some element of fun to this, that's a lot more applicable for the average person, I would argue.

00:32:59

Do you have an example off hand? I was trying to think of a good example of how you take a habit

00:33:05

and convert it into a ritual. Do you have something off hand for that? I was trying to think of one

00:33:11

that I've done, but I don't have a good example that I'm coming up with.

00:33:15

Well, I think the when I think of ritual, I think of like my morning routine. And each one of the

00:33:21

things that are in my morning routine started off as an individual habit that I had to build,

00:33:25

but now they all kind of roll together or like a shutdown routine. That would be a you could reframe

00:33:31

that as like a shutdown ritual where I empty all my inboxes and I time block the next day,

00:33:38

you know, and essentially in my mind, it's stacking these habits together. But when you link them

00:33:45

together, like a series of dominoes, there's some momentum that carries over from one to the next.

00:33:51

So you can do a whole bunch of things with a small amount of effort. For example, when I wake up,

00:33:59

if you were to actually like write out my morning routine, it's kind of ridiculous. It's something

00:34:04

like drink 20 ounces of water, read my Bible, spend time in prayer, do my stretches,

00:34:10

shower, make coffee, but all of that stuff happens in like a 30, 45 minute period. And it happens

00:34:18

kind of automatically where like I struggle even to like think through the pieces there,

00:34:23

because I do it. Exactly. Like I fill up my water bottle before I go to bed at night and I set it

00:34:29

by my on the nightstand. So the very first thing that I do when I get up is I chug 20 ounces of water

00:34:35

to get my body going. I don't think about that. I just see the water bottle and I drink it. It's

00:34:40

just automatic at this point. But I think if you never really considered building your habits,

00:34:47

linking them together, that's really what the ritual ritual is. It takes a little bit more time,

00:34:52

but it's also the kind of thing where I'm going to block an hour on my calendar for this thing.

00:34:57

And then I'm in a cram as much positive stuff as I can in there and just knock down all those

00:35:02

dominoes at one time. Yeah, that's very fair. I mean, I do a lot with like the morning routine

00:35:07

process as well. And I think that can be a good one. I was trying to think through something that was

00:35:15

day to day project, almost checklist related. And to me, those aren't necessarily

00:35:23

rituals. I mean, the thing that did come to mind, I have a process I kind of go through

00:35:33

before we start recording, before I start doing live streams, before I run a webinar.

00:35:39

I have a whole series. I just ran through 60 plus items that I checked off before we started

00:35:48

recording here. And that was before you and I ever connected on the video system. So before we

00:35:55

ever connected, I had run that. And then that was done. But I have this process post that setup

00:36:06

of mostly just sitting and staring is what it looks like. But it's me thinking through the process

00:36:12

of what is this going to look like? What are the things I need to make sure I bring up?

00:36:17

Usually I've got my notepad and I'm writing a handful of things down that I want to make sure

00:36:21

that I'm going to bring up things that pop into my head to have nothing to do with what I'm getting

00:36:28

ready to do. That kind of acts like a ritual, because I've done it so many times now, that it

00:36:33

just kind of has that feel. It doesn't have to be. But in my case, I think it does qualify for that.

00:36:41

Absolutely. I mean, ritual, I think this is the powerful part about the way Greg McKeown

00:36:47

frames it is don't overthink it. Whatever you do, it's the, what did I say? It's the how you do it.

00:36:55

It's not the specifics of what you are actually doing. A part of my getting ready to record

00:37:01

really any podcast, but bookworm specifically, because it's at this 1PM Central Time slot.

00:37:08

I've already eaten lunch. I'm going to make sure that the outline is good to go. If it's my episode,

00:37:16

I'm going to review my my my node file. So I kind of know where things are, what I want to talk about.

00:37:21

I'm going to make my coffee. I'm going to bring it down to my office. That all gets me in a certain

00:37:27

state for the podcast itself. And I don't ever stop and think about all of the individual levers

00:37:35

that I'm pulling there. It's just part of the process. And I know that it works. And so I think

00:37:43

identifying the different rituals that you have, that's kind of the place to start with this.

00:37:46

And we're not going to turn this into another habits episode, I promise.

00:37:49

We're trying to though. But the other thing with this, because the next chapter is all about

00:37:57

release and gratitude, I think when it comes to the rituals, there's value in understanding

00:38:04

what you're currently doing and realizing that that has a purpose. Yes, you can cut some things

00:38:12

out and add some different things if you want to craft these in a specific way. If you want to

00:38:18

make positive changes, this is the place to do it. But you don't go into it thinking,

00:38:24

there are all of these other people who are doing all of these amazing things. And I am so far

00:38:30

behind them because I am not doing everything that they are doing as part of their routines

00:38:34

or rituals that will just make you miserable. Nothing will ever stick. You're not going to do

00:38:38

anything. So I think there's power in coupling this gratitude section to this. I am glad that I

00:38:48

get to make coffee and look at an outline and sit down and record a podcast. I'm not looking at it

00:38:54

through the lens of I'm trying to maximize my output. I am enjoying the journey. And that's really

00:39:02

where the gratitude piece comes in. It's gap versus gain. You're looking at where you were and

00:39:07

recognizing the growth from where you started, as opposed to thinking about where you wish you

00:39:13

were and measuring how far you have to go. That's the whole issue I have with goals is like as soon

00:39:18

as you close that gap, as soon as you cross that finish line, there is now another gap to be crossed.

00:39:25

And the finish line has moved. The goalposts are farther out, maybe farther out than they've ever

00:39:29

been. And now you just feel discouraged because this took a Herculean amount of effort for me to

00:39:34

get to this point. How am I ever going to get to that other thing? I can't sustain this,

00:39:38

right? But you can if you enjoy the process. There's a lot to be said. I think you brought

00:39:44

up this whole gratitude versus release concept. And I think there's probably a ton that we could

00:39:51

say about that. It seems like gratitude is one that has come up numerous times, right? This is

00:39:59

something we do with our kids. Not I wouldn't say every meal, but occasionally, well, like,

00:40:05

what was the best part of your day? Like, we'll ask that question. And it seems so routine to me,

00:40:12

but it is interesting to learn from a four year old what the best part of her day was.

00:40:22

Eating mac and cheese is sometimes the answer or the six year old will like, oh, I was able to

00:40:29

color. Like good news. I saw a dog today. Yeah, no kidding. It's like, hey, dad, guess what?

00:40:35

Over rest time, I counted 178 cars. Like, why? Like that's, that's what goes through my head,

00:40:42

right? But you're like, that's amazing. Number one, I didn't know you could count that high.

00:40:46

Number two, that's some intense focus to be willing to sit there and just stare at cars driving by.

00:40:52

For an hour. So that's intense. But these are the things we don't even pay attention to, right?

00:41:00

But asking kids, what was the best part of your day is often a fascinating conversation that

00:41:07

comes from it. But yes, gratitude. Yeah. And this is one of those things that I kind of wish you

00:41:12

would have gotten a little bit deeper. He has some cool visuals in this section about the

00:41:19

different directions when you focus on what you lack versus focusing on the things that you have.

00:41:24

On page 58, he says, when you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on

00:41:29

what you have, you get what you lack. And that's a great one liner. But this section is, is kind of,

00:41:37

kind of short. Maybe we need to tackle a whole book on gratitude at some point. Probably,

00:41:42

because I feel like there's a lot of ways we could go with that one. This is like, I just had a

00:41:46

conversation with my wife about this one in that if you're focusing on the bad things that are

00:41:53

happening right now, you tend to just completely gloss over the good things. And if you're focused

00:41:58

on all the good things, you can sometimes gloss over all of the bad things. Like those are the

00:42:03

things that I was having a conversation with her about because like, look at our life situation.

00:42:10

We're moved into an apartment. We are trying to find a house. I do find with change. My wife does

00:42:17

not. The limbo is driving her nuts, not knowing what comes next because we don't have a place

00:42:23

located yet. So these are all things that really bother her. They don't even register for me a lot

00:42:30

of times. I really don't want to live in an apartment, but it's still something that is important to her.

00:42:35

So it's easy to focus on all the bad things that we don't like about our living situation right now.

00:42:41

But that's not the point. It's better to pay attention to, I have zero yard work.

00:42:46

House maintenance doesn't exist because it's a phone call. Like these are all things that make

00:42:52

life super easy. Those are the things that we need to be paying attention to. Otherwise,

00:42:58

it's easy to fall down the negativity bandwagon. Yep, totally. So again, the next section here on

00:43:06

rest could have spoken a lot more. I don't want to say eloquently, but it feels kind of like

00:43:16

he did a little bit of research on this enough to sound smart when he says that it's your

00:43:26

responsibility to relax. But there's so much more to be said here. This one specifically,

00:43:33

I mean, we've talked about sleep before, so we won't spend a whole lot of time here.

00:43:38

Did a whole book on it. We did. Yep. So again, all of these individual chapters have a lot

00:43:43

more that can be said. This one specifically, I put it in the outline though, because I feel like

00:43:49

I could have written a better section for him. And that's completely unfair to Greg,

00:43:57

based on my situation and kind of my whole journey with this stuff. But this, I call it out because

00:44:05

I feel like this kind of was a tipping point for me where I started to question or think a little

00:44:11

bit more critically, judgmentally maybe about the rest of the things that he was going to be saying

00:44:18

in this book. Like the first three chapters kind of flew under the radar, didn't even realize

00:44:24

till I got to this one, I'm like, hey, he didn't even really touch on this stuff. Oh, wait, he did

00:44:30

the same thing when he was talking about gratitude. And that I feel like sets the tone for my,

00:44:38

for the rest of the book for me, not in a positive way. Sure. I do want to point out that

00:44:45

there was an action item I had from this section on sleep and rest and such. He mentions, because

00:44:50

the problem with reading as many books as we do is, and this is maybe what you're getting at here,

00:44:55

Mike, is that it's easy for us to see how it could have been better because someone else did it better,

00:45:02

or we've been reading enough about it that we feel like we could do better. More the matter.

00:45:06

Adler has taught us well. It's true. He has destroyed us in being able to read a book and be

00:45:13

completely amazed by it because only we had never read how to read a book. We would be so much happier.

00:45:20

It's so true. So true. Anyway, we've done so much on sleep and it's come up in so many different

00:45:27

so many different books at this point that we just haven't found. I don't feel like we see much

00:45:36

whenever these topics come up. There's not much new, right? There was a point here that was new to me

00:45:41

in that if you take a shower at night about 90 minutes before you go to bed, something about

00:45:47

that helps your body relax temperature-wise and helps you sleep better. And I thought, huh,

00:45:53

that's interesting. I've been one that takes a morning shower for a long time. So I'm going to

00:46:00

experiment with this one a little bit. All right. Just add a carry out. I'm going to, again, this is

00:46:04

very minor, right? So I'm going to attempt to, and the way our daily routines work, this actually works

00:46:10

out well. I'm going to take a shower at night, roughly an hour or 15, hour and a half before

00:46:15

I go to bed. And we'll see. See if it changes how easy it is to fall asleep. But just a curious

00:46:23

thing is it wasn't even a long section, really. It was like two or three paragraphs in the whole

00:46:28

thing. But that was just one little tidbit that I thought was interesting. That tidbit, it was

00:46:34

interesting to me too, because growing up my dad and he had gotten this from his dad,

00:46:40

he had told me that you should take a cold shower before going to bed, because that will help you

00:46:46

sleep. Yeah. And then now Greg McKeown is in the exact opposite. Take a hot shot.

00:46:52

And I think Greg McKeown is actually right, because there are a lot of people who say

00:46:55

take a cold shower in the morning because it wakes you up and you're more alert. So

00:47:00

that's probably one of those things that has just been passed down from generation to generation.

00:47:04

And there's more science behind what Greg says. But the way that Greg says it, it sounds like the

00:47:09

exact same thing, just changing hot and cold. It's like, oh, my great, great grandfather told me to do

00:47:17

this. So this is what you should do. Totally. Some of the lists that he has in here feel like

00:47:26

that. Like the proposed work schedule, dedicate the morning to essential work, break down that

00:47:30

work into three sessions of no more than 90 minutes each. Take a short break, 10 to 15 minutes in

00:47:34

between sessions to rest and recover. So kind of like Pomodoro, but you don't want to get into

00:47:41

the science behind it or give anybody credit, like that's kind of how it relates. And that's not

00:47:45

probably what he's trying to. Yeah, it's not what he's trying to say, but that's how it comes off.

00:47:49

Right. Right. It's so true. He doesn't want to credit.

00:47:53

But trust your uncle, Greg here. My dad used to always make fun of people who took showers in

00:48:00

the morning at all. Didn't matter. Hot or cold. Why are you taking a shower in the morning?

00:48:04

Like you should take a shower at night because you're dirty at night. That was what he said

00:48:08

all the time. Think about it. He's a farmer. Guess what? He's out in the dirt.

00:48:14

In oil and stuff on him all day long. He's like, well, of course you're going to take a shower

00:48:19

at night. That's just how it works. Because I'm not going to bed like that. So he was always just,

00:48:26

why would you take a shower in the morning? He's like, didn't you just take one the night before?

00:48:30

That doesn't make sense. There you go. Take two showers every day. One at night,

00:48:35

90 minutes before you go to bed, that's hot and a cold one in the morning. There you go.

00:48:39

Yeah, no kidding. That's kind of what this left me with is like, okay, so I should take a

00:48:44

shower in the morning because that's what works for me. And then usually, if I put that off,

00:48:49

sometimes I'll go running late morning and I'll just shower then. But if I did shower in the

00:48:54

morning, I'm not going to skip my workout. So now I'm showering after my workout. And then

00:48:58

I'm going to shower at night because Greg told me to. Like, no, I'm not taking three showers a day.

00:49:03

All the great showers. But there's another chapter here, which we won't really talk about,

00:49:08

which is notice. And this is really about distractions and attention. And again, a super deep topic

00:49:14

that we wrote whole books on. But these five chapters, which we have spent too much time on

00:49:19

comprises this first section of the book. This is also the one I think that is the most

00:49:25

interesting to me, which is maybe why I was a little bit disappointed that he didn't get into

00:49:30

these more. But we should probably move on to the second section here, which is effortless action.

00:49:35

Now there are five chapters here. I'm going to list these real quickly. We're not going to go

00:49:39

through all of these. Chapter six is defined. Chapter seven is start. Chapter eight is simplified.

00:49:45

Chapter nine is progress. Chapter 10 is pace. And this is where you basically apply all of the

00:49:53

productivity stuff that you've heard over the years. This is where pretty much GTD and such

00:49:58

comes in. I think there are a couple of things that are interesting here. The first chapter is

00:50:05

kind of all about defining what done looks like. His advice in this section is to make a done for

00:50:13

the day list, which I think is a good idea, but also sounds like time blocking without wanting

00:50:20

to mention Cal Newport. And again, that's unfair to say that. But we've read enough books and I'm

00:50:28

like, hey, this is totally Cal's idea where you take certain things and you put them on your

00:50:34

counter because that's when you're going to do them, but you're going to limit the number of

00:50:37

things that you are going to try to get done. And if you do those small amount of things,

00:50:41

then that is a successful day. This feels like re saying that in simpler, more undefined terms.

00:50:49

And I don't like it. I feel like it's not super actionable. Maybe if you're just coming into this,

00:50:56

like you're not really entrenched in the productivity space, like we are, you haven't read all the books

00:51:02

that we've read. You don't know all of us, the things that we know. And I don't say that to

00:51:06

sound like, oh, we figured all these things out. It's kind of like the curse of knowledge,

00:51:10

like the more you learn about things, you forget what it was like to be a beginner.

00:51:14

So I'm saying this in Greg's defense. Maybe he is writing this for the beginner. And I just have

00:51:20

so far gone past that this speaks to me differently. What do you think?

00:51:25

I actually thought it was a really cool idea. And it didn't feel like it was Cal Newport's thing at all.

00:51:30

Okay. Because the difference, I think, so Cal Newport's time blocking process,

00:51:38

he would oftentimes refer to like if something happens to change. Like changes have to happen,

00:51:47

right? And he does refer to how that happens quite a bit. So his time block will change mid-day.

00:51:54

This I don't feel like has that flair because, okay, how many people are listening to this?

00:52:01

You have a task list. You might be looking at it right now, because you're listening to us

00:52:05

while you're putting together your task list for the day. Okay. So people do this. You have your task

00:52:11

to do list. And how many of us put things on there that you aspire to do that day,

00:52:19

or that you want to do that day, but aren't necessarily mandatory. And you might not actually

00:52:24

get to them. It's just would be cool if. Yeah. That's a really good point. And I'm the

00:52:31

back in my head, I'm thinking the same thing you are. That's what people do. But the way that he

00:52:35

explained this, it sounds like a separate list. It does. It doesn't sound like just limit your

00:52:42

to do list, make another list of the things that are absolutely critical. Yes. That's what I think

00:52:48

it is. Now, I didn't take it as it's a separate list until you just said that. But in my head,

00:52:56

it wasn't necessarily here's all the things that I could do today, which is what a lot of us do.

00:53:02

Right? I do this. Yeah. And instead, it's a here are the things that at the end of the day,

00:53:09

the day is done when these are completed. And if I have more energy, I can go on to another list

00:53:16

elsewhere and work on them if I want. But it's not necessary. Is this where you talked about

00:53:21

upper and lower bounds? Was that later? I got that part. I can't remember. I don't see that in my

00:53:30

outline in this section. So maybe that's later. I'm glad that you said that though, because I

00:53:35

honestly never thought about it that way. But you're absolutely right. I completely agree with the

00:53:40

concept of limit your task list to the things that are going to make today successful. He doesn't

00:53:47

give a number, which I wish he would have done. Right. Because I think people need that. Otherwise,

00:53:51

they're always going to end up with 10, 15, 20 things. Yeah, it's three. After much practice,

00:53:57

I've gotten up to five. And that is it. I cannot do more than five. And so I feel like this is

00:54:05

really ambiguous. And maybe if he would have framed it that way, then I will completely agree with this.

00:54:12

It's kind of funny that I went totally the other way. And I'm like, well, this is what

00:54:16

Kalnuport is telling you to do, because you have one list now, and you are limiting it. And you're

00:54:22

also identifying when you're going to be doing these things. So that's the better method. Maybe

00:54:26

it was just the lack of detail that completely threw that off for me and let me paint this picture

00:54:30

of something that he was never intending to say. Yeah, I feel like it was, where is this? It's in

00:54:35

the chapter on pace. Okay, I'll come back to that. To me, I feel like it's in software, in project

00:54:43

management, defining done is an important step. Yep. This is this is super important, especially if

00:54:49

you're doing client work, like, when am I actually done working for you? Like, this is really,

00:54:53

really important. Now, after flying an airplane, it's pretty easy. When I land, we're done. Like,

00:54:59

well, it's probably not that moment. It's like, when we're at the gate and we're getting off the

00:55:02

plane, like, Blake would have to tell us. But there's a point at which that flight is completed,

00:55:07

right? But I think it's, you know, it's, it's interesting that Greg has this done list for the day.

00:55:15

And he's defining, you know, at the end of the day, if I have these, call it four, three, two,

00:55:22

whatever the number is, these three things done, I can quit working when those are completed.

00:55:29

That's just a thought process that we don't normally think about when we think about putting

00:55:33

together a to-do list. Exactly. But it's also not at all what he was talking about in the rest of

00:55:38

the traffic. Sure. I mean, this is where I wanted it to be. Yeah. So I completely agree in this idea,

00:55:44

but I think he didn't flesh it out. Sure. Yes, you should define done for your day. That is time

00:55:50

blocking. And you doesn't have to be time blocking. There can be other flavors of it,

00:55:55

but that's how I do it. And I feel like what he told people at the end of this, my brain went to

00:56:02

time blocking. And if you didn't have any sort of reference for this, this is kind of like,

00:56:07

pie in the sky. Well, what are you talking about, Greg? I've got all these things that I need to do.

00:56:12

I can never get them all done. And now you're going to tell me that I just need to make them

00:56:17

easier so that I get them all done. Like, I don't know. I think you do have to, at some point,

00:56:23

say no, which is not really the point of this book. It's the point of the previous book. The rest of

00:56:27

this chapter, I really enjoy it. I really like that story of the ship that is being built for the

00:56:33

the King of Sweden. And he keeps making it bigger. Yeah, he wants it to be longer. He wants more

00:56:39

cannons on it. And then by the time that it's finally done, they take it out for the voyage.

00:56:44

And it tips over it so heavy it sinks like before it gets a mile from the shore and the army's there

00:56:50

and they have this parade and everybody sees it sink after they spent all this time building

00:56:55

this giant military warship. And I thought that was kind of hilarious because there are a lot of

00:57:00

work projects that do the same thing. But that's project based. And I think that that's really the

00:57:07

point he's making here. And that's really the powerful idea, whether it is a personal or a

00:57:11

professional project. He says, getting clear on what Don looks like doesn't help you finish the

00:57:17

thing, but it helps you get started. Totally agree with that. It provides the motivation because

00:57:21

you know, this is what it's going to look like. One more finish, you're not going to go crazy.

00:57:25

Like, Henrik Hybertson, the guy who had to keep modifying the plans. But then at the end,

00:57:33

like the one takeaway from this chapter is, okay, by the way, retrofit this to planning your day.

00:57:36

And like, what? Yeah, just shoehorn it in there. It'll be fine. Yeah, it'll all be the same.

00:57:43

It reminds me of the, what is it, the F 35 project fighter jet that the US was, I think it's F 35.

00:57:52

And ended up being like a trillion dollar project. And I don't know that it actually was

00:58:00

completed the way they wanted it to be. I know that some of them were sold to the Israeli

00:58:06

government. And there was all sorts of restrictions on what they couldn't, couldn't do with them. And

00:58:11

they just immediately like ripped out the computer and put something else in it.

00:58:15

So it's like, it was violated so many things. Anyway, that's a whole another topic.

00:58:20

Yep. Yep. A couple of things from this section on, let's see, was it start where he was talking

00:58:29

about the microburst, which is a meteorological surge that causes powerful winds and storms for

00:58:37

a brief, but intense period. I have a, a real life picture of this etched into my brain because

00:58:45

I guess it was two summers ago, I was out for a run on the way back. I get this weather warning.

00:58:55

I'm about three miles from my house. I look around and I'm like, it doesn't look like anything. But

00:59:02

it was clear when I left. So maybe this is a fluke. I had a thought to like stop at the park because

00:59:08

there was this shelter there, but I'm like, I'm just going to keep going. And then by the time I got

00:59:12

to my house, it became very evident that there was indeed a storm coming. And in fact, I got home,

00:59:20

got inside and about a minute and a half later, we got a ton of rain, a ton of hail, and we lost

00:59:28

power for an entire week. So being stuck in that would have been very, very bad, but I just made

00:59:34

it back. And in my mind, that's what I picture when I picture these microburst is like, this comes

00:59:40

out of nowhere and is super powerful. You have no idea that it's coming, but then it leaves an

00:59:47

impact that you see for, I mean, we didn't have power for a week afterwards, which in our area,

00:59:54

that's that never happens. Like when we lose power, it's for 10, 15 minutes, but hundreds of thousands

01:00:00

of people around us, you know, they all lost power because of this, this crazy storm. So that's

01:00:05

the picture that I get. And when you think about making the, the first step with something,

01:00:12

he makes a point in the chapter that now only lasts 2.5 seconds. So if you can do something now,

01:00:17

if you could do something in those 2.5 seconds that has that much effort or power behind it in

01:00:24

terms of creating the outcome that you want, that's a really cool idea. You have to identify

01:00:32

what that thing is that can provide that, that big boost and leave that impact like the microburst,

01:00:38

but I, it's got me thinking that way. I think maybe this is a little bit of a hyperbole and an

01:00:45

exaggeration. Like I don't think just finding the one thing that you're supposed to do to move

01:00:50

something forward and then doing it is, is it's really fair to compare that to a microburst necessarily.

01:00:57

But it's an interesting analogy. I grew up with tornadoes. So there's so many times my grandfather

01:01:05

used to say, you know, if the wind changes, what is it? Three times in three minutes. Like if it

01:01:09

changes direction three times in three minutes, hit the deck. That's what we would do. So anyway,

01:01:16

those were, there were a number of times we saw twisters that would come touch down and then they

01:01:22

would go back up and then they would leave and then we would hear the tornado siren. It's like,

01:01:27

thanks guys. Thanks for the warning. Appreciate that. Yeah, that was the other thing.

01:01:31

It is the sirens never went off when I was out for my run. So I was like, God, no big deal.

01:01:36

Yeah, it can't be that big. I don't know. We've just growing up, we always just learned to watch the

01:01:41

weather and try to interpret it yourself instead of trusting what everybody else said. Yeah. Anyway,

01:01:45

one thing that you mentioned very quickly that I want to, I just want to call out in a little

01:01:50

more detail is the concept that what we consider the present, like what we consider right now,

01:01:55

is a span of about 2.5 seconds that you were talking about. Does that seem weird to you?

01:02:02

And my head that might actually be long, but the more I think about it, it's really short.

01:02:06

But it's just, first off, how do they even know that? I don't have any idea how they would

01:02:12

measure that. But it's just an interesting thing. It's like, okay, the present, what we consider

01:02:16

right now is 2.5 seconds. So in this 2.5 seconds, what are you doing? Well, I'm making these motions

01:02:24

with my hands. So I don't know, it's just kind of an interesting side point.

01:02:29

Yeah, I don't really like that 2.5 seconds, to be honest. I get, I think, the point that he's

01:02:35

making, because what he's trying to get you to do is to make a decision to take action. And

01:02:42

when framed that way, it only takes a couple of seconds to make that decision and do something,

01:02:48

and that thing that you do could be the microburst that allows you to take significant action on

01:02:55

this thing that you've been procrastinating on. Although I am a little bit skeptical that if

01:03:00

you go into it expecting those results every single time, you're going to be disappointed when

01:03:04

you make that decision, you make a little bit of an effort, and it doesn't have a ginormous

01:03:11

effect every single time. Sometimes it does. A lot of times it doesn't. And especially the 2.5

01:03:17

seconds, that's how long the decision may take. But the actual completion of the action takes

01:03:24

significantly longer than that. And a little bit, like that 2.5 seconds, what that does in me when I

01:03:31

read that is I can't waste a single moment. I have to take advantage of every 2.5 seconds,

01:03:38

but I can tell you that that's not the way that I work. And I don't want to work that way anymore.

01:03:45

I have a very chill, if you were to watch me work, you'd probably be like, is this guy doing anything?

01:03:53

Because I know my ebbs and flows, and I prioritize things in the morning specifically is when I

01:04:04

create. I do my morning routine like we talked about. I come down to my office, and at that point,

01:04:09

I'll sit down to write. But when I'm no longer in the flow, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going

01:04:16

to refill my water bottle. I'm going to use the restroom, do all those things. And I do that

01:04:21

fairly frequently. I do that basically whenever I hit that wall. And so just like getting up and

01:04:28

walking around, going outside, shooting some hoops, coming back in, and then reengaging with the work.

01:04:34

That allows me to do a lot in a given day. But if you're sitting there measuring like the hours

01:04:41

that I work in the moments that I'm wasting, right, those are going to add up pretty quick.

01:04:49

I don't like measuring my productivity that way. I think that's dangerous. And it forces you into

01:04:57

I have to be working every single moment when really, if you want to maximize your output,

01:05:03

you have to get, he talks about this in pace, right? You have to bite off not more than you can chew.

01:05:10

And he tells that great story of the people who are racing to the South Pole. And there's the one

01:05:17

guy who's going to push his team really hard when the weather is great. They're not going to do

01:05:20

anything when the weather is bad. And then there's the other guy who's like, we're just going to go

01:05:23

15 miles every single day, no matter what. And he's the one who gets there. And the guy who's

01:05:29

pushing his team when it's when it's nice and then not doing anything when it's when it's bad,

01:05:34

like they're all burnt out because they're constantly sprinting. And then when they're not

01:05:39

sprinting, they're not able to fully recover. And that was a big lesson I had to learn was

01:05:46

slow and steady wins this race. You're not going to knock it out of the park every single day. And

01:05:53

actually, it's better to just do a little bit here and a little bit there. And I guess kind of to

01:05:58

wrap this up, what I've learned is that I can do that even throughout my day, a little bit here

01:06:03

and a little bit there. And then when I measure it at the end of the day, I've made some significant

01:06:07

progress. Yeah, this is this is where they introduced the Greg introduces the upper and lower

01:06:15

bounds of work where you apply this to writing. Okay, I'm not going to stop until I've written at

01:06:24

least 500 words. But I have to stop if I hit 1200. And that sounds so weird, doesn't it? It does.

01:06:33

It does. But the trick here is that they're going to be days when trying to get to 500 is a stretch.

01:06:41

And there are days when 1200 is easy. But the problem is that if you make it easy to stop before

01:06:52

500, you won't always make the progress you want. But if you allow yourself to go above the 1200,

01:06:59

you're going to wear yourself out such that doing tomorrow's 500 is even more difficult.

01:07:04

Exactly. Like those are the the sides of that. I think this is brilliant, actually. And it's not

01:07:11

like you hear people talk about, got my 1000 words for the day, or I did my morning pages,

01:07:16

like you hear these things, right? Or I'm going to write a weekly newsletter, or I'm going to do

01:07:21

this. And I'm going to do 1000 words a day, like whatever that is, a video a week,

01:07:25

whatever those are, you're a lot of times people measure the outcome instead of the stuff that

01:07:31

goes into it. That's a whole nother topic I'm not going to go into here. But the piece that goes

01:07:36

into it, take the ship and the race to the South Pole, right? They were deciding to do,

01:07:42

was it 15 miles a day? I think is what it was. Yep. And they chose to do the 15 miles,

01:07:49

no more than 15 miles. And whenever they decided that, it meant that they were always able to

01:07:56

recover. And they were always able to get the breaks. But on some days, it was hard to get that

01:08:02

15 miles, right? So you're going to hurt yourself. If you go beyond it, you're going to not get

01:08:09

anywhere. If you don't have that minimum piece, but the important part here is that they were

01:08:13

setting up a distance that like their goal was to do 15 miles a day. Their goal wasn't,

01:08:19

they weren't looking at the South Pole saying, that's where I'm, that's where my goal is. It's a

01:08:23

good thing to do that to keep that end in sight. But they were focused on the day to day. And I

01:08:29

think this is the important part here that I want to point out in that if you set these upper and

01:08:34

lower bounds, and this is something I want to do for some of my creative work, I don't know what

01:08:38

that means, given that I'm trying to move a lot more into video and such. So because of that,

01:08:45

I don't know what that looks like. How do I measure? There's no word count that I can

01:08:49

measure on that. So that's the piece that I want to, to try to figure out that I wrote down as an

01:08:56

action. I mean, this is determining what are those upper and lower bounds for the creative

01:09:00

work that I do. Yeah, I love this. I wish the whole section was on this specific topic.

01:09:06

I know, right. How do you reconcile a microburst with this? I don't know. Me either.

01:09:11

I mean, the easy answer is you use the microburst concept to start that period.

01:09:18

Sure. I mean, that's the easy one. Whenever you set that time to start,

01:09:22

like if I'm going to sit down and start to work on an article, I could use the microburst to

01:09:29

start that period to get me towards the 500 words. I guess this sounds like if microburst is a

01:09:35

strong, sudden storm, this sounds like gentle rainfall, like the light rain and it's just slow

01:09:43

and steady and it just is what it is. There's nothing exciting about this, which is totally not

01:09:49

the picture you get with a microburst. Right. It might depend on what we're talking about too,

01:09:53

because in the story of upper and lower bounds, they're talking about a long-term goal that's

01:10:00

going to take a long period to achieve. And then you're breaking it up into those little pieces

01:10:05

to work towards it. Like the creative work I'm talking about would be like that. There is no

01:10:10

end in sight with that. But the microburst piece from where I'm sitting would be super helpful for

01:10:18

cleaning up that massive video gear I've got sitting over here in the corner.

01:10:22

That sort of thing would be super helpful. What was he mentioned? The drawer that had the pencil

01:10:29

tray that was lodged slightly that had been that way for two years.

01:10:34

Yes. And the GTD expert came and fixed it in two minutes.

01:10:38

Right. It's all done. It saved so much frustration for the next several years.

01:10:43

Like I had issues with that story. That was so weird to me. But I think that's maybe the

01:10:49

difference is one, the microburst is for things that aren't recurring, whereas the upper and lower

01:10:55

bounds would be for things that are just ongoing. That's at least how I'm reconciling it in my brain.

01:11:01

I wish chapter seven on start. He wouldn't have even used the microburst example there,

01:11:05

because I think what he's really talking about is clarity. Clarity is not a microburst.

01:11:11

Sure. Clarity is knowing what the next step is. That's really what he's talking about.

01:11:18

Find that first obvious step, the minimum viable product, all that kind of stuff.

01:11:22

Anyways. And then chapter eight, simplify. This one's interesting too.

01:11:27

Chapter eight and nine, I'll talk about these real briefly. So chapter eight is

01:11:33

make things as simple as possible. One of the things he talks about is maximize the steps not

01:11:39

taken. And again, this is a little bit contradictory to the first or the chapter right before this,

01:11:45

which is start because it's identify that next thing and then do it. And I know that these two

01:11:50

can fit together, but I don't think you fit them together very well. I feel like if you

01:11:56

read this and start as the thing that resonates with you, then you're naturally not going to be

01:12:01

asking yourself, well, should I be doing this thing in the first place, which is what simplifies

01:12:06

all about. But I think that's a really important idea. And you should absolutely be thinking about

01:12:11

the things that you're engaging with. The next one on progress, this one, I feel like, again,

01:12:19

there's a whole book to be written on this. But this is really talking about it requiring courage

01:12:27

to give yourself permission to fail. So any sort of creator, I think this chapter is going to

01:12:34

resonate with. He says to start with rubbish and to iterate to make failure cheap. And on page

01:12:40

132, he even says inspiration flows from the courage to start with rubbish. And he makes the

01:12:45

point in here, which this resonated with me, many people want to learn a new language, but they

01:12:50

don't because they want to be flawless. This is totally what happened to me back in the day,

01:12:56

because I had Spanish class in high school and I could not roll my arse. I still can't roll my

01:13:01

arse. And I was like, well, I'm not going to sound as good as senior Wilkie. So I'm not going to do

01:13:07

this. I did the bare minimum to get through the class. And then I never went back and revisited it.

01:13:13

But now I'm on, I have to look, I think it's like 580 something days in a row on Duolingo.

01:13:21

But I had to, again, when I reengaged with it, I had the same thing, like, I can't roll my arse.

01:13:26

And I went on YouTube and looked for like, how do you roll an arse? And I could never get it.

01:13:31

But I moved past that. And ever since I gave myself permission not to roll my arse, it's a lot

01:13:37

more enjoyable. This is similar to what we were talking about earlier, like we make things harder

01:13:43

than they need to be. I think so many times, I do this all the time, all the time. I don't want to,

01:13:53

like, I can't work on, let's say editing a video, I can't work on editing that video.

01:13:59

Okay, why? Well, the video file hasn't been loaded into a new project for me to start

01:14:07

working on it yet. Okay, well, why hasn't it been loaded into that? Well, I haven't updated the

01:14:13

software because I want to do that before I start it because there's a new feature I want to use.

01:14:17

Okay, why haven't you updated that? I don't know, I just haven't clicked the update button,

01:14:22

like, so thus I'm not editing a video because the software is not updated, but I just haven't

01:14:29

clicked the button to update it maybe because I think it's going to restart it, but I don't know,

01:14:33

I don't want my computer to go out of commission for those 10 minutes. So like,

01:14:37

I do this all the time, all the time, I'm terrible. Yep, the struggle is real.

01:14:44

All right, last part here, part three is effortless results. And the chapters here,

01:14:52

chapter 11, learn chapter 12, lift chapter 13, automate chapter 14, trust and chapter 15

01:14:59

prevent. In chapter 11, learn, he talks about reading, which I thought was kind of cool.

01:15:04

He says on page 163 specifically, reading a book is among the most high leverage activities on

01:15:11

earth. And yes, Greg, I agree with you. He talks about the older a book is the higher the likelihood

01:15:19

it survives into the future, which is interesting and probably means we should read more classics.

01:15:26

We're going to read an older book next, I think actually. And he talks about distilling to understand

01:15:33

instead of just, I think like most people read, I know it's a generalization, but we both did this

01:15:42

before we read out a read a book, it's like, you just sit down, you crank through this thing,

01:15:47

whatever jumps out, it jumps out at you. If you're really trying to suck everything out of a book,

01:15:52

you're going to recreate everything the author is saying in an outline. And we neither of us

01:15:58

do that anymore, because what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand the principles

01:16:05

and that gets into like the synoptical readings and topical reading. I forget how Mortimer Adler

01:16:12

describes it in that book about how you're comparing the author's arguments against the

01:16:16

arguments of other authors in other books. And that's really where a lot of the magic happens.

01:16:21

I think the productivity books that we read tend to fall into the systems, sort of a thing,

01:16:28

like just do x, y, z, and you'll get these results. And he says in this section that those methods,

01:16:36

those can be used once to produce linear results, but they really can't be applied over and over

01:16:43

again. And really what we should be trying to get are the principles that can be applied broadly.

01:16:49

These are the things that are universal and timeless, which I agree with that. And it makes

01:16:56

me realize the value of a couple of the books that we've covered. Number one, principles by Ray Dalio.

01:17:00

And then the other one would be the great mental models that we both really enjoyed. We read that

01:17:05

one more recently. Those types of books are the ones that I really connect with now. And he kind

01:17:14

of hit the nail on the head and showed me why I rankle at the systems books so much.

01:17:19

Sure. Yeah, I mean, it has to do with how much background do you have? Like he's talking about

01:17:26

how great reading is and how to distill things. It's interesting to me that we've

01:17:34

inadvertently, I think, we have stepped more towards more recent releases in books.

01:17:40

And we've both picked books that are pre-order only at the time we talk about it to a year,

01:17:50

two years old. That's probably a lot of books that we've covered in recent months.

01:17:54

But he's recommending what was the, is it Lindale? I forget the name Litter.

01:18:03

I forget what the name of the effect is that the longer a book has been published, the more likely

01:18:08

it is to stay a classic. So the older a book is, the more impactful it likely is on your life.

01:18:17

This is something that we don't do, I don't think, in bookworm at least. So I don't know if there's

01:18:26

something we should do with that. There are a lot of classics out there that we probably

01:18:31

should cover at some point and just haven't. At the same time covering the newer ones is fun.

01:18:37

It is. It's like because we get to be a voice about it from day one. So it's just a curious

01:18:44

thing to me. I don't really have a specific point other than reading is important. You should all do

01:18:50

it. And there was one kind of sad fact in this. Yes, there was. The number of people reading more

01:18:57

than four books in a year is declining. That made me sad. Yes. Yeah. The average American only reads

01:19:03

four books a year and 25% don't read it all. And this is my issue with things like Blinkist.

01:19:09

The Blinkist service is fine, but it encourages, I shouldn't say encourages, enables people to not

01:19:16

read the books. Come on people, don't be lazy. Read the books. If you want to supplement that

01:19:23

with Blinkist, go right ahead. But make sure you are reading the books. At least some books.

01:19:31

I mean, you can't read everything. There's too much information out there, but don't be the average

01:19:36

lazy person who doesn't read the books and then reads the Blinkist thing or listens to the Blinkist

01:19:42

thing. And then it's like, there, I read the book. No, no, you did not read the book. That really bothers

01:19:47

me. That bugs me so much. It's like, by the way, bookworm is where you need to do that. Like,

01:19:52

we're enabling people to not read too, Mike. So like, it's true. It's true. Whoops. But yes,

01:19:57

do you go read the books? We are enabling you to not read them. Here's what you should do.

01:20:03

When we talk about gap books, you guys do a gap book as well. But don't read any of the books

01:20:08

we're reading. You read the other stuff and then you tell us which ones we should read. And then

01:20:12

you can get the distillation from us on the ones that we are reading or use this as a filter and

01:20:18

then go read them. That's fine too. Just read something. Don't just listen. Don't get the synopsis.

01:20:26

Do the heavy lifting. I'm a big believer in the value of that. I think that's the big reason we

01:20:33

continue to do this is that you and I get so much out of reading the books and talking to you.

01:20:38

Yeah. There's a lot to it for sure. I want to talk real briefly about this distill to understand,

01:20:43

though. Are you familiar with the concept of progressive summarization?

01:20:46

Progressive summarization. I don't think so. This, I believe, is made popular by

01:20:52

Tiago Forte with the building of second brain stuff. Sure. And his version of this

01:20:59

is that you read something and you grab your notes from that thing. So one easy way to do this,

01:21:08

if you're doing digital stuff is like you highlight stuff on the Kindle and then you use read wise

01:21:11

to pull it into your note taking up. Then when you go back and you look at your notes,

01:21:17

you continue to summarize. So the first time that you go through it, maybe you're going to

01:21:24

bold things. And then the next time that you go through those notes, you're going to highlight

01:21:30

things. And so each time that you do it, you're condensing this entire work into less and less

01:21:37

words until you essentially have like a very quick synopsis of what the author was

01:21:46

originally saying. And I don't know that I like this idea. I think that they're, that

01:21:52

summarizing things is valuable. I do that with not only the MindNote files that I create,

01:21:58

but also when I transfer those notes into Obsidian, I write a three sentence summary.

01:22:03

And I get a lot of value of forcing myself to write those three sentence summaries.

01:22:08

But I don't ever want to go back and read all my notes and then go back and read them all again,

01:22:15

and then go back and read them all again, which is kind of implied with this idea of

01:22:19

progressive summarization. But that's the picture that I get when he talks about distilling things

01:22:25

down. And I was curious how you do this. I don't. All right. That's easy, right?

01:22:34

But that just seems like a ton of work to me in time that I'm not going to devote.

01:22:39

Right. And that's, that's kind of the thing is like, I don't think to distill you need to do

01:22:43

the progressive summarization, but that's the popular thing I see all the time now. And I don't

01:22:48

think that's great for everybody. I think, you know, I don't really see people talking about that

01:22:53

at all. So maybe that just is the difference in the circles we run in sometimes, but that's

01:22:58

that concept of reviewing them again regularly, like that that sounds cool. It sounds nice. But

01:23:05

that's quite a time commitment, I would say. Maybe this is just because like I do a lot of thought

01:23:13

work, as we call it. But I also have a lot of physical work that I do as well. Before testing

01:23:21

and everything, I was pulling cables through the wall, right, where this camera is like

01:23:26

up above, over down, like I did a whole bunch of that built a whole new video rack in the other

01:23:32

room with cables and stuff in and out of it. So like, that's a lot of physical stuff, right? So

01:23:37

when I have those types of projects, the time to sit and review book notes and such,

01:23:43

there's no chance, not even close. You couple that with somebody's email doesn't work. I've got to go

01:23:51

fix Microsoft Word being dumb and rejecting license keys once more. Like there's just a

01:23:56

bunch of that stuff that I end up dealing with that's physical and I have to go somewhere to do that.

01:24:03

So the amount of time that people talk about devoting to building notes databases and

01:24:14

reprocessing existing notes that are written, it seems like, and whenever I've experimented with

01:24:22

those types of things, it takes a significant amount of time and I never have that kind of time.

01:24:27

Sure. And I don't know if that's just because I'm terrible at being an essentialism person

01:24:33

and following the effortless tactics, but just my day to day doesn't allow that sort of thing.

01:24:39

I don't feel like I'm over busy, but that's the thing is like this distillation. This is not

01:24:45

the effortless path. No, no, not at all. There's a lot of effort involved here. I would argue that

01:24:51

it's worth it. And as Martin points out in the chat, even Tiago says, you're not going to do this

01:24:56

with everything. You're going to do this with the stuff that really strikes a chord.

01:24:59

This is kind of what I do with Nick Milo talks about this with the MOCs and there's your favorite

01:25:05

term again, but that's really what those are is like a workshop. It's like, wait, what are we

01:25:09

talking about again? Map of content. I had to translate this one talking about. I don't even

01:25:15

know what we're talking about. Yeah, but that's the same kind of thing for me. It's a distillation

01:25:19

because I'm taking my notes and I'm pulling in pieces of them on a specific topic, but that is

01:25:24

more applicable to me than just taking like a book or an article, which is how I've seen progressive

01:25:31

summarization applied a lot of times. You have this lengthy thing and then you're going through it

01:25:35

and you're grabbing the notes. That's one pass and then you're bolding things. That's another pass.

01:25:39

And then you're highlighting things. That's another pass. I have no desire to do that kind of thing.

01:25:44

And I feel like if you're to do that just within that specific article, you are missing out with

01:25:50

bumping it up against the other things that other people have written on those specific topics.

01:25:55

That's kind of what we were talking about with all the different books that we've read

01:25:58

and how to read a book influenced that you can get tunnel vision with this progressive

01:26:06

summarization and you're just applying this with this specific article. And that's great. You walk

01:26:12

out of it with a couple of sentences that really summarize everything that the author maybe is

01:26:17

trying to say. Assuming you're able to do that really, really well and you really understand this

01:26:21

now, but what are you going to do with those other sentences? How do you connect those to

01:26:25

other things? I feel like that's still missing. It would be interesting to see

01:26:29

Greg McKeown and like walk him through how I do obsidian stuff and see what he thinks of that.

01:26:37

Or if he has any suggestions on how to do it better, I feel like his advice is, he's one of the few

01:26:42

people that I would listen to if they said, "Hey, you should do it this other way instead."

01:26:45

This specific section, again, he doesn't really get into a lot of detail here, but I feel like

01:26:51

you can kind of tell he knows what he's talking about at least. It's true. I'm still not going to do.

01:26:56

That's fine. You're off the hook. We do need to talk here real briefly about chapter 13

01:27:05

automate because this is where they talk about checklist and we had done this a little bit earlier.

01:27:11

And essentially, this chapter is, "Go read the checklist,

01:27:15

Manifesto." He even says that and snipes one of the stories.

01:27:18

I guess this is maybe save some of this for Stalin rating. He tells a lot of cool stories in here,

01:27:27

but a lot of these stories are taken from other places. He tells the story of Major Hill who

01:27:35

crashed that Boeing Model 299 because it was too complicated even though it could fly longer,

01:27:41

it could haul more cargo, more guns, whatever. It was too complicated and they crashed right

01:27:47

after they took off. Why? Because the pilot had forgotten to do something super simple because

01:27:53

they didn't have that checklist of things that they had to do. So that, I didn't really like.

01:27:59

I feel like this chapter should not have been in here. He put it in here just because he needs to

01:28:03

have five chapters in these sections. But really, what he is saying is a tool go on. They talked

01:28:08

about this a lot better than I did. There is one thing in here though that I think is worth

01:28:13

talking about and that's these cheat sheets. So that's essentially what a checklist is.

01:28:18

I was talking to Rosemary Orchard the other day. She made a comment about how templates are

01:28:25

essential for your brain, something along those lines.

01:28:31

Your brain doesn't work right unless you're following a checklist sort of a thing.

01:28:35

And that got me thinking that term templates because templates obsidian, you can have templates

01:28:41

for a whole bunch of things. Text expander is a great way to just throw a bunch of templates

01:28:44

inside of something. But this can apply to a lot of different areas of your life. And some of the

01:28:50

things that he calls out here are like your to-do list. That's a template, an agenda for a meeting.

01:28:55

That's a template, an outline for a podcast. That's a template. And I realized that that one

01:29:02

specifically, if I sit down and record a podcast without having an outline, I am terrified. And

01:29:09

those end up awful because I'm fumbling all over my words. With Bookworm, we've kind of hit this

01:29:15

sweet spot where we talk about these books. If we put things in the outline, sometimes we follow

01:29:19

it, sometimes we don't. And just the fact that it's there and I can fall back on that if I need to.

01:29:24

That's kind of the release my brain needs to engage in the conversation.

01:29:27

I'm curious though, what other sorts of cheat sheets and checklists you have in your life?

01:29:33

You could have a time-bound one too. I do this for Sunday morning,

01:29:37

both whoever's the tech person on duty at that time. We have one that's a minute-by-minute checklist

01:29:48

that has 750. This equipment needs turned on at 8.05. This equipment needs turned on at 8.45.

01:29:58

The live stream needs kicked on at 8.50. We need to kick on the local recording. We have all of

01:30:06

these things that are time-bound so that we know when the things need to be actually accomplished.

01:30:12

It covers from 7.30 to 12.30 across the entire morning. That one's pretty intense. I don't even know.

01:30:20

Last time I checked it, it's like 67, the high 60s number of things that are on it

01:30:26

that has just been continually different per week too. We have a template that we drop in and then

01:30:33

we make tweaks depending on what's going on that Sunday morning. I don't know. That's one thing

01:30:41

that we do that's similar to the procedures thing, the working procedures that I've been working on.

01:30:46

So that's one piece of it. Try to think of what else I use.

01:30:51

Do you have anything at home that you use? For example, one of the things that we have,

01:30:55

and this is definitely a checklist, but they're called McSquares and they're these dry erase

01:31:03

sort of things that are magnets so they're on our refrigerator. We have four of them, one for each

01:31:08

of our boys and we homeschool our kids. One of the things that Rachel does as part of her evening

01:31:14

routine is she puts on there all of the things that the kids have to do the next day and each

01:31:20

kid has their own list. So that's what they work off of. They get up in the morning and she has

01:31:25

basically like an office hours type thing where she works one-on-one with each of the kids for

01:31:30

an hour on the things that they need help with. So like Toby, for example, classical conversations,

01:31:34

he's in challenge now, so he's doing Latin. So she's doing Latin with him and learning it alongside

01:31:41

him. But the other kids, like all of their independent work, those are the kinds of things that they'll

01:31:46

just go and they'll check them off and they'll work through that list. And when we're done with

01:31:50

their list, that's when they can play video games and things like that. And it just got me thinking

01:31:56

that plus the outlines plus the meeting agendas, like there are lots of different ways that you

01:32:02

can apply these checklist. It's not just a checklist, like the flight checklist, like, oh, I'm going to

01:32:08

do this thing now. And so I have to make sure I follow all of these steps. There's a lot of value

01:32:12

in that, especially with complex tasks. But I think there's a lot of places that maybe you're

01:32:18

doing this already. You don't even really realize it. Yeah, I would say there's a lot of things that I

01:32:22

have routine processes for, but nothing that's, I don't think I have anything for home that's

01:32:30

documented outside of a packing list for when we're going on a trip. That would be about as

01:32:36

much as it would be. But that's the only one I can think of that's actually

01:32:40

detailed out and written. Everything else is either just habit, mental, or haphazard.

01:32:49

Sure. Well, this is one of my action items. It's not anything specific, but I am going to look for

01:32:56

all of the places that I can create checklist/templates. But I'm not going to be rigid anymore about

01:33:01

that term checklist. It doesn't need to be a series of boxes that I actually check.

01:33:06

Sure. It's just any sort of template automation sort of thing. Like with Obsidian, I have my

01:33:13

daily questions and all my journaling stuff. When I create a new daily note, all that stuff gets

01:33:17

dropped in automatically. And Greg McKeown helped me to realize that that's actually a form of a

01:33:23

checklist. Sure. Yeah, no, I could see that. I mean, my wife has some, they've got their lists of

01:33:29

things they do for school, but that doesn't involve me at all. Sure. It's like they have that. But

01:33:33

that's about as close as I can think that they get the routine of time bound. The way

01:33:41

classical conversations is going to run and the rest of their homeschooling process.

01:33:44

Yep. That's all there. But yeah, I don't think we do a ton of that.

01:33:49

All right. That's all I got for this section. I will just mention in the conclusion, he tells a

01:33:54

little bit more detail about their personal story that he mentions at the beginning of the book and

01:33:59

gets a little bit more detail about the health stuff that they are still going through with their

01:34:03

daughter. And that was kind of the inspiration for the book is when she was dealing with stuff,

01:34:10

he still had all of the things that he had to do. And he needed to make those things more

01:34:17

effortless. I don't really like that. I will say I don't really like that framing though,

01:34:21

because if your kid is sick, nothing else really matters. And he admits that, I mean,

01:34:28

he says as much, but he talks about how I still needed to get back to the people and cancel the

01:34:34

talks and all that sort of stuff. And in the back of my mind, I'm going, no, you don't. You don't

01:34:38

owe anybody any explanation when your kid is dealing with, you don't know what, you know?

01:34:46

Family first. Yeah, ideally, you don't want to burn those bridges and you don't want to let

01:34:53

people down. But as a recovering people, pleaser, I can tell you, if you're going to disappoint

01:35:00

somebody better than your family, especially in the moment when they really need you.

01:35:08

I think maybe I just took it differently, but I think he was just talking about

01:35:12

canceling. He wasn't talking about justifying. He was just like, yeah, that talk in three days,

01:35:18

I'm not going to be there. So like, and that's what he's saying. Whereas if I took what you said

01:35:25

to an extreme, like he just doesn't tell him he's not going to be there and doesn't show up. Well,

01:35:30

that's not good for him either. So correct, correct. Now, I'm not saying like you're going to take

01:35:37

that approach with everything. But if your to do list is too long and there's too many people

01:35:42

for you to get back to and you need to get to the hospital with your kid. Okay, I'm going to say,

01:35:49

let this person know, let this person know, and the other ones who I'd like to tell,

01:35:53

I'm not going to tell them and that's going to be okay. Right, right. And I think that's what he

01:35:58

was getting at is, but you have to keep in mind he was book touring and a whole bunch. So that

01:36:05

that people who have to know is actually quite long, which is where he actually started the book

01:36:10

with what he started the book with in that what happens if the essential gets to be too big,

01:36:18

and you can't get it accomplished. That's kind of where all this comes from.

01:36:25

Where's the line with essential though? That's the question in my mind. And I admit that I am not

01:36:29

as important as Greg McKeown. So my engagements are not at the same level as his, but I don't know,

01:36:38

I kind of think the approach is still going to be the same. And there's still going to be a point

01:36:46

when you're going to say, I'm sorry, I'm not going to show up and the conference organizers

01:36:53

going to have to figure this out, whether I get back to him or not. Right. And that's fine.

01:36:59

And you never want to get to that point, obviously, but if you do, you don't have to do all those

01:37:06

things. Correct. Yep. Harry. You do. Anyway, he's had a rough life with his daughter.

01:37:13

Yeah. And they haven't rode ahead of him yet. But that's ultimately what sparked this book.

01:37:23

And if memory serves this book, he had a second book deal already, and then put it off because of

01:37:35

these things. Like, I think if I remember the introduction correctly, he had it planned to come

01:37:40

out like a year or two after essentialism. But it's been longer than that, right? So it's been put off.

01:37:45

So anyway, lots of family stuff. Everyone's got to figure this out for themselves.

01:37:52

You feel the emotion in this conclusion. Yep. And you really do feel for his situation.

01:38:00

But I feel like he could have articulated this a little bit better and given people permission,

01:38:05

like he did essentialism. Like, yeah, you want to make stuff as easy as you can, but eventually,

01:38:11

life's going to punch you in the face. And at that point, you got to say no to stuff.

01:38:15

Right. I don't know. It felt to me like a missed opportunity to tie both of these things together.

01:38:20

That's all. Sure. Maybe. I don't know. I feel like he did a decent job with it, but

01:38:24

he did a decent job. Yes. I agree. Essentialism is an unfair high bar to compare.

01:38:29

That's really tough though. When authors have a runaway hit like that,

01:38:34

it's tough to write a follow-up of any kind because trying to live up to the success of the first is

01:38:42

a very tall task. So when you have something like essentialism in your back pocket and you're

01:38:50

trying to write a follow-up to it, you have a long ways to go.

01:38:55

Yep. All right. Action items. I mentioned one of them already, which is to consider where I can

01:39:04

create templates, checklists, in the different areas of my life. And I've got another one here

01:39:10

from the first section, chapter two, enjoy. He made this comment about these building blocks of joy.

01:39:17

And I like this picture. I want to identify my own building blocks of joy. What are the things

01:39:24

that I enjoy doing? And then how can I compare those or pair those enjoyable things with the

01:39:30

essential things to make them more fun and more effortless? That's your thing? Yep. Those are mine.

01:39:36

What about you? I have two. And I've mentioned them both already. I'm going to start showering at

01:39:40

night to see if that helps with some sleep scenarios. And the second is setting the upper and lower

01:39:49

bounds for doing creative work and when and what does that look like. So I don't know. We'll

01:39:59

figure that out. But those are the two that I'm going to run with. Cool. All right. Style and

01:40:04

rating. This is a tough one. It is Greg McKeown. And I love me some Greg McKeown.

01:40:14

I love his style. I love his visuals. It's a very easy read. It's not essentialism.

01:40:23

And that's probably not fair to effortless or to Greg. But this one just feels like your standard

01:40:35

cookie cutter productivity book, like he was working with the editor and they said, okay,

01:40:40

this is the formula for a successful sequel. And he just stuck to it. There are lots of different

01:40:48

things that he could have expounded on a lot more. And I wish what would have happened is instead

01:40:54

of just covering all of these topics a little bit, he would have just completely left the ones

01:41:00

alone that weren't in his wheelhouse and really leaned into the ones that you can tell there's

01:41:05

more to be mined here. That's a personal thing. I feel like for somebody who's looking for an

01:41:13

introductory productivity book, absolutely, I would recommend this. And I feel like for someone

01:41:19

who's just coming into this world, this is probably more approachable. The charts and things that he

01:41:24

has, the tables, where all the different summaries of all the different things that he's talked about,

01:41:29

that probably makes things a lot more understandable for some people. And I think there are some really

01:41:36

powerful ideas here. I think the in the conclusion, he has this chart of like making things lighter

01:41:43

or heavier and really the big takeaway from this is choose the simpler path 100% agree

01:41:50

with that message. And so I think there's a lot of good stuff in here. I was disappointed because

01:41:57

I was hoping for another essentialism. And that's not what we got. I do think it's a good book though,

01:42:04

and it's definitely recommendable. But it didn't knock me off my feet like I was hoping that it would

01:42:14

and a lot of other books that we've read have. So I'm going to rate it at 4.0, which is a decent

01:42:20

rating. It's a good book, but it's not on my short list of the top books that I would recommend for

01:42:28

people who really want to dive into some of the stuff that you and I are excited about.

01:42:32

Sure. I just want to point out one thing based on what you said. You wished he had avoided some of

01:42:39

the areas that weren't in his wheelhouse. And I wonder if that's even possible.

01:42:44

Yeah, because the flow and the overall story that he's telling for each of the parts,

01:42:50

if he eliminates some of those, like take the checklist manifesto section,

01:42:55

if he eliminates that, does it defeat the purpose of what he's trying to say?

01:42:59

Maybe it just felt very regimented to me. Every section has exactly five chapters,

01:43:07

and some of them, like there's not a whole lot in them. One of my nodes in my my node file,

01:43:14

chapter 12, lift has two things in it. And some of them, I've got a ton of stuff because you can

01:43:21

really tell like, he knows what he's talking about here. This is important. Write this down.

01:43:26

Yeah, I wonder, and I've been processing this, and this is something I wrote

01:43:32

before we started here, in that I think that we are potentially the wrong audience for this.

01:43:43

Agreed. And I, it's possible, Mike, that you and I are slowly becoming

01:43:48

an audience that's hard to write for. I completely agree.

01:43:53

And I say it because like this particular book, had I not read Work the System,

01:44:02

had I not read Checklist Manifesto, had I not read any of our habit books,

01:44:09

had we not read the Sleep Revolution, margin, second mountain, like if we had not read these,

01:44:18

this would probably come across very different. And I could easily see how this particular book,

01:44:26

if I hadn't read those, this could be a very big deal. And I wonder if, if I went back and

01:44:35

reread Essentialism, would I be as amazed by it now as I was when I first read it? And

01:44:42

I suspect that probably not, I would be surprised if I was actually. And given that,

01:44:51

it's difficult for me to look at this particular book and say that I wish it had been so much more

01:44:59

and that I wish it had been an Essentialism because when did we read that originally? It's been,

01:45:04

it's one of the first books we covered. Yeah. At this point. So we've got over 100 books between

01:45:10

here and there, at least that we've recorded on even. And I wonder if you came at this particular

01:45:19

book, if you came at Effortless without so much of our background, would this be a very different

01:45:24

book to us? Probably, and probably should be. Coming from my stance, like he's a great writer,

01:45:33

I would say, like he's very good at putting sentences and paragraphs telling stories. Like

01:45:38

he's good at doing that. And I'm with you in that there's some sections and I'm like,

01:45:42

yeah, that's a cool idea, but you could have done a lot better. Or there's some sections,

01:45:49

it's like, why is that even in there? Or that's a cool thought. How does it apply to these other

01:45:54

thoughts? Like those are the things that we're going through my brain. But as I was sitting and

01:46:00

just processing earlier, it's like, okay, if you look at each individual point, you can kind of

01:46:04

see a whole picture that he's trying to tell. He's trying to put you in a mindset. He's trying

01:46:09

to get you to act on that mindset. And then helping you to choose which actions to do that will

01:46:16

have long term effects. Like that's the path he's trying to take us on. And if you don't have

01:46:25

a lot of background in this, I think he did a really good job of it. But you and I know too much

01:46:30

here. And we know a lot of the nuances and subtleties of each of those individual pieces

01:46:37

that he's using to get to that end story. That I think makes it difficult for me to say this is a

01:46:43

five star book. I think you nailed it at 4.0. I'll join you there. And it's primarily because

01:46:50

the way that we have come at books and the number that we have read make it difficult to say that this

01:46:58

is a top notch. Absolute must read book compared to the bank that we have in our back pocket.

01:47:08

Now, that said, I'm not sure what it would take at this point for someone to write a book that would

01:47:18

fit that category. If you're going to write a nonfiction book that's going to just completely

01:47:22

blow us away and show us a whole bunch of new stuff and completely change the way we do our lives,

01:47:28

that's a very tall task at this point. And I have no idea what kind of book that would have to be

01:47:38

to have that kind of an impact. So anyway, I'm going to put it at 4.0. I think he's a great writer.

01:47:45

I will probably recommend this to folks who don't read a lot. But folks who read a lot,

01:47:50

it's probably not one I would say you have to read. Sure. All right. So we have a double 4.

01:47:56

We'll put this one on the shelf. What's next, Joe? The now habit by Neil Fjord. I didn't look up

01:48:05

how to say that. I'm nervous about this one, actually. So yeah, I think this will be interesting.

01:48:13

Given that we've been talking about working systems and building systems and choosing

01:48:21

what you're going to do and automating things, the concept of doing things right now and building

01:48:27

a habit around right now, I think will be interesting. I'm not sure you and I are going to like this one.

01:48:35

That's all right. Anyway, what are you going to pick for after that?

01:48:39

Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. That is the next one. Sweet. And then

01:48:45

gap books. Normally, we don't have gap books. This time, you and I have the same gap book.

01:48:55

And that is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because Joe and David have convinced me to read

01:49:03

a fiction book that we are going to be covering for the Relay Special Focused episode.

01:49:10

But it'll be fun. I'm super excited that I'm finally getting you on some fiction. I don't care

01:49:14

where it's at. I'm totally going to be all in on this one. So it'll be fun. Looking forward to that

01:49:20

one. So yes, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It'll be a good time.

01:49:24

Thank you to everybody who has joined us for the live recording, the conversations that

01:49:30

happened in this chat are super fun. And also, thank you, especially to the Bookworm Club Premium

01:49:36

members who are willing to support the show monetarily. It helps us buy a few books. It helps

01:49:43

us pay some costs like hosting and things like that. And we really do appreciate your support.

01:49:51

If you want to become a Bookworm Club Premium member, you get access to a couple of bonuses.

01:49:57

I've got the Mind Node files for all the books that we cover here. And I upload those to the club

01:50:03

in a special members area. There's a Bookworm wallpaper that you can download. A couple of

01:50:10

Gap episodes that Joe's recorded. And so you get a few goodies, but really, it's just a way to

01:50:17

support the show and everybody who has chosen to do that. We really do appreciate the fact that

01:50:21

you're willing to support us financially and help us keep this thing running.

01:50:24

Super excited for everybody that joins us live too. It's always fun, I think. So, if you haven't

01:50:31

already, give us a subscribe on YouTube, like the things that helps us out quite a bit. And it'll

01:50:38

also help you find out whenever we're doing a new live recording. And we'd love to have you join us

01:50:43

for that. That said, if you are reading along, I want you to stop right now and get a head start

01:50:51

on this book and go purchase the book, The Now Habit by Neil Fjord. And join us here in a couple

01:50:57

weeks and we will cover that one together.