Bookworm Transcripts

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What's new and exciting, Joe B. Legg?

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What's new and exciting?

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Um, I get to livestream from a park this weekend.

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That is new and exciting.

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Just not on any of my platforms.

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It's church thing.

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But I've never tried to livestream outside of a dedicated building.

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So this will be fun.

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Cool.

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It means a joke is to get up before I am and go set up tons and tons of tech gear

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for four hours straight before we do anything with it.

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That's what it means.

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Super fun.

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So that's what's new in Joe's world.

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Nice.

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So that was the best question I came up with, by the way, for my follow-up on a different question

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instead of how are you?

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Nice work.

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Nice work.

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I would say this one works about 80% of the time.

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You get an interesting response, like yours, instead of, "I'm good.

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How about you?"

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You know which was the whole idea behind the action item in the first place.

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Yep.

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A couple other ones that I was thinking about, which I don't think worked quite as well,

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but can be deployed tactically in certain situations, is everything okay.

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I feel that one kind of leads people into a more truthful, honest response, as opposed

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to just, "I'm good," because you're sort of implying that maybe there is something that

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is not okay by asking it that way.

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And those are the two best ones I came up with.

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If I tried some other ones, like, "What book have you read lately?"

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I mentioned that one on air last time.

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Or what project excites you?

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What project are you working on currently?

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Just picking out a specific thing that someone is excited about, different versions of that

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type of question.

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But the one I landed on as the clear winner, I think, is what's new and exciting.

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You like it?

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I like it.

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It's probably the better route to go than the route I've been taking with that whole thing,

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because I was trying to come up with different answers to the "How are you?" scenario.

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Every time I tried to come up with it in the morning, I only did this for about four or

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five days, because it was weird.

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But you ended up trying to come up with answers that revolved around your energy states without

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realizing it.

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It's like, "I'm tired.

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I'm doing really well.

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I'm super excited today."

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You have these different energy levels that we talked about.

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I feel new today.

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You'd come up with answers like that.

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They don't really do much other than get people to just look at it a little funny.

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Really, why is that?

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Then they'd ask a follow-up question.

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Sometimes it led into something more than that.

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For the most part, it was just a little weird.

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I'm probably just doing it wrong.

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A few states is not a good response to that question.

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Coming up with a different question altogether is probably better.

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Cool.

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The other item here for follow-up, and by far the coolest one, is this new Bookworm rating

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website that Joshua had put together.

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Do you have a link that you could drop in the chat?

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It keeps blocking my links when I put them in there, so no.

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I can grab one quick.

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Send it to you.

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You can drop it in.

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Sure.

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This website has got a table of all of the Bookworm episodes.

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I knew this was being worked on because Joshua had asked about the last episode where I

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had missed the ratings.

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They didn't show up in the feed, and then once I got those and put them in, I understood

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what he was working on here.

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This is basically a list of all of the different episodes.

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It's got my rating and your rating, and then it's got the average of the ratings.

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Bitter Sweet by Susan Cana, I rated it 3.0, you rated it 4.0, so it's an average there

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at 3.5.

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At the bottom of this, there is some Bookworm trivia where it shows that, for example, out

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of 143 ratings, 18 books have been given a double 5 star.

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It's 12% every eighth book on average, which is really cool.

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The most recent book to be awarded full stars by both Mike and Joe was 142, yes to life

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by Victor Frankl.

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Four episodes ago.

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Some really cool stuff here.

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Joe's average rating, my average rating, you're nicer than I am.

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Your average rating is 4.13.

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Mine is a 4.1.

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Barely.

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Barely.

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Yep.

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And the biggest difference in rating is two stars on Episode 98, the crossovers of Should

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Amust.

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Were you surprised by that one?

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I was.

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That one really stood out to me that I knew, if you had asked me what book I had rated

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the lowest, I think this is my lowest rated book.

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Is this the lowest rating on Bookworm period?

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Could be.

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Maybe Joshua can add that to the stat to probably tell us the answer to that.

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Well, I mean, highest rated book isn't going to do us much good, but lowest rated book,

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I would be kind of curious.

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Nope, you have a 1.5 for Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance.

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Ah, yes.

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That's right.

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Yeah.

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And then I've got the two for the crossroads.

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But yeah, I didn't realize like the concept of thinking of the spread between your rating

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and my rating never crossed my mind as something that would be interesting to see.

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Yeah.

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It's totally fascinating to me.

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Like there's some other stuff too here.

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Like I have rated a five books, five stars, 33 times.

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You've done it 30 times.

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We've given the same rating 57 times.

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Like it's kind of interesting how that's.

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I don't know stats that I never totally would have expected to come up with.

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But I guess this is what happens when you come up with 100 and what is it?

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146 data points for somebody to play with.

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So there you go.

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Yeah, so this website is very cool.

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Thank you, Joshua, for putting this together.

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I'll have a link in the show notes if you want to check this out.

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This is great.

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I love the fact that he put this together.

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And this is a continuation of a project that had started several years ago by Andrew

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Pfeiffer, I believe.

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Joshua mentioned in the Bookworm Club that that project had been abandoned.

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So he kind of rebooted it with this website.

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And this looks great.

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I feel like we should put in a redirect for this or something.

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Like Bookworm.fm/statts or something that takes you here.

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Is that out of line?

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I'll let you know.

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I don't know if we should do something with it.

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Whatever you want to do is cool.

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All right, so Bookworm.fm/statts.

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That's a URL we can use.

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Yep, I'm totally going to do that when we're done here.

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All right, you heard it here, folks.

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There you go, Joshua.

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Thanks for making this.

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This thing is sweet.

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I absolutely love this.

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The data nerd in me is just ecstatic.

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So yes.

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All right, but I think that is it for follow-up.

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So you're ready to talk about today's book?

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No, but we should do it anyway.

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I'm wondering why you are so hesitant to talk about this one.

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This is, I am curious.

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I've been hesitating on this book since we got on this call.

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Even before we started recording.

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So there's that.

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This will be fun.

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All right, well, today's book is Hero on a Mission by Donald Miller, which maybe that's

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the part that is surprising to people because Donald Miller has kind of been all over the

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place with his literary journey.

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He kind of gets into the reason behind that in this book, which is kind of meta-fascinating

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to me.

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I first discovered Donald Miller from the book Blue Like Jazz.

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I'm guessing the first place you heard of him too.

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Yes.

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Okay.

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Which was a religious book.

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And then from there, he pivoted and kind of became the business strategy guy and came

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out with Story Brand, which is the big thing, I would argue, that he is known for.

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Although he does a lot more with that now with like business made simple and marketing

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made simple, all that kind of stuff that is an extension of that Story Brand.

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Now I am familiar with business made simple.

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I'm also familiar with marketing made simple.

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I actually have access to the business made simple course library thing, whatever.

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When I was working with the family business, we were doing some Story Brand stuff and we

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had signed up for the Story Brand course, the thousands of dollars one got to work with

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a Story Brand coach for a little while when we were redoing our website.

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And that kind of morphed into the complete catalog of Donald Miller's training.

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So I've gone through some of it, but I got to be honest, I'm not a real big fan of that

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stuff.

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And the reason is I feel like it is overly simplified.

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I am probably just again, not the right person for this kind of stuff for someone who is

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an entrepreneur and has never really had a grasp of why their business is broken and

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it feels like everything is really hard.

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There's probably a lot of clarity that can come from some of the simple models that he

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uses.

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Like your business is an airplane.

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These are the engines and this is the wings and stuff like that.

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Metaphor though, it was overly simplified in my opinion.

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So it never really clicked for me.

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And I expected a hero on a mission to be business made simple for your personal life.

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Is that kind of what you were anticipating going into this as well?

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That's what I was hoping for, yes.

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So yes, that was definitely the trajectory I expected to get, yes.

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Interesting.

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Okay.

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So the beginning of this, likes in this mode where he's picking my words apart already.

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Yeah, I am.

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So the book is broken into I guess three different sections though part three is really just the

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templates that he talks about.

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So there's an introduction, which is where we'll start.

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But before we get there, just how this put together introduction, act one, how to create

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a life of meaning, act two, create your life plan and then act three, which is all of the

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templates and things.

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So let's get into the introduction here.

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Now the introduction started off really shaky for me because he shares a lot of his story

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at the beginning here.

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And a lot of his story is essentially I was a jerk and this is his words, not mine.

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And I'm not trying to project anything on Donald Miller at this point.

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He is very self-deprecating, especially as he talks about where he was 20 years ago,

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living with the guys in the house and then having to have an intervention because he's

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projecting blame onto all of them.

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And he's like, I was not a good person to live with.

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So he starts off by basically saying he's been playing the victim card for a long time

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and playing the victim has affected the quality of his life.

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However, from there, he starts talking about Victor Frankl and logo therapy.

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I was curious, what do you got to this point?

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Did you fall off your chair like I did?

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I honestly, so this was, I was reading this at 5.45 in the morning.

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I woke up early that day to start this book.

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I didn't wake up in order to start this book.

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I woke up early.

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So I started the book.

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We'll go to 5.15 blah, blah, blah.

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The thing that happened was at 5.45, I was to that part where he got to Victor Frankl.

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And I set the book down and I looked out the window.

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The sun was rising.

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I was like, this is going to be a weird journey.

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And I went and made a cup of tea and I went and sat down and then I continued.

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So it was enough of a jarring moment that I had to stop what I was doing.

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Go grab something to drink and come back.

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Yeah.

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I haven't had that very many times, reading a book, just say that.

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So Victor Frankl, the author of Man's Search for Meaning and Yes to Life, which we mentioned

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we were looking at those stats.

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Probably the only author who we've reviewed multiple times and never given anything less

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than five stars would be my guess.

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Big fans of Victor Frankl, we've talked about that in those other episodes.

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So we won't spend too much time revisiting that.

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But Victor Frankl is the one who survived through the Nazi concentration camps and came

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out with logo therapy as a way to compensate with what makes sense of what he had just

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been through.

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And so he was kind of working with people who had been through the same sort of thing

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and find meaning in all of the pain and suffering that they had gone through, not look for pain

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and suffering in order to bring meaning.

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But we had to go through this.

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We did.

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Now how do we turn it around to use it for good, basically?

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So there's an interesting detour right at the beginning.

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And I actually have in my mind node file after 10 years made a system slash planner.

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And I put in a red flag emoji because I wanted this to be the point where this is where I

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started to see things go off the rails.

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It's important to know, I guess, before we get into the rest of the book here that there

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is a planner that goes with this.

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Now in the book, he provides the printouts of the actual planner pages.

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There's also QR codes that you can use to, and I think you can access these for free

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online and print them out if you want.

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But there is also a product associated with it, which he frames as it's a couple bucks

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a month in order to cover the hosting costs.

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It's $10 a month or $100 a year, so it's far exceeding the hosting costs.

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And like I said, I'm familiar with the other business made simple stuff.

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I have no interest in this web software at all.

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I don't think that's going to detract a whole lot from the conversation that we'll have,

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but you do need to recognize at this point in the book that he is selling something.

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He's a business guy.

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I don't fault him for that, but I kind of expected at this point that everything he's

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going to talk about is going to be filtered through, use my system.

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It's not exactly what happens here, but the software that he's put together and the

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sheet said he has, they're kind of guides that you can use to apply some of the principles

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he's going to talk about if you wanted to do it that way, but you can apply it your

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own way as well if you want to.

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Did you get into the software at all?

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Did you buy into this to find out?

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I didn't.

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I didn't ask.

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I went to the website.

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I saw the pricing.

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I did not sign up for a trial or anything because I'm not interested in it in the least.

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Yeah.

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I don't think there is a trial, but I think when I got through, so I picked up the book

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and was like flipping through it at the very beginning, you know, how to read a book.

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You flipped through it.

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What the things about before you actually sit down to start reading it.

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It's impossible to do that and not catch that there's a QR code at the beginning and at

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the back and at five, six, seven places throughout the book as well.

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The same QR code is in many places.

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If you go to that link, there's a whole bunch of go to the, go download now or whatever it

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is, get the online tool, whatever it is.

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You go through that.

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You go through it many, many, many times and then you finally click on one and it takes

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you to the payment page right away.

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Whenever I got there, I realized, oh, this is a sales thing.

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But I had done that before I had started reading the book, which meant that I knew before I

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ever started reading that this book was a sales pitch.

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And that framed the rest of the book for me, which was not helpful because then it told

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me that I had paid to read a book to sell me something, which never goes over well in

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my mind.

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It just seems very strange.

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So anyway, it rubbed me the wrong way.

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I get that you can still get a lot of good out of this.

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You don't have to go through his course or whatever it is that you're going through.

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You can get it downloaded for free at that URL, but you have to pay attention very specifically

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to what you're looking at because it does a little deceptive, so where the free part

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is versus the paid.

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So it's a little strange.

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And yes, you can use the stuff in the back of the book, but it's printed so small that

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you actually can't really use it unless you write really small.

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So you'd have to copy it and blow it up.

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All I have to say, that's a business move for sure to try to sell that.

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So I get it, it's just a little frustrating to me.

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I'm not surprised by the approach of selling the online software.

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What I would have loved to see him sell instead would be like a digital planner that you could

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put inside a good notes or something.

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I feel like that's the logical in between here without having to have like a physically

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like a notebook.

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Yeah, that was the other things like a Michael Hyatt approach, full focus plan or sort of

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a deal.

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I could totally see that.

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Yep.

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I could see something like that happening.

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Well, yeah, so I think there's a, I don't fault him for making the choice to go software

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instead because I've seen specifically like goal setting software, life mission software

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and having those things be able to tie together, that could be kind of cool.

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Is it $10 a month cool?

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Not to me, but no.

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So I knew this was going to be there.

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I didn't scan any of the QR codes until I was done with the book because I wasn't going

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to implement anything that he was talking about at the beginning.

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And also everything that he outlined here, I actually created a version of this for my

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faith, his productivity course.

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So I went into it thinking I'm going to just understand the thought process behind what

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he has designed to see if I want to make any modifications to what I had created.

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Now, I don't really even use that anymore because I use the fancy pens and the blank

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page and I do the, create the time.

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But as I was thinking through this and thinking about the thing that I had made back in the

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day for faith based productivity, makes me kind of want to go back and take a look at

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that again.

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I still got my remarkable and I think maybe I'll experiment with modifying that template

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and putting it inside of there.

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I think using a remarkable would be more enjoyable for me than using an iPad for that.

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iPad I use for very specific things.

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Sketch Notes primarily at this point, which by the way, did you see the sketch note I

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made for the next book we're going to cover?

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I did.

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I didn't even grab the like of it, so I have a download of it to hold on to that.

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Hey, thanks.

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It's pretty slick.

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I have not started our next book, but I have it in hand.

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It showed up a day later than it was supposed to, so prime.

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But I have it.

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Super excited about it.

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That'll be fun.

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We'll get to that in a bit.

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But yeah, so software versus planner, I can see why he took the approach that he did.

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I'm not going to sign up to make sure to verify whatever that those things are connected as

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powerfully as they can be using online software, but based on the other Donald Miller stuff

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that I have access to via online software, I'm guessing that it's not.

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Yeah, that's all I'm going to say.

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Even if it was, it's not worth 100 bucks a year to me.

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I didn't have the visceral negative reaction to that, though, that you did.

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I knew that was going to be there.

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And like I said, I put the red flag in the ground because I expected that was going to

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be the anchoring point for everything he was going to talk about.

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But maybe it was just because I had in the back of my mind, well, I've kind of done a

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version of this already with faith-based productivity.

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But I didn't feel like he was pushing me other than the QR codes at the end.

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Obviously those are pointing back to the system that he's made, but I didn't feel like it

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was simply a sales pitch for the planner.

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And that resulted in me getting a lot more out of the book than I was anticipating at

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this point in the introduction.

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Yeah, I want to point out one clarification to what you just said.

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And that is that having finished the book, I don't feel like the book was a sales pitch

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in its entirety.

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That was my perception once I figured out that he had this product because I figured

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out all the pricing and what the product was before I ever started reading the introduction.

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So that was my perception before I got into it.

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I just want that to make that clear.

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Gotcha.

00:21:56

Yeah, that makes sense.

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And I think that is the impression you're going to get at this point in the book.

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But let's get into the actual content here.

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So the first part, they're not actually called parts in this book.

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They're called acts, which is kind of in line with the whole story brand thing, a play,

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whatever.

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So I actually kind of like that approach.

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Act one here is how to create a life of meaning.

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And there are six chapters in act one.

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I do not have all six of these in the outline.

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Maybe we'll get into something for each one of these.

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I don't know though.

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I kind of just grabbed a couple of bullets on the big themes.

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Chapter one is the victim, the villain, the hero and the guide, the four roles that we

00:22:47

play in life.

00:22:48

Chapter two is a hero accepts their own agency.

00:22:51

Chapter three is a hero chooses a life of meaning.

00:22:53

Chapter four, what elements are necessary for a person to transform?

00:22:57

Chapter five, a hero knows what they want.

00:22:59

Chapter six, a morning ritual to guide and direct your story.

00:23:03

So the first chapter, the victim, the villain, the hero and the guide, this is the thing to

00:23:09

understand for the rest of the book to make sense.

00:23:13

It's the basis of the title hero on a mission.

00:23:17

So just real briefly, let's define these four different roles.

00:23:21

The victim is the person who surrenders their life to fate.

00:23:26

The villain is a person who makes others small.

00:23:29

The hero is a person who is willing to face their challenges and transform.

00:23:34

And the guide is the one who helps the hero on their journey.

00:23:37

The guide is the one that I attach to being familiar with the story brand framework because

00:23:44

story brand is all about your business, like who are you trying to help?

00:23:48

That's your customer.

00:23:49

They're the hero and you are the guide.

00:23:52

So when you get into designing your website and your messaging and things like that, you

00:23:57

want to create empathy and you want to exhibit authority, but it can't just be all about you.

00:24:03

It's all about the problem that your customer is facing.

00:24:06

Were you familiar with story brand going into this and did you have the same sort of thought

00:24:11

about this or what were you thinking at this point?

00:24:14

Yeah, so I'm familiar with story brand.

00:24:18

I have a half completed work set for it at the moment that you and I were going to go

00:24:23

through at one point and never happened.

00:24:26

But so I have that that I've worked through completely honest with you.

00:24:31

I've not read the formal set of it, but I've been around it enough.

00:24:35

I feel like to understand it to some degree, this might be a case of like GTD where I read

00:24:40

enough around it that I thought I understood it and then if I went and read it, I wouldn't

00:24:43

actually understand it.

00:24:44

It might actually be the way it is.

00:24:47

But anyway, all that said, I get the concept of building the story, building your brand

00:24:53

around that story.

00:24:54

As far as like these four roles, I think it kind of depends, like me personally, what

00:25:00

I identify as it depends on what arena we're talking about because I know that I float

00:25:05

from thing to thing, which is not abnormal.

00:25:09

But as far as I want specifically that I find myself identifying as all the time, I don't

00:25:15

know that I really have one that I feel like I sit in all the time, regular or most of

00:25:20

the time I should say, but I get the concept at least.

00:25:25

Okay.

00:25:26

So yeah, the story brand framework is actually really well put together, I feel.

00:25:31

And I became aware of this when I was at the Entre Leadership Summit down in San Antonio

00:25:39

and Don Miller presented there.

00:25:40

He had just kind of came out with this.

00:25:42

And I think it's like a seven part framework.

00:25:45

It's really easy to understand which is why it's so effective in terms of helping businesses

00:25:49

create their marketing narrative.

00:25:52

And just real briefly, it starts with character.

00:25:55

It's the customer and identifying what they want.

00:25:58

That character has a problem.

00:25:59

And so you identify external internal philosophical problems they're trying to overcome.

00:26:04

Step three, they meet a guide who understands their fear.

00:26:08

That's where you exercise empathy and authority.

00:26:10

Step four, that guide gives them a plan.

00:26:12

So you summarize whatever plan it is that your product or your service is offering.

00:26:18

Step five, calls them to action.

00:26:21

So the hero has to do something.

00:26:23

He's a director of transitional call to action that results in ultimately success or failure.

00:26:28

Here's what it looks like if you take action and your situation changes.

00:26:31

Here's the tragic results of failure.

00:26:33

If you failed to take action, if you just continue to leave things as they were, for

00:26:38

example, and then use all that to create like an identity transformation for the customer.

00:26:43

From something to something.

00:26:45

I've filled this out dozens of times and every time I do it, it's really, really effective.

00:26:50

It helps you think through things.

00:26:53

It connects very, very easily.

00:26:56

And the net result is you don't give your customer, the person who's landing on your

00:27:01

website experiencing your marketing message, a whole big message that they have to unravel.

00:27:07

Donald Miller uses the analogy of giving customers like 8-pound bowling balls to carry around

00:27:13

with in terms of like a lot of online messaging.

00:27:16

So you want to make it as simple as possible for them to understand and resonate with whatever

00:27:21

you're trying to help them achieve.

00:27:23

And then remembering that you're not the hero in this journey they are.

00:27:27

So now here on a mission, we've got that guy and hero again, but now it's all about you.

00:27:31

And he's applying it personally.

00:27:33

And I did not expect this to transfer well.

00:27:35

So at this point when he's talking about these four different roles and I feel like I understand

00:27:41

what he's going to say already about two of them.

00:27:44

I am very, very skeptical.

00:27:49

However, I do like how he is saying at this point we need to take responsibility for writing

00:27:55

our own story.

00:27:57

We talk a lot about personal responsibility and self-determination on this podcast and

00:28:01

a lot of conversations that we have.

00:28:03

And that's kind of what chapter two is all about is agency, the ability that we have to

00:28:08

make our own choices.

00:28:11

And so I am hopeful that this message that he's going to share here is going to resonate

00:28:18

with me, but recognize I do have this bias of this story brand that I don't think is

00:28:24

going to translate real well to an individual's perspective at this point.

00:28:30

Yeah, this is where him trying to make that transition to do the translation of story

00:28:38

brand to a personal life because I caught that right away when he started to do that

00:28:42

as well.

00:28:43

I was like, okay, this is where he's going with that.

00:28:45

But there are components of it that I feel like it worked well.

00:28:49

There are some spots where I'm kind of what?

00:28:53

Hold on.

00:28:54

So there are some of those, but all of that aside, like you were talking about in chapter

00:28:59

two here where a hero accepts their own agency.

00:29:02

This one really struck me because there's a lot of little one liners in this section

00:29:08

that I found super interesting and super helpful.

00:29:11

One of those comes from page 21, but some people mistakenly believe that because they

00:29:17

cannot control some characteristics of their lives, they cannot control their lives at all.

00:29:23

Okay, that is so true.

00:29:26

If you tend to have one little area that's spiraling out of control, that doesn't mean

00:29:31

you've lost control of absolutely everything.

00:29:35

That just means there's one little thing that's got out of your control.

00:29:39

It's not your entire life is going up in flames.

00:29:42

It's one little small thing that needs corrected.

00:29:46

I think that is something that comes up regularly, but again, he has a lot of these little tidbits

00:29:52

in here.

00:29:54

I don't want to discount.

00:29:55

I know I've kind of been naysaying already on this one, but I do want to point out, there

00:29:59

are some really good points in these sections, this being one of them.

00:30:06

There's a handful of these all.

00:30:07

I'll point out as we go through, but I did appreciate that.

00:30:12

If you come at it from a hero stance, if you use the story concept, if you're going to

00:30:16

be the hero of your story and you're going to take ownership of the actions that you need

00:30:23

to make, you have to keep in mind you are in control of that.

00:30:27

You're the one that decides what you do every day.

00:30:30

You may have other people telling you you need to do certain things, but it's your choice

00:30:33

to actually act on them or not.

00:30:35

The consequences, if not following through on that, might be quite severe, but if you're

00:30:41

okay swallowing those consequences, that's okay.

00:30:44

You're still the one that's making the decision to do what someone else has asked you to do,

00:30:49

or to decide what it is you're going to be doing.

00:30:51

Thus, you're the one that has the control.

00:30:54

In that particular part, I really appreciated him making that point here.

00:30:58

There are a lot of one-liners like the quote you shared from page 21 that I did not expect

00:31:06

to come out of Donald Miller's mouth.

00:31:09

There's a lot of wisdom that he shares in this.

00:31:12

This is the point where he is really leaning into the hero's journey metaphor.

00:31:21

I will say at this point, I'm not positive that that is going to work, but I think the

00:31:28

further that we go in the book, the more I come around to that.

00:31:33

Some important elements of that which he talks about here.

00:31:38

Chapter 2, he introduces the idea of the narrative void, which is the restlessness of sitting

00:31:44

in the theater of your mind waiting for something to happen.

00:31:48

It's kind of how he puts it, when one story ends, another story needs to begin.

00:31:53

And chapter 3 on page 32, he says, "Some of my saddest, most depressing, can't get out

00:31:59

of bed experiences have come in the season following a significant accomplishment."

00:32:03

His significant accomplishment that he's telling at this point in the book is riding his bike

00:32:08

all the way across the United States.

00:32:11

I know exactly what this feels like.

00:32:14

I won't retell the whole story here because I know people are sick of it, but running

00:32:17

my first half marathon, hurt myself, cross the finish line.

00:32:22

What do I do next?

00:32:23

I felt that void.

00:32:24

I know exactly what that feels like.

00:32:26

I was hurt at the time, so I couldn't feel it with something else, at least another running

00:32:31

goal.

00:32:32

So I feel like calling that out and forcing us to deal with that is important.

00:32:40

And also, he's planting the seeds here for the whole idea of goal setting, why it may

00:32:48

or may not be such a great idea.

00:32:50

Put a pin in that one.

00:32:51

We'll get to that later.

00:32:54

But he also talks about Frankl's formula for a life of meaning in this chapter.

00:32:59

And again, he kind of comes back to this all the time.

00:33:01

So take action creating a work or performing a deed, experience something or encounter someone

00:33:07

that you find captivating that pulls you out of yourself, have an optimistic attitude towards

00:33:11

the inevitable challenge and suffering you will experience in life.

00:33:14

And uses that kind of at this point as the foundation for everything else that he's going

00:33:19

to share, which I feel like was a very positive move.

00:33:25

I understand citing Victor Frankl at the beginning.

00:33:31

And at that point, I'm thinking maybe that was a mistake.

00:33:35

Maybe we've read a bunch of Victor Frankl stuff.

00:33:39

I've studied his life outside of those books even because I find him fascinating.

00:33:44

So I was completely expecting him to misinterpret some of the stuff that Victor Frankl had talked

00:33:50

about.

00:33:51

And usually that stuff doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

00:33:54

I can see when someone's trying to just shoehorn something in there because of the name associated

00:34:00

with it.

00:34:01

But I feel like what he did with Victor Frankl's ideas and logo therapy, because he says that

00:34:06

he kind of experiences himself and that's the thing that gave him hope, I feel like that's

00:34:09

authentic.

00:34:10

And I feel like he shares these little tidbits very well.

00:34:14

And so this is kind of borrowed credibility at this point because it's Victor Frankl.

00:34:18

But I feel like Donna Miller does a good job with this.

00:34:21

Yeah, I would agree with that, especially this section here specifically of like when

00:34:26

you've completed a big goal, then what, like what's the next thing?

00:34:32

Like that's almost dangerous territory when you've succeeded at something big.

00:34:38

Like I specifically think about last summer we did our big remodel on the house.

00:34:44

And when we got done with it, we specifically decided we were not going to be doing any

00:34:48

major projects on the house or on the property over the winter just because we knew we needed

00:34:53

a break.

00:34:54

What I was not expecting is this massive void of boredom and exhaustion, overwhelm, all of

00:35:04

that coming on as a wave after completion.

00:35:07

Like we've moved in, everything's good to go.

00:35:10

Like we can kind of just take a step back now.

00:35:13

And that hits hard.

00:35:16

It really can.

00:35:17

And it makes it kind of difficult to like get yourself going again.

00:35:22

Unless you have like, I forget the term you had for it.

00:35:26

There's that what did you call it?

00:35:27

Narrative void.

00:35:28

Yeah.

00:35:29

When you don't have that mission, that story that you're working on.

00:35:34

So you have to come up with the next thing.

00:35:36

But I don't think it has to be in the same arena necessarily.

00:35:42

Like that's where the whole goal setting thing comes in.

00:35:45

That he's going to pitch.

00:35:48

And I'm sure we'll have a fun conversation about.

00:35:50

But he's got the whole like once you've completed one, go on to the next one.

00:35:54

Don't get like, yes, it's good to take a break.

00:35:56

It's good to rest.

00:35:57

It's good to celebrate.

00:35:58

But go on to the next one.

00:36:00

And he, he nails this, I think with some of the backing he provides with man search,

00:36:06

remaining from Victor Frankl in that he is talking about like you have to have that drive,

00:36:11

that meaning, that purpose.

00:36:14

Or there's nothing to live for.

00:36:16

Like that's, that there's no point in continuing, thus the depression that can set in after

00:36:21

success.

00:36:22

So you have to like shift your gaze forward to the next thing.

00:36:27

Or you're in dire straits very quickly.

00:36:29

Yeah.

00:36:30

He says that meaning comes from motion, which I thought was a very profound statement.

00:36:35

Yeah.

00:36:36

And you could just talk about that for another 20 pages, I feel, but he, he didn't.

00:36:41

The idea though is, is really powerful.

00:36:43

And he also shares the idea of the existential vacuum here, which again, he credits Victor

00:36:49

Frankl for this, but this fits perfectly with this narrative void that he was talking about.

00:36:54

Cause the existential vacuum is where we feel like life should be better, more fun, more

00:36:58

rewarding, more fulfilling.

00:36:59

It's that whole idea of the gap where you think you should be at this point and you're

00:37:04

not and you measure the distance that you have to go and you get frustrated because all

00:37:09

you see is how you're falling short.

00:37:12

And the opposite of that would be the gain where you measure where you are versus where

00:37:16

you started and that produces motivation to keep going.

00:37:20

But really it's having that meaning that life mission, life theme is what I call it,

00:37:25

your purpose statement.

00:37:26

Why are you here?

00:37:27

You know, if you have that, you can reverse engineer the projects that you're going to

00:37:31

work on and the daily actions that are going to produce the, the meaning for you.

00:37:36

I have nitpicks maybe with the way that they're framed.

00:37:39

If you're talking about goals, but the idea is, is the same and it's accurate, I would

00:37:45

what argue.

00:37:46

Yeah, for sure.

00:37:47

All right.

00:37:48

So the next idea in here, starting in chapter four, what elements are necessary for a person

00:37:53

to transform?

00:37:54

Now, he's talking about transformation through the whole hero's journey.

00:37:59

You were this wimpy little character who was scared of everything and at the end of it,

00:38:05

or the hero who does the thing and everybody thinks you're awesome.

00:38:11

So that's kind of what he's talking about with this transformation.

00:38:15

That's the seed that's planted here, but I think the more powerful idea behind this.

00:38:19

And I think he kind of starts to speak to this, but that was the idea I had going into

00:38:23

it.

00:38:24

Transformation is not an overnight thing.

00:38:28

You don't just snap your fingers.

00:38:35

There's not a single event that helps you go from zero to a hundred or from victim to

00:38:38

to hero.

00:38:39

The truth is, and this is what he is kind of communicating at this point, is that we are

00:38:45

actually always transforming.

00:38:47

We are always changing.

00:38:49

He even says humans are designed to change when we don't.

00:38:51

It's an indication that something is wrong.

00:38:55

And I love that.

00:38:56

I mean, one of the things I've adopted with the whole faith-based productivity thing is

00:39:00

starting to get into YouTube more.

00:39:01

And I'm trying to end my videos with that.

00:39:03

Keep going and keep growing.

00:39:04

Like I want that to become my tagline.

00:39:07

Essentially don't ever give up and constantly be looking to change.

00:39:11

Figure things out.

00:39:12

Try something new.

00:39:14

You're going to mess up.

00:39:15

You're going to fail.

00:39:16

He kind of talks about that throughout this whole section here is that failure is actually

00:39:22

where you learn.

00:39:24

And failure is an opportunity for education is how he frames it at one point.

00:39:29

And heroes have to engage their challenges.

00:39:31

Very Ryan Holiday-esque.

00:39:33

The obstacle is the way sort of a vibe going on here at this point.

00:39:38

Yeah, this whole transformation idea is you could take this the wrong way.

00:39:45

If you think of some of the hero movies, there's an event that takes them from a nobody to

00:39:51

superhero overnight.

00:39:54

Like what you were saying.

00:39:56

It's the little things that add up.

00:39:59

We've talked about this before.

00:40:00

This is why the habits books always do so well.

00:40:02

And we always get excited when we have conversations about routines and habits, right?

00:40:07

And whenever we look at those little things and the repeated actions over time, it's that

00:40:15

continual progression that leads you to great places.

00:40:20

Whether that quote unquote great place is success as you would see it in the public eye.

00:40:28

Or if that is success in the sense of you made an impact on your kids lives in a positive

00:40:34

way, which is no small feat, I want to point out.

00:40:39

And if you're able to say that you've succeeded in that, then you've done well.

00:40:46

But it's these little transformational habits and these little things that do add up over

00:40:52

time that lead you to that.

00:40:54

I mean, the big things can happen.

00:40:56

Like it can be a big overnight thing.

00:41:00

But that is easily the exception, not the rule.

00:41:04

And I wish it was normal.

00:41:06

And you could just call that into place.

00:41:08

It's like, okay, tomorrow I am sun being distracted at all the little things.

00:41:13

I'll be focused 100% from here on out.

00:41:16

And there's something that would cause that.

00:41:18

I would imagine if I asked for a raise of hands, everybody would raise their hand asking

00:41:23

for that to happen.

00:41:25

But that's not going to happen.

00:41:27

So it is these little things that you have to dedicate yourself to that add up over time.

00:41:33

Is this the part where you're talking about the writers that showed up on a dedicated

00:41:37

writing schedule every day?

00:41:39

I don't remember if this was that part.

00:41:41

I don't think that was at this point.

00:41:43

I think that's probably in Act 2.

00:41:46

Okay.

00:41:47

But I tend to get those things mixed up.

00:41:50

Yeah.

00:41:51

So Act 1 really is kind of big picture stuff.

00:41:57

And then Act 2 is the specifics.

00:42:00

And kind of the last part here in Act 1 is a Morning Ritual, the Guide Director's story.

00:42:05

So it's planting the seeds for the routines.

00:42:07

He shares his Morning Ritual, which includes reading his eulogy, reading his 10 year, five

00:42:12

year and one year visions, reading his goal setting worksheets and filling out his daily

00:42:15

planner page.

00:42:18

So I'm sure we'll get into that.

00:42:20

But before we move on to the next part, I just want to call it a couple of other things

00:42:26

I liked from this that he says in Chapter 6, "A life plan is not about productivity,

00:42:32

but it will make you more productive."

00:42:34

Love that statement.

00:42:35

That is, I agree with that 100%.

00:42:38

He said that better than I could have possibly done, but I've tried to say similar things

00:42:45

regarding the time block plan for the day and the intention that it provides.

00:42:49

We had a follow up item for you, several shows in a row to see if that actually clicked.

00:42:55

What did you think of that quote there?

00:42:59

It's a good one.

00:43:00

Did it resonate with you?

00:43:01

I know that.

00:43:02

Did it make you want to plan your day every day or in some way, shape, or form?

00:43:06

Not time blocking specifically, but…

00:43:08

Yeah, I mean…

00:43:11

So here's…

00:43:12

Okay, let me explain this one.

00:43:14

So I started to figure out why some of the time blocking thing hasn't clicked for me.

00:43:21

It's because I didn't realize this until I read this book and got through the part

00:43:27

you're talking about.

00:43:29

But I kind of do a pseudo plan for the day anyway and have for quite some time.

00:43:37

But I don't think I could have told you that that's what it is.

00:43:41

Sure.

00:43:42

I would have…

00:43:43

Regularly, I would have told you that, yeah, I make a list of things I'm trying to do

00:43:46

today.

00:43:47

It's a checklist of things I'm setting out to accomplish today.

00:43:51

But the part of that that isn't captured anywhere is the own…

00:43:56

My mental plan of when all those things are going to happen.

00:44:00

It's not a plan in the terms of this hour, this is going to happen and this is going

00:44:06

to take 30 minutes and this is going to take two hours.

00:44:09

I don't do that.

00:44:10

But I know that if I'm going to write this particular article, it's going to be done

00:44:14

this morning.

00:44:15

If I'm going to go run these errands, that's going to be right after lunch.

00:44:17

And I know if I'm going to do any form of administrative maintenance tasks, that's

00:44:22

going to be right before I go home.

00:44:25

I have all of that plan in my mind, but it never gets externalized anywhere.

00:44:30

And I think it's because I know that my schedule tends to change so much day to day or like

00:44:34

hour to hour that trying to write it out doesn't seem to make sense.

00:44:39

But I know in my head when those things are best going to work out and then I shoot for

00:44:43

that.

00:44:44

So I think that's what some of my angst with the time blocking is, is like I have kind

00:44:49

of a plan already and have done that for quite some time.

00:44:53

But I don't think I could have told you that I'm doing that.

00:44:55

It wasn't until recently that I was able to connect that that's what I'm doing.

00:45:00

So yet, yes, he does get into like this whole ritual of, you know, make your plan for the

00:45:05

day and stuff like, and I get that.

00:45:06

So I've been like answering these questions of myself in the morning, which is kind of

00:45:10

similar to what he's getting at.

00:45:14

But as far as like the hourly time blocking thing, I don't think I'll actually ever get

00:45:19

to a point where I'm fully like writing that out every single day and thinking that's super

00:45:23

exciting.

00:45:24

I don't think that's going to be me.

00:45:26

Sure.

00:45:27

And I think Donald Miller would say that's okay because he actually says in the daily

00:45:32

planner section in act two, which we'll get to in a minute, that the daily planner page,

00:45:38

you could fill us out every day if you want, or just on days where you need additional

00:45:42

focus, which was surprising to me.

00:45:44

Everybody I know who has professed a system is like, you got to do this every single day.

00:45:50

He's kind of like, I just use it whenever you want.

00:45:53

Right.

00:45:54

I absolutely loved and I'm not used to people saying that, which is why when he said it,

00:45:59

like, well, hold up.

00:46:01

Yep.

00:46:02

What?

00:46:03

You're a guy who has a set of worksheets and a system here and you're telling me to maybe

00:46:08

use it sometimes when it's helpful?

00:46:10

Mm hmm.

00:46:11

Who are you?

00:46:12

You're strange.

00:46:13

Yeah.

00:46:14

So this is like the seeds of these are the principles and take them and apply them how

00:46:19

you want.

00:46:20

If you want more structure in order to help you apply them, I've got this thing that you

00:46:23

can use and I think he's kind of okay if you decide that that's just not for you.

00:46:30

Right.

00:46:31

Right.

00:46:32

It's interesting.

00:46:33

And then the other thing here with the hero knowing what they want, this feels selfish

00:46:38

at first, but he kind of addresses that.

00:46:41

He mentioned that the sweet spot is the things that benefit us and others.

00:46:47

And he does a really good job of defining that, what that looks like.

00:46:50

You can't just be in service of others.

00:46:53

You need to have something that's in it for you.

00:46:55

Otherwise you're going to lose motivation to keep going.

00:47:02

But also he talks about asking the question, what if and I like this question.

00:47:09

I've asked versions of this question in the past, but this is one of my action items.

00:47:13

What if I did the thing?

00:47:16

What if I wrote a New York Times best selling book because that's the thing on the bucket

00:47:22

list for me?

00:47:23

Right.

00:47:25

And I want to start asking this as a filtering question.

00:47:30

That's kind of the idea he talks about here is having a theme.

00:47:33

Life theme is where my mind went.

00:47:35

Every story has a controlling idea or a theme.

00:47:39

And that theme serves as a filter.

00:47:42

So you're not trying to do everything.

00:47:43

You're trying to do the right things.

00:47:45

But kind of encouraging you, you're capable of more than you realize at this point.

00:47:51

You'll never get it if you're trying to live the life and the story of other people or

00:47:58

that they want you to live.

00:47:59

You have to define that for yourself.

00:48:01

But when you focus in on a specific thing because it's really important to you because

00:48:05

it's going to help you and help other people, then that creates motivation to consistently

00:48:09

do it.

00:48:10

And that's really cool and I think very exciting as you go into the next part here in Act 2.

00:48:17

Yeah, I think it's a good segue.

00:48:20

Let's go to the fun part here.

00:48:23

All right.

00:48:24

So Act 2 is Create Your Life Plan.

00:48:28

And right there, it's in the title.

00:48:30

You kind of know what he's expecting us to do with this section of the book.

00:48:35

Chapter 7 is a eulogy allows you to look back on your entire life even before it's over.

00:48:42

We'll come back to that.

00:48:43

I just want to go through the rest of these chapters real quick.

00:48:45

Chapter 8 is a good eulogy talks about who and what the hero loved.

00:48:49

Chapter 9, a good eulogy helps you find narrative traction.

00:48:52

Chapter 10, write your eulogy.

00:48:53

Chapter 11, create your long-term vision and short-term goals.

00:48:56

Chapter 12, a hero gets things done.

00:48:58

Chapter 13, the hero on a mission daily planner.

00:49:00

Chapter 14, the role that matters most.

00:49:03

Chapter 15, the story goes on and on.

00:49:05

So lots of chapters here.

00:49:07

Several of them come before the actual writing of the eulogy, which I loved.

00:49:12

Yeah.

00:49:13

Yeah.

00:49:14

So the term eulogy, you probably, at least I did, instantly thought of Stephen Covey and

00:49:22

the seven habits, right?

00:49:25

It's not what I thought of.

00:49:26

Well, habit number two, begin with the end in mind.

00:49:29

I guess maybe that's just my upbringing with the family business and my dad.

00:49:33

And has a whole self-determination product built off of that principle as a perchains

00:49:38

to goal setting.

00:49:39

I'm wearing a funerals too much.

00:49:41

Fair enough.

00:49:42

I instantly thought of the worksheet we have here that helps you write one.

00:49:47

Oh my gosh.

00:49:48

Sure.

00:49:49

Well, going into it and seeing all these chapters about a eulogy, that's what I anticipated

00:49:54

is, okay, so we're getting into life, purpose, mission, statements, stuff like that.

00:50:00

So probably going to come back to Stephen Covey, seven habits.

00:50:04

I know this already, Donald Miller.

00:50:06

You don't need to talk to me about it for four chapters.

00:50:09

That was me at the beginning of chapter seven.

00:50:12

However, he won me over with this section.

00:50:17

He did a really good job of talking about the eulogy in a new light.

00:50:22

He probably brought up Stephen Covey at one point.

00:50:24

I didn't jot it down in my notes here, but I don't know that he did.

00:50:29

I don't remember.

00:50:30

He did.

00:50:31

There's definitely a lot of new material here on this idea.

00:50:35

So don't write it off even though at the beginning it probably sounds the same as we talk about

00:50:39

it, but essentially eulogy, what legacy are you going to leave?

00:50:45

And he has a couple of exercise questions in each one of these chapters, which is a very

00:50:51

effective way of doing this because he doesn't just give you all the questions at once.

00:50:55

In chapter seven, you have to identify, I will likely pass away when I am about X years old.

00:51:01

And if I die when I am X years old, that means I only have Y years left to live.

00:51:06

This is very weight, but why ask?

00:51:10

Have you ever seen one of those calendars?

00:51:12

Mm-hmm.

00:51:13

Yeah.

00:51:14

Yeah, they're humbling.

00:51:15

I'll say that.

00:51:17

Yeah.

00:51:18

So the calendar I'm talking about basically has the average lifespan and then you color

00:51:22

in the squares from the moment that you're born to the day that you die.

00:51:28

And the whole idea behind it is you see all those boxes that are colored in and you're

00:51:34

like, "Oh my gosh, my life is half over," or whatever.

00:51:38

And it's very sobering when you look at that.

00:51:43

Yes.

00:51:44

However, this feels very stoic, memento-mori sort of a thing.

00:51:50

Remember you're going to die.

00:51:52

What you do with that is the important thing.

00:51:54

And I feel like he does a really good job of saying, "Okay, well, I'm probably going

00:51:58

to live to be about 80.

00:51:59

I'm 40 now, then I better get busy."

00:52:02

And it creates the momentum or the motivation to take action now and start creating the

00:52:08

life that you want to live.

00:52:10

One of the interesting things, because he shares a lot of his own personal story throughout

00:52:13

this, is that he kind of got a late start.

00:52:17

He talks about how he bought this chocolate lab, Lucy, and started traveling around the

00:52:25

country with Lucy.

00:52:27

And he thought at that point, "I'm in my mid-30s, this is the only companionship I'm

00:52:31

ever going to have."

00:52:33

And at the end, he talks about how now he's married, they just have their first kid.

00:52:40

Lucy is going to die soon.

00:52:44

So one story's ending, another story's beginning.

00:52:48

I don't want to jump right to the end, but it's a very effective metaphor.

00:52:54

When I read that last chapter, I mean, I have a dog named Lucy.

00:52:58

Maybe that's part of it.

00:53:00

But I went through this not too long ago with our previous dog, who passed away suddenly,

00:53:09

and then we ended up getting another dog.

00:53:12

And I found myself getting emotional as I was reading that last chapter.

00:53:18

And he does a really good job, I feel, of communicating like, "Well, yeah, you should

00:53:22

be emotional because the story is ending, but don't just stay there."

00:53:25

Like, life keeps going, brings in Victor Frankle again.

00:53:28

Like, this is the perfect mashup of all these different things, all these different ideas

00:53:33

that we've read in my opinion.

00:53:34

And then he tells it through the Donald Miller lens, which is kind of self-deprecating, kind

00:53:40

of humorous sometimes, sometimes trying to be funny, not so funny.

00:53:45

He's got one kid who's a couple of months old, so he's talking about explosions of

00:53:49

love and explosions of poop.

00:53:52

I've been through it with five kids, so that doesn't work for me.

00:53:56

I know you going through it for the first time, exactly how fascinated you are by this.

00:54:02

However, it doesn't translate.

00:54:04

But overall, I feel like all the different dots that he's connecting with this, it's

00:54:10

very, very effective.

00:54:12

And the eulogy is the thing here that I feel this kind of anchors a whole bunch of stuff.

00:54:18

I want to write my own eulogy.

00:54:22

That is an action item that I am going to commit to.

00:54:26

I'm not sure if I'm going to share the whole thing on the air next time, but I'm definitely

00:54:31

going to write it.

00:54:32

I think that's a noble task to take on.

00:54:37

I think a lot of people should do this.

00:54:39

I'm very grateful that he took the three chapters to explain basically what makes a

00:54:45

good eulogy.

00:54:48

Like I mentioned earlier, one of the first things I thought of was the eulogy that I

00:54:51

read whenever we have funerals here at the church.

00:54:57

Some of them are written very well, and some of them are lackluster to be kind.

00:55:05

And there have been, I think, two.

00:55:11

One in particular, I know, stood out to me.

00:55:13

But there have been two that I know I've read that were written by the deceased, one

00:55:20

of which was written as they were on their deathbed with the help of their family, which

00:55:27

I found very emotional and difficult to read.

00:55:32

The other one I'll bring up just because it fits this very well.

00:55:38

The person had the deceased.

00:55:41

They died early.

00:55:42

They were in their late 50s.

00:55:44

They wrote their own eulogy in their early 20s.

00:55:48

And that eulogy was inserted as part of the bulletin, rundown, whatever you want to call

00:55:57

it, the handout that came at the funeral.

00:56:00

That was placed beside the eulogy that was then written by the family.

00:56:06

And to see the two side by side was just mind blowing to me.

00:56:11

How'd they match up?

00:56:13

Very well, actually, it was shocking because what had happened was he had written this

00:56:20

eulogy in his early 20s and then basically did what Donald Miller is talking about here,

00:56:27

where he was trying to live his life towards that end goal.

00:56:35

There weren't any specifics like, "I'm going to have a big business."

00:56:37

You don't like none of that was part of it.

00:56:39

It was all relationships, which is a lot of what he's getting at here.

00:56:43

That's chapter 8, yep.

00:56:45

In what makes a good eulogy.

00:56:47

I have no idea how this person came about the concept to do this, but obviously they

00:56:53

came about it somehow.

00:56:55

And to see the family's response to reading that, because a lot of them didn't even know

00:57:03

that he had written it.

00:57:06

It was just a super fascinating experience to have.

00:57:10

I waited till now to bring this up because this makes perfect sense here.

00:57:13

But absolutely, I'm going to join you in trying to write this because I feel like this is

00:57:19

something that can definitely drive a lot of good in your life as far as a mission goes.

00:57:27

But I also know this is not going to be simple.

00:57:31

You know this, this is not going to be a fun or exciting process by any means.

00:57:38

But I think Donald Miller has set us up well with understanding what makes a good one and

00:57:43

giving you the framework to help you get through this to do it well.

00:57:48

But yes, it's one that I'm definitely going to take on here.

00:57:53

Yeah, he does give a lot of great examples of people who have written their eulogy.

00:57:57

He shares his, I think he shares his wife's like a whole bunch of other people, a couple

00:58:02

paragraphs.

00:58:03

These are the sort of elements that you would include in it.

00:58:05

There's even a whole bunch of questions that he gives you in chapter 10 with writing your

00:58:11

eulogy.

00:58:12

I'm not going to read them all, but they are in the mine node file.

00:58:14

So I guess there's a plug for membership.

00:58:18

You want to get access to that stuff.

00:58:20

There you go.

00:58:21

This section about people and relationships, how they give us meaning, he mentions this

00:58:29

drama triangle in chapter eight, which is interesting because if you just take that

00:58:35

statement at surface value, yeah, your life should be about other people, you could totally

00:58:40

get sucked into this.

00:58:42

And I've seen this manifest, but I didn't really understand how you get there necessarily.

00:58:50

But basically he did a really good job of defining this.

00:58:53

So basically this drama triangle is when we interact with someone who sees themselves

00:58:57

as a victim, the person positions themselves as a victim to attract a rescuer.

00:59:04

And then the rescuer swoops in and makes themselves feel good by helping the victim.

00:59:09

However, the victim has no desire to actually change.

00:59:11

So when the rescuer's patient starts to wear thin, they begin to blame and persecute the

00:59:15

person they were attempting to rescue.

00:59:17

Who then needs a rescuer other than their original rescuer and on and on we go.

00:59:23

Yeah.

00:59:24

So this is kind of like a false hero, I think, at this point.

00:59:27

You could find someone who has a need and who is trying to get attention this way.

00:59:32

But that's not going to provide the meaning.

00:59:35

You're going to fall into this trap.

00:59:36

So he says, "Heroes on a mission attract other heroes on a mission."

00:59:40

Really you got to find other people who are like-minded, not in an echo chamber, but people

00:59:46

who are at least trying to believe they have the agency to change their situation.

00:59:52

If you get around people like that, then that will inspire you to change yourself.

00:59:56

And it's a reinforcing perpetual cycle at that point.

01:00:03

He does also make the point here that when others are involved in our stories, we have

01:00:06

to make compromises.

01:00:07

He talks about how he had to make compromises when he got married.

01:00:10

He had to make compromises again when his daughter was born.

01:00:13

At that point, I'm like, "Buddy, you have no idea."

01:00:17

You could just get and start him, my friend.

01:00:21

Yeah.

01:00:22

And I don't say that because my family has cramped my style or anything like that just

01:00:26

with each additional person.

01:00:28

You've got less and less agency for yourself.

01:00:33

And you willingly trade that because a story that involves other people is more meaningful.

01:00:40

But yeah, he's kind of talking about it with his first kid who is a couple of months old

01:00:47

and framing it as this requires a huge amount of sacrifice.

01:00:52

And when you have five kids and they are 14 and under, that requires much more sacrifice.

01:00:58

So I'm very much aware of this problem.

01:01:00

Donald Miller, I don't need you to explain it to me.

01:01:04

That's just me.

01:01:05

Yes.

01:01:06

At the same time though, there are many people who aren't even to his point.

01:01:09

Yep.

01:01:10

It totally makes sense.

01:01:12

What he's saying isn't wrong for the stage he's in.

01:01:17

And I think he's got a good viewpoint given his starting point there.

01:01:24

He's coming at it probably from a better place than what I was at that time in that season.

01:01:29

So kudos to him on that front.

01:01:31

But yes, absolutely.

01:01:33

Yeah.

01:01:34

Two kids is way more complicated than one, three more.

01:01:37

So I'm done at three.

01:01:39

You've got five.

01:01:40

I don't even want to think about it, Mike.

01:01:42

Like I'm good at three.

01:01:44

I'll stay there.

01:01:45

We see probably four or five years ago, we bought a suburban and we went into the dealership

01:01:55

and we're talking to the sales guy.

01:01:59

Actually it was four years ago because Adelaide is four and we had five kids.

01:02:04

And my wife and I walked in.

01:02:06

We didn't have the kids with us.

01:02:08

Well, we need a bigger family vehicle.

01:02:11

Okay, so how many kids you got?

01:02:14

And it's like five.

01:02:18

Five?

01:02:20

Pardon me for asking this, but are you planning on having any more?

01:02:26

Just because that determines whether you need the bucket seats or the...

01:02:29

Right, the vehicles.

01:02:31

Sure, that's what you're thinking about.

01:02:34

Yeah.

01:02:35

But you was wrong with you.

01:02:36

So his mind was blown at that and then...

01:02:42

But that's all right.

01:02:43

There's another thing in chapter nine I wanted to talk about here with creators, not consumers.

01:02:51

So this is one of the things that we have tried to make a mantra in our family is create

01:02:58

not consume.

01:02:59

It's one of the things my wife and I talk about all the time and the intentional family

01:03:01

podcasts that we do.

01:03:03

I've even got on my iPhone home screen, the widget smith thing with the text at the bottom

01:03:08

that says create not consume.

01:03:10

So whenever I open my iPhone, I see that as a nudge to not just go check Twitter or whatever,

01:03:19

but do something that I consider to be a positive use of that technology and just intentional

01:03:26

technology uses what I'm trying to go towards.

01:03:30

So I love that idea from the perspective of intentional technology use, but I also think

01:03:38

it fits really well with what he's talking about here in terms of narrative and story.

01:03:44

Because he says creators make things that didn't exist before and a life plan and a life vision

01:03:50

and ultimately a life well lived could fit there as well.

01:03:57

Consumers consume what creators create.

01:04:00

So somebody says you're going to do this and you end up doing that and then you complain

01:04:03

because it's not what you wanted to do.

01:04:07

So creators create consumers consume and then they complain about the things that they've

01:04:12

consumed because really they should be creating themselves, but they don't do it because I

01:04:17

don't know.

01:04:18

There's a lot of different reasons, but I think one of the big ones is that they're

01:04:21

waiting for somebody to give them permission to do it.

01:04:24

Consider this your permission, permission granted.

01:04:27

You can create the life you want.

01:04:29

You don't wait for somebody else to give you the ability to do that.

01:04:33

Start where you are with what you have.

01:04:35

You don't have to change your entire situation overnight, but do something to move in the

01:04:41

direction that you want to go.

01:04:43

Whenever you let other people define your world, they're always going to make it too

01:04:48

small.

01:04:49

That and if you're waiting, like you go back to act one when we're talking about the heroes

01:04:55

agency.

01:04:56

Don't wait for the perfect circumstances either.

01:05:01

This is something I've been bad about in the past.

01:05:04

Well, I can't start seeding the grass until it's just right.

01:05:10

The perfect time to seed grasses in the spring and in the fall.

01:05:13

Yeah, but I have the time mid-summer.

01:05:17

It's not perfect.

01:05:18

It's going to take more water, but I'm not paying for water.

01:05:21

It's just a well pump.

01:05:22

I don't pay for the water.

01:05:24

Water it.

01:05:25

Who cares?

01:05:26

That's my view now.

01:05:27

But previously, I've always waited for those perfect scenarios.

01:05:32

If you're looking for absolute perfection, you'll never find it, which means you'll never

01:05:37

act on it, which means you don't get anywhere.

01:05:39

You'll always be complaining because you didn't act on the thing that you think you should

01:05:42

have done.

01:05:43

Now you're sitting in a wallowing pit of nothingness.

01:05:46

So please stop.

01:05:47

Get up.

01:05:48

Do something.

01:05:49

Here's your permission to get going.

01:05:51

This is also where helping you to realize that you're running out of time can be used

01:06:00

for the positive, I'll say.

01:06:02

No one likes to think about the fact that they don't have a whole lot of time left.

01:06:09

But when you realize that it does create urgency to start living your life now, and in chapter

01:06:15

nine, he talks about page 114.

01:06:17

He says, "Every day we write a page that someone will someday read."

01:06:21

So kind of to your point, don't wait until circumstances are perfect because they're

01:06:24

never going to be.

01:06:26

Start tomorrow and write the page of your life story that is in alignment with the story

01:06:33

that you want to tell.

01:06:36

You're picking up, if you're embracing these ideas that he's talking about, every single

01:06:39

one of us is embracing a story in progress.

01:06:43

And the tendency could be, "Well, I want to start at the beginning and I want to make

01:06:45

it perfect, but you can't do that."

01:06:50

You're jumping in the middle and you've only got so much time left.

01:06:52

So I feel like that is a very compelling argument for just starting where you are with what

01:06:57

you have.

01:06:58

And so this character in our story, maybe he's made a whole bunch of mistakes.

01:07:02

That's actually a good thing from a storytelling perspective because it's going to make the

01:07:04

comeback that much sweeter and the triumph that much greater.

01:07:09

Okay.

01:07:10

So this character who has made all these mistakes in the past wakes up today and is you and

01:07:16

what is the thing that they are going to do, the best version of them is going to do today

01:07:21

to set up this storybook ending.

01:07:25

I feel like that's a really cool visual exercise.

01:07:30

And that's kind of what he's talking about in this chapter is developing this vision.

01:07:34

There's different ways that he talks about this.

01:07:35

The three characteristics of a good vision, it should probably embarrass you.

01:07:38

It should probably scare you.

01:07:40

And then says, "Oh, by the way, it should also be realistic," which that was kind of jarring.

01:07:45

He embraces that.

01:07:46

He recognizes that.

01:07:47

He's like, "Think big, dream big, and then, oh, by the way, now make it realistic."

01:07:52

I feel like the embarrassing, scaring part, that's kind of just priming the pump.

01:07:57

But then the realistic is a very effective way for like, "Okay, so what can you do now?"

01:08:02

Right?

01:08:03

You don't have to have it all figured out.

01:08:04

You can't go from zero to 100.

01:08:06

What can you do right now to start moving in this direction?

01:08:10

But then the other thing that was really effective for me was he talks about how the choices

01:08:18

that he and his wife are making and the life that they're creating, that is establishing

01:08:22

what is normal for their daughter.

01:08:25

And so one of the visions that they have is this retreat center sort of a thing.

01:08:30

They call it Goose Hill, where they have people come and he has these bookshelves in their

01:08:34

carriage house, which he wants to fill with people's life stories, and their hero and

01:08:40

emission stories.

01:08:41

He wants to collect all of those in three ring binders and have all of them there on the

01:08:46

bookshelf.

01:08:47

So there's a whole bunch of things that they're doing right now that are creating this normal

01:08:53

world for their kids.

01:08:56

And that has me thinking, "What elements of my story do I want to make normal for my

01:08:59

kids?"

01:09:00

I feel like I've done some of this stuff already because my wife and I have done our family

01:09:05

core values and things like that.

01:09:09

We've got a weekly date night and the weekly one-on-ones with my kids and things like that.

01:09:15

And I know that they appreciate that stuff because they're old enough now that they see

01:09:23

their friends, they don't do that sort of thing.

01:09:27

And they still like hanging out with me.

01:09:29

So I'm going to continue to do it as long as they're willing.

01:09:32

Yeah, take advantage while you can.

01:09:34

But at this point, it is normal for us.

01:09:37

And I think that's awesome because I want them to be able to do the same sort of thing

01:09:40

with their kids.

01:09:41

And by making it normal in our house, I feel like that sets them up for success.

01:09:47

But I definitely want to think about that.

01:09:48

And are there any other elements of my story that I want to make normal for my kids?

01:09:52

And maybe they're elements that don't exist yet.

01:09:54

Maybe they're things that are traditions that are yet to be crafted.

01:09:59

But I want to spend some thinking time on that.

01:10:01

Yeah, no, that's good.

01:10:03

Because I know we have some defaults that we're setting for our kids, like not making progress

01:10:09

on Sundays, like making sure that we're taking a break, giving yourself the rest, making

01:10:14

sure sleep is a priority.

01:10:16

There's some of those things that we're trying to make sure the kids pick up.

01:10:20

And those go a long ways to the point where my oldest knows, you're not getting a phone

01:10:27

ever.

01:10:29

Never.

01:10:30

And she knows I'm joking, of course.

01:10:34

But she also knows it's going to be a while before you are allowed to have one of these.

01:10:39

She's nine.

01:10:41

And she does have a friend who has one and is starting to become friends with some older

01:10:46

kids who have phones and stuff.

01:10:48

So it's interesting to see her, like whenever her friends ask her about it, like, well,

01:10:54

my dad's a tech guy at church.

01:10:57

And when she gets that out, they're like, oh, so you probably have like, nope, I mean,

01:11:00

I have nothing.

01:11:02

Absolutely nothing.

01:11:03

Get a light phone.

01:11:06

Not even that.

01:11:07

Like, no, nothing.

01:11:09

That's actually what we did for our 14 year old.

01:11:12

We got a light phone.

01:11:13

I wrote it up actually recently for the sweet set up.

01:11:16

It's a great entryway because there are text messages.

01:11:20

There's no multimedia messages.

01:11:21

There's no web browser.

01:11:23

There's no apps.

01:11:24

And we've talked to him about it.

01:11:26

We've watched the social dilemma together.

01:11:28

Like he gets it.

01:11:29

He understands why.

01:11:30

And he also gets annoyed by some of his teenage friends who like will come over and they just

01:11:33

stare at the phones all the time.

01:11:35

So I feel like, you know, we've planted the seeds there, but we'll see.

01:11:40

Yep.

01:11:41

Anyway, we could spend a whole episode on that one, but yes.

01:11:44

Yeah.

01:11:45

Another thing he says here on page 117, there's lots of these little quotes that I just absolutely

01:11:49

love.

01:11:50

I know.

01:11:51

I know.

01:11:52

It's what I was saying early on.

01:11:53

Yeah.

01:11:54

A lot of like one-liner zingers here and there.

01:11:55

Yep.

01:11:56

He says, "This is not a book of chance you can recite to force the genie out of the bottle

01:11:58

and grant you three wishes, although those books seem to sell well."

01:12:03

That they do.

01:12:05

Like, yeah.

01:12:06

Yeah.

01:12:07

You really just...

01:12:10

I didn't expect that statement because he is embracing what this book really is, but

01:12:17

also slamming like every other stereotypical productivity book in this space at the same

01:12:23

time.

01:12:24

This is chef's kiss.

01:12:31

But only because he's dissing on the parts you don't like.

01:12:34

So Echo Chamber going on right here.

01:12:37

That's what that is.

01:12:38

That's true.

01:12:39

That's true.

01:12:40

However, I've been thinking a lot about this.

01:12:43

This probably relates a little bit to Storyrand and just like the stuff that I've been creating

01:12:46

lately with faith-based productivity, the YouTube channel, stuff like that.

01:12:51

I have struggled.

01:12:53

Like, let's just share with the YouTube stuff specifically.

01:12:57

I've got a whole bunch of these sermon sketch note videos that I've been doing long before

01:13:01

I ever cared about YouTube.

01:13:03

And I continue to do those roughly every week and they get a handful of views, probably

01:13:09

all people at my church.

01:13:12

And they don't perform well.

01:13:16

So I've been thinking about as I'm getting into other types of YouTube videos, do I

01:13:21

want to just delete all those?

01:13:24

Do I even want to do those anymore?

01:13:27

Because the other ones that perform well, they reach a broader audience.

01:13:34

But then I've just gone through ship 30 for 30 and they basically say become as niche

01:13:38

as you can.

01:13:40

You want to get to the point where people don't like you because of something that you have

01:13:46

created.

01:13:47

And I feel like that's the sermon sketch note stuff for me.

01:13:50

I'm kind of still wrestling through this, but kind of where my mind is at right now is,

01:13:54

"No, I'm going to leave them up there because that's who I am."

01:13:57

And if that takes people off good because those aren't the people who are going to be

01:13:59

my true fans anyways, and the internet's big enough that I'll find the people who think,

01:14:04

"Oh, this is great that you do the standard productivity stuff and the sermon sketch notes

01:14:08

and bookworm and all this other stuff."

01:14:10

There's an audience there that I can absolutely serve well and that's what I should be trying

01:14:17

to do, not try to be more palatable to other people or the algorithm.

01:14:23

So yeah.

01:14:25

Totally fair.

01:14:26

The last thing I really want to talk about in this book is this topic of goal setting.

01:14:35

Now in chapter 12, he says, let me back up, chapter 11, create your long-term vision,

01:14:41

short-term goals.

01:14:42

So that's where he starts talking about goal setting.

01:14:45

However, chapter 12 was where I re-engaged with him because he says, quote, goal setting

01:14:55

is optional.

01:14:57

What?

01:14:58

Did you catch that?

01:14:59

It's the second paragraph at the very beginning of chapter 12 and marked this in my notes.

01:15:04

I'll just read it to you.

01:15:06

The third and optional step in creating your life plan and experiencing a life of meaning

01:15:11

is to fill out your goal setting worksheets.

01:15:14

Right.

01:15:15

It's right at the beginning of the chapter.

01:15:18

Yeah.

01:15:19

So this just kind of sealed the deal for me that at this point, I have officially been,

01:15:28

every objection I've had to Donald Miller has been disarmed.

01:15:32

I still don't think he's all that funny sometimes, but that's, that's just personal style, whatever.

01:15:38

I really appreciated this statement and this was kind of the cherry on top in terms of

01:15:44

I've got all these principles and I'm sharing my story and I feel like there's something

01:15:48

here that can help you, but you don't have to do it my way.

01:15:50

I mean, he's got goal setting templates.

01:15:53

It would be very easy to just lean into that and be like, this is what you got to do.

01:15:58

Every, I shouldn't say every, I gotta be careful how I phrase this.

01:16:05

The beginning of my productivity journey and the stuff that I did online, I was very much

01:16:12

encouraged to embrace this role as the guru and well, I've done this for a period of time.

01:16:21

So just trust me and do it this way.

01:16:24

And Donald Miller totally went the opposite direction here.

01:16:29

And that's not what I expected him to do.

01:16:33

I mean, at this point in the book, maybe, but at the beginning, you know, I was expecting

01:16:37

here's the system, follow the system.

01:16:40

And I found at this point, obviously, because I have my own issues with goals and the vacuum

01:16:45

that they create as soon as you achieve one and all that kind of stuff.

01:16:50

By framing it as optional, I'm like, this is my people.

01:16:56

I am 100% on board with this, this message at this point.

01:17:02

But just to, you know, tie a bow on this, the point that he's making by saying goal setting

01:17:07

is optional is that all you really need is motivation and action.

01:17:14

The way I wrote this down was motivation and action creates traction.

01:17:19

Those aren't the words that he used.

01:17:21

He does talk about narrative traction, right?

01:17:24

But all you really need is something that will create the momentum that you need to show

01:17:31

up and do what you need to do.

01:17:34

And then at that point, you can chuck the rest of the system and all of the regular stuff.

01:17:41

I still believe habits and routines are important, but it talks about the daily planning and

01:17:46

how like even that is optional.

01:17:48

You can use it strategically whenever you need a little bit of additional focus.

01:17:54

And this has got me rethinking a whole bunch of things.

01:17:59

So here's something that has crossed my mind as I've been kind of reflecting on this book

01:18:06

prepping for today, Mike.

01:18:08

And I want your hot take on this, okay?

01:18:11

Because I did not prep you for this at all.

01:18:13

But there's a lot of times we talk about goal setting and we've belabored the negatives

01:18:19

of goal setting or resolutions or the short term things regularly.

01:18:27

But at the same time, there might be a disconnect here in our own, I guess, negativity towards

01:18:37

the term goals and setting goals in that I think that we tend to set things called projects.

01:18:46

And we have these short term projects that we have that we're off to achieve.

01:18:52

And part of me wonders if we've been in the productivity space enough to think of a goal

01:18:58

as something else, like the concept of a smart goal.

01:19:02

Yeah.

01:19:03

Like, you know what I mean?

01:19:04

Like the whole measurable realistic time bound, like all of that.

01:19:08

I think whenever I think of a goal, I think of that.

01:19:12

But at the same time, I wonder if the broader world doesn't see it that way.

01:19:17

And they would say that like what we call a project that we're trying to accomplish here

01:19:21

in the next month or two, like take your YouTube channel, like you're trying to accomplish

01:19:27

releasing a video and just call it one video, like you've got the next one.

01:19:31

I wonder if people would call that a goal and you and I would call it a project.

01:19:37

I wonder if there's just a terminology difference there.

01:19:40

I think you're right.

01:19:42

I think most people who'd and when I say most people, not even like bookworm listeners,

01:19:48

the general public, when you first stumble upon the idea of goal setting, that is the

01:19:54

very first time you've applied any sort of intentionality to maybe to how you live your

01:20:01

life and you begin to live with not just for today, but for tomorrow.

01:20:09

And so it can be very effective when you start to think that way.

01:20:12

I think the issues I have are very much attached to the smart goals because that is the next

01:20:18

step, the general public.

01:20:20

Okay.

01:20:21

So I'm going to set a goal.

01:20:22

Now it's got to be smart, right?

01:20:23

Because that gives you something which is realistic to go after.

01:20:29

However, I feel the better approach is what the onal miller is talking about here.

01:20:34

You begin with the end in mind.

01:20:36

You have the eulogy.

01:20:38

What do you want your entire story to be about?

01:20:42

And then from there, you can work backwards.

01:20:44

I like the idea of the acts like he's talking about.

01:20:47

And I even like the idea of the chapters.

01:20:49

You could apply this to this analogy to your life.

01:20:55

And I would say the projects that you're talking about, maybe those are chapters.

01:20:58

So maybe this is like the YouTube chapter for Mike, right?

01:21:02

But I would never by approaching it that way, I would never set smart goals.

01:21:08

I would never say by this date, this chapter is going to be over.

01:21:11

I'm going to move on to the next one.

01:21:12

That's the issue I have with them.

01:21:15

So it's almost like if you have never set a goal before and you stumbled on the idea

01:21:20

of goals, fine.

01:21:22

Okay.

01:21:23

Use them.

01:21:24

Great.

01:21:25

Now you have a little bit of intentionality.

01:21:26

However, if you stick with it long enough, the better way to do this is to work backwards

01:21:31

and to forget everything you knew about smart goals.

01:21:35

So yeah, I think you're right that it's the way that we describe them and the goal.

01:21:41

The goals themselves maybe aren't necessarily bad.

01:21:44

They just have to be framed the right way and it's not framed the way that most people

01:21:47

are going to think about them.

01:21:49

Yeah.

01:21:50

I part of me asked that because I was looking at his worksheets for how do you set a goal

01:21:55

and break it down and all these things when you're going to complete it by and such.

01:21:59

And like it has that smart goal, askness of it.

01:22:02

Like just I noticed that it's reeking of that, right?

01:22:07

But at the same time, I could easily see how taking some of the things that I call projects

01:22:14

that have due dates on them, you know, early on I mentioned we've got this live stream

01:22:20

thing I'm doing on Sunday, right?

01:22:22

Like, well, the due date for that is Sunday.

01:22:24

Like I cannot, it's impossible for me to put that off outside of canceling part of the

01:22:29

scope of the project.

01:22:31

It's not going to, it's not going to move at all.

01:22:35

So that particular project, I know some people will call it a goal.

01:22:41

It's our goal to do that service well.

01:22:45

And I just don't call it that.

01:22:48

But I could see how taking some of his worksheets and if I applied it to that project, it actually

01:22:53

would make sense and maybe potentially be helpful.

01:22:56

I'm not going to do that.

01:22:57

But that is something that I know could be helpful for some people.

01:23:01

So anyway, I had that translation happen in my brain at some point when I was walking

01:23:05

through the woods and it occurred to me that maybe we're a little bit off, you know, coming

01:23:11

back to the whole mental models concept of questioning your assumptions.

01:23:16

And I had that, I wonder if we're off base on some of this goal angst.

01:23:25

So I just wondered if we were off potentially just have a different terminology.

01:23:29

That's what I was processing.

01:23:31

I think maybe I need to reframe my angst.

01:23:35

My angst is not with the whole concept of goals, but smart goals specifically.

01:23:42

Because one of the things that he says, which I think this has stated really well, the secret

01:23:47

to success is to one, work on the right things and to do a little every day.

01:23:53

And that is the essence of my issues with the goals.

01:23:58

Like, yeah, you can put in all the metadata and break it down into all the individual

01:24:01

things and have all the due dates.

01:24:03

You're still not going to do anything about it.

01:24:06

Because you're not going to be motivated tomorrow and you're going to think, oh, I've got

01:24:09

three months to do this thing and you're going to put it off until the last possible

01:24:12

moment and then it's going to suck every second that you're working on it.

01:24:16

That's what most people do.

01:24:18

But that's what you just said is an excellent reason to pick this up and go through this

01:24:26

concept.

01:24:27

Right?

01:24:28

Because that issue with putting things off and not feeling like you have to get to it

01:24:35

and to get it done is primarily because you're not motivated to do it ahead of time, which

01:24:42

I think is partly why you and I get into the habits world because then it becomes a motivation

01:24:47

to do those things every single day, which kind of forces you into the forward progress

01:24:53

like that mode.

01:24:55

But if you go about doing that blindly without some in-game in mind, it does get to be, I

01:25:06

guess, hollow, if you will, without that substance behind it.

01:25:13

So that's where Story Brand comes in.

01:25:16

It gives you that substance as opposed to just finances for business.

01:25:21

And that's where some of his Right Your Ulogy, which to me is the big, big, big point in

01:25:28

this book that stands out and that here's what makes a good one.

01:25:32

Here's how you do this.

01:25:34

You should do this.

01:25:35

The whole 10-year, five-year, one-year vision thing, sure, cool, awesome.

01:25:40

Probably not going to do that part.

01:25:41

Yeah, I'm either going to say that.

01:25:43

Going to skip fast forward plus 30 on that one.

01:25:48

But I think that that Ulogy piece is the core component here.

01:25:53

He's doing a lot of setup for it.

01:25:55

I guess I'm kind of in the middle of wrap-up here.

01:25:57

I don't intend that.

01:25:58

But the thing about it is that if you have that mission, if you have that drive, the

01:26:06

habits, the routines, the day-to-day stuff, I don't want to say it becomes easy, but it's

01:26:11

easier to get the motivation to start, I guess.

01:26:14

Oh, for sure.

01:26:15

Who struggles with that starting point?

01:26:18

Like getting started is always the trick for me.

01:26:22

Having that mission is the part that makes that a lot easier.

01:26:27

Knowing that mine's a bit fuzzy from time to time, especially right now.

01:26:31

So I'm aware of that.

01:26:33

Yeah, I agree with that.

01:26:35

Really what you need is alignment, something that is pulling you towards something that

01:26:40

is meaningful to you doesn't have to be something that is easy, that kind of gets into the whole

01:26:46

idea of passion, which he doesn't address this specifically in here, but basically the

01:26:52

whole Victor Frankl thing, finding meaning in the suffering while passion is suffering.

01:26:59

The word for passion is petit, which literally means suffering.

01:27:02

So what are you willing to suffer to see come about?

01:27:06

And I think that is in a nutshell.

01:27:10

There's a whole bunch more in this book, to be honest.

01:27:13

Chapter 14 talks about the role that matters most.

01:27:15

That's the guide.

01:27:16

So essentially once you've lived out your here on a mission journey, try to help other people

01:27:22

do that.

01:27:23

And then chapter 15 is where he kind of ties it all together.

01:27:26

Like I said, that's the emotional part where he talks about how Lucy's not going to be

01:27:30

there much longer, but encourages you to look for opportunities to transform.

01:27:35

And that's a big takeaway.

01:27:37

Start where you are with what you have.

01:27:38

And that's how I would frame it, but keep going, keep growing and embrace those opportunities

01:27:43

as you see him.

01:27:44

The last part is part three.

01:27:48

We don't really need to say a whole lot about this, but this is where all the templates

01:27:51

are.

01:27:52

So if you want to see kind of how his system works, this is where you see it all.

01:27:56

You see the daily planner pages, you see the goal setting worksheets, you see the eulogy

01:28:00

stuff, everything that you need in paper form.

01:28:04

That's too small to write on.

01:28:05

It's true.

01:28:06

Just going to say that.

01:28:07

This part was weird to me because normally this is in an appendix.

01:28:11

This is normally the...

01:28:12

Yes.

01:28:13

Go to the appendix and get this.

01:28:14

And he made it part of the book, like the formal part called it its own act.

01:28:20

So to me, this is an introduction, a two act book and an appendix, but he termed it different.

01:28:25

So I don't know, it was weird.

01:28:27

I think there's some marketing thing going on there, but that's...

01:28:32

They were like, no, you need three parts.

01:28:34

And he's like, okay, fine.

01:28:36

I know, I know, I know.

01:28:38

But the thing that's weird here is like, okay, so now you come back to the beginning of this.

01:28:42

This is where I started off on a weird foot because I saw the sales pitchy thing at the

01:28:46

beginning.

01:28:47

And then if you follow the trajectory of this episode even, there's a lot of really cool

01:28:52

things and a lot of things you can learn from what he has here.

01:28:55

And I like a lot of stuff he has here.

01:28:57

And then he ends me on the sales pitch thing again.

01:29:01

He brought me back to that.

01:29:02

I had kind of forgotten about it at this point.

01:29:04

Then he brought me back to it.

01:29:05

I was like, oh, come on.

01:29:06

So you started me and ended me on this sales thing, which from a business stance, I totally

01:29:12

get it, but I just was not into that at all.

01:29:16

So it bugged me.

01:29:18

It really did.

01:29:19

Interesting.

01:29:20

Like, come on.

01:29:21

I just considered the book over after act two, to be honest.

01:29:24

I know, I wish I could have, but I couldn't let it go.

01:29:26

For some reason, it bugged me.

01:29:28

And I don't fully understand why, but there's something about it I just didn't care for.

01:29:34

It left a bad taste in my mouth.

01:29:36

Fair enough.

01:29:37

Done.

01:29:38

I'm ready for action items.

01:29:40

Sure.

01:29:41

True book.

01:29:42

You get to go first.

01:29:44

All right.

01:29:45

So my action items, I have three of them.

01:29:51

One I mentioned in part one is to ask, what if and fill in the blank there with something

01:29:58

that I tend to think is impossible.

01:30:02

So a dream bigger, essentially.

01:30:04

The second one is to write my eulogy.

01:30:09

And the third one, which is somewhat related to that, but I don't think I broke this out

01:30:14

as a separate action item because I want this to be a separate thing.

01:30:21

This is connected, but it's not necessarily the same thing.

01:30:25

And that is the what elements in my story do I want to make normal for my kids?

01:30:30

So does that make sense?

01:30:31

I want this to be separate.

01:30:33

This could manifest in the picture that you were talking about about the people, the person

01:30:37

who had written their eulogy when they were 20 and then you did the funeral when they

01:30:40

were 50.

01:30:41

I would imagine this sort of thing would show or could show up there.

01:30:46

But I want this to be like a separate list sort of a thing that I can talk to my wife

01:30:51

about.

01:30:52

We can get an agreement about this is what we're going to do without telling her, hey,

01:30:57

let's write our eulogy.

01:30:58

I'm not sure she would embrace that action item like I would.

01:31:01

Give you the side eye.

01:31:03

What are you talking about?

01:31:05

What did you read now?

01:31:06

What did Joe talk you into?

01:31:07

That's sort of the reaction I would anticipate, at least initially until I explained it.

01:31:15

So what about you?

01:31:19

I have two, well, I'll call it two and a half because I had the one early on of setting

01:31:25

up Bookworm.fm/stats because Joshua was amazing.

01:31:28

I'll call it a half action.

01:31:31

The two that I wrote down, one is I want to write my eulogy as well.

01:31:35

I think that's a great thing to take on.

01:31:40

I want to amend your version of this.

01:31:42

I want you to write it by hand first before you type it out.

01:31:46

Okay.

01:31:47

Because I think it'll be different if you write it by hand as opposed to typing it first.

01:31:52

Just my opinion.

01:31:53

I think you should do that.

01:31:54

That's what I'm going to do.

01:31:55

All right.

01:31:56

The other one that I wrote down is to, he has, and I know you've done this with faith-based

01:32:05

productivity, but I haven't really had any form of a printout that I ever do for myself

01:32:12

on a daily basis where you have, I talk about these questions that I ask myself in the morning.

01:32:19

I feel like it would be better off if I wrote them by hand in the morning and then transfer

01:32:23

them.

01:32:24

It's a little bit longer.

01:32:25

There's a couple minutes longer to do that.

01:32:28

But I think that would be a little more impactful, but would also give me a piece of paper to

01:32:34

look at for the days, I guess, mission to use that term.

01:32:41

I need to try to create something along those lines.

01:32:44

I've got kind of my own branding that I use for things like that, but I've never formally

01:32:49

made my own printout for something like that.

01:32:52

I want to start that process.

01:32:53

I think it's going to take me some iterations to get that right, but I at least want to start

01:32:56

that journey there.

01:33:00

That's my goal.

01:33:01

All right.

01:33:02

So what I wrote down for your second action item there is to create a daily plan type thing.

01:33:07

Is that accurate?

01:33:08

A daily plan type thing.

01:33:10

Sure.

01:33:11

We'll call it a daily plan type thing.

01:33:12

That's going to be the title for a daily plan type thing.

01:33:15

I'd put that right at the top.

01:33:16

I'm not quite sure what else I was to say that.

01:33:18

Yeah.

01:33:19

I don't know what it would actually be, but something.

01:33:21

But I'm going to call it the daily plan type thing.

01:33:25

All right.

01:33:26

Totally going to put that at the title.

01:33:28

You know that right.

01:33:30

That works for me.

01:33:32

All right.

01:33:35

So style and rating.

01:33:39

This is a tough one because of how I approached it at the beginning.

01:33:47

I totally anticipated that this was going to be story brand for individuals and nothing

01:33:53

more and I was going to rip this to shreds.

01:33:57

Yep.

01:33:58

Donald Miller caught me off guard with the Victor Frankl stuff at the beginning and my

01:34:05

preconceived notions of this were shattered at every turn I feel.

01:34:10

I really enjoyed this book.

01:34:11

I feel like there's a lot of great stuff here.

01:34:15

I think you and I both will not sign up for the software, but that doesn't detract at

01:34:23

all from the book itself.

01:34:26

I guess if you can get past the QR codes and the sheets in Act 3, it doesn't detract

01:34:32

from the rest of the message itself.

01:34:34

Yes.

01:34:35

It is not a sales pitch in a hardcover binding.

01:34:42

There's a lot of really great stuff here.

01:34:44

Even things that we have thought about, read about, studied ourselves.

01:34:50

Like I said, I knew at the very beginning he had a planner that he was going to pitch

01:34:55

and I was going into it thinking, well, I've already got my planner, so no thank you.

01:34:59

I've been there, done that.

01:35:00

I've literally created the same sort of thing that you created here, Donald Miller.

01:35:06

There was a lot of great stuff in here and I feel like this, dotted a lot of eyes, crossed

01:35:11

a lot of tees, gave me a lot of unique perspective on a lot of different things that we had talked

01:35:17

about.

01:35:21

I don't have a whole lot of negative stuff to say about it other than the style itself.

01:35:26

Donald Miller is Donald Miller.

01:35:29

There are occasionally times when his personality just kind of rubs me the wrong way, but that's

01:35:35

just because of me.

01:35:40

It's not him, that's me.

01:35:42

I mentioned the jokes about the kids and the babies and things like that and I've moved

01:35:46

on past that.

01:35:48

I 100% believe that if I were to go get coffee with Donald Miller, he would be very different.

01:35:57

He would be able to read the room and be like, oh, that didn't land.

01:36:00

He would modify his tone.

01:36:03

This is a very authentic book, I feel.

01:36:07

A lot of this is based on his story.

01:36:10

At the beginning, I thought it was a bit self-deprecating and just based on other stuff that I've seen

01:36:16

him, a song present.

01:36:19

I've read a lot of his more recent books.

01:36:23

I very much anticipated that that was just going to be the style and it was who he was

01:36:29

but it wasn't really connected to the message that he was going to be communicating.

01:36:35

That's not the case here.

01:36:36

I feel like the stories that he shares that actually it's not just a matter of preference

01:36:41

or personal style.

01:36:42

They are essential to the whole message of this book.

01:36:46

It creates the authority for what he is going to be talking about.

01:36:52

You know how we had talked about with Joshua Becker?

01:36:56

We read, I forget, the first couple books and then the things that matter was the one

01:37:04

that was authentically him, the book that he was meant to write.

01:37:07

I feel kind of weird saying this at this point but I feel like this is the book that Donald

01:37:11

Miller was meant to write.

01:37:16

And maybe that's just because I'm more interested in the personal stuff than the business stuff.

01:37:20

I'm sure he's helped a lot of businesses with Storybrand and business made simple and all

01:37:24

that kind of stuff.

01:37:27

But everything that I have read by Donald Miller, this is the one that has felt the most

01:37:32

authentic.

01:37:34

I don't know if he's intending to shift his business and hero on a mission software becomes

01:37:40

the main thing.

01:37:42

I can't imagine that being the case because personal stuff does not scale like business

01:37:48

stuff does.

01:37:49

Everybody that I know who started with personal stuff has tried to get to the point where

01:37:53

they're working with businesses.

01:37:55

He's kind of coming at it from the other direction.

01:37:58

But in terms of the message, I stand by that statement that in terms of just buying a book

01:38:03

off the shelf that Donald Miller has written, this is the best one that I have read so far.

01:38:10

I have trouble putting it at a 5.0.

01:38:15

I'm going to put it at 4.5 just because I feel like it is very good.

01:38:21

And I feel like just about anybody can get something out of this one.

01:38:23

I would recommend this to just about anyone.

01:38:25

I've already recommended it to a bunch of people.

01:38:28

My mastermind group is going to be writing our eulogy together whenever we get to that

01:38:34

point because we take turns picking the meetings and this is totally what I'm going to make

01:38:39

everybody do.

01:38:41

Nice.

01:38:43

But yeah, I do think there's a possibility that this could just not be for you.

01:38:51

That's kind of what I was anticipating going into it was pleasantly surprised, however.

01:38:55

I feel like this is very much on-brand for the bookroom audience and also for me personally.

01:39:02

I can nitpick little things about specific statements that he shared here and there.

01:39:09

But for the most part, those one-liners that he tries to manufacture because he is a good

01:39:16

writer and understands the writing process, I feel like the majority of them landed for

01:39:20

me.

01:39:21

So yeah, 4.5 would recommend this.

01:39:26

All right.

01:39:27

Well, I think at the very beginning, so I don't do this very often, but in my notes for this

01:39:34

book, I sometimes will write a pre-read rating.

01:39:39

I'll do this once in a while.

01:39:41

Just like, okay, I flipped through the book, I glanced it over, I read the table of contents,

01:39:45

I've seen the title, I've read the accolades, I've read the back of the book, I've done

01:39:50

all those how to read a book things.

01:39:53

And I'll like, okay, what do I think this is going to come out to?

01:39:56

And once in a while, whenever I do that, I read the book and it comes out exactly where

01:40:00

it's at.

01:40:01

This is a case where this might be the widest spread I've had from what I think it's going

01:40:07

to be at the very beginning.

01:40:08

And again, I don't do this all the time, but I did it on this one because I put down,

01:40:12

this might be a 1.0 book is what I wrote in my notes here.

01:40:16

I think that's fair at the beginning.

01:40:18

Yeah, I was like, hmm, this is not going to go well.

01:40:22

So when I started the book, my assumption was I was going to have a 1.0 book because I assumed

01:40:29

the entire book was a sales pitch.

01:40:31

The whole thing was going to be trying to get me to buy something, he was going to give

01:40:35

me a system I didn't want to do, he was going to ask me to do some stuff I think are hokey.

01:40:39

These are all the expectations I had coming into this book.

01:40:43

Now, as he started in the introduction, I pretty much thought that's where I was going to get

01:40:49

until we got to that point where I had to go grab some tea and he mentioned Victor Frankel.

01:40:55

And I think at that point, I don't think I had quite the turnaround at that point as

01:41:01

what you did.

01:41:02

It just caused me pause because at that particular point, it's like, okay, he's either going to

01:41:07

make me angry that he used Victor Frankel to try to get me on board or he's going to

01:41:11

nail this.

01:41:12

That would be one of those two and I don't think there's much in between.

01:41:16

And I think he did nail it with his use of Victor Frankel's credibility.

01:41:21

I think he did really well with that.

01:41:23

He spent the rest of the next part and a half or so, act and a half or so, kind of redeeming

01:41:29

himself from my beginning expectations.

01:41:33

And it came a very long way from that, which you can kind of see.

01:41:36

Again, you can see the trajectory of this in even the Bookworm episode here.

01:41:40

I think there's a lot of these one paragraph, one line comments that come out that are like,

01:41:47

yeah, you absolutely nailed it.

01:41:48

You made me think about that differently.

01:41:50

And at this point, when you've read this many self-help business non-fiction books, you get

01:41:55

one tidbit out of it and it was worth the read.

01:41:57

So with this one, I think there's more than that.

01:42:01

There's definitely more than one or two tidbits that you can pull from this.

01:42:05

Obviously, writing your eulogy, I've seen the benefits of that firsthand.

01:42:09

And yet, I've not done anything with it and he's prompted me to act on that.

01:42:13

So it came a very long way.

01:42:16

I don't think he entered on a very good note with me because he brought me all the way

01:42:19

back where I started and was like, oh, come on.

01:42:21

Why did you have to do that?

01:42:23

Just calling it a appendix.

01:42:24

Don't do that thing.

01:42:25

Don't do the business thing.

01:42:26

I was with you.

01:42:28

So anyway, I don't know why I've got that beef there.

01:42:32

So I don't think I'm going to go to the 4.5 with you, but I will go to 4.0 on it.

01:42:39

I feel like that's a good place for it to land just because I think that there's a ton of

01:42:43

value in this middle section here.

01:42:46

Again, I'm not doing this whole 10, 5, 1-year vision thing.

01:42:50

I've done those sorts of things before and I feel like I spend more time trying to create

01:42:56

those than I ever spend working towards them.

01:43:00

So I don't know what that is.

01:43:02

Maybe that's me, maybe my fault.

01:43:04

I'm just the wrong person for this.

01:43:06

Wrong brain.

01:43:07

Not sure what that is, but I am grateful for having gone through this.

01:43:11

I don't know if this is the book he was meant to write.

01:43:14

I don't know if I would go that far with you, but I do think this is one that if you

01:43:20

haven't put together a mission, you haven't found what that is.

01:43:24

I feel like this is a really good book to pick up to help you figure that out.

01:43:28

There's a lot of material and self-help type things out there.

01:43:33

Mike has some good stuff.

01:43:34

So there's a lot of this stuff out there, but this is a great place to start for sure,

01:43:40

I think.

01:43:41

So definitely going to recommend it to a handful of folks that I know could go through this.

01:43:46

So yes, ready, eulogy.

01:43:47

Pick this up, read it, do it.

01:43:50

All right.

01:43:51

So let's put here on a mission on the shelf.

01:43:54

What's next, Joe?

01:43:56

Going up next is a book that officially released two days ago.

01:44:01

You can get your hands on it two days ago, I think?

01:44:02

One day ago, something like that.

01:44:03

Anyway, you can pre-order it for quite a while.

01:44:05

Building a second brain by Tiago Forte.

01:44:08

This thing's been hitting all sorts of charts on the Amazon lists.

01:44:11

It's been all over the place.

01:44:13

I know you had a pre-release version of been through it and I've seen your sketch notes

01:44:18

on it.

01:44:19

So super excited to go through this.

01:44:20

I've not had a chance to start it.

01:44:22

I'm itching to get my hands on it and go through it.

01:44:25

So very high expectations at this point.

01:44:30

And I think we know how expectations can frame your view of a book at this point.

01:44:33

So that's either a good thing or a bad thing.

01:44:36

We'll see how it lives up.

01:44:39

All right.

01:44:40

I have a book after that which you've probably never heard of.

01:44:48

Oh boy.

01:44:49

It is called Love and Work by Marcus Buckingham.

01:44:54

Now context here, I signed up for during COVID, John Maxwell has these Live to Lead conferences

01:45:04

and they were forced to go virtual.

01:45:07

And so they sold a virtual pass for like 50 bucks or something one year.

01:45:11

So I signed up for it and they had basically John Maxwell and a handful of the speakers

01:45:17

in a room of like 20 people presenting on a stage for the video.

01:45:21

And I watched the videos from that conference and Marcus Buckingham blew me away.

01:45:29

Okay.

01:45:31

And this book came out just a couple of months ago, but the subtitle is How to Find What You

01:45:35

Love, Love What You Do and Do It for the Rest of Your Life.

01:45:39

And the very first line in the Amazon description, you long been told to do what you love.

01:45:43

Sounds simple.

01:45:44

Right.

01:45:45

So you can kind of see like he's going to blow up this myth.

01:45:50

Right.

01:45:51

And I am, I feel like this is a great follow up to hear on a mission.

01:45:57

I haven't read it yet.

01:45:58

So I don't know exactly what to expect here other than I've heard Marcus Buckingham present

01:46:05

before and he was a very engaging speaker.

01:46:08

So that's what we're doing next.

01:46:11

Okay.

01:46:12

That sounds exciting.

01:46:13

I think.

01:46:14

I don't know.

01:46:15

I feel like the whole do what you love thing has always been kind of hokey, but to find

01:46:20

a book that's going to take it on, I'm game.

01:46:24

At least I think that's what's going on.

01:46:25

I think that's what's going on.

01:46:27

We'll find out.

01:46:28

Super fun, super fun.

01:46:31

I don't have a gap book this time around.

01:46:33

All right.

01:46:34

No, I was just about to ask.

01:46:35

I do not have any gap books.

01:46:38

I have a whole bunch of books that I keep intending to read as gap books.

01:46:42

I thought I was going to crank through this Donald Miller one super fast, but he gave

01:46:46

me a lot to chew on.

01:46:47

How's it's new?

01:46:48

I wasn't sure what that was.

01:46:49

Okay.

01:46:50

I thank you for saying that because I feel like this was one that I thought I was the

01:46:54

same way.

01:46:55

I thought this was like a five day read, four day read or something.

01:46:58

And then I took the whole two weeks on it.

01:47:00

I was like, huh.

01:47:01

Yep.

01:47:02

Maybe I don't know.

01:47:03

There's something there.

01:47:04

It's a good one though.

01:47:08

I mentioned the, the my node file.

01:47:10

I'm going to get that posted right after we record here, but that is one of the perks

01:47:15

of becoming a bookworm club premium member.

01:47:18

If you go to bookworm.fm/membership, you can sign up five bucks a month, 50 bucks a year.

01:47:23

You get access to all my mind node files.

01:47:25

I upload them as PDF files and also actually mind node files as the app that I use to make

01:47:31

them so you can edit them yourself.

01:47:33

There's also some gap book episodes that Joe created back in the day.

01:47:36

There is a bookworm 4K wallpaper that you can download and put on your devices, but that

01:47:44

is the way to support the show for the people who are willing to do that.

01:47:48

Give us a couple of bucks a month to help us keep the lights on, buy the books, etc.

01:47:52

We really appreciate it.

01:47:54

And we really, really, really appreciate those of you who read along with us.

01:47:58

So if you are one of those really great people, pick up Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte.

01:48:03

We'll cover that with you in a couple of weeks.