Bookworm Transcripts

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So we were about to start recording.

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And then Mike held up a fun looking device in front of the camera and said,

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"Do you want to talk about this now or do you want to record first?"

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And I said, "We should record first because I want to know thoughts on this

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and I want the public to know his thoughts on this

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because this is an unnecessary purchase that most people probably won't make.

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But it looks really fun."

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So what is this, Mike, and why?

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Yes, so it is an e-ink Android tablet.

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It is kind of like a remarkable plus plus.

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The exact model of it is the Onyx Books tab ultra.

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So a terrible name.

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Yep, I would agree with that.

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It is more expensive than anyone should spend on an e-ink tablet.

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I absolutely love it, however.

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So the genesis of this, I've been using my remarkable lot with the day job.

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I think we talked about that on this podcast.

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Yep, a little bit.

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I really like it.

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I put together a PDF planning template that we sold alongside the focused New Year

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calendar.

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So people who bought the calendar got a PDF planning template.

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And I've been using that on the remarkable.

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And when you actually have it on the remarkable, it's great.

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However, the remarkable does not allow templates.

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So that means that you have to upload a PDF.

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And you have two choices basically because you can't use a template.

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You could have a different, like upload a new document every time you want to fill it

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out.

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You could copy and paste and make one giant PDF that's 365 pages long and fill it out

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day by day.

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Sounds frustrating.

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It was insanely frustrating.

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But what I wanted was a template.

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And so that got me thinking, is there any other devices that could allow me to do this?

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Kind of like the remarkable, but I could use templates.

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And then a friend of mine sent me a picture of his Onyx books, Note Air 2 Plus.

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So it's like the top of the line Onyx books device prior to this one coming out.

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And he sent me a screenshot of him using Obsidian on it.

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And I was like, oh boy.

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Yep, because now I can do my journaling at night on an E-ang tablet potentially.

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And I'm finding a million more use cases for this and a million more justifications for

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spending way too much money on this thing.

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So I did a thing.

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And I found a open box, which was less than the retail with a whole bunch of extra stuff.

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But it was a little bit more than the older one, the Note Air 2 Plus that I mentioned.

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So I bought it and I love this thing.

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It's exactly what I envisioned.

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It gives me the ability to do templates.

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It's great for taking analog notes.

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I've got a screen protector thing on it called the paper like, which makes it more like

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the remarkable.

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And then it is exactly like it says on the tin, an E-ang Android tablet.

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And when I tell people I have an E-ang Android tablet, their reaction is one of two things.

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It's like, who in the world needs one of those?

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Or I can't believe Schmidt's got an Android device.

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And I'm probably a little bit of both of those mixed in together.

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Sure, sure.

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Okay.

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Why?

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Android, what are you thinking?

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Come on.

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These are all the thoughts that go through my brain.

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But it's Mike.

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So I've never owned an Android device before.

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So I can't compare it to a stock Android device.

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My understanding is that it is not stock Android.

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It is kind of like the book's version, but it does have the Google Play Store on it.

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So it comes preloaded with a bunch of tools, including the Notes tool.

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So that Notes tool, I'm sure, is way more feature rich than anything else that you would

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just find on an Android device.

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There's different layers.

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There's different tools.

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There's OCR.

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All that kind of stuff built into it.

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You can tap a button, export all the text that you've written as text that you could

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send in an email, copy paste to something else, which was another thing with the remarkable.

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In order to export those notes, you had to send yourself an email.

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I don't want to send myself an email.

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So yeah, I love this thing.

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The battery on it, I think I've charged it once in the week and a half that I've had

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it.

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That's quite a bit.

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It has two different light adjustments, one for blue light and one for, which they call

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night and then one for warm light, which they call day.

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It doesn't make any sense, but basically it's like the orange-ish light and then the blue-ish

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light.

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So I turn the blue light all the way down and it has the ability kind of like scribble,

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you know, where you can write on the iPad itself and it converts your handwritten text

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into actual text.

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But it does it in a box at the bottom.

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I don't know.

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There's a bunch of things that I actually like better about iOS on this thing.

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It's not, I mean, it has the ability, supposedly, to like watch videos and things.

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Like they has a higher refresh rate mode, but there's no way I'm actually going to do

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that.

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It just, yeah.

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It's more than enough to run Obsidian.

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One of the things I really like about this, by the way, is you know how in iOS you have

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all the different apps that are open in iOS decides what you should leave open and what

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you want to, what you should close?

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Like trying to be smart about what's continuing to run in the background.

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But it's stupid and it never works.

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So with this one, you can actually lock something.

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So it's perfect because Obsidian takes a long time to open, probably because my vault is

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35,000 files.

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I'm syncing everything using Obsidian.

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That's what it is.

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I, not too long ago, I switched my, it's the Bible thing that completely wrecks it in this

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case because it's a note for every verse, right?

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Yeah.

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I have not historically used your method of a verse per note and have gone with like the

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chapter per note.

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And I, I don't, maybe a month ago or so I switched it over to the verse version for

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other reasons.

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And my vault got significantly slower and borderline impossible to use for about a day

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until it got caught up.

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It's like, okay, now it's synced across.

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Now we can quit with all this nonsense.

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And now we can continue working on things.

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And Blake has the perfect way to explain this.

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It's a vault.

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This is a vault of biblical proportions.

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This is amazing.

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Literally.

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I love this.

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Yeah.

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So you're right.

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So it basically, even the iOS devices have trouble keeping up with a vault that big.

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The computer has no problems, but the iOS devices definitely do.

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So this is a problem only when you actually open the app though.

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So by being able to lock it and say, never close this app, I never have to deal with

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that.

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Nice.

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So it just syncs constantly in the background.

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Yes.

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I mean, probably, but it's tiny little text files.

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So it's not, not a whole bunch of data.

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Sure.

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In reality, when I am opening this to use it, it's at the end of the day and I'm planning

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my day using that pad and then I am going through and I am completing all of my journaling

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in Obsidian on an eink device now instead of staring at it, staring at my phone or just

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not doing it.

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That was like a point of friction is like, I don't want to use my phone for this.

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Obsidian's terrible on the phone anyways.

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Really the only thing I use Obsidian on the phone for is whenever I'm like taking book

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notes or something, if that's not in the book itself, I'll do it there.

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Or if I'm making a list of some sort or capturing a quote, something along those lines.

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That's usually what I'm doing.

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So it's not like any heavy lifting at all.

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Yeah.

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So I love it.

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I love doing the filling out my journaling that way.

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It doesn't do all of the stuff.

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Obviously that the main Obsidian does on the computer.

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You don't have the canvas and stuff like that.

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But it's more than enough for what I want to use it for.

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And it is just hitting the sweet spot in my productivity workflows, I guess.

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It's helping me to not have to go back to the devices.

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I think we'll talk about this more next time in the next book.

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But I've been rethinking all of the analog digital stuff and what jobs am I hiring my

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devices to do and not touching them, potentially trying to stay away from things unless I

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have a reason for going there.

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I absolutely love this thing.

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I'm going to do a video on it at some point.

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I have the keyboard case coming today.

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So you are all in on this thing.

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I see how this is going.

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Yep.

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I have a pretty slope.

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That's what I'm seeing.

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But if you're looking for like a tablet, this isn't the thing to get.

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The iPad is so much better in so many ways.

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But for what I wanted this device to be, it's perfect for me.

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It's great.

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Can't say enough good things about it.

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And I am now.

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I now own an Android device.

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So there you go.

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It's a number of years ago now, maybe four or five.

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Is that a number of years?

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Four or five years ago, I purchased my first Samsung.

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It was a refrigerator.

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So I texted some of my families.

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I finally broke down and bought a Samsung.

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And I think it was my mom, maybe one of my sisters.

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I don't know.

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Somebody made the comments.

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Like, are you okay?

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Do I need to get you to a hospital?

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That was the comment that was made.

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I was like, no, it's just a refrigerator.

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It works out great.

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Yeah.

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I don't think I'd get a...

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So one thing I'm noticing with Android and really anything non-appable that has a computer

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system in it is that a lot of people like to force updates.

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And I don't think I would want a forced update to my refrigerator.

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That's what I'll be worried about with a Samsung.

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Yes.

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I'm going to break my refrigerator during an update in the middle of the night.

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I'm going to come down and everything's going to be warm and ruined.

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Yeah.

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To be fair, I am not like that refrigerator.

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It was at our old house.

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That refrigerator was...

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It didn't even have an ice or no.

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It didn't even have like a water thing in it, whatever you call that.

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So it was completely stainless across the front.

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There was no screen.

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You could even get ice out of the front of it.

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You had to open it and pull the tray out.

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That's how lame, I guess, of a refrigerator that was like.

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It's old school.

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Just keep food cold and freeze some of it.

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That's all you have to do.

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Maybe give me some ice once in a while.

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You have very few tasks you need to accomplish here.

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Showing me pictures of my kids from three years ago is not a task I want my refrigerator

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to fulfill.

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So just keep food cold, please.

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That's all I needed from it.

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So it did not give me updates.

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I did not expect it to give me updates.

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I don't know why you need that stuff on our refrigerator.

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Anyway, all of that aside, we should do some follow up because...

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Can I do one more thing real quick since we were talking about journaling?

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I have to mention this.

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Otherwise I am terrible at self-promotion.

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I made a thing.

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I updated my journaling bootcamp course.

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I added a few lessons to it.

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I moved it over to Circle.

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It's part of the Facebook activity community thing.

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It's a separate thing.

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You have to buy it.

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It's $27 as we record this.

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The price is actually going to go up shortly.

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I am also working on a digital journaling and obsidian course.

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I recognize that not everybody who journals wants to go hardcore like I did with obsidian.

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I split those two.

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But I'm going to give the digital journaling in obsidian course when it's ready to everybody

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who buys the journaling bootcamp.

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So if you're listening to this, the price will be probably higher.

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At that point it will be $37.

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But you can get the journaling bootcamp course plus the obsidian one when it comes out.

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I've got it all outlined.

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I'm going to record it.

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My goal is to get it out in the next couple of weeks.

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But there you go.

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Now exit soapbox.

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Let's talk about the book.

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Okay.

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Well, let's not yet because I took the leadership evaluation from 21 year Refutable Laws of Leadership.

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And I assume you did this.

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This seems like a simple enough thing you would have pulled off.

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So I did this and I made a list of what my score was for each of the laws.

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And then you can categorize them based on strength areas, growth areas or weakness areas.

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And then I totaled up how many I had in each of those.

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And I really wish I had not done that.

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Did you do that part?

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Or was that like an extra thing?

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I did all the telling.

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So I have my scores for all 21 areas.

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And there's two specifically that targeted for me to work on.

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Then I did the average.

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I didn't do anything outside of that.

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Is that what you're asking?

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Well, I did the details.

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So I did the totals on the scores themselves and like what you're saying the average isn't

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such.

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But I did a little bit of looking online.

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And there's a way that he has started to like if you score between what is it?

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One and four it's a weakness area.

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If it's between five and seven it's the growth area and then an eight or nine is a strength

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area.

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And then I tallied up how many I had in each of those categories.

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Which is not a fun number to get because I'm betting most of us have a lot in that weakness

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area.

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And I did.

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And it was not fun to look through like oh these are.

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Huh.

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So more than half of these are in the weakness area.

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Not one I wanted to see.

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So you did the same approach as me but I think maybe you were a little bit harder on yourself

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than I was.

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I think so.

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I think so.

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Which is good.

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It's good for me to see like okay this is the work I need to go do.

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And I have not formally put together a list of things I need to work on here because I'm

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a little bit leery of doing too many things at one time.

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Like we've talked about this regularly.

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Like if you attempt to adjust too many things in your life concurrently you can end up failing

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at all of them at one time.

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Work on one of them and you have more of a chance of success in that.

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And that's what I'm a little bit leery of.

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So I'm kind of sticking with right now I've got one other action item here on the list

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for follow up which was to intentionally connect with my volunteers on Sundays.

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Because of timing of when we're recording these we've only had one Sunday since we recorded

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last.

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I did that on Sunday which was good and it's obvious it's only one week so nobody's really

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going to notice that it's any different.

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It's not like anyone's in my brain so they don't see that I connected with everybody.

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They just saw that I connected with them.

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And my hope is like that's the beginning of a habit that then has better effects long

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term I guess.

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Trying to build those relationships with those volunteers.

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Now the question is like do I add to that based on the results of this leadership evaluation.

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If I was a go getter who was ready to like take on the world probably but I know that

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that's just a glutton for punishment in my case so that's a bad idea.

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So I think over the next week or two I need to figure out what comes next and start working

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on it and that should become a perpetual cycle on my part.

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So not anything formal to add to that list but going to continue down that path.

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Cool.

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I also took the assessment you want me to chime in here before you get to the other one.

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Okay.

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Yeah.

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So yeah I took the assessment.

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I have been passionate about leadership for a very long time and the framing of the questions

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doesn't give a whole lot of room.

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I don't know.

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I feel like there should have been more a larger range because zero was never one was rarely

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two was sometimes and three was always.

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So I think I gave myself a lot of twos where maybe you gave yourself ones.

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It's fair.

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And that caused most of my scores to be in the eight through ten range.

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But there were two that were lower than that law ten and law eleven which don't have it

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in front of me.

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What specifically those two were?

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Influence and inner circle.

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Ah yes.

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Okay.

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So yeah but the big thing for me from taking that assessment was the questions that were

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asked.

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There were specific ones that just kind of highlighted recent events at the day job and

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like oh I did a good job in this scenario or I could have actually done this a little

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bit differently.

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But I did tend to give myself the benefit of the doubt with the sometimes.

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That should be right in the middle but it skews towards the high end.

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So yeah.

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Yes.

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At least do a five point scale.

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Come on.

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I know right.

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That would make it a little bit easier.

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So good job on taking the evaluation.

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What were your other two?

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Come up with a list of things that people my inner circle must have.

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So this is probably related to the lower score there.

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I had some work to do in that area.

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And I did come up with a couple of things.

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I don't, I realized in doing this by the way that there are different levels I think

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to the inner circle for me.

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Because there are certain people that I will allow to speak into my life in certain areas.

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But I, so I think like there are certain criteria people have to meet in terms of I'm

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going to listen to you as you talk about a thing because you've had success in this

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particular area.

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And true inner circle is like my personal confidants, only a couple of people who are

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really, really close to me.

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So I can share some of these just to give people examples I guess if they're thinking

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about building their own inner circle.

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I came up with four things and there's probably more if I spend more time on this.

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But these are the ones that are really important to me.

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Got to have a growth mindset.

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You have to constantly be trying to grow and maximize your potential.

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Not do all the things, but not stay where you are.

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Number two is a commitment to excellence.

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So if we're going to work together on anything, I need to know that you are not going to

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mail it in.

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I'm not going to have to quality check your work.

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I can rest assured that when I let you do this thing in this project, you're going to come

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back with something that is really great.

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Number three, and this is where I think there are different versions of this.

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But for me personally, if you're going to be true inner circle, I would say that you

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have to be spiritually serious.

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And so that disqualifies certain people who I do open myself up to in certain areas.

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But I was thinking back to like the minus, minus to the plus, plus, plus ratings that

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I did so long ago, the people who were truly plus, plus, plus, there were only two of them.

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One was my wife and one was my pastor.

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And these are people who at any point, no matter what the situation, I will listen to

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what they have to say.

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So maybe that's unfair.

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Maybe that's not what inner circle really means, but that's kind of how I defined it for this

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exercise.

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I was thinking through these things.

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There are a lot of people who would be in like the next tier below that I shouldn't

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say a lot of people, but it gets significantly larger, maybe three times as many people, four

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times as many people.

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And then the last one, self-starter, self-motivator, had trouble labeling this one.

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But basically, if you know what to do, you're going to just go take care of it.

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You're going to do it.

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You mean you have to do it perfect, doesn't mean you can't ever miss.

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It doesn't mean that you have to confess that you're perfect.

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I think that's a lot of the problem with the productivity space, to be honest.

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Well, I just do this thing every single day and look at the results that I get.

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And no one shares the struggles or the fact that they're not as perfect as they seem.

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Everybody has a bad day every once in a while.

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So that's not what I mean, but you are motivated to take action on your own.

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How does this apply to me?

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If you see something, we're working on a project together and you see something that needs

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to be done, you're not going to call a meeting and let's talk about it and try to get me

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to take care of it.

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You're going to bring your own energy source.

00:21:03

You got your own batteries.

00:21:06

I don't have to pump you up and motivate you.

00:21:09

So those are the four that I came up with.

00:21:11

I feel like those are pretty high standards.

00:21:14

Not that that's wrong in this particular case, but knowing the people that at least I'm around

00:21:21

a lot, those are pretty high goals, which is, again, what you would want in the case of

00:21:26

an inner circle.

00:21:28

Right.

00:21:29

And the other one I had was to connect with people and this is a typical Mike Schmitt's

00:21:37

action item.

00:21:38

Very general, very vague.

00:21:39

Yep.

00:21:40

I do.

00:21:41

However, it was successful.

00:21:45

This one was what I needed to be thinking about this.

00:21:50

And there are a couple things specifically with the day job that have happened in the

00:21:54

last couple of weeks, different like we call them LMA is management assessment sort of

00:22:01

meetings that this definitely, this action item in the back of my head changed the way

00:22:07

that I went into those meetings and produced a more authentic heartfelt conversation, which

00:22:15

translated into building more trust and better action items from those meetings.

00:22:22

So I'm very glad that I did this one, even though it's hard to say I've completed it.

00:22:29

Nice.

00:22:31

Well, that's probably a good place to jump into today's book because as I think about

00:22:38

leading people and such, it means that really you have to lead yourself first and you have

00:22:44

to know where you're going and you have to know why you're going there, which can bring

00:22:48

us to today's book, which is Icky Guy, which is a really fun word to say.

00:22:55

I said the word Icky Guy whenever my kids asked me what book I was reading because they

00:23:01

like to ask and how do you say that Icky Guy?

00:23:05

And now it's like one of their favorite words to say it is a fun one, not one that I would

00:23:11

normally, you know, I would not have said that that's how you pronounce it when I first.

00:23:16

So I'm very grateful that they have pronunciations in the descriptions for the book.

00:23:20

But the subtitle on this is the Japanese secret to a long and happy life.

00:23:24

This is by Ektor Garcia and Francesca Mariahs Mariahs.

00:23:29

You're not going to get me to try to correct those pronunciations.

00:23:32

Ektor is what I'm going to go with as far as the author bank.

00:23:35

This was originally written in 2017, I believe 2016 and then it was translated into English.

00:23:45

So it was originally written in Spanish about the Japanese and then translated to English.

00:23:51

Just follow the language stuff with me there.

00:23:55

So this has been around the language stuff.

00:23:59

Basically, you know, at a high level, the book is about a specific area in Japan called

00:24:09

Okinawa and they have an especially abnormal long life, like they have a long lifespan

00:24:19

expectancy in this area and this book is about them and why that works and how they

00:24:26

live basically.

00:24:28

And there's a lot to cover here.

00:24:30

The premise, the word ikigai refers to like this four circle Venn diagram and they didn't

00:24:40

really talk about the Venn diagram in the book, which is why I'm bringing it up now.

00:24:45

I assume that's a link to it in the chat.

00:24:48

It's my hand drawn one.

00:24:49

I'm actually writing a newsletter about this current.

00:24:52

Got it.

00:24:53

And the one that's in the book, I didn't really like.

00:24:54

Well, it's black and white kind of boring.

00:24:56

So I'm in a color one.

00:24:57

I took a picture of the one on the back cover because that one's colored.

00:25:01

Yeah, true.

00:25:02

That's what I used, at least in my notes, but I don't have it on a way I can share it here

00:25:06

right now.

00:25:07

But take those four circles.

00:25:10

One of those is what you love.

00:25:12

The other is what the world needs, what you can be paid for and what you are good at.

00:25:17

And then that centerpiece, if you know how Venn diagrams work, that very centerpiece

00:25:20

were all four of them cross, that's ikigai.

00:25:24

Basically it's why you are on this earth.

00:25:26

So that's kind of what they're getting into.

00:25:28

I guess I'm jumping into the prologue here or introduction, whatever you want to call

00:25:32

it.

00:25:33

But the bank of it is like, what is this word?

00:25:36

What does it mean?

00:25:37

And what do you do to figure out what that is for you?

00:25:43

And what are the ramifications of figuring out what your own ikigai is?

00:25:48

I just like, I like saying it.

00:25:49

It's a fun word.

00:25:50

I'm probably going to say it a lot in this episode and it's going to get annoying.

00:25:54

My apologies ahead of time, but no apologies.

00:25:58

I like Carol's pronunciation ikigai.

00:26:02

I know ikigai.

00:26:03

Yeah.

00:26:04

Cool concept.

00:26:07

You're right that I thought the whole book was going to be about this Venn diagrams.

00:26:11

Not what we got at all.

00:26:13

Not at all, no.

00:26:15

But cool concept.

00:26:17

So let's talk about it.

00:26:20

Yeah.

00:26:21

So I kind of alluded to the prologue here, which is where they're talking about this

00:26:25

word itself and kind of trying to demystify what it means.

00:26:31

And I believe it's in here where they start like name dropping some things.

00:26:38

One of the people that they name drop is none other than Victor Frankel, which is pretty

00:26:43

cool and mentions his logotherapy, which we'll come back to here in a little bit.

00:26:49

But they introduce us to the word ikigai and trying to figure out what it is and how

00:26:57

do you get it and get it something that a lot of people have in Japan and it's something

00:27:03

that they hold on to quite a bit.

00:27:04

So they don't really give you a solid definition of it at that point in the book other than

00:27:11

it's an interesting word.

00:27:12

And here's how we met and here's how we got to this book.

00:27:14

That's really what the prologue is.

00:27:16

Yeah.

00:27:17

I was surprised to see the Victor Frankel stuff at the beginning also, although it makes

00:27:23

total sense.

00:27:24

I feel like they did a better job of advocating for Victor Frankel's logotherapy than Victor

00:27:30

Frankel did when he read Mansey's.

00:27:33

Yeah, that's totally fair.

00:27:34

And it's also come up in other places.

00:27:37

And I felt like I had a better understanding and it felt like a more important topic than

00:27:43

it had any of the other times that it came up, which is why I say they did a great job

00:27:49

of explaining it better than Victor Frankel did maybe.

00:27:54

But yeah, so this is, I don't know, a complimentary idea, a different version of this.

00:28:01

It's not really like a competing idea to the logotherapy, which is just the psychology

00:28:06

made popular by Victor Frankel to help people find their life purpose.

00:28:09

And kind of the way that they do this is they went to Okinawa where they have a high percentage

00:28:17

of people who live to be a hundred plus.

00:28:20

What's the term they use for that?

00:28:21

Super centurians or something like that?

00:28:24

Centenarians are...

00:28:25

Centenarians.

00:28:26

People who have lived to be a hundred or older.

00:28:28

And then there's the term super centenarian, which is someone who has lived 110 or older.

00:28:33

Gotcha.

00:28:34

Yeah, so they basically went and found all the people who were living a really long time

00:28:39

and wanted to find out why.

00:28:42

And that's kind of the icky guy or icky guy.

00:28:47

icky guy.

00:28:48

Yeah, well, let's just jump into chapter one here because it basically is a continuation

00:28:53

of that, which is titled icky guy, the artist being young while growing old.

00:29:02

And they do mention here that they've got the Vindai agreement here.

00:29:07

They mention that it's something that's hidden.

00:29:09

icky guy is something that's hidden inside each of us.

00:29:12

It's interesting to me that they use the term hidden as in like you have to find it.

00:29:18

And I feel like that comes out a little bit later as well.

00:29:21

But they also mention that in Japan, the concept of retirement is borderline non-existent,

00:29:29

so much so that the word for retire as we know it in the English language doesn't exist

00:29:35

in the Japanese language.

00:29:37

I find that fascinating.

00:29:39

And part of this is me coming from a farming background because for a very long time since

00:29:45

I was very little, I've always had this thing in the back of my head that like, well, farmers

00:29:49

don't retire.

00:29:50

They just quit.

00:29:52

Like they're done.

00:29:53

They die.

00:29:54

Like that's all that happens.

00:29:56

They work and work and work on the farm.

00:29:57

And then one day they die.

00:29:59

Like that's just how like that's the culture that I grew up around.

00:30:03

And many people followed that.

00:30:06

And I've kind of seen that play out since I was little.

00:30:11

And having that in the back of my head, I have said for a long time, like I'm probably

00:30:16

one of those people who will never retire.

00:30:18

I may quit working in a career, but I'm probably not going to say that I'm retiring.

00:30:25

Like I'm just not one of those people.

00:30:27

And this is vindication for me.

00:30:29

Like this is an excuse to continue down that track.

00:30:33

And I'm grateful that people who live a long time agree with me.

00:30:36

So I will follow that pattern.

00:30:40

This is interesting because I realized, I didn't realize that at the time, but in the

00:30:46

last episode, you remember I asked you if you had a life sentence.

00:30:52

And I said no.

00:30:53

Yeah.

00:30:54

And now we're reading a book about finding your life sentence essentially.

00:30:58

Yes.

00:30:59

Yes, because this was something that was on my mind.

00:31:01

Okay.

00:31:02

So like we're right after the New Year's, right?

00:31:03

So everybody does their New Year's resolution, which are the best thing you could ever do

00:31:06

in your life.

00:31:08

And I've been like working through this, like why is Joe on this planet?

00:31:13

And so I was trying to find like some books around this and I stumbled across this one.

00:31:17

It's like, I don't know that this was exactly what I was after, but I know that it's like

00:31:22

tangentially related to that in some form.

00:31:26

So like, let's go for a shot.

00:31:28

Let's do that.

00:31:29

And then the life sentence thing came up in the book prior to that, which I was not aware

00:31:33

was going to come up and hit me in the face.

00:31:36

But here we are.

00:31:38

Yeah.

00:31:39

It is kind of interesting though, because even though the book is titled, Icki Guy, it's

00:31:46

really about living a long life.

00:31:50

And that's one part of it.

00:31:51

In fact, in this chapter, they talk about the four factors of a long life, which are diet,

00:31:58

exercise, finding a purpose or Icki Guy, and then strong social ties.

00:32:04

And the format of the book is kind of interesting because they hit on all of those and they

00:32:08

hit on them again as they go throughout the book.

00:32:12

But essentially the book could be encapsulated in just this first chapter.

00:32:18

Yes.

00:32:19

I don't know.

00:32:20

And that was something that's in the back of my head.

00:32:22

Like a couple of things throughout this whole book that I was curious about from the very

00:32:26

beginning.

00:32:28

One is, you know, if you read the table of contents, which we're going to work through

00:32:32

all the chapters here, some of them much faster than the others.

00:32:35

But the entire table of contents, just reading that would tell you that this is not entirely

00:32:43

about this concept of Icki Guy.

00:32:46

Like, you can tell that just by the table of contents.

00:32:49

So that's one thing that I was like, huh, interesting.

00:32:52

The other is there's a foundational assumption that a happy, well, I don't want to say happy

00:33:01

first per se, but that a long life is the end goal.

00:33:06

Like that's the assumption here that a happy and long life is your absolute end goal and

00:33:11

the end all be all.

00:33:12

Like that is what you should strive towards.

00:33:15

There are people I know that would argue with that assumption.

00:33:19

I don't really want to go into that in depth, but like that's something like, okay, that

00:33:24

is the premise.

00:33:25

If you buy into that premise and that assumption, then this is the book 100%.

00:33:32

But if you don't, you're kind of looking at this with a side eye.

00:33:36

And I was maybe about a third of the way through it whenever that realization hit me.

00:33:40

Okay.

00:33:41

Now, now I'm kind of just wondering, like, yeah, okay, we can talk about how to live a

00:33:47

happy and long life.

00:33:48

It's not wrong.

00:33:49

I'm not sure I buy 100%.

00:33:59

So I'm kind of giving it the side eye in that sense.

00:34:01

Yeah, that's fair.

00:34:03

I mean, I gave it the side eye right at the beginning because they used passion inappropriately.

00:34:07

I didn't catch that.

00:34:09

What was that?

00:34:10

Well, they have the Venn diagram, right?

00:34:12

So the crossover of what you love and what you are good at, they say that's your passion.

00:34:18

The crossover of what you're good at and what you get paid for is your profession.

00:34:22

The crossover of what you can be paid for and what the world needs is your vocation and

00:34:26

the crossover of what the world needs and what you love is your mission.

00:34:29

So go back to the passion one, what you love and what you are good at, right?

00:34:33

So passion is not what you love.

00:34:35

It is the exact opposite of that.

00:34:38

The root word for passion is Latin word petit, which literally means to suffer.

00:34:44

So really, if I were to redo this, the what you love, I would say what is important to

00:34:50

you.

00:34:53

And if you look at what is important to you, what you're good at, then I agree with passion.

00:34:57

But this whole idea of like doing what you love, that kind of comes through in the end

00:35:01

goal, right?

00:35:03

The end goal for me is not to live a long life.

00:35:06

It's to live a life of maximum meaning.

00:35:09

But a lot of the people who are living to be 110 plus, they live in these small communities

00:35:17

in rural Japan, it sounds like.

00:35:20

There are other places.

00:35:21

They talk about these blue zones and there's five specifically that they called out.

00:35:24

One's Okinawa in Japan, they visited Sardinia, Italy.

00:35:27

There's one in California, which is interesting.

00:35:29

One in Costa Rica and one in Greece where they have a high percentage of people who

00:35:35

live the longest.

00:35:37

But all of them seem to be just happy living in their small little bubbles.

00:35:40

And I'm not saying that that is wrong, but that is definitely not for me.

00:35:44

That's not how I view my concept is the life theme, right?

00:35:49

That's my version of the sentence for your life.

00:35:52

And I think Iki-guy can kind of compliment that, but right at the beginning, yeah, the

00:35:56

what you love part, I took issue with that and kind of redefined it in my brain so that

00:36:00

I could get through the rest.

00:36:03

This is why I like doing these episodes with you because I just slum, oh, then diagram,

00:36:08

what you love, what you're good at, what you can be paid for, what the world needs,

00:36:11

Iki-guy's in the middle.

00:36:13

And I'm not even sure I read the words between the two specific pieces and what like the

00:36:19

passion, profession, and vocation mission.

00:36:21

I don't even think I read those till just now.

00:36:23

Like I just like, oh, interesting diagram, I just kept going.

00:36:27

But you caught it.

00:36:28

Good job.

00:36:29

See?

00:36:30

This is why we do this.

00:36:31

Hey, thanks.

00:36:32

So, yes, they talk about, like you called out the blue zones, they talk about, I don't

00:36:40

even know how to say it, Moai.

00:36:43

It's like an informal group of people with common interests and they like pay dues and

00:36:47

stuff and have some benefits and such from that.

00:36:50

But it ends up being like their close friend group and the people that they connect with

00:36:54

the most.

00:36:55

And then they also call out this 80% secret.

00:36:59

Mara Hachibu is what they refer to it.

00:37:01

Fill your belly to 80%.

00:37:04

So basically don't eat until you're full.

00:37:06

I love that.

00:37:09

I think it's so interesting.

00:37:10

I made the funny story about this.

00:37:13

I was talking about this particular concept to my wife over breakfast, I think, one morning.

00:37:20

And of course, my girls are there and they heard that.

00:37:23

Well, then that night for dinner, Becky made something that I was absolutely loving.

00:37:28

And I didn't gorge myself on it, but I was definitely 100%, maybe 105% full after that.

00:37:34

And I was like, "Oh, I'm going to pay for that tomorrow for eating that much."

00:37:39

And my oldest Emma was like, "Well, didn't you just say that you should only eat until

00:37:44

you're 80% full?"

00:37:45

I was like, "Yes, but sometimes the food is really good."

00:37:48

So, I am not good at this one.

00:37:51

Like me being small and 100 pounds soaking wet, this is not something I want to do.

00:38:00

This is an action item I wrote down.

00:38:02

Yeah, you're going to do this.

00:38:04

That specifically, I overeat all the time.

00:38:07

And I'm active enough and I run enough that I'm probably a little bit overweight, but I'm

00:38:13

pretty fit.

00:38:14

I mean, I run 20, 30 miles a week, most weeks.

00:38:20

I spray my ankle about a month ago, so I'm ramping back up.

00:38:23

Haven't done that lately.

00:38:25

But yeah, so that's kind of my justification for eating a lot.

00:38:29

However, the next book we're going to read, author introduces this concept of savoring.

00:38:35

And that I had already read and that triggered in my mind this specifically.

00:38:42

So I tend to just eat, right?

00:38:44

And oh, this tastes good.

00:38:45

So I'll just keep eating.

00:38:47

But I don't really savor what I'm eating.

00:38:50

And I think if you employ that idea of savoring, you eat a little bit more slowly.

00:38:54

You are more aware of how full you are.

00:38:57

And so it becomes easier to say that is enough.

00:39:00

That's the theory anyways.

00:39:01

I'm definitely going to try to be more mindful about my eating.

00:39:05

But the one that really I wanted to talk about here was the Moai you mentioned.

00:39:09

So in the Moai, members make a set financial contribution to the group that allows them

00:39:15

to participate.

00:39:17

And then if there's money left over, they pay it back basically.

00:39:21

And this sounds a lot to me like a church, at least a functioning church.

00:39:30

This is, I realize that that's my Moai.

00:39:33

That's how I realize the benefit of this.

00:39:38

And it's kind of interesting because I think a lot of people view the religious community

00:39:45

or any sort of church, like you hear the term church shopping, right?

00:39:49

Or church hopping.

00:39:50

You're trying to find the right one where it really clicks.

00:39:52

All of the people that they talk about in this book were not surrounded by people who

00:39:56

were just like them.

00:39:57

They all did different things.

00:39:58

They all had different trades.

00:39:59

Like you wouldn't probably have chosen to settle down in this specific spot with this

00:40:03

specific group of people.

00:40:05

But this is who's there.

00:40:07

And so you just learn to thrive in that community together.

00:40:10

Everybody was exactly the same.

00:40:12

The people that they interviewed in this book, I think they would have thought that was a

00:40:15

little bit boring.

00:40:16

But it occurred to me that that's typically how we look for these types of groups.

00:40:20

We want people who are just like us.

00:40:23

And the best version of this, I think, is not where you have a bunch of people who are

00:40:27

just like you, but where you fit as a specific person in this collective whole and you have

00:40:35

a specific role, the specific gifts that you contribute to that group, that they are

00:40:42

lacking.

00:40:43

And likewise, they have things that you need.

00:40:46

Sometimes you don't realize the things that you really need.

00:40:50

You don't realize the need for wisdom from people who are older than you, who have seen

00:40:55

some things who have lived a totally different life than the way that you have lived it.

00:41:00

We tend to focus on this person has achieved a goal that I want to achieve.

00:41:05

And I want to do what they have done.

00:41:07

So I'm going to go look for those people.

00:41:10

But that is very limiting and I feel this book has helped broaden my perspective and my appreciation

00:41:18

for the diverse group of people who are part of the church community that I happen to be

00:41:23

in.

00:41:24

And if you know my story, the church that we're at, I'm not going to tell the whole thing

00:41:27

here, but I said at one point, that is the last church I will ever set foot in.

00:41:35

That is where we are.

00:41:37

That is where I am the men's ministry coordinator.

00:41:39

My wife and I are elders at that church.

00:41:41

Like it's kind of crazy, but not the place I would have picked.

00:41:45

That's my point.

00:41:46

It's one thing I've learned working in a church.

00:41:50

Never, never, never, never tell God that you will never do something.

00:41:54

It's a terrible idea.

00:41:56

All right.

00:41:57

Let's come on to the second chapter here, which is anti-aging secrets, little things

00:42:02

that add up to a long and happy life.

00:42:05

They start this chapter with the concept of escape velocity, which is basically when

00:42:11

technology can gain us one year of a lifespan every year.

00:42:16

Like when you're life expectancy every year, like I had to stop and think about this one.

00:42:20

And it's like, okay, like to be honest, like this is where things start to get like, huh,

00:42:27

to me, because I don't want to do that.

00:42:30

I know that people have this thing where they think they can, like people genuinely believe

00:42:36

that they can live forever and they're trying to figure out how to expand their life expectancy

00:42:40

with this escape of velocity.

00:42:43

And I just can't, like I don't want that.

00:42:47

The time component is important to me.

00:42:50

Like, I don't know.

00:42:52

I just think that that's a bad idea.

00:42:54

But here we are.

00:42:56

And people are doing this.

00:42:57

And I get that it's a thing.

00:42:59

But throughout this chapter, they set that up as like, here's what people are trying to

00:43:04

do.

00:43:05

And like, if you want to expand your life expectancy and live a longer life, this is

00:43:12

where they start to translate, okay, like the technology can get you there.

00:43:15

But there are also other components that help a lot as well.

00:43:20

They mentioned like an active mind and a youthful body, which they'll talk about some

00:43:24

of the exercise stuff a little bit later.

00:43:26

And then they introduce the concept of stress and how stress can kill you.

00:43:32

Basically, that's the concept.

00:43:35

And they explain a lot about how stress works, what causes it, why do we have it because

00:43:41

of cave dwellers and such.

00:43:42

Like, there's a lot of the background that's there and they kind of wrap it up with like

00:43:47

a little bit of stress is good.

00:43:49

But when we have things like email and social media expectations, like these things kind

00:43:57

of put permanent stress on us, that's where your problems are, it's to step in.

00:44:02

So they're advocating for getting away from that type of stress, but knowing that little

00:44:06

bits of stress are also good.

00:44:09

Yeah.

00:44:10

So the next book is going to speak a lot better to this than Ikei Gai did.

00:44:15

Yeah.

00:44:16

Yeah.

00:44:17

And then I can already see that.

00:44:20

But yeah, that's, you did a good job of summarizing this.

00:44:24

There are two, one thing I did find helpful in this, this chapter is that the people who

00:44:29

live the longest here to dispositional traits, one is a positive attitude, one is emotional

00:44:33

awareness.

00:44:34

And these are themes that come up a lot in bookworm.

00:44:37

I feel like we talk a lot about the whole concept of self-determination and personal responsibility

00:44:46

and how that's actually a positive thing.

00:44:49

And I think the easy, I say easy, like the one that people will grab without understanding

00:44:58

the concept argument to that is, so what am I supposed to do?

00:45:04

Just pretend that nothing bad is happening in my life.

00:45:06

And no, you're not supposed to pretend that nothing bad is happening in your life.

00:45:10

You do recognize those things, but you can't stay there.

00:45:13

And so the people who live the longest, the fact that they have a positive attitude doesn't

00:45:17

mean that nothing bad ever happens to them.

00:45:20

It means that they're able to move past that.

00:45:22

They can endure the short periods of stress, but the body does wear down a lot faster during

00:45:26

those periods of crisis.

00:45:28

So you do generally want to avoid those.

00:45:31

And the constant stress that you were talking about, that's definitely not good for us.

00:45:34

And we should figure out ways to mitigate that, which again, we'll talk about in the

00:45:37

next episode.

00:45:38

But most health problems that we experience are in fact caused by stress.

00:45:44

However, I think this whole idea of escape velocity is garbage.

00:45:48

This is so weird to me.

00:45:53

I don't even know how to address it.

00:45:54

I can't even like put it into words.

00:45:56

This just seems like common sense to me.

00:45:58

No, you're not going to live forever.

00:46:01

This is where like, I have a hard time believing that the ancient Japanese, where a ikigai

00:46:06

comes from would believe this.

00:46:09

This feels like the author is trying to blend something with a new idea.

00:46:13

This feels like something CGP Grey would talk about, you know, on cortex.

00:46:20

This does not feel like it belongs in a book on ikigai.

00:46:24

And I don't believe that this is going to happen.

00:46:26

And I don't think it's worth spending any time trying to achieve this.

00:46:30

I think we should try to be good stewards of what we've got.

00:46:33

We should make the most of the resources we have available to us.

00:46:36

We should not be upset when they eventually run out because they are going to.

00:46:42

This is not a race against the clock.

00:46:43

Try to solve the secret before the clock runs out.

00:46:49

I think this is this is the deviation point here where like you were saying, like the

00:46:55

ancient Japanese probably would argue with the concept of trying to reach escape velocity.

00:47:04

And I say that knowing that having read the rest of this book and knowing the things in

00:47:10

the culture and the lifestyles that they lead in order to have a long life, the long

00:47:15

life is very likely just the byproduct of a culture that they have created and not the

00:47:22

seeking of a culture in life in order to develop a long life.

00:47:27

Like it's kind of become that somewhat.

00:47:29

They will regularly talk about how I'm going to live to be 120.

00:47:34

And yet, like that's just because there are so many super centenarians there.

00:47:40

But I don't think that's the original purpose.

00:47:43

Like they have such a culture around doing things with intention and purpose and building

00:47:49

community and having a healthy lifestyle.

00:47:51

Like that's such a big part of the culture in its entirety that the idea of trying to

00:47:59

live forever just would seem absurd to people who were developing that culture.

00:48:05

So I don't see that as the intention of those in Okinawa.

00:48:12

And yet that seems to be the intention behind the book.

00:48:15

Like how do I intentionally try to live?

00:48:18

Not necessarily live forever but have a really long life.

00:48:20

Like that's the purpose, not the byproduct.

00:48:24

And I would venture to say it's more of a byproduct for the people that they're studying.

00:48:29

And I don't know that for certain, but that's my suspicion.

00:48:32

It reminds me, I had a conversation with somebody and I blanking on who it was when I was the

00:48:39

host of the productivity show for Asian efficiency.

00:48:43

And they referenced most people's approach to productivity and they tied it to a South

00:48:50

Park episode, which full disclosure, I have never seen a full South Park episode.

00:48:56

All right.

00:48:57

But I remember this story specifically where there's this underground race that is trying

00:49:05

to take over the world and they have a three step plan, but they can only ever get to step

00:49:11

two because step two is collect more underpants.

00:49:14

Well, why do we need to collect more underpants because we need to collect more underpants?

00:49:19

So that's what I thought of when I heard this, this whole, this, this argument for living

00:49:26

forever or living super long.

00:49:28

Why do you want to do that?

00:49:29

To live super long.

00:49:31

Okay.

00:49:32

But why?

00:49:33

Right.

00:49:34

Right.

00:49:35

Right.

00:49:36

I couldn't ever really connect to that.

00:49:40

And again, you go back to Icky guy, the initial Venn diagram, that makes a lot of sense to

00:49:46

me what the world needs.

00:49:49

People are the reason for productivity, right?

00:49:51

So I can get on board with that idea, but I do agree with you that we kind of lost sight

00:49:57

of that as we went and it's more so on just like we should try to live for a really, really

00:50:03

long time without ever questioning why we want to do that.

00:50:08

Or I don't know, life isn't measured in length alone.

00:50:14

I feel like you've got to have another qualitative measure that you use there, especially if

00:50:21

you're going to talk about Icky guy, but that's kind of not, at least not what they're talking

00:50:25

about here.

00:50:26

That's, that's a good place to go on to chapter three here, which is from logo therapy to

00:50:32

Icky guy that he's going to go back to Victor Frankle here.

00:50:34

But I also want to point out that like some of this that you and I are talking about,

00:50:38

like this is the foundational premise of the book of living a long life and one of the two,

00:50:44

right?

00:50:45

And like that's what you and I do here, like we've done this enough and we've critiqued

00:50:49

books long enough that we will sometimes just like wait a second is the entire premise

00:50:54

of the book, which is assumed in most cases, even valid.

00:50:58

Like, well, let me back up here.

00:51:00

Like we do that.

00:51:01

I know that not everyone does.

00:51:02

They'll just assume that the book is built on a good premise and it's not always true.

00:51:08

So just when you're reading books, pay attention to what the assumptions are if you can locate

00:51:14

them.

00:51:15

Anyway, from logo therapy to Icky guy, how to live longer and better by finding your purpose.

00:51:19

This is similar to what you're talking about.

00:51:21

You know, whenever we're discussing the concept of Icky guy, why are you on this planet and

00:51:25

how do you find joy in that?

00:51:29

This comes back to Victor Frankle and like, how do you find the mission for your life and

00:51:32

where is your purpose and meaning in life?

00:51:35

Obviously, we reference Victor Frankle in Man Search for Meaning being like one of the

00:51:39

gold standards for how we find a five star book.

00:51:44

And yet he's brought up here and his science of logo therapy being a big part of it.

00:51:52

This is a pretty solid pitch honestly for logo therapy and like what it looks like to

00:51:58

find meaning.

00:52:01

I can't say that I fully caught how they go from logo therapy to Icky guy.

00:52:08

I didn't catch that transition real well.

00:52:10

At least I'm not placing it in memory.

00:52:13

But I border line just associated like logo therapy is Icky guy.

00:52:19

Maybe you have a clean answer to this, but that's kind of how I landed on it.

00:52:23

Like, okay, here, these are these are kind of the same thing.

00:52:26

I'm coming at it from different angles, but Victor Frankle has a process that's summarized.

00:52:33

They have a, I don't remember where this came from this summer, maybe they put the summary

00:52:36

together, but they've got a five step process of summarizing logo therapy that Victor Frankle

00:52:44

put together.

00:52:45

Step one is a person feels empty, frustrated or anxious.

00:52:49

And I started thinking about that as like, okay, most issues can come back to one of

00:52:53

those three things.

00:52:55

Step two is the therapist shows him that what he is feeling is the desire to have a meaningful

00:52:59

life.

00:53:00

Three, the patient discovers his life's purpose at that particular point in time.

00:53:05

I think that's an important disclaimer there.

00:53:08

Step four is of his own free will, the patient decides to accept or reject that destiny in

00:53:12

step five.

00:53:14

This newfound passion for life helps him overcome obstacles and sorrows.

00:53:17

And like, I feel like that's a pretty solid summarization of how logo therapy works.

00:53:23

Now, when you go to translating that to Iki Guy, like it's, there's not really a process

00:53:29

for discovering it.

00:53:30

And yet it seems like it kind of lands in the same territory.

00:53:35

Am I off base on that?

00:53:38

No, so Iki Guy, all we really have for definition there is what the word means and then the

00:53:43

Venn diagram.

00:53:45

In this chapter, we do have the five steps of logo therapy that he talks about.

00:53:50

And then he gets into Merida therapy and Nikon meditation, which is basically other ways

00:53:57

that you can find your life's purpose.

00:54:00

So there's no like, here's the process for Iki Guy in terms of discovering your life's

00:54:05

purpose.

00:54:06

But that is something that he says here is that we don't create the meaning for our life.

00:54:08

We discover it.

00:54:10

I agree with that a hundred percent.

00:54:12

I think the issue I have here is not with this specific chapter.

00:54:18

I think this chapter is pretty good in terms of discovering your life's purpose, finding

00:54:24

out what you should be doing.

00:54:26

The issue I think I have is in the interpretation of one of those circles with Iki Guy, which

00:54:34

is what the world needs.

00:54:37

Because all of the examples of the people living in the small communities who have lived to

00:54:42

be a hundred and ten plus.

00:54:44

I feel like those worlds are fairly small.

00:54:50

And that's fine.

00:54:51

There's a line to be walked there, I think, in terms of finding meaning in your day to

00:55:00

day and going deep, not necessarily wide.

00:55:04

Having a large impact in the life of one person as opposed to just being an acquaintance

00:55:09

and to many different people.

00:55:12

This is the problem with social media, by the way.

00:55:14

You've got 600 Facebook friends, but the average American only has three real friends.

00:55:20

A high percentage of them have no friends, true friends.

00:55:24

We have all these acquaintances and we call them friends.

00:55:28

There's a lot of value to be had, I think, in the model that they're talking about here.

00:55:33

However, if you were to tell me, "Okay, I'm going to drop you in this tiny little town

00:55:36

and you're going to live here for the rest of your life and you're going to have no

00:55:39

contact with the outside world," because they had to fly on a plane and then get in a car

00:55:43

and drive past a bunch of forsaken land and then they finally found somebody.

00:55:48

A lot of their excursions when they met people, they detailed that in the book.

00:55:54

Part of me is like, "That'd be kind of cool to live out in the middle of nowhere, cabin

00:55:57

in the woods."

00:55:58

But then part of me right after that is like, "I don't want to stay there."

00:56:03

That's a nice retreat.

00:56:05

But I feel you're diminishing the value of your life and the impact that you can have.

00:56:13

Your legacy is tarnished in a way if you are just absolutely content with that.

00:56:18

You should be questioning, "Is there something more for me to do?"

00:56:22

I feel like that gets lost just in their interpretation of Iki-gai.

00:56:30

All that to say in this chapter, I feel the steps that they have and the different methods

00:56:34

that they talk about are good tools that you can use to figure out your own individual

00:56:39

life mission statement, life purpose, life theme, whatever you want to call it.

00:56:44

However, I would just encourage everybody who's going to read this chapter specifically,

00:56:48

but a larger picture of this book to think a little bit bigger than the authors would

00:56:55

kind of guide you to.

00:56:56

I think that's a valid point because this can kind of pigeonhole you into a one specific

00:57:03

way of getting there.

00:57:07

They give some examples of a suicidal mother and a doctor who's frazzled.

00:57:12

They give some of these stories and show how they find their own purpose.

00:57:20

I think that was through the concept of logotherapy in those particular cases.

00:57:27

The point, I think, from this whole section is people have different ways of getting there

00:57:31

and discovering this.

00:57:34

They will eventually end up landing on the last part of the book coming back to this,

00:57:39

which I'll do when we get there.

00:57:42

I think it is important.

00:57:43

This is kind of the one section where they're kind of giving you ways to find the answer

00:57:48

here to what your own Iki-gai would be.

00:57:51

Yet, there's no real clear path other than pay attention to what you like to do.

00:57:57

That's a lot of what it comes to.

00:58:00

But it also comes into the next chapter here, chapter four, is find flow in everything you

00:58:05

do.

00:58:06

Welcome back to the stage, Mahali, Cheek, sent me Holly.

00:58:10

Let's go to flow.

00:58:12

That's what we're talking about.

00:58:13

They introduce Mahali.

00:58:15

They introduce the process for achieving flow.

00:58:20

There's an Owen Shafer in this book has this whole thing.

00:58:24

I forget where he was from.

00:58:26

He's got this seven-step thing of how to find flow, which is knowing what to do, knowing

00:58:31

how to do it, knowing how well you are doing it, knowing where to go, where navigation

00:58:37

is involved, perceiving significant challenges, perceiving significant skills, and being free

00:58:43

from distractions.

00:58:45

These requirements before you're going to be in this flow state where time seems to stop

00:58:52

right.

00:58:53

They bring this up because there really is a bit of a societal norm and elevation of

00:59:00

people who work in the crafts, like these artisans in the Japanese culture.

00:59:06

That's really what they do all day every day.

00:59:10

That is their thing.

00:59:12

They go to their craft and they focus hardcore on it all day long.

00:59:18

Part of me is like, that would be amazing.

00:59:20

Part of me is like, I don't know if I could do that all day every day.

00:59:24

That seems like a lot.

00:59:26

If you have that strong of a connection, that's exactly what you would want.

00:59:33

They get into how to do that on some smaller things as well.

00:59:36

It ends up being a very important part of the culture and the process because being in that

00:59:41

flow state is one of those things that can help you connect to your icky guy but also

00:59:46

can help with the longevity piece.

00:59:49

They have a definition for micro flow in here which is finding pleasure in the small ordinary

00:59:55

things and I really like that definition.

00:59:58

Again, though, I bet that's not the goal just to have fun and live a long time.

01:00:05

Take it in moderation but I did find that useful.

01:00:08

I like the idea.

01:00:09

They ask the question here, can someone really retire if he is passionate about what he

01:00:13

does?

01:00:14

That feeds into the whole concept of retirement not being a thing in Japan.

01:00:18

I really like that.

01:00:21

They talk about artisans, Takumi, in this chapter which this is what I want to do.

01:00:29

I want to be a Takumi.

01:00:35

I don't even know exactly what the art is going to look like but I've been thinking a

01:00:38

lot about this over the last couple weeks about the things that I make.

01:00:43

That's my art.

01:00:45

I want to become more excellent in it not so I can sell more but just so I can make better

01:00:52

stuff that makes a bigger impact in people's lives.

01:00:57

If I'm able to do that, I can see where I could be happy and fulfilled doing that for

01:01:05

the rest of my life.

01:01:07

It's probably not going to be video courses in 40 years but some way, shape, or form,

01:01:13

that's what I would like to do.

01:01:16

Now when it comes to that in the day to day, the practical side for me, I've got a day

01:01:21

job.

01:01:22

This is where all the practical advice about how technology is great if we're in control

01:01:26

of it but our generation suffers from an epidemic of multitasking comes in and they

01:01:31

do a really good job in this chapter.

01:01:33

I feel like of defining the dangers of this, they mentioned some of the same studies that

01:01:39

you and I have heard a hundred times but they shared one statistic that I don't think I

01:01:43

had ever heard before, at least not phrased this way.

01:01:47

That working on several things at once decreases your productivity by more than 60% and your

01:01:52

IQ by at least 10 points.

01:01:57

That's a big reduction.

01:01:59

So not only is it taking you longer, it's making you stupider.

01:02:03

Stupid is not a word I know but I'll use it because it's fun to say.

01:02:08

It should be.

01:02:11

And then the other thing here is that rituals over goals, the happiness is in the doing.

01:02:16

I really do think that's a great encapsulation of my issue with goals where you get so focused

01:02:20

on the outcome and that's kind of the Western philosophy.

01:02:23

You just got to achieve this goal and once I do that, everything's going to click into

01:02:26

place.

01:02:27

My life is going to be so much better than you get there and really there's something else

01:02:30

that you want.

01:02:31

The goalposts seem to move.

01:02:33

So there is value in finding your enjoyment of the process, just showing up and doing the

01:02:40

thing, making the whole idea of the artisan that really resonates with me.

01:02:46

When I picture an artisan, I get a picture in my mind of Bob Ross.

01:02:53

My wife and I go to this sushi place that we really like and they have on the TV and

01:02:59

the bar every single time we go, Bob Ross video is playing.

01:03:03

And this guy is just so happy all the time.

01:03:07

He's painting these pictures, he's happy little trees.

01:03:11

He loves, he loved what he did.

01:03:15

He would have done that forever.

01:03:18

Interestingly, these are all videos that are, I don't know, from the 80s or something, but

01:03:26

the way that he made them, he was the first live streamer.

01:03:29

Totally.

01:03:30

Yeah.

01:03:31

Let's make an entire painting in 30 minutes.

01:03:35

Let's do it.

01:03:36

Yep.

01:03:37

Yeah.

01:03:38

You're a dreams of sushi is that's referenced actually in this book.

01:03:42

I'm familiar with that series, but I have not actually watched it.

01:03:46

But yeah, you can get a picture of somebody who just absolutely loves what they do and

01:03:49

you're like, I want to do that.

01:03:51

Not painting specifically, but I find myself watching those Bob Ross videos.

01:03:55

I'm like, I kind of want to paint.

01:03:59

So that's what I want to be when I grow up Bob Ross for podcasts and video courses,

01:04:06

I guess.

01:04:07

I don't know.

01:04:09

I remember seeing a YouTube video, I believe this was a Japanese person too.

01:04:15

They were ironing a shirt.

01:04:16

You seen this?

01:04:17

It's a white shirt and they're ironing it with like the super hot iron and the movements

01:04:22

are meticulous.

01:04:24

The folds are precise and everything is choreographed in a very orderly manner.

01:04:33

And I remember thinking that like, and there's no music in the background, there's nothing.

01:04:38

It's just real time, this man ironing this shirt.

01:04:42

That's it.

01:04:43

And all you hear is like the iron on the ironing board with the shirt.

01:04:48

And it's like border, border line like obsessive over the details of ironing this shirt.

01:04:56

And I remember thinking, one, this man has way too much time on his hands to get this

01:05:00

good at ironing a shirt.

01:05:03

And two, I kind of want to be this good at ironing a shirt.

01:05:06

Like that was like the dichotomy in my brain of like, yes, I don't think I could do this.

01:05:12

But at the same time, I really want to do this.

01:05:15

Like that concept of being in such flow in such a minor way and yet a major way, it's

01:05:23

like in the realm of meditation, which they talk about in this chapter and how like that

01:05:27

can be an instant vacation if you learn how to do it well.

01:05:31

And like, I get that, but like, I can see that.

01:05:34

Like if trying to get really good at even some of the mundane things can have some positive

01:05:39

effects.

01:05:41

Now that said, the next chapter here, which is chapter five is about masters of longevity,

01:05:48

words of wisdom from the longest living people in the world.

01:05:51

And they have like some of the comments from the super centenarians that are 116, 117,

01:05:59

I think the oldest that they had notes from was 122.

01:06:03

It's like, what?

01:06:06

Like, we're talking 40 years longer than people we consider old.

01:06:13

Like really?

01:06:15

Okay.

01:06:16

And I, they have some like wide ranging thoughts on why they were able to live as long as they

01:06:24

have.

01:06:26

And some of it was like, I never eat meat.

01:06:30

And like, I'm never stressed.

01:06:31

I never worry.

01:06:32

Like these are all like grand things.

01:06:34

And like, that's what they attribute to living a long life.

01:06:38

But I think that comes back to what I was saying earlier.

01:06:41

There's a like inside these people that they're being interviewed.

01:06:46

They're such a wide range of why they think they're able to live a long life that they're

01:06:52

just not even aware of what it is that leads to that, which is why I think it's more cultural

01:06:57

and societal than it is specific on that particular person.

01:07:02

So yes, there's some words of wisdom here, but I think that's the point.

01:07:06

Like it's pretty wide ranging.

01:07:08

Yeah.

01:07:09

So I don't like this chapter.

01:07:15

I like the idea of this chapter.

01:07:17

I think it is executed poorly.

01:07:21

And the only reason I think that is because I have read 30 lessons for living by Dr. Carl

01:07:29

Pillimer, I believe is the author's name.

01:07:32

And that is the book that you should read if you like the concept of this chapter at

01:07:39

all, because this is specifically people just sharing.

01:07:45

Like you said, their tips for living to be as old as they were, but everybody is unique.

01:07:52

And I think you can take a large sample size and maybe you can tease out some things like

01:07:57

certain percent of people said this, so there's probably some truth in that.

01:08:00

But this is all just like a handful of stories.

01:08:04

And this is what this one person said.

01:08:06

And I tend to be skeptical of that advice.

01:08:08

However, Carl Pillimer, what he did is he interviewed tens of thousands of people who

01:08:13

have lived a successful life and he defined successes.

01:08:18

He went into nursing homes and found people who had lived a long life.

01:08:22

And when you go into a nursing home, most of the people there don't want to be there.

01:08:28

However, there are always a couple who are just absolutely loving life.

01:08:33

Right?

01:08:34

And so he went and he interviewed those people.

01:08:37

Why are you so happy?

01:08:38

What made you get to this point in your life and feel like you have lived a successful

01:08:43

life?

01:08:44

And I like that definition better than this icky guy is kind of focusing on or anchoring

01:08:49

on the length of the life, right?

01:08:50

Not solely, but that's kind of the bias, especially in this chapter.

01:08:54

Right?

01:08:55

So Dr. Carl Pillimer interviewed all of these thousands of people and then he condensed

01:09:00

it down into these 30 lessons.

01:09:02

And you can apply those lessons in different ways as opposed to, you should just never

01:09:05

eat meat because look at these people in this town.

01:09:08

A couple of people told me that.

01:09:09

Right.

01:09:10

Right.

01:09:11

And they have that, like they almost have a disclaimer in here without saying it because

01:09:15

one of the folks that they have a bio on was 122 when she died.

01:09:26

And she died of natural causes.

01:09:29

She wrote a bicycle until she turned 100.

01:09:32

She lived on her own until she was 110 when she finally agreed to move into a nursing home

01:09:39

after she accidentally started a small fire in her apartment.

01:09:44

And she stopped smoking at 120.

01:09:47

Yeah.

01:09:48

Yeah, that's true.

01:09:51

Let that sink in for a second.

01:09:53

She stopped smoking two years before she died at 122.

01:09:59

Yep.

01:10:00

Yep.

01:10:01

So I'm pretty sure that there would not be the argument for people to start smoking on

01:10:07

a list of things you should do to live a long life.

01:10:12

Correct.

01:10:13

Let me defend the office here a little bit because I like the fact that they just shared

01:10:17

what these people said.

01:10:19

Right.

01:10:20

They're not trying to condense down the handful of interviews that they did into these are

01:10:24

the key concepts.

01:10:25

Otherwise they would have cut that part, but they published the entirety of the interview.

01:10:29

Right.

01:10:30

They didn't cut out the inconvenient part.

01:10:33

However, why add it then?

01:10:36

Like what's, what is the value of these things if they're going to contradict some

01:10:40

of the other things that you were talking about in the rest of the book?

01:10:44

I don't know.

01:10:45

Yes.

01:10:46

Yeah.

01:10:47

One of my favorite things, so this person, Jean, that died at 122 on her 120th birthday,

01:10:54

she said, "I see badly, I hear badly, and I feel bad."

01:10:58

But everything's fine.

01:10:59

Like that was her comment.

01:11:02

It's like, "I just got a kick out of it."

01:11:04

It's like, "Yeah.

01:11:05

Okay.

01:11:06

Yep.

01:11:07

I get it."

01:11:08

Super fun.

01:11:09

Right.

01:11:10

I'm going to buy those of those people.

01:11:11

The next chapter here, which is chapter six, which is lessons from Japan's centenarians,

01:11:17

this is where they start to summarize what they've learned from interviewing and seeing

01:11:23

the lives of these people and what are the things that they do and then they're going

01:11:28

to start talking about the details of their lives here later.

01:11:34

But they tell the story about arriving there and seeing how they live in community and

01:11:41

how it's a pretty big deal to celebrate, eat, drink together.

01:11:45

They're talking about birthday parties and some of the spiritual realm there, which was

01:11:52

a little bit strange.

01:11:54

It reminded me a lot of, from the United States, of course, Native American spiritual

01:12:00

culture, spirits in nature.

01:12:03

It really reminded me of that, so having respect for nature in a broader sense.

01:12:10

So that seems to be a pretty big part of it.

01:12:14

Then they have a series of lessons that have been learned from these.

01:12:20

There's five of these that they spell out.

01:12:24

The first of which is, "Don't worry."

01:12:26

The first of all, the two is cultivate good habits, nurture your friendships every day,

01:12:31

live an unhurried life.

01:12:32

I didn't like to see that one.

01:12:34

And be optimistic.

01:12:38

It's interesting to me that these are, they're more mindsets than they are actions.

01:12:45

If you caught that.

01:12:46

Don't worry, cultivate good habits doesn't say what those should be, which they will

01:12:51

talk about what their habits are a little bit in the upcoming chapters here, but nurture

01:12:57

friendships.

01:12:58

Again, that's more mental than it is anything.

01:13:01

Live an unhurried life.

01:13:02

That's a mindset.

01:13:04

Be optimistic.

01:13:05

Absolutely a mindset.

01:13:06

These are all revolving around mindset, which is awesome and frustrating at the same time

01:13:15

because it means that this is not outside the realm of what you could accomplish.

01:13:20

There's nothing in this list about setting smart goals.

01:13:23

There's not anything about goals at all, Mike.

01:13:26

I know.

01:13:27

Just habits.

01:13:28

Yeah, I like this list.

01:13:31

I understand why it would be frustrating for people.

01:13:34

I kind of didn't react that way, I guess, maybe because I have work to do in some of

01:13:42

these areas, but I recognize the value of them.

01:13:46

The cultivate the good habits, it's probably the one I feel like I made the most progress

01:13:49

on so far, but I definitely could do better not worrying about things.

01:13:54

Living an unhurried life.

01:13:55

I mentioned savoring previously.

01:13:56

I have a feeling we're going to get more into that in the next episode.

01:14:01

Being optimistic.

01:14:02

I tend to think worst case scenario and have a contingency plan for everything.

01:14:09

Nurturing your friendships every day.

01:14:11

This is something that has come up over and over and over again as an action item for

01:14:14

me.

01:14:15

I don't have an action item from this book specifically.

01:14:18

Like you said, a lot of these are just mindset things.

01:14:20

I want to start to move my mindset in all of these different areas, but recognizing the

01:14:25

importance of people, which as an introvert is uncomfortable, but is what it is and I

01:14:30

know that it's true.

01:14:32

So I'm going to be looking for little ways that I can nurture my friendships, but that's

01:14:38

also baked into my daily questions going all the way back to triggers.

01:14:43

That book, by the way, has made a profound impact on my life from that one simple thing

01:14:49

about the daily questions.

01:14:51

I had no idea when I set out to actually attempt that that was going to have this big of an

01:14:57

impact, but one of my daily questions is, did I do my best to be a good friend today?

01:15:04

And I am going to continue to ask myself that question.

01:15:09

I'm going to try to bump up that score and take consistent action on this.

01:15:14

Good job.

01:15:15

Keep it up.

01:15:16

We'll do.

01:15:17

So here's a look at what the Okinawans eat, which is kind of a summarization of what they're

01:15:25

calling this ekei-kai diet, even though it's not what it really is.

01:15:29

So they eat a wide variety of foods, 18 different foods each day.

01:15:32

I tried to find like what the typical American eats, like different types of food that the

01:15:37

American would eat.

01:15:38

And I don't know what the answer to that is.

01:15:41

I know it's not 18 because I started thinking through the number of different foods that

01:15:44

I eat in a day, which is pretty wide ranging, and mine's like nine.

01:15:49

I'm like, okay, they're doing a good job.

01:15:52

So they eat at least five servings of fruits and vegetables every day.

01:15:55

Grains are a foundation, especially rice, almost no added sugar.

01:16:01

And when they do have something with added sugar, it's cane sugar.

01:16:03

They eat fish an average of three times a week.

01:16:06

They eat much fewer calories because they eat till they're 80% full.

01:16:10

They drink a lot of green tea, specifically San Pincha, which is a mix of green tea and

01:16:15

jasmine flowers.

01:16:17

And they eat quite a bit of shikuwasa, which is like somewhere between a lime and a mandarin

01:16:23

orange.

01:16:24

So there you go.

01:16:25

That's the miracle diet, if you would.

01:16:30

But at the same time, my wife and I got into this conversation because I was explaining

01:16:35

this to her.

01:16:36

She was the cook in her family.

01:16:38

And I think because I know that there are people who live a long time who are in like

01:16:47

Siberia and all they eat is fish all winter long.

01:16:50

Like this stuff happens and they live a long life and they're not eating more than like

01:16:55

three different foods in a week.

01:16:58

So I know that that's not necessarily the end all be all and I hesitate to say like here's

01:17:07

the diet that every human should eat because I can't help but think that genetics are involved

01:17:11

in this on a pretty wide ranging scale because if someone has strong German blood, your tendencies

01:17:19

towards certain foods and the foods that you like are much different than someone who was

01:17:25

born and raised in Hawaii.

01:17:27

But just so far apart and yet we want to have like here's the diet that every human should

01:17:34

eat.

01:17:35

Like that's that's what I struggle with.

01:17:37

Like I don't think it's that simple.

01:17:38

I think it really depends on your background like your genetic background, your DNA and

01:17:45

taking this diet and saying I'm going to do that is not I just don't see that as a the

01:17:53

answer to everything.

01:17:54

I say that and yet I'm quite certain that my genetics are not Japanese and yet I've been

01:18:03

taking on the action item of putting green tea into my morning breakfast routine because

01:18:11

they talk about the green tea and all the health benefits that come with that.

01:18:14

So I have incorporated that I've been drinking tea and for breakfast for a long time now.

01:18:19

I don't know that I've said that much publicly but I have not been doing much for coffee.

01:18:25

I do coffee once in a while still but mostly I'm on the tea train at the moment but I've

01:18:30

been doing green tea instead of the black tea stuff.

01:18:33

All right.

01:18:34

Well you do have a garden so.

01:18:37

Yes.

01:18:38

Yes.

01:18:39

You are able to eat the rainbow if you want to I guess.

01:18:41

It's true.

01:18:42

It's true.

01:18:43

The tips they give you here but yeah.

01:18:45

That was one of the things from one of the chapters that we just came from but they were

01:18:52

talking about how most of the people in these areas had their own gardens and that's where

01:18:56

they got most of their food.

01:18:58

Yeah we kind of fit that category though we they were we were joking a lot at the end

01:19:02

of the summer last year because we we had quite a few like boxed pizzas and stuff last

01:19:07

summer it's like you know I don't have time to cook a good meal because I'm busy growing

01:19:11

my organic garden.

01:19:13

We have to eat these processed foods while I'm growing my organic garden like that was

01:19:17

the joke in our house.

01:19:19

That's funny.

01:19:20

Yeah we we don't really have a garden.

01:19:24

Rachel has a couple things that she grows out in the front of our house.

01:19:29

We have a kind of weird lot though it's kind of on a corner and there's no room in the

01:19:33

backyard but we do have some beds in the front she grew some tomatoes and things there

01:19:40

cucumbers.

01:19:41

And my parents have a bigger garden that we help out with so we do a little bit of this

01:19:47

but could definitely eat more fruits and veggies it's kind of the thing they talk about the

01:19:52

eating the rainbow and having a bunch of different varieties of fruits and vegetables not just

01:19:57

the number of servings.

01:19:59

I tend to agree with you I don't like the specific recommendations for you should eat

01:20:04

this and do this however I do have an action item here to try green tea as well.

01:20:10

They talk about the forget how to pronounce it Hara Hachi Buu again you know I mentioned

01:20:17

earlier I've got an action item to kind of savor my food and stop eating when I'm at

01:20:21

80% full.

01:20:24

They do also talk about fasting in this chapter.

01:20:27

They mention that you should consume fewer calories overall or you could fast two days

01:20:34

per week which they define fasting as consuming less than 500 calories.

01:20:38

I'm actually pretty close to this already one day a week so typically Wednesdays I will

01:20:45

fast all day and then I'll eat a meal after we get back from church and it ends up being

01:20:51

a little bit bigger meal because I like to eat but if I practice my previous action item

01:20:57

I could probably keep that under 500 calories for the day and I want to try to do that.

01:21:05

I don't necessarily want to try to do a second day a week yet I don't know I do recognize

01:21:11

that I could do this a little bit more I actually have on my New Year calendar I have a habit

01:21:16

tracker built in there and I'm tracking a couple of things specifically the days that

01:21:20

I run the days that I write and the days that I fast so I'm trying to write every day run

01:21:26

a couple times a week and fast at least once a week but I could see that increasing that

01:21:32

frequency a little bit as the year goes on.

01:21:36

Now kind of going alongside the diet realm we need to talk about exercise and this chapter

01:21:42

was strange to me very strange basically they talk about the chapters called gentle movements

01:21:50

longer life exercises from the east that promote health and longevity and you know there's

01:21:56

a number of specifics in this like they talk about Tai Chi they talk about yoga they talk

01:22:01

about what was it radio tie I don't tell I don't remember all of them but they have

01:22:07

a whole bunch of these and my best explanation is they're all yoga esque like that that's probably

01:22:14

the the cleanest way I can explain that and I get it I mean that's that's kind of their

01:22:20

form of exercise now saying that I have like I've done yoga in the past I've been doing

01:22:26

a little bit since starting to read this book not every day like a couple times a week in

01:22:32

place of my other workouts but regardless of all of that and I don't really have strong

01:22:39

opinions on types of exercises I have such a smattering of things that I do that I'm

01:22:44

absolutely the wrong person you should take advice from on types of exercises for different

01:22:48

things but they did call out a specific point in here that I thought was fascinating they

01:22:54

mentioned that metabolism slows down 90% after you've been sitting for 30 minutes yeah that

01:23:02

one kind of struck me that okay if your metabolism is dropping by 90% and all I've done is sit

01:23:09

down for 30 minutes that's pretty telling so that would mean that no for no more than

01:23:17

30 minutes like if you if you get up after that period like your metabolism then stays

01:23:21

high like I've said this for a long time I have a high metabolism I know this I just

01:23:25

moved a lot and the days that I played basketball like on Fridays the whole Apple Watch thing

01:23:32

will tell me that I've burned thirteen to fourteen hundred calories at the end of the

01:23:35

day like it's ridiculous what I go through and the the alarming part is like I know a

01:23:43

lot of people do this like even during the workday like as we're doing this I've done

01:23:47

that we've been sitting here for almost an hour and a half now so like this is something

01:23:51

that absolutely happens and I can't help but think that there are huge ramifications just

01:23:57

societally that this could be resolved if you just got up and walked around for a little

01:24:03

bit so I get it at the same time I don't know where I fit on all of the slower movement

01:24:11

type exercises I get why they're recommending it but at the same time like I like to go

01:24:18

run for an hour sometimes and play basketball so I'm not going to do yoga on those days

01:24:24

because basketball is more than enough that day yeah I like the idea of some of the different

01:24:32

exercises that they shared here I have to do stretches every morning for ever since I

01:24:41

hurt myself the first half marathon that I ran so the stretches help make sure that

01:24:46

my muscles are in the right spot but they also help with some of the sciatic nerve pain

01:24:52

that I was experiencing and I think a lot of like the yoga or the sun salutations is

01:24:59

the one that I actually grabbed a picture of those different steps and I want to try

01:25:04

that that seems like if I could actually do those movements that would be very simple

01:25:10

and very effective way to increase my flexibility and just get my body moving in the morning

01:25:16

kind of an extension of the stretches that I'm already doing so I do want to want to

01:25:21

try that but yeah I don't just the whole concept of yoga and Tai Chi and a lot of the things

01:25:28

that they recommend in this book like I've tried yoga before and it hasn't really stuck

01:25:34

in the I don't know what the reason is for some of the stuff I do think it's interesting

01:25:38

though like I'm I'm with you I'm not going to just do this they basically say you don't

01:25:44

need to exercise a tongue you just need to move a lot and it's interesting to me that

01:25:47

that a lot of the the hotness right now is like CrossFit or high intensity interval training

01:25:55

you know the seven minute workout type stuff that's not the same as CrossFit I understand

01:26:00

that but that's like the the people that I know in my life who are in CrossFit that's

01:26:06

kind of how they got there is the high interval high intensity interval training that was the

01:26:10

first step and that's very contradictory to this and I think that's probably just our

01:26:15

western culture wanting the quick fix the high intensity let's get this over with and

01:26:21

then move on to the the other thing whereas the the real general message of this chapter

01:26:27

is just make it part of your lifestyle make it something that you do consistently that's

01:26:32

healthier for you in the long run I think there's some truth to that and I'll be trying

01:26:38

to move more but you're not going to get me to commit to a specific yoga routine or anything

01:26:46

like that totally valid alright so chapter nine last chapter before the epilogue resilience

01:26:58

in wabi-sabi wabi-sabi wabi-sabi I'm gonna go with wabi-sabi how to face life's challenges

01:27:05

without letting stress and worry aid you and this is where we start talking about emotional

01:27:10

resilience we get to learn about anti-fragile which is super fun to see that book pop up

01:27:16

and get a promo here they mention Buddhism and stoicism pretty heavily as well asking

01:27:23

yourself the question what's the worst thing that could happen it's kind of coming back

01:27:26

to like the stoicism piece there with Seneca and meditation comes up yet again Mike yet

01:27:34

again you'd think that we would learn how to meditate one of these days considering how

01:27:38

much this stuff comes up and yet I'm not doing it it's because you haven't moved to a tiny

01:27:44

coastal town in Japan yet it's probably it that's that's my next move if I want to meditate

01:27:49

every day I need to move to a tiny town in Japan that that would solve the problem 100%

01:27:56

this is interesting though because the whole idea of anti-fragile getting stronger when

01:28:01

you're harmed he talks about the the hydra here this is very much contradictory to the

01:28:10

previous chapters where he talks about how we need to avoid stress completely that's not

01:28:16

exactly what they say but that's the the idea you're left with right because chapter two most

01:28:22

health problems are caused by stress and here it's saying like well actually this dress can make

01:28:26

you make you stronger if you have the right mindset it just seems a little bit out of place but I

01:28:32

like the message of this chapter I do like the whole concept of the anti-fragility I do like

01:28:39

thought the idea of resilience and in grit as Angela Duckworth would would call it I think

01:28:46

actually they mentioned that in this particular chapter but uh not quite sure what to do with

01:28:54

that it feels like contradictory ideas here and had a little bit of trouble reconciling that in

01:29:00

my head I think I personally would lean towards don't wish it was easier wish you were better and

01:29:10

focus on your growth and just try to become better and do better with everything that you have and

01:29:15

trusted to you but that's again a little bit contradictory to the live a long and happy life

01:29:22

that's probably just my mindset not coming from the same part of the world as as theirs I do

01:29:30

think it was interesting in this chapter mentioned that every senior that they interviewed

01:29:35

had a primary and a secondary occupation did you catch that yeah yeah basically building in

01:29:42

redundancy yeah redundancy yeah so that's the how to be anti-fragile right create redundancies

01:29:49

bet conservatively in certain areas make many take many small risks and others get rid of the

01:29:53

things that make you fragile but this specifically when I read this I thought of myself and I thought

01:30:00

of you because we both have day jobs and we have the stuff that we do on the side right yes so we

01:30:06

have our primary occupations and we have our secondary occupations and I like it that way

01:30:13

yeah I'm totally a fan because like I can go do my day job and then when I go home like we're

01:30:20

like I do a few things online but most of the side stuff is like my wife runs the acorn ridge

01:30:27

business which she's starting to so you know how like I'm a big fan of the like term

01:30:34

notebooks like she's gotten into leathercraft and making like custom leather things and she's in

01:30:39

the process of making me a leather cover for it it could then be roused for all the things like

01:30:45

super nice it would be it would cost me so much money to have to buy one of these things so anyway

01:30:51

she's doing stuff like that that becomes a side business that the the two of us share there's all

01:30:56

sorts of things I fix instrument clusters out of vehicles like there's all sorts of stuff that

01:31:00

just comes on the side it's like little bits that add up to quite a bit by the end of the year and

01:31:05

I like having those different streams because like if something ever happens in this one well

01:31:11

then we'll just focus on this other one and then we'll start to add in new things later so like

01:31:15

it's just less stressful overall to do it that way and more fun oh it's way more fun way more fun

01:31:23

like that means we get to go record podcasts about books and then I can go fix the network

01:31:28

stuff that I screw up later on and then I can go do some video stuff like it's just all sorts of

01:31:32

places and I like that I never really thought about the balance of like the day job and the side

01:31:39

stuff in terms of anti fragility before but it does make sense to view it through that lens and I

01:31:47

also want to be careful here because I don't think you can just prescribe oh everybody should have a

01:31:52

side gig but reading this kind of validated that idea in my head I've mentioned before that there

01:32:00

was a Derek Sivers essay that I that's really made this click for me I'll put the link in the

01:32:06

the show notes for that but it talked about having a well-paying job and then you can let the art

01:32:12

be the art and when I read that I was like aha that is the formula for Mike Schmitz which is

01:32:19

kind of different from a lot of the stuff that you see online it's not necessarily bad but people

01:32:24

tend to kind of tend to gravitate towards the the people who go indie right they can finally walk

01:32:31

away from the side job and and do the thing they've always wanted to do full-time I know some people

01:32:37

who have done that that's absolutely the right thing for them but and I found myself kind of

01:32:42

aspiring to be like that and that's the dangerous part I think is you got to figure out your own path

01:32:48

you can't just try to copy somebody else's you can't do something the same way that that they did

01:32:53

and that doesn't mean that you shouldn't strive for that if that's really what you want to do but

01:32:57

just the the fact that maybe your path is a little bit different than that doesn't prevent you from

01:33:05

success in the the side thing that the success in the the art the passion if you will right because

01:33:14

it's not just what you love it's what you're what's really important to you if it's really

01:33:18

important to you you're going to find a way to do it whether or not it is the thing that can

01:33:22

completely pay your bills going back to that definition of icky guy right what you can be paid

01:33:27

for what you love what the world needs what you're good at you know if it's really important to you

01:33:33

you'll find a way to do it before you can be paid for it before you're good at it before you

01:33:38

identify this is something that the world needs and as you do it you get better at it there's a

01:33:44

niche that opens up for you and as you get better at people are willing to pay for the quality

01:33:48

right that these are all interconnected so I think a lot of times with the the side stuff maybe

01:33:54

it ends up being the icky guy maybe it just becomes part of your your passion or your mission of

01:34:01

trying to tie back to this diagram and there's it's falling down all over the place but I hope

01:34:05

you get what I'm what I'm saying here yeah yeah yeah maybe maybe a good way to wrap that is

01:34:12

actually with the epilogue because at the very end here they basically just have a

01:34:16

summarization of the whole thing and a final note which I alluded to earlier from from Victor

01:34:23

Frankl but they've got the 10 rules of icky guy here number one stay active don't retire

01:34:30

two take it slow three don't fill your stomach four surround yourself with good friends

01:34:37

get in shape for your next birthday smile number seven reconnect with nature give thanks

01:34:43

live in the moment number 10 follow your icky guy which is a bit circular 10 rules of icky guy

01:34:51

follow your icky guy okay all right and then they they have you know some like closing thoughts

01:35:00

they're one of which is they mentioned like you need to stay busy doing what you love around

01:35:04

people you love and just from a Christian background like okay that doesn't always 100

01:35:12

line up but I get what they're saying if you follow the premise of their like the foundation

01:35:18

of what they're getting it and then the comment from Victor Frankl is that if you don't know what

01:35:24

your icky guy is yet or what your mission in life is that's your mission to discover it like that's

01:35:31

your focal point which I absolutely love that because it means that if you actually don't know

01:35:37

what that mission is that's your mission like that's that's where you need to go to work and

01:35:44

maybe this is where I'm at right now at the same time like reading through some of the bios and

01:35:49

and seeing some of the comments and how people like what people's icky guys are is interesting

01:35:57

because it's not near as high level as you would typically think like when you and I talk about

01:36:04

mission and life purpose and life theme and that concept it's usually like my goal is to sell to

01:36:09

serve other people by helping them understand technology like it's something big grand like

01:36:16

that whereas most of the times whenever they were talking about an icky guy it was to be a good

01:36:23

mom and grow a good garden and that was as far as it went it wasn't to have the best garden and

01:36:28

to teach people how to garden and have the best lifestyle ever like that was completely off the

01:36:33

radar it was I want to grow a garden and I want to be a good mom like and that was the icky guy

01:36:41

like that was the focal point and that struck me that like sometimes we have it maybe this is the

01:36:46

millennial thing but like we want this big grand mission and we want this big life purpose but it

01:36:52

doesn't necessarily have to be that big right now it might be at some point and you might grow

01:36:57

into that but in a short term it doesn't have to be that large so if you don't know what that is

01:37:04

like that becomes the goal in discovering what that is so I just thought that was super interesting

01:37:09

you want to be content but you don't want to be complacent that's the best way I can think

01:37:15

to describe it yep and that's my issue with it is I feel like there's a a bit of complacency with

01:37:20

some of the things that they they described here which just is not a fit for me there's actually a

01:37:28

really great quote that is not from this book that I came across by Phillips Brooks who said that

01:37:35

sad will be the day for every man when he becomes absolutely contented with the life he is living

01:37:40

with the thoughts that he is thinking with the deeds that he is doing when there is not forever

01:37:44

beating at the doors of his soul some great desire to do something larger which he knows that he was

01:37:49

meant and made to do I feel like that is the mission is to discover what that purpose is for

01:37:57

each individual and this is something that I am very passionate about that's that is my life theme

01:38:03

my life theme is to help people answer the question why am I here by inspiring encouraging

01:38:09

and teaching them to connect to their callings discover their destinies and live the lives they

01:38:13

were created for like that is what gets me going and I try to filter everything that I do through

01:38:20

a connection to that life theme and I feel like that's the takeaway from this is yeah like you said

01:38:24

at this point if you don't have that figure it out then once you have it try to start living it as

01:38:29

much as you can make sure that your values are in alignment with that your daily actions are in

01:38:33

alignment with your values and therefore in alignment with your life theme and doesn't have to be

01:38:37

written in stone you can edit it and change it in the future but that that larger message I 100

01:38:45

indoors all right that brings us to the end of the book should we do action items let's do it all

01:38:52

right I've got a couple here I've talked about both of them already one is doing the yoga bit

01:38:57

which I actually started this morning did a sudden salutation this morning Mike a few times actually

01:39:04

and it was different I'll say that I'll have to report more next time because I'll do it a few

01:39:11

more times before then and then green tea over breakfast versus my typical black or herbal

01:39:17

teas or an oolong I've been trying to find a white tea actually to kind of go alongside this

01:39:22

because they mentioned like it's even better than green tea but it's expensive so I don't want to

01:39:28

buy it there we go so anyway I've got those two very tactical in this particular case how about you

01:39:35

I have four action items from this sure so one is the Hara Hachi boo fill your ability to 80 percent

01:39:47

be more mindful of my eating that's all the same action item different ways of saying it I have

01:39:52

one that I've kind of already been taking action on but the way that they frame this from chapter

01:39:58

for no screens one hour after waking or one hour before going to bed the exception to this and

01:40:07

really the justification for buying the onyx books at the beginning is that device so no phones no

01:40:15

computers however I have intentionally anchored this device to only allow me to do certain things

01:40:24

on it that's kind of the beauty of having it in the role that it is and I mentioned it's way

01:40:29

too expensive for anyone to really justify getting it in the way that I'm using it but there's a lot

01:40:36

of value in that I don't need to add all the other things on there I can still do Spanish via

01:40:42

Duolingo on the phone and I can still take sketched notes via good notes on the iPad not asking this

01:40:49

to do that and what it does is keep me focused on the journaling and the note taking and it does

01:40:55

that really really well but I've compartmentalized it to that specific thing and it's way too expensive

01:40:59

for that so that's that one and then also try green tea I have heard a lot of people extol the

01:41:07

virtues of green tea and I feel like I've tried it at one point and didn't like it but I'm going to

01:41:12

try it again two minutes and then don't cross the two minute mark that's the key that's the key

01:41:17

gets better if you go past that point okay good to know and then the last one I can't get myself

01:41:24

to say try yoga so I'm framing it as do more stretches i.e. sun salutations jitter all right so

01:41:35

next time I'll ask you how your yoga is going sure oh my all right as far as style and rating goes

01:41:44

the style of this it feels very scattered to me as far as the writing itself they're pretty good

01:41:53

but it feels like it's all over the place now I'm trying to keep in mind that this was

01:42:00

a Spanish book written about the Japanese that was translated to English so I'm trying to keep

01:42:05

that in mind so some of that is purely going to be in the translation so I don't want to get too

01:42:11

caught up on the the technicals of like using this word versus that word sentence length and

01:42:17

such because I know that that's somewhat flexible in a translation that said the overall structure is

01:42:24

not up for judgment in the translation piece so I know that like they they bring back the iki

01:42:31

guy concept and try to discuss it throughout a number of these chapters almost like they're

01:42:38

trying to force that concept onto a diet or force it onto an exercise but like iki guy isn't

01:42:46

those things like you're talking about the okanawans in the Japanese culture that would make sense

01:42:53

when you're talking about the diet and the exercise and icky guy is part of their lifestyle so like

01:42:59

that fundamental concept of those two pieces are disconnected and yet tried to force together

01:43:06

it's like I don't like that they did it that way and I wish they would have worked through

01:43:10

that a little bit it kind of feels like they landed on this is a really fun word let's make it the

01:43:16

title of our book and then we're going to talk about this blue zone that we really love like it

01:43:21

feels like that's just kind of how it happened uh I don't know that that's it that's just the way

01:43:27

it feels so I don't really like the way that they structured these components that said there's a

01:43:33

lot of really cool stuff in here and a lot of like we've pointed out a handful of facts now studies

01:43:38

that we've not heard of stats that we've not noticed that are actually a fairly big deal so I do

01:43:44

appreciate that they did some research on that obviously they went to this particular place and

01:43:50

worked with these people so absolutely love the concept of what they're doing this is not what

01:43:56

I was expecting based on the title and the subtitle of the book like it just doesn't seem to line up

01:44:01

100 percent so knowing that there's a lot of great things here and knowing that I am very grateful

01:44:09

I've read it I've already recommended it to a couple people with some reservations but at the

01:44:16

same time like what are you doing like this doesn't and I'm not even sure I buy your whole premise

01:44:21

on under the foundation so because I have like I really like this and I don't know about this

01:44:26

like I'm gonna put it at a 4.0 just because like okay just feels a bit weird so I'm gonna land at a

01:44:33

4.0 on this one like all right uh I agree with everything that she's said about this I was thinking

01:44:43

of the other Japanese productivity concepts that I've been introduced to like Kaizen yeah and I

01:44:51

don't remember reading a book of this length on Kaizen so maybe just these concepts don't translate

01:44:57

well into this format and it does feel like there is a bunch of opinion added to this and I like

01:45:06

some of the attempts that the authors made to communicate their their message but it feels a

01:45:13

little bit little bit clumsy the way that it's put together there are some chapters in here where I

01:45:19

have a ton of notes like the logo therapy to aiki guy uh that whole chapter I've got a whole

01:45:26

bunch of stuff and then there's like the chapter five masters of longevity where I have three things

01:45:32

I jotted down there's yeah there's things I just feel like they don't really belong here but the

01:45:38

core message and that that Ben diagram even though I have issues with some of the ways that

01:45:43

it's put together I feel like it is a very powerful idea and you don't have to agree 100% with an

01:45:51

idea for it to be powerful so there are things that I would change with this however just the way

01:46:00

that it was presented in this book I feel like it's got me thinking about things in a different way so

01:46:06

that is 100% successful and I'm glad that I've read it there are other things that the authors

01:46:12

presented in ways that we've read in different books and we've heard some of this stuff a hundred

01:46:17

times but the way that they phrased it really helped it click for me in a way that it didn't before

01:46:23

like the multitasking thing for example and some of the stuff around logo therapy I mentioned at

01:46:30

the beginning I feel like they did a better job of extolling the virtues of logo therapy than

01:46:34

Victor Frankl did at the end of Man Search for Meaning so there's a lot to like about this um I

01:46:40

I don't think yeah towards the end of the book I felt like it was getting a little bit

01:46:46

a little bit long for me uh and that's just a direction that the authors took so I recognize

01:46:51

that I feel like the real value of this is at the beginning the first couple chapters specifically

01:46:56

one and three if you and four four is also pretty good where they get into the whole idea of flow

01:47:03

in a little bit different way um some really really great sections in here some sections I

01:47:09

didn't really care for overall I'm glad that I read it and I think the idea of a Vicky Guy is

01:47:16

tomorrow Carol's term is uh is powerful and I think it should be something that people

01:47:22

consider I think the the whole idea of your figuring out why you're here is is a worthwhile

01:47:28

pursuit so I will join you at the 4.0 a little bit disappointed in in how this one all came together

01:47:36

especially after a really strong start but overall I think it is a a good book that people should

01:47:41

consider adding to their libraries I don't know if there's anything better out there that I would

01:47:44

recommend just feels like this could be packaged into one of those blog posts and you could get

01:47:51

the 80% of the value and 20% of the words yep I get you all right let's shelf it what's next

01:47:57

next is how to call him your mind by Chris Bailey and this is one that I got an advanced copy for

01:48:05

it is I almost gave away my my uh view on the book before we started it I think

01:48:14

I like it let's just say that and it's going to be a good discussion I think it's gonna

01:48:17

I think it's gonna expound on some of the ideas that were presented in this one and uh

01:48:23

there's some stuff in there that I moment I read it I was like I can't wait to talk to Joe about this

01:48:29

yeah it'll be good I'm maybe about a third of the way through it at the moment so

01:48:35

that'll that'll be a fun conversation I think I get witcher yep I'm with you all right after that

01:48:41

I've selected a book called why has nobody told me this before this is by Dr. Julie Smith

01:48:46

she is a clinical psychologist and she actually her claim to fame is actually sharing psychology

01:48:53

tips on tiktok and I did not discover her there I'm like rarely on tiktok at all and

01:49:00

I think I found her on instagram I don't know anyway this book has a lot of praise to it and it

01:49:08

answers a lot of like difficult mental health questions so I'm very interested to see

01:49:13

you know what is it that she's willing to share in the book and I know that there's a lot of people

01:49:19

that have said it's been very life-changing as far as their viewpoints and mindsets go so

01:49:24

I'm very curious to see see what you think about it Mike and see what I think about it so it'll be good

01:49:29

all right we will read a book by tiktok doctor yep pretty much how about a gap book Mike what

01:49:37

he got well this book talked a little bit about stoicism and I don't really buy into the whole

01:49:46

idea of stoicism but everything I know about stoicism I have heard essentially from Ryan Holiday

01:49:53

and he references these meditations by Marcus Aurelius over and over and over and over and over and over

01:50:00

and over and over again and I realized that I have only ever heard of these framed by Ryan Holiday

01:50:07

and I bought a copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius I'm going to read the original source

01:50:15

see what he actually has to say and I was a little bit nervous about this because I thought maybe

01:50:23

this would be like a ginormous book and there was no way I'd be able to get through it but

01:50:28

I bought a specific copy that Ryan Holiday recommended before he made his premium $110 version

01:50:34

and it's like a modern translation of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and it's about the size of a

01:50:41

normal bookworm book so I'm going to try and get through that okay sounds good well I am still

01:50:47

like chipping away at tribe of mentors by Tim Ferriss you may hear me bring that one up

01:50:51

now and again as I'm you know diving in and out of other books but that one I kind of come to

01:50:57

when I'm between things so I've kind of been back in on that one here lately so tribe of mentors Tim

01:51:04

Ferriss lots and lots and lots of books to cover in that particular one so that all said thank you

01:51:12

thank you thank you thank you thank you to those of you who are bookworm members and to those of you who

01:51:16

join us on the live streams it seems like we've had more and more folks doing that so it's been

01:51:21

super fun to see you guys in the chat thanks for joining us live but we're also very grateful to

01:51:26

those of you who helped support the show financially through the bookworm club memberships and if you

01:51:32

would like to join those amazing members of the bookworm community you can go to bookworm.fm/membership

01:51:39

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01:52:02

all right and if you are reading along with us pick up How to Calm Your Mind by Chris Bailey and we

01:52:09

will talk to you in a couple of weeks