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17: QBQ! The Question Behind The Question by John Miller
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I certainly took my time, huh?
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- You mean you're two minutes late?
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- I am.
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- I guess that's out of character for you, so yeah.
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(laughs)
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That's a good thing.
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- It never fails.
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I go to pick up a microphone and you know this.
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Something always goes wrong.
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So I was ready.
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Three, well, at this point, it's five, six minutes ago.
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And I went to pull up Adobe Audition to do the recording piece.
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And it had some weird error and wouldn't open it.
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So I had to restart my computer.
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And it took three minutes to get that done and then a couple minutes to get everything back up and ready to go.
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- Oh, the life of podcasting.
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I know, Adobe, right.
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But frankly, paying attention to folks who at least post stuff on Twitter,
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I have a lot fewer problems with Adobe Audition than other people seem to have with Logic.
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- That's just my gut feel though.
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I don't have any data on that.
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- I'm saying--
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- I don't know.
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I use Logic and I actually really like it.
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- See?
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There you go.
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You gotta prove me wrong.
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(laughs)
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- It's just me.
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Small sample size.
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(laughs)
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- Sample of one.
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Should we jump into follow up?
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- Let's do it.
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- So you have an end of day checklist on here.
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Tell me about that.
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I have a checklist that I go through at the end of my day now.
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And the idea here is that I do this during the buffer block and I have to admit that this is still not something that's ingrained in me yet.
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So I have not fully implemented this yet, but really the takeaway from last time was that I would actually have this checklist.
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So I do have the checklist and I need to just get better at using it now.
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So I'll run through five items that are on my end of day checklist.
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So when I'm done working, I get to the buffer block.
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Basically, I want to ask myself these questions.
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Number one are all my emails processed.
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Number two are all my inboxes emptied.
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So that would include envy, alt, or drafts.
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You'll be happy to hear.
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- Nice.
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- Number three are all my tasks in my task manager, which is OmniFocus.
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Number four are all my meetings on my calendar.
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And then number five are all my tabs closed.
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I'm kind of bad at this where I'll just close my computer and leave.
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And then when I open it up again, I have a whole bunch of tabs.
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And I know that that's a terrible thing from a productivity perspective to leave those open loops.
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So I put that in the checklist as well.
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- I started doing that like nine months ago with the tabs thing.
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That just blew my mind.
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I did not realize I did that until, oh gosh, I'm not going to think of who suggested this.
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I saw somebody on Twitter.
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I have no clue who.
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I would love to give them credit, but I can't give a name.
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But they suggested putting a process inbox and then Safari or Chrome.
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And I saw that and thought, what does that mean?
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How on earth do you have an inbox in a web browser?
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And they were simply referring to the tabs and trying to clear them out so that you had
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a clear web browser when you came back the next time.
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- Makes total sense to me.
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- I know, it makes total sense to me too.
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I just found myself not doing that.
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In fact, I went back and I realized I did a webinar for Asian efficiency a couple of years ago
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on some basic productivity techniques.
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That was one of the things I recommended.
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- Of course. - So I need to take your own advice.
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- Nice.
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- And the checklist as we learned last time is hopefully the way to do that.
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- Cool.
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- I do it as part of my daily review, so I have this whole process of doing my inbox clearing
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all at once.
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I just do a part of that.
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That's usually a first thing in the morning thing as opposed to the end of the day.
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But it just depends on how you want to come at it, what it is that you want to do.
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- Right.
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The other follow up item that I had was reading Strengths Finder with Rachel.
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And I have to admit that I failed on this one as well.
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- I did.
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- Yeah, okay.
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So not trying to make an excuse here.
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I did finally purchase the Strengths Finder, but every time I went to purchase it, they
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make it really, really hard.
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And that was enough friction for me to just be like, "I'll do this later."
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So basically, if you go to the website, you cannot buy just straight out of the box an
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access code for the assessment.
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You have to buy the book and then you enter the access code and it walks you through creating
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the account.
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And then what I didn't realize until just recently was that once you have that account and you
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log in to view your own results, you can then from that point purchase a separate access
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code for somebody else.
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- Got it.
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- But it's completely unintuitive.
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I didn't want to purchase another copy of the book.
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In fact, I went and I looked, the Kindle versions are usually cheaper.
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- Right.
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- So I'm like, "I have the book already.
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I don't need another version of this book.
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Maybe I can just get the Kindle version.
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It'll be included in the Kindle version, but it's a physical thing.
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So is it actually in the Kindle version?
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So I went and I looked at the Kindle version and the Kindle version is actually $20.
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So it's more expensive than the print one.
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And I don't know.
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It's a stupid little thing, but it was enough for me to just keep kicking the can down the
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road.
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But I did actually figure it out now, purchased the code for Rachel, have sent it to her and
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we have a week off next week over the week after Christmas.
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So we're going as a family.
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We rented a big house actually through Airbnb, kind of the middle of nowhere.
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And then her family is going to come stay there too.
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So it'll be fun and we'll be there for a week and we'll have some downtime.
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There'll be a couple days where we'll be the only ones there.
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So the plan is that she's going to take it then and then we'll talk about those results
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in one of our family meetings.
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- Fun.
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- So it sounds like you need to do some sort of a screencast on how do you get a Strengths
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Finder code?
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- Yeah, seriously.
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It's completely ridiculous.
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I don't understand.
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In fact, I found the screen where you could buy just the access codes without being logged
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in.
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And then it tells me, you need to have like an official account before you can purchase
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this.
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And the way they phrased it made it sound like you had to have a certification from Gallup
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in order to buy these.
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You had to go through a process and be approved.
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But really all you need to do is have an account already.
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So I saw that screen and I got freaked out.
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I'm like, well, there's no way I'm going to be certified.
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So I guess I can't purchase this and I kind of gave up on it for a while.
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And then when you put it back on the follow up, I'm like, I really need to figure this
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out.
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So we got it.
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- I'm glad I can prod you a little.
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- Bookworm is fulfilling its purpose.
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- There you go.
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- It's me follow through and stuff.
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- Awesome.
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So the two that I had, one was this continued process of writing down expectations for my
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projects as I take them on and then reevaluating those whenever they close.
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Now I did have, I had a couple of projects and I thought I was going to have this for
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this episode.
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So this will work out well.
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I had a couple of those that finally were completed the past week.
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And as a result of that, I realized I'm terrible at thinking how a project is going to end at
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the very beginning.
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And I've never noticed that before because I was reading what I wrote down for a couple
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of these projects.
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And then I'm looking at how it actually turned out and realizing I got nowhere close in my
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expectations.
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Huh, interesting.
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But if I had, because here's the other thing that I did, I was trying to, because it was
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long enough period from the time I started those projects to the time I completed them
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that I couldn't remember what I had wrote down for the expectations on it.
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So I was able to kind of, I guess guess what I thought I originally thought I could get
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done on the project or how it would turn out.
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And the comparison of what I thought I expected and what I actually expected was drastically
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different, which caught me off guard because it made me think that I had actually accomplished
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what I intended to accomplish.
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But whenever I reviewed it, I realized that it was, it was just a lot different.
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I don't know how else to say it without explaining the whole project and everything, which I
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can't do.
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But seeing the difference there was something that struck me, which I think is the point
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of that whole process is to help you see how we actually view these things.
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It was just a lot more alarming than I was expecting.
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So I explained that in a very vague, non-descriptive way.
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Sorry about that.
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But I think I get the gist of it.
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Yeah, it's a good process.
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I want to continue doing it.
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I'm probably going to drop it off of our follow up for the next one, just because it served
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its purpose.
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I'm going to continue doing it.
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And I have been, I've continued to write down what I thought a project would do at the beginning.
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So I've still been doing that.
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I just only have two of them that have actually been completed.
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Anyway, there you go.
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The other piece of follow up that I have is avoiding my phone early in the morning.
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This is a complete failure for me.
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I have this tendency to just want to know if any, for example, I want to know if I did
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any of my websites break overnight.
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Most of my clients will let me know if something's busted.
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Well, I would like to know that because if it's broken, I typically would try to fix it
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first thing in the morning when I get up, which is awesome if you're in my world because
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that means in most cases I can get it fixed and up and running before my client ever gets
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out of bed.
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So it's kind of this magical, like, I sent Joe a thing in the night and then it just magically
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works in the morning.
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I've kind of created this little monster of mine and I think I need to break that cycle
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before I'm going to be able to break the phone in the morning thing entirely.
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So I'm kind of copying out on that one somewhat.
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That is, avoiding your phone in the morning is way harder than it should be.
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Even maybe especially from our perspective because we're in the productivity space, like
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we understand all the rationale why you want to do that and it's still really, really
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hard to fight that urge.
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Right.
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Right.
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And you would think that if, to me, it seems like I should be able to just say, I'm not
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going to pick it up because I know that there's a lot of negative stuff that's on there that
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I don't want to start my day with.
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There's a lot of things that can distract me and get me off my intended path of the
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morning which may be developing a new plugin of some sort or writing a website, coding
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of some kind of writing articles.
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Like it can prevent me from doing a lot of that stuff that's vital to my business or
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vital to what I like to do.
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And you would think that if I knew that I would be able to just avoid my phone in the
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morning.
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But it's nowhere close to that.
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It doesn't even come in that ballpark.
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It's just something that completely messes with me because I keep thinking this should
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be simple and should be obvious.
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And yet it's one of the hardest things I feel like I've done in a long time.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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Which is why one of my action items was to remove email from my phone.
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And right.
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I'm finding now that there are times where I feel the urge to go in and check it.
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But physically, I'm not being able to do it is great.
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Nice.
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Well, maybe I should start using a different alarm clock and put my phone downstairs in
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the morning.
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I don't know.
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But it's not working the way I'm doing it.
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So I need to try to figure out some other other ways of coming at it or trying to break
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some of these current cycles or expectations that I've set.
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I probably need to break some of those currently before I'm going to get anywhere without one.
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Just the way it goes.
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Which may lead me into our book for today simply because it's going to make me ask questions
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and why in a lot of cases.
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So the book that we have read for our conversation today is QBQ.
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The question behind the question, which is by John G. Miller.
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And I think I called this out in the last couple of episodes.
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But this is a book that's on a list of books put together by Dave Ramsey.
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If you're familiar with him.
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And this is one of the books that at least he used to require his new hires to read before
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they started.
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I don't know if he still does that or not.
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But it was on a list at one point that he would ask people to read before they started
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working for him.
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And having read it, I can understand why.
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There are a few other books that are on that list that I have planned to make you read
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with me, Mike.
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And listeners, I'm going to prod us a little bit.
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Because I just think it'd be fun to go through all those books that he has recommended for
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his employees.
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And that is the entirety of why I picked this book, Mike.
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No philosophical, no deep underlying need on this one.
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There you go.
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I'm glad you picked this one.
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And I can totally see why Dave Ramsey or really anybody would require their employees
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to read this.
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There's a lot of workplace examples in here.
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He mentions at the very beginning the story about the waiter that basically blew his mind
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because he asked for a diet Pepsi, I believe, and they only served Coke.
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Or the other way around.
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I mix up the brands.
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But the waiter then talked to his manager who went to the store around the corner to
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get the person what they really wanted.
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And the waiter brought it to John Miller, I guess, when he was at the restaurant.
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And he just was blown away by that little thing.
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And then he kind of deconstructs that about what enabled this waiter to go above and beyond.
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It was the fact that the manager gave them the ability to make those types of calls.
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And it really comes down to the whole idea behind this book is taking responsibility and
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impacting the things that you can impact and not projecting the blame onto other people.
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So I really like that whole message.
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It's kind of been something that has been indoctrinated to me from a very young age.
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So I read the topic resonated with me right away.
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But then the way that he explains it, like this book, I really enjoyed it.
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This is one that I'm with you in that I think I was just raised in a way that this is almost
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second nature, like the concept of personal accountability.
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And if something goes wrong, I need to do something to fix it.
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Whether it's my fault or not, I can still take responsibility for it.
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So that's something that I know me personally, I always jump to.
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I always assume like, even if something like, take for example, somebody reruns me while
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I'm driving.
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Well, it's not necessarily my fault, but I can take responsibility to make sure that
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everything is fixed.
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I can make sure that my car is taken care of and not rely on the insurance agency or
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any of that.
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I can be the one that takes care of it.
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And it seems like, and this is something I'm hesitant to talk about, but I understand
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that it's a big deal right now because this whole personal accountability piece is something
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that seems to be disappearing in our culture, which is kind of saddening because so many
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times I run into people who it's the end of the world because somebody else did something
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to them or the latest political world, the new president doesn't believe what I believe
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and is against me.
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So everything's going to come crashing down.
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Well, that's not true.
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It's not necessarily the end of the world because someone else did something to you.
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It's more about what am I going to do about it.
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And that's what this is a lot about, of let's come up with the question behind the question.
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And if I define that because it's a bit nebulous to say it that way, that was one thing I
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struggled with here is he would talk about QBQs and it would be kind of difficult for
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me at times to just do the translation.
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But I think that was just because of my own mentality.
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That's not his fault at all.
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But the way that he defined a QBQ is a tool that enables individuals to practice personal
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accountability by making better choices in the moment.
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And the way that he goes about defining what that actually is as far as a question goes
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as he puts together a series of three criteria that you essentially ask yourself.
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So think of the question behind the question as something that you're going to ask yourself
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in a moment so that you can create a better outcome as opposed to falling into this assuming
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if somebody else's fault.
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You can take that responsibility.
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But the three criteria for one of these questions is that it starts with a what or a how.
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It contains an I and it focuses on action.
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So the classic example here is what can I do?
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Something goes wrong.
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What can I do about it in order to create a better outcome?
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So to me, that's a great way of leading us.
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If you look at the cultural thing, if people stopped asking why won't shipping get their
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act together?
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Well, instead of asking why won't shipping get their act together, what can I do to better
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enable shipping to do their job?
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A completely different question, but it leads to an action in it, something that you can
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physically do.
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I'm rambling now, Mike.
00:18:21
You jump in.
00:18:22
No, I completely agree.
00:18:24
And this was something that I kind of learned with working with the Asian efficiency team.
00:18:29
I think I may have mentioned this story before where when we were launching the podcast,
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there was something that had gone wrong.
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Somebody basically had pushed published too early on a podcast episode and it went out
00:18:41
to the feeds and people were downloading it and the episode wasn't finished.
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And so at the time, because I was working on the podcast project, I saw that and immediately
00:18:56
I was like, "Oh, no, I need to fix this."
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The way that I had always traditionally done things is figure out what went wrong, but
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the way that I was asking the questions was framed as, "Who did this?
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What happened?
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Who's responsible for this?"
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And when that was happening, when I was going through that process, I was trying to figure
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that out.
00:19:19
Tan basically just corrected me on the spot.
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He's like, "No, it doesn't matter.
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It doesn't matter.
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Let's just figure out what we need to do to fix this going forward."
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And really what he was saying was the application of the question behind the question and implementing
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the formula that you just mentioned.
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Begin with the what or the how.
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It contains the word "I" and the focus on the action.
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So it doesn't matter what somebody else did in the past, but what can I do right at this
00:19:42
moment to fix this.
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And then obviously from a system standpoint, you want to understand what had happened so
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that you can change the system and make sure that there's safeguards in place so that that
00:19:53
doesn't happen again.
00:19:55
But I had always focused on figuring things out from the perspective of assigning accountability
00:20:03
in terms of blame as who is the one who did this thing so that we can hold them accountable
00:20:08
for whether this worked or didn't work.
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And that's kind of not the right approach.
00:20:12
And one of the things I really like about the Asian deficiency team is that one of the core
00:20:17
values we have is "we" before me.
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So a lot of people will say, "We win or we lose as a team," but at Asian deficiency,
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it really is true.
00:20:25
Like if we fail in one particular area, we're not going to isolate the single person and
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shame them for making the wrong decision.
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We're going to, as a team, figure out how to fix this, how to pull everybody up, how to
00:20:39
make the best of this situation, and how to move forward.
00:20:44
So I guess the short way of saying this would be that in the past, I had been asking what
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John Miller would call the "I" cues, the incorrect questions in terms of just projecting
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the blame.
00:20:56
But those are incorrect questions because those questions don't produce anything productive
00:21:01
or positive from asking them.
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You can try to figure out the same result, but the way that you ask the question can
00:21:09
either be framed as positive or negative, and I realized now that in the past, what I had
00:21:13
done a lot of times when I was asking those questions, is I was asking them in a negative
00:21:19
light.
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And so that was a big thing for me, was recognizing that you want to ask these questions, yes,
00:21:26
but you want to do it in a way that moves the team, the organization, yourself forward.
00:21:31
I think we have a tendency to protect ourselves.
00:21:36
We have a desire to make sure that if something bad happens, we know that it wasn't something
00:21:44
that we did.
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There's something in us that wants to know it's not my fault.
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I did my job.
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I did everything correctly.
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There's something in us that wants to say that.
00:21:57
It leads us to how do I get to that point, how do I prove that it's not me, that it's
00:22:03
not my fault, which leads us to these incorrect questions, these IQs of why do they continue
00:22:11
to do this?
00:22:12
Why do they always make it harder on us?
00:22:14
Why did they put it around about?
00:22:15
That's a terrible idea in that spot.
00:22:17
They should have been in a stoplight.
00:22:18
There's so many of these things that, why would they inflict this on us and putting us
00:22:24
in a situation where we're, and it looks like you have this on the outline, we're the
00:22:28
victim, we're the one who's had something happen to us, and instead of coming at it
00:22:35
from the standpoint of what do I do about it or how do I solve this right now, instead
00:22:41
of coming at it that way, we try to protect ourselves and we want to make sure that we're
00:22:45
in the right and making sure that we're the ones who are awesome right now, and they're
00:22:52
the ones that screwed everything up.
00:22:54
That's just kind of the mentality we seem to take with a lot of situations, especially
00:22:58
negative ones.
00:22:59
You know, if it's positive, we want to take credit for it, but if it's something negative,
00:23:03
we always want to pass the blame off because we don't want to be the one at fault.
00:23:07
We're always the victim in that situation.
00:23:10
This is why this is kind of, it'll mess with you a little bit because if you're always
00:23:14
coming at it from the standpoint that this is something that happened to me and you reverse
00:23:19
that and start thinking about, well, even if it's something that negative happened to
00:23:23
me, I can still do something about it.
00:23:26
If you change that, that's where so many of these protests and the riots and all these
00:23:32
social justice groups can start to get somewhere.
00:23:36
I just hear a lot of noise with a lot of it, and this is probably highly controversial.
00:23:41
Whoops.
00:23:42
But I hear a lot of noise with it, and my question is always, well, what are you going
00:23:46
to do about it?
00:23:48
Don't, you know, violence is never the answer.
00:23:51
Getting upset and making other people angry, that's never the answer.
00:23:54
So what's the action item here?
00:23:57
You know, go back to GTD.
00:23:58
What's the next action?
00:23:59
What are you going to do about it?
00:24:01
And don't say that you need to do this.
00:24:04
What is it that I can do in this situation?
00:24:06
He told a story about a CEO who went through some of these trainings that they do about
00:24:14
QBQs, and the whole point of it was to help people understand personal accountability.
00:24:20
And one of the comments that the CEO made toward the end of it is, what can you do about
00:24:27
the situation?
00:24:29
And it completely missed the point of the whole conference because you can understand
00:24:33
what he's saying is, you know, you need to take personal responsibility, but the better
00:24:37
example there would have been if the CEO stood up and said, this is what I need to do.
00:24:41
Like, here's what I can do to help whatever situation.
00:24:44
So it's kind of a shift in thinking away from, I'm the one who's just at fault or I'm the
00:24:52
one, not that I'm at fault, but I'm the one that's the victim here and getting away from
00:24:57
that and stepping into, what do I do about it?
00:25:00
Yeah.
00:25:01
And I think that that is a great example because from a CEO perspective, he's looking
00:25:08
at that and saying, I really want to change the culture of this organization, then not
00:25:16
saying this is the correct approach, but I'm projecting now his approach is probably,
00:25:21
I just need to communicate this to everybody in the organization.
00:25:25
So that's why he framed it that way.
00:25:27
Personal responsibility begins with you.
00:25:29
Going back to social justice issues and things like that.
00:25:33
There are a lot of, a lot of times when you can look at it as I'm just one person, what
00:25:38
sort of difference can I make?
00:25:39
And really the point that I got from this book is that you really want to make a big
00:25:45
difference.
00:25:46
That's the best thing you can do is to just model it, to do it yourself.
00:25:52
And you may not think that you have this big platform and it's not going to ripple down
00:25:57
like a CEO would just telling everybody and, you know, assuming that they're going to
00:26:02
apply this immediately and it's going to be this big change in the organization.
00:26:06
But the truth of the matter is that that approach isn't going to work anyways.
00:26:09
Right.
00:26:10
Right.
00:26:11
You're going to get much more traction.
00:26:13
You're going to get much further if you just apply this to yourself.
00:26:17
And so the whole idea of the victim thinking, something that my dad taught me, he said this
00:26:22
over and over and over again, he had this, this graphic made where it was procrastination
00:26:29
and there was an arrow so like procrastination leads to blame, leads to victim thinking.
00:26:37
And the whole idea is that you procrastinate on things that you know you need to do.
00:26:42
And then when push comes to shove and things don't go exactly the way that you want them
00:26:47
to, that's when things go wrong.
00:26:50
And then when people ask you or hold you accountable for the results, then you play the victim
00:26:55
card.
00:26:56
And the example of this, and I think we've mentioned this on this podcast is you go to
00:27:01
your class on the first day of the semester and they give you the syllabus and they say
00:27:05
there's going to be a big project due at the end of the semester.
00:27:08
Here's the due date.
00:27:09
And most people are going to procrastinate on that project.
00:27:12
They're going to wait till the week before and then they're going to pull for all nighters
00:27:17
and they're going to try to cram and get this thing done.
00:27:21
And then the day before it's due, they have some technical issue, their computer malfunctions,
00:27:26
they lose all their work.
00:27:28
And it's not my fault.
00:27:29
Well, it is your fault.
00:27:31
The only reason that you're in that situation is because you put it off so long to begin
00:27:36
with.
00:27:37
It's the classic, "dog ate my homework" sort of a thing.
00:27:40
And we can fill in the blanks with our own situation.
00:27:43
I mean, every single person does this where you project that things are going to go perfectly
00:27:49
and then things don't always go perfectly.
00:27:52
And then because they don't go the way that you had planned them instead of assuming the
00:27:56
responsibility for the way that things have turned out and not starting on this thing
00:28:00
earlier when you had the time and you decided to watch Game of Thrones or whatever the new
00:28:05
TV show is, insert your favorite time waster there.
00:28:09
Then when we actually do have to have the thing done, it's not our fault.
00:28:14
Or even sometimes if we get it done, it's just way harder than it needs to be.
00:28:19
That's the kind of person I am.
00:28:20
I'll get things done, but if I procrastinate on them, I will project the blame onto other
00:28:26
people still when it doesn't go my way and I'll say, "Oh, this is so much harder than
00:28:29
it needed to be."
00:28:30
Well, it's so much harder than it needed to be because I put it off.
00:28:33
If I would have just started right away, if I would have pedaled before I got to the
00:28:37
hill, I would have had some momentum.
00:28:38
This would have been a lot simpler.
00:28:41
So many of our incorrect questions come from that.
00:28:44
Like the process of, "I didn't get this done in time.
00:28:48
I didn't think about it ahead of time."
00:28:50
But now that I missed because I waited, "Well, why would they ever do this to me?
00:28:56
Why can't they get their act together?
00:28:58
Why am I sitting here waiting to get?
00:29:01
Why can't they get their discount card to work?
00:29:04
I need this right now."
00:29:05
Well, you should have been in a week ago.
00:29:09
You could have had it figured out a week ago.
00:29:11
That's...
00:29:12
It happened so much.
00:29:14
And even in situations where you have people who are administrators or secretaries and
00:29:22
such, and I run into this all the time with clients, that I need a certain amount of information
00:29:27
from them so that I can build a website for them.
00:29:30
I give them their deadline because based on the time that they want to launch, here's
00:29:34
the date that I need to have all the information from them, which gives me the time to build
00:29:38
it.
00:29:39
Rarely do they get it to me on time.
00:29:41
Just the way it goes, just the way it happens.
00:29:44
And then my typical MO on that is, "Okay, you were four days late on getting the information.
00:29:51
The very first thing I do is push the launch date back four days.
00:29:56
I just take the amount of time and just tack it onto the end."
00:29:58
And I always, always have to have a conversation on why I did that.
00:30:02
They don't understand, "Well, that's the date you gave me.
00:30:06
That's the date that it should be.
00:30:08
Why can't you do what you told me you were going to do?"
00:30:10
It's like, "Well, because you didn't do what you told me you were going to do."
00:30:14
It's just simple cause and effect here.
00:30:17
But that whole consequence's conversation of taking ownership for the thing that you
00:30:21
did or didn't do, in this case procrastination, leads to a failure of hitting that deadline,
00:30:27
which they're not happy with.
00:30:29
They don't want to take the blame in this case.
00:30:32
They don't want to take credit for screwing up the deadline.
00:30:36
It's not that complicated.
00:30:37
Just think about it ahead of time and I understand we're all busy.
00:30:41
We have a ton of things going on.
00:30:42
But if you're going to commit to something, do it and take ownership of it.
00:30:48
Don't try to blame somebody else, which is what so much of this book is about.
00:30:53
Don't put it on somebody else.
00:30:55
Take it on to yourself.
00:30:57
Just own it.
00:30:59
It sounds simple.
00:31:00
I get that.
00:31:01
I'm making this sound crazy easy, but it's not.
00:31:05
I understand that.
00:31:06
But at the same time, it is that easy.
00:31:09
Just do what you say you're going to do and very few things are problematic because of
00:31:13
that.
00:31:14
Maybe I should raise traditional.
00:31:16
I don't know.
00:31:17
And if you don't do what you say you're going to do and if there is a crisis, then that
00:31:22
kind of leads into the next point on the outline, the brainstorming versus blame storming.
00:31:26
I mean, the meeting that you're describing where they're trying to figure out why you
00:31:30
push the due date back four days is an example of blame storming and they're trying to figure
00:31:38
out, well, why is this this way?
00:31:41
Instead of brainstorming, I view that as figuring out together the best way to solve
00:31:48
this particular problem.
00:31:51
Just the whole model of this is going to be delivered by a certain date is going to create
00:31:58
some of that.
00:32:00
He has a quote in the book where he says questions that begin with when always lead to procrastination.
00:32:07
So when you put it out there that way is like, when are you going to have this done?
00:32:14
And I say I'm going to have it done by a specific date.
00:32:17
Then there's built in motivation, I guess, to procrastinate.
00:32:21
The best way to say that.
00:32:24
And really, when we ask incorrect questions, when we use when when we blame storm, when
00:32:31
we do things like that, what we do is we accept stress.
00:32:35
It's a choice.
00:32:36
He says it's a choice that you make by asking those incorrect questions.
00:32:41
And on page 35, he mentions that the answers are in the questions.
00:32:44
So literally it sounds super simple, but it really is true.
00:32:49
If you want to get better results, all you really have to do is ask some better questions
00:32:55
and not fall into that blame storming cycle because those meetings where you're trying
00:32:59
to figure out, well, whose fault is this really?
00:33:01
You could go back and forth for hours.
00:33:04
Well, I couldn't get it to you until four days later because of this.
00:33:08
And then, you know, there's always going to be a justification.
00:33:12
And that's where the procrastination leads to blame leads to victim thinking cycle comes
00:33:16
in.
00:33:17
And there's always going to be something that you can use as a crutch to say, this is not
00:33:20
my fault.
00:33:22
And that's what we mentioned a lot about society.
00:33:25
And I prefer to just apply this to myself.
00:33:27
But this is prevalent in society today is that we tend to blame other people for the
00:33:33
things that happened to us.
00:33:35
And really, that's not going to change anything.
00:33:38
What we need to do is to not assign the blame.
00:33:42
You know, maybe we did start off disadvantage.
00:33:44
Maybe we are in a tough spot.
00:33:46
But blaming somebody else for being there really doesn't help anything.
00:33:49
It just makes you bitter.
00:33:51
And so what can you do right now to fix that?
00:33:54
You can start asking the right questions following that QB key formula.
00:33:59
What can I do?
00:34:02
I want to go back to this example of, you know, me and this meeting with the client because
00:34:09
something I've been doing for a while that it's mostly me trying to avoid a conflict.
00:34:15
You know, I'm trying to be the good freelancer here and trying to make sure it's a positive
00:34:19
meeting because it typically leads to better things for me in the long run.
00:34:22
Pretty obvious stuff, I think.
00:34:25
Whenever we get into a situation where something negative has happened and they're trying to
00:34:28
do this blame storm process of why did this go bad and why is it this way?
00:34:34
I find myself typically just trying to say, you know what, let's not go there.
00:34:38
You guys can work on that on your end.
00:34:40
At some point, you can figure out where it went wrong on your end unless it's something
00:34:43
I did, in which case I'm usually the one who's going to say, hey, I screwed this up.
00:34:47
Like I try to make sure that I point those things out if I did screw something up and
00:34:51
then I know it.
00:34:52
But if they go through this process of trying to figure out where something went wrong,
00:34:57
my tendency is to say, you know, take your own time and do that right now.
00:35:00
This is what we need to figure out on how to get forward.
00:35:03
And if they still want to hit a certain deadline, even though they were four days late, typically
00:35:07
what I can do is say, here's here are a few areas that I'm going to need responses
00:35:12
from you.
00:35:13
And here is the timeframe that has like I've given you a week to give me those responses.
00:35:21
If you want to gain those four days, you need to beat those deadlines.
00:35:24
Like you can make this back up on your end.
00:35:27
So if you can make up four days in these three check-in periods, then we can make those
00:35:31
four days and still hit your deadline.
00:35:33
Now granted, 99% of the time they still go until the last day or a day after on those
00:35:40
check-in periods and they don't actually make up time, but in their mind, they're still
00:35:44
trying to hit some of those and they'd like, oh yeah, we could do that.
00:35:48
And then they plan on still hitting that deadline, but then they don't actually make
00:35:51
up the time.
00:35:52
And then we have another conversation when we're at the deadline and it's not done.
00:35:56
Like, okay, guys, it's not complicated.
00:35:59
You didn't actually do what you said you were going to do.
00:36:01
So it's interesting to me that whenever those blame storms start to crop up, that if you
00:36:07
can shut them down and let them solve it on their own end, you can at least start to
00:36:12
try to have this conversation of where the ownership lies on moving forward instead of
00:36:17
focusing on the past.
00:36:19
Now I'm not trying to discount that there's no value in doing that because something I
00:36:24
try to do, at least personally, is it, you know, if something goes wrong, I want to get
00:36:27
the path forward figured out and then come back to it afterwards and figure out what
00:36:31
went wrong and why it didn't happen the way I wanted it to.
00:36:35
I'm not always the best at that, but I try to just because I want to know how can I prevent
00:36:40
that from happening again in the future?
00:36:42
I don't want it to continue to be a problem, but it at least forces that conversation.
00:36:47
Is this something you ever do?
00:36:49
Do you ever have to deal with folks that want to push deadlines around and blame in different
00:36:54
areas?
00:36:55
Or is this just something that I'm dealing with?
00:36:57
No, it's definitely something that I think probably everybody deals with because you can't
00:37:01
control what other people are going to do, but you can control whether you fall into
00:37:05
the blame storming cycle or the brainstorming cycle.
00:37:08
And so one of the things he says is like break the circle of blame.
00:37:11
That's really where the focus needs to be.
00:37:13
That was one of my big takeaways from this book.
00:37:17
I mean, really there's a single takeaway for me here, but it's that the only person I can
00:37:22
change is myself.
00:37:24
So I can't try to fix anyone else.
00:37:26
I can go back and I can deconstruct the situation.
00:37:29
I can figure out where things went wrong and I can institute procedural changes, systemic
00:37:34
fixes to these processes that can make better outcomes in the future.
00:37:39
But I can't say, well, client X, you have to do things this way.
00:37:44
I think another area that this really manifests is in the tools that you have.
00:37:51
He talked about that quite a bit and I forgot to put this in the outline here, but he mentioned
00:37:56
that focusing on what we don't have is a waste of our time and energy.
00:38:00
And a lot of times I know I've fallen into this trap.
00:38:03
I think well, soon as I get that new MacBook Pro, which actually I am recording this podcast
00:38:09
on right now.
00:38:10
What?
00:38:11
Yep.
00:38:12
I got a new 15 inch MacBook Pro.
00:38:15
I do a lot of video work and I had a 13 inch with no video card.
00:38:18
So it was time.
00:38:19
Ah, it's so jealous.
00:38:22
It's a pretty great machine, but that aside, I don't doubt that a bit.
00:38:30
That aside, there are definitely cases where I've thought to myself, if I could just get
00:38:35
this particular tool, it would make everything else so much easier.
00:38:39
Now, this is a little bit different because this is a work computer and it's not something
00:38:44
that I personally paid everything for myself, Asian efficiency, helped me out a little bit
00:38:48
because I am doing this to create videos for Asian efficiency.
00:38:52
So a little bit different situation.
00:38:54
It wasn't just me saying, oh man, I want a new computer.
00:38:58
I went from exporting a five minute screen flow and 35 minutes to exporting a 45 minute
00:39:04
screen flow in five minutes.
00:39:05
So it's, it makes total sense for this particular situation.
00:39:10
But I mean, fill in the blanks.
00:39:12
It could be you wanted to, you want to start a podcast and oh, I can't start a podcast because
00:39:17
I don't have my high LPR for you.
00:39:19
I don't have an awesome audio interface.
00:39:21
I don't have Logic Pro that I can edit this stuff on.
00:39:24
Doesn't matter.
00:39:25
Use what you've got or start with some entry level stuff.
00:39:29
I started with a Blue Yeti and Garage Band and that was completely fine for a really long
00:39:33
time.
00:39:34
Once you get into something, then you can upgrade your tools a little bit later.
00:39:38
But we tend to focus on these, on the tools so much and we use that as a, as an enabler
00:39:43
for our procrastination.
00:39:45
There's a quote in there by, I believe it was Deb Weber from State Farm Insurance.
00:39:49
He said, "Every time I do the job with the tools I have, I tend to receive more tools."
00:39:54
And I think that's the perfect way to approach this.
00:39:56
So the podcast example, just start podcasting.
00:39:58
And then once you start getting some momentum, then you can upgrade it.
00:40:02
But don't use the tools as a reason not to get started with something.
00:40:06
In essence, don't blame your tools or lack thereof.
00:40:09
Right.
00:40:10
Right.
00:40:11
Well, you're familiar with the podcast Lore by Aaron Mankey.
00:40:15
He, he put a tweet out two or three days ago as we're recording this.
00:40:20
I'll see if I can find it or not, but he, he posted that he's still using GarageBand
00:40:26
for Lore, which receives millions of downloads.
00:40:30
Like, really?
00:40:32
It hit the top podcast in 2016 for Apple.
00:40:35
Like, right.
00:40:36
And he's still using GarageBand for his editing.
00:40:39
Now it's an older version because I think he wanted some features that they've pulled
00:40:43
since then, but he's still using a free software that came with his Mac.
00:40:48
Like this is, to me, I'm like, see, you don't have to have super sophisticated tools.
00:40:54
Like I'm complaining about Adobe Audition earlier.
00:40:56
Like, this is just something I use.
00:40:58
I like using it, works well.
00:40:59
I know how it works.
00:41:00
I'm going to run with that.
00:41:01
I do all of my recording on a road podcaster.
00:41:04
Like, that seems to work really well for me, but it's a tool that I have.
00:41:08
And you know, I could upgrade.
00:41:09
There are some ways I could make this better.
00:41:12
But for now, you know, it does the job, does a good job, and I'm happy with it.
00:41:17
So, you know, at some point, if I get good at podcasting, I'll probably upgrade.
00:41:21
If it continues to be something that I want to do, I'll get to that point.
00:41:24
But like you said, you know, if I get good and do a good job with the tools I have, more
00:41:28
tools will come.
00:41:29
That's the way it works.
00:41:31
Right.
00:41:32
You just have to take ownership of what you can control, which from a podcast perspective,
00:41:37
since this is a podcast, we're talking about podcasting, would be the creation of the actual
00:41:42
content.
00:41:43
He defines ownership in the book as a commitment of the head, heart, and hands to fix the problems
00:41:49
and never again affix the blame.
00:41:53
And that kind of ties back to the next point on the outline here, the three people that
00:41:57
you have to beat.
00:41:58
I really like this.
00:41:59
I'm into sports.
00:42:01
So this sports analogy that he had was really resonated with me.
00:42:05
If you played sports competitively, like in high school, for example, you can probably
00:42:09
think back to a specific game that was quote unquote, decided by a bad call or decided
00:42:18
by the referee because the referees are human.
00:42:22
They're going to make mistakes.
00:42:24
Maybe it actually is a hometown referee, but that doesn't really matter.
00:42:29
And what John Miller says in the book is that you have to be good enough to beat first yourself,
00:42:36
second your opponent, and third the referee.
00:42:39
And when you think about it that way, it's like, yeah, that makes total sense.
00:42:44
And in the case of professional sports, for example, and you're on the biggest stage,
00:42:50
you're playing for the Super Bowl.
00:42:51
I mean, people work their entire lives to get to that point.
00:42:54
It would really stink to have the referee have a bad call that looks like it determines
00:42:58
the outcome of the game.
00:43:00
But in real life, or for me and for everybody else who is not a professional athlete, you
00:43:05
can definitely apply this to your specific situation.
00:43:08
You can say, yeah, there is going to be things that I can do to overcome any variables that
00:43:15
the referee in my life, whatever that looks like, would throw my way.
00:43:19
So that could be the referee could be a boss that doesn't understand the huge time commitment
00:43:27
that email really is.
00:43:28
You know, we talked about email quite a bit on this podcast.
00:43:31
I worked on a product for Asian efficiency called Escape Your Email.
00:43:34
Some of the research shows that the average US worker spends 6.3 hours per day dealing
00:43:39
with email.
00:43:40
Okay.
00:43:41
Well, if you have a boss who sends you an email and then comes into your office 10 minutes
00:43:44
later to ask you if you receive the email, that's going to waste a lot of time.
00:43:48
But there's still things that you can do to set yourself up for success.
00:43:52
You can overcome the referee in that particular situation.
00:43:56
So recognizing that you are in complete control of the entire outcome.
00:44:02
That is really freeing in my opinion.
00:44:06
It's enabling it.
00:44:07
It gives you permission to be successful in that sense because you can take account, you
00:44:13
can take responsibility for the entire process.
00:44:16
And then you can say, okay, whether I succeed or fail, this is completely on my shoulders,
00:44:20
which really it is because there are things that you can do.
00:44:22
Like I mentioned before, you can pedal before the hill.
00:44:25
You can gain enough momentum where even a bad call isn't going to matter because you've
00:44:29
run up the score.
00:44:32
This is similar to the thing I keep saying.
00:44:34
It's not necessarily my fault, but it can be my responsibility.
00:44:40
I don't have to rely on the referee in this case to be the one that dictates the outcome
00:44:46
for myself.
00:44:47
I can take ownership of that.
00:44:50
It's kind of disheartening to see how many people reject this concept.
00:44:57
And that warrants why this book exists because personal accountability is not something
00:45:02
that is...
00:45:04
I don't want to say that it's not common, but it's not mainstream, I guess is the word
00:45:09
for it because it's not something you just see and absolutely everybody.
00:45:14
And I could pinpoint certain groups, but you're always going to be stereotyping and there's
00:45:18
not always true stereotypes.
00:45:20
So it can fall in a lot of different categories, but ultimately, if I can beat my opponent,
00:45:27
I can beat myself, but when it comes to the other people who are setting the rules and
00:45:33
the who ones are making the calls that dictate the outcome in front of me, it's really up
00:45:38
to me to make sure that I'm good enough to even beat them.
00:45:43
And I think about my high school days and some of the things that I did, especially in
00:45:50
basketball because I was speaking captain of what they called it for our basketball team
00:45:55
my senior year.
00:45:56
And that was something that I learned with the refs there.
00:45:59
Like, okay, there was a bad call made.
00:46:01
My first instinct was to go ask him what happened and what was it that he did.
00:46:08
Just can you explain to me what happened so that we can make sure it doesn't happen
00:46:11
again.
00:46:12
And oddly enough, if I asked that question in like the first quarter of a basketball game,
00:46:16
the refs typically wanted to try to help us get better, which probably swayed them a
00:46:21
little bit in the wrong direction.
00:46:22
I think they were favoring us in some cases and I'm not so sure I was comfortable with
00:46:27
that.
00:46:28
But it happened.
00:46:30
If you're willing to say, you know, where did I go wrong or how do I fix it in the future,
00:46:36
then people are a lot more forgiving and they tend to be the more inclined to try to help
00:46:42
if you're willing to ask for help.
00:46:44
And that's something that I think is very unique in some circles where we tend to have
00:46:52
this victim thinking, we tend to expect or feel entitled to certain things.
00:46:57
And that's not necessarily a good thing in most cases.
00:47:01
You're better off trying to come at it from the standpoint of the main question here.
00:47:06
What can I do?
00:47:07
What can I do about this?
00:47:08
What's the QBQ here?
00:47:10
How do I come at this in a better way?
00:47:13
And you know, one of the quotes I noticed that you wrote down here is the easiest thing
00:47:16
to spot is gaps in integrity and others.
00:47:19
So if I'm looking for something that I can do about it, it's easier for me to step away
00:47:26
from this blaming mentality that's looking for something that they did wrong.
00:47:32
You know, it's taking it on to myself instead of looking for gaps in what they're doing.
00:47:37
Yeah.
00:47:38
And I think I've shared this on the podcast before too.
00:47:41
But one of my favorite quotes is that we tend to judge other people by their actions
00:47:46
and ourselves by our intentions.
00:47:48
True.
00:47:49
So we see what other people do and we assume that they meant to hurt us and we project
00:47:55
that onto them.
00:47:56
And that just leads us down the cycle of playing the victim card.
00:48:03
He talks in the book about how personal accountability changes the world one choice
00:48:07
at a time.
00:48:08
And it's literally every single situation, every single social interaction that you have
00:48:12
assuming that the other person, assuming the best about the other person, I guess, is maybe
00:48:17
the best way to do it.
00:48:20
Because yeah, the easiest thing to spot is those gaps in integrity and other people.
00:48:23
It's easy to spot the mistakes that other people make.
00:48:28
But that really doesn't help fix anything because he mentions on page 68 that change
00:48:35
only comes from the inside as a result of decisions made by the individual.
00:48:39
So if you want to change your situation, you have to start within yourself.
00:48:45
So going back to the personal accountability changes the world one choice at a time.
00:48:49
Personal accountability literally will change your world one choice at a time, assuming that
00:48:54
you implement this.
00:48:55
And this is the thing.
00:48:57
It's so easy to do.
00:48:58
It doesn't require anybody else being on board with this, agreeing with it, doesn't require
00:49:03
buy-in from your spouse, your family.
00:49:07
You can do this right now.
00:49:09
It's just sometimes difficult and we don't want to accept the responsibility.
00:49:14
We don't want to say that, yeah, the buck stops here, that I am in control of my own outcomes
00:49:20
because sometimes we don't like those outcomes.
00:49:24
He's got a section here because he kind of talks about how these QBQs, they're great questions,
00:49:33
but they're intended to be asked of ourselves.
00:49:36
We've talked about this quite a bit at this point.
00:49:38
It's not necessarily.
00:49:40
I can't expect someone else to change things and I don't need to be the victim here.
00:49:44
But it can be a bit tempting to say, here are the questions that I'm asking myself.
00:49:49
You should ask yourself these as well.
00:49:51
It would be very easy to say, here, here's a great way for you to start thinking.
00:49:57
You should start thinking this way.
00:49:59
He points out very clearly, no, that's not the point here.
00:50:03
You should be asking yourself and not other people.
00:50:06
The quote that he's got around this, it's not about asking better questions of our coworkers,
00:50:12
our customers, or family.
00:50:14
It's about asking better questions of ourselves.
00:50:16
Don't try to project these on to other people, which is something I wish I could do.
00:50:22
I would love to do, and I would love to hand this book out to a lot of people, but it's
00:50:27
going to rug people the wrong way and it's going to have an opposite effect.
00:50:32
One of the things that I liked in here is the QBQs serenity prayer.
00:50:37
The serenity prayer is pretty popular and my grandma had this hanging in her house.
00:50:44
I've seen it a lot of different places.
00:50:46
The serenity prayer goes, "God grant me the grace to accept the things I cannot change.
00:50:51
The wisdom of the..."
00:50:53
I forget how it goes.
00:50:56
Basically accept the things you can't change, the courage to change the things that you
00:50:59
can and the wisdom to know the difference.
00:51:03
He kind of reframes this in terms of the message of the book and I thought this was so good.
00:51:07
The peace is God grant me the serenity to accept the people I cannot change, the courage
00:51:12
to change the one I can and the wisdom to know it's me.
00:51:18
What was the story?
00:51:19
There was some gal that had someone who worked for her and they eventually parted ways because
00:51:26
they couldn't work together.
00:51:29
It was a couple years later and as things worked out, he ended up working for her again.
00:51:35
The second time around, her comment was that this is awesome.
00:51:39
We're working really well together.
00:51:41
I wonder what all he changed and she realized, "No, he didn't change at all.
00:51:46
He's still the same.
00:51:47
The difference is how I'm treating him and how I see what he's doing."
00:51:52
It was purely a difference in herself and not this person working for her.
00:51:58
I think it's very interesting if you come at it from, "This is all me."
00:52:04
It's all about how I perceive things and what I do about it.
00:52:08
I've got a couple of quilts here.
00:52:10
One refers back to the tools thing we were talking about.
00:52:15
When would we get better tools and better systems?
00:52:19
The quote that he had here was about, or it is, here you go, page 40, "Succeeding within
00:52:24
the box."
00:52:26
This is specifically geared towards creativity.
00:52:30
We do a lot of creative work, Mike, you and I, and so much of that revolves around coming
00:52:35
up with something new or finding a way to portray an idea or display it or choosing the
00:52:41
medium in order to convey a concept.
00:52:45
So many times we want to have a better tool.
00:52:47
I would like a better MacBook.
00:52:49
I'm going to come steal Mike's MacBook.
00:52:51
There's so many of these cases where I wish I had a better tool, but frankly, creativity,
00:52:57
it really thrives when certain constraints are put on it or when there's a certain box
00:53:02
that you're trying to work within.
00:53:04
That's so much of why I love coding and development because there are certain constraints that
00:53:08
you need to work within.
00:53:12
Once you're within that, the sky's the limit on how you actually achieve it in most cases.
00:53:16
There's a problem to be solved and you've got certain ceilings that you need to work
00:53:21
underneath of in order to accomplish something.
00:53:23
I love that concept of succeeding within the box and not always trying to make sure that
00:53:30
you get outside the box or think outside the box, but being willing to work within it.
00:53:34
You get the difference there?
00:53:35
Is that too nebulous?
00:53:37
No, definitely.
00:53:39
I mentioned at the beginning of the new MacBook as an example, that's, again, an example
00:53:45
of evolving the tools that I was using.
00:53:48
I was succeeding within the box.
00:53:50
I was doing video on a 13-inch MacBook Pro with no video card.
00:53:57
I got to the point because I had done that, because I had focused on the tools that I
00:54:01
had and just using them to create the content that I got to the point where I was like,
00:54:06
"Okay, I can justify now upgrading the tools."
00:54:11
The important thing is to start where you are with what you have.
00:54:15
Absolutely, start somewhere and start now with what you currently have.
00:54:22
The other quote that I had mentioned, I had to, page 116, he mentions wisdom is what
00:54:27
we learn after we know it all.
00:54:31
I was reading this in a situation where my mother-in-law was in the living room and my
00:54:36
wife was in the couch.
00:54:37
We were all just doing our own thing, so I of course had a book.
00:54:41
I ran across this and I read it out loud and my wife and my mother-in-law both almost
00:54:46
simultaneously, "Man, that's true."
00:54:50
Yes, once we think we know it all, eventually we learn that, "No, we don't know it all."
00:54:56
The more I learn and the more I feel like I understand, the less I know.
00:55:01
It's just kind of crazy how that happens.
00:55:03
The more I understand, the more I know, the less I know.
00:55:06
It just seems like the more areas and the more knowledge that I gain or the more areas
00:55:11
that I feel like I'm starting to understand, the more I realize there are even more areas
00:55:15
that I don't understand.
00:55:17
I really liked that quote of wisdom what we learn after we know it all.
00:55:22
There was one quote I did not like in this book.
00:55:25
That's good.
00:55:26
We haven't had many of those.
00:55:28
He said that we buy too many books.
00:55:31
Oh yes, I hated that.
00:55:33
I was really hated that.
00:55:35
I disagree.
00:55:36
We buy too many books.
00:55:37
Blasphemy.
00:55:38
I get his point.
00:55:40
His point is that we buy the books and they sit on the shelf and we don't actually read
00:55:44
them and we don't apply anything that we learn in them, which is really the point of
00:55:50
this podcast.
00:55:51
So hopefully we don't fall into that definition.
00:55:55
But yeah, I will definitely continue to buy books.
00:55:58
Yes, I know.
00:56:00
It was a whole chapter that he dedicated to.
00:56:02
We buy too many books.
00:56:03
But in this particular case, his chapters were really short.
00:56:07
So that entire quote unquote chapter was a whopping three paragraphs long.
00:56:12
So I attributed the shortness of that particular chapter within this book to its weight in
00:56:20
value.
00:56:21
Okay, it's really short.
00:56:23
It doesn't have a lot of value, hopefully.
00:56:28
So you want to jump into action items here?
00:56:31
Yeah.
00:56:32
Like I mentioned earlier, I really only have the one action item, which is no trying to
00:56:38
fix anyone else.
00:56:40
Nice.
00:56:41
So don't.
00:56:42
Again, I don't know exactly how you put a.
00:56:47
I don't know how you quantify that, but really the whole message of the book, I don't know
00:56:51
how you quantify any of the stuff that he's talking about necessarily, which is really
00:56:56
why I think he ends the book by saying, great.
00:57:01
So now that you've finished the book, read it again because he really wants to make sure
00:57:05
that you get it and that this permeates down and it actually affects and changes the way
00:57:10
that you go that you live your life.
00:57:13
So you can ask me if I'm doing okay on this, but I don't have like a definition of done
00:57:20
for this particular action item.
00:57:22
We run across those on occasion.
00:57:23
Like I've got a couple here that's like, I don't know how I'll, I don't know how to
00:57:27
measure this.
00:57:28
Sometimes I wish these action items you could measure, but at the same time, there would
00:57:31
be so many things we're measuring we wouldn't get anything done.
00:57:33
So exactly just the way it works.
00:57:35
So I have one that's a little similar to that is noticing my blaming tendencies.
00:57:41
So essentially noticing when I ask these incorrect questions of why can't they get this right?
00:57:47
Instead of asking those and noticing when I'm trying to put it off on someone else and
00:57:50
make myself the victim, instead of that, just pay attention to it and don't allow it to
00:57:55
happen.
00:57:56
And I'm afraid to spend much time with that one because I'm afraid of how often I do it.
00:58:02
So okay.
00:58:04
The other one that I wrote down here is thinking out loud around others that work in my kids.
00:58:11
And I mean that in a very pointed way in what can I do about this right now?
00:58:15
So primarily what I'm trying to do is create a situation where I can help other people
00:58:21
see how I'm thinking about something such that if something goes wrong, what can I do
00:58:27
about this right now?
00:58:28
What's the next step here?
00:58:29
And saying that out loud, obviously talking to myself so I can play off the I'm crazy
00:58:34
card.
00:58:35
But what can I do about this right now?
00:58:37
Primarily in my work situations and around my kids because at work, if I'm saying those
00:58:44
things out loud, it's potentially something that other people can notice.
00:58:47
Okay, it's not important to focus on whose fault this is.
00:58:51
It's not important to find the blame.
00:58:53
But how can I fix this right now?
00:58:55
What is it I can do?
00:58:57
And trying to, I guess, push that a little bit just inadvertently and through osmosis,
00:59:04
do the whole lead by example thing at work.
00:59:06
And that can translate into my kids as well.
00:59:09
I would love for my girls to grow up not saying that it's someone else's fault, even
00:59:16
if it is someone else's fault, I would like for them to be really good at this and taking,
00:59:22
you know, being really good at personal accountability and being willing to take responsibility
00:59:26
for things, even if it's not them that caused it, I would love for them to have that skill
00:59:31
in that mindset.
00:59:33
So I want to try to talk about those things out loud at home and at work, just so that
00:59:38
both situations that people can around me can see that example.
00:59:42
And hopefully that'll start to permeate throughout circles.
00:59:46
That's my thought.
00:59:47
So I'm going to try it.
00:59:48
See how it goes.
00:59:50
As for how easy this book was to read, I thought it was crazy easy to read.
00:59:54
It's very understandable.
00:59:56
I thought that Mr. Miller was quite the author.
01:00:00
He could distill things quite easily and seemed to be able to convey a lot of information
01:00:05
in a very short, short book.
01:00:08
Well, I guess I wouldn't say it's a super short book, but it's shorter than some that
01:00:13
we have on the list.
01:00:15
I enjoyed it.
01:00:16
I thought it was a good book.
01:00:17
I would recommend it.
01:00:19
There are, we're just looking real quickly, there are 39 chapters, but there are 115 pages
01:00:29
and a lot of the chapters are not even an entire page.
01:00:34
One chapter, chapter 36 I'm looking at right now is literally two sentences.
01:00:39
So you could probably read this entire book in less time than you would listen to this
01:00:44
podcast.
01:00:47
But it is definitely an easy read and the content in there is really good.
01:00:51
It's very approachable.
01:00:52
I really enjoyed this book.
01:00:54
I do got to knock him for saying we have too many books though.
01:00:57
So I got to give him 4.5.
01:01:00
Just because of that.
01:01:01
That's started.
01:01:02
Yep.
01:01:03
Sorry, John.
01:01:04
Just because he told me to read books.
01:01:05
But you're not getting my books.
01:01:08
Sorry.
01:01:09
Well, he even called out listening to too many podcasts in that chapter too.
01:01:13
Right.
01:01:14
So I was like, okay, this is a chapter I'm going to skip.
01:01:18
So yeah, I would echo the 4.5.
01:01:22
Just minor details that lead me to that that aren't really worth going into.
01:01:27
But yeah, I would put it at 4.5.
01:01:29
It's a really good book.
01:01:30
There's a lot in here.
01:01:32
There are a number of groups that I wish would read this.
01:01:36
But that's just just life.
01:01:39
Wait goes.
01:01:40
Don't try to fix them.
01:01:41
Fix me.
01:01:42
Right.
01:01:43
And that's a really stupid, spiteful, maybe, you know, rating.
01:01:48
I'll expound on that a little bit more, I guess.
01:01:51
The book is really, really good.
01:01:52
But I would prefer, I guess, to only give the 5 stars to the books that completely just
01:01:58
blow me out of the water.
01:01:59
There've been a couple of books that have done that.
01:02:02
This book, while it was really, really good, I'm really glad that I read it.
01:02:05
Didn't have that sort of effect for me.
01:02:08
And again, maybe it was my upbringing where my dad has kind of preached this stuff to
01:02:12
me from a very young age.
01:02:14
So I didn't really feel like there was really anything completely new in here for me.
01:02:19
But the way that he said it was kind of refreshing.
01:02:22
It was presenting the information in a different way.
01:02:25
So there was definitely a lot of takeaways for me.
01:02:26
But I do want to qualify that statement.
01:02:29
I'm not just talking it because he said, "Don't buy any more books."
01:02:32
It's mostly just in jest.
01:02:34
But yeah, I'm with you because we're making this sound like a 4.5 is a bad thing.
01:02:38
And it's not.
01:02:39
It's a 4.5 out of 5.
01:02:40
Like you're most of the way there.
01:02:42
So it's not like it's a bad rating.
01:02:46
It's just that those five star books, we shouldn't have one every single week.
01:02:52
Those are special books.
01:02:56
Hopefully.
01:02:58
So the upcoming books.
01:02:59
Next one that we're going to be reading is Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath, which is
01:03:05
one that I picked out.
01:03:07
And then you picked out one that I honestly have never heard of.
01:03:10
The Shallow's by Nicholas Carr.
01:03:12
This is an internet book in that it's about the internet and what it does to our brain.
01:03:17
So we did some of this with brain chains.
01:03:20
I think this one is a little easier to read and maybe a little better written.
01:03:27
And just skimming through it, I think it has a little, I shouldn't say a little.
01:03:31
It has some more depth to it and a broader range.
01:03:36
That's probably the better way to say it.
01:03:38
That's my first impression on a book that I have skimmed over and have read literally
01:03:43
none other than skimming.
01:03:45
There you go.
01:03:47
Nice.
01:03:48
All right.
01:03:49
So if you want to follow along, you can go to bookworm.fm/list.
01:03:56
You can get a list of all the books that we have read as well as the upcoming books.
01:04:02
And there's also a button on the webpage and on the sidebar to recommend a book.
01:04:06
So if you wanted to make a recommendation for one, you'd love us to cover here on bookworm.
01:04:12
We would really appreciate that.
01:04:13
We've got a handful of recommended books and some of them have been making their way into
01:04:17
the rotation like the checklist manifesto, which was the last one that we did.
01:04:22
So absolutely we want to hear from you.
01:04:24
If you have any recommendations, please submit that via the website.
01:04:29
And if you listen to one of our podcasts or you've read one of the books and you think
01:04:33
we completely misrepresented it or you're mad at something we said or you're like, yeah,
01:04:39
that's exactly what I was thinking.
01:04:41
If that's you, the best way to let us know about that is on iTunes.
01:04:45
So you can drop or I'll drop a link to our podcast that's on iTunes in the show notes
01:04:51
and you can just click on that and go let us know what you think of the show over there.
01:04:55
That's a great way to help other people find the show as well.
01:04:59
Usually you're getting a lot out of these episodes and we really appreciate you tuning
01:05:04
in so we will catch you next time.