Bookworm Transcripts

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Well, I have to start this one, Mike, by apologizing and saying thank you all in the same

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same sentence here, because I know that

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due to me, we have had to move this recording how many times four times

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something like that.

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I I I do not like doing this to you and especially don't like doing it to

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the bookworm community.

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So my apologies for not being able to fulfill our scheduled timing for when we're going to record, but

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here we are.

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We finally made it.

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The art of clear thinking is finally going to happen.

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I hope I hope we may get through this.

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Yeah, no apology needed for people who aren't watching me change the live recording event over and over and over again.

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Joe's been dealing with some health stuff.

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So glad you're feeling a little bit better and are at least up right now.

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So yep.

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Maybe you're thinking a little bit clearer than you were a couple days ago.

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I don't know if that's true or not, but we're going to we're going to try.

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This book will be the perfect test of the framework that he's going to outline here.

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If you're able to actually get through this, see how good this this book really is in in real time here.

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You know, I'm not sure there's much called for like brain fog illness stuff.

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All right, before we just bore people with talking about health stuff, we need to jump into action items from last time follow up.

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I had two.

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I'm gonna go first because you've got five.

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Okay.

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And so I had two of these.

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One was to start asking the question, who did you help today?

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And I have done this one with great success and started doing this over dinner with my kids and Becky.

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This is an interesting thing. My kids have now started calling this kindness acts like they're referring to.

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The answer to this question, who did you help today?

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They refer to him as kindness acts and I will hear them sometimes calling out.

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So you could do a kindness act if you XYZ pick up my toys for me and they are regularly hunting these down.

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It's very interesting to see like the mind shift for them.

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So I don't know what that's going to become long term, but we're definitely going to continue.

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Doing this. So it's kind of a fun, a fun new thing to do over dinner at this point.

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Awesome.

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I like it.

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Super fun.

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The other one that I had was to talk through what a rite of passage would look like for my kids.

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I've started this conversation.

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This one's going to be a long term, like working this out.

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You don't just sit down and figure this one out overnight unless you've pre processed it.

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So I don't foresee that one.

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Needing another follow up is just a thing that is now the discussion has been started,

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which is the part I wanted to make sure happened.

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So I had success this time, Mike, despite being under the weather.

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Well done.

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I had mixed success with my five.

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Yeah.

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So list 10 things for I know I'm being successful when I finally completed this one.

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And that, of course, is a note in obsidian.

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The second one was teach my family to call each other out when in the gap.

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I still am struggling with this one.

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We haven't had like a formal meeting about this.

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However, today I was able to notice because of this action item to help other people

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notice this that I was in the gap.

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So that works.

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Yeah.

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I want to help people notice this and all I do is see it in myself.

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Yep.

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Yep.

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So I don't know when we're going to have the big, you know, family meeting or whatever.

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When I originally thought of this, I think I'm going to move on from this one and

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continue to take small steps in this direction.

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So plan is it is BBS week at church.

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So when the family gets back, Rachel and I have been talking through some stuff.

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So I'm going to point out to her the revelation I got about being in the gap versus being

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in the game and then just kind of mentioned from there that we're going to.

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Hopefully just highlight this or spotlight this a little bit more with with ourselves

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and with our kids.

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But I don't think it's going to be a big formal thing.

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So I don't know what to do with this one.

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Like, I'll guess I'll mark it down, but it's not really done.

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It's it started.

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The other ones ask what I might be wrong about.

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I feel like I've been asking this nonstop for the last several weeks.

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I I yeah, I people are probably sick and me talking about this, but it just is relevant.

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Like the season I'm in going full time independent.

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Like there's a lot of stuff that I did not know.

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And so I'm trying to build all these systems and do all these things.

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And I didn't really have a clear picture of what exactly it needed to happen when I started.

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I'm working with a coach right now, Matt Ragland, actually on some of this stuff.

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That's been really, really helpful.

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But one of the things that I have done was I created this like email course for obsidian.

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So actually, if you go to the obsidian university website now, it's not sign up for the cohort

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or the membership or anything like that kind of morphing that.

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And it's just going to be the cohort, the community is going to be on attached to that, basically.

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But if you go to the website, all it is is a newsletter sign up, basically.

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And then it triggers an email course with a couple of videos that I made, stuff like that.

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So I'll put a link to that in the show notes that people are interested in that.

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But that is an example of what I haven't known.

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So take that a little bit further.

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What am I wrong?

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I've been wrong about.

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I feel like this is kind of challenging me to reconsider some of my core assumptions about how my independent

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creator business is going to be built.

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When I first started it, I kind of thought, well, I'll get a couple of like coaching clients.

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I've done this operation stuff with some other people and maybe I could find some creative

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entrepreneurs to work with.

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And I am working with a couple of them, but I feel like that really isn't.

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It's not gaining the momentum and the traction that I kind of hoped it would.

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So at that point, it's like, OK, well, pivot, figure something else out.

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It's wrong about that.

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Right.

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And to be clear, like, I still think I can add value there, but it just seems like there isn't a whole

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lot of interest for that kind of thing.

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So that's fine.

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Got to figure out what people want.

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So I feel like this is this is in progress, but I've gotten some revelation from it, but I've got a

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lot more to go with this.

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And this goes deeper than just the business stuff, obviously, even some of like the

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personal beliefs and things like that.

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What's that saying?

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Strong convictions lately held.

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That's kind of what I want this thinking time question to to foster.

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And feel like I'm making progress in that direction.

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Figure out when I'm most productive and protect that time.

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I know when this is.

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This is kind of mid morning, probably from like nine until 11.

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And I've identified it.

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I haven't really protected it real well.

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And that's basically because of life.

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The other one I have here is the weekend Wednesday, which I 100% and behind this idea.

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This is based on the CGP gray video, where you take a break in the middle of the week.

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And basically the Wednesday would become my my Saturday.

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However, we're recording this on a Wednesday and when we're done with this, I got another

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recording on a Wednesday.

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So like it just hasn't worked out yet, but I'm going to keep pushing for for this direction.

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I do think this is this will fit well with my natural rhythm once I am able to

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establish that, but right now feels like I am constantly behind.

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So yeah, is what it is.

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Got to work on.

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Got to work on Wednesdays currently, but.

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So Wednesdays are your weekend.

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Nine to 11 o'clock is your best time.

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And here we are sitting right on top of that.

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Exactly.

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I mean, it is what it is, right?

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So it's OK, but I want to I want to try to to move the needle here over time.

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And one of the things that I intend to do with this is like I take a guitar now,

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bass lessons once a week.

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And that has typically been on Fridays because Fridays were my quieter days.

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I want to change that to Wednesdays.

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And yes, technically that's like an obligation, but it's not a work obligation.

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It's a fun obligation and that being on the calendar means that I got to work around that.

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So just having that, you know, on the calendar now, things like this in the future,

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Wednesday is not an option for stuff like this, as long as that container is there,

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like it's going to get filled because right now I've just got too much to do it,

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not have time to do it in.

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But if I start protecting that time for fun stuff,

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I think I can I can pull this off at least half the day.

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That would be nice.

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Maybe I do a little bit in the morning, but the guitar lesson at 10 AM is like the cut

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off, right?

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So if I've got some extra writing that I want to do early in the morning,

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I could I could do that.

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But then I've got that hard hard stop there.

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Another idea I've had with this is like the one on ones that I do with my kids,

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typically been doing those like Monday mornings.

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Well, if I could do those on Wednesday mornings, you know, now even that extra

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writing isn't an option.

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So I'm forcing myself to like go have fun and then go to a guitar lesson.

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And then at that point, you know, you're in the middle of your day.

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So I don't know, it'll take some some planning for sure.

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But I think it's I think it's possible.

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Fair enough.

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Let's jump into today.

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So today's book is the art of clear thinking by hasard Lee.

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And the tagline of this is a stealth fighter pilots timeless rules for making

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tough decisions.

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This is not to be confused with the art of clearly thinking, which I'm not

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really sure how the two would compare at this point.

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Maybe not very well, but in this particular case, this is coming from the

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world of Air Force, United States Air Force.

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There's a whole bunch of stories and such from that realm.

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But yeah, there's a lot of good things here.

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I struggled with a few things in it, of course, as always.

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But I'm curious, Mike, your initial thoughts, like we always do, what do you

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originally think of this?

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And do you kind of scoffed at me a little bit when I mentioned the title, given

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how close it is to the different book that we've done?

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So yeah, what were your initial thoughts?

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Oh, yeah, so the, the other book that we did was the art of thinking clearly by

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Rolf de Belly.

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I believe it was.

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Yeah.

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So the art of clear thinking, this just sounds like a dumbed down version of

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that book.

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And I was like, really pick a better title.

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I was skeptical about this one at first because the title sounded very

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similar to the other one that we had read, which I don't know.

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I mean, it's not a huge deal, but I feel like if you write a book in this space,

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you've heard of the art of thinking clearly.

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And it just shows a lack of imagination.

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Right.

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And then you've got this is basically a, how do I put this?

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It almost appeared like a, like a discipline style book.

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Allah, Jocko, willing, right?

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So I was, I had very clear, like extreme ownership vibes to me at the beginning,

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just with the Air Force instead of the instead of seals.

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Instead of the seals.

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Yeah.

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And the beginning story is talking about all of the, the Gs that he was under and

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the crazy maneuvers and stuff like that.

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Like it followed the right at the beginning.

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Anyways, it felt like it was following the, the extreme ownership playbook.

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Um, I think that was unfair at the beginning just to, to be upfront here.

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Like my initial thought was, okay, so you're just cashing in on what Jocko did.

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But, uh, I think this is actually a good book.

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There's a lot of good stuff in here.

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And, uh, the further I went with it, the more, uh, that initial impression that I

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had was, uh, dismantled.

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Yeah.

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I think that's fair.

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I think as we dive into this, uh, there's a lot of story to this.

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And I know I've already got a handful of these stories mixed up in my head.

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So apologies before we ever get started here, but in the introduction to this,

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he does, like you were saying he talks about, uh, his, his experience in the F 16.

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And again, this is going to pull heavily from all the.

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Air force world, uh, and just as background, some of my interest in choosing this book is the

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fact that I tried to get into the air force way back in the day, but have some health

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things like I've got scoliosis in my spine.

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So I've got a curve in my spine.

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So I'm not actually eligible for anything military and all the physicals rule me out

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because of that.

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So that was actually the reason that I didn't get into, uh, the air force originally.

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And.

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So, so I have a very strong interest in anything flying as a result of going way

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back and having wanted to get into it.

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So that said, like these stories, of course, resonate with me, talking about the F 16 and

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then the F 35.

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So like these are all planes that I could tell you a lot about them just because.

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I have a strong interest in them, but in the introduction, he, he, he shows us in

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uh, starts us off with, uh, this ACE helix that this was like my first, like, wait a

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second, this, this actually work out scenario because he, so ACE refers to assess, choose

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and execute.

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And he tells us that he has these three sections of the book.

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So he refers to the three sections of the book.

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He's organizing into these three sections, assess, choose and execute.

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But whenever I look at the table of contents and float through all the chapters, it's

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not organized that way.

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Yeah.

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And the mathematicalness of this book and the orderliness of it, just like the fact

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that that doesn't connect.

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Wait, what?

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No, you didn't.

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So unless I sorely missed something, he doesn't actually follow that.

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It's definitely in there.

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Like it's definitely something he talks about, but it's not actually organized that

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way, even though it appears he intended it to be.

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I'm not sure what happened there.

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I just don't see it.

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Maybe I completely missed something.

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Did you catch it?

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No, I didn't catch that.

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He said it was going to be broken up into three parts.

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Uh, I do remember the ACE helix, assess, choose, execute.

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And that does surface throughout the rest of the, the book in different ways.

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And I did think it was kind of weird that the first chapter is called assess.

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And then the rest of them are all different.

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There is no choose or execute chapter.

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So maybe because I know a little bit about the book proposal process, you

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typically have to write like the first chapter.

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So maybe the introduction in the first chapter, like the table, a

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initial table of contents was written and submitted to the, the editor.

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And then they said, no, we're going to pivot.

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But everyone back and fixed it possible.

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Still kind of weird, but to be honest, it didn't really bother me.

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And until you pointed it out.

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Yes.

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It's true.

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Like here, here, I'll even read this to you.

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This is the sentence I'm referring to.

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Therefore I've organized the book into three sections, assess, choose, and execute.

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These sections form the pillars for how we make decisions as fighter pilots

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through a concept known as the ACE helix.

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I'm like, but it's not organized into three sections.

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Anyway, that's me being a snot.

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Um, that was the thing like, okay, he's introducing this ACE helix.

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And it's something that, well, let me, let me back up.

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The helix part of it is because they graph at according to time.

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So then you've got those three pieces that then end up being graphed according to

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him.

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He didn't actually show it because I like, I still have a little bit of a

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hard time picturing what he's talking about because he's referring to like second

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and third order effects over time.

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So I get kind of how he gets there, but I kind of wish he'd put in a, an image

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of some sort to help explain that.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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That's, that's fair.

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Also, I had no idea you wanted to be a fighter pilot.

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That's fascinating.

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Yeah.

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I grew up fairly close to a white men Air Force base, which had some of the

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stealth planes there on site for a while.

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So they were actively hunting down people to learn to fly them whenever I was in

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high school.

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And I had, I'd been around seeing these fighter jets going over our fields on the

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farm regularly. And as a result, I got, it kind of became enamored with flying in

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general.

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So there you go.

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Well, the day that we were originally going to record this happened to be during

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the EA flying.

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Are you familiar with, with that?

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No, I don't know that one.

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Okay.

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So EA is experimental aircraft association, but they have a big fly in in

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Oshkosh, Wisconsin, which is where I grew up, about 30 minutes from where

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we live.

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So we actually went on Tuesday.

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Oshkosh is a town of maybe 60,000 people, 70,000 people.

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It's not big, but during that week, when they have this fly in, people will

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literally fly their planes from all over the world.

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And there will be over a million people that will go through the gates.

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So for that week, they have a big sign they put on the control tower, busiest

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control tower in the world.

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And they always have like a bunch of classic warbirds.

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They have the ultra lights, like everything you can think of.

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All the major airlines have their big temporary structures that they can bring

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their VIPs to and they have a big air show a couple times a day.

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But I remember growing up as a kid, we would go there because it was in town.

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We would just go in the evening when no one was around and just walk around.

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And there were always like the stealth planes.

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I remember seeing the stealth bomb or the SR-71, the Concorde came one day.

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Like, so those types of planes are typically there in like the main corridor,

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you know, and they'll have, they'll be part of the air show every day.

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So you should definitely come check that out sometime.

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Yeah, absolutely.

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People in Oshkosh will rent out their houses to people from all over the world.

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I have a friend who grew up in Oshkosh.

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They always rented their house out to this family from Australia.

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So they just kind of had this like this handshake deal.

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They would, they would rent it out long before Airbnb, like every single year.

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They were the family that stayed there.

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But yeah, it's a, it's a big thing.

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And then when I was at Mackstock, I was talking to the guys that were part of,

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that are part of Mack Ikeab were there.

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So Dave Hamilton and John F. Braun.

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Pilot Pete was there.

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So I was talking to Pilot Pete and asked him if he was going to the EA,

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because that was the week after.

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He's like, no, not this year.

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He's like, but I remember back in the nineties, I threw, I flew the hairier there.

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Of course.

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Of course.

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Yeah.

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So if you were interested in that kind of stuff, like that's, that's the place to be.

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They have all these cool activities for the kids, like cool activities.

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It's all free, but you, they have like a whole big hangar

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where you can go through and you can put the rivets in the sheet metal,

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like to build the airplane wings and you can, I don't know, but all of the activities

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take like 60, 90 minutes, you know, but they give you a whole bunch of stuff at the end.

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And yeah, it's for people who are really serious about aviation.

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It's kind of lost on us.

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My kids are like, ooh, planes.

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No, we took two of our kids to the Eau Claire air show a handful of years ago.

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And then of course, where I was at in Missouri, they had air shows occasionally.

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I know that I didn't get to go in it, but they had an SR 71 on site at one point.

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I believe that one was still in service at the time.

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If memory serves, which I'm not guaranteeing that at all, but because, you know, being a kid,

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trying to remember what they told me about the plane at the time is probably not reliable at this point.

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But yeah, anyway, super fascinated by all these things.

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I don't know specifically.

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I have nobody in well, I shouldn't say that my namesake.

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I have a great, great uncle who served in World War two.

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And he was the rear gunner on one of the planes.

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It was a dauntless, be Douglas plane that he was the rear gunner on.

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And that's the family member that I was named after.

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So maybe that's where that comes from, but I didn't really learn that until I was in late high school.

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So anyway, one last E a tidbit.

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I remember to this book, you know, the author talks about his experience flying the F 16 and then the upgraded electronics and all that of the F 35.

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Yeah, the F 35 was a ridiculous machine.

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So I remember being at the E a flying when the F 35 was kind of pre production.

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It was like the first time I'd ever been unveiled and they were talking about all the fancy features of it.

00:23:01

And I don't remember any of the specifics, but he talks about that transition and it was kind of cool because I remember that period.

00:23:10

I remember being at the E and them talking about that.

00:23:12

So I had a little bit of a frame of reference for that.

00:23:14

Sure.

00:23:16

I just know that the helmet for the pilots and the F 35 is worth more than my house.

00:23:22

I remember that.

00:23:25

That much I know.

00:23:28

All right, let's dive into the book because I feel like we could talk about this for a while.

00:23:33

Not I didn't realize that, but chapter one is called assess.

00:23:37

This is where I thought we were going to begin the first of three parts and then we didn't get there, but assess.

00:23:45

He has a story at the beginning and he has a pretty good way of starting the book off with this, which is just basically there's a plane that

00:23:54

disappeared over the ocean and it landed in the ocean, like it crashed into the ocean and they never were able to recover the plane.

00:24:04

And if you know anything about aviation, there's the black box, black boxes that they want to recover and then that helps them determine what happened.

00:24:14

And it's a big deal in the world of aviation to figure out what happened so that way they can, you know, people who fly, they can learn from their mistakes.

00:24:23

And then the industry can continue to get safer and more advanced and they couldn't recover this.

00:24:28

So they had all sorts of suspicions, I guess, about what exactly happened and then eventually they did recover it and it was completely different.

00:24:37

It was all basically inexperienced.

00:24:40

They could have stopped it, but didn't could have stopped the crash, but didn't.

00:24:45

The moral of the story being, you know, be able to take a step back and evaluate the situation using experience and all of the information because in the case of this flight crashing, there were three different pilots, none of which had all of the information.

00:25:01

One was inexperienced enough to actually cause the problem.

00:25:04

So step back, evaluate the situation.

00:25:09

This was interesting because I think this was the only civilian story that he told.

00:25:15

Oh, that's true.

00:25:18

I hadn't connected that.

00:25:19

And it's the first chapter book, which is a stealth fighter pilots timeless rules for making tough decisions.

00:25:26

Like it was a really good story and it's told really well.

00:25:31

I had not heard that story before, but specifically when they were sharing the details of the black box, it's all like human error, like you were saying.

00:25:43

And it's also kind of stands in contrast.

00:25:47

It's interesting because one of the things that I jotted down from the introduction was this fact that he shared that the US hasn't lost a fighter pilot in air to air fighting since April 15, 1953.

00:25:56

So that's a long time without these sticks.

00:26:01

How long is that?

00:26:02

Is that 70 years at this point?

00:26:04

What was the year?

00:26:05

1953.

00:26:06

53.

00:26:08

Yeah, so it'd be 70.

00:26:10

Yeah, 70 years.

00:26:11

That's impressive.

00:26:13

Right.

00:26:13

And then there's this civilian flight, which I know that the civilian flights have a pretty long track record of no crashes now to, at least for a lot of the major airlines.

00:26:27

It feels like you used to hear about that stuff more frequently.

00:26:30

And so that's evidence of these checklists and these frameworks actually helping with this, this sort of stuff.

00:26:36

The thing that stood out to me from this first chapter was the fact that old bad pilots don't exist because mistakes are fatal.

00:26:49

For whatever reason, that really hit home.

00:26:51

And it got me thinking, yeah, I mean, that's that's true.

00:26:55

You have to be excellent in what you do.

00:26:57

And what if the stakes were that high for me with excellence in the different areas where I have to perform, quote unquote, I'm kind of glad that they're not.

00:27:11

But it challenges me to get a little bit better and to have a little bit more discipline.

00:27:19

That's not exactly what he's talking about in this book, but just spent something I've been thinking about a lot lately.

00:27:26

Cal Newport actually has a pretty great podcast where he's been sharing his thoughts on this deep life stack that he's talking about.

00:27:33

And the very base level is discipline and basically doesn't matter where you are at whatever point in your life.

00:27:40

The next step towards a better life, a deeper life is to enact another discipline.

00:27:47

And so you kind of go up the stack and then you reevaluate, you come back to the bottom and you create more disciplines.

00:27:52

And that's the thing that creates the excellence that he's talking about here too.

00:27:58

The other thing I liked was the inserting the space between the impulse and the response and the way that they do this in the F 16 is they have this rule before you make a decision.

00:28:11

And then you can wind the clock. There's this little analog clock, which there's no reason for it to be there.

00:28:17

But it's kind of muscle memory at this point that when they feel like they have to make a decision, they insert that time by winding the clock.

00:28:26

Just the fact that they have to reach out and turn the dial, basically that creates a little bit of space. It doesn't actually do anything.

00:28:35

But it helps them to make better decisions. And I don't have a clock that I'm going to wind, but it has me thinking about what's my version of that?

00:28:44

What can I do as like a default response so I don't respond emotionally?

00:28:50

You know, there's been an end to kind of piggyback on that. There are people who talk about the space you need to make a decision, like the bigger the decision, the bigger the space you sometimes need to make that decision.

00:29:05

I have heard of, I don't have an interest in doing this, but I have heard of people setting reminders on their phone because like some of these decisions we're talking about, they're big enough. It's like multiple days or weeks that you need to wait before you make a call on something.

00:29:18

And they'll set the reminder or the timer so that like they're not allowed to make that decision until that goes off.

00:29:27

And it forces the time period before you make that call. Like I could totally see doing something like that. I am not disciplined enough to actually do that reliably.

00:29:38

So it would not become muscle memory and be a positive. It would just be like, "I should do this again."

00:29:44

And I don't foresee that working in my scenario, but it does make sense. It does seem to be a big deal, especially if you're flying a plane.

00:29:54

Yep. So let's go on to the next one, which is called power laws. And it's at this point. So like now he's not following the ace line immediately. Chapter two, we're already kind of off.

00:30:07

He does reference it towards the end of the chapter, but it's at this point, like I feel like he's starting the process of explaining how to assess things or like what is it you're going to use to get to that decision later.

00:30:21

Like somewhere in this case, the laws that are at play in that. And some of these laws, I'm just going to kind of cycle through these quickly because I feel like the actual laws he refers to are the parts that I found especially helpful for me anyway.

00:30:37

One of those is the concept of exponential growth. Like things can accelerate as you go through them. The other was diminishing returns. The further you get along with something, the less return you get from it.

00:30:50

The concept of a long tail, people talk about that. Like you have the peak of the most common thing. And as you get to more and more niche, the less there are people in that.

00:31:00

So getting to the long tail side of it. And then he refers to things like tipping points. The one of these three that I found was the most interesting to me is that of exponential growth.

00:31:12

Some of that might just be because I like sound, like running sound for things. Not everybody realizes this, but if you see like the faders on a sound board, that's an exponential scale, or it's technically it's logarithmic.

00:31:25

But the scale on that, like if I had the fader and it was like say a third of the way up from the bottom, if I were to move at a quarter of an inch, that's like increasing or decreasing the volume by about 10 or 12 decibels.

00:31:41

But if that fader is towards the top third and I move at a quarter inch, it may only increase it by about one to one and a half decibels.

00:31:50

So like it's not actually linear when you get through that scale. So like that concept, I totally get. It's definitely different depending on what we're where you're going to hold a bunch of reasons for that on the fader. Not going to go into that now.

00:32:03

But these concepts and these laws are the parts that you need to have embedded in your brain so that you can be better, better situated to make the decisions and to evaluate a situation.

00:32:15

Hopefully that makes sense.

00:32:17

Yeah, and you couple that with the fact that our minds are biased towards that linear thinking.

00:32:23

And one of the things I jotted down at the beginning of this chapter is that there's no problem so bad you can't make it worse.

00:32:30

Yes, I wrote that down too. It's a great call. I love that.

00:32:33

Yep, I'm going to remember that one. I really liked the story here about the college students who had developed the back rub algorithm.

00:32:43

I had never heard this story before. Were you familiar with this?

00:32:47

I had never heard it. No.

00:32:49

Okay, so back rub was a search engine algorithm basically. And by the way, this is like a tech story, but he did a pretty phenomenal job telling it as a fighter pilot.

00:33:03

I felt like he nailed it. He was talking about the history of excite.com and Yahoo! back in the day and how the search engine pages were like the destination pages and they had everything on there.

00:33:18

And then obviously Google kind of famously changed all that with just the search bar and the two buttons.

00:33:24

So back rub actually became Google. But at one point excite.com owned this space.

00:33:33

And the CEO of excite.com could have bought the algorithm for $750,000, which is nothing when you consider the fact that Google is now valued at $1.5 trillion.

00:33:49

And so sort of missed opportunity here because they were thinking the wrong way about this. They couldn't see where the industry was moving to.

00:34:03

It kind of reminded me the way this story was told of the innovators dilemma. Clayton Christensen, company after company after company that was, this was their business model.

00:34:17

And so this new thing was a threat to it, so they kind of dismissed it. After all, they are the market leader. They hold a firm position.

00:34:26

But I don't know exactly what that has to do with power loss other than I guess try to recognize that it doesn't take too long for your position to change for good or for bad with these power laws.

00:34:43

They can be used by you and they can be used against you.

00:34:47

When I first got into this chapter, I couldn't help but think of the 48 Laws of Power by Robert Green.

00:34:55

And I kind of wondered, okay, is that where he got the title for this? This goes back to, is he stealing some titling things or just not being original with it?

00:35:04

Like you were talking about earlier with even the title of the book. I kind of wondered about that. Maybe not. Maybe it's just a good way to explain it.

00:35:11

It's hard to come up with a different way of terming it. But I know that seeing some of these laws and seeing how they operate, I mean, it's helpful.

00:35:22

It tells you where you can and can't operate. I know who is it? Elon Musk has talked about how to innovate in the world of Tesla and how he uses like the laws of physics as the boundaries.

00:35:37

Like that's the only thing he can't cross. But anything leading up to that point is open game. Like to challenge the status quo.

00:35:48

So it kind of falls into that category. Like just because it's not been done doesn't necessarily mean it's out of play. We'll probably get into that one a little bit later.

00:35:59

Sure. So let's move on to learned lessons. So we've learned to assess. We know the laws of power that we have to abide by.

00:36:10

The next one is to learn lessons. And this is where he kind of gets into some of the F 35 pieces because it was such a different platform than the F 16 that he was used to.

00:36:24

And some of these lessons that he's learned that he shares with us are very interesting and at the same time kind of like expected.

00:36:36

So let me kind of read through these. The first is to adopt concepts over facts.

00:36:43

Make the training learner centered coaching is more effective than evaluating continually assess where technology can augment your training.

00:36:56

Utilize an apprenticeship model. There's one more set aside time to debrief. The last one of those is the one that I feel like I need to do more often because we do so many big events at our church that we oftentimes have

00:37:12

like a great big event which I had this past weekend. Maybe that's why I've been ill. And now I'm in the middle of another week that I somehow have to get through because not well.

00:37:23

And so we're in the middle of that and then I've got another one next week. So it's like three in a row within the span of two and a half weeks. We've got major events going on.

00:37:32

And trying to take the time to debrief each one is not something I typically try to do with my team. So just seeing that and being willing to adopt that as something that we're able to do regularly, I feel like that could help us get better over time.

00:37:49

But this is stuff he's learned from training fighter pilots.

00:37:54

Yeah, that debrief phase he kind of talks about the different parts of that. There's the reconstruction phase, the analysis phase, and then the instructional phase.

00:38:06

And I think that's a little bit too complex for me anyways. I'm not sure I want to follow a great big formula for that but I do absolutely think it's important to debrief.

00:38:23

I would reframe that I guess as reflect. And obviously I do this as part of like the personal retreat process.

00:38:32

But I think it's valuable even at the end of the day when you're considering, you know, what went well, what could have gone better, sort of a thing. What changes do you want to make.

00:38:45

But I don't know, this is just too formal for me, the reconstruction, the analysis and the instructional part. It probably works really well if you've got a group of people to have that framework that you go through.

00:38:58

But for an individual who is trying to make the most of this book that they read, I would say adopt the concept but maybe don't worry about the details.

00:39:07

The other thing that I really liked from this was the first one that you mentioned that the concepts over facts because learning is about being able to forecast the future.

00:39:17

And while the numbers and the terminology are quick to change, he says concepts evolve much more slowly.

00:39:25

I think this is a really powerful idea. And the reason that this resonated with me, I think, is that especially with like the generative AI stuff that's happening right now feels like it's changing so fast.

00:39:42

And it's impossible to stay "on top of all of that." But you can still learn from it by just kind of groking the basic concepts.

00:39:56

You don't have to use it for everything. You don't have to have mastered a specific generative AI. But I would argue you should have a general idea of how to use it.

00:40:06

And this was kind of evidence to me at MaxTock because there were some people who were curious about it. And then there were other people obviously who were like, "This is a bunch of garbage."

00:40:17

I'm like, "Well, let's maybe not dismiss it all that fast." And I feel like if you're focused on the numbers and the terminology, which feel like in the text space, it's easy to do that because the terminology is chat GPT.

00:40:35

Or the numbers are processor speeds or whatever. It's easy to focus on that and miss the big picture of what the technology allows us to do.

00:40:49

That's the conceptual part for me. And I feel like that is the big takeaway. And it's not really an action item per se, but it's a reminder.

00:41:03

Don't get so bogged down in the details of all this stuff, but constantly be asking, "What does this mean for me?"

00:41:15

I kind of think of the chat GPT AI stuff as ways to quickly summarize entire areas or entire technical expertise documents and the like.

00:41:30

Just because that's what it's doing is it's gathering a whole bunch of information from places and then it's trying to spit out the most common denominator amongst those.

00:41:40

If that's what it's doing, this is a way to summarize information. It's not necessarily to give you a specific point blank answers.

00:41:48

I've tried asking it questions about how do you make good technology decisions in a church and it has no idea what to tell you.

00:41:56

It'll give you somehow to use for how to set up a sound board or something along those lines. This is not helpful. It's not what I was asking.

00:42:04

But it's because that information is not really out there and it's summarizing it incorrectly.

00:42:09

It's good for certain things. I get how some people think it's complete garbage.

00:42:15

Why would we ever want this? I get that. I also get how people are a little bit afraid of it.

00:42:24

One side note here, one of the things people are a little bit concerned that it's going to start writing code for us and then developers are going to be out of a job.

00:42:33

As someone who has been a developer, I can tell you that that would require a manager or somebody higher up to very accurately tell it what it needs to do.

00:42:44

That is very impossible because the number of times that document has to get tweaked and re-tweaked and re-tweaked and then there's just an interpretation that has to happen and what did it get that done.

00:42:56

Good luck. It's not going to go well.

00:43:00

Cal Newport predicted this back in deep work with the people who were going to be successful in the new economy because one of the categories was the people who know how to maintain the machines.

00:43:10

That's really what asking a question in a right way is. It's figuring out how to write a prompt.

00:43:18

There's going to be different versions of this. The scenario that you described just to double-click on that for a second.

00:43:26

I tried this. It produced some garbage. This is garbage.

00:43:31

That person is not going to be the one who learns the lessons.

00:43:36

The other type of person is, "Oh my gosh, this is going to eat my job."

00:43:40

They're not going to learn any lessons either because they're going to avoid it at all costs.

00:43:45

It's the people who are curious about it and they're poking it around the edges just to see what it's capable of.

00:43:53

That's the thing that's going to provide the learning and ultimately the path forward.

00:44:00

I do want to clarify though that there are ways that writing code for you is possible in some very repetitive, very normalized ways at the moment.

00:44:11

There are ways to do this. It can get some base stuff.

00:44:15

When you're on the bleeding edge of trying to create something new, that's the area I'm referring to.

00:44:20

Just to clarify that. Okay, let's keep moving.

00:44:24

So, chapter 4, "Fast Forecasting."

00:44:27

This is an interesting concept to me because I don't feel like I've ever heard it called this.

00:44:33

I've always just thought of this as thinking fast, but that's essentially what we're talking about.

00:44:40

He refers to this in a way that says to ignore precision when you're trying to come up with a decision

00:44:49

or a forecast very quickly and try to focus more on models and general concepts.

00:44:56

One of the ways that he explains this is through trying to convert Celsius and Fahrenheit back and forth,

00:45:04

which I thought was fascinating.

00:45:07

I realize I do this a lot, especially in math stuff.

00:45:11

But there's the formula, the equation for converting Celsius into Fahrenheit, which is 5/9 of the degrees in Fahrenheit minus 32.

00:45:20

So, take the degree in Fahrenheit, subtract 32, multiply it by 9, divide it by 5. That's the process, right?

00:45:28

However, you can go through that process and be very precise with it, or there's some tricks on this that you can use to get roughly correct and get close enough.

00:45:40

He says he's got these five little hook areas that -40 degrees Fahrenheit is -40 degrees Celsius.

00:45:49

41 Fahrenheit is 4 degrees Celsius, and he's got these things, and those are the triggers.

00:45:54

So then, if you see something that's 45 degrees Fahrenheit, he has a reference point to know it's roughly 6 or 7 degrees Celsius.

00:46:01

He doesn't have to be exact, but it does get you close enough.

00:46:05

And in that case, it's close enough that you can make an accurate decision, because all you're trying to do in this case is get to the point where you can make that decision very quickly.

00:46:14

You're not trying to make it the most clear decision. You just have to know how to act and what comes next.

00:46:22

That concept, I don't think I've ever had it explained to me like that, so I really appreciated this particular chapter,

00:46:29

because I feel like something I do a lot without realizing it.

00:46:34

I tend to process lots of lots of lots of lots of information and take that and boil it down to something very small, and I tend to do that very quickly.

00:46:44

I can really can't tell you how that happens. Maybe it's just racecar brain going off, but I know that it's something I do a lot of.

00:46:51

Maybe that's the world of IT. Not sure what it is, but I can usually process a lot of things very quickly, and then I don't have to be exactly correct,

00:46:58

but I know that I can get somewhere close. Maybe that's why I like this chapter, because it's something I kind of already do,

00:47:04

and it makes me feel better about myself. That's just what I think. Anyway, I really liked it.

00:47:09

Yeah, this is the most compelling argument for mental models I've ever heard.

00:47:14

Exactly. He even uses that term in here.

00:47:17

Yeah. Shane Parrish, you should work with us hardly and have him write the new introduction.

00:47:23

Yes. I agree 100% with this. A couple of interesting facts from this that I liked.

00:47:33

A modern supercomputer takes 40 minutes to replicate one second of brain activity.

00:47:37

I don't know when this was written, and I don't know exactly how powerful that supercomputer is, but it kind of doesn't matter.

00:47:43

That is a large gap to overcome.

00:47:47

Will we ever get to the point where the computers can actually do that? I don't know.

00:47:52

Maybe it kind of feels like we're in that area of diminishing returns, and there's still occasional breakthroughs,

00:48:00

like Apple Silicon was a lot faster than the Intel chips that it replaced, but it's not 2,400 times faster.

00:48:11

Not percent times. That's insane.

00:48:17

It's cool, the whole idea of the second brain and externalizing your thinking.

00:48:23

Obviously, I'm a huge fan of Obsidian. I like the fact that you can visualize these sorts of connections,

00:48:28

and it's cool to use technology to do that kind of thing.

00:48:32

But ultimately, this is shining a light on the fact that nothing compares to the power of the organic gray matter between your ears.

00:48:40

That's a compelling argument to trust it.

00:48:44

Instead of going back and running all the numbers and doing all the collection of all the facts, because that's my default.

00:48:51

This chapter was something that is a great reminder for me.

00:48:56

Don't get bogged down in trying to figure everything out.

00:48:59

Whatever your gut is telling you, it's probably right.

00:49:02

Because I've been collecting these mental models, and this is kind of an important topic to me.

00:49:08

I haven't explicitly gone into it with the intention of I'm going to be able to fast forecast,

00:49:14

but I'm recognizing that this is the value of reading all of the books that we read.

00:49:20

The result of all the disciplines is that in the moment when you need all of that and you really can't logically connect all the dots,

00:49:29

you just got to trust your instincts that you've got better stuff to draw from,

00:49:34

and your brain is actually pretty good at picking the right thing to do there.

00:49:39

The other thing is that computers feel miserably at predicting when a pattern will change.

00:49:46

You can have a computer or a transformer model, right?

00:49:53

Look at the things that are already out there and synthesize or summarize those things,

00:49:58

but it has no idea what's coming next. It's not able to predict that kind of stuff.

00:50:04

I don't know if it'll ever get to that point. It kind of doesn't matter to me, to be honest.

00:50:09

And then the last thing, no decision is a decision and often the worst one.

00:50:15

I fall into this all the time.

00:50:18

Whenever I'm going to buy something, we've got to do some work in our house

00:50:23

and we've got to putting it in a bathroom in the basement.

00:50:27

Five kids, one tiny little bathroom means that bedtime routine is kind of crazy.

00:50:33

So we finally are putting in a bathroom in our basement and I had to pick out a shower curtain.

00:50:40

I go to Home Depot and I know exactly what the tile looks like.

00:50:44

I know exactly what the floor looks like, the wall, everything. Rachel's picked out all that stuff.

00:50:48

All I got to do is get a brushed nickel shower curtain.

00:50:52

I don't know which one to get.

00:50:55

[laughter]

00:50:57

I literally was looking online and I've got all these different options looking at Amazon,

00:51:01

looking at the Home Depot website, Lowe's, Menards, all the different places for hours.

00:51:05

And then I'm like, just go to the store and see whatever they have in stock.

00:51:09

Unfortunately, they had one.

00:51:12

So I got it.

00:51:13

It's the best.

00:51:14

And it works.

00:51:15

It is the best.

00:51:16

Yeah, it looks fine, you know, and forcing functions.

00:51:21

That's hilarious.

00:51:22

I love that.

00:51:24

I don't know.

00:51:25

This is like, here's an example from this past Sunday.

00:51:28

You know, we had an outdoor service.

00:51:30

I had a great big like LED screen that was there.

00:51:33

We were playing videos for some testimonies that were repeatedly playing.

00:51:38

And at one point, the video cut out.

00:51:43

We could still hear the audio coming through the PA, but the video cut out.

00:51:48

I was on my way back to the production room at the time when I saw it happen.

00:51:54

So I was like two seconds away from the room.

00:51:57

And I walked in.

00:51:59

I unplugged the video cable, which freaked out the guys that were back there and plugged

00:52:03

it back in and it came back up instantly.

00:52:05

So the video was only down for about four seconds.

00:52:08

And then it came back up, which most people when they see something like that just attribute

00:52:12

it to some weird glitch and they don't ever think about it.

00:52:15

Nobody even commented on it.

00:52:16

Most people didn't even notice it happened.

00:52:19

I noticed it right away, but the kicker here is like in less than two seconds from seeing

00:52:24

that I had it fixed.

00:52:26

But the trick was that I knew from stuff we had done previously that the output coming

00:52:33

to the screen was fine because we had just put cameras up on it.

00:52:38

So the video versus the cameras were two separate systems.

00:52:41

I knew that the cameras were fine, which told me it had to be on the computer that was

00:52:46

producing the videos, but they weren't coming into the production system, which told me

00:52:50

it had to be on the computer itself, knowing that the audio and video were coming out of

00:52:55

it separately.

00:52:56

I knew that unplugging the video side of it wasn't going to affect the audio, which was

00:52:58

the most important part.

00:53:00

So there's literally to me, there's no risk in unplugging that.

00:53:05

And that's the most likely problem.

00:53:07

But again, in two seconds, I knew that, and it's purely because one, it's experience

00:53:12

and two, it's the breakdown of here are the different components of what's at play, like

00:53:19

the model of how this structure works.

00:53:22

So then there's this one component that's not working correctly.

00:53:24

So that has to be where it needs to be.

00:53:26

But in order to summarize down to that level, you have to have a lot of background on the

00:53:32

system, which I think is some of what he's getting at.

00:53:34

And it's like, you have to have these mental models in play and understand the structures.

00:53:39

You don't have to understand the specific facts.

00:53:41

Like, I have no idea why it glitched.

00:53:43

Do I need to know why it glitched?

00:53:45

Do I need to calculate what the frame rate was of the video coming out of that system?

00:53:49

No, I don't care.

00:53:50

None of that matters.

00:53:51

The only thing that matters is that I didn't have a signal.

00:53:54

And in order to get a signal back, my best chance is, you know, the classic IT, let's

00:53:58

restart it.

00:54:00

That's it.

00:54:01

It's amazing how often that works.

00:54:03

Anyway, I liked this chapter.

00:54:05

Just there you go.

00:54:07

It's a good one.

00:54:10

The next one is called creativity.

00:54:12

I'm guessing you liked this one.

00:54:14

Just going to throw that little tidbit out there.

00:54:16

Do you like this chapter, Mike?

00:54:18

I did.

00:54:19

I like the quote on page 177.

00:54:24

Creativity is one of the few resources that can provide an exponential advantage to those

00:54:28

who are able to harness it.

00:54:32

And I like the definition of creativity, which is generating alternatives from which we can

00:54:37

assess expected value.

00:54:39

That kind of makes it seem like, oh, yeah, everybody should do this, which I think is

00:54:44

one of the limiting beliefs when it comes to creativity.

00:54:48

Creativity is simply connecting things in non-traditional ways.

00:54:53

It's not producing art using a specific medium, which is what a lot of people think of.

00:55:00

Oh, I'm an engineer.

00:55:01

Oh, I'm a lawyer.

00:55:02

I'm not creative.

00:55:03

Yes, you are.

00:55:04

Or at least you should be because it'll make you better at what you do.

00:55:07

Yeah.

00:55:09

This one, it's an interesting chapter.

00:55:12

And it has a lot of, like we've talked about creativity a lot on the show.

00:55:17

And there were a couple of the stories at the beginning, one of which was about, you know,

00:55:22

they needed to have a, I think it was a helicopter.

00:55:24

They needed it to have longer range.

00:55:27

And somebody, one of the more inexperienced pilots said something about, oh, if we just

00:55:32

drop a missile bank, we can put an external fuel tank on it and get the range we need.

00:55:39

It's like completely untested, never been done.

00:55:41

They did it work great, right?

00:55:43

So stuff like that is fascinating to me.

00:55:45

You got to have a little bit of outside the box thinking.

00:55:50

And there was also the one where a guy used old radios to sneak underneath of some, I'm

00:56:01

going to botch this badly, but they were shooting missiles towards radios.

00:56:05

The enemy was, and he used other radios and only turned his on and off at times in order

00:56:10

to confuse those missiles.

00:56:11

And it worked really well.

00:56:12

He still got shot down, but.

00:56:14

Yeah.

00:56:15

So that was where he needed to go.

00:56:17

That was, I think, an anti-aircraft system, but it was an older one.

00:56:22

And it took a long time to boot up.

00:56:27

And when it was online, basically, you're producing a radio signal so the enemy could

00:56:32

figure out where it is.

00:56:33

It's not supposed to be movable, but they packed it up and unpacked it so many times

00:56:38

that they figured out they could do it in so many hours.

00:56:41

So they actually did make it more mobile.

00:56:45

And as a result, they were able to shoot down this stealth plane that the US had, that they

00:56:50

figured was completely invisible.

00:56:53

There was no way anyone was going to be able to find it, let alone find it with this 1970s

00:56:59

Soviet era technology.

00:57:01

But that's exactly what happened because the guy got so good at using it and he knew how

00:57:05

to use it so well to circumvent the advantages that the US technology had.

00:57:13

Yeah.

00:57:14

And there's also, and just to put this book into a timeframe, this was released earlier

00:57:19

this year.

00:57:20

So this is a 2023 book.

00:57:22

And because he talks about the Russian invasion into Ukraine and how some of the Ukrainian

00:57:29

teenagers were using drones and turned them into cocktail bombers.

00:57:35

Like, how did you come up with that?

00:57:39

But that's just the process he's talking about.

00:57:41

It's like being willing to think outside the box and just make stuff happen.

00:57:46

Like when you have an in-game you're trying to accomplish, like that's when the creativity

00:57:50

can happen.

00:57:51

My dad and I joke all the time, him still being on the farm and the lead farmer there, that

00:57:56

farmers are like the best at inventing things just out of like invention due to necessity.

00:58:03

Like needing to get a job done, but in order to get the tool to do it, I got to drive an

00:58:08

hour and a half to get back to the shop and then come back to the field.

00:58:11

No, I'm going to make up some way to get the job done.

00:58:16

So it's just when you got something you have to get done and you don't have the resources

00:58:23

to do it the proper way you get real creative.

00:58:26

So yes.

00:58:27

Figure it out.

00:58:28

Really love this one.

00:58:29

Yeah, obviously this has got a military bias towards it.

00:58:33

The whole idea in this chapter is the effects based operations, which is creative decision

00:58:38

making that views the enemy as a system.

00:58:41

So I want to kind of take that concept and maybe make it more applicable.

00:58:49

So this is with a specific enemy that you are at war against, but obviously the parallel

00:58:58

here that is easy to draw is what Stephen Pressfield talks about as the resistance in

00:59:05

the war of art.

00:59:07

So I feel like there are ways to be more productive and more creative, even if you're not fighting

00:59:13

another actual person by embracing this concept because really all that book is is effects

00:59:20

based operations for overcoming the resistance.

00:59:25

And so again, no action item associated with this.

00:59:28

I'm not sure I have any action items to be honest, but I think this is a cool idea.

00:59:36

And it's really the system is producing the results that we're getting.

00:59:43

And if you're unhappy with the results that you are getting, then change your system.

00:59:48

A system has three parts.

00:59:49

It's got an input.

00:59:50

It's got a process.

00:59:51

It's got an output.

00:59:52

Right.

00:59:53

I know that we've read systems books that make it a little bit more complicated, but that's

00:59:56

essentially it.

00:59:58

So what is coming in?

01:00:00

What processes it following that produces the output?

01:00:03

It's easy to look at the output and be like, well, I should have done something else.

01:00:05

I should have made something else.

01:00:07

But that was the logical conclusion of the process of the inputs.

01:00:12

Like you can't blame the end result.

01:00:15

If you want a different end result, you either have to change the inputs or tweak the processes.

01:00:21

So this affects based operations to me.

01:00:23

This is kind of tweaking the processes.

01:00:26

What is tweaking the processes look like?

01:00:29

Basically all of the tactics that we have ever read in any of these books, all of the

01:00:34

quote unquote life hacks, right?

01:00:36

The tips and the tricks.

01:00:39

Go ahead and try those and see if they produce some sort of benefit to your creativity and

01:00:45

productivity workflows.

01:00:46

But recognize that whatever system, soup to nuts, that said book is professing that

01:00:54

we happen to read.

01:00:55

I'm not going to, well, I shouldn't say that so definitively, I guess, but 99% certainty.

01:01:02

I'm not going to take that whole system and then just follow that.

01:01:06

But I'm going to find pieces of it like, oh, hey, that's something that can help me overcome

01:01:11

this specific thing that I am struggling with, a lack of motivation, whatever.

01:01:16

So maybe the best example of this, by the way, if people really wanted to go nuts with this

01:01:23

concept would be all of the tactics that Jake, Nap and John Zorowski talk about in make time.

01:01:31

I feel like that's framed beautifully for this because it's like, here's a bunch of advice.

01:01:36

Try it, see what works.

01:01:38

This card, what doesn't.

01:01:39

Like that's really the goal here, but the effects based operations title for whatever

01:01:44

reason kind of help this solidify in my brain.

01:01:48

Yeah, and it seems like in the military world, it's made a huge difference in how they find

01:01:54

success.

01:01:55

So yeah, I don't know.

01:01:57

Really liked it.

01:01:58

Again, one of my favorite chapters.

01:02:00

Another good one is mental toughness.

01:02:03

Have you noticed we're not on the Ace Helix really much at all?

01:02:06

Just want to point that out.

01:02:08

Mental toughness.

01:02:12

He initially starts this off by talking a little bit about stress, at least near the

01:02:16

beginning he's talking about that.

01:02:18

But he has a portion near the end, right near the end of the chapter, we're talking about

01:02:23

five different pillars that were formalized into a syllabus that was then used in training

01:02:33

students for being fighter pilots.

01:02:36

And this was used as a way to help develop this mental toughness that he's referring

01:02:41

to.

01:02:42

Now, these are very long points.

01:02:43

I am not going to be able to read through this whole thing.

01:02:46

So I'm going to try to summarize these for you because we're not going to take that

01:02:49

amount of time for this.

01:02:50

The first one was that, and this is the classic, you don't rise to the level of your expectations,

01:02:56

but you fall to the level of your preparation.

01:02:58

This is the type of thing that we've heard before.

01:03:01

So the more you prepare, that's the level that you're going to fall to, not necessarily

01:03:05

the expectations you're trying to rise up to.

01:03:08

So that's the first one.

01:03:09

The second one is that it's a focused based training that they put these pilots through

01:03:15

and that your brains are incredibly powerful as his point, but that the thinking about

01:03:21

what's already happened or worrying about future events, you don't have control over.

01:03:24

Like that's not helpful.

01:03:26

So you need to focus only on the information and the stuff that you can control.

01:03:30

The number three is that you need to learn how to calm your body and mind during stressful

01:03:34

events.

01:03:35

Again, I was talking about the stress side of it.

01:03:37

They learned that whenever pilots or anybody is under stress, the mental clarity that they

01:03:42

have to make decisions is significantly impaired.

01:03:46

So being able to calm yourself down in order to make a good decision is super important.

01:03:52

They also, number four, they systematically build confidence.

01:03:56

You kind of see this in kids.

01:03:58

I initially thought of coaching little kids like in Pee Wee Sports and such where you

01:04:04

help them have success and maybe it's something very, very simple.

01:04:07

Like you kicked the ball.

01:04:08

I don't care that it went out of bounds, but you kicked the ball period.

01:04:12

And that's a way of building confidence and helping them get up to the point where now

01:04:16

they're kicking the ball into the goal.

01:04:19

So systematically building that confidence.

01:04:22

And then the last one, the fifth was basically visualization training, what they called chair

01:04:27

flying.

01:04:28

Basically, you're sitting and visualizing your way through the process of flying a jet

01:04:32

per what he's referring to.

01:04:35

But that practice is one that I know we've referred to quite a bit, visualizing things

01:04:41

before you go through it.

01:04:42

And we've read about how that has the same value as physically doing it for real.

01:04:49

So definitely something that could be incorporated.

01:04:53

But yeah, these are all the practices that they go through to help build mental toughness

01:04:57

into their pilots.

01:04:58

Yeah, a couple of things I want to touch on.

01:05:03

You don't rise to the level of your expectations, the fall level of your preparation.

01:05:07

But probably the most famous reframing of that is by James Clear.

01:05:13

At least in our world, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level

01:05:17

of your systems or habits.

01:05:21

And then you're talking about building confidence, especially in kids that resonates with me

01:05:26

because soccer starts this week.

01:05:29

I'm coaching the middle school soccer team.

01:05:32

And I never thought I would coach middle school soccer, but I've been doing it now for a couple

01:05:38

of years.

01:05:39

I've been the assistant coach.

01:05:40

This year I'm actually the head coach.

01:05:41

The previous head coach doesn't have a kid in the program anymore.

01:05:44

So the program's going to continue.

01:05:46

Someone needs to head coach.

01:05:47

Everyone's like, Michael, do it.

01:05:50

So I'm doing it.

01:05:52

But one of the things that is surprising to me is seeing that confidence develop like

01:05:59

that is incredibly rewarding.

01:06:01

I shouldn't say surprising, but it affects me in a positive way more exponentially more

01:06:07

than I thought it would.

01:06:10

There is really no better feeling than seeing a kid who, especially at the beginning of

01:06:18

the year, we're a home school team.

01:06:20

No one's really super serious about this.

01:06:23

We're not winning any championships, anything like that.

01:06:26

We had a good team last year.

01:06:27

We went undefeated, but it's not like you get an official trophy.

01:06:30

We won the conference or state champs or anything like that.

01:06:36

In high school they have these different tournaments and things that they do, but it's middle school.

01:06:40

So it's kind of like it doesn't really matter.

01:06:43

The thing that really matters is that people are growing and developing as people.

01:06:48

So you get these kids that come at the beginning and some of them have never played soccer

01:06:52

before.

01:06:53

We're working on basics, like passing, touches, all that kind of stuff.

01:07:00

And then by the end of the year, they can do something that they didn't think that they

01:07:04

could do.

01:07:06

And you see their eyes get real big.

01:07:08

It's like, "Wow, I surprised myself."

01:07:11

That's super, super cool.

01:07:15

The other thing I want to hit on here with the visualization training, I may have shared

01:07:19

this before, but with my background with the family business and emotional intelligence,

01:07:24

there was a study which is attributed to the University of Chicago where they had three

01:07:30

different groups of athletes.

01:07:33

And the first group practiced free throws every day for an hour for 30 days.

01:07:38

The second group didn't touch a basketball, but they practiced visualization, this chair

01:07:42

flying that he's talking about.

01:07:44

They pictured themselves making free throws for, I don't know, how long, 30 days in a row.

01:07:49

And then the third group did nothing.

01:07:51

And what they found was that the people who put in all that work to actually improve their

01:07:57

free throw shooting, they improved by like 18%.

01:08:00

But the group that didn't touch a basketball, they practiced visualization, they also improved

01:08:04

almost the same.

01:08:05

It was like 17%.

01:08:06

It was like 1% lower.

01:08:08

And they never touched a basketball.

01:08:10

Right?

01:08:11

So that's the power of the visualization.

01:08:13

If you can see yourself doing something, you can do it even if you don't really know how

01:08:17

to do it.

01:08:18

So obviously the best version of that is that you combine those two.

01:08:21

You practice physically, but also mentally.

01:08:26

And then the other thing here, this whole chapter is mental toughness, right?

01:08:29

So recognize when you're not in a spot to make these good decisions.

01:08:33

I feel like I've not been in a good spot to make good decisions lately, because I've

01:08:37

been fairly stressed.

01:08:38

But there's a line here.

01:08:39

He says, "You lose 20 IQ points the minute you put on the helmet."

01:08:44

So recognize that.

01:08:45

And then that's the whole point of the acelics and the systems and the frameworks and the

01:08:50

checklist is to kind of mitigate the fact that you're not at your peak.

01:08:56

Yeah, all of that is to build up that toughness he's referring to, which is just confidence,

01:09:02

I think, in being able to be decisive.

01:09:04

That seems to be what he's referring to, which is why he goes into this last chapter,

01:09:10

which is to prioritize and be decisive.

01:09:13

And this is where we get to dive into the Eisenhower Matrix, and he quotes Eisenhower's

01:09:21

famous saying, which I don't have in front of me, which is that what is urgent is seldom

01:09:28

important, but what is important is seldom urgent.

01:09:32

And he takes us through the four quadrants of the whole thing, and then how to make those

01:09:37

decisions.

01:09:39

And again, there's not really any rocket science to this.

01:09:44

No pun intended there.

01:09:46

But this is something that we have talked about, but it's really just trying to whittle

01:09:51

out all the unnecessary details and just focus on the ones that you have control over and

01:09:57

the ones that get you to a quick and accurate decision.

01:10:03

And that's effectively what he's saying here, but he does go through a lot of the Eisenhower

01:10:06

and D-Day stuff.

01:10:09

Here as well.

01:10:10

So yeah, very interesting.

01:10:13

So I obviously am familiar with the Eisenhower Matrix and I'm familiar with that quote that

01:10:21

you shared, but I feel like this story, this time had more detail than I had ever heard

01:10:29

before.

01:10:30

He's a really good storyteller.

01:10:33

And so he's actually talking through the historical events of Eisenhower and the other leaders

01:10:40

being in that secret location, except it's not so secret anymore.

01:10:46

And he kind of frames the story that way is like, there was this place and this is where

01:10:51

it is.

01:10:52

And then like this is what happened there, which was an interesting approach.

01:10:58

So I feel like if nothing else, this adds a little bit more color to the Eisenhower Matrix,

01:11:07

but I feel there's a couple other things he points out here that for some reason I'd

01:11:13

never heard this framed this way before.

01:11:16

So we've got the Eisenhower Matrix, the urgency and the importance.

01:11:20

And there's this quadrant for which is not important and not urgent.

01:11:24

That's the distractions, right?

01:11:26

We've heard that part before, but he calls out that that quadrant is different than leisure

01:11:33

time.

01:11:34

And the difference is that these are things that are not urgent and not important.

01:11:38

These are things that on that Matrix that would take from you, but leisure time actually

01:11:46

adds to you.

01:11:47

It recharges you.

01:11:49

And that's maybe if you think about it for any amount of time, that seems obvious.

01:11:55

But I like the fact that he called that out because I feel like you can look at this and

01:12:00

think, oh, all that fun stuff, that's not important.

01:12:03

It's not urgent.

01:12:04

I shouldn't do that.

01:12:06

And I think that's one of the mistakes that people make when it comes to productivity in

01:12:10

general, but time blocking specifically is like, well, I'm going to make use of every

01:12:14

single hour.

01:12:15

But if you try to make use of every single hour and you're constantly trying to be productive,

01:12:20

then you're going to burn out.

01:12:22

You need to schedule the fun stuff.

01:12:25

The minute that you start scheduling the fun stuff, it becomes a lot more achievable.

01:12:31

And then the other thing he points out here, which I recognize I got to listen to this,

01:12:36

don't go above 90% capacity.

01:12:38

I feel like I've been redlining for a while, but I also feel like there's not a whole lot

01:12:43

I can do about this at the moment.

01:12:46

So I'm not sure what to do with that other than to be aware of like, hey, you can't do

01:12:50

this forever.

01:12:52

Start trying to take your foot off the gas a little bit.

01:12:56

Yeah, I definitely resonate with the last comment you made there because for a few months

01:13:02

now I've been trying to learn to work through my tasks with focus and deliverance and not

01:13:10

necessarily speed.

01:13:13

So regularly I'm working through something, but I used to hustle through things all the

01:13:18

time.

01:13:20

And I've just found that the list is never done.

01:13:23

It doesn't matter if I have three things on it or 30 things on it.

01:13:27

There's always another one.

01:13:30

So I'm trying to get to where I'm just focusing on the one I need to do right now.

01:13:35

So depending on how I'm feeling when we're done with recording this, I need to go in

01:13:38

and work on putting some headsets together on the soundboard.

01:13:44

And that's the type of thing I could get done in the matter of minutes, but I'm probably

01:13:48

going to take 30 to 45 minutes on it because I want to dial things a lot more carefully.

01:13:54

And I know that my end product is significantly better.

01:13:56

But I set aside the time for that too.

01:13:59

I know that I could just go get that done and go right on to the next thing, but the

01:14:04

quality at the end is significantly better.

01:14:06

I'm in a spot where I have the luxury to do that.

01:14:09

I just need to clarify that.

01:14:10

So I don't have to have my foot on the gas right now, thankfully.

01:14:14

Now come Friday, I need to do that.

01:14:17

But to the floor, here we go.

01:14:21

But today we're not in that spot.

01:14:24

So that brings us to the afterward, which the only it is only a two page thing.

01:14:29

The only reason I put this in there because all he does is summarize the whole thing.

01:14:33

I simply found it fascinating that he ends the afterward with good luck.

01:14:39

Yeah, that's an interesting way to end this just good luck.

01:14:43

Okay.

01:14:44

I don't really know what I think of that other than just that's interesting.

01:14:48

I've not had an author give me all of this advice and show me how to do all these things

01:14:53

and then end it with good luck.

01:14:57

Usually there's some motivational thing, some go save the world or go change your life

01:15:03

or something like that.

01:15:04

Not good luck.

01:15:05

I just thought it was interesting.

01:15:07

I kind of like that.

01:15:09

I think that what that implicitly implies is that it's up to you to make the decisions

01:15:20

and create the outcomes.

01:15:23

And he can give you this framework and he can tell you all these stories and he can inspire

01:15:27

you, but ultimately you got to do it.

01:15:31

So this book is not short.

01:15:33

It's like just under 250 pages.

01:15:37

And this is the kind of thing that in other books, I feel like this could have gone on

01:15:42

for 10, 20 pages.

01:15:44

I got to tie a nice bow around all this stuff.

01:15:49

And that's just really making it longer.

01:15:52

This is a very succinct and it is maybe a little bit jarring when you compare it to

01:15:56

the format of some of the other books, but I feel this is definitely the right way to

01:16:00

end it.

01:16:01

Yeah, I liked it.

01:16:05

Any other thoughts before we talk about our long list of action items here?

01:16:09

Nope.

01:16:10

Okay.

01:16:11

So my list of action items is exactly zero, which is a little odd to me given some of

01:16:18

the practicality of some of this.

01:16:21

But I feel like that's because there's a lot of like mental training stuff here that's

01:16:26

involved, but I don't know.

01:16:28

Do you have any?

01:16:30

I do not.

01:16:31

I don't have anything from this.

01:16:34

I'm trying to even think of what the action items could be.

01:16:37

I guess something like implement the aclex for decision making.

01:16:42

There's lots of like little things, kind of aha moments, but there was never anything

01:16:49

tactical like this is what you should do in this particular situation, which is kind

01:16:54

of surprising.

01:16:55

I feel like the book is kind of set up for that kind of stuff.

01:16:58

So to get to the end and not have any feels a little bit weird.

01:17:03

It does.

01:17:04

I would agree with that.

01:17:05

The only thing I could potentially see doing is like the debrief piece that we talked

01:17:09

about early on, but even that sure.

01:17:12

I don't really want to adopt like the systematic approach that he has with that.

01:17:19

So I'm not going to put that down just because I feel like it would be more like a review

01:17:24

process and there's teams involved.

01:17:26

I don't know.

01:17:27

It seems like it's excessive to do that.

01:17:29

So I have no action items, which would then bring us to style and rating.

01:17:33

From a style stance, I have to say this is fascinating.

01:17:37

I love this because it's mostly story.

01:17:41

You okay with that, Mike?

01:17:42

It's like reminisce and affiction.

01:17:45

You okay?

01:17:46

Except it actually happened.

01:17:47

So it's all good.

01:17:48

Okay.

01:17:49

So if it's nonfiction, but just a story, you're okay with that.

01:17:52

All right.

01:17:53

Just just clarifying.

01:17:55

So what if it was a fiction story that you didn't know it was fiction?

01:17:59

What if someone told you it was nonfiction?

01:18:02

What about like historical fiction?

01:18:04

I don't know.

01:18:08

I guess try to trick me, see if you can pull it off.

01:18:12

But I have a feeling I'll be able to smell it out.

01:18:16

So anyway, as far as style goes, I love this.

01:18:22

Definitely uses a lot of story to help drive point home.

01:18:26

It's really hard to miss his point at times.

01:18:29

Sometimes we read these and it's like, how does that story play into that?

01:18:31

I didn't have that at all here.

01:18:34

So absolutely loved it.

01:18:36

I am a little thrown off by the Ace parts thing at the beginning and then that not existing.

01:18:44

It kind of feels like a bait and switch of sorts.

01:18:48

So I'm a little thrown off on that one.

01:18:50

Not really sure what he's doing there.

01:18:54

But anyway, as far as a rating goes, again, I really like the book.

01:18:59

But I don't feel like it's a 5.0 book, but I can pretty easily from my stance put it

01:19:06

at 4.5.

01:19:07

I say that partially knowing that my bias towards liking, you know, aerospace related

01:19:16

books is probably putting a bias on that rating because there's so much of this like, oh,

01:19:23

yeah, that's really cool.

01:19:24

So I got super excited about some of these stories.

01:19:27

So I know that there's some bias in that a little bit.

01:19:30

But regardless, as far as like the concepts go, I feel like if you're going to work on

01:19:35

trying to be better at making decisions and such, there's a lot in here that can help

01:19:39

you do that.

01:19:41

There's some frameworks you can use.

01:19:42

He doesn't tell you that this is the only way you've got to do it and you have to do these

01:19:45

things.

01:19:46

It is kind of laid out in a way that you can say here are the things that are possible.

01:19:52

Not those as you need.

01:19:54

He doesn't explicitly say that, but I definitely caught that vibe.

01:19:57

So anyway, all that to say, I'm putting it at 4.5.

01:20:01

All right.

01:20:03

Well, as I mentioned at the beginning, this book started off a little bit slow for me

01:20:10

because I felt like it was at the beginning a cookie cutter of extreme ownership by Jocko

01:20:18

will get the end of the book, I feel like that is an unfair assumption to make at the

01:20:24

beginning.

01:20:26

It is a little bit weird as you pointed out with the introduction in the first chapter

01:20:30

and then kind of abandoning the acylics for a long period of time.

01:20:34

But the content that's in here is really good.

01:20:37

Some of the ideas are really powerful.

01:20:41

The big tactical stuff, like the Eisenhower matrix, I feel like those are things that we

01:20:47

have heard before, but as you alluded to, he is a phenomenal storyteller.

01:20:52

And just to be clear, my thinking on stories specifically, I think this is really important.

01:20:58

I recognize that if I'm going to be a content creator, essentially, I have to become a good

01:21:03

storyteller, whether that is via writing or via podcast or via YouTube.

01:21:09

And it's something that I don't feel like I'm great at, but I'm trying to get better

01:21:12

at.

01:21:13

Another very brief side note, I worked for a short while with Aaron Beverly.

01:21:18

He was when I worked with him, the runner up for the World Championship of Public Speaking.

01:21:22

He's since won that competition.

01:21:26

And he told me at one point I should develop a story file.

01:21:29

So I've been trying to do that, like different stories that I could pull out in different

01:21:32

situations and have different versions of them.

01:21:34

So here's like the quick three bullet one.

01:21:37

Here's all the details for the longer ones and really those stories about what happened

01:21:44

to you.

01:21:45

That's what is fascinating to people.

01:21:48

And also is harder to argue with.

01:21:51

Rule number one, don't argue on the internet, right?

01:21:54

So I'm not going to debate facts or theology or anything like that, but I will share stories.

01:22:02

So I like that concept and hasadli is very good at it.

01:22:07

I like the book a lot.

01:22:11

I am surprised that got done with it and neither of us had any action items from it.

01:22:17

That feels a little bit weird.

01:22:18

I also feel like there's nothing really solid like I walk away from this.

01:22:22

And like I have these mind node summaries that I do like the mind maps and those are

01:22:27

available to the book or club members, but I also bring those into obsidian and I force

01:22:30

myself to write a three sentence summary of the book.

01:22:33

I have no idea how to summarize this book in three sentences.

01:22:38

There's no unifying thread throughout it in my opinion.

01:22:41

The ace he likes.

01:22:42

I feel like was supposed to be that, but it's not not super strong.

01:22:46

All that to say like what exactly is this?

01:22:48

The art of clear thinking, I don't know, it's not really a system.

01:22:51

It's not really a framework, even though there is one.

01:22:54

It's a bunch of really cool stories and some tactical stuff that you can use to make better

01:22:59

decisions.

01:23:01

But I don't think this is one of those books, I could be wrong, but I don't think it's

01:23:05

one of those books that I'll look back at and like, I'll insert how to read a book or

01:23:12

lots of other ones at this point that at the moment didn't seem like a necessarily a big

01:23:17

deal, but over time they've grown in value and I'm so thankful that I've read this one.

01:23:22

I don't foresee that being the case with this one.

01:23:25

So I think it's a good book.

01:23:26

I think it's an entertaining read.

01:23:27

I think the book or audience would enjoy picking this one up and going through it.

01:23:33

I think it's a pretty easy read.

01:23:35

Lots of stories again, but I'm going to rate it at 4.0.

01:23:40

I don't think it had quite the impact that I'm looking for in a 4.5 and I don't predict

01:23:50

that it's going to leave a lasting impact.

01:23:53

This is one that in the moment, as we're having this discussion.

01:23:57

I'm glad we went through it.

01:23:58

I'm glad I was able to talk through it with you, but I don't feel like this changed my

01:24:03

life in any significant way.

01:24:06

Awesome.

01:24:07

All right.

01:24:08

Let's shelf it.

01:24:09

What's next, Mike?

01:24:11

Next is Life Worth Living by Miraslav Volf, Matthew Grossman and Ryan McAnally-Linds.

01:24:19

I'm probably butchering those names, but these are three authors who I believe co-teach

01:24:28

a class called Life Worth Living.

01:24:31

I think at Yale, I've just started this book a couple days ago and I did not know that

01:24:38

this is basically a curriculum for a college class on figuring out lifestyle design sort

01:24:46

of stuff.

01:24:47

Good to know.

01:24:48

I'm not starting to yet.

01:24:49

It's actually a workbook that goes with it I saw on Amazon.

01:24:56

I don't have the workbook.

01:24:57

I don't think I'm going to go through the workbook.

01:25:00

This will be interesting because it's a pretty long book and there's a lot of reflection

01:25:05

questions at the end and you're supposed to wrestle through those.

01:25:08

I think we'll kind of naturally do that a little bit as we go, but obviously the Book

01:25:12

Worn format, we're going to finish this in a couple of weeks.

01:25:16

I don't know, going through it a little bit faster than intended may have consequences.

01:25:22

I guess we'll see when we sit down to discuss it.

01:25:25

Yeah.

01:25:26

Well, after that, I want to go through The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Mark Schmitz.

01:25:32

Not Mike Schmitz.

01:25:34

Mark Schmitz.

01:25:35

This was a Book Worn Club recommendation that I was cycling through those this morning.

01:25:40

It's like, hmm, or no, it was last night.

01:25:41

It's like, hmm, which one of these is most interesting to me and that one is it?

01:25:45

Well, super excited to go through that mostly because it's Mark Schmitz.

01:25:51

So we're going to put Mike's reputation on the line by somebody he doesn't know.

01:25:55

Oh boy.

01:25:57

How about gap books, Mike?

01:26:02

I do not have any gap books.

01:26:03

I mean, I have a stack of gap books that I would like to get to at some point, but it

01:26:06

hasn't happened yet.

01:26:07

Yeah.

01:26:08

Yeah, I don't either given the craziness of the last two weeks and the upcoming week

01:26:13

or so, not happening.

01:26:16

Well that all said, big thanks to those of you who have joined us live.

01:26:21

And for those of you also who make recommendations in the club, we definitely do go through those.

01:26:26

And I think at this point, we're probably covering about half of the recommendations

01:26:29

that are in the club.

01:26:31

So if you have a book you want us to cover, go to club.bookworm.fm and join that community,

01:26:38

just completely free.

01:26:40

And make a recommendation.

01:26:41

We definitely go through those and pick from that regularly.

01:26:46

But while you're there, the other thing you can do is you can join the Bookworm Pro membership,

01:26:52

which is paid, but it gets you access to a number of things.

01:26:57

Mike's Mind Node files, his Mind Map City builds for the books.

01:27:02

You get access to the bootleg version of the podcast, which is released immediately after

01:27:10

recording, and has all the pre and post conversations on it.

01:27:15

You also get the pro subscription to the podcast as well, which is the ad free version.

01:27:20

So we'd love to have you on that.

01:27:23

Helps keep the lights on here at Bookworm.

01:27:25

And in order to join that, you can go to bookworm.fm/pro and that'll get you to the place you need

01:27:31

to go.

01:27:32

All right.

01:27:34

You are reading along with us.

01:27:36

up life worth living and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.