Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

This episode of Bookworm is sponsored by Factor Meals,

00:00:03

America's number one ready to eat meal kit.

00:00:05

Go to factormeals.com/bookworm50

00:00:09

and use the code Bookworm50 to get 50% off.

00:00:13

All right, so we have no follow up

00:00:15

from the last episode.

00:00:18

So I think I'm going to utilize this time

00:00:22

at the beginning of this episode

00:00:25

to talk to you, Joe Buellig, about properties in obsidian.

00:00:29

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

00:00:32

I got it right there.

00:00:35

This is interesting.

00:00:36

So I told Mike right before we hit record,

00:00:38

I've seen the emails and I've seen the announcement

00:00:41

that this is a thing.

00:00:43

But I haven't had a chance to read them all.

00:00:45

I've just got done running a big conference

00:00:47

the last three days, four days, and trying

00:00:52

to get caught up on all the things.

00:00:53

And this is one of the pieces that I've not had a chance

00:00:56

to read up on.

00:00:56

So please enlighten me, Mike, what in the world

00:01:00

are obsidian properties?

00:01:01

Well, before I get into that, I'll just say that

00:01:04

if you were not aware, there are chapter markers

00:01:06

in these podcast episodes.

00:01:09

So if you don't care at all about obsidian,

00:01:10

you may want to skip the rest of this chapter

00:01:12

and just go straight to the book.

00:01:14

(laughs)

00:01:16

But obsidian properties are kind of a big deal, I think.

00:01:20

They add essentially database properties

00:01:25

a lot like at the top of a Notion document to obsidian.

00:01:30

And there's different types of data that can be used there,

00:01:34

obviously dates and checkboxes and list items.

00:01:39

But what's really cool about it is that it creates

00:01:43

a visual interface for the document level metadata

00:01:47

that was a little bit hard for people who were new to it.

00:01:52

If you really dug into it and figured out

00:01:54

the yaml stuff with the three dashes

00:01:57

and then you could put in the tags colon

00:01:58

and then document level tags and things like that,

00:02:02

you could figure it out, you could hack it together.

00:02:05

But this makes it a lot easier, a lot more visual.

00:02:10

I'm not sure if you've seen any screenshots of it,

00:02:12

but it's basically like these fields

00:02:14

at the top of the document.

00:02:15

It looks very much like a Notion document,

00:02:19

except the properties can also be moved to the sidebar

00:02:23

so you can put them exactly where you want them

00:02:26

and not have them clutter up your document

00:02:29

or your note at all.

00:02:30

The big thing I think that is cool about it though

00:02:33

is it makes the application of metadata

00:02:37

a lot more approachable for the average person.

00:02:41

You don't have to be a total plain text nerd

00:02:43

in order to leverage this stuff anymore,

00:02:46

which I think is kind of cool.

00:02:48

- What's wrong with being a plain text nerd?

00:02:50

- Nothing, but most people are not gonna do it.

00:02:52

(laughs)

00:02:54

So, okay, this is really good for me

00:02:57

'cause I have seen many, many different ways

00:03:00

of trying to handle document level metadata,

00:03:04

things like tagging your daily notes

00:03:08

or in my case, tagging bookworm notes and such,

00:03:12

that way I can easily pull them together.

00:03:15

Is that the idea behind this?

00:03:16

But that's specifically referring to tags.

00:03:20

I suppose if you were using different notes

00:03:22

as like information about a plant

00:03:25

and you've got a whole bunch of different types of plants

00:03:27

and you wanted to put perennial versus annual

00:03:30

and have a checkbox for one or the other at the top

00:03:32

and you could pull those together.

00:03:33

Is that kind of the concept here?

00:03:35

- Kinda, so, (laughs)

00:03:39

I'll give you an example.

00:03:41

This does not exist yet,

00:03:43

but as I've been playing with properties,

00:03:45

this is what I'm going to do.

00:03:47

I am going to create a note in my obsidian vault

00:03:51

for each of my fountain pens.

00:03:54

And in the properties, you can put things like,

00:03:57

this is the ink that's in there

00:03:59

and this is when it was inked

00:04:00

and this is when it was last cleaned

00:04:03

and this is the nib size.

00:04:05

And obviously those are all metadata,

00:04:08

so then you use something like DataView

00:04:10

and you can sort all that stuff.

00:04:12

One of the things that I was doing with YAML

00:04:15

back in the day was creating notes

00:04:16

for each of the Bookworm episodes

00:04:18

and I would have my rating and your rating

00:04:20

and then a DataView table for all of the files

00:04:22

that were in the Bookworm folder

00:04:24

and then I could ascend it or descend it

00:04:25

by Mike's rating or Joe's rating.

00:04:28

The Bookworm stats page has basically eliminated

00:04:32

the need to do a lot of that, (laughs)

00:04:33

which is really cool.

00:04:34

Thanks, Joshua, for putting that together.

00:04:36

So, yeah, there's lots of cool stuff you can do

00:04:39

with DataView but now you can do it visually.

00:04:44

You can, once you the properties are in your,

00:04:47

your Obsidian Vault, you can say,

00:04:48

"I want this property here."

00:04:49

And then you just select the values,

00:04:51

you can auto-complete, so it's not just putting

00:04:53

in the plain text and hoping you got the incantation right.

00:04:56

(laughs)

00:04:58

- That sounds so, I mentioned the plant thing

00:05:00

'cause that sounds similar, your fountain pen thing

00:05:02

sounds similar to what I do in,

00:05:05

I've got a perennial flower herb medicinal garden

00:05:10

of sorts that I have at our house

00:05:12

and when I put together the garden

00:05:15

of what I'm gonna have in that for that year,

00:05:17

I have notes for each of the types of plants

00:05:20

that I have in that garden,

00:05:21

but I have a lot of things like aliases for the type,

00:05:25

so then I've got like the scientific name for it,

00:05:27

what type it is as an herb, a flower, a vegetable,

00:05:30

et cetera, et cetera.

00:05:31

Is it an annual perennial?

00:05:33

How deep to plant it?

00:05:34

How early you need to start it?

00:05:35

I've got all that stuff as currently,

00:05:39

it's just in data fields to use through data view,

00:05:43

like that's how I currently do that.

00:05:45

It sounds like this is a specifically built

00:05:50

to purpose thing that would handle that,

00:05:52

my catching on.

00:05:54

- Yeah, basically, I don't know,

00:05:57

I mean, a lot of people can use Obsidian

00:05:59

without any sort of metadata whatsoever.

00:06:03

- But it's no fun.

00:06:04

- Yeah, I know, but I feel like

00:06:05

I haven't been doing it very well.

00:06:08

I feel like this gives people the foundation

00:06:10

that they need to actually make their metadata useful.

00:06:14

So I am considering a lot of really interesting ways

00:06:17

to use this, don't have it all figured out yet.

00:06:21

By the way, if anyone has recommendations

00:06:24

for books on how to structure metadata,

00:06:28

I would love to hear your recommendations

00:06:32

'cause I went searching spelunking, shall we say,

00:06:36

for books on how to structure metadata

00:06:38

for digital collections and something along those lines.

00:06:42

There is a handful of textbooks

00:06:44

that are all like $100 each,

00:06:45

and they have like six ratings,

00:06:48

and I'm not gonna drop a hundred bucks

00:06:51

on what looks like a textbook

00:06:53

without knowing that it's really, really good.

00:06:55

- Yeah.

00:06:56

- I've been in the Obsidian Forum

00:06:57

and other people have asked this question too,

00:06:59

and I have not found anything that looks approachable.

00:07:04

I want to do some research here

00:07:07

and eventually condense this down

00:07:10

into you're just getting started with Obsidian properties.

00:07:13

Here's how you use it in different practical ways

00:07:17

that aren't gonna mess up your vault down the road.

00:07:19

But as it pertains to metadata,

00:07:23

I feel like it's all just kinda trial and error.

00:07:25

You figure out what mistakes to avoid by making them,

00:07:30

and then you have to go back and clean them all up,

00:07:33

and I wanna not have to do that.

00:07:36

Or at least I wanna save other people

00:07:37

from having to do that.

00:07:38

So.

00:07:40

- This is, so this is why I went down the road

00:07:44

of like the text file process for a long time,

00:07:48

and borderline still do,

00:07:51

and this concept of properties,

00:07:54

like this is one of the first things

00:07:55

I'm starting to come to grips with,

00:07:56

because this now gets you into the proprietary side of it,

00:08:01

somewhat, it doesn't have to be.

00:08:04

I'd be curious to see what those properties

00:08:06

look like in a text file,

00:08:07

like the raw text view of that.

00:08:12

But that gets to be the tricky part with it is like,

00:08:15

okay, how do you transport that to another tool?

00:08:18

'Cause it's forever been a thing that they talk about.

00:08:21

The more you get into the plugins

00:08:23

and the special ways of using it,

00:08:26

the less flexible you can be,

00:08:29

and the less portable it becomes.

00:08:31

So like that can easily be a hang up for some people.

00:08:35

Not necessarily for me in my case,

00:08:37

'cause I know like I can write the scripts

00:08:38

and fix all the things very quickly,

00:08:41

but I also tend to not use some stuff like this

00:08:45

just because it does take a lot of work to fix it

00:08:48

if you change your mind on how you wanna do it.

00:08:50

No, as time has gone by,

00:08:52

I've kind of started using it more and more knowing

00:08:56

that like the difficulty for me to write a script

00:08:59

and fix it is actually very, very low.

00:09:02

So it's very easy for me to fix them.

00:09:04

So I'm more likely to try using it to begin with.

00:09:07

But that said, it's just a thing

00:09:10

I feel like people should be aware of.

00:09:12

- Well, it's all still the yaml formatting.

00:09:16

It's just now you can see it visually.

00:09:18

It takes that yaml section and creates,

00:09:21

I keep coming back to Notion.

00:09:24

It's just like the property fields in Notion,

00:09:26

like you have those different lines underneath,

00:09:28

except they're all based off of plain text

00:09:32

and you can move them to the sidebar

00:09:33

if you don't want them at the top of your document.

00:09:35

- Sure.

00:09:36

- But-- - So if I have notes

00:09:38

that with pre-existing yaml,

00:09:39

it'll just show up that way.

00:09:40

- Yep.

00:09:42

Those will be properties.

00:09:43

And then you can change at a system level

00:09:46

what types of values those properties are.

00:09:51

So like if you just had plain text for dates, for example,

00:09:54

you can choose a date property type

00:09:57

and then it renders that with a calendar picker

00:10:00

and it's pretty cool.

00:10:01

I think that everyone should take a look at it.

00:10:06

The one piece of advice I'll give people

00:10:08

who are gonna go nuts with this is don't go to nuts.

00:10:12

Because each value that you create

00:10:16

or each property that you create

00:10:20

adds to the list of properties.

00:10:22

So just like tags, if you have a whole bunch of tags,

00:10:25

you can kind of dilute the value of the tags

00:10:27

that you have.

00:10:29

So it's easy to say, I'm gonna put 10

00:10:31

or 20 different properties at the top

00:10:33

of every single document.

00:10:34

And just from my own experience,

00:10:36

working with teams that have done that,

00:10:38

there's like three or four that you actually use.

00:10:41

And when you have all those properties

00:10:42

and most of them are empty,

00:10:43

you glance at it and you're like,

00:10:45

oh, this isn't up to date.

00:10:46

And you don't trust any of it.

00:10:48

So just be careful with some of that stuff.

00:10:53

But yeah, it's fun.

00:10:57

And I feel like it makes Obsidian more

00:11:00

of a database application.

00:11:02

Obviously you gotta figure out how to use something

00:11:04

like DataView in order to really make the most of this.

00:11:07

But it really does position Obsidian

00:11:10

as a notion alternative,

00:11:12

which I never thought I would ever say, but totally true.

00:11:16

- Once you get the sharing side of it nailed down,

00:11:19

which is a little tricky with Obsidian.

00:11:22

- That's true.

00:11:23

You can do collaborative vaults though.

00:11:24

I was gonna say we should probably test that

00:11:25

for Bookworm.

00:11:27

- There you go.

00:11:29

Test it for the Bookworm people

00:11:30

who don't wanna get into notion.

00:11:32

- Yep, exactly.

00:11:34

All right, thanks for let me talk about

00:11:36

something Obsidian related.

00:11:37

We should probably talk about today's book now.

00:11:39

- Okay, sounds good.

00:11:42

- All right, so today's book is Life Worth Living

00:11:47

by three separate authors,

00:11:49

who I'm gonna butcher these names every single time

00:11:52

that I'll say them.

00:11:54

So maybe I just won't say that.

00:11:55

(laughs)

00:11:57

It's, there are three academics

00:12:00

and they're all teachers at Yale, I believe.

00:12:04

Life Worth Living is actually a class

00:12:09

that you can take as a Yale student.

00:12:12

Okay, fine, I'll mention these names once

00:12:14

and then you can make fun of the way that I pronounce these.

00:12:19

Miraslav Volf, Matthew Grossman

00:12:23

and Ryan McAnally-Lins.

00:12:26

- Well done.

00:12:27

(claps)

00:12:28

How are you, Mike?

00:12:29

- Thanks. (laughs)

00:12:31

This is not the traditional type of book

00:12:36

that we would cover for Bookworm.

00:12:38

There are lots of parts.

00:12:41

There are five official parts

00:12:43

in addition to an introduction and an epilogue.

00:12:47

So I think instead of trying to tackle this by chapter,

00:12:50

we will tackle it by part.

00:12:52

It is very difficult to discern

00:12:55

and it really doesn't matter, I guess,

00:12:58

where which author is speaking.

00:13:01

It's not really written as the type of book

00:13:05

where I'm the expert

00:13:07

and I'm gonna convince you about a thing.

00:13:09

It's really designed to give you a bunch of questions

00:13:12

and then you dig in and find the answers yourselves.

00:13:15

So it's definitely checking the right boxes for me

00:13:20

here at the beginning,

00:13:24

but in addition to the, let's see,

00:13:28

15 different chapters here,

00:13:30

there are questions and basically a whole workbook

00:13:35

that goes along with this.

00:13:37

It's not officially a workbook.

00:13:39

There is a workbook that you can buy,

00:13:41

but there are basically questions to consider

00:13:45

and exercises to complete at the end of each of these chapters,

00:13:49

which I don't know about you,

00:13:50

but I did not have time to go through and do those.

00:13:53

So I'm assuming you didn't either.

00:13:55

- I got to the end of chapter one

00:13:57

and I looked through the list

00:13:59

and then I looked at my watch and said,

00:14:02

uh-uh.

00:14:02

(laughing)

00:14:04

- That's fair.

00:14:05

(laughing)

00:14:06

- It's like this would be amazing to go through.

00:14:09

However, it's gonna take a lot of time

00:14:12

and I don't know that in two weeks time,

00:14:15

if you ignored the process of reading the book,

00:14:20

I don't know that I have,

00:14:21

if I had taken all of my reading time

00:14:23

and put it towards answering these questions and doing

00:14:26

the work, I don't know that I would have enough time

00:14:28

to actually do it, not appropriately.

00:14:30

So no, I didn't even attempt it.

00:14:33

- Yeah, I mean, it's designed to be a college course.

00:14:36

I forget if it's undergraduate or graduate,

00:14:38

it doesn't really matter.

00:14:39

It's a lot of work if you're gonna go through

00:14:41

the whole thing.

00:14:42

All that to say that I feel like there is a lot of meat here

00:14:47

and we are not gonna be diving quite as deep.

00:14:50

That description is actually pretty punny

00:14:54

if you understand the contents of the book,

00:14:56

which we'll get into in a bit.

00:14:57

(laughing)

00:14:59

But we're not gonna be doing it the way

00:15:00

the author is intended.

00:15:01

I think there's some good stuff there.

00:15:04

I'm kinda curious.

00:15:05

We're not gonna talk about the specifics of the exercises

00:15:08

but did you read them?

00:15:10

What did you think of the exercises?

00:15:12

One of the first ones I think was make a life inventory

00:15:15

and stuff like that.

00:15:17

Did you think those sounded interesting

00:15:18

or were you like, yeah, that sounds stupid,

00:15:20

I'm not gonna do that.

00:15:21

- I wouldn't say I thought it sounded stupid.

00:15:24

I think that reading those questions,

00:15:26

'cause I read all of the expected work for you

00:15:31

to do through this.

00:15:34

And I can't say any of it struck me as that silly.

00:15:37

It's all questions that are very inward focused,

00:15:41

like you're trying to find answers

00:15:43

to things inside yourself.

00:15:45

And that seems to be a theme throughout the book.

00:15:47

There's not gonna be cut and dry answers to things.

00:15:52

Like I can't tell you what the guide

00:15:54

to what matters most really is

00:15:56

because there's just a series of questions

00:15:58

that help you get there.

00:15:59

And that's the part that they're guiding you through

00:16:02

at the end of each chapter

00:16:04

and what those questions are designed to help you with.

00:16:08

So having read them, I thought they were super interesting.

00:16:10

I feel like there's a lot of them

00:16:12

that would have a lot of value.

00:16:14

But again, my concern is like,

00:16:17

it's gonna take a lot of time.

00:16:19

Like again, this is for students in college.

00:16:23

I don't remember if it was undergrad or grad,

00:16:26

but if you were to take the time to answer all of them,

00:16:28

it's not a small commitment to do that.

00:16:31

I think if you were to go through

00:16:32

and pick out some of them and answer some of them,

00:16:35

then it could be a little more doable.

00:16:39

Personally, I'm probably not gonna go back

00:16:42

and do this just because of time.

00:16:45

But I could easily say that there's a lot of value

00:16:48

in doing it if you choose to do that.

00:16:50

- Yeah, I agree.

00:16:53

I'm kinda torn on whether I wanna go back

00:16:56

and try to follow the process.

00:16:58

I thought most of the exercises

00:17:01

and like the thinking time prompts

00:17:03

and the questions that they give you were pretty good.

00:17:07

There weren't any in there

00:17:10

that just completely impressed me, I guess,

00:17:15

which I kinda expected there would be.

00:17:19

Just given the whole positioning of this book

00:17:24

and how like, if this class was offered,

00:17:27

when I was in college, I totally would have taken it.

00:17:31

- Sure.

00:17:32

- But yeah, it's three academics

00:17:35

who are not trying to convince you of anything,

00:17:38

but they're trying to present a lot of different options

00:17:41

and a lot of different questions

00:17:42

and get you to consider things from different perspectives.

00:17:45

Part of the way that they do that

00:17:47

is they tell a whole bunch of stories

00:17:49

from a lot of different backgrounds.

00:17:53

They'll mention Bible stories, they'll mention Buddhist stories,

00:17:57

they'll mention historical stories,

00:17:59

they'll mention Confucius.

00:18:02

I'm trying to think of any of the other different

00:18:07

like major religions that they covered,

00:18:10

but this is not a religious book.

00:18:12

They're basically saying like,

00:18:15

these are the big questions that everybody is trying to answer

00:18:20

and they do a little bit of projecting maybe

00:18:23

where they say this is how the Christians answer this

00:18:27

and this is how the Muslims answer this.

00:18:30

But I feel like for the most part,

00:18:32

they do a pretty good job of identifying the main points

00:18:37

without making a whole bunch of other assumptions.

00:18:43

This is kind of hard to explain,

00:18:45

but this is my big beef with a lot of non-religious books

00:18:50

that try to bring up aspects of like Christianity

00:18:55

or Bible scripture is they'll look at part of it

00:18:59

and they'll draw a conclusion and I'm not a Bible scholar,

00:19:03

but I have gone to Bible college and I know enough

00:19:06

to know that that inference that you just made

00:19:09

is totally wrong.

00:19:10

- Yeah.

00:19:12

- I can see through that stuff

00:19:15

and I don't even really know enough to point out

00:19:18

the specifics of the inaccuracies,

00:19:22

but I feel like they do a pretty good job

00:19:24

of not overextending themselves to the point

00:19:26

where they look silly, which.

00:19:29

- I think that's a good point in that like,

00:19:32

whenever we read books and they do bring up scripture

00:19:34

and it's like you totally misquoted that.

00:19:37

Because you know that and if it's just something point blank

00:19:40

wrong about how they've inferred what the scripture means,

00:19:45

then I instantly question all of the references

00:19:50

to things that I don't have the background to

00:19:53

because did they misunderstand that one as well

00:19:55

and they just, I just don't know if it's correct or not.

00:20:00

Like that and so then I'm second guessing the author

00:20:03

the rest of the time.

00:20:04

- Yep, definitely.

00:20:07

So let's get into the actual book itself.

00:20:10

Now the first part here is the introduction.

00:20:13

There's not a whole lot here.

00:20:15

Some of what is here we actually talked about already.

00:20:18

This is where they talk about.

00:20:19

They are three authors who have unique perspectives

00:20:23

and they teach this as a class together at Yale.

00:20:27

One of the things that they mentioned though

00:20:29

in the introduction, which is titled

00:20:31

This Book Might Wreck Your Life.

00:20:32

Very appropriate introduction I feel.

00:20:37

They'll get into the specifics of the approach

00:20:41

that they're gonna take actually in the next section.

00:20:43

So we won't get there quite yet.

00:20:46

But yeah, anytime you start asking big questions

00:20:50

it can be uncomfortable when you start to get some answers.

00:20:55

But finding out the answers is a worthwhile pursuit.

00:20:59

They would argue and I would agree.

00:21:01

They do mention that questions are best tackled

00:21:04

with true seeking communities.

00:21:06

So figure out for yourself where that is for you

00:21:11

in some sense, the Bookworm podcast can be that.

00:21:17

But I don't think that is quite what they're describing

00:21:20

I think they're talking more about a more regular,

00:21:23

more intimate gathering of a handful of people.

00:21:28

Again, recognize that this is typically taught

00:21:30

as a college class.

00:21:32

They see a small group of students multiple times per week

00:21:36

for multiple weeks in a row.

00:21:39

So that creates the space to consistently have

00:21:44

these conversations.

00:21:46

And I think they're right that that's the way

00:21:51

that you get the most out of this

00:21:53

is by having conversations with other people

00:21:56

who are on the same journey.

00:21:59

And then the other thing here is that like in poker,

00:22:02

so that kind of alluded to the books

00:22:04

that we've read by Annie Duke.

00:22:07

You are not responsible for the outcome

00:22:09

but you are responsible for how you play your hand.

00:22:12

And I feel like that is a perfect analogy for metaphor,

00:22:17

whatever.

00:22:18

That's a good way to think about

00:22:20

why should we be asking these questions in the first place?

00:22:24

If we can never be sure that we're gonna get

00:22:28

to the ultimate truth, why should we even pursue this

00:22:32

in the first place?

00:22:33

And I think you and I probably both have our own reasons

00:22:37

for doing that, but I think they lay out

00:22:40

a pretty good case why anybody regardless

00:22:45

of your belief system should at least consider

00:22:48

these questions.

00:22:50

- Yeah, and just so you understand

00:22:52

like some of these questions that they're referring to,

00:22:55

we should probably detail out what the question is as well.

00:22:59

But some of these questions that they have

00:23:01

towards the end of that introduction

00:23:03

are what are your greatest hopes for yourself?

00:23:06

What are your greatest fears?

00:23:07

What brings you joy?

00:23:08

What are your sources of peace?

00:23:09

What memories trigger responses of regret or disappointment?

00:23:14

What memories trigger responses of satisfaction or delight?

00:23:17

What tends to make you feel embarrassed?

00:23:18

Like these are questions that are,

00:23:20

and this isn't even the workbook part of it.

00:23:22

Like this is just the pre-book

00:23:26

is where we're at right now.

00:23:27

And that's why I'm saying like these questions

00:23:29

are not something you're going to answer very quickly.

00:23:32

And it's not something that you can do lightly either.

00:23:35

Like I can come up with some of these very quick,

00:23:38

like very, very swiftly,

00:23:40

but some of these I have to stop and process for a while,

00:23:44

maybe go for a walk before I can get an answer

00:23:47

to some of these, it's not a simple thing.

00:23:49

Honestly, like going through this introduction,

00:23:51

it made me think of your life-themed course quite a bit, Mike.

00:23:54

Like this whole book made me continue to come back to that.

00:23:58

Just knowing like some of the questions you had me process

00:24:00

in the middle of that cohort.

00:24:01

So for what it's worth,

00:24:04

there's a little plug there for you as well, but.

00:24:06

- Thanks.

00:24:06

- Yeah, that was something that continued to come up

00:24:08

in my brain.

00:24:09

Like these aren't the exact same questions

00:24:12

that I worked through when I was coming up

00:24:14

with my life theme,

00:24:15

but they're in the same vein.

00:24:17

Like it's in that same territory.

00:24:19

- Yeah, and for people who are interested in that,

00:24:24

by the way, the cohort is not available currently,

00:24:27

but I do have a email course, which is five parts.

00:24:32

It's a watered down version of the cohort, basically.

00:24:34

So I'll put a link to that in the show notes

00:24:37

for anybody who is interested.

00:24:39

But you're right, that's essentially

00:24:41

what drew me to this book in the first place.

00:24:44

Was this sounded like another version

00:24:46

of my life-themed cohort?

00:24:48

- Sure.

00:24:49

- So. - I kind of wondered,

00:24:50

getting through the first few chapters,

00:24:52

like I wonder if this is either,

00:24:55

like in my brain, it's like,

00:24:56

I wonder if this is where Mike got some

00:24:57

of his life-themed concepts,

00:24:58

but I know the book was just written this year,

00:25:01

and you've been on that for quite a while.

00:25:03

So I was like, I know that that's not the case,

00:25:04

but it's what made me,

00:25:06

it made me question it for a split second.

00:25:09

- Well, it's interesting because

00:25:14

I don't think anything is probably truly original

00:25:19

in the productivity space.

00:25:21

It's all kind of a remix.

00:25:23

And I realize that the life-themed stuff

00:25:28

that I've kind of put together is my version of it,

00:25:31

but I'm constantly refining it.

00:25:34

And so selfishly, I was going into this as like,

00:25:37

well, maybe they have some really great ideas

00:25:39

that I could glean some insight from

00:25:41

and make some modifications to the course from.

00:25:43

But the real reason that I picked this book

00:25:46

in the first place was that it was a recommendation

00:25:48

in the Bookworm Club.

00:25:50

And when I saw it come across, I was like,

00:25:52

this looks great.

00:25:53

I'm gonna pick it.

00:25:54

- Nice.

00:25:56

- Yeah.

00:25:58

All right, so let's get into the first section here.

00:26:03

Part one is titled Diving In.

00:26:08

And there are just two chapters in this first part.

00:26:13

What's worth wanting and where are we starting from?

00:26:17

And the big thing to be discussed at the top here

00:26:24

is the four modes of being that they talk about.

00:26:29

So they have this visual where you've got action

00:26:34

and reflection on kind of like a Y axis.

00:26:39

Okay, and at the very top is action.

00:26:42

And then there's a bar that goes across

00:26:46

which represents autopilot.

00:26:49

And then there are layers below that

00:26:52

that are effectiveness, self-awareness,

00:26:54

and self-transcendence.

00:26:56

And then on the right side of this,

00:26:59

for autopilot, our habits, for effectiveness,

00:27:01

a strategy for self-awareness,

00:27:03

his vision for self-transcendence is truth.

00:27:06

And then there's this little like plotted path

00:27:10

where you start at autopilot, you go down

00:27:14

and then you come back up.

00:27:15

So that's essentially what they're trying to do

00:27:20

with the structure of this book

00:27:22

is that you are engaging with this topic right now.

00:27:26

And I think they're kind of assuming

00:27:28

that you've never really thought about this stuff before.

00:27:31

Otherwise, like why would you be starting at the autopilot?

00:27:34

But the whole goal is to go down and then come back up.

00:27:39

In fact, just let me read through the different parts.

00:27:42

Part one is diving in, part two is the depths,

00:27:44

part three is bedrock.

00:27:45

So that's how we go all the way down, right?

00:27:47

Part four facing the limits

00:27:48

and then part five is back to the surface.

00:27:51

So the journey they're trying to take us on is you go down

00:27:56

and then you come back up.

00:27:58

And there's some key actions or questions

00:28:00

that go along with each one of these areas.

00:28:03

So autopilot, that's basically we do what we do

00:28:06

because that's what we do.

00:28:08

Effectiveness is what we do getting us what we want.

00:28:13

Then there's self-awareness,

00:28:15

which is what do we really want?

00:28:18

And then self-transcendence is what is worth wanting?

00:28:23

And that's the part where I'm not sure

00:28:28

how anybody can actually coach someone

00:28:33

in that particular arena.

00:28:37

I don't know, I don't have a whole lot of examples of this,

00:28:41

but it struck me as I was thinking about this,

00:28:45

that most of the stuff that I've found,

00:28:47

because I've tried to find like personal mission statement stuff,

00:28:51

we did, what was the Donald Miller book,

00:28:55

Hero on a Mission, right?

00:28:57

- Yeah.

00:28:58

- A lot of them don't go all the way down

00:29:03

to the self-transcendence level.

00:29:06

And maybe that's just the result of three academics

00:29:10

getting together and making a course about this

00:29:11

where it's like, well, obviously we gotta consider this piece.

00:29:15

I don't think they can really, or anybody really,

00:29:19

can point you in the right direction

00:29:22

once you get to that level.

00:29:25

And I'm not sure if it's good or bad

00:29:28

that they attempted to do this.

00:29:30

What do you think?

00:29:32

- Well, I know that when I look at these four different levels,

00:29:36

autopilot effectiveness, self-awareness,

00:29:39

and self-transcendence,

00:29:41

the first two, the autopilot piece, which are your habits

00:29:45

and the effectiveness, which is basically strategy.

00:29:48

Those two, I think, those are the territory

00:29:51

that probably 90 to 95% of our productivity

00:29:54

and self-help books cover, business books as well.

00:29:57

That is the territory where most of them live.

00:30:00

When you get to like the self-awareness piece,

00:30:02

what do we really want?

00:30:04

That particular component, I feel like we hit books

00:30:07

on that sometimes.

00:30:10

I'm thinking about things like the second mountain,

00:30:12

like going towards the second level of things,

00:30:15

like that concept, or you could even maybe get into

00:30:19

like mental models, maybe touches this a hair

00:30:22

where you're starting to put together

00:30:23

like the meaning of life, territory,

00:30:26

and what is it that you actually want to accomplish in life?

00:30:30

That territory gets covered sometimes.

00:30:33

What is worth wanting?

00:30:35

I have a hard time figuring out what is even meant by that,

00:30:40

and we'll get to it a little bit,

00:30:44

but that concept is one that I don't know

00:30:47

that I've ever touched on through anything I've read

00:30:51

or even really discussed.

00:30:53

So that one's a little bit like, hmm,

00:30:56

either you are brilliant, and this is a great idea,

00:31:00

and absolutely something that should be talked about more,

00:31:03

you're full of baloney.

00:31:06

It's one of the two.

00:31:09

Maybe it's somewhere in the middle,

00:31:11

but I'm hoping that as we go through this,

00:31:14

I'll get clean answers on my opinions on it,

00:31:16

'cause right now I'm just a little unsure

00:31:18

of what to think of it.

00:31:20

- Sure, yeah, well, so let's put a pin

00:31:22

in the self-transcendant stuff.

00:31:24

I definitely want to come back to that,

00:31:26

but that is gonna be part three, I believe,

00:31:29

the bedrock stuff.

00:31:30

- Yeah.

00:31:32

- The other thing that we should talk about here

00:31:34

in this first section is,

00:31:38

where are we starting from, that's chapter two?

00:31:41

And they talk about the Walgreens motto

00:31:43

on the corner of happy and healthy,

00:31:46

and they add to that in a very academic way,

00:31:50

well, if you're gonna be happy

00:31:51

and you're gonna be healthy,

00:31:52

then you probably have a long life too.

00:31:54

So they have, the good life is,

00:31:58

and this is not what they're,

00:31:59

like the theme of the book,

00:32:00

but this is where they're starting.

00:32:02

Long, healthy, and happy.

00:32:04

But then they go on to share examples

00:32:06

of famous people who did not have a long,

00:32:09

not have a happy or not have a healthy life,

00:32:12

and these stories were great.

00:32:13

Martin Luther King Jr. were familiar with Abraham Lincoln.

00:32:16

Again, we're familiar with this,

00:32:18

but they get into the depths of his depression,

00:32:22

basically, and that was an interesting

00:32:24

wrinkle to the character that I never really understood.

00:32:26

And then not healthy,

00:32:27

or they talk about Lady Constance Leiten.

00:32:31

I'm terrible with these names.

00:32:34

But again, not familiar with that story,

00:32:37

but the point that they're making

00:32:38

with each of those short stories

00:32:40

is that you can't just buy into this narrative.

00:32:44

You can have a long, healthy, happy life

00:32:46

and not have a life worth living.

00:32:49

Likewise, there are people who have been missing aspects

00:32:53

of this, but everyone would agree

00:32:55

that they actually lived a life worth living.

00:33:00

So they end this whole section

00:33:03

with a couple of wrong beliefs,

00:33:04

which is that we can know what's good

00:33:06

by what makes us feel good,

00:33:08

and that doing good will automatically make us feel good.

00:33:11

I guess this is effective in scrambling you

00:33:16

at the beginning, which is probably their intention.

00:33:19

Like you've been on autopilot for a long time.

00:33:22

You've probably been living your life

00:33:23

in accordance with these basic belief systems

00:33:26

and kind of unintentionally been optimizing

00:33:29

for these three things,

00:33:31

living a long, healthy, happy life.

00:33:33

And they're trying to disorient you

00:33:34

and get you to think that the default

00:33:37

is not necessarily the best course of action.

00:33:39

Planting the belief like, well,

00:33:41

I've been following these wrong beliefs,

00:33:43

well, what is the right belief that,

00:33:44

well, I'm glad you asked.

00:33:45

Let's go on to the next section.

00:33:47

I feel like that's what kind of the response

00:33:49

that they're going for here.

00:33:50

- Yeah, but it's also a good place to start from as well,

00:33:56

because so many books and public speakers

00:33:59

and stuff talk about how to have a happy life.

00:34:02

How many times have we talked about this

00:34:03

where that's not the answer?

00:34:04

Like that's not the end goal.

00:34:06

Struggle, although we tend to avoid it

00:34:09

is actually a very big positive.

00:34:12

So as much as we want to avoid things that are difficult,

00:34:16

that's where a lot of the joy in life can come from.

00:34:18

And although they didn't spell that out here,

00:34:22

they're saying that this happy, long, healthy life

00:34:27

isn't necessarily the target, even though

00:34:32

that's what many people find as like the bullseye

00:34:35

for their life success.

00:34:37

But if you were to hit that bullseye,

00:34:40

you end up having lots of regrets,

00:34:42

which they've shown many, many, many times.

00:34:44

So that's not the end game,

00:34:47

even though they don't really tell you what the end game is,

00:34:51

they're just getting you to ask the questions.

00:34:53

- Yeah, I mean, I get the approach.

00:34:57

And I think for part one anyways, it works.

00:35:00

Let's go on to the next part, which is part two,

00:35:05

the depths.

00:35:06

And in this section, there are four chapters,

00:35:09

chapter three, who do we answer to?

00:35:10

Chapter four, how does a good life feel?

00:35:13

Chapter five, what should we hope for?

00:35:15

Chapter six, how should we live?

00:35:18

This is where started to lose me a little bit.

00:35:22

They basically structure these chapters

00:35:28

in a way where they tell a story

00:35:32

and they try to make a point or introduce a key concept.

00:35:37

And then they wrap it up with some questions

00:35:41

to get you to think about that particular thing.

00:35:43

So like, for example,

00:35:45

with chapter four, what is a good life,

00:35:48

or how does a good life feel?

00:35:49

They introduce the topic of utilitarianism,

00:35:52

which is doing whatever brings the most happiness or pleasure.

00:35:56

And there's a story that goes along with it.

00:35:58

And the story is pretty well done.

00:36:00

All of the stories in the book are pretty well done, I feel.

00:36:03

However, utilitarianism, this is essentially

00:36:08

not just your happiness pleasure,

00:36:12

but maximizing happiness pleasure for the entire group.

00:36:16

And then they talk about how pleasure,

00:36:18

what feels good can actually lead us away

00:36:19

from what really matters.

00:36:20

And talk about how sorrow is just as important

00:36:23

for a good life as pleasure.

00:36:26

So you leave the chapter with more questions than answers.

00:36:30

And again, that's intentional

00:36:33

because there's a workbook associated with this.

00:36:35

So had we actually gone through this,

00:36:38

like a semester course that it is,

00:36:41

I'm sure we would have some different reactions to this.

00:36:45

But because of the format here for Bookworm,

00:36:49

we cranked through it in a couple of weeks,

00:36:52

and we're wrestling with the content.

00:36:54

Now, a lot of the content that they share,

00:36:58

and a lot of the ideas that they introduce,

00:37:02

I've heard different versions of these before.

00:37:03

I'm not sure how familiar you are with this kind of stuff,

00:37:06

but it didn't feel like anything was completely new

00:37:11

from anything in this book.

00:37:15

But this section right here,

00:37:17

part two, the depths,

00:37:18

this is where we're starting to get into the effectiveness

00:37:21

and the self-awareness section.

00:37:23

So this is where is what we do,

00:37:26

getting us what we want,

00:37:28

and what do we really want.

00:37:30

And I don't know, I mean,

00:37:33

I didn't actually take a whole lot of notes

00:37:35

in this particular section,

00:37:38

because I feel like maybe I've wrestled through this already.

00:37:44

Maybe I have a version of this that I've kind of figured out,

00:37:47

and so I've gone through some of this already, I don't know.

00:37:51

I agree with some of their minor points,

00:37:54

you know, that money is a form of influence or power,

00:37:57

and they talk about a AAA vision

00:37:59

where we have things that are available,

00:38:01

accessible and attainable to us.

00:38:03

They talk about this idea of moral alchemy,

00:38:07

where we're balancing the needs and wants of individuals

00:38:11

in a way that promotes the good of the group,

00:38:13

like checks and balances, things like that.

00:38:16

But they also get into like full-on academic mode,

00:38:20

and I have a little bit of a reaction to that,

00:38:24

I feel like to talk about consequentialism,

00:38:27

ethics, concerned with the consequences of our actions.

00:38:31

That term, consequentialism,

00:38:34

just kind of rubs me the wrong way,

00:38:37

because I like the idea, but it's like,

00:38:41

"Oh yeah, what you do doesn't exist in a vacuum

00:38:43

when you do something, it affects the people around you."

00:38:46

That seems very basic, and I get like,

00:38:48

that's because of the way I was raised

00:38:51

and the beliefs that I hold,

00:38:53

but it did feel sometimes like the way

00:38:56

that they describe some things,

00:38:57

especially in this section, it's like,

00:39:01

while the topic sounded like it's right in my wheelhouse,

00:39:05

at this point it feels a little bit like

00:39:07

we're speaking different languages.

00:39:09

- I think some of my, 'cause I'm with you on this,

00:39:14

in like the angst with this particular part,

00:39:17

who do we answer to, really the answer is ourselves,

00:39:20

how does a good life feel,

00:39:21

what should we hope for, how should we live?

00:39:24

It's all left with questions at the end,

00:39:28

so that you can work through the process

00:39:29

of figuring out what the answer to those questions are yourself.

00:39:33

The problem with that is that what happens

00:39:36

if my answer to that question conflicts

00:39:40

with your answer to that question,

00:39:43

and by me achieving success in my answer,

00:39:48

it takes away from success on your answer.

00:39:53

Do you get where I'm going with this?

00:39:53

Like this is like the whole relativism thing

00:39:58

that I feel like is creeping into this,

00:40:00

because then it means that how should we live?

00:40:03

Well, it kinda depends on how you feel about a certain topic.

00:40:08

That's the air that I got from this.

00:40:10

No, they don't say that to be clear.

00:40:14

Like that is not something that they point out,

00:40:17

but because the answers to these questions

00:40:20

aren't founded in something concrete,

00:40:23

and it allows it to be flexible,

00:40:28

this part, they lost me on this.

00:40:31

This is where I started to really question

00:40:33

the entire validity of the book,

00:40:35

and I started to wonder, what are we getting into?

00:40:39

(laughs)

00:40:40

Like, what is this, Mike?

00:40:41

What did you do?

00:40:42

(laughs)

00:40:44

That's what I started to wonder.

00:40:47

I wanna be clear, there are some good

00:40:49

points in here, and some of these questions

00:40:51

are absolutely 100% things you should ask of yourself.

00:40:54

So I wanna be clear on that.

00:40:56

It's not 100% like all, yes, you get my point.

00:41:01

So I'm not 100% against them,

00:41:03

I'm just saying like this is where it started to lose me,

00:41:06

and the fact that there's not any basis that this stands on,

00:41:11

and that it's dependent on how I process something,

00:41:14

that's the part that got me a little bit

00:41:16

questioning of the validity of this.

00:41:20

That's interesting.

00:41:21

I think I agree with you, though,

00:41:24

I never really realized that as I was going through this,

00:41:26

I just thought this section felt awkward.

00:41:29

(laughs)

00:41:29

Yeah, I think when I got through,

00:41:32

I think it was chapter five,

00:41:34

what should we hope for the third chapter in this part?

00:41:37

And it was because we came out of the chapter,

00:41:39

how does a good life feel?

00:41:41

It got me wondering why we were asking questions

00:41:45

that were so, like they didn't have any true basis.

00:41:50

Now, I'm coming at this as a Christian

00:41:51

who stands on a Bible,

00:41:53

and like that is my concrete foundation.

00:41:56

So because of that,

00:41:58

if I answer these questions in a way that conflicts with that,

00:42:01

to me that's then wrong,

00:42:03

but I know that not everybody's gonna view things that way.

00:42:06

Yeah, I guess you don't necessarily have to though.

00:42:12

If you've thought about the creed

00:42:15

by which you live your life,

00:42:17

then this section feels unnecessary.

00:42:21

But if you have never considered that before,

00:42:25

I think I understand where they're coming from.

00:42:29

Sure.

00:42:30

This episode of Bookworm is brought to you by Factor Meals.

00:42:33

With the busy fall season just around the corner,

00:42:35

you might be looking for wholesome, convenient meals

00:42:38

for jam-packed days.

00:42:39

I know as we go back into school,

00:42:41

things are crazy,

00:42:43

but Factor America's number one ready to eat meal kit

00:42:45

is there to help.

00:42:46

With Chef Prepared, dietitian approved,

00:42:48

ready to eat meals delivered straight to your door.

00:42:51

Save time, eat well,

00:42:53

and stay on track with your healthy lifestyle.

00:42:56

Too busy to cook,

00:42:57

but wanna make sure you're still eating well.

00:42:58

Well, with Factor you can skip that extra trip

00:43:00

to the grocery store and all the chopping, prepping,

00:43:03

and cleaning up too,

00:43:04

while still getting the flavor and nutritional quality

00:43:07

that you need.

00:43:08

Factor's fresh,

00:43:09

never frozen meals are ready in just two minutes.

00:43:11

So all you have to do is heat and enjoy.

00:43:14

This is my favorite part about Factor Meals.

00:43:17

Sometimes my wife and my kids are gone for the day

00:43:20

and I'm home alone.

00:43:21

I don't wanna spend a whole lot of time cooking,

00:43:23

but I don't wanna go out to eat either.

00:43:25

Factor gives me healthy options that I can eat at home

00:43:28

and I can prep on my own in just a couple of minutes.

00:43:31

They're so easy and they are so tasty.

00:43:34

You can choose from over 34 weekly flavor-packed,

00:43:37

dietitian-approved meals,

00:43:38

which are all ready to eat in two minutes or less.

00:43:42

And if you really want to level up your lunch options,

00:43:44

you can go with the Gourmet Plus options,

00:43:46

which are prepared to perfection by chefs,

00:43:48

and they are ready to eat in record time.

00:43:50

So you can treat yourself to upscale meals

00:43:52

with premium ingredients like broccolini,

00:43:54

leeks, truffle butter, and asparagus.

00:43:57

If you're counting calories,

00:43:58

try the calorie-conscious options,

00:43:59

which are just as delicious,

00:44:01

but have less than 550 calories per serving.

00:44:04

And if you need an extra boost

00:44:06

to help you support your fitness and wellness goals,

00:44:09

then get the protein plus meals,

00:44:10

which give you 30 grams of protein or more

00:44:12

with each serving.

00:44:14

No matter what your dietary needs,

00:44:15

factor has you covered,

00:44:17

so this August get factor and enjoy eating well

00:44:19

without the hassle.

00:44:20

Simply choose your meals

00:44:21

and enjoy fresh flavor-packed meals delivered

00:44:24

straight to your door, ready in just two minutes.

00:44:26

No prep, no mess.

00:44:28

So head to factor meals.com/bookworm50.

00:44:31

That's B-O-O-K-W-O-R-M-5-0.

00:44:35

And use the code of bookworm50 to get 50% off.

00:44:38

That's code bookworm50@factormeals.com/bookworm50

00:44:43

to get 50% off.

00:44:45

Our thanks to factor meals

00:44:47

for their support of the Bookworm podcast.

00:44:49

Yeah, let's go to the next section

00:44:53

because this is the one where I feel like

00:44:58

you'll get some real benefit from considering

00:45:01

some of the stuff,

00:45:02

but I think I might have issues

00:45:04

with some of the ways that they assemble it.

00:45:07

So let's talk through it.

00:45:10

Maybe you can help this make sense.

00:45:12

So part three is bedrock.

00:45:14

And there's two chapters here.

00:45:16

Chapter seven is the recipe test.

00:45:17

Chapter eight is the really big picture.

00:45:20

And the recipe test,

00:45:22

I think this is a bold move.

00:45:27

But I think it's effective in thinking through like,

00:45:33

well, what is a life worth living to go back to the title?

00:45:38

There are different aspects that make up this good life.

00:45:43

And they talk about a life being like a recipe

00:45:48

and for a recipe to be good,

00:45:53

you have to have different foods

00:45:58

from these different categories,

00:46:00

three basic food groups they call them of a good life.

00:46:04

One of them is agency.

00:46:05

One of them is circumstance and one of them is effect.

00:46:11

So stoicism is one life recipe

00:46:16

that elevates the agency area above others.

00:46:19

Utilitarianism elevates the affect part

00:46:23

above the others and Confucianism

00:46:25

elevates circumstance above the others.

00:46:29

And the thing we have to figure out

00:46:33

is how are we going to handle the inconsistencies?

00:46:38

Will we ignore them?

00:46:39

Will we view them as opportunities

00:46:42

because they're never as simple and black and white

00:46:45

as they appear to be?

00:46:47

They talk about Confucianism in here

00:46:49

and how he never actually defined the way that a lot of,

00:46:54

I'm not a Confucious, I don't know.

00:46:59

- You're not confused.

00:47:01

- Well, I mean-- - Sorry, I couldn't pass that one.

00:47:04

- Yeah, yeah.

00:47:05

I don't understand the frame of reference for the way.

00:47:08

I'm assuming that's kind of like

00:47:10

a idea that is communicated in that belief system,

00:47:16

which I just don't understand.

00:47:19

But basically he was saying that Confucious never defined

00:47:23

the way it was the followers, I guess, of this religion.

00:47:27

I don't know, that defined the way.

00:47:30

So my big takeaway from this is at this point,

00:47:35

we're trying to answer questions that you and I have

00:47:40

answered with religion, without religion,

00:47:44

but then we're talking about religion

00:47:46

and sharing a bunch of different examples

00:47:50

of how people use religion to answer these questions.

00:47:53

Now, I commend them getting people to ask the questions,

00:47:57

even if they don't consider themselves

00:47:59

to be religious, one of my big takeaways

00:48:02

from doing the Life-Name cohort,

00:48:03

which is part of my faith-based productivity community,

00:48:06

it says it on the tin, but I had a bunch of people

00:48:09

that were in there and from all over the world,

00:48:12

who weren't, they didn't consider themselves to be religious,

00:48:17

they were just interested in this idea of applying

00:48:20

their values to their productivity and their actions.

00:48:25

Again, recognize I have a bias here

00:48:28

and I'm coming at this from a certain direction,

00:48:31

but this feels like a lot to grok at this point

00:48:36

and then at the end of chapter seven,

00:48:40

they're basically saying,

00:48:41

we're never gonna figure it all out anyways,

00:48:43

there's always gonna be inconsistencies.

00:48:45

I feel like if you go into this,

00:48:47

as someone who is anti-religion,

00:48:52

there's a good chance you are that way

00:48:54

because there is an element of faith involved

00:48:56

and you can't reconcile everything

00:49:01

in the accounts in your head, right?

00:49:04

So I feel like this right here would throw some people

00:49:07

for a loop, it's like, yeah, you know what?

00:49:09

You're not gonna be able to figure it all out anyways,

00:49:10

so don't worry about it.

00:49:12

I think there's a certain person who's getting into this

00:49:14

and like, whoa, what?

00:49:15

Screw this, and chuck it and walk out of the class.

00:49:19

- Yeah, yeah, I can see that for sure.

00:49:24

'Cause like even, so again, by the time I got here,

00:49:29

I was in skeptic mode,

00:49:31

but the title of chapter seven, the recipe test,

00:49:34

what does a test give you when you're done?

00:49:37

- A result.

00:49:39

- A result based on known answers, right?

00:49:43

So we're now trying to put this recipe test together

00:49:48

with these three components,

00:49:50

but then we're told that it can change

00:49:53

and that the answer isn't always the same.

00:49:58

- Yeah.

00:49:59

- It's not how a test works.

00:50:01

Like that's the part that now I get, like sometimes like

00:50:04

with English, you're writing a paper or you can get a test

00:50:06

and there's a test that's a written paper

00:50:08

and it's subjective, like I get that,

00:50:11

but that's not where my brain was at the time.

00:50:13

But I was very much like, that's not the point,

00:50:15

like don't tell me that there's these three pieces

00:50:19

and that you're going to show me how to put them all together

00:50:21

and then don't put them all together.

00:50:23

But that's super frustrating for me.

00:50:26

- Yeah, I completely agree and that's why when I read

00:50:30

the recipe test as the title, I'm like,

00:50:32

oh, I think I see what you're going to try to do.

00:50:35

I hope this works for you and it kind of doesn't.

00:50:38

(laughs)

00:50:39

- Yep.

00:50:40

- It's good in theory and it, like you go into this

00:50:45

and you're like, oh, I want this to make sense.

00:50:48

I want this to be true, you know, because it's convenient

00:50:51

and if I could just think about it this way

00:50:52

and base it off of this other thing that I understand,

00:50:55

like that would make this simple and,

00:50:58

but they can't quite get there.

00:51:00

(laughs)

00:51:01

- Yeah.

00:51:01

- Question is just too big. (laughs)

00:51:04

Which actually leads to the next chapter,

00:51:06

which is the really big picture.

00:51:09

And this is where they talk about where are we,

00:51:14

cosmology and who are we, anthropology.

00:51:16

Talk about tribalism, Ray Kurzweil's six stages

00:51:21

of the universe, which is interesting,

00:51:24

but again, like I don't really know what you do with this.

00:51:26

(laughs)

00:51:27

The six stages of Ray Kurzweil's,

00:51:30

six stages of the universe, by the way,

00:51:32

they do a good job of condensing this, I feel,

00:51:34

to physics and chemistry, biology and DNA, brains,

00:51:37

technology, the merger of human technology

00:51:40

with human intelligence and then the universe wakes up.

00:51:45

So you read that and you're like, oh, we're at stage five.

00:51:49

And he basically, I guess I'm talking about Ray Kurzweil,

00:51:53

but really it's the authors who are interpreting this.

00:51:56

So they basically are saying that,

00:52:01

well, again, that's not really fair either,

00:52:02

because they say we're gonna present

00:52:03

all these different perspectives

00:52:05

and you gotta figure out what you believe about this.

00:52:07

So I'll go back to he, Ray Kurzweil.

00:52:10

Basically saying that the universe

00:52:12

has lots of different iterations of this.

00:52:14

This is the cycle, but it hits reset

00:52:16

and it starts all over.

00:52:18

And the net result of that is kind of a dread

00:52:23

of the matrix style, the robots are coming.

00:52:29

And then you couple that with all the stuff I see

00:52:35

and read and hear about people who have never really

00:52:40

experimented with generative AI,

00:52:44

but they are absolutely terrified of it.

00:52:47

I don't know.

00:52:48

I mean, you could hear all that stuff and be like,

00:52:51

oh yeah, this is confirmation.

00:52:52

Ray Kurzweil was right.

00:52:53

We better be careful.

00:52:54

I tend to think that this is a little bit sensationalized

00:52:58

and yeah, the universal ends someday, but not like that.

00:53:03

I don't know, but at the end of this chapter,

00:53:08

they're kind of leading you into that,

00:53:11

kind of leading you down that road,

00:53:13

which I know they talk about how they're trying not

00:53:17

to do that and all the opinions and the perspectives

00:53:20

that they're sharing are simply for diversity sake

00:53:23

and you can be exposed to a bunch of this different stuff.

00:53:28

There's nowhere else really to go with this chapter.

00:53:32

It's kind of like, well, if we can't really draw any

00:53:35

conclusions or we can't really take anything away from this

00:53:38

because you could be at that point,

00:53:39

the merger of human technology, human intelligence.

00:53:42

And oh my gosh, the universe is gonna wake up

00:53:45

and disappear at some point in the future.

00:53:47

How does that actually change anything?

00:53:48

You just do the best you can with what you have.

00:53:54

And so it kind of feels like, well, why is this even here

00:53:57

in the first place?

00:53:58

- Yeah, I'm 100% with you because there's so much

00:54:02

of this that's like, okay, so you're just trying

00:54:04

to show me how small and insignificant I am.

00:54:06

Like I'm already aware of that,

00:54:08

but that doesn't really help me here.

00:54:12

And I get that we are a cog in the wheel of life

00:54:17

and I get that, but I can't quite put my finger on why

00:54:24

this is here, like coming back to like the structure

00:54:27

of the book, maybe this is that transcendent piece

00:54:32

that I don't understand and maybe my brain is just too small

00:54:36

to grasp what they're trying to share.

00:54:40

Absolutely 100% of these could be the answers to it,

00:54:43

but given my lack of knowledge on this

00:54:47

and my current background, I have to say this is just weird

00:54:51

and I don't understand it.

00:54:53

I don't really, I don't know why this is here.

00:54:56

Other than just they wanted to rant about how small we are.

00:55:00

That's really the only thing I got out of it.

00:55:04

Now I've been through those exercises before where,

00:55:08

again, I'm bringing up Christianity in such quite a bit

00:55:11

because they bring it up a fair amount in the book as well.

00:55:14

They bring up a lot of Bible references in this.

00:55:17

I don't know what their like personal beliefs are now that I

00:55:23

am saying that, but because of my background,

00:55:26

like I've been through that process of trying to understand

00:55:28

like how big God is and how small I am.

00:55:31

It's like I've been through that exercise many, many times

00:55:34

at this point, this feels just like another one of those

00:55:36

only without the experience of how big is God.

00:55:40

Because just here's how small you are,

00:55:42

like that's which is strange to me.

00:55:46

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

00:55:48

[laughs]

00:55:50

Well, I understand why they got here because of the model

00:55:53

that they anchored everything off of in chapter one.

00:55:57

If you're going to go all the way down to the depths

00:56:00

and then come back up, like you do have to consider

00:56:03

some of these giant questions.

00:56:07

But I think--

00:56:08

Maybe that's it.

00:56:08

Maybe that-- maybe-- still processing.

00:56:11

Maybe the reason for that is like they're trying to get you

00:56:14

go all the way down into this transcendent piece

00:56:16

so that you can start to see like your role in the broader

00:56:20

world.

00:56:21

Like maybe they're just trying to help you understand

00:56:22

your place in and amongst everybody else.

00:56:26

Maybe that's it.

00:56:27

I'm trying to find the doubt, like the benefit of a doubt

00:56:30

here, like I'm trying to find it.

00:56:34

Yeah, I think that's kind of what they're trying to do.

00:56:36

But again, having read 170-some books for Bookworm,

00:56:45

probably about 500 of these types of books overall,

00:56:51

I feel this isn't the most effective approach

00:56:56

for most people.

00:56:57

Again, they're adapting a Yale class.

00:57:01

So maybe it fits perfectly when you stretch it out

00:57:05

and you have more time to go that deep.

00:57:09

I don't know.

00:57:09

But I agree.

00:57:10

It kind of feels like why did we go there.

00:57:15

Now let's go into the next section,

00:57:18

if you're cool with that.

00:57:19

Part four is facing the limits.

00:57:23

And this is before we technically go back to the surface,

00:57:27

that's actually part five.

00:57:29

But I think this is my favorite section in the whole book.

00:57:34

And this is all about when things go wrong.

00:57:38

And chapter nine is when we inevitably botch it.

00:57:42

Chapter 10 is when life hurts.

00:57:44

Chapter 11 is-- and there's no fixing it--

00:57:47

Chapter 12, when it ends.

00:57:49

So this is where we start to wrestle with,

00:57:53

like chapter 12, when it ends.

00:57:55

We can't escape the fact that we're all going to die someday.

00:58:01

When we inevitably botch it, as much as you

00:58:03

try to live a perfect life, you're going to mess it up.

00:58:08

When life hurts and there's no fixing it,

00:58:11

there's pain involved here.

00:58:13

And you're not always going to be able to find a solution

00:58:18

to that, which I think is probably--

00:58:22

most people anyways would want to alleviate the suffering.

00:58:30

Yeah, I really like this whole section.

00:58:34

There's nothing really specific in here

00:58:36

that stands out to me.

00:58:38

It's like this is new revelation,

00:58:42

and this has really rocked my world.

00:58:45

But this is kind of the stuff that I was anticipating.

00:58:48

The types of questions we were going to be wrestling with

00:58:51

throughout the entire book, not the Rakers, Well Stuff,

00:58:57

et cetera.

00:58:58

Now, there are little things in this section

00:59:00

that I could nitpick.

00:59:02

They're definition of repentance, I don't think,

00:59:06

is quite the same as my Christian definition of repentance,

00:59:11

because they define repentance as confession,

00:59:14

make things right, and restitution, do what's right,

00:59:17

whereas our religious belief system would say,

00:59:21

well, it's up to us for the confession part,

00:59:24

but the restitution part is not up to us.

00:59:27

So it feels a little bit weird to put that in the hands

00:59:30

of the individual, but I don't necessarily

00:59:34

think that that's wrong.

00:59:38

I think that probably is the thing

00:59:40

that we should be trying to do when we inevitably

00:59:42

botch it, because that's the chapter that this is coming from.

00:59:47

But I guess if I had to pick one thing that really just kind of

00:59:50

stood out, well, two things that stood out to me

00:59:53

from this section, first comes from chapter nine,

00:59:56

where being wrong without realizing it

00:59:58

feels exactly like being right, which is why you have to ask

01:00:03

all these questions, because you can convince yourself,

01:00:06

especially if you surround yourself with people who

01:00:08

think and talk and act just like you,

01:00:11

that you have the corner on the truth,

01:00:13

and no one else knows anything and wake up sheeple.

01:00:18

But it's much more effective, and it's honestly much more fun

01:00:21

when you consider that you might be wrong,

01:00:26

and just realizing that you can't trust your feelings.

01:00:31

You can't trust the strength of your convictions.

01:00:35

Strong convictions lately held is that saying.

01:00:37

That's kind of the goal here.

01:00:39

I constantly want to be putting things under the microscope.

01:00:42

And saying, is this what I still believe?

01:00:47

Then the other one comes from chapter 12

01:00:49

that what we do only matters if time is finite.

01:00:52

I never thought about that before.

01:00:55

But that was interesting, because if we're

01:00:56

going to live forever, yeah, it doesn't really matter

01:00:58

what we do today.

01:01:00

If we don't do the right thing, we can try again tomorrow.

01:01:04

So I like that the whole reason for caring about productivity

01:01:11

in the first place is because time is a finite resource.

01:01:13

It's the one resource we can never get anymore of.

01:01:17

So if you threw out that constraint,

01:01:19

that changes the whole discussion.

01:01:22

Yeah, I have to agree with you that this

01:01:23

is my favorite part in the book, because it kind of brings us

01:01:28

back to reality of we're going to screw things up

01:01:32

and trying to understand how the whole--

01:01:39

if we lived forever, nothing would matter what we do.

01:01:43

Well, because you've got infinite amount of time

01:01:45

to try again tomorrow or patch up that relationship

01:01:49

or build a new one.

01:01:51

You've got gobs and gobs at times.

01:01:52

So who cares how long it takes?

01:01:56

Whereas because we have an expiration date,

01:02:00

it means that you only have so much time

01:02:03

to take advantage of the relationships and the energy

01:02:09

that we have right now.

01:02:10

So as a result of that, whenever you have situations

01:02:13

when we inevitably botch it, as they say,

01:02:17

there are some things you need to do to either learn from

01:02:22

or recover from that situation.

01:02:26

And I'm with you.

01:02:28

Their definition of repentance doesn't really

01:02:32

mesh with me at all.

01:02:34

But I think some of that is we're coming from a background

01:02:38

where that's something that's talked about quite a bit.

01:02:41

That some of our angst with this is

01:02:42

like this is coming at it from a stance

01:02:44

that is attempting to cover a territory that we both live

01:02:49

and breathe a lot.

01:02:51

And yet they're not calling it out point blank

01:02:54

and they're trying to dance around it.

01:02:56

Maybe that's what's going on.

01:02:57

Martin in the chat thinks they're all Christian, according

01:03:00

to the Amazon plug.

01:03:02

Maybe that's true.

01:03:03

And maybe they're trying not to be point blank with it.

01:03:06

But I kind of wonder if there's some underlying stuff here

01:03:11

that would make this a lot more clear that's just not being

01:03:13

said.

01:03:14

But I have no way of knowing that.

01:03:17

Because I'm probably not going to get all three of them

01:03:19

in a room to ask them.

01:03:21

Well, let me just say that with any sort of community

01:03:28

that assembles around a shared belief system,

01:03:32

the natural tendency is going to be

01:03:36

to just accept certain things as true

01:03:40

because you have this either explicit or implicit

01:03:44

shared belief system.

01:03:46

And this is the way things are.

01:03:48

So we don't question those things when we're with

01:03:51

those groups.

01:03:53

And I think that it is absolutely valuable

01:03:57

to question everything.

01:04:01

And so I don't-- maybe what's happening here

01:04:04

is just being academics coming at this,

01:04:08

the same topic that we have these--

01:04:12

for lack of a better term, blind spots.

01:04:14

I don't really feel like they're blind spots

01:04:16

because I feel like I've considered them

01:04:17

and I've made my decisions about them

01:04:20

and I'm open to changing my mind about things.

01:04:24

But I haven't.

01:04:28

So I'm willing to entertain a different perspective.

01:04:33

And it could be just that they're

01:04:35

talking about things in terms that we're not used to hearing.

01:04:40

I don't really know.

01:04:44

I don't know.

01:04:44

I guess at this point, I'm willing

01:04:46

to give them the benefit of the doubt

01:04:49

with the stuff like defining repentance.

01:04:53

Because if you were to pull the people up my church,

01:04:57

I'm not sure how many of them would even

01:04:59

have a definition of the word repentance.

01:05:00

We all kind of understand what we think it means.

01:05:05

But it's one of those things that's foundational.

01:05:08

And because it's foundational, we never

01:05:11

go deep enough to consider it.

01:05:13

And that is the model that they introduced at the very beginning

01:05:15

is like, we're going to go all the way down.

01:05:17

And then we're going to come all the way back up.

01:05:21

So I think it's good that they're forcing us

01:05:24

to get outside of our comfort zone with some of this stuff,

01:05:28

even though it feels a little bit clunky to me in some places.

01:05:34

And I think that's to go with that thought there quick

01:05:38

before you move on.

01:05:40

I think that point right there is one that I mentioned

01:05:44

early on, either this is a brilliant thing

01:05:46

or I'm just not smart enough for it.

01:05:48

And there's a part of me that wonders

01:05:50

if it's the latter of those two, because there's a lot of it

01:05:52

that just like, why is this even here?

01:05:55

I don't understand this.

01:05:57

I want to leave room for the fact that I'm not

01:06:01

at a spot where my intelligence can handle that conversation.

01:06:05

And maybe I've got some growth to do before this hits me

01:06:09

like it should.

01:06:10

So I want to make sure I leave room for that,

01:06:13

because obviously I don't know everything.

01:06:16

Well, possible.

01:06:18

But I think the other thing that might be happening here

01:06:21

is that because they're trying to go deep, come back up,

01:06:27

and they're looking at so much material,

01:06:30

it's possible that in any given situation

01:06:33

there is a certain aspect of the material

01:06:38

or a certain type of question that really triggers--

01:06:43

maybe triggers is the wrong word,

01:06:44

but resonates with an individual based on their upbringing

01:06:51

and their experiences.

01:06:53

That's the question that unlocks the new perspective.

01:06:58

But it's hard to tell which one it is,

01:07:02

because we're not doing it the right way,

01:07:04

because we're just cranking through this book

01:07:07

in a couple of weeks.

01:07:08

So I think if you were to tackle this,

01:07:12

let's just assume each chapter is a week in the class.

01:07:16

Some weeks, you're like, eh, I didn't really care

01:07:20

for that class.

01:07:21

There might be some weeks though where it's like, oh, yeah,

01:07:23

that's the one.

01:07:24

That makes the whole semester worth it.

01:07:26

But we kind of missed that, I feel,

01:07:28

because of how fast we're going through this.

01:07:32

And I don't think--

01:07:33

Very well could be.

01:07:34

I don't think they are trying to find--

01:07:38

this is the one question that the average person should

01:07:42

be asking, although that would be an interesting perspective

01:07:46

for a book as well.

01:07:49

All right, let's go into the last part here.

01:07:52

Part 5 is back to the surface.

01:07:58

And this is where we're bringing this back around.

01:08:01

Chapter 13, it turns out we have some work to do.

01:08:03

Chapter 14 changes hard.

01:08:05

Chapter 15, making it stick.

01:08:08

I like this section a lot too.

01:08:10

So it seems like just the going down part was the--

01:08:13

It's just that bottom of the dip where

01:08:16

we're in that self-transcendant thing.

01:08:18

Yeah, yeah.

01:08:20

So the things that they call out here that I really like--

01:08:23

actually, there's something I like from each one

01:08:25

of these chapters.

01:08:27

The first one, they talk about how insights are one thing,

01:08:30

but action is another.

01:08:31

And they use the example of Thomas Jefferson writing the words,

01:08:34

all men are created equal while holding hundreds of slaves.

01:08:38

And I have heard that story used previously as an accusation.

01:08:46

And from where we are today, we could say rightfully so.

01:08:51

But I like the perspective that they have here,

01:08:53

because essentially what they're saying without saying it

01:08:59

is, no matter where you find yourself in the scope of time,

01:09:07

if you don't put wisdom into practice, it withers and dies.

01:09:10

So the question we need to be asking ourselves

01:09:13

is, am I doing the right thing with what I know or what

01:09:21

I believe?

01:09:22

Am I practicing?

01:09:24

And then the other thing that strikes me about this

01:09:27

is this was a small error in judgment.

01:09:31

Now you could say small wasn't small.

01:09:33

He impacted hundreds of people's lives.

01:09:36

That is true.

01:09:38

But it wouldn't have taken a whole big mindset shift,

01:09:42

I feel, for that to be a completely different story.

01:09:47

In fact, they share a different story about somebody else

01:09:50

and I didn't shut down the name, who actually did free

01:09:54

all of their slaves when they became aware that this is wrong.

01:09:58

And I would like to think that I would take the same approach.

01:10:02

If I was shown the error of my ways, I would change.

01:10:06

I don't think any of us know that until we're

01:10:07

put in that position.

01:10:09

But that's the goal here.

01:10:12

Chapter 14, to talk about how change is hard

01:10:16

and how you should design your world to nudge you

01:10:20

in the desired direction.

01:10:23

And that gets back to the book nudge that we actually covered.

01:10:27

I forget which episode that was a long time ago,

01:10:33

the one with the elephant on the cover.

01:10:35

Surprise.

01:10:35

You don't remember every book and every number.

01:10:38

I remember a shocking amount of them.

01:10:41

Because I do all the show notes.

01:10:43

I do.

01:10:44

I do all the show notes.

01:10:45

So I've got a raycast search that

01:10:50

finds the book titles on the site for me.

01:10:52

But there's some.

01:10:53

I don't even need the search.

01:10:54

I'm like, oh, yeah.

01:10:55

42, that's how to read a book.

01:10:59

When it's mentioned.

01:10:59

And at least every other, if not every third episode.

01:11:05

The other thing that is interesting in this chapter,

01:11:08

though, is that they say, art is how we express our truest selves.

01:11:12

And that is a small statement that could easily be overlooked,

01:11:17

except that I just got done writing a whole big email

01:11:21

course on the creativity flywheel.

01:11:24

And I was like, yes, absolutely.

01:11:27

Because I've been wrestling through how to communicate this

01:11:30

myself.

01:11:30

But I really believe with that creativity flywheel

01:11:32

that there has to be some sort of output.

01:11:34

And I get pushed back occasionally when I talk to people

01:11:36

about this because, oh, I'm just not creative.

01:11:38

I don't write anything for public consumption.

01:11:41

I'm not a podcaster.

01:11:42

I don't have a YouTube channel.

01:11:44

Doesn't matter.

01:11:45

I always argue you are creative.

01:11:46

You have to have some way of expressing yourself.

01:11:49

And so this was basically an admonition.

01:11:52

I felt like that we should all try to be artists.

01:11:55

And then chapter 15, they talk about the Ignatian Retreat.

01:12:00

And this was cool.

01:12:01

The Ignatian Retreat is 30 days, I believe.

01:12:06

And the bigger idea here is that spiritual awakening

01:12:10

is not a one time thing.

01:12:11

However, they talk about this examine, ex-amen.

01:12:15

I don't know if that's how you actually pronounce it.

01:12:17

But the goal of the examine is to notice God's presence

01:12:19

in the day to day.

01:12:20

And it's broken down into these different parts.

01:12:22

Gratitude, review, sorrow, forgiveness, and grace.

01:12:26

And this obviously has parallels to journaling.

01:12:30

But also, I would argue, if you extended a little bit further

01:12:35

somewhere between the 30 days and 15 minutes that this is,

01:12:38

you've got essentially the personal retreat that I am a huge fan of.

01:12:43

So I don't know.

01:12:44

I feel like we're on the same wavelength here as we wrap up this book.

01:12:49

Yeah, this is so obviously like we're getting back up

01:12:51

into the territory where we're talking about habits and actions,

01:12:55

which is a lot of the territory where we tend to gravitate.

01:12:59

And they start that off with like we've got work to do.

01:13:03

You've got to get, you know, just sitting around thinking about this

01:13:06

is not going to accomplish anything.

01:13:08

So you need to act on it.

01:13:11

I've got a thing on my home screen on my phone

01:13:15

that says words don't matter, deeds do.

01:13:18

That comes from a book we read, I don't know, five or six ago.

01:13:20

I don't remember what it was.

01:13:22

But I know that that phrasing stuck with me.

01:13:25

It's like words do matter.

01:13:26

Like obviously we read books and we think that they matter.

01:13:30

But that's not the intention behind that phrase.

01:13:33

It's purely that I can say a lot of things.

01:13:36

But unless I act on it, it doesn't really have much weight.

01:13:40

To me, like this last part tends to try to bring that to life.

01:13:43

And just saying like, you know, there are many, many things

01:13:46

that you can process mentally and that you can spend some time

01:13:51

in your, you know, thoughts trying to come up with the answers

01:13:54

of these questions.

01:13:56

But until you take the time to act on them,

01:14:02

it really doesn't come to fruit at all.

01:14:06

And I think that's where some of the creativity piece,

01:14:08

like they're offering options for how those actions could come about.

01:14:13

And I think it's great.

01:14:14

You know, I love to see, you know, when authors tell us

01:14:17

to be creative like that in those ways.

01:14:20

And I think to your point, it doesn't always have to mean like art per se.

01:14:26

People tend to say that, you know, being creative is art.

01:14:30

But art has it's a very loose term, I would say.

01:14:35

I think of art in a lot of different ways.

01:14:36

Like I obviously spend a lot of time behind a sound board.

01:14:39

That's like, if anything, that's the area where I spend a lot

01:14:42

of time developing art in music and taking the instruments

01:14:46

and the singers that I am given and their talents as well.

01:14:51

And then trying to put that all together into a cohesive song

01:14:53

and trying to bring the energy of that song out.

01:14:56

So that's my form of like creativity and artwork of sorts.

01:15:00

So I am 100% on board with this.

01:15:03

I like this part.

01:15:05

So I didn't get all confused elated on this one.

01:15:08

I understood it, I think.

01:15:10

Nice. All right.

01:15:13

And then the last part is the epilogue.

01:15:17

And this is titled What Matters Most.

01:15:21

It's basically an admonition to live a life worth living.

01:15:26

They talk about essentially paraphrasing,

01:15:30

but do what you can not to live a trivial life.

01:15:33

Your life is too valuable to be guided by anything less

01:15:36

than what matters most.

01:15:39

And page 283, there's a quote that I really liked.

01:15:43

What matters most will not clamor for your attention.

01:15:45

It's really loud.

01:15:47

It's almost never flashy.

01:15:48

It's easy to miss and it can be hard to hold on to.

01:15:51

So again, that is a big reason why I really

01:15:54

like the personal retreat idea.

01:15:58

Not going to go too deep into that, but I will share.

01:16:01

As we record this, I just recorded a YouTube video

01:16:05

on my last personal retreat.

01:16:07

I walked through the whole template that I use in Obsidian.

01:16:12

And you can actually download that for free.

01:16:14

So if you're interested in doing a personal retreat in Obsidian,

01:16:18

there'll be a link to that in the show notes.

01:16:20

And you should go check that out.

01:16:21

But a real effective way, I feel,

01:16:24

like to wrap all this up before we get into style and rating.

01:16:30

I guess I don't want to talk too much about the whole journey

01:16:35

that they attempted to bring us on.

01:16:37

But just in isolation with this epilogue,

01:16:40

I feel like it's an effective conclusion to the very long book.

01:16:45

Yeah, I think in the epilogue, the quote

01:16:48

that you mentioned, what matters most rarely

01:16:52

clamors for our attention.

01:16:53

That concept is one of the few quotes out of the book

01:16:57

I wrote down as well.

01:16:59

And I think it's a great place to end it,

01:17:01

because the things that we tend to put on a pedestal,

01:17:05

like this is the most important thing to me,

01:17:08

they're almost never the thing that are right in front of you

01:17:12

and that just naturally happen you don't have to work at.

01:17:16

That's not the case.

01:17:17

It's almost always the thing you have to sacrifice

01:17:20

and work your tail off for.

01:17:21

So it's not going to be the thing to saying, hey,

01:17:24

pay attention to me.

01:17:25

It's always going to be the thing that

01:17:27

wants to hide behind the corner.

01:17:29

And you have to seek it out.

01:17:31

Otherwise, it's not going to happen.

01:17:33

Yep.

01:17:34

All right, anything else before we get into action items?

01:17:38

It's a really long list of action items,

01:17:40

so we better get after it.

01:17:42

(laughs)

01:17:43

Well, I do have one that I was sort of on the fence about,

01:17:48

but I think I am going to pick up the workbook

01:17:56

that I saw on Amazon that goes along with this.

01:18:00

I don't know, maybe I don't need the actual workbook.

01:18:03

Maybe I just need to spend a little bit more time

01:18:05

with some of these exercises and action items,

01:18:09

but I'm not committing to giving it the whole effort

01:18:14

that they're asking for.

01:18:18

But I do think it's possible that there's a little bit more

01:18:23

to be mined here than we got in the two weeks

01:18:28

that we had to crank through the book.

01:18:31

So I intend to pick up the workbook

01:18:34

and kind of pick at this here and there

01:18:37

and consider some of these questions

01:18:39

and go through some of these exercises

01:18:41

when I have a little bit of extra time.

01:18:44

Obviously, a life theme is a thing for me.

01:18:47

And so as I shared before,

01:18:48

I feel like there's elements of this

01:18:49

that can give me some new perspective

01:18:52

and some new insights, some new dimensions

01:18:54

to some of the stuff that I'm already doing,

01:18:56

but that's also the trick is figuring out

01:18:59

how do I make this system or this process my own?

01:19:04

And I don't have anything specific

01:19:09

that I am looking to get from this.

01:19:11

It's quite possible.

01:19:12

I spend several hours going through some of these exercises

01:19:15

and I'm like, yeah, I like what I have already a lot better.

01:19:18

(laughs)

01:19:19

But I want to at least dig a little bit deeper.

01:19:23

- Yeah, I don't have any action items on this.

01:19:27

None.

01:19:28

Other than maybe think about it,

01:19:31

but I don't foresee that happening either.

01:19:33

So sorry, no action items on this one for me.

01:19:37

- That's all right.

01:19:39

Okay, style and rating.

01:19:42

This is gonna be tricky.

01:19:44

(laughs)

01:19:46

- Tricky or easy?

01:19:48

- Well, as already said,

01:19:50

we didn't do this the right way.

01:19:54

So giving this any sort of rating

01:19:59

based on our experiences kind of unfair,

01:20:02

but also this is the podcast at this point,

01:20:07

175 episodes in or 177 I guess, actually.

01:20:12

- Yep, that's getting ready to correct you.

01:20:16

- Yep.

01:20:17

- Yeah, this is what we do.

01:20:18

So from the Bookworm perspective,

01:20:23

I feel that cranking through this material

01:20:26

in a couple of weeks is good and beneficial,

01:20:30

but it's not gonna give you

01:20:33

what the authors intended to give you.

01:20:37

That's not necessarily a bad thing,

01:20:41

although the argument could be made it is

01:20:43

when they are three academics at Yale

01:20:46

trying to walk you through the material

01:20:49

that they teach in a semester long course.

01:20:52

(laughs)

01:20:54

I am glad that I read this.

01:20:56

I am thankful for the recommendation.

01:21:00

There are some things that I will continue

01:21:03

to noodle on from here.

01:21:05

The things that I did not like about this book

01:21:09

were number one, the approach where we start up high,

01:21:14

we go down and then we come back up,

01:21:16

which is a little bit surprising to me

01:21:18

because I feel like the way that that is framed

01:21:21

at the beginning that is somewhat of an effective way to do it.

01:21:26

However, having gone through this,

01:21:27

I think my approach would not be,

01:21:30

okay, start at the top and we're gonna go all the way

01:21:33

down to the bottom and then back up,

01:21:35

but it would be to shine a light on

01:21:39

what you are currently doing

01:21:42

and is that getting you the results

01:21:44

that you were hoping for?

01:21:46

So my version of something like this

01:21:49

probably would not have four layers.

01:21:53

It'd probably only have three.

01:21:55

And instead of starting out top and going down,

01:21:58

it would be sort of establishing a baseline

01:22:00

and then okay, let's build on top of that.

01:22:03

The whole like arc thing felt a little bit disorienting,

01:22:08

but that's just me.

01:22:09

Again, you've got a longer timeframe.

01:22:11

Maybe that works a lot better.

01:22:14

Some of the stuff in here,

01:22:17

I had a hard time reconciling.

01:22:21

We kind of talked about the recipe test

01:22:24

and the really big picture stuff

01:22:26

and all this stuff at the beginning,

01:22:28

I feel like unfairly, not unfairly,

01:22:33

but it definitely anchored me on a lower score

01:22:37

than it would have if we just started with part four.

01:22:44

If we did part four through the epilogue,

01:22:47

feels like a totally different experience to me.

01:22:52

So really this is a tale of two different journeys here,

01:22:57

one on the way down, one on the way back up.

01:23:00

I feel like the one on the way back up

01:23:02

felt a lot different.

01:23:05

Left me with a lot of great food for thought

01:23:10

but the stuff at the beginning,

01:23:13

like the whole first part of the book,

01:23:14

I was kind of like, where are we going?

01:23:16

I was looking for something to grab onto

01:23:18

some sort of reference point

01:23:21

and didn't really, really get it.

01:23:24

I am struggling with what to rate this.

01:23:29

Going back to the discussion on the obsidian properties,

01:23:34

I've been thinking about creating a property

01:23:38

for book ratings in obsidian.

01:23:42

However, there is no half-star

01:23:44

Unicode character that renders in obsidian.

01:23:48

So I am hearing David Sparks' voice in my head saying,

01:23:53

you guys gotta quit using these half-star ratings.

01:23:56

And so I think I'm gonna try to do that.

01:24:01

So that leaves me with three stars or four stars.

01:24:04

This is tough.

01:24:08

I think I'm gonna go with four stars

01:24:13

just because I don't think I've found very many books

01:24:18

that are willing to consider these questions.

01:24:22

And I think that there is a reason for that

01:24:24

because it is difficult to do.

01:24:26

And I can nitpick a lot of stuff

01:24:32

with especially the first half of this book

01:24:35

but my overall feeling at the end of it,

01:24:39

I think this is worthwhile.

01:24:42

I think I would recommend this book for a lot of people

01:24:46

till I write mine.

01:24:47

I don't know that I've got a better resource

01:24:51

to send people to.

01:24:52

- I'll recommend this one until I have mine done

01:24:56

and then I'm not gonna recommend it anymore

01:24:58

'cause then you should read mine.

01:25:00

- Well, I guess, you know, who is this for, right?

01:25:03

What is the problem this is trying to solve?

01:25:06

And it's really thinking about

01:25:09

what is the life that I want to live?

01:25:14

It's essentially the same sort of stuff

01:25:17

that I'm trying to help people wrestle through

01:25:20

with the life theme

01:25:22

and a totally different approach to doing it.

01:25:25

I don't have a book and I don't have a PhD

01:25:28

and I'm not teaching a college level class

01:25:31

but I guess the people that I have worked

01:25:36

through a life theme with,

01:25:38

if they were to come to me and be like,

01:25:40

you know what, I don't like your life theme.

01:25:42

Give me a book to read instead

01:25:43

'cause I really like your book recommendations.

01:25:46

I just don't like the way that you teach this thing.

01:25:50

I would recommend this.

01:25:51

I don't have a better resource.

01:25:53

- Sure.

01:25:54

- Maybe there is one out there.

01:25:56

I'll continue to look for it but haven't found it yet.

01:26:00

- Well, as far as your obsidian property thing goes,

01:26:03

you could use a scale of zero to 10 in obsidian

01:26:06

and then use your, like a nine would be a 4.5

01:26:10

and have it translate and using BVU.

01:26:12

You could do that.

01:26:14

I have no qualms with a half star.

01:26:17

I think your whole, like Max Sparky, like sure, great

01:26:21

but I'm perfectly happy with a half star.

01:26:24

I have no issues with that.

01:26:25

Like Amazon reports things in half stars.

01:26:28

It's gotta be okay.

01:26:29

- It's gotta be reports things

01:26:30

but when you rate something, what are your options?

01:26:34

One, two, three, four, five.

01:26:36

- Yep, it's true.

01:26:38

That is true.

01:26:39

I'm perfectly happy with I have star.

01:26:43

(laughing)

01:26:44

- Okay.

01:26:44

- Besides, we'd have all this retro stuff

01:26:49

we'd have to figure out what to do with.

01:26:50

I can't just script rewrite all of the episode.

01:26:54

- That's fair.

01:26:55

- And how we recorded it.

01:26:56

Okay, style and rating.

01:26:57

So style of this book,

01:26:59

I like the stories.

01:27:00

I like the idea of taking a story,

01:27:04

process it and then give me some questions

01:27:05

to process through it at the end.

01:27:08

I think if I had taken the time to go through

01:27:12

this entire book in the span of 15 weeks,

01:27:17

so I'm taking a chapter a week

01:27:19

and doing all of those probably gonna be something

01:27:23

that I get more out of

01:27:25

and I could probably understand it at a deeper level

01:27:28

but I could also say that for about any book we read.

01:27:32

So that's an obvious.

01:27:34

I am aware that we don't cover this.

01:27:38

We're not covering this book

01:27:39

in the way it's intended to be processed.

01:27:42

I do know at the beginning,

01:27:44

they do mention that you need to cut yourself some slack

01:27:48

and that you shouldn't be too hard on yourself.

01:27:50

So I'm aware that they start off with that.

01:27:53

So you haven't even got into the book

01:27:55

before they're already starting to tell you,

01:27:57

like it's okay to come up a little bit short

01:28:01

on some of the stuff.

01:28:02

So I'm aware of that.

01:28:03

So I'm grateful that they do offer that.

01:28:06

The dip thing where we're gonna start at the top,

01:28:10

go to the bottom, come back to the top.

01:28:12

I think I understand why they're doing that.

01:28:16

If you process it in the scheme

01:28:18

of we're gonna do this in 15 weeks,

01:28:21

which I don't know if that's how they do it or not.

01:28:22

This is how I am thinking about it

01:28:25

because if you're starting at the top

01:28:26

or you're talking about your actions and your habits,

01:28:30

and then we're gonna go down to the hard to process stuff

01:28:33

of the self-transcendant, very high level view of things.

01:28:37

And then we're gonna come all the way back to action.

01:28:40

If you do that over the span of 15 weeks,

01:28:42

it takes you from, here's where your starting point is.

01:28:45

Here's what you're currently doing.

01:28:47

Here's how we get all the way to the meaning of your life.

01:28:49

And then here's how you start acting on that meaning in life.

01:28:52

If you do that over that span of time,

01:28:54

like I could see how that would be a little more motivating

01:28:56

and could drive you to some actions.

01:28:58

When you do this in two weeks

01:28:59

and you're going from top to bottom to top

01:29:03

in the span of probably a few days,

01:29:05

it gets to be a little bit jarring.

01:29:07

So I wonder if there's a little bit of

01:29:09

the translation from a class into a book,

01:29:12

just didn't go well.

01:29:14

And the way that we are processing this book

01:29:17

has us reviewing it in a way that's unfair.

01:29:22

So I need to put that caveat on this.

01:29:25

That all said, the beginning and ending parts,

01:29:29

I feel like I understand well enough

01:29:32

and can resonate with,

01:29:34

there's some real weird stuff to me in the middle

01:29:36

and there's some parts of it

01:29:37

that kind of made me think you guys are weird and crazy.

01:29:40

Or I just don't understand.

01:29:43

And again, I'm leaving that as a caveat.

01:29:45

Since I don't have issues with half stars,

01:29:50

unlike Max Sparky and Mike,

01:29:53

I will rate it at the 3.5.

01:29:55

(laughs)

01:29:57

'Cause I don't think it's in that four territory

01:29:59

and I don't think it's quite as bad as a three.

01:30:02

So I am going to put it at 3.5.

01:30:04

Somebody ever figures out how to put us on to the zero scale.

01:30:08

I'll make that change, but I don't see that happening.

01:30:11

So 177 books deep and we're not on that yet.

01:30:15

So here we are.

01:30:18

Anyway, I'll do a 3.5.

01:30:20

- All right, let's shelf it.

01:30:23

What's next, Joe?

01:30:24

The next is another Bookworm Club recommendation.

01:30:28

This is The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Mark Schmitz.

01:30:33

I think we talked about this a little bit last time.

01:30:34

Mark Schmitz is no relation, I'm assuming.

01:30:37

At least that you're aware of.

01:30:39

- Nope.

01:30:40

- Okay, just checking on it.

01:30:42

But this is probably gonna be in the same vein.

01:30:45

I have not actually picked it up to start reading it.

01:30:47

Like I have it at my house,

01:30:48

but I've not actually started reading it.

01:30:50

So I'm like, gonna guess it's gonna be

01:30:52

in the same territory as the one we just covered.

01:30:54

By the way, it's Mark Schulz, I believe, not Schmitz.

01:30:58

- What?

01:30:59

How did I get that wrong?

01:31:02

- Totally thought it was Schmitz.

01:31:03

Did I just think it was your name?

01:31:05

- Probably.

01:31:06

I mean, it still looks like a good book

01:31:10

and I'm glad you picked it, but.

01:31:12

- Schulz.

01:31:14

- Now I'm frustrated.

01:31:16

- I'm not personally invested in this one

01:31:18

like you thought I was.

01:31:20

(laughing)

01:31:22

- Well, my bad, Mark Schmitz apparently doesn't exist

01:31:26

in the scheme of what I thought.

01:31:27

Mark Schulz, that's what you said.

01:31:30

- Yeah, I'm sure Mark Schmitz is out there somewhere.

01:31:32

- I would assume so, yes.

01:31:34

My bad.

01:31:37

Anyway, what's after that one, Mike?

01:31:39

- Good question.

01:31:41

So I've been going back and forth between a couple of them,

01:31:44

but I think I'm gonna pick one

01:31:46

that I really want to exist in the Bookworm canon.

01:31:52

- Yeah.

01:31:53

- There is a book that is very popular

01:31:57

that we have never read

01:32:00

and it is called The Emith Revisited by Michael Gerber.

01:32:04

- Oh.

01:32:04

- And this I know is a businessy book.

01:32:07

So hopefully you're still interested in this one, but yeah.

01:32:12

I think it'll be a fun conversation

01:32:15

and it's gonna be one of those ones

01:32:17

that I'm adding links to the show notes

01:32:20

from for a long time to come.

01:32:22

This is one of those that's like polarizing, right?

01:32:25

I think this is one of those

01:32:26

that people either love or hate.

01:32:28

- Kinda, yeah.

01:32:30

- Didn't they cover this on Cortex at one point?

01:32:34

- They did, yep.

01:32:36

- Okay.

01:32:37

I'm like nervous about that one, no.

01:32:39

Okay, all right.

01:32:40

- Sorry.

01:32:42

- I mean, I'm with you in that we should definitely cover this.

01:32:45

That doesn't make me not nervous about it though.

01:32:47

- That's fair.

01:32:49

All right, you got any gap books?

01:32:51

- No, with the conference and everything going on

01:32:53

and all sorts of craziness, absolutely not.

01:32:58

I'm itching for our ministry season to start

01:33:00

that way I can get some time off.

01:33:02

(laughing)

01:33:04

- I actually do have one.

01:33:05

- Okay.

01:33:06

- So I am about 75% of the way through a book called

01:33:11

How to be miserable 40 strategies you already use

01:33:18

by Randy J. Patterson.

01:33:21

- Okay.

01:33:22

- This is kind of a parody of a self-help book.

01:33:27

It's broken down into four different parts

01:33:32

and each part has 20 different strategies.

01:33:35

And it's basically the inverse of everything

01:33:37

you've ever heard in the productivity world.

01:33:39

Like make sure you get enough sleep

01:33:41

and make sure you eat right.

01:33:43

So they're written as ways to be miserable, right?

01:33:46

And so it is kind of like satirical.

01:33:49

You can sleep when you're dead.

01:33:50

You know, you should stay up as long as possible.

01:33:53

Try to work as soon as you get up,

01:33:56

keep your phone by your bed

01:33:57

so you don't lose any time like that sort of thing.

01:33:59

It's quite humorous for people like me

01:34:02

who have been in this world for quite a while.

01:34:04

But there's probably people who would pick this up

01:34:06

and be like, "What? I don't get it."

01:34:08

I think you would find it pretty funny though.

01:34:11

- I wrote it down to buy it.

01:34:13

So that's immediately what I'm, yes.

01:34:17

As soon as I'm done here.

01:34:19

- I think it's any good.

01:34:20

Maybe we can talk about it for Bookworm.

01:34:23

- Have to do like an after dark episode.

01:34:26

- Yeah, exactly. It's like a satirical thing.

01:34:29

- I like it.

01:34:30

- All right.

01:34:31

So thank you to everyone who supports the show.

01:34:34

Thank you for listening.

01:34:35

Thank you if you have attended the live recording.

01:34:37

Thank you specifically if you are a Bookworm Club Premium member

01:34:40

and you support the show financially,

01:34:42

really means a lot to Joe and myself.

01:34:44

Helps us keep the lights on.

01:34:46

If you want to become a Bookworm Club Premium member,

01:34:49

you can go to bookworm.fm/membership,

01:34:51

five bucks a month, 50 bucks a year.

01:34:53

And that gets you an access to the Pro Feed,

01:34:58

which is the Ad-Free version.

01:34:59

Also a bootleg version, which Joe publishes

01:35:02

right after we wrap up.

01:35:04

So you get to hear all of the technical issues

01:35:07

we encounter, all of the stupid things we say

01:35:10

that Toby edits out in the main episode.

01:35:16

That's all in the bootleg.

01:35:18

And then I've got the Mind Map files

01:35:21

for all of the books that we have read.

01:35:24

Those are available in both PDF and Mind Node format

01:35:28

for Bookworm Club Premium members.

01:35:30

So again, if you want to support the show,

01:35:32

we would love to have you join us,

01:35:34

bookworm.fm/membership.

01:35:37

- One other side note about the bootleg.

01:35:38

You also get to hear like the pre and post conversations we have.

01:35:41

- That's true.

01:35:42

- On the episode, like I think today we were talking about

01:35:45

racing electric cars.

01:35:46

So like, yeah, anyway, all sorts of fun stuff.

01:35:49

So if you're one of these amazing people

01:35:50

that reads along with us,

01:35:52

pick up The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Mark Schulz.

01:35:56

Not Schmitt's and we'll cover that with you

01:35:59

in a couple of weeks.