Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

So Mike, I have a cup of coffee with me as normal at this point.

00:00:06

From a local coffee bean roaster that I discovered is quite literally just under one mile from my house.

00:00:15

Whoa!

00:00:17

And I was quizzing the guy because we ran across his website and I had never seen him before.

00:00:25

I was like, "How on earth is there a coffee roaster in our town and I'm not aware of this?

00:00:31

How do I not know this?"

00:00:33

And then I go talk to him and like there's not even a storefront.

00:00:37

Like I open the front door to this place to come pick up my coffee and I walk into one of their offices.

00:00:43

I'm like, "Oh, did I come in the wrong door?"

00:00:45

And he immediately greets me and welcomes me and gives me a tour of the place and tells me he's been there for 20 years.

00:00:51

Okay, somebody explained, start talking, turns out he's been doing wholesale up until about three months ago.

00:00:59

Only.

00:01:00

So he didn't have a website, he didn't do retail stuff like that, so I don't feel so bad.

00:01:07

So you're going to make him a website and he's going to give you free coffee for life?

00:01:11

His son went to college for internet marketing.

00:01:16

I didn't know you could get a degree in that.

00:01:18

But he did and so his son put it together for him.

00:01:22

That's how I learned of it.

00:01:24

But I made sure to, you know, like I do with all businesses like this that I interact with their website.

00:01:29

I simply mention, "Oh, if you ever need a web developer, by the way."

00:01:33

Yeah, I do that a lot.

00:01:35

I've gotten so much free coffee that way.

00:01:37

So what's the name of the roaster? Let's give him a shout out.

00:01:44

Oh, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.

00:01:47

"Cafe Strata" is the name of the...

00:01:50

The stuff.

00:01:52

I've never heard of this.

00:01:55

I had not either.

00:01:57

Customroasting.net, I think is what it is.

00:02:01

I'm looking it up quick.

00:02:03

Yes, customroasting.net.

00:02:04

There you go.

00:02:06

Shout out to my dude here close by.

00:02:09

Nice.

00:02:11

Fun times. So I have something I want to bring up from a couple times ago.

00:02:16

Okay.

00:02:17

This is number one on the list here.

00:02:19

Because you rated this book at a five.

00:02:22

And a friend of mine who I actually recorded a podcast with him, as we record this one,

00:02:29

that one will theoretically be live.

00:02:31

So you might hear us roast you on that a little bit.

00:02:34

Sorry about that.

00:02:36

But he brought up, the 10x rule has a lot of swearing in it.

00:02:40

That's something that's typically been a downside for you whenever we read these books.

00:02:45

It's not something that usually catches me off guard.

00:02:47

I'm not sure if that's because of the farm background and just being around it a lot.

00:02:51

But it came up when I was talking to my buddy Josh and he wanted to know why swearing was

00:02:58

okay in that book and you still gave it a five despite of it.

00:03:02

And I'm curious too.

00:03:04

Where did he say go?

00:03:06

Well, to be honest, I guess it's the way that it was used.

00:03:15

And that maybe doesn't impact the rating that I would give it necessarily.

00:03:19

But I guess I was able to look past it a lot because I knew going in I wasn't going to

00:03:23

like Grant Cardone.

00:03:26

I even said that in the podcast.

00:03:27

I don't think he and I would be friends.

00:03:29

He seems a little bit.

00:03:32

So you're looking past.

00:03:33

You're looking past his style.

00:03:37

Is that what you're saying?

00:03:38

Yes, yes, exactly.

00:03:40

Whereas there are a lot of other books that we've read maybe not even for the podcast,

00:03:46

but other books that I've read where I'll just absolutely love a book and then they'll

00:03:51

drop in an F bomb and be like, "Why did you do that?"

00:03:55

So I guess that's kind of my justification is that I knew what to expect going into the

00:04:01

10x rule.

00:04:02

I apologize to people who are listening and maybe they didn't know what to expect and

00:04:07

that caught them off guard.

00:04:08

I could totally see that happening.

00:04:11

But I guess just trying to reconcile it in my own head, I think what happened and why

00:04:18

I'm not okay with it.

00:04:20

That's the wrong term, but able to look past it maybe for the 10x rule.

00:04:26

Thank you, squirmed your way out of that.

00:04:27

The one way I'm not sure how to counter you with it.

00:04:29

That's okay.

00:04:30

Well, I mean, I definitely don't condone it.

00:04:35

I just think that there's a lot of value there which it didn't detract from.

00:04:41

Like I said, if you're going to get a lot out of the 10x rule, you're going to get

00:04:45

a lot out of it despite Grant Cardone, I would say, in his little bit edgy, rough style.

00:04:52

Whereas I forget what other book had that.

00:04:56

Was it daring greatly where I had an issue with that?

00:04:59

Yeah, because Brené Brown is a Texan.

00:05:03

Yeah, Brené sounds like someone that I'd love to go get coffee with.

00:05:07

And so when she did it, it was a woman who wrote that book because I think I messed

00:05:12

up the first time.

00:05:13

Yes, female.

00:05:15

Yeah, it was out of left field for me in that book.

00:05:19

And I don't know.

00:05:24

I mean, the best thing I can do is compare Grant Cardone to Gary Vaynerchuk because people

00:05:30

in our space, I think, are probably familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk and even if they don't

00:05:33

like him because I think almost everybody in our space doesn't like him, but they respect

00:05:37

him.

00:05:38

Like what he teaches and what he, like he go to one of his talks, everybody who I know

00:05:44

has like consumed his content or heard him speak or whatever, like it's really, really

00:05:49

good stuff.

00:05:50

It's, you know, they'll use the term life-changing, but it doesn't mean that I like him either.

00:05:59

Yeah, I think expectations are a lot with a book, which is interesting if you start,

00:06:05

like, if you're reading a book every two weeks or every week, if you're reading between

00:06:08

as well, like what we are, it seems like the preconceived notions of what you're going

00:06:14

to get into make a big difference.

00:06:17

This is why I advocate for reading introductions so much because some people like to skip those,

00:06:22

but I feel like those are important.

00:06:24

The introductions, just because they lay their groundwork for what you're getting ready to

00:06:28

get into, like they adjust your expectations to what the rest of the book is going to be

00:06:33

like.

00:06:34

And to me, that's really important.

00:06:36

So I guess if you're looking at the 10x rule and you know there's going to be swearing in

00:06:39

it and you know that Grant Cardone is of that style, I can see where it just doesn't even

00:06:46

cross your mind, but if you're not expecting it at all, it would be jarring.

00:06:49

I could see that.

00:06:50

Yeah, so probably should have called that out, I guess.

00:06:54

But yeah.

00:06:55

No, that's fair.

00:06:57

That's fair.

00:06:58

I know that Grant seems to be very motivated and he seems to use swearing to help with that.

00:07:07

So anyway, I thought it was interesting.

00:07:10

Another thing I want to pick on you about this might start out as a pick on Mike's show.

00:07:14

Sorry about that.

00:07:15

I saw a tweet by you about transitioning to to do versus Omni Focus.

00:07:22

I'm going to bring this up again.

00:07:26

So are you doing this?

00:07:29

If so, I am still playing around with to do, but I am not going to transfer everything.

00:07:36

Matt basically talked me out of it on the episode of the productivity show where we talked

00:07:40

about it because I was like, oh man, Matt, these features are awesome.

00:07:44

Maybe I should switch over.

00:07:45

I'm like, well actually Mike, Omni Focus is coming out with the same features.

00:07:48

So maybe you don't have to.

00:07:50

Yeah.

00:07:51

But I was very, very impressed with to do and how Matt was using it.

00:07:57

One feature he called out specifically, which I don't know why I never thought about this,

00:08:00

but to do has this feature where you can use the different priority levels.

00:08:04

And I mentioned on the episode that I hate the definition of different priority levels

00:08:08

because either things are priority or they're not.

00:08:11

And he said that he's using them to define energy levels.

00:08:13

And I was like, oh, that makes so much sense because I've tried to hack my way, you know,

00:08:18

different perspectives or context for that in Omni Focus in the past.

00:08:22

I currently don't even use a low energy level context anymore because it just wasn't something

00:08:28

that I could really get my mind to think that way very effectively.

00:08:33

But when it's part of the interface, and that's the cool thing about to do in my opinion,

00:08:37

is that the interface is packed.

00:08:39

But once you get used to the interface and you know where the things are, it actually

00:08:42

gives you a ton of information and it can actually be easier to use because you have

00:08:48

all of that visual instead of having to drill down and find that sort of thing.

00:08:54

Are you subscribed to there is a newsletter that David Allen puts out on GTD Times?

00:09:01

Do you get this?

00:09:03

I believe I do, but I don't read very many newsletters.

00:09:08

Okay, he sent it out.

00:09:10

It's one of the few that I try to keep up on just because it's kind of nice to get, you

00:09:15

know, straight from the horse's mouth.

00:09:17

What's going on with GTD?

00:09:19

I kind of just like having that little motivation that happens occasionally.

00:09:23

Anyway, he sent out a newsletter.

00:09:25

It's probably been about a week ago as we record this that basically said that you should

00:09:31

get rid of your today list.

00:09:33

Like don't put together a list for today.

00:09:36

What?

00:09:37

That made me stop and think a little bit.

00:09:41

And he had a pretty good rationale for it because it had more to do with if you do create

00:09:48

a today list or like in my case it would be the dashboard that I'm kind of known for

00:09:53

on OmniFocus.

00:09:54

That's exactly what that is.

00:09:56

And it's essentially if you're in OmniFocus, anything flagged or do today.

00:10:01

That's what that is.

00:10:04

David Allen was saying that if you do that it dilutes the other contexts that you have

00:10:08

and you end up working from today lists as opposed to your contexts, that really kind

00:10:14

of struck a chord with me.

00:10:15

So I'm experimenting right now without my dashboard, which I'm going to say the first

00:10:22

couple of days wreaked havoc on me.

00:10:26

I'm so used to my dashboard.

00:10:28

But it's an interesting experiment.

00:10:30

Anyway, I bring it up because it's fun to see what David Allen says as far as kind of

00:10:35

the nuanced side of GTD and how that can play into certain apps and programs and even analog

00:10:43

tools.

00:10:44

It's fun to see how he's still experimenting with all those things.

00:10:48

Yeah, I don't want to sound negative, but I will.

00:10:53

I stopped listening to David Allen's opinion on technology when he appeared on MacPower

00:10:59

users and told everyone that he was using e-productivity, which I just pasted in the

00:11:04

chat.

00:11:06

Take a look at that application.

00:11:07

I know I've seen this thing.

00:11:10

Oh my gosh, he must be getting a kickback or something.

00:11:12

I mean, his picture is on the homepage.

00:11:14

But how in the world do you recommend something like this over something like OmniFocus or

00:11:20

any of the other applications that are out there?

00:11:23

So I've kind of come to this place where David Allen and I had a little bit of a falling

00:11:29

out in my head where I really embraced getting things done and it was transformational.

00:11:35

And then from that point, basically, I realized all of the problems with GTD, the honeymoon

00:11:43

was over.

00:11:44

He recommended this app and I was just like, what?

00:11:47

And then I kind of had to reconcile my head, like, what are the good things from GTD that

00:11:51

I can apply and what are the things that I'm okay with not listening to David Allen for?

00:11:58

Like the tickler file is another one.

00:11:59

I don't have a tickler file where I have 31 folders and I'm going to put the thing that

00:12:06

I need to do next month on the 15th and the folder for the 15th.

00:12:10

That just makes no sense.

00:12:12

So I've kind of reconciled this in my head where the flowchart out of GTD is absolutely

00:12:16

awesome.

00:12:17

I'm going to apply that every single way that I can.

00:12:21

And I've even actually adapted that a little bit in terms of how I work because of kind

00:12:26

of identified different branches and things that might, the things might take.

00:12:29

Like if it's a task, it's not necessarily going to go into the task manager.

00:12:33

It might end up on my calendar, depending on the type of task.

00:12:35

So I've flushed that out a little bit more in my own head and kind of made my own mic

00:12:39

TD.

00:12:40

I don't know.

00:12:41

Yeah.

00:12:42

Yeah.

00:12:43

But there's a lot, a lot of good there.

00:12:45

So I don't know, I guess that's like the long version of saying that I kind of viewed David

00:12:51

Allen as like my productivity hero in a sense.

00:12:56

And then it's kind of like you find out that your favorite basketball player actually likes

00:13:02

a music group that you can't stand or something like that.

00:13:04

You know, it's just like, oh, we're not don't have as much in common as I thought we did.

00:13:08

Right.

00:13:09

That's kind of kind of where we're at.

00:13:10

See, I tend to, I tend with stuff like this, I tend to abstract the technical recommendation

00:13:18

from the mindset.

00:13:20

So in this case, like, yes, he uses e-protativity.

00:13:23

Looks like a nightmare to me, but you also have to keep in mind that they use Lotus notes

00:13:28

on the back end.

00:13:29

And if you use Lotus notes from a functional standpoint, e-protativity, I think makes sense.

00:13:35

But if you can get away from Lotus notes, which I'm not really sure why people get into

00:13:39

Lotus notes, it hesitates say that out loud.

00:13:42

Anyway, there you go.

00:13:44

So I don't know why people use Lotus notes.

00:13:46

Say it louder.

00:13:48

If you do, I could see where you use that, but I don't get it.

00:13:51

I don't understand it.

00:13:52

So that doesn't follow me.

00:13:54

However, I know that if I follow or pay attention to how that software functionally operates

00:14:01

in the intent behind it, that I can do a lot of the same things, even more so in other

00:14:07

areas.

00:14:08

I can do the tickler file thing.

00:14:09

Like I get that.

00:14:12

But for me, I tend to do that via calendar.

00:14:15

I've got a tickler calendar in my application for that so that if something comes up, like,

00:14:21

for example, I'm considering and likely going to go to the Minneapolis Ignite deal here.

00:14:28

When is that May?

00:14:29

Sometimes I'm likely going to go to that.

00:14:32

But I don't know for certain.

00:14:33

So I've gone ahead and calendared it under my tickler calendar.

00:14:37

And then I'm always reviewing a couple months out once a week just to see what's coming

00:14:41

up and that's how I trigger that stuff.

00:14:43

Anyway, that's just the concept that I'm pulling out from that.

00:14:47

I'm not necessarily following it to the letter in the way that it's recommended, but I'm following

00:14:51

the mental state that comes with it.

00:14:53

That makes sense.

00:14:56

One other thing about GTD, David Allen has built a brand and a business for what is it?

00:15:04

Like 20 years now?

00:15:05

Offable.

00:15:06

One simple flowchart, essentially.

00:15:09

Yep.

00:15:10

It is amazing how much mileage he has gotten out of that.

00:15:15

Even the updated version of the book, like we talked about as a very first episode we

00:15:19

did on Bookworm, I was looking forward to it because I'm like, "Yeah, it's going to

00:15:23

be updated.

00:15:24

He's not going to talk about palm pilots anymore."

00:15:27

And instead, he just got rid of all of the tech stuff, which I get it and it makes it

00:15:31

more evergreen.

00:15:33

But yeah, I want to know how he's implementing these different tools, but also, I guess,

00:15:39

if he's still on e-productivity, maybe I don't want to know how he's implementing these tools.

00:15:42

Yeah.

00:15:43

Play to your strengths.

00:15:44

Good job, David.

00:15:45

Yep.

00:15:46

Anyway, I have a hard time arguing with GTD just because I feel like I've studied neuroscience

00:15:52

enough and I pay attention to my own mindsets in a way that I have a hard time arguing with

00:15:59

it.

00:16:00

So, necessarily, I can argue the technicalities.

00:16:03

I don't need file folders.

00:16:06

I can argue that day in and day out, but I can't argue the mindsets that are behind

00:16:11

those recommendations.

00:16:13

That's what I found.

00:16:14

And because of that, that's why I tend to listen to them still.

00:16:17

And whenever he says things like, "Don't use it today, Liz, why start talking," I'll

00:16:22

put a link to that newsletter.

00:16:24

There's a public version of that.

00:16:25

So I'll put a link to that specific one in the show notes that way other people get it.

00:16:30

I'll put a link to e-productivity too in case anyone wants to use the official David

00:16:33

A.

00:16:34

I will do that.

00:16:35

It's a desk manager.

00:16:36

There you go.

00:16:37

There you go.

00:16:38

All right.

00:16:39

So you're a gamer now.

00:16:40

Yes, I am.

00:16:41

I don't think you know this yet, but I bought a Nintendo Switch.

00:16:46

What?

00:16:47

I did.

00:16:48

Okay.

00:16:49

So...

00:16:50

So I know very little about these things.

00:16:51

I know there's a lot of hype around them.

00:16:53

I am so far from a gamer, but okay.

00:16:56

Go.

00:16:57

I was too.

00:16:58

In the last game that I got into was Skyrim for Xbox 360, which originally came out five

00:17:04

or six years ago.

00:17:06

Like before, I think we had one kid at the time and he was young, so I would play it

00:17:13

you know, at night after he went to bed.

00:17:16

That's how long ago it was.

00:17:17

But I've heard a lot of things about the Nintendo Switch.

00:17:21

I've heard about it when it was before it was launched.

00:17:25

And I just thought it sounded dumb, honestly.

00:17:28

Like who wants a console that you can like pick up and take with you?

00:17:31

And sometimes you can play it on the TV.

00:17:33

Like that just sounds...

00:17:34

There's like there's going to be a ton of compromises technically and it's not going

00:17:38

to be a very good system.

00:17:41

Plus the last several Nintendo systems have not been great.

00:17:44

But one of the things I do like about Nintendo is that they have a lot of intellectual property

00:17:47

like Mario, Zelda, which are still like a ton of fun, but also very family friendly.

00:17:55

You know, so my kids are to the age now, Toby is nine, where he's getting into video games.

00:18:01

And we've still got the Xbox 360 and he's still playing Lego Star Wars and stuff like

00:18:05

that, which is fun.

00:18:07

But he's at the point now where like it's getting a little old for him and he's wanting

00:18:11

to do something else.

00:18:13

And so it's like, well, his friends are probably going to be playing like Call of Duty and stuff

00:18:17

like that.

00:18:18

And I don't necessarily want him doing that yet.

00:18:21

So what are the options here?

00:18:24

And I have another friend who is a he streams for a living.

00:18:29

He big stream.net is his website where he actually will teach people how to stream on

00:18:35

Twitch.

00:18:36

So he's built a brand and a business around this and he plays video games essentially

00:18:40

12 hours a day every day.

00:18:42

And he told me he's like, you got to check out the switch.

00:18:45

It's an awesome console and it would be perfect for you.

00:18:48

And because he knows that like my kids are gamers and stuff like that.

00:18:53

And what serious?

00:18:54

And he's like, yeah, you really need to give it a shot.

00:18:57

And so I checked it out and turns out that they launched at the beginning of April.

00:19:01

If you didn't pre-order them, you couldn't get one.

00:19:04

And even now, like if you were to go on Amazon, you can't buy one.

00:19:08

But one time he was he I was working on something and he sent me a Twitter direct message.

00:19:16

He's like, Hey, prime members on Amazon can get the switch right now.

00:19:20

You should go get it.

00:19:21

But I missed it.

00:19:22

You know, by the time I looked at it, they were sold out again.

00:19:24

It was like 20 minutes later.

00:19:26

And he's like, Oh man, that those went quick.

00:19:29

Yeah.

00:19:30

I'm like, Oh, well, no big deal.

00:19:31

Just let me know.

00:19:32

I guess if it happens again.

00:19:33

So he let me know a second time and they were available.

00:19:36

So I bought it.

00:19:37

And I'm like, well, even if I don't like it, they're in such high demand right now that

00:19:40

I can sell it and I can make money on this thing.

00:19:42

Right.

00:19:43

So I bought a switch and I bought Zelda Breath of the Wild and it's amazing.

00:19:49

I absolutely love it.

00:19:51

And yeah, like I haven't really gotten a new video game in the in the past several years.

00:19:56

But one of the things that's always been on my list that comes up again and again and

00:19:59

again is I need to make more time to play.

00:20:03

And turns out I actually do like like gaming and especially playing Zelda on the switch.

00:20:10

It's a really fun, expansive, like huge game where you can kind of go anywhere, do anything

00:20:16

super, super fun.

00:20:18

And even if there were no other games that came out on the switch, like that would be

00:20:21

enough enough for me.

00:20:23

Nice.

00:20:24

So don't plan on hooking me on this one.

00:20:29

I'll bring it to max stack so you can try it.

00:20:32

Okay.

00:20:33

All right.

00:20:34

You do that.

00:20:35

We'll see how long I get stuck on it.

00:20:39

How's the speed reading going?

00:20:42

Speed reading has kind of been put on pause for the time being because I had some other

00:20:47

projects that I was working on.

00:20:48

I was traveling.

00:20:50

Actually, that's essentially right now and starting up in a week or two, I'm going to

00:20:56

get back into it.

00:20:58

Yeah, I don't want to make this the Mike complaints show, but I had to travel last week and I

00:21:03

flew I flew United, which is a news right now.

00:21:07

Oh my gosh.

00:21:08

So when I when I flew, I was standing in line to come back from Austin because he did our

00:21:16

second quarter planning.

00:21:17

I was about to board the flight to Chicago, which was already 45 minutes late because

00:21:22

the crew wasn't there, even though they were in Austin.

00:21:26

They got stuck in traffic and I'm like, you're in Austin.

00:21:29

How do you not know that there is traffic at 5 p.m.

00:21:32

Whatever.

00:21:33

Thanks.

00:21:34

Now I'm going to get stuck in a, you know, stuck overnight at an airport.

00:21:36

Well, turns out I didn't even get on that plane because my flight from Chicago to Appleton

00:21:41

was canceled.

00:21:42

I got the notification as the plane was boarding.

00:21:44

So I go to the front asking them like, what, what do I do?

00:21:47

And they're like, just stay.

00:21:48

We'll figure something else out after we board the plane.

00:21:52

So they boarded the plane and turns out there was no other options available to me.

00:21:58

And the official, the official reason for canceling the flight, I'm going to pull this

00:22:02

up.

00:22:03

I took a picture of it on my phone because I'd never seen this before.

00:22:07

Let's see.

00:22:09

Where is it?

00:22:10

Okay.

00:22:11

It says canceled due to air traffic control conditions impacting our flight operations.

00:22:16

Okay.

00:22:17

So they told me weather related.

00:22:20

I called my wife to let her know that I wasn't coming home tonight because of weather and

00:22:23

she's like, what weather?

00:22:25

I mean, this is Chicago to Appleton.

00:22:27

It's a three hour drive.

00:22:28

If there is no weather in one of these places, there's no weather in the other either, right,

00:22:32

especially in April, like if there was snow or something, that maybe I could see, but there

00:22:37

was no weather, I have a friend whose dad used to work for United.

00:22:40

I showed him that he's like, yeah, they probably just didn't have enough people on the plane

00:22:44

to make it just to justify the fuel costs.

00:22:46

So they canceled it.

00:22:47

Thank you, United.

00:22:48

But they told me that it was weather related.

00:22:50

So they wouldn't even pay for a hotel.

00:22:53

So I'm running up and down the Austin airport talking to Southwest talking to Delta, all

00:22:59

these other places to try and get another flight home.

00:23:05

Southwest could have got me in at like 1230 into Milwaukee, but my wife's got a drive

00:23:09

an hour and a half to pick me up.

00:23:10

I'm like, no, it's not a great option.

00:23:12

Found a Delta flight that would have worked.

00:23:15

And United's like, oh, yeah, we can book you on a Delta flight.

00:23:17

I'm like, OK, this is the one I want.

00:23:19

And they're like, oh, we can't get you on that one.

00:23:21

And I'm like, it's available.

00:23:23

I have it up on my app.

00:23:24

I can buy the ticket right now.

00:23:26

What do you mean?

00:23:27

You can't get me.

00:23:28

Oh, I don't know.

00:23:29

We just can't do that.

00:23:31

But there's space available, but we can't book that one.

00:23:36

So I stayed in some sleazy hotel, didn't sleep, got up at four in the morning to fly back.

00:23:42

And then two days later, this thing comes out where they basically beat up this guy

00:23:46

and dragged him off the plane.

00:23:48

And prior to my customer service experience, the lady that I was talking to was just rude.

00:23:55

I'm like, I got to get home.

00:23:57

Same thing that these staff people were saying.

00:23:59

I got to get to Louisville.

00:24:00

Right.

00:24:01

Sorry, nothing we can do.

00:24:02

Weather related.

00:24:03

Da, da, da, da, da.

00:24:04

I'm like, come on.

00:24:07

There is something you can do.

00:24:08

You can get me on this Delta flight right here.

00:24:10

Nope.

00:24:11

Sorry, I can't do that.

00:24:12

Well, can you at least find me a place to stay?

00:24:16

Because there was so much stuff going on in Austin that week that I was there that I

00:24:20

couldn't even find a hotel that was pretty, even really close to the airport.

00:24:24

Right.

00:24:25

It is ridiculous.

00:24:26

And yeah, and then the CEOs responses were like, he initially is like, well, sorry, we had

00:24:33

to re-accommodate the passenger.

00:24:35

And then later on, he sends out the letter to the employees.

00:24:38

You guys did the right thing.

00:24:39

And then finally, the third time, he's like, we're deeply sorry.

00:24:44

Our deepest sympathies and like, whatever, you're just saying that because your stock

00:24:48

lost $750 million yesterday.

00:24:51

I heard it broke a billion.

00:24:52

So the time it was all said, I think it was across a couple of days.

00:24:55

But yeah, it's significant.

00:24:58

So Mike, follow up.

00:24:59

Mike is never flying United again.

00:25:01

This is partly why I fly Delta all the time.

00:25:06

But part of that's because I've got MSP not far from me.

00:25:10

It didn't mean to rhyme that.

00:25:12

But they have their own terminal.

00:25:17

So Delta has their own massive terminal and then everybody else shares their own and

00:25:23

they're on different locations.

00:25:25

So you literally have to take a tram from one to the other because there's separate

00:25:28

buildings that are like half a mile away from each other.

00:25:31

So yeah, I always fly Delta.

00:25:34

I have never really had any experiences like what people talk about with United at all.

00:25:39

There you go.

00:25:41

In other news, I bought a Rhino.

00:25:44

Nice.

00:25:45

About time.

00:25:47

Since on my nightstand, first thing I see when I get up in the morning, hi Rhino.

00:25:51

Sean Blonk sent me a picture of a Etsy print he bought with a Rhino on it.

00:25:57

Nice.

00:25:58

Nice.

00:25:59

I need to get some more, but I have the little figurine there.

00:26:02

In other news, your Apple script, Mike, you are it.

00:26:06

I'm thinking I'm going to have to put a timeframe on this thing because it doesn't look like

00:26:11

anybody wants to be nagged like you do.

00:26:15

Fine.

00:26:16

All right.

00:26:17

So here you go.

00:26:20

So when this episode airs, I'm going to say two weeks from the day this thing comes out.

00:26:26

If that thing hasn't hit its goal, I'm going to pull it down and read.

00:26:31

Give me a solid people.

00:26:32

Come on.

00:26:35

So that means that whenever this comes out, the next episode, so we're going to talk about

00:26:40

grit here in a little bit if we ever get past all our follow up and stuff, but we're going

00:26:45

to talk about grit.

00:26:46

Then the next book we'll talk about later, but whenever the following episode comes out,

00:26:53

if it's not up by that time, I'm sorry, Mike.

00:26:57

That's okay.

00:26:58

We tried.

00:26:59

We tried.

00:27:00

All right.

00:27:01

So that's done.

00:27:03

We got to listen to question this time via email and I get a handful of these that are

00:27:07

mostly like, you know, where do you buy your books and some things like that that aren't

00:27:12

really that.

00:27:13

They're not complicated questions.

00:27:16

This one I thought was interesting.

00:27:18

So this comes from Justice.

00:27:22

And have you read through this, Mike?

00:27:24

Yes.

00:27:25

I put it in the show.

00:27:26

Why don't you just read through it for the sake of the listeners because this is a great

00:27:30

show that everybody is.

00:27:31

Yeah, I did think it was good.

00:27:33

So this comes from Justice.

00:27:34

I am reading these books along with you while reading.

00:27:37

I really enjoy it.

00:27:38

After a book is finished, though, I struggle with all the new information.

00:27:41

Where do I keep it?

00:27:42

I'm afraid it will slip away.

00:27:45

How is it possible to remember all the important details from these books?

00:27:48

What is your method of making notes?

00:27:50

Is it only important to write down the broad outlines?

00:27:52

The personal MBA, for example, is loaded with useful information.

00:27:55

How can I make a system so I can quickly find the information back?

00:27:59

Thanks for your time.

00:28:00

Kind regards, Justice.

00:28:01

Yeah.

00:28:02

So this is a great question.

00:28:04

And my answer is going to be probably a little bit different.

00:28:09

But there are a couple of articles on the Asian efficiency site that I've seen.

00:28:14

I'll see if I can find some of these links and maybe put them in the show notes on how

00:28:18

to effectively read and implement what you're learning.

00:28:23

But my approach to this is a little bit different because I am not necessarily concerned about

00:28:29

applying as much as possible from the personal MBA.

00:28:34

So my theory behind what I read is that if I constantly am getting these good inputs essentially,

00:28:45

and then I'm teasing out a couple different things that I'm actually going to apply, which

00:28:48

is where the action items come in, then to a sense, whatever sticks, sticks, whatever

00:28:54

doesn't, I'm okay with that.

00:28:57

Because if I could, if a constant stream of inputs, which are going to give me a bigger

00:29:03

toolbox essentially to work from, I'm not necessarily concerned about whether all of

00:29:08

those tools are organized perfectly.

00:29:11

What I really want to happen is that next time I'm facing a particular situation and

00:29:16

I'm thinking, how do I solve this?

00:29:19

I don't necessarily have an archive that I'm going to go back and reference and do a search

00:29:23

or whatever, but I'm going to think like, okay, just looking at this problem, how do

00:29:26

I best solve this?

00:29:28

If I've got a bigger toolbox to work with, if there's a bunch of things that I'm putting

00:29:31

in there that are going to provide different perspectives and different options in terms

00:29:35

of how you would do that, I'm going to connect those dots a little bit differently than I

00:29:41

would have done it previously before I had read all the books.

00:29:45

I'm kind of fine with just dealing with the things as they are, applying a few of the

00:29:50

specific things via the action items, but then not trying to make sure that 60% of the

00:29:56

book at least I've got documented in an Evernote somewhere that I can go back and reference

00:30:01

later.

00:30:02

But if you want to do that sort of thing, I totally get that and that's where some of

00:30:05

those articles would come in.

00:30:08

Like one way that people do it, I know it's like they'll mind map the book while they

00:30:11

are reading it and they'll put it down the specific items.

00:30:16

We kind of do that when we read for this.

00:30:18

I've got an app called Shelf that I use and I just jot down as I'm reading whatever stands

00:30:22

out to me.

00:30:23

And then I pick out a couple of those things, throw them on the outline.

00:30:27

And I've got essentially a bunch of different notes for all of these books that I can go

00:30:31

back and reference, but I'm not making sure that I'm going back and referencing these

00:30:34

every year or something like that.

00:30:37

Although I get it if people want to do that sort of thing, that's just not how I do it.

00:30:42

Does that make sense?

00:30:43

It makes sense to me.

00:30:45

I mean, I don't go quite as far.

00:30:48

Well, maybe I do.

00:30:50

I do things quite a bit differently because I write my notes down as I'm reading the book

00:30:56

and I keep a book index at the back.

00:30:58

So at the back of the book, and where did I get this?

00:31:03

It was from a podcast with Tim Ferriss and Maria Popova, I think, of brain pickings.

00:31:14

And they both talked about how they do these indexes at the back.

00:31:16

And I think Sean Blanc does this too.

00:31:18

But as you run across something that strikes you, you write down the topic of that quote,

00:31:23

underline it and then put the page number to it.

00:31:26

So you basically create your own index of topics and things you find interesting in the

00:31:29

book.

00:31:30

So I do that.

00:31:31

But one of the things that I write down, and we talked about this probably a couple months

00:31:34

ago at this point about, wasn't the personal MBA, it was not going to think of which one

00:31:41

it was.

00:31:42

It's funny, I can't think of the name of the book and we're sitting here talking about

00:31:45

or retaining information, but it was the concept of doing a commonplace book.

00:31:51

And I keep one of those topic things in the back of my book indexes for the commonplace.

00:31:58

And essentially what I do is I take those particular ones and then I make sure it's something

00:32:02

that I want to put in my commonplace before I actually do it.

00:32:06

And then I've got a notebook that I hand write that quote into my commonplace book and then

00:32:11

it's my goal to memorize those.

00:32:13

So I literally memorize probably one or two quotes that really strict me from a book.

00:32:20

And I tried best I can to commit those to memory.

00:32:23

And it's just something I work on.

00:32:25

I wouldn't say daily, but every couple days I work on memorization of my commonplace, which

00:32:30

is interesting because you can pull those out at different times.

00:32:33

But the other thing I do, so I'm committing some of those to memory.

00:32:38

And then my general notes, because I pull two or three of those of my notes out for our

00:32:44

bookworm outline that we talked through.

00:32:47

And I usually have 15 or 16 things that I've written down that strike me in a book is something

00:32:52

I want to write down.

00:32:54

Anyway, I have these kind of like a templated project in Omni Focus that prompts me to

00:33:02

review and reread those notes at different intervals.

00:33:06

So I will, like for example, the book we're going to go through today, grit, once I've

00:33:12

completed reading that, I take those notes and I create a project for it where I will

00:33:17

review those notes in one month and then within four months, so three months after I've reviewed

00:33:24

it.

00:33:25

And then again, six months after that.

00:33:26

So one month from now, I'll review my notes from grit, four months from now I'll review

00:33:31

them again.

00:33:32

And then in 10 months, I'll review them again.

00:33:36

And then after that, I just kind of quit at that point.

00:33:39

Otherwise, I'm just constantly rereading notes from a book.

00:33:42

And I've learned that if I do that, it's a way of recalling that information.

00:33:48

And it seems to work pretty well to help me remember it, but I would say that I don't

00:33:53

worry a whole lot about letting information slip away because I'm always reading something

00:33:58

new.

00:33:59

And if I get too concerned about trying to retain one book, that's fine.

00:34:03

If you're concerned about it that much, I would just say, reread it later on, like in

00:34:07

six, seven months, if it's that important to you, reread it.

00:34:10

We reread getting things done and we still talk about it.

00:34:13

It's still an important book, but that's what I would do is reread it.

00:34:18

And if that particular topic is something that you want to continue to learn about, I would

00:34:23

just say pick up another book similar to it and keep going.

00:34:27

Yeah, I think at the very end of that, you really hit on something where if it's something

00:34:31

that you really want to learn more about, pick up another book on it and keep going.

00:34:36

If you're following along with Bookworm, maybe you're in a position like we are where

00:34:40

you're dealing with these specific problems and these books are really the right thing

00:34:45

at the right time.

00:34:46

That is an ideal scenario.

00:34:48

The more likely scenario, at least for some of these books is that whatever book we're

00:34:53

covering maybe isn't exactly what you need.

00:34:57

And that's okay.

00:34:58

I mean, there's some books that you've picked Joe that I was like, "I don't know about

00:35:02

this one."

00:35:03

And I'm sure that there's some vice versa.

00:35:05

But Brandon Whittle, which is a friend of mine, Brandon Whittle, who is actually just

00:35:10

on the productivity show, podcasts to talk about 12-week years stuff.

00:35:13

He also wrote a post on Asian efficiency, which I just sent you via chat, on letting

00:35:19

your biggest problems speed up your reading and the gist of this article, which I think

00:35:23

makes a ton of sense, is that you identify the problem that you're trying to solve and

00:35:27

then you find the book that you think can help you solve it and then you read that book.

00:35:31

And if you read it that way, I guarantee you, you're going to retain a lot more naturally

00:35:35

because this is very applicable and it solves a problem that you're having right at this

00:35:39

moment.

00:35:40

And then you don't have to create all the systems on the back end in order to retain

00:35:44

that stuff if you don't want to, which is kind of my approach.

00:35:48

I mean, again, I totally understand why people would want to do that.

00:35:51

They want to have that big reference system that you can go back to.

00:35:53

Me, I just want to read the books.

00:35:57

And then I want to be held accountable.

00:35:58

I mean, accountability is another big thing where you can read a book and you can say,

00:36:02

yeah, I'm going to do this, this, this and this because I wrote down these 25 things,

00:36:06

but that doesn't really matter if you don't follow through with them.

00:36:09

So like the podcast, essentially, for us is serving as a way of holding each other accountable

00:36:17

to the things that we say that we're going to do.

00:36:19

I think that's a really important piece for anything, whether it's applying what you're

00:36:22

learning in books or just general productivity stuff.

00:36:26

If you have a goal in mind, the best thing that you can do to make sure that you hit

00:36:30

it is to write it down.

00:36:31

And then I would say even further than that, tell somebody else about it and say, hey,

00:36:35

call me out if I don't hit this because they can make sure that you're going to follow

00:36:38

through and do the things that you said you were going to do, which will ultimately get

00:36:41

you to that goal.

00:36:43

Productivity and goal achievement really isn't that complicated.

00:36:46

All you have to do is identify what you want to do and then you have to identify the things

00:36:50

that you need to do on a regular basis that will get you there.

00:36:53

And then you just have to show up and do those things, but that is easier said than done.

00:36:57

Oh, yeah.

00:36:59

Definitely easier said than done.

00:37:00

I mean, take a look at the book we're going to go through today.

00:37:02

Nice segue there, Mike.

00:37:04

Because the book today is about exactly that is how do you push through things you don't

00:37:09

want to do and how do you develop the perseverance to drive towards your passion, which is a

00:37:14

lot of what productivity and goal setting is about in why do you do it?

00:37:19

Why do I get into productivity?

00:37:21

Why am I so interested in all these tools and why am I getting on the mic for doing

00:37:24

to do versus omnifocus or even exploring it?

00:37:27

Why do we get onto these things?

00:37:29

It has a lot to do with using these tools and systems to help us get towards our goal

00:37:36

and to drive towards our passions, which is what Angela Duckworth takes us through in

00:37:41

our book for today called grit.

00:37:44

And this is a book that I picked for Bookworm and I tried to do some digging, Mike, to figure

00:37:50

out where I had this recommended it.

00:37:51

I could not find it.

00:37:52

I don't even, it wasn't even on my books to read list.

00:37:55

I'm not really sure how I picked this or where it came from, but it was one that I think

00:38:01

was recommended in a book that we recently read.

00:38:04

Does that sound familiar?

00:38:05

Because I think I just put it directly on the Bookworm list whenever I saw it because

00:38:10

it never hit any of my personal lists.

00:38:13

That could be, to be honest, I've heard about this book for many years or maybe not many

00:38:18

years, but pretty much when the day it came out because I used to work full time with

00:38:24

a family business and we had a product called personal responsibility and there was a scale

00:38:30

in there called resiliency, which my dad is the one who developed the assessment.

00:38:35

He coordinated all the research behind it.

00:38:39

And then when this book came out called grit, he absolutely hated the term grit.

00:38:44

He's like, "What is this sandpaper?"

00:38:46

The book came out in 2016, so it couldn't have been that long ago.

00:38:51

Okay, well the concept of grit I know has been around for a while.

00:38:55

Maybe he's been doing research on this, so maybe he bumped into...

00:38:59

Right, she's been researching this for well over a decade, I know that.

00:39:04

Yeah, exactly.

00:39:05

So in our industry, we were a small software publisher and I think he was just frustrated

00:39:11

by the fact that we weren't able to get the recognition that Angel Duckworth was and all

00:39:21

of a sudden people are talking about grit and he's been doing the same sort of thing

00:39:24

with this personal responsibility concept for the assessment spent out probably 15 years

00:39:29

at this point.

00:39:30

So people are like, "Yeah, grit, this new thing."

00:39:33

He's like, "No, it's not a new thing and grit is a terrible term."

00:39:36

So I was like, when I was reading this, I'm like, "Dad, please forgive me."

00:39:41

Nice.

00:39:42

I feel like I'm...

00:39:43

I'm glad I couldn't flick the line.

00:39:44

...gratinizing with the enemy.

00:39:47

But it's a great book.

00:39:49

And yeah, exactly what you were talking about, she mentions at the beginning, "Our potential

00:39:54

is one thing.

00:39:55

What we do is quite another.

00:39:56

Greatness is doable.

00:39:57

It is many, many individual feats and each of them is doable."

00:40:01

And that kind of gets into the whole premise of the book, "Why do some people do them and

00:40:05

why do some people don't?"

00:40:06

And she says that it's grit.

00:40:09

The first talking point I wrote down here because this is at the beginning of the book

00:40:11

was this equation which I thought was kind of neat, which she kind of defines talent,

00:40:16

skills, and achievement because most people think that if you go with the person who is

00:40:20

talented, you're going to get better results.

00:40:22

And she actually says that actually, according to her research, if you go with a person who

00:40:27

has talent, you're probably going to get less results because they're going to coast by

00:40:31

on that talent up into a certain point.

00:40:33

And then when things get hard, they're going to take the easy way out.

00:40:38

That's not obviously every single scenario, but these equations that she put for it, she

00:40:44

says, "Talent times effort equals skill."

00:40:47

And skill times effort equals achievement.

00:40:50

So this is where a lot of different things come in here.

00:40:53

Deliberate practice, making sure that you're doing the right things over and over and over

00:40:56

again.

00:40:58

But you can overcome a lot of talent deficiency simply by effort and that is really getting

00:41:05

at the heart of what grit is and why that translates into achievement.

00:41:10

Yeah, I was trying to look up, she's got a definition for grit and I can't locate it.

00:41:15

Do you have that one?

00:41:18

I don't.

00:41:19

I mean, she talks about it throughout the entire book and she every chapter, one of the things

00:41:23

I liked about this book is every chapter added like a different context or a different perspective.

00:41:26

So I kind of felt like the definition of grit kept evolving as the book went on.

00:41:33

So I wasn't too concerned with the specific definition.

00:41:36

But one quote which I think kind of summarizes it as she shares at the beginning is by Will

00:41:41

Smith.

00:41:42

He says, "I'm not afraid to die in a treadmill.

00:41:44

I will not be outworked, period."

00:41:46

And I think that just encapsulates it.

00:41:48

Yeah.

00:41:49

It's something that I feel like is so important, especially in our culture today because there

00:41:55

are a lot of people who want something given to them without working for it.

00:42:01

And I'll admit, there's a lot of times where I feel that way.

00:42:04

Like, I am just tired of working my tail off to get somewhere with my business.

00:42:08

I'm just tired of it.

00:42:10

Can somebody just, you know, give me a million dollars?

00:42:12

I'll just quit.

00:42:13

I think of that on occasion, which is kind of sad.

00:42:17

But it's something that you can definitely build and you can work on and get better at.

00:42:23

But I don't think it's a common.

00:42:26

I don't think that grit is something that is, I guess, increasing in our society.

00:42:31

To me, my perception is that people who have a lot of grit are fewer and further between.

00:42:38

Do you agree with that?

00:42:40

Completely agree with that.

00:42:41

In fact, it's kind of interesting that this book follows up step by Chris Capehart.

00:42:47

It would be interesting to get his perspective on this book because the whole premise of

00:42:52

his book is you just need to take one step and then another step and then another step.

00:42:57

And the way that you take those steps is by establishing this grit.

00:43:02

And what's interesting about this is I think that grit would fall under the category of

00:43:06

like soft skills.

00:43:08

And I would say that grit can be acquired.

00:43:11

It can be learned.

00:43:12

It can be taught much more easily than hard skills, which is generally you're reading,

00:43:18

writing, and arithmetic.

00:43:20

And going back to research in 1905 or something, it's been shown that soft skills, so grit would

00:43:27

be in that category, actually account for up to 85% of your personal and professional

00:43:32

success.

00:43:34

So I think that this is just absolutely critically important, but it's not emphasized.

00:43:41

What is emphasized is you are the product of your environment.

00:43:46

It's not your fault.

00:43:47

The whole victim mentality.

00:43:48

Things are the way they are.

00:43:49

There's nothing you can do to change them and rely on the system to help you out, which

00:43:56

I understand the system is there to support you and stuff like that.

00:43:59

And maybe you were disadvantaged at the beginning, but what matters is not where you start.

00:44:03

What matters is how you finish.

00:44:05

And that's the whole idea here is that every single person that she features in this book

00:44:10

pretty much, they weren't the most talented.

00:44:13

They didn't start off the best, but they overcame that with effort and discipline and

00:44:18

she would call it grit.

00:44:20

And she talks about some people in here who are, you would think that they are the role

00:44:26

model.

00:44:27

They're the gold standard for successful people.

00:44:29

You know, mentioned Will Smith, she talks about Michael Phelps.

00:44:32

She talks about the Seattle Seahawks when they won the Super Bowl.

00:44:36

You know, there's a lot of different stories in here about people who have applied grit

00:44:39

to overcome the deficiencies.

00:44:41

And most people I don't think understand, I didn't really even fully understand before

00:44:45

of this book, how much that can be overcome simply by developing this mindset that, you

00:44:52

know, I'm not going to give up when stuff gets tough.

00:44:55

Yeah.

00:44:56

And she explores a lot of things where, you know, some people just seem to be born with

00:45:02

grittiness.

00:45:03

Other people don't want anything to do with it.

00:45:06

I think there's a little bit of genetics involved with each of those.

00:45:10

And there's parenting involved with some of it as she goes into.

00:45:13

There's a lot of aspects that impact it.

00:45:16

I'm curious, Mike, did you do the quiz to figure out what your grit score is?

00:45:20

And do you want to share that number?

00:45:22

Yeah, absolutely.

00:45:23

Maybe I should lay out the whole scale here because from, and it's a 10 question quiz,

00:45:30

or what do you call it?

00:45:31

It's not a quiz.

00:45:32

It's a assessment.

00:45:33

There you go, assessment.

00:45:36

And the ratings time you're done, whether you end up doing the math, it comes out between

00:45:41

a 1.0 and a 5.0 with 1.0 being you don't have any grit at all.

00:45:48

And 5.0 is you don't ever stop doing what you want to do.

00:45:51

I guess that'd be my interpretation of it.

00:45:54

So where'd you land, Mike?

00:45:56

I was a 4.4, which is between 80 and 90%.

00:46:04

Keep in mind, like I grew up working for a family business.

00:46:08

Ever since I was 12, I've been helping with product development.

00:46:12

This personal responsibility product, and I've been, this stuff has been drilled in

00:46:15

me from a very early age.

00:46:17

So I think I've got a little bit of an advantage.

00:46:20

I've been a little bit of a head start.

00:46:21

I gave the same assessment actually to my squad, my discipleship group at Church, because I

00:46:26

was telling them about this book as we were going through it, and had them all do it.

00:46:31

And they were all in the three range, which was really interesting to me because I think

00:46:39

a lot of those guys I would describe as gritty.

00:46:42

They're not going to give up.

00:46:45

But I think that when I took the assessment, what I understood in the mindset of this was

00:46:52

just how effective what my dad did, my upbringing was in terms of this stuff.

00:46:58

And I can really see the benefit of that now.

00:47:01

Yeah, so I took it twice.

00:47:04

And I took it twice because in one sense, I was thinking primarily about my work in the

00:47:09

sense of working on the computer.

00:47:12

And in the other sense, because I realized that I've got kind of two different ways that

00:47:16

I work.

00:47:18

One is with the intellectual world, which is on the computer like I'm talking about.

00:47:22

The other is whenever I'm doing something around the house, or something outdoorsy of

00:47:27

some sort.

00:47:28

Because I do a lot of that, and I feel like they both have completely different.

00:47:33

I come at those completely different.

00:47:35

So I took it with both of those in mine.

00:47:39

And if I focus on the outdoorsy DIY side, I fall at a 4.4 in that range, which I could

00:47:47

see.

00:47:48

I don't care if it's negative 10 outside, I'm going to finish the deck today.

00:47:53

I just have that mindset with some things.

00:47:55

And I think that's a lot of the farm coming out in me.

00:47:57

I still have agriculture in my blood.

00:47:59

If I focus on the computer side of things, I come in at a 2.9.

00:48:04

I tell why the variance there is on that.

00:48:09

I have to put all kinds of systems in place to get me to do stuff on a computer.

00:48:14

It's crazy to me that it could vary that much between those two mindsets.

00:48:18

But I thought it was interesting to at least compare the two.

00:48:21

It seems interesting that those two different modes of working have such a different grit

00:48:27

score.

00:48:28

That is interesting.

00:48:29

That is really interesting.

00:48:30

I also thought it was interesting how she's got the odd number of questions.

00:48:36

Can determine your passion score and the even numbers determine your perseverance score?

00:48:40

Did you do that part of it?

00:48:42

I did do that.

00:48:45

In both cases, perseverance was higher than passion.

00:48:49

I'm not really sure why that was.

00:48:52

She says that that's normal.

00:48:53

My passion score was 4.2.

00:48:55

My perseverance score was 4.6.

00:49:00

I don't want this to come across as a break in my results.

00:49:04

In some sense, this is a bad thing because specifically with Asian efficiency and the

00:49:10

sprint planning that we do, when you do scrum and you do sprint planning and you have the

00:49:15

story points, essentially what you're doing is you're agreeing as a team that we're going

00:49:19

to do this many story points.

00:49:23

Because we have a small team and we have a somewhat specialized team and we're in the

00:49:26

middle of a development project for a product that we're going to release, a lot of the

00:49:30

specific development side of this falls on me, especially when Tan and Brooks tend to

00:49:35

be, they've been traveling the last couple of sprints.

00:49:39

We'll agree to this stuff.

00:49:43

We'll get into the middle of the sprint.

00:49:44

One of these issues may end up being a lot, lot, lot bigger than we originally estimated

00:49:50

it.

00:49:52

I'm going to finish that no matter what.

00:49:55

I can't get myself to be okay with letting these issues roll over.

00:50:00

In fact, this last sprint, one of the issues did roll over that was assigned to me and

00:50:05

it just frustrated me all weekend that I was not going to be able to finish this thing,

00:50:09

even though I was working on it on the weekend because I was trying to get it done.

00:50:13

This stuff just eats me up if I can't finish it.

00:50:17

That would be an application of this in the negative sense.

00:50:21

You have to be okay sometimes with the whole idea of margin.

00:50:25

This is good enough, but I have trouble with that.

00:50:28

I'm the opposite with that stuff because if I realize that I'm not going to hit something

00:50:34

or I feel like it's going to be too much to accomplish in the time frame that I have for

00:50:39

it.

00:50:40

I tend to justify and say, "Well, I could work on it maybe a little bit Saturday morning."

00:50:45

Then I can pick it up Monday morning and I'll be done with it by Monday afternoon.

00:50:49

If I can come up with that mindset on say Thursday morning, I won't touch it at all until

00:50:56

probably Saturday or even I won't touch it at all until maybe Tuesday and I'm already

00:51:00

late again.

00:51:01

I tend to do that just because it's not worth the heartache that comes with it with the intellectual

00:51:09

side.

00:51:10

If it's something around the house, I will spend way longer on it than I need to in order to

00:51:17

get it done by the time frame that I want to get it done.

00:51:20

It's crazy how it's so different to me, those two perspectives.

00:51:25

It's almost like if I can solve the problem of how to accomplish something time-wise in

00:51:34

my head, if I can solve that problem of how to actually get it done, it's as if I don't

00:51:39

need to do it because I've already solved the problem and solving the problem is the

00:51:43

part that I like doing.

00:51:45

If I can solve the problem of how do I need to plan out this work or what's the path forward

00:51:53

to accomplish this by a certain date?

00:51:57

If I can solve the problem time-wise of how that's going to work, to me it's almost like

00:52:02

I've already accomplished it even though I haven't touched it, which is a problem because

00:52:06

then I still have to do the work to actually follow through on that.

00:52:11

That whole follow through thing is something I really struggle with, especially with the

00:52:14

intellectual stuff.

00:52:17

Interesting.

00:52:21

The phrase that she uses here is enthusiasm is common, endurance is rare.

00:52:25

It sounds like you're saying that.

00:52:28

You have to manufacture the endurance.

00:52:31

Exactly.

00:52:32

I can...

00:52:33

If it's something new and shiny, like for example, I've got this other podcast, I'm

00:52:36

starting with a buddy of mine, it's a new and shiny.

00:52:40

I can go spend time on that.

00:52:42

It's fun.

00:52:43

It's played for me to go build the websites and stuff for that.

00:52:49

Whenever it's something that I don't necessarily want to do or like to do or don't fully understand

00:52:56

what it is I'm going to try to accomplish, if I hit any one of those I tend to try to

00:53:01

put it off and the whole procrastination thing becomes a battle for me.

00:53:07

That's a perfect segue to the next point where on page 106, she says that before hard

00:53:12

work comes play.

00:53:14

Actually, what she says even before that is what really caught my attention.

00:53:20

She's talking to this person and this person says that the whole idea of do what you love

00:53:26

is bad advice.

00:53:27

I would agree to that to a certain extent.

00:53:30

Maybe we can talk a little bit about passion and what that really looks like, but it's

00:53:34

not necessarily doing the fun things all the time.

00:53:37

The person that she's talking to says most people stink at the things they love and they're

00:53:41

using that as justification for why that is bad advice because you want to do the things

00:53:45

that you're good at.

00:53:46

You'll get paid more for those things.

00:53:49

Then she counters that.

00:53:52

Most people stink even more at what they don't love, which I thought was really good.

00:53:58

You're talking about podcasting.

00:54:00

Essentially, what you're doing is you are doing what you love and the more that you do

00:54:04

the thing that you love and the more deliberate you're going to be in your practice.

00:54:08

You're going to be looking at how do I make this thing even better in the area of podcasting.

00:54:13

You're going to be looking at how do I tweak this audio setting so the audio sounds even

00:54:17

better.

00:54:18

How do I do the EQ settings?

00:54:20

I went down that path when we were launching the productivity show.

00:54:22

I started listening to all these different podcasts and taught myself all about compression,

00:54:27

all about EQ, all about noise gates and all of this different stuff.

00:54:33

That was because I was so driven by like, "I want this thing to be the very best that

00:54:36

it can be."

00:54:37

The first couple you throw out there, maybe they stink.

00:54:41

Maybe they're not that great, but you learn.

00:54:43

As you iterate, I'm not saying that about your podcast, Joe.

00:54:48

You've done a great job.

00:54:49

Fine, I'll say it.

00:54:53

The important thing is that you iterate and as you iterate that process, if you love

00:54:56

the thing that you're doing, each iteration, you're exponentially getting better.

00:55:02

If you don't have that passion that's driving you to do that sort of thing, it's really

00:55:06

hard to maintain that motivation.

00:55:09

Backing up a few pages, she has a definition for passion.

00:55:12

She says, "Passion for your work is a little bit of discovery followed by a lot of development

00:55:16

and then a lifetime of deepening," which is really, really important, I think.

00:55:23

You have to try new things and that's why the do what you love isn't necessarily good

00:55:28

advice because you can be narrow-focused on your current set of experiences and you

00:55:34

can get sidetracked on this path where this is the thing that I love, this is the thing

00:55:41

I'm positive.

00:55:42

I know this is the thing that I love because this is the best thing I've found on my current

00:55:45

set of experiences.

00:55:47

As you try new things, you'll find that, "Hey, that new thing, that's even better."

00:55:51

It's a better use of my skill set.

00:55:52

I can totally see how what I'm doing here can be morphed into that thing.

00:55:56

That's my experience with Asian efficiency.

00:55:59

When I joined the team, I was a writer.

00:56:02

As I wrote, I started developing scripts for video.

00:56:04

Now I do a lot of video production.

00:56:06

I do a lot of podcasting.

00:56:07

I use the skills that I developed as a writer, especially for the videos.

00:56:11

I'm writing scripts and I'm recording audio, stuff like that.

00:56:14

I don't necessarily write all the time because that is one step on the path of finding the

00:56:21

thing that I'm really, really good at, the thing that I'm "passionate about."

00:56:26

The thing that I absolutely love to do and it hurts me when I can't do that.

00:56:31

Ultimately, that's the definition of passion.

00:56:33

I talk a little bit about it in my book.

00:56:36

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

00:56:41

The thing that you are passionate about, literally it is the thing that you are willing to suffer

00:56:45

to see come about.

00:56:47

In the context of podcasting, for example, you got to get this thing out into the world.

00:56:50

You want to start this podcast with a friend of yours.

00:56:54

The idea of not being able to do that hurts to a certain extent.

00:56:59

That was the way it was with me when I started writing my book.

00:57:02

I told a story all the time that I'm not a morning person, but I started getting up at

00:57:06

5 a.m. to write for an hour before I went into work because that passion, that vision,

00:57:12

that dream, having it be as strong as it was, that drove me.

00:57:18

That vision drove me.

00:57:20

Obviously, vision can be worked into this discussion on grit here, but ultimately that

00:57:25

passion, I think, that we really need to understand this before we can really develop

00:57:31

the grit because the passion is your compass and make sure that you're heading in the right

00:57:36

direction.

00:57:37

How many times do books tell us to find your purpose in life and find your calling?

00:57:42

We talk about it all the time.

00:57:43

What's your mission?

00:57:46

It's when you figure that out that so much of this stuff comes to.

00:57:52

It all comes to fruition at that point.

00:57:55

Until you get to that point, it's really difficult to do the stuff you don't want to do.

00:58:00

Take my example here where if I have a client that comes to me and they want another new

00:58:06

discourse plug-in, if it's something I've done before, it's pretty easy for me to just

00:58:13

say, "True, I'll do it."

00:58:14

Then I spend 20 minutes copy pasting and tweaking and then I'm done.

00:58:18

That's awesome from a financial standpoint, but it's really boring.

00:58:23

It's like, "Okay, I need a challenge and a problem that I haven't solved before with

00:58:29

a lot of these things."

00:58:30

If somebody comes to me with a plug-in that they want for discourse, it's something that

00:58:35

no one's really comprehended before.

00:58:39

We start trying to do mock-ups and we go through the process of figuring out how it

00:58:42

should work and everything.

00:58:44

Then I go build that.

00:58:45

I have a hard time putting it down.

00:58:47

That is something that I can really get engrossed in and go into this whole process of learning

00:58:55

how to get it done and digging into code bases and I get excited by that.

00:58:58

For some weird reason, I know it's probably a bit demented.

00:59:00

Anyway, it's fun digging through code in that sense for me because it's problems to be solved

00:59:04

and that's what I'm trying to do.

00:59:06

If it's something I've done before, the problem's already been solved.

00:59:11

That's the part that gets me excited is solving new problems in technology.

00:59:16

If it's a problem that already has a solution, I don't really want to touch it.

00:59:21

I'm like, "Okay, this is boring.

00:59:24

It's not a challenge anymore and I don't really want to go there."

00:59:29

Interesting.

00:59:31

I had this down as an action, well, not an action item for following the podcast, but

00:59:36

I actually wrote this down to ask you.

00:59:38

I'm putting you on the spot here.

00:59:40

All right.

00:59:41

What is your purpose?

00:59:43

Yeah, I struggled with this a little bit because I know what I see as some of my mission, but

00:59:49

I don't think that translates into a purpose.

00:59:53

I use those two words specifically here because I've been on a mission to do something, but

01:00:00

I don't know that I've ever connected the feeling side of it, which is where I think

01:00:04

the purpose comes in because that was something I noticed, especially in Angela's definitions

01:00:10

here of how this all plays together because there's a definite internal feeling that drives

01:00:15

a lot of what we should do or what we want to do.

01:00:19

I've had this mission of helping people with technology for quite a while and I've been

01:00:25

on that path and I can tell you that through what I've been explaining to you, that doesn't

01:00:30

always hold true.

01:00:32

I can go help people with technology.

01:00:34

That's fine.

01:00:35

I can build websites and help people accomplish what they want to do, but that doesn't necessarily

01:00:39

translate to me getting excited about going and doing it as I've talked about.

01:00:46

The challenge here is how do you translate that and what do I do with it because I need

01:00:51

to determine how does that translate into a passion of mine that I am excited to get

01:00:59

up and go to work on.

01:01:01

I cannot tell you that I have this perfectly laid out at the moment.

01:01:05

This is part of what I've got an action item down here to connect with my purpose and I

01:01:09

say that a bit preemptively because that requires the purpose to be defined and I'm

01:01:16

not 100% on that, but I'll give you what I got so far.

01:01:21

Where I'm at with it right now is essentially helping people solve new problems with technology.

01:01:30

The caveat there of new problems is very important because it's hard for me to get excited about

01:01:37

things that aren't new.

01:01:41

I'm aware of that.

01:01:42

This is partially why I spend a lot of time searching for new patents in the technology

01:01:46

world to try to turn those into businesses.

01:01:48

That's a thing that I really love doing, but it's not something I'm building, but it is

01:01:54

still solving a problem which is why the website thing and that to me are the same,

01:02:00

which is really weird.

01:02:02

That's what I'm doing.

01:02:03

I'm trying to solve problems with technology.

01:02:06

For me that translates in so many ways with, I meet face to face with people who want a

01:02:11

website, but I'm more interested in understanding what their business is and understanding what

01:02:17

is it that you actually want your business to accomplish.

01:02:20

Those are the questions I tend to ask because I want to know how the technology and how

01:02:25

the websites can help them meet those goals.

01:02:28

I have this passion for helping other people meet their goals primarily in the realm of

01:02:32

technology.

01:02:33

If I understand what their goals as a business are, it's a lot easier for me to help them

01:02:39

get there.

01:02:40

Sometimes I have people come to me and say, "I just need it to look like this."

01:02:44

They give me this exact set of parameters that they want spelled out.

01:02:50

A lot of times I back away from that and say, "I don't know that that's actually what you

01:02:54

want and if I do it, there's a good chance you're not going to be happy with it because

01:02:57

it doesn't look the way you think it was.

01:02:59

It was going to turn out.

01:03:00

I just don't like doing that."

01:03:02

I ask these why questions a lot and I know I'm on a rant right now, but it's maybe not

01:03:07

a rant but a ramble.

01:03:09

I go through this process of trying to solve these technological problems with people and

01:03:15

trying to find solutions to them.

01:03:16

I'm trying to tweak and morph my purpose into the excitement that can come from creating

01:03:23

those solutions and that's where I want to direct myself.

01:03:27

Yeah, that's interesting.

01:03:29

Because you do a lot of technical stuff, I think that you could probably relate very

01:03:33

well to the story of the three brick layers on page 149.

01:03:38

For those who aren't familiar with it, essentially she tells the story of these three people

01:03:41

who were laying bricks and asks the first one, "What are you doing?"

01:03:47

He says, "I'm laying bricks."

01:03:48

Ask the second one, "What are you doing?"

01:03:49

He says, "I'm building a church."

01:03:51

The third one, "What are you doing?"

01:03:52

He says, "I'm building the house of God."

01:03:54

They're all doing the same activity but their perspective on what they're doing is different

01:03:58

and I've heard the story before but she defines it as the first has a job, the second has

01:04:03

a career, the third has a calling.

01:04:07

A job is the necessity of life.

01:04:09

It's a thing that you have to do to make the money that you need to live.

01:04:11

A career is a stepping stone to another job but the calling is one of the most important

01:04:18

things that you can identify in your life.

01:04:22

My purpose I wrote down and maybe this isn't where it's going to end up but as I am reading

01:04:30

this book, I was constantly thinking about that.

01:04:33

What is my purpose?

01:04:34

Which is why I asked you.

01:04:38

I didn't write it down word for word because I think it's going to change but essentially

01:04:41

what it is is helping people make the most of their talent so that they can live the

01:04:47

life that they were created for.

01:04:50

That's going to manifest itself a lot of different ways.

01:04:53

It could be technology related.

01:04:56

Helping people become more productive using their technology, specifically Apple Technologies

01:05:01

because that's my domain of experience.

01:05:03

You need to put Apple Tech in there.

01:05:06

I don't necessarily want it to remain Apple Tech forever.

01:05:10

Who knows what the next thing is at the moment?

01:05:12

It's iPhones and iOS and stuff like that but you never know where things are going to go.

01:05:18

I view that as pigeonholing the purpose.

01:05:22

Maybe right now that would be accurate.

01:05:25

But Angela would say it could change too.

01:05:28

Exactly.

01:05:30

But ultimately what I want to do and my purpose, she says that your purpose is the intention

01:05:35

to contribute to the well-being of others too.

01:05:38

There has to be an others focused aspect to this I believe where everybody says, "Oh,

01:05:45

I want to make the world a better place."

01:05:47

Essentially that has to be true for your purpose because if you're just trying to collect

01:05:52

and hoard as much as you can then that's not really going to be fulfilling.

01:05:58

Regardless of your religious or personal belief system, she makes it sound like this

01:06:04

is something that you absolutely have to have as part of your purpose.

01:06:09

That was the reason that I wrote my book because I saw that there was a huge void.

01:06:19

Really what kind of struck me was a quote by Todd Henry in the book "Excellent Creative."

01:06:25

I think it was where a friend asked him, "What's the most valuable land in the world?"

01:06:31

He's throughout real estate in Manhattan, the oil field of Saudi Arabia.

01:06:36

His friend says, "No, it's actually the graveyard because that's where all of the unwritten

01:06:40

books, unstarted businesses, all of the stuff that people said, "Oh, I'm going to get to

01:06:45

that tomorrow."

01:06:46

They eventually ran out of tomorrow's.

01:06:48

Those are the things that maybe could have changed the world.

01:06:51

There's a lot of stories about people who they came from nothing.

01:06:57

How many other people do we write off because they come from nothing?

01:07:00

Whereas, I guess my purpose is I want to help people regardless of their situation, make

01:07:04

the most of what they have so that they can reach their full potential and just eliminate

01:07:09

the roadblocks and the obstacles that might get in the way of doing that.

01:07:13

This is probably why you and I connect so well because with your purpose and mine, although

01:07:19

they're fairly different, we tend to translate them into the same day-to-day activities close

01:07:27

to anyway because we're both trying to help other people get better at something or accomplish

01:07:33

something that they can't necessarily do without help.

01:07:37

I think it's cool.

01:07:39

It's fun to see what drives a lot of what we do online.

01:07:44

Yeah, absolutely.

01:07:47

You've got a quote on here, "Fall 7, Rise 8."

01:07:51

What was the culture that this came from?

01:07:53

This is the Japanese culture, the culture of Kaizen.

01:07:56

Of course.

01:07:57

Which again appeared in this book a little bit earlier.

01:08:00

I think it was page 118 when she's talking about the deliberate practice.

01:08:05

Yeah, I love this saying, "Fall 7, Rise 8," and really the essence here is that it doesn't

01:08:13

matter if you fail.

01:08:14

What matters is whether you get up when you fail and how you overcome those difficulties

01:08:19

or whether you just give up and say, "This isn't for me."

01:08:23

Because obviously with a book about grit, there's a lot of people who overcame a lot

01:08:27

of different things before they really realized their success.

01:08:33

One specific story that I thought of right away when I read this was there was a class

01:08:41

that I was taking as part of my business degree in college which was statistics.

01:08:48

I did not understand statistics.

01:08:51

In fact, she tells a story about failing a class and she was determined to pass.

01:08:55

That was exactly my scenario.

01:08:57

I did not get statistics.

01:08:59

The teacher was like, "Well, this is the material.

01:09:04

You got to do it on your own sort of a thing.

01:09:07

There wasn't a whole lot to support offered.

01:09:11

It was up to me to make it happen."

01:09:15

I did it though.

01:09:16

I didn't get it at first.

01:09:17

I think I failed the first couple tests really, really badly because I just didn't get it,

01:09:21

but I put in a ton of extra work.

01:09:24

At the end of the class, I ended up getting a solid A. I could tell my teacher because

01:09:29

I had met with him at the beginning, "What are my options here?"

01:09:33

I'm just not getting this.

01:09:34

Essentially, I was told, "Maybe you want to consider dropping the class."

01:09:38

I'm like, "No, I need this for my business degree.

01:09:41

I'm just going to make this work.

01:09:42

I'll figure it out."

01:09:43

I figured it out and I could tell by the end of the class that this is why I did it, but

01:09:50

he was really proud of the transformation.

01:09:53

I think that was cool for him to see, but it was really rewarding for me personally because

01:09:57

it gave me a sense that it doesn't matter what the challenge is that I'm going to face.

01:10:01

It doesn't matter if I completely don't get it right now.

01:10:04

I have the ability to understand this thing if I just apply enough effort.

01:10:07

Going back to that equation at the beginning, I may not have the talent for this, but I

01:10:11

can overcome it with my effort.

01:10:15

She has the two equations towards the beginning where was it talent times effort equals the

01:10:21

skill and the skill times effort equals achievement?

01:10:24

I think we were talking about that early on.

01:10:28

The part that's interesting to me about that is how effort is a double multiplier in that.

01:10:34

If I spend more effort, even if I have very little talent, it can equal more achievement

01:10:42

to someone who has a lot of talent but never puts any effort into it.

01:10:47

That's an important rule to keep in mind because so often we run across folks who feel

01:10:54

like they can't do something.

01:10:55

Angela talks about the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, but I run into people

01:11:02

a lot that have this fixed mindset that don't think they can get better at something.

01:11:06

They're just stuck on the talent treadmill of I can only do as good as I'm born with

01:11:13

and I can only go as far as I have naturally, if that makes sense.

01:11:18

Kind of a hard way to think about it, but the important part is do you see yourself as

01:11:22

not able to change things but you're able to or you're stuck working with the circumstances

01:11:28

and the consequences of what just naturally happens or can you do something about it?

01:11:34

I think we on Bookworm talk about a lot where you've got to do something about things if

01:11:39

you expect them to change.

01:11:41

You can't just let the circumstances of the universe just impact you and push you around

01:11:46

however you have to come out and do something before you're going to get anywhere.

01:11:50

We talk about this a lot and that's where the effort piece comes in.

01:11:54

It's also part of how Angela and her family do things with this hard things rule, which

01:12:01

I think is interesting because they're specifically trying to train grit into their kids and themselves,

01:12:06

which I think is a very noble and very wise thing to do.

01:12:11

Do you want to explain the hard things rule?

01:12:14

Yeah, and this is getting into the parenting and grit section.

01:12:19

She's got a whole chapter on this.

01:12:20

Which I greatly appreciated.

01:12:21

I appreciate it.

01:12:24

I was very grateful for this.

01:12:25

Which is interesting even if you aren't a parent because it really gets into how much

01:12:31

of this is genetic or inherited and how much of this is developed and I think that a lot

01:12:37

of it is developed.

01:12:38

So specifically for parenting, it's talking about what are the strategies that you can

01:12:43

use to develop grit in your kids, but recognizing the fact that you're not necessarily just

01:12:52

born with this stuff and you can develop it, you can apply that to any situation I would

01:12:55

say.

01:12:57

So the hard things rule comes from page 241.

01:13:04

And essentially there's three parts to this.

01:13:07

Number one, everyone, including mom and dad has to do a hard thing, which is something

01:13:10

that requires daily deliberate practice.

01:13:13

And you get to pick your own hard thing.

01:13:16

Actually that's the third part is you get to pick your own hard thing.

01:13:20

So kind of going out of order.

01:13:21

Sorry.

01:13:22

The second one, you can quips, but not in sorry.

01:13:24

Yeah.

01:13:25

You can quip it not until the season or the session is over.

01:13:28

And then number three, you get to pick your own hard thing.

01:13:30

So when I read that, I thought that was kind of out of order.

01:13:32

So I would just spoil this down to two things.

01:13:34

You have to pick a hard thing.

01:13:36

Something that requires daily deliberate practice.

01:13:38

You get to pick what it is.

01:13:40

And then number two, you can quip, but not until the season or the session that you've

01:13:43

picked is over.

01:13:44

And then the action item actually here, and this is kind of rolled into one of my bigger

01:13:48

action items, but this would be a specific takeaway, would be to pick hard things for

01:13:52

everyone in my family.

01:13:53

I think this is really, really important, especially for my nine year old and my seven

01:13:57

year old where like they are playing piano and they've been practicing every single day.

01:14:03

And they're seeing a lot of growth there, but I don't think they really consciously

01:14:06

identified that this is a hard thing and they're recognizing that they're growing.

01:14:10

They just show up and do it every day and they can do more.

01:14:13

So I want to help them understand what's actually going on there.

01:14:17

I feel like that's not going to be easy.

01:14:20

I was trying to think about how to explain some of this to my four year old.

01:14:24

I'm like, well, about that.

01:14:28

I don't know that I have a good answer to this, but trying to help her understand, you

01:14:34

know, if you're because we're trying to teach her letters and words and such now, and I

01:14:39

learned that with her, she has a lot of talent.

01:14:43

You know, she's similar to me whenever I was in elementary school because I was one that

01:14:49

things just came to naturally.

01:14:50

Like, I just, the way the school was taught and everything, it just clicked.

01:14:55

They'd give me math problems.

01:14:56

I'd be done in five minutes and want more.

01:14:58

Like, that was just the way I was.

01:15:00

And our oldest Emma is the same way.

01:15:03

She catches things so fast that whenever we sit down to try to teach her letters of the

01:15:08

alphabet, she is just bored.

01:15:11

She doesn't actually work on learning them at all.

01:15:13

She's just bored with it.

01:15:15

But if you change the game and change it to where you're trying to learn words instead

01:15:21

of letters, she can sit there for an hour and try to figure it out.

01:15:26

Like, it's a completely different game to her.

01:15:29

And it's fun to see her at least start to develop some of those skills.

01:15:34

But when things come naturally to her, it's hard to get her to continue working on things

01:15:39

when she doesn't want to, which is exactly what we need to be trying to do if we want

01:15:43

to develop grit in our kids.

01:15:46

Or even, it doesn't have to be kids.

01:15:48

I mean, she spells us out at the beginning of that chapter that if you're in charge of

01:15:53

or teaching or coaching anyone, that it all is the same.

01:15:59

Like if you're trying to help other people get better, it's the same process for that

01:16:03

for it, whatever it is you're doing.

01:16:05

But anyway, coming back to Emma, it's a challenge to get her to figure out how to push through

01:16:12

something that isn't easy or that doesn't come right away.

01:16:18

So teaching her to endure and do the follow through of the hard work, I think that's going

01:16:22

to be a challenge in and of itself to get her to that point.

01:16:25

Yeah, definitely.

01:16:27

And I think that a great example of how to do this, you follow Pat Flynn at all?

01:16:32

A little bit, yeah.

01:16:34

What is it?

01:16:35

Smart Passive Income?

01:16:36

Yep.

01:16:37

So he's also got a book called A Will It Fly?

01:16:40

And he starts that book with a story about a paper airplane that he is helping his son

01:16:46

create.

01:16:48

And his son is losing interest and Pat makes their plane and he shows how it flies and

01:16:53

his son is like, "Wow, that's awesome.

01:16:54

I want to do that."

01:16:55

And then he creates one and it doesn't fly and he's all disappointed and dejected and

01:16:59

he's ready to give up.

01:17:00

He's ready to go do something else.

01:17:02

He's like two years old at the time.

01:17:04

And Pat's teaching him like, "Well, no, why do you think it didn't fly?"

01:17:08

He's like, "Well, it doesn't look like you're listening.

01:17:09

Well, why doesn't it look like mine?"

01:17:11

Well, once you identify like, "Okay, this thing we need to change and this thing we need

01:17:15

to change."

01:17:16

They do a couple iterations and eventually they get a plane that flies.

01:17:20

And I've been following him on social media as well and he's been showing pictures of

01:17:24

his son had like a lemonade stand but it wasn't a lemonade stand.

01:17:28

It was like a game thing.

01:17:31

And nobody stopped by.

01:17:33

And Pat was watching this and he's feeling hurt for his son because he's got this business

01:17:40

idea and it's not working essentially.

01:17:43

And he said that one of his most proudest moments was when the day was over and he's

01:17:49

like, "Well, no one took advantage of my offer.

01:17:52

I guess I got to change it or something like that."

01:17:54

He's still like digital marketing principles and really business principles and his kid

01:17:59

is like four or five years old and essentially a lemonade stand.

01:18:02

And there's a lot of opportunities I think like that if we recognize them where it doesn't

01:18:07

necessarily have to be like, "You need to understand ROI."

01:18:09

And he doesn't have all this other stuff but understanding and welcoming that challenge

01:18:14

where recognizing that this thing that you want to do, it is going to be hard and that's

01:18:19

okay.

01:18:20

That's actually a good thing.

01:18:21

And then when it doesn't work you don't just give up and say, "Well, I guess I don't

01:18:25

have the talent.

01:18:26

I wasn't able, I'm not made to do that thing."

01:18:28

But figuring out why it doesn't work and deconstructing and figuring out what you need

01:18:31

to change which you need to put in order so that it does work and then trying, trying,

01:18:35

and trying again.

01:18:37

The process of teaching your kid to analyze what they've done wrong without criticizing

01:18:43

them, that's not simple.

01:18:47

And I understand what Pat's doing and I guess I could say I could aspire to that but I feel

01:18:53

like this is definitely something I want to work on which is why one of my action items

01:18:56

is to change the way I praise my kids because I don't want them to get the idea that they

01:19:03

are naturally born in a certain skill, like they've got a natural skill.

01:19:08

Emma definitely does.

01:19:10

The other two do as well but her I know more of because she's older so I know more about

01:19:17

her.

01:19:18

But with her I know that I need to be more intentional with that and I don't want to

01:19:26

use the praise that I give her to show that it's a talent that she's just born with and

01:19:32

I would rather teach her that she can always make things a little better without crushing

01:19:37

her spirit because that's the trick here is I think there's a balance between showing

01:19:42

your kid that they can always get something better and they can always improve on something

01:19:46

without completely destroying their drive.

01:19:50

Yep, yeah definitely.

01:19:52

And I think the easy way to do that is to number one be observant and understand what

01:20:01

is going on.

01:20:02

I mean you're already there you're identifying that things are easy for her, some things

01:20:05

aren't easy for her when something is easy for her she'll get bored with it, that sort

01:20:10

of thing.

01:20:12

And then whenever something happens that they might view it as a negative thing just calmly

01:20:20

ask them well why do you think that happened?

01:20:23

For me that's the big thing is just asking them, making them think through the process

01:20:28

and kind of figure it out and help them along the way if they want it but I think there's

01:20:33

a lot of value just in them going through that thought process whether they arrive at

01:20:38

the right conclusions or not eventually they're going to but learning to ask the right questions

01:20:43

is key.

01:20:47

Speaking of questions do you want to move on to action items here?

01:20:51

Sure, one other thing I want to call out here though it kind of pertains to parenting as

01:20:56

well is this whole idea of Sisu I believe is how they pronounced it.

01:21:00

Oh right I haven't been following the outline sorry I skipped it.

01:21:03

No that's okay which is the definition here this is a term from Finland I believe yeah.

01:21:11

So Sisu is a compound of bravado and bravery of ferocity and tenacity of the ability to

01:21:16

keep fighting after most people would have quit and to fight with the will to win and

01:21:19

it's kind of ingrained in the Finnish people that they have this Sisu and I think that

01:21:27

this is essentially what we're trying to teach with grit and also in this section she talks

01:21:33

about how you can get grit fairly easily when you join an excellent or gritty team and that's

01:21:40

where there's a lot of value in joining like extracurricular activities athletics would

01:21:46

be one example where even if your your kid for example or maybe even you like you're

01:21:53

not necessarily a quote unquote athlete the things that you learn there those can be transferred

01:22:01

the grit that you learned in athletics for example can be applied to other situations

01:22:05

it's a very generalizable skill and so when it comes to developing these sorts of things

01:22:11

that the best way that you can do this I think and she uses the example of ballet for her

01:22:15

daughter is you need to get them in a on a team essentially with a coach or another another

01:22:21

adult who is going to display and uphold these these standards that is not necessarily you

01:22:27

as a parent I think for us especially because we homeschool our kids that is extremely important

01:22:34

yeah I've been trying to figure out because again we're getting to that point where kids

01:22:40

are starting to get into the formal school system like not we're going to homeschool

01:22:47

but we need to start being more intentional with it but also you know does she have an

01:22:52

interest in piano does she have an interest in something else that I can get her involved

01:22:56

in that's kind of a team effort with other kids like that's what I want her to to start

01:23:01

to get into so she has some of this extracurricular stuff specifically Emma since you know the

01:23:06

other two are way too young for that at the moment but we're starting to get to that point

01:23:11

and that's something I have to think about very specifically and my wife and I have had

01:23:15

a number of conversations on that lately so this comes at a good time nice and I think

01:23:21

that this to the the highest level would be the example at the end of the book where she

01:23:28

goes to visit the Seattle Seahawks because she talks and basically spends the entire

01:23:33

day with Pete Carroll who's the coach and if you are a football fan you either love

01:23:39

or you hate the Seahawks because they've traditionally been a very good team and a lot

01:23:44

of that has been because of Pete Carroll's coaching he's instilled in them that you are

01:23:50

going to be finishers and that doesn't necessarily mean that they are going to win everything

01:23:54

but they are going to fight till the very end and if you go back and you look at the

01:23:57

statistics the Seahawks the last several years have been very very good at the end of games

01:24:03

at the at the end of the season you know they don't always necessarily start off real well

01:24:09

but they'll they'll usually end well and then the momentum will carry them through the playoffs

01:24:13

and they've been in the Super Bowl a couple times and they've they've won it at least once

01:24:17

that I can remember in recent history great but it's not necessarily because they have

01:24:22

the most talented players they do have a lot of very talented players but they've completely

01:24:26

bought into this Brotherhood mentality where like they're just going to hold each other

01:24:32

to a hired standard of excellence and in this chapter talks about how Pete Carroll even

01:24:38

in the when they're picking players to draft like they're they're identifying how gritty

01:24:43

they think that these players are and they specifically target the people that they think

01:24:48

will do that so one example was Earl Thomas I believe where Earl Thomas is a really really

01:24:53

good defensive back but he's not a real big guy and coming out of college if I'm remembering

01:24:59

right he wasn't necessarily like the most talented guy but he's the he's the guy that

01:25:02

just will never say die and they've got a couple guys like that on the secondary which

01:25:07

they've developed this this nickname the the Legion of Boom they've been one of the best

01:25:12

secondaries in the in the NFL for several years now because they've completely embraced

01:25:17

this mentality and so I thought this was really cool to identify that yeah maybe you're not

01:25:22

going to be an NFL player but you can develop these skills they can be transferred to any

01:25:26

arena and you can take it all the way up to that elite level no matter what arena that

01:25:33

happens to be.

01:25:34

Yeah I can't say that I'm a huge Seahawks fan but I definitely appreciate what Pete Carroll

01:25:42

is doing and how he comes at it so I was I was grateful you could probably tell that

01:25:46

Angela has had a lot of back and forth with Pete Carroll and maybe she's a Seahawks fan

01:25:51

that's very possible she talks about the Seahawks a lot it seemed but anyway I thought it was

01:25:56

interesting and it was it was a good example.

01:25:59

Yeah definitely and even if the Seahawks example doesn't resonate with you there's another

01:26:04

athletic example with the UNC Soccer Coach where they've been one of the best soccer

01:26:11

teams in in the in the country but they never are at the top of the recruiting class it's

01:26:15

once the players get into the program that they develop this grit and this never say

01:26:20

die attitude that they're able to overcome a lot of those things so I know lots of stories

01:26:25

in this book lots of examples which I thought were were really good and also with the UNC

01:26:30

Soccer example there was a quote I wrote down which I thought was really good it says the

01:26:33

origin of great leadership begins with respect of the commander for his subordinates and so

01:26:39

when you're talking about professional sports specifically there is a tendency to view a

01:26:44

lot of the athletes especially as they're coming out of college like they've been told

01:26:47

you're great you've got all this talent and a good number of them try to get by on that

01:26:53

talent and you can't do that as this book is is explained right like the grit and the

01:26:59

the tenacity the effort like that can overcome any deficiency in terms of of talent but then

01:27:08

from a professional perspective you've got a bunch of athletes who've been told they've

01:27:12

been great they've signed signed these contracts they've got millions and millions of dollars

01:27:16

have never gone to college and they don't know how to store any of this stuff so in in

01:27:21

essence there's a tendency to view these people kind of spoiled you like they've been given

01:27:25

everything and then you've got a coach who has to manage all of these personalities and

01:27:33

develop this sense of grit and tell people essentially that you're not all that in a

01:27:37

bag of chips like you have to you have to kind of instill in them this responsibility

01:27:43

that they've never had to develop for themselves it can be easy to kind of projecting again

01:27:49

I'm not a I'm not a professional coach okay but I can see how it would be easy to to

01:27:55

view them as as lesser in this in a certain sense like immature essentially I mean that's

01:28:03

what the media would say for a lot of these people but what really works is when you can

01:28:09

get over that mindset and you can respect the people that are underneath you regardless

01:28:15

of where they're from that's a challenge that I don't necessarily have an answer for but

01:28:20

I thought was really interesting yeah if you can develop the mindset of pushing through

01:28:24

things you don't want to do and sticking things out through the end that's what this book

01:28:29

is about like how do I develop that that character trait and continue to get better at what it

01:28:36

is I want to do connect with what it is that I see as my purpose in life and go after it

01:28:43

to me that's what the books truly about to sum it up yep I would completely agree so

01:28:49

on that note action items I've got two here one is to and I've mentioned both of them so

01:28:55

far so this is going to be a reiteration sorry about that one is to change the way I praise

01:29:00

my kids and that's primarily in not calling out how talented they are as opposed to praising

01:29:09

the effort that they put into something so that they learn that it's the hard work that

01:29:16

matters I still want to praise them for their accomplishments and what they achieve but

01:29:22

I want to specifically call out that effort piece to help them see that that's important

01:29:29

the other one I've got here is to connect with my purpose which implies that I know

01:29:33

what it is exactly I kind of just want to spend some time reflecting on that to make

01:29:37

sure that I'm on on point with that and then try to do a little bit further reflection

01:29:44

to tie in what it is I do every day that connects with that kind of using that word

01:29:50

twice there but trying to make sure that what it is that I see as my my very top level goal

01:29:57

how do I relay that all the way down to what it is that's on my runway and what it is I'm

01:30:04

going to do it right now in this moment so I want to try to tie those two together yeah

01:30:11

that definitely makes sense I want to go back to your praising your kids thing and I want

01:30:16

to expound on that a little bit because I think this is again something that could be

01:30:22

more difficult than first seems because I think that the culture that's been created

01:30:26

where everybody gets a participation ribbon like that's hate that's rooted in well it's

01:30:31

rooted in the same same desire that you have though to praise the effort so I am going

01:30:38

to apply that also the one that I wrote down because I really like this term was become

01:30:42

a role model for my kids specifically teach them the welcome challenge and then there's

01:30:47

some specifics that go along with that like having everybody identify a hard thing changing

01:30:52

the way that you praise your kids I would say for me that looks like praising the effort

01:30:57

but not necessarily rewarding the effort yes if the results aren't there you don't get

01:31:03

a reward but that's okay because you can get to the point where you get those results you

01:31:09

just have to change a little bit what you're doing and you have to figure out why it's not

01:31:12

working so I think that's really important but that's that's a the big one for me and

01:31:17

then the other one that I wrote down this is another person who has a TED talk so actually

01:31:21

watch the TED talk for once yeah I haven't watched hers but I definitely it didn't make

01:31:28

my action items but yeah I'm planning to watch that probably this afternoon I actually really

01:31:35

enjoyed her writing style I could sit down and read this thing for an hour with no problem

01:31:41

she has a lot of stories to explain her concepts as well as a lot of science and I think she

01:31:46

balanced the two really well so I just really loved reading this one I kind of wanted it

01:31:51

to keep going yeah I did too so what would you give it in terms of the five star rating

01:31:58

this is one where because we we reserve certain ratings for you know I hate this one or this

01:32:05

is life changing and this is one that I felt like I connected with a lot personally it's

01:32:11

one that I've needed to read I think because it really struck a chord with me because I

01:32:17

know that I'm not necessarily a gritty person whenever it comes to things that aren't easily

01:32:22

accomplished like I just don't always stick out stick through with things I think that's

01:32:28

partially because I'm typically pretty talented in some areas and I use that word in a very

01:32:35

direct way but I tend to be talented in certain areas especially when it comes to solving

01:32:40

problems so whenever it gets hard I have a tendency to just stay away from it so I really

01:32:44

needed this book and it really struck a chord with me because of that I would consider this

01:32:49

in my case life changing it really it really has a big impact on me so I'm going to give

01:32:55

this one a five nice yeah I was tempted to give it a five because I think it's a really

01:33:01

good book I would not define it as life changing for me for a lot of different reasons the

01:33:05

main one being kind of what we talked about earlier where I've kind of grown up with this

01:33:09

stuff I was able to get over this stigma of my dad not liking the term grit even though

01:33:15

that's been drilled in me for a long time is that why you can't rate it a five because

01:33:18

you know no that's that's not true that's not true I got I got over that but one thing

01:33:23

that kind of a little bit bugged me about this is like especially with the parenting

01:33:27

section she says and it wasn't just the parenting section there were a couple other sections

01:33:32

where she throws out this theory and she's like my theory is that this is true but I

01:33:37

don't have enough empirical data to support that right and then she'll talk about her

01:33:41

experience and her experience will make a lot of sense and so the stories are really

01:33:44

good that way but I wish that she would have taken a harder stance on some of the things

01:33:50

maybe that's just a researcher background as opposed to an internet marketer background

01:33:54

like Grant Cardone in the you know the 10x rule but I just felt like some of the stuff

01:34:02

she really could have just hammered it home but she she didn't and it was essentially

01:34:07

because she didn't have statistical numbers to back up what she was projecting but I

01:34:12

feel like you probably could have got those those numbers as almost like she ran out

01:34:16

of time when she was writing the book is kind of my my view on those sections you know

01:34:21

you can obviously take into account for parenting the whole microcosm of my kid growing up from

01:34:27

when they're born to 18 years old but there's got to be ways to look back at what other

01:34:33

people have done and kind of draw some conclusions from that which I don't know she kind of

01:34:38

did but kind of didn't she didn't like I said she did she did she did do a certain degree

01:34:44

but I felt like she always kind of prefaced it as like well just so you know this may

01:34:47

be wrong or you know like this is my own personal experience so this isn't necessarily gospel

01:34:51

truth and of Grant Cardone would be like this is the only way to do this you know and then

01:34:59

dropping up on or something but no so that was the one thing that kind of bugged me is

01:35:05

like she's got it all there this like what she's telling us is really has a potential

01:35:12

to change your life I feel and it's just like come on believe in yourself a little bit more

01:35:17

right so yeah that was the one thing that kind of bugged me so I'm gonna rate it 4.5

01:35:24

still very very great book and the assessment itself I think is really really great and I

01:35:29

opening like if all you did was take the assessment you would you would probably still get a lot

01:35:33

out of the book yeah that's true that's very true we kind of flipped on this one so on 10x

01:35:38

rule we were the opposite so here you go we can we can switch places on occasion so next book up

01:35:46

is your choice what are we reading we are reading the sleep revolution by Ariana Huffington which

01:35:52

was one that we that I bought at max stock last year and I've been saying I've been making

01:35:56

you read for a long time so the time has come Joe we're going to learn about sleep so here here's

01:36:02

a question you've said that you bought this at max stock I went to order it on Amazon and I had

01:36:09

to pre-order it on Amazon because it said it hadn't been released yet and I was confused by that

01:36:17

it thankfully it released the next day so I pre-ordered it and then it came out the next day

01:36:24

I have it in my hands and the copyright is 2016-2017 is this an updated version I don't see there

01:36:33

there must be an updated version then because yeah like I have it on my shelf and I know that's

01:36:37

where I got it interesting I don't know that's kind of it struck me as odd I was like this doesn't

01:36:43

add up I don't understand the math here anyway analytical Joe that's okay and just a little bit

01:36:50

of justification for this one so I'm not sure how common knowledge this is but I was actually

01:36:58

diagnosed when I was 18 years old with epilepsy and that is a genetic thing that they can't really

01:37:04

test they can hook your brain up to an EEG and they can tell when and when your brain is misfiring

01:37:09

but basically the kind of seizures that I have when my brain misfires I have a seizure so unless

01:37:14

I'm having a seizure when they're doing the test it's not going to tell them anything so I've been

01:37:18

on medication for a while which makes me drowsy and one of the things that can trigger a seizure is

01:37:25

not getting enough sleep so sleep has been very very important to me for a long time it's kind of

01:37:29

why I've been using flux for years and why I'm so militant about like blue light and because that

01:37:36

was a game changer for me but there's a lot of things coming out in the productivity space recently

01:37:43

on like the importance of sleep which I think is great because even if you don't have a medical

01:37:47

condition like I do you still like there's a lot of stuff that is a lot harder because you're not

01:37:54

giving your body the chance to do it at its full capacity and so I'm excited to dive into this one

01:38:00

hopefully you are too I'm nervous because I know I know I don't I don't give myself the sleep I

01:38:08

should like I'm I'm usually asleep by 9 45 10 o'clock at night and up at 5 if not a little before so

01:38:16

and I know that for me that's not quite enough sleep just based on how I feel but I kind of insist

01:38:21

on doing it that way so I'm a little nervous about this one just just gonna say it following the

01:38:28

sleep revolution becomes my choice and it is out of our minds by Ken Robinson Ken Robinson

01:38:37

here's another TED Talk guy for you he's big on education for kids and how the public school system

01:38:47

I guess his claim to fame is that the public school system tends to drive creativity out of kids

01:38:52

and he's trying to find ways to revolutionize the school system to bring it back

01:38:58

so that's that's kind of his claim to fame I guess and he wrote this book out of our minds

01:39:03

which I think follows that thread and I'm interested in reading it so I'm gonna drag you along with me

01:39:08

nice it's only fair after I make you learn about sleep it's either you go and I get you there

01:39:17

what are you reading in between there Mike?

01:39:19

I have a book that has been on my shelf for a while which I've actually started

01:39:26

called Steel the Show by Michael Port. Michael Port is a guy who basically the essence of the book

01:39:34

is how to become a better public speaker I've mentioned on this podcast before that I've joined

01:39:40

Toastmasters and in fact as we record this I just got done with a competition for Toastmasters

01:39:48

I joined the international competition and made it past the first round and then took third place

01:39:53

in the second round where the only first place actually went on to like the regional thing

01:39:58

so I want to continue to get better at public speaking and so this book was recommended to me

01:40:04

as kind of the book in that particular space so I'm really looking at this one not for like

01:40:11

life-changing mindset stuff like we would typically do on bookworm but more practical tips little

01:40:17

things that I can do which would make what I what I do in terms of public speaking even better

01:40:22

nice well I'm not going as serious I'm reading the Screwtape Letters by CS Loose

01:40:30

mostly just for fun but it's what would you call it Mike you've read this probably fiction

01:40:36

but definite threads of religious truth I guess is what I'd call it it's about the it's

01:40:47

essentially about demons and how they can I have to convince humans to do what they want

01:40:54

so that's a fictional fictional story applying a lot of principles from the Christian belief

01:41:01

system to why things work the way they did so I don't know what the what the literary term for

01:41:06

that is an allegory maybe possibly it's interesting I've read parts of it before never the whole thing

01:41:12

and I intend to read the whole thing so here you go nice so if you want to recommend a book

01:41:20

you can do that on the bookworm website you can go to bookworm.fm/list

01:41:26

and you can see a list of all of the books that we have read along with links to them a list of

01:41:33

the books that are planned a list of the books that are recommended and on the right hand side

01:41:37

there's a I'm sorry left hand side there's a big button where you can recommend a book so if you

01:41:41

want to add to the list that would be great we've done a couple of recommendations and they've been

01:41:48

great some other ones on the list of recommended that which we're going to add at some point soon

01:41:52

anti-fragile that's one that I've been wanting to read for a long time sapiens is on here

01:41:56

classics like the seven habits of highly affected people so if you have a book that you want to

01:42:03

see us read all the three big questions for a frantic family I think my wife probably added that one

01:42:07

no comment but yeah we want your feedback and we want to know what you want us to cover so

01:42:15

please go check out that list and if you have any that you want to see us cover on bookworm

01:42:18

please recommend them and if you have any feedback you want to leave for us there's a few ways you

01:42:22

can do that one is similar to what justice did that we went through earlier on is you can go to

01:42:28

bookworm.fm and there's a contact link there if you go into that contact link you can fill out

01:42:33

that form and it'll send an email to myself and I'll pass it on to Mike from there if

01:42:39

it's worth that so make it good another way is with an iTunes review you can go out leave a

01:42:46

simple rating leave us a comment there as well those help a lot to help other people find the show

01:42:51

and then the third way is if you want to leave some comments and just have a conversation about

01:42:57

it you can go to productivityguild.com that's rebranding Mike of the discussion site I was running

01:43:05

so I recently rebranded that and I get each of these episodes posted on that as a new topic so

01:43:11

people can have conversations on them there as well nice as so thanks everyone for listening if

01:43:18

you're following along at home the next book on the list is a sleep revolution by Ariana Huffington

01:43:23

and we will talk to you next time