Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

How's Mike doing?

00:00:01

Good.

00:00:02

I think I got everything set up.

00:00:03

I am actually recording this podcast from my new setup at the co-working space.

00:00:09

Ooh.

00:00:10

Fancy fancy.

00:00:12

Yep.

00:00:12

I got a private office.

00:00:14

What?

00:00:16

Yep.

00:00:17

But it's cheaper than the other office I had and I don't have to pay for insurance or internet, which at the old place, I was getting the max I could get there.

00:00:29

This is a small town with scones and problems, I guess, was 18 down, which isn't so bad, but only one up.

00:00:37

And here at the co-working space, I've got, I think, 80 down and 50 up.

00:00:42

So it's way better for podcasting.

00:00:45

No kidding.

00:00:46

No kidding.

00:00:48

I'm jealous.

00:00:50

I have pretty good internet, but not that good.

00:00:54

I'll move to Appleton.

00:00:56

We got an extra office right next to me.

00:00:59

Right.

00:01:00

You get that by my wife.

00:01:01

Oh, fun times.

00:01:06

I'm playing around with trying to get a shortcut to where I can press a button and it mutes my mic and unmutes it automatically.

00:01:16

Oh, you need a Rolls Mike switch.

00:01:20

Oh, what?

00:01:21

Yeah, I have a, well, I'm not sure what you're using to actually, I guess, think.

00:01:25

Castor tells me you're using a road podcaster.

00:01:27

So.

00:01:28

Yes.

00:01:29

I have a high PR 40, which I have running through a focus right.

00:01:33

Scarlett two, I two.

00:01:34

It's a recording interface, but before it gets there, I have this little box that has an XLR in it and XLR out and a button on it.

00:01:42

And it is a physical mute button for my microphone.

00:01:46

What?

00:01:47

Yep.

00:01:48

It's this little blue box.

00:01:49

I'll take a picture.

00:01:50

I'll send it to you.

00:01:51

OK.

00:01:51

And I heard about it from Marco Arment.

00:01:54

I forget which podcast he mentioned it on, but he's on like a million podcasts.

00:01:59

And yeah, this thing is.

00:02:02

Is awesome.

00:02:03

So there's the picture now to share this with you.

00:02:07

And you can, it comes with instructions.

00:02:10

So essentially, like if you have it pushed in, it's on.

00:02:13

If you push it, so the button is up, then it is off.

00:02:17

But you can also rewire it, which sounds like something that maybe Joe would do so that you can push it and it mutes temporarily.

00:02:25

OK.

00:02:27

Because I've been trying to rewire my, what is it?

00:02:31

The function, but key on my keyboard.

00:02:34

I want to rewire that to where I push and hold it and it's when I'm holding it, it mutes and when I let go of it, it unmutes or I'd be OK, pressing it once and having it mute, pressing it again and having it unmute.

00:02:45

That's what I'm playing around with.

00:02:46

OK.

00:02:47

Yeah.

00:02:48

I mean, this, this essentially is either pushed in or pushed out so you can tell whether it's on or off, but it's not.

00:02:55

It's not something where the state actually changes.

00:02:58

Mike Schmitz attachment one image.

00:03:00

Clicking.

00:03:02

Loading.

00:03:04

Why is that taking so long?

00:03:06

Because you don't have Apple and co working internet.

00:03:08

Oh, right.

00:03:10

That's got to be it.

00:03:11

Mike switch, but see, you have to be running XLR.

00:03:13

Yep.

00:03:15

To get that to work.

00:03:16

Yeah.

00:03:17

So the road podcast, I know is USB and actually what you should maybe look into for the USB is an application called shush.

00:03:24

Yeah, I, yes, I'm aware of this.

00:03:28

That's the, the only thing I can find for a USB option.

00:03:31

But yeah, a lot of the not that the road podcaster is not a good Mike, but it's, I mean, it's a podcaster.

00:03:39

It's designed to be easy to plug into your computer and get running.

00:03:42

Right.

00:03:43

The more serious you get about your audio setup, almost all of the higher end microphones are at the XLR format.

00:03:49

And that's where it gets for me.

00:03:51

I've had trouble because the USB, you can use shush.

00:03:54

And you can use the, I use the function key to either temporarily mute or temporarily enable your microphone.

00:04:01

But with a recording interface, you can't do that.

00:04:04

So I was stuck for a real long time and we would be recording and I would try to like move away from the mic.

00:04:11

As far as my headphone cord would allow me and cough so that you couldn't hear it.

00:04:16

You wouldn't have to edit it out.

00:04:17

But obviously I know that that still is coming through a little bit.

00:04:22

Right.

00:04:22

So when I found this hardware button, I was like, yes, this is perfect.

00:04:26

Nice.

00:04:27

Now with with an interface like that,

00:04:30

can you still control it with the mic input volumes?

00:04:35

Like on your computer itself?

00:04:38

Uh, no, I don't think I have the ability to change that on the computer settings, but the focus right as it built in.

00:04:48

And actually the focus right, if you're going to get a recording interface,

00:04:52

this is the one to get.

00:04:53

It is amazing.

00:04:54

You don't have to get the two.

00:04:55

I too, you can get the single one if you want.

00:04:56

They both have this feature where they have the gain knob and there's a ring that goes around the gain knob and it flashes green as I'm talking.

00:05:05

Like if you were recording in logic or what's the audition?

00:05:10

Is that the Adobe version?

00:05:11

Yep.

00:05:11

You know, you got the level, the bar and you want it so it's not peaking.

00:05:15

You don't want it to be read.

00:05:16

Well, when you actually pick or clip on the focus, right, the ring turns from green to red.

00:05:21

So you know if your mic is too hot.

00:05:23

Hmm.

00:05:24

Interesting.

00:05:24

Well, I've been looking at because I think you run a high P.R.

00:05:28

40, right?

00:05:29

Yes, I do.

00:05:30

And I have been considering probably maybe in the next two months, I'm considering doing some upgrading on my mic setup.

00:05:39

So I have access to our church runs beta 87s, the sure mics.

00:05:46

Those are now three of them and then we've got a couple of 58s, the beta 58s at the church.

00:05:52

And that's what we use heavily.

00:05:54

We have a pretty sweet sound setup at the church.

00:05:58

And I am considering because we never use all of those 87s on a Sunday and I'm in and out of the church enough with my

00:06:06

IT position that I'm debating just grabbing one of those, picking up an interface and then just using that a couple of times to see if I like it or not.

00:06:14

And if I like it, I'll buy one.

00:06:16

So yes, all that to say, I'm playing around with audio stuff right now.

00:06:20

Nice.

00:06:22

This is this is a very dangerous slippery slope that you.

00:06:25

Oh, it's far from somewhat dangerous.

00:06:28

It is very, very dangerous.

00:06:30

Let's go blow $3,000.

00:06:34

That's easy to do.

00:06:35

You totally can do that too.

00:06:36

It's it's crazy.

00:06:37

One of the things that and I know you mentioned that you've been using.

00:06:43

What's the name of the service to like level things.

00:06:46

Oh, a fonic.

00:06:46

A fonic.

00:06:48

Yeah, which is a pretty awesome service.

00:06:49

But I like to do things manually and I like to know what specific adjustments are being made.

00:06:56

So like one of the things that I got was a VST plugin for logic and you can use it in audition in other places too called sound soap.

00:07:05

Just and what it does is you you find like the background in your audio track and you open up the interface for the plugin.

00:07:13

Inside a logic and you basically hit play during the time where there's noise and you press and hold the learn button on the interface and it learns the noise and then it just eliminates that particular noise from the rest of the audio track.

00:07:23

It is magic, but there are a lot of plugins like that that do a lot of really cool things and they're all a couple hundred dollars apiece.

00:07:31

Right.

00:07:33

I know like the whole learning thing that's something like that's built into audition.

00:07:38

Like I can do that.

00:07:39

I can also do like a noise gate compressor on it.

00:07:41

We're going to go way deep here, but I can do some.

00:07:45

I do like all of my EQ and compressors and noise gates and stuff.

00:07:49

I do a lot of that post, but on like on your mic, I don't tend to mess with the EQ a whole lot because the HIL does a really good job of pulling in the right EQ settings.

00:08:02

Just stock.

00:08:04

The road per my voice doesn't seem to fit super well, so I have to run a little bit of an EQ on it to get it to sound natural for me.

00:08:14

And I do that and then I'll also run the noise gate on it before I pass it through.

00:08:20

Aphonic because it just seems like that helps it out because I did a little.

00:08:24

I shouldn't say I did a little.

00:08:25

I did a lot of research on them before I decided to start using them, but they do a lot of the leveling.

00:08:34

And catching a lot of the background stuff, even though I'm already pulling some of it.

00:08:37

And then the thing that I think is really interesting is they're really good at normalizing audio levels across the entire track.

00:08:45

For both your voice and mine and it makes those two work together pretty well.

00:08:50

So I have noticed that as far as overall volume levels, it works really well.

00:08:54

You don't notice it if you're listening to the podcast in just traditional headphones.

00:08:59

I notice it quite a bit if I'm listening to it in the car.

00:09:02

For some reason, listening to it in the car, it sounds a lot different.

00:09:06

And when I started using that service, it got a lot better.

00:09:09

That's what I know.

00:09:12

Yeah, I can't speak to listening to podcasts through a car stereo.

00:09:16

I usually almost than listening to them through a Bluetooth headset or lately, it's been the AirPods, which are amazing and worth every penny in my opinion.

00:09:26

AirPods, you've been like upgrading stuff and not telling me what's the.

00:09:30

The AirPods actually I've had for a while because I was gifted them.

00:09:34

I helped out a friend of mine who owns a digital marketing firm here in town.

00:09:38

Actually right down the street from where I am right now.

00:09:40

And with some some scrum stuff, he was just asking me questions about, you know, how do you how do you do this at Asian efficiency and any tips for for this?

00:09:50

And so we had quite a bit of discussion about it, which was honestly a lot of fun for me.

00:09:55

So I didn't really expect anything.

00:09:57

But he's like, well, you got to give me something for your time.

00:09:59

And then he's like, the AirPods look cool.

00:10:01

How about those?

00:10:02

And then he's like, here they are.

00:10:03

What?

00:10:04

Yeah.

00:10:05

So he gave them to me essentially, I think it was before Christmas, like when they first come out and I, you still can't get them.

00:10:10

They're six weeks out.

00:10:11

So I was like, what?

00:10:12

How did you get them?

00:10:14

And he's like, I called Best Buy.

00:10:16

They had him.

00:10:16

So here you go.

00:10:17

And they're, they're great, especially if you're all in on the Apple ecosystem, like I am, they really do just kind of switch between the different devices.

00:10:25

It's really easy to pair them with my Mac and with my, with your phone.

00:10:29

Like you, you open up the case and you have your phone open next to you and it just recognizes them.

00:10:35

You push a button and they're paired and then via the iCloud settings and the handoff stuff that they do.

00:10:40

Like you can kind of go from one device to the next.

00:10:42

And for the most part, it's pretty, pretty seamless.

00:10:45

Once in a while, you don't have to go and I'll have to just select them from the input drop down, but never really have any connection issues.

00:10:51

And they are great for Skype calls.

00:10:55

Nice.

00:10:55

I am aware, I haven't, so I'm still on a iPhone 6s.

00:11:00

So I still have a headphone jack and I, I can't say that it's something I use a ton, but I know that I need to get into the whole wireless headphone thing soon.

00:11:11

And soon and very soon.

00:11:13

Yes, you do.

00:11:14

On that note, should we jump into our follow up?

00:11:17

Let's do it.

00:11:18

All right.

00:11:19

So the first one here, I think you have for me, right?

00:11:22

The sleep tracking stuff.

00:11:24

Well, I put the sleep tracking on there for both of us.

00:11:27

OK.

00:11:27

Because I started doing it.

00:11:29

Nice.

00:11:31

Well, I've been doing it and turns out I'm still not a very good sleeper.

00:11:35

My sleep quality is usually about 80 percent.

00:11:38

80 percent.

00:11:40

OK.

00:11:40

Yeah.

00:11:41

And this is what sleep cycle, right?

00:11:43

This is what sleep cycle.

00:11:44

Yep.

00:11:44

So yeah, I don't know one night my wife uses it to.

00:11:50

And interesting, interestingly, you can tell, like the app can tell when somebody else is running sleep cycle nearby.

00:11:58

Well, right.

00:11:59

My wife and I started doing this too.

00:12:00

It's pretty cool.

00:12:01

Yeah.

00:12:01

All of a sudden I noticed, like as I was setting it, that there's a little chain link icon, you know, and I see Rachel's name.

00:12:08

And I'm like, what, how does it?

00:12:09

Did it accidentally load her profile or something?

00:12:13

And no, what it's saying is that there's another one nearby and it kind of balances that out, which I think is kind of crazy.

00:12:19

But one night she slept really, really well and she got 100 percent and she woke up and she's boasting about it.

00:12:25

She's like, hey, look at this.

00:12:26

I'm better sleeper than you.

00:12:27

That's kind of funny.

00:12:31

Huh.

00:12:32

Yeah.

00:12:34

I at this point in time, I might kill for some 80 percent nights.

00:12:37

Well, you also have a young child.

00:12:41

So yes, but the last four nights I've been OK, across the last four nights, I have averaged.

00:12:49

68 percent on that.

00:12:51

So I've had a couple of 59s, I think 171 or something like that.

00:12:57

Anyway, it's averaged out mid high sixties in that range.

00:13:01

And I've never hit 100.

00:13:03

I've only I rarely hit 90s.

00:13:05

So this is why I didn't want to do this originally because I because I knew it was going to be bad.

00:13:13

But I did get into it.

00:13:15

And I have done their whole trial thing.

00:13:18

I'm trying to see because you can do the whole sleep notes bit with that.

00:13:23

And I want to know how how do certain things affect my sleep because I don't think I stay in bed long enough.

00:13:30

And so which things am I doing that are helpful?

00:13:34

This is what plays into my next follow up with naps because I've been doing naps here and there.

00:13:38

I haven't been very consistent at it, but I've been doing it a little bit.

00:13:41

Overall, Joni's help was sleep.

00:13:45

And I'm hoping to help me with that.

00:13:47

But I don't the thing, the thing that I get concerned about with some things like tracking, and I've brought this up before, I don't want to become reliant on them.

00:13:55

So if it's something that helps me fall asleep or helps me stay asleep, I'm going to stay away from it.

00:14:01

But if it's something that's just passive and I don't have to touch it and it does this sort of thing, I that I can get behind.

00:14:07

That's why I like this one.

00:14:10

Yeah, on the topic of your naps, by the way, I was recording the productivity show with 10 yesterday.

00:14:16

OK.

00:14:17

And I don't know if that episode is going to be up at the time.

00:14:20

This one comes out.

00:14:20

So if it is, I'll get you the links.

00:14:23

You can put it in the show notes, but I gave you a shout out based on he was talking about his strategy for taking naps and he made a comment that he knows that he's in a privileged situation where he can make his own schedule.

00:14:35

And he has the luxury in the middle of the day that when he's tired to take a nap.

00:14:39

And I pointed out that in the last episode, the sleep, actually two episodes ago now, the sleep revolution that you pointed out that while you were working in a corporate environment, you would schedule meetings with yourself and go out to the car and that.

00:14:51

But he thought that that was genius.

00:14:52

I win.

00:14:55

I have talked to a couple of people that work in that scene that still work in that corporate situation who are still doing that because that's something that they do because I taught that.

00:15:09

You schedule meetings with themselves and then go take a nap.

00:15:11

It's your legacy lives on.

00:15:13

Yes, continuing with my nap, even though I'm not that great at it.

00:15:17

So the next one here be my kids teacher question mark.

00:15:24

I I brought this up to my wife to talk about because we're we're in the process of turning a nail down.

00:15:30

How are we going to homeschool?

00:15:31

Because that's our plan with all of our kids and our oldest now is four.

00:15:37

So we're we're not at the point where we have to do something with school, but we need to start having these conversations seriously.

00:15:42

So I brought this up to my wife that I wanted to be heavily involved in teaching and in schooling our kids and although we don't have answers to that, it's something I'm going to continue having a discussion on.

00:15:55

So just bringing that up saying I'm going to do something about it, but I don't know what that actually looks like.

00:16:01

Nice.

00:16:03

So when you when you start homeschooling, you definitely need to check out bits box.

00:16:08

I don't know if I've told you about this before, but this is amazing.

00:16:12

And my kids absolutely love it.

00:16:13

And I keep thinking that, okay, they're going to get to the end of the exercises where they're actually learning things because it's designed for kids.

00:16:20

You can't go into two advanced concepts, but I don't know.

00:16:24

Somehow they always implement some some new angle to the things.

00:16:28

And then my kids are just like they can't wait to open up those boxes when they come every month.

00:16:33

Yeah.

00:16:34

And at this point, my probably even my seven year old is probably a much better

00:16:41

coder than I.

00:16:41

But that's OK.

00:16:45

It happens.

00:16:47

So my action item here, I knew you were going to put this one on here probably because it was the only one that was on the list.

00:16:57

For me, I and I don't know how to follow up with this other than to say that I am working on it.

00:17:03

And that is to be OK with being wrong.

00:17:05

So I feel like in order to get really quantifiable feedback on this, you would have to follow me around and ask the people that I interact with every day.

00:17:15

But I feel like I have been doing a better job with this.

00:17:19

And I think that it kind of plays into the book that we read for today also because of the whole win,

00:17:26

the win situation.

00:17:27

Yeah, that actually was not intentional.

00:17:30

I wasn't thinking about that ahead of time.

00:17:32

But in the book he talks about and we'll get into this habit more in depth, but you don't have to think one side has to win and one side has to lose.

00:17:42

And so that's where I think a lot of this being OK with being wrong comes in is in the past, I might have viewed being wrong as losing, but it doesn't have to be that way if you just shift your mindset.

00:17:55

So a little bit of a teaser for today's book, which is the seven habits of highly affected people by Stephen Covey.

00:18:01

It is probably the most read productivity book.

00:18:07

I think the one that I got said it had been sold 25 million times or something like that.

00:18:12

Yeah.

00:18:12

And say I've got the 25th anniversary edition, very top over 25 million copies sold.

00:18:17

Yep.

00:18:18

Yeah.

00:18:19

And this was this was interesting.

00:18:22

Very enlightening and I got a lot more out of this book than I honestly thought I would.

00:18:27

Yeah, I would agree with that.

00:18:30

I was not sure what to expect.

00:18:31

And there were a lot of things I feel like have been because it's been around for 25 years plus at this point.

00:18:41

There's a lot of the steps and the habits that are in here that have been written about significantly in other books.

00:18:49

So there's a number of these that are not groundbreaking, but I think at the time, this was just unheard of.

00:18:57

So I think there's a lot to learn from it, but there's also some things that I feel like I knew.

00:19:02

Is that fair?

00:19:04

Yeah.

00:19:04

Yeah.

00:19:05

No, that is very fair.

00:19:07

But what I was really surprised by was the depth of everything that was in here and.

00:19:15

Really how much I got out of it.

00:19:19

I mean, essentially, there are seven habits, obviously, and he breaks through the different habits and he identifies like the first three are kind of your own personal habits.

00:19:28

The next three have to do with other people.

00:19:31

And then habit number seven is the one that kind of keeps everything going.

00:19:34

And if you just look at the titles, you can you can look at those.

00:19:39

You could be like, Oh, yeah, I know what that means, but you don't know what it means.

00:19:42

You know, that's like the scene from from Princess Bride, where Cini is talking to an ego and he's like,

00:19:49

you keep using that word.

00:19:50

I do not think it means what you think it means.

00:19:51

So like you hear habit number one be proactive and you're like, Oh, yeah, I got to be proactive, not reactive, duh.

00:19:58

But then he's got a whole bunch of stories and a whole bunch of nuggets of information that really add a whole lot of context and help you see it.

00:20:07

In a different way.

00:20:09

It's a difference in my mind from just like understanding information and having it be revelation where like your eyes are opened and you really get it.

00:20:17

You know, it's not something that you've just read in a book and you could spit back these seven things, but.

00:20:22

OK, yeah, now I really do have a solid mental picture of what it means to be proactive and I can actually implement that in my life going forward.

00:20:31

Yeah, I love that he had so many examples about these things because like to your point, I mean, some of these things begin with the end in mind.

00:20:39

Great.

00:20:39

Awesome.

00:20:40

That way I know where I'm going, duh, like that's kind of my gut reaction with it.

00:20:46

But once you go through a lot of the examples that he has, he really does deep dive.

00:20:51

I mean, the books over, what is it?

00:20:52

It's over 300 pages long and big one.

00:20:55

Yeah, so it's it's not a quick read, but there's a lot there to go through.

00:21:01

And to your point, once you know, he summarizes the habit at the beginning and then he spends the rest of that chapter deep diving it and explaining it at a very intricate level, which is interesting.

00:21:15

I found and having some of the examples of this in the stories that put those into place or something that made it very easy to consume and keep going with.

00:21:24

Yes, totally agree.

00:21:26

And I am trying to find now, but there is actually in the version that I got an assessment.

00:21:31

Did you?

00:21:33

Yeah, I saw that.

00:21:33

I haven't done it, but it's on my list.

00:21:35

OK, well, maybe we can talk about it next time then because I'm having trouble finding my results.

00:21:40

I figured that they would have been sent from like Covey.com or something, but a search of my email client of choice, which is mailmate for Covey is not returning any results.

00:21:50

But that was interesting because I wasn't as high as I thought I would be.

00:21:55

So I'm interested to hear your results.

00:21:58

We can put that in the follow up.

00:22:00

But yeah, I haven't taken it.

00:22:03

So I want to know.

00:22:04

I kind of want to know as well, because I felt like there were a lot of these that I.

00:22:09

I do, but I didn't realize that I did them, which is fun and exciting at the same time.

00:22:15

So you want to jump into these?

00:22:16

I think I think it would be good to just go through each habit and just kind of discuss what we think about it and how well we feel we are at it.

00:22:22

Because there's a lot here.

00:22:24

And I think if we do anything other than this could get to be a very long show.

00:22:29

Yes.

00:22:30

No, I saw that you put those as a talking points and I think that that makes the most sense.

00:22:35

But I do think that it's worth mentioning at the very beginning something from the introductory section of the book, which he references over and over and over again.

00:22:45

And that is this P slash PC mindset, which is production slash production capacity.

00:22:53

And he's talking about these seven habits through the lens of these are the things that you need to do to make sure that you are able to continue to produce at an elite level.

00:23:05

So if you he uses the analogy like the goose and the golden egg, like if you keep seeking the production, the golden eggs, you can burn out the goose and then all of a sudden the thing that you had, which was producing this high level of output or this desirable, this valuable thing is now gone.

00:23:21

And now what do you do?

00:23:22

So in terms of the habits, he's saying that you need to do these so that you can keep getting the production, but also you keep up your production capacity.

00:23:32

Because as long as you continue to do these habits, you're in essence enlarging your capacity.

00:23:37

You're going to get more in the long term than if you tried to really just focus on the short term results and then, you know, a quarter later, you've burnt out and now you've got nothing.

00:23:46

Yeah, it's terrible whenever you have a company that and you see it typically with CEOs, if they know that they're going to be retiring in the next three years, sometimes there's a tendency to.

00:24:01

Pull from the long term goal and go for short term goals.

00:24:05

And quite often that means that you're you're destroying your ability to create later on and produce later on.

00:24:13

So you're borrowing from the future and that makes it very hard for the follow up CEO to come in and fix everything because then they have to spend all kinds of money that should have spent or been spent earlier in order to keep up production.

00:24:25

So you see a lot in those scenarios, but it definitely applies and I really appreciated that he applied so much of this to families and children because it definitely applies in that.

00:24:37

It's not necessarily a business book, even though it can be seen as primarily a business book, but I loved his examples with kids, especially with, you know, P and PC and talking about production and production capacity, even with his own children and helping them see how that plays out.

00:24:56

I thought it was very valuable.

00:24:57

Yeah, and there's the thing that kind of blew me away about this book is like you see, for example, at Asian efficiency, we teach all the time the Eisenhower Matrix, which he didn't attribute it to Eisenhower in this book, but it's also in this book where you've got the four quadrants, the important and urgent, the urgent, but not important, but not urgent, and then things that are neither important nor urgent.

00:25:22

Okay, and that he talked about in this book and he had the diagram to illustrate it and he had, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 of those different diagrams, those different concepts that he taught throughout these pages.

00:25:36

Like it was just jam packed with that, even though it's 300 pages long, a lot of the books that we read, you get through 30 pages and you're like, okay, there's nothing new here for the next 270.

00:25:47

I'm looking at you, David Allen, with getting things done.

00:25:51

But, uh, but this one, I mean, it's just thing after thing after thing after thing after thing, but it never feels rushed and it never feels like you've stayed on a concept for too long or you've left it too early.

00:26:08

Like he always completes his thoughts and he always, at least my perspective anyways, left you at a point where it's like, yeah, I totally get what he's saying there.

00:26:18

And then at the end of every one of the chapters or the habits, he's got action steps.

00:26:23

So this is how you can actually apply this and you go through the exercises and I have to confess that I did not go through all of those exercises.

00:26:30

Some of them were pretty in depth.

00:26:31

And if you were to go through all of them, this book probably takes more like a month instead of a week.

00:26:37

Yeah, I didn't do any of them.

00:26:40

The other thing I want to point out here is that the way he sets this up where the first three habits are focusing on you, habits four through six or focusing on some other people and then habit number seven sharpened the saw.

00:26:51

That's how you keep everything going.

00:26:53

But the way that he frames it, it's kind of like, well, you got to take care of your own stuff first.

00:26:59

Like you can't really help anybody until you take care of yourself.

00:27:02

In Asian efficiency, we call it glowing green, but it's the classic example.

00:27:06

Like you go on an airplane, they tell you put your own oxygen mask on first.

00:27:10

You know, before you try to help other people, at least that's how I view that.

00:27:13

But when you get to habits four, five and six, there is a lot of emphasis, not on the circumstances of your situation and how do you overcome this negative situation, but it's.

00:27:26

He does it nicely.

00:27:28

It doesn't seem like condemning, but it's basically like it's your fault.

00:27:31

What are you going to do about it?

00:27:33

Like even though those three habits are focusing on your relationships with other people, it's focusing on your side of the relationships and what you can do to make things better, which I really appreciated.

00:27:44

And there's a quote in here.

00:27:46

Sorry.

00:27:47

That's kind of building up to this quote that I wanted to share because.

00:27:50

When I went into this book and I'm going through the individual stuff, I have to be honest.

00:27:56

Okay.

00:27:57

So I'm going through this and I'm like, man, I can think of somebody who could really use this right now.

00:28:02

But then I read this quote and slapped me in the face and it said, no one can persuade another to change.

00:28:08

Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be open from the inside.

00:28:11

We cannot open the gate of another either by argument or by emotional appeal by Marilyn Ferguson.

00:28:16

And it's just like it's completely pointless to focus on trying to change other people, but you can get a lot of change implemented, especially when you get into like habit four with the win-win and this habit number five.

00:28:33

But which we'll get to in a little bit.

00:28:35

But when you really understand what those look like, I can totally see how using those strategies can implement much greater positive change than me just laying out like, hey, you should change this, this, this, and this.

00:28:47

Maybe the person should change this, this, this, and this.

00:28:49

But that doesn't mean they shouldn't.

00:28:51

That doesn't mean that I don't have anything that I can change.

00:28:56

And if I just sit there and wait for them to change, then that's just going to make me bitter and angry.

00:29:01

I know this because it happens.

00:29:02

Well, I think this, you know, that's a good segue into habit one with be proactive because so much of this is about my reaction to what other people are doing or me taking the initiative.

00:29:15

And that's ultimately what habit one is about is taking responsibility.

00:29:20

You know, we've, we've read a number of books that talk primarily about owning the situation and not playing the victim.

00:29:28

And that's ultimately what you have to start with because each of these habits builds on each other.

00:29:32

You really can't move on to five unless you've got four, an understanding of number four.

00:29:37

You can't go to four unless you've got three.

00:29:39

Like it all builds on each other and it all starts with being able and willing to take responsibility for a situation.

00:29:47

That's what he's meaning by be proactive be the one that takes that initiative and don't wait for someone else to do it for you.

00:29:53

You know, it's not something that's going to just magically happen.

00:29:57

And anything that happens in life, whether it's with your kids or with business, you just, you can't rely on other people to do things for you.

00:30:04

There's a lot of our culture and society that wants you to believe that, but it just doesn't work that way.

00:30:08

So this is something that I found very helpful because so much of what we do could be chalked up to, well, this didn't work out well for me or I'm just waiting until this comes along.

00:30:22

You know, if you take things in the web development world, so many times people get upset because a competitor beat them out because they have a better website and like, well, if I just wait long enough, people will find my website and it'll be better off.

00:30:35

Well, it doesn't really work that way.

00:30:36

Yes, it can work that way, but let's not do that.

00:30:40

You need to do something, like go out and do something about it.

00:30:43

Don't just wait for someone else to either fail or sit around hoping that something happens.

00:30:48

Like do something about it.

00:30:50

Yeah, and there was a quote on page 80, which really hit me.

00:30:55

And I think this is the best way I have ever heard the argument for personal responsibility summed up because it puts the ownership on you for your future.

00:31:05

It says, until a person can say deeply and honestly, I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday, that person cannot say I choose otherwise, which is really powerful when you think about it, because you can say, well, I got a bad

00:31:20

start. I'm a victim of my circumstances.

00:31:22

These things happen to me and they led me to this point.

00:31:25

That all may be true, but until you say, no, it's my fault and I can do something about it, you're stuck there.

00:31:33

But the moment that you say, okay, this is on me.

00:31:37

So that's empowering because that gives you the ability then to change your future.

00:31:43

And I think he tells the story of Victor Frankl in here and Victor Frankl is an amazing guy.

00:31:49

I have studied his life a little bit.

00:31:51

Yeah, I've studied his life a little bit even prior to this book.

00:31:54

But again, just like the way that he uses these stories is really, really powerful.

00:31:59

So he's talking about being proactive and he tells a story of Victor Frankl who wrote Man Search for Meaning.

00:32:05

Victor Frankl was a World War II concentration camp survivor and he had the job of removing the dead bodies from the gas chambers after they

00:32:19

after people had been killed by the Nazi soldiers.

00:32:21

So if anybody had a reason to be reactive and to be bitter and to be angry about his situation, it would be this guy.

00:32:30

But he he's the one who said essentially that your attitude is the last of the human freedoms and people can never take that away from you paraphrasing obviously.

00:32:41

But he just had that epiphany one night that he has power in this situation even though he's a prisoner when he chooses to determine and be proactive and chooses to determine his own attitude.

00:32:57

And then once he started doing that, he noticed that he had influence not only over the other prisoners, but also over some of the guards.

00:33:05

Yeah, and I just think that that is super, super powerful because if you were to take a physical situation where you would say that there is absolutely nothing you can do about this, I am stuck.

00:33:14

I just have to wait for this thing to be over. It would be a physical prisoner like him in a concentration camp, especially like this is not just your normal prison.

00:33:23

People go here to die and he's just refusing to and I wouldn't I shouldn't say refusing to accept the reality of the situation, but refusing to let the reality of the situation

00:33:34

change his approach to how he's going to live his life. And that's a really, really powerful

00:33:41

choice that that an ability that we all have because no matter how bad our situation is,

00:33:47

no matter how bad your situation is, dear listener who is listening to this right now, you are not in the situation that Victor Frankle was.

00:33:53

I am not in the situation where Victor Frankle was. So in essence, like what this does for me is it says you have nothing to complain about knock it off.

00:34:02

Choose your own attitude and be proactive about choosing to be happy and have gratitude and all of the other things that we talk about on this podcast because

00:34:09

there's really no one and no thing that is preventing you from experiencing that other than yourself.

00:34:16

There's a lot there. Sorry. No, it's okay. It's okay because I feel like the stories that come with this.

00:34:27

It can come down to a mindset and you're dead on with this is something that you can't rely on someone else to do and

00:34:34

circumstances can lead you to where you have a big influence on other people. That's something that he brings up in this habit is a circle of influence or what's the what's the other one circle of

00:34:46

a circle of concern. Yeah, but yeah, he brings those two up and ultimately what they come down to is the the group of people

00:34:57

that you can have an impact on and

00:35:00

when you understand who that group is and know where your circle of influence lands, like what is the what are the sectors that I can impact?

00:35:09

Like what are these different areas that I can touch and I have a big impact on

00:35:14

when you understand that then you start to see how your

00:35:17

your actions and your what you take responsibility for can reach the broader world. The question is

00:35:25

how do you decide what how you're going to impact or where how you want to try to move things

00:35:29

and that that transitions us into habit to

00:35:33

with begin with the end in mind where he talks a lot about mission statements and people hate mission statements, Mike.

00:35:40

It's true.

00:35:43

People do not like mission statements. I love mission statements and I love core values, which I don't think he specifically called out core values,

00:35:50

but that's kind of how I viewed the implementation for us anyways of the mission statement.

00:35:55

One other thing regarding this kind of leading into beginning with the end in mind though on the whole topic of responsibility,

00:36:05

he defined responsibility as response,

00:36:08

ability and

00:36:10

really what that means is the ability to choose your own response and I thought that was really good and he kind of

00:36:18

iterated that theme throughout the rest of the book over and over and over again.

00:36:22

But specifically with habit number two begin with the end in mind. If you assume

00:36:27

responsibility, the ability to choose your own response, the ability to create your own future,

00:36:34

then this was a really powerful exercise and this is one of the

00:36:39

action items that I wrote down for myself.

00:36:41

Again, I've heard this habit over and over and over again. I have heard the story from this habit

00:36:48

where he says,

00:36:50

"Begin with the end in mind and you're going to your own funeral. What do you want people to say?"

00:36:54

But one of my action items is to write my own eulogy because I want to really think through in detail

00:37:02

what does the end of my life look like if I, if it goes the way that I want it to.

00:37:08

And then once I have that mental picture and that's kind of the crux of this habit is once you know what you're aiming at,

00:37:15

then it helps you to maintain the momentum that you have to keep on course.

00:37:19

But it also helps direct and advise the actions and the things that you have to do on a regular basis

00:37:26

to get to that place. Whereas if you didn't have that end in mind, if you didn't have that mission statement, if you didn't have that true north essentially,

00:37:33

then you can look at

00:37:35

this thing is happening and

00:37:38

I don't know what to do right now, but when you know that my goal is this, then it's easy to make a decision.

00:37:45

This is where 12-week year comes in, I think, because I've been doing a lot with it.

00:37:49

Are you still doing 12-week year? Have you put it off?

00:37:54

I've fallen off the bandwagon for this quarter. I'm going to do it again next quarter though.

00:37:58

Yeah, I'm already like noting down some of my goals for the next quarter, but yeah, I failed this few too.

00:38:06

Well, I think this plays in really well with 12-week year because

00:38:12

maybe I should start a podcast with somebody who could hold me accountable to those goals.

00:38:16

There you go. I highly recommend it. Just make sure it's theoretical.

00:38:21

But it's very helpful to have goals that

00:38:27

I can work towards for the next 12 weeks and

00:38:31

knowing that I have those down gives me a place that I want to be. The part that I want to try to work on with that,

00:38:38

because the ones I'm working through right now,

00:38:42

I feel like aren't...

00:38:43

and I've brought this up on that other podcast as well,

00:38:47

is I don't think this is something that I've been very good at, is setting those goals

00:38:54

and nailing down what I want that end to be. So that's something I want to get better at.

00:38:58

I don't know how to put that into an action item,

00:39:01

but it's something that I want to at least keep in mind.

00:39:04

So I want to be better about putting those goals together and knowing where I'm going to go.

00:39:09

So I'm usually pretty good at visualizing where I want things to land,

00:39:14

but I want to be more proactive. I want to be more intentional with it.

00:39:20

So I know that I have a lot of projects and for a while I've been trying to write down

00:39:24

what I see those as...

00:39:27

what do they look like when they're done and visualizing what it looks like when it's completed,

00:39:32

but I haven't been very good about sticking with that.

00:39:34

So I want to try to pull that back out and keep going at it.

00:39:37

So I think there's to kind of wrap that up. I think there's a lot of value in knowing where you're

00:39:42

going to go. It's hard to say, "I'm going to go see some nature." Like, "Okay, great. Where are you

00:39:49

going to go?" I don't know. I'll figure it out when I get in the car. Well, it doesn't really work

00:39:53

that way. You can just hop in the car and start driving, but it's pretty aimless and it's going

00:39:58

to be a long drawn out process. You may not actually get anywhere that you want to be.

00:40:04

If I did that where I'm at and I accidentally go the wrong direction, I would end up in a major city,

00:40:10

not nature. It would be the opposite of what I want. So you have to really put that plan together

00:40:16

and this is where Habit 2 comes through. Yeah. In the talk that I gave when I was competing in the

00:40:26

Toastmasters competition, and also, by the way, I found out that there is a TEDx in November in

00:40:32

Oshkosh, which is about 20 minutes from my house. I have submitted to give a TED talk. It's technically

00:40:39

after the deadline, but I've had some back and forth with the director and basically they're like,

00:40:45

"Well, yeah, if we're blown away by the application, you might still squeeze you and otherwise we'll

00:40:49

keep it on file for next year." Nice. I have submitted to give a TED talk. It's kind of cool.

00:40:54

But in that talk, I explained this mental model that I understood when I was doing the research

00:41:02

from my book, which is the definition of hustles, to force to move

00:41:05

herlier unceremoniously in a specified direction. And if you were to break that down, you've got

00:41:10

three parts. You've got the force, which is the work. And that's what most people think of. That's

00:41:14

what most people see the early mornings, the late nights. But you can't start there. The second part

00:41:20

is the moving herlier unceremoniously. That's your purpose. And then the last part is in a

00:41:25

specified direction. That's the vision. That's what Stephen Covey is talking about with beginning

00:41:29

at the end in mind. But it's just like getting in the car and going on a trip. You have to work

00:41:34

backwards. You have to start with the destination. Once you have the destination, you can figure out

00:41:38

the route that you're going to take to get there. That's your purpose. And then finally,

00:41:42

you get in the car and you go. But if you just get in the car and start driving, like you said,

00:41:46

you're never going to get there. And I think this is really, really important. And again,

00:41:51

this is one of those things that you can very easily just gloss over. Well, yeah, I know I need

00:41:55

to have a vision. And I can, if you were to ask me right now, I can spit back to you my vision,

00:41:59

quote unquote, but unless you take the time to actually write it down and think through the whole

00:42:04

thing, you've not really, you don't really have a vision. And in page 106, he talks about there's

00:42:10

two creations to all things. Number one is the mental. So you have to have the picture. And then

00:42:17

number two is the physical. So if you want the physical manifestation of your ideal future,

00:42:25

you must first have the mental picture of it. And until you write it down, I would say that your

00:42:31

mental picture is not going to be clear enough to the point where it is going to provide the

00:42:36

direction that you need. I absolutely loved the double creation thing where you create it once in

00:42:46

your mind. And then you create it once in reality. That part I absolutely loved. And it was primarily

00:42:53

because the first creation of a thing is frequently done by other people. Just in general, like in

00:43:02

life, it seems like most people's lives are dictated by someone else's first creation. Think about

00:43:10

if I'm working for a company, the first creation is typically your bosses. They want a certain

00:43:15

thing and they push it down to you. That's kind of the stereotypical view of that. Though that

00:43:20

stereotype seems to be breaking slowly. But that's typically where that seems to come from. And

00:43:27

if you take control of that, in some cases, you can't, I understand that. But if you can,

00:43:32

if you can take control of that first creation, which is something I'm trying to do and have been

00:43:36

for quite a while now is planning out my day ahead of time. If I look at what I'm doing for

00:43:44

today and I know, here's my goal, here's where I'm going to spend all my time. I got bookworm at

00:43:49

9am and then after that, I'm working on this website. When I get done with that, I'm going to grab

00:43:53

lunch and then I've got this and then that and back and forth. If I know what that day is going to

00:43:57

look like, then I'm much more apt to actually achieve that. That's, to me, the essence of

00:44:05

begin with the end in mind, I think. Sounds good to me. I like it. But whenever you do that and

00:44:16

you know where you're going to go, you have to actually put together what that end needs to be.

00:44:23

And nailing down what that end should be is where Habit 3 comes in with put first things first,

00:44:29

because that's knowing what it is you want to work towards is half of it, but knowing what that

00:44:37

thing should be in order to get you to a broader mission is even more complicated, I think. But

00:44:45

I will say that Habit 3 put first things first. I consumed this chapter very quickly because this

00:44:51

feeds our productivity minds. I like this. I like this. Oh, that's a good one too. I had a

00:44:59

bunch of action items that aren't worth talking about here, but little things break out my projects

00:45:04

this way instead of that way. I have a bunch of those. Yes, it was fun. I liked this one a lot.

00:45:11

Right now, so yeah, there's a lot of productivity stuff in here. The one thing that actually the

00:45:20

first thing that really jumped out at me was on page 158 when he's talking about the four

00:45:25

generations of time management. He talks about the first generation was essentially notes and

00:45:31

checklists. Very, very simple. Second generation was calendars and appointment books. Third generation,

00:45:37

which as he was writing it, he's saying this is where we are now, is where people are beginning to

00:45:44

prioritize and suckles. You've got a whole bunch of things to do starting to make decisions about

00:45:50

what things you are not going to do. Then the fourth generation, the fourth level which he describes

00:45:56

as the highest, at least that's how I interpreted it, is relationships and results, which leads into

00:46:03

the next several habits, obviously, where you're focusing on other people. But this is kind of

00:46:10

going back to the point of Chris Bailey and their productivity project where people are the reason

00:46:14

for the productivity. You can be efficient. You can be effective. But what are the results that you

00:46:23

are getting both in terms of the things that you are getting done and the quality of the relationships

00:46:29

that you have with the people that are around you? I thought that was a very important distinction,

00:46:35

which set up the rest of the book perfectly. This is the chapter that brought up the Eisenhower

00:46:41

Matrix, correct? Yep, exactly. Then he talks about, so he goes through the four quadrants. I almost

00:46:48

felt like he was taking credit for this. So did I. I don't know. Maybe he is the one that came up

00:46:54

with it. Everything that I had seen previously was based off of former President Dwight Eisenhower,

00:46:59

who the quote attributed to him is that things that are important are seldom urgent. Things that

00:47:05

are urgent are seldom important. But I didn't do any enough research to really tell who was right

00:47:11

here. Right. I didn't look into it at all. But I know that the Matrix is very interesting enough

00:47:17

so that, and I don't do this now, but I played around with it at one point in OmniFocus of setting

00:47:23

up contexts around this. I think a number of people have tried this, where you have a context for urgent

00:47:29

and important. And then you have the second quadrant, which is important, not urgent.

00:47:34

And you see how it goes. You follow the Matrix around and you set up a context for each one of them.

00:47:38

So you have four contexts that you work off of. I tried that at one point, but it doesn't really

00:47:42

make a whole lot of sense to me from getting things done standpoint, because at what point

00:47:47

are you in that context? I mean, you're really just kind of running around with this classification

00:47:54

of your tasks, but it doesn't really tell you when you should work on those.

00:47:58

Right. No. Yeah, it does make sense. One of the things that I really got out of this section of

00:48:03

the book that I had never heard explained this way previously, though, was the kind of breakdown

00:48:09

of where you're spending the bulk of your time, like which quadrant are the activities that

00:48:16

you're working on associated with. And he did a really good job, I thought, of laying out,

00:48:20

like if you're just getting started with this, you're probably doing the majority of your time

00:48:25

and things that are urgent. And I've always heard it said, like, well, obviously, you want to spend

00:48:30

most of your time and quadrant to the things that are important, but are not necessarily urgent.

00:48:34

But he gave some real practical tips on how to get there, which I thought was great. Like he said,

00:48:39

if you are spending 80% of your day dealing with things that are urgent, then the places where you

00:48:44

want to look to carve time to go to quadrant to is quadrants three and four, specifically quadrant

00:48:51

four. Like if you have any activities in there, the things that are not urgent or important,

00:48:55

like cut those out immediately. But then he kind of talked about how it's going to be a process

00:48:59

before you can spend 80% of your time on quadrant two, which is kind of the ideal or whatever the

00:49:03

percentage was. And he's basically saying like, you can't just say, okay, now I'm going to do this.

00:49:08

You have to chip away at it. You have to chip away at the things that you've been doing,

00:49:12

which are urgent, but are not important. And that's where I would classify a lot of email-related

00:49:17

stuff, which don't need to go into that because we've covered that at length. But I mean, I'll

00:49:23

just throw it out there again as an idea, though, if you are looking, if you're like, yeah, I recognize

00:49:28

that I'm dealing with a lot of urgent stuff. I feel like I can't keep my head above water,

00:49:31

and the importance of getting neglected. Look for the quick wins. And one of those quick wins is

00:49:36

going to be email for a lot of people. Yeah. I know that I spend a lot of time on email

00:49:42

more so than I want to. But I also know that I can't do anything about that because with doing

00:49:50

web development and working with a lot of clients, email is the primary source of communication.

00:49:55

And there's not really a way around that right now, especially when I have clients that are like,

00:50:01

I'm working with one really closely right now who's in Australia. That's a fun time zone thing.

00:50:06

You know, there's a lot of cases where I'm at the end of my day. I'm sending emails like crazy to

00:50:12

this person just and I'm just trying to get as many questions out as I can because I know that

00:50:17

she will be going through this at night for me. And I will have a whole bunch of things in the

00:50:22

morning. Like, it's just how it has been working out. Now, I don't know what the time zone difference

00:50:26

is. I've never looked it up, but that's just kind of the way it's worked out with her. So,

00:50:30

you know, I'm not going to get away from email. Sorry for the digression. I'm not going to go away

00:50:34

from email, but I know that sorting through the email and nailing down which of those actually apply

00:50:41

to my quadrant to the important, not urgent that he put such an emphasis on.

00:50:47

The client work really doesn't fall into that for me. It doesn't fall into that category. And

00:50:54

it's because I feel like those are, it's almost like those are not important, but urgent, I guess,

00:51:04

is how I would put those because they pay the bills, but they don't pay the long-term bills.

00:51:09

Like they take care of this month, typically, or well, they take care of next month quite

00:51:15

frequently, but the longer-term projects for me are my own projects. And I know that those are

00:51:22

handy because whenever I get them built, they then have a recurring income that come off of them,

00:51:26

because that's just how I build things. And that has a much better long-term investment.

00:51:33

And I know that those are better for my business more than just this month. It's better for the

00:51:38

multi-year process. So I know that for me, those quadrant two tasks apply to that, but I'm not

00:51:44

always the best at doing that. This is why I have an action item for my projects come first.

00:51:49

And I have started taking some of those development projects and my early morning time, which is

00:51:57

some of my best time. I put towards those as opposed to my client stuff, which means, Mike,

00:52:03

I may finally be able to kick my email in the morning habit because I'm not going to be touching

00:52:07

any of that until after my second breakfast anyway. So this might serve as a dual-purpose action

00:52:14

item here. I think you should create a course on how Hobbits deal with email.

00:52:18

The Hobbit email habit. There you go. Yeah, but so specifically how you get to that point where

00:52:27

you put your own projects first, that's what else he spends the rest of the chapter talking about,

00:52:34

where one of the things I wrote down is don't prioritize your schedule, schedule your priorities

00:52:38

because you can find yourself in the situation and I'll pick on you since you just threw it out there.

00:52:42

You know, like, I don't have time for my own personal projects because I'm so busy replying to

00:52:47

clients. So I think anybody listening to this can apply that in their own version to their own

00:52:56

life where I don't have time for X because I'm so busy dealing with Y. But the problem is that

00:53:02

we go to Y because it's been conditioned, like you said, checking your email first thing in the

00:53:07

morning. Well, if you check your email first thing in the morning, yes, you are going to have

00:53:10

responses from clients that you're going to have to deal with at some point in the day. And because

00:53:14

you're looking at it right then, you're going to want to do it right then. But if you put it off,

00:53:19

even for a half an hour or an hour, so that you can focus on the thing that you've deemed is more

00:53:25

important, then you'll probably be surprised at you'll be able to make you'll be surprised by the

00:53:32

fact that you can make progress on your important project, your personal project in your scenario.

00:53:37

And somehow you'll still be able to stay on top of the client stuff because you're just not opening

00:53:44

the door to that distraction until the appropriate or the more appropriate time. But it's this whole

00:53:49

idea of priorities. You have to identify the things that are most important to you. And on page 166,

00:53:57

he says, if you were to fault yourself, which area would it be? And I'm curious,

00:54:01

your response, I'll share mine too. There's three areas essentially. One is the inability to

00:54:05

prioritize. Two, the inability or desire to organize around those priorities. Or three, the lack of

00:54:11

discipline to execute around them. I'll go number three for me. Easily number three.

00:54:19

I think for me, it's honestly a little bit of number two. The inability or desire to organize

00:54:27

around those priorities. I won't say it's really the desire. I think it's the inability I'll say

00:54:32

because I tend to bite off more than I can chew. And I have been doing better this year is kind of a

00:54:39

year of an adjustment for me and my wife. And we've said no to some things. And saying no, by the way,

00:54:47

side note here, this is always really scary, especially if you said yes to something prior.

00:54:52

And you created that expectation. But it's really important that you reset those expectations in a way

00:54:57

that it's beneficial to both parties. Because if you just try to honor all these commitments

00:55:02

that you made and you're overstressed and you're just over capacity, you can't physically do all

00:55:07

these things. That's also not fair to the other people that you have made the commitments to.

00:55:11

Now they may go to you because they know that you're going to say yes to things. You become the

00:55:15

easy button in essence. But in the long run, what they respect more is when you tell them, no,

00:55:21

I can't do it because of this. But then this is kind of thinking, you know, next next habit,

00:55:26

the win-win thing. Let me let me introduce you to a person who could help you with this. Or let

00:55:31

me set you up in a position where I can create more time in my schedule for the things that I

00:55:36

need to do. But you are also your needs are being taken care of.

00:55:39

Yes, to all the things.

00:55:42

So I think a lot of this can be summed up with take care of your stuff,

00:55:48

your quadrant to the important, not urgent. Take care of those priorities first,

00:55:55

especially when they apply to your own thing. And you know, this is something that the productivity

00:56:01

space has talked about for a long time, but actually putting it into place and running with it is not

00:56:08

simple. Because it means you have to say no to some things and it means you have to be okay with

00:56:14

delaying something like email in the morning. So yes, it's not simple to actually put in place,

00:56:22

but we'll say this is how you should do it. But good luck.

00:56:27

Yeah, well, it's obviously all of this stuff is easier said than done. And even at the end of the

00:56:32

book, he talks about how like, I'm telling you all of this and I know all of this, but I still

00:56:36

struggle with all of this. Right. I was very grateful that he said that.

00:56:40

So what's the next one is think win-win. So this is where we step out of working with yourself and

00:56:52

working with and stepping into working with others. So those first three be proactive, begin with

00:56:57

the end in mind, put first things first. If you notice those three play into your own way of

00:57:04

doing things, it's winning with yourself. Yeah, he calls them private victory.

00:57:08

Yes. So once you get past those, then you can step into habits four, five, and six, which start

00:57:15

off with think win-win. And although this is something that I think is very helpful, this is one

00:57:22

mic that I feel like I've done for a long time. And that I've been doing quite a bit because I do

00:57:28

this with clients a lot. There's some things I want to do. There are things they want to do.

00:57:32

And I'm going to continue a conversation until we're both happy with it. Like that's kind of how I

00:57:37

do things. Not always, but that's what I shoot for. And I think that's what he's getting at with

00:57:42

the win-win is I'm we both need to be happy here in our entirety, not because I also noticed

00:57:50

some of his stories. It was easy to see how people thought they were doing a win-win conversation,

00:57:55

but they ended up having a win-lose or a lose-win situation without even realizing it.

00:58:00

That would be frustrating. Yeah, I think that this was probably the shortest chapter in the book.

00:58:05

And I think it really is just setting the stage for the next habit. So we can maybe go through this

00:58:10

one fairly quickly. But the one thing that kind of jumped out to me in this section was on page 178,

00:58:15

he says, "You think effectiveness with people and efficiency with things." And I know that I've

00:58:20

been guilty of applying efficiency to my relationships and the projects, group projects that I've been

00:58:26

involved with, where it's just like, "How do we get this done?" That's not necessarily the right goal.

00:58:31

The right goal should be, "How do we accomplish this goal so that everybody feels good about it?"

00:58:37

And this is a really simple concept, I guess, that he presents fundamentally anyways. It's a

00:58:44

simple concept to understand. It's not maybe simple to implement. But the first part of

00:58:50

here, I have it number four. He's really talking about the mindset shift where you have to think,

00:58:54

"Not how do I get what I want at the expense of what other people need, but how do we approach

00:59:00

every single situation as this is a win for both people?" And I think that he talks about the win-lose

00:59:06

and the lose-win approach. I think that's probably a default for a lot of people, where it's not

00:59:13

necessarily, "You have to lose in order for me to win or vice versa." We can both win in a particular

00:59:22

situation. He says that that obviously is not 100% of the case. But we have to understand that

00:59:28

there is a difference between a scarcity mindset and an abundance mindset, which he kind of talks

00:59:32

about a little bit later. With the abundance mindset is essentially, and this is Grant Cardone

00:59:37

again, there's no shortage of success. There's no shortage of wins that are available. So that

00:59:43

means that you don't have to lose in order for me to get what I want or what I need.

00:59:48

That's a big deal. I feel like a lot of people get caught up in that, because it's not necessarily,

00:59:54

if I win, it's taking from you. It just means that you have a different way of thinking about

01:00:00

this than I do. I think that's a big problem with people. I know I see it in business a lot.

01:00:05

Just because we have competition doesn't mean that me winning means you losing. I mean, you can.

01:00:12

But it doesn't have to mean that. It just is a difference of you need to differentiate a little

01:00:17

bit, help customers see the difference between your products. Going after people doesn't necessarily

01:00:23

have to be, if they come to me, they don't go to you. It doesn't have to be that way.

01:00:27

Yep, totally agree. I think that business is actually a great place to view this, because there

01:00:34

are typically two different kinds of business people. They're the kind of people who are like,

01:00:38

"Oh, we need to destroy all of our competitors, because we can never be successful until we're

01:00:42

the only option." Then there are the people that are like, "Hey, yeah, that person over there,

01:00:45

they're doing something awesome. That's cool. Hey, our audience, go look at their stuff,

01:00:49

because that's really cool." Then in my experience, that reciprocity, that second approach is actually

01:00:56

more beneficial, plus it's a lot less stressful, because you don't have to try. I know kidding.

01:01:00

You know, cloak and dagger, figure out what all your competitors are doing and sabotage it in the

01:01:04

middle of the night. I just don't like to work that way.

01:01:09

It's hard and it's pathetic, honestly, because you end up focusing on other people more than you

01:01:17

do your own business. It can cause such a distraction from focusing on what you want your business to

01:01:25

do whenever you're focused on everyone else's and trying to beat them. Yeah, it's not good.

01:01:31

Right. That actually leads into the big takeaway, this whole second part of this book for me,

01:01:38

is this topic of emotional bank accounts. This does apply to habit number four, I think,

01:01:43

when we win, but it also applies very much to habit number five, which is seek first to understand

01:01:47

then to be understood. The whole idea behind these emotional bank accounts is that we are

01:01:53

constantly either making deposits or withdrawals in our relationships with people.

01:02:01

And he gives six different types of deposits that you can make. I've heard that concept again,

01:02:11

you know, of the deposits and withdrawals. Probably heard it from somebody who was quoting Steven

01:02:17

Covey, but I never really understood what specifically this looked like. He has these six major deposits

01:02:23

and I really think that this is going to help me identify more solidly in my own life. I can

01:02:29

recognizing the opportunities that exist. And also when they happen like, yes, this is making a deposit

01:02:33

or no, that was wrong because I was making a withdrawal, whatever. But the six major deposits,

01:02:38

he says, number one, understand the individual. Number two, attend to the little things. Number

01:02:43

three, keeping your commitments. Number four, clarifying expectations. Number five, showing personal

01:02:49

integrity and number six, apologizing when you make a withdrawal. Number four, in particular,

01:02:55

like this one, I know for me personally, I can recognize that when people clarify the expectations

01:03:02

because I took the Colby test and I'm definitely a high fact finder. So this is a point of stress

01:03:08

for me in a lot of different organizations and a lot of different working relationships.

01:03:13

I don't have details. I'm stressed out. I will sit up at night thinking about what am I supposed

01:03:19

to do here? Whereas if you took an extra 30 seconds and just told me, like, I can actually ramp down,

01:03:24

my mind can relax and I don't feel that constant stress. And that sounds pretty sensational,

01:03:30

but it's true. And the other fact finders know exactly what I'm talking about.

01:03:36

All the quick starts are like, you guys are crazy. You just need to relax, but it's not the way we're

01:03:41

wired. Yeah, I don't know that I'm real great at this, but I have started doing this honestly with

01:03:51

our kids because with kids, it seems like there are a lot of things that you just learn the sounds

01:03:59

of things in your house without realizing it. I can tell you when the door to our trash can,

01:04:04

like the covered door to our trash can, I know when that door has been opened as opposed to any

01:04:08

other cabinet door in our kitchen, I know that sound and I want to know what are you throwing away

01:04:15

because a lot of times it's something that we actually need and should not be thrown away.

01:04:21

But what I've learned is because I have some of those reactions built in, I tend to react very

01:04:28

quickly or some of those instincts built in, I react very quickly because I don't want something

01:04:33

bad to happen. But there are times when they are doing something very positive and I'm reacting

01:04:40

negatively based on preconceived notions of what's happening. So taking this habit five,

01:04:47

seek first to understand, then to be understood, if I take that and apply it to my children,

01:04:52

I started asking questions and wanting to make sure that I can affirm what they know to be going on

01:04:59

and then start to react to it. But holy cow, that is not simple with children.

01:05:04

No, definitely not. I feel like I'm trying to get information out of you, but you know that you

01:05:12

don't want to share it. I empathize with your struggle with the opening of the garbage can.

01:05:20

More than once, kids have gotten to clean their plates and put the trash in the sink and the dish

01:05:27

in the trash. So yeah, you feel like, oh, I just got to go check, make sure we're not like throwing

01:05:34

away something that isn't supposed to be thrown away. I am convinced that I lost a Bluetooth headset

01:05:40

that way. I had a Bluetooth headset, and this is when I worked corporate, that I

01:05:46

was certain I had it in the car, because that's where I kept it. I would take phone calls in the car.

01:05:53

I now know that was a terrible thing to do, but it's what I did. And there was once that

01:05:58

I had the car at the mechanic shop and I was pretty certain that a mechanic stole it

01:06:04

because I think it was sitting in the center console, but I couldn't prove that. And then later on,

01:06:09

I got to thinking, wait, I think I had that on the kitchen table, but we'd already taken the trash

01:06:14

out and the trash truck had already come. And this was at the same point in time when our oldest

01:06:19

Emma was learning to throw things away. And we realized at that point that we had to keep an eye

01:06:25

on her. So I think my Bluetooth headset ended up in the trash can sometime.

01:06:30

Yeah, your Bluetooth is in a landfill somewhere.

01:06:33

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm certain. I'm just glad I didn't go through this whole thing of

01:06:39

getting onto the mechanic shop. Yeah, no kidding. So going back to these different deposits,

01:06:48

the clarifying, the expectations, and it's easy to look at these and say, well, I wish people would

01:06:53

do this. And that's again, the part where I was challenged with this because that is the natural

01:07:00

way to look at things, I think, is to say, like, well, this situation right here isn't ideal,

01:07:06

at least in my mind, you know, how do we fix it? And it's easy to project, well, this person should

01:07:10

do this to fix it. But the more complicated approach and the better approach and the

01:07:17

Stephen Covey approach is to say, well, what can I do to fix this? And so this emotional bank

01:07:23

account analogy and these different things that I can do to make these deposits, I think this is

01:07:29

where he talks about the 80/20 principle, the Pareto principle, I think that was actually from

01:07:34

I put first things first, but in terms of actually affecting change, that's the 80/20,

01:07:40

is what are the things that I can do to add to the emotional bank accounts of other people?

01:07:46

And this is where he used a lot of stories about like conversations that you have with your kids,

01:07:52

specifically teenagers. And he had the one scenario, which he went through a couple different times

01:07:57

and projected like different angles on it, where the dad is trying to talk to his son about the

01:08:03

value of school and his son just wants to drop out and go become a mechanic because he has a friend

01:08:09

who's doing that right now. And he's seeing the money that he's making right now. And he thinks

01:08:14

that that's a great career move where his dad is saying that, no, you should go to college,

01:08:19

you should get a degree, you should have a professional occupation, you know, whatever that looks like,

01:08:24

not making value judgments about any of those things, by the way. But essentially,

01:08:31

the kid has a different view than the dad and the way that the dad approaches the situation is

01:08:35

just like, well, I'm older than you, I have all this experience, trust me, I know best.

01:08:38

And he's explaining how that particular situation is both making withdrawals, but also

01:08:45

the kind of the insight I got was that by the time this kid is 16 and thinking that high school

01:08:52

is a complete waste of time, that he's already made a bunch of withdrawals. And there haven't been a

01:08:59

whole whole lot of deposits made. So when the dad actually has an important situation like that,

01:09:05

where he wants to speak and guide his son's life, he can't do it. And so maybe that's just the ages

01:09:12

of my kids where I'm recognizing that like, oh, they're going to be teenagers pretty soon. And I

01:09:16

want to be able to have a balance in their lives to the point where they will actually listen to

01:09:24

what I have to say. That means that right now I've got to be intentional. And I have to continue

01:09:28

to be intentional about making deposits instead of withdrawals, instead of just telling them that

01:09:33

this is the way that things are. This is how we fix this specific situation. He even uses the

01:09:39

example. I think this might have been actually at the beginning of the book, but do you remember

01:09:44

the story he told about his daughter's like three year old birthday party?

01:09:47

Yes. Vaguely.

01:09:50

Essentially, he's trying to get his daughter to share her toys with her friends.

01:09:54

Oh, right.

01:09:55

Do you want to share? She's like, no. And he's like, well, if you do this, you know,

01:09:58

your friends will, whatever. And then she's, no, I don't want to. And then she's like, well,

01:10:01

you should do it. No, I don't want to. You're going to do it. No, I don't want to. And then finally,

01:10:05

he just like takes the toy and gives it to the kids. And so now his daughter's upset. And that

01:10:11

is a withdrawal in the eyes of his daughter. But he did that. He justifies it in the story. And he

01:10:16

says that he admits that it was wrong to do it that way. But he said that he felt the pressure

01:10:21

from the other parents who were making this judgment on the way that his daughter was acting.

01:10:25

And I think that me personally, like I can totally fall into that trap if I'm not careful.

01:10:30

So that's one of my action items is to recognize problems, crisis is like that, crises, whatever,

01:10:39

as opportunities to invest in my kids, not to just put a band-aid solution on it,

01:10:47

get the situation smoothed over. But the bigger issue is that I've made a withdrawal. And now

01:10:52

my kids don't trust me as much or whatever.

01:10:55

So all of that leads into habit six, synergize. And I have to admit this is probably one that I

01:11:01

struggled with the most in all of this because I felt like it was very philosophical and hard

01:11:07

to get your hands on. Ultimately, what it's getting at is the process of asking questions and being

01:11:15

open with each other in relationships and being willing to come up with better ideas and build

01:11:24

off of each other, essentially one plus one equaling three instead of just adding our two things together

01:11:30

and building off of each other and creating an environment where everybody's happy with the

01:11:35

situation. Everybody has the win-win scenario, but you're able to work together and synergize to

01:11:41

come up with a better solution to whatever it is that you're trying to solve or whatever situation

01:11:46

you're trying to overcome. And if that sounds a bit vague, it's because I felt like the book was

01:11:52

very vague on this. He tried to show some scenarios, but I kept wanting to like, how do I know if I'm

01:11:59

doing this or not? That simple question I felt like I had a hard time answering. Did you struggle

01:12:04

with this one or is this just me being difficult?

01:12:08

No, he wasn't super clear, but the way I view synergy based off of reading the book is that

01:12:16

synergy is where we're able to because we have taken care of our own stuff and we've thought

01:12:24

win-win and we've sought first to understand then to be understood. Once all of that happens,

01:12:29

now we have the ability as an organization, as a team, to create something that is where the

01:12:38

whole is greater than the sum of the parts. That was my big takeaway with this section was that

01:12:43

until you really seek first to understand then to be understood, because a lot of people just

01:12:47

view like, well, I'm going to do my part and I'm going to communicate my part and people just have

01:12:51

to understand my part and how it fits into everything else. And he's saying in habit five,

01:12:56

no, first you need to understand how other people are feeling. And that's like going back to the

01:13:01

kid's scenario and the examples that he shared, the value, the deposits were made when instead of

01:13:09

saying like, well, this is what you should do, it was like, okay, so you're saying that you feel

01:13:12

this way or you view school as a complete waste because of this. Once you do that, then

01:13:18

everything else gets a lot easier. And then when you are working together as a team, that's where

01:13:24

you can really kind of click in and everything just works. Everything is easy in a sense. He

01:13:33

uses the example of that one class where people were really emphasizing the seek first to understand

01:13:38

then to be understood. And then at one point, it just kind of clicked. And all of a sudden,

01:13:42

they had this situation where as a professor, he was throwing the syllabus out the window because

01:13:46

he's like, we have a really unique situation here where everybody is in alignment. There is synergy

01:13:51

here and we can do a whole lot more than we would typically do in a classroom setting.

01:13:55

And I thought that story was very helpful, but he kept talking about how they threw the

01:14:04

syllabus out the window and they were able to come up with better ways of doing the class.

01:14:08

And overall, they had a better experience, but he never told you what that was or how they did it.

01:14:12

That was what I struggled with is there were a lot of these stories where something happened,

01:14:19

someone was vulnerable and opened up, and then they started going through this ideation process.

01:14:25

And I guess this is something where you just kind of have to feel it and go with it,

01:14:31

but he didn't ever nail it down as to what that was that they did once they sensed this.

01:14:35

And that's what I struggled with because I feel like there are situations where I sensed that

01:14:41

something like this could happen, but nothing really comes of it because I'm not always sure

01:14:46

what to do with it. That's what I struggle with. I am going to define synergy as group flow.

01:14:52

So we've talked a lot about Mihaly, Chik-Sit Mihaly, and the whole concept of flow, deep work,

01:14:58

where you feel like you're in the zone and you're just, you're writing for 20 minutes,

01:15:02

all of a sudden you've got a thousand words done and you don't have to make any changes because

01:15:05

it was all awesome. As a writer, I've been there and I covet those times, but they don't always

01:15:11

happen. And if I were to tell you, "Man, I sat down with my iPad today and the words were just

01:15:16

flowing and I was able to get so much writing done," if you're a writer, you understand. If you're not

01:15:21

a writer, you're like, "I have no idea what you're talking about, thousand words. Is that exactly

01:15:25

good? Is that bad?" Yeah, so I kind of think that that's the way it is with the section of the

01:15:29

book. Like if he were to give you a bunch of examples of synergy, the people who were in those

01:15:33

situations would be like, "Yeah, that's totally how it goes. This is totally how it happens." And

01:15:38

you're right. Like the results are 100 times better than anything you can imagine, but for everybody

01:15:42

else they're just like, "Okay." Like the teaching example, we're not teachers, so we're like,

01:15:47

"That's true." Okay. But I think that this is something that you have to discover for yourself,

01:15:54

but once you do it, it's addictive, I guess, would be the right term, where this is the kind of thing

01:16:02

where normal results are now no longer adequate. You strive for this thing all the time.

01:16:10

And I think this is something that I think I understand it, and I think I've been through this

01:16:15

situation before. I just wanted to understand it from his viewpoint, and I get what you're saying.

01:16:24

I think that makes it, it helps me make a lot more sense of it because it doesn't necessarily

01:16:30

mean that there's a set way to do it because I understand that there's not. I just kind of wanted

01:16:35

him to give me that. Maybe I wanted him to give me something that's not possible to give me.

01:16:41

Well, on page 280 now, he does kind of talk about synergy as valuing differences. And I think

01:16:45

that is the hard part for a lot of people naturally. I know it's hard for me naturally,

01:16:51

is to completely trust that the person who is different than me is bringing value, and they're

01:16:56

doing it consistently, and I can just trust them to do it, and I can focus on my thing. And that's

01:17:00

why I use the term "group flow." When you've got somebody who's doing one part and they're doing it,

01:17:05

awesome. They're hitting it out of the park, and you know that you don't even have to think about

01:17:08

that, and you could just focus on your part to this thing. And you know that because you have real

01:17:13

synergy, because everybody's thinking when, when, because you've sought first to understand

01:17:18

them to be understood, that when you get done and you put all this stuff together,

01:17:22

like it's just going to be incredible, I think that those situations, at least looking back at my

01:17:29

past, those are kind of few and far between. They're not as frequent as I would like them to be.

01:17:34

And so that's the value of talking about it in this format that he's laid out here. You know,

01:17:40

where you are working up habits one through six, and then habit number seven, we'll talk about a

01:17:44

little bit. That's kind of how you keep everything going. This is like the top level in terms of

01:17:48

the effectiveness hierarchy, where this is where you can really make a lot of progress when you

01:17:55

are working with other people and you're working in alignment. It's like the end game. This is what

01:18:01

we're shooting for. This is why you do all these other things. Exactly. So I really appreciated

01:18:06

that because there, there isn't a thing that you want to work towards. So I liked it. I enjoyed the

01:18:13

chapter. I like that it's a bit, a bit mythical somewhat, but I also understand that in order to

01:18:24

describe it in detail would probably require sacrificing some of the content of it. So I'm

01:18:30

not going to dwell on that. The part that I found very helpful is when we step into habit seven

01:18:35

with sharp in the saw, because this is something that I think, at least especially that term, has

01:18:40

been floating around the productivity space for a very long time. And it's obviously probably 25

01:18:46

years at this point, and something that I find very helpful if I take the time to do it. So

01:18:52

sharpen the saw, take care of yourself. Take breaks, rebuild yourself, take care of the goose so that

01:19:00

the goose can continue to produce golden eggs. That's what you're shooting for. And what are the

01:19:05

four? I don't have it in front of you. Do you know what the four areas are of that?

01:19:09

Yeah, I remember him talking about those. I did not actually write those down, but the whole

01:19:15

analogy of sharpen the saw, he kind of illustrates that with a story at the beginning where this

01:19:19

guy's chopping down a tree, and he's been chopping it down for five hours. And somebody comes up to

01:19:25

him and is like, hey, you should take a break and you should sharpen your saw. And he's like,

01:19:28

I can't stop and take a break. I've got too much sawing to do. Whereas anybody who has been in

01:19:35

that situation knows that if you take the time to sharpen the saw, then it's going to make everything

01:19:41

exponentially easier. I believe the areas he mentioned, there was kind of like spiritual, physical,

01:19:47

mental, and emotional. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So in terms of sharpening the saw, I think that this is

01:19:57

where the morning routine or the morning ritual really helps. And he even talked about that,

01:20:05

but he didn't call it that. He called it the daily private victory, I think,

01:20:08

which, and he talked about doing it at the beginning of the day, which to me, I read that

01:20:13

and I'm like, Oh, morning ritual makes total sense. And again, like you have to understand how he's

01:20:20

stacking these things together where habit number seven makes all the other habits work. So what

01:20:24

he's saying is that I don't think this is a stretch to say this, that the morning ritual is the key

01:20:30

to being able to achieve any of the other habits. And that's when you when you put it in terms like

01:20:38

that, like adds a lot more gravity or makes it more serious, your decision to either follow

01:20:45

through with your morning routine or to skip it. Yeah, yeah. And I think this is like, there's a

01:20:51

whole website, my morning routine that I love, I keep up with that thing a lot. But it's people

01:20:57

writing about what they do in the morning, and what is their process and what does it do for them.

01:21:01

And I love that because I'm big believer in morning rituals, and I have fine tuned mine and continue

01:21:09

to even after reading this, I've been slowly making changes and tweaks to it. But this is something

01:21:15

that I find a lot of value in even so much that I plan and set up my morning the night before in a

01:21:21

lot of detail, even down to setting my fork on the table. Like it's pretty intense. But I find that

01:21:28

my morning is a time when the house is quiet, the kids are not running around screaming,

01:21:33

and it's a chance for me to do some of my most important work, which is why I've been doing my

01:21:38

projects, my project stuff in the morning, because I know it all get it done, and I know I can focus

01:21:43

on it. And that's something that really gets me excited and makes it easier for me to do my

01:21:47

client work throughout the rest of the day. I love my morning. I do too. And obviously,

01:21:53

as an efficiency, we do as well. We've got a whole product on the concept of rituals. But it is very

01:22:00

easy if you don't maintain the vision and the why for the morning ritual to say, "Oh, I just need

01:22:07

another 20 minutes of sleep," and skip it. I'll tell myself, I've been there. I was there this morning,

01:22:14

honestly, where it was hard to get out of bed, and I had to kind of abbreviate my morning routine,

01:22:21

or my morning ritual. And that's ultimately, according to Stephen Covey, and I agree with

01:22:27

them on an intellectual level. That's not okay. If you really want to get to the place where

01:22:32

you say you want to get to, starting with the habit number two, beginning with the end in mind,

01:22:36

if you really want the results that you've articulated there, then this is how you do it,

01:22:41

because what the daily private victory the morning ritual does is it allows you to take the first

01:22:48

three habits and do them quickly in succession and knock them out at the very beginning of your day.

01:22:55

So then you've got those boxes checked, essentially, and now you can focus on the other people's stuff,

01:23:02

like you mentioned, the client stuff. You're in a much better position to deal with those situations

01:23:07

correctly, because you're not having to think in the back of your mind, "Oh, I have to do this

01:23:11

yet today." And I think that there's a lot of value in that. And again, I just need to really hammer

01:23:19

home how important this is, and then to make sure that I prioritize this thing, the morning routine,

01:23:27

the morning ritual. And I've done pretty good at this. It's gotten a lot better over the last couple

01:23:31

of years. But after reading this whole habit number seven, sharpened the saw, really reiterated the

01:23:38

need and the importance of this for me. And it really illustrated or brought to light the areas

01:23:44

or the times when I haven't followed through with it. Yeah. So you want to jump into action items?

01:23:50

Yeah, let's do it. Although I want to add one other thing regarding the morning ritual,

01:23:55

because this totally applies to me. I know what to do. Sometimes I don't do it.

01:23:59

Page 308, he says that the person who doesn't read is no better off than the person who can't read.

01:24:05

So if you know what to do, that's not good enough. You're just as bad off as the person who doesn't

01:24:11

know what to do as long as you don't do it. What was the sad? Was he? Yes, it was right before that

01:24:22

because he talks about how much to read, because he talks about the value of taking in good literature.

01:24:28

And he's like, "You can get into the best minds that are now or that have ever been in the world.

01:24:32

I highly recommend starting with a goal of a book a month, then a book every two weeks,

01:24:36

then a book a week." It's like, "Oh, that's what Mike can I do."

01:24:40

Yeah, I saw that too. And that obviously makes me feel good and validates what we do with

01:24:49

Bookworm. But I want to also add that it's not just the books. I would say that it's also

01:24:54

audio. It could also be podcasts. Hopefully, if I listen to this, you're getting a lot of value

01:24:59

from this conversation. I think so. But also, I know that some of the biggest revelations that

01:25:05

I've got have been from podcasts. And podcasts are interesting because generally, they're more

01:25:10

entertaining. But if you approach it the correct way, and it's not just news and sports and whatever,

01:25:18

but you listen to productivity based stuff like this, I think that is a great way to get this kind

01:25:24

of information in a passive format. Because you don't know when somebody's going to say that one

01:25:31

thing that you're like, "Oh my gosh, yeah, that makes total sense and that changes your life.

01:25:35

I know I've experienced that in different podcasts that I've listened to." And it doesn't happen

01:25:39

every time, obviously, but that's okay. Every book that we read, I don't personally love.

01:25:43

I don't personally have like 10 different takeaways in every book that we read. This one I've

01:25:47

got quite a few. But that's okay. It doesn't mean that you don't just stop doing it because

01:25:54

you tried it once and it didn't work. Yep. So for action items, the first one I have,

01:26:00

and I've talked about this one a couple times, my projects come first. Right now, that means

01:26:05

Discourse League, which I think I've brought up a couple times here, but it's a plug-in for Discourse.

01:26:11

I'm not going to go into what that actually is. But that's my personal big project that I need to do

01:26:16

or that I find is very important, but there's no urgency behind it at all. So it's my quadrant to

01:26:24

thing that I need to do. So I have dedicated an hour every morning to work on that

01:26:31

and having that come first. And I started doing that mid last week and that has already led to

01:26:42

some pretty big progress on that. So that's awesome. I love doing that. So that's something I'm

01:26:48

putting in place and I'm hoping to continue that when we record next. I'll check in on it, but that

01:26:54

will be I shouldn't have to do after that. The next one I've got here is Defer Everything Outside

01:27:00

This Week. And it also plays into my other one, Weekly Planning. He brings up the process of planning

01:27:08

by the week instead of planning by the day. And the idea is that it brings you up a bit that you're

01:27:15

not caught up in the minutia of the urgent tasks. And it's a way to elevate you up to your goals,

01:27:22

as opposed to just the day to day stuff. And I want to try that. I put together a plan for this

01:27:29

week and I've been operating on this week, Mike. So it's so far it's going pretty good. When I say

01:27:34

Defer Everything Outside This Week, that's kind of an omnifocus specific way of saying that.

01:27:39

And essentially what that means is from a technical standpoint is that I took all of my projects that

01:27:45

are not something I'm going to work on this week and defer them to Sunday so that way they don't

01:27:50

show up until next week. And then I'll review them all then during my weekly review, because I'm a

01:27:55

good GTDD or push everything off that I'm not going to work on next week and just continue that

01:28:00

cycle. That's my plan. We'll see how it works. Nice. Yeah, to be continued. So my action items,

01:28:07

this is actually the first time I think the majority of my action items are not like big

01:28:13

philosophical life-changing. Yeah, you're getting all practical now.

01:28:17

Well, thank you, Stephen Covey. I mean, it gave us the action items. So number one,

01:28:22

I mentioned I want to write my own eulogy. Again, this is something that I've heard and I've understood

01:28:29

conceptually for a long time. I've never actually taken the time to do it. And I think that with a

01:28:35

lot of the stuff that I got from this book, it was things that I had heard previously that I

01:28:39

understand now a lot more and a lot better simply because I've applied myself a little bit more in

01:28:46

unearthing these concepts. And this is something that he said, write this down. So I'm going to do

01:28:50

that. Number two, I want to write down my current roles. That's a big section of the book. He talks

01:28:54

about your roles when he's talking about finding your center and your balance. And I think that

01:29:00

I've written down my responsibilities, but I need to write down my current roles to make sure that I

01:29:05

am consistently making deposits in those current roles. But the specific takeaway here is write down

01:29:11

my current roles. And the third one, this is the pie in the sky one that is recognize problems as

01:29:17

opportunities to invest specifically in the lives of my children. I don't know exactly what that's

01:29:22

going to look like. If I could anticipate those problems, they wouldn't be problems. But that's

01:29:28

something that I recognize from reading the book that there's a lot of value in those situations

01:29:34

if I view them correctly. So I am going to try and do that.

01:29:37

Cool, D.L. How about author's style? What do you think of his writing style?

01:29:41

His style is awesome. I wish he wrote like 50 more books that I would read them all.

01:29:48

Reminding me very much a couple weeks ago, when I was driving down to Chicago for the

01:29:56

Ancha Leadership One Day Summit, I listened to an audiobook by Jim Rohn. Have you ever listened to

01:30:03

Jim Rohn? I have not listened to him, but I know of him.

01:30:06

Okay. Yeah. Anybody in the productivity space has heard the name Jim Rohn because most of the

01:30:12

big thought leaders in the productivity space credit him as their productivity father essentially.

01:30:18

So I was, what was I doing? I was listening or reading a book or listening to a podcast. I forget

01:30:26

somebody mentioned, you got to get this book, The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn.

01:30:31

So I looked it up. It's not actually a book. It's an audio that he mentions cassettes,

01:30:36

but they're CDs that you can get off of Amazon. So there's two CDs. I listened to that on the way

01:30:40

down to Ancha Leadership, and it blew my mind. This guy is just so sharp. He's got story after

01:30:47

story. Personal example, you can tell that he's living this stuff out. That is the exact way I

01:30:52

felt reading this book, which surprised me. I mean, I know that Stephen Covey is like the

01:30:57

godfather in terms of the productivity space, but when you are listening to somebody, you hear their

01:31:02

voice inflections, you hear like there's a lot more communicated than just the words that they're

01:31:07

saying. And so it wasn't surprising to me that I got a lot out of the Jim Rohn CDs that I listened

01:31:13

to on the way to Ancha Leadership. It did surprise me that I was blown away at the same level when

01:31:19

I read this book. And I think we've talked a little bit about how he just keeps moving. He's got all

01:31:25

these stories, everything that he's sharing, a solid information. There's tons of personal

01:31:29

stories, there's tons of stories of famous people, there's tons of illustrations and diagrams to

01:31:34

really solidify the concepts that he's teaching. And in addition to just giving you the concepts,

01:31:37

he's explaining this is how this works. Like he literally thinks of everything. He dots every

01:31:42

eye, he crosses every tee. I totally get why this book has sold 25 million copies. And I am ashamed

01:31:50

to say that it took me 34 years of my life to actually read this. But this was one of my favorite

01:31:57

books of all time. And I cannot recommend it enough. Everybody who is familiar with the seven

01:32:04

habits and it hasn't actually taken the time to dig into it, do it, you will not be disappointed.

01:32:09

This is an easy five stars for me. Nice. I agree with you on his writing style. It's

01:32:18

a little, I shouldn't say I got dry at some point, but whenever things feel dry to me, it has more

01:32:24

to do with because I've understood that concept before. I'm one that I tend to look for new things.

01:32:32

And if it's something that I feel like I already know, I tend to want to discount it or skip by it.

01:32:39

Which is honestly, it's good for me whenever I'm reading a book that's something I already know

01:32:45

because it forces me to do the whole focus thing and work on my focus muscle.

01:32:49

So that's something I really appreciate. And there was some of that here. But the part that was

01:32:55

interesting to me is that with this, it was something where I may know the concept. I know

01:33:02

the quadrants, the important urgent thing. But the way he explained it was in a lot more detail

01:33:08

and in a way that showed me how to understand it in a better way and in a new light. And I really

01:33:15

appreciated that. It was a way of me taking some of the productivity stuff that I've studied and

01:33:20

learned over the last few years and put it into words that really struck a chord.

01:33:26

So I really appreciated that. And he has a way of pulling those things out.

01:33:31

There were a couple points that I felt like with the synergize thing that I wanted a little bit

01:33:38

more. One thing that really, really irked me was that whenever he would give examples and tell

01:33:44

stories, he would never tell you what the company was or who the people were.

01:33:47

Never. It was always just this third party mystical company I worked with, a big real estate agency.

01:33:54

Great. Who was it? What were they doing? I don't give me some more context here. When was this?

01:33:59

I tend to want some of that background. I understand it's not necessary,

01:34:04

but I really wanted it. And I felt like it could have added just a little bit more.

01:34:08

Although I feel like this is something that is vital and I'm again sad that I haven't

01:34:13

with you. I haven't read it yet and feel ashamed for saying that. So it's fun that we get to do

01:34:19

this together, Mike. We get to do this whole really popular book thing together, even though it took

01:34:25

us forever to do it. So I will say that this is something I will highly, highly recommend.

01:34:30

There are a few points I feel like could have been just a little bit better, but that's just me

01:34:33

being nitpicky. So I'm going to put it at 4.5. Oh, Josh was right. I know he was right. I'm like,

01:34:40

oh, great. Here we go. So I'm going to hear about this one. But yes, I will put it at the 4.5

01:34:47

because yes, that's where I land. That's all right. Other than you're never going to hear the

01:34:54

end of it. I know I won't. I was like, oh, great. I was trying to figure out, okay, can I find a

01:34:59

couple more things that I don't like about it? Nope. But I don't feel like it's worthy of a

01:35:03

5. Oh, great. Here we go. That's me. It's funny. All right. So upcoming books next.

01:35:10

Well, yes. Yes. So the next one up. And this is a story. This is a very quick read. You'll

01:35:15

read it in 30 minutes or less. The Go Gitter by Peter Kine. And this is, well, the tagline on it

01:35:24

is a story that tells you how to be one with the title being the Go Gitter. So this is going to be

01:35:30

a motivational thing. So this will be a fun one. So if you're reading along with us or you want to

01:35:36

read along with us, this is a good one to jump in on because it's going to be a quick read and

01:35:41

very easy to get into. Nice. What we got after that is one of my favorite books of all time that I

01:35:50

couldn't believe we hadn't covered yet. So we need to do this one. Okay. That is the five

01:35:55

dysfunctions of a team by Patrick Lindsay Elie. So obviously I'm giving away. I've read this book.

01:35:59

I like it a lot. But it's worth talking about. There's a ton in here. And it's a really easy read

01:36:05

because the first part of it is kind of a leadership parable or fable. He calls it. And in the second

01:36:10

half of it, he's kind of dissecting the key concepts from there. So it kind of reads like a

01:36:16

story. And then he dives into the concepts and how to actually apply them. Very, very good book.

01:36:22

And I really like Patrick Lindsay O'Neill a lot. So that's coming up next.

01:36:25

I've read a couple of his books. I'm a big fan of him. I have not read this one. So it'll be

01:36:29

good. That'll be a fun one. For gap books, the one I picked up this morning that I'm reading

01:36:37

before the Go Gitter, Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. And I've had this one

01:36:44

recommended to me by a couple folks, namely Josh over on theoretical has been telling me to read

01:36:49

it. But it's the concept of taking like take product design, the creative process of designing

01:36:56

a thing and taking the mindsets and the paradigms that come with that process and applying it to

01:37:02

your life and what it is that you decide to do with your life. So that's the concept of it.

01:37:07

And I'm through the introduction. So I can't give you a whole lot on it other than that.

01:37:11

So I think it'll be good. What are you doing?

01:37:15

I'm very intrigued by the title of your book, but my gap book is actually one that I'll call

01:37:21

them listener, Josh, recommended to me via Twitter. And that is, "Do you talk funny by David Neheel?"

01:37:28

So Josh had been listening to the bookworm and he mentioned, or he reached out to me on Twitter

01:37:32

and said, "Hey, I know you're doing some want to get better public speaking. You should check

01:37:37

out this book." And I bought it and it looks great. So thank you, Josh, for recommending that.

01:37:41

And it makes just to dive into this one. I really don't think there's a whole lot of application

01:37:46

here for bookworm, but for me personally, I think this is very timely. I need to get you two together.

01:37:51

Good grief.

01:37:52

Josh, you should come to Mac stack.

01:37:55

Hey, there you go.

01:37:58

I got a coupon code for you.

01:38:00

On that note, because we keep getting recommendations, if you have a recommendation,

01:38:06

and you would like us to go through a book, because we're starting to get through some,

01:38:10

or get into a handful of these recommendations that we've had from people,

01:38:14

if you have one, go to bookworm.fm/recommend. And from there, you can fill out that form and

01:38:19

it'll send us an email with what it is you want us to read. And if you want to see what other

01:38:24

people are recommending or see with the books that we've been through in the past, catch up a

01:38:27

little bit, see what we're planning to go through in the future, bookworm.fm/list.

01:38:32

And you can see all of the books that are in our queue have been completed, etc, etc.

01:38:38

And if you want to help other people find the show and you want to unseat that jerky

01:38:43

radio station, which is currently the number one result in iTunes when you search for bookworm,

01:38:48

please go to iTunes and leave us a review. We would really appreciate it. And if you want to join

01:38:53

in some conversation on some of the different episodes that we've published, you can head over

01:38:57

to ProductivityGill.com. Yeah, and I'm trying to get that to where it's posting like the,

01:39:03

it's turning those topics into comments on the bookworm.fm site, but I had a little bit of code

01:39:08

and open source stuff I got to do to get that to work. So anyway, I'm working on that. Lastly,

01:39:13

the one thing I'd like, you know, if you want a different way to support the show,

01:39:18

if you're buying books or buying something on Amazon, click one of the links to one of the books

01:39:21

in our show notes. That gives a little bit of a kickback. Those are affiliate links and we get a

01:39:26

bit of a shared revenue from Amazon in that process. So that's another way to support the

01:39:30

show. We don't talk about that one as much, but it is something that you can do to support us as

01:39:35

well. So if you're reading along with us, the Go Getter by Peter Kine is up next. There's a link

01:39:39

to that in the show notes and we'll jump into that one next time.