Bookworm Transcripts

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-Do you want a Yeti?

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-I am.

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This is my portable podcasting studio.

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-Okay.

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So that means you are mobile.

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Where are you?

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-I am in Door County, sister Bay, to be precise.

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-Okay, vacation?

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-Mm, kind of working vacation.

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-Okay.

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-My parents have a place in sister Bay,

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and I can work from anywhere.

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So we came up Sunday night,

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and we just been hanging out up here,

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and I've been working remote.

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Even funny anecdote about this,

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sister Bay, which is about 800 people,

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actually has better internet than I can buy

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in Nina, Wisconsin, where I live.

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So this is better internet than my house,

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even though Nina is probably,

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gosh, I don't know, 20 times the size?

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No, not 20 times.

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Yeah, 20 times the size.

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Wow.

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-And you have pretty good internet at home.

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I feel like--

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-Yes, it's okay.

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Usually when I record, I'm at the co-working space,

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which is in Appleton.

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It's a little bit bigger town,

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and that actually has a fiber connection.

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-Right, right.

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'Cause I remember you telling me

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that you had a pretty good data connection

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at your co-working space,

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but I guess I was comparing it to that.

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So your co-working space,

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in comparison to your house,

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is there a big difference in speed there?

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-Upload, yeah.

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I mean, the fastest I can get at home is five up,

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but at the co-working space, it's 50 down, 50 up.

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-Oh, wow.

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See, everybody looks at the download speeds,

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but--

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-Doesn't matter.

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- --it has to be a master's,

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and we do--

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like, we're uploading video files and stuff.

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They're big files, so upload speed is very important.

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-Definitely.

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-Right.

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I'm gonna--

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you're gonna have to cut this part out,

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but I'm gonna have to move my microphone up a little bit

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'cause I can't hunch over the entire episode.

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There we go.

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-Hmm, maybe I should leave this in.

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[laughs]

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I created a makeshift standing desk.

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-A makeshift standing desk.

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Now, see, right before we started,

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because I know that you record standing up, right?

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You like to stand up and talk.

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I always sit at my desk with--

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I have a Herman Miller Airon that I use for a desk chair.

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Super nice chair.

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Love them.

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Crazy expensive.

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Don't-- yeah.

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OK, we're not gonna go down that train.

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But I have debated trying to find a way to raise my microphone

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so that I can stand and podcast.

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I don't know if that would change the way

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that I have conversations on a mic or not.

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I know a lot of people seem to think it makes a big difference.

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I've never tried it, so I can't speak to that in any way.

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But you seem to like it.

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-I do.

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Now, maybe listeners to Bookworm

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might think a little bit differently,

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but I am much more animated when I'm standing up.

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[laughs]

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And that's something that I've had to learn and develop

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as I've done podcasting is--

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and it just comes from recording

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and then hearing the episodes after they go live.

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When I first started, it was very, very monotone,

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and honestly very boring to listen to,

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so I'm hoping that that is not the case anymore.

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[laughs]

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But one of the things that I do to kind of trick myself

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to being a little bit more animated is I don't normally do this,

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but when I podcast, I try to talk with my hands.

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So having a microphone on a desk, though,

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this could be tricky.

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I might accidentally whack the microphone a few times.

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Well, don't hit the mic because then I have to edit more.

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[laughs]

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So that would mean that if I stand up,

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well, you normally record--

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like you have a boom stand for your mic,

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so that way you're not whacking it.

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Okay, that makes sense.

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Okay.

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I may try this the next time we record or something.

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I don't know.

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I have to find a way to mount it

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because I'm currently mounting my boom stand.

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It's not on my desk,

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but it's attached to a shelf

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that's the same height as my desk,

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and I can't get it up high enough to stand for it.

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I tried.

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So I would need to do something,

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like mount something to the wall

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so that I can then mount the mic to the thing

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I mounted to the wall.

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It's not as simple as just raise it up.

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So I want to try this at some point.

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Yeah, I have an electric standing desk

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and it's awesome because you can program the heights,

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so I have one for sitting, one for standing,

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and I don't know why,

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but I absolutely love hitting the button here

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and go, "Mmm."

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(laughs)

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This is what you do in your breaks, right?

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You just raise your desk and lower it back and forth.

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I'm gonna take advantage of that harvest seven year warranty.

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(laughs)

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See if I can get this thing to wear out.

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That I can get a new one.

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Let's go through our follow up.

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We've got some fun things here.

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You put on Roger Bustle's poetry.

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I haven't looked at this.

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I'm gonna click the link now.

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Yeah, so we mentioned this in the last episode,

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and I dropped the ball and didn't get you the link.

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So I wanted to just throw that in here

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because Roger listened to the episode

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and was pretty thrilled that we gave him a shout out.

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So here's another one, Roger,

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and we're actually gonna include the link this time.

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(laughs)

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It's totally my fault because I didn't get it to you right away

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and then was kind of surprised

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when the episode came out a few days later.

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So good job, Joe, I'm turning that one around.

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(laughs)

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So for the listeners, I'm usually quite slow

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at getting episodes released.

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I think Mike's probably used to my one and a half week turnaround

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after we record,

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and that one I got out in like two days.

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So I will say that's my fault more than Mike's fault.

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(laughs)

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Well, I did honestly, I will admit that I forgot

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about the link.

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I probably would have remembered it at some point,

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maybe when I saw you at Macstock,

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and I think that's why you turned it around so quick.

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Right, 'cause I knew that we were gonna be seeing each other

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at Macstock and I wanted that one out before.

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We saw each other, that way we would potentially,

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'cause we potentially were going to record at Macstock

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but it didn't work out.

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We always plan to do that but it needs, yeah.

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So we get busy and yeah, it just doesn't work out,

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I don't think, but it's something that--

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Planning fallacy.

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Yeah, there's one of these,

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we're gonna jump into the book here quick.

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So there's a lot of reasons that we just don't get there,

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but we always intend to, but yeah.

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So anyway, I got this one out,

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the last one out in a couple days,

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and Mike didn't have a chance to send me this.

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So I'm now looking through Roger's poetry.

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I like this stuff, it's good.

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I know, that's really good.

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That's why I wanna include the link to it.

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It's not just somebody who's like,

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"Yeah, I'm gonna post something."

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Like, I'm really impressed by the quality of this poetry.

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I could not do this.

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I played around with poetry at one point.

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There is a reason I don't publish it anywhere.

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(laughs)

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I don't ever plan to do this.

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Go Roger, well done.

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So next one here, speaking of MaxTock,

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and I just threw this on here,

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so I'm kinda putting you on the spot.

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You are putting me on the spot,

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I realize this as I'm finishing up

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this conversation on Roger.

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Oh, Mike threw this in here, okay.

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Yeah, so we were at MaxTock

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and I spoke at MaxTock

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and I gave a deeper dive,

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both of them on the topic of email.

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And since we talked about email

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multiple times on Bookworm,

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I feel like we have to have at least one takeaway

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that you got from either of my talks at MaxTock.

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So here's the thing I got.

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There's, I will tell you,

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there's one big thing that's made a pretty big impact

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on my email habits,

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because I get a lot of email.

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We've talked about this before.

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I did some things,

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it cut back on my email,

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then I did some more client work

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and got more into that,

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which means my email started to get heavy again.

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So despite all of my work to make sure email

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doesn't bombard me,

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I'm still bombarded by email.

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So I have learned that I can't say that I like email,

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I really don't like going through email,

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I don't like the process of processing it

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to use the same word twice there.

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But I do know that there's a very specific pattern

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that you should go through when you're doing email.

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And whenever I listen to you,

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my talk about email flow and how all that should work,

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I have followed that for a long time.

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So it's great to have the confirmation

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that I'm doing the right thing

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from an Asian efficiency professional here.

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- Comformation bias.

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- There you go.

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So I really appreciated the confirmation piece there,

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'cause I feel better about myself,

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'cause that's the way our cognitive biases work.

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But in the process,

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one of the things that you mentioned offhand, I think,

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'cause you didn't really dive into it

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and much detail was the inverse sorting,

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so that you've got the oldest at the top.

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And it seems like a lot of people don't do this.

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I have wanted to do this for a long time,

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but I've used Gmail for a long time.

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And I talked about a few episodes ago now on WIMS@Work

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that I moved away from Gmail over to Apple Mail,

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which a lot of people really didn't like

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and sent me emails about,

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which is great and interesting at the same time,

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because, okay, so long story short,

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the only reason I made that shift was because of Touch Bar,

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which I know a lot of people don't care for, love it,

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so you guys can just, you send me the Haiti Mail

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if you want on that, I still like Touch Bar,

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you're not gonna convince me otherwise.

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But I realized in the process of using Apple Mail

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as compared to, as the in conjunction with Touch Bar

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that it works a lot like Gmail with the single keystrokes.

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You can set up the Touch Bar in order to enable that functionality.

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Well, I was considering a move to Mailmate per mic,

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and I downloaded Mailmate, I was trying it

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'cause it's the one that Mike likes to use,

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and I figured if Mike is using it, hmm,

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maybe I should consider this,

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but I didn't follow through with that, Mike,

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so that's not the one thing,

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but it did at least prompt me to explore Apple Mail a little bit,

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and I realized you can inverse sort in Apple Mail now.

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I did not know that until I started trying to figure out

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how I could do it, and it's built in.

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I just had to turn it on.

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Nice.

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So I did do that, and it means the old stuff showed up at the top,

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and I didn't realize that I was holding things in my inbox,

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so between those two, I'm getting better at email, Mike,

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so thank you for that.

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Sweet, one step at a time.

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So there you go, there's my one thing from MaxDoc

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from your talk, well done, sir.

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Now, I should point out, Mike did something at MaxDoc

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that kind of caught some people off guard,

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because when you're giving talks,

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especially about Mac computers,

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it's very tempting to want to do like a live demonstration

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of a specific application,

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and a few people tried to do this.

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Some of that is dependent on getting a good Wi-Fi signal,

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which there were issues with this year at MaxDoc,

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and it has a lot of problems

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if you try to just play a recorded video.

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So if you're giving a talk

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and you're going to do something like a live demo,

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you need to do something like what Mike did,

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which was to record the demo as a screencast,

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and then break said screencast up into little bits

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such that you can advance it as you want.

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Mike did a very good job with this, well done, sir.

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So it was very interesting to watch

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because you were able to take that,

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what would have been a very difficult screencast

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to do a voice over on live and get it to work perfectly.

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I know there were a few people that boasted

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about this afterwards, Mike, that were sitting there.

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They missed out on like what you were talking about

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with email because they were so caught up

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and how is he doing that?

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Like that is, what is he doing?

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So yeah, there was a few folks that were very impressed

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and I was too, so well done.

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Cool, yeah, just a little bit more description, I guess,

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on exactly what I did for anyone who wants

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to steal the strategy.

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Like Jodit said, I recorded the video on screen flow

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of like getting notifications, things like that,

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and then I cut it up into tiny videos

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and then placed those videos in a keynote presentation

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on separate slides, which autoplayed

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when you loaded the slide.

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So that meant that while I was presenting,

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I didn't have to be at my computer even.

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I had the clicker and every time I hit the forward arrow

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on the clicker or the forward button on the clicker,

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then it would play the next piece,

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but on the screen behind me, it just showed my screen.

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And so it would hold the last frame of the video,

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my mouse in a certain position,

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and then I'd pick up the video there on the next one.

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And it looked like I was controlling everything

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with the clicker, but I wasn't.

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I was just playing a bunch of little videos

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with the spacing so that I could narrate over them.

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Does that, does that make sense?

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- It makes sense to me, but I got to see it behind the scenes.

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So that happens, but it was interesting.

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I hadn't thought to do something like that.

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I don't do screencasts live like that really ever,

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but if I ever need to, you can be sure I'm stealing this one.

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- Yeah, so what that allowed me to do is like,

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there's one spot in particular where I wanted a notification

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to play at the exact right time with the sound,

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and I was able to trigger that with the clicker

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rather than sending the email and waiting

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sometimes five seconds, sometimes five minutes

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for the email to show up and then the notification to play

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and having to sit there be like,

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okay, just wait for it, wait for it.

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- Yeah, and that was the piece that really confused people

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because they were like, how did he,

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'cause there were a couple of folks that thought

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you were actually doing the live demo,

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and they could not figure out how you had triggered

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the notification to come exactly when you wanted.

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There was a few folks in front of me that were like,

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look at each other, like, what?

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They were so confused, it was great.

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- That's funny.

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- So that was Max Talk, I enjoyed it.

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It was a good time, I like Max Talk.

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- And if you like Max or Apple Things,

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you should come to Max Talk next year, dear listener.

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- And we can hang out, like we can meet each other,

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it'd be fun.

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We'll talk about books at a max conference.

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(laughing)

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- All right, then I've got a whole bunch here.

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- Yeah.

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- You're not gonna be able to hold me accountable too

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because I don't know how to quantify these necessarily.

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I'm not tracking every time I don't use a power base, no.

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(laughing)

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But just running through these real quickly,

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these are the things I wrote down from last time.

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I wanted to show respect to other people before responding.

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I wanted to not use power base nose.

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I wanted to not use nose without proposing a yes.

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I wanted to use positive framing when proposing a yes.

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And I wanted to use, I would prefer not to.

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So I can tell you that progress has been made,

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but I can also tell you that I have not used

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I would prefer not to yet.

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And that probably means that I'm not saying no enough,

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but I don't know that for sure.

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I feel like in the last couple weeks,

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even couple months, I've done a pretty decent job

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of editing the things that I am committed to

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and the things that I am doing now really are the right things.

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And so I kind of think that partly this has kind of been

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set in motion before we read this book.

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And so I haven't had the opportunity to use these

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in practice as much as I maybe would have, you know,

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six months ago.

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But yeah, I do think that my mindset has shifted specifically

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the one about showing respect to other people before responding.

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Like that one really hit me.

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And I try to every single request that I get

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have that different mindset where it's not just like,

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well, no, I can't do that.

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Example, the other day, I'm in Door County.

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So I am two hours from home and I got a text message

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from somebody who isn't necessarily like a really close friend,

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kind of an acquaintance.

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It goes to my church, like we're friends,

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but we don't hang out, that sort of thing.

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And he was asking if he could get a ride down to Oshkosh.

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And it'd be real easy for me to just be like,

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well, no, I'm not around.

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Sorry.

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But I caught myself, I shouldn't even say I caught myself.

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I noticed that like I approached that text message

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different than I would have in the past.

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Like, I honestly felt for this guy and was trying to figure out

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a way that like, oh, do I know anybody in the Appleton area

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that could give this guy a ride down to Oshkosh.

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And so I consider that a win, even though from his perspective,

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I wasn't able to help him out.

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Right.

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I think that over time, like there are going to be definitely

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more positive outcomes from this.

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Yeah, I can see that there's a lot of value in thinking

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through how do I deliver a no in a good way.

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I do it with clients all the time.

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I kind of hate doing it with clients all the time,

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but it's a good thing to do it with clients all the time.

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So like, OK, I need to make sure that they know one,

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that I'm trying to help them.

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Two, I'm the wrong person to help them.

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And three, where they should go from there, which is exactly

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what my follow up was, is trying to use the yes, no, yes.

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Every time a big decision needs a no.

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And it's something I have found is most important in my client

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relationships whenever I need to tell them no on a specific thing,

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like take, for example, I have one in particular right now

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that wants-- and I don't know why certain people do this.

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They want to dictate the way that I'm storing data

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for their plugin, for say, discourse.

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And if they want that level of detail,

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I typically need to find a very strong way to say, no,

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I do this for a living.

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I know what I'm talking about.

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This is the way it should happen.

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I'm a discourse expert.

00:18:43

Yes, I am a professional at this.

00:18:46

Please stop arguing with me on this.

00:18:48

Unless you are one of the top data analysts in the world,

00:18:50

you should not be arguing with me on this.

00:18:53

And if you're one of the top data analysts in the world,

00:18:55

you are likely not going to employ my services in this scenario.

00:18:59

You would simply do it yourself.

00:19:01

So let's say no here.

00:19:05

Right.

00:19:05

Those are entertaining conversations.

00:19:07

Yeah, I feel like if I was still doing client work,

00:19:09

I would probably have a lot more opportunities

00:19:11

to practice this stuff.

00:19:12

But I'm glad that I'm not.

00:19:14

I can pass them on to you if you want.

00:19:16

I'm good.

00:19:17

You could pose as my admin that says no.

00:19:21

I will pass.

00:19:22

But thanks.

00:19:24

I'd prefer not to jump.

00:19:25

Just do.

00:19:27

There you go.

00:19:30

All right, we've been alluding to our book for the day.

00:19:32

Why don't you introduce it for us?

00:19:33

Sure.

00:19:34

This is The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf DeBelly.

00:19:37

And I probably slaughtered that name and I apologize.

00:19:40

But this is a book all about cognitive biases.

00:19:44

And it's really laid out, interestingly,

00:19:46

because every chapter, I think, is exactly three pages.

00:19:50

I don't think I saw one that was longer when that was short.

00:19:53

Right.

00:19:53

They're like two and a half, three every single time.

00:19:56

Yep.

00:19:56

But there are 100 mini chapters, each one covering

00:20:00

a different cognitive bias.

00:20:03

And so in this episode, what we're going to do

00:20:05

is something a little bit different.

00:20:06

We're not going to try and encapsulate

00:20:07

the thoughts of the entire book, because it's impossible to do.

00:20:12

We're also not going to go through all the cognitive bias.

00:20:14

We're truly biased.

00:20:16

Like, everything is biased.

00:20:17

I can't control anything.

00:20:19

Yep, exactly.

00:20:21

So we're not going to go through all 99 of them either.

00:20:24

We're going to pick some of our favorites.

00:20:26

And then you've got a couple--

00:20:28

or actually one specific talking point, which

00:20:30

was something that I was thinking about the entire time also,

00:20:33

is like, where is the line of the ethical use of these biases

00:20:36

when it comes to selling and marketing?

00:20:38

And that is maybe a niche discussion

00:20:43

off of this general topic of cognitive biases.

00:20:45

But given what we do for a living,

00:20:49

I think it's very important.

00:20:51

Well, it was interesting to me that going through this,

00:20:56

I work with clients and I work on my own projects.

00:20:59

And 99% of the time, that is all online business-ish.

00:21:06

The 1% is cases where I'm helping someone set up

00:21:08

like a point of sale system in their brick and mortar.

00:21:13

So I could not help.

00:21:16

Every time a new bias was introduced,

00:21:20

I could not help but see that bias being exploited

00:21:24

in certain areas of business or online marketing

00:21:28

in some form or another.

00:21:30

It seems like almost every single one of these

00:21:32

has a form of extortion of sorts put into it

00:21:37

in order to get people to buy.

00:21:39

And the question I have-- and we can get into it either now

00:21:43

or later.

00:21:43

It doesn't matter to me, Mike.

00:21:45

I felt like it would be very easy to sell a lot of things

00:21:49

if you employ like five or six of these.

00:21:52

In your online business, you could

00:21:53

sell as much as you want every single day.

00:21:57

Question is, should you do that?

00:22:01

Personally, I feel like the answer is no.

00:22:03

But at what point-- because it's almost impossible to market

00:22:07

without doing something here.

00:22:08

So what do you do?

00:22:12

Yeah, this is a very, very interesting question.

00:22:14

And I'm sure that there's going to be people

00:22:16

on both sides of this argument.

00:22:21

In the-- OK, so there was a book that I read a while back,

00:22:24

which kind of changed my opinion and perspective

00:22:27

on this topic.

00:22:28

And that is "Influence" by Robert Sealdini.

00:22:32

Have you read that one?

00:22:33

I have not, but it's on my list.

00:22:35

OK, so this is often referred to as the marketing Bible.

00:22:40

And what it talks about is seven specific marketing

00:22:44

strategies which are wrapped up in these cognitive biases.

00:22:48

And he explains how they work and then also

00:22:51

how to combat them.

00:22:53

And so he uses stories in that book

00:22:55

of people who are trying to use these marketing tactics

00:22:59

or cognitive biases against him and how he spun them around.

00:23:05

And I think that when it comes to these cognitive biases

00:23:09

and the marketing strategies that you would use

00:23:11

to either play-- to play off of these, what really--

00:23:16

the really the fine line here is in what are you actually

00:23:21

promoting?

00:23:21

What are you selling?

00:23:23

If you are marketing junk, if you are marketing

00:23:26

a pyramid scheme, which actually was referred to specifically

00:23:30

in one of these cognitive biases,

00:23:33

if you know that the thing that you are selling

00:23:36

is not the thing that the person needs,

00:23:40

then I think that, yeah, there's definitely

00:23:43

a lot of opportunity to use these in a negative way.

00:23:47

I think if you are honest, it is fine to use story

00:23:51

to sell your product.

00:23:53

Story bias is one of the biases.

00:23:55

You don't want to manipulate people

00:23:57

and you don't want to play to their fears necessarily,

00:24:02

but you want to give people an opportunity

00:24:05

to buy the thing that you've created

00:24:07

if you really think it is going to help them.

00:24:10

And so I think, obviously, there's

00:24:12

some gray area there between what is a legit product

00:24:15

and what is a junk product that you're just trying to sell

00:24:18

because you want to make a bunch of money.

00:24:20

But I think that that is really the distinction

00:24:23

between when this is OK and when it's not.

00:24:26

Really, it comes down to, do you trust the person

00:24:28

that you're buying from?

00:24:30

If you trust the person that you're buying from,

00:24:32

then the cognitive biases that play into this,

00:24:35

that is, in my opinion, that's OK to a certain degree.

00:24:39

They might be using different strategies, different tactics.

00:24:41

That's OK if you trust that they really

00:24:43

do have your best interests at heart.

00:24:44

Like if you align with their core values,

00:24:47

you can trust the end result of the product

00:24:49

that they're selling.

00:24:50

So an example of this would be Apple

00:24:53

stands on privacy versus somebody like Google

00:24:55

stands on privacy.

00:24:58

I will spend a bunch of money on Apple products

00:25:01

because I align with the company's values and vision.

00:25:04

And I believe them when they say that they're not

00:25:07

going to sell my data because that is important to me.

00:25:09

Now, there are lots of other people

00:25:10

who are like, I don't care.

00:25:11

I got nothing to hide.

00:25:12

Go ahead and sell my data as long as I get Gmail for free.

00:25:15

That's fine.

00:25:16

But you have to recognize that both of those products

00:25:19

are being marketed using these cognitive biases.

00:25:22

And that's going to taint how you view the company based

00:25:25

on your values and your vision.

00:25:27

So I personally don't like the fact

00:25:30

that my mail is being read through.

00:25:32

So when I see Google using those cognitive biases against me,

00:25:36

I'm going to think, oh, those jerks, what the heck are they doing?

00:25:39

But when I see Apple do it, it's not a big deal if that makes sense.

00:25:45

Because your biases towards their motivation.

00:25:48

Like you're trusting them simply because you

00:25:52

know that they have a core value of letting you keep your own data

00:25:57

and not using it for their own purposes.

00:25:59

So because you buy into that, it's

00:26:01

OK if they do something that is either very similar to or at least

00:26:06

along the same lines of what Google does.

00:26:09

So you tend to be OK with that.

00:26:12

I think I tend to fall into a lot of the same category there.

00:26:15

The question is that if I look at how

00:26:19

I market certain websites of my own,

00:26:22

even take like Bookworm, how do you want to market that?

00:26:25

Well, we don't really market it at all.

00:26:28

We just kind of let it grow on its own.

00:26:30

And we let people share it with their friends

00:26:32

and let it grow that way.

00:26:34

We don't really do a lot of marketing per se.

00:26:38

We tend to do the whole word of mouth thing, which

00:26:42

has kind of its own bias in it as well,

00:26:44

because you're taking advantage of the friendship side of things,

00:26:47

letting story play into it.

00:26:50

But at the same time, I would like it to grow more, of course,

00:26:55

like who wouldn't, right?

00:26:57

So if you want it to grow more, then what do you do about it?

00:27:00

And that's something that I have been struggling with,

00:27:03

specifically with my business as a whole.

00:27:05

It's something I've talked about on theoretical a number

00:27:07

of times, and I'm working through over the next couple

00:27:09

of months in a week or so and trying to figure out, well,

00:27:13

what is the right way to market without exploiting

00:27:16

some of these things?

00:27:17

Because there's some of them, like you mentioned the story

00:27:19

bias.

00:27:21

I like telling stories about how something has helped me.

00:27:25

I like doing that.

00:27:27

And I feel like that's a way for me to convey something

00:27:29

to the folks who follow me so that they can see,

00:27:35

this is what I struggle with.

00:27:36

This is how I work through things.

00:27:37

This is something I'm trying to nail down.

00:27:40

But the trick comes in whenever I feel that the intent behind

00:27:46

that story is to try to get a sale.

00:27:48

I think part of this is what's the purpose?

00:27:51

Like what's your underlying intent of said marketing

00:27:55

strategy, which is darn near impossible to drag out

00:28:02

of somebody else.

00:28:02

Like you can never nail down what someone else's intent is.

00:28:06

But you can see what their actions are

00:28:08

and try to extrapolate out to it.

00:28:10

But you have to be careful with that because there's a bias

00:28:12

that comes with that one as well.

00:28:13

So this is kind of the slippery slope of, OK, well,

00:28:16

this bias and that bias.

00:28:17

And if I try to do this, well, then what about that?

00:28:20

It can get to be a bit fatalistic almost,

00:28:23

where there's not an answer here.

00:28:25

So just do nothing, which I think

00:28:28

I have fallen into even that trap in the fence.

00:28:32

Yeah, I don't think you can judge other people's motives

00:28:35

necessarily, but you can judge the thing

00:28:37

that they are trying to sell.

00:28:39

And you can say that you're selling this thing for X amount

00:28:42

of dollars.

00:28:43

It's really only worth this amount of dollars because of X.

00:28:48

And obviously even the value judgments

00:28:51

are going to be different.

00:28:52

But there's definitely going to be times

00:28:53

where you can identify that the product that is being sold

00:28:58

or marketed isn't being sold or marketed honestly.

00:29:03

And so it really comes down to the integrity

00:29:06

and the character of the marketer, in my opinion.

00:29:10

We used Apple and Google as an example.

00:29:13

But you mentioned the online space.

00:29:14

Like there's a lot of people selling stuff in the online space.

00:29:18

And I think that whether you trust the person or not

00:29:21

really comes down to what does the person stand for.

00:29:24

And is it in line with your core values, which

00:29:27

is probably one of these kind of biases to begin with.

00:29:33

But I think that there are definitely certain things

00:29:36

that you can just say, like, yeah, that's really not worth it.

00:29:38

That is a scam in essence.

00:29:41

But I do think that those are few and far between.

00:29:44

And I also think that from the Joe Buleg perspective

00:29:48

and you're talking about, how do I--

00:29:50

I want Bookworm to Grow, what my business to grow.

00:29:53

But I also don't want to be a sleazy marketer guy.

00:29:56

I don't think that there is anything wrong with being

00:29:59

marketer guy.

00:29:59

You don't have to be sleazy.

00:30:01

But you can definitely tell stories.

00:30:03

And framing is another one of these cognitive biases.

00:30:07

You can frame your offering in a positive way.

00:30:09

There's nothing immoral about that.

00:30:12

And in fact, when you do that, it opens the door for you

00:30:16

to actually help people.

00:30:17

I think the intention is really important.

00:30:19

Like, if you are in the productivity space,

00:30:24

you are either capitalizing on the audience,

00:30:28

and you're just trying to make a quick buck,

00:30:30

or you are honestly trying to help people do more with what

00:30:34

they have been given and do the right things, maybe not even

00:30:36

do more, but make sure that what they're doing

00:30:38

is the right things.

00:30:40

And I think there's a lot of people

00:30:41

in this space who that is their intention.

00:30:43

They do want to help people.

00:30:46

And I think that comes through in how you market.

00:30:49

It's almost like you can, in my opinion, anyways,

00:30:52

like you can kind of smell a phony if you do any amount

00:30:56

of research or digging.

00:30:58

Like, you can see pretty quickly when something is fake.

00:31:03

You go on Amazon and you search for something,

00:31:06

and you get the real product at $300,

00:31:10

and you get all the knockoffs at $15.

00:31:12

You know that those aren't going to meet your needs.

00:31:14

Right.

00:31:16

And I think there's something to that,

00:31:18

because so many of these online businesses,

00:31:22

they want to use a lot of these tactics.

00:31:25

They want to frame things in a certain way,

00:31:26

even though they don't necessarily--

00:31:29

like, it's a sales thing.

00:31:30

It's not a integrity thing.

00:31:33

If you get the difference between those two in that case,

00:31:36

because they're trying to get a sale, as opposed

00:31:38

to trying to accomplish something for that person.

00:31:41

I think this is where, like, personally--

00:31:44

and I can see this because I'm me.

00:31:46

This is even a bias.

00:31:47

But I feel like whenever I'm trying to do some of this marketing

00:31:51

and I'm trying to share certain things,

00:31:53

I'm genuinely trying to find a way to get things out to people

00:31:56

because I think it can help them.

00:31:57

Like, just hearing the struggles that I'm going through,

00:32:00

because this is kind of my take on the productivity space,

00:32:02

is trying to share what I'm going through

00:32:05

and what I'm struggling through,

00:32:06

the things I'm working through from a nap or a services

00:32:10

standpoint.

00:32:12

I feel like that's a way to help people with it

00:32:15

because they can see my way of working through it.

00:32:19

And if they can understand my mindset

00:32:21

on how I've got to where I'm at, my hope is that they can take that

00:32:24

and then grow from it and nail it down from--

00:32:28

nail their own system down using that as a base.

00:32:31

And that's OK.

00:32:33

I think to try to genuinely find a way to share your own story

00:32:37

so that it helps other people work through their own,

00:32:40

I think it's also very easy to use that and say that I'm

00:32:44

going to do this because it's a good way to sell

00:32:48

and people tend to trust you if you do this.

00:32:51

It's very easy to come across that way.

00:32:53

Like, some people, I'm sure, will interpret

00:32:55

what I'm doing in that way, even though that is far from my intent

00:32:59

and that's not what I'm doing.

00:33:00

I'm trying the best I can to show that I'm genuine in that.

00:33:03

And I think you would be the same, Mike.

00:33:05

You love to help people with their apps, with their tools,

00:33:10

with their time, email.

00:33:11

I mean, you love helping people in the same way.

00:33:14

I think you would say the same.

00:33:15

You genuinely love helping people.

00:33:16

The trick is how do you convey that without crossing

00:33:21

these lines, whatever those lines are?

00:33:24

Right.

00:33:24

Well, I think that a big key to this

00:33:26

is in what sort of feedback people give you

00:33:30

after you've offered the assistance

00:33:32

or they've gone through the product.

00:33:34

So at Asian Efficiency, we're implementing

00:33:36

a net promoter score system.

00:33:38

And that is basically after you've gone through the product,

00:33:40

what do you think of it?

00:33:41

Did it help you?

00:33:43

Did it not help you?

00:33:44

And then if it didn't help you, like, if you're honest,

00:33:47

you're going to try to fix that so that it can actually

00:33:49

help the person.

00:33:50

In fact, if you implement MPS the right way,

00:33:53

you don't give up on that person until you've closed that loop

00:33:56

and they are happy.

00:33:57

And I think that if you actually track,

00:34:00

what do people think of the product itself?

00:34:01

And this is not the trolls and the haters who are sending you

00:34:04

emails saying that you should kill yourself

00:34:07

because I know that you get those.

00:34:08

You want some?

00:34:10

No, that's OK.

00:34:12

Those people, you don't want to try to win over.

00:34:14

There's always going to be people who take issue

00:34:15

with how you are promoting your product,

00:34:18

unless you don't promote your product and then they win.

00:34:20

But if you are promoting it and your product is good,

00:34:24

then if people go through the process

00:34:25

and they go through your product,

00:34:26

like those testimonials in essence,

00:34:28

like those should be generated automatically

00:34:31

as long as you follow up with the person.

00:34:33

I mean, they're not always going to come out and say,

00:34:34

yeah, this was great.

00:34:35

This changed my life.

00:34:36

But if you give them the opportunity to,

00:34:38

that can give you a baseline on whether you are actually helping

00:34:42

people or you've transitioned into sleazy marketing guy.

00:34:45

Because I think the key there is,

00:34:48

what do you do with that negative feedback?

00:34:50

Do you actually change?

00:34:51

Do you try to improve it?

00:34:52

Or you just say, well, I got your money already,

00:34:54

so I don't care.

00:34:56

Yeah, I think that's tricky.

00:34:57

Kind of a side note on the troll thing.

00:34:59

I talked to somebody at max talk about trolls

00:35:03

as a side conversation and got this really cool idea

00:35:06

on how to respond to them.

00:35:07

This person told me that he likes to send a lorum.

00:35:12

Lorum Ipsum to trolls.

00:35:15

So he gets the troll telling him his product is junk.

00:35:19

And he has, you know, I have, as a web developer,

00:35:23

I've got these text expander snippets that have lorums.

00:35:27

And for those of you who don't know, a lorum Ipsum

00:35:29

is essentially, it's Latin text and it's just nonsense to us.

00:35:34

So it's just this long text,

00:35:37

it's just this long text that has a way

00:35:39

of just filling in paragraphs.

00:35:41

It's just a filler is all it is.

00:35:43

It doesn't mean anything.

00:35:44

There's nothing in it.

00:35:45

Like it's not meant to be read, it just fills space.

00:35:48

And this guy likes to send those to trolls

00:35:52

and they get so confused because they think

00:35:54

you buried something in there for them to read

00:35:58

and they pour through it and they sometimes find patterns

00:36:01

that don't exist, which is another bias that's in here.

00:36:04

It's very entertaining to get some of their pies.

00:36:07

Now he did tell me that you have to be careful with that

00:36:09

because they will send you a whole bunch of emails

00:36:10

and follow up trying to figure out what you were telling them.

00:36:12

So you'd feel okay with that.

00:36:14

- Interesting.

00:36:16

Yeah.

00:36:17

I can see where that would just drive some people nuts

00:36:19

and why you might want to do that.

00:36:22

But I think ultimately the long term

00:36:24

that maybe isn't helping.

00:36:25

- No, it's not at all.

00:36:26

It's purely entertainment value at that point.

00:36:28

So it's not something I plan to do.

00:36:31

So for a while I was just sending blank emails to them

00:36:35

which confused them as well.

00:36:37

Like wait, did he mean to send a blank email?

00:36:40

What did he forget to type it in?

00:36:41

Like it really confused them

00:36:42

but it just meant more email.

00:36:43

So I stopped doing that.

00:36:45

- Do you want to talk about some of the biases themselves?

00:36:53

I mean, we talked a lot about them generally

00:36:56

but we'll be diving into some specific ones.

00:36:59

- I think we've talked around this ethical use of them thing.

00:37:03

I don't, we're not going to come up with an answer here.

00:37:05

I think if you could nail down an answer,

00:37:07

a lot of people would be excited

00:37:08

and then they would exploit your answer to get something.

00:37:11

So I don't think you're going to nail,

00:37:13

I think it's going to be something

00:37:15

that we each have to nail down how we want to go

00:37:19

about doing marketing in an honest and integrity filled way

00:37:24

so that people are genuinely excited

00:37:26

about the things we're creating

00:37:28

and they're happy with the way that we sold them on it.

00:37:30

So I don't think we need to go over that anymore.

00:37:34

So I'm good with jumping into the next one

00:37:36

which is three biases to which were most susceptible.

00:37:40

So that means we get to talk about some of these Mike.

00:37:43

- Picking three out of these 99 is going to be

00:37:46

maybe pretty difficult but we'll give it a shot.

00:37:50

- That's why I wrote down that we're most susceptible to,

00:37:55

not three that were susceptible to

00:37:57

because I felt like I was susceptible

00:37:59

to like all of them in some way.

00:38:01

- Yep, that's terrible.

00:38:02

- I think Rolf de Belly would agree

00:38:04

that these all come into play at some point.

00:38:08

But yeah, let's dive in here.

00:38:10

Do you have a clear winner?

00:38:14

- I don't have a clear winner.

00:38:16

I've got three written down.

00:38:18

How about this?

00:38:19

We'll just alternate, go back and forth.

00:38:21

So one of them that I know that I'm susceptible to,

00:38:24

I don't have, like I didn't rank these

00:38:27

but one of them I wrote down is what's called

00:38:29

the gambler's fallacy.

00:38:31

So it's the concept that if something is happening

00:38:35

repetitively and the example that he gave in the book was,

00:38:40

what was the game?

00:38:40

I'm terrible at gambler's games.

00:38:43

- Roulette, I think.

00:38:44

- Was it Roulette?

00:38:46

- Pretty sure because it had been a certain color

00:38:49

so many times in a row so people kept betting

00:38:51

on the other color thinking,

00:38:52

"Oh, it's gonna be the other color this time."

00:38:54

And it never was.

00:38:55

- Right, so they're at a Roulette table

00:38:57

and the ball kept landing on black

00:39:01

and it landed 20 times in a row on black

00:39:04

and people started betting on red like crazy

00:39:07

because it has to eventually go red

00:39:11

and a lot of people lost millions of dollars

00:39:13

on betting on red and it kept landing on black

00:39:17

and it didn't actually go to red until the 27th spin.

00:39:21

So at that point there was a lot of money on the table

00:39:24

and a lot of people went bankrupt.

00:39:26

So the concept there is that if something is happening

00:39:30

repeatedly you tend to expect the opposite to happen

00:39:35

very quickly or right away because it can't just keep

00:39:39

going in that line forever.

00:39:42

So in that particular case, every single role,

00:39:46

it has a 50/50 chance of black over red.

00:39:50

Even though it's been 20 times on black,

00:39:52

it's still 50/50 on roll 21.

00:39:55

But we tend to think that, "Oh no, it has to be like 90/10.

00:39:59

"It's gonna land on red because it's been black

00:40:01

"so many times."

00:40:02

It doesn't actually matter.

00:40:04

It doesn't, the probability that it doesn't work out.

00:40:06

It's still 50/50 every single time.

00:40:09

We just don't like to think that way.

00:40:10

And this is something that I know I fall into.

00:40:12

I know there have been cases where I've had a handful

00:40:16

of rough client projects.

00:40:18

Surely the next one's going to be good

00:40:20

because I've had so many bad ones.

00:40:22

It has to balance out some time.

00:40:24

Oh no, it doesn't actually work that way.

00:40:27

So this is one that I know I need to make myself familiar

00:40:30

with and be okay not falling into.

00:40:33

- Yeah, and this is interesting because it basically

00:40:37

works against another cognitive bias,

00:40:40

which is the regression to mean error.

00:40:43

And he used the example there of somebody

00:40:45

who their back pain went away after they visited

00:40:48

a chiropractor or their golf game got better

00:40:51

after they visited a professional.

00:40:54

And his point with the regression to mean

00:40:56

is that it would have improved on its own

00:40:57

because these things tend to average out.

00:41:00

But with the gambler's fallacy, that doesn't work

00:41:03

because there is no balancing force in the universe.

00:41:06

So like when you're playing roulette

00:41:09

or when you're flipping a coin, for example,

00:41:10

there's nothing that says it has to be this

00:41:13

a bunch of times in a row in order to make this balanced

00:41:17

like for example, a system like the weather.

00:41:21

And this was really, really interesting

00:41:23

because this was on my list too.

00:41:25

So I have to pick a different one now.

00:41:26

(laughs)

00:41:28

I know that I've fallen into this

00:41:30

where you see something happen a bunch of times in a row

00:41:32

and you're like, oh well, it's probably going to be

00:41:34

the other one now.

00:41:35

But what you just said is that like if you flip a coin

00:41:37

10 times and it's had 10 times in a row the next time

00:41:40

and it's still got that 50% chance

00:41:43

of being had 50% chance of being tails.

00:41:46

That kind of boggles my mind.

00:41:48

It's not the way my mind works.

00:41:51

So yeah, I definitely believe that I am susceptible

00:41:53

to this one as well.

00:41:54

- Yeah.

00:41:55

And because our mind doesn't work that way,

00:41:57

we just expect like the probability of it happening

00:42:00

that many times in a row has to be different

00:42:02

than 50/50 on the next roll.

00:42:04

Like it just has to.

00:42:05

Like it's a mathematical thing, but it's not.

00:42:08

(laughs)

00:42:09

It's purely 50/50.

00:42:11

Okay.

00:42:13

So this one was on your list too.

00:42:14

So that mean I have to go again?

00:42:16

- No, no, I'll pick one.

00:42:17

- Okay, you go next.

00:42:19

- Okay, so this one I've known about for a really long time.

00:42:22

I still find myself falling for this though

00:42:26

and that is the planning fallacy

00:42:28

where we tend to underestimate how long

00:42:31

projects are going to take.

00:42:34

And the point behind this one is that there really is

00:42:37

no learning curve for us when it comes to planning,

00:42:41

which again seems counterintuitive.

00:42:45

Seems like we should be able to learn that,

00:42:47

you know, last time I did this project,

00:42:48

it took this many hours.

00:42:49

So next time I do this project,

00:42:50

it's gonna take that many hours.

00:42:53

It's not going to be less than that

00:42:55

because things are never gonna go

00:42:57

exactly the way that they're supposed to.

00:42:59

But I am ashamed to admit that I fall for this more often

00:43:02

than I probably should.

00:43:04

The example that they use here,

00:43:06

I thought was really interesting.

00:43:08

That's the Sydney Opera House, which was built in 1957.

00:43:12

And they projected that this is gonna be done in 1963

00:43:17

for $7 million.

00:43:19

It was actually completed in 1973

00:43:21

and the total cost was $102 million.

00:43:24

Even people who do this, like for a living,

00:43:27

they suck at this as well.

00:43:30

- Makes me feel a little better.

00:43:32

- Yep, yep.

00:43:33

- Yeah, I know that it's something that,

00:43:35

and you know, let's go task management here.

00:43:37

I have played around with the estimated time thing

00:43:40

and I'm gonna focus a few times

00:43:43

and I've dabbled with it even here recently,

00:43:46

trying to figure out if I could find a way

00:43:48

to calculate how much time I'm spending on certain things

00:43:51

or trying to get a feel for how much I can do in a day.

00:43:55

But it's so hard to nail down

00:43:57

how much time something's gonna take.

00:43:58

My typical method of doing that is knowing

00:44:02

that I think something's going to take me 15 minutes

00:44:04

so I set aside 45 for it.

00:44:06

Like that's the best way I can do it.

00:44:09

But even then I sometimes am off,

00:44:11

but yeah, I know that I'm terrible at this as well.

00:44:14

- Yeah, actually this is interesting.

00:44:16

We just had a scrum meeting this week

00:44:19

for Asian efficiency and Marmal just got back

00:44:22

from scrum leaders training, forget exactly what it was.

00:44:26

But one of the things that they said was

00:44:28

you do your, they call it planning poker

00:44:30

where you kind of identify how many story points

00:44:33

something is gonna be and then you bump it up one.

00:44:36

So if you were to say like this is gonna be

00:44:40

in the way that the story points work in scrum,

00:44:42

it's the Fibonacci number sequence.

00:44:44

So the number of story points is equal

00:44:46

to the sum of the previous two.

00:44:48

So it goes one, then two, then three

00:44:50

because three is the sum of one plus two

00:44:52

but then the next one is five

00:44:53

because it's three plus two.

00:44:55

The next one is eight, five plus three, 13, 21, whatever.

00:44:58

So that means that if the Asian efficiency team

00:45:01

is planning our sprint and we say this issue

00:45:04

is gonna take 13 story points, everybody agree?

00:45:06

Yes, we don't leave it at 13, we bump it up to 21

00:45:09

which is actually a much, much larger estimate.

00:45:13

- Right, interesting.

00:45:15

Yeah, I've just, yeah.

00:45:17

It makes a lot of sense to bump things up

00:45:19

from where you think they should be.

00:45:21

All right, so another one on my list here

00:45:24

of ones that I know I'm susceptible to

00:45:26

is the self-serving bias.

00:45:29

So essentially if something goes well,

00:45:34

say I build a new product, I create a new website,

00:45:38

I launch said website and it's a success,

00:45:41

I will attribute that success to my own professional prowess

00:45:46

and how great I am (laughs)

00:45:48

at building websites.

00:45:49

I will say that that's something I did.

00:45:52

If it goes badly, I tend to assume

00:45:56

that it's because I hit the timing wrong

00:45:59

or the technology was not working the way it should.

00:46:03

It's something external, it's not my fault.

00:46:06

So I like to take credit for the successes

00:46:08

and pass the blame to the failures, to something else.

00:46:11

Not usually to other people,

00:46:12

usually to other circumstances in my case,

00:46:15

but I like to make sure that things are self-serving.

00:46:17

And whenever I read this about the self-serving bias,

00:46:22

I wanted to stop reading.

00:46:24

(laughs)

00:46:25

It's like, I don't wanna know about this

00:46:27

'cause I know I do this.

00:46:28

- Yeah, a lot of these are kinda related and the self-serving bias.

00:46:34

Yeah, basically we attribute success to ourselves

00:46:43

and failure to other people.

00:46:46

I definitely can see that one applying to myself as well.

00:46:51

But it wasn't one of my top three,

00:46:53

so you didn't steal it from me.

00:46:54

(laughs)

00:46:55

- Okay, good.

00:46:56

All right, I'm having trouble picking these.

00:47:00

Man, there's so many.

00:47:01

Let's say availability bias,

00:47:04

where the availability bias is where we create a picture

00:47:08

of the world using the examples that most easily come to mind.

00:47:13

So I am aware of this and I know that I have done this,

00:47:17

but I've also taken steps to overcome this,

00:47:20

I believe, and that's one of the reasons, in my opinion,

00:47:23

why Bookworm is so important because when we read

00:47:25

these different books, we hear these different stories,

00:47:27

we get these different perspectives.

00:47:29

It causes us to rethink and reevaluate what we quote unquote,

00:47:32

no.

00:47:33

So we're in the examples of the availability bias

00:47:36

that they use in the book is the phrase,

00:47:38

smoking can't be bad for you because my grandma smokes every day

00:47:41

and she lived to be 100.

00:47:42

Okay, that's one data point.

00:47:45

But when you don't understand all,

00:47:49

when you don't really understand the information

00:47:50

that is available on a particular topic,

00:47:53

then you focus on that one data point and you're like,

00:47:55

oh, it's not so bad.

00:47:56

It can cause you to overestimate,

00:47:58

overestimate, for example, the chances of a plane

00:48:03

or a car crash or you underestimate the chances

00:48:05

of diabetes or cancer.

00:48:06

Most people are terrified, well, I shouldn't say most people,

00:48:09

there are a lot of people who are terrified

00:48:10

of getting on an airplane because they don't have

00:48:12

the control over the outcome, but it's actually much, much safer

00:48:17

than even getting in a car.

00:48:20

Likewise, a lot of people don't think about their life

00:48:25

or their mortality, I guess, don't wanna make this

00:48:27

a downer of an episode, but like, it is a very real possibility

00:48:32

that you could end up getting one of these diseases.

00:48:34

And in fact, it's much higher than you getting

00:48:37

in a plane crash, but that's where people's minds go

00:48:40

if they have this availability bias.

00:48:43

Because we prefer wrong information to know information.

00:48:48

Ignorance is not bliss.

00:48:51

And that's why, like I mentioned Bookworm,

00:48:54

the benefit of reading these books for me is that

00:48:58

it gives me a bigger mental toolbox, even if I don't,

00:49:03

even if I don't create these really elaborate notes

00:49:08

or mind maps, which for this one actually, it's pretty huge.

00:49:11

- I bet.

00:49:13

- If I don't go back and reread those things,

00:49:14

even if I don't internalize those things

00:49:16

where like I can spit back these statistics,

00:49:18

they do impact my overall view of a particular subject.

00:49:23

And it becomes a more informed point of view.

00:49:26

And I know we've talked about this before,

00:49:27

but I'm okay with the subconscious effect that that has

00:49:32

on my worldview without having to know all of the specific

00:49:36

points or all the specific ways that it has benefited me.

00:49:39

Does that make sense?

00:49:40

- It does, it does.

00:49:42

It's very similar to, and I'll get into this one

00:49:46

as far as one of them that fascinates us.

00:49:49

I'll get into that one here in a minute, but survivorship.

00:49:51

I'll just table that one.

00:49:54

We'll come back to that one here in a minute.

00:49:56

The last one on my list for,

00:49:58

'cause we've been three or three now.

00:50:01

- Two.

00:50:02

- You're most susceptible.

00:50:03

- Two, you started.

00:50:05

- Right, but you did the gamblers fallacy on top of me.

00:50:08

- True, I do have one more I wanna mention

00:50:10

because this is one that I definitely fall for.

00:50:14

- No, okay, all right, so you go ahead with that one.

00:50:17

- Okay, so my third one then is overthinking.

00:50:20

- What, you overthink things, Mike?

00:50:23

- Oh yeah, all the time.

00:50:25

And this is sort of related to the ambiguity aversion

00:50:30

because I wanna know things.

00:50:33

The things that I don't know freak me out.

00:50:35

But overthinking exactly what it sounds like,

00:50:39

you think too much and you cut off your mind

00:50:41

from the wisdom of your feelings.

00:50:43

The way that he framed this was really, really interesting

00:50:46

because we tend to think myself included,

00:50:49

we tend to think of emotions as bad things,

00:50:51

like the flight or fight response in the productivity space.

00:50:54

We talk about that and say like,

00:50:55

you need to escape that because those emotional decisions,

00:50:58

that's actually gonna lead to bad decisions.

00:51:00

You need to see the problem the right way.

00:51:02

Well, the way he framed it in this book,

00:51:05

the emotions that form in your brain,

00:51:07

they form the same way that the rational thoughts do.

00:51:10

And they're merely a different form of information.

00:51:14

So if you're making a decision based on collecting

00:51:17

all of the information and making the best decision,

00:51:19

you need to weigh that stuff.

00:51:21

And sometimes it needs to be weighed more

00:51:23

than the facts and the data that you collect.

00:51:28

And that's where I believe I fall into the overthinking thing

00:51:30

is I tend to do tons and tons of research,

00:51:34

give you an example, whenever I have to book my own flights,

00:51:37

I sit there and I look at flights for like two or three hours.

00:51:40

And I'm stressed out 'cause I'm like,

00:51:41

"I can't find the flight I want."

00:51:43

All of them leave at like six in the morning,

00:51:44

I gotta be at the airport at four.

00:51:46

I don't wanna do that.

00:51:48

And I've started working with an executive assistant

00:51:51

and that's one of the things that she does for me

00:51:52

is she books my flights whenever I need them

00:51:54

and she'll just go and she'll find them

00:51:55

and she's much better at it than I am

00:51:57

and she'll show me the flights and be like,

00:51:58

"Well, no, I prefer not to leave."

00:52:00

Or this layover right here, this is too short.

00:52:03

I gotta change plans, I'm gonna have to run across Chicago,

00:52:05

whatever, like that's a big load off of my brain,

00:52:10

I don't have to think about that stuff.

00:52:14

And when she presents the flights to me,

00:52:16

I can look at it and I can use my gut reaction,

00:52:19

my initial feeling on the thing,

00:52:21

like, yes, this is good, no, it is bad

00:52:23

instead of having to comb through all of the thousands

00:52:25

of flight options that are available that day.

00:52:28

And that really gets into like the very end of this,

00:52:30

which we can talk a little bit about it,

00:52:32

but just real briefly, what he says is that

00:52:36

there's a time to recognize all these cognitive biases

00:52:39

and overcome them.

00:52:40

And there's also a time when the decision

00:52:42

really doesn't matter that much to go with your gut

00:52:44

and to go with those emotional responses

00:52:47

because to go through the 99 point checklist

00:52:51

for every decision you make, including like,

00:52:53

where do you wanna go out to eat, that's ridiculous.

00:52:56

- Yes, to all the things.

00:53:02

- Yeah, there's a lot there, but I'm with you on,

00:53:05

you know, if you've got too many things available to you,

00:53:08

or you've got too many options,

00:53:10

which is another thing in here, you know,

00:53:12

if you've got too much to choose from,

00:53:15

it can be overwhelming and it gets hard

00:53:17

to actually make a decision.

00:53:19

This is why a lot of cases,

00:53:20

like if my wife and I are gonna go out for dinner or something,

00:53:23

it's not uncommon for me to pick two or three options

00:53:27

and then let her pick from that.

00:53:29

'Cause I can typically get it whittled down fairly quickly

00:53:33

and she's pretty good at making that final decision.

00:53:35

So I just know that sometimes this is better

00:53:37

for us to just work in that way.

00:53:39

Otherwise, it gets to be kind of a mess and takes forever.

00:53:44

I get you.

00:53:45

- I like that strategy.

00:53:46

I may have to employ that.

00:53:47

- Or work it the other way around,

00:53:50

let her filter it and you pick the final,

00:53:52

depending on how you do it.

00:53:53

- Yeah, you do it.

00:53:55

- The last one on my list of ones I'm susceptible to,

00:53:57

inability to close doors.

00:53:59

And I've gotten better at this one,

00:54:01

but essentially it is,

00:54:03

you think that everything just either needs a little more time

00:54:07

or that the next thing that's brought up

00:54:10

is potentially the big thing.

00:54:13

So in the world of online stuff,

00:54:16

I am currently a part of three podcasts.

00:54:18

I've got at least two fairly substantial website builds

00:54:22

that I'm going through right now that could become businesses.

00:54:25

And then I've got all my client stuff.

00:54:27

So I've got a ton of things going on.

00:54:29

And that's just the work I do for my own business.

00:54:33

There's also the stuff I do at the church.

00:54:35

There's also another commercial contractor client that I have.

00:54:38

Like there's a lot of these things that I do

00:54:42

that can very quickly overwhelm my time.

00:54:46

So I tend to see opportunities

00:54:48

and I want to say yes to them,

00:54:50

but that quickly leads me to having too many projects going on.

00:54:55

Thus we come back to Joe needs to use yes, no, yes more often

00:54:59

and continue saying no to things.

00:55:02

So I am in a place now where I know

00:55:05

that I can maintain what I'm currently doing.

00:55:07

I don't need to kill any of these things

00:55:09

that I'm working on right now,

00:55:11

but I sure need to stop saying yes to anything new for certain.

00:55:16

So I'm up against a brick wall on this one right now, Mike.

00:55:19

So I have to start saying no more often.

00:55:24

Nice.

00:55:25

Do you want to, I mean, we could definitely keep going

00:55:28

on the ones that were susceptible to.

00:55:31

There's a couple that I just wanted to talk about

00:55:33

because they were really interesting to me.

00:55:35

What do you want to do?

00:55:36

Do you want to keep talking about those?

00:55:37

I've got three that I'm fascinated by.

00:55:41

So I'll let you start this round.

00:55:44

Okay.

00:55:44

So I'll start with one that I am scared I am susceptible to.

00:55:48

And that is the chauffeur knowledge.

00:55:52

He uses the story of this world-renowned speaker

00:55:57

and he goes and he gives all these talks

00:55:59

and the chauffeur has heard the talk

00:56:01

over and over and over again.

00:56:02

So he floats this idea one time.

00:56:04

He's like, "Hey, I know your talk.

00:56:05

"Why don't you let me give it?"

00:56:06

And the expert's like, "Yeah, that sounds interesting."

00:56:10

And then he gets up and he gives the talk

00:56:12

and somebody asks him to question that he can't answer.

00:56:14

And he says, "That is such a simple question.

00:56:17

"I'm gonna let my chauffeur answer it."

00:56:19

And then he calls on the quote unquote chauffeur,

00:56:21

which is actually the expert to come on and take over.

00:56:25

But the point of the story is that

00:56:27

what you can recite doesn't necessarily mean that you know.

00:56:32

True experts recognize the limits of what they know

00:56:35

and what they don't know.

00:56:36

And he talks about the circle of confidence.

00:56:38

What lies inside your circle of confidence,

00:56:40

you kind of understand intuitively what lies outside.

00:56:42

You may only partially understand.

00:56:44

So one of the things that I do for Asian efficiency

00:56:48

is I host the Productivity Show podcast

00:56:50

and I go on and I do research every single week

00:56:53

for a Productivity topic.

00:56:56

And I am scared that I am a poser,

00:57:00

that I am a chauffeur.

00:57:02

Because even though I live in this space,

00:57:05

I eat and breathe this stuff.

00:57:08

I am scared that I am spouting off information

00:57:13

that I have not fully internalized and really understand.

00:57:18

I guess I'm a little bit scared that I am missing

00:57:22

the real point of some of this stuff.

00:57:26

And I do not want to come across as not being authentic

00:57:30

or genuine.

00:57:31

And I want to make sure that the stuff that I do

00:57:35

give as advice, it is stuff that I know works.

00:57:40

I don't wanna mislead anybody,

00:57:42

which is why I try to talk about my own personal experience

00:57:45

as much as possible.

00:57:46

Because it's hard to dispute that.

00:57:50

This is what I did, this is the result that I got.

00:57:52

I can't really argue that.

00:57:53

But if you're trying to spout off something else

00:57:56

that you've gotten from somebody else

00:57:58

and like, hey, you should totally do this,

00:58:00

then that's dangerous, I think.

00:58:04

- This one was on my list too.

00:58:06

So you took this one from me as well.

00:58:08

But I have this on here because of one,

00:58:11

it's fascinating to me too.

00:58:13

I am with you in that I don't want to fall into this one.

00:58:16

So I'm aware that it would be very easy for me to,

00:58:19

like in the, especially in the productivity space,

00:58:21

we talk about this all the time.

00:58:22

And we went into this earlier with the ethical use bit.

00:58:26

But I know that it would be very easy for me to say,

00:58:30

here's what you should do and here's how this should work.

00:58:33

And this is what everybody recommends

00:58:35

and spout it off as if I am very familiar with it

00:58:39

and it's something I do all the time.

00:58:41

Now in some cases, that's true.

00:58:43

I do the exact thing.

00:58:45

And I try to explain the exact process

00:58:47

that I go through on that.

00:58:48

There's a lot of cases where I just suck at it

00:58:52

and I'm terrible at this thing.

00:58:53

And I do the best I can to explain that

00:58:55

'cause I don't want people to think

00:58:58

I'm a hundred percent expert in this.

00:59:00

I'm just maybe a step ahead of some folks that follow me

00:59:03

and that's exactly where I need to be.

00:59:05

So I'm still struggling through all this

00:59:06

and this is exactly why I brought up the ethical thing

00:59:09

because I don't want that,

00:59:12

I don't want to get to a point

00:59:12

where people have that correlation of thinking,

00:59:16

oh, he's just spouting off stuff, he's learned elsewhere.

00:59:19

Like, I don't want to do that.

00:59:20

So I have a pretty strong knee-jerk reaction

00:59:23

to folks that I feel like are doing that

00:59:25

and don't want to go there.

00:59:26

- Yep, totally agree.

00:59:29

- Some with you on that one.

00:59:30

One of the others that I have,

00:59:33

and I mentioned this earlier is the survivorship bias

00:59:37

which is the first bias he mentions in the book

00:59:41

and I thought it was very interesting

00:59:44

and it's something that I see a lot of in,

00:59:48

especially entrepreneurs because they will see

00:59:51

someone who did a thing and it's highly successful

00:59:54

and people want to emulate it.

00:59:55

So one example that I would give on this

00:59:58

is the lore podcast, so Aaron Mankey runs that.

01:00:02

It is crazy how many people are now starting to do things

01:00:06

very similar to him and his podcast.

01:00:09

They see the thing he's doing, they're trying to emulate that.

01:00:11

He made it big.

01:00:13

Surely I can make it big too if I simply do what he's doing.

01:00:17

The example in the book was rock stars.

01:00:19

There was a guy who saw he was seeing

01:00:21

all these successful rock stars.

01:00:23

I could be a rock star.

01:00:24

Well, what you're not seeing is all the failures

01:00:27

and all the people who didn't make it.

01:00:30

So the title of that chapter is,

01:00:32

"Why You Should Visit Cemeteries"

01:00:34

that way you can see all the people who didn't make it

01:00:36

and all the people who didn't become overnight success

01:00:41

in that case, quote unquote, overnight.

01:00:43

But it's something that I see a number of people trying to do.

01:00:47

I have even helped some people try to get businesses

01:00:51

off the ground that are kind of borderline this

01:00:54

because they feel like they see something,

01:00:57

they want to emulate another site,

01:00:58

they want to follow the pattern

01:01:01

of a bigger successful business.

01:01:04

And although that's a good thing to do in some cases,

01:01:06

you don't want to copy them verbatim.

01:01:09

It's going to go badly because they've been successful.

01:01:12

That's them, they're being true to themselves.

01:01:14

You're not in that case.

01:01:16

So it can be kind of dangerous to fall down that slope,

01:01:20

but just be aware that people tend to do this.

01:01:24

And I'm fascinated by it because I'm,

01:01:26

I don't struggle with this one at all

01:01:29

because I know there's a lot of failures

01:01:30

and you have to get through some of those failures

01:01:32

to get to the success.

01:01:34

And I know that a lot of people have just had

01:01:38

to completely give up the thing that they had as a dream

01:01:41

because it didn't work out for them

01:01:43

because they didn't have X, Y, and Z

01:01:45

that made it possible.

01:01:46

So I see this, so I try to help people see it,

01:01:50

but I'm not one that struggles with,

01:01:52

oh, they made it big, I can do it too.

01:01:54

Like I don't typically go that far out.

01:01:58

- Yeah, this is interesting because I think it touches

01:02:00

on another cognitive bias, which is exponential growth

01:02:03

because people see the success of lore

01:02:07

and they view it as overnight success,

01:02:11

but in my opinion, suddenly never comes suddenly.

01:02:15

I was actually on the Homework Podcast,

01:02:17

which Aaron Maki hosted with Dave Kalo

01:02:21

before lore became big.

01:02:24

And like I remember when I recorded him with them,

01:02:28

he had mentioned that this was kind of a side project

01:02:30

that he was doing and he had just launched,

01:02:32

I think at that time he had just been on

01:02:33

Systematic with Brett Turpstra and talked about it,

01:02:36

but it really hadn't taken off yet.

01:02:38

I thought it was cool, but he was still pretty excited

01:02:43

about it and it was still pretty new.

01:02:45

Not saying that he's not excited about it now,

01:02:47

but like when you start something new,

01:02:48

you're usually like super excited about it

01:02:50

because you have no idea where it could actually go.

01:02:53

And in this particular instance, it ended up taking off.

01:02:56

Even if these copycats had something a little bit unique

01:03:00

about their story, it's gonna take a long time

01:03:05

before they would achieve a success that Aaron has

01:03:08

because Aaron did this for a long time.

01:03:10

It was essentially a passion project

01:03:12

and that term gets thrown around a lot.

01:03:13

And I think it kind of has a negative connotation,

01:03:16

but it's something that he was doing for fun

01:03:19

before it was going to pay all of his bills

01:03:22

and lead to the lifestyle that he now has.

01:03:24

And that's what makes it successful.

01:03:26

The exponential growth, that's the concept of,

01:03:29

we don't understand exponential math

01:03:35

as well as we understand linear math.

01:03:36

We can add things, but we don't multiply things very well.

01:03:39

And the story that he uses there

01:03:41

is like the penny doubled every day

01:03:43

that results in over $5 million.

01:03:45

Most people you say you want a penny doubled every day

01:03:47

or $1,000 for 30 days.

01:03:49

So you have $30,000 at the end of the 30 days.

01:03:51

A lot of people without doing the math,

01:03:52

just thinking about it, they take the $30,000.

01:03:55

But the penny doubled, the exponential growth,

01:03:58

that's the key to growing.

01:03:59

That's the key to success.

01:04:01

And you don't see that when you just look at the result,

01:04:04

and you just look at Laura and you'll be like,

01:04:05

oh, I could do that.

01:04:07

Well, you could, but you won't.

01:04:10

You're gonna give up long before Aaron did,

01:04:15

because you're not seeing that exponential growth yet.

01:04:18

- You're also not seeing all the difficulties

01:04:21

that he has to deal with on that.

01:04:23

- Exactly.

01:04:24

- So you don't know the backstory.

01:04:26

- Yeah, if you don't really have the Y

01:04:30

to get you through that initial,

01:04:33

before the hockey stick growth,

01:04:36

you won't make it.

01:04:39

There is gonna be, like you said,

01:04:40

a lot of trials to overcome.

01:04:42

There's gonna be a lot of adversity

01:04:43

you're gonna have to overcome,

01:04:45

but it can be worth it in the end,

01:04:49

but you have to have your own reason for it.

01:04:52

You can't just be like, oh, I wanna copy this guy over there.

01:04:54

Like that is not gonna be enough to see you through.

01:04:57

- So what else fascinates you?

01:05:01

- So many winners, Chris, this is interesting,

01:05:04

because if you think about any sort of auction,

01:05:08

the specifically the example that comes to mind for me

01:05:12

is free agency for sports.

01:05:14

The winner of the auction often turns out to be the loser,

01:05:20

because by definition of the auction,

01:05:23

they are willing to pay more than anybody else,

01:05:25

so they are paying above market value.

01:05:28

And as we're recording this, kind of the NBA free agency,

01:05:32

when it has been going on the last month or so,

01:05:36

and there's people who are signing like $200 million contracts,

01:05:39

and you just see that stuff and you're just like,

01:05:42

wow, that is ridiculous.

01:05:44

I won't, I'm won from, 'cause it is a lot of money,

01:05:47

but that's a separate discussion.

01:05:48

I mean, if the market is going to pay that,

01:05:50

then more power to you.

01:05:52

But even if you understand the market,

01:05:54

and you say that, yeah, that salary,

01:05:55

like the money is justified.

01:05:59

Generally speaking, what I've noticed is that

01:06:01

you find out that this certain player

01:06:03

signed for this much money, and you're like, what?

01:06:06

Like they're not a superstar,

01:06:08

how did they get that much money?

01:06:10

And it's because of this winner's curse,

01:06:13

and this can obviously play out in a lot of different arenas,

01:06:17

but that's the one that I kind of see in the news,

01:06:20

but I mean, eBay auctions, whatever,

01:06:23

like there's a lot of different ways

01:06:25

that this could manifest, and I think it's interesting

01:06:29

to see that any sort of auction,

01:06:32

like you are going to be overpaying.

01:06:34

(chuckles)

01:06:35

- Yes, that's the whole purpose of that thing.

01:06:38

Like the way an auction works is designed

01:06:41

to raise the prices as you can.

01:06:44

Yeah, don't call that that.

01:06:45

- You basically can't win with an auction style.

01:06:49

- Right, right.

01:06:50

Unless there's no one else there that's interested in it,

01:06:52

you know what it's worth, and you don't pay up any more,

01:06:55

unless you come in it that way,

01:06:57

and you just get lucky that no one else is there,

01:07:00

it's never gonna work out well.

01:07:02

- Yeah, but see, that's the thing I think

01:07:04

is interesting about this,

01:07:05

is that's a very dangerous assumption to make,

01:07:07

is like, oh, look, I discovered this thing,

01:07:09

and there's so many other people out there

01:07:10

that would pay more for this,

01:07:11

but they don't know about it.

01:07:13

- Right. - Especially in today's society,

01:07:15

like people know about it. (chuckles)

01:07:17

- Yeah, it's kind of the way it works.

01:07:19

The last one here on my list of those

01:07:21

fascinate me, and I shouldn't say it's the last one

01:07:25

that fascinates me because a ton of these fascinate me,

01:07:28

but the one that I wrote down, anyway, is anchoring,

01:07:31

and you see this a lot with pricing strategies,

01:07:34

especially when prices are up for negotiation,

01:07:39

because someone will drop a number,

01:07:41

and that sets the baseline by which

01:07:43

all other numbers are judged.

01:07:45

So if you think about walking into, say, a car dealership,

01:07:49

and you see $10,000 on a car,

01:07:52

you're probably more apt to spend, say, 9,000 on it,

01:07:57

or 9,500 because your baseline was 10,000,

01:08:00

but if you do some more digging,

01:08:01

you may find out that that car is worth 6,000,

01:08:04

but because they had the baseline so high,

01:08:06

they anchored it so high,

01:08:08

you tend to not go down that far

01:08:10

when you're talking about it,

01:08:11

and you see this a lot of times,

01:08:12

it doesn't have to be the same thing,

01:08:14

even if you're talking about something completely unrelated,

01:08:17

let's talk about, say, consulting prices.

01:08:20

I'm going to charge, say, $1,000, $1,500

01:08:25

for an hour of my time to talk through something,

01:08:28

or we could spend $400 on this whole thing,

01:08:32

like this other, say, video course of sorts.

01:08:35

These are things that Mike and I work on quite a bit,

01:08:37

and I'm just throwing numbers out there.

01:08:39

I'm not pulling anything out specifically,

01:08:41

but if you use that baseline as the $1,500,

01:08:46

$400 seems crazy cheap,

01:08:47

so of course, let's jump in and buy that.

01:08:50

Even though it's two videos,

01:08:51

and they're both 30 seconds long,

01:08:53

it's not worth $400.

01:08:55

So that doesn't add up,

01:08:57

that's not what you spend on that,

01:08:59

but people would do it because of how it's anchored.

01:09:02

- Yep. - There you go.

01:09:04

- I really like the anchoring bias as well,

01:09:08

and this isn't one of those ones

01:09:09

that is used in marketing all the time,

01:09:12

and really this is why you really have to trust

01:09:15

the person who is marketing to you,

01:09:17

because if they say this thing is worth $10,000,

01:09:20

and you buy the one that's worth $9,500,

01:09:23

you have to really believe them when they say

01:09:25

this is worth $10,000.

01:09:27

That's where in the past,

01:09:29

I've seen, you go to anywhere,

01:09:31

even, well, it's used something like Slack,

01:09:34

and you go to sign up for Slack,

01:09:35

and you see the different plans that are available.

01:09:37

It's like the free, the basic,

01:09:38

and the enterprise or something like that.

01:09:41

They're anchoring off of the enterprise,

01:09:42

and you work backwards,

01:09:43

and you find the one in the middle.

01:09:46

And Slack is an awesome service.

01:09:48

I love it, we use it with Asian efficiency,

01:09:50

we use it a couple other teams that I'm involved with.

01:09:54

I know a lot of people,

01:09:55

I haven't personally had to pay for any of the premium features

01:09:59

because of the way that we use it,

01:10:01

but I know a lot of people who do.

01:10:03

They trust the company,

01:10:05

but that anchoring bias,

01:10:06

that's not a bad thing in Slack's case,

01:10:10

because they're providing the different options,

01:10:13

but any sort of web service that you go to,

01:10:15

they'll use the same sort of thing.

01:10:18

And if you just go there cold

01:10:19

and you have no idea who it is,

01:10:20

or what the service is all about,

01:10:23

that's where you really have to be aware

01:10:25

of that type of stuff.

01:10:26

And so, you mentioned buying a car, for example,

01:10:29

really important who you buy your car from.

01:10:31

You don't wanna buy it from the sleazy car salesman

01:10:35

who is gonna sell you a lemon,

01:10:37

but if you really trust the person that you're buying from,

01:10:39

and they say, "This one's worth $10,000,

01:10:41

"this one's worth $9,500,

01:10:42

"doesn't have this sister this."

01:10:45

You can use anchoring bias,

01:10:47

and it doesn't have to be a negative thing.

01:10:49

- Yes, yes, I'm with you.

01:10:51

- A little bit of a tangent, sorry.

01:10:53

(laughs)

01:10:54

- That's all right, I'm with you.

01:10:55

We see this stuff a lot.

01:10:57

- All right, so, there's two I wanna call out.

01:11:02

The one I wanna call it just because it's appropriate

01:11:07

for our audience is the zygronic effect,

01:11:09

which I think maybe we've even mentioned

01:11:11

on this podcast before.

01:11:13

This was interesting because he talks about

01:11:15

David Allen specifically,

01:11:16

and I got more about the science behind David Allen's approach

01:11:19

from the three pages here

01:11:20

and the end of the getting things done,

01:11:22

but I think he talks about how we keep

01:11:25

uncompleted things in our head,

01:11:28

and we clear them when they are finished.

01:11:29

But what's interesting about this

01:11:31

is that those outstanding tasks only nod us

01:11:33

until we know how we're going to deal with them.

01:11:37

And that's why task managers are so important.

01:11:39

Okay, so that one I think is interesting

01:11:42

from a productivity perspective,

01:11:43

but the one that I have an action item for

01:11:46

is the news illusion where we are incredibly well informed,

01:11:51

yet we know incredibly little.

01:11:54

There's, I mean, especially now, I think,

01:11:58

with this current state of news,

01:12:00

you get very biased information no matter

01:12:03

what side you associate with.

01:12:07

And there's a book by Simon Sinek

01:12:10

where he kind of explains why this is the case

01:12:12

called leaders eat last, I believe.

01:12:15

And he talks about some of the regulations that were passed

01:12:18

and basically when news companies had,

01:12:21

they didn't have as strict guidelines

01:12:24

on presenting different sides of the story.

01:12:27

You got people who sensationalized one side of the story

01:12:30

because it resulted in higher ratings

01:12:32

and you find yourself in situation we are today.

01:12:35

But really the thing that I took away from this

01:12:39

is that we don't need all of that news.

01:12:42

We don't need to know everything that is going on

01:12:44

because it doesn't have any positive benefit.

01:12:48

And so one of my takeaways here is no news,

01:12:52

except for tech news.

01:12:53

And that's just because I find it interesting

01:12:55

and I want to know about that sort of stuff.

01:12:58

It has a direct application to a lot of the work that I do,

01:13:02

but I don't need to necessarily go on to CNN

01:13:05

or Fox News or MSNBC or any of those other stations

01:13:08

that just find out what's going on in the world.

01:13:10

I've often told people, and this is not something

01:13:14

that I've really firmly internalized,

01:13:17

but I use Twitter fairly often.

01:13:19

That's really the only social media network I'm on.

01:13:22

And I like to look at the trends every once in a while

01:13:24

because I feel like that gives you a pretty accurate view

01:13:27

of what people think about what is going on in the world

01:13:30

as opposed to it being colored or tainted by one side

01:13:35

or the other.

01:13:36

And so I guess this was justification for me to use Twitter

01:13:39

as my news since I'm already there

01:13:41

and not feel like I'm missing out

01:13:43

because I don't subscribe to a quote unquote real news source.

01:13:46

- I don't like the news at all.

01:13:49

I have avoided it for a while 'cause even if, like,

01:13:54

of course there's the confirmation bias that comes in.

01:13:57

You're only gonna listen to the one that talks about

01:13:59

the things that you like and in the way that you liked them.

01:14:03

But at the same time, ratings go up

01:14:07

if negative things are talked about.

01:14:09

- Exactly.

01:14:10

- As opposed to positive.

01:14:11

So every time I come away from watching the news,

01:14:14

which the only time I really watch the news

01:14:16

is when I am somehow stuck in front of a TV at, say,

01:14:20

a hotel, try and eat breakfast, and they've got the news on.

01:14:23

That's about the only time I really watch the news,

01:14:26

which is awesome.

01:14:27

But it's something that I know if I spend time watching the news.

01:14:31

I only have to watch it for about five or six minutes.

01:14:34

And they've, like, jumped through, like, seven stories

01:14:36

in that amount of time.

01:14:37

And I just feel like the world is going to collapse

01:14:40

because of what they're presenting.

01:14:42

It doesn't matter what it is, what station it is.

01:14:45

It seems to always be the same.

01:14:47

- Yep, yep, definitely agree.

01:14:50

- All right, so how do you overcome this stuff?

01:14:53

Do you overcome it?

01:14:54

I think you alluded to this earlier

01:14:57

of being aware of them but being okay,

01:14:59

not worrying about them in some cases.

01:15:02

And I think there's a lot of value in that

01:15:03

because if you're trying to overcome all of these,

01:15:06

how many are in here, Mike?

01:15:07

Did you, what was the number?

01:15:08

It was like 100--

01:15:09

- I believe there were 99 of them.

01:15:12

And so that's a pretty big checklist.

01:15:14

(Mike laughs)

01:15:15

- See, he should have come up with one more.

01:15:17

(Mike laughs)

01:15:18

But biases against biases, maybe.

01:15:21

But I feel like if you're trying to overcome these things,

01:15:25

like, this is not gonna happen.

01:15:27

Like, you're not going to overcome all of them.

01:15:29

I think over time, you can slowly build up resolve

01:15:32

against certain ones and know which ones you're susceptible to

01:15:36

and find ways to overcome those.

01:15:38

There's probably some value in doing that.

01:15:39

I know that from us reading so many books

01:15:43

and in such short time frames,

01:15:44

you tend to hear about certain ones.

01:15:47

On occasion that get talked about in more detail,

01:15:50

I know going through this, there was probably six or seven

01:15:52

of them that I know we've talked about in other books.

01:15:56

And they're things that I feel like

01:15:57

I've been working to overcome as it is.

01:15:59

So I think there's some value in reading through this

01:16:02

and just seeing what they are and knowing

01:16:03

that you're gonna have to try to beat some of them.

01:16:05

And then just building that over time.

01:16:07

I don't think you're gonna just sit down and say,

01:16:08

I'm gonna beat this one today.

01:16:11

It's not gonna work that way.

01:16:13

- Right, actually when I was reading this,

01:16:15

I was thinking about the decision-making framework

01:16:17

from decisive, the rap format.

01:16:20

Widen your options, reality test your assumptions,

01:16:25

attain distance and prepare to be wrong.

01:16:28

And the four specific villains of decision-making

01:16:31

that they address in that book,

01:16:33

a couple of them are cognitive biases.

01:16:36

So it's addressing them specifically.

01:16:38

And as I was reading this, let's think back to that.

01:16:40

And that's a great framework,

01:16:41

but it's assuming that these are the cognitive biases

01:16:44

that impact you or you're most susceptible to.

01:16:47

And so I think there's some value

01:16:48

in identifying where your weaknesses are.

01:16:51

The strategy to overcome them, I kind of alluded to this,

01:16:54

but he's got in the epilogue, the strategy.

01:16:57

And he starts it off by saying that just because you,

01:17:01

you've read through these doesn't mean

01:17:03

that you're not gonna struggle with them anymore.

01:17:04

He admits that he struggles with them.

01:17:06

Kind of the way that he attacks this is that

01:17:11

he recognizes these cognitive biases

01:17:15

and tries to overcome them

01:17:16

when he's making a really important decision.

01:17:17

But the trivial stuff, the day-to-day stuff,

01:17:20

he's fine letting his emotions handle that

01:17:23

because if you were to employ a framework

01:17:26

for every single decision that you make,

01:17:28

the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day.

01:17:32

So if you're gonna go through a 99-point checklist

01:17:34

for every one of those 35,000 decisions,

01:17:36

you'll have, well, you won't even get through all 35,000.

01:17:40

You won't actually do anything and you'll be exhausted.

01:17:44

So the efficiency mechanism is where you do allow

01:17:47

your emotions to make some of the decisions

01:17:50

and you don't worry about the fact that

01:17:53

these cognitive biases may come into play

01:17:54

when you're choosing which restaurant you're gonna go

01:17:56

out to eat at or what you're gonna wear in the morning.

01:18:00

You're not gonna go through, oh, the overconfidence effect

01:18:04

is kicking in here as I'm choosing which shirt to wear.

01:18:07

It doesn't matter.

01:18:08

- Just run with it.

01:18:10

- Yeah, yeah.

01:18:11

And so I think everybody's gotta find their own balance

01:18:14

with this, but basically, I think it's the knowledge

01:18:18

of these things that they exist that is beneficial.

01:18:21

Going through all 99 of these

01:18:22

and not being able to recite all 99 of these,

01:18:24

not having them all written down in a book,

01:18:26

even in my notes, which I have this huge mind node,

01:18:29

I did not write down every single one.

01:18:31

I wrote down most of them, what they were

01:18:33

and the big takeaways to me,

01:18:35

like what spoke to me as I read through it.

01:18:38

But you don't need to recognize every single decision

01:18:41

that you make that all of this stuff is coming into play.

01:18:44

You just need to know what are the ways that you could fail

01:18:47

when you really do need to make a good important decision.

01:18:51

And then what are the steps that you personally

01:18:53

should take in order to overcome that?

01:18:55

And I think that's where this book offers a lot of value.

01:18:58

He doesn't give specific strategies

01:19:00

for every single one of these,

01:19:02

but in the words of G.I. Joe,

01:19:04

now you know and knowing is half the battle.

01:19:07

Way to go, G.I. Joe.

01:19:09

So for action items here, one of the things that I,

01:19:15

well, the only thing I wrote down here,

01:19:17

'cause so much of this is just be aware of this,

01:19:20

which that's a lot of books, it seems like,

01:19:22

okay, just use this as knowledge

01:19:25

when you're making decisions and talking in the future.

01:19:27

But in this case, the one that I wrote down specifically here

01:19:31

is working through my marketing strategies online.

01:19:34

And we talked about this a lot earlier.

01:19:36

It's something I've been struggling with.

01:19:38

I'm working through it on theoretical,

01:19:39

to a point, and it's something it's,

01:19:42

I've kind of been painfully aware of it lately,

01:19:45

and I say painfully aware very intentionally I do that

01:19:49

because it has literally caused pain to my brain at times.

01:19:52

So, okay, I need to figure this out.

01:19:55

What is it I want to do?

01:19:56

'Cause I want to grow so many of these things online

01:19:59

that I'm doing, but I don't want to do that

01:20:01

in a scammy way, I guess, would be the way to say that.

01:20:05

So I'm just trying to nail down,

01:20:06

what is it I'm okay with?

01:20:08

What is it that I like to do,

01:20:09

and how do I find a good way to do that?

01:20:13

That's what I got.

01:20:14

- Yeah, it makes sense.

01:20:16

The action items that I had,

01:20:18

one of them I talked about already,

01:20:19

that is the no news, except tech news,

01:20:23

just because I find that specifically interesting

01:20:26

and that's not gonna depress me.

01:20:28

The other one, I wrote it down here

01:20:32

as no when to hold them and when to fold them.

01:20:34

This is being the epilogue,

01:20:36

and just recognizing what are the decisions

01:20:39

that I should be considering my cognitive biases.

01:20:43

For example, if I were going to change careers,

01:20:46

take a different job, whatever,

01:20:47

like the big decisions, like that where I want to move

01:20:50

to that sort of thing, like that's where I want to recognize

01:20:53

that this stuff is actually coming into play.

01:20:56

And then recognizing when not to consider

01:21:00

the cognitive biases.

01:21:02

For example, when booking a flight, choosing a restaurant,

01:21:05

whatever, recognize that,

01:21:07

I don't need to collect all of the information,

01:21:09

I can just offload this,

01:21:10

I can make the emotional decision, and it's gonna be fine.

01:21:14

- And you have to be okay with that.

01:21:16

- So I guess the takeaway from that,

01:21:19

if you were gonna try to hold me accountable to this,

01:21:22

is did I make any stupid decisions take much longer

01:21:26

than they needed to be?

01:21:27

(laughs)

01:21:29

- Okay.

01:21:30

I will ask you that question next time, Mike.

01:21:33

- Okay.

01:21:34

(laughs)

01:21:36

- So author's style,

01:21:37

I like kind of the rapid fire of this one,

01:21:41

and a lot of cases I don't like that,

01:21:43

but he spells it out in the intro

01:21:45

that I'm not going to explain how to beat these things,

01:21:48

I'm just going to share with you this list

01:21:50

that I have collected over time.

01:21:52

And he does a very good job of giving you tons and tons

01:21:56

of examples, there are hundreds of examples in this thing.

01:21:59

And I think there's like two or three examples per cognitive

01:22:03

bias, and when you think about them being two and a half,

01:22:05

three pages long, each, like that,

01:22:07

he's covering stories quick, and it's a lot of them.

01:22:10

It's one that would be very hard to skim, I would say.

01:22:14

Like there's no way you could really skim through this

01:22:16

and understand each one of them at the depth that you could,

01:22:20

like you would just miss a bunch of things.

01:22:22

If you did that.

01:22:23

So he has a very engaging style,

01:22:25

'cause it's interesting to read,

01:22:27

and you want to just keep going on it.

01:22:29

It is, there's not a real easy way to summarize it.

01:22:32

That's why we didn't really try to go through it at all.

01:22:36

There's not a way to just say,

01:22:38

this is something you need to do,

01:22:39

'cause there's so many different things here.

01:22:43

It's like a whole bunch of little stuff,

01:22:45

which are all helpful, but really hard to summarize.

01:22:48

So I do really like it.

01:22:51

I'm not really sure how to rate this one though.

01:22:54

Like I've been sitting here trying to figure out

01:22:55

what to put this at.

01:22:57

I'm inclined to put it at a 4.0,

01:23:00

'cause I really like the book,

01:23:02

but I'm not real sure what else I want out of it,

01:23:04

but it doesn't feel like it's a five or even a 4.5.

01:23:08

I'm not really sure, but I think I'm putting it at a 4.0,

01:23:10

but I don't really have a good rationale for that one, Mike.

01:23:14

- Fair enough.

01:23:15

Yeah, I struggled with that as well,

01:23:17

partly because I felt like,

01:23:20

because we're reading it for Bookworm,

01:23:22

I needed to take good notes on this.

01:23:26

The, I think it would have felt totally different

01:23:29

if I was just reading this for fun,

01:23:30

and I could read these three page chapters and just be like,

01:23:33

oh, that was interesting.

01:23:34

We'll find the next one,

01:23:36

which is what I did sometimes,

01:23:38

but most of these I tried to at least write down

01:23:40

like what it actually was so I could decide

01:23:43

if it's something that was worth talking about.

01:23:45

So in some ways, this was kind of stressful to read.

01:23:50

I'm gonna share with you the PDF version of my Mind Node file,

01:23:55

and you can feel free to put this in the show notes

01:23:57

if you want, excuse any typos

01:23:58

because most of it was done on my phone,

01:24:01

but it's enormous.

01:24:02

And I don't know, I mean, there's definitely,

01:24:08

I got a lot, I got a lot out of this book.

01:24:10

There's a lot in here and his stories are great.

01:24:13

I mean, every single three page section,

01:24:15

he's got powerful stories.

01:24:16

He's got a lot of research that he cites.

01:24:19

Like I'm very impressed by the amount of work

01:24:21

that went into this book.

01:24:23

But that being said, it's definitely not

01:24:26

a five star, in my opinion either.

01:24:28

And because of the way that I went through it,

01:24:34

I kind of dreaded it in some sense

01:24:39

because I guess it comes back to the chauffeur

01:24:42

knowledge thing.

01:24:43

I knew that he really understood this stuff

01:24:45

a lot better than I did.

01:24:47

I felt a little bit inadequate, I guess,

01:24:51

getting on the microphone today and talking about this stuff

01:24:53

because I'm like, I don't really understand

01:24:54

what all this stuff is.

01:24:55

You have three pages is enough to help me understand

01:24:57

procrastination or the gambler's fallacy

01:24:59

or any of that stuff.

01:25:02

So I struggle with this as well.

01:25:04

I think I'm gonna meet you at the foro.

01:25:07

It's definitely like a lot of great content

01:25:09

which is why I can't really justify reading it

01:25:11

lower than that, but it also wasn't anything

01:25:15

that just blew me out of the water

01:25:17

and it's like, oh, this is amazing.

01:25:18

I can't wait to tell everybody I know about this book.

01:25:21

Certain people I think will get a lot out of this book.

01:25:23

I also think that it's gonna be completely overwhelming

01:25:27

for some people as well.

01:25:28

- Right, yeah, I'm with you.

01:25:30

I think a lot of what we do on Bookworm

01:25:32

could come across as the chauffeurs thing,

01:25:36

but just know listeners, we're learning this as we go.

01:25:40

Like we just finished the book

01:25:42

so we're talking about something we just read.

01:25:44

So just be aware of that.

01:25:46

So I don't know that we really need to change anything

01:25:48

for that.

01:25:49

It's just something that,

01:25:51

this is the nature of the show.

01:25:52

So it goes.

01:25:53

So we got a couple foros there

01:25:57

and what we've got for upcoming books.

01:26:01

See, this one was your choice.

01:26:02

Next one's mine.

01:26:04

Upcoming is The Legend of the Monk and the Merchant

01:26:07

by Terry Felber.

01:26:09

And this is the last of the Dave Ramsey books, Mike.

01:26:12

- Nice.

01:26:14

We get through this one and no more Dave Ramsey books.

01:26:18

I don't know if I'm excited about that.

01:26:20

Sad about that.

01:26:21

It just is.

01:26:22

- It means we can go work for Dave Ramsey, right?

01:26:24

- Ooh, there you go.

01:26:26

We get after that.

01:26:29

- I mentioned I actually met him,

01:26:30

well, didn't actually meet him.

01:26:32

I saw him at an Anshia Leadership one day event.

01:26:36

And he's an interesting guy.

01:26:40

I really appreciate his perspective

01:26:43

on leadership specifically.

01:26:45

Everybody kind of knows him as the money guy,

01:26:47

but I think that the money principles

01:26:50

that he teaches on a show and stuff like that,

01:26:52

those have application in a lot of different ways,

01:26:54

which is why Anshia Leadership is kind of a cool brand.

01:26:58

The whole time I was sitting there though,

01:26:59

I was kind of thinking to myself,

01:27:01

there's no way I could work for this guy.

01:27:03

(laughing)

01:27:05

- That is actually a conversation I've had to have

01:27:08

with my wife before because he is always looking

01:27:11

for Ruby on Rails developers, which is my bread and butter.

01:27:15

So I have had to have this conversation before,

01:27:19

but always the bullet that kills it every single time

01:27:23

is you have to live in Tennessee to work for him.

01:27:28

And we're pretty firmly rooted in Minnesota.

01:27:30

So that's not something that I would need

01:27:34

to consider in reality, but it is a conversation

01:27:38

I've had to have before.

01:27:40

- Yeah, yeah. (laughing)

01:27:43

One after that is one that I picked up a little bit ago

01:27:47

and is one of those classics, I guess.

01:27:51

Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.

01:27:56

And I think this will be interesting to cover

01:27:59

on Bookworm and it kind of fills a spot

01:28:02

in the library kind of like seven habits

01:28:04

of how the effect of people did,

01:28:06

where it's like, okay, you guys talk about productivity books,

01:28:08

but you haven't covered this one yet.

01:28:11

So that's really a justification.

01:28:13

I don't know much about this book

01:28:14

other than a couple of people that I really respect

01:28:17

have recommended it.

01:28:18

It was written quite a while ago though,

01:28:20

so it'll be interesting to go through this.

01:28:23

- Yeah, I'm excited about that one as well.

01:28:26

For a gap book, I am reading Getting Things Done, Mike.

01:28:30

(laughing)

01:28:32

- The other one.

01:28:33

- Oh, right, the other one.

01:28:34

Yeah, it's by Edwin Bliss.

01:28:37

So this is one, and maybe we should be doing this one

01:28:41

for a bookworm, I don't know,

01:28:42

but I had this one recommended to me by Mike Vardy

01:28:45

over on the Productivitiest.

01:28:47

And he mentioned that he shared this on Instagram.

01:28:52

People kind of went nuts wanting to know something about it

01:28:55

and I happened to order it

01:28:57

and I didn't really think about that a whole lot.

01:29:00

So I posted a picture of the order of books I had come in

01:29:03

and everybody wanted to know about this one.

01:29:05

- Oh, I get what you're saying, Mr. Vardy.

01:29:08

That's, yeah, people always, what is that?

01:29:11

Oh, yeah, well, it's from way back before David Allen did.

01:29:15

His book, this one is, what was it?

01:29:17

It was published in 1976.

01:29:20

So it's an older one.

01:29:22

So I'm gonna go through that one,

01:29:24

just kind of curious as to what a mid '70s version

01:29:27

of Getting Things Done is.

01:29:29

- And the one that I have for a gap book,

01:29:32

I don't think I've mentioned this one before,

01:29:34

but I couldn't go back and see if I mentioned on the last show

01:29:38

or not.

01:29:38

And that is Confessions of the Pricing Man by Herman Simon.

01:29:43

And this is an economics book in a lot of ways.

01:29:50

It talks about, like the subtitle says

01:29:54

how price affects everything.

01:29:56

It uses a lot of stories and a lot of examples

01:29:59

of what happened when companies did this sort of thing.

01:30:03

And so that's kind of right up my alley.

01:30:05

I'm a little bit of a nerd when it comes to that sort of stuff,

01:30:07

understanding why companies launch a product

01:30:10

at a specific price point and the impact that it has.

01:30:13

He uses stories in there about how people were like,

01:30:14

on the verge of bankruptcy, they doubled their price

01:30:17

and all of a sudden they're doing really well,

01:30:18

even the product didn't change.

01:30:21

Like the number of sales goes up

01:30:23

because they just raised the price.

01:30:24

And so this kind of goes along with our discussion

01:30:27

on the marketing, but I wanna understand

01:30:29

how this really impacts selling products.

01:30:34

And I wanna be able to use the principles that are in here

01:30:38

in a lot of the projects that I'm working on,

01:30:40

not in a manipulative way like we talked about today,

01:30:42

but just understanding the economics behind things.

01:30:46

- Yeah, last time you were talking about 10% happier.

01:30:50

- Oh yeah, yeah.

01:30:51

- That was the one you were going to last time.

01:30:52

So, I don't know, it sounds interesting.

01:30:54

Maybe I should pick this one up as well.

01:30:55

That looks like an interesting topic.

01:30:58

This is a recommendation by Tan and also Brooks

01:31:02

from Agent Efficiency.

01:31:03

And I have not been disappointed yet

01:31:06

by a book that Tan has recommended.

01:31:08

- Okay, good to know.

01:31:11

I know that I've got,

01:31:14

I'm wrapping up the list of books that I had,

01:31:18

'cause I tend to select my books like five in a row

01:31:20

and just plan them all out.

01:31:21

And I'm coming up to the end of that

01:31:22

and I need to start filling in what my next five

01:31:26

are going to be and I'm planning to do that 100%

01:31:30

from the book recommendations from listeners.

01:31:33

At least on my end of things,

01:31:34

I don't know what Mike's gonna do,

01:31:35

but listeners, if you're listening to this,

01:31:37

'cause if you're hearing this, you're listening to this,

01:31:39

but I am going to be going through those book recommendations

01:31:42

and selecting at least five for my selections

01:31:46

in the upcoming list.

01:31:47

So if you want to get your book on that list,

01:31:51

bookworm.fm/recommend, fill it out, send it in,

01:31:55

I'll get it and I'll put it on the book list

01:31:57

and I'll look through that book list

01:31:59

whenever I'm selecting those

01:32:00

and maybe yours will be selected.

01:32:02

There you go.

01:32:04

- Nice.

01:32:05

Yeah, I've selected a couple from the list.

01:32:07

I've not batched them like you're talking about,

01:32:10

but yeah, I'll definitely pick some from the list as well.

01:32:14

I try to balance them between books

01:32:16

that I've been recommended and books

01:32:18

that I wanted to read for a while.

01:32:20

But if you want to give us some feedback,

01:32:25

we would really appreciate it

01:32:26

if you wanted to leave us a five-star review

01:32:28

so we could end KCRW from the top spot

01:32:33

when you search for bookworm on iTunes,

01:32:35

we would really appreciate it.

01:32:37

But all of that feedback really helps guide the show.

01:32:42

We do listen to it and we want to hear what you think.

01:32:46

So you can either contact us via the website

01:32:49

or give us an iTunes review if you've got a moment

01:32:51

that would really help other people find the show

01:32:53

and we would really appreciate it.

01:32:56

- Yeah, I'm one that's going to go through the list

01:32:58

for sure for selecting next books.

01:33:00

I know that I tend to get some other recommendations

01:33:03

here and there.

01:33:05

For some reason I seem to do those as gap books

01:33:07

for some reason.

01:33:08

They tend to fall into that category for me,

01:33:10

but I don't know.

01:33:12

We'll see where I land.

01:33:14

So get your recommendations in.

01:33:15

I'm going to be selecting from that.

01:33:17

And if you're reading along with us and listening along,

01:33:21

the one that we're doing up next

01:33:23

is the legend of the monk and the merchant.

01:33:25

We'll go through that one next time.