Bookworm Transcripts

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Hey, can you hear me okay? Is my audio sound all right?

00:00:02

Yeah, sounds good to me.

00:00:03

Okay, cool. I am using a different microphone this time.

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Yet again?

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Yeah, well, so here's the thing.

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I've got my recording set up at my co-working space,

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which is 15 now with road construction, 20 plus minutes from my house.

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All right, yeah.

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And occasionally it's like, I need to record something

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and it's not worth the hour drive there and back because I have to park in the ramp

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and then walk to the space and get everything set up.

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It's yeah.

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So I went on the interweb and I looked up Jason Snell's recommendation

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for an entry-level podcast mic, which is this audio technica 2100 USB.

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All right.

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So I bought this.

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I think it was 65 bucks on Amazon dynamic.

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Dynamic.

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It's got an XLR, but it's also a USB microphone.

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I got the little shock mount in the stand for it and tested it out today

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as my travel podcasting set.

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We've even got like somebody on Amazon makes a cheap like custom case for it.

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So I can throw it in my bag when I travel and stuff like that.

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Very nice.

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Very nice.

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I tend to cart the road podcast around.

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Sounds like garbage, which is not fun.

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But it sounds like garbage. I want to, you know, do it right.

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So I will find out more in the post process at the point.

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It sounds fine right now.

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I tested it and I recorded a few samples and logic and it seemed to sound pretty good.

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Doesn't have quite the dynamic range of the high LPR 40 that I normally use,

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but it sounded surprisingly good for for what I paid for it.

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Well, so given that this turns out stamp of approval,

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those of you looking to get into podcasting, check out the audio technical 2100 USB.

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But only if this sounds OK, but only if this is so to actually get there.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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So given the drastic price difference between the high L and the E.T.,

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I would imagine it's probably a good thing that this one doesn't have the range that the other does,

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that the high L does.

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If they worked out to be the same, I feel sorry for Hyle.

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Like that's a sad day.

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Yeah, I love my Hyle and I actually got it from Dan Benjamin during one of his,

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like every once in a while, he just clears out all of his five by five gear

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and gets new stuff.

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And so it's actually Dan Benjamin's Hyle PR 40.

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So it has been through many a podcast and top notch podcast.

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It has produced many a podcast in its day.

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It is an experienced podcasting microphone, which either helps our podcast.

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Can you better either means it's in really good shape or it's worn out needs to quit.

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Yep.

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Let's hope for the former.

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Right.

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Well, I was I've got that one actually at home with me too, but I've got a different sort of dock that I had it hooked up.

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To and I noticed it's a Thunderbolt two doc that's converted into USB C or Thunderbolt three for my MacBook Pro.

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And I noticed the last time I recorded some random artifacts, like every couple minutes and when I'm doing a project,

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I can go back and I can rerecord those sections when you're recording a podcast.

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You either get it or you don't.

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So I'm nervous to use that one from from home.

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So I was looking for an alternative.

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That makes sense.

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Yeah, it's there's nothing more frustrating than having recorded a podcast and then looking at your own audio and seeing these little peaks.

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Whenever you're not talking and wondering what is that?

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And it's some weird pop or boom or something.

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And it's purely because of a bad connection somewhere that is frustrating.

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Yeah, it's it's really annoying.

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Another thing I really like about this audio technical one, like I like the dynamic microphones rather than the connetzer microphones because you have to be in front of the microphone in order for it to pick up your audio.

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It's not going to pick up a whole bunch of background noise.

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Of course, if you can hear my dog clomping on the hardwood floor behind me, then it you've proved me wrong.

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But this one seems to block out a lot of the extra noise.

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And so I warned you, you know, via via I message or messages before we started here that I am recording this from home.

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So there may be a few background noises that aren't normally there because I don't have complete control over the environment here, but we'll give it a shot.

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And I think that this the audio technical does a great job of blocking out all that all that background stuff.

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There you go.

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There's there's the podcast, Mike introduction, I guess, for the day or tip it's for the day.

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Podcasting is very it's very finicky if you want it to be.

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You could you can just grab a run of the mill.

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Like you could do it with your your ear pods that have the mic built into it.

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You can do it that way.

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And I've seen people that do that and it can work.

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But if you get fussy with the audio on it, yeah, you can get really nitpicky with what chords do you use and pop filters and yes on and on it goes.

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It is a slippery slope for sure and an expensive one at that.

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Definitely.

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Podcasting can be a very expensive hobby or job, depending on your perspective.

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Yes.

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All right.

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So follow up Twitter.

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How are you doing with Twitter?

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I still really like Twitter, but I don't think I really asked for stuff on Twitter.

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I asked you for something, but it wasn't on Twitter.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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And whenever someone's it's fun because now Mike is setting me things with hashtag art of asking.

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I like this.

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Yep.

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Despite you absolutely hating the book.

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You're still using it.

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I did.

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I did.

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I like the message.

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Definitely not the messenger.

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So you have an ask for stuff on Twitter.

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So I need to carry this one over the next time.

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I think so.

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You're going to drop it.

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I'm not really sure what to ask for, but that doesn't mean that the action item isn't valid.

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So I guess I need to need to think about this a little bit more.

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I try to be very.

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I don't know.

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I'm the anti-amanda, I guess when it comes to Twitter because I tend not to just throw

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everything out there.

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There's enough people who do that on social media, I feel.

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So I tend to try to think about how I can move things in a positive direction.

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And that I think kind of works against my goal of asking for stuff on Twitter, but.

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Yeah, I put it out there.

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So I definitely do want to.

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Want to do that, just not quite sure how to do it yet.

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That's fair.

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That's very fair.

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I was trying to figure out how to use Twitter more broadly.

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Like I wanted to do some of the asking bits and I understand that.

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I think what I landed on with some of how I've been changing it is doing just a little bit more than just posting feeds of things.

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My past with Twitter has been posting fun articles and posting my own stuff.

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And that's pretty much as far as it went.

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And I'm trying to be better about using it as like a community building and platform building tool as opposed to just.

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Broadcasting.

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And there are a lot of folks who follow me that I would like to get to know better.

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And I'm trying to see Twitter as a way to do that.

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So it changes the way I view Twitter in the broader sense.

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And I think if I follow that path long enough, you eventually land on the way that.

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Amanda was using it or is using it to ask for things and share her life, which I don't think I'll go near as far as she does.

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Like I don't I don't think that's that's not me and not my personality.

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So I don't see it going quite that far, but I do want to use it as a tool to to interact with folks for sure.

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Yeah, it's definitely a good tool for for that sort of thing.

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And I know that like there's a lot of negativity on Twitter.

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I guess I've been able to avoid that for the most part.

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That's an understatement.

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Most of my yeah, I know, but I'm a little bit.

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I mean, I get it.

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People are jerks, but I don't know what I would have to do to get my Twitter to flip like that, I guess.

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Most of the people that I meet, maybe it's just the people in the productivity space because most of the people that I meet that are kind of in the same running the same circles as we do are pretty cool.

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So I guess the productivity community and the Mac community, maybe our exceptions to the general Twitter verse.

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Oh, Twitter.

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Well, we'll keep playing with it.

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See where it lands, but there is the bookworm Twitter thing, but it's purely a feed of the episodes.

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It's true.

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Yeah.

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I I occasionally will will tag the the bookworm account and then I'm never quite sure when you'll actually see it.

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I don't checking the notifications for it.

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Like I see those on a daily basis.

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Like I'm aware of those.

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It's just one that's in most cases, I'm not so certain that the bookworm account needs to respond to them.

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Like I just don't see.

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Like I understand how people use blanket accounts like that, but the bookworm account, I don't think it's one that it doesn't really have a personality, if you will.

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Like it's purely a feed driven deal.

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So I tag it whenever I post things mostly so that other people can find the feed for it.

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And it's a fun way to talk about it, but that's about as far as it goes for me.

00:10:26

Yeah, that makes sense.

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If only we had like a bot that could handle the Twitter account inside baseball for those of you care, Joe basically does everything for this podcast as you show up in the court.

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It's a good time.

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I like doing stuff like this.

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It's fun.

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So if you have any extra money or thanks, you want to send it to Joe.

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Click on the links to the books in the show notes.

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That's the best way because those are affiliate links.

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So that's how that's how the hosting gets paid.

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And that's about all that gets paid with those right now.

00:11:01

So there you go.

00:11:03

There's the plug for the day.

00:11:05

All right.

00:11:07

You have one more action item here.

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Yeah, it was to have at least one conversation with the only goals to listen to understand what the other person is feeling.

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I definitely did do this one.

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What's kind of interesting about this one is that the other person doesn't really understand that that's the perspective or they don't care, I guess, in my experience, because it's a much better experience for them, obviously, to have me just understand like what is what is going on here rather than trying to fix everything.

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So I've actually been able to apply this to a lot of different conversations that I've had.

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You I think you mentioned the last time that like with a spouse and with kids, you've got opportunities for daily practice with this.

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So I'm not including those in this acceptance criteria or definition of done.

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All right.

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If you want to go all scrum on our action.

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Fine finished.

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But I did actually have a conversation with somebody.

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I met them for coffee and definitely this was at the front of my mind and was my only goal in meeting them was to really just understand and hear what they were going through or what what was happening in in their life.

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And it's interesting because

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I guess to get a little bit, little bit religious for a moment.

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I do a lot of a lot of discipling and we've got I've actually got a discipleship group of guys that that I called the rhino squad at our church.

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I've mentioned it on the podcast before.

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I've noticed that with men in particular, like that's always been one of my how do you describe it?

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Like one of the one of the things that's really important to me is is I want to raise up men because I think that a lot of the issues that we suffer from in a society comes from a lack of people accepting responsibility and a lot of them happen to be men.

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I mean, if you have if you have a single parent family, oftentimes it's the mother who's there.

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It's the father who has just doesn't want to deal with it and takes off.

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And I think that that's that's wrong.

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And so I've tried very hard to sew into men and and help men become better husbands, better fathers, better employees, better leaders, better business owners, like whatever it is.

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I believe that there's there's a lot of things that you can develop that will have generalizable results like the cross categorical improvement across your entire life.

00:14:00

If you implement some spiritual principles, so what I'm noticing and this is not necessarily me is when I sit down and I have this perspective of just listen, just understand there will usually be at some point in the conversation.

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Like an aha moment where it's like, okay, now say this.

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And because I have made going back to the seven habits of how affected people, I have made the deposits of paying attention, like really paying attention and really listening when I get inspired to say, you know, one specific thing.

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That is usually very well received and it's really cool to see how that works.

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It's like you listen, you listen, you listen, you listen, you listen.

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Okay, now talk.

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And then when you talk, it's like what you say is hitting the mark and you can tell like the lights are going on.

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And it could be, I think that a lot of times it could be like the exact same thing I could be saying, but if I haven't prepared the ground, if I have not made enough deposits, if I have not listened enough, then it's just going in one ear and out the other.

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So a lot of it is not even like knowing what to say, it's knowing when to say it.

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And I think that the listening part here is a very, very important piece to making the kind of change that I want to in people's lives.

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I think it's hard to counsel people like what you're saying whenever they have some glaring issue or something that they're working through.

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They're not going to receive that until you've, like you're saying, until you've listened or you've paid attention or actively questioned, confirmed that you understand what they're saying.

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Like until you have done a fair amount of that, they're typically not going to listen to you at the level that you would like.

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And it's only at that point that you can really start to share what you see as the next step.

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But at the same time, like what you're saying,

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you don't always know what the thing is that you need to share until you've paid attention long enough.

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And it's not easy to wait, Mike.

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Like it's sometimes I just wanted like this is the thing you need to know.

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I need to tell you right now.

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Why can't you just let me go now?

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Like that's what I tend to want to do.

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It's like, okay, this is not the right thing to do.

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And yet it's the thing I want to do.

00:16:31

Yeah, and high-fak finder in me, you know, typically it's like, okay, we're going to set up this meeting

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and I'm going to help you solve your problem.

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Like that's the old approach, I guess, or at least that would have been the tendency for the old old old approach.

00:16:45

The old, the old Mike, free art of asking, Mike.

00:16:51

So what you're saying is a two star rated book made a big impact on you.

00:16:57

Well, I'm not going to give the book all that credit.

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I guess what I'm going to say is that because I am a high-fak finder,

00:17:06

that's typically how I will naturally approach conversations.

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And I've known for a long time, that's not necessarily the right approach.

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I mean, if you've been married for any length of time,

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you know your wife, either response to that or she doesn't, most likely she does not,

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like mine does.

00:17:24

So like, I've learned that in the past, but this is kind of like reinforcing it.

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And what I've noticed this time around is that as a high-fak finder,

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you want to always have, I'll just speak for myself, I always want to have like an agenda.

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Like, what are we trying to do here?

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What are we trying to fix?

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What's the problem that needs to be fixed?

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What's the thing that needs to be done?

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What's the decision that needs to be made?

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When you go into a conversation with the only goal being to listen or understand,

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it's very freeing for a high-fak finder because you don't have to know all that stuff.

00:18:00

And it's okay.

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I would be very nervous walking into a meeting.

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Somebody were to say, for example, "Hey, we want you to come in and we want to have a meeting.

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My first question is going to be, "Okay, what about?"

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I'm not going to just walk into that meeting unprepared.

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But I guess this attitude of applying it to the conversation of the only goal being to

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listen or to understand means that I don't have to know all that stuff.

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And my little monkey brain inside of me is not pushing all the buttons like,

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"Hey, you don't know this. You don't know that."

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Does that make any sense?

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It's like something inside of me is suppressing the high-fak finder long enough for some actual

00:18:43

good to happen in these conversations.

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"Get myself out of the way that way the positive can happen."

00:18:49

Exactly.

00:18:50

Exactly.

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But for whatever reason, just saying like, "Okay, all you have to do is listen and understand

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what's really going on here."

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That is enough for the high-fak finder nerd inside of me to be like, "Oh, okay."

00:19:01

At the same time, it's uncanny the number of times that if you're just listening to what

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someone else is saying, they come up with the answers themselves.

00:19:10

Exactly.

00:19:11

Or if you're doing the whole active listening thing where you want to ask questions and try

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to genuinely understand what the other person is thinking and feeling around a difficult topic.

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It's just weird how often they drive to their own conclusions.

00:19:27

Like, what's the phrase?

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Thoughts disentangle themselves across lips and pencil tips.

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So it's not mine.

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I stole it from somebody.

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But the concept of that is that you don't fully understand how you yourself think about

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something until you've had a chance to verbalize it either with your mouth by saying it out loud

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or by writing it down.

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This is why people talk about journaling and having that be a big deal or writing a book

00:19:56

or things like what we do here with Bookworm.

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I don't fully synthesize everything about a book until we've had a chance to sit down and talk it

00:20:04

through.

00:20:05

So the concept there is thoughts disentangle themselves across lips and pencil tips.

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You have to get it out of your brain before you fully think it.

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And whenever you're having a conversation with somebody, that's what you're doing.

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If you're asking questions, they're disentangling what they think about it,

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which means they end up coming up with their own solutions sometimes.

00:20:24

Yeah, and that's honestly great segue into today's book because I think that this

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tome of knowledge, the 600 pages that is paid to think.

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Monster.

00:20:36

Yeah, a lot of this is just the right questions to ask yourself.

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And it's almost like having that conversation with somebody, but it's an inner dialogue

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where you've got the prompts and then just by answering the questions that are outlined there,

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you arrive at those right answers.

00:20:54

Do you ready to jump into this thing?

00:20:55

Let's do it.

00:20:57

This might be a 10 hour episode, but give it a shot.

00:21:01

This is your pick.

00:21:02

Well, first of all, this was not actually my pick.

00:21:06

This was a listener.

00:21:07

Yes, it was.

00:21:07

Don't pass that on.

00:21:08

The you chose this.

00:21:09

This was a recommendation, which I picked prior to looking at the page count.

00:21:16

This is bigger than any college textbook I ever had.

00:21:21

And I was a biology major at the beginning.

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So this is a very dense, very heavy book.

00:21:29

And I think that it's a great reference book.

00:21:32

I think that there's a lot of stuff here that I will go back to.

00:21:34

We'll try to unpack this in an hour or two, in a podcast, but it's really not doing it.

00:21:42

Yeah, it's really not doing it justice because all of these individual chapters,

00:21:47

if it's the right thing for you at the right time,

00:21:50

this could completely change your life.

00:21:52

But I think kind of the way we approached it for Bookworm is definitely not the way that

00:21:57

it was intended to be consumed.

00:21:59

It's kind of like you're going to go through these exercises with your team.

00:22:03

You're going to answer these questions during your thinking time and you're going to establish

00:22:08

this habit and then you're going to move on to the next thing.

00:22:11

And I obviously did not take that approach to this book, but there's a ton of stuff in here.

00:22:18

And I will say that comparing it to a college textbook probably isn't fair because I thought

00:22:23

it was a much more entertaining and engaging read than all of my college textbooks put together.

00:22:28

Well, that's good.

00:22:30

Maybe that's maybe that's just because I like the idea of this thinking time.

00:22:35

We've actually got a dojo module that's coming out on this exact topic, which is why I picked it

00:22:40

not realizing how big it was.

00:22:43

But the whole idea here is that you need to have the time to think about your problems because a

00:22:49

lot of the problems that we face, they're not really the problems, they're the symptoms.

00:22:52

And you have to embrace the right mindset once you have that time in order to really uncover

00:22:57

the real problems.

00:22:59

And so paid to think kind of outlines some different processes that you can use to identify the real

00:23:06

problems that you're facing and then figure out the solutions to those.

00:23:10

So my first impression of this book was holy cow, how am I going to get through this in two weeks?

00:23:15

And yeah, the nice thing was that it was interesting enough that I did end up finishing it in about

00:23:25

nine days, which I felt was very impressive, even for myself.

00:23:29

And part of that was that I was going through a lot of it and it felt like there were areas that I

00:23:39

wanted to skim just to get past so much of it because there is a little bit of repetitiveness

00:23:45

with it because you're always asking questions.

00:23:47

And it was getting long.

00:23:50

I was like, okay, I could just skim these four chapters and be okay.

00:23:53

Like that was my thought.

00:23:55

I didn't.

00:23:56

So I actually did go through and read the vast majority of it.

00:24:00

There was a couple of small sections I skimmed.

00:24:01

But I think you're right that this is primarily about taking time to think through and ask yourself

00:24:10

questions about the business and the life that you're leading.

00:24:14

And it's very well laid out.

00:24:17

I mean, it's basically a way to live whenever you stop and look at it.

00:24:21

It's a way to live out life in such a way that's very intentional, which can be very overwhelming.

00:24:26

I mean, it's talking about changing a lot in order to go in the right direction, which is intense for sure.

00:24:35

Yeah, definitely.

00:24:38

And really the very beginning of this book, this stuff is maybe a little bit out of order.

00:24:44

The first thing maybe worth defining here is this Goldsmith productivity principle, the GPP,

00:24:49

which I think starts on page 37.

00:24:51

He mentions it a lot. Basically, what this is is the belief that 80% of an organization's success

00:24:58

is determined by its systems, not its people.

00:25:01

Or most organizations, you think you've got a superstar employee, can't lose this person.

00:25:07

What he's basically saying is that, yeah, you can, as long as you have the systems in place

00:25:11

to do what you need to do.

00:25:14

And that's where a lot of this paid to think methodology comes from, is how do you

00:25:21

actually develop those systems so that you're not consistently relying on a single person

00:25:27

to do a job. And that can sound a little bit cold and inhuman if you

00:25:32

look at it through the wrong lens. But it's not basically, it's not saying this is how you get

00:25:38

rid of all your people. This is how you make your people more effective.

00:25:41

This is very almost disheartening when you stop and think about it. It's like, no,

00:25:47

I'm invaluable to the people I'm working for. Like the...

00:25:51

Yeah, you're not as great as you think you are.

00:25:53

No, don't tell me this. I don't want to know this. Stop. I'm worth at least 90%, not 20%.

00:25:59

That was my first thought. I don't want to know this.

00:26:01

I'm kind of going through this on a micro level right now because, as you mentioned,

00:26:05

we just had a baby last week. And so I've taken two weeks off of work.

00:26:10

And the podcast is still being released. Stuff is still happening at Asian deficiency without me.

00:26:16

So it's kind of like, you know, they can do this without me. They did it without me at the beginning.

00:26:22

They can do it without me again. And really, like as I'm reading this book, it's really interesting

00:26:27

because I'm thinking about like, okay, so I normally do this before a podcast comes out.

00:26:31

I wonder if Marmal is going to do that the same way. And I'm recognizing all of these places

00:26:35

that there are systems in place that need to be updated. One of the things that they talk about

00:26:41

was like this whole maps versus words thing. And, you know, I might have a standard operating

00:26:48

procedure on how to release a podcast episode. But if it's written in a way that I understand it,

00:26:54

but everybody else on the team doesn't understand it, then it probably needs to be rewritten.

00:26:57

I can think of a couple instances of those things that I probably need to update once I get back

00:27:01

to work. That's the beauty of taking time off. It's like you get the perspective on these sorts of

00:27:06

things. There you go. Yeah, exactly. And that's the whole idea of the book is that you need to have

00:27:12

this time quote unquote off so that you can think about the problems that are in your business,

00:27:18

rather than just trying to execute and doing all the day to day stuff, which is where a lot of people

00:27:24

get stuck. And he actually says, I've got so many notes in here that it's going to be really hard

00:27:31

for me to find this stuff. But he's got a chart on one of these pages of the percentage of

00:27:36

time that you should actually spend thinking rather than executing in your job. And he's got it for

00:27:43

the different levels and for the CEO level, which I wouldn't define myself as a CEO. You're definitely

00:27:51

a CEO, Joe. So I was curious to get your feedback on this. He says that you should spend 90% of your

00:27:57

time thinking. I would go out of business. I'm just going to say that. The trick here

00:28:06

is that I am on both ends of that spectrum. So I am CEO. I am little manager. I am the grunt worker

00:28:15

all in one. So the top may be 90, 10, but the bottom 10, 90, I need to be somewhere in the middle.

00:28:24

But I don't know which route it should go. But yeah, that's the important point because he does

00:28:32

talk about how sometimes you do have the different roles. So that is a very important distinction that

00:28:36

you just made that you're not wearing the CEO hat all of the time. And I feel like a lot of this

00:28:42

stuff that he's describing here, these are really big companies where you are only going to have one

00:28:47

role. Yes. And if you only have the one role of a CEO, which I think would be really cool,

00:28:52

but at the same time, that's a lot of you need to stop and think through every little move that

00:28:59

the entire company is making because you're the one who is deciding the next move that all the

00:29:05

grunt workers need to be putting in place. And some people may not like being called a

00:29:09

grunt worker, but you're only worth 20% of what the company needs. So call it what it is.

00:29:16

So question for you, because you have complete control over Joe Buleg Enterprises.

00:29:29

Okay, so what would it look like for you? Because you mentioned you can't just think about your

00:29:35

business 90% of the time you go out of business. But I know you've also mentioned you've probably

00:29:41

on one of your other podcasts that you've been looking for other people to delegate work to and

00:29:47

stuff like that. So what would it look like or what would it take for you to get to the point

00:29:53

where you were wearing that CEO hat most of the time? Have you kind of thought through that?

00:30:00

Because I think that's probably the goal for most people in a situation like yours is how do I

00:30:09

grow this thing? Yes, and the trick that I have, so for those who don't know, because I talk about

00:30:17

this stuff a lot, and I don't always know, I don't always spell out what exactly it is that I'm

00:30:21

talking about with this. But my primary is web development and specifically in the world of

00:30:27

discourse, because you know, discourse expert here. And I am aware that holding onto that hat,

00:30:36

if I'm going to grow that, the only way to really grow it is one of two ways. You can either

00:30:45

stop doing smaller clients and only stick with large corporations and use them as your

00:30:51

main clients. You can do that, or you can go down the path of finding other developers,

00:30:58

managing the client relationships, and then doing the whole management process of these other

00:31:06

developers. And the former is easier for me. The latter is a lot more complicated,

00:31:16

especially when you're first trying to get into it, because you're trying to coerce people to

00:31:23

work for you, and you're trying to pass projects to them, and essentially taking finder's fees,

00:31:28

if you will, and doing the management side of it, and letting them do the hard work, quote unquote,

00:31:34

hard work. And that's not a simple transition. And that's probably the only way that I could

00:31:41

grow that side of my business. Now, the alternative here is that there are a couple other areas that

00:31:46

I maintain and try to drive an income from. You know, I've talked about the productivity

00:31:53

guild before. That's an area that I'm working to build out. I've got the discourse league

00:31:57

plugins that I build and maintain. And those two, I can grow, and I need to spend some time thinking

00:32:04

through. So when I was going through this book, Mike, that was those two areas were the ones that

00:32:09

I spent a lot of time focusing on, because the client side's a lot more difficult and a lot more

00:32:13

challenging to grow in the long run, because there's a lot of development shops out there. And one of

00:32:19

my one of my sales deals is that this is not a company that you're hiring. This is me personally.

00:32:25

So I'm going to manage the entire project start to finish. That's a very big selling point and

00:32:29

people love that. So to consider moving away from that towards being a development shop that I'm

00:32:34

selling against and using as a sales tactic is very odd. Like that would be a very decent shift

00:32:42

for me from a sales standpoint. But I know that I just know that with the like things like the

00:32:49

guild or with the discourse league plugins, those have a lot higher potential with what I'm doing.

00:32:55

Specifically the league plugins, because it's selling code and you have a chance of building

00:33:00

a technology that could become a bigger business. So that's probably where the primary should be

00:33:05

for me in the long run. So that's where I need to spend some time with the CEO hat on.

00:33:09

Yeah. And the reason I ask that is because I know that you do do a lot of that development

00:33:16

stuff. And I know secret, I don't like client work. And I think that what I think that a big

00:33:24

reason why I don't like the client work is exactly as you described, it is easier for me to sit down

00:33:31

and code the website than it is to find somebody that I trust and develop all the systems to have

00:33:36

them do it for me. And I think that what that really shows is not that client work is bad.

00:33:43

It shows that there's some, there's some thinking time that needs to be applied to this,

00:33:48

because the long term solution is not, I don't think, and if it is, that's fine. I think it's

00:33:54

going to be different for different people, but I know you fairly well. So I think that the long

00:34:00

term solution is not Joe has a bunch of development jobs. That's something that you do because maybe

00:34:07

you like writing the code every once in a while, maybe it pays well, you know, that you could have

00:34:12

a lot of different reasons for that particular hat that you wear. But I think that you're like

00:34:21

me in that if you were to actually take the big picture approach and think about like,

00:34:28

well, where does this fit, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, there probably isn't

00:34:32

a whole lot of room for development Joe, am I correct? Yes, because in most cases,

00:34:39

we're client work Joe, I should say. Yeah, I mean, in most cases, what you find is developers who

00:34:44

who do the client work side of things, it's simply a way to pay the bills on their way towards

00:34:52

building something that takes off. It's, it's really hard to find someone who does what I do,

00:34:57

who doesn't have three, four, five side things that they're building for themselves,

00:35:03

hoping that one of those takes off. And when one takes off, they tend to drop the client work

00:35:10

very quickly and then go build on that. Like that's the typical trajectory there. And it's for a good

00:35:16

reason. Yeah, I think that a big reason here, like you just mentioned that when people hire you,

00:35:23

they are hiring you, they're not hiring the fact that this code is going to get written.

00:35:27

I think that that doesn't necessarily scale. And if it were to scale, you've got to redefine

00:35:34

what your order qualifiers versus order winners are. This is one of the things you really liked

00:35:38

about this book. He's defines these different characteristics of why you might get a job or get

00:35:45

a contract, whatever, into one of these two categories. And the order qualifiers are the things

00:35:51

that just get you into the conversation. So somebody is developing a Ruby project, the fact

00:35:57

that you know Ruby is an order qualifier. It's not going to be the thing that gets you the job

00:36:03

versus all the other people who actually know how to code Ruby. And I've seen this in my own

00:36:10

experience where I think there's a lot of things that that if you're looking at your business through

00:36:16

the wrong lens, you don't have the right perspective, you can say, Oh, this is an order winner when

00:36:22

really it's just an order qualifier. If you look at a lot of the other people that are out there,

00:36:26

this thing that you think differentiates you maybe doesn't differentiate you as much

00:36:32

as you think it does. And so you have to kind of go back to the drawing board then, and you have to

00:36:37

figure out what are the things that qualify as order winners for our organization or for our

00:36:44

business. And if you don't have those, how do you develop the things that will become the order winners?

00:36:53

Yes. And if you want to use like continue the example of mine, for me, the order qualifiers are

00:36:59

Ruby on Rails, Ember, front end development stuff, you know, the whole styling side of things,

00:37:03

those qualify me to do the thing. But what I've found is with the size of clients that I work with

00:37:10

and the volume that I work with, the winners are speed. I can build something very quickly and get

00:37:17

it out the door. And two, you don't have a whole lot of people to work with. If you want to know

00:37:24

something about it, you go to me. If you want to change something on the code, you go to me. If

00:37:28

you want to add to it, you go to me. Like it's just a continual like, this is very easy. They have a

00:37:33

single point of contact and that person handles everything, which is sometimes stressful for me.

00:37:39

Like that's that's not always simple. But at the same time, it simplifies the process to the point

00:37:45

where they don't have to deal with it, which means that their life gets easier and they see a lot of

00:37:51

value in that. And it becomes a very big winner in most cases. It's kind of rare that I start a

00:37:57

conversation with a client, make sure that I bring this up and lose a contract because of it.

00:38:03

Like it's kind of rare that I do that. I think that that's that's great. And the stuff that you

00:38:10

just identified, like those are things that don't just apply to Joe Bielig. So I think what was

00:38:16

illuminated to me was thinking back on my experience of client work. I typically would just say,

00:38:24

like, like you said, that the benefit of working with me is you get to work with me. And I'm going

00:38:29

to make sure that your stuff gets done on time. I'm going to make sure that the code is clean.

00:38:34

But if you actually take the time to identify what are the benefits of working with you, that is

00:38:40

something then that you could scale. You could go out and hire somebody. And you could in the

00:38:46

interview process of finding the right person, you could say, okay, you got to be able to manage

00:38:49

the project because when someone hires Joe Bielig Enterprises, they're going to get one person who's

00:38:54

going to handle their project. And they're going to make sure that it's done quickly. And they're

00:38:58

going to make sure that it's done well. Like, but I guess when I was going through this, I was

00:39:02

thinking back to my experience and how like, I never actually did that. And maybe my client work

00:39:08

experiences a little bit different if I actually do take that approach. I think that regardless

00:39:14

of whether you're in client work or not, that this whole idea of working from the desired outcome

00:39:21

is really important. And this gets into what he calls a Cyclonic Strategic Thinking Modeler,

00:39:26

CST. And really, it's just thinking backwards. But there's five different steps here. And he

00:39:32

does has a lot of these types of lists, which I think kind of help cement this stuff. They give

00:39:38

you a framework that you can actually wrap your head around rather than just, oh, yeah, begin with

00:39:43

the end in mind. So real quickly, the five steps here, the desired outcome. So where you want to

00:39:49

be at the end, and then the strategy that you're going to use to get there. From there, you're

00:39:53

going to think about the macro tactics. So big picture tactics. And then you've got the individual

00:39:58

tactics, the little things that you're going to do every day. And then there's the execution of it.

00:40:02

And this whole idea of executive thinking, or ET as he calls it throughout the rest of the book,

00:40:10

is the first four of these. So the desired outcome, the strategy, the macro tactics, and the tactics.

00:40:16

And that's what he's saying that as a CEO, you should be spending 90% of your time doing,

00:40:21

and only 10% of your time actually executing the strategy and the tactics that you've

00:40:26

identified that are going to get you where you want to go.

00:40:31

One of the things I struggled with on this book was the number of lists. I know you like these things,

00:40:36

but I'm not going to remember them all. I'm just going to drop a lot of them.

00:40:41

Me either. I don't know that I'm going to actually end up remembering any of them time it's said and

00:40:46

done. I was trying to, this is something I try to do in books, quite a bit is generalize it

00:40:53

to the point that I can remember it. And this one's hard to do that with, because it's so granular

00:41:00

that it gets very difficult to say, "Here's what I'm going to take away from this,

00:41:04

and here's how I'm going to apply that." This is why I only have one action item that we'll get to

00:41:08

later, but I struggled with that. And it's fun to go through it. It makes it easier to synthesize

00:41:14

it in that moment, but I had a hard time nailing it down later on.

00:41:17

Yeah, that's totally fair. And that's honestly why I said at the beginning that this is a great

00:41:23

reference, because I think at any given point in your business ownership journey,

00:41:30

there's going to be something in here that is exactly what you need, but you don't have to

00:41:36

necessarily memorize or remember all of this stuff, just knowing that it's there and being able to

00:41:41

reference it is something that I think is very valuable. Yes, and that's something I love about

00:41:47

having these physical books, because I will often remember, "Here's a thing that I picked up whenever

00:41:54

I was reading Innovators Dilemma. As much as that book was painful to read, this is a thing that I

00:41:59

remember I picked up from that." But what was the exact like that? And then I can go grab it off the

00:42:04

shelf and flip to my notes and be done. Like that's something I love having about that. This book is

00:42:10

very much like that. I have a number of things outlined. I have a number of notes indexed in the

00:42:15

back. This is something that I think will definitely, you know, we keep talking about it as a textbook.

00:42:19

It definitely is like it's something I'm going to refer to over time, but it's not something that

00:42:25

I think I'm going to have some big revelation as I'm going through it. It's going to help

00:42:29

supplementing a lot of what I already do. Yeah, and he loves the Innovators Dilemma, by the way.

00:42:36

Yes. He talks about Clayton Christensen. Did I get his name right? Yes. I think. Yes.

00:42:42

Okay. Yeah, he talks about them quite a bit. And actually, there's a couple examples here,

00:42:47

including the next point on the list here that you had put on here on page 3.23. He talks about

00:42:54

Kodak. This kind of gets into disruptive technologies and things like that, but he kind of references

00:43:01

the case studies from the Innovators Dilemma in support of some of his ideas regarding the

00:43:06

disruptive technologies. Yeah. And the thing with Kodak, I think that was a very interesting

00:43:17

story because ultimately it's about how Kodak was trying to innovate into the digital camera

00:43:25

space. So correct me if I'm wrong here, because I just read another story about Kodak. So I'm

00:43:29

making sure I'm getting the right one. But Kodak was working towards innovating into the digital

00:43:33

camera space and long story short didn't when they originally thought they should

00:43:39

and ended up falling behind as a result, which I think is where Innovators Dilemma plays in very

00:43:45

nicely because the disruptive technology piece is very important. And honestly,

00:43:52

certain sides of my business take advantage of that and trying to help corporations introduce

00:43:59

disruptive technology. So it's something that I'm very familiar with. But I really wish,

00:44:05

you know, in that story Kodak would run with what they originally had. And it's not something a

00:44:10

lot of companies do is continually doing research and let them run in different ways and trying to

00:44:15

break into new territory. That's something we just don't do. But you have to take, you know,

00:44:20

paid to think, you have to take the time to think through those and be willing to put them in place

00:44:25

the right way. And a lot of companies don't. And even if they try to do it, they still fail

00:44:29

sometimes because they don't see it through to the end like Kodak.

00:44:35

Yeah, that's totally fair. And it's really getting back to the Innovators Dilemma. I think this is

00:44:44

from that book, but he talks about a little bit later, the innovation S curve, where you've got

00:44:50

basically the the amount of effort that you're putting towards something. And then all of a sudden

00:44:56

you you hit a point where you get a whole bunch of gain from it, and then it kind of levels out at

00:45:00

the end. So you can't expect those same gains to to continue to be provided by that that innovation.

00:45:07

And that's where Kodak was there at the top of that S curve. And they weren't embracing this

00:45:13

Innovators mindset where there's really only two options. You're either catching up to somebody,

00:45:17

or if you're the market leader like Kodak, you're creating something new. And what they didn't

00:45:22

realize was that with digital photography, they had the future in their hands. They kind of viewed

00:45:30

that as not that important of an innovation. And then what happened is everybody else recognized

00:45:35

the validity of that technology and recognized the market demand for it. And they embraced it,

00:45:41

and they took off and then Kodak, which developed the technology in the first place.

00:45:44

Basically, they they went out of business. I mean, I believe that they've actually filed

00:45:50

bankruptcy now, which is kind of sad because they had this first. But there's a lot of technologies

00:45:55

that have been like that. I remember seeing something recently. Somebody posted on on Twitter,

00:46:00

a screenshot of, I think it was like Fast Company or Inc, one of those business magazines

00:46:07

from about 10 years ago, and it's Bill Gates holding a like a Nokia cell phone. And it's talking

00:46:15

about how will anybody ever be able to catch Nokia. And obviously that was right before Apple

00:46:21

introduced the iPhone. And this is one of the things that I know I am an Apple fanboy,

00:46:27

unapologetically. So I really like their mindset, regardless of whether you agree with their new

00:46:37

technologies. And you think that the iPhone 10 slash X is like the greatest thing or the,

00:46:42

or the worst thing, it shows that they are consistently looking for the next new thing. I

00:46:51

saw something from one of the analysts that said that that little mechanism they have on the front

00:46:55

where the notch is the, I forget what they call it, but all those different sensors and things.

00:46:59

That is going to give them if that really is something that catches on, that gives them an 18 to

00:47:05

24 month head start on this new technology, which to me just shows their focus is on like,

00:47:13

yeah, the iPhone is the thing that's made us the most valuable company in the world.

00:47:17

But they're always looking for that next new thing. They've famously been working on that car project

00:47:22

project Titan, which up until now there has been nothing from that, but they've sunk a whole bunch

00:47:27

of resources into it to see if there is something there. And I think that this is really, really

00:47:34

interesting with the whole concept of the Apple TV, because Apple already completely changed the

00:47:44

music industry. So they have some experience in this disruptive technology category.

00:47:51

And I think that the recording industry was kind of in the same shoes as Kodak until it was too

00:47:59

late. And then they realize, okay, yeah, this downloadable music, this is a thing. And then they

00:48:04

needed somebody like iTunes to help them get to that point. And I think that if you're,

00:48:12

the Apple has had the technology. And I think that Tim Cook is not completely off his rocker when he

00:48:17

says the future of TV is apps. I mean, you buy a new TV today, you're going to get Netflix,

00:48:21

you're going to get Amazon Prime video, you're going to get cool, you're going to get all of

00:48:24

these things built into the interface, but the interface is terrible. Apple's really good at

00:48:28

interfaces. But I think that the cable companies are extremely hesitant to give Apple this,

00:48:36

they're extremely hesitant to let Apple control this industry like they did the music industry.

00:48:43

And I think it's kind of interesting to see how this is going to play out, because I think they

00:48:47

all recognize that forcing somebody to pay 130 bucks a month to get stuff over a cable box is not

00:48:56

going to work long term. But they're not willing to let me subscribe to just the ESPN, for example.

00:49:06

So I'm kind of, I think that this is something that we, that if you keep an eye on it, it's going

00:49:10

to be really interesting to see how this plays out. And it's exactly what he's talking about in this

00:49:15

book and also in the innovators dilemma playing out right in front of us. Apple's good at this stuff,

00:49:20

and they did it in the music. And I mean, something I would love to see is, especially with the Apple TV,

00:49:26

is seeing them bring to TV and movies, what they did with music. Because I think we'll eventually

00:49:35

get there where you're paying for the specific channels that you want, or the specific networks

00:49:42

even that you want. And I could see them eventually getting to that point. And I think the whichever

00:49:47

network or channel decides to do it first, is going to be in a lot better shape than the ones

00:49:52

who are going to sit tight and say, No, I want my money through the cable company. Like, they're

00:49:57

going to be a lot better off if they move first, because somebody's going to bite on that,

00:50:03

someone's going to go first. And whoever that is is in good shape. I mean, it was the same way with

00:50:10

iTunes and music, you know, the people who went first made a lot more off of it than those who

00:50:16

waited. So again, you know, bring this all the way around. Apple's good at this because they're

00:50:22

willing to, they're willing to bet on something, you know, take the iPhone notch. People are

00:50:27

kind of up in arms over it to a point like, this is ridiculous. Well, it creates an iconic symbol.

00:50:33

And it brings them into a category that people will have a hard time catching up to. And, you know,

00:50:41

a lot of folks, Leidroid already has it. Like, he kind of, not really, like, I've, I've set some of

00:50:48

those things up. Not really. It's not actually where they are. You just want it to be. And that's

00:50:56

what I tend to see with them is they're not, they're, they're not scared of pushing the envelope,

00:51:02

even if it's in a way that people think already exists. Whenever they pushed out,

00:51:09

what was the product? They're pushing out the HomePod now. And, you know, it's kind of like an

00:51:16

Echo. It's kind of like a Google Home. And this is a category that already exists. And yet,

00:51:21

they'll push it as something that's never been done before. When you start boiling down all the

00:51:26

pieces, they're right. Like, there are some things in there that have never been done before.

00:51:30

There's just a lot of copycats around it trying to get ahead of it. You know, even Amazon pushed

00:51:34

out brand new versions of their Echo, trying to be Apple to this punch. And still, whenever you

00:51:41

boil it down, there's still not where Apple wanted it is planning to be. So I don't know,

00:51:46

I think it's something Apple's something we could talk about for a long time, Mike.

00:51:50

I just want to know how does that team with Apple? Because you know, their upper management is

00:51:57

always thinking about the next thing. And that's the mindset I would love to have, or at least pick

00:52:02

apart and understand in more detail. I know we've had a lot of insight into Steve Jobs and his brain

00:52:10

and how he thought about things, which he was difficult to work for. And yet, he came up with a

00:52:15

lot of different interesting ideas. That's the mindset I think that we're going to start seeing

00:52:21

more and more of in the future. And it was even one of the quotes, and I don't have it in front of

00:52:25

me that came out of this book, was that there's fewer and fewer thought leaders coming out of

00:52:30

universities and such, and going into management and going into company leadership. There's fewer

00:52:36

and fewer people leading who are thinking through things the right way. That's something I would

00:52:41

like to be a part of is pushing the envelope and being willing to go out there and do that. But

00:52:47

I don't know what that looks like, but it's the leadership side of it that I get really interested

00:52:51

in with Apple. There's my rant. Yeah, leadership is the next point on the outline here, but I want

00:52:59

to actually just add one more thing to this whole idea of innovation, because like you mentioned,

00:53:03

the Android camp specifically will say, well, that's existed on Android for a long time. And

00:53:11

like you said, yes and no. In the innovating everywhere chapter, he talks about how only 10%

00:53:17

of new products are actually new, and that 26% are improvements to existing products,

00:53:24

20% are new product lines created from existing products, and 26% are new additions to existing

00:53:32

product lines. So when you're thinking about innovation, it's not trying to catch lightning

00:53:38

in a bottle and creating this new unrelated technology that is going to change the world.

00:53:43

It is looking at what you already have and figuring out what is the next logical step here. And this

00:53:50

is something that like you said, regarding leadership, but I think it absolutely pertains

00:53:55

to innovation as well. This is something that isn't being developed. In fact, it kind of gets

00:54:00

trained out of us as we grow older on page 417. He says that all people are born innovators,

00:54:06

but as they journey through childhood and into young adulthood, they become conditioned to color

00:54:10

inside the lines, both literally and figuratively. And this is the number one reason why my wife

00:54:18

and I homeschool, because we do not want our kids put in a room with 30 people where the teacher's

00:54:25

main job is to keep order. You know, we want them to develop the skills to think for themselves.

00:54:33

And actually, my nephew, who also, I think maybe last year or maybe even this year,

00:54:41

was homeschooled. He's 10 right now. He'll be 11. It kind of had an aha moment the other day,

00:54:48

because he has trouble getting through his work. He tends to procrastinate and just kind of

00:54:56

doggles and then, you know, at 6 p.m. and he's not done with the schoolwork yet.

00:54:59

So I introduced him to the Pomodoro method. And my sister-in-law said that this like completely

00:55:05

changed things for him. And he's getting all of his work done in two and a half hours. And some of

00:55:10

the people who are in the education system, like two and a half hours, well, you're not getting

00:55:14

your work done. Like, yes, he is, because this is exactly the skill set that I have had to learn

00:55:20

as I've worked from home. These are the things that are really going to help you be successful

00:55:25

in the new economy. And these are the kinds of things that, like you said, typically do not get

00:55:30

taught. It's not the reading, the writing, the arithmetic. Yes, those things are important.

00:55:34

But it's these other things that are just as important, these things that you can apply to your

00:55:40

life every single day to get gains. There's a lot there. I don't know where to jump in off of that.

00:55:49

But I know that the homeschooling thing is something we're planning to do. We have a lot of reasons

00:55:54

for that. But a lot of it comes down to when you really start to consolidate it, it comes down to

00:56:01

being able to custom tailor what our kids are learning in a way that helps them in the real world.

00:56:09

And I hesitate to use the phrase real world just because I know that's technically the point of

00:56:17

public school as well. I just don't feel like the little things are taught in such a way that they

00:56:23

should. And again, that's boiling it down way too far, but that's the general thing there.

00:56:30

Yeah, well, I mean, transitioning into the leadership section, because that's the next

00:56:37

point on the outline. And it's something that you brought up earlier. One of my big takeaways

00:56:40

in the leadership section was from page 345, he says that people will follow you when they

00:56:47

believe that you will get them where they want to go. And it is impossible to ask even a staff

00:56:56

of teachers in that environment to get every single kid where they need to go and to get them

00:57:04

to buy in because you have to invest in those people individually in order to get that buy in.

00:57:10

And I've seen teachers who absolutely they are able to do this, but it's not everybody. And what

00:57:16

happens in that setting, my own personal opinion, my own personal experience, is that if you don't

00:57:24

have at least the majority embracing that mindset, then the whole message gets diluted. You may think

00:57:30

that this one teacher, yeah, they absolutely change my life. But it's unless everybody has that

00:57:37

mindset, then the general, the general feeling that that I have towards my my education is like

00:57:45

honestly, a lot of it was a waste of time. Even even in college where I have a business degree and I

00:57:51

apply a lot of that stuff, even on a daily basis, I still look at like the amount of money that I

00:58:00

invested. And I know that part of us is I went to a private school instead of a public school,

00:58:04

but still like the cost of tuition is so expensive. There are other ways that I could have learned

00:58:09

those particular skills and the things that are really going to make the difference are not those

00:58:15

facts, those numbers, those charts. It's the relationships, it's the networking, it's the people

00:58:22

that you meet, that's where the value lies. And I just, it's going to be interesting to see,

00:58:28

because I think it's kind of at a tipping point with a lot of these online educational programs,

00:58:32

where yeah, there are some jobs where you need to get a certain degree or a certain certification.

00:58:38

But the options that you have in order to get those types of things, in order to get the knowledge

00:58:43

that you need, there's a lot, a lot more and there's a lot more different delivery options that weren't

00:58:50

available even 10, 15 years ago when I was going to school. This book, this is a really great example,

00:58:58

because this is the kind of thing that I was reading through this. I'm like, man, I wish I would

00:59:02

have had a class like this when I was going to college, when I was learning my business degree.

00:59:07

This would have been great. I was thinking about it. I'm like, this book cost me 35 bucks on Amazon.

00:59:13

I would have actually taken a class. How many thousands of dollars would that have cost?

00:59:18

And thinking back to the classes that I've taken, like, I've got a bunch of notes here on this,

00:59:24

and there's a couple things here that I've, action items that have been applied to my life.

00:59:27

There, I don't know that I've still got that type of stuff, like that stuff that I learned in

00:59:33

college has really made that big of an impact, because the whole system is set up to pass the test.

00:59:38

And once you pass the test, at least my own personal experience, you forget most of what you quote,

00:59:43

unquote, learned. Yeah, I'm with you there. So going to public school, I felt like I was really

00:59:50

good at getting homework done in school. And that meant that, because primarily I was trying to get

00:59:57

it done that way. I didn't have to do it when I got home. And doing all of my school work at school

01:00:03

ended up in the long run teaching me very little about self discipline in the long run, because,

01:00:09

you know, let me get this thing done now, and then I don't have to do anything later. And I can do

01:00:12

whatever I want. So then I ended up in this pretty rough place. So I felt like school didn't really

01:00:17

prep me well for working in the real world. And I continue using that phrase. But it's something

01:00:25

that I don't want my girls to to deal with. So this is where the homeschooling thing and leading

01:00:30

my girls to a point where they can pick up on a lot of this. And I can teach them these little

01:00:35

the little skills like a pomodoro. Like I can teach them those things specifically geared towards

01:00:42

them. So I I'm with you there. I know that when it comes to the leadership side of things

01:00:48

with this book specifically, that a lot of people would benefit from this. I know a lot of

01:00:54

MBAs that would benefit from having read this. And it's something I wish more people would do is

01:01:01

read books like this, even though this one I felt like was really kind of long. And there's a

01:01:07

lot to digest here. And I think it was long. I think if you didn't have some of the background

01:01:12

of the other books that we've read, this would be a nightmare for most people, I think.

01:01:17

If you know, this is a totally different book. If it's the first one we do for bookworm.

01:01:21

Yeah, this is completely different for sure. So I don't think, you know, if you if you haven't been

01:01:26

a reader of much in the past, don't pick this up. It is not for the everyday reader for sure.

01:01:33

That's completely fair. But if you're one like us who has been through a lot of business books,

01:01:38

you've been through a lot of self-help productivity style books, you can pick a lot up out of this

01:01:43

because there's a lot of summary with things that you already know. And yet there's a lot of little

01:01:48

nuggets that you can pull out of it. So I think that's where your point of you wish you had read

01:01:52

this instead of maybe some of the degree stuff, though the degree is still nice to have. But

01:01:57

having gone through this and compiling that with a lot of the other information that we've

01:02:05

consumed and discussed here on bookworm, it's a great book to go through for sure.

01:02:12

Yeah, definitely. This stuff has more value in my work life than my entire statistics class.

01:02:20

But that was required for the degree and this wasn't, which kind of gets me thinking like,

01:02:26

who decides this stuff anyways? And actually, are you familiar with Omar Zenholm, the $100 MBA guy?

01:02:33

I know the $100 MBA, but I don't recognize that name for some reason.

01:02:41

He actually was on a podcast, and I forget which one it was. I listened to it probably a couple

01:02:45

years ago now. But the $100 MBA is literally an online class for how to run an online business,

01:02:52

essentially. He's teaching you the things that you need to know in order to get your business off

01:02:55

the ground. And he's an interesting guy because if I'm remembering the story correctly, he was

01:03:00

actually a professor at a university, and he was teaching business classes, and he was frustrated

01:03:07

because he was having to teach them how to manage factories. And he's like, there is no way any

01:03:12

of these people will ever need to manage a factory. Like, this is so old school, we should be teaching

01:03:17

the this instead. So he looked at what is the process to get some of these newer things added

01:03:22

to the curriculum. And after he would submit it, it would take at least two years in order for

01:03:29

it to be approved. And at that point, he's like, well, it's all changed by then. So he quit his job

01:03:36

as a university professor. And he developed this $100 MBA where literally you can go pay a

01:03:41

hunter box and you sign up and you get this video course. And he's teaching you the things that he

01:03:45

understands about business. He's a really smart guy. I actually signed up for it a couple years ago.

01:03:50

And it's really good. It's kind of like the the pre-fizzle, I guess, if you want to think of it that way,

01:03:55

where fizzle kind of teaches a lot of the same types of business type things. But it applies it

01:03:59

to a specific context, like starting a blog or creating an online course or launching a podcast,

01:04:05

things like that. And I think that that just very clearly articulates the real, the real problem here.

01:04:12

Now kind of getting back to leadership. And really, I think that this is what Omar Zenholm did

01:04:20

is one of my takeaways here was effective leadership is recognizing the real situation. So he talks

01:04:30

about effective leadership leads from both the front and behind, depending on the need and situation.

01:04:34

And he talks about the different ways that you can look at yourself as a leader. This is one of

01:04:41

my action items is to look at myself from what he calls the outside in perspective to see what

01:04:46

areas that you can improve. It's very freeing. We talk a lot, it seems about this whole idea of

01:04:55

like personal responsibility. But if you view the situation as what can I do to fix this as opposed

01:05:02

to, well, this is wrong and they should fix this for me, then you've got a lot more control over

01:05:08

the situation, which I think that that's really taps into this whole idea of leadership. But

01:05:14

recognizing that Omar Zenholm, I'm a professor at this university, I want to prepare people to own

01:05:21

their own businesses. And I'm not able to do that in my current situation. Like, how are what are

01:05:27

the options available to me in order to remedy this? And this is something that I want to do,

01:05:32

like I mentioned, this is the action item for me is to look at myself. What are the areas that I

01:05:39

need to change that I can alter that I can quote unquote fix to make everything that I do a little

01:05:48

bit easier. How do I solve how do I solve the problems that exist in my life, basically, through

01:05:55

this lens of myself as a leader and taking responsibility for the situation? Maybe I'm not the ultimate

01:06:02

person who has the final say on the situation, but that doesn't matter. What can I do right now

01:06:07

to make it better? You're translating it to leading yourself, like leading your personal life.

01:06:11

That's what it sounds like to me. Is that there? Yeah, exactly. Yep.

01:06:16

Which will play into my one and only action item, but it's not going to share it to a leader.

01:06:24

All right, so talk to me about video games. You got it on here.

01:06:27

Yeah, so one of the unexpected things that I found in this book, and there's a lot of these

01:06:36

little statistics that if you're paying attention, there's a lot of these nuggets that can provide

01:06:42

a lot of insight, I think. But there's this in, I forget what section this was, but he talked about

01:06:48

how people who play video games, actually what it does is it improves your decision-making

01:06:54

skills. Because you have to make quick decisions. He said that people who play video games

01:07:00

make correct decisions 25% faster, and they typically take action up to four times faster

01:07:06

than the average person, which I never really thought about it that way, but that makes total

01:07:12

sense. And this whole idea of taking action faster, there's a lot of value in that because

01:07:16

a lot of times we know what we're supposed to do, and we just tend to overanalyze things,

01:07:22

and we don't take action paralysis by analysis, where if we would just take action, we would make

01:07:27

the right decision. So this is actually a really big benefit in my opinion. And the action item

01:07:36

for me is to play more video games. Now I've got a little bit of a head start here with the

01:07:42

baby being born. And actually, as we record this, FIFA 18, which I used to be big into FIFA,

01:07:49

and I haven't played it maybe for like five or six years, because we haven't had an up-to-date

01:07:54

system that could actually run it. We've got a Nintendo Switch now. So I've actually got

01:07:58

FIFA 18 for the Switch, and I'm not saying I'm going to play video games for half hour

01:08:01

day or anything like that. But this is the kind of thing where like, I don't create the time to

01:08:06

quote unquote play. And this is something that I believe that there is some value to. Now,

01:08:14

obviously it kind of depends on what you're doing with the video games. And obviously,

01:08:19

you don't want to take it to the extreme. But what I'm recognizing here is that that fast action

01:08:24

response that video games give you is actually a good thing. Well, that's fair. I'm still not

01:08:31

going to get into video games. Sorry. That's okay. It's the same. Well, like, if I'm going to dedicate

01:08:39

time to this, I have to take it away from something else, and I'm not going to take something away

01:08:42

right now for video games. Just not going to happen. Sorry. Fair enough. I'll let you play

01:08:48

up. You tell me how it goes. All right. Well, FIFA is kind of the one thing that I've really

01:08:55

gotten into over the years. It helps that tan is really into FIFA as well. So like, I was on

01:09:00

hip chat the other day and I'm like, happy FIFA day. But so it's almost like a, not necessarily a

01:09:09

community, but it is sort of a social thing where you can play other people online and stuff like

01:09:14

that too. So it also kind of helps me get outside of my, my box a little bit. That's the big thing

01:09:22

for people working from, from home. It can be both a, a benefit and a detriment is the fact that,

01:09:30

like, you don't have to put your suit and tie on and go to the office and interact with other people.

01:09:37

There, I know a lot of people, and I, I try very hard not to fall into this category because I'm

01:09:41

an introvert and I definitely could see myself doing this. In fact, my kids, they, they tend to do

01:09:47

this. My seven year old will wear pajamas pretty much the entire day. And every once in a while,

01:09:52

be like, Hey, you got to get clothes on. He's like, why? You just need to.

01:09:57

This is life. Put on your clothes.

01:10:05

Oh, video games. Yeah. I, I have had a number of people tell me that I need to get into video games.

01:10:10

It still doesn't happen. I barely watch TV, let alone get into games.

01:10:16

Yeah, that's fair. I mean, I don't, I don't really watch, uh, watch TV either. Uh, if you're gonna,

01:10:24

if you're going to, I don't think they necessarily have to be classified as different things,

01:10:29

either. I think if you were to say, okay, I'm gonna spend so much time watching TV,

01:10:34

then use that quote, unquote TV time playing video games instead of watching Game of Thrones or

01:10:40

something like that. I guess that's the takeaway for me is that if you're just going to sit there

01:10:43

and watch something, that's really not going to add any value. I mean, obviously depends on what

01:10:48

you're watching too. Like I watched the, uh, the film on minimalism with my, my wife and that was

01:10:55

really impactful, but most people, you know, they're not looking for that when they go look at what's

01:10:59

in their Netflix queue. Um, so it's recognizing that like what you're doing, what is this actually,

01:11:06

what is this actually doing for me? And I think that in terms of like video games,

01:11:10

yeah, it can help you disconnect. It can help you. Um, I relax, I guess. I don't want to say zone

01:11:19

out of that definitely is, is a, uh, is a possibility, I guess, but not for me the way that I typically

01:11:26

do it. I mean, I'll go online. I'll play a game of two of FIFA and then I'll turn it off and that

01:11:31

takes maybe a half an hour. It's not like I'm, you know, binge watching Game of Thrones or whatever the,

01:11:36

the latest TV show is where it's just like show after show after show, just so I know what happened.

01:11:42

Yes, but unless it's something like the Great British baking show, then you can learn lots.

01:11:50

I'm a fan. I suppose, of course, because my bread thing. Yes. Yeah, it translates. I like it.

01:11:59

Go British. I used to, I used to think that there would be some sort of knowledge transfer

01:12:07

for watching those types of like cooking shows. Uh, learn that that typically is, is not the case,

01:12:15

at least for, for me and my wife, like we would, we would watch the shows and a lot of them now are,

01:12:22

it's not so much like this is how you do it sort of thing. It's more so the drama, which,

01:12:26

you know, I get people like that sort of thing. In fact, uh, I have a friend who is one of the top

01:12:31

camera people for the, the top chef show. Oh, yeah. But I just can't watch it anymore.

01:12:36

Same drama for your mama. I don't need it.

01:12:42

Nice. Nice. Yeah. I, with shows like the Great British baking show, I tend to get a lot out of

01:12:48

it because I'm, I'm translating it to how could I make a thing like that given what I know about

01:12:56

making say sourdough bread. And that process is one that I am very intrigued by and it's inspired

01:13:03

me to try a few things. So it's, I've picked up a lot from it, but I think you have to be very

01:13:08

pointed with the thing that you want to watch and know how you're going to translate it probably

01:13:15

before you ever do that. Like, I think there's got to be something like that.

01:13:20

Well, it sounds like you're already applying the five steps to, uh, applying executive thinking

01:13:28

to your British baking show then because the first one is learning. The second one's applying. The

01:13:33

third one's adopting fourth is integrating and fifth is becoming. So what you're saying is that

01:13:37

you're watching your show and you're learning and then that actually translates into you actually

01:13:42

becoming a better breadsmith. Breadsmith. I love that. I like that. Coin that term for sure.

01:13:51

No, it's, that show is, it's interesting. Like we watched it last night and I forget which episode

01:13:58

it was and they had the, for those who know, it was the Scandinavian princess cake, which is just

01:14:07

intense on how you make it and it inspired my wife and she looked up the exact recipe

01:14:14

and told me I'm going to make this. Like, okay, go for it. Like, I'm all for this. Like, yes,

01:14:20

by all means, that looks amazing. Please make me a cake to try.

01:14:24

Nice. That sounds pretty good. Yes. I, I'm with you. You know, there's this whole process of how you

01:14:32

apply this executive thinking model, which the whole book is based on and it, it's actually not

01:14:40

complicated. Like, this is one where, and maybe this is the generalization that I'm pulling from

01:14:46

the book of, you know, here's a thing. I want to learn about it. Here are the steps I need to take

01:14:52

to actually implement it into my life. It's something that I apply and then I continually iterate over

01:14:59

it to get better with it and then I become that thing that I was working towards.

01:15:03

If you want to take that same model, let's get off of the breadsmithing and work back towards

01:15:09

the coding side of it. This is the exact same thing. You learn a lot about code. You learn how it works.

01:15:13

You try to build something on it and you iterate off of it. And eventually at some point, you can

01:15:17

say, Hey, I'm a developer. Whoo. Like, you, you get to that point where you've done it enough and

01:15:22

you've been at it long enough that you're good at it and you're comfortable saying you are that thing.

01:15:27

Don't tell Jeff Goings that because he would say, go the other way, like I am a writer. And then

01:15:31

you work the way through the process. But this stepped process is the other way around.

01:15:36

Yeah, exactly. And this whole idea behind applying the executive thinking, this is something that at

01:15:44

the very end of the book, he has a bunch of different examples and like testimonials of people who

01:15:49

are applying this in a lot of different arenas, a lot of different scenarios. One lady in the

01:15:54

back of the book talks about how she applies this to every personal decision that she makes. And I

01:15:59

think that maybe that is a little bit extreme. Yeah, but the whole idea here is that this isn't

01:16:08

just for the CEO, this isn't just for management, this isn't just for somebody who is in business.

01:16:15

These are skills that you have the opportunity to apply to all of your different decisions as you

01:16:20

go about your day. No matter what situation you find yourself in, there is definitely opportunity

01:16:26

to apply these principles in your personal and professional life.

01:16:30

Did you feel like this was similar to getting things done? Did you get that vibe?

01:16:36

No, mainly because he taught different stuff after the first 10 pages.

01:16:44

I mean the five step process, like the steps he goes through, to me, maybe I'm just thinking

01:16:51

about it wrong, but it seemed very similar to collecting, going through the thing you've collected,

01:16:58

building off of it to create a system out of it and then putting it in place.

01:17:02

Maybe it might just be because I like finding that correlation, like I like finding

01:17:09

areas where GTD falls right in line with what something or something that already exists and

01:17:14

something that people have already created. So it's interesting to me the number of times I see that

01:17:19

correlation come out. Well, I think that with GTD, you can take anything and put it in the top

01:17:27

and get a very clear, this is what the next action is on the bottom. I don't think you can do that

01:17:33

with the simple five step process for executive thinking because the process isn't necessarily

01:17:41

as important as the questions that you ask throughout the process. So if all you did was apply the

01:17:49

desired outcome strategy, macro tactics, tactics, and execution, that's not enough to get you any

01:17:55

sort of results. Does that make sense? Yes, that's fair. I'm with you there.

01:17:59

So it's a framework that has a lot more flexibility, I guess I would say, which is one of the things

01:18:07

that I know people have trouble with with GTD. Some people really like the simple straightforward

01:18:12

formula. Some people don't like it and they try to modify it. In fact, I'm not sure if you caught

01:18:19

this, but I sent over some videos for you to look at for a product that we're working on.

01:18:24

And I basically created a new category in the GTD workflow because there's this thing,

01:18:31

especially when it pertains to email, it's like, is this something that I need to take action on,

01:18:35

or is this reference material? Maybe it's just something I want to read later. It doesn't really

01:18:39

fall into either of those categories. So what do I do with this thing? And a lot of people that I

01:18:45

interviewed, that was a big pain point for them. They're familiar with GTD, but there's this thing

01:18:50

that they're like, well, it's not really this or that. So I'm just going to leave it in my inbox

01:18:55

and not do anything with it. That's not a good solution. That's completely anti-GTD, but that's

01:19:01

what happens with GTD because it is so rigid. And maybe that's not even the way that David Allen

01:19:08

intended it, but that's the way that it gets applied a lot. And I think that with the framework

01:19:13

and the methodologies that are applied and paid to think, there's a lot of room for interpretation

01:19:18

with this. That's very fair. And I get some of the pain points with GTD. And I see where people are

01:19:25

trying to create new categories. I always tend to see these new categories as ones that fall into

01:19:31

existing categories. It's mostly semantics that people want to put in on it. That's what I tend to

01:19:36

see. And it's always, I don't know, I think it's interesting. The number of ways that people try to

01:19:43

say, I'm leaving GTD and I'm doing this now. Yes, but the thing you're doing now is GTD. You're

01:19:49

just calling it something different like this. It's uncanny the number of times I've seen that.

01:19:54

But it's a fun marketing tactic. I get that. So I have a hard time faulting them because I

01:20:00

know what they're doing to an extent. They may not realize they're doing it themselves, but that's

01:20:04

what I tend to see. Yep, definitely. And with GTD, I think that there's, I don't know, I mean, I get

01:20:14

David Allen's approach. Very first book we did for Bookworm was the new version of GTD. And

01:20:23

I was pretty disappointed by it because I was expecting a lot more evolution in the framework.

01:20:31

I was expecting a lot more in terms of the research supporting the framework and the reasons why

01:20:36

the stuff was there. And it kind of felt like after reading that book, he's got something that's

01:20:43

making money. So why change it? Yes. Yes. So, and that's fair. I get that, it kind of gets into

01:20:50

the last point here on selling continuously. This is a really interesting chapter to me because

01:20:57

the big takeaway here is that everybody is selling on page 465. He says,

01:21:05

"The success of every leader hinges on his ability to sell to sell himself is capable and credible,

01:21:10

to sell his ideas, the way a salesperson sells products and services, and to sell others on the

01:21:15

promise that he can take them where they want to go." So, I think that transitioning away from GTD

01:21:22

because I don't want to just completely bash that book again. It's probably good.

01:21:27

This whole idea of selling yourself, this is interesting. And I want to get your perspective

01:21:34

on this because I know that this is something that we've both kind of struggled with in the past,

01:21:39

but I work with a company that has dedicated people to sell stuff. And you're kind of the guy who

01:21:45

does it for you. So, what was your thought on this particular chapter? Was there a lot of in here

01:21:53

that you really liked and resonated with you or was this an uncomfortable chapter for you?

01:21:57

It was one that I understood, I get what he's saying. In that particular realm, I tend to want

01:22:05

to know what does it mean. This is one of my sticking points on the book. He talks very high

01:22:15

level in a lot of cases. It's very philosophical, if you will. And I tend to want tactics. What

01:22:22

do you mean by build out a platform? Great. What do you mean by that? Because people mean different

01:22:29

things when they say that. And I tend to want to know what you mean by that. Oddly enough,

01:22:34

since the time that I read this and now I read another book, Ryan Holiday's "Perennial Seller."

01:22:39

And if you want to focus on that specific chapter, I highly recommend that book. So,

01:22:47

"Perennial Seller" is one that I picked up way more on this topic than I did from

01:22:51

David Goldsmith here, simply because it's dedicated to that. And Holiday does a lot of

01:23:00

selling of products for a long time, which is exactly what Goldsmith is getting at here,

01:23:05

with building a thing and then selling it over and over and over for your life, essentially.

01:23:11

That's what I got out of that section. But to me, from this specific book, I felt like I was

01:23:17

struggling with it and was wondering, "What am I supposed to do with this?" That was my question

01:23:22

from this specific book. But thankfully, since then, I read another one that covered that topic

01:23:27

exactly. So, I don't know what else I'm talking about.

01:23:31

Okay. Yeah, that's fair. This is an interesting chapter for me because I think that

01:23:37

what it really showed me was that everybody is in sales, whether you are a salesperson or not,

01:23:45

whether you have an online business or not. The example that I thought of right away,

01:23:53

I think he touched on this in a sentence or two, and that really got my mind going in this direction,

01:23:58

that if you have a significant other, then you have sold yourself and your abilities to

01:24:07

meet that person's needs to at least a certain degree. People are not just throwing themselves

01:24:13

at you because you're you. You have done something to position yourself in the marketplace

01:24:20

in a favorable light. And that, I think, is really interesting because everybody does that. And what

01:24:26

that shows me is that everybody has the ability to sell. And especially for me personally, because

01:24:34

I want to develop my leadership skills, selling is absolutely critical in the leadership arena.

01:24:43

Leadership is selling because, as I mentioned, when we were going through a leadership section,

01:24:48

that people have to believe that you can get them where they want to go. Well, if you want people to

01:24:53

follow you, then you have to sell them on the fact that you can get them where they want to go.

01:25:00

They're not just going to come to you because you've got all of the skills and things like that.

01:25:05

You have to be able to communicate that in an effective way. And in this chapter, there are

01:25:12

four cornerstones that he has for engaging on it. So I think that there's a ton of stuff here

01:25:17

that you could unpack. There's a lot of things here that you could spend a lot of time talking

01:25:23

about even just these four cornerstones for engaging others, but I'm just going to run through them

01:25:27

real quickly. Number one is the behaviors, so how you act. Number two is oratory skills. And this

01:25:34

is why, in my opinion, every single person should be in Toastmasters. Number three is writing skills,

01:25:41

and then number four is interpersonal skills. And you probably heard in some way, shape, or form that

01:25:47

one of those things is really important when it comes to leadership building a platform,

01:25:53

however you want to frame it. But I thought it was really interesting to see all four of them

01:25:57

grouped together. And that's what David Goldsmith does a really good job of is providing these lists,

01:26:03

and there's too many of them, in my opinion, for them all to resonate. But this particular one did

01:26:08

with me. That's fair. Go for it. Also in this chapter is the idea of Guanchi, I think he calls it,

01:26:20

which is like the circles of trust. And when it comes to leadership and selling, that's what

01:26:26

you want to develop are these circles of trust. And I also thought that it was interesting that on

01:26:31

page 490 talks about how stats and stories are persuasive. And he actually has a formula

01:26:37

for selling with stories. He has like a diagram with the three different pieces to the,

01:26:42

it's a very basic hero's journey in essence. So I have a close friend and mentor who

01:26:51

gives me a lot of advice when it comes to client work and how to sell to them. And

01:26:58

he's very good at finding where some of my pain points are in the process and helps me see

01:27:06

a lot of the issues that I have with it and what to do about them. And something he has told me

01:27:13

numerous times is the acronym ABS, and it's not anything new, but always be selling. And I think

01:27:20

it's very interesting because you, when you stop and think it through, even when I'm having

01:27:27

conversations with friends, if I always have in the back of my mind of talking about the things that

01:27:33

I'm doing safe for work or the ideas that I'm exploring, those are all sales tactics to an extent.

01:27:42

And it's uncanny the number of times that those one-off conversations eventually lead to something

01:27:50

where someone remembers that I was talking about something with OmniFocus and I went,

01:27:56

well, I've never heard of OmniFocus. Okay. And then they have another friend three months later

01:28:01

who mentions OmniFocus and I'm like, oh, do you know Joe? Like he's got a whole course on it.

01:28:07

Like it's weird how often that sort of thing happens. And I've never really forgotten this

01:28:14

simply because it's weird how often these things are interconnected and they continue to come back

01:28:19

to you. So at the same time, you have to be careful with it because you don't want to ruin

01:28:23

friendships over this and you're pushing your ideas and pushing your stuff all the time.

01:28:27

Like go back to the beginning asking questions and listening. It can go both ways. But at the same

01:28:32

time, it's interesting to me to see all the interconnectedness of this stuff whenever you start

01:28:37

looking at selling the ideas and selling the thing that you're working on. And I don't know, Mike,

01:28:43

how do you, because you do a lot of this stuff with Asian efficiency, but they do a large part

01:28:48

of the sales and marketing side, what did you get from this as far as like what you specifically

01:28:53

can do for you? Well, I think that the big one of the big takeaways for me is that there are many

01:29:01

different paths to yes. In fact, he's got a diagram with a bunch of different different ways that

01:29:06

you can get to yes. And then that coupled with several small yeses can be just as effective as

01:29:12

one large yes. That's actually the example I got from the book of somebody who is proposing and

01:29:19

they're about to be married is that you didn't just all of a sudden show up with a diamond ring

01:29:23

and be like, Hey, will you be my wife? That there were several smaller transactions that took place

01:29:28

along the way, applying that to online business. And your example with the omnifocus course, like

01:29:35

you're not this is the where I think a lot of the the sticking point is for people in our shoes is

01:29:40

that you don't want to just show up and be like, Hey, buy my thing. Because if you don't know the

01:29:45

person's situation, if you haven't had those several small yeses, then that can seem like a

01:29:51

really gigantic hurdle to say, Hey, pay me money for this thing. But if you can get people to say yes

01:29:58

to other things along the way, you can have a very clear idea of whether that course or whether

01:30:04

that thing that you are selling is the right thing for that particular person. It makes it a lot easier

01:30:10

to feel good about offering those solutions to people. As it pertains to Asian efficiency, I mean,

01:30:17

we have somebody on staff now who has some experience with internet marketing. And she's writing sales

01:30:23

letters and she's writing marketing copy and she's really, really good at it. But I used to have to

01:30:28

do that sort of thing. All of the podcast episodes that we would do for the productivity show that

01:30:32

have like the intro and the outro, like I would write those and I would write the headlines and

01:30:36

I'm not great at it. But I've had a bunch of practice and really it comes down to being honest

01:30:44

about what you are offering and then being okay when people say, yeah, actually, I want to give

01:30:49

you money for that thing because there is value there that is going to solve a problem that I have.

01:30:55

That's the big thing for me from this chapter is identifying what it is that you are actually

01:31:02

offering. What are you actually selling? This is a quasi action item, I guess, for me is to figure

01:31:10

out, you know, if someone were to say Joe Buellig, Mike Schmitt, what do you do have like a one

01:31:16

sentence thing that very clearly articulates what I can offer a value that they can actually pay me

01:31:23

money for. Because that's what makes this all work. And it's completely fine. It's completely

01:31:30

ethical as long as it is done in the right way. And I'm not misrepresenting and saying, oh, yeah,

01:31:34

I'm going to solve all of these problems for you. And then I can't deliver on those. That's

01:31:39

where things start to feel scammy in my opinion. Fair enough. Great for action items.

01:31:46

Let's do it. So I got a bunch of them here. You do.

01:31:51

Yeah. So number one I mentioned, because this will be the easiest one for me, I think,

01:31:59

is play video games. Cheater.

01:32:05

I've got some, got some practice on that already. We'll see if that sticks once I quote, unquote,

01:32:10

quote, go back to work. All right. Another one for me is this outside in analysis of my

01:32:17

own shortcomings as a leader. I started doing this, but I haven't formalized it. And I need to just

01:32:23

like sit down for an hour or two and just really think about this, figure out what my weaknesses are

01:32:29

so that I can, I can fix them. I have a little bit of an idea of some of them.

01:32:34

I also want to, and these other two, we didn't really talk about in terms of like the actual

01:32:40

chapters in the book, but these are just little things that stood out to me.

01:32:44

I develop an idea bank. I tend to capture things into drafts, but I don't, I realized that I don't

01:32:52

have a very concrete place that I store all of these ideas. And I don't know. I mean, the easy

01:33:01

thing is just to send that to something in, in Evernote, but I want to develop a process

01:33:06

for curating these things before they would even get in there. Basically, what I want to end up with

01:33:12

is a bank of ideas that I know are really good. And then I can go in there whenever I quote, unquote,

01:33:20

need an idea for something, and I can look through those things and just be like, yeah,

01:33:25

this is the time for that one. In the past, I have definitely been the type of person who's like,

01:33:30

oh, I've got this idea. I got to do something with this. But I'm recognizing that from this book,

01:33:36

that ideas themselves aren't the thing. Like anybody can have an idea. And if you pay attention

01:33:44

for any length of time, you will have ideas. But the things that makes some ideas successful is

01:33:51

the process that they go through to get refined, which is where a lot of the lists from this book

01:33:56

come in. And once they've gone through the refining process, then maybe this idea is gold,

01:34:02

or maybe it's garbage and it needs to be thrown away. So what I want is a bank of ideas where

01:34:08

I can go in there at any given moment and flip through those things and then pick one if I wanted

01:34:14

to and say yet now is the time for this one. Does that make sense? Sounds like a Sunday maybe list.

01:34:18

Kind of, but not really. Because I can't help myself.

01:34:21

Extra level of curation that needs to happen before the Sunday maybe list. And the

01:34:27

something maybe list is different in my opinion, because that's something like, well, someday I

01:34:32

want to go take this trip someday. I want to go do this thing. This is more like, what are all

01:34:38

the things that I could do to build the business. And as I get those ideas, I'm going to put them

01:34:46

someplace. But I don't want them to just be like random junk. Like, yeah, hey, I could have a

01:34:53

could hold a conference, or I could do whatever. A lot of that stuff, if it's half baked, it's

01:34:59

really not a good idea. So what I want is to develop a process before it gets to the quote unquote

01:35:04

someday maybe list inside of Evernote or Devon thinker or whatever that looks like.

01:35:09

Yeah, I think you and I just have different ways of thinking about someday. Maybe I'm aware of that.

01:35:15

I just maintain enough of them that I have different levels of seriousness with them,

01:35:20

where I've got one that anything and everything that pertains to business just goes in there.

01:35:25

And then over time, they move to other lists depending on what they are and how baked out they

01:35:31

are, like how done they are towards being a realistic thing. And they get culled along the way if

01:35:37

they're good or bad, depending on where they where they should land. So I just have a different

01:35:41

way of running with that and have for quite some times. I think you and I just have different

01:35:45

semantics around it. Yeah, and I guess my definition of this really comes from how we use JIRA at Asian

01:35:53

efficiency. We've got a space, excuse me, we've got a space inside a JIRA where we can submit ideas

01:36:01

and then every once in a while, we'll have a meeting and we'll go through all the ideas and

01:36:04

we'll say, Hey, yeah, this is a great idea. Let's work on this one. But everything that gets

01:36:09

submitted to the ideas space is not something that we're going to do. It's not something that is going

01:36:16

to be done at some day. It's not, it's not even, I don't know, I mean, of all the ideas that get

01:36:25

submitted, the percentage of them that get taken action on is is fairly small. And that's my

01:36:30

concern, I guess, with the Sunday maybe list is like, I don't want to have 100 things in here.

01:36:35

And then there's only one or two that are really valid. I want to just see the one or two. And

01:36:41

if I recognize that there's only one or two things in my idea bank, then that means that I've got to

01:36:46

set aside more time to think and develop more ideas because the ideas are there as long as

01:36:53

you create the time for them, if that makes sense. It does. It does.

01:36:58

And then my last one here, I was a little bit hesitant to put this one on, but I think that this

01:37:04

is going to be fairly simple and there'll be some value in this. There's a whole section in here

01:37:08

where it talks about alliances. And one of the things that I want to do is I want to list out

01:37:16

my allies. And the reason that I want to do this is because I think that with a lot of organizations

01:37:26

with a lot of businesses, it can be the tendency can be to look at the things that are not working,

01:37:37

especially if they are inflicted by other people. And then you almost are viewing that person as

01:37:43

you're working against them instead of working with them. So I want to make a list of allies,

01:37:49

just so I recognize that we are all on the same team. Fair enough. I hope I get to be on this list.

01:37:57

Just a little secret that I want to put out there. So I have one action item and I have

01:38:05

teased this a few times throughout this show. And it is primarily that I need to work through

01:38:11

my project planning methods. And I've been calling it like my project management

01:38:16

system, but not in your typical project management way. Like the traditional way of thinking that is,

01:38:23

here's a project. Here are all the steps that help me get that project done. Here are all the timelines.

01:38:28

Here's who it's assigned to blah, blah, blah. That's not what I'm talking about.

01:38:32

Ultimately, what I'm getting at is I have a lot of my client projects, a lot of my own projects,

01:38:41

and planning out when those are going to happen and maintaining the details of those. Similar to

01:38:46

what you would do with the task, like just moving the physical project and managing it itself.

01:38:53

Similar to what you would do with a task within that project. In trying to figure out, can I use,

01:38:58

I can't help myself, the GTD method on the project level, which is similar to some of the

01:39:04

higher horizons that come out with David Allen stuff. But this book really showed me that I need

01:39:10

to be better about strategically planning when I'm going to do what. And that led me to non-digital

01:39:19

planning tools, of course, because I do that. I've shared this on, I think it's on behind the

01:39:29

paywall of the guild. So I can't link to that. But I've shared some of this on the pros side of

01:39:33

the guild. But the project planning method I've been using currently is the whiteboard that I've

01:39:39

got in my office. Mike, you haven't been over here. You got to come visit. I'm going to show you this

01:39:43

whiteboard system that I use. But I have this whole process of using these larger post-it

01:39:48

notes to manage projects. And I'm trying to figure out how that plays into the higher level thinking

01:39:53

that a lot of what David Goldsmith is talking about in the book and trying to maintain how do I

01:39:58

put what project where and when and what is it that needs to happen on that to move it forward.

01:40:04

That's what I'm working through. You're going to have to ping me on this one every week or so

01:40:10

that we record just because it's a continually evolving process. And I'm trying to take a lot of

01:40:16

what came out of this book to apply it to that whole process of planning these projects out

01:40:22

and moving them around from place to place. That's what I'm working on.

01:40:26

Nice. Great, fun. So author style and rating hit me.

01:40:34

So I really like the author style. I really like the list. There's definitely a lot of information

01:40:41

here and it definitely got to be too much for this particular setting. But that's the only

01:40:46

bad thing I think I could say about this is that from the bookworm context, it's a lot.

01:40:53

From the potential to change your life perspective, I think that there's tons of good

01:41:01

stuff in here. And if you got even one of those lists that really clicked with you,

01:41:07

it would be worth your while, but it is 600 pages and they are big pages. So it's definitely not

01:41:14

something that I'm going to recommend to everybody. I really enjoyed it though. And I'm going to give

01:41:19

it four stars. The only reason I'm not giving it five is like I said, it really doesn't fit the

01:41:24

bookworm format and it's really, really long. Yeah, you're like iterating the exact thing that I

01:41:30

wanted to say is like it's long. There's a lot here. If you haven't read a lot of the books that

01:41:34

we've been through, this is intense and you're likely going to hate it. That's my thinking.

01:41:41

So I hesitate to recommend it to people. But if you followed along in your into these business

01:41:47

books sorts of things like that level of book, I could see where there's a lot of really great

01:41:52

things here. It's long and there's a lot of lists and it's hard for me to generalize it down the way

01:41:58

I like to. So I'll join you on the four stars bit for all of those reasons. But that's where I land

01:42:06

it on. I think it's easy to read and I didn't want to skim anything because there's a lot of little

01:42:10

nuggets in it for sure. But you really need a framework and a foundation built on a lot of these

01:42:18

principles before those little tidbits really come out and before you can really do anything with those.

01:42:25

Yeah, that's that's completely fair. I think that your perspective really determines what you're

01:42:29

going to get out of this particular book. Brandon Wentland wrote an article on the Asian efficiency

01:42:36

side a while back on picking the books that you're going to read to solve the problems that you're

01:42:41

facing, which I think is a really brilliant idea. And if you are already bought into the idea of

01:42:47

thinking time like me and you're just wondering how do I actually implement this, then this is a

01:42:51

great book. If you're just looking for something entertaining to read and the topic isn't necessarily

01:42:57

something that's completely resonating with you, then you're going to quickly get burned out by

01:43:02

this book agreed for sure, which leads us into what's coming up next. So this one was Mike's choice

01:43:10

as much as he likes to pawn it off on our dear listeners. This was still your choice, Mike.

01:43:14

You can't do that. So the one I have chosen for the next round is anti-fragile by Naseem Talib,

01:43:23

Talib, Talib. Not sure how you say that. I should have another short book. Yeah, it's another short

01:43:29

book for sure. And I knew how long this one was when I picked it. I just wasn't planning on Mike

01:43:36

picking a textbook prior to this so that I would have a little more time on it. This one's what

01:43:41

is it roughly 400 pages, 420-ish somewhere in that range. So another long one. Sorry about that.

01:43:47

But tagline on this, things that gain from disorder. So we talk a lot about structures and

01:43:55

systems, hoping this one kind of breaks that mold a little bit. Yeah, this is one that's been on my

01:44:01

list for a while. And I think that the tagline there is very, very intriguing. So this will be

01:44:08

fun. Yeah, having started it. So very interested in this one. Yeah, mine actually comes tomorrow,

01:44:14

I believe. So I'm going to have to crank on this one. The one after that is Mindset by Kael Dweck,

01:44:22

which is a book that has been on my list for quite a while and is another reader recommendation.

01:44:31

But I know that this one is much shorter than paid to think. So I feel confident picking this one.

01:44:35

That makes me happy. I'm working through a gap book at the moment. Should finish it up the next day

01:44:41

or so. Finish by John A. Cuff. Fun story. Two nights ago, I actually got to go to his book

01:44:47

signing for this book. I pre-ordered it and was in the middle of it whenever I got to go meet him

01:44:52

and have him sign it. Great fun. So this is a book about not starting new projects, but how do you

01:44:59

actually beat perfectionism, procrastination and such and finish those projects? And I like John A.

01:45:05

Cuff. So I'm excited. Yeah, we're going to have to do one of his books for the bookworm because I

01:45:11

picked one of his gap books as well. I think I picked do over at one point. Oh, yeah. He had that

01:45:17

one for sale on Monday, but I haven't picked it up. So yeah, we should do either do over or finish

01:45:22

one of those two for sure. Yeah, John A. Cuff is a great writer, very entertaining. My gap book

01:45:29

is another Tim Sanders book called Today We Are Rich, which is amazing. I loved Love Is The Killer

01:45:36

App, but Today We Are Rich is even better. Wow. Definitely check that one out. It's quite the

01:45:42

accolade. Yeah, I'm all aboard the Tim Sanders train. So after having gone through paid to think,

01:45:53

we might be a little bit gun shy on listener recommendations, but despite that, I did select,

01:45:59

so anti-fragels, the one reading for next time. That's my personal choice for this. But the next

01:46:04

five that I have selected, and I've already picked them, so take that as you may, we're

01:46:12

listener recommendations. So people who submitted something to the contact forum on the site,

01:46:17

those came in, and then I selected those for those. And I think Mike, maybe you can disagree

01:46:21

with me here. I think we're starting to get to where we're doing more of these recommendations,

01:46:24

because it's interesting to see what people recommend. And at some point, it's more fun to pull from

01:46:29

what someone else recommends than your own list. It's kind of fun, but just the way it works out.

01:46:33

So if you have a recommendation, you want to add to this list, and you want to want your book to

01:46:39

make it onto Bookworm, you can do that Bookworm.fm/recommend. And you can just fill out the forum there

01:46:45

quick. It'll hit my inbox. I'll get it on the list or run from there. And if you want to see what

01:46:49

else has been recommended, or you want to see what those five are that I've planned, Bookworm.fm/list,

01:46:55

we'll get you that entire list of books. And if you want to help other people find the show and

01:47:01

help us take down KCRW as the top return when you search for Bookworm on iTunes,

01:47:07

please head over to iTunes and leave us a rating and review. It really helps us out,

01:47:14

and it helps other people find out about the show. So thanks for joining us, and let's pick

01:47:19

up Antifragile. We'll go through it next time.