Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

So my voice probably sounds a little bit funny.

00:00:03

I'm battling a cold, so I apologize.

00:00:06

Bummer.

00:00:07

But I got my physical mute button so I can mute out any grossness so you don't have to edit it out.

00:00:13

I appreciate that.

00:00:16

Thank you.

00:00:16

And I just listened to Free Agents with Max Sparky and he was obviously very sick and he was talking about his experience.

00:00:24

And so it's a little bit inspiring because it's like Max Sparky can power through and so can I.

00:00:29

This is it's it's more difficult than you realize.

00:00:31

So for the listeners, if you ever decide to start a podcast and you should, then you're inevitably going to have a point where your voice is not ideal.

00:00:41

And when you get to that point and you realize that you have hit this not so ideal state with your voice, you kind of have to just do it anyway.

00:00:53

You just kind of got to deal with it.

00:00:55

Yep.

00:00:57

I've I've had to record a few times whenever I have a cold and it's easier to get the base out of my voice whenever I'm editing.

00:01:04

I know that but it's not a fun thing at all.

00:01:09

You just kind of have to deal with it.

00:01:10

Tough enough buttercup.

00:01:11

I know no sympathy here.

00:01:13

Good luck, Mike.

00:01:14

We shall be passing the rest of the show.

00:01:16

Thank you.

00:01:18

Ready for follow up.

00:01:19

Let's do it.

00:01:20

Do I have to go first or can you go first?

00:01:21

Well, yours is at the top of the list.

00:01:23

So for going in chronological or alphabetical order.

00:01:27

You would go first.

00:01:28

I see how it is when I was in elementary school, you know how they used to always line you up by alphabetically by last name.

00:01:36

Did they do that with your school?

00:01:38

Yep.

00:01:38

Yep.

00:01:39

I totally remember that.

00:01:40

And with my last name starting with the B, it was always towards the front of that line.

00:01:45

However, the nice thing was there were a lot of students in my class with the last name.

00:01:52

It starts with B and B you put you towards the end of that list.

00:01:58

So I wasn't like dead front on the on the class.

00:02:01

Always a good thing.

00:02:02

Anyway, all I had to say, I'm used to having to go early on in the list.

00:02:06

So first one on here, name my fixed mindset.

00:02:10

I spent some time on this one and I found a whole bunch of names that I don't like.

00:02:16

I found some names that I do like.

00:02:19

But the problem I had with this was that naming my fixed mindset instead of this goes back to

00:02:27

the previous book of mindset by Carol Dweck.

00:02:30

And because of the way that I wanted to name this, I found myself finding fun names for it that

00:02:39

actually made it fun to say and fun to use.

00:02:43

I'm not going to share them here because I'm afraid one of them will stick.

00:02:46

Oh, come on.

00:02:47

I see.

00:02:48

Here's the thing.

00:02:49

I don't want it to be a fun thing to say because if it's fun to say and it's fun to use it to

00:02:54

me, almost encourages the fixed mindset to a point, which is the opposite of what I want to do.

00:02:59

Thus, I've been trying to figure out what it should be.

00:03:05

So it's a name that I don't necessarily like saying.

00:03:08

And yet it's a name that I can relate to.

00:03:12

It should be Schulist Joe.

00:03:14

Schulist Joe.

00:03:15

That's what you think it should be.

00:03:16

Is that from something or do you just make it up?

00:03:18

You're a famous baseball player.

00:03:19

Oh, OK.

00:03:21

Cool.

00:03:21

Was he Schulist didn't work leads?

00:03:23

I think for one game, which is where the name came from.

00:03:26

Got it.

00:03:26

You want to take a crack at what I named this fixed mindset?

00:03:29

Well, if it's not Schulist Joe, I have no idea.

00:03:31

That seemed like the obvious one to me.

00:03:33

My working name and I say working because I'm not.

00:03:35

I'm not sold on it yet, but right now I'm going with Oscar.

00:03:39

All right.

00:03:40

That's what I'm running with.

00:03:41

Can I be done with this part now?

00:03:42

Sure.

00:03:43

OK.

00:03:44

All right.

00:03:44

So number two on the list, send a note to every author I read.

00:03:48

And I intentionally mean for books on this particular one simply so that I can find a way

00:03:54

to encourage the authors that I've been reading and enjoyed.

00:03:57

And I have done this twice now received no feedback on it so far, which is fine.

00:04:05

That's not the point.

00:04:06

So I have started doing that.

00:04:08

I assume at some point I'll run across somebody that will respond to it in some form.

00:04:13

Did you send one to Mr.

00:04:14

Taleb?

00:04:15

I did.

00:04:16

I didn't hear anything bad.

00:04:17

OK.

00:04:18

I wouldn't hold your breath.

00:04:20

I just as you were as you're talking about that because the that episode as we're

00:04:25

recording this was released not too long ago and so I was re listening to it before

00:04:29

we recorded today and you're talking about this action and I'm like, Oh, I wonder what

00:04:34

that would look like if Joe sent Mr.

00:04:35

Taleb and a message.

00:04:37

It would probably be something along the lines of you're a brilliant man and he'd

00:04:40

reply with I know.

00:04:41

No, I I shared some thoughts.

00:04:47

And I tried my best to be encouraging and I heard nothing back.

00:04:51

That might be a testament to him not dealing with email.

00:04:55

You're just not being an email person.

00:04:56

I don't know.

00:04:57

True.

00:04:57

Don't know.

00:04:58

OK, I'm done.

00:04:59

Your turn.

00:04:59

All right.

00:05:00

My fixed mindset persona.

00:05:02

I think maybe I took this a little bit further than you did.

00:05:07

Did you actually define yours?

00:05:09

Did you just name it?

00:05:09

I just named it.

00:05:10

I didn't go any further than that.

00:05:12

OK.

00:05:13

I don't prefer to think about my fixed mindset much.

00:05:17

So I didn't want to dwell on it.

00:05:18

Well, let me tell you, I mean, as I started this, it was it was hard.

00:05:22

But then once I got going, I was like, Oh, yeah, and you do this and you do this

00:05:26

and you do this.

00:05:27

So it got it got real real fast.

00:05:30

So mine is Miguel McGee.

00:05:33

Just because I have fun saying it, Miguel McGee.

00:05:37

I like it.

00:05:37

Miguel McGee is overstressed, overtired, overworked, overwhelmed.

00:05:42

Gets caught up in being busy and getting things done.

00:05:44

Never stops to ask why he's doing things in the first place.

00:05:47

Just knows that things need to get done in order for him not to fail.

00:05:50

He's reluctant to try new things because it's just one more thing that is going to

00:05:53

stress him out.

00:05:55

He is firmly caught in what David Allen would call emergency scan modality.

00:05:59

But he's comfortable staying there because at least it's familiar and he knows what to expect.

00:06:04

He's too busy to question how things could be better.

00:06:07

He's always looking to the future for the next breaker vacation when maybe things

00:06:11

will slow down and get better.

00:06:12

He has trouble delegating things because the person that give this to probably won't do it

00:06:17

as well as I would.

00:06:18

And on the same note, he has trouble trusting people to follow through because he's been

00:06:22

burned before.

00:06:22

He's trouble relating to people because he's so focused on what is wrong with the task

00:06:26

of the project that they're working on.

00:06:28

He's just looking at the task instead of the person.

00:06:30

So that's that's Miguel.

00:06:32

Miguel does not sound like a fun person to hang out with.

00:06:35

Apparently I'm not.

00:06:37

At least occasionally.

00:06:40

Like I said, this is all stuff I noticed in myself.

00:06:44

So as I'm thinking about the fixed mindset guy and projecting my own faults onto him,

00:06:49

there's a lot of stuff that was illuminated.

00:06:51

So got some work to do, but it was a good exercise.

00:06:54

Fair enough.

00:06:55

OK, maybe I should go.

00:06:57

No, I'm not going to say that.

00:06:59

I'm not going to do it.

00:07:00

Nope.

00:07:00

No, I'm going to do it.

00:07:02

Oh, come on.

00:07:02

You got to tell Oscar what a jerky is.

00:07:04

Yeah, I don't like Oscar.

00:07:05

Go away, Oscar.

00:07:07

Goodbye, Oscar.

00:07:08

All right.

00:07:09

So my second one here is have a good answer for how am I helping my wife develop personally?

00:07:13

To be honest, I'd forgotten about this one, but I did it.

00:07:16

So I kind of did it unintentionally or naturally, organically, I guess.

00:07:21

You accidentally followed through on your follow up.

00:07:25

Well, I think like this is the ideal way that follow up happens is I'm so impacted

00:07:29

by the stuff that we read that it just naturally changes what I do.

00:07:33

I'm not doing this to check a box and have Joe not rake me over the coals.

00:07:37

Although you don't really do that anyways.

00:07:40

But so this is like ideal scenario, I think.

00:07:43

My wife, she is another Wonder Woman.

00:07:47

She homeschools our five kids.

00:07:50

She runs her own photography business on the side.

00:07:52

Like she does a ton and she is very selfless.

00:07:56

She will take care of other people at the expense of herself often.

00:08:01

And so I've been talking to her the last couple of weeks about making sure that she has

00:08:07

time to take care of herself.

00:08:09

And one of the things that I mentioned, like a great way to do that is we belong

00:08:13

to this gym, which is just a couple minutes from our house and they have built in childcare.

00:08:18

So any kids under eight, you can drop them off for up to two hours.

00:08:22

And I've been trying to convince her for the last month or so.

00:08:26

Maybe we've been talking about this like you need to go to the gym every day,

00:08:30

not because you want to get an incredible shape or lose a bunch of weight or anything

00:08:34

like that, but just go to yoga.

00:08:36

Go just hang out upstairs if you want.

00:08:38

Just drop the kids off for two hours because it costs you nothing and have a little bit

00:08:42

of space, have a little bit of of me time where you can just take care of yourself.

00:08:47

And she started doing that a couple of weeks ago.

00:08:49

I think it was two weeks ago, she went every day and afterwards, she's like, yeah, you're right.

00:08:55

That was that was incredible.

00:08:56

And she's been she's been consistent with it, I think, ever since then.

00:08:59

So yeah, that's the story there, I guess, about how I'm helping my wife develop.

00:09:03

Personally, she's less stressed because she can pay herself first.

00:09:07

That sounds like a really fun time way to go, Mike.

00:09:10

What's interesting about this is that like we belong to this gym for years and we've

00:09:15

talked about this a little bit before, but like it took us a while to actually execute on it.

00:09:22

And as is usually the case with this sort of thing, like after you start doing it,

00:09:26

you're like, what took me so long?

00:09:29

I've been doing this thing for a long time, but never actually fulfilled my expectations on it.

00:09:34

What happens if I try it once?

00:09:36

Oh, I should have started this a year and a half ago.

00:09:39

Yeah, it's more it's kind of like, you know, that people are telling you to do this thing

00:09:43

and you kind of see the logic in it, but you don't really believe that it'll work.

00:09:47

And then you just kind of throw it off, you know, just dismiss it.

00:09:51

And then eventually one day you try it and you're like, Oh my gosh, they were right.

00:09:55

This is amazing.

00:09:55

And then I'm just using this as an example of that sort of thing.

00:09:58

I mean, it definitely works the other way around to where she points out stuff that I've been

00:10:02

making harder for a long time.

00:10:04

But every time that happens, I feel mixed emotions because I'm thankful that I understand

00:10:09

the situation a little bit better, but I also feel bad because it's like, Oh man,

00:10:12

how much time have I wasted making this harder than it needs to be?

00:10:16

Yeah, it's always disheartening when you realize you've been wasting sometimes hours

00:10:22

at a time or in some cases, even days at a time trying to do a task that you either

00:10:28

shouldn't have been doing or there's a much better way to do it.

00:10:31

And we won't talk about how many times that happens in code.

00:10:34

No, I'm not going to go there.

00:10:36

Then my last one, don't say, can I do this?

00:10:40

But how can I do this?

00:10:41

This is not something that I think I can just check off as being done.

00:10:45

But I do have an example of this, which has happened in the last couple of weeks

00:10:50

to where there was a situation where it just was like, I don't think I'm going to be

00:10:54

able to do this thing anymore and then just a little bit different shift in mindset,

00:10:59

realize that actually there was a way that this could still be done.

00:11:04

And obviously you still need to consider whether those are the right things.

00:11:06

But the shift is in looking at something based off of your current situation,

00:11:10

as opposed to looking at something through a new configuration, which opens up new

00:11:15

opportunities, if that makes sense.

00:11:16

This is something that I hope I will continue to do, but have had at least one

00:11:21

small win from this recently.

00:11:22

Cool.

00:11:23

Well, good to hear.

00:11:24

Yeah, taking steps in the right direction.

00:11:26

I'll do I need to carry this one over to the next round?

00:11:28

I don't know.

00:11:30

I'm not sure that there will be a real easy way to measure whether it was

00:11:37

successful or not, other than hopefully I remember another example where I applied

00:11:42

this, but I don't I don't see this like decision, whether to do this thing or not

00:11:47

do this thing or maybe reconfigure things that I can do this these things.

00:11:51

Like that's not something I go through every day.

00:11:53

If I was constantly thinking about how things could be improved and could be

00:11:56

different, like I wouldn't ever get any work done.

00:11:59

So there's a balance that needs to be struck there.

00:12:01

And I would say probably you don't need to follow up with this one again.

00:12:05

Okay.

00:12:05

The definition of done, did I at one point say, how can I do this?

00:12:09

Instead of, can I do this?

00:12:10

Yes.

00:12:11

All right.

00:12:11

Fair enough.

00:12:12

So let's step into today's book.

00:12:15

One that I know Mike absolutely loves.

00:12:17

I will say second time was better than the first.

00:12:20

All right.

00:12:22

Good to know.

00:12:23

So today's book, the four disciplines of execution by Chris

00:12:27

McChesney, Jim Heuling and Sean Covey.

00:12:30

And this is a book that I think was technically a listener recommendation,

00:12:36

but productivity masters, I guess, of sorts would recommend this book.

00:12:42

So you use anyway, it's made the rounds.

00:12:43

And when you see a book like this, make the rounds with a lot of different types

00:12:49

of people, that's something that I tend to put a little bit of

00:12:53

value on.

00:12:53

It's an idea that causes me to get curious.

00:12:56

And it's one that makes me think that it would be a good fit for bookworm.

00:13:01

And in this particular case, this one was actually one of the book club books

00:13:05

that we did for the productivity guild on the, the pro side of it.

00:13:10

Anyway, that's kind of my rationale on it.

00:13:13

Nothing, you know, groundbreaking other than everyone's talking about this

00:13:16

and I'm getting curious.

00:13:18

I ended up doing it for, like I mentioned, the guild book club and had

00:13:22

some really fun conversations about it as a result of that and felt that it

00:13:28

would be a good fit for us to chat about.

00:13:32

And hopefully you didn't despise it this time because it sounds like the first

00:13:35

time was very difficult for you.

00:13:38

It was, I think I still had the same issues with it the second time around,

00:13:43

although I pushed through some of those, those sections that caused me to just

00:13:48

write it off the first time.

00:13:49

And there's definitely some great information in here.

00:13:53

I will say that it starts off with an introduction written by Clayton Christensen,

00:13:58

author of the innovators dilemma.

00:14:00

So my, my note for that part is not a great start.

00:14:03

We got a lot out of that book, but it wasn't, wasn't something that we, we enjoyed.

00:14:10

I thought that this book was, was written in a lot more engaging way, but there's

00:14:15

definitely, I think a limited scope in the application of these four disciplines of

00:14:21

execution. The main point is, is great.

00:14:23

You know, he mentions in the, the intro that once you decided what to do,

00:14:27

your biggest challenge is in getting people to execute at the level of excellence

00:14:31

that you need.

00:14:31

But from my specific situation, I work with a small team at Asian efficiency.

00:14:39

I work with small teams at our church.

00:14:43

I guess you could say I work with a small team in my family, but this seems very

00:14:48

much like a business book.

00:14:49

And if you are not a CEO and you have no vision of growing your company to be huge,

00:14:56

I think that there's limited application here.

00:14:58

In fact, the three different sections he talks about number one, the four disciplines.

00:15:02

Section two is installing them with your team.

00:15:04

And then he takes it up a level to section three is installing it with your

00:15:07

organization.

00:15:08

So I think it's kind of written under the assumption that you get to call all the

00:15:12

shots and how this gets implemented because he, as he calls out in one of the sections,

00:15:16

like if the CEO is not on board and driving this, it's not going to work.

00:15:20

Okay.

00:15:20

Cause I didn't give a few examples too of, well, I guess they gave examples of teams

00:15:26

who were implementing this, but it's difficult to have that team continuing to

00:15:32

operate with this framework when the broader organization isn't on board and the other

00:15:37

teams aren't operating under this framework.

00:15:39

So I could easily see how, you know, this is, this is a cool process to go through,

00:15:45

but when you start trying to actually, you know, put the rubber to the road, it has

00:15:51

some issues, I think, which I think you would agree with.

00:15:54

Yeah.

00:15:54

There's, it's a great idea.

00:15:56

And then the implementation is where I think it's going to be difficult and surprise,

00:16:01

surprise, they've got a solution for that, you know, my 40x.com.

00:16:05

That's the thing that turned me off the first time.

00:16:07

Cause it's like, okay, this is the plan and you're like, hmm, that sounds really good.

00:16:11

Sounds really difficult.

00:16:13

Sounds borderline impossible, but I'll keep, you know, I'm, I'm interested.

00:16:18

What are you going to say next?

00:16:19

Oh, well, we've got a tool which you can use to track all this.

00:16:21

No, I'm out because I've seen those types of tools before.

00:16:25

And to be honest, I read this, I finished this when I was on the plane.

00:16:28

So I did not log in and look at that tool, but I envision like e-productivity all over again.

00:16:35

Usually they're, they're a little bit behind in terms of the technology.

00:16:39

And then they are selling this to companies and organizations with the idea that everybody

00:16:45

is just going to log in and use this thing and they're going to keep it up to date.

00:16:48

And it's going to be great, but usually the interface is so bad that no one wants to use it.

00:16:54

So they don't use it.

00:16:55

And then as soon as you don't start tracking everything in there, it becomes quickly useless.

00:16:59

And then you're back to blaming people.

00:17:01

Like, why isn't this working?

00:17:03

And I know that's a problem.

00:17:04

I mean, they spent two thirds of the book talking about what happens and to avoid that or what

00:17:10

you can do to avoid that situation where the implementation doesn't work.

00:17:13

But I don't know, it just seems like the stars really have to align if you're going to implement this.

00:17:19

I think that there's definitely parts of it that are great.

00:17:22

There's definitely things that you could apply to any situation, like the whole idea of the whirlwind.

00:17:28

I thought that was great.

00:17:29

You know, he talks about the whirlwind being the enemy of execution.

00:17:33

And this is, I think, a little bit before the individual disciplines.

00:17:37

But basically the whirlwind is the everyday stuff.

00:17:39

It's urgent and it pulls you in.

00:17:42

And what you need to do is you need to manage the whirlwind and then you have to manage the new stuff that you want to do.

00:17:51

And he uses the numbers, I think, 80% of your time is going to be dealing with the whirlwind.

00:17:55

And only 20% is going to be available to be used towards new initiatives.

00:17:59

And I think that that's pretty accurate.

00:18:02

That's something that we struggle with at Asian efficiencies.

00:18:05

We got these things that we do on a regular basis and we're always wondering, like, how many story points do we actually have to devote to new stuff for our quarterly goals or things like that?

00:18:15

And this is a balance that you really have to figure out on your own.

00:18:19

On page 80, he says, if you ignore the urgent and can kill you today, if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.

00:18:23

So balance here is really, really important.

00:18:25

Right.

00:18:26

One of the notes I have down is that this book gave me a nomenclature.

00:18:31

It gave me terms.

00:18:32

To use for a lot of these things that you mentioned, the whirlwind, which is just another word for, you know, the emails you got to send, the paperwork you got to do, the client calls you got to take, the like all of those pieces that you got to do, just to keep the business running and to keep things moving.

00:18:50

Which don't actually get you ahead.

00:18:54

They just get you to the point of treading water.

00:18:57

And that's just one piece of it.

00:19:00

But you've also got things like the scoreboard or the lead measures or the wigs, the wildly important goals, like having that nomenclature.

00:19:08

I found to be very helpful just to think through the framework.

00:19:13

It doesn't have to necessarily be this framework that I'm using, but you can pull pieces out of this, I think, and still maintain some of the names for things because I found the naming to be very helpful because even whenever I'm referring to, you know, I've got my paper system.

00:19:29

And I've got all these different areas that I'm keeping track of in that.

00:19:34

It's not uncommon for me to sometimes put www next to certain tasks just so that I know that those are part of the whirlwind and they're things I've just got to get done.

00:19:45

But they're not as important as, you know, some of the others that I'll put wig next to just so that I know that those actually apply to my goals.

00:19:54

And, you know, it's just interesting that I can do that, but at the same time, the four disciplines is really a, at least I saw it as a framework similar to GTD.

00:20:05

Like it seems to want to be in that class of productivity almost.

00:20:10

And I just didn't feel like it belonged there.

00:20:13

I like it belongs at a CEO's desk, not necessarily at the individual's corner.

00:20:20

I don't know.

00:20:21

Do you agree with that?

00:20:22

Yeah, I kind of had the same thought.

00:20:24

This is like GTD for corporations.

00:20:26

But I think the, like I said, the implementation of it is difficult because it's contingent on everybody buying into this vision.

00:20:36

And there's a whole lot of stuff here that you probably don't need to communicate to everybody who's going to be helping you implement it at the same time, which is why something like the 40x tool that they have where it's got all of those boxes.

00:20:52

And all those things.

00:20:53

Like, I think that's kind of overkill for most organizations.

00:20:57

Now, that being said, I'm not in a large organization where this has been implemented.

00:21:00

They've got lots of stories in the book of people who have done it successfully.

00:21:05

So it obviously works, but I just don't see how it could work in any of the teams that I'm involved with right now.

00:21:12

Definitely some good stuff in here though.

00:21:15

And you mentioned a couple of things.

00:21:16

So maybe we should jump into what these four disciplines are.

00:21:18

Yeah, I was just thinking that.

00:21:20

So the whole framework here is based on four specific, I almost want to call them habits, these disciplines that you are to put in place in order to achieve your wildest dreams.

00:21:35

I'm making that part of it.

00:21:36

Basically it doesn't, but it could.

00:21:39

It could.

00:21:39

I mean, it sounds like them.

00:21:41

And really, like these four things are so simple.

00:21:45

You know, at number one, focus on the wild.

00:21:48

The important number two, act on the lead measures.

00:21:50

Number three, keep a compelling scoreboard.

00:21:52

Number four, create a canes of accountability.

00:21:54

Another way to say this, focus on the right things, do the things that contribute to growth in those areas, make sure that you're tracking your growth and do it regularly.

00:22:03

Like there's personal application to these things.

00:22:07

And I think that some of the terms are very businessy slash salesy.

00:22:12

So I kind of had a little bit of a reaction like you did where it's like, Oh, there's a term for this thing.

00:22:17

Like the whirlwind, but some of it was just like, no, I'm not going to call it that.

00:22:22

The lead in the lag measures I really like, we'll get into that in the second section.

00:22:26

But the first one here, focus on the wild, the important.

00:22:28

He's got these wildly important goals, which he calls wigs.

00:22:32

And he uses later on in the other sections about getting everybody on board.

00:22:37

You have these wig meetings.

00:22:39

And just like, no, it's, it's your one thing.

00:22:41

That's what you're focusing on.

00:22:42

Like that.

00:22:43

That's so much more approachable than your, your wig, your wildly important goal, at least, least to me.

00:22:47

Well, yeah, because he even spells out they, man, I keep saying he, it's they.

00:22:52

There's three authors here.

00:22:53

They call out that you don't want more than one of these, maybe two.

00:22:57

Like that is, that is the thing that they make very clear, I think.

00:23:02

And it does correlate a lot to almost like find your mission.

00:23:08

And what is your core intent of your company?

00:23:13

Like it's, it's that sort of thing is what drives you?

00:23:15

What gets you excited?

00:23:15

What gets you out of bed in the morning?

00:23:17

Like those are the types of things I felt like this one and to be correlated with.

00:23:21

And yet they're calling it wigs and calling them goals and like, well, yes, of course, they're goals.

00:23:26

But at the same time, like this is, this is another word for it.

00:23:31

So I'm with you at the same time.

00:23:34

I, I don't think that because we're being a little bit hard on it.

00:23:39

I think there is still quite a bit of value in the four steps that go with this.

00:23:47

But I think that the terminology is very businessy.

00:23:50

I mean, Sean Covey, of course, you know, with the, the, all three of them, they've done research on how many organizations, hundreds.

00:23:57

I know they've talked to thousands or worked with maybe even a hundred thousand plus people to work through this.

00:24:04

And in order to help them achieve their goals.

00:24:07

So it's not like they don't have some backing to this.

00:24:11

And it's not like they don't have a lot of research to show that this is correct.

00:24:17

But at the same time, there are a lot of books out there and a lot of people talking about these cool, innovative ideas, which are probably just innate to humans if you stop and think it through.

00:24:30

But these steps are very talked about.

00:24:35

They're very normalized in the productivity space.

00:24:38

So I don't really see this as revolutionary or groundbreaking, but at the same time, something like this would be very necessary at an organization level, like we've been saying.

00:24:50

And using this type of terminology would definitely relate to a lot of executives and upper management.

00:24:56

And honestly, if an organization is going to be successful, something like this could help significantly.

00:25:03

I just think maybe you and I are the wrong audience for this.

00:25:06

Totally agree. But I also don't think that we're being too hard on them because they make a point of saying that you can apply this anywhere.

00:25:13

And they use an example from section three.

00:25:16

They talk about 40 X on personal goals and they use an example, somebody who uses to potty train their kid.

00:25:21

And I'm like, there is no way you used 40 X to potty train your kid.

00:25:25

I've gone through the process four times now.

00:25:28

And we are not having wig meetings with my two year old talk about the most important thing.

00:25:33

You know, we're just telling them you aim there.

00:25:37

So like my note for that is like 40 X and potty training question mark, please.

00:25:41

Just embrace what you are.

00:25:44

You are a productivity system for businesses and you're absolutely right.

00:25:50

Like they have success in that arena.

00:25:51

Don't try to be like, oh, this is a breakthrough system that you can apply to every area of your life.

00:25:57

No, none of this stuff is new, but just package it like you did and say, if you're a business and you want to prove effectively your organization, then do this.

00:26:06

You know, make it, make it cookie cutter, make it prescriptive.

00:26:09

And don't tell me that, oh, if you just change some of the terminology, you can use this with your two year old who needs to learn how to go to the bathroom.

00:26:15

Like it's not going to happen.

00:26:16

The first one is essentially what you would think.

00:26:19

Focus on the wildly important.

00:26:21

Pick your one thing.

00:26:22

Like, what is the thing that you need to do for your self or for your company in order to actually make progress, to get past the whirlwind and actually improve yourself or.

00:26:36

Your company.

00:26:36

And that is a thing that is much easier said than done.

00:26:42

They have a lot of ways to help you figure out what this wildly important goal is.

00:26:47

My gut reaction to this was, who doesn't immediately know what the answer to this question is when you first hear.

00:26:54

Businesses, that's who because they've been doing the processes over and over again and never asking about why they're doing it.

00:27:01

Yes.

00:27:02

So when you first hear this, like you immediately have something jump in your mind.

00:27:06

For a lot of people, I know it's, you know, I want to lose weight or I want to, you know, be more fit.

00:27:12

Like those are very common goals, especially in personal lives.

00:27:16

But when it comes to businesses, I think it can get a little more muddy.

00:27:21

But even then, if you're at the top of that organization, like I think about my business, well, it's a one man show, but even then I could immediately tell you what my

00:27:32

wildly important goal is even though I have a lot of ventures, I can still tell you exactly where that goal needs to be.

00:27:41

So I struggled with them.

00:27:44

And this is, this is the theme that you and I talk about a lot.

00:27:48

They spell it out and then they repeat it.

00:27:50

And that happens a lot.

00:27:52

Yep.

00:27:53

I understand why authors do it.

00:27:55

I get it.

00:27:56

But at the same time in this particular one,

00:28:00

if you can't take the four steps and translate it into how to install it in your team and you, you don't understand how to then go take it and install it in your organization,

00:28:09

I don't understand why you have to have these sections in here, like explain the framework and then let them translate it.

00:28:19

Like that's, that's my view.

00:28:20

Maybe people will disagree with me.

00:28:22

If you disagree with me, let me know.

00:28:23

Link in the show notes on how you can do that.

00:28:25

But the thing there is that I just don't see why you've got to repeat that much because it's two full sections on the book, which is a fairly significant amount of this particular text.

00:28:38

Yeah.

00:28:39

No, I agree and disagree.

00:28:41

OK, good.

00:28:42

I think that that's actually one of the more compelling sections in the book is the installing 40x with your team.

00:28:48

There's a lot of real practical stuff in there, a lot of lists.

00:28:52

And I think that that's great.

00:28:53

The third section installing it with your organization, that's where it got a little old for me, but you're right in that the first section of the book that you could probably just write the book on those four principles.

00:29:05

That's where the meat is.

00:29:06

But I could totally see how the second section could be helpful when you're trying to install it in an organization.

00:29:12

Also, the focusing on the wild, the important part, this was a little bit not clear, I thought, in how they explain this because they're talking about pick one while the important

00:29:23

goal, they say if every other area of operations state at the current level performance, what is the one area where change would make the biggest impact?

00:29:30

They say, don't try to change a bunch of things at once.

00:29:34

They use the quote from Steve Jobs and was proud of what we don't do as a matter of what we do.

00:29:37

And then when they get to the four rules for applying discipline one, they talk about don't let your team focus on more than two wild, the important goals at the same time.

00:29:45

So it's like, OK, you just preach this message and now you're making a concession against it.

00:29:50

It's like, we want you to pick one thing.

00:29:52

But we know you're not going to do that.

00:29:54

So at least don't pick more than two.

00:29:56

Yes.

00:29:57

It's like, do you believe this or not?

00:29:59

Like either say, you know, one's really not that important.

00:30:02

You make it consistent, make it one or two throughout the whole thing, or at least at the very end when you're talking about how you're going to pull this off, don't be like, well, it's OK if you've got to.

00:30:11

I changed my mind.

00:30:14

Not going to know.

00:30:16

Not going to do it.

00:30:16

OK.

00:30:17

Again, I get it.

00:30:18

Businesses organizations, if you ask a CEO, which one of these things is most important, they're going to say all of them.

00:30:23

Yes.

00:30:25

But to me, it kind of watered down the effectiveness of that message.

00:30:30

And I believe that this is the first discipline.

00:30:32

This is the most important one.

00:30:33

Like if you're going to pick one theme that really is going to make a difference in your personal professional life, it would be this, you know, pick that one thing where, you know, according to the one thing by Gary Keller, he says, the one thing that makes everything else easier or unnecessary.

00:30:48

It doesn't say pick that one thing and then add a couple of ancillary things alongside it.

00:30:53

Like, no, there's one thing.

00:30:55

There's no room for negotiation on this in my mind.

00:30:57

So the second discipline here is act on the lead measures.

00:31:00

This is my favorite one.

00:31:01

This is your favorite?

00:31:02

Yeah.

00:31:03

I could understand that because this is the one that I think I resonated with the most as well.

00:31:07

But the principle here is that you take your wildly important goal.

00:31:12

You think it through to determine what I guess from a data standpoint, like what

00:31:18

can you break that goal down into in order to accomplish the goal, which that ends up being your measurement on whether or not you're to that.

00:31:28

Now, we should also backtrack a little bit and say that whenever they tell you to come up with your wildly important goal, they have some criteria on what, like how you should define it.

00:31:38

And it's always go from this point, from point A to point B in X amount of time.

00:31:45

Whenever you do that, you can then translate it down to, OK, if I'm going from zero members in January to a thousand members in June, then I've got five months to accomplish that.

00:32:00

And then you can take the five months and say, well, that means I've got to have 200 a month to get up there.

00:32:05

And then that becomes your lead measure.

00:32:08

Because then you can look at the month and say, OK, did we hit 200?

00:32:10

Nope.

00:32:11

Well, we got to ramp things up then so that you can keep going.

00:32:14

And that's how you create your trajectory to get to that goal and those become your lead measures.

00:32:19

Yeah, this is great stuff.

00:32:20

And to revisit what you were just saying about the wildly important goal, defining it, the formula that they use is from X to Y by specific date, which is great.

00:32:30

And that leads in perfectly to this lead versus lag measures, though, because most people, when they measure that in terms of their wildly important goal, they are measuring those lag measures, the number of members like you mentioned or the sales amount.

00:32:44

We want to double our sales this year.

00:32:45

You know, that's that's something that I've heard in the past.

00:32:48

Well, you can measure that at the end of the year and you can see if you hit it, but that's the lag measures.

00:32:54

It doesn't tell you whether you did the right things in order to double your sales.

00:32:58

And a lot of people, I think, especially in sales, there's a disconnect here a lot of times between those, those lag and the lead measures because you're being measured against the lag measures in terms of your performance.

00:33:13

But what's really driving that performance is the number of calls that you make or the number of emails that you send and understanding how those are connected is really important if you want to maintain the motivation to follow through and hit those lag measures.

00:33:27

Because you could be doing the right things.

00:33:29

And if you're not seeing the results, if you're just looking at the lag measures, then you can get discouraged pretty quick because you're like, oh, I'm not seeing any change.

00:33:38

This isn't really working.

00:33:39

Yes, and even I think maybe the example I gave is geared on lag measures versus lead to just because, you know, I would think of acquiring members to a site would be the end result versus the lead on that would be, you know, the way that you actually accomplish that, which, you know, in an hour world, that would mean recording audio or writing or putting together videos.

00:34:06

Exactly.

00:34:06

And you could translate that into every time I release a video, I get, you know, three or four new members.

00:34:14

So that would mean that I need to release 10 videos across a certain timeframe.

00:34:20

So you could then say, okay, well, I have I created my 10 videos?

00:34:24

No, well, of course your lag measure isn't going to measure up just because you haven't done the actions at the beginning to actually achieve that.

00:34:32

And that's the hard part is figuring out how those are connected because, as he mentions in the book, there's two responses to a lag measure.

00:34:39

Oh, cool.

00:34:40

If you've hit it or oh, no, if you haven't, but at that point, it's too late to do anything about it.

00:34:44

Right.

00:34:45

Whereas the lead measures, if you can figure out how those are connected to your lag measures, these are the things that will tell you if you're likely to achieve that goal and they are fully within your control, which is important.

00:34:57

So they're predictive and they're influenceable or you look at your lag measures, it looks like, you know, we're not going to hit this point by whatever date based on the data that we've got right now.

00:35:07

You can pull the right levers and you can put more effort into the right lead measures to adjust for that and to still hit your targets.

00:35:15

But if you don't understand the connections, then you really have no idea whether what you're doing is hitting the mark.

00:35:21

And these lead measures help you with the third discipline, which is keep a compelling scoreboard.

00:35:28

And I forget what some of the recommendations were on this because I think this was a bit fuzzy for me whenever I was reading it, trying to nail down what do you actually mean by this.

00:35:38

And they have some examples, but my data analyst brain kept translating it into just create a graph and put your dots on it.

00:35:47

Like that's.

00:35:49

You've got your lead measures and then you've got your lag result that you're trying to hit.

00:35:55

And ultimately what this becomes is the chart that shows how close to your end result you are getting, which I just translated as put dots on a graph.

00:36:06

Yeah, they've got examples of some different scoreboards in later sections in the book.

00:36:11

But the one that they use was like a mountain climber versus a goat in terms of the chartered trajectory that they needed to be hitting in order to achieve their goal at the end of the quarter of the year or whatever.

00:36:22

And then the trajectory of the team at the given moment.

00:36:25

I think an example of this kind of is like the if you've ever seen a sprint burn down chart, like the story points that you're closing as the sprint goes on.

00:36:35

Jira's got these tools built in.

00:36:36

So you can see like if you were just consistent, your graph would look like this.

00:36:40

Our graph always looks nothing like that because we start working on the big story point issues at the beginning.

00:36:46

We don't close them.

00:36:47

So we don't ship anything and all of a sudden, like right at the end, it just like falls way down.

00:36:52

And most of the time we hit our our velocity and we we close all the issues that are in our sprint.

00:36:58

But it looks nothing like that chart.

00:37:01

So when I saw the goat in the mountain climber and like comparing those two, I'm like, do you want to just completely dishearten your team because there is no way there.

00:37:09

I forget that when you start something new, you're not going to be operating a peak efficiency.

00:37:15

You're not going to be on the same trajectory that you're going to be a couple months from now.

00:37:19

Once you've gotten into the swing of things.

00:37:21

And so I completely agree with the point behind keeping a compelling score.

00:37:25

But he talks about how people play differently when they're keeping score.

00:37:28

There's more intensity, there's better teamwork.

00:37:30

I mean, I grew up playing sports and I can totally tell you.

00:37:33

Yeah, absolutely.

00:37:34

In fact, I don't play a pickup basketball anymore because I get a little bit too competitive.

00:37:39

But the the way that this is implemented as they explain it in the book, I think leaves a little bit to be desired.

00:37:48

There is one important thing here though that I think is worth calling out.

00:37:52

And that is that players have to keep the scoreboard, not the managers.

00:37:56

You can't just have top level people saying, Oh, you guys are behind, you know, because of what that that fosters in my mind.

00:38:04

Anyways, the the us against them mentality and really if you're talking about an organization, the really effective teams, like there is no eye.

00:38:12

There's just us, like one of our core values that Asian efficiency is we before me, like we lose or we win as a team.

00:38:19

And, you know, if somebody really just does an outstanding job, yeah, they'll get recognized for their effort.

00:38:25

But we're all in this together.

00:38:27

And I think that a lot of the scoreboards that I've seen in the past, that's been an error that they've made is it's the

00:38:33

managers and the sea level employees being like, okay, this is what we're going to do to measure.

00:38:38

And none of the people who are responsible for the work of head and he buy in on it.

00:38:42

That's a good point.

00:38:43

But it also leads us into the fourth point, which is create a cadence of accountability.

00:38:49

And I'm curious as to your thoughts on this one, because you're a part of a team that works off of a scoreboard of sorts because of the agile process.

00:39:00

What they're saying is you have to create a regular occurring, they want weekly, right?

00:39:05

If I remember that, right?

00:39:07

Yeah, weekly 30 minute meetings, which there is no way those meetings are less than 30 minutes.

00:39:12

So they want a 30 minute meeting once a week to basically review the scoreboard and follow up on the lead measures and see how they are doing as compared to their end game in the wildly important goal, their wig.

00:39:31

So for me, as a solo pernour who's building my own stuff and working for clients, the wildly important goal piece in a lot of cases is either one personal development or two, a side project that I'm working on.

00:39:47

And as a developer, it's very easy to come up with side projects.

00:39:52

I tend to have too many of them and I need to focus on one.

00:39:56

And I have that one, but how do you create this cadence of catching up with what's going on and how's, you know, what's our progress on it?

00:40:05

Like that sort of thing is difficult when it's just me.

00:40:10

So in my particular case, right now, I actually do have a couple other people that I'm getting involved with one of my side projects.

00:40:20

So that actually does lend itself to the team scenario and the accountability side of it.

00:40:26

But before that, and even, you know, on some of the stuff I'm doing, it just doesn't really apply.

00:40:33

So I struggle with how do you actually implement this in all scenarios?

00:40:38

So I'm curious, how do you guys do something like this with Asian efficiency?

00:40:41

Because you guys are doing agile, but not for development.

00:40:44

You're doing it for content for the most part.

00:40:47

This is where I started to disagree with this book was this whole idea of these wildly important goal meetings.

00:40:55

We use a little bit different framework, which comes from the book, Scaling Up by Vern Harness.

00:41:00

The old version was the Rockefeller habits.

00:41:02

And there's a lot of the same principles.

00:41:05

I mean, the basic idea here is that you need the team to constantly be thinking about what is the one thing that we're moving towards.

00:41:13

What is our wildly important goal?

00:41:15

I just don't think a weekly meeting where we're looking at the wildly important goal is effective.

00:41:21

The way that we do this, we have what are called functional areas of accountability, the functional accountability chart that we go over in our monthly meetings.

00:41:30

And so, for example, one of my areas is the podcast and another area is the dojo.

00:41:36

Another area is products.

00:41:37

So I'm going to go crunch those numbers.

00:41:40

And we do check in on those on a weekly basis.

00:41:43

We have a weekly meeting, which is actually only about 15 minutes where everybody reports on the numbers for the area of accountability and they share any insights that they see.

00:41:52

But we don't talk about the wildly important goal in every one of those weekly meetings.

00:41:57

We've thought through and agreed as a company that these are the right levers that we should be pulling.

00:42:03

And then people are assigned to those areas of responsibility.

00:42:07

And then they track those metrics to make sure that those levers are being pulled in the right way.

00:42:12

We've identified our lead measures in essence.

00:42:14

But there's nothing once a week that's that is explicitly stating, you know, how does the customer satisfaction rate or the customer support response time influence our wildly important goal?

00:42:26

And if you were to do that for every functional area of accountability, which is kind of the picture that I got when I read this, there's no way that's a 30 minute meeting.

00:42:35

You can say, well, everybody should just use this format and they should do it in two minutes or less, but that's not going to happen.

00:42:42

It's hard because the purpose of this meeting as spelled out in the book is to go over this goal.

00:42:48

And although I get that, I don't know, maybe that's the way it should be done.

00:42:54

Like you measure how you're getting to that.

00:42:56

But that would just mean reviewing the scoreboard, which it sounds like you're doing.

00:43:00

Just not explicitly talking about the goal itself.

00:43:04

Exactly.

00:43:05

We're reviewing the scoreboard as a team so we can see if we're moving in the right direction.

00:43:11

But then, you know, going off of these points here, number one, account report on commitments.

00:43:16

We do that number two, review the scoreboard, learn from our successes and failures.

00:43:19

We do that to number three, plan, clear the path and make new commitments.

00:43:23

That's ridiculous on a weekly basis, in my opinion.

00:43:26

Makes sense.

00:43:27

All right.

00:43:27

Should we go into section two?

00:43:29

Let's do it.

00:43:29

This is the part you liked, right?

00:43:30

Well, this is the part where I have the most notes.

00:43:33

There's a lot of stuff in here.

00:43:36

I think that could be useful.

00:43:38

Like I said, I don't, and I don't see a scenario where I'm implementing 40X in my life

00:43:46

in any way, shape or form, to be honest, at least as they prescribe it in this book.

00:43:50

Like I said, there's a lot of good principles here.

00:43:52

But installing 40X with your team, this is essentially broken down into the four different sections.

00:43:58

So how do you install discipline one?

00:44:00

How do you install discipline two?

00:44:01

How do you install discipline three?

00:44:03

How do you install discipline four?

00:44:05

And they give some very practical steps in how to do this.

00:44:09

But they also cover five stages of change here, which I think are important.

00:44:14

Stage one is getting clear.

00:44:15

Stage two is you're launching this thing.

00:44:18

Stage three is adoption where everybody's buying into it.

00:44:21

Stage four is optimization where you tweak things.

00:44:23

And then stage five is habits.

00:44:25

Okay.

00:44:26

And that even that is, I think, way more complex than it needs to be.

00:44:31

Really, the takeaway here is make the things that you want to do over and over again.

00:44:36

The right things, the lead measures, make those habits and you're good.

00:44:39

Yeah.

00:44:40

So I'm a part of a few and I'm also a part of temporary teams.

00:44:44

You know, as a freelancer, you get drug into teams just kind of quickly.

00:44:50

This is why I have a lot of accounts with say Trello and todoist and I'm all over the place at Lassie and stuff.

00:44:58

Like I'm very familiar with these products and I use a lot of them regularly.

00:45:03

This might be why I'm on paper.

00:45:05

So the thing with it is that I get to go through this process of onboarding.

00:45:12

You get to get credentials.

00:45:14

You get access to things, but, you know, on top of all that, you're trying to get

00:45:19

familiar with the cadence of the team.

00:45:22

And for some, you know, in some of my clients, actually the majority of my

00:45:26

clients are international anymore, which is kind of fun because they're working

00:45:30

while I'm sleeping and I get to work while they're sleeping.

00:45:32

So it works out quite well for me.

00:45:35

So I don't get the daily interruptions piece from a lot of them, but you go through

00:45:40

this spin up process with each of them, which I account for in my quotes.

00:45:45

And by the time you get into the groove with them, at least for me, my project is

00:45:52

usually half over, if not almost over, and you wrap it up and you move on.

00:45:58

And then you do it all over again.

00:45:59

So you have to be okay with doing, like getting involved with new things very

00:46:04

quickly and frequently, which is a good thing for me because I love new things,

00:46:09

new and shiny, yay.

00:46:10

So it's a good thing to see new organizations and new ways of interacting.

00:46:16

So I haven't yet run across a team that uses 40x.

00:46:22

I run across a lot of agile shops, oddly enough, a lot of waterfall shops, which I

00:46:28

don't even want to go into.

00:46:30

Don't not going to do that.

00:46:32

I guess what I'm getting at is this is not a thing you see frequently.

00:46:36

I can see how it would be helpful.

00:46:38

I can see how you're somewhat doing this with Asian efficiency.

00:46:43

If you translate the terminology and yet I don't know that if I had a general,

00:46:50

like if I had an organization that I was running that was, you know, hundreds

00:46:53

or maybe thousands of people, I'm not sure I would go through the process of

00:46:57

implementing this.

00:46:59

So I like some of the stuff that was in this installing it in your team

00:47:02

section, but it felt like a lot of repeat to me.

00:47:06

Yep.

00:47:07

And I think that's intentional, to be honest.

00:47:09

I mean, it starts with the Greek myth of Sisyphus, I believe, is the guy's name.

00:47:14

He's the one who was punished by the gods and forced to push a boulder up a

00:47:17

mountain.

00:47:18

Every time he reaches the peak, the boulder rolls back down and he has to push

00:47:20

it up again.

00:47:21

So I feel like right at the beginning of this, they're saying that you're going

00:47:25

to fail at this over and over and over again.

00:47:27

And it's a little bit of a cop out, in my opinion.

00:47:30

It's like, you know what, if this doesn't work, it's you, not us.

00:47:33

Just keep trying.

00:47:34

Yeah.

00:47:36

But I do get it, like all of the situations are different.

00:47:39

And it's interesting you're talking about the client work because there is no way

00:47:44

I would try to work on this sort of thing with a team that I was not going to be

00:47:50

working with six months from now.

00:47:52

Like that's just a complete waste of time for six weeks.

00:47:55

Yeah, exactly.

00:47:57

But I think that this whole section again is more complicated than it needs to be.

00:48:05

There's a section where he talks about installing discipline to acting on the lead

00:48:11

measures and he calls out three reasons that this is so hard.

00:48:15

And this, I think just like encapsulates perfectly this whole section.

00:48:21

Number one, lead measures can be counterintuitive.

00:48:24

Number two, lead measures are hard to keep track of.

00:48:26

Number three, lead measures often look too simple.

00:48:28

Yes.

00:48:29

To all all the things.

00:48:31

But if all you did was understand that piece of this and focus on the lead measures,

00:48:36

I'd say that's the 80/20 of this whole section of the book is just figure out

00:48:41

what are the right levers to pull and then motivate the people to pull those

00:48:44

levers, all of the other initial four disciplines, the keeping the compelling

00:48:48

scoreboard, creating the cadence of responsibility, that stuff will happen,

00:48:52

I think almost automatically, if you are doing the right things, if you're

00:48:56

pulling the right levers.

00:48:57

So what about installing this with an organization?

00:49:00

Because I feel like this is the one area that this book is geared towards.

00:49:03

And yet it's at the very end and not talked about.

00:49:06

Well, I suppose they talk about it quite a bit through the sections, but to me,

00:49:10

this is the purpose of the book is to say this is a thing you should do for your

00:49:14

organization.

00:49:15

And I think you and I would agree that this is where it's probably best suited.

00:49:20

But what are your thoughts on this section?

00:49:23

Because I feel like you and I don't really, like we're not a part of a group

00:49:28

that would be classified as an organization.

00:49:30

I don't think, you know, I work at the church, but that's a team.

00:49:34

Like it's not large enough for for that to say it's an organization.

00:49:38

Like it's just not enough people running it to say that.

00:49:42

But I work for a lot of organizations.

00:49:45

But again, I'm only with them for three weeks on average.

00:49:49

So you get familiar with each other, you get the thing done and then you walk away.

00:49:53

Sometimes I come back and I do something again for them.

00:49:57

But that is not, I don't want to say that's not the norm, but I don't do extended

00:50:02

stays with organizations is what I'm getting at.

00:50:04

Yeah.

00:50:05

So this section, again, not a huge fan of this.

00:50:08

So let me back up just a little bit because in the previous section about

00:50:12

installing 4DX with your team, the very last chapter in here is automating 4DX,

00:50:18

which is the sales pitch for their software.

00:50:20

Okay.

00:50:21

So think about it.

00:50:22

They've spent this whole big section of the book talking about how this is going

00:50:26

to be really difficult installing this with your team.

00:50:28

We're going to tell you all these things that you should do.

00:50:31

You're going to try these things.

00:50:32

You're going to fail.

00:50:33

You should just try again.

00:50:34

Oh, by the way, if you want to make it easier and automate it, like that's the

00:50:37

key word there is automate.

00:50:38

I think like automate that's automatic.

00:50:41

There is no way this doesn't work.

00:50:42

In my opinion, just because you bought a piece of software, it doesn't mean this

00:50:45

is guaranteed to work, but that's how they framed it.

00:50:47

Right.

00:50:48

Okay.

00:50:48

And that's very important because that leads into then installing this in your

00:50:52

organization, because if you can install this with the team, which you've already

00:50:56

established, there's no easy feat.

00:50:58

Okay.

00:50:59

Just imagine what you can accomplish if you install this with your entire organization.

00:51:04

Like that's how they frame this.

00:51:05

And the first thing they do in this third section is they give you case studies,

00:51:10

which are written by somebody else.

00:51:11

Okay.

00:51:12

These are essentially testimonials for the software that they just advertised.

00:51:16

Yes.

00:51:17

And so right away, this is bugging me.

00:51:19

This is driving me crazy because it's just rubbing me the wrong way.

00:51:23

This is the kind of thing I expect in a free ebook I download from a website or one

00:51:28

of those, you just pay shipping sort of a deals, not from a quote unquote, New

00:51:32

York Times bestseller or whatever it says on the, on the cover.

00:51:35

Like this is supposed to be like a Keystone business book.

00:51:39

All right.

00:51:39

I don't want case studies for why your software is great from people that you've

00:51:44

paid or given a discount to.

00:51:45

But again, this section, there's some good stuff in here.

00:51:49

They have steps to installing 40 X in your organization.

00:51:52

Some of these I like some of them I don't step one, clarify the overall

00:51:56

while the important goal absolutely makes a ton of sense.

00:51:59

Step two, design the team while the important goals and the lead measures.

00:52:02

So how did the team while the important goals support the overall

00:52:05

while the important goal?

00:52:06

That makes sense to step three, leader certification.

00:52:10

I wonder how you get certified.

00:52:12

They didn't talk about this.

00:52:14

Joe, you have any idea?

00:52:14

How do I get certified for VD for 40 X?

00:52:17

I don't know. I wondered that when I read it.

00:52:19

I probably have to pay them.

00:52:21

Huh? I mean, they're the guys who.

00:52:23

So like right there, step three, it's like, oh, well, if I'm not going to go

00:52:27

all in with this and hire these guys to help me do this, like, I'm not going to

00:52:32

get the full benefit of it.

00:52:34

It's it just feels so out of place and sleazy in this book, in my, my opinion.

00:52:38

The number four, the team launch number five execution with coaching.

00:52:43

Again, I wonder who provides that coaching.

00:52:45

Probably somebody who certifies leaders know anybody.

00:52:49

Maybe they've got software that can help me implement this automatically.

00:52:52

You know, it doesn't work that way.

00:52:54

And the number six quarterly summits, like, I think that's very easy to overlook this

00:52:58

piece. I think this is the most important part of this whole section.

00:53:01

These quarterly summits, what's happening here is not the wild, the important

00:53:06

goal meetings.

00:53:07

OK, this is not something that's unique to 40 X.

00:53:10

This is something that we saw when we did the five dysfunctions of a team where

00:53:14

they would go away for those off sites.

00:53:15

Those off sites, I think, are the key to your team being effective, that

00:53:20

communication that happens.

00:53:22

And it's not because you follow a set of simple steps.

00:53:25

It's because, like we saw in that book, the leaders are invested in and they're

00:53:29

paying attention to the people that they're working with.

00:53:31

They're not checking off boxes.

00:53:33

They're not checking a dashboard on my 40 X.com.

00:53:37

They're investing in their people.

00:53:39

And these quarterly summits, these are a really important piece of the scaling

00:53:42

framework that we use as well.

00:53:44

So I didn't resonate with this section at all.

00:53:45

I didn't care for it.

00:53:46

No, the only other thing I wrote down here was the personal goal stuff, which we

00:53:50

touched on already, the potty training, like, come on, just embrace what you are.

00:53:54

You're not everything for everybody.

00:53:56

That's OK.

00:53:57

Be the system for businesses and organizations.

00:53:59

You know, big, big companies, give them a framework to follow that they can

00:54:03

implement easily.

00:54:04

Give them the tools, sell them the certification, sell them the coaching.

00:54:07

But you're not selling it to me.

00:54:09

I'm not going to get certified so that I can teach my kid how to go to the bathroom,

00:54:12

like, no.

00:54:13

All right.

00:54:14

So all of that said, let's get past all of this.

00:54:17

What's what do you have for action items on this one?

00:54:22

I don't have an action item for this book.

00:54:24

I don't know.

00:54:27

Like I took a whole bunch of notes.

00:54:29

I've got the mind note file in front of me.

00:54:31

Yep.

00:54:32

And as I usually do when I'm writing down my action items, like I'll note those

00:54:37

in my mind note file, like I want to make sure that I do this and I'll put action item

00:54:40

colon and then the thing that I want to implement.

00:54:44

I did, you know, command F, try to find the term action item and I had none.

00:54:48

And I think that's because, like I said, this is a framework that probably is the

00:54:54

exact right thing if you are in the exact right scenario.

00:54:58

But that scenario is not me.

00:55:01

And I kind of resented the fact that they tried to make it sound like, oh, yeah,

00:55:06

you could totally apply this to your situation no matter what your situation is.

00:55:09

You know, you're a parent.

00:55:10

40 X. No, my wife is not going to be a fan of 40 X.

00:55:15

I can tell you that.

00:55:15

So yeah, no action items for me.

00:55:18

I don't have any action items on this one either.

00:55:20

I thought for sure you'd have some because, I mean, you are Joe CEO, uh, Joe

00:55:24

Buehler, enterprises.

00:55:25

So like if as you scale your business, as you grow, can you see yourself doing

00:55:31

specific things from this book?

00:55:34

Or is it just kind of like the general knowledge of the lead versus lag measures

00:55:37

that impacted you?

00:55:38

Well, when you say grow my business, here's a fun question.

00:55:42

I'm going to pose this to you.

00:55:43

I'm a freelance web developer.

00:55:46

I do custom websites.

00:55:48

How do you scale that?

00:55:50

Yeah.

00:55:50

No, I mean, I get it.

00:55:51

If you are the one doing all the development, there's not a whole lot of room

00:55:54

for that.

00:55:55

I thought I remembered you saying at one point in either bookworm or maybe one

00:56:00

of your other podcasts that you were looking at, like offloading projects to

00:56:04

other developers.

00:56:05

So I thought maybe some of this would, would resonate in that specific scenario

00:56:10

where essentially you're kind of building a team of other freelancers, but you're

00:56:13

dictating how the work gets done.

00:56:15

So maybe there is some of this that you could apply in that specific scenario.

00:56:18

But yeah, I get it.

00:56:19

I mean, if you are the one doing the work, there's no sense having a 30 minute

00:56:23

wildly important goal meeting with yourself.

00:56:24

Yeah.

00:56:25

I mean, I could do that.

00:56:27

Or, you know, I do pass some work off to some other developers.

00:56:30

I just did some of that this morning.

00:56:33

But even with that, like we're not into this together.

00:56:36

This is just a small project that I need some help with.

00:56:40

It's kind of like me with my clients where I come in, I do a thing and then I leave.

00:56:45

This is the same thing with them.

00:56:47

We're just doing repeated projects, but there is no broader goal that they're

00:56:54

going to be working on with me.

00:56:55

Like if there's a goal, it's my side project.

00:56:57

It's not going to be, you know, let's go build a network of plugins together.

00:57:02

Like, well, no, I want to build the network of plugins and then maybe let you

00:57:06

like hire you to help me with it on occasion.

00:57:09

Like that would be the thing to do there.

00:57:11

So when it comes to scaling a freelance web development business,

00:57:16

I don't think that's a thing that's if you're honest with yourself, will actually

00:57:22

happen.

00:57:23

I think if it's going to scale, it's because you're doing the side project thing

00:57:29

and your side personal stuff actually drives an income that you can then turn

00:57:33

into a business that's outside of the freelance stuff.

00:57:36

So that's, that's a thing that you see a lot with tech startups is that the person

00:57:41

who started it or made the thing to begin with, they were doing development and then

00:57:48

they had a need for something or they wanted a tool to do something for them.

00:57:52

They go and they make it and then that becomes a business in itself and then

00:57:56

they eventually dropped the freelance work.

00:57:58

So that that I can see and there's one of my current goals is to potentially

00:58:04

take a shot at that.

00:58:05

But as the development business goes, I don't really see that as a place

00:58:11

where I would focus this.

00:58:13

Yeah.

00:58:13

No, that that makes sense.

00:58:14

And that's why I think that this is for some people, the absolute right thing.

00:58:19

But I think that those people are few and far between and not the typical

00:58:24

person who listens to bookworm.

00:58:27

I think a lot of the people that listen to bookworm, they're in a similar

00:58:30

situation, what you just described.

00:58:32

They're working a job.

00:58:34

Maybe they're a freelancer.

00:58:36

Maybe they're not, but they've got some sort of side project that they're

00:58:39

trying to grow and maybe that becomes a business in the future.

00:58:42

But it's just something that they're doing.

00:58:44

It's the, the essence of a passion project, you know, and I think that there's a lot

00:58:48

of things that you could translate from this book, but the way that they explain

00:58:53

them, the language that they speak makes it very difficult in a way that I, that a

00:58:58

lot of the other books that we read from this, like productivity space aren't,

00:59:03

they're a lot more approachable.

00:59:05

They're a lot more generalizable.

00:59:06

And that's probably just because this is written from a business perspective

00:59:10

instead of a personal perspective.

00:59:11

I think if it was the other way around, if it was written from a personal

00:59:14

perspective, you could make that leap a lot easier in terms of translating.

00:59:19

How can I implement this with my family, with my business, with my church group,

00:59:23

whatever, but because it's written specifically from the business perspective,

00:59:27

it's a lot harder to do it the other way around.

00:59:29

All right.

00:59:30

So the hard question, author style and rating.

00:59:33

What do you give it, Mike?

00:59:34

I struggled with this for a long time because as I was reading this, I was also

00:59:41

in Austin for an Asian efficiency mastermind where we had nine of our best

00:59:46

customers in a room.

00:59:48

They all have 45 minutes on the hot seat to talk about their personal

00:59:51

professional problems that they wanted solved and get feedback from the group.

00:59:54

I found myself referencing this book way more than I care to admit.

00:59:58

I think that there's some gold nuggets in here, the lead versus lag measures.

01:00:04

If that's the only thing that you got out of this, like that was worth it.

01:00:08

But to be honest, I got that out of it the first time that I read it and I didn't

01:00:13

finish it.

01:00:13

I don't think I got any new revelation from reading it the second time around

01:00:19

it because I think basically I got to the first section last time and then was

01:00:21

like, oh, these other sections aren't going to apply to me and turns out I was

01:00:25

pretty much right.

01:00:25

So there's definitely some good information in here.

01:00:29

I think I'm going to rate it three stars because as much as I've railed

01:00:33

against it today and a lot of the issues that I have with it, like I said, if you

01:00:37

are the person that this is written for, this could absolutely be

01:00:41

transformational.

01:00:43

And even if it doesn't completely resonate with you, you'll still find some

01:00:47

stuff in there, like the lead versus lag measures or the scoreboard.

01:00:50

You know, we've implemented some of that stuff in my family as well, not from

01:00:53

reading it this time, but we've like printed off the routines that our kids

01:00:59

follow.

01:00:59

That's their scoreboard for their morning routine, their evening routine.

01:01:02

And it just makes everything so much easier.

01:01:05

The fact that we've got this, in essence, a scoreboard, a visual indication of what

01:01:09

needs to be done, it just makes the work so much easier.

01:01:12

So there is some definite, some definite gold in here, but you really have

01:01:17

to mind to get it.

01:01:18

Fair enough.

01:01:19

Yeah.

01:01:20

So I, I found the book easy to read.

01:01:22

I mean, I'll give them that.

01:01:23

They give a lot of stories, a lot of examples, and that helps significantly

01:01:27

with, with the book.

01:01:29

So I really was appreciative of that and enjoyed going through it.

01:01:33

I think I'm with you that there are a lot of gold nuggets in here.

01:01:37

I love having, you know, terms like the whirlwind that I can use to help

01:01:42

myself understand some of these things.

01:01:44

I, I struggle to know how to implement a lot of it.

01:01:48

And yet when I look at the four steps of defining what you want to do, what's

01:01:53

it going to take you to get there, keep track of what it takes to get there.

01:01:57

And, you know, do the cyclical process of keeping check, keeping everything in

01:02:01

check.

01:02:02

That four step process is very powerful.

01:02:04

Even though, you know, it's, it's not necessarily groundbreaking or new.

01:02:09

I think they formalized it in a way that organizations at a broader level can

01:02:16

understand it.

01:02:17

And it's something that they can relate to.

01:02:19

Whereas individuals in the productivity space tend to gravitate to books like the

01:02:27

one thing or the seven habits, you know, those types of books are more geared

01:02:31

towards personal, personal versions of this in some form or another.

01:02:35

They're not laid out like this.

01:02:37

But they tend to synthesize the same ideas in those forms.

01:02:42

So I do think that the, the book itself has a lot of value, even for

01:02:49

individuals, just because like you're saying, there's a lot of little nuggets

01:02:52

in here.

01:02:53

There's a lot of tips and tricks that you can pick up.

01:02:55

But I think that it's definitely geared towards someone who is business minded,

01:03:00

which, you know, I think you and I are somewhat maybe not to the level that they

01:03:04

would expect you to be, but it's still something that I think there's quite a bit

01:03:08

in there.

01:03:09

So all that to say, I am going to put this at a four just because I think that

01:03:14

the information here is very valuable.

01:03:16

And it is a book that I've recommended to a number of people already.

01:03:20

Uh, and they have found a lot of value in it.

01:03:22

And I say that because they, they, they have shared that there are a lot of the,

01:03:28

the lists and the processes that they are completely unfamiliar with.

01:03:33

So for people who haven't been in the productivity space much at all,

01:03:36

this seems to be a book that helps them understand some of the basic structures

01:03:41

of productivity, uh, from a personal and organizational stance.

01:03:45

So I think there's a lot of value to the book and I did get a lot out of it.

01:03:50

I just don't know what to do with it in my scenario.

01:03:53

Uh, I have some ideas that it could apply to in, uh, a business idea that I'm

01:03:59

working on right now.

01:04:00

So I could see how it applied to that, but my personal freelance work.

01:04:05

I, I struggle with it.

01:04:07

So that's what I got.

01:04:08

So I'm going to put it at a four.

01:04:09

Nice.

01:04:10

Uh, yeah.

01:04:11

As you were talking, I was trying to look up the website because I was like,

01:04:14

all you need to do to implement is go to my 40 X.com.

01:04:17

But apparently you go to my 40 X.com and you can't even sign up for it.

01:04:21

Like if you go to the website, uh, it has a couple of additional buttons for

01:04:27

software updates, upcoming events and viewing the demo.

01:04:30

None of them work for me.

01:04:32

So that's cool.

01:04:33

Yeah.

01:04:34

All right.

01:04:37

Let's put 40 X on the shelf.

01:04:39

What's next?

01:04:39

All right.

01:04:40

Uh, so the next book that we're going to be doing was inspired by another one

01:04:44

of your podcasts where I heard you and Drew talking about the artist's way

01:04:48

by Julia Cameron.

01:04:49

And it intrigued me.

01:04:52

So I have this book.

01:04:53

Haven't started it yet, but I'm anxious to dive into it.

01:04:57

Nice.

01:04:57

I'm looking forward to that one as well.

01:04:59

I think that one's on my list.

01:05:01

It just hadn't made it into my list for a bookworm quite yet.

01:05:03

So anyway, uh, the one after that, 168 hours by Laura Vanderkamp.

01:05:08

And this was a listener recommendation.

01:05:12

I'm on my bank of recommendation books.

01:05:14

And this one was not a textbook and looked interesting.

01:05:18

So I selected it.

01:05:20

That's what we got.

01:05:21

So the artist way followed by 168 hours, but you're reading a book between here and

01:05:27

there.

01:05:27

Yes.

01:05:28

And I actually read this book already, but it's As A Man Thinketh by James

01:05:32

Allen.

01:05:32

This is a very short book.

01:05:34

It's the anti-paid to think.

01:05:36

I think it's an older book and you could probably even find it for free, uh,

01:05:42

like a PDF version.

01:05:43

I think the printed one was something like 40 pages, but it's just on the power

01:05:49

of your thought life.

01:05:50

And the inspiration for that term as a man thinketh is actually from the Bible.

01:05:56

As a man thinketh, so is he, uh, this is not a quote unquote Christian book.

01:06:02

Uh, it basically just talks about that the power of, of your mind and those

01:06:06

mental pictures that you create.

01:06:08

It's written in a way that it's, even though it's kind of old English, it's very

01:06:11

approachable.

01:06:12

It's similar, uh, not in terms of like it's a story like the, uh, the go getter

01:06:17

was, but it kind of feels like it's written from the same, same time period.

01:06:21

Got it.

01:06:22

Makes sense.

01:06:22

Uh, the book I'm getting ready to pick up is principles by Ray Daliel.

01:06:26

This, this one has made a few rounds and I've had a handful of people

01:06:30

recommended to me and it's gotten a lot of accolades from some personal references.

01:06:36

So I'm going to go through it.

01:06:38

We'll see how it goes.

01:06:39

Kind of a long one.

01:06:39

We'll see how quickly I can get through it, but that's when I'm going to go through

01:06:43

before I get to the artist's way and then we'll catch on that one next time.

01:06:48

But I'll let you follow up here.

01:06:50

All right.

01:06:51

Yeah, I'm actually interested in that principles by Ray Daliel as well.

01:06:54

I saw that one pop up on Amazon the other day as something I might be interested in.

01:06:57

And I thought it looked, looked intriguing.

01:06:59

So let me know how that one is.

01:07:01

We'll do one might say that you could recommend that book if it's good.

01:07:04

Uh, and if you would like to recommend a book, dear listener, please go over to bookworm.fm.

01:07:10

Uh, slash list will take you to the page where we have all of the books that we

01:07:15

have covered so far on the right sidebar.

01:07:17

There will be a button to recommend a book and we want to know what you want us to cover.

01:07:22

There's a bunch of them on the list.

01:07:24

We've been starting to slot those in more and more.

01:07:26

So if you have something you'd like to see covered on the show, please let us know.

01:07:29

And if you have some feedback for us or you love the show, one of the best ways

01:07:34

you can do that is leave us an iTunes review.

01:07:35

We greatly appreciate that.

01:07:37

But if you also want to just ask a question or follow up with something, you can do

01:07:42

that over on productivityguild.com.

01:07:43

You'll find a topic there for this episode.

01:07:47

I'll do the best I can to get a link to that in the show notes as well.

01:07:50

And, uh, and you can click on that and go ask a question, interact with the show.

01:07:55

So on and so forth.

01:07:56

And Mike, are you still trying to, are we still trying to beat KCRW?

01:07:59

I haven't checked.

01:08:00

Oh, you know it.

01:08:01

So KCRW is beating us.

01:08:05

If you, if you go search for bookworm, their show pops up right before hours.

01:08:10

So leaving iTunes reviews greatly helps us take them down.

01:08:14

Please help.

01:08:15

You know, we're coming on the holiday season.

01:08:17

Give your loved ones the gift of bookworm and give bookworm the gift of a glowing five star review.

01:08:23

It would really help us out.

01:08:24

All right.

01:08:26

Thanks everybody for listening.

01:08:27

If you're following along, we'll be covering the artist way next time and we'll talk to you all in a couple of weeks.