Bookworm Transcripts

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How's Mike?

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Pretty good.

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How's Joe?

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Doing well.

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Just taking a sip of my delicious pour over coffee before we get rolling.

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Ooh, what's the bean of choice today?

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To be honest, I'm not sure because I walked over to the local place, which is a block from the co-working space where I'm recording this.

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And my brother-in-law works there, but my brother was there also and they were doing a bunch of coffee experiments that are

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above even my head.

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And so I just said, make me whatever you would recommend.

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And it's tasty.

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Nice.

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So you're not real sure what it is?

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I'm not sure, but it's good.

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Those are sometimes the best, though.

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That's been my experience.

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Yep.

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And I know it was made manually and made with love.

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It's, uh, it's delicious.

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Good deal.

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We have a fair amount of follow up for today and it's mostly on your end.

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Yep.

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I didn't do so hot on follow up this time.

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I wondered.

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I saw you in editing the document earlier.

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I don't know if you saw me on there at the same time, but I noticed you only had one of the, the action items from the last round.

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I don't know if that was because I just didn't get them pulled over or you just didn't want to talk about them.

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It made me feel better to think that you just didn't want to talk about them.

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No, I have no problem talking about them, but I did.

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I did see that.

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I grabbed the one that I got done.

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That's what it was.

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Okay.

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I got that one first.

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And actually, even that one's not completely done.

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So the first thing on my list was to make a list of a hundred things that I want to do.

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Turns out this is really hard.

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I'm not sure if you've ever tried to do this, but like one through 10 are easy.

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Like 11 through 50 start to get difficult.

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And then anything after that is, is really hard.

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I think that if I were to like do this in batches, that would, would help.

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But I spent a couple hours on this and I still am only up to 72, but there's some cool stuff on here.

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So I can give you some of the, some of the highlights.

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Yes.

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What I consider the highlights anyways, I'm interested for sure.

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Okay.

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So these tend to fall into one of, I'd say three different categories.

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One, I am either at a place eating something.

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Two, I am taking my family somewhere or three, I'm doing something by myself, which is kind of weird

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to see how those would would break down.

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Like for example, one of them I have on here is attend a soccer game in Europe.

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I really don't see my fam, anybody from my family wanting to do that with me, at least right now.

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So I'm not sure how that one actually gets, gets accomplished.

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But there's some other stuff on here that's personal development.

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So some of like long term goals, learn to play the, the piano, learn a second language.

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I kind of know how to play the piano, but I want to actually be able to like perform it to visit Wimbledon.

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I'm a big into tennis.

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I want to go on an Alaskan cruise.

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I want to take my kids to the Grand Canyon, places like that, eat a cheesesteak at Pat and Genos in Philadelphia.

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I want to eat a hot dog at Cody Island.

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Yeah.

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So a lot of it is not things that I want to have.

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A lot of it is like experiential stuff, which is kind of cool because a lot of that stuff is a lot easier to attain than you maybe think it is.

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All you've got to do is, is plan for it.

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So if I want to attend a Broadway musical, for example, there's like a bunch of other things that can happen in that same area that are on my list.

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Like visit the, the Statue of Liberty, walk through Central Park, stuff like that.

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Like I could plan a trip to New York and I could knock a whole bunch of these things off.

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So that was kind of cool.

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It sounds like this is something I don't want to do.

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Well, it, it's, yeah, it's exciting as you're going through it and you're like, oh man, I could do this stuff.

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This is awesome.

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And then also, it's also kind of disheartening at the same time because you're like, man, there's a lot of stuff that I want to do.

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And I've got to work and I've got to take care of my family in the meantime.

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So never going to get to all this.

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But looking at this list, this is, this is kind of cool because it's not.

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I would, I wouldn't say it's like specifically a bucket list, but there's a lot of things on here where, and this is where the value of the hundred things comes in, I think, because you can look at this list and you can say, OK, I want to do that one now.

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It's kind of like a someday, maybe list, but more intentional, I guess, whereas a someday, maybe list, the way I've always used that in the past.

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It's like, Oh, here's an idea.

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Yeah, I guess I'll just throw that in a bucket somewhere and maybe I'll look at it at some point.

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This is more being proactive and thinking like, OK, what are the experiences or what are the things that I want to accomplish by the end of my life or a set point in time?

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Yeah, that was going to, that was going to be my question is, how is this different than a someday?

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Maybe because I think what you're getting at is these aren't necessarily things you're thinking of that you feel like you should do or that you need to do at some point.

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You just don't know when it's not so much that as much as let me just sit down and dream about what I would like to see in my life.

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Like that seems to be the difference that you're trying to call out. Is that fair?

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Yep. So like the definition of done for any of like for this specific thing, making a hundred list of 100 things that I want to do or have done or experienced, whatever the acceptance criteria for this is not that I've done all these things.

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It's that I've got a hundred of them, which is totally different from how I've approached a someday, maybe listen to the passwords like, oh, hey, I had this great idea.

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I should put that somewhere so I don't forget about it sometime, but I end up forgetting about it anyways.

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So this is more just brainstorming what's possible instead of like making sure that this thing doesn't fall through the cracks, if that makes sense.

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Yeah.

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Like I know that out of this list, not all hundred things are going to get done and that's okay, as opposed to like for me, anyways, someday, maybe less is like, oh, that's something I really want to make sure I don't forget about.

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This is just kind of like thinking about the possibilities and then narrowing it down from there at some point.

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Makes sense.

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So I guess my follow up question to this is because I know this would be my tendency now that you have this list of 100 things, which I'm not.

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Planning to do.

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Do you find yourself wanting to run through that and categorize these things and like prioritize them of sorts and start to do things with that list?

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Or is this just a thing that you're you're happy to have done it and it's just going to sit from here on?

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That is a great question.

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And I don't know the answer to that yet.

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I will say that the reason I did this in the first place, this was an action item for the previous book, which was 168 hours, the main takeaway there being that you have more time than.

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You think, but you have to be intentional about how you spend it, whether that is personally, professionally, work, family, whatever.

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And so this list has been cool because it's given me some ideas for how I can be intentional when spending my time, but I don't have a real solid definition of done, I guess, or how I'm going to translate the things from this list to making sure that it shows up on my calendar.

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The exercise itself, what it did is it made me excited because there's some things on here that are going to take a lot of time.

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We're going to have to save a lot of money to fly halfway around the world, whatever.

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Yeah.

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But there's some things that like I could put this on the calendar right now for the summer that are going to be completely free.

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And so there is some long term project planning that needs to happen with some of these, but some of these, like, literally, I could take action on them as soon as the weather is nicer outside.

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Yeah.

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So, so yeah, there's, I think that the value in the exercise is really just in doing the exercise.

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It'll be interesting to see maybe a follow up to a follow up how many of these things I actually do something with.

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Yeah.

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Like keeping a log of when you when you've gotten through these and how far along are you?

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Right.

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That sounds like a lot of work.

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So I don't know.

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Maybe I do turn these into like a project in Omni Focus or something and then I just check them off as I do them.

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And every once in a while, I go through that project every month, every two months, every three months and pick the next thing off of the list that I want to accomplish.

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Interesting.

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All right.

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You had to keep us posted on that one, but I want to hear about this story file.

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How's that going?

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The story file is in existence, but not a whole lot more has been done with it.

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All right.

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So this actually was kind of done by the time I mentioned it because it was something that I had picked up from my speech coach.

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And so I have a story file.

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I have some stories in the story file.

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I have not had as much time to devote to creating new stories for the story file as I would have liked in the last couple of weeks, which is why the last two here are a complete disaster.

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All right.

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Add three questions to the family meeting.

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This is super simple.

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As soon as we have another family meeting, we're going to do this same with creating an outsourcing budget and YNAB.

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The problem being that we have not had a family meeting in two weeks, which sounds terrible as I'm confessing that publicly, but it's the truth.

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So well, considering we haven't had one in a very long time, if ever, depending on how you classify it, you're okay.

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All right.

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Fair enough.

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Yeah.

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We, I mean, this is something that my wife and I both confess is important to us.

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We've got the components.

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We know exactly what we need to do.

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It's just the last two weeks.

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Well, one, we were, we were not at home and we just weren't in the place to do our family meeting at the time that we had set aside for it because we were with other people.

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The other one, I had a really long day and got done.

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We went out to eat and that was the mistake.

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We went out to eat before we did any of the other stuff because afterwards I was useless.

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I just want to go home and go to bed.

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Yeah.

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So, so yeah, part of it was an intentional choice to spend time with some family members.

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The other one was just, I was lazy at the end of the day.

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All right.

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Fair enough.

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I have one item on follow up and I both put it in action and have destroyed it since doing so, which I suppose means it's been successful since I tried it and it just didn't work.

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But what I did was what I was calling my extreme calendaring makeover and I essentially hyper scheduled every minute of my day on my calendar.

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And I had one conversation about this already just yesterday about why this didn't work.

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And it ultimately comes down to me setting up recurring events in my calendar.

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And it being a ideal day that I designed or I guess in this case, it would be an ideal week that was in my calendar and trying to follow that and every day being a failure because not every day is ideal.

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In fact, most are not.

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So the calendaring experiment thus failed and I'm working through some different ways to to do that, which I think this is a thing that we've talked about.

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Like how do you plan out your day?

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What is the best way to do that?

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And we always come back to it's different per person.

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Like that that's always the answer.

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I think when you actually want to be real about it, that's that's how it lands.

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And for me, I think I need to come back to in the morning, writing out what's going to happen and when for that day.

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And I've I've done that before.

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I have some potential downfalls that caused me to fail when I do that.

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I'm aware of those anymore.

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And I think the last time I did it, I was not aware of those.

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So I'm hoping fingers crossed that this round goes a little bit better than the last.

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However many like 12 times I've tried doing.

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Yeah.

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So one particular difficulty, I think that you face is that you work with clients.

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And so you have, I'm assuming anyways, based on my experience working with clients.

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And this is why I don't do it anymore.

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Is that they can demand your time at and you and then everything, everything that you've planned just kind of gets checked out the window.

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Is that kind of what's happening in your situation when your day quote, unquote, doesn't go the way you planned it?

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No, actually it's not.

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Because okay, ever since I got into client work, I've been very particular about making sure that the the projects that I take on are not ones that if something goes wrong, I have to fix it right away.

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Now, my tendency may be that I want to go fix it right away, but it doesn't necessarily like it doesn't have to be done that way.

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And I've become okay with not getting a lot of that stuff done immediately whenever they ask.

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See, that's the mindset shift I could never, I could never make.

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Yeah.

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Even if I said, nope, this other thing is more important.

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I'm thinking about the fact that something's wrong on a WordPress installation somewhere instead of being able to focus my full attention on what I confess.

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Is what I should be doing at that moment.

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Right.

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I think I've become really good about focusing on the thing I'm doing right now and not worrying about, you know, the things that I know that are wrong.

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Here's this is this is partially because working in IT in any form, you always have major problems somewhere.

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Like there are all I can say here, right?

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A lot of five major issues that I'm aware of on websites or in person, computers and such, I could give you those very quickly.

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I'm getting stressed just hearing you talk about that.

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Yes.

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But the thing is that that sort of thing is around like everybody thinks their thing needs solved immediately.

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Exactly.

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It's just not true.

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And I feel like I've developed a very clear head with that sort of thing.

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And as a result, whenever those pieces come up, like, oh, well, I'll put it on the calendar for tomorrow.

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It's not going to kill anybody to wait until then because I've got other things that are more important.

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And I've never had a client get angry at me whenever I say something like that.

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So I will continue doing it.

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So I can't say that the client stuff is a thing where they can dictate my day.

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I'm just not in a position where that's how it works out.

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For me, it's more that I want to get their stuff done whenever the day gets going.

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So, for example, if I'm fixing a bug on a website, typically, depending on the bug that can range from 30 minutes to an hour and a half on average.

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And sometimes whenever I'm doing that, I find other things that need to be solved or I know that the next steps on the project could get done in the same time frame.

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So I want to go work on those because I'm already in the groove and I've already got it all up and running.

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As a result, I will often put my own, like my own projects aside so that I can get that thing done.

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The trick is that I don't always then schedule time later on in the week to catch up on the stuff I set aside.

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That tends to be where things fall down.

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And at the same time, it can completely derail the ideal week whenever I do that thing, whenever I continue into that flow for just one extra 30 minute block.

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Like it can completely throw it off.

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So I just don't see that the whole ideal week thing working in that sense.

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And that's why I'm moving more towards, okay, what does today look like and putting together that schedule for today, just because things just move too fast for me to know when things are going to happen for the entire week.

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That makes sense.

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So the couple of thoughts on this.

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First, I understand the stress or the friction that comes from working really hard on this ideal week plan.

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And then by halfway through Monday, you got to chuck it.

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That's frustrating.

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But also, I think that that's okay.

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And that's something that when it comes to this extreme calendaring approach or David Sparks would call it hyper scheduling.

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I like his definition on that.

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Then you have to be okay with things being changed.

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And I think it was depending on which internet source you find, Winston Churchill, Dwight Eisenhower, a bunch of different people have said this apparently.

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But plans are worthless, but planning is everything.

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I think that there's a lot of value in that because in the extreme calendaring example where you're planning out every minute.

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And I would say maybe that's another thing that you could try is not budgeting every minute, but maybe just every hour or hour and a half like increase the size of your time block.

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And you'll have more buffer.

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Yeah.

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So that's just a random thought.

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But when you do that, like the fact that you are thinking through and identifying these are the things that I want to be intentional about and putting the big rocks on your calendar first.

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That's where probably 90% of the value comes in.

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It's not the fact that my schedule is 100% accurate.

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And at any given moment, I can look at it and say, oh, this is what I'm supposed to be doing right now.

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It's the fact that you've thought about it ahead of time.

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You've planned your work and then you've worked your plan, so to speak.

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Yes.

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And I think there's, you know, what you're saying is the planning piece being extremely important because I going through that process of putting together the ideal week and where everything is going to land that I find invaluable.

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I've done that.

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I don't know how many times and it always gets checked out the window and it always feels like a failure because I can't follow that ideal plan like ever.

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So it's frustrating whenever you have to do that, but at the same time developing that plan and figuring out when is the good time to do all these different pieces.

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That's an important piece to it.

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I know I'm going to end up throwing it out every time I sit down to do it.

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I have this ideal mentality that it's going to work this time.

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And in the back of my head, I always know, no, it's not.

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So it's this weird dichotomy that's going on in my brain.

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Now, there's the, there's the other thought though, because I really do believe that it is possible to make the perfect plan.

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And for any number of reasons, the plan may not end up being perfect and that's okay.

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But one of the things that I have been studying as I've been going through my gapbook, are you familiar with the the Colby index A assessment?

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I've heard of it, but that's about as far as it goes for me.

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OK.

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So the Colby assessment, what it does is it identifies your preferred action modes.

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And we've used this at Asian efficiency for years because there's a lot of value and understanding that, for example, I'm a high fact finder.

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And if I'm working with somebody who is a high quick start, there's going to be friction there.

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And the way to overcome it is to give me details so that I can get on board with with whatever we're trying to do.

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Whereas a quick start is like, I'm just going to jump in and do this thing.

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My wife, by the way, is a high quick start.

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And when it comes to working with teams, that's good because you can overcome those conflicts when you recognize what's going on there.

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And then you have people who work different ways and they can you can play to each other's strengths.

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But there's also value in understanding this for yourself.

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So for example, just real briefly, there's four different scales that the Colby index A assesses.

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One is fact finding.

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Two is follow through three is quick start and four is implement or implementation.

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You take the assessment and you get a score from one to 10 in each of those different areas.

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So one to three in a given area means that you tend to resist working that way.

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Four through six, whatever, you can do it, but it's not something that you'll normally seek out.

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Seven through nine.

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That's what you normally look to.

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All right.

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So my score from left to right, seven, six, three, three, I am a high fact finder, which means that if I'm

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going to sit on a work on something, I'm going to find out all the information I can do,

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all the research before I even start on the task.

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Whereas by wife, a high quick start, she can jump in and just figure it out on the fly.

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All right.

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The thing that is kind of interesting about ours is that we both have a fairly high follow

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through and that's following the procedure.

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So she jumps in and does stuff and creates the procedures and then I see the procedures and I'm like, oh,

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OK, now I know what to do and then I work.

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But the point that I'm learning from this book is that while everybody's got their

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different way that they're wired and how they're going to work, these action modes,

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you can actually function in any one of these at any time.

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But if you naturally resist, like I'm a naturally low quick start and also naturally

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low implementation, so that's like manipulating physical things.

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Great example.

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This is like a light bulb burns out in my house.

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I'm not it sometimes takes me weeks to replace it because I just don't care to go get the light bulb

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in the new one.

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OK, you can function each one of these different action modes, but they will require

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a different amount of energy.

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And so in the assessment, it'll say you should spend this amount of your time in this

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particular mode, this amount of time in this particular mode.

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And the thing that I am thinking through right now when it comes to this calendaring

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and planning my day is identifying the things that I'm going to be doing and which

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mode I'm going to be in while I'm doing those things.

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Because if I have a whole bunch of tasks that I'm going to work on tomorrow and

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they're all quick start type tasks where there's not very detailed standard

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operating procedure documents for me to follow, that's going to be really stressful

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and I'll probably be burnt out by noon.

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And I think that if I can identify the tasks that I've got to work on and then

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slot those, like basically space them out appropriately, I'll be able to be more effective.

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Does that make sense?

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It makes sense.

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I just don't work that way.

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It sounds like a lot more work.

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I realize, but I really think that there's value in understanding yourself and how

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you work.

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And then from there, you can identify is whatever task you happen to be.

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It happens to be on your list.

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Is this something that is going to be easy for me to do or is this something that's

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going to be hard for me to do from a cognitive perspective?

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And if you stack too many cognitive things to do in a row, then you're

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basically guaranteeing that your plan is going to be blown up.

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And here's here's the other side of this.

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And it's purely an emotional side of it.

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It's not a mathematical scheduling problem.

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It's an emotional problem.

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And what it essentially comes down to is whenever I get into a given task, say,

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I'm working on that bug in the code and I get into that and I realize once I'm

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working on that project that it's been weighing on my mind more than I thought it

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was, and it has been a stressor when I didn't realize that it was.

00:23:25

And when I connect all those dots and it comes to the forefront of my brain,

00:23:30

how much of an impact this is having on my my thinking and how much it's clouding,

00:23:35

I want to get it off of my mind.

00:23:38

And the best way to do that is to complete the task.

00:23:40

And by completing the task, everything moves forward, but that takes time.

00:23:45

And exactly.

00:23:46

It is a positive thing in my mind to put off certain things in order to

00:23:52

accomplish that for the sake of mental clarity.

00:23:55

But I can't tell you that that's going to happen when I sit down to plan my ideal

00:24:01

day or my ideal week.

00:24:02

I can't tell you that I can get pretty close to that realization whenever I sit

00:24:08

down in the morning and take 10 minutes to run my lists and I can run through

00:24:13

the hard events that are going on that day.

00:24:15

You know, when I'm sitting down to do that, I can usually figure out those

00:24:19

emotional states on those particular pieces when I'm doing that, not always,

00:24:23

but it can happen.

00:24:25

And that's the piece I was alluding to earlier about this is a thing that I'm

00:24:29

aware of now when I really haven't been in the past.

00:24:31

So it's a piece that I find important whenever I'm planning out my day,

00:24:36

but it's not a piece that I've been fully aware of before.

00:24:39

Gotcha. Yeah.

00:24:41

So like applying what I what I'm learning from this book, The

00:24:45

Sort of Connection by Kathy Colby to what you just described, like these bugs

00:24:50

that you find out about and then they weigh on you subconsciously and you know,

00:24:54

you need to do them.

00:24:55

I would guess that that's because if you were to take the assessment,

00:24:59

you're probably a high-fact finder as well and a low probably low quick start.

00:25:03

And the fact that you have to jump in and figure these things out,

00:25:08

but you don't know all the details, like that weighs on you if you are a low

00:25:12

quick start and a high-fact finder.

00:25:14

So the approach that I would take in that particular situation and I don't

00:25:20

have to deal with it because I took the easy way out and just said no more

00:25:22

client work is to say like I've got five slots where I can address bugs for

00:25:30

this week.

00:25:31

And then when I go into my email, I'm going to take them as they come,

00:25:34

but everybody else is just getting a text expander snippet that says, sorry,

00:25:37

not going to get to this till next week.

00:25:39

And I know that some clients aren't going to like that.

00:25:42

But again, that's something I don't have to worry about because I decided not

00:25:46

to work with clients.

00:25:47

But if you're just looking at it from a and I don't want to say like a purely

00:25:52

productivity perspective because I think the term productivity, there's a lot of

00:25:56

negative connotations with that.

00:25:58

And I'm kind of glad to see the shift in the productivity space lately where it's

00:26:01

not just getting more stuff done, but it's being intentional about the things

00:26:05

that you're doing and getting the right things done.

00:26:07

I think that's a much better definition.

00:26:09

But like you really do have to protect the golden goose in essence and you have

00:26:14

to make sure that you're working the way that you work well.

00:26:18

And if you don't do that, even for a prolonged period, like maybe I think it

00:26:24

is entirely possible that an individual could be just head down.

00:26:29

I got to do this and creating a lot of Catholic,

00:26:33

people call it conative stress that is cumulative and it's building up over

00:26:37

years and years and years until finally, it's just like, I can't take this anymore.

00:26:41

So identifying the and I think the calendar is where this plays out, how you're

00:26:46

spending your time and what you're spending your time on that can really

00:26:50

provide a huge amount of benefit in terms of taking action on the right things.

00:26:55

Does that make sense?

00:26:56

Yeah, I think a lot of people tend to operate in scenario similar to what I run

00:27:01

into.

00:27:01

I like your idea of, you know, set across the week five times when you can

00:27:07

say work on bugs, but at the same time, like take this particular week, for example,

00:27:13

when I sat down on Monday and was looking at the week ahead, I knew that the

00:27:19

projects that were in front of me for client work were going to be done roughly

00:27:23

Wednesday afternoon and it actually worked out to where those were done Wednesday

00:27:27

morning, which meant that on Monday, I didn't know what was going to happen on

00:27:32

Thursday and Friday and yet we're recording this on Thursday.

00:27:36

I was doing client work this morning because I had some stuff that showed up on

00:27:40

Tuesday and it was something that if I move quick, I can charge more for it.

00:27:44

So I jumped on it and, you know, things like that happen and they happen fairly

00:27:51

regularly to me, at least on a weekly basis, if not more and trying to do

00:27:56

something on a weekly basis.

00:27:57

I've just learned it just doesn't work.

00:27:59

Like I could say, sure, I'll do that quickly for you, but I need to wait until

00:28:03

tomorrow to scope it with you.

00:28:05

Well, no, like let's get a meeting on the calendar for this afternoon, sit down

00:28:11

and do a video call on it and get it figured out like that sort of thing is

00:28:16

partially why I can charge high rates and it's also partially something that

00:28:20

keeps me really engaged with my client work because I love jumping into new projects.

00:28:25

This is where I'm not sure that the the fact finder versus quick start thing that

00:28:30

you're throwing out really works for me because some things, you know, if it's a new

00:28:34

project, I'll jump into it immediately and get running with it.

00:28:37

But if it's a project that's been sitting there for three months, I tend to not want

00:28:40

to touch it at all.

00:28:41

So I think there's a lot of facets to this.

00:28:44

There is.

00:28:45

There is.

00:28:46

We should maybe do an entire episode on the specific book because it's a ton of insight

00:28:50

that you can get from this.

00:28:51

So the quick start thing, like this is you're right.

00:28:55

You could be that you do have a high quick start and you like the idea of

00:29:00

you're doing things out on the fly, but I kind of think like I've been in that

00:29:05

situation to even though I am a low quick start and I think the difference here is

00:29:09

that if you can understand why doing this particular project is important, that is

00:29:15

actually appealing to your high fact finder.

00:29:18

So one example of this is like if you tend to put off your own projects and focus

00:29:24

on projects that have been given to you by other people, which is exactly what you

00:29:29

told me a few minutes ago, that is evidence of a high fact finder because the fact

00:29:34

that there is no hard set deadline for your thing.

00:29:38

That's not translating into action for you.

00:29:41

If you were a high quick start, it would.

00:29:43

Interesting.

00:29:44

I think some of that has to do with trying to get the bills paid.

00:29:48

Yeah, money's a big motivator.

00:29:49

Yep.

00:29:50

Putting food in miles is important.

00:29:53

All right.

00:29:54

We've had our big round to follow.

00:29:57

Yeah.

00:29:58

All right.

00:29:58

So today's book is How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler.

00:30:03

And this is one that I picked.

00:30:04

I don't think it was a recommendation, but I've heard it mentioned by a bunch of

00:30:08

people like Jim Rohn, for example, he's mentioned this book.

00:30:12

I believe we heard about it in Napoleon Hill.

00:30:15

I think in Girl Rich also.

00:30:17

So it's something that I'd seen pop up a couple different times and so decided that

00:30:22

it was probably appropriate for for a bookworm.

00:30:25

Yeah.

00:30:26

And it's interesting that this is episode 42.

00:30:30

So have you seen or read, I should say, because it was a book first hitchhiker's

00:30:34

guide to the galaxy?

00:30:35

I haven't.

00:30:36

OK, so the secret to life, the universe and everything is 42.

00:30:40

Yep.

00:30:40

This part I know, like I know that part.

00:30:43

So probably very appropriate that we're covering this book for episode 42.

00:30:46

Although we've mentioned Mahali so many times that maybe flow should have been

00:30:50

episode 42.

00:30:50

Yeah, that's true.

00:30:51

That it's a good point.

00:30:54

No, I was excited whenever you picked this.

00:30:56

And it's one that I think it'll be good for us to go through this.

00:31:01

I'm very interested in your take on it because I've had, for example, like I take

00:31:06

this to to church whenever I've got books that I'm reading.

00:31:09

Like I'll set them on my desk at the church and it's always interesting.

00:31:13

Which of our pastoral staff will mention something about the books I have sitting

00:31:18

there?

00:31:19

This one, almost every single pastor made a comment on and it was so polarizing on

00:31:26

whether or not people liked it or not.

00:31:27

There was a couple that just absolutely hated this book and others thought it was

00:31:31

fascinating.

00:31:32

So I think this will be a fun conversation.

00:31:34

Cool.

00:31:36

To be honest, I can't see how anybody would hate this book other than the authors

00:31:41

style.

00:31:41

This book was written, I think, in the 1940s was the original version.

00:31:46

He talks at the beginning about the difference between getting information from

00:31:52

a book and getting information through a passive medium like radio, which I think

00:31:57

there's a lot of application there or a lot of similarities between like podcasts

00:32:01

and audio books, but maybe we can get into that in a little bit.

00:32:05

But it is so it is a little bit a little bit older and it's pretty long.

00:32:08

It's over 300 pages on how to read a book.

00:32:13

But I thought it was was interesting and I like the framework that it presented.

00:32:17

There's a couple things in particular that I thought were great and definitely

00:32:21

application to bookworm.

00:32:23

I don't think you need to apply the entire system that he talks about here, but he

00:32:28

makes very, very good arguments for the approach that he outlines.

00:32:33

The beginning was kind of hard to get into because you're trying to figure out

00:32:36

how how he's writing this and you're trying to get in the groove of how how to

00:32:43

read him, I think, which is kind of an odd way to say that.

00:32:46

It was difficult for me to to understand why he was going so deep on so many

00:32:54

topics because there's so much in here.

00:32:57

It's very expository.

00:32:59

So at some point, I'm like, why are we going into this?

00:33:02

And then I would get done with it and think, huh, that was interesting.

00:33:05

And so I was having a hard time figuring out what do I think about this?

00:33:10

Because there's some of it that was frustrating and then the exact frustrating

00:33:14

words I found very interesting and I liked them.

00:33:17

So I don't know what to do with that.

00:33:20

Well, let's start here with the main idea being that just because you've gone

00:33:26

through and read a book doesn't mean that you're going to benefit from having read

00:33:31

the book. And so at the very beginning, he introduces this analogy, which I thought

00:33:36

it worked for me, I guess, but I didn't think it was super strong where he's got

00:33:40

a picture and a catcher.

00:33:42

So the message is sent by the writer and it's received by the reader.

00:33:46

So the author is the pitcher and you as the reader are the catcher.

00:33:50

And he mentions that skillful authors have more control over their message.

00:33:54

They're not throwing their concepts over the mental backstop.

00:33:59

But you need to be skilled as a reader in order to receive the whole message.

00:34:04

I completely agree with that.

00:34:07

And he makes a distinction here between being informed, which is to know something

00:34:12

is the case and being enlightened, which is to know why something is the case.

00:34:17

Difference here is kind of like being able to remember versus being able to

00:34:20

explain and being informed is a prerequisite to being enlightened.

00:34:23

But the goal is not to stop there.

00:34:25

I think there are a million ways that you could apply this to our current culture

00:34:30

and all of the information that is available to us today and especially with

00:34:34

social media because people are self-proclaimed experts because they read

00:34:40

some article on Facebook and that that means nothing.

00:34:44

You know the fact that you you know a fact of those, some of those aren't even

00:34:48

facts, a lot of that stuff can be can be made up.

00:34:51

But the fact that you know something really doesn't mean that you have any

00:34:55

understanding of the topic and that's really the goal of bookworm, I would argue.

00:35:00

And really something that I've had an emphasis on for a while now is like I

00:35:06

don't want to just go through the motions.

00:35:10

I don't want to just read through a bunch of books and say that, yeah, I've

00:35:15

done them, I've read through them and I have that information.

00:35:18

I want this stuff to be actionable.

00:35:20

I want it to change things for the better.

00:35:22

And I think that a lot of the books that we read for bookworm, they have the

00:35:26

potential to do that, but you have to approach it in the right way.

00:35:30

And so that's where we get into the four levels of reading, active reading,

00:35:35

the four questions and all of the other lists that he has in this book.

00:35:39

Tons of lists.

00:35:41

Yes, very many lists.

00:35:43

I think whenever you know when I go back to the polarizing responses I got

00:35:49

from the pastors at church, it seemed like there were a couple different ways

00:35:53

to read from that.

00:35:55

And I think he gets into this.

00:35:56

I think Mortimer gets into this to some extent, but it has a lot to do with what

00:36:03

kind of book is it?

00:36:04

Are you classifying it correctly?

00:36:06

And are you reading it according to that classification?

00:36:09

And in this particular case, what I was seeing was some folks.

00:36:15

And this might impact some of the ratings that we do and have done in the past.

00:36:20

But some folks would read a book with the intent of trying to pull out the nuggets

00:36:25

of what am I supposed to learn here and what am I supposed to do with it?

00:36:29

That was one camp and the other camp was reading it simply as

00:36:36

kind of an informational journey that they were just curious about.

00:36:40

And they didn't have any specific expectations of the book, which meant that

00:36:46

they appreciated it because they enjoyed the expository nature of it.

00:36:50

And it seemed like those two camps were pretty defined and your expectations of

00:36:58

it ahead of time dictated whether or not it was going to be something you liked.

00:37:02

So I would imagine, you know, in this particular case, I was coming at this

00:37:07

from the stance of what is the tactical process that you think I should be using

00:37:13

to read a book.

00:37:14

Like that was that was my expectation.

00:37:15

That is not what I got when I came into it.

00:37:19

And thankfully, I figured that out very early and readjusted my my thinking on it,

00:37:25

which meant that I did enjoy this book, but the initial slap in the face that I

00:37:32

would receive whenever I jumped into this was very different than what I landed on.

00:37:37

Yeah, yeah, totally.

00:37:38

That makes a lot of sense.

00:37:39

So let's get into the questions here before we get into the levels because I

00:37:43

get directly correlates to what you just mentioned.

00:37:46

Like there is no one standard formula for making sure that you glean every

00:37:52

possible thing that you can out of a book.

00:37:55

But he poses these four questions that you should apply to what you're reading.

00:38:00

He calls us the essence of active reading.

00:38:01

That's the goal is the active reading where you're not just mindlessly cranking

00:38:06

through pages.

00:38:07

I've done that, especially when like studying for tests for college.

00:38:10

You just got to get through the material and hope that some of it sticks.

00:38:13

Like that's that's not what this is talking about at all.

00:38:16

So or when you're reading the innovators dilemma, maybe, maybe.

00:38:20

Well, I think what's interesting about this is that he talks about developing the

00:38:24

skill of reading and there's reading the words faster.

00:38:30

So you can you can do that.

00:38:31

But then also there's the comprehension, what you're actually actually seeing.

00:38:35

And those are both skills that can be developed.

00:38:38

I think I mentioned on here a while back that I took that speed reading course

00:38:42

by Abby Mark Spiel.

00:38:43

Yes.

00:38:43

And one of the big takeaway from that is that becoming a better reader means that

00:38:48

you can read faster and you can remember more.

00:38:51

And that's what I got from going through that course is I have had the numbers

00:38:56

and I don't have in front of me, but like statistical numbers that showed that my

00:39:00

words per minute went up and then my comprehension went up as well.

00:39:04

Because what she teaches in there is not that you're just cranking through

00:39:08

a book by moving your finger in a certain pattern along the page, but you're

00:39:12

recognizing the points in the book where you can move your reading stick shift.

00:39:18

So instead of being in first gear as you're going through a really meaty passage,

00:39:23

you know, you're in this section for this book, for example, he has a whole big

00:39:26

section on like how to read the different types of books.

00:39:28

I went through those fairly quickly because I wasn't that interested in how you

00:39:33

apply these four questions to science and math.

00:39:35

But the main ideas though, you know, the goal is not to be competent, but to understand

00:39:39

the problem when you're reading a science or a math book, but it all comes back to

00:39:43

these four questions, which is number one, what is the book about as a whole?

00:39:47

Number two, what is being said in detail and how number three is the book true in

00:39:53

whole or in part and number four, which is probably the biggest one.

00:39:57

What of it? So what is it going to do?

00:39:59

What's the result, the action that's going to be that's going to come from this?

00:40:04

And one of the things that I wrote down here is that if you ask no questions,

00:40:08

you'll get no answers.

00:40:10

And I've definitely been guilty of that when reading through books before, not

00:40:14

not asking these questions of the author, not asking, for example, is the book true

00:40:20

or whole in whole or in part going back to the last episode that we did with the

00:40:23

168 hours and the very different reaction that I had the second time I read through

00:40:27

that. And from the first time, I can honestly say the first time I went through

00:40:30

that book, I didn't ask that question.

00:40:32

I just assumed it was true because it was new to me.

00:40:35

And I don't know, maybe I saw on Amazon, it had a high rating or something.

00:40:40

But the second time I read it, I developed my reading skills because I'd done it

00:40:44

enough to the point where I read that passage and I'm like, wait a minute, does

00:40:48

that make sense? Does that line up with all the other things that I've read,

00:40:51

which is getting into the four levels of reading? We'll talk about that in a little

00:40:53

bit, but these questions, I thought were really valuable.

00:40:56

If you got nothing else out of the book, these questions are great.

00:40:58

So here's my question to you because I went through this piece and reread this

00:41:05

section, I think three times because I was trying to get a feel for when he felt

00:41:12

was appropriate to answer these questions.

00:41:14

And my takeaway from that was that it didn't matter when you answered them,

00:41:20

but you're trying to do it as early in the process of picking up a book as possible.

00:41:25

But what was your feel of that? Did you feel like there was a clear cut?

00:41:30

Do it now for this particular section?

00:41:32

So you went all in with this format then?

00:41:35

Well, this is a thing that I'm looking at it from the stance of we run the bookworm

00:41:41

podcast. This is a book about how to read a book.

00:41:44

And in theory, we are active readers on this and can dive deep into books and

00:41:49

understand them. And I feel like I consume a lot of books and I would like to do it

00:41:54

here and get myself to the point where I feel like I thoroughly understand the

00:42:00

material that I'm picking up.

00:42:01

So I was, I was definitely all this tactical stuff he had in here.

00:42:05

I was all in for it.

00:42:07

OK, so here's here's my approach to these four questions.

00:42:10

And this is we're blowing up this outline, but maybe it's makes sense to answer this

00:42:15

in the way that I read a book because what I do is I keep these four questions

00:42:22

online, but I'm not asking them every 50 pages.

00:42:25

I'm not getting to the end of the book and writing it out on a note card.

00:42:28

But I am keeping in mind, like, what is the book about as a whole?

00:42:32

I think that any book we do for a bookworm, we want to know that right away.

00:42:37

And then what is being said in detail and how like I take notes as I read because

00:42:42

I want to refer back to certain things that the author said or write down the page

00:42:45

numbers is the book true or in whole or in part.

00:42:48

That's really the piece that I feel I am just now getting to the point where I can

00:42:53

make those kind of judgments.

00:42:56

And that's again, completely subjective because it's going to be based on the books

00:43:01

that you've read.

00:43:02

So I could say something that says, well, based on what I read in this other book,

00:43:05

this isn't true.

00:43:06

And someone else could say, well, based on these 12 other books that say this other

00:43:10

thing, it is true.

00:43:11

That's completely valid, but I don't have those other 12 books to base my experience

00:43:16

off of right now.

00:43:17

And that's not I'm not going to let that stop me from forming an opinion and then

00:43:21

ultimately number four, taking action on it.

00:43:24

What of it?

00:43:25

So the way that I read a book is I map everything in mind node.

00:43:31

I start off with a new mind node file and I'll do a Google image search, download

00:43:36

the cover of the book and put that in the middle of my mind node.

00:43:39

And then as I'm reading, I don't create nodes for individual chapters or

00:43:44

individual sections unless I really think they make sense.

00:43:48

In fact, I can I can export the one that I made for this book to give people an

00:43:51

idea of what this looks like.

00:43:52

So we'll put this in the show notes.

00:43:54

You can download it as a PDF or something.

00:43:55

But I'll create nodes for the things that I think are important.

00:43:59

So I've got a separate node for the picture catcher analogy.

00:44:01

I've got a separate node for the four levels of reading, got a separate node for

00:44:05

the essence of active reading.

00:44:06

I've got a node for how to read and then sub nodes under that for all the different

00:44:10

types of books, which was like the middle two thirds of this book.

00:44:13

I've got a node for how to make a book your own.

00:44:16

I've got a separate node specifically for the fourth level of reading, which we'll

00:44:20

get into hopefully in a little bit because that's the one I think that most

00:44:25

people don't get to.

00:44:27

And I feel like as post a bookworm, we are just getting to and that's the ability

00:44:32

to compare books with with other books that you've read.

00:44:36

You've got some some context to to apply it there.

00:44:39

So I will create this mine node file and I will write things down and it'll be a

00:44:45

combination of both main points that I want to remember and then also specific

00:44:50

quotes, a lot of the lists I'll create separate sub nodes for each point in list.

00:44:56

Like, for example, analytical reading, she's got a list on the 11 rules.

00:45:00

I have all 11 rules listed here, but that's just stuff that I want to be able

00:45:06

to reference. The majority of the things that I write down are the things that are

00:45:10

standing out to me as I'm trying to answer the question, what is this book about?

00:45:17

From there, you've heard me reference my reaction to certain things.

00:45:21

I'll put those in my mine node file sometimes.

00:45:24

Like the one for Laura Vandercam, like I put my my rebuttals to her arguments in

00:45:29

my mine node file. Nice.

00:45:30

So what I when I'm done, I've got this mine node file that I can go back and I can

00:45:35

write this and also it's searchable.

00:45:37

So I can find something specific if I wanted to do that.

00:45:41

But I've got a I've got something that I can review on the book later, although I

00:45:46

have not created the habit or the ritual of going through those on a regular basis.

00:45:51

But I'm kind of reading this and this gets into my my one action item for this

00:45:55

book is to read not just for today, but for tomorrow.

00:45:59

So thinking that once I'm through this book and I want to be able to articulate

00:46:04

what this book is about and how it's how it's changed me is I'm answering those

00:46:07

four questions again at any point in time.

00:46:10

How can I do that effectively?

00:46:12

And that's kind of where this book challenged me to think about how I can take

00:46:16

that up to another level.

00:46:18

But I feel like I kind of had a head start already in how I've read a book

00:46:24

and how that evolution has played out just from us producing 42 episodes of bookworm.

00:46:29

So I want to get into another section of how do you pre read a book because

00:46:35

that was a piece that we I don't think we have on the outline at the moment.

00:46:40

Correct.

00:46:41

But there's there's a whole process that I've gone through in the past of how do I

00:46:47

skim through a book looking at the outline, all those things.

00:46:50

Like I do a bit of legwork ahead of time before I ever start reading a book and

00:46:55

for a long time and I find that to be something that's extremely helpful because

00:47:01

it sets the mood for the expectations I have for the book.

00:47:04

Like primaries, when was the thing written?

00:47:07

If it was written in 1920, that's very different than if it was written in, you

00:47:10

know, 2017, like you come at it very differently, mentally, whenever you do that.

00:47:15

So that's that's something I've always wanted to to understand.

00:47:18

So I go through, you know, the the copyright dates.

00:47:22

I go through the table of contents just to see, you know,

00:47:25

what is it that I'm going to be seeing?

00:47:27

I used to try to get a feel for how long the thing is.

00:47:29

Like, OK, this book is very big, but there's 150 pages of appendix at the end.

00:47:34

So the actual book is, you know, 200 pages, but the whole thing is 400.

00:47:39

Like there's there's some of that.

00:47:41

It just kind of helps you set your expectations for how long it's going to take.

00:47:44

And once I've gone through that, then I just start at the beginning and start

00:47:49

working my way through it.

00:47:50

As I go through it, I underlined things that I find interesting.

00:47:55

And I think I've talked about this a little bit before where I create this

00:47:59

personal index in the back, which he talks about in this book and recommends that you

00:48:03

do. So it made me wonder if I first heard about that from Tim Ferris and Maria

00:48:08

Popova on the podcast that they did together and they both came to doing that.

00:48:13

And I wondered if this was the original source of where they got the idea or if

00:48:17

they came to it themselves.

00:48:18

I don't know.

00:48:19

It's kind of curious.

00:48:20

I've never mentioned this book in that podcast, so I was curious.

00:48:23

So I will do that at the back, but I also I create a new note in bear and I just

00:48:30

write anything down that I find interesting.

00:48:33

Any thoughts that I had from the book, I usually try to put the page number with

00:48:36

that just so I know where it was at if I ever want to go back to the book and look

00:48:40

at it, but that's that's ultimately been how I've gone through one.

00:48:46

Like I haven't done much more than that.

00:48:48

I've made for sure haven't really done anything at the end of it to to lay out,

00:48:53

you know, what did I think about the book?

00:48:55

Like I tend to rely on these conversations that you and I can have about it.

00:48:59

I'll kind of review my notes every once in a while.

00:49:02

If I try I want to refresh my memory about a book, I'll do that.

00:49:06

But that is pretty much what I do.

00:49:11

It's not crazy complicated.

00:49:13

Yeah.

00:49:13

And I think that that's completely fine.

00:49:16

I think that my mind node file, your book index at the end, they're kind of

00:49:23

modifications of the section in here where he talks about how to make a book,

00:49:27

your own, he's got a whole bunch of tactics, which include underlining major

00:49:31

points, vertical lines at the margins to emphasize underlying statements, stars

00:49:35

and asterisks to emphasize important statements or passages, numbers in the

00:49:39

margin to get a sequence of points, numbers of other pages in the margins,

00:49:43

cross references, circling a keywords and phrases, writing in the margins to ask

00:49:47

questions, that's basically what I do in my note.

00:49:50

And it sounds like you do the same sort of thing in bear.

00:49:54

So he's got a very analog system where you can like this is how you would do it.

00:50:00

And he's got the legend in essence of like this equals this.

00:50:05

But I think the real value here is not that you're applying his tactics

00:50:09

specifically, but that you're understanding the heart behind those tactics and how

00:50:13

what you are going to record is going to help you answer those those four questions.

00:50:18

Also in that section on how to make a book, your own, he's got a section or a point

00:50:22

on the two types of note taking.

00:50:24

And this is where a mind map file, I think, is awesome because there's

00:50:28

structural note taking and then there's conceptual note taking.

00:50:31

So structural, I do have my node files, like a hundred and sixty eight hours,

00:50:36

where there's a whole node for part one, a whole node for part two, a whole node for

00:50:41

three, it can be useful to go back to a mind map diagram and see very visually how

00:50:47

that book is laid out, but then also conceptually, that's where the specific

00:50:53

things that I write down are kind of all over the place, like the important list

00:50:56

and things I'll try to try to capture.

00:50:59

But I'm not trying to recreate what is in the book.

00:51:03

I'm really writing down conceptually the things and the arguments that the author

00:51:08

is making that I want to remember and respond to.

00:51:12

There's a section in here and I mentioned it here just a second ago, you know,

00:51:15

you're talking about and I wrote down some of the tactics that he had for that

00:51:19

pre reading process, which I think is interesting because it's it's a lot more

00:51:24

than I think most people do and I did find it interesting because it's a lot of

00:51:28

what I do, but he had six points there of things that you should look at or read

00:51:34

before you start reading the actual book and the first of which is the title page

00:51:40

and preface. So why did they write the book?

00:51:43

When was it written? You know, I mentioned that a little bit ago.

00:51:46

The second is table of contents.

00:51:48

So you're looking through what is what's the layout of this book?

00:51:52

I thought it was interesting.

00:51:53

He on this particular piece, he was calling out that people used to write these

00:51:58

table of contents in a lot more detail than they do today and was basically saying

00:52:03

because of the publishers because they they want to leave the interesting bit.

00:52:09

They don't want to give away the goose at the very beginning.

00:52:12

So that's kind of interesting.

00:52:13

It's probably a sign of the times there.

00:52:15

He says number three here is to check the index and part of the rationale for that

00:52:20

one was to try to get some of the key terms.

00:52:23

Like a lot of books have specific words that they call out in very intentional

00:52:29

ways and you can sometimes pick those up by skimming through the index and reading

00:52:33

through that he does say to read the publishers blurb on the back of it.

00:52:37

Do you do this, Mike?

00:52:38

I feel like this is one that I don't always do.

00:52:40

No.

00:52:41

So that section, I think, has somewhat limited value, especially with productivity

00:52:49

books because if you were to read like the inside and outside jacket covers,

00:52:54

it's just going to be blurbs from famous people who they've paid to say wonderful

00:52:59

stories about the book.

00:53:01

And so that can be misleading at worst.

00:53:06

And then at best, there's really no value there, in my opinion.

00:53:10

Like the fact that Tony Robbins said that the new Michael

00:53:13

Haya book is great.

00:53:14

That means nothing to me.

00:53:15

So I tend not to read that stuff.

00:53:18

Fair enough.

00:53:18

I understand his his points though in doing that.

00:53:22

And I think that there's a lot of value in that in a format where you can very

00:53:27

briefly, before you dive into the meat of the book, understand in broad strokes

00:53:32

what the book is about.

00:53:33

He's got a whole 11 rules here for analytical reading.

00:53:37

And rule number one is that you have to know the kind of book you're reading.

00:53:41

You should know this is early in the process as possible.

00:53:43

I completely agree with that.

00:53:44

So whatever you have to do to figure that out, that's great.

00:53:46

And then if you can identify how the book is laid out and how the authors,

00:53:54

then by the layout of the book, if you can identify the types of arguments

00:53:58

that the author is going to make, like for example, sometimes you can tell

00:54:02

based on how the book is laid out that what they're saying in a particular

00:54:07

argument isn't the entire picture.

00:54:08

And so at that point, if I know that the next section is going to expound on that

00:54:12

further, I'm not going to rip that part to shreds because I know that I don't have

00:54:17

the whole picture yet.

00:54:18

Does that make sense?

00:54:19

Yeah, it does.

00:54:20

I think you also have to keep in mind when this book was written in the 70s, when

00:54:24

76 I think is when they revised it.

00:54:26

The revised version.

00:54:27

Yeah.

00:54:28

I think that timeframe was pre-purchased quotes for a lot of the blurbs and stuff.

00:54:36

I don't think it was nearly as big of a deal at that time as what it is now.

00:54:40

That might be part of why he's calling the now.

00:54:43

I try to read them on the back of the book, but I tend to skim over

00:54:50

when there are testimonials of sorts because what you're saying, Tony Robbins

00:54:55

on the new Michael Hyatt book, don't put much weight in that because those two are

00:54:59

best buds.

00:55:00

Exactly.

00:55:00

And of course they're going to promote each other's material as much as possible.

00:55:04

So they're just trying to get their names on each other's work at that point.

00:55:10

Right.

00:55:10

So I understand it, but at the same time, if it's something that the author

00:55:14

themselves wrote, that I think could be helpful because it's, you know, the piece

00:55:19

getting at is it's a good way to get a quick overview and summary of what the

00:55:23

books about.

00:55:23

And I think if you can find that particular piece of the marketing materials,

00:55:27

there might be a little more value in that versus the testimonials piece.

00:55:32

Is that fair?

00:55:33

Yeah.

00:55:34

This is actually where I think something like Blinkist can really help because Blinkist

00:55:39

is a short version, basically, of books.

00:55:41

And I've run into people who are like, oh, yeah, I've read that book on Blinkist

00:55:46

and I'm like, no, you haven't read the book, but you understand the summary because

00:55:51

they condensed 300 pages into four minutes.

00:55:54

Yep.

00:55:54

But I think that there is value in that because the Blinkist summaries aren't going

00:55:59

to make value judgments on the content.

00:56:00

They're just going to present a structural outline or a skeleton for what the author

00:56:05

has done.

00:56:05

So if you wanted to use something like Blinkist to go through 50 different books

00:56:10

real quickly before you identified the one that you really wanted to sink your

00:56:14

into, I think that's a very valid approach.

00:56:17

Yeah, I think that's fair.

00:56:18

All right.

00:56:18

Let me go back to this preheating outline here.

00:56:21

So title, page and preface, table of contents, check the index, read the publishers

00:56:26

blurb and then number five, skim the main chapters.

00:56:29

And he's just talking about, you know, going through the chapter titles and just

00:56:34

kind of checking out what are the quotes that are pulled out because there's

00:56:37

usually some formatting that shows some of the interesting points within a

00:56:40

chapter.

00:56:41

He's saying go through those and then step six, he says to skim

00:56:44

the entire book, those last two, oh, well, number five of skimming the main chapters.

00:56:50

That's probably a thing that I would say I do.

00:56:52

But skimming the entire book feels like overkill to me because I'm getting ready

00:56:58

to read the whole thing anyway.

00:56:59

I get why he's saying that and it might be that in his mind, you do the pre reading

00:57:06

process, you go through those six pieces and then you sit down and try to answer

00:57:10

those four questions, what's it about, what's being said in detail and how is the book

00:57:15

true and whole or part and then what of it?

00:57:17

Trying to answer those four questions after you've done that preheating process.

00:57:20

I could maybe see that.

00:57:21

I could see that flowing into the process that he's proposing here.

00:57:26

I could see that, but I'm not going to do that.

00:57:29

I'm sorry.

00:57:30

And this is one area of the book.

00:57:32

I think that this is where the difference in society or cultural norms is most

00:57:40

evident because you're talking about getting the most out of the information

00:57:45

that you are reading and he's comparing the approach to a book versus the approach

00:57:50

to listening to the radio or like I said earlier, maybe you could apply that to

00:57:54

podcasts or audio books, but what about social media?

00:57:58

You know, you're not skimming your Twitter feed so that you can go in and dive into

00:58:02

like this is just not the way people approach information in general anymore

00:58:07

because there is so much information available to us.

00:58:10

So I think that if you have a lot of extra time to devote to reading,

00:58:16

that's great, but I also think that with the pace of society and the pace of just

00:58:22

the everyday everyday life now being so much different than it was in the 40s when

00:58:26

he wrote this, that I don't think there is that much value in skimming the whole

00:58:32

thing before you would you would dive into it.

00:58:35

I think that there's value in understanding the main concepts of the book and

00:58:41

understanding before you even get into in there like what is the problem or the

00:58:45

question that the author is trying to solve or answer.

00:58:48

I think though that this is the point of diminishing returns where if you're

00:58:53

going to skim through all of this stuff, I don't see being able to do that and I

00:58:57

don't see a whole bunch of value coming from that if I were to do that.

00:59:01

Like I don't see how skimming this book chapter by chapter before diving into it

00:59:05

did changes what I get out of it.

00:59:07

That's fair.

00:59:08

All right.

00:59:08

We've been skirting all around on our outline.

00:59:11

Do you want to come back and do these four levels of reading?

00:59:14

I think I think it's important to go through these bits.

00:59:16

Yep, definitely.

00:59:17

And this honestly shouldn't take too long unless we dive into the last two, but

00:59:22

the first one is elementary reading.

00:59:24

This last word.

00:59:25

Yeah, I know.

00:59:26

So the first one is elementary reading, which the example he gives there is what does

00:59:31

the sentence say.

00:59:32

The second level of reading is inspectional reading, which is what is the book about

00:59:36

number three and this is where he starts to get into how to read all of the

00:59:41

different types of books is analytical reading.

00:59:44

And this is where you have the organized questions that you're trying to answer.

00:59:49

And then the last one, number four and the most interesting one in my opinion

00:59:53

is synoptical reading.

00:59:55

If I spelled that right, placing many books in relation to one another.

01:00:01

This is where I think Bookworm has evolved a lot since we recorded episode one.

01:00:08

And one of the talking points that I had written down was how do you think

01:00:13

Bookworm today is different from that first episode, which I think we covered

01:00:18

getting things done.

01:00:20

Now, even in that one, we were comparing it to the previous version of getting things

01:00:24

done.

01:00:24

But I think as we've gone through a lot of the self development books, what I'm

01:00:29

reading is that I'm comparing what I'm reading to things, other things that the

01:00:34

authors of the previous books have said.

01:00:36

And then also because there were action items associated with those things, a lot

01:00:41

of times there's experiences that I can use to weigh whether what I'm reading

01:00:46

right now with this book is accurate or not to my specific situation.

01:00:50

So as we get into analytical reading and whether you agree or disagree with

01:00:55

the author, I feel like because we've gone through and read all those other books

01:00:58

done the action items associated with them, we've got a lot more context now

01:01:03

for this fourth level of reading.

01:01:05

All right, I want to reiterate these because I just want to show some of the

01:01:11

pyramid of this of sorts if you can follow that analogy with me.

01:01:15

So first level is elementary.

01:01:17

And like Mike said, you know, what does the sentence say?

01:01:20

It's can you interpret what the words are like that's that is the basis,

01:01:26

that basic level of reading.

01:01:29

Once you've mastered that, then you can build on that and get up to this

01:01:33

inspectional reading and start to apply meaning to it such that you can start

01:01:38

to understand what the sentences and paragraphs actually are intended to mean

01:01:44

or how you're going to interpret those.

01:01:46

Then you get into the analytical piece, which is where he spends the vast

01:01:50

majority of this time in this book.

01:01:52

How do you understand and how do you, you know,

01:01:55

physically and tactically go through different styles of books and different

01:01:59

types of topics such that you can get the most out of them and then syntopical

01:02:06

at the top level?

01:02:08

I think this is where Bookworm is kind of brilliant from you like Mike

01:02:14

and I stance here because, you know, we get the chance to go through this book

01:02:19

and then we get to process it for an hour and a half.

01:02:21

And once we've processed it, it's it's impossible.

01:02:25

How many times have we gone through a book and not mentioned another book in

01:02:29

some form, right?

01:02:31

And part of like next week, it's going to be ridiculous.

01:02:34

All right.

01:02:34

You know, the next episode is we're going to be talking about flow with Mahali

01:02:38

and that book has come up, I think, in like three fours of the books that we've

01:02:42

read so far.

01:02:44

So it's kind of a great hopefully like a culmination of that.

01:02:48

But, you know, the way that we've processed books in the last 41 episodes

01:02:53

and we're getting up to this one has led us to understanding a lot of different

01:02:58

topics and because there's a lot of overlap because of the style of books

01:03:02

that we tend to go through, you start to put together overarching themes and it

01:03:08

makes it easier for us to to challenge different concepts and constructs that are

01:03:14

put in front of us.

01:03:16

You know, we we have 168 hours that, you know, although we love some of the

01:03:22

mentality of it, there are definitely some areas where we strongly disagree and

01:03:27

part of the rationale, but behind that comes from some of the other books that

01:03:31

we've read in the past and the the ideals that we've developed through the

01:03:35

understanding we've gained from previous readings.

01:03:39

So I think that this fourth level, this centopical level, which is one that I

01:03:45

don't think you can get to unless you are reading a large number of books in

01:03:51

fairly short amount of time.

01:03:53

And that is primarily what we do on bookworm.

01:03:57

We go through a book every two weeks and most of the time Mike and I are going

01:04:01

through a book in between those.

01:04:03

So on average, we're looking at roughly 52 books in a year and you go through

01:04:08

that many books, it's hard not to start drawing correlations between them.

01:04:12

And it's hard to miss that there are different areas that can be applied to each

01:04:18

other. I mean, correct me if you think I'm wrong there, Mike, but when you start

01:04:22

reading that volume, it's interesting how many different dots start connecting that

01:04:27

you normally wouldn't have connected.

01:04:29

And I think that's what he's getting at that top level.

01:04:32

I completely agree.

01:04:35

Now, what's interesting about this top level of this fourth level of reading is

01:04:40

that this is kind of the inspiration for bookworm before we had any idea what this

01:04:46

is because I forget if I approach you, you approach me, but the idea was basically

01:04:52

we want to read these books.

01:04:54

We have a big list of things that we're not getting around to that's hold each

01:04:57

other accountable and talk about them.

01:04:59

So we actually get stuff out of them.

01:05:01

And that's an example of how you don't need to apply his whole system.

01:05:08

You have to understand the principles of what he's stating.

01:05:12

And then if you want to customize the workflow or the step by step so that it

01:05:17

fits the way that you work, like that's that's completely fine.

01:05:22

And I also think what's exciting about this is that we're 42 books in now and there's

01:05:28

a bunch of other books, like you said, that we've read, that we haven't covered

01:05:31

for the show that's given us a lot of context.

01:05:34

And like I said earlier, what that does is it makes me feel more confident in

01:05:41

responding to what the author is saying, which is really the whole point of reading

01:05:45

a book. He gets into this in the section on analytical reading, but he talks about

01:05:50

how reading a book is really a conversation.

01:05:52

The author is making an argument and the reader is making a judgment and the reader

01:05:57

owes it to the author to think critically about what they said and respond.

01:06:01

And that means that even if you disagree with the author, it's not necessarily a

01:06:06

bad book.

01:06:07

It's not a bad thing that you rent it that you read it.

01:06:11

He mentions there's four responses to an author when you disagree.

01:06:14

You can say to the author, you're uninformed, number two, you're misinformed,

01:06:17

number three, you're illogical or number four, your analysis is incomplete.

01:06:21

But all of those as educated opinions and responses to the material that you've

01:06:26

read is not a bad thing.

01:06:28

And so I want to call that out because listening to my rant on 168 hours,

01:06:33

I think that maybe that could be interpreted that way.

01:06:35

And I do disagree with some of the information in that book specifically,

01:06:39

talked about, but I don't think that going through the process of reading that book,

01:06:45

coming to the conclusions that I did, I still think that there's a ton of value

01:06:48

in that process, even if I didn't end up giving it five stars.

01:06:51

I think there's so much here that you can go through.

01:06:55

Like this book gives you ways of thinking about the books that we've gone through.

01:07:00

You know, Bookworm has given us a platform to process what we're reading.

01:07:06

And I think about the books that we read in between the Bookworm books and those,

01:07:14

although I feel like I get a lot out of them, I know that I'm not processing them

01:07:19

as well as the ones that we read for the show.

01:07:22

And that's primarily because those are not books that I have someone to sit down

01:07:27

and really pick apart with.

01:07:29

Like those are just on my own.

01:07:31

These are things I have to go through on my own ways in order to get the information

01:07:37

out of them. So kudos to you, Mike, on presenting this idea because, you know,

01:07:41

we both came to the idea, you know, go back to the beginnings of the podcast.

01:07:45

You know, we both kind of had the idea we wanted to do a show together,

01:07:48

but weren't sure what the topic of it should be.

01:07:51

And you posed the idea of, you know, reading a book every two weeks.

01:07:53

And I thought it was ridiculous because it was no way I was going to read a book in two weeks.

01:07:58

And almost two years in now reading one a week.

01:08:02

So it's interesting how you can grow in that way.

01:08:04

But it has been very interesting to see how all of these books tied together.

01:08:11

But I think you you've got a few other things here on this outline that are kind

01:08:15

of a smattering of topics.

01:08:16

You want to just kind of go through these random topics quickly?

01:08:20

Sure.

01:08:22

So let's see.

01:08:23

The first one here is the sub vocalization regarding the the active reading.

01:08:30

So this is a term that I picked up when I went through the speed reading course by

01:08:35

Abby Mark Spiel and really what this means is like how fast you read,

01:08:42

how fast you're you're speaking the words in your mind.

01:08:46

That's sub vocalization.

01:08:48

So the goal when you're reading skilled readers can read at what

01:08:53

Mark Spiel calls thinking speed, but a lot of people read at talking speed.

01:08:58

And you can see this yourself if when you're reading a book, you find yourself

01:09:03

mouthing the words you are reading at talking speed.

01:09:06

So the goal of becoming a skilled reader and the goal of a good speed reading

01:09:13

course is not just to read faster.

01:09:16

But like I said, it's the speed plus the comprehension.

01:09:18

So this sub vocalization, this is one specific place that

01:09:23

this plays out that I wanted to point out because I think that this highlights the

01:09:30

place where a good speed reading course can really be beneficial because it's not

01:09:35

just teaching you, you know, move your finger in a certain pattern across the page.

01:09:40

It'll give you a bunch of tactics that you can use to help you consume the material

01:09:45

not only faster, but also get more out of it.

01:09:47

And so that's the important thing I want to call out there.

01:09:49

The thing I really liked about Abby Mark Spiel's course is that it's the speed

01:09:53

and the comprehension.

01:09:54

It's not just a formula that you follow.

01:09:56

It's going to allow you to get through more books faster.

01:09:59

So do you because there's these two different ways of reading that involve some

01:10:03

of this and one is where you're reading and you're hearing your voice in your head

01:10:08

and the other is where you don't.

01:10:10

Which of those camps do you land in?

01:10:12

We haven't we've not talked about this.

01:10:13

I am in the camp where you do not hear your voice in your head.

01:10:16

That's exactly what I'm what I'm talking about because that if you can hear the voice

01:10:19

in your head, you are reading at talking speed and you're going to be significantly

01:10:24

slower than the person who can read at thinking speed.

01:10:27

So in the course, I don't remember the specific numbers, but I think reading

01:10:30

at talking speed was something like 120 words a minute and reading at thinking

01:10:34

speed is something like 300 words a minute.

01:10:37

So if you can make that switch to reading at thinking speed instead of reading at

01:10:41

talking speed, you can read books almost three times faster.

01:10:45

So I'm one of those that hears my voice in the head.

01:10:48

You should check out Abby Mark's Beel's voice.

01:10:51

This is a thing I'm aware of.

01:10:53

Like this is not a thing that I'm like completely oblivious to.

01:10:58

It's simply a thing that I have tried to make that switch before and it always

01:11:03

feels wrong and I feel like I can't like I can't retain the understanding of what

01:11:07

I've read whenever I make that switch.

01:11:09

So I I'll look into it, but I will be quite a strong skeptic going into it.

01:11:16

Yeah, that's that's fine.

01:11:18

How is the skeptic going into it?

01:11:19

And to be honest, when I started the course, I was already reading fairly fast.

01:11:24

I think it was like 300 words a minute with 80 percent comprehension on the initial

01:11:28

test that I did after I went through her course and implementing some of the

01:11:32

strategies that she implemented because now let me preface this by saying that she

01:11:37

talks about the stick shift.

01:11:38

So you're not always reading super, super fast.

01:11:41

You're recognizing the opportunities for you to use a different tactic and read

01:11:46

a little faster, but at the end of the course, using those those tactics that she had

01:11:49

taught me, I was reading at 600 words a minute with 80 percent comprehension.

01:11:53

Or no, I think it was 90 percent comprehension because my comprehension did

01:11:56

actually go up.

01:11:57

And so having a program like that that you can go through, that was the light

01:12:01

bulb moment for me where it was like, I'm reading this faster, but there's no way

01:12:05

I'm remembering this.

01:12:06

And then she quizzes you at the end on the material that you just read and you're

01:12:10

like, Oh my gosh, I remember that.

01:12:11

Yeah, interesting.

01:12:13

You're your brain, especially if you're used to reading and reading at talking

01:12:16

speed, you're like, there's no way I'm going to be able to keep up with this.

01:12:20

But the more that you practice it and the more that you see the results, the more

01:12:25

confident you get in your ability to speed up.

01:12:28

Fair enough.

01:12:29

So talk to me about the habits of making a book your own.

01:12:34

Yeah.

01:12:34

So this is from the section on how to make a book your own.

01:12:37

He mentioned the tactics, the two types of note taking.

01:12:40

The other thing that he called out in this section of the book specifically is to

01:12:45

create a reading habit.

01:12:47

And he points out that beginning readers will not be graceful, just like beginning

01:12:51

skiers.

01:12:52

And I am definitely a very beginning skier.

01:12:55

So that analogy resonated with me.

01:12:59

But the point that he made here and this really, I think, applies to anything is you

01:13:04

learn by doing.

01:13:06

So establishing a reading habit where you are reading every day, that's, I think

01:13:11

the proof is in the pudding with Bookworm where we started doing this.

01:13:15

We started cranking through the books.

01:13:17

We started understanding the books that we were going through because we were

01:13:21

talking about them and we're applying them to our lives at the action items.

01:13:23

The fact that you start doing that and then you, if you can consistently do it,

01:13:29

it's almost like the score takes care of itself.

01:13:32

You don't have to worry about, well, did I improve by X percent today?

01:13:35

Doesn't matter.

01:13:36

Just check the box.

01:13:37

Like don't break the chain.

01:13:38

Just keep reading.

01:13:40

And as you do that, you can't help but improve.

01:13:43

Yeah, I think there's something to be said about developing the focus of a book as

01:13:48

well.

01:13:48

And I think of that as a habit that you have to work towards building because,

01:13:53

well, take you and I, for example, when we sit down and read a book, I would say my

01:13:58

average in a day is somewhere around 30, maybe 40 pages that I'll read in a day.

01:14:03

Do you know what yours is, Mike?

01:14:05

I don't know because it's going to depend on the day, to be honest.

01:14:08

I don't read fiction in the evening like you do though.

01:14:11

I will typically read the books that we read for bookworm and even the gap books.

01:14:16

That's what I'll do at night.

01:14:17

And so sometimes I've got an hour that I'll read and I'll actually make some

01:14:23

significant progress in my book.

01:14:24

Other times, tonight, when I get done recording this, I'm going to a church youth

01:14:31

camp and it's about an hour away.

01:14:33

I'm not staying overnight, so I'm going to play bass at the at the worship service

01:14:38

and drive home tonight.

01:14:39

I'll probably be home about 1130.

01:14:41

I'm not reading tonight.

01:14:43

So it's going to it's going to average up.

01:14:45

But one thing that does help with establishing this habit and is having a

01:14:50

physical book with you all the time.

01:14:51

Now, maybe you could do this with a Kindle, but I've tried it with a Kindle and it

01:14:55

never worked for me.

01:14:56

A Kindle just feels too much like another digital device to me.

01:14:59

And if I have to go into my backpack to get my Kindle, I'm just as likely to go

01:15:03

backpacking, grab my iPad and play Civilization six or something.

01:15:08

So having a physical book with me all the time, whenever I've got a few minutes

01:15:13

here or there, I'll pick it up and read it.

01:15:15

And that has helped me establish that habit.

01:15:17

So it sounds like you're probably hitting that 25 30 page a day average, even

01:15:23

though you've got some days where you're probably hitting about 60 and others when

01:15:25

you get zero because I have days when I hit zero as well.

01:15:28

So I tend to do things similarly.

01:15:30

I will say that just sitting down and starting to be like, you're going to be

01:15:35

at that level tomorrow, that's not going to happen.

01:15:38

No, it's just not.

01:15:39

That's too much all at once.

01:15:41

I've told folks that if you want to get into reading and you want to build that habit,

01:15:46

try to go for a book a month and work on that.

01:15:50

So if you're someone who wants to read along with a bookworm, that would be

01:15:53

catching every other book on average.

01:15:55

If you start on that and you're going at that level, even at, you know, like a

01:16:00

300 page book, that's 10 pages a day, which might be significant for you.

01:16:06

If you're not used to reading long form like that, but you could do a book every

01:16:11

two months and read five pages a day.

01:16:12

Yep.

01:16:13

And then again, that's a 300 page book.

01:16:15

So most aren't that long.

01:16:17

So most are somewhere around that 200, maybe two, 25 range.

01:16:21

So it seems like if you wanted to get into into building that habit, it's pretty

01:16:27

easy to just say, I'm going to read three pages a day.

01:16:29

And it's interesting how that can evolve into something like what we do where we're

01:16:36

doing a book a week.

01:16:36

So I always encourage people start small and let it build.

01:16:41

I don't think that it's that difficult for most people to make the switch.

01:16:46

It's just going back to your extreme

01:16:49

calendaring example about being intentional about where you're spending your time.

01:16:52

Be intentional about the stuff that you're reading.

01:16:54

I mean, a lot of people are reading a lot, but they're reading their Twitter feed

01:16:59

or their Facebook, Facebook wall, you know, like that stuff isn't going to give you

01:17:05

any value.

01:17:06

But if you were to take the hour that you spend going through your social media

01:17:10

feeds and reading that stuff and apply that to a book, which I think that, especially

01:17:16

the books that we cover for Bookworm, like that's the thing that's kind of been

01:17:21

writing to me over the couple of years that we've been doing this is that there are

01:17:26

a lot of really smart people who have written things down and made them.

01:17:31

And a lot of cases like the public library, they are freely accessible for anybody.

01:17:36

All you have to do is seek it out.

01:17:38

And you don't need to read every book and expect every single one to completely

01:17:44

change your life, but you don't know when you're going to read that one book that

01:17:47

does.

01:17:48

In the last episode of Free Agents, David Sparks was talking about how he's gotten

01:17:53

into some of the productivity books recently and how he kind of had a negative

01:17:57

stigma attached to the productivity book guys, you know, and I totally get that.

01:18:02

The Grant Cardones of the world, stuff like that.

01:18:04

Yeah, but also I know and I've been following David Sparks long enough that like

01:18:09

the omnifocus videos that he did several years ago, that's kind of what got me

01:18:14

started on my productivity journey. So and those were based off of GTD getting

01:18:18

things done. I mean, I think that's probably the place where a lot of people

01:18:21

in the productivity space started.

01:18:22

It's like, Oh, I read GTD.

01:18:23

It changed my life.

01:18:24

Maybe you read GTD and it didn't change your life.

01:18:27

That's completely fine.

01:18:28

But there's another book out there that will, whether that's deep work or the 12

01:18:32

week year or thinking girl rich, whatever it is, there are plenty of good ideas that

01:18:39

you don't have to reinvent for yourself.

01:18:42

If you'll just seek them out, I read the actually I listened to because it's not

01:18:47

available in a printed form, but Jim Rohn has an audio book called the Art

01:18:53

of Exceptional Living. And at one point in there, he uses this analogy.

01:18:57

He tells the story of like, I could call my neighbor and say, Hey, come on over.

01:19:02

I just discovered a gold deposit in my backyard and his neighbors like, OK, well,

01:19:07

do you have a shovel I can use?

01:19:08

And he's like, No, go get yourself a shovel.

01:19:10

And the neighbors like, well, do you know how much they charge for shovels nowadays?

01:19:15

And it's a ridiculous example.

01:19:17

But he applies that to the person who won't go get a public library card because

01:19:23

all of these these books, you don't even have to buy them.

01:19:25

They're right there for you to download.

01:19:28

I actually had to check out, but also a lot of the libraries have the like the

01:19:32

overdrive system, I think, where if you had an ebook reader, you can check them out.

01:19:36

The ebooks as well for free.

01:19:37

You don't even have to physically go there.

01:19:39

Like the solutions to whatever problem you are facing are out there.

01:19:45

You just have to know where to look.

01:19:46

And then also, this is where this book comes in.

01:19:49

You can read the information.

01:19:50

It can go in one ear and out the other or you can understand the information that

01:19:54

is being presented to you in the right way.

01:19:56

And you can think critically about what the author is saying and you can decide

01:20:00

for yourself whether this is true or not.

01:20:02

And if it is true, you can do something about it.

01:20:04

That's really where you're going to see the change, not the fact that you read a book,

01:20:08

but that it inspired you to do something and create a new habit and that habit,

01:20:12

you know, done over and over and over again,

01:20:14

translated into the success that you were looking for.

01:20:17

Also, Jim Rohn, I think he said, like, success is a few small disciplines,

01:20:22

repeated every day, and failure is a few errors in judgment repeated every day.

01:20:26

It's like literally the small things that make the difference.

01:20:29

And I think what you're getting at is

01:20:31

essentially how he wraps up this book in that, you know, what is the purpose of

01:20:36

writing books and that ultimately comes down to, you know, growing your own mind

01:20:42

and giving yourself a wider breadth of information and understanding about the

01:20:48

world and the relationships and people that you know.

01:20:50

And I think that's a lot of why I do read a book is, you know, it's about

01:20:56

something that I want to understand more.

01:20:58

But at the same time, there are a number of books that we've gotten into on book

01:21:03

that I don't want to read.

01:21:06

And but it's, you know, this is where should gets in the way sometimes.

01:21:09

Like, I feel like I should read this because of X, Y, Z.

01:21:12

And it's rare that I jump into one that I'm not interested in reading.

01:21:18

And I wish I hadn't read it.

01:21:20

I don't know that we've done one for bookworm that, you know, although we may not

01:21:25

have liked the majority of it, there is still some knowledge and understanding

01:21:29

and some nuggets that you can pull out of it.

01:21:31

It's not like we've had a book that we rated a zero.

01:21:34

Like there's there's always been something that you can pull out of it.

01:21:38

And I think that's a lot of what I'm trying to get out of a book anymore is

01:21:42

what are those two or three nuggets that are completely new to me and that I can

01:21:48

then apply to other books or something in my life or it could maybe change the way

01:21:53

I think about a certain thing.

01:21:54

Like those are the pieces that I'm trying to get out of it.

01:21:57

Yeah.

01:21:58

There's a couple of things that you just said, which relate to the last section

01:22:01

in this book, the reading and the growth of the mind.

01:22:03

The first point you made was that there wasn't very often a book on the list that

01:22:08

you didn't want to read and afterwards you felt like you were right and not wanting

01:22:12

to read it.

01:22:13

I'm paraphrasing what you said, but you're good.

01:22:15

OK, cool.

01:22:16

So he says in this section that you must tackle books that are beyond you.

01:22:21

And I would argue that most of the books that I haven't wanted to read for bookworm

01:22:25

are because they are beyond me.

01:22:28

Yeah.

01:22:28

And in that instance, yeah, I have the same reaction.

01:22:31

Also in this section, he talks about the three types of books.

01:22:35

So number one are those that are not worth reading analytically.

01:22:39

And he points out that about 99 percent of books fall into this category.

01:22:43

And I would argue that maybe art of asking fell into this category because it was

01:22:49

so based on the person's personal experience in it.

01:22:53

I don't want to rehash the whole book, but I just that was the one I thought of

01:22:56

that maybe didn't fit there.

01:22:58

And then there was a second category, which is books that are worth reading

01:23:02

analytically once once you go through it, you get something out of it.

01:23:06

Even if you didn't really like the book, that's fine.

01:23:09

And then there is the section.

01:23:11

The third type of book are those that are worth rereading.

01:23:15

And hopefully, I think if if you're listening to bookworm,

01:23:21

one of the whether it's intended or unintended purposes of this podcast is that

01:23:25

it is helping you filter which of these books fall into which of those three

01:23:31

categories, the ones that are just not even worth diving into, the ones that are

01:23:36

worth reading and then the ones that are worth reading again and again and again.

01:23:40

Also in this section talks about how there's no limit to the amount of growth

01:23:43

and development that the mind can sustain.

01:23:45

That really is what bookworm is is all about is the personal development and the

01:23:51

wealth that comes from the process.

01:23:53

So hopefully, Joe, you like doing bookworm and we can do this forever and we can

01:23:56

just keep getting better and better.

01:23:59

Whether we keep finding new books to read or we go back and read, read some books

01:24:05

again, this is where 168 hours in particular was interesting to me because

01:24:10

in page 33, he articulates what I experienced when I read that book.

01:24:14

He said that you find on returning to a book that there was less than you

01:24:17

remember.

01:24:18

The reason, of course, is that you yourself have grown in the meantime.

01:24:21

You're still in the middle of the book and you're still in the middle of the book.

01:24:24

And so, you know, you're still in the middle of the book and you're still in the middle

01:24:28

of the book and you're still in the middle of the book.

01:24:30

And so, you know, you're still in the middle of the book and you're still in the

01:24:34

middle of the book and you're still in the middle of the book.

01:24:37

And so, you know, you're still in the middle of the book and you're still in the

01:24:41

middle of the book and you're still in the middle of the book.

01:24:44

And so, you know, you're still in the middle of the book and you're still in the

01:24:47

gap versus the game, which I know we've talked about, but real briefly, the gap

01:24:52

is where you focus on like where you want to be and then you compare it to where

01:24:56

you are right now and you see how far you've got to go and that can be discouraging

01:24:59

and that quickly puts you in a negative frame of mind.

01:25:03

But the growth is where you look at where you were, you reflect on where you came

01:25:07

from and you look at where you are now and you see how you've developed and how

01:25:12

you've advanced that focusing on the growth that creates a positive state of mind.

01:25:17

And so I think that even rereading a book that you get less out of the second time,

01:25:21

there's still a lot of value in that because it's going to highlight the growth that's

01:25:25

happened. Here's a question to you.

01:25:27

We've been doing bookworm for 41 episodes.

01:25:30

This one makes 42 and we've maintained roughly the same format the entire time.

01:25:37

Like there's been a couple things we change here and there, mostly just.

01:25:41

All right, let's let's make sure we talk about some action items here or let's

01:25:46

make sure we're talking about gap books.

01:25:48

That was one that we added.

01:25:49

There are some little tiny things that we've done.

01:25:52

We haven't really stopped long enough to talk about should we change up the overall

01:25:57

format of this because given these four questions that he's posing that we answer

01:26:03

about a book and maybe applying this syntopical piece in some form,

01:26:08

I don't know. Do you think we should change any of this format up because we

01:26:13

have our flow that we typically follow and I'm curious as to your thoughts on it.

01:26:16

Yeah, I saw you put this in here and at first I kind of gasped.

01:26:22

I'm I'm okay with changing up the format.

01:26:25

I don't think changing it to just follow the format that was presented in this book

01:26:32

without taking some time to think about the specific changes and what the purpose

01:26:36

of the changes would be.

01:26:37

I don't think that there's benefit in that.

01:26:40

I do like a lot of the format that we do do have.

01:26:45

Maybe people get bored with the the follow up with the action items, but I don't

01:26:49

know that accountability that helps me out a lot to know that I have to tell you

01:26:53

publicly that I did not get to creating an outsourcing budget in Wine Ab like

01:26:58

that public shaming has created action more often than not.

01:27:03

Yeah, so I don't know.

01:27:06

Maybe what we should do is we should throw it out to the listeners and if they

01:27:09

have any suggestions that can they can let us know for how we might be able to

01:27:12

to make bookworm better.

01:27:14

I'm okay with changing the format, but I also think that it's pretty solid at the

01:27:18

moment, at least when I reflect on the last 42 episodes and how I've grown from it.

01:27:26

Yeah, I'm good with that.

01:27:28

So to the listeners, now that you've listened about how to read a book, if there

01:27:33

are any changes or things you feel like we don't cover any loopholes or things

01:27:38

that are just not worth your time, hit us up.

01:27:41

Like, let us know.

01:27:42

Twitter, email, there's all kinds of ways.

01:27:44

Just go to the show notes.

01:27:45

You'll find a way to get ahold of us.

01:27:48

But that's it's a thing that I'm I've been contemplating for a while and haven't

01:27:53

nailed down and kind of wonder what it would look like if we we made some changes.

01:27:59

So I don't know.

01:28:00

I don't know what the answer to until all of that is, but it's a thing that I'm

01:28:03

I'm working through.

01:28:04

Nice.

01:28:05

So on that note, I'm sure you have an action item here.

01:28:08

Yes, you do.

01:28:09

Kind of hit me up, Mike.

01:28:11

What's your action item?

01:28:12

Well, my action item, like so many of my ambiguous action items is going to be hard

01:28:18

for you to hold me accountable to.

01:28:19

But really, as I read this book, the thing that I took away from it was I want

01:28:24

to be even more intentional about what I am writing down as I'm reading the book.

01:28:30

And this is already happening because even with like the gap books, it used to

01:28:34

be when you introduced the concept of the gap book, I would start a gap book and I'd

01:28:38

be like, yes, I don't have to take notes on this one.

01:28:40

And then I'd start reading it.

01:28:42

I realized that there's some stuff in there I want to remember.

01:28:44

And so what I do now is I approach the gap books the same way I approach the books

01:28:50

for Bookworm.

01:28:50

I create a mind node file and they're just as detailed.

01:28:55

But I do think that he does in the whole section, which we didn't really, really

01:29:00

cover on the how to read the different types of books.

01:29:03

He talks about how the four questions change slightly depending on the type of

01:29:08

that you're reading.

01:29:09

What that whole section did is it made me recognize that I need to think a little

01:29:16

bit more about how I'm going to answer those questions specifically through each

01:29:23

book that I read.

01:29:24

And so I think that that is going to translate into slightly different outlines.

01:29:29

Maybe I'll have a little bit more structural note-taking as opposed to just

01:29:36

conceptual note-taking when I read these books.

01:29:38

But really the expectation here for me is that I just have a little bit more solid

01:29:45

skeleton in my mind node file than that I do currently.

01:29:48

So the thing that I wrote down for me because I like to do the tactical side of

01:29:54

this is I want to put together a legit written out what my process is for reading

01:30:01

a book and kind of make it into a checklist of sorts, I guess.

01:30:05

It might incorporate those four questions.

01:30:08

I haven't decided if that's a thing I want to take the time to do.

01:30:12

I know that the pre-reading section that I do, I've never formalized that.

01:30:17

And I think it would be cool to do that.

01:30:19

And it might I mean, that would turn it into something I could share too.

01:30:22

Because I'm sure some folks would be interested in that.

01:30:24

But that is my one and only action item despite the plethora of tactical

01:30:30

suggestions that he has in his book.

01:30:33

Yep. Yep. That's the same response I had.

01:30:36

Is that this is great that you have all these lists, but I'm going to take the

01:30:39

ideas and chuck the form.

01:30:42

Yep. Yep.

01:30:44

Sorry.

01:30:45

How did you feel about the author's style?

01:30:47

What did you read it, Mike?

01:30:49

Well, I like the style.

01:30:51

Like I mentioned, he's got a lot of lists.

01:30:52

And when I read the list, well, I went through and understood the points that he

01:30:57

was making, I found myself saying, yeah, I agree with all of those in theory.

01:31:03

I'm not going to apply them that way.

01:31:05

So there's a I feel like even though this is a longer book and it was written a while

01:31:10

ago, that it's fairly easy to read because there's so much structure to it.

01:31:16

Like the six steps to systematic skimming, the 11 rules to analytical reading,

01:31:20

the four aides to reading the four responses to the author when you disagree.

01:31:23

Like the whole book pretty much is like that.

01:31:25

So I feel like it's a fairly easy read with the exception of the how to read

01:31:29

history, the fact that I'm not going to read history, but I'm not going to be

01:31:33

going to read history.

01:31:35

So I'm going to read history.

01:31:36

I'm going to read history.

01:31:37

I'm going to read history.

01:31:39

I'm going to read history.

01:31:40

I'm going to read history.

01:31:40

I'm going to read history.

01:31:42

I'm going to read history.

01:31:43

I'm going to read history.

01:31:44

I'm going to read history.

01:31:45

I'm going to read history.

01:31:46

I'm going to read history.

01:31:47

I'm going to read history.

01:31:49

I'm going to read history.

01:31:50

I'm going to read history.

01:31:51

I'm going to read history.

01:31:52

I'm going to read history.

01:31:53

I'm going to read history.

01:31:54

I'm going to read history.

01:31:56

I'm going to read history.

01:31:57

I'm going to read history.

01:31:58

I don't think that I would go around necessarily recommending it to anybody,

01:32:03

which is probably why you got such strong responses from people at your

01:32:08

church who saw it.

01:32:09

I think you do have to be in the right frame of mind to really benefit from this

01:32:13

type of book, even just the title.

01:32:15

I think that people will read it like how to read a book.

01:32:17

I know how to read a book.

01:32:18

Yeah.

01:32:19

Yeah.

01:32:19

And that's the person who should read it, but they're not in the state to get

01:32:23

anything out of it.

01:32:24

That was my reaction.

01:32:25

It's like, really?

01:32:25

I know how to read a book.

01:32:26

Yeah.

01:32:27

Yeah.

01:32:27

So assuming that you're in the right state, I think you'll benefit a lot from this.

01:32:31

I'm going to give it four stars.

01:32:32

That's fair.

01:32:33

I think I'm going to meet you at the four stars and we'll just both land on that.

01:32:38

It's a lot of for the same reasons.

01:32:39

Like he he goes into this expository deep dive on the philosophy behind a lot

01:32:45

of it.

01:32:45

And although I find that interesting and valuable, it was not what I was

01:32:50

expecting.

01:32:51

And I think expectations make a big difference on a lot of this.

01:32:54

So that was a thing that once I got past it, I was good.

01:32:58

And I also found that, you know, the the layout and the format that he gives for

01:33:05

how to go through a book, he kind of belabours it a little bit when he gets into

01:33:09

the the subsections towards the back, like how to do this with history, how to do

01:33:13

it with science, like all of those bits.

01:33:15

I felt like we're too long because it it felt like he was grasping at straws for

01:33:22

like, how do I draw this out?

01:33:23

What it felt like?

01:33:24

And maybe that's just our give it to me now mentality.

01:33:27

But I did struggle with that.

01:33:29

I do know that the syntopical piece is one that I find very interesting and valuable.

01:33:34

And I haven't really thought through it near at the level that he expounds on it.

01:33:40

So I was very interested in that.

01:33:41

So again, I'll meet you at the four point.

01:33:44

Oh, so this one's right even with us.

01:33:47

They're my nice.

01:33:49

So thanks for picking this one.

01:33:51

That was a good one.

01:33:51

Yeah, no problem.

01:33:53

And now that we can shelf how to read a book and now that we know how to read a book

01:33:58

and in better detail, it's only fitting that the first book we do after that is

01:34:03

flow by Mahali.

01:34:04

What is it?

01:34:05

She sent me Holly.

01:34:06

She sent me Holly.

01:34:07

I believe I've yet to be corrected and that's the pronunciation I found on the

01:34:12

Internet.

01:34:13

Got it.

01:34:13

Got it.

01:34:14

So I have a notes file in bear about.

01:34:19

I've been playing around with this concept of writing a book about books.

01:34:23

And it's probably some time down the road.

01:34:26

But anyway, I tend to write things down that I find in every book.

01:34:30

It has some interesting things in it.

01:34:32

Like every book has to mention Apple or Steve Jobs.

01:34:36

Like those you have to tell a story about Apple or Steve Jobs.

01:34:40

Like that is just a thing that you must do.

01:34:42

And another one that's in there is you have to mention flow by Mahali because

01:34:47

every book seems to mention that in some way.

01:34:51

So because it's so popular across the books that we read, I felt that it was

01:34:55

only fitting that we eventually and now in reality should read this book.

01:34:59

So thus our next book for bookworm is flow by Mahali.

01:35:03

She sent me Holly.

01:35:04

Nice.

01:35:05

Yeah.

01:35:05

And the one after that is one that I just kind of randomly selected, I guess.

01:35:12

But it's been one that I've heard about and been aware of for a long time.

01:35:17

And that is Man Search for Meaning by Victor Frankle.

01:35:20

Are you familiar with Victor Frankle at all?

01:35:21

I am.

01:35:22

OK, so yeah, this guy has a phenomenal story and I feel bad every time I

01:35:29

reference him and haven't read his book.

01:35:32

All right.

01:35:33

For those of you aren't familiar with Victor Frankle, he is a World War two

01:35:37

concentration camp survivor and his big theme is attitude, at least in a lot

01:35:45

of the quotes and stuff that you would find from him on the web.

01:35:48

So Man Search for Meaning, I can think of nobody more qualified to talk on this

01:35:55

topic than somebody who has gone through like that amount of pain and suffering

01:35:59

like Victor Frankle has.

01:36:01

I really have no idea what to expect from this book.

01:36:03

I know that Victor Frankle is kind of famous for being positive, but he went

01:36:07

through some some pretty hard stuff.

01:36:08

So we'll see.

01:36:10

So for gap books, I have no gap book this time around.

01:36:16

And it's primarily because we have a large men's conference going on at our

01:36:22

church next week.

01:36:23

And I know that my reading time is going to be cut close to half between here

01:36:27

and the next episode.

01:36:28

So I am starting in on flow right away and it will probably take me until the day

01:36:33

before we record next time to get it done.

01:36:36

So no gap book for Joe this round.

01:36:39

All right.

01:36:39

My gap book I mentioned already that is the

01:36:43

alternative connection by Kathy Colby.

01:36:46

This topic just fascinates me because the the conative assessment process.

01:36:53

There's really no right answer to this.

01:36:57

In fact, whenever you take the assessment, they give you results and they say the

01:37:01

first thing they say is congratulations, you got a perfect score.

01:37:03

Got it.

01:37:04

So it's not something that you can change, but I think there's a lot of value in

01:37:08

the awareness and this book just really takes everything that I knew about Colby

01:37:12

and cranks it up several notches because she talks a lot and she has a lot of

01:37:16

stories about how you can apply this in all these different situations.

01:37:20

And she's saying if this person is working with this person, they're going to

01:37:23

experience conflict and this is typically going to be the result.

01:37:25

And I'm thinking of different instances in my life where I'm like, yeah,

01:37:29

that's why that thing didn't work out.

01:37:33

So it's really interesting.

01:37:35

So if you are reading along with this,

01:37:38

you've noticed that some of the more recent books have been at least on my

01:37:43

side of things, those have been recommendations.

01:37:45

And if you want to get your book on that list or you have one that you want to

01:37:50

to hear us go through, you can do that over a bookworm.fm/recommend.

01:37:55

You can also go to slash list and get a list of all the books that we've

01:37:59

completed, all the ones that we're planning to complete and all of the ones

01:38:02

that other people have recommended.

01:38:03

So it's a pretty big book list.

01:38:05

So if you have one that you want to put on that list, you can do it with

01:38:08

the button right there on that page.

01:38:10

And if you want to support the show, you can use any of those links on that page.

01:38:16

Those are Amazon affiliate links.

01:38:18

So if you decide that you want to buy the book for the next book that we're

01:38:21

going through on bookworm and you use that link, that'll help us out.

01:38:24

Another way you can help us out is going to iTunes and leaving us a rating and

01:38:29

review KCRW is still ahead of us in the bookworm search term.

01:38:35

So we want to change that.

01:38:37

All right. So if you're reading a long pick up flow by Mahali, Cheek, sent me Holly.

01:38:41

I think I just like saying his name now.

01:38:42

And we will dive into how to put yourself in the mode of flow next time.