Bookworm Transcripts

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So long range follow up. I forget what episode it was and exactly how long ago it was, but one of my

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action items from Thinking Grow Rich was this personal communication room. And like we were chatting

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about before we got started here, my office I am happy to announce is almost done. It should

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be done early next week. I've got paint on the walls and so all that's left is the door, the trim,

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and the bookcase, which I believe all the wood for that is stained already and the contractor is

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going to be putting it in end of this week and beginning of next week. So that is super exciting.

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So you have a new bookshelf going in, all of this and that's the part I catch. So.

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Yeah, well I figured I need somewhere to store all these books. Actually it was encouraged,

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highly encouraged by my wife who literally said either find a place for these books or I'm throwing

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them out because they're kind of in stacks all around our bedroom at the moment.

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Nice. Yeah, the Schmidt's house is kind of in flux at the moment because I shared with you that

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Rachel's mom has been living with us for a couple of years because she was a single parent Rachel's

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father and hopefully she's okay with me sharing this on the podcast. Died in a car accident when

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she was really young. So her mom has done everything that she could to provide a great future for her

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kids. She's taken jobs that she had to and a couple of years ago she was in child care and

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hurt her back. The situation wasn't a good one. She had to fight to get basically the employer.

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It was a workman's compensation issue. It happened at work but they were fighting it and so she

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was in a tough spot. She needed to have major back surgery. She was living in a basement apartment

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and we're just like that's not going to work. Come stay with us until your back is better. So

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she had surgery a couple of years ago. She's been going back to school and she's going to graduate

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I believe either this summer or next winter with a communications degree. So she's kind of hit the

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reset button and she moved out at the beginning of February. So she now has her own place. It's

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kind of weird but it's kind of like sending your kid to college. Like they're leaving the house

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except it's your mother-in-law. So I will say though that I am really proud of her. She's worked

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really hard to get to this point. She's got a full-time job lined up. It's been really cool to see how

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she's kind of completely changed her life through this process. So she's moving out. My office is

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getting done. This is a happy day at the Schmitt's house. That doesn't sound like an easy transition

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for her either to be moving in with her daughter and spending two years there. That's

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sounds like it can almost come across as almost humiliating I guess. I'm thinking about in later

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years if I had to move in with one of my daughters to get by. That just sounds like a humiliating

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thing to for me. Maybe that's me as a male I don't know to admit that I would have to need that help

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but kudos to her for being willing to to work through that and not give up and go back to school.

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That's nuts. So congratulations. Yep. Good job Shirley.

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And on that note you get a new office space now. I do.

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But you said these things like they were willy-nilly like it wasn't that big a deal. Trim in a door

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in a bookcase like no big deal. But are you doing those? Are you hiring that out? No I am not doing

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any of this. I have no woodworking ability whatsoever. All right. Do you own a saw? Maybe I should

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ask that question. Nope. All right. I own some screwdrivers.

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Okay. I think I bought a black and decker drill at Walmart when I was in college.

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All right. Yeah. I don't do tools. Sorry. Black and decker. Mike. Oh Mike.

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All right. So yeah throughout the brand just because I knew it was going to get a reaction from

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you. Yep. Thanks. Thanks for that. All right. Okay. We need to move on.

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All right. So we've got a couple other follow up items here. That one's long range.

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I'll give you that. That's been a while back. How long ago was Think and Grow Rich? When was that

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one? To be honest I don't even know. I probably should have looked it up before we started recording.

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But I did not. So Think and Grow Rich was episode 34. That was September 14th 2017.

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Yeah. So it's been a while. Yeah. It's been a couple of weeks. Yeah. For sure.

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You have another one on here. Read for tomorrow as well as for today. Dang it. You weren't supposed

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to ask me about this, Joe. I wasn't. I'm asking you anyway. I'm just kidding. Yeah. I saw this on

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there. I didn't put it in the follow up section because I wasn't sure how you could hold me

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accountable for this. But I will say that the my node files that I create for the books that we read

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have a little bit more structure. And I think that that is going to be my successful completion

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of this action item. Because I believe that I've made it a little bit easier where I can go back

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into one of these my node files and understand just by looking at the major nodes what the book

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was about because it more closely follows the book outline as opposed to just here's a node for

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all my action items and that sort of thing. Yeah, that's fair. A lot of people have shown

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some interest in your my node files for sure. You were considering sharing these things

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at one point. Have you. Yeah. I man, I will share them. I don't really have an issue sharing the

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content of them other than I mentioned when we did the last episode that most of the time I'm reading

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a physical physical book and I'm taking notes on my phone. So that means that there's a lot of

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misspellings and occasionally there's even things where I go back and I read my notes and I wrote

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something down wrong and I can't figure out what that stuff. So I want to make sure that they're

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clean and coherent before I would share them publicly. But why just post them off. Yeah, maybe.

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If enough people ask then I'm sure that I'll I'll share them as is but I have been going back

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and and just cleaning up a few things here and there with the intention of at some point making

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these available. I'm thinking that I'm probably going to revamp my personal website somewhat in

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the style of like a Jason Snell. I think maybe you do this too where he's he's got like a short

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description of all the different podcasts that he's he's creating all the different content pieces

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essentially that he's creating. He's got different posts for each of those where the main the main

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feed would be that sort of thing. And then if you wanted to join my my email list which I don't even

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know what I would do at that at this point other than start building an email list. That would be a

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a campaign that I would set up then where I could just upload these these files and then whenever

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we release a new episode of Bookworm that those would go out but I haven't set all that up yet.

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Okay, so there was a piece in here that I want to call out and it was that you said if enough

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people asked for these my known files. So that being said listeners at bobblehead.jo on Twitter

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nail him. Oh boy. I think you should post these. I'm going to join the crowd every time I see one

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of these I'm going to join. So I hit him up fair enough. Well let me let me just clarify this by

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saying that I will at some point make these available but if people complain loud enough I will

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probably make them available sooner. No promises I guess if probably my squeaky wheel gets the grease

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as I was told recently when I when I got well it's not official official but I've got like I

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guess I'll just say I will most likely be presenting at max stock this year but it's

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it's not officially anetta and one of the things that guy told me it was like okay okay I get it

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squeaky wheel gets the grease. You were probably in from the beginning anyways let me sift through

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the three dozen proposals that you sent over and let you know which one I like. So you're

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persistent we'll give you that. Yep. All right so I have a piece of follow up here. This template

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for reading a book in bear that actually didn't land in bear it ended up being in

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tax expander because I ended up setting up a it's a workflow that I'd created that very simply

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adds a new note to bear and then once it's created that note I just run the tax expander

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snippet in in bear and then it's it recreates it right there for me so it's it's not exactly a

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bear template but it kind of acts as that because you know I can't help myself and I if I'm going

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to automate something if I can automate it I will so yes that's that's what I have so I'll try to

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make sure we got a link to that workflow and those details in the show notes if you're interested in

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that but yeah I think that's what we got for follow up did I miss anything. No although I am

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curious to see how the last book that we read influenced how you read this book that we are

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covering today. Yeah and that's that's an interesting question so I have I've got a number of things

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open because you know podcasters we always have like 12 windows open it seems like when we're

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recording but I have my notes up from reading flow which is today's book and I am posting these I

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posted the notes I had on how to read a book from last time on my collected site which I haven't

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talked about here I did start a new kind of a commonplace in the digital world website based on

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something that drew he started doing and I got intrigued by it and built a thing around it so

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anyway uh collected dot jobulig.com is where I've been posting this stuff just and it's random stuff

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and I am not this is why I tell you to post your mind node thing without editing it because I'm

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not editing this and sometimes it's not even full sentences that I'm putting on this and I have a

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few of those pieces in my notes for today's book which I will post out on the collected site probably

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tomorrow or so it'll show up there and then I'll make sure there's a link to that in the show

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notes as well so that's why I say you need to post your mind node file we'll just start posting

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our book notes so everybody bobblehead joe on twitter how many times I need to say this

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through this episode that's probably enough right right about there I think is good okay I'll keep

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bringing it up I'm sure a couple more times would do it well hey by the way uh shout out to

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tulip girl who I was talking to us about the last book that we read and it was asking questions

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about the the the mind node files she had asked me if how many of them I I do this for and do I do

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it for every book that I read and my initial response was well no I don't do it for every book

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that I read I don't have that many turns out I do have that many going through my my my node

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folder in my iCloud here there's got to be at least a couple dozen books that I've created these

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really elaborate mind node files for yeah and it is really cool to go back and look at these

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I like growing this this library so I definitely see where uh like a collected dot mike schmitz

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dot me or whatever that that had these like that would be kind of cool to see yeah so if you if you

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want like my site that I have in any of the listeners too the collected site that I'm running

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it's running a theme for jekyll that I wrote and I wrote it in such a way so that it makes it

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easy for other people to create these sites for themselves and mine is just running off of

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github pages if you're familiar with that at all so if you're a coder developer of any sorts you

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have a github account if you don't have a github account it's really easy to get one like everything

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else and they have a whole structure for setting up a website that's hosted right in your public

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repository that's there and once you do that you can and there's instructions on on my site on how

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to do that so I'll make sure there's a link in the show notes for that theme because that theme

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spells out in the the read me for it how to set that up so if you're interested mike you can get

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this done and you don't even have to pay host for it yeah I don't think you're gonna jackalify me

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uh I did take a look at your your uh your read me I've never used jackal before and as I was

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reconsidering like what do I want my site to be kind of what what got me going on this was the

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fact that mike shmit's that me exist it's got links to all the things that I'm currently building

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and producing but the content on there hasn't been updated in like a year and a half and that's

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just because a lot of the stuff that I publish I publish someplace else so thinking about like

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how do I want to repurpose this I kind of went the other way I'm on a square space trial at the moment

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just because I know quite a few people who have made it work with square space uh square space

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I kind of like the idea of not having to ever touch my site in terms of maintenance I just

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have to create the content so I guess we could follow up on that see if I'm still there in a

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couple weeks but so far it's pretty nice sounds lame I knew you weren't gonna like that but

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and to be honest it was one of those things that as a former web developer and I will use the

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word former because I don't want any more client work uh that I never thought I would do but

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simplicity sometimes wins fair enough I get that I've told a few people that if you want something

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really simple set up a medium blog and I have I have a handful of clients that I do that for

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just because they want something easy and they want the existing audience to just tie in so

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there are places for things like that I just if you're gonna build it for yourself and you can

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why anyway that's me I like to control yeah I just don't want medium or Facebook to own my

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my node files when I publish that fair enough that's fair all right so today's book flow

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by mahali cheek sent me holly I didn't look that up I'm just going off of the way you say it Mike

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beautiful I'm hoping I pronounced that somewhat correctly like an Olympic figure skater you nailed

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it yeah all right triple axel and all right yep the psychology of optimal experience is the tag

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line on this national bestseller this book I haven't gone back to to check I wish I had

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tracked how many books we've done for bookworm that this one has come up within yeah I would

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like to know that I bet it's at least a third if not half of the books we've been through have

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mentioned this one is that fair assessment absolutely uh so I don't drink but you know how

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like I'm Mac power users they've got the the Brett Terpstra thing where every time Brett Terpstra's

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name is mentioned you take a drink that's what it would be like for bookworm with me holly cheek

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sent me holly maybe we'll adapt it so you take a drink of coffee instead yep so I've got a note about

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a potential book I've played around with a book about reading books or writing a book of sorts

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basically summarizing all of these books that we read and there's a list of things in that note

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that have like things you must mention to write a non-fiction book of this sort one is that you

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always need to mention apple or steve jobs in some way and talk about how amazing that they are and

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you typically it seems like meditation or yoga or something of that sort tends to come up and

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then you have to mention flow just a random thought how many people do you think cite this book

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simply because they can pronounce his name and it's so hard to pronounce that if you've heard

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it for the first time you just assume the other person has really done a ton of research and really

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knows their stuff hmm that's a good question because here's the other thing whenever people

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quote this book I'm not certain that the last name his last name I don't know that it's always

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there like I see flow by mahali a lot yep mahali see yeah I see that a lot but I don't know that I

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see his full entire last name spelled out very frequently I don't know why that is but it's a

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cool name I like it it is a cool name and it's a it's a really good book too it was honestly a

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lot better and a lot more approachable than I thought it was but I also am very glad we read

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how to read a book before this because it gave me some tactics and strategies to approaching this

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book which were really helpful I think that like if you were just getting into the productivity

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space and you're like what book should I read what's you know what's the most influential book

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you've ever read and someone tells you flow and this is the first book that you pick up like this

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big mistake right right because this is it's philosophical I would say it's not tactical per se

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there are a lot of tactics that are mentioned kind of in passing that's not the purpose of the book

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and he spells that out at the beginning which I'm very grateful that he did because I I was kind

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of expecting a lot of tactics and the like to be mentioned and I was able to pull that out in a

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lot of areas but at the same time it was very clear at the beginning that I'm going to talk about

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the stories around this and I'm going to talk about the the conceptual ideas that are encompassed

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within this concept and I'm not going to go into how do you apply this and he even says I am leaving

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that to you to decode and decipher how that what that means for you which I can appreciate but I can

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only appreciate it because he said it you know I get a little bit out of shape whenever books

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don't say that and that's the way that they are they expect you to interpret it but they don't

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tell you that yeah it's very anti-current productivity space where it's like I'm not going to give you

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any action items you can figure out what action you're going to take right and I think part of

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that maybe is the the era in which it was written my version was the bluish a yellow looking one

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it's a paperback that I got off of off of Amazon but I know that there is a hardcover version which

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was printed in like the 60s is that correct I think I have the same one you do and I'm trying to get

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the copyright dates and stuff on it it was originally written in 1990 1990 was the original a hardcover

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edition of this book was published in 1990 by harper and roe the one that I'm holding in my hand

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is a modern classics edition which was published in 2008 yep yeah that's the one that I have to I

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guess I assumed it was older because I found this book in my parents place in dor county they

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long story short they bought this house which on the bottom floor is lined it's like a finished

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basement and all the way around the entire basement are these bookshelves that are filled with books

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like every possible category topic you can think of most of them are quite a bit older and there

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I found flow in those bookshelves like the people moved and they just left all these books so I

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found flow there and my dad actually took it and he's reading it right now but in that version which

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was the old hardcover version there was like a note that was typed on a typewriter like a personal

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recommendation from a guy named stewart who was basically saying like this book will change your

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life that's cool so I guess I just you know for context that's why maybe I thought it was a little

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bit a little bit older there's another one finding flow the psychology of engagement with everyday

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life yeah I know he's got a couple others but that one was written in 98 so how long do you have

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to wait before your book becomes a classic I mean 1990 and it's reprinted in 2008 that's like less

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than 20 years it seems a little weird it's modern classics is what it says okay does that count sure

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I guess according to the the New York Times anyways but yeah this is so this is a really good book I

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do think that it is a little bit dated in the content which wasn't really distracting to me but

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I don't know I feel like my whole paradigm for this book has kind of been rocked because I thought

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it was older than it was but yeah like the content that's in here is really really good and maybe we

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should start with the definition of of flow yes and I before we jump into that I just want to say

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mahali is still around last I knew so he is I believe still teaching I'm gonna pull this up real

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quick he's born 1934 September 29th oh that's a day before my birth nice yes so he's still around

00:21:07

on that note I'll let you define flow all right so what is flow and the definition that he uses

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in the book which is really paramount to everything else we're going to be covering in this episode

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is optimal experience and I like that definition because I feel it's very open and you can kind of

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define for yourself what optimal experience looks like but optimal experience on page three he talks

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about how the best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limit

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in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult or worthwhile so optimal experience is

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kind of the point when you're performing at your best it's not necessarily the point when everything

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is just clicking and everything is easy but it's the point where you're really able to to perform at

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a level that maybe you didn't even think that you could reach yeah and I like that and I think he goes

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through scenario after scenario after scenario of ways that this actually happens and I learned

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that he he loves tennis players and he loves athletes kind of in general and what was the other one

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violinists he mentioned a lot I don't know I felt like he had a lot of stories that were around these

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I checked both of those boxes by the way so I liked all those examples yes that makes sense

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I cannot resonate with really any of those I was quite an athlete in high school but that

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hasn't translated into today's world really but at the same time I can resonate with the feelings

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that he's mentioning in each of these scenarios so I wouldn't say I was completely alienated by those

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but he did like them quite a bit and I think part of that's because it's it's easier to explain a

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concept like flow where you you're effectively losing track of time because you're so engrossed

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in the activity that you're working on because it's a challenge and you have the skills to meet that

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challenge but it's something that you definitely have to work at and when you're working at it at

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that level you tend to tune out everything except that one activity and I have been there I've done

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that a number of times and I totally get it and I like this concept of manufacturing this state

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the state of mind and I like that he has spelled out the components of flow which hopefully we'll

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get to but I think you're right in that this is a this is an optimal experience as he calls it

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which I think is a really good good way to explain it yeah so there's there's a lot here later on

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in the book he has a diagram it's page 74 which I'll just mention because it's relevant to our

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discussion of what flow is obviously in the book it's down the road a little bit but the channel

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flow basically shows that it doesn't matter what your skill level is at what you want to do is you

00:24:10

want to maximize your skill level wherever it happens to be so if you're a beginner at something

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if you're doing something in that area that is stretching you to your limit so to speak

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you're in flow if you're somebody who's a professional in a specific area then the degree of difficulty

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for the task that you're doing has to be elevated in order for you to achieve that state of flow

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and the real takeaway here at the beginning is that the goal for for people should not be

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to live a comfortable life it should be to create a life worth living and that happiness really

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has nothing to do with your comfort he's got a lot of stories in here in addition to

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the sports analogies and the musician analogies stories about people who are in like small rural

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farming towns and they live a hard life they work 16 hours a day but they're in flow pretty much

00:25:03

all day and they're super happy so the takeaway here is that you can manufacture this flow

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in whatever area you need it to be you just need to you need to make sure that you're doing the right

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things in order to enter into that state and I think for a musician or for an athlete maybe it's

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easier to do that like if when I was playing tennis competitively in college or playing basketball

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in high school for example soccer those sorts of things and you're competing against other people

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and you know state championship games on the line like you hear those stories like it's easy

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it's easier to enter into a state of flow in that scenario than it is when you're like myself

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right now 30 something I'm not competing competitively I'm focused on my family and things like that

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how do I still how do I still manufacture that state of flow I think that's one of the things

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that's attracted me to running to be honest we've talked about how my experience with running

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kind of creates that that runner's high where you know you feel like you're about to hit a wall

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and then I would describe it as you're entering a state of flow you push past that wall and you

00:26:11

feel like you can go forever you get done you shattered your personal record and you're like

00:26:15

wow I feel great that's flow and I can literally put on my shoes go for a run it's not dependent on

00:26:23

anybody or any external circumstances other than maybe you know if it's super cold outside or it's

00:26:27

raining or whatever like maybe those things could change my plans but really my point is that

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there are opportunities to manufacture that flow regardless of your situation and regardless of

00:26:37

what opportunities you have available to you and so as I was reading this the real thing that I'm

00:26:43

trying to wrap my head around is where are those opportunities that are in front of me on page 10

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he talks about the problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they

00:26:54

cease to derive pleasure from the present I think that's a very real danger in the productivity space

00:27:00

you can be so long-term focused that you're no good in the moment I don't want to I don't want

00:27:05

to be that way so I think that this book is a really good book especially if you're into productivity

00:27:11

because it's kind of the checks and balances where a lot of the productivity books will say

00:27:15

you got to have a vision you got to have a why I believe in all that stuff it's what got me to

00:27:18

the situation that I'm in right now but on the other side of that like don't be dissatisfied

00:27:24

with your current situation look for ways to make what you have to do better and that's what flow is

00:27:28

all about in my opinion so there's a lot there and I do want to call out it's easy to look at

00:27:35

this state of flow and it's easy to look at the examples that he gives because the common denominator

00:27:43

in the vast majority of those examples is the fact that they are physical in some way

00:27:51

they are cases where people are doing something with their hands they are run an attractor they are

00:27:57

competing in tennis they are playing some sports game and although he continues to say and show

00:28:06

a few examples of how you can do this without doing something physical almost every time there's

00:28:12

this physical aspect to it and I kind of struggled with that given the fact that you and I work in

00:28:19

a space where everything is it's knowledge and information it's not how strong I am it's not how

00:28:28

fast I am it's not how skilled I am at doing something very particular with my movements it's

00:28:34

it's what I know and how I translate what I know into more information that I'm creating and I

00:28:42

don't know did you notice this connection and did you see a way to translate it very well or do you

00:28:47

think I'm just completely off base no if I'm hearing you right I think what you're saying is that

00:28:52

there's a physical aspect to creating flow that he seems to go back to quite a bit yes and I think

00:28:58

that that's that's true it means he's got a whole section in here on the body and flow and I've got

00:29:03

a couple of of action items associated with that which we'll we'll get to at the end but I think that

00:29:11

the flow isn't just a physical activity although you can achieve flow through physical activity I

00:29:19

may go off on an on a tangent here because I I've read and I've shared it shared it last time the

00:29:27

Coneredive Connection by Kathy Colby and that book just rocked my world and my wife read it and she's

00:29:34

really enjoying it too I firmly believe that the Coneredive Connection where it talks about the

00:29:40

different ways that you're wired you've got your dominant mode which for me is a fact finder and

00:29:45

then there's there's follow through which is the the systems of the processes that you would you

00:29:50

would follow if you've got documentation it's easy for you if you're a high follow through to just

00:29:54

follow the standard operating procedure and get the thing done and this quick start which is where

00:29:58

you just make stuff happen on your own and then this implementer where you're physically manipulating

00:30:03

things so that's where a lot of like the the physical exercise the gardening those types of things

00:30:10

they would recommend and when I'm reading flow I'm reading it in context of that book okay so

00:30:16

talking about like in the Coneredive Connection they mentioned that you should have a leisure

00:30:21

activity in one of your non-dominant modes so my results are seven for a fact finder six for

00:30:26

follow through three for quick start three for implementer that means that I should look for a

00:30:32

leisure activity that activates my quick start and my implementer modes because it allows me

00:30:38

to disconnect from the way I have been functioning in those other modes because you've only got so

00:30:43

much so much fuel in the tank so to speak for each of those different modes so that means when I

00:30:49

when I have the time to just mess around and and activate those other modes I don't need to be

00:30:55

performing at my my best so to speak but I can still achieve flow in those states just because

00:31:01

I'm not super skilled in those things that I would use a high quick start or a high implementer

00:31:07

doesn't mean that I can't achieve flow going back to that channel flow it just means that I'm maybe

00:31:12

not as skilled in whatever area I happen to be doing there maybe I'm not a super skilled gardener

00:31:17

so that means that it's actually easier for me to get into flow because the task doesn't have to be

00:31:21

that hard in order for me to get there so one of the things that I've been thinking about as I was

00:31:26

reading this book is how do I activate those other modes and achieve flow because I think the value

00:31:33

from the book that we read for today in flow is just get in flow as much as you can the more that

00:31:38

you are in flow you that the happier you will be the more focused your attention will be that the

00:31:43

better the the end result of whatever you're doing happens to be so one of my action items here and

00:31:49

this is kind of going out of order but I think it's very relevant to what we're talking about right

00:31:53

now is to think about how I can achieve flow in those non-dominant modes which for me are the quick

00:32:01

starter and the implementer and also at the same time as I was thinking through this book like how

00:32:07

can I do that in a way where I am also spending time with my family because I've said over and over

00:32:12

again like my family is the important thing to me one of the things that I've landed on is I'm not

00:32:17

a high quick starter I'm not a high implementer which means that I won't just sit down with a

00:32:21

bunch of Legos and build something like that's stressful for me I'm like where are the instructions

00:32:27

all right but not for my kids in fact if I were to sit down and do that with them that's when they

00:32:32

would open up that's when they would start talking to me so if I approach that as I'm going to switch

00:32:39

my modes now I'm going to you know I've been working for a while I've been activating the

00:32:44

high-fak finder the high follow through now I need just something which is going to give me

00:32:48

it's going to change things up it's going to give me a break that's like the ideal activity and

00:32:54

I think that when you approach playing Legos with your kids as something that is going to help you

00:32:59

be more productive and do better work like it's a lot easier to justify so I really like how this

00:33:06

book got me to to make these connections using that syntopical reading that we were talking about

00:33:11

last time and just figuring out like what are the ways that I can achieve this which I wouldn't

00:33:17

normally default to so I think there's one of the one of the aspects of creating flow because we

00:33:24

haven't really talked about what these conditions are that that take you to this flow state and

00:33:30

the thing I'm working through mentally with some of like the work that I do is I do a lot of code

00:33:37

I do a lot of you know consulting work and it's a lot of thinking time so I spend a lot of time

00:33:42

thinking and that thinking and an ideation process is difficult to it's difficult to

00:33:51

manufacture this flow state with that type of work that's that's what I have found and I have an

00:33:58

action item around this to try to work through some of it so I don't have an answer here I'll just

00:34:02

preface it with that but I know that some of the aspects of flow is the skill level involved you

00:34:10

almost gamify things if it's not a game in itself he told a story about a guy who figured out this

00:34:16

game of how he tapped his fingers and would use that process to to kill time when he's in meetings

00:34:23

he didn't want to be in so like those things are interesting but it seems like you have to create

00:34:29

this game or this competition with yourself in some way which in every scenario was a physical

00:34:36

component that I can remember anyway you know in every scenario that's what he was that's what he

00:34:42

was getting it and I don't know that it translates super well into the idea only in knowledge worker

00:34:49

states like that was my one of my bigger concerns with going through this is although this flow

00:34:55

state is something I feel like is very valuable and I do enter it quite a bit when I'm when I'm doing

00:35:02

say work around the house or I'm drawing out designs for things on my whiteboard you know but

00:35:09

every case that I can think of where I've entered that it's either a play or a game of some sort

00:35:18

where I'm trying to get something brand new up and running and I lose track of time when I'm doing

00:35:24

that like I'm trying to get a new type of website up and running so it kind of becomes a game of

00:35:28

how do I get this up and running so maybe that's the translation point right there but it gets

00:35:33

difficult for me to get that same state to apply when I'm doing say client work so that's why I was

00:35:40

asking the question because I feel like it's an excellent state to work towards but I feel like

00:35:45

it's difficult to get it translated into the knowledge worker mindset yeah because the typical

00:35:50

knowledge worker just thinks that they should be creating all the time and there's no balance and

00:35:56

I think that in the book he talks about how you you have to have that balance he mentions I forget

00:36:03

which pages is the growth of the self requires opposite tendencies it requires differentiation

00:36:09

and it requires integration so as that pertains to social situations you want to be part of a group

00:36:15

but you want to stand out I think that that you can apply that to yourself as well with a lot of

00:36:21

the stuff that I mentioned from the the the conerative connection so it's not just I'm going to create

00:36:27

I'm going to code I'm going to do these things for eight hours a day because that's going to be

00:36:32

impossible anybody who does knowledge work for a living like a writer for example a content creator

00:36:40

knows that if you just sat down at your keyboard and you wrote for eight hours you're only going to

00:36:45

get a couple hours worth of productivity out of that particular that particular session so

00:36:51

really the benefit here from flow I think is that you're balancing these different things you're

00:36:57

balancing these different modes and that's where I think you're talking about the eight components

00:37:02

of enjoyment when you're talking about the characteristics of flow possibly is that correct yeah this

00:37:07

particular part of the book I think mentally I somehow jammed a bunch of things together

00:37:14

which isn't correct so some of this I might be a little wishy washy on okay let me go through

00:37:20

these eight components of enjoyment here and then I want to come back and make a point

00:37:24

regarding a flow because I think that there's something valuable what she said like when you're

00:37:29

trying to figure out something new that's the gamification like that's the thing that you enjoyed

00:37:33

that's when you experience flow it's like I said if you're looking at that channel flow it's a lot

00:37:37

easier for you to enter into a state of flow because the the challenge of the task doesn't have to be

00:37:42

off the charts in a particular area because this thing is new to you that's the thing that we seek

00:37:47

is that that ability to to enter into an activity face a difficult problem and then find the solution

00:37:53

like we feel real satisfied from that and that skid gets into these eight components of enjoyment

00:37:58

where number one is it occurs when we confront tasks that we can complete number two we have to be

00:38:03

able to concentrate on what we're doing number three the task has to have clear goals number four

00:38:08

the task has to provide immediate feedback so in your particular case either you figured out how

00:38:12

to launch the site or you didn't yep number five removes awareness and frustrations of everyday life

00:38:19

number six allows people to exercise a sense of control over their actions that's a big one you

00:38:24

know you have to feel like you are in control of whatever you're doing number seven the sense of

00:38:29

yourself disappears but afterwards this is interesting it appears even stronger and then number eight the

00:38:35

sense of duration of time seems to be altered so there's a lot on that topic especially with

00:38:42

those last couple that pertain to productivity i'm sure you've heard the statistics about the real

00:38:48

cost of interruptions and i think that's because a lot of people are just focused on

00:38:53

on executing in their dominant modes so they have to do a task which has a significantly higher

00:39:00

degree of difficulty in order for themselves to be quote-unquote in the zone or experience flow

00:39:05

so that means when they get a notification when their co-worker stops and it says hey can you help

00:39:10

me with this quick and they break that state of flow then when they start to work on that task

00:39:17

again they have to ramp themselves back up so i have no doubt and you can correct me if i'm wrong

00:39:23

but if you are going to code a website and it's something that is in your wheelhouse it's something

00:39:29

that you're really good at if you had enough time to just focus on this one thing you could get into

00:39:34

a state of flow pretty much every time but the difficulty is you don't know how much time that's

00:39:39

going to take and most often you're going to have to stop before you get there yes and maybe you know

00:39:45

as a as a knowledge worker with control over your schedule like you're able to provide longer

00:39:50

work sessions and you can you can circumvent that great most people who work a day job you can't you've

00:39:57

got an hour between meetings and so how do you create flow there that's the the real challenge

00:40:02

yes and as a developer in the type of development that i do i need a two-hour block if i'm going to

00:40:09

work on say a new plug-in for discourse i need a two-hour block like if i don't have that it's not

00:40:14

worth starting like that's been that's my experience with it and that might be because maybe i am getting

00:40:21

into that flow state but at the same time i know that if i have less than that say i have an hour

00:40:29

to work on it the first you know 15 20 minutes i'm trying to get my head around the design of it

00:40:35

of sorts and then i'll sit down to actually write the code but i don't want to go too far

00:40:39

because i don't want to get down a path that i can't finish and then i'll be lost trying to get back

00:40:45

into it so it ends up being a pretty big waste of time if i don't have a decent block to get into

00:40:52

it so maybe i kind of have this flow thing figured out already and i just don't realize it so

00:40:58

maybe i'm headed down that path who knows but i think i struggle to maybe put it into words

00:41:05

as to the state that i'm getting into when i do that and like i've mentioned this before but the

00:41:11

whole procrastination thing is the thing i struggle with and the concept of getting into flow so that

00:41:17

you're not focused on how much time is involved but you're just engrossed in the activity like that's

00:41:21

incredibly appealing and i'm very envious for people who don't struggle to start things like that and

00:41:28

again it's it's a thing that i know that i'm i'm working through so that's why i'm asking the

00:41:33

questions and i do like those eight pieces like some of those really really jump out at you and

00:41:40

you know the ones that i think are most interesting to me we must be able to concentrate on what we

00:41:46

were doing yes and we've talked about like cubicle nation before if you're in that scenario is it

00:41:54

possible for you to concentrate on what you're doing and for me that's a very loud resounding no

00:42:01

and that's partially why i don't ever want to work in that scenario again so i know that that's

00:42:08

a thing that has to be there in order to get this to work and i think that piece by itself is a much

00:42:15

bigger aspect to this than i think we're we're giving it credit for yeah i agree with you and i

00:42:22

think that i am probably very similar to you but i do not think that it is impossible to manufacture

00:42:28

flow in that particular environment right but if you aren't careful you're never going to get there

00:42:33

because everything in your environment is working against you page two he says happiness is not

00:42:39

something that happens it is a condition that must be prepared for cultivated and defended privately

00:42:45

by each person a better argument for productivity could not be made in my opinion like that's what

00:42:50

productivity is all about i i personally believe that productivity is not figuring out a way to get

00:42:57

more done it is figuring out a way to get done the things that are important to you and he kind of

00:43:03

really gets into that in this whole section here on attention but the thing that i don't have any

00:43:09

scientific data for but kind of what i want to experiment with and he didn't really call this out

00:43:15

but let's say you're in whatever mode you've achieved a state of flow and now you have to switch

00:43:21

to a different activity can the state of flow even to a minute degree can it be translated from one

00:43:29

domain to another i kind of think that it can so for example if i am writing an article

00:43:37

recording a podcast whatever okay i'm in a particular mode i'm all jacked up talking to you

00:43:42

right now i get done with this i'm going to be physically exhausted okay even though i've not

00:43:47

really done anything quote-unquote oh thanks Mike well you know what i mean like i'm standing here

00:43:53

at my desk like i'm such a trash i'm exhausted after two hours of standing i'm such a yeah

00:43:58

but i've know i know from experience that that's also like one of the best times for me to go for a

00:44:04

run so i kind of think and again no data to back this up but if i'm in a state of flow right now

00:44:12

and i get done and i switch my mode from whatever i'm doing to something completely different and i'm

00:44:18

able to achieve a state of flow there and then once i get done there i'm going to come back switch

00:44:23

my mode completely go to the other end of the spectrum do something else and achieve a state of

00:44:27

flow there i kind of think that the more that you get into that state of flow and this is kind of

00:44:32

what kel newport's book debork is all about is the more that you get into that zone the easier it is

00:44:39

to get there and so i think that recognizing that i have to switch between these different modes in

00:44:49

order to go back to the conerative connection in order to really maintain a state of flow in all

00:44:53

these different areas like if i'm able to do that the end result at the end of the day is that i

00:44:59

i i i kicked its butt but i think if you approach your day as okay i am going to work in the zone as

00:45:07

much as i can what's the thing i'm really good at i'm really good at code so i'm going to work on

00:45:12

this client project and i'm just going to crank out as much code as i can i think that's a recipe

00:45:17

for disaster because i think if you were to approach your day is like okay even if i've got eight hours

00:45:22

now to just do my my deep work the fact that it's harder for you to achieve flow for those things

00:45:29

where you have more skill means that there's going to be at least if you have an inner voice like me

00:45:36

quite a while before you enter into that that state of flow where you've got somebody talking in

00:45:42

your ear saying this is a waste of time you're wasting your time you know you're you're losing

00:45:47

your productivity you're going to get done today you're not going to have anything to show for it

00:45:51

i think if you can if you can kind of stagger your modes it's kind of like the concept of eating your

00:45:56

frog where like if you are able to do something at the beginning of the day you can look back at it

00:46:01

and say well at least i got that done you know if i'm if i've set aside two hours to work deep

00:46:07

and create this piece of content and at the end of that two hours either i've achieved flow or i've

00:46:11

not achieved flow but at that point i'm going to go from my run i'm going to switch my modes i can

00:46:16

be okay with the results because the next thing that i'm that i'm switching over to is another

00:46:21

chance to achieve flow does that make sense yes i think so because a lot of what i i see in myself

00:46:28

is that i need to cycle between different modes throughout the day otherwise i get exhausted exactly

00:46:35

and i i can't keep like one of my struggles is a lot of my side projects involve code well my day

00:46:42

job is code and that's fine but i need something other than that to to break them up which is where

00:46:52

time to sit and read is an excellent way to break those up because one of the most commonly

00:46:58

mentioned ways for the flow state to be entered is when you're reading a book like that is one of

00:47:02

the most universal ways that people get into it i mean how many of us pick up a book and you're

00:47:07

fully engrossed in it and you i mean that's just a state that's what that's what we're talking about

00:47:12

so i i'm with you i i think you have to to float between those two so i think you make perfect sense

00:47:18

when you're saying that that's exactly what you do yeah so this is kind of long-term follow-up i

00:47:23

guess like i am convinced that if i if i were to apply context in the gtd sense the context wouldn't

00:47:31

work so i'm waiting for the new omni focus where you've got the takes or just use a notebook

00:47:36

mic or just use a notebook or use things or use to do yeah yeah yeah nope i'm i'm sold on the omni

00:47:43

the omni groups vision for 2018 okay but i cannot wait for omni focus three because i want to apply

00:47:50

these tags to the test that i have to do by identifying which mode they are associated with

00:47:55

and then going back to the conerative connection it part of the report that they give you when you

00:47:59

take the assessment is you should spend so much time in this mode so much time in this mode i really

00:48:03

want to try ordering my day by ok i've got this many fact finder tasks so i can't do another fact

00:48:10

finder task i'm going to do something else and then staggering those back and forth as i

00:48:15

plan out my you know my hyper scheduled calendar i think that that's going to provide a lot of value

00:48:21

i just unfortunately can't uh i'm not going to go through all the effort to identify all the tasks

00:48:26

that i have to do with those particular modes right now where there's not a real easy way

00:48:30

to to sort them that is very fair talk to me about because you got another point here

00:48:36

of what do you do with a book that's hard to read and i'm curious what you're getting at with this

00:48:41

because it's a question that i i think i want any answer to because we we come across a lot of books

00:48:48

that don't always strike our fancy it's probably the most tame way i can think to say that we don't

00:48:55

like them yep and yet we we persevere we we go through them so what are you getting at with this

00:49:01

question and what is your answer to it do you have an answer to this uh maybe hop out so let me back

00:49:06

up just a little bit and share a couple quotes from this whole section on the flow of thought

00:49:12

as it pertains to attention because these really stood out to me page 119 he says unless a person

00:49:16

knows how to give order to his or her thoughts attention will be attracted to whatever is most

00:49:21

problematic at the moment this is email in a nutshell you lose sight of the things that are

00:49:28

important to you and you the things that are urgent that other people are telling you you need to do

00:49:33

this right now that's screaming at you and unless you have the context of what are the things that

00:49:38

i want to direct my attention and my focus towards then it's very easy to say yeah i'll do that and i'm

00:49:43

not saying you shouldn't say yeah i'll do that but only say yeah i'll do that when you recognize what

00:49:48

other thing you're not able to just divert your attention to and it's not just email he also says

00:49:54

to avoid this condition people are naturally eager to fill their minds with whatever information is

00:49:59

readily available as long as it distracts attention from turning inward and dwelling on negative

00:50:05

feelings ouch i believe this is why so many people will just zone out and watch tv even though they

00:50:12

don't really enjoy it this is why a lot of people will spend time on social media even though like

00:50:17

the statistics show that if you're on facebook for any length of time you're actually more depressed

00:50:21

than you were when you went on there yeah uh like i've always thought like well why would you do that

00:50:27

it's this is it you know it's this any benefit approach people are looking for that distraction

00:50:32

and with the smartphone like if you don't tame your notifications especially you have an open portal

00:50:38

for other people to distract you so you have to train yourself in order to divert your your

00:50:43

attention a specific way and so on page 120 he talks about the better route to avoid chaos

00:50:48

and consciousness is through habits that give control or mental processes to the individual

00:50:52

there's lots of ways you can do this i think one of the best ones is meditation which obviously

00:50:57

requires practice doesn't mean that you never get distracted as you're doing your meditation i get

00:51:02

distracted all the time but just the fact that you are practicing mindfulness that's important

00:51:07

okay so now how does that pertain to reading a book that is quote unquote hard to read i think

00:51:12

there's a lot of reasons why a book might be hard to read the amanda palmer book was hard for me to

00:51:17

read just because i didn't care about the the details of her love life uh there are other books

00:51:23

though that especially pertaining to the last book that we read they talk about how you need to read

00:51:28

difficult books you need to read books that are above you if you were to sit down with a book and

00:51:33

there's a whole bunch of words in the page that you don't understand having to go look those up

00:51:36

in a dictionary like that's a lot of work past me would have been like i forget this

00:51:41

all right so my question to you then is like where's the balance here between reading a book so that

00:51:48

you can get into that state of flow which you're not going to be able to do if a book is is difficult

00:51:54

for you to read and the value of and what does that fall in and balancing like the the value of

00:52:01

going through the book and struggling through some things and figuring some some things out i personally

00:52:07

think that if it's a book that is challenging you mentally for example as you're you're reading it

00:52:14

that that's the kind of book that you should at least push through to the point where you can go

00:52:22

back to those levels of reading you can identify what the book is really about what the author's

00:52:27

arguments are and at that point if you decide that what the book's topic is is just not relevant

00:52:33

to you at this point fine you know don't read the rest of it but i think it is unfair to the author

00:52:38

to just start something and you don't put forth an honest effort to understand it and say you know

00:52:44

this book isn't very good but i'm curious to get your thoughts yeah i have a fair number of thoughts

00:52:50

on this because i've worked through this a few times and i know that there are a significant

00:52:57

number of books that i have read that are easy and i can get into this flow state i read them with

00:53:03

no problem whatsoever i get excited about picking them up and i tend to carry certain books around

00:53:10

with me because i just want two or three minutes here and there to read them i don't do that with

00:53:14

every book and i'll admit flow was not a book that i did that with it was not one that i felt like i

00:53:22

got into the state of flow with and i felt like i had to really work at it not a problem and that

00:53:28

doesn't typically affect my my rating of it other than it does affect i guess my enjoyment of having

00:53:36

read it and in this particular scenario you know take flow for example it's very philosophical it's

00:53:43

very idea heavy and the concepts that it's sharing it gets to be a little bit repetitive it's the same

00:53:51

state of being that he's talking about just in a lot of different scenarios which is great and

00:53:56

and can be a little bit hard at the same time so in this case i felt like there were some areas of

00:54:02

this that were maybe a little bit above my my head and that's fine but this is one of those books

00:54:09

that i use as a way to to drive some of my focus habits of okay well i'm getting distracted i'm not

00:54:18

really sticking with this one my attention keeps wanting to bounce and i need to regularly recall

00:54:26

my focus back to reading the book instead of trying to figure out how i'm going to track my

00:54:32

tasks for that day on paper because it is the superior way to do things debatable my little

00:54:38

dig there but i i think in this case flow is it's an excellent book but it is a challenge and it is

00:54:47

one that i i struggle so i would say it's possibly in some scenarios hard to read there are others

00:54:54

such as the innovators dilemma that is so epic in the world of bookworm that we refer to it frequently

00:55:01

that was very hard to to get through because of the detail of sectors of industry that we don't really

00:55:09

care for and as a result it was kind of above or you know it's way off on the side and not something

00:55:17

we're interested in i think of those as very hard and although i rarely put a book down because i

00:55:26

tend to see those challenges as things that can help not only my ability to read it can also help me

00:55:34

develop that focus muscle and it can help me learn things for the future that i may be able to prepare

00:55:41

for later if i'm aware of them now and you know the innovators dilemma is a great example of this

00:55:48

because it spells out in that book how to stay relevant in an industry and how to make sure that

00:55:56

you are not falling behind your competitors or letting the small guys come in and overtake your

00:56:02

business and those concepts are things that i use regularly and almost i know i use them on a

00:56:09

weekly basis in today's world i wouldn't say daily but i do use them weekly and not necessarily in my

00:56:15

own business i tend to do that in with a lot of my clients that i'm consulting so it is a thing

00:56:23

that i have learned to use however when we read that book i didn't see those connections and never

00:56:28

used that uh those concepts at all that was something that i grew into i think that's a good

00:56:34

example of of what you're getting at here is you know this is something that i'm going to use in

00:56:37

the future it's a pain to read right now i don't want to read this because it's a challenge and yet

00:56:44

persevering through that's difficulty can lead to future dots being connected that that i can use

00:56:52

an in-future experiences yeah i mean not everything worth doing is easy yes uh in fact most things

00:57:02

that are worth doing aren't easy and so regardless of the activity you're going to have to have some

00:57:09

sort of why or motivator as to why you should be doing the thing in the first place so maybe you

00:57:15

pick up this book and the only reason the only why you have is because you heard us talk about it on

00:57:20

bookworm maybe that's a strong why maybe it's not maybe you pick it up because you really want to

00:57:26

understand how to improve your life i mean there's a lot of stuff in here that that talks about that

00:57:33

that as i was thinking through and synthesizing this i kind of landed on this formula which

00:57:40

isn't necessarily molly c sanctioned but you know working working backwards like what do people want

00:57:48

it's not an easy life it's a fulfilling life well how do you then achieve happiness or fulfillment

00:57:56

it's from being in flow how do you get in flow it's by directing your attention like if you were

00:58:03

to focus on one thing that you could do today it's directing your attention on the things that

00:58:07

that make the difference the difference that makes the difference as tan would say

00:58:10

so i think that if you're going to approach a book even if it's difficult to read that's completely

00:58:17

fine you may just muscle through it and uh with the intention of getting a specific thing out of it

00:58:23

there may be books where you muscle through it and there really isn't a whole lot of value

00:58:28

there i think maybe the innovator's dilemma kind of applies in that in that sense because we don't

00:58:34

you know i'm not running a a steel company or uh any of the other examples that he that he had in

00:58:40

there so it's a little bit harder to make those those connections you know for a knowledge worker who

00:58:44

writes content for the internet maybe there's not a whole lot that that applies there so other

00:58:49

than reading it for bookworm maybe that's one where you're okay pulling the plug but uh i think that

00:58:56

the uh the main takeaway here is to i don't know is to understand that there's going to be some

00:59:05

things that will motivate you to push through some things that will make you uncomfortable and that's

00:59:11

going to be necessary in order for you to achieve a state of flow now also it's interesting about

00:59:17

this especially on the topic of like reading a book to get into a sense of flow there are definitely

00:59:22

different types of books uh and i think that depending on the type of book that you're reading

00:59:26

and the way that you're reading it it can be easier or more difficult to get into a state of flow

00:59:31

this one in particular not very easy to get into a state of flow where you're just cranking through

00:59:36

the pages and devouring everything that he's saying because a lot of his arguments you have to stop

00:59:41

and think about if you're really going to understand them now on the flip side i read to my kids every

00:59:46

night so if i'm reading good night moon or old mama squirrel and i'm doing all the voices for the

00:59:51

characters like i can get into flow that way it's a lot easier than spending 20 minutes reading flow

00:59:57

so i think also it's uh you know that the type of book and your expectations from it what you're

01:00:04

going to get out of it are important well let me just talk about this work in as flow section because

01:00:10

i really got a revelation from this so he talks about how there are a couple different ways to

01:00:16

experience flow at work you can either change the constraints and opportunities for expressing

01:00:21

freedom and creativity or you can change the job itself until the conditions are conducive to flow

01:00:26

so you can either change the situation or you can put yourself in a different situation kind of

01:00:31

how i read that but what's interesting about this whole section is that people most often

01:00:36

experience flow in work over 50 percent of the time compared to over 50 percent of people who

01:00:42

experienced apathy during leisure so this really just drives home the point that what people want

01:00:49

is not an easy life but a fulfilling life you have to have a purpose and a meaning when she gets

01:00:56

to at the end of the book behind the things that you are doing i mean a lot of people work hard to

01:01:03

make money so that they can have more leisure right that's the popular belief but what he's saying

01:01:09

here is that when you're when you're spending time in leisure half the time you're not happy that

01:01:14

you're you're in the leisure activity that you're working so hard to get to like that just kind of

01:01:19

blew my mind and it made me think you know maybe we're approaching work the wrong way i believe that

01:01:27

there is no work-life balance there is just life and you have to balance it and you do have to have

01:01:33

balance or intentional imbalance if you will according to 12 week year you know tip the scales in your

01:01:38

your favor because you're never going to have enough time to do all of the things that you want

01:01:44

to do but this really got me thinking i have long been a proponent of boundaries and making very

01:01:53

very strong rigid statements like i'm not going to do this after this time this book got me

01:02:01

rethinking that and i know that there is value in those boundaries for protecting the time for the

01:02:05

things that are most important which for me is spending time with my family and those those boundaries

01:02:11

were extremely important when i was in an office job and i had the opportunity via email via project

01:02:18

management tools to be thinking about work when i was home with my family that doesn't happen that

01:02:25

often anymore i've done a pretty good job tuning my own home my wife can i guess correct me she can

01:02:31

write in the email in and say you know actually you're not not doing so hot if she she sees it

01:02:36

differently but but uh mic today is very different than mic five years ago in terms of the intention

01:02:44

and the mindfulness being present when i am with my family and so my thought process here as i'm

01:02:50

reading this book about flow is that if i experience flow when i'm at work and the more flow i experience

01:02:58

the happier i am the happier i am the happier everybody around me is yep maybe i should work a

01:03:06

little bit more and i'm not just saying i'm looking for more things to do but maybe be okay with the

01:03:13

fact that i'm in flow like let's just push through and finish this cycle and finish this article

01:03:19

whatever and yeah maybe i spent a little bit more time on this thing than i had originally intended

01:03:24

to but not being so hard on myself for for doing that since that's really the thing that's going to

01:03:32

make everything else better in a sense i'm interested to hear your thoughts on this yeah because i

01:03:40

i talk about this whole time balance process with my wife quite a bit and it's it's not it's not easy

01:03:47

it's a fight in some ways for for the time in the right places but one of the things that i tend to

01:03:55

to tell my wife is i don't want my work to be a job i want work to be an extension of who i am

01:04:03

that's what i try to do i love building things online and the best way i found to turn that into a

01:04:10

money maker is to do it for clients so i love what i do and i love helping people solve those problems

01:04:17

it's easy for me to to lose track of time when i'm with someone in person working through things with

01:04:23

them and like that's an easy thing for me to do but at the same time it's easy as well for me to

01:04:31

to spend too much time on that and it's not easy like that it's definitely a tension and a balance of

01:04:37

how much time do i spend doing the things that i love for other people versus doing them for myself

01:04:45

versus doing them for my family and to me that's the the balance and tension that you're you're

01:04:51

talking about is these are all things i love doing i love writing i love playing with especially my

01:04:56

kids i love hanging out with my wife and talking about the books and the ideas that we're each coming

01:05:02

up with or reading about and you know those are fun things and it's obvious that you and i like

01:05:08

talking about books because we were on a whole podcast about it and i would imagine you talk to

01:05:12

your wife about some of the books you're reading i do the same like that is an extension of our work

01:05:18

but it's outside of work as well like there's a very blurry line there so i i try to think of it as

01:05:25

these are all activities that i love doing that that i get enjoyment from but who i'm doing them

01:05:31

for is somewhat of the delineation that our culture and society has created around this concept of

01:05:39

work-life balance it should all be the same type of activities at least in our cases just

01:05:45

directed for different purposes zit i don't know do you follow that train of thinking yes i think i

01:05:51

would add a little bit more context to it just because people like you and myself and probably a

01:05:59

lot of people who listen to the show they've got side hustles side projects things that they are

01:06:05

working on outside of work that's the thing for me that has typically fallen into that category of

01:06:12

i feel bad about working on this thing because i should be not working right now and so i guess

01:06:17

my point from reading this book is like why do i feel that way why should i say to myself i should

01:06:23

not be doing this thing if i really enjoy doing it and it's not stealing time from the things that

01:06:28

i've prioritized as most important like if it fits why not do it one of those things is screen

01:06:35

casting for screen casts online like i just finished up a module on on my node last weekend

01:06:42

as we're recording this and that's one of the main reasons i'm looking forward to having that

01:06:47

office done in my basement is i i want the studio where i can go record that right now if i want to

01:06:53

record something for a screen cast using a good microphone and having a quiet environment

01:07:00

like i have to get in my car and i have to drive 20 minutes to the co-working space then i got to

01:07:05

walk to the walk to my office get everything hooked up get everything set up you know start

01:07:09

recording and if i just am not feeling it that day like what am i going to get back in the car and

01:07:14

go home no like i'm here for the next three hours i'm going to finish this thing dang it right you

01:07:18

know and it it makes the the activity sometimes not enjoyable and i was thinking like well why

01:07:24

like i love doing this sort of thing and i think that this is this is why is i want to be able to

01:07:29

flow in and out of these modes and whenever i am in this the space where i've got a high amount

01:07:36

of energy and motivation in this particular mode like this is the time that i should be working on

01:07:40

this thing i just think that that's going to make everything so much easier and i think balancing

01:07:45

those modes is more important than keeping a cap on the number of hours that i quote unquote

01:07:51

work and obviously you know there is there has to be a balance here you you have to keep the main

01:07:58

thing the main thing so for me i have to be very careful that the time that i have budgeted for

01:08:04

my family does not get affected and then also the time that i've committed to the other things

01:08:10

that that can't be affected you know for all of a sudden i'm i have all this other time and i'm in

01:08:16

flow all the time that's great but if it means i'm not getting stuff done for Asian efficiency like

01:08:20

that's not good so there is there's a balance between all these different different areas but

01:08:26

my point here is that it's not as simple as work and life anymore or even work and personal there's

01:08:33

a lot of different factors that go into this there's a lot of different levels it's it's pretty

01:08:38

complicated but this book made me kind of rethink how i classify those things and really just

01:08:46

challenged the traditional idea of well i've got to have this much time to rest yes i do need

01:08:53

rest time i need i need leisure time but i don't think i need to just say you know i'm not going to

01:09:00

do any more than this number of hours per week because like that's what i quote unquote full-time

01:09:06

job is i think that there's a balance to be struck here based on knowing myself and then

01:09:13

balancing that within the context of all my other responsibilities that can really help me i hate

01:09:18

to say like be more productive but in the sense of making progress on the right things i think

01:09:24

that definition fits i want to disagree with you on one point here and that is that this is a

01:09:29

complex and difficult thing to work through i think it's actually quite simple i think we

01:09:34

overcomplicate it because it's a simple process of if you're going to take on a side hustle and that

01:09:41

is an extension of what you love to do it's a simple trade-off okay you're you're going to work

01:09:48

on this side hustle and in my case i tend to trade my client work for that side hustle but the balance

01:09:55

there is knowing how much i can trade that and still maintain an income that i'm comfortable with

01:10:02

if i'm not comfortable with the income that i have then i just need to scale back my personal

01:10:07

project work so you know i've done that some people have seen that it happens with whether or

01:10:13

not i i keep a project around or kill it and that's it's that simple i mean if if you want to do a

01:10:18

side hustle or you have one that you feel like is eating your life too much you need to scale

01:10:23

something else back and if that means spending less time with your family that's your choice i won't

01:10:29

make that choice and it sounds like you won't make that choice mic but some people would and it's

01:10:34

always a trade-off that is that is the full sum total of what we're talking about is if you want

01:10:40

to to work through something like that i don't even know how we got on this topic now but the the

01:10:45

thing that's interesting to me is it's just a matter of trade-offs that's all it is and if you're

01:10:50

not comfortable with where you're at on something well then do something different like that don't

01:10:54

just keep doing it that's the balance that i'm i see and and for me i know like i've said numerous

01:11:01

times here is like okay well code and helping people like those are some of the things that i

01:11:04

i know that i love and how i direct my attention for those is just a back and forth of choosing to do

01:11:12

one for a client or choosing to do it for myself and how much time am i going to dedicate to all of

01:11:18

that and then picking and choosing how much to put in each in each bucket that goes there yep totally

01:11:24

agree so let me just clarify this a little bit more because i agree with you that on one level

01:11:30

this is simple and the simple part in my mind is the mindset shift about your job so one of the

01:11:37

things i got from this section was that many people consider their jobs something they have to do

01:11:42

well i started thinking about the stuff that i get to do and i'm like my job's pretty awesome

01:11:47

my wife and i were talking about this last night she's like you know it's super cool that you get

01:11:51

to do this this and this now and that's your job and i'm like yeah i know isn't that

01:11:54

so the mindset shift of going from my job is something that i have to do versus my job is

01:12:01

something that i get to do that i think is the easy part the hard part is recognizing all of

01:12:07

the opportunities that are available to you and understanding whether they are positive or

01:12:12

negative so for example on page 69 he talks about optimal experience is a form of energy

01:12:17

and energy can be used either to help or to destroy the goals to which is applied can make life either

01:12:22

richer or more painful that for me is is the hard part because it's never packaged so cleanly as like

01:12:28

this is good this is bad you start doing something and you realize that there are negative ramifications

01:12:33

to doing this thing like you mentioned you know if you're working on the side project and all of a

01:12:36

sudden your family's going to fall apart like that's that's a very negative thing but it could appear

01:12:41

if you have the wrong perspective as a positive thing at first so that's the thing i want to be

01:12:46

very careful about and that's the thing that i think is difficult and is different for every

01:12:51

single person that's fair but you still have to work through all that like that's i think that's

01:12:55

the part that i'm i'm getting it yep exactly and on this topic of of family specifically this was

01:13:01

the next point on the outline on page 178 he talks about in his words the illusion of family values

01:13:12

i'm curious before i give you my thoughts here i think you kind of know probably what i'm

01:13:15

going to say what was your reaction when you read this this part all right so because he puts family

01:13:22

values in quotes and the quote unquote family values that the elder spent so much effort

01:13:30

inculcating in the young were a reflection of this simple necessity even when it was cloaked in

01:13:35

religious and moral considerations and what he's getting at there is that families tend to pass

01:13:42

down thoughts about how the world works to the kids i mean obvious you know kids watch their

01:13:48

parents and they're passing that down and he puts family values in quotes i think because he's

01:13:55

he's saying that it's something more than that or something different than that so i can't say that

01:14:01

what he's calling an illusion of family values i can't say that i took exception with that

01:14:07

but i'm guessing that you did to a certain degree i'm not going all 168 hours on this

01:14:13

but i i do have thoughts so uh with the way that mohaly writes he's very very educated he knows a

01:14:23

lot about a lot of different perspectives and belief systems he i don't believe is a

01:14:28

a christian but he makes a lot of references to scriptural passages from the bible and uses them

01:14:33

to build what i consider to be very valid and strong arguments however i do think that there is a

01:14:41

degradation of family values and it is not an illusion and it is a bad thing and my basis for

01:14:47

this really comes from employing the strategy that we talked about in the last book of syntopical

01:14:54

reading and comparing it to 30 lessons for living which i mentioned is one of my gap books

01:15:01

but with that book is very briefly is about a thousand interviews that this guy did with people

01:15:08

who were older that were part of the quote unquote golden generation so these are people

01:15:12

born in like 1920s who went through the Great Depression those sorts of things like they really

01:15:17

had to suffer through some things no one born after that point has had at least in the united states

01:15:22

uh to go through anything of that magnitude since so they have a very different and more valid

01:15:29

perspective i think on this whole idea of pleasure versus pain and having to go through some things

01:15:35

and understanding what true happiness is okay i respect their opinions much more than my peers

01:15:41

and they all said the the same thing that the relationships are the important thing and that

01:15:48

a lot of that book is built on this whole concept of family values one of the things

01:15:53

they talk about is make sure your marriage is strong like not it's good to have a strong marriage

01:15:58

which is kind of how i think it would be approached nowadays and kind of the lens through which

01:16:03

i viewed it when i read flow uh there are things you can do to make sure that you have a strong

01:16:08

marriage and then it's up to you to do them or not it's not a complicated formula and it's not magic

01:16:14

where you're paired up with this person and either it works or it doesn't now there are sometimes you

01:16:18

know if things are not going to work out but i believe a lot of this a lot of the things that

01:16:22

don't quote unquote work out we justify is not working out because we are more pleasure focused

01:16:27

as a society there's a book actually a whole series of books that by this guy named Ed Cole

01:16:33

who kind of is the father of the the men's ministry in the christian circles and he has this

01:16:39

definition of love versus lust which i really like he says love is the desire to benefit the

01:16:45

other at the expense of the self where lust is the desire to benefit the self at the expense of the

01:16:51

other and i don't think it's too much of a stretch to say that that completely applies to today's

01:16:58

society uh the phrase i use is that we worship at the altar of convenience when this is no longer

01:17:04

convenient for me i'm going to chuck it and i'm going to find something else we also really want

01:17:11

immediate satisfaction you know i want what i want and i want it right now we're not willing

01:17:16

to go through some things in order to see the the end result talking about passion for example

01:17:22

doing the things that you're passionate about doing the things that you quote unquote love

01:17:26

doing the things that are important to you like you were talking about a little bit ago uh mike roe

01:17:30

the guy from dirty jobs said don't follow your passion but always bring it with you i think

01:17:35

that that lunch pale mentality can apply to family values and i think that's a little bit different

01:17:42

than mahali's view but in my opinion family values are not only important they are worth fighting for

01:17:48

i think if you define them the way you define them that's true i think he's defining them differently

01:17:53

yeah i agree i think there's a disconnect in what you're calling values i think what you would

01:17:58

define as values is possibly what he would call beliefs or faith uh tenants of sorts so i don't know

01:18:06

that i would say you're at odds but i can see how you got there very quickly yeah and i i guess the

01:18:12

thing for me is that while my beliefs my values quote unquote are definitely based on a judo

01:18:21

christian belief system i would argue that there is a lot of empirical data that shows that families

01:18:29

societies are better in some sense based off of those values like for example i don't have the

01:18:36

statistics in front of me but i did at one point look up the statistics of kids who are juvenile

01:18:44

delinquents that come from single parent families basically like the homes without a father and a

01:18:49

lot of that comes back to the dad not accepting the responsibility of providing for the family the

01:18:57

the mom got pregnant and the dad bale like that's not always a situation but it's a situation a lot

01:19:02

as we're recording this today when we get done i am going to the boys and girls club our church

01:19:08

is hosting a free basketball tournament with them and uh the people that we serve there

01:19:13

like there's there's a kid that that goes there as a member of the club he's like 12 years old 350

01:19:20

pounds because his mom doesn't know how to how to cook and feeds him junk food all the time there's

01:19:26

another kid who's worn the same shirt for three months in a row so they're teaching them how to

01:19:30

do laundry and stuff like that like it breaks my heart to see that stuff and i think that a lot

01:19:35

of that comes back to a lack of these quote-unquote family values i think that there are truths here

01:19:41

that go beyond a christian belief system and i guess that's the thing i don't want to really say

01:19:48

like i'm at odds with this or i'm offended by what he said or anything like that this is just my

01:19:53

color commentary on what he said i feel like when he was talking about this section he glossed over

01:19:58

it and there's there's a lot more to be unpacked here that has a significant impact especially in

01:20:04

the context of discussing flow not only as it pertains to the self but in this whole idea of

01:20:13

family because he's got in this whole section is enjoying solitude and other people i laughed

01:20:19

when i read that because i'm definitely not a people person yeah my wife laughed too and she

01:20:24

was she said oh you're gonna read this and you're gonna figure out how to be more social well kind

01:20:28

of but i think that there's there's a very real aspect of achieving flow that is based on your

01:20:35

societal interactions with other people whether they be in a family or in a community however you

01:20:39

want to define that but the values play a big part i don't know that i would say he needed to spend

01:20:44

more time on this the thing that i think he did need to cover is the the social aspect like you said

01:20:49

but in the scenario of the different categories that he is his spelling out here is that that is

01:20:58

a small piece of it so i don't think he wanted to go into any of them in a broad sense but it does

01:21:05

mean that he needed to touch on it at least a little bit but i think if he'd spent that much time on

01:21:10

that one topic it would have dictated that he needed to spend that much time on each of the others

01:21:15

as well and then he's beyond the scope of what he intended to cover that's my thinking yep and

01:21:21

that's that's fair uh i just i just wish i understood his real thoughts on this topic because the way

01:21:29

that he wrote it in this book i kind of disagree with it that's fair but when when mohaly calls me

01:21:35

we'll we'll have a chat shoot him an email i'm gonna figure it out there we go all right so you

01:21:41

you've got down here page 198 yeah and this is about catastrophes and i think i found the section

01:21:48

you're talking about let me just read this quick because it's talking about coping with stress or

01:21:53

cheating chaos that's the chapter that this is in and again page 198 a major catastrophe that

01:22:00

frustrates a central goal of life will either destroy the self forcing a person to use all his

01:22:05

psychic energy to erect a barrier around remaining goals defending them against further on slots

01:22:11

of fate or it will provide a new more clear and more urgent goal to overcome the challenges

01:22:17

created by the defeat and is that right is that the section you're talking about yep exactly so

01:22:24

the reason i wanted to talk about this is because i'm literally going through this right now all right

01:22:30

yeah so there's there's two outcomes here number one a major catastrophe can destroy the self

01:22:35

forcing you to erect barriers around remaining goals or number two it can provide a new more

01:22:40

clear more urgent goal to overcome the challenges created by the defeat so my context here i shared

01:22:47

on bookworm last fall how i competed in the humorous speech contest for toastmasters yes and i did

01:22:55

much better than i thought i would okay i made it to the district level lost at at the district

01:22:59

level which is really the finals to do a professional comedian this spring is the inspirational

01:23:06

speech contest which is right in my wheelhouse and in the meantime i've gone through heroic

01:23:12

public speaking with michael and amy port i've hired a coach i've been working on creating like

01:23:20

better content better stories that's where the whole story file came in and felt like i was making

01:23:25

a lot of progress so we had the club level competition which in the past has not even been

01:23:32

a competition and i lost there's a lot of things around the the specifics of the situation which

01:23:40

i'm not going to get into the detail i don't want to make excuses but my reaction basically was like

01:23:46

that's not fair but what can i do about that you know i'm in the middle of a catastrophe right now

01:23:50

because i did not win at the club level which honestly depending on your point of view i guess

01:23:55

you know maybe i should have but i had my whole quarter map though i had next quarter map though

01:24:00

like i'm gonna go compete at this level i'm gonna get to this level i'm gonna get to this level and

01:24:03

to be honest the speech that i delivered like i did a great job it was it was awesome i really

01:24:08

do believe that i should have won but i didn't so what do i do now like my goal i told my speech

01:24:13

coach was to get to the world championship of public speaking and maybe that goal was too lofty

01:24:18

but i didn't even get past the first round yeah so what do i do now i find myself in this place where

01:24:25

it's like fair or not there's nothing i can do to advance and compete at these other contests which

01:24:34

i was planning on competing in uh the ones that i competed in last year and i'm struggling at the

01:24:41

moment to find a new more clear more urgent goal to overcome the challenges created by that defeat

01:24:47

so as i'm reading this book i kind of find myself in this place where it's like you got to be careful

01:24:55

you don't want to slip into that first category but on the other hand like i don't want to just

01:25:01

pick something to do instead but i find myself having to pick something to do instead this is a

01:25:06

big part of my 12 week year for the next two quarters and it's gone now it's like not even an

01:25:10

option so i don't know what that thing is but i do recognize especially after reading this book

01:25:17

like highlights the importance of you have to find the next thing but the failure isn't final you know

01:25:24

i'm not not defeated just delayed but in order for that to be true i have to find the next thing yes

01:25:30

and i guess my question to you is have you looked at other speaking competitions that you could get

01:25:37

engaged with because it sounds like you had yourself locked in on this one path and we're counting on

01:25:44

getting down and there's i'm sure there's all kinds of things you've unpacked of why

01:25:48

which i don't think we should go through here but yeah we don't need to have a therapy session

01:25:53

yeah you're right you know i i had somebody in my 12 in my 12th year accountability group our

01:25:57

local mastermind who flat out told me he's like you got to get over this toast master thing like you

01:26:02

put all your eggs in that basket yeah like yeah you're right but i don't even know what the other

01:26:07

options are like that's what i was familiar with well at one point you were talking about trying

01:26:10

to do a TED talk and you've mentioned a couple times yeah and i i tried to do that got got nowhere

01:26:17

yeah yeah you've mentioned a couple times speaking at max doc so i guess my thinking is

01:26:22

why must it be a toast master's competition why can't it be a talk that you give to your church

01:26:31

or a talk that you give at some other venue like what is the what is the lockdown on the

01:26:37

competition that you can't get passed yeah that's that's a very fair question uh i don't know specifically

01:26:44

what the path looks like to my ultimate goal using any of those other vehicles i guess so

01:26:49

specifically the max doc thing i love max doc i'm really looking forward to being there but that is

01:26:55

like giving a technical presentation maybe my talk at max doc changes somebody's life but i don't

01:27:01

know but for sure i really do want to get into public speaking though and i really do believe

01:27:09

based on like the feedback that i've gotten and the progress that i've made because even the people

01:27:13

who some of the people who heard me at the at the club level hadn't heard me in a while they come

01:27:18

up to me afterwards and like wow can't believe how much you've improved like you you're so much

01:27:23

better than you were even a couple of months ago like i want to be a professional speaker i want

01:27:28

to be on a stage get paid to speak and inspire people and i don't know what the path looks like

01:27:36

other than jutose masters but that doesn't mean it's not possible and my job is to figure out

01:27:40

what that looks like it's definitely not impossible there are other options i just have to learn how

01:27:45

to see him yeah and i think this ties into the last point we've got here on our outline is the

01:27:49

meaning behind something which i think is exactly what you're talking about is what what is the

01:27:55

purpose behind this because i understand the competition piece and this may actually be

01:27:59

one of the more perfect examples of this because he does go through a process in the book of

01:28:07

explaining how you can get addicted to this state and mentions surgeons that i guess that was

01:28:13

another example he went through time and time again surgeons getting addicted to the state of

01:28:18

flow and other like chess masters who got addicted to it who it ruined their lives because they got

01:28:25

so into it and in one case a few cases i guess he actually mentions it led to suicide just because

01:28:31

everything outside of that state of being was so difficult to work with and so difficult to deal

01:28:38

with it they just couldn't handle it anymore yeah which is which is why you have to be able to

01:28:42

switch between those different modes and experience flow in different places in my opinion because

01:28:46

if you put all your eggs in that one basket and the only way you feel flow is when you've got

01:28:50

somebody's heart in your hands literally like that's not healthy all right so let me turn your

01:28:55

words back on you it's not healthy when you're locked into one state of flow and when you're

01:29:02

looking at competition it's very easy to to reach that state when it is a competition i guess my

01:29:08

challenge to you would be to find a place that's not competition for speaking because that's an area

01:29:12

that i don't think i've seen you try to thrive in i see you at max stock and that seems to work out

01:29:18

well but i don't know that i've heard much about you speaking apart from max stock and apart from

01:29:25

toastmasters like those seem to be your your comfort zones so i don't i don't know if it's worthwhile

01:29:32

trying to find someplace outside of that but it seems like to me that if you want speaking to be

01:29:37

the purpose that you're you're reaching for you know to use his terms here meaning if you want to

01:29:42

find meaning in in all of this that seems to be the the direction you should be heading yeah absolutely

01:29:47

so if anybody wants a keynote speaker for your next conference at bobblehead joe

01:29:53

so the the moral of this episode is to tweet to mic

01:29:58

tell him to post his mind node files and show him speaking gigs right all right so with all of that

01:30:06

being said and i hopefully we weren't too much into your therapy session there you have a

01:30:11

handful of action items here i don't know that we've really talked about much of them

01:30:16

why don't you take us through them quick sure all right so as is sometimes the case i mean

01:30:22

sometimes we go through the the structure of the book and it's pretty straightforward sometimes

01:30:27

there's just way too much to get through everything which is kind of the case right here so this first

01:30:30

one we didn't really talk about this we touched on it though the body and flow one of the things

01:30:35

that he talked about for achieving flow with your body is to try yoga which honestly my wife has

01:30:42

been trying to get me to try for a long time and i think that i am finally ready to give it a shot

01:30:50

i say that reluctantly because i know as soon as she hears this she's going to be like come to my yoga

01:30:55

class and i definitely don't want to go to the yoga class but i will try yoga also related to the

01:31:02

body and flow is and this isn't necessarily physically i'm not quite sure how i got inspired for this

01:31:10

one in this section to be honest but it has to do with the seeing skill he made some comment about

01:31:16

noticing details just in your your everyday life and i was like oh that's a really cool idea the more

01:31:24

that you can notice those little details and and the beauty and the simple things that sort of thing

01:31:28

like the more grateful you'll be the happier you'll be like that makes a lot of sense and so as i was

01:31:33

thinking through how can i develop my seeing skill i've seen people do these like picture a day things

01:31:38

and they'll do them for like the entire year i want to do this every day in march so i'm not going to

01:31:43

commit to the entire year but i do want to try to do this for an entire month and the the goal here

01:31:49

really is just to post publicly instagram or whatever a picture that i've taken in any given day and

01:31:56

my focus on this is going to be not necessarily like the beautiful sunsets or whatever although

01:32:00

we're taking a trip to florida so maybe they will be some of those but really just like the macro

01:32:05

stuff the everyday stuff i want to challenge myself because i'm not really a photographer to

01:32:10

to try and see those things and then capture those things with a camera you have an iphone 10 i do so

01:32:16

you have a great camera actually that's the reason i got it to be honest it's got the the two uh the

01:32:22

two different cameras and i've always had like i think i upgraded from a success and i always

01:32:26

just had the the single optical image stabilization camera and i think every single picture i have of

01:32:32

my eight-year-old is blurry because he just moves to us so i'm like i am getting the nice camera this

01:32:38

time dang it and i'm gonna get some good pictures of my kids fair point fair point all right what's

01:32:44

your life theme yeah that i i don't know well i have an idea i think we've we've talked a little bit

01:32:50

about this uh before but i want to refine it and this is getting back to that whole idea of the

01:32:56

making of meaning uh he's got in in that section he's got his meaning system i didn't really like his

01:33:01

meaning system i like dave ramsi's legacy journey one a lot better yeah so he's got four stages which

01:33:07

is personal needs community goals personal potential and then a cause or an idea dave ramsi is now

01:33:12

later us them so the basic idea here is that you're going to take care of your immediate needs then

01:33:17

you're going to plan for the future then you're going to look at the people in your family then

01:33:21

you're going to be invested in a bigger global cause and so i want my life theme to be able to be

01:33:26

played out in all those different areas and i've said before i believe on this podcast that

01:33:31

like i want my life to be about helping people make the most of their time their talent you know

01:33:37

their ability that they've been entrusted with find their their purpose discover your destiny you

01:33:42

know do what you were created to do that sort of thing so i want to get that down to a single

01:33:47

sentence and then the other one i've got here is to consider how family time can become a flow

01:33:52

activity i've given a couple teasers i guess from things that i've already kind of discovered from

01:33:58

going through this where like i've discovered that story time at night can be a flow activity and

01:34:03

even something simple like playing legos with my kids that can be a flow activity with my family

01:34:08

as well nice nice yeah i know for me i know one of the things that i do uh my oldest really likes to

01:34:15

build puzzles so the thousand piece puzzles or a five hundred piece puzzle uh we have one of those

01:34:20

out quite a lot so she loves doing that so i love putting those together with her so i i totally

01:34:26

get it i've got a couple couple action items here one i alluded to earlier is create competition of

01:34:34

some kind within myself around my client work to help to generate some of that flow state i don't

01:34:40

know what this means which might make it hard to know if i've hit it or not not actually having it

01:34:47

defined so essentially what i'm trying to nail down is can i somehow gamify it in that i

01:34:55

quantify how long i think it'll take and then try to beat that or see how fast i can get a project

01:35:02

scoped and invoiced like maybe i'm doing something along those lines so i don't i haven't figured it

01:35:08

out but that's that's a thing that i want to at least explore to help me with that that flow state

01:35:15

uh not only with the development side of it but with the the admin piece of it so try to make a

01:35:21

little more enjoyable other than you know dealing with cranky clients here and there but i don't feel

01:35:25

like i get a lot of those versus what some people deal with so my other one i'm trying to visualize

01:35:31

my day ahead of time i've tried to do this before and i just haven't been able to make it a habit and

01:35:37

he mentioned in a lot of cases you know visualizing things ahead of time helps you get through certain

01:35:44

areas like he mentions a couple prisoners of war who visualize things one in particular i know uh

01:35:50

to pass the time he would mentally play rounds of golf in his head for hours and days on end

01:35:57

and one of the first things he wanted to do whenever he uh was rescued he asked to play around a game

01:36:03

of golf and people were just stunned by that so he'd been playing golf for how long uh and he beat

01:36:09

a number of them he was quite successful at that round of golf something too that that whole process

01:36:14

but that's a thing that i want to do every morning is just visualize how the day is going to go

01:36:19

so that it it sets me up better for actually following through on that though so we'll see how

01:36:25

it goes yeah that visualization that's really powerful uh there's a study which depending

01:36:30

where which search engine you find it could either be the University of Chicago or or some place in

01:36:35

Australia but the basic findings where they had three groups of basketball players the first group

01:36:41

shot free throws every day for an hour the second group didn't even touch a basketball but they

01:36:45

practiced mental rehearsal visualization and pictured themselves making free throws third group did

01:36:50

nothing and after 30 days the first group improved by i think it was 28 percent the second group which

01:36:55

never touched a basketball improved by 27 percent and a third group obviously did nothing so they

01:37:00

didn't even go backwards yeah that visualization is really powerful yeah uh i get it let's talk

01:37:06

through ratings you go first you want me to i can go okay um so this this book is definitely a meaty

01:37:13

book mihaly is a really smart guy and there's a lot to this uh it definitely is not an easy read but

01:37:20

there's a lot of value here it's definitely worth unpacking really glad that we read it really

01:37:24

glad that this is now a part of my library there's a few things that i didn't necessarily agree with

01:37:32

or like we talked about the the family values but overall i think that there's a lot of value in

01:37:39

this topic and i think that devoting the time to understand it will pay immense dividends for

01:37:45

just about everybody so i i can't give it five stars i think just because i still like have a

01:37:52

bad taste in my mouth about the family values thing and like you mentioned like i really don't

01:37:56

know what he what he believes on that and i think it's a really important piece but i got to give it

01:38:00

4.5 it's fair that's fair i i would agree with you that i would say it's an easy book to read but it's

01:38:06

not necessarily an easy book to fully comprehend so i i think this is one that you could probably

01:38:12

read a few times and get something different out of it each time because you're it takes quite a

01:38:17

bit of processing to get through it which is a downside because i i would not recommend this to

01:38:22

someone who was new to nonfiction or or just learning about productivity at all or even not even

01:38:27

productivity just trying to figure out what it what states of mental capacity lead you to being

01:38:33

the most happy so you know those are things that i i i would recommend it to a lot of people but

01:38:39

there's also a lot of people that i would not recommend it to so it would you know we need to

01:38:43

know each other and i need to know you well enough before i can say yes you should read this but if

01:38:47

you're someone who has read a lot of the books that we've read you'll be fine it'll be it'll be good

01:38:52

for you there's some areas that he mentions that i just flat don't agree with and that's primarily due

01:38:58

to my christian beliefs i don't have a hundred percent certainty that i i trust that it's all true

01:39:05

because there's a lot of slipped in things and nuances that he mentions that i don't agree with

01:39:10

so anyway that that being said i'm gonna go with the 4.0 with this and that is ultimately because i

01:39:18

think the the information in here is awesome but at the same time it's not super approachable

01:39:25

unless you have a lot of background so i i don't think that it's one that i'm going to recommend

01:39:30

to everyone again but it's it's still a good book so it's not like a 4.0 is a bad rating so there we go

01:39:37

that's what i got listen to you trying to justify the low rating from a holly i know right it's like

01:39:44

i feel like this was supposed to be a 5.0 book but it's more like a high form yeah it should be

01:39:51

a 4.0 plus i just didn't feel like it got there all right uh next book that we're going to be going

01:39:58

through perfect book to follow up this book because the last section in here is talking about meaning

01:40:04

we're going to be going through man search for meaning by victor frankle which i've started and i

01:40:09

am super excited about this one this is one of those ones that is i think going to be very difficult

01:40:15

to read and i just read through the the introduction and he talks about how at the end of the the

01:40:21

introduction he had a choice he's living in austria at the time the the nazis are coming they're

01:40:27

they're going to put his entire family in concentration camps and he gets approved for a visa to go to

01:40:33

the u.s and to write his books and to do his research and he said that he had an opportunity to escape

01:40:38

but he chose to stay with his parents knowing their inevitable fate i'm like wow uh so this is

01:40:45

going to be can be very interesting and uh the main idea here i'm sure people i have heard of

01:40:49

this before is that your attitude really determines what determines your your destiny you know what

01:40:56

your your purpose is is tied to not what happens to you but how you approach what happens to you

01:41:01

and uh so i'm i really am looking forward to this one yeah and this i should note this one

01:41:07

was mentioned on page two of flow yep yeah right away yeah so it was interesting to me that we

01:41:16

and when you said that this was the next book that you wanted to do for bookworm it was i don't know

01:41:21

maybe 30 45 minutes after that that i actually picked up flow to start it so you had just said

01:41:27

we're going to do man search for meaning next and then i'm reading man search for meaning by victor

01:41:32

franklton we're okay great that's awesome so there's there's definitely an influence here in mahali's

01:41:38

mind from this one so perfect perfect choice to follow that up with following that one we might

01:41:44

shift a little bit in in how we talk about things uh for this one but uh what's best next this is by

01:41:51

matt perman and tagline here is how the gospel transforms the way you get things done now we have

01:41:59

talked about our faith a couple times with some books that are explicitly christian this one's

01:42:05

probably going to go deep on that um the foreword is by john piper and uh it's one that has a lot of

01:42:12

accolades that i've run across i had it recommended to me by uh chris bowler and he had sent i've got

01:42:20

an email thread between him and drew and uh it's been recommended to me now a couple times since

01:42:27

then as well so i i think it would be interesting for us to go through it and take the productivity

01:42:32

angle that you and i have a tendency to bring up all the time uh and apply uh the bible to it so

01:42:40

that's that's the goal with this particular book we'll see if it actually lives up to that

01:42:45

expectation or not so before warned yes i guess that one will be uh explicitly christian yes

01:42:52

yes it's going to be hard to get around that one without without going that route yeah

01:42:57

although at this point you probably know exactly where joe and i stand on a lot of that stuff yep

01:43:01

we've already covered that it's scared your way yet then yeah all right so my gap book here is an

01:43:07

interesting balance to one of the challenging questions that i was forced to deal with in this

01:43:12

book uh and then we talked about it with work and flow like maybe i should work more well my gap

01:43:17

book is rest why you get more done when you work less by alex suyong kim pang i think is how you say

01:43:23

this well done i have this book already but it's kind of i'm expecting anyways the opposite argument

01:43:30

which i think will be good in providing additional perspective and helping me land on exactly what

01:43:35

i should be doing when i should be doing it etc nice uh my gap book is stoner by john williams

01:43:43

it's not what you think i'll just say that uh this was another recommendation to me

01:43:50

drew koffman mentioned that this would be one he thought i would enjoy it is a uh a work of fiction

01:43:56

and it is about a man uh william stoner who is a professor at the university of mazuri and has a

01:44:06

rough life and the trials that he goes through in his uh in his marriage coming from a farming

01:44:13

background being privileged enough to get to university this is set uh pre it starts pre

01:44:20

world war one and works its way through world war one that's when it's set so i don't know it's

01:44:24

an interesting story and i've been enjoying it so far so it's it's one i would recommend if you're

01:44:30

into fiction nice uh and i know that you mentioned the book that you had chosen was a listener

01:44:36

recommendation i know there's a couple others on the list that are also listener recommendations if

01:44:40

you want to recommend a book for us to cover you can do that by going to bookworm.fm/list and you

01:44:49

will see all of the books that we have covered so far plus uh the planned books the recommended

01:44:55

books and on the right side of that page there will be a button to recommend a book yourself

01:45:01

and if you want to support the show in any way we're looking for iTunes reviews imagine that and

01:45:08

it's it's not hard to do just click the link in the show notes and uh you can hit the

01:45:13

review button there and and and review the show so we would love to to hear from you that way but

01:45:19

there's also another way you can support the show and that is pseudo financially and that is by

01:45:25

clicking any of the the book links in the show notes because those are all affiliate links

01:45:29

um it gives us a little bit of kickback help us pay some of the hosting for the website and such

01:45:34

that uh that run the show so that would help us out a lot if you would just you know click the

01:45:38

link the next time you're on amazon all right so if you're following along the next book is man's

01:45:44

search for meaning by victor freckle and we will talk to you next time