Bookworm Transcripts

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I feel like we have a lot of follow up.

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We do just wait till next time.

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There's going to be even more.

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Oh, good.

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Yeah, I was looking towards the end of this outline and looking at the action items

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for the end of this show.

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And okay, we may need to hustle through the book part because we've got a lot of

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follow up.

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We've got a lot of action at the end.

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So we'll see how this actually lands.

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Sure.

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Uh, I'll go first here.

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I have three and I think I've only really touched one.

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So I am going to need to carry this over.

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And number one was reevaluate my mission statement.

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And to be honest with you, I really didn't get that done at all because I got caught

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up in a whole process of reevaluating a mission statement for one of my websites.

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So I didn't get my personal one done, but I've been working on mission statements a

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lot lately.

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So kind of the way it works.

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So that one I haven't touched at all.

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Sad day.

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All right.

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So what about the second one, readjusting your online presence?

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I assume these are related.

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So I'm kind of curious.

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Yeah.

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To a point, I was making this adjustment about being more open about my faith online.

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And this one, I don't know that you can say is ever really done, but at the same

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time, the mindset has been shifted.

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So I'm going to say this one's in good shape, but I haven't spent in a place where

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it's really become anything significantly different for what I normally do online.

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So I can't say that there's anything you can go look at to say this is done, but

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the mindset shift has definitely been adjusted.

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So I don't know what to say on that one other than it's on its way.

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So I'm going to say it's in good shape.

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I think you could check that one off, to be honest, as long as the mindset shift is

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has happened, then I think that's really all you need for a quote, unquote definition

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of done.

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I think that when it comes to your mission or really just anything that you throw out

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publicly, the only thing you can do is really be authentic from where you are right now.

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And I look back at some of the stuff that I wrote or created and I'm like, man, what

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was I thinking?

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But it's okay.

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Like it doesn't really bother me like I thought it would because I have this

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obsession, I guess, with being correct and not wanting to be wrong or share wrong

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information.

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And I think I've talked on this podcast for a long time that meant that like I like to

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write songs and in particular worship songs that we sing a couple of them at my

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church and for a long time, I didn't write anything because I didn't want to be

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theologically incorrect.

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And I realized finally that like that doesn't really matter.

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But trying to not make a mistake, you're getting away from the whole heart of it in

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the first place, which is just worship is supposed to be like coming out of your heart.

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It's supposed to be a reflection of who you are and your attitude towards something.

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And I was so paralyzed by not wanting to be wrong that really I was wrong because I

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wasn't being authentic.

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I think that there's a very important distinction between practicing what you preach and preaching

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what you practice, practicing what you preach.

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You know, you throw something out there and then you try to live up to it.

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But when you are preaching what you practice, like you establish the habits and it's things

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that you do consistently.

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And then that's what you write about.

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That's what you talk about.

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That's what you create.

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Like that's there's authenticity in that that people can see, which is important because

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if you're not authentic, you're going to lose credibility in the eyes of other people.

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But more importantly, you're going to lose credibility in your own eyes and you're going to say,

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"Well, I don't do what I say I do.

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So what's the point?"

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I think my action item just struck a chord with Mike.

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Yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately.

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That's fair.

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That's fair.

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It's good to hear that we're kind of on the same path here.

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Hopefully you're encouraged by that though.

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Yeah.

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I mean, like it's not something that like you have to dot all the eyes and cross all the

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teas and then you're like, "Okay, finally my mission is now ready."

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Right.

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Like you are who you are and as long as you are who you are and you're not trying to be

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something that you're not, then you've succeeded.

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I like it.

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Last one here, write out my life goals.

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I thought about it once.

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That doesn't count.

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No, probably not.

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I'm going to let that one carry over.

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So not shooting too good here.

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I'm 33% on my action items from last round.

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So sad day, but we'll talk about them again next time, which means that next rounds follow-up

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for action items is going to be where it's outside like 45 minutes just to talk action items next time.

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We may have to have a B-sides just for our action items.

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I know.

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I know.

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Though we are coming up on number 50.

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So that's true.

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We're going to have to do something special for number 50, I think.

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Yeah, I'll have to have a thought about that.

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Just one thought.

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It's only four episodes away.

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Crazy.

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Just you only get one thought about it.

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Okay.

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Just one.

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All right, your turn.

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All right.

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So all of these, I was nervous about you putting these on.

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I'm like, how are we going to talk about these?

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But that's par for the course, I guess, at this point.

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Yep.

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So the long term one, which is kind of the one that I was hoping wouldn't get on here,

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because I have nothing to share with this.

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You realize I just copy paste, right?

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Yep.

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Like I just pulled the action items off last time and paste them in at the follow-up for the next.

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You're aware of this.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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Typos and everything.

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It all comes across.

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I don't know.

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I guess I kind of was hoping in the back of my mind you'd miss one, but

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oh well.

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So yeah, the long term planning is a bad deal.

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I don't have any progress with this.

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I really don't know when this is going to happen, how it's going to happen.

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I also right now don't really want it to happen any time soon, because I just went through

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reevaluating everything that I'm committed to.

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And I love all the stuff I get to do.

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So having to take a break from it seems kind of weird.

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But anyways, it'll happen at some point.

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Long term follow-up.

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Okay.

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Just like my office.

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Yes.

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Second one, plan weeks at 75%.

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I don't have a percentage, but I feel like I've done a pretty good job of this.

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And the way that I've implemented this is shared with you the Dominate Your Day template that I

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created.

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It's kind of the Cal Newport manual time blocking.

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And I've been breaking down my time throughout the day based on one hour time blocks and overestimating.

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So I have found that my most important test of things I put on that list that like I really

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want to get these done.

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And even the things that I'm like, it'd be awesome today if this happened.

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I've consistently been hitting all of those and not really being stressed out about it.

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Nice.

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Like I haven't felt a quote unquote time crunch.

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So I feel like I'm doing pretty good at this.

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I think if I need to dial it back and get close to that 75% would be where I have things on there

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that I'm just not able to complete.

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We can revisit that.

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It's probably worth revisiting maybe a couple months down the road to see if it's still

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still working because I don't really have a firm structure around that 75% how to implement that.

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Just because I don't know.

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I mean, I guess I could look at every single task and say, well, this should take an hour,

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but I'm in a budget too.

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So that's 50%.

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But that just seems like way more work than it's worth.

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I'm happy to know that 80/20.

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That sounds like a terrible idea.

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Yeah, exactly.

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Next one, give more than you get.

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I think that I've made the mindset shift here also and really it's not even a mindset change.

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It's more so just reinforcing something that I've believed for a long time,

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but I've tried to be more conscious about it.

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And there's, I'm recognizing that there are a lot of really small opportunities for this,

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which if you don't approach it through this lens, it's really easy to miss.

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So for example, I mean, this is a really, really minor example,

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but I was on Mac Power users a couple of weeks ago and have had quite a few people who have

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reached out to me via email after that.

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And one guy in particular is like, I almost spit out my water when I heard you say you were an

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Appleton.

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So like, I couldn't believe there was somebody else in Appleton.

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So I actually met him for coffee this morning.

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First time I met the guy, we don't really know each other and other than via email.

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And so what's standard protocol in that situation?

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Like, you just buy your drink, you go sit down, you talk, whatever.

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I just bought the guy coffee.

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You know, it cost me a couple bucks, but who cares?

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You know, and he made a comment.

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He's like, oh, I didn't know I was going to get free coffee.

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Like, that's cool.

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You know, like, I was able to, I was able to give and it cost me really nothing.

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You know?

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Those are cool.

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I think those instances are really fun.

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I used to be extremely cautious about meeting people that I met online and I don't really know why.

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And anymore, I feel like I'm doing that a fair amount.

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Like, it seems like about every four or six weeks I'm meeting up with somebody that I have no idea who they are.

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I don't know if that's a factor of me just doing client work or what that is.

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So first time I think I've done it and yeah, it was pretty cool.

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And I guess just a shout out to the Mac community in general.

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Like, I don't think I've met a single person from the Mac community who has turned out to be a jerk.

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In all my experience, and I drove down to Mac stock that one year just to see what it was like.

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And I didn't know anybody there.

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And a lot of the people that were there were like, they brought their Apple user groups and stuff.

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And Dave Ginsburg, I know, is the suburban Chicago Apple users group.

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I met him that first time I was down there.

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I sat and ate lunch with those guys.

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And they were just like completely welcoming.

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And I don't know, we bonded over nerd stuff.

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But like, it's cool because it's not that way in a lot of other places.

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And so, I don't know, I guess being that this was a guy who listened to Mac Power users.

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It's just another example of like these people tend to be really welcoming, really, really fun,

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really just open people.

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And so, I can't speak highly enough of the Mac community.

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And you should come to Mac stock if you're listening to this right now and use Apple devices at all.

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Yes, absolutely.

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And then you get to meet these really nice people.

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Like, for example, our friend who did the whole rating with the spreadsheets in bit,

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because they showed us that we had a missed rating for Monk and the Merchant.

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And I went back and I listened to the end of that episode and realized we did rate it.

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I just failed to get it on the website.

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So, we did rate it.

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And it is out there.

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So, there you go.

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So, I filled in the gap.

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So, we do just have the one episode we didn't rate.

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But other than that, they are all there.

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And then in other news, I think this is probably a big one.

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Is this a big one?

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I think this is a big one.

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It could potentially be a big one, which makes me a little bit nervous.

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But yes. So, last night, I got kind of a hair-brained idea.

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And I texted Mike and said, "Here's what I'm thinking.

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You cool with that?"

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And he said, "Sure."

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So then this morning, I put that thing in place and built it.

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And it now exists.

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We've played around with this concept a few times, I think.

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But we are introducing the Bookworm Club.

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And this lives at club.bookworm.fm.

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This is nothing less than a discourse community

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to jump in and have conversations about the episodes that we record and release.

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So, each of the books that we read, there is now a conversation dedicated to them.

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They did exist technically before on the productivity guild.

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But it just never really felt like it was cohesive.

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And basically what I did was I took that category from the guild,

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exported it, created a whole community around that one.

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So now it has its own, but then those also get to be comments underneath of the episodes themselves

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on the Bookworm.fm site.

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So, any of the episodes that you go to at Bookworm.fm,

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you'll see down at the bottom of those where you can have the conversations about those episodes.

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And it all revolves around this Bookworm Club site.

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And again, it's club.bookworm.fm.

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So, if you're interested in having a chat about these episodes, you can check us out there as well.

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And I would imagine this is going to end up being part of our end of episode spiel now.

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That would be the appropriate way to handle this.

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Yep. I would assume so.

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The thing that makes me a little bit nervous about this is just that I am pretty bad at checking comments on things.

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But I have pinned this tab, so hopefully I will look at it every day and just see what's new.

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But I think that this is a really cool idea and a really valuable resource for people who

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listen to Bookworm because they maybe don't want to read the whole book.

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They just want to hear us distill it.

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I think that that probably wasn't the original intention behind the podcast when we launched it.

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But I've talked to several people now who that's kind of what they do is they use this as their

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vetting source for books.

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And I think that anytime that you can have any sort of discussion about what you're reading,

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it helps solidify it in your own mind.

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So I've noticed even we'll get on the mic and we'll start talking about a particular book that we read.

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And I'll have a certain opinion and then I'll hear you talk about stuff and I'll think through

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things and be like, "Oh, well, actually, Joe's got a good point.

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Yeah, I guess maybe I was off in this particular area."

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So even while we've been recording, my opinion and rating of books have changed just as I talk through things.

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So I think it's cool that listeners can do that as well now too.

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I don't think there's any coincidence that we don't put...

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It's obvious we work off of an outline whenever we're recording and we always put the ratings

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bit at the bottom of that outline, but neither one of us ever fill in what our rating is until we get there.

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So it's always this surprise of even for us of what is this rating going to be because

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the conversation of getting there.

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Like right now, I have a feeling of where I'm going to rate today's book,

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but I would imagine by the time we get there that ratings changed.

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So I don't know if that's good or bad.

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Yep.

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But I think you made a good point here that we've learned a lot of people listen to bookworm

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to get a good overview of a book to help them to decide if they're going to read a book or not.

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Or sometimes they use it as a way to understand a book in and of itself with no plan to read it.

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So my thought on developing this club and this community is, you know, we talk about these books

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and sometimes we get questions about those on Twitter or email and sometimes I get the same

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questions multiple times and this would be a great way to consolidate all of those.

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So if you're listening to us and there's a point that you feel like we didn't clarify or

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there's a question about the book itself that you won our thoughts on, this is the one place we would

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point you to have that conversation and ask that question.

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It's kind of a way to keep it all in one place, if you will.

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Yep.

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Exactly.

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Is it fair to market bookworm now as the Internet's largest book club?

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Ooh, that's a good question.

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I guess I'll have to see how many people sign up.

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I even made it easy.

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You can one click sign in with Google or Twitter.

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So there you go.

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You know why people listen to us instead of reading the books for themselves, Joe?

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It's because people are too busy.

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See what I did there?

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Uh-huh.

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Nice.

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That's cheesy.

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Way to go.

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Yeah.

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Something else cheesy.

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I mean, we were originally set to record this last week, but you texted me and you're like,

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"Hey, can we move this?

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Because I'm not going to be able to finish the book.

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I'm too busy."

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Yep.

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"Smiley face."

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Exactly.

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Exactly it.

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Yep.

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We were going to record this a week ago and it didn't happen because I was busy.

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The title of the book for today is, in fact, busy.

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The subtitle is "How to Thrive in a World of Too Much" and it's by Tony Crab.

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And this is a listener recommendation that I picked up in a bookstore because I saw it

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and it looked somewhat interesting and I knew it was a listener recommendation at one point.

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So I figured, you know, it's a couple bucks.

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I'll just buy it and it's been on my bookshelf for quite a while.

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Didn't really know what to expect when we got into it, but I was pretty pleasantly surprised by this one.

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I didn't really think a whole lot of it based on the title or the cover,

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but you can't judge a book by its cover.

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Right.

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It turns out right.

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One thing really cool about this book, by the way, is right at the beginning and the

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preface and then the getting started, it's basically like how to find the time to read this book.

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And he's got 10 points here because he knows that what he's speaking to is the thing that can

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keep people from actually picking this book up and reading it.

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So I thought that was really cool.

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It's very meta at the beginning because he is talking about the fact that you picked up a book

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about busyness and that's likely because you're busy, but you're too busy to read it.

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So it's like the cyclical issue of this will help me overcome my busyness,

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but I'm too busy to help me overcome my busyness.

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So I did appreciate that he at least addressed that upfront because it was something that

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crossed my mind the moment that you mentioned that we were going to jump into this book.

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That was the first thing I went through my head is like, well, I feel like this is for an

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audience that won't read it.

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So very true.

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I was grateful he addressed that immediately.

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You know, I was talking to this guy at coffee this morning and we were talking about bookworm

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and the fact that we read so many books.

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And he mentioned to me that he doesn't read a ton of books, but he works in an industry

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where there are people who definitely could afford to read a couple books.

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And he made the comment something along the lines of like, the people who really need this stuff

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don't know that they need this stuff.

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And so like you can give them the book even.

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They don't have to buy anything.

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They don't even have to go to the library and get it.

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But they may not get anything from it.

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I've been listening to a lot of Jim Rohn stuff on Audible.

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He's the guy who mentored Tony Robbins and a lot of the other like big name success people.

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But Jim Rohn is really, really grounded and I really, I really like his stuff.

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And he's got this thing.

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He talks about this, the parable of the sewers, which is a Bible passage.

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But the basic idea is that you sow seed and then some of the seed produces a harvest.

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Some of it doesn't.

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He even uses the example like in the Bible verse it says that the birds come and take

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some of the seed.

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And he's like, well, at that point you got two choices.

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You can leave your field and go chase the birds or you can keep sowing more seed.

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And I thought that was really cool because like not all your seed is going to hit the mark.

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Not everybody that I give a book, give a copy of the five dysfunctions of a team for example.

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Because I buy every copy that I can find and just give it to as many people as I think would

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actually benefit from it.

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But his point was that if you give something to somebody and they don't do anything with it,

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it's not worth questioning why or trying to fix it or getting mad at them because they

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didn't do what they were supposed to do.

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He just has this phrase in his Jim Rohn inflection, which I can't imitate.

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He just goes, isn't that interesting?

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Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of, there can be a lot of angst around picking up books because

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we have so much going on.

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It's very much a cultural norm to have a lot of things moving, which is what we'll get into here.

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And whenever I tell people that I read a book a week or close to, that always strikes people as

00:19:07

what?

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Like really?

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And the assumption is almost like you have no life.

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That's almost what you get the sense of.

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I can't help but think that people just haven't realized that to get into books,

00:19:24

you build up this ability to read at that level.

00:19:28

You're not going to just decide you're going to read a book a week and start doing that tomorrow.

00:19:32

You're not going to do that, especially if you haven't read a book in its entirety

00:19:36

within a year's span.

00:19:37

I tend to tell people, and we've talked about this before, is find something that you want to

00:19:42

solve.

00:19:42

Like find a problem that you feel like you want to solve and find a book that talks about that.

00:19:46

And that is, I think, one of the easiest ways to get really engaged in a book and to be drawn to

00:19:52

it.

00:19:53

And it makes it an easier read.

00:19:54

And if you do that, then you start to build up over time the more you do that.

00:19:59

You start to build up that endurance and that ability to read at longer levels.

00:20:04

That's a great point.

00:20:05

And I brought that up in my conversation this morning that you should look to read books that

00:20:10

are going to solve a problem that you have.

00:20:12

My friend, Brandon Wentlin, wrote a post on Asian efficiency.

00:20:16

The title of it is, "Let your biggest problems speed up your reading."

00:20:20

When you know that the information that you're about to get is going to solve a very real problem

00:20:24

that you have, then that's going to provide the motivation to actually do it.

00:20:27

For us, with bookworm books specifically, a lot of these self-development books,

00:20:33

these have a lot of times direct application to the stuff that we create, at least for me,

00:20:38

online.

00:20:39

And so it's very easy to see the correlation there.

00:20:42

Whereas if you're in an industry where self-development, maybe there's not such a clear path between

00:20:50

reading these books and becoming the person who is going to be qualified for the position

00:20:55

that you want someday.

00:20:56

If it's not as a direct connection to your ideal future, I can definitely see where it would

00:21:03

be a lot harder to follow through with that.

00:21:05

But this book today can help us understand how to clear some time for it.

00:21:10

So let's jump in here.

00:21:12

Mastery, stop managing your time.

00:21:14

Now I will say this section on stop managing your time.

00:21:18

I really appreciate that because so much of what we've talked about,

00:21:21

we even read a whole book about time management.

00:21:24

The 168 hours, Laura Vanderkamp.

00:21:26

With that, we were talking specifically about how to manage your time to the minute

00:21:33

down, even further depending on how far you want to go.

00:21:35

And he starts this whole thing off by saying, "Don't do that."

00:21:39

So like, "Okay, well, at least we're not pigeonholed into one view of thinking here.

00:21:45

We're at least looking at things that are at opposite ends of the spectrum."

00:21:51

But I don't know.

00:21:52

I really liked this section, mostly because it does help you get away from the strictness,

00:22:00

if you will, of a lot of what we talk about with the productivity world.

00:22:03

Okay, we're not going to go through this whole managing each minute bit.

00:22:08

Like be okay with a little bit of sloppiness, which I was kind of grateful for.

00:22:13

That way people aren't continuing to pound forever efficiency into you.

00:22:17

Yeah, no, I totally agree.

00:22:19

I do a presentation for Asian efficiency where we talk about the three different levels of

00:22:24

productivity or the three different pieces to the productivity puzzle.

00:22:28

Level one is time management.

00:22:30

And I think that this is honestly pretty basic.

00:22:34

If you've never done anything with time management previously,

00:22:37

then yeah, look to manage your time and you'll see some immediate benefit.

00:22:41

But for anybody who's been in this space for any length of time or read any sort of

00:22:46

self development book, like that just gets harder and harder to realize gains from,

00:22:51

because there's always additional things that you can be doing.

00:22:54

So if you're not managing your time and you feel overwhelmed,

00:22:56

yeah, managing your time a little bit more effectively can produce the efficiency that

00:23:01

you need to create some space.

00:23:03

But for everybody who's doing that at some point,

00:23:05

there's a level of diminishing returns.

00:23:07

And so you have to go beyond managing your time at that point,

00:23:12

because everybody's got the same amount.

00:23:14

You can't create more of it.

00:23:16

And he talks about the three reasons why time management doesn't work.

00:23:21

It doesn't help you regain control.

00:23:23

Like I said, it can get you a few more minutes in your day, maybe,

00:23:26

but it doesn't help you regain control of the direction of the day.

00:23:29

Number two, it will not make you happier.

00:23:32

And then number three, it will not make you more effective.

00:23:34

That's really the key.

00:23:36

If you want to be effective, if you really want to take action on the things that are

00:23:39

going to create your ideal future, then a lot of times it's not the fact that you don't have

00:23:43

time to do those things.

00:23:44

It's the fact that you don't have the energy maybe to take action on it,

00:23:48

or you can't focus long enough on something.

00:23:51

You know, we covered deep work.

00:23:53

That's what that book is all about is developing your focus muscles

00:23:56

so that when you've got the time to work on something,

00:23:58

you can create the energy and the motivation.

00:24:00

You've got enough focus muscle that you can laser focus on that thing

00:24:05

that you're supposed to be doing and cut out all the distractions and everything.

00:24:08

And that's really where you see significant progress.

00:24:11

Yes.

00:24:11

Let's just jump into the next one here, churn.

00:24:13

Why don't you explain this one?

00:24:15

This one is related because when it comes to managing your time,

00:24:21

many people will ask simply, in isolation, should I be doing this thing,

00:24:27

or should I not be doing this thing?

00:24:29

And this whole idea of churn here, this is relentless washing machine spin

00:24:36

of gears and concerns.

00:24:38

And he talks about Roy Baumeister, who is the guy who did a lot of the willpower studies.

00:24:47

And in this study, there were three groups, those who were thinking about an exam before

00:24:52

they took it, those who thought about the exam and had a study plan,

00:24:57

and then those who didn't think about the exam at all and instead went to a party.

00:25:03

And this whole idea of churn, this is basically like being worried about the test

00:25:08

even before you would take it, whether or not you're doing anything to prepare for it.

00:25:13

They suffered this idea of churn where it's kind of always in the back of your mind

00:25:18

and you're thinking about these things.

00:25:19

But the ones who had a plan, the ones who wrote down a plan, regardless of what that plan was,

00:25:25

regardless of whether it was any good, it basically gave their brain permission to switch off

00:25:30

and not worry about those things anymore.

00:25:32

So how does this relate to the managing your time and choosing between the different things?

00:25:38

Well, everything that you commit to, everything that you sign up for is going to be demanding

00:25:46

your attention in the back of your mind to some level, whether you realize it or not.

00:25:50

And on page 24, when he's talking about the choices, he mentions that the truth is every

00:25:56

choice has a consequence. Each time you choose something, you un-choose something else.

00:26:00

So when we try to do everything, we are un-choosing things.

00:26:02

When we choose busy, we are un-choosing thinking, creativity, and focused attention.

00:26:07

We are un-choosing quality time, relationships, and the joy of deep engagement.

00:26:11

Instead, we should be consciously and deliberately choosing not to do things,

00:26:14

killing off options in our lives, and work to allow a greater focus on fewer things.

00:26:18

Instead of choosing more, we should choose less instead of gray, we should choose color.

00:26:23

That requires a plan. If you were to write down what are the things that you want to do,

00:26:29

what is your life mission, or bring it back to your action items?

00:26:34

Oh, thanks. Once you have that and you've identified the things that you're going to be doing in any

00:26:39

given day, any given month, every given year, you can then measure those things against what is

00:26:45

your life mission, to be another way to put it. And you can ask yourself, is this moving me closer

00:26:50

to achieving my life mission, or my ideal future, or whatever other term you want to plug in there?

00:26:56

And if you take the time to think through those things and put them in the right order,

00:27:00

it's very easy to say no in some of those instances, because you can very clearly

00:27:03

see, like, yeah, this one thing, this opportunity that maybe an isolation seems like maybe I should

00:27:08

be doing that. When I take it in context of who I really am and what I want to do, it's really

00:27:13

not that important. But if you don't take the time to do those things, then you get stuck viewing

00:27:17

those things in isolation. And it's not just a, where does this fit amongst everything that I need

00:27:21

to do? It's just, should I do this? Yes or no? And we can always convince ourselves that yes,

00:27:25

we should be doing one more thing. You get a few points here. I want to follow up on. And one is

00:27:31

this concept of if you get it out of your brain, you're not continually rolling it over in your

00:27:37

thoughts. And he brought up David Allen's Getting Things Done in this particular section. And I

00:27:43

will say it was kind of interesting. He brought up a lot of books that we've read, which is kind of

00:27:48

an interesting thing that you start to see happening. Like you start to recognize a lot of authors the

00:27:54

more that you do this. But he did bring up the Getting Things Done methodology and the benefit

00:28:00

that comes from externalizing the projects and the tasks, the things that are weighing on your mind.

00:28:07

And I have to say that, you know, I've moved into an analog way of managing projects and tasks. But

00:28:14

at the same time, I've been building out slowly over the last few years, like things like mission

00:28:21

statements and higher levels of ideas and philosophies and that sort of thing. Like I've been storing a

00:28:28

lot of that just because one, I need a place to write it down because I feel like I don't fully

00:28:33

comprehend what I think about something until it comes out of my head in some way. What's the

00:28:38

classic quote on that thoughts disentangle themselves across lips and pencil tips. And I think that's

00:28:45

absolutely true because how many times we were just talking about this earlier, we don't fully

00:28:49

understand what we think about this book until we get a chance to sit down and talk it through.

00:28:53

So getting it out of your head, in this case, I find that it's a chance for me to really put down

00:29:01

to the letter how I feel about a specific topic, whether that's, you know, giving in the church

00:29:06

and how much you should or shouldn't give. And in what ways should you give? Do you give direct

00:29:10

to the church? Do you give to people in need within the church? Like there's all kinds of different

00:29:14

ways that you can do that. But whenever I need to externalize something like that, I have my own

00:29:21

ways of and own places of doing that. So I think this can go even beyond the day to day churn to

00:29:28

use his turn here. But at the same time, I think there's also this other aspect that gets involved

00:29:34

here with the worry bit because that can be stressful as well. I mean, how many times have I

00:29:41

mentioned that I've got something going on with my business and I start to worry about it and trying

00:29:45

to make decisions for it and how do I how do I make the right decision in that case? We even read a

00:29:50

whole book on making decisions. And those are things that I find in the same light can cause a lot of

00:29:58

angst and makes me frustrated. And then I'm taking that out of my wife or my kids. Like that's not

00:30:03

okay. But again, I feel like I have to, in some cases, talk to someone about it, whether that's

00:30:10

talking to you about a book or talking to my wife about the frustrations I've got. You know,

00:30:15

in any of those scenarios, I think he's correct here in that you really got to get it out of your

00:30:20

head in some way because if you hold on to it, you tend to make it a lot worse. Like it's just,

00:30:26

it's not good. Yep. Because you tend to make things like you tend to blow a matter proportion

00:30:32

and you don't always have to articulate how you feel about it. So I totally resonated with that

00:30:38

section. Yeah, he says a little bit later that externalizing your thinking is important. Like

00:30:45

trying to remember everything you need to do is like trying to play chess only in your mind.

00:30:50

It's a lot easier when there's an external board. Right. Just need a chess board. And then I think

00:30:55

that that kind of leads into like the weather or not choices because when you can see the whole

00:31:00

board, you can evaluate how important something is. And one of the quotes that really hit me was the

00:31:07

one he shared by President Eisenhower, which really illustrates the fact that there are

00:31:11

opportunity costs associated with your choices. The cost of one President Eisenhower once said,

00:31:16

the cost of one modern heavy bomber is this a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.

00:31:21

And when you think of it that way, instead of just it costs so many millions of dollars,

00:31:26

it's a lot more there's a lot more weight and importance put on that particular choice.

00:31:32

And that importance is there whether you realize it or not. So it's important to note that that

00:31:37

stuff is there because once you get all that stuff out on the external board and you don't

00:31:42

have to try to keep it all in your head, then you don't have to constantly be jumping back and forth

00:31:47

between different things. I mean, a lot of productivity books will speak to how bad multitasking is.

00:31:52

There's a section in this one too. But what I really like about this book is that he uses research

00:31:56

just about everywhere. These are not just his thoughts. And he quotes David Meyer's research

00:32:01

specifically showing that the multitasking increases the overall time needed to complete

00:32:06

tasks by 40%. He also says that the reason that a lot of people do this is that a small

00:32:13

amount of dopamine is released in your brain, which is the pleasure chemical whenever you switch

00:32:16

tasks. So you can switch tasks all day and you feel good about it. But when you look at the numbers,

00:32:22

when you get it all on that external board, you look back at what you actually accomplished,

00:32:27

it's nothing compared to what you thought in your head. Yep. This is why people tend to

00:32:33

or want to quantify the whole self data process of collecting numbers on your own

00:32:42

actions and thoughts and maybe not thoughts, but number of steps and heartbeat and that sort of

00:32:48

thing. I think a lot of people want to capture that so that you have numbers that you can't

00:32:53

argue with. Yep. Quantified self. Yeah, that's there you go. That's important because you are

00:33:00

what you do. You're not what you think you do. And one thing that was kind of impressed on me

00:33:05

recently was that consistency can't be inconsistent. So you want to establish a habit of getting up

00:33:14

early or going to the gym or whatever it is, like, let's just use going to the gym as an example.

00:33:19

You can't go to the gym two days a week and say, oh, for the five days that I excused myself from

00:33:26

going and I had something else to do, like flip a switch and be like, don't form the habit off of

00:33:31

those days only. And then turn it back on when you actually do follow through and go to the gym.

00:33:36

Okay, there I did it. Now I want that one to count. Right. You're creating the habits for all

00:33:42

seven days and the more that you do that, the stronger those habits become, the more ingrained

00:33:46

they become. And you're developing those habits, whether you whether they are through neglect or

00:33:52

maybe they're intentional, but they're still negative, or whether they're intentional and

00:33:56

they're positive. So you have to recognize what you're doing and is it the right thing. Now, as it

00:34:01

pertains to managing attention, managing your time, I think that a lot of people have developed

00:34:07

this habit of distraction. He mentions a Boston College study which found that people underestimate

00:34:13

their frequency of distraction by a factor of 10, which is crazy. He said participants estimated

00:34:19

that they switched focus every four minutes, but they watched their eyes and they actually switched

00:34:24

every 14 seconds. We're really good at this, aren't we? So you may think that you're focused and you can

00:34:30

multitask, but you can't. Yeah, my my wonderful wife made the comments and I'm aware that I've

00:34:39

been getting worse, but she mentioned over lunch. This is two hours ago as we're recording that

00:34:46

I've gotten into the habit of checking my phone about every 10 minutes, even when I'm off of work.

00:34:51

I was like, no, I don't. And then I started thinking about it like,

00:34:53

all right. I think you're right. So yeah, we are what we repeatedly do, whether we are aware of it

00:35:03

or not. And we talk about this all the time too. Yeah, yeah, I know. But knowledge, knowledge doesn't

00:35:10

translate into action. I was just reading the other day about the four different levels of knowledge,

00:35:16

level one. And this is taken from, I think it's the power of potential by Ed Cole. Level one is

00:35:22

assumption. Level that's the lowest level. Level two is knowledge. So you know what to do. Level three

00:35:31

is skills where you can do what you know you're supposed to do. And level four is practice or

00:35:37

diligence, you know, where you're doing it every single day. It's become a part of who you are.

00:35:41

And that's where leadership happens, whether you are leading other people or just leading yourself.

00:35:46

And I think that that's really important because it does require personal leadership, personal

00:35:51

management in order to put into practice any sort of diligence, any sort of habit that you want to

00:35:58

create that's positive is going to be a little bit difficult at first. But the price of diligence

00:36:05

upfront is much, much less than the price of regret at the end. Agreed. Let's talk about

00:36:12

attention. Two types of attention. What are the two types of attention? First is directed,

00:36:17

which is effortful or focused in Tony's words. And the second one is involuntary. And so the

00:36:25

kind of the examples that he shares in the book are number one directed when you are working on a

00:36:30

project or you're writing a paper or whatever, you have directed attention at the task at hand.

00:36:36

And then involuntary, this is more like you're out for a walk. And you notice the birds chirping

00:36:42

in the trees or you notice how beautiful your surroundings are. And that's probably at the heart

00:36:47

of why so many people in the productivity space say that you should be going for walks outside

00:36:52

because they don't explicitly at least I never heard people explicitly say that it's recharging

00:36:57

your directed attention through involuntary attention. But that really just kind of clicked for me when

00:37:01

I when I heard that. I think one of the pieces of this that really stuck out to me was he mentioned

00:37:07

a book. Of course, I would notice this distracted by Maggie Jackson definitely wrote this one on my

00:37:13

list. Because he goes into this whole ADHD thing a little bit. And I've talked about before how

00:37:21

this is the thing I struggle with. And I think some of this where you know the context switching,

00:37:28

you know, giving off dopamine or you know, the more that we can switch, the more pleasure that we get

00:37:34

from that. And that all comes from or can come from distractions. And I can't help but think that

00:37:42

there's so much of these different levels of attention that we continue to degrade a little bit simply

00:37:47

because we are so caught up in these switches and distractions for lack of a better term.

00:37:54

And I think this is something I struggle with definitely as my wife gratefully pointed out just a

00:38:00

little bit ago. So like, okay, definitely a thing I need to work on. Certainly something that I need

00:38:05

to continue to be aware of. I'm not really sure how to turn that into an action item here. I tried.

00:38:11

But I couldn't really find a specific thing that I felt I wanted to put in place other than just be

00:38:19

aware of it, which is never a great action item. Just be aware of this. It's like impossible to

00:38:25

really quantify that because I'm not going to leave my phone elsewhere because I'm I end up making

00:38:31

a number of phone calls and stuff here and there that I feel like I want to have around. And I don't

00:38:36

think I'm at a point where I would try to find some other method to handle that. I just need to be

00:38:42

aware of it. It's a thing I need to keep in mind. Nice. And I think that's that's fine. That's

00:38:48

the starting point for all of this stuff and really the way that he he wrote this book,

00:38:54

this whole first section on mastery, in my opinion, is kind of like just to show you how much you

00:39:00

suck at this. So that he has your attention going forward. That's a good point. I hadn't thought of

00:39:06

that. Everything you know is wrong. Now here's what you should do instead. All right, fair enough.

00:39:12

All right. So differentiation. This is my my minor rant here. Yeah. He uses the term productive

00:39:19

and I don't like the way he uses it. I was okay. So a thing that I do before we start recording

00:39:26

is try to take about 15 minutes to look over the outline and then just kind of glance through

00:39:30

each section that's on the outline just to kind of get a feel for it. In this case for the listeners

00:39:36

here, I'm looking at Mike's list of items here. And the first two that we're going to talk about

00:39:43

quickly, I believe are just kind of points of interest. And the first one, Mike wrote down a

00:39:50

wrong definition of productivity. And I was looking through this section trying to figure out where

00:39:56

this was at because I didn't recall him defining productivity. So I was trying to find that and

00:40:02

realized, wait, Mike wants to rant on what he's talking about for this whole section. All right.

00:40:09

So I will quit quit now. Hit me with your rant. Okay. Well, I, you know, the more people I hear

00:40:16

kind of define productivity this way, the more I feel like maybe what I'm really getting at,

00:40:22

then maybe isn't productivity per se. But I think that productivity is more than just cranking out

00:40:29

widgets. And on page 81, that's basically how he frames it. He says productivity can provide

00:40:35

important advantages over competitors, which can increase profitability. But it will rarely

00:40:40

keep you ahead in the long term. So the big issue I have with this is that in his definition here,

00:40:48

it's kind of implied that we are competing in an industry and there can be only one winner.

00:40:55

And I can do things to increase my quote unquote productivity in the short term,

00:41:00

which will put me above you, but they won't keep me there. And I think that in that context,

00:41:06

I maybe agree with him, but I think that it really doesn't apply to this book. I mean,

00:41:11

this book is not how to become a more productive company by being less busy. This applies to just

00:41:16

about anybody. And this whole idea here about being first, about being tops, I believe that this

00:41:23

is based on a scarcity mindset. And I think that's dangerous, really dangerous. When you think that

00:41:29

there is only so much success to go around, then you have no problem stepping on people to get above

00:41:35

them because it doesn't matter who you step on on your way up once you get there, you know,

00:41:39

you're king of the mountain. All right, but just because I achieve my ideal future doesn't mean

00:41:45

that you can't. There's not a limited number of ideal futures out there. And if I get one that

00:41:51

means that there's less to go around, like, there's a lot of opportunity. And really, you're the

00:41:57

captain of your own ship, you get to decide whether you get there or not, it's just going to be a

00:42:02

matter of, are you faithful in the practices and the are you diligent in the habits that are going

00:42:07

to get you there? I really think that the more that I read and study this stuff, like, that's what

00:42:11

it comes down to is these simple habits, like it's not complicated. But a lot of people won't do it

00:42:17

or don't do it simply because they don't make that connection. And they don't follow through on it.

00:42:23

So I just want to call that out, I guess, that like this whole chapter is called Stop Being So

00:42:28

Productive. And there's some good stuff in here, a couple of my action items come from here. But

00:42:32

framed that way, it's incorrect. That's fair. I almost feel like there needs to be a different

00:42:40

term for what you're talking about, because you're correct in that we hear productivity a lot. And

00:42:47

in the vast majority of cases, you could do a simple find replace with productivity for efficiency.

00:42:56

And that's what they mean. In most cases, that seems to be the way that they intend it.

00:43:03

So I wonder if there's this mashup of essentialism, minimalism, productivity,

00:43:10

sort of thing. Maybe you should coin a term for what you mean by all of this.

00:43:15

Not a bad idea. And I know that as someone who works for a company called Asian efficiency,

00:43:21

I get it. But I also think that there's so much more to productivity than just being efficient.

00:43:31

We've read the book by Peter Drucker, and he talks a lot about effective versus efficient.

00:43:36

And I think that there's middle ground where if you can achieve both, then you're really

00:43:41

making progress. There's efficiency, that's important. You don't get to choose,

00:43:47

I'm just going to apply this mindset to this one area of my life. Your values, your views,

00:43:54

they're going to permeate everything that you do, unless you are intentionally

00:43:59

a hypocrite. You say one thing and you do another. And so that's why it's dangerous to be in a

00:44:06

situation like work-wise where you have to compromise on your morals or your standards.

00:44:11

And the company wants you to do this, because if you start to make concessions in one particular

00:44:16

area, those will apply to your entire life. You can't separate those two.

00:44:20

Going back to the whole idea, the work-life balance and how that's completely not true.

00:44:26

You don't get to choose between, "This is who I am at work. This is who I am in life."

00:44:31

The habits that you establish are going to apply to every single area of your life.

00:44:37

I don't know. The people that I've heard define it, they've always applied it to specifically a

00:44:44

work context in terms of the actual output of a machine. And I just think that that is wrong,

00:44:52

especially today. There's a whole industry built up around this idea of productivity.

00:44:58

And I don't think that it's all just figuring out how to squeeze a few more

00:45:03

hours out of the people beneath you. He mentioned Mahali in this book.

00:45:07

He did. But we always have to point out.

00:45:11

Mahali, I think, and we read his book. And I think it's interesting just how many different ways

00:45:19

you can pull his research into so many different topics, from busyness to grit to willpower.

00:45:27

It comes out a lot. We have to point it out. Hi, Mahali.

00:45:34

Specifically, in this particular context, he calls out something which is a little bit different.

00:45:43

He references the flow research. But the point that he was making in this particular book,

00:45:47

I thought was a little bit different, which is why I wanted to call it out.

00:45:51

He said that, according to Mahali's research, which this I don't think was really touched on

00:45:55

in the book that we read, he said that finding the solution was easy, finding the right question

00:46:01

was hard. Once the question was discovered, the ideas flowed freely.

00:46:05

I think this is a really powerful idea. And I've kind of seen this happen

00:46:10

myself in a couple of different areas. One of the things that I've done recently is we've kind of

00:46:16

revamped our family meeting structure. And really, what we've focused on are three questions.

00:46:23

What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? And what should we keep doing?

00:46:29

And it's been amazing to me that when I have an hour of time, we go to dinner, whatever with my

00:46:33

wife, we think about those questions, the results that we get and the clarity that we get regarding,

00:46:39

like, okay, this is what we need to do next. And it just was a great illustration to me of this

00:46:44

point that once you have the right questions, finding the solutions becomes a lot simpler.

00:46:49

And I think those particular questions, I think they're designed to help you point

00:46:56

yourselves in the right direction. Because I love those questions. It's a thing that I think I want

00:47:00

to steal a little bit. But, you know, in the next section here is about building your brand. And

00:47:07

I just want to pause and talk about the culture of busyness because we haven't really done that

00:47:13

yet, Mike. And I feel like this is kind of a big point because there's so much of our general

00:47:19

conversations where I'm busy, like, how are you? I'm busy, like, okay, great, not great.

00:47:25

[laughs]

00:47:26

So, he does call out, like, this is a thing where there's a competition of who has the more stressful,

00:47:32

the more jam-packed schedule. And it comes out just in general social conversations all the time.

00:47:40

And when I started reading this, I started trying to pay attention to that more. It's a thing I

00:47:46

knew about, knew it was a problem, but I can't say that I've ever tried to focus on how often it comes

00:47:53

out. And it's kind of nuts how frequently this whole dynamic of how much you have going on and

00:48:01

how overloaded you are. Like, that comes out all the time. And just for fun, there was a... I was

00:48:08

at church for a function a couple nights ago. And there was a member of our small group that was

00:48:14

there. And he came up, I had just sat down, it was going to be there for about an hour, with nothing

00:48:19

in particular I needed to be doing. And he just asked me how things were going. And I just, instead

00:48:23

of saying I'm busy or anything along those lines, I just told him I'm learning to not be busy.

00:48:28

That led to a one-hour conversation. So, like, okay, well, this is a thing that is a problem. And

00:48:36

it's prevalent pretty much everywhere. But it's not easy to break. I still find myself talking about

00:48:45

how much is going on and need to stop, I think, partially because I need to scale back on the

00:48:51

number of things that I'm doing. And it's a thing, that's a piece I've been working on for a while.

00:48:55

But the brand, you know, I use that term there, of busyness is just wrong. Like, we need to get

00:49:03

away from that. Yeah, well, just to back up a little bit, because we're in section two,

00:49:06

but section one was mastery on page 45. Right. He says, busyness is bad, but that doesn't mean

00:49:12

full and active lives are bad. Days and lives crammed with deep immersion and projects,

00:49:17

interactions and experiences that are truly meaningful to you are the juice of life. That

00:49:21

is mastery. And so that's important to call out that just because you've got a bunch of things

00:49:25

going on doesn't mean that you're, quote unquote, busy, right, and you need to dial stuff back. Now,

00:49:29

maybe you are and you do have to dial stuff back. I think that that's probably a safe assumption.

00:49:34

Yes. If you're just getting introduced to this concept, but I do want to call that out because

00:49:39

you're right, busy as a terrible brand. I'm glad you brought up that example because that's exactly

00:49:43

what I was thinking of is like you go somewhere to a social function, you see somebody that maybe

00:49:48

you don't see every day and they ask you, Hey, how's it going? What's your initial response?

00:49:54

Like try to do anything except, Oh man, I'm so busy. It feels weird.

00:49:59

And that's wrong. I've been trying to shift that to call out like specific things. You're like,

00:50:06

you know, your example, what have you been up to and be like, Oh yeah, you know, I've been working

00:50:10

on this project or whatever. But busy is kind of like the easy answer where no one can push back.

00:50:19

If you were to say to somebody like, Oh, I've been working on this project, like they could say,

00:50:24

well, that's a dumb idea. All right, they could point out a hundred reasons why that's a waste of

00:50:29

your time. But when you say, Oh man, I've been so busy, like what do you say to that?

00:50:33

Right. You're not going to argue with me. Yeah, exactly. You might try to one up me,

00:50:37

but you're not going to argue. Right. Which is sometimes what happens. But I think that that's

00:50:41

maybe at the root of that is like, it's a protective thing where it's like, as long as I don't say what

00:50:45

I'm actually doing, they can't have any issue with it. Right. So, but yeah, I like this whole idea of

00:50:53

building your brand intentionally. I'm another thing that I thought of regarding your brand at the

00:50:57

moment is if you were to have one word that describes your life and you were to ask your kids, for

00:51:04

example, or your wife or whoever is closest to you, you know, what is that that word? It may shock

00:51:10

you. I know like kids specifically, they're really perceptive. And there's a couple of things in here,

00:51:15

which action items specifically that apply to my situation with my kids. But I think that you

00:51:22

could apply this in a lot more, a lot more broad context. And if you really want to get an idea on

00:51:27

what you're portraying, what brand you are putting out there, like do that exercise, ask somebody

00:51:32

close to you, you know, what's one word that you would use to describe me? And if it's busy,

00:51:38

like you know something's got to change. Right. Which is really where this whole idea of what

00:51:44

are your five words comes in. I did it as I was reading it, just because I knew that if I left that

00:51:50

page, I would probably forget about it. There's a whole bunch of words. And basically, you're

00:51:55

supposed to select the five that best describe you. That's your personal brand. And there's a

00:52:02

bunch of them on there, the ones that I came up with. And you know, this is just my perspective. So

00:52:07

take that for what it's worth. But this was a cool exercise for me because part of it is what

00:52:13

you currently do. But part of it also is recognizing that, Oh, this is what I want to be known for,

00:52:17

because what I found is that there were more than five that I could apply to me. And then trying to

00:52:22

rank those, this is kind of what I landed on logical, perceptive, purposeful, sincere, insightful. Now,

00:52:30

depending how well you know me, you can probably point out at least one, one instance where I've

00:52:35

failed in those things. But I think there's a lot of value in recognizing that this, these are the

00:52:40

words that resonate with me. This is who I really am and who I want to portray whenever I master

00:52:48

busyness enough to let these things come out. Like, this is who I am. But you know, if we're not

00:52:54

careful, then busyness can drown these. Yeah, I like this concept a lot. And like, I've played

00:53:00

around, and we've talked a lot about like goal setting and how do you hold yourself accountable

00:53:06

to things. But I think this can be a way to do that. If you have these five things or these aspects

00:53:16

of your character that you want to be known for, as opposed to being known as busy, which all of

00:53:23

these are better, in my opinion. Exactly. That's really the point he's trying to make is like,

00:53:28

any one of these things that you can pick instead of busy is going to be an improvement.

00:53:33

Right. So I like this idea, and I've played around with the idea of people talk about their yearly

00:53:38

themes. And I've played around with the concept of like quarterly themes, because I feel like the

00:53:43

three month bit handles a lot better in my world. And so I've played around with that. But I feel

00:53:48

like this can be kind of an overarching view. And there's a lot of these things that we've come

00:53:53

across in the past, like life goals and missions and, you know, your areas of responsibility. And

00:53:59

we come across these sorts of things quite a bit. But to be honest with you, whenever you

00:54:03

review these sorts of things, they're pretty quick to review. So it doesn't seem like it's a huge

00:54:09

deal to add one of these to it. So yeah, I'm going to try to figure out what my five are. I

00:54:14

haven't done it, but I'll do my best to get it done by next time that way our action list doesn't

00:54:19

continue to grow. This is kind of like beginning steps to figuring out really like what your own

00:54:28

path is going to be. The next step is to come up with a sentence that describes you. And on page

00:54:36

124, I put just in my notes, unique ability, because I think that what he was speaking to is

00:54:43

directly what that book that I mentioned as a get book, our unique ability is all about.

00:54:49

It's identifying what is unique about you. What is this the skill set that you have

00:54:54

that really like only you can do the thing that you were made to do. What is the thing that really

00:54:59

just is the sweet spot for you? And most people don't take the time to figure that out. Now,

00:55:04

I've been going through that workbook, going through the exercises. I sent out these emails. I sent

00:55:10

one to you, which is honestly really scary when you send those out. It feels so weird.

00:55:16

And they give you a form template to work off of I customized the heck out of it, but I don't

00:55:20

want it to seem like a form email. But that's really hard. We're basically part of the unique

00:55:24

ability workbook is you send out these emails to 10 people or so that are close to you. And you

00:55:30

ask them, what do you think my unique ability is? What are the things that you think I'm good at?

00:55:34

What are the skills that you think I have? And then you kind of distill all that down and you see

00:55:38

what the themes are and what other people say. And it was my experience that every single email

00:55:44

that I got back, it was amazing to read through those. And it was really, really cool to see what

00:55:50

other people projected about me. One thing that somebody said through one of those emails,

00:55:56

which I thought was just awesome. And I never really thought about it this way, but really just

00:56:00

shows the value of getting those outside opinions. They said that you connect people to their own

00:56:05

creativity. And I was like, ah, that's my sentence. Is it fair if you steal what someone else says?

00:56:12

Can you do that? I don't know. I mean, if going through all that feedback, I mean,

00:56:16

that's kind of the theme, but the way that they said it, I'm like, oh, yeah, that really resonates

00:56:20

with me. And so I guess I'll throw that out there just as I've just gone through that myself,

00:56:24

that if you if this concept appeals to you, then it's a small section in this book, which is cool.

00:56:30

But if you really want to dive into it, check out unique ability 2.0.

00:56:34

Yeah, I put it on a list that lists as long. So.

00:56:38

Yeah. And it's not quick. I mean, it's not one of the things where like, oh, I'm going to read

00:56:44

this book this week as a gap book or anything. It takes time. You know, you send out these emails,

00:56:50

and I procrastinate on it for days because I didn't want to do it. Yeah, I couldn't bring up the

00:56:54

courage of like, hey, can you send me something nice about myself? That feels really, really weird.

00:56:59

I'll put my ego on this. But it was one of the most, oh man, it was one of the most rewarding

00:57:02

things I've ever done though. Like the feedback that I got was just amazing. And it really highlighted

00:57:08

a lot of things. One of the things that one of my friends wrote in the email was in addition,

00:57:13

like a piece of radical candor. He's like, you tend to give credit quickly to other people for

00:57:20

your ideas, but by synthesizing them, and you always put your own spin on it, you really don't

00:57:26

need to do that. You've earned the right to speak to these things. And immediately when I read that,

00:57:31

I remembered when I was a freshman in college, I had a professor that did not like me. I was

00:57:37

pretty vocal about my faith and we had differing views. Just leave it there. One of the papers we

00:57:42

had to, we had to write was a book report. And she accused me of plagiarism and said she was going

00:57:49

to take me in front of the academic court and get me kicked out of college. And I was like,

00:57:54

you know, I didn't plagiarize that. Well, you didn't cite your sources correctly. I'm still

00:57:58

going to give you an F. And so my grade in that class went from an A to a C because of that one

00:58:03

paper. I never realized how much that impacted me until I got that email back. And instantly,

00:58:09

I thought of that and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I am still changing how I approach stuff because

00:58:14

that one person had a vendetta against me. And I realized that's completely wrong. I shouldn't

00:58:18

be letting that dictate my course in my future anymore.

00:58:24

So you procrastinated sending out these emails for a few days, but I will say that as someone

00:58:29

who received one of these emails and having been through a lot of these books and through

00:58:36

training seminars and such in the past, like this is a thing that I have done to some extent or another.

00:58:42

And I know that they're really hard to send out, but a lot of people are more than willing to

00:58:49

respond to those genuinely and understand the process that you're working through and what it

00:58:55

is you're trying to accomplish. So for those listening, like if you're encouraged to do this,

00:59:01

like don't be afraid of that because the vast majority of people are more than willing to help

00:59:06

out. And I run across very few people who receive one of these and just don't understand and just

00:59:12

don't do it. You just don't run across that very often. So it's rare. So send it out. Don't be

00:59:18

afraid of it. Right. But bottom line, whatever format you use, definitely figure out what your

00:59:25

unique, I guess I'll just use the term unique ability. I can't think of a better one. And start

00:59:30

building your own personal brand. I think that that's a really important idea and one of the big

00:59:36

things I got out of this book. Fair enough. Let's talk procrastination, the three causes of it.

00:59:41

Yeah. So this is an interesting section here because I think there's a lot of people who speak

00:59:46

to procrastination and give like tips and tricks, well, life hacks, whatever, to help you overcome

00:59:53

procrastination. But he talks about three different causes, dependence. I'll do it when I basically,

01:00:01

I need to the deadlines coming up inertia and mood and the the little acronym he's got for this

01:00:06

is dim. The mood thing that's I don't feel like it. And then he explains that this is because

01:00:12

your mood is determined by the balance of two different chemicals. So one is dopamine. And do

01:00:17

you know how to pronounce this other one? I'm not sure it's like no repent of freeing. But basically,

01:00:23

he breaks this down into those four different scenarios, basically, when you don't feel like

01:00:29

doing something that it can fall into. And this just really just highlighted to me his approach

01:00:35

to everything in this book. And I really like this where it's all based on research, but he

01:00:38

distills it down and like these are the main points. So number one, if you don't have enough

01:00:42

dopamine, that's the the pleasure chemical, then you should use the reversal theory and you should

01:00:47

have fun with the tasks. Second, you could be having too much dopamine, in which case you should

01:00:52

switch off all those distractions to reduce the multitasking which produces it. Number three,

01:00:58

not enough of the other one, I don't know how to say it. And then the tactic in that particular

01:01:03

case is you need to scare yourself with what could go wrong if you don't deliver. And then the last

01:01:08

one you've got too much no repent of freeing or whatever you call it. And in that case,

01:01:12

what you need to do is break the task down. So all of these tactics I've heard before,

01:01:17

but it was cool to see him explain it in a way that you can figure out specifically what is the

01:01:24

cause of you not feeling like taking action on this thing. And then you can use the correct

01:01:28

strategy for that particular scenario. I thought that was a cool approach.

01:01:32

I think it's either Nora Penifrin or Nora Epinephrine, one of those two I would go with.

01:01:38

Both of those sound better than mine.

01:01:39

Yeah, no, I did appreciate the specifically that piece with the mood side of it because I know

01:01:47

that is a thing that I have struggled with in the past. And my wife will tell you that I used to

01:01:53

put things off all the time just because I didn't feel like working on them at that time. And she

01:01:58

mentioned to me at one point that if I don't feel like I'm going to be in the mood for something

01:02:04

and I'm waiting for that mood to happen, I'll never get it done.

01:02:07

Okay, you're probably right because she's usually right on those things. So I listened to her

01:02:12

and that's been a long time as probably been six years ago or better now, maybe longer.

01:02:17

And I have been actively working against that one for a long time. So I've been able to

01:02:23

I think it passed that bit. But I think the key here is like there's going to be one of these three

01:02:29

that I think you fall into the most. Not everyone I think falls into procrastination in general.

01:02:36

I mean, everyone procrastinates to some extent on something, but some are way better at say the

01:02:41

work instance than others. And I think the key is just knowing which of these causes you struggle

01:02:46

with and then determine how you're going to overcome those.

01:02:49

Yeah, the big takeaway, I think, is one of the first points he makes in this section is when

01:02:55

under pressure to perform, don't act think. Yeah, figure out what's really going on. And then

01:03:01

you have a much better chance of effectively dealing with the reason why you don't want to do

01:03:09

this thing right now. And even like procrastination, this is something that everybody deals with.

01:03:15

And there are some people who are just driven by those those deadlines. But I guess like the

01:03:20

thing could be when you're doing your weekly review and you know this thing is coming up and

01:03:24

you know you should start working on it, but you aren't yet. Like what are the ways in that particular

01:03:30

scenario that you should try so that you don't have to be so stressed as it comes down to the

01:03:36

wire. I think there's a lot of value in figuring figuring that out. And a lot of times what it takes

01:03:41

is stepping back a little bit, not just doing something, but thinking about what is the right

01:03:47

thing to do in this particular scenario. Section three engagement, the three sections here. So

01:03:52

this is the last one. First one's mastery, second one's differentiation, and the last one is engagement.

01:03:58

Yeah, so there's a there's a lot of really cool stuff in here. I think they have the most notes

01:04:04

about this particular section. The first chapter in this section is called Stop Striving for More.

01:04:11

And there's a research study that he quotes on page 167 by Mark Lepper and David Green,

01:04:18

which I thought was really interesting. And this is the first point here, love versus job. So in this

01:04:23

particular study, they asked children to draw for a couple of minutes. And they rewarded some of the

01:04:31

children for their drawing. The kids that were not rewarded were twice as likely to draw afterwards

01:04:38

when there was no reward. They had intrinsic motivation. They just liked drawing. The extrinsic

01:04:44

motivation to get the reward made that joy into a job. And I think that there's a lot of people

01:04:51

that this applies to. It's not just not just kids. If you're working on a side project, you know,

01:04:57

and you finally get that thing launched and it becomes your your business at that point,

01:05:01

like your whole attitude towards that thing could completely change. That's really sad.

01:05:06

It doesn't have to be that way just because you figure it out a way to get paid for the

01:05:12

thing that you really enjoy doing doesn't mean that you have to stop enjoying doing that thing.

01:05:16

That's true. I think there's a lot of interesting points to this. But the one that I think that

01:05:21

stands out the most to me actually is a recall of and I'm going to do it here too,

01:05:28

Flow by Mahali. There's a lot of points in Flow that are geared towards finding the

01:05:35

aspects of the work that you're doing that make it enjoyable. And he has all of his

01:05:41

different aspects that help you understand how to do that. But I think the most important one is

01:05:48

that you need to find an internal challenge or find something inside yourself that enjoys a thing

01:05:53

and use that as your driver to accomplish something as opposed to higher dollar amounts or, you know,

01:06:02

somebody's praise, like those pieces are nice, but they're not going to keep you going for 10 years.

01:06:09

They'll keep you going for 10 weeks, maybe 10 months, but not indefinitely. So twisting it to

01:06:16

a point where you're using that aspect internally, to me, that was the piece that I got out of this,

01:06:22

which was trying to turn that inside to myself because I work with all kinds of clients on a

01:06:28

weekly basis. And although it's great to see the excitement from them and frankly a paid invoice

01:06:37

from them between those two, like that's great. But I take more joy in seeing the product completed

01:06:43

and looking good than I do from either one of those. So I really do think you have to turn that

01:06:49

internally. Yeah, exactly. He mentions that wealth doesn't equal what we have wealth equals what we

01:06:54

can do. And the more resources you have, the more options you have, maybe, but the tendency can be

01:07:03

to, especially once you start to realize some financial success, like, I got to have more,

01:07:09

I got to have more. And I think that's really dangerous. You can, essentially, if you had that

01:07:16

approach, you're never really going to be satisfied. If all you want is a little bit more, then once

01:07:22

you get a little bit more, you're going to find that you feel hollow and empty and you're going to need

01:07:27

just a little bit more. Joseph Campbell, he mentions in this section that the Holy Grail is your

01:07:33

purpose in life. And the best way to success is to consciously focus on your values first and seek

01:07:38

to grow your capabilities in those areas. Like, let's say you're working on something, maybe you're

01:07:45

at the very beginning, Joe, you had a different job and you really wanted to become a web developer.

01:07:52

And you just really craved the autonomy that that would provide you and you really liked writing the

01:07:57

code. Okay, so the tendency can be once you achieve that situation, that you view your job,

01:08:03

not as something that you get to do anymore, but something that you have to do. And I think that

01:08:08

you can switch those at any point, and it's very important to do that. You have to view

01:08:13

what you are currently doing, especially if it's something that is in line with who you want to

01:08:19

become and what you like, what you want to your life mission, like if it's in line with your core

01:08:23

values, then there's no reason to be looking for something else that's better. You can be satisfied

01:08:29

in that thing that you get to do. And his main point here is that you're trying to

01:08:34

become more engaged in the work that you do. And, you know, this is a thing we've talked about

01:08:40

in a number of episodes and covered a lot of books on that. But we haven't really delved into

01:08:46

too much of becoming more engaged in the relationships that we have with other people.

01:08:53

We have a little bit, you know, I mean, we did "Brenae Browns" daring greatly, which kind of touches

01:08:58

that realm to some extent. As much as we didn't care for the book itself, Amanda Palmer's book

01:09:04

talked about it quite a bit. Maybe her methods are a little out there, but you know, but in this

01:09:10

particular book, he does touch on this to a point more about the number of people that you

01:09:16

should be engaged with. And one of those that he brought up, as far as the number of people,

01:09:23

was Dunbar's number, which is kind of a semi-famous number, to some extent, which is basically the

01:09:30

number of relationships that you are able to maintain mentally, basically the number of people

01:09:36

that you're able to stay in contact with, to some extent or another.

01:09:39

Yeah, so if you log on to Facebook and you see that you have 800 Facebook friends, that's not true

01:09:44

because Dunbar's number is 150. That's the number of relationships a person can actually manage.

01:09:49

That's important, but also he's got like three different tiers that he uses under Dunbar's number.

01:09:55

So you have 150 people. The next group is 15. And then at the top, you've got your five people who

01:10:01

are your closest circle. So, you know, from inside out, you've got five people who are really,

01:10:06

really close to you. Next, you've got 15. And this is the group that he says determines your

01:10:10

life satisfaction. That was the point that really stood out to me was who are these 15 people?

01:10:16

And what am I allowing them to say and to speak over my life? Jim Rohn said it this way, you know,

01:10:24

to ask yourself about the people that you're associated with, basically, who am I around?

01:10:29

What are they doing to me? And then is that okay? So recognizing like the people that you're

01:10:35

around all the time, they are speaking words over your life. And they're either words that are

01:10:38

going to help you grow or they're words that are maybe going to keep you small. And I really think

01:10:44

that is a lot of value in identifying those 15 people. So that's one of my action items is to

01:10:49

write all those down. But then also, I've got another action item associated with that. How can I give

01:10:53

to my 15? Because my last action item, you know, for today, give more than I give more than I take.

01:11:00

I believe that the way to foster those relationships is not just to take, you know, going back to the

01:11:05

seven habits of how they affected people, the emotional bank account, you know, how can I

01:11:08

make deposits instead of withdrawals with those 15 people? Yeah, I wrote down that I want to figure

01:11:13

out who these 15 people are as well as an action item. But I know that this isn't an easy thing to

01:11:20

do. And it's also kind of odd to basically be ranking your friends. Like, that seems kind of weird.

01:11:28

Right. So I was hesitant to even really talk about it just because it just seems weird to

01:11:35

some level, like it seems very impersonal. But at the same time, I get what he's saying. And I think

01:11:40

there is some value in it. It just feels a little odd. It does feel a little odd. I will give you that.

01:11:46

Another thing related to this is on page 189. This is something that I texted my wife. He says,

01:11:55

if we do allow business to steal the micro moments, we disembowel relationships. And I think that

01:12:01

specifically with your 15, the people that you are probably closest to, there are lots of opportunities

01:12:08

for busyness to steal those micro moments when like, I'll just use my kids as an example,

01:12:14

because you can really see it on a kid's face. Like, if they're trying to tell you something,

01:12:19

and then your phone, even if it's like over in the corner and it buzzes and you look at it,

01:12:24

you can see the disappointment on their face. So that was a picture that I got when I read that

01:12:29

section. But I think that this applies to just about everybody that you are close to, like,

01:12:34

recognize that those micro moments are there. And then I texted my wife and I shared that section

01:12:42

of the book. And then I'm like, new rule, no looking at your phone and we're together.

01:12:47

Not just for her, for me too, because you need to recognize that this is actually happening.

01:12:53

And no one would, I'm not going to say out loud, like, hey, this Twitter mention is more important

01:13:00

than you. But that's really what I'm saying when I let that sort of thing happen. So I guess,

01:13:06

if I were to give one piece of advice for once you list out your 15 and you really want to start

01:13:11

building those relationships, it would be put the phone away. Yeah, fair point. And kind of

01:13:16

tangential to this is our next point here, the lisado ratio, which I thought was interesting.

01:13:23

Because I hadn't really thought about this, but man by the name of lisado, he transcribed

01:13:29

some meeting minutes and essentially found that the number of positive comments compared to the

01:13:36

number of negative comments, that ratio could be used to determine whether or not the business was

01:13:41

in a good place or not. And the number, if I remember correctly, where the breakpoint was,

01:13:46

was 2.9. So if you have 2.9 positive comments per one negative comment, you are much more likely to

01:13:55

have a successful business on your hands. And I did think it was interesting that people have

01:14:00

been taking this ratio and then determining what that ratio is for things like your marriage

01:14:06

or a friendship and such. And if I remember, if numbers are sticking in my brain correctly,

01:14:10

5.0, so 5 positive comments for one negative comment was an indicator of a healthy marriage.

01:14:17

So I don't know, I thought this ratio was interesting. I hadn't really thought about that concept

01:14:22

before, but it was an encouragement to think about, okay, within the relationships that I have,

01:14:27

say I've got this list of 15, am I maintaining that I'll call it 3, 3.0 of three positive

01:14:36

comments per one negative? Am I maintaining that? And I don't know that I am because I am not sure

01:14:43

that I've really ever paid attention to it. But it is an interesting idea that I do want to make

01:14:48

myself more aware of. Yeah, exactly. I mean, specifically in a marriage context, because I think

01:14:55

that the people that are closest to you have the greatest potential to hurt you as well, Ed Cole

01:15:02

said it this way, marriage is the closest thing to heaven or hell. You'll know I'm sorry.

01:15:05

He also makes a distinction, by the way, of love being the desire to benefit others at the

01:15:11

expense of self and lust being the desire to benefit self at the expense of others. I think that's

01:15:17

really played out in these positive versus negative comments. Like if you are focusing on

01:15:25

everything that your spouse is doing wrong, this ratio is going to be low. And in that case,

01:15:30

I'd say you're in lust mode where it's like you're the one who's the problem, you need to fix things.

01:15:35

But there's a lot of people in Ed Cole, like he's kind of the father of the men's ministry

01:15:39

movement. So he's worked with lots and lots and lots of people. And he's seen marriages change when

01:15:47

I mean, he's a minister to men specifically. So when the man makes the change and says, hey,

01:15:53

changes the focus instead of like, hey, you need to fix this and this. But what can I do? What can

01:15:59

I change? What do I do that bugs you? You know, and then when you put the other person first,

01:16:05

that naturally is going to produce a lot of the gratitude in those positive comments. But also,

01:16:10

there's another section here about busyness making you more selfish. And he's got statistics of these,

01:16:16

these trainee priests were only 10% stopped to help a man when they were later in a rush,

01:16:20

but 63% stopped when they had more time. And there's a couple things that spoke to me from this

01:16:25

section, specifically with my kids, you know, when you say something like, wait a minute,

01:16:31

that is in a child's mind, specifically a negative comment. You may not think of it that way. But

01:16:37

the point that Tony makes in this book is to pause the busyness, not your kids. And so even if

01:16:42

you're going to measure this, if you were to record your entire conversation, you know, the Amazon

01:16:47

Echo is recording everything that you say and you play it all back. Think about this through the

01:16:52

perspective of the other person, because you may not see that, you know, wait a minute as a as a

01:16:58

negative thing, but it can be because it's showing where your priorities lie. You need to make the

01:17:05

main thing the main thing. Yeah, I use that phrase, pause the busyness, not your kids. And it sounds

01:17:10

kind of extreme, but really like that's what's happening. Like, I think you had an action item at

01:17:15

one point to whenever you were using your phone and somebody, someone was in your presence, you're

01:17:20

going to be saying what you were doing on your phone. Right. That's the acid test. Like, if I'm on

01:17:25

if I'm on Twitter instead of paying attention to you, then I am saying that Twitter is more

01:17:30

important than you, whether that's what I mean to say or not. Right. That was the thing I did.

01:17:35

Oh, you're going to make me bring this up again, aren't you? My oldest Emma. Basically, I told her,

01:17:40

it's okay to ask me what I'm doing on my phone if you see me on my phone. And there's a conversation

01:17:47

you don't really want to have a whole lot. Like, okay, I'm on my phone. Dad, what are you doing?

01:17:52

Oh, I told you it was okay to ask me that question. And I'm on Twitter and I don't want to admit it.

01:17:59

Okay, like that, that'll get to you quick. So given my current state of being aware that I'm back

01:18:08

into a bad habit with that, I should probably say it's okay that she does that again.

01:18:13

There's a lot of value in that because it's just it's making it abundantly clear what is

01:18:17

actually going on. And are you okay with knowing the truth about yourself? That's really what it

01:18:23

comes down to. And I think that that is the difference between somebody who has a growth mindset

01:18:32

and the whole quantified self. Like, that's all built on this idea of, what am I doing?

01:18:37

Not what do I think that I'm doing? And then how can I make improvements to this? How can I

01:18:42

do better? Because we've all got room for improvement, but it's just it's kind of sad to me sometimes

01:18:48

that I see people who just put on the rose colored glasses or maybe they just have resigned themselves

01:18:54

to the fact that like, this is the way things are. There's nothing I can do about this. Things

01:18:58

are never going to change. Jim Rohn said, it will all change for you when you change. And so I want

01:19:03

to know all the things that I'm doing wrong. In fact, I asked my wife the other day. So what

01:19:07

are the things that I do that drive you nuts? She's like, Oh, do I really have to tell you? I'm like,

01:19:11

yes. Because I want to not do those anymore. And yeah, it can be uncomfortable, but it's important.

01:19:21

Yeah, it really is. Change is hard. It's never fun. I get that. Yeah. And actually,

01:19:26

that's another thing that I really like about this book in particular is he's got

01:19:30

the all these different sections. He's got all this information and a lot of books,

01:19:35

like that's where they would end it. But he the last chapter here, he talks about page 229. He says,

01:19:41

we still seem to believe that if we know something and decide something and are sufficiently

01:19:44

motivated, we will change. And he's basically like, that's not going to happen. So he gives you seven

01:19:49

strategies for implementing the personal change. Just real quickly, I'll run through these seven

01:19:54

different strategies just to call them out. So number one, make your goals clear. Number two,

01:19:58

keep it really small. Number three, plan your next step. Number four, use social influence.

01:20:03

Number five, slipstream your habits. Number six, reward, good behavior. And then number seven,

01:20:09

I've titled what the heck. And basically, the idea here is he uses the example of dieting,

01:20:15

where if somebody has something and breaks their diet, they're much more likely to keep overeating,

01:20:20

then they are to say like, okay, well, I've done that. Now I can go back to the way that I should

01:20:25

be acting. And so basically defeating that behavior and recognizing that just because you messed up

01:20:32

once doesn't mean that everything that you've done previously is now out the window. There's value

01:20:36

in establishing these habits, and you're not going to be perfect. But just recognizing the fact that

01:20:42

these are going to produce the change that you are looking for. And if you mess up, give yourself

01:20:46

some grace, don't beat yourself up. Just keep going. Don't say, well, I guess that I'm completely

01:20:52

off the rails now, it didn't work. Just be willing to adjust and repair. And I thought this was great

01:20:58

because it's like, okay, so you've read this, maybe you're convinced of this. Now while you're

01:21:03

convinced before you even put this book down, here are some suggestions for actually translating

01:21:08

this into action. That might be a good place to end it right there. Like this is all about how much

01:21:13

you have going on, how we have this culture of saying how much we have going on, and a lot of

01:21:20

tactics around how to get away from that. And when you work through all of these tactics, and you know

01:21:27

a lot of the aspects that lead up to a too busy life, you have to put certain things in place.

01:21:35

And you have to follow through on those. I mean, this is, we talk about it all the time, maybe every

01:21:40

show about how the action items and the follow up that comes with those and holding each other

01:21:44

accountable to these is one of the best things that comes out of the show. And that is a piece

01:21:49

that he is asking you to do here is decide and actually move forward with some change and don't

01:21:56

just be complacent and just run with status quo of busy. All right, so let's talk action items.

01:22:02

I have three. Mike has a bunch. I probably could have had double, to be honest. You decided to cut it

01:22:10

in half. Yep. All right, so the three I have, and I think I've talked about, I think I've talked

01:22:17

about all of them, I want to stop saying I'm busy and replace that with the phrase I've decided not

01:22:23

to be busy. And I chose that wording carefully, because my hope is that whenever that phrase is

01:22:31

used, it can convey the idea that this is a decision, number one, and that I am deciding against it.

01:22:37

So it does convey those two different aspects to the busy culture or against the busy culture,

01:22:44

if you will. So that's that is number one. I will probably screw that one up a few times,

01:22:49

just saying. Two, I want to list my 15 closest peeps. Like that's a thing that I want to do.

01:22:55

I think there's some value in that just still feels weird, still weird. And then one that I

01:23:00

developed in the middle of recording this, what are my five brand words? I knew that I

01:23:05

wanted to do this, I just didn't get it written down. So I am going to go through with that. I'll

01:23:09

share them next time if I've got them done, because it's been busy. All right, so for me,

01:23:18

I've also got listing out my 15 related to that, how can I give to my 15? So I don't know exactly

01:23:24

how I'm going to do that. Maybe for every person that I identify, I have one specific thing that

01:23:29

I could do to make a deposit instead of a withdrawal. Might be a way to implement that. I've also

01:23:35

put on here a stop saying, wait a minute to my kids. And this really impacted me when I read that.

01:23:40

So I feel like I've kind of already been doing this. But yeah, we should definitely check in on

01:23:46

that next time. I put make time to help people. I forget specifically which section this came from,

01:23:53

but I don't want to be selfish because I'm busy. I want to be able to give more than I take. And I

01:24:02

think that putting aside specific time in order for that to happen is one way to make sure that it

01:24:08

does happen. Kind of along those same lines, there's a, there's a, he mentioned in the first section,

01:24:14

this concept of rules of engagement, which I don't think I've ever really done. So basically,

01:24:22

what this is going to be is clearly written guidelines for if somebody wants me to do X, you know,

01:24:31

then that these are the rules that pertain to me being able to say yes to that sort of a thing.

01:24:37

And I think that being able to define that for side projects, even for things like people want

01:24:43

to meet for coffee or whatever, like I think that if I created rules of engagement around that,

01:24:47

it'd be a lot easier to just look at my calendar be like, oh yeah, I said I said Friday mornings

01:24:50

for this. Okay, Friday mornings are open. You know, so it'd be a lot easier to say yes to the right

01:24:55

things for that as well. So that's kind of my definition of the rules of engagement.

01:25:00

He also mentions creating a monthly plan template, which is I think a really good idea. I've already

01:25:07

done that for my daily thing. So I want to take that a step further and create something to help me

01:25:12

theme my my months. And then the other thing I have on here, he introduces this idea by these

01:25:18

two guys for a balanced scorecard. And I think this specifically pertains in the business world.

01:25:25

But I want to apply this to my own life. So what are the four things basically that I want to

01:25:30

keep score on that are going to be true indicators of whether what I am doing is is working. Going

01:25:38

back to like the four disciplines of execution, you've got the lead measures, you've got the lag

01:25:42

measures. Well, I think when it comes to businesses, even if you're focusing on the lead measures,

01:25:47

you can have 200 different lead measures to be tracking and not have any time to do the actual

01:25:53

work. And so my takeaway from that particular section was that whatever your situation,

01:25:59

organization, whatever, you can distill it down to just the handful of things that are really

01:26:05

moving the needle, the 80 20. And so I want to identify what my four things are.

01:26:09

All right, it's quite the list. That is quite the list. You think you can get through all this in

01:26:14

two weeks? We will see. All right, we'll talk about it next time and go from there. So talk to me

01:26:23

about author style. And what do you rate this? Well, I mentioned at the beginning, I was a very

01:26:29

pleasantly surprised by this book. I really did not expect a whole lot to be honest, kind of figured

01:26:37

that just skimming through it, that it was going to be a rehash of a lot of productivity stuff and

01:26:42

then put in a specific order. And the guy was going to say, Hey, here's my system sort of a thing,

01:26:46

but that's not really what it was at all. Right. It was a lot of great information, a lot of research

01:26:50

behind everything. He did a great job of distilling down the main points, I thought. I really like

01:26:54

the flow of the entire book. I really like how he starts by addressing the main objections for

01:27:00

even reading it in the first place. And he ends with the action steps to make sure strategies to

01:27:04

put this into action. So I really liked a lot of this book. The one thing that is going to keep me

01:27:09

from giving it five stars is the whole section on stopping so productive just because I personally

01:27:14

have an issue with how we defined it. All right. And it's more than just it's more than just the

01:27:18

definition. Like I said, the scarcity mindset versus the abundance mindset. I think that for me,

01:27:25

anyways, like that was a really big revelation. That was something that really changed a lot of

01:27:30

things for the better in my life. And so I think that that's, like I said earlier, when we were

01:27:35

discussing that section, I think it's dangerous. And even if you were to recognize that, you know,

01:27:41

this is a little bit off, maybe there's there's limited value in that that particular section.

01:27:46

But the rest of it, I thought was great. So I'm going to give it four and a half stars.

01:27:49

I can say that I really appreciate the vast number of stories and research that he put into this.

01:27:55

There's a lot there and makes it really hard to argue with the piece that I struggled with was

01:28:03

connecting some of the dots on like, okay, how does this apply to being busy? Like that,

01:28:10

that part I got a little bit confused by to an extent, not a lot, but just to a point there.

01:28:16

I had a number of points where like, okay, well, why are we talking about this? Because this book's

01:28:21

about busyness, right? So I had a few points where I was a little bit thrown off because of that.

01:28:27

Those are minor overall, but I will say I'm going to rate this at a 4.0. And part of the reason for

01:28:33

that is that I really enjoyed reading this, but I can't say that there was any major like, oh, yeah,

01:28:41

that that'll change my life. Like, I really didn't feel like there was, I mean, there's a lot of

01:28:45

little stuff that you can pick up from this, but there was anything major that I felt like was

01:28:50

stand out. You got to read this. This is exactly what you need right now. It doesn't really hit that

01:28:55

spot on the radar for me. So I'm going to put it at the 4.0.

01:28:59

Yeah, that's it. I definitely agree with you on that, by the way. And I think that it's interesting

01:29:03

depending on your position as you read this particular book, because there's a lot of books

01:29:09

that we talked about last time, I think that if we were to go back and reread getting things

01:29:14

done, we're not going to rate that a 5 anymore. But when it's the first time that you're introduced

01:29:19

to a particular subject, like it really can rock your world. For this one, I guess going into it,

01:29:26

I wasn't looking for a radical new idea. But what I found were a lot of great suggestions based on

01:29:33

the number of actionatives that I have. Like, I think that there's a ton of value in this for me,

01:29:38

but it's in the small adjustments to things that I'm currently already doing. Or, you know, maybe

01:29:45

I'm doing them in a little bit different way and the way that he phrased it makes more sense to me.

01:29:49

So I think that, yeah, you're right, depending on the approach that you take to this, and also

01:29:54

your position in life, like that could determine what you get out of this. It's not going to be,

01:30:00

okay, just follow these three steps and your life is going to change forever. But there's

01:30:04

going to be a lot of little things in here. Yes. So upcoming books, we've talked a little bit about

01:30:09

relational books coming up and talked a little bit about family bits. So our next one is actually

01:30:18

a repeat author, which I don't think we've done before, have we? We've not repeated an author,

01:30:22

I don't think. I don't think so. So this is Patrick Linciones, the three big questions for a

01:30:28

frantic family. And I believe the only thing I need to say about this is that it was recommended

01:30:33

by your wife. Yeah, that's a lot of pressure to rate this highly. But I promise to give it a

01:30:40

fair and objective rating. Okay. All right, I'll hold you to that. All right. The one after that

01:30:46

is "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, which is another one of those books

01:30:51

that probably everybody has heard about. And I'm kind of thinking based on our experience with

01:30:58

like the seven habits of how they affected people, thinking girl rich, stuff like that,

01:31:02

even Victor Frankl, that maybe it isn't what I think it is. And so I want to dive into it and

01:31:08

really understand what he's saying. Because everything I've heard about Dale Carnegie has been

01:31:12

real, really positive. But generally speaking, like if you were to go out on the street and take

01:31:17

a poll of what people think about "How to Win Friends and Influence People," I would say that

01:31:20

the public perception of this book is not that positive. So I want to get to the heart of this one.

01:31:26

I feel like this book is a polarizing book. Exactly. Yep. Some people absolutely love it,

01:31:32

which I feel like are usually upper management CEO types. Maybe I'm off on that. And a lot of

01:31:38

other people don't get it and think it's a terrible book. Like that's my perception. Could be. I mean,

01:31:43

you remember what I thought of who moved my cheese. So fair. All right. And then for gap books,

01:31:48

I'm reading "Profit First," which is really written to business owners. And the basic idea is set

01:31:56

aside money for your profit first. If you were to apply this in a personal context, it's set aside

01:32:01

money for your savings account before you try to pay your bills. It's pretty simple and straightforward,

01:32:06

but it's an entertaining read. Yeah. I saw the pumpkin plan on our recommended list. And that

01:32:11

one may actually make it into the mix sooner rather than later, just because I was looking at

01:32:18

all of our recommended books on Amazon. And noticed that that one has a large number of reviews,

01:32:23

and yet it's still a 5.0 rating on that particular one. So that's kind of rare for that level. My

01:32:30

gap book is Unstuck by Matt Perman. This is a pre-launch advanced copy that I was given. I think I

01:32:37

mentioned this last time, but I'm actually diving into it in depth. I guess it's tonight. So I'm

01:32:43

jumping into that one and plan to chronicle my path through it. I'll note he's the author of

01:32:49

What's Best Next, the book we did last time. So kind of a follow-up to that one. But something

01:32:54

you'll notice with some of these is we're starting to pull from our recommended book list quite a bit.

01:32:59

So if you have one that you want to get onto that list, bookworm.fm/recommend, fill out that form,

01:33:05

send it in, hits my email, and then I do my best to get it into that recommended list on the site

01:33:10

as soon as I can. And if you want to see the ones that are already recommended, again, bookworm.fm/list,

01:33:15

and you can see all of those there as well. And if you are following along and want to help support

01:33:20

the show in some way, if you go to that list, it has the Amazon link. Those are affiliate links.

01:33:26

So if you want to pick up any of these books, you do us a favor and click on those particular

01:33:31

links, and we get a little bit of a kickback from that. Yeah, and you can also help us out

01:33:34

if you are so inclined by going to iTunes and leaving us a review. KCRW is still the number one

01:33:42

result for bookworm, which made it my personal mission to dethrone them. So please help me out.

01:33:48

And then as we talked about at the beginning, if you want to join the podcast book club,

01:33:53

the Internet's largest book club, unofficially. The unofficial largest internet book club.

01:34:00

Yeah, club.bookworm.fm. Like if you are all right. You got it right. All right, cool.

01:34:06

Well done, Mike. Yeah, I would love to see some of those conversations take off there. I think

01:34:12

that's a cool idea. But if you are reading along and want to join us on the next journey,

01:34:19

the three big questions for a frantic family by Patrick Linceyone, and we will dive into that one