Bookworm Transcripts

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How's Mike doing good? How are you?

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I am doing well. I see a note about new podcast gear in the set outline.

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I think maybe I texted you a picture when I got this thing, so I was so excited about it anyways,

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but yeah, I am running all of my audio stuff now through a channel strip, which is a DBX 286S,

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which I had no idea what it was until I started getting frustrated because I didn't have enough gain in my,

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my Audient ID4 interface to power the the Sure Beta 87A the way I wanted it to.

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I was getting a lot of like, hissing in the background, and you can remove that after the fact, but it just

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bugged me every time I recorded anything.

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So I started looking at preamps. Preamps are really expensive turns out.

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I quickly was priced out of my price range and found this thing and it was so cheap audio gear wise.

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It was like 200 bucks. I was like, there's no way this thing works, but I have a local audio place nearby me

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I think I've mentioned before, Pixel Pro Audio, and I really like those guys.

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They know what they're talking about and they basically will sell me anything and if I don't like it for any reason,

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I'll just bring it back because they know I'll be back again later.

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There you go.

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So they said, yeah, take it for spin. And I really like it.

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The thing I really like about this in addition to the preamp, which makes my mic sound better,

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there's a couple of things that happen prior to the audio even getting to my interface.

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So before it even gets into logic, it's already got a little bit of compression.

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It's already got a little bit of a de-essing, so it's less harsh.

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It's got a little bit of an enhancement, not a whole lot.

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The thing I absolutely love about it though is this expander gate.

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And since you have kids at home who may or may not decide to melt down whenever you record something,

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you should look into this too because this noise gate is magical.

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I have this little light on my channel strip right below my monitor.

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It's red most of the time, which is where I have it set.

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So anything in the background, like the home of the air conditioner or whatever, you're not going to hear.

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When I start talking, it turns green, letting the sound in.

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But what I can't figure out how this even is possible is that it does a phenomenal job of removing all the background noise,

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even when the noise gate is open and it's recording my audio.

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I'm not an audio engineer, so I have no idea how it does it, but it's magic.

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Yeah.

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Basically, it drops out anything that's under a certain decibel range.

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That's fundamentally how it works.

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So anything that, say you have it set at, I'm trying to recall a normal number on it because I know where it sits on the gauge

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whenever I work on audio, but it's like two, three, maybe five decibels, maybe it's even up to ten sometimes.

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But it's basically dropping anything below that level out entirely.

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So that way it doesn't ever make it into the final recording or out into the system.

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So what I know is that I don't have to worry about anymore people making noise in the background.

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Like my kids can be playing literally outside my office door and you would not hear them with this thing.

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It's crazy.

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I will also say that the Sure Beta 87A that you are now using, right?

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That's the right mic?

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Yep.

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That's also the mic that I'm on currently.

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And those particular microphones, if you get the gain set correctly on those, they do a pretty good job of dropping out anything that's not right on the mic as well.

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So depending on how you have your settings on it, I'm not using a gate or a limiter on mine at all.

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And I've managed to fine-tune the gate, not the gate, the gain and compressor on it such that it drops a lot of that stuff out.

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So for those listening, if you're not into audio gear or any audio engineering at all, this is all Greek, I'm sorry.

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But if you do any recording at all ever, go by yourself a DBX 286S now and thank me later.

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Or buy a soundboard.

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So here's the other route you can go, Mike.

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So you went that direction, which is totally cool.

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And depending on how you want it set up, that is the better route, depending on what you want to accomplish.

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On my end, I simply bought a full-on soundboard that has a built-in compressor.

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It's got the whole EQ settings.

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I can run effects on it if I wanted to.

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But it comes with preamps and a lot of gain to it.

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So Mike's like a high LPR40, that thing is super gain hungry.

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And you can run those on this particular one.

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With the Beta 87, it's fairly gain hungry too, not nearly as much, I don't think.

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But even on this particular board, I can drop the pad off of it and run it at like a quarter on it.

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So I still got a 75% higher I could go with this particular one.

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So it's, and what am I using?

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It's the Behringer 1204 USB.

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So it's a USB soundboard.

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So I'm running everything through that.

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And because it's a full soundboard, I actually pull the output off of my computer and run it as a separate input

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into that board.

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And then I'm picking and choosing what I want to go into my headphones out of all of that.

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So I'm like treating my output on it like a full monitor setup.

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So that's way more information than most people wanted.

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But that's the route that I'm going to get a lot of those features.

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But you have a lot more in your setup than what I do.

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Yeah, but nobody cares about that.

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What they really care about is the bookmarks that you mentioned in the last episode.

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So I have follow up for this also.

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I think I sent you a picture, but I have bookmarks right here.

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I'm going to grab one.

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Okay, wave it in front of the microphone.

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You can't hear it.

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That's a bookworm bookmark.

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On the front it has the logo and it says the Internet's largest book club with a disclaimer

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that this is all me and you assume no responsibility.

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And then on the back there's the bookworm logo with the glasses, like the long skinny one on the top of the website.

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And these are not just your run of the mill cheap little bookmarks.

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These are two by six.

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So they're two inches wide and then six inches tall.

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And they are the thickest cardboard mat I could find from you printing.

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So I think they started at like eight or ten.

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And I'm like, I don't want some flimsy little bookmark to be marking my page in my books.

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I'm going to go all up.

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Yeah.

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So I have these are 16 pound or whatever the mat ones in there.

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They're really nice.

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They don't bend.

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They're not going to get ruined just because you're using them in normal day to day use.

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Also, it turns out when you order stuff off the Internet, if you buy like a hundred of them,

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it's fairly expensive.

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If you buy like a thousand, it's only a couple bucks more.

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So I have a thousand of these bookmarks waiting to be given out to people.

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Now, I'm not going to tell you how you can get them yet.

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You're going to have to tune in next episode to find out how you can buy one of these from where you are right now.

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But I will say that I will bring these with me to max stock this summer.

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So if you listen to the podcast, come say hi and I will give you a bookworm bookmark.

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Nice.

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I did not know you got a thought.

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I saw that you sent me the preliminary on these things and a thousand.

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Holy buckets, Mike.

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Yeah, I got this great big box.

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And as soon as I got it, I'm like, this maybe was a mistake.

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I opened it up and there's just bookmarks for days.

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Wow.

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Like I said, it was only a couple bucks more to get a thousand as opposed to a hundred and fifty.

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So I'm like, go big or go home.

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That's nuts.

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Well, now you're going to have to tune in next time to figure out how to get these.

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I know the answer to this.

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Yeah, next episode is episode 50.

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So we've got something special planned.

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You're definitely going to want to catch that one.

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Okay.

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So we got a new podcast here.

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We got bookworm bookmarks coming down the pipeline.

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Say that five times fast.

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Bookworm bookmarks.

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See, it's hard.

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You got a couple of other things here for follow up outside of fun toys and such.

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Yep.

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So real follow up.

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I've got use and instead of but and I've also got eliminate fixed opinion words and use

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personal words.

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These are both kind of aspirational action items that there's no way you're going to be able

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to hold me accountable to these, but I have done these.

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Kind of typical for us, right?

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Yeah, exactly.

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I do have some real ones for this time.

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Quote unquote real ones.

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Right.

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And then the other one was to invite people to tell their wins.

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This I haven't officially implemented.

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I will actually do this today though later on.

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So I think I mentioned in the last episode that I've got a discipleship group of guys

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at my church where I think this would be perfect.

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And I've forgotten the last couple times that we've met our meetings.

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We tend to go like wire to wire, trying to cram everything in anyways, but I'll be a

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little bit more time this afternoon and it's fresh of mine.

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So I'm definitely going to implement this this afternoon.

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Okay.

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And then you've got some and I want to know right away.

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These are not in correct order.

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I want to know what are your five brand words.

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You want me to start there?

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Okay.

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Yep.

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This is follow up from like two episodes ago.

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So we got it.

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We got to get this one or three maybe.

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I don't know.

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I did it.

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That's that's at least a step in the right direction.

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I suppose this comes all the way back from I'm going to have to look it up now.

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It is from doing the book busy.

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Yep.

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So whatever episode busy was that would have been 46.

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It looks like so episode 46.

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So this being 49.

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I'm now what three episodes behind on this one, but at least you got it done.

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I got it done.

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All right.

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So five brand words and just as a refresher, like the purpose of this was to change your

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brand from one of exhaustion and being overworked and constantly hustling from one thing to the

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next and just being overwhelmed.

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So changing away from that and then using these as a way to guide your conversations

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and what it is that you do day to day.

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So five brand words.

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Number one, authentic.

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There was a whole list of these in the book.

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I didn't necessarily follow them to the letter, but I picked a couple of my own, but one of

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those was authentic and I have kind of a push for this across a lot of the platforms and

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conversations that I have.

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Like I want to be very real with people.

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I don't like it when people sugarcoat things.

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I'm pretty particular with making sure or hunting down when people are trying to put

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one over on me and I don't want to be that person.

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So I've tried for a long time to be very real with things and I want that to continue to

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be something that comes out.

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So number one is authentic.

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Number two, I feel like this one fits me pretty well.

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Entrepreneurial.

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I feel like I'm always looking for an angle to develop my business or a new business in

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some way.

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Like I'm always trying to build something that could be helpful to other people and that

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would potentially drive a future income.

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Doesn't have to be right away, but could be in the future.

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So I feel like I'm always trying to build or develop something in some way.

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So that would be number two.

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Number three, I deviated a little bit from the list and just wrote down white space.

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And this is something that if you remember, I don't remember if it was two episodes ago

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now, maybe last episode about developing white space in our family, that has become

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something that's really important to me is making sure that we have the space to just

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go play as a family and not necessarily just hustling quite a bit.

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So this maybe coincides a little bit with the book, Busy, or directly contradicts the

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cultural norm there.

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But we really like to have those buffer zones.

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And although that kind of started with our family, I've been seeing that start to morph

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into, you know, the timelines that I put together for clients on development projects.

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It can come in on the amount of time I allocate towards certain tasks in a day, like how much

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time am I going to spend on email?

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Or you know, even, you know, I'm going to go run a gig for a local band, run sound for

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them.

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Like, okay, well, I'm going to give myself an extra amount of time before and after that,

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just to show up early and just have conversations and have some fun.

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So, you know, creating those buffer zones in that white space between things, I've found

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to be something that I really see as important and want to help other people to develop as

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well.

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So authentic entrepreneurial white space, number four is innovative, which can kind

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of go with entrepreneurial.

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But I like to be or try to find ways to think outside the box and find a different angle

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on or a different way of doing something that is already being done, which would lead me

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into number five of being a problem solver.

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So I can see how there's a pretty strong theme here of trying to be someone who's very real

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and finding something new in that.

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So that comes out and being innovative, trying to find a new way to do things.

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But also, I just really love helping people solve their problems.

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Maybe that's why I do the development thing because someone brings a problem with their

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website or, you know, you name it and it is now my goal to try to meet that and solve

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that problem in some way.

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So there you have it, Mike.

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Authentic entrepreneurial white space, innovative problem solver.

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There you go.

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Nice.

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I will send every website problem I have over to you now so you can solve that.

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All right.

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I have three follow up items.

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That was number three that Mike made me jump ahead to.

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So do I have to do them backwards then if you made me start at the end?

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No, you can pick whatever other ones you want.

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I just wanted to make sure you did that one.

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I'm going to go backwards.

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All right.

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So number two is avoid arguments.

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I think I've been better about this.

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No, you haven't.

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I haven't.

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I'm just kidding.

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I'm creating an argument right now.

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See, I even responded with a question.

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No, this comes from our last book of how to win friends and influence people of trying

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not to prove that I'm right, especially with my clients.

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So trying to guide them instead of saying, no, this is wrong.

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And I don't feel like I've done a lot of arguments in the past, but it is a thing that

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I wouldn't say has never happened.

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So is it actually done?

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I don't know.

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I'm going to mark it off and say yes, but I haven't been having arguments as much lately.

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There we go.

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Success.

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Number one on my list since I'm going backwards is developing a checklist for client calls

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for right before I jump on a client call.

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I did do this.

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I have a checklist of things that I am going to do as far as doing a little bit of research

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about the company, what are their websites, what kind of design and stuff is involved

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with their current process, and then looking over what they have sent me already because

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they usually send me a series of what their problem is that they're trying to solve in

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some way, what their idea is and trying to go through some of that.

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I've been using it for a few calls already and it has sped them up significantly, which

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I was not expecting.

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I was more just trying to use that as a way to understand their company quicker.

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And I have found that if I start a call, Mike, and just say, you know, I was doing some research

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about your site and how you guys do things.

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And this is my view on that as it pertains to your idea here.

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For whatever reason, saying that and being able to be very genuine in that because I

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did do that, they trust me quicker on what's going on.

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They trust my opinion on things.

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And I get more of those projects and they seem to go way smoother.

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That's just been my experience so far.

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Awesome.

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That has had a much bigger impact than I was expecting.

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So if you do client work, I highly recommend this.

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Just saying.

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Sweet.

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Go Joe.

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Go follow up.

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Follow up.

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Check.

00:16:29

Which brings us to today's book, Peek by Andrew Erickson.

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This was a listener recommendation.

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I tried to figure out who recommended this and couldn't find it for whatever reason.

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Maybe I deleted the email because this is back when we did recommendations via email.

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I could not find that.

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So sorry, whoever recommended this, you're free to reach out to me and say, "Hey, that

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was me."

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Whoever recommended this, definitely recommend another book.

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I like this one.

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So yes, Peek, tagline on this is secrets from the new science of expertise.

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Very in-depth book about the process of becoming an expert in your field.

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And take your pick on what field you would like to talk about.

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I'm guessing that there was some piece of that field discussed somewhere in this book.

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I was very comprehensive on covering a lot of different sectors.

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Yeah, there was tons of stuff in this one.

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I put down some talking points just because there wasn't anything.

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How long was this yesterday or today when I opened up the document?

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You always fill this in.

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I never touch this.

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Yeah.

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Well, I feel kind of bad because this one I was like, "Well, we should probably condense

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this down and skip certain sections."

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And I didn't feel like there was anything in here that we should skip.

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That's also good.

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Okay.

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People just try to crank through all nine of these as quick as we can.

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First one here is the power of purposeful practice.

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And this kind of sets the stage for everything that he's going to talk about.

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What's interesting here though is that he doesn't really get to the gold standard, that's

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section four, till a little bit later.

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But he does talk about the usual approach that people take when they try to learn things.

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And he's got some stories in this first chapter which explain why those initial or those usual

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approaches don't really work.

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And then some purposeful practice examples of how people have used this to achieve some

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pretty crazy results.

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But like I said, he's kind of holding back a little bit because he's going to give you

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the formula a little bit later.

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But even right away at this beginning section of the book, he's got me hooked.

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He starts off with this story about a guy named Steve who randomly is trying to remember

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and memorize strings of numbers, random numbers.

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And when they start doing this experiment with this guy, he can only remember like nine

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in a row.

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But he keeps doing it.

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He basically plateaus and he's frustrated with himself because he wants to get better

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than he breaks through.

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And eventually two years later, he can remember 82 random characters in a row, which is nuts

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when you think about that.

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Like I have trouble remembering a phone number, seven characters.

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I honestly think that a lot of those security codes that you get from places for two factor

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authentication, they're never more than six characters because it seems like six is like

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the logical place where yeah, people can remember that and anything above that.

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Like there's a good chance they're going to get it wrong.

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So 82 characters.

00:19:13

What?

00:19:14

Yep.

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And this is a completely, I don't want to say completely useless, but kind of like you're

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not going to make a living with this type of skill probably.

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But it just shows you the kind of thing that people kind of struggle with a little bit

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in their everyday life.

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It's not enough to really think like, oh, I should really develop this skill and fix

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this problem that I have.

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But everybody can relate to this.

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Like they've all experienced that.

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It's like, oh, yeah, just tell me the number and then I can't remember it.

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So it just shows you like you have trouble with this one little thing.

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But here's an example of a guy who's gone so much beyond that.

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And it's because he's not taking this usual approach, memorizing these things.

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He's applying this whole idea of purposeful practice to get better.

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Yeah, I really liked this section just because it explained that you don't have limits.

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And this will we'll get into this in the next one.

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But we tend to think there are certain limits to what the human brain can accomplish.

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And this is a good example of that because we typically didn't really think about how

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many numbers you could hold in your memory before repeating them.

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I feel like I personally have been better at the whole number of memorization thing than

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most like I have a handful of numbers in my head that are non typical like driver's license

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numbers and more social security numbers than I probably should have in my brain like all

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of my kids, my wife and mine.

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And I've even had cases where there's a couple of social security numbers in my head because

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someone rattled it off just to prove that I couldn't remember it.

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And I did.

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So I have a few numbers in my head just because of that.

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But that's more long term not even like this whole test was for short term memory.

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And they go on to explain later on the book that even he gets to the point where he's

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recalling 82 numbers or whatever it was 80 something.

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And since that time that number has been grown to over 300 that the records continue

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to be broken on how far people can go with that.

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That just kind of blows my mind like to your point.

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Why?

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Like what am I supposed to do with this?

00:21:32

Yeah, it's a cool trick.

00:21:34

It's a fun party, you know, trick of sorts, but I don't really see the usefulness in

00:21:39

that.

00:21:40

But it did show a good point in that if you are smart with the way that you practice,

00:21:47

which I, you know, this is what I took as the point here is if you're smart with the way

00:21:51

that you practice, then you can improve on any goal or tasks that you set your set yourself

00:21:58

to.

00:21:59

Exactly.

00:22:00

So the usual approach and he has another person in this section, Renee, who's not able

00:22:04

to memorize that much, they repeated the same experiment and she plateaued a long time before

00:22:09

Steve did.

00:22:10

And they're like, well, why is that the usual approach is to get to a quote unquote acceptable

00:22:15

level and then plateau because that's good enough.

00:22:20

And at that point, additional traditional practice doesn't help you.

00:22:26

You have to push yourself if you want to continue to get better.

00:22:29

So a step up from that is this purposeful practice, which is different than what he calls

00:22:33

naive practice, which is just doing something a bunch of times.

00:22:36

And I think this is the thing that's really important is we can probably all identify

00:22:40

situations in our lives where we've applied this naive practice.

00:22:45

We've hit a plateau.

00:22:46

We're like, oh, that's as far as I can go.

00:22:48

Maybe somebody can go further, but that's it for me.

00:22:50

And really his point is like, no, that's just the tip of the iceberg.

00:22:54

Like there's a whole lot more ground to take in this particular area if you really want

00:22:57

to, but you have to approach it the right way.

00:23:00

And the thing that Steve used to help him remember this stuff, and this is really the

00:23:04

thing that was interesting to me in this section, is like your short term memory is limited.

00:23:08

You've only got so much RAM in your biological computer, but you can create these mnemonics

00:23:13

or these mental modes to help you transfer that into long term memory.

00:23:17

And then that exponentially increases what you're able to get done.

00:23:20

And the purpose of practice is the thing that allows you to recognize these patterns, which

00:23:25

are there.

00:23:26

So a lot of it is like awareness.

00:23:27

It's just like seeing this stuff for what it really is as opposed to just a bunch of

00:23:31

random numbers.

00:23:32

Yeah, I think this this moves us into the second here of harnessing adaptability because so

00:23:40

much of what we've known historically is that, you know, you're born within an innate talent

00:23:46

and you can only be as good as what you're born with.

00:23:48

Like that has been a, we know now a myth for a long time.

00:23:52

And the second section, he really gets into some of the, like the neuroscience behind some

00:24:00

of this with homeostasis and plasticity of the brain and how you can, if you focus on

00:24:06

a certain area, continue to get better at it.

00:24:09

I believe this is a section where he brought up the London taxis, taxi drivers and how

00:24:15

certain parts of their physical brain are larger than the normal human being.

00:24:22

And the hippocampus, that whole section was like the spatial recognition part of the brain.

00:24:28

And number one, London taxi drivers, holy buckets, you have to remember a lot.

00:24:34

Yeah.

00:24:35

Like that was intense whenever he was explaining some of the details that those particular drivers

00:24:42

have to remember or in the tests that they go through to even get their license.

00:24:46

That was just bonkers to me.

00:24:48

But I thought it showed a really cool aspect of how the brain can evolve and adjust to

00:24:56

being deliberately practiced on a certain area.

00:25:00

So I thought it was kind of cool.

00:25:01

Yeah.

00:25:02

I mean, necessity is the mother of invention, right?

00:25:05

Like if you're going to be a taxi driver in London, you have to learn this stuff.

00:25:08

So your brain adapts so that you can learn this stuff.

00:25:11

On page 47, he says, "The reason that most people don't possess these extraordinary physical

00:25:15

capabilities isn't because they don't have the capacity for them, but rather because

00:25:19

they are satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that

00:25:23

is required to get out of it.

00:25:25

They live in the world of good enough."

00:25:27

And now this whole idea of homeostasis, he does a good job of explaining this.

00:25:30

I had no idea what this was before I read the book, but I feel like I kind of understand

00:25:34

it now.

00:25:35

Okay.

00:25:36

So I'm going to talk about it like an expert on a podcast.

00:25:38

No, I'm just kidding.

00:25:39

Perfect.

00:25:40

So homeostasis is the tendency of a system to act in a way that maintains its own stability.

00:25:45

So how does that apply to your brain changing or your body changing?

00:25:48

Well, your body is going to try to maintain a status quo.

00:25:53

And if you push your body, your muscles and your cells are forced to change and find

00:25:57

a new comfort zone.

00:25:58

This is what exercise does.

00:26:00

Okay.

00:26:01

So when your body is pushed to the point where homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the

00:26:05

body has to respond with changes which are intended to reestablish that homeostasis.

00:26:10

That new normal.

00:26:12

And this works in your brain too because your brain and it, like in your body, you would

00:26:15

use this to develop muscle, for example.

00:26:17

But your brain requires these networks and develops new neurons which creates new connections

00:26:23

and it produces myelin, which is something that we learned about in deep work by Kale

00:26:28

Newport, I believe it was.

00:26:30

Myelin is the substance around your nerve cells that allows them to fire faster and

00:26:35

cleaner.

00:26:36

And in this book, he mentions that it allows them to fire up to 10 times faster.

00:26:40

So it's the stuff that allows your brain to work better, but then also it's building

00:26:44

your brain.

00:26:45

That's just why the hippocampus and the London taxi drivers grew.

00:26:48

And this is a really cool idea because it means that like London taxi drivers, this

00:26:53

wasn't when they were six, 10, 12 years old.

00:26:56

I mean, they're grown adults and they're still able to change their state.

00:27:00

Now a lot of the research behind the brain that I've heard in the past is like by the

00:27:03

time you're 12, the majority of this is developed or whatever.

00:27:08

And so I think if you read those stats, you can be like, oh, well, I kind of missed my

00:27:11

chance to develop my brain to the maximum capacity for the rest of my life.

00:27:16

And really this section is saying that no, like your brain is always changing, your body

00:27:20

is always changing.

00:27:21

And so if you apply this idea of purposeful practice, you can make it change in the way

00:27:25

that you want and develop the skills that you want to have.

00:27:27

As long as you do it the right way, that was the takeaway I had from a lot of this is,

00:27:32

and it didn't even translate into an action item for real.

00:27:35

I don't think, you know, for me.

00:27:38

These items were tough to come by in this particular book, but seeing how there's not

00:27:45

really a timeline that could lead you to the point where you can't get better.

00:27:52

There are obviously some things that like, I will never be a better swimmer than Michael

00:27:57

Phelps guaranteed.

00:27:59

I do not have the physical makeup for that.

00:28:02

So he has a definite edge from a physical stance than I do.

00:28:08

So I will never keep up with him.

00:28:10

Well, we'll get into that in a little bit, but I would argue against that because what

00:28:15

matters is the approach that you take.

00:28:16

So just the fact that Michael Phelps is born with the DNA that he has means nothing if

00:28:21

he's not applying the same purposeful practice that you are.

00:28:24

Now I know a little bit about Michael Phelps and his regimens.

00:28:26

So yeah, there's no way you're going to catch him because he's got a disciplined machine.

00:28:29

Like he's got this purposeful practice down to a science.

00:28:32

So given where he is now, where you are now, if you both apply this, like you'll never

00:28:35

catch him, but he uses examples even in the physical arena of sports of people who like,

00:28:41

if you're five foot tall, it's going to be hard for you to make it to the NBA.

00:28:44

But that doesn't mean you can't.

00:28:45

Like if you apply purposeful practice, you literally can achieve any goal that you want,

00:28:49

which is really exciting.

00:28:50

Like Alan Iverson, good luck.

00:28:53

Super short dude, but he'll kill you on the floor.

00:28:56

Yeah, exactly.

00:28:58

One other thing I want to call out here is the whole section about the musicians.

00:29:02

He talks a lot about musicians and in particular violinists, which I liked because I grew up

00:29:08

playing violin.

00:29:09

You're not biased on this at all, are you?

00:29:11

No, not at all.

00:29:12

Well, it resonated with me because he talks about the changes that happen as you practice

00:29:17

the violin in particular.

00:29:18

And I grew up learning the Suzuki method, which is a lot about memorization.

00:29:22

I remember when I was 12 years old, I had like eight volumes of music memorized.

00:29:26

I could play like with all these four seasons from memory.

00:29:28

And I would do that in front of people and they'd just be like, how can you do that?

00:29:32

And I recognize now after reading this book that like, I wasn't special.

00:29:36

Like I just applied this principle of purposeful practice.

00:29:39

I had a good teacher who taught me these fundamentals and I just did them every day.

00:29:43

Right.

00:29:44

And that purposeful practice is what allowed me to memorize all this stuff and develop

00:29:47

the musical year that I now have.

00:29:49

And I'm grateful that my parents had me stick with that when I was younger.

00:29:53

I mean, there's all sorts of people who were like, oh, I wish I would have stayed playing

00:29:56

piano or whatever.

00:29:58

But really it also doesn't matter when you start.

00:30:00

Like it is easier when you start because I started when I was five years old.

00:30:04

And I took lessons up until the time I was 18 and I still play today.

00:30:08

Like the stuff that was instilled in me from five to 18 is carrying over through the rest

00:30:12

of my life.

00:30:13

That's a good foundation that I had.

00:30:14

But just because you don't have that foundation doesn't mean you can't do this.

00:30:18

That's the thing about this book that's really exciting to me is like, it doesn't matter

00:30:22

where you start, whether you're 15 or 55, just where are you going to go right now?

00:30:28

Like what are you going to do right now going forward that's going to produce the results

00:30:31

that you want?

00:30:32

Because you're in control.

00:30:33

Like you're the captain of your own ship.

00:30:35

All you have to do is apply this purposeful practice.

00:30:38

And whenever you hit that plateau or that ceiling, because you're going to hit it at

00:30:41

some point, recognize that that's not the end of the line.

00:30:44

That's just an obstacle for you to overcome.

00:30:46

But the musicians part here, I really like this because that's a great example of learning

00:30:51

to develop this purposeful practice on a regular basis.

00:30:54

If you were to discipline yourself, regardless of your age, to learn how to play an instrument,

00:30:58

you're practicing purposeful practice every day.

00:31:02

And I think that that skill, that purposeful practice, like that deep work that Kel Newport

00:31:06

would talk about, that translates to just about any other area.

00:31:11

So if you read this book and you really like the principle behind it, like apply it to

00:31:15

whatever domain you want, but just do it over and over and over again.

00:31:20

And then as you do that, as we're talking about in this particular chapter, homeostasis,

00:31:24

the plasticity of the brain, like your body is going to adapt to develop the capacity for

00:31:29

the thing that you want to do.

00:31:31

Which brings us to part three of mental representations, because I think that's exactly what's going

00:31:37

on.

00:31:38

Like this is something I've referred to quite a bit as connecting the dots.

00:31:41

You know, mental representations are basically little tiny pieces that you create and become

00:31:48

so ingrained in the way that you do things that they then become building blocks to develop

00:31:53

even more mental representations or connect even more dots.

00:31:57

And there are a lot of ways that you can think through this, but you know, coming from my

00:32:01

world of development, like I have a very large number of these mental representations around

00:32:08

ways to put code blocks together.

00:32:11

It doesn't necessarily come down to syntax on how do you actually write the code anymore

00:32:17

for me?

00:32:18

Because I've done that so much that it's not a thing that I have to think through.

00:32:21

I start thinking through logistics on how data transfers.

00:32:25

Now that may be over the top of your head for some people, but essentially what it is is

00:32:30

you're memorizing bits over time that then help develop into bigger bits.

00:32:36

The classic example here is learning to read.

00:32:39

You learn letters and letters become your mental representations that then develop into

00:32:45

another mental representation of a word.

00:32:48

And then that builds into a sentence and then sentences into paragraphs and then, you know,

00:32:53

entire essays, books, and then it continues to develop beyond this.

00:32:58

But each step of that process is a mental representation.

00:33:03

And you know, the point in the book ends up being that if you want to improve on an area,

00:33:10

then you need to determine what these mental representations are that you need to develop

00:33:16

and then continue to build on top of them.

00:33:17

And that is the mechanical process that you go through to build into your practice routines

00:33:25

that continue to push you towards that expert level of experience in a certain realm.

00:33:30

Yeah.

00:33:31

Mental representations are basically patterns that help you to remember things.

00:33:35

And like the code example, another example would be scales for a musician.

00:33:39

Yeah.

00:33:40

Another example would be chess openings.

00:33:42

This is where he talked a lot about chess.

00:33:44

He's kind of obsessed with chess.

00:33:46

Yeah.

00:33:47

Yeah, he is.

00:33:48

And I like that though, because I think that that's a great example.

00:33:51

I mean, I grew up playing chess.

00:33:53

I went to tournaments and stuff.

00:33:55

I totally understand what he's talking about where he mentions that there's all these

00:34:00

different patterns in chess.

00:34:01

And specifically, there's different openings in chess.

00:34:04

So there's only a certain number of good moves you can make at the beginning.

00:34:10

And there's whole books written, which are just filled with these openings where if you

00:34:14

open with this, then you counter with this.

00:34:17

And so good chess players, the first part of the game is automatic.

00:34:22

They just choose the opening that they're going to use.

00:34:24

The person chooses the response they're going to use and like the first 10 moves, like there's

00:34:28

no thought that that's required for the most part.

00:34:32

And what's really interesting is when you play somebody who's really good at chess and

00:34:35

they open with a particular opening and you respond with something that's completely crazy,

00:34:41

it breaks their brain.

00:34:43

They look at you and they just have to stop.

00:34:47

These guys, maybe they've played thousands of hours of chess and they're really, really

00:34:52

good and they can figure out anything.

00:34:53

And then you just do something that's out of the ordinary and it's like, whoa, what

00:34:56

are you doing?

00:34:57

Put on the breaks.

00:34:59

Let's figure out what's going on here.

00:35:00

Because you've broken the mental model, you've broken the pattern and then they have to figure

00:35:05

it out.

00:35:06

So these patterns, what they do is they allow you to accurately size up the situation quickly

00:35:11

and identify strengths and weaknesses, which is what's happening in the game of chess when

00:35:14

you do these openings.

00:35:16

And it also gives you the ability to zero in on individual details and pieces, which

00:35:20

is what you force people to do when you do something out of the ordinary.

00:35:23

It's like, okay, so now I really have to figure out what's going on here.

00:35:26

And then you have to look at like each individual piece on the board.

00:35:29

And again, there's different patterns that are applied to this.

00:35:32

So you know, like if your king is castled on the right side of the board and you've

00:35:35

got certain pieces in front of it, like it's fairly well protected, you don't need to

00:35:38

worry about whether that pawn is in the right place.

00:35:42

But it is interesting how like when you watch somebody playing a game of chess, especially

00:35:46

at a high level, you can kind of see like the efficiency that's happening there is pretty

00:35:52

crazy because at any time when they make a move, it's impossible for them to fully consider

00:35:57

every single piece on the chessboard, they have to rely on these patterns, which is why

00:36:03

computers can sometimes beat the best players in the world because they can analyze all

00:36:07

the patterns at the same time.

00:36:08

But also like the ability to think outside the box and go around the patterns is pretty

00:36:13

cool too.

00:36:14

One of the things that they mention in here is that you need to have options.

00:36:19

They give another example with the mental representations with the doctors where they assimilate the

00:36:24

facts about the patient, then they recall the relevant medical knowledge and they use the

00:36:27

facts and the knowledge to identify possible diagnoses and choose the right one.

00:36:31

But a common mistake that he mentioned that a lot of doctors make is that they fail to

00:36:35

generate multiple options.

00:36:36

It's that confirmation bias that we read about in whatever book that was.

00:36:41

Man, so many books.

00:36:42

I started thinking clearly.

00:36:43

That's what it was.

00:36:44

Rob DeBelly, I think.

00:36:45

Yeah, yeah.

00:36:46

That was really interesting to me too is like, so these mental models, mental representations,

00:36:51

yes, they do make it easy to accurately identify what's going on in all of these different

00:36:56

informations.

00:36:57

But in the case of a doctor, when it's life and death, you have to be able to break away

00:37:00

from those mental models and not get sucked into.

00:37:03

Well, this is what's going on here.

00:37:05

Like you really need to understand all the details.

00:37:07

A lot of interesting things with patterns, I think.

00:37:10

And again, he talks about chess a lot in the book.

00:37:14

And I don't see that as a bad thing.

00:37:16

I played chess quite a bit in elementary and high school.

00:37:20

So I have a thing for chess as well.

00:37:23

I haven't played it in recent years, just because I don't really know a lot of people

00:37:28

that play it.

00:37:29

So yes, I am with you on the whole chess thing.

00:37:32

I totally get-- and I like that he talked about it quite a bit.

00:37:35

Chess is one of those games where it's very quantifiable as far as how good you are and

00:37:41

obviously who wins or not.

00:37:43

But it's an interesting game.

00:37:46

So I'm fascinated by it.

00:37:47

You have another point here under mental representations for two forms of writing.

00:37:50

I thought this was cool because I write a lot.

00:37:52

And so this showed me there's two ways that I can practice this on a regular basis.

00:37:58

So the two forms of writing that he mentioned, I'll do these out of order.

00:38:01

But the first one that I want to stay away from is knowledge telling.

00:38:06

That's the beginner way.

00:38:08

Knowledge telling is just spitting out a bunch of facts.

00:38:13

And that doesn't really tell a compelling narrative, I feel.

00:38:17

The other way is to plan it.

00:38:20

And this is what he calls the expert way.

00:38:23

And on page 76 he talks about to write well, develop a mental representation ahead of time

00:38:27

to guide your efforts.

00:38:28

Then monitor and evaluate your efforts and be ready to modify the representation as necessary.

00:38:33

So what does this look like?

00:38:34

It means that when I sit down to write, I'm thinking about who I'm writing to and what

00:38:39

the goal of the thing that I'm going to be writing is.

00:38:42

I'm not just sitting down and whatever comes to mind, like I'm putting words on the page.

00:38:46

And maybe you could get some benefit from that.

00:38:49

But I do think that as a content creator on the interwebs that there's a lot more value

00:38:55

to taking this approach.

00:38:56

I feel like you're going to hit the mark a lot better if you plan your approach to writing.

00:39:00

Yeah, I'm with you there.

00:39:02

I mean, I do a fair amount of writing.

00:39:03

I spend more time writing emails than anything.

00:39:06

And that's fine.

00:39:07

But email has its own.

00:39:08

If you think it through ahead of time instead of just transferring information, even that

00:39:13

can be in the same sector as what you're talking about.

00:39:17

But it's not near as long and it doesn't have to be as thought through because it's not

00:39:20

as comprehensive, if you will.

00:39:23

So I think I do a fair amount of writing yet for a few projects.

00:39:29

But I don't know that it's nearly like it's not even we're close to what you do, like

00:39:34

at all.

00:39:35

I definitely like the latter of the two for sure.

00:39:38

But I don't know that this is a thing that I would see as a big point that I need to

00:39:44

take.

00:39:45

Fair enough.

00:39:46

I just really like this idea because Tana's been talking about this Asian efficiency with

00:39:52

these stories and we've been putting these in our acceptance criteria of like the blog

00:39:55

posts that we write and the podcast that we record is thinking through ahead of time,

00:40:00

like, okay, someone is going to give us their time to read this thing or listen to this

00:40:03

thing.

00:40:04

What can they get from this?

00:40:06

Like, how are we delivering value to them?

00:40:09

And if you don't think about that, there's a chance that you may not deliver value.

00:40:14

That's kind of kind of scary to me.

00:40:16

I take that responsibility, I guess, seriously.

00:40:20

And I know that people tune in because it's entertaining, but I don't want to waste anybody's

00:40:26

time.

00:40:27

And ultimately, like, I don't want to waste my time either.

00:40:29

Like, why write something that isn't going to help anybody and nobody reads.

00:40:32

Right.

00:40:33

So I take whenever I go to share things like this, like, this is where that innovative piece

00:40:38

comes in with those brand words because like, I'm pretty particular with, you know, if I'm

00:40:44

going to write an article or talk about something that involves discourse with that, I'm going

00:40:49

to be very particular about making sure that if I'm going to share how to do something,

00:40:54

it's something I have not seen talked about yet.

00:40:57

And it's a new way of doing things that hasn't been conveyed.

00:41:02

And I deal with it enough that I'm usually pretty good about finding those things.

00:41:05

Same thing in like the productivity space.

00:41:08

If I'm going to share something, like I've gotten to where I want to make sure that this

00:41:12

is a new way, like it's a new workflow I've written or, you know, it's a different way

00:41:19

of using the calendar or whatever it is to try to help people find their own ways of

00:41:24

using things instead of, you know, here's the best way to manage your email.

00:41:29

Like I have some pretty strong opinions on how that stuff should be shared or what I should

00:41:34

be sharing.

00:41:35

So I'm pretty particular with trying to make sure it's new.

00:41:37

So whenever I'm thinking about, you know, how I'm conveying that, it's usually some of

00:41:43

its knowledge transfers.

00:41:44

So maybe some of that's the former, but I try to make sure I'm explaining the wise behind

00:41:48

it so that it can resonate with people.

00:41:51

But I don't do it a lot.

00:41:53

But when I do, that's, that's the path I try to take.

00:41:56

I don't know if that is what you're talking about, Mike.

00:42:00

It sounds like you're maybe kind of getting at it from the sense of this is a thing I

00:42:04

want to convey and this is the best way to do it so that it actually helps someone.

00:42:09

It doesn't necessarily have to be a completely new way to do things.

00:42:12

It just has to have some value in itself.

00:42:14

Does that make sense?

00:42:15

I don't know if I'm making those two distinctions very clearly.

00:42:18

Yeah.

00:42:19

So you're talking about things that could be under the second form of writing that I'm

00:42:25

describing here, but I don't think it necessarily has to be.

00:42:29

So one important distinction I think to make here is that like a lot of the stuff that

00:42:33

I write about, it's not new.

00:42:36

It's new to me.

00:42:37

Right.

00:42:38

But if I search the internet for something, I'll find somebody else who said something

00:42:41

similar and I used to do that.

00:42:43

I used to get discouraged by that and be like, oh man, I can't come up with anything.

00:42:46

I'm not creative.

00:42:47

And what I've learned is that all you can do is share what you know.

00:42:52

Sean McCabe talks about teach everything that you know.

00:42:56

And I think maybe he picked that up from Nathan Berry at one point.

00:42:59

I was going to say that's a Berry is in there.

00:43:01

Yeah.

00:43:02

And the real point is like you don't have to be an expert in something before you can

00:43:06

help somebody.

00:43:08

There are always going to be people who are not at the level that you are.

00:43:11

So you don't have a responsibility to try to teach an expert, hey, this is the way that

00:43:15

I think you should be doing this.

00:43:17

Like somebody above you.

00:43:19

That's not going to provide any value and you're just going to look like an idiot.

00:43:24

But if you find somebody who's struggling with email and you say, hey, this is what

00:43:27

has worked for me, maybe you want to try this, you know, and you present it in the right

00:43:31

way because you've read how to win friends and influence people.

00:43:35

Then that's absolutely something that you should do.

00:43:38

Like don't keep stuff in just because somebody else wrote about something.

00:43:43

But what I want to do is when I sit down the right, like have a goal.

00:43:46

What is the outcome I want to achieve?

00:43:49

I don't want to just write to write.

00:43:51

I've done that and it produced some stuff.

00:43:53

But I feel if I had had this revelation earlier, it would have significantly shortened the

00:43:58

process of writing the book.

00:44:00

If I had an idea of what I wanted to end up when I had started to show up and write every

00:44:03

day, does that make sense?

00:44:05

It does.

00:44:06

Okay.

00:44:07

And so I think that planning that ahead of time, having a vision for where you want to

00:44:10

go and this applies to anything in life, not just writing.

00:44:12

Like if you know where you want your family to end up, if you know where you want your

00:44:17

career to end up, then you can do the things that are going to get you there.

00:44:20

And a lot of this, you know, this is maybe a recurring theme in the book of think about

00:44:25

the thing that you need to do and then go do it.

00:44:29

Like, what is the best way to get better at learning a larger vocabulary?

00:44:34

Well, what are the steps you should go through to learn words and learn how to use them correctly?

00:44:39

Well, do that.

00:44:40

We tell my kids all the time, stop.

00:44:43

Think about what you're going to do.

00:44:44

Okay.

00:44:45

Now.

00:44:46

Yeah.

00:44:47

Like why shouldn't I do the same thing?

00:44:49

Right.

00:44:50

Which there's your perfect segue to part four, the gold standard of deliberate practice.

00:44:54

Like that's what we're talking about.

00:44:56

Yep.

00:44:57

So you just gave away what the gold standard was because earlier we talked about the usual

00:45:00

approach and then purposeful practice, but the gold standard is like you said, deliberate

00:45:05

practice.

00:45:06

Right.

00:45:07

And you know, this is if I have a qualm with the book, it's that he repeats the same theme

00:45:12

multiple times over and over again, just in different ways.

00:45:15

With this particular piece, like this is the core of it in that thinking through what

00:45:22

it is that you need to do to hone in on a nuanced piece of your trade or to develop a

00:45:31

skill at a more fine level, you know, decide what it is that you need to do and do it.

00:45:39

Like, there you go, deliberate practice.

00:45:42

First of all, let me just run through real quickly the seven characteristics of deliberate

00:45:46

practice that he has in here.

00:45:47

And there's lots of lists in this chapter.

00:45:48

We're not going to go through all of this.

00:45:50

But this one, I think, is going to help people understand the difference between deliberate

00:45:54

practice and purposeful practice.

00:45:56

So characteristics of deliberate practice, number one, develop skills that other people

00:46:00

have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been

00:46:03

established.

00:46:04

Number two, takes place outside of one's comfort zone and requires a student to constantly

00:46:08

try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.

00:46:12

So failure here is not a bad thing.

00:46:14

Number three involves well-defined specific goals and often involves improving some aspect

00:46:19

of the target performance.

00:46:21

Number four requires a person's full attention and conscious actions.

00:46:24

Sounds a lot like deep work to me.

00:46:26

Number five involves feedback and modifications of efforts in response to feedback.

00:46:31

Number six, both produces and depends on effective mental representations.

00:46:36

So this is interesting because it means that in order to apply deliberate practice, you

00:46:40

have to have these mental representations, but the more you do deliberate practice, the

00:46:43

more mental representations you develop.

00:46:45

So it gets easier and easier to do this.

00:46:48

Number seven, nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by

00:46:52

focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically.

00:46:58

So that's a lot there.

00:47:01

There's another section in here where it kind of compares them side by side.

00:47:05

So deliberate practice requires a field that's reasonably well developed and it requires

00:47:10

a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or

00:47:13

her performance.

00:47:14

That teacher could be an actual person.

00:47:16

It could be a YouTube video.

00:47:18

It could be a blog post.

00:47:19

It could be a podcast.

00:47:20

But the difference here is that purposeful practice is pushing oneself hard to improve.

00:47:26

Deliberate practice is purposeful and informed.

00:47:30

So deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get

00:47:36

there.

00:47:37

It's a very important difference.

00:47:38

And he mentions Malcolm Gladwell in this whole process because Malcolm Gladwell I

00:47:42

think is the one that really I guess popularized a lot of this I think.

00:47:49

With the 10,000 hour rule to become an expert, we can dive into this a little bit more.

00:47:54

But I think it's interesting that this is a topic that a lot of people have referred

00:48:01

to of what does it take to become an expert in a field.

00:48:05

And they refer to 10,000 hours of doing something or practicing something to get to that point.

00:48:14

But the distinction that you just made is the key to that whole process that a lot of

00:48:21

people miss out on.

00:48:22

It's like, well, you have to know what it is you're doing and why and specifically seeking

00:48:28

out ways to find the areas that you're lacking and do something about it.

00:48:34

That that's a key distinction that I feel like Malcolm Gladwell didn't like that didn't

00:48:39

come out of his book.

00:48:42

What was the outliers was the book and that didn't really come out in that at least people

00:48:48

didn't catch it.

00:48:49

If he goes through and he spells it out, I've not read the book, you know, disclaimer there.

00:48:53

So if he spells it out, it didn't make it into to public translation and the media of

00:48:58

any kind.

00:48:59

So I was a little bit bummed about that.

00:49:01

Yeah, I also have not read outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

00:49:04

So when Andrew Zarex and kind of badmows Malcolm Gladwell a little bit kind of picks

00:49:10

on his research, like for example, he mentions that Malcolm Gladwell claimed all of the violinist

00:49:16

that he studied at age 20 had put in the 10,000 hours, but only half of them did.

00:49:23

So like right away, he's destroying his credibility.

00:49:26

Yep.

00:49:27

And my note in the document we're working off here is Malcolm Gladwell.

00:49:29

What a chump.

00:49:30

But again, I have no idea I've read the book.

00:49:32

So I really can't speak to it.

00:49:34

But I do think that and there's Erickson is right.

00:49:37

The point he makes is that there is no distinction between that practice and that deliberate

00:49:43

practice, which I do totally agree with.

00:49:45

Even in this section, they talk about the musicians and the violinists and they talk

00:49:49

about how there are no prodigies, there are no shortcuts to become an expert on the violin

00:49:54

requires several thousand hours of practice.

00:49:57

And the biggest predictor of success is how many hours you put into it.

00:50:01

So in that case, Malcolm Gladwell's point about 10,000 hours to become an expert on the

00:50:07

surface level, it's absolutely true.

00:50:09

But if you dig into it on an individual basis, how you practice is more important than whether

00:50:14

you practice in terms of becoming like the very elite of whatever field you want to be

00:50:18

in.

00:50:19

So the key here is deliberate practice.

00:50:21

It's the way to go.

00:50:23

It's the gold standard.

00:50:25

Question there though, Mike, is how do you actually do that?

00:50:29

Thankfully, the next section is principles of deliberate practice on the job.

00:50:33

And he kind of starts to delve into in these next few sections, like how do you go about

00:50:39

putting this into place and what are the like, how do we actually do this when you're going

00:50:44

to work?

00:50:45

Or, you know, when you're at home, like these are some places where he starts to dive into

00:50:50

that.

00:50:51

But you have a point here, three myths.

00:50:52

I don't recall this.

00:50:53

What are the three myths?

00:50:55

Yeah.

00:50:56

And actually before we get there, because this is where he started to lose me in this book,

00:51:00

honestly.

00:51:01

But he has a blue, he has a blueprint in the gold standard, which I just want to call

00:51:04

out real quick before we get into the principles of deliberate practice on the job.

00:51:08

He says that the blueprint for getting better in any pursuit is to get as close as deliberate

00:51:11

practice as you can.

00:51:12

And then he gives three steps, identify the expert, expert performers, figure out what

00:51:17

they do that makes them so good.

00:51:19

And then number three, come up with training techniques that allow you to do it too.

00:51:23

And I think that approach you could apply to any specific area.

00:51:26

Like you said, the next section he gets into, how do you apply this in these different arenas?

00:51:31

And this, I thought was kind of the weakest section of the book because I really liked

00:51:34

the principles.

00:51:35

And I was thinking, my mind was racing as I was reading this first part of the book, like,

00:51:38

Oh, I could apply this here.

00:51:39

I could apply it there.

00:51:40

I could play more chess.

00:51:41

That's going to help me.

00:51:42

I was like, okay, this is how you practically do it.

00:51:44

Well, maybe.

00:51:47

But the three myths that he talks about here, this is regarding the improvement only being

00:51:52

possible if participants abandon the business as usual practices and they reject these three

00:51:56

myths, which are typically found on the job.

00:51:58

Okay.

00:51:59

So number one, your abilities are limited by your genetically prescribed characteristics.

00:52:04

Myth number two, if you do something long enough, you're bound to get better at it.

00:52:07

Myth number three, all it takes to improve is effort.

00:52:10

You can try really hard, you can do something a lot.

00:52:13

And usually if you don't see any progress at that point, you fall into that first myth

00:52:17

and you say, well, I guess I just wasn't made to do this.

00:52:20

Okay.

00:52:21

And his point is that, well, any one of those things could have been contributing to the

00:52:25

fact that you failed at this thing, but what's required is not that you give up, but that

00:52:30

you think about it differently and you figure out how to solve this thing.

00:52:33

I do have another thing here in this section where he talks about focusing on one particular

00:52:37

skill.

00:52:38

I just want to start with this part because this is exactly what Toastmasters does.

00:52:42

On page 122, he talks about art, Turak, I believe, telling presenters to focus on one

00:52:47

skill.

00:52:48

And Toastmasters, what they do is, yeah, you have to go through and you give 10 speeches,

00:52:51

but there's an emphasis on each individual speech.

00:52:54

Like the first one is the icebreaker.

00:52:56

All you're focusing on is getting up in front of people for the first time and telling

00:52:59

your story, something that you're familiar with.

00:53:02

The next one, I don't have these in front of me, but the next one that gives you like

00:53:04

a couple of basic points on like, if you're going to structure a speech, this is what

00:53:07

it should look like.

00:53:09

And then there's one later where you're focusing on your body language and all these sorts of

00:53:13

things.

00:53:14

There's advanced curriculum, which like there's a whole book on just how to tell better stories,

00:53:19

things like that.

00:53:20

And I think like that approach, whether you're trying to get into public speaking or you're

00:53:23

trying to become a better, you know, you want to learn more scales on the guitar or the piano,

00:53:28

whatever, you want to lower your golf handicap, whatever it is, like you can apply this, this

00:53:33

approach and just focus on one little aspect of it.

00:53:36

Another in the book he talks about how like trying to improve a general skill, like memorization

00:53:41

isn't really going to work.

00:53:42

You have to improve one specific thing.

00:53:44

I also wanted to ask you regarding this section because he talks about video, I believe, and

00:53:52

I think there's a very important difference between YouTube videos, which is something

00:53:58

that you would watch and you would acquire knowledge versus something like video modeling

00:54:03

where you see the activity and then you translate it.

00:54:06

Does that make sense?

00:54:07

One side of it being like a video that explains to you how something operates and the second

00:54:15

being an explanation of how to accomplish a task that you can then translate and do yourself.

00:54:21

Yeah.

00:54:22

So like backing up a little bit in this section, he talks about what you're able to do, not

00:54:25

what you know is what's really important.

00:54:27

And traditional business training typically focuses on knowledge at the expense of skills.

00:54:32

He talks about passive learning, like lectures that don't improve the care that patients

00:54:36

receive from doctors.

00:54:37

Okay.

00:54:38

And that's what got me thinking about these YouTube videos because I think that that's

00:54:42

a form of passive learning a lot of times.

00:54:45

You sit down and you watch a YouTube video and you have no goal of actually learning

00:54:48

how to do one specific thing and applying it.

00:54:50

Now sometimes you do and you're trying to figure out how to change the oil on your specific

00:54:55

make of car.

00:54:56

Like you can go on YouTube and you can find that video and you can, it'll show you exactly

00:54:58

what to do.

00:54:59

It's a little bit different because then you're translating that into action.

00:55:03

But I think that a lot of our consumption based society is focusing on this knowledge

00:55:07

and it's kind of scary.

00:55:09

One it's annoying because you get people who watch the video made by YouTube guy who has

00:55:14

no basis for anything that he believes but he's throwing something up on the internet

00:55:18

and then all of a sudden they're the expert on whatever topic.

00:55:21

Yeah.

00:55:22

That's annoying.

00:55:23

But also like if you just get in that consumption mode for the sake of consuming, you're getting

00:55:29

away from deliberate practice and all of the stuff that we talked about earlier where

00:55:33

as you practice deliberate practice and you develop these mental representations and it

00:55:37

makes it easier to develop more mental representations, I think the opposite of that is true where

00:55:42

if you sit down in front of the TV and you become mindless, like the more, easier it

00:55:47

is to be mindless whenever you sit down to watch something.

00:55:51

But what's interesting here is that it doesn't have to be that way.

00:55:54

The video medium is not the bad guy here.

00:55:59

It's your approach when you sit down to watch it because there's this very powerful principle

00:56:03

of video modeling.

00:56:05

And just to give an example, this isn't from the book, but there was a study done depending

00:56:10

on where you look at says University of Chicago or someplace in Australia.

00:56:14

But the basis of it is that they took basketball players and they split them into three groups.

00:56:19

The first group practiced shooting free throws for an hour every day for 30 days.

00:56:24

They improved by 24%.

00:56:26

The second group did not touch a basketball, but they practiced mental rehearsal and visualization,

00:56:31

which is exactly what video modeling does.

00:56:34

You picture yourself doing the activity the correct way.

00:56:37

You're applying deliberate practice specifically to visualization and how you're going to do

00:56:41

this.

00:56:42

They even though they never touched a basketball for those 30 days, they improved by 23%.

00:56:47

It's virtually the same thing, which is crazy when you think about it.

00:56:51

But this is also the thing that makes Michael Phelps, we talked about him earlier, so successful.

00:56:55

He's got a thing where he gets up on the platform and his coach yells, "Put in the videotape."

00:56:59

And he's playing through in his head the race that he's about to swim.

00:57:04

One of my favorite stories of him is, I forget which Olympics it was, but it was the Beijing

00:57:10

Olympics.

00:57:11

He was doing the 100 meter butterfly final or something like that.

00:57:13

His goggles broke as soon as he jumped into the water.

00:57:15

So he was swimming blind.

00:57:17

He had practiced this in his head so often that he knew exactly where everything was.

00:57:22

He wasn't rattled.

00:57:23

And that was the one where if you remember, he stretched out at the end.

00:57:25

He didn't take another stroke.

00:57:27

The other guy did and he won by a 100th of a second.

00:57:30

And they asked him afterwards, "What did it feel like to swim blind?"

00:57:32

He's like, "It felt exactly like I imagined it would."

00:57:35

So you can use a video like this to apply deliberate practice in any area, in that particular

00:57:41

scenario.

00:57:42

No, he's an athlete, so he's applying it to his job.

00:57:45

But you can apply it to your job too, whether you're working in a factory cranking out widgets

00:57:49

or learning to develop your writing skills, podcasting, whatever, by just thinking through

00:57:54

ahead of time, what is this going to look like?

00:57:56

Yeah.

00:57:57

So I'm going to go back to the original point here of focusing on one skill.

00:58:02

Because this is the point at which I started to really struggle with this book.

00:58:08

Because I felt like this is where he calls out deliberate practice and explains how that's

00:58:13

different than purposeful practice, which to me was borderline splitting hairs into some

00:58:20

degree.

00:58:21

Like, okay, sure.

00:58:22

I get it.

00:58:23

I understand what he's saying.

00:58:25

But then he spells out focusing on one skill.

00:58:28

And I feel like he starts to repeat that throughout the rest of this.

00:58:32

So this is where I felt like there was a turning point in the book.

00:58:37

And I started to struggle with it.

00:58:40

Because then it starts to feel like a repetitive, find the point where you're weak, figure out

00:58:45

how to work on it and work on it.

00:58:47

And he continues to repeat that story in different ways throughout the rest of it.

00:58:54

Maybe that's just my perception of it.

00:58:56

But that was kind of my take on it.

00:58:58

I don't know.

00:58:59

Did you get this feeling at all?

00:59:00

I mean, you said this was where you kind of got lost.

00:59:03

A little bit.

00:59:04

I do think that the difference between deliberate practice and purposeful practice is important.

00:59:09

And I can see how this plays out though in the next section where you're talking about

00:59:15

the plateaus.

00:59:16

Okay.

00:59:17

So we can come back here, you know, if you had something else to say regarding this section.

00:59:20

No, go on because I think it'll continue to come out.

00:59:22

Okay.

00:59:23

Yeah, because this directly applies to what you just said.

00:59:25

Page 162, he says, when you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid or

00:59:29

at least steady improvement.

00:59:30

And when that improvement stops, it's natural to believe you've hit some sort of impassable

00:59:34

limit.

00:59:35

So you stop trying to move forward.

00:59:37

You settle down to life on that plateau.

00:59:38

This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.

00:59:41

I think that when you reach that plateau, you really have to drill down on one specific

00:59:48

skill.

00:59:49

So maybe let's just use golf as an example because I used to golf.

00:59:53

I don't golf a whole lot anymore, but I've taken a few lessons in golf and most people

01:00:00

when they have a lesson, they're like, I want to fix my slice.

01:00:03

I want to do whatever, you know, and the pro will tell them like there may be six or

01:00:08

six different things that they should change, but you can't have somebody change all those

01:00:13

things at once.

01:00:14

So they'll have them do like the simplest change they can implement like, okay, we're

01:00:17

going to just change your grip a little bit.

01:00:19

Now get used to this and then they come back and they make another little change and another

01:00:21

little change.

01:00:22

They're all like micro improvements of the bigger issue of that.

01:00:26

The fact that every time I hit a drive, it slices off to the right.

01:00:30

And so I think you can apply that approach to any time that you would hit one of these

01:00:34

plateaus is like, regardless of the skill, there's always going to be one specific thing

01:00:40

that you can drill down deeper to.

01:00:43

And that may be the thing that breaks everything open.

01:00:46

He talks about how the best way to move beyond a plateau is to challenge your brand of your

01:00:49

body in a new way and the best way to challenge it in a new way is to get as specific as possible.

01:00:55

You know, niche down and identify what is the smallest thing I can do right now.

01:01:03

What is the smallest thing I can improve right here that may just be the thing and the catalyst

01:01:08

that makes everything else simpler?

01:01:10

I've seen this myself in my study of learning to play the violin.

01:01:15

There have been plateaus where it's like, I'm never going to learn how to do vibrato

01:01:18

or I'm never going to learn how to play in third position or whatever.

01:01:22

There's definitely places like that where you feel discouraged and you're like, well,

01:01:25

those guys can do it so easily.

01:01:26

Like, what's the problem for me?

01:01:29

And usually it's just figuring out like one specific thing like with vibrato, it was one

01:01:34

specific movement on one specific finger.

01:01:37

You know, and that one thing rather than trying to develop this vibrato, which sounded good

01:01:42

all the time, wherever I played it, you know, just doing it, that there's one finger in

01:01:45

this one position.

01:01:46

Once I got that, like everything else just kind of clicked into place.

01:01:50

And so I think that you can apply this not just on the job, but you know, we're talking

01:01:53

chapters six now at principles of deliberate practice and everyday life.

01:01:57

I think that this is really valuable if you really want to bust through things.

01:02:00

I feel like this is more of the same.

01:02:05

It has a lot to do with, again, the recurring theme that I continue to see is, and maybe

01:02:12

I'm just biased here because once you notice it, I continue to notice it.

01:02:18

And I do see how there is a difference between, you know, choosing to go practice and be in

01:02:26

being intentional in doing your practice and then turning that around and saying, I'm

01:02:31

going to find the one thing that I need to work on right now and work on that one thing

01:02:35

and that being the difference that he's talking about.

01:02:40

But regardless, and maybe this is just because I've always practiced this way, that whenever

01:02:47

I'm working on something, I'm always looking for the place where I'm the weakest.

01:02:50

And right now, maybe the example here is that I have a thing for running sound and audio.

01:02:58

I'm not necessarily in a place where I would spend the money to solve some of the problems

01:03:04

that I'm currently seeing and say my current, you know, what you're hearing right now, like

01:03:09

I'm not necessarily in a place where I would do that, but I'm continually trying to see

01:03:14

and notice the little nuances and certain frequencies of certain audio sources and how

01:03:21

do I tweak that to make it sound more clear and more real.

01:03:25

That is a place where I've been spending probably the last two years continually trying to improve.

01:03:31

And that goes for live performances.

01:03:33

It goes for podcasting.

01:03:35

Anything to do that has to do with audio, you know, video editing and grabbing the audio

01:03:39

off of that.

01:03:40

Many of those things, I feel like I've been trying to get better at that.

01:03:45

So I've been specifically finding places where I am subpar in my mind and then continuing

01:03:52

to work on those.

01:03:53

But I also don't see that as different than practice in general, but that might just be

01:04:02

a factor, Mike, of me just always seeing practice in that way.

01:04:06

Like, okay, well, this is where I need to improve on X, Y, Z.

01:04:10

So go.

01:04:11

That's the thing I need to work on.

01:04:12

Like, I feel like I've always done that.

01:04:15

So the concept of just doing the thing without focusing on that seems a bit weird.

01:04:22

So maybe that's my, my qualm here like that just seems odd to not do that.

01:04:27

Maybe I do think that, and I don't think this is something that you do, but based off of

01:04:32

what you just said, I think the, you could interpret that as focusing on your weaknesses

01:04:38

and trying to develop those.

01:04:41

And in specific areas, maybe you want to do that, but generally I would say that the

01:04:46

things that you're no good at doing, unless you really have a reason to develop that skill,

01:04:50

then be fine with not being good in those areas.

01:04:53

And that's completely fine.

01:04:54

Just choose something that you want to become excellent.

01:04:55

In fact, he uses an example, I forget what chapter it's in, but this guy he's never played

01:05:00

golf before and he's just going to prove to himself that this deliberate practice works

01:05:03

and he's going to become a PGA Tour professional.

01:05:06

Like he's going to be on the tour competing against Tiger Woods.

01:05:08

Yeah.

01:05:09

And at the time of the writing, he hadn't quite gotten there, but he had gotten pretty far.

01:05:13

And I think that's, that's cool.

01:05:14

But again, like figure out what's important to you and then apply deliberate practice

01:05:18

to it.

01:05:19

That I think is an important idea.

01:05:21

And maybe like you said, you've kind of, you've applied this intentionally, unintentionally,

01:05:26

whatever for a while, I really got a lot out of this.

01:05:29

Now he is kind of repeating the same principles in these different sections.

01:05:33

How it plays out in your job is the same way it's going to play out in everyday life.

01:05:37

But there is some really important stuff in this particular section though, which I think

01:05:41

will resonate with people as they set personal goals as opposed to professional.

01:05:46

So for example, he talks about the New Year's resolution effect.

01:05:50

And he talks about how at first it's easy, the experts are the ones who figure out how

01:05:55

to keep going every day.

01:05:57

And this is where he gets into this whole idea of willpower versus motivation.

01:06:02

I think maybe this is in this section and maybe that he feels like he needs to call this out

01:06:07

in everyday life because when you're getting paid to do something and you have a manager

01:06:11

who's holding you accountable for doing something, you've got the intrinsic motivation to do

01:06:16

what you're supposed to do so you don't get fired.

01:06:19

So maybe that's the justification for this particular section.

01:06:24

But this whole idea of motivation versus willpower was really interesting to me.

01:06:28

This probably was my favorite part of the book.

01:06:30

Do you want to unpack this?

01:06:32

Yeah, I want to hear why you felt like this was your favorite part because I think I

01:06:37

glossed over it.

01:06:38

Okay.

01:06:39

So it's fascinating to me that you loved this and I am having a hard time recalling it

01:06:45

at all.

01:06:46

Okay.

01:06:47

So we read the willpower instinct and it was one of my favorite books.

01:06:51

Okay.

01:06:52

I really liked that book.

01:06:53

The point that he makes in this book is that willpower is a situation specific attribute

01:07:02

and willpower and natural talent are both things that people tend to assign after the

01:07:07

fact.

01:07:08

I think this is absolutely true.

01:07:10

So you can say, well, I joined the gym.

01:07:13

I went every day for three weeks at the beginning of the year, but then I stopped going, oh,

01:07:17

I ran out of willpower.

01:07:19

But how does that help you today?

01:07:22

The fact that you didn't have willpower and you can see that after the fact that's the

01:07:25

thing that caused you to fail, how do you make sure that you don't fail next time?

01:07:30

It's not like you've got a gauge in your car and you can see, oh, my willpower is full.

01:07:33

I should try to do this now.

01:07:35

I mean, there's certain principles like eating your frog doing the important things at the

01:07:38

beginning of the day when you have the most willpower.

01:07:41

Like those are general principles that I absolutely agree on.

01:07:44

But I really like the idea here.

01:07:46

He says the real secret to sticking with something is maintaining your motivation because

01:07:51

in any given instant, you can create motivation.

01:07:56

It doesn't matter how tired I am.

01:07:58

If my kids are running out into the street and they're about to get hit by a car, I've

01:08:00

got motivation to go save their life.

01:08:03

And that's a really extreme example.

01:08:05

But I mean, you can think of your own scenarios where all of a sudden the situation dictates

01:08:11

the fact that you have to do something and you don't even think about, well, I don't

01:08:15

know if I can.

01:08:17

Like you just do it.

01:08:18

And that's because of motivation.

01:08:21

There's two parts he calls out to maintaining motivation, the reasons to keep going or the

01:08:25

reasons to stop.

01:08:27

I love this idea.

01:08:28

So anytime you find yourself having trouble sticking with something and he talks about

01:08:32

in here really what makes people successful is they've developed these habits.

01:08:37

And then again, he talks about violinists in this section and how the successful violinist

01:08:41

develop these habits and they start early in the day.

01:08:43

So again, there is some general principles from the whole idea of willpower and starting

01:08:48

early that we can apply here.

01:08:50

But when it comes down to any moment, any given day, you find yourself with not enough

01:08:54

motivation to do the thing that in your heart, you know, you want to do, you can either strengthen

01:09:01

your reason to keep doing this thing or you can decrease the reason to stop doing this

01:09:06

thing.

01:09:07

And again, if it's, and if it's something you want to stop doing, you could apply this

01:09:09

inversely, but this is specifically talking about deliberate practice.

01:09:12

So how do we keep going with this deliberate practice?

01:09:15

I think this is a revolutionary idea.

01:09:16

And it's really cool because it puts you in control of the situation at any given moment.

01:09:20

It does not matter what has happened up until this point today.

01:09:24

There are things that you can do.

01:09:25

You can renew your motivation to go to the gym no matter how dead tired you are.

01:09:29

But you have to have the willpower to, you know, set that motivation.

01:09:33

Kind of.

01:09:34

But I think that it's not necessarily true.

01:09:37

Like you could, you could have your willpower depleted.

01:09:41

And if it's a life and death situation, all of a sudden you've got the motivation to act

01:09:47

the right way.

01:09:48

So how do you trick yourself, hack yourself, whatever?

01:09:53

How do you manufacture that motivation on demand?

01:09:56

I believe that there are ways that you can do that.

01:09:59

I think the simplest way to do it would be just to write down the list of the reasons

01:10:03

why you want to keep doing something.

01:10:05

And you look at that, you take it out, you read it out loud if you have to.

01:10:08

Like before you decide that, okay, I really am going to follow through on this commitment

01:10:12

that I made to myself.

01:10:13

A lot of times motivation can be like social pressure, social like positive peer pressure,

01:10:19

accountability.

01:10:20

I don't want to have to go to my next podcast recording with Joe and tell him that I just

01:10:24

was too lazy to follow through on my action items.

01:10:27

You know, like that's, that's an example of this motivation.

01:10:30

We manufactured that motivation by starting this podcast.

01:10:34

I had trouble following through with those things prior to having to tell you publicly

01:10:38

that I failed.

01:10:41

So I think that there's lots of things you can do that don't necessarily have, you don't

01:10:45

have to start a podcast.

01:10:47

You can do it to sign a micro level.

01:10:49

But there are things that you can do every single day to manipulate your motivation and

01:10:53

that's a good thing.

01:10:54

So moral of the story is find a buddy and start a podcast.

01:10:58

That's what I heard.

01:10:59

Well, it's one way you could do it.

01:11:01

But yeah, there's lots of things that you could do to either strengthen your motivation

01:11:06

to keep doing it or weaken your motivation to stop.

01:11:09

I think just doing that for the first time can be really powerful.

01:11:14

So if you've committed at the beginning of the year, you know, you want to go to the

01:11:18

gym and then you find yourself struggling with the motivation to go at the end of the

01:11:23

day when you've set aside the time to do so.

01:11:25

Take out a piece of paper.

01:11:26

If you've never done it and list all the pros and the cons, if you, if you, if you go and

01:11:30

if you don't go and then figure out how to make the pros stronger and how to weaken the

01:11:36

cons.

01:11:37

So it just makes it inevitable.

01:11:39

Like this is where packing your bag the night before and putting it by the door, like

01:11:43

little things like that, that's a way of, of weakening the reasons to stop doing this

01:11:48

because you no longer have to think about getting everything ready to go.

01:11:52

And yeah, I guess you could view that as you're not spending as much willpower.

01:11:56

But I think like that's a lag measure, whereas a lead measure is the motivation.

01:12:00

And that's the thing that you can influence at any given moment.

01:12:03

So I think I'm with you in that I finding motivation that and the type of motivation

01:12:10

that works for you, take my business, for example, I have a pretty strong motivator

01:12:15

to continue speccing projects and sending estimates and invoices because by doing that,

01:12:22

well, and the business continues to work, but that's really not the, the main motivator

01:12:27

there.

01:12:28

The main is that I have people waiting for me and I do not like it at all when people

01:12:34

are waiting on me.

01:12:35

Like I just don't like that at all.

01:12:37

I, I, I feel myself tensing up at the thought of people waiting on me to get information

01:12:44

back to them.

01:12:45

So when I have a handful of developers who are potentially waiting on me in order for

01:12:52

them to do their job, like that's a pretty strong motivator for me.

01:12:56

Yeah, it doesn't matter if your willpower is higher low at that moment because they're

01:12:59

waiting for the thing, you're going to get it done.

01:13:01

Correct.

01:13:02

Deadlines do the same thing.

01:13:03

You know, if I have to get this thing done by a specific date and you put it off until

01:13:07

the last possible moment at that moment, all of a sudden you've got motivation.

01:13:11

Well, why don't you create that motivation prior to that?

01:13:13

Yep.

01:13:14

You can say, well, you know, if I wait until, if I wait until a week from now to start working

01:13:18

on this thing, that's going to make the weekend really crazy and stressful.

01:13:22

I don't want that to happen.

01:13:23

Okay.

01:13:24

Now I've got the motivation to start now.

01:13:26

So the next part here, here you go listeners.

01:13:29

Before we jump on the call, I typically read through this list of talking points that Mike

01:13:33

has put up here because his is usually way more extensive than what I would put up there.

01:13:37

So I usually don't add to it.

01:13:39

So there's, there's my preface.

01:13:41

But when I went through it, I saw this part seven, the road to extraordinary, and then

01:13:46

Mike writes down page 205 and types in Mike's rant.

01:13:50

It doesn't tell me what the rants on.

01:13:52

It doesn't tell me what particular part of page 205 we're talking about.

01:13:56

So this entire time I've had this like down here, just kind of curious as to what is Mike's

01:14:03

rant.

01:14:04

He every once in a while has a good rant.

01:14:06

Okay.

01:14:07

I need to know what this is, Mike.

01:14:10

Okay.

01:14:11

So section seven is the road to extraordinary.

01:14:14

And there's lots of good stuff here.

01:14:16

And on page 205, he starts off with something that I agree with.

01:14:19

He says, research on the most successful creative people in various fields finds that creativity

01:14:24

goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches

01:14:28

of time, exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities

01:14:32

in the first place.

01:14:33

All right.

01:14:34

So that's deep work.

01:14:35

Great.

01:14:36

Yep.

01:14:37

Later on, he says that creativity will always retain a certain mystery because by definition,

01:14:43

it generates things that have not yet been seen or experienced.

01:14:47

And I say, Baldard ash, Mr. Erickson.

01:14:50

Okay.

01:14:51

And I feel very strongly about this because if I had this view, I would not be doing what

01:14:59

I am doing right now.

01:15:00

I've shared, I believe on this podcast before how I viewed myself as a long time as not

01:15:07

creative.

01:15:08

I grew up playing violin.

01:15:10

Like I'm a fairly accomplished musician.

01:15:13

I like to write songs.

01:15:14

Okay.

01:15:15

But I will write a song and I will see that the chord progression that I used or the melody

01:15:19

line that I came up with realized like I listened to the radio and I hear where I got that

01:15:24

from and I'd get so discouraged and I'm like, Oh man, I am just not creative.

01:15:28

All I can do is rip off other people.

01:15:30

Okay.

01:15:31

And the tipping point for me where I finally got over that and this thing like paralyzed

01:15:37

me for years for a long time.

01:15:38

Like I wrote nothing musically or words on the page because I was just like, I can't

01:15:45

come up with anything new.

01:15:46

I don't know what it is, but I'm just not creative.

01:15:49

Other people have this thing.

01:15:50

I do not.

01:15:51

But the tipping point for me was when I read Austin Cleon steel like an artist and he basically

01:15:56

said that when you what you do when you create is that you connect all these dots, all these

01:16:02

inputs, everything that you're bringing in your mental toolbox, your brain, when you

01:16:08

create something, you're taking those dots, which are not original and you are connecting

01:16:12

them in ways that have not been connected before.

01:16:16

Now when you do that, you are not coming up with something that's mysterious.

01:16:20

Like that gave me a formula for this.

01:16:23

And my entire career is based on the working of this formula.

01:16:27

More good ideas in, more synthesis of good ideas out.

01:16:31

And I can't tell you like how many people have written to me and encouraged me like,

01:16:37

Hey, you mentioned this that really helped me.

01:16:40

And it makes me upset when I think about the fact that like I held back on that for so

01:16:44

long.

01:16:46

And I see the positive impact that that has when I just put stuff out there.

01:16:51

And I feel like there's a lot of people who were in my shoes and they're just like,

01:16:55

I have nothing to contribute.

01:16:56

And I'm like, yes, yes, you do.

01:16:58

Like we need what you have.

01:17:00

Throw it out there because you don't know who it's going to help.

01:17:02

You don't know who's on the other side of your faithfulness to this idea that you have

01:17:07

in your heart.

01:17:09

And the more that you hold back on it, like the more the world gets ripped off.

01:17:13

I don't have the specific quote in front of me, but right now I'm thinking of there's

01:17:16

a quote in the, the accidental creative by Todd Henry where he's talking to this guy.

01:17:21

And this guy asks him something like, where do you think the most valuable land in the

01:17:26

world is?

01:17:27

And it's not real estate Manhattan.

01:17:29

It's not the oil fields in Saudi Arabia.

01:17:31

The guy says, it's the graveyard because that's the place where all the unwritten books

01:17:35

on founded businesses, like all the things that people said, I'll get to that later.

01:17:40

And I would say like those people who are like, I'm going to get to that later.

01:17:43

Maybe it's not doesn't manifest like that.

01:17:45

Maybe it's just, well, I don't have the skill to do that quite yet.

01:17:47

I need to get better.

01:17:48

Okay.

01:17:49

But the problem is you put it off till tomorrow and eventually you run out of tomorrow's.

01:17:53

And so this is just a very small part in this book, but I think it's really, really dangerous.

01:17:59

And this is the thing that kept me stuck for a really long time.

01:18:03

So I definitely disagree with him on this particular point.

01:18:06

Creativity is not something mysterious.

01:18:07

Yeah, it is.

01:18:08

There is pieces to it that kind of seem like you don't really understand.

01:18:11

I mean, we read the war of art by Stephen Pressfield.

01:18:14

He talks about the resistance in like the spiritual realm, you know, and it kind of makes it seem

01:18:19

like something that you can't see, you can't touch.

01:18:22

Like, it's kind of mysterious in that sense, but it doesn't have to be.

01:18:26

Like it doesn't have to be this thing that just is paralyzing you because you don't understand

01:18:31

how it works and it's so much smarter than you and it's always working against you.

01:18:34

Like, yeah, it's going to be there.

01:18:35

But if you apply this principle of deliberate practice, you can do the thing that you're

01:18:41

too scared to do right now.

01:18:42

One of the thoughts around this that I've had for a long time now is that if I'm going

01:18:46

to write an article, if I'm going to create a video, if I am going to, you know, take

01:18:52

a project, I only really have to have the knowledge to share such that there is one person

01:19:04

that doesn't know it yet.

01:19:06

Even if it's the same thing that's already in existence.

01:19:09

And the more that you create in a given area, the more, you know, this is right up this book's

01:19:15

alley, the more that you work on that specific area and continue to write for it, you know,

01:19:21

take writing, for example, say a blog, the more blogs that I write, the better at writing

01:19:26

them I get if I'm continually trying to improve, you know, my grammar, the vocabulary that

01:19:33

I'm using, the comprehension around the topic itself.

01:19:38

If I'm continually finding, you know, the one thing to focus on and continuing to get better

01:19:42

at it, then over time you start to develop more and more skills.

01:19:49

And the number of people who don't know that level of skill continues to increase as your

01:19:54

experience continues to increase.

01:19:56

So, you know, if you're ahead of one person and you're writing, well, then you can help

01:20:01

one person, but the more you write, you make it to the point where you're ahead of 10 people.

01:20:06

And now you've got 10 people that you can write for.

01:20:09

And as you get better, now you've got a thousand or 10,000 or a million.

01:20:13

The more that you do it, the better you get, which means the people that you understand

01:20:19

more than or have developed your skill more than continues to grow.

01:20:23

But you could probably correlate that to the process of building an audience online.

01:20:28

The more that you work at it, the more you develop and practice and develop your skills,

01:20:34

the more creative dots that you're able to connect.

01:20:38

And to some people, it may look like you're developing something brand new.

01:20:44

When really you've just connected dots that have already been connected in one way or

01:20:48

another, you're just expressing them differently, which means that it strikes different people

01:20:52

in different ways.

01:20:54

And eventually you may have a completely original idea, but I would say it's going to be likely

01:21:00

a rare occurrence if you haven't already been developing the expertise over time and trying

01:21:07

to connect a lot of dots historically.

01:21:11

It's going to take you a while to get to the point where you can start to connect dots that

01:21:16

have never been connected before or in ways that have never been done before.

01:21:20

And it does take a lot of hours to get to that point.

01:21:24

So if you're one that says that you don't have something unique to share with the world,

01:21:31

of course not, especially if you've never done it before, you're likely not to if you

01:21:38

don't ever get started.

01:21:39

If you feel like you have something unique to share to the world, go for it.

01:21:43

But if you feel like you don't, how do you expect to get to that point if you don't start

01:21:48

doing something about it?

01:21:49

So there's your motivation.

01:21:52

Get to work.

01:21:53

Yeah, and don't wait until you have the pedigree that you feel you need to share something.

01:22:00

Just do it because everybody that I know deals with imposter syndrome to some degree.

01:22:08

And I deal with it a lot.

01:22:10

I think about the fact that I write and I podcast now on the interwebs and this was

01:22:17

not something I went to school for.

01:22:19

This is something I literally decided to start like three or four years ago.

01:22:23

And I've applied to Libert practice and I've gotten to this point, but still like I've got

01:22:27

to fight those demons in my own head where it's like, who are you?

01:22:30

Who do you think you are that you can say this or you can do this?

01:22:35

Like there's lots of other people out here that people would rather listen to than you.

01:22:41

Like that's what goes on in my head.

01:22:43

And I just got to I just got to say, shut up.

01:22:45

I'm doing it.

01:22:46

I'm going to iterate in public as Sean McCabe says.

01:22:50

And like I said, when I do that, I hear back from people.

01:22:53

I get the feedback.

01:22:54

That's kind of what he's talking about in here.

01:22:56

He's like, you get to focus on the work that you're doing and get to get the feedback and

01:22:58

then whatever you messed up, fix it.

01:23:01

But if you never throw it out there, you're never going to get any feedback.

01:23:04

And obviously you want to be careful who you listen to feedback from.

01:23:07

Fortunately, I mean, especially in the Mac community, like there's a lot of people who

01:23:11

are really, really supportive.

01:23:12

The productivity community is a lot like that too, where there's a couple of people specifically

01:23:17

who like commented on something that I did when I was first throwing stuff out there and

01:23:21

it was super, super scary.

01:23:22

And they're like, yeah, that's good.

01:23:24

You should keep going.

01:23:25

And I can't tell you like what that did to me and the motivation that that gave me and

01:23:29

the confidence like, hey, maybe this is something that I can do because for a long time, that's

01:23:35

what I battled was like, you don't have the ability to do this.

01:23:39

And I think that there's a lot of people who maybe want to do something, they've got to

01:23:43

dream to do something, they've got a vision for something.

01:23:46

And that fear is keeping them back because they look at all the other people who are

01:23:51

doing quote unquote extraordinary things.

01:23:53

And I want to tell those people who are listening to this right now, like you don't know what

01:23:57

you're capable of, but you will never get there if you don't start.

01:24:02

And really like this whole, the thing I want to make a point on in this particular section

01:24:06

is like, don't worry about the fact that this creativity to you right now might seem mysterious.

01:24:13

Like just understand the formula and then follow it.

01:24:16

And then these things will come like it's going to take care of itself as long as you've

01:24:21

got the right mindset.

01:24:22

Yeah, you can't just hit publish and expect to get a thousand downloads of your of your

01:24:25

podcast or a bunch of social shares on your blog posts just because you threw it out into

01:24:30

the world.

01:24:31

But if you throw it out there and then somebody says something and you look at it and you say,

01:24:35

why I could develop this particular skill a little bit better, I could improve my voice.

01:24:41

When I first started podcasting, I almost didn't because I hated my voice.

01:24:44

I hated hearing my own voice.

01:24:47

And I still don't really like hearing myself talk, but I get comments from people now who

01:24:51

are like, I actually, I think you've got a really good podcast voice.

01:24:54

I'm like, really?

01:24:55

Like, but a lot of that is just because I've been doing it long enough and I've been going

01:24:59

to Toastmasters and I get up and I've learned the voice inflections and to bring the energy

01:25:05

and to talk with my hands and all this type of stuff.

01:25:07

Like, if you go back to the first thing I did, you know, I look at it now and I'm like,

01:25:10

well, that was garbage.

01:25:13

But I didn't view it that way at the time.

01:25:15

And I also didn't view that as the ceiling for what I could do.

01:25:18

It was just like, okay, I'm going to throw this out there.

01:25:20

This is the very best I can do right now.

01:25:23

And I'm not going to be ashamed of that.

01:25:24

It is what it is.

01:25:25

And if you're going to compare it to somebody like David Sparks or Joe Buleg at the time,

01:25:31

you know, like any of these other people who I look up to, my quote unquote, Internet

01:25:35

heroes, like, yeah, I'm not as good as them.

01:25:37

And maybe I'll never get to that point, but I don't know until I try.

01:25:40

Which begs the question.

01:25:42

What about natural talent?

01:25:45

Natural talent is garbage.

01:25:46

Now, this is a, this is an interesting section because this is, I mean, we see this played

01:25:52

out in almost every single arena.

01:25:55

So he uses the example here of musicians, he uses the example of athletes.

01:26:01

Those are probably the two biggest things where I think people kind of view, like either

01:26:07

you're born with it or you're not.

01:26:09

Like you hear the stories in, if you're a musician of Mozart when he's five and his

01:26:14

dad plays like a chord on the piano and it's got one wrong note and he runs downstairs and

01:26:18

he plays the same chord with the, with the corrected note.

01:26:20

And we think like that's, that's crazy.

01:26:23

But when he talks about in this, in this section is that even those quote unquote prodigies,

01:26:28

like they have to apply this, this deliberate practice principle and they're not just born

01:26:34

with this.

01:26:36

They have to follow the same formulas as everybody else.

01:26:39

And yeah, maybe you have some more natural ability that makes it easier at first, but

01:26:44

this principle of deliberate practice more than makes up the difference.

01:26:48

And the biggest limiting factor that people have is their limiting beliefs about themselves.

01:26:55

They've accepted the fact that they quote unquote can't do something.

01:27:00

He mentions that one sixth of adults think that they are tone deaf.

01:27:05

And because they think they are tone deaf, they are tone deaf, but they don't have to

01:27:08

be tone deaf.

01:27:09

And in fact, a lot of them are not really tone deaf.

01:27:12

They just have said this about themselves.

01:27:14

And so it's a self fulfilling prophecy.

01:27:17

But I think that this is something that you could apply to any, any arena, I'll just use

01:27:20

an example of myself as a musician.

01:27:22

And I mentioned when I was five years old, I was in the Suzuki program, I learned to

01:27:26

play classical music.

01:27:27

I could read notes on a page.

01:27:29

I could play technically very, very well.

01:27:32

I went away to college, met some other musicians and like, Hey, come on over.

01:27:36

Let's jam.

01:27:37

And I was like, Oh, what?

01:27:38

Like, where's, where's the sheet music?

01:27:41

You know, even just like chords on the page, I had trouble playing along with those, but

01:27:46

I've learned to jam.

01:27:47

I've learned to improvise.

01:27:48

It's a very different set of skills, but it's something that you can apply this to

01:27:53

liberal practice to.

01:27:54

And you know, that's one small example of when you're becoming a musician, like there's

01:27:59

different, different avenues and that you can go down and there's different specific

01:28:03

skills that you can develop through this concept of the deliberate practice.

01:28:06

That was something that even though like on the surface, people would look at me and

01:28:09

like, well, you're, you're pretty skilled by a lens.

01:28:11

You put me in a room and asked me to do it a little bit different way.

01:28:15

I was completely uncomfortable.

01:28:18

That really helped me realize that, you know, there's more to being a musician than being

01:28:21

able to play the notes on the page.

01:28:24

And I think that like you can apply that skill and really have to apply that skill.

01:28:27

If you want to become an expert in any given field, there's going to be things to your

01:28:31

point earlier where you mentioned like, I see these things that I need to improve.

01:28:36

I think that you're playing this out in your own arena then, but don't accept the fact that

01:28:41

just because you can't do this thing right now, it doesn't mean that you can't develop

01:28:44

the ability to do that.

01:28:45

You just got to figure out the right thing to focus on.

01:28:47

Maybe you got to get a coach or a tutor who can show you the right things to do, but this

01:28:51

deliberate practice more than makes up any natural talent deficiency you may have.

01:28:56

I think there's sometimes that we have, we may have limiting beliefs we don't know about,

01:29:03

but sometimes like I may know that I have a limiting belief, but it's not in an area

01:29:11

where I really feel like doing anything about it.

01:29:13

So, yep.

01:29:14

Like, okay, well, you know, I am not a singer and don't claim to be.

01:29:21

Could I get better at it?

01:29:23

Probably.

01:29:24

Do I have a limiting belief on it?

01:29:26

Maybe, maybe not.

01:29:28

Like, I'm not terrible.

01:29:30

If you think you're not a singer, you do have a limiting belief, but whether or not you choose

01:29:34

to overcome it is completely fine and completely up to you.

01:29:37

I am not going to take the time to continue to work at my ability to sing.

01:29:42

I'm just not.

01:29:43

Will I take the time to get better at running sound and running live performances?

01:29:48

Sure.

01:29:49

Yeah, I'll do that because that's an area I care about, but I'm not too concerned about

01:29:55

a limiting belief around my singing ability.

01:29:57

Like, that is not a thing that I'm going to work on.

01:30:00

So, like, do these limiting beliefs exist?

01:30:05

Yes.

01:30:06

Should you do something about them?

01:30:08

I would say if you want to.

01:30:10

Exactly.

01:30:11

The goal, you know, growing up, if your dream was to become a singer, then yes, you should

01:30:16

do something about that limiting belief because it's keeping you from doing what is inside

01:30:19

your heart.

01:30:21

But if it's something that you are completely fine with not being the greatest at, then

01:30:24

don't do anything with it.

01:30:26

I mean, you can't apply the 10,000-hour rule to everything that you do.

01:30:30

You got to pick and choose how you're going to invest your time, attention, your energy,

01:30:33

your focus.

01:30:34

I mean, these are all related to this whole idea.

01:30:36

You can't deliberate practice every single thing that you're ever going to do.

01:30:40

You're going to have to not be an expert at something and that's completely fine.

01:30:43

In fact, the more you specialize, the more valuable you become.

01:30:47

So, Mike, section 9, where do we go from here?

01:30:52

We learn to create mental representations.

01:30:55

That's the important thing, I think.

01:30:57

If you were to boil this book down into a single sentence, it is look for ways to create

01:31:03

mental representations in the way that you practice anything.

01:31:07

And if all you did was try to do that, then you've kind of activated the whole formula

01:31:13

that's outlined in this book, in my opinion.

01:31:16

The ability to create those mental representations, though, is extremely valuable.

01:31:20

And that's something that I want to instill in my kids.

01:31:26

I think this is something and this could open up a can of worms.

01:31:29

But he talks in this last section about the education system and how deliberate practice

01:31:36

is focusing on the acquisition of specific skills, right?

01:31:39

It's not just knowledge, it's things that you know how to do.

01:31:42

That is absolutely not the way that you study for a test.

01:31:45

Knowledge just for facts stays in your short term memory.

01:31:48

There is nothing that you gain long term from that.

01:31:52

And you can totally see this.

01:31:53

I was this way.

01:31:54

I'm a pretty good test taker.

01:31:55

I could sit down with the book the night before and memorize everything, ace the test,

01:31:59

and then a week later, you asked me what was on it and I have no idea because I never

01:32:03

developed those mental representations.

01:32:06

And so like that's what I, my big takeaway from this whole thing is I want to learn to

01:32:10

do this more myself.

01:32:11

I'm going to create some specific habits and rituals, which will help me to do that.

01:32:15

And then also I want my kids to be able to develop the skill because that's what's going

01:32:20

to make them excellent in whatever they decide to do.

01:32:22

That said, do you anything else do you want to say on the book?

01:32:25

Well we hear Mahali in this last section.

01:32:27

Every book has to have Mahali in it.

01:32:28

It's true.

01:32:29

It's a requirement.

01:32:30

The last thing I'll mention here is page 257.

01:32:34

There's a quote I liked.

01:32:35

He said, "It is as if they are on a constant stimulating journey where boredom is never

01:32:40

a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities."

01:32:43

I love this.

01:32:44

I want to apply this myself.

01:32:45

I want my kids to adopt this.

01:32:47

And kids are a great acid test for this because think about it.

01:32:51

Like what do you hear from kids all the time?

01:32:53

I'm bored.

01:32:54

Yep.

01:32:55

If we're honest with ourselves, we say the same thing.

01:32:58

That's why we veg out and watch Netflix for eight hours and go through an entire season

01:33:02

of whatever.

01:33:03

Speak for yourself.

01:33:04

I don't do that.

01:33:05

But I'm saying like people do do that.

01:33:07

I've honestly never understood the Netflix and the YouTube.

01:33:10

Here's the next show, next episode.

01:33:13

I have trouble getting through one.

01:33:15

But I do understand that this is a conditioned behavior.

01:33:20

And I do think that boredom is not necessarily a bad thing as we've talked about with the

01:33:24

mindfulness, which book that was that we read more or less maybe.

01:33:29

You gotta give yourself space to just think.

01:33:32

You can't just be busy all the time.

01:33:34

But I do think that there's a lot of value in viewing the world through a lens that's

01:33:37

like I'm going to figure out how this works.

01:33:40

I'm going to make the most of my time here.

01:33:43

And I'm going to be fascinated with whatever problem or obstacle that comes before me because

01:33:47

it's a challenge and an opportunity for me to grow.

01:33:50

All right.

01:33:51

You ready for action items?

01:33:52

Let's do it.

01:33:53

Matt, you got four here.

01:33:54

I have two.

01:33:55

There's a couple specific ones which you can hold me accountable for.

01:33:59

A couple which you will never be able to hold me accountable for.

01:34:03

So one of the things kind of related to that last section, but also he mentions this a

01:34:07

little bit earlier.

01:34:08

I want to teach my kids to look for why, not how.

01:34:12

One of the authors that I really like, Ed Cole, who wrote the men's curriculum that we

01:34:15

have at our church, said that the man who knows how will always have a job.

01:34:21

The man who knows why will always be his boss.

01:34:25

And I think that applies to this whole idea of excellence and peak.

01:34:28

Like the whole theme throughout this book is like, if you really want to develop your

01:34:31

skills, you got to understand why, not just how.

01:34:35

And so I want to teach my kids to do that.

01:34:36

I also want to still in my kids what he calls a self-fueling, self-motivating drive for

01:34:40

tremendous work.

01:34:41

I define this as a standard of excellence.

01:34:43

So there's a little bit of a two-edged sword because a lot of people deal with perfectionism

01:34:50

and not shipping something because it's not quite ready.

01:34:53

And I've been there too.

01:34:55

But I think that's different than just doing the very best that you can.

01:34:58

Really that's what I want to instill here is like, don't mail it in.

01:35:00

Give it your very best effort, whatever you're trying to do.

01:35:03

So those are the two that there's no way you're going to be holding me accountable to.

01:35:06

All right.

01:35:07

The two that you can hold me accountable to are learn to type faster.

01:35:10

So this was, I forget which section this was.

01:35:13

Oh, the plateaus, I think.

01:35:14

Dvorak.

01:35:15

Dvorak.

01:35:16

Dvorak.

01:35:17

No, not Dvorak.

01:35:18

Oh, come on.

01:35:20

That would drive me nuts looking at my keyboard and having the keys printed wrong.

01:35:25

I just could not do that.

01:35:27

You can fix that.

01:35:29

But I do think, especially for somebody like me who writes a lot on their computer, that

01:35:35

this would be a skill that would provide a lot of benefit.

01:35:40

And I know that I've hit a plateau with my typing speed and I've been okay with that.

01:35:45

I know that there are tools out there.

01:35:47

In fact, somebody sent me a promo code for some typing tutor in the Mac App Store.

01:35:52

So I'm going to give that a shot and I'm going to try to boost my typing speed by the

01:35:56

time we record next.

01:35:58

The other one that I want to hold me accountable for.

01:36:03

Hold on.

01:36:04

Before you do that, you need to check your eye message.

01:36:07

Complaint against Dvorak.

01:36:09

I need to address.

01:36:10

Keyboard cover for Mac.

01:36:11

Yeah.

01:36:12

Unless you've got one for my code keyboard, it's probably not going to happen.

01:36:15

Oh, I bet I could do that too.

01:36:17

All right.

01:36:18

Well, follow up.

01:36:21

The other one is I want to start playing chess.

01:36:24

I think that he shared a lot about how that's a great way to develop mental models, mental

01:36:27

representations.

01:36:28

That's something I used to do.

01:36:30

I just got to find somebody to play with.

01:36:31

Sounds like he used to play chess.

01:36:32

So you win?

01:36:34

I am in.

01:36:35

So I have this was one of my ex-names as well as I wanted to get back into chess.

01:36:39

But I was asking around for a few people to figure this out and did not find anyone.

01:36:45

You will probably kill me to begin with.

01:36:48

Just going to say that because it's been a while.

01:36:51

It has.

01:36:52

But I want to get back into it.

01:36:53

Me too.

01:36:54

Is there like some app or something we can do this with?

01:36:58

Because we are definitely not in the same area.

01:37:00

There's got to be an iOS version.

01:37:01

Okay.

01:37:02

I know that there's one called really bad chess, which a lot of people were talking about.

01:37:05

I'm not sure if that's like real chess.

01:37:07

Okay.

01:37:08

But I'll find something.

01:37:09

Okay.

01:37:10

You find something I will accept whatever and run with that.

01:37:14

So I'm cool.

01:37:15

I'm good with that.

01:37:16

So that was one of my actions.

01:37:18

I had the two.

01:37:19

That was one of them.

01:37:20

I was going to say get back into chess.

01:37:21

The other one was trying to apply deliberate practice to client management.

01:37:27

And I don't really know what that looks like right now.

01:37:29

I know that there are a few points of frustrations that I have with communication in general with

01:37:37

client management processes.

01:37:40

So I may be trying to solve some of that.

01:37:41

But basically I need to nail down what that one area I need to focus on with client management

01:37:47

is and work on that.

01:37:49

So I'm essentially this is a broader area to start applying to how I handle clients in

01:37:57

my business.

01:37:58

So that is that is my other one.

01:38:01

I don't know what that looks like quite yet, but that is a that is a thing that I would

01:38:05

like to do.

01:38:06

Nice.

01:38:07

There you go.

01:38:08

Author style and rating.

01:38:09

I can go first on this one.

01:38:10

I have a point here for style because it's it's been slowly occurring to me the different

01:38:16

types of books that we've been selecting, Mike.

01:38:19

And how some of these are they're written very concisely and they are designed to get

01:38:26

a point across to do it really well, but in the shortest amount of space that you can

01:38:33

comprehend.

01:38:34

And then there are other books like peak that are more designed towards like a meandering

01:38:39

journey across a topic.

01:38:42

And how long is this one 260 pages just shy of something like that?

01:38:48

Yeah, something like that.

01:38:49

It's not a short book, but personally I felt like it could have been significantly shorter

01:38:56

and gotten the same points across.

01:38:59

And part of this is I've been realizing that if you pick up a book that's written by doctors

01:39:07

or PhDs or people who do research for a living, those are always going to be long meandering

01:39:15

journeys.

01:39:16

And I think that I had false expectation on this book when I started thinking it was

01:39:23

one of these more concise, get a lot of points across type of book and ended up on a meandering

01:39:32

journey through a topic.

01:39:35

And that made it hard for me to continue through some of those more difficult points, at least

01:39:42

what I saw as more because I kept wondering why are we talking about this again?

01:39:46

That was what I kept.

01:39:48

He has a ton of stories.

01:39:49

It was fairly easy to read.

01:39:51

It wasn't like I was trudging through it.

01:39:53

I just couldn't figure out why we were talking about certain things again.

01:39:57

So that was my qualm with it.

01:40:00

So I love the topic and I love the concepts that are in here.

01:40:04

I just felt like the writing style on it.

01:40:08

I felt like I didn't do it justice.

01:40:11

Like I could have been done a little bit better in that sense.

01:40:14

So as far as the rating, I'm going to put it at a four because from a writing style,

01:40:19

I would put it lower than that, but from a conceptual level, I put it higher than that.

01:40:24

So the difficulties with rating things, but I'm going to leave it at a 4.0 on this case.

01:40:31

All right.

01:40:32

Well, I can tell you, even with my rant, which was based off of less than half a page out

01:40:39

of this 260 page book, I'm going to rate this a five.

01:40:43

I really enjoyed this book.

01:40:45

Wow.

01:40:46

The guys who wrote it are really, really smart.

01:40:48

I didn't feel like they were making themselves out to be smarter than me though.

01:40:54

Like I felt it was very approachable even for somebody who doesn't really like the scientists

01:40:59

explaining every single facet of every single thing.

01:41:01

I really, really enjoyed this.

01:41:02

I got something out of every single chapter.

01:41:05

I kind of thought, you know, when I looked at the table of contents, because I know how

01:41:09

to read a book now, thanks to Mortimer Adler, that like they would be repeating a bunch

01:41:13

of stuff and they did a little bit.

01:41:15

But for the most part, I understood why they express things in different ways.

01:41:19

It didn't feel, feel, I didn't feel like when I read a section, they didn't need to

01:41:24

say this because they said this, this earlier.

01:41:27

They always applied a different perspective to it, which I found to be fresh.

01:41:31

So I really, really enjoyed this book.

01:41:33

I'm really glad that you picked it.

01:41:34

I'm really glad whoever recommended it, definitely recommend another book whoever you are.

01:41:40

And yeah, I would definitely recommend this one to just about anybody.

01:41:44

I think that this really has the potential to change your life if you really apply what

01:41:48

they're talking about here.

01:41:50

And I feel like they presented in a way where it really makes you feel that it's possible.

01:41:55

And so I left this book feeling very encouraged and I think that anybody who's new to this

01:42:01

idea, they're not read deep work and a lot of the other books that we've read, like even

01:42:05

so, this would be a great introduction to the topic.

01:42:09

So we've alluded to this a couple times, I think, at least early on, about episode 50,

01:42:15

which will be next.

01:42:16

Mike, we've had some ideas on it.

01:42:18

I don't know how much of this you want to share.

01:42:20

I'll just tell you that if you tune into bookworm because you want to know what we think about

01:42:28

books as kind of like a pre screening for whether you should read them, whether it's

01:42:33

worth your time, that episode 50 is going to be awesome.

01:42:39

It's going to be gold.

01:42:40

This is going to be the most, I don't want to say most value-packed episode, but basically

01:42:47

if you're looking to grow your reading list with the very best books that are out there,

01:42:52

you're going to want to tune in for this one.

01:42:55

And we're also going to make another surprise announcement about how you can get those bookmarks.

01:42:58

Yeah, I'm excited about that part.

01:43:00

Got some things in the works.

01:43:01

This is going to be cool.

01:43:02

I've shown you some stuff and I'm excited to share this with the world in next episode.

01:43:06

That'll be fun.

01:43:08

So tune into that one for sure.

01:43:09

So because episode 50 is a special one, I think that means 51 is your choice, Mike,

01:43:15

since Peak was mine.

01:43:16

I thought so, but I wasn't sure.

01:43:17

So I don't actually have a book for episode 51 yet.

01:43:21

So get those recommendations in.

01:43:23

All right, so episode 50, you may have some ideas on that, but we have some cool ideas

01:43:30

with it too.

01:43:31

Mike will hopefully tell us next time what he's going to choose for episode 51.

01:43:37

I have 52 picked, but that's two episodes out.

01:43:40

We're not going to divulge that.

01:43:43

So that brings us to Gap Book's, Mike.

01:43:44

What do you have for Gap Book?

01:43:46

I am reading right now, Thou Shall Prosper by Daniel Lapehan, I believe.

01:43:52

He's a Jewish rabbi.

01:43:54

And this is a book that Dave Ramsey recommends.

01:43:57

He talked a lot about it when I was at the Entre Leadership Summit a few weeks ago.

01:44:01

I was recording this and it's been on my bookshelf for a long time.

01:44:05

And I've been going through it.

01:44:07

It's interesting.

01:44:08

Daniel Lapehan, he's talking about like the 10 commandments to wealth building and he

01:44:13

talks about it from a Jewish perspective, which I am not Jewish.

01:44:16

But it is interesting because they have a spiritual reason to believe why they should

01:44:21

be successful and they are successful.

01:44:24

It's a crazy percentage of the world's wealth that's controlled by a very small percentage

01:44:28

of the Jewish population.

01:44:31

And I do think that there's a lot of truth to the fact that they think they're going

01:44:35

to be successful.

01:44:36

So they are very enlightening read.

01:44:37

I'm about halfway through it.

01:44:39

Nice.

01:44:40

So I picked up here a couple days ago a book, The Revenge of Analog.

01:44:46

Real things and why they matter by David Sachs.

01:44:49

Partially because, and I may make this a bookworm book at some point.

01:44:54

We'll see.

01:44:55

It's an interesting book.

01:44:56

It talks about the return of vinyl records, the return of paper notebooks and such.

01:45:04

So you can probably guess why I'm interested in this.

01:45:08

It talks about the return of board games.

01:45:10

So it's an interesting book and the author, David Sachs, he is a writer and reporter for

01:45:19

Bloomberg Business Week, New Yorker, you know, those types of things.

01:45:23

So he's a very good writer, very entertaining writer.

01:45:26

So it's an easy book to read.

01:45:27

So yeah, I recommend it.

01:45:29

It's an interesting one.

01:45:30

Awesome.

01:45:31

I've heard of that.

01:45:32

I'm going to have to give that a shot.

01:45:33

Yeah.

01:45:34

So if you send a book, you can do so at bookworm.fm/list.

01:45:40

We'll give you a list of all of the books that we've covered, all the ones that are

01:45:43

recommended, all the ones that are planned and there'll be a button right next to that

01:45:47

where you can recommend a book.

01:45:49

I know you're going to talk about another way that people can recommend a book.

01:45:52

Yep.

01:45:53

And that is on the Bookworm Club, which club.bookworm.fm.

01:45:58

You can get there from bookworm.fm as well, just in the menu.

01:46:01

But basically that is our online community around the Bookworm podcast.

01:46:07

And there's a fancy button in the top that says recommend that you can click on and it

01:46:12

will help you to create that topic for a new book.

01:46:17

Whenever you do that, you can also vote for them once they are on that list.

01:46:21

So if you recommend a book, make sure you click the vote button once you've done that.

01:46:25

And the highest voted books are the ones that I tend to look at when I'm selecting what

01:46:30

comes up next and I'm getting ready to select like the next bank of three books because

01:46:35

I tend to do it in batches like that.

01:46:37

So get your recommendations and get your votes in on those recommended books and we'll have

01:46:43

some of those start to come up here in the near future.

01:46:47

That's one way that you can get involved in the community, but another way that you can

01:46:50

help out the podcast.

01:46:51

There's two ways really.

01:46:52

One is to click the links in the show notes for the episode because those are Amazon links.

01:46:58

So we get a little bit of a kickback on the particular books that you've bought through

01:47:03

Amazon if you use those links, but you can also leave us an iTunes review that helps out

01:47:07

a lot and helps other people find us.

01:47:10

And it's just a super helpful way to let us know how you feel about the show.

01:47:14

So if you get a moment, click the link in the show notes and you can leave us a review

01:47:19

on iTunes.

01:47:20

All right.

01:47:21

So thanks for joining us.

01:47:22

Tune in next time for a crazy value packed episode and find out how you can get your own

01:47:27

Bookworm bookmarks and we'll talk to you next time.