I've got an OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock and it's been flickering in and out and I thought it was a bad power cable.
00:00:25
So I called the company and they're great.
00:00:27
I've got a replacement Thunderbolt 3 cable and then also a replacement power cable,
00:00:32
but it was still doing it.
00:00:33
So I'm like, "Ah, whatever. What the heck? I hear it's pretty stable."
00:00:36
I heard somebody say it actually fixed some of their issues.
00:00:38
I think it was Katie Floyd and MacPower users.
00:00:40
I'm like, "All right, I'll go for it."
00:00:42
And sure enough, I've had no issues with my Thunderbolt 3 dock since I upgraded.
00:00:48
So it must have been a Thunderbolt 3 issue with High Sierra, but seems to be just fine.
00:00:54
Interesting.
00:00:55
I have not upgraded, but that's not a surprise to anyone who knows who's me.
00:01:00
I want to and I'm actually planning to as soon as I have two kind of crucial client projects
00:01:08
I'm working on right now and I have all of their code finely tuned on my Mac.
00:01:15
So I'm a little nervous to upgrade because those two are still in play or were.
00:01:21
I guess one of them has wrapped up this week.
00:01:23
But I have one that's outstanding and it's supposed to wrap up early next week.
00:01:27
Once that wraps up and it successfully deploys, I'm blocking off an afternoon.
00:01:33
Cool.
00:01:34
So that is my plan.
00:01:36
Well, I'm glad I'm glad it solved your problem.
00:01:38
Way to go.
00:01:39
Yeah.
00:01:40
Go Mojave.
00:01:41
Dark mode's kind of cool, although it looks really dumb in the apps that don't support it,
00:01:45
which is most of them.
00:01:47
Okay.
00:01:49
Does it just make the toolbars and the buttons and stuff dark and everything else is white?
00:01:54
Is that how that works?
00:01:55
Kind of unless it, if it's designed for dark mode, like you can tell.
00:01:59
Like for example, I tried dark mode obviously when I got it installed and mailmate actually,
00:02:05
when you launch it looks pretty good in dark mode because it's using all standard elements
00:02:10
in the Mac operating system except for the engine that renders the email message.
00:02:13
So everything's nice and dark and then bam, white email.
00:02:18
Which, I'm not sure how you really get around that.
00:02:22
You probably have to do some special code.
00:02:24
You know, if somebody's sending you a newsletter for example, and I say the background color
00:02:27
is white, I'm not sure that there's much you can do with that, but...
00:02:31
Interesting.
00:02:32
So if you send, now that's an interesting point because I feel like Apple Mail will have the
00:02:39
same problem.
00:02:40
Yep.
00:02:41
I haven't tried Apple Mail.
00:02:42
I despise Apple Mail with the intensity of a thousand suns.
00:02:45
So I haven't even launched it yet.
00:02:48
Fair enough.
00:02:50
All I was going to say was if you have like an HTML email, so most newsletters, like those
00:02:57
typically have some form of a white background added to them.
00:03:03
Like that's just part of how that HTML is built.
00:03:06
So I would assume that the rendering mechanism would have to support that.
00:03:13
That would be my assumption.
00:03:14
I would think so.
00:03:15
Which would mean that even with dark mode, some of those newsletters will still show up as
00:03:19
white.
00:03:20
Exactly.
00:03:21
So it's not probably not an easy problem to solve.
00:03:23
Also, while I'm on this rant, have you seen the to-doest trailer?
00:03:29
Yes.
00:03:30
They created a video trailer for their dark mode, which is just completely over the top ridiculous.
00:03:38
It's like a movie trailer with like dramatic music in the background and everything.
00:03:42
It's like, guys, you released dark mode.
00:03:44
Good job, but let's tone it down a bit.
00:03:47
And I've seen a couple of these, actually.
00:03:49
I prefer the approach that things took.
00:03:51
If you go into the App Store and update things, they announced dark mode.
00:03:55
And they're released notes basically just say, yeah, there's only one new feature, but
00:03:59
we think it's pretty cool.
00:04:00
Here's dark mode.
00:04:01
It was not a Hollywood production to announce it.
00:04:06
Hey, check it out.
00:04:07
It's black now.
00:04:08
Black is the new white.
00:04:10
Okay, link in the show notes.
00:04:15
Stop.
00:04:16
Go watch that.
00:04:19
First reaction.
00:04:20
Why?
00:04:21
Exactly.
00:04:22
I'm with you.
00:04:24
Okay.
00:04:25
All right.
00:04:26
I don't know why you would do this.
00:04:27
Because you're really excited.
00:04:29
I guess.
00:04:30
Apparently.
00:04:31
Nobody cares about dark mode, though, Joe.
00:04:33
What people really care about is, did we make our daily Mies?
00:04:36
I have a list for my daily Mies.
00:04:39
I have not done well at implementing it, though.
00:04:44
Okay.
00:04:45
All right, why?
00:04:47
Well, I don't want to give any excuses.
00:04:50
I think I just did not do it very well.
00:04:54
I kind of put it off too.
00:04:57
As we're recording this, this is on a Thursday.
00:05:00
Last Friday, I did my personal retreat.
00:05:03
When I did my personal retreat, I went back to the drawing board and a lot of different
00:05:06
stuff.
00:05:07
So actually, the first follow up item on the list in the notes that we have is put routines
00:05:11
on my calendar again.
00:05:12
I did that.
00:05:13
So I did that on my personal retreat.
00:05:15
I actually used good notes this time.
00:05:17
And I created the Wheel of Life.
00:05:20
And then I just jotted down what went well, what could have gone better, that sort of
00:05:23
thing.
00:05:24
All my questions and things.
00:05:25
That's on page two.
00:05:26
And then page three.
00:05:27
I took a blank, weekly calendar and color coded it and put my morning routine on there for
00:05:32
the first time of the day, starting at 6am.
00:05:35
The evening routine on there, the gym and the running, all that type of stuff, that's all
00:05:38
green, glow green, Asian efficiency, core value.
00:05:41
Become the best version of yourself.
00:05:42
So that's kind of the way I associate that in my head.
00:05:45
So I did all that.
00:05:46
And then along with that, I thought through my daily mes because I don't want to get to
00:05:52
the end of the day and just realize I forgot to tie up all the loose ends.
00:05:56
So I did make a list of things in Evernote as like a checklist.
00:06:02
So I've got my morning routine in there under the morning section.
00:06:06
And then I've got my work day daily mes.
00:06:09
So when I get done working for the day, the three things that I want to make sure that
00:06:12
I do clear my email, clear my drafts inbox and close all my windows and apps.
00:06:17
Do I do that every day?
00:06:19
No.
00:06:20
So that's the part that I have to work on next.
00:06:23
And then the evening stuff, I've got read, journal and set up my clothes for tomorrow.
00:06:27
So that's all part of my evening routine now, getting ready for the next day.
00:06:32
Oh, and also part of that, which I forgot to put in the checklist.
00:06:35
But this part I have been doing is planning out my day the night before because that's
00:06:40
part of my morning routine is to review that daily plan.
00:06:43
So I'm adding that now to my daily mes note.
00:06:46
But yeah, I need to do a better job of following this.
00:06:49
Okay.
00:06:50
Do you want to know what I heard in that that really jumped out at me?
00:06:54
Sure.
00:06:55
Evernote.
00:06:56
Yes.
00:06:57
Why?
00:06:58
Well, of course that's the piece I pick out.
00:07:03
Yeah, no, I'm not happy about it.
00:07:06
Let's say that.
00:07:07
Okay.
00:07:09
But I was looking at the options for like a simple checklist.
00:07:13
There really aren't a whole lot of great options for that sort of thing.
00:07:16
There's Evernote.
00:07:17
I've got a buddy who is really into notion, which actually is pretty cool.
00:07:22
But it hasn't, I don't know, it seems fairly new to me.
00:07:25
It seems like one of those things that I could go all in on and then it disappears or it
00:07:29
gets acquired or whatever.
00:07:32
I've already got an Evernote account already paying for the Evernote account.
00:07:34
I wanted to have a place where I could store this plus some other things.
00:07:38
So the other, another one of my action items is the mistakes log.
00:07:43
Okay.
00:07:44
So I have a mistakes log in Evernote again because I can't append to a note in day one.
00:07:49
I can't append to a note in any other system.
00:07:52
I can do it in something like Ulysses.
00:07:55
But I didn't really like the way that that looked and I don't use Ulysses that way as
00:07:59
like this is the reference material sort of thing.
00:08:02
So looking at drafts and what can I append to?
00:08:06
I can append to text files and Dropbox stuff like that.
00:08:08
You can also append to Evernote.
00:08:10
So okay.
00:08:11
That's two votes for Evernote I guess.
00:08:12
I may as well just go with this for now.
00:08:16
And when I get frustrated with it, then I'll look for something else.
00:08:20
But I didn't want to not do this because I didn't have a tool that could support it.
00:08:25
So that was the thought process there.
00:08:29
Fair enough.
00:08:30
There are places I think Evernote still serves a really good purpose.
00:08:34
I just don't see it for myself.
00:08:36
I have a lot of issues with Evernote and fight it whenever it comes up.
00:08:41
I do too.
00:08:42
I mean, literally last week I was telling everybody don't use Evernote because they
00:08:45
just laid off like half their company.
00:08:47
They're not going to be around much longer, but looking at what's available right now
00:08:51
that fits my needs, like there really isn't a whole lot.
00:08:54
Yeah.
00:08:55
At least not anything that I can use the way I want to.
00:08:59
So drafts is great, but I don't know all of the code behind it.
00:09:04
It's got a built-in integration where you can append to Evernote.
00:09:06
I don't have to worry about that.
00:09:09
I'm sure I could hack my way in there.
00:09:11
Rosemary Archer probably has a way to do this.
00:09:13
But I don't understand.
00:09:15
The Sibler solution is the best solution in my case.
00:09:19
Fair enough.
00:09:20
Yeah, I'm not an Evernote fan.
00:09:23
That's no surprise.
00:09:26
I think whenever -- and I've got some action items from today's book that I think will
00:09:29
play into that conversation a little bit later on.
00:09:33
But with the checklist piece, I just do that on OmniFocus.
00:09:38
That's how I do that, Mike.
00:09:39
I thought about that.
00:09:40
Lazy.
00:09:41
Yeah.
00:09:43
I don't know.
00:09:44
I mean, OmniFocus -- that's my other action item here -- is to rethink the sequential projects
00:09:49
in OmniFocus, which I didn't do a very good job of this either.
00:09:53
To be honest, everything was crazy up until the personal retreat.
00:09:57
And so I need to do a review and maybe a new convey of my OmniFocus, to be honest.
00:10:04
It's gotten a little out of hand.
00:10:07
I'm on the work today and tomorrow.
00:10:09
So I promise right now, do your listener, by the time you hear this, I will have gone
00:10:14
through OmniFocus and cleaned it all up.
00:10:15
I'm not a hypocrite.
00:10:19
But it is -- I can tell.
00:10:21
I can feel the friction, which is something that we're going to talk about in today's
00:10:25
episode.
00:10:26
I can feel the friction from the system not being maintained to the level that it should
00:10:29
be, which kind of ties back to the daily mes.
00:10:33
That's one of the things I like about these action items is that it forces me to follow
00:10:38
through on this stuff.
00:10:39
Like, I can in the back of my head know that, hey, I should go through OmniFocus or I should
00:10:43
create that list for my morning and evening routines.
00:10:46
And when I shut down at the end of my workday, but Bookworm is the thing that actually causes
00:10:53
the action more often than that.
00:10:56
Good Bookworm.
00:10:57
I'm leading through your list here.
00:10:58
I think the only one that's outstanding is a mistakes log.
00:11:02
Did you do this?
00:11:03
Yeah, I have this in Evernote because I needed to append to it.
00:11:09
So I do have a mistakes log.
00:11:12
I'm not going to share what's on the mistakes log.
00:11:16
But I do need to, it is kind of cool.
00:11:20
One of the things that's hard with this is that I tend to move on from those things fairly
00:11:27
quickly.
00:11:28
So it's a little bit hard at the end of the day.
00:11:31
If I don't capture it basically when it's happening, which it doesn't happen all the
00:11:36
time, then I tend to forget about those things.
00:11:39
So I do need to get better at that, but I've got the system set up now.
00:11:43
I can just jot it down in drafts.
00:11:44
I've got a drafts action, which appends to the mistakes log.
00:11:47
So hopefully that will become a habit.
00:11:50
Sure.
00:11:51
Well, I developed a daily Meeze as well.
00:11:55
I simply created a checklist called Meezen Plus in OmniFocus because I'm lazy and I know
00:12:02
that OmniFocus can do checklists.
00:12:04
So I just did it in OmniFocus because I'm lazy.
00:12:09
So what is on that list?
00:12:11
I suppose it'd be easy if I look at it.
00:12:14
So the idea here that I think I'm landing on is that this needs to start about 30 minutes
00:12:21
before the end of my work day.
00:12:25
And the exact mechanics of some of the items on this list are still kind of up in the air
00:12:32
just because my whole OmniFocus system is kind of in flux right now.
00:12:37
OmniFocus 3 really screwed with how I do things.
00:12:44
Maybe in a good way?
00:12:45
I don't know.
00:12:46
It's still up in the air for me.
00:12:47
I really was not a fan of the tags switch.
00:12:50
So I'm coming around to it.
00:12:53
I'm trying.
00:12:54
I don't really get an option at this point.
00:12:56
So I'm being that person.
00:12:58
So now that they're here, my thinking is, I should really embrace this if I'm going to
00:13:04
use them at all.
00:13:06
I guess I could just say I'm only going to have single tags on everything.
00:13:10
Yeah, exactly.
00:13:11
If you want to just keep your contacts, you could just use a single tag.
00:13:14
Yeah.
00:13:16
But the other thing too is whenever I switched, some of my perspectives broke as well.
00:13:23
And a couple of those I had relied on, and I actually have to rethink how I build those.
00:13:28
I can still get it the same way I want.
00:13:31
I just have to redo it.
00:13:33
Not a huge deal, but it's a classic.
00:13:38
Whenever you have, and this isn't a crisis, I mean this is a task manager, but bear with
00:13:43
me.
00:13:44
When you have a big change of some sort or something is thrust on you like that, that's
00:13:50
the time when you should stop and rethink it because you're already going to change.
00:13:54
So it's easier to make bigger shifts when you're already in the middle of that.
00:13:58
So that's exactly what I'm doing here.
00:14:01
I have a lot of adjustments that I've been making to my system as a result of that upgrade.
00:14:08
I have not moved to Mojave as we talked about, but I am changing how I store a lot of things
00:14:17
in OmniFocus.
00:14:18
So because of that, I still have some issues with how I do some of this.
00:14:25
Regardless, I still have a Miesen+ project.
00:14:27
I'm saying you're looking at it.
00:14:31
It has some things like clearing out inboxes, flagging tasks for tomorrow because that's
00:14:36
the whole plan for tomorrow thing, which I don't really like the concept of flagging
00:14:40
in OmniFocus 3.
00:14:41
I don't know why.
00:14:43
I think it has to do with one of my other action items.
00:14:46
I'll get there in a second.
00:14:47
I've got some things on here like cleaning up my digital workspace, cleaning up my analog
00:14:52
workspace.
00:14:53
So my desk, getting to that here in a second as well.
00:14:56
But then I have a couple things on here because this particular list goes beyond the end of
00:15:03
my workday and helps me jumpstart my family transition as well, which sounds a little
00:15:10
odd when I first say it.
00:15:13
But for example here, I have read until four o'clock.
00:15:18
So four o'clock is when I typically get off work.
00:15:20
So read until the end of my workday.
00:15:22
And then I have an item here just to make sure I don't forget this, but I want to pray
00:15:25
over that family transition.
00:15:28
And at least that's what I call it.
00:15:31
Because I don't have a commute home because it's seven steps upstairs and I'm now in the
00:15:37
midst of my family, the transition period between the moment whenever I'm still 100%
00:15:44
on work and the time when I'm engaged with my family is very small.
00:15:51
Like that timeframe is very tight.
00:15:53
So I want to pray over that transition so that it goes well because it's too easy for
00:15:58
me to still be in work mode and still be driving and I need to stop and go have fun.
00:16:05
Like that's what I'm praying over.
00:16:08
So just praying that that's a good transition.
00:16:11
So I highly recommend it goes well for me whenever I do it.
00:16:13
I don't always do it, but I should.
00:16:17
Once I get to after work, quote unquote, I have some kind of lame things here.
00:16:27
Things like checking on laundry, checking on how are dishes.
00:16:31
Do I need to wash dishes quick?
00:16:33
Put them away, that sort of thing.
00:16:34
Check out the trash, like simple stuff just because in our household, those things tend
00:16:40
to not always get done.
00:16:42
And I found that if I just put them on this list, they have a much better chance of actually
00:16:46
getting done.
00:16:47
So that takes me through that process.
00:16:50
And then once that's done, this whole Miesen plus checklist is done.
00:16:55
And then I'm off to the races for the afternoon.
00:16:58
So I do it at the end of the work day.
00:17:00
And a couple of the steps in there help me set up for tomorrow.
00:17:05
And I don't know.
00:17:06
I seem to like it.
00:17:07
I've run it a number of times since we last talked.
00:17:11
I think I'm still tweaking it and adjusting it, but it seems to be going well.
00:17:15
So I'm going to keep trying with it because I think it's one of those things that will
00:17:19
forever and always be adjusted.
00:17:22
So there you go.
00:17:24
So you check things off as you do them and then it just repeats the next day?
00:17:28
Yes.
00:17:29
So the project itself, you're asking about the OmniFocus structure itself.
00:17:35
Is that what you're?
00:17:37
Yep.
00:17:38
I have it set to repeat.
00:17:40
The project itself repeats.
00:17:42
I just have it on weekdays.
00:17:44
I don't run this on weekends.
00:17:46
So Monday is kind of a tough one just because it's bigger than normal.
00:17:51
But Monday through Friday, I have it to repeat during those days.
00:17:55
And then I have the defer time on it.
00:17:58
I don't have a due date, but I have a defer time on it to set for, what is it, 315?
00:18:04
Because the idea is that I start this at about 330.
00:18:08
So I want it to show up before then.
00:18:11
And then whenever I check off the last item on it, that's when it completes the project
00:18:16
automatically.
00:18:18
That's how that works mechanically.
00:18:19
Is that what you're asking?
00:18:21
Yeah.
00:18:22
So one of the things that makes me not want to put the daily me's in OmniFocus, and maybe
00:18:28
this is something that I should just do, is I don't really want to go in and check the
00:18:34
things off.
00:18:36
Sure.
00:18:37
Like, I want to just crank through the stuff.
00:18:41
I want to make it a habit and not have to track it.
00:18:44
I want OmniFocus to be for quote-unquote the more important stuff.
00:18:48
But maybe that's just something I need to get over in my own head and just stick it
00:18:52
in there.
00:18:53
Yeah.
00:18:54
I think this depends on how you see this checklist working for you.
00:18:59
I have a tendency to use checklists in the way that airline pilots do, in that this is
00:19:06
what I want to be doing at this time.
00:19:08
And then I re-evaluate those checklists on a monthly basis.
00:19:12
And if I have something in that routine that I want to change, I just change the checklist.
00:19:20
And it's easy for me to change my habits that way just because all I ever do in that scenario
00:19:27
is run the checklist, run the checklist, run the checklist.
00:19:30
Which makes it sound kind of robotic.
00:19:32
But at the same time, I'm not sitting there looking at the list and running down each item.
00:19:38
It's one of those do confirm, if you remember the checklist manifesto.
00:19:43
It's the do confirm type of list.
00:19:45
So I tend to run the whole thing and then when I'm done, look back at it and make sure I
00:19:50
got it all.
00:19:52
And if I didn't, that's when I do the ones that I didn't do.
00:19:56
That's how I do it.
00:19:57
And then it's easier for me to make adjustments in the long run.
00:20:01
So no, I'm not just sitting there looking at it the whole time.
00:20:03
That sounds crazy to me.
00:20:05
What about hyper scheduling?
00:20:07
Hyper scheduling, I haven't really done.
00:20:09
So okay, so the next two.
00:20:11
So hyper scheduling and then working with the Omni Focus forecast view.
00:20:16
With Omni Focus 3, they brought over the forecast view which has like your calendar and the
00:20:23
deferred and do items throughout the day and it puts them in a single list.
00:20:28
Love this.
00:20:29
This is genius, I think.
00:20:31
So it's easy for me to look at this and see my entire day.
00:20:34
Now, I'm only two or three days in on this.
00:20:37
So I don't really have a good verdict other than I like it a lot.
00:20:41
And this is what's screwing with some of my Mies and Ploss process because they have
00:20:45
some features with how you can put things on that forecast view as far as like how you
00:20:50
tag them to get them to show up there.
00:20:53
And I haven't fully played with all of that.
00:20:55
I've still got to go through Sparky's field guide.
00:21:00
And then I'm working through some of Tim Stringers Learn Omni Focus things as well.
00:21:05
There's a lot of stuff in there that like I feel like those guys know how some of the
00:21:08
stuff works and I'm just trying to think through the mechanics of what I want and then using
00:21:12
them to help me figure out how to get what I want.
00:21:15
So that's what I'm doing right now.
00:21:17
So those two between the hyper scheduling and the forecast view like they're kind of working
00:21:21
together to help me create like my plan for the day.
00:21:25
But I haven't been real good about figuring out how to actually get it to show me what
00:21:28
I want.
00:21:30
So that's that's the piece that I'm working in.
00:21:32
So I'm getting there.
00:21:33
Just not there.
00:21:34
On the topic of the Max Sparky field guide that Max Sparky guy is crazy.
00:21:38
He released the series shortcuts guide, which is three hours of video the week before and
00:21:42
then the next week releases.
00:21:44
Yeah, I know.
00:21:45
I know.
00:21:46
I know.
00:21:47
I know.
00:21:48
Which has like I think five hours of video.
00:21:49
Yeah.
00:21:50
It's long.
00:21:51
It's a lot.
00:21:52
I kept wondering if you still had legal clients after that.
00:21:54
It's like what have you been doing?
00:21:56
Is this did you drop everything and just do this?
00:21:58
Yeah.
00:21:59
Perhaps to you David.
00:22:00
Yep.
00:22:01
All right.
00:22:02
Last item here, sketching my workspace.
00:22:04
I didn't actually sketch it.
00:22:05
So I don't have a picture.
00:22:07
Um, to send you the of on paper.
00:22:10
I just, I sat at my desk and started rearranging things until it felt right, which is not the
00:22:16
way you're supposed to do this.
00:22:18
So, uh, maybe I'll take a picture of this.
00:22:22
You do that, Joe, like you take a picture with your digital device instead of sketching
00:22:26
it with your analog pens.
00:22:28
Thanks.
00:22:29
Thanks.
00:22:30
Uh, I do have my fountain pen sitting here there with an arms reach.
00:22:35
I just didn't use them.
00:22:36
Of course.
00:22:37
Of course.
00:22:38
My wife wanted me to like draw it all out into scale and then like cut out little pieces
00:22:44
that were the same size and then rearrange them on the piece of paper.
00:22:47
It's like, that sounds like way more work than just moving the thing itself.
00:22:51
Hmm.
00:22:52
Maybe that's why you didn't do it.
00:22:53
It could be.
00:22:54
I got this idea of a super complicated thing in my head.
00:22:57
Could be.
00:22:58
Anyway, there you go.
00:23:01
Follow up done.
00:23:02
All right.
00:23:03
Sweet.
00:23:04
Let's talk about happiness.
00:23:05
Woo.
00:23:06
Happy.
00:23:07
Yay.
00:23:08
Today's book is the Happiness Advantage by Sean Acor.
00:23:12
Is that how you say his last name?
00:23:14
That's how I've had or heard other people say it.
00:23:17
So I'm going to say yes.
00:23:18
Okay.
00:23:19
I picked this book and I picked it basically because a few people told me it was really
00:23:24
good and I thought it was a little bit different take, uh, a little bit different topic than
00:23:29
a lot of the stuff that we cover on bookworm.
00:23:31
Actually, though it seems like the last dozen books or so, they've kind of been along the
00:23:36
same vein other than work clean, which was the last one.
00:23:39
But we tend to get like different perspectives on the same topics and they reference a lot
00:23:43
of the same studies and stuff like that.
00:23:45
So I wanted to pick something a little bit more outside the the bookworm box.
00:23:50
And I think that this book delivered it definitely is research based.
00:23:53
He has a link to a whole bunch of studies in the back and some of them are familiar.
00:23:57
But for the most part, this is not focusing on productivity or maximizing your potential
00:24:03
or anything like that.
00:24:04
Those are all benefits of happiness.
00:24:05
It's really just cultivating a happy state.
00:24:09
And as it turns out, happy people are our productive people.
00:24:13
But it's, it's a, I'm not sure if I'm doing a good job explaining this, but it's a, it's
00:24:17
a different approach.
00:24:18
It feels very different than a lot of the books that we've read in my opinion anyways.
00:24:23
It kind of feels like the, like, I don't know if you could say like the next generation
00:24:29
of productivity book maybe, but it's, it's along the lines of like the meditation and
00:24:39
enjoying your work and getting past the concept of like burnout.
00:24:45
It feels like it's approaching that side of things and has a lot of tactical examples
00:24:52
and stories for how to basically be happy and productive and not just productive.
00:25:00
Yeah.
00:25:01
I mean, the, the book is on happiness.
00:25:04
So by nature, it's a little bit more emotional than a lot of the books that we've, we've
00:25:10
read.
00:25:11
It's not just, hey, do this thing and you'll get this result.
00:25:14
There's a more human element to it.
00:25:17
I guess is the best way to, to describe it.
00:25:20
And also Sean is a really good writer.
00:25:24
He's pretty funny.
00:25:26
Yeah.
00:25:27
It's definitely one of the more entertaining books that we've read in my opinion.
00:25:30
Yeah, I'd give you that for sure.
00:25:33
So there's again, three different sections to this book.
00:25:37
What?
00:25:38
Really?
00:25:39
Yeah.
00:25:40
Although if you look at my, my mind node, because I try to, I hate it when one side
00:25:44
is like overweighted and I try to balance things out, but if you break it down into the
00:25:49
three sections, the first section, there's almost nothing there.
00:25:52
The second section is where all the seven principles are.
00:25:54
And that's where all of the notes are.
00:25:56
And then the third section is really like 10 pages at the end.
00:25:59
Yes.
00:26:00
And so I don't like the way that this, this mind node file looks.
00:26:05
Yep.
00:26:06
It, again, it looks like the editor said, we need to break this up into three pieces.
00:26:10
And here you go.
00:26:12
I don't really want to do an intro.
00:26:14
I just want to talk about all the principles.
00:26:16
So here's your intro you're making me right.
00:26:19
Oh, and you're making me put an outro too?
00:26:21
Okay.
00:26:22
Well, here you go.
00:26:23
Like that's what, that's how it feels to me.
00:26:25
Honestly, if they would have described it as intro content outro, it would have been
00:26:29
perfect because that's exactly what part one and part three are.
00:26:32
Like there's no masquerading.
00:26:34
This is like, oh, this is the first part.
00:26:35
You know, no, this is just an introduction to the topic.
00:26:39
The topic is great.
00:26:40
The seven principles are awesome.
00:26:42
Tons of good stuff there.
00:26:43
And then the last part, just applying this, call it an outro.
00:26:48
I mean, it's called the ripple effect is the third section.
00:26:52
But really it's just like, okay, what are you going to do from this point on?
00:26:55
And there's really not a whole lot more there.
00:26:57
Like I said, the meat of this is in the seven principles part two.
00:27:00
The first part is officially titled Positive Psychology at Work.
00:27:04
And this kind of talks a little bit about like neuroplasticity and the growth mindset
00:27:08
and how your brain can change.
00:27:11
But really, like I said, the majority of the content in this book is those seven principles,
00:27:16
which I put in the outline and I call out a couple things from each section.
00:27:20
But we can pick and choose or just crank through this if you want.
00:27:24
You know, however you want to want to do this.
00:27:25
There's a couple of things that I wrote down, which would be cool discussion points, I think.
00:27:30
But otherwise, I think that you can kind of tease out pretty easily from each of these
00:27:35
sections, the main points.
00:27:37
And there's not 24 of them we got to crank through.
00:27:39
Yeah, true, true.
00:27:41
Yeah.
00:27:42
I think we should just jump into them because again, like part one, what is it?
00:27:47
It's 30 pages just over.
00:27:50
Part three is about 10 pages out of a 210 page book.
00:27:54
So guess where all the talking points are.
00:27:58
Exactly.
00:27:59
So let's just jump in.
00:28:01
So number one, so principle number one, he just calls it the happiness advantage and
00:28:08
just jumps right in with the definition of happiness and I can't find his definition
00:28:12
here.
00:28:13
Do you have it?
00:28:14
I've wrote down a couple of different things from this section because one of the sections
00:28:19
in my outline is what is happiness and that's what I put in the outline there.
00:28:23
And he mentions that there's no singular definition to this because it's relative to
00:28:27
the person who's experiencing it.
00:28:29
But on page 39, he says, "pleasure combined with deeper feelings of meaning and purpose."
00:28:35
And he also referenced a definition from Socrates, I believe, which I liked, called human.
00:28:41
He just said it was human flourishing.
00:28:43
So happiness is being able to flourish in your work, your personal life, really like
00:28:49
all the different areas and you can find whatever systems which break your life down into however
00:28:53
many different parts.
00:28:55
But really happiness is being able to flourish in all those different areas to the best of
00:28:59
your ability, in my opinion.
00:29:01
It was Aristotle.
00:29:03
Ah, Aristotle, dang it.
00:29:08
One talked the other, which way was which, Mike?
00:29:10
I'm going to change that on my mind node file right now.
00:29:13
Did you write Socrates on your outline?
00:29:15
I did, I don't know why.
00:29:16
I'm going to make sure page 40, I think.
00:29:19
Yeah, Aristotle.
00:29:21
Yep.
00:29:22
Eusto-monia, which translates not directly to happiness but to human flourishing.
00:29:26
Yep, Aristotle.
00:29:27
Sorry.
00:29:28
No, thank you for correcting that.
00:29:32
Got it.
00:29:33
Way to go.
00:29:34
Ah, yes.
00:29:35
So one of the things that I think, all right, so this might be confession time.
00:29:42
I don't know.
00:29:43
Whenever I got through this point, given like what's been going on in my life lately, I
00:29:49
read that and thought, hmm, that sounds nice.
00:29:52
So it's like, I'll just be upfront.
00:29:55
Like I do not feel like what I have been through lately puts me in a spot where I've
00:30:02
been very happy, I guess.
00:30:04
It's been very stressful and emotional, somewhat angering at times.
00:30:09
And even before we started recording, I told you that, okay, clients have been mean to
00:30:15
me today.
00:30:16
So today's kind of a rough day for Joe.
00:30:18
And I just feel like that's been the norm at least this week and maybe even this month.
00:30:23
So it's like, okay, I'm just tired.
00:30:26
So hopefully I've got some action items from this book that I want to get to in a little
00:30:32
bit.
00:30:33
But the nice thing about his groundwork here is that it does lay the foundation for what
00:30:40
you can do when you're in a situation like what I'm currently in.
00:30:44
So I think this is good timing.
00:30:45
So good pick, Mike.
00:30:47
So I'm kind of interested in some of the rest of this as well, just because I know there's
00:30:52
a lot of pieces of this that could be very applicable in any stage, but especially when
00:30:56
you're going through a stressful time.
00:30:58
Yep, definitely.
00:31:00
And he talks about how happiness leads to success in the different areas.
00:31:04
And it's an interesting point that you brought up because a lot of people I think view happiness
00:31:10
is based on their circumstances.
00:31:14
So if the right things happen, then I'll be happy.
00:31:17
And really the whole point of this book, I would argue, is that you can choose to be
00:31:21
happy and then it changes how you see your circumstances.
00:31:24
So even if a bunch of bad stuff is happening, you can still choose to be happy and I know
00:31:30
it's easier said than done for sure.
00:31:33
But I do think that you can choose to set the course or just react to what's happening
00:31:41
to you.
00:31:42
And this first section he's talking about why you should choose to be happy.
00:31:47
The rest of the section he talks about, or the rest of section two, the other principles
00:31:52
he kind of talks about how you can pull the right levers in your life to get there.
00:31:57
But happiness leads to success.
00:31:58
He says, "A marriage, health, friendship, community involvement, your creativity, your
00:32:02
job or your career."
00:32:04
The second point I had on this outline was the broadening effect, which he talks about
00:32:08
how when you're happy, those positive emotions, they flood your brain with dopamine and serotonin,
00:32:14
the positive chemicals, and they dial up your learning centers to higher levels.
00:32:18
So it's easier for you to learn stuff and memorize stuff, helps you organize your information
00:32:23
better, keep it longer, retrieve it faster later on, allows you to think more quickly
00:32:27
and creatively, you become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving.
00:32:31
By the time you get done with this section, you're like, "Okay, you've convinced me.
00:32:35
I'm going to try and be happy."
00:32:37
Sure.
00:32:38
Yeah.
00:32:39
The way I explained it to my wife was that a lot of our culture and society sees happiness
00:32:47
as the result of success.
00:32:51
And he basically tries to flip that and say, "Actually, it's the other way around."
00:32:59
Whenever you've got a situation when you just don't see the upside and it's just a down
00:33:04
season, like the Builig household lately, that makes it such that it's even more important
00:33:13
to apply a lot of these principles to help you get past that.
00:33:18
Because it's not something that you have to keep working towards and continue to strive
00:33:23
for success and then you can say, "I'm there."
00:33:26
The classic is that we work 50, 60 years to get to retirement and then it's at that
00:33:32
point you're supposed to stop and relax and go to the beach and have a great life.
00:33:37
And how many people completely fall apart when they get to that point?
00:33:41
Because there's no purpose that they see.
00:33:43
That's the opposite of what you want.
00:33:47
You want to figure out how to be happy in the scenario that you're in and let that drive
00:33:53
the success later on.
00:33:54
Yep.
00:33:55
And in this section, he does give different tactical things that you can do to benefit
00:34:02
from the happiness advantage.
00:34:04
One of the things that came up in this section was meditate, which I know I saw you posted
00:34:10
something, keeps coming back to you.
00:34:14
Of course he's done it.
00:34:15
Yeah.
00:34:16
So we may have to revisit that at some point.
00:34:17
I won't put you on the spot right here.
00:34:18
But...
00:34:19
That's fine.
00:34:20
You can put me on the spot.
00:34:21
I'm good with that.
00:34:22
All right.
00:34:23
So I'm curious because this wasn't what you were referencing when you posted that I don't
00:34:26
think.
00:34:27
No.
00:34:28
But what's your thought process on this whole idea of meditation?
00:34:29
Are you convinced yet?
00:34:31
I am convinced that it works for some people, yes.
00:34:35
But now you?
00:34:38
So you're referencing a tweet for the listeners.
00:34:42
Mike is referencing a tweet that I put out because...
00:34:46
And I don't even remember what it was.
00:34:48
I think it was the App Store had a thing on...
00:34:50
Yeah.
00:34:51
The 10% happier thing.
00:34:52
Is that what it was?
00:34:53
Yeah.
00:34:54
And it was something along the lines of why does this keep hitting on my feeds?
00:34:58
Why do I keep noticing this?
00:34:59
Well, I also know that it's one of those things where if you bought a red car, you start
00:35:04
to see more red cars.
00:35:05
Yep.
00:35:06
And I've got that whole scenario where I've been thinking about meditation on and off for
00:35:12
the last two or three weeks, it seems like so, which means that I continue to see apps
00:35:17
like Headspace and Oak and all these different meditation type systems continue to be thrown
00:35:25
at me.
00:35:26
This book brought it up.
00:35:27
It just continues to hit me.
00:35:30
I'm like, "Okay.
00:35:32
I haven't done anything about it.
00:35:33
I'll say that.
00:35:34
I don't even have an action item for it, Mike."
00:35:36
But it's a thing that I know helps a lot of people to work through quick scenarios and
00:35:47
they have a lot more clarity.
00:35:50
They can let things go easier.
00:35:53
I get that.
00:35:56
Maybe I haven't stuck with it long enough.
00:35:58
I've been in scenarios where I've meditated for 40 days straight, 10 minutes at a time.
00:36:06
I have a hard time seeing any effects from it.
00:36:12
Now, is that because I'm just not looking at the right results?
00:36:16
Is that because I'm just not, maybe I'm not meditating right as if there's a wrong way
00:36:24
from what I understand?
00:36:25
You're doing it wrong.
00:36:28
So whatever the answer is there, I personally don't see those effects that people rant and
00:36:34
rave about.
00:36:35
So I continue to have my skepticism for me personally.
00:36:41
I'm not denying that it doesn't work for some people.
00:36:43
I just have a hard time seeing it myself.
00:36:45
Okay.
00:36:46
Yeah, fair enough.
00:36:48
So back to the list then.
00:36:50
Meditate.
00:36:51
Find something to look forward to.
00:36:53
Commit conscious acts of kindness.
00:36:55
Infuse positivity into your surroundings.
00:36:58
Exercise.
00:36:59
Spend money, but not on stuff, which I thought was an interesting point.
00:37:03
Then use a signature strength, which they linked to a survey.
00:37:08
Did you go through the survey?
00:37:11
I didn't.
00:37:12
I thought I should though.
00:37:13
Well, I started it.
00:37:15
It looks to me kind of like the Strengths Finder assessment, which I think we did a while
00:37:21
back.
00:37:22
Yeah.
00:37:23
The Colby one would be another one.
00:37:25
I think there is value in identifying the way that you're wired and then using those
00:37:30
things that are kind of unique to you.
00:37:34
So unique ability would be a Colby term or a Dan Sullivan term for that sort of thing.
00:37:41
But there's lots of ways that you can get that idea and express that based on what systems
00:37:47
you're familiar with.
00:37:49
It's not a specifically Dan Sullivan idea.
00:37:53
But the basic idea being that there are certain things that are in your wheelhouse.
00:37:57
And if you do those things, then obviously I would say that does make you happier.
00:38:02
So one of the things that is simple to do, especially for somebody who is a freelancer
00:38:10
or has more control over what they do and how they do it, not like you and I, but even
00:38:18
if you work in a corporate environment, look for ways to express that unique ability in
00:38:24
what you do.
00:38:25
There's going to be some stuff that you're going to have to do that you don't really
00:38:28
want to do.
00:38:29
That's okay.
00:38:30
But figure out how to do the tasks that you do have to do in a way that is in line with
00:38:37
the way that you're wired using that signature strength is the way that they would say it
00:38:41
here.
00:38:42
Sure.
00:38:43
You want to go to principle two?
00:38:45
Yeah.
00:38:46
So principle two is the fulcrum and the lever.
00:38:51
Is that how you say this?
00:38:53
I say lever.
00:38:54
That's me.
00:38:55
We'll say lever, the fulcrum and the lever.
00:38:58
And in this section, he talks about how to maximize your potential and it's being based
00:39:04
on two things.
00:39:06
So number one, the length of your lever or lever, how much power and possibility that
00:39:12
we believe we have.
00:39:14
And then number two, the position of our fulcrum, which is the mindset with which we generate
00:39:19
the power to change.
00:39:21
And I really like this part because we all, I think, understand this concept dating back
00:39:27
to first introduction to simple machines and how you've got a Cesar or Teeter totter and
00:39:32
you've got the fulcrum in the middle, kid on the right who weighs more than the kid on
00:39:36
the left, like it doesn't work.
00:39:38
But if you move the fulcrum, then you can achieve the balance.
00:39:40
Or if you want to move something that's really heavy, you move the fulcrum and then you can
00:39:44
use that lever and you can move the big rocker or whatever it is.
00:39:49
But to apply that to a mindset is a little bit interesting.
00:39:53
I really liked the analogy though.
00:39:55
Yeah.
00:39:56
I think this is one of those that, and Sean does a great job of telling story after story
00:40:02
after story in an entertaining way.
00:40:06
So I'm going back to an earlier point.
00:40:09
He's a great writer.
00:40:10
Love listening or not listening, but reading the stories that he pulls together.
00:40:16
And I think there's a lot of ways that you could apply.
00:40:21
I think fulcrum in the lever and there's a lot of different ways that I felt like this
00:40:27
concept was maybe, I don't want to say repeated, but reiterated with a different view later
00:40:33
on.
00:40:34
Like, for example, the Zorro circle, which we'll get to.
00:40:38
I could see how the fulcrum in the lever is being applied in that principle.
00:40:44
It's one where he's, I don't want to say reusing it, but just coming at it slightly
00:40:49
different.
00:40:50
Like, that was maybe a view that I had there.
00:40:52
But I do like the concept though.
00:40:55
It's a good one.
00:40:56
Yeah.
00:40:57
The key thing here, I think for me is from page 63, he mentions that happiness is not
00:41:02
about lying to ourselves or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our
00:41:06
brain so that we can see ways to rise above our circumstances.
00:41:11
I think this is the natural first argument people will have after reading that first
00:41:17
section is like, "Well, you don't know what I'm going through."
00:41:20
Yeah.
00:41:21
And he's basically saying it doesn't really matter what you're going through.
00:41:24
Happiness is not lying about the stuff that is happening to you.
00:41:27
It's not pretending like it doesn't happen.
00:41:31
But he does say on page 68 that our external reality is far more malleable than many of
00:41:36
us think and far more dependent on the eyes through which we view it.
00:41:40
But I think there's a lot of truth to this.
00:41:43
I think a great explanation of this, which is the second point in the outline under the
00:41:47
section is the workaholics curse.
00:41:49
I've fallen into this.
00:41:51
The workaholics curse is basically viewing family time or leisure time as unproductive.
00:41:56
And when you do that, it makes it that way.
00:41:58
It's the self-fulfilling prophecy idea.
00:42:00
If you say, "Well, I'm not really having a great time with my family.
00:42:03
This isn't really restorative.
00:42:04
I'm not getting these things done," which I'm thinking about these projects that I need
00:42:08
to complete.
00:42:09
Then obviously, that's not going to be the quality time that you would like.
00:42:14
When you view something as a waste of time, he says, "You don't get the benefits."
00:42:18
And so one of the things I wrote down in this section, which I took off my action items
00:42:21
because there's just no way that this makes any sense to follow up on, is make the most
00:42:26
out of every moment.
00:42:27
Well, if you made the most out of every moment, no, I can honestly say next two weeks from
00:42:30
now, I have not made the most of every moment.
00:42:33
But that's the mindset that I want to apply here.
00:42:36
I want to be able to, I guess, if you're a corporate environment, the saying might be,
00:42:42
"Leave work at work."
00:42:44
When you work from home, it's different, but it can be more difficult in a way because
00:42:52
your work is right there, especially if you work on the internet.
00:42:56
Like I do, if you don't tame your notifications and things, you can be eating dinner with
00:43:02
your family and something will happen and then all of a sudden you're thinking about that
00:43:05
thing.
00:43:06
So I've done stuff.
00:43:07
I've got the office.
00:43:08
I leave my computer down there.
00:43:11
Everything gets ignored after 5 p.m.
00:43:15
There's stuff that I've done, but I can still, because it's just down the stairs and I've
00:43:20
got this project that's due in a couple of days in the back of my mind, even when I'm
00:43:25
upstairs hanging out with my family, I do feel that where it's like, "Oh, you should
00:43:29
be down there.
00:43:30
You should be recording that audio.
00:43:31
You should be working on that screencast.
00:43:32
You should be doing this, that, and the other thing."
00:43:34
We're just watching a movie now anyways, or kids are busy.
00:43:39
They're playing with their toys, so they won't notice if you disappear for half an hour and
00:43:44
get some stuff done.
00:43:46
That's what I want to break away from.
00:43:49
That's a tough one.
00:43:51
I think it gets worse if the tasks that you can do at home are small.
00:43:58
I think about quick emails.
00:44:00
It's the worst, especially if you have it on your phone, because it's too easy to just
00:44:07
pull that up and send off that quick response.
00:44:09
It's like, "No, this is not what I should be doing now."
00:44:13
It's easy to do that.
00:44:15
Yeah, just delete it.
00:44:19
There is no email on my phone.
00:44:21
I have thought about deleting all social media from my phone.
00:44:26
I have a feeling if I did that I just would not be on Twitter at all anymore, which I
00:44:31
am on the fence about.
00:44:33
I do enjoy Twitter.
00:44:36
I'm almost never on Instagram.
00:44:38
Those are the two social media networks that I've got on my iPhone, but I do go look at
00:44:42
Twitter almost every day.
00:44:45
I didn't put it down as an action item, but I do see that being the one thing where my
00:44:53
attention could be stolen.
00:44:58
It's also difficult going back to your point where the things are small that you can do
00:45:02
like cranking out an email responding to something.
00:45:05
That's not something I in particular struggle with because I just tell people I'm bad at
00:45:10
email.
00:45:11
If you need to go to hold an email, it's not the way to do it.
00:45:15
I do think that it's also difficult if you enjoy what you do.
00:45:20
I mean, I love podcasting.
00:45:22
I love writing.
00:45:23
I love creating the videos that I create and the ability to go work on those things that
00:45:31
other people are going to see and they're going to read and they're going to listen to
00:45:35
and they're maybe going to reply and say, "Hey, that really helped me out when you explain
00:45:38
that thing."
00:45:39
That gives me energy.
00:45:40
I really enjoy that, but it doesn't mean that working on those things all the time
00:45:45
is the right thing at the right moment.
00:45:47
It's a balancing act for me.
00:45:50
Yeah, I think part of this section involves how you view things.
00:45:56
I guess how you're changing the fulcrum is just changing your mindset on how things operate.
00:46:03
With this workaholics curse, one of those is that you're viewing time where you're not
00:46:09
producing as lost time.
00:46:13
That's just a wrong view.
00:46:16
Whereas you should shift your thinking as to the time away from it is where you get your
00:46:20
ideas.
00:46:21
If you think of it that way, then yeah, sure, I'm working by playing with my kids because
00:46:25
I'm clearing out my brain so that I can get better ideas for my clients or something else.
00:46:32
But that shift in mentality I think is where I've had that view for quite a while when
00:46:40
I'm just mowing the lawn or driving doing errands or something like trying to keep.
00:46:46
I'm not going to listen to a podcast, I'm not going to name it while I'm doing that just
00:46:51
because I want the freedom and the clear white space in that time to let my brain just
00:46:59
kind of go wild because I don't do that very often.
00:47:03
That whole shift in mentality I think is most of what he's talking about here.
00:47:08
There's some nuances to it, but that to me is the key takeaway from that section.
00:47:14
There is another section where he talks about basically if you're working with other people
00:47:20
or you're a manager or a leader of a work team.
00:47:25
He kind of talks about whether you view what you do as a job, career, or a calling.
00:47:30
I like that description.
00:47:33
There's one story in particular.
00:47:35
I don't think he told it in this book, but I remember it about the three brick layers
00:47:39
where someone, the story goes, two or six walks up to the first guy.
00:47:43
He's like, "What are you doing?"
00:47:44
He's like, "I'm laying bricks."
00:47:46
He goes up to the second guy.
00:47:47
He's like, "What are you doing?
00:47:48
I'm building a wall."
00:47:49
He goes to the third guy, "What are you doing?
00:47:51
I'm building a great cathedral to my God."
00:47:53
They basically, they're all doing the same thing, but they're viewing the work that they
00:47:57
do differently.
00:47:59
The one guy's just doing it because somebody's making him.
00:48:01
The second guy's doing it because this is what he does.
00:48:03
The third guy has really bought into this vision of he's creating this thing.
00:48:07
That's a job career or calling.
00:48:10
I think this is important if you work with people underneath you because you have to
00:48:15
cast the vision for what they're doing.
00:48:20
This was one of the things that I took away from this chapter even though I don't work
00:48:24
with a work team underneath me at the moment.
00:48:29
I really like the whole topic and idea of leadership.
00:48:33
I want to become the best leader that I can.
00:48:36
Page 81, he talks about the fastest way to disengage an employee.
00:48:38
I want to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck, which I've seen
00:48:43
people do that.
00:48:44
It's like, "Well, we want to do this.
00:48:45
Why do we want to do this?"
00:48:46
Because we're going to make a lot of money.
00:48:48
I'm like, "Well, okay."
00:48:51
That just has never sat well with me.
00:48:55
Again, I don't have an opportunity to play this out right now.
00:49:00
I do want to file this away.
00:49:03
I think I've done that already because it really hit me when I read this section.
00:49:08
Then I work with people and we're working as a team.
00:49:13
It's not going to just be monetarily driven.
00:49:17
It's going to be casting the vision for the thing that we're doing.
00:49:20
If they're not super excited about it, maybe they're not the right people for the job.
00:49:25
Maybe this isn't the right fit.
00:49:28
I think that that's really important as a leader because there's this other concept
00:49:33
in this chapter, "Pig mailing" in effect, I think is what he called it.
00:49:37
Our belief in another person's potential brings that potential to life.
00:49:42
I think this is a super cool idea and I can't wait to try this out where you've got somebody
00:49:49
who maybe they've been told their entire life, like, "This is who you are.
00:49:53
This is what you're capable of."
00:49:55
Side note, when my dad went to school, they had this thing called a predictor.
00:50:02
When he was in high school, he hadn't gotten very good grades because he just was not interested.
00:50:12
Then the predictor based on his previous work had said, "This is the best you can do."
00:50:17
Junior senior year when he's trying to get into college and he's acing all these exams,
00:50:22
they're dialing down his grade because his predictor said, "No, no.
00:50:25
This is the best you can do."
00:50:28
He wanted to go to Marquette University in Milwaukee.
00:50:31
He ended up having to go to university in Wisconsin, Oshkosh for a year to get good grades there
00:50:36
before he could get into the school he wanted to.
00:50:39
I think there's a lot of people, maybe there's not a formal system like that anymore where
00:50:44
it's like, "No, no, no.
00:50:45
Based on what you've done previously, this is the cap.
00:50:48
This is your maximum potential."
00:50:51
You put people in those boxes, but I think people have been putting boxes like that for
00:50:54
their entire lives.
00:50:55
I just think it's really exciting to recognize that every time you work with somebody, even
00:51:01
like the discipleship group that I lead at my church, any organization, any team that
00:51:06
you're a part of, looking for the real potential that people have and drawing that out of them,
00:51:12
that's a really exciting idea to me.
00:51:15
This whole idea of the pignillion effect really excited me.
00:51:19
I think it's a crazy concept that just shifting the way that you think about something changes
00:51:29
so much in how you approach a problem or even a season of life, it just changes everything.
00:51:39
You approach it differently from an action stance just because of that simple shift in
00:51:43
thinking.
00:51:44
It's just nuts how small of a change it takes to pull that off.
00:51:48
That's really the whole idea of this whole section, the fulcrum and the lever is just
00:51:54
moving the fulcrum makes the job that you were going to do.
00:51:58
Maybe it was impossible, but you changed your mindset a little bit and now it's possible.
00:52:03
All right.
00:52:04
Let's go on to Principle 3, which is the Tetris Effect.
00:52:08
I really liked this one.
00:52:10
I guess this applies to what I was saying earlier about.
00:52:13
You buy a red car and you see a red car everywhere.
00:52:16
It plays into that a little bit.
00:52:19
The name of the principle gets pulled from the game Tetris.
00:52:23
Yeah, it was playing Tetris, but I was trying to remember if it was a study or if it was
00:52:27
just people who did it.
00:52:30
Essentially what it is is that if you play Tetris a whole lot for say three hours a day
00:52:35
for a week, you start to see patterns in buildings and you wonder if I turn that building on
00:52:43
its side, between those two houses or if I put this car this way, would it fit in traffic
00:52:48
a certain way?
00:52:49
You start to try to piece things together because your brain starts to function that
00:52:55
way.
00:52:56
It's basically carry over.
00:52:58
Yeah.
00:52:59
It was a study because they played Tetris for three days and then they saw these shapes
00:53:03
everywhere.
00:53:04
That's what it was.
00:53:05
He starts this chapter interestingly.
00:53:06
He talks about how he mentions the Tetris study a little bit later, but he starts it
00:53:12
with a personal story of how he's got his hand on the police car because he's going to
00:53:17
steal this police car at 3 a.m. because he's been playing Grand Theft Auto all night.
00:53:22
Which...
00:53:23
Great way to start a story, by the way.
00:53:24
Yeah, yeah.
00:53:25
I know.
00:53:26
He basically says he never would have rationally decided to do that sort of thing, but he'd
00:53:31
been playing this video game for so long that he walked out of his dorm room and he's looking
00:53:36
for a car to steal.
00:53:37
I don't think he was really looking for a car to steal.
00:53:39
He did not follow through with it, but it is interesting.
00:53:43
I've always believed that about video games to a certain degree.
00:53:46
Never really had any scientific data to back it up, but I do think that those images that
00:53:51
you see over and over and over again, they do have an impact on you.
00:53:55
You can't say, "Well, I'm going to go play these shooter games and then not recognize
00:54:00
that you're a little bit more violent or prone to violence than maybe you would have
00:54:05
been."
00:54:06
And this is crystal clear for anybody who has kids.
00:54:09
I mean, if you put little boys especially speaking from my own experience, there's a
00:54:14
direct correlation between the amount of screen time that they get playing video games and
00:54:18
how crazy they are when they get done.
00:54:21
So yeah.
00:54:23
But anyways, that's kind of a derivative of the topic that he's talking about here.
00:54:28
Really the idea behind the Tetris effect and the problem with this, he says, "Is that
00:54:33
paradise becomes a hell when all you can see are the problems?"
00:54:38
So there's a positive Tetris effect, which is kind of what he gets to at the back part
00:54:42
of this chapter, but there's also a negative Tetris effect, which is a cognitive pattern
00:54:46
that decreases your overall success rate.
00:54:49
Interesting fact from this section, he mentioned that lawyers are 3.6 times more likely to
00:54:55
suffer from major depressive disorders in the rest of the employed population.
00:54:59
They make a lot of money, which in his point is that money obviously does not equal happiness,
00:55:06
but lawyers are trained to be critical rather than accepting.
00:55:09
And these are his words, not mine.
00:55:11
So all the lawyers listening, I apologize.
00:55:13
But this is what Sean is saying based off of his research.
00:55:16
And he mentions that it's hard to compartmentalize what makes people successful.
00:55:23
But when you do train your brain to constantly look for those things that are wrong and places
00:55:28
that people have broken the law and things like that, that does have a negative effect
00:55:32
on your state.
00:55:34
I feel like I fall victim to this a little bit.
00:55:39
And it's because when you do development, a lot of your time is spent looking for errors
00:55:46
and trying to figure out what you did wrong.
00:55:48
That is a lot of what I do.
00:55:53
And it kind of rubs off.
00:55:55
I find myself even outside of working hours just noticing all the things that I'm not
00:56:01
doing the right way.
00:56:03
This was one of your action items, I think was the whole keeping a mistakes log.
00:56:08
I don't need to do that because I know that I did wrong.
00:56:12
I know exactly what I did wrong.
00:56:15
And it's a thing that I feel like I do a lot.
00:56:18
The problem is that with the shift to pro course and building a team, I'm also reviewing
00:56:28
other people's code on a regular basis and looking for errors there as well.
00:56:33
Which means that I'm in a place where I'm looking for errors with other people as well.
00:56:39
That is not a good habit to build.
00:56:41
That does not go over well.
00:56:43
So I definitely resonated with this, but in a very negative way.
00:56:50
This is not a thing I should be doing.
00:56:52
So this one really struck home and made me really rethink how I come at some things just
00:56:59
because I definitely see this.
00:57:01
And it's not a good thing.
00:57:03
It's not.
00:57:04
And recognizing that it happens is really the first step.
00:57:08
And when he's talking about the negative Tetris effect and he describes it as a cognitive
00:57:13
pattern decreases your overall success rate, he basically makes the analogy of your brain
00:57:18
as a spam filter.
00:57:20
So if you train your brain to see the negative things, then the positive things will be filtered
00:57:25
out.
00:57:26
But the easy remedy for this, and I say easy because it's simple.
00:57:31
Not because it's incredibly easy to do.
00:57:34
But he talks about the positive Tetris effect.
00:57:36
You're scanning the world for opportunities and ideas that allow your success to grow.
00:57:40
And he gives three specific things that contribute to this positive Tetris effect, the three
00:57:45
different blocks of positive Tetris, I guess.
00:57:48
Our happiness, gratitude, and optimism.
00:57:51
I believe we've talked about gratitude a little bit on this podcast before, or is that a
00:57:56
conversation that we have not had?
00:57:58
I feel like we've talked about it, but not at length.
00:58:02
Okay.
00:58:03
So just real briefly, gratitude is something that impressed me.
00:58:08
I don't know when that was, maybe a year or two ago.
00:58:11
And this is something that I have implemented into my own life.
00:58:17
My wife and I, every week we have our date night.
00:58:21
And this sounds really cold and not exciting at all.
00:58:26
But we have our family meeting when we do our date night.
00:58:30
It's great for us though.
00:58:31
We love it.
00:58:32
We love it.
00:58:33
We talk about the three questions of what should we start doing, stop doing, keep doing.
00:58:38
A lot of great stuff comes from that.
00:58:40
And one of the things that we do at the end of that family meeting is we express gratitude.
00:58:46
One specific thing that we are thankful to the other person for from the last week.
00:58:52
And that, I mean, when we first started doing gratitude, even before we started implementing
00:58:58
it into our family meetings.
00:59:00
I recognized right away that you could be in a really foul mood.
00:59:05
You could be really ticked at the other person because they did this, this, and the other
00:59:09
thing, which never really is true.
00:59:12
I mean, we judge other people by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions.
00:59:17
And we tend not to give the other person the benefit of the doubt, even the people who
00:59:20
work closest to us for whatever reason.
00:59:22
But even if you are really ticked at this other person, if you verbally express gratitude
00:59:30
to them for something, my own experience anyways, all of that negative stuff is instantly broken
00:59:36
off.
00:59:37
You cannot sincerely express gratitude and stay in a negative state.
00:59:42
So that just illustrates to me how quickly you can change from a negative to a positive
00:59:48
state.
00:59:49
You just have to have those supports that scaffolding to say, Hey, knock it off and be grateful right
00:59:54
now.
00:59:55
And sometimes like, Well, I don't want to be grateful right now.
00:59:58
But when you do, when you follow through with it, you know, it's not like it takes hours
01:00:02
or days to break out of that funk.
01:00:04
No, because you can do it immediately.
01:00:06
If you just do the right thing.
01:00:08
And this, you know, this is one of the action items that I took down is gratitude.
01:00:14
In a couple ways, one is with journaling at night.
01:00:17
We'll talk about that one in the next principle.
01:00:20
But the main one that I want to implement here is coming up with my three gratitudes for
01:00:28
the day.
01:00:29
This comes from what is it?
01:00:32
Page 102.
01:00:33
And he was mentioning, mentioning like some CEOs that he was training in Africa.
01:00:38
And they, they chose to say three gratitudes at the dinner table with their children each
01:00:44
night.
01:00:45
And that, that struck me like, okay, that is a thing I want to do because not only does
01:00:50
it apply the social aspect, principle seven.
01:00:55
Again, we get there.
01:00:57
It applies that aspect, but it also helps me break some of that negative searching that
01:01:02
I do.
01:01:04
It's a way to counteract that and does so in front of my kids so that I can teach them.
01:01:11
It does so with my wife who is probably the one that I look for mistakes in the most for
01:01:17
whatever reason, just because we live together.
01:01:20
So there's that.
01:01:21
And that, that is what I'm trying to counteract.
01:01:24
I don't want to be looking for negatives in my wife all the time.
01:01:27
I would rather be searching for things that I'm very grateful for in, in that day.
01:01:31
And I'd like to do that with them.
01:01:33
I think that that's helpful in a lot of ways.
01:01:37
So that's one of my main action items and probably the biggest one for me to take away
01:01:40
from this book.
01:01:42
Nice.
01:01:44
We don't have anything formal like that, but there have definitely been multiple times
01:01:49
where we'll be like in the car and everybody is just bickering and fighting and I'm like,
01:01:54
all right, everybody knock it off.
01:01:56
We're going to do gratitude.
01:01:57
People are like, you know, okay, everybody say one thing that they're thankful or they're
01:02:02
grateful to Toby for, you know, we'll go around each individual person will say something
01:02:08
about him, then we'll go to the next kid.
01:02:09
And by the time you get done, it's a totally different atmosphere.
01:02:13
It's really crazy how that, how that works.
01:02:16
So I guess we deploy it tactically.
01:02:18
Probably because we don't have a dinner at home together as a family every single night.
01:02:25
We've got five kids now and they're involved with different things.
01:02:29
And so someone's always running somewhere, which makes it a little bit more difficult.
01:02:32
But I do think that if you're able to do that, if you do have that ritual of eating together,
01:02:40
like that's the best place to implement some of the stuff.
01:02:44
If you don't, it becomes a little bit harder because you don't have that set time every
01:02:49
single day in order to do these things.
01:02:50
But I think that's great that you're doing that.
01:02:53
And one of the action items that I had from this section was along the same lines to make
01:02:59
a list of the good things in my job, my career, and basically every area of my life.
01:03:04
Make a list.
01:03:05
I guess I'm keeping it and everyone know it now.
01:03:09
But looking at that periodically, I'm not sure if I want to do this every day.
01:03:13
I mean, there would be value in doing that every day.
01:03:16
My concern is that I keep adding things to my morning routine and it keeps getting longer.
01:03:21
Maybe it's just something that I do once a week, you know, when I do my weekly review.
01:03:25
- Do it night.
01:03:26
- When you're gaining time by not watching TV.
01:03:28
- Yeah, yeah, I could do that.
01:03:31
But step one is to make the lists.
01:03:34
- Sounds good.
01:03:36
Do it.
01:03:37
- All right.
01:03:38
Number four.
01:03:39
- Yes.
01:03:40
Number four, falling up.
01:03:41
Basically, this is how you view failure.
01:03:45
I think that's the best way to describe this.
01:03:48
- It's probably the cleanest way to describe it, yeah.
01:03:51
- Yeah.
01:03:52
So there's a mental map that you create which offers you three different paths after crisis
01:04:00
or adversity.
01:04:02
The first path is one that keeps circling around where you currently are and there's
01:04:06
no change.
01:04:07
This is, I think, the first path is one that keeps circling around where you currently are.
01:04:11
The saddest one and the one that a lot of people will default to.
01:04:15
This is why the whole idea of the growth mindset that we learned about in Carol Dweck's book
01:04:21
is so important because if you have a growth mindset, you basically will not stay at this
01:04:28
one.
01:04:29
You're going to go one direction or the other.
01:04:31
So the second scenario then is the one that leads to further negative consequences.
01:04:36
That's obviously not great.
01:04:38
This is why we're afraid of conflict and challenge, he says.
01:04:41
But the third one is the one that leads to a place where we are stronger and more capable
01:04:45
than we were before and he calls this the third path.
01:04:50
And he says that people's ability to find the path up depends largely on how they view
01:04:53
the cards that they've been dealt.
01:04:55
So if you think that you got a raw deal and all of these things are working against you,
01:05:00
then it becomes a lot harder to recognize that third path even though it's there in just
01:05:05
about every instance of crisis or adversity.
01:05:09
That's the part I struggle with because I feel like that's what I'm at right now.
01:05:13
Yeah.
01:05:15
This is the chapter that I needed the most but didn't like the most.
01:05:19
Yeah.
01:05:20
This is the one that's easier said than done for sure.
01:05:22
Yeah.
01:05:23
Like with, take it from a business stance.
01:05:26
In web development, it's all about how fast you can get your failures out of the way.
01:05:31
And the goal there, especially if you're trying to build services, like the goal is
01:05:35
to get minimum products out the door, see if the public likes them and 99% of the time
01:05:42
they do not, you cancel it and go on to the next one.
01:05:45
Like that is the rinse and repeat cycle you go through and not a fun one really because
01:05:50
you've got failure after failure after failure.
01:05:53
I mean, if you go look at any of the big names in the tech industry, you know, it's interesting
01:05:58
to look at the list of failures they've got before they made it to where they are.
01:06:03
And that's a lot of it.
01:06:04
I mean, that's the way it works.
01:06:06
But they view failure in the right way.
01:06:08
Like they see it as a learning experience.
01:06:11
And although that sounds easy to do, that is a lot harder to get to, I think, than it
01:06:18
seems like it's easy to say, sure, failure.
01:06:21
I learned X, Y and Z in the midst of that process.
01:06:25
Great.
01:06:26
But there's also the emotional aspect of it, which I think is what he gets to in this
01:06:31
book is like, okay, well, you also have to come at this.
01:06:34
And feel good about having gone through that downturn.
01:06:39
So you know, take Joe's life right now.
01:06:42
It's just not been fun.
01:06:43
All I can really focus on is the negative for whatever reason, which is why this was
01:06:47
good because it's like, okay, don't view it as all these things that went wrong.
01:06:51
You got to view them as ways to learn and grow from them.
01:06:55
And that's not an easy thing to do, especially when health is involved.
01:07:00
So it's definitely a learning experience.
01:07:02
I think you have to work through that, but it's, it is a mindset shift.
01:07:06
And this is definitely one that I know that I need to work on.
01:07:09
Yeah, on page 123, he talks about how we choose to explain past events.
01:07:15
He calls it explanatory style has a crucial impact on our happiness and future success.
01:07:20
So optimism, it's not that bad.
01:07:22
It's going to get better.
01:07:23
Pessimism, it's really bad and it's never going to change.
01:07:27
And that ties into this bank robber story, which was one of the things that I wanted to
01:07:32
talk to you about this bank robber story.
01:07:34
He mentions there's 50 people in the bank.
01:07:37
Robert comes in and this one person gets shot in the arm.
01:07:41
It's assuming you are that one person.
01:07:43
Are you lucky or unlucky?
01:07:45
How do you, how do you view that?
01:07:47
When he explained it, my first reaction.
01:07:53
That's the important one I think is the first reaction.
01:07:55
Yeah.
01:07:56
When I first thought through it, my first reaction was, ooh, I'm glad he didn't hit
01:08:00
my heart.
01:08:01
That was my first reaction to it.
01:08:04
My instant second, like half a second later was like, dude, that sucks.
01:08:12
I don't want to get hit with a bullet.
01:08:14
That's not fun.
01:08:15
So yep.
01:08:17
I attempted to say I had kind of both, but the very first reaction was I'm glad I didn't
01:08:24
die.
01:08:25
Like that was my initial.
01:08:26
What was yours?
01:08:27
I had the exact same thing where at first I considered myself lucky because you could
01:08:33
have got hit in the heart and then right away, well, one out of 50, I guess I'm unlucky
01:08:37
because I got hit and nobody else did.
01:08:42
But I think the locating thing in this exercise is the first reaction that you have.
01:08:48
He mentions that in the study where they did this 70% of people viewed themselves initially
01:08:52
as unlucky.
01:08:53
30% viewed themselves as lucky.
01:08:57
And I think maybe we are part of the 30% based on our reactions to this, which I think is
01:09:03
probably in line with the growth mindset and everything that we have read in the entirety
01:09:09
of the bookworm existence.
01:09:11
I think that has contributed to that.
01:09:14
But I think maybe it's different for somebody who this is the first quote unquote self-development
01:09:20
book that you read.
01:09:22
Maybe you read it and you think a lot of these ideas are hokey.
01:09:25
And well, that stinks.
01:09:27
I'm completely unlucky in that situation, which ties back to the real point here that
01:09:33
we learn helplessness.
01:09:36
And they mention a study here.
01:09:37
This isn't the first place I heard about this study.
01:09:39
I forget where I heard about it previously, but it was quite a while ago where they put
01:09:43
these dogs and I don't remember all the specifics of the study, but basically the dogs were
01:09:48
in this cage.
01:09:49
They had this warning that was going to go off, which meant that the dogs were going to
01:09:54
receive an electric shock.
01:09:57
And the way that they could get out of the situation and prevent the shock, whatever,
01:10:02
was to do some certain action that they knew to do.
01:10:05
But then every once in a while, if you put them in a situation where that action didn't
01:10:09
open the door or whatever, then you've got this very little reward scenario and eventually
01:10:14
they just started whimpering when they heard the noise and they just laid down because
01:10:17
they knew they were going to get shocked, even though they had the ability to escape
01:10:21
the situation.
01:10:22
I heard a different story one time about this guy who grew up in Alabama and he told this
01:10:28
at a conference.
01:10:29
He said he used to catch grasshoppers when he was a kid, put them in a jar, shake the
01:10:33
jar, grasshopper goes nuts, trying to jump out, keeps hitting his head on the lid.
01:10:37
Eventually you get to the point where the grasshopper just stops jumping.
01:10:41
And at that point, as a kid, he would take the grasshopper, put it in a fire ant mound
01:10:45
and the grasshopper would sit there and get devoured by the fire ants, even though at
01:10:48
that point the lid is gone and it can jump to safety.
01:10:51
And I think that happens to a lot of people when they're conditioned to, "This didn't
01:10:58
work.
01:10:59
This didn't work for me all these other times or it's not going to work for me this time
01:11:02
so I'm just not going to try."
01:11:04
Which is really, really sad.
01:11:06
But also, you can kind of see how people get to that point.
01:11:09
You can't really blame them, I guess, for that mindset.
01:11:13
But I do think that a very important truth from this section is that there is always
01:11:18
that way out, you may not see it right away, but that third path is going to be there.
01:11:24
And if you're constantly looking for that third path, I think that's the real key here,
01:11:29
is that you're not going to find it every single time.
01:11:32
Sometimes bad stuff's going to happen.
01:11:33
But if you embrace this mindset that the third path is always there and you've changed
01:11:37
yourself to look forward more often than not, you're going to find it.
01:11:39
And then that's going to result in the positive results, like the MetLife hiring practices
01:11:46
that he talks about where the positive sales agents outsold negative agents about 21% the
01:11:51
first year, but that increased to 57% in year two.
01:11:55
So it wasn't just that one year in isolation, that series of events, but their approach
01:11:59
to how they did everything that contributed to the long-term gains.
01:12:06
Yeah, and one of the ways that he spells out a way to find that path, to understand your
01:12:16
way out of it, is what he calls the ABCD model, which is the path from adversity to opportunity.
01:12:24
And the ABCD is adversity, belief, consequence, and disputation.
01:12:31
Whereas adversity is the event that you can't change, belief is your reaction to that event.
01:12:39
So why we thought it happened, what we think it means for the future.
01:12:43
C is the consequence, what is going to happen as a result of that belief.
01:12:50
And then there's the disputation, which is first telling ourselves that the belief is
01:12:54
just that, it's a belief, and then challenging it.
01:12:58
I think this is helpful, I will say that this is kind of hard for me to fully grasp as far
01:13:05
as how to apply it.
01:13:06
And he kind of ends the chapter on that.
01:13:09
I kind of wish he'd spelled it out more.
01:13:11
I'll take more time with it.
01:13:12
Yeah, I think this is a really complex section.
01:13:16
You could probably write a whole book just on this section.
01:13:19
I do appreciate the model that he put in there.
01:13:23
I do think, like you said, it's easier to maybe understand on the surface than to implement
01:13:30
in reality.
01:13:32
When I heard this ABCD model, I immediately thought of, I think it was the WIP model from
01:13:37
decisive, for making better decisions.
01:13:40
That one seemed a lot more like, here's the checklist, just do these things.
01:13:44
This one is like, well, okay, if you say to do this, but it sounds really hard.
01:13:49
Right.
01:13:50
Yeah, I don't think that there's an easy answer to this.
01:13:53
And also, I think we talked about boundaries and how one of my beasts with that book was
01:13:58
that they had this prescriptive approach to everything.
01:14:02
I appreciate the fact that there's a lot of nuance to this section.
01:14:07
There isn't just, oh, just follow this formula every time you encounter a problem.
01:14:12
Trust me, it's going to be great.
01:14:15
It may not be great.
01:14:17
I thought he did a good job navigating around the sensitivity in this section, if that makes
01:14:23
sense.
01:14:24
Yeah.
01:14:25
Again, this was a section I felt like I needed that I wanted to spell it out more, but that's
01:14:30
probably just me and my stage right now.
01:14:32
That's probably the one factor there.
01:14:35
Anyway.
01:14:36
Do you have any action items from this section or what's the, I mean, you mentioned this is
01:14:39
the section you needed.
01:14:41
So what's your big takeaway from this section?
01:14:44
Well, this section laid the foundation for, I have three action items and one of them is
01:14:52
the gratitude I talked about.
01:14:54
One is revamping my journaling at night.
01:14:59
And that particular one, it's hard for me to say that this is the section that prompted
01:15:04
that, but there's like the next two, well, maybe this is the place to bring it up.
01:15:10
So what I'm essentially doing is it's part of the Tetris effect with the constantly
01:15:17
seeing the negative pieces, which I think sets this up for me because it means that I see
01:15:23
a lot of failures.
01:15:25
And trying to get past that means that I need to be focusing on positives as much as
01:15:30
I can right now.
01:15:32
And one of the ways that I'm doing that is with the three gratitudes at dinner.
01:15:37
One of the other ways is through my journaling at night, which I haven't been real consistent
01:15:42
with partly because, you know, with journaling, a lot of people use these journaling prompts
01:15:49
where they have questions that they ask themselves and they go through those.
01:15:53
And I've used those in the past, but I've never understood the why behind those questions.
01:15:58
And I'm a why person.
01:15:59
So I don't think I've fully given those, the attention that they deserve.
01:16:05
Like, I don't think I've directed those questions to myself accurately.
01:16:12
So I don't know what questions I want to be asking myself quite yet.
01:16:15
This is part of why I have just a journaling revamp.
01:16:19
And this particular section prompted that to at least start that conversation.
01:16:24
But I didn't fully say that in my mind, I didn't fully say that journaling is the way
01:16:28
that I need to do that until we got it until I got into principle five, which is the next
01:16:34
one.
01:16:35
So I can't say that this section is the one that caused it, but it laid the foundation
01:16:40
to tell me that this is the thing I need to do.
01:16:43
Gotcha.
01:16:44
Well, we will follow up with your journaling action item next time, I guess.
01:16:48
I am one of those people who uses the prompts, although it took me quite a few iterations
01:16:52
to land on questions that really resonated with me that didn't want to just skip over
01:16:55
every time I watched it.
01:16:57
So I understand the struggle, but.
01:17:00
Yeah.
01:17:01
Anyway.
01:17:02
So let's go on to the next one, because I think I'm going to continue flushing some
01:17:05
of these things out.
01:17:06
But number five is the Zorro Circle, which I like the name a lot on this one.
01:17:14
So the idea here, he steals from the movie, I think it's the mask of Zorro, but it's been
01:17:20
a while since I saw it.
01:17:22
There's a guy Alejandro who wants to become a sword fighter, but he's way too emotional
01:17:29
and he charges at things way too quickly and then he ends up losing.
01:17:34
So in his training, Zorro draws the circle and he's like, you can't leave the circle.
01:17:41
And over time, as he learns to not overextend himself, like the circle gets bigger.
01:17:46
And the idea here as it pertains to your life and not sword fighting is to limit your focus
01:17:53
to a small circle before you expand your sphere of power.
01:17:58
So control what you can control, which is really powerful because no matter what your
01:18:05
situation is, maybe you don't have control over your entire day.
01:18:08
You do have control over your morning or some small piece of your life that you can
01:18:13
say, I am going to be the master of this domain.
01:18:17
And when you do that, when you have that control that increases your happiness, your
01:18:20
motivation and even your career satisfaction.
01:18:23
Yeah.
01:18:24
So one of my action aims is this journaling piece and the other is around email.
01:18:32
Email is a great place to implement the Zorro circle.
01:18:35
Yeah, because I suck at email and if I have any clients listening to this, they know that.
01:18:44
One of the things that I just, I slowly get behind on email every single day, I'm just
01:18:50
a little more behind on it, which means that I have this ever growing backlog.
01:18:54
Yeah.
01:18:55
I've debated bankruptcy a few times.
01:18:59
I have taught this stuff.
01:19:00
I know, but the problem is that I have such a high volume that I have to touch, but I
01:19:09
also have enough other stuff going on that I don't take the time for and it also drains
01:19:13
me.
01:19:14
So energy wise to pull it off doesn't work out.
01:19:17
So I have all kinds of things I'm playing around with from hiring a salesperson for the
01:19:22
business to virtual assistants.
01:19:24
Like I've played with all kinds of stuff.
01:19:26
Ultimately, what I'm doing right now is what he explains in this section.
01:19:31
So this comes from page 143 and effectively what he does, the exact, I think it's an executive
01:19:39
that he's working with at the time, he essentially needs to start working through this backlog
01:19:45
of email.
01:19:46
And in order to do that, he just ignores everything that's in his existing inbox, only responds
01:19:53
to what comes in today and then sets a time limit.
01:19:58
So he's going to spend an hour.
01:20:00
He only works on what's going on today and then goes as far as he can into say yesterday's
01:20:05
emails and just continues doing that day after day until he finally gets completely caught
01:20:11
up and it grows and he continues to expand where he's working.
01:20:15
It eventually even gets into his desk.
01:20:17
He ends up having his desk completely cleaned up and he starts to get a lot of things in
01:20:21
order.
01:20:22
Okay.
01:20:23
That is the process I feel like I need to start right now.
01:20:27
I feel like a lot of things are spinning out of control for me, which is why I mentioned
01:20:31
like the whole omni-focus rebuild sort of thing at the beginning.
01:20:35
There's just a lot of pieces moving right now and it's been kind of chaotic.
01:20:38
So I'm trying to create a little bit of structure.
01:20:40
I feel like this is maybe the place to start.
01:20:43
Maybe email is the thing I need to start on to work through and continue to build that.
01:20:48
So I'm kind of claiming that my Zorro circle is going to be my email inbox.
01:20:53
Nice.
01:20:54
I like that.
01:20:55
You know, that approach where you just set aside so much time to work on your email,
01:20:58
I think Sean Blanc mentioned that he does this where he just sets aside 30 minutes to crank
01:21:03
your email and maybe he'll see your message or reply to you.
01:21:07
Maybe he won't.
01:21:08
Sure.
01:21:09
If not, sorry, it's not personal.
01:21:10
He's going to spend 30 minutes per day dealing with email.
01:21:13
I think that's a cool idea.
01:21:14
Yeah.
01:21:15
I also want to explain a little bit further something that you hit on there because you
01:21:18
mentioned like you feel like things are spinning out of control.
01:21:21
That's the difference between the internal locus of control and the external locus of
01:21:26
control, which is really the idea here where when you say control, which you can control,
01:21:30
if you have an internal locus of control, these, even if it's just a couple of things,
01:21:35
these are the things that I have control over.
01:21:37
But if you have an external locus of control where things are just happening to you, there's
01:21:42
nothing you can do to impact what happens to you.
01:21:45
You're just a victim of your circumstances.
01:21:48
Those are the people who are never really engaged in their work and happiness hinges
01:21:53
on this internal locus of control.
01:21:55
I wrote down, this is like he went through this section pretty quick, but he has a list
01:22:01
of advantages of what he calls internals.
01:22:05
So I wrote these down because it's pretty substantial.
01:22:08
If you view the events that happen to you as within your control, you have an internal
01:22:13
locus of control, you have higher academic achievement, greater career achievement, you're
01:22:16
happier at work, you have lower job stress, lower turnover, higher motivation, better
01:22:22
task performance, higher organizational commitment, you're better at problem solving, you're
01:22:26
better at communicating, you've got stronger relationships, you are a more attentive listener,
01:22:31
and you are more adept socially.
01:22:33
So if there was a list of things that could get you to embrace a certain mindset, that's
01:22:37
a pretty impressive list.
01:22:39
That is an intense list.
01:22:41
Yeah, but again, he goes through it kind of quick.
01:22:44
One of the things I should point out about the way that this book is written, he will
01:22:47
throw at a statistic and just put a footnote there and then link to the study at the end.
01:22:52
He's not going to spend 10 pages explaining this is what the research study said.
01:22:58
So it's very anti-mahaly, I guess, in the approach where it's just like, here's the one
01:23:05
thing you need to know from this and then he's on to the next idea, telling some other
01:23:09
joke, you know, and there's good and bad associated with that.
01:23:14
Some of those things, like you in the last section, you mentioned, oh, she would have
01:23:17
a little bit deeper on this because he has, he's done the work, but he's distilled it
01:23:21
down as far as he possibly could.
01:23:24
It's actually one of the things that I thought about when reading this because at 210 pages
01:23:28
or so, this is not a short book by any means, but it's definitely shorter than it could
01:23:34
have been, which is probably the first time we've ever said that about anything we've
01:23:38
covered before.
01:23:39
Yeah, he did a good job of consolidating it.
01:23:42
He did, yeah, he did a great job of consolidating it down.
01:23:46
One of the sections that he talks about here, which he definitely could have gone on, there's
01:23:50
probably a whole books written on this particular topic, is the two different modes of our brain,
01:23:55
which he calls the jerk and the thinker.
01:23:57
I love that.
01:23:58
Yeah, I did too.
01:24:01
So this is also the section where he gets into a little bit emotional intelligence that
01:24:07
came up when we were talking about the power of habit and how I had a beef with the Starbucks
01:24:12
thing and how like they've tied into part of emotional intelligence.
01:24:15
Well, he kind of understands this topic here.
01:24:18
So if you really want to dive deeper into emotional intelligence, this is kind of a good section
01:24:22
to start with because it'll kind of wet your appetite.
01:24:25
So there's basically two parts of your brain.
01:24:27
There's the jerk, which is the limbic or emotional region.
01:24:31
And there's this part of your brain called the amygdala, which triggers emotional hijacking,
01:24:38
basically.
01:24:39
It's the emotional response when something happens.
01:24:42
It's the fight versus flight response.
01:24:44
Floods your body with adrenaline and stress hormones.
01:24:47
That fight versus flight response, like I said, which is great when you are in the prairie
01:24:52
and you're trying to decide whether you should escape the tiger that's coming at you or not.
01:24:57
But not so great when you're in an office environment.
01:25:00
And the problem here is that if you are in that constant state of stress, that cortisol,
01:25:05
the stress hormone that builds up and it's basically only a matter of time until your
01:25:11
brain gets emotionally hijacked and you make things a bigger deal than they really are.
01:25:15
The jerk overrides the thinker, which is the other side, the rational region, which is
01:25:19
the prefrontal cortex.
01:25:22
This is what you use to think logically, draw conclusions from the data, plan for the future,
01:25:26
think then react.
01:25:28
So this is the thing that would say, you know, this probably isn't a big deal, but your
01:25:32
enemy does is like, no, no violence.
01:25:36
It's just basically like it's so loud when you have all those stress hormones in your
01:25:40
brain that there's nothing you can do about it at that point.
01:25:43
Interestingly, I found from this description though, resilience, which is the subject of
01:25:50
grit, obviously, which we read, that allows the thinker to win against the jerk.
01:25:55
So you can do things to build up your resilience, to build up your grit, Angela Duckworth would
01:26:00
say.
01:26:01
And that allows you to override the jerk and put him in his place.
01:26:05
I just like the terminology of the jerk and thinker.
01:26:08
Yeah.
01:26:09
I do.
01:26:10
I'm like, okay, I, that of anything that's in this section, I think that is probably one
01:26:16
that's really going to stick with me, just the terminology.
01:26:19
Like, oh, the jerk was talking there like that.
01:26:22
I could definitely see myself using these phrases.
01:26:24
I don't know if that's a good thing to do or not, but it's probably a thing I'll end
01:26:29
up doing.
01:26:30
If we didn't have to use the book titles for our podcast titles, this is definitely what
01:26:34
this episode would be, the jerk and the thinker.
01:26:37
Yeah.
01:26:38
Yeah.
01:26:39
Pull a Merlin man.
01:26:40
Show title.
01:26:41
Title.
01:26:42
Yep.
01:26:43
There you go.
01:26:44
There's also a section in here where it's a short story about this executive who said
01:26:48
they wanted to run a marathon.
01:26:51
And this resonated with me because this is exactly what happened with me.
01:26:56
So the short version from the story is that this person wanted to run a marathon and they
01:27:02
just decided they were going to go for it.
01:27:04
They were going to just start running long distances and they were going to run a marathon
01:27:07
in three months.
01:27:08
Right away, I knew that there's no way that's going to happen.
01:27:10
It took me almost a year to build up the endurance to do my half marathon.
01:27:15
However, my half marathon right before I ran it, I overtrained because instead of running
01:27:23
every other day for a while, I started running every day and I basically doubled my workload
01:27:28
like the week, two weeks before the half marathon messed up my knee, was able to finish
01:27:34
the half marathon, but then had to go to physical therapy and talked a little bit about that
01:27:40
experience in the past.
01:27:42
So I went to physical therapy, got everything good, my knee's fine, now I'm starting to run
01:27:48
again, I'm building up my distance and I got into the point where I could run like five
01:27:53
miles.
01:27:54
And they had just completed this loop the lake project they call it, where I live.
01:28:00
And this great path, it's a little bit shorter than this bigger loop that I use.
01:28:04
I used to do, and I figure out it's probably like seven miles, I can totally do this.
01:28:08
Ended up being eight and a half miles, but I did it anyways.
01:28:11
And I went from five miles to eight and a half miles and got symptoms of plantar fasciitis,
01:28:17
which is really painful.
01:28:19
And if you look at it, they say nine to 12 months to recover from this, I'm like, no,
01:28:23
I am not dealing with this.
01:28:25
Immediately took more time off because I tried to do too much.
01:28:30
And then I've got a, so just the last week or two, I've been able to start running again.
01:28:36
And hopefully this time I've learned my lesson and I'm going to do it the right way.
01:28:41
I'm going to build up my distance slowly.
01:28:43
They say that to avoid plantar fasciitis, what you should do is you shouldn't be increasing
01:28:48
your distance by more than like 10% when you run.
01:28:51
So right away, I'm like, well, yeah, I'm an idiot.
01:28:54
I ran eight and a half miles and my body wasn't wasn't ready for that yet.
01:28:58
But it's hard like 10%, 30%, you know, what's the difference?
01:29:03
Well, especially for me because I've ran a half marathon before.
01:29:08
So, you know, I'm running four miles and I'm like, this, I hate this.
01:29:14
Like, I ran 13.1, you know, I can do this.
01:29:18
I can go a little bit further, but no, no, like you really do have to be careful.
01:29:22
That's kind of the lesson that I'm, I'm learning here.
01:29:25
And that's kind of ties back into this, this topic here because he mentions like the Zorro
01:29:29
circle, the first circle we need to draw is self-awareness.
01:29:32
So I need to be aware of where my, my limits are physically and not, not push it and just
01:29:42
be patient, trust the process and build this stuff over time.
01:29:46
All right.
01:29:47
So don't go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:29:49
Don't go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:29:51
Nope.
01:29:52
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:29:55
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:29:57
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:00
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:02
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:04
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:06
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:08
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:10
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:11
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:12
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:13
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:14
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:15
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:16
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:17
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:18
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:19
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:20
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:21
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:22
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:23
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:24
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:25
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:26
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:27
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:28
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:29
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:30
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:31
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:32
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:33
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:34
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:35
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:36
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:37
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:30:38
Okay.
01:30:57
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:17
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:24
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:26
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:27
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:28
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:29
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:30
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:31
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:32
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:33
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:34
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:35
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:36
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:37
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:38
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:39
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:40
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:41
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:42
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:43
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:49
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:31:56
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:03
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:10
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:15
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:22
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:29
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:36
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:41
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:48
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:32:55
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:02
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:07
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:14
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:21
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:28
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:33
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:38
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:43
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:48
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:33:55
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:00
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:05
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:10
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:15
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:22
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:27
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:32
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:37
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:42
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:49
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:54
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:34:59
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:04
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:09
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:16
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:21
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:26
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:31
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:36
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:41
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:46
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:51
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:35:56
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:01
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:06
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:10
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:15
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:20
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:25
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:30
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:35
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:39
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:44
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:49
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:54
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:36:59
I'm going to go run a marathon tomorrow.
01:37:04
My action item from this section is simply be a better friend.
01:37:09
Because I tend not to be very extroverted, I tend not to be very social, which maybe people who listen to this podcast and they're like, "Mike, I wish you wouldn't talk so much.
01:37:22
Find that hard to believe."
01:37:24
But in real life, I prefer to be in the background.
01:37:29
I would rather stay home with a good book than go out to dinner with friends.
01:37:35
Really what I'm recognizing from this section is that this is one of those things that you have to do before you really need it.
01:37:44
You can't just, when crisis comes, call up the friends that you wish you would have made last year.
01:37:52
He talks in this section like food and air. We seem to need social relationships to survive.
01:37:59
Helps people bounce back from setbacks faster. They accomplish more. They feel a greater sense of purpose.
01:38:04
I understand all of that rationally, but it's still hard for me to do.
01:38:12
One of the stories that he tells in this section which really made this hit home for me,
01:38:17
and I think this is the way that I can actually apply this. This is enough of a mental model for me to sink my teeth into.
01:38:26
This whole idea of an offensive line. He uses the story of Joe Montana, but really just about any good quarterback would say the same sort of thing.
01:38:37
They've got a record-breaking year. They always thank their offensive line.
01:38:41
They're the 350-pound lineman who are standing in front of them which give them the space to be successful.
01:38:48
In page 181, he says, "We can't always stop the 350-pound lineman flying at us, but we can all invest in a strong offensive line."
01:38:56
Again, not an action item because I don't think that this is something that I really want to share publicly on the air.
01:39:05
We've done something similar in the past, but something I just want to think about is, "Who is my offensive line?
01:39:11
Who are the people that I can count on?"
01:39:14
If something really messed up happens tomorrow, who can I call for help? Who do I know is going to be there?
01:39:24
There are a handful of people that already I can think of that would be on that offensive line.
01:39:32
The thing is, you can't just assume that because they're there right now, they're always going to be there.
01:39:38
What I'm recognizing from reading this section is that I have to invest in those relationships.
01:39:44
The people who actively invest in their relationships are the heart and soul of a thriving organization, he says,
01:39:52
but this is just personally that I want to apply this, but there's a whole section in here about what he calls the glue guys,
01:39:58
which I thought was really interesting. If you want to have a good team, a good organization, a good business,
01:40:04
you've got to have these glue guys who just hold everything together.
01:40:10
I'm curious because you used to work in a corporate job.
01:40:17
I was talking to you yesterday last week when I was stuck at the Minneapolis airport.
01:40:20
I'm like, "Yeah, glad I don't have to be there anymore, flying for my corporate job."
01:40:25
Thinking back, can you think of people who fit this glue guy description?
01:40:30
Oh, yeah, totally. There's a number of the teams that I worked on probably would have fallen apart without one or two people on those teams,
01:40:40
just because it's hard to say what they did.
01:40:44
Exactly.
01:40:45
That's the part that's so weird about glue guys.
01:40:48
"Intangibles."
01:40:53
It's crazy simple things like showing up with candy one day when you know it's going to be a rough day,
01:40:59
or throwing parties or just having conversations about what's going on in life.
01:41:05
It's crazy how those things shouldn't matter, but make a big deal out of something very small.
01:41:12
I can definitely think of certain folks even flying with some of those folks.
01:41:18
They definitely hold teams together.
01:41:20
The challenge for me then is how do I become a glue guy in the teams and the organizations that I'm a part of?
01:41:28
Sometimes I just don't want to be the glue guy.
01:41:31
Sometimes I just want to go into my hole.
01:41:34
I'm just giving me a book.
01:41:36
I'm recognizing from this section, this is probably the section that challenged me the most, because this is so anti my nature,
01:41:44
but I recognize how important this stuff is.
01:41:48
I will say, going back to the offensive line concept, with what I've been going through with this whole Lyme disease adventure,
01:42:00
is that I have learned that we have a very close-knit group of friends around us.
01:42:06
I can't say that I knew that ahead of time, but going through this scenario,
01:42:14
I've had friends coming over and mowing the lawn.
01:42:17
Silly things like that don't seem like a big deal, but it makes a huge difference to me, especially right now.
01:42:25
That's been a huge encouragement.
01:42:29
It's definitely a thing that I'm aware of on the other side of things.
01:42:33
I definitely want to make sure that I'm building into friends as well, as much as they've built into me.
01:42:40
That's definitely the way that I want to come at this.
01:42:43
I'm with you on that.
01:42:44
Nice.
01:42:45
Another thing from this section that really stood out to me, maybe it's just because I've got five kids who are constantly like,
01:42:52
"Daddy, check this out.
01:42:53
"Daddy, look at this."
01:42:55
The response that you have to something that happens to other people is really important.
01:43:01
The tendency can be to, "Uh-huh, yeah, okay."
01:43:04
Great.
01:43:06
That is a negative response in the eyes of a kid, but also think of somebody you know from work or from church,
01:43:16
whatever, they're excited about this thing that happened to them.
01:43:20
He makes the point in this chapter that a passive response to good news is just as harmful as a negative one.
01:43:28
The only appropriate response when somebody's super excited about something, and this is hard for me,
01:43:34
but is to be super excited back, to have a positive response, "Wow, that's great.
01:43:38
"Congratulations.
01:43:39
"Great job."
01:43:40
Even something like, "Hey, that's cool."
01:43:43
That's a negative response, but I tend to not be that emotional cheerleader type guy.
01:43:49
I can totally see how my natural response is that neutral response, and that's difficult for me.
01:43:58
I'm going to have to work on understanding and really tying into the empathetic nature of,
01:44:04
"Okay, you're really excited about this thing, understanding why you're excited about it,
01:44:07
"and then being excited about it for you, especially as you become more public in a leadership role.
01:44:16
"This is something that you've got to do over and over and over again."
01:44:19
Right.
01:44:20
Cool.
01:44:21
What else, Mike?
01:44:22
We went through all seven principles.
01:44:24
We did.
01:44:25
Gratitude comes back in this section again, by the way.
01:44:27
I know.
01:44:28
It comes back a lot.
01:44:29
He talks about how gratitude sparks an upward spiral of relationship growth where each individual feels motivated
01:44:35
to strengthen the bond.
01:44:37
Maybe that's what I've got to do, is I just got to every time we go to dinner with somebody,
01:44:41
"This is going to be weird, but let's express gratitude."
01:44:48
Which doesn't make it weird when you say, "This is going to be weird."
01:44:51
Yeah.
01:44:52
It just arms it.
01:44:54
It's one of the things I like about working with Asian efficiency.
01:44:57
We end all of our meetings with the Roundtable Gratitude.
01:45:00
When we did a live event last year in Austin, we took a bunch of our best customers out to dinner,
01:45:06
and we actually did the Gratitude ritual at dinner, and everybody said that that was really, really cool.
01:45:12
I appreciate the fact that this is a part of the work culture, but you can apply this to really any realm of your life.
01:45:21
I think that it would have positive impact.
01:45:24
If you walk into your job tomorrow, though, and say, "Hey, boss, I think we should express gratitude next staff meeting."
01:45:32
Probably, maybe they're not going to be sold on the idea yet, but that's one of the things I've been thinking about is
01:45:39
if you're not the decision maker, this isn't part of your company culture, so to speak.
01:45:44
How do you implement this sort of stuff?
01:45:46
I don't have a simple answer for that, but I do think that those situations like that,
01:45:51
where it's going to be the hardest to implement, those are also the situations where you'll get the most benefit from it.
01:45:57
Action items, I think we've talked about them all, but I suppose we should summarize them just so we have them all in one place.
01:46:04
Yeah, so I've got make a list of what's good in my life.
01:46:09
I've got create two lists for what I can and can't control, and be a better friend.
01:46:14
Hopefully, hopefully I'll have some success story from that one next time.
01:46:20
The other two, for sure, you can hold me accountable to this one.
01:46:24
We'll see.
01:46:25
All right, good luck.
01:46:27
The three that I have, the first one, three gratitudes at dinner with the family, and then doing an evening journaling revamp of sorts.
01:46:38
So I'll have to figure out what my questioning is that I'm going to go through, and I'll share that next time.
01:46:42
And then changing up my Zorro circle with my email patterns and how I handle email, because everybody loves email, right?
01:46:51
Wrong.
01:46:52
False.
01:46:53
All right, so author style and rating.
01:46:57
I can go first.
01:46:59
I really enjoyed this book.
01:47:01
I found it very easy to read.
01:47:04
Sean has a very approachable style.
01:47:06
You feel like everything that he shares with you is well researched because it is, but it's also distilled down into just the key points.
01:47:14
I mentioned earlier that this is probably the first book we've read for Bookworm War, I thought this could have been longer.
01:47:20
Not that I necessarily wanted it to be longer.
01:47:23
I guess that there's one particular area here that, from the seven principles that stands out to you, maybe there's something in there that you're like, "I wish it would have dove a little bit deeper on this."
01:47:33
But I don't know.
01:47:35
I think that the length is good.
01:47:37
I like the format.
01:47:39
I wish they wouldn't have just said, like, this is part one, part two, part three, just focused on the content itself.
01:47:44
Right.
01:47:45
But I'm going to give this 4.5 stars.
01:47:48
The only reason really it's not 5 stars is that we have covered some really incredible books that have profoundly impacted me like Victor Frankl's Man Search for Meaning.
01:47:57
Right.
01:47:58
So if we had more stars, it would probably be higher, but it's a very, very good book.
01:48:03
[laughs]
01:48:05
You have to change the scale to a 10 star scale.
01:48:09
[laughs]
01:48:10
I guess.
01:48:11
Well, I'll agree with you.
01:48:13
I think this is a very easy book to read.
01:48:15
I had one or two sections where I wanted him to expand more, but that's purely me wanting to know more about that topic.
01:48:22
I think he does.
01:48:25
Lengthwise, I think he nailed it, which is rare for us.
01:48:29
I don't think we usually say that.
01:48:31
It's usually the other way around.
01:48:32
I was like, "Why hundreds did you write 300 pages on this?"
01:48:35
I think if he had written 300 pages, we'd say that about this book, but he didn't.
01:48:40
He kept it concise and to the point.
01:48:42
I'll join you at 4.5 just because I don't think I'm with you.
01:48:46
I don't think it's in Man Search for Meaning category.
01:48:49
It's not in that level, but it did have a lot of great impacts on me and some challenging action items that came out of it.
01:48:59
So, well done, Shawnee, or highly recommend it.
01:49:03
Coming up next, are we still on Hyper Focus?
01:49:05
Are we still doing that?
01:49:06
We are.
01:49:07
Hyper Focus is technically both of ours, which we talked about last time.
01:49:12
We're going to do something a little bit different.
01:49:14
We're going to cover the book like we normally would, but we're also, hopefully, going to have a short interview with the author, which is Chris Bailey.
01:49:24
I interviewed Chris for the productivity show not too long ago, and we dove into some of the specifics of the book.
01:49:30
Really, what we want to talk about in this one is the whole writing process and how he did it.
01:49:36
He's agreed to do it, so it's on the calendar.
01:49:40
I just hope that nothing comes up to mess that up.
01:49:44
If it all goes according to plan, there'll be some special bonus content from the author himself in the next episode.
01:49:51
Which will be kind of fun.
01:49:53
Hopefully, that all works out.
01:49:54
That is the current plan anyway.
01:49:57
Following Hyper Focus, if I follow the pattern correctly, it's my pick.
01:50:05
Which I have selected, kind of a long one, but I think it'll be good, but it's predictably irrational by Dan O'Reilly.
01:50:14
I have seen this one make the rounds.
01:50:17
It's a notable book from New York Times.
01:50:20
It was a notable book of the year.
01:50:22
New York Times bestseller.
01:50:25
A lot of good accolades with that one.
01:50:27
I've heard it mentioned a lot.
01:50:30
I'm kind of interested in going through that one.
01:50:32
I think it'll be good.
01:50:33
Nice.
01:50:34
Yes.
01:50:35
Then for gap books, I've got one which I picked up from an Asian efficiency reader we had to meet up when I went to Austin for quarterly planning.
01:50:46
Last week, someone was telling me about personal Kanban, mapping work, navigating life.
01:50:53
This is by Jim Benson.
01:50:55
This is a cool idea because we use Scrum and Asian efficiency.
01:51:00
We get a lot of people who say, "Scrum sounds awesome.
01:51:03
My company is not going to use it. Is there anything I can use personally?"
01:51:07
This whole idea of personal Kanban is very interesting to me.
01:51:11
I really don't know anything about this book other than it was recommended.
01:51:15
Sure.
01:51:16
Is that similar to Scrum?
01:51:17
I know Scrum is on our recommended list.
01:51:20
Yes.
01:51:21
Scrum is agile for teams.
01:51:24
Scrum and agile are not the same.
01:51:26
Basic idea being that you work in these sprints.
01:51:31
Personal Kanban is the same idea where you've got the list of things that you want to do.
01:51:37
They're in progress.
01:51:38
They're being reviewed or they're done.
01:51:39
It's my experience.
01:51:40
I'm hoping that this book is going to be simple systems to implement this into your personal life, whether you are a solopreneur.
01:51:48
There's one book I read at one time where they talked about implementing agile with your family.
01:51:53
Every time I talk to people about that, they're like, "Yeah, I'm not going to do that."
01:51:57
Yeah.
01:51:58
I'm hoping that this book is pretty well reviewed.
01:52:01
It gives some simple systems to implement this sort of thing.
01:52:04
I do think the Kanban model or agile are Scrum.
01:52:07
There's a lot of value to that.
01:52:09
It's just figuring out what's the stuff to keep and what's the stuff that really doesn't make a difference when you're distilling it down from a work situation.
01:52:17
Sure.
01:52:18
Well, for gat books, I actually have one this time.
01:52:22
I finished up reading Lord of the Rings not long ago at night.
01:52:28
I picked up another one, The Everlasting Stream by Walt Harrington.
01:52:32
Kind of an interesting story of how he went from big-time journalists for the Washington Post to hunting rabbits.
01:52:43
Quite a journey that he goes through.
01:52:45
It's kind of a fun story to read through, but that's the one that I've been going through at night lately.
01:52:50
Interesting.
01:52:52
We were talking about Scrum there a second ago, the book.
01:52:57
It's actually the highest voted book on our recommendations list right now, which means...
01:53:04
We're going to have to do that one at some point then.
01:53:06
We're probably going to have to do that.
01:53:08
It's not like it's just by one.
01:53:10
It's up there a little ways.
01:53:12
It will likely make it under our list.
01:53:15
But if you have a book that you want to put on our recommended list, just go to the Bookworm Club.
01:53:23
So club.bookworm.fm and there's a button there for recommend.
01:53:27
You can just create a new post on the recommendations category and tell us what the book is.
01:53:32
You don't have to have read it.
01:53:34
Someone was asking me about that.
01:53:36
It's like, "No, you don't have to have read the book.
01:53:38
You don't have to have a lot of information about it other than you would just like to hear us cover it."
01:53:43
So if you don't want to read it and you want us to read it instead, that would be the way to do it.
01:53:46
Give us a good pitch though.
01:53:48
Yeah, if you don't want to read it, we'll read it for you.
01:53:51
Right.
01:53:52
But if you have something that's kind of outside the wheelhouse, we're open to those, but we have to be...
01:53:57
Me specifically, I have to be convinced.
01:53:59
So if you think I should read a particular book, feel free to state your case why.
01:54:04
So make your arguments.
01:54:06
Lay them out well.
01:54:07
Yep.
01:54:08
And good luck.
01:54:09
In addition to joining the club, you can also leave us a review on iTunes, which would be very helpful.
01:54:16
We've got one here that I want to call out by Amozarté.
01:54:19
I think it's how you say the name.
01:54:21
This is my virtual book club, Five Stars.
01:54:23
Bookworm is a fantastic way to do two things.
01:54:26
Discover new personal productivity books to read and/or number two.
01:54:29
Get the cliff notes versions of a book you'd like to read, but don't have time.
01:54:34
So thank you for the review, Amozarté, and if you want to help us dethrone KCRW as the number one return for Bookworm,
01:54:43
that is the best thing that you can do.
01:54:45
Join the revolution people, go to iTunes and give us a rating and review.
01:54:49
It helps other people find the show and puts Bookworm in its rightful place.
01:54:54
All right.
01:54:56
Go for it.
01:54:57
All right.
01:54:58
So if you're reading along with us next time up, we're going to be going through hyperfocus.
01:55:03
We'll go through that one next time.
01:55:05
Chris Bailey and we will go through that one next time.