Bookworm Transcripts

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Joe Buleg, I am literally looking you in the eyeball right now.

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-That's really weird.

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-This is the very first live bookworm recording just to prove that it's live.

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Here's a live high five.

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-Woo-hoo.

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-Not a sound effect.

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[laughter]

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-Yes, we'll see how this goes.

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Mike and I have got together.

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What's it been, a couple days ago now?

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We've spent a couple days together.

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It's been fun hanging out, going through some bookworm stuff, doing some work work

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on the faith-based productivity sites.

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It's been a good time, but it is kind of weird to be in your office.

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-Yes, you've helped me out a lot with the faith-based productivity stuff, which people

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are going to find out more about in a little bit because we're getting ready to kick it

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off and launch the course.

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You've been helping me out with the community aspect of it.

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I don't want to give out too many details about that right now because it's not publicly

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joinable, I guess.

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Well, technically it is, but we haven't really done anything with it.

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Keep that under wraps for now.

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We do have an exciting announcement for the bookworm community.

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We are testing this right now, but another thing we've done while you've been here at

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my office, you've literally been in my office, you've been sleeping in my office, is we have

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figured out, you have figured out, I have figured out how to press the button to start

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it.

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-This has got lots of disclaimers on today.

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-Yes, but this is a test live recording.

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We are broadcasting this live, we didn't share the link because we weren't sure that it was

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going to work and we didn't want to disappoint a bunch of people.

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But hopefully if this goes well, this will be coming to the bookworm premium membership

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soon.

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-Yes, hopefully the next time we record, we will have it on the schedule.

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We'll make it known to the community, to the club.

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If you are a premium member and you want to listen live, there'll be a chat involved

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with it.

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It'll be a good time.

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-We're, again, we're doing some test run right now as we're recording this one.

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I think your wife might be listening right now, upstairs, so if you are, hi Rachel.

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Next time we record, we're going to try to get it on the club and premium members can

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listen in live, so you get the pre-scoop before everything gets published.

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-It will be like sitting in my office, watching Joe and I record, except no one will be in

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my office, except for me again.

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-Yes, I'm not staying that long.

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-All right.

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A couple of other things here for follow up before we get into today's book, which I

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know we've been trying to not talk about this while you've been here because I know

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you've got thoughts.

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I've got thoughts.

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-I have strong opinions about this book.

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-Yes.

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Well, hang on to those for just a second.

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We're going to mention one more time the bookworm shirts because this is the time if you

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want to show your support for bookworm at Max-Stock, now is the time to get your shirt

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because it does take a while for them to print and to be delivered.

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The shirts are great.

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There's both T-shirts and sweatshirts, though it's getting to be not sweatshirt weather

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anymore, but if you want to buy one for the fall, or you live somewhere even colder than

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Wisconsin, that's fine.

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You could do that too.

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Max-Stock I mentioned this is happening at the end of July.

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I will be speaking.

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Joe will be there and a bunch of our friends will be there as well.

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MPU is going to be recording live.

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There's a couple people who are going to be speaking for the first time, including our

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buddy Josh.

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I'm excited to see that.

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If you do want to come to Max-Stock and you haven't gotten a ticket yet, you can use the

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coupon code that they gave me to save a bunch of money at this point because the early bird

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is gone.

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The code focused at checkout will get you $70 off the ticket price and basically get

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you the early bird price still.

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If you want to go to Max-Stock and you have been dragging your feet.

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That's a pretty good deal.

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I didn't realize I got that much off, but that's pretty sweet.

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Yeah, it was a little bit extra off of the early bird prior to that disappearing, but

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as we're recording this, it disappeared about a week ago.

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Now it is effectively getting you early bird price for using that code.

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It's a significant chunk of change if you decide after that deadline has passed that

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you do want to go.

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We would love to see you.

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We've got a whole bunch of stuff.

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I keep buying more stuff.

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He needs to stay off a sticker mule.

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He needs to.

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That's true.

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I get those emails with a new product or some crazy special and I'm like, "Hey, I bet

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we could make some cool bookworm stuff out of that."

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We got, as you were here, delivered bumper stickers, which are actually pretty cool.

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I take a look at these things.

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It's like, "Okay, I'm not a bumper sticker person, but gosh, I want these things."

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Not just bumper stickers, though.

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As you have in your possession now, the pins that we had previously discussed, which you

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were earnestly longing for.

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This is one of the things I was looking forward to the most about coming to see, Mike.

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What's the pins that I had in my possession?

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Totally.

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Just the pins.

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Bookworm pins.

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That was the main draw.

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Cool.

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I also gave you about 200 more bookmarks.

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I'm not through the last set.

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Yeah.

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I got way too many bookmarks.

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We've also got stickers, I believe.

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I'm going to have all of this stuff with me at MaxStock because that is a logical place

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to give it away so it doesn't just sit in my closet.

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We got tons of stuff.

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If you are a listener, definitely come say, "Hi, I want to meet you first of all."

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Then don't be shy about asking for things because chances are I will have lots of stuff.

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He needs to give a bunch away.

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I need to give a bunch away.

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Please hunt us down.

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There will be a link in the show notes if you want to buy a MaxStock ticket.

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There's no special link.

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Just remember to use the code "Focus" if you want to save $70 on the weekend pass.

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We do have a couple of action items to follow up on from our last book.

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We've got, for me, ask more questions.

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This was kind of specifically for my 101s that I do with my kids and that did happen.

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I don't really consider this to be done though.

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I think this is something that I need to continue to do and continue to keep an eye on.

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Again, this is one of those like presence equals success action items for me.

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Technically, I guess it's done, but it's still going to be more to do with this.

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Now, is this one of those things where you get together with each of your kids?

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You do one-on-ones with your kids each week and then you're just trying to be more intentional

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about probing and asking what's going on in life, that sort of thing.

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That's the intent?

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Exactly.

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Really, just when you're getting together with other people even, just asking more questions,

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how are they doing rather than just talking about what you're doing, which is why it's

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been kind of weird for me while you've been here, Joe, because basically you've been like,

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"Hey, how can I help you?"

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And I don't like being the subject of attention.

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I spun it on you.

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Yes, but I am very appreciative for your help.

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I can't wait for people to see the community.

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The other thing I've got here is to identify my own restorative niches, niches, whatever.

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I call them niches.

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I didn't really get a chance to do this.

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My whole role has kind of been turned upside down lately, which we kind of talked about.

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I'm not sure how much I want to share here, but things are happening.

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And now is not the time to figure out how to back away from things, if that makes sense,

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I guess.

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So this is kind of on pause for me.

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I do know that this crazy season is not going to last forever.

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And at that point, I've got to figure out something that can kind of help me restore

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a sense of balance.

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But if I would have tried to do this, this last week, it would have been a complete disaster.

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So now I want to push back on that a little bit because this is similar to one of my action

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items, which was to determine to determine daily time for respite.

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And I kind of see this restorative niches process of being very similar to that.

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So a question mark I would have for you is instead of seeing that as like some longer

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term, like multiple hours or multiple days where you're getting away or trying to restore

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yourself, trying to find like 20 to 30 minutes a day, as opposed to those longer term spells,

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just because even through the crazy periods, that's huge.

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Yeah.

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No, I understand.

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And it's kind of hard to explain it if I get into a whole bunch of details, but basically

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everything I know is wrong for a lot of my world at the moment.

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Yeah.

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And I'm kind of along for the ride.

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Again, I'll share more details when I can.

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It's good things.

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But now is not the time where I can say, well, I need 30 minutes a day of alone time.

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And this is the thing I'm going to be doing.

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Right.

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Because stuff's just happening.

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And that's kind of the season that I'm in.

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Now as we're recording this, faith-based productivity launches in a couple of weeks.

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And some other things happen in a couple of weeks.

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And that kind of establishes a new normal for me, which again, I'll share details when

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I can.

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But I'm hesitant to try to figure out ways to hack the current system when it's going

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to be blown up completely.

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Right.

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That's really my point.

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But I agree with you that this is something that needs to happen.

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I just have no idea what it even looks like anymore.

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I thought I had an idea when I put the action items.

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But ever since then, it's kind of an whirlwind.

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Sure.

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Sure.

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I have one other action item here.

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And that is to spend less time in my pseudo-extrovert mode.

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I suppose we didn't mention these four come from the book Quiet by Susan Cain, where we

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were talking about introversion.

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And obviously, I think if you have listened to us for very long, you know that Mike and

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I are both introverts.

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And whenever we spend time in these extroverted modes, it doesn't always go well long-term.

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Now, granted, whenever I go on trips, I have a tendency to fall into this extrovert mode

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more.

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It just kind of ends up being the way the things operate.

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But I know that that's just a temporary thing.

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But I have been like from a long-term like a day-to-day stance.

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I've been doing pretty well with this.

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So although this trip doesn't do me too well in that regard, Mike, it has been pretty good

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overall.

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Cool.

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So should we jump into today's book?

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Yes.

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I've been waiting a few days to do this.

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All right.

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So today's book is How to Take Smart Notes by Sankay Arons.

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And I mentioned last time that there was a video.

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Did you watch the video?

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It didn't.

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Okay.

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Intentionally.

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Maybe that's okay.

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I think maybe that's better, actually.

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Okay.

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Sure.

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Not that there was really anything wrong with the video, but definitely not my style.

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This book was recommended and it quickly jumped to the top of the recommendations in the Bookworm

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Club.

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And it's interesting.

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It's broken down into a couple different sections, but it's not the standard breakup

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of a lot of the types of books that we read.

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In fact, a lot of the systems pieces of this you can get just from the introduction.

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And then the rest of the book, he kind of expounds on some of those things.

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And there's some nuggets in there and he talks about a lot of productivity principles

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and things that some of them we've mentioned on the show before, some of them we haven't.

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So we'll dive into some of those.

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But I don't know.

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I can see how this case could be made for this being the book form that it is.

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A case could also be made that this should be a blog post.

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Yeah.

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So one of the first things I have a tendency to notice, we've talked about books a little

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bit since I've been here with Mike and his family.

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And one of the first things I noticed, if you look at the spine of this book, it looks

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fine, but there's a couple very telling things.

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Now, you shouldn't judge a book by a cover as they say.

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But one thing I noticed is there is no publisher mark.

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So this is a self published book.

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Yep.

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Number two, if you look at another book, you notice that the titles are reversed from this

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one?

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Yeah, it doesn't fit on the bookshelf once you put it upside down.

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They screwed up the printing on it.

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Yeah.

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Which did not start me off too well.

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I was wondering if you were going to notice that.

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It really, really irked me.

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Being someone who likes things to line up cleanly, like that just it bothered me.

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And that was before I even opened the thing.

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I hadn't even gotten into it yet.

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I think we need to go into a little bit about what this system is before the rest of my

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thoughts can really come out on this because I have some strong opinions against this book.

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And yet I like it, which is weird.

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So I'm kind of struggling with this.

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I will note on the back of this.

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Now this is one thing that endeared me right away.

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Most of the time whenever you hear people talk about software, or like they're referencing

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tools and stuff in these books, they'll give you tools that work on Windows.

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They'll give you tools that work on Mac.

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This guy notes Windows, Mac, or Linux on the back of this, which immediately endeared me

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to him.

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It's like, oh, he's willing to mention Linux.

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Okay, this might be my kind of thing.

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So I was very torn.

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It's like, okay, he mentions Linux, but they screwed up the printing on the book.

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So I wasn't real sure what to do with that.

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Yeah.

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So let's jump into the content itself, I guess, with the introduction here.

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And the introduction, he talks about a couple different things.

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The big one being the slip box.

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And he credits kind of this whole book to this method that was developed by a German

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guy, Niklas Loomin, I believe is how you say his name.

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And essentially what he did is he had this system which allowed him to write papers and

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publish books really fast.

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So this is kind of through the lens of academia.

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He used his slip box to not only write a thesis in a year and enter academia as a professor

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of sociology at the University of Bielafel, I think is how you say that.

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But in 30 years, he published 58 books and hundreds of papers.

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So this guy is a pretty prolific writer and he basically says that this slip box system

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that he created, this is the reason he's able to do what he does.

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So that's kind of amazing, you know, right at the beginning.

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But it's not too complicated.

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Basically what he does is he reads things and then he writes his ideas on index cards,

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puts the bibliographical information on one side, and then any personal notes about that

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thing on the other side.

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And he would number them so he could group things together.

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And then whenever it came time to write, he would take these cards which he had put in

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this little slip box and he'd just thumb through them and find one that he wanted to write

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on and then he had a whole bunch of interconnected ideas and the paper basically wrote itself

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is kind of the idea.

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Now a question for you, as you were reading through this book, were you able to put together

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very quickly what this system is?

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Kind of.

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I think I understand what it is.

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I don't think I would do it exactly that way.

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It just doesn't make sense.

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So one of the key components that Lumen had with his whole process is like a numbering

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system.

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Every card had an ID number.

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And he had all process for putting new notes in the box, in the slip box, behind other

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notes that those ideas connected to and then if they connected to multiple notes, he had

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a whole system of numbering to help you determine where those processes were.

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Which is really cool.

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But he also mentions in this book, Sankay, he mentions that he had kind of two slip boxes

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that one of them was four citations, the other one was four the ideas themselves.

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And then at other points he mentions like the starting points, like an index note that

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helped you get to certain areas within the slip box.

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All of that's fine and well, but I kind of struggled with it because he didn't spell

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that out in one place.

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He has this area where he says like everything you need to do to do this system, but it's

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actually spread out through the whole book, which is a thing that I really, really struggled

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with.

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It felt like he was trying to sit down and tell us what the system is and then didn't

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entirely.

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He kind of just alluded to it.

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And it frustrated me enough that I actually put the book down after the first, I think,

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four chapters after he went through the area where I thought he should go through the system.

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Got really frustrated because I couldn't figure out what the thing was.

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And I did some research on a Zetlkosten casten, I think is how you say that, which is kind

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of the name that's been attributed to this whole process.

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And I learned more by doing a few quick Google searches, actually DuckDuckGo searches to

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determine what that system was.

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So I don't know where to go from there, but the book was just kind of a jumping off point

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for me to figure out what was going on with it because I felt like he didn't justify,

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like he didn't do a really clear, didn't give us a clear explanation of what that system

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looked like.

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True.

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And I also think that having to manually draw or write the numbers and the related ideas

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with them kind of takes the magic out of the system for me because if you're going to

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be moving things around then and you decide something should be somewhere else, you have

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to erase that or write over it and put something else.

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So as he was describing that, I was like, man, this would be way easier with the digital

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tool.

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And he recommends a digital tool, but I don't recommend you take his recommendation for the

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digital tool.

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How do you say the name of this?

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I know you looked at it.

00:18:53

Zetlkosten.

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Zetlkosten.

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Okay.

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So this is basically a digital tool which is designed to follow this system.

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And actually, this is not the first time that I had heard of this tool.

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I remember looking at this back in the day when I heard about it somewhere else and I

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cannot feel the life of me remember where I heard about it.

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I went to the website to maybe download this app and take a look at it.

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And the entire website is in German so I can't read anything and yeah, I could translate

00:19:21

it.

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But at that point, it's obvious that like this is not, this is not the type of thing that

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I want to build a workflow on.

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So something like this should not be central to how I do things.

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Now, one of the aspects that he mentions and he reiterates this over and over and over again

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through the whole book is that the concept is that you work inside this slit box to develop

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your own ideas about something and that something could be whatever you want it to be.

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And we'll get into some of this a little bit later.

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But the premise of it is that you have serendipitous interactions with your own ideas and make

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new connections.

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I think you and I have talked about this before where some of the greatest ideas are random

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connections between two dots.

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And this whole note system is designed to do that.

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The trick is it's specifically geared towards writing.

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Like the whole intent is to be able to publish these thoughts at some point, which I'm not

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sure how much that applies direct to me.

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But it is a fascinating concept.

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Yeah.

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And I think there's some truth to that idea.

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If you have a system that allows you to connect dots easier, then I can see how the process

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of writing suddenly becomes a lot simpler.

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And you don't have to be worried about the blank screen.

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You know, it's kind of his main point at the beginning of this is that a lot of people

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hear that saying that the struggle is the blank page or the blank screen.

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And he's basically saying that if you take good notes, it's not a struggle at all because

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the system connects the things for you and all you've got to do is show up and write.

00:21:08

Right.

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Again, you know, I wouldn't implement it the way that he's implemented it.

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And I'm not sure that even as I've kind of thought on this for a while that I can get

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100% of the way to the destination that he's describing.

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But I do think that you can get pretty close.

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And another point I want to call out here is that at page 32, he says that tools are

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only as good as your ability to work with them.

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So it's easy to think, well, I just need the perfect tool, which is why people will

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download Zettlecast.

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And because they hear him talking about it like, oh, maybe that'll solve my problem.

00:21:42

Sure.

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But you really don't need anything fancy.

00:21:44

He mentions that there are really only four tools that you need.

00:21:47

You need something to write with and write on.

00:21:49

And he combines it as one tool for some reason.

00:21:52

You need a reference management system.

00:21:55

You need the slip box itself and you need an editor, which I presume is where he's saying

00:22:00

you're going to be doing your writing.

00:22:02

Now I've kind of thought through that process and what's this going to look like for me.

00:22:07

I don't have a real solid definition for the slip box itself, although I have been playing

00:22:12

around with an app, which we will talk about probably a little bit later, which maybe will

00:22:18

allow me to do this.

00:22:20

Yeah, I think I'm going to try it mostly because I like the end result concept and I'm not

00:22:27

distributing it to his ability to sell me on it at this point.

00:22:33

But I am not interested in any of the tools he recommended.

00:22:38

I'm very much a command line Vim user.

00:22:41

If you're a Vim user, you have to let me know in the club.

00:22:44

Like you have to find me.

00:22:47

I want to know other Vim users in the club.

00:22:50

For sure.

00:22:51

Hit me up.

00:22:52

But yeah, that's a process that I'm going to be trying to implement it.

00:22:55

I have most of it in place.

00:22:57

The whole hyperlinking between things.

00:22:59

I can do all of that there.

00:23:00

The trick is how to find other notes and create those links.

00:23:05

So I'm getting close to that point, but yeah, it'll be an interesting process.

00:23:11

For sure.

00:23:12

Should we jump into the four underlying principles?

00:23:17

Yes.

00:23:18

Okay.

00:23:19

So the first one is that writing is the only thing that matters.

00:23:24

And this is probably a very polarizing way to start what is really the beginning of the

00:23:28

book.

00:23:30

But I don't think it's quite as polarizing as maybe it first comes off.

00:23:35

And the reason I say that is because he's coming at this from an academia lens.

00:23:40

And so at the beginning, he's talking about whether you're a professor, whether you're

00:23:43

a student, yada, yada, yada, all these different scenarios where you should be writing.

00:23:48

And it's easy to say, well, I'm not a student.

00:23:50

I'm not a professor.

00:23:51

I have no need to be writing.

00:23:53

But I also think that the average person writing could be very beneficial to them.

00:23:58

And they just haven't implemented it yet.

00:24:01

Sean McCabe, I know, is a big believer in this.

00:24:03

He has done his course, I think it's 30 days to better writing.

00:24:07

And basically he says that, you know, whatever you are creating and whatever you are doing,

00:24:12

writing is the tool that is going to get you there.

00:24:14

I'm kind of paraphrasing.

00:24:16

But essentially he's saying that if you can create a writing habit, you can create just

00:24:22

about anything.

00:24:23

And it's hard sometimes to see the connection between something like this.

00:24:26

This is an audio format, right?

00:24:28

But there was still writing that went into this.

00:24:31

In fact, it's kind of interesting because he's talking about taking better notes for

00:24:34

the books that you're reading.

00:24:35

So you connect these ideas later.

00:24:37

And that's literally what I'm doing from a bookworm with my mind note files.

00:24:41

So I think you need to kind of push past the initial reaction if the title is first chapter

00:24:50

doesn't sit well with you.

00:24:51

Yeah.

00:24:52

I would echo that because I know that although my days are spent on the keyboard, that's

00:25:01

what I do.

00:25:02

I do a lot of stuff on the keyboard.

00:25:04

Even though that's what I do, it doesn't necessarily mean that I see the prose writing

00:25:10

that I do.

00:25:11

Obviously a lot of my writing is in code not to be decrypted in any way.

00:25:17

But the writing itself, I don't know that I would say that is the only thing that matters

00:25:22

in life.

00:25:23

I think that he does have a point in saying that writing is a great way to understand

00:25:31

you yourself and what you think about the world.

00:25:34

So I think there's still a lot of value in the concept of writing these notes, even

00:25:39

if you don't have the intent of publishing it.

00:25:43

But to go as far as to say that publishing and writing books is the end all be all.

00:25:48

Not sure I could jump on board with that.

00:25:50

Sure.

00:25:51

That's fair.

00:25:52

I do think though that writing has a lot more value than people realize.

00:25:57

And kind of his point from this section is that it causes you the perspective that you

00:26:03

have when you view writing as the thing, the primary end, maybe not the only thing that

00:26:08

matters.

00:26:09

Maybe that's a bad way to say it.

00:26:10

But you're approaching a book, let's say, from the lens of I want to be able to write

00:26:15

my own interpretation of this.

00:26:18

Or in my case, maybe I want to approach a book as giving me ideas for other blogs and

00:26:25

things that I could be writing about.

00:26:27

That does change how you approach the book.

00:26:32

You can approach a book as just like, well, whatever hits me hits me and surprise, surprise,

00:26:36

you're not really inspired by anything.

00:26:39

But if you approach it through a different perspective, which is kind of what we've had

00:26:43

to do with Bookworm, is like, I've got to get through this book and I've got to be able

00:26:47

to understand it so I can talk about it at least at a certain level, then I would argue

00:26:55

that that causes you to get a lot more out of it than if you would just set down.

00:26:59

I guess it's time to read.

00:27:01

And I think taking that to the next level is I'm not just going to read this to understand

00:27:06

it, but I'm going to read it to repurpose it.

00:27:09

I'm going to take the dots from this book, connect them with some other dots from some

00:27:12

other books, different ideas, and create something new out of it.

00:27:16

I do think that that probably even exponentially increases the number of dots that you collect

00:27:22

when you sit down to read a book.

00:27:24

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that.

00:27:26

Because I know that he does mention a number of different types of notes.

00:27:32

And some of those are literature notes, like notes you're taking about the ideas that you

00:27:36

run across while you're reading.

00:27:39

Although I felt like I should stop reading the book and start creating those notes as

00:27:44

I was reading it, I chose not to.

00:27:46

Maybe I should have, but I did not.

00:27:49

I will say that whenever I've started in on our next book, I have been making some notes

00:27:53

with the intent of doing that.

00:27:55

No idea what will come of that, but it still is an interesting jumping off point.

00:27:59

Right.

00:28:01

He does talk about the different types of notes, actually, in the next section.

00:28:05

That's another thing.

00:28:06

These kind of blend together on the same page.

00:28:09

There's no real clear delineations.

00:28:11

It was self-published.

00:28:12

He was trying to cut back on a number of pages so he didn't finish the page to start a chapter

00:28:15

where it should start.

00:28:16

He just started the chapter right as the next one or previous.

00:28:19

Is the exact opposite of every kid in every school ever who increased the margins and

00:28:25

the font sizes to try to get the text to fill up the pages.

00:28:28

He was trying to keep it down.

00:28:30

Yeah.

00:28:31

But the next chapter is simplicity is paramount.

00:28:36

The basic idea here is that you should keep things as simple as you can.

00:28:41

He does talk about the three different types of notes.

00:28:44

Maybe we should talk about these a little bit.

00:28:46

Fleeting notes, permanent notes, and project notes.

00:28:49

In my definition, I guess fleeting notes are the things that you want to capture right

00:28:53

now but don't really matter.

00:28:55

Permanent notes are the things that you want to capture right now and you have to make

00:28:57

sure that you have access to it later.

00:28:59

Project notes are the temporary things that are associated with something that you're

00:29:03

working on right now but you're not going to need them long term.

00:29:06

Is that fair?

00:29:07

Yes.

00:29:08

Okay.

00:29:09

Then, again, when you are collecting these ideas, you want to make sure that you collect

00:29:17

them in a way that eliminates the friction.

00:29:20

Both I would argue in capturing them in the first place, which is why for this specific

00:29:27

piece of it, the first part of his workflow, the tools where you write things down, I

00:29:31

continue to use drafts.

00:29:32

I know you mentioned you removed it off your phone a while ago.

00:29:35

But it's back.

00:29:36

All right.

00:29:37

Good.

00:29:38

Because drafts is a killer application and one of the best features is that you can set

00:29:40

it so that every time you open the app, there's that blank draft.

00:29:43

Now I'm not opening it ahead of time like you were so it's ready to build specific things.

00:29:49

I highly recommend just to grab that one real quick.

00:29:53

If you have drafts on your phone, I do highly recommend building in the model.

00:29:57

Also memory to launch drafts before you sleep your phone.

00:30:04

Because then whenever you unlock your phone, the first thing you're presented with is an

00:30:07

open screen to start typing.

00:30:09

Absolutely love that.

00:30:10

I get it.

00:30:11

It makes sense, but I'm not sure.

00:30:14

Maybe I should do it, but that just seems like a bridge too far for me.

00:30:18

I mean, the fact that I have to tap the app and it opens and it's ready to type, that's

00:30:22

enough of a reduction of friction for me.

00:30:24

I like not being able to have to tap the extra button to open up a new sheet.

00:30:29

And I get where the next level of that would be that you just open up your phone and there

00:30:33

it is.

00:30:34

But that just feels kind of weird to me.

00:30:38

But whatever, no judgment.

00:30:41

One point I want to make here is that with this whole slit box concept, and he mentions

00:30:45

this in this Simplicity is Paramount section.

00:30:50

Really whenever you hear people talk about keeping notes or writing ideas down, they

00:30:55

always want to categorize it.

00:30:58

And this whole slit box is designed to break that down.

00:31:01

It's designed to prevent that.

00:31:03

He has a quote here.

00:31:06

I'm just going to read this quick.

00:31:07

It's on page 41.

00:31:09

If you sort by topic, you are faced with the dilemma of either adding more and more notes

00:31:13

to one topic, which makes them increasingly hard to find.

00:31:17

Or adding more and more topics and subtopics to it, which only shifts the mess to another

00:31:21

level.

00:31:22

I thought that was really interesting because how many times do you hear about people refer

00:31:26

to like Evernote notebooks and they don't know how many to create?

00:31:30

Which ones should they create?

00:31:32

Or you refer to people who have writing workflows in Ulysses.

00:31:38

That's pretty common, but almost everybody wants to categorize and add tags and topics.

00:31:43

They always want to do that.

00:31:45

This is specifically designed to not do that.

00:31:48

Yeah.

00:31:49

Well, for sure the topics and the folders, for example, I completely agree with that.

00:31:56

I think maybe you could use keywords to replace his numbering system.

00:32:01

Sure, or tags.

00:32:02

Because I know like the Zettelcasten app that he loves so much that we can't stand, it

00:32:09

leverages tags to do that whole serendipitous connections part.

00:32:14

Yeah, well, tags are the interesting evolution of the system, I think.

00:32:19

Because it's not a one-for-one matching of how you would connect things.

00:32:24

But tags are a really convenient way that is supported in just about every application

00:32:29

and also in the operating system on Mac and iOS, I guess, but not really.

00:32:37

But my point is that it's kind of everywhere.

00:32:39

And I think there's a lot of creative ways that you could use tags to filter things and

00:32:43

find related ideas.

00:32:45

And that's really the shift he wants people to make.

00:32:47

He mentions that the old way is you kind of think to yourself, under which topic do

00:32:53

I store this note?

00:32:54

Which folder does this belong in?

00:32:57

And the new way that he's trying to get us to embrace is in which context do I want

00:33:02

to be able to stumble upon this again?

00:33:05

So as you're thinking about something in the future, where do you, like those topics,

00:33:11

that's how you should organize things so that things pop up in front of you at the right

00:33:15

time.

00:33:16

And this is an interesting idea.

00:33:17

And again, I think maybe tags is sort of the right way to implement this nowadays.

00:33:22

But I don't know that you can get 100% of the way there either.

00:33:28

I'm not quite sure what this looks like in my application of it.

00:33:32

Well, I know that towards the beginning, he made a very strong point that he's not referring

00:33:37

to a Wikipedia page of sorts where you've got links that go all sorts of places and

00:33:44

it's ways of finding things.

00:33:47

He makes a very clear point that that's not what it is.

00:33:50

And yet the more of an explanation I got for it, the more I felt like this is exactly

00:33:53

what it is.

00:33:54

Yeah.

00:33:55

So it's just not long for him.

00:33:57

The idea is that you have a whole bunch of smaller notes and you're building links from

00:34:02

those notes to other notes.

00:34:03

Like that was a lot of what I was seeing.

00:34:06

And I could see that.

00:34:09

One of the questions that I ran across in this process was like, "Okay, well that's fine,

00:34:12

but how do I get started into this whole system?"

00:34:17

I don't know if he actually spelled it out very well, but he refers to, or at least people

00:34:23

in the Zettel-Kasten community have a tendency to refer to index notes.

00:34:28

And they'll have a single index note that then helps them find topics and jump off of

00:34:33

them.

00:34:34

Sounds like the bullet journal.

00:34:35

It does.

00:34:36

So it felt a lot like that.

00:34:39

And I could see that.

00:34:42

But maybe that's a good segue into the next chapter here.

00:34:45

Nobody ever starts from scratch because with that, everybody has ideas about things in

00:34:51

some form or another.

00:34:53

If you stop long enough to write out a thought on anything, you can form an opinion on it

00:35:00

in some way or another.

00:35:02

Which is kind of nice because the beauty of this and something he stresses quite a bit

00:35:05

is you're not doing anything you don't want to do.

00:35:08

You always just go with the topics that seem interesting at the time.

00:35:12

And the more time you spend doing it, the more ideas you get in it, the bigger it grows,

00:35:15

the more organic it becomes, everything takes off for amazingness.

00:35:21

Yeah.

00:35:22

This section specifically kind of gave me a moment of revelation because he uses a lot

00:35:33

of different studies to support his ideas in this book.

00:35:36

And he's not alone in that.

00:35:38

There's a lot of books in our space that use research studies, whether they have done

00:35:42

them themselves or they are citing work that somebody else has done to support an idea.

00:35:47

And I remember we had Chris Bailey on and he talked about how he had access to his fiance's

00:35:56

like Ebsco host sort of a thing, where he could look at the academic papers and read

00:36:00

them all for himself.

00:36:01

Oh yeah.

00:36:02

Yeah.

00:36:03

And I was thinking to myself as he was describing that that sounds miserable.

00:36:06

Yeah.

00:36:07

Okay.

00:36:08

But I'm also myself writing more lately and I find myself writing these ideas and then

00:36:16

in the back of my mind, I'm like, there's a study that I've read about somewhere that

00:36:21

is perfect to illustrate what I'm talking about here, but I can't remember what it is.

00:36:26

Right.

00:36:27

Right.

00:36:28

You know, so for me, I kind of had this picture of what if as I was taking these notes and

00:36:36

writing about these like reading these books where they cite these studies, what if I had

00:36:42

a slip box where I could tag or whatever, but all of those studies basically were grouped

00:36:48

together.

00:36:49

And then whenever I needed to go back and support an idea, I could very quickly flip

00:36:55

through those, get the gist of them.

00:36:57

That's something he talks a lot about.

00:36:59

And then if I needed to dig deeper and cite something specific, you know, it's right there

00:37:04

for me.

00:37:05

I've got maybe 20 different studies, you know, that pop up all the time.

00:37:10

You know, so there's 20 of those cards in my system and I can find the one that I need.

00:37:16

And then if I need to, I could dig a little bit deeper, but that would probably save

00:37:20

me a lot of time over Googling.

00:37:22

Okay.

00:37:23

What was that one study by the one guy with the radishes and what was the findings?

00:37:27

Right.

00:37:28

You know, because that stuff, they're having a handful of those studies and the more books

00:37:32

that we read, the more that we do get exposed to, but you do see the same ones popping up

00:37:36

over and over and over again.

00:37:37

But I can't for the life of me remember this is what the denon and krigger effect was or

00:37:42

Parkinson's Law or any of that type of stuff.

00:37:44

So.

00:37:45

Do you, do you have a pin board account?

00:37:47

I do.

00:37:48

Yeah.

00:37:49

That's, I have put off having a pin board account for a long time.

00:37:54

This book actually prompted me to finally do it because I run across all the time that

00:37:59

I want to store or come back to.

00:38:01

So in my mind, what I'm thinking of, because he refers to quite a few tools around maintaining

00:38:09

a bibliography and then using that as a way to put sources into your permanent notes

00:38:15

that are in the slip box.

00:38:17

And although that sounds all grand, I'm not one that really needs to ever create a bibliography.

00:38:24

Right.

00:38:25

But it would be nice to have like a list of sources.

00:38:28

And because so many of the sources and the interesting tidbits that I want to refer to

00:38:33

are web based, it made sense to me to have something with a long term storage, such as

00:38:39

pen board that has the archive ability.

00:38:43

So I haven't started building all this out yet, but my intent is to take that pin board

00:38:48

account and grab links to those pens and use that in the slip box as opposed to the real

00:38:57

link because it'll be an offline archive of it.

00:39:00

Sure.

00:39:01

Yeah, I think pin board, that's an interesting example that I hadn't really thought of.

00:39:04

I do have a pin board account.

00:39:05

I basically just collect interesting things that I want to look at later to my pin board

00:39:09

account.

00:39:10

But I could see that being the foundation of this.

00:39:13

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

00:39:15

One thing I want to call out from this section on page 48, he says that we have to read with

00:39:21

a pen in hand, develop ideas on paper and build up an ever growing pool of externalized

00:39:26

thoughts.

00:39:28

And when I read that, I thought of something that I've heard David Sparks say multiple

00:39:31

times is like, I don't have a single unpublished thought.

00:39:36

And kind of when I read this in this book, I had that picture, but then also kind of made

00:39:42

the connection that there's a system that allows you to do that.

00:39:47

It's not as simple as just writing or talking into a microphone as we're doing right now

00:39:55

about everything that pops into your head, the act of getting it into your Zettelcast

00:40:02

and whatever that happens to be, your slip box, that is the thing that allows you to make

00:40:09

those connections and make the not having a single unpublished thought be a positive

00:40:16

instead of a negative, in my opinion.

00:40:18

Sure.

00:40:19

And it kind of challenged me to think through, because up until this point, I was kind of

00:40:22

like, well, this sounds okay for academia, but I'm not really sure how much this can impact

00:40:29

my own life.

00:40:31

But then, you know, I'm thinking through the launch stuff or faith based productivity and

00:40:35

all the things that I want to write.

00:40:39

And I realized that it is really difficult for me to sit down with just a topic and just

00:40:46

start writing.

00:40:48

And I'm like, well, you really have nothing to lose at this point.

00:40:51

You may as well give this a shot.

00:40:52

Right.

00:40:53

Right.

00:40:54

That's exactly what my thought process was.

00:40:55

That's why I have an action item of building one of these, because I know that, like I

00:40:59

have a lot of ideas and there's a lot of these that I feel like I want to share at some point.

00:41:05

But I don't have a habit of sitting down and writing on a daily basis, which is what this

00:41:09

would require.

00:41:11

And if I were to build that in, it becomes a lot easier for me to find things that I can

00:41:18

pull together and share because there's, and maybe we'll get into this a little bit about

00:41:23

how to use this to get into the publishing piece because there's a lot of value in pulling

00:41:29

all this together and it makes it very easy to take things and thoughts that you have

00:41:32

developed over time and pull them together to create a paper.

00:41:37

In this, in our case, it would be creating a blog post or creating notes for a podcast

00:41:41

or something.

00:41:42

So I can see a lot of value in it.

00:41:44

That's why I have an interest in it.

00:41:46

Yeah, and that kind of leads into the next section here, let the work carry you forward,

00:41:52

because I think if you're implementing this the right way, he's arguing that it becomes

00:41:57

easier to do this.

00:41:59

It's almost automatic.

00:42:02

He talks about exergenic versus endergenic reactions.

00:42:06

Think I'm saying that right.

00:42:08

Exergenic equals you have to keep adding energy to keep the process going, whereas endergenic,

00:42:14

the reaction, once you trigger it, it continues by itself and it even releases energy.

00:42:18

So kind of the picture in my head as it pertains to writing is you sit down to write and you

00:42:26

don't feel the first of all the intimidation of the blank page anymore.

00:42:31

But as soon as you start writing, it actually gets easier to write.

00:42:36

You build momentum through that instead of viewing it as I've got so much willpower and

00:42:41

I can only do this for an hour and then I'm going to be exhausted.

00:42:46

He's arguing basically that if you're doing it right, you can keep going as long as you

00:42:51

want to because you're not running out of ideas and you're not running out of energy.

00:42:56

But you need to have a good workflow which produces energy and doesn't consume it.

00:42:59

Yes, and I think this comes from the idea that you don't work on things you don't want

00:43:05

to.

00:43:06

Yes.

00:43:07

He mentions that a handful of times of like, go where your mind wants to go.

00:43:12

And if your mind wants to think about how to put together Linux on an Android phone and

00:43:17

use it as a dumb phone, we won't talk about that here.

00:43:22

If you want to think about that and write about it, go for it.

00:43:24

But if that gets boring and you have an interest in writing about wings of airplanes, like,

00:43:30

well, then go write about that.

00:43:32

Wherever your mind goes that you have an interesting idea that you would like to write

00:43:37

about, go with it.

00:43:38

Like, don't be restricted.

00:43:39

I think that's the concept he's getting at here.

00:43:41

I've just let it carry you and follow it as opposed to what the general rule of thumb

00:43:47

that people refer to in academia and in nonfiction writing and all those circles is, you know,

00:43:52

develop your idea and then put together your outline and then fill it in.

00:43:55

Like that's, that concept is completely out the window when you have something like

00:44:00

this in place.

00:44:01

Yep, and I think, you know, we can push back on the only go where your brain wants to go

00:44:07

with thing because maybe, maybe because we're not in academia.

00:44:13

I don't know.

00:44:14

But that one, I think people will struggle with.

00:44:20

I know I struggled with it, but I also think that it doesn't negate the validity of some

00:44:24

of the stuff that he's sharing in this section about the feedback loops.

00:44:29

So there's a couple ways you can come at this.

00:44:32

You can say, well, I'm not in academia, so I don't get to choose whatever I want to write

00:44:36

about.

00:44:37

You know, whatever my brain happens to want to focus on.

00:44:39

I have to write about X because that's my job.

00:44:44

And that doesn't necessarily mean that this can't work for you.

00:44:48

He talks in this section about the fixed versus growth mindset.

00:44:52

And we've got a whole episode devoted to that.

00:44:55

But the growth mindset views the obstacles as an opportunity instead of a roadblock.

00:45:04

So kind of if you're, if you hit that writer's block, the growth mindset versus the fixed

00:45:09

mindset, that's the thing that's going to get you over or keep you stuck.

00:45:14

And I think that's a very important point that maybe is even under emphasized in this

00:45:19

particular book.

00:45:21

But the point that he's making is that that growth mindset that fuels a feedback loop.

00:45:29

And the feedback loop is really powerful.

00:45:32

That I totally understand how you could use that to gain momentum for whatever you are

00:45:39

trying to do.

00:45:40

If you're constantly feeling like you're stuck in your work, you're going to lose motivation.

00:45:44

You're much more likely to procrastinate.

00:45:45

That's kind of what he talks about.

00:45:47

He talks about the good workflow.

00:45:52

But also the feedback loop, what that does is once you get that going, it kind of keeps

00:45:59

going.

00:46:00

So I may experience some initial resistance when I sit down to write about topic X.

00:46:07

But if my growth mindset is enough to push me forward and I start writing about topic

00:46:14

X and at the same time I'm reading and I'm starting to connect dots in a different way,

00:46:19

I should be able to collect those things and put them in the queue so that I don't get

00:46:24

stuck again.

00:46:25

There should always be something next that is easy to transition into.

00:46:31

And the feedback loop is going to make when I get done with one article, now it's not

00:46:36

just a sigh of relief.

00:46:37

I'll finally publish that one.

00:46:38

It's what do I get to do next?

00:46:40

It's not what do I have to write next?

00:46:42

That's the deadline that's coming up that I'm scared of.

00:46:44

But I've got this momentum.

00:46:46

I'm cranking out these words.

00:46:47

The words are flowing.

00:46:48

The ideas are connecting.

00:46:49

I want to keep going.

00:46:51

And that's a very important, what's the word I'm looking for?

00:46:54

It's not really like a tipping point, but kind of, it's a very different approach which

00:47:01

can be the difference between the snowball effect.

00:47:05

Once you get a little bit of motion, you're going down the hill like you can keep going

00:47:08

as opposed to you never even start.

00:47:10

Yeah, I think it's a good distinction to make because it's just a matter of if you're

00:47:15

into a specific area, just keep it going.

00:47:18

But if you have to produce something, it would sure help to have a lot of ideas in that area.

00:47:24

Yes, yes.

00:47:26

But I think if you know, this is a mind game you're playing with yourself in some degree,

00:47:33

in that you're trying to encourage yourself to write about a specific topic.

00:47:40

And if you know that you've got to crank out a few articles on a specific topic or in a

00:47:46

specific genre, you can kind of focus your brain towards those ideas.

00:47:53

Even if you have random thoughts on something completely different.

00:47:56

Like if you have the freedom to float with those, go with it.

00:48:00

But if not, hopefully you're able to stick to it.

00:48:04

Right, right, yeah.

00:48:07

Which that's kind of a sad place to end up where you just have to hope that stuff works.

00:48:16

So for me, as I'm reading through this, I'm kind of inspired to figure out a way to make

00:48:22

this work for myself.

00:48:23

So I don't have to rely on that.

00:48:25

All the conditions have to be perfect and things have to work out just right for me.

00:48:29

But again, you know, at this point in the book, you really don't know exactly how to

00:48:33

do that if you're not using a three by five index cards and a wooden recipe box.

00:48:39

Although that sounds really intriguing to me.

00:48:42

I don't have any interest in analog hyperlinks.

00:48:45

Like just not for me.

00:48:47

Yeah, exactly.

00:48:48

So I mean, even analog Joe is saying that's too.

00:48:52

No, not happen.

00:48:53

No, I'll stick to text.

00:48:57

And unfortunately, that's about as far as you get because in the next section, he talks

00:49:00

about the six steps to successful writing and they break it down into these different

00:49:04

sections.

00:49:05

And this is where you find out a lot about the different studies and things.

00:49:08

There's some nuggets in here.

00:49:10

But at this point, his explanation of the system is basically done, in my opinion.

00:49:15

I don't think it's an opinion.

00:49:17

He's done.

00:49:19

He, I don't know.

00:49:22

So the six steps, let's just go through the six of them here.

00:49:25

So separate and interlocking tasks, that's the name of the title.

00:49:31

And as I flip through here, there are, let's see if I can grab the little subheadings underneath

00:49:38

of this.

00:49:39

So separate and interlocking tasks, that's the name of the title.

00:49:44

But then he has six subsections there.

00:49:46

Give each task your undivided attention.

00:49:49

Multitasking is not a good idea.

00:49:51

Give each task the right kind of attention, become an expert instead of a planner, get

00:49:56

closure, reduce the number of decisions.

00:50:00

I'm not really sure how he got to those six subheadings off of separate and interlocking

00:50:06

tasks.

00:50:07

Maybe I'm just thinking about it wrong, but it felt very disconnected to me.

00:50:11

A lot of these sections felt like they were just kind of pieced together.

00:50:15

Thus, obviously he's writing this book using a slip box.

00:50:21

He even calls that out at one point.

00:50:23

And it's pretty obvious.

00:50:27

It seems like there's a whole bunch of points where there's this cool story, which I'll give

00:50:33

him that he's good at telling these stories.

00:50:36

But then it feels like he's pulling a bunch of random notes together to some degree and

00:50:41

then trying to put a couple sentences that connect them.

00:50:44

That's the way it felt.

00:50:45

Maybe I'm wrong in that, but that was kind of my perception.

00:50:48

Well, this whole first chapter on separate and interlocking tasks, this read to me like

00:50:55

a poor introduction to task management.

00:50:58

Oh, sure.

00:50:59

Sure.

00:51:00

I mean, there's a lot of stuff in here that I have heard over and over and over again in

00:51:04

the productivity world and you could probably find something that I've written on every

00:51:07

single one of these topics.

00:51:09

Yeah.

00:51:10

You know, we're multitasking.

00:51:11

No one can truly multitask.

00:51:13

What you're really doing is your context switching.

00:51:16

He mentions Mahali here on page 60.

00:51:19

That's a requirement, by the way.

00:51:20

Yep, exactly.

00:51:22

He talks about how constant interruptions reduces your productivity by 40 percent, makes you

00:51:27

at least 10 IQ points dumber.

00:51:29

I mean, this is all stuff that we have heard multiple times.

00:51:34

He does talk about the zygronic effect in here, which his explanation to this, I thought,

00:51:39

was pretty good.

00:51:41

But again, it doesn't really fit with the system for collecting and connecting notes.

00:51:48

It's just a general principle for how you would work regardless of the context.

00:51:56

So maybe this is worth calling out real quickly because the essential idea of the zygronic

00:52:02

effect is that we don't have to complete the task to convince our brains that we don't

00:52:08

need to think about it anymore.

00:52:09

All we really need to do is write it down in a way that convinces our brains.

00:52:13

It's going to be taken care of later.

00:52:15

And this is kind of why getting things done or GTD works.

00:52:19

People have this system.

00:52:20

The secret to mind-like water is to get all that little stuff out of your short-term memory

00:52:24

so your brain isn't trying to constantly go back to those things.

00:52:28

But the slip box is not the place to keep your tasks in any arena, even in academia.

00:52:38

You're not going to keep track of the things that you need to write there, I think, unless,

00:52:42

because of my very limited knowledge of that world, maybe that is how it works.

00:52:47

As you wake up in the morning and you say, "I need to write something today.

00:52:51

I'm just going to sit down and write whatever I feel like."

00:52:55

Maybe some people can do that, but I would say 98% of the people who are listening to

00:53:00

this right now, that's not the way that they're going to work.

00:53:03

They're going to need some sort of system.

00:53:05

That's kind of how I view this chapter as an attempt to say, "Oh, we'll see.

00:53:08

I told you so," but really doesn't give you any specifics for how to do that.

00:53:12

Sure.

00:53:14

Maybe his point is that if you're going to have a task of writing focus on it, maybe?

00:53:21

I don't know.

00:53:22

I guess.

00:53:23

Maybe that's what he's getting at.

00:53:24

I don't know.

00:53:25

I struggle with it.

00:53:26

That said, the next section, "Read for understanding," because I'm done with that one.

00:53:31

I thought this was interesting.

00:53:33

Taking notes on the books you're reading, taking notes on the articles and links and

00:53:40

such, and then using those as jumping off points for your ideas, your permanent notes

00:53:45

in the slip box or the zettlkastin.

00:53:48

I thought that was an interesting concept and one that I really want to try to build

00:53:52

out for myself.

00:53:53

Yeah, I liked this chapter, and not just because I felt like it supported the way that I take

00:54:01

notes, but...

00:54:02

It's telling us, "Hey, you're doing good."

00:54:05

Maybe that's why I liked it.

00:54:07

On one level, obviously, there is that piece of it, but I also think there's some interesting

00:54:11

things here which I didn't really get before.

00:54:13

One of the things that I thought was interesting was he mentioned that Charles Darwin used to

00:54:17

force himself to write down and elaborate on the arguments that were the most critical

00:54:22

of his theories, forcing yourself to see things from the other perspective.

00:54:26

I think that is a really powerful idea.

00:54:29

He also mentions in here, "Get the gist."

00:54:32

This is...

00:54:33

He defines it as a skill, and as we develop that skill, reading becomes easier.

00:54:37

You can grasp it just quicker.

00:54:39

You can read more and less time.

00:54:40

You can more easily spot patterns and improve your understanding of them, and along the

00:54:44

way you increase your set of thinking tools.

00:54:47

This is the part that I viewed as validation for the way that I do things, because I've

00:54:52

seen this in my own life.

00:54:54

I have had people who I show how I take notes, and I even have a post written up on my website,

00:55:01

so I'll put the link in the show notes for anybody who's interested in this.

00:55:04

But the too long didn't read version is that I take notes in my note on my phone while

00:55:10

I am reading a physical book.

00:55:13

I have had people who look at the my note files that I create for a book, and they think,

00:55:20

"Oh my gosh, that must have taken you 20 hours to get through that book and make those notes."

00:55:25

But it doesn't.

00:55:32

Just to get through the book.

00:55:36

I don't know how to explain it until I read this section, but I just recognize these are

00:55:40

the things that I should be writing down.

00:55:42

I'm not trying to write down everything.

00:55:43

I'm not trying to recreate the book, or even the main ideas of the book, but I am getting

00:55:49

better at recognizing the things that are going to be important to me later.

00:55:54

He defines that as the gist.

00:55:57

Yeah, and I think there's some value in the concept of determining what the gist is,

00:56:05

because one thing he does call out in a number of places, repeats it over and over, is that

00:56:11

you should not be quoting books and quoting the things that you read.

00:56:15

You should be taking the idea of what they're saying, boiling it down to the gist of that

00:56:23

area and then putting it into your own words.

00:56:27

How many times did your teacher say, "No, don't say what they said, say it your own way.

00:56:31

Use your own words to do it."

00:56:33

By doing that, it forces a few things.

00:56:35

It forces you to understand it yourself a little bit better.

00:56:39

It's the classic concept of if you want to learn something, teach it.

00:56:44

It's that idea.

00:56:45

You're basically teaching yourself because of what you've read.

00:56:49

Yep.

00:56:50

Yeah, I have an interesting story about this, which I believe explains why I've kind of

00:56:57

resisted this subconsciously.

00:56:59

I maybe have told the story in the podcast before, so I apologize if I have.

00:57:03

But when I was a freshman in college, I was in an intro to theology class at a Catholic

00:57:10

university and I was doing very well in the class.

00:57:17

Then at the end of the semester, my teacher called me to the office because we had a book

00:57:24

report that we were supposed to do.

00:57:26

Apparently, I had not cited things correctly.

00:57:31

She said that I had plagiarized the book report, which I hadn't.

00:57:35

I just didn't cite it correctly, I guess.

00:57:39

She was going to take me to academic court and I was potentially going to get kicked

00:57:43

out of school.

00:57:45

Basically, that rocked my world.

00:57:48

I said, you know, I didn't plagiarize the paper and I'm sorry, you know, if I didn't

00:57:53

cite things correctly, I'll take the blame for that one.

00:57:56

Maybe at that point, I didn't say I'd take the blame for that one.

00:57:58

But I don't know.

00:57:59

Anyways, she didn't end up taking me to academic court, but she did give me zero on the paper

00:58:03

and it was worth a six of our grades.

00:58:04

So I went from an A to a C and that one book report.

00:58:08

One book report.

00:58:10

You know, literally read the book and write about it.

00:58:13

So anything that I'm going to quote, you know exactly where it's coming from.

00:58:17

Right.

00:58:18

Right.

00:58:19

And I didn't realize until we were at, I think it was max stock a couple of years ago and

00:58:27

we were getting coffee and somebody had mentioned to me, like, you know, you've been around

00:58:34

this space long enough.

00:58:36

You've made your own interpretation of these ideas.

00:58:39

You've connected these dots for yourself.

00:58:42

It's okay to have this be your thing.

00:58:45

Like you don't have to give credit for every single idea you've ever had.

00:58:49

And really in this section, what he's, what he's saying, you just said is like he wants

00:58:53

you to, as you're taking these notes, think through things and put your own spin on them.

00:58:58

And I guess like I've been doing that, but I've also been at the same time reluctant to

00:59:02

take credit for doing that.

00:59:05

So this is somebody in academia telling me essentially the exact opposite of what my

00:59:10

intro to theology teacher told me, my freshman year of college.

00:59:13

It's like, no, this is okay.

00:59:16

Now, the next piece here is take smart notes, which I felt was a cop out of a title since

00:59:23

it's the title of the book.

00:59:25

Right.

00:59:26

Um, the section he's basically making the case for everything he's made the case for.

00:59:31

Yes.

00:59:32

And explains how it's important to think outside your brain.

00:59:37

You know, you just need to stick with it and do a few notes every day and that whole premise,

00:59:44

you know, that's, that's what he's getting at here.

00:59:46

Use the system.

00:59:47

I do think it's interesting to like that you mentioned, take a few notes every day.

00:59:54

That's kind of like, you know, just show up and write a page every day, which is how I

00:59:59

wrote my book.

01:00:01

So I think this is kind of interesting in terms of lead versus lag measures.

01:00:06

You know, I view it as like previously I had the measure of, I'm going to show up and I'm

01:00:09

going to write a page every day.

01:00:11

But if you're going in collecting ideas and you really believe in the system that he's

01:00:15

outlining here, the writing takes care of itself, then it's almost like a no brainer.

01:00:23

All I have to do is collect a couple of different ideas every day to my slip box.

01:00:26

I can totally do that, you know, and I think that maybe reduces the friction for people

01:00:31

if they approach it that way.

01:00:32

I do agree with you that this is kind of a weak section.

01:00:36

There are a couple things that were interesting to me here.

01:00:40

Number one, the two different factors of memory, he talks about storage strength, which actually

01:00:44

gets stronger with age.

01:00:47

But retrieval strength does not, and that requires the right cues, which is interesting

01:00:52

because you kind of think like you get older, your memory goes.

01:00:55

But really what he's saying is that the retrieval strength, if you have the right cues in place,

01:00:59

then there's no reason that your system of filing things and then recalling them has

01:01:05

to diminish in its capability.

01:01:08

The other thing is that he mentions, "Make a career one note at a time."

01:01:12

I forget if this is the title of a whole section.

01:01:15

But this appealed to me because I feel like I've kind of done this.

01:01:19

Yeah.

01:01:20

You know, I don't want to retell my whole story, but I really had no entryway into this

01:01:28

world.

01:01:30

And I just started collecting ideas that Austin Cleon book that I know I've mentioned a

01:01:35

bunch of different times on this book's, on this podcast, still like an artist.

01:01:39

That was really influential for me.

01:01:40

It gave me permission to collect things and just be okay with the natural output.

01:01:46

And then that kind of led to me writing the book led to me getting connected to lots of

01:01:50

different places, people like you, Joe, like never would have got there had I not embraced

01:01:55

that idea of just collect the dots.

01:01:58

He says it a little bit different, "Make a career one note at a time."

01:02:02

But I guess I just want to say, like I'm a case study for the fact that this is possible.

01:02:07

Yeah.

01:02:08

I think there's a lot of value to sticking with the system a little bit at a time.

01:02:14

And he has like the last section here is "Make it a habit."

01:02:16

So we'll refer to it there.

01:02:18

But I do want to go into the next section here of "Develop ideas."

01:02:23

Because I think this is where he probably should have spent a decent amount of time.

01:02:31

He should have spent, obviously I'm critiquing this book quite hard, but he should have spent

01:02:37

some time very explicitly explaining the system and then go through some of the tips.

01:02:42

Like I get the principles process and then take us through the developing ideas.

01:02:48

Like what are some of the philosophies around developing ideas?

01:02:54

And essentially what he's getting at here is that you need to spend some time with all

01:02:57

of these notes.

01:03:00

Try to make connections, create links between things, figure out what's going on between

01:03:04

them, change, alter, rewrites the ideas that you have already written.

01:03:11

Just continue to work with the system.

01:03:13

And basically what you're doing is you're taking time to develop, obviously, your ideas, your

01:03:20

thoughts.

01:03:22

And over time that can become something that can then become published later on.

01:03:26

So this section I kind of wish would actually have been a little bit longer.

01:03:32

But at the same time I'm quite comfortable with him keeping it brief.

01:03:37

Sure.

01:03:38

Yeah, this section kind of makes the, this is where he starts to explain how these things

01:03:48

can fit together.

01:03:49

I don't know if it was the way that he explained it or just at this point in the book my brain

01:03:55

went this place.

01:03:56

But I recently heard about this new Mac app.

01:03:59

I'm going to send you this via messages so you can take a look at this.

01:04:03

Okay.

01:04:04

This is an app called hook and it's basically for creating links to different things and

01:04:12

different screens and different applications on your Mac.

01:04:16

So you can say I want to be able to get back to this specific spot and this specific application.

01:04:21

You run it through hook and you've got a link.

01:04:23

Now a URL that will take you exactly there.

01:04:26

So it's kind of like iOS deep linking, I guess.

01:04:30

And I haven't really played with this a whole lot.

01:04:32

But as I was thinking along the way about what does the slip box look like and what is the

01:04:37

app that I'm going to be using for this.

01:04:39

I thought of this app and I'm like, maybe you don't need to have just one app for this

01:04:44

sort of thing.

01:04:45

Maybe the future of digital slip boxes is something like this where you can just link

01:04:51

to whatever section of whatever you need and connect those things that way.

01:04:56

Again, I haven't played with this a whole lot, but I'm interested in the idea of at any

01:05:00

point in any application being able to very quickly get a URL and stick that somewhere

01:05:05

in a digital slip box.

01:05:09

I think that there's a lot of power in that and that probably even works a lot better

01:05:14

than some of the keywords and the tags that we were talking about earlier.

01:05:18

Sure.

01:05:19

No, I think that's an interesting point to make.

01:05:20

I am very familiar with hook.

01:05:24

We'll need to have an offline conversation about them after this.

01:05:26

I've got a connection to the company that makes it.

01:05:30

I haven't spent any time with it, but I know a lot about it.

01:05:33

I hadn't really thought about it this way, but now that you've mentioned this app, it

01:05:38

makes me realize that a lot of the files and such that I want to use for this, that whole

01:05:45

plain text structure I'm contemplating for this, it really just needs to have the ability

01:05:52

to store links.

01:05:54

No matter how you do this, if you're going to do it digitally, I've already alluded to

01:05:58

this with the pinboard thing without realizing it.

01:06:01

Having links that go places, that could be huge.

01:06:05

My concern with something like hook is that what happens if those things move.

01:06:10

Yes, exactly.

01:06:11

That's the trick with that.

01:06:14

Not sure how that handles that.

01:06:16

Again, I've not used it, so I can't speak to that, but it is of a lot of interest to

01:06:23

me.

01:06:24

Yeah, I'm fascinated by this idea because he makes the statement here, and I've heard

01:06:29

this before, when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

01:06:33

Really what he's talking about when he says that is developing the mental models that you

01:06:37

need to tackle creative problems.

01:06:40

But I also think that applies to, as I'm reading this book, how I would assemble my

01:06:45

slip box.

01:06:46

It's very easy to say, "Oh, I need a zettle caston because I need to be able to have the

01:06:50

numbering system in the upper left and do it exactly the same way."

01:06:54

That would be the letter of how to take SmartNotes Law, but the spirit of it is just being able

01:07:00

to connect these things.

01:07:03

Maybe there's different and better ways to do that.

01:07:06

That gets into the Royal Air Force story, which I really like this story.

01:07:09

This was the first time I'd heard this, but this is awesome.

01:07:12

Do you remember this story?

01:07:13

I do, but I want you to tell it.

01:07:16

So basically, the Royal Air Force wanted to put reinforcement in their planes to where

01:07:23

they were being shot.

01:07:25

They asked this guy, Abraham Wald, to find out where they were most frequently shot.

01:07:30

They had all these planes that came back with bullet holes in them, and the Royal Air Force

01:07:33

wanted to add armor where those bullet holes were.

01:07:37

Abraham Wald said, "No, you want to add it to everywhere where those aren't because those

01:07:41

are the areas where the planes got hit that didn't make it back."

01:07:46

It's so brilliant to think of it that way.

01:07:47

All the ones that didn't make it back, are the ones that got hit in the fuel tank, well,

01:07:53

you need to reinforce the fuel tank.

01:07:54

Yeah, the returning planes could only show the data that was less relevant, basically.

01:08:00

Being able to see things through a different perspective, not being locked into, this is

01:08:04

the only way to approach a solution to this problem, I think, is really important.

01:08:09

I don't know that Hook is the way to do that, but I do think that for me personally, the

01:08:16

digital application of the slip box requires some modifications to what we just read in

01:08:23

this book.

01:08:24

Sure.

01:08:25

Now, the next section here is "Share Your Insight."

01:08:30

This is where he explains the process of developing an outline based on the ideas that

01:08:36

are already in your slip box, taking those and then pulling it all together in order

01:08:43

to create an article, a paper, a book.

01:08:46

That's what he goes through.

01:08:48

It's that particular section that tipped me off because he also mentioned in that section

01:08:55

that this is how he wrote this book, which then puts a whole new light on the disconnectedness

01:09:03

of certain areas.

01:09:04

Not all of it is, but there's a lot of pieces where it's like, "I think you just wanted

01:09:09

to talk about multitasking.

01:09:11

I think you just wanted to talk about it."

01:09:15

There were a handful of areas that were similar to that.

01:09:18

I think you just wanted to talk about groupthink and brainstorming.

01:09:20

I think you just wanted to.

01:09:24

Whenever he mentions that he uses his slip box to do this, one of the things in this

01:09:28

area that I maybe I would clarify based on his process is that it should probably be

01:09:35

something that you spend a little more time in the editing room in that process before

01:09:42

you publish it because obviously I don't think he did that well with this book.

01:09:49

That's just my opinion.

01:09:50

We'll get to author style and rating later.

01:09:52

Maybe I gave it away already.

01:09:54

But again, the intent of the book is to share what you've done.

01:09:59

That's what he's getting at here.

01:10:01

Yeah.

01:10:03

To be honest, these last two chapters I think were some of the weakest.

01:10:07

The one thing I got from this chapter was that we tend to prioritize certain ideas and

01:10:13

that doesn't necessarily make them better.

01:10:16

He has a quote from Charlie Munger, "It says an idea or a fact is not worth more because

01:10:20

it is easily available to you."

01:10:23

He mentions that your brain prioritizes that information that's easily accessible in the

01:10:27

moment, but that does not mean that it's relevant.

01:10:31

Also, getting back to the Rolf D'Bali book that we read, blanket on the name, but all

01:10:40

the different biases that people can have.

01:10:43

We tend to prefer the first idea best.

01:10:48

That is a challenge to me just because you've thought about something for a little bit and

01:10:54

you've gotten a potential solution.

01:10:56

It doesn't mean that you should run with that.

01:10:58

Maybe think a little bit more and see if you can come up with some other ideas because

01:11:01

that first one is typically not the best.

01:11:04

I think if you just devote a little bit more time to noodling on these things, then maybe

01:11:11

some of those things become clear just because you give your brain the space to identify

01:11:15

those.

01:11:16

The art of thinking clearly.

01:11:17

There it is.

01:11:18

Yep.

01:11:19

I had to hunt it down.

01:11:20

It's like at some point you get so many books underneath of you it starts to get hard

01:11:24

to pinpoint exactly who wrote what sometimes.

01:11:29

Last section here is make it a habit.

01:11:34

This is where that concept of, you know, spend a little bit of time writing notes each day.

01:11:42

That's where that gets important.

01:11:44

If you are maybe setting goals or just setting time for how much time you're going to spend

01:11:51

in your slip box or how many notes are you going to try to create each day or edit each

01:11:55

day or publish each day, it's important to create the flow and the regularness of spending

01:12:05

time inside these notes.

01:12:07

Yep.

01:12:08

Yeah.

01:12:09

I don't think we need to really spend any time here because there are other books that

01:12:14

explain habits way better than this one does.

01:12:17

Action items?

01:12:18

Yeah.

01:12:19

Are we there?

01:12:20

Are we there?

01:12:21

Are we there?

01:12:22

I think so.

01:12:23

All right.

01:12:24

So I'll go first.

01:12:25

I'm going to change my approach to writing, but I am not going to go full on with his system.

01:12:32

I've started doing this and I'm going to try to explain this in audio format.

01:12:37

It's probably not going to make that much sense, but I'll try to outline the essential

01:12:42

pieces and how they tie together.

01:12:44

Okay.

01:12:45

So as I mentioned, I'm going to be doing a lot more writing hopefully and I'm trying

01:12:49

to figure out what is the system that I can use to do that to make it easier.

01:12:54

And the first part of that has always been to capture ideas in drafts and that part is

01:12:59

not going to change.

01:13:00

I've kicked around the idea of tagging things in drafts because you can do that, but I think

01:13:06

that drafts for me is just the collection point.

01:13:10

I'm not going to put tags on them there.

01:13:13

From there, I can decide what things I want to write more on.

01:13:18

And this is where a new app that I've been playing with comes into play and that is

01:13:22

Notion.

01:13:24

Notion is a pretty cool database application.

01:13:26

I guess is how you would explain it.

01:13:28

A lot of people view it as like an Evernote replacement.

01:13:31

It is not an Evernote replacement at all.

01:13:33

It can function as an Evernote replacement, but that is definitely not doing it justice.

01:13:40

Just as an example, one of the things that I've done with Notion and I am very, very

01:13:44

new to this application and not even scratching the surface with it.

01:13:48

I created a section for the content that I wanted to create for my blogs, my emails and

01:13:54

also the podcasts that we publish.

01:13:57

So I created that section and then I created a Kanban view, which was as simple as a couple

01:14:04

mouse clicks, set up the columns, assigned colors to each of them.

01:14:09

And now I've got a Kanban view for all of the things that are in the backlog, things

01:14:12

that I want to write, things that I am writing, things that are published or done.

01:14:18

And also I can assign whatever properties I want to those things.

01:14:22

So one of the easy ones I did was Story Points.

01:14:25

If you wanted to break it down in individual sprints, you could do that sort of thing too.

01:14:29

But also from that section, you can go click to create a new view and then select a calendar

01:14:35

view.

01:14:36

So all of the things that are on my Kanban board and the dates that I want them to be

01:14:40

published on now show up on a calendar.

01:14:43

And they show whatever I want on there, including the Story Points.

01:14:46

So how big is this task really?

01:14:48

Is it just a quick little blog post saying, hey, there's a new bookworm episode that's

01:14:52

published today, click here to listen.

01:14:54

Or is it something that I want to spend some time researching and writing?

01:14:58

So I can see Story Points.

01:14:59

I can see the status of the thing.

01:15:01

Have I started it or not?

01:15:03

It's pretty cool.

01:15:05

And the thing that I think Notion is really going to help with, and this is something I

01:15:09

need to dig into more, is the interlinking.

01:15:12

So you can have all of these different sections, all these different places.

01:15:15

I could literally have a section and notion of all the different research papers that

01:15:19

have popped up in these books that we've read.

01:15:22

And I could link to those in any of the other sections.

01:15:26

So it's kind of like building a wiki, but not really.

01:15:30

Again, Notion is kind of its own animal.

01:15:32

Sure.

01:15:33

It's its own thing.

01:15:34

But it makes the interlinking of things and ideas very, very easy.

01:15:40

And so I think I need to put a little bit more thought into the types of things that

01:15:45

I want to collect in there, whether they end up as keywords or just separate spaces.

01:15:50

But then ultimately those tasks or those things that I create in my compound board, I can

01:15:55

even link to the Ulysses sheet.

01:15:57

Ulysses is where I do all of writing.

01:15:59

Notion is where I kind of organize everything.

01:16:02

And drafts is where everything is going to be collected on the front end.

01:16:05

At least that is the initial thought.

01:16:08

I like it though.

01:16:10

I've not played with Notion, so I have no concept of that particular app.

01:16:16

But I know that I've listened to you and a couple other people refer to Notion in the

01:16:21

last couple of days.

01:16:22

Like it seems like a really cool tool.

01:16:24

I'm just stuck in the plain text world.

01:16:27

Yeah.

01:16:28

So I think it could be a really cool thing for you.

01:16:32

I think it's just something I'm not going to do though.

01:16:34

Yep, that's fine.

01:16:36

But I also want to say that if people are going to go look at Notion and try to figure

01:16:40

it out, you won't be able to just by downloading and launching the app.

01:16:44

You really have to have like a specific use case that you're trying to build.

01:16:48

And if you have that, then it's pretty easy to make Notion do whatever you want.

01:16:53

But that was a problem I had the first time was everybody's talking about this.

01:16:56

I better go look at it.

01:16:58

I don't even know what to do here.

01:16:59

There's no wizard which is going to walk me through things because you can literally

01:17:03

do anything with it.

01:17:04

You can build your own applications inside of it.

01:17:06

It's crazy.

01:17:08

Which I think is why a lot of people refer to Notion as like an Evernote comparison.

01:17:15

Because with that, like with Evernote, it was hard to get into it because it was so open

01:17:20

ended.

01:17:22

You could do a lot of things with it and it made it hard to nail down what you should

01:17:27

be doing with it or how you wanted to use it.

01:17:29

Notion kind of reminds me of that.

01:17:31

Yeah, I could see that although Notion is way more powerful than Evernote.

01:17:36

So maybe that to the nth degree.

01:17:38

I mean, I just saw a tweet the other day that Gantt charts are coming to Notion.

01:17:43

Which again, is just a view of the things that are already in there.

01:17:46

So you don't need to go in there and try to figure out how to put all these things on

01:17:50

the Gantt chart.

01:17:51

You just put the work that you're doing in there and then you click the button and it

01:17:54

shows up in a Gantt chart.

01:17:55

It is crazy powerful.

01:17:58

Very interesting.

01:17:59

Well, don't count on me using Notion.

01:18:03

But I do.

01:18:04

You're going to be using Zetalcastin.

01:18:05

I do.

01:18:06

I am not using Zetalcastin.

01:18:08

Everns know.

01:18:10

No.

01:18:12

But I do want to build out a slip box of Zetalcastin.

01:18:15

And obviously, like I've alluded to this a handful of times, I am planning to do so in

01:18:20

plain text files.

01:18:22

I already have a Git repository where I still store a lot of notes and reference.

01:18:27

So I'll just build it into that.

01:18:29

Which is nice because then it means that, again, I can use drafts as well as the starting

01:18:34

point if I want.

01:18:37

And for me, it means that I can put things into working copy on my phone, commit it to

01:18:43

the repo and then pull it back down wherever I want and I'm good to go.

01:18:48

So that makes it very easy for me to just have the single point.

01:18:52

And again, it's all plain text files.

01:18:54

But the piece that I got a nail down is how do I want all the hyperlinking to works?

01:18:59

Because obviously plain text does not hyperlink.

01:19:02

Right.

01:19:03

So there's a lot of ways that you can do that with Vim, a VI editor.

01:19:08

But again, that's going to get into command line tools.

01:19:11

And this is far from a Linux command line world that we're referring to here.

01:19:17

So that said, I'll make an action item on the club for it.

01:19:21

And all of my Vim people, please find me.

01:19:26

All right.

01:19:29

Style and rating.

01:19:30

It's your book.

01:19:31

You go first.

01:19:32

Okay.

01:19:33

I actually didn't mind the style too much.

01:19:38

The third section, I almost called it the second section because after the introduction,

01:19:43

there really are only two sections.

01:19:45

I definitely thought that was the weaker part of the book.

01:19:48

And maybe it's just because I'm familiar with a lot of the stuff that you talked about

01:19:52

already because it's kind of general productivity stuff.

01:19:54

I do think that it inspired some cool changes to my writing workflow and made me think about

01:20:01

how I write a little bit differently.

01:20:04

I was really intrigued by the exergenic versus energetic reactions and kind of like, how

01:20:08

can I make my writing workflow kind of automatic?

01:20:13

So I feel like this is going to be one of those books that is going to have a significant

01:20:18

impact in the way that I work.

01:20:21

That being said, it's not really something I would recommend to people.

01:20:28

I think it solves a very specific problem if you approach it a certain way.

01:20:34

And so for some people, this might be the right book at the right time.

01:20:37

I kind of think maybe it was for me.

01:20:41

I think that some of the things that he, an explanations that he uses are kind of dry.

01:20:47

I know that there's a little bit of a language barrier there.

01:20:51

I don't know if the author is German, but if you watch the video, you can kind of tell

01:20:56

that it sounds like English isn't its primary language.

01:21:00

And that kind of comes across in some of the writing as well.

01:21:05

I'm kind of torn as to where to rate this.

01:21:09

I think I'm in a rate at 3.5.

01:21:12

And that's because I think that I got some solid stuff out of it.

01:21:16

But it was definitely at certain points, a slog to get through.

01:21:21

Not one of the better books, I would say, that we've written.

01:21:25

But over time, I could see this book being one of the most impactful.

01:21:30

Like I come back to this and how to take smart notes.

01:21:32

That was the point where writing got a whole lot easier for me.

01:21:36

Yeah, I think that sometimes happens because what was it?

01:21:40

How to read a book?

01:21:41

Mortimer.

01:21:42

Neither one of us really cared for the book, but it's had an impact on both of us.

01:21:48

And it's honestly one of our more popular episodes, oddly enough.

01:21:52

So I think this is going to fall into that.

01:21:55

Obviously, if you've listened to this whole thing, you know that I'm not a huge fan of

01:21:59

the format of this.

01:22:01

I just, I felt like he was skimping and then trying to expand.

01:22:05

Like it was just weird to me.

01:22:08

So I struggled with it.

01:22:09

I struggled with how he put it together.

01:22:12

I struggled with how he edited it.

01:22:15

I found a lot of typos and grammatical errors, which really bothered me after the first probably

01:22:22

10 that I found.

01:22:23

It seemed like about every second or third page I found something on it that was off.

01:22:29

It's like, come on.

01:22:31

And they did put the editor's name at the front, so I was like, okay, well, now I know who I'm

01:22:36

not using.

01:22:37

So sorry to say all of that.

01:22:41

But that all said, I think, like this one's hard for me because I think I'm with you and

01:22:46

that the idea I think is super important and can have a huge impact.

01:22:51

It could have exponential impact long term, but I do think that the book itself, I really,

01:22:59

really struggle with.

01:23:00

There's a website, zettlcastin.de.

01:23:02

It's actually an English that I ran across in the process of trying to figure out this

01:23:09

system in a little bit more.

01:23:11

It's written by, what's the guy's name?

01:23:15

Christian, can't find his last name.

01:23:18

Christian and Sasha, they do a fantastic job of explaining the system and how it works

01:23:25

and even show how it can work in tools like Envyalt.

01:23:28

Envyalt's actually one that they absolutely love.

01:23:31

Christian even submitted some changes to Envyalt for, on behalf of Brett a couple times.

01:23:37

So that endeared me a little bit more towards him.

01:23:41

So my thinking on this is I'm going to rate this at 2.5.

01:23:47

I'm sorry to say that.

01:23:51

Mostly because the system's really cool, but there are much better ways to get it.

01:23:56

This book is not worth going through in order to get to that point.

01:23:59

I don't think it's well done.

01:24:00

I just don't.

01:24:01

Yeah, if I had found that other guy, maybe I would have rated it lower.

01:24:04

Yeah.

01:24:05

I mean, and maybe that's the problem that I'm doing here is I did compare Christian and

01:24:10

Sasha's writing to Sankes and I much prefer the website version of it.

01:24:18

So that's the downside of that, but that's where I'm going to land.

01:24:22

I think that's completely fair.

01:24:24

I did not know there were other options for the same information, but if there is a better

01:24:28

option, I wholeheartedly endorsed going there instead.

01:24:33

We'll put a link to that in the show notes.

01:24:35

So if people are hearing us talk about this, they're interested in further study, but they

01:24:38

don't necessarily want to pick up how to take smart notes, then they can check that out

01:24:42

first.

01:24:43

Something of interest to me is like, okay, this was by far the top voted book in the recommendations

01:24:49

on the club.

01:24:50

It's a fascinating topic.

01:24:51

Yeah.

01:24:52

I wonder how much of that has to do with just the title.

01:24:54

Yeah, true.

01:24:56

So I don't know how much of that is people are voting it because they know of the book

01:25:00

and what it's about and how much of that is how to take smart notes.

01:25:05

Like, whenever we were picking this book up, I was super excited to get it.

01:25:10

I'm a little disappointed right now, but I can literally see the disappointment on your

01:25:15

face.

01:25:16

Yeah.

01:25:17

But the title is intriguing.

01:25:18

So yeah, I could see how it got there.

01:25:20

Cool.

01:25:21

All right.

01:25:22

What's next, Joe?

01:25:25

Next one up is my pick emotional intelligence by Daniel Goldman.

01:25:28

I feel like this one's been a long time coming and we've talked a lot about how to improve

01:25:34

Carol Dweck's mindset of, you know, whole growth mindset.

01:25:38

This kind of takes that to a little bit different level, I think, with how do you improve and

01:25:44

get better with your emotional state, not just your intellectual state?

01:25:48

Yeah.

01:25:49

This is a topic that I know a little bit about, probably just enough to make me dangerous,

01:25:52

but not enough to really be of any use.

01:25:55

So I'm interested to see your reaction to a lot of the books that we've read after we

01:26:00

go through this because I feel like a lot of the authors that we read about, they touch

01:26:04

on the topic of emotional intelligence.

01:26:05

I talk about it way too much, I know.

01:26:07

Sure.

01:26:08

But it does influence a lot of different areas.

01:26:11

So this will be interesting.

01:26:12

Yeah, I think it'll be a fun one.

01:26:13

The one after that is the next recommendation in the Bookworm Club.

01:26:20

You guys have gone nuts voting for this one.

01:26:22

This is Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt.

01:26:25

And I basically am picking this because of the number of votes that it has gotten.

01:26:29

I have to confess this is not something that I'm itching to read, although I've read Michael

01:26:34

Hyatt's stuff before and I think he's a good writer.

01:26:37

I also tend to not like the systems and Michael Hyatt tends to write systems.

01:26:45

So we will see.

01:26:47

Hopefully I will be pleasantly surprised.

01:26:48

I have not gotten this yet.

01:26:49

I am still holding you on the hook if I don't like it.

01:26:52

Alright, well hold the club on the hook if you don't like it.

01:26:58

Alright, alright.

01:26:59

Fun times, Gap books.

01:27:01

I finished up a book that I was reading at night and I just picked up a new one.

01:27:06

This is kind of a classic, not kind of a classic.

01:27:08

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens.

01:27:13

It's Charles Dickens.

01:27:14

Enough said.

01:27:15

That's all I need to say.

01:27:16

Mike Drop.

01:27:17

Yep, the one I have I'm still reading because we hustled to get this one done so we could

01:27:23

record this live while you were here.

01:27:25

I'm still reading Company of One by Paul Jarvis and actually I've just started this because

01:27:30

I kind of switched my focus to this book instead.

01:27:33

So Company of One is interesting.

01:27:35

He's basically making the argument that growth should not be the default option for companies.

01:27:42

And I think that's an interesting mindset that kind of flies in the face of a lot of

01:27:45

the stuff that we read.

01:27:47

So but he's done it.

01:27:49

He's built a successful company and not a huge company.

01:27:52

So I'm interested.

01:27:54

He's a very good writer.

01:27:55

The first chapter has been really entertaining.

01:27:57

So excited to get through the rest of this one.

01:27:59

And I will mention that the notes for that I've taken the MindNote files for both this

01:28:06

book and Company of One are both going to be in the Bookworm Club, the Premium Membership.

01:28:10

So members are going to be able to get access to those.

01:28:14

Yeah.

01:28:15

And I also want to point out that we've been going through a lot of listener recommendations

01:28:20

lately.

01:28:21

Just kind of picking out some of the high ones I actually grabbed.

01:28:24

I actually when I picked Quiet, I didn't realize it was on the recommendations list.

01:28:29

But it was so that was unintentional.

01:28:32

But yeah, we've been picking a lot of books off of that list.

01:28:34

So if you have one that you want to get in the running for showing up on the show, go

01:28:41

to club.bookworm.fm/recommend or just go to the club.

01:28:45

There's a big button at the top that says recommend a book.

01:28:47

Click on it.

01:28:48

That's the easy way to do it.

01:28:50

From there, you can also see all the books that are currently recommended.

01:28:53

Make sure you get your votes in.

01:28:54

You know, if you get your votes in, obviously the higher it is, the better chance there is

01:28:57

for it to show up on the show.

01:28:59

So you can see all the books that are on the recommendation list.

01:29:01

You can see all the episodes.

01:29:03

That's the easy place to see it all.

01:29:05

All right.

01:29:06

And if you want to support the show, there's a couple ways that you can do that.

01:29:11

Number one, you can join the revolution, go over to iTunes and leave us a rating and

01:29:15

review.

01:29:16

Help us take down KCRW.

01:29:18

Thank you to everybody who has done that.

01:29:20

You can also buy a bookworm t-shirt.

01:29:23

We get a couple bucks from every one of those sales.

01:29:26

And you can join the bookworm club.

01:29:28

We've got a premium membership, which gets you access to a wallpaper that I designed,

01:29:34

the book notes from all of the books that we read.

01:29:37

And then as we mentioned at the beginning, we're experimenting with this live recording.

01:29:42

So we will potentially have the ability by the time we record the next show, if you are

01:29:46

a bookworm club premium member, to listen to the show live, hear all of the mistakes

01:29:51

that we make before we edit the thing.

01:29:53

Oh, I didn't think about that.

01:29:55

And join the chat as we record, ask questions, things like that.

01:30:00

Kind of scary, what that's going to look like.

01:30:04

But it's also kind of exciting.

01:30:05

I've done that before with Asian efficiency.

01:30:07

And I'm kind of excited to see what people think as we're talking about this stuff live.

01:30:12

I think that might result in a lot better conversation, a lot more complete conversation.

01:30:18

So if you want to be a part of that, make sure that you join because we're going to

01:30:22

share that link.

01:30:23

It's going to be in a private section of the bookworm club.

01:30:25

Yeah, I'm literally looking forward to that.

01:30:26

I think it'll be a lot of fun.

01:30:27

But I also want to note, we're obviously here in the room together today.

01:30:34

And that's been a process of us working together on Mike's site, faith-based productivity.

01:30:39

So I just want to point out, keep your eyes on that.

01:30:41

The thing's coming out very soon.

01:30:43

Mike's looking at me kind of funny because he doesn't want me to talk about this.

01:30:46

But I'm doing it anyway.

01:30:48

It's something I think we're both, I'm getting involved in it to some degree and I think

01:30:53

it's going to be really cool.

01:30:54

So it's something I have a lot of interest in as well.

01:30:57

So yeah, keep your eyes on what Mike's doing right now.

01:30:59

It's really cool.

01:31:00

Cool.

01:31:01

Well, thank you for that.

01:31:02

All right, now I'll quit doing that now.

01:31:03

So if you're interested in emotional intelligence, we'll catch that one next time.

01:31:07

So pick up the book and read it along with us.