Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

Super excited today Mike.

00:00:01

Why is that? I mean, I think I know why, but it's because like we're doing this and.

00:00:06

People can listen to us while we do it.

00:00:08

It's true. This is a live recording super excited about this.

00:00:13

People can hear all of the mistakes that we make and all of the stuff that I typically edit out.

00:00:18

So which means you can hear whenever my kids are banging against the door.

00:00:23

Or something weird going on in my house.

00:00:26

Live cast is live.

00:00:29

Be forewarned.

00:00:30

Yep. So if you're in the chat on the live site, you'll definitely hear some of the stuff that's normally cut out.

00:00:40

But we'll see how this changes things with Bookworm.

00:00:43

Hopefully it doesn't change a whole lot.

00:00:45

But I am super excited about it.

00:00:47

So this if you're not aware of what's going on, we do have premium memberships on our club club.

00:00:53

Bookworm.fm.

00:00:54

And if you are a premium member, you have access to a live page where you can click the little play icon and listen to this as we record it.

00:01:04

So if that's interest of interest to you, you can sign up for a membership and you can join in on the next one.

00:01:11

Yeah. And there's this is this was the the easy thing to add in terms of benefits for premium members.

00:01:20

We do have some suggestions that I'm kind of thinking through how we can do that.

00:01:24

Like one of the things people suggested was interviews with authors.

00:01:26

And while I would love to do more interviews with authors, I need more clout with authors who are not authors of the clan of the cave bear.

00:01:35

So I have a limited pool to draw from hopefully that changes as we go.

00:01:44

But I think that's a great idea.

00:01:46

But this was something that wasn't going to increase the amount of work we had to do and it would be an easy thing to see if people liked it.

00:01:52

So that's why we started with this thing.

00:01:54

And hopefully people like it.

00:01:56

Maybe they don't.

00:01:57

You know, we stopped doing it, but it really wasn't a huge investment to get this up and rolling because you're a wizard and you know how to set up all the all the things.

00:02:03

So all we really have to do is hit record and audio hijack when we go live.

00:02:08

So, but this is kind of the point I'm making is that this is hopefully just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the things that we're going to be adding to the premium membership, although we don't really have a solid roadmap yet for what else is coming.

00:02:20

Right.

00:02:20

Right.

00:02:21

We have a lot of ideas and you and I have talked about things that we would like to do for bookworm memberships for a long time.

00:02:30

So I think the hope is that we'll eventually add quite a bit to it, but it takes time.

00:02:35

But all I have to say, we're live.

00:02:38

We are live.

00:02:39

Exciting.

00:02:40

Just like me at Mac stock in a couple of months.

00:02:44

That was a terrible segue.

00:02:46

That's just terrible.

00:02:47

Sorry.

00:02:49

Well, I want to crank through this follow up because I feel like we've got a lot to talk about in today's book.

00:02:54

Yeah, but we've talked about the memberships.

00:02:57

We talked about the live podcasts.

00:02:58

I do want to mention Mac stock again because I had somebody just the other day who's like, Hey, what was your code again?

00:03:05

I think I'm going to be able to make it.

00:03:06

So if you're coming to Mac stock, definitely come say hi.

00:03:10

And if you haven't bought your ticket yet, use the promo code focus because now it will give you the early bird price and it will save you 70 bucks on the weekend pass.

00:03:18

So there's it'll be a link in the show notes.

00:03:19

It's not a special link.

00:03:20

Just use the code focused if you like saving money.

00:03:23

I don't know why you wouldn't do that, but go for it.

00:03:26

Right.

00:03:28

Yes.

00:03:28

So Mac stock, it'll be fun.

00:03:30

Mike and I will be there.

00:03:31

Our friend Josh will be there speaking as well.

00:03:34

Mac power users is being recorded live this year at Macs.

00:03:37

So I'm pretty excited about that one too.

00:03:39

I'm apparently excited today.

00:03:40

Yep.

00:03:42

That'll be fun.

00:03:43

I have attended a live Mac power users recording before and I can indeed say that they are a ton of fun.

00:03:49

Live Steven is the best Steven.

00:03:52

Good.

00:03:53

We got a couple action items to follow up on.

00:03:56

The first one here I took on the task of building my own zettled cast in side.

00:04:04

No, I did.

00:04:05

Did this whole Twitter conversation?

00:04:08

There was a Twitter conversation about my critiquing the spine of the book,

00:04:14

How to Take Smart Notes and it being backwards.

00:04:16

Apparently that's a European thing.

00:04:19

I had to defend you with screenshots.

00:04:21

Because it is backwards.

00:04:23

It is.

00:04:23

At least per what I'm used, I don't think I have ever seen a book back in that in that form.

00:04:29

But yeah, so let me.

00:04:31

Is it true that that's the year I didn't look into it, but is that the European way of doing it?

00:04:34

I don't know that.

00:04:35

A tulip girl says it is and I'll take her word for it, but just for people who haven't been on Twitter and haven't seen the screenshot that I shared.

00:04:42

Basically, you put your books on the shelf with the spine facing out and you put them with the top on the top and the bottom on the bottom, right?

00:04:50

So spines out and then not upside down.

00:04:54

And then all the books on my bookshelf have the words on the side, but they are rotated 90 degrees clockwise.

00:05:04

And I took a screenshot of the, how to take smart notes book on my bookshelf.

00:05:10

And what we mean is that if you put it not upside down, it's the words on the spine are rotated 90 degrees counterclockwise.

00:05:18

So it is exactly backwards to every other book on my bookshelf, unless you take the book and put it upside down on the bookshelf and then the spines read the same way, which seems weird.

00:05:30

I don't know why people would do that differently in different parts of the world, but that could very well be a thing.

00:05:35

It could also be, you know, the academic books are published different way.

00:05:39

I have absolutely no idea why this is the case.

00:05:41

I just know that knowing that a book is upside down on my bookshelf bothers me.

00:05:46

I'm looking at the title, the other way.

00:05:48

Yeah, I don't know.

00:05:52

All the books that I have, they read top to bottom as you're looking at the spine and it's standing up, but this one reads bottom to top.

00:05:59

Oh, another thing I just noticed.

00:06:01

So if you have the book like laying flat on your desk, and you're looking at the spine, so the cover is on the top, the words are upside down.

00:06:10

It makes no sense.

00:06:11

That's how I found it.

00:06:12

Yeah, that's how I discovered the problem.

00:06:14

That can't be right.

00:06:15

I'm still going to say this is a problem because you can read the spine correctly if you put the book upside down.

00:06:21

Yep.

00:06:22

That's just it's it's wrong.

00:06:24

It's weird.

00:06:24

I don't care if it's a standard somewhere.

00:06:26

It's wrong.

00:06:28

Now that we've angered all of Europe, tell us about your zettle cast.

00:06:33

Don't don't hate on me, but the furious rose is coming for you.

00:06:37

I did build a zettle cast in and I did do it in plain text and I did do it with them, which means I get to maintain my happy life with a zettle cast in on command line.

00:06:51

Life on.

00:06:53

Okay.

00:06:53

I think maybe we need more details on this, but I also think maybe an audio podcast is the medium.

00:07:00

Yeah, I thought about trying to figure out how I like how I do this, but the short of the long is that VIM being the amazing text editor that it is allows me to midstream search for other files, kind of like a fuzzy search so I can search for other

00:07:23

zettle cast in notes and copy the the reference for where that file is and just drop it into the note that I'm on right now.

00:07:33

And then there's a shortcut.

00:07:34

It's just built into VM GF and it will automatically take you to the other notes.

00:07:39

So it kind of acts like hyperlinks, but it's plain text.

00:07:42

That's that's the way it functions.

00:07:44

That's the that's the base structure that I need to have in place for it.

00:07:50

I am combining like reference notes and the idea notes themselves into like the permanent notes.

00:07:56

I combine them into one directory.

00:07:58

So I'm kind of cheating in that sense, but it means that I can maintain reference links perfectly between them.

00:08:05

Okay.

00:08:05

That's kind of the complicated technicals, but maybe screenshots and stuff would better serve this.

00:08:10

Well, if you decided that you wanted to write your first blog post in like three years, we could put a link to it.

00:08:17

I know.

00:08:17

It's been three years. Please, please don't tell me it's been.

00:08:20

I just picked out that number.

00:08:22

I have no idea.

00:08:22

You just don't.

00:08:23

It might be.

00:08:24

That's the problem.

00:08:25

Or hey, I've been there.

00:08:27

I've been better lately, but here we are.

00:08:31

I built a zettle cast in my.

00:08:34

All right.

00:08:35

So let's get off of me.

00:08:40

What did you do?

00:08:41

Yeah.

00:08:41

Well, actually, I've mentioned the the process that I wanted to use in the last episode.

00:08:47

I found some issues with that though.

00:08:48

OK, so just to recap real quickly, my initial thought was that I was going to use drafts to capture ideas, which that part works beautifully.

00:08:57

And then I was going to use notion to plan everything in Ulysses to write everything.

00:09:02

And my plan was to use the.

00:09:05

X callback URL schemes in Ulysses in a link field in notion so that I could have a notion card or whatever you call it for.

00:09:16

This thing that I want to write and then it can show up in the.

00:09:20

The compound or the scrum style view and then also in a calendar view.

00:09:25

And then when I want to write, I just click on that link.

00:09:28

It takes me straight to that sheet in Ulysses, which is the whole point of those URLs.

00:09:31

But the URL fields in notion only support web URLs, which is OK, a pain.

00:09:39

So no local URLs and means that my genius system is now broken.

00:09:46

And I have to look for something else.

00:09:47

Now I do have an idea for something else.

00:09:50

One of the links that was pointed out to us.

00:09:54

And I think we maybe even mentioned it on the show was the Zetelkasten.de.

00:10:00

And there's a lot of resources that are available there, including how to set up a Zetelkasten with envy.

00:10:06

Alt if I'm remembering correctly.

00:10:07

Yes.

00:10:08

Well, Brett Terpstra has as we're recording this this week launched a beta

00:10:15

of envy ultra, which is basically envy alt plus.

00:10:21

And I probably owe Brett a bunch of money for all the things that I've been using of his over the years anyways.

00:10:26

So I'm definitely going to buy this as soon as it comes out, even though I absolutely love drafts.

00:10:30

And it means that if I put stuff in here, it's not available on iOS, most likely.

00:10:35

I don't really know.

00:10:36

Sure.

00:10:36

Maybe it's plain text.

00:10:37

It's in Dropbox.

00:10:38

I can get to it anyways.

00:10:38

I'm not sure how that how that's going to work yet.

00:10:41

But it sounds like based on the conversation that he's had and the types of things that he's added that this might be kind of the ideal replacement because it sounds like you can kind of link things together inside of this envy ultra that I've not yet seen.

00:10:56

So you can do that and envy all.

00:10:58

Yeah.

00:10:59

But the from the the post that I saw, it kind of sounded like they recognize that this was the next step and they made it a lot better.

00:11:08

But I don't know what that looks like.

00:11:09

Oh, OK.

00:11:10

So not a whole lot of details there, but I'm going to give it a shot.

00:11:13

Cool.

00:11:14

No, I haven't looked into like I knew that he had released comments and such around the beta for envy ultra and was definitely planning and planning to look into it.

00:11:28

I just haven't had the time to to see what all he's released on it.

00:11:31

Yeah.

00:11:32

Well, he mentioned in the post that there have only been like 20 people who have gotten access to it.

00:11:36

I'm not one of the 20.

00:11:37

Sure.

00:11:38

OK, with that.

00:11:39

I'm going to look at it whenever it becomes publicly available.

00:11:43

Fair enough.

00:11:44

So back to square one with my Zetal cast.

00:11:46

But I will say that I have been using notion to publish things.

00:11:51

And if you've been following my blog at all, you've noticed that I published a lot more, not just with the launch stuff for faith-based productivity, either.

00:11:59

I think I published even two blog posts in one week, the week before that, which is probably the first time that has ever happened.

00:12:07

Sure.

00:12:08

So I think the perspective change of recognizing, like, eliminate all the friction from idea to publish post, that's kind of working.

00:12:18

I'm just still searching for the right tools to make it as.

00:12:21

Sure.

00:12:22

Seamless as possible.

00:12:23

Well, that said, let's go into today's book.

00:12:26

Let's do it.

00:12:27

We have a lot to cover here.

00:12:28

Yes, we do.

00:12:29

15 chapters.

00:12:30

I don't know.

00:12:33

I think we're going to we're going to do it different.

00:12:36

Today's book is emotional intelligence by Daniel Goldman.

00:12:40

The tagline on this is the groundbreaking book that redefines what it means to be smart or why it can matter more than IQ.

00:12:50

I guess that's probably the actual tagline emotional intelligence.

00:12:52

Why it can matter more than IQ.

00:12:54

I have the 10th anniversary edition.

00:12:58

Did you get the same?

00:12:59

Yes.

00:13:00

I think so.

00:13:01

The purplish one.

00:13:02

OK, that just occurred to me.

00:13:03

I'm conflicted on this one.

00:13:05

I have areas where I really love this and I have areas where I really hated this.

00:13:09

So this will be a fun conversation because of that by itself.

00:13:15

But you have quite a bit of background in this world.

00:13:18

I think you know way more about this than I do.

00:13:21

I do.

00:13:22

Now, I know enough to make me dangerous, but probably not enough to have an

00:13:29

intelligent conversation with Daniel Goldman.

00:13:31

All right.

00:13:33

So I'll say that right now.

00:13:35

Like I understand what EQ is and how it works.

00:13:39

I have a rudimentary understanding of the brain physiology and the stuff that happens.

00:13:44

That's the part where like if you got me in a room with a doctor, they they could pick

00:13:49

apart, you know, anything that I was going to say.

00:13:52

Sure.

00:13:53

But yeah, this is interesting.

00:13:56

We talked in the last episode about an emotional intelligence assessment that the

00:14:01

family business has has set up and I give you access to it.

00:14:05

I took it, but we'll put opinion on the results because I think it'd be interesting

00:14:09

to talk about those and compare them after, you know, when we have them side by side.

00:14:14

Uh, cycle.

00:14:15

Yeah.

00:14:16

Cause I haven't gone through it yet.

00:14:17

Sure.

00:14:17

Yeah, which is time got away from me and I was busy, you know, building things for live

00:14:23

streams and the sunshine didn't get it done.

00:14:25

We'll forgive you.

00:14:26

Uh, but I think I think that will be an interesting conversation to that.

00:14:32

Part of it though, I realized as I went through this book kind of has forced me to

00:14:38

look at it through a more practical lens.

00:14:41

This book was not exactly what I expected.

00:14:45

I obviously have heard the term emotional intelligence and recognized Daniel

00:14:51

Goldman's name for a very long time because this has been a part of what I've done

00:14:55

for a very long time.

00:14:57

But what I was surprised by was all of the other people's research that he referenced

00:15:06

in here.

00:15:07

It felt a lot like what was that book?

00:15:11

I didn't like the Danarayli book.

00:15:13

Predictably irrational.

00:15:14

Yes.

00:15:15

Yes.

00:15:16

Which is a very academic book.

00:15:18

And that's really the main thing I had against it.

00:15:21

It wasn't, you know, that the book was bad, but this one felt a lot like that.

00:15:25

And this was probably the closest book we've ever had for me not getting it done.

00:15:31

Sure.

00:15:32

This one was down to the wire because it's almost 300 pages and it's broken down into

00:15:38

five sections, but towards the end of the sections, when he's talking about the

00:15:42

application of this and why you want to develop these skills in school.

00:15:46

Well, I work, I work with a family business that sells this stuff to schools.

00:15:51

You don't have to convince me that we should be changing this to kids.

00:15:55

You know, so just recognize that's the perspective.

00:15:57

I'm coming from as we talk about this.

00:15:59

My, my biggest qualm because I'm with you.

00:16:02

I almost didn't get through this so much so that I finished it at about nine,

00:16:08

30 this morning.

00:16:09

So about an hour and a half before we hopped on here and that was pushing it.

00:16:15

So I think the biggest qualm I had is that in the introduction, he makes the

00:16:20

point that he's going to go through a lot of the science behind a lot of this.

00:16:25

And then the goal is to talk about what to do with it after that.

00:16:31

And he calls out if you, if the science is of no, of no interest to you, go to

00:16:35

chapter four to start.

00:16:37

I didn't because this is bookworm and I needed to go through that first part.

00:16:43

It made me angry though when I went through the first three chapters, but then the

00:16:48

rest of the book, he continues to bring up the science and get into the neurology

00:16:54

and the neuroscience of everything.

00:16:57

Like he continues to get into it outside of those first three chapters.

00:17:01

So even though he tells you that if that's of no interest to you, skip it, you

00:17:04

actually can't.

00:17:05

You can't escape it.

00:17:06

The science is going to follow you no matter where you go.

00:17:09

Yeah.

00:17:11

I mean, I appreciate the science on it, but it was frustrating that he never would

00:17:16

quit on it and reiterated some of it a handful of times.

00:17:20

So that was incredibly frustrating to me.

00:17:22

Well, I actually didn't mind the science part of it, but I felt like the strongest

00:17:27

science part was in the first two chapters.

00:17:29

Yeah.

00:17:30

And then after that, maybe it was just talking over my head because I'm not a

00:17:36

doctor, but I really had a hard time following the chain of command there.

00:17:42

I mean, really for part one, the emotional brain, that's kind of

00:17:46

where he breaks down what's going on.

00:17:48

And I feel like if you understand that part for 99% of people, you understand

00:17:52

all of the science that you need to understand.

00:17:54

Sure.

00:17:55

So maybe we should just kind of talk about, talk about that and, you know,

00:18:00

emotional hijacking stuff like that.

00:18:02

What do you think?

00:18:03

Yeah.

00:18:03

No, it sounds good.

00:18:04

OK.

00:18:04

Because he's for once Mike, it's not a three part book.

00:18:09

This is a five part book.

00:18:12

And I think that's because in the intro, he talked about how it was received more

00:18:19

than received a lot better than he intended or in went further than he expected.

00:18:24

So they revised and expanded it.

00:18:28

And I was really wishing he hadn't when I finished.

00:18:30

So I wonder if he added two parts because I don't know what was in the original.

00:18:34

Yeah, but could be.

00:18:36

Yes.

00:18:37

So yes, part one, he talks about the emotional brain.

00:18:42

And this is all about the science behind it.

00:18:45

I have no idea how to talk about this, Mike, because I don't recall it well enough,

00:18:49

other than stuff happens in your brain to cause it, which is a terrible way to say this.

00:18:56

Well, I can kind of break this down.

00:19:00

I'll try to do it quickly.

00:19:01

So the first chapter is what are emotions for?

00:19:04

And he defines the word emotion.

00:19:08

The root of it is the word motor, which means to move plus the E prefix

00:19:12

which means to move away from.

00:19:14

So your emotions were he's arguing.

00:19:19

Basically, the thing that would get you away from danger away from the saber tooth

00:19:26

tiger who's trying to eat you.

00:19:27

And that really is at the heart of this fight versus flight response.

00:19:35

And the term he uses for that throughout the rest of the book is emotional hijack.

00:19:43

Now, basically what happens when this fight versus flight response is triggered

00:19:49

is that your brain gets these signals and it goes through a certain pathway.

00:19:56

It goes to the thalamus and splits into a couple of branches.

00:19:59

One goes to the neocortex.

00:20:01

That's the thing that processes things rationally and logically.

00:20:04

One goes straight to the amygdala, which is the emotional brain.

00:20:08

He calls it the seat of all passion.

00:20:11

That's located on each side of your brain right above the brain stem.

00:20:14

That's the thing that controls affection and then also passion.

00:20:18

OK, so what that does is it means that part of the signal is not going from

00:20:25

not being filtered through the neocortex.

00:20:28

So ideally, the signal would go through the neocortex, then to the amygdala.

00:20:33

And now you've thought about rationally and you can appropriate a proper emotional

00:20:38

response.

00:20:39

But because it branches, part of it goes straight to the amygdala.

00:20:42

It doesn't get processed rationally.

00:20:44

And so it gives your brain the opportunity to say,

00:20:48

made a made a we need to do something about this now.

00:20:50

OK, and like I mentioned it, when you were being chased by tigers,

00:20:55

that maybe was a good thing because it kept you alive.

00:20:57

Sure.

00:20:58

When you are in an office environment and you're trying to figure out the correct

00:21:01

response to a coworker who you're going to see every day for the rest of your life,

00:21:05

you know, you don't want to fly off the handle because your survival is not

00:21:09

being threatened.

00:21:10

OK, and that's a general statement I know, but I'm fairly safe and I think

00:21:15

insane.

00:21:15

Haven't worked in an office environment lately.

00:21:20

You know, I know you have.

00:21:21

So maybe you're going to rebut me on that, but I don't know.

00:21:24

But I don't think I'm going to rebut that.

00:21:27

OK.

00:21:28

But but anyways, the point is that this fight versus flight needs to be tamed

00:21:33

because of the way society is now and how we have evolved.

00:21:39

And basically, there are a lot of instances every single day, even where this fight

00:21:46

versus flight response is triggered, even if it's in the wrong scenario.

00:21:51

And that's what he calls an emotional hijacking.

00:21:54

OK, so there's really like just to review and this is straight from the book,

00:21:58

two components to this emotional hijacking, the triggering of the amygdala,

00:22:02

the seat of all passion, and then the failure to activate that neocortex and balance it out.

00:22:06

OK.

00:22:07

So when everything just goes straight to the amygdala and that just goes from zero to a hundred,

00:22:11

that can cause you to do stuff that after the fact, you're like,

00:22:15

I really wish I wouldn't have responded that way.

00:22:18

The emotional intelligence is learning to control that, basically.

00:22:22

Yes.

00:22:24

To all the stuff.

00:22:25

All right.

00:22:26

So we don't need to get into details about your own emotional hijacking stories, but

00:22:30

if you like, I don't know if I want to tell you about this or not.

00:22:34

But I do want to call it out to people who are listening, though, because

00:22:38

you can hear, you can hear this sort of thing and you can think, like, well,

00:22:43

I don't really deal with that.

00:22:44

But then if you have an eye on this thing and this is kind of where a lot of my

00:22:48

action items for bookworm come from, it's like the stuff that you can't really

00:22:52

follow me around and check a box.

00:22:53

Like, yes, I did this sort of a thing.

00:22:55

It's more of an awareness thing.

00:22:56

So if all that happens is you listen to this episode about emotional

00:23:00

intelligence and you recognize this process of emotional hijacking.

00:23:03

And in the back of your mind, as you're going throughout your day, you're

00:23:06

thinking about what are the times that I have allowed this emotional

00:23:10

hijacking to occur, you will find lots.

00:23:12

And that just is an indication not that you're a failure or that you don't have

00:23:17

emotional intelligence, but that you need to develop this stuff, which is kind of

00:23:22

what the back part of this book is about.

00:23:24

Right.

00:23:24

And he does have, I think it's towards the end of this part where he talks about,

00:23:31

you know, what are the aspects of emotional intelligence that you need to,

00:23:37

to build in?

00:23:38

I'm trying to get this list put in front of me because it's towards the end of

00:23:43

things.

00:23:44

Well, there's lots of lists in here.

00:23:46

And to be honest, I don't think any of them are good because he's taken them

00:23:50

from other people.

00:23:51

He's not presenting his own.

00:23:53

Sure.

00:23:54

Uh, which is kind of the problem with this.

00:23:56

Like I'm going through this and in the next section, I'm not sure if we want to go

00:24:00

there right now, but part two, the nature of emotional intelligence.

00:24:03

He's got seven kinds of intelligence by Howard Gardner.

00:24:07

Gardener.

00:24:07

And that's kind of the, from the stuff that I've seen, that's kind of the list

00:24:13

that people refer to.

00:24:14

And then from there, he's got five domains of emotional intelligence.

00:24:18

He talks kind of vaguely around some specific concepts like self-awareness

00:24:22

and empathy, but it's really hard to nail down from reading this.

00:24:27

And I did not go through the appendices.

00:24:29

So maybe he hasn't listed in there.

00:24:31

But, you know, one of the things that I've always liked about the, the product

00:24:36

that you, that I give you access to is I think that it very clearly defines like,

00:24:41

here's the different domains and then here's the skills inside those domains.

00:24:44

And here's your score in these specific areas.

00:24:46

Here's how they all connect.

00:24:47

Here's what these results mean.

00:24:49

Like it's, it's very clear.

00:24:51

Whereas with this, he's using so many different models that it's hard to land on.

00:24:57

This is the one that I should be paying attention to.

00:25:00

Yeah.

00:25:01

No, I think that's, that's an interesting perspective because I didn't pick up on that.

00:25:04

Maybe that's just because it was a bit of a slog to get through different aspects

00:25:11

of this book for some reason.

00:25:13

Sure.

00:25:13

But I know that like when I ran across, it's on page 43, I found it.

00:25:18

So the five domains that he's talking about, I found those really helpful.

00:25:26

And just to read those off, knowing one's emotions, managing emotions, motivating oneself,

00:25:32

recognizing emotions in others and handling relationships.

00:25:37

Now, to me, that was helpful when I first read it.

00:25:41

And then he's got the next five chapters that handle each of those independently.

00:25:45

To me, that was interesting because it kind of showed almost a pyramid of you got

00:25:50

to know yourself before you can manage yourself and you got to be able to manage

00:25:54

yourself before you can motivate yourself.

00:25:56

Like, you know, it kind of builds on each other like that.

00:25:59

I appreciated.

00:26:00

But I can see your point pretty easy because he does start referring to other

00:26:06

aspects of like emotions in general whenever he gets into each of these even.

00:26:12

So yeah, I could see that.

00:26:14

Yeah.

00:26:14

Well, I guess just to push back on that a little bit from my perspective, the seven

00:26:18

kinds of intelligence by Howard Gardner, you know, he mentions verbal, mathematical,

00:26:23

spatial, kinesthetic, which is kind of like people who are really good at sports.

00:26:27

They have kinesthetic intelligence, musical intelligence, and then interpersonal

00:26:31

and intrapersonal.

00:26:32

Interpersonal is kind of like the social skills, intrapersonal is kind of self-management.

00:26:37

So traditionally, emotional intelligence has been defined as those last two,

00:26:41

interpersonal and intrapersonal skills.

00:26:44

Okay.

00:26:45

But there's also like another model that I'm familiar with.

00:26:49

You know, he's got the five domains of emotional intelligence.

00:26:52

One of the domains or one of the things that I'm familiar with, there's four key

00:26:56

performance areas.

00:26:57

So they're all a little bit different, but they'll talk about the same things.

00:27:00

Number one is relationships and interpersonal communication.

00:27:03

Number two is personal leadership.

00:27:05

Number three is self-management.

00:27:06

Number four is intrapersonal development.

00:27:08

So you can cut and slice this stuff a lot of different ways.

00:27:11

But I kind of think if you look at those seven kinds of intelligence by Howard Gardner

00:27:15

and you just view emotional intelligence as interpersonal and intrapersonal,

00:27:19

that gives you the most solid basic framework for identifying what falls into

00:27:25

the category of emotional intelligence.

00:27:27

Sure.

00:27:27

No, that makes a lot of sense now that you say that.

00:27:32

But of course, I'm a complete newbie to this.

00:27:35

Yeah.

00:27:35

You've been around it for quite a while.

00:27:37

So it's interesting to take some of like my gut reactions and then overlay the

00:27:45

background that you have on this.

00:27:46

Yeah.

00:27:47

It's like, oh, this actually, it seems like it works really, really well.

00:27:50

Oh, yeah, I could see there's a lot of flaws with that.

00:27:53

Well, part of that might just be my preference for a different way of looking at it too.

00:27:57

So I want to call that out.

00:27:59

I'm not trying to say that Daniel Gorman is wrong.

00:28:02

He is the guy when it comes to this stuff, right?

00:28:05

Sure.

00:28:06

I really, you know, if we were to have a conversation, he would talk circles around

00:28:11

me for sure.

00:28:12

He knows this stuff way better than I do.

00:28:14

But we're approaching this from the perspective of reading this from a bookworm perspective.

00:28:21

How did you like the book?

00:28:22

What did you get out of it?

00:28:23

That sort of thing.

00:28:24

And so everything negative that I'm going to say is not a character reflection or

00:28:30

judgment on Daniel Gorman in his work.

00:28:32

It is just my preference for the way that he presented it in this book.

00:28:37

Yeah.

00:28:38

And I do think that this is a super, super important topic.

00:28:43

One of the quotes that I really liked and again, not Daniel Gorman, most of the good

00:28:47

stuff in here I realized was not Daniel Gorman.

00:28:50

This was Howard Gardner again.

00:28:51

He says, we subject everyone to an education where if you succeed, you will be best suited

00:28:57

to be a college professor and we evaluate everyone along the way according to whether

00:29:02

they meet that narrow standard of success.

00:29:04

We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their

00:29:08

natural competencies and gifts and cultivate those.

00:29:11

There are hundreds and hundreds of ways to succeed and many, many different abilities

00:29:15

that will get you there.

00:29:15

That is at the heart, I believe, of why emotional intelligence is so important because you will

00:29:20

try something at some point in your life and you will fail at it.

00:29:23

And if you have emotional intelligence, you might classify that also as like a growth mindset.

00:29:30

You're going to look at the thing as like, well, I don't have the ability yet, but maybe I

00:29:35

can get that ability or maybe I can grow and develop that specific skill so that I succeed

00:29:40

next time.

00:29:40

And it's not just IQ, your academic intelligence, you're born with this.

00:29:45

And I guess I'm just not good at that sort of thing.

00:29:48

So there's tons of crossover here with probably 90% of the books that we've read for bookworm.

00:29:54

Sure.

00:29:56

But this is kind of, I would argue the thing that started it all.

00:30:01

I don't know when this book was written.

00:30:03

I don't, it's not within arms reach.

00:30:05

It's over there on my coffee table, but I know it was a while ago.

00:30:08

I mean, you sit down to record and you don't have the book in your hand.

00:30:12

Nope, because I'm looking at the upside down Sanki Aaron's book instead.

00:30:15

Well, it was originally written in 95.

00:30:21

OK, yeah, that's what I thought somewhere around there.

00:30:24

So this is 20 something years old, you know, and there's been a lot of stuff that's come out.

00:30:31

I would say in the self development space since that time that, you know, everything's a remix.

00:30:38

It's touching on something that Daniel Gorman talked about here.

00:30:41

And in some cases, they create a whole separate book about that specific thing.

00:30:46

But this is kind of the root of a lot of the stuff that we talk about.

00:30:51

Right.

00:30:51

No, it makes sense.

00:30:53

I will say like those five domains.

00:30:55

Uh, like, I think maybe there's a difference between that and categorizing emotions and

00:31:05

developing them and understanding them in that those domains, which are the next four

00:31:11

chapters after part one, like that, to me, that gave me a good framework for

00:31:18

almost a step by step of how do you build emotional intelligence?

00:31:24

Maybe I'm thinking about that wrong, but that was my takeaway from it.

00:31:28

And at least at first blush, that was something that was extremely helpful.

00:31:33

Yeah.

00:31:35

For once, we're, I think it, I think it is helpful.

00:31:37

I'm just not 100% satisfied with the way that he sliced that stuff.

00:31:41

That's all.

00:31:41

That's true.

00:31:42

That's true.

00:31:43

One other thing from this section, though, that's worth calling out is that he

00:31:48

mentions in chapter three that at best your academic intelligence determines only

00:31:54

about 20% of your success.

00:31:57

Okay.

00:31:58

And then he goes on and he says that IQ or academic intelligence and EQ or

00:32:05

emotional intelligence are not opposite, but they are separate.

00:32:09

So that doesn't necessarily mean that emotional intelligence accounts for 80%

00:32:18

of your success, although I would argue it does.

00:32:22

Okay.

00:32:25

Um, so.

00:32:27

There, uh, there is some research that goes as far back is 1918, published by

00:32:36

Charles Mann.

00:32:38

And I believe that this is talking about the term he uses is soft skills and

00:32:45

people skills, but that is very analogous with emotional intelligence.

00:32:51

Um, in my opinion, you know, maybe somebody will try to correct me and say,

00:32:56

no, those are, those are different, but that study showed that only 15% of job

00:33:02

success comes from technical skills and that the 85% comes from having well

00:33:07

developed soft skills and people skills.

00:33:09

So, uh, I just call that out because, uh, as you read through this, it kind of

00:33:16

seems like Daniel Gorman is not wanting to make an outrageous claim that he can't

00:33:21

back up, but I would say even if he were to have made the outrageous claim, it's

00:33:26

not outrageous enough that this stuff is really, really, really, really, really

00:33:30

important.

00:33:30

Sure.

00:33:31

Well, I won't argue with that because I run across in, you know, a lot of the

00:33:38

things that I do, I feel like I've run across a lot of students that are super,

00:33:42

super book smart, but you can't hold a conversation with them.

00:33:46

Sure.

00:33:46

And to me, this is why I, and this is why I think this, this topic of emotional

00:33:53

intelligence has come up how many times Mike, over all the books that we've read.

00:33:57

My fault.

00:33:58

I feel like it comes up a lot.

00:33:59

Yeah.

00:34:00

It's your fault.

00:34:00

Yeah, I'd hold it.

00:34:02

I tend to drag it into a lot of different things.

00:34:04

But, but yes, it does.

00:34:07

Fair enough.

00:34:08

Come up quite a bit.

00:34:09

Um, because it's so all encompassing of a lot of the different success skills that we

00:34:14

talk about, I mean, that statistic that I just shared that soft skills and I would

00:34:20

argue emotional intelligence, you know, soft skills and emotional intelligence

00:34:23

really are all about working with people.

00:34:25

And that's kind of jumping ahead a little bit.

00:34:29

But, you know, there's lots of research that's, that shows that these are the things

00:34:33

that employers are looking for in today's workplace.

00:34:35

It's not, can you, do you have the technical skills to do the job?

00:34:39

Sure.

00:34:40

So again, you could view that as like fixed mindset versus growth mindset.

00:34:43

But when I get the person here, are they going to be able to adapt and learn

00:34:46

things that they need to learn in order to thrive in this environment?

00:34:50

You know, however you define that, whether it's soft skills, emotional

00:34:53

intelligence, growth mindset, whatever, the key competencies there, I think are,

00:34:57

are the same.

00:34:58

Sure.

00:34:59

Um, one thing I wanted to talk to you about from this, though, is this whole idea

00:35:04

of emotional intelligence and extraversion.

00:35:07

I'm not sure if your brain went here when he talked about how men and women who

00:35:14

have emotional intelligence are outgoing.

00:35:18

So he's not saying this per se, but we just read quiet by Susan Kane, not too long ago.

00:35:27

Right.

00:35:27

So the question I had then is, does emotional intelligence make you less of an introvert?

00:35:32

Hmm.

00:35:33

That's interesting because I hadn't thought about it in that regard.

00:35:38

I did connect the differences between personalities and emotional intelligence,

00:35:44

like that concept I did, uh, contemplate to some degree, but I didn't, I didn't do

00:35:52

it in the sense of, does this make you more extroverted as much as are you able

00:35:56

to be true to yourself in public and in private?

00:36:02

Like that was, that was kind of the connection that I was making, but I don't

00:36:07

know.

00:36:08

Now that you say that, I'm not a hundred percent certain because I feel like if

00:36:12

you are skilled and emotional intelligence and, and able to develop these soft skills

00:36:19

in a social setting or in a work setting or any setting where other people are

00:36:28

connected to what you are doing in some form and you have to interact with them.

00:36:32

Like I sense that having these skills is vital, regardless of introversion, extra

00:36:40

version because the introverted side of it would be more one on one or one on two,

00:36:46

whereas the extroverted side of it would be like me in the middle of a group of 30 people.

00:36:51

Okay.

00:36:52

Those are two very different social settings and I feel like you have to have these skills for both.

00:36:56

Yeah.

00:36:57

Does that make sense?

00:36:59

I feel like I just rambled.

00:37:00

I think if I'm hearing you right, what you are saying is that if you are introverted,

00:37:06

you may be outgoing, but you'll tend to be outgoing with smaller groups as opposed to being

00:37:11

extroverted where you thrive in the large group setting.

00:37:16

I think so.

00:37:17

That's me talking out loud.

00:37:20

Yeah.

00:37:21

That's me talking out loud.

00:37:23

That's me thinking out loud.

00:37:24

Sure.

00:37:24

Well, so I'm not a hundred percent certain on it.

00:37:27

I kind of put you on the spot with that and it's kind of a tough question to answer.

00:37:32

Thanks, Mike.

00:37:34

Yeah, no problem.

00:37:36

I kind of think that there's a lot of nuance to this, which none of the books that we've looked at

00:37:45

really address enough in my opinion or at least to satisfy me.

00:37:51

Because when we're going through Quiet by Susan Kane, kind of in the back of my head

00:37:56

was the fact that I am an introvert.

00:37:58

I took that self-assessment, 18 out of 20 questions lean towards the introvert,

00:38:03

so definitely introverted.

00:38:04

But everything that I do that brings me joy, that brings me life, that brings me energy,

00:38:13

happens to be public or you could make the argument extroverted.

00:38:18

So that was something I had trouble reconciling.

00:38:21

And I feel like we kind of touched on it a little bit during that episode.

00:38:25

And I think that's kind of where emotional intelligence, the first the idea really came up

00:38:30

was I probably made the argument in that episode that emotional intelligence is kind of the

00:38:35

thing that allows you to override your natural preferences, sort of a thing.

00:38:39

But this whole book is basically about how you can develop these emotional intelligence skills.

00:38:46

It talks about neuroplasticity later in the book and how you can change your brain and

00:38:51

how your brain naturally prunes itself of the things that you don't use and that sort of thing.

00:38:55

So I kind of lean more towards Daniel Gullman's stance on this where maybe you are born introverted

00:39:07

extroverted, but a lot of the development that happens while you are young in the emotional

00:39:15

skills that you develop determines what people would call or how people would label you as either

00:39:23

introverted or extroverted when you are older. I guess you could take a 100% introverted person

00:39:31

and if you did everything correctly throughout their entire childhood to develop the emotional

00:39:37

intelligence skills, their emotional literacy so that they were comfortable in any situation,

00:39:42

you probably would think that they are an extrovert when they got older.

00:39:48

And going back to the Susan Caine book, he makes the argument that like, well, some people do that,

00:39:52

but it is exhausting to them. I kind of think that maybe if you have emotional intelligence

00:39:58

developed to the ability, developed high enough, it doesn't have to be exhausting is kind of the

00:40:04

point because you are not constantly in that state of fight versus flight and you are not

00:40:08

having to constantly put that thing down. You have developed the barriers or kind of like the,

00:40:13

in the bowling alley, you have the gutters that come up for the little kids, they don't just keep

00:40:18

throwing the balls in the gutter, like that sort of thing. The guardrails that keep you from getting

00:40:24

to the point where you are investing too much emotional energy just trying to overcome this

00:40:28

thing and talk to this person or this group. Now, here is kind of a different follow up question,

00:40:34

I will flip it back on you. Do you feel like with this book, there is the undertone? Because Susan

00:40:42

Caine referenced this in her book, how the assumption of extroversion underlies certain texts and

00:40:51

conversations in social settings. So do you think that Daniel Gorman has that bias unknowingly

00:40:59

and is gearing people towards building in extroverted traits unnecessarily?

00:41:06

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know exactly, but I do know that all of the research

00:41:16

about how successful somebody is is tied to how well you are able to manage your relationships

00:41:25

with other people. And from that lens, it kind of doesn't matter what your preference is.

00:41:34

You have to develop these skills. If you are naturally aggressive or deferring, you have to

00:41:41

develop the skills that are going to help you to become assertive and kind of land in the middle.

00:41:45

And that's kind of getting into the results of the assessment that I gave you. There's a whole

00:41:51

bunch of research behind this, which is fascinating to me. There's something like 8.5 million people

00:41:57

that have gone through it now. And so there's 140 doctoral level papers and books that have

00:42:04

been written on this sort of thing or on this specific instrument. And they've connected it to

00:42:09

if you have these emotional intelligence skills, your GPA is going to be a whole point higher.

00:42:14

They have these profiles in the research of a weak leader or manager. These are people who have

00:42:23

a lot of empathy, a lot of drive, strength and motivation, but they don't have time management

00:42:28

skills. They don't manage their stress very well. They don't have self-esteem. You can see these

00:42:33

sorts of patterns. And it would be very easy to look at these and say, "Well, of course, I'm going

00:42:39

to be low in this area because I'm an introvert, but of course, I'm going to be low in this area

00:42:44

because I'm an extrovert. The inverse of that could also be true." But I think that at a certain

00:42:50

point, if you want to reach your full potential, whatever that means for you, I'm not trying to

00:42:56

say that everybody needs to be extroverted and successful and yadda yadda yadda. Define success

00:43:01

for yourself and then chase it and get it. But if you want to achieve your full potential,

00:43:10

there are certain points where you just have to say, "I'm willing to change." In fact, that's one of

00:43:16

the scores in that assessment is change orientation. And so there are a lot of people who will take

00:43:23

this assessment and they'll fall into the category of at-risk students, for example.

00:43:30

And he talks a little bit about that in this book. He talks about emotional intelligence

00:43:35

in the inner city. That's typically where the at-risk individuals are because they come from homes

00:43:40

where they don't develop these skills and then surprise surprise, you develop these skills and

00:43:43

they do better. But if you're a teacher in that situation, you don't try to work with everybody

00:43:52

to get them to a certain level because you can't. And one of the things that kind of

00:43:57

indicates whether this kid that you're working with is going to respond to the intervention that

00:44:02

you're going to give them is this change orientation scale. So you may have very low scores in all

00:44:08

these different areas. And if you're a change orientation score is also low, basically what

00:44:12

that's saying is that you're completely fine with the way things are. You don't really want to change.

00:44:17

And on the inverse of that, you can take the same assessment, everything else could be exactly

00:44:23

the same, but change orientation is high. Those are the people that are going to respond

00:44:27

and they're going to blossom when somebody sits down and explains this stuff to them.

00:44:32

So again, this is just probably raising more questions than providing answers. But that's

00:44:40

what's going through my head is like, okay, so I'm introverted. Okay, so I'm this on the Colby

00:44:45

assessment. What do I do with that? I can't just expect people to modify the way that they're

00:44:51

going to work to my preferences. I'm the one who has to be willing to change. Not as fair. Now,

00:44:57

one of the things that you mentioned in the midst of this is empathy. And this is I had a couple

00:45:05

notes that I wrote down about this in my Zettelkasten, which was revolving around that concept because

00:45:14

it was part of that five domain thing. See, apparently that had an impact on me. I don't think

00:45:21

I realized that it impacted me that much. But the empathy side of it was step, what step is it?

00:45:28

Step four out of the five. Yeah. So there's a self-awareness side. There's the management

00:45:34

of emotions motivating yourself. And then the empathy side is step four in that five domain world.

00:45:41

And I, my sense is that empathy is sorely lacking in our culture today. Yes. I don't know if that's

00:45:50

100% true. You probably know that way better than I do. But my sense is that because it's lacking,

00:45:56

we don't, we have a tendency not to care what other people think. And that's almost worn as a

00:46:04

badge of honor sometimes. Like, I'm going to do this. I don't care what other people think about it.

00:46:08

It's like, I'm a self-made man. Yeah. And I'm, I struggle with that because

00:46:14

I'm one of these people that I feel that I sense and I have taken tests on. Like, I'm hypersensitive

00:46:20

to what other people are thinking and feeling. I don't know why that is or how I got to that point.

00:46:27

But I'm aware that I tend to do that. And it seems odd to me that other people don't.

00:46:33

Because I've just always done that. And I'm not trying to suit my own horn here. It's just

00:46:42

something it's kind of a neat to me. And I have a hard time grasping and I struggle with, like,

00:46:48

okay, well, they're obviously uncomfortable with what you're saying. Why are you continuing to

00:46:54

berate them right now? Like, they're completely out of their element and yet you keep going.

00:46:58

Like, you should be stopping. Yeah. And people just don't get it. Like, and I really struggle with

00:47:05

that. Right. No, there's, I think you're right. I think that this is something that you could point

00:47:10

to and say, this is lacking in our society today. But again, this can take a lot of different

00:47:16

forms. So I forget which episode it was, but not too long ago, I made the argument that

00:47:23

we should have more honor in our society. And you could say that honor is empathy.

00:47:31

Sure. It's empathy displayed for people who have achieved a certain level, not just in age,

00:47:39

but what they've been able to accomplish. Like you can define for yourself what deserves honor,

00:47:47

but at the core of it is this empathy, which is being able to see, hear, feel what the other

00:47:55

person is going through. Now, I'm not sure if you've ever heard it said that like 90% of communication

00:48:02

is nonverbal. Yeah, I have heard that. Or I get maybe, maybe nonverbal is not the right word.

00:48:08

Although I think that's how he said it in the book, but nonverbal to me is like the text on the page.

00:48:16

That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is that there's a lot of nuance that determines

00:48:21

what's being said that, that you can miss if you don't have empathy. If you just look at the message,

00:48:26

if you just look at the text from the text message, you're not going to get sarcasm.

00:48:31

A lot of different things, a lot of those nuance things are not going to be there. And so someone

00:48:37

might say something sarcastically and you get mad at them because you think it's a personal

00:48:41

attack, which is by the way, side note, why I think emojis are so cool. I feel like people write

00:48:48

this off as it's just a stupid little kid thing. But what it does is it gives you the ability to

00:48:54

add all of that nuance back into a text-based message, which is all.

00:49:00

Yeah, I would say if you it takes some time to kind of learn how they're used in specific

00:49:10

scenarios, it's kind of like learning another language. But once you understand that, it gives

00:49:16

you a much bigger palette to work with when you're trying to communicate your message to other people,

00:49:22

whether it be text message, email, or something like Slack, for example, which increasingly,

00:49:29

that's how people are working. So if there was one thing that I could say in defense of the open

00:49:35

office design, it would be that you do eliminate a lot of the potential for something that somebody

00:49:42

said to be taken the wrong way. And now all of a sudden, they're all ticked about it, and they

00:49:47

hold this grudge and it affects their work for three days until it gets dealt with. You kind of

00:49:51

can see that there's something here, or maybe a lot of those incidences don't even happen

00:49:58

when you do have face-to-face communication. But empathy is another way to say this, I think,

00:50:08

might be like, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

00:50:12

That's really what empathy is all about. Like, if you want to be any sort of successful,

00:50:18

qualified, effective leader, this is something you really have to, you really have to understand

00:50:26

and develop in yourself. And I'm looking at my results from this assessment that I took.

00:50:33

And my empathy score is kind of in the middle. So there's definitely room for improvement for me

00:50:38

here. And that's kind of the thing is I'm looking and I'm reading through this. This book is like,

00:50:44

this is the thing that I really want to develop, is this ability to, at any given moment, not just

00:50:51

when it strikes me, but be able to put myself in the other person's shoes and see things from

00:50:58

their perspective. That's really what empathy is. Sure. No, makes sense. Let's go on to part three.

00:51:06

I think this will be fun. Emotional intelligence applied. Yes. You put a link in here. I've not

00:51:14

clicked it yet. Well, before you clicked that, I click it now. Go ahead.

00:51:19

But let's just break down these sections in here. All right. So there's three, I think, chapters in

00:51:26

here, chapter nine is intimate enemies. Chapter 10 is managing with heart. Chapter 11 is mind

00:51:32

and medicine. This is all under the header of part three emotional intelligence applied.

00:51:36

And just by reading those chapters, you can basically get all of the main points he's saying

00:51:43

in this section. But I feel like he missed the big one, which is why I put the link in.

00:51:48

Okay. All right. So just real briefly, let's talk about the main points from these sections,

00:51:54

though. So intimate enemies, this is really talking about your close relationships,

00:51:59

specifically your significant other. There has been a crazy climb in the eventual divorce rate,

00:52:07

which is different than the divorce rate that everybody has heard for a while. It's been around

00:52:12

50% right? Well, he breaks it down. Like people who got married in the 1890s, the chance of them

00:52:18

getting divorced at some point in their life was 10%. In the 1920s, it was 18%. In the 1950s,

00:52:24

it was 30%. In the 1970s, 50%, 1990s, 67%. And he kind of ties this back. And I completely

00:52:32

agree with this to not having enough emotional intelligence to, or you could really just probably

00:52:37

encapsulate this a lot of cases with the word empathy. But we'll use emotional intelligence,

00:52:41

because there's a lot of other stuff that goes into it. But really, you know, there's differences

00:52:47

between how boys and girls typically are raised. And that kind of leads to this scenario where

00:52:54

there's going to be conflict. And if you don't have the emotional intelligence skills to work

00:52:57

through the conflict, then, you know, things can end up in a not ideal scenario. Anything else you

00:53:05

want to add from that section? No, I think that covers a lot of it. I just know that the

00:53:11

divorce rate thing by the year they were married was astounding to me. That was way higher than

00:53:18

I was expecting. Yep. Yeah. And it's old too, at this point. I'd be curious to know what the

00:53:23

more recent numbers are. Right. But in 1995. Well, that was he updated it in 2005. So I don't know

00:53:28

if that's what I don't know is Diddy up because the version I'm looking at was updated in 2005.

00:53:34

What I don't know is did he update those numbers? Well, I kind of think you would just slide it

00:53:38

in a 2005 number because I don't see that going down anytime soon. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. But

00:53:45

actually one other interesting thing from here was there was this guy John Gottman who we had

00:53:50

heard in a different book. I couldn't place on where I heard that before. But he did this research

00:53:54

where he brought in these couples and they talked about things and he could predict within 94%

00:53:58

accuracy who was going to be divorced within three years. And this book kind of shows through

00:54:03

the example that really what he's able to identify there is the emotional intelligence skills that

00:54:07

they either have or don't have in their relationships with each other.

00:54:10

So yeah, the next section, managing with heart, this is really about don't be a jerk and be a

00:54:17

good leader by developing your emotional intelligence skills. And that's where the link comes in. But

00:54:22

before we get back there, mind and medicine, I one of my main notes under here was being mortal by

00:54:29

a tool go on it because he talks about all this stuff. Yep. Basically, just a whole book written on

00:54:35

this now. Yeah, exactly. So don't just consider the facts, but consider the patient's emotional

00:54:42

state when treating the whole patient there done with that one. Let's go back to the business one

00:54:47

because this one's interesting. Okay. Yeah, so I'm looking at this link. This is an infographic.

00:54:54

This obviously needs to be in the show notes. It's pretty intense. I'm kind of going through

00:55:00

it. There's a lot here. Yeah. So this was originally published at the University of Maryland in the

00:55:05

Robert H. Smith School of Business. It's called the emotional IQ in you. And what it shows is basically

00:55:12

that if you want to be successful in the workplace, whatever, again, whatever that looks like for you,

00:55:19

this is kind of specifically this infographic, I think originally targeted more towards like

00:55:24

workforce development people entering the workforce or reentering the workforce. You know,

00:55:28

what are the things that are going to help you get and stick in a job? Okay. So this first part,

00:55:33

especially, you know, over one in three hiring managers are putting an emphasis on emotional

00:55:38

intelligence. 71% said it's more important than IQ. That's what Daniel Glamond's arguing. Okay,

00:55:43

59% even said they wouldn't hire someone who had the academic skills, the high IQ and low

00:55:48

emotional intelligence, or again, you could say soft skills. Managers especially can benefit from

00:55:54

this half time or lost accidents, lost time accidents were reduced by half. Formal grievances reduced

00:56:01

by 20% plant productivity revenues, $250,000 beyond their goal when manufacturing supervisors

00:56:08

went through emotional intelligence training. And then it talks about why employers value these

00:56:13

skills. They help people remain calm under pressure, resolve conflict effectively. They're empathetic

00:56:17

to their colleagues. They lead by example, they put more consideration into their business decisions.

00:56:22

And all that adds up to 34% higher profit growth in firms with managers who have high emotional

00:56:28

intelligence. And to be honest, that is just the tip of the iceberg. All right. So that one

00:56:36

stood out to me is like 35 or 34% higher profit, higher profit growth, I should say. That's,

00:56:47

that could be a lot. You want some better statistics? That's huge.

00:56:50

Better statistics? Okay. So at L'Oreal, they had a process for selecting sales agents,

00:56:58

and they changed it. They started selecting sales agents using emotional competencies instead of

00:57:04

the standard competencies. What they found is that the sales agents that were selected using the

00:57:08

emotional competencies outsold the salespeople using the other competencies on an annual sales

00:57:15

basis of $91,370. So almost $100,000 more per person, you know, who maybe they went to the same schools,

00:57:25

had the same resumes, the same, the same internships. Okay. But one person has the emotional

00:57:31

intelligence skills that you need. And that's going to result in $100,000 more money for your company.

00:57:37

I mean, that's a lot. Exactly. Which is why smart companies are recognizing this. You know,

00:57:42

it's not a trick question. You're trying to decide between two people. And if I were to tell you,

00:57:47

you can know with 100% certainty, almost 100% certainty, which one of these is going to result

00:57:53

in 100% more revenue, and you're not going to get to pay them more. And actually, I should say

00:58:00

that these skills aren't, are also going to be the thing that helps that employee climb the ladder

00:58:04

and become more successful. Another statistic. In a large beverage firm, 50% of division presidents

00:58:11

typically left after only two years. So what that means is that you constantly have to be

00:58:15

replacing those people. You constantly have to be retraining, rehiring, looking for more people.

00:58:21

Okay. But when they started using emotional competencies to hire those division presidents,

00:58:27

only 6% left after two years. And they outperformed their targets by 15 to 20%.

00:58:32

One more. The Air Force found that by using emotional intelligence to select their recruiters,

00:58:41

they increased their ability to predict successful recruiters by nearly three times in the immediate

00:58:47

gain. Immediate gain was a savings of $3 million annually. Yeah, it's crazy, the impact that this

00:58:57

stuff has. And I love the business examples because that puts a dollar sign on it. You know,

00:59:01

we can talk about this stuff. Yeah, businesses track everything. Yeah, you can kind of talk about

00:59:06

it at a high level, like we are kind of on this podcast. Oh, this stuff's important. But

00:59:10

how important is it? How can you quantify it? In your personal life, it's hard to do that.

00:59:15

When you talk about a business who changed some practices and started teaching this stuff and they

00:59:19

saw these results, it kind of puts more meat on the bones, I think. For sure. Just going back to the

00:59:27

link because there's a couple sections towards the end of this. I really like this infographic. So,

00:59:32

you know, if you're listening to this, I highly recommend you take a look at this. But it has

00:59:36

a couple sections that Mike didn't refer to quite yet. One is how emotional intelligence affects

00:59:43

your image, like how you come across to other people. And then it has a section about taking

00:59:49

stock of your own emotional intelligence and improving that. So, there are some keys there. But

00:59:55

of course, they're just, you know, they're keywords to, you know, look at gestures,

00:59:59

page to body language. Like these are things that, you know, aren't in depth by any means,

01:00:06

but they're at least points to keep in mind. So it's, it's a, I, you know, going through this

01:00:12

very quickly. It seems like a great overview of basically this entire book, but from a business

01:00:18

stance. Yep, definitely. And you know, going back to those five different domains that section

01:00:24

that you were talking about, take stock of your own emotional intelligence to attain these qualities

01:00:27

yourself. Consider your own emotional intelligence, do you? And then the first two, I feel like

01:00:32

encapsulate everything. Do you recognize your emotions and do you register others emotions? Yeah,

01:00:37

that comes back to intro personal and interpersonal communication skills. So you can slice it a lot

01:00:45

of different ways, but I kind of feel like anything outside of those two domains is, or those two

01:00:50

things now is just personal preference. And you're trying to put your own stamp on the thing, you know,

01:00:57

part four, sure. Windows of opportunity. I wasn't sure what to think about this section.

01:01:03

I felt like reiteration. I wasn't even really sure what to put in this section for the outline.

01:01:09

Yeah. A couple of things I put just because they were interesting as I was, was reading them.

01:01:16

They're not really like the main ideas here. I guess real quickly, the chapters in here,

01:01:20

the family crucible trauma and emotional learning and temperament is not destiny.

01:01:27

So the family crucible, I didn't really write down a whole lot from this section.

01:01:32

There was again a list in here with seven different things. So it says,

01:01:38

Yeah, what was that even for? I just read this and then I finished the chapter.

01:01:42

Poorly in school, lack one of the seven key elements of EQ. So, you know, this was another

01:01:49

example where like, okay, we got another list. Oh, so that just completely invalidated what I

01:01:53

read earlier. Okay. Well, we'll just read between the lines here, spit out the sticks.

01:01:58

But the things you list here, I agree with confidence, curiosity, intentionality, self-control,

01:02:03

relatedness, capacity to communicate, cooperativeness, but emotional intelligence is emotional

01:02:08

intelligence. I mean, it should be the same skills that you're developing when you're young as the

01:02:14

things that are important when you're, you're older. How you act them out, maybe is going to

01:02:19

change a little bit, but I don't know. This just seemed like noise to me at this point, but I wrote

01:02:27

it down because this. Because the thing that was interesting to me from this section was the

01:02:35

whole discussion of PTSD. Now, I have not suffered from PTSD. So I am not educated in this at all.

01:02:45

It kind of sounds like Daniel Gorman has some experience with this, or at least working with

01:02:50

people who have gone through this. So please understand this through his words, not mine.

01:02:58

But I like the discussion of what happens when PTSD kind of rewires your limbic circuitry. It kind

01:03:08

of gave me a picture for what's really going on there. So the idea behind PTSD, again, from someone

01:03:18

who has no experience of this, just trying to regurgitate what Daniel Gorman has said. In an

01:03:22

instant, you can be taken back to the moment of trauma. And your brain is quick to be flooded with

01:03:27

adrenaline and noradrenaline, which mobilize your body for an emergency. And he's got some

01:03:32

specific stories of people who kind of go through that in the book. He says that you lose the ability

01:03:39

to control CRF, which is the main stress hormone that the body uses to trigger the fight versus

01:03:48

flight response. So basically, your body, once you go through something really traumatic, is quick

01:03:56

on the trigger when it comes to activating this fight versus flight. And this results in short-term

01:04:04

gains, if you are, I think one of the more common examples that I've heard of anyways of PTSD is

01:04:11

like people who go away to war, and then they come back and they deal with some of the horrific

01:04:17

things that they saw while they were deployed. Okay, so in the moment when you're over there,

01:04:24

and you're in the middle of that stuff, this circuitry, this emotional response,

01:04:29

this can be the thing that keeps you alive, right? But in the long run, what it does if you can't

01:04:35

retrain your brain and develop those emotional skills to control that, is that it's like a car

01:04:44

stuck in high gear where you're just constantly revving your engine. I thought that was really

01:04:49

interesting. Again, there's no simple, this is what you do with this, but it helped me understand it

01:04:55

a little bit better. Yeah, I have not personal, as in me experience with PTSD, but I do have some

01:05:05

family, a couple family members who have struggled with it. I'm not going to tell their stories

01:05:12

because I'm pretty sure they're not comfortable with that. But it's kind of terrifying not being

01:05:20

the person and just seeing the results of it, it scares me. It really does. Like, okay, there's

01:05:28

the little tiny triggers and they can cause all kinds of problems. And in one scenario,

01:05:33

there's treatment and such being done that seems to be right in what Daniel Goldman would like to

01:05:41

see done in that scenario. But yeah, there's a lot and it's kind of sad to see,

01:05:48

like there's a lot of people that don't understand PTSD. So it is kind of refreshing to, in this

01:05:57

regard, it's refreshing to see that he does seem to understand it, especially at a very

01:06:03

detailed level and understand what you could do to help maybe not necessarily eliminate it,

01:06:10

but keep it under control. So that was encouraging, at least. Yeah, Daniel Goldman's

01:06:16

statement from this section that stands out to me is that once your emotional system

01:06:21

learns something and never lets it go, you just learn how to control it. So you develop the emotional

01:06:27

skills that you need to manage it, basically, which isn't an ideal solution because,

01:06:36

again, I'm not in that situation, but you can't just go back to the way things were. You just kind

01:06:44

of learn to make the best of the way things are. Right. Right. Now, Mike, you and I, you know,

01:06:50

we've talked about like growth mindset and fixed mindset quite a bit in the past. I would say,

01:06:59

you know, Carol Dweck's book, Mindset, is probably one that we both reference a lot.

01:07:05

And it seems like we come back to it quite a bit. So when I got to the section on temperament here,

01:07:11

I was definitely thinking through, it's like, I'm not one that feels locked in and I'm really

01:07:19

interested in learning on how to improve my emotional skills. So that section, you know, some of it

01:07:30

was a little bit disheartening that some people don't feel like they can get any better at it,

01:07:33

but it was also encouraging to know like he does have the side of things where he knows you can

01:07:40

get better at these skills, which is always an encouragement when he's the person who wrote the

01:07:46

book on it. Yeah, this one made me a little uncomfortable because basically he says there's

01:07:52

four different types of temperament, timid, bold, upbeat, and melancholy. You could probably

01:07:57

build a four squared grid out of that, but I didn't. But he does talk about-

01:08:04

Indi Graham. Yeah. Well, known like the important versus urgent sort of a thing,

01:08:09

you know, or two axes, you know, on the top is timid on the bottom is bold or vice versa,

01:08:16

and on the right is upbeat, on the left is melancholy or vice versa, because he talks about how

01:08:21

timid people have a nervous system that is more easily excited and therefore stressed.

01:08:26

Okay, so if you're timid or maybe introverted, basically he's saying that you have an over-excitable

01:08:36

amygdala, and you need to develop the emotional intelligence to tame it. So you need to become more

01:08:41

bold or extroverted. He didn't exactly say that, but that's kind of the picture that I'm getting,

01:08:46

you know, because if you're too far on one side, you want to move towards the other side, right?

01:08:52

And I am not sure that you can say that about temperament, and maybe that's just the wrong

01:09:00

word choice there to me. But I don't know that that whole section didn't sit real well with me.

01:09:08

He talks about how the children who had overcome timidity had parents who would put gentle pressure

01:09:14

on them to be more outgoing. I again, the way that he words that sounds kind of bad,

01:09:21

especially after reading the Susan Caine book, where if your kid isn't introverted, let him be

01:09:26

introverted, right? But I do think that you do have to learn how to cope with these different

01:09:31

situations, and you can put your kids in a safe environment where they can learn these skills,

01:09:36

whether or not they are homeschooled, public school, private school, doesn't matter,

01:09:40

which kind of gets into the next section. But anyways, so I don't know exactly where this line is

01:09:48

between your temperament, or maybe you might even say your personality, because upbeat melancholy,

01:09:53

like that could get factored in there too, and I could definitely see those being applied to the

01:09:57

term personality. But I don't think if you are a certain personality that it's wrong, or an

01:10:03

indication that you have low emotional intelligence skills. Sure. Again, I don't know where the line

01:10:09

is between like, I need to override my personality, or this is just the way that I'm wired. I kind

01:10:14

of think though, especially after reading this book, that, and I'll say we because I fall into

01:10:20

this sometimes too, but generally speaking, we default to saying it's not my fault, this is the

01:10:27

way that I'm wired, instead of figuring out, well, what are the things that I can do to changing it

01:10:31

better? Yeah. And improve my own situation, bringing it all the way back to another emotional

01:10:36

intelligence skill, which is personal responsibility or self-determination. But we're not going to go

01:10:41

there today. Just further proof that all of this stuff is related.

01:10:47

Yeah. And it's fairly fluid, and we're always learning a lot more about it. That's probably

01:10:53

because a lot of this is dependent on brain science. Yeah. In one degree or another. And I think

01:11:03

maybe that's what you're bumping into with all these different models or ways of slicing and

01:11:07

dicing in that everybody's still trying to figure out what's going on and trying to create the

01:11:12

categories. So everybody's positing their own version of those because we don't really understand

01:11:19

it all that well. Maybe that's what's going on. Yeah. And they're saying this is the thing.

01:11:24

Yeah. So everybody's trying to figure it out. So I don't know what the answer is to that, but

01:11:34

I think I get your point on temperament. Like I could see how that's pushing things a little bit

01:11:39

far. I didn't really get that vibe from him. Not saying it's not there. I just didn't pick it

01:11:46

up when I read it. Yeah. I think I'm totally reading between the lines on this, but that's

01:11:51

where my brain went. So maybe it's my own my own fault. Yeah, which makes sense given your background.

01:11:58

Yeah. Should I talk about the last section, the emotional literacy? Yes. Or illiteracy.

01:12:05

Right. Because chapter 15 is the cost of emotional literacy. Chapter 16 is schooling the emotions.

01:12:12

I don't have a whole lot to say on this section because really he's making the case that we should

01:12:17

be teaching this stuff in schools. And he is absolutely right. Although I look back at the

01:12:23

resources that he shares, and I'm familiar with some of those and a lot of them, I don't like.

01:12:28

Yeah. So that kind of ties back to what we were just talking about where people will pick out a

01:12:34

piece of this and say this is the thing. If you look at some of those different tools that are in

01:12:39

the back of the appendix, I think Cherry picked the ones that line up with the way that he sliced

01:12:46

this stuff. And he's like, this one was good for teaching you this and this one is good for

01:12:50

teaching you that. But you can't just develop a single emotional intelligence skill. It's part

01:12:57

of the problem. You've got to develop the whole thing. Now there is research that shows that this

01:13:01

stuff is interrelated. So typically what happens, you've got people who take the assessment like you

01:13:07

and I took and they score very, very low in all the different areas. If they improve in any of the

01:13:10

areas, typically they'll improve across the board. So there is some crossover there. But just as an

01:13:16

example of people who have like Cherry picked a single piece of this, that we covered grit by

01:13:23

Angela Duckworth. Okay. You and I both very much liked that book. Right. Another way to say grit

01:13:29

would be resilience. And that's kind of what he talks about in the cost of emotional literacy,

01:13:35

all these different kids that are able to overcome their circumstances. Really what they have is

01:13:39

this resilience he calls it, but Angela Duckworth would call it grit. That is the emotional intelligence

01:13:45

skill that you can develop. It is one emotional intelligence skill that you can develop. She wrote

01:13:48

an entire book and has created an entire brand, teaches all these classes on that specific thing,

01:13:54

which by the way, so my dad is the one who helped develop a lot of this stuff. And he kind of has

01:14:03

a personal vendetta against Angela Duckworth and Carol Dweck because he hates the terms, growth

01:14:09

mindset and grit. Interesting. He feels that they are just cherry picking single pieces of this whole

01:14:14

concept of emotional intelligence. They're ignoring a lot of the important stuff. So

01:14:19

I understand his perspective. Interesting. Especially after reading this book and recognizing that

01:14:24

like, well, in this specific area, this is the thing that kind of produced this result. But

01:14:30

when you consider all of the different things and the totality of your life, what are the things

01:14:34

that are going to make you able to achieve your goals and reach your full potential and be successful

01:14:40

whatever that looks like for you, it is going to be a complete development on this emotional

01:14:46

literacy or these emotional intelligence skills. So this whole section about how we need to be

01:14:52

teaching these things. And there is some stuff out there that will help you do it. I'm like,

01:14:56

yeah, but none of that stuff is very effective. And again, my perspective, right? I am coming at

01:15:03

this through the lens of a family business that has a product that has been used almost 9 million

01:15:09

times. And there is direct research that shows you use this tool and you will improve your grade

01:15:15

point average by over a single point, you know, and lots of different stuff like that. So

01:15:21

maybe I'm a little bit more emboldened to say like, they're doing it wrong. You should use this

01:15:26

instead because these are the results that you can get. You don't have to talk about this through a,

01:15:31

what's the term I'm looking for? Like, when you're not talking about the specifics and the action

01:15:38

items and the things that you can do, but you're just talking about like the high level stuff and

01:15:42

oh, wouldn't it be great if you know, it doesn't have to be like that with emotional intelligence.

01:15:46

But that's totally the way he talks about these last two chapters.

01:15:51

Yeah. I don't know. I found it interesting that like he does go through quite a few sections here

01:15:58

of what happens if you don't build these skills. Yep. Or what happens if you just are completely

01:16:03

oblivious to it? And I understand what he's trying to do, but he kind of did that through the whole

01:16:11

book. Right. There are a lot of stories where he talks about people who just don't get it and

01:16:18

they are unaware of what's going on around them have zero empathy, don't have a clue. Like,

01:16:24

that is brought up quite a bit. So then to reiterate it and have a whole chapter on it towards the end

01:16:31

seemed like beating a dead horse. Yeah. So I kind of struggled with it, but I will say it is interesting

01:16:39

regardless. It just got to be a little over the top for me. He does share a story of the self-science

01:16:46

class at Nuevo School in San Francisco. And I felt like that story was a little bit sensationalized,

01:16:55

not saying that the stuff that he talked about there doesn't happen, but it was presented in such a

01:17:02

way that he made it. He really illustrated. I think kind of the point he was trying to make was like,

01:17:09

this type of stuff does not happen other places. And I feel like that's kind of unfair, that it

01:17:14

does happen other places. And you don't have to do it the exact way that they do it. But kind of the

01:17:21

sense you have after hearing that story is like, oh, wow, they're doing it right. And everybody else is

01:17:25

doing it wrong. I don't really think that's that's the case. Sure. I think there's a lot again, a lot

01:17:31

of nuance when it comes to the best way to help the individual that you are working with develop

01:17:37

these skills. But really, the first step is recognizing them. And that's challenging for myself even

01:17:45

as a parent. Like, am I doing everything that I can do to make sure that my kids are developing the

01:17:51

emotional skills that they need, especially as a home school parent, right? Because that's kind of

01:17:56

the stigma. It's like a home school is they don't have social skills. That's half of emotional intelligence.

01:18:01

Well, depending how you slice it, you know, but yeah, so I don't know, I don't have a specific

01:18:09

answer. And it's not really an action item, because it's not something I'm going to take action on.

01:18:14

But that's kind of a question that I've been asking in the back of my head for a long time,

01:18:19

is what is the right thing to do with not just my kids collectively, but each individual kid,

01:18:25

because they are so different. What else Mike? Action items? Let's go to action items. I have three.

01:18:31

Build optimism into my thoughts. The optimism came up a handful of times through this book,

01:18:37

and it's something that I am aware that I sometimes have negative self talk. But

01:18:46

I don't always do anything about it. This really showed me that I need to do something about it.

01:18:52

Going back to the five domains thing, because apparently they had a bigger impact on me than I

01:18:57

realized. The first step was self awareness of what's going on with your emotions. I feel like I'm

01:19:05

fairly attuned to this, but I could definitely be better. So I'm taking the action to try to

01:19:11

notice my emotions better. Not really sure how to technically do this other than just at certain

01:19:18

points of the day, just try to be aware of how I feel, or if things change or something comes up,

01:19:22

just try to be aware of it. Can I make a recommendation for you? I don't know. I don't know if I wanted

01:19:28

or not, but I have thought about like the whole chime once an hour thing. But I don't know. What

01:19:33

are your thoughts? Well, you have a, shall I say lean iPhone setup, correct? It's pretty tight.

01:19:44

Yep. Okay. So I would check out, because I think this is the perfect app for what you are trying to

01:19:51

do. I would look at mood notes. I think if you haven't bought it previously, it's like five bucks

01:19:57

or something. It's got a really simple swipe interface. You can just so you can quickly capture

01:20:02

how you're feeling. But then there's a whole bunch of extra stuff if you dig a little bit deeper,

01:20:06

which sounds kind of like you just have space to type in notes. But the way that they do it is

01:20:13

really smart. I think if you look at it, you might be like, hey, yeah, that's kind of exactly the

01:20:17

thing I'm looking for. So they have like several prompts. If you were to say, you know, I'm super

01:20:23

smiley face right now, and then like, what are the emotions that you're feeling? And then why do you

01:20:27

feel that way? It's not as simple as that. But the way that they probe and they prompt you down that

01:20:33

path, you can uncover some things and get some insights. So if that's really the goal is to,

01:20:38

you know, get the insights from the emotions, that might be the tool that makes it really easy.

01:20:43

It's five bucks. Four to three. Okay. I don't know. It looks cool. Does this do like chimes at

01:20:48

certain times of the day? Or is it once a day? Like, how's it worked? Well, you can, you can set up

01:20:52

your own notifications. So you could say, like, when I was was using it regularly, I was having

01:20:57

it notify me at, I think, eight 30 noon and like five 30, something like that. Okay. Yeah. So you

01:21:05

can choose the intervals that you want. And you can say, you know, once a day or every hour,

01:21:10

whatever you want, and then you just go straight in there and then you can like quick swipe up or

01:21:14

down to indicate your response. And then you've got that, that log, you can go back and you can

01:21:19

see in the mornings, typically I'm pretty down because I haven't had my coffee yet or whatever.

01:21:23

Like whatever insights you're trying to gain from this, sure, modified self sort of a thing.

01:21:28

It's really easy to see that sort of stuff as it pertains to your emotions inside of mood notes.

01:21:33

Got it. Got it. I may try this. I gotta look. We'll see.

01:21:40

A third one here, I'm going to take the survey that you sent me this thing that you want me to

01:21:45

go through that your your family runs. I want to go through this. So maybe next time we can go

01:21:51

through the results of that, that'd be kind of a fun follow up. Yep. And we'll have chapter markers.

01:21:56

So if you're done with emotional intelligence, I want to skip over it, you can do that.

01:22:00

No, I'll take it.

01:22:04

The one action item that I wrote down from this came from my least favorite section as it happens.

01:22:14

Part three, emotional intelligence applied. He's talking about intimate enemies in the John

01:22:18

Gottman research. He uses this term, which I thought was brilliant, emotional fault lines.

01:22:22

And we really didn't discuss it because I think that as it pertains to the podcast,

01:22:31

there really wasn't a whole lot there. But as it pertains to my situation, as I think through

01:22:37

the things that cause friction in my relationship, that's really the goal. So in the book, he kind

01:22:42

of talks about how like there's these earthquakes, but if you are looking for them, you can identify

01:22:48

these emotional fault lines or the places where things can fall apart. So not saying that my

01:22:53

marriage is falling apart, but I don't know the things that can cause the friction in our marriage.

01:22:58

And then recognizing recognizing those things, step one, step two would be building in the systems

01:23:04

or the margin. So that that stuff all of a sudden, you know, isn't a big deal. All right,

01:23:09

Stalin rating. I have to admit, I've been dreading this section.

01:23:14

Episode for some reason, because I've been trying to figure out how do I want to rate this?

01:23:20

Because you want me to go first? No, I'll go first. I picked it.

01:23:23

This is this is one of those where

01:23:29

the concept and the awareness that it brings you are invaluable. But the book itself is

01:23:38

really, really hard to go through and get there. So I almost feel like I want to rate it two

01:23:46

different ways and give it a five and a one at the same time, which is so weird. Like I've had

01:23:53

this before where, you know, one doesn't match up with the other, but I feel like they haven't been

01:23:59

this severe before. So I cannot say that he's an easy person to read when he gets into storytelling

01:24:08

mode. It's great. When he's telling stories as examples, those work out really, really well.

01:24:14

And I liked those. But the moment he starts trying to expand on it and talk about it,

01:24:20

he gets into some of the science typically, where he really shouldn't. And just kind of expands

01:24:28

things to the point where it's just kind of hard to read. Maybe that's just my opinion. I don't know.

01:24:35

It was a challenge is what I'm saying. So rating it, I'm going to put it at a four,

01:24:42

I think, just because I like what he's saying. It was just hard to get. So yep, I

01:24:51

hesitate to recommend that people read this. But I also want people to get the concept.

01:25:00

So I don't know if there's a better avenue to get. You would know the answer to that.

01:25:05

But I have a hard time recommending it, but I will put it at a four. There you go. I'm done.

01:25:12

I'll quit now. All right. Well, I have seen all over the place this book, which is white and has

01:25:19

orange letters, I believe it says emotional intelligence 2.0. What I thought we were going to read was

01:25:25

an earlier version of that book. Turns out it's somebody totally different. So yeah, it's a different

01:25:31

in the emotional intelligence space, at least in the last 10 years, that is the book. It sounds

01:25:36

like everybody is going to, but I have not read that. So I can't recommend that one over this one.

01:25:42

Sure. I can say that Daniel Goldman is the guy when it comes to this stuff.

01:25:48

This was, like I said at the beginning, not what I expected. The first section was,

01:25:54

I loved the brain science stuff actually. When he got into his models, he started losing me.

01:26:01

And then I feel like he talked around some different concepts that he could have

01:26:07

highlighted a lot more strongly as like, these are the skills, specific skills that you need,

01:26:13

not relying on other people's lists and talking around things. But I do think that this is an

01:26:18

incredibly important topic. I do think that he has earned the right to be the voice behind this.

01:26:26

I personally didn't really care for the style all that much. I found myself wanting to skip

01:26:35

large portions of it. I didn't. I muscled through it. But this was the,

01:26:41

I'm trying to think of the last time I went through a book like that I was really just

01:26:48

bored trying to crank through it. Now that isn't to say that it's not a good book though either.

01:26:54

And I'm trying to separate in my head my perspective being around the stuff for a while and somebody

01:27:00

who is coming to this for the first time. I feel like for somebody coming to this for the first time,

01:27:07

this book reads a lot easier. I also think that if you enjoy the academic writing style or

01:27:17

all of the different research reports that he mentions kind of like Dan O'Reilly, that wasn't

01:27:24

a bad book. It just wasn't my preference. So preference aside and then perspective aside,

01:27:33

I think that this is probably a very good book. I can't completely disconnect from either of

01:27:40

those things though. So I'm going to actually join you at four stars. And the reason being,

01:27:46

again, we record these podcasts and I feel kind of bad sometimes because there was a lot of feedback

01:27:51

on the Sankay Aaron's book, which I think I gave three and a half. And people were like,

01:27:56

oh, I can't believe you didn't like it. And I listened back to episode. I'm like, well,

01:27:59

I guess you can see how I can see how you got there. But I actually didn't think it was all

01:28:03

that bad. I thought there were some great ideas there. So if you're going straight to this section,

01:28:09

you haven't used the chapter mark, you didn't listen to anything else in the episode. I think

01:28:15

that maybe makes a little bit more sense. If you're going through this linearly and you've listened

01:28:19

to us complain about the way that he's done things. Maybe that's a little bit surprising that we're

01:28:24

both ending up at 4.0. But I feel like this is a good book. There's really not anything wrong

01:28:31

other than some preference stuff that you and I have. And again, I said at the beginning,

01:28:36

like if I were to sit down and talk to Daniel Goldman, someone who's listening to the conversation

01:28:41

would very quickly side with him instead of me because he's going to be way smarter.

01:28:45

And way more steeped in this stuff than I am. But so just take everything that you have heard so far,

01:28:52

all of our complaints with a grain of salt. Because I really do think this is a worthwhile

01:28:59

read. Is there something better? I don't know. I haven't read any of the other books on emotional

01:29:04

intelligence. But there's just so much here that retroactively you can go back and you can say,

01:29:10

oh, I like to grip better. I like growth mindset better. I liked all these other things that we've

01:29:13

read better. But that's just somebody's take on one small piece of this. And when you think about

01:29:18

kind of the historical importance of this concept of emotional intelligence and really what Daniel

01:29:24

Goldman did when he wrote this back in 1995, I feel like he's earned the benefit of the doubt.

01:29:30

And so that's why I'm meeting you at four stars.

01:29:34

Makes sense. All right. Let's put it on the bookshelf. What's next, Mike?

01:29:39

Next is a listener recommendation. Actually, I haven't looked at the club yet today. But at the time,

01:29:46

this was the most requested book. And that is free to focus by Michael Hyatt. This is probably

01:29:52

going to be some sort of systems book, which is going against the grain on everything inside of

01:29:58

me when it comes to productivity lately. But I do enjoy Michael Hyatt's writing. I do like his

01:30:06

perspective. And so this I think will be a fun discussion at the very least, and probably a

01:30:13

very entertaining book as well. I fully expect a sales pitch for his full focus planner. Yes,

01:30:19

and the course. But yes. Yep. Well, after that, we'll shift gears quite a bit and go back in time

01:30:28

to some degree. I've wanted to read this for a long time. So I figured I'd drag you along with

01:30:33

me. This kind of falls into the category of what's the book? Stephen King's on writing.

01:30:40

Okay. It falls into that category. But this one is bird by bird by Ann Lamott. So we'll do that one

01:30:46

after free to focus by Michael Hyatt. Tagline on this one is some instructions on writing in life.

01:30:52

I think this will be a fun one. All right. Cool. Then we've got some gap books. I am still reading

01:30:59

Company of One by Paul Jarvis because I really want to get through this one. But it's been crazy

01:31:06

lately. As we're recording this, we're in the middle of the launch week for faith-based productivity,

01:31:12

which is kind of cool to see it get out there, but also very crazy. And some other things happening,

01:31:19

which I'll share details when I when I can. But that plus the length of emotional intelligence

01:31:26

meant that I didn't have a whole lot of extra time to read. So Company One got put on the shelf.

01:31:31

I kind of sapped all time. Yeah. So that's my lame excuse for my same gap book three weeks

01:31:38

or three episodes in a row. Yeah. I'm in the middle of one I wasn't really expecting to pick up.

01:31:43

For a gap book, it's called Healing Lime by Stephen Booner. Long time listeners in the show,

01:31:50

no, I've picked up Lyme disease and I'm in the middle of fighting that. This book is like the

01:31:54

de facto book for how to beat it. So I'm kind of going through that in a very leisurely way

01:32:02

because it's similar to this book, emotional intelligence in that there's tons and tons and

01:32:07

tons and tons of science at the beginning. And then he starts about talking about the healing

01:32:12

process. It's like, it's huge. So there's a lot to it. So it's not one of those sit down and read

01:32:17

it in two days sort of thing. It's borderline textbook. So anyway, I'm going through that trying

01:32:22

to figure out to take care of myself. All right. If you want to recommend a book for us to read,

01:32:29

you can do so over at the club, go to club.bookworm.fm and make sure that you're signed up and then go

01:32:36

to the recommendations category and recommend a book, but also make sure that you vote for your

01:32:42

book after you recommend it. We can sort those books by the votes. And that's kind of how I've

01:32:48

picked anyways, the last couple books that I've picked for for bookworm. You can also see a list

01:32:54

of all of the books that are planned and that we've covered if you go to bookworm.fm/list. And if

01:33:02

you want to support the show, you can click on those links. Those are Amazon affiliate links. So if

01:33:07

you decide to buy the books, read along with us, then that helps us out a little bit. So thank you

01:33:12

in advance. You can also help us out by leaving an iTunes review, link in the show notes. Those are

01:33:18

always fun. It's fun to get through reviews, see what people think of the show. You can also join

01:33:22

the club club.bookworm.fm. Lots of cool conversations going on there. I'm terrible about keeping up

01:33:29

with them, but people love talking about the books, especially the one we did last time,

01:33:33

how to take smart notes. That one took off very quickly to system. So everybody's got thoughts on

01:33:38

the system. We're going to be posting our action items that we talked about here on the show. As

01:33:43

soon as we're done recording here, since if you're listening to the live version of this, which

01:33:50

hi, you'll get to see those right away and we can talk about those right away. If you're not a

01:33:55

member and you haven't listened to the live, you have to wait for the episode to come out. So we'll

01:33:59

post those action items up there, but you're welcome to share yours as well to get some accountability

01:34:05

towards those. And again, I mentioned memberships, piece of that. Join the premium membership on the

01:34:12

club. So club.bookworm.fm/membership. That'll get you to the sign up for that. And it's $5 a month

01:34:21

for the subscription. And then you get access to all of Mike's book notes and the live feed and a

01:34:29

private area and the chat system, like there's a lot to it. So support the show, help us keep the

01:34:36

lights on and become a premium member of the Bookworm Club. All right. So that'll do it

01:34:42

for emotional intelligence. If you're reading along, pick up Free to Focus by Michael Hyatt,

01:34:48

and we will talk to you next time.