Bookworm Transcripts

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Joe bill you got some explaining to do understand your back on apple mail.

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Of all places to go right away that's where you choose to go.

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I got the newsletter and I was distraught and waiting to talk to you about this.

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Okay explain.

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All right.

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What do you want to know why are you using apple mail because I needed to break apart two different checking intervals.

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And I needed two different apps to do it.

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Hmm, I know you're using proton mail right that's kind of the.

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Yep, the backbone of this.

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I got tired of the Google side of things.

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I just know too much about how they do things and decided to avoid them if I could.

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Thus I went with proton mail and wanted to keep that particular account separate from all the other accounts.

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Now keep in mind.

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I have I checked whenever I wrote that newsletter.

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I didn't put it in the newsletter, but I have 23 different email addresses that are going into that account or into that cheese.

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Application so it's going into mail mate and I needed to keep this particular account separate because it's my main.

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And thus I wanted to break that one apart entirely.

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I will say that the only reason that I was able to go back to apple mail was because I was able to get the gmail.

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Shortcuts into apple mail.

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That is the only reason that I chose that one.

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Otherwise I'd have to go somewhere else and possibly end up using the web browser for it.

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But.

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That's the main reason I did it was because I could get the shortcuts.

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Okay, well, I'll allow it, but it is really weird writing and rich rich text though.

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Yeah, I've become so accustomed to the markdown email thing that it just.

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Mestes with me still I am still not completely used to it yet.

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Well, I definitely love me some mail mate and email is a topic that comes up on the show fairly often.

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And I wanted to call it out kind of as a plug for your newsletter too, because I really do enjoy reading those and as I read through your email, I found myself understanding at least where you're coming from and why you were.

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Why you were doing it, but my anger level subsided the further that you went because you did lay out the case for how you're using it very well.

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But I wanted to point people to it because you in addition to the little blurb about some little something that you've you figured out or you're applying like the switch from.

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Mail mate to apple mail because of the pro time mail thing pro time mail by the way, I know is the iOS version that's like the super secure end to end encrypted.

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Email so I get that, but you've also got a bunch of links in there to other things that you find around the web.

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I saw the link to the last bookworm episode.

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So I really do like the way that you curate all that stuff and I find the stuff that you linked to very.

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Well, I guess, you know, we're pretty good friends.

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So maybe it's not a surprise that it would be in alignment with like the type of thing that I like to read, but chances are if you're listening to bookworm, you'd like that kind of thing to so.

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Plug for Joe's newsletter weekly impulse, even if you have to read it in apple mail.

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I will say that newsletter is very fun to put together because it gives me an excuse to be impulsive and go with my last minute decisions.

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So thank you for everyone who reads it because you're feeding my run with shiny new stuff problem.

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All right, should we get into some of these follow up action items?

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Sure.

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All right.

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So I've got a couple of them here.

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I will go in order of failure, I guess, with a set time every day for working out that that is not something that I have done particularly well.

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And that's kind of just because the last couple weeks have been a little bit crazy.

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I'm going to try and figure out how to do that still, but it is on my radar.

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All right.

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So my next action item was to identify my power hours and to shade them on my daily planning sheet.

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I did this.

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I shaded the left side of my sheet with like a light yellow, light yellow shading on the Omni Grafle file and the next ported that as a PDF.

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So there's the link.

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And it's enough to visually catch my eye and basically tell me this is special.

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Only put really important stuff here.

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And it seems to be working pretty well.

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I've been messing with the timeframe.

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At first it was four hours.

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It was from eight to 12, basically everything before lunch.

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But I found that with my morning routine and then trying to squeeze in a workout sometime in the morning too.

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That was a little ambitious.

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So I dialed down what I considered my power hours to be those three hours from nine to 12.

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Did you get the link?

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I did.

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I'm looking at this.

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Okay.

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Yes.

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Cool.

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Actually, I'm going to share this in the live chat too for the people who are listening live.

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So bonus to the premium members.

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Maybe that's what we should do when we share links on the show is just put them in the live chat.

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Yeah, there we go.

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So this is still a work in progress.

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This sheet I've edited so many times but I'm really getting more and more happy with where this is at.

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I'm hoping to land on something that will stick for a significant amount of time.

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I pull this into good notes on my iPad and fill it out that way.

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That kind of leads into my other action item which shows to write out my shutdown routine.

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I did this too and I'm going to pull this up real quick because I want to get this right.

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Okay.

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So this is what I identified because I wanted to make it as simple as possible.

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I put empty my email so I want to end the day with no emails in my inbox.

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I want to empty drafts which that's an aspirational one at the moment because there are 300 drafts inside of your house.

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Geez.

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Yeah.

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It's stuff like this where I jot it down and then I pull it up in my recent stuff but then I just forget about it.

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So I need to get in the habit of clearing this out but I definitely want to do that.

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I want this to be like an ideas inbox.

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And then I want to close all my browser tabs and the idea there being that all of my open loops are now gone.

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And if there's something that I'm in the middle of I should really finish it before I quit.

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But this is like my signifying to myself that I'm done.

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And then I also want to plan tomorrow during my shutdown routine which maybe seems a little bit weird.

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I've always done this the night before but I'm thinking that as I'm closing all of the open loops and I that's like the ideal time to identify the stuff that's going to carry over.

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And I'm not going to forget like oh yeah I need to do this thing tomorrow and it screws up my plan.

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Does that make sense?

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So you're doing this at night?

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End of my workday.

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End of your workday.

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Yep so empty the email empty drafts close my browser tabs and then plan tomorrow using the sheet that I just shared.

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Do that at the end of my workday instead of at night before I go to bed because what I found is by the time I'm doing that right before I go to bed.

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It does help me empty my brain and helps me transition to sleep because I'm not trying to hang out of those things in my head.

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But I've also found that the distance between the end of my workday and when I actually fill out the sheet there are some things that can fall through the cracks and I'll forget that oh yeah I have to do this other thing without opening up a task manager or a calendar to look at it.

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You know I just sit down fill it out and I think by doing it right after closing all the open loops and closing all the tabs specifically that'll kind of give me a quick reminder of like the things that I've done during the day and the things that I have yet to do.

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So it's going to be fresh in my head and it's going to make planning my next day a lot easier and a lot more accurate if that makes sense.

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Sure.

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There'll be no surprises for future Mike when he sits down the next day to get down to work.

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So that's my shutdown routine my aspirational shutdown routine I still need to implement this.

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But my action item was to write it out and I did do that.

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Well done.

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Thank you.

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Good job Mike.

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All right and then you've got one.

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Do I have to do this?

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Yes you do.

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I didn't even touch this.

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Was that intentional or you just didn't get around to it.

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I think I kind of borderline had PTSD from reading getting results.

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That's kind of what I figured.

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So this was sort of intentional then right?

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Maybe yeah I I'll put it this way.

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I looked at this every day since we recorded getting results.

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And every day I said no.

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Checked it off and moved on.

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So maybe that's Joe's rebellion against the book.

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But I didn't do this and I have zero plans to do this.

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Yeah so the actual action item is three MIT's question mark.

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Yes.

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So if you decided no then this is done.

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Yeah totally.

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All right even in the show notes I'm putting a check mark done.

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All right.

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No one's done.

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Oh too fun.

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Well before we jump into the book I just want to call out one thing.

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Obviously I didn't do I suppose I would call that a success on the action item.

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But I will say this it's kind of cool.

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We've already had a little bit of a back and forth here today on the live stream which is

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for bookworm premium members.

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And if you're not a premium member you know we've been alluding to this already.

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If you're not you can become a member on the club club.bookworm.fm.

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Just go over there join the club and you'll find links there to join the membership side

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of that.

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So also link in the show notes for that.

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So yes lots of cool stuff that are in premium.

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We'll talk about that more at the end of the show.

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But for now we're going to jump into our book Mike.

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One other thing I'll just call out is that if you listen in overcast which a surprising

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number of people do.

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Marco Armant makes it really easy because there's the little dollar sign icon in the

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bottom you tap on that and it'll take you right to the membership page too.

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Love it.

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I love that he's done that.

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It makes it so easy.

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Yep.

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All right.

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So today's book is my choice and it is range why Generalist Triumph in a specialized world

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by David Epstein.

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This was a believe listener recommendation that got a ton of votes in the club and I

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wanted to avoid Sapiens so I looked for the next highest rated book.

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This happened to be it.

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It's a very interesting book.

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The cover says I loved range from Malcolm Gladwell which makes a lot of sense.

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It's written in a lot of the same style I would say.

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Although I think we'll get into the specifics of the writer style later but I felt like

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David Epstein's was a little bit more approachable.

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It seems same sort of format though.

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There's 12 different chapters which we're going to try to go through all of them and

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just get through them fairly quickly.

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They all have multiple stories but really speak to a specific point.

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And David Epstein does a great job of telling a bunch of really good stories, tying them

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all together and kind of interweaving this fabric for this argument which really is encapsulated

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by the subtitle of the book.

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But we're going to dive into the details here in a second.

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I have to say that whenever I was reading this book I really enjoyed reading this because

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I felt like I was reading my story because I have been on so many different sectors and

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so many different career paths in the last decade that it kind of justified my jumping

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around to some degree.

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So I was grateful.

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I was like, "Thanks David, you're feeding my interest in jumping around all over the

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place."

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So I liked this one.

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It was a good pick.

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Mike, well done.

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Thanks.

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Well, it wasn't me.

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I just picked what the listeners recommended.

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So thank you Bookworm listeners.

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You had to make that call though.

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I did.

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Let's jump into the first chapter here which is the Cult of the Head Start.

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And this is where he lays out a very compelling argument against what we traditionally are

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taught I would argue regarding specialization.

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This was really interesting to me.

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The stories that he mentions at the beginning of this, he compares and contrasts two famous

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people, well famous at least to me.

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Number one is Tiger Woods, which you see the videos of him walking around in a diaper

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carrying a putter.

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And the kind of the idea is like his dad has been training him and grooming him to be the

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best golfer in the world basically since he was born.

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And then you contrast that with Roger Federer who I don't believe he is the number one tennis

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player in the world at the moment, but he's probably the best tennis player ever.

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I used to play tennis in high school and college so I still follow that world a little bit.

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I definitely know who Roger Federer is even if a lot of the listeners maybe don't.

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He's the Michael Jordan of tennis.

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And his entry into the sport was kind of the exact opposite.

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He tried a bunch of different things.

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He actually grew up playing soccer and then kind of stumbled into tennis and was really

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successful in that.

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Which when you look at those two side by side, you can get the feeling that, yeah, the Tiger

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Woods method is really the method that you should follow if you really want to become

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excellent at something.

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But the argument that he makes in the rest of the book is actually no, the more probable

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path to success is to follow Roger Federer and to do a bunch of stuff and eventually

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land on something as opposed to identifying something super early and specializing in

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that and only that.

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I made a different connection here because he didn't, well, I guess he did talk about

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this to some degree with trying to help children specialize as early as possible.

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And that's something that you see like baby genius and you see all these different curriculums

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and ways of teaching your babies to learn things super, super fast.

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He basically debunks that here and saying that yes, you do get a head start.

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But in most cases, the people who jump around and try a bunch of different systems, a bunch

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of different mechanisms in the long run, they catch up and in most cases are ahead.

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But that's the story we don't hear about because we hear about the story from Tiger Woods who

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got a start at 18 months, two years old and started winning tournaments super, super

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early.

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We hear that and we assume that that's the only way that you can become an absolute professional,

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the de facto expert in a given field.

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But that's not true.

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And I believe that's the premise he's exploring and arguing throughout this entire book is

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that you cannot let you can be successful in a single area doing that.

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But for the most part, everyone else like the other 80 to 90% of the elite that have

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had a lot of success in their given areas of expertise have a large range of backgrounds

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and experiences that they're able to pull from in order to develop that expertise, which

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is something that I was fascinated by because with three kids that were homeschooling, they

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are two, four and six right now, they're ages, which is awesome that they're separated like

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that except when like the birthdays start to come through, then I never really remember

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which one of them's off.

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You probably understand that.

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But that concept of teaching kids early, like trying to give them a bunch of different experiences

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instead of focusing them on a single given experience.

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That was my big takeaway from this chapter and one that really set the tone for the rest

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of the book.

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Yeah.

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And if he doesn't explicitly say that that's the only way to do it, he does kind of imply

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that that's kind of the general belief is that it's at least the best way to do it.

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Correct.

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So from a parenting perspective, we have kids who are a little bit older and they're still

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exploring stuff and some of the stuff that they are into like soccer, for example, I

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actually didn't play soccer until high school and then ended up playing on a high school

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team that my junior year lost in the state finals.

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And I was actually pretty good at it.

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I was all conference, I think my junior and senior year, but I picked it up in high school

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basically.

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So my story is kind of weird, but it's kind of in the back of my mind, I've always wondered

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like, well, what if I had started sooner?

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And this book basically made me feel not so bad about that or not so bad about as our

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kids are getting involved in these sports, doing them at a recreational level.

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Like as soon as you are five or six and you play soccer, there's pressure to join the

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traveling teams and be gone every single weekend and have practiced three nights a week.

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And I've always kind of pushed back against that as like, well, it's not really necessary.

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But in the back of my mind, I'm always like, well, am I removing opportunities for my kids

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in if I don't let them try that stuff?

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And this book basically was saying, no, you're doing the right thing.

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So validation, I guess, confirmation bias at least.

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There you go.

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Well, I can't say coming from the other side of that coin, like we haven't.

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Our kids aren't old enough to really get into the heavy sports side of things, at least

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in my opinion.

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I have talked to a few parents and like, oh, your oldest is six.

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Has she been doing dance for a couple of years?

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Like, no, she's six.

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Let her have fun.

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Right.

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Maybe that's fun for her, but I'm not certain that something competitive in any form would

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be good for her in this particular case.

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So no, we're not going to do that.

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Now it's also interesting though, because like the examples that they use in here a lot

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are like sports and music.

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And I was also classically trained in the Suzuki method, which we'll talk more about

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that when it gets into that chapter.

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But I have been playing violin since I was five.

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And there are a couple different scenarios where I play the violin still, the primary

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one being in the worship team at our church.

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And I can see the benefit of having that foundation and playing since I was a wee little lad.

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Like how that makes what I'm doing now easier.

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But I also think that part of that maybe is in the methodology and kind of this whole

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idea of deliberate practice, like not all experience leads to expertise.

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And so I think I was probably part of a good program where that experience did lead to

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expertise and I'm still kind of reaping the benefits of that.

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But I don't think the important thing is necessarily that I started when I was five, because I'm

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not trying to become a world famous violinist.

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I'm not spending 10,000 hours as according to all the studies, you know, to be be great

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at this sort of thing.

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And before we go to the next chapter, we should probably unpack this idea of kind versus wicked

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learning environments.

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So real quickly, the kind learning environments are the ones where all of the rules are fixed.

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And those are pretty easy to spot.

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And that's where music and sports in particular kind of reside, which is why you can selectively

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choose examples like the Tiger Woods and the Mozart's and people like that and say that

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specialization is the right way to do it because of those kind learning environments.

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But most of the world is what David Epstein calls a wicked learning environment where

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the rules are unknown or that they change all the time.

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And that means that all of the things that you've trained yourself to do over and over

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and over again have diminished, if not no value, because you can't just repeat the same formula.

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You've got to make new connections and figure out new things.

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And so maybe that's kind of the point that we can use to go into the next chapter here,

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which is chapter two, how the wicked world was made.

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Yeah.

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And before we jump into that, just some examples of kind versus wicked learning environments,

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like a kind learning environment would be chess.

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At least that's the example he gives in that when you're learning chess and when you're

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playing chess, your feedback on how you're doing is immediate.

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If you follow like there's a whole mathematical model that will tell you if you're ahead or

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behind as the game plays.

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And if you watch that, you can learn as you play the game and continually improve your

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mental models for playing that game.

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That would be a kind scenario where a wicked scenario would come in like a wicked learning

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environment is when you're looking at something scientific that doesn't have any known solutions.

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So if you're trying to solve or find a cure for a disease, like there is no feedback on

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whether or not you're headed in the right direction or not.

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Yeah.

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You're essentially guessing and then testing those guesses.

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You don't have any feedback right away to know if you're on the right path or not.

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Yep, exactly.

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And so the chess, for example, with the limited or finite number of options or combinations,

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those are things where computers do great.

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Yeah.

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Like what's the story they share in there?

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Is it Gary Kasperov?

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When he lost to Big Blue, I think it was the IBM built chess computer.

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Yep.

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You know, they're--

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That's right.

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So with the jumping off point that a lot of people will use for projecting this future

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where artificial intelligence just kind of dominates everything.

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But David Epstein basically says, well, they can do that in chess, but they can't do that

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a lot of other places.

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And one example that he uses is the StarCraft tournament, which I didn't even know that

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was a thing.

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Right.

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But apparently there's like a World StarCraft championship and they did the same thing.

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It's a computer application.

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It's a real-time strategy game.

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And just because of the fact that there are more options there, the computers and the

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StarCraft tournament ended up not doing well against the humans that were there.

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So the main point, kind of what you're talking about, I'm glad you shared some of those examples

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that the world isn't chess or golf.

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It's more complex than that those who don't specialize tend to do better.

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Absolutely.

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Because it's a wicked world that we live in.

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It is a wicked world, at least most of it.

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All right, so I'm good for chapter two, how the wicked world was made.

00:24:00

How was the wicked world made, Mike?

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I tell you the truth.

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I don't really know.

00:24:07

He shares some research here, which I think he just liked that headline and then tried

00:24:14

to put some stuff into it.

00:24:15

Okay.

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I need to back up because this was totally a mean way of posing this because I'm not

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sure how to reiterate what he said.

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And I knew that by asking that question, it's a really, really hard question.

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You're going to make me do it.

00:24:27

Summarize it.

00:24:28

So I figured if I passed it on to you, I wouldn't have to do it.

00:24:31

I think I can do it.

00:24:32

But when you ask it as a question, it's like, well, there isn't a simple answer.

00:24:36

But there are some patterns that have played out and he attributes them to two people specifically.

00:24:42

James Flynn, who noticed the trend that people tended to increase significantly in intelligence

00:24:49

as the generations evolved.

00:24:50

And this is known as the Flynn effect, where the increase in IQ with each new generation,

00:24:56

it's the increase in IQ with each new generation in the 20th century.

00:25:00

So what that translates into is big gains in similarities and imperceptible comments,

00:25:08

which like you're much better at problem solving.

00:25:12

And then Alexander Luria did some research about the people, I forget the specific time

00:25:20

period, I believe it was Soviet Russia.

00:25:24

And he was wondering if in the Soviet Russia history example, you could take some of these

00:25:34

remote villagers and you could put them in a different job and you could see this Flynn

00:25:41

effect in action just by changing their location and the types of things that they were doing

00:25:47

on a day to day basis.

00:25:48

Because these remote villagers had trouble recognizing patterns or similarities, they

00:25:54

had trouble recognizing things that were outside of their immediate application and how they

00:25:58

use them every day.

00:26:01

And the hypothesis here basically is that the greater the move towards modernity, the

00:26:06

greater the ability to think abstractly.

00:26:10

So modern life requires range.

00:26:12

That's kind of how we got here and why the world is so wicked again in his definition,

00:26:19

just meaning that there's no clearly set boundaries or clearly defined rules that everybody plays

00:26:27

by.

00:26:28

You really don't know where the edges are.

00:26:31

You have to kind of figure that out.

00:26:32

And so if you've grown up in a tiny little farm in Iowa, there's basically some cultural

00:26:41

things there which have been working against you as it pertains to developing this range

00:26:47

which will help you be more successful as you go forward.

00:26:50

The people who tend to be more modern, civilized maybe is the term that would go here, although

00:26:56

that doesn't really feel right.

00:26:58

And they kind of have an advantage here, although I kind of am wondering if there's a limit

00:27:04

to this.

00:27:05

So it's easy to look back in the last couple hundred years and say, "Oh yeah, here's the

00:27:09

trend."

00:27:10

But as everybody carries the entirety of the internet in their pocket, I think there's

00:27:16

probably a limit to this where it does more harm than good.

00:27:20

At some point, I don't know that for sure, but Kel Newport probably agrees with me.

00:27:26

I think you're working around this really well because it's difficult to explain how

00:27:34

did we get in a scenario where we don't have clean lines on what works and what doesn't

00:27:38

every day.

00:27:40

If you go back to the agrarian lifestyle, I came from a farm and I know if you walk

00:27:47

out onto the farm yard, you can look and see everything that needs to be done.

00:27:53

You can physically see it and you know by looking at your fields whether or not you've

00:27:57

been successful or not.

00:27:59

You can tell and you've noticed those subtleties over time.

00:28:02

But when you start getting into more of these intellectual property style products, which

00:28:09

we have done for decades now, as you step more and more into that, it's very difficult

00:28:15

to see your feedback loop and to know if you are succeeding or not.

00:28:22

So I think it's not as simple as it used to be and over time we've had to develop these

00:28:29

ways of thinking as a society to, I guess, analogize and analyze.

00:28:36

Analogize.

00:28:37

How do you say that?

00:28:39

Analogize?

00:28:40

That works.

00:28:41

I don't know.

00:28:42

You have to use analogies in order to develop the thinking around it, which we'll get into

00:28:47

a little bit later.

00:28:49

He does go into that quite a bit, but it's a long process that happened to develop this

00:28:56

wicked world that we now live in.

00:28:59

That's I think the summary there.

00:29:00

Yeah.

00:29:01

He says on page 46, "Exposure to the modern world has made us better adapted for complexity

00:29:06

and that has manifested as flexibility with profound implications for the breadth of our

00:29:10

intellectual world."

00:29:12

I do think though that we kind of are at this tipping point with this because with the internet,

00:29:21

you have the ability to be connected with anybody anywhere and you can find people who

00:29:28

are like you, which means that there is the possibility that you get connected to these

00:29:34

groups and instead of giving you a bunch of different perspectives and ideas, they're

00:29:38

just reinforcing the echo chamber that you're in.

00:29:44

You kind of see a negative picture of this in the neo-Nazi stuff that goes around on

00:29:49

Facebook and Twitter where it's a very small portion of the population, but they all hang

00:29:56

out the same place together.

00:29:58

You get this groupthink mentality and it feels like this big movement and they're galvanized

00:30:03

to spread their ideals and do their stuff.

00:30:07

You've got the ability to connect yourself with all these different ideas and you just

00:30:11

have to make sure that they're legitimate ideas.

00:30:15

These universities he mentions, Foster Specialist Thinking Education is too narrow, students must

00:30:20

be taught to think before being taught.

00:30:22

What to think?

00:30:23

Well, if all you did was surface book and social media, you're not really being taught

00:30:27

what to think, but you probably think you are.

00:30:31

There's a lot of information out there and it's hard to tell at a glance like what's true

00:30:37

and what's not.

00:30:38

It's very easy to find justifications for your beliefs even if they happen to be wrong.

00:30:47

That's something that is worth questioning.

00:30:49

It's something that I try to do is always ask myself, "What if I'm wrong?

00:30:53

What if there's a better way to think about this or to solve this problem?"

00:30:58

Not just to get so set in my ways that this is the way I've always done things.

00:31:01

This is the way I'm going to continue to do things.

00:31:04

There's obviously some benefit to that, but there could also be a lot of people who think

00:31:09

they know a lot about a subject because they read a couple Facebook news posts and they

00:31:14

look legit.

00:31:16

The whole idea of the fake news stuff.

00:31:20

That's not new since Donald Trump became president.

00:31:24

Snopes has been around for a long time trying to discredit that stuff and point out the things

00:31:28

that people are verbally vomiting on the internet.

00:31:31

I'll actually, none of that is true, but it sounds good.

00:31:33

Then you get people who read that and then they're like, "Hey, I'm an expert in this

00:31:37

because I know some facts."

00:31:39

Well, maybe you know some facts and maybe the facts aren't even intentionally wrong,

00:31:45

but they're telling the wrong story and you just completely use it to support the wrong

00:31:49

story without bothering to take a step back and see the whole picture.

00:31:53

I feel like that's easier than ever to do is to reinforce your default.

00:31:58

It's perspective, I guess.

00:32:02

The real value of range is taking into consideration all of those other perspectives and understanding

00:32:09

that one of them might be the key to going to the next level for yourself, not as an attack

00:32:15

on the way you do things just because it's different.

00:32:19

After chapter two, I feel like there should be, he doesn't have this book broken out into

00:32:24

parts.

00:32:25

But I feel like if he had, see, we rail on books all the time for going into three parts

00:32:30

for this and that and the other thing.

00:32:33

Then we get a book where they don't do that and now I find myself trying to break it into

00:32:38

three parts.

00:32:42

But chapter three, at least my take was that he made a shift in the way he was presenting

00:32:49

things and he went from making the argument for developing range in your thinking to showing

00:33:00

ways to do that or at least telling stories about how it has happened in the past.

00:33:05

I feel like that starts in chapter three when less of the same as more.

00:33:11

In this particular chapter, I did find, I'll put it this way, whenever we shift into these

00:33:19

different tactics, my brain had a tendency to try to, I've got a summarizing brain.

00:33:25

Every time I would go through each of these following chapters, I tried to summarize it

00:33:29

and fit it into the other ways of thinking.

00:33:32

The general summary I came away from was be willing to add dots to your brain to connect

00:33:37

later from a lot of different areas.

00:33:41

That's the very, very broad sense that I came to.

00:33:46

With this particular chapter, when less of the same is more, I really came away from

00:33:50

this thinking about the medical system, with how we develop specialists in a lot of areas.

00:33:58

Because his essential point here, if I grasped it correctly, is that we need to be willing

00:34:05

to step outside our normal domains in order to understand potential new ways of doing

00:34:11

things within our domain.

00:34:14

That's where it's less of the same domain can potentially give you more feedback.

00:34:21

Whenever we look at the specialist way of thinking inside the medical industry, I feel like it's

00:34:27

pretty rare that that specialist is the one who's going to have a breakthrough.

00:34:31

What was the story, Mike?

00:34:33

Was it the coronary heart specialist?

00:34:37

I think this is where this was at, where there's a conference every year where most

00:34:42

of these specialists, I think it was coronary heart disease, whenever those specialists

00:34:48

are in their conference, you have a better chance of having a successful treatment plan

00:34:53

when you have the diagnosis given by somebody who's not the specialist.

00:34:58

Really?

00:34:59

How do I plan that?

00:35:01

You can't.

00:35:03

That's the thinking is you need to be willing to step outside your domain in order to collect

00:35:07

more dots so that you have a more innovative way of coming at things.

00:35:12

I think that that section maybe was chapter five, but it could apply here to, I think.

00:35:25

That's one of the problems with all the stories that he has is that they all tie together

00:35:31

and he's got a very specific arc that he's leading them down.

00:35:35

Depending on which story you remember when you can associate with a different idea, because

00:35:41

basically each one of these stories are used to support a specific idea.

00:35:48

The story that he tells here, or the big one anyways, is the story of the figli del

00:35:52

coro, which was an all-female music group in Venice during the Vol these time, which

00:35:57

was pretty radical because traditionally the instruments that they were playing were

00:36:04

played by men.

00:36:07

Even more radical about this group was that the girls who were comprised of this group

00:36:12

were orphans left to the espadale, I think is how you say it.

00:36:17

It's basically a hospital by their mothers.

00:36:19

They had this drawer in this door and they would put the children in the drawer and then

00:36:27

they would take them into the hospital and care for them.

00:36:30

He mentions in the book that most of these girls that were left here were probably unwanted

00:36:35

children from Venice's prostitution industry and they were saved because they were put

00:36:42

in this drawer instead of ending up like a lot of kids in the canals.

00:36:47

While they were there, they learned to play these instruments.

00:36:50

A lot of them did not have an easy life, obviously.

00:36:54

Many of them were deformed and in fact when they played, they played behind this veil so

00:36:58

people couldn't see their faces.

00:37:01

But they played so well that all of these famous people were like, "I have to meet the

00:37:04

people who are playing behind that veil."

00:37:06

Then when they meet them and they see that they're not the picture of beauty that they

00:37:11

were anticipating based on the music that they were playing, they almost can't believe

00:37:15

it.

00:37:16

But essentially they were like the rock stars of their day.

00:37:19

The other thing that was interesting about this is that all of them, even though some

00:37:22

of them were known as the greatest violinist of their time, they also all played several

00:37:28

different instruments.

00:37:29

They didn't specialize.

00:37:31

Playing multiple instruments goes against everything that we think about getting really

00:37:38

good and deliberate practice, especially in the music category.

00:37:43

I guess that speaks to me because, like I mentioned, I grew up playing violin.

00:37:47

I've been in this world.

00:37:49

Again, I wasn't trying to become a concert violinist or anything, but I've played with

00:37:53

symphonies and orchestras and stuff like that in the past.

00:37:57

And basically I was just like, "No, I don't want to work that hard."

00:38:01

But everybody in that world is like, "Well, you got to pick your instrument and you got

00:38:05

to concentrate on it and you got to do it from a young age."

00:38:08

That's the only way that you're going to get really good.

00:38:12

This whole Pigly Descoran, then some of the other examples that he shares in this chapter

00:38:16

of people who went on to become really great musicians, he uses all of these different examples

00:38:23

of people he would think.

00:38:24

They should have specialized because they're really good and that wasn't their story at

00:38:28

all.

00:38:29

I have to say that I really liked this chapter because of that.

00:38:33

It's like, you don't have to specialize that early.

00:38:38

At the same time, this also encouraged me to have a conversation with my oldest daughter

00:38:44

who has taken one year of piano lessons at this point.

00:38:49

She absolutely adores her piano teacher.

00:38:52

I think that is part of why she is still doing it.

00:38:56

So kudos to her.

00:38:58

But I'm also starting to question, "Should we be introducing other instruments?

00:39:04

Should we be encouraging the singing side of things?

00:39:09

What should we be trying to help her with in that given domain?"

00:39:15

Not necessarily because we're trying to create a master musician out of her, but simply because

00:39:22

I think if she is going to have long-term learning with musical instruments, this chapter prompted

00:39:33

a conversation, at least with myself, about what should that look like?

00:39:38

So I don't have an action item around this, per se, but I at least am thinking through

00:39:45

the future for our kids when it comes to how do they learn specific instruments or in other

00:39:51

domains like in the sciences, how do we make sure they have a lot of experiences around

00:39:55

different types of science, or a whole bunch of different ways of coming at mathematical

00:40:00

models, how do we do that in the long term?

00:40:04

Just seeing this kind of made it okay to not specialize on a specific instrument or

00:40:10

on a specific genre.

00:40:12

And honestly, that's pretty freeing, Mike.

00:40:17

I don't have to try to figure out which of these my kid is really good at and loves doing

00:40:22

and then encourage just that one and focus on that one.

00:40:25

Right.

00:40:26

Let them play, let them go with a whole bunch of different things.

00:40:28

Exactly.

00:40:29

They're going to be way better in the long run anyway.

00:40:31

So if she loves piano, let her keep playing piano.

00:40:34

And when she says, "I'm bored with piano, I want to try something else," let her try

00:40:37

something else.

00:40:38

That's kind of my takeaway from this is not to pigeonhole yourself into one specific thing,

00:40:44

but to recognize that all of these different domains, even if they're different instruments,

00:40:49

maybe it's not easy to translate from one thing to another.

00:40:52

So I grew up playing violin.

00:40:53

I tried to learn piano at one point.

00:40:54

I could never get the left hand to work.

00:40:58

Just wasn't happening.

00:41:00

So the traditional model and really the way that I grew up learning to play an instrument

00:41:07

was this whole idea of deliberate practice focusing on error prevention.

00:41:12

But he makes the point here that many great musicians, what they do is they learn to improvise.

00:41:18

Lots of great musicians don't take the traditional path because they hate those formal lessons.

00:41:24

So if your child or even yourself, if you wanted to pick up the guitar or learn an instrument,

00:41:33

go ahead and do it.

00:41:34

And then if you absolutely hate the traditional way of doing things, look for a different way

00:41:39

to do things.

00:41:40

I wish I had done that growing up.

00:41:42

I grew up classically trained.

00:41:44

And I could play with all these four seasons when I was 10 years old.

00:41:48

But when I was in high school and I met some other people who played instruments and like,

00:41:53

okay, want to come over and we'll jam and I don't know what to do.

00:41:56

Like, where are the notes?

00:41:58

Like, what do I play?

00:42:00

I have no idea.

00:42:01

It's terrifying.

00:42:03

And interestingly, one of the things that they mentioned here is that it is easier for

00:42:07

a jazz player to learn to play classical music than a classical player to learn to play jazz.

00:42:12

I agree with that.

00:42:13

And I think the takeaway for me is to focus on the improvisation piece of it, which I'm

00:42:18

glad that the program we have our kids in that they do focus on that.

00:42:22

They kind of have a dig here on classical players.

00:42:24

They say that jazz players are creative artists.

00:42:27

Classical players are re-creative artists.

00:42:28

Yes.

00:42:29

And had I not been a classical player who definitely fits that description, I probably would have

00:42:34

taken a shoe with that, but it's totally true.

00:42:39

Oh, Mike.

00:42:40

Well, the next chapter here, chapter four, learning fast and slow.

00:42:46

This one kind of messed with me a little bit partially because we're homeschooling and

00:42:51

partially because of my history in school.

00:42:55

And the process here and what is explained is that a lot of our school systems, the way

00:43:04

that we teach our kids in the school systems is through, and I forget the terminology on

00:43:11

what it was, like how they coined the terms, but it had to do with immediate feedback or

00:43:18

reiterating the lessons right away.

00:43:21

Like take, for example, two times two equals four.

00:43:24

Once you learn multiplication, if you had an entire worksheet that had you copying or

00:43:31

going through that exact process, three times three, four times four, and you had a whole

00:43:36

worksheet of that, in the long run, you're more likely to forget that than you are if

00:43:42

you had a worksheet that had multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, algebra,

00:43:48

and you had a whole bunch of different things on that worksheet that were from a lot of

00:43:52

different areas because it's in a lot of different areas, it forces you to slow down and think

00:44:00

through each of those individual aspects and struggle with them, likely get more of them

00:44:07

wrong, but the process of getting wrong answers is what helps the student develop long-term

00:44:15

learning.

00:44:16

So this whole chapter is based around how do you best learn?

00:44:22

Should you be trying to quickly pick up facts and memorize and try to get immediate feedback

00:44:29

from what you've learned?

00:44:31

Or do you try to struggle with things and come up with the wrong answers and figure out why

00:44:37

you got the wrong answers because the slower method develops the longer term results.

00:44:45

Now, there is a set of two podcasts.

00:44:50

I recently listened to these by Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History.

00:44:55

It's about the LSAT, the legal, the lawyer assessment test that all lawyers need to take

00:45:02

in order to get into their law school.

00:45:05

And Malcolm Gladwell did a fascinating job of explaining how standardized tests with

00:45:12

a time limit actually create a lot of problems long-term for deciding who goes to the elite

00:45:20

law schools and who doesn't.

00:45:22

I just want to call that out because if that's that learning process of going fast versus

00:45:27

slow is intriguing to you, go listen to those.

00:45:31

It's very enlightening, if not a little bit disturbing, typical of Gladwell, I suppose.

00:45:38

Yeah, my own version of this, the basic idea here being that students typically ask questions

00:45:45

to find the parameters and the rules and that learning fast and easy ways to solve problems

00:45:49

can be detrimental in the long run.

00:45:53

Mention that many people argue that the reason that US students don't do so well in international

00:45:58

measures is because they do so well in class.

00:46:01

That kind of hit home for me because when I was in high school, I was a very good test

00:46:07

taker.

00:46:09

I think I got a 30 on the ACT.

00:46:12

I didn't take the SAT.

00:46:15

And the highest area that I had on that exam was science.

00:46:21

I really enjoyed biology and did really well in my small high school biology program.

00:46:28

So I'm like, hey, I'm going to be a biology major.

00:46:30

I got to college and realized that I had learned how to ace the exams and I had learned how

00:46:38

to take the tests, but I did not know biology.

00:46:42

It became very evident very quickly.

00:46:45

First year of school, I mean, I was doing some health stuff too, but almost flunked out

00:46:51

and switched my major to business, which was definitely the right move for me personally,

00:46:57

not just because the science program was hard.

00:47:00

I mean, I put in the work.

00:47:01

I remember one Thanksgiving break.

00:47:04

I was in the lab basically from when everybody went home Friday, all day Friday, all day

00:47:11

Saturday, I basically slept in the lab.

00:47:14

And my teacher, he knew I wasn't doing so hot in the class.

00:47:18

He would come in all the time and see me there.

00:47:19

And you could just see he was proud of me for putting in the effort.

00:47:23

He's like, yeah, you're going to do really good.

00:47:24

And I took the exam and failed it.

00:47:26

So I'm like, well, you're doing the right things, but you're just not getting it.

00:47:33

Because I hadn't learned to think that way.

00:47:37

And for whatever reason, business just made more sense to my brain.

00:47:41

That was the right thing at the right point for me.

00:47:44

But I had taken my performance in a specific area and projected that like, yes, this is

00:47:49

the thing for me.

00:47:51

And I look back on it now and I can recognize that I had learned to do things the fast way,

00:47:57

but had I learned to do things the slow way, I'm sure that I would have had a much better

00:48:01

foundation for that.

00:48:02

And it would have been much more manageable for me.

00:48:06

But now you can look back and say like, well, what could have been, you know, I don't really

00:48:11

do that.

00:48:12

I just think as I'm reading this chapter that if you are presented two roads on how to solve

00:48:20

something and you really care about understanding the thing, it's going to come back into your

00:48:27

field of view at some point, don't take the shortcut.

00:48:31

Because there really isn't a shortcut if you try to get things quickly, you're going to

00:48:37

lose them just as quick.

00:48:39

In fact, he mentions a study about people who are trying to learn Spanish.

00:48:43

That's one of my action items from a couple of episodes ago, still rock and duel lingo.

00:48:49

But I'm not the R don't have the R.

00:48:51

I even watched YouTube videos on how to do it.

00:48:54

I can't do it.

00:48:56

The training they said for it was to practice this gurgling sound and it just sounds like

00:49:02

a cat dying.

00:49:03

So I'm not going to do it on air.

00:49:04

All right.

00:49:05

So what is a word where I would have to roll an R?

00:49:07

I don't know if I can do this or not.

00:49:09

Serato.

00:49:10

I can't roll it.

00:49:11

Serato.

00:49:12

Kind of.

00:49:13

Serato.

00:49:14

Yeah.

00:49:15

Serato.

00:49:16

Basically anything where you see two hours, you know, I can't do that.

00:49:18

But you're stealing my point.

00:49:19

Sorry.

00:49:20

That's all right.

00:49:21

My point is that I would do a lingo there is so much stuff in there that you really can't

00:49:29

sit down and be like, I'm going to learn Spanish in 30 days.

00:49:32

Maybe you could if you just like flew to Spain and you were completely immersed in it.

00:49:36

You know, there's been lots of studies and stories of people who have done that sort

00:49:41

of thing and they learn stuff a lot faster.

00:49:43

But I'm just going through it methodically and I'm on to like level two, I guess, of

00:49:50

the seven that are there.

00:49:52

But I'm not just like going through the, you know, the way it's the way it's done, they

00:49:56

have these different checkpoints.

00:49:59

And before each checkpoint, they have all these different categories.

00:50:01

Each of the categories, you have to complete at least the initial level in order to go

00:50:06

on to the next one.

00:50:08

And there are basically five levels for each of these different categories.

00:50:12

And a lot of them are the same basic concepts is repeated over and over and over and over

00:50:16

and over and over and over in different ways.

00:50:19

So you could go through this and be like, okay, I unlocked the next one.

00:50:23

I'm moving on to the next one.

00:50:24

But that's not the approach I'm taking.

00:50:25

I'm basically going for the completion, the dual lingo completionist, where like I answer

00:50:30

every single question that they have in here before I move on to the next one.

00:50:34

So it's taking me a while.

00:50:36

I'm putting in a lot of effort, but already I can tell that this is giving me a foundation

00:50:41

where I actually understand this stuff as opposed to just passing the test like I did in high

00:50:46

school and now finding myself in a situation where like, I don't remember a word of Spanish.

00:50:50

You know, I have to start over.

00:50:51

So I am starting over, but I'm not looking for the shortcut.

00:50:55

Nice.

00:50:57

Let's move on to because we got a number of chapters to roll through here.

00:51:01

Chapter five, thinking outside experience.

00:51:03

I think I introduced this one for chapter three, unless the same as more and got back.

00:51:09

Well, you use the medical example.

00:51:10

And I think this is where that comes from because they talk about the medical problem

00:51:14

that's proposed by Carl Dunker in this chapter.

00:51:18

It could be that they talked about the cardiologist conference in that previous chapter

00:51:23

too, but main point here being that they have this test, which is to the patient has

00:51:31

a tumor that can be destroyed by a ray, but the ray will harm the healthy tissue too.

00:51:35

At lower intensity, it won't affect either the tumor or the healthy tissue.

00:51:40

How do you save the patient?

00:51:42

And the vast majority of people...

00:51:45

Real quick.

00:51:46

Real quick.

00:51:47

Did you figure this out before you saw the answer?

00:51:48

Well, I did after I started reading the other stories.

00:51:50

So I couldn't figure it out the first time.

00:51:53

And then he shares another story, totally different domain about a general who's trying

00:51:58

to capture the city.

00:51:59

And he can do it if he gets all his troops there at the same time.

00:52:02

There's several roads that lead there, kind of like a wagon wheel, but mines on the road

00:52:06

mean that only a few soldiers can travel safely at a time.

00:52:09

So as soon as he said, there's several roads that lead there like a wagon wheel, I kind

00:52:13

of got the picture of, oh, you could do that with the ray too.

00:52:17

But without that second story, I wouldn't have got it.

00:52:19

And then he tells a third story about a fire chief who is trying to put out this fire.

00:52:25

All the townspeople are throwing buckets of water on this thing.

00:52:27

He tells everybody to stop, fill their bucket with water, and everybody throw it at the

00:52:30

same time.

00:52:31

And then that's how they're able to extinguish the fire.

00:52:34

So the point he's making is that you can combine these different stories and you can

00:52:39

very easily get led to the answer of, well, just get multiple rays, dial down the intensity,

00:52:44

shoot them from different directions.

00:52:46

And the healthy tissue all around the tumor, which is in the stomach, I believe is going

00:52:50

to, or the heart wherever, like that's going to take out the tumor, but it's not going

00:52:56

to impact the tissue around it.

00:52:59

And I thought that was a really cool exercise.

00:53:02

And the, I see a lot of parallels to what we do with bookworm with this, where we read

00:53:08

all these different books, we get all these different perspectives, even the ones that

00:53:10

we totally hate, we completely disagree with them.

00:53:12

Looking at you, Amanda Palmer, like, it gives you a little bit, it gives you a little bit

00:53:18

more of a complete picture.

00:53:21

And then you can draw things from those.

00:53:23

When you read those books, you may not even realize that you're going to find something

00:53:26

of value there, six months, six years down the road.

00:53:30

But you now have that as a dot that you can connect, and you're building out your mental

00:53:35

toolbox, basically.

00:53:37

Yeah.

00:53:38

This is the chapter where they get into analogical thinking.

00:53:41

That's what I was trying to think of earlier and failed, but it's where you're using experience

00:53:46

and knowledge from another domain and using the analogy of how things work on that other

00:53:51

domain in order to inform your current domain that you're working on.

00:53:56

That whole process is one that I feel like bookworm has been exceptionally good at helping

00:54:04

us develop that mic, because how many different genres have...

00:54:08

I mean, we kid sometimes that we focus on business and self-help, but it's crazy how

00:54:13

many different genres are within that.

00:54:15

Yeah.

00:54:16

From goal setting to handling technology to productivity to setting missions, all of these

00:54:24

different areas, minimalism.

00:54:26

We're all over the place.

00:54:28

And over time, you start to catch those mental models, for lack of a better term, and you

00:54:36

can apply them to other areas.

00:54:38

Yep.

00:54:39

Just my own thinking, like over time, I feel like we've been able to apply more and more

00:54:43

of that.

00:54:44

Maybe that's why we have the jokes about the Amanda Palmer book.

00:54:47

We have that sort of thing, because we've got those analogies from other areas that we

00:54:51

can apply to the current.

00:54:54

I don't know.

00:54:55

I see it in a lot of my daily life that I've had much different...

00:55:02

Much different perspectives on things than I used to, even though I couldn't necessarily

00:55:07

tell you that this one book helped me think differently.

00:55:11

It has more to do with the variety of books that we've gone through have helped to develop

00:55:17

that way of thinking.

00:55:20

So I guess that's an encouragement to anyone who's listening to this that doesn't read,

00:55:24

just start reading.

00:55:25

Maybe that should be our creed for people who listen to this.

00:55:29

Just start reading.

00:55:31

Yep.

00:55:32

Yeah, it's a cumulative effect.

00:55:35

And the diversity of the perspectives is really where the magic is, but it requires the right

00:55:41

perspective too, because it's easy to read a bunch of stuff and develop a bunch of skill

00:55:48

and proficiency in a specific area and think that you've got it all figured out.

00:55:52

And then so when someone comes and says something, maybe in an inelegant way and challenges that

00:55:57

idea, it's easy to dismiss it because of all, I know all this stuff in this particular domain.

00:56:03

And if you do that, then you're losing the value of the inside view versus the outside

00:56:08

view that he talks about here.

00:56:10

And he mentions the inside view, that's dangerous because the more details that you know about

00:56:14

your scenario, the more likely you are to say it will occur.

00:56:17

That's why he says that 90% of major infrastructure projects go over budget because the more details

00:56:24

you know, the more overconfident you get, which I thought was a really interesting observation.

00:56:29

Right.

00:56:30

We learned about that in Scrum and he just attributes it to the waterfall method.

00:56:33

But I think that this definitely is a piece of it too, where you are studying this thing

00:56:40

and you think that you've identified every possible scenario, everything that can go

00:56:44

wrong and you're like, oh, well, that's not that big a deal.

00:56:47

We can work around that.

00:56:48

But then when you get out there, like you realize what you didn't know at the at the time, my

00:56:54

parents are going through this right now.

00:56:56

They're having their place in Door County being worked on.

00:56:59

And it's been like one mishap after another.

00:57:02

And the builder was there this week and told him, like, I'm really sorry that there's so

00:57:06

much trouble with this.

00:57:07

He's like, everything that could go wrong has gone wrong.

00:57:10

He's going to make it the point like, well, we're out of the woods now.

00:57:12

You're like, well, I'm not so sure.

00:57:14

Yeah.

00:57:15

There's more stuff that could go wrong.

00:57:17

We're sure of it.

00:57:18

You know, I don't buy that.

00:57:21

Yeah.

00:57:23

You don't know what you don't know.

00:57:24

The next chapter here is chapter six, the trouble with too much grit.

00:57:29

I like this one.

00:57:30

I do too.

00:57:31

And he brings out Angela Duckworth who wrote the book, grit.

00:57:35

Yep.

00:57:36

I really enjoyed him working through her process and some of her learnings after having written

00:57:47

or gone through all the research process for it.

00:57:51

But the general principle here is that if you have so much grit that you are so focused

00:57:57

on your current project and can't step away from it in order to gain broader thinking,

00:58:04

the chances are it's going to take you longer to get the thing done if you get it done at

00:58:08

all.

00:58:10

And I love that.

00:58:13

It gives me license to do new stuff and try to step away from it.

00:58:18

But he does bring out some of even Angela Duckworth's issues with what has happened

00:58:26

as a result of her research.

00:58:28

Yes.

00:58:29

So it has gotten to be such a big indicator, like the tests that show grit and people who

00:58:38

see how grit scores are indicators for other success in different areas.

00:58:47

And part of her process was to show that single scores don't have that big of like they have

00:58:55

troubles with having pure accuracy whenever you use a single score for things.

00:59:00

And that's exactly what people are doing with her own tests.

00:59:03

So even she has issues with the way people are interpreting her own research.

00:59:10

So yeah, people take it too far basically.

00:59:12

Yeah.

00:59:13

It's a good idea.

00:59:14

There's truth there.

00:59:16

But if you take it to the extreme, then it can be counterproductive.

00:59:21

Jocko Willink, one of the guys who wrote Extreme Ownership, he has a podcast and I heard him

00:59:26

talk about how they publish Extreme Ownership.

00:59:28

And the last chapter of Extreme Ownership is the dichotomy of leadership.

00:59:32

And he mentioned that people basically ignored that chapter and owned the idea of Extreme

00:59:38

Ownership.

00:59:39

And they would go to these businesses and they would be working with these CEOs.

00:59:41

And they said, I'm doing everything that you said to do.

00:59:43

I'm taking Extreme Ownership, but their company is dysfunctional.

00:59:46

And Jocko was like, well, yeah, but you're not letting your people do it.

00:59:49

You've got to have a balance there.

00:59:52

And I kind of feel like that's the same situation with grit here because grit can help you stick

00:59:58

with your initial decision when actually that could be a detriment in finding what he defines

01:00:04

in this book as match quality.

01:00:06

Tells the story of the West Point cadets and basically people were joining, graduating,

01:00:13

going through all the tough stuff, hanging out as long as they needed to to get all the

01:00:17

benefits and then leaving.

01:00:19

And that really wasn't the point.

01:00:20

Like they wanted to groom people to be career cadets, you know, be in the military, have

01:00:26

a military career.

01:00:28

And they've invested so many in these people, how do they get them to stick?

01:00:32

And there were lots of different ways that they were trying to do that.

01:00:35

But basically what David Epstein is arguing here is that by forcing people to make a decision

01:00:40

at such a young age, you're forcing them to develop this grit and to stick with this thing.

01:00:46

And then eventually they're going to get to a point where they're wondering what else

01:00:51

is out there.

01:00:52

And at that point, they're going to go try some different stuff and they're going to

01:00:55

switch and they're going to find something that really works for them.

01:00:59

And that's kind of the same model with the education system.

01:01:02

You know, you go to a college and you declare a major and at 18, you have no idea what you

01:01:09

want to do.

01:01:10

Right?

01:01:11

Right?

01:01:12

And you're going to invest $50,000 a year in some of these private schools to find out

01:01:18

what you want to do.

01:01:19

Like, we'll just put a pin in that for now.

01:01:23

But the argument that he makes here is that switch is a really winner.

01:01:26

He quotes Seth Godin.

01:01:27

He says, "We fail when we stick with tasks that we didn't have the guts to quit."

01:01:33

And I think that's really true.

01:01:34

I, my own kind of career path is a little bit weird and I've kind of stumbled into this

01:01:40

thing, writing, podcasting, screencasting, just in the last couple of years.

01:01:44

I mean, if you would have told me at 18, okay, you got to pick your career and you

01:01:47

got to stick with it for the rest of your life.

01:01:48

Like, there's no way I would have picked this.

01:01:51

I was terrified to talk into a microphone the first time that I did it.

01:01:54

Yeah.

01:01:55

And so you do have to have like the broad range of experiences to try a bunch of things.

01:02:00

And I, you know, if you pick something and you make a commitment, you have an emphasis

01:02:04

on grit, I can totally see a situation where you stick with things too long.

01:02:08

That's really what he's arguing against.

01:02:09

Right.

01:02:10

Right.

01:02:11

I don't think I have this problem, to be honest.

01:02:14

I have it.

01:02:15

I don't think you do either.

01:02:16

No, I think I just, oh, that's getting really difficult to deal with.

01:02:21

I'm going to step away for a little bit and see what I learn and then come back to it.

01:02:24

I do have that problem.

01:02:26

I'm looking at it too long.

01:02:28

And loyal to a fault my wife has described it as, yeah, where if I say I'm going to do

01:02:34

something, I'm going to do something and I'm going to stick with that thing.

01:02:38

Even if, you know, the expectations have passed, you know, it's kind of like, I said, I was

01:02:42

going to do this.

01:02:43

I'm going to continue to do this.

01:02:45

It's my natural tendency anyways.

01:02:47

I've gotten better at saying no to things over the last couple of years.

01:02:51

But actually Bookworm has been a big help with that.

01:02:53

The boundaries book that we covered, you know, stuff like that has been really instrumental

01:02:57

in me getting to that point.

01:02:58

But that is still something that I have to fight against.

01:03:01

Sure.

01:03:02

Well, let's move on.

01:03:03

Chapter seven, flirting with your possible selves.

01:03:06

This one I felt like the chapter title explained it really, really well.

01:03:10

It did.

01:03:11

Play around with different, I don't want to say different personalities, but different

01:03:15

lifestyles, I guess, to determine which ones you like and which ones you do not like.

01:03:21

And in the process, you'll learn how things work in different areas that you can then

01:03:25

use as dots to connect in different domains.

01:03:28

Yep.

01:03:29

There's a really fast summary.

01:03:30

Yeah.

01:03:31

The coolest story in the whole book, I think, comes from this chapter with Francis Hesselbein,

01:03:38

who got involved with Girl Scouts and champion diversity.

01:03:42

She never really wanted to, but she kind of found herself working up the ranks.

01:03:46

And at one point, Peter Drucker called her the best CEO in America.

01:03:50

It's quite an accolade.

01:03:52

Yeah, no kidding.

01:03:53

She said that I did not intend to become a leader.

01:03:57

I just learned by doing what was needed at the time.

01:04:00

I feel like that is a really great summary of an awesome approach to life.

01:04:07

Just figuring out what needs to be done next and not basing it off of what you've done in

01:04:12

the past, being willing to try something totally different, totally new just because the need

01:04:16

is there.

01:04:17

And you have the, not even maybe the knowledge of the ability at the moment that you step

01:04:21

out to try to fix it, but at least the willingness to try.

01:04:26

And who knows where that's going to take you.

01:04:29

Yeah, I feel like this chapter was one that, this is one of them that I resonated with

01:04:35

a lot because I've had a number of job and career shifts in my working experience.

01:04:46

And none of them have, like none of those changes have really been by design or by intention.

01:04:55

They've all been, well, at this particular point in time, this makes the most sense.

01:05:02

So what do I do now?

01:05:03

What do I do now?

01:05:04

Yeah.

01:05:05

And you make that move.

01:05:07

Every single one of them has operated that way.

01:05:10

And I cannot tell you, like there is no way that I could have put together the plan of

01:05:16

work experience that I now have.

01:05:19

Like it's just very much a go with what works at that time and suits my interest at that

01:05:26

time, which sounds terrible.

01:05:28

I, you're doing it right.

01:05:31

I mean, he says basically test and learn, not plan and implement first act and then think.

01:05:36

I think that summarizes what you're talking about a lot, but it's not a bad thing.

01:05:40

I like it.

01:05:42

So he's justifying my jumping around.

01:05:45

And I like that.

01:05:46

He's, he's stroking my ego there.

01:05:48

Thank you.

01:05:49

But he also mentions that instead of asking if someone is gritty to follow up with that

01:05:56

chapter that we just closed up, we should be asking where they are gritty because you

01:06:02

may have grit in one arena, but not in another.

01:06:05

He shares his story, I think, in this particular area of how he had grit on the track.

01:06:11

He ran track and basically was terrible at the beginning and then set a bunch of school

01:06:15

records, but not in the classroom.

01:06:18

So that's why just a measure of grit is not a great measure of future leadership.

01:06:23

You basically, if you assume that grit is always a good thing, even if you do that, you

01:06:30

can't just measure it overall.

01:06:31

You have to measure it by a specific domain, which is why you need to evaluate all the

01:06:37

options and with your possible selves.

01:06:39

Sure.

01:06:40

Uh, chapter eight, the outsider advantage.

01:06:43

I felt like this was very similar to chapter five, thinking outside experience, but he's,

01:06:51

I think he's taking it one step further in this specific chapter.

01:06:57

So the outsider advantage being someone who's not even tangentially related to a given problem.

01:07:06

Like if there's a chemistry problem, you're talking about someone who has zero science

01:07:13

background whatsoever, say they're, they're a writer and they're not connected to that

01:07:19

world at all, but that person doesn't have the expectations and rules and thinking patterns

01:07:27

that people have within the science community.

01:07:30

So they're, they have a chance, a greater advantage in thinking outside the box and being able

01:07:38

to develop a theory for solving the problem that's within the box because they don't know

01:07:44

the unspoken norms and the subtleties that go with different potential solutions.

01:07:50

So if you don't live in a given domain and there's a problem within that domain, it doesn't

01:07:56

mean you can't tackle it, it just means that other people may not understand your solution

01:08:03

right away and you may have a lot of explaining to do as a couple of the people in this chapter

01:08:08

had to do.

01:08:09

So if you're an outsider, it is your advantage.

01:08:13

But that's where the value lies.

01:08:14

Right.

01:08:15

He mentions the Einstein's the lung effect.

01:08:18

I think that's how you say it, which is the tendency for problem solvers to only employ

01:08:22

familiar methods, even if better ones are available.

01:08:25

And some of the stories that he mentions is like through this company, Inocentive, I think

01:08:29

it was Eli Lilly, they were trying to find a solution to a problem that they were going

01:08:35

to post on their, their website.

01:08:36

And at first everybody in the company was like, that's crazy.

01:08:39

We can't share that stuff.

01:08:40

And he's like, well, we're not going anywhere with this right now.

01:08:43

We may as well just give it a shot.

01:08:44

And it was like a lawyer, a dentist.

01:08:48

I forget somebody totally outside the domain that found a solution that ended up working

01:08:54

for them.

01:08:55

And he mentions that those big innovations usually come from those people that are outside

01:08:59

the domain.

01:09:00

So not only if you are outside the domain, do you have some explaining to do maybe, but

01:09:06

if you're inside a domain and you're stuck, that's really a cue to start looking outside

01:09:13

and to not just write off everybody who's not in the pharmaceutical industry as being

01:09:17

crazy whenever they, they share something.

01:09:21

It depends a lot.

01:09:22

I think on how you state the problem that you're trying to solve to, in fact, back in

01:09:25

chapter five, he mentions by John, a quote by John Dewey, it says, a problem well put

01:09:30

is half solved.

01:09:31

I really like that.

01:09:32

I love that quote.

01:09:33

Yeah.

01:09:34

I personally believe that a lot of the problems that we try to solve are much easier to solve

01:09:45

simply when we ask the right questions, which is kind of the whole basis of my personal

01:09:51

retreat stuff is just getting away, asking the right questions and giving my brain enough

01:09:57

time to kind of unravel those things for myself.

01:10:01

In that essence, the personal retreat scenario, almost just giving your brain time to think

01:10:07

through things that kind of is an outside perspective, right?

01:10:11

Because you're just so stuck in the day to day, but I can totally see if you're in a

01:10:15

particular domain too, and you are stuck with a problem, then that can help to solicit

01:10:23

ideas from outside your area of expertise as well.

01:10:28

For sure.

01:10:30

Chapter nine, lateral thinking with withered technology.

01:10:36

I have to say that I really, really enjoyed this chapter.

01:10:39

Great.

01:10:40

Great chapter.

01:10:41

Which is probably to be expected given some of the stories.

01:10:46

The main one being the story about Nintendo.

01:10:51

Yes.

01:10:52

And how the one particularly that stands out to me is the Nintendo Wii, how it took the

01:11:01

world by storm, I would say, and a lot of people had those game consoles.

01:11:09

But nobody saw it coming because it was underpowered.

01:11:12

Yeah.

01:11:13

Yeah, absolutely.

01:11:14

It was a lightweight game console.

01:11:17

It didn't do anything super complex.

01:11:20

The technology in it was normal at best.

01:11:25

And yet the design and the way it was delivered and what it was able to do got everybody excited.

01:11:34

And you still see these things being played.

01:11:39

And all of that came from being willing to not necessarily try to develop a brand new

01:11:46

technology but use what was out there and reinterpret it in a different way.

01:11:51

Re-negotiate the way that you would normally use that technology.

01:11:55

Like there's a lot of potential value if you can get an idea outside of the way people

01:12:02

normally think.

01:12:03

I think that's the main concept that you're trying to relay here.

01:12:08

Yep.

01:12:09

He mentions the Game Boy 2 which that was an interesting example because the Game Boy

01:12:13

was a huge success.

01:12:15

It sold 12 million units.

01:12:18

And I'm not sure if you remember the Game Boy or not but it wasn't the best system.

01:12:24

There was specifically I think the Sega Game Gear which was a full color screen.

01:12:31

It sounded a lot better if I remember right because there were a couple speakers instead

01:12:34

of one.

01:12:36

And it was backlit so you could play it at night in a car for example.

01:12:43

Like the Game Boy had a whole bunch of things that were working against it yet that was

01:12:47

the one that was super popular.

01:12:49

And it's interesting because you mentioned the Wii that was the next iteration of this.

01:12:53

I would argue the Switch is the same thing.

01:12:56

Compared to the modern PlayStation or Xbox the Switch is completely underpowered but it's

01:13:01

insanely successful in large part because they've figured out different ways to innovate

01:13:07

where it's a hybrid system.

01:13:08

You can pull it out.

01:13:09

You can play it and bring it with you on an airplane or whatever.

01:13:11

You can hook it up to your TV.

01:13:14

And that's not the only thing that is selling the Switch system but it is one of those things

01:13:21

I think.

01:13:22

And it's really interesting this whole story of how it really ties back to this one guy

01:13:27

who joined Nintendo back in the day when they were a small company in Kyoto that sold playing

01:13:33

cards.

01:13:34

Yup.

01:13:35

You know.

01:13:36

And how this guy was just a tinkerer basically and the CEO was just like yeah just keep trying

01:13:42

to innovate stuff in different ways and that led to all of these different things that

01:13:46

Nintendo is really the company that you think of now when you think of video games at least

01:13:50

if you have any sort of perspective in terms of video game history like Nintendo is the

01:13:56

company.

01:13:57

Right.

01:13:58

Maybe not right now immediately.

01:14:00

Maybe our kids don't think of Nintendo that way but you and I probably do.

01:14:05

And it was never because they had this secret thing that no one else could duplicate.

01:14:11

Everybody kept trying to do stuff better and they kept selling the thing that was working.

01:14:16

Right.

01:14:17

Right.

01:14:18

It's kind of funny.

01:14:19

I would say that the Nintendo has been like their whole realm of consoles.

01:14:25

They're just very good about thinking through the way people want to play those games.

01:14:33

And the hardware that they put together for that is always incredibly simple.

01:14:40

But I think it's always been meticulously designed.

01:14:43

Yup.

01:14:44

In a way that makes it extremely fun to play.

01:14:48

What I think is their advantage.

01:14:50

But you're right.

01:14:51

Almost every device they've come out with has been been with underpowered underwhelming

01:14:59

technology.

01:15:00

Yeah.

01:15:01

Well, another example of this by the way, I'll put this in the chat here as well.

01:15:08

You're familiar with panic.

01:15:10

So there's this company panic that makes software for the Mac and they decided they're

01:15:16

going to make this completely underpowered retro style gaming thing that they can't

01:15:21

make enough of them yet.

01:15:24

And it's two colors.

01:15:26

It's a simple LCD screen with like this crank on the side.

01:15:30

It's goofy looking.

01:15:32

And if you look at this, you're like, why would anybody want to play this?

01:15:36

But they've, there's so much interest in this thing.

01:15:39

It's the Game Boy all over again.

01:15:41

I holy cow.

01:15:43

Okay, so I click on this link play.date.

01:15:48

That image at the top, you can, it's like a full 360 viewer.

01:15:53

Yup.

01:15:54

That's okay.

01:15:55

The web developer and me just geeked out a little bit.

01:15:57

I.

01:15:58

Yeah.

01:15:59

And it's a D pad, two buttons and then this weird crank on the side and a two color LCD

01:16:04

screen.

01:16:05

Everything about it looks like from a technical perspective that it would be a complete failure

01:16:10

because everybody's got a smartphone in their pocket that can play games much more powerful

01:16:14

than what is going to be available on this thing.

01:16:17

But people are falling all over themselves to get this.

01:16:20

This thing is nuts.

01:16:22

I like this thing a lot.

01:16:24

150 bucks.

01:16:26

It will ship in early 2020.

01:16:28

Yep.

01:16:29

Huh.

01:16:30

There's a good episode of the talk show, by the way, where John Gruber interviews the

01:16:34

guys who made this.

01:16:37

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

01:16:40

All right.

01:16:42

We should probably move on though.

01:16:43

We got three more chapters.

01:16:44

Okay.

01:16:45

So chapter 10, fooled by expertise.

01:16:52

This is the basic idea here being that you can know a bunch of stuff about a specific

01:17:00

area or domain and think that because you know all these facts that you will be able

01:17:06

to tell the future no matter even if it's very narrowly defined and you would in fact

01:17:13

be very wrong.

01:17:14

You would be a terrible horrific forecaster.

01:17:17

That's a good way to put it.

01:17:19

Because that's what experts do.

01:17:22

There's people who become entrenched in this single big idea even when they're presented

01:17:28

with facts to the contrary.

01:17:30

And then there are people like this every day on TV, for example, that make matters worse.

01:17:37

They continue to make these terrible predictions and they continue to declare victory.

01:17:43

He says that there's a perverse inverse relationship between fame and accuracy when it comes to

01:17:49

forecasting or how much of an expert you're, how much of an expert someone is supposed

01:17:55

to be that basically means if they're telling you the way things are going to be that you

01:17:59

should probably run in the other direction.

01:18:01

Just like you know, weather forecasters?

01:18:03

I wasn't going to go there, but yeah, I guess.

01:18:08

I feel like the weather forecasts I look at are rarely correct anymore.

01:18:12

I mean, they're pretty close, but I feel like they've gotten worse with time.

01:18:16

Maybe that's just my perception.

01:18:18

That's probably a little bit different because you get least of a map that you can look at.

01:18:21

It's true.

01:18:22

But I couldn't help making that connection.

01:18:24

Sure, sure.

01:18:25

He basically says there's two different types of people in here.

01:18:29

There's foxes and hedgehogs.

01:18:31

Foxes are integrators who know many little things and hedgehogs have a, are narrow view

01:18:35

experts who know one big thing and that the best teams exhibit this active open mindedness

01:18:41

and basically that the foxes way of approaching things is better.

01:18:46

Yeah.

01:18:47

I do think the more times we see experts making predictions, it's, it's really important to

01:18:56

know like what their background is.

01:18:58

I think especially based on this chapter, if they have lived and breathed a very specific

01:19:06

specialty their entire working career, they're less likely to be accurate in their predictions.

01:19:13

They're forecasting like that's, you know, that's, that's ultimately what's

01:19:17

I think what he's getting at here.

01:19:20

But if they have a little bit more of a broad background and they're willing to look outside

01:19:27

their current like using that whole bias we talked about earlier with, if it's your own

01:19:32

internal project, if you're willing to make the comparison to external scenarios that are

01:19:38

very, very similar, you're more accurate with your forecasting.

01:19:43

Sure.

01:19:44

But I feel like not many experts in the, at least that make public predictions, that's

01:19:51

pretty uncommon, I think.

01:19:54

That's kind of my just guess though.

01:19:56

I think the application of this really is don't get so set in your ways and be willing

01:20:02

to be wrong.

01:20:03

Sure.

01:20:04

He mentions, and I totally agree with this, most people aren't searching Google for information

01:20:09

to confirm that they're wrong.

01:20:11

They're searching Google and Facebook and all the other places to find things that are

01:20:17

going to support their firmly held belief.

01:20:21

In fact, he says that one study showed that two thirds of the people surveyed would not

01:20:26

hear counter arguments to their position, even if they were being paid to do so.

01:20:33

I just think that that's really sad.

01:20:36

And I don't want to be that type of person.

01:20:39

I want to have, how does it put strong convictions lightly held?

01:20:44

Yep.

01:20:45

Something like that.

01:20:46

Basic idea being like, stand for something, but don't think that you've all got it.

01:20:51

You've got it all figured out and be willing to admit that you're wrong.

01:20:54

I think they could go a long way.

01:20:56

If you're always willing to admit that you're wrong, you know, you're in better shape overall.

01:21:02

Yep.

01:21:03

Chapter 11, learning to drop your familiar tools, ignoring the chapter itself and just

01:21:10

looking at the title, I could not help but think about dropping all of my productivity

01:21:16

tools, Mike.

01:21:18

I could not separate that until I got into...

01:21:22

Well, you already dropped mail notes.

01:21:24

I didn't drop it.

01:21:25

I still use it.

01:21:27

But I could not help but make that correlation.

01:21:32

Yeah.

01:21:33

Well, the story behind this is the firefighters who battle the big, the National Park fires,

01:21:43

the really big wild fires and how they can be working really hard and have it contained

01:21:50

and then in a moment lose control of the thing.

01:21:54

And they tell stories of how one specific example, I think it was in 1994, they were

01:21:59

fighting a fire and all of a sudden it like leaped a river or something and it was advancing

01:22:06

at 11 feet per second, which is insane to think about how fast that is moving.

01:22:11

It's scary to be honest.

01:22:12

And at that point, you're like, "Oh man, I got to get out of here."

01:22:17

And the thing that they would tell people to do would be to drop your tools and run.

01:22:25

And he looked at a bunch of different stories like that and the people who didn't make

01:22:29

it basically, they continued to hold their tools even though they were told, "Put the

01:22:34

stuff down.

01:22:35

Put your chainsaw down and just book it for the exit."

01:22:38

You know how they were so ingrained mentally to hang on to their tools because that's the

01:22:45

thing that they could control.

01:22:48

Essentially putting down your tools is an admission that things are outside of your control.

01:22:55

And I can understand that conceptually.

01:22:59

I think, I'd like to think that if I'm in that situation, I would be able to say, "No,

01:23:04

I'm going to preserve myself, not my tools."

01:23:09

But I don't know, people who study me closely could probably point to several examples of

01:23:14

how I refuse to do that.

01:23:16

Yeah.

01:23:17

I don't know.

01:23:18

And the different other stories that tie into that, like the Challenger explosion, they

01:23:24

basically knew enough to understand that that was going to happen.

01:23:29

But because they have this whole mantra built on data and they even talk about the sign

01:23:34

hanging in a mission control, that something like, "In God, we trust all those bring data

01:23:41

or something like that."

01:23:42

So there's obviously this big emphasis on data.

01:23:44

And when somebody says, "I just don't feel right about this thing," and they say, "Well,

01:23:48

where's the data?"

01:23:49

And I don't have any to support it.

01:23:50

It's very easy to just sweep that under the rug.

01:23:52

And then after the fact, say, "Oh, shoot, I guess I should have said something."

01:23:56

Right.

01:23:57

I think this does come out in a lot of different areas.

01:24:03

I run into this quite a bit with setting up sound for bands and such because I have my

01:24:12

own preferences with microphones and the way I set things up and how I position things

01:24:18

like monitors and things on stage.

01:24:21

I just have my own way of doing things.

01:24:24

Most sound people who do this on a regular basis, you understand what I'm talking about.

01:24:28

You want the microphone positioned in a very specific way in comparison to that monitor

01:24:32

on the floor.

01:24:35

But sometimes those norms need to be broken and the way that I do things is going to be

01:24:43

different than somebody else who's involved with it as well.

01:24:47

And it's very hard for me to let go of the standards that I have held and be willing

01:24:53

to do something different.

01:24:56

And I think that's ultimately the lesson that needs to be.

01:24:59

I don't know if I have an action item from that mic, but there is a lot of value in

01:25:05

learning to not even necessarily your tools, but just being willing to drop a given structure

01:25:14

or a set of norms when it's actually inhibiting potential growth.

01:25:21

If you follow me there.

01:25:22

Yeah.

01:25:23

I guess the thing is you don't really know sometimes if it's inhibiting potential growth.

01:25:28

Right.

01:25:29

Right.

01:25:30

A lot of the stories, the space stories that they shared like Gravity Pro B, for example,

01:25:35

they found what they believe to be a non-critical error, but they knew that delaying launch

01:25:40

again could jeopardize the entire program.

01:25:42

So at that point, there's a lot of pressure to keep moving forward with things.

01:25:47

Do you have enough guts to say, I have this feeling that this is the right thing to do,

01:25:52

and I'm willing to dig in my heels and fight for this.

01:25:54

Right.

01:25:55

Right.

01:25:56

That's a case-by-case scenario I think for me, and I'd like to think that I could do

01:26:01

that, but I'm not so sure.

01:26:03

I tend to be the analytical person who's like, well, let's study all of the numbers and crunch

01:26:08

everything and see where it ends up.

01:26:10

What are the possible scenarios here?

01:26:13

And sometimes you do just have to go with your gut.

01:26:18

I think that probably pertains to the firefighting too.

01:26:21

I mean, maybe I've never been a firefighter, so I don't know this, but there probably is

01:26:27

a gray zone between whether you feel like you are in control of the fire or not in control

01:26:32

of the fire.

01:26:34

And if you've got a tiny little window to drop your tools and get out of there, if you're

01:26:37

going to make it, I could totally see how you could miss that because you're still trying

01:26:44

to enforce your will on the outcome as opposed to being willing to just chuck it because you've

01:26:52

got this premonition that things are going awry.

01:26:56

Yeah.

01:26:57

I think I have a tendency to not want to let go of my tools.

01:27:03

You could make this correlation with productivity as well.

01:27:07

So it's less of a thing across the entire sector because how many times do people want

01:27:15

to try a new task management system and they go jump on board just because it's new and

01:27:19

shiny.

01:27:20

So I think that particular scenario is a little bit opposite, but I obviously like I

01:27:25

have my own tools that are probably not well suited for the tasks that I'm doing, but I

01:27:33

don't let go of them because I know that they work and they do a good job and I like how

01:27:38

they work.

01:27:39

But every once in a while, I'll run across.

01:27:43

When I ran across more recently was like if you do screencasting, whether it's internal

01:27:48

or external in any form, the general recommendation for video editing in that space is screen

01:27:54

flow.

01:27:56

It's pretty, pretty common.

01:27:59

Given the work I do at our church, I work with Adobe Premiere Pro quite a bit and there are

01:28:06

some things that Premiere Pro does and does extremely well that screen flow can't touch.

01:28:13

And sometimes I have to be willing to say no to screen flow and go use Premiere Pro and

01:28:20

vice versa, but knowing when to drop which tool to do the task, that's not simple.

01:28:27

That's the hard part.

01:28:28

Right.

01:28:29

Yeah.

01:28:30

Although I would argue you should always go with screen flow.

01:28:36

Yep.

01:28:37

Coming from the screen flow master, I get it.

01:28:42

Anyways, chapter 12, deliberate amateurs.

01:28:47

The definition of the word amateur he shares in this chapter, which I thought was really

01:28:50

interesting because amateur you tend to think is like somebody who wanted to be a professional

01:28:56

but couldn't quite make it.

01:28:58

Right.

01:28:59

Right.

01:29:00

They're on the path to professional.

01:29:01

Yeah.

01:29:02

But amateur actually comes from the Latin word for a person who adores a particular endeavor.

01:29:07

I really like that.

01:29:08

And the basic idea being here that you should embrace your amateur status and just really

01:29:13

sink your teeth into all the different domains, all the different experiences that you can

01:29:18

collect, all the different things that you can try, all the different experiences that

01:29:25

you can have because even if you try something and you find that that wasn't something I

01:29:31

enjoyed, case in point, Amanda Palmer's book.

01:29:36

There is value in that thing being added to the sum of all of your experiences and being

01:29:41

able to connect all the pieces in a different way which eventually you connect enough of

01:29:46

those things.

01:29:47

You collect enough of those things.

01:29:48

You can connect them in the way that really is the thing that's going to help you find

01:29:53

your niche, reach your full potential.

01:29:58

And I use an example here of the US Securities and Exchange Commission and how they say that

01:30:05

specialization actually was a big factor in the 2008 global financial crisis because

01:30:11

you had the bank regulators regulating the banks, securities regulators regulating the

01:30:16

securities, the consumer regulators regulating the consumers, and the insurance regulators

01:30:22

regulating the insurance but provision of credit actually went across all of these markets.

01:30:27

And if they would have had somebody who dabbled in all of them, they probably could have seen

01:30:32

that like, "Oh, this one's not doing great.

01:30:33

This one's not doing great.

01:30:34

This one's not doing great.

01:30:35

Oh boy, we're in trouble."

01:30:37

Prior to just everything coming to a head and then we're in this global financial crisis.

01:30:44

I don't know enough about the financial market to say whether that's true or not but it

01:30:48

made sense to me and he also compares the medical training that people typically receive to

01:30:53

medieval guilds which produce specialized skills and trades that were protected and they tend

01:30:58

to foster conservatism and stifle innovation because this is the way we do things.

01:31:04

This is the way that we've always done things.

01:31:06

And again, not a doctor, not in that world but made sense to me when he described it.

01:31:10

I think my main takeaway from this particular section and I don't like this wasn't one

01:31:17

that really jumped out at me in any way.

01:31:19

So I don't have a lot on this one but the main takeaway I had was that it's okay to continue

01:31:27

exploring even after you've developed a sufficient amount of proficiency in a given area.

01:31:34

So even if, let's come back to the screen, ScreenFlow, Premiere Pro, screencast editing.

01:31:43

After you're doing that process, it's very easy to develop your own way of doing things

01:31:51

in your own kind of brand if you will, your voice in the way that you edit video and show

01:31:58

a screencast.

01:31:59

And most editors of those screencasts will do that.

01:32:04

You know, Mike, I'm sure you have specific percentages whenever you zoom into sections

01:32:09

on a screen.

01:32:10

You want to zoom in a certain amount and you always do it at that amount if you can.

01:32:15

That sort of thing is something that you tend to do.

01:32:18

But I think when it comes to being an amateur, you have to be willing to explore and continue

01:32:24

to try different things that you would have done before you reach that level of proficiency.

01:32:30

That's true.

01:32:31

So like watching what other people do, like, for example, when I watch your screencast,

01:32:37

I see how you do things in comparison to how I do them and Max Sparky does it differently.

01:32:43

And some folks on Don McAllister's team do it differently yet.

01:32:47

You know, there's, every editor has a different way of coming at those different aspects.

01:32:53

And over time, you can continue to explore and play with those.

01:32:56

To me, that's what I really want to take away from this particular piece is like just

01:33:01

be willing to continue to explore even after I've got the proficiency level.

01:33:06

So if there's an action item with this, it's probably to do with my writing, being willing

01:33:12

to explore and play around with the way that I write, sure, articles in my newsletter,

01:33:17

even though I already have, like, I know what my writing voice is.

01:33:20

Like I could, I could probably write out a list of what makes up my writing voice.

01:33:26

But I'm willing to change that and alter it.

01:33:29

So that that's an area that I'm probably going to be working on in upcoming days to

01:33:34

continue to improve that.

01:33:36

But that, hopefully that point is coming across that you have to be willing to explore even

01:33:41

though you have, I don't want to say a professional level of skill in a given area, but a sufficient

01:33:48

proficiency to do an extremely good job in an area.

01:33:50

Well, I think it's fair to say a professional level of skill.

01:33:54

And I think that kind of just highlights the point that you may technically be a professional,

01:33:59

but think like an amateur.

01:34:00

Sure.

01:34:01

Yeah.

01:34:02

Which I think is probably a great place to end this.

01:34:05

I like it.

01:34:08

Never stop learning.

01:34:10

Thus always listen to bookworm.

01:34:12

Exactly.

01:34:14

Action items.

01:34:15

All right.

01:34:16

What do you got?

01:34:17

I actually don't have any.

01:34:18

The thing I put down was try more stuff, I guess.

01:34:20

Is this like my three MITs?

01:34:24

No.

01:34:26

Reading this book, I felt like there was a very compelling story around the idea that

01:34:33

we mentioned at the right at the beginning that range why General is trying for a specialized

01:34:37

world, like you kind of get the idea just from that subtitle.

01:34:42

But this is kind of interesting too because I got asked by somebody recently, like, what

01:34:47

do you think about Blinkist?

01:34:48

I'm like, well, it's kind of like going to the gym and putting no weight on the bar and

01:34:55

saying there I worked out today.

01:34:57

Right.

01:34:58

Like, yes, you got the key ideas, but you didn't put forth any effort in order to get

01:35:02

them.

01:35:03

So they really have little value for you.

01:35:06

So very simple premise behind the content that is in this book, but having gone through

01:35:13

and read the almost 300 pages, you feel like you get a lot more out of it by the end.

01:35:21

But it's not very specific stuff.

01:35:22

I feel like it's very general mindset stuff.

01:35:24

I feel like I said the same thing when we did Malcolm Gladwell with Blink, which makes

01:35:28

sense, these guys are kind of cut from the same cloth.

01:35:32

I liked David Epstein a little bit better than Malcolm Gladwell, by the way.

01:35:37

But I don't have anything specific that I'm like, oh, yeah, that was a great idea and

01:35:42

I'm going to start doing that.

01:35:43

I just think this is a mindset that I want to continue to employ.

01:35:46

So as an example, as I read through this, I recognize that me trying to learn Spanish,

01:35:52

for example, that is an application of this range principle that I am already doing.

01:35:58

And provides further motivation for me to keep going with it.

01:36:03

But there was nothing in here that would have triggered goal learn Spanish, even though I

01:36:09

mentioned like there's the studies at the beginning.

01:36:11

Like the stories that are in here are very much geared towards this is a historical event

01:36:17

that happened.

01:36:18

Sure.

01:36:19

And he's using it to support an idea, but there's not a specific application of the idea that

01:36:25

he's telling you prescriptively.

01:36:27

This is how you do it.

01:36:28

So I don't have any specific action items from here.

01:36:32

Sure.

01:36:33

I have one and it comes from some of the earlier chapters in the book, but sets some intentions

01:36:41

for homeschooling as we teach our girls.

01:36:46

And this is especially top of mind right now because we're getting ready to start school

01:36:53

in about four days as we're recording this.

01:36:56

So my wife and I need to and have plans to this weekend work through what is our like

01:37:03

three to five year goal for different things to teach our girls in the next three to five

01:37:10

years.

01:37:11

And we could do that, you know, as it comes and just pay attention and do it that way.

01:37:17

But it's hard to know when to shift and when to introduce something.

01:37:24

If you don't have some form of a master plan there and I even hesitate to use the term master

01:37:30

plan, but and that's why I say intentions.

01:37:34

Like it's not a locked in outline that we have to follow regardless.

01:37:41

We're not going to be too gritty with it, but we do need to at least set some form of

01:37:46

a goal.

01:37:47

And a lot of this particular book helped me to see that and gave me a number of ways

01:37:53

that we could potentially introduce those aspects.

01:37:55

So that's that's what we need to do.

01:37:58

That's my main action item.

01:38:00

I won an only mic.

01:38:01

All right.

01:38:03

Then I guess style and rating.

01:38:05

Hit me.

01:38:06

I've been putting this off because I don't know exactly how to how to rate this.

01:38:13

I probably have said something in the past about how the best books inspire lots of different

01:38:18

action items.

01:38:20

I have no action items from this book.

01:38:21

I also thought it was a great book.

01:38:23

There's a very entertaining read.

01:38:25

It breaks your model.

01:38:26

It does break my model.

01:38:28

So I have to make a new model.

01:38:30

I will say before I pick the the rating here that the the stories that he selects are just

01:38:40

incredible.

01:38:41

And the way that he tells them is incredible.

01:38:44

There's a lot of stories in here that I had heard before in the first chapter.

01:38:48

There's a story of the the Polgar sisters, which I think came from Malcolm Gladwell.

01:38:52

Yeah, we've read that one before.

01:38:54

Yeah.

01:38:55

Yeah.

01:38:56

But the way that David Epstein tells the stories, I don't know if he's just sharing details

01:39:02

that are more in line with what I care about, but I just felt that these stories really

01:39:09

resonated with me almost every single one that that he shared.

01:39:13

And I didn't feel ever like he was trying to shoehorn a story in to loosely support a

01:39:22

point that he was trying to make.

01:39:24

I felt like every story that he shared was very, very well integrated.

01:39:29

And there was nothing that I would have cut out from this book.

01:39:33

That being said, again, like it's really one core idea that you get from this book.

01:39:38

It's almost 300 pages long.

01:39:41

But I really enjoyed it.

01:39:42

The only thing I can say negative about it is it was kind of a pain to try to make a

01:39:47

mind-note file for this because there were so many stories.

01:39:51

I kind of picked and picked select ones that impacted me towards the end and didn't try

01:39:56

to capture them all.

01:39:57

Sure.

01:39:58

But if you're just looking for an entertaining book that you can learn something from, I

01:40:04

think almost anybody could benefit from reading range.

01:40:07

I'm going to put it at 4.5 and the only reason I hesitate at all and why I say, you know,

01:40:15

I'm not sure what to rate this is because I enjoyed this book so much.

01:40:18

I was considering rating it a five.

01:40:21

I kind of want to save the fives for the books that just completely rock my world and blow

01:40:25

me out of the water.

01:40:27

But this was a really, really good book.

01:40:30

I felt very glad to be reading it whenever I would pick it up to read it.

01:40:34

Even though I went through it probably at a slower pace than I thought I was going to

01:40:39

just because it is pretty meaty.

01:40:42

I don't think it's inapproachable.

01:40:45

I don't think you have to be an intellectual in order to understand it.

01:40:49

I feel like anybody could pick this book up, read it, be entertained by it, and walk away

01:40:55

understanding that you don't need to be specializing in picking the things that you think are going

01:41:02

to be building this specific career that there is value and a breadth of experiences.

01:41:07

I think that's a really valuable idea too.

01:41:10

So I think that's something that probably everybody should apply.

01:41:14

For those reasons, 4.5.

01:41:17

I will put it at a 5.0.

01:41:21

It's primarily because I can already see, I finished reading it a handful of days ago.

01:41:29

I can already tell that it has made a pretty big impact on how I view things day to day.

01:41:36

Even though I can't tell you what those...

01:41:40

When it happens, I couldn't tell you that it was happening.

01:41:43

When I reflect on the day, I can tell that this book has had a pretty massive impact

01:41:47

on the way that I view different interactions and the way that I view learning and the way

01:41:52

that I try to connect things.

01:41:55

I've tried to do the whole analogy connection process a handful of times just in the last

01:42:01

couple of days.

01:42:03

I never would have done that without having read this.

01:42:06

It's led to some pretty big problem solving scenarios for me.

01:42:14

I think there's a ton of value in this book.

01:42:16

I absolutely loved it.

01:42:18

It's 300 pages long, not quite, but it needed to be that long, which is kind of weird to

01:42:25

say.

01:42:26

I feel like when we have a book that's 300, 350 pages long, we'd usually come away saying,

01:42:30

"That should have been a blog post."

01:42:32

This is not that.

01:42:35

There is a lot here.

01:42:37

Yes, there are a handful of places where it seems like it's overlapping a previous thought,

01:42:44

and then it doesn't.

01:42:46

It is a different take on it.

01:42:51

I love this book.

01:42:52

It's one I will likely reread in the future.

01:42:56

I love it.

01:42:57

Thus, 5.0, I will go there.

01:43:01

That said, of coming books, next one up, a different style.

01:43:07

We'll see how this goes on bookworm, but creativity ink by Ed Catmull.

01:43:12

The story behind Pixar.

01:43:15

I'm excited about this, partially because I know Steve Jobs is involved in this.

01:43:20

That's part of my reasoning.

01:43:22

I'll stop there.

01:43:23

I'm excited about this one.

01:43:24

As I mentioned last time, I listened to the audiobook version of this, but I also have

01:43:28

ordered the hardcover, so I'm going to be reading it for reals this time.

01:43:32

For realsies.

01:43:34

The next book that I picked is a listener recommendation.

01:43:37

Again, the highest rated one that's not Sapiens, ultra learning by Scott Young.

01:43:42

I'm going to be putting that off for as long as I possibly can.

01:43:48

I'm guessing that's not because you don't want to read it, it's because it's long.

01:43:53

Mainly, yeah.

01:43:57

But ultra learning, I saw this one come across my radar the other day, and I saw it on an

01:44:03

Amazon page or something.

01:44:04

I was immediately intrigued by the idea behind it.

01:44:08

It was actually in my Amazon cart already.

01:44:12

I was looking for a reason to read this anyways.

01:44:15

I don't know.

01:44:17

The introduction is by James Clear.

01:44:20

Oh, now I'm interested.

01:44:22

It's amazing how that happens.

01:44:27

So that said, I guess, gap books in between here and there.

01:44:30

I'm actually picking up a tried and true classic again, Mike, Getting Things Done by

01:44:37

David Allen.

01:44:38

I'm rereading it at this moment, partially because I'm realizing that having started

01:44:46

working at the church full time, I'm having to change a number of systems, thus some of

01:44:52

the writing and the changes you see.

01:44:54

I'm now using OmniFocus for this.

01:44:57

You see some of those things coming out.

01:44:59

This is why, because my whole work environment has changed.

01:45:04

I feel like rereading GTD would help me in that systems building process.

01:45:11

I'm curious to see my thoughts on it at this point, having gone through all these other

01:45:15

books.

01:45:16

So that'll be a fascinating reread.

01:45:18

All right.

01:45:19

We may have to revisit that one officially before we get in the future.

01:45:22

Okay.

01:45:23

Episode 100, maybe.

01:45:24

You got a gap book, Mike?

01:45:26

Yeah, my gap book is a book that was recommended to me by my brother, and I'm going to put

01:45:33

this with an asterisk, but it's Playing with Fire by Scott Reikens.

01:45:37

Fire is this whole movement, stands for Financial Independence Retire Early, and there's a whole

01:45:44

community around this, which is maybe a little bit more extreme than I would prefer.

01:45:52

Let me put it that way.

01:45:54

Okay.

01:45:55

But the ideas behind some of this stuff, well, if you go look for Fire on Google or something,

01:46:03

you'll see some weird stuff.

01:46:04

But the basic idea is don't spend money on junk you don't want.

01:46:09

Figure out what really is important to you and then save as much as you can.

01:46:13

And by doing that, there's like this whole community around this kind of led by people

01:46:20

like Mr. Money Mustache, they are able to save a whole ton of money and retire early,

01:46:27

even if they don't make a ton of money, which just by challenging the traditional ideas behind

01:46:33

what you really need to have and what you really need to spend on.

01:46:37

And I'm not definitely going anywhere near the extreme end of this, but I am intrigued

01:46:43

by the idea.

01:46:45

If you decide that you want to have a $6 latte from Starbucks every day, that's fine if

01:46:51

that's important to you.

01:46:52

But most people who do that, maybe it's just a default.

01:46:56

And so if you add all that up and then you are able to identify that that is adding however

01:47:02

many years to you before you can reach Financial Independence, maybe that's enough incentive

01:47:08

to change some of your habits.

01:47:10

That's kind of the takeaway for me on this stuff.

01:47:13

And again, combined with the life and air thing, just kind of identifying what really

01:47:17

is important to me and what isn't cutting that stuff out.

01:47:20

Cool.

01:47:21

There's a whole documentary that goes along with this too, by the way.

01:47:24

The guy who wrote this, Yelsa made a documentary, which is at the moment playing in select cities

01:47:29

nowhere near me, but I'm sure there's one in a close to where you are.

01:47:34

So if you want to recommend a book, you can do so in the club.

01:47:40

Just go to club.bookworm.fm.

01:47:42

There's a whole recommendation sections button.

01:47:45

That's where we pick these books that we're going to be reading.

01:47:48

You can vote for the ones that you want us to cover.

01:47:51

You can make a recommendation if you don't see one.

01:47:53

I'll call out one specifically because I did it last time.

01:47:56

And I really want to see it climb the charts margin by Richard Swenson.

01:48:00

I feel like that's an idea.

01:48:02

That's worth unpacking on bookworm.

01:48:04

So if you want us to pick it, you can increase the likelihood of that by going over to the

01:48:08

club and clicking the vote button below margin.

01:48:13

Did you recommend that one?

01:48:15

I got it started.

01:48:16

Got it.

01:48:17

I was thinking, wait, I saw that one, but I think Mike recommended that.

01:48:23

It's like, wouldn't you just pick it?

01:48:25

I could, but it's more fun to vote for it.

01:48:28

It's more fun to, yeah, for the most part, I try to pick stuff that the community is

01:48:34

interested in.

01:48:35

Interesting.

01:48:36

Does that mean I need to start putting my own stuff on there?

01:48:38

Go for it.

01:48:39

That'd be interesting.

01:48:40

I'm not sure.

01:48:41

I want to do that.

01:48:42

Anyway, club.bookworm.fm/membership.

01:48:47

This is where the folks who are currently listening to this as we record it live.

01:48:52

Hello.

01:48:53

If you're a premium member, you get special perks like listening to the show live.

01:48:58

There's a awesome, awesome wallpaper that Mike put together that is a bookworm super

01:49:03

high-res desktop background photo that you can use for that.

01:49:09

Mike also just caught up on a bunch of his mind node files.

01:49:12

There's a bunch of new mind-vote node files there.

01:49:15

I've recorded, I think, two or three gapbook episodes that are yet to be released, one of

01:49:21

which will be released tomorrow.

01:49:23

Those who are listening live, stay tuned tomorrow.

01:49:27

There are a lot of cool perks that come with being a premium member of bookworm.

01:49:32

If you haven't already, club.bookworm.fm/membership, you can join the club and get all the great

01:49:40

perks that come with that.

01:49:42

Next time, we're going to start with a different style of book, Creativity Inc. by Ed Catmull,

01:49:48

and we'll learn about the story behind Pixar.