Bookworm Transcripts

00:00:00

This is your fault, Joe.

00:00:01

-What did I do now?

00:00:03

-I bought another fountain pen.

00:00:06

-Ooh.

00:00:08

That makes me really happy.

00:00:10

-My wife is angry at you.

00:00:12

-That's okay.

00:00:13

I don't talk to her as much as I talk to you.

00:00:15

-Sure.

00:00:16

-All right.

00:00:18

What did you get?

00:00:19

All the details.

00:00:20

-All right.

00:00:21

I got a Twisbee diamond 580 and an ink set from Twisbee that I heard recommended on the

00:00:29

Pen Addicts gift guide.

00:00:31

I should have known when I started listening to that, I was going to buy something.

00:00:36

The Twisbee 580 is a piston filler fountain pen.

00:00:40

The first one I've had where you suction up the ink after you dip it in the bottle.

00:00:45

I like it a lot.

00:00:46

It's really nice.

00:00:48

My first fine nib, I've got a medium nib, which is a Shafer 300, which I liked.

00:00:55

The fine nib is definitely for me.

00:00:57

I got six different inks in this ink set.

00:01:01

A couple different greens.

00:01:03

There's a blue, there's a pink, I think, a purple and an orange.

00:01:08

I'm using the orange right now and it looks awesome in my Barenfig confidant notebook.

00:01:13

-This makes me happy on so many levels.

00:01:16

It's a little disturbing.

00:01:20

That is my favorite pen that I own.

00:01:24

The Twisbee diamond 580, that's my thing.

00:01:28

I like the 580 a lot.

00:01:29

I use a fine nib in it too, so I think we have the identical pen.

00:01:33

It makes me happy.

00:01:35

-Sweet.

00:01:36

I'm a big fan.

00:01:38

Only had it a day, it came actually while I was traveling.

00:01:42

This is the first day that I've used it, but inking it up, I believe that's the term

00:01:47

all the cool kids use was really fun.

00:01:52

It feels really nice when I use it.

00:01:55

I really like the fine nib.

00:01:56

It feels a lot better than the medium nib did and far less feathering.

00:02:03

This is the pen for me, at least until I find something else new and shiny.

00:02:07

-Can I make things more difficult for you?

00:02:09

-Oh, boy.

00:02:10

Sure, go ahead.

00:02:11

-They make an ink well specifically for these pens because you can unscrew the nib section

00:02:19

and then it clicks onto the top and the ink well has a little tube that reaches down towards

00:02:25

the bottom of the ink well.

00:02:27

When you use the piston filler, it just sucks it up through that right into the pen.

00:02:32

You don't actually have to dip the nib into the ink itself at all.

00:02:37

-Oh, wow.

00:02:38

-Which is addictive.

00:02:41

I purchased this thing using gift card money a couple years ago, three years ago I forget

00:02:46

now.

00:02:48

I love it, but it's like 40 bucks for the ink well.

00:02:52

I'm going to just stick that pen in the back of your mind and see how long it takes you

00:02:57

to buy it.

00:02:59

-Will Mike buy it before next episode?

00:03:01

Tune in to find out.

00:03:04

-Yes, there you go.

00:03:06

I'm proud of you, Mike.

00:03:08

You've stepped into the true analog world.

00:03:10

I'm very happy for you.

00:03:12

-Full analog nerddom achieved.

00:03:14

-Totally.

00:03:15

-All right, we've got some other follow-up here from last episode.

00:03:19

Did you do your two-minute morning practice?

00:03:23

-Sometimes.

00:03:24

Yes, not entirely, but sometimes.

00:03:27

I need to keep working on this one.

00:03:29

I like having it there, the concept being just answering a few questions about my day

00:03:34

and how things I'm grateful for and things I'm planning to do for the day ahead.

00:03:40

Those are the things that I'm working towards implementing in my morning routine.

00:03:46

Sometimes it works, sometimes I don't get it done.

00:03:48

I know that when it happens, I'm more effective throughout the day.

00:03:53

There's that.

00:03:54

I should do it more.

00:03:55

Thus, it's going to stay on the list, Mike.

00:03:58

-All right, so we're checking in on it next time.

00:04:00

Is that what I'm hearing?

00:04:01

-I think that would be a fair thing to do.

00:04:04

-Okay.

00:04:05

-How about you?

00:04:06

-We've got three action items from last time, which a lot of them are impossible to mark

00:04:12

as completed via action.

00:04:14

So typical for me?

00:04:16

-Yep.

00:04:17

I think you do this on purpose.

00:04:20

-Maybe.

00:04:21

Although the action items from this book aren't any better.

00:04:26

The first one was to answer the question, "Who can I mentally release to?"

00:04:30

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that I maybe don't need anyone.

00:04:39

That sounds a little bit weird saying it, but let me clarify that.

00:04:44

Someone had mentioned to me, and I apologize, I can't remember who said it specifically,

00:04:50

but they said basically, "That's what journaling is for me.

00:04:53

I'm able to write those things down, and it's like getting them out and confessing them

00:04:56

to somebody."

00:04:57

I realized that between that and the prayer habit that I have firmly established as part

00:05:04

of my morning routine, I really should just quit whining about how I don't have anybody

00:05:08

and just start doing this.

00:05:11

-Yes.

00:05:12

-So, lesson learned.

00:05:15

I've also got one for sharing my failures.

00:05:18

I have passed this one with flying colors.

00:05:21

I just recorded an episode of Focused and shared all about all the things that I have failed

00:05:29

at this year.

00:05:35

That was inspired by this action item.

00:05:39

It's episode 88, and we're really talking about the last year, because we started Focused

00:05:44

at the beginning of the year.

00:05:46

January, basically, was when we changed it from free agents to Focused.

00:05:50

We've been talking about Focused for about a year.

00:05:52

We're reflecting on that.

00:05:53

Picking a word for the year, which is something that we did.

00:05:56

I traveled to Kansas City this last week and spent some time with the Blanc Media Team,

00:06:03

and we all went out to dinner, and Sean asked everybody, "Okay, what was your last year

00:06:08

summarizing a single word?"

00:06:10

I was like, "Oh, man."

00:06:13

The one I landed on was Reset, and you can listen to Focused if you want all the gory details,

00:06:19

but that really got me thinking about this topic more in depth, more detail, and that

00:06:28

coupled with this action item, I was looking for an opportunity to share that type of stuff,

00:06:34

and so I have done that.

00:06:37

I've also done this a couple of times just talking to people face to face, so I don't

00:06:43

have a record of those conversations, but I have done a better job of sharing the things

00:06:50

that I have not done well in the last year, and it's actually been really freeing, which

00:06:57

is the point in this action item from the last episode.

00:07:01

You are awesome.

00:07:03

I would say that this one I can mark as complete, but it's not something I want to be done with.

00:07:09

I want to continue to do this.

00:07:12

I think that this is something that is super helpful for anybody to do, but it's really

00:07:18

hard to bring yourself to the point where you will do it.

00:07:22

This is something that I've tried to follow this path and go down this path a lot in recent

00:07:28

years, and I feel like you and I have been pretty frank with each other and on the show

00:07:34

as well, but it's very different whenever you're intentional about using, at least in my case,

00:07:40

the way I do it is I use my failures in order to tell a story for someone else so that they

00:07:44

can learn from what I did wrong.

00:07:45

That's a lot of what I end up doing.

00:07:49

I assume you're doing something similar, but I have found it to be extremely freeing doing

00:07:54

that as well.

00:07:55

Yeah, honestly, sometimes people will approach me and they'll say this happened just the

00:08:01

other day in my mastermind group.

00:08:04

You know, I look at everything I got done and then I look at you, Mike, and I'm like,

00:08:10

that's whole another level.

00:08:11

And I immediately was like, well, I'm not so hot.

00:08:15

I feel that this, that and the other thing, and I had to let this go and stop doing this

00:08:20

because I just couldn't handle it.

00:08:22

And the standard response when I share that type of stuff is like, oh, wow, I had no idea,

00:08:28

which is kind of the point, I guess, is that people tend to project everything that's going

00:08:32

right.

00:08:33

And then you try to hold yourself to this impossible standard set by these other people

00:08:37

that you're watching.

00:08:38

And I don't want to contribute to anybody else's, anybody else not feeling good about

00:08:44

what they're able to do because the truth is that I struggle with this stuff and make

00:08:49

mistakes just like everybody else does.

00:08:51

The important thing is the perspective and the adjustments that you make as you keep

00:08:55

going, going back to the growth mindset thing.

00:08:58

You know, if there was a drinking game for bookworm, it would be growth mindset related.

00:09:03

I like it.

00:09:06

I like it.

00:09:07

Well, I can better be Holly continuing on this process.

00:09:10

Yes.

00:09:11

Flow Mahali growth mindsets.

00:09:13

Always think about getting better.

00:09:15

There you go.

00:09:17

We just summed up 82 episodes of bookworm.

00:09:22

Last action I had to my hand was to implement Untouchable Days question mark.

00:09:27

That's because I'm not going to do this immediately.

00:09:31

But as I mentioned in the last episode, I feel like I've kind of been doing this already

00:09:36

and I'm going to continue to look for opportunities to do this because the work culture at Blanche

00:09:42

Media is so awesome.

00:09:44

That was a big takeaway, which we'll get into that as we get into today's book.

00:09:48

But I recognize that I am just totally in love with this eight week cycle thing and for

00:09:55

sabbaticals and things being chill and using base camp and not expecting an immediate

00:10:00

response.

00:10:01

Like, if you get the right people on the team, this is definitely the way to work.

00:10:06

All right.

00:10:07

I am on board with you.

00:10:09

I just wish I could do that more.

00:10:14

Well, that, I guess, let's just jump into today's book then because that's a perfect segue.

00:10:20

So today's book is Margin by Richard Swenson, which I first heard about in red when Sean

00:10:29

Blanche talked about it several years ago.

00:10:32

And since then he has released a course called the margin course, which is pretty awesome.

00:10:39

I've gone through that course.

00:10:42

I work with the Blanche Media team, so I didn't help build that one.

00:10:46

That one was in development before I joined the team, but it's kind of what you would

00:10:52

expect from Blanche Media.

00:10:55

It's the same sort of format as the focus course, but the entire focus is on margin in

00:11:00

the different areas that you need it, which we'll jump into in a little bit.

00:11:03

So I've read this book before.

00:11:05

I liked it when I first read it.

00:11:07

Then there was the margin course, which I have gone through.

00:11:12

And then I read this book again.

00:11:15

And I have to say that reading it the second time, it impacted me a lot greater than it

00:11:20

did the first time that I read it.

00:11:23

If I were to sum it up, I would say the first time I read it, I'm like, "Oh, that sounds

00:11:26

nice, but this guy's probably just making a bigger deal about this."

00:11:29

For where I am right now and what I've gone through in the last year, I read this and

00:11:33

I was like, "Oh, man, I should have listened to this the first time."

00:11:36

Yeah, for sure.

00:11:39

I went through this and thought, "This is perfect timing.

00:11:43

I really needed this."

00:11:45

And a case in point, I told Mike this before we started recording.

00:11:50

This is the first time I'll be recording this episode without book in hand.

00:11:55

And I just sit, you know, we're talking about failures.

00:11:58

I am certain I brought the thing home from church.

00:12:01

I come home early on Fridays and we record this.

00:12:05

And I set it down somewhere and I cannot find it.

00:12:07

And if I had given myself the time between things, I would have had plenty of time to

00:12:14

go back to the church, see if I left it there, come home.

00:12:17

Like I could have done that, but I didn't give myself enough buffer, enough margin to

00:12:22

do that.

00:12:23

And that meant that I was hustling around for 15 minutes, trying to find this book.

00:12:28

I still couldn't find it.

00:12:30

So thankfully I have a handful of notes on my phone from going through it that I wanted

00:12:35

to talk about for Bookworm, which I didn't know when we started recording Mike.

00:12:38

I was looking while you were talking.

00:12:40

And I'm going to be going off of that.

00:12:42

But this is, again, case in point, if I had been building in margin where I should be,

00:12:48

I would not have had to hustle and rush and start this whole episode with a little bit

00:12:53

of stress on the back of my mind.

00:12:55

So this is good timing.

00:12:57

Thanks for picking this, Mike.

00:12:58

I owe you.

00:13:00

Thanks to the Bookworm Club for picking this because it had lots of votes.

00:13:05

So but yeah, this is the right thing at the right time for me too, as I read through this

00:13:12

and end of the year as we're recording this was reflecting on the last year.

00:13:17

A lot of things became pretty clear to me, which we'll get into as we dive into the specifics

00:13:23

of this book.

00:13:24

The book is broken down into really four different sections, officially three.

00:13:29

The first chapter is called Marginless Living.

00:13:32

That's where we'll start.

00:13:34

This first chapter really just talks about the state of the society or the culture right

00:13:42

now and how we have all of this affluence.

00:13:49

We're really prosperous.

00:13:51

So he asked the question, if we're so prosperous, why are we so stressed?

00:13:57

And they makes the point that pain and the absence of margin are related and pain isn't

00:14:03

necessarily a bad thing because it causes us to focus.

00:14:06

The next whole section of the book is part one, the problem pain and then it goes into

00:14:13

part two, the prescription margin and then it ends with part three, the prognosis health.

00:14:19

I think for today we'll focus kind of specifically on the three different parts and we're not

00:14:25

going to go through all the different chapters in here, but we'll kind of call out the things

00:14:29

that are important and talk about some of the main points unless you had anything you

00:14:33

wanted to talk about as it pertains to the Marginless Living section, Joe, but that's

00:14:37

kind of like the introduction.

00:14:38

Yeah, I don't think there's anything specific other than I live it.

00:14:42

So there's that.

00:14:43

Yeah.

00:14:44

All right, cool.

00:14:45

Well, then we'll jump into part one, the problem, pain.

00:14:51

And one of the things that stood out to me in this section was his definition of progress.

00:14:59

Progress is proceeding to a higher level of development, but he makes the observation

00:15:04

that progress always gives more.

00:15:07

It never, progress is never associated with less.

00:15:12

And there are some charts in the appendix of this book for different areas.

00:15:19

And when you look at them, they're kind of like the hockey stick type curve where we've

00:15:23

gone along for a little while and then all of a sudden the last 10 years like ramps way

00:15:27

up.

00:15:28

And then when you combine all of those together, it's kind of has an exponential effect in

00:15:32

the bottom line is that we have more of everything that we've ever had before.

00:15:37

And there's a quote, let me find this by Peter Drucker.

00:15:42

This is not actually in the book, but when I saw this, it really impacted me and I thought

00:15:47

it summarized perfectly what he's talking about in this section because Peter Drucker

00:15:54

is the big management guy.

00:15:57

He said at one point that in a few hundred years when the history of our time will be

00:16:01

written from a long term perspective, it's likely that the most important event historians

00:16:05

will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce.

00:16:09

It is an unprecedented change in the human condition for the first time.

00:16:12

Literally substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices.

00:16:16

For the first time, they will have to manage themselves and society is totally unprepared

00:16:20

for it.

00:16:22

So when I read that and then thought about everything that Richard Swenson says in margin,

00:16:27

I'm like, yeah, he was totally right.

00:16:29

And Richard Swenson is kind of talking about the current state of things in this first

00:16:34

section here on the problem of pain.

00:16:36

So I kind of struggled with this part, Mike, because and I understand it's his entire premise

00:16:42

here, but he explains how progress just almost by definition means adding things.

00:16:49

This is my summarization in that you're continually contributing more to what you're

00:16:55

doing in life and what you're willing to take on.

00:16:59

As we progress and we have smartphones, well, it didn't mean that we stopped communicating.

00:17:07

It just changed the way we communicated and by proxy, we almost could say we communicate

00:17:11

a lot more than we ever have just in a different way.

00:17:15

And that's not necessarily allowing us to subtract in some form, which means we're constantly

00:17:22

putting addition to the equation and putting more into our lives.

00:17:26

So again, not by definition, progress equals addition, but it is something he kind of goes

00:17:34

to.

00:17:35

And the reason I somewhat struggled with it is because I like progress.

00:17:38

Sure.

00:17:39

And so like, OK, I really enjoy that technology continues to grow in advance and we continue

00:17:45

to get better at things.

00:17:48

He wouldn't argue with that.

00:17:49

He was very careful to say he's not.

00:17:51

This is not a we should go back to the way things were type book.

00:17:56

That's not his point.

00:17:57

His point is that if we're going to continue to accelerate progress, we have to be aware

00:18:04

of what it's doing.

00:18:06

This is more of an awareness thing than anything.

00:18:09

So I could definitely appreciate that, but I do still like progress.

00:18:13

Yeah.

00:18:14

And I think the main point here is not that progress is bad.

00:18:17

He's careful to call that out.

00:18:19

His progress is not evil, but to be intentional about the areas that we want to apply progress

00:18:27

in because more for the sake of more is not necessarily a good thing.

00:18:32

In the second chapter, the pain of progress, he talks about the five different environments

00:18:39

and he mentions that most of our progress has come from advances in the physical environment

00:18:44

and the cognitive environment, but most of our pain is felt in the social, emotional

00:18:49

and spiritual environments.

00:18:51

And that is where a lack of margin can really show up.

00:18:56

I actually let me redefine that.

00:18:58

I think that's kind of where the absence of margin is experienced first.

00:19:04

And then if you don't deal with some of the symptoms as they become evident in those areas,

00:19:11

which is kind of why he's calling this out, then eventually they will cause you to completely

00:19:15

break down and the physical and cognitive environments are going to be impacted as well.

00:19:19

There's kind of two basic principles that he outlines in the book.

00:19:23

One, that man has limited capacity and two, that overloading the system leads to serious

00:19:28

breakdown and performance.

00:19:30

You can't just rev your engine all the time.

00:19:32

You've got to rest eventually, but a lot of us think, "Oh, I got this.

00:19:37

I'll just push through this thing.

00:19:39

I'm so guilty of this.

00:19:40

I do that all the time."

00:19:42

I'll just get to this point and then things will be better, but they're not better because

00:19:46

the systems that have contributed to this haven't been addressed.

00:19:49

And I haven't built in or prioritized margin into how I plan my day, my week, my year,

00:19:58

how I manage myself and my family.

00:20:01

And it's a systemic problem.

00:20:02

That's not the result of something that went wrong, although there's a lot of value and

00:20:07

simplicity too.

00:20:08

We'll get to that in a little bit.

00:20:10

I just think that he really does a great job of pointing out that we neglect certain

00:20:17

areas.

00:20:18

We experience pain in those certain areas and then we dismiss it because we see all these

00:20:21

gains in these other areas.

00:20:23

But those gains are temporary unless we recognize what's really going on.

00:20:26

Absolutely.

00:20:27

And I can say, because I live this lifestyle without margin, it is very painful.

00:20:35

Can I just stop there?

00:20:36

I feel like I have to keep saying I screw this up.

00:20:39

Share your failures.

00:20:40

Do that a lot today.

00:20:43

Yeah.

00:20:45

The thing about stress though, I want to call out here because he does talk about this in

00:20:50

chapter four.

00:20:52

Stress can be positive or negative.

00:20:55

And he's a medical doctor.

00:20:57

So he has a lot of great explanations for these different things.

00:21:02

Positive stress is called you stress, which makes us especially creative before a deadline.

00:21:06

We probably all experienced this and thought to ourselves, well, see stress isn't bad,

00:21:11

but then there's negative stress also and that's distress.

00:21:15

That's the systemic kind of stress where if you're constantly under stress or constantly

00:21:19

under load, then eventually something is going to break.

00:21:24

There's a whole bunch of effects from these stress disorders.

00:21:27

Again, he's a medical doctor, so he breaks them down into psychological, physical, and

00:21:30

behavioral.

00:21:31

I'm not going to go into all of these, but it's pretty serious.

00:21:36

Everything from depression to anxiety to forgetfulness to headaches to insomnia.

00:21:45

It's pretty crazy to see all of the things that lack of margin can lead to.

00:21:51

And I don't know about you, but when I read that list, I'm like, oh, yeah.

00:21:54

That's been me.

00:21:55

That's been me.

00:21:56

Check.

00:21:57

It was almost like a checklist of here's all the things I've screwed up.

00:22:01

Yep.

00:22:02

That's yep, that one and that one and that one.

00:22:03

And to be honest, the thing that I, because he talks about knowing your limits, when it

00:22:10

comes to how much can you lift, you pretty much know your limit.

00:22:16

But when it comes to how many people can you help through a difficult situation, there

00:22:23

is an emotional limit there, but we don't really think of it that way.

00:22:27

We don't think about, you know, if you have a friend who's going through a difficult time,

00:22:34

you know, maybe they found out they have cancer or something.

00:22:36

Like that's traumatic for both them and you to help them through that.

00:22:41

But multiply that by a hundred friends who have a similar scenario.

00:22:46

Like you can't do that.

00:22:47

Like that's like, that's an easy one.

00:22:48

It's like, no, I cannot help a hundred friends.

00:22:51

I wish I could and I would likely try, but I'm going to destroy myself and the process

00:22:56

in order to do that.

00:22:58

So there is an emotional limit there, but we don't really think about that.

00:23:02

At least I hadn't really thought about it that way.

00:23:05

So whenever he spelled all this out, like, okay, yeah, understanding limits when you

00:23:08

go over those limits, it's when you're overloaded and stressors start, the stress starts to

00:23:12

kick in.

00:23:13

Like, yes, there can be good stress.

00:23:15

I get that.

00:23:17

Makes perfect sense.

00:23:18

But it still means you have to be aware of it and know when you're over those limits

00:23:23

because it's okay to go over those limits as long as you know it and are willing to get

00:23:26

back off of it.

00:23:28

That was at least the takeaway I had from that.

00:23:30

Yeah, a lot of this comes just from recognition of the current state of things.

00:23:36

But the thing is that he makes the point we've lived so long without margin that we kind

00:23:42

of don't even know what to look for a lot of times.

00:23:46

We just assume that this is the way things are.

00:23:48

You know, because we don't even know what margin is, we don't realize when it's gone.

00:23:53

And again, stress isn't necessarily bad.

00:23:56

One of the things that jumped out to me as I was reading this section, I was thinking

00:23:58

about flow by Mihaly and how we need to have a certain amount of stress in order to really

00:24:06

feel fulfilled.

00:24:09

And I totally believe that.

00:24:11

But I also think there are a lot of things that can compound that stress that we voluntarily

00:24:17

put ourselves in harm's way.

00:24:18

And then when they all add up together, it's kind of like the straw that broke the camel's

00:24:22

back.

00:24:23

Some of the factors that he talks about and hear that can contribute to stress are change,

00:24:27

mobility, expectations, time pressure, work, control, fear, relationships, competition,

00:24:33

frustration, anger.

00:24:35

And if you don't pay attention to any of those things, it's very easy to again view

00:24:39

that as a checklist.

00:24:40

And yep, got that one, got that one, got that one.

00:24:43

And then you realize that, well, yeah, I guess kind of the reason I feel the way that I do

00:24:48

is that all of these things are working against me.

00:24:51

And even that can become normalized.

00:24:53

So I, as I've been thinking about this, have been comparing where I'm at now with where

00:24:59

I was at the beginning of the year.

00:25:02

And I've recognized now that at the beginning of the year, I was not in a very good place.

00:25:07

At the time, I felt I was fine.

00:25:10

But when I compare it to the current state of things, I realized that the way things

00:25:14

are right now is actually a whole lot better than they were.

00:25:17

And it makes me very thankful for the situation that I'm in, the margin that I have created.

00:25:24

And then also, it makes me want to never go back to that because I realized once I get

00:25:29

some distance from that, how awful that was.

00:25:32

And it, I hesitate sharing this, you know, we're sharing my failure.

00:25:36

So I'm going to talk about this, but I feel a little bit of, well, I'm sharing this stuff,

00:25:41

but it's really nothing compared to people who have like clinical depression or are dealing

00:25:45

with suicidal thoughts or things like that, because I never had it to that degree.

00:25:49

So who am I to complain about stuff?

00:25:52

But there's, you got to recognize this stuff too.

00:25:55

You can't just smile and say everything is fine.

00:25:58

Like the, the meme with the dog and the house is on fire.

00:26:01

That's looking back, I kind of realized that that's kind of what I was trying to do at

00:26:04

the beginning of the year.

00:26:06

And fortunately, some things played out and my situation changed.

00:26:12

I'm able to look back at it now and realize how far I have come.

00:26:17

And not to say that I've arrived, not to say that I figured everything out.

00:26:22

I probably still have a lot of ground to take, but this feels way better.

00:26:27

And as I'm reading margin, again, this is kind of like, now I feel for the first time,

00:26:32

I am able to breathe.

00:26:33

I am able to relax.

00:26:34

I'm able to let my guard down.

00:26:36

And that's what margin does.

00:26:37

Well, I'm very grateful for where you are now.

00:26:40

For sure.

00:26:43

One thing I want to point out about this book, because I did not know this going in.

00:26:48

And I, I think that's just because I didn't really look into this book a whole lot, but

00:26:53

this is definitely a Christian book.

00:26:55

Yes.

00:26:56

I don't think that anywhere near detracts for us, of course, for some, I think it might.

00:27:02

At the beginning of this, he doesn't talk about God and Christ and the Bible early on

00:27:11

in this, not much anyway.

00:27:13

But when he, like, as he goes through the book, it becomes, I don't want to say a focal

00:27:18

point, but it's, it's a, a strong theme that runs through it later on the book, which,

00:27:24

personally, I really enjoyed because it's kind of a breath of fresh air from what I

00:27:28

feel like I normally do with some books where I'm like trying to translate the evolution

00:27:32

talk and such.

00:27:34

This is not that.

00:27:36

This is just a straight up, you don't have to really translate it if you're a Christian

00:27:41

at all.

00:27:42

So definitely a breath of fresh air for me.

00:27:45

But I did want to point that out.

00:27:46

I feel like that's an important thing to bring up for some.

00:27:49

Yes.

00:27:50

I'm glad that you, you brought that up because I was asked just the other day by somebody,

00:27:57

should I recommend the second mountain by David Brooks to somebody who would typically

00:28:03

be put off by talk about faith?

00:28:07

And I said that book, no problem.

00:28:10

Like he talks about some of his personal beliefs, but it really doesn't color any of

00:28:16

the points that he makes in that book.

00:28:18

It's part of his personal story.

00:28:20

That is not the case with this book.

00:28:21

As I was thinking about that, I'm like, well, yeah, you could recommend the second mountain.

00:28:25

Definitely don't recommend margin to that person.

00:28:27

Yes.

00:28:28

And actually to be fair, the first two sections is not a whole lot of that.

00:28:33

And honestly, that's where the majority of the value from this book comes for me is talking

00:28:38

about the pain that comes from a lack of margin.

00:28:41

And then part two is the prescription.

00:28:44

That's where we talks about creating margin in different areas.

00:28:48

It's not till the third section, the prognosis where I think this is the weakest section

00:28:54

in the whole book anyways, but that's really where he gets into a lot of the spiritual

00:28:58

stuff and his own, like a lot of his lists of things, like three points, four points,

00:29:04

whatever, you'll see a lot of that stuff in there.

00:29:06

So if you're put off by that, then I would say just read the first two sections of this

00:29:10

book, but there's still value in it for anybody.

00:29:14

Yeah.

00:29:15

No, I think it's a valid point because at the end of part one, and this is when he first

00:29:19

brings it up in that God did not call us to a life of hectic overload.

00:29:25

Like that's when he brings it up.

00:29:28

And that's where like that theme starts around.

00:29:31

It's like, this is not what was intended for you.

00:29:34

And to be honest, like that's a bit of an alarm bell for me partially because some of

00:29:42

the marginal living that I have is as a result of my job, which is working for the church.

00:29:50

Sure.

00:29:51

So that's something I'm going to have to wrestle with.

00:29:53

And I don't really know what to do with that.

00:29:55

It's one of those things like people expect you to be there during working hours, but

00:29:59

a lot of the events are after hours.

00:30:01

So what do you do with that?

00:30:04

Do I just not do the extra events?

00:30:06

Do I do some?

00:30:07

Do I not work someday?

00:30:08

Like, what does that mean?

00:30:09

What does margin mean in that scenario?

00:30:11

I don't have an answer to that because I feel like I need to be doing both and the pressure

00:30:16

is to do both.

00:30:18

But my wife obviously doesn't want me to do both and I would agree with her that I should

00:30:22

not do both.

00:30:24

So I haven't quite figured out what to like what the solution there is.

00:30:28

I don't have an action item on this because I don't really know what it what I would write

00:30:32

other than just think about it.

00:30:35

But you know, trying to figure out how to simplify that and nail it down to where it's

00:30:39

more accurate.

00:30:40

I don't really know what that means quite yet, but it is something I need to explore

00:30:45

because given the biblical background of this book, it definitely made me stop and think

00:30:54

it through a little bit from a different angle.

00:30:56

Sure.

00:30:57

Well, I definitely have thoughts on that and it does pertain to this book, but we should

00:31:02

probably have that conversation off air.

00:31:04

All right, we can do that for the sake of the listeners.

00:31:08

There's drafts here I come.

00:31:10

Mike, tell me.

00:31:12

The point which is general, which could apply to your situation and everybody else I think

00:31:19

is not that you shouldn't be doing certain things, but to make sure that you're doing

00:31:24

the right things.

00:31:26

And that's really what this whole first section is designed to do is to highlight the fact

00:31:31

that you're probably doing some things that are not the right things.

00:31:36

And the fact that you're doing some things that are not the right things are what contribute

00:31:40

to the current state of pain that you're experiencing.

00:31:42

And everybody's experiencing this to some degree, I would argue, just because this is

00:31:46

the default for our society and for our culture.

00:31:50

Whenever we have any sort of margin, the tendency is to fill it.

00:31:54

And if I've got three hours on my calendar, I'm going to find something to plug into those

00:31:59

three hours.

00:32:00

And he's saying basically, no, just leave those three hours there or better yet build

00:32:05

a system that systemically produces those free hours or produces the savings margin or produces

00:32:14

in the four different areas, which we'll get into in the next section.

00:32:18

Don't be upset that those things exist.

00:32:21

Just the fact that those things exist without an association or an allocation for that stuff,

00:32:27

that's not a bad thing.

00:32:28

In fact, that is actually a good thing because we're so used to functioning under overload

00:32:34

and he's got all sorts of different descriptions of overload here, like activity overload, change

00:32:41

overload, choice overload, debt overload, expectation overload, fatigue overload.

00:32:47

This one was eye opening to me because he shared a statistic with this one that 54% of

00:32:53

people say they are more tired at the end of a vacation than at the beginning.

00:32:59

So this guilty, this just highlights exactly what I was saying.

00:33:04

You've got the margin built in, right?

00:33:06

You're doing everything technically correct.

00:33:09

You've taken a week of vacation.

00:33:11

You should feel better at the end of that vacation.

00:33:14

But the fact that you don't is a red light that there's some other things that are broken.

00:33:21

And so I don't think it's a prescriptive thing.

00:33:24

Like you can just say, you've got to build in this amount of buffer, this amount of margin.

00:33:28

As soon as you have three hours of margin in your week, then you're good.

00:33:32

And now you can move on to the next thing.

00:33:33

I don't think it's that simple, but it's the alignment of doing the right things and eliminating

00:33:39

the wrong things that produces the margin.

00:33:43

And you can't just do stuff all the time.

00:33:44

You are going to have to take a break.

00:33:46

But ultimately, you can't formulaize that.

00:33:50

There's got to be some margin, but it's going to be different for every person in relation

00:33:55

to what they should have in terms of what their prescription looks like, I guess, for

00:34:02

the margin for the different areas.

00:34:03

All right.

00:34:04

So what's the prescription for all of this problem we've created, Mike?

00:34:07

The prescription is margin.

00:34:10

And as we've alluded to it, it wouldn't have guessed that one.

00:34:14

It's true.

00:34:15

It's true.

00:34:16

He defines margin as the space between our load and our limits.

00:34:21

Now the margin course that Sean Blunk put out has a visual for this, which is really

00:34:28

powerful.

00:34:29

It's like a bar graph.

00:34:30

And the top part of it is red.

00:34:32

And that shows basically the top part of the limit.

00:34:38

And then at the bottom, you've got a yellow bar and that's your load.

00:34:43

And then in between that is the blue and that's the margin.

00:34:46

And so what you've got from this bar that stretches from the bottom of the page upward

00:34:54

is essentially your total capacity.

00:34:57

And there's a couple ways that you can achieve margin.

00:35:01

You can increase your limit.

00:35:04

You can move that top bar up or you can decrease your load.

00:35:08

The problem is that for a lot of us, the load is at the limit or if not above.

00:35:13

And so we've got to be an overdrive all the time and we get burned out.

00:35:17

Now I agree with those two things, but I think probably everybody listening to bookworm.

00:35:24

I know that is a generalization, but I think it is probably 100% true.

00:35:29

We would default to, well, I'll just increase my limit.

00:35:33

The problem is there's an 80/20 with this and we've already done this about a hundred

00:35:37

times.

00:35:38

So at some point you have to decrease your load and no one wants to do that.

00:35:45

No one wants to go back on a commitment that they made or stop doing something that they

00:35:49

enjoy on some level.

00:35:51

But I've actually had to do this this last year and stop doing a couple different things.

00:35:56

And I can tell you that Dr. Swenson is right once you do that things are way better.

00:36:04

I really love doing this but saying no to it makes me even better.

00:36:08

Yes, it's true.

00:36:09

So just one example, sharing my failures here.

00:36:12

I used to do screencast for screencast online.

00:36:15

I really loved doing screencast for screencast online.

00:36:18

Don McAllister, JF, Brissette, they are amazing to work with and I have learned so much from

00:36:25

working with them.

00:36:27

When I stopped working with Asian efficiency and I needed some additional work, they were

00:36:33

the first ones who were like, "Yeah, you can do more screencast.

00:36:35

You can do the tip videos."

00:36:36

Like, I cannot speak highly enough about everybody in that organization.

00:36:41

But it also became clear once I started working with Blonk Media that this was something that

00:36:45

had to go.

00:36:47

And it killed me.

00:36:48

I struggled with that for like four months and I knew I needed to talk to Don about it and

00:36:53

I just kept putting it off, kept putting it off, eventually sent him an email and he's

00:36:58

like, "I knew this was coming."

00:37:03

But I continued to operate under that heavy load for additional months.

00:37:07

It caused myself and my family more stress even though it just, at the time it passed,

00:37:13

that season was gone.

00:37:14

It wasn't the right fit for me anymore.

00:37:17

So that's one example.

00:37:19

And ultimately I think everybody has to make those decisions.

00:37:22

Not just with your work either.

00:37:23

I mean with the different areas, you've got emotional energy, you've got physical energy,

00:37:27

you've got margin in time and you've got margin in your finances.

00:37:31

You've got to make those choices.

00:37:33

And the problem is, I had this revelation when I was thinking about the margin with

00:37:37

your finances.

00:37:40

When you have margin in your finances, it's easier to save because you're saving towards

00:37:48

some big goal maybe like paying off your house and you've made some progress already.

00:37:52

So when you get additional income, you're just like, "Yeah, I'm going to contribute that

00:37:56

to this thing over here."

00:37:57

And you don't feel like you need to buy something.

00:38:01

Whereas if you don't have any margin, because all these areas I think tend to be related,

00:38:06

you don't have any emotional margin, don't have any financial margin.

00:38:09

You're working really hard and you feel like you've earned something.

00:38:11

So when the new airpods come out, you buy them because you deserve it.

00:38:14

And that's 250 bucks down the drain.

00:38:18

Whereas when you have that financial margin, when you have that emotional margin, you're

00:38:22

like, you can see things more clearly and you don't have to just medicate the symptoms

00:38:29

if that makes sense.

00:38:30

It makes sense to me.

00:38:31

I think with my specific case, like the one I struggle with the most likely right now

00:38:37

is physical because I feel like I'm in a pretty good stance financially at the moment.

00:38:44

But obviously, we've talked about all of my health issues that come and go.

00:38:49

And this is where I have an action item in it.

00:38:53

And I guess we'll go through these four areas.

00:38:55

But I need to get back into, I was doing for a long time a daily yoga practice and had

00:39:03

tried to whittle that down.

00:39:05

This is talk about increasing limits instead of increasing margin.

00:39:10

That's what I was trying to do in that I was trying to make sure that my morning routine

00:39:15

I could add as many things to it as I could.

00:39:18

Now when I couldn't add all the stuff to it that I wanted to, I debated moving the time

00:39:24

back that my girls get up in the morning.

00:39:26

It's like, oh, you guys need to sleep a little longer.

00:39:28

That'll give me more time in the morning.

00:39:29

I legitimately had this conversation with myself.

00:39:32

That is a way that I could get more time in the morning.

00:39:36

I also thought about getting up earlier, but I'm trying to make sure I don't cut on sleep.

00:39:40

Well, then that made me think, well, can I go to bed earlier?

00:39:43

It's like, well, then my wife has these seven things go wrong.

00:39:47

Okay, so I really can't do that.

00:39:49

And it's like, oh, well, I suppose I could cut out some of the stuff I do for fun in the

00:39:56

morning, like just checking in on some stuff I want to do research on in the morning.

00:39:59

It's like, oh, well, but I didn't want to cut that.

00:40:03

So go ahead and cut it.

00:40:06

Pick up the yoga practice.

00:40:07

That's my action item is I need to be willing to do that.

00:40:11

But I have not been good about making sure that even from a time stance that I've got

00:40:17

those buffer times, like those buffer zones in there, I just don't.

00:40:22

So again, this book was super helpful in helping me see that stuff because I normally

00:40:28

wouldn't have noticed it.

00:40:30

And sometimes you run across books that do that where this exposes something that you've

00:40:35

just assumed as a default for a long time.

00:40:40

And this is a cultural default answer of just fill all your time with all the stuff.

00:40:46

And he just point blank says, no, that's not right.

00:40:52

Even to the point where he's a doctor and is choosing to only work three days a week.

00:40:57

Now he makes enough he can do that, but he made the choice to only be in his practice

00:41:04

three days a week.

00:41:06

Like that, that is awesome and terrifying to me at the same time.

00:41:11

But you know, hey, if it works for him, go for it.

00:41:14

I can't do that.

00:41:15

I would lose my job if I did that.

00:41:18

So I have to come about it in different ways in order to get to that point.

00:41:22

But yes, the health thing is the one that I need to like the physical side of the margin

00:41:28

is the one that I need to focus on the most.

00:41:30

Yeah, well, since we're talking about some of the time stuff, this is a really interesting

00:41:36

section to me.

00:41:39

He shares some research at the beginning of that chapter where at one point people thought

00:41:49

that we were headed towards a two day work week because we were getting so efficient

00:41:55

that we would just get everything done and then we would have all this extra time, which

00:42:00

kind of boggles my mind when you read that because that's obviously not what happened.

00:42:06

We just find more stuff to fill it with.

00:42:08

And that's kind of his point in that that chapter is he says, he's got all these axioms

00:42:13

and this is the sixth one.

00:42:15

He says, the spontaneous flow of progress is to consume more of our time, not less.

00:42:19

You kind of can't really picture how that's going to work.

00:42:24

It just sort of happens.

00:42:26

If you're not not intentional, you're not protecting it.

00:42:30

The big thing that stands out to me in this specific section, because he's got a whole

00:42:35

bunch of practical things that you can do to restore time margin, everything from turning

00:42:42

off the television to pruning your activities, separating time from your technology, getting

00:42:48

less done but doing the right things, planning for your free time.

00:42:52

But the one that really stands out to me is availability, be available.

00:42:59

I've been thinking a lot about this and I've shared this before all the way back from the

00:43:03

productivity project when you first read it by Chris Bailey, where he made a comment about

00:43:08

how people are the reason for productivity.

00:43:12

I'm reading this chapter and I'm like, what does time margin look like?

00:43:16

It is being available to help other people and not feel bad about it, not feel like I'm

00:43:24

not doing what I need to do because I'm helping this person and I'm able to devote everything

00:43:28

that I have to assisting that person.

00:43:33

My wife and I, one of my, one of my, my gap books was Life and Air and we've talked about

00:43:37

this before and one of the things that came from reading that was this statement where

00:43:43

even if we don't have a million bucks, we want to be able to make people feel like a

00:43:47

million bucks.

00:43:48

So to me, that's a great, that's summarized perfectly in availability.

00:43:53

He says usefulness is nine-tenths availability.

00:43:55

I think that's probably pretty accurate.

00:43:58

So the action item for me associated with this is simply a question, am I interruptable?

00:44:04

If someone were to call and say, hey, I just need somebody to talk to you right now, can

00:44:08

I drop everything?

00:44:09

Do I have enough time margin to drop everything?

00:44:11

Go meet them for coffee or for lunch and to spend a couple of hours talking through things

00:44:16

because I say that that's the stuff that's really important to me, but my actions really

00:44:20

dictate and our evidence of what is a priority for me.

00:44:26

And I'm not happy when I do a self-examination and I ask myself, like, am I interruptable

00:44:30

because I think a lot of the time the answer is no.

00:44:32

I want to get better at that.

00:44:35

And I want to start thinking about systemic ways that I can create that into my schedule.

00:44:41

When I was growing up, I had, well, I didn't, but my dad had a habit of if he saw someone

00:44:47

on the side of the road, he always stopped and helped them because we could.

00:44:51

We had the time to do that.

00:44:53

And I think about the number of times I've driven past people I see parked on the side

00:44:57

of the road.

00:44:58

And I think that is, like, irks me that I don't stop, but I know that if I do, I'm going to

00:45:04

cause a meeting to start late.

00:45:07

I'm going to cause an event to start late.

00:45:09

Like I'm going to cause those issues.

00:45:11

And I would rather leave the person on the side of the road than do that.

00:45:15

So like that bugs me.

00:45:18

And if I had, if I give myself more time for things like that, I would gladly stop and

00:45:23

help more people.

00:45:25

I specifically remember when I was in college, I went to Nicaragua on a mission trip.

00:45:33

It was a two week mission trip.

00:45:35

It was basically two sub mission trips within that.

00:45:39

The first week we were there, we were on a farm.

00:45:42

And the purpose of the farm was to teach local farmers how to create a self-sustaining

00:45:49

farm.

00:45:50

Great idea, right?

00:45:51

Well, the thing they had asked us to do is help a local farmer build a new structure

00:45:56

for housing his cattle.

00:45:58

Again, simple.

00:46:01

What was difficult was that there were a handful of us guys on that team that had built structures

00:46:09

like this before.

00:46:10

We'd worked with concrete, we'd worked with a bunch of things.

00:46:13

And whenever we got to the job site, we were going at it.

00:46:17

We know how this works.

00:46:18

Like, not going to think twice about it.

00:46:20

But whenever we were working with the locals who were working on that project, like, we

00:46:26

were doing all the work and they were just kind of watching us the whole time, which

00:46:32

irked a couple of the other guys.

00:46:33

I didn't think much about it because in my mind, I was thinking that this is why I'm

00:46:38

here to do this with them or for them.

00:46:41

Like that was my point.

00:46:42

So it didn't really strike me.

00:46:44

But one of the other guys on the team, it really bothered him.

00:46:48

So he ended up having a conversation with them and they couldn't understand why we were

00:46:54

working so hard and could not get it through their minds, why we were hustling so much.

00:47:02

They kept saying we're trying not to help because we don't work at that pace.

00:47:08

So they didn't even know how to jump in because they were so used to taking their time to

00:47:14

go through it slowly because they gave themselves so much time.

00:47:20

Because what happened, what we eventually found out was that structure did not need

00:47:24

to be completely built for about nine months.

00:47:28

And the pace we were on it was going to be built in about three weeks.

00:47:32

So they had just planned to work on it a little bit each day.

00:47:37

We were there to get it done while we were there in one week.

00:47:39

Yeah, exactly.

00:47:40

We had this same thing in Costa Rica.

00:47:42

We showed up at this orphanage and we were going to rake the yard and they actually took

00:47:47

the rakes away from us at one point.

00:47:48

We went and got them back because we weren't done and then they took them again and hid

00:47:51

them.

00:47:52

Yeah.

00:47:53

And it's interesting.

00:47:56

And he does call this out in the book that there is a point at which third world countries

00:48:03

are better than us in the United States, specifically when it comes to time and margin.

00:48:09

Because they know how to give themselves that buffer and they do it on a much better scale

00:48:15

than we do.

00:48:16

And we always feel like we have to get things done as quickly and as efficiently as we possibly

00:48:20

can shorten up the time frame, kick things out quicker.

00:48:24

That leads to a more fulfilling life, right?

00:48:26

Well, no, not exactly.

00:48:29

They have it right in my opinion.

00:48:32

Exactly.

00:48:33

The real value for me in reading this book is just articulating another option where

00:48:40

things don't have to be so hectic and so crazy.

00:48:44

And again, you got to kind of wrestle with that yourself to define what that looks like

00:48:50

for you.

00:48:51

But I guess going through it the second time, the thing that I realized was how important

00:48:56

this really is.

00:48:57

Like don't put it off.

00:49:00

So the tough questions, say no to something and start creating the margin because you

00:49:05

really need it before you realize that you're going to need it.

00:49:08

Yeah, absolutely.

00:49:09

By the time you realize that you don't have margin, it's already too late.

00:49:13

Now, question for you.

00:49:15

So we've talked about physical.

00:49:17

I feel like understanding physical margin, that's fairly easy, like making sure that

00:49:21

you're in good health so that you don't have an overload of health issues.

00:49:26

So that one's fairly easy to understand time.

00:49:28

That one's pretty obvious.

00:49:29

Like don't butt things up against each other so that you don't have time to find your book

00:49:34

whenever you're getting ready to record on it.

00:49:36

And finances live below what you earn.

00:49:40

Like that's easy.

00:49:42

And this is actually just real quickly.

00:49:44

This is the thing that where I started to disconnect the first time I read it because

00:49:48

he's talking about how he's only choosing to work three days a week, but he also is

00:49:53

driving an old pickup truck and he's chopping his own firewood.

00:49:55

Right.

00:49:56

And I'm like, I'm not going to do that.

00:49:58

Yes.

00:49:59

So like those three areas, the physical, the financial and the time, but the emotional,

00:50:08

to me, this is the hard one.

00:50:11

Probably the most valuable of the four is in terms of like mental space.

00:50:17

But how like, what was your take on this one?

00:50:21

Because like the other three, I know I can get my head around and the emotional one I

00:50:25

know I should get my head around, but I kind of struggled with, what am I going to do

00:50:29

with it?

00:50:30

Yeah.

00:50:31

The emotional one, he makes the point in the book that this is the most important.

00:50:37

And this is also probably the hardest one to measure.

00:50:41

You can look at your calendar and you can see how busy you are.

00:50:43

You can look at your body and you can say, I got to get to the gym more often or I got

00:50:47

to eat better or I got to get more sleep.

00:50:50

You can look at your bank accounts and you can say, I got to start saving.

00:50:56

But when you look at your emotions, at least for me, the response is whenever you realize

00:51:03

that you're making a big deal about something that really isn't a big deal, it's like, oh,

00:51:06

we'll just suck it up, buttercup.

00:51:09

Right?

00:51:10

It's like you can change your attitude.

00:51:12

You can change your emotions.

00:51:14

But the light bulb moment for me was kind of that on a certain level, you can't.

00:51:21

The way that you are feeling about things and the reason that things are such a big deal

00:51:25

is because you have a whole bunch of things that have contributed to this lack of emotional

00:51:31

margin.

00:51:32

Again, he's got a whole bunch of things here, which you can do to restore margin and your

00:51:36

emotional energy.

00:51:37

You can cultivate social supports.

00:51:39

You can serve somebody.

00:51:41

You can laugh.

00:51:42

You can cry.

00:51:43

He talks about sabbaticals in here.

00:51:45

All of that stuff is great.

00:51:48

But the question for me as I was going through this was, how do I identify whether I have

00:51:53

any emotional margin?

00:51:55

Because I always thought that I did.

00:51:57

And then as I look back at the beginning of the year, like I said, this has been probably

00:52:03

the most difficult year I've ever gone through.

00:52:05

I also feel like I'm in a really good spot right now.

00:52:08

So I don't want to focus and dwell on the negative.

00:52:11

But in sharing my failures, I will share that at the beginning of the year, I didn't

00:52:15

know what my work life was going to look like or how it was going to provide for my

00:52:20

family.

00:52:21

I just knew I was supposed to get faith-based productivity out the door.

00:52:25

So I knew that this is the thing I got to work on.

00:52:28

And for a long time, that was what I did every single day from when I went to bed.

00:52:36

And most days, it was fine.

00:52:38

Most days, I was able to bring it.

00:52:40

Most days, I was motivated to get this thing done.

00:52:44

But there were occasional days where I would wake up and I look back at it now and I recognize

00:52:50

I didn't have any emotional margin.

00:52:51

And that's why as soon as I got up, I'm like, I just want to lay here for the next eight

00:52:57

hours.

00:52:58

I don't want to do anything today.

00:53:01

And that's, I don't deal with that anymore.

00:53:04

And that's because I have some emotional margin.

00:53:07

The other kind of light bulb moment for me is it pertains to all this stuff.

00:53:11

I mean, obviously you're talking about motivation and I believe motivation can be manufactured

00:53:15

unlike willpower.

00:53:17

So there are things that you can do in the moment to create the motivation to do certain

00:53:21

things, but you do have your limits.

00:53:23

And I recognize now that I was overloaded a lot of the time and that brought me really,

00:53:30

really close to burnout.

00:53:33

But the other thing is that all of these areas of margin, they're interrelated.

00:53:39

And so the moment that I started getting more emotional margin was the moment that I started

00:53:45

getting more time margin because I was more effective when I was working.

00:53:52

And the moment that that happened, I started to get a little bit more margin in physical

00:53:57

energy and I started to feel better.

00:54:00

So I'm not going to be able to do that.

00:54:04