Bookworm Transcripts

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All right, Mike. So there's a thing that happens sometimes when you introduce somebody else to a given thing.

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And they eventually become so enthralled with it. They love it and they learn a lot about it.

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And they eventually eclipse you in how far they are into using said thing.

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And I feel like that's where we are right now with you and fountain pens.

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Because I have I have four fountain pens, two of which I use almost daily.

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I use a single ink, which is a noodlers black ink, but holy buckets, dude, you're sending me pictures and stuff of new pens you're buying and the inks you're using.

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It's like, how many pens and inks you got going over there now?

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There's a fair amount.

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So the challenge last time was, would I buy the fancy bottle that you had mentioned for my Twizbee?

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Right. Right. And did you?

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I did not.

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OK. Instead, I bought a sailor 1911 fresca and a bottle of Yomogi, manio sailor ink, which is amazing.

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We're more expensive. So here's the story with this.

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I started listening to the Panatic, which was definitely a mistake.

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Yeah, from an economic perspective, a mistake.

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And yeah, Brad and Mike were talking about some of their favorite pens.

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What's on their desk and they're going through all of these different crazy special edition pens.

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And I'm like, man, someday I'd love to have a sailor because Mike's got like five sailors on his desk.

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And then I went and checked the Anderson pens website, which next time you're in town, we'll have to stop by there because it's about 100 feet from the co-working space that I got.

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Go to sure.

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And they had an experienced sailor 1911.

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So it was cheaper than the standard one.

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There's no sign of wear on this at all.

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And when I saw it, I'm like, I'm probably not going to find a better deal than than that.

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So I bit the bullet and I bought myself a fancy fountain pen, a truly fancy phone pen.

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Like crazy.

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Yeah, I love it.

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I'm using it using it all the time.

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I kind of knew that once I had like a really nice pen that I would end up using it more.

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But I think I ended up using it more than even I thought I was going to.

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It just is so comfortable.

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Right.

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So well, the ink looks awesome.

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Yeah, I'm a big fan.

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I also purchased the the Twisbee Eco and filled it with the pink ink from the Twisbee ink sampler that I got in Rachel's using that one presently.

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And I have a pilot metropolitan on the way as well.

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Oh, so you did go that route.

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See, that was one I told you to get, I think, right?

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Yep.

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Yep.

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The plan is that that one will be the everyday carry stays in the backpack, probably got it.

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Got it beat on that one a little bit.

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Sure.

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Yeah.

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Well, you've made me proud for sure.

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I guess the only other question I have at this point is what notebooks are you using?

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I am using solely a Berenfig.

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Confident, the clear edition.

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So the James Clear one, the it's got the black cover and the golden boss triangle thing, just because I think it looks awesome.

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Sure.

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The Berenfig paper I really like, but I don't know.

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There's lots of different versions of the confidant.

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I would use any one of those.

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I do like the larger size.

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So this is not like the standard moleskin size.

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It's a little bit bigger.

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It's basically the exact size of my 11 inch iPad Pro.

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So I can grab like the notebook, a pen in my iPad and very comfortably carry it to coffee shop, whatever.

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So that's that's where all of the the noodling happens is inside that that Berenfig.

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Well, I'm proud of you.

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Well done, sir.

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I only hope that now you don't cost me money in this endeavor.

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We'll just never use the sailor and you'll be.

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All right.

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I'll do my best.

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One thing I want to point out before we start running through action items and follow up there is that we're doing something at the end here of 2019 going into 2020.

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And Mike saw this happen in a couple other places, one in particular, and it kind of sparked something in us.

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So we thought we would try it, see how it goes, but it's top books of 2019.

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So what we'd like to ask you to do is go to club.bookworm.fm.

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At pinned at the top of that list of topics, there's a poll, top books of 2019.

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Go into that and choose your favorite book of all the books we've covered for the year of 2019, which is a pretty difficult task, to be honest.

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I submitted my vote.

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Did you do this already, Mike?

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Did you put one in on this?

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I did.

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OK, I don't know if I should ask what it is.

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We'll do that whenever we do the episode.

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But there's already votes on this.

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The cream of the crop is starting to come towards the top.

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And there's this.

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I had a hard time going through this list in order to choose the one that I was going to vote for because I restricted it to one vote.

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Not sure if I should have done that or not, but it's what it is.

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And holy cow, this is hard to do.

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So anyway, go to club.bookworm.fm.

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Click on that poll topic, submit your vote.

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You have until midnight on December 31st.

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So you have until the end of the year to get your vote in.

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And you want to add to that, Mike?

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It's kind of cool looking through that list and realizing that we read a lot of books in 2019.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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That doesn't even include the gap books.

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Right.

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So that's actually quite a bit to pick from there.

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These are the books that we covered for bookworm, by the way, in 2019, not the books that were published in 2019.

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Yeah, that would be a long list.

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Holy cow.

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That would be.

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Yeah.

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One time.

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So yes, club.bookworm.fm.

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How many times can I say it club.bookworm.fm?

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Go to the poll, submit your votes, and we'll go from there.

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So that said, action items, Mike, I have one that I need to go through because I did it last time.

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And that is this two minute morning practice.

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And I had one person ask me about this from the last time I said I only got it done halfway.

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Like what exactly it is that I'm doing as part of that.

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Well, there's three different prompts that I'm attempting to go through on this.

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I'm only about 75% of the time getting this done.

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But each day there's three things I'm answering.

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One is I will let go of blank.

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I am grateful for blank.

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I will focus on blank.

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Those are the three things that I'm doing as part of this two minute morning.

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Practice and just trying to make that a part of my morning routine.

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It has been going into paper.

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You know, no surprise there.

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And it ends up being part of like my daily journal for the day.

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So it ends up being how I start my day.

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And then at the end of the day, I'm using that same notebook and same location to do

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like my end of day journaling, which I don't really have any prompts for.

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I feel like I should.

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I don't know how many times people told me I should use prompts for this.

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And I don't.

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So anyway, that's the one I got to follow up on from two episodes ago.

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You've got a couple here, Mike.

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I do.

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And in typical Mike fashion, there's no way to tell if they were successful.

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So good job.

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How can I simplify my life in the form of a question?

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I haven't spent a whole lot of time thinking about this, to be honest.

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Although I am about to walk into a period, which is a simplification of my life,

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which is a two weeks sabbatical.

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So kind of I'm doing this, but there's definitely more room to make improvement in this area.

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One of the things that I've been thinking around this, this topic is just minimizing

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the number of things that I am involved in, the number of commitments that I have made,

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new projects pop up all the time.

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And I am feeling a lot better about saying no to them.

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And a lot of it is because of this question, how can I simplify my life?

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I know that my goal is to this to create simplicity.

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And so when I am presented with an opportunity for a project now, it's kind of my initial reaction

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instead of being like, Oh, that's interesting.

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I really want to do that.

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It's kind of like you.

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Sure.

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I want to touch this with a 10 foot pole.

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Yeah.

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You know, and I have to.

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So it's kind of flipped where instead of trying to talk myself out of doing it, now I kind

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of have to talk myself into doing it, which for me is kind of a baseline of progress

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that's being made.

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But like I said, I know that there's more stuff to be done here.

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So not completely done, but for terms of following up with action items, I'd say this is done.

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A second one I had was am I interruptible?

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And this one, I do actually have a specific story that proves that I did actually do this one.

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Okay.

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Let's step in the right direction.

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Yeah, I think it was two or three days after we recorded somebody asked me for help moving a couch.

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And it was in the middle of my work day and my initial reaction was, no, I'm not going to drop

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everything and help you move a couch.

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But then I instantly remembered this action item.

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And I'm like, well, let's figure out a way to make this work.

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And you know what?

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It all worked out.

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So I was in fact, interruptible, but again, judging by my initial reactions, there's room

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for improvement here still.

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I need to seek out more opportunities to be interrupted, I think.

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Which is so weird to hear someone say, I need to find ways to be interrupted more.

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Like, yeah.

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Okay.

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Sure.

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Well, nobody likes being interrupted.

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That's the thing.

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You know, I'm also teaching a Bible college class right now in personal management.

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And the lesson that we just did was on attitude and discipline.

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And the word for discipline that they use in a couple of different places literally

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means to hit under the eye.

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So you think about all of the Bible verses that talk about the benefits of discipline

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and choosing to be disciplined.

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It's like subjecting yourself to pain.

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Doesn't sound that enjoyable, but ultimately it produces a good result.

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Right.

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Which for me is better relationships.

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So I know that being interrupted is going to drive the productivity nerd in me crazy,

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but that's probably a good thing.

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And I think just to defend you and clarify, I think what you mean by this is

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interruptible by people, not necessarily interruptible by some media related thing.

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I'm not looking for notifications to go off so I can be distracted by

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something.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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Yeah.

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People who have some something that they need my help with and I want to,

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instead of just saying, no, I got my own stuff going on, being able to prioritize

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people over projects.

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Right.

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So you're essentially making the distinction between being interrupted versus being

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distracted.

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Yep.

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Definitely.

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No, between those two there.

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So people versus things, I like it.

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I've got three here from our last book, margin.

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Uh, one is to get back into my daily yoga practice, which has failed about as bad as it

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could in that I did it absolutely zero times.

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I'm going to try again though.

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You know, that's, that's the way this works.

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You just keep going.

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So I need to keep trying on that.

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That is definitely something I need to, uh, to get back into.

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I also had, uh, simplifying my life on here, simple life.

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Uh, I don't have anything specific as far as success with this goes, but I've been

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having a lot of conversations about my schedule.

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I know you and I talked a little bit about, uh, my schedule with working at a church,

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uh, after our last recording, what should my schedule look like?

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What does it look like when I'm at the church, when I'm at home, etc, etc?

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A lot of questions, a lot of details around that, but I am still working through that.

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I don't think there's a way to say, yeah, your name on this.

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I think you kind of alluded to that.

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Um, but it is one that I am going to continue working on, but I don't think it's

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worth following up on again for say.

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Uh, last one here is to put some buffer time between my task blocks.

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So essentially giving me, uh, you know, that buffer zone between what I'm working

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on.

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And this has gone very poorly.

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Um, basically what I'm saying is Joe is really bad at putting margin into his life.

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And in my attempt to put more buffer between all of my tasks, I realized that over

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the last two weeks, I had one week of catch up from Thanksgiving.

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And then this past week I've been hustling because we're going to be gone next week

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for Christmas.

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So the last two weeks have been the opposite of putting in buffer, if anything.

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Uh, so I had a lot of questions for Mike after our last episode.

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How, how long do we talk after we recorded last time?

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Like maybe 20, 30 minutes, even after we were done.

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Yeah, probably about 30 minutes.

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Some of that was me quizzing Mike on the, the work, uh, scheduling of the sweet setup

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and how they do things with like this two weeks of bad.

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I called it's coming up and such and it's like, is that a routine I could start to adopt?

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I would love to.

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No idea if that'll work.

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Um, it doesn't make sense to start that routine on a sabbatical.

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That would be kind of odd.

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Maybe it would make sense, but that's that way of thinking is something I'm trying to work towards.

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So this whole simple life and buffer between task blocks, the whole yoga practice, like it's all intertwined.

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So much of this really is, uh, but no conclusive answers, but I'll keep working on them.

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So what I got.

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All right.

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Cool.

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So that's it for follow up.

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Yep.

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Tell us about today's book.

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Today's book was not my choice, but it was my choice.

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This was selected from a game I played, uh, where club members first one to send me a private

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message to on the book they wanted us to cover.

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No questions asked.

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We would cover the book.

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Mike didn't like that concept, but it turned out okay.

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I think Mike did and awful.

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On the club chose the infinite game by Simon Sinek, uh, so that is today's book.

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So we picked it up.

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We have read it.

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It's time to go through it, but I did enjoy this one.

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Uh, and we'll get into what is the infinite game here shortly, but I'm grateful that we had the

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chance to go through this one.

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But what were your first impressions on this, Mike?

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This is an awesome book.

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I forgot how much I liked Simon Sinek.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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No, uh, three different sections, just 11 different chapters and everything flowed together

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super tightly.

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There were a lot of stories in here that feel like I've heard before.

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One thing that instantly came to mind was, Oh, yes, Simon Sinek really likes Apple from a

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business organization perspective.

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Yes.

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Yes.

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But there's a lot of other other stories in here too.

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So yeah, there's lots of Apple culture, Steve Jobs, Apple retail stores.

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Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, Microsoft messed up by Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple, like there's,

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yeah, there's a lot of that.

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Let me just read off all the chapter titles here because there are 11 and we're not going to go

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through all of them.

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I think we have seven written down here to kind of go through and we may pull some stuff from the

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other pieces here, but chapter one through 11, finite and infinite games just cause

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cause no cause.

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Keeper of the cause, the responsibility of business revised will and resources,

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trusting teams, ethical fading, worthy rival existential flexibility and the courage to lead.

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And the first of those is finite and infinite games.

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And this is where he really lays out what is the point of this book, I think.

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And his, his point here is that number one, this shouldn't be a book that needs to be written.

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And yet it needed to be written.

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But two, a finite game is one that has an end.

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It's one that's once you've reached the end of it, you know, if you've won or lost.

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And an infinite game is one that never stops as the name implies.

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So what has to happen is whenever you're playing that game, you have to think about it very

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differently because you're essentially empowering the people after you to continue living out the

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values and the methods that you have put in place yourself as part of playing that game.

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So your methodologies and the systems and the lifestyles you put in place between those two

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different thought processes is drastically different.

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Um, and the whole book is just littered with examples of how this has come about.

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I think the one thing I want to point out here though is that he keeps it very focused on business,

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which is kind of Simon Sennox, M.O. here.

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So he's, he's very much focused on companies, businesses and how the world of economics operates.

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It's not really one that he gears towards like a personal life.

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You could definitely do that and you can pull out those parallels, but it's not

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something that he focuses on. I think at all. I don't remember him calling that out in any way whatsoever.

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But anyway, finite and infinite games.

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Yeah. So what is the difference between a finite and infinite game?

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Well, one you can win, the other you can't. That's a simple answer.

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Yeah. No, that's that is a simple answer. He's got a bunch of other points where I thought

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this was really interesting, an interesting way to start the book because we probably,

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if we're honest with ourselves, tend to default towards a finite mindset.

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So I'll just quickly go through how he defines a finite, a characteristics of a finite game are

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played by known players. There's an agreed upon objective that when reached ends the game, players

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where uniforms and are easily identifiable, a set of rules and referees is in place to

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enforce those rules and the game ends when the time is up and the players live to play another day.

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Now, an infinite game is kind of the exact opposite. It's played by known and unknown players. There's

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no agreed upon rules. There's sometimes conventions, but players can break them if they want to.

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There is no finish line, infinite time horizons, kind of your point. There's no such thing as winning,

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and it's the game that lives on and the players that run out, which I thought that

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play on words isn't, it kind of encapsulates this idea perfectly. So you think about your life

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and the 70, 80 years that you're here and time goes on before and after, and you're trying to

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leave the biggest legacy that you can, at least a lot of people, that's their goal.

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And so that's an infinite mindset is what can I create that's going to last, rather than the

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finite one is the short term nearsighted. How can I make the most of this tomorrow sort of a thing,

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which he impacts that from a business perspective as we get into the other chapters. But this is

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definitely something worth defining here at the beginning. Some examples of this, because he talks

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about how business is an infinite game. And this is where you start to see the pro apple bias.

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I don't think this is 100% true anymore. But when he was writing this, he was talking about

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Steve Balmer, correct? And their release of the zoom and they were the zoom HD. And their goal

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was they were going to kill the iPod, they were going to beat apple. And he said that he spoke

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at a Microsoft event and he got one of these zoon HDs and it was a really impressive product.

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So Microsoft strategy was beat apple, but apple strategy was bigger. They had an infinite mindset.

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Their goal was to help teachers teach and help students learn. And I don't I don't remember who

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said what was championing that specific finite story or infinite story at the time. But he did

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mention that he was in a cab with an Apple executive and he told them what Microsoft had said and

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was like, Hey, the zoon HD is way better than the iPod and the apple executive is like, I'm sure it

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is like didn't wasn't didn't phase them at all. And I thought that was a cool story. And it showed

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the difference between a finite mindset and infinite mindset really well. Yeah, because it

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really does take two of like the conglomerates in the tech world. Like they're definitely against

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each other and yet one's really not paying attention to the other. And the other one's hyper focused on

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their competitor in this in this story, which did not work out well for Microsoft in the end,

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as we all know. But yeah, they, you know, as he goes through these two different mindsets,

00:22:01

he does call out five essential practices. If you're going to adopt an infinite mindset,

00:22:10

we'll talk about some of these, maybe most of these. Maybe all of them, we'll see. Yeah, probably

00:22:18

all of them time is all said done. There's really only one that's not on our list right now. So I

00:22:24

might just mention it because, but it's so the five essential practices are to advance a just cause,

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build trusting teams, study your worthy rivals, prepare for existential flexibility,

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and demonstrate the courage to lead. And you can see the parallels with some of his chapter titles

00:22:47

here, just cause trusting teams worthy rivals courage lead. So let's just dive into the

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first of those, which is the just cause. And the reason I say that is because this is where a lot

00:23:00

of the core starts to begin, because he does say that your just cause has to be something more than

00:23:09

dollars, and it has to be something that you can't achieve. So it can't be a goal. I don't know how

00:23:16

many times we talk about, you know, setting goals and making sure they're achievable and such.

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That's not what we're talking about here. This is bigger than that. Yes, you can have those goals,

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and you can have those short term trajectories that you're trying to put together. But this is

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bigger than that. And, you know, he of course gives a lot of examples like the one you just shared with

00:23:37

Apple and Microsoft, Apple was focused on delivering excellent technology and trying to share music,

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making music available to everyone, thus the iPod. But Microsoft was focused on winning the MP3

00:23:53

player game. Yeah. And those are two different ways of coming at it. And you can kind of see

00:23:58

that still today in that Apple is now running Apple music, and they are still fighting to make

00:24:06

sure that music is available to all people. And, you know, that's that's kind of ingrained in their

00:24:12

culture, that concept, which is probably where some of their service mentality is now coming out,

00:24:17

at least partially not to get into Apple finances at all. There's lots of other podcasts for that.

00:24:25

Yeah, you know, I could rattle off five or six just off the top of my head. And I'm sure there's

00:24:31

way more than that. But, you know, the that is the core principle there in putting together,

00:24:36

you know, what is that long term goal? Is it trying to solve the fight against AIDS? That wouldn't

00:24:46

necessarily be a just cause because you're focused on one, what happens if you find the cure for AIDS

00:24:52

that will now you've succeeded in that. So that wouldn't necessarily be a just cause because you

00:24:57

can achieve that. So if you get the point there, like the goal is to determine what it is your

00:25:03

company is shooting for in the long term that you will continue to work towards, even if,

00:25:08

you know, all of the cultural circumstances change, you will continue fighting and adapting

00:25:14

to achieve that mission. Yeah, so you in that passage right there, I think you said the word

00:25:21

goal like five times and I had it occurs to me that goals are finite minded because they are,

00:25:32

by definition, a game that has a clear ending. And I've kind of a brewing on this lately, but as

00:25:40

you were just talking, kind of, sheaves the moment of clarity here where goals are finite-minded,

00:25:47

but habits maybe are an infinite-minded version of that. So habits are the things that you're going

00:25:55

to do every day going forward and you don't even care that you'll probably be doing them the rest

00:26:00

of your life, whereas goals have a specific ending, like, I'm going to run this half marathon and I

00:26:06

had this experience, I guess, done running the half marathon. I'm like, okay, now what? That was

00:26:10

cool, but that was a year of my life now. What's next? So as I'm going through and reading this

00:26:19

and talking through this with you, I'm recognizing more and more that goals are dumb. I understand

00:26:25

in a lot of context, maybe they're necessary, but I find myself every time people are talking about

00:26:33

goals now, kind of pushing back on the concept a little bit, and especially after reading this book,

00:26:41

that feeling is kind of multiplied. And I don't know if that's completely justified, but

00:26:52

my initial reaction as we're talking about goals and getting into the just cause and stuff is that

00:26:58

not the default way that we should be thinking about how we want to live our lives. The just

00:27:08

cause is the thing that kind of provides the motivation the definition he has is it's a specific

00:27:14

vision of a future state that doesn't exist. It's a future state so appealing that people are

00:27:18

willing to make sacrifices in order to help advance toward that vision. And he's again talking about

00:27:23

this from a business perspective and rallying people behind you're just cause, but I think even

00:27:27

on a personal level, you could identify a just cause. And that's the thing that makes you show up

00:27:34

every day. It's not the fact that you're checking a box and I am now 37% complete towards my goal

00:27:42

of writing a book or whatever. And it kind of challenges me because I've kind of defaulted to

00:27:49

that way in the past and I want to kind of change that. And I've kind of been thinking about this

00:27:55

for a while anyways about habits and habits over goals and that kind of thing. But as I was reading

00:28:01

this section, the action item associated with this for me is to identify what is my just cause.

00:28:08

I've got my life theme, which is a version of this, I think. But I want to condense that down.

00:28:18

Have you given any thought to this just cause and how it applies to you?

00:28:23

Yeah, to some degree. And I know that like the sweet setup just has the planner and the plan

00:28:31

your year thing that they've recently come out. I'm sure you're well aware of that, Mike.

00:28:37

And I've tried to, I haven't jumped into that, but what I've, what it prompted whenever I saw that

00:28:45

a lot of this came out is that's what really kicked off some of my thinking around, okay,

00:28:50

what does 2020 look like? 2020, you know, people, there's a, I think an especially large

00:28:57

number of folks interested in putting together goals and plans for 2020, just because of the

00:29:04

weird coincidence of 2020 vision, like there's just, there seems to be a weird connecting thing

00:29:10

there. Even folks that I've talked to and like, oh yeah, I'm never setting plans and goals. I had

00:29:16

conversations with our small group last night with folks that are very much anti goal orientation.

00:29:22

And then I'm like, yeah, I'm thinking about setting some goals this year. Why are you doing

00:29:26

that? You've been against these things for years, almost a decade. Like, well, it just seems right

00:29:31

with it being 2020. Okay. Yeah. Sure. So I'm not, I'm not sure plans and goals are necessarily the

00:29:39

same. No, they can be. No, but I am all for planning. I'm not all for setting goals. Just to clarify.

00:29:47

I think what I've been, and if you've gone through my working with Tommy Focus Course and listened to

00:29:55

some of the stuff I've talked about recently, you're aware that a lot of what I've done with my

00:30:00

task management systems is they're built around the development of habits. They're not necessarily

00:30:07

goal oriented. There's not necessarily a thing that I'm shooting for that's going to end in three

00:30:13

months. I have some of those thought processes that I kind of worked towards, but they're not locked

00:30:21

in stone. And I'm more towards, more geared towards trying to build the habits on a daily and

00:30:27

weekly basis than anything, and then step back and make sure that those are shooting me towards

00:30:32

the mission that I want to shoot towards. So I've thought about it in that sense, but

00:30:37

part of the reason I brought up the sweet setup piece was just because that is what prompted some

00:30:44

of this thinking. And then whenever we went through, when we're going through this particular section,

00:30:48

my mind immediately started to translate it into how does this apply to me personally. And

00:30:57

this is again, what I was mentioning earlier in how I'm trying to do this simplification process.

00:31:02

And do I try to put myself on a rhythm of work and then having some time to stop,

00:31:09

take a step back and reflect on it. That whole habit mentality is, I think, similar to

00:31:16

this just cause mentality in that you're trying to build an infinite process. You're not trying

00:31:25

to achieve a thing on a short term. And of course, being the end of the year, there's a lot of people

00:31:32

talking about setting up goals and do smart goals and make sure you got your review for the year

00:31:39

completed. It's like, well, review could be a good thing. But in most cases, people are taking

00:31:44

that review and then setting up their annual goals for the next year. I don't really buy into

00:31:49

that because life moves too fast. And at least for me, it does. I know there are some people that

00:31:55

it works out great, but holy buckets, you know, if I set up goals for end of year 2020,

00:32:01

I guarantee you before January is half over, I've got them changed. Like, it's just not going to work.

00:32:06

So I think I'm with you. I haven't done formal goals in a long time. Our church is interested in

00:32:15

having us set up goals for the year. And my first response to that was, can I set up goals for the

00:32:21

next seven weeks? But that was my initial response. And my boss kind of looked at me and was like,

00:32:28

well, yeah, I suppose that might work. So, you know, we're small enough still. We can have everybody

00:32:32

operating on different schedules and it's okay. So kind of weird. But that's, I don't know, all of

00:32:38

this to say, I've had a lot of thoughts about it. I don't like goals. I think I'm with you in that

00:32:42

sense. But I do want to try to put up the routines and put together some kind of a plan for the year,

00:32:50

maybe not quite the year, but at least a routine to work towards.

00:32:54

So just real quickly, he has some characteristics of a just cause, which I think would be helpful.

00:33:01

So a just cause must be for something. It's got to be affirmative and optimistic. It must be

00:33:07

inclusive. So it's open to all those who would like to contribute. It must be service oriented

00:33:12

for the primary benefit of others. That's the one that really jumps out to me, talking about

00:33:17

some of my follow up action items from last time, being interruptible, prioritizing people

00:33:22

over my own stuff. Just cause must be resilient. So able to endure political, technological,

00:33:28

and cultural change. And it must be idealistic, big, bold, and ultimately unachievable.

00:33:32

So I've been thinking about this. And again, I don't have this nailed down, which is why it's

00:33:38

an action item, but just to bring some clarity, maybe for people who are listening. I think that

00:33:44

the just cause lands somewhere between the phrase that I've mentioned, my wife and I landed on,

00:33:51

from going through the Life in Air book, where there was one thing in particular that really

00:33:55

jumped out to me as we were going through those exercises. And that was we want to make people

00:33:59

feel like a million bucks, even if we don't have a million bucks. I don't think that's a just

00:34:04

cause, but I also don't think my life theme is either, which is for sake of transparency here.

00:34:10

You know, it's to help people answer the question, why am I here by inspiring, encouraging, and teaching

00:34:15

them to connect to their calling, discover their destiny, live a life they're created for.

00:34:18

So I think my just cause is probably a simple one sentence thing somewhere between those two.

00:34:25

And I want to, by next time, spend some time thinking about that. I'm hoping that I will have

00:34:33

something that is clear and concise that I can share next time that we record. But I have a

00:34:39

feeling this is going to take a little bit of effort. I don't think a just cause is something

00:34:45

that you just stumble onto. And then you're like, Oh, yeah, that's the thing. I think this

00:34:51

maybe needs to be discovered. And there's different levels of nuance along the way. But I totally

00:34:58

see the value in this. And I think that a just cause personally, ultimately translates into a just

00:35:07

cause for my family. I've mentioned we've got like the family core values, but I'd love to

00:35:12

get that down into a single sentence for our just cause. And ultimately have that applied to

00:35:17

everything that we do. How specific do you feel like that needs to be? And here's here's why I

00:35:23

asked that question. My wife and I have looked at and adopted to some degree the mission of our

00:35:33

church as our own personal. I might call it a just cause. And that is to glorify God by being a

00:35:42

disciple who makes disciples of Jesus Christ. Like that's the mission statement there. And

00:35:48

to me that that is a difficult thing to work towards. But at the same time,

00:35:55

I love working with technology. I love working with books. I like the whole analog space. I've

00:36:00

got this thing for privacy and data ownership and such. I've got a lot of those things that I'm

00:36:08

interested in, but none of those come out in that statement. And I haven't figured out if

00:36:16

that's okay to me, me personally, some people will throw a fit. Some people say, "Oh, it's

00:36:21

perfectly fine." It's hard for me to say I should trust any one or multiple people on that.

00:36:27

It has more to do with, "Is that okay for me or not?" So that's why I'm asking, in your case,

00:36:31

do you feel like that should be more specific or can it be more broad in that form?

00:36:37

Depends. I think it depends on you personally. That helped. None at all.

00:36:41

I think it's fine. I mean, he uses examples of like CVS helping people on their path to better

00:36:48

health. It's hard to get more general than that. But also, he shares stories of how they were able

00:36:54

to filter the decisions that they made based on that cause. And it was obvious that, and this is

00:37:01

from chapter 11, so jumping all over the place, but in 2014, they decided to stop selling cigarettes

00:37:07

in their stores because they recognize that this isn't in line with their cause. So what is the

00:37:12

single sentence cause that allows you to instantly filter things and say, "This is a heck yes or

00:37:20

this is a no." I think that's really the value of the just cause. But how specific you need to be,

00:37:28

I think, probably differs for the person or the organization. I guess for you personally,

00:37:35

how specific do you think you need to be? Because I'm just telling on myself, I guess,

00:37:42

if I left it more general, my tendency is going to be to look for the loopholes and the reasons not

00:37:49

to do stuff. I need to get it very clear where there's no wiggle room in terms of how you're

00:37:57

going to interpret this for me to really be motivated by it. But maybe that's not you.

00:38:02

Well, mine would be the other way around. Because it's so general, I feel like it makes it easy to

00:38:08

say yes to a bunch of stuff. Oh, yes, that kind of fits. I could say yes to that. But I think is

00:38:16

potentially the fear that I have with it. So maybe you help me answer that question.

00:38:22

Oh, dang it. Now I have more work to do.

00:38:24

Sorry. I could point you to a fancy fountain panel to make that work more fun.

00:38:33

Oh, thanks, Mike. You're helping lots today. So now you're giving me more action items and

00:38:40

you're costing me money. Okay. I see how this is going to go.

00:38:43

All the clarity that's going to come from it though.

00:38:45

Uh huh. Yeah. I can't help but sit down and write about it because I got the new fancy

00:38:50

pin. It's like, okay. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Thanks for that. All right. We better move on. So

00:38:55

determining what your just cause is, please do better at it than I have. And once you have done

00:39:03

that, you have to have a keeper of the cause. And I thought this was interesting. It's why I put

00:39:08

it in the outline. But he talks about cases where the original founder for a company

00:39:16

who has that vision and has that just cause and is driving towards it.

00:39:20

The Keystone story here is about Sam Walton and wanting to deliver inexpensive products to the

00:39:31

world. So essentially he wanted to make all the products available at cheap prices. That was his

00:39:36

goal and was trying to make sure that it was done in a way that everybody was happy about it

00:39:41

and did exceptionally well at it. Thus Walmart is like everywhere. And what happened was,

00:39:49

shoot him. Am I going to forget his name? The guy who succeeded him. All right. You're going to

00:39:56

listen to me flip pages. What was his name? Mike Duke. So Mike Duke took over from Sam Walton.

00:40:05

And had a different mindset. He didn't have that long term vision of trying to deliver inexpensive

00:40:12

products. He had the vision of trying to cut costs and to do to drive up shareholder value.

00:40:20

And what happened? All kinds of bad stuff from lawsuits and, you know,

00:40:26

public not wanting Walmart anymore where they used to lobby to have a Walmart brought to their

00:40:33

town. Now they were lobbying to keep them out. It just changed the whole trajectory of the company.

00:40:39

And I think you can still see those ramifications yet today. So the keeper of that cause has to have

00:40:46

the infinite mindset. Otherwise, they start to make the poor decisions that you don't want to see.

00:40:53

He does bring up Apple again in this story. But, you know, it's a process that you have to make

00:41:00

sure that if you are the keeper of that just cause, that it does have to have ripple effects down

00:41:07

through the company. You brought up CVS. That's a great example. Because with that, they had to

00:41:13

make decisions to, I believe it was like a $2 billion decision. Does that sound right? It seems like

00:41:20

it was a very large number to CVS on how much they lost whenever they decided to stop selling

00:41:27

cigarettes in their stores. Yeah, they were basically giving up the sales of roughly 700 packs of

00:41:36

cigarettes per store per day. So it ended up being a ton of money. And when they did it,

00:41:43

all the experts were like, I don't know what they're thinking. Their earnings per share is going to

00:41:47

go way down. But then because they took a stand, it actually had a net positive effect. And they're

00:41:54

way further than they would have been had they not taken that stance.

00:41:58

Yeah, I would say that this particular chapter, keeper of the cause, one of the things that really,

00:42:04

this one really drove home for me is just the terminology and becoming aware of the way that

00:42:15

some of the upper level management thinkers in these big companies, how are they operating?

00:42:22

And just the words that they use, can you tell if they're shortsighted or longsighted in the way

00:42:30

that they're making their decisions? I haven't really noticed that previously. So whenever he was

00:42:35

explaining and telling some of these stories, it really struck home that, yeah, this happens a lot.

00:42:42

And the finite game is one that's played by a lot of people more so than I ever really wanted to

00:42:50

become aware of, but it's still I mean, it's everywhere is ridiculous. Okay, keeper of the cause. Are you

00:42:58

the keeper of the cause? I'm a keeper of a cause. Well, this is the interesting thing about this is

00:43:02

you may not be the CEO of your organization. You can still be the keeper of a cause. I was

00:43:11

talking to the guys in my discipleship group last night about the topic from extreme ownership,

00:43:19

like decentralized command and like the chain of command in our church, but this applies to any

00:43:25

organization as well where you've got people who are communicating up and down and ultimately,

00:43:30

you want everyone to be in alignment, everybody recognizing what is from that book, they called

00:43:35

it the commander's intent. So what is the vision for this organization? What are we working towards?

00:43:43

What is our just cause? And you need everybody to buy into that and to work towards it from the top

00:43:48

to the bottom, but you can't have the person at the top personally communicate to every single person

00:43:56

along the chain of command, especially as you get into hundreds and thousands, millions of people.

00:44:01

There's no way you can you can do that. So you got to communicate, you got to communicate the vision

00:44:08

or the cause to the people below you, they've got to communicate it to the people below them.

00:44:12

They've got to communicate to the people below them. That's how a big organization or a big team is

00:44:18

ultimately successful. I think if you've got a CEO who is infinite minded, that's great.

00:44:26

And that's one of the things that struck me about these stories that they told. You get to know

00:44:31

Wells Fargo later and all of the stuff that they did wrong. That wasn't just a CEO who all of a sudden

00:44:40

changed the culture in all of those different branches. There were a lot of managers along the

00:44:46

way who embraced that culture. And yeah, leadership starts at the top, but I don't think it's as simple

00:44:53

as just get a new person at the top and then instantly everything becomes better. Trust has to be built

00:45:00

over time. He talks about that in this book. So I don't know, it encourages as I'm reading through

00:45:07

this section, it encourages me to for the food chains that I am at the top of or the totem pole,

00:45:13

whatever. I want to make sure I'm infinite, infinitely minded and I'm communicating that down to

00:45:18

everybody below me. But if I find myself not at the top of the food chain, then it's my responsibility

00:45:25

still to connect infinitely to whatever vision is being passed down. I don't want to just go along

00:45:33

with things because this is the way that we do things. Look for ways that I can improve things.

00:45:38

Look for ways that I can build trust and the circle of safety and all that type of stuff.

00:45:43

With the people that are around me, regardless of whether my CEO has said this is the way we're

00:45:50

going to do things, I feel like if you were to take that approach, that's probably a recipe for

00:45:57

promotion. I think that if you can lead people well, which to be a good leader, that's kind of the

00:46:04

unwritten thing he's saying here is like, if you're going to be a good leader, you need to be

00:46:07

infinitely minded. I don't know that he explicitly says that at any point. He uses a lot of stories

00:46:12

though of like finite minded leaders and how they failed. So the narrative is like, if you're really

00:46:18

going to be good at this, you got to be infinitely minded. And I feel like that kind of will develop

00:46:23

your leadership abilities to the point where maybe you are. If you're not in charge of a large team

00:46:28

now, you might be in the future. If that's something that you want or aspire to, then the way to do

00:46:33

that is to start where you are with what you've got and apply that infinite mindset the best you can.

00:46:38

I think the important thing is that we're all the keeper of a cause in some form. And if you're

00:46:47

a dad or a mom, that's an easy one. I was recently introduced to, this will be a good segue into the

00:46:58

next section. I was recently introduced to the concept of thinking about families as a team

00:47:03

and how, think about a baseball team, you got a coach who leads that team and they're running

00:47:10

drills, they're doing practice, they're learning how to play the game. And then they have their

00:47:17

competition. They play the game. They win or they lose, but then they come back and they try again

00:47:22

for the next time. And they maybe get to the end championship, but then they come back again

00:47:28

next year. And it's just a repetitive, it's an infinitely recurring cycle. Translate that to

00:47:36

your family. And I see myself as the coach for my family team. And it's my job to run drills with

00:47:45

our kids and teach them how things work in life, show them simple things like math or how,

00:47:54

when you walk into an ice cream shop, what should you expect? What's the expectation

00:47:58

of the owner of that shop on how you should interact with them? Soft skills in that sense.

00:48:03

Those are the drills that we're running. And then later on, they will have chances to do those on

00:48:07

their own, but then you can review those, go through it with them and then continue to help

00:48:11

them become better humans following the cause that you're working towards. And this gets into the

00:48:17

next section, trusting teams. But that mindset behind thinking of your family as a team,

00:48:24

and if you go into this next section of trusting teams, you have to have that team working together

00:48:31

so that they can reach that long term infinite cause that you're, that just cause that you're

00:48:38

working towards. And that's done by continuing to work through difficult things together,

00:48:45

whether it applies to the just cause or not, but learning how to help each other through a lot of

00:48:51

those, those instances and sharing how you're feeling about it. If you've got things you're

00:48:56

struggling with asking others in that team to help you with it, etc, etc, you get the point.

00:49:01

Yeah. So you really have to have that whole team working really well in order to succeed

00:49:08

in working towards your just cause. And I do like the idea of thinking of my family as that team.

00:49:16

You know, there's obviously other areas that I am the leader of as well, you know, sound teams

00:49:21

and video teams at our church. Like I am the keeper of the cause in those areas as well.

00:49:27

And I can continue to build those teams in those scenarios in the same way. But frankly, it just,

00:49:33

I like the family thing. Yeah. Well, before even trusting teams, he kind of touches on this topic

00:49:40

a little bit in will and resources because he talks about how in any game there are two

00:49:46

resources that two resources that people need to play will, which is intangible, harder to measure

00:49:50

and then resources, which are tangible and easy to measure. He makes the point that every leader

00:49:55

has a bias. And the things that you were talking about, the soft skills and the things like that,

00:50:00

as you are leading your family, that shows your bias towards the will, not the resources, which

00:50:09

like the money is the easy one. You know, how much do we have in the bank account, the things that

00:50:13

you can measure like that. Going back to the Walmart thing, we can see this in the statement that Mike

00:50:23

Duke made when he took over. He says, I'm confident we will continue to deliver value to our shareholders,

00:50:30

increase opportunity for our over 2 million associates and help our 180 million customers

00:50:36

around the world save money and live better. He makes the point from that quote that those are

00:50:42

in the wrong order. It's shareholders, associates, customers, but Sam Walton's just caused the team

00:50:50

that he was leading his just cause that he was trying to communicate was lower the cost of living

00:50:54

for everyone. So the customer is first. And I thought that was really interesting. Now getting

00:51:03

into the trusting team section, there's a story here about Alan Mulally and how he

00:51:10

kind of changed the culture at Ford when he took over as the new CEO. He was the CEO of Boeing

00:51:19

prior to that. And so talking about this from a corporate perspective, I liked this story because

00:51:26

I actually heard Alan Mulally speak when I was at Entre Leadership. When he spoke, it was an

00:51:32

interesting presentation because he made this slide, put it up on the wall. And he basically was

00:51:38

like, these are the 13 things, everything I know about leadership. And then he proceeded to talk

00:51:44

about the 13 things that are on that slide. And it's not complicated. It's simple stuff.

00:51:51

But it is kind of to your point about leading your family well, the things that he did, how

00:51:59

he kind of set the tone and dictated the direction that they were going to go. So when he took over,

00:52:04

and he talks about this in this book, Simon Scenic does, that the executives were asked to

00:52:09

report on their business plans and they were to assign it green, yellow, or red based on how well

00:52:14

it was doing. And time after time, he has these meetings with people who are in charge of these

00:52:19

projects and all of these things are coming back green. And he's getting frustrated because he's

00:52:23

like, guys, these are not all green. We're about to lose many billions of dollars this year.

00:52:29

Something is broken. Let's figure out what it is. And it was hard for him to create the circle

00:52:35

of safety that Simon Scenic talks about in this book, where people would admit that they're

00:52:41

struggling with something. And immediately when somebody shared something for the first time,

00:52:46

like he praised them in front of everybody, everybody that was there kind of thought they were going

00:52:50

to be humiliated, berated, or they were going to get fired. That's what the previous CEO did.

00:52:56

But he wanted to set an example of, I want to know what's not going well. And he uses this phrase,

00:53:04

like, you have a problem, but you are not the problem. And that's, I have an action item

00:53:10

associated with this too. Now, I want to create that circle of safety inside of my family as well.

00:53:16

I want it because he mentions that it's necessary for trust to exist. So how do you do that? How do

00:53:23

I create a circle of safety for my kids? That's kind of my action item here. Because

00:53:28

he talks about this in this chapter, how a leader cannot force anybody into the circle of safety.

00:53:36

This really challenged me. He mentions that trust is built over time. You cannot

00:53:43

tell somebody, Oh, just trust me. That doesn't doesn't work that way. He's even got this cool,

00:53:50

little cool, little chart. Well, I guess it's not a chart, but there's two axes. There's performance

00:53:55

on the Y axes, and then there's trust on the low axes. And he talks about how the Navy seals

00:54:00

try to find, obviously, people who are high performance have high trust. The people that

00:54:06

are toxic for them are the people who are high performers, but they have low trust. Because

00:54:11

if you have high performance, you can tend to rely on your own abilities, but you're not going

00:54:16

to win every battle. And when it starts going south, do you have the character? Do you have the trust

00:54:22

necessary there for people to admit that things are going wrong? So you can fix them? Or do they just

00:54:27

try to just gloss over it? And that kind of gets into like the ethical fading stuff, which we'll

00:54:33

get to in a bit. But you don't want people who are going to compromise the standard

00:54:39

in order to cover their butts. You want people who are ultimately going to prioritize trust first.

00:54:47

And that does start at the top. And again, that's something that spoke to me as I was going through

00:54:53

this too, about my family is I've got to take the first step. I have to set the tone. I have to

00:55:00

become vulnerable myself. I have to admit my mistakes. I have to talk about all the times that

00:55:06

I've messed up. And an insecure, finite-minded leader would say, well, I can't possibly tell my kids

00:55:13

the times that I've messed up because then they're not going to listen to me. They're not going to

00:55:17

respect what I have to say. But actually, the opposite is true. When you do that kind of stuff,

00:55:22

they do respect you because they see the things that you're doing wrong. They see your flaws.

00:55:27

And if you just pretend like they don't exist, then eventually what they start to believe is,

00:55:33

well, I guess dad's just a hypocrite. And I don't want that.

00:55:37

I don't think anybody does want that. This is a challenging thing to think about whenever you

00:55:45

start applying it to your family because so much of it comes back to how you live. It's not necessarily

00:55:53

about what you say or what you decide. What do you actually act on? Yes, I can say that I like to do

00:56:01

my morning routine. And I tell my kids, yeah, I read my books every morning and I read my

00:56:06

Bible every morning and I pray every morning. But if they don't ever see you do any of that,

00:56:10

it gets hard for them to know if it's actually happening or not. They might be able to pick it

00:56:17

up. They might be able to nail down if you actually are or not. But they have to see

00:56:22

the action that corresponds to the words or just the action. So I do think that if you

00:56:30

determine what that just cause is and you create that safety zone and make sure that you're not

00:56:37

going to have any gotchas in there, like, yeah, I'm going to create the zone for you to share. And

00:56:42

then depending on what you say, I'm either going to make it easier for you or I'm just going to use

00:56:48

it against you. And if you do the latter of those two bad things happen and you've just completely

00:56:55

trashed your safety zone in that sense. So it doesn't end up well. Yeah, I would add to that.

00:57:03

I think the most important thing is that you follow through on what you say you're doing.

00:57:08

Right. If you are going to, if you say that I read my Bible and I pray every morning,

00:57:13

then you better make sure that that is what you actually do. It can't be something that you

00:57:18

confess is important, but then your life doesn't line up with it. It doesn't mean I'm going out of my

00:57:24

way to, hey, kids, look, I'm actually doing it, but they can tell, I believe they can tell when you

00:57:33

are saying something and you feel bad because you're not living it out versus this is part of

00:57:41

who I am. This is part of my identity. And there's a confidence behind the statement that is lacking

00:57:47

otherwise. They can tell when you're faking it. I guess it's kind of what I'm saying. And it's

00:57:52

not just kids, I think. I think if you're leading a team or an organization that they can sense it

00:57:58

as well. Absolutely. So in other words, don't be lazy. And I think that that's probably a good

00:58:03

place to jump into our next talking point here in ethical fading and lazy leadership. Oh, nice

00:58:11

segue. I know, right? Because the end, and you mentioned earlier, like the whole Wells Fargo thing

00:58:17

with how they they had theoretically a good mission, but they didn't follow through on it in the long

00:58:28

term. They lost sight of that. What was the number 3.5 million fake accounts that were opened under

00:58:37

Wells Fargo? And people were getting late fees, all kinds of stuff, all sorts of bad things were

00:58:42

happening. There's tons of corruption that came out of that. And it essentially comes back to if

00:58:50

you're not on point, if you are the keeper of the cause, and you are the one setting the example,

00:58:58

take your family again, if you are not the one following through and you're not actually doing

00:59:06

the things you're telling your kids that you're doing, they catch that laziness. And people know

00:59:11

if you're not going through with it, thus, over time, that leads to what he termed ethical fading,

00:59:19

where you slowly but surely start to lose that the course towards that just cause. And you start

00:59:29

looking at the more shortsighted, the finite games that you end up playing. That's not good. All,

00:59:36

all, tons of examples were bad things come out of this. Wells Fargo is just one example.

00:59:43

I'm sure you can think about how this has happened in your own life. I can think of times when I've

00:59:47

slowly gotten worse and worse at procrastination over time, and it's led to bad conversations,

00:59:52

and I've had to cancel a bunch of stuff that I really didn't want to cancel because I screwed

00:59:56

up and got behind on things. It just doesn't pan out. Don't do that. Don't be lazy. That's

01:00:03

the moral of the story there. Yeah, and it can happen to anybody. They have a... I didn't write

01:00:09

down all of the corporate stories that he shares in this book in my Mindowed File, but I did write

01:00:14

down this Princeton University Good Samaritan study, which was really interesting. These are

01:00:20

students who were in the Divinity program, I believe. And so they're studying religion,

01:00:32

and the Good Samaritan is a Bible story about this guy gets beat up left on the side of the road,

01:00:37

and then who is actually going to stop and help that person. So they had somebody who was in a lot

01:00:42

of distress, and they put them strategically on the way to class for these students, and then they

01:00:48

had a researcher that went with them. I don't know how they did this study without it making it seem

01:00:54

like they're trying to manipulate me. That would be my thought if I was participating in this study.

01:00:59

Like, I know they're going to try to get me to do something I shouldn't be doing.

01:01:01

They're totally going to try to do this on me. Yeah, so I don't know exactly how they did it,

01:01:07

but what they found was that with low pressure to get where they were going, 63% of the people

01:01:16

stopped and helped the person. With medium pressure, 45... to just keep going to wherever they were

01:01:23

supposed to be, 45% of people stopped, but with high pressure, only 10% of people stopped. And this

01:01:29

is the group, like I said, that you would think 100% of these people would stop every single time,

01:01:35

no questions asked. But you apply a little bit of pressure, and it's easy to shift your focus on

01:01:41

your own stuff instead of the problems of people around you. This comes all the way back to beginning

01:01:46

of the episode and what I want to change in my life. So this is not something that you read about

01:01:54

it and you say, "Well, yeah, the people who were running Wells Fargo, they're just complete jerks,

01:02:00

and there's no way I would have done that if I was in that situation." It's a slippery slope.

01:02:05

It's practice he points out to choose language that softens or obscures the impacts of our behavior.

01:02:12

The words that we choose can distance us from any sense of responsibility, but they can also

01:02:16

have the opposite effect as well. They can help us act more ethically if we choose them well.

01:02:21

As I was reading this, I was thinking about the probably only TV show I've gotten into in the last

01:02:26

15 years, which is this Canadian comedy called Corner Gas. I'm not sure if I showed you this when

01:02:34

you were here or not. But it's written by us. I think this might be the first time I've ever heard

01:02:39

of it. Okay, so it's written by a stand-up comedian, think like Jerry Seinfeld. Okay, but it takes place

01:02:48

in a small town in Canada. Instead of Seinfeld, which is just loud obnoxious humor, it's

01:02:56

just really sarcastic. There's this one scene in there where these two police officers are

01:03:03

arguing, and one of them's like, "You lost the Clavec Cup." The other one's like, "I didn't lose it.

01:03:08

I'm just unable to ascertain its whereabouts." The other one's like, "Don't try to please mumble

01:03:13

jumbo on me. I taught it to you." That's immediately what I thought when I read this section.

01:03:19

And that's obviously a funny example, but it did challenge me to think about how I do this.

01:03:30

How am I lazy in my leadership and how do I default towards this ethical fading?

01:03:41

And I don't have anything specific that came to mind, but this whole section on lazy leadership

01:03:47

really stood out to me because there's a couple things he points out in this that kind of lead

01:03:52

to this ethical fading. So the first thing he says is that lazy leadership chooses to put

01:03:58

processes in place to fix problems rather than building support for their people. I definitely

01:04:06

am guilty of this where we think about something that went wrong and then, "Okay, well, how can we

01:04:12

make sure this doesn't happen again?" I recognize after reading this book that that's a finite-minded

01:04:18

way to solve that problem. A more infinite-minded approach would be, "Okay, what is the job that

01:04:25

this team or these people are trying to do and asking them, 'How can I support you?'" That's

01:04:32

kind of the story that he tells about the barista who worked at the Four Seasons and

01:04:37

it was kind of interesting because they talked about how he had a couple different jobs, a couple

01:04:40

different hotels and compared and contrasted the infinite-minded versus finite-minded

01:04:44

approach between those different organizations. That really hit me. And again, I don't think I

01:04:50

have anything specific that I'm doing this right now and I need to change it, but I've definitely

01:04:55

done it in the past and I want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Solutions to ethical fading

01:05:01

are usually finite in nature, which then leads to more ethical fading. So the best solution when

01:05:10

it comes to this ethical fading is just don't even start, don't even go there because ethical

01:05:17

decisions are not based on what's best in the short term. Usually when you have a situation like

01:05:23

a Wells Fargo or some big corporate scandal, the focus is on, "Well, how do we fix this?" And

01:05:32

naturally, it's going to be short term. And it's kind of shocking as you read through these chapters

01:05:40

to recognize that if you were to get caught doing something like that and then you ask yourself,

01:05:45

"How can I fix this?" Whatever answer you're going to come up with is going to be wrong because

01:05:50

your perspective is wrong. It's more complicated than that. And really, you just have to go back

01:06:00

and start at the beginning with an infinite mindset and a just cause.

01:06:05

I think this is where the concept of habits comes in pretty strong and how I've been watching a

01:06:12

couple interviews of James Clear lately and it kind of has me wanting to reread atomic habits

01:06:18

over Christmas break. But I've become more and more aware of how his thinking around habit building

01:06:28

is essentially lifestyle building. Just not called that. You're just thinking about the

01:06:35

individual components of what you do on a day-to-day basis and how you live your life on a day-to-day

01:06:40

basis and how those little tiny incremental steps can add up to massive change and massive results.

01:06:51

I think that is ultimately what can help protect against some of this ethical fading in the lazy

01:06:58

leadership. Because me for one, I'm very prone to the whole instant gratification circle of procrastination.

01:07:06

It just can eat me alive if I'm not careful. And I have to continue to build habits to stop that.

01:07:14

Otherwise, like you're saying, ethical fading can creep up on you and you don't even realize it's

01:07:19

happening. It's so hard to get the high-level review or the reflection point you need to even

01:07:26

see it. Sometimes you got to have a spouse or somebody just slap you across the face and say,

01:07:31

hey, you're screwing this up in order to actually get the point across. So the hope is you don't

01:07:37

ever go down that path. The reality is you're probably going to lean towards it at some point.

01:07:42

So trying to put together something to help with that in the long term would be helpful.

01:07:47

Ethical fading is not a single wicked act done by evil people. It's something that anybody is

01:07:55

susceptible to. Absolutely. Now, to kind of transition off of that, he talks about

01:08:02

these other companies or other people that he terms worthy rivals. And worthy rivals,

01:08:11

think of them as not necessarily your competition, but somebody or some company that is working in

01:08:18

the same space that you are. And it's important to identify them because knowing who those rivals

01:08:25

are helps you identify your own weaknesses because you can start to see their strengths

01:08:30

and how they do things. And it can help illuminate some of what you're doing as well. You may not

01:08:35

like them. You may absolutely despise them, but you have to at least recognize and respect them

01:08:43

for what they are doing. He tells the story early on about how there's another. Yeah, he

01:08:48

didn't name the person, did he? I tried to find it. He did eventually.

01:08:53

Okay, I drew a blank and missed that part. You have to tell who it is when we're done here.

01:08:57

But he tells the story of how there's another individual who was working in the same space as he

01:09:05

was as far as writing books and creating things. And he would constantly check in to see,

01:09:12

you know, was his book rated higher than this other guy's book? Or was it the other way around?

01:09:19

And if he was losing, he would just loathe and be upset about all the things that this other guy

01:09:26

was doing and was jealous, etc, etc. And whenever he was winning, he would kind of gloat like,

01:09:33

oh, yeah, you know, look at me, beat his chest and be all excited about it. But then he was asked

01:09:40

to do a joint interview with this guy. So they were on the stage at the same time,

01:09:47

and they were asked to introduce each other. And if you've ever been to conferences or anything

01:09:55

along those lines, these public interviews, the introduction is basically talking about the

01:10:01

accolades of the other person and how great they are and trying to explain to the audience

01:10:11

you know, why they should be listening to that particular person. And Simon had the opportunity

01:10:19

to go first in this in this instance. And I'm going to I'm just going to read what he says because

01:10:25

he starts this particular segment. So whenever he goes to introduce his rival, this is what he says,

01:10:33

"You make me unbelievably insecure because all of your strengths are all my weaknesses.

01:10:40

You can do so well the things that I really struggle to do." The audience laughed. He looked at me and

01:10:45

responded, "The insecurity is mutual." And he went on to identify some of my strengths

01:10:50

as areas in which he wished he could improve. That right there is like one

01:10:56

just true humanity in practice. Like that's just awesome for one. But two, it shows the power of

01:11:05

rivals in that they do show you what it is you're doing well and what it is you need to improve on.

01:11:11

And that and then can encourage you to continually improve yourself. Okay, now I'm dying because I

01:11:18

completely forgot who was the person. It was Adam Grant. Adam Grant. Okay, how did I miss that?

01:11:24

Got it. Okay. Well, the way he wrote it was interesting because he is very generic about the

01:11:32

person the whole time. And then he kind of just slips it in under the radar near the end as like

01:11:38

a big reveal. I kind of feel like if you were to see him read this chapter out loud, there would

01:11:45

be a big buildup to that reveal. But when it's just text on a page, it's kind of like, "Oh, yeah,

01:11:50

by the way, it was Adam Grant." Sure. Sure. Wow. I just completely missed it. So maybe some of the

01:11:54

effect is lost there. But that was definitely a cool story. I love this chapter because at the

01:11:59

beginning, he's talking about it and you're like, "I got to know who that person is." And then he

01:12:05

doesn't tell you. Like he goes through that. I was just flipping back through it, obviously,

01:12:10

because I was there reading it. He doesn't tell, he goes on to explain the worthy rivals thing

01:12:15

and then comes back to it. That's why I missed it because I got angry because he didn't tell me

01:12:21

and then I blocked it out. Yeah, exactly. The worthy rivals, this is a really cool section I

01:12:27

thought because, like you said, the worthy rival could be anybody. It could be somebody that you

01:12:34

really like. It could be somebody that you really hate. But how you view the people who are also players

01:12:41

in the game in whatever space you happen to be in, I feel like this is something that's easily to

01:12:49

slip into a finite mindset. And he makes the point that the finite mindset for book authors is stupid

01:12:58

because can people read more than one book? Of course they can. We read 20-something of them this

01:13:05

year. Right. So just because they bought Adam Grant's book doesn't mean that they're not going

01:13:12

to buy his book. And that's kind of the default approach that we take is like, "Oh, well, they chose

01:13:18

this other person, so they obviously aren't going to choose me also." And I think that's fairly natural.

01:13:25

And in some games, that is true. Some arenas, that is true. But it doesn't have to be true. And he

01:13:36

explains that in an infinite game, both you and your worthy rival can be successful. I really like

01:13:43

this. I've been studying this for quite some time. This abundance versus scarcity mindset.

01:13:50

And I never made the connection between finite and infinite, but it totally makes sense. Where

01:13:55

an infinite mindset is an abundance mindset and a finite mindset is a scarcity mindset.

01:13:59

And what does that mean? It means that a scarcity mindset thinks that there's only so much success

01:14:06

to go around. And it's easy to see with a finite mindset and with that scarcity mindset,

01:14:12

the approach of Steve Walmer led Microsoft where we've got to beat Apple because this

01:14:20

pie is only so big and we got to get our share. But that isn't the case most of the time.

01:14:28

And this is, I think, hard for us as humans to understand that the abundance mindset,

01:14:34

just because somebody else is successful, like that's not taking anything away from us. In fact,

01:14:38

that may actually be a help to us because if somebody likes Adam Grant's book and we talk about the

01:14:44

same stuff, maybe there's a good chance they were at this event. They saw us on the same stage.

01:14:49

They're going to come and buy my book too. When you identify your worthy rivals, it's not

01:14:56

as somebody that you're trying to beat necessarily. How does he put it? He says that if you're playing

01:15:05

an infinite game, other players are not competitors to be beaten, but they are rivals which make you

01:15:10

a better player. And it also doesn't matter if your rival is playing with a finite or infinite

01:15:17

mindset as long as you are playing with an infinite mindset. So that's an interesting

01:15:22

scenario, I think, where if you are competing with somebody and they do have a finite mindset

01:15:27

where you can kind of let them set the tone and slip into that, but it's not the best way to

01:15:35

do things. Competitors compete for customers. He says rivals look for followers and recognizing

01:15:42

that there's no shortage of the followers that you can attract to a just cause just because somebody

01:15:48

else has attracted some followers doesn't mean that there are less of them out there for you.

01:15:52

I want to pull in the last section here, the courage to lead because I've been itching to talk

01:15:56

about this whole CVS story and we brought it up a couple of times, but I feel like this is a good

01:16:00

place to kind of morph the end of this book together because with worthy rivals, sometimes you have

01:16:08

companies that are willing to have courage and take that step towards something that no one

01:16:15

else is being willing to take that step forward in with CVS, it was cigarettes and nicotine, like

01:16:23

they're out to help us be healthy. That's not helpful by selling cigarettes. Is it a big

01:16:30

plus to their bottom line? Absolutely. But they had the courage to step forward and then

01:16:35

remove that from their sales. And by doing so, if their rivals are paying attention,

01:16:42

they can now see that weakness in themselves. So take for example, if Walgreens is watching CVS

01:16:48

and those two arrivals, it's now on Walgreens shoulders to do something similar or to consider

01:16:58

their own just cause. And if they're actually shooting towards it because have they done something

01:17:03

at that level when CVS just did it. So if you have the courage to take those steps and to follow

01:17:10

your just cause and to do something that no one else is doing, if you have rivals and you've

01:17:16

identified your rivals, like that might become your strength. But what are your rivals having

01:17:21

the courage to lead in? And are you falling behind is the bad term there? Because that's a finite

01:17:29

mentality. But are you shortcutting your own just cause because you're not doing the same?

01:17:34

So knowing who your rivals are and seeing what they're doing can help you see where you need to

01:17:42

improve as well. I don't know if I want to take this action item, but it's an interesting action

01:17:48

item if any of our listeners would like to take it to identify who your worthy rivals are.

01:17:53

I feel like I should do this. But I most certainly don't feel comfortable identifying them publicly,

01:18:02

most likely, because a lot of the stuff I tend to do is very, it's a lot of writing and very

01:18:09

personal in that sense. So I would be identifying a person, not a company. I don't feel like I

01:18:14

would have an issue identifying a company, but identifying a person and talking about them on

01:18:18

air. That seems a little odd. So don't expect that one, Mike. But it's an interesting question

01:18:24

of should you identify your worthy rivals when you're operating in a personal space of sorts? I

01:18:30

don't know, probably, but not something I would share publicly. Yeah, that is interesting. I'm not

01:18:38

sure I want to apply that either. Before we hit record, we were talking and you asked me,

01:18:47

"Offair, are we worthy rivals?" And I said that I think in an alternate universe, probably.

01:18:55

I think I still think that you could make that argument, but it's not a direct competition,

01:19:05

necessarily. Like, if I'm writing on task management at the sweet setup and you are creating a task

01:19:13

management, I'm the focus course. Technically, I guess you could view us as rivals. But also,

01:19:19

I think that we've both kind of had this infinite mindset as it pertains to the productivity space

01:19:26

specifically for a long time. And so I don't typically view you that way, or anybody else who

01:19:34

would come out with a course or write a book that way, that there's enough room here for everybody.

01:19:40

I do think it's worth identifying if you want to pick somebody who kind of challenges you to

01:19:49

do better. He makes the point in the previous section, knowing who you're worthy rivals are,

01:19:54

is the best way to adapt and improve before it's too late. So you can learn from what other people

01:19:58

are doing. But to your point about CVS and Walgreens, it was interesting, as he talks about that in the

01:20:05

last chapter here, that that's not what happened. He shares how Walgreens has a similar statement

01:20:11

that they use. But then when asked about the fact that they continued to sell cigarettes,

01:20:18

they justified it with a statement that basically said, "Well, it's our legal right to do this."

01:20:28

And that kind of goes back to the ethical fading thing. If you find yourself trying to justify

01:20:34

something legally, like, "I can do this," then you probably have disconnected from your just cause.

01:20:39

And I think that when you see somebody who has a just cause in a particular area like CVS,

01:20:46

and they make a statement, or they make a decision that's in line with that just cause,

01:20:50

like deciding to stop selling cigarettes in their stores, it almost doesn't matter what somebody

01:20:55

else is doing if you're Walgreens or whoever the other pharmacies are. I don't even know.

01:21:00

They're going to do what they're going to do depending on the mindset that they have as they're

01:21:07

playing the game. And if you've got a finite mindset, then you are always going to be looking at the

01:21:12

short term, and you're never going to make those big, bold leaps like CVS did. And ultimately,

01:21:19

we talked about how that turned out better for them. The previous chapter on the existential

01:21:24

flexibility kind of talks about this too. We covered what was that, the innovators dilemma,

01:21:30

and they talked about Kodak. Well, Kodak appears here again, and they invented the digital camera.

01:21:38

Existential flexibility is being able to see the next big thing for your just cause, and being able

01:21:46

to kill the thing that you were doing and go over to the new thing. The Kodak story was interesting

01:21:51

to me because when they started, their cause was you press the button, we do the rest. They wanted

01:21:56

people to be able to take photographs without having a professional photographer there to take it.

01:22:01

And it's interesting. He makes a point in the book that as they abandoned the digital photography,

01:22:08

even though they had the patents on it, once the patents dried up in 2007, the money dried up,

01:22:15

and ironically, the one market that Kodak had left when he wrote this, I'm not even sure if this

01:22:20

is true anymore, is professional photographers. So they went full circle, and they totally forgot

01:22:28

who they were. We're trying to serve. He also talks in this section about Disney and how they

01:22:33

released Snow White, and it was a successful animation. And then Walt's like, I got to build

01:22:40

the happiest place on Earth. I got to build Disneyland, and everybody's like, you're crazy.

01:22:44

He's like, no, this is going to be awesome. I think that the courage to lead ties in with this

01:22:49

previous chapter very nicely, where there will be points as a leader where you see

01:22:56

what leap you have to make. And the finite minded solution is always going to be to cling to what

01:23:05

you know. The infinite minded solution is going to leap into the unknown and see what's actually

01:23:15

there. And it's easy to talk about that podcast and say, oh, yeah, when you see those opportunities,

01:23:21

just go for it. But it's totally different. When you're there and you've got people who are relying

01:23:26

on you. And I'd like to think that I have, after reading this book specifically, would have the

01:23:34

the courage to say, I don't know what's next, but I know that it's this direction and to step out there.

01:23:43

But time will tell, I guess, when the rubber hits the road, that's when you really find out what

01:23:51

you're made out of. But the more that you can connect to your just cause, and the more firmly

01:23:57

you can attach to it, he talks in this section about integrity, firm adherence to a code of

01:24:01

especially moral or artistic values incorruptible, that can put you in a position where you are more

01:24:08

likely to succeed and navigate that successfully. I really don't know what else to add to that.

01:24:14

Do you have more to add to the book? Or should we do action items? No, I'll just, well, there are a

01:24:19

couple quotes. I'll just add page 217, right near the end, he says, playing the infinite game is

01:24:24

not a checklist. It's a mindset. It's not something that you can just check the boxes and look there.

01:24:30

Now I'm infinite minded. There is no formula for an infinite mindset. And then he also

01:24:38

says on the page 218, which I think is the second to last page, courageous leaders are strong because

01:24:42

they know that they don't have all the answers and they don't have total control. They do, however,

01:24:45

have each other, and they have a just cause to guide them. I'd like to think that that applies

01:24:51

to bookworm. And I think you could apply that if you want to whatever organization you happen to be

01:25:01

in. But inherent in that statement is the requirement that you admit that you don't know everything.

01:25:11

And it's kind of interesting to me that some organizations, if you were to say, yeah, I don't

01:25:20

have all the answers, they'll be like, hey, that's great. You're admitting it and we know that we can

01:25:25

work with this and we can go in the right direction. And other organizations, if you say you don't

01:25:30

know all the answers, it is a negative thing and you're not going to last long. Ultimately,

01:25:36

I think an infinite minded view or perspective of that would be, well, good, I shouldn't have

01:25:43

been there in the first place. But I don't know. It's a great ending to the book, I think,

01:25:49

in a great encouragement to launch yourself into an infinite mindset.

01:25:55

Absolutely. Well, I have one action item that I'm going to write down because I'm not comfortable

01:26:00

writing down the second one in that I just want to define what my just cause is personally.

01:26:06

I like having the mission statement tied to the church, but I don't think that's quite specific

01:26:14

enough for me. So I need to work on that one. That's probably something I could share. So I'll

01:26:20

write that one down. But that's what I got, Mike, because I feel like that's the starting point

01:26:24

for the rest of this. There's so many other aspects that are going to come out of that.

01:26:30

But I feel like that's the starting point. Sure. Well, I've got two that I've mentioned,

01:26:36

and that's basically it. I'm trying to decide if I want to put these down formally. But since I

01:26:42

talked to my bottom already, first one, identify what is my just cause. I want to spend some time

01:26:49

thinking about that and see if I can come up with a single sentence there. And then the other one,

01:26:54

which I'm not sure I want to share this, but I do want to think about how do I curate that circle

01:26:58

of safety for my kids so that trust exists in our family. Our kids are getting a little bit older.

01:27:05

Toby is almost 13. And that is kind of scary to me. Teenagers are typically the point people say

01:27:14

like, Oh, all of a sudden they just don't care what you have to say. They just stop listening to

01:27:19

you. And I don't want that to happen. But I also recognize that I've got to so before we get to

01:27:24

that point. And I've been doing that, I believe with like the one on ones that we do. But I want

01:27:29

to continue to think about this and see if there's anything else that I can do to to create that

01:27:35

that circle of safety where my kids feel like they can they can talk to me about, but anything as

01:27:41

they get older and they're dealing with more serious life issues. I want to not just be the

01:27:46

person with all the answers, you know, finite-minded leader who's like, this is what you got to do.

01:27:50

But I want to be the person who is willing to listen and to help them solve their problems.

01:27:57

I think that's a really noble thing to take on and a very tall task. Like,

01:28:02

good luck. Yep. I know that stating it publicly. But what's the alternative?

01:28:10

It's true. It's just not do it. That's not true. Fair enough. All right. Well,

01:28:17

styling rating, it's Simon Sennick. It's easy to read. And he is very good at telling stories

01:28:25

with words on a page. And it's an easy one to sit down and get lost in. I read it fairly quickly

01:28:35

and really enjoyed going through it. So it's one that I would recommend. You know, it's one that

01:28:42

I think is extremely helpful if you have any qualms with, you know, is do you have a direction

01:28:51

in your life? Do you feel like you've got a good handle on where you should be going,

01:28:56

which is probably, you know, we didn't plan this out at all. You know, we don't typically look

01:29:03

further than the next two books as far as the schedule for bookworm. But this turned out to be

01:29:09

an excellent one to read here towards the end of the year, I feel. Because, you know,

01:29:14

with the new year coming, like it's a very good one to have under your belt because it's one that

01:29:21

can kind of set you up for determining what is that goal, not goal. I keep using that word.

01:29:27

What is your just cause? What is it you're shooting for? So I really appreciated having

01:29:33

gone through it at this time and I'm glad to have gone through it as far as how to rate it.

01:29:40

I don't, I know, I feel like we've done this a lot lately. It's not. I don't know that this is a 5-0.

01:29:51

And to me, I don't know why though. Like it's one of these that I got a lot out of,

01:30:00

but something about it just doesn't strike me as 5-0. I know it's at least 4.5,

01:30:07

but I don't feel like I can go all the way to 5.0. I don't know why that is though. I wish I could

01:30:15

nail that down. It might just be that this is, this will sound a little weird. This is a very

01:30:21

skimmable book. I felt that like it's not one that like take range, for example, like that one you

01:30:29

really had to just sit and read. Like it's not one that you could just jump around and jump ahead,

01:30:37

come back. Like you can't do that. It builds on itself through the entirety of the 280 pages that

01:30:43

are in it. Like that book you can't do that with. This one you definitely can. I don't know if

01:30:48

that's why I struggled going all the way to the 5.0. Because there are definitely other books that

01:30:53

are like that that are 5-0. I don't know. This is kind of a weird one for me. Maybe it's because

01:31:00

it wasn't 100% my pick. I don't know. I'm going to put it at 4.5. I'm not 100% sure why though.

01:31:05

This is so weird. All right. I need to be done. I'm going to put it at 4.5.

01:31:09

Well, I think the reason that you are not putting it at a 5.0 is because you are not Walmart,

01:31:17

you are not Ford, you are not CVS, you are not Apple, you are not Microsoft. It's hard for people

01:31:26

like us to put ourselves in the shoes of a Alan Malali or a Steve Jobs or a Sam Walton.

01:31:35

So in my opinion, this book is a little bit difficult to translate if that makes sense.

01:31:42

Sure. Sure. But the information in it is really, really good. And it is typical Simon Sinek.

01:31:49

It is very well written. Great stories. He was a little bit more snarky in this one than I thought

01:31:57

the previous books that we read by him were, which I actually enjoyed. There were a couple lines

01:32:05

where he's like, so people will typically say this. And then he's kind of sarcastic, like,

01:32:10

well, what's the point? And I actually really enjoyed that. I also am going to meet you though

01:32:16

at 4.5 because I feel like from a bookworm perspective, if you are in the right position,

01:32:23

then Simon Sinek is just what the doctor ordered. But for anybody who's not over a large team or

01:32:34

organization, that there are probably other books written by other people who speak more directly

01:32:41

to the things that you are going through. There's tons of great stuff in here, tons of things

01:32:46

that we didn't even talk about that really impacted me. It's a pretty short book. Well,

01:32:53

it's 200-something pages, so it's not that short. But it's an easy read. It's not something that

01:32:59

you have to labor through and it took me weeks to get through. I feel like he does a great job

01:33:05

of taking these complex topics and subjects and making them approachable. He gets into

01:33:13

economics and definitions of capitalism. I felt like I actually understood what he was talking

01:33:19

about as he's introducing us to Adam Smith and I'm blanking on the other guy's name. But

01:33:26

the guy who kind of changed the definition of capitalism and how he uses that to launch into

01:33:32

all the examples of corporations and businesses who are kind of applying this in his view the wrong

01:33:38

way. I feel like Simon Sinek and Adam Grant once he shared that they're worthy rivals. I can

01:33:46

totally see how these guys are talking about some of the same things, but maybe different sides of

01:33:51

the same coin. I think it's probably a matter of personal preference, whether this is a five-star

01:33:56

book or not. But it isn't something that I would just recommend to anybody off the street just because

01:34:04

of the approach that he takes. There are a lot of corporate stories, a lot of stories about

01:34:10

Apple specifically. I can think of a couple people in particular where as soon as they start

01:34:16

this book and they get to the part about Microsoft versus Apple, they're going to disconnect.

01:34:21

So I do think it's a great book. I'm really glad that we read it. It makes me want to read more

01:34:29

Simon Sinek. But I think from a bookworm perspective, this is a 4.5 that could easily be justified

01:34:37

as a five. Thanks for justifying me. I appreciate that.

01:34:40

So let's put Simon on the shelf. What's next, Mike? The next book is Indestractable by Near

01:34:50

Eyal, the guy who wrote Hooked. Kind of interesting because that book was how to make habit-forming

01:34:56

products. And this one is basically how to fight against that from a user perspective. So be

01:35:02

interesting. Yeah, I'm excited about going to this one. It'll be good. Following that,

01:35:07

I kind of struggled to pick this one, but I really want to read this one with you.

01:35:13

Making it all work by David Allen. This is going to take us back all the way to episode number one

01:35:22

of bookworm, which maybe there's a different time to do this, but I really want to do this.

01:35:26

It's the follow up to getting things done if I understand it correctly. I've never read this,

01:35:32

Mike. Have you read this before? I have not. Okay, so this will be interesting. I'm not 100%

01:35:39

certain what we're getting into, but I've wanted to read this for a long time.

01:35:42

You know, I have opinions on David Allen. I know you do. This will be a fun episode.

01:35:47

One way or the other. That didn't weigh into my decision. Oh, so I'm excited. I think it will

01:35:56

go through. I'm either going to be fired up or eating humble pie. One of those two. So it'll be a

01:36:02

good one. I do not have a gap book this time around. That whole simple life thing going to get

01:36:09

there, but you have one and I know you have a story with it. I do. Yeah, we got a puppy, a

01:36:16

golden doodle puppy named Lucy. And my gap book is The Perfect Puppy by Gwen Bailey. This is a book

01:36:21

that I had on my bookshelf at one point. We got it when we got our previous dog and then I loaned

01:36:27

it to somebody and never got it back. So we've got a new puppy. We want to make sure that we are

01:36:33

creating naughty monster with unintentionally bad habits. You know, so I remember when I read

01:36:41

through this the first time that it really helped. And I want to go through it again because I feel

01:36:46

like this is the thing we need as we got this this three month old golden doodle puppy in our

01:36:53

house. We need to make sure that we we do it right from the beginning and don't try to

01:36:58

don't try to change things after the fact. So that's what I'm going to be going over as we're

01:37:02

on Christmas break. Thanks. How to take care of your puppy. Love it. Oh, welcome Lucy.

01:37:12

Um, just a quick reminder. Go to club.bookworm.fm.

01:37:16

Top of the list. There should be poll top books of 2019. Go get your vote in. Go do that now.

01:37:22

We would love to know, you know, what you feel are the best books that we covered

01:37:27

for 2019. And we'll talk about them in some format. So while you're there club.bookworm.fm,

01:37:35

go to slash membership. And you can support the show through that. You get access to all of

01:37:40

Mike's book notes, his mind node files. There's a handful of gap book episodes have recorded

01:37:47

in the past. I haven't had gap books for a little while. So there are none or new ones,

01:37:53

but there are some old backlog there. And there's some special stuff like a really cool wallpaper

01:38:01

for your computer. So I love that thing. It's what I use on everything I can possibly put it on

01:38:06

including computers that aren't mine. So anyway, go to club.bookworm.fm. All kinds of goodies there.

01:38:11

Get your vote in. Awesome. And if you're reading along with us, pick up

01:38:15

indestractable by near I/O. And we will talk to you in a couple of weeks.