Bookworm Transcripts

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I have decided, Mike, that I really, really, really like the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

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Yeah?

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Yes.

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This morning, I was editing videos because my life revolves around video right now.

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And I had two hours' worth of recorded video that I needed to encode with this machine.

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You want to take a crack at how long it took to do that two hours?

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About a hundred times less than it would have taken you on your previous computer?

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Yes, significantly.

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Now, there's a lot that goes into this, but it took 10 minutes to encode that two hours.

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Yeah, it's a screaming machine, for sure.

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I was beside myself.

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I thought that, you know, historically, that would have taken me about two hours to get

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the encoding completed.

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So to have it in 10 minutes is just astounding.

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I love this thing.

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Just love, love, love it.

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And it features a keyboard that actually works.

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Yes, it has an escape key.

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Right.

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I don't know if you know that or not, but it has an escape key that I'm quite thrilled

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about.

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I don't use it like you programmers do, but I know that probably makes you very happy.

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Oh, I'm thrilled.

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Absolutely thrilled.

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Probably way more than I should be.

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Faux show.

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Now, I want to jump in to follow up here, Mike, but you have to do it in a specific order

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per the outline.

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Okay.

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All right.

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I want you to do number three and then your choice of one and two back and forth, but

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number three has to come first.

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Okay.

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So the true follow up here is I'm my action item to create a stop doing list.

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I did not do this.

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In fact, I went kind of completely against this.

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The goal of this item was to stop doing things and different time, different place.

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I probably would have done that.

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We are in the middle of this self quarantine thing.

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Everybody's responding to this a little bit differently.

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My response apparently is to make things.

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Yep.

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So instead of choosing things to stop doing, I made two new things since we recorded last.

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The first one is a new course on the suite setup on the topic of time blocking, which

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was something that I floated by Sean not too long ago, said, Hey, what do you think about

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this idea?

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Because one of the things I love about working with Sean and the rest of the team at those

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we'd set up, but Sean specifically, he's the one who sets the tone for the company for

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the very beginning of this.

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He said that he doesn't want to be tone deaf to what's going on in the world.

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He wants to authentically help people, which is evidenced by giving away the time management

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course.

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That happened during my last sabbatical.

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So it was really cool to see that happen.

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That was really encouraging to me that I'm in the right place.

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These are my people.

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Sure.

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Yeah.

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So I want to follow the idea of the time blocking course that was based off of, you know, I've

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had several people who have reached out to me and asking for some help with this time

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blocking thing, which I tend to talk a lot about.

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And one person in particular, our buddy Josh asked me if I knew of any good resources.

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I'm like, you know, I really don't.

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Kel Newport's got some old blog posts from 2013, which talk about this, which were inspiring

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to me and I kind of synthesized my own system off of this.

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But I don't know of anything that I could just send people to.

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So I made something.

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Hey, that works with, with, and not just me, with a lot of help from Isaac and the rest

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of the team at the suite setup.

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So I want to, want to clarify that.

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But if you download the course, you'll hear my voice, you'll see my face.

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So, but it is definitely a team effort.

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But yeah, it's a short, it's really five videos on the basics of time blocking, some

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tips and tricks, how to do it.

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And then a video on how to do it in fantastical and a video on how to do it in good notes.

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So it's a fun course.

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I think it's a very timely course and it's a very affordable course at $29.

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Actually, right now as we record this, it's 23.

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I'm not sure if that price is still going to be, that launch price is still going to

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be available when, when this episode goes live.

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But even so, it's, it's not a huge investment.

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We did a webinar yesterday for it.

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If that is up by the time this publishes, I'll include a link to the replay.

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Fun course to do, it's talking head videos that I shot at home myself.

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First time I ever did that sort of thing.

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Nice.

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But it turned out pretty well.

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I'm not sure if you've looked at the contents of the course because I just sent it to you

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this morning.

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But I'm really happy with the way it turned out.

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Yeah, I haven't actually hit play on any of the videos yet, but I was queuing things

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up because I need more things to do.

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Yeah, right.

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I'm bored, need time fillers.

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Sure.

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But no, it looked like it was a really cool course.

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I'm excited to go through it because it's the exact thing that I need help with right

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now.

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I'm like, so I'm excited that you made something to help.

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Yeah, and that's the cool thing is, you know, that was the, that was the authentic reasoning

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behind creating it was, I don't know of anything like this out there.

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I wish that something like this existed.

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Let's make it and let's make it affordable because this is what people need right now.

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Right.

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So cool.

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Thing number one, thing number two is I launched another podcast with my wife and it is called

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the intentional family.

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It is something that we've been talking about for a long time.

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Kind of the inspiration for this is we have been doing this sort of stuff with our family

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for years where we have these different systems.

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I've talked about a lot of them on bookworms specifically, like the family core values and

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stuff like that.

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And every time that people come over and they see the stuff on our walls, like the pie charts

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and things like that, they see it and they're like, so what's the deal with that?

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You know, and then we explain it and they're like, oh, that's awesome.

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I want to steal that and we're like, go ahead.

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So we don't profess to have everything figured out, but we do know some things that work

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at least for us.

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So we wanted to share that on a larger scale, especially now, you know, that was kind of

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the thing that got this out the door was people were reaching out to us and asking for advice

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on, hey, I'm homeschooling now.

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What should I do?

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Or kind of time blocking was part of this too.

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Like, okay, now everything has changed.

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My family's home with me.

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I'm still trying to work remotely.

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Like how do I make this work?

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So we believe we've got something to share and we started a podcast, which is going to

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be real, the plan is every other week, although we have so many ideas we may for a while

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start doing it weekly.

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And they're going to be shorter, 30 minute episodes.

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So kind of the anti bookworm, if you will.

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Yeah.

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A little bit quicker than what we pull off.

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Yeah.

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And the reason for that, I think that when you're talking about stuff that you want to

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implement with multiple people, it's important that you keep it simple.

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Really, you can't make broad sweeping changes with your family.

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If you have multiple members that you're trying to coordinate, and I'll go in the same direction.

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So we want to give people little things that they can do, little adjustments.

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And so that's kind of a forced constraint for us not to go too deep on any single topic.

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And if we do stretch it out over multiple episodes that people have time to have time

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to think through the things and figure out how to apply it to their family situation.

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Sure.

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So that is at intentionalfamily.fm.

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That's also on Apple Podcast.

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I assume it's an overcast.

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Haven't looked for it there yet.

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But go subscribe if that sounds of interest to you.

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I already did.

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Thrilled the death.

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Thanks.

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I feel like this is something I have wanted to exist for a long time.

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There are a few like family oriented podcasts that I have attempted to listen to in the

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past that always struggle to because I feel like the co-hosts are not exactly, how do

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I say that?

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It's exactly easy to listen to.

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So I'm glad that you and Rachel are doing this.

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I'm really glad that Rachel is doing one.

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No.

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Yeah, exactly.

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So this is her baby.

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I introduced the first episode and I in the introduction, I said, you know, I am the co-host.

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Rachel is the host.

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And I'm doing this just because I have some podcast experience.

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But from here on out, you know, she's, she's run in the show.

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Sure.

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And that's because she has a lot to share.

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I do too, but I have other places that I can talk about stuff.

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Right.

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Right.

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And then yet to be released episode of Focus, as we record this anyways, talking to David

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about this, he said, glad I'm not the only one who doesn't have a single unpublished

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thought.

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Yeah.

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You know, that's, I'm quickly trending to that, that category.

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But this is, I don't know, people can hear me talk about stuff multiple places and you

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probably get sick of just another podcast about what Mike Schmitt says to say.

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But it turns out, you know, my wife is actually amazing and the secret to a lot of my success.

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So she's going to talk about it from her perspective.

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And more importantly, I think is the dynamic that we have in leading the family together.

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It's not a, it's not something that one person can do.

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It takes, it takes both, both people.

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And so again, not saying that we have it all figured out.

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A lot of people know a lot more about this than we do, but we want to share what we do

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know and hopefully help some people who are looking for some answers right now.

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Sure.

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I think this is the perfect time to be releasing something like this because there are so many

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people stuck with no one but their family.

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So it's good timing.

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Well done, Mike.

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Good job, Rachel.

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Really excited.

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Yeah, and the other thing about this that's interesting to me is that we don't know when

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things go back to normal, but the time that you have right now with your family doesn't

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have to be a negative thing.

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We had a family meeting day one and said, you know, this could be awesome or this could

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be really annoying.

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It's up to you guys in your perspective.

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Yeah, we can't do some of the stuff that we liked to do, but we can still have fun together.

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And we've been able to do that largely as a family right before we recorded here.

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We had a playing lightning out in the driveway with the entire family on the basketball hoop

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that you saw via FaceTime.

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Nice.

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You know, so little things like that really make a big difference.

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And I feel that if you are stuck home with your family, the things that you do now are

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going to echo years from now.

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The seeds that you plant right now will produce a harvest when you go when things go back

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to normal.

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And I think it's really important for a family specifically to recognize that you have an

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opportunity here.

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For sure.

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No, I think this is a good one.

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I haven't listened to the first one, but I have it and I am subscribed.

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So yes, I'm excited about this one.

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Good call, Rachel.

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If you're listening, good job.

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Excited.

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All right.

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Enough talking about me and my failed action item.

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I was going to say, this is kind of like the entirety of your follow up is I failed.

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But here's all the cool stuff I'm making because I failed.

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I failed gloriously.

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Oh, well done, Mike.

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Good job.

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Well, I have a single action item here, which is simply a question.

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How do I apply great thinking to my online business?

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And this is coming from good to great.

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And I'll be honest and admit that I did not spend one second thinking about this over

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the last two weeks.

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Apologies.

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I'm not even an attempt.

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I think it's a cool idea, but I don't have anything.

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Yeah, I am tempted to just say, let's forget all the action items until we're done with

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this thing along with all the gap books.

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But the action items do come out from reading the book, though.

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So I guess it's worth still talking about them, even if our success rate is going to

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go down significantly.

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Yep.

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Yep.

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I think it's continuing to go.

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At least for me, it's continuing to go down.

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I feel like my...

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I would be interested to see the success rate of action items from the time we started the

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Bookworm podcast to right now.

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I would venture to say that there's a much lower success rate now than there was at the

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beginning.

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That's my speculation.

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Oh, for sure.

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Well, I mean, right now, just because of where everybody finds themselves, it's going

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to be lower.

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In the webinar yesterday with Sean, I encouraged him to share this.

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And he talked about it, and I think it was really important for a lot of people to realize

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that there's maybe this unset expectation right now that you're working from home.

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You don't have your commute.

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You don't have all these other things, all these other distractions, if you will.

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So think about all the time that you have and how productive you can be.

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You're not going to be productive.

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I've seen a lot of articles being published lately about stop trying to be productive

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during all of this.

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And I think that's an important attitude to have.

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Sean shared in the webinar yesterday that on his best day, he's at about 75% effectiveness.

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And I'm glad that he shared that in the webinar because then I could share it here because

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I totally agree with that.

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He said on some days, it's more like 50, but on his best days, it's like 75.

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So you're not going to get as much done as you were getting done before, just because

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things are different.

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And there's a whole bunch of other factors that are weighing on you subconsciously, maybe

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even you don't even realize how emotionally drained you are from all of this stuff.

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So cut yourself a break, cut everybody that you work with a break.

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If they're not getting things done, not getting things to you in the way that they normally

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do, everybody's trying to figure this out on the fly.

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Yes, yes.

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And yes.

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I will say, I have more time, but it's all being used up by my Javi job.

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So there's that, which is why I've had a few people email me recently, "Joe, where's your

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newsletter been?

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Where's your blog post?"

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I'm like, "I don't have time.

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I just don't, thankfully, as of this weekend, coming into this next Monday, it drops off

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significantly for me because we finally started to hit a stride this week.

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So I feel like I'm in pretty good shape after this.

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So my goal is to write something in the following week.

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But this episode will have released by then, so it'll be kind of weird.

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Sorry, that would be strange.

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But that's where I land.

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I spent no time thinking about the question I was supposed to spend time thinking about.

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And I am not planning to do that confession.

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That's all right.

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We forgive you.

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All right.

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Let's jump into today's book, which is The Antidote by Oliver Berkman, Happiness for

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People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking.

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And I have to admit that as I was reading this, I feel like this is the antithesis to

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a lot of the books that we've read on Bookworm.

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It is, yep.

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I don't know if that's 100% accurate, but it feels like he is going through the process

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of picking apart a lot of the health, self-help theories one by one and showing why they are

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wrong and showing why you need to do the exact opposite.

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I think that's my story.

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Well, he's attempting to show why they're wrong.

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Yes, yes, yes, yes.

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That's a very good clarification to make.

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Thank you for that, Mike.

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Yeah.

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I think I just figured out what your opinion of the book is.

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But I struggle with this.

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So at a broad level, before we get into the specific contents, I feel like there's a lot

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to be mined from this book.

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But the way that it's written is trying to address a whole bunch of things in a short

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chapter, sprinkle in some personal stories.

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And as a result, there's not really a deep conversation around any one of these things.

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Just as an example, later on in the book, he talks about Carol Dweck and mindset, fixed

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versus growth mindset.

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He calls it fixed theory and incremental theory.

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But he quotes Carol Dweck specifically.

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And there's a whole book on that topic, which speaks to it much more clearly and has a lot

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more value, in my opinion, than the two-page section in here.

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And that's like one selective point that he's using to support the argument laid out at

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the very beginning of this chapter.

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And I feel like a lot of the stuff that he uses in here is that selective picking and

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choosing of things that will support his argument without looking at them in totality to see

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what they support and what they don't support.

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So if you read this at surface level, you kind of feel like these things tie together.

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But to me, because I've read enough of these books maybe, I feel like it's tied together

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very loosely.

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And if you look closely at any one of these, you start to see where things are falling

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apart at the seams in the patchwork of his arguments.

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Is that fair?

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Sure.

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Yeah.

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No, I think that's fair.

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I feel like there were a number of times he was making an argument.

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And I wondered, "Am I just falling into the mirror?"

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Into the positive thinking trap as he would refer to it?

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Or is he actually full of it?

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I kept asking that question to myself quite a bit.

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And that is not to say that I agree or disagree with anything.

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That's just based on how the book itself is put together.

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So maybe that should be more author style and rating.

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But I think it's important to call out here at the beginning because as we go through

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all of these things, these are very selective in how they are presented.

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So there is definitely a bias here starting with the very first story where he talks about

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being at the get motivated event and how he's standing next to this guy who is basically

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heckling from the outer rim, like way up in the nose bleeds and thinking that this is

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ridiculous.

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That's kind of the framework for the rest of the book.

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Because this whole industry is like this.

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And I don't think it's all like that.

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I think there are people that are like that.

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And I don't like those types of events either.

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I was offered the opportunity to go to a Tony Robbins event for free.

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And I'm like, "Nah, I don't really want to go."

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Even though I think that Tony Robbins does a lot of good.

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If you follow his life story at all and the money book specifically, someone showed up

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at his house on Thanksgiving Day when his parents couldn't afford a Thanksgiving dinner

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and they were arguing about it and someone delivered them a Thanksgiving dinner.

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And that made an impact on him.

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So he gave out, I forget the number, but it's thousands and thousands and thousands of

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Thanksgiving dinners from the proceeds that he made from that one book.

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So I think there's a lot to like about Tony Robbins, but the whole way that his events

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and just his whole platform is put together, I don't like that kind of stuff.

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Same thing for Gary Vaynerchuk, same thing for Grant Cardone, even though I really liked

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that book and the message behind it.

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You know, I'm able to disconnect the message from the messenger with a lot of this stuff.

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But I totally get it if other people have trouble doing that.

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What about the four hour work week?

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Tim Ferriss?

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There's a whole hour and a half rant on, I mean episode.

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What I think about the four hour work week.

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Okay.

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I just wondered if you'd be able to separate those two, that's all.

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Well that's a little bit different because I think the message there is, hey, this is

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easy and it's not easy.

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You can do it.

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I think that's different than saying, hey, you only have to work four hours a week, which

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isn't the message of that book if you dig into it, but the provocative title makes it

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seem like it is.

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And I guarantee Tim Ferriss did that on purpose.

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Oh, he totally did.

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Sorry, didn't mean to send you down that trail.

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All right, let's jump into the meat of the book.

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And I haven't put in every single chapter to work through it.

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I didn't even put the chapter titles in the outline for today because I feel like there's

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some very specific points that we should work through for this particular book.

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And the first of those is the beginning of the book goes through some of the overarching

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problems with the world of positive thinking.

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And he tells this from the story of going to this get motivated conference and how people

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were all about thinking positively and trying to neglect or put aside the negative thinking

00:21:14

that you're prone to.

00:21:16

Like don't do that, but think about how great you are and think about how awesome the future

00:21:22

is going to be.

00:21:23

Like that was the overarching theme of the conference.

00:21:26

Never been to one of these.

00:21:27

I actually had never heard of this get motivated conference, even though he claims it's like

00:21:30

the biggest one, maybe that's, I don't know, something to do with time warp with when it

00:21:35

was written versus now.

00:21:37

But he totally should have gone to a Tony Robbins event and done the fire walk and talked

00:21:41

about that.

00:21:42

I kind of thought that because he does reference that later on.

00:21:47

But the premise here is that, and this is the foundation that the rest of the book sits

00:21:53

on, the premise is that the people who get into deep into positive thinking have a tendency

00:22:03

to neglect or search for the negative thoughts in order to set them aside.

00:22:11

And his whole premise here throughout the rest of it, and tell me if you agree with this

00:22:17

Mike, is that by trying to hunt down the negatives and set them aside, you actually make yourself

00:22:25

worse, worse off in the end, as opposed to better, which was your intention by doing

00:22:31

the positive thinking and neglecting the negative thinking.

00:22:34

Do you think it's a fair assessment?

00:22:36

That is a fair assessment.

00:22:37

And I agree with that.

00:22:38

I mean, he talks about the problem of positive thinking being that you have to scan for those

00:22:42

negative thoughts, but scanning will draw attention to the negative thoughts.

00:22:46

So trying to get rid of everything negative is going to produce anxiety and security and

00:22:49

sadness as you see all those things that are really there.

00:22:52

So the effort that you spend trying to be happy can make you miserable.

00:22:57

I agree with that 100%.

00:22:59

But I also think that that doesn't mean you should completely stop trying to be happy

00:23:06

or to discount everything that has a positive message to it.

00:23:13

And that's my real issue with the way that the get motivated event is framed.

00:23:18

Again, I understand all the issues with those types of things.

00:23:22

I have never been to a Tony Robbins event, but I studied them.

00:23:27

And I asked and interviewed people who have been to them, what's it like?

00:23:32

And from what I understand, it's like a big positive pepper alley.

00:23:38

And it goes against every fiber of my being, the way that they describe these events where

00:23:43

he's up on stage and he's making everybody jump up and down and they have these dance

00:23:48

contests with people and they're like, no, I don't want anything to do with that.

00:23:52

But that doesn't mean that that doesn't work for some people.

00:23:56

And then the other thing that really kind of raised a red flag in my head right away

00:24:00

was this 18 month rule that he talks about.

00:24:03

He says, the most likely person to buy a self-help book is someone who bought one in the last

00:24:06

18 months.

00:24:08

And when I read that part, I'm like, yep, guilty.

00:24:10

That's totally me.

00:24:11

And then he adds this little big one that evidently didn't solve all their problems.

00:24:17

And I was like, you don't get it.

00:24:19

I'm not buying these books because good to great or any of the books that we've read,

00:24:25

even the ones that I've given five stars, I did not get that book to solve all my problems.

00:24:32

I maybe got that book to solve a problem.

00:24:35

And I think that's the difference that's worth calling out here at the very beginning is

00:24:39

that trying too hard to be happy, trying to achieve perfection, especially believing that

00:24:44

one event or one book is going to provide all of the answers, that is going to be something

00:24:49

that is just going to be frustrating.

00:24:51

But if you can look at your life and you can say, here's one thing that would make me happier.

00:24:56

And I want to make this change because I want to be happier.

00:24:59

That is totally fine.

00:25:01

And that is very much in line with the growth mindset that he calls out later.

00:25:04

Very much against the broad description of the positive thinking culture that he highlights

00:25:12

in this first chapter.

00:25:13

I think there's one and obviously you and I are going to argue with him because we have

00:25:19

a tendency to support this positive thinking world.

00:25:25

But I think there's one fundamental issue I have with his structure and his foundation.

00:25:32

And that is he makes the assumption that people who focus on positive thinking are in actuality

00:25:43

focusing on the negative thoughts and trying to root them from their brain.

00:25:49

And I think that is fundamentally flawed because that is something that I do not do.

00:25:55

And I don't see it that way at all.

00:25:56

Yes, I try to think positively and look at the bright side of things.

00:26:02

But I'm not naive.

00:26:03

I'm not saying the negative stuff isn't there.

00:26:07

Obviously with the health stuff I've dealt with, it's certainly not something I can just

00:26:13

say, hey, I feel great.

00:26:15

No, it doesn't work.

00:26:18

I can't just say, yes, I'm better.

00:26:20

And then all of a sudden be better.

00:26:21

That works for some people.

00:26:22

But in most cases, it doesn't work that way.

00:26:27

And if you had taken that approach, you'd be miserable instead of on the verge of beating

00:26:31

this thing.

00:26:32

Definitely.

00:26:33

So I don't buy his foundation, which is unfortunate because the rest of this book, he has a lot

00:26:42

of good points.

00:26:43

And I do have a couple of points here that I will act on as a result of reading this.

00:26:48

I'm grateful for having read this.

00:26:50

But I think his foundation is flawed, which of course is going to make me a skeptic for

00:26:56

the rest of the book.

00:26:57

Exactly.

00:26:58

And I caught that within the first 10 pages and like, oh boy, here we go.

00:27:04

This might have been better if the first chapter had been omitted and he just jumped

00:27:08

into stoicism.

00:27:09

Yeah, it might have.

00:27:12

Yeah.

00:27:13

The last thing I'll say about this first chapter, the note that I jotted down is that you shouldn't

00:27:17

assume that any booker system is going to solve all of your problems.

00:27:21

And this is where I think the stoic perspective is maybe a little bit different and we would

00:27:27

have to interview Ryan Holiday to really know this for sure because he wrote the book The

00:27:31

Obstacle is the Way.

00:27:33

But I view this and I'm glad you brought up your health battles because from an outside

00:27:39

perspective, you can tell me if this is wrong, it appears to me that you have just identified

00:27:45

that this is the next hurdle I have to get over.

00:27:48

So we're going to take care of this thing.

00:27:51

And then there's another hurdle and we're going to take care of that thing.

00:27:54

And then there's probably another hurdle that you didn't know about or didn't see coming.

00:27:58

And then you take care of that thing and you just keep going.

00:28:01

You don't assume that this one pill that I'm going to take is going to magically fix

00:28:07

all of these things that would have caused you to be frustrated.

00:28:11

And if you kept looking for those things, it might actually hurt you.

00:28:13

Is that fair?

00:28:14

Absolutely.

00:28:15

100%.

00:28:16

And obviously when you have health issues, you can't help but reflect on them when you

00:28:21

read something like this.

00:28:23

And I continued to see how the way I've approached my healing process, which by the way, I'm

00:28:29

very close to the end of if I'm not like within sight of it right now.

00:28:33

Anyway, I haven't said that publicly.

00:28:36

There you go.

00:28:37

So, you know, having that history, you know, as we go through these things, I guess I can

00:28:41

use that as a recurring example because it hasn't been simple.

00:28:46

This has been an almost two year long process, which I know there are people that do much

00:28:50

longer healing processes than I've been through and some that are way worse.

00:28:55

I'm not downplaying that.

00:28:57

But at the same time, it hasn't been simple.

00:29:00

And every time it seems like you'd get to one point, the next could be worse.

00:29:05

It could be better.

00:29:06

It could seem worse.

00:29:07

Like you never know.

00:29:08

You don't know what's coming up.

00:29:09

But if I had gone through what he's calling this positive thinking, don't think bad thoughts,

00:29:15

like, no, I was thinking quite a few times like, what happens if this kills me?

00:29:20

Like I had those thoughts on a regular basis.

00:29:23

So it's not something that you're going to just magically make go away because you're

00:29:30

thinking a certain direction.

00:29:33

So I wouldn't say that I'm at the level of Ryan Holiday and the Stoics, but we can jump

00:29:42

into that because it's a chapter that he goes into immediately after explaining this whole

00:29:49

cult of positive thinking.

00:29:50

I don't remember if he used the actual term cult.

00:29:53

Do you remember if he did that or not?

00:29:54

Okay.

00:29:55

I couldn't remember if I was cult of optimism, I think is how he defined it.

00:29:58

Okay.

00:29:59

Maybe that's where I got that.

00:30:00

I felt like I was imposing something on him, but it felt familiar.

00:30:04

I don't know.

00:30:05

But he talks about stoicism.

00:30:07

And if you don't know what stoicism is, I'm probably the wrong person to explain it

00:30:10

to you.

00:30:11

But the general gist, the way I understand it is that when things happen to you, you don't

00:30:20

take a positive or negative stance on it.

00:30:23

It is just a thing that has happened.

00:30:25

It's not inherently good or bad.

00:30:28

And it is your response to that thing that dictates your overarching reaction to it.

00:30:35

So yes, if you're in a car accident, we would naturally say, oh, that's bad.

00:30:41

That would be the question.

00:30:43

It's like, well, you had a car accident.

00:30:46

If someone got hurt, is that inherently bad?

00:30:49

And some people would say yes.

00:30:51

Some people will say no, it kind of depends on how you react to it.

00:30:54

Sometimes when people have had an accident, it becomes the best thing that ever happened

00:30:57

to them, which is always counterintuitive when you hear those stories.

00:31:02

But it's your reaction to things that dictates whether it becomes a good or bad thing.

00:31:07

That's at least my view of stoicism.

00:31:08

Yeah, Mike, you can contradict me now if you'd like.

00:31:11

That is generally correct.

00:31:16

Stoicism has been something that has fascinated me for a while.

00:31:19

I don't consider myself a stoic.

00:31:22

But this in this section, he talks about that beliefs cause your distress.

00:31:29

And that's a shared thought between stoicism and positive thinking.

00:31:33

And I agree with that.

00:31:35

And I think that everything I shared at the beginning about the intentional family and

00:31:38

like what we're trying to do to redeem this time that we find ourselves in.

00:31:42

This could be classified as stoic thinking because you have this event where you have

00:31:49

to stay home, schools canceled, all the extracurriculars are canceled.

00:31:53

And that is not great.

00:31:56

But that doesn't mean that good can't come out of it.

00:31:58

And that's what we did.

00:31:59

We viewed it.

00:32:00

Okay, this is what it is.

00:32:02

So how do we redeem this time?

00:32:03

How do we make the best of this time?

00:32:06

How do we still do positive things during this time?

00:32:09

That's where I think I start to break away from the stoic philosophy.

00:32:13

Because he talks a lot in here about negative visualization, which I want to talk about.

00:32:18

But I want to go back to the perspective of how do you view the current situation that

00:32:22

we find ourselves in.

00:32:24

Because this is something that I have been thinking a lot about.

00:32:27

It is not a secret that I am a Christian and that my religious beliefs shape how I view

00:32:34

the world.

00:32:36

I think that when it comes to positive thinking and stoicism and the role of faith with this,

00:32:46

you can accept a situation for the way that it is.

00:32:50

And you can wish and believe that it was different and will be different.

00:32:56

And that those aren't necessarily at odds with each other.

00:33:01

So as I find myself wanting this thing to change and to be done and to go back to life

00:33:10

as normal, there is a process of walking that out.

00:33:16

And even for somebody who considers themselves a man or woman of faith in you, you pray and

00:33:22

you believe that God hears your prayers and things are going to change, there is a process.

00:33:28

You don't see it all the time right away.

00:33:30

And that doesn't mean that you stop.

00:33:32

You keep doing the things that you know to do.

00:33:36

And then you kind of release the results.

00:33:39

And that I think is very much in alignment with a lot of the stuff that's in this book

00:33:44

is that you recognize what is going on.

00:33:46

You're not making a value judgment about it.

00:33:48

You're doing what you know you need to do regardless of whether you fall into positive

00:33:53

negative, whatever.

00:33:54

I almost feel like the subtitle of this book is kind of a distraction for the real value

00:33:59

of the information that's in here almost because it forces you to pick a side.

00:34:04

And I think that there's a lot of value in recognizing that you don't have control over

00:34:09

everything that's going on.

00:34:11

And that's okay.

00:34:12

Just do what you know to do.

00:34:14

And then like the way I would say it based on my belief system would be do your best and

00:34:20

let God do the rest.

00:34:22

Okay.

00:34:23

But even if you don't believe in in God, there has to be an element of that.

00:34:27

That's kind of what he's preaching.

00:34:28

And I use the word preaching intentionally through the rest of this book is that you're

00:34:33

not going to be able to control everything.

00:34:35

So if you try to control everything, you're just going to get frustrated.

00:34:37

You're going to get anxious.

00:34:38

That's kind of the point of the whole first chapter.

00:34:41

So Stoicism here where he's talking about don't disconnect your feelings from the actual

00:34:46

event.

00:34:47

Just recognize the event for what it is.

00:34:49

I think that's a really interesting idea.

00:34:52

And it's a hard one to follow through on.

00:34:54

I think definitely your gut reaction is you get in a car accident.

00:34:58

Oh my goodness.

00:34:59

This is just terrible.

00:35:01

This is this is a terrible thing to happen when I learned that I had Lyme disease.

00:35:06

It was devastating when it first happened.

00:35:09

But at this particular point in time, like I'm one of those weird people that would tell

00:35:13

you that I'm grateful for having had Lyme disease at this point because it's taught me

00:35:19

so much about good health.

00:35:21

And I've learned how horribly I was living and helped me to develop a much better life

00:35:28

style.

00:35:29

So at this point, I'm grateful to have somehow contracted Lyme disease.

00:35:33

I think it was through mosquitoes, but it's a whole nother scientific conversation to

00:35:38

have non-ombochrome.

00:35:40

But I feel like when it first came, like when that first happened when I first learned

00:35:47

that I had Lyme disease, it was one that was very difficult to come to grips with and borderline

00:35:54

sent me into a bit of a depression until figuring out what to do about it, talking to

00:36:01

a couple doctors who specialize in alternative medicine and being willing to ask the questions

00:36:07

around what's the right path forward for this and being willing to fight instead of

00:36:14

just giving up and saying, whoops, well, I guess my life's over because some people

00:36:18

do that.

00:36:19

People who receive that diagnosis, borderline shut down entirely and don't even try.

00:36:29

That is the opposite of what you're after.

00:36:31

You need to take...

00:36:34

I'm not one that studies stoicism.

00:36:36

I don't know that I would call myself a stoic.

00:36:38

I don't even know if I really want to call myself a stoic or go down that path.

00:36:43

But seeing the benefits of just evaluating things as they are and then reacting to them,

00:36:52

I don't think I would go that far.

00:36:54

I think to your point, with the book, it's not sides.

00:36:58

There is a medium.

00:36:59

I forget what the name of that argument is.

00:37:01

There's an argument that there's a title for it.

00:37:04

Whenever someone makes it a choice between one thing and another, but there's actually

00:37:08

a middle ground and they don't acknowledge that, there's a name for that, but I can't

00:37:12

think of what it is.

00:37:13

Stoicism, I feel, is the same way as what you're saying with this book.

00:37:17

I don't feel that it has to be your all-in with stoicism or your not.

00:37:22

I feel like there is a middle ground of being willing to acknowledge things and choosing

00:37:28

your reaction to them, but I'm okay inherently saying something's good or bad to a certain

00:37:33

degree.

00:37:34

That's my tendency.

00:37:35

Exactly.

00:37:36

I'm okay with that.

00:37:37

You have to be willing to say things are good or bad because there was something that you

00:37:40

said, and I forget exactly the way that you said it, when something lands in front of

00:37:45

you, you have the choice whether to accept or reject that.

00:37:50

He talks about how later on specifically, we tend to reject any sort of thought on the

00:37:56

topic of death.

00:37:59

I want to separate that for a moment and just think about the concept of there's something

00:38:05

that's presented to you and you have the ability to accept or reject that as truth.

00:38:12

Everybody is going to make that decision based on their own model, what they consider to

00:38:19

be true.

00:38:21

But I think there is a lot of truth to the fact that you don't have to assume control

00:38:30

of everything that every person or everything is going to try to put on you.

00:38:36

You don't necessarily have to sign for the package.

00:38:40

I have had people tell me over and over again that you are going to have what's the celiac

00:38:51

disease where you're not going to be able to eat bread.

00:38:54

I love bread.

00:38:57

And so every time they try to tell me that or they try to get me tested, whatever, and

00:39:01

they're trying to prove their theory, I'm like, nope, nope, I feel fine.

00:39:05

I eat bread all the time.

00:39:07

I don't want to project sickness onto myself because I know that when I start doing that,

00:39:13

I will start to feel sick.

00:39:15

And I know that there are people who do struggle with that and making that change really does

00:39:21

improve the quality of their life.

00:39:22

So I am not talking about ignoring what is there.

00:39:26

And I think that's the distinction I'm trying to make here.

00:39:28

Is there is a difference between pretending something isn't happening and saying, yep,

00:39:34

okay, this is what it is.

00:39:36

Now what's the best path forward from here?

00:39:39

And choosing the correct way to respond in those different situations, by the way, is

00:39:42

a little bit tricky.

00:39:44

If somebody were to come and tell me, hey, you've got celiac disease, when I don't feel

00:39:48

bad, I don't feel bad after I eat bread, that's very different than when somebody is

00:39:55

telling you, hey, you've contracted Lyme disease and here are some things that you can do to

00:40:00

mitigate and beat this thing.

00:40:02

You're not going to bury your head in the sand and just say, nope, I don't have it.

00:40:06

I refuse to accept Lyme disease because the whole time you are miserable, you have no

00:40:10

energy, you have the aches and pains.

00:40:13

Like, there are times when you do have to though, just block that stuff out of your mind,

00:40:18

I think, and it's tricky to know the difference there.

00:40:21

That is the thing that I struggle with where we are right now, is where is that line?

00:40:27

And I'm constantly asking myself, how am I responding and am I responding appropriately?

00:40:33

Because I don't want to walk in fear.

00:40:35

I believe that spirit of fear, you can see that anytime you go to the store and just

00:40:40

look at people's faces, they're terrified of catching this thing.

00:40:44

And I feel like that negative energy that does attract some of this stuff.

00:40:47

And I don't want to pass that along to my kids.

00:40:50

So I'm going to be careful that I'm not living that way, but I'm also going to be wise and

00:40:55

I'm not going to the store unless I have to.

00:40:57

Right.

00:40:58

Right.

00:40:59

I told our girls because they were getting a little nervous because they'd seen other

00:41:03

people take multiple steps back whenever they get close to us when we're walking on the

00:41:09

street and they're trying to make sure that they're not getting too close by accident.

00:41:14

Like, is it really that dangerous?

00:41:15

And I was like, well, the absolute worst that could happen is you could die and then we

00:41:20

go to heaven.

00:41:21

So I'm not too concerned about it.

00:41:25

Yeah.

00:41:26

And that's where negative visualization comes in with this chapter.

00:41:29

Yeah, absolutely.

00:41:31

But it's a thing that frustrates other people whenever you say that.

00:41:34

Well, I'm not too concerned about it at the same time.

00:41:38

Like we were talking beforehand, it's my job to run a lot of the live streams.

00:41:43

A lot, all of the live streams that our church does.

00:41:46

So anything video related ends up going through me, I've become way more popular than I ever

00:41:50

wanted to be.

00:41:51

And as a result of that, I end up being in these scenarios where there's a lot of people

00:41:56

in that building sometimes, you know, they're all being careful about not getting too close

00:42:00

to each other and trying to make sure there's not too many people in one room at a time.

00:42:03

Like they're careful about that, but you're still in the same building.

00:42:08

And it's like, well, we're just going to sacrifice Joe for the sake of everybody else.

00:42:12

It's OK.

00:42:13

Sorry.

00:42:14

I'll be fine.

00:42:15

No, maybe that's just me being naive.

00:42:17

But at the same time, I know if I do that, it allows, you know, at this point, close

00:42:23

to a thousand or more than a thousand people to stay home and not go out.

00:42:29

So it's a big deal for me to do that.

00:42:32

So that's why I'm OK with it.

00:42:34

But all right, stoicism, I like the concept.

00:42:37

I think there's middle ground.

00:42:38

I would like to go into it.

00:42:40

Yes.

00:42:41

Quick point on the negative visualization.

00:42:43

This is something that I had heard about a while back.

00:42:46

And I don't like the way that he described it here.

00:42:48

But if you want a good explanation of this, check out the Tim Ferriss fear setting Ted

00:42:53

talk where it's basically goal setting, but you're envisioning a worst case scenario.

00:42:58

And again, this is the type of thing that doesn't really fit with the way that I think.

00:43:04

But I see the value in it because the basic idea there is that if you picture the worst

00:43:10

case event, it's not going to be as bad as that.

00:43:14

Just like if you picture the best case event, it's probably not going to be as good as that,

00:43:17

which can cause you to be disappointed.

00:43:19

So the opposite end of that, the negative visualization is picture the worst thing that

00:43:22

could happen.

00:43:24

And then everything that would happen above that is just gravy.

00:43:28

Sure.

00:43:29

So confronting that worst case scenario, saps it of its anxiety inducing power, he says,

00:43:34

which is really true.

00:43:36

And you kind of did that, you know, when you're talking to your kids and you say, well,

00:43:38

if we die, we're saying that it happens, this we go to heaven, you know, and you can

00:43:43

apply that.

00:43:44

It doesn't have to be death.

00:43:45

That doesn't always have to be the worst case scenario.

00:43:47

Although that is a topic in this book.

00:43:49

So I think it's not, it's not off topic to, to think of it that way.

00:43:55

Yeah, as far as like the negative visualization piece goes, that is where I started, I have

00:44:02

one action item from this and it all involves journal prompts.

00:44:05

I've been doing more journaling at night.

00:44:07

I think our next book will encourage that to some degree, but I've been doing more of

00:44:13

that and I've been slowly changing up some of the prompts that I use as part of that.

00:44:19

And this is where one of them came from.

00:44:20

It's like, okay, in the scenarios that I'm dealing with today, what's the worst that

00:44:24

could happen?

00:44:25

Like take the live streaming, for example, a lot of things can go wrong when it comes

00:44:31

to live streaming.

00:44:32

People think, oh, yeah, just turn it on.

00:44:34

No, it is not that simple.

00:44:37

It is quite complex if you're going to do a really well produced live stream.

00:44:43

And the worst that could happen is it goes down, you know, we get kind of been out of

00:44:48

shape and we're very particular with it.

00:44:50

And I do a lot of backups and such, but the absolute worst that could happen is it goes

00:44:55

down.

00:44:56

We apologize.

00:44:57

We try again.

00:44:58

So it's okay.

00:44:59

Yeah.

00:45:00

And with the technical stuff specifically, I'm glad you brought that up because that's

00:45:03

like the place that everyone could probably agree to take a stoic approach because when

00:45:09

the stream goes down, it's not morally good or bad.

00:45:13

It just is.

00:45:14

And everybody knows that there is a technical cause that that thing is down.

00:45:18

Yep.

00:45:19

So you can just say, okay, the stream is down.

00:45:22

What can I do about this?

00:45:23

What's the best thing to do right now?

00:45:26

As opposed to if you do attribute a moral judgment to that, then you're freaking out

00:45:30

because, oh my gosh, this is the stream is down.

00:45:33

This is terrible.

00:45:34

All these people can't see it.

00:45:35

Well, I can't even think of a positive scenario where you think it's good that the stream

00:45:38

went down, but you get, you get my point, you know, that like, if you're able to detach

00:45:43

the meaning, you can solve the problem a lot quicker.

00:45:46

Absolutely.

00:45:47

And I think, you know, some of, I've jokingly said that working in IT has helped me beat

00:45:54

Lyme disease and a mold infection because it has shown me how things just go bad for

00:46:00

no reason sometimes.

00:46:01

Yeah.

00:46:02

So it's just, you know, it's, it's not a good thing, you know, it went down.

00:46:06

Okay.

00:46:07

What can we do about it?

00:46:08

These four things.

00:46:09

Okay.

00:46:10

Let's start at number one.

00:46:11

Let's start working our way through them.

00:46:12

That's kind of just become my approach to life.

00:46:14

Maybe I'm still like, I don't know.

00:46:16

I don't think of it that way.

00:46:17

Well, it's interesting cause I think there's a lot of alignment actually between stoicism

00:46:21

and Christianity.

00:46:22

There's a verse that says the rain falls on the just and the unjust, you know, and I

00:46:25

think that I call that out specifically because I think a lot of people think of Christians

00:46:29

as just bearing their heads in the sand and just confessing the positive things the Bible

00:46:33

says like this stuff is going to happen.

00:46:34

So what are you going to do when it, when it happens?

00:46:37

You're not going to get upset.

00:46:38

Oh, this is terrible.

00:46:39

The rain should not be falling on me right now.

00:46:41

It's literally told you it's going to.

00:46:44

And here we are.

00:46:45

All right.

00:46:46

Buddhism.

00:46:47

You ready for Buddhism?

00:46:49

I, I, I am not someone who understands Buddhism very well.

00:46:54

Like I have a decent grasp on stoicism.

00:46:57

Buddhism.

00:46:58

I feel like I should, even though we just read, you know, Zen in the art of motorcycle maintenance.

00:47:04

I feel like there's some overlap there, but there's a couple things in this section.

00:47:11

He talks about Buddhism and the primary piece of it that I got from him is this concept

00:47:19

of non-attachment.

00:47:21

And it's that in Buddhism, if I understand this correctly, there's a, a lot of, a lot

00:47:28

of, an acknowledgement that we have a tendency to attach to expectations.

00:47:33

And that becomes what lets us down because those expectations are not met.

00:47:38

So an example of this would be, all right, we'll, we'll continue the Lyme disease health

00:47:43

thing.

00:47:44

If I hold the expectation that I should not have received this diagnosis of Lyme disease,

00:47:55

like if I hold that expectation that that's not something that should have happened, I

00:47:59

will become upset and my ego will be hurt as a result of that and it'll become a detrimental

00:48:04

thing to me.

00:48:06

So if I hold that expectation, I become attached to this concept of, I guess, security and

00:48:11

stability, like if that's the thing that I'm attached to when bad things or things that

00:48:17

threaten that happen, it's, it's a major problem.

00:48:22

And he, as a result of understanding that, went and did a meditation retreat.

00:48:28

Have you ever done one of these, Mike?

00:48:29

I feel like this is something we've seen come up from time to time.

00:48:31

They, like people in our books tend to do these from, you know, on occasion.

00:48:35

I, I always like, whenever I read them, I'm like, huh, I wonder if I should do that sometime.

00:48:39

And then I read the end of it and think, I really don't want to do that.

00:48:43

Nope.

00:48:44

So I have not and I will not.

00:48:47

Sorry.

00:48:50

But as a result of this meditation retreat, he became aware of one, the noise that goes

00:48:58

on around us and this lack of calm that is around us.

00:49:04

And all of that is due to this attachment on our expectation, like we're expecting certain

00:49:11

things and we're attached to that.

00:49:13

Do you feel like I covered this?

00:49:15

Okay.

00:49:16

I feel like I really struggled to understand this.

00:49:17

I'm like trying to process what I read right now.

00:49:20

Yeah.

00:49:21

The thing is, I wish that he had not called this the Buddhist guide to not thinking positively

00:49:26

because it's really talking about mindfulness meditation, which is not a spiritual practice.

00:49:32

I feel like you can tie it to Buddhism, but you can also tie it to any other religion.

00:49:38

Maybe not any other religion, but I think there's elements of this where mindfulness

00:49:41

meditation is simply recognizing what your mind is focusing on and then letting it go.

00:49:46

You're not attaching to it.

00:49:48

And that's the mistake that a lot of people make when they start trying to meditate is

00:49:52

they get frustrated with themselves.

00:49:53

Oh, I shouldn't be thinking about what I need to do after this session.

00:49:59

You just recognize that, oh, I was thinking about something else instead of my breath and

00:50:03

you recenter, you refocus, you train your brain.

00:50:07

I think that's essentially what he's saying here, but obviously he's tying it to Buddhism

00:50:12

and the Buddhist story and stuff like that.

00:50:15

One thing I want to go back just a little bit here because you were talking about the diagnosis

00:50:20

of the Lyme disease.

00:50:22

And I want to call out because I think this is really important and I'll stop talking

00:50:28

about this after this.

00:50:30

But when someone comes to give you a diagnosis, you have the opportunity to accept or reject

00:50:36

that.

00:50:37

And there are people who accept a diagnosis without actually anything being wrong in their

00:50:43

body and they think they've got cancer, so they die of cancer, but then they go to

00:50:47

room, they do the biopsy afterwards and they find out there's no cancer.

00:50:51

And they've just convinced themselves mentally that they have cancer, so they end up dying.

00:50:56

There are medical cases of that.

00:50:59

And so I think that's an important distinction to make out.

00:51:03

Don't just assume that because somebody said something that you sign for that package and

00:51:09

you take that on.

00:51:10

Now, if you do have something that you are dealing with, then these are the facts that

00:51:20

I am faced with.

00:51:21

This is the situation I find myself in.

00:51:24

Then you figure out what you do from that point forward and for me, faith is always a

00:51:30

piece of that.

00:51:31

But I want to call that out because nothing and no one is infallible and just because

00:51:39

somebody said something once, regardless of it's a doctor or a self-help guru or your

00:51:45

shrink or whatever, don't just blanket accept everything that people say about you.

00:51:51

Now back to the Buddhism thing, I don't know much about Buddhism.

00:51:57

I am not fascinated in the least about the Buddha's story.

00:52:03

And this chapter was really tough for me to get through, but I do think that the whole

00:52:10

idea of mindfulness meditation is really powerful.

00:52:13

And that's really what he's talking about here in terms of the benefits from this, where

00:52:18

mindfulness meditation, he says meditation and he ties it to Buddhism.

00:52:21

But I've seen the research report.

00:52:23

It's mindfulness meditation that reduces pain and teaches you that it's temporary.

00:52:28

It's not a Buddhist teaching.

00:52:30

It's a mindfulness meditation practice that causes that.

00:52:34

And I agree with the anti-precrastination advice, which is typically to get you to feel

00:52:39

better about acting and how feeling like acting and acting are two very different things.

00:52:45

Big point being that you don't need to wait until you feel like it or to actually do something.

00:52:50

Professionals just do the work.

00:52:52

Completely agree with all of that.

00:52:54

Just wish it wasn't attached to an Eastern religion.

00:52:56

I feel like that's going to alienate a bunch of people.

00:52:59

Sure.

00:53:00

One thing I want to point out about that is that there is a thing where people who have

00:53:07

Lyme disease, it's pretty common if you're able to get past Lyme disease to pick up

00:53:12

a mold infection, which is exactly what I did.

00:53:15

And I didn't realize we were going to have like a health podcaster.

00:53:20

With that, generally what happens is one of two things.

00:53:24

When you come out of Lyme disease, you have a tendency to become aware of the things you

00:53:29

should avoid from foods and smells, scents, that sort of thing.

00:53:36

You learn what you shouldn't be around and things that can cause issues or flare-ups

00:53:42

during the process of healing.

00:53:45

When you come into the mold infection world, it's very easy.

00:53:49

The most common thing that people do is immediately search their house for mold, assume that they

00:53:53

have a mold infection in the house, try to clean it, move, they do all kinds of things

00:53:57

and try in an attempt to remediate that and prevent the mold from existing in their house.

00:54:03

When most people have learned how to deal with it and synthesize that and deal with

00:54:07

the, like your body can deal with that mold, if you have a mold infection, your brain tells

00:54:12

you you need to avoid it.

00:54:13

When that's actually probably the last thing you should be doing because it's like the

00:54:18

whole peanut allergy concept, the more you keep people away from it, the more likely

00:54:21

they are to get the allergy.

00:54:23

They're learning now if you slowly introduce it back, they can take people who are deathly

00:54:29

allergic to peanuts and help them become tolerable of them.

00:54:34

They may not be able to eat them constantly like everyone else, but at least won't kill

00:54:38

them.

00:54:39

It's the same thing.

00:54:40

I bring this up because this is a thing that can become so bad that a lot, I shouldn't

00:54:47

say a lot, some people develop what's called multiple chemical sensitivity syndrome, MCA

00:54:53

and a primary way I've seen people fight that is with something called DNRS, dynamic neural

00:54:59

retraining system.

00:55:00

I'll explain that here in a second, but it's something that I kind of have used to beat

00:55:05

the mold process.

00:55:07

All of this is brought up because it all comes down to the way you think about things

00:55:12

when you are exposed to them, which is a lot of what we're talking about with stoicism

00:55:15

and Buddhism here.

00:55:17

With DNRS, what you're doing is when you are exposed to things like say new paint, you

00:55:25

teach yourself to think about it as it's fine.

00:55:28

It's not something that's going to hurt me.

00:55:30

As opposed to when you smell that immediately trying to get out of there because you're afraid

00:55:35

it's going to cause a reaction, each of those responses is valid.

00:55:40

One will help you learn to deal and process those things.

00:55:45

The other, the latter of those two will end up causing you to get worse over time so much

00:55:51

so that some people actually have to become homeless and live on boats because they can't

00:55:54

be around anything in the air in modern society.

00:55:59

You don't want to go down that road.

00:56:00

All of that comes down to the way you think about things and the way you react to the

00:56:06

surroundings that you're in.

00:56:07

I have of course studied this significantly because I feel like this is part of my healing

00:56:12

process.

00:56:13

But it could have very easily gone the other way.

00:56:16

Am I saying that Buddhism is exactly the answer you should go through?

00:56:22

Absolutely not.

00:56:23

I don't even think of mindfulness meditation as the answer to that.

00:56:26

I think that's just one piece of the toolkit.

00:56:29

But I'll stop rambling now.

00:56:31

I feel like all of this can be extremely beneficial if you come at it from the right

00:56:36

view.

00:56:37

Yes, absolutely.

00:56:39

But you do have to come at it from the right view and you do have to tease out the good

00:56:44

stuff and spit out the sticks, which is really true about every single book that we read.

00:56:49

Yep.

00:56:50

It's typical.

00:56:51

Okay, can we say no to goals?

00:56:54

I want to say no to goals.

00:56:56

Let's move on.

00:56:57

Yes, just say no.

00:56:58

Yeah, there's all a whole section in here about how goals are a bad thing.

00:57:04

And I have to say, I was excited about this part.

00:57:07

I feel like you were probably excited about this part.

00:57:10

Indeed.

00:57:12

This section starts with a story about the people who are trying to climb Mount Everest

00:57:18

and there is a bunch of them that are climbing it at the same time.

00:57:21

And they're all so obsessed with their goal that they all know that they have to reach

00:57:26

a certain point by a certain time.

00:57:29

Otherwise they have to turn around or they're going to die.

00:57:32

And they get so obsessed with reaching the summit that they climb and they don't get there

00:57:35

by the time.

00:57:36

It's so close that they just keep going and they're watching this from afar and every

00:57:41

single person is like, what are they doing?

00:57:43

And sure enough, they all die because they're up there too late and they lose their way

00:57:47

at night and they get stuck in a blizzard and then they die.

00:57:52

This I feel like is a little bit sensational when it comes to setting goals because what

00:57:59

it's saying is that when you see the summit, your attempts to break the rules agree with

00:58:03

that and on a good day, you get away with it, but on a bad day, you die.

00:58:07

I think I'm most of them on a bad day.

00:58:11

You're not going to die, but I understand the message here that you get so engrossed

00:58:16

with accomplishing the goal that you don't recognize the harm that it's doing.

00:58:20

Yes.

00:58:21

I don't like goals.

00:58:23

I've learned that whenever I set goals, it becomes the thing I don't achieve.

00:58:28

And you know, again, I set a goal at one point to see if I could beat Lyme disease by a

00:58:32

certain point.

00:58:33

I did that and then I blew past it.

00:58:36

That's now been about a year ago.

00:58:40

Here we are.

00:58:41

I just don't.

00:58:42

You know what?

00:58:43

We've railed on goals how many times, but I don't think that his thing is like whenever

00:58:49

you have the goal, you have a tendency to fixate on it and you'll set things aside and that

00:58:55

don't pertain to it.

00:58:56

And in the end, you end up making it harder to achieve the goal and it gets worse.

00:59:01

I don't like goals.

00:59:03

I like that he railed on him.

00:59:05

So here's the thing though.

00:59:07

You mentioned you set the goal to beat Lyme and the advice when people set goals is to

00:59:14

set smart goals, specific, measurable, all that junk.

00:59:19

You know, and then you have a specific date tied with it.

00:59:23

And I feel like it's the date being associated with it that causes a lot of the negative

00:59:29

ramifications with goals.

00:59:31

I think having the goal and having it be very detailed and knowing exactly what you're

00:59:37

supposed to do to move in the right direction, that's not a bad thing.

00:59:41

But if you set it and forget it and you have this date associated with it and the date

00:59:45

comes and goes, then yeah, you will find yourself frustrated that it didn't happen.

00:59:50

But what if you constantly adjusted the goal?

00:59:55

And if every single week you looked at the goal and you updated it with new information,

01:00:01

as you figured out that actually this direction that I was going when I set this thing isn't

01:00:05

the right thing to do anymore and now the next action is this.

01:00:08

And instead of achieving it by next week, it's going to be next year.

01:00:12

I think there would be a lot of value in taking that approach.

01:00:14

The problem with that approach is that is a ton of mental maintenance.

01:00:19

And I'm thinking about that specifically because the webinar yesterday with Sean on task management,

01:00:25

time blocking, things like that.

01:00:27

And people were asking about scheduling your tasks.

01:00:31

And I agree with that.

01:00:32

But my advice and Sean's advice too was don't even decide when you're going to do a task

01:00:36

until you decide these are the three things I'm going to do today and then you put them

01:00:39

on your calendar.

01:00:40

And people would say, well, what about all the other stuff my task managers?

01:00:43

Should I put dates and all that?

01:00:44

Absolutely not because by the end of the next day, it's all going to be wrong.

01:00:49

And I feel like that's the real issue with the goal.

01:00:51

The goal itself in the moment can probably produce a lot of good and motivation.

01:00:57

But then it's quickly out of date.

01:01:00

What do you think about about that?

01:01:02

Yes, because I have tried to do things similar to this and have even laid out.

01:01:10

Here are the things I'm going to do for the next two days.

01:01:14

Guess what?

01:01:15

It doesn't work.

01:01:16

It doesn't happen.

01:01:17

It's because by noon today is different.

01:01:23

And of course that's going to change tomorrow.

01:01:27

So it doesn't work at all.

01:01:29

It just doesn't.

01:01:30

So I am with you 100%.

01:01:33

I don't.

01:01:34

I mean, I'm cool with setting dates on specific things, like taking out the trash, like something

01:01:41

along those lines I'm cool with.

01:01:43

You know, maybe you have a task that can only be done on a certain day.

01:01:46

Like I'm cool with that.

01:01:48

But when it comes to trying to lay out like a week ahead of time and here are the things

01:01:52

I'm going to work on this week, even if I'm left in my own devices and working on my

01:01:56

own things, that doesn't work.

01:01:58

Yeah.

01:01:59

Because I'm one of these idea people and I just come up with things all the time and

01:02:03

it's like, oh, let's go try that.

01:02:04

And you know, oh, well, no, that's a bad idea.

01:02:06

I shouldn't be doing that one anymore.

01:02:07

So that changes the whole week.

01:02:10

It just doesn't work.

01:02:11

It doesn't.

01:02:12

Maybe that's just me.

01:02:13

It doesn't sound like it's just me.

01:02:14

I don't like doing it.

01:02:15

Can I stop doing it?

01:02:16

I'm going to stop doing it.

01:02:17

Yeah.

01:02:18

Well, see, I think the reason that people set goals, he says, is that they're attracted

01:02:23

to goals because they dislike uncertainty.

01:02:25

And I totally understand that I dislike uncertainty too.

01:02:28

I wish I knew exactly when life was going to return to normal, but I don't and it drives

01:02:33

me nuts.

01:02:34

So as I was, as I've been thinking about the topic of time blocking a lot lately, I'm

01:02:40

realizing that I can apply certainty to a certain degree to my day.

01:02:47

Again, that plan is going to be blown up.

01:02:49

I know that.

01:02:50

So it's not worth trying to plan more than one day in advance, but planning one day in

01:02:54

advance, that does give me enough certainty and intentionality that even my overactive

01:02:59

brain can focus on what it should be doing and get to work.

01:03:03

When I don't time block, that's when I get distracted and I get nervous.

01:03:09

And so in one sense, time blocking is setting a goal for how you're going to go through

01:03:14

your day.

01:03:15

It's just a very small chunk of time.

01:03:17

And I feel like that works for me.

01:03:20

But when you project way out, that's when things are going to go off the rails and they're

01:03:24

probably going to go off the rails spectacularly.

01:03:27

There's a story in here about the person who was training for a marathon.

01:03:30

They ran the marathon.

01:03:31

They put themselves, had to stay at home for several weeks.

01:03:34

I did that exact same thing.

01:03:36

Nice.

01:03:37

First time I ran my half marathon, I set the goal to run the half marathon.

01:03:42

And I even when I was doing the training was kind of bragging about the fact that like

01:03:45

I hated running and this was the ultimate test of mind over matter for me.

01:03:49

If I can do this, I can do anything.

01:03:51

I overtrained my patella tendon slipped off of my kneecap the week before the race.

01:03:57

I ran the race anyways, finished it and I remember crossing the finish line.

01:04:02

I knew that I'd hurt my knee.

01:04:04

I didn't think it was something super major like I'd torn anything, but I was in pain.

01:04:08

And I remember crossing the finish line, getting the medal, taking the picture and thinking

01:04:13

to myself, now what?

01:04:17

I accomplished my goal.

01:04:19

Now what do I do?

01:04:20

And it's like, oh, I hurt my knee.

01:04:23

This is going to affect me for the next several weeks.

01:04:25

I did.

01:04:26

I took like six weeks off and then didn't get any better.

01:04:29

So I had to do physical therapy.

01:04:30

That lasted, I think, another six weeks.

01:04:33

Then I started running again and I up my distance too fast, had to deal with plantar

01:04:37

fasciitis and again, had it take like six weeks off.

01:04:41

And then so I'd basically start from scratch when I started running again.

01:04:46

And that was about the time that I started reading atomic habits.

01:04:51

And the identity based habits clicked with me and I realized that I'd set this goal to

01:04:55

run this half marathon.

01:04:57

That was the wrong approach.

01:04:58

I needed to take the James Clear approach and instead identify myself as a runner.

01:05:03

The moment that I did that, it was a lot more fun when I would go for my runs.

01:05:07

It was not training in order to accomplish a goal.

01:05:10

It was doing something that I enjoyed because it was part of who I was.

01:05:15

And so that is the thing that I think goals are dangerous.

01:05:19

But again, if you take away the date, if I don't have to run a half marathon by a certain

01:05:23

time or a certain day, then maybe that changes how I approach that practice.

01:05:30

I don't know.

01:05:31

Maybe I never would have done it in the first place.

01:05:32

I'm not sure.

01:05:33

But I do think that you can do these things.

01:05:37

You can have these goals.

01:05:38

You just have to frame them the right way.

01:05:40

And unfortunately, the way that many people are trained to set their goals, that kind

01:05:45

of sets them up for failure.

01:05:46

Which is exactly what you should embrace.

01:05:48

Oh, nicely done.

01:05:50

Nicely done.

01:05:52

Nailed it.

01:05:53

Nailed it.

01:05:55

Next topic is embrace failure.

01:05:57

So and again, this is another thing we've talked about in the past.

01:06:01

Like don't be afraid to make mistakes.

01:06:04

And he starts this whole chapter off with a story about a museum.

01:06:08

I'm drawing a blank on the name of it now.

01:06:11

GFK, something like that.

01:06:13

I forget what it stands for.

01:06:15

But it's a museum of failed products, which sounded fascinating to me.

01:06:20

And I really wanted to go through it.

01:06:22

Yep.

01:06:23

Which is why corporate executives pay money to go through it.

01:06:25

Because they want to see what doesn't work and why.

01:06:30

So I was intrigued by that.

01:06:32

But at the same time, like I have a long list of my own failures.

01:06:36

I shouldn't say I have a list.

01:06:38

I know I have a lot of failures.

01:06:40

I haven't actually listed them though.

01:06:42

Maybe I should.

01:06:43

I don't want to do that.

01:06:45

Start a museum.

01:06:46

I know, right?

01:06:47

A museum.

01:06:48

Joe's failures.

01:06:49

And we've got analog Joe and now we have failed Joe.

01:06:53

So this is a thing that I don't want to do.

01:06:55

I'm not planning to do, but it would be interesting to see like of the things I've tried to do

01:07:00

in the past, the things I've failed at and just examine them.

01:07:04

What worked?

01:07:05

What didn't work?

01:07:06

I have a tendency to like, oh, that didn't work.

01:07:07

You know, cast it aside and move on.

01:07:08

And then not spend much time with it.

01:07:10

That's the opposite of what he's proposing here.

01:07:12

Yep.

01:07:13

So if you're embracing it, become aware of it.

01:07:16

Learn from it and move on.

01:07:17

There you go.

01:07:18

Yeah.

01:07:19

So this is where he talks about Carol Dwecken, her research and the point that he's making

01:07:24

in this chapter, the subtitle of this chapter is the case for embracing your errors.

01:07:32

And it very easily, I think, can get to the point where you are relishing those failures.

01:07:40

And I don't think that's healthy.

01:07:43

So he mentions Carol Dweck, the fixed theory versus the incremental theory or fixed mindset

01:07:47

versus growth mindset.

01:07:49

And having read mindset, I would argue that Carol Dweck's approach would not be try to

01:07:58

fail and then celebrate that you failed.

01:08:00

But when you fail, ask yourself why and recognize that you're able to try something else and

01:08:06

figure out a way that works.

01:08:08

If all you're doing is searching for how can I fail next, I don't necessarily think that

01:08:14

that leads to eventual success.

01:08:17

I think there's a difference there.

01:08:19

Do you agree?

01:08:20

Yeah.

01:08:21

I think so.

01:08:22

I mean, it's not guaranteed.

01:08:23

I think you're at least, you have to be willing to at least try.

01:08:25

I think that would be the point.

01:08:26

Yeah.

01:08:27

You have to be willing to try.

01:08:29

You have to give it your best shot and you have to believe that what you're trying could

01:08:32

possibly succeed.

01:08:35

What if you were actually successful?

01:08:38

I think that's a key part to mindset.

01:08:42

But I don't think that comes across in the two pages that he devotes to this.

01:08:46

And I feel like it's kind of tacked on as growth mindset is embracing your errors.

01:08:53

Not necessarily.

01:08:54

It's recognizing that the error occurred and figuring out what you can learn from this,

01:08:59

but it's not building a monument to that error and staying there forever.

01:09:05

I think that's an important difference.

01:09:08

It's worth calling out here because I kind of get the and maybe this is just sensationalized

01:09:13

because this is what he's trying to do by attacking the cult of optimism is to just rail

01:09:20

against all this stuff that other people are.

01:09:23

But like the traditional way that people are doing this and to provide like a very contradictory

01:09:29

approach to this, like maybe he's trying to be provocative with this stuff and he takes

01:09:34

it further than he would in conversation over coffee or something like that.

01:09:39

But I think that you got to recognize that you made a mistake.

01:09:44

Yes, but absolutely not do you build a any sort of monument to those those failures.

01:09:51

You recognize that this thing happened and this is the path to go from here.

01:09:56

Like this is the path forward, but then you leave.

01:10:00

You don't stay there.

01:10:01

And I think there is a temptation for a lot of people to stay there because they want

01:10:05

to be able to look back at that and say, check out this badge of honor, check out all these

01:10:09

things that I failed.

01:10:11

You know, the common quote Einstein or Edison had 10,000 steps to the light bulb, 9,999

01:10:19

things that didn't work.

01:10:21

But do you think he had a catalog of all of those items that he was like taking around

01:10:27

to parties and being like, Hey, everybody check this out.

01:10:29

Check out all these failures.

01:10:30

Like absolutely not.

01:10:32

And I feel like, especially with the internet connected age that we live in, that can be

01:10:37

the other extreme of this.

01:10:39

I don't think that's healthy.

01:10:42

And maybe I'm making too big a deal out of this, but his whole point here is that you

01:10:47

don't need to fear this failure.

01:10:49

You need to, you need to embrace this.

01:10:52

It's going to be everywhere.

01:10:53

90% of products fail and you need to be willing to persevere in the midst of those setbacks.

01:10:59

You need to be possessed enough charisma to convince other people to follow you.

01:11:02

You know, that's he talks about those are the characteristics of successful entrepreneurs.

01:11:07

They're also the characteristics of unsuccessful entrepreneurs, but that doesn't mean that

01:11:10

they're bad.

01:11:12

And that's where like the survivor bias uses this as a thing to say like, the goals are

01:11:17

bad.

01:11:19

This I thought was interesting on the heels of the goals chapter.

01:11:22

I thought of this right away because I've been thinking about this.

01:11:24

I think even shared it on bookworm, how people interview sports teams that win the title.

01:11:31

And there's this bias towards goals because they say, yeah, man, at the beginning of the

01:11:36

year, we set a goal to win the Super Bowl and we worked hard every single day and we

01:11:40

won.

01:11:41

Well, what about the other 29 teams or in college, hundreds of other teams that had

01:11:45

the exact same goal that didn't achieve it?

01:11:49

You know, that doesn't mean that setting the goal was the thing that got them there,

01:11:54

but it also doesn't mean that setting the goal was a bad thing.

01:11:57

There's a difference between correlation and causation there.

01:12:00

Yes, 100% with you.

01:12:05

Good job, Mike.

01:12:06

Anything else you want to say about failure?

01:12:10

I can't say I've got anything else.

01:12:11

I want to talk about death.

01:12:13

All right.

01:12:14

Talk about the ultimate failure.

01:12:18

One of the last main chapters is discussing death and how we have a tendency to talk about

01:12:25

it quite a bit, but then we don't really think about it and we try to ignore it.

01:12:30

What I mean by that is we have a bunch of articles and people talk about things to do

01:12:35

before you die or this is my bucket list.

01:12:39

That's a bucket item.

01:12:40

We talk about that sort of thing, but do you actually stop long enough to think through

01:12:46

death and the end of your life?

01:12:49

It's something we just don't like to think about.

01:12:52

I would imagine that given that Mike and I are Christians, we probably think about it

01:12:59

more than normal.

01:13:02

Given society and our culture, I would imagine it's on your mind and my mind more than most

01:13:08

people.

01:13:10

I think that's fine.

01:13:12

I know as someone who runs sound for funerals on a regular basis, at least not lately, that's

01:13:20

maybe a bit of a positive with coronavirus.

01:13:23

But whenever I'm running sound for funerals, I'm around that a lot and it's something that

01:13:29

I'm forced to grapple with.

01:13:32

It's not a simple task to run the event of a funeral for a mom who passed away, who has

01:13:41

four kids that are under 10 years old.

01:13:44

That's not easy.

01:13:45

It's not easy to run sound or help with the tech side of the funeral of a seven-year-old

01:13:50

girl who has loving parents and a family who now miss her and she was the baby of the

01:13:55

family.

01:13:56

That's hard.

01:13:57

That's not simple.

01:13:59

It's something that will cause you to go home and cry for hours sometimes.

01:14:04

I feel like I've been forced to embrace and think about death quite a bit.

01:14:09

I get that with him and his in this book, he just wants it to be something that is on

01:14:15

your mind.

01:14:16

At least that was my perspective on it.

01:14:18

He just wants you to be willing to think through death not as something that should

01:14:23

be avoided or not discussed, but as something to come to grips with because it's the one

01:14:28

thing that unifies all of us that we can't all escape.

01:14:32

We will all die at some point.

01:14:34

So that's something that you have to come to grips with and be okay thinking about and

01:14:39

discussing.

01:14:40

Thus, discussing it.

01:14:41

See, I've done my part, Mike.

01:14:43

I'm done.

01:14:44

I can go home now.

01:14:46

This is the thing that when I read this chapter, instantly thought of the news that is surrounding

01:14:53

the coronavirus and the statistic that every news source everywhere is tracking is how

01:15:00

many people have gotten it and how many people have died.

01:15:03

And that is causing a lot of people to be very negative and to be very fearful.

01:15:11

When he was talking about mortality, celients, not people typically will actively work to

01:15:16

avoid thinking about death.

01:15:19

I totally get it.

01:15:21

For a lot of people, they're being forced to do that now and they don't like it.

01:15:27

For you and I specifically, yeah, you're right.

01:15:29

This is something that we probably think about more often than I think that right now that

01:15:34

is having positive effects.

01:15:36

So death, where is your victory?

01:15:37

Oh, death, where is your sting?

01:15:39

Right?

01:15:40

Because we die.

01:15:41

Oh, well, we go on to the next thing.

01:15:45

And that's not saying we're right.

01:15:47

You're wrong, whatever, but it's just a thought process that's the way we're wired internally

01:15:55

and it does help keep you more stable.

01:16:00

That was one observation I had just regarding this chapter and then where we find ourselves.

01:16:05

There is a little bit of the in this chapter, he does talk about the Mexican day of the

01:16:09

dead and like the parades and things that they would do for this.

01:16:14

Have you ever seen anything like this?

01:16:16

Yes, I have been aware of this for a few years now, but yeah.

01:16:20

Okay, well, I was at the Sean West Conference in Austin, Texas on the Mexican day of the

01:16:29

dead and there is a big Mexican population in Austin, Texas and they had the parade and

01:16:37

it went right past the conference venue while Sean was delivering the keynote.

01:16:43

Nice.

01:16:45

So I'm like, obviously you hear all this stuff.

01:16:48

So you go peek outside and people are walking through the streets with like the skeletons

01:16:52

on a string.

01:16:53

It's just weird.

01:16:54

Well, it's weird to me.

01:16:56

I shouldn't say it's weird because I'm sure like culturally, you know, we're just not

01:17:00

not used to that.

01:17:01

I thought when it happened that this is bizarre, I don't know why anybody would really want

01:17:07

to do this.

01:17:08

I do think that that is personally kind of maybe taking it a little too far.

01:17:12

I think death is worth embracing as a fact of life.

01:17:15

Don't deny that it's going to happen.

01:17:17

Now on the other side of this, are you familiar with Dan Sullivan?

01:17:20

strategic coach?

01:17:21

I know his name.

01:17:23

I couldn't tell you much about him though.

01:17:25

He's the guy who did the unique ability thing that I had sent you.

01:17:28

And so I like a lot of Dan Sullivan stuff.

01:17:32

However, he has a book which I will send you the link to.

01:17:41

Okay.

01:17:42

Actually, I'll put this in the live chat.

01:17:45

Yeah, so Dan Sullivan has this thing that he does.

01:17:49

It's called the lifetime extender.

01:17:50

It's basically a worksheet.

01:17:52

And this is an ebook called my plan for living to 156.

01:17:58

And the description says you have a number we all do once your brain locks onto your

01:18:01

imagined lifespan, your body accepts it as fact.

01:18:05

I think this is ridiculous.

01:18:08

So this is the other thing I thought of as I was going through this chapter is like the

01:18:11

exact opposite where people are projecting that they're going to live forever or even

01:18:18

further longer than anybody ever has.

01:18:22

I know that this is kind of prevalent now.

01:18:25

And like I said, I think this is kind of ridiculous.

01:18:28

But I feel like this is the other end of the spectrum and the healthy approach is somewhere

01:18:34

in the middle where you recognize that someday you will die.

01:18:39

And so you're not scared of it.

01:18:41

It's going to happen.

01:18:42

You're not looking forward to it either.

01:18:44

You're not trying to make it happen.

01:18:46

But if you were to take either one of those approaches, you're going to rob from the present.

01:18:52

You're not going to be able to make the most of the time that you have.

01:18:55

And I feel like regardless of your religious belief system, that's really your goal, your

01:18:58

job, your objective is to, there's that word goal.

01:19:02

But you get what I mean.

01:19:04

Like your mission while you are here, regardless of how you choose to define it, is to make

01:19:09

the most of the time that you've got for some people that maybe, you know, touches

01:19:13

many lives as you can for some people that may mean accumulate as much as you can.

01:19:18

I think you and I would probably have issues with some approaches over others.

01:19:22

But that's ultimately what everybody's trying to do.

01:19:26

And I think recognizing that there's a beginning and there's an end to your lifespan that's

01:19:32

inherent in a healthy approach to this.

01:19:34

You know, as a way to show like how this can come about in real life and like what this

01:19:40

can lead to, I have added it to one of the journal prompts that I've added as an action

01:19:47

item is what would happen if I died today?

01:19:51

Like that's that's one of the journal prompts.

01:19:53

Now that's not a question I really want to think about daily.

01:19:57

But it's something that I have found.

01:19:58

I've been trying to use that one the last probably four or five days.

01:20:02

And it's interesting how that changes the way I interact with my kids specifically because

01:20:08

I'm a lot more grateful for the day that I have with them when I'm considering what

01:20:16

would happen if I wasn't here tomorrow because I'm grateful to have that time to read Narnia

01:20:21

to them and play hide the squish mallow.

01:20:24

That's inside joke for Mike.

01:20:26

It's still a game.

01:20:27

It's totally still a game.

01:20:30

We should do like an Instagram live for that because it's just intense.

01:20:34

All right.

01:20:35

That was a joke.

01:20:36

I'm not actually doing that.

01:20:39

I don't even know how I would do that.

01:20:41

But my point is that considering my own mortality is a good thing because it shows me that I

01:20:51

need to be grateful for what I have now.

01:20:53

Now I could.

01:20:54

And a lot of people recommend that you do this have like a gratitude journal where you're

01:21:00

writing about the things you're grateful for.

01:21:03

But I've done that in the past and I don't want to poo poo that because I think there

01:21:08

are a lot of people that find that as a great thing and it works great for them.

01:21:11

That's awesome.

01:21:12

I have found that contemplating the opposite helps me become more grateful in the last

01:21:19

four or five days.

01:21:21

That considering the worst case scenario from my own stance has led me to become more invested

01:21:31

in the people around me as much as I can.

01:21:35

Anyway, given you know, self isolation.

01:21:38

But you get my point.

01:21:40

Like this is something that I have found extremely valuable and yet difficult to recommend to

01:21:46

other people because it just is morbid to recommend.

01:21:50

Here we are.

01:21:52

It's one of those topics that's kind of socially taboo and I think maybe it shouldn't be.

01:21:58

But also I get why it is.

01:22:02

Absolutely.

01:22:03

Yep.

01:22:04

Anything else you want to cover on the book before we do action items?

01:22:09

One thing at the end he talks about practicing the mental more which literally means remember

01:22:14

that you shall die and his recommended exercise I think is pretty cool.

01:22:20

I'm a 10 year 80 years old and then answer the questions.

01:22:21

I wish I had spent more time on and I wish I had spent less time on.

01:22:26

There is a book dedicated to this specific thing which is really good.

01:22:31

I've mentioned it before 30 lessons for living.

01:22:34

I forget who wrote it.

01:22:35

But it was somebody who had interviewed thousands of people in nursing homes.

01:22:39

And if you go into a nursing home usually that's a very negative atmosphere but there's

01:22:45

always a couple people there who are just different, they're happy, they're upbeat, they

01:22:50

are making the most out of their time in this life.

01:22:53

And so those are the types of people that he interviewed and he condensed every one

01:22:57

of their answers into these basically like 30 different points but things that he heard

01:23:02

over and over and over again.

01:23:04

And I think that is a really cool idea.

01:23:06

That book was really really good.

01:23:07

It was a really entertaining and really informative read.

01:23:10

If you're interested in this topic that would be the place that I would send people to look

01:23:14

for sure.

01:23:15

All right, I have one action item from this book and I've mentioned it a few times already

01:23:21

and that's journal prompts with trying to do more journaling lately because theoretically

01:23:28

we have more time now than we did before.

01:23:31

False.

01:23:32

I have been using a couple different prompts in that, you know, the one I just mentioned

01:23:38

what would happen if I was gone after today and another is what would happen if those

01:23:45

closest to me were gone tomorrow.

01:23:47

Like it's kind of a flip on it and you tend to answer those a little bit differently but

01:23:52

you get the concept like that's what I'm trying to just try to go through that on a

01:23:57

daily basis to keep those necessarily top of mind but just aware of those on a regular

01:24:02

basis because I have found at least in my short time doing those that they are helpful

01:24:09

in making me aware of the positives when I'm also aware of the negatives which I think

01:24:15

is likely the point of the whole book Mike.

01:24:18

Could be.

01:24:19

I don't think he actually says that.

01:24:20

There's so much emphasis on the negative but it's true.

01:24:24

I agree with you completely.

01:24:27

I actually have an action item to and see it comes from chapter six where he talks about

01:24:39

we didn't really get into this but the idea of the threats and how when people watch the

01:24:46

news it kind of normalizes things that you wouldn't normally think could happen to you

01:24:52

and then you start expecting that every time you get on the subway or get on a bus that

01:24:57

the person behind you has got a bomb in their shoes.

01:25:01

You see that stuff on the news and then you project it into your own situation.

01:25:05

I think that is totally happening right now with this coronavirus stuff.

01:25:10

My action item is to stop watching the news.

01:25:14

I shouldn't say stop watching the news.

01:25:15

Stop following the news.

01:25:18

I'm not going to do it completely because I do want to know what is going on but I have

01:25:22

found myself over the last several days airing on the side of paying too much attention to

01:25:27

the news and recognizing the emotional impact that it has on me.

01:25:33

I never feel good when I'm done.

01:25:36

Limiting that to maybe in the morning and then maybe in the evening and everything else,

01:25:41

just completely avoid it because that's the thing.

01:25:45

If I check it during lunch or whatever, that's the kind of thing that can sabotage the rest

01:25:50

of my day and zap my energy and my motivation and I want to avoid that.

01:25:56

That's fair.

01:25:58

I follow the news so well that I didn't even know that the CARES Act was a thing until

01:26:03

I think two weeks after it was initially opposed and someone said, "Hey, what are you

01:26:08

going to do with your care check?"

01:26:10

I was like, "What's a care check?

01:26:12

I don't know what that is."

01:26:14

To explain it all to me.

01:26:16

Oh, I didn't know this was a thing.

01:26:18

When did this come about two weeks ago, Joe?

01:26:21

Oh, apparently I'm good at keeping up with things.

01:26:25

Who knew?

01:26:26

Yeah, and that impacted your life negatively.

01:26:30

How?

01:26:31

It didn't.

01:26:32

Exactly.

01:26:33

Oh, okay.

01:26:34

Yeah, great.

01:26:35

Awesome.

01:26:36

Now, how do I get the right data rate on my live stream feed?

01:26:39

That's what I'm focused on.

01:26:42

Yeah.

01:26:43

All right, so let's step into style and rating.

01:26:46

I will say that for the most part, he's a pretty easy author to read.

01:26:51

He's good with stories.

01:26:52

A few times I was thinking the stories didn't have anything to do with what he was making

01:26:56

a point of and sometimes I felt like he was picking out stories that were there to complicate

01:27:00

matters or explain things that he didn't seem to have a good point overall.

01:27:06

That was especially in the Buddhism section.

01:27:08

I was like, "I have no idea what you're getting at here."

01:27:11

There's also a whole section on arguing between the difference between I and me.

01:27:16

I am so lost on what you're talking about.

01:27:22

That got difficult.

01:27:23

I understood all of his stories.

01:27:24

I loved the stories, but then it seemed like whenever he tried to tie them together, it

01:27:27

got a little difficult to follow.

01:27:30

I will say, overall, I'm glad to have read this.

01:27:35

I feel like this is...

01:27:37

I don't want to say it's a breath of fresh air.

01:27:38

It's not, but it's interesting to read something that's the opposite of what we normally would

01:27:45

read.

01:27:46

It's like, "You know, great thoughts."

01:27:47

It's a gust of contrary wind.

01:27:49

Sick goals.

01:27:50

He comes and is like, "No, don't do that."

01:27:54

It's like, "Okay, great.

01:27:55

Awesome.

01:27:56

It's good to get somebody on the other side of the fence, I think."

01:28:00

It does bring you down a little bit in that sense.

01:28:04

I think you've said a few times, Mike, that he sensationalized things.

01:28:10

I haven't figured out if I'm glad he did that or if I'm upset that he did that because

01:28:14

I feel like by him sensationalizing it, it gets the point across a little better.

01:28:20

You can get the sense of this is the point he's trying to make in each step, but at the

01:28:26

same time, I feel like it's exaggerated to the point of almost unbelievable.

01:28:32

I don't know if I should follow him or argue with him.

01:28:36

Maybe that's what he wants.

01:28:37

Malcolm Gladwell tends to do that.

01:28:39

I don't know if that's the path that he's going down here, but I can say I'm grateful

01:28:46

to have read this.

01:28:47

I don't know if I'm going to recommend this one.

01:28:49

I think it would have to be in very specific scenarios if I would say, "You should read

01:28:56

this," but that means I have to figure out how to read this.

01:29:02

I'm going to put it at 3.5.

01:29:07

That's where I'm going to put it.

01:29:08

I feel like there are some good tidbits out of here.

01:29:10

Obviously, I've got some action items out of it.

01:29:13

It's good to have gone through, but I have so many things I feel like I'm arguing with

01:29:18

that I just don't think it would be as helpful unless you have a lot of the history in the

01:29:24

books that we have read.

01:29:26

If you've read as many books as we have in the same genre, I feel like this would be

01:29:29

a good one just as something different.

01:29:34

It's not contributing to the echo chamber, but if you're still on the edge of getting

01:29:41

into reading more, I would stay away from this.

01:29:44

I don't think it would be as helpful.

01:29:46

That's just my opinion.

01:29:47

What are your thoughts, Mike?

01:29:49

I agree with you, and I think it's a bit of a shame because there is definitely room for

01:29:57

a book that says you don't have to go all Gary Vee and not to go as far the other way

01:30:06

as he did.

01:30:07

It's kind of like, here's what everybody's saying.

01:30:10

There's this uneasy feeling that I get when I follow these people.

01:30:15

I am just going to come up with the biggest sensationalist anti-message I can.

01:30:23

I'm thinking right now of New York Times article recently, which I agree with this, but the

01:30:29

reason that it's popular is because of the headline I guarantee you, it's like, "Stop

01:30:33

trying to be productive during the coronavirus."

01:30:36

The basic point is that you're not going to be as effective as you normally are because

01:30:40

we're all trying to figure out a new normal.

01:30:43

I agree with that, but that's not as enticing as, "Hey, productivity sucks."

01:30:50

It's not going to get as many clicks.

01:30:53

I feel like that's the approach that he took with this book.

01:30:56

I feel like that's a bit of a shame because I don't agree 100% with Gary Vee, Tony Robbins,

01:31:04

all those types of people.

01:31:05

I definitely don't agree 100% with the message in this book, but because he's so far the

01:31:11

other way, I feel like I have to pick one side of the fence that I lean more towards,

01:31:15

and I find myself going back to the stuff that I despised at the beginning with this

01:31:19

description of the Tony Robbins event.

01:31:21

And saying, "Oh, maybe there's elements of that which are good," because there are elements

01:31:25

of that that are good.

01:31:26

There's elements of this that are good too, but by taking such a strong sensational approach,

01:31:30

I feel like he's forcing you to pick a camp to be in.

01:31:34

I think there's definitely room in the middle for actually this is the way to do this, where

01:31:40

you sit in the middle and you take pieces of this and pieces of that and you combine

01:31:45

it, that's not going to probably sell as many copies.

01:31:48

So I get why, that's why you didn't take that approach.

01:31:53

But yeah, I agree with you that this isn't the type of thing that you would recommend,

01:31:58

because it's so far the other way that I would be worried if I recommended this to somebody

01:32:02

and they read it, they'd be like, "Oh, well, you agree with all of this stoicism stuff

01:32:07

and all of this thinking about death stuff?"

01:32:10

Some of it, yeah, but not the majority of it, not the way that he presents it, and I'm

01:32:15

not going to be there to defend myself.

01:32:18

I'm not going to tell you that, "Hey, you should read this."

01:32:23

That being said, there is some good stuff in here, picked out some good stuff.

01:32:27

I think there's elements of truth to a lot of this stuff, but you do have to dig in order

01:32:31

to get them.

01:32:33

His original point about how you try to find a system, you try to read a book, and it solves

01:32:39

all your problems, this isn't going to solve all your problems either.

01:32:42

This did the opposite of what it promised to do in the first chapter, I think, because

01:32:48

he was basically saying that this is what you've been trying, it's not going to work,

01:32:51

so you've got to go the other way.

01:32:52

I feel like I went the other way about reading this book, and I'm like, "Ugh, this just feels

01:32:56

weird.

01:32:57

I don't want to stay here either."

01:32:59

I'm going to put it at 3.0, because I do think, like I said, there's some good stuff

01:33:04

here.

01:33:05

I feel like any one of these chapters could have been an entire book, and there are entire

01:33:08

books written on this stuff.

01:33:11

I feel like reading this and thinking you understand stoicism, for example, is dangerous.

01:33:18

Same thing with Buddhism and goal setting and the multimori and any of these things.

01:33:25

I really find myself, the real issue I have with this book, I think, is just the fact that

01:33:30

it tries to combine a whole bunch of things, and it doesn't do it in a very fair way, I

01:33:37

think.

01:33:39

If you want a surface-level book that is contrary to all of the cult of optimism stuff, then

01:33:46

it's not a bad read.

01:33:48

All right.

01:33:49

You should know that the next book on the list actually have bought twice now.

01:33:54

Really?

01:33:55

Yeah, it was not intentional either.

01:33:57

All right.

01:33:59

You're welcome, writer Carol.

01:34:03

The next book is The Bullet Journal Method by writer Carol, who he's got a fast-ending

01:34:08

story.

01:34:09

He made the rounds and the podcasts when this was released.

01:34:12

He developed the Bullet Journal Method as a response to ADD, ADHD.

01:34:16

I forget specifically, but basically he was trying to find something that would work for

01:34:20

him.

01:34:21

He created this analog system that has kind of blown up now, and so we are going to be

01:34:26

talking about bullet journaling.

01:34:28

I'm really excited about this.

01:34:29

I find myself doing more and more with my paper and pen, especially now that I'm home

01:34:34

all the time, that just feels really good to slow down and do all my time blocking that

01:34:38

way.

01:34:40

I think this is going to be a fun one.

01:34:42

It warms my heart that you're excited about using pen and paper, Mike.

01:34:48

The story here is that I purchased this book and it was delivered.

01:34:57

The package just didn't seem right.

01:35:01

When I opened it, I discovered none other than little red-writing hood inside this package.

01:35:11

Not the same at all.

01:35:12

The distributor had sent me the wrong book.

01:35:14

It's not exactly the same.

01:35:16

It differs in chapter two.

01:35:20

It wasn't what I was after.

01:35:21

I contacted them.

01:35:22

They refunded me.

01:35:23

They told me it's not worth sending back.

01:35:24

The big bad wolf is Google.

01:35:25

I know, totally.

01:35:26

They told me it wasn't worth sending back.

01:35:28

The book was 75 cents or something.

01:35:31

It's not even worth shipping.

01:35:33

They keep it.

01:35:34

They refunded me.

01:35:36

I bought the book again and I picked it up.

01:35:40

I was ready to read it about three days ago.

01:35:42

I received it today.

01:35:45

I'm excited to go through it because I have been on the edge of bullet journaling for

01:35:49

a while.

01:35:50

My ADD has gotten a lot worse since all of my health stuff has gone on, which is weird

01:35:56

and apparently normal.

01:35:58

I don't know.

01:35:59

That's weird.

01:36:00

I learned that when you're starting to come off of a mold infection, like whenever you

01:36:04

treat that, if you have ADD, it can get worse.

01:36:06

It's so weird to me.

01:36:08

But anyway, I have to work through that.

01:36:12

All that to say, I just went on a rabbit trail.

01:36:14

The bullet journal method is next.

01:36:16

Following that, we have Nudge by Richard Teller.

01:36:19

Teller?

01:36:20

I don't know how I say it.

01:36:22

I'm going to say Teller.

01:36:23

I like Teller.

01:36:24

All right.

01:36:25

I forget the tagline on it.

01:36:26

I have totally spaced on what it's about, but Nudge is next.

01:36:29

All right.

01:36:30

And then the other one that we added after that, because it was a gapbook that I am just

01:36:34

having trouble reading, is Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.

01:36:39

So if you want to stock up in preparation for the next several episodes, those are the

01:36:43

next three books that we will be covering.

01:36:45

Awesome.

01:36:46

Got a gapbook this time?

01:36:47

No gapbooks.

01:36:48

You don't.

01:36:49

I do.

01:36:50

Really?

01:36:51

Okay.

01:36:52

I do.

01:36:53

I don't know how I did, but I did.

01:36:54

Well, I know how I did.

01:36:55

This the, I got to get it out here.

01:36:57

It's an illustrated book of bad arguments.

01:37:02

That's okay.

01:37:04

It's really entertaining.

01:37:05

It talks through, it sounds silly, but it talks through things like a straw man argument,

01:37:11

like that type of thing.

01:37:13

What is that and how do people use it?

01:37:16

Like whenever people are discussing something and making a point or arguing something, they

01:37:21

tend to force you to choose a camp one side or the other when there is a middle road,

01:37:27

like that sort of thing.

01:37:28

That's a bad argument in their definition.

01:37:31

It's fascinating.

01:37:32

Really interesting to go through.

01:37:34

I would recommend that one.

01:37:36

It's short.

01:37:37

There you go.

01:37:38

All right.

01:37:39

I have a gapbook.

01:37:40

Woo hoo.

01:37:41

Nice job.

01:37:42

Yes.

01:37:43

Absolutely.

01:37:44

Now, that all said, something we would absolutely love and I know a few people are doing it

01:37:49

now is if you would join us live for these shows, everybody's doing live stuff right

01:37:53

now.

01:37:54

If you want to become a member so that you can listen to these live and engage with

01:37:57

us on the chat while we're doing this, sometimes we alter things, what we're talking about,

01:38:02

depending on what people are saying in the chat box.

01:38:04

But if you want to do that, go to bookworm.fm/membership and you can sign up.

01:38:09

It's a $5 a month membership.

01:38:11

You get access to the private members area of the forums.

01:38:15

You can listen to us live.

01:38:16

You get a special bookworm wallpaper.

01:38:19

You get access to all of Mike's My Node PDFs.

01:38:23

You get access to some really cool stuff.

01:38:25

If you haven't done that already, you can join us bookworm.fm/membership.

01:38:30

All right.

01:38:31

Thanks, everybody, for listening.

01:38:34

Thanks to the Premium Club members for supporting the show.

01:38:37

If you're reading along, pick up the bullet journal method by writer Carol and we'll talk

01:38:41

to you in a couple of weeks.