117: Think Again by Adam Grant

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1. 00:00:00 Have you ever gotten into time tracking, Joe?
2. 00:00:02 I tried it multiple times and it seems like every time I try it, bad things happen and Joe stops.
3. 00:00:11 So you just avoid it now so you don't cause something else bad to happen.
4. 00:00:17 I do.
5. 00:00:18 I do.
6. 00:00:19 Correct.
7. 00:00:20 Yeah.
8. 00:00:21 Usually I end up, oh, how's this work?
9. 00:00:24 Assuming you're talking about tracking where your time goes in the past, not like time blocking.
10. 00:00:29 For the future, right?
11. 00:00:30 Correct.
12. 00:00:31 So time blocking or time tracking.
13. 00:00:34 The data nerd in me cannot handle it if that data is not perfect and captured very cleanly.
14. 00:00:43 And my experiences with time tracking are that the lines between activities are so fuzzy that it's really hard to get good data and I get mad with the data.
15. 00:00:54 And then I just like, fine, I'm not collecting this anymore.
16. 00:00:56 That's my experience with time tracking.
17. 00:00:58 Are you going to tell me I'm wrong?
18. 00:01:01 No, that's completely fair.
19. 00:01:02 I don't have the connection to bad events happening because I've tracked my time, but also it's left a bad taste in my mouth because I've tried to do it manually in the past and it hasn't worked.
20. 00:01:12 Sure.
21. 00:01:13 But I have to admit that I have been using timing to automatically track my time for quite a while on my Mac.
22. 00:01:21 So I've always had that running as like a backup.
23. 00:01:23 And the last six months, I've really gotten into manual time tracking with Timerie for iOS.
24. 00:01:27 I've actually got two screens on my iPhone, one, which has a couple of widgets and the intentional apps.
25. 00:01:32 I want to see when I first open it.
26. 00:01:34 And then the other screen is all Timerie widgets.
27. 00:01:38 It shows me the time on task, the time spent by Dave sort of by project.
28. 00:01:42 And then time spent for the week sorted by tag and then a bunch of save timers, which has been really cool.
29. 00:01:49 I selfishly bring this up because as we record this, I made a thing.
30. 00:01:54 Which is a combination of both the time tracking and the time blocking.
31. 00:01:59 So the time blocking course we launched a while back.
32. 00:02:01 I made a complimentary like bookend type course for time tracking for people like past me who had a negative reaction to it.
33. 00:02:11 Didn't really know where to start.
34. 00:02:12 And I think it's it's helpful if you understand a few key concepts before you go into it.
35. 00:02:17 I think a lot of people make it more complicated than it needs to be.
36. 00:02:22 And maybe, you know, I thought maybe that was your reaction with it.
37. 00:02:25 It sounds like maybe there's something deeper.
38. 00:02:27 Yeah, in my case, it's time tracking.
39. 00:02:30 It's got a role.
40. 00:02:30 Yeah.
41. 00:02:31 So I I understand.
42. 00:02:33 Like if you don't have my aversion to unclean data is probably the way to say that.
43. 00:02:40 If you don't have that aversion and you're OK with like the lines being somewhat fuzzy and it not being like down to the minute.
44. 00:02:47 Correct.
45. 00:02:48 Like if you're OK with that.
46. 00:02:50 I feel like it's probably fine and it can be extremely helpful.
47. 00:02:54 I've listened to like on cortex gray and Mike talk about once a year about their time tracking adventures and I always listen to those and think, oh, that's really cool.
48. 00:03:03 I'm going to do and I set up what kind of like what you're talking about.
49. 00:03:05 Pull up timer.
50. 00:03:06 Let me set up all the things on the widgets.
51. 00:03:08 Let me get all these on here.
52. 00:03:09 It was going to be really nice, really cool.
53. 00:03:10 I'm going to get to see where all my time goes and like a weekend.
54. 00:03:14 I'm mad at it because it's not correct.
55. 00:03:16 So.
56. 00:03:16 So yes, if you're OK with it, I think it's great.
57. 00:03:20 Timery is the thing that really made it work for me.
58. 00:03:24 It's changed a lot and I think the widgets with iOS 14, like that's kind of a game changer in terms of the tools that are available.
59. 00:03:33 You know, it just makes it so much simpler and yeah, you're not going to get like perfect data.
60. 00:03:38 I don't really want the data to be perfect.
61. 00:03:40 I guess I don't really care if it's perfect.
62. 00:03:42 Ideally, it would be perfect.
63. 00:03:44 But what I want to know is did I spend five hours firefighting this week?
64. 00:03:50 And if so, like what system was it that was broken that caused that?
65. 00:03:53 And what can I do to fix it?
66. 00:03:56 Or Otter talks about tracking deep work time.
67. 00:03:58 I think that's kind of jokingly, but I do do that sort of thing.
68. 00:04:02 Like I check my writing time, my screen casting time.
69. 00:04:05 It's not specifically deep work, but if I'm not getting, you know, 20 hours of writing time in a week, I'm not happy with that.
70. 00:04:12 And I'm thinking about what can I do schedule wise to carve out more time to do that sort of stuff.
71. 00:04:17 I don't know, the continuation of like all the stuff bouncing around in my brain with obsidian and ideas and stuff like that.
72. 00:04:23 It isn't real simple for me where like, oh, I get inspired and then I write something.
73. 00:04:28 I'm recognizing that there is a process and really it is an equation.
74. 00:04:32 And if I put in more time into the process, like I get more and better output from it.
75. 00:04:36 And time tracking helps me intentionally start and stop those things.
76. 00:04:39 So I will not try to convince you to track your time again.
77. 00:04:44 I'm going to be a tough sell.
78. 00:04:45 I really am, but I will.
79. 00:04:47 I will try to convince everybody else that I can.
80. 00:04:50 I feel like the effort that you put into it is worth it.
81. 00:04:53 And if you're interested in the course that we put together, it's simplified time management,
82. 00:04:58 or simple time management is the name and it's those two courses and it's available at the sweet setup.com/time.
83. 00:05:07 And it is discounted during launch week, which may or may not be over by the time this would get published.
84. 00:05:13 So live listeners are getting the hookup.
85. 00:05:16 But yeah, I'm really happy with how it came out.
86. 00:05:20 I've been working on this for a while.
87. 00:05:22 So just want to tell everybody about it.
88. 00:05:25 Good job.
89. 00:05:26 Thank you.
90. 00:05:26 Time tracking.
91. 00:05:27 Go for it.
92. 00:05:28 I won't follow you.
93. 00:05:30 I will encourage people to try it 100%.
94. 00:05:34 I totally get it.
95. 00:05:35 I get mad at it.
96. 00:05:39 So I know that about myself, so I'm better off trying to schedule it ahead of time instead of keeping track of it in post.
97. 00:05:45 There's probably, I view it as like time budgeting.
98. 00:05:48 So like time blocking is the plan.
99. 00:05:50 That's the budget for I'm going to make my dollars go this far for this month.
100. 00:05:54 And then if you never look at what you actually spend, it's easy to go over that stuff, right?
101. 00:05:59 So the time tracking is how well did you stick to the plan?
102. 00:06:02 And then from that, you can gain some insights to make better plans for next time.
103. 00:06:06 But yeah, I think like Mosquito says in the chat, like I think this makes
104. 00:06:10 and maybe what he's saying is what I'm struggling with as well is like how much benefit is there to time tracking in the details?
105. 00:06:18 Like high level, it makes sense.
106. 00:06:20 But when you get down to the details, it tends to be difficult.
107. 00:06:23 And every time I've tried to go down this road, I always feel like I need to
108. 00:06:28 make it possible to take the data and do a whole bunch of stuff with it when that's the problem.
109. 00:06:35 But trying to do just great big blocks and trying to do the blanket, general area type
110. 00:06:42 time tracking to me doesn't seem to be worth it when that's probably the point that actually is worth it.
111. 00:06:48 So this is the conundrum of Joe's data brain.
112. 00:06:52 That's what this is.
113. 00:06:53 So yes, I think you should think again about time tracking Joe Bealig.
114. 00:07:00 Okay, but before we think again, we need to do a couple items of follow up here.
115. 00:07:05 Too easy.
116. 00:07:06 Too easy.
117. 00:07:06 So I had two things from last time and I failed on these.
118. 00:07:10 I have to say the first one was my story file.
119. 00:07:13 I do want to do this and I have the folder set up in Obsidian, but that's all the work I've put into it.
120. 00:07:19 Like I said, I was launching a course.
121. 00:07:20 So I didn't really have a whole lot of extra time.
122. 00:07:24 Sure.
123. 00:07:24 And I just completely dropped this one.
124. 00:07:27 The vocabulary thing, this is something I think that's going to be ongoing.
125. 00:07:31 And I've been looking for like new ways to say things.
126. 00:07:34 I've been trying to pay attention to my speech as I am talking about things.
127. 00:07:41 I noticed there are a couple phrases that I use over and over again that are descriptive,
128. 00:07:46 but I want to expand that.
129. 00:07:48 So like, I guess step one is recognizing my limited vocabulary.
130. 00:07:52 And I've kind of done that.
131. 00:07:54 Like one thing I say specifically when I get, when I try to illustrate that I feel very strongly
132. 00:08:00 about something is I'll say something along the lines of with the, I hate it with the intensity
133. 00:08:04 of a thousand sons.
134. 00:08:05 I need to find a different way to say that.
135. 00:08:07 Nice.
136. 00:08:09 So again, that one's ongoing.
137. 00:08:13 And I will try not to say that specific phrase the rest of this episode, but we will see.
138. 00:08:19 Do you ever have a phrase that you want to adopt, but it feels a little odd coming out of your mouth?
139. 00:08:24 Most of them to be honest.
140. 00:08:26 Most of them.
141. 00:08:26 Which has been my struggle with this.
142. 00:08:29 When he was finished eating, this is almost every meal.
143. 00:08:34 And I have said it, I think once, but it always feels weird coming out of my mouth.
144. 00:08:39 When I have listened to him say it, you know, when I heard him say it a lot.
145. 00:08:44 But whenever he was finished eating, if someone asked him if he wanted something else,
146. 00:08:49 like you want some more chicken, he would always say,
147. 00:08:52 no thanks. I've had a delicate sufficiency. If I had another bite, I'd be sure to bust.
148. 00:08:56 He said it all the time.
149. 00:08:58 And I've always thought, I love that. I want to adopt that.
150. 00:09:03 I've said it. I think once or maybe twice and it always, it just feels weird.
151. 00:09:06 It's a bit too long to say I'm full.
152. 00:09:08 So yes, phrases.
153. 00:09:12 Oh, all right. Shall we think again?
154. 00:09:16 Sure.
155. 00:09:17 This one's the title on this one's just too easy for that.
156. 00:09:22 I know.
157. 00:09:22 This is a great title.
158. 00:09:24 Well played, Adam Grant. This is think again by the aforementioned Adam Grant.
159. 00:09:30 We have heard of Adam Grant previously in many books.
160. 00:09:34 I think I first came upon him when he was mentioned maybe in deep work by Cal Newport
161. 00:09:41 based off of his work from his previous book, which was Originals, which we have not read.
162. 00:09:47 But this one was recommended by awful otter in the chat.
163. 00:09:52 So thank you for the recommendation.
164. 00:09:55 And I picked this one partly because I thought the topic was pretty fascinating.
165. 00:10:01 Partly because I couldn't believe we hadn't read anything by Adam Grant when he keeps coming
166. 00:10:07 up over and over again. Probably Mihaly is the other one that happens a little bit more,
167. 00:10:11 but Adam Grant is like right up there, him and Cal and probably a handful of others.
168. 00:10:17 So yeah, this is the newest book by Adam Grant and it is split into really four different parts,
169. 00:10:26 three main ones, and then a conclusion.
170. 00:10:29 Part one is individual rethinking. Part two is interpersonal rethinking. Part three is collective
171. 00:10:35 rethinking. And I did not know really what to expect with Adam Grant's style going into this.
172. 00:10:46 I want to ask you before I share mine, what was your impression of this book as you started it?
173. 00:10:53 It's a little odd. I thought it first. He has it. How do I say this? It has a little bit of different
174. 00:11:01 way of telling stories, I guess, in a good way. I wasn't expecting it, but he has kind of a way of
175. 00:11:09 telling a story and trying to get the point across within the story, like trying to do the
176. 00:11:14 dialogue about it within it at the same time. I don't know if you picked up on this, but he tries
177. 00:11:19 to weave those two things into one cohesive bank of paragraphs. And I appreciate that, but I wasn't
178. 00:11:27 expecting it. And at least it took me a little bit to adjust to that partially because it's so
179. 00:11:33 standard for people to tell a story and then unpack it. That whenever somebody starts unpacking
180. 00:11:38 it mid-story, it just seemed a little different. I kind of like it. I wish more people would do that.
181. 00:11:44 But it wasn't what I expected. Yeah. So you brought up the thing that I thought was kind of odd
182. 00:11:49 about this book because he feels like a decent storyteller, but towards the end of the book,
183. 00:11:55 I realized that at the beginning of the chapters, normally the stories I capture every single one
184. 00:12:00 of those from my Mind Node file, and there were several chapters in a row where I'm like, well,
185. 00:12:04 that really wasn't substantial enough to put in the Mind Node file because I don't want to just
186. 00:12:08 capture everything he says. And I was like, huh, that's weird because I was just thinking about how
187. 00:12:15 stories are so important. And I don't have anything really to nitpick with the way that he's telling
188. 00:12:20 these stories, but they're not landing like a lot of the books that we have read. And I think the way
189. 00:12:25 you articulate it where he's kind of unpacking it as he's telling it, that is probably exactly
190. 00:12:30 what's going on here. He just jumps right into the meat of what he's trying to communicate in these
191. 00:12:35 chapters. And I will say, I think he is an excellent communicator. You could argue, I guess, about
192. 00:12:44 whether his approach is better than just like tell the story and then talk about what's in it.
193. 00:12:50 But his approach does feel more researched, I guess, like it takes greater skill to just
194. 00:12:59 leave off in the middle of those stories and flow into the content without it feeling jarring.
195. 00:13:05 And we're kind of used to that because there's distinctions between like, here's where the story
196. 00:13:10 ends and here's where the concepts start. And you really don't have that with this particular book,
197. 00:13:17 but I actually found it kind of refreshing. Yeah, I mean, it's a thing people do
198. 00:13:22 pretty common. We do it here on the show too, right? We're going to tell a story. I'll tell you a
199. 00:13:30 story about something my grandfather used to say, right? And when I'm done, then I debrief it, right?
200. 00:13:40 So then I'm taking you through like what my thoughts are on it, how it applies to what we're
201. 00:13:44 talking about. That's a very regular cadence in normal conversation. People do it when they're
202. 00:13:50 giving talks all the time. I have a talk at our church this Sunday, two days, I should probably
203. 00:13:56 finish writing it. And whenever I give those, it's pretty common for me to do the same thing, right?
204. 00:14:04 You have something you're going to share that is the story. And then you pick it apart and show the
205. 00:14:11 different pieces of it and how it applies to whatever your topic is. The thing with that is though,
206. 00:14:18 when you tell stories like that and then you unpack them, you can pretty much pick out any
207. 00:14:24 detail you want and get the ideas or the concepts or the points that you're wanting to get across.
208. 00:14:32 You can pretty much pull whatever you want from a story. Like if you really try, you can get just
209. 00:14:37 about any idea from just about any story. I mean, it's just the way it works, right? To do what Adam
210. 00:14:43 Grant did here, like you're saying, is a little more polished and it's not as simple, which means
211. 00:14:51 this book is not one that someone could sit down and write over the period of two or three months,
212. 00:14:56 I don't think. Some of the books that we've read are, they're ones that people have,
213. 00:15:02 you know, they've collected ideas in obsidian for the last four years and they're just going to
214. 00:15:08 grab all the things out of it and bust a book out in two or three months, right? That's a thing that
215. 00:15:13 people do pretty regularly. And I would probably argue that most of the books we read are like that,
216. 00:15:19 where someone's been thinking about something for a long time and they're just going to write
217. 00:15:23 the book very quickly. This isn't like that, I don't think. Just the way it's structured and the way
218. 00:15:28 he puts things together, like the ideas within the stories and then weaves it all together.
219. 00:15:35 That is not a simple thing to do. Like if I'm trying to tell a story and tell you what it means
220. 00:15:42 at the same time, you have to maintain like two to three different ideas in your brain as you're
221. 00:15:48 telling it in order to do that. That's a difficult skill to pick up. And like when you hear people
222. 00:15:55 do that, they're more engaging stories, right? But not many people can do that. It's not an easy
223. 00:16:02 thing to pick up. Yeah, cool. So I'm not alone then in recognizing that. I think, let's just
224. 00:16:11 have been to the content here because there's some really great stuff in here and this could be a
225. 00:16:17 a long episode. I've broken it down in the outline into three different parts and I think
226. 00:16:25 we'll just try to tackle those as opposed to going chapter by chapter, although there's
227. 00:16:29 a really clear idea, I feel like in each one of these chapters that you could unpack. I want to
228. 00:16:37 talk about the first one. Chapter one is, actually part one is individual rethinking. So this is
229. 00:16:44 about training yourself to think differently about things. And chapter one is a preacher,
230. 00:16:50 a prosecutor, a politician, and a scientist walk into your mind. This is kind of setting the tone
231. 00:16:57 right at the beginning that this isn't really what I thought it was going to be. I knew Adam Grant
232. 00:17:02 was a researcher and expected a very academic book. And so to basically lead into it with a joke,
233. 00:17:10 it's very whimsical, kind of fun. Very witty. Yeah, you could use that term. No banter here,
234. 00:17:19 though. The other thing though is it's not just to mix things up or get your attention. It's a
235. 00:17:27 really solid point that he's making in this chapter. So just to define these real quickly,
236. 00:17:32 as we think and talk, we often slip into the mindset of these three groups,
237. 00:17:37 preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. Preachers, that's when we tend to defend our sacred beliefs,
238. 00:17:44 prosecutors, when we try to poke holes in others, beliefs, and politicians, when we want to win
239. 00:17:49 over an audience. Those three things, I think that maps perfectly with the previous book on the art
240. 00:17:57 of Woody banter. And maybe the thing he defines next is a much better way of articulating
241. 00:18:04 why I didn't really like it, because he's basically saying, "Those are all the wrong way to do this.
242. 00:18:11 Really what you want to do is you want to think like a scientist, and a scientist is not trying
243. 00:18:16 to get their way. They're not trying to influence someone and change their mind about someone.
244. 00:18:19 They are trying to change their own mind and make sure that they are understanding the truth,
245. 00:18:26 the way things really are." So that's what scientists do, he says, is they try to find the truth,
246. 00:18:32 they run experiments, they test hypotheses, and he makes the argument that these belong in our
247. 00:18:37 lives as much as in the lab. Yeah, I think one of the fears with this is that if you have a scientist
248. 00:18:45 who has a preconceived bias and is looking for proof for it, which then can put you into,
249. 00:18:55 say, the prosecutor's stance or the politician's stance, it can put you in those with the name
250. 00:19:01 of science behind it. That's the fear, right? But I like this. I like these different ways that
251. 00:19:10 we come at things. So if I have a belief and I'm solid on it, but I am not willing to
252. 00:19:19 second guess it or rethink it, it puts you in the preacher category. And there's a belief that I
253. 00:19:26 hold, which there are these that we all have to some degree or another. But if you have that belief
254. 00:19:33 and you're not willing to at least consider it as potentially false, or that something can
255. 00:19:41 contradict it, that's when you're in that category. But I think you can move into that
256. 00:19:44 scientist role if you're willing to objectively step back from that belief.
257. 00:19:49 And reevaluate it, right? This is, as Christians, we see this sort of thing a lot probably. So
258. 00:19:56 I think that there's a lot of people that I've had some pretty deep religious conversations with.
259. 00:20:04 And I'm okay with someone challenging my beliefs. I've studied enough of the science behind
260. 00:20:13 what I believe that I feel like I have a pretty good grasp. And I haven't run across
261. 00:20:18 anyone that can disprove it. So here we are, right? But you have to be willing to objectively
262. 00:20:25 look at it that way, I think. And that's what he's getting at here.
263. 00:20:28 Yeah. This is the definition we would all like to apply to ourselves, right? Is that we're open
264. 00:20:34 minded and we're willing to change our minds. I think you can locate yourself based on your
265. 00:20:39 actions with this kind of thing. I was talking to Chris Bailey the other day, and he said that
266. 00:20:45 when he presents at these events, he'll watch the other speakers as they're watching him,
267. 00:20:53 or watching like he'll be in the room watching somebody else present and he'll look at the
268. 00:20:58 other speakers who are presenting and they've fallen to two groups. There's the people in the
269. 00:21:02 back of the room who are like arms crossed, pointing out as the person is speaking, like all the ways
270. 00:21:09 that they disagree with them and all the reasons why they're wrong. And then there are the people
271. 00:21:12 who are in the front row and they're like eyes are wide open and they're just like jotting
272. 00:21:16 everything down that they can. Those are the people who really want to learn. Those are the
273. 00:21:21 scientists. I guess the people in the back, if I had to pick one of these, they would be prosecutors.
274. 00:21:28 Yeah. And I don't want to be a prosecutor. I think there are times for all of these different
275. 00:21:38 roles going back to like the art of Woody Bantar and why it's not necessarily bad.
276. 00:21:42 But my default mode of operation, I definitely want to be the scientist. I want to look at things
277. 00:21:52 and understand things for the way that they are. And he talks about this rethinking cycle versus the
278. 00:21:57 overconfident cycle. This was really helpful. I feel like when you fall into one or two or one of
279. 00:22:03 these two, then it's easy to just stay there. Like there's some momentum that keeps you going in that
280. 00:22:08 direction. The rethinking cycle, you start from a place of humility believing that you don't know
281. 00:22:14 it all. And you start to doubt the things that you do know, you become curious. And so you seek
282. 00:22:19 out the other opinions, the other perspectives. That's really what we're doing when we read all
283. 00:22:22 these books that we don't explicitly say this every time. But I think it's true that we go into
284. 00:22:29 these books open minded enough to at least entertain the possibility that what we had previously known
285. 00:22:36 about whatever topic this book is talking about. That could be wrong. Now maybe we fall into a bias
286. 00:22:42 where we try to pick books. This could be, and I don't think we do this consciously, but you could
287. 00:22:46 make the argument that subconsciously we tend to pick the books that we know are going to agree
288. 00:22:50 with our perspective. But I feel like we've read enough books at this point that we've got a pretty
289. 00:22:55 broad spectrum of ideas and people who have written these and where they're coming from.
290. 00:23:04 And then the result of that curiosity is ultimately discovery, which then you've gotten something good
291. 00:23:10 out of this cycle. So it keeps going. The overconfident cycle though assumes that you know the truth
292. 00:23:17 and you don't you're threatened by everything that comes against it. So you've got pride at which
293. 00:23:20 leads to conviction. And you're going to that's when you're going to poke holes to try to change
294. 00:23:25 people's minds. Confirmation and desirability biases. We learned about these.
295. 00:23:29 Which one was this the art of thinking clearly, I think is where we first heard about all those
296. 00:23:33 different biases. So yeah, essentially what this is is confirmation bias. You have an idea and you're
297. 00:23:40 looking for all the ways that it's right. And you were talking about the day nerd in you. This is
298. 00:23:45 probably one of the reasons why you don't like the data because you know how easy this is to do.
299. 00:23:51 Easy to manipulate. Yeah. And then the desirability bias. This is you're seeing what you want to see.
300. 00:23:58 And then you use that as validation of something that isn't right there.
301. 00:24:01 Awful water is saying Mike is saying he needs to read a man of Palmer's book again. No, I am not.
302. 00:24:06 Although if you go back and look at the ratings, I gave it a higher I remember we did episode 100.
303. 00:24:12 You were surprised at the rating that I had given it because we talking about it and I bashed it a
304. 00:24:16 lot because I have I have disagreed with that book. And I'm moving on to the next contrary opinion.
305. 00:24:22 Thank you, Otter. But I feel like I did do a decent job. Probably not a perfect job,
306. 00:24:29 but a decent job of trying to get something good out of that book.
307. 00:24:33 Trying. Yes. Trying. There are a lot of biases that go into how we pick these books, right? But
308. 00:24:40 at the same time, this is why we alternate you and me. Like picking these books. I tend to be a
309. 00:24:46 little more adventurous, I think. And Mike is forced into like whenever I ask Mike,
310. 00:24:52 what did you think about this before you started reading? He's like, I don't know. I didn't.
311. 00:24:55 It's your book. I just figure I have to deal with it and get through it. Like that's how.
312. 00:24:59 And like sometimes Mike picks a book and why are we reading this? Like I don't understand.
313. 00:25:05 And it's something I argue with the whole time through, but then you love it. Like this,
314. 00:25:10 the stuff goes back and forth, right? This is some of. It does happen. Yep.
315. 00:25:14 The nice part of the way that this works because it forces both of us to be
316. 00:25:18 pushed outside of kind of our normal, what we would choose. And then you get a little bit
317. 00:25:25 different perspective on our own beliefs and it forces you to have the conversation at least about
318. 00:25:34 why you believe what you do, why you think the way you do. And then you kind of have to defend it,
319. 00:25:40 right? Like whenever we have our back and forth here on Bookworm, we kind of, we have to defend
320. 00:25:47 what we think of it, right? That's how we end up having these conversations. And when you do that,
321. 00:25:53 it's kind of like a live think again scenario, right? So I have to evaluate my own viewpoints and
322. 00:26:02 justify them to you or argue with the author or support the author, right? Like these are what
323. 00:26:11 we do as we go through this, which is the nice part. Like that means we have practice at doing
324. 00:26:16 this, right? So maybe we're better at this than some. I don't know. I can hope.
325. 00:26:19 I think probably if you were to engage in a conversation like this about ideas,
326. 00:26:29 I think it kind of gnat on a regular basis. That's naturally going to refine the way that you think
327. 00:26:34 about things. And if you went into it every single time with the perspective of, I'm just going to
328. 00:26:39 defend what I currently believe, this would not be fun at all. This would be really stressful.
329. 00:26:45 Because you're just being attacked the whole time, not just one episode, like last episode.
330. 00:26:53 I'd never attacked you. Just kidding. Never. I would never attack you. Right. Multiple times.
331. 00:26:58 It's also interesting to me how you can slip in and out of these things.
332. 00:27:04 So the very first story he told is Mike Lazaritis. I don't know if I said that right. The guy who
333. 00:27:10 invented the Blackberry, they had nearly half the smartphone market in 2009, but it had dropped
334. 00:27:18 to less than 1% by 2014. When Adam told his story, basically he was saying he was thinking like a
335. 00:27:28 scientist, and then they had some success. And then he started clinging to those beliefs that they
336. 00:27:34 had about all people want a keyboard. And you don't want to do web on mobile. You just want email.
337. 00:27:39 And obviously we know how that turned out. And that was kind of interesting because we've heard
338. 00:27:44 that story before. Specifically about the iPhone launch and how it completely turned everything
339. 00:27:50 on its head in terms of the mobile phone and how people used them and Blackberries demise because
340. 00:27:57 they were unwilling to change or they tried to change too late. I think it was first heard about
341. 00:28:04 that in Innovators dilemma or something similar. And then we applied that example there for sure.
342. 00:28:12 Steve Jobs comes up all the time. Apple comes up all the time. But that was kind of interesting.
343. 00:28:18 It made it more personal because I've heard that story before and you can view it through the
344. 00:28:21 lens of like, I know what happened to Blackberry, the company. But when you view it as like this
345. 00:28:25 person who had this great idea because they were challenging the status quo and the norms
346. 00:28:31 about different ideas, and then they got comfortable with their own idea. It just kind of shows that
347. 00:28:39 it can happen to anybody. Yeah, and it's a factor of scale too, right? So there's,
348. 00:28:44 you have your idea. It is successful. The idea was successful because you challenged the way
349. 00:28:51 things were working as it was. But then that thing had to be scaled in order to fulfill the needs of
350. 00:29:01 the market. And by doing so, they kind of fall into a rut of delivering to that one small piece
351. 00:29:09 of the market. And the market keeps moving. They're kind of fixed on that one point in time,
352. 00:29:13 but the market keeps moving on them. And that's fine. But as they've grown to get to a point where
353. 00:29:21 they can scale and fit that need, fill that need, they lose their agility and their ability to
354. 00:29:28 maneuver and pay attention to the nuances in the market and continue to adapt.
355. 00:29:34 And the next thing you know, Apple comes around with the iPhone and destroys Blackberry's whole
356. 00:29:38 market. So yeah, whoops. Yeah. And I don't think it has to be like a big company. Obviously,
357. 00:29:47 that's the whole framing of this section is that this is individual rethinking. But it does kind of
358. 00:29:55 show you how high the stakes can be, you know, how rethinking can completely change your world for
359. 00:30:02 the positive and also failing to rethink can change it for the negative. Right. Let's go to the next
360. 00:30:10 chapter, the armchair quarterback and the imposter. I like these two. The imposter syndrome, that is
361. 00:30:18 something I have dealt with in the past. And I never really had a clear formula for this before.
362. 00:30:25 But Adam Grant helped me out a lot. He says that imposter syndrome is when your competence
363. 00:30:33 is higher than your confidence. And the armchair quarterback syndrome is the opposite. It is when
364. 00:30:39 your confidence is greater than your competence. So armchair quarterback, this is like the guy who
365. 00:30:47 played football in high school thinking that they could be a better quarterback than Tom Brady,
366. 00:30:53 because he missed the guy that was open and he happened to see it on TV. Right. And the imposter
367. 00:31:00 syndrome, I feel like this is something that anybody who does anything publicly deals with at some
368. 00:31:06 point. And I guess the way to boost this, the way to fix this is to develop more confidence.
369. 00:31:16 And as I read this, kind of what stands out to me is that the way to develop more confidence,
370. 00:31:21 put in more reps going back to the practice by Seth Godin, like ship every day. If you do that
371. 00:31:28 enough times, you'll feel confident in your competence. And so this will kind of even out.
372. 00:31:36 I feel like this is kind of what has happened with me in podcasting. I was terrified of podcasting
373. 00:31:41 when I started. In fact, I joined Toastmasters because we had just started Bookworm and I was
374. 00:31:46 unhappy with the way I sounded in the recordings. And I would edit the heck out of them and I
375. 00:31:51 couldn't get it to sound any better. So many a's, so many um, so many rambling thoughts. I still do
376. 00:31:58 that sometimes. I know it's not perfect. But if you go back and listen to those early episodes,
377. 00:32:02 man, I can't do it. I'm just so bad. They are. And then, you know, the productivity show back
378. 00:32:09 when I was doing that and focused. And I feel like now I've got enough reps where sitting down
379. 00:32:14 to record a podcast does not make it hard for me to breathe anymore. Like it's still,
380. 00:32:21 I still feel a little bit of the pressure is not the right word, stress isn't the right word. But
381. 00:32:28 like, you never really lose that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you are going to like
382. 00:32:34 get up and give up a speech. You just learn that it's really not that big a deal and you'll be able
383. 00:32:39 to get through it. So it doesn't cause all the alarm bells to go off in your head when you
384. 00:32:44 you feel that sort of thing. And so several hundred reps in, you know, I feel like I, I kind of
385. 00:32:50 have smoothed that out a little bit. It seems like whenever you start
386. 00:32:54 podcasting or giving talks in person or anything that involves you speaking words to other people,
387. 00:33:02 it seems like there's a period that you have to go through at the beginning where
388. 00:33:07 you get super nervous ahead of time because you feel like you have to say all the right words
389. 00:33:12 in the right order and tell the right stories in the right way. You need to be so on to get it
390. 00:33:18 dialed in. And then over time, you figure out the tricks and the steps to cover when you did
391. 00:33:28 something wrong or to fill things when you're not quite sure what to say or your story didn't
392. 00:33:34 quite go where you thought it was going to go. Like you figure out how to handle those,
393. 00:33:38 which means that whenever you hit the record button and you're ready to start talking and
394. 00:33:45 you're going to be talking for two hours or more. In some cases, it's not as big a deal. I don't
395. 00:33:52 want to seem like each episode of Bookworm isn't a big deal because it is. But at the same time,
396. 00:33:58 you learn how to navigate all those things very quickly on your feet. And the only way to really
397. 00:34:05 do that is through putting in the reps as you're calling it, getting the experience. I don't know
398. 00:34:11 how many episodes of podcasts I've recorded, you've of course recorded significantly more than I have.
399. 00:34:17 But you build it up over time, right? And you figure out how to handle the nuances of talking
400. 00:34:24 and rambling like we do sometimes. It's cool. Michael fix it in post.
401. 00:34:31 Yeah, it's true. I ramble and figure Michael. Michael fix it.
402. 00:34:35 Most of the time I cut my stuff. But actually, the more we do it, that's kind of the thing that
403. 00:34:42 opened my eyes to it is that we get done in our recording time is like an hour and 48 minutes.
404. 00:34:50 And we think like, well, we'll cut that down. It'll probably be closer to an hour and a half.
405. 00:34:55 That's our target. But as I'm going through and I'm doing the edit, I'm not trying to hit
406. 00:35:01 an hour 30 exactly. So over time, like the amount of stuff that I've cut has gotten
407. 00:35:05 significantly less. And so it really only ends up being a couple of minutes that gets shaved.
408. 00:35:10 Because the conversation is decent. That's a point I want to get to in a little bit here. But
409. 00:35:18 before we move on from the armchair quarterback and the imposter syndrome, I feel like the imposter
410. 00:35:23 syndrome specifically can be seen in this graph of Mount stupid that he has, which is pretty great.
411. 00:35:29 So Mount stupid is basically like you get to the top of this little, little dip and you feel like,
412. 00:35:35 I have it, I'm at the top of the mountain and I can see everything and I know everything.
413. 00:35:39 And that is the point where you realize if you have the open mind open enough to
414. 00:35:45 understand everything that you don't know. And so you go up in terms of your willingness to
415. 00:35:53 talk about this topic and then it goes way, way down because you're like, okay, I guess I don't have
416. 00:35:58 nearly as much expertise in this area as I thought and people should go listen to this other guy
417. 00:36:02 instead. And then over time, eventually that goes, that ends up trending upwards again and you get,
418. 00:36:10 you know, obviously a lot further in terms of your ability to speak about your expertise in that
419. 00:36:17 particular topic. But getting to the top and realizing that you don't know everything that I feel like
420. 00:36:27 that's enough to knock some people on their butt and they don't ever recover from it.
421. 00:36:30 It's like you put in the work to become a quote unquote expert and then you realize you're not
422. 00:36:39 an expert and then you have an identity crisis and you never really recover from it. You just
423. 00:36:44 walk away from it and try to do something else. It's kind of where growth versus fixed mindset
424. 00:36:48 comes in, in my opinion. The more I learn, the less I know that whole thing, it's like the,
425. 00:36:56 as you're going up the mountain, right? So you get to the peak and you're like, oh, I know almost
426. 00:37:02 everything about this. Like you can see the peak right in front of you and you, I know all the
427. 00:37:05 things about this. And then you realize that that peak isn't actually the peak. There's just a little
428. 00:37:10 dip on the other side and then it continues going up after that. It's like, oh, I thought I almost
429. 00:37:15 knew everything there was to know about this. And I know a tenth of it, maybe.
430. 00:37:22 This is why goals suck because the goal is the top of Mount Stupid. And you get there and you're
431. 00:37:27 like, yes, I have arrived. Oh, never mind. The finish line just moved on you.
432. 00:37:34 The other cool thing, well, real quickly, chapter three is talking about the joy of being wrong
433. 00:37:41 and talking about detaching the present from the past and the opinions from the identity. I think
434. 00:37:46 that's really important. And I feel like we do a pretty good job of that. This is another form of
435. 00:37:52 this, I guess, would be like, I have experienced working with family. And I have learned to be
436. 00:37:58 very careful because I can separate work from family. And when we're working, put on the work hat.
437. 00:38:05 And when we're done working, put on the family hat. But I know not everybody can do that.
438. 00:38:12 So I've got to be really careful to protect the relationships there. But the one that I really
439. 00:38:18 want to talk about here, because you mentioned the discourse that we have in the back and forth
440. 00:38:23 and the differing opinions is chapter four, the good fight club. Bookworm is the good fight club.
441. 00:38:28 We're basically the right brothers, especially whenever I just decide to pick on Mike for no
442. 00:38:35 real reason other than it just seemed fun that day. Like, yeah.
443. 00:38:40 He still tolerates me, I think, and still loves me somewhat. But
444. 00:38:45 no, it's all good. The right brothers specifically, like everybody knows the story of the right
445. 00:38:53 brothers inventing the airplane probably Kitty Hawk, right? But this makes it way more personal
446. 00:38:58 because he talks about how the right brothers typically would fight. Like, they'd be shouting
447. 00:39:05 at each other to defend like their ideas for the propeller and things like that. But what was
448. 00:39:09 really interesting about this is that as vehemently as they would defend their beliefs, they'd go
449. 00:39:14 home, they'd sleep on it, they'd come to work the next day without any resentment, without any
450. 00:39:21 offense, they're able to put what happened yesterday behind them and frequently they would come back
451. 00:39:26 and they'd be like, no, your idea was better. No, your idea was better. Like they had changed their
452. 00:39:31 minds both and now they're like fighting again just on opposite sides of the
453. 00:39:37 I think that's the ideal version of this. What's that saying? Like strong convictions
454. 00:39:45 lightly held something like that strong opinions lightly held like be willing to defend your
455. 00:39:51 opinions. Yeah, have the discourse about it. You got to go into that though with the underlying
456. 00:39:57 assumption that we're going to be debating and judging the ideas, not the person. If I
457. 00:40:04 went into these podcast recordings like, Oh, I hope Joe doesn't say anything negative about any
458. 00:40:11 of my ideas because if he does, I'm going to take that as an attack on my personal character,
459. 00:40:16 then we're probably not doing this podcast very long and vice versa. You have to be able to separate
460. 00:40:24 those those two. If you really want to think again, learn from what you don't know and be curious,
461. 00:40:32 which the more I studied this topic as we read this book and just cements like my desire to be a
462. 00:40:39 lifelong learner, the growth mindset, we're talking about mindset at Carol Duck, one of my
463. 00:40:43 favorite books. I like I get it that some people aren't there yet, but the more that I understand
464. 00:40:51 about this, the more I realize if you're going to live like that fixed mindset lifestyle,
465. 00:40:56 what a miserable existence. Yeah, I don't want to be there.
466. 00:41:02 And with you, I think there's a lot to be said for constructive conflict, but it's not everyone
467. 00:41:10 that you can have that with, right? Yep, that's true. And I have, I don't think I would call them
468. 00:41:18 fights, but strong debates here on bookworm occasionally. It's true. More often lately than
469. 00:41:24 normal. That might be my fault. And it seems like whenever we do that,
470. 00:41:31 you know, it's pretty common after we do things like that that Mike or I will text the other one
471. 00:41:37 say, I was kind of rough on you. You okay? Like, we do that, right? Yeah. So it seems like if you
472. 00:41:45 have someone that you can do that with, and you both know that the ideas can change
473. 00:41:52 and that the ideas don't dictate who they are necessarily, like they might be a part of who you
474. 00:42:00 are, but it can morph over time, right? If you know that and you don't take things personal,
475. 00:42:06 like if you don't like my idea, you don't like me, no, that's not the case at all.
476. 00:42:10 It's okay that I don't like your idea and that we disagree on something. We can still
477. 00:42:16 be friends, right? So take it, go down the politics route, right? In today's culture,
478. 00:42:24 if you're blue or red, you can't like blue or red, like you can't like the other side. For whatever
479. 00:42:31 reason, we've decided that you can't have cordial conversations with somebody on the other side of
480. 00:42:36 the aisle. I have no idea why that is. It doesn't make sense to me because I don't think that it's
481. 00:42:40 possible for us to truly dislike every little tiny detail about someone purely because of a
482. 00:42:50 political stance on like which party they ascribe to because I don't, the people I've talked to,
483. 00:42:59 it doesn't seem like anyone loves absolutely every aspect of the party they support, right?
484. 00:43:06 Which means everything is up for conversation and I would like to understand where you're coming from
485. 00:43:11 if we don't agree, that's fine. We can still be friends, but not a lot of people are willing to
486. 00:43:17 do that today, as they say in the chat, this is why I'm purple. But this is something that I
487. 00:43:24 feel like could be helpful given the political climate that we're in, right? If you could
488. 00:43:31 find ways to have these fights, quote unquote, fights in a good way and be willing to
489. 00:43:39 think again on your own opinions, that's okay. And everybody's better time it's all said and done.
490. 00:43:48 Yeah. All right, that's it. We got to read leaders eat last. Someone needs to go vote for that
491. 00:43:55 on the bookworm club. Everyone listening live, go do it right now. So we have a justification
492. 00:44:00 to pick it because it's an older book, but it speaks to this exact thing. It's come up over and
493. 00:44:04 over and over again. It's true. Yeah. I won't revisit, in my opinion on that, which is largely
494. 00:44:10 shaped by that book, but you're absolutely right. I will respond to the thing about picking on each
495. 00:44:17 other. I agree, the place where I feel the worst about it, because I feel like with bookworm, we kind
496. 00:44:23 of, we signed up for it, right? Yes. But when I show up in your live streams, start challenging
497. 00:44:30 stuff. That's where I was like, did I go too far? No, good luck going too far on that one.
498. 00:44:36 So yeah, those are fun. It's one of these things that I enjoy. Like if someone's willing to engage
499. 00:44:45 me on something like you have an opinion, let's take, you know, one of the fun ones I thought was
500. 00:44:52 whenever we were having this back and forth about whether or not you should be using terms like
501. 00:44:56 PKM versus just a notes database, right? Yep. You know, opinions can change on that over time,
502. 00:45:03 but I had a fairly strong opinion on it. Yes, you did. Mike had a fairly strong opinion on it on
503. 00:45:08 the opposite side, right? Yep. And the thing that I find is very fun is like if someone's willing to
504. 00:45:15 form ideas and form an argument that directly contradicts what I'm, what I have a viewpoint on,
505. 00:45:24 but I can formulate my side of it as well. And we're willing to have this back and forth.
506. 00:45:29 To me, those are fun. But I know that Mike is fine if I razz him and I know that we're going to be
507. 00:45:40 fine when that's over with. Like we've done this long enough that we know each other well enough to
508. 00:45:44 know I can give Mike a hard time. He can give me a hard time. We can argue till the sun sets.
509. 00:45:53 And we'll be fine on the other side of the fight. But I think those are fun. So I don't think
510. 00:45:59 that you go too far. You're fine. Okay, cool. That kind of is a good spot to go into the next part.
511. 00:46:06 Part two is interpersonal rethinking. And this is interpersonal. So this is involving other people.
512. 00:46:13 And the first chapter in this section, chapter five is called dances with foes,
513. 00:46:22 which is kind of a weird chapter title. But the main point here is that a good debate is more
514. 00:46:30 like a dance than a war. That sounds kind of weird to say it. But in a war, Adam Grant says,
515. 00:46:40 you are trying to gain ground, but in a negotiation, you are disarming your opponent by agreeing with
516. 00:46:51 them. So you're not trying to steamroll them and take something. And that's why
517. 00:46:56 like there's a give and take here. I think this is the chapter where the person was debating the
518. 00:47:03 computer and kind of disarmed it because he kept agreeing with the spirit of the point that the
519. 00:47:13 computer was making. And then eventually the computer couldn't do that sort of thing too.
520. 00:47:18 And so he won over the audience to to his side. But I think the most of us,
521. 00:47:25 I'll just speak for myself. I can learn from this because I have definitely fallen into the
522. 00:47:32 category of what he describes as a logic bully, which is someone who overwhelms with rational
523. 00:47:39 arguments. And the problem with this is that people's minds are not changed by the presentation of
524. 00:47:47 facts. This does not cause them to change their minds. It actually causes them to dig in their
525. 00:47:52 heels, even though they don't have the ability or the facts to argue back. And I never really thought
526. 00:48:00 of it that way. And I would like to think that, you know, I've come a long way in this over the
527. 00:48:06 the last couple of years, but I do think I need to take this a step further.
528. 00:48:10 I want to go back to your point about a dance versus a war, because think about, at least in the US,
529. 00:48:19 political debates, whenever they're arguing, because it's total full on argument, right?
530. 00:48:25 Of one side versus the other, we cut each other off, we're rude to each other, we're all sorts of
531. 00:48:33 stuff whenever he's like the people who are doing these debates, like that's what they do,
532. 00:48:37 slandering each other constantly. You're not debating the topic.
533. 00:48:42 Yeah, my 11 year old was watching the last presidential debate. And at one point,
534. 00:48:46 we watched it for like two minutes. And he's just like staring at the TV like, yeah, these are adults.
535. 00:48:52 And then eventually he's like, girls, girls, you're both pretty and he walks away.
536. 00:48:56 I love it. But that's true, right? Even our kids pick up on it.
537. 00:49:06 We don't, if you want to have a cordial debates and you want to influence someone,
538. 00:49:14 if you're trying to, I don't want to say put my opinion on someone else, but share an opinion
539. 00:49:20 with the hope that someone else will adopt said opinion. If I'm trying to do that,
540. 00:49:25 slandering that person and cutting them off and interrupting repeatedly is not the way to do that.
541. 00:49:33 Thus the dance. So you're, you're able to have the back and forth. Listen to what the other person
542. 00:49:39 saying. Maybe you're agreeing with them. Maybe you're not. But if you are agreeing with them,
543. 00:49:43 at least the spirit of what they're saying, I may not believe in a certain law, but I love the
544. 00:49:49 spirit of the law. And that's fine. I just think the way that they're going about trying to do that
545. 00:49:54 thing is wrong. That happens a lot. And that's fine. But trying to have those debates in a cordial way
546. 00:50:03 is very challenging today. Yeah. You know, the, the political debates is kind of an interesting
547. 00:50:09 thing because you're not trying to reach a consensus and really it's a performance for the people who
548. 00:50:17 aren't even in the room, right? You're trying to sway the opinion of all the people who haven't
549. 00:50:21 made up their minds about who they're going to vote for. I wonder if that's at the heart of some of
550. 00:50:27 this is kind of to your earlier point. We don't view the other person as a human. They're just
551. 00:50:35 an obstacle in the way to me showing strength and wisdom, the fact that I have mastered all these
552. 00:50:43 issues and I can lead the country in a specified direction. And it's easy to see how we got there.
553. 00:50:54 And it's easy to see why that is the way people, the default mode of operation now. And you can
554. 00:51:02 argue that a recent presidential candidate made it worse. But it's always as long as I can remember,
555. 00:51:09 like, I've never wanted to watch those debates because all they're doing is yelling at each other
556. 00:51:13 and criticizing each other. And you get so many people saying, Oh, you did this, no, I didn't,
557. 00:51:18 that you walk out of there and you're just kind of like dumbfounded. Like you don't really don't know.
558. 00:51:24 What was true? What wasn't? You got to go back and fact check the entire thing in order to
559. 00:51:28 understand like what really really happened. So what do you do? You just kind of go with your gut,
560. 00:51:34 like, whose personality did I resonate with more? Right? So it's easy to say like, well,
561. 00:51:41 what if we just view the other person as a human and treated them the way that we wanted
562. 00:51:47 them to be treated? But what would it take for someone in the political arena to start doing that?
563. 00:51:53 You know, is the system so established that no one would be willing to try that? Or would you not
564. 00:52:02 even rise to that level where you would get a big enough audience in order for that to be displayed
565. 00:52:10 on like a large scale? I don't know. I kind of am wondering like, if you got to play the game and
566. 00:52:16 then you get so used to playing the game that like it's not even an option? Or is it just as
567. 00:52:20 simple as someone being like, hey, you know what? You're right. We've kind of turned into us versus
568. 00:52:26 them and I'm not going to do that anymore. I don't know that like if you think of human psychology,
569. 00:52:33 we're drawn to negative things versus positive things. So we're wired for watching out for danger.
570. 00:52:45 So we notice when things are negative immediately, whereas if it's positive, it has to build over
571. 00:52:53 time. Like you could show me a new story of something extremely positive, but it's not going to have
572. 00:53:00 near the impact of something much less dramatic, but it's negative. So we're drawn to this negative
573. 00:53:05 side. And in the world of politics, they need more people drawn to them. Thus, they can get the votes,
574. 00:53:14 get their paychecks, keep their jobs. And what that means is in today's climate, because of
575. 00:53:22 the media being something that's easy to get to a lot of people very quickly, if it's something
576. 00:53:28 negative, they get more attention. I mean, look at everything Trump did a lot of what
577. 00:53:33 he had for his campaign, he played games to make things negative. And that actually drew a lot
578. 00:53:43 of people to him. And as time has gone on, we've done that more and more.
579. 00:53:50 Your question around, if someone tried to step away from that, what would happen,
580. 00:53:57 I don't know. I feel like it wouldn't be successful. I feel like maybe there are people doing this. We
581. 00:54:05 just don't know about it because they're not going to get the attention. They're not going to get
582. 00:54:09 the airtime. And if they happened to be on the stage, say for a presidential debate,
583. 00:54:16 and they were able to call out the slander and stuff and try to have a cordial debate
584. 00:54:27 to do a dance instead of the war, probably not going to get very far would be my guess,
585. 00:54:34 just because we're not drawn to that. And although the intellectuals will applaud them and people who
586. 00:54:41 want to have a little more cordialness between the two sides of the aisle might be all on board,
587. 00:54:52 but I just don't see how that could take off. It would take a lot of people, I think, to
588. 00:54:59 have that same mindset shift all at the same time. No, I think you're right. And the reason I ask
589. 00:55:06 that is that I read an article yesterday about Joe Manchin, the Democratic governor or Democratic
590. 00:55:17 senator from West Virginia. The Senate in the US is evenly divided 50/50, but there's a Democratic
591. 00:55:25 president, Democratic vice president. So vice president cast the tie-breaking vote in
592. 00:55:30 whenever there's a tie. So essentially Democrats control the House, the Senate, and the presidency,
593. 00:55:40 which that's always a political party's dream, right? We own all three of these. We can pass
594. 00:55:45 whatever the heck we want. But Joe Manchin is on record as saying the insurrection that happened
595. 00:55:51 on January 6th. He's like, that really changed me. And he's the one who provides the majority,
596. 00:55:58 right? And he's saying, well, actually, we all have to work together. So you can't just count
597. 00:56:04 on my vote. Everybody's kind of freaking out about it. So I think this is really interesting,
598. 00:56:11 because there is one person who is standing up and saying, hey, we got to work together.
599. 00:56:17 And I think that's the first step to humanizing the other side. And it'll be interesting to see
600. 00:56:23 if more people follow suit or if he's gone in six months and somebody else takes his place,
601. 00:56:28 and its business as usual. Right. I think there's a lot to be said for,
602. 00:56:34 and we don't need to keep belaboring politics here, but there's a lot to be said for situations
603. 00:56:44 where you are forced to spend time with people who disagree with you.
604. 00:56:51 There's a lot of value in that. It helps you to build empathy for folks who disagree with you.
605. 00:57:00 And it can oftentimes lead to compromise whenever you hit a roadblock. And currently,
606. 00:57:11 the way our political system is set up, the people who are in the house and Senate and doing the
607. 00:57:19 voting don't have to live near the people that they're arguing against. Yep. Leaders eat last.
608. 00:57:25 So if it wasn't possible for them to always leave and they had to do the school functions with
609. 00:57:36 everyone in DC if they had to do all the events together at all times and they had to do all
610. 00:57:43 the social stuff together, not just retreat home when they're not voting. Yep. Exactly.
611. 00:57:50 I feel like they could change a lot of things, but I don't remember who I've talked to somebody
612. 00:57:55 about this pretty regularly. I can't place who it was, but anyway. No, the conversations are
613. 00:58:00 the critical part. And not just the conversations like the debate trying to convince somebody,
614. 00:58:05 but trying to understand somebody. Let's move on from politics and talk about something
615. 00:58:11 less dangerous like racism, shall we? Sure. It's really less dangerous.
616. 00:58:17 Because he tells the story here. I think it was chapter six, but there was a jazz musician,
617. 00:58:24 if I'm remembering the story correctly. And it wasn't a big deal when I was reading the book,
618. 00:58:29 but as we're talking about this, this is what comes to mind. An African American musician
619. 00:58:35 who was performing and one of the, I don't remember the titles, I avoid everything,
620. 00:58:42 everything KKK, but the head honcho basically of the local KKK was there at the bar,
621. 00:58:48 watching him play and walks up to him afterwards and he's all confused and basically says like,
622. 00:58:55 I have never known a black man like you. And then they have a conversation about it.
623. 00:59:01 And they continue the conversation and they basically become friends and this guy convinces the
624. 00:59:06 white guy to leave the KKK and basically everywhere that he goes, he has these conversations with
625. 00:59:13 people because that that KKK guy goes and tells his buddies of the KKK and like, there's a ripple
626. 00:59:19 effect with this and a whole bunch of people end up walking away from the KKK because of this
627. 00:59:24 black musician who is willing to engage in the conversation and say, well, like, this is,
628. 00:59:30 no, I'm no different than you are. Like, what was your perspective about me and then what would it
629. 00:59:36 take to change your mind? And then as they talk about things, they realize that we've got a lot
630. 00:59:42 more in common than we thought. And so that causes them to rethink their stereotypes and all of their
631. 00:59:48 beliefs about everything and make the decision that, oh, I really shouldn't have been involved in this
632. 00:59:55 white nationalist terrorist group to begin with. But it's hard to see that, right? If you,
633. 01:00:02 yeah, how does that work? If there's a group of people that you don't know much about,
634. 01:00:09 you have a tendency to shy away from them. Yeah. And that doesn't have to be the way I said that
635. 01:00:15 it was very racist implied, right? But it doesn't have to be race. Yep. I have a tendency to,
636. 01:00:23 you're probably the same way. If there's a group of tech nerds gathered around talking about a
637. 01:00:29 bunch of Microsoft computers, I have a tendency to shy away from them. Yep. Totally. That's what
638. 01:00:34 I was thinking too. It's because like, I know a decent amount about PCs. I just,
639. 01:00:40 I don't care for like, I have my other preferences. I'm comfortable on Apple computers. Like,
640. 01:00:46 that's where I live. That's an uncomfortable area for me. I'm not just going to walk up and
641. 01:00:53 try to break the ice and try to understand what they're doing and such. Like, that's not
642. 01:00:59 I'm going to stand my echo chamber. Correct. It's more comfortable in my echo chamber.
643. 01:01:04 That applies in so many ways. It's just blown up in the race world, probably for good reason.
644. 01:01:13 Just knowing having acquaintances who are very racist, it's the- Very emotionally charged.
645. 01:01:20 Yes, it is. And I don't want to say that it's unfounded because I don't think it's unfounded.
646. 01:01:29 I just wonder about the mechanics and methods that people go about trying to solve the problem.
647. 01:01:35 Yeah. It doesn't make sense to me to be racist in an attempt to solve racism.
648. 01:01:40 My brain doesn't work that way. But that seems to be a lot of what happens at the same time.
649. 01:01:47 Like, this is a weird spot for me to talk about this because most of the time, whenever I'm going
650. 01:01:52 to have a race conversation, I want to have that with someone who's not of the same race I am.
651. 01:01:56 Because it forces the conversation to be a little more understanding like you and I talking about
652. 01:02:03 it probably isn't. That's not doing a whole lot of good. Yeah. Anyway.
653. 01:02:08 But the big takeaway from this for me is that it gives me hope because I realize the potential
654. 01:02:18 that can come from a single conversation. This one guy was willing to engage and he changed
655. 01:02:27 the minds of multiple people who were involved in this organization that who knows how many
656. 01:02:32 other people they would have impacted. So it's like a domino effect, but it's an exponential
657. 01:02:37 domino effect where first you knocked on one, then two, then four. And so you can kind of think
658. 01:02:46 like if you are paying attention to the stuff that's going on in the world today, well, I'm just
659. 01:02:49 one person. Like, what difference can I make? You can make quite a bit of difference. You just
660. 01:02:55 don't realize it yet simply by your willingness to engage in the conversation in the appropriate way.
661. 01:03:01 So that's the big thing for me, not just about race, but about everything here is
662. 01:03:05 be willing to engage. You don't know what you don't know, right? That's kind of the whole point
663. 01:03:12 of this whole book. And you are never going to find out what you don't know until you start talking
664. 01:03:17 to some people that are different. Yes. But you have to be willing to do that. And yeah,
665. 01:03:23 which is not comfortable, special. Correct. And it has to be people on both sides of the fence have
666. 01:03:28 to be willing to have the conversation. If I walk up to someone and I want to have a conversation
667. 01:03:35 about the school referendum that passed in our area a couple years ago, I was very much against
668. 01:03:40 it. A lot of people were for it. I felt like the school was making bad choices. My opinion is they
669. 01:03:47 didn't seem to care if the school made good or bad choices. Like, this is the way this worked,
670. 01:03:51 right? But so many people I couldn't even have a conversation with without it. Like, I would ask
671. 01:03:57 a question and I would instantly get yelling back in my face. That doesn't help anybody
672. 01:04:03 in this situation at all. It's like, I feel like you've been hurt. So now I feel like I'm trying to
673. 01:04:10 like, what has happened in your past that's kind of led you to this point? Like, now I feel like I'm
674. 01:04:16 trying to do some form of a ministry to help because like, I don't know where this anger came from.
675. 01:04:19 So like, that's the difficult thing with this, these whole difficult conversations. Like, how do you
676. 01:04:27 have them and how do you disarm them when not everyone's willing to have them in a cordial way?
677. 01:04:34 Yeah. Volume is not going to win anybody.
678. 01:04:37 Right. Right. That was something you talked about earlier. It was like the whole confidence
679. 01:04:42 thing, right? It's like my, oh, what was the, there was a little cartoon. It's like,
680. 01:04:47 what was it? Hold your expertise and listen to my confidence. Like, it was something like that.
681. 01:04:54 It's like, my confidence can overwhelm the science behind it, as long as I am saying it
682. 01:05:00 forcefully, it will get across and be the thing that takes hold.
683. 01:05:03 Yep. Shall we move on to the next section? Sure. So part three is collective rethinking.
684. 01:05:09 And there are a couple chapters here. Chapter eight charge conversations,
685. 01:05:15 which is kind of what we were talking about having these difficult conversations. And
686. 01:05:20 really collective rethinking, though, is not a person to person. This is like as a group,
687. 01:05:24 how do we change our minds about things? And then chapter nine, rewriting the textbook,
688. 01:05:29 chapter 10, that's not the way we've always done it. I don't know exactly what I want to cover
689. 01:05:34 here. I feel like this could go a bunch of different ways. I guess let's start with the charge
690. 01:05:42 conversation section and let's talk about idea cults. Because idea cults are groups that stir up a
691. 01:05:48 batch of oversimplified intellectual cool aid and recruit followers to serve it widely.
692. 01:05:54 And as I read that, I could not help but think of the hashtag Rome cult.
693. 01:06:01 Yep. We talked a little bit about that on one of your live streams.
694. 01:06:06 And I do think there is a little bit of room for interpretation of the word cult, but I do
695. 01:06:17 also agree that it is generally negative. What people think of is the cool aid drinking,
696. 01:06:23 you know, and that's not necessarily what it means, but it almost doesn't matter because
697. 01:06:29 in people's minds, that's what it means. And the hashtag Rome cult always rubbed me the wrong way
698. 01:06:38 when I was a part of the, when I was using Rome research, I was part of the, what do they call it,
699. 01:06:46 true believers, like I paid the big sum and had the five year license and attended the calls and
700. 01:06:52 they were good. Like the community is cool and they're nice, but it is a big hurdle to get over
701. 01:06:59 and it would always kind of like rub me the wrong way. Not to the point, obviously, where like I
702. 01:07:04 completely walked away from it because of the branding, but I recognize it like it did. It
703. 01:07:11 didn't leave it like a negative taste in my mouth. And having read this, I realize that while
704. 01:07:19 hashtag Rome cult may not be the dictionary definition of a cult, they are definitely an
705. 01:07:28 idea cult. I could say that as a former member. I think they're not the only one. You mentioned
706. 01:07:39 like PCs versus Apple users, that would be another more palatable version for a lot of people.
707. 01:07:46 But same sort of thing, I think, where you just say, well, this is the right way to do things.
708. 01:07:53 And you're not considering or open to any of the other options. I think the big takeaway from this,
709. 01:08:02 for me, is to constantly be questioning these things. And if I recognize one of these
710. 01:08:09 idea cults, I really want to start to distance myself from that. That doesn't mean like I'm not
711. 01:08:18 listening to Mac power users or whatever, but it means I'm going to have my eyes open when I engage
712. 01:08:24 with this. I think if you go into an idea cult thinking you're going to change people's minds,
713. 01:08:30 you're wasting your time. So you can go observe, but just know what you're getting into.
714. 01:08:37 It seems like there are a lot of these out there. If you, like when you say that you're going to try
715. 01:08:45 to avoid them, the question is going to be at what point is it an idea cult in it? What point is it
716. 01:08:51 a strong opinion? Yeah, that's fair. Right. So there are going to be people who share your
717. 01:08:57 opinion. Is that an idea cult? Like where does that start and end? Probably up for debate.
718. 01:09:03 There are a number of folks now that I've been hearing from that like this app agnostic concept
719. 01:09:11 that I've talked about for a few months now, maybe longer than that. Going back to plain text files
720. 01:09:18 and staying away from the special formats and such or the systems that lock you into it, you can't
721. 01:09:25 even get at the data. Rome research. Like these are things that I tend to promote and push.
722. 01:09:32 Is that an idea cult? Because I've got a lot of people starting to follow that.
723. 01:09:36 And is that something I need to be cautious on? Right? So where's the line here? Do you get what
724. 01:09:43 I'm and I'm not saying is wrong. I'm just trying to work through that in my own brain.
725. 01:09:48 Well, what Adam Grant would say is that if you find yourself saying blank is always good or
726. 01:09:55 blank is never bad, then you may be a member of an idea cult. I would say the former, probably not
727. 01:10:01 the latter. Okay. Then yeah, there are times when I would say using plain file formats that I have
728. 01:10:08 control over is always good. Like I would probably say that. So does that qualify? I would qualify
729. 01:10:14 then. Yeah, it's probably not as strong as some other idea cults out there. But yeah.
730. 01:10:20 And I think this is why there's like nuance to this, but really I want to recognize
731. 01:10:27 when I am in those echo chambers, basically. Because I do that too. I mean, with the work that I do
732. 01:10:36 at the suite setup, I'm kind of paid to say this is the one that is always good. This is my job to
733. 01:10:44 tell you, don't use anything else use this one. But even that has evolved over the years. If you've
734. 01:10:51 read any of my reviews in the last couple of years, it's kind of like this is the one we recommend
735. 01:10:57 for most people because of X, Y and Z. But if you want something that does this, then you need
736. 01:11:04 then check out this one. Right. Almost every review I've written over the last
737. 01:11:09 couple of years has been in that format where it hasn't just been a single recommendation.
738. 01:11:13 There is a recommendation for like most people recognizing who most people that come to
739. 01:11:19 the suite setup are and what they're looking for. Generally, they are creative people. They
740. 01:11:24 want to write or something like that and they want to become more productive. They want to have more
741. 01:11:29 better output, whatever that means to them, whether it's blog posts, book, whatever.
742. 01:11:34 So I can go into it from that frame of reference and recognize that this is probably for that
743. 01:11:41 person what I would recommend. But there's always nuance to it. And the idea cult thing that always
744. 01:11:48 good or never bad, that's kind of like the binary bias, I think is how he frames it.
745. 01:11:57 Where like it's either good or it's bad, there is no gray area, there's nothing in between and
746. 01:12:01 nothing is really that simple. And you make the point that binary bias can be with your emotions
747. 01:12:06 as well as with issues. And I'm probably going to be very bad at this, but my goal is any ways to
748. 01:12:13 recognize the spectrum with all this stuff. And to try to understand the perspectives of the other
749. 01:12:19 people who have different opinions of the different points on the spectrum.
750. 01:12:23 That's fair. I think it's just something to be aware of it. I would struggle to say
751. 01:12:29 I don't want to do this at all, because I do have some points that I think
752. 01:12:34 are important enough that I'll ascribe to them or promote them, create them maybe potentially.
753. 01:12:42 I don't know if this whole epic, nausic thing is something I created. I don't think it is, but
754. 01:12:46 that concept is probably one I would stand on and say, yeah, sure, to use his definition,
755. 01:12:53 yeah, it's an idea, Colt. I just know that I've been burnt by doing other things.
756. 01:12:57 So I'm going to stand on it for now. But if someone can make a strong argument
757. 01:13:04 against that, I'm all ears. And there are places where
758. 01:13:10 I violate my own rules with that as well. I have special file formats that I use regularly for
759. 01:13:22 video editing and such. So there's a lot of stuff that I do that does require things outside of that.
760. 01:13:30 And yet I still promote plain files. I'll get off that high horse.
761. 01:13:36 Which is completely fine, I think. You do want to attract your people. I mean,
762. 01:13:42 Funky Mosquito in the chat mentions that this is tribalism. Well, Seth Godin wrote a book called
763. 01:13:49 Tribes, which is all about attracting and serving your tribes. So it's not all bad, I think.
764. 01:13:55 Right. Right. At least from who are you going to help perspective because PC users probably
765. 01:14:03 don't care what I have to say. But I think if we really want to land on the truth, then
766. 01:14:11 all we can really do is change ourselves in our perspective and be willing to see the other side.
767. 01:14:17 And I think the moment that you enter into these idea cults and don't recognize
768. 01:14:23 what you're walking into, you potentially slam the door on that sort of stuff. You got to tread
769. 01:14:30 carefully with that, I think. Right. Right. And then also, when it comes to these issues and things,
770. 01:14:37 complexity isn't necessarily a bad thing. We don't have to just make something
771. 01:14:43 stupid, simple, right or wrong. We can admit that there are different levels of nuance
772. 01:14:52 with this issue, which I guess, looking back at the approach I've taken to the
773. 01:14:56 sweet setup reviews recently, that's kind of what I've done is saying, oh, it's not as simple.
774. 01:15:02 Just pick the best task management app or pick the best email up. That's kind of why we came
775. 01:15:07 out with those quizzes because there's different criteria. And I just got sick of people asking me
776. 01:15:11 like, okay, so which task manager should I use? And I have to ask the questions, well, like,
777. 01:15:15 do you want due dates and start dates? Where do you want to access it from? That sort of thing.
778. 01:15:21 Right. And then it took my mental flowchart and turned it into quiz.
779. 01:15:27 And I want to point out, whenever you have things that you're recommending,
780. 01:15:35 I had a person, this is within the last two weeks, had a person ask me an opinion on
781. 01:15:41 a computer that they wanted to upgrade to. And they've been a fairly long time Mac user,
782. 01:15:50 Apple user, they were laying out kind of like what you're saying, like, what is your situation?
783. 01:15:56 My default is you've been a long time Mac user, obviously, by a new Mac, like, that's
784. 01:16:02 easy answer in my head. But I was like, okay, well, let's take what are you trying to do with it?
785. 01:16:08 And they laid out the things they're doing for work, the things that they're
786. 01:16:12 in the process of getting into it. It's like, well, based on what you're telling me,
787. 01:16:16 you probably need a PC. Like, I don't want to be someone who takes someone who's an Apple user
788. 01:16:22 and puts you on a PC. But what you're telling me, if everything you just explained is 100% true
789. 01:16:29 when you're going to follow through on all of that, this is what I would recommend. And it's
790. 01:16:33 against what I would normally want someone to do. But you have to be willing to put everything
791. 01:16:38 in context, right? So it's okay. I like that you're willing to, like, take people down
792. 01:16:44 a decision tree. It's something that I've, I have struggled with in the past, like, don't tell me
793. 01:16:51 the one thing that beats all the others. Like, walk me through what works best for
794. 01:16:57 my situation. We had this in, I just did a bank of, did office hours this past Wednesday with
795. 01:17:04 Team Analog on Analog Joe. And one of the gentlemen who was there had some very pointed
796. 01:17:12 questions about a specific app that he was looking for. It's like, it really depends. And
797. 01:17:19 I can't tell you what the answer is because I'm not getting enough information to point you in the
798. 01:17:25 right direction. So yes, context is important. That's the most frustrating thing.
799. 01:17:32 Yes, if I can't get all the data, I can't make a recommendation. You have to let me know
800. 01:17:38 what the way that you work. And then I can recommend something. Right. Right. Yeah. Until then,
801. 01:17:43 I'm going to tell you grab a notebook. So here's my default answer until you give me more information
802. 01:17:50 to tell me otherwise. And a fancy fountain pen. Totally. This kind of reminds me of something
803. 01:17:56 in chapter nine, the, the dumbstruck effect where they, or where Adam talks about the sage on the
804. 01:18:05 stage and the lecture format, which is typically what people gravitate to, but is actually really
805. 01:18:11 bad for actually learning. So I don't want to be that, that person, which is a little bit tricky,
806. 01:18:21 because at the same time, like Toastmasters and speaking competitions and things like that,
807. 01:18:27 in some sense, I'm sort of working towards that. But I don't think just because you are a speaker
808. 01:18:36 doing like a professional, you get a professional speaking gig, whatever you're presenting on a topic
809. 01:18:42 that you have to default into this format. There are ways, I think, that you can overcome this.
810. 01:18:49 Michael Port does a great job of talking about this in the heroic public speaking class, because
811. 01:18:56 the last, the last session in the, the self-paced one is a speech that he gave. It's a keynote
812. 01:19:03 speech. It's like an hour long. And he incorporates not just like his story and the elements of giving
813. 01:19:08 a good speech, but there's a huge section where the audience is mingling, like there's audience
814. 01:19:14 participation and then they come back together at the end. So I think it's easy to kind of click
815. 01:19:19 into like, well, this is the default format, but start looking for new and more interesting ways to,
816. 01:19:26 to mix things up, which kind of leads into the last chapter in this section. Like that's not the
817. 01:19:31 way we've always done it as it pertains to lectures, presenting from slides, standing up in front of
818. 01:19:36 people. That's the way that we've always done it. But it doesn't mean that that's the way that we
819. 01:19:42 have to do it. Right, right. Like whenever I give talks at our church, two things kind of
820. 01:19:49 talking about the sage on the stage thing, it's pretty common for people to see me. I'm the IT
821. 01:19:53 director of the church. I'm talking at the church about tech in some way. So it's very easy for
822. 01:19:59 people to project. I'm the expert onto me. And I try to make sure I'm not necessarily like,
823. 01:20:08 I know a lot and I'm probably an expert in a few very small areas, but not all of them. Like,
824. 01:20:14 I am very far from being an expert on everything technology that doesn't exist. So I'm very careful
825. 01:20:20 to point that out. Like, if I get a question, like, I'm going to lay that, that foundation there's
826. 01:20:26 like, that's not always, not always the case. So yes. But at the same time,
827. 01:20:32 talking about the conventions, like when we get talks and stuff, like people get up talk,
828. 01:20:37 you have your slides. That's what I do. But, and I think you're the same way. Like, if I'm
829. 01:20:42 going to put something on the screen, it's because there's a specific image I want in your brain.
830. 01:20:47 Or I'm trying to show you how something works. It's really hard to explain in words. For example,
831. 01:20:54 like one of the last talks I gave, I was telling the story of a new technology that had come out
832. 01:21:00 that people hated and really wanted to not become a big deal. It was the automobile. But I told the
833. 01:21:06 whole story without telling you what the technology was. And then the moment that I revealed what it
834. 01:21:13 was, I put the old Model T up on the screen. It was black leading up to that. But I put a Model T
835. 01:21:19 up because that was the one that was kind of the talking point that we were going through.
836. 01:21:24 I didn't want people looking at a Corvette, like a brand new C8. I didn't want that on screen.
837. 01:21:29 I wanted the one that was from back in the time, right? So I'm picking and choosing those very
838. 01:21:34 specifically because there's an image that I want to put into your brain. Another piece of that
839. 01:21:40 talk was talking about London taxi drivers. Like we've talked about this, right? The spatial piece
840. 01:21:45 of how London taxi drivers develop their brain, right? Yeah. I told that story. But to do that,
841. 01:21:52 I brought up a couple images of the most difficult intersections in London so that people could
842. 01:21:58 understand how difficult it is to drive in London because most of us have not been there, right?
843. 01:22:03 So anyway, conventions like, yes, you can do things in the same way. But I like to tweak what
844. 01:22:10 the norm is. I'm not putting words on a slide and just going to read it to you. I despise that. I
845. 01:22:15 please stop if you do that. But these are all any color you want as long as it's black.
846. 01:22:20 Good job, Michael. All of these things are things that you can tweak and use to your
847. 01:22:27 benefits. But at the same time, traditional ways of doing some of those things are not always great.
848. 01:22:33 Yep. Let's see. Anything else from this section? I mean, there's lots of other stuff we could talk
849. 01:22:39 about. I guess the other thing I want to hit on here would be the judging yourself versus judging
850. 01:22:48 your work. There's a whole flowchart with this. And I think this hits on something we talked about
851. 01:22:58 with the practice by Seth Godin. And I have had to learn over the years to separate myself from the
852. 01:23:07 thing that I have made. When you end up shipping something, you have essentially taken a snapshot
853. 01:23:18 of your thoughts on a particular topic at that moment in time. And it is difficult to disassociate
854. 01:23:28 your identity from the way that you used to think. But it is also very important, especially for
855. 01:23:34 creatives, especially if you are constantly rethinking things, be willing to say, "Well,
856. 01:23:39 that's what I used to think," but it has changed. And then the other thing related to that is in
857. 01:23:47 chapter 10, we hear disagree but commit again, which is from the Jeff Bezos thing. Essentially,
858. 01:23:54 what that is saying is, "Are you willing to gamble with me on this?" And if you are willing to do that,
859. 01:24:03 is an indication of the culture of the company or the organization that you are a part of.
860. 01:24:09 He talks in this chapter, which I thought was kind of cool, that the teams that are psychologically
861. 01:24:15 safe, they actually report more errors, which kind of seems contradictory because if you're
862. 01:24:22 psychologically safe, then you're willing to admit your mistakes and get them fixed. The Toyota way,
863. 01:24:30 eventually you're going to iron all those things out. He makes the point, though, that they probably
864. 01:24:37 make much less because when you are in a psychologically safe environment, you are willing to share your
865. 01:24:45 errors when you aren't in that environment, you just sweep them under the rug. So you really
866. 01:24:49 don't know how many errors are being made, which I thought was a very profound insight there.
867. 01:24:56 It is interesting that if you feel comfortable in your job and such, and you feel secure,
868. 01:25:02 you're more willing to point out the mistakes you made or that your group is making.
869. 01:25:06 But if we're not comfortable there, I'm not going to point this out because I don't know that this
870. 01:25:12 is going to go over real well. It's an interesting phenomenon, I think. But it seems like, I would say
871. 01:25:21 probably you and I are very comfortable in our positions and as such that we could do that
872. 01:25:26 very comfortably. So it would be an easy thing for us to do. I would concur.
873. 01:25:31 Real briefly, I'll talk about the last part here, which is part four, the conclusion. Chapter 11 is
874. 01:25:38 escaping tunnel vision. And then there is just like the little epilogue at the very end. But chapter
875. 01:25:44 11, there's some interesting stuff in here. So it makes the point that the average person is
876. 01:25:50 12 different jobs throughout their life. And he talks about identity foreclosure, which is
877. 01:25:56 attaching to a single identity or a fixed mindset. This reminded me a lot of the conversation about
878. 01:26:05 how to be everything. I can't find the specific point about when and how you make a shift. He does
879. 01:26:18 talk quite a bit in here about the reviews or the checkups. And I feel like when you do a career
880. 01:26:25 checkup, that's the point when you realize, well, I'm on this track, but I should actually be over
881. 01:26:30 here on this track. And that reminded me of Emily Wopniks, where you're going this way and then
882. 01:26:34 you get over here and then you go up this way. And then you go way back over here. But you're
883. 01:26:38 not going backwards necessarily, you're still going up, you're just moving laterally to a different
884. 01:26:45 line, different parallel. And I feel like this conversation in this chapter kind of helped
885. 01:26:51 solidify that for me. So I feel even more strongly that, yes, you should be everything.
886. 01:26:57 Be willing to sidestep and keep going forward. Yep, exactly. He also talks in this section
887. 01:27:06 about how our lives and identities are open systems. He defines open and closed systems. I don't really
888. 01:27:12 want to talk a whole lot about that because we're going to talk lots about systems in the next book.
889. 01:27:18 So it's easier for the next episode. Yep. You know, we'll discuss how systems work.
890. 01:27:23 Maybe a little. Anything else? I don't think so. I feel like we've covered all the high points on
891. 01:27:30 it. There's of course a lot between those points that we've, like we're catching all the peaks as we
892. 01:27:36 drive by, right? Typical Instagram feed. So, you know, we're catching all the high points as we're
893. 01:27:42 going across this one. There's a lot, again, like we were talking about earlier, as he tells these
894. 01:27:46 stories, there's a lot of little tidbits as he tells the story. So yes, we're sharing
895. 01:27:53 these high points, but there's a lot more to it. So yes, there's a lot in it. We could go on and on
896. 01:28:01 on about this one. All right. Do you have any action items from this book? I plan to think again.
897. 01:28:07 The cheater ones. No, I don't. This one was hard for me. I felt like I was, I actually tried to
898. 01:28:15 figure out what to do with this. And what I discovered is that I'm neck deep in selling and buying
899. 01:28:25 our house, like moving from one to the other. And I've been using a lot of this in that process.
900. 01:28:34 Okay. Let me think about things from a technical scientific stance and try to get my emotions out
901. 01:28:41 of the mix, which is not an easy thing to do when you're talking about your house. No, right? So,
902. 01:28:46 I've been doing that quite a bit and using some of this material in the midst of conversations with
903. 01:28:55 my wife, with agents, with all the people involved in selling and buying houses. Like,
904. 01:29:01 there's a lot to that, right? So I've been using a lot of this and there's been a number of times
905. 01:29:06 where my wife and I are discussing something and I can tell she's a little more emotional about it
906. 01:29:13 than I am and just like, okay, hold on, hold on back. Think about it this way. Like, this is just
907. 01:29:18 a pure science stance. So I have used things in those ways. And I've found that that's very
908. 01:29:24 helpful. But I don't know how to tell you what that action item is. Like, I haven't figured out
909. 01:29:30 how to articulate what that is. Does that make sense? Like, it's just hard to, what do I do with it?
910. 01:29:36 Sometimes these books like, yeah, start doing this, stop saying this. Do that. Like, sometimes
911. 01:29:42 it's very clear. This is telling you ways to think. So how does that materialize in the physical realm?
912. 01:29:52 I don't know. That's what I'm getting at. Well, I've got two specific ones which aren't like,
913. 01:29:57 do this, but more keep this in your repertoire for specific situations. So I mentioned the
914. 01:30:06 separation of identities working with family. That's the easy example. But there are other places
915. 01:30:12 where you need to protect the relationship, but you also need to have this debate in order to get
916. 01:30:20 any sort of resolution. So he mentions in chapter four, the tactic of using the phrase,
917. 01:30:28 can we debate? Which I think is pretty genius. Because if you're just talking to somebody,
918. 01:30:33 there isn't a real clear distinction that like, oh, we've left the talking as friends to
919. 01:30:39 talking as people with differing views and we're trying to solve a problem at church, work,
920. 01:30:44 whatever. And I feel like that is a very clear distinction. Like, we are transferring from
921. 01:30:50 this mode to this other mode and hopefully will protect the feelings and the relationship better.
922. 01:30:58 So I do want to keep that in my back pocket, I guess, and use that at some point. The other
923. 01:31:06 thing I want to do is, and this is from chapter 10, that's not the way we've always done it.
924. 01:31:14 I want to ask myself and others when appropriate, how do you know? Because I feel that question is not
925. 01:31:22 very pointed, like that is not very threatening in a lot of the situations where I could envision
926. 01:31:29 using that. But also it forces the other person to articulate why we're just defaulting to a
927. 01:31:38 certain way of doing something. And again, I don't have a specific place that I want to use that in
928. 01:31:44 the next two weeks. But I feel like those two are great ways. Back to my action item, expanding
929. 01:31:50 my vocabulary. This is more like my vocabulary for debate and disagreement.
930. 01:31:56 How to start them, how to maintain them. Sure. I applaud you for that. I'm not usually one that
931. 01:32:04 wants to change my vocabulary. I just become aware of it, I guess. It's something I
932. 01:32:08 am pointed out, tends to just be in the back of my mind anyway. I don't know. I'm weird.
933. 01:32:14 That's fair. Let's go to style and rating. I guess my book I go first.
934. 01:32:19 Yep, good luck. Well, we talked a little bit about my epiphany of the stories not being as
935. 01:32:27 awesome as I thought they would be. I'm okay with that. I think the book itself is pretty awesome.
936. 01:32:35 I really like Adam Grant's style. It's entertaining. It's not a slog to get through, which a lot of
937. 01:32:45 like people in his position who write books like this can definitely feel that way. There was someone
938. 01:32:51 in the chat who had mentioned earlier that Daniel Kahneman, right, thinking fast and slow,
939. 01:32:56 that is one of those big ideas that comes up over and over and over again, but we don't really
940. 01:33:01 mention it. The reason we don't really mention it, I think, is because neither of us were really
941. 01:33:05 excited about reading that book. That tempered the takeaways from the book. Not that you have to
942. 01:33:13 really sell a really powerful idea. I get that a lot for a lot of these people, just the act of
943. 01:33:18 writing it and communicating it. That is their contribution to the world. I think a lot of people,
944. 01:33:25 though, in books that have been written since that one, that have taken that concept and packaged
945. 01:33:32 it a little bit differently, those are the ones that have resonated with us. I'm thinking about
946. 01:33:36 the "Never Split the Difference" by Chris Voss. They talk about thinking fast and slow at
947. 01:33:44 different points in there. Thinking fast and slow is never the one though that comes to our minds.
948. 01:33:48 I feel like, again, could be one of those. I feel like the way that Adam Grant communicates
949. 01:33:55 is really well done and makes me... It's like you had a good meal and you think about that even
950. 01:34:04 after you step away from the table, you think back to like, "Oh, that was a really great dinner.
951. 01:34:10 The food was great. The conversation was great. Good company," whatever. You have fond memories
952. 01:34:13 of that experience. That's what I'm left with with this book. I also don't think I have any spots
953. 01:34:21 where I quoted Adam Grant because I have these different emojis that I use in my Mind Node files.
954. 01:34:27 I have one for the quotes that I want to remember. There wasn't anything like one liner-ish
955. 01:34:36 that totally encapsulated it outside of context that I wanted to put into my quote book, which
956. 01:34:42 was, again, a little bit alarming to me, but also I think that's not necessarily a bad thing.
957. 01:34:47 That's probably a good thing because it means everything is tied together very cohesively
958. 01:34:51 because I didn't ever stumble upon one thing that I felt like, "Oh, I want to cherry pick that thing
959. 01:34:56 out of here." I do think that there are more profound, more impactful books that we have read,
960. 01:35:04 which is the only reason why I'm not going to write this five stars, but it's really, really good.
961. 01:35:10 I'm really, really glad that we read it. I do think I would recommend this to just about anybody
962. 01:35:16 who listens to this podcast. I'm going to rate it at 4.5. Again, just because it doesn't feel like
963. 01:35:25 completely life-changing walking away from it, but I have nothing negative to say about it.
964. 01:35:34 I wish it would have been longer, to be honest, even though it is 250 pages and it took me the
965. 01:35:39 entire two weeks to get through. I got done and I had that disappointed feeling like, "Ah, now I've
966. 01:35:44 got to find another book to read, but I want to keep reading this one."
967. 01:35:48 I'm with you. It's an interesting book to go through. It took me about the third chapter to
968. 01:35:56 figure out what was going on with the stories, which was why the very beginning of it feels very
969. 01:36:01 fuzzy to me. I couldn't quite put my finger on what was going on, but I knew it was different
970. 01:36:07 and I knew there was something strange about it. I couldn't quite tell if I liked it or not
971. 01:36:12 because it didn't fit my normal. Once I discovered what he was doing,
972. 01:36:19 it was fine. I didn't struggle with that at all, but because it doesn't follow...
973. 01:36:26 we were talking about earlier, it doesn't follow the normal way of storytelling and then debrief
974. 01:36:32 after, which means that you have to approach it somewhat differently, mentally. That's fine.
975. 01:36:42 That's not a bad thing. It just means that from a readability stance, I felt like I had to focus
976. 01:36:48 on it a little bit more than normal. Again, not bad, just a thing to be aware of. As someone who
977. 01:36:56 is prone to distraction, this one I found I did better if I was reading it in the morning. A lot
978. 01:37:03 of time books I can read at night, but this one I found that I did better if I was reading it in
979. 01:37:09 the mornings because I was more focused at that time. I don't really understand why
980. 01:37:17 all those pieces came together in that way, but it was a thing that I just want to call out.
981. 01:37:22 I don't want to say it was a difficult book to read because it's not.
982. 01:37:28 I guess what I'm saying is it's not as easy as a lot of the others that we've
983. 01:37:35 covered. If you want something that's a little more difficult, just from a readability stance,
984. 01:37:41 I feel like this is solid. As far as the material that he's covering, I really loved it. There's a
985. 01:37:48 lot of great topics here. I think you're right in that we've covered a lot of things that maybe
986. 01:37:54 revolve around some of these concepts independently. They've not all been put together in this form,
987. 01:38:04 in the sense of be careful what you hold as foundational thoughts in your brain.
988. 01:38:09 We haven't had anybody tell you, "Please don't do that." That's a lot of what you come away with
989. 01:38:15 this from. Come away from this with. That I appreciate. I struggle to put it at the five.
990. 01:38:25 I feel like I want to put it at the five, but I shouldn't. I'll join you at 4.5 on this one.
991. 01:38:32 Again, I will recommend this to folks. I can't say I've done that at this point, but if someone
992. 01:38:40 wants to have a discussion around the idea of trying to maybe challenge your own beliefs
993. 01:38:48 or challenge the beliefs of a collective group, this is a solid one to go to. Just be ready for
994. 01:38:55 things to be a little bit different as far as style goes. That's, I think, the point I'm trying to
995. 01:39:00 get across. Anyway, 4.5. Awesome. Let's put this one on the shelf. What's next, Jobyleg?
996. 01:39:08 Work the system. Sam Carpenter, this one has come up a number of times by you. I feel like
997. 01:39:14 you've brought this one up a handful of times over a number of episodes. I'm not going to be
998. 01:39:20 able to place how many and such, but I feel like we need to cover this one for the number of times
999. 01:39:26 that we've talked about systems and the number of times that we've belabored systems and argued
1000. 01:39:33 against them and told them, "That won't work." How many times have we done this? I feel like we need
1001. 01:39:39 to read a system book about the system. Here we go. 118. It'll be work the system. Sam Carpenter.
1002. 01:39:48 Then what are we doing after that, Mike? Another new book, which is actually not out yet as we
1003. 01:39:54 record this, but we both really enjoyed essentialism by Greg McKeown, and he has a new book coming out
1004. 01:40:03 April 27th, Amazon says, called Effortless. I think this is going to be a fun one. I preordered
1005. 01:40:14 this and he and his wife co-presented in an Effortless webinar, which I watched the other day.
1006. 01:40:23 I feel like this one could go one of two directions. This could either be a vast departure
1007. 01:40:33 from essentialism, which I don't really anticipate, but it could feel a bait and switch because
1008. 01:40:41 essentialism is so focused on pick the right things. Now we're going to be focusing on it. I think
1009. 01:40:48 the efficiency aspect of that, but I expect it to be done in a way where it actually doubles down
1010. 01:40:55 on the essentialism message, which that I'm not quite sure what that ends up being. I've
1011. 01:41:03 kind of seen these as two polar opposites in the productivity world for a very long time. I'm really
1012. 01:41:10 looking forward to reading this one. I think it'll be a fun one. Mosquitos saying that he downloaded
1013. 01:41:16 work the system from their website and has been spammed. Pretty much all of those will operate
1014. 01:41:21 that way, but yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Probably a ding against it to begin with though.
1015. 01:41:27 Yeah, that is a good point though. We should call that out. If people do want to read this,
1016. 01:41:32 you can download the entire book for free from the website in a PDF form. In the show notes,
1017. 01:41:39 I always include the Amazon links because I prefer the physical books and I have bought
1018. 01:41:43 work the system. It is on my bookshelf back here. That one will be in the show notes,
1019. 01:41:48 but if you want to download it for free from the website, you can do that too at workthesystem.com.
1020. 01:41:52 Just know you're going to get pitched. What happens with free stuff?
1021. 01:41:56 You got any gap books? I don't because selling a house takes time, Mike. I barely got through this
1022. 01:42:04 one. That it does. I haven't started work the system yet. I'll be honest. I think it's going to
1023. 01:42:12 be tight for me to get that one done in two weeks. I'm not even going to attempt it this time around.
1024. 01:42:18 All right. You? I don't have one on here, but I do have to take the walk of shame and
1025. 01:42:27 admit that I still have not finished the road less stupid. I do have a sabbatical coming up,
1026. 01:42:34 and I will try to finish that one along with work the system. I think I will be able to do that.
1027. 01:42:41 I'm not picking a gap book until I get through that one.
1028. 01:42:43 Good call. Good call. All right. Thanks, everyone, for listening. Thank you to the people who have
1029. 01:42:52 joined us live. Thank you specifically to the Bookworm Premium Club members who are willing to
1030. 01:42:58 support the show financially. Help us keep the lights on. If you go to bookworm.fm/membership,
1031. 01:43:07 you can sign up for $5 a month and you will get access to all of my mind node files from the books
1032. 01:43:15 that we've read. You'll get access to a couple secret sections on the Bookworm Club, and you will
1033. 01:43:21 get access to a wallpaper that I designed, and a couple of extra things like some gap book episodes
1034. 01:43:28 that Joe had recorded back in the day. If you would like to support the show, you can do that
1035. 01:43:36 at bookworm.fm/membership. And we'd love to have you there. So if you're reading along with us,
1036. 01:43:43 pick up work the system by Sam Carpenter. Read through that. We'll discuss it in a couple weeks.