119: Effortless by Greg McKeown

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1. 00:00:00 How you feeling Joe Bueleg?
2. 00:00:01 Doing pretty well.
3. 00:00:02 I think so anyway.
4. 00:00:04 Everybody thinks I'm dying, but I'm not.
5. 00:00:06 I promise.
6. 00:00:06 [laughter]
7. 00:00:08 Yeah.
8. 00:00:09 Well, for those who haven't been following you on Twitter,
9. 00:00:14 you're not feeling the greatest, but you're muscling through
10. 00:00:17 for the Bookworm fans, so we appreciate that.
11. 00:00:20 It's true.
12. 00:00:21 This past weekend, I started to cough and got a fever
13. 00:00:26 and a few things and thought,
14. 00:00:28 those sound very familiar for symptoms.
15. 00:00:31 Joe's a positive person though.
16. 00:00:33 That's what I've been telling people,
17. 00:00:34 is I'm a positive person.
18. 00:00:36 And I had to cancel a couple things this week
19. 00:00:40 and had been slowly catching up.
20. 00:00:44 Trying to figure out what all's going on in the world
21. 00:00:46 that I've missed since I kind of just hibernated in red books.
22. 00:00:50 Not that there's anything wrong with that.
23. 00:00:52 Absolutely not.
24. 00:00:53 I'm now emerging for the first time since all of that began.
25. 00:00:57 And we're here.
26. 00:01:00 I think I might sound a little funny, but other than that,
27. 00:01:03 I feel fine.
28. 00:01:04 I don't really have any symptoms to speak of at this point.
29. 00:01:07 So that's good.
30. 00:01:08 That's kind of where I sit.
31. 00:01:10 I'm glad you're feeling better, but now if we go a little bit
32. 00:01:13 off the rails an hour into the episode, people know why.
33. 00:01:16 Yep, exactly.
34. 00:01:17 So if Joe starts to ramble incoherently, now you know why.
35. 00:01:23 That is it 100%.
36. 00:01:25 Well, I am glad to be recording this episode with you.
37. 00:01:29 I am looking forward to talking about today's book.
38. 00:01:32 Before we do that, we've got a little bit of follow up
39. 00:01:35 that we should touch on here.
40. 00:01:38 Did you make your working procedures?
41. 00:01:41 Started to.
42. 00:01:42 I started to put together some--
43. 00:01:44 and I specifically did this for my work stuff.
44. 00:01:49 And that has been--
45. 00:01:53 the nice part is that I started doing that last week
46. 00:01:56 and worked with my assistant to put those together.
47. 00:02:01 And we were in the process of check listing some things.
48. 00:02:04 And then Joe disappeared every week.
49. 00:02:07 And he was able to just take those and run with them.
50. 00:02:10 I really haven't been consulted at all this week
51. 00:02:13 as a result of that.
52. 00:02:14 We even had a couple folks step in who had never done some
53. 00:02:19 events and never done some different pieces.
54. 00:02:21 And they did really well with it.
55. 00:02:22 Having not ever touched certain hardware,
56. 00:02:26 and we're able to work the checklists and systems
57. 00:02:29 and follow the things and be in pretty good shape.
58. 00:02:32 So I would call that a success.
59. 00:02:35 Now, obviously, there are a lot of procedures
60. 00:02:38 that are yet to be documented.
61. 00:02:40 I don't think we'll ever get done with that.
62. 00:02:42 But it's encouraging to see that it at least helps in one arena.
63. 00:02:48 Now, there are a lot of other arenas,
64. 00:02:51 personally, that I want to do this for.
65. 00:02:53 But Joe's motivation and energy level has been a little subpar.
66. 00:02:57 So we're not there, obviously.
67. 00:03:01 So is what it is.
68. 00:03:04 Well, the fact that nothing completely blew up
69. 00:03:08 while you were gone, at least to your knowledge,
70. 00:03:11 I consider that a huge win.
71. 00:03:13 Yep.
72. 00:03:14 Yep.
73. 00:03:14 There was an event that happened last night
74. 00:03:18 that they moved into a different room, which
75. 00:03:20 meant that I had to have a sound tech for it.
76. 00:03:22 And I didn't really know anything about it
77. 00:03:25 because they just took care of it, which is exactly what
78. 00:03:29 I wanted to happen.
79. 00:03:31 So I'm not going to argue at all.
80. 00:03:33 Beautiful.
81. 00:03:34 All right.
82. 00:03:34 Your second one here is the general operating principles.
83. 00:03:38 The GOPs.
84. 00:03:40 Is that kind of related, or is this something
85. 00:03:43 separate you can report on?
86. 00:03:44 I think on that one, you could probably just
87. 00:03:46 draw a line through it.
88. 00:03:49 All right, because Joe, I didn't even attempt this.
89. 00:03:53 I looked at it on the list, and I thought, that's cool.
90. 00:03:58 No, we're not going to go there.
91. 00:04:01 That's just nothing.
92. 00:04:02 So it's not a thing I even attempted
93. 00:04:05 because the more I thought about it, the more I thought.
94. 00:04:08 This is a cool idea.
95. 00:04:10 I understand the intent behind this.
96. 00:04:13 I just don't think it's going to be something
97. 00:04:15 that's going to work out for me.
98. 00:04:18 At least in the short term.
99. 00:04:19 It might be something for the long term,
100. 00:04:21 but I don't have enough people involved with what I'm doing
101. 00:04:23 to make that worthwhile.
102. 00:04:25 Right now, like from work, it's me and one part-timer
103. 00:04:28 underneath of me for the stuff I do online.
104. 00:04:30 It doesn't really go beyond me.
105. 00:04:33 I mean, maybe we could do it for Bookworm,
106. 00:04:35 but that seems excessive.
107. 00:04:37 But no, I didn't even touch this one.
108. 00:04:40 I didn't even attempt it.
109. 00:04:41 I looked at it once and thought, uh-uh.
110. 00:04:44 Well, if you wanted to do this for Bookworm, I'm fine with that,
111. 00:04:47 but I feel at this point, we know what Bookworm is.
112. 00:04:50 Yeah.
113. 00:04:51 And some people love it.
114. 00:04:53 Some people wish it was something different
115. 00:04:56 and I had some different stories to tell.
116. 00:04:58 Correct.
117. 00:04:59 But I'm working on it.
118. 00:05:01 I'm working on it.
119. 00:05:02 We've gathered feedback over the years at this point.
120. 00:05:05 And most of the time we review the feedback.
121. 00:05:08 And when we do, that's cool.
122. 00:05:11 Or it's probably more so that Joe comes up
123. 00:05:14 with some random ideas like,
124. 00:05:16 maybe we could change the format and do this.
125. 00:05:18 And Mike's like, but then people wouldn't get this.
126. 00:05:20 And I'm like, well, yeah, you're bright.
127. 00:05:21 Well, I'm the grandpa who doesn't like change, so.
128. 00:05:26 That is what it is.
129. 00:05:27 I force you in to change once in a while.
130. 00:05:28 Like we're live streaming on YouTube right now.
131. 00:05:30 So I do force you into it occasionally.
132. 00:05:33 Yep.
133. 00:05:33 Video was never a thing that I would have agreed to
134. 00:05:36 when we started this.
135. 00:05:37 Yep.
136. 00:05:39 It's true.
137. 00:05:39 It's true.
138. 00:05:40 And yeah, here we are.
139. 00:05:41 And it's turned out really well, I think, so.
140. 00:05:43 It's true.
141. 00:05:44 Hey, on the topic of feedback, by the way.
142. 00:05:45 And not, or blind all the time.
143. 00:05:48 There is one person in particular,
144. 00:05:50 if you look at the Bookworm Club,
145. 00:05:51 who represents, I don't know, half a dozen fiction authors,
146. 00:05:55 who is just desperate to get one of them on the show.
147. 00:05:59 Correct.
148. 00:05:59 It's not gonna happen.
149. 00:06:00 Yes.
150. 00:06:01 I rather enjoy, like, this is maybe the sick twisted part
151. 00:06:06 of my brain in that there are a number of people
152. 00:06:10 who send us these, like these people send us these things
153. 00:06:14 all the time.
154. 00:06:15 And I rather enjoy skimming them.
155. 00:06:18 I don't ever actually read them,
156. 00:06:19 'cause they're way too long.
157. 00:06:20 But they're entertaining at least, to read.
158. 00:06:23 It's like, oh, please read my memoir
159. 00:06:25 and share it with your audience.
160. 00:06:26 No.
161. 00:06:28 No, you're not Steve Jobs, I'm not gonna do that.
162. 00:06:30 The best part is all the follow up messages.
163. 00:06:33 Oh, yeah, definitely.
164. 00:06:34 It's kind of implied that you're gonna at least
165. 00:06:37 get back to them, and then when you don't,
166. 00:06:40 they kind of don't know what to do.
167. 00:06:42 It's like, oh, you must be really busy.
168. 00:06:43 Or no, sorry.
169. 00:06:46 Yep, still not gonna respond.
170. 00:06:48 It's usually three or four though.
171. 00:06:50 It's at least, we know it's at least two
172. 00:06:52 that you'll hear from every one of them.
173. 00:06:55 Sometimes you get the third, sometimes you get a fourth.
174. 00:06:58 I feel bad for those people,
175. 00:06:59 'cause I used to have to do that, but.
176. 00:07:01 Sure, there are some that make it into,
177. 00:07:05 like, my personal email spam filters,
178. 00:07:07 'cause there's another email address that I used to have
179. 00:07:09 on the site that would forward into that.
180. 00:07:13 But I don't ever respond to those either.
181. 00:07:17 So there are more even than what we see
182. 00:07:20 through that system, like, which is, wow.
183. 00:07:23 Saying something.
184. 00:07:24 (laughs)
185. 00:07:25 On the topic of fiction though,
186. 00:07:27 bombshell, breaking news,
187. 00:07:30 Mike is going to read a fiction book.
188. 00:07:32 You have been trying to get me to read fiction
189. 00:07:36 for a long time. (laughs)
190. 00:07:38 Recently, David Sparks has also been trying
191. 00:07:40 to get me to read fiction.
192. 00:07:41 Kindred spirits.
193. 00:07:42 And we have the relay members special
194. 00:07:46 that we have to record for Focused.
195. 00:07:49 So David floated the idea of reading a fiction book,
196. 00:07:54 and I said, well, if we're gonna do that,
197. 00:07:55 I gotta include Joe on this,
198. 00:07:57 because this has been his drum
199. 00:08:00 that he's been banging for the last several years.
200. 00:08:03 Yes.
201. 00:08:04 So we are going to read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
202. 00:08:09 and talk about it for the Focused Member Special,
203. 00:08:12 which will go out to all the relay FM members.
204. 00:08:14 So you don't need to be a member of Focused specifically,
205. 00:08:17 but if you are, then you will also get that special episode.
206. 00:08:20 It will not be part of the normal feed.
207. 00:08:23 And I am a little bit terrified, Joe.
208. 00:08:25 I have no idea what to expect.
209. 00:08:27 I feel like I can walk in one of these bookworm recordings
210. 00:08:30 and just off the cuff talk about anything in my mind node file.
211. 00:08:34 I have no idea what reading a fiction book
212. 00:08:36 is going to do to this workflow. (laughs)
213. 00:08:39 I think we're gonna force you to get in touch
214. 00:08:42 with your emotions.
215. 00:08:43 Mike, also, I just wanna point out some comments
216. 00:08:46 in the chat here and the earth is ending.
217. 00:08:49 Now I have to watch out for flying pigs at work.
218. 00:08:51 (laughs)
219. 00:08:53 These are the things in the chat at the moment.
220. 00:08:57 So this is a big deal and I'm excited for you.
221. 00:09:01 I'm nervous for you, but I'm excited for you.
222. 00:09:03 I think this will be fun.
223. 00:09:05 It'll be a good time.
224. 00:09:06 That's for sure.
225. 00:09:07 But regardless, this is something Mike texted me and said,
226. 00:09:11 "Hey, we have this idea about reading a fiction book,
227. 00:09:15 "are you in?"
228. 00:09:16 Like, "Obviously, why would I not?"
229. 00:09:19 Like, all the things line up, all the stars have aligned.
230. 00:09:23 And here we are with Mike volunteering himself
231. 00:09:28 to read a fiction book.
232. 00:09:29 And that's why I said that earlier.
233. 00:09:30 It's like, this is not a thing where I pitched something
234. 00:09:33 that would offer you the opportunity to read a fiction book.
235. 00:09:37 This was you reaching out to me saying,
236. 00:09:39 "Hey, here's this idea."
237. 00:09:41 Like, obviously I'm a yes, I'm all in.
238. 00:09:43 (laughs)
239. 00:09:44 - And it was really instigated by my kids
240. 00:09:47 because we were watching the Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy
241. 00:09:50 movie not too long ago.
242. 00:09:52 We love that movie and I know it's based on those books.
243. 00:09:55 And my kids were looking for something to read over the summer
244. 00:09:59 and I'm like, "Hey, would you be interested in reading?"
245. 00:10:01 There's a whole series of books that this movie is based on.
246. 00:10:04 Like, "Yeah, that'd be awesome."
247. 00:10:06 So we got the whole set from Amazon.
248. 00:10:09 We're just gonna read the first one
249. 00:10:10 for the special episode.
250. 00:10:12 - Yep, yep.
251. 00:10:14 - So my 11 year old Joshua,
252. 00:10:15 he is cranking through the first one.
253. 00:10:18 He's almost done with it already
254. 00:10:19 and he wants to talk to me about it too.
255. 00:10:21 So, I have internal pressure.
256. 00:10:23 I have pressure from all the sides to read fiction.
257. 00:10:26 - Good for you, good for you.
258. 00:10:29 It's good to know that more than one person is willing
259. 00:10:32 to pressure you into a more enjoyable experience
260. 00:10:36 with books, right?
261. 00:10:37 - Well, that is to be determined, but we will see.
262. 00:10:40 Well, we did just do an episode, by the way,
263. 00:10:44 I'm not sure if you listened to it, but--
264. 00:10:46 - I haven't yet, I saw it, but I haven't.
265. 00:10:48 - Yeah, reading and learning.
266. 00:10:50 I did not see this, but David had a lot
267. 00:10:55 of complimentary things to say about Bookworm.
268. 00:10:56 He basically said, "This is how he decides
269. 00:10:58 what Book's to listen to."
270. 00:10:59 So that was super cool to hear.
271. 00:11:01 I also got some great feedback from a couple of people
272. 00:11:03 about the Work the System episode.
273. 00:11:06 One person in particular said that they just love
274. 00:11:09 the conversational aspect of it and got a lot out of it,
275. 00:11:14 but also like agreed that maybe the whole book
276. 00:11:19 wasn't worth investing the time to read.
277. 00:11:24 Just get the gist of it, don't maybe buy that one,
278. 00:11:27 just download the PDF, whatever.
279. 00:11:29 So I guess we're staying true to our accidental mission
280. 00:11:32 of being the filter for people deciding
281. 00:11:34 what Book's to read.
282. 00:11:35 - It's so true.
283. 00:11:37 I look back on that sometimes and I'm amazed
284. 00:11:41 that we missed that.
285. 00:11:43 - Yeah.
286. 00:11:44 - Do you ever realize that?
287. 00:11:46 We started this as something that we thought
288. 00:11:49 people would join us in reading this,
289. 00:11:51 reading books in two weeks, and then we'll talk about it
290. 00:11:54 and then we could have a discussion with those
291. 00:11:55 who have read it online.
292. 00:11:58 That was kind of our thought process when we started this
293. 00:12:02 and didn't realize that we would be the not very short
294. 00:12:06 version of Blinkist.
295. 00:12:09 So here we are.
296. 00:12:10 - We should have known, Joe Buelegg,
297. 00:12:12 that people would be looking for a more effortless
298. 00:12:15 path to knowledge acquisition.
299. 00:12:17 - Ooh.
300. 00:12:19 - Which leads us into today's book.
301. 00:12:20 - Nailed it.
302. 00:12:21 - Which is Effortless by Greg McKeown,
303. 00:12:25 a follow up to Essentialism,
304. 00:12:27 which I think was one of both of us,
305. 00:12:29 one of our favorite books that we've ever read.
306. 00:12:33 And just kind of the right thing at the right time,
307. 00:12:36 which maybe is a little bit unfair to this book
308. 00:12:39 because I don't know how you follow up Essentialism
309. 00:12:41 with another book as good as Essentialism.
310. 00:12:44 But we're gonna get into that in a minute here.
311. 00:12:48 The format of this book is, of course, three separate parts.
312. 00:12:54 Part one is Effortless State,
313. 00:12:56 Part Two is Effortless Action,
314. 00:12:58 Part Two is Effortless Results.
315. 00:13:01 I have issues with the way these are broken up.
316. 00:13:04 There are exactly five chapters in each of these.
317. 00:13:08 And it seems like he kind of made these
318. 00:13:09 because he wanted those charts at the end of each section,
319. 00:13:14 which was kind of the summary.
320. 00:13:16 Some of these are definitely stronger than others.
321. 00:13:21 What were you thinking prior to diving into this book
322. 00:13:26 and then what was your initial impressions
323. 00:13:30 through the beginning of it?
324. 00:13:32 Were you, oh yeah, this is exactly what I expected.
325. 00:13:36 Were you kind of skeptical
326. 00:13:37 because there's no way he can follow Essentialism
327. 00:13:39 or you kind of let down
328. 00:13:40 'cause it wasn't as good as he thought it was gonna be?
329. 00:13:42 - Where do I land on all of it?
330. 00:13:43 - Sure.
331. 00:13:44 So the thing that was interesting to me
332. 00:13:47 is that we came off of Work the System into this.
333. 00:13:51 And we had Sam Carpenter kind of running
334. 00:13:56 his telephone business at us
335. 00:14:00 and was explaining how you put systems together
336. 00:14:03 and how you can optimize them
337. 00:14:04 and how everything is a system.
338. 00:14:06 And we came off of that into this, right?
339. 00:14:09 And in my head, because I had Sam Carpenter's mantras
340. 00:14:14 floating around in my brain whenever I picked this up,
341. 00:14:20 the first thing I thought of whenever I read the word,
342. 00:14:22 effortless, the tagline is make it easier
343. 00:14:25 to do what matters most.
344. 00:14:27 And in my head that meant systems
345. 00:14:31 because we came from Work the System
346. 00:14:34 and worked into this one.
347. 00:14:36 And that's fine.
348. 00:14:37 But I don't know that Greg McEwen would say
349. 00:14:42 that his book on effortless is about systems.
350. 00:14:47 I mean, he probably would if you tried to define a system
351. 00:14:52 into like general working on tasks and projects.
352. 00:14:57 I think he could probably get there,
353. 00:14:59 but I don't think that was his intent there.
354. 00:15:01 But that's what I came into it with.
355. 00:15:03 So knowing essentialism and having read that
356. 00:15:08 and appreciated that, this, having worked the system
357. 00:15:12 in the background and also your explanation of it
358. 00:15:14 whenever you first introduced it of his background
359. 00:15:17 and why he wrote it and how he got to this point
360. 00:15:21 in putting this book together,
361. 00:15:23 because of all that background,
362. 00:15:25 it ended up being pretty much what I expected
363. 00:15:28 'cause it does fit a lot of that.
364. 00:15:31 I don't know that there's any specific point
365. 00:15:36 at which I was surprised.
366. 00:15:38 But at the same time, like there's a lot of good nuggets
367. 00:15:42 in this one, I think.
368. 00:15:43 So I don't know if that answers what you're after.
369. 00:15:46 No, that's exactly what I was going for
370. 00:15:49 because I agree that work the system tainted this one
371. 00:15:54 to blood over.
372. 00:15:55 But I do feel that this one kind of feels more
373. 00:16:00 like a natural follow up to work the system
374. 00:16:02 and it does essentialism.
375. 00:16:04 It does.
376. 00:16:05 Which that maybe is an unfair statement to say
377. 00:16:08 because you're kind of in a tough spot as an author.
378. 00:16:10 You wrote this book, "Essentialism,"
379. 00:16:11 which completely blew up
380. 00:16:13 and if he would have kept referring back to it.
381. 00:16:15 As I said in essentialism,
382. 00:16:17 we probably would have-- - Why hate that?
383. 00:16:18 - Docked him for that, right?
384. 00:16:20 So he's gotta just leave that behind
385. 00:16:22 and go to the new thing, whatever that happens to be.
386. 00:16:26 I will say at the very beginning here,
387. 00:16:29 I don't think he knocked this one out of the park
388. 00:16:30 like he did essentialism.
389. 00:16:33 But I don't know how you can.
390. 00:16:35 Maybe essentialism is that lightning in a bottle
391. 00:16:37 once in a lifetime sort of a thing that,
392. 00:16:40 there's no way you're gonna be able to follow up
393. 00:16:42 to that sort of thing.
394. 00:16:43 I think very few authors are able to follow up with a book
395. 00:16:47 like that with another book that is as good.
396. 00:16:51 Probably the closest that I've seen is Cal Newport
397. 00:16:54 in all the stuff that he's written following up
398. 00:16:56 with deep work.
399. 00:16:58 But even those, they don't resonate on the same level
400. 00:17:01 for us anyways, like deep work did.
401. 00:17:03 But I use him as an example
402. 00:17:06 because there are several books by him that I really enjoy
403. 00:17:08 including so good that they can't ignore you,
404. 00:17:10 which I would argue maybe is my favorite,
405. 00:17:13 even above deep work.
406. 00:17:14 We talked about that when we did the draft episodes
407. 00:17:17 back in the day.
408. 00:17:18 I think it was episode 50 when we picked our favorite
409. 00:17:21 non-bookworm books.
410. 00:17:24 People wanna hear us talk about that
411. 00:17:25 when they should go vote for it in the club by the way.
412. 00:17:28 So yeah, this book, I mean the very first chapter,
413. 00:17:32 they have like this little tagline associated with it
414. 00:17:34 and it is, is there an easier way?
415. 00:17:37 So let's jump in here to part one, Effortless State.
416. 00:17:40 I really don't know exactly how to define
417. 00:17:42 what he's talking about with Effortless State.
418. 00:17:44 This is kind of like the fundamental building blocks
419. 00:17:46 in my opinion, kind of like the perspective stuff.
420. 00:17:49 You need to understand, but the term state,
421. 00:17:52 I get this picture of somebody like sitting on a rock
422. 00:17:56 meditating and I don't think that's really what he's,
423. 00:18:00 he's going for with this.
424. 00:18:01 Really is trying to get us to think about the things
425. 00:18:04 that we do, the things that are essential
426. 00:18:07 and then how do we make those essential things easier to do?
427. 00:18:11 Because we really only have a couple of options
428. 00:18:14 when we can't do all of the essential things.
429. 00:18:18 We can let some essential things fall through the cracks
430. 00:18:21 and not do them or we can make those essential things easier
431. 00:18:24 so that we have more resources to devote
432. 00:18:27 to the other essential things.
433. 00:18:29 I think that is the insidious backstory to this book.
434. 00:18:34 That he doesn't explicitly address but is right there
435. 00:18:38 is what he's doing with this book is enabling people
436. 00:18:41 like past me who want to just squeeze in one more thing.
437. 00:18:44 Because you justify it by saying,
438. 00:18:46 "Well, I made the other stuff easier,
439. 00:18:47 so yeah, now I can fill that space."
440. 00:18:49 And if I were to go back and tell past Mike,
441. 00:18:52 one thing it would be do not touch that space.
442. 00:18:55 You leave that space alone, that is sacred.
443. 00:18:58 That's what we call margin, you should hold on to that, sir.
444. 00:19:01 Exactly.
445. 00:19:03 I don't think I had this reaction.
446. 00:19:05 I think effortless state made a lot of sense to me.
447. 00:19:07 But it's because this is horrible.
448. 00:19:14 Systems thinking, that's what crossed my mind when I went here.
449. 00:19:19 And I don't know if this is a testament to how well Sam Carpenter
450. 00:19:22 put that book together or just the place
451. 00:19:25 that we are comparing it to effortless against.
452. 00:19:28 But in my mind, he's talking about my mind
453. 00:19:33 and the way that I process inputs, I guess,
454. 00:19:39 and the way that I view the work that I'm doing,
455. 00:19:42 the tasks, the things I'm choosing to act on.
456. 00:19:45 But the piece here that's maybe a little difficult to
457. 00:19:50 get my head around on it is that he doesn't ever point out
458. 00:19:58 what aspect of life he's referring to.
459. 00:20:02 And I think maybe that's why you're having it.
460. 00:20:05 Because he doesn't say that we're going to talk about how we use our time.
461. 00:20:08 He's not talking about how we use our actions.
462. 00:20:11 He's kind of floating amongst those two plus your mental state
463. 00:20:17 and the way that you choose to take care of your body.
464. 00:20:21 And he doesn't ever actually say, this is the realm that I want to focus on.
465. 00:20:26 He bounces all over and doesn't seem to have a dedicated path of working through those.
466. 00:20:31 Maybe he does. I just didn't see it. That's very impossible.
467. 00:20:34 That he had a path and I just didn't recognize it.
468. 00:20:37 But that's not one that I noticed anyway.
469. 00:20:42 So he doesn't ever nail it down.
470. 00:20:45 Yeah, there's not a clear path forward for this.
471. 00:20:48 But I will say he does talk about the two ways to achieve all the work that really matters.
472. 00:20:53 Those are his words, all the work that really matters.
473. 00:20:57 Sure.
474. 00:20:57 All right, so right there.
475. 00:21:00 I think I have issues with this.
476. 00:21:02 But his two options are gain superhuman power so we can do all the impossibly hard
477. 00:21:07 but worthwhile work or get better at making the impossibly hard but worthwhile work easier.
478. 00:21:14 And I think that is important, but that is only applicable up to a certain point.
479. 00:21:20 And the image is that he draws here.
480. 00:21:25 I think don't do that justice. He's got a picture of a giant snowball that you're pushing uphill
481. 00:21:33 and it says maximum effort and then tiny results.
482. 00:21:37 And then flip that over instead of pushing it uphill, if you're pushing it downhill,
483. 00:21:41 tiny effort and maximum results.
484. 00:21:43 And in a best case scenario, yes, that is true.
485. 00:21:48 I think asking that question, what if this could be easy is really important and powerful
486. 00:21:56 and he calls that effortless inversion.
487. 00:21:57 That's the whole gist of this first chapter invert.
488. 00:22:00 But I also think it has limited application.
489. 00:22:03 And I'm trying to reconcile him.
490. 00:22:06 I had the things that he is telling me here in this book and all of the things that I have
491. 00:22:10 heard for a very long time, which I am questioning.
492. 00:22:13 Think again by Adam Grant, right?
493. 00:22:15 But if it's worth doing, it's going to be difficult.
494. 00:22:19 If it was easy, everyone would do it.
495. 00:22:21 I think there's a little bit of truth to that.
496. 00:22:24 So I don't believe that it's simply I haven't discovered the effortless path to some of the
497. 00:22:33 things that I'm doing.
498. 00:22:34 I think some of the things that I'm doing are difficult.
499. 00:22:38 And that's okay because they're worth doing anyways.
500. 00:22:41 I think there's a lot of parallels you could draw there.
501. 00:22:45 Some of the obvious ones would be with parenting.
502. 00:22:47 I think Bookworm is definitely an example.
503. 00:22:50 I mean, we don't really make money from Bookworm.
504. 00:22:53 This is the definition of a passion project.
505. 00:22:55 And it takes a lot of hours to read the books and to edit them and to publish them.
506. 00:22:59 Like the reason there aren't a bunch of other podcasts like this is because it's a ton of work
507. 00:23:06 and who's crazy enough to do that.
508. 00:23:07 Yeah, there's, I mean, there's a lot of things that I think around this one.
509. 00:23:13 Growing up on the farm, you tended to agree, right?
510. 00:23:17 It's only the hard stuff that really matters.
511. 00:23:20 The simple stuff, the easy stuff doesn't get corn to grow.
512. 00:23:25 Like that was kind of the perspective that was passed, at least to me.
513. 00:23:30 Now granted, in today's farming world with the size of equipment and how much automation
514. 00:23:36 they've done, I think it's crazy simple to be honest.
515. 00:23:40 But when I was starting, it was not filling a corn planter meant carrying 50 pound bags of
516. 00:23:48 seed around and tearing the tops off and manually dumping them into buckets.
517. 00:23:52 Now they just take a big tube and they fluke a switch and it fills the big center hopper and
518. 00:23:57 they sit there and drink a Coke while they fill it up.
519. 00:23:59 So that's how it goes now.
520. 00:24:01 Anyway, all that to say, you know, there's, there's a thing here where
521. 00:24:06 if it's worth doing, it's difficult or anything that's worth, you know, if it were easy,
522. 00:24:15 everyone would do it that whole concept.
523. 00:24:17 I think Greg would probably say that there might be some truth to that.
524. 00:24:23 I don't think he would say it's absolutely false, but I think the piece that he would
525. 00:24:28 add into that is that it means that we simply haven't thought about it the right way.
526. 00:24:34 That's, I think we're each coming out with this effortless state in that,
527. 00:24:37 yes, it's difficult.
528. 00:24:39 At least on the surface, it's difficult.
529. 00:24:42 But that either means that the task itself isn't being, like it's being done too well.
530. 00:24:50 Like there was the story of the videography team that was asked to put together the recordings for
531. 00:24:57 a professor.
532. 00:24:59 That's a great story.
533. 00:24:59 Yep.
534. 00:25:00 And basically the professor asked this gal to record some of his lectures.
535. 00:25:07 And in her mind, she immediately went to full on multi-camera videography team that's then doing
536. 00:25:14 the animated graphics and stuff to build these so that they could be reused multiple times in the
537. 00:25:20 future.
538. 00:25:20 That's where her brain went.
539. 00:25:21 She asks the professor, what is your intent with these?
540. 00:25:26 Oh, well, I have one student that's in sports and can't make the class and wants to catch up.
541. 00:25:30 Hey, guess what?
542. 00:25:32 It's not multi months of work.
543. 00:25:34 It's somebody sitting there with their phone kicked on.
544. 00:25:37 Like this is world's different.
545. 00:25:40 And I think some of what this effortless state part, part one here, is just helping us to step away
546. 00:25:50 from our assumptions with these things.
547. 00:25:52 Because it's easy to jump into big, overblown, massive projects.
548. 00:25:59 Like that's where my brain goes a lot of times.
549. 00:26:00 People ask me for a recording, a video recording, and I'm thinking about setting up lights.
550. 00:26:05 I've got these fancy, like, I've got like a $12,000 video camera over there.
551. 00:26:09 Like I've got those, all the video, like audio gear, like that's where my brain goes
552. 00:26:14 whenever they ask me about trying to record a video.
553. 00:26:19 But a lot of times they just need to share a video with like two people.
554. 00:26:23 It's like, oh, we'll just set up your computer, turn on the webcam, hit record.
555. 00:26:26 You don't need this big thing.
556. 00:26:29 But that's where my brain goes.
557. 00:26:30 And some of what I think Greg is trying to encourage us to do is
558. 00:26:33 don't jump to the big, complicated pass.
559. 00:26:37 Think about the simplest, most straightforward way to get the job done.
560. 00:26:42 And oftentimes that means it is easy.
561. 00:26:46 So the concept of if it were easy, everyone would do it.
562. 00:26:50 If getting the results was easy, then everyone would do it, right?
563. 00:26:55 But I think the actions that get to those results can be easy, but I think you have to
564. 00:27:01 think about them differently and be willing to not go the 10 extra miles in a lot of cases.
565. 00:27:08 So again, you're probably right.
566. 00:27:10 There is some validity in it, but I think there are some ways to shortcut it at the same time.
567. 00:27:16 Yeah, well, that story in particular, I like that story, but it also bugs me
568. 00:27:21 because I am also guilty of overthinking things.
569. 00:27:26 But that is an example of, I don't know if they were getting paid for this or if they're doing it as
570. 00:27:32 a favor, whatever.
571. 00:27:33 If you're doing it as a job, then on one level, you probably don't care how complex things get
572. 00:27:40 because you're going to get paid for the complexity.
573. 00:27:42 You're the professional, right?
574. 00:27:43 So assuming it's a favor, then what you're doing is you're trying to figure out a way to
575. 00:27:49 accommodate all these people who are asking you to do things.
576. 00:27:52 And that I have fallen into the trap of more than once, and it always bugs me when I do.
577. 00:27:59 And I do have that approach, I think, of when someone asks me to do something.
578. 00:28:03 If I do want to accommodate them, I do tend to overthink it.
579. 00:28:07 But what's even simpler is just saying no.
580. 00:28:09 So again, he wrote essentialism.
581. 00:28:13 So I know he gets this, and I feel like this is kind of lost in the translation.
582. 00:28:17 If you just look at this book in isolation, though, is, well, yeah, maybe this particular thing went
583. 00:28:26 from a thousand hours worth of effort because it was a thousand hours when they were talking
584. 00:28:30 about it initially to a couple of hours.
585. 00:28:33 But what does that simplification, what sort of behavior does that encourage going forward?
586. 00:28:40 More accommodating of people who just want you to solve their problems?
587. 00:28:44 No, thank you.
588. 00:28:46 But if you apply this in a personal sense, then this is something completely different than the
589. 00:28:51 story that he's telling.
590. 00:28:52 Because now what you're trying to do is make something, let's say, because that's probably the
591. 00:28:59 angle you and I would come at this with as creators.
592. 00:29:01 And with a creator, yeah, there are ways that you can simplify things, but only to a point,
593. 00:29:07 like the farmer example that you mentioned, if you have the machinery and can automate stuff,
594. 00:29:11 like that's cool, more power to you. But at some point, you still have to plant the seed in the
595. 00:29:17 ground, like you can't automate that part. I can't automate the creation of a podcast episode.
596. 00:29:24 I can't have a robot sitting here and record this conversation with you, nor would I want to,
597. 00:29:28 because the quality would not be there.
598. 00:29:31 And in the example of the class lecture, the quality doesn't matter.
599. 00:29:37 So I think there's lots of different variables here, which completely change this scenario
600. 00:29:43 when I apply it in any way that resembles my life.
601. 00:29:45 And I don't really know how to reconcile that.
602. 00:29:49 Well, in this particular case, she was like the head of media at the school.
603. 00:29:53 So that was a lot of her job is doing that sort of thing for professors and
604. 00:29:58 employees of the school.
605. 00:30:01 Sure, sure.
606. 00:30:03 It's her job, really, to do that. But she's choosing what her teams work on at the same time.
607. 00:30:10 So there's a lot of dynamics in that one, I think.
608. 00:30:14 Yeah, yeah. And that's fine. That story in isolation, just kind of bugs me,
609. 00:30:20 because I have so many questions about what would you say in this scenario, Greg?
610. 00:30:24 Yep.
611. 00:30:25 He doesn't get into it. In some ways, this book is kind of short. I mean, he's got a lot of visuals
612. 00:30:31 in here, and it's 215 pages or something like that.
613. 00:30:35 But there's lots of charts and things where he's restating things that he's already said.
614. 00:30:40 It could have been quite a bit longer. And I feel like a lot of this stuff,
615. 00:30:44 he just doesn't get into it nearly as deep as he could have.
616. 00:30:47 This next part, though, with enjoy, what if this could be fun?
617. 00:30:51 I think this is the one that really resonates with me.
618. 00:30:55 I think there's a lot of opportunity here for me. One example of this that I thought of
619. 00:31:02 pairing something essential was something that's enjoyable.
620. 00:31:04 I've got this rowing machine, which Blake encouraged me to buy.
621. 00:31:09 I don't really have any sort of... I don't really watch YouTube videos,
622. 00:31:14 but I know that there are a lot of things on YouTube that I kind of want to watch.
623. 00:31:18 But I haven't really engaged with it because I just don't have the time to do it.
624. 00:31:22 Well, I can reinforce the essential activity of working out if I pair it with something that I
625. 00:31:29 want to do, which is watch these YouTube videos, so I can pull up a queue.
626. 00:31:34 And now the rowing machine, that becomes my YouTube time.
627. 00:31:38 And there's lots of other ways that you can do this sort of thing.
628. 00:31:41 He uses an example in the book of how they were trying to get everybody to clear the table
629. 00:31:47 after dinner. Everybody just takes off and I've got homework and they disappear in their rooms
630. 00:31:51 or whatever. So what they did is they tried to make that more fun and now they just sing
631. 00:31:57 Disney tunes at the top of their lungs while they're cleaning the dinner table.
632. 00:32:01 That's a cool example, I think. And it has me thinking about what are the...
633. 00:32:06 He calls them building blocks of joy that I can add to my own rituals, which is a whole
634. 00:32:12 another section here. And I thought this was kind of cool. We've read lots of books on habits,
635. 00:32:16 right? But rituals are kind of like groups of habits and he defines them as the habits are the
636. 00:32:22 what you do, but the rituals are the how you do it. And I feel like that's a really cool way to
637. 00:32:28 to think about it. And it's probably a lot more approachable than something like habit stacking,
638. 00:32:33 although like the technical stuff that we read about in atomic habits and tiny habits.
639. 00:32:39 For the average person, the rituals of like how you get the things done, that I think opens itself
640. 00:32:46 up to a lot more. What he's trying to get people to do, you know, where you apply some flavor to
641. 00:32:52 this, some element of fun to this, that's a lot more applicable for the average person, I would argue.
642. 00:32:59 Do you have an example off hand? I was trying to think of a good example of how you take a habit
643. 00:33:05 and convert it into a ritual. Do you have something off hand for that? I was trying to think of one
644. 00:33:11 that I've done, but I don't have a good example that I'm coming up with.
645. 00:33:15 Well, I think the when I think of ritual, I think of like my morning routine. And each one of the
646. 00:33:21 things that are in my morning routine started off as an individual habit that I had to build,
647. 00:33:25 but now they all kind of roll together or like a shutdown routine. That would be a you could reframe
648. 00:33:31 that as like a shutdown ritual where I empty all my inboxes and I time block the next day,
649. 00:33:38 you know, and essentially in my mind, it's stacking these habits together. But when you link them
650. 00:33:45 together, like a series of dominoes, there's some momentum that carries over from one to the next.
651. 00:33:51 So you can do a whole bunch of things with a small amount of effort. For example, when I wake up,
652. 00:33:59 if you were to actually like write out my morning routine, it's kind of ridiculous. It's something
653. 00:34:04 like drink 20 ounces of water, read my Bible, spend time in prayer, do my stretches,
654. 00:34:10 shower, make coffee, but all of that stuff happens in like a 30, 45 minute period. And it happens
655. 00:34:18 kind of automatically where like I struggle even to like think through the pieces there,
656. 00:34:23 because I do it. Exactly. Like I fill up my water bottle before I go to bed at night and I set it
657. 00:34:29 by my on the nightstand. So the very first thing that I do when I get up is I chug 20 ounces of water
658. 00:34:35 to get my body going. I don't think about that. I just see the water bottle and I drink it. It's
659. 00:34:40 just automatic at this point. But I think if you never really considered building your habits,
660. 00:34:47 linking them together, that's really what the ritual ritual is. It takes a little bit more time,
661. 00:34:52 but it's also the kind of thing where I'm going to block an hour on my calendar for this thing.
662. 00:34:57 And then I'm in a cram as much positive stuff as I can in there and just knock down all those
663. 00:35:02 dominoes at one time. Yeah, that's very fair. I mean, I do a lot with like the morning routine
664. 00:35:07 process as well. And I think that can be a good one. I was trying to think through something that was
665. 00:35:15 day to day project, almost checklist related. And to me, those aren't necessarily
666. 00:35:23 rituals. I mean, the thing that did come to mind, I have a process I kind of go through
667. 00:35:33 before we start recording, before I start doing live streams, before I run a webinar.
668. 00:35:39 I have a whole series. I just ran through 60 plus items that I checked off before we started
669. 00:35:48 recording here. And that was before you and I ever connected on the video system. So before we
670. 00:35:55 ever connected, I had run that. And then that was done. But I have this process post that setup
671. 00:36:06 of mostly just sitting and staring is what it looks like. But it's me thinking through the process
672. 00:36:12 of what is this going to look like? What are the things I need to make sure I bring up?
673. 00:36:17 Usually I've got my notepad and I'm writing a handful of things down that I want to make sure
674. 00:36:21 that I'm going to bring up things that pop into my head to have nothing to do with what I'm getting
675. 00:36:28 ready to do. That kind of acts like a ritual, because I've done it so many times now, that it
676. 00:36:33 just kind of has that feel. It doesn't have to be. But in my case, I think it does qualify for that.
677. 00:36:41 Absolutely. I mean, ritual, I think this is the powerful part about the way Greg McKeown
678. 00:36:47 frames it is don't overthink it. Whatever you do, it's the, what did I say? It's the how you do it.
679. 00:36:55 It's not the specifics of what you are actually doing. A part of my getting ready to record
680. 00:37:01 really any podcast, but bookworm specifically, because it's at this 1PM Central Time slot.
681. 00:37:08 I've already eaten lunch. I'm going to make sure that the outline is good to go. If it's my episode,
682. 00:37:16 I'm going to review my my my node file. So I kind of know where things are, what I want to talk about.
683. 00:37:21 I'm going to make my coffee. I'm going to bring it down to my office. That all gets me in a certain
684. 00:37:27 state for the podcast itself. And I don't ever stop and think about all of the individual levers
685. 00:37:35 that I'm pulling there. It's just part of the process. And I know that it works. And so I think
686. 00:37:43 identifying the different rituals that you have, that's kind of the place to start with this.
687. 00:37:46 And we're not going to turn this into another habits episode, I promise.
688. 00:37:49 We're trying to though. But the other thing with this, because the next chapter is all about
689. 00:37:57 release and gratitude, I think when it comes to the rituals, there's value in understanding
690. 00:38:04 what you're currently doing and realizing that that has a purpose. Yes, you can cut some things
691. 00:38:12 out and add some different things if you want to craft these in a specific way. If you want to
692. 00:38:18 make positive changes, this is the place to do it. But you don't go into it thinking,
693. 00:38:24 there are all of these other people who are doing all of these amazing things. And I am so far
694. 00:38:30 behind them because I am not doing everything that they are doing as part of their routines
695. 00:38:34 or rituals that will just make you miserable. Nothing will ever stick. You're not going to do
696. 00:38:38 anything. So I think there's power in coupling this gratitude section to this. I am glad that I
697. 00:38:48 get to make coffee and look at an outline and sit down and record a podcast. I'm not looking at it
698. 00:38:54 through the lens of I'm trying to maximize my output. I am enjoying the journey. And that's really
699. 00:39:02 where the gratitude piece comes in. It's gap versus gain. You're looking at where you were and
700. 00:39:07 recognizing the growth from where you started, as opposed to thinking about where you wish you
701. 00:39:13 were and measuring how far you have to go. That's the whole issue I have with goals is like as soon
702. 00:39:18 as you close that gap, as soon as you cross that finish line, there is now another gap to be crossed.
703. 00:39:25 And the finish line has moved. The goalposts are farther out, maybe farther out than they've ever
704. 00:39:29 been. And now you just feel discouraged because this took a Herculean amount of effort for me to
705. 00:39:34 get to this point. How am I ever going to get to that other thing? I can't sustain this,
706. 00:39:38 right? But you can if you enjoy the process. There's a lot to be said. I think you brought
707. 00:39:44 up this whole gratitude versus release concept. And I think there's probably a ton that we could
708. 00:39:51 say about that. It seems like gratitude is one that has come up numerous times, right? This is
709. 00:39:59 something we do with our kids. Not I wouldn't say every meal, but occasionally, well, like,
710. 00:40:05 what was the best part of your day? Like, we'll ask that question. And it seems so routine to me,
711. 00:40:12 but it is interesting to learn from a four year old what the best part of her day was.
712. 00:40:22 Eating mac and cheese is sometimes the answer or the six year old will like, oh, I was able to
713. 00:40:29 color. Like good news. I saw a dog today. Yeah, no kidding. It's like, hey, dad, guess what?
714. 00:40:35 Over rest time, I counted 178 cars. Like, why? Like that's, that's what goes through my head,
715. 00:40:42 right? But you're like, that's amazing. Number one, I didn't know you could count that high.
716. 00:40:46 Number two, that's some intense focus to be willing to sit there and just stare at cars driving by.
717. 00:40:52 For an hour. So that's intense. But these are the things we don't even pay attention to, right?
718. 00:41:00 But asking kids, what was the best part of your day is often a fascinating conversation that
719. 00:41:07 comes from it. But yes, gratitude. Yeah. And this is one of those things that I kind of wish you
720. 00:41:12 would have gotten a little bit deeper. He has some cool visuals in this section about the
721. 00:41:19 different directions when you focus on what you lack versus focusing on the things that you have.
722. 00:41:24 On page 58, he says, when you focus on what you lack, you lose what you have. When you focus on
723. 00:41:29 what you have, you get what you lack. And that's a great one liner. But this section is, is kind of,
724. 00:41:37 kind of short. Maybe we need to tackle a whole book on gratitude at some point. Probably,
725. 00:41:42 because I feel like there's a lot of ways we could go with that one. This is like, I just had a
726. 00:41:46 conversation with my wife about this one in that if you're focusing on the bad things that are
727. 00:41:53 happening right now, you tend to just completely gloss over the good things. And if you're focused
728. 00:41:58 on all the good things, you can sometimes gloss over all of the bad things. Like those are the
729. 00:42:03 things that I was having a conversation with her about because like, look at our life situation.
730. 00:42:10 We're moved into an apartment. We are trying to find a house. I do find with change. My wife does
731. 00:42:17 not. The limbo is driving her nuts, not knowing what comes next because we don't have a place
732. 00:42:23 located yet. So these are all things that really bother her. They don't even register for me a lot
733. 00:42:30 of times. I really don't want to live in an apartment, but it's still something that is important to her.
734. 00:42:35 So it's easy to focus on all the bad things that we don't like about our living situation right now.
735. 00:42:41 But that's not the point. It's better to pay attention to, I have zero yard work.
736. 00:42:46 House maintenance doesn't exist because it's a phone call. Like these are all things that make
737. 00:42:52 life super easy. Those are the things that we need to be paying attention to. Otherwise,
738. 00:42:58 it's easy to fall down the negativity bandwagon. Yep, totally. So again, the next section here on
739. 00:43:06 rest could have spoken a lot more. I don't want to say eloquently, but it feels kind of like
740. 00:43:16 he did a little bit of research on this enough to sound smart when he says that it's your
741. 00:43:26 responsibility to relax. But there's so much more to be said here. This one specifically,
742. 00:43:33 I mean, we've talked about sleep before, so we won't spend a whole lot of time here.
743. 00:43:38 Did a whole book on it. We did. Yep. So again, all of these individual chapters have a lot
744. 00:43:43 more that can be said. This one specifically, I put it in the outline though, because I feel like
745. 00:43:49 I could have written a better section for him. And that's completely unfair to Greg,
746. 00:43:57 based on my situation and kind of my whole journey with this stuff. But this, I call it out because
747. 00:44:05 I feel like this kind of was a tipping point for me where I started to question or think a little
748. 00:44:11 bit more critically, judgmentally maybe about the rest of the things that he was going to be saying
749. 00:44:18 in this book. Like the first three chapters kind of flew under the radar, didn't even realize
750. 00:44:24 till I got to this one, I'm like, hey, he didn't even really touch on this stuff. Oh, wait, he did
751. 00:44:30 the same thing when he was talking about gratitude. And that I feel like sets the tone for my,
752. 00:44:38 for the rest of the book for me, not in a positive way. Sure. I do want to point out that
753. 00:44:45 there was an action item I had from this section on sleep and rest and such. He mentions, because
754. 00:44:50 the problem with reading as many books as we do is, and this is maybe what you're getting at here,
755. 00:44:55 Mike, is that it's easy for us to see how it could have been better because someone else did it better,
756. 00:45:02 or we've been reading enough about it that we feel like we could do better. More the matter.
757. 00:45:06 Adler has taught us well. It's true. He has destroyed us in being able to read a book and be
758. 00:45:13 completely amazed by it because only we had never read how to read a book. We would be so much happier.
759. 00:45:20 It's so true. So true. Anyway, we've done so much on sleep and it's come up in so many different
760. 00:45:27 so many different books at this point that we just haven't found. I don't feel like we see much
761. 00:45:36 whenever these topics come up. There's not much new, right? There was a point here that was new to me
762. 00:45:41 in that if you take a shower at night about 90 minutes before you go to bed, something about
763. 00:45:47 that helps your body relax temperature-wise and helps you sleep better. And I thought, huh,
764. 00:45:53 that's interesting. I've been one that takes a morning shower for a long time. So I'm going to
765. 00:46:00 experiment with this one a little bit. All right. Just add a carry out. I'm going to, again, this is
766. 00:46:04 very minor, right? So I'm going to attempt to, and the way our daily routines work, this actually works
767. 00:46:10 out well. I'm going to take a shower at night, roughly an hour or 15, hour and a half before
768. 00:46:15 I go to bed. And we'll see. See if it changes how easy it is to fall asleep. But just a curious
769. 00:46:23 thing is it wasn't even a long section, really. It was like two or three paragraphs in the whole
770. 00:46:28 thing. But that was just one little tidbit that I thought was interesting. That tidbit, it was
771. 00:46:34 interesting to me too, because growing up my dad and he had gotten this from his dad,
772. 00:46:40 he had told me that you should take a cold shower before going to bed, because that will help you
773. 00:46:46 sleep. Yeah. And then now Greg McKeown is in the exact opposite. Take a hot shot.
774. 00:46:52 And I think Greg McKeown is actually right, because there are a lot of people who say
775. 00:46:55 take a cold shower in the morning because it wakes you up and you're more alert. So
776. 00:47:00 that's probably one of those things that has just been passed down from generation to generation.
777. 00:47:04 And there's more science behind what Greg says. But the way that Greg says it, it sounds like the
778. 00:47:09 exact same thing, just changing hot and cold. It's like, oh, my great, great grandfather told me to do
779. 00:47:17 this. So this is what you should do. Totally. Some of the lists that he has in here feel like
780. 00:47:26 that. Like the proposed work schedule, dedicate the morning to essential work, break down that
781. 00:47:30 work into three sessions of no more than 90 minutes each. Take a short break, 10 to 15 minutes in
782. 00:47:34 between sessions to rest and recover. So kind of like Pomodoro, but you don't want to get into
783. 00:47:41 the science behind it or give anybody credit, like that's kind of how it relates. And that's not
784. 00:47:45 probably what he's trying to. Yeah, it's not what he's trying to say, but that's how it comes off.
785. 00:47:49 Right. Right. It's so true. He doesn't want to credit.
786. 00:47:53 But trust your uncle, Greg here. My dad used to always make fun of people who took showers in
787. 00:48:00 the morning at all. Didn't matter. Hot or cold. Why are you taking a shower in the morning?
788. 00:48:04 Like you should take a shower at night because you're dirty at night. That was what he said
789. 00:48:08 all the time. Think about it. He's a farmer. Guess what? He's out in the dirt.
790. 00:48:14 In oil and stuff on him all day long. He's like, well, of course you're going to take a shower
791. 00:48:19 at night. That's just how it works. Because I'm not going to bed like that. So he was always just,
792. 00:48:26 why would you take a shower in the morning? He's like, didn't you just take one the night before?
793. 00:48:30 That doesn't make sense. There you go. Take two showers every day. One at night,
794. 00:48:35 90 minutes before you go to bed, that's hot and a cold one in the morning. There you go.
795. 00:48:39 Yeah, no kidding. That's kind of what this left me with is like, okay, so I should take a
796. 00:48:44 shower in the morning because that's what works for me. And then usually, if I put that off,
797. 00:48:49 sometimes I'll go running late morning and I'll just shower then. But if I did shower in the
798. 00:48:54 morning, I'm not going to skip my workout. So now I'm showering after my workout. And then
799. 00:48:58 I'm going to shower at night because Greg told me to. Like, no, I'm not taking three showers a day.
800. 00:49:03 All the great showers. But there's another chapter here, which we won't really talk about,
801. 00:49:08 which is notice. And this is really about distractions and attention. And again, a super deep topic
802. 00:49:14 that we wrote whole books on. But these five chapters, which we have spent too much time on
803. 00:49:19 comprises this first section of the book. This is also the one I think that is the most
804. 00:49:25 interesting to me, which is maybe why I was a little bit disappointed that he didn't get into
805. 00:49:30 these more. But we should probably move on to the second section here, which is effortless action.
806. 00:49:35 Now there are five chapters here. I'm going to list these real quickly. We're not going to go
807. 00:49:39 through all of these. Chapter six is defined. Chapter seven is start. Chapter eight is simplified.
808. 00:49:45 Chapter nine is progress. Chapter 10 is pace. And this is where you basically apply all of the
809. 00:49:53 productivity stuff that you've heard over the years. This is where pretty much GTD and such
810. 00:49:58 comes in. I think there are a couple of things that are interesting here. The first chapter is
811. 00:50:05 kind of all about defining what done looks like. His advice in this section is to make a done for
812. 00:50:13 the day list, which I think is a good idea, but also sounds like time blocking without wanting
813. 00:50:20 to mention Cal Newport. And again, that's unfair to say that. But we've read enough books and I'm
814. 00:50:28 like, hey, this is totally Cal's idea where you take certain things and you put them on your
815. 00:50:34 counter because that's when you're going to do them, but you're going to limit the number of
816. 00:50:37 things that you are going to try to get done. And if you do those small amount of things,
817. 00:50:41 then that is a successful day. This feels like re saying that in simpler, more undefined terms.
818. 00:50:49 And I don't like it. I feel like it's not super actionable. Maybe if you're just coming into this,
819. 00:50:56 like you're not really entrenched in the productivity space, like we are, you haven't read all the books
820. 00:51:02 that we've read. You don't know all of us, the things that we know. And I don't say that to
821. 00:51:06 sound like, oh, we figured all these things out. It's kind of like the curse of knowledge,
822. 00:51:10 like the more you learn about things, you forget what it was like to be a beginner.
823. 00:51:14 So I'm saying this in Greg's defense. Maybe he is writing this for the beginner. And I just have
824. 00:51:20 so far gone past that this speaks to me differently. What do you think?
825. 00:51:25 I actually thought it was a really cool idea. And it didn't feel like it was Cal Newport's thing at all.
826. 00:51:30 Okay. Because the difference, I think, so Cal Newport's time blocking process,
827. 00:51:38 he would oftentimes refer to like if something happens to change. Like changes have to happen,
828. 00:51:47 right? And he does refer to how that happens quite a bit. So his time block will change mid-day.
829. 00:51:54 This I don't feel like has that flair because, okay, how many people are listening to this?
830. 00:52:01 You have a task list. You might be looking at it right now, because you're listening to us
831. 00:52:05 while you're putting together your task list for the day. Okay. So people do this. You have your task
832. 00:52:11 to do list. And how many of us put things on there that you aspire to do that day,
833. 00:52:19 or that you want to do that day, but aren't necessarily mandatory. And you might not actually
834. 00:52:24 get to them. It's just would be cool if. Yeah. That's a really good point. And I'm the
835. 00:52:31 back in my head, I'm thinking the same thing you are. That's what people do. But the way that he
836. 00:52:35 explained this, it sounds like a separate list. It does. It doesn't sound like just limit your
837. 00:52:42 to do list, make another list of the things that are absolutely critical. Yes. That's what I think
838. 00:52:48 it is. Now, I didn't take it as it's a separate list until you just said that. But in my head,
839. 00:52:56 it wasn't necessarily here's all the things that I could do today, which is what a lot of us do.
840. 00:53:02 Right? I do this. Yeah. And instead, it's a here are the things that at the end of the day,
841. 00:53:09 the day is done when these are completed. And if I have more energy, I can go on to another list
842. 00:53:16 elsewhere and work on them if I want. But it's not necessary. Is this where you talked about
843. 00:53:21 upper and lower bounds? Was that later? I got that part. I can't remember. I don't see that in my
844. 00:53:30 outline in this section. So maybe that's later. I'm glad that you said that though, because I
845. 00:53:35 honestly never thought about it that way. But you're absolutely right. I completely agree with the
846. 00:53:40 concept of limit your task list to the things that are going to make today successful. He doesn't
847. 00:53:47 give a number, which I wish he would have done. Right. Because I think people need that. Otherwise,
848. 00:53:51 they're always going to end up with 10, 15, 20 things. Yeah, it's three. After much practice,
849. 00:53:57 I've gotten up to five. And that is it. I cannot do more than five. And so I feel like this is
850. 00:54:05 really ambiguous. And maybe if he would have framed it that way, then I will completely agree with this.
851. 00:54:12 It's kind of funny that I went totally the other way. And I'm like, well, this is what
852. 00:54:16 Kalnuport is telling you to do, because you have one list now, and you are limiting it. And you're
853. 00:54:22 also identifying when you're going to be doing these things. So that's the better method. Maybe
854. 00:54:26 it was just the lack of detail that completely threw that off for me and let me paint this picture
855. 00:54:30 of something that he was never intending to say. Yeah, I feel like it was, where is this? It's in
856. 00:54:35 the chapter on pace. Okay, I'll come back to that. To me, I feel like it's in software, in project
857. 00:54:43 management, defining done is an important step. Yep. This is this is super important, especially if
858. 00:54:49 you're doing client work, like, when am I actually done working for you? Like, this is really,
859. 00:54:53 really important. Now, after flying an airplane, it's pretty easy. When I land, we're done. Like,
860. 00:54:59 well, it's probably not that moment. It's like, when we're at the gate and we're getting off the
861. 00:55:02 plane, like, Blake would have to tell us. But there's a point at which that flight is completed,
862. 00:55:07 right? But I think it's, you know, it's, it's interesting that Greg has this done list for the day.
863. 00:55:15 And he's defining, you know, at the end of the day, if I have these, call it four, three, two,
864. 00:55:22 whatever the number is, these three things done, I can quit working when those are completed.
865. 00:55:29 That's just a thought process that we don't normally think about when we think about putting
866. 00:55:33 together a to-do list. Exactly. But it's also not at all what he was talking about in the rest of
867. 00:55:38 the traffic. Sure. I mean, this is where I wanted it to be. Yeah. So I completely agree in this idea,
868. 00:55:44 but I think he didn't flesh it out. Sure. Yes, you should define done for your day. That is time
869. 00:55:50 blocking. And you doesn't have to be time blocking. There can be other flavors of it,
870. 00:55:55 but that's how I do it. And I feel like what he told people at the end of this, my brain went to
871. 00:56:02 time blocking. And if you didn't have any sort of reference for this, this is kind of like,
872. 00:56:07 pie in the sky. Well, what are you talking about, Greg? I've got all these things that I need to do.
873. 00:56:12 I can never get them all done. And now you're going to tell me that I just need to make them
874. 00:56:17 easier so that I get them all done. Like, I don't know. I think you do have to, at some point,
875. 00:56:23 say no, which is not really the point of this book. It's the point of the previous book. The rest of
876. 00:56:27 this chapter, I really enjoy it. I really like that story of the ship that is being built for the
877. 00:56:33 the King of Sweden. And he keeps making it bigger. Yeah, he wants it to be longer. He wants more
878. 00:56:39 cannons on it. And then by the time that it's finally done, they take it out for the voyage.
879. 00:56:44 And it tips over it so heavy it sinks like before it gets a mile from the shore and the army's there
880. 00:56:50 and they have this parade and everybody sees it sink after they spent all this time building
881. 00:56:55 this giant military warship. And I thought that was kind of hilarious because there are a lot of
882. 00:57:00 work projects that do the same thing. But that's project based. And I think that that's really the
883. 00:57:07 point he's making here. And that's really the powerful idea, whether it is a personal or a
884. 00:57:11 professional project. He says, getting clear on what Don looks like doesn't help you finish the
885. 00:57:17 thing, but it helps you get started. Totally agree with that. It provides the motivation because
886. 00:57:21 you know, this is what it's going to look like. One more finish, you're not going to go crazy.
887. 00:57:25 Like, Henrik Hybertson, the guy who had to keep modifying the plans. But then at the end,
888. 00:57:33 like the one takeaway from this chapter is, okay, by the way, retrofit this to planning your day.
889. 00:57:36 And like, what? Yeah, just shoehorn it in there. It'll be fine. Yeah, it'll all be the same.
890. 00:57:43 It reminds me of the, what is it, the F 35 project fighter jet that the US was, I think it's F 35.
891. 00:57:52 And ended up being like a trillion dollar project. And I don't know that it actually was
892. 00:58:00 completed the way they wanted it to be. I know that some of them were sold to the Israeli
893. 00:58:06 government. And there was all sorts of restrictions on what they couldn't, couldn't do with them. And
894. 00:58:11 they just immediately like ripped out the computer and put something else in it.
895. 00:58:15 So it's like, it was violated so many things. Anyway, that's a whole another topic.
896. 00:58:20 Yep. Yep. A couple of things from this section on, let's see, was it start where he was talking
897. 00:58:29 about the microburst, which is a meteorological surge that causes powerful winds and storms for
898. 00:58:37 a brief, but intense period. I have a, a real life picture of this etched into my brain because
899. 00:58:45 I guess it was two summers ago, I was out for a run on the way back. I get this weather warning.
900. 00:58:55 I'm about three miles from my house. I look around and I'm like, it doesn't look like anything. But
901. 00:59:02 it was clear when I left. So maybe this is a fluke. I had a thought to like stop at the park because
902. 00:59:08 there was this shelter there, but I'm like, I'm just going to keep going. And then by the time I got
903. 00:59:12 to my house, it became very evident that there was indeed a storm coming. And in fact, I got home,
904. 00:59:20 got inside and about a minute and a half later, we got a ton of rain, a ton of hail, and we lost
905. 00:59:28 power for an entire week. So being stuck in that would have been very, very bad, but I just made
906. 00:59:34 it back. And in my mind, that's what I picture when I picture these microburst is like, this comes
907. 00:59:40 out of nowhere and is super powerful. You have no idea that it's coming, but then it leaves an
908. 00:59:47 impact that you see for, I mean, we didn't have power for a week afterwards, which in our area,
909. 00:59:54 that's that never happens. Like when we lose power, it's for 10, 15 minutes, but hundreds of thousands
910. 01:00:00 of people around us, you know, they all lost power because of this, this crazy storm. So that's
911. 01:00:05 the picture that I get. And when you think about making the, the first step with something,
912. 01:00:12 he makes a point in the chapter that now only lasts 2.5 seconds. So if you can do something now,
913. 01:00:17 if you could do something in those 2.5 seconds that has that much effort or power behind it in
914. 01:00:24 terms of creating the outcome that you want, that's a really cool idea. You have to identify
915. 01:00:32 what that thing is that can provide that, that big boost and leave that impact like the microburst,
916. 01:00:38 but I, it's got me thinking that way. I think maybe this is a little bit of a hyperbole and an
917. 01:00:45 exaggeration. Like I don't think just finding the one thing that you're supposed to do to move
918. 01:00:50 something forward and then doing it is, is it's really fair to compare that to a microburst necessarily.
919. 01:00:57 But it's an interesting analogy. I grew up with tornadoes. So there's so many times my grandfather
920. 01:01:05 used to say, you know, if the wind changes, what is it? Three times in three minutes. Like if it
921. 01:01:09 changes direction three times in three minutes, hit the deck. That's what we would do. So anyway,
922. 01:01:16 those were, there were a number of times we saw twisters that would come touch down and then they
923. 01:01:22 would go back up and then they would leave and then we would hear the tornado siren. It's like,
924. 01:01:27 thanks guys. Thanks for the warning. Appreciate that. Yeah, that was the other thing.
925. 01:01:31 It is the sirens never went off when I was out for my run. So I was like, God, no big deal.
926. 01:01:36 Yeah, it can't be that big. I don't know. We've just growing up, we always just learned to watch the
927. 01:01:41 weather and try to interpret it yourself instead of trusting what everybody else said. Yeah. Anyway,
928. 01:01:45 one thing that you mentioned very quickly that I want to, I just want to call out in a little
929. 01:01:50 more detail is the concept that what we consider the present, like what we consider right now,
930. 01:01:55 is a span of about 2.5 seconds that you were talking about. Does that seem weird to you?
931. 01:02:02 And my head that might actually be long, but the more I think about it, it's really short.
932. 01:02:06 But it's just, first off, how do they even know that? I don't have any idea how they would
933. 01:02:12 measure that. But it's just an interesting thing. It's like, okay, the present, what we consider
934. 01:02:16 right now is 2.5 seconds. So in this 2.5 seconds, what are you doing? Well, I'm making these motions
935. 01:02:24 with my hands. So I don't know, it's just kind of an interesting side point.
936. 01:02:29 Yeah, I don't really like that 2.5 seconds, to be honest. I get, I think, the point that he's
937. 01:02:35 making, because what he's trying to get you to do is to make a decision to take action. And
938. 01:02:42 when framed that way, it only takes a couple of seconds to make that decision and do something,
939. 01:02:48 and that thing that you do could be the microburst that allows you to take significant action on
940. 01:02:55 this thing that you've been procrastinating on. Although I am a little bit skeptical that if
941. 01:03:00 you go into it expecting those results every single time, you're going to be disappointed when
942. 01:03:04 you make that decision, you make a little bit of an effort, and it doesn't have a ginormous
943. 01:03:11 effect every single time. Sometimes it does. A lot of times it doesn't. And especially the 2.5
944. 01:03:17 seconds, that's how long the decision may take. But the actual completion of the action takes
945. 01:03:24 significantly longer than that. And a little bit, like that 2.5 seconds, what that does in me when I
946. 01:03:31 read that is I can't waste a single moment. I have to take advantage of every 2.5 seconds,
947. 01:03:38 but I can tell you that that's not the way that I work. And I don't want to work that way anymore.
948. 01:03:45 I have a very chill, if you were to watch me work, you'd probably be like, is this guy doing anything?
949. 01:03:53 Because I know my ebbs and flows, and I prioritize things in the morning specifically is when I
950. 01:04:04 create. I do my morning routine like we talked about. I come down to my office, and at that point,
951. 01:04:09 I'll sit down to write. But when I'm no longer in the flow, I'm going to go upstairs. I'm going
952. 01:04:16 to refill my water bottle. I'm going to use the restroom, do all those things. And I do that
953. 01:04:21 fairly frequently. I do that basically whenever I hit that wall. And so just like getting up and
954. 01:04:28 walking around, going outside, shooting some hoops, coming back in, and then reengaging with the work.
955. 01:04:34 That allows me to do a lot in a given day. But if you're sitting there measuring like the hours
956. 01:04:41 that I work in the moments that I'm wasting, right, those are going to add up pretty quick.
957. 01:04:49 I don't like measuring my productivity that way. I think that's dangerous. And it forces you into
958. 01:04:57 I have to be working every single moment when really, if you want to maximize your output,
959. 01:05:03 you have to get, he talks about this in pace, right? You have to bite off not more than you can chew.
960. 01:05:10 And he tells that great story of the people who are racing to the South Pole. And there's the one
961. 01:05:17 guy who's going to push his team really hard when the weather is great. They're not going to do
962. 01:05:20 anything when the weather is bad. And then there's the other guy who's like, we're just going to go
963. 01:05:23 15 miles every single day, no matter what. And he's the one who gets there. And the guy who's
964. 01:05:29 pushing his team when it's when it's nice and then not doing anything when it's when it's bad,
965. 01:05:34 like they're all burnt out because they're constantly sprinting. And then when they're not
966. 01:05:39 sprinting, they're not able to fully recover. And that was a big lesson I had to learn was
967. 01:05:46 slow and steady wins this race. You're not going to knock it out of the park every single day. And
968. 01:05:53 actually, it's better to just do a little bit here and a little bit there. And I guess kind of to
969. 01:05:58 wrap this up, what I've learned is that I can do that even throughout my day, a little bit here
970. 01:06:03 and a little bit there. And then when I measure it at the end of the day, I've made some significant
971. 01:06:07 progress. Yeah, this is this is where they introduced the Greg introduces the upper and lower
972. 01:06:15 bounds of work where you apply this to writing. Okay, I'm not going to stop until I've written at
973. 01:06:24 least 500 words. But I have to stop if I hit 1200. And that sounds so weird, doesn't it? It does.
974. 01:06:33 It does. But the trick here is that they're going to be days when trying to get to 500 is a stretch.
975. 01:06:41 And there are days when 1200 is easy. But the problem is that if you make it easy to stop before
976. 01:06:52 500, you won't always make the progress you want. But if you allow yourself to go above the 1200,
977. 01:06:59 you're going to wear yourself out such that doing tomorrow's 500 is even more difficult.
978. 01:07:04 Exactly. Like those are the the sides of that. I think this is brilliant, actually. And it's not
979. 01:07:11 like you hear people talk about, got my 1000 words for the day, or I did my morning pages,
980. 01:07:16 like you hear these things, right? Or I'm going to write a weekly newsletter, or I'm going to do
981. 01:07:21 this. And I'm going to do 1000 words a day, like whatever that is, a video a week,
982. 01:07:25 whatever those are, you're a lot of times people measure the outcome instead of the stuff that
983. 01:07:31 goes into it. That's a whole nother topic I'm not going to go into here. But the piece that goes
984. 01:07:36 into it, take the ship and the race to the South Pole, right? They were deciding to do,
985. 01:07:42 was it 15 miles a day? I think is what it was. Yep. And they chose to do the 15 miles,
986. 01:07:49 no more than 15 miles. And whenever they decided that, it meant that they were always able to
987. 01:07:56 recover. And they were always able to get the breaks. But on some days, it was hard to get that
988. 01:08:02 15 miles, right? So you're going to hurt yourself. If you go beyond it, you're going to not get
989. 01:08:09 anywhere. If you don't have that minimum piece, but the important part here is that they were
990. 01:08:13 setting up a distance that like their goal was to do 15 miles a day. Their goal wasn't,
991. 01:08:19 they weren't looking at the South Pole saying, that's where I'm, that's where my goal is. It's a
992. 01:08:23 good thing to do that to keep that end in sight. But they were focused on the day to day. And I
993. 01:08:29 think this is the important part here that I want to point out in that if you set these upper and
994. 01:08:34 lower bounds, and this is something I want to do for some of my creative work, I don't know what
995. 01:08:38 that means, given that I'm trying to move a lot more into video and such. So because of that,
996. 01:08:45 I don't know what that looks like. How do I measure? There's no word count that I can
997. 01:08:49 measure on that. So that's the piece that I want to, to try to figure out that I wrote down as an
998. 01:08:56 action. I mean, this is determining what are those upper and lower bounds for the creative
999. 01:09:00 work that I do. Yeah, I love this. I wish the whole section was on this specific topic.
1000. 01:09:06 I know, right. How do you reconcile a microburst with this? I don't know. Me either.
1001. 01:09:11 I mean, the easy answer is you use the microburst concept to start that period.
1002. 01:09:18 Sure. I mean, that's the easy one. Whenever you set that time to start,
1003. 01:09:22 like if I'm going to sit down and start to work on an article, I could use the microburst to
1004. 01:09:29 start that period to get me towards the 500 words. I guess this sounds like if microburst is a
1005. 01:09:35 strong, sudden storm, this sounds like gentle rainfall, like the light rain and it's just slow
1006. 01:09:43 and steady and it just is what it is. There's nothing exciting about this, which is totally not
1007. 01:09:49 the picture you get with a microburst. Right. It might depend on what we're talking about too,
1008. 01:09:53 because in the story of upper and lower bounds, they're talking about a long-term goal that's
1009. 01:10:00 going to take a long period to achieve. And then you're breaking it up into those little pieces
1010. 01:10:05 to work towards it. Like the creative work I'm talking about would be like that. There is no
1011. 01:10:10 end in sight with that. But the microburst piece from where I'm sitting would be super helpful for
1012. 01:10:18 cleaning up that massive video gear I've got sitting over here in the corner.
1013. 01:10:22 That sort of thing would be super helpful. What was he mentioned? The drawer that had the pencil
1014. 01:10:29 tray that was lodged slightly that had been that way for two years.
1015. 01:10:34 Yes. And the GTD expert came and fixed it in two minutes.
1016. 01:10:38 Right. It's all done. It saved so much frustration for the next several years.
1017. 01:10:43 Like I had issues with that story. That was so weird to me. But I think that's maybe the
1018. 01:10:49 difference is one, the microburst is for things that aren't recurring, whereas the upper and lower
1019. 01:10:55 bounds would be for things that are just ongoing. That's at least how I'm reconciling it in my brain.
1020. 01:11:01 I wish chapter seven on start. He wouldn't have even used the microburst example there,
1021. 01:11:05 because I think what he's really talking about is clarity. Clarity is not a microburst.
1022. 01:11:11 Sure. Clarity is knowing what the next step is. That's really what he's talking about.
1023. 01:11:18 Find that first obvious step, the minimum viable product, all that kind of stuff.
1024. 01:11:22 Anyways. And then chapter eight, simplify. This one's interesting too.
1025. 01:11:27 Chapter eight and nine, I'll talk about these real briefly. So chapter eight is
1026. 01:11:33 make things as simple as possible. One of the things he talks about is maximize the steps not
1027. 01:11:39 taken. And again, this is a little bit contradictory to the first or the chapter right before this,
1028. 01:11:45 which is start because it's identify that next thing and then do it. And I know that these two
1029. 01:11:50 can fit together, but I don't think you fit them together very well. I feel like if you
1030. 01:11:56 read this and start as the thing that resonates with you, then you're naturally not going to be
1031. 01:12:01 asking yourself, well, should I be doing this thing in the first place, which is what simplifies
1032. 01:12:06 all about. But I think that's a really important idea. And you should absolutely be thinking about
1033. 01:12:11 the things that you're engaging with. The next one on progress, this one, I feel like, again,
1034. 01:12:19 there's a whole book to be written on this. But this is really talking about it requiring courage
1035. 01:12:27 to give yourself permission to fail. So any sort of creator, I think this chapter is going to
1036. 01:12:34 resonate with. He says to start with rubbish and to iterate to make failure cheap. And on page
1037. 01:12:40 132, he even says inspiration flows from the courage to start with rubbish. And he makes the
1038. 01:12:45 point in here, which this resonated with me, many people want to learn a new language, but they
1039. 01:12:50 don't because they want to be flawless. This is totally what happened to me back in the day,
1040. 01:12:56 because I had Spanish class in high school and I could not roll my arse. I still can't roll my
1041. 01:13:01 arse. And I was like, well, I'm not going to sound as good as senior Wilkie. So I'm not going to do
1042. 01:13:07 this. I did the bare minimum to get through the class. And then I never went back and revisited it.
1043. 01:13:13 But now I'm on, I have to look, I think it's like 580 something days in a row on Duolingo.
1044. 01:13:21 But I had to, again, when I reengaged with it, I had the same thing, like, I can't roll my arse.
1045. 01:13:26 And I went on YouTube and looked for like, how do you roll an arse? And I could never get it.
1046. 01:13:31 But I moved past that. And ever since I gave myself permission not to roll my arse, it's a lot
1047. 01:13:37 more enjoyable. This is similar to what we were talking about earlier, like we make things harder
1048. 01:13:43 than they need to be. I think so many times, I do this all the time, all the time. I don't want to,
1049. 01:13:53 like, I can't work on, let's say editing a video, I can't work on editing that video.
1050. 01:13:59 Okay, why? Well, the video file hasn't been loaded into a new project for me to start
1051. 01:14:07 working on it yet. Okay, well, why hasn't it been loaded into that? Well, I haven't updated the
1052. 01:14:13 software because I want to do that before I start it because there's a new feature I want to use.
1053. 01:14:17 Okay, why haven't you updated that? I don't know, I just haven't clicked the update button,
1054. 01:14:22 like, so thus I'm not editing a video because the software is not updated, but I just haven't
1055. 01:14:29 clicked the button to update it maybe because I think it's going to restart it, but I don't know,
1056. 01:14:33 I don't want my computer to go out of commission for those 10 minutes. So like,
1057. 01:14:37 I do this all the time, all the time, I'm terrible. Yep, the struggle is real.
1058. 01:14:44 All right, last part here, part three is effortless results. And the chapters here,
1059. 01:14:52 chapter 11, learn chapter 12, lift chapter 13, automate chapter 14, trust and chapter 15
1060. 01:14:59 prevent. In chapter 11, learn, he talks about reading, which I thought was kind of cool.
1061. 01:15:04 He says on page 163 specifically, reading a book is among the most high leverage activities on
1062. 01:15:11 earth. And yes, Greg, I agree with you. He talks about the older a book is the higher the likelihood
1063. 01:15:19 it survives into the future, which is interesting and probably means we should read more classics.
1064. 01:15:26 We're going to read an older book next, I think actually. And he talks about distilling to understand
1065. 01:15:33 instead of just, I think like most people read, I know it's a generalization, but we both did this
1066. 01:15:42 before we read out a read a book, it's like, you just sit down, you crank through this thing,
1067. 01:15:47 whatever jumps out, it jumps out at you. If you're really trying to suck everything out of a book,
1068. 01:15:52 you're going to recreate everything the author is saying in an outline. And we neither of us
1069. 01:15:58 do that anymore, because what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand the principles
1070. 01:16:05 and that gets into like the synoptical readings and topical reading. I forget how Mortimer Adler
1071. 01:16:12 describes it in that book about how you're comparing the author's arguments against the
1072. 01:16:16 arguments of other authors in other books. And that's really where a lot of the magic happens.
1073. 01:16:21 I think the productivity books that we read tend to fall into the systems, sort of a thing,
1074. 01:16:28 like just do x, y, z, and you'll get these results. And he says in this section that those methods,
1075. 01:16:36 those can be used once to produce linear results, but they really can't be applied over and over
1076. 01:16:43 again. And really what we should be trying to get are the principles that can be applied broadly.
1077. 01:16:49 These are the things that are universal and timeless, which I agree with that. And it makes
1078. 01:16:56 me realize the value of a couple of the books that we've covered. Number one, principles by Ray Dalio.
1079. 01:17:00 And then the other one would be the great mental models that we both really enjoyed. We read that
1080. 01:17:05 one more recently. Those types of books are the ones that I really connect with now. And he kind
1081. 01:17:14 of hit the nail on the head and showed me why I rankle at the systems books so much.
1082. 01:17:19 Sure. Yeah, I mean, it has to do with how much background do you have? Like he's talking about
1083. 01:17:26 how great reading is and how to distill things. It's interesting to me that we've
1084. 01:17:34 inadvertently, I think, we have stepped more towards more recent releases in books.
1085. 01:17:40 And we've both picked books that are pre-order only at the time we talk about it to a year,
1086. 01:17:50 two years old. That's probably a lot of books that we've covered in recent months.
1087. 01:17:54 But he's recommending what was the, is it Lindale? I forget the name Litter.
1088. 01:18:03 I forget what the name of the effect is that the longer a book has been published, the more likely
1089. 01:18:08 it is to stay a classic. So the older a book is, the more impactful it likely is on your life.
1090. 01:18:17 This is something that we don't do, I don't think, in bookworm at least. So I don't know if there's
1091. 01:18:26 something we should do with that. There are a lot of classics out there that we probably
1092. 01:18:31 should cover at some point and just haven't. At the same time covering the newer ones is fun.
1093. 01:18:37 It is. It's like because we get to be a voice about it from day one. So it's just a curious
1094. 01:18:44 thing to me. I don't really have a specific point other than reading is important. You should all do
1095. 01:18:50 it. And there was one kind of sad fact in this. Yes, there was. The number of people reading more
1096. 01:18:57 than four books in a year is declining. That made me sad. Yes. Yeah. The average American only reads
1097. 01:19:03 four books a year and 25% don't read it all. And this is my issue with things like Blinkist.
1098. 01:19:09 The Blinkist service is fine, but it encourages, I shouldn't say encourages, enables people to not
1099. 01:19:16 read the books. Come on people, don't be lazy. Read the books. If you want to supplement that
1100. 01:19:23 with Blinkist, go right ahead. But make sure you are reading the books. At least some books.
1101. 01:19:31 I mean, you can't read everything. There's too much information out there, but don't be the average
1102. 01:19:36 lazy person who doesn't read the books and then reads the Blinkist thing or listens to the Blinkist
1103. 01:19:42 thing. And then it's like, there, I read the book. No, no, you did not read the book. That really bothers
1104. 01:19:47 me. That bugs me so much. It's like, by the way, bookworm is where you need to do that. Like,
1105. 01:19:52 we're enabling people to not read too, Mike. So like, it's true. It's true. Whoops. But yes,
1106. 01:19:57 do you go read the books? We are enabling you to not read them. Here's what you should do.
1107. 01:20:03 When we talk about gap books, you guys do a gap book as well. But don't read any of the books
1108. 01:20:08 we're reading. You read the other stuff and then you tell us which ones we should read. And then
1109. 01:20:12 you can get the distillation from us on the ones that we are reading or use this as a filter and
1110. 01:20:18 then go read them. That's fine too. Just read something. Don't just listen. Don't get the synopsis.
1111. 01:20:26 Do the heavy lifting. I'm a big believer in the value of that. I think that's the big reason we
1112. 01:20:33 continue to do this is that you and I get so much out of reading the books and talking to you.
1113. 01:20:38 Yeah. There's a lot to it for sure. I want to talk real briefly about this distill to understand,
1114. 01:20:43 though. Are you familiar with the concept of progressive summarization?
1115. 01:20:46 Progressive summarization. I don't think so. This, I believe, is made popular by
1116. 01:20:52 Tiago Forte with the building of second brain stuff. Sure. And his version of this
1117. 01:20:59 is that you read something and you grab your notes from that thing. So one easy way to do this,
1118. 01:21:08 if you're doing digital stuff is like you highlight stuff on the Kindle and then you use read wise
1119. 01:21:11 to pull it into your note taking up. Then when you go back and you look at your notes,
1120. 01:21:17 you continue to summarize. So the first time that you go through it, maybe you're going to
1121. 01:21:24 bold things. And then the next time that you go through those notes, you're going to highlight
1122. 01:21:30 things. And so each time that you do it, you're condensing this entire work into less and less
1123. 01:21:37 words until you essentially have like a very quick synopsis of what the author was
1124. 01:21:46 originally saying. And I don't know that I like this idea. I think that they're, that
1125. 01:21:52 summarizing things is valuable. I do that with not only the MindNote files that I create,
1126. 01:21:58 but also when I transfer those notes into Obsidian, I write a three sentence summary.
1127. 01:22:03 And I get a lot of value of forcing myself to write those three sentence summaries.
1128. 01:22:08 But I don't ever want to go back and read all my notes and then go back and read them all again,
1129. 01:22:15 and then go back and read them all again, which is kind of implied with this idea of
1130. 01:22:19 progressive summarization. But that's the picture that I get when he talks about distilling things
1131. 01:22:25 down. And I was curious how you do this. I don't. All right. That's easy, right?
1132. 01:22:34 But that just seems like a ton of work to me in time that I'm not going to devote.
1133. 01:22:39 Right. And that's, that's kind of the thing is like, I don't think to distill you need to do
1134. 01:22:43 the progressive summarization, but that's the popular thing I see all the time now. And I don't
1135. 01:22:48 think that's great for everybody. I think, you know, I don't really see people talking about that
1136. 01:22:53 at all. So maybe that just is the difference in the circles we run in sometimes, but that's
1137. 01:22:58 that concept of reviewing them again regularly, like that that sounds cool. It sounds nice. But
1138. 01:23:05 that's quite a time commitment, I would say. Maybe this is just because like I do a lot of thought
1139. 01:23:13 work, as we call it. But I also have a lot of physical work that I do as well. Before testing
1140. 01:23:21 and everything, I was pulling cables through the wall, right, where this camera is like
1141. 01:23:26 up above, over down, like I did a whole bunch of that built a whole new video rack in the other
1142. 01:23:32 room with cables and stuff in and out of it. So like, that's a lot of physical stuff, right? So
1143. 01:23:37 when I have those types of projects, the time to sit and review book notes and such,
1144. 01:23:43 there's no chance, not even close. You couple that with somebody's email doesn't work. I've got to go
1145. 01:23:51 fix Microsoft Word being dumb and rejecting license keys once more. Like there's just a
1146. 01:23:56 bunch of that stuff that I end up dealing with that's physical and I have to go somewhere to do that.
1147. 01:24:03 So the amount of time that people talk about devoting to building notes databases and
1148. 01:24:14 reprocessing existing notes that are written, it seems like, and whenever I've experimented with
1149. 01:24:22 those types of things, it takes a significant amount of time and I never have that kind of time.
1150. 01:24:27 Sure. And I don't know if that's just because I'm terrible at being an essentialism person
1151. 01:24:33 and following the effortless tactics, but just my day to day doesn't allow that sort of thing.
1152. 01:24:39 I don't feel like I'm over busy, but that's the thing is like this distillation. This is not
1153. 01:24:45 the effortless path. No, no, not at all. There's a lot of effort involved here. I would argue that
1154. 01:24:51 it's worth it. And as Martin points out in the chat, even Tiago says, you're not going to do this
1155. 01:24:56 with everything. You're going to do this with the stuff that really strikes a chord.
1156. 01:24:59 This is kind of what I do with Nick Milo talks about this with the MOCs and there's your favorite
1157. 01:25:05 term again, but that's really what those are is like a workshop. It's like, wait, what are we
1158. 01:25:09 talking about again? Map of content. I had to translate this one talking about. I don't even
1159. 01:25:15 know what we're talking about. Yeah, but that's the same kind of thing for me. It's a distillation
1160. 01:25:19 because I'm taking my notes and I'm pulling in pieces of them on a specific topic, but that is
1161. 01:25:24 more applicable to me than just taking like a book or an article, which is how I've seen progressive
1162. 01:25:31 summarization applied a lot of times. You have this lengthy thing and then you're going through it
1163. 01:25:35 and you're grabbing the notes. That's one pass and then you're bolding things. That's another pass.
1164. 01:25:39 And then you're highlighting things. That's another pass. I have no desire to do that kind of thing.
1165. 01:25:44 And I feel like if you're to do that just within that specific article, you are missing out with
1166. 01:25:50 bumping it up against the other things that other people have written on those specific topics.
1167. 01:25:55 That's kind of what we were talking about with all the different books that we've read
1168. 01:25:58 and how to read a book influenced that you can get tunnel vision with this progressive
1169. 01:26:06 summarization and you're just applying this with this specific article. And that's great. You walk
1170. 01:26:12 out of it with a couple of sentences that really summarize everything that the author maybe is
1171. 01:26:17 trying to say. Assuming you're able to do that really, really well and you really understand this
1172. 01:26:21 now, but what are you going to do with those other sentences? How do you connect those to
1173. 01:26:25 other things? I feel like that's still missing. It would be interesting to see
1174. 01:26:29 Greg McKeown and like walk him through how I do obsidian stuff and see what he thinks of that.
1175. 01:26:37 Or if he has any suggestions on how to do it better, I feel like his advice is, he's one of the few
1176. 01:26:42 people that I would listen to if they said, "Hey, you should do it this other way instead."
1177. 01:26:45 This specific section, again, he doesn't really get into a lot of detail here, but I feel like
1178. 01:26:51 you can kind of tell he knows what he's talking about at least. It's true. I'm still not going to do.
1179. 01:26:56 That's fine. You're off the hook. We do need to talk here real briefly about chapter 13
1180. 01:27:05 automate because this is where they talk about checklist and we had done this a little bit earlier.
1181. 01:27:11 And essentially, this chapter is, "Go read the checklist,
1182. 01:27:15 Manifesto." He even says that and snipes one of the stories.
1183. 01:27:18 I guess this is maybe save some of this for Stalin rating. He tells a lot of cool stories in here,
1184. 01:27:27 but a lot of these stories are taken from other places. He tells the story of Major Hill who
1185. 01:27:35 crashed that Boeing Model 299 because it was too complicated even though it could fly longer,
1186. 01:27:41 it could haul more cargo, more guns, whatever. It was too complicated and they crashed right
1187. 01:27:47 after they took off. Why? Because the pilot had forgotten to do something super simple because
1188. 01:27:53 they didn't have that checklist of things that they had to do. So that, I didn't really like.
1189. 01:27:59 I feel like this chapter should not have been in here. He put it in here just because he needs to
1190. 01:28:03 have five chapters in these sections. But really, what he is saying is a tool go on. They talked
1191. 01:28:08 about this a lot better than I did. There is one thing in here though that I think is worth
1192. 01:28:13 talking about and that's these cheat sheets. So that's essentially what a checklist is.
1193. 01:28:18 I was talking to Rosemary Orchard the other day. She made a comment about how templates are
1194. 01:28:25 essential for your brain, something along those lines.
1195. 01:28:31 Your brain doesn't work right unless you're following a checklist sort of a thing.
1196. 01:28:35 And that got me thinking that term templates because templates obsidian, you can have templates
1197. 01:28:41 for a whole bunch of things. Text expander is a great way to just throw a bunch of templates
1198. 01:28:44 inside of something. But this can apply to a lot of different areas of your life. And some of the
1199. 01:28:50 things that he calls out here are like your to-do list. That's a template, an agenda for a meeting.
1200. 01:28:55 That's a template, an outline for a podcast. That's a template. And I realized that that one
1201. 01:29:02 specifically, if I sit down and record a podcast without having an outline, I am terrified. And
1202. 01:29:09 those end up awful because I'm fumbling all over my words. With Bookworm, we've kind of hit this
1203. 01:29:15 sweet spot where we talk about these books. If we put things in the outline, sometimes we follow
1204. 01:29:19 it, sometimes we don't. And just the fact that it's there and I can fall back on that if I need to.
1205. 01:29:24 That's kind of the release my brain needs to engage in the conversation.
1206. 01:29:27 I'm curious though, what other sorts of cheat sheets and checklists you have in your life?
1207. 01:29:33 You could have a time-bound one too. I do this for Sunday morning,
1208. 01:29:37 both whoever's the tech person on duty at that time. We have one that's a minute-by-minute checklist
1209. 01:29:48 that has 750. This equipment needs turned on at 8.05. This equipment needs turned on at 8.45.
1210. 01:29:58 The live stream needs kicked on at 8.50. We need to kick on the local recording. We have all of
1211. 01:30:06 these things that are time-bound so that we know when the things need to be actually accomplished.
1212. 01:30:12 It covers from 7.30 to 12.30 across the entire morning. That one's pretty intense. I don't even know.
1213. 01:30:20 Last time I checked it, it's like 67, the high 60s number of things that are on it
1214. 01:30:26 that has just been continually different per week too. We have a template that we drop in and then
1215. 01:30:33 we make tweaks depending on what's going on that Sunday morning. I don't know. That's one thing
1216. 01:30:41 that we do that's similar to the procedures thing, the working procedures that I've been working on.
1217. 01:30:46 So that's one piece of it. Try to think of what else I use.
1218. 01:30:51 Do you have anything at home that you use? For example, one of the things that we have,
1219. 01:30:55 and this is definitely a checklist, but they're called McSquares and they're these dry erase
1220. 01:31:03 sort of things that are magnets so they're on our refrigerator. We have four of them, one for each
1221. 01:31:08 of our boys and we homeschool our kids. One of the things that Rachel does as part of her evening
1222. 01:31:14 routine is she puts on there all of the things that the kids have to do the next day and each
1223. 01:31:20 kid has their own list. So that's what they work off of. They get up in the morning and she has
1224. 01:31:25 basically like an office hours type thing where she works one-on-one with each of the kids for
1225. 01:31:30 an hour on the things that they need help with. So like Toby, for example, classical conversations,
1226. 01:31:34 he's in challenge now, so he's doing Latin. So she's doing Latin with him and learning it alongside
1227. 01:31:41 him. But the other kids, like all of their independent work, those are the kinds of things that they'll
1228. 01:31:46 just go and they'll check them off and they'll work through that list. And when we're done with
1229. 01:31:50 their list, that's when they can play video games and things like that. And it just got me thinking
1230. 01:31:56 that plus the outlines plus the meeting agendas, like there are lots of different ways that you
1231. 01:32:02 can apply these checklist. It's not just a checklist, like the flight checklist, like, oh, I'm going to
1232. 01:32:08 do this thing now. And so I have to make sure I follow all of these steps. There's a lot of value
1233. 01:32:12 in that, especially with complex tasks. But I think there's a lot of places that maybe you're
1234. 01:32:18 doing this already. You don't even really realize it. Yeah, I would say there's a lot of things that I
1235. 01:32:22 have routine processes for, but nothing that's, I don't think I have anything for home that's
1236. 01:32:30 documented outside of a packing list for when we're going on a trip. That would be about as
1237. 01:32:36 much as it would be. But that's the only one I can think of that's actually
1238. 01:32:40 detailed out and written. Everything else is either just habit, mental, or haphazard.
1239. 01:32:49 Sure. Well, this is one of my action items. It's not anything specific, but I am going to look for
1240. 01:32:56 all of the places that I can create checklist/templates. But I'm not going to be rigid anymore about
1241. 01:33:01 that term checklist. It doesn't need to be a series of boxes that I actually check.
1242. 01:33:06 Sure. It's just any sort of template automation sort of thing. Like with Obsidian, I have my
1243. 01:33:13 daily questions and all my journaling stuff. When I create a new daily note, all that stuff gets
1244. 01:33:17 dropped in automatically. And Greg McKeown helped me to realize that that's actually a form of a
1245. 01:33:23 checklist. Sure. Yeah, no, I could see that. I mean, my wife has some, they've got their lists of
1246. 01:33:29 things they do for school, but that doesn't involve me at all. Sure. It's like they have that. But
1247. 01:33:33 that's about as close as I can think that they get the routine of time bound. The way
1248. 01:33:41 classical conversations is going to run and the rest of their homeschooling process.
1249. 01:33:44 Yep. That's all there. But yeah, I don't think we do a ton of that.
1250. 01:33:49 All right. That's all I got for this section. I will just mention in the conclusion, he tells a
1251. 01:33:54 little bit more detail about their personal story that he mentions at the beginning of the book and
1252. 01:33:59 gets a little bit more detail about the health stuff that they are still going through with their
1253. 01:34:03 daughter. And that was kind of the inspiration for the book is when she was dealing with stuff,
1254. 01:34:10 he still had all of the things that he had to do. And he needed to make those things more
1255. 01:34:17 effortless. I don't really like that. I will say I don't really like that framing though,
1256. 01:34:21 because if your kid is sick, nothing else really matters. And he admits that, I mean,
1257. 01:34:28 he says as much, but he talks about how I still needed to get back to the people and cancel the
1258. 01:34:34 talks and all that sort of stuff. And in the back of my mind, I'm going, no, you don't. You don't
1259. 01:34:38 owe anybody any explanation when your kid is dealing with, you don't know what, you know?
1260. 01:34:46 Family first. Yeah, ideally, you don't want to burn those bridges and you don't want to let
1261. 01:34:53 people down. But as a recovering people, pleaser, I can tell you, if you're going to disappoint
1262. 01:35:00 somebody better than your family, especially in the moment when they really need you.
1263. 01:35:08 I think maybe I just took it differently, but I think he was just talking about
1264. 01:35:12 canceling. He wasn't talking about justifying. He was just like, yeah, that talk in three days,
1265. 01:35:18 I'm not going to be there. So like, and that's what he's saying. Whereas if I took what you said
1266. 01:35:25 to an extreme, like he just doesn't tell him he's not going to be there and doesn't show up. Well,
1267. 01:35:30 that's not good for him either. So correct, correct. Now, I'm not saying like you're going to take
1268. 01:35:37 that approach with everything. But if your to do list is too long and there's too many people
1269. 01:35:42 for you to get back to and you need to get to the hospital with your kid. Okay, I'm going to say,
1270. 01:35:49 let this person know, let this person know, and the other ones who I'd like to tell,
1271. 01:35:53 I'm not going to tell them and that's going to be okay. Right, right. And I think that's what he
1272. 01:35:58 was getting at is, but you have to keep in mind he was book touring and a whole bunch. So that
1273. 01:36:05 that people who have to know is actually quite long, which is where he actually started the book
1274. 01:36:10 with what he started the book with in that what happens if the essential gets to be too big,
1275. 01:36:18 and you can't get it accomplished. That's kind of where all this comes from.
1276. 01:36:25 Where's the line with essential though? That's the question in my mind. And I admit that I am not
1277. 01:36:29 as important as Greg McKeown. So my engagements are not at the same level as his, but I don't know,
1278. 01:36:38 I kind of think the approach is still going to be the same. And there's still going to be a point
1279. 01:36:46 when you're going to say, I'm sorry, I'm not going to show up and the conference organizers
1280. 01:36:53 going to have to figure this out, whether I get back to him or not. Right. And that's fine.
1281. 01:36:59 And you never want to get to that point, obviously, but if you do, you don't have to do all those
1282. 01:37:06 things. Correct. Yep. Harry. You do. Anyway, he's had a rough life with his daughter.
1283. 01:37:13 Yeah. And they haven't rode ahead of him yet. But that's ultimately what sparked this book.
1284. 01:37:23 And if memory serves this book, he had a second book deal already, and then put it off because of
1285. 01:37:35 these things. Like, I think if I remember the introduction correctly, he had it planned to come
1286. 01:37:40 out like a year or two after essentialism. But it's been longer than that, right? So it's been put off.
1287. 01:37:45 So anyway, lots of family stuff. Everyone's got to figure this out for themselves.
1288. 01:37:52 You feel the emotion in this conclusion. Yep. And you really do feel for his situation.
1289. 01:38:00 But I feel like he could have articulated this a little bit better and given people permission,
1290. 01:38:05 like he did essentialism. Like, yeah, you want to make stuff as easy as you can, but eventually,
1291. 01:38:11 life's going to punch you in the face. And at that point, you got to say no to stuff.
1292. 01:38:15 Right. I don't know. It felt to me like a missed opportunity to tie both of these things together.
1293. 01:38:20 That's all. Sure. Maybe. I don't know. I feel like he did a decent job with it, but
1294. 01:38:24 he did a decent job. Yes. I agree. Essentialism is an unfair high bar to compare.
1295. 01:38:29 That's really tough though. When authors have a runaway hit like that,
1296. 01:38:34 it's tough to write a follow-up of any kind because trying to live up to the success of the first is
1297. 01:38:42 a very tall task. So when you have something like essentialism in your back pocket and you're
1298. 01:38:50 trying to write a follow-up to it, you have a long ways to go.
1299. 01:38:55 Yep. All right. Action items. I mentioned one of them already, which is to consider where I can
1300. 01:39:04 create templates, checklists, in the different areas of my life. And I've got another one here
1301. 01:39:10 from the first section, chapter two, enjoy. He made this comment about these building blocks of joy.
1302. 01:39:17 And I like this picture. I want to identify my own building blocks of joy. What are the things
1303. 01:39:24 that I enjoy doing? And then how can I compare those or pair those enjoyable things with the
1304. 01:39:30 essential things to make them more fun and more effortless? That's your thing? Yep. Those are mine.
1305. 01:39:36 What about you? I have two. And I've mentioned them both already. I'm going to start showering at
1306. 01:39:40 night to see if that helps with some sleep scenarios. And the second is setting the upper and lower
1307. 01:39:49 bounds for doing creative work and when and what does that look like. So I don't know. We'll
1308. 01:39:59 figure that out. But those are the two that I'm going to run with. Cool. All right. Style and
1309. 01:40:04 rating. This is a tough one. It is Greg McKeown. And I love me some Greg McKeown.
1310. 01:40:14 I love his style. I love his visuals. It's a very easy read. It's not essentialism.
1311. 01:40:23 And that's probably not fair to effortless or to Greg. But this one just feels like your standard
1312. 01:40:35 cookie cutter productivity book, like he was working with the editor and they said, okay,
1313. 01:40:40 this is the formula for a successful sequel. And he just stuck to it. There are lots of different
1314. 01:40:48 things that he could have expounded on a lot more. And I wish what would have happened is instead
1315. 01:40:54 of just covering all of these topics a little bit, he would have just completely left the ones
1316. 01:41:00 alone that weren't in his wheelhouse and really leaned into the ones that you can tell there's
1317. 01:41:05 more to be mined here. That's a personal thing. I feel like for somebody who's looking for an
1318. 01:41:13 introductory productivity book, absolutely, I would recommend this. And I feel like for someone
1319. 01:41:19 who's just coming into this world, this is probably more approachable. The charts and things that he
1320. 01:41:24 has, the tables, where all the different summaries of all the different things that he's talked about,
1321. 01:41:29 that probably makes things a lot more understandable for some people. And I think there are some really
1322. 01:41:36 powerful ideas here. I think the in the conclusion, he has this chart of like making things lighter
1323. 01:41:43 or heavier and really the big takeaway from this is choose the simpler path 100% agree
1324. 01:41:50 with that message. And so I think there's a lot of good stuff in here. I was disappointed because
1325. 01:41:57 I was hoping for another essentialism. And that's not what we got. I do think it's a good book though,
1326. 01:42:04 and it's definitely recommendable. But it didn't knock me off my feet like I was hoping that it would
1327. 01:42:14 and a lot of other books that we've read have. So I'm going to rate it at 4.0, which is a decent
1328. 01:42:20 rating. It's a good book, but it's not on my short list of the top books that I would recommend for
1329. 01:42:28 people who really want to dive into some of the stuff that you and I are excited about.
1330. 01:42:32 Sure. I just want to point out one thing based on what you said. You wished he had avoided some of
1331. 01:42:39 the areas that weren't in his wheelhouse. And I wonder if that's even possible.
1332. 01:42:44 Yeah, because the flow and the overall story that he's telling for each of the parts,
1333. 01:42:50 if he eliminates some of those, like take the checklist manifesto section,
1334. 01:42:55 if he eliminates that, does it defeat the purpose of what he's trying to say?
1335. 01:42:59 Maybe it just felt very regimented to me. Every section has exactly five chapters,
1336. 01:43:07 and some of them, like there's not a whole lot in them. One of my nodes in my my node file,
1337. 01:43:14 chapter 12, lift has two things in it. And some of them, I've got a ton of stuff because you can
1338. 01:43:21 really tell like, he knows what he's talking about here. This is important. Write this down.
1339. 01:43:26 Yeah, I wonder, and I've been processing this, and this is something I wrote
1340. 01:43:32 before we started here, in that I think that we are potentially the wrong audience for this.
1341. 01:43:43 Agreed. And I, it's possible, Mike, that you and I are slowly becoming
1342. 01:43:48 an audience that's hard to write for. I completely agree.
1343. 01:43:53 And I say it because like this particular book, had I not read Work the System,
1344. 01:44:02 had I not read Checklist Manifesto, had I not read any of our habit books,
1345. 01:44:09 had we not read the Sleep Revolution, margin, second mountain, like if we had not read these,
1346. 01:44:18 this would probably come across very different. And I could easily see how this particular book,
1347. 01:44:26 if I hadn't read those, this could be a very big deal. And I wonder if, if I went back and
1348. 01:44:35 reread Essentialism, would I be as amazed by it now as I was when I first read it? And
1349. 01:44:42 I suspect that probably not, I would be surprised if I was actually. And given that,
1350. 01:44:51 it's difficult for me to look at this particular book and say that I wish it had been so much more
1351. 01:44:59 and that I wish it had been an Essentialism because when did we read that originally? It's been,
1352. 01:45:04 it's one of the first books we covered. Yeah. At this point. So we've got over 100 books between
1353. 01:45:10 here and there, at least that we've recorded on even. And I wonder if you came at this particular
1354. 01:45:19 book, if you came at Effortless without so much of our background, would this be a very different
1355. 01:45:24 book to us? Probably, and probably should be. Coming from my stance, like he's a great writer,
1356. 01:45:33 I would say, like he's very good at putting sentences and paragraphs telling stories. Like
1357. 01:45:38 he's good at doing that. And I'm with you in that there's some sections and I'm like,
1358. 01:45:42 yeah, that's a cool idea, but you could have done a lot better. Or there's some sections,
1359. 01:45:49 it's like, why is that even in there? Or that's a cool thought. How does it apply to these other
1360. 01:45:54 thoughts? Like those are the things that we're going through my brain. But as I was sitting and
1361. 01:46:00 just processing earlier, it's like, okay, if you look at each individual point, you can kind of
1362. 01:46:04 see a whole picture that he's trying to tell. He's trying to put you in a mindset. He's trying
1363. 01:46:09 to get you to act on that mindset. And then helping you to choose which actions to do that will
1364. 01:46:16 have long term effects. Like that's the path he's trying to take us on. And if you don't have
1365. 01:46:25 a lot of background in this, I think he did a really good job of it. But you and I know too much
1366. 01:46:30 here. And we know a lot of the nuances and subtleties of each of those individual pieces
1367. 01:46:37 that he's using to get to that end story. That I think makes it difficult for me to say this is a
1368. 01:46:43 five star book. I think you nailed it at 4.0. I'll join you there. And it's primarily because
1369. 01:46:50 the way that we have come at books and the number that we have read make it difficult to say that this
1370. 01:46:58 is a top notch. Absolute must read book compared to the bank that we have in our back pocket.
1371. 01:47:08 Now, that said, I'm not sure what it would take at this point for someone to write a book that would
1372. 01:47:18 fit that category. If you're going to write a nonfiction book that's going to just completely
1373. 01:47:22 blow us away and show us a whole bunch of new stuff and completely change the way we do our lives,
1374. 01:47:28 that's a very tall task at this point. And I have no idea what kind of book that would have to be
1375. 01:47:38 to have that kind of an impact. So anyway, I'm going to put it at 4.0. I think he's a great writer.
1376. 01:47:45 I will probably recommend this to folks who don't read a lot. But folks who read a lot,
1377. 01:47:50 it's probably not one I would say you have to read. Sure. All right. So we have a double 4.
1378. 01:47:56 We'll put this one on the shelf. What's next, Joe? The now habit by Neil Fjord. I didn't look up
1379. 01:48:05 how to say that. I'm nervous about this one, actually. So yeah, I think this will be interesting.
1380. 01:48:13 Given that we've been talking about working systems and building systems and choosing
1381. 01:48:21 what you're going to do and automating things, the concept of doing things right now and building
1382. 01:48:27 a habit around right now, I think will be interesting. I'm not sure you and I are going to like this one.
1383. 01:48:35 That's all right. Anyway, what are you going to pick for after that?
1384. 01:48:39 Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. That is the next one. Sweet. And then
1385. 01:48:45 gap books. Normally, we don't have gap books. This time, you and I have the same gap book.
1386. 01:48:55 And that is Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because Joe and David have convinced me to read
1387. 01:49:03 a fiction book that we are going to be covering for the Relay Special Focused episode.
1388. 01:49:10 But it'll be fun. I'm super excited that I'm finally getting you on some fiction. I don't care
1389. 01:49:14 where it's at. I'm totally going to be all in on this one. So it'll be fun. Looking forward to that
1390. 01:49:20 one. So yes, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It'll be a good time.
1391. 01:49:24 Thank you to everybody who has joined us for the live recording, the conversations that
1392. 01:49:30 happened in this chat are super fun. And also, thank you, especially to the Bookworm Club Premium
1393. 01:49:36 members who are willing to support the show monetarily. It helps us buy a few books. It helps
1394. 01:49:43 us pay some costs like hosting and things like that. And we really do appreciate your support.
1395. 01:49:51 If you want to become a Bookworm Club Premium member, you get access to a couple of bonuses.
1396. 01:49:57 I've got the Mind Node files for all the books that we cover here. And I upload those to the club
1397. 01:50:03 in a special members area. There's a Bookworm wallpaper that you can download. A couple of
1398. 01:50:10 Gap episodes that Joe's recorded. And so you get a few goodies, but really, it's just a way to
1399. 01:50:17 support the show and everybody who has chosen to do that. We really do appreciate the fact that
1400. 01:50:21 you're willing to support us financially and help us keep this thing running.
1401. 01:50:24 Super excited for everybody that joins us live too. It's always fun, I think. So, if you haven't
1402. 01:50:31 already, give us a subscribe on YouTube, like the things that helps us out quite a bit. And it'll
1403. 01:50:38 also help you find out whenever we're doing a new live recording. And we'd love to have you join us
1404. 01:50:43 for that. That said, if you are reading along, I want you to stop right now and get a head start
1405. 01:50:51 on this book and go purchase the book, The Now Habit by Neil Fjord. And join us here in a couple
1406. 01:50:57 weeks and we will cover that one together.