157: The Laws of Creativity by Joey Cofone

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1. 00:00:00 All right, so you sent me a image via text message, Joe Bielig,
2. 00:00:07 that the world needs to know about--
3. 00:00:09 I did.
4. 00:00:11 What did you do?
5. 00:00:13 I did something completely contrary to what I have preached for a number of years.
6. 00:00:20 Can we be done now?
7. 00:00:21 Yeah, tell us what it is.
8. 00:00:23 [laughter]
9. 00:00:25 So I went out and purchased one of the new Series 8 Apple watches.
10. 00:00:32 Yes, you did.
11. 00:00:34 Now come here.
12. 00:00:35 [laughter]
13. 00:00:36 Did you get it yet?
14. 00:00:38 I did.
15. 00:00:39 I have it on my wrist at the moment.
16. 00:00:42 It's super exciting.
17. 00:00:44 I think.
18. 00:00:45 We're terrifying.
19. 00:00:46 I'm not sure what it is.
20. 00:00:47 It's part of a broader experiment, I would say.
21. 00:00:52 I'm kind of relying on the whole "I could return this if I wanted to" scenario right now,
22. 00:00:58 because I'm a little bit like, "Is this going to do some of the things I wanted to do?"
23. 00:01:04 And the core behind a lot of this is Joe's ADHD, actually.
24. 00:01:09 Yes, and there's tons of woes and mind-blowns in the chat at the moment, and it's probably warranted.
25. 00:01:15 But a lot of this is because of ADD, ADHD, and my time blindness
26. 00:01:20 and how I tend to lose track of what it is I'm supposed to be doing at any given time.
27. 00:01:24 That's honestly a lot of what I'm coming after with this, because if I do any form of alerts and stuff on my phone,
28. 00:01:32 I get lost in all the other stuff that's possible on the phone.
29. 00:01:35 There's not enough resistance on that.
30. 00:01:37 So I was trying to find some way to get some form of a time-based alert/reminder of things I need to be doing
31. 00:01:46 without the ease of getting sucked into a whole bunch of other things.
32. 00:01:49 Now, that's why I say this is an experiment because I have no idea if this is going to work,
33. 00:01:53 but here we are. It's worth a shot I figured.
34. 00:01:57 Well, keep us posted.
35. 00:01:59 I have my own experiment.
36. 00:02:03 I have been using Raycast for the last week.
37. 00:02:08 Okay.
38. 00:02:09 Which means I have not been using Alfred.
39. 00:02:11 Why?
40. 00:02:13 Well, there's definitely some things I like better about Alfred.
41. 00:02:21 However, the extensions that are available for Raycast have gotten significantly better.
42. 00:02:27 I shouldn't say significantly better. There's a lot more of them.
43. 00:02:31 So there's an obsidian one which has been out for a while,
44. 00:02:35 which allows you to pin notes and make them accessible inside of Raycast without opening obsidian.
45. 00:02:47 And that's pretty cool.
46. 00:02:49 There's another one that integrates with Typefully.
47. 00:02:53 I think that's the one about writing the Twitter threads.
48. 00:02:57 You can add additional items to your menu bar for a lot of these extensions as well.
49. 00:03:06 So I have both of those in my menu bar and they're really handy.
50. 00:03:09 The Typefully one actually shows you all the drafts and everything that's scheduled and all that kind of stuff.
51. 00:03:14 So it's sad to say I was surfing the Alfred forums trying to find updated versions of different extensions.
52. 00:03:23 And there's more that's available for Raycast at this point that is appealing to me than there is for Alfred.
53. 00:03:30 Nice.
54. 00:03:31 Yeah, I'm looking through the website for Raycast at the moment because I have like a cursory knowledge of Raycast and that it exists.
55. 00:03:44 But I could not tell you what the comparison is between Raycast and Alfred.
56. 00:03:51 I mean, I know they're both launchers, but that's about as far as my knowledge goes because I'm deep into Alfred when it comes to like I've got a bunch of custom workflows.
57. 00:04:01 I have all of my text snippets migrated from text expander into Alfred.
58. 00:04:05 So the concept in my brain of moving from Alfred to something like Raycast is a very daunting and particular process that I can see in my mind.
59. 00:04:15 So it would probably take a lot of selling to get me to make that move, to be honest.
60. 00:04:21 But I'm sure there are reasons to make that move.
61. 00:04:25 I just am not there.
62. 00:04:27 That is fair. I mean, that's the exact argument I used.
63. 00:04:30 Matt Burchler is the one who told me about Raycast several months ago and I told him quote, "You will have to pry Alfred from my cold dead hands."
64. 00:04:38 Nice.
65. 00:04:42 But can you build your own custom stuff for Raycast?
66. 00:04:45 Yeah, I mean, I don't know how.
67. 00:04:48 There's not a workflow editor like in Alfred, but obviously there's a whole bunch of third parties that are building extensions.
68. 00:04:55 In fact, the person who did the Bookworm Stats page, Joshua, I believe I found an extension that he had created for finding Bible verses and copying the contents so you could paste them other places.
69. 00:05:11 I don't know that for sure, but it looked like maybe the same person.
70. 00:05:16 So, yeah, I know they have some sort of developer tools where you can build that sort of stuff.
71. 00:05:24 It's all over my head, which is why I just went searching for extensions and found what I needed in Raycast instead of Alfred.
72. 00:05:32 This looks intense.
73. 00:05:34 I'm looking at the process for building extensions and it seems like it would be simple, but that is for developers.
74. 00:05:45 I would say trying to find, in Alfred, it's like drag and drop.
75. 00:05:50 Take all of your components and you can build this whole thing visually.
76. 00:05:53 That doesn't look like that's the way that Raycast works.
77. 00:05:56 It's a code-based thing.
78. 00:05:59 I think somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but that's what it looks like.
79. 00:06:02 I have no idea.
80. 00:06:03 They're both over my head.
81. 00:06:05 Fair enough.
82. 00:06:08 But I've been digging it.
83. 00:06:10 Cool.
84. 00:06:11 It took a little while to get used to, but there's still some things that I like better about Alfred that I got to figure out things to do.
85. 00:06:18 Like the clipboard history, I'm sure that there's either an extension or some built-in functionality for Raycast for that sort of thing, but haven't set that up yet.
86. 00:06:26 You can do that with keyboard maestro too.
87. 00:06:29 Yeah, you can.
88. 00:06:30 There's lots of tools for that.
89. 00:06:32 There's also an app inside of setapp called Paste, which has a pretty great UI.
90. 00:06:37 So, anywho, that's what I've been playing with.
91. 00:06:41 I've also been considering my rituals.
92. 00:06:43 Have you done the same?
93. 00:06:45 Kind of.
94. 00:06:46 Kind of.
95. 00:06:47 Okay.
96. 00:06:48 So, I spent some time kind of quasi-journalling about this.
97. 00:06:56 And one of the components that I was kind of focused on was morning and evening routines.
98. 00:07:02 And I use routines intentionally there because I kind of have a process I go through, but it's not like a collective, like we all do this together.
99. 00:07:11 This is a Joe thing.
100. 00:07:13 And I think that's okay to a point, but one of the things I've wanted to do is get my kids involved with some of the things I do morning and evening.
101. 00:07:22 And, I mean, you've been to our house.
102. 00:07:25 One of the things I tend to do regularly is go on walks with the dog morning or evening or both if I can.
103. 00:07:31 And I'm trying to get to where I'm taking my kids with me to turn it into more of a ritual that they can relate to.
104. 00:07:38 So, that's one small way.
105. 00:07:41 I know there are many aspects and many components that I've been through mentally that I've "considered" and then chose to do nothing with because I feel like they're like, "I'm going to do something with you."
106. 00:07:51 And I feel like they're in a good state as it is, but it's at least shown me that there's a different light to view these through.
107. 00:07:58 And that, I think, is where some of the value of this comes in, but the one change is really all I'm going to report at this point in time.
108. 00:08:06 All right.
109. 00:08:08 I had the exact same action I'm to consider my rituals and they've been considered.
110. 00:08:14 I didn't really do anything with them.
111. 00:08:19 Yeah, I don't know what I was expecting with this action item, but when it came time to actually put things under the microscope, I realized I don't really want to make a whole lot of changes.
112. 00:08:31 So, that is what it is, I guess.
113. 00:08:35 But I'm pretty happy with my routines.
114. 00:08:39 I'm sure that there are other things that I could do with this, considering rituals for just noticing the crazy things that I do, but I didn't really take it that far.
115. 00:08:52 Sure.
116. 00:08:53 So, yeah, I guess it's done.
117. 00:08:57 Good job.
118. 00:08:58 Check.
119. 00:08:59 I'll call it done.
120. 00:09:00 You call mine done, I'll call yours done.
121. 00:09:02 It's a fair.
122. 00:09:03 We'll make a pack here.
123. 00:09:05 I will say getting some time from that previous book, I think I like it less.
124. 00:09:13 Yeah.
125. 00:09:14 Yeah.
126. 00:09:15 I don't know.
127. 00:09:16 I felt like I was trying to give it the benefit of the doubt as we were talking about it.
128. 00:09:19 It's come up just thinking about it several times since then.
129. 00:09:24 And every time I think about it, I'm like, I'm glad that one's over.
130. 00:09:29 I don't know that I've had that experience, I've had a weird experience in that it hasn't really come up mentally outside of my intentional sit down and think about rituals thing.
131. 00:09:40 I can't say I really thought about it at all, which is usually not a good sign for it long term.
132. 00:09:45 Like that tells me it didn't leave a very strong impression, which means it's not going to stick around with me for long.
133. 00:09:51 Yep.
134. 00:09:52 But today's book is different.
135. 00:09:57 As it is.
136. 00:09:59 So let's talk about today's book, which is the Laws of Creativity by Joey Kefone.
137. 00:10:07 Do you know who Joey Kefone is?
138. 00:10:09 We've talked about the last two episodes, but he is the CEO and founder of Baron Fig.
139. 00:10:14 Yes.
140. 00:10:15 And he's an interesting guy.
141. 00:10:18 We got a chance to talk to him for the Focus podcast.
142. 00:10:24 And we talked a little bit about the book.
143. 00:10:27 He kind of flipped it on David and I and asked us what were our favorite laws, which was kind of interesting.
144. 00:10:32 And we talked about his story.
145. 00:10:35 But this book is a lot of pages.
146. 00:10:39 I don't have in front of me.
147. 00:10:41 I don't know exactly how many it is, but there are lots of laws.
148. 00:10:45 And they're all broken down into these tiny little sections.
149. 00:10:48 And I believe there are 37 official laws and then the epilogue kind of tying it all together.
150. 00:10:56 They're broken down into three different sections.
151. 00:11:00 And each chapter has a separate title, which is tied to a law.
152. 00:11:04 I thought that was kind of weird.
153. 00:11:06 Case could be made, I think, for just saying that the chapter number and then the title should have been the name of the law, but is what it is.
154. 00:11:15 And each one of them has the law and then a story and then some personal application.
155. 00:11:25 And it's kind of built, I would argue, as like a reference.
156. 00:11:30 I don't think it's really intended for you to start at the beginning, read through it once, glean a whole bunch of information and be like, there, I'm good to go.
157. 00:11:42 That's what we do for Bookworm, so it's true.
158. 00:11:45 I guess as you were reading through this, because I have had this, I think, a little bit longer than you have.
159. 00:11:52 I've had a little bit more time to process it.
160. 00:11:55 What was your first impression of this one?
161. 00:11:58 Did you feel like you were drinking from the fire hose?
162. 00:12:01 I don't think I was, but I think that's ultimately a factor of having read fairly widely around the topic of creativity.
163. 00:12:11 Because of that, there's a very large number of these laws that, oh, yeah, I mean, I know that.
164. 00:12:19 It's cool to hear it in your voice, and I maybe understand it a little bit different in Joey's voice here.
165. 00:12:26 But overall, there's a lot of this that's kind of known.
166. 00:12:31 The connections between different laws and how they can play out in connection to each other is unique, I would say.
167. 00:12:40 There's a handful of these, like, I have never thought about it that way.
168. 00:12:43 That all stands out, but those are not common to me anyway through this book.
169. 00:12:49 I wouldn't say it's drinking through a fire hose.
170. 00:12:51 It's just a different source of water in this case.
171. 00:12:55 It's just a different way of coming at it.
172. 00:12:57 Sure, that's fair.
173. 00:12:59 You're right that we have covered a lot of these topics before.
174. 00:13:03 I know from talking to Joey that his approach was to write everything that he could think of that tied into this category of creativity.
175. 00:13:14 And I feel he's done that pretty well with this book.
176. 00:13:17 So I think if you are just kind of dipping your toes into this category, this is a great resource.
177. 00:13:26 This could be the one book that you buy on the topic potentially.
178. 00:13:31 But, yeah, there's definitely a lot here.
179. 00:13:36 He mentioned that interestingly he was going to write a nonfiction book, did some research, found out they're about however many pages, 60,000 words, whatever.
180. 00:13:49 And so he wrote more than that, thinking it was going to get pared down and there the writing process is done.
181. 00:13:56 And then he was working with an editor who's like, I like everything that you have, but you forgot about this and this.
182. 00:14:01 So he wrote more.
183. 00:14:04 So I think this is closer to like 80,000 words.
184. 00:14:06 And it's definitely longer than he had first intended it to be.
185. 00:14:11 But there's some great stuff in here.
186. 00:14:13 It should be a fun conversation.
187. 00:14:14 Just real quickly, the bones of the book.
188. 00:14:16 There is an introduction.
189. 00:14:18 Then there is a prologue, which has really the first law.
190. 00:14:24 And then there is part one foundation or how to think creatively.
191. 00:14:29 There are seven laws in there.
192. 00:14:32 The next section is part two process, how to create from start to finish.
193. 00:14:37 This goes up to law number 25.
194. 00:14:43 And then the third part is excellence, how to rise above the rest.
195. 00:14:49 This goes up to 37.
196. 00:14:51 And then at the end, there is the epilogue dream the future.
197. 00:14:56 A little bit about his story.
198. 00:14:58 There's another law in there.
199. 00:15:00 So more than the official 37, we're not going to go through all of them.
200. 00:15:04 I had a real hard time putting together the outline for this one.
201. 00:15:08 I think it probably makes sense to tackle it section by section.
202. 00:15:12 But I had texted you earlier that if there are any specific laws you want to hit, jump in and.
203. 00:15:20 And add those.
204. 00:15:22 They are all their own distinct chapters and sections.
205. 00:15:26 But they also kind of all tie together in my opinion.
206. 00:15:30 So not quite sure how this is going to go.
207. 00:15:33 I think we'll just kind of flow from one to the next and highlight stuff under these big section titles.
208. 00:15:41 But yeah.
209. 00:15:43 Yeah, and I think that's totally a fair way to do this because this is almost a Tim Ferriss type set up.
210. 00:15:52 Like Tim, when he writes his books, it's like, okay, this chapter can stand alone.
211. 00:15:56 Like you can read this, not read the rest of the book and get everything you need to know out of this one chapter.
212. 00:16:01 I don't think he intended to write it that way.
213. 00:16:03 And he definitely has connections between those between chapters.
214. 00:16:06 But it has that feel to it where you could go read about the specific law that's giving you issues.
215. 00:16:12 And so much so that at the end he has sections where it's like if you're struggling with whether or not you're creative, go read about these laws.
216. 00:16:20 Like he has sections at the end that tell you that type of thing.
217. 00:16:24 So I think it's something that's very portable and you can pick and choose, you know, it's kind of like choose your own adventure book if you wanted to.
218. 00:16:32 But at the same time, like the way we read like start to finish, it definitely has a flow to it as well.
219. 00:16:39 So it's not like you have to jump around either.
220. 00:16:42 So it is just a little bit different in that in the form factor.
221. 00:16:46 It's different.
222. 00:16:47 Yes.
223. 00:16:48 And it is a Baron Fig book.
224. 00:16:50 So like personal Socrates, every page has the number of pages left in the chapter.
225. 00:17:02 And it's this one instead of having a printed bookmark that is added has a braided cloth bookmark that's like fused into the binding, kind of like the bookmarks you would find in the expensive Bibles.
226. 00:17:18 But chunkier.
227. 00:17:21 It's a really well put together book and it looks really nice.
228. 00:17:25 Yes.
229. 00:17:26 They did a good job as you would expect.
230. 00:17:29 All right, so let's talk about the first section here, which is the introduction.
231. 00:17:37 The introduction is pretty short, but there are some important ideas in here, I think.
232. 00:17:45 One of the things I liked in this section was the three devastating perspectives taught by school systems.
233. 00:17:51 Those were Joey's words, which are authority is unquestionable.
234. 00:17:57 Man made rules must be followed and the end is visible from the start.
235. 00:18:01 And he's basically saying that these are not true.
236. 00:18:05 And the quicker you learn that the more you'll be able to reach your creative potential.
237. 00:18:12 Talks about how creativity is severely undervalued mentioned that it's not a talent.
238. 00:18:18 It's a skill.
239. 00:18:19 Everybody's got it.
240. 00:18:20 You can develop it.
241. 00:18:22 And also defines thinker as anyone who has a brain and uses it, which I really like this.
242. 00:18:29 This is all right in my wheelhouse.
243. 00:18:33 He's speaking my language at this point and he's making a really solid case, I feel, for the fact that everyone should read something like this.
244. 00:18:41 Regardless of whether you think of yourself as the creative type, we could probably have a whole big discussion just on that.
245. 00:18:49 But anything else you want to talk about here in the introduction?
246. 00:18:53 Yeah, there's a section here where he talks about kids and the stats around if the kids are in the arts versus the sciences and such.
247. 00:19:05 And if that's their go-through thing.
248. 00:19:07 And I want to read this one particular section because I found it very striking just how big these numbers actually are.
249. 00:19:16 So if I read this, kids who take part in the arts are 400% more likely to participate in a science fair.
250. 00:19:26 They are 300% more likely to win a school attendance award and 400% more likely to be on the honor roll.
251. 00:19:34 Just by taking part in the arts.
252. 00:19:37 And that messed with my head because that was not me.
253. 00:19:42 I didn't do that at all.
254. 00:19:45 But it makes sense after going through the rest of the book, those stats make perfect sense.
255. 00:19:51 Hopefully we can tease that out as we go through this episode.
256. 00:19:55 But I did find that and he nailed it, putting that at the very beginning.
257. 00:19:58 It was very jarring to me when I read that.
258. 00:20:01 I knew that arts and creativity can lead to side effects in the other arenas.
259. 00:20:08 I was not expecting it to be that large.
260. 00:20:11 So it definitely struck me from the beginning.
261. 00:20:14 Yeah, I guess I grew up in that category, the arts because I have played violin since I was really young.
262. 00:20:22 But I have mentioned before that for a long time, I didn't think of myself as creative.
263. 00:20:27 Primarily because I really liked writing songs and every time that I would write one, I would notice pretty much than 24 hours afterwards.
264. 00:20:38 That the chord progression or the melody line or something had come from some other song.
265. 00:20:43 And so I thought, well, they must have just got this flash of inspiration and they are creative.
266. 00:20:49 But I didn't experience that. I just stole what they already had.
267. 00:20:53 So I probably experienced some of the benefit of that but didn't really realize it until later.
268. 00:21:02 Also along the topic of what happens when you're your kids, let's go into the next section, which is the prologue.
269. 00:21:11 Because the sub-title here is remember your possibility.
270. 00:21:15 The law here is the law of origin and says that everyone, including you, started out creative.
271. 00:21:22 Creativity is not something you need to learn, but remember.
272. 00:21:24 Mentioned that when we're kids, everything is a possibility until we're proven otherwise.
273. 00:21:35 And then shares this statistic that according to NASA, when you are five years old, you have a 98% chance.
274. 00:21:43 I guess that would be like the 98th percentile, like 98% of people when they are age five.
275. 00:21:49 Which that's kind of startling. Basically, everybody is a creative genius when they're young.
276. 00:21:55 There's a very small percentage of people who have already had that trained out of them by that point.
277. 00:21:59 But I would argue that the earlier you go, the closer you get to 100%.
278. 00:22:03 Maybe you could make the case for an individual here or there.
279. 00:22:06 But the bottom line is that there are a large number of people who don't think that they are creative,
280. 00:22:12 who actually were at one point in their life.
281. 00:22:15 Most people, 98% of people, were actually a creative genius when they were in kindergarten.
282. 00:22:23 And you lose that over time.
283. 00:22:25 Yeah, that's the upper echelon, right? So that's the top.
284. 00:22:29 So creative genius is 98%. But that doesn't mean you're not in elevated creativity stats.
285. 00:22:37 You know what I mean? Like that's, they're still that 2%.
286. 00:22:40 That doesn't mean you're not creative at all. Like that was a spectrum of types that they put them into.
287. 00:22:47 So the other 2%, it did not mean that they were complete luddites in the world of creativity.
288. 00:22:52 That's not what it meant at all. And that calls out his point here, right?
289. 00:22:57 So at age five, not everybody, but darn close to everybody is a creative genius.
290. 00:23:04 Which means if you go to the very front of that particular section of the prologue,
291. 00:23:08 the second sentence there, creativity is not something you need to learn.
292. 00:23:12 But remember, like that to me was a key quote that you need to keep in mind throughout this entire book.
293. 00:23:19 Like that's a fundamental point that you need to hold on to because it's not something that you have never been before.
294. 00:23:28 You simply have to recall what it was like and go back to that mindset.
295. 00:23:33 That's exactly. He has set us up for the rest of the book.
296. 00:23:37 Yes, he has. So actually, let's go into part one because part one, in addition to being the foundation,
297. 00:23:47 how to think creatively, at the very beginning, before he gets into the actual laws, he has a grouping of these.
298. 00:23:53 And he calls this the laws of mindset. And he says that creativity is a piece of software.
299. 00:24:00 To run it, you need the correct operating system.
300. 00:24:03 And this kind of ties to what you were just talking about.
301. 00:24:07 We have to remember how to be creative.
302. 00:24:10 Essentially, we have to swap the operating system.
303. 00:24:14 Right. We were running a creative OS at one point.
304. 00:24:19 And then for most of us, it got drilled out of us.
305. 00:24:24 There is a quote, I can't recall it off the top of my head by Hugh McLeod, which talks about how over time we read these boring textbooks that teach us algebra and all the mathematics and discovering later on in your life that you want to be creative is simply a small
306. 00:24:50 voice inside of you asking for your crayons back.
307. 00:24:54 And that's, I like that picture. That is powerful to me. But this whole idea of the OS, I mean, we're tech nerds.
308. 00:25:03 So, curious if you thought the same thing, but like you get a new operating system, you get new features, you can do new things.
309. 00:25:10 Right. And we both have an intentionality focus to how we're using our technology. So we try to use it.
310. 00:25:16 And in our house, we have this whole mantra, create not consume. Right. Well, that's essentially leveraging the OS in order to make something.
311. 00:25:25 And this is definitely the place to start the laws of mindset. Like, how are you approaching your life? The things that you do.
312. 00:25:33 I mean, you can make this very general. And I think there is a danger for some people who approach us to think that, well, what I do for work isn't necessarily creative.
313. 00:25:44 I mean, I'm not a college worker. I don't, but even knowledge worker, like, it, I would argue a lot of people fall into that, that definition that don't think that they do.
314. 00:25:53 And if you do fit into that definition, then you are in some way, shape or form creative. And the story.
315. 00:25:59 Like, the, that alone establishes the baseline, but for people who need a little bit more convincing, I feel like this chapter does a, or this section does a pretty good job.
316. 00:26:13 And I think that the idea of the law is in here. I don't know if there's any specific ones that you want to talk about, or you want to talk about the laws of mindset more.
317. 00:26:21 I would say like the concept of mindset is obviously he's starting with it. It's the foundation for everything else.
318. 00:26:31 I mean, I think I've said that about three different things now. Apparently he's laying a lot of groundwork.
319. 00:26:35 With the mindset piece, he starts with the very first chapter and the very first law, which seems a bit cliche to me knowing how books are set up, but it was easily the most impactful to me in the entire book.
320. 00:26:48 It's kind of weird to start off on that, but maybe that's just because I sat down with this creativity book and it got me all excited.
321. 00:26:55 Maybe that's what's going on.
322. 00:26:57 But the very first one here in this section on how to think creatively is the law of expression, which he titles be weird.
323. 00:27:08 I still think it's strange that he did that. Why not just call it the law of expression?
324. 00:27:12 I think he's trying to define what he means by the law with a description of it.
325. 00:27:19 I would love to know his mind, what his thinking was for that, but it kind of acts as a description for the law. Anyway, the law of expression, it's basically be yourself and it's okay to be weird.
326. 00:27:34 It's very likely that there are things that you do and have loved or the things that you enjoy that you tend to hold on to. Keep them a little bit close to your chest.
327. 00:27:44 I think listeners of this podcast probably know I grew up on a farm, but if you were to live in my area and know me from my circles in person, most people don't know that.
328. 00:27:58 That's kind of a hidden thing in my history because I just don't talk about it much.
329. 00:28:04 But I feel like it comes up a lot here on the show. I'm not sure how that worked out, but here we are.
330. 00:28:09 But that is the concept. There's these things that you are or have in your background. It's okay to let those come out.
331. 00:28:18 People don't have to understand why. People don't have to understand why you like those things or what it is that you enjoy.
332. 00:28:28 They don't have to be on board. It's okay to be strange. That's something that I feel is important to say, just because so many of us want to hold some of those things behind the scenes or behind the curtain because we don't know how people are going to react to that.
333. 00:28:43 They may not like that and they may not like us afterwards. That's okay. It's okay that people aren't thrilled with you. Not everybody has to love you.
334. 00:28:54 Yeah, page 28, Jada Don, one of the quotes I really liked. Weird means you're different. Different means you're unique. Unique means you're original.
335. 00:29:05 That in a nutshell gives you a really good taste of his writing style. It's actually very concise. It's not a lot of fluff here, even though it's 80,000 words or something like that.
336. 00:29:16 There's just a lot to say with all of these different laws. I can tell you this first section he told me when we interviewed him that this was not part of the original plan.
337. 00:29:29 This was one of the things that the editor said you need to need to add this as a foundation, which if you know Joey's story, he's a former designer, obviously the CEO, Baron Fig, writing a book is just the latest thing that he's done.
338. 00:29:44 But if you look at him from the outside, you can be, "Oh yeah, that person. He's creative, obviously."
339. 00:29:51 There's that concept of the curse of knowledge. You kind of forget what it's like at the beginning. So he had somebody else explain from an outside perspective.
340. 00:30:04 You know, you need some foundational stuff here. So you kind of forget what you don't know. Everybody's got those blind spots.
341. 00:30:14 But he mentioned that when they pointed that out, he's like, "Oh yeah, never even thought about that." So it's not surprising to me that this one hits you the hardest because this is essentially one of the last things he wrote, the synthesis of everything that he created with this book.
342. 00:30:31 I kind of felt the same way. I like every single one of these laws.
343. 00:30:38 You can't talk about them all, Mike.
344. 00:30:40 I know. So I'm going to pick challenge assumptions, I think. The law of disruption is the one that goes along with this. You have every right to challenge question and improve upon the ideas that are handed to you.
345. 00:30:52 And this is my creative journey in Nut Shell. This is still like an artist. This is a... I don't know.
346. 00:31:02 Probably a lot more normal than I realize, but I feel that this is... This seems like not the path that everybody else that you look at in his creative takes.
347. 00:31:17 But essentially what he's saying here is, you're going to get these ideas that are handed to you. And it is absolutely creative to question them.
348. 00:31:29 And then even if you do find that they are valid, to improve upon them.
349. 00:31:34 So just because somebody creates something, just because somebody writes something, just because someone records something doesn't mean that that is true. You have to figure that out for yourself.
350. 00:31:47 Here is the obligatory "How to Read a Book" mention.
351. 00:31:51 That has... I mean, in terms of impact the books that we've read, that's got to be at the top of the charts because it basically gives you permission to question everything an author is telling you. Just because something is printed and has a hard binding on it doesn't give them the right to speak into your life.
352. 00:32:09 That's kind of like the belief that I had, is like, "Oh, well, this person, they published a book." So obviously everything that they said is true.
353. 00:32:16 But you read enough books and that can't be the case because there are competing ideas and you have to... We've learned having done 157 episodes of this that you have to sort this all out and how does this measure up against this thing over here?
354. 00:32:29 Well, if this is true and this person over here says this thing and that's true and these are competing ideas, they can't both be true.
355. 00:32:34 So what do I think about these sorts of things? And that is this chapter in a nutshell.
356. 00:32:40 But this is really important. Challenging assumptions from a neutral mindset, not assuming that this is right or that this is wrong, that whatever piece of information that is placed in front of you, this could be true, this could not be true.
357. 00:32:55 I'm going to weigh this and I'm going to figure it out for myself.
358. 00:32:58 But also recognizing that we have a whole bunch of assumptions and even limitations that have just been handed to us.
359. 00:33:10 It mentions that we inherit the assumptions of the people that came before us, but that doesn't mean that they are true.
360. 00:33:16 So you have to push against these things and figure out where the boundaries and the barriers are for yourself.
361. 00:33:24 I think there's, I mean, if we look through some of these other chapters, I'm looking at the, this is one of the things I love, they put a summarization of all the laws at the back.
362. 00:33:36 At the same time, they did not put the descriptive chapter names in the back.
363. 00:33:42 So if you look at the back, you can see the list of laws.
364. 00:33:45 So you and I just talked about the first and second.
365. 00:33:48 So the law of expression and the law of disruption, the others are law of connection, law of the unknown, law of continuity, law of competition, law of play.
366. 00:33:58 And if you work through all of those, obviously this is an entire mindset that he's setting up because he's positioned this as a mindset.
367. 00:34:09 And yet it's easy with so much of our societal structures and I kind of want to say constructs and architecture, but it's not really intentionally designed, I don't think.
368. 00:34:22 But so much of how we set up school, the workplace and our just normal social lives, it's built more around, let's get more done and earn more money.
369. 00:34:37 It's really geared towards that and not so much what is your creative expression?
370. 00:34:42 Like that is a thing that is borderline shunned, even so much so that whenever, like if you go through that first chapter, I was talking about be weird, there is a quote he has, what page is this?
371. 00:34:55 Page 29, he even talks about the word weird here and he says like the word weird has been weaponized.
372. 00:35:03 So with a single utterance, you can dampen a person's spirits and kill their confidence by calling someone weird because it has that negative connotation that comes with it.
373. 00:35:12 When really that should be a compliment, like you're weird.
374. 00:35:17 So that means you have like special talents, like there's something different about you that's different than me, which means you have an edge up on me.
375. 00:35:25 But that's not the way it's taken, like that's not the way we use that term.
376. 00:35:28 But that's that mindset piece, that's really what he's getting at is like if you can develop that mindset of it's okay to be weird and it's okay to think differently than everyone else.
377. 00:35:39 Unintentional, non-distive jobs, you know, there are a lot of things that can come out of that that are very positive and can help you in your creative process.
378. 00:35:50 And that creative process doesn't have to mean like your typical fine arts thought process. Like it doesn't have to be a painting.
379. 00:35:58 It doesn't have to be graphic design. Like there's a lot of things that are highly creative that you wouldn't think about.
380. 00:36:04 And I'm not going to go into it right now, but I can think of all sorts of things that are not there and I'm going to ramble too long if I go there.
381. 00:36:11 But my point is like there's a lot of this that is beat out of us over time. He kind of alludes to that in places he doesn't directly go after that in the book, but it is something that I think we all need to be aware of.
382. 00:36:26 Like so much of our normal day-to-day lives directly competes with this mindset.
383. 00:36:31 Yeah, I'm trying to figure out where to go next with that. I think number seven have fun because this is where he talks about the law of play and how when you're having fun, you're doing something of your own free will in this state, you'll go further longer and harder with less overall effort.
384. 00:36:46 And the connecting thing here, I think, is that you can have fun and solve important problems. So having fun and playing does not mean that you're playing video games and not doing something important.
385. 00:37:02 You can take this mindset towards literally anything that you do, aka the dirty jobs guy. Right?
386. 00:37:10 Yeah. But also with that, the thing that really kind of challenged me was chapter number four on embracing fear. And again, all these things are connected.
387. 00:37:20 How can you have fun while embracing fear? Well, you can just play with something and not feel the self-imposed pressure to be successful. Welcome failure. That's number five, right?
388. 00:37:34 So if you have faced a challenge, he mentions that every time you avoid a challenge, it's fear that is stopping you from embracing it.
389. 00:37:43 However, when you are afraid, that's typically a sign that you are on the right path. Fear is necessary to all creative acts, he says, and the law of the unknown.
390. 00:37:53 We've probably all heard the Mark Twain quote, right? Courage is not the lack of fear. It's acting in spite of it.
391. 00:37:59 But when I read this, I had to look in the mirror and I was kind of disappointed at how many things I identified. Like, yeah, I haven't done this. I haven't done that because I'm afraid.
392. 00:38:14 We were talking before hitting record, you know, like the community thing that I announced in the newsletter is the latest example of this. Like, I had this picture in my head, this is going to be awesome.
393. 00:38:29 We'll be able to hold people accountable to what we say we're going to do. Like, I knew all the right things logically to say like, well, you should move forward with this, but I've been sitting on this thing for months and I've been hesitant to throw it out there because in the back of my mind, I'm thinking to myself, well, what if nobody shows up?
394. 00:38:50 What if it's not the success that I think it could be? And I just talk about it. You know, that's good enough. There's potential there. I could do this someday, right? Well, what's holding me back? It's fear.
395. 00:39:07 And I, there are other things besides that. That's a small example, but it really has got me thinking like, I got to push a little bit harder and I got to, I got to see what is possible in a couple different areas of my life.
396. 00:39:26 I can't just take the convenient or comfortable path. There's specific things that I've identified that I don't really want to share publicly, but I recognize that, yeah, I've played it safe a little too much.
397. 00:39:44 And I walked out of this section, closed the book after chapter number seven. Big sign is like, well, it's time to go.
398. 00:39:58 It's a work. Time to put it out there, right? Yep. Anything else you want to talk about in this first part?
399. 00:40:05 No, I think I'm good. All right. Yeah, Blake. This is very similar feeling that I had after reading Courage is Calling, which we have covered that book for Bookworm as well.
400. 00:40:19 Ryan Holiday. That's another, another really good one. But that's kind of what this whole first section is about is it's kind of a pepperale to get you to think of yourself as a, as a creative person.
401. 00:40:34 Part two, which is the next one here. This is titled Process, How to Create from Start to Finish.
402. 00:40:45 And lots of laws in here. I'm not even sure where to start with this one. I guess we'll start by talking about the grouping of these laws.
403. 00:40:56 He says that these are the laws of action. And the thing here is that sometimes we make things harder than they need to be. Creativity is like traveling.
404. 00:41:09 There is a destination. And all we really need to do is to trust the process. We need to show up. We need to create every day.
405. 00:41:17 That's one of the reasons I love ConvertKit, by the way. They have these core values. And one of them is Create Every Day.
406. 00:41:23 ConvertKit became successful when they stopped trying to be a newsletter service and focused on being a newsletter service for creatives.
407. 00:41:36 And I think that's fascinating because now there's people on there like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who runs his newsletter on ConvertKit.
408. 00:41:44 I think James Clear does too. I don't know. There's some really big names. ConvertKit is a really big company. But really what took off was when they got specific.
409. 00:41:54 And Create Every Day is one of their core values. I went to the conference that they do. I think it's called Craft and Commerce a couple of years ago.
410. 00:42:03 And they completely own those values. Everyone who came to that conference got a t-shirt with one of those values on it.
411. 00:42:11 There's other ones like default to generosity and teach everything that you know. But Create Every Day is the one that really stuck with me.
412. 00:42:19 I even had that sticker on my iPad for a while. I love that. I mean, that's literally what if I were to summarize this whole section, that's what you got to do.
413. 00:42:28 You just got to show up every day. You got to do the thing. And then the score will take care of itself.
414. 00:42:34 I know that one of those that stands out to me is to teach everything you know.
415. 00:42:39 Because I've learned that there's a lot of things that I know how to do or that I enjoy doing that other people find completely strange and don't have any idea how they work.
416. 00:42:50 It's not that complicated, but the concept of putting drafts on your home screen so you can easily launch it and get thoughts out of your head without getting distracted.
417. 00:43:01 That concept is so beat into me from habit that I don't even think about it anymore.
418. 00:43:09 But whenever I mention it, it seems like there's always one or two people that reach out and like that completely changed the way I think about my phone.
419. 00:43:15 I forget that it even exists. So that concept of teach everything you know is one that I found is very, very helpful.
420. 00:43:24 It's okay. Even if you've said it a hundred times, say it again. It's okay.
421. 00:43:29 Teach it again.
422. 00:43:30 Yeah. And there's lots of things that tie in this section. There's a lot of laws.
423. 00:43:37 I think the one I'll start with is actually the first one in this section because this ties into...
424. 00:43:43 Side note, I knew this one was coming up. Whenever I looked through the table of contents before I ever started reading, I knew this was going to be on the outline when we were recording.
425. 00:43:52 I just want to make that point.
426. 00:43:54 Yeah. Well, I actually don't want to spend a whole lot of time here because I feel like we talked about this already.
427. 00:43:58 But obligatory mention of number eight is ask more questions. The law of curiosity. The only way to know what is not known is by asking.
428. 00:44:06 So ask better questions. It's a whole theme we covered when we talked about personal Socrates.
429. 00:44:13 But I think it's worth mentioning again because as it pertains to creativity, sometimes we're afraid to ask.
430. 00:44:21 And basically he does a really good job of explaining in this section that just ask.
431. 00:44:27 Don't fear the answers. They hold no power over you.
432. 00:44:31 But you will never get an answer if you don't ask questions. So questions are the true path.
433. 00:44:37 There's two types of questions, external questions, which are questions about the world.
434. 00:44:41 And internal questions, which are questions about yourself. You need to ask both types of questions.
435. 00:44:48 And also, not every question needs an answer. Sometimes the value is just in asking the questions.
436. 00:44:54 So if you don't get an answer right away, continue to marinate on that. Don't feel bad or feel like you've missed the result that you are after just because you don't get an immediate and obvious answer.
437. 00:45:09 That's happened to me lots of times where I'll be asking a question. I don't know.
438. 00:45:14 But I'll just continue to think about it. I don't get frustrated by the fact that I don't know.
439. 00:45:19 And then weeks later, sometimes even months later, it's like, oh, this is what this is supposed to be.
440. 00:45:26 And that's when the clarity comes and you just don't step out there before you're ready with that sort of thing.
441. 00:45:33 Now that's not meaning you're not trusting the process and you're not doing the work every day.
442. 00:45:39 But when it comes to products and things, for example, I'll have this general idea for something and I won't know exactly what it's supposed to look like.
443. 00:45:45 And I'll continue to build a mind map on it and write different aspects of it.
444. 00:45:49 But I'll hold off on actually publishing the thing or launching the thing until I see all the pieces click into place.
445. 00:45:57 That's the kind of questions that sometimes take me a while to develop in the dark room of my mind.
446. 00:46:05 Yeah. And that's... So jump ahead to chapter 21.
447. 00:46:10 So welcome to the interconnectedness of this book. Chapter 21, come back to it, the law of stepping away.
448. 00:46:17 This is one... So this is one that it struck me really almost not at all whenever I read it because this is something I'm aware of.
449. 00:46:25 Like this is... I don't know that we've read a book that talked about this, but specifically, it comes up in a number of places.
450. 00:46:31 But if you're stuck on something, go do something else.
451. 00:46:35 I do this when I'm writing code all the time. Like if I get hung up on something and I don't know what to do next, I go do something completely different.
452. 00:46:41 And hopefully a different realm altogether.
453. 00:46:44 In today's world, it's not uncommon for me to get stuck doing a code problem and decide to go fix an issue I know that's on the soundboard because it's completely different than what I'm currently acting on.
454. 00:46:55 That process of stepping away from it and then coming back to it seems to be something that makes a pretty big impact on your thought process when it comes to the creativity piece.
455. 00:47:07 But so that maybe that's part of what's going on there, Mike. If you've got these questions, you don't know the answers to them.
456. 00:47:12 I don't know. I'm gonna take the dog for a walk. Maybe the ideal come to me when I see pine cones sitting in amongst the leaves with snow on them.
457. 00:47:20 Like I have no idea, but that does seem to happen.
458. 00:47:24 That is definitely related. And this was one of the ones that I wanted to talk about too.
459. 00:47:30 The law of stepping away, the definition of this for people who are interested over familiarity is poisonous to creativity.
460. 00:47:36 It produces boredom and blindness. The cure is space and time when progress stagnates, take a break.
461. 00:47:41 So that is definitely related to what I was talking about earlier.
462. 00:47:47 Now, there's another thing that he mentions in this section. Doesn't really talk a whole lot about, but I wrote a newsletter about this.
463. 00:47:58 So I caught it right away, which is the idea of Theseus' ship. Do you remember this?
464. 00:48:04 Yes, but you should tell it.
465. 00:48:07 Okay, so the short version of this, the story of Theseus is he's the Greek guy who went and fought the Minotaur and the Labyrinth in one.
466. 00:48:20 So there's this thought experiment that Theseus is famous. He had this ship.
467. 00:48:27 So they bring the ship back to the harbor over time. The ship wears out. So they replace a board here, a board there over time.
468. 00:48:35 Every single piece of Theseus' ship has been replaced. Is it still Theseus' ship?
469. 00:48:45 You could say, well, no, because everything is different. Every nail has been replaced. Every board has been replaced.
470. 00:48:53 None of the original components are still in the ship. But the other side of this is that you could argue that, yes, they've been replaced over time, but the essence of the thing.
471. 00:49:08 That's what Theseus' ship really is. And that is absolutely still the same. It looks the same. It functions the same.
472. 00:49:16 Right. So this is interesting as it pertains to creativity because you are always changing. One of the statistics I'd heard is that your cells replace themselves every seven years and different organs, different body parts will replace their cells at different rates.
473. 00:49:36 So it's not exactly that, but just go with me for this. The truth is that your body is always reproducing itself.
474. 00:49:45 The bottom line is if you're going to take the literal approach here and say, no, Theseus' ship is not the same as it was because all the pieces have been replaced, you are not the same person that you were. However long ago.
475. 00:49:59 And for the sake of simplicity, let's say seven years ago. All right. So you are a different person in many ways than you were the first time maybe that you had an idea for something.
476. 00:50:12 And that means that because you made a decision about something at one point does not mean that it is still the right decision.
477. 00:50:21 You have to give some space and some time to a lot of these things in order to do the right thing at the right time to do the right thing in the right moment.
478. 00:50:31 You have to constantly be reconsidering things and be willing to change your mind about things. So when it comes to creativity, the way to do that is we've all heard about the flow state, right?
479. 00:50:45 Well, he's got a separate version of this he talks about in this chapter of the float state. And that is where the prefrontal cortex is allowed to stop concentrating.
480. 00:50:56 I think Chris Bailey would call this scatter focus. But this is just basically where your mind is wandering. And this is a fascinating idea to me because as you are taking into consideration that you're constantly changing just like these these ship.
481. 00:51:11 Away from things for a while doesn't mean that you've got a checklist of things in Omni focus and every seven years you go through every single one of those someday maybe items you decide this is the one this is not the one.
482. 00:51:22 This is literally just giving your mind the permission to bounce around between different things. And if something clicks be like, okay, yeah, I'll try this now.
483. 00:51:33 Yeah, this kind of comes with, you know, when he talks about float. He also comes at this with the order of five.
484. 00:51:44 You resonate with this at all. So the order of five. He talks about how when to step away and for how long to step away. He talks about doing things for five minutes like he step away for five minutes, five hours, five days, five weeks, five months, five years.
485. 00:52:00 And it's your call based on the complexity of the situation and the depth you're stuck at.
486. 00:52:08 How long you need to step away from that thing. Now, like whenever I'm talking about like a code project, depending on how complex it is, it might be five minutes. I need to step away. It might be five hours.
487. 00:52:20 It's rare that it's five days. But occasionally I can think of a couple cases where I've needed to let something sit for five days.
488. 00:52:29 But there have also been seasons where like, I don't really know how our life is going to look once we move into our house.
489. 00:52:38 Like, so we need to just take a break from trying to make any form of like grand plans for like five months, whenever we get into our house and just kind of operate.
490. 00:52:50 However, works best. Like, don't do any pre planning on it because it's probably not going to be what we think it is. And it's just not worth the mental space to do that. So that's where this order of five thing I think is it's, it's handy. Obviously, it's not a hard and fast rule.
491. 00:53:05 It's just one of those observations of this seems to be about the thing that happens. So it's just kind of an interesting point.
492. 00:53:14 Well, using the house project as the example here, again, it's all interrelated, but 24 and 25 tie together here, publish imperfection and let it go.
493. 00:53:26 So the publish imperfection, that's the law of good enough. Right. You got your house to the point where it was good enough and then you moved in.
494. 00:53:34 Yep. Exactly. Right. And then there's the law of the finish line, which says at the end is a fallacy, you never reach it. You choose it.
495. 00:53:41 Correct. There will always be something else for you to do. You got to be willing to have baseboards on it or house. So yeah, there's still lots to do.
496. 00:53:50 Right. So that maybe ties into the publish imperfection, but the 25 let it go. That's the law of the finish line. Maybe the baseboards is the place where you draw the line like this is good enough and this is done.
497. 00:54:03 Right. But when it comes to even a blog post or a podcast episode, whatever, like it's never going to be perfect. I had to learn this when I was editing podcasts.
498. 00:54:13 You can tweak things and try to dial things in just right and try to clean up every um, and there's a law of diminishing returns there.
499. 00:54:22 Yes. Eventually you get to the point where you just have to ship the thing. And one of the quotes from this law of the finish line by Leonardo da Vinci, which I love because Leonardo da Vinci is a great person.
500. 00:54:32 I love because Leonardo da Vinci, he's the guy who did all these things. Right. So, and you think about the incredible things that he did. And it's easy to attach to, he achieved perfection when he painted the Mona Lisa did all these things. Right.
501. 00:54:53 But he's the one who said that art is never finished. It's only abandoned. So it'd be interesting to go back and talk to him. I mean, we can't do that, but it would be interesting to hear him say, well, this wasn't perfect because XYZ. And I just decided that I'm going to do it.
502. 00:55:12 I mean, I'll ship it anyways. When you think about somebody who made such a profound impact on the world and understand that he had the reason he had that impact was because he embraced this way.
503. 00:55:24 Because he was the one who would just ship things and he just shipped things enough and did it enough that eventually he got.
504. 00:55:32 More excellent at things. He was able to do all this, the stuff and achieve this level of excellence precisely because he wasn't worried about things being perfect.
505. 00:55:46 Because he just chipped it. You can't control the life of a thing that you release out into the wild. There's another thing that Joey talks about in this chapter.
506. 00:55:57 And the other thing that we decide to make, we must also decide to stop making. We have to reach that point where this is good enough. And the quicker that you can do that, the more reps you'll get in. That's ultimately the thing that's going to lead to the quality.
507. 00:56:10 I want to talk about one other chapter in this part before we move on. Maybe you've got another one you want to go over. But one of them, let me get back to my table of contents here. It's referred to as define the problem.
508. 00:56:23 The second one in this, law of precision. And one of the things that, and people talk about this fairly often whenever they're talking about creativity and trying to solve a fairly big problem. I guess it doesn't have to be a big problem, but solving a problem in general.
509. 00:56:43 The thing that makes it easier to solve is if you take the time to do the hard work to actually define what the constraints are and define what the issue actually is.
510. 00:56:58 I know that there's a quote like the "I'm going to butcher this." But it has to do with the person who can define the problem the best is most likely the one who's going to answer the question of what's wrong.
511. 00:57:10 Yep, that's Josh Kaufman. That's in my my node. Whoever best describes the problem is most likely to solve it.
512. 00:57:18 There you go. There you go. And that's one that I feel like this is an understated point whenever it comes to innovation, invention, creativity, trying to break rules, break new ground.
513. 00:57:35 These are all tied to who can define the problem the best. I think about probably an easy one is Elon Musk and Tesla.
514. 00:57:47 He regularly talks about how they will try to define all of the laws of physics that are working against them.
515. 00:57:58 Those are the constraints. If it doesn't violate one of those laws, it's free game to try to break that rule and that convention.
516. 00:58:08 That's purely a process of defining what the situation is and then working backwards from that point.
517. 00:58:16 To me, that's an understated process because if you can take the time to articulate what the issue actually is, what is it you're up against, that makes it so much easier to find the solution to it.
518. 00:58:34 I have seen this with this whole ADHD journey that I've been on. I was like, how do I actually manage this the right way now that I've been able to define it and what are the fears and the parts that make me anxious and the restrictions that I somehow have in my brain to doing things
519. 00:58:53 and lack of motivation on things like, what is it that is causing all of that and what can I do about it?
520. 00:58:59 What is the actual problem and then let me work backwards from that?
521. 00:59:04 I feel like that particular process is one that I need to do more of.
522. 00:59:08 I have no idea what that actually means, but I know that it's something that I want to do.
523. 00:59:13 Just defining things clearly seems to be a thing that whenever I do that, I gain a lot of clarity.
524. 00:59:21 Even though I think I understand the problem on a surface level, it doesn't necessarily mean I have a clean definition of it.
525. 00:59:28 That's the part that I think is important in the process.
526. 00:59:32 Yeah, there's a really cool story in this chapter which illustrates this about Jan Ernst, Matt's Gelliger.
527. 00:59:41 The Cliff Notes version of this is that Jan was born to a slave mom who had a lot of foot injuries because shoes were expensive.
528. 00:59:50 He wanted to figure out how to get someone like his mom's shoes.
529. 00:59:57 He took a job at a shoe factory in Massachusetts and identified the bottleneck which was this lasting process.
530. 01:00:04 That is the attaching of the top and the sole of the shoe together.
531. 01:00:09 Jan invented a machine that could produce 14 times more shoes through this lasting process than a human could.
532. 01:00:19 This was a role that humans would go through this lasting process.
533. 01:00:22 Now they can 14x that.
534. 01:00:25 What that did is it made shoes more affordable.
535. 01:00:28 The example here is refining the question which was how do I make shoe production cheaper?
536. 01:00:34 How do I make the lasting process faster?
537. 01:00:38 I think just applying this to myself, I settle for the surface level question way too often.
538. 01:00:46 How can I make shoe production cheaper?
539. 01:00:48 They're like, "There, I figured out the problem."
540. 01:00:50 No, there's a whole other level that you can get to.
541. 01:00:53 And really what he's saying in this section is that when you do sharpen that problem, that's when you are really in a position to solve it.
542. 01:01:04 So I had the same sort of thing.
543. 01:01:06 I don't know exactly how to apply this to myself, other than just spend some more thinking time on some of the problems that I'm facing.
544. 01:01:15 And not settling for the first version of the problem to surface itself.
545. 01:01:22 Really digging into things and being like, "Okay, so what are the component parts of this?"
546. 01:01:27 It's almost like the five Y exercise except it's not that simple.
547. 01:01:32 You got to keep digging and you got to spend more time on it.
548. 01:01:36 Yes.
549. 01:01:37 Anyway, I like that one.
550. 01:01:38 I mean, it's one of those more tactical parts of the book for sure.
551. 01:01:43 Yeah, there's lots of other stuff in here.
552. 01:01:46 But the other one that I really like was the limit yourself.
553. 01:01:50 So the law of simplicity, while counterintuitive, the more options you have, the less likely you are to make progress.
554. 01:01:57 I think that kind of speaks for itself, but that's really the thing is, you know, someone who is a high-fact finder like myself tends to try to figure out all the details.
555. 01:02:12 And that works against me sometimes.
556. 01:02:15 And related to that is number 16.
557. 01:02:17 This is kind of what I was talking about with the Leonardo da Vinci thing.
558. 01:02:20 Focus on quantity.
559. 01:02:21 It calls us the law of iteration.
560. 01:02:23 Don't concern yourself with quality, rather, prioritize quantity through iteration even at the expense of quality.
561. 01:02:28 Over time, the quality will emerge.
562. 01:02:30 You just got to get enough reps in.
563. 01:02:33 And when you do that, then you will make something eventually that's pretty good.
564. 01:02:37 Almost by happenstance too.
565. 01:02:39 It's kind of how that goes.
566. 01:02:42 I know with the simple things that I think of, right?
567. 01:02:46 So whenever I'm running a sound system, like when I first started doing that for full bands, it was probably okay.
568. 01:02:54 Like looking back on what I used to do, like, I don't know how anybody could listen to that.
569. 01:03:00 Whatever it is I put together.
570. 01:03:01 And I apologize in my brain to the bands that I did that with.
571. 01:03:05 But whenever I look at the number of times I have run sound since that time, it's in the hundreds category.
572. 01:03:14 And which means, you know, with each of those, you know, in the three to four hour range per, you know, we're well over a thousand hours, maybe two or three thousand hours.
573. 01:03:26 It's not at the ten thousand hour territory, but it's probably close to half of that would be my guess.
574. 01:03:32 So I know that there's not been a point in time when I'm like, oh, that's when I got really good at this.
575. 01:03:39 And I wouldn't even say today that I'm really good at this.
576. 01:03:41 I just know that I'm significantly better than I used to be.
577. 01:03:44 And that's something we'll talk about later, the whole comparison piece.
578. 01:03:47 But it's one that I know that because of all of the constant iterations of trying this and trying that and seeing somebody else do that and attempting to make all these edits to how I operate with a soundboard,
579. 01:04:00 I've gotten better at it.
580. 01:04:02 And every once in a while, I'll have, you know, a band up there in a song that I feel like that was really good.
581. 01:04:08 And a lot of people think it went really well.
582. 01:04:10 It's like, so I must not be terrible at what I'm doing.
583. 01:04:14 I can continue to iterate and continue to get better because I know there's a lot of headroom for me to learn in that realm.
584. 01:04:20 But it's one that I know that over time, it's led me to a place where I've gotten significantly better at it.
585. 01:04:27 Well, even if you are terrible, it doesn't matter.
586. 01:04:30 Just start where you are with what you have.
587. 01:04:32 You'll get better.
588. 01:04:33 Exactly.
589. 01:04:34 Yep.
590. 01:04:35 Get a start sometime.
591. 01:04:36 Yep.
592. 01:04:37 All right.
593. 01:04:38 The next section here, part three is excellence or how to rise above the rest.
594. 01:04:47 And these, the grouping of these is the laws of greatness.
595. 01:04:51 So the big takeaway here is that creativity is a skill to be mastered, to be better than the majority.
596. 01:04:56 You must do what the majority is not willing to do.
597. 01:05:00 Lots of laws here again, but the place I actually want to start with this is number 31, push mental endurance.
598. 01:05:07 He tells a story about Harry Houdini.
599. 01:05:10 And fun fact, Harry Houdini is from the town that I live in, Appleton.
600. 01:05:17 There's actually a Harry Houdini museum, Houdini Plaza.
601. 01:05:21 Like, that's the famous person that came from Appleton, I guess.
602. 01:05:25 Nice.
603. 01:05:26 That's why you're so slippery.
604. 01:05:27 Got it.
605. 01:05:28 No, Harry Houdini was an escape artist.
606. 01:05:30 There's actually some other cool, cool stuff about Appleton.
607. 01:05:33 So you know those bird scooters that are all over the cities?
608. 01:05:36 You probably seem to like many app birds scooters.
609. 01:05:38 The company is bird.
610. 01:05:40 You, you scan it with your phone, turn it on, then you can ride the scooter wherever, just
611. 01:05:45 lead it.
612. 01:05:46 Oh, got it.
613. 01:05:47 I had this, like, vision of almost like a skateboard with birds on it.
614. 01:05:51 Like, that's what I had in my head.
615. 01:05:52 I was trying to figure out what was going on.
616. 01:05:54 Yeah, so those scooters, there's lots of different companies, but bird is the one that was like
617. 01:05:59 featured in the Apple keynotes and stuff like that.
618. 01:06:02 So the guy who started the bird company, which is worth $4 billion, the stupid scooters.
619. 01:06:09 Yep.
620. 01:06:10 He's from Appleton.
621. 01:06:12 Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft is from Appleton.
622. 01:06:16 I actually heard him speak, he came back to Appleton and spoke at the local college there
623. 01:06:20 one day, which was kind of cool.
624. 01:06:23 Harry Houdini was an escape artist and they would put him in straight jackets and tie him
625. 01:06:29 up and throw him in the river.
626. 01:06:31 And that's actually how he died, by the way.
627. 01:06:35 But before he died, that's a made him famous.
628. 01:06:39 And the stories that they tell in this chapter are just like crazy situations that he put
629. 01:06:48 himself into.
630. 01:06:49 So the law here is the law of the will, often the deciding factor between success and failure
631. 01:06:53 is not skill timing or luck, but it's just the willingness to endure.
632. 01:06:58 And the takeaway from this chapter is to push yourself and everything.
633. 01:07:03 That wasn't something that really spoke to me.
634. 01:07:06 I just found the whole section on Harry Houdini interesting.
635. 01:07:09 However, one of my two action items comes from this chapter, which is to create a personal
636. 01:07:14 manifesto.
637. 01:07:15 So we've got the core values for the family, but I like this idea of a manifesto.
638. 01:07:23 And I want to make this short, just like a bunch of different short sentences that are
639. 01:07:28 punchy that just kind of encapsulate like, who is Mike Schmitz?
640. 01:07:33 What do I believe in?
641. 01:07:35 I think this is a cool idea.
642. 01:07:37 I think I would like to actually get it designed by I've got a graphic designer or a friend
643. 01:07:42 who did the logo for Bookworm, the logo for Intentional Family, did the core values that
644. 01:07:47 we did.
645. 01:07:48 I think long term I'd like to have him do something with this as well because my artistic ability
646. 01:07:52 is not anything to write home about.
647. 01:07:57 Maybe Joshua could put it together too.
648. 01:07:59 I'm not sure.
649. 01:08:00 But step one is actually creating this.
650. 01:08:02 And then I want to spend some time going back to the last section, let it marinate for a
651. 01:08:07 while because I know I'm not going to nail it right at the beginning.
652. 01:08:12 But I think this is a really cool exercise.
653. 01:08:14 Yeah, I want to point one thing out here that this is the part on excellence, how to rise
654. 01:08:21 above the rest, the laws of greatness.
655. 01:08:26 If you look through this list, do the work, self-discipline, adapt, tailor your surroundings,
656. 01:08:33 engage in practice, mental endurance like you're talking about, expose yourself to new things,
657. 01:08:38 never stop learning.
658. 01:08:39 If you start flipping through these in your brain, like you can treat them like note cards,
659. 01:08:43 these are the tenets that people tend to talk about when they're referring to being creative
660. 01:08:50 in general.
661. 01:08:51 There's some of the things that you tend to hear people talk about.
662. 01:08:54 This is at the end, this is the last part in the book.
663. 01:08:58 This is not where it starts.
664. 01:09:01 This is where he's ending the journey of talking about the laws of creativity.
665. 01:09:05 I feel like that's important because we tend to want to jump to the end on things a lot
666. 01:09:09 of times.
667. 01:09:10 And yet this is after you got your head in the right place, you've developed your creative
668. 01:09:17 process and then it's at that point that you tell yourself that you're never going to
669. 01:09:23 stop learning.
670. 01:09:24 You're going to continue to push yourself into new territories and explore new arenas
671. 01:09:28 you've never explored before and show up every day and create order and deal with chaos.
672. 01:09:35 These are all the things that come after all of those points in the beginning.
673. 01:09:43 That was something that he never says that.
674. 01:09:46 It's not called out.
675. 01:09:47 He never makes that point, but it struck me quite strongly, obviously, just because I
676. 01:09:53 know that this is the part where I really want to jump to this.
677. 01:09:57 I really want to get to the point where I can say that, "Hey, I love to learn new things."
678. 01:10:04 Like that's something that I know I love to do.
679. 01:10:07 So I'm never going to stop learning.
680. 01:10:08 I'm going to take on this law of growth and that's going to be something I'm going to
681. 01:10:11 focus on because I know I love doing that.
682. 01:10:14 The problem is I don't have the other, what is this, 32 laws before that, under control.
683. 01:10:22 I've got a lot of things in that creative process like that part too.
684. 01:10:26 I got a lot of that that I need to work on.
685. 01:10:28 I got a lot of stuff in the very first chapter on "Be Weird," struck me strongly.
686. 01:10:33 I got work to do if I'm going to make this a focal point, which I feel like everybody
687. 01:10:38 should in their own way.
688. 01:10:41 But I think it's important to point out, this is at the end.
689. 01:10:44 This is at the end of the process here.
690. 01:10:47 This is the, you're right though, this is the stuff that people see.
691. 01:10:51 So on that topic, the law of growth, that's from chapter 33, "Never Stop Learning."
692. 01:10:56 One of the things that you mentioned here is that when you're creating the things you
693. 01:11:00 consume become building blocks.
694. 01:11:02 I like that.
695. 01:11:03 I've described PKM, personal knowledge management for people who don't know, I guess.
696. 01:11:09 But if you're listening to this, you probably know what that is.
697. 01:11:12 The whole combination of ideas and the thinking tools, and that's why I'm so fascinated with
698. 01:11:17 tools like Obsidian, I feel like they do give you these mental Lego pieces that you can
699. 01:11:24 recombine in new and interesting ways.
700. 01:11:27 That does create something new.
701. 01:11:30 But there's lots of stuff in here related to the creative process that we've been talking
702. 01:11:36 about.
703. 01:11:37 Actually, it starts on number 26, "Do the work."
704. 01:11:39 That's essentially the create-every-day thing that we were talking about.
705. 01:11:42 The law of showing up, the law of order, the law of chaos, the law of habitat, the law
706. 01:11:49 of intention.
707. 01:11:51 But the one that I wanted to really talk about here is number 32, "Expose yourself to new
708. 01:11:58 things, the law of adventure.
709. 01:12:00 Routinely venturing to the unknowns that your pool of inspiration never grows stagnant."
710. 01:12:04 This sounds great.
711. 01:12:06 This sounds like it's being set up for bookworm perfectly.
712. 01:12:11 You should just read a bunch of books.
713. 01:12:14 However, he says that you need a healthy flow of experiences as a creator, and reading
714. 01:12:19 a book is not the same as a lived experience.
715. 01:12:22 Does that make you uncomfortable?
716. 01:12:24 It's probably one of the first times I've heard somebody in a book tell us that reading
717. 01:12:29 a book isn't the answer.
718. 01:12:31 Yep.
719. 01:12:32 How many times have we read the phrase, "Leaders read and readers lead."
720. 01:12:38 That whole concept is like everybody people say, "Read as many books as you can and read,
721. 01:12:44 read, read, read, read.
722. 01:12:45 We hear this constantly."
723. 01:12:47 Here he is telling us, "Hey, don't do that.
724. 01:12:49 It wouldn't hurt, but don't do that."
725. 01:12:52 Yeah, exactly.
726. 01:12:53 I think he's saying, by the way, not that you shouldn't do that, but just that that's
727. 01:12:57 not good enough.
728. 01:12:59 Correct.
729. 01:13:00 If you really want to get the most out of these experiences, you have to live them, not just
730. 01:13:04 read about them, which I think he's right.
731. 01:13:08 I don't think that that's necessarily fighting against what you were talking about earlier,
732. 01:13:13 leaders or readers, etc.
733. 01:13:15 I've gotten a ton of benefit from reading these books, but when I read the section, I'm like,
734. 01:13:20 "I haven't achieved the full benefit in some of these areas because I have probably settled
735. 01:13:27 for reading the book."
736. 01:13:29 There's a whole other level.
737. 01:13:31 Actually, that's one of the things I like about Bookworm is we have these action items.
738. 01:13:34 That is essentially a lived experience.
739. 01:13:36 We read about these things.
740. 01:13:37 Okay, so it's not enough just to read about it.
741. 01:13:39 How do I actually apply this?
742. 01:13:41 You can take that even further.
743. 01:13:43 If you're going to want to understand Japanese culture, which is where Kaizen comes from,
744. 01:13:50 you could read about it.
745. 01:13:51 There are books about that topic, but you probably will get a deeper understanding if
746. 01:13:56 you actually go there like he did and see it in real life.
747. 01:14:02 I think that's the challenging thing for me.
748. 01:14:04 I don't have an action item associated with that.
749. 01:14:07 It's a good reminder that just because you've read some things doesn't mean that you know
750. 01:14:11 all things.
751. 01:14:12 There's a whole nother level that you can get to.
752. 01:14:16 The other thing I want to mention in this section, I love how it starts with "Do the
753. 01:14:22 work great every day essentially," but then the last chapter in this section, don't give
754. 01:14:27 up.
755. 01:14:28 The law of tenacity.
756. 01:14:29 Essentially just keep going.
757. 01:14:31 He mentions in this section actually, you've got two choices.
758. 01:14:34 You can quit or you can continue.
759. 01:14:37 I feel like I personally have quit before I've realized the full potential of things in the
760. 01:14:46 past.
761. 01:14:47 I don't want to do that anymore.
762. 01:14:49 Everyone probably has their own version of this.
763. 01:14:51 That's applicable to them.
764. 01:14:52 They have their own example.
765. 01:14:53 They can fill in their own blanks here where they haven't decided to keep going with things.
766. 01:15:02 We did a whole book on grit, which is essentially what this is talking about, developed grit
767. 01:15:07 by persevering.
768. 01:15:08 No one wants to persevere.
769. 01:15:09 That feels uncomfortable.
770. 01:15:11 No one wants to keep going when things are hard, but that is literally how you develop
771. 01:15:16 this skill that is going to see you through.
772. 01:15:19 I don't know.
773. 01:15:20 I don't like something.
774. 01:15:21 It's not a knowledge problem.
775. 01:15:22 I guess you can't read books about it.
776. 01:15:24 Go back to the previous thing.
777. 01:15:26 You have to live this experience in order to develop the grit.
778. 01:15:31 You can't get the mental models and just by reading about it, think, "Okay, well, next
779. 01:15:36 time I encounter something really hard, I now know what I need to know in order to get
780. 01:15:39 through it."
781. 01:15:40 No, you've got to force yourself to go through some things.
782. 01:15:43 Then that's how you do it.
783. 01:15:45 Every trial that you face is an opportunity.
784. 01:15:49 It's an opportunity to develop that grit to become the type of person who could persevere.
785. 01:15:54 That's obviously hard, but I feel it's the perfect closure of this section of the book
786. 01:16:01 before we get into the epilogue.
787. 01:16:03 Just to put a little more substance to that outline there, there's a recent thing that
788. 01:16:12 I've been working through at home as weird as this is going to sound, chickens, in that
789. 01:16:20 this past spring, we've got the five acres that our house sits on and this has allowed
790. 01:16:29 us to do things like raise chickens.
791. 01:16:33 I think we're probably going to add quail to that over the next four or five months,
792. 01:16:37 which will be fun.
793. 01:16:38 My point is that whenever we started this process, I grew up around chickens, so it's
794. 01:16:43 not really a brand new thing to me.
795. 01:16:46 My wife, however, is completely brand new to the concept, so she bought a book about
796. 01:16:53 raising chickens.
797. 01:16:54 Raising poultry is what it's called.
798. 01:16:56 Apparently, it's a really well-known thing.
799. 01:16:58 Anyway, she read the thing, "Cover to cover," and that would make you think you knew a lot
800. 01:17:05 about raising chickens.
801. 01:17:09 Yet, when we got our chicks and have raised them through the summer and recently did the
802. 01:17:16 whole butchering process, that entire span has taught us so many things that the book
803. 01:17:23 never could prepare you for.
804. 01:17:25 It's that lived experience of working with chickens and them getting into the neighbor's
805. 01:17:30 yard and what do you do about that?
806. 01:17:32 We've got some that are going broody on us, so they're constantly sitting and not actually
807. 01:17:37 going out eating bugs like we want them to.
808. 01:17:39 There's all these little tiny details that are like, "How do you manage animal behavior
809. 01:17:46 and how do you learn how to do that?"
810. 01:17:48 You can read a lot of books about it, but it's all thought process, and the lived experience
811. 01:17:53 is going to have a stronger impact, and it's going to have a lot more nuance and subtleties
812. 01:17:57 that come along for the ride.
813. 01:18:00 You can read a book about raising chickens, but until you actually do it, you're not going
814. 01:18:03 to catch up on all the little tiny details, like the concept of a pecking order, or clicks,
815. 01:18:09 or all these different things that come with it being cooped up.
816. 01:18:13 Where do you think all these phrases came from?
817. 01:18:16 There's a reason those phrases exist, and there's a reason that we have those connotations
818. 01:18:20 behind them.
819. 01:18:21 Just raise chickens for three months.
820. 01:18:23 You'll get it figured out.
821. 01:18:24 There's so many lessons that come with that, but I think that's what you're getting at
822. 01:18:27 is whenever you read a book and what he's getting at here, it's like, "You can read a
823. 01:18:31 book.
824. 01:18:32 You can read an awful lot about it."
825. 01:18:33 That's not a bad thing, but you're not going to get as much detail and as much resolution,
826. 01:18:40 if you will, on the concepts and on the process as you would were you to go actually live it
827. 01:18:46 and see it firsthand.
828. 01:18:48 Yeah, and that's actually a perfect spot to go into the last section, the epilogue, "Dream
829. 01:18:55 the Future," because the big takeaway from this is, "Yeah, you have to live it out.
830. 01:19:02 You have to do it, and you can't have it all figured out before you start doing that."
831. 01:19:08 He mentions that the future is a mystery.
832. 01:19:11 The law that's associated with this is the law of vision, which makes on the surface,
833. 01:19:15 maybe sounds like, "Well, you have to have this picture and you're heading, you've got
834. 01:19:18 to have all these details."
835. 01:19:20 So the definition here to achieve a thing, one must first envision a goal, but the next
836. 01:19:25 part, "Point yourself in a direction and let the process carry you forward."
837. 01:19:29 This is something that I mentioned.
838. 01:19:32 I didn't really know how profound it was when I got this phrase, but I put together that
839. 01:19:43 YouTube video on the 42 creativity tips.
840. 01:19:48 I mentioned one thing in there, "You need a direction, not a blueprint."
841. 01:19:52 The picture I got in my head of this is, "You need a compass," which points you in the right
842. 01:19:55 direction, but you don't have a blueprint, which is the whole outline, the master plan
843. 01:20:01 of the house being built.
844. 01:20:04 So you just need to know what the next step is, basically.
845. 01:20:08 Then you need to keep taking that next step, and when you do that, the next step will show
846. 01:20:11 up, and then you take that one, and you keep doing that.
847. 01:20:15 That is the process that will help you create this picture for the future.
848. 01:20:21 You will never get the picture of the future until you start doing that, though.
849. 01:20:25 And along the way, you take those steps and you're like, "Is this the right thing?"
850. 01:20:30 I don't know, so you start looking around, "Anybody else doing this?
851. 01:20:33 Am I out here on my own?"
852. 01:20:35 And that's when you start comparing yourself to other people.
853. 01:20:39 When you do that, you tend to start changing what you do because, "Oh, I want to do this
854. 01:20:44 like they're doing it over there."
855. 01:20:47 And therein is actually the road to folly.
856. 01:20:52 I can't be somebody else.
857. 01:20:56 I'll just use David Sparks as an example, because I've looked up to David for a really
858. 01:21:00 long time.
859. 01:21:02 I bought a whole bunch of the field guides before I ever knew him, and he was a big inspiration
860. 01:21:09 for me getting into screencasting.
861. 01:21:11 However, my style is different than David's, and as long as I was trying to do it, just
862. 01:21:16 like David Sparks did it, I couldn't quite get it.
863. 01:21:21 I had to find my own voice and my own way of doing things, and now I'm comfortable enough
864. 01:21:26 in that I can just sit down and crank out screencasts.
865. 01:21:31 But it was really, really difficult for a while because I was comparing myself.
866. 01:21:35 And you could do the same thing with other podcasters, other bloggers, other YouTubers,
867. 01:21:42 whatever you're creating, there's going to be a temptation to take your art and put it
868. 01:21:49 side by side with somebody else.
869. 01:21:53 And the minute that you do that, you'll feel discouraged, and you'll see a whole bunch
870. 01:21:57 of flaws in what you're doing, which aren't necessarily even flaws.
871. 01:22:01 They're the things that make you you.
872. 01:22:03 But because it doesn't match up perfectly with what somebody else has done, who in your
873. 01:22:07 mind is more successful than better than you are, you feel like you should be doing it that
874. 01:22:11 way and you're not, so you must be the one who is wrong.
875. 01:22:15 If you ever want proof that you need to keep going, go look at Marquez Brownlee's very
876. 01:22:20 first YouTube video.
877. 01:22:23 He likes to make fun of that video himself.
878. 01:22:25 But you know.
879. 01:22:26 How about his 100th YouTube video, which I remember seeing that one, and at the moment
880. 01:22:31 he's celebrating the fact that he has 97 subscribers.
881. 01:22:35 Yep.
882. 01:22:36 Yep.
883. 01:22:37 Because it was episode 100 and he didn't have that many subscribers yet.
884. 01:22:41 Yep.
885. 01:22:42 Yep.
886. 01:22:43 But that's the thing, right?
887. 01:22:45 We always want to compare, I don't even remember what part it was in, but they had basically
888. 01:22:51 the delayed start, like the overnight success concept, right?
889. 01:22:56 So someone had been, was it Einstein had been working on things for four or five years
890. 01:23:00 previous, and then all of a sudden he had four big hits and everybody saw him come out
891. 01:23:05 of nowhere and he's got all these amazing things.
892. 01:23:07 So he's a genius, of course, right?
893. 01:23:09 But he's been working on them for a long time.
894. 01:23:11 But you don't realize that whenever someone has that moment, like they've been busting
895. 01:23:17 their tail, they did the work, they showed up, they had the process figured out and they
896. 01:23:20 didn't give up.
897. 01:23:22 They just kept going.
898. 01:23:24 And yet we want to jump to the end and say, hey, why didn't I have the success you did
899. 01:23:31 and compare what I'm doing today to somebody else's today when they've got 10 years on
900. 01:23:36 me?
901. 01:23:38 Of course, theirs is going to be better.
902. 01:23:40 This is, I saw an interview, this is kind of in retrospect, it was of Kobe Bryant and
903. 01:23:46 his rationale for getting up at four AM to hit the gym.
904. 01:23:50 Like to me, number one, that's insane.
905. 01:23:53 But that's what he did, right?
906. 01:23:54 Mamba mentality.
907. 01:23:56 But he would get up and he could do all of his drills and in the interview, he was talking
908. 01:24:01 about how if he gets up at four AM, he can get an extra four or five hours on the other
909. 01:24:08 players doing practice.
910. 01:24:11 And that doesn't sound like a whole lot when you think about it in a single day because
911. 01:24:13 it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
912. 01:24:15 But in the span of a week, he's now got 28 hours on him and he was starting to like run
913. 01:24:21 through all the math and by the time a year ended because he would also throw in like
914. 01:24:26 whenever the NBA would have their breaks, like when they have this off season, he wouldn't
915. 01:24:31 quit.
916. 01:24:32 He just kept going.
917. 01:24:34 And because of that, it meant that in the span of like two years, he had an extra 10,000
918. 01:24:37 hours on every other player.
919. 01:24:40 Like in two years, he was like developing that amount of extra.
920. 01:24:45 That's the process, right?
921. 01:24:46 Like you're continuing to go after things and you're doing the extra work and willing
922. 01:24:51 to put in the extra time before people even realize that you're doing it.
923. 01:24:56 And then all of a sudden you come out of nowhere and you've got all these things that
924. 01:24:58 you've had success at and people wonder where did he come from.
925. 01:25:02 Well, I've been sitting back here working on this for how many years and putting in
926. 01:25:06 all the extra time that nobody knew about.
927. 01:25:09 And now you're seeing and so that concept means like you can't compare like the only
928. 01:25:14 person and he mentions this, the only person you should be comparing to is your previous
929. 01:25:18 self.
930. 01:25:19 Like that's really the only place you should be doing that comparison because that's the
931. 01:25:22 only fair place to do it.
932. 01:25:25 Yep.
933. 01:25:26 Yeah, I love studying Kobe Bryant.
934. 01:25:30 Feel like he would have taken that same approach to a lot of like business ventures.
935. 01:25:39 Definitely lost him before his time.
936. 01:25:44 Anything else on this book?
937. 01:25:47 I feel like I'm lacking a lot, but hey, I think that's part of the process, but no, I think
938. 01:25:53 I'm good.
939. 01:25:54 All right.
940. 01:25:55 Well, let's talk about action items.
941. 01:25:58 What we're going to do to try to close that gap a little bit.
942. 01:26:02 Although I would say that there's a ton of potential action items from this book.
943. 01:26:08 Any one of these laws, you could read it and be like, okay, that's where I've been missing
944. 01:26:11 it and that's what I'm going to work on next.
945. 01:26:14 And probably all have lots of things in all of these different areas that we could apply.
946. 01:26:18 There were two things that stood out to me though, both from this last section on excellence.
947. 01:26:24 One I mentioned the personal manifesto, but there's another one.
948. 01:26:30 Let's see, which chapter was this from creating a personal mantra.
949. 01:26:36 This is 29 tailoring your surroundings.
950. 01:26:39 Two types of habits, external and internal, this is kind of getting into positive self-talk,
951. 01:26:45 I guess, but I want to develop a personal mantra.
952. 01:26:51 We've got, like I said, the family core values and those could essentially function that way.
953. 01:26:56 We've got five values and then like a phrase at the bottom of the graphics as your estimates
954. 01:27:01 be a leader.
955. 01:27:02 So that is essentially kind of like a mantra, but I want to develop one for myself personally,
956. 01:27:07 which is going to be based off of the tenants in that manifesto.
957. 01:27:11 So I don't know if this is going to be done by next time, but I will at least have worked
958. 01:27:16 on it for next time because I really like both of these ideas and I feel like this can
959. 01:27:23 kind of provide clarity on the types of things that I would create, if that makes sense.
960. 01:27:30 I've got a gap book I'm reading, which I'll mention, which is kind of tied into this as
961. 01:27:35 well, but been thinking a lot about who is Mike Schmitz, the creator and what does he
962. 01:27:41 create?
963. 01:27:42 And I think I'm starting to get clarity on what exactly that looks like and the themes
964. 01:27:49 that tie everything together, at least more clarity.
965. 01:27:54 Anyone could look at me on the outside and be like, well, you've faith this for activity
966. 01:27:57 or whatever, you know, but there's always been like the missing some of the connections
967. 01:28:03 and the threads between that stuff.
968. 01:28:04 And I feel like that's what the manifesto and the mantra are going to help me with.
969. 01:28:09 What about you?
970. 01:28:10 Sure.
971. 01:28:11 I have three, I think.
972. 01:28:12 Yeah, I'm going to say three.
973. 01:28:15 I have two questions.
974. 01:28:17 I'm going to try to answer and I've been getting better at doing this.
975. 01:28:22 The first one of those comes from chapter one.
976. 01:28:25 What makes me weird?
977. 01:28:26 I feel like it would be helpful for me to actually list this out.
978. 01:28:30 I don't know what's going to come out of that.
979. 01:28:32 So I actually don't know if that's going to be shareable or not.
980. 01:28:34 I would assume it would be unless there's something actually legitimately weird on that
981. 01:28:39 list.
982. 01:28:40 I guess we'll find out.
983. 01:28:42 So that's one.
984. 01:28:44 Number two, I want to answer the question, what am I afraid of?
985. 01:28:47 Now this is tying together a few different of the laws, one of which is the one around
986. 01:28:54 fear, like don't be afraid or you're going to deal with fear and such.
987. 01:28:57 The other is defining the problem.
988. 01:28:59 The problem of creativity, I guess, in Joe's mind.
989. 01:29:04 I do a lot of creative things, but not necessarily in the areas that I want them to be.
990. 01:29:10 I've edited three videos in the last four days, but they're local political things or
991. 01:29:16 they're for work.
992. 01:29:18 But I don't really have the time or space to do that for myself, even though I've gotten
993. 01:29:24 a lot better at it.
994. 01:29:26 Some of that is I think fear related, that's just one example of that.
995. 01:29:30 So I want to work through like, what am I afraid of with that?
996. 01:29:34 So what makes me weird?
997. 01:29:35 What am I afraid of?
998. 01:29:36 And then this one actually ties us all the way back to how we started this episode with
999. 01:29:39 the Apple Watch thing, right?
1000. 01:29:41 I want to put together, I don't know what these are, but reminders of some sort that
1001. 01:29:47 revolve around some of the habits that I'm working on for each day.
1002. 01:29:54 And I say that because some of what my process has been is to move a lot of things over
1003. 01:29:59 to Apple reminders and having that visible to me at all times.
1004. 01:30:05 And the short experiments I've been doing via phone and now my watch over the last week
1005. 01:30:11 and a half have been extremely successful, a lot more than I ever expected.
1006. 01:30:17 So I kind of want to play off of that a little bit and see if that can help me use the Seinfeld
1007. 01:30:21 concept of don't break the chain.
1008. 01:30:23 I mean, that's the idea, right?
1009. 01:30:25 So I kind of want to play around with habits, reminders, Apple Watch concept there and see
1010. 01:30:30 what comes out of that.
1011. 01:30:31 So those are the three.
1012. 01:30:33 Look at you with those questions.
1013. 01:30:35 All right.
1014. 01:30:36 I've been around you too long, apparently.
1015. 01:30:39 I guess.
1016. 01:30:40 All right, let's get into style and rating and my book.
1017. 01:30:46 So I'll go first.
1018. 01:30:48 I absolutely love this book.
1019. 01:30:51 It's an easy five oh for me.
1020. 01:30:52 I think even if there was only one or two things that you got out of this, even if everything
1021. 01:30:57 else was new, there is something here for everybody.
1022. 01:31:00 However, I would argue most people have not heard this message, at least in this way,
1023. 01:31:05 even if you've read along with every single book that Bookworm has covered, there is tons
1024. 01:31:11 of new stuff in here for you that we did not explore in all of its depth because we want
1025. 01:31:16 to keep this podcast under five hours.
1026. 01:31:18 Yes.
1027. 01:31:19 There is so much here and it's a very easy and entertaining read.
1028. 01:31:25 I think Joyfulon's style is chef's kiss.
1029. 01:31:29 It's so good.
1030. 01:31:30 It's really concise.
1031. 01:31:33 It's fairly whimsical and fun.
1032. 01:31:37 He has a sense of humor.
1033. 01:31:39 I'm not sure if you read all of the footnotes, but those were hilarious a lot of times.
1034. 01:31:45 Love the footnotes.
1035. 01:31:46 Wow, the footnotes.
1036. 01:31:48 Footnotes for Joey are not, this is a resource and the link to the thing that I got this from.
1037. 01:31:54 It's just additional off-the-wall comments about what he has said in the actual text
1038. 01:32:00 of the book.
1039. 01:32:01 I don't know how many words this is if you count all the footnotes because there's tons
1040. 01:32:05 of them.
1041. 01:32:06 I think there was one, maybe that wasn't it.
1042. 01:32:09 I think there was one of them that said the footnote was just, "This is a terrible idea."
1043. 01:32:14 That was it.
1044. 01:32:15 Yep.
1045. 01:32:16 Okay.
1046. 01:32:17 Cool.
1047. 01:32:18 Yeah.
1048. 01:32:19 So it's a long book.
1049. 01:32:22 It is a very entertaining book to read though.
1050. 01:32:26 And I feel it is the potential to completely change people's lives.
1051. 01:32:32 Whether you consider yourself a creative or not, that's the one thing I think this book
1052. 01:32:37 has working against it.
1053. 01:32:38 It's titled "The Laws of Creativity."
1054. 01:32:40 There are a lot of people who are going to disconnect simply because of the title.
1055. 01:32:45 Because the word creativity is in there and they're not going to go through the process
1056. 01:32:49 because they don't consider themselves to be creative.
1057. 01:32:52 So if you're listening to this and that's you, pick up this book anyways because it will
1058. 01:32:57 probably change your mind.
1059. 01:33:01 It's hard for me to reconcile.
1060. 01:33:04 I have a hard time handing out those five-start ratings now.
1061. 01:33:08 Every time I think of a five-start rating, I instantly think of Victor Frankel.
1062. 01:33:12 I'm like, "Well, there's a creativity, man's search for meaning."
1063. 01:33:15 But they're both five-star books in their own right and you really can't compare those
1064. 01:33:19 two together.
1065. 01:33:21 That's where my brain always goes and why I have so much trouble with that high rating.
1066. 01:33:26 But I do think this book is worth it.
1067. 01:33:28 There's a lot of work that went into it.
1068. 01:33:29 I think it's really, really well done.
1069. 01:33:32 And for the bookworm audience, this is definitely one you got to add to your library and get
1070. 01:33:38 the physical book.
1071. 01:33:39 Because the physical book is beautiful, it's really well put together just like the personal
1072. 01:33:44 Socrates book that we mentioned.
1073. 01:33:46 There's a lot of like, "Baron Figg touches with this."
1074. 01:33:48 That are really, really nice.
1075. 01:33:50 You're missing out if you get the digital version of this.
1076. 01:33:53 Make sure you get the physical one as well.
1077. 01:33:55 Just to continue that train of thought, we talked about this when we read personal Socrates,
1078. 01:33:59 which was also by Baron Figg.
1079. 01:34:03 They have little things like how many pages are left in the chapter.
1080. 01:34:07 That's just a slight difference in coloration between the summary at the end of the chapter
1081. 01:34:13 of every chapter and the chapter numbers and such.
1082. 01:34:17 All those little tiny details add up to a really well done structure and physical book.
1083. 01:34:25 I love it.
1084. 01:34:26 Absolutely love it.
1085. 01:34:28 Not a glue binding.
1086. 01:34:30 It's, I don't know, has a nice touch to it.
1087. 01:34:34 There's a lot of things that this book as a whole, it brings up all sorts of things in
1088. 01:34:40 my brain.
1089. 01:34:42 Whenever I think about who is a creative person, people tend to immediately jump to the fine
1090. 01:34:47 artists, right?
1091. 01:34:48 Someone who plays in an orchestra or they are someone who does paintings.
1092. 01:34:55 People will make the jump to writers usually.
1093. 01:34:57 That's not an uncommon jump.
1094. 01:35:00 You're not typically going to think of farmers, welders, plumbers.
1095. 01:35:06 Like you're not going to think of that category typically.
1096. 01:35:10 And yet, like my upbringing was one where I was math and science hardcore.
1097. 01:35:15 Like that was my realm.
1098. 01:35:16 I excelled at those and that was where I focused, but I was on the farm and I would never tell
1099. 01:35:23 you I was a creative.
1100. 01:35:24 I was not in the arts.
1101. 01:35:25 I was always math science that world.
1102. 01:35:28 And I even said that earlier on the episode, like arts was not a thing I spent time in.
1103. 01:35:33 However, whenever you're thinking about simple things, like you don't even, you don't even
1104. 01:35:38 process this really, but planting a field, like a farmer going out to plant a field, you
1105. 01:35:46 really got to think through how are you going to number one, get the planner in the field.
1106. 01:35:52 You don't really think about that a whole lot, but that's not always a simple answer
1107. 01:35:56 because if there's no approach, how are you going to get it in there?
1108. 01:35:59 And you can't just drive straight in because otherwise the planner will hit the road as
1109. 01:36:03 you're going into.
1110. 01:36:04 So you have to be careful with how you come into the field.
1111. 01:36:07 So you have to get really creative, quote unquote, to figure out how to get that equipment
1112. 01:36:12 into a field.
1113. 01:36:15 Multiply that out over how many different scenarios and how many different years I've
1114. 01:36:19 had in those situations and like, yeah, absolutely, those can be creative endeavors,
1115. 01:36:25 whether you realize it or not.
1116. 01:36:27 And I think that's my point that I said early on and even with like captions and stuff,
1117. 01:36:32 like everyone's creative in different ways, which is why I think this book is, I don't
1118. 01:36:39 want to say perfect, but it's definitely one I think everyone should read because whether
1119. 01:36:43 you think you fit into a creative realm or not, you are.
1120. 01:36:49 And that means that you can change the way you're thinking.
1121. 01:36:53 Or creativity, not learn creativity.
1122. 01:36:56 You know, as we discussed earlier, like this is, this is anything everyone should pick
1123. 01:37:01 up.
1124. 01:37:02 So I think you absolutely nailed it with the 5.0.
1125. 01:37:04 I will definitely give you that.
1126. 01:37:06 What do we even call those?
1127. 01:37:07 Those gold books, the Tenno.
1128. 01:37:09 Golden books.
1129. 01:37:10 Yep.
1130. 01:37:11 Golden books.
1131. 01:37:12 So I think it definitely fits in that.
1132. 01:37:14 Does it strike us as, you know, man search for meaning with Victor Frankl?
1133. 01:37:19 I feel like that's almost like a 10.0 book and we have to like, we stopped at our scale
1134. 01:37:24 at five and we just kind of have to go with that.
1135. 01:37:27 Like there's a bit of a spectrum there, it seems like within the fives, but yeah, that's
1136. 01:37:32 just kind of how it works.
1137. 01:37:33 All that to say, you should pick this up.
1138. 01:37:35 If you've read along with us up to this point and you didn't do it on this one, absolutely
1139. 01:37:40 go do it.
1140. 01:37:41 Pick up the physical book because the thing is amazing.
1141. 01:37:43 I just love holding it.
1142. 01:37:45 Like this is like normally, but here's an example.
1143. 01:37:48 When we record these episodes, I usually have the books in my hands.
1144. 01:37:52 Like I want them with me and I will regularly set them on my desk when I'm not referencing
1145. 01:37:57 that.
1146. 01:37:58 This time I headed in my lap the entire time.
1147. 01:38:00 I didn't want to put it down.
1148. 01:38:02 I just like how it feels.
1149. 01:38:03 I like it.
1150. 01:38:04 Yeah, it's awesome.
1151. 01:38:06 Cool.
1152. 01:38:07 You gave me an idea for some special episodes sometime.
1153. 01:38:11 We should take all the five star books and break them into tears.
1154. 01:38:15 Ah.
1155. 01:38:16 Does that even count?
1156. 01:38:17 We've got tears and sub tears, like one, two, three of five.
1157. 01:38:20 Yeah, I think you got to because the yes tears probably just Victor Frankel and then we can
1158. 01:38:25 figure it out from there.
1159. 01:38:26 Sure.
1160. 01:38:27 That sounds really difficult.
1161. 01:38:29 I don't know that I want to do that.
1162. 01:38:30 It would be difficult.
1163. 01:38:31 It would be cool, but man, that would be tough.
1164. 01:38:33 Yes, it would.
1165. 01:38:35 All right.
1166. 01:38:36 Well, let's put the laws of creativity on the shelf.
1167. 01:38:40 What's next, Joe?
1168. 01:38:41 Yeah, I'm pretty excited about this one.
1169. 01:38:44 So discipline is destiny by Ryan Holiday because why on earth would we have a Ryan Holiday
1170. 01:38:50 book that's out in the wild that we haven't covered?
1171. 01:38:52 And he recently released this one.
1172. 01:38:54 Though I think there is there one or two that's earlier than I'm trying to think of the first
1173. 01:38:59 one we covered, but I feel like he's got one.
1174. 01:39:02 There's courage is calling.
1175. 01:39:04 There's four in the stoicism series that he's doing.
1176. 01:39:08 Yeah, but there's one before that series that he did, I thought.
1177. 01:39:12 Well, there's, I don't know, I think we've done all of them.
1178. 01:39:17 Sure.
1179. 01:39:18 We've done all those major ones.
1180. 01:39:20 Blake is pointing out, trust me, I'm lying.
1181. 01:39:22 We have not covered that one.
1182. 01:39:23 That's what it is.
1183. 01:39:25 But we did, let's see, we did Stillness is the key.
1184. 01:39:29 That actually was not part of the stoicism series.
1185. 01:39:32 We did the obstacles the way we skipped ego is the enemy, I think.
1186. 01:39:37 That's true too.
1187. 01:39:38 So we got two of his books we've not covered.
1188. 01:39:40 That's what I was thinking.
1189. 01:39:41 We've covered all of them, but we haven't.
1190. 01:39:43 Anyway, I'll have to say, Disciplinist Destiny is his latest one.
1191. 01:39:47 That's a part of this stoicism series.
1192. 01:39:50 We've enjoyed every book of his that we've read.
1193. 01:39:52 So it feels fitting to me that if he's got a new one out, we should cover it.
1194. 01:39:55 So, that's what I want to do next time.
1195. 01:39:59 All right.
1196. 01:40:00 I'm going to pick a book that Carol mentioned, actually in the chat here today.
1197. 01:40:06 I'm going to pick Mind Management, Not Time Management by David Kadavi, the Digital Zettel
1198. 01:40:13 Casting Guy.
1199. 01:40:16 This is on my short list to pick.
1200. 01:40:18 As in, if you hadn't picked it this time, it's what I would have picked after Disciplinist
1201. 01:40:21 Destiny.
1202. 01:40:22 It's that far up there.
1203. 01:40:24 So it's been coming up quickly whether you decided to pick it or not.
1204. 01:40:28 So there you go.
1205. 01:40:29 Cool.
1206. 01:40:30 All right.
1207. 01:40:31 Thanks for the recommendation, Carol.
1208. 01:40:32 This one looks great.
1209. 01:40:34 So thank you to everyone who has joined us live.
1210. 01:40:37 Thank you to everyone who downloads and listens.
1211. 01:40:41 Thank you, especially to the Bookroom Club Premium members who throw some money at us
1212. 01:40:45 every month to keep the show going.
1213. 01:40:48 We really appreciate that.
1214. 01:40:50 We do not have ads.
1215. 01:40:52 We're working on that.
1216. 01:40:54 So this is literally the big way that we keep the show going.
1217. 01:40:59 We do share some affiliate links in the show notes for people who want to pick up the
1218. 01:41:03 books that we're reading as well.
1219. 01:41:05 So you can support the show that way.
1220. 01:41:07 But for five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year, that's the most direct way.
1221. 01:41:11 And that gets you access to a couple of goodies in addition to our undying gratitude.
1222. 01:41:16 I take Mind Map book notes of all the books that we read.
1223. 01:41:21 Every once in a while, I upload a bunch more into the club for the Premium Club members
1224. 01:41:25 so you can download either the PDF versions of my Mind Map notes or the Mind Note files
1225. 01:41:29 if you want to edit them.
1226. 01:41:31 Because occasionally there are typos and things in there and people want to use that as like
1227. 01:41:35 a jumping off point for their own notes on the books as they read along.
1228. 01:41:40 So you can do that.
1229. 01:41:41 There's a 4K wallpaper that I put together with the Bookworm logo on it.
1230. 01:41:45 There's a couple of gap book episodes that Joe did back in the day.
1231. 01:41:49 But the big thing, like I said, is that you are supporting us in the work and telling
1232. 01:41:54 us that you like what we do, which we really appreciate.
1233. 01:41:57 It's not a ton, but it means a lot.
1234. 01:41:59 I guess just a side note here that if you, not just both Bookworm, but when you support
1235. 01:42:07 your favorite creators monetarily, that is like a huge vote of confidence to keep going.
1236. 01:42:16 And I think I'm speaking for you, Joe, that sometimes I look at the number of people who
1237. 01:42:20 are willing to support the show.
1238. 01:42:23 And it's always a big boost to all of the challenges that we shared in the creative
1239. 01:42:28 process here today.
1240. 01:42:30 Sometimes you feel like, is this making a difference?
1241. 01:42:33 We got a lot of stuff going on.
1242. 01:42:34 Joe and I both have day jobs.
1243. 01:42:36 So I've had the thought, you know, like, should we just wind this thing down?
1244. 01:42:40 Should we keep going with it?
1245. 01:42:41 And every time I look at all the people who are supporting us every single month, it's
1246. 01:42:46 a huge boost to the confidence and a big motivation to keep this thing going.
1247. 01:42:52 So thank you to everybody who is joining us on this journey.
1248. 01:42:56 We love you.
1249. 01:42:59 You're awesome.
1250. 01:43:00 Be amazing.
1251. 01:43:01 Because you're already amazing.
1252. 01:43:02 All right.
1253. 01:43:03 I guess I should share the URL.
1254. 01:43:04 It is Bookworm.fm/membership if you'd like to join.
1255. 01:43:08 There you go.
1256. 01:43:10 Bookworm.fm/membership.
1257. 01:43:11 Good job.
1258. 01:43:12 All right.
1259. 01:43:13 And if you're reading along with us, pick up Disciplined Destiny by Ryan Holiday and
1260. 01:43:18 we'll read that one.
1261. 01:43:19 Cover it with you here in a couple of weeks.