160: 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene

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1. 00:00:00 Are you excited about learning how to be powerful, Mike?
2. 00:00:02 Uh, no, honestly.
3. 00:00:05 [laughs]
4. 00:00:06 It's totally fair.
5. 00:00:08 Totally fair.
6. 00:00:09 I am hesitant to discuss this book.
7. 00:00:12 Yeah?
8. 00:00:13 Yep.
9. 00:00:14 I will say that after I read the preface to this book,
10. 00:00:17 I understand why there is such a division around this particular book,
11. 00:00:24 and why there's competing sides and a lot of conflict around it.
12. 00:00:28 Sure.
13. 00:00:29 I'm like super excited to cover this with you.
14. 00:00:32 Probably a lot of the same reasons that you are not excited to cover this one with me.
15. 00:00:36 [laughs]
16. 00:00:37 Sure.
17. 00:00:38 Just the way it goes.
18. 00:00:40 So, I think it'll be fun.
19. 00:00:41 The entire time I was reading this one, I had the scene from Pinky and the Brain playing
20. 00:00:46 in my head.
21. 00:00:47 What are we going to do tomorrow, not bright?
22. 00:00:50 Same thing we do every night.
23. 00:00:52 Try to take over the world.
24. 00:00:54 Yep.
25. 00:00:55 So, this will be interesting because you're not wrong on that at all.
26. 00:01:02 It will be entertaining to say the least.
27. 00:01:04 So, we have some follow-up here.
28. 00:01:07 You have the focus course as number one on this list.
29. 00:01:10 Yeah, this isn't actually follow-up, but I do want to announce to all the Bookworm listeners
30. 00:01:16 that I will be part of the focus course academy that's going to be coming out in January.
31. 00:01:22 The January cohort, I will be presenting one of the workshops on PKM.
32. 00:01:27 So, the focus course is run by my friend Sean Blanc.
33. 00:01:31 I've worked with Blanc Media for a long time.
34. 00:01:34 Sean told me at one point that I was the first person to actually buy the focus course
35. 00:01:39 back in the day.
36. 00:01:40 I didn't know that.
37. 00:01:41 It's a good job.
38. 00:01:43 Yeah.
39. 00:01:44 It's a great course and it's exactly what it says on the tin.
40. 00:01:49 So, if you feel like you've always wanted to check out the focus course but you haven't
41. 00:01:53 yet, this January cohort would be a great time to do it because I will be a part of it.
42. 00:01:57 I don't know who the other speakers are but there's a couple other workshops that will
43. 00:02:00 be part of it as well.
44. 00:02:02 The URL that you can go to for this, which I think it opens up after we record but before
45. 00:02:11 this releases, it'll be just the focus course.com.
46. 00:02:15 And it'll show the Focus Academy once it's ready to go.
47. 00:02:20 But yeah, it's four weeks long and it's a lot of fun.
48. 00:02:24 I've been a part of these as a member of the Blanc Media team.
49. 00:02:30 Now I get to participate as a workshop leader, I guess.
50. 00:02:35 And if anyone wants to go through it with me, that'd be cool.
51. 00:02:39 Yeah.
52. 00:02:40 There you go.
53. 00:02:41 Super exciting.
54. 00:02:42 Good job.
55. 00:02:43 Do good.
56. 00:02:44 Some other follow-up here.
57. 00:02:46 I've got three items on my list.
58. 00:02:49 And I made progress on all of them.
59. 00:02:52 Attempted one of them twice that I said I was going to do once.
60. 00:02:56 That one was scheduled my week ahead of time.
61. 00:02:58 So the idea here is to think about the week coming up and then plan out when certain tasks
62. 00:03:04 are going to happen.
63. 00:03:05 And I did this.
64. 00:03:07 It took a lot longer than I thought it would.
65. 00:03:10 So I did it on week one and by day two, so on Tuesday it had completely fallen apart.
66. 00:03:16 And then the entire week needed to be done.
67. 00:03:18 And some of that was out of my control.
68. 00:03:21 Some of it was definitely my fault.
69. 00:03:23 I will absolutely take credit for some of it.
70. 00:03:26 Basically what had happened is we're end of year, so we're neck deep in all the budgeting
71. 00:03:30 stuff for next year.
72. 00:03:32 And with tech, it tends to flirt with all the other departments it seems like.
73. 00:03:38 So you end up in a situation where I'm pulled into a lot of things and they don't necessarily
74. 00:03:43 know that they need me there until last minute and we're in the middle of the meeting.
75. 00:03:47 So getting pulled into those meant that I had multiple hours that were yanked from my
76. 00:03:51 days that I absolutely was not planning for.
77. 00:03:55 So the fact that I had that happen told me that there's a lot more flexibility in my
78. 00:03:59 schedule day to day that I don't have.
79. 00:04:03 I guess there's a lack of flexibility and I don't know where that's going to be pulled.
80. 00:04:06 So that made it a bit tricky.
81. 00:04:09 So then week two, meaning this particular week that we're working through right now, I decided
82. 00:04:14 to try it again, Mike, even though I told you I would try it for one week.
83. 00:04:18 And this particular week, I made an attempt to do that for the entire week, but only in
84. 00:04:26 the mornings till about 11 o'clock and just kind of left the afternoon where wherever
85. 00:04:33 it lies.
86. 00:04:34 I'd either be buffered a catch up on the stuff I did not get done in the morning or I can
87. 00:04:38 use that to get ahead for tomorrow and just kind of leaving that open ended.
88. 00:04:43 And that kind of coincided with one of my other action items, which was to map my week
89. 00:04:48 according to energy levels and types of work, knowing that a lot of my hard knowledge work
90. 00:04:52 is always done in the mornings, primarily before 11 o'clock.
91. 00:04:56 So that's why I was choosing to do that.
92. 00:04:59 So far it's kind of been okay because some of why I did that was knowing that most of
93. 00:05:05 the time whenever I get pulled into things last minute, it's literally last minute, meaning
94. 00:05:10 in the end of the day.
95. 00:05:11 So somewhere between two, three, three, 30 or so is when a lot of that stuff will happen.
96. 00:05:17 Not always, but that's generally where it occurs.
97. 00:05:21 So I'm trying to like work around that particular component and knowing that I've got to be
98. 00:05:26 a little bit flexible at those times.
99. 00:05:29 It's been all right.
100. 00:05:31 It's been interesting to see what the ramifications of trying to plan your week ahead of time
101. 00:05:36 are and how difficult that is.
102. 00:05:40 And right now what I'm trying to weigh is the payoff of planning this ahead of time
103. 00:05:47 compared to how much time it takes to do that.
104. 00:05:51 And is the amount of time I'm putting into building that plan worth the maybe mediocre
105. 00:05:59 gains on how much I'm getting done and the effectiveness of what I'm getting done?
106. 00:06:04 So I don't know that the payoff is there, but it does seem to work.
107. 00:06:10 And what I don't know is is this something you need to do for a while in order to reap
108. 00:06:14 the benefits or is there something fundamentally flawed in the logic with this process?
109. 00:06:20 So right now I would say juries out unless you have an immediate, this is why Joe duh.
110. 00:06:25 No, you don't have that.
111. 00:06:27 I did not have that.
112. 00:06:29 Yeah, scheduling your whole week ahead of time.
113. 00:06:32 I've never really done that to begin with because I felt my schedule was too fluid for
114. 00:06:39 that.
115. 00:06:40 And I've always done time blocking instead.
116. 00:06:45 So when you said time blocking was difficult.
117. 00:06:48 I kind of figured this wouldn't stick.
118. 00:06:52 Yeah, these things rarely do.
119. 00:06:54 And yet I feel like I need to keep trying them.
120. 00:06:56 I don't know why that is.
121. 00:06:58 Seems like the thing I should do.
122. 00:06:59 Everybody tells me I should be doing it.
123. 00:07:00 Every time I try everything I possibly can to make it work, it never works.
124. 00:07:06 I don't know if that's just a factor of my job or my brain.
125. 00:07:09 I don't know which one it is.
126. 00:07:10 It's probably an 80/20 here for everybody, but specifically for you.
127. 00:07:15 I think that's where time blocking kind of was it for me.
128. 00:07:17 I know other people who do plan their entire week ahead of time, but I don't know exactly.
129. 00:07:23 I don't expect that part of it to really stick, but there's probably a version of this that
130. 00:07:28 clicks for you if you want to still explore it.
131. 00:07:31 I don't blame you if you decide to quit it though.
132. 00:07:36 At some point I'm just like, I need to stop trying.
133. 00:07:41 I'm learning that I can pretty much nail down what tomorrow morning is going to look like.
134. 00:07:48 But if I try to nail down what tomorrow afternoon looks like and pick whatever day of the week
135. 00:07:53 you want, I don't really have a clean answer on what tomorrow afternoon is going to look
136. 00:07:57 like.
137. 00:07:58 And I sure don't know what the following day's morning is going to look like.
138. 00:08:01 Not cleanly.
139. 00:08:02 So I'm only ever about one day out of being able to make those types of plans.
140. 00:08:09 And I think that is primarily just the nature of how fast paced things are with both my thinking
141. 00:08:17 and with the job that I hold.
142. 00:08:19 So between those two I think it just makes it extremely difficult.
143. 00:08:23 Yeah, knowing tomorrow morning may be good enough.
144. 00:08:26 Correct.
145. 00:08:27 Get the two or three things I know I absolutely have to get done that are super high importance,
146. 00:08:33 get those done and then try not to worry about the rest.
147. 00:08:35 That seems to be the cleanest way I can come at it despite people telling me you need
148. 00:08:39 a time block.
149. 00:08:40 You need to plan your things ahead of time.
150. 00:08:42 You need to bla bla bla bla bla bla bla bla.
151. 00:08:44 Don't do it.
152. 00:08:45 That's what I'm learning.
153. 00:08:46 Don't do it.
154. 00:08:47 Well, I still am going to advocate for time blocking, but that's just me.
155. 00:08:51 What about these eight week cycles?
156. 00:08:53 Maybe that's the...
157. 00:08:54 Started.
158. 00:08:55 Okay.
159. 00:08:56 So this could be the sweet spot here, by the way, is like the eight week cycles instead
160. 00:09:01 of the week.
161. 00:09:02 But then the time blocking, so you have the long view and the short view.
162. 00:09:05 Right.
163. 00:09:06 Right.
164. 00:09:07 So I started this planning process for putting together basically six weeks of work.
165. 00:09:13 Right.
166. 00:09:14 So then I've got a week of buffer and then a week to plan the next eight week cycle.
167. 00:09:18 So I've been working through what the first six weeks of 2023 is going to look like specifically
168. 00:09:24 at work.
169. 00:09:25 I feel like that's the place I need to start with this.
170. 00:09:26 It's the cleanest area I can start on this.
171. 00:09:29 Going outside of that, I think it's going to get to be too much too fast.
172. 00:09:33 So trying to nail down what the first six weeks of January into February is going to
173. 00:09:39 look like for 2023 as far as work I'm doing with my assistant and with some of the volunteers
174. 00:09:44 here at the church.
175. 00:09:46 So knowing that process and working through it and seeing what projects are going to be
176. 00:09:52 on the front burner for that seems to be a good planning process at the moment.
177. 00:09:58 So again, juries out won't know until sometime in February how that goes.
178. 00:10:02 But that particular planning process is proving quite fruitful so far.
179. 00:10:07 Nice.
180. 00:10:09 So how about you?
181. 00:10:11 I have two action items.
182. 00:10:13 The first one was to consider my environments in my rituals.
183. 00:10:18 I can tell you that one thing that has happened with this is I have a routine of reading my
184. 00:10:26 Bible and praying every morning.
185. 00:10:29 And I have been using apps for this with the discipleship group that I lead at my church.
186. 00:10:35 There's an app called Echo that we use for like a group prayer request thing, which is
187. 00:10:40 kind of cool because when you're done it can send notifications to people be like, hey,
188. 00:10:43 so I'm so prayed for you, which is kind of fun to get.
189. 00:10:47 And then the other thing that we've been doing is going through you version together with
190. 00:10:52 the shared Bible plan or Bible reading plans so you could do like chronological reading
191. 00:10:57 plan.
192. 00:10:58 And then at the end of the day it says, what did you get?
193. 00:10:59 And there's a space for you to put your little little comment.
194. 00:11:02 It's kind of cool to see like as you're reading it together what people are getting.
195. 00:11:06 However, I don't like grabbing my phone first thing in the morning.
196. 00:11:11 Yeah, I wonder how that was going to go.
197. 00:11:13 Yeah, it is.
198. 00:11:14 It is this this year I am committing to changing the way that I do my my morning Bible reading
199. 00:11:22 specifically because that's the thing that I usually do right away in the morning.
200. 00:11:27 And I'm going to do it analog.
201. 00:11:31 I've already talked to my guys and they're going to do it too that I recognize that even
202. 00:11:37 if I am able to, which probably there's like a 75% success rate, like grab my phone and
203. 00:11:43 go directly to the thing that I was going to do with it.
204. 00:11:47 But still there's the possibility there.
205. 00:11:49 And it just changes everything even having that as a option in the morning, I feel.
206. 00:11:55 So that's one thing that has changed from this.
207. 00:11:59 But I haven't really done a whole lot else with it in terms of like, I'm going to do
208. 00:12:02 this thing in this place because it's better for this or anything.
209. 00:12:06 If I'm going to do anything with any amount of privacy or quiet, it has to be in my office.
210. 00:12:13 Yep.
211. 00:12:14 Yep.
212. 00:12:15 I could try to be in the bedroom with the door closed, but that's not very successful.
213. 00:12:20 It's still upstairs by everybody.
214. 00:12:22 So the actual place that things happen, like that I have limited options there.
215. 00:12:30 So I think just getting that one change though is ultimately a win for that action item, but
216. 00:12:36 I don't think I'm completely done with it.
217. 00:12:37 I don't want to continue to kind of just think about that a little bit more.
218. 00:12:42 The other one I had was to document my weekly rhythms.
219. 00:12:45 This is harder than I thought it was going to be.
220. 00:12:48 Yeah.
221. 00:12:49 Partially because my weekly rhythms are in large part dependent on what other people
222. 00:12:55 need.
223. 00:12:57 And for I can make a weekly rhythm that I can stick to, I need everybody else to establish
224. 00:13:05 their weekly rhythms and communicate them to me.
225. 00:13:08 Yep.
226. 00:13:09 That's fair.
227. 00:13:10 I don't know if or when that will ever happen.
228. 00:13:16 So I have identified a couple things.
229. 00:13:19 I've identified, well, let me just back up a little bit.
230. 00:13:24 So I want to get into a regular writing rhythm.
231. 00:13:26 I want to write every single day.
232. 00:13:30 And one of the things that I have identified with this exercise is that Monday is the day
233. 00:13:35 that I will do the one I want with my kids.
234. 00:13:38 So I'll take one of them once a week.
235. 00:13:41 We'll go to a coffee shop, play games for an hour in the morning, something like that.
236. 00:13:46 And Monday is the day that works best to do that.
237. 00:13:51 So I have identified that Monday's, this isn't like a theme, but one of the things that's
238. 00:13:55 going to happen is Mondays are going to be the days that the one on one happens.
239. 00:13:59 So I'm probably going to have to pass on the writing for Monday unless it happens later
240. 00:14:03 on in the day like after the day job stuff is done.
241. 00:14:07 The other thing I have identified is that we have with the day job, we call it focus Fridays.
242. 00:14:15 So Fridays are really the day to really work on a project without any interruptions.
243. 00:14:22 And so by the time Friday comes around, I usually have very clear like I need to finish
244. 00:14:29 up these things.
245. 00:14:31 And I have a little bit more flexibility on my Fridays because there's no meetings that
246. 00:14:37 I have to work around.
247. 00:14:39 So I've been thinking about how I could make Fridays my creative days, not theming like
248. 00:14:46 the entire day, but how could I do something a little bit extra on a Friday?
249. 00:14:52 Last week I tested just doing like over lunchtime a Q&A in my circle community.
250. 00:14:58 So people join in live zoom style thing and just chatted for a little bit.
251. 00:15:04 That was really fun.
252. 00:15:05 And I want to do more of that type of stuff.
253. 00:15:10 If I don't have a zoom hangout sort of a thing, maybe it'll be when I record stuff for the
254. 00:15:17 YouTube videos.
255. 00:15:19 I have a lot of ideas that are percolating and I'm working on.
256. 00:15:22 So if I just have the space to regularly work on the videos, if I force myself to sit in
257. 00:15:26 the chair and actually record them, they don't take that long.
258. 00:15:29 Within an hour I could get the raw footage done and then it's up to me to delegate the
259. 00:15:37 next part of that because I'm still figuring out what is my brand, my vibe, all that kind
260. 00:15:42 of stuff.
261. 00:15:43 And then process that.
262. 00:15:44 So we'll make a process out of that so I can hand it off to somebody like Joshua or
263. 00:15:48 Toby to help me with some of the editing potentially.
264. 00:15:53 So yeah, that's kind of a thought process there.
265. 00:15:55 But other than that, I haven't really identified a whole lot in terms of themes other than
266. 00:15:59 Tuesdays and Wednesdays seem to be all day meetings.
267. 00:16:05 You like meetings?
268. 00:16:06 Good job.
269. 00:16:07 I don't like meetings, but they're necessary and they don't have to suck.
270. 00:16:13 They're getting better.
271. 00:16:15 They are getting better.
272. 00:16:16 So that tells me that currently they are not better.
273. 00:16:19 All right.
274. 00:16:20 Well, they're better than they used to be.
275. 00:16:21 We're still making progress.
276. 00:16:23 But yeah.
277. 00:16:24 I still remember the days when I would hop in my car at five till six in the morning, dial
278. 00:16:32 into my first meeting at six o'clock and would be on the phone all day long until I hopped
279. 00:16:39 in the car to come home at somewhere around four, four fifteen and would be on a call until
280. 00:16:46 I made it home around five and then would sit in the garage with the car running.
281. 00:16:52 Well, maybe not necessarily with the car running, but we'll sit in the garage with my headset
282. 00:16:58 still on and finishing up my meeting at five and always wondering, it's like, why?
283. 00:17:03 I don't think I did anything today other than just listen to people or, you know, correct
284. 00:17:08 some things, but we didn't actually decide anything.
285. 00:17:10 We didn't progress anything, but they're paying me pretty well to do this.
286. 00:17:14 So that would never fly in one of my meetings.
287. 00:17:18 Yep.
288. 00:17:19 I kind of look for people who are not paying attention and then I just ask them, like,
289. 00:17:24 so what do you think?
290. 00:17:25 Just to catch them and they have to admit, like, I wasn't paying attention.
291. 00:17:29 This is pre-video call days.
292. 00:17:32 You could do that, but it was not, it was far from normal.
293. 00:17:36 It was always conference calls.
294. 00:17:38 That's what it was.
295. 00:17:39 So I kid you not.
296. 00:17:41 Most of my day was spent on mutes walking laps around the building.
297. 00:17:45 That's what I did.
298. 00:17:47 Yep.
299. 00:17:48 So I got my steps in a lot.
300. 00:17:50 So there it goes.
301. 00:17:52 All right.
302. 00:17:53 Let's jump into today's book, which is a national bestseller, despite some people's
303. 00:18:00 opinions of it.
304. 00:18:02 It's The 48 Laws of Power.
305. 00:18:03 This is by Robert Green and this is a monster of a book at what we decide.
306. 00:18:10 409 pages?
307. 00:18:11 Is that what I have?
308. 00:18:13 No, it's 430.
309. 00:18:14 430, there you go.
310. 00:18:18 Plus another 200 sum in the margins.
311. 00:18:21 Oh, yes.
312. 00:18:23 Yes.
313. 00:18:24 I did my best to read all of this.
314. 00:18:27 So what Mike's referring to is there's the main portion of the book, which is the 430
315. 00:18:32 pages, but the margins are wide enough that you can write in them, which is handy, except
316. 00:18:37 for the fact that there's a lot of times when they fill them with, like, poems or short
317. 00:18:41 stories or quotes or all sorts of stuff.
318. 00:18:46 And if you want to read all of that, there's 200 is probably an exaggeration, but maybe
319. 00:18:51 another 50 or 60 or so pages worth of stuff in there.
320. 00:18:58 It's large.
321. 00:18:59 There's a lot in here.
322. 00:19:01 And this is a book that I know has been, I don't want to say divisive, but it's controversial
323. 00:19:06 in the aspect of why would I ever want to do a lot of these things?
324. 00:19:12 Or these are genius.
325. 00:19:14 I'm going to do all of these things.
326. 00:19:16 Like, it seems like people have one of those two reactions when I did some searching on
327. 00:19:21 it.
328. 00:19:22 But I know that you had some qualms with the size of this book, Mike.
329. 00:19:27 What was your initial reaction to it when you first started reading it?
330. 00:19:31 Oh, man.
331. 00:19:33 Reaction when I first started reading it.
332. 00:19:36 I was apprehensive.
333. 00:19:41 It starts, well, let's talk a little bit about the structure because there are no sections.
334. 00:19:45 It's just the 48 laws.
335. 00:19:47 So what I noticed is with the first law, the same format is kind of used throughout.
336. 00:19:55 There is the summary of the law right below the law and like a title page for that section.
337. 00:20:02 And then generally there's like the origin and historical examples of it in action and
338. 00:20:09 then the keys to the law.
339. 00:20:10 And at the end, there is a quote about the authority of the law, an image that goes along
340. 00:20:16 with it, and then the reversal of the law when you can go against it kind of most of
341. 00:20:23 the time.
342. 00:20:25 And right out of the bat, in the first law, there are these stories which I started to
343. 00:20:33 document in my mind map.
344. 00:20:36 And after the first one, I was like, I give up.
345. 00:20:40 Yeah, I did something similar.
346. 00:20:42 I wrote down the first one because what I like to do is whenever I have those stories,
347. 00:20:46 I like to put them in my notes and make a link out of it because then it'll tie it all
348. 00:20:50 the other places.
349. 00:20:51 Yep, and so I did that on the first one, but then I remembered when I was writing it in
350. 00:21:01 my notes that was like, okay, well, what was the date on that?
351. 00:21:03 Because sometimes I'll want to put the date on it.
352. 00:21:05 And when I did that, I had flipped somewhere in the middle and it occurred to me when I
353. 00:21:09 had flipped through the book at the beginning, thank you Adler for how to read a book.
354. 00:21:13 I was flipping through the whole thing and was remembering, I was like, okay, I've seen
355. 00:21:18 a lot of dates and stories like, let me just kind of flip through all of this because
356. 00:21:23 by that point, I had figured out some of the flow, like what you're talking about for each
357. 00:21:26 of these laws slash chapters.
358. 00:21:29 And I quickly realized that this is a huge number of stories.
359. 00:21:35 And there's, I think I remember one that overlapped.
360. 00:21:40 Like one person was brought up twice, I think.
361. 00:21:43 And then a lot of them are all.
362. 00:21:45 Because more than that, he actually does a pretty good job weaving stuff throughout the
363. 00:21:51 book.
364. 00:21:52 He'll reference a person and kind of assumes that you've read the previous anecdote about
365. 00:21:58 that person in previous laws.
366. 00:22:01 However, the style of these stories is very Ryan Holiday-esque.
367. 00:22:09 However, I feel like he's, because they're all, most of them are like ancient history.
368. 00:22:17 I feel like he's filling in a lot of blanks with these.
369. 00:22:22 Like just as an example, the first one that I jotted down, Nicholas Fokay, King Louis,
370. 00:22:28 the 14th's finance minister, he throws a huge party to honor the king.
371. 00:22:33 Instead the king feels threatened, has him thrown in jail, replaces him with someone
372. 00:22:36 that wasn't a threat.
373. 00:22:37 He has a very convenient narrative that fits the law that he's telling you.
374. 00:22:42 But you can see that there is a lot of opinion in that story.
375. 00:22:46 Yes.
376. 00:22:47 And I'm not saying that the story that he's telling around this is wrong, but I also think
377. 00:22:53 that there are multiple ways to view events that happen.
378. 00:22:58 And it's obvious he's coming at it from a singular perspective.
379. 00:23:03 I don't blame him for that given the very clear objective of the book itself.
380. 00:23:12 But I didn't feel like I wanted a whole bunch of notes about somebody's opinions on historical
381. 00:23:18 events.
382. 00:23:20 So I stopped capturing them after that and really just jotted down the principles and
383. 00:23:24 the big ideas of laws that he was trying to tell.
384. 00:23:28 That's ultimately what I landed on too.
385. 00:23:30 Something that you're explaining, some of the threads, I didn't catch that, which is interesting
386. 00:23:36 to me because I did not catch that there's some stuff that was reiterated in names that
387. 00:23:41 came up multiple times because in my head they were all completely different stories.
388. 00:23:47 Some of that just might be that there's a lot of, and they'll say this wrong, there's
389. 00:23:52 a lot of foreign names that I don't resonate with.
390. 00:23:55 You should say Mike or John or Matthew, I can generally keep those apart.
391. 00:24:00 Chinese names, I struggle to do that with.
392. 00:24:03 Yeah, there's a lot of French and Chinese history in this.
393. 00:24:06 So because of that, it all fell together and it's like, wait, these must all be different
394. 00:24:13 people because you wouldn't reuse the same one.
395. 00:24:16 And that might be a misnomer.
396. 00:24:19 I may not have connected that.
397. 00:24:20 So yeah, he talks about Mao Zedou and Cao Cao Bunch.
398. 00:24:26 He talks about Napoleon multiple times.
399. 00:24:29 Marie Antoinette is one I saw a bunch of times.
400. 00:24:34 And after a while, I saw that he was really just building off of the stories that he was
401. 00:24:40 telling, adding a little bit more shading when he brought up their names again.
402. 00:24:46 But it's too much to keep track of.
403. 00:24:48 It's a lot.
404. 00:24:49 It is a lot.
405. 00:24:50 And it's 48 laws.
406. 00:24:53 And depending on the law, he either starts with a success story of using this law of power
407. 00:25:02 or a negative of what happens if you don't follow this.
408. 00:25:06 He starts with one of those two.
409. 00:25:08 But in most cases, you're getting one or two stories on both of those sides of the coin.
410. 00:25:13 Yep.
411. 00:25:14 Not always, but you generally do.
412. 00:25:15 And then when he explains it, he's going to give you a couple more.
413. 00:25:18 Yeah, what I found confusing, by the way, is the story.
414. 00:25:21 And then there's the interpretation.
415. 00:25:23 But because the stories are so impeninated, I felt like by the time I got to the heading
416. 00:25:27 of the interpretation, I rolled my eyes a little bit every time.
417. 00:25:30 Like you already gave me the interpretation.
418. 00:25:32 Right.
419. 00:25:33 Right.
420. 00:25:34 Yes.
421. 00:25:35 But he doesn't want you to think of it that way.
422. 00:25:37 Yeah.
423. 00:25:38 He's inflicting one of these laws of power over you by doing it that way, I'm sure.
424. 00:25:41 So just how it goes.
425. 00:25:43 So like we said, there's 48 laws here.
426. 00:25:47 We are absolutely not covering all of these.
427. 00:25:50 I wrote down six.
428. 00:25:52 And we can go through those.
429. 00:25:54 If you want to add to that, Mike, go ahead.
430. 00:25:56 But before we do that, I think we need to talk about the preface slash introduction of
431. 00:26:02 this particular book because in this, he's kind of laying the groundwork for power itself.
432. 00:26:08 And these laws are basically power games.
433. 00:26:12 He kind of references that at the very beginning.
434. 00:26:15 Yeah.
435. 00:26:16 But during the preface, he makes a couple of quotes here at the beginning.
436. 00:26:21 One of which of these is that the most important of the skills or the talents that go into
437. 00:26:29 all these power laws, the most important of these skills and powers, crucial foundation
438. 00:26:34 is the ability to master your emotions.
439. 00:26:36 Now, as we talk about each of these different laws, at least the ones that we're going to
440. 00:26:41 cover, I think it's fairly important to remember that whatever you're doing, you have to have
441. 00:26:48 control over yourself in order to do any of this.
442. 00:26:53 I think at the moment, I'll let aside whether or not you should do this.
443. 00:27:00 And I say that knowing that whenever I looked this book up to do some research on it, I
444. 00:27:05 found an interesting stat that this was one of the most requested books in prisons for
445. 00:27:12 prisoners to read, which is an interesting thing to stick in the back of your brain whenever
446. 00:27:16 we're going through this.
447. 00:27:17 Well, anyway, let me defend that a little bit because I think the principles that he's
448. 00:27:22 teaching here, obviously just by the names, they're going to rub you and me the wrong
449. 00:27:30 way.
450. 00:27:31 But I don't think it's necessarily good or bad.
451. 00:27:37 I think his approach, what he would like to do with the book anyways, is have these principles
452. 00:27:42 be a moral.
453. 00:27:45 And I do think there is room to view power as a moral.
454. 00:27:51 Like you could use it either way, just like money is a tool and you can use it for good
455. 00:27:58 or bad.
456. 00:27:59 I feel power is the same way, just maybe brand it a little bit differently.
457. 00:28:06 Okay, so maybe instead of power, maybe this is influence or leadership, right?
458. 00:28:14 Even was talking with my discipleship guys about this last night.
459. 00:28:18 Leadership, we tend to think of that's a good thing, right?
460. 00:28:21 But people will have an aversion to sales.
461. 00:28:25 Why?
462. 00:28:26 Because they have this picture in their head of somebody using it the wrong way, the snake
463. 00:28:30 oil salesman who's trying to sell you a lemon of a car, right?
464. 00:28:34 But that's not all sales.
465. 00:28:37 Sales is really being able to sell somebody on an idea.
466. 00:28:40 And I told all my guys, like you're all married, you sold yourself at least once.
467. 00:28:45 Right.
468. 00:28:48 And it was at church that I've mentioned.
469. 00:28:49 Jesus was the best salesman that ever lived.
470. 00:28:52 Yeah.
471. 00:28:53 That's what it is.
472. 00:28:55 But so we have this picture that's associated with it.
473. 00:28:59 And I think a lot of people with something that they don't understand, like power specifically,
474. 00:29:04 they probably have a negative view of that.
475. 00:29:09 And you can take that negative view and be like, "Oh, I want that so that I can manipulate
476. 00:29:13 people."
477. 00:29:14 That's the example that you were kind of alluding to with the prisoners who want this
478. 00:29:18 book.
479. 00:29:19 Yes.
480. 00:29:20 I think everyone should want to understand the principles that are in this book.
481. 00:29:24 I'll just leave it at that for now.
482. 00:29:27 Yep.
483. 00:29:28 Totally fair.
484. 00:29:29 That's probably a good point too.
485. 00:29:31 Let's just start diving into this.
486. 00:29:32 I think what we're alluding to will make more sense once we start talking through some
487. 00:29:36 of this.
488. 00:29:37 And I will say this, the laws that I've picked out to talk about are not necessarily the
489. 00:29:42 most controversial ones either.
490. 00:29:46 They're simply the ones that I feel like I'm most interested in and that I feel like
491. 00:29:50 you would be the most interested in.
492. 00:29:53 It's not necessarily the ones that are the flash bang exciting ones.
493. 00:29:58 Yeah, I do have a couple more that I just jotted down examples and stories.
494. 00:30:05 We don't have to discuss the laws, but I'll interject those as we go in between here.
495. 00:30:09 Sure.
496. 00:30:10 No, it sounds good.
497. 00:30:11 So let's start with Law 1 because I feel like it's a good spot to start, which is never
498. 00:30:16 outshine the master and he's got like these little paragraphs that come with each of these.
499. 00:30:23 I feel like it makes more sense if I read those.
500. 00:30:25 So I'm going to read this.
501. 00:30:27 Always make those above you feel comfortably superior in your desire to please or impress
502. 00:30:31 them.
503. 00:30:32 Do not go too far in displaying your talents or you might accomplish the opposite.
504. 00:30:36 Inspire fear and insecurity.
505. 00:30:38 Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of
506. 00:30:43 power.
507. 00:30:44 And this is one that I kind of wanted to bring up because I feel like this is something that
508. 00:30:49 some people do unintentionally and it's a good one to be aware of.
509. 00:30:57 This is one that I know when you work in tech at a church, you are the expert on a certain
510. 00:31:03 area.
511. 00:31:04 So you can very easily accidentally outshine somebody who thinks they know tech pretty well.
512. 00:31:12 We've all dealt with folks like this that think they know a certain area but then they
513. 00:31:15 don't.
514. 00:31:17 Or like when someone tells me that they know sound systems really well and they walk in
515. 00:31:22 and they want to mix something.
516. 00:31:26 That's fine.
517. 00:31:27 Go for it.
518. 00:31:28 But don't get upset if I come fix things because I don't know you.
519. 00:31:33 I don't know if you know what you're doing.
520. 00:31:37 And if you have your electric guitar EQ, like a bass guitar, it's going to be a bad day.
521. 00:31:44 So trying not to outshine someone is not always as a.
522. 00:31:47 As a random hypothetical example.
523. 00:31:49 As a random hypothetical that has never happened ever.
524. 00:31:55 Yeah.
525. 00:31:57 So the big thing I think that you need to realize right from the beginning here again
526. 00:32:04 is that there are multiple ways to look at these things and never outshine the master.
527. 00:32:12 Another way to say this but you could say this about a lot of these different laws is
528. 00:32:17 be self aware, right?
529. 00:32:19 Don't make somebody else feel like an idiot.
530. 00:32:24 And this is where like you use the church example.
531. 00:32:27 I think the church is one place where people maybe could benefit from understanding the
532. 00:32:33 other perspective here.
533. 00:32:35 So the way he so explicitly states is like never outshine the master.
534. 00:32:40 Realize you cannot shine the master simply by being yourself.
535. 00:32:43 Never imagine that because the master loves you.
536. 00:32:45 You can do anything that you want.
537. 00:32:47 The big thing I took away here though is that it's okay to let others outshine you.
538. 00:32:50 You don't have to say everything that you want to say.
539. 00:32:56 Even if it's true, you don't have to say it.
540. 00:33:00 And that's the thing about all of this stuff.
541. 00:33:03 You mentioned like the self control and the introduction.
542. 00:33:07 Essentially all of these laws, strategies, if you want to use this as the manipulation
543. 00:33:13 handbook, right?
544. 00:33:16 Is exercising because I'm sorry.
545. 00:33:18 I use that term because I've heard other people describe it that way.
546. 00:33:22 So you're not necessarily wrong.
547. 00:33:24 Yeah.
548. 00:33:25 That's the dark side of this that people who have an issue with this book, that's how
549. 00:33:29 they describe it, right?
550. 00:33:31 Because they see how other people have applied this stuff for manipulative purposes.
551. 00:33:37 And yeah, you can totally see how that would work because it's all based on how humans
552. 00:33:41 are wired.
553. 00:33:44 But the big thing that if you're going to take that approach, all of these laws are
554. 00:33:49 simply exercising self control long enough to get what you want.
555. 00:33:54 That doesn't have to be manipulative though.
556. 00:33:59 You can apply these laws, I think, to get what you want in a way that doesn't necessarily
557. 00:34:04 mean that it hurts the other person or they don't get what they want.
558. 00:34:07 I think there's win-wins here.
559. 00:34:09 However, it's not really told that way because almost every one of these laws is like, "This
560. 00:34:15 person did this and then they got power and then they killed the other guy."
561. 00:34:19 Yep.
562. 00:34:20 And then that became a repeating pattern.
563. 00:34:22 And then somebody finally had to break it.
564. 00:34:25 There's those patterns that happen a lot, right?
565. 00:34:27 Yep.
566. 00:34:28 So this is also, I think, about my corporate days when I was doing data analysis.
567. 00:34:34 And one of the things I would do is take a lot of the data and whatever results we had
568. 00:34:39 come up with and put them into slide decks for my superiors to then use in their presentations.
569. 00:34:49 And it was always a thing that did me a lot of good if I made those very flashy and very
570. 00:34:58 well done because then it made my boss look like a genius.
571. 00:35:04 Even though I know I did all the work, I got all the data put together, I ran the reports,
572. 00:35:12 I took it all and made it into a pretty slide deck and then I handed it all off.
573. 00:35:17 And he goes and does a presentation with my 40-some hours worth of work and looks like
574. 00:35:23 a genius in the process.
575. 00:35:25 So if I can do that and he looks good, then he's excited and wants to keep me around because
576. 00:35:31 I make him look good.
577. 00:35:33 So if I don't ever try to outperform him or try to say, "Well, I'll present it."
578. 00:35:39 No.
579. 00:35:40 That's not the point.
580. 00:35:42 This is an interesting one.
581. 00:35:43 I totally do not say, but this is an interesting one for me because my official title in the
582. 00:35:48 day job is a second in command.
583. 00:35:51 So I have to walk this line all the time.
584. 00:35:55 And there'll be times where it's clear to me what needs to be done, what needs to be
585. 00:36:00 said.
586. 00:36:01 But I recognize that I'm not the one it should be coming from.
587. 00:36:05 So I talk to the CEO, like, "Hey, do you see it this way?
588. 00:36:09 Yeah, I do.
589. 00:36:10 Okay, well, this is what you should do.
590. 00:36:11 Okay, yeah, I'll do that."
591. 00:36:12 Yep.
592. 00:36:13 You know, I'm fortunate that we've got a good enough relationship, working relationship
593. 00:36:17 that's...
594. 00:36:18 I don't know.
595. 00:36:20 There's no politics in that, but yeah.
596. 00:36:24 Politics are fun, right?
597. 00:36:27 There's another one I want to jump into here though before we get to law 17 and that is
598. 00:36:33 law number seven.
599. 00:36:36 Just real briefly, this one is get others to do the work for you but always take the
600. 00:36:40 credit.
601. 00:36:41 And these law titles are terrible.
602. 00:36:46 However, I will give you a practical example.
603. 00:36:48 Are they terrible or are they genius?
604. 00:36:50 No, this one I don't like.
605. 00:36:52 The way it's stated.
606. 00:36:53 But I apply this one and I'll tell you how.
607. 00:36:57 So long time ago, I used to play Carxon all the time with Tan at Asian Efficiency, a couple
608. 00:37:06 of other people Brooks and there was another guy in Scott that lived in the Austin area.
609. 00:37:12 And Tan was a ruthless Carxon player.
610. 00:37:17 Carxon is a board game where you get points for completing cities and roads and things
611. 00:37:22 like that.
612. 00:37:24 And you can start building a city and then end up sharing it with somebody.
613. 00:37:28 So Tan's strategy was always get in on something, share it with somebody and then never complete
614. 00:37:34 it.
615. 00:37:35 But the other person complete the city and you split the points.
616. 00:37:39 And in the meantime, you go build something else on the side.
617. 00:37:44 And that's genius.
618. 00:37:46 And I've adopted that strategy myself.
619. 00:37:49 It means that I almost always win whenever I play with my family.
620. 00:37:56 Well done, Mike.
621. 00:37:57 I think.
622. 00:37:58 So that's a non nefarious way that you could implement one of these laws board games.
623. 00:38:02 Sure.
624. 00:38:03 I have to watch this one a little bit because sometimes I want to give credit where credit
625. 00:38:12 is due.
626. 00:38:14 And I don't think that's necessarily bad.
627. 00:38:16 So that's the reverse of this one.
628. 00:38:19 And I'm aware that my assistant tends to do a lot of leg work for me and we'll do things
629. 00:38:27 like setting up a stage, building entire scenes on our sound board.
630. 00:38:31 He will do a lot of that for me.
631. 00:38:33 And then I walk in and run the event.
632. 00:38:37 And then whenever they do the things at the end and thank you for this person and thank
633. 00:38:41 you for they point at me and say thanks to Joe.
634. 00:38:44 But I'm not the one with a microphone.
635. 00:38:46 So I can't also say and it's also my assistant here.
636. 00:38:50 I can't say that.
637. 00:38:53 So I end up taking the credit for things that he has done.
638. 00:38:57 Now he's aware of this and we've talked about it before.
639. 00:39:00 It's like we're behind the scenes.
640. 00:39:01 If people notice what we're doing, we're not doing our job.
641. 00:39:03 Like that's that whole thing we talk about.
642. 00:39:06 So he's aware of that.
643. 00:39:07 I make sure I applaud him where I can.
644. 00:39:10 But I end up doing this inadvertently.
645. 00:39:14 So it's not necessarily bad in every case, but playing board games is probably an easy
646. 00:39:19 one to take full advantage of a lot of these.
647. 00:39:23 Yep.
648. 00:39:24 Yep.
649. 00:39:25 Board games are like a microcosm of society.
650. 00:39:30 You can learn a lot from playing board games as someone.
651. 00:39:35 You may not want to either.
652. 00:39:37 All right.
653. 00:39:38 Let's look at Law 17 and there's a specific story on this one that I want to kind of
654. 00:39:44 tell you about.
655. 00:39:45 Anyway, Law 17 is keep others in suspended terror, cultivate an air of unpredictability.
656. 00:39:52 Again.
657. 00:39:53 I know you don't like some of these titles, but they're kind of fun, honestly, in a morbid
658. 00:39:58 sort of way.
659. 00:40:00 The paragraph underneath of this.
660. 00:40:02 "Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people's
661. 00:40:07 actions.
662. 00:40:08 Your predictability gives them a sense of control.
663. 00:40:11 Turn the tables.
664. 00:40:12 Be deliberately unpredictable.
665. 00:40:13 Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off balance and they
666. 00:40:17 will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves.
667. 00:40:21 Take into an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize."
668. 00:40:26 And there's a story in here.
669. 00:40:29 This is from 1972.
670. 00:40:30 This is what he would call the observance of the law.
671. 00:40:34 And he's telling the story of a couple of chess champions.
672. 00:40:38 So Boris Spasky and Bobby Fisher.
673. 00:40:41 Yep.
674. 00:40:42 And I think this is an awesome story.
675. 00:40:46 Let's see if I can get the two set up correctly here, but Fisher, these two are supposed to
676. 00:40:53 face off, right?
677. 00:40:55 And this is the world championship of chess that they're talking about.
678. 00:40:58 So they're supposed to face off against each other.
679. 00:41:01 Fisher is like not showing up.
680. 00:41:04 He's late.
681. 00:41:05 He's not responding to things.
682. 00:41:07 He's just being unresponsive, which is very out of character for him.
683. 00:41:12 Spasky is being very impatient, cannot wait to start this and is becoming very anxious
684. 00:41:17 about it.
685. 00:41:18 There's a big to do about it.
686. 00:41:20 Eventually, Fisher does show up and then shows up late to the actual event itself.
687. 00:41:25 Spasky's like, "Come on."
688. 00:41:27 So then they finally after a bunch of to do, yeah, he almost gets disqualified.
689. 00:41:32 So he shows up last minute and they do the first match and Fisher loses because he makes
690. 00:41:41 some weird off the wall move that he can't recover from, which is again, completely
691. 00:41:49 out of character for him.
692. 00:41:52 And the thing you need to know about these types of championships is once you've lost
693. 00:41:55 the first game, it's actually very difficult to come back from that.
694. 00:41:59 And if you lose the first two, which he did, because he didn't make it in time for the
695. 00:42:04 second one and got disqualified for the second game, if you lose the first two, it is like
696. 00:42:08 almost unheard of to come back and win it.
697. 00:42:12 Yeah, so real quick with Bobby Fisher, he's a weird dude.
698. 00:42:15 So actually, this is normal for him.
699. 00:42:19 Okay, maybe now.
700. 00:42:21 The way it was pitched is he didn't used to be.
701. 00:42:24 Yeah, so I guess I'm adding maybe some more context here to the story because I grew up
702. 00:42:29 playing chess, played in the tournaments.
703. 00:42:32 I had the Elo ranking and all that.
704. 00:42:35 But I was never like grand master.
705. 00:42:37 I was not going to compete in any of these tournaments.
706. 00:42:40 But Bobby Fisher was popular when he had just written a book when I was in middle school
707. 00:42:48 in high school.
708. 00:42:49 So everybody, he was the hotness, but he was always really, really strange.
709. 00:42:54 Yeah.
710. 00:42:55 So he's starting to play these games and he's making bad moves, but then winning.
711. 00:43:02 And he does this whole throw him off thing to spasci so much that spasci starts like
712. 00:43:09 going nuts, thinks that Fisher is hypnotizing him, thinks there's something in the chairs
713. 00:43:13 or in the food, like thinks that they're like playing mind games with him.
714. 00:43:18 And ultimately, Fisher wins because didn't spasci resign.
715. 00:43:23 Yeah, he resigned.
716. 00:43:26 And then even though he was still young, he never fully recovered from that defeat.
717. 00:43:31 Now, this is exactly what he's getting at here.
718. 00:43:33 Like keeping others in suspended terror, cultivating an error, an error of unpredictability.
719. 00:43:38 Like, if you're continually throwing things off and you're not following a set pattern,
720. 00:43:42 people have no idea what you're doing.
721. 00:43:43 So then trying to, now again, this is when you're in the middle of doing like power moves,
722. 00:43:48 right?
723. 00:43:49 That's when this would apply because if I were to do this to Mike when it comes to recording
724. 00:43:53 times for bookworm, like, what does that gain anybody?
725. 00:43:57 Yeah.
726. 00:43:58 So the unpredictability of Joe's schedule, which is probably more unpredictable than Mike
727. 00:44:02 would like, but I'm not this bad.
728. 00:44:06 I don't think you're no Bobby Fisher.
729. 00:44:09 No, I hope not.
730. 00:44:10 I hope not.
731. 00:44:12 Uh, yeah, this is interesting.
732. 00:44:16 So chess players in particular, I mean, I grew up around chess players.
733. 00:44:22 So I was one.
734. 00:44:24 It am one?
735. 00:44:25 I don't know.
736. 00:44:26 I have in our living room right now, one of those, like you can hang on a wall chessboards,
737. 00:44:32 therefore like clubs and classes where you can teach people like from famous games and
738. 00:44:39 things like that.
739. 00:44:40 So, um, we have those things set up in our living room and whoever happens to be playing,
740. 00:44:46 they'll just like make one move when they're walking by.
741. 00:44:48 Another person will come and they'll make the other move.
742. 00:44:51 So games take days to complete.
743. 00:44:54 But sure.
744. 00:44:55 Um, but chess players are very smart in specific ways.
745. 00:45:02 And uh, if you get them outside of their comfort zone, they, they don't know what to
746. 00:45:09 do.
747. 00:45:10 So this other guy that the Bobby Fisher was playing spasci, I think he said his name was
748. 00:45:15 I didn't jot down the names.
749. 00:45:17 He is very good at what he does inside of this little bubble.
750. 00:45:24 Right.
751. 00:45:25 And then Bobby Fisher just walks in and pop.
752. 00:45:28 Yep.
753. 00:45:29 Yep.
754. 00:45:30 Now he's totally discombobulated.
755. 00:45:33 Uh, I think there's another lesson to be learned in this chapter.
756. 00:45:37 I mean, obviously this is written from the sense of the four yet laws of power.
757. 00:45:40 So you can assume the upper hand by being unpredictable, but also be a little bit flexible
758. 00:45:47 and then you won't get so upset.
759. 00:45:50 Like you picked an example, an extreme example, obviously for the illustration purposes of,
760. 00:45:55 of this particular law, and we can all relate to this a little bit.
761. 00:45:58 Uh, but I think we can all deal with it maybe a little bit better than spasci did.
762. 00:46:04 It doesn't have to be completely demoralizing and cause you to go insane.
763. 00:46:08 Yeah.
764. 00:46:09 And it is interesting story because like spasci was known for being able to calculate and
765. 00:46:15 plan moves like 30 and 40 moves out, which was significantly more than Fisher was able
766. 00:46:22 to do and Fisher knew that.
767. 00:46:25 So came at it from a completely different strategy.
768. 00:46:28 So he's employing this very well and he held the upper hand in the match from day one,
769. 00:46:35 well, even before day one, whether spasci knew it or not, uh, didn't matter, but it eventually
770. 00:46:41 won one out because of that.
771. 00:46:44 Well that advantage that you're, that you're talking about there, like that's all based
772. 00:46:48 on predictability, right?
773. 00:46:50 And as a chess player, it's really satisfying to tell my boys like, Hey, mate in four,
774. 00:46:57 they're like, what?
775. 00:46:58 Yeah.
776. 00:46:59 Like, no, just watch four moves later.
777. 00:47:02 You know, you got them.
778. 00:47:03 Yep.
779. 00:47:04 But Fisher comes out of the box with like these moves that no one in their right mind
780. 00:47:09 makes and it totally disorients spasci and it changes him the, it forces him to completely
781. 00:47:15 change the way that he's thinking.
782. 00:47:17 He can't predict things anymore.
783. 00:47:20 Yes.
784. 00:47:21 Now this is, this is one of those that I don't really know.
785. 00:47:28 There's a lot of these.
786. 00:47:29 I should preface this.
787. 00:47:30 I don't really know how you would use this in a positive way in day to day.
788. 00:47:36 There's a lot like this.
789. 00:47:37 Like, hmm.
790. 00:47:38 I don't think I ever want to do that.
791. 00:47:40 Like that is so deceptive.
792. 00:47:42 I don't think I could bring myself to do that.
793. 00:47:46 So there's a lot of these.
794. 00:47:48 Now I also am aware like if you can see it through the right lens, it does have positive
795. 00:47:53 sides to it, but that's not always easy to see throughout this book, at least not for
796. 00:47:59 me.
797. 00:48:00 I feel like I'm usually pretty good at that, but I struggled with it on this one.
798. 00:48:02 This isn't necessarily positive, but let me give you a non, I don't know.
799. 00:48:08 I don't think it's really that big a deal if you were to employ something like this.
800. 00:48:12 Let's say you're part of a group, right?
801. 00:48:15 And there's a established time.
802. 00:48:18 Everyone's going to be here at this time.
803. 00:48:20 Hypothetical example here.
804. 00:48:23 And you are the one who is always on time and the rest of the group, 60 to 70% of them,
805. 00:48:29 about 75% of the time, always show up 15 and 20 minutes late, right?
806. 00:48:35 Weird protocol, I'm running even a few minutes late.
807. 00:48:38 I'm going to tell everybody, hey, I'll be there, you know, whatever time I'll be a little
808. 00:48:42 bit late.
809. 00:48:43 I think it's good for the group every once in a while, for me not to say anything and
810. 00:48:48 to show up late like everybody else.
811. 00:48:51 Why?
812. 00:48:53 Just to, just to, well, number one, I guess is it, it's easy to see what other people
813. 00:48:59 are doing, but you can't necessarily see what you're doing, right?
814. 00:49:03 So if you try and talk to these individuals like, hey, it's really important, you're on
815. 00:49:07 time.
816. 00:49:08 Yeah, yeah, I understand, but they just never do it.
817. 00:49:10 Like shock to the system.
818. 00:49:11 When somebody does it to them, now actually they realize, oh, this is a jerk move that
819. 00:49:15 I've been doing every single week.
820. 00:49:17 Sure.
821. 00:49:18 Right.
822. 00:49:19 And I'm not saying like, just do this, but as a tactic, like if talk, if words aren't
823. 00:49:23 working, maybe something like this does.
824. 00:49:24 And in the grand scheme of things, you know, it's not, it's not that big a deal.
825. 00:49:28 15 minutes, right?
826. 00:49:29 Whatever.
827. 00:49:30 Another thing I think is it forces a conversation.
828. 00:49:35 So I'm never the one to shy away from conflict, right?
829. 00:49:38 But I get sick of being the one who's like, hey, this is what we all agreed upon over
830. 00:49:43 and over and over and over and over again.
831. 00:49:46 So if you have implicitly said we're not going to play by these rules anymore, fine,
832. 00:49:52 I don't play by me either.
833. 00:49:54 Let's go back to the beginning.
834. 00:49:56 Let's redefine the terms of engagement here.
835. 00:49:59 Right.
836. 00:50:00 I don't know.
837. 00:50:01 Is that manipulative?
838. 00:50:03 Uh, maybe I guess you could frame it that way.
839. 00:50:07 But I also don't think like if, if you are trying to talk to people and people aren't
840. 00:50:12 willing to talk or nothing actually changes, you know, sometimes you need something that's
841. 00:50:16 a little bit more shocking to the system.
842. 00:50:18 And this is one of those things that's shocking to the system.
843. 00:50:20 But I don't think it necessarily needs to be completely disruptive or destroy relationship
844. 00:50:24 sort of a thing.
845. 00:50:25 Just like, whoa, that's weird.
846. 00:50:27 Mike's usually here.
847. 00:50:28 Five minutes early.
848. 00:50:29 Where is he?
849. 00:50:30 Yep.
850. 00:50:31 It's totally fair.
851. 00:50:33 I think what you're talking about there, like fine, I'll be unpredictable in this case.
852. 00:50:38 That also plays into, I don't have this one on the outline, but law 22, which is use the
853. 00:50:42 surrender tactic transform weakness into power.
854. 00:50:45 It's kind of what you're talking about.
855. 00:50:47 It's like, fine, you want to play by those rules?
856. 00:50:48 I'll play by those rules.
857. 00:50:49 Like, I'll surrender to that.
858. 00:50:51 And like, there's a policy at work right now that they're implementing.
859. 00:50:55 I'm not going to explain it and I'm not going to explain what I'm going to do.
860. 00:50:58 But I'm basically like, fine, you can put that policy in place.
861. 00:51:02 I'll play by that rule.
862. 00:51:04 I don't think you understand the ramifications of that rule.
863. 00:51:08 But I can now be unpredictable, kind of like what you're saying, because you decided to
864. 00:51:12 put this policy in place, which I think is a very bad policy in general.
865. 00:51:18 But if you see it on the surface, it doesn't appear that way.
866. 00:51:22 But it has ramifications on down the line.
867. 00:51:24 I kind of wish I could talk about it, but we're in the very depths of this at the moment.
868. 00:51:30 So I'm not going to say anything right now.
869. 00:51:32 Yeah, that's fine.
870. 00:51:33 And I just want to like reiterate here, these are a moral, these laws, these tactics, right?
871. 00:51:40 So you could, even the exact scenario that I described, like I could go into it with the
872. 00:51:46 attitude of, oh, I'm going to stick it to this person.
873. 00:51:48 And that would be wrong.
874. 00:51:50 But if it's just, you know what, it's not that big a deal.
875. 00:51:53 I'm in the middle of something and would I normally just like absolutely kill myself
876. 00:51:58 in order to be there on time?
877. 00:51:59 Because I made the commitment.
878. 00:52:00 Yeah, I would, because that's my personality.
879. 00:52:02 But I might decide, you know, it's really not that important as evidenced by other people's
880. 00:52:07 behaviors.
881. 00:52:08 So I'll be okay with letting that boundary get a little bit softer, you know, and that
882. 00:52:16 is, I'm not doing a very good job of explain this, but I feel like it's very important
883. 00:52:20 the attitude that you go into this.
884. 00:52:23 I'm not trying to hurt somebody.
885. 00:52:24 I'm not trying to like damage them.
886. 00:52:27 I'm not trying to kill anybody examples in this book, but I could still use the tactic
887. 00:52:36 without the negative ramifications of it.
888. 00:52:40 I think it's possible for each and every one of these for it to be like a win-win sort
889. 00:52:45 of a thing.
890. 00:52:46 You got to get a little bit creative maybe with the execution of it, but it's possible.
891. 00:52:50 Yes, yes.
892. 00:52:51 This is why I brought up at the very beginning that one of the most important skills that's
893. 00:52:57 crucial to power is mastering your emotions.
894. 00:53:00 Yeah.
895. 00:53:01 Like this is why I brought that up because if you go through these, it's very easy.
896. 00:53:05 Like take this policy thing is very easy for me to get upset about it, complain, moan,
897. 00:53:10 wine.
898. 00:53:11 Like I could do that or I could play by the rule and let them see the results of that
899. 00:53:20 rule and try not to get all emotional about it.
900. 00:53:23 Now do I want to get emotional about it?
901. 00:53:25 Yeah, I think it's a terrible idea and I think everybody should know about it, but I'm not
902. 00:53:30 going to go find a bunch of coworkers and collude together and complain about it.
903. 00:53:38 No, I'll just bite my tongue, go along for the ride, be okay with that, and just let
904. 00:53:46 the actions do the speaking in this particular case.
905. 00:53:49 It's kind of the route that I'm going with it.
906. 00:53:51 But this is the application of something like what he's referring to in these laws, just
907. 00:53:56 not with the results of somebody being beheaded in the process.
908. 00:54:00 Yeah.
909. 00:54:01 So I know we're not talking about the one that's actually on the outline yet, but let's just
910. 00:54:05 continue this.
911. 00:54:06 Use the surrender tactic, right?
912. 00:54:07 So there's this policy that goes forth and you may be your emotional about it because
913. 00:54:12 you know it's going to make it harder to do your job the right way.
914. 00:54:17 Well, you could say your piece and eventually disagree but commit.
915. 00:54:24 You lose that battle.
916. 00:54:26 They'd go ahead with the policy anyways.
917. 00:54:28 Just stick to the policy and don't like your job will suffer because of it.
918. 00:54:34 So they will feel that, right?
919. 00:54:35 You'll have to cut corners.
920. 00:54:36 You won't be able to do things the same way that you use to type a theoretical example.
921. 00:54:40 But eventually they'll come to you and be like, well, why aren't you able to do this?
922. 00:54:45 Because this is the policy.
923. 00:54:47 So this is the way I have to do things and I just can't do it the way I want to do it
924. 00:54:50 anymore.
925. 00:54:51 Oh, okay.
926. 00:54:52 Well, now you've got the upper hand.
927. 00:54:54 Correct.
928. 00:54:55 Yes.
929. 00:54:56 So inflicted this pain upon yourself.
930. 00:54:58 You just didn't realize it.
931. 00:55:00 So yeah.
932. 00:55:02 So the actual law that I have in the outline is law 23 and just came up short on 22 there,
933. 00:55:08 which is concentrate your forces.
934. 00:55:11 The paragraph here, conserve your forces and energies by keeping them concentrated at
935. 00:55:15 their strongest point.
936. 00:55:16 You gain more by finding a rich mind and mining it deeper than by flitting from one shallow
937. 00:55:22 mind to another.
938. 00:55:24 Intensity defeats extensity every time.
939. 00:55:27 When looking for sources of power to elevate you, find the one key patron, the fat cow who
940. 00:55:32 will give you milk for a long time to come.
941. 00:55:37 This is interesting to me for a number of reasons.
942. 00:55:39 One, if you want to think about terms of power and like trying to gain an upper hand in some
943. 00:55:45 scenario is something as simple as like a policy at work or maybe it's a relationship
944. 00:55:51 online.
945. 00:55:52 I don't even know what that would be.
946. 00:55:53 But if you're thinking about these things, it pays if you follow this thought process,
947. 00:56:00 it pays to think about it long enough to decide what is the one place that would have the
948. 00:56:06 full impact and have the ability to carry me in perpetuity without having to spread myself
949. 00:56:13 thin.
950. 00:56:14 Can I focus all of my energy on that one place?
951. 00:56:17 That's essentially what he's getting at here.
952. 00:56:20 And he's not wrong in that because I can think of all sorts of times whenever I've spread
953. 00:56:24 myself too thin and ended up with myself spread too thin and got nowhere when I would be better
954. 00:56:31 off focusing on one direction and coming out at the other end with some form of success
955. 00:56:36 instead of a whole bunch of failures littering the field behind me.
956. 00:56:40 So I think this is a good one to keep in mind, but it's also one that if you redirect what
957. 00:56:47 he's getting at, it doesn't have to necessarily mean power plays, but it can be applied elsewhere.
958. 00:56:54 Yeah.
959. 00:56:55 So when I read this one, I thought of online writing to be honest.
960. 00:57:02 Okay.
961. 00:57:03 Yeah.
962. 00:57:04 So we mentioned before the call, I've been following the ship 30 for 30 stuff for a
963. 00:57:10 while and I understand why maybe those guys, their personalities rub people the wrong way,
964. 00:57:13 but the stuff that they talk about is really good.
965. 00:57:15 One of the courses that they have inside their captain's table thing is become known for a
966. 00:57:21 niche that you own and it's all about becoming like super, super specific.
967. 00:57:26 And really all of the different webinars and things that they do, they just walk people
968. 00:57:32 through like get more specific, get more specific.
969. 00:57:35 Okay.
970. 00:57:36 So now you've got your niche and now you can generate ideas that you want to write about
971. 00:57:40 or create content about.
972. 00:57:42 And one of the mistakes that everybody makes and I've done this myself is they try to get
973. 00:57:47 too broad and one of the reasons that you would get too broad is because you see somebody
974. 00:57:53 else who is doing something in a specific area and you say, I want to be like that person
975. 00:57:59 and productivity is the easy one.
976. 00:58:01 Who would you say is the productivity guy?
977. 00:58:04 If you had to pick one person on the internet.
978. 00:58:07 I had to pick one person on the internet.
979. 00:58:09 Everybody that's alive today, who's the productivity guy?
980. 00:58:14 I'm probably a little bias at the moment, but not going with my bias and going off of
981. 00:58:19 history.
982. 00:58:20 Everybody typically would think of David Allen.
983. 00:58:22 Exactly.
984. 00:58:23 Exactly.
985. 00:58:24 And that's why I asked you because I knew you were going to say David Allen.
986. 00:58:26 He's the productivity guy.
987. 00:58:28 There's never going to be anybody else who can brand themselves as the productivity guy.
988. 00:58:33 He owns that, right?
989. 00:58:35 But I can get more specific.
990. 00:58:37 I can be the faith based productivity guy.
991. 00:58:41 But the tendency is, well, I don't want to talk about faith based productivity necessarily
992. 00:58:46 because there's stuff that's important to me that doesn't necessarily fit inside that
993. 00:58:52 container and the trick is just figuring out how it does.
994. 00:58:55 But if you don't take the time to figure that out, you end up going broad.
995. 00:59:00 Like I want to talk about this thing and that thing and the other thing and there's no unifying
996. 00:59:03 thread between them and nobody knows what the heck you stand for.
997. 00:59:07 So no one ends up following you because you're trying to...
998. 00:59:10 If you try to stand for everything you'll be known for nothing, I think that's how the
999. 00:59:15 saying goes.
1000. 00:59:17 Yeah.
1001. 00:59:18 You got to pick something.
1002. 00:59:19 And that to me is concentrating my forces, identifying what is the niche that I want
1003. 00:59:24 to create stuff for and then everything has to tie back to that.
1004. 00:59:29 And if I'm going to make a difference, if I'm going to build an audience, if I am going
1005. 00:59:33 to have an impact in people's lives, it's going to be because I was able to concentrate
1006. 00:59:38 my forces in a specific area and didn't let myself get spread too broad.
1007. 00:59:42 With my situation specifically, yours too, we're not full-time creators.
1008. 00:59:46 We got day jobs, right?
1009. 00:59:47 So there's limited time that goes into these things.
1010. 00:59:49 They have to connect.
1011. 00:59:51 If they don't connect, like what the heck are we doing here?
1012. 00:59:54 Correct.
1013. 00:59:55 So waste the time.
1014. 00:59:56 Yep.
1015. 00:59:57 This is one that...
1016. 00:59:58 This is partly why you don't see me writing really at all right now because I can do book
1017. 01:00:04 worm and I can do my day job, but book worm has its own niche, right?
1018. 01:00:12 So we're doing the productivity self-help business books and we have our cadence with
1019. 01:00:18 that, right?
1020. 01:00:19 When it comes to writing, like I can do the Mac OS tech productivity thing.
1021. 01:00:27 There's a lot of people that do that.
1022. 01:00:28 I don't really have a way that I'm different per se in that, but I also know that that's
1023. 01:00:33 only one very small piece of the interests that I would rather explore.
1024. 01:00:38 The problem is, this is why I...
1025. 01:00:41 Maybe this is why I'm trying to nail down what this actually looks like.
1026. 01:00:46 I like the pen and paper world.
1027. 01:00:47 I like the tech productivity thing, but at the same time, I really, really enjoy boiling
1028. 01:00:54 sap or building cages for quail and trying to get a little quail thing going up.
1029. 01:00:59 I would love to somehow incorporate those things, but it doesn't really fit.
1030. 01:01:03 They're so diverse that it's hard to tie that stuff together.
1031. 01:01:06 Now, you can make the argument that Joe just hasn't taken the time to figure out the common
1032. 01:01:11 thread amongst those things and then become that person and that's very likely a big part
1033. 01:01:18 of it, but at the same time, I need to know what is that arena that I want to explore and
1034. 01:01:26 make that the thing.
1035. 01:01:28 But I don't know what that is right now.
1036. 01:01:30 So that's partly why you don't see me writing really at all.
1037. 01:01:32 I write a lot for myself and where I had to nail down what that arena is, there's probably
1038. 01:01:38 a ton of content I probably already have, just needs published that I could release.
1039. 01:01:43 The trick is that right now it doesn't fit the audience that follows me based on what
1040. 01:01:48 I'm known for, which is a bit fluid in itself.
1041. 01:01:54 So a lot of people know me as the OmniFocus scripting guy, which is ironic considering
1042. 01:02:00 I've not used it for, I don't know how long, I still get questions even yesterday.
1043. 01:02:03 I got a question.
1044. 01:02:04 It's like, "Hey, can I get the Java script version of this OmniFocus script?
1045. 01:02:09 I don't see that it's been updated in a while."
1046. 01:02:11 That's because I haven't touched it in years.
1047. 01:02:14 So apologies, but that's just how it is.
1048. 01:02:18 Right.
1049. 01:02:20 Let me add one other tangential thought to this because I feel like timing here is really
1050. 01:02:26 interesting.
1051. 01:02:28 You mentioned the Apple Tech stuff.
1052. 01:02:31 Yes.
1053. 01:02:32 And that's what triggered this thought.
1054. 01:02:34 With Apple Tech specifically, there are a lot of people who are leaving Twitter, which
1055. 01:02:41 I continue to be on Twitter because I feel like it still has a lot of business value.
1056. 01:02:46 And it's kind of a weird season as people who no longer need Twitter for business value
1057. 01:02:52 because their audiences are big enough to find them other places have the luxury of
1058. 01:02:57 leaving.
1059. 01:02:59 But when they leave, there's a vacuum now.
1060. 01:03:02 There's a void that you can fill if you continue to write and publish socially.
1061. 01:03:09 So it's kind of a unique opportunity, I feel, where you still want to niche down.
1062. 01:03:15 I mean, the thing that gives you the authority is that you get so specific.
1063. 01:03:20 Right.
1064. 01:03:21 I have a little bit of authority maybe when it comes to the broad category of productivity.
1065. 01:03:27 But when you combine the Bible college degree and teaching the personal management class,
1066. 01:03:33 now I have a lot more authority as the faith-based productivity guy.
1067. 01:03:35 So you still want to do that.
1068. 01:03:38 But maybe there was somebody in the Apple Tech space.
1069. 01:03:40 I don't know who was doing a specific thing and you felt like it was just too crowded.
1070. 01:03:46 You couldn't make your claim there.
1071. 01:03:48 Just make the stuff you want to make and publish it consistently.
1072. 01:03:53 And I really believe there's never been a better time to get noticed.
1073. 01:03:58 But you got to be strategic with it.
1074. 01:04:00 Yes.
1075. 01:04:01 The trick is creating what you want, like whatever that area, whatever that niche is.
1076. 01:04:07 I don't feel solid enough to say that I know what that is.
1077. 01:04:10 Yep.
1078. 01:04:11 That's the problem that underlies that.
1079. 01:04:14 So like the marketing side of it and like how I publish things and where that's at and
1080. 01:04:17 how I go through that process, like I can nail that down all day long.
1081. 01:04:21 I know what those avenues are.
1082. 01:04:23 But the back side of it, if the, in like what we're talking about, like concentrate your
1083. 01:04:28 forces, if you're concentrating on one small, super tiny niche, what is that?
1084. 01:04:35 Because my brain is so scattered that trying to get, like this is why hobbies are a bad
1085. 01:04:41 idea for me because like I'll go do this hobby for a while and then like two months
1086. 01:04:45 later, we'll go on to the next one.
1087. 01:04:48 And that's just, you know, I have a hobby of collecting hobbies as they say.
1088. 01:04:51 So that makes it tricky.
1089. 01:04:54 Like when I'm always jumping from topic to topic, like cool, that's fun.
1090. 01:04:59 I've now learned how to handle all the voltage and amperage changes whenever you're dealing
1091. 01:05:05 with solar panels and building your own lithium ion solar panel battery packs.
1092. 01:05:09 Like I can tell you how to do all these things.
1093. 01:05:13 Why?
1094. 01:05:14 Like that doesn't fit the whole analog Joe productivity world at all, but I've been fascinated by
1095. 01:05:21 it.
1096. 01:05:22 So that's what I've spent my time on whenever I'm researching things.
1097. 01:05:26 But that has nothing to do with really anything that pertains to bookworm or stuff I've done.
1098. 01:05:34 So whenever I have those seasons, the question is, well, then how do you find the common thread
1099. 01:05:38 that underlies all that and focus on that?
1100. 01:05:41 And I don't think I'm in a good spot right now to be able to nail that down.
1101. 01:05:47 That's the hard part.
1102. 01:05:48 Joe Buleg Renaissance, man.
1103. 01:05:50 Modern day Leonardo.
1104. 01:05:52 Sure.
1105. 01:05:53 Sure.
1106. 01:05:54 Well, that said, let's go on to another law because it sounds like fun.
1107. 01:06:00 Let's jump ahead to law 29 and this is maybe kind of coinciding with what we were just
1108. 01:06:07 talking about.
1109. 01:06:08 But plan all the way to the end is what this is called.
1110. 01:06:10 So law 29 plan all the way to the end.
1111. 01:06:13 Here's the paragraph underneath of that.
1112. 01:06:15 The ending is everything.
1113. 01:06:17 Plan all the way to it, taking into account all the possible consequences, obstacles, and
1114. 01:06:21 twists of fortune that might reverse your hard work and give the glory to others.
1115. 01:06:26 By planning to the end, you will not be overwhelmed by circumstances and you will know when to
1116. 01:06:30 stop.
1117. 01:06:31 Gently guide fortune and help determine the future by thinking far ahead.
1118. 01:06:37 And this particular law, I feel like actually should be either towards the beginning or
1119. 01:06:42 towards the end of the book.
1120. 01:06:43 I'm not sure which one, probably at the end.
1121. 01:06:47 Because in every single one of these laws, I think it's every single one, there's always
1122. 01:06:55 the predicated notion that the person enacting the law knows what they're after and like
1123. 01:07:05 on a high level view, like everybody already knows the goal that they're trying to accomplish.
1124. 01:07:09 Like when you're hearing about one of the ministers underneath of Napoleon, he had a
1125. 01:07:14 mission that he was working on for years and he had this goal that he was headed towards.
1126. 01:07:20 And he didn't necessarily have the whole thing planned out to the end, but he did know what
1127. 01:07:25 the ultimate mission is.
1128. 01:07:28 Maybe that comes up because we're here at the end of the year and I know that a lot
1129. 01:07:31 of people are thinking about mission and goals and stuff whenever January starts rolling
1130. 01:07:35 around.
1131. 01:07:36 So maybe that's why that jumps ahead to me.
1132. 01:07:38 But just the concept of planning all the way in that has a couple things that are required.
1133. 01:07:46 If you're going to plan all the way in, number one, you need to know what you're shooting
1134. 01:07:49 for, like what is that goal?
1135. 01:07:51 What is the ending that you're wanting to have accomplished?
1136. 01:07:56 And two, you also have to have the ability to work yourself to that, I guess, is the way
1137. 01:08:04 to put that.
1138. 01:08:05 So if you're wanting to be a pro basketball player and join the NBA, you have to have
1139. 01:08:11 the ability to do that first.
1140. 01:08:14 You can't just say, "I'm going to go play in the NBA if I said that right now."
1141. 01:08:20 Everybody should join forces and make sure that I don't do that because it's a huge waste
1142. 01:08:25 of time.
1143. 01:08:26 Don't do that.
1144. 01:08:27 But all of this is dependent on knowing what the end should be, what the outcome should
1145. 01:08:30 be, and then working your way towards that.
1146. 01:08:32 That's what building that plan all the way the end is about.
1147. 01:08:35 I don't like this law.
1148. 01:08:38 Goals are dumb.
1149. 01:08:39 That's all I guess.
1150. 01:08:40 Cool.
1151. 01:08:41 All right.
1152. 01:08:42 Let's go to the next one.
1153. 01:08:43 So the things I jotted down from this, most men are ruled by their heart, not their
1154. 01:08:48 head.
1155. 01:08:49 Most people have no concrete picture of their end goal.
1156. 01:08:52 When you plan to the end, you want to come to emotion.
1157. 01:08:54 I agree with all of those points in isolation.
1158. 01:08:59 And he does use a lot of different stories of specific people who had specific goals for
1159. 01:09:03 a really long time and all the things that they did in order to make that goal come to
1160. 01:09:09 fruition.
1161. 01:09:10 But when I read those, it reminded me of interviewing the winning team in the Super Bowl or the
1162. 01:09:18 NBA Championship.
1163. 01:09:19 It's like, "Did you think that you were going to hear?"
1164. 01:09:22 "Oh, yeah, yeah.
1165. 01:09:23 We knew because we had a goal."
1166. 01:09:25 They all had the same goal, but yeah.
1167. 01:09:28 So this is fine.
1168. 01:09:32 You can talk about this principle.
1169. 01:09:34 Again, I think it's dangerous to talk about goals this way because it's not the thing that
1170. 01:09:42 creates the success.
1171. 01:09:43 Now this book is interesting because these are essentially all different tactics that
1172. 01:09:47 it's up to you to figure out when is the right time to use these different tactics.
1173. 01:09:52 So there's an area of nuance that is often missed when it comes to setting goals, I feel.
1174. 01:09:58 Sometimes maybe the goal is the right thing in the right situation, but not all the time.
1175. 01:10:03 And most of the time, I'm going to argue that habits and routines are going to be better
1176. 01:10:07 than goals.
1177. 01:10:09 There's going to be reversals for all of these laws.
1178. 01:10:12 Well, most of these laws, actually.
1179. 01:10:15 So I guess in this context, it's actually kind of cool because I feel like this is different
1180. 01:10:20 than most of the other times that we hear goals talked about because it's essentially
1181. 01:10:25 like one of the 48 different strategies that you could be using.
1182. 01:10:30 But again, the way that he describes it and the way that he described it, there's a bias
1183. 01:10:37 associated with this.
1184. 01:10:39 I forget which one this is.
1185. 01:10:41 It's maybe a confirmation bias.
1186. 01:10:44 Because somebody did this and they were successful, then I should do the same thing.
1187. 01:10:50 I would caution people not necessarily.
1188. 01:10:54 I do think if you were to plan all the way to the end, like he's describing here, I can
1189. 01:10:59 think of a lot of scenarios where that would actually be really frustrating and maybe do
1190. 01:11:04 more harm than good.
1191. 01:11:08 So I just want to call that out.
1192. 01:11:09 I mean, doesn't necessarily mean that this is the wrong strategy.
1193. 01:11:13 However, you got to know a lot more about the situation before you can assume that it
1194. 01:11:19 is the right one.
1195. 01:11:21 I think you made an important observation here in that there's 48 laws that does not
1196. 01:11:28 mean you're using all of them at the same time.
1197. 01:11:31 It would be impossible.
1198. 01:11:32 Some of our contradictory.
1199. 01:11:34 They are.
1200. 01:11:35 They absolutely are.
1201. 01:11:36 Used in the right ways, these can absolutely contradict each other.
1202. 01:11:40 Now, that's why some of the opinions I have about this book as a whole that I'll share
1203. 01:11:47 later are what they are.
1204. 01:11:50 But ultimately, you're picking these depending on the situation.
1205. 01:11:55 I know you used it kind of in jest, but the manipulator's manual that you're referring
1206. 01:12:00 to, you could absolutely use this as a reference book to look back on.
1207. 01:12:06 It's like, "Okay, here's a situation I'm dealing with and I need to get to this end goal.
1208. 01:12:12 If I want to shoot towards that end goal, how do I get to that point and I'm struggling
1209. 01:12:16 to figure out how to do that?"
1210. 01:12:17 You could pull this out and read through these laws and like, "Yeah, that's what I need to
1211. 01:12:21 try for this."
1212. 01:12:23 You could absolutely do that.
1213. 01:12:25 I don't know that that's what I'm going to do.
1214. 01:12:28 But having read it, it's going to be hard to get some of this out of my brain, which
1215. 01:12:32 is probably a good thing in some areas, but in others, not so much.
1216. 01:12:38 One other book, which maybe if people are familiar with this, adds some context for how
1217. 01:12:43 you might use something like the 48 Laws of Power, is this book by Derek Sivers, How
1218. 01:12:50 to Live.
1219. 01:12:52 The subtitle is 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion.
1220. 01:13:00 This book explicitly is like, "Do this."
1221. 01:13:04 Then the next chapter is, "Do the opposite thing."
1222. 01:13:08 It's written in a way that you can't just try to do all of the things you have to think
1223. 01:13:12 about when to implement them.
1224. 01:13:15 I love that style.
1225. 01:13:16 It's classic Derek Sivers, so it's really, really good.
1226. 01:13:20 But I feel like you kind of got to take the same approach with the 48 Laws of Power,
1227. 01:13:24 even though it's not explicitly stated that way in this one.
1228. 01:13:29 Yes.
1229. 01:13:30 Now, it is interesting that one of these is put together a plan.
1230. 01:13:37 That's really it.
1231. 01:13:38 He's just telling you, if you're going to become powerful, you need to not-- you're
1232. 01:13:44 not going to do it haphazardly.
1233. 01:13:47 You need to be on a mission.
1234. 01:13:48 So there's that.
1235. 01:13:50 That's Law 29.
1236. 01:13:51 If we go to Law 40, this one is fascinating to me for a handful of reasons.
1237. 01:13:57 It might-- no, I'm not going to say it's my favorite one, but it might be up there.
1238. 01:14:02 This is Law Number 40.
1239. 01:14:04 Spies the free lunch-- I have so many different areas I could apply this.
1240. 01:14:09 Here's the paragraph.
1241. 01:14:10 What is offered for free is dangerous.
1242. 01:14:12 It usually involves either a trick or a hidden obligation.
1243. 01:14:16 What has worth is worth paying for.
1244. 01:14:18 By paying your own way, you stay clear of gratitude, guilt, and deceit.
1245. 01:14:22 It is also often wise to pay the full price.
1246. 01:14:25 There are no cutting corners with excellence.
1247. 01:14:27 Be lavish with your money and keep it circulating for generosity as a sign and a magnet for
1248. 01:14:32 power.
1249. 01:14:35 This was specifically geared towards finances.
1250. 01:14:39 That's really what his chapter here is about.
1251. 01:14:42 This Law is about.
1252. 01:14:44 It's basically like, pay your way and don't take something for free.
1253. 01:14:49 Living in the attention economy, that could absolutely apply to apps, to services, to
1254. 01:14:57 all sorts of stuff at the same time.
1255. 01:15:00 If you're not paying for it, how's that go?
1256. 01:15:02 If you're not paying for it, you're the product.
1257. 01:15:05 That's how that goes.
1258. 01:15:07 I immediately took it that direction.
1259. 01:15:09 Obviously, that's Joe being privacy centered on this stuff.
1260. 01:15:14 That's where that comes from.
1261. 01:15:15 This is absolutely true, I guess, in a lot of cases, whenever you see something that's
1262. 01:15:19 for free, there's either someone wants to buy you lunch.
1263. 01:15:23 It's not necessarily a power move.
1264. 01:15:27 It's possibly possible they want information, which may just be learning about you and just
1265. 01:15:33 trying to build a relationship with you.
1266. 01:15:36 The question would then be, why do they want to do that?
1267. 01:15:40 One thing this book taught me is being skeptical is his playbook here.
1268. 01:15:46 Assume everybody's trying to get you.
1269. 01:15:49 That's kind of the underlying theme here.
1270. 01:15:54 Being the skeptic whenever you see something free is his point in this particular law.
1271. 01:15:59 It's kind of depressing, actually.
1272. 01:16:00 By the time you get to the end, you're like, "Okay, can we move on?
1273. 01:16:03 I'd like to have some hope in humanity again."
1274. 01:16:06 Yes, exactly.
1275. 01:16:07 Yeah, one of the points he makes in this chapter, which I think was pretty profound, is that
1276. 01:16:12 money is psychologically charged.
1277. 01:16:16 That explains a lot of people's view, I think, on that money is evil.
1278. 01:16:23 They'll even misquote that Bible verse.
1279. 01:16:25 No, it's not money that's evil.
1280. 01:16:26 It's the love of money that is evil because it's replacing what you should be loving instead.
1281. 01:16:32 It becomes a knightal.
1282. 01:16:35 But I think this is interesting, despise the free lunch.
1283. 01:16:39 One of the things that Rachel and I have documented from going through the book Life
1284. 01:16:45 and Air, like Millionaire, but what does it look like if you have an abundance of life?
1285. 01:16:51 It's really just ways to start.
1286. 01:16:54 If money was no object, how would you live your life?
1287. 01:16:57 And then you kind of work backwards from there and other elements of that that you can implement
1288. 01:17:00 now.
1289. 01:17:01 One of the things that we landed on was along the lines of the free lunch and the generosity
1290. 01:17:07 we want to make people feel like a million bucks, even if we don't have a million bucks.
1291. 01:17:10 That's a phrase we landed on.
1292. 01:17:12 What does that look like?
1293. 01:17:13 That means that when we meet somebody for coffee or lunch most of the time, we're just going
1294. 01:17:21 to offer to pay for it.
1295. 01:17:24 We're not doing that to manipulate somebody, although I do think because money is psychologically
1296. 01:17:30 charged and you do so in that way, you will reap a harvest from that.
1297. 01:17:38 There are a lot of times now where people understand that that's our MO and so when the
1298. 01:17:45 bill comes, they'll snatch it before we even get a chance to be like, "No, just one check."
1299. 01:17:50 Over here, is that bad?
1300. 01:17:52 No, I wasn't trying to get that out of the person, but if they want to reciprocate, I'm
1301. 01:17:57 okay with that.
1302. 01:17:58 It reminds me of verse Proverbs 11, 24, and the message version says, "The world of the
1303. 01:18:02 generous gets larger and larger."
1304. 01:18:04 It's kind of interesting to me because a lot of these laws map up with these biblical
1305. 01:18:08 principles.
1306. 01:18:09 They do.
1307. 01:18:10 It's like if you can interpret them.
1308. 01:18:12 This is not new.
1309. 01:18:13 I've been saying this for a really long time, but...
1310. 01:18:19 Yeah, I think there's a couple different ways to take this.
1311. 01:18:25 Like what you're saying, despise the free lunch.
1312. 01:18:28 Again, he's coming from a building power thought process.
1313. 01:18:34 That's where he's coming from.
1314. 01:18:36 If you accept a free lunch, you owe somebody something and that's bad.
1315. 01:18:40 Yeah, supposedly.
1316. 01:18:41 In this construct of power and levels of power and who's at what level and who has power over
1317. 01:18:49 whom, when you're in that structure, then you need to be wary of someone offering to
1318. 01:18:57 buy your lunch because the question is, are they trying to get power over you?
1319. 01:19:04 Because you're saying generosity when your generous, your world expands, and some would
1320. 01:19:12 say that that's absolutely what this law is getting at because you're expanding your
1321. 01:19:17 power because you've expanded your world.
1322. 01:19:19 So that's absolutely playing into what he's calling on here.
1323. 01:19:24 And yet the way that he wrote this, it's like this is a negative and that's not necessarily
1324. 01:19:31 bad.
1325. 01:19:33 Being a free lunch, if you're on the receiving end of that generosity is what I'm referring
1326. 01:19:39 to.
1327. 01:19:40 If you're receiving that, it's kind of seen as that's a bad thing.
1328. 01:19:43 So you don't want to do that.
1329. 01:19:45 You want to flip the tables.
1330. 01:19:47 But at the same time, sometimes me being on the receiving side and doing that with honor
1331. 01:19:55 to the person giving to me is exactly what I need to do to show respect to that other
1332. 01:20:01 person.
1333. 01:20:02 Right?
1334. 01:20:03 And the whole book is written from a scarcity mindset.
1335. 01:20:06 And all the stories support that because there can be only one king of France.
1336. 01:20:10 There can be only one ruler of China.
1337. 01:20:13 Yes.
1338. 01:20:14 Right?
1339. 01:20:15 But the truth is that for anybody who is not the leader of a nation, success is not a
1340. 01:20:23 zero sum game.
1341. 01:20:25 I don't have to, you don't have to lose in order for me to win.
1342. 01:20:32 But I do think that based on the level that he's talking about these principles, that
1343. 01:20:36 is a little bit different.
1344. 01:20:38 Yep.
1345. 01:20:39 Absolutely.
1346. 01:20:40 I guess what I was going to say is that if I'm accepting generosity from, say, one of
1347. 01:20:46 my elders, it can be a sign of respect to that person if I'm accepting that free lunch.
1348. 01:20:54 So I've had a couple people take me out to lunch.
1349. 01:20:58 They've bought and I know that accepting that is sometimes exactly what I need to do.
1350. 01:21:04 There are times I offer to buy that I weigh that depending on the situation.
1351. 01:21:08 And I'm not going to be one that's trying to always do that just because I sometimes
1352. 01:21:13 know that I don't want that persona.
1353. 01:21:16 For some people, it works really well.
1354. 01:21:17 So in your case, it might work really well to do that.
1355. 01:21:20 I just know that in my particular, with my personality, it doesn't fit to do it that
1356. 01:21:23 way.
1357. 01:21:24 So sure.
1358. 01:21:25 It's just the way it is.
1359. 01:21:27 Okay.
1360. 01:21:28 So I do law number 45.
1361. 01:21:29 This is the last one I want to talk about that I wrote on the outline here.
1362. 01:21:34 45 out of 48.
1363. 01:21:35 So 45, law 45, preach the need for change, but never reform too much at once.
1364. 01:21:43 Here's the paragraph under this one.
1365. 01:21:44 Everyone understands the need for change in the abstract.
1366. 01:21:47 But on the day-to-day level, people are creatures of habit.
1367. 01:21:50 Too much innovation is traumatic and will lead to revolt.
1368. 01:21:54 If you are new to a position of power or an outsider trying to build a power base, make
1369. 01:22:00 a show of respecting the old way of doing things.
1370. 01:22:03 If change is necessary, make it feel like a gentle improvement on the past.
1371. 01:22:08 Yes, yes, and yes.
1372. 01:22:13 This is right in my world.
1373. 01:22:15 And it's because if I'm going to implement a new piece of software, that can be a major
1374. 01:22:21 amount of change for somebody.
1375. 01:22:24 And knowing how much to change at one time is key.
1376. 01:22:29 So if I'm going to change a whole bunch of things at one time, it usually is not going
1377. 01:22:32 to go well.
1378. 01:22:33 You have to choose which ones are we going to change all at once.
1379. 01:22:36 For example, I'm in the middle of rebuilding our church website.
1380. 01:22:40 And whenever we're doing that, there are lots of ramifications and things that we could
1381. 01:22:46 do to incorporate which have trickle effects down through other areas of the organization.
1382. 01:22:51 And if we do too much of that, everybody gets lost, doesn't know where to go to find a calendar,
1383. 01:22:58 doesn't know where to go to do, you name it.
1384. 01:23:02 And we have too many things that are mixed up and too difficult to locate.
1385. 01:23:06 So we can't change too many things at one time, but we can set up the structure to allow
1386. 01:23:11 us to change it over a couple of years.
1387. 01:23:13 So that's exactly what we're doing in that case.
1388. 01:23:16 And this particular case has nothing to do with power, has everything to do with helping
1389. 01:23:22 people go along for the ride and not causing problems.
1390. 01:23:25 So maybe that's a power move, but I'm just trying to create less work for myself in the
1391. 01:23:30 process.
1392. 01:23:31 So this is purely self-preservation in this particular case.
1393. 01:23:35 Yeah, exactly.
1394. 01:23:37 You mentioned the tech stuff, but I feel like New Year's resolutions falls into this
1395. 01:23:44 too.
1396. 01:23:45 It doesn't.
1397. 01:23:46 You can change at least six things at once and it's fine, Mike.
1398. 01:23:50 Let's make this tech-related.
1399. 01:23:53 It's like trying to change your life OS.
1400. 01:23:56 Okay.
1401. 01:23:57 Yeah, sure.
1402. 01:23:58 That'll work.
1403. 01:23:59 That's a thing, isn't it?
1404. 01:24:01 Life OS isn't that an actual...
1405. 01:24:03 Probably.
1406. 01:24:04 Yeah.
1407. 01:24:05 I don't know.
1408. 01:24:06 I guess you could argue that that's kind of what I do with the daily notes in Obsidian.
1409. 01:24:09 Ding.
1410. 01:24:10 There goes Bellblick.
1411. 01:24:11 But the big takeaway here is I think you should not try to change a bunch of stuff at once.
1412. 01:24:19 Whether or not you're trying to get other people to move along with you or you're just
1413. 01:24:24 trying to make changes yourself, this is the principle.
1414. 01:24:29 But everyone wants the big changes.
1415. 01:24:33 And one of the things I jotted down in this chapter is never let the seductive charm of
1416. 01:24:37 an idea cloud your reason.
1417. 01:24:40 Side Cole said that the most powerful thing you can do is create an image.
1418. 01:24:45 And this is why you might want a revolution.
1419. 01:24:48 This is why people will attach to New Year's resolutions is they have an image in their
1420. 01:24:53 head of a different life.
1421. 01:24:57 And they want the noun without having to do the verb.
1422. 01:25:04 You don't really understand all the work that's going to be part of this.
1423. 01:25:09 And if you really did, you wouldn't be choosing that.
1424. 01:25:13 Or you would run out of motivation before you actually got a chance to achieve it.
1425. 01:25:21 And that ties into the one other thing that I jotted down from this for today was going
1426. 01:25:29 back to Law 32, Play to People's Fantasies.
1427. 01:25:32 So I feel like these kind of go together.
1428. 01:25:35 This is what productivity books do.
1429. 01:25:39 They promise the revolution.
1430. 01:25:41 They promise the sweeping changes, right?
1431. 01:25:46 And that's not the true way to implement any sort of lasting change.
1432. 01:25:53 But Law 32 talks about how change is slow and gradual.
1433. 01:25:58 I wrote it down this way.
1434. 01:26:00 Suddenly never happens suddenly.
1435. 01:26:02 But when you package it and you try to sell it in a form of a New York Times best-selling
1436. 01:26:06 book, you want it to seem sudden.
1437. 01:26:12 And then to bring power fantasy must remain to some degree unrealized.
1438. 01:26:16 So I don't know, it's just interesting to me reflecting on this book specifically and
1439. 01:26:23 how it's probably leveraged several of these laws to get people to buy more copies of this
1440. 01:26:29 book.
1441. 01:26:30 So the promise, I think, is that you're going to be able to have the upper hand in whatever
1442. 01:26:35 situation you happen to be in.
1443. 01:26:38 That's probably unrealistic.
1444. 01:26:39 You can probably implement some of this stuff and get a little bit more leverage and have
1445. 01:26:42 a little bit more control.
1446. 01:26:44 And that would be a win, but that's not why people are going to pick up the 48 laws of
1447. 01:26:48 power.
1448. 01:26:49 It's going to be because they believe in the revolution and it's going to completely
1449. 01:26:54 change their world.
1450. 01:26:56 But probably not.
1451. 01:27:01 Or people are picking it up because they're now in a new situation and there are people
1452. 01:27:07 playing power moves and they're trying to figure out what's going on.
1453. 01:27:11 That's another way you could come at this.
1454. 01:27:13 But I have lots of thoughts on this overall.
1455. 01:27:17 That is fair.
1456. 01:27:18 However, I feel like if someone were doing that, I don't know.
1457. 01:27:23 I understand that people are in bad jobs and bad situations and you can't just have a
1458. 01:27:33 conversation about it.
1459. 01:27:34 But me personally, I don't think I would try the majority of these with the intention of
1460. 01:27:41 I am going to manipulate this person so that I get a better situation.
1461. 01:27:46 I think if I had to resort to any of these for any length of time, I would quickly be
1462. 01:27:50 like, I'm in the wrong spot.
1463. 01:27:51 I'm out of here.
1464. 01:27:52 Sure.
1465. 01:27:53 These are things that you can, the one we were talking about earlier where you do something
1466. 01:27:58 unexpected and it kind of jars people and it forces a look at what's really going on.
1467. 01:28:07 But I don't know.
1468. 01:28:09 I feel like I would get to the point where I would feel like there's no alignment here
1469. 01:28:13 and I would choose to remove myself from that situation long before I would really be able
1470. 01:28:18 to leverage any of these laws to any real effect.
1471. 01:28:22 But that's just me.
1472. 01:28:23 Yeah, I know that just looking at the book holistically and I went back and I skimmed
1473. 01:28:31 through the preface after I finished reading this and I did that because I didn't recall
1474. 01:28:40 if he made the comment that we should play by these rules, like that he's making the
1475. 01:28:48 claim that everyone should operate by these laws and should try to do these things because
1476. 01:28:54 that's definitely the error that the whole book has as you're reading through that.
1477. 01:28:59 It seems like that's what he's calling for but he never explicitly said that as you were
1478. 01:29:05 going through the law.
1479. 01:29:06 So I went back to the preface because that's the only thing you have outside of the law.
1480. 01:29:09 He doesn't have a conclusion.
1481. 01:29:10 He doesn't have an explanation for a group of laws.
1482. 01:29:14 He doesn't have that.
1483. 01:29:16 So I went back to the preface and he doesn't ever say, not that I found, he doesn't say
1484. 01:29:24 that you should do these things.
1485. 01:29:26 And he also doesn't say that these are all explicitly evil in their way and he also doesn't
1486. 01:29:34 say that they're explicitly good in their own way.
1487. 01:29:37 It's just left open for you to make that decision, which I think you kind of alluded
1488. 01:29:44 to this earlier, might be part of the power play he's taking here because he's now made
1489. 01:29:48 me an extreme skeptic of everything that he's doing.
1490. 01:29:52 So I'm not certain that this is unintentional.
1491. 01:29:56 I would assume it is intentional, but he even disqualifies the people who say this doesn't
1492. 01:30:03 exist because he's got a quote.
1493. 01:30:05 I'm going to read this because this is funny to me because he's quelling fears over this
1494. 01:30:10 book before you ever get into it.
1495. 01:30:12 This is what he says, "To some people, the notion of consciously playing power games,
1496. 01:30:16 no matter how indirect seems evil, a social, a relic of the past.
1497. 01:30:21 They believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do
1498. 01:30:25 with power.
1499. 01:30:26 You must be aware of such people for while they express such opinions outwardly, they
1500. 01:30:30 are often among the most adept players at power."
1501. 01:30:33 Okay, so even if you're going to say you're going to opt out, does that then make you one
1502. 01:30:38 of the supreme power players?
1503. 01:30:42 That's really what you're left with on that.
1504. 01:30:44 So again, he's not telling you that you should or shouldn't do this.
1505. 01:30:47 He's not saying that these are necessarily good or bad, but that these do exist.
1506. 01:30:52 I think Blake mentioned this in the chat early on.
1507. 01:30:56 It doesn't matter if you like these or don't like them.
1508. 01:31:00 What we were saying, we may not like the way that they're expressed.
1509. 01:31:04 Like the terminology behind them may not necessarily be the way that we would term it, but this
1510. 01:31:10 is the way things work.
1511. 01:31:12 Like a lot of people play by this playbook.
1512. 01:31:15 If you think of all the political campaigns, the candidates are playing by these rules
1513. 01:31:21 constantly.
1514. 01:31:22 They're always doing these things.
1515. 01:31:24 So that doesn't mean that they're right.
1516. 01:31:26 It doesn't mean that they're a good person, but that's what they're doing.
1517. 01:31:31 So I don't really know where I'm landing on the...
1518. 01:31:35 I'm going to use this versus I'm not going to use this.
1519. 01:31:37 This is why I'm kind of stalling on getting to action items.
1520. 01:31:40 Well, let me influence you maybe a little bit here because, yeah, I agree in isolation.
1521. 01:31:46 It's hard to tell.
1522. 01:31:47 What does he really think about this stuff?
1523. 01:31:48 How should you be using this stuff?
1524. 01:31:50 However, look at the rest of the body of work.
1525. 01:31:55 His blog is called Power, Seduction, and War.
1526. 01:31:59 Yes.
1527. 01:32:00 Yes.
1528. 01:32:01 He's written the art of seduction, the 33 strategies of war, and then a couple of books, which
1529. 01:32:08 actually sound kind of decent, the laws of human nature and mastery.
1530. 01:32:13 However, I don't want to read the other ones.
1531. 01:32:17 Yes.
1532. 01:32:18 That makes me non-willing participant in the game.
1533. 01:32:24 Maybe, but I'm okay with that.
1534. 01:32:27 Yes.
1535. 01:32:28 That's the part here that is a bit dicey and maybe why this is such a divisive book.
1536. 01:32:37 This is why some people absolutely love it.
1537. 01:32:40 This is why some people think it's terrible.
1538. 01:32:42 At the end of the day, I'm kind of transitioning into action items here knowing that I get to
1539. 01:32:46 go first on this.
1540. 01:32:48 I'm not real sure what to do with this because there's a lot here that, again, if I think
1541. 01:32:56 back to working in a number of consulting roles and being in different headquarters for
1542. 01:33:01 different companies, these things happen a lot at the levels that I was participating
1543. 01:33:07 in.
1544. 01:33:10 I sensed, I could tell that certain things were happening and that power plays were happening,
1545. 01:33:16 but I couldn't necessarily tell you what they were trying to do or why they were doing
1546. 01:33:22 certain things that seemed so strange.
1547. 01:33:27 Looking back on those situations and replaying some of the moments that I remember in meetings
1548. 01:33:32 that left me completely flabbergasted that somebody would do something, it's like, "Oh,
1549. 01:33:37 that's this law."
1550. 01:33:38 Oh, that's what they were doing.
1551. 01:33:41 Things started to click.
1552. 01:33:43 I also don't know that those people knew what they were doing.
1553. 01:33:46 They just kind of intuitively knew what was going on.
1554. 01:33:50 So maybe they knew they were playing a power play.
1555. 01:33:53 Maybe they didn't.
1556. 01:33:54 I don't know, but you could kind of tell what was going on and this has kind of crystallized
1557. 01:33:59 some of that for me.
1558. 01:34:02 As far as what to do with this, as far as action items go, I have one.
1559. 01:34:08 And it's primarily because something that comes up a lot, this isn't necessarily a specific
1560. 01:34:16 law, but it comes up in a number of them in that trying not to share too much information
1561. 01:34:22 too early or at all.
1562. 01:34:25 So basically, the way I wrote it down, you'll appreciate this, Mike.
1563. 01:34:29 I wrote it down as "bite my tongue."
1564. 01:34:31 That's what I wrote it down as.
1565. 01:34:33 Just because I tend to share too much about situations, obviously on bookworm, that's
1566. 01:34:40 the point.
1567. 01:34:41 But in day to day, that's not necessarily the point.
1568. 01:34:44 Sometimes I feel like it's becoming a problem in certain relationships.
1569. 01:34:50 So bite my tongue.
1570. 01:34:52 The unknown is better than the known negative in a lot of cases.
1571. 01:34:58 So that's one thing that I've kind of collected from the bank of these laws.
1572. 01:35:03 So again, I don't really know what else to do with that other than just be aware of it.
1573. 01:35:09 In a lot of cases, I don't want to use some of these laws in other areas like, "Oh yeah,
1574. 01:35:14 I use that all the time."
1575. 01:35:15 Huh, interesting.
1576. 01:35:17 So it's kind of eye-opening, but it's definitely got me looking at things like a skeptic.
1577. 01:35:22 So I'm not sure the net outcome is positive here.
1578. 01:35:27 So anyway.
1579. 01:35:28 I just have the one action item.
1580. 01:35:29 Did you come up with any out of this?
1581. 01:35:32 You have one more action item than I do.
1582. 01:35:34 Okay.
1583. 01:35:35 See, I win.
1584. 01:35:37 I have more points than Mike on the action items list.
1585. 01:35:41 Yeah.
1586. 01:35:42 We'll talk about the book in style and rating.
1587. 01:35:46 I thought it was a fascinating read, but there's nothing from this that I wanted to implement
1588. 01:35:53 a specific way.
1589. 01:35:54 I think a lot of it is information that maybe or may not prove useful in the future.
1590. 01:35:57 There's definitely some things that I wanted to talk to you about, which were cool, but
1591. 01:36:02 not a traditional bookworm style action item to be found in here for me.
1592. 01:36:08 Yeah, totally fair.
1593. 01:36:09 All right.
1594. 01:36:10 So for style and rating, I will say that his style here is pretty engaging, actually.
1595. 01:36:17 I know that I said earlier that the stories were hard for me to keep square with each
1596. 01:36:24 other and I'll stand beside that because I did not connect a lot of dots between different
1597. 01:36:30 stories.
1598. 01:36:32 Maybe that's a factor of it's just being long and I got tired.
1599. 01:36:35 Maybe it's a factor of the names didn't connect with me.
1600. 01:36:38 Not sure what that was, but the format that he has for each of these laws, like observance
1601. 01:36:43 and I can't think of what the other term was.
1602. 01:36:48 Basically it's whenever you use it the transgression.
1603. 01:36:51 That's what it was.
1604. 01:36:52 You can use the wrong one.
1605. 01:36:54 If you observe the law, certain things happen.
1606. 01:36:56 If you transgress the law, this happens.
1607. 01:37:00 Then he'll do the keys to power or the interpretations.
1608. 01:37:03 I like that flow.
1609. 01:37:04 You're not wrong in saying that he's interpreting a story and then interpreting his interpretation
1610. 01:37:09 of the story.
1611. 01:37:10 You're not wrong in saying that.
1612. 01:37:11 I just hadn't connected that that's what was going on until you set it.
1613. 01:37:16 I like that he has the same format for each of them because then it allows you to compare
1614. 01:37:21 law to law knowing that you're not going to use all of them at once.
1615. 01:37:25 He's great at telling the stories.
1616. 01:37:27 There were a lot of times I felt like I kind of want to skim this so I could be done with
1617. 01:37:31 this book, but I really couldn't because every time I went to the next law, it's like, oh,
1618. 01:37:37 this is a fascinating story.
1619. 01:37:39 He's done that so many times going through this.
1620. 01:37:44 I'm fairly certain that Ryan Holiday was his research assistant.
1621. 01:37:50 Can anybody confirm or deny that?
1622. 01:37:52 I'm pretty sure there's a connection between those two, which makes perfect sense.
1623. 01:37:56 There is a connection.
1624. 01:37:57 They actually just did a webinar together, I believe.
1625. 01:38:01 It makes sense, Blake says it's true.
1626. 01:38:04 It makes sense to me because if you look at how Ryan Holiday puts together stories that
1627. 01:38:09 you really don't know, this is absolutely what this is.
1628. 01:38:13 I don't know that there were really any of these stories that I knew at all.
1629. 01:38:18 There was maybe a couple that I knew about, but not in the level of detail that he shared.
1630. 01:38:25 Maybe that means I'm not widely read.
1631. 01:38:26 I don't know what that means.
1632. 01:38:29 That all said, as far as the book itself, should you read it?
1633. 01:38:33 What are we rated as?
1634. 01:38:36 It's one of these that I think long-term, this is one that I'm going to be glad that
1635. 01:38:43 I have read.
1636. 01:38:44 I am not sure that this is one that I want to read again or come back to because it makes
1637. 01:38:49 me feel kind of icky.
1638. 01:38:51 It's a technical term for those of you out there.
1639. 01:38:55 The trick with this one is that it's positioned in a way that comes across very negative and
1640. 01:39:02 in order to find the positive, which I tend to prefer, you have to do some interpretation.
1641. 01:39:08 It's not always the case, but in most cases, that seems to be what you need to do.
1642. 01:39:12 As far as an encouragement, if you're going to read it, I don't find that that's the case.
1643. 01:39:20 You were saying when you finish reading it, it's like, "Okay, I'm glad I'm done with this."
1644. 01:39:26 There's not really any resolution to the negatives that I feel like I've worked through.
1645. 01:39:31 At the same time, knowing about these different tactics and methods that people can use to
1646. 01:39:37 climb the power wall, if you will, it tells me that
1647. 01:39:42 there's a lot of stuff that happens, whether people realize they're doing it or not.
1648. 01:39:46 I'm not sure, but you can become aware of these things being used against you.
1649. 01:39:53 What you do with that, I think, is up to you, but in my case, I'm probably going to let
1650. 01:39:58 things lie in a lot of cases, not always, but it would be good to be aware of these things.
1651. 01:40:03 I'm kind of glad that I've been through this now, just to understand that construct a little
1652. 01:40:08 bit more helps me see some of my history and of different lights, so I'm very grateful
1653. 01:40:12 for that.
1654. 01:40:13 As far as rating goes, it's weird.
1655. 01:40:18 This is kind of a weird book.
1656. 01:40:19 I feel like we say that every time though.
1657. 01:40:22 It's far from a five, in my opinion, but I also feel like it's got some value to it.
1658. 01:40:28 I'm going to put it at 4.0 because I feel like there's a lot of good that you can learn
1659. 01:40:33 from this.
1660. 01:40:34 But at the same time, you've got to come at this with a side eye, I think.
1661. 01:40:39 If you're well-read prior to going into this, I think you'll be in good shape.
1662. 01:40:43 If this is one of the first non-fiction books you pick up, you're probably getting slapped
1663. 01:40:48 in the face with this one.
1664. 01:40:50 I feel like you've got to have some background before you get into it.
1665. 01:40:53 4.0.
1666. 01:40:54 That's where I land, Mike.
1667. 01:40:56 All right.
1668. 01:40:57 Well, I will say I was pleasantly surprised with the stories.
1669. 01:41:04 I don't think there was a single story in here that was a slog to read.
1670. 01:41:09 They were all pretty fascinating.
1671. 01:41:12 So very, very good storyteller.
1672. 01:41:14 However, the rest of the premise of the book made me uncomfortable.
1673. 01:41:19 I am glad to have read it.
1674. 01:41:22 I don't think this is one you have to read.
1675. 01:41:25 I don't think I would necessarily recommend this one for the bookworm audience.
1676. 01:41:31 I don't know.
1677. 01:41:32 Maybe time will prove me wrong.
1678. 01:41:34 Maybe the further we get from this, the more value it has.
1679. 01:41:38 I'll how to read a book by Mortimer Adler.
1680. 01:41:41 Maybe I'll keep realizing that I heard about this in this book and keep coming back to
1681. 01:41:47 it.
1682. 01:41:48 But I kind of don't think that's the case.
1683. 01:41:52 You mentioned that it made you feel icky.
1684. 01:41:56 I'll say it this way.
1685. 01:41:58 You get done with this one.
1686. 01:41:59 You want to go take a shower.
1687. 01:42:01 I feel the perspective that is communicated here, whether intentional or not, is not a
1688. 01:42:12 healthy one.
1689. 01:42:14 If you are going to look around every corner and assume that everybody has it out for you
1690. 01:42:20 and try to figure out who's using what laws of power against you and then getting upset
1691. 01:42:25 that they're doing that and trying to turn the tables and actually manipulate them instead,
1692. 01:42:30 that sounds like a miserable life.
1693. 01:42:33 I have no interest in that whatsoever.
1694. 01:42:35 I also mentioned the perspective of the scarcity mindset as it pertains to the power dynamics
1695. 01:42:47 that he's describing here.
1696. 01:42:49 Maybe I'm not setting big enough goals.
1697. 01:42:52 Maybe I don't aspire for enough greatness, but I don't really want to be the president
1698. 01:42:56 of the United States or the king of France or anything like that.
1699. 01:43:00 I have a hard time believing that there's a if I am to be successful, somebody else can't
1700. 01:43:07 be, which is the prevailing thread throughout this entire book.
1701. 01:43:11 So I don't really think that's great either.
1702. 01:43:13 I do think there's some good stuff in here.
1703. 01:43:15 Like I said, the stories are great.
1704. 01:43:17 I do like the perspective of like these are all the different laws and you got to decide
1705. 01:43:21 for yourself where you're going to use them.
1706. 01:43:23 I do like the fact that at the end of every section, there is a reversal.
1707. 01:43:27 There was one where the reversal section was.
1708. 01:43:29 There is no reversal for this law.
1709. 01:43:31 I forget which one that was.
1710. 01:43:32 I remember that.
1711. 01:43:33 Yeah.
1712. 01:43:34 There was one of them.
1713. 01:43:35 But for the most part, it's all it's talking about how, you know, here's where you want
1714. 01:43:39 to use it.
1715. 01:43:40 Here's where you don't want to use it.
1716. 01:43:41 Like you said, there's that when you obey it, this is what happens.
1717. 01:43:44 And when you go against it, this is what happens.
1718. 01:43:48 So a lot of good context, a lot of content here.
1719. 01:43:52 I feel like the stuff in the margins is pretty fascinating.
1720. 01:43:56 It's all like different fables and anecdotal stuff where it kind of ties into the main
1721. 01:44:01 topic, but not directly.
1722. 01:44:04 I gave up trying to keep up with all of that stuff though to be honest, I was getting through
1723. 01:44:08 it.
1724. 01:44:09 Yeah.
1725. 01:44:10 I do think it's probably a pretty good reference work.
1726. 01:44:13 Like I'm glad I've got this one in my library.
1727. 01:44:16 However, when people are coming over and they're asking like, hey, you have any recommendations?
1728. 01:44:20 What should I read?
1729. 01:44:22 I have a hard time thinking I will ever recommend this one.
1730. 01:44:25 Yeah.
1731. 01:44:26 So better than I expected, not great in my opinion.
1732. 01:44:31 Really just I chalk that up to difference of philosophical opinion between me and the
1733. 01:44:39 author here.
1734. 01:44:41 I'm not surprised you rated it 4.0.
1735. 01:44:43 I do think there's value here.
1736. 01:44:44 However, I'm going to rate it at three and a half.
1737. 01:44:46 Totally valid.
1738. 01:44:48 7.5.
1739. 01:44:49 Okay, let's put it on the shelf.
1740. 01:44:51 What's next, Mike?
1741. 01:44:52 Next is another laws book, the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell, the updated
1742. 01:44:59 version by the way, because this book has been around for a long time.
1743. 01:45:03 This is one of those like, well, it's not a classic book like Stephen Covey type classic,
1744. 01:45:08 but it's been around for a while.
1745. 01:45:10 And I did see that he updated it for like the 25 year anniversary or something this last
1746. 01:45:15 year.
1747. 01:45:16 And so I bought it.
1748. 01:45:17 And this is one of those ones that I feel is going to be one that we point back to in
1749. 01:45:23 the bookworm library.
1750. 01:45:24 It was kind of surprise that we hadn't covered this.
1751. 01:45:26 I think we've both read it at different points, but we haven't covered it for bookworm.
1752. 01:45:31 And that's going to change.
1753. 01:45:33 Yeah.
1754. 01:45:34 No, I went through this with a group of men eight years ago.
1755. 01:45:38 So I have the new version on the way.
1756. 01:45:42 I think it's supposed to be at my house today, which would be good because I'm hoping to
1757. 01:45:45 start it tonight.
1758. 01:45:46 So looking forward to going through that one.
1759. 01:45:48 Now following that, I figured out how to pronounce this.
1760. 01:45:52 I picked a book knowing that the beginning of the year is a time shortly after the one
1761. 01:45:58 will cover this, but Iki guy is how you say this, I K I G A I Iki guy.
1762. 01:46:06 It's the Japanese secret to a long and happy life by Hector Garcia.
1763. 01:46:12 And this is basically if you think about like all those Venn diagrams of passion, what you're
1764. 01:46:17 good at, things you like to do.
1765. 01:46:20 This is like that center section of all of those.
1766. 01:46:23 So I know that this one is very highly rated and talked about in a lot of cases in a lot
1767. 01:46:28 of lists.
1768. 01:46:29 So I kind of want to cover this one.
1769. 01:46:31 I've been itching to do like a missions, passions, values, something book for some reason.
1770. 01:46:38 And this kept coming up, I asked Mike before via text, like, what's like one of your best
1771. 01:46:44 missions purpose book out there?
1772. 01:46:47 And it's like hero on a mission.
1773. 01:46:49 Like, well, we already covered that one.
1774. 01:46:50 I can't do that one again.
1775. 01:46:53 But anyway, I think Mike should write one.
1776. 01:46:56 That's what I'm hoping for here.
1777. 01:46:59 That's the goal.
1778. 01:47:00 Anyway, so Iki guy is what's coming up after 21 laws of leadership.
1779. 01:47:04 How about gap books, Mike?
1780. 01:47:07 I'm finishing a gap book that I had previously.
1781. 01:47:12 We should definitely do something by this author, by the way.
1782. 01:47:16 Some day is today by Matthew Dix.
1783. 01:47:19 This is a creative book.
1784. 01:47:22 And it's pretty good.
1785. 01:47:23 It's got a blurb on the very front.
1786. 01:47:25 You know how like they'll have the blurbs from famous people?
1787. 01:47:29 David Allen, Cal Newport, et cetera.
1788. 01:47:32 This one is from Dr. Ali Abdahl.
1789. 01:47:34 There you go.
1790. 01:47:37 Doctor.
1791. 01:47:38 I like it.
1792. 01:47:39 I like it.
1793. 01:47:41 I sent you a picture of this, but I
1794. 01:47:43 managed to get a pretty good deal on a couple of books.
1795. 01:47:46 And I have one that I've been kind of working through slowly.
1796. 01:47:52 When I tell you what it is, that will make sense.
1797. 01:47:54 But I've been reading little bits of it here and there day
1798. 01:47:57 by day.
1799. 01:47:59 It's Tribe of Mentors by Tim Ferriss.
1800. 01:48:01 I've been starting to kind of work through that.
1801. 01:48:03 That one's going to take some time.
1802. 01:48:05 That one's not going to be done in a couple of weeks.
1803. 01:48:07 That one will take time.
1804. 01:48:10 I should look up.
1805. 01:48:11 It's like 600 pages.
1806. 01:48:12 It's long.
1807. 01:48:14 It's longer than the moment we just covered.
1808. 01:48:16 I know that.
1809. 01:48:17 Yeah, it's ginormous.
1810. 01:48:19 And I believe this is essentially a book that
1811. 01:48:22 was written by all the interviews that he's done.
1812. 01:48:27 So it's a pretty brilliant premise to be honest.
1813. 01:48:30 Just take all those interviews, package them up
1814. 01:48:32 in a book form, and sell it.
1815. 01:48:34 Right.
1816. 01:48:34 And it's an expensive book.
1817. 01:48:36 I want to say it's $48, $40 something.
1818. 01:48:39 I found it at a used bookstore for like 12.
1819. 01:48:43 And it was like in perfect condition.
1820. 01:48:44 It was like done.
1821. 01:48:45 That's coming home with me.
1822. 01:48:46 So that said, we're super grateful to everyone
1823. 01:48:50 who has joined us on the show today.
1824. 01:48:52 And especially those of you in the chat.
1825. 01:48:54 And even more so, those of you who have joined the Bookworm
1826. 01:48:57 Club at club.bookworm.fm--
1827. 01:49:01 see if I can get these words out of my mouth.
1828. 01:49:03 And those of you who have joined the memberships so much,
1829. 01:49:07 we're so grateful to you.
1830. 01:49:09 It's a simple $5 a month, $60 a year.
1831. 01:49:13 You get all kinds of cool perks.
1832. 01:49:15 We talk about it all the time.
1833. 01:49:17 But we're always grateful to have those of you join us
1834. 01:49:20 on the show as well.
1835. 01:49:21 And we're very grateful to those of you who do that
1836. 01:49:23 to help us keep the lights on here for the podcast.
1837. 01:49:26 So thank you.
1838. 01:49:27 All right.
1839. 01:49:28 If you are reading along with us,
1840. 01:49:29 pick up the 21 Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell.
1841. 01:49:32 And we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.