171: The Gap and The Gain by Dan Sullivan & Dr. Benjamin Hardy

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1. 00:00:00 So I made a thing, Joe Buleg.
2. 00:00:02 Cool. What did you make?
3. 00:00:04 I made a website for a cohort that I will be leading on Obsidian.
4. 00:00:13 And it is called Obsidian University, and you have given me a testimonial, so thank you very much for that.
5. 00:00:18 Very excited about this, actually.
6. 00:00:21 There are very few of these types of things that I get super stoked about.
7. 00:00:25 One that you've done recently is this Life-themed cohort, which I'm a little behind on,
8. 00:00:28 and I'm planning to get caught up in the next day.
9. 00:00:31 And two, when you told me you were going to start this, I thought that is awesome.
10. 00:00:36 I have to go through this because my Obsidian game, although I take borderline full credit for trying to get you,
11. 00:00:42 or for getting you on to Obsidian over Rome, like I'm, I'll take full credit for that.
12. 00:00:47 I know I don't get full credit for that, but I'll take it just because I want it.
13. 00:00:51 But I know that you are the person I go to when it comes to Obsidian,
14. 00:00:55 so I definitely need some help in upping my Obsidian game at this point,
15. 00:00:59 so I'm glad that you are the person that gets to do that.
16. 00:01:01 So I'm hopeful that going through this cohort will help me do that.
17. 00:01:04 So I'm very, very, very excited that you're doing this.
18. 00:01:07 Awesome. Yeah.
19. 00:01:08 Well, the genesis behind this, I guess, for full disclosure, I don't think we've really talked in detail about it,
20. 00:01:17 but I have left the day job.
21. 00:01:19 I am now a full-time indie creator.
22. 00:01:24 I'm going to try to do a couple other things to, like, some business consulting and things like that,
23. 00:01:30 but primarily the focus here is on having more time to create things.
24. 00:01:35 And so don't have the day job to pay the bills anymore.
25. 00:01:39 I was thinking through what are the things that I've kind of always wanted to do.
26. 00:01:43 Well, one of the things I've always wanted to do was to go through a cohort on Obsidian.
27. 00:01:49 I lacked the confidence to do a cohort until I started doing this Life Theme cohort, which has been going really, really well.
28. 00:01:55 But yeah, Obsidian is my jam. I love it.
29. 00:01:59 It's my favorite app of all time.
30. 00:02:01 And I've done webinars before on Obsidian.
31. 00:02:04 I've even made courses on Obsidian previously, but never been able to go deep in, like, a done-with-you format,
32. 00:02:11 which is what this cohort is intended to be.
33. 00:02:14 I spun up a website last week, which, by the way, can you tell what platform that website is?
34. 00:02:20 No. Should I?
35. 00:02:23 I don't know. I just shared it with a couple other people, and they're like, "Oh, is that WordPress?
36. 00:02:28 Oh, is that, you know, fill in the blank?" And it's Squarespace.
37. 00:02:33 So...
38. 00:02:34 I was going to say, I didn't look at it that close when I saw it, so I don't remember...
39. 00:02:38 See, I would have guessed WordPress on this.
40. 00:02:41 But yeah, Go Squarespace.
41. 00:02:43 It looks pretty good, eh?
42. 00:02:45 I like this.
43. 00:02:46 Yeah, so Squarespace should sponsor Bookworm, but they haven't yet.
44. 00:02:50 Oh, there's that.
45. 00:02:51 But it's cool. It's a really great platform.
46. 00:02:54 And they have, like, this block editor now, so I was able to tweak all the different sections,
47. 00:02:58 and there are all the details on that web page of CityIniversity.com.
48. 00:03:03 The big thing you need to know is that it's going to have eight different live sessions,
49. 00:03:09 and it's going to take four weeks.
50. 00:03:11 So I'm going to do two live sessions a week, plus an office hours, probably Monday, Wednesday,
51. 00:03:14 Friday.
52. 00:03:15 And there'll be, you know, eight sessions, so two sessions per week, starting from...
53. 00:03:20 First time you've run Obsidian, here's the settings that you should enable,
54. 00:03:24 which Obsidian has come a long way.
55. 00:03:26 It's version 1.3 now, I believe.
56. 00:03:28 They've got the Canvas feature.
57. 00:03:30 Like, they keep adding stuff to it all the time, so there's a lot of stuff in there that has changed
58. 00:03:35 in the last several months.
59. 00:03:36 But giving you the foundation, and then from there, just adding on different workflows and things like that,
60. 00:03:41 culminating with some of my crazy nerdy workflows, like the Bible Study in Obsidian,
61. 00:03:46 which...
62. 00:03:47 Where I've got not only the Cross Reference Library, but I've got, like, link to the Greek and Hebrew,
63. 00:03:53 all the original words, so you can, like, do word studies in Obsidian.
64. 00:03:58 It's kind of nuts.
65. 00:03:59 So all of that is going to happen starting June 12th,
66. 00:04:03 and the cost is going to be $247, which I think is pretty fair for eight group coaching sessions
67. 00:04:11 and then four office hours.
68. 00:04:13 There's a separate circle community that I spun up for this, really, really excited about it,
69. 00:04:18 so if you want to come nerd out about Obsidian with me, please come check it out.
70. 00:04:22 This is my first real big venture since going indie.
71. 00:04:27 I call the Life-Themed cohort kind of an experiment, but this is the one where, like,
72. 00:04:31 I could see myself doing this forever.
73. 00:04:34 Like, if I was going to pick an identity for myself online, I'd love to be the Obsidian guy.
74. 00:04:39 Yeah.
75. 00:04:40 I have a lot of respect for people who use Obsidian in different ways, like Nick Milo, for example,
76. 00:04:44 linking your thinking, but he's more conceptual.
77. 00:04:47 He's the idea-verse guy, you know, and it's all about, like, the way that you interact with your notes.
78. 00:04:52 I want to give people, like, practical wins on, like, "Here's this crazy application,"
79. 00:04:56 which you opened it, and probably were like, "Nope, too complicated for me,"
80. 00:04:59 and close it, at least that's what I did the first time.
81. 00:05:01 Yeah.
82. 00:05:02 And you just need someone to kind of show you the ropes and get your system off the ground
83. 00:05:05 so it can start contributing to your productivity and creativity workflows.
84. 00:05:10 So that's the goal.
85. 00:05:12 I remember I was listening to a podcast.
86. 00:05:15 I think it was MacPower users.
87. 00:05:17 Dr. Dr. Drang was on, and he made the comment.
88. 00:05:21 Somebody asked him if he had tried Obsidian, and he said that he downloaded it once,
89. 00:05:28 opened it, and went, "Ew!"
90. 00:05:30 and promptly uninstalled it.
91. 00:05:32 And from there on, he decided that that was not his thing,
92. 00:05:35 which is classic Dr. Drang, right?
93. 00:05:37 Like, that he always wants to build his own thing.
94. 00:05:40 That's not really most people's style, like, using an existing tool is usually
95. 00:05:45 what people are going to do.
96. 00:05:47 They're not going to go code their own thing.
97. 00:05:49 The beauty of something like Obsidian is, like, you can really make it your own tool,
98. 00:05:53 which is why something like this is so helpful.
99. 00:05:55 So, yeah, I think this will go well.
100. 00:05:57 I'm really, really excited about it for you, Mike, and also for myself.
101. 00:06:01 So there's that.
102. 00:06:02 A little bit of selfishness there involved.
103. 00:06:04 [chuckles]
104. 00:06:05 Awesome.
105. 00:06:06 Well, should we get into follow-up?
106. 00:06:09 We've got a couple different action items here.
107. 00:06:12 Mine was already completed by the time we ended recording last episode,
108. 00:06:15 which was to consider joining the Farnham Street membership.
109. 00:06:18 I did that.
110. 00:06:19 It's pretty cool.
111. 00:06:20 They've got some courses that they've recorded, including one on
112. 00:06:24 reading books.
113. 00:06:26 But the courses are not the reason, I think, to join that thing.
114. 00:06:30 The courses are actually fairly old.
115. 00:06:33 You can kind of tell.
116. 00:06:34 Some of them are several years old at this point.
117. 00:06:37 And the material is still pretty good, but really I wanted to be able to get access
118. 00:06:44 to some of the members.
119. 00:06:46 They've got, like, a discourse form.
120. 00:06:49 And I know they're working on this, like, homeschool curriculum.
121. 00:06:53 So they had additional details in there for members, which I wanted to get access to.
122. 00:07:00 But I haven't had a whole lot of time to explore the depths of the membership.
123. 00:07:04 Seems pretty cool, though.
124. 00:07:06 I think I probably would recommend it if you are interested in it.
125. 00:07:09 But, you know, don't sign up for it because you heard somebody talking about it.
126. 00:07:14 You'll look at the page and you'll either feel like, "Oh, yeah, that's exactly what I am looking for."
127. 00:07:19 Or, "I'm not so sure about this."
128. 00:07:21 If you're not so sure about it.
129. 00:07:22 Don't do it.
130. 00:07:23 But it is basically what it says on the Tim.
131. 00:07:26 It's more far enough street and better.
132. 00:07:29 Which you really can't go wrong with.
133. 00:07:32 Like, even just their base stuff is pretty top notch, so you can't go wrong with them.
134. 00:07:38 Yep.
135. 00:07:39 I don't mind.
136. 00:07:40 But that's me.
137. 00:07:41 Exactly.
138. 00:07:42 Yeah, I had one, which is to start writing some blog posts again.
139. 00:07:46 I actually have three written.
140. 00:07:49 One of which is scheduled to go out this Thursday.
141. 00:07:52 I'm going to release those on a Thursday schedule.
142. 00:07:55 First one is kind of like classic Joe.
143. 00:07:58 This is simplicity and task management.
144. 00:08:01 That's kind of what I need to start with just to get the blog post thing rolling.
145. 00:08:05 But then I'm kind of working my way into more of these, like, how do you use tech at a church scenario?
146. 00:08:12 Because that's the world I live in.
147. 00:08:14 I'm learning that as I tour other churches and I try to figure out, like, how are other
148. 00:08:18 churches using tech at the scale at which I'm using it and slightly under or slightly
149. 00:08:24 above.
150. 00:08:25 Just learning that I have a really weird perspective on it.
151. 00:08:28 And that it's one that I'm trying to get out there a little bit more.
152. 00:08:31 Like, how do I use tech in a way that helps people sing on a Sunday morning during the
153. 00:08:37 songs versus just watch a performance?
154. 00:08:39 So, like, I have a lot of that mentality, but I haven't really found many other people
155. 00:08:43 who do.
156. 00:08:44 So, I'm trying to, like, okay, well, let's write about this and maybe we'll find this crowd
157. 00:08:48 in the process.
158. 00:08:49 So, that's kind of where I'm starting with this.
159. 00:08:51 We'll see where it lands.
160. 00:08:52 We'll see what happens from there.
161. 00:08:53 But that's the blogging world that I'm heading down.
162. 00:08:57 We'll see where it lands this time.
163. 00:08:59 Cool.
164. 00:09:00 Super fun.
165. 00:09:01 I'm also going to be joining you on this action item, though, not related to the book.
166. 00:09:07 But I have been doing a little bit of research just around, like, topic ideas and things
167. 00:09:15 like that.
168. 00:09:17 And I'm excited to get back into writing consistently as well.
169. 00:09:24 I feel like writing is a great compliment to the speaking that happens on a podcast.
170. 00:09:29 There's that, yeah.
171. 00:09:31 It's not.
172. 00:09:32 I think maybe the tendency is to think, well, I'll pick one or the other.
173. 00:09:37 I would encourage people to do both because it comes out different via audio than it does
174. 00:09:43 when I have time to sit down and think about what I'm going to write.
175. 00:09:47 So I'm excited to read your blog posts.
176. 00:09:50 That'll be fun.
177. 00:09:52 I hope we'll see.
178. 00:09:55 All right.
179. 00:09:57 Well, let's talk about today's book, which is The Gap and the Gain by Dr. Benjamin Hardy
180. 00:10:06 and Dan Sullivan.
181. 00:10:09 I have brought up this concept I feel many times on not just bookworm, but other podcasts,
182. 00:10:18 newsletters.
183. 00:10:19 And it's just one of those things that seems to bubble up in a lot of different conversations
184. 00:10:24 that I have.
185. 00:10:26 And it's an idea that was created by Dan Sullivan.
186. 00:10:29 He's the creator of Strategic Coach.
187. 00:10:32 And it's been around for a while.
188. 00:10:35 However, in the last year or so, I think he got together with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who
189. 00:10:43 also helped him put together a book, I think it's called Who Not How.
190. 00:10:48 So basically, Dr. Benjamin Hardy has become Dan Sullivan's writing buddy.
191. 00:10:54 And it's kind of like a partnership to help create these bookworm-style books from these
192. 00:11:03 concepts that Dan has taught for a long time.
193. 00:11:06 And he has had these little self-published leaflet booklet type things on these different
194. 00:11:13 ideas.
195. 00:11:15 But this was the first time I've seen The Gap and the Gain in an actual printed hardcover
196. 00:11:22 format, like a lot of other books that we read.
197. 00:11:24 Now going into this, I have to admit this is a very short 170 pages.
198. 00:11:34 There is definitely an opportunity here to judge this as well.
199. 00:11:39 This could have been just a blog post because there's a whole bunch of single pages with
200. 00:11:43 single quotes on them because Dr. Ben Hardy is the one who's writing this.
201. 00:11:48 But Dan Sullivan is the one with the idea.
202. 00:11:50 So basically, those pages with those quotes, those come from conversations about this topic
203. 00:11:56 with Dan Sullivan.
204. 00:11:59 And I will say before we get into the book itself that this is one that I would actually
205. 00:12:05 recommend that people check out on Audible because the Audible version of this after
206. 00:12:12 each chapter has basically like a 15, 20 minute, maybe that's too long.
207. 00:12:17 I don't know, but there's like these informal podcast episodes where Dr. Ben Hardy and Dan
208. 00:12:23 Sullivan are sitting there having like a conversation over coffee about the concepts from the chapter.
209. 00:12:30 So you get a whole bunch more context.
210. 00:12:33 And honestly, that's where some of the really great stuff comes is when Dan Sullivan is
211. 00:12:37 just kind of talking.
212. 00:12:39 But what was your first impressions of this book and ultimately this idea?
213. 00:12:47 So I'm kind of new to the idea of the gap and the gain.
214. 00:12:51 As I learned about the difference between those two different mental models of sorts,
215. 00:12:57 I guess I would use that term.
216. 00:13:00 I realized that this is something like I've thought this way with the gap mentality for
217. 00:13:07 a while and a lot of arenas.
218. 00:13:09 But I also sometimes will step out of that and think with this gain mentality.
219. 00:13:15 So once I understood like what is he referring to by the gap in the game?
220. 00:13:20 My next question was, okay, if that's the entire book, what's the rest of the book going
221. 00:13:26 to hold?
222. 00:13:27 So like the blog post thing you were talking about, it's almost where you could say, yeah,
223. 00:13:33 you could probably do this in a blog post.
224. 00:13:35 You write like a 2000 word blog post and you could probably get this there.
225. 00:13:39 I don't know that that really would do the topic justice though because I feel like this
226. 00:13:45 is a big enough idea that it warrants putting a book around it even though there are a lot
227. 00:13:51 of, I don't want to say filler because that's not the right word.
228. 00:13:55 There's a lot of like detail put around subtopics for those that helps put a lot of meat behind
229. 00:14:03 the ideas.
230. 00:14:05 So this might be a weird case where yeah, this probably could have been a blog post.
231. 00:14:08 And I'm not sure I would want it in that format.
232. 00:14:11 If I had a blog post sent to me that was called the gap in the game and I understood like roughly
233. 00:14:15 what that was, read the whole blog post.
234. 00:14:18 I don't think it would have the impact that an entire book like this would have.
235. 00:14:21 So I don't know how I feel about that because I normally don't like it when people do a
236. 00:14:26 book that could have been a blog post.
237. 00:14:28 So I'm a little bit torn in that regard.
238. 00:14:31 Well it's, it can and it can't be done as a blog post I feel.
239. 00:14:38 It can be done as a blog post in that you can get the gist of the idea in probably a
240. 00:14:44 package of about 2000 words.
241. 00:14:47 However, you're not getting the real value of the idea without diving deep into it.
242. 00:14:55 And that's exactly what Dr. Benjamin Hardy has done here.
243. 00:15:00 I'm not sure if you looked at the back of the book with all of the references.
244. 00:15:04 There's a ridiculous number of references.
245. 00:15:07 A ridiculous number of references, right.
246. 00:15:10 And so that's really what I feel validates a lot of the ideas in here.
247. 00:15:16 And if you just lose all that context, it's just something somebody said and it loses
248. 00:15:22 some of the punch, I guess.
249. 00:15:26 So I actually am very glad that this format exists, but I think people need to understand
250. 00:15:31 that going into it.
251. 00:15:33 There will be the opportunity to be like, oh well, they're just extending this.
252. 00:15:40 But honestly, I think it's actually not nearly as long as it could have been.
253. 00:15:46 A lot of the references, for example, he'll have a single sentence and he'll have three
254. 00:15:51 different references of studies that support that statement, whereas maybe other books
255. 00:15:57 that we have read, they'll talk about that for the next several pages, trying to summarize
256. 00:16:01 everything that those studies said.
257. 00:16:04 So I feel like it's in terms of the number of words, it's a pretty quick read.
258. 00:16:09 But that is actually the author doing the job of condensing it down for us, which honestly,
259. 00:16:16 I wish more books that we read took that approach.
260. 00:16:19 Yeah, I just glance.
261. 00:16:21 There's 40-ish 42 pages at the back of the book, which are all in notes, references,
262. 00:16:28 index, and the like.
263. 00:16:31 So the book itself is 172 pages with 40-some pages at the back after that to cite things
264. 00:16:40 and such.
265. 00:16:41 So yeah, he definitely covered his tail as far as like, here's where this came from.
266. 00:16:47 So good job.
267. 00:16:48 Good luck, Mr. Hardy.
268. 00:16:50 All right, so maybe let's start here by going into the introduction.
269. 00:16:56 And I guess I should kind of preface this.
270. 00:16:58 There's two different parts to this book.
271. 00:17:00 There's an introduction before the first part.
272. 00:17:03 Part one is get out of the gap.
273. 00:17:05 Part two is get into the gain and then there's a short conclusion at the end.
274. 00:17:09 So only two parts, not three, which is kind of refreshing because it's right there in
275. 00:17:13 the title of the gap and the gain.
276. 00:17:15 There's really no need for a third part.
277. 00:17:17 You probably could spin one up if you really, really wanted to, but that's not the approach
278. 00:17:23 that they took.
279. 00:17:24 You could have, I guess, done the gap, the gain, and then getting from one to the other.
280. 00:17:29 Like you could have done maybe some of that, but he kind of does it all on the two.
281. 00:17:34 Yeah, there are opportunities here to extend this for sure, but they did not take that approach.
282. 00:17:42 In fact, the real concept of the gap and the gain really comes through in this introductory
283. 00:17:49 section.
284. 00:17:51 There's a visual here where it talks about your brain and I'll try to describe this via
285. 00:17:59 podcast and audio, but it's not going to be effective.
286. 00:18:04 So basically there are two approaches we can take to things.
287. 00:18:08 And one is to look at where we are right now.
288. 00:18:11 So imagine a dot like right in the middle of the screen, right?
289. 00:18:16 And then on a vertical axis, you compare that to your ideal, which is above that dot.
290. 00:18:24 And that results in you always looking at how far you have to go.
291. 00:18:30 And this is the problem with goals is that when you are striving for a goal, you never
292. 00:18:37 can get there fast enough, you can never do it good enough before long you get frustrated
293. 00:18:44 at the lack of progress that you're making.
294. 00:18:47 You're noticing all the things that are going wrong and getting in your way.
295. 00:18:51 And that creates what's known as the gap.
296. 00:18:55 And he says the other way to do this is to take where you're currently at and measure
297. 00:18:59 backwards, look at where you're at versus where you started.
298. 00:19:04 And obviously what that does is it helps you to recognize the growth that has occurred
299. 00:19:10 in the progress that you have already made.
300. 00:19:13 And when you look backwards like that, when you try to measure your progress, you get
301. 00:19:16 excited about, hey, this is actually working, even though I don't see it happening moment
302. 00:19:22 to moment or day to day.
303. 00:19:25 So it creates this motivation to keep going.
304. 00:19:31 And this is definitely the better approach of the two.
305. 00:19:36 However, this is not a knowledge problem.
306. 00:19:38 And you can't just decide, I am going to now live in the game instead of the gap.
307. 00:19:47 In fact, in the audio from the audible version, I remember one of those like podcast interviews,
308. 00:19:52 sections, Dr. Benjamin Hardy asked Dan Sullivan, like, so how often do you fall into the gap?
309. 00:19:59 He's like, oh, every single day, multiple times a day.
310. 00:20:03 He's like, I do it all the time, but I'm getting really good at recognizing when it happens.
311. 00:20:08 And then I flip the switch and I go back.
312. 00:20:10 And that's really the value here.
313. 00:20:13 I think the recognizing these two things is really important because in this first section,
314. 00:20:18 he kind of talks about how only 14% of American adults say that they are very happy.
315. 00:20:26 And he kind of starts with this quote by Thomas Jefferson about how we have the right to
316. 00:20:32 life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
317. 00:20:34 But just by saying that we're going to be pursuing happiness, we're implying that we
318. 00:20:37 don't have it.
319. 00:20:39 And when you're chasing happiness externally, it's because you're disconnected internally
320. 00:20:43 and you're trying to fill that gap.
321. 00:20:45 He also talks about how high achievers are particularly prone to be in the gap.
322. 00:20:52 And everything in life happens for you, not to you.
323. 00:20:58 So a couple of really important perspective changes here coupled with this idea of hedonica
324. 00:21:05 adaptation, which is where we're never satisfied with what we get because we get used to it
325. 00:21:09 quickly.
326. 00:21:10 The goalposts keep moving as soon as we get somewhere we feel like there's somewhere
327. 00:21:13 else we should be.
328. 00:21:16 This is where a lot of light bulbs clicked for me.
329. 00:21:20 Obviously, it's the introduction, he's kind of explaining the difference between the gap
330. 00:21:23 and the gain.
331. 00:21:24 But I hadn't really considered the detriments of like the scale of the detriments of constantly
332. 00:21:34 looking at what you're trying to achieve and measuring between where I'm at now and that
333. 00:21:41 spot.
334. 00:21:43 It never really occurred to me that that's a negative or could be a negative till he
335. 00:21:47 started explaining this.
336. 00:21:50 By the end of the introduction, then I'm like, "Huh, apparently I do that a lot because
337. 00:21:56 I constantly see the stuff that I have not accomplished, that I want to accomplish, and
338. 00:22:01 then by proxy, all the things that I need to do, that I continue to not do, that I have
339. 00:22:08 to achieve in order to get the goal that I'm trying to work towards."
340. 00:22:12 So maybe that's the bad word to use, the goal term, but I just find that the picture that
341. 00:22:20 you can see in your brain of where I'm at now, where I want to be, and then if you're
342. 00:22:24 constantly looking at that, instead of seeing all the steps to get there, which you may do,
343. 00:22:31 but you tend to see all the shortcomings that you have that would be preventing you from
344. 00:22:37 achieving that.
345. 00:22:39 As if you're looking at, say, yesterday, are you better off today than you were yesterday?
346. 00:22:45 Have you gotten closer to that ideal versus yesterday?
347. 00:22:50 If I think about last year and how I was handling myself at work and how I was able to help
348. 00:23:00 the people who have events going on at the church, I would consider really better at that
349. 00:23:04 now than I was just a year ago.
350. 00:23:07 But I really only see how the event that I've got coming up in a week, I don't have all
351. 00:23:12 the stuff I need to get there, so I don't feel like I'm adequate to run that.
352. 00:23:16 That's what I see versus if I had been asked to do this a year ago, this could have been
353. 00:23:21 a real bad ordeal, but now it's actually feasible.
354. 00:23:25 I'm just shy of that.
355. 00:23:28 So little things like that, you wouldn't think that that's a big deal, but if you're constantly
356. 00:23:34 seeing where you're short, especially now that I've read this, I can definitely see
357. 00:23:40 where that can lead to long-term effects that are just not pleasant.
358. 00:23:45 This was very eye-opening and I think a really good place to start with this.
359. 00:23:49 Let's talk about the needs that you brought up there because that is addressed in the
360. 00:23:57 first chapter.
361. 00:23:59 Because I mentioned the first part is get out of the gap, the first chapter is embrace the
362. 00:24:06 freedom of wants.
363. 00:24:08 And the core idea there is to recognize that everything that you're striving for is a
364. 00:24:18 want, not a need.
365. 00:24:20 It defines a need as unresolved internal pain.
366. 00:24:26 And on the surface, I think there's a lot of narrative in the productivity space, which
367. 00:24:31 would kind of say that's not the way to do it.
368. 00:24:37 If you don't really want something enough, if you don't believe in it enough, if you
369. 00:24:41 don't need it, then you're not going to put in the effort in order to get it.
370. 00:24:49 And this is where right away the book starts to get really interesting for me because page
371. 00:24:56 90 talks about Nval Ravekant.
372. 00:24:59 So great timing picking that one right before this.
373. 00:25:03 But the idea there is that success and life really is a single player game.
374. 00:25:09 You're not competing against anybody else but yourself.
375. 00:25:12 And so you got to ask yourself, what do you feel you need in order to be happy?
376. 00:25:16 What do you measure yourself against?
377. 00:25:19 But then he gets into the story of Trevor Lawrence, the quarterback for the Jacksonville
378. 00:25:24 Jaguars and formerly the quarterback for the Clemson Tigers.
379. 00:25:31 I forget.
380. 00:25:32 He was a very, very successful college quarterback.
381. 00:25:34 Just one.
382. 00:25:35 And it was Clemson.
383. 00:25:36 I don't know about the Tigers piece.
384. 00:25:37 Okay.
385. 00:25:38 Yeah.
386. 00:25:39 He was an insanely good quarterback.
387. 00:25:42 He gets to the NFL and he's drafted by a terrible team.
388. 00:25:48 And they made the playoffs last year, which was kind of cool to see, but they were bad
389. 00:25:53 for a while.
390. 00:25:55 And so this like high draft pick quarterback, I don't know if he was picked number one or
391. 00:25:59 not.
392. 00:26:00 I think maybe he was.
393. 00:26:01 So a top pick in the draft or one of the top picks in the draft goes to this bad team.
394. 00:26:05 And you're used to thinking, used to hearing people be like, Oh yeah, well, I'm going to
395. 00:26:09 do everything I can to turn this around.
396. 00:26:12 I'm not going to sleep until we reached the playoffs and we're winning a Super Bowl and
397. 00:26:16 yada, yada, yada.
398. 00:26:17 And the sports commentators were kind of beating up Trevor Lawrence because he was basically
399. 00:26:27 saying that I love football.
400. 00:26:29 I'm going to give it my best.
401. 00:26:31 But if things don't work out the way I want them to, it's not going to define me.
402. 00:26:37 They didn't know what to do with that.
403. 00:26:38 Well, they knew what to do with it, which was just drive him into the ground because
404. 00:26:46 he wasn't he wasn't he wasn't obsessed.
405. 00:26:49 Like that's that's the kicker here.
406. 00:26:51 Like he wasn't so obsessed with football that it defined his entire being.
407. 00:26:59 That was the problem in the whole situation, but he's he's got an awesome mentality there.
408. 00:27:05 Right?
409. 00:27:06 He's able to realize that his entire identity is not wrapped up in football, which is great
410. 00:27:12 because at some point you can't play football anymore.
411. 00:27:15 At some point you have to retire from football.
412. 00:27:18 I don't know many 80 year old who are playing football.
413. 00:27:23 At some point you have to retire.
414. 00:27:24 So if you do that, you know, think of like all the heartache that a lot of pro sports
415. 00:27:30 players have when they retire, how many times do these superstars retire and then come
416. 00:27:35 back when they have their entire identity wrapped up in that sport and then step away
417. 00:27:40 from it.
418. 00:27:41 Well, what do they have left to do?
419. 00:27:43 Well, he's got a great mentality there's like, well, he'll just do something else.
420. 00:27:47 So it's cool to see.
421. 00:27:49 But again, the media doesn't know what to do with that.
422. 00:27:52 Like he's he's super healthy.
423. 00:27:53 Well, we only want unhealthy pro sports players.
424. 00:27:56 Like that's like that's that's that's really all we want.
425. 00:27:59 We want people who have an unhealthy relationship and just work constantly.
426. 00:28:03 That's what we actually want.
427. 00:28:04 Yeah, we want people who are obsessive and that's kind of the point is he talks about
428. 00:28:09 obsessive versus harmonious passion and obsessive passion is highly impulsive.
429. 00:28:14 It's fueled by emotions and unresolved internal conflict.
430. 00:28:20 It's regularly associated with addiction correlated with low self esteem.
431. 00:28:24 Like you don't want to be in that camp, right?
432. 00:28:26 But harmonious is healthy intrinsic motivation.
433. 00:28:29 You control your passion instead of your passion controlling you.
434. 00:28:32 But that's not the narrative that the the world wants to hear.
435. 00:28:40 One of the things that they they talk about in this chapter, which I really appreciated
436. 00:28:45 that story about Trevor Lawrence and I felt like it illustrated was that when you are
437. 00:28:50 in the gap, you are desperate to get there because you're trying to escape being here.
438. 00:28:57 That phrasing resonated with me because I can see how I slip into that sometimes.
439. 00:29:05 I'm definitely susceptible to that.
440. 00:29:09 And I don't want to be.
441. 00:29:11 So there's definitely room for growth having gone through this this book.
442. 00:29:16 But related to that is another key idea here called the two types of freedom, which is
443. 00:29:22 really, really powerful.
444. 00:29:24 The first type is freedom from, which is external, objective.
445. 00:29:28 You're not a slave, you know, that kind of thing.
446. 00:29:30 I don't have to do this thing anymore.
447. 00:29:33 But then there's freedom to, which is internal, subjective, you're your own master.
448. 00:29:38 You get to do something else.
449. 00:29:41 And that's kind of what Trevor Lawrence is talking about.
450. 00:29:42 He's like, I get to play football, and that's great.
451. 00:29:44 I'm going to do my best to to be the best that I can be.
452. 00:29:48 But ultimately, whatever that best is, I'm good with.
453. 00:29:52 I'll know that I gave it my best shot.
454. 00:29:56 And I will be completely satisfied when it is time to move on to something else because
455. 00:30:01 he recognizes that he has the freedom to make that transition when he wants to.
456. 00:30:05 You definitely see people who are just kind of holding on, right?
457. 00:30:11 And maybe they hold on longer than they they should because they have trouble letting go.
458. 00:30:16 They have trouble embracing a different identity.
459. 00:30:20 So I think there's a lot of different applications of this, but obviously one of them would be
460. 00:30:24 transitioning between major life stages.
461. 00:30:30 The two different freedoms are interesting to me.
462. 00:30:33 You really don't think about like, I have the freedom to do something, but you also have
463. 00:30:39 the freedom from something, right?
464. 00:30:43 So like, it's the difference between being a slave and a master as he uses here.
465. 00:30:48 This is an interesting concept to me because I don't usually think in those terms.
466. 00:30:52 I can't say that I've really thought about, you know, I have the freedom to run a soundboard
467. 00:30:57 the way I want to run it.
468. 00:31:00 I'm not free from something.
469. 00:31:03 I just like, I have the autonomy to be able to do that.
470. 00:31:06 Now, that's a bad example because I don't know many sound boards or people who are dictated
471. 00:31:11 to use a thing like that in a certain way.
472. 00:31:14 But I think you get my point.
473. 00:31:16 I just don't think I really have processed that at a deep level.
474. 00:31:21 So there's some action items later on.
475. 00:31:22 We'll talk about that.
476. 00:31:23 I think will maybe help me with that to some degree.
477. 00:31:27 But this is like getting into the territory where, again, I haven't really thought through
478. 00:31:34 that terminology.
479. 00:31:35 So this goes back to that whole blog post concept, right?
480. 00:31:38 This is starting to put some meat on the bones for the gap side of this in a way that
481. 00:31:45 I haven't processed it this way.
482. 00:31:47 So yes, I understand the gap, but now you're starting to give me a little bit more around
483. 00:31:52 that.
484. 00:31:53 So again, I'm grateful for that.
485. 00:31:55 All right.
486. 00:31:56 Well, let's go into chapter two, which is be self-determined.
487. 00:32:03 And by the way, all these chapters have like subheadings as well.
488. 00:32:08 So this one is define your own success criteria.
489. 00:32:12 And it starts with a story about public education, which was invented in 1918 to get kids out
490. 00:32:22 of factories.
491. 00:32:24 I'm kind of paraphrasing his words.
492. 00:32:26 So if that's factually incorrect, I apologize.
493. 00:32:29 Obviously you and I both homeschool so people know our thoughts on this already.
494. 00:32:34 But the big point he's making here is that it wasn't to train kids to become leaders
495. 00:32:41 and creative thinkers.
496. 00:32:43 It was an investment in our collective economic future.
497. 00:32:49 And this whole structure or system teaches our kids to measure themselves against an
498. 00:32:57 external reference point.
499. 00:33:00 Just think of like all the standardized tests that you can take and the scores that you
500. 00:33:04 get and the percentiles like I totally see the evidence of this.
501. 00:33:10 And I think you and I probably at some level have internalized this already.
502. 00:33:16 Maybe this added some more context, some more color, some more detail.
503. 00:33:21 But one of our goals as a family with homeschooling our kids was that we wanted our kids to become
504. 00:33:28 a lifelong learner's.
505. 00:33:30 We wanted them to love the process of learning because I recognized with my internet career
506. 00:33:37 and the things that I've done online creatively that I started off not good at any of these
507. 00:33:43 things.
508. 00:33:44 But I was smart enough to put something out there, learn from it and do it better next
509. 00:33:49 time.
510. 00:33:50 In fact, one of the first things that got me into screencasting, I don't know if I've
511. 00:33:54 ever told you this story, when I was first starting to talk to Tan at Asian efficiency,
512. 00:34:00 I had seen some of David Sparks screencasts.
513. 00:34:04 I think he had just done the whole Omni Focus series at that point.
514. 00:34:09 I was like, "Wow, these are really cool.
515. 00:34:11 I'm going to try to make one."
516. 00:34:13 And I recorded one on TextExpander and it was terrible.
517. 00:34:18 It was awful.
518. 00:34:21 I did it sitting on my couch one afternoon.
519. 00:34:26 It was 15 minutes of rambling.
520. 00:34:28 I didn't really show anything.
521. 00:34:30 I made every mistake in the book, but I published it to a now defunct YouTube channel called
522. 00:34:36 "Semicro Workflows."
523. 00:34:37 It was the only one that I had ever published.
524. 00:34:39 I don't even think I ever made it public.
525. 00:34:41 But somehow Tan found it and we were talking and he's like, "Hey, I like the screencast
526. 00:34:47 stuff you do."
527. 00:34:48 And I was like, "What are you talking about?"
528. 00:34:49 He's like, "The Semicro Workflow stuff."
529. 00:34:50 I'm like, "Oh my gosh, you found that?
530. 00:34:52 I'm so ashamed."
531. 00:34:53 He was able to see the potential there.
532. 00:34:57 He's like, "No, no, this is pretty good.
533. 00:34:59 I think you could be pretty good at this."
534. 00:35:03 So I accidentally published the first one.
535. 00:35:06 That was by far the hardest one and the most embarrassing.
536. 00:35:10 But then I was able to learn from that and iterate on it.
537. 00:35:14 Now I'd like to think that I've gotten pretty good at it.
538. 00:35:18 But that iterative cycle, if I had not...
539. 00:35:25 I can see if I was in this environment that he's describing with public education and
540. 00:35:30 I think once you get into the workforce, there's the same sort of tendency to compare
541. 00:35:35 what you're doing with other people who are doing certain things and that can keep you
542. 00:35:38 from ever trying anything.
543. 00:35:41 If I had recognized that that sort of situation was there, I probably never would have done
544. 00:35:47 it.
545. 00:35:48 However, that was the thing that kind of catapulted me into this whole creative cycle.
546. 00:35:53 So it doesn't take a lot to get it going.
547. 00:35:56 And that's really what we want to teach our kids.
548. 00:36:00 Create not consume.
549. 00:36:01 That's a big part of it.
550. 00:36:02 So we're not saying you can't use the technology, but use it with a purpose.
551. 00:36:06 Don't just go through the endless feeds.
552. 00:36:08 Don't just consume the stuff.
553. 00:36:11 Determine for yourself what success looks like with these different tools, different platforms,
554. 00:36:20 etc.
555. 00:36:21 And I've got a couple different action items associated with this.
556. 00:36:27 The first one is to list 10 things for I know I'm being successful when.
557. 00:36:34 And this is not associated with an outcome.
558. 00:36:38 That's why it's specifically worded.
559. 00:36:42 It's not I know I'm successful when.
560. 00:36:45 It's I know I'm being successful when.
561. 00:36:48 So it's the conditions present tense that have to be satisfied in order for me to okay, yeah,
562. 00:36:56 I'm doing the right things.
563. 00:36:57 I'm not not associated with an outcome.
564. 00:36:59 And then the other one is to come up with my own filtering questions.
565. 00:37:02 There's a bunch that they use on page 45 about what they should be what you should be engaged
566. 00:37:07 with.
567. 00:37:08 And I love me some questions, but I want to identify my own questions.
568. 00:37:13 But I want to use the ones that are necessarily provided for us in the book.
569. 00:37:18 But I guess that's one other thing I'll mention here is as he goes through this, there's six
570. 00:37:21 different chapters here, but he gives you lots of different questions and lots of different
571. 00:37:24 practical like try this out.
572. 00:37:27 Think through these questions, write down some things.
573. 00:37:30 You know, if you're keeping a journal and you're following along at home, it's almost
574. 00:37:33 like a workbook.
575. 00:37:34 And I would encourage people to spend some time wrestling with this stuff, not just
576. 00:37:38 cranking through the words like we did for this podcast.
577. 00:37:43 That's a good point because there are, like you get to the end of these chapters and there
578. 00:37:48 are like chapter takeaways, but there's a lot of like time for a quick exercise.
579. 00:37:53 Pull out your journal and simplify the success criteria you've listed above.
580. 00:37:57 Like, and then he has questions for you to work through.
581. 00:38:00 And I didn't do hardly any of these completely upfront about that right now.
582. 00:38:07 But I have a couple, three action items here of these to do.
583. 00:38:13 This is, I'm going to join you on this particular one.
584. 00:38:16 I'm being successful.
585. 00:38:17 I know I'm being successful when one through ten.
586. 00:38:20 What are those things?
587. 00:38:22 And that, that in itself I think is like the starting point for if these things are happening,
588. 00:38:31 then I know I'm on the right path.
589. 00:38:34 And like some of those things, like sometimes I feel like it's helpful to like hear some
590. 00:38:39 of those examples.
591. 00:38:42 And some of these are like I can wake up every day and ask, what would I like to do today?
592. 00:38:46 If my passive revenue exceeds my lifestyle needs, I can live anywhere in the world I
593. 00:38:51 choose.
594. 00:38:53 There are no whiny people in my life.
595. 00:38:55 I wear my watch for curiosity only.
596. 00:38:57 I can quit anytime.
597. 00:38:59 And these are things that aren't necessarily like data driven.
598. 00:39:04 My brain tends to go there.
599. 00:39:05 It's like when I have this much money per month, I know I'm being successful.
600. 00:39:09 It's like no, that's not, that's not even remotely what he's getting at here.
601. 00:39:13 This is primarily like the non-tangibles, I guess, of day to day life.
602. 00:39:20 So like that's, I feel like that can be very, very helpful.
603. 00:39:23 So I definitely want to do this one.
604. 00:39:25 So I'm joining you on this action item.
605. 00:39:28 Nice.
606. 00:39:29 And it's not so much I've gotten to a certain point.
607. 00:39:33 I've got enough passive income and I, these conditions can be met.
608. 00:39:37 It's really the things that are tied to progress in that direction.
609. 00:39:45 Like there's a story in here, which I really liked about the British rowing team.
610. 00:39:50 And they had not won a gold medal since 1912, but they won a gold medal in Sydney in, in
611. 00:39:57 2000, I believe, by using a single sentence filter, which was just, will it make the boat
612. 00:40:07 go faster?
613. 00:40:09 And that's pretty brilliant when you think about it.
614. 00:40:14 I mean, when you're talking about like teams and organizations and empowering individuals,
615. 00:40:23 whether they be employees or volunteers, to really run with the vision, this is the kind
616. 00:40:30 of thing that you need.
617. 00:40:31 They don't need to know all the individual details and all the OKRs and all like the,
618. 00:40:36 the vivid vision and all that kind of stuff.
619. 00:40:38 They need to know what's the filtering criteria so that I can make the decisions on my own
620. 00:40:43 and apply the speed of implementation and move things forward without a whole lot of
621. 00:40:49 back and forth.
622. 00:40:52 And I love this story, but I also need to figure out what is that single sentence filtering
623. 00:41:00 mechanism for me.
624. 00:41:01 So we mentioned the life theme cohort earlier.
625. 00:41:03 I have that, that life theme and I'm continuing to refine it as we go through that stuff.
626. 00:41:08 But each one of the weeks, I give people a whole bunch of clarifying questions, which
627. 00:41:13 I think are really valuable.
628. 00:41:15 The whole goal of the life theme cohort is to end up with the single sentence.
629. 00:41:19 But I like this as a separate version of that, I guess, is like a single question.
630. 00:41:24 Right?
631. 00:41:25 So yeah, the life, the life theme, tying it to the life theme, that maybe answers the
632. 00:41:29 question of what we do.
633. 00:41:32 But then the, this question is almost like how we do it.
634. 00:41:37 And I love this approach.
635. 00:41:39 I like the idea of the, how do you say this?
636. 00:41:46 Ethemia, which is being on the right path and not being led astray.
637. 00:41:55 And he also mentions how living in the game is living by clearer measurables that you've
638. 00:42:00 defined for yourself.
639. 00:42:01 You know, so it kind of, for me, ties back to the daily questions that I do inside of
640. 00:42:07 Obsidian all the time.
641. 00:42:09 Did I do my best to move the needle in these particular areas?
642. 00:42:13 You know, I think there's a chance, I don't have an action I'm associated with this, but
643. 00:42:17 I want to continue to just kind of think on this.
644. 00:42:19 And I think this may influence some of that stuff a little bit.
645. 00:42:23 I think primarily I'm doing the right things, but maybe the, the flavor is going to change
646. 00:42:28 a little bit.
647. 00:42:30 Before we started recording, I told you that I had three action items and I could only
648. 00:42:33 find two of them on my notes.
649. 00:42:35 This was the third one was that filtering system trying to get narrowed down to that
650. 00:42:38 single question.
651. 00:42:39 The trick here is that I'm not done with your life theme cohort.
652. 00:42:43 So I don't have that part nailed down here.
653. 00:42:46 So that might end up being a delayed action item here, but I'm going to at least write
654. 00:42:50 it down, start working towards that.
655. 00:42:52 Because I feel like that would be crazy helpful.
656. 00:42:55 Like, should I get donuts this morning?
657. 00:42:57 I mean, the answer is yes, but how do I justify with that question?
658. 00:43:01 So.
659. 00:43:02 Sure.
660. 00:43:03 Well, you may not want to get donuts in the morning when you read through the next chapter.
661. 00:43:10 So you just got to skip that one.
662. 00:43:13 Can't do that.
663. 00:43:15 Can't do that.
664. 00:43:16 You got to read the whole thing.
665. 00:43:17 Sorry.
666. 00:43:18 All right.
667. 00:43:19 Fair enough.
668. 00:43:20 Chapter three is the compound effect of the gap or the gain.
669. 00:43:23 Train your brain to see the gains.
670. 00:43:26 I like that a lot.
671. 00:43:29 There's a lot of talk in this chapter about optimism and how being continually in the
672. 00:43:35 gap wears down your physical body.
673. 00:43:38 One of the studies that they shared in this chapter, I really liked mentioned that optimistic
674. 00:43:44 people live on average 10 plus years longer than pessimistic people.
675. 00:43:48 And they tie that specifically to a study of the sisters of Notre Dame where they had 180
676. 00:43:55 nuns who were all born before 1917, right?
677. 00:44:00 Autobiographical journal entries.
678. 00:44:02 And then the nuns whose entries contained overtly joyful content lived on average of
679. 00:44:07 10 years longer.
680. 00:44:09 And by age 85, 90% of the happiest nuns were alive compared to 34% of the least happy nuns.
681. 00:44:17 And I mean, you could nitpick that study, I guess there's only 180 people, but I think
682. 00:44:24 this is true.
683. 00:44:26 I, for a while, we were going into a local nursing home for a church ministry.
684. 00:44:34 Like once a month, we would just go visit with the residents there.
685. 00:44:37 We would sometimes play music, play games.
686. 00:44:41 One time the kids came and they brought their favorite storybooks.
687. 00:44:44 And so they sat with the residents and read their storybooks to them, done like Christmas
688. 00:44:50 caroling in the halls, stuff like that.
689. 00:44:53 And there are definitely people there who are, they don't want to be there.
690. 00:44:57 There are also people there who are just, they don't really care.
691. 00:45:01 They're loving their best life.
692. 00:45:03 There was one guy I remember who his name was Carl.
693. 00:45:06 He was an army veteran.
694. 00:45:09 And every time that we came, he would like get on the intercom and make the announcement.
695. 00:45:14 He like prided himself on being the guy, you know, who was announcing all the social
696. 00:45:18 happenings.
697. 00:45:19 And he just loved it when we came in there, you know, and he was our best buddy.
698. 00:45:24 And there were a couple other people like that that really they stick out in my mind.
699. 00:45:30 But there are also other people there who obviously they're upset at their circumstances.
700. 00:45:35 Their family members aren't around or even if they are, they're not coming to visit and
701. 00:45:40 they just get real negative and bitter.
702. 00:45:43 I think I mentioned this at one point, but there's a book that I read as a gap book a
703. 00:45:48 long time ago called 30 Lessons for Living, which is a really, really great book.
704. 00:45:54 And basically, it was by Dr. Carl Pillimer and he went into all these nursing homes and
705. 00:45:59 found these people who are just, they're full of joy.
706. 00:46:02 They're having a ton of fun and interviewed like 10,000 of them about, you know, what
707. 00:46:08 was, what's the secret to your happiness?
708. 00:46:12 And I definitely think there's, there's something to this idea.
709. 00:46:17 And the pessimistic response to this, I guess, would be, well, you can't just choose to be
710. 00:46:23 happy all the time.
711. 00:46:25 And he's kind of saying, yeah, yeah, you can.
712. 00:46:29 Which is frustrating to be quite frank because it means that if this is, this is like going
713. 00:46:38 back to like a handful of the last few books, like if it's not going well, I don't like
714. 00:46:44 where it's going, it's in my brain.
715. 00:46:48 And I don't like being told that it's my fault that I'm unhappy about something.
716. 00:46:55 But it's absolutely true.
717. 00:46:57 And it's absolutely something that I need to work on.
718. 00:47:00 Like, and obviously, like, I feel like this is something that I need to definitely work
719. 00:47:04 on because it keeps like beating me over the head here recently.
720. 00:47:08 Like, Joe, have you got this through your thick skull yet?
721. 00:47:11 This is in your brain, like, quitting, quitting frustrated by these things?
722. 00:47:15 Like, quit it.
723. 00:47:17 So I kind of want to blame you for the books that you're picking for this particular feeling.
724. 00:47:23 So thanks for that, Mike.
725. 00:47:24 But I also know that this is my own doing as well.
726. 00:47:28 So yeah, I don't really have an action item with this one because I'm not really sure
727. 00:47:31 how I would write it down or what it would be tangent.
728. 00:47:34 However you say that wouldn't be tangible.
729. 00:47:38 But I do know that this is one thing that I need to continue to work on.
730. 00:47:41 So maybe this is the thing.
731. 00:47:44 It is trying to get this to where I'm noticing when I'm going down one path mentally versus
732. 00:47:50 the other.
733. 00:47:51 So maybe I'm getting there.
734. 00:47:52 But continuing to read books that tell me to get my head in the right place is helpful,
735. 00:47:56 too, because it keeps pounding me over the skull with it, which is a good thing.
736. 00:48:00 Well, this one is interesting because it doesn't say get your head in the right place,
737. 00:48:05 but it basically paints a picture of, okay, there's two options.
738. 00:48:08 And this one's good and this one's not so good.
739. 00:48:09 So choose the good one.
740. 00:48:11 Yes, which is the same as telling me get your head in the game.
741. 00:48:15 Yeah, it's less abrasive, I feel.
742. 00:48:19 But yes, like he does talk about in this section how comparison makes you unhappy.
743. 00:48:24 The gap robs you of enjoying what you have.
744. 00:48:28 It's a really powerful idea here about changing the context and changing the meaning because
745. 00:48:33 a pushback with what you were just sharing was well, so I'm just supposed to pretend
746. 00:48:39 that this bad stuff didn't happen to me.
747. 00:48:42 And not exactly, but sort of.
748. 00:48:46 You don't have to attach like you don't have to stay attached to the negativity of those
749. 00:48:53 situations later on in the second half of the book he talks about this experience transformer
750. 00:49:00 where you take what happened and you kind of spin it and you use it for good.
751. 00:49:05 And I think one of the things he says in this chapter that highlights the pushback to this
752. 00:49:11 is that people with low emotional intelligence, you know, I love that topic emotional intelligence
753. 00:49:17 obviously, but people with low emotional intelligence are highly sensitive to fairness violations.
754. 00:49:24 So if you find yourself saying that's not fair in his words, maybe you have low emotional
755. 00:49:31 intelligence.
756. 00:49:33 And again, like that could be heard the wrong way and be like, Oh, well, you're telling me
757. 00:49:38 that I'm not skilled or you're better than I am.
758. 00:49:42 No, no, because emotional intelligence, you have the ability to develop that.
759. 00:49:46 It's not something that you're just born with.
760. 00:49:48 It's not talent.
761. 00:49:50 It's not innate ability.
762. 00:49:52 It's something that if you embrace a growth mindset, you can develop and you can become
763. 00:49:57 a better version of yourself.
764. 00:50:00 One of the best stories in this whole book, by the way, is comes from this chapter of
765. 00:50:04 the Principia College women's soccer team.
766. 00:50:08 This is what I was just getting ready to bring up like this is gold.
767. 00:50:11 Well, I'll let you talk about it if you want.
768. 00:50:14 Yeah.
769. 00:50:15 So this is 1984 to 1988.
770. 00:50:16 Kim Butler was a college soccer player at Principia College.
771. 00:50:20 And they were not doing well.
772. 00:50:21 They were doing very poorly.
773. 00:50:22 And the coach decided that once they got on the bus to drive back, they had an hour
774. 00:50:31 or two back after games, there weren't locker rooms.
775. 00:50:35 So they didn't do a debrief after the game.
776. 00:50:37 They just went straight from the field onto the bus.
777. 00:50:39 And the coach would start a five minute timer and they were allowed five minutes.
778. 00:50:43 Again, this is the beginning of the game, beginning of the season they were doing very
779. 00:50:47 poorly.
780. 00:50:48 They were allowed five minutes to sulk.
781. 00:50:51 In other words, they were given five minutes to just be upset about how the game went.
782. 00:50:57 And then the coach would set a 10 minute timer and they had to collectively talk about
783. 00:51:02 good things that happened during the game.
784. 00:51:05 And then they would set another 20 minute timer and every player had to point out one
785. 00:51:10 specific good thing that another player did during that game.
786. 00:51:14 In other words, they were given five minutes to sulk over this and then they were forced
787. 00:51:17 for 30 minutes to focus on the positives.
788. 00:51:20 This is exactly what he's referring to here is that you're allowed five minutes in this
789. 00:51:25 gap territory, which I can appreciate that he's willing to admit that we're not all superhuman
790. 00:51:32 and we can't just force our brains to step away from it.
791. 00:51:35 But if you allow yourself a short amount of time in that, it's literally set a timer.
792. 00:51:41 I would totally have to set a timer and then flip the script and go into the gratitude practice.
793. 00:51:47 And noticing the things that were improvements or that went really well and flipping the
794. 00:51:53 script and either like just externalizing those in some way, whether it's writing them,
795. 00:51:58 whether it's talking to somebody about it in some form, doing that can change your attitude
796. 00:52:06 about it.
797. 00:52:07 So you're not like you were saying, Mike, like it's not, you're not playing pretend like
798. 00:52:12 we're not getting the dollhouse out here and building some stick figure thing that is fake
799. 00:52:17 and we're just going to pretend that everything is happy, go lucky.
800. 00:52:20 No, that's not the case at all.
801. 00:52:23 You're actually putting yourself in a different mindset so that you can focus on those gains
802. 00:52:29 and so that you can focus on the positive side of it.
803. 00:52:33 That type of thing is the sort of thing I need to hear.
804. 00:52:35 So thank you for that team.
805. 00:52:37 Yeah, I mean, there's a lot going on in that format there, but the main point that he's
806. 00:52:45 making there is that didn't allow them to stay in the gap for very long.
807. 00:52:50 And the beginning of that story, he talks about how they were pretty terrible.
808. 00:52:54 A lot of them had never played soccer before.
809. 00:52:57 In the first half of the season, they lost every game.
810. 00:53:02 The second half of the season, they won every game and they ended up winning the division
811. 00:53:07 to NCAA championship, which is kind of crazy to think about.
812. 00:53:13 Yeah, but it's, I don't think it's far fetched.
813. 00:53:20 I think this is a really, really powerful idea.
814. 00:53:23 The problem is from all speaking from myself, I tend to get stuck in that gap, right?
815. 00:53:28 And I continue to brew on what went wrong.
816. 00:53:31 I could benefit a lot from just setting the five minute timer and like, okay, let's turn
817. 00:53:34 the page.
818. 00:53:36 And for whatever reason, it's easier for me to see this in other people, like when I was
819. 00:53:39 coaching the middle school soccer and basketball teams, I told my kids this all the time, like
820. 00:53:46 when they had a rough game, you're like, okay, so you've got five minutes to be upset about
821. 00:53:51 that one.
822. 00:53:52 Then we turn the page and we don't talk about it ever again.
823. 00:53:55 We move forward.
824. 00:53:58 But yeah, there's, so there's the switching from the gap to the game.
825. 00:54:02 There's the bonding with the teammates by calling out the things that other people did
826. 00:54:07 well.
827. 00:54:08 That positive focus, that's another thing.
828. 00:54:11 Dan Sullivan talks a lot about just from the different things that I've read and heard
829. 00:54:17 from him.
830. 00:54:18 In fact, at the day job, we tried to begin and end every single meeting with a positive
831. 00:54:23 focus.
832. 00:54:24 So the beginning of the meeting, you're calling out and sharing the good news, right?
833. 00:54:29 And then at the end of the meeting, we're sharing gratitude.
834. 00:54:33 So in the middle of the meeting, we're arguing, we're fighting, we're pushing to get our way,
835. 00:54:39 right?
836. 00:54:40 But we're talking about ideas, not people, and then we always wrap it up cleanly at the
837. 00:54:45 end.
838. 00:54:46 I think this is a very generalizable approach for any sort of team.
839. 00:54:52 The other thing I want to mention here with the calling out something good that you saw
840. 00:54:56 someone else do.
841. 00:54:58 You've embraced this in our family before.
842. 00:55:01 Got five kids, and that means that every seat in the suburban is filled, which means
843. 00:55:07 on long road trips, sometimes tempers flare a little bit.
844. 00:55:13 And I remember one time being in the car, people were fighting and I was like, all right,
845. 00:55:17 that's it.
846. 00:55:19 Now everyone is going to share one thing that they appreciate about Malachi.
847. 00:55:24 No one wants to do it at first, but after they start, you gain a little bit of momentum.
848. 00:55:29 All right, now share one thing that you appreciate about Jonathan.
849. 00:55:33 15 minutes later, it's completely changed the atmosphere in the car.
850. 00:55:39 So I have a little bit of experience with this and I can confirm it definitely works.
851. 00:55:44 I took a different approach about a year ago.
852. 00:55:47 All my kids were in the back and they were fighting.
853. 00:55:50 And this was in January in Minnesota.
854. 00:55:53 So not exactly warm outside.
855. 00:55:55 And they were just on each other.
856. 00:55:57 And I told them, it's like, fine, you need to cool off.
857. 00:56:00 And I rolled down all the windows in the back.
858. 00:56:03 We're doing 65 down the road.
859. 00:56:05 It's freezing.
860. 00:56:06 I think I want to say it was like zero, five degrees outside.
861. 00:56:10 So you guys need to cool off.
862. 00:56:12 It's like, I left the windows for exactly 60 seconds and then rolled them back and was
863. 00:56:16 like, okay, are we all settled now?
864. 00:56:18 All good?
865. 00:56:19 Okay.
866. 00:56:20 They were fine after that.
867. 00:56:21 So you just need to cool off of it.
868. 00:56:23 It's like, literally your approach is probably significantly better life lessons than mine,
869. 00:56:28 but it works.
870. 00:56:31 Say whatever works.
871. 00:56:33 All right.
872. 00:56:34 Let's go into the next part.
873. 00:56:38 So part two is get into the gain and chapter four is always measure backwards.
874. 00:56:46 And that is kind of exactly what it says on the tin.
875. 00:56:50 I think the second half of this book is going to go significantly faster because some of
876. 00:56:54 this stuff has been discussed already.
877. 00:56:58 But the big thing here is that progress is everything.
878. 00:57:02 I like the idea that they talk about with inattention blindness, which is you're being
879. 00:57:07 so fixated on one thing that you fail to see anything else.
880. 00:57:11 Definitely see how that applies to me.
881. 00:57:14 But then the big section here is talking about journaling and questions for journaling, which
882. 00:57:22 these are good.
883. 00:57:23 I'm not going to use these.
884. 00:57:24 I've got my personal retreat framework actually instead.
885. 00:57:27 So where am I right now?
886. 00:57:28 What are my wins in the last 90 days?
887. 00:57:30 What are my desired wins for the next 90 days?
888. 00:57:33 Where will I be in 12 months?
889. 00:57:34 Where will I be in three years?
890. 00:57:36 Basic idea is the same.
891. 00:57:39 But I'm not going to apply these questions.
892. 00:57:46 Actually, there's one other idea here which is worth unpacking.
893. 00:57:49 That's four levels of competence by William Howell.
894. 00:57:53 You start off with unconscious incompetence.
895. 00:57:57 You have no idea what you don't know.
896. 00:58:01 And then you get into conscious incompetence.
897. 00:58:03 You recognize what you don't know or you're like a skill.
898. 00:58:07 And then conscious competence where if you apply yourself, you realize that you can do
899. 00:58:13 a thing and then unconscious competence is kind of the highest level and that's where
900. 00:58:16 it just becomes automatic.
901. 00:58:19 And that's really what we're striving for.
902. 00:58:23 That's what we're moving towards when we embrace this whole model.
903. 00:58:26 But we can forget about the progress that we've made, especially ones we get to that
904. 00:58:30 top level without taking the time to look backwards.
905. 00:58:36 Which is the big idea here.
906. 00:58:39 Always measure backwards because that's where you can see your growth.
907. 00:58:44 The journaling piece here is the part that caught me the most.
908. 00:58:49 He kind of got into this whole, I think this was the section where he was talking about
909. 00:58:52 the last hour of your day is the most important because you're like wrapping up your current
910. 00:58:58 day and preparing for the next.
911. 00:59:00 And I have an on again off again relationship with journaling and I do it maybe a couple
912. 00:59:08 times a week right now.
913. 00:59:11 After reading this, I'm starting to realize that's a really good way to keep an eye on
914. 00:59:16 am I focusing on the distance between where I'm at right now and where I feel like I should
915. 00:59:22 be or want to be, need to be.
916. 00:59:25 And or am I focusing on where I'm at right now versus where I was like a week ago or even
917. 00:59:32 yesterday or earlier in the day.
918. 00:59:34 Those are things that I want to try to keep an eye on.
919. 00:59:36 So I just wrote it as get consistent with my evening journaling.
920. 00:59:40 Like I already have, I'm similar to you.
921. 00:59:42 I don't have like these questions.
922. 00:59:43 I don't really want to follow those.
923. 00:59:45 I kind of have my own process for that.
924. 00:59:48 So I'm going to follow my own.
925. 00:59:49 I just want to get more consistent with it.
926. 00:59:51 I just feel like that would be super helpful, especially after reading this.
927. 00:59:55 So that's the one piece from this chapter I took away.
928. 00:59:58 Well, actually, I think you're starting to get into the next chapter.
929. 01:00:03 So where it was?
930. 01:00:05 Let's actually go there.
931. 01:00:06 Yeah.
932. 01:00:07 So chapter five is measure three wins daily, but this is where he talks about the research
933. 01:00:13 about the people who use their phones before bed.
934. 01:00:18 Oh, right.
935. 01:00:19 So he kind of introduces it in the previous chapter with the concept of journaling, but
936. 01:00:25 the specific, like the most valuable hour of your day part, that comes from this chapter.
937. 01:00:32 Yes.
938. 01:00:33 I believe.
939. 01:00:34 Yeah.
940. 01:00:35 No, you're right.
941. 01:00:36 I'm flipping through it right now.
942. 01:00:37 You are absolutely correct.
943. 01:00:38 I just got ahead in my notes, apparently.
944. 01:00:39 Well, that's okay.
945. 01:00:40 I mean, there's, it all kind of kind of blends together here in the second half of the book.
946. 01:00:44 The first thing he says in this section is that your behavior is before better coded
947. 01:00:48 into your longterm memory.
948. 01:00:50 And he talks about how reactivity breeds more reactivity, which is kind of what you were
949. 01:00:55 talking about, breaking that, that cycle.
950. 01:00:57 And I had kind of the same thought.
951. 01:01:00 There's some startling statistics in here, by the way, 96.9% of people use their phones
952. 01:01:05 the hour before bed, which I fall into that occasionally, but 90.8% use their phones in
953. 01:01:13 bed right before they fall asleep.
954. 01:01:17 And that seems ridiculous to me, but I, I don't know.
955. 01:01:23 I guess, I guess I can, I can see that.
956. 01:01:25 Now I don't do that, but I do fall into the larger group of using it the hour before bed.
957. 01:01:30 Frequently, I forget to do Spanish until I'm about ready to head to bed.
958. 01:01:37 And that's when I, I have to use my, my phone occasionally.
959. 01:01:40 I'll do some journaling stuff on there too, because I'm already using my phone for Spanish.
960. 01:01:45 So this has got me thinking about my bedtime routine.
961. 01:01:52 And I want to figure out a way to do Spanish earlier so that when I am getting ready for
962. 01:02:00 bed, I do not have to touch my phone.
963. 01:02:06 Now I do digital journaling.
964. 01:02:08 So how am I going to do that?
965. 01:02:10 Typically that happens at the end of my day.
966. 01:02:13 Well, I've got the onyx books, but I've kind of slipped in just crazy, craziness with the
967. 01:02:19 last several weeks.
968. 01:02:22 I have not been using it for journaling at the end of the day consistently.
969. 01:02:27 I feel like I've been running around like a chicken with my head cut off.
970. 01:02:32 So I know that's got to change.
971. 01:02:36 And this, I think could go a long way in, in towards helping me feel more balanced and
972. 01:02:44 more centered.
973. 01:02:47 Another thing associated with this and the habit of journaling, this is a separate action
974. 01:02:51 item for me, but I want to get consistent with the gratitude journaling.
975. 01:02:55 So that's kind of the, the whole package or the, the process that they're describing in
976. 01:03:02 this chapter is that you want to measure your three wins every day.
977. 01:03:09 So it's very specific.
978. 01:03:10 You should journal your, your three wins.
979. 01:03:14 You should pick three things that you want to work on at the, for tomorrow or at the
980. 01:03:19 beginning of the day.
981. 01:03:21 I don't like getting that specific with it.
982. 01:03:27 But this really did speak to me.
983. 01:03:28 It talked about time, they should have quote from Thomas Edison, never go to bed without
984. 01:03:31 a request of your subconscious.
985. 01:03:33 I feel like by using the phone before bed, I kind of just throw the possibility of that
986. 01:03:40 out the window.
987. 01:03:43 Whereas if I, I can see how if I really went all in with this journaling practice, that
988. 01:03:48 would produce some of that stuff where it's like, well, let's continue to, to think on
989. 01:03:53 that.
990. 01:03:54 And even after I'm like, okay, well, I'm going to leave that until tomorrow.
991. 01:03:57 Having that in your subconscious.
992. 01:03:58 I can see the, the value of, of that approach.
993. 01:04:01 That's definitely something that I want to do as well.
994. 01:04:04 I have a bad habit of, I'll crawl into bed and then I'll pull my phone out to check on.
995. 01:04:11 I, I've, I've played on and off, uh, on chess.com for a while now.
996. 01:04:18 And I'll pull out my phone and play like some of the daily games that I've got going
997. 01:04:21 on and just like make my one move for the day on a two or three games.
998. 01:04:25 And I'll do that while I'm in bed and then maybe read a, an article I've saved to a reading
999. 01:04:30 list and then put the phone away and, and roll over and try to go to sleep.
1000. 01:04:36 So like I'm, I'm absolutely in this category.
1001. 01:04:39 Okay.
1002. 01:04:40 This is not good.
1003. 01:04:42 So I really shouldn't do this.
1004. 01:04:44 I didn't write this as an action item.
1005. 01:04:46 I probably should.
1006. 01:04:47 I'll, I'll do this.
1007. 01:04:48 I'm going to add an action item here.
1008. 01:04:50 So I'll take the action item.
1009. 01:04:51 I need to stop doing that.
1010. 01:04:52 Just put the phone away.
1011. 01:04:54 I know this.
1012. 01:04:55 Things I know how many times we've read books about this.
1013. 01:04:57 How many times have I picked books about this?
1014. 01:04:59 And yet here I am in the same boat again.
1015. 01:05:01 Yeah, it's not a knowledge problem, um, which is why this whole idea of the gap in the game
1016. 01:05:10 I feel is so powerful because that perspective can create the motivation to follow through
1017. 01:05:15 with some of these things that we know we should do, but we have trouble doing them.
1018. 01:05:22 Another thing in this chapter that's kind of talked about is this whole idea of like
1019. 01:05:26 how you end the day and how you start the day.
1020. 01:05:28 So you don't want to be reacting all the time.
1021. 01:05:30 You want to be intentional when I hit the ground running and they introduced this concept
1022. 01:05:35 of Pearson's law, which is that when performance is measured, performance improves.
1023. 01:05:40 And when performance is measured and reported back, the rate of improvement accelerates.
1024. 01:05:45 And this in this chapter kind of speaks to me about the daily journaling stuff and like
1025. 01:05:55 the daily questions, which I mentioned earlier, this kind of solidifies why this approach
1026. 01:06:02 is important to me because it's a way of measuring that performance, but not in a way where you're
1027. 01:06:09 focused on the gap.
1028. 01:06:11 I feel like when you focus on the outcomes and I did this and I accomplished this, that
1029. 01:06:16 kind of reinforces the gap thinking, but the gain is, I don't know, like the daily questions
1030. 01:06:22 talked about in triggers by Marshall Goldsmith really feels like a very complimentary idea
1031. 01:06:27 of staying in the gain.
1032. 01:06:31 So I'm tend to continue to do that.
1033. 01:06:35 Alright, the last official chapter here is chapter six.
1034. 01:06:46 That is transform every experience into a gain.
1035. 01:06:52 Big idea in this chapter is that meaning and value are not given to us.
1036. 01:06:58 We create them.
1037. 01:07:00 That's kind of a powerful idea and when you frame an experience in the gap, you lose the
1038. 01:07:06 power and the ownership over it.
1039. 01:07:09 It kind of talks about how even traumatic experiences can be changed and that your past
1040. 01:07:14 isn't fixed, but it's flexible.
1041. 01:07:17 I guess what do you think about that idea?
1042. 01:07:21 I don't like it because again, it means that it's my fault.
1043. 01:07:25 So in this chapter, he goes through a lot of transforming your viewpoint on things.
1044. 01:07:35 He starts with a story of a guy who's trying to invest and he thinks he needs $5 million
1045. 01:07:39 in the bank in order to feel financially secure, but then once he gets to like seven, he's
1046. 01:07:43 like, "Well, I actually think it should be like 10," and then he's all of a sudden,
1047. 01:07:47 at 17, but he still feels like he doesn't quite have enough.
1048. 01:07:50 It's like, dude, you're three times over what you felt like you needed, but it's exactly
1049. 01:07:54 this.
1050. 01:07:55 He's found his meaning in a bigger number.
1051. 01:07:58 It's like the Rockefeller thing.
1052. 01:07:59 I don't even know if it's a real deal.
1053. 01:08:01 It's like, "How much is enough money?"
1054. 01:08:02 He's at a dollar or more.
1055. 01:08:04 I don't know if he actually said that or if somebody's just made this up at this point,
1056. 01:08:07 but that concept is exactly what we're talking about here.
1057. 01:08:11 That gap thing that's always moving, but the whole life and meaning and you creating it
1058. 01:08:16 for yourself, I don't really have arguments against that, but I also know that trying
1059. 01:08:24 to do that and to get yourself trained to think that way, if you're not wired that
1060. 01:08:33 way, I don't want to say from birth because I know that it's more like a training thing,
1061. 01:08:38 but if you've not been taught that from early on, it's tough to switch your mindset from
1062. 01:08:45 one side to the other on that one.
1063. 01:08:48 It's a continual battle, at least for me, I find that if that is.
1064. 01:08:52 Yes, one that I don't like, but I also like because it means I have control over it, but
1065. 01:08:58 it also means that I'm bad at it, Mike.
1066. 01:09:01 Well, I think I'm bad at it too.
1067. 01:09:07 This whole idea of the experience transformer, I know this is from a strategic coach and I
1068. 01:09:15 want to try and find this resource and give this a shot.
1069. 01:09:22 However, I think I've seen this before and my recollection of it was powerful idea, but
1070. 01:09:31 too complicated in the tool.
1071. 01:09:35 So I think there's an 80/20 with this, which is recognizing that you have the ability to
1072. 01:09:43 interpret things different ways.
1073. 01:09:45 Facts don't necessarily equal truth, right?
1074. 01:09:48 Going back to liminal thinking by Dave Gray.
1075. 01:09:53 I want to try and apply this.
1076. 01:09:55 I want to be, I guess, more psychologically flexible is kind of how he talks about it
1077. 01:10:01 because psychological flexibility basically means that you can manage your emotions,
1078. 01:10:04 they don't manage you.
1079. 01:10:05 So you don't really mind what happens and that leads to less anxiety and depression.
1080. 01:10:13 He also talks about how successful people don't control events, but they control their
1081. 01:10:17 response to those events.
1082. 01:10:21 And so that's challenging to me.
1083. 01:10:22 I think I can do a better job with that.
1084. 01:10:26 So I have an action item here for finding that experience transformer and giving it a shot,
1085. 01:10:31 but I am not that confident that the actual tool is going to stick with me.
1086. 01:10:40 This is similar to the whole, it's not my fault, but it's my responsibility territory
1087. 01:10:47 as well.
1088. 01:10:48 It's also in the territory of I'm not, how do I say this?
1089. 01:10:55 I'm not sorry for the actions I've taken, but I'm sorry for your response to them.
1090. 01:11:03 It starts to fit into that territory.
1091. 01:11:05 You know what I mean?
1092. 01:11:07 It's not necessarily, I don't have to get all bent out of shape because somebody else did
1093. 01:11:11 something.
1094. 01:11:13 I can't control what they did, but I can control my reaction to it.
1095. 01:11:19 And I know like I've had a couple of crazy days, Mike has been very gracious in moving
1096. 01:11:24 bookworm recording times around for me, but I've just had some stuff at work that's out
1097. 01:11:29 of my control and I could get really bent out of shape on it.
1098. 01:11:34 Last Friday I was kind of hot under the collar, but I made sure I didn't talk to anybody
1099. 01:11:38 because I knew I was hot under the collar and I was going to say something inappropriate.
1100. 01:11:42 So I didn't speak.
1101. 01:11:43 I just chose not to say words like, "Tell me what needs to be done.
1102. 01:11:46 I'll do what I can to get it done."
1103. 01:11:49 And that has served me very well in this particular scenario because then I know that
1104. 01:11:53 I still have those relationships fully intact.
1105. 01:11:55 I didn't, you know, it didn't lead to anything, but that means that you have to be willing
1106. 01:12:01 to control your actions in those scenarios.
1107. 01:12:04 But again, I can't control what they do.
1108. 01:12:07 They may have stepped out of bounds and I feel like they're definitely in the wrong.
1109. 01:12:11 And since then I've made sure we've had a calm conversation about it.
1110. 01:12:17 They're aware of my feelings on it.
1111. 01:12:20 They realize what they did now.
1112. 01:12:22 And I think we're in a better spot overall, but it just means that in the moment trying
1113. 01:12:27 to keep a cool head, maybe I should have rolled the windows down.
1114. 01:12:30 I wouldn't have worked today.
1115. 01:12:32 But that is just something I need to make sure that I know that I can control my reaction,
1116. 01:12:37 but I can't necessarily control the circumstances.
1117. 01:12:41 That's not simple to do.
1118. 01:12:43 In that particular scenario, I know I've had some practice in that particular one.
1119. 01:12:48 But in general speaking, I'm not very good at this.
1120. 01:12:52 There are definitely a lot of areas in this specific arena that I know I need to work
1121. 01:12:56 on.
1122. 01:12:57 Well, you and me both, but I think it's really important that you try to, the collective
1123. 01:13:03 you, we, all of us together, try to transform these experiences because in the words of Dr.
1124. 01:13:11 Benjamin Harvey and Dan Sullivan, they say that when you don't transform your experiences
1125. 01:13:15 and avoid them instead, which is the other option there, you could just continue to be
1126. 01:13:20 upset about the thing that happened.
1127. 01:13:23 Then you experience intrusive rumination.
1128. 01:13:25 I've definitely been in that place before, but even more importantly or more powerfully
1129. 01:13:31 in my mind, I guess, is that I've seen other people who are close to me get stuck in that.
1130. 01:13:39 And I don't want to do that.
1131. 01:13:44 Again, it's probably easier to see in somebody else than it is in yourself, but ultimately
1132. 01:13:48 you have to take control over yourself.
1133. 01:13:55 But I have a very vivid picture of some experience that hasn't been transformed and how it just
1134. 01:14:04 ate away at people close to me.
1135. 01:14:06 I could see the effect that it was having on them.
1136. 01:14:13 The person who wronged them, they completely forgot about it.
1137. 01:14:17 They moved on.
1138. 01:14:18 There's nothing, no additional interaction, but it just continued to eat at the people
1139. 01:14:25 who just refused to let it go.
1140. 01:14:27 It's not even letting it go.
1141. 01:14:28 That's not the thing.
1142. 01:14:29 It's not pretending that it didn't happen, but it's like, "Okay, so what good can I glean
1143. 01:14:33 from this?"
1144. 01:14:34 And then I'm willing to just dismiss it.
1145. 01:14:36 I'm not going to stay there.
1146. 01:14:38 It's like as long as you hold on to it, you, the Bible would say you retain the sins of
1147. 01:14:44 others on yourself by refusing to forgive and move on from that situation.
1148. 01:14:52 I think that's really dangerous.
1149. 01:14:58 The season of life that I'm in, going into my first day, officially full-time independent
1150. 01:15:06 creator guy, right?
1151. 01:15:09 I got to be careful because I don't want to let anything steal or sabotage my future.
1152. 01:15:19 I don't even really know exactly what it's going to look like at this point, kind of
1153. 01:15:24 figuring this out as we go, which is both exciting and terrifying to me.
1154. 01:15:30 But I guess just hearing him talk about this in this chapter reminded me of the importance
1155. 01:15:36 of this, not to get stuck there.
1156. 01:15:38 The picture I got in my head, like the fear setting, worst case scenario, was my first
1157. 01:15:44 week being independent, something happens and I get offended and I just let that thing
1158. 01:15:49 eat me up for the next six months and I make absolutely no progress.
1159. 01:15:54 That's the situation I want to avoid.
1160. 01:15:58 That's the trick, right?
1161. 01:16:00 Is knowing when that sort of thing has happened and when to move on with that.
1162. 01:16:07 I know my boss is really good at this.
1163. 01:16:09 He deals with all sorts of church political stuff and people who think things should be
1164. 01:16:14 done a certain way or a different way and it's like, that's not really our church.
1165. 01:16:19 He deals with that constantly and I know there are many people that he just doesn't want
1166. 01:16:24 to talk to because he knows he's just going to get complaints from them all the time.
1167. 01:16:29 But he always greets him with a smile.
1168. 01:16:31 He always is willing to talk to him.
1169. 01:16:33 He doesn't let it get under his skin.
1170. 01:16:35 It's like, well, maybe they'll eventually understand the overarching situation instead
1171. 01:16:40 of focusing on this one little tiny thing that doesn't really apply.
1172. 01:16:45 I can appreciate his viewpoint on that.
1173. 01:16:48 It's not one that I feel like I have fully adopted but it's one that I know that I could
1174. 01:16:52 learn from.
1175. 01:16:53 Okay, this is a person that I know that I regularly have issues with.
1176. 01:17:00 That doesn't mean I need to treat them significantly different in this arena that I'm referring
1177. 01:17:08 to.
1178. 01:17:09 There are sometimes you need to but the one that I'm referring to, no, it doesn't warrant
1179. 01:17:12 that.
1180. 01:17:13 So definitely something I need to learn as well.
1181. 01:17:15 How many times have I said that this episode?
1182. 01:17:17 I didn't write them down.
1183. 01:17:19 Please don't count them.
1184. 01:17:20 Okay.
1185. 01:17:21 Lots of learning happening this episode feels like.
1186. 01:17:25 Yep.
1187. 01:17:26 Yep.
1188. 01:17:27 All right, so there's one last chapter here and that is a very brief conclusion where a
1189. 01:17:35 lot of the big ideas in this book are reiterated.
1190. 01:17:40 I didn't write down a whole lot.
1191. 01:17:42 The big thing that kind of stood out to me as I went through this conclusion is that
1192. 01:17:46 ideals are like the horizon.
1193. 01:17:48 You will never get there.
1194. 01:17:50 He reiterates that measuring backwards liberates you from the gap encourages us to make the
1195. 01:17:56 choice to be happy and reminds us that we train our brain on what to see.
1196. 01:18:01 He also shares a whole long list of all of the failures and the times where he slipped
1197. 01:18:06 into the gap, which is kind of it's very motivating to hear him describe it because
1198. 01:18:13 measuring backwards, you can see how like the first, what seemed like insurmountable obstacles
1199. 01:18:18 that he encountered.
1200. 01:18:19 Obviously, you can see now like how he's gotten to that point, but all these points is kind
1201. 01:18:24 of build on each other.
1202. 01:18:26 So I think the effect of that, you can tell me if you viewed this the same way, was that
1203. 01:18:32 you kind of see how he started at nothing.
1204. 01:18:34 In fact, he shares how like at one point he was living on his, staying at his cousin's
1205. 01:18:40 couch or something and playing Warcraft 15 hours a day.
1206. 01:18:44 It's kind of hard to see like really the same guy was that guy, but in this last conclusion,
1207. 01:18:51 he kind of chronicles every step of that journey and the failures and rejections that happened
1208. 01:18:56 along the way and how he transformed those experiences and it's kind of encourages you
1209. 01:19:00 that like you can do it too.
1210. 01:19:03 I had a hard time accepting that that was a true story.
1211. 01:19:09 There's no way, no way, but yes way.
1212. 01:19:13 He totally did.
1213. 01:19:14 I totally believe him.
1214. 01:19:17 I didn't write anything down on this chapter, but I know that like those particular here's
1215. 01:19:21 where I've struggled with this in the past.
1216. 01:19:24 It shows that, you know, so many times you read articles online, especially people in
1217. 01:19:29 the productivity space and they like paint this picture of here's this grand way of doing
1218. 01:19:34 your project management or your task management and it just seems like they've got it all
1219. 01:19:38 put together.
1220. 01:19:39 I know I've been guilty of this too.
1221. 01:19:40 I know it comes across that way sometimes, but sometimes people are writing these things
1222. 01:19:46 because they know it's the right way to do it.
1223. 01:19:48 They just can't always bring themselves to do it every single time.
1224. 01:19:51 And this is exactly what he's dispelling in that he knows that this is a thing that
1225. 01:19:58 exists.
1226. 01:19:59 This is absolutely a better way to think about things by focusing on the gain versus the
1227. 01:20:03 gap, but it doesn't mean that once you understand that you've just magically flipped the switch
1228. 01:20:09 and every time you've looked down on yourself for the things you haven't yet accomplished,
1229. 01:20:13 you can just magically not have that anymore.
1230. 01:20:16 It's not the case.
1231. 01:20:17 The man who is responsible for the idea and the guy who's responsible for this book, they
1232. 01:20:23 know this is difficult and here's how difficult it can be.
1233. 01:20:28 So he's like putting some real world, even when you know all of this, it can still still
1234. 01:20:34 get you.
1235. 01:20:35 You just have to recognize it.
1236. 01:20:37 That to me is very refreshing and motivating and I'm very, very grateful that they put that
1237. 01:20:42 in there.
1238. 01:20:43 Awesome.
1239. 01:20:46 Well, that's the official end of the book.
1240. 01:20:50 Should we go to action items?
1241. 01:20:52 Yes.
1242. 01:20:53 So I've got a bunch which I'll run through.
1243. 01:20:56 So my first one, make my list of 10 things for I know I'm being successful when way back
1244. 01:21:02 from that first section.
1245. 01:21:04 Come up with my own filtering questions like the ones on page 45.
1246. 01:21:08 I want to teach my family to call each other out when in the gap.
1247. 01:21:14 I don't know exactly how I'm going to do this yet because I feel like you got to do
1248. 01:21:19 this the right way.
1249. 01:21:21 But I want this to become a thing at our house that we recognize this in each other and call
1250. 01:21:27 each other out when we see it.
1251. 01:21:30 I mentioned the no phone the hour before bed.
1252. 01:21:33 I want to use the books instead which some people may argue that's still a screen.
1253. 01:21:37 It's an eink screen.
1254. 01:21:38 It's not the same.
1255. 01:21:40 But I'm going to use this very intentionally and it's going to require me to shift some
1256. 01:21:46 things around so that I can intentionally avoid my phone specifically.
1257. 01:21:51 That's the big win.
1258. 01:21:52 I want to get consistent with the gratitude journaling and I want to find that experience
1259. 01:21:57 transformer online and give it a shot.
1260. 01:22:01 What about you?
1261. 01:22:03 I have the four two of mine are replications of yours.
1262. 01:22:08 One was to do the I know I'm being successful when those 10 things list.
1263. 01:22:14 The second was to come up with my own filtering questions question questions we'll see what
1264. 01:22:18 that lands.
1265. 01:22:19 The other was consistency with my evening journaling and then the last one was to stop
1266. 01:22:25 playing chess and bed before I go to sleep.
1267. 01:22:28 That's hard to say out loud.
1268. 01:22:35 All right.
1269. 01:22:36 Well, let's go to styling rating.
1270. 01:22:41 This is a different type of book.
1271. 01:22:45 It's not like a lot of the other books that we read and that's both good and bad primarily
1272. 01:22:51 good I would say.
1273. 01:22:53 But I don't think it's necessarily that doesn't necessarily mean it's like a five star book
1274. 01:22:58 or anything.
1275. 01:22:59 Keep in mind who these two people are the relationship that they have in creating this
1276. 01:23:04 book.
1277. 01:23:05 This is Dan Solomon's idea and he worked with Dr. Benjamin Hardy in order to write this book
1278. 01:23:11 about his idea.
1279. 01:23:13 That sounds like something that could get lost in translation or something where he's
1280. 01:23:19 like, okay, here's the core idea.
1281. 01:23:20 Now just add 300 pages, make it longer, boom, done.
1282. 01:23:24 That's not the approach that they took.
1283. 01:23:26 And for the dynamic here, I think that's the right approach.
1284. 01:23:30 It's something like 170 pages.
1285. 01:23:32 I don't know how many pages are just a single quote in the middle of a page though.
1286. 01:23:39 All those quotes are kind of supplementary quotes.
1287. 01:23:41 They're not pulled from the content of the book itself.
1288. 01:23:43 It's from conversations that Benjamin Hardy had with Dan Sullivan.
1289. 01:23:48 So I think it's a really effective way for communicating about this concept.
1290. 01:23:56 I think this concept is transformational.
1291. 01:24:01 It definitely has the ability to completely change your life.
1292. 01:24:05 However, just looking at the book itself, like where do I think this actually belongs
1293. 01:24:11 in terms of a rating?
1294. 01:24:14 I think it's about a 4.0.
1295. 01:24:16 The idea itself maybe is like a 5.0 idea.
1296. 01:24:21 And this is something that I've been talking about off and on for a long time.
1297. 01:24:26 I'm very grateful and happy that we went through it together and had a conversation about it.
1298. 01:24:31 There's definitely more meat in this book than some of the other things that I've heard
1299. 01:24:34 about the gap in the game previously.
1300. 01:24:38 But I also don't think this measures up to some of the other 5.0 books that we've had.
1301. 01:24:48 I don't know if that's just the way that it was packaged or maybe this is like a really
1302. 01:24:57 powerful idea, but the real power of it comes from applying it yourself so it doesn't need
1303. 01:25:03 a whole lot of explanation.
1304. 01:25:05 I think the net result of that is that it feels more basic, more elementary when you go through
1305. 01:25:13 it.
1306. 01:25:14 It feels very simple.
1307. 01:25:16 And I don't think that necessarily means that it's not a killer idea.
1308. 01:25:24 But I don't know.
1309. 01:25:25 I'm trying to think of some of the other 5.0 books that we've read.
1310. 01:25:30 The one gold standard that always comes to mind is man search for meaning.
1311. 01:25:36 I feel like this one doesn't have that kind of impact.
1312. 01:25:42 Another one that comes to mind is Flow by Mihali or How to Read a Book.
1313. 01:25:48 I feel like the ideas that I took away from some of those books, which are in the Bookworm
1314. 01:25:53 Hall of Fame, the Golden Books, those feel weightier than the one that I've heard.
1315. 01:26:00 This does.
1316. 01:26:01 I feel like this is very approachable and just about anybody can read this and get some immediate
1317. 01:26:08 benefit from it.
1318. 01:26:09 So I would recommend that everybody read it.
1319. 01:26:12 But I also recognize that I want to be careful how I rate books like this going forward.
1320. 01:26:21 I really want to protect those higher ratings for the ones that really do feel like world
1321. 01:26:28 altering.
1322. 01:26:29 And while this is a really cool idea and I definitely talk about it a lot, it doesn't
1323. 01:26:35 feel world altering to me.
1324. 01:26:38 Maybe that's just because I've encapsulated this idea and just kind of the idea of syntopical
1325. 01:26:43 reading.
1326. 01:26:44 I've mixed it and mashed it up with a whole bunch of other things that we've read.
1327. 01:26:51 I think there's a potential that you could come to this book and be like, "Oh my gosh,
1328. 01:26:54 this is amazing."
1329. 01:26:55 Totally a five star book.
1330. 01:26:57 I think it's also possible you could come into this like we talked about at the beginning,
1331. 01:27:01 completely miss the plot and be like, "Oh, this should have been a blog post."
1332. 01:27:05 So I think the truth of the matter is somewhere in the middle.
1333. 01:27:10 So I'm going to give it four stars.
1334. 01:27:13 I just want to say that from a style stance, they did really, really well with this.
1335. 01:27:18 You come into a new chapter and you got a story that I've never heard before and they
1336. 01:27:23 detail it in a way that exactly tells what that particular chapter is trying to get across
1337. 01:27:29 and they don't have so many chapters here that it gets hard to put it all together.
1338. 01:27:34 Like you got two parts, you got six chapters and a conclusion.
1339. 01:27:38 That's really all it needs.
1340. 01:27:40 But again, you can get into that blog post territory.
1341. 01:27:43 I don't think this is that given the way that they came at this.
1342. 01:27:48 So I don't see it in that territory.
1343. 01:27:51 I think you're right, it's not a 5.0 book.
1344. 01:27:54 Some of that is just because the idea is really big, but it's not necessarily a, "This is
1345. 01:28:00 going to completely change your life in one day."
1346. 01:28:03 Type of idea, but it could definitely change your life in a very short amount of time too.
1347. 01:28:11 So I'm a little hesitant on that front.
1348. 01:28:15 But I know it doesn't sit in the 5.0 territory.
1349. 01:28:21 This doesn't quite feel quite right.
1350. 01:28:23 So I think you're right on with the 4.0.
1351. 01:28:25 So I'll join you there just because it just seems right.
1352. 01:28:30 Sometimes you feel your way through these things.
1353. 01:28:33 That's my take.
1354. 01:28:34 Anyway, I really like the book.
1355. 01:28:35 I've already recommended it to a couple of people.
1356. 01:28:37 I think it's one that a lot of people should read, especially if you find yourself struggling
1357. 01:28:45 with your mindset on things.
1358. 01:28:47 If you can't seem to figure out why you always feel down about your entrepreneurial adventures,
1359. 01:28:56 you might just be thinking about it wrong.
1360. 01:28:59 I feel like this could really help you get your brain in the right spot with that.
1361. 01:29:03 I have recommended it directly to a couple of people already.
1362. 01:29:08 So I think a lot of people should pick this up.
1363. 01:29:10 I don't know if I would say everybody though.
1364. 01:29:12 I think I agree with you.
1365. 01:29:14 The other thing I'll add with this before we put it on the shelf is I really do recommend
1366. 01:29:21 that people get this one unaudible, which sounds weird because I'm generally against
1367. 01:29:27 the audiobooks.
1368. 01:29:30 The best audiobooks for me are ones that I have read previously and I just want to re-here
1369. 01:29:37 or re-listen to the book itself or they're the biographical books like creativity ink.
1370. 01:29:46 I really liked that in audible format.
1371. 01:29:50 I guess fiction books too, but I don't really do fiction.
1372. 01:29:54 I was just getting here to say, "Wait a second."
1373. 01:29:57 I recognize that that would be a good format for stories basically.
1374. 01:30:04 But this one, having the additional material where they actually just start shooting the
1375. 01:30:10 breeze in between the chapters, I feel like that adds a lot.
1376. 01:30:15 So that is more valuable, I think, than the actual content in the book sometimes.
1377. 01:30:21 Fair enough.
1378. 01:30:23 Because the book is very formal, but when you get somebody in an informal setting, I feel
1379. 01:30:27 like the way that they say things sometimes speaks louder than what they're actually saying.
1380. 01:30:34 So if you're looking for a good audible candidate, this is one of those.
1381. 01:30:41 Fair enough.
1382. 01:30:43 All right, that being said, let's put this one on the shelf.
1383. 01:30:47 What's next, Joe?
1384. 01:30:49 Up next is the things you can only see when you slow down by Haman Sunum because mindfulness
1385. 01:30:57 is the thing we need to talk about because I'm not being very mindful right now.
1386. 01:31:04 There you go.
1387. 01:31:06 And I'm going to drag you along with me.
1388. 01:31:09 This one's rated pretty high in the Amazon world.
1389. 01:31:12 So I'm curious to see.
1390. 01:31:14 I see a lot of these 50 books you need to read in the next three years or 15 books to
1391. 01:31:21 read this year.
1392. 01:31:22 And I feel like this one keeps hitting every list I see lately.
1393. 01:31:25 So right now I want to know what the hype's all about, even though it's been around for
1394. 01:31:29 a while, I think, if I remember correctly.
1395. 01:31:33 And then what, Mike?
1396. 01:31:35 Well just on that topic, I think this is a pretty cool timing for this book.
1397. 01:31:39 I mean, we just talked about the gap in the game.
1398. 01:31:41 There's definitely a mindfulness aspect to that.
1399. 01:31:43 Headspace has been a sponsor of Bookworm in the last several episodes.
1400. 01:31:46 So I've been dabbling with that again.
1401. 01:31:48 So I'm actually excited to get into that one.
1402. 01:31:52 But after that, I am picking one from the Bookworm Club award recommended decoding greatness
1403. 01:31:59 by Ron Friedman.
1404. 01:32:00 And so we're going to go through that one after your book on things that you can only
1405. 01:32:08 see when you slow down.
1406. 01:32:11 Sounds good.
1407. 01:32:12 But how about a gap book, Mike?
1408. 01:32:13 What do you got?
1409. 01:32:14 I do have a gap book.
1410. 01:32:17 Shooting right now, The Richest Man in Babylon by George Claisen, this is kind of a classic
1411. 01:32:23 book that I have heard recommended many, many times.
1412. 01:32:28 And I have never actually read it.
1413. 01:32:30 So I'm going through it right now.
1414. 01:32:32 There you go.
1415. 01:32:33 How about you?
1416. 01:32:34 I've been back into tribe of mentors lately.
1417. 01:32:37 So Tim Ferriss' book, I told you this is going to keep coming up.
1418. 01:32:42 Yep.
1419. 01:32:43 And I'm not 25% of the way through it.
1420. 01:32:45 So you may hear me talk about this for about the next year at this point.
1421. 01:32:50 So there you go.
1422. 01:32:52 Super fun.
1423. 01:32:54 All right.
1424. 01:32:55 Well, thanks for listening, everyone.
1425. 01:32:57 Thank you specifically to the Bookworm Club Premium members.
1426. 01:33:01 If you want to become a member, you can do so at club.bookworm.fm.
1427. 01:33:06 And I think also at bookworm.fm/membership.
1428. 01:33:09 $5 a month, $50 a year helps us keep the lights on here at Bookworm HQ and gets you a couple
1429. 01:33:16 of perks.
1430. 01:33:17 I do these Mind Node, Mind Map files for all of the books that we read.
1431. 01:33:23 And those are all in the club along with a Profeed, which is the same show minus the
1432. 01:33:30 ads and a bootleg feed, which Joe mentioned earlier, that basically is the moment that
1433. 01:33:38 we go live.
1434. 01:33:39 And so it has a little bit of extra stuff at the beginning and at the end of the episodes.
1435. 01:33:43 Today's bootleg, you get to hear me be frustrated with my technology right before talking about
1436. 01:33:49 the gap in the game.
1437. 01:33:53 So that's a separate feed that's available inside the Bookworm Club once you subscribe.
1438. 01:33:59 So if you want to support the show, we'd love to have you join us, bookworm.fm/membership.
1439. 01:34:06 And if you're amazing and you read along with us, pick up the things you can only see when
1440. 01:34:10 you slow down.
1441. 01:34:11 We'll cover that one with you in a couple of weeks.