194: Mastery by Robert Greene

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1. 00:00:00 So Mike, hey, let's do some follow up. How's that sound? Let's do it. Bootleg listeners will know
2. 00:00:07 why that's funny. Yes, exactly. Exactly. All right. So first things first, you're creating a reading
3. 00:00:15 workshop. How's that going? It's going pretty well. I've got a few people who have signed up already.
4. 00:00:22 So thanks everyone who has signed up. This is the first paid workshop that I have ever done solo.
5. 00:00:30 I've done some paid workshops with other people in the past, and I know that I can do a good job
6. 00:00:36 with this one. But it is a bit of a mental hurdle to get over, you know, this is not just a free
7. 00:00:42 webinar. This is actually a paid workshop. But that being said, I love doing these because you can
8. 00:00:50 just sink your teeth into delivering the absolute best presentation you can. Whereas with a free
9. 00:00:55 webinar, you give some information at the beginning, but you only have really like 45 minutes before
10. 00:01:01 people's attention starts to wane because they don't really know exactly what they signed up for.
11. 00:01:05 And then you got to get to the pitch for the thing that you're actually selling. Like, this is just
12. 00:01:10 really clean, you know, $49. I'm going to help you get more out of the books that you read.
13. 00:01:16 So I'm really looking forward to this. I've got a bunch of the slides already made up,
14. 00:01:21 and I've got some ideas for new things that I want to build out for this yet.
15. 00:01:26 The data is going to be April 19th, by the way. I pushed this back just a little bit,
16. 00:01:31 because I am also getting my community off the ground. So I haven't officially announced this
17. 00:01:39 yet, but by the time this goes live, there'll probably be a public link that you can sign up for.
18. 00:01:44 So I know we're talking about the reading workshop. Let me get back to that in a second,
19. 00:01:51 because the community has an interesting pricing model. I'm going to do just yearly no monthly,
20. 00:01:59 but $100 a year for the first 100 paying members. And just kind of as a way to thank the early
21. 00:02:07 adopters, the people who followed me for a long time. So everyone who signed up on the page that
22. 00:02:11 you made me create as the waiting list, they get first dibs at those 100 spots.
23. 00:02:17 And then after that, it's going to go up probably to $150 a year, and then eventually $200 a year,
24. 00:02:24 because I don't want it to get too big. I want to, again, deliver an insane amount of value to
25. 00:02:31 the people that are there. And I feel like if I'm going to do this solo, there's a limit to the
26. 00:02:35 number of people that I can really serve well. Anyways, you can go to the link in the show notes
27. 00:02:42 if you want to find out more about that. But that's got all my book notes, my sketch notes,
28. 00:02:47 weekly live co-working calls, ask me anything calls, stuff like that.
29. 00:02:52 And Mike would tell me not to do this, but I got early access to help give
30. 00:02:57 little feedback and take a look at things that it's looking good, everybody. It's looking good.
31. 00:03:02 So be one of those first 100 if you can.
32. 00:03:05 The thing that took the longest out of that was the onboarding.
33. 00:03:13 I created a special onboarding section that has a whole bunch of custom CSS. I'm not sure if you
34. 00:03:19 caught that. The like buttons are not like buttons. They say mark is completed.
35. 00:03:23 I didn't see that. No, I didn't see that.
36. 00:03:26 Yeah. So anyways, all that to say, I wanted the first time you enter the community to be just a
37. 00:03:35 great experience where if you're not familiar with this at all, it walks you through the whole thing.
38. 00:03:39 I spend a lot of time creating a bunch of videos and just styling that. So it feels different
39. 00:03:44 than all of the other areas. And it feels very linear. Like you go here, you go here, you go here,
40. 00:03:48 you go here, by the end of it, you know exactly what's going on there. But yeah, so that's been the
41. 00:03:54 focus. But that's basically done now. That onboarding took me 10 times longer than I thought it was
42. 00:04:00 going to. But it's not. It was worth it. It's good. Thank you. Yeah, that so now the focus is on the
43. 00:04:08 the reading workshop. And I don't think I've ever been more excited to do a presentation
44. 00:04:14 than this one. I love talking about not just books, but like the whole reading process.
45. 00:04:21 And it kind of shocks me that more people don't really dig into this. Like, I don't know, maybe
46. 00:04:30 I'm just a nerd. But I find the whole process fascinating. And every time I bring up like how
47. 00:04:36 to read a book being influential by Mortimer Adler, I get two kinds of reactions. One, if I'm talking
48. 00:04:42 about this stuff online, people are like, Oh yeah, I really got to find out about that. But if I do
49. 00:04:46 it in real life, like the people who I see day to day, they're like, why do you need a book like
50. 00:04:51 that? But also they'd never picked up a book in the last six months. So I think the number of the
51. 00:04:57 number of real people online or like that that exist out there that actually pick up books as
52. 00:05:02 frequently as you and I do. Yeah, so the all that to say that the small group of people that will
53. 00:05:08 be joining for this live workshop, I feel like there is not a group of people on the internet that
54. 00:05:12 is more my people. Yes, those are your people. You're gonna make some friends. Hopefully.
55. 00:05:19 That's great. Okay, so next thing is we launched a pro show and we launched a Patreon. And that's
56. 00:05:27 going well. So I just want to thank everybody for the folks who signed up, the folks who are
57. 00:05:32 considering signing up. Thank you so much. We are excited to do that and we're excited to
58. 00:05:37 figure out a way to support the show a little more long term. And you know, just the update on
59. 00:05:43 that is it's going well. So thanks. Yes, I will echo everything. Corey said thank you to everybody
60. 00:05:48 who supports us via the Patreon. And what we did to keep this kind of simple is we created a couple
61. 00:05:58 of feeds. And I'm using a service called Hello Audio for this, but we've got a bootleg feed where
62. 00:06:04 basically we hit record on zoom when we get connected. And then that gets uploaded to the
63. 00:06:12 bootleg feed without any edits. So that's why I made the comment about bootleg listeners will
64. 00:06:20 know why that's funny when we started the episode because there was a little bit of a,
65. 00:06:24 I don't know, misfire? Absolutely. Absolutely.
66. 00:06:30 So that gets published really, you know, we record these almost two weeks before the episode launches.
67. 00:06:37 So those get thrown up right away. If you want to get the earliest possible version of the show,
68. 00:06:42 that's the one hot off the press. But then there's a pro show which has a separate segment. Today,
69. 00:06:49 we talked about apprenticeships and Corey asked me where I would like to apprentice and it caught
70. 00:06:55 me completely off guard. So you wanted to hear my answer. Thank you. All that Toastmasters training
71. 00:07:03 paid off. But yeah, so it has an extra segment. And then when we have ads, those ads will be
72. 00:07:10 removed. So that is another separate feed that you can sign up for. And then there's also a book
73. 00:07:14 worm wallpaper, which is uploaded there, all that stuff you get instant access to when you sign up
74. 00:07:19 for Patreon. We use Patreon because they handle all the merchant records stuff. I don't have the
75. 00:07:24 bandwidth. Corey didn't want to and I don't blame you, you know, manage all the
76. 00:07:28 VAT tax and all that kind of stuff. So Patreon is just the simplest way to support the show.
77. 00:07:36 So there'll be a link in the show notes if you want to join Patreon at seven bucks a month.
78. 00:07:40 There is no yearly option for this. Not patreon.com/bookwormfm. And thank you to everybody who already signed up.
79. 00:07:49 All right. So next mic is your action items. So you were going to create an automatic or an
80. 00:07:55 autopilot schedule. Were you able to do that? Yeah. So I'll actually cover the three of these
81. 00:08:03 sort of together. Okay. So the idea behind the autopilot schedule is that it's Monday at three p.m.
82. 00:08:11 This is when I do this. And I am still working on this, but essentially I am building this out.
83. 00:08:19 And one of the things that is sort of it sort of tangentially related to this is the implement
84. 00:08:26 the work cycles. This isn't exactly what I was talking about with the implement work cycles, but
85. 00:08:30 the idea with the implement work cycles is I want to do these like eighth week, every eighth week,
86. 00:08:36 take it off essentially. Like regular breaks, not just a vacation every once in a while when I feel
87. 00:08:42 like I'm submerging and I just need a little bit of time because every time I take a vacation like
88. 00:08:47 that, usually like the first several days, I'm just completely exhausted by the time I'm actually
89. 00:08:54 starting to feel good about the vacation. It's time to go back to work. And then I feel depressed
90. 00:08:58 again. Like hopefully people can relate to that cycle. But when you have these like regular breaks,
91. 00:09:06 then it's more sustainable in the long run. The first time you're like, Oh, this is amazing.
92. 00:09:10 I should have done this a long time ago. The second time you're usually like, I don't want to take
93. 00:09:13 a break yet. I'm still good. There's stuff to be worked on by the third time you're just like,
94. 00:09:17 okay, yeah, this really makes sense. And it allows me to do my best work. I used to do this
95. 00:09:21 sort of rhythm when I was at Blanc Media. And I want to do that for myself now. Okay, so that
96. 00:09:30 actually ties to my autopilot schedule because I was thinking about my regular work week. And
97. 00:09:40 because I'm an elder at my church and we're there for both services, I plan the worship
98. 00:09:44 tunes have to be there early both services. Sundays basically are not a rest day. They're
99. 00:09:50 more a work day than any other day of the week, to be honest, they're from eight in the morning
100. 00:09:55 till eight at night usually. And that means that Monday morning has always been hard.
101. 00:10:02 And I realized it was because I was making it hard. So I would force myself a lot of times,
102. 00:10:10 like, okay, this is why I got to get done this week, got to hit the ground running on Monday
103. 00:10:14 morning. If I'm going to get all this stuff done, I'm finally at the point where I think
104. 00:10:18 as part of my autopilot schedule, Mondays are going to be for finishing off the newsletter.
105. 00:10:24 So I've got it written at that point, but it's putting it all in ConvertKit, making sure the
106. 00:10:28 links all work, if there's anything tangential that needs to be added to that. Like today,
107. 00:10:33 when I sent mine out, I had to make sure that the link to join the community was available for
108. 00:10:38 the people who raised their hands early. They wanted to be notified when it was available,
109. 00:10:42 that sort of thing. So that's happening on Mondays. We're happy to be recording bookworm
110. 00:10:48 on a Monday, which is a little bit weird. But normally there is a mastermind group that I'm
111. 00:10:53 a part of, which is later in the afternoon. And then Mondays is also the day that I do the one
112. 00:10:58 on one with my kids. So just putting that all Monday and treating Monday essentially as an
113. 00:11:02 off day where I do just a little bit of work. I know those that doesn't jive, like it's not really
114. 00:11:07 an off day if I'm doing some work. But it also just sets up, I don't know, it feels really good.
115. 00:11:16 It feels like this is a really good rhythm. And then I'm not finding that Tuesday through Friday,
116. 00:11:19 I'm not able to get the rest of the stuff done. So I think this is really working. And then kind
117. 00:11:24 of taking that concept to the rest of my autopilot schedule, I've got Tuesdays are the days when
118. 00:11:30 focus gets recorded, Thursdays I've got these regular meetings, Wednesdays, there's certain
119. 00:11:35 things that happen Fridays are the Ask me anything's in the library, my community.
120. 00:11:39 So I'm kind of putting the pieces into place. But I'm also trying to limit the number of things
121. 00:11:46 that I am putting in these days, which is the other action item I had, which was simplify my daily
122. 00:11:51 schedule. So I'm not trying to, you know, three most important tasks. And then all of the other
123. 00:11:59 things, I'm trying to just if I have things on the calendar, those actually count. Yeah, yeah.
124. 00:12:05 And don't try to do too much. But also, I think one of the things that's helping with that is
125. 00:12:12 larger blocks of time and less context switching, which sounds so obvious. But as an example,
126. 00:12:21 I've got a screencast online tip video that I have to do. And instead of like working on that
127. 00:12:27 a little bit on this day, a little bit on the next day, and a little bit on the next day,
128. 00:12:30 I've just blocked a couple of hours where I can just sit down with nothing else to do and crank
129. 00:12:35 that up. And that is, that has been helpful. So obviously, you know, I'm all in with the whole
130. 00:12:42 idea of slow productivity, these action items, there's nothing like super amazingly like transformative
131. 00:12:49 with any one of these. But I feel like I'm making progress on these. And it is moving me in that
132. 00:12:53 slow productivity direction, which ultimately, I think is a good thing. Yeah, that's definitely
133. 00:12:58 a good thing. It sounds good in terms of the Monday routine seems reasonable. Like,
134. 00:13:05 like, you know, my opinion on this that you didn't ask for. But it's like, it seems like that makes
135. 00:13:10 sense with Sunday being so crazy that you need an ease into the focused work that happens on,
136. 00:13:16 you know, Tuesday through, Tuesday through Friday. So that seems, seems reasonable.
137. 00:13:21 Yeah. And I guess one of the things that I didn't mention, but the bad habits, you know, full
138. 00:13:28 transparency, what has been happening was work had been slipping into Saturday, not all day
139. 00:13:35 Saturday, but there was basically always something that needs to be done on Saturday. Regardless of
140. 00:13:40 how early I hit the ground running on Monday. So I was like, okay, well, Saturday is not turning
141. 00:13:45 into my day off. Let's just put it out the other end. Let's make Monday the day off. And that's
142. 00:13:51 that's helped a lot. Actually, what's happened since I started doing that is that I've been
143. 00:13:56 having more time off on Monday and also less to do on Saturdays. Yeah, it seems like a win-win
144. 00:14:02 on both ends of the spectrum. Yeah. All right. So I had four mine were to figure out the big and
145. 00:14:07 small. I was trying to do one project a day, figure out other poll system items, and then can I be
146. 00:14:15 more specific with my rituals and spaces? So I'll tell you two of these I was able to work on.
147. 00:14:18 The other two I was not. So figure out what's big and small that I was able to think about that one
148. 00:14:24 and put in some good focus thought on that. I think what I got to partially is the fact that
149. 00:14:30 that's going to take a longer period of time. Right? Like it's going to be a refining process.
150. 00:14:35 Like some of the things I think are big, I need to transition those into small. And then some of
151. 00:14:41 the things that are small right now, I want them to be bigger. So therefore I need to transition
152. 00:14:45 those in. So it's like some of them I can just axe right now and I could say, okay, that's done.
153. 00:14:49 Like I'm that small. I'm not going to worry about that anymore. And I'm going to treat the big stuff
154. 00:14:53 as big. But then some of these ones I noticed that there was a transition period that needed to happen.
155. 00:14:59 And I'm starting to figure out how that transition works and how I move one from the other to the
156. 00:15:05 other bin and move the other one back. The one project per day, not going to happen.
157. 00:15:10 Like that is just not in the cards for me and this season of life. I think, so with running
158. 00:15:16 an academic schedule, I think in the summers and then during like winter break where I have a larger
159. 00:15:21 block with less commitments, I think that's doable then. Right? So I can say like, okay,
160. 00:15:26 today I'm going to work on this and that's the only thing I'm going to focus on. But I don't have
161. 00:15:30 to teach a couple classes and mentor students and advice students. Like I have the ability to
162. 00:15:35 not be so all over the place. The other pool system items, probably just going to can that.
163. 00:15:43 I think I'll go back at some point and revisit pool systems and how those might work. But I
164. 00:15:49 just think that's going to take too much front end work right now in terms of me trying to set
165. 00:15:55 that up and trying to make sure other people understand it and how that works and I'm just kind
166. 00:15:59 of not going to focus on that one right now. The can I be more specific with my rituals and spaces?
167. 00:16:04 I go on an adventure mic all the time where I will set up a working space and it'll work for a
168. 00:16:10 couple months and then something happens and it doesn't work anymore and I need to set up a
169. 00:16:15 different working space and I need to set up a different working space and I'm honestly tired
170. 00:16:18 of doing that. I don't like doing that. It annoys my wife very, very badly and then it also bothers
171. 00:16:25 me because I feel like I'm spending too much time setting up and tearing down and figuring
172. 00:16:28 anything out. But the counter of that is I don't like setting up and tearing down a lot.
173. 00:16:34 If we're going to record an episode, I don't like to have to set everything up every time
174. 00:16:38 and then tear it down when I'm done. If I'm going to write and I want to focus space,
175. 00:16:42 I don't want to have to do that. I don't know the answer to this but I've been basically looking
176. 00:16:46 at every aspect of my house and my work space isn't going, "Could that be the space? Could that be
177. 00:16:52 the space? Could that be the space?" There's a space in my garage and I'm like, "That could
178. 00:16:56 totally be the space in the summer." But then the winter comes and it's just a little too cold out
179. 00:17:02 there. "Could I heat it? How much would it cost me to heat it?" I run all those things through
180. 00:17:07 through my head and I haven't landed on any specific place yet and then with the number of
181. 00:17:13 children I have, I feel like they expand. They have owned the entire house and owned every
182. 00:17:19 corner of the entire house and I can't figure out how to gain any of that back to get some of that
183. 00:17:25 back. So like the Lego room and this other room and then we need some storage but it'll work out.
184. 00:17:30 I think we're going to land on a space here at some point. That's my update. What you need is
185. 00:17:37 one of these rooms that I just shared in the chat. Have you seen these? I'm looking at this right now.
186. 00:17:44 Okay, so the funny thing about this, and I told you, this is infiltrating almost every aspect of my
187. 00:17:52 life right now. I'm looking for spaces to work. I saw the, so at our church we have the drummer
188. 00:17:58 inside the fishbowl and I was like, "I wonder if I bought a fishbowl and if I put that in the garage,
189. 00:18:05 could I then work inside the fishbowl and it would be less space to heat?" And maybe that would work
190. 00:18:09 really, really well. But this looks like a fishbowl only, you know, times a thousand.
191. 00:18:15 Yeah, so the website here is room.com and essentially it's these little phone booth style things that
192. 00:18:22 you can pop into and they're completely soundproof. These two have these at the day job.
193. 00:18:27 And the focus room is the one that I think you need. Yeah, but for $18,000, I don't think I need
194. 00:18:34 that mic. Yeah, well, these are the original but I think that there are a lot of knockoffs of these
195. 00:18:41 and essentially you could build something if you were handy. I'm not handy, but if you were, you could,
196. 00:18:46 I'm sure build something similar pretty easily. They're fairly straightforward. I don't think
197. 00:18:52 you can download the plans or anything like that anywhere, but somewhere somebody has to have a
198. 00:18:57 version of this, you know? But I think this is a really cool idea.
199. 00:19:02 That's my leading candidate right now. My leading candidate is to build a room like this
200. 00:19:06 inside of my garage, but I haven't convinced myself that it's worth it enough or that I'll use it
201. 00:19:12 enough to do this. That was cool. I like that. I've not. I did not know there's a website that
202. 00:19:18 sold these. That's amazing. Yeah, I actually see Instagram ads for all of the knockoffs just because
203. 00:19:25 the type of internet activity I have. How are Instagram ads so good? Like they are so
204. 00:19:33 no idea. It's unbelievable. Yep, that's scary. Unbelievable. All right, are we ready to launch
205. 00:19:40 into our book? We are. All right, so we did a book called Mastery by Robert Green and for those who
206. 00:19:51 are new to Robert Green, he, I believe when I was reading up on him, he's got like seven
207. 00:19:57 international bestsellers. I mean, he's written a lot of books that have become very popular
208. 00:20:03 and this book was written in 2012, 2013. It was written in 2012 and then kind of reprinted in
209. 00:20:10 2013. It's got an introduction in six chapters. There is no conclusion, which I thought was really
210. 00:20:15 interesting. We'll talk about it as we work through it. He seems to have a system for his book writing.
211. 00:20:24 I don't know if you've noticed this or not, Mike, but like he'll pick interesting people or famous
212. 00:20:30 people or however you want to position that and then he'll make a book out of talking about them
213. 00:20:36 and he'll grab their stories and then he'll make a book out of that. If you look at his Wikipedia
214. 00:20:43 page, you can see the people he focuses on in the different books and this book is no different. He
215. 00:20:48 did exactly that with a group of people and you're going to hear us talk a lot about that process
216. 00:20:53 and those people. We can go ahead and get started on the introduction. The book is called
217. 00:21:00 Mastery. Really what he's trying to introduce us to is this concept of mastery. The way he
218. 00:21:05 defines it is the feeling that we have a greater command of reality, other people, and ourselves.
219. 00:21:10 That's his super-duper high-level definition of mastery, but he goes into process and mirror
220. 00:21:17 neurons and what are the obstacles to become a master and what are the mindsets for achieving
221. 00:21:21 mastery. Then essentially what he does is he breaks each of these out throughout the introduction
222. 00:21:26 into each of the chapters and it basically gives you a guide to thinking about these things but
223. 00:21:33 then a bunch of examples from these other famous folks' lives. That's setting the stage on it.
224. 00:21:42 What did you want to talk about or what did you want to hit on as we set the stage?
225. 00:21:47 Well let me just say that we covered one other Robert Greene book for Bookworm prior to this one
226. 00:21:54 before you joined the show, Corey, and I was not a fan. I actually liked this one a lot better,
227. 00:22:04 but it followed very much the same format and that phrase or the definition of mastery that you
228. 00:22:10 shared, the feeling that we have a greater command of reality of other people or ourselves.
229. 00:22:15 That, when I read that I was like, "Oh boy, here we go again," because 40 laws of power feels,
230. 00:22:22 and this isn't, I don't think, attributed directly to Robert Greene, but I mean it's essentially
231. 00:22:28 how to wield power over other people to get what you want. So there is a very obvious negative
232. 00:22:36 application of that power that your mind instantly jumps to when you start reading those stories
233. 00:22:42 and it feels very uncomfortable, at least it did to me. That I think though is not what you get with
234. 00:22:49 mastery. I like mastery a lot better and the two keys to motivation are the one thing I want to
235. 00:22:54 add to this from the introduction. The first one is that you must see your attempt at attaining
236. 00:23:00 mastery as something extremely necessary and positive, and the second one is you must convince
237. 00:23:05 yourself that people get the mind and quality of brain that they deserve through their actions in
238. 00:23:10 life. Which sounds kind of funny, but I also think it's very true. So essentially the TLDR
239. 00:23:20 with mastery is that if you are not just putting in the time, so it's really not about the 10,000
240. 00:23:28 hours or later in the book he says 20,000 hours to really become a master. Those 20,000 hours though
241. 00:23:35 don't really matter if you're doing it wrong. And so that's really what the rest of the book is about
242. 00:23:42 is approaching the work that you're trying to become excellent at the right way. And that second
243. 00:23:49 key kind of leads into the fact that maybe there are people who are living at a level lower than they
244. 00:23:58 really are capable of. And the way that I read that was kind of like yeah you want to help people,
245. 00:24:05 but you can't just pull people out of that either. They have to make the decision.
246. 00:24:10 It's kind of like the people who are, you hear all these stories about people who are
247. 00:24:16 in a tough spot financially, they win the lottery and they end up back there. Because they just
248. 00:24:22 don't have the right mindset, the right financial management skills in order to steward all the
249. 00:24:29 wealth that they just acquired. So in some ways it's really not the blessing that it appears to be on
250. 00:24:36 the surface. I think Robert Greene would say that everything worthwhile in life you've got to earn.
251. 00:24:43 But when you realize that what you get is dependent on your effort, and if you do things the right
252. 00:24:52 way that can actually be very freeing. I'm a big believer in the idea of self-determination or my
253. 00:25:00 dad with the software business had an assessment skill building system called Personal Responsibility,
254. 00:25:07 which was sold to at-risk programs in schools like inner cities where you have kids who are
255. 00:25:18 at risk not because of something that they did, but just the situation that they were born into.
256. 00:25:22 But the first step of getting out of that is to decide that you're not just going to let it be
257. 00:25:27 the way that it's always been and you're going to do something about it. So I feel like this
258. 00:25:33 introduction does a really great job of setting the stage for the next, what are their six different
259. 00:25:39 parts here? I guess they're chapters? I don't know. Well, they're chapters, but they sure didn't feel
260. 00:25:44 like chapters because I mean you're taking 350 pages and you're chopping it into like seven-ish
261. 00:25:51 sections, which you know, those are pretty long chapters there. Now he subdivides that
262. 00:25:57 in a way, but like there wasn't in my perspective, there wasn't a lot of structure in terms of the
263. 00:26:03 subdivision except for when he would say like we're going to talk about the seven strategies to do
264. 00:26:09 whatever, right? So then he would then he would break that down, which I thought was good.
265. 00:26:12 As you were going through the introduction that what stood out to you, the one other piece that
266. 00:26:19 I thought about was he talks about his whole life being an apprenticeship. And I really, really like
267. 00:26:24 thinking like that. I really, really like that mindset of like at any given time, I'm in a process
268. 00:26:30 of learning and at any given time in a process of, you know, trying to get to mastering and
269. 00:26:36 and trying to develop and trying to grow. And I think that's a good way, just I mean, maybe it's
270. 00:26:42 the educator in me, but it's like I think that's a good way to approach approach life, right?
271. 00:26:46 As I'm trying to learn some skill, I'm trying to grow, I'm trying to advance in some way where
272. 00:26:51 I got I got rubbed a little bit the wrong way, I would say, is the fact that like the people he
273. 00:26:57 puts out as the masters, right, that he refers back to, I don't know that there's a direct
274. 00:27:03 connection between if I do the things that he tells me, I'm going to achieve what they
275. 00:27:07 what they achieved or close to what they achieved. I think there's a very, very realistic path to
276. 00:27:11 where, hey, I can, I can think about my whole life as an apprenticeship, I can work hard my
277. 00:27:16 entire life, I can stay open, I cannot fall to the obstacles of all this stuff. And I can still not
278. 00:27:22 achieve what these six or seven people achieved in their life. And like, we don't, I don't think
279. 00:27:28 we really talk about that enough in the book and I get why you wouldn't talk about that. But it's
280. 00:27:32 like that kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little bit. Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential
281. 00:27:38 overlap here with the 48 laws of power, but I'm kind of glad that it's not as explicit as I was
282. 00:27:43 worried it would be. Okay, so, so chapter one then moves into, and I'm really intrigued to hear
283. 00:27:49 what you say about chapter one, because as the guy who runs the life theme cohort, right,
284. 00:27:54 chapter one is called discover your calling the life's task. Now, I think there's a discrepancy here,
285. 00:28:01 but I don't want to bias you. So what did you think about the life's task? I'm intrigued with what
286. 00:28:08 you thought about that. Well, first of all, it's kind of a clumsy term, if you ask me.
287. 00:28:13 I agree. But there are five strategies he mentions for discovering your inclinations and life's task,
288. 00:28:22 return to your origins, which is the primal inclination strategy, occupy the perfect niche,
289. 00:28:28 the Darwinian strategy, avoid the false path, the rebellion strategy, let go of the past,
290. 00:28:33 the adaptation strategy, and find your way back the life or death strategy. Those are all obviously
291. 00:28:39 different strategies that you could use to land on this life's task. So the process for this,
292. 00:28:47 regardless of the strategy that you use, is connect with your inclinations, your sense of
293. 00:28:52 uniqueness with this connection established, look at the career path that you are on or about to
294. 00:28:56 choose, and see your career path as a journey of twists and turns rather than a straight line.
295. 00:29:00 That is straight from the book. That is the process. What the heck does that mean?
296. 00:29:04 I agree. So I think this is actually pretty good. I appreciate that he's leading people down
297. 00:29:14 thinking about these types of questions. And I don't think it's a simple formulaic answer that
298. 00:29:22 you could just say, just do this, and then you get it. So I'm not sure that there's a different
299. 00:29:29 approach really to be taken at this point. This is the place to start. But if I were to add to this,
300. 00:29:35 because as you mentioned, do have the life theme cohort and I've coached people through this,
301. 00:29:40 this kind of thing, I think there are some other ways to get to the clues that can help you kind
302. 00:29:47 of lock into this. And then also the life's task, I feel like is a little bit, I don't like that term.
303. 00:29:55 It feels like you pick one thing that you're going to do. And then that becomes the thing
304. 00:30:01 that your whole life is about. The life theme. And when I came up with that term, it was kind of
305. 00:30:07 like extending the yearly theme idea from the Cortex podcast, like, well, if you've got a theme
306. 00:30:13 that you're filtering your decisions through for your year, what if you had that for like a larger
307. 00:30:18 timescale? Let's just call it a life theme. But I also tell people like your life theme can change,
308. 00:30:23 I've actually changed mine not too long ago. And my current version of it is I help people
309. 00:30:28 multiply their time in town, leave a bigger dent in the universe. So the very short version,
310. 00:30:32 I'm a multiplier. So when I get an opportunity to do something, I ask myself, how do I think this
311. 00:30:38 is going to align with that life theme? It's not a life's task. And then this is a different task.
312. 00:30:45 So it's obviously no. It's this is an interesting task. Can I bring meaning and purpose to this thing?
313. 00:30:53 And if not, then it's an automatic no. Maybe I think that I can bring meaning and purpose to it.
314. 00:31:00 But once I start doing it, I realize, ah, this really isn't the thing. Okay, well, now the
315. 00:31:03 personal retreat process comes comes in because every three months I can reevaluate things. And
316. 00:31:08 just because I said yes to something six months ago doesn't mean it's still a yes for me today.
317. 00:31:14 So you have to look at all these different pieces. And I feel like you really can't do that justice
318. 00:31:20 in a single chapter. But also, you know, it's a fine intro to or a fine place to start with the
319. 00:31:26 whole concept of mastery, I think. Yeah, the part that I like that he did here was
320. 00:31:32 when he talks about figuring out your life's task, he separates it into three different
321. 00:31:36 sections. So there's the inward journey. There's then assuming that that's going well, right? Like
322. 00:31:42 you're working should be a pretty verification or what you're doing should be part of that
323. 00:31:47 when you figured out what that inward journey is. And then your mindset is realizing that like
324. 00:31:52 this journey or this thing that we're doing is the way we learn more and the way we adjust and the
325. 00:31:58 way we shift. Now I wouldn't have been like this is why I love having these conversations, right?
326. 00:32:04 Because I didn't realize that task bother task the word task bothered me as much as it did until
327. 00:32:09 until right now. Because trajectory theme context, right? Like all of those seem better. And then
328. 00:32:17 especially in this this three part series he gives. If I figure out the inward journey, right? Like
329. 00:32:21 I look at the patterns and like what are my unique and what are my inclinations? Like so for me,
330. 00:32:25 personally, this would be teaching, education, learning, development, right? Like that's where I
331. 00:32:31 feel like I've I've got this inclination or this inner calling to continue to do this type of work.
332. 00:32:36 Okay, then it changes the way I think about my vocation, right? So vacation would be job because
333. 00:32:42 now it doesn't matter where I'm doing that. Like you can teach and you can help people learn and
334. 00:32:48 you can like mentor and coach and do all these things in a bunch of different contexts. Okay,
335. 00:32:53 so why would I pick this context over this context? Well, maybe there's something I need to learn in
336. 00:32:57 that area or maybe I've just got a random opportunity that came along in this other area. Like it takes
337. 00:33:04 some of the pressure off of the picking the perfect job kind of thing, right? Like because
338. 00:33:08 you often think about like, Oh, I need to pick the perfect thing. No, no, no. If it's in that
339. 00:33:11 inclination area, if it's in that unique area, or what he would call life task, we would call life,
340. 00:33:16 you know, like theme, if it's in that area, you're good. Like just run that. And then the other one
341. 00:33:21 is the mindset of like, okay, if that changes, change, stay within that theme, but allow that
342. 00:33:27 to change. Yeah, and then coupled with this is a heavy emphasis on natural selection and evolution.
343. 00:33:35 So kind of biased with this is like, if you really want to make any sort of difference,
344. 00:33:41 you got to connect to this thing as early as you possibly can and make your entire life be about
345. 00:33:46 it because you are just a blip in the universe, which I agree with that on some level. You know,
346. 00:33:52 I really liked 4,000 weeks by Oliver Berkman, which essentially was that he talks about this idea
347. 00:33:58 of cosmic insignificance theory, which the positive side of that is the entire universe doesn't
348. 00:34:06 depend on you following through and doing the thing. So don't put all the pressure on yourself that
349. 00:34:12 I guess I tend to do. But then also with that, like, I'm changing my career and I'm not going to
350. 00:34:19 share my actual age. Let's just say I'm north of 40. Okay, is it too late for me? I mean, based on
351. 00:34:26 the examples that he shares here, you might think so. He even says in some of the stories,
352. 00:34:30 the person was in their mid 20s and they were realizing that their life was passing them by
353. 00:34:37 and so they decided to do this thing. So some of that stuff was like, I don't know if I agree with
354. 00:34:42 that. I personally believe that when you really are doing the thing that you are supposed to be
355. 00:34:52 doing at whatever stage in life, the compound effect kicks in and you now are not adding to
356. 00:34:59 your life, you are multiplying. So I kind of don't worry about that, but is that that tone throughout
357. 00:35:07 the entire book. And I don't know how that might influence somebody who is younger. Like younger
358. 00:35:18 Mike reads this. He probably thinks, okay, this is really important. I got to nail this down by the
359. 00:35:24 time I'm 25. And I'm not sure that that's healthy or helpful necessarily. Now that doesn't mean that
360. 00:35:32 you can't get good stuff out of it. I just think like he probably doesn't even mean to lead people
361. 00:35:37 that way, but just that is a little bit of the tone that comes through. So you got to recognize
362. 00:35:42 that and you also have to approach this plug for the reading workshop, I guess. Like you find the
363. 00:35:48 stuff that's useful and then you discard the rest. Well, and I thought that was very relevant in
364. 00:35:54 this book because I thought there were certain things in here that were extremely useful and
365. 00:35:59 extremely valuable. And then there were other like, I mean, fairly long sections that I was like,
366. 00:36:04 okay, we could like, we could just hack this out of here. And I would not have missed anything
367. 00:36:08 anything in this book. So that's good. I want to call out one thing. There is a section here and
368. 00:36:14 I don't remember where it is. I don't remember what chapter it's in, but he does talk about,
369. 00:36:17 oh, I think it was Benjamin Franklin. Does any talk about Benjamin Franklin doing really,
370. 00:36:21 really good work in the later part of his life and like acknowledging that like, hey,
371. 00:36:26 really good work in like your mastery phase might not achieve until the very end. But then he like,
372. 00:36:32 kind of like pops his own balloon because he's like, he had a lot more really, really good work
373. 00:36:35 to do. And then he died at like 83. And I was like, oh, man, what if he'd stayed alive?
374. 00:36:40 I can't remember. So I definitely remember him talking about Benjamin Franklin. I feel like,
375. 00:36:46 well, actually, I know that Cal Newport talked about Benjamin Franklin in slow productivity.
376. 00:36:54 So we heard a different version of that story of Benjamin Franklin's life in the last book that
377. 00:36:59 we read, but obviously different details and different emphasis here, slightly different, I
378. 00:37:06 would argue. So I think maybe a little bit of that perspective, I kind of thought the same thing as
379. 00:37:14 I was reading about Benjamin Franklin, but then I realized, well, maybe that's just to carry over
380. 00:37:17 from a slow productivity. And I'm not sure, you know, I did not go back and reread the
381. 00:37:24 section of Benjamin Franklin to see if I was accurate in like attributing, well, that's not
382. 00:37:28 exactly Robert Green is saying he's using these stories to emphasize these points.
383. 00:37:32 Because this book is ridiculously long, I'm trying to find out online and I cannot find it
384. 00:37:38 anywhere how many words are actually in this book. But if the average nonfiction book is like 60,000
385. 00:37:42 words, this has got to be like 120. I agree. It was long. It's over 300 pages and it's tiny,
386. 00:37:51 tiny print. It's just like the 48 Laws of Power. I mean, there's, I would argue, not a whole lot
387. 00:37:57 of filler words in here, but this is, you know, this is a mammoth of a book to get through.
388. 00:38:04 Yeah, I agree. Okay, so let's move to chapter two, we'll get there, we'll get the style of
389. 00:38:08 rating because I'm sure we're going to have things to say about that. So I put you on the spot on
390. 00:38:12 chapter one, I'll take chapter two in terms of intro and the listener to it. So it's submit to
391. 00:38:16 reality, the ideal apprenticeship. So the point he's trying to make in this one is the fact that
392. 00:38:22 these individuals, so let's we, I don't think we've actually talked about the individuals that he
393. 00:38:26 that he hits and I won't remember them all. But Da Vinci is one of them. Temple Grandin is one
394. 00:38:31 of them. There's a filer fighter pilot. Can you can you remember the name? I can't remember it off
395. 00:38:38 the Caesar something or other. Yeah, there's a fighter pilot, then there's
396. 00:38:43 all I say is name wrong every time. He's German, Gertha. I forget how you say it. Oh, yeah.
397. 00:38:51 I'm not sure how to pronounce it. G-O-E-T-H-E. There you go. But so he's got these series of people,
398. 00:38:59 right? So what, and what he does here is he pulls out some of these examples where they were
399. 00:39:05 apprentice or they did an apprenticeship under certain other people. So, you know, one of the ones
400. 00:39:11 that he calls out here is Faraday and how Faraday did an apprenticeship under, I forget who his
401. 00:39:16 apprentice was, but another very, very popular scientist at the time. And then what he's trying
402. 00:39:23 to say is like here, here are the keys to mastery from an apprenticeship standpoint. So I'm going
403. 00:39:27 to focus mastery in now just on this apprenticeship perspective. And I'm going to hit it in a bunch
404. 00:39:32 of different ways. What's the goal of your apprenticeship? What's the ideal apprenticeship have in it?
405. 00:39:37 What are apprenticeship mistakes? You know, how do you transition out of an apprenticeship,
406. 00:39:42 those type of things? And then he even goes further on that and he says, here are the
407. 00:39:48 eight strategies for completing this ideal apprenticeship. And then you can walk through
408. 00:39:53 what each of those are, right? Like value learning over money, keep expanding your horizons,
409. 00:39:57 revert to a feeling of inferiority. Trust the process. And he goes through,
410. 00:40:01 goes through all of these. And at times he ties back into the examples that he gave originally.
411. 00:40:06 And at times he uses the example to set up the front end of it and then brings out his teaching
412. 00:40:11 points at the very end. And he kind of switches back and forth between those styles, which
413. 00:40:16 I don't have a problem with. And I thought they were effective other than if I thought some of them
414. 00:40:21 were a little too long. I thought he went on a little too long in certain situations.
415. 00:40:28 So the things that I'm going to say like I got out of chapter two, right? Again, so it's all about
416. 00:40:33 this apprenticeship is like what my major takeaway from this is, I wish we did more apprenticeships.
417. 00:40:39 I wish we lived in a world and in a society where this type of work was, I guess, the process
418. 00:40:49 of doing it was more part, more ingrained into our society. We are in an educational society.
419. 00:40:54 And it's funny for me to be saying this as somebody who works in education. We live in an educational
420. 00:40:59 society. It's go learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. And when you're 21, now you go and essentially
421. 00:41:05 work for the first time. Right? Maybe you've had a job. Maybe you've had an internship,
422. 00:41:10 but really you haven't had any seasoned period of time where you've been doing work unless you did
423. 00:41:14 that intentionally. And I think there is such value in going and studying under somebody. Now,
424. 00:41:22 five to seven years, I don't know about that. I don't know if I think that's relevant. But like,
425. 00:41:27 this ties into the idea of gap year. So if you do a gap year and you do it appropriately and you
426. 00:41:32 spend a strategic period of time learning something underneath the tutelage of somebody else who's
427. 00:41:38 an expert in that or who's a master in that, man, I think that's so valuable. And I just don't think
428. 00:41:43 we do that anymore. And it's not even part of our culture. And like that, I mean, out of all the
429. 00:41:48 stuff he says in this chapter, that was my like, aha from this whole thing was like,
430. 00:41:53 why really wish there was there were more avenues for connecting apprentices and apprentices and
431. 00:42:01 mentors or masters and figuring out a way that even if you did it informally, and it was like
432. 00:42:07 part of the part of the day or, you know, a couple hours a week, you went and you apprenticed under
433. 00:42:12 somebody. And I just think I think we'd be so much better off for that professionally and personally,
434. 00:42:17 as we move forward. Well, I agree with you. I think however, you don't need to let a lack of a formal
435. 00:42:27 apprenticeship necessarily stop you the general you. As we talked about in the pro show, when you
436. 00:42:40 asked me what my apprenticeship looks like, I feel like I kind of have gone through an apprenticeship
437. 00:42:46 over the last several years as I've changed my career. However, I also think there's a dangerous
438. 00:42:53 side to this where you have to find a master, because I think, yeah, you want someone who really
439. 00:43:02 understands something if they're going to be the ones who are going to show you the ropes.
440. 00:43:05 However, we live in the internet age and you can connect with a lot of different people and
441. 00:43:11 essentially you can have different apprenticeships in different forms. A lot easier, you have a lot
442. 00:43:18 more access to to people, but you got to be specific in knowing what exactly you're hoping to
443. 00:43:25 to learn from this person. So if I know that I want to, I don't know, become a better,
444. 00:43:37 I want to become a better at internet business as a solo preneur. I can go study Justin Welsh
445. 00:43:44 very easily as the solo preneur guy. I can access the courses, I can join the communities,
446. 00:43:52 you can get direct access to somebody a lot easier than you could back in the day. I think
447. 00:43:58 that is pretty cool. But also, as we talked about, I have a little bit of a hard time embracing the
448. 00:44:06 idea of, yeah, you're just going to become my guru and I'm going to commit to you for the next
449. 00:44:11 five to 10 years, which is a lot of the stories that he told in the book. And a lot of them are
450. 00:44:16 historical examples, obviously, 1700s, 1800s, 1900s. So what I just described with the online stuff
451. 00:44:24 was obviously not an option. And I do think that there is a deeper level of this apprenticeship,
452. 00:44:31 but there's probably a lot to be said for that. I just have a hard time thinking through how that
453. 00:44:36 actually gets lived out in a positive, practical way. I think the steps are still great, though. So
454. 00:44:44 like, there's these three steps to the apprenticeship phase, where you go through deep observation,
455. 00:44:49 you observe the rules, you observe the power relationships that exist within the group. Step
456. 00:44:54 two is the skill acquisition. And this is where you start with one skill that you can master,
457. 00:44:58 and that serves as a foundation for acquiring the others. And then there's the experimentation or
458. 00:45:02 the active mode where you step out, you embrace the criticism, and you start to think about new
459. 00:45:07 ways that you can do things. And that's kind of when stuff just becomes like second nature.
460. 00:45:12 So that's really the goal, right? He talks about that in this chapter is to transform your mind
461. 00:45:18 and body, where this just becomes tacit knowledge. It's a feeling for what you're doing. It's hard
462. 00:45:23 to put into words, but it's easy to demonstrate and put into action. So I think the biggest thing
463. 00:45:32 that is holding people back from embracing an apprenticeship mindset, not necessarily going
464. 00:45:38 through a formal apprenticeship, but he talks about two kinds of failures, never trying out
465. 00:45:42 your ideas because you're afraid and making mistakes with a bold adventure, some spirit,
466. 00:45:45 that's the kind that you can learn from. I feel like the opportunities are there for just about
467. 00:45:51 everyone to learn from an apprenticeship relationship. But the thing that will keep people from doing
468. 00:45:59 it, I think, is that they don't want to look like a fool. You have these people who are in the past,
469. 00:46:07 I've called them my internet heroes, right? You don't want to look like an idiot in front of them.
470. 00:46:11 So you don't ever say anything. You don't enter the conversations that are happening
471. 00:46:18 in the appropriate way to actually get better because you don't want to make a mistake.
472. 00:46:24 And if you're too afraid to make a mistake, then you're never going to become great at the thing.
473. 00:46:30 That's really what apprenticeship is, I think, and if I were to summarize this,
474. 00:46:34 is admitting that you don't know very much and being willing to learn from people who know more
475. 00:46:41 than you do. So you said, you talked about the tangible side of this and what it would be like.
476. 00:46:48 So, Mike, if somebody came to you and they were like, "Okay, I want to be a solopreneur content
477. 00:46:54 creator on the internet, will you apprentice me? What would your gut reaction be?" And let's say,
478. 00:47:01 let's get the character personality side out of it. It's purely a, you've already vetted them,
479. 00:47:09 you know that they would be okay, that they would not come in and wreck your whole situation.
480. 00:47:14 But would you entertain it? The only reason I hesitate is because I feel like I don't know enough
481. 00:47:21 about it to actually help someone in that situation. Now, if you're telling me, "Hey,
482. 00:47:26 teach me how to read books better." Yeah, that's kind of what the workshop is. It's a mini-apprenticeship.
483. 00:47:32 So, I also think, though, that you have to, with the internet, the best way that this gets lived out
484. 00:47:41 is when you apply one of ConvertKit's values that I really like, teach everything that you know.
485. 00:47:47 You don't have to get to the point where you are an expert before you are sharing the things
486. 00:47:52 that you know. So, with the internet, you know, I think there's a lot of nuance with that question.
487. 00:47:57 I need to know specifically who you are and what stage you're at. Because if I have gone through
488. 00:48:02 what you have, what you are going through and I can help you, then yes, I am absolutely willing
489. 00:48:09 to do that. But that doesn't mean like, "Okay, give me $50,000 and I'm going to teach you everything
490. 00:48:14 that you need to know." That's kind of what the library is for in a sense, is like, you can make
491. 00:48:20 these small bets. You can enter these conversations where the stakes are lower. And then, if you really
492. 00:48:28 want to go deep, usually there are opportunities for you to do that as well. I'm working on that
493. 00:48:33 type of stuff for the library. Right now, there is nothing else for people who really want to work
494. 00:48:38 with me other than the 100 bucks a year to join the membership or sign up for one of the cohorts.
495. 00:48:45 But as I develop more mastery myself, I think those opportunities to walk people through that
496. 00:48:51 process will present themselves. I kind of already are in the areas of like PKM and the life-themed
497. 00:48:58 stuff. But then essentially, you know, I'm not going to step outside my, what is it, zone a genius,
498. 00:49:07 whatever. I'm not going to pretend like I know more than I know. I'm going to recognize that
499. 00:49:12 I'm a traveler on this path as well and I'm not going to pretend like I have all the answers.
500. 00:49:17 Yeah. I think the reason I asked the question is I have a little bit of a different,
501. 00:49:23 I don't know if it's different or just a different nuance or spin to it. But it's like,
502. 00:49:26 if somebody came to me, which this happens all the time in education, right? Somebody comes to me
503. 00:49:30 and they're like, "Hey, I want a student teach under you." Or, you know, I would want to apprentice,
504. 00:49:35 you know, from a classroom management perspective. And that maybe is the wheelhouse you're talking
505. 00:49:40 about where you narrowed it down and said, "Yes, this is my zone of expertise." Like,
506. 00:49:45 I would have no problem with them coming in. As long as they do from the beginning,
507. 00:49:50 I don't have it all figured out. I don't have it all together. But sure, I've been in a classroom
508. 00:49:54 longer than you have. And if you want to come in and learn some things that work and some things
509. 00:49:59 that don't, like that'd be great. I don't think I'd have any problem bringing them in.
510. 00:50:04 Well, education I feel like is a little bit different because in order to get in front of the class,
511. 00:50:08 you have to have the credentials, right? What are the credentials that I have earned?
512. 00:50:14 Experience. Each people's stuff online. Yeah, that's about it though. Like with education and with
513. 00:50:21 medicine specifically, like, there are all of these formal channels that you have to go through.
514. 00:50:26 And so the fact that you have the letters at the end of your name means that you know what I want
515. 00:50:34 to know. It's a lot harder to verify that with just solo-preneur guy online.
516. 00:50:41 Make up some letters for the back of your name.
517. 00:50:44 That's why the testimonials and the social proof are such a big deal.
518. 00:50:48 I agree. You know, you go to a course and you see, you know, do I recognize anybody who is saying
519. 00:50:52 nice things about this because you want to know that they can actually get you where you want to go?
520. 00:50:57 All right. So let's move to chapter three. So chapter three is absorb the master's power,
521. 00:51:02 the mentor dynamic. I do not like the name of this chapter at all, the title of this chapter
522. 00:51:10 at all. So absorb the master power. Now the content I'm actually okay with, but like the
523. 00:51:15 the name just doesn't do it for me. So again, he has this section. I guess if there was a
524. 00:51:19 substructure in the book, he has subsections in some of these chapters and maybe all of them
525. 00:51:25 that are keys to mastery. Right. So how do you master this thing? And then he goes through and
526. 00:51:29 kind of gives you strategies for it. But the first thing that he's going to start talking
527. 00:51:35 about in this chapter is how do we find the right master? How do we use books to temporarily
528. 00:51:42 serve in a place where we can't can't get a master? It's okay to have multiple
529. 00:51:47 masters or multiple mentors as you work through this. Then he says how do that he has a whole
530. 00:51:51 section on how to get the most out of this mentor or most out of this master. And there's four steps
531. 00:51:56 in this one. He's choose the right mentor according to the your needs and inclinations. So he ties
532. 00:52:01 this back to what he would call the life task. If the if the mentor doesn't relate to the life
533. 00:52:06 task, what are you doing? You're picking the wrong mentor. Gaze deep into the mentor's mirror.
534. 00:52:11 You know, so this one gets a little interesting, but it's like you kind of have to stop somewhere
535. 00:52:17 right? So you have to figure out where the mentor is going to stop being able to mentor you and then
536. 00:52:21 then move that one. That's kind of like the the mirror thing. And then transfigure their ideas.
537. 00:52:26 So you can't just replicate exactly what they do. You take what they do, you spin it with your own
538. 00:52:32 uniqueness and your own perspective and then you it ends up becoming different, maybe better,
539. 00:52:37 hopefully better in your mind than what they they worked with you on. And then create a back
540. 00:52:43 and forth dynamic. So how do you adapt and learn and grow and go back and forth? And I can tell you
541. 00:52:48 that from my experience in like the closest, it's definitely a mentor advising relationship,
542. 00:52:54 but the closest apprenticeship relationship I've had, this back and forth is huge. When you
543. 00:52:59 you can tell when you reach that phase where it becomes less of a true mentee mentor situation
544. 00:53:06 and they're coaching you almost all the time, and where they almost start to treat you like a
545. 00:53:10 colleague. And like you're not officially a colleague yet, but like it's very, very close and you feel
546. 00:53:15 it like because they start to get your opinion and ask you questions and like it's much less
547. 00:53:21 I'm going to teach you this or coach you this. It's much more of a we're gonna have a conversation
548. 00:53:24 about this. And I'm really hoping to get stuff out of you just as you're hoping to get stuff out of
549. 00:53:29 me. And it's a really, really fun time in that situation. I'll give the the listeners a
550. 00:53:36 an example of like one of the case studies that he uses. So he uses Manny Pacquiao and his boxing
551. 00:53:44 coach Roach was the guy's last name. So basically Roach develops this new style of
552. 00:53:50 training as boxers where he puts on these big mitts and he basically tries to mimic
553. 00:53:55 the opponent for the fighter, right? So he figures out what the ticks are on the fighter
554. 00:54:00 and like where they have flaws and where they have weaknesses and then that helps the person
555. 00:54:05 he's training kind of see those things before the fight and like be able to take advantage
556. 00:54:10 of those things before the fight. But what he learns through this is like basically
557. 00:54:15 Pacquiao would make suggestions on how he would do certain things and then he would
558. 00:54:18 they would have this back and forth and basically they both got better. He got better, Roach got
559. 00:54:22 better as a trainer, Pacquiao got better as a fighter and there was this back and forth dynamic
560. 00:54:26 that evolved or that happened throughout the course of their training together. And
561. 00:54:32 for those of you who don't know anything about boxing, Pacquiao just absolutely owned the sport
562. 00:54:36 in his weight class for a very, very, very long time. So it was a very effective and a very
563. 00:54:42 beneficial relationship for both of them. Yeah, I want to go back to the book's
564. 00:54:47 conserves temporary mentors. Really? I'm surprised you'd want to go back to there.
565. 00:54:51 I thought about interrupting you before you got too far down that trail there, but I resisted.
566. 00:55:00 I disagree that they are temporary mentors. I feel like books are one of the most
567. 00:55:06 amazing inventions ever. I mean, you have access to some of the greatest thinkers and the most
568. 00:55:18 revolutionary ideas to ever be shared and you can get them for free at a public library.
569. 00:55:26 That is amazing. And if you would have told somebody prior to Gutenberg's press that this would be
570. 00:55:35 a thing, they'd be like, yeah, right? And I feel like we've kind of lost the value of this because
571. 00:55:43 the internet has lowered the barriers so far that people can publish crap with no barrier to entry.
572. 00:55:53 So it's becoming really hard to filter out what's the good stuff and what's the junk.
573. 00:56:00 And if you want to find the good stuff, just go buy something with a binding on it. It's a lot
574. 00:56:07 harder to actually have an idea worth sharing. And that's the kind of the litmus test for that.
575. 00:56:17 So I think that this has been very important to me, obviously. And I think coupled with this
576. 00:56:25 is a little bit of a difference of opinion with how this dynamic actually works. I'm not
577. 00:56:33 disagreeing that the best version of this happens in person, person to person. If you are
578. 00:56:41 committing to a mentor for the next five to seven years and there's one person that you're going
579. 00:56:46 to spend the majority of your time with, yeah, you want to be with them day to day every day.
580. 00:56:53 However, I don't live in a place where those types of mentors, at least for my professional
581. 00:57:01 stuff, they're not around me. So what do I do? Do I pack up my family and move to Austin, Texas?
582. 00:57:09 You know, I've thought about that. I could go hang out with Ryan Holiday at the painted porch,
583. 00:57:14 right? I'm not going to do that. And I would argue that that is not limiting my professional options
584. 00:57:20 just because I'm not physically in the same location. Maybe it lowers my chances of being
585. 00:57:27 mentored by Ryan Holiday, but also just being in the same location doesn't mean that you're going
586. 00:57:33 to have the access to that relationship either. So I feel like there's a historical bias here
587. 00:57:42 where cities were the places where these ideas were shared and you did have to be in those places
588. 00:57:48 engaging in those conversations in order to even have a chance for these apprenticeships to
589. 00:57:53 present themselves and that I think is changed. So I think the question you have to be asking as
590. 00:58:02 you go through this whole book, and I hope I'm not going to just harp on this every single chapter,
591. 00:58:08 but we have to think differently about what are we trying to get out of this whole idea of
592. 00:58:14 apprenticeship and what are the different ways that we can apply ourselves and develop these skills.
593. 00:58:21 Now there is something that is important here that he talks about to learn requires a sense of
594. 00:58:26 humility. So you have to believe that there are others that are better than you are and that's
595. 00:58:30 hard to do online. Everyone wants to project. Oh, I've got it all together and I know everything,
596. 00:58:37 right? But you aren't going to learn that way. But he also says that if you work on yourself
597. 00:58:44 first and you develop a strong work ethic and organizational skills, the right teacher will appear.
598. 00:58:48 I 100% agree with that statement, but the right teacher is going to appear in different ways
599. 00:58:55 now than, you know, in 1800. Now the right person appearing might be, I'm trying to become a better
600. 00:59:05 writer. So I buy this course and then I go through this and I see other people talking about this
601. 00:59:12 tangential thing and holding up the work of this other person as like a example of quality.
602. 00:59:18 Oh, I'd never heard of that person before. I'm going to go study their work. And that is a very
603. 00:59:26 valid approach, I think, to learning the skills that you need to learn. And that's where I say,
604. 00:59:31 like books can absolutely serve as more than temporary mentors. Having read, I don't know,
605. 00:59:37 there's probably something like 500 books in the last eight, nine years since I first started the
606. 00:59:44 bookworm podcast and all the gap books and things that came before that. There's 188 versions of the
607. 00:59:51 the mind map notes in the community for people who are interested. I recognize that there is value
608. 01:00:00 to be gained through the quantity as well. So books can't just be like, you know, I'm really stuck on
609. 01:00:06 this problem. I wonder if there's a book. The reading life has to be developed, but I think it's also a
610. 01:00:14 very important part of modern day apprenticeship. If you're neglecting books as a way to develop
611. 01:00:22 skills, you are hindering yourself. And it's kind of amazing to think about how much access we have to
612. 01:00:30 to this stuff. So let's take advantage of it. Yeah. All right, anything else on chapter three?
613. 01:00:34 No, I don't think so. I think the absorbing the master's power feels a little bit weird.
614. 01:00:43 I agree. It feels almost like science fiction. I think though, hidden in that phrase is something
615. 01:00:52 that he didn't speak directly to. But as a parent, you may be kind of get it. You want as a parent,
616. 01:00:58 you want your kids to go further and do more than you did. And I feel like when you have a real
617. 01:01:06 apprentice relationship like that, and it doesn't have to be again, the formal apprentice relationship,
618. 01:01:11 there have been people who in my life, there are currently people in my life who I look up to,
619. 01:01:17 and they recognize the fact that, you know, I am just absorbing everything that they are willing
620. 01:01:23 to share. They are mentors in my life. And I think they would say the same thing. Like,
621. 01:01:29 it's rewarding to them to invest in someone who actually wants to hear what they have to say and
622. 01:01:37 actually and put it into practice. So I think if you understand that, it's probably kind of natural
623. 01:01:43 for the master to want to launch the apprentice at some point past where they've been able to go.
624. 01:01:53 Yeah, I can tell you that I've seen situations where they haven't wanted to launch that. And
625. 01:01:58 it never ends well. It really does not end well because everybody ends up getting bitter in the
626. 01:02:02 end and it's a bad situation. But yes, that would be the hope is they would launch.
627. 01:02:07 All right. Chapter four, Mike, I felt like chapter four kind of came out of nowhere.
628. 01:02:15 And it's not that it didn't relate eventually. But like chapter four is see people as they are
629. 01:02:22 social intelligence. So if I think about this from a, we're working down this list, right? We go from
630. 01:02:28 here's the idea of mastery. Let's get apprenticeships. Let's absorb everything we came from the master
631. 01:02:33 and then let's figure out basically how to interact with that person and like interact with
632. 01:02:38 them well through social intelligence. But like the way most of this chapter worked,
633. 01:02:43 it was basically like I want to write a little, not little fairly large section on social intelligence.
634. 01:02:51 But it's like I didn't need nearly this much depth or breadth like from a social intelligence
635. 01:02:58 standpoint. So let me let me give the overview unless you want to chime in right now. I'll give
636. 01:03:01 you the opportunity. Well, I want to ask you a question. What the heck is social intelligence?
637. 01:03:05 Okay, good point. Okay, so I don't know the answer to that. That's why I'm going to move
638. 01:03:13 move straightforward. But like we unpack important components, specific knowledge,
639. 01:03:20 and then general knowledge of human nature. We unpack the seven deadly realities, right? Which
640. 01:03:27 envy conformism, rigidity, self obsessiveness, laziness, flightiness, passive aggressiveness.
641. 01:03:33 Then the four strategies for social intelligence, speak through your work, craft the appropriate
642. 01:03:38 persona, see yourself as other CU, suffer, suffer fools gladly. Like all of this stuff is not bad.
643. 01:03:46 I don't think any of this is bad. I just felt like it was kind of like, and we're going to detour,
644. 01:03:52 but it's going to be like a really big detour, right? Like we're going to go
645. 01:03:56 from, you know, it's a very American reference rate, we're going to go from like New York to
646. 01:04:02 Portland through Mexico. And I was like, wait, what are we doing? Like, why are we going the
647. 01:04:08 whole way down there? That said, I think this is a really interesting section on human nature.
648. 01:04:16 I think it's a really interesting section on some general good ideas to avoid the set. I mean,
649. 01:04:20 the seven deadly realities, right? Like, if we avoid those things, we're going to be in a much
650. 01:04:24 better situation than we are if we have those in our life and they're impacting our relationships.
651. 01:04:28 The four strategies for social intelligence, I think those are really, really good in terms of,
652. 01:04:32 you know, like advancing your work or helping you not get stuck in these obstacles. So
653. 01:04:39 that's my general take on chapter four, and that we can get more specific after you give us your
654. 01:04:45 commentary. So the title, first part of the title, see people as they are, I like that.
655. 01:04:54 The concept of social intelligence, I think that's mislabeled. I think what he's really talking about
656. 01:05:03 here is emotional intelligence, which has a social aspect to it. I used to work for family
657. 01:05:13 business that has a emotional intelligence assessment and skill building product, not the
658. 01:05:18 personal responsibility piece that I mentioned earlier, but another product called the Success
659. 01:05:23 Profiler, which, and this is going to color my bias on this, which is why I'm sharing this.
660. 01:05:28 That product has been used something like eight and a half million times and has 120
661. 01:05:35 doctoral level papers and books written on it. So like huge research basis, right? Emotional
662. 01:05:41 intelligence is a thing. Let me tell you. And it's hard to measure. So primarily, family business
663. 01:05:51 sells to school systems where the focus is on test scores. And did your kids graduate,
664. 01:05:58 especially with like special education programs? It's, did they do what they needed to do for their
665. 01:06:05 IEPs? And we're not necessarily concerned about the social aspect of this. I mean,
666. 01:06:12 if you were to ask a teacher, yes, obviously they are concerned about it. But how do you,
667. 01:06:16 how in the heck do you teach that stuff? How do you test for that stuff? How can you measure that
668. 01:06:20 stuff? Well, there are tools, but it's, it's difficult. Okay. So when I am thinking about
669. 01:06:26 emotional intelligence, I'm thinking about a couple different aspects of this. There's an
670. 01:06:31 intra personal part of this, which is how do I deal with my own emotions? And that kind of,
671. 01:06:40 he talks about with the naive perspective, which is viewing people out of our own emotional needs.
672. 01:06:45 So if you don't have intra personal emotional intelligence skills, then everything feels like
673. 01:06:51 a big deal. You can't see things, how they really are. And you're projecting that on everybody else.
674. 01:06:56 But there's also the interpersonal piece of this, which is how do I communicate effectively. And
675. 01:07:03 this is where like all of the other emotional intelligence skills typically get measured.
676. 01:07:09 And one of them that I really like is called sales orientation, but essentially it's leadership.
677. 01:07:13 And every time people go through that, they're like, I don't want to be a salesperson. I hate
678. 01:07:17 this scale. And I'm like, well, are you married? Because if you are, you're a salesperson,
679. 01:07:22 you've sold yourself at least once. Sales is really the belief that you can get people where
680. 01:07:28 they want to go. And so there's a lot that goes into this. And I feel like when he's talking about,
681. 01:07:35 in this, when we talk about in this chapter is how to manage the complexities of relationships
682. 01:07:41 effectively. Now there are complexities in the relationship with the master that you may be
683. 01:07:48 apprenticing under that you kind of alluded to, where maybe they don't have the emotional
684. 01:07:53 intelligence skills and they're not seeing things right, where they're launching you as the apprentice
685. 01:07:59 at some point. I've seen that that too. So that doesn't mean that you can't learn from them,
686. 01:08:04 but you got to go into it with your eyes open and not just blindly trusting this person. And then
687. 01:08:09 all of a sudden is like, well, I thought they were going to do this. And they didn't. I'm the victim
688. 01:08:13 here. No, recognize what's going in going on here. And again, use what you can better yourself.
689. 01:08:20 You're not trying to use the master and then just discard them. That was one of the scientists
690. 01:08:27 examples that you alluded to earlier. That was kind of my take on that apprenticeship model is
691. 01:08:32 like at some point, the guy that he was apprenticing under wasn't he was he wasn't willing to share
692. 01:08:40 the spotlight. But the apprentice had gotten so good that he's like, well, okay, I can't grow
693. 01:08:45 here anymore. So I'm going to go do something else. He didn't like throw his master under the bus or
694. 01:08:49 anything like that. So you got to be don't be a jerk. But then there are also like all of the
695. 01:08:54 people. If I'm in a day to day job, these are all my coworkers that I have to manage my relationship
696. 01:09:03 with them effectively. And I'm not just talking about like the suffer fools gladly, although that
697. 01:09:09 could be applied here. I mean, there are people that you work with probably who are not helping you
698. 01:09:16 as much as they are needing something from you. I remember Michael Hyatt did a blog post about
699. 01:09:21 this a long time ago about these two types of people in the world, people who have their own
700. 01:09:25 battery source and those who don't. And the ones who have their own battery source, they bring life
701. 01:09:30 and energy to every meeting that they're a part of and the ones who don't, you got to like pull
702. 01:09:34 them along. And you can identify people from your own work situations that fit those two different
703. 01:09:39 categories. So that's what I'm thinking of as suffer fools gladly is like this person is part of
704. 01:09:43 this team and yeah, it's going to be a little bit harder to work with them. But it's necessary.
705. 01:09:47 Doesn't mean that I'm going to spend all my time working with them. I'm going to do what I need
706. 01:09:52 to do with them. And then I'm going to go where I'm celebrated, not just tolerated. There's people
707. 01:09:57 who are easy to work with and we can do something awesome a little bit easier. Right. And I used to
708. 01:10:01 in the past get offended and I'm not saying this is this is right. But like I would get so
709. 01:10:07 frustrated whenever I was in one of those situations that it became evident I feel to everybody else
710. 01:10:12 who was there when I felt like this was a waste of time like you knew it. So I feel like I'm getting
711. 01:10:19 better at hiding that stuff. And that's what he's talking about here. So I feel like the topic is
712. 01:10:25 important, but I don't really like the approach that he took. And I feel like obviously I'm biased
713. 01:10:32 here, but there's another another way to tackle this, which makes a lot more sense.
714. 01:10:36 And I don't think I don't think it needed to be any longer for sure. But like it was like maybe
715. 01:10:42 social and emotional intelligence right and hitting both sides of that. And that's a way you
716. 01:10:46 could have structured chapter four and saying like, well, that's what they call it in the schools,
717. 01:10:50 social emotional learning like there are coupled. So that that might have made that might have made
718. 01:10:56 more sense. I did like a quick search on I was like, I wonder what emotional intelligence like
719. 01:10:59 what's the first reference on Wikipedia to like this. But I can't easily find that I can tell you
720. 01:11:06 that it's early. It's fairly early. It's before this book was written. So clear.
721. 01:11:11 All right, chapter five, awaken the dimensional mind, the creative active. Now, as somebody who's
722. 01:11:18 thought about creativity a lot, I'm intrigued at your perspective on this. I'll give a very,
723. 01:11:26 very light overview and then I'll let you take off. So basically calls out the what's the
724. 01:11:32 dimensional mind. It's active creative. It's got a childhood spirit. We're trying to then unlock
725. 01:11:38 the dimensional mind. He'll say the two essential requirements are a high level of knowledge about
726. 01:11:43 something and then an openness and flexibility to think new and original, right? That would,
727. 01:11:47 that's what he would call the dimensional mind. Then the other major section of this one is
728. 01:11:50 basically the nine strategies or sorry, the nine strategic approaches to being most creative.
729. 01:11:56 I did not personally think this was the most interesting part of this section. I thought this
730. 01:12:02 was kind of like, okay, yeah, that's fine. But I'll go through the nine real quick.
731. 01:12:05 Authentic voice, fact of great yield, mechanical intelligence, natural powers,
732. 01:12:10 the open field, the high end evolutionary hijack, the dimensional thinking, and then
733. 01:12:15 alchemic creative and the unconscious. And part of the reason why I didn't think I like these
734. 01:12:19 is because I don't think you get very much from those titles at all. You can read those titles and
735. 01:12:25 be like, I have no idea what this guy is talking about. And for me, that's a problem. So I will
736. 01:12:30 stop and I will let you take on the creative first.
737. 01:12:34 - I agree with you 100% that you don't get a whole lot out of those. In fact, this chapter,
738. 01:12:39 I have the most notes on and I didn't write down those at all because I felt they were not very
739. 01:12:46 useful. I do think this is a really good chapter, by the way. He's got a lot of good stuff to talk
740. 01:12:53 about here. You kind of hit on a little bit with the dimensional mind. Let me share the
741. 01:12:56 definitions for the conventional and the original mind here because the dimensional mind is blending
742. 01:13:01 them. Conventional mind is you force your mind into tighter and tighter grooves in order to make
743. 01:13:05 a living and conform to society. And that has negative connotations. But I feel like your mind
744. 01:13:09 has, it's naturally going to do that. That's your body's efficiency mechanism. It's going to try
745. 01:13:15 to make a routine out of everything. Then you've got the original mind, which is naturally creative,
746. 01:13:19 actively transforming everything around them to play with ideas. So the dimensional mind is
747. 01:13:23 the blending of the two where you've got discipline and a child like spirit are the two terms that
748. 01:13:28 he used there. And I like that a lot. So you've got the discipline where you're going to show up
749. 01:13:34 every day and you're going to do the work. There's that famous quote, I forget the author, but
750. 01:13:39 I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately, it shows up promptly at 9 a.m. every morning.
751. 01:13:44 So that's the discipline part. But then also the child like spirit. I mean, we're probably familiar
752. 01:13:51 with that from a different phrase for having faith like a child where you're just constantly
753. 01:13:55 maybe curious as the right word. You don't feel scared or intimidated about playing with these
754. 01:14:04 different ideas. And you never know which one you're going to get completely sucked into. And
755. 01:14:09 that is ultimately, I would argue a good thing. Now, there's also some stuff he talks about later
756. 01:14:17 on in here that I think are are good like tidbits. I don't think there's a whole lot here in terms of
757. 01:14:24 actual effective creative structure. And I say that as somebody who has a model called the creativity
758. 01:14:31 flywheel. So maybe I'm biased there too. But I'll just share a couple of the things that I liked
759. 01:14:38 here. So the primary law of the creative dynamic is that your emotional commitment to what you are
760. 01:14:44 doing will be translated directly into your work. So if you want to be creative, you can't just be
761. 01:14:50 deadline driven and be like, Oh man, I got to crank out 500 words by tomorrow. It's got to be
762. 01:14:55 stuff that you love thinking about and that you are curious about. And that's the, you know,
763. 01:15:00 the dimensional mind and that that original mind coming through that has to be there.
764. 01:15:04 The negative capability is the ability to endure and even embrace mysteries and uncertainties.
765. 01:15:11 This is underrated, I think. This is at the heart of some of the advice that I'll share in the reading
766. 01:15:19 workshop is like, if you're not sure what book to pick up next, think about a problem that you've
767. 01:15:28 been wrestling with. Richard Feynman has this concept of like the 12 favorite problems where
768. 01:15:33 you're constantly just thinking over these problems that you don't understand. For months,
769. 01:15:38 maybe even years, not knowing the answer. That's this negative capability. It's being okay,
770. 01:15:44 not having the answer and constantly just kind of searching the, the horizon for when that,
771. 01:15:50 that thing is going to show up. But if you're like, I have to have this thing by 4 p.m. on Friday,
772. 01:15:56 you're never going to get it. Yale talks about how the brain is an instruments
773. 01:16:01 instrument developed for making connections. I feel like that is really why I am so fascinated
774. 01:16:09 by the concept of PKM or personal knowledge management. I like the idea of being able to
775. 01:16:15 see how things connect together. I think the big like graph views in obsidian and apps like that,
776. 01:16:21 where you've got all those little dots connected. I feel like those sorts of views, they look cool
777. 01:16:25 on social media, but they are absolutely useless. However, the local graphs where you can see like,
778. 01:16:30 this note is connected to this note. And then when you go to that note, you see, oh, there's another
779. 01:16:34 connection here. And as you kind of surf through things, you can see things connecting down the
780. 01:16:39 chain like that is, that is, that's pretty cool. And then the greatest, greatest impediment to
781. 01:16:44 creativity ultimately is your impatience. You've got to get it done. And it's got to be great.
782. 01:16:50 It's got to be done now. Like, yeah, absolutely. If there was a place where he basically like had a,
783. 01:16:57 you know, a map and he could look directly into my brain or sorry, like a magnifying glass,
784. 01:17:02 look directly in my brain. It was in the emotional pitfalls around creativity, complacency,
785. 01:17:07 conservatism, dependency, impatience, inflexibility, and gradio. And I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes,
786. 01:17:14 and then you mentioned it and I want to, I want to double down on it, right? Like,
787. 01:17:18 the primary law of creative dynamic, the emotional commitment, right? Like, and I feel like that's,
788. 01:17:22 that's my biggest struggle with being creative and doing creative things is like,
789. 01:17:26 am I really committed to this thing? And am I committed to it long enough to really
790. 01:17:33 demonstrate those creative outputs, right? And that's where, you know, like, that's one of the,
791. 01:17:39 one of the major struggles I have. Well, there's another thing that's kind of related to that here.
792. 01:17:46 So your mind rises to the level required and the lack of intensity keeps the brain from kicking
793. 01:17:51 into a higher gear. So if you really want to have consistent, prolific, creative output, I think you
794. 01:17:58 do have to get to the point where you are kind of forcing yourself to show up and do it. And when
795. 01:18:06 you do that, you might be surprised of what you are actually capable of. But that has to be coupled
796. 01:18:13 with this, this creative process and the playing with the ideas and not putting things out there
797. 01:18:19 before they're ready. Now, I recognize that those are kind of contradictory. That's why the creativity
798. 01:18:26 flywheel exists is because I was thinking through, you know, back when I was with Asian efficiency,
799. 01:18:32 I had to, in addition to write things for the blog, in addition to creating the outlines and
800. 01:18:37 hosting the episodes for the productivity show, I had to create from scratch a different productivity
801. 01:18:44 video course every single month. And I didn't know what I didn't know. So when they asked me to do
802. 01:18:51 it, I'm like, yeah, sure, why not? And I look back at it now and I'm like, how the heck did I do that?
803. 01:18:57 And it was essentially because I was constantly reading, I was constantly learning, I was constantly
804. 01:19:05 curious. And when I was actually going through that stuff and taking notes and then looking back
805. 01:19:10 at my notes, there was always enough content to be made. So you have to kind of get into this
806. 01:19:18 rhythm. And sometimes the thing that you need in order to like kickstart that rhythm is you do
807. 01:19:23 need a deadline, you do need to force yourself to ship something. Because I think it was the last
808. 01:19:27 episode we were talking about the slide I made from the creativity presentation where it was the
809. 01:19:32 quantity produces the quality. And you've got like the poop emoji and then the poop emoji, poop emoji,
810. 01:19:38 diamond, right? And everyone loved that one. The first time you make something, it's going to be bad.
811. 01:19:43 The second time that you make something, it's still going to be bad. It's going to be a little bit
812. 01:19:46 better. But by the by the fourth, fifth, the hundredth time, you've gotten pretty good at the thing.
813. 01:19:53 I'm not a great podcaster. I've just made like a thousand episodes at this point. So the stress
814. 01:20:00 and anxiety of showing up to talk into a microphone is not the same as it was the first time that I
815. 01:20:05 did it. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, so let's go to six, the sixth and final chapter.
816. 01:20:12 Fuse the intuitive with the rational and then mastery. So fuse the intuitive with the rational
817. 01:20:20 mastery. So again, he's got a keys to mastery section here where you basically says masters have
818. 01:20:26 a sensation of the sudden heightened intellectual power, the intuition or fingertip feel. High level
819. 01:20:33 intuition is distinct from rationality kind of makes a distinction between those two things.
820. 01:20:37 The higher level intelligence, okay, he talks about basically like putting things into practical
821. 01:20:44 reuse, looking for connections, looking for deep reflections, looking for questions, and looking
822. 01:20:49 for how we learn from this. A lot of this chapter then is taken up with how many are there? Seven.
823. 01:20:57 There's like seven basically revisit the people we've talked about. And then we're going to try
824. 01:21:03 to glean a couple things out of those from a how they fused together and became a master.
825. 01:21:09 So again, I'm not a big fan of the titles because I don't think the titles really helped me get
826. 01:21:16 what I was supposed to get out of the thing. I think when he got to the end and he would like
827. 01:21:23 summarize it. So you do like a paragraph or two at the end of every story where he'd summarize it,
828. 01:21:27 that all came together nicely. But like if I look at my mind map here and I look at the title
829. 01:21:32 and then what I got out of it, it was like, yeah, there's there's maybe a connection there,
830. 01:21:36 like maybe a loose connection. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait,
831. 01:21:38 you said look at the mind map. Did you do a mind map for this book? I've done a mind map for all
832. 01:21:44 of all of the books since I started to do my math. Because I know you were talking about the
833. 01:21:48 mind maps, then you're like, I don't know if I'm going to stick with this. No, I like it. I like it.
834. 01:21:52 Okay, cool. It's a very, very good way for me to organize my brain, right? As you would know,
835. 01:21:57 very well. But like I said, some of them are clear connections and other ones I thought,
836. 01:22:04 you know, weren't as great. And it's just too much content, I mean, to go through in detail,
837. 01:22:11 all seven of them and what they covered. But he again defines mastery here, the ability to get
838. 01:22:18 very specific in knowledge, but also remain expansive in the dimensions of reality or contextual
839. 01:22:24 relationships. So I think what would be fun to do, which I didn't do, it's not an action item,
840. 01:22:28 but it would be interesting to do is go back and like try to peg out every time he gave more detail
841. 01:22:33 about what mastery is, and then try to lump all those together into a, this is what Robert Green
842. 01:22:39 says mastery is and what the characteristics of it are. Yeah, I like to think of this chapter as
843. 01:22:47 the Star Wars chapter. Okay, I'm intrigued. So he has this term he introduces called the dynamic,
844. 01:22:56 which is the living force that inevitably operates in anything we study or do. I never even once put
845. 01:23:04 that together. Okay, go ahead. Yeah, well, I mean, the rest of this is kind of a summary about mastery,
846. 01:23:12 but he talks about the ultimate reality being that all beings are interconnected. So definitely
847. 01:23:18 some Star Wars vibes here. I think there's, you know, set aside the Star Wars piece. There's some,
848. 01:23:25 some actual, actually useful stuff here. Like he talks about on page 261 that you must see every
849. 01:23:31 setback failure or hardship as a trial along the way as seeds that are being planted for further
850. 01:23:35 cultivation, if you know how to grow them. A couple of reasons why that stood out to me.
851. 01:23:41 I talked about the creativity of flywheel briefly. I, when I explain that to people,
852. 01:23:45 I talk about your PKM system or the place where you're capturing your notes. It's kind of like an
853. 01:23:51 idea greenhouse. So I talk about how when you capture things, they are seeds and you don't really
854. 01:23:58 know what you have to work with until you give them the right conditions and you cultivate them
855. 01:24:02 for a little bit. So I like that a lot, but also kind of zooming out from that essentially,
856. 01:24:07 like everything that you feel is wrong or this is a setback and this shouldn't be happening.
857. 01:24:14 You kind of have to take the approach of it's all going to be fine. This too shall pass.
858. 01:24:20 Like it's the obstacle is the way essentially. I had a reference earlier to so good they can't
859. 01:24:28 ignore you. So good job. I'm glad we're getting all these. Well, side note up with that. In the
860. 01:24:34 end of the book, he has the people that he thinks. He thinks Ryan Holiday. So Ryan Holiday actually
861. 01:24:39 did a lot of research for this book. I didn't see that. Yeah. So it makes a lot of sense that all
862. 01:24:45 these stories and all the details that he's sharing is like, these sound familiar. Not the same
863. 01:24:50 stories, but the same sort of style. He has a very similar storytelling style to Ryan Holiday.
864. 01:24:56 And I was like, well, that makes sense. Wow. I had no idea that connection. I didn't make it
865. 01:25:00 that far in the acknowledgments. Yeah. So yeah, I think this is a great, actually,
866. 01:25:06 a very great way to end the book. I feel like it's kind of setting the stage for like, okay,
867. 01:25:12 so there's this all these different steps that we've talked through. Now you could just do these
868. 01:25:16 things, but essentially it's not just going to click and it's going to be awesome from that moment
869. 01:25:20 forward. You do have to sort of stick with it. And then the other thing that I jotted down here,
870. 01:25:26 the page 269, mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It's a function of time and intense
871. 01:25:31 focus applied to a particular field of knowledge. So it's almost like the TLDR of the last chapter
872. 01:25:40 here is trust the process. Yeah. Yeah. Which is a good way to end a 320 page book, but it's not
873. 01:25:46 through in 20 pages. I don't even know how many words. I still can't find it, but it's got to be
874. 01:25:51 like 100,000 words maybe twice. It's got to be like twice as long as your normal productivity self
875. 01:25:57 help type book, but it's very much, you know, Robert Green. If you read 48 Laws of Power,
876. 01:26:02 it's the same sort of deal here. But I thought this was a really cool way to end it. I don't mind
877. 01:26:07 that it's abrupt and there's no like conclusion. Yeah. By the time I got done with this, with this
878. 01:26:12 chapter, honestly, I was ready to be done with the book because it's so long. And then in the next
879. 01:26:16 section was basically he does like biographies for all the people that he covered and then
880. 01:26:20 acknowledgments and it's absolutely done. All right. So anything else before we get to action items
881. 01:26:26 from this book? Nope. Do you have action items? I have one. And my action items, I don't know,
882. 01:26:34 Mike, like feel free to call me out if you think my action items are not worthy of the bookworm
883. 01:26:38 podcast. But like the one I want to think about is I really would like to apprentice under somebody.
884. 01:26:45 Like I would like to establish like an apprenticeship relationship with somebody.
885. 01:26:48 My challenge with it is I don't know what it's going to be in. Like I don't know
886. 01:26:51 where I would want to do that. And then the other thing is I don't have any idea where I'm going to
887. 01:26:56 get the time to do something like that. Like I, you know, with having as many children as I have
888. 01:27:00 and you know, life and commitments and all that stuff. I what I'll commit to on the action item is
889. 01:27:06 I want to think about the realistic person because the person I mentioned in the pro show is not
890. 01:27:12 realistic, right? Like I don't think that's a realistic apprenticeship. But I want to think about
891. 01:27:17 a realistic person that I could apprentice under. And then maybe in the future think about whether
892. 01:27:21 or not I try to set up that relationship. That's it. That's the only one I have out of this.
893. 01:27:26 Well, I read a whole bunch of words and have zero action items. Is that good or bad, Mike?
894. 01:27:37 Ah, I don't think it's either. I think it is evidence of the fact that I've been thinking about
895. 01:27:46 a lot of the themes and concepts that he talks about in this book for a long time.
896. 01:27:52 And I have already chosen to pursue them in my own ways. Now there were a lot of things that I
897. 01:28:02 jotted down here, which I'm going to continue to noodle on. But I also think this has a very
898. 01:28:10 particular bias towards the physical apprenticeship. And that's not something that interests me in
899. 01:28:20 the least, to be honest. Wow. He said, well, least you're strong on that. I'm not judging. I was
900. 01:28:29 just you're strong on that, not even the way. Well, let me let me say this. The last 10 months
901. 01:28:36 of trying to run my own business have been the hardest 10 months of my life.
902. 01:28:44 And I feel like I am still in survival mode. So I don't feel like I have the margin to go find
903. 01:28:56 somebody to apprentice under now someone were to come to me and be like, hey, I'm going to take
904. 01:29:01 care of all of your bills, all your debt. You're not going to have to worry about money ever again.
905. 01:29:05 Just come learn this thing from me. Yeah, let's talk. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
906. 01:29:09 Yeah, that makes total sense. All right. So let's move on to
907. 01:29:13 style and rating. It's my book. So I go first, right? Yep. Okay. So I want to give this book
908. 01:29:24 three stars. And I'm going to give it three stars based purely on content.
909. 01:29:32 I from a like style standpoint, it was it was okay. Like I don't feel like, yay, it was great.
910. 01:29:42 Like I don't I didn't not like the whole here's a character. Now I'm going to pull
911. 01:29:49 you know, examples from that of the points I want to I want to talk about. But I just it
912. 01:29:53 felt clunky sometimes. And I was like, okay, I understand this example, but does it really relate
913. 01:29:59 to the thing you're trying to tell us? And sometimes I just wanted him to be more direct in terms of
914. 01:30:03 style. So I thought the content was good. Like I was happy with what he covered with the exception
915. 01:30:09 of I would say, I guess what was I strong on that like social intelligence piece just felt like
916. 01:30:14 it was like really kind of out of out of nowhere. But otherwise, I was good on the content. So three
917. 01:30:19 stars. All right. I never would have guessed prior to this discussion that I would rate this higher
918. 01:30:27 than you, but I'm going to give it four stars. Okay. I the reason I'm going to give it four stars,
919. 01:30:34 I think I agree with everything that you said about the three star rating. However, I don't know
920. 01:30:40 that I have found a better book for the I got to come up with a term for this, the apprenticeship
921. 01:30:50 mindset. I don't know, like really, this is sort of growth mindset, sort of self help. But I don't
922. 01:30:57 even really like that term. Like there's a lot of truth in here about becoming the best version
923. 01:31:04 of yourself. And that's a really important idea to me that we have talents and abilities that
924. 01:31:11 are inherent. And we have to cultivate them. We have to develop them. And ultimately,
925. 01:31:18 we're going to be held responsible for our excellence in stewarding those things.
926. 01:31:27 So I feel like there's lots of stuff in here that I was like, yeah, this is very much
927. 01:31:34 things that we should be thinking about. I tend to verbalize all the little nitpicks that I have
928. 01:31:42 with stuff. Because I feel it's probably a little bit more interesting in terms of listening to a
929. 01:31:48 podcast. But there's a lot of stuff that I really agree with in here. And I don't think if I were
930. 01:31:55 to attempt to write a book about this same topic, that it would look anything like what he's got here.
931. 01:32:02 I think we have a lot of differences of opinion, but I also feel like I was able to
932. 01:32:12 glean a lot from this, even though I don't have specific action items associated with it.
933. 01:32:18 Maybe it's because it's from such a different perspective that it helps me kind of fill in some
934. 01:32:26 of the blanks, like get some additional puzzle pieces. I guess for context, we read a book a
935. 01:32:35 while back called "Leminal Thinking" by Dave Gray, which really impacted me. And it was really
936. 01:32:41 about how we tend to build all of our beliefs and all of our theories and live our lives
937. 01:32:49 according to this sliver of experience that we have. But there's so much more that we don't know.
938. 01:32:55 And you kind of have to seek out and embrace, we'll say, contradictory mindsets if you want to get a
939. 01:33:03 better picture. This was definitely a contradictory book to me in a lot of ways. But ultimately,
940. 01:33:09 I feel like that was a helpful thing. So I think the stories were fun. I'm not sure I would have used
941. 01:33:19 as many or used the ones necessarily that he used, but he's definitely a good storyteller,
942. 01:33:26 and they are entertaining. And as you mentioned, at the end, he's got the breakdown of all the
943. 01:33:30 different biographies that he shared. Temple Grandin was someone in particular that I was
944. 01:33:37 familiar with, but didn't have a lot of the details that he shared and thought that was
945. 01:33:43 really, really kind of cool to kind of fill in a lot of those gaps. So I think I would recommend
946. 01:33:53 people read this one. I definitely liked it better than "48 Laws of Power." I feel like if you've got
947. 01:33:59 a pick one Robert Green book that you should read, this would be the one. Now, I know he's probably
948. 01:34:06 got others that I haven't read, but "48 Laws of Power" is kind of the one that is probably the most
949. 01:34:13 popular. And then there's one about the laws of seduction that I have absolutely no interest in.
950. 01:34:19 But this was kind of best-case scenario for me when I heard you say you wanted to read Robert
951. 01:34:25 Green book. I was bracing myself, but I actually enjoyed this one. And I'll tell you that even
952. 01:34:31 though I gave it a three-star rating, I would still recommend people read it. The thing is,
953. 01:34:35 I just want them to go in knowing like, hey, there's good stuff in there. It's just a little bit
954. 01:34:42 longer than it needs to be, and that might drop your expectations a little bit.
955. 01:34:46 Yeah, that is fair. I should caveat that recommendation that people read this is like,
956. 01:34:51 if you're going to pick this up to read it, you've got to know what you're in for. This is a very
957. 01:34:57 long book. And I don't think I probably would have picked this one up to read it
958. 01:35:03 without having to do it for the podcast. But having said that, I'm glad that I put in the effort
959. 01:35:09 and got through it. Good. All right, so let's put mastery on the shelf. And then Mike,
960. 01:35:15 you get to pick our next book. All right, so the next book that we are going to do
961. 01:35:22 is Super Communicators by Charles Duhigg. And this is hopefully going to be a bit of a redemption
962. 01:35:30 for me with Charles Duhigg. I was not a fan of the power of habit. Or he had one after that too,
963. 01:35:36 which was like the big productivity book, productivity in air quotes, because it was like
964. 01:35:41 smarter, faster, better. And it felt very much like the pseudo productivity that Cal Newport talked
965. 01:35:51 about in slow productivity. It's also a daffd punk song, but you know, what are you going to do?
966. 01:35:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I like the idea of super communicators and just communicating better
967. 01:36:02 more effectively. You know, having had the day job previous to this, I under have a greater
968. 01:36:09 appreciation for the importance of communication in day to day work. So I feel like this is an
969. 01:36:17 important topic. And haven't really seen a whole lot of books about this was kind of
970. 01:36:21 surprise to see Charles Duhigg write one. But hey, let's let's read it together. And after that,
971. 01:36:28 so after that, I stole a book from Mike. And this book is called Why We Sleep by Matt Walker.
972. 01:36:35 And let me give you a little bit of a reason why I stole this book from Mike. So I want to request
973. 01:36:40 book recommendations for from the audience. And it's going to take a minute for us to get the
974. 01:36:48 the pipes all connected in the background that way we have a very easy, seamless way for you to do
975. 01:36:53 that. But look for that coming up in the in the next episode, we'll describe how to give us
976. 01:36:59 recommendations in terms of I would like to do an audience book in Mike Wood as well. We'd like to
977. 01:37:05 do an audience book for not my next one, but that I think it'll be my next next one. And
978. 01:37:12 what we'll tell you is that we're going to enable lots of feedback into that process. But Mike and
979. 01:37:18 I still get to pick the book. Right. We're not I mean, we're not just going to let you all just pick
980. 01:37:21 based on like number of votes or number of recommendations. We still get to winnow it down to,
981. 01:37:27 you know, three or whatever, and then Mike and I will pick from the top three or whatever that
982. 01:37:30 might be. So Mike, do you have any gap books right now? Are you reading anything on the side?
983. 01:37:35 I do. So mentioned in the show that Ryan Holiday kind of served as the assistant to Robert Green
984. 01:37:43 sounds like for this book. Well, I discovered a book written by Ryan Holiday's assistant
985. 01:37:51 called Ghost Town Living by Brent Underwood. Now, have you seen there's a handful of people who
986. 01:38:02 are online that kind of went in together and bought this ghost town called Cerogordo?
987. 01:38:08 No, not at all. So like Nathan Berry was one of them and I forget the couple other like recognizable
988. 01:38:15 names they went in together and they bought this ghost town. So this is that group and Brent Underwood
989. 01:38:23 my understanding is like he was part of that group and he actually lived there for a while.
990. 01:38:27 So I saw some of the stuff that they were were sharing, you know, like when they they bought it.
991. 01:38:32 And I just think the whole concept of the ghost town is fascinating. You know, you have this whole
992. 01:38:39 town that existed and then like it just disappears. Like how many stories are in those places that
993. 01:38:46 are completely abandoned like that kind of stuff is fascinating to me. So yeah, this looks like an
994. 01:38:52 interesting, interesting reading. I'm going to try to get through this one before super communicators.
995. 01:38:59 Wonderful. My my gap book is the same as it was last time because mastery was so long and I did
996. 01:39:05 have enough time to focus to that one as well. But this one's Evergood Endeavor by Tim Keller and
997. 01:39:10 it's part of a grant project that I'm working on right now. But it's really good so far. I'm really
998. 01:39:15 enjoying it. Just need to get a little more time in there and crack out a little bit more.
999. 01:39:20 Awesome. So that wraps up another episode of Bookworm. We want to thank you guys.
1000. 01:39:26 Thank you all for listening. If you would like to see the episodes or find the episode, you can go
1001. 01:39:32 to bookworm.fm online. And if you're interested in the pro show or the bootleg feed, go to our Patreon
1002. 01:39:41 page, so patreon.com/bookwormfm. Check that out and we'd really appreciate it if you became a member.
1003. 01:39:48 So other than that, Mike, thanks for another great conversation. Absolutely. And if you are
1004. 01:39:53 reading along with us, pick up Super Communicators by Charles Duhigg and we will talk to you in a
1005. 01:39:58 couple of weeks.