21: The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman

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1. 00:00:00 You ready to hit her follow up?
2. 00:00:01 - Let's do it.
3. 00:00:02 - All right, so first one here on the list.
4. 00:00:05 I'm to encourage Becky to read it.
5. 00:00:07 That's what it says on the list,
6. 00:00:09 but I know that that is referring to the book
7. 00:00:12 Who Moved My Cheese,
8. 00:00:13 and my wife finished reading it here a few days ago.
9. 00:00:16 She read it in two settings.
10. 00:00:18 So kudos to her.
11. 00:00:21 She had some interesting feedback on it.
12. 00:00:25 Mostly, really, there's a book for this.
13. 00:00:29 (laughs)
14. 00:00:30 What's her reaction?
15. 00:00:32 It's interesting, but it has led to some fun conversations.
16. 00:00:35 And those have been enjoyable.
17. 00:00:38 I've had a good time talking through,
18. 00:00:41 now that you and I have gone through that one,
19. 00:00:43 it's kind of interesting to sit down and do that again
20. 00:00:45 with my wife and get her perspective on it.
21. 00:00:47 So it's been interesting.
22. 00:00:48 I've enjoyed that process with her.
23. 00:00:50 - Nice, I actually just gave a talk at Toastmasters
24. 00:00:54 before I came here on Who Moved My Cheese.
25. 00:00:58 - Nice.
26. 00:00:59 - I still like the book,
27. 00:01:01 even though my wife is not convinced
28. 00:01:03 of the joy of that book.
29. 00:01:05 - I will say that it was fun doing the Toastmasters project
30. 00:01:10 because I'm in the storytelling book.
31. 00:01:12 And so I was supposed to do a folk tale,
32. 00:01:14 and I cheated kind of and retold Who Moved My Cheese.
33. 00:01:18 But retelling it, I was able to kind of cherry pick
34. 00:01:20 the pieces that I really liked out of it.
35. 00:01:22 - Oh, nice.
36. 00:01:23 - 'Cause you've only got seven to nine minutes
37. 00:01:24 to tell the whole thing anyway.
38. 00:01:25 So you physically can't cover everything.
39. 00:01:29 And I like my version a lot better.
40. 00:01:31 - Nice.
41. 00:01:34 Maybe I should get you to record that sometime
42. 00:01:36 and we'll just post that book for him.
43. 00:01:38 - Yeah, it was fun.
44. 00:01:40 - Cool.
45. 00:01:41 You got a couple here on the list.
46. 00:01:44 - Yeah, so I don't have specifically
47. 00:01:48 data to support being willing to laugh at myself,
48. 00:01:53 but I'd like to--
49. 00:01:53 - I'm gonna ask how you were gonna record that one.
50. 00:01:56 - I think it's more just a reminder.
51. 00:01:59 It seems like a lot of my follow up items
52. 00:02:01 tend to be that sort of thing.
53. 00:02:03 So yeah, I guess next time you see me laugh at me
54. 00:02:06 and see how I respond.
55. 00:02:08 - All right, we'll do.
56. 00:02:11 - And the other one, remodeling office space.
57. 00:02:14 Haven't done anything more with this,
58. 00:02:16 but then we've been gone for a couple of weeks.
59. 00:02:18 So probably since the last time that we talked,
60. 00:02:21 we really haven't had the chance to do anything with this.
61. 00:02:25 We are, we've submitted all of our tax information,
62. 00:02:28 so we're waiting till we hear back from our accountant
63. 00:02:30 about what kind of return we're gonna get
64. 00:02:32 before we commit to spending a lot of money
65. 00:02:35 to finish off the office,
66. 00:02:37 but it looks like that's gonna happen
67. 00:02:39 in the next probably month or two.
68. 00:02:41 - See, here's the thing.
69. 00:02:45 There are a number of us now listening to you
70. 00:02:47 talk about this tax return.
71. 00:02:50 Knowing that we will not get one.
72. 00:02:52 So for those of you out here who are like me,
73. 00:02:57 who run your own business,
74. 00:02:58 you know a tax return is a thing that does not exist ever.
75. 00:03:02 - I have lots of dependence, remember.
76. 00:03:05 - 'Cause if you happen to overpay,
77. 00:03:06 they simply hold onto it until the next quarter
78. 00:03:09 and use it for that.
79. 00:03:10 Like you're not gonna get anything back ever.
80. 00:03:13 - That true, true.
81. 00:03:15 I don't know, I guess this is the first year
82. 00:03:17 we've done it this way,
83. 00:03:19 but last year, even though my work situation had changed,
84. 00:03:23 we still got a little bit of a return.
85. 00:03:26 And this year we have an additional dependent.
86. 00:03:30 So I think maybe we'll get a return.
87. 00:03:34 Maybe? - Nice.
88. 00:03:35 Nice.
89. 00:03:36 Fun, fun.
90. 00:03:38 All right, you wanna talk about this Apple script?
91. 00:03:40 You've been bugging about me on this.
92. 00:03:43 Yeah.
93. 00:03:44 - Actually the question is,
94. 00:03:45 do you want to talk about this Apple script?
95. 00:03:47 - Yes, I do.
96. 00:03:50 I looked into this because I wanted to know,
97. 00:03:52 okay, how much time is it gonna take for me to pull this off?
98. 00:03:55 And before I go too far,
99. 00:03:57 take me through and more for the listeners and me,
100. 00:04:00 'cause I got to listen to the recording of this
101. 00:04:04 a couple times just to make sure
102. 00:04:05 that I understood what you were after,
103. 00:04:07 but explain to the listeners what you're after
104. 00:04:09 with this Apple script and day one.
105. 00:04:11 - Well, basically what I wanna do is I want to be able
106. 00:04:17 to job real quickly what I am focused on,
107. 00:04:22 but that can't happen on my phone I realize
108. 00:04:26 because I won't take the time to pull my phone out
109. 00:04:30 and enter what I happen to be focused on at the moment.
110. 00:04:32 But if I'm on my computer,
111. 00:04:36 which I am pretty much all doing the working day,
112. 00:04:38 which is really when I wanna track this stuff anyways,
113. 00:04:40 then an Apple script, there's a lot less friction there.
114. 00:04:43 So I think that having it be on my Mac instead of an iOS device
115. 00:04:48 would be enough for me to make this sticky.
116. 00:04:51 Does that make sense?
117. 00:04:52 - So effectively it's a recurring pop up on your computer
118. 00:04:57 that asks what you're doing right now.
119. 00:05:00 - Yep.
120. 00:05:01 - And when you fill it in and you hit enter,
121. 00:05:03 it logs it to day one, right?
122. 00:05:06 - Yep, exactly.
123. 00:05:07 - Okay, now what you need to know is that day one
124. 00:05:11 does not have Apple script support.
125. 00:05:14 - Boo.
126. 00:05:15 - So that's on day one.
127. 00:05:17 However, they have CLI support,
128. 00:05:20 command line interface support, which means
129. 00:05:24 that if we do this, it is possible
130. 00:05:27 to make this process happen.
131. 00:05:30 But it will require the end user will have to install one,
132. 00:05:36 the command line, I'm trying to think of how to explain this
133. 00:05:40 for people who don't get it, it's shell scripts.
134. 00:05:43 So you have to install this package for day one
135. 00:05:47 in order for the Apple script to do anything,
136. 00:05:49 which I think actually is technically gonna end up being
137. 00:05:52 like an automated service of some sort,
138. 00:05:54 but it all works effectively the same.
139. 00:05:56 But you would have to be comfortable installing
140. 00:05:59 two separate pieces in order for it to work.
141. 00:06:02 Is that okay?
142. 00:06:04 - I guess we'll find out.
143. 00:06:07 (laughing)
144. 00:06:08 I would think so.
145. 00:06:10 - Okay, 'cause I can't, from the service
146. 00:06:14 or the Apple script side of it,
147. 00:06:15 I can't install that for you, that's a security risk,
148. 00:06:18 they should never allow that.
149. 00:06:20 So I'm not gonna be able to say,
150. 00:06:22 install this one thing and you're done,
151. 00:06:24 but I can say if you install this package,
152. 00:06:27 and I can link to it, give you instructions on it,
153. 00:06:30 and install this Apple script,
154. 00:06:32 do you want the time period to be configurable?
155. 00:06:38 - You've talked about every hour,
156. 00:06:40 does that need to be able to change per person?
157. 00:06:43 - That's a good question.
158. 00:06:46 I would say that the simplest solution
159. 00:06:49 is invariably the best solution.
160. 00:06:52 So let's just go with one hour.
161. 00:06:55 - Okay, hard-coded in.
162. 00:06:56 Okay, now all my questions aside,
163. 00:06:59 I'm going to put a bounty on this,
164. 00:07:05 and I did some research into,
165. 00:07:07 can I do something in WordPress that makes this possible?
166. 00:07:10 And I believe I have found a plugin, Mike,
167. 00:07:12 that lets me say, okay, you can donate via PayPal
168. 00:07:16 up until this dollar amount is hit,
169. 00:07:18 and once that dollar amount is hit,
170. 00:07:19 then we don't, like you don't go over,
171. 00:07:22 and then everybody can see a status at the same time.
172. 00:07:25 If I understand it correctly,
173. 00:07:27 which is exactly what we want.
174. 00:07:29 So I'm gonna put this in place,
175. 00:07:32 I don't have any idea what the link will be,
176. 00:07:34 but by the time this particular show goes live,
177. 00:07:36 I'll have the link in the show notes.
178. 00:07:38 So if you're interested in this script
179. 00:07:40 for having your Mac nag you every hour
180. 00:07:44 to log something today,
181. 00:07:45 wanna do it automatically for you,
182. 00:07:47 you can go to the link in the show notes.
183. 00:07:51 That will give you a page to where you can donate.
184. 00:07:54 I'll set the bounty for it.
185. 00:07:56 Mike, gut feel as it's around 300, Mike,
186. 00:07:59 three, 350 somewhere in there,
187. 00:08:02 just to get the whole thing pulled together
188. 00:08:04 and get all the documentation and everything for it.
189. 00:08:06 So I'm gonna set one of those two.
190. 00:08:08 I gotta figure out the exact hours on it,
191. 00:08:11 but that number will be on the page.
192. 00:08:14 If you go to the link in the show notes,
193. 00:08:16 so scroll down, click, go to the page, there you go.
194. 00:08:20 And we'll go from there.
195. 00:08:23 Once we hit the bounty, I'll go to work.
196. 00:08:26 Nice.
197. 00:08:27 Fun, fun.
198. 00:08:30 Wow, I can't believe you're like hiring me out on this stuff.
199. 00:08:34 (laughs)
200. 00:08:36 All right, fun times.
201. 00:08:38 So now that we're done with followup,
202. 00:08:40 unless you got something else you wanna go through,
203. 00:08:42 nope, oh, happy day.
204. 00:08:44 Looks so good.
205. 00:08:45 The book for today, the personal MBA.
206. 00:08:47 This book, it's by Josh Kaufman,
207. 00:08:52 and this is one that I saw mentioned by Sean Blanc,
208. 00:08:57 via, I believe it was Twitter.
209. 00:09:00 There's probably no way I'm gonna find that tweet.
210. 00:09:02 It's been a while.
211. 00:09:02 It's probably been a year plus ago about at this point.
212. 00:09:06 He mentioned this book, said he really enjoyed it.
213. 00:09:09 I have been told by multiple supervisors
214. 00:09:13 that I should go get an MBA.
215. 00:09:15 I almost went for it,
216. 00:09:17 but I could never get the math to line up
217. 00:09:20 on why I should get an MBA versus,
218. 00:09:24 like the amount of money I was gonna put into it,
219. 00:09:27 versus the salary bumps I would get for having it.
220. 00:09:30 Like, I could never get the math to work out.
221. 00:09:32 Mm-hmm.
222. 00:09:33 So I didn't do it.
223. 00:09:35 And over time, I've never been in a situation
224. 00:09:40 where I feel like I have needed it or wanted it.
225. 00:09:43 So whenever I saw that this book was something
226. 00:09:46 that was potentially an alternative
227. 00:09:48 and kind of a crash course for an MBA,
228. 00:09:51 and I saw Sean Blanc recommending it,
229. 00:09:53 thought, "Whew, give it a shot.
230. 00:09:54 I'll drag Mike along for the ride and see how this goes."
231. 00:09:57 So here we are.
232. 00:09:59 Josh Kaufman thinks that you made a good choice.
233. 00:10:01 That was cool.
234. 00:10:03 - Yeah, he talks about at the very beginning of the book,
235. 00:10:05 exactly what you were just describing,
236. 00:10:08 about how the cost of an MBA doesn't really pay for itself
237. 00:10:13 and how a lot of the information that you need to learn
238. 00:10:19 for an MBA type degree,
239. 00:10:23 is kind of changing and evolving.
240. 00:10:25 And by the time that you would go to an MBA program
241. 00:10:27 to get the knowledge that they would teach you,
242. 00:10:29 it's kind of out of date.
243. 00:10:31 And so I've also thought that the same thing
244. 00:10:35 that I should go get an MBA, crunch the numbers,
245. 00:10:38 and say, "Ah, this really isn't worth it."
246. 00:10:40 So this has been on my list for a long time,
247. 00:10:43 but I also knew it was very long
248. 00:10:44 and that was enough to make me procrastinate
249. 00:10:46 on actually reading it.
250. 00:10:48 - Right, right.
251. 00:10:49 I will say whenever I started this process,
252. 00:10:51 I've always got two or three business ideas
253. 00:10:56 that I'm bouncing around inside my head.
254. 00:10:58 And I will say it's very helpful to have those
255. 00:11:01 if you're gonna read this,
256. 00:11:02 because it immediately gives you an example to work through
257. 00:11:07 'cause he goes through a ton of information
258. 00:11:11 and I just found it extremely helpful to have,
259. 00:11:14 okay, this particular business is one
260. 00:11:15 that's on the forefront of my mind.
261. 00:11:18 I'm really interested in taking it forward
262. 00:11:20 and seeing how I can promote it and make it something big.
263. 00:11:23 Going through this book,
264. 00:11:24 while having that on my mind was really enlightening
265. 00:11:28 and helped me understand the concepts in a much better way.
266. 00:11:32 - Yeah, definitely.
267. 00:11:33 One of the things that he mentions at the very beginning,
268. 00:11:36 the first talking point that we had written down
269. 00:11:38 just to kind of set everybody's expectations for this book,
270. 00:11:40 if you haven't read it yet,
271. 00:11:41 is that it doesn't give you the answers,
272. 00:11:43 but it helps you ask the right questions.
273. 00:11:45 And I would say that is definitely true.
274. 00:11:49 And so as you approach this book through a lens,
275. 00:11:53 like you were saying, where have this business idea
276. 00:11:56 or this idea for a project or a venture or whatever,
277. 00:11:59 it will help you ask the right questions to determine
278. 00:12:03 whether this thing is actually viable
279. 00:12:05 or something that you should be doing,
280. 00:12:06 or whether it's just one of those pie in the sky ideas
281. 00:12:09 that's really not something that you could monetize
282. 00:12:12 and therefore it's not really worth the time and the effort
283. 00:12:15 that you would invest in it.
284. 00:12:16 And I didn't realize how important being able
285. 00:12:20 to ask the right questions really was.
286. 00:12:22 But I kind of had that same experience
287. 00:12:25 after I read the book was like,
288. 00:12:27 when I was viewing some different projects and things
289. 00:12:30 through what I was learning,
290. 00:12:31 as I was reading the book,
291. 00:12:32 it just crystallized a lot of things for me.
292. 00:12:34 And the answers became super, super clear
293. 00:12:36 as soon as you knew what questions to actually ask.
294. 00:12:39 - So here's a question for you.
295. 00:12:41 'Cause you have a business degree, right?
296. 00:12:43 - Yes.
297. 00:12:44 - So he's bashing business degrees at the beginning.
298. 00:12:49 Not a bachelor's, but the master's.
299. 00:12:53 What's your take on that?
300. 00:12:55 Given you have a business degree
301. 00:12:58 and we're kind of down that path,
302. 00:13:00 the content that he covers here and his attitude, I guess,
303. 00:13:05 towards academia in the business world,
304. 00:13:09 that strike you as a very negative thing,
305. 00:13:12 that make you angry?
306. 00:13:13 What was your take on it?
307. 00:13:14 'Cause I don't have a full business degree.
308. 00:13:16 - No, he's 100% right.
309. 00:13:18 It's an absolute complete waste of time money.
310. 00:13:21 - All right.
311. 00:13:22 - Yes, I have a liberal arts business degree,
312. 00:13:23 so it was probably twice as expensive.
313. 00:13:26 And yeah, the things,
314. 00:13:28 the classes that I really benefited a lot from
315. 00:13:32 were not the ones that really had anything to do
316. 00:13:36 with business.
317. 00:13:38 The standard business classes, the statistics,
318. 00:13:40 the accounting, I basically muscled my way
319. 00:13:44 through those classes and retained absolutely nothing
320. 00:13:47 from them.
321. 00:13:48 There was one or two classes in particular
322. 00:13:51 where I actually did learn a lot and it was more so
323. 00:13:54 mindset stuff, like how to think about different problems.
324. 00:13:58 In fact, one of my classes,
325. 00:14:00 which was my senior capstone class,
326. 00:14:03 the teacher would have us do case studies
327. 00:14:05 to bring in newspaper articles,
328. 00:14:07 usually wall street journal articles.
329. 00:14:09 And we discussed,
330. 00:14:11 this company made this specific decision
331. 00:14:14 and then we kind of dissected it.
332. 00:14:15 Did they make the right decision or not?
333. 00:14:17 You know why?
334. 00:14:18 We did some simulations and one of the big projects
335. 00:14:20 we had to do was this thing where we broke up
336. 00:14:23 into separate small groups basically
337. 00:14:25 and we had a semester long project
338. 00:14:27 where we were running a shoe company,
339. 00:14:29 which was part of this simulation.
340. 00:14:31 But other than that,
341. 00:14:32 like the actual information that I was taught
342. 00:14:34 that appeared on the test
343. 00:14:36 was definitely not worth the amount of money
344. 00:14:39 that I paid for it.
345. 00:14:41 And once you get out into the business world,
346. 00:14:43 you figure out a lot of these things
347. 00:14:46 based out of necessity that never really
348. 00:14:49 were taught in business school.
349. 00:14:52 So when I was going to school,
350. 00:14:53 it was 2001 to 2005.
351. 00:14:58 And the internet was kind of just getting going.
352. 00:15:01 In fact, one of the case studies that we did was on Amazon.
353. 00:15:03 I remember that one specifically.
354. 00:15:06 And so the landscape of,
355. 00:15:08 especially internet based business
356. 00:15:10 has changed a lot since I was in school,
357. 00:15:12 but I can't imagine that even now
358. 00:15:15 they are teaching the kinds of inbound
359. 00:15:18 content marketing type ideas that you need.
360. 00:15:20 You know, grow your email list.
361. 00:15:21 I guarantee that's not being taught
362. 00:15:23 in the business program at St. Norbert College
363. 00:15:26 where I went to school.
364. 00:15:27 But that's the kind of thing
365. 00:15:28 that really has been beneficial to me
366. 00:15:31 is that type of stuff where I've learned it
367. 00:15:33 pretty much through trial and error.
368. 00:15:35 - So is this,
369. 00:15:37 it sounds like you would see this the same way
370. 00:15:38 I see a computer programming degree.
371. 00:15:42 People go to school to learn how to build programs
372. 00:15:45 and write code.
373. 00:15:47 And by the time they get out of a four year school
374. 00:15:51 and they're done with it,
375. 00:15:53 most often I run across people
376. 00:15:56 who are talking about how great Java is.
377. 00:15:58 And you know, it's going to be the thing of the future.
378. 00:16:00 And it's like, I don't know anybody that thinks that.
379. 00:16:04 Like everybody I talk to is talking about Python and Rails.
380. 00:16:08 Like they don't really talk about, okay.
381. 00:16:11 All right, I know I probably offended a few people there,
382. 00:16:13 but that's okay.
383. 00:16:14 I just don't see the schools keeping up
384. 00:16:18 with how fast things are moving.
385. 00:16:20 Things just take off.
386. 00:16:21 And if you're going to build a degree around it
387. 00:16:25 by the time they get the books written,
388. 00:16:27 like what was the one that we talked about
389. 00:16:29 the time it took to write a textbook,
390. 00:16:31 like being eight to 12 years or something like that?
391. 00:16:34 - Yep, it's completely ridiculous.
392. 00:16:37 And in fact, there's another resource
393. 00:16:39 that this book reminded me of called the $100 MBA,
394. 00:16:42 which is Omar Zenholm, I believe.
395. 00:16:44 - Okay.
396. 00:16:44 - He was actually in academia.
397. 00:16:46 He was a professor and he wanted to teach his students
398. 00:16:51 not how to manage factories
399. 00:16:52 'cause that's not what they were going to be doing.
400. 00:16:54 But he wanted to teach them some of this internet marketing
401. 00:16:56 stuff where he was a professor.
402. 00:16:58 And I can't remember specifically where he said
403. 00:17:00 that he was a professor, but he went to get
404. 00:17:03 the curriculum changed and it was going to take years
405. 00:17:06 before it was approved.
406. 00:17:08 And so what he did is he basically distilled everything
407. 00:17:10 that he knew about business into a video course
408. 00:17:13 that you can pay at one time, $100, $100 MBA,
409. 00:17:17 and get this sort of information as well.
410. 00:17:19 I think that that is really the key.
411. 00:17:22 And this is actually one of the points.
412. 00:17:24 The very end of this book, he talks about
413. 00:17:25 how self-education is never done.
414. 00:17:28 The people who are successful are not the ones
415. 00:17:30 who have paid a bunch of money and gotten a piece of paper,
416. 00:17:33 but they are the ones who are continually looking
417. 00:17:34 to improve their skill set.
418. 00:17:36 And that's where this book, I believe, has a lot of value.
419. 00:17:41 All right, so let's jump into some of the things
420. 00:17:44 that are brought up within the book.
421. 00:17:46 One of them that I thought was pretty interesting was
422. 00:17:50 he goes through the process for evaluating a market
423. 00:17:55 and he had these 10 steps that,
424. 00:17:59 if you look at the 10 steps and look at the market
425. 00:18:03 that you're thinking about going into,
426. 00:18:05 see this is why I say it's helpful to have a potential
427. 00:18:07 something in your head, 'cause you're going through this.
428. 00:18:10 Okay, how do you evaluate this market?
429. 00:18:11 If I've got an idea in my head,
430. 00:18:13 I'm immediately starting to consider the pieces
431. 00:18:16 of that market or that business as they apply to this.
432. 00:18:19 So anyway, the 10 ways to evaluate a market,
433. 00:18:23 I'm just gonna run through them quick
434. 00:18:24 'cause I don't wanna spend a ton of time on this,
435. 00:18:27 but the 10 steps of evaluating a market urgency,
436. 00:18:30 how badly do people want or need it right now?
437. 00:18:33 The market size, how many people, the pricing potential,
438. 00:18:36 what's the highest price you could charge for it?
439. 00:18:39 Cost of customer acquisition,
440. 00:18:42 how easy is it to find somebody to buy it?
441. 00:18:45 Cost of value delivery, how much does it cost
442. 00:18:47 to create and deliver the thing?
443. 00:18:49 Uniqueness of the offers at a complete niche.
444. 00:18:52 The speed to market, how fast can you create it
445. 00:18:55 and get it out the door?
446. 00:18:56 The upfront investment, how much it takes to get going,
447. 00:18:59 upsell potential, can you do an upsell?
448. 00:19:02 Evergreen potential, does it ever need to be updated
449. 00:19:05 because it's, what do I want to say?
450. 00:19:07 It's timeless, that type of thing.
451. 00:19:10 So, anyway, I thought it was interesting to look at
452. 00:19:13 all of those, and the more
453. 00:19:15 of them that your potential business
454. 00:19:17 could hit the better off you are.
455. 00:19:19 And, this is helpful as an entrepreneur,
456. 00:19:21 as somebody who's always coming up with ideas,
457. 00:19:23 it immediately showed me,
458. 00:19:25 it made me want to go pull up my business ideas list,
459. 00:19:28 and just run through it like, yes, yes, no, no, no,
460. 00:19:32 no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, oh, great.
461. 00:19:37 Like, it just made me want to do that.
462. 00:19:39 So, it was a framework to help me go through them,
463. 00:19:42 and to get through it a little bit better.
464. 00:19:44 - Yeah, exactly, and you're supposed to,
465. 00:19:46 for these 10 different things,
466. 00:19:47 in the book he talks about rating each of them
467. 00:19:49 on a scale from one to 10.
468. 00:19:51 And then you add them all up at the end,
469. 00:19:52 and if you, the total score is below 50,
470. 00:19:55 it's a bad idea, and you should move on.
471. 00:19:57 If it's 50 to 75, it's got some potential,
472. 00:19:59 but it's going to need a lot of effort.
473. 00:20:00 If it's 75 or above, very promising, full speed ahead,
474. 00:20:04 and these type of things,
475. 00:20:06 this whole section was maybe just a couple of pages,
476. 00:20:08 but this is the type of thing
477. 00:20:09 that this book is chock full of,
478. 00:20:11 and even if this was the only thing
479. 00:20:12 that you got out of this book,
480. 00:20:14 it's still going to be very beneficial.
481. 00:20:17 And there's a whole bunch of them.
482. 00:20:18 I think he says at the beginning
483. 00:20:19 that there are 248 simple concepts
484. 00:20:23 that are part of this book.
485. 00:20:24 And so, I would argue that if you are involved
486. 00:20:27 in any sort of business whatsoever,
487. 00:20:29 you're going to find something in here,
488. 00:20:31 whether you've got an MBA or not,
489. 00:20:32 that you're going to just be like,
490. 00:20:34 "Wow, that's amazing.
491. 00:20:35 I could apply that right now,
492. 00:20:36 and that's going to make this thing so much simpler for me."
493. 00:20:40 - So the concept that it was only two pages
494. 00:20:43 on this particular piece,
495. 00:20:45 that whole thing drove me nuts.
496. 00:20:46 I'm going to get into that later.
497. 00:20:48 There was a big piece of this book
498. 00:20:49 that just made me angry.
499. 00:20:51 (laughs)
500. 00:20:52 We'll get into that later.
501. 00:20:54 You've got a thing on here,
502. 00:20:55 frustration leads to burnout.
503. 00:20:56 Where are you going with that?
504. 00:20:58 - Yeah, he just talks about his experience
505. 00:21:00 with Proctor and Gamble.
506. 00:21:03 And he tells a lot of his story
507. 00:21:04 throughout the book,
508. 00:21:06 especially at the beginning,
509. 00:21:07 where he kind of outlines his process
510. 00:21:11 and how he was climbing the corporate ladder
511. 00:21:13 and he was going to do this stuff.
512. 00:21:14 And then he just kind of stopped and rethought things
513. 00:21:17 and was like, "I don't know if this is really
514. 00:21:18 what I want to do."
515. 00:21:19 And there were three big takeaways
516. 00:21:21 from his PNG experience,
517. 00:21:23 which I thought were really good.
518. 00:21:25 And definitely something that people
519. 00:21:28 probably don't ever stop to think about,
520. 00:21:30 but it's something that you really should think about
521. 00:21:32 if you find yourself in one of these organizations.
522. 00:21:34 Number one, large companies move slowly.
523. 00:21:36 Number two, climbing the corporate ladder
524. 00:21:37 is an obstacle to doing great work.
525. 00:21:40 And then number three, frustration leads to burnout.
526. 00:21:43 So specifically, frustration leading to burnout.
527. 00:21:45 I just wanted to tease that one out
528. 00:21:47 because if you are frustrated
529. 00:21:50 with your particular work situation right now,
530. 00:21:53 Josh's experience,
531. 00:21:56 and I think kind of the default experience
532. 00:21:59 is that if you don't figure it out, if you don't fix it,
533. 00:22:03 then it's only going to be a matter of time
534. 00:22:05 until you actually exit.
535. 00:22:07 And so there's probably a lot of people
536. 00:22:08 who maybe are listening to this right now
537. 00:22:10 and they're thinking,
538. 00:22:10 "Well, I'm really frustrated with my work,
539. 00:22:12 but I have no intentions of leaving
540. 00:22:14 unless you figure out how to reconcile those things.
541. 00:22:17 In a few years, you're going to find yourself leaving."
542. 00:22:20 And so I kind of saw this as a warning sign
543. 00:22:22 because as we talked about in the last couple of books,
544. 00:22:24 a lot of this stuff is on us as individuals.
545. 00:22:26 It's not on the company's fault.
546. 00:22:28 It's not the organization's fault
547. 00:22:30 because of our particular situation,
548. 00:22:32 but how do we take accountability for this?
549. 00:22:35 How do we take responsibility for this
550. 00:22:37 and fix it from our perspective
551. 00:22:39 instead of just projecting the blame onto the organization?
552. 00:22:42 'Cause there's a lot of big organizations,
553. 00:22:44 I think that offer a lot of really good potential jobs
554. 00:22:48 and a lot of really good potential careers.
555. 00:22:49 And that's completely fine if you want to be involved
556. 00:22:52 in that particular thing.
557. 00:22:52 And I just want to throw this out there
558. 00:22:54 because I don't want people to be forced to leave
559. 00:22:58 just because they are at a crossroads right now
560. 00:23:00 and they don't realize it.
561. 00:23:01 They just continue to put one foot in front of the other
562. 00:23:03 and pretty soon they're in the same position where,
563. 00:23:06 oh, I never really thought about this,
564. 00:23:07 but yeah, I've been frustrated for years.
565. 00:23:08 I got to get out of here.
566. 00:23:10 - Yeah, I always tell people that
567. 00:23:12 if you're frustrated in the position that you're in,
568. 00:23:14 you need to do one of two things.
569. 00:23:16 You either need to think about your job differently.
570. 00:23:20 Don't be one who's blaming
571. 00:23:22 being the, don't have the victim thinking.
572. 00:23:26 Get to work and do something and make it better
573. 00:23:29 or get yourself promoted out of that position.
574. 00:23:31 Do something, don't just sit tight.
575. 00:23:34 But if you're in a position where the organization
576. 00:23:39 will not let you get better and will not let you
577. 00:23:44 continue to grow, that's when you need to start
578. 00:23:47 looking at leaving.
579. 00:23:48 But if you're burnout because of your own doing
580. 00:23:51 and I would venture to say that most cases
581. 00:23:54 it's your own doing, then you need to do something about it.
582. 00:23:57 Don't put it on somebody else.
583. 00:23:59 Take responsibility for it.
584. 00:24:01 - Exactly, there's a lot of systemic problems
585. 00:24:03 that can be solved as soon as we recognize
586. 00:24:04 that this is actually a system
587. 00:24:06 and we can just change some of the inputs
588. 00:24:07 if we wanna get different outputs.
589. 00:24:09 And that was another thing that I wrote down here
590. 00:24:11 is that success is based on mental models and systems
591. 00:24:14 and he used the example of Charlie Munger.
592. 00:24:17 That's one of the things that I've really learned
593. 00:24:19 in my work with Asian efficiency
594. 00:24:20 is that we maybe don't realize it
595. 00:24:23 but everything around us is part of a independent
596. 00:24:27 and interdependent system.
597. 00:24:30 And so if you don't like the results
598. 00:24:31 that you're getting, tweak the system.
599. 00:24:34 And a lot of times even just small tweaks to the system
600. 00:24:37 can produce really monumental results and changes
601. 00:24:42 which is why this book in my opinion,
602. 00:24:45 I know we're gonna get to the ratings and stuff later
603. 00:24:47 but I really enjoyed it because there's a lot
604. 00:24:48 of little things in here, a lot of potential sources
605. 00:24:51 of revelation and inspiration where they can provide
606. 00:24:55 a blueprint for a small tweak to a system
607. 00:24:58 that can change a situation from bad to good.
608. 00:25:02 - Yeah, I like the whole system thinking
609. 00:25:06 but you know, we're tech nerds.
610. 00:25:08 (laughing)
611. 00:25:09 We like systems.
612. 00:25:10 And I'm a programmer, I'm always trying to put things
613. 00:25:12 into a system and make it work out for me.
614. 00:25:14 - Yep, maybe I think I suppose.
615. 00:25:18 - Any talks about how every business is made up
616. 00:25:21 of five interdependent systems
617. 00:25:23 which I thought this part was really valuable too.
618. 00:25:26 Number one, value creation.
619. 00:25:27 So what value are you giving to the world?
620. 00:25:29 Number two, marketing.
621. 00:25:31 And this is, we've talked about this before.
622. 00:25:33 I'm terrible at self promotion
623. 00:25:35 but this is a big part of any business system.
624. 00:25:39 If you wanna be successful, you have to market yourself.
625. 00:25:41 Number three, sales.
626. 00:25:42 This is another thing that people tend to shy away from
627. 00:25:44 but you have to ask for the sale, value delivery.
628. 00:25:48 So once you have made the sale
629. 00:25:51 and you've promised something to the customer,
630. 00:25:53 you have to be able to deliver that.
631. 00:25:55 And then fifth is finance.
632. 00:25:57 So these businesses being made up
633. 00:26:01 of these interdependent systems,
634. 00:26:03 this was maybe something that seems really straightforward
635. 00:26:07 and common sense.
636. 00:26:09 But when he laid him out in the book,
637. 00:26:11 he kinda showed how you go from one to the next.
638. 00:26:13 And this part I thought was really good.
639. 00:26:14 Some of the later stuff where he talks about systems,
640. 00:26:16 I thought he has a whole section devoted to systems
641. 00:26:19 at the end, I thought maybe that was,
642. 00:26:21 I wasn't as impressed with that.
643. 00:26:22 A lot of that stuff was pretty elementary, I thought.
644. 00:26:25 But this part at the beginning
645. 00:26:27 where he's literally deconstructing,
646. 00:26:29 this is what a business is.
647. 00:26:30 Every single business is gonna follow this specific formula.
648. 00:26:33 And then you can real quickly identify,
649. 00:26:36 oh yeah, my business, I'm stuck at this point.
650. 00:26:38 I haven't asked for the sale.
651. 00:26:41 - Yeah.
652. 00:26:42 - That I think is really valuable.
653. 00:26:44 - You're not gonna sell anything
654. 00:26:45 and don't ask him to buy.
655. 00:26:47 - Yep, exactly.
656. 00:26:48 - It's helpful because he really breaks down an MBA
657. 00:26:53 or business and how you do business.
658. 00:26:58 He breaks it down into these big categories
659. 00:27:01 and then goes through the category in,
660. 00:27:03 I don't know if I wanna say a high level or a deep level.
661. 00:27:07 It's almost both.
662. 00:27:09 It's kinda weird how he goes through it.
663. 00:27:10 But he starts off, and maybe I'm backing up here,
664. 00:27:15 maybe I'm just going crazy.
665. 00:27:19 He starts off with value creation.
666. 00:27:21 A business is going to have value that it's coming up with
667. 00:27:25 or deriving from nothing
668. 00:27:27 or out of some base materials.
669. 00:27:30 It's developing something new.
670. 00:27:32 And then he walks you through the process of,
671. 00:27:35 what does that value look like?
672. 00:27:37 How do you go about showing that value?
673. 00:27:39 How do you market it?
674. 00:27:40 How do you do the sales?
675. 00:27:42 How do you deliver it?
676. 00:27:43 He goes through the whole thing.
677. 00:27:45 And he's got a bunch of little details
678. 00:27:49 of how to technically pull those off.
679. 00:27:51 And to me, the section of this that really stood out,
680. 00:27:54 Mike, was the marketing section
681. 00:27:57 because so much of the online world
682. 00:28:00 and development world,
683. 00:28:02 how you go about promoting this stuff.
684. 00:28:05 And there's a good chance
685. 00:28:07 I'm not going to see that person in person.
686. 00:28:10 So the sales process has to be entirely digital
687. 00:28:14 and mostly automated.
688. 00:28:15 And it's kind of weird how that all has to work out.
689. 00:28:18 So if you look at the concepts
690. 00:28:21 and the methods that he gives you in here
691. 00:28:24 and try to overlay that on the digital world,
692. 00:28:26 it's kind of interesting how it can all play out
693. 00:28:28 because you start to see things like the freemium model
694. 00:28:32 that we're all familiar with now.
695. 00:28:33 This thing is free.
696. 00:28:35 If you want these special features,
697. 00:28:37 then you pay this subscription.
698. 00:28:38 Like the details of why that works is fascinating to me.
699. 00:28:43 'Cause he explains why that stuff works out.
700. 00:28:47 And I'm not going to dive into that.
701. 00:28:49 You'll have to read the book, sorry.
702. 00:28:51 (laughs)
703. 00:28:52 There's some interesting backstories behind a lot of that.
704. 00:28:57 And the more that I get into software development,
705. 00:29:00 the more I realize the freemium model works.
706. 00:29:02 And here's something, you know,
707. 00:29:04 everybody seems to talk about millennials
708. 00:29:06 and make fun of them lately.
709. 00:29:07 But it's kind of the in thing to do.
710. 00:29:10 But technically we are one or how do my grandfather say that?
711. 00:29:14 I are one.
712. 00:29:15 So it's interesting because we really just don't like,
713. 00:29:20 we don't like people pushing opinions on us.
714. 00:29:23 We don't like people telling us how to act
715. 00:29:24 or how to do things.
716. 00:29:26 And a lot of marketing is trying to help us
717. 00:29:31 and force us to see or do something we may not want to do.
718. 00:29:34 Like there's so much of that
719. 00:29:35 trying to trick us into doing things.
720. 00:29:37 So the radar that goes off of,
721. 00:29:39 "Don't make me buy that," comes out a lot for me.
722. 00:29:43 And a lot of the marketing methods that he spells out,
723. 00:29:46 some of them I'm like, "You do that
724. 00:29:49 and I'm never buying it from you."
725. 00:29:51 (laughs)
726. 00:29:52 There is some of that.
727. 00:29:53 But the concept of, "Give me something free
728. 00:29:56 and then let me test it.
729. 00:29:57 Let me dip my toe in the water."
730. 00:29:59 That one really resonated with me.
731. 00:30:00 That's why I wrote down "Fremium Model" here.
732. 00:30:02 'Cause it's something that I find
733. 00:30:06 that works really well in the tech world.
734. 00:30:08 And I think that might be because so many people
735. 00:30:10 are against the "Ram it Down My Throat" type of marketing.
736. 00:30:15 - Yeah, and I think it's a great example
737. 00:30:17 of one of the things that he says in there,
738. 00:30:19 that marketing is not selling.
739. 00:30:21 Marketing is getting noticed.
740. 00:30:22 Sales is closing the deal.
741. 00:30:24 And a lot of people can't differentiate those two
742. 00:30:26 when they're talking about the "Fremium Model"
743. 00:30:28 because they see, "Well, I'm getting the app for free.
744. 00:30:31 So how am I going to make any money?
745. 00:30:33 How am I gonna monetize?"
746. 00:30:34 And to be fair, some companies
747. 00:30:36 that embrace the "Fremium Model",
748. 00:30:38 they don't worry about that.
749. 00:30:39 They don't even think about it.
750. 00:30:40 They just try to acquire as many customers as they can
751. 00:30:43 because that extends their runway from a startup perspective.
752. 00:30:46 And then they figure out,
753. 00:30:48 they decide that they're gonna figure out
754. 00:30:50 the money thing later.
755. 00:30:51 But, and that's obviously not a great approach either.
756. 00:30:56 But there's a lot of really great marketing ideas in here.
757. 00:31:01 Not just the "Fremium Model",
758. 00:31:03 but also like the Maslow's "High-Rarchy of Needs",
759. 00:31:05 where he talks about number one, physiology, number two,
760. 00:31:08 safety, three, belongingness, and love,
761. 00:31:10 for esteem, five, self-actualization.
762. 00:31:12 And the idea here is that you're gonna move down this,
763. 00:31:16 this, or up this pyramid, I guess,
764. 00:31:21 where you're gonna satisfy a level one needs,
765. 00:31:23 and then you're gonna go to level two needs,
766. 00:31:24 and you're gonna go to level three needs.
767. 00:31:26 But really when it comes to sales
768. 00:31:28 and whatever you're trying to sell,
769. 00:31:30 like you are meeting a need at some specific level,
770. 00:31:33 and some people don't realize that,
771. 00:31:35 well, because we're not worried about,
772. 00:31:38 getting eaten by mammoths and stuff like that,
773. 00:31:41 that we don't have to worry about those needs,
774. 00:31:43 but the needs just change.
775. 00:31:44 And so you have to recognize that,
776. 00:31:46 whether you interpret it the way the Maslow did,
777. 00:31:49 or the other one that I really liked
778. 00:31:50 is the ERG model that he talks about in here.
779. 00:31:52 And we've mentioned this,
780. 00:31:53 I think on the previous episode,
781. 00:31:55 a little bit where you've got existence.
782. 00:31:57 So first of all, I have to make sure that I'm going to survive.
783. 00:32:00 And then from there, you want to improve your relationships.
784. 00:32:02 You wanna make sure that you are in good social standing
785. 00:32:05 with your friends, or your spouse, whatever.
786. 00:32:09 I wanna make sure those relationships are good.
787. 00:32:10 And then finally, the top level, the G, that's the growth,
788. 00:32:13 and that's where you wanna invest in yourself.
789. 00:32:17 And a lot of this stuff is just,
790. 00:32:19 it's things that I've heard before,
791. 00:32:22 but thinking about them from a marketing
792. 00:32:25 and business perspective was a little bit different for me.
793. 00:32:29 I also really liked the iteration model
794. 00:32:31 that he talked about, the wigwam,
795. 00:32:33 I think is what he calls it,
796. 00:32:36 where you watch, ideate, guess,
797. 00:32:39 and then ask which one, and then act, and then measure.
798. 00:32:43 There's a lot of little things like this,
799. 00:32:44 which could just, if you tried just one of them,
800. 00:32:48 it would change how you're doing your marketing
801. 00:32:51 and your sales, and it could be the thing
802. 00:32:53 that kind of pushes you over,
803. 00:32:54 'cause you're like you were talking about,
804. 00:32:55 your online sales process has to be,
805. 00:32:58 for the most part, completely automated.
806. 00:33:00 So a lot of times, the system isn't working,
807. 00:33:03 and you're not getting the results,
808. 00:33:04 and if you don't deconstruct it,
809. 00:33:06 and you don't have the blueprints like this,
810. 00:33:07 to match up what you're doing with what's working
811. 00:33:11 and what's not, you can kind of guess,
812. 00:33:13 is this the thing that's broken?
813. 00:33:15 Nope, okay, well, let's try something else.
814. 00:33:17 But I think that the way that he presents
815. 00:33:19 these different models and shows you the questions to ask
816. 00:33:22 that it's really easy to pinpoint some of those things.
817. 00:33:25 - Did you catch this story about the hero's journey?
818. 00:33:29 - Yeah, and this is something that
819. 00:33:32 Tan has been preaching to me for a while
820. 00:33:35 about this hero's journey, and about,
821. 00:33:37 we wanna tell the hero's journey,
822. 00:33:39 and all of our content, stuff like that.
823. 00:33:41 - Right. - And I never really got
824. 00:33:43 the complete picture of it,
825. 00:33:45 but when he explained it in the book,
826. 00:33:48 he kind of broke it down into a couple different steps,
827. 00:33:51 which again, this is the kind of thing
828. 00:33:53 that really crystallized it for me.
829. 00:33:55 So number one, you introduce the hero.
830. 00:33:58 Number two, the hero has a call to adventure,
831. 00:34:02 and this could be your potential customer,
832. 00:34:04 where you're introducing them as the hero,
833. 00:34:06 and then they've got this call to adventure
834. 00:34:08 where they wanna do this thing,
835. 00:34:09 and then the third part of this is there's a trial,
836. 00:34:11 so there's gonna be some sort of hardship
837. 00:34:14 that they're gonna have to go through,
838. 00:34:15 and then number four is the success,
839. 00:34:17 so you wanna paint this picture of your customer,
840. 00:34:20 for example, if they buy your product,
841. 00:34:22 they're going to have victory and overcome this trial
842. 00:34:25 that they're facing right now.
843. 00:34:26 Number five, you've got the riches,
844. 00:34:28 you've got the reward, you've got the promise of more time,
845. 00:34:32 or whatever, fill in the blank with whatever you're trying
846. 00:34:36 to sell, and then number six, the return to normal life.
847. 00:34:39 So you've gone away, you've gone through this quest,
848. 00:34:42 this hero's journey, you've emerged victorious,
849. 00:34:44 now you return to normal life,
850. 00:34:45 and you're just like anybody else.
851. 00:34:47 That I think is a really important piece,
852. 00:34:49 because a lot of times you can think about,
853. 00:34:52 well yeah, that's great, that worked for that person,
854. 00:34:54 but it'll never work for me,
855. 00:34:56 and that's because you don't finish this hero's journey,
856. 00:34:59 you have to really paint the picture
857. 00:35:01 of the hero's journey of an individual
858. 00:35:03 who is not necessarily special,
859. 00:35:05 but they have this particular problem,
860. 00:35:06 and then show how they overcame this particular problem,
861. 00:35:09 show the benefit of the success,
862. 00:35:11 the reward that they got for actually completing this thing,
863. 00:35:15 and then now we've conquered this thing,
864. 00:35:17 we've slain the dragon, we return to normal life,
865. 00:35:19 and we teach other people how to do the exact same thing.
866. 00:35:23 - Wow, you spelled that out way more than I was gonna
867. 00:35:25 (laughs)
868. 00:35:26 go into, I didn't even go into the whole steps thing,
869. 00:35:30 I was just imagining, he spells out the whole hero's thing,
870. 00:35:33 like you did very well there,
871. 00:35:35 and the only thing I could think of was Frodo,
872. 00:35:38 and taking Lord of the Rings going through the whole thing,
873. 00:35:43 and I was trying to place that type of story
874. 00:35:47 into marketing, and it was just a weird story
875. 00:35:52 that I was playing out on my head anyway,
876. 00:35:54 it was something that was enlightening to me
877. 00:35:57 to see so many times we see marketing things
878. 00:36:01 that are just rammed down our throat,
879. 00:36:03 people are using scent, and they're using
880. 00:36:05 all kinds of these word plays in order to get you
881. 00:36:07 to think a certain way, like stuff like that
882. 00:36:09 kinda drives me crazy, but this one really struck me
883. 00:36:13 because it's one that I tend to resonate with,
884. 00:36:15 I mean think about like Amazon reviews,
885. 00:36:18 you look for the people who say something along the lines
886. 00:36:21 of my life was horrible, I found this
887. 00:36:24 and now everything's good again,
888. 00:36:25 like that's some very, very dumb down version of it,
889. 00:36:28 but that's something that I find interesting
890. 00:36:31 because when I'm looking at reviews,
891. 00:36:33 or if I'm considering a product of some sort
892. 00:36:38 or a service that I want to contribute to,
893. 00:36:41 if I'm looking at those, I tend to trust
894. 00:36:44 the people who have dealt with something negative
895. 00:36:47 and overcame it, and using that product or service
896. 00:36:51 is what helped them do that.
897. 00:36:53 Frodo makes it over the mountain, that type of thing,
898. 00:36:57 and whenever I think about some of the materials
899. 00:37:01 and the things that I put together to sell things,
900. 00:37:04 it made me wonder, do I ever do this?
901. 00:37:07 Like that's what helps me buy,
902. 00:37:09 why wouldn't I use that to sell?
903. 00:37:11 So it was enlightening to me to think through
904. 00:37:14 my current marketing efforts,
905. 00:37:15 I'm looking at the freemium model,
906. 00:37:17 looking at this hero's journey,
907. 00:37:19 how can that help me write my materials in the future?
908. 00:37:22 - Yeah, exactly, and if you take this approach
909. 00:37:24 and you try to not only tell a hero's journey,
910. 00:37:28 but develop the hero's journey
911. 00:37:30 with the customers that you're working with,
912. 00:37:32 then that can really contribute
913. 00:37:34 to a really strong sense of purpose
914. 00:37:37 for the work that you're doing.
915. 00:37:39 I've discovered this with Asian efficiency
916. 00:37:40 where when we developed our email product,
917. 00:37:43 escape your email, we've talked about the development process
918. 00:37:47 and how we interviewed people about their specific problems,
919. 00:37:50 and then we developed specific solutions for them,
920. 00:37:52 brought it back to them, said,
921. 00:37:53 "Here, try this, let us know if it works or not."
922. 00:37:56 But then once they do and they realize that it does work,
923. 00:37:59 then they become raving fans,
924. 00:38:01 and those are the type of people that you see
925. 00:38:04 on the website with the testimonials,
926. 00:38:07 and those kind of things really aren't that hard
927. 00:38:10 to get, all you have to do is focus on this hero's journey
928. 00:38:13 and focus on the actual story.
929. 00:38:15 But when you hear customers say,
930. 00:38:18 "Yeah, I did what you told me to do,"
931. 00:38:19 and it completely changed my life,
932. 00:38:21 and now I've got so much more time to spend with my family
933. 00:38:24 and don't struggle with email.
934. 00:38:26 I went from dealing with it for six hours a day
935. 00:38:28 to an hour a day, that type of stuff is real,
936. 00:38:31 and when you can attach the story
937. 00:38:34 in the hero's journey to some of those people,
938. 00:38:37 for me personally, and we've talked about core values
939. 00:38:39 and things like that, that's one of the things
940. 00:38:41 that connects me to my work at Asian efficiency,
941. 00:38:43 is I really enjoy the idea of pulling other people up.
942. 00:38:46 And if you focus on the hero's journey,
943. 00:38:48 you can attach to those stories,
944. 00:38:50 and it can kind of give you increased motivation
945. 00:38:53 and increased purpose, it can become the why
946. 00:38:56 behind all of the things that you do,
947. 00:38:58 and I think that's really important.
948. 00:39:00 - I tell people this all the time,
949. 00:39:01 if you're looking for your mission in life,
950. 00:39:04 find a way to help people.
951. 00:39:05 - Exactly.
952. 00:39:06 - If you can figure out where,
953. 00:39:09 and to me, if you have a product or a business,
954. 00:39:11 it needs to solve a need, like something negative
955. 00:39:15 or a problem that people may not know needs solved,
956. 00:39:20 or it helps enable something that currently wasn't possible.
957. 00:39:23 Like there's always something that's being overcome,
958. 00:39:26 a way to help people either understand, accomplish more,
959. 00:39:30 do more, not have a problem,
960. 00:39:32 like you can always help people in some way.
961. 00:39:35 If you can find a way to help people,
962. 00:39:37 that's to me what brings most people,
963. 00:39:40 if you think about how people find joy in life,
964. 00:39:43 you talk to folks who are near the end of their life,
965. 00:39:46 if you summarize everything that they tell you
966. 00:39:49 and what brings them joy in life,
967. 00:39:51 it usually comes down to how they have helped
968. 00:39:55 or had relationships with other people.
969. 00:39:57 - Yep, but I guess what I'm saying is that
970. 00:40:01 don't just look to help people,
971. 00:40:03 you know, if you're using the analogy of like a role-playing game,
972. 00:40:07 these are not non-playable characters
973. 00:40:09 that we are talking about here
974. 00:40:11 where you're trying to help them
975. 00:40:12 literally focus on helping the customers that you have
976. 00:40:16 become the hero.
977. 00:40:18 Put them in the place of utmost importance
978. 00:40:21 and help them solve their problem,
979. 00:40:22 and then this kind of stuff,
980. 00:40:24 I believe will take care of itself.
981. 00:40:26 - That's like I tell other folks
982. 00:40:27 who are building plug-ins and stuff.
983. 00:40:29 So if you can find a way to help other people make money,
984. 00:40:31 you can make a lot of money at it.
985. 00:40:33 (laughs)
986. 00:40:34 If you help other people do the thing,
987. 00:40:35 that they wanna do, yeah, you're better off.
988. 00:40:38 Next thing you got here, three universal currencies.
989. 00:40:41 - Yeah, this actually leads into,
990. 00:40:44 ties together beautifully because the hero's journey,
991. 00:40:47 the problem that you're trying to solve for people,
992. 00:40:49 I would argue is always going to be to try to improve
993. 00:40:53 the amount of one of these three universal currencies.
994. 00:40:56 So number one is resources,
995. 00:40:58 and that's probably what most people think of
996. 00:41:00 when they think of currencies,
997. 00:41:01 how much money do you have.
998. 00:41:03 Number two is time,
999. 00:41:05 and this one I think is undervalued by a lot of people.
1000. 00:41:09 And then number three is flexibility.
1001. 00:41:12 Those three things I believe you need to have a balance of,
1002. 00:41:16 this was a big reason why I took the job with Asian efficiency,
1003. 00:41:21 is that they offered me the time and the flexibility
1004. 00:41:25 so that I could reframe my current schedule,
1005. 00:41:28 and I could, if I wanted to, take an afternoon off
1006. 00:41:30 and go to the Children's Museum or go on a field trip
1007. 00:41:34 with my family because we homeschool our four boys.
1008. 00:41:38 But I think that it's a mistake to focus on
1009. 00:41:41 just one of these things.
1010. 00:41:42 I think you do need to make sure
1011. 00:41:44 that you have a healthy balance here
1012. 00:41:46 between the different things,
1013. 00:41:47 the resources, the time, and the flexibility.
1014. 00:41:49 And depending on your specific situation,
1015. 00:41:51 you're probably going to value one of these higher
1016. 00:41:54 than the others,
1017. 00:41:55 but you can have all the money or all the resources
1018. 00:41:58 in the world if you don't have the time and the flexibility,
1019. 00:42:00 you're not going to be happy.
1020. 00:42:02 You can have the time and the flexibility.
1021. 00:42:04 You can not have a job and have all the time in the world.
1022. 00:42:08 But if you don't have money,
1023. 00:42:09 you're not going to attract a spouse and start a family
1024. 00:42:12 because you need to have all three of these things.
1025. 00:42:16 And I think, again, this is one of those things
1026. 00:42:18 where it's just a good reminder.
1027. 00:42:20 When I read this, I was like,
1028. 00:42:21 oh yeah, I need to make sure that all three of these accounts,
1029. 00:42:24 so to speak, are full.
1030. 00:42:27 And if I find myself really focusing
1031. 00:42:30 on one particular season,
1032. 00:42:32 taking a lot of side jobs and things like that
1033. 00:42:34 'cause I want to save up the money
1034. 00:42:35 to finish my office, for example,
1035. 00:42:39 I need to make sure that I'm doing that in a way
1036. 00:42:41 where I'm not neglecting the time and the flexibility,
1037. 00:42:44 which is the reason why I got the job that I have now
1038. 00:42:48 in the first place.
1039. 00:42:49 I have to remember the why behind all the things, basically.
1040. 00:42:54 - All the things, all the great things.
1041. 00:42:58 - I was excited when I saw that you put Kaizen down here.
1042. 00:43:01 So Kaizen,
1043. 00:43:04 for people who don't know that, Mike,
1044. 00:43:08 I know it immediately jumped off the page at me,
1045. 00:43:11 so you want to explain what that is before--
1046. 00:43:14 - Yeah, Kaizen is actually another one
1047. 00:43:17 of the Asian Efficiency Core values.
1048. 00:43:19 And the basic-- - What is with
1049. 00:43:21 the Asian Efficiency, like all over this stuff?
1050. 00:43:24 - Yeah, I don't know, sorry, I guess.
1051. 00:43:28 But Kaizen is basically consistent improvement
1052. 00:43:31 and it comes from the Toyota development,
1053. 00:43:35 well not development model, I guess,
1054. 00:43:37 but production model,
1055. 00:43:39 where they famously, several years ago,
1056. 00:43:43 gave anybody on the assembly line the ability
1057. 00:43:46 to stop the assembly line for any reason and fix something.
1058. 00:43:51 Which, if you think about it,
1059. 00:43:52 that's a pretty big responsibility
1060. 00:43:54 'cause you have hundreds of, not thousands of people
1061. 00:43:57 who are all doing their job,
1062. 00:43:59 but when the whole assembly line stops,
1063. 00:44:00 that means all of those people cannot do their jobs.
1064. 00:44:04 They are not building the cars anymore
1065. 00:44:06 and they are not able to sell the cars and make money.
1066. 00:44:09 So this was a really radical idea back in the day,
1067. 00:44:12 but what they did is they gave any employee the ability
1068. 00:44:14 to pull the yellow cord and stop the assembly line.
1069. 00:44:17 And when that happened, the managers would come over
1070. 00:44:20 and they'd say, "What did you see?
1071. 00:44:21 "Basically what's out of place?
1072. 00:44:22 "What do we need to fix?"
1073. 00:44:23 And then the employee would mention that,
1074. 00:44:25 "Oh, I saw this thing and we need to make sure
1075. 00:44:27 "that this is right and they would always make sure
1076. 00:44:29 "that it was right."
1077. 00:44:30 And they gave any employee the ability to do that
1078. 00:44:32 whenever they wanted to.
1079. 00:44:34 That's one of the things, again,
1080. 00:44:36 I mentioned Asian efficiency, one of our core values.
1081. 00:44:39 One of the things I really like about working
1082. 00:44:40 with Asian deficiency is you can develop all these systems.
1083. 00:44:44 You can have all of this stuff in place.
1084. 00:44:46 And then you can just get head down, focusing on,
1085. 00:44:50 "Well, we gotta do things according to the system."
1086. 00:44:52 But you need to develop the ability to look at things
1087. 00:44:56 and say, "How can I make incremental improvements?
1088. 00:44:59 "How can I make this even better?"
1089. 00:45:01 And so one of the things that we do is we have,
1090. 00:45:04 as part of our scrum board, every single sprint,
1091. 00:45:07 we have an issue which everybody tracks time against
1092. 00:45:10 called Kaizen.
1093. 00:45:11 And it's basically just, you're gonna,
1094. 00:45:13 you put down on the issue, you comment on the issue,
1095. 00:45:15 what specific system that you are looking to improve
1096. 00:45:19 and then you just go and you make fixes
1097. 00:45:21 and you make changes to the currently existing systems.
1098. 00:45:24 And everybody does this for a couple hours a week
1099. 00:45:26 and then everybody just logs their changes there.
1100. 00:45:29 That type of stuff really makes a big difference
1101. 00:45:32 in the long run and really just need to be careful
1102. 00:45:36 that you don't just get stuck in,
1103. 00:45:38 okay, this is the way things are.
1104. 00:45:41 I really, really believe in the idea of Kaizen,
1105. 00:45:44 not just at a professional level,
1106. 00:45:45 but even on a personal level.
1107. 00:45:47 Like my wife and I have our family meetings on Sunday nights
1108. 00:45:50 and we talk about the different things
1109. 00:45:52 and we talk about what's working
1110. 00:45:53 and what's not working.
1111. 00:45:54 If you never take the time to ask like,
1112. 00:45:56 what is not working, you will never figure out
1113. 00:45:58 what is it working.
1114. 00:46:00 You'll just continue to bang your head against the wall
1115. 00:46:02 and wonder why things aren't working.
1116. 00:46:04 So the whole idea of Kaizen I think can make,
1117. 00:46:06 can make your entire life easier.
1118. 00:46:08 - So two things that jumped out whenever I saw Kaizen.
1119. 00:46:12 One, and they're both development related, of course.
1120. 00:46:16 One is what we refer to as continuous development
1121. 00:46:21 or continuous improvement, I guess is another way to say it.
1122. 00:46:24 Essentially, you're always releasing new fixes.
1123. 00:46:29 So you don't do these massive,
1124. 00:46:32 I'm gonna put a release together, turn it loose
1125. 00:46:34 and then everybody downloads it in the way you go.
1126. 00:46:37 The concept is that if I find something small,
1127. 00:46:40 I tweaked and cleaned up the code, I push it right now
1128. 00:46:44 and you're just always pushing something new.
1129. 00:46:47 It could be multiple times a day that that happens.
1130. 00:46:50 Sometimes some programs you get an update on them
1131. 00:46:53 every three or four weeks, some cases,
1132. 00:46:56 it's every three or four years.
1133. 00:46:57 But in some of the more advanced systems in today's world,
1134. 00:47:01 they're every three or four hours, if that.
1135. 00:47:05 Sometimes it's three or four times an hour.
1136. 00:47:08 The other concept that this makes me think of
1137. 00:47:11 is what we refer to as complaint driven development.
1138. 00:47:15 Effectively, you take the thing that has the most
1139. 00:47:20 complaints against it and that's what you work on.
1140. 00:47:26 If I've got a thousand clients or a thousand customers
1141. 00:47:29 on a specific set of software that I've written
1142. 00:47:31 and 400 of them are complaining about the same thing,
1143. 00:47:35 I should probably go do something about it.
1144. 00:47:37 But if I have four complaining about something,
1145. 00:47:40 they may be really loud and be very vocal
1146. 00:47:42 and give me a whole bunch of feedback,
1147. 00:47:46 but it's only four out of a thousand.
1148. 00:47:48 I'm not gonna touch that.
1149. 00:47:50 If it's 50%, then I'm gonna jump all over it.
1150. 00:47:53 Now, those are really high numbers.
1151. 00:47:54 If you get 50% of the people complaining, something's off.
1152. 00:47:58 The whole thing went down.
1153. 00:47:58 Amazon broke for the day.
1154. 00:48:00 Something like that happened, but that's the concept.
1155. 00:48:03 And the reason I bring those two up is because
1156. 00:48:05 it's easy to say, I'm gonna work on this
1157. 00:48:09 and by this date, I'm gonna say I'm better at it
1158. 00:48:13 as opposed to this is the thing I'm gonna work on right now.
1159. 00:48:17 This is the thing that needs stopped
1160. 00:48:18 and put in place right now in order to continually
1161. 00:48:21 get it better.
1162. 00:48:22 And I like those concepts at the same time.
1163. 00:48:26 I feel like you have to be careful with some of this.
1164. 00:48:29 It's too easy.
1165. 00:48:30 Like, so much of this book is talking about systems
1166. 00:48:32 and this is how you do this and this is how you do that.
1167. 00:48:33 And this is how it gets better.
1168. 00:48:35 And there's a lot of these things that just end up
1169. 00:48:38 being a lot and a lot and a lot.
1170. 00:48:40 The concern I have with that is a lot of the relational
1171. 00:48:43 side comes up short, I guess.
1172. 00:48:47 And the thing that he calls out that made me stop
1173. 00:48:51 and think about it was this concept of an assistant buyer.
1174. 00:48:55 And effectively what it is is you come alongside somebody
1175. 00:48:59 and explain the product, show the details,
1176. 00:49:01 explain all of the difficulties that can come
1177. 00:49:06 from using maybe a competitor product.
1178. 00:49:10 I don't know what it is, but you get the concept.
1179. 00:49:13 You're coming alongside the person who's potentially a buyer
1180. 00:49:16 and helping them make that decision.
1181. 00:49:19 And I struggle with figuring out how to do that online.
1182. 00:49:23 I'm not gonna see these people.
1183. 00:49:24 In most cases, I will never know their first name.
1184. 00:49:27 So how do you come alongside somebody
1185. 00:49:31 and walk through the questions and help them understand
1186. 00:49:34 it well enough so that they can make that purchase decision?
1187. 00:49:38 I mean, from a technical standpoint,
1188. 00:49:39 like, okay, build a webpage and here's an FAQ
1189. 00:49:42 and all this stuff.
1190. 00:49:42 But to me, those are all these cold
1191. 00:49:44 and they don't really show the personal side of it.
1192. 00:49:48 And it's something I struggle with.
1193. 00:49:51 I would like to sit down and go through it with everybody.
1194. 00:49:53 I feel like I could sell a lot of things
1195. 00:49:55 if I could just sit down on a phone
1196. 00:49:56 and go through things with people.
1197. 00:49:58 But I can't do that online.
1198. 00:50:01 I'm never gonna get that level of detail
1199. 00:50:04 and that level of personalization
1200. 00:50:07 with an online product like that.
1201. 00:50:08 - Yeah, that makes sense.
1202. 00:50:11 I think there's two parts to this.
1203. 00:50:13 So first, I think what you're talking about
1204. 00:50:15 is the education-based selling,
1205. 00:50:16 where you make the customer more informed
1206. 00:50:19 so that what you are offering is of higher value.
1207. 00:50:23 And I think along with that,
1208. 00:50:26 very important piece is later on on page 180,
1209. 00:50:30 he says, "Always focus the majority of your efforts
1210. 00:50:33 on serving your ideal customers."
1211. 00:50:35 Customers buy early,
1212. 00:50:36 buy often spend the most spread the word
1213. 00:50:37 and are willing to pay a premium for the value you provide.
1214. 00:50:40 The more ideal customers you can attract,
1215. 00:50:42 the better your business.
1216. 00:50:43 And so the way I interpreted this was
1217. 00:50:47 when it comes to education-based selling
1218. 00:50:49 and creating the value of the thing
1219. 00:50:51 that you are trying to sell.
1220. 00:50:53 Be willing to not be the right solution for people.
1221. 00:50:58 Don't try to be everything to everyone
1222. 00:51:01 and just identify who your ideal customer is
1223. 00:51:05 and then serve them to the very best of your ability.
1224. 00:51:08 And if you can do that,
1225. 00:51:09 then you can attract more ideal customers like that
1226. 00:51:13 and you don't have to deal with,
1227. 00:51:15 like you were saying,
1228. 00:51:16 the people who are complaining about something
1229. 00:51:17 and so you're just responding to the things
1230. 00:51:19 that they're complaining about,
1231. 00:51:21 even though those people maybe
1232. 00:51:22 are never gonna buy anything from you again.
1233. 00:51:24 I mean, we see that with people at Asian efficiency,
1234. 00:51:26 they complain about the content on our blog
1235. 00:51:29 and in the podcast,
1236. 00:51:30 but these are the people who never buy anything.
1237. 00:51:32 And for every one of those,
1238. 00:51:34 there's 10, 100 maybe people who are saying,
1239. 00:51:37 "Oh my gosh, this stuff is amazing.
1240. 00:51:38 "It's really, really good."
1241. 00:51:40 I really have applied this principle
1242. 00:51:42 that you talked about on the podcast
1243. 00:51:44 and it really changed things for me.
1244. 00:51:45 And then I went ahead and I bought rituals or whatever.
1245. 00:51:48 So don't worry about trying to make everybody happy
1246. 00:51:52 'cause you'll never be able to do that.
1247. 00:51:55 Yeah, don't do that.
1248. 00:51:56 (laughs)
1249. 00:51:57 I say it all the time, wait three weeks
1250. 00:51:59 before you trust any feedback that you get on it
1251. 00:52:02 unless it's positive, then I'm all over it.
1252. 00:52:04 But if I release a new thing,
1253. 00:52:06 I'm gonna get a bunch of people mad at me
1254. 00:52:08 whenever it first comes out.
1255. 00:52:09 I wait three weeks,
1256. 00:52:10 see if they're still complaining about it.
1257. 00:52:12 (laughs)
1258. 00:52:13 And then I'll do something.
1259. 00:52:14 - Yeah, one other thing I wanna add here,
1260. 00:52:17 going back to the Kaizen thing
1261. 00:52:19 and I think this also applies to the value of the product
1262. 00:52:22 that you're throwing out there
1263. 00:52:23 and serving your ideal customer,
1264. 00:52:25 there was a really good quote here by Alan Weiss.
1265. 00:52:27 He says, "Improve by 1% a day
1266. 00:52:28 "and in just 70 days, your twice is good."
1267. 00:52:31 Most people I think don't realize that the power,
1268. 00:52:35 the compound effect that kicks in
1269. 00:52:38 when you make those small incremental improvements.
1270. 00:52:41 And it doesn't just have to be improvements
1271. 00:52:43 to your systems and how you're doing things
1272. 00:52:45 which is kind of the approach
1273. 00:52:46 that we take at Asian efficiency,
1274. 00:52:47 bringing this back to how do you become
1275. 00:52:49 an assistant buyer when selling online?
1276. 00:52:51 How do you do education based selling?
1277. 00:52:54 - It could literally just be making the product
1278. 00:52:56 that you are selling 1% better consistently.
1279. 00:53:01 And then pretty soon you've got a really awesome product
1280. 00:53:04 which isn't gonna be for everybody
1281. 00:53:06 but for the people that it's appropriate for,
1282. 00:53:08 it's gonna be the exact thing that they need
1283. 00:53:10 and they are going to become those raving fans.
1284. 00:53:13 - Okay, I can't recall.
1285. 00:53:16 You've got reference levels on here.
1286. 00:53:18 I can't place what that is.
1287. 00:53:19 - Sure, reference levels,
1288. 00:53:23 there's a quote he put in there
1289. 00:53:25 which I think that this is really what Bookworm is all about.
1290. 00:53:29 He says, "Good books, magazines, blogs, documentaries,
1291. 00:53:32 "even competitors are valuable
1292. 00:53:34 "if they violate our expectations about what's possible."
1293. 00:53:38 When you discover that other people
1294. 00:53:40 are actually doing something,
1295. 00:53:41 you previously considered unrealistic or impossible,
1296. 00:53:44 it changes your reference levels in a very useful way.
1297. 00:53:48 And I think that just about every person
1298. 00:53:51 who is listening to this podcast
1299. 00:53:53 probably has some reference levels
1300. 00:53:55 which they need to be violated.
1301. 00:53:58 They need to have that paradigm shifted.
1302. 00:54:00 They need to see things bigger
1303. 00:54:02 and they have to have a different picture painted
1304. 00:54:04 of what is actually possible.
1305. 00:54:06 And that's the kind of thing
1306. 00:54:07 that reading all of these books really helps with.
1307. 00:54:11 This one in particular,
1308. 00:54:12 a lot of different business systems where it's like,
1309. 00:54:14 "Oh, we don't really have to struggle with things like this.
1310. 00:54:16 "There is a better way to do this."
1311. 00:54:19 The next book which we're gonna talk about in a little bit
1312. 00:54:22 and we've got a special guest is gonna be joining us
1313. 00:54:24 for that one, the 10X Rule by Grant Cardone.
1314. 00:54:27 That one in particular,
1315. 00:54:28 his whole mission in that book
1316. 00:54:31 is to just destroy and annihilate your expectations
1317. 00:54:34 of what you think is possible.
1318. 00:54:36 And I can say in my own life,
1319. 00:54:39 I've talked about the process of writing the book
1320. 00:54:41 and how that led to my work with Asian efficiency.
1321. 00:54:43 And all of these things now where it's like,
1322. 00:54:46 "Why would anybody listen to me?
1323. 00:54:48 "Why would anyone care about my perspective on this stuff?"
1324. 00:54:51 It's because my reference levels have been pushed.
1325. 00:54:55 They've been adjusted and the boundaries have been pushed.
1326. 00:54:58 I've been able to push those things
1327. 00:54:59 because I can take the course, I can read the book,
1328. 00:55:02 I can listen to the podcast,
1329. 00:55:04 I can see other people who are going through
1330. 00:55:05 this hero's journey and I can say,
1331. 00:55:08 "Well, if they did it, if it worked for them,
1332. 00:55:10 "then maybe that'll work for me too."
1333. 00:55:11 And just stepping out there and doing it,
1334. 00:55:14 I think that that's really what this is all about.
1335. 00:55:17 It's helping people escape their definition of status quo
1336. 00:55:22 or their definition of normal
1337. 00:55:24 and to just put themselves out there and try something.
1338. 00:55:27 Try something that you think maybe isn't possible.
1339. 00:55:30 Get a bigger vision, get a bigger picture
1340. 00:55:33 about what's possible and then just step out there
1341. 00:55:35 and see what happens because a lot of times
1342. 00:55:38 just the energy and the action that you take,
1343. 00:55:41 that translates into motion, that produces results
1344. 00:55:44 that are a lot bigger than you could even possibly imagine.
1345. 00:55:46 I didn't envision myself in this position
1346. 00:55:50 that I am in right now when I decided to get up
1347. 00:55:54 and start writing every day before work,
1348. 00:55:57 but one thing leads to another and then before long,
1349. 00:56:00 you've got a much better version of things
1350. 00:56:04 than you could have possibly projected
1351. 00:56:08 before you had gotten a bigger canvas
1352. 00:56:10 to work with, if that makes sense.
1353. 00:56:11 I think it's fun to destroy expectations
1354. 00:56:14 when it comes to glass ceilings.
1355. 00:56:16 Okay, I think I can accomplish this.
1356. 00:56:21 Well, this person did something that maybe indicates
1357. 00:56:25 that you could triple that.
1358. 00:56:27 (laughs)
1359. 00:56:27 It's kind of fun to see what people do
1360. 00:56:30 if you have a way to show that
1361. 00:56:33 where they think their maximum ability is
1362. 00:56:37 is actually much higher.
1363. 00:56:39 What's the thing with the marathon runners?
1364. 00:56:42 Whenever they feel like they are exhausted
1365. 00:56:44 and they can't go any further, they've actually used,
1366. 00:56:48 I think, what is it, 40% of their energy?
1367. 00:56:50 They still have 60% left in the tank or something like that.
1368. 00:56:54 I'm not a marathoner, couldn't tell you.
1369. 00:56:56 Not planning to do that.
1370. 00:56:58 Not a long distance runner, not for me.
1371. 00:57:00 But the concept is that typically,
1372. 00:57:04 when it comes to our bodies,
1373. 00:57:06 when we feel like we can't do anymore,
1374. 00:57:08 that number is actually at 40%.
1375. 00:57:10 We're not actually at the cap.
1376. 00:57:12 We're not even halfway there. (laughs)
1377. 00:57:15 So if you can help people see that in so many arenas,
1378. 00:57:19 that you start to open up a lot of doors for people.
1379. 00:57:23 And it starts to help people see that,
1380. 00:57:26 "Yes, I can do more.
1381. 00:57:27 "Maybe I'm not gonna procrastinate as much anymore on this.
1382. 00:57:29 "I'm gonna keep moving.
1383. 00:57:30 "I'm gonna keep at it.
1384. 00:57:32 "And I can do more than what I think I can currently."
1385. 00:57:35 I think this steps into your next point here,
1386. 00:57:37 the Acresia versus procrastination,
1387. 00:57:40 is if I define, most people don't know,
1388. 00:57:43 what is Acresia?
1389. 00:57:44 No, I'm not a crazy one.
1390. 00:57:46 Not a lot.
1391. 00:57:47 Well, okay, no comment there.
1392. 00:57:49 But Acresia, essentially what it is,
1393. 00:57:53 is putting something off to the future.
1394. 00:57:57 We know something would be in our best interest,
1395. 00:57:58 but we don't do it.
1396. 00:58:00 There's something I feel and know that I should do,
1397. 00:58:04 but I ain't gonna do it,
1398. 00:58:05 'cause I don't wanna.
1399. 00:58:07 Like that whole concept is Acresia versus procrastination
1400. 00:58:12 to me, they're basically the same thing.
1401. 00:58:13 Just my opinion.
1402. 00:58:15 Procrastination, the definition he gave
1403. 00:58:17 is avoiding the task that you know you need to do.
1404. 00:58:19 Acresia, like you mentioned,
1405. 00:58:20 knowing that something is in our best interest,
1406. 00:58:22 but we don't do it anyway.
1407. 00:58:23 So an example would be, "I should quit smoking."
1408. 00:58:26 Acresia, and maybe I'm saying this wrong,
1409. 00:58:29 I guess I just read it, and read it Acresia.
1410. 00:58:32 Acresia?
1411. 00:58:33 Acresia?
1412. 00:58:34 Acresia?
1413. 00:58:35 He gives a pronunciation in here.
1414. 00:58:37 I miss that, so Acresia,
1415. 00:58:40 that is lacking command over yourself.
1416. 00:58:44 Going back to the reference levels for a little bit,
1417. 00:58:48 and also kind of tying into this whole idea of Acresia,
1418. 00:58:51 and identifying like what is possible.
1419. 00:58:53 There was a story, actually ESPN picked it up
1420. 00:58:57 about a pastor in LA, I believe,
1421. 00:59:01 Matthew Barnett, who's the pastor of the Dream Center Church.
1422. 00:59:04 He has been training for a while.
1423. 00:59:07 He set out to do the World Marathon Challenge,
1424. 00:59:09 which I thought about when you were talking about marathon
1425. 00:59:11 running.
1426. 00:59:12 What it literally is, is seven marathons in seven days
1427. 00:59:16 on seven different continents.
1428. 00:59:18 The first one is in Antarctica.
1429. 00:59:20 And so he'd been training for a while.
1430. 00:59:22 He did this World Marathon Challenge,
1431. 00:59:25 and I think it was the fourth marathon, his knee popped,
1432. 00:59:29 and ESPN picked up the story because,
1433. 00:59:33 even though he had this knee injury,
1434. 00:59:35 he finished all of the marathons.
1435. 00:59:37 And he's telling the story now about how,
1436. 00:59:42 when he's knee popped, he thought he was done,
1437. 00:59:45 and there was always somebody who,
1438. 00:59:48 in all the different marathons,
1439. 00:59:49 who saw him and ran the race with him.
1440. 00:59:54 And he talked about how basically he just had resolved
1441. 00:59:57 in his mind that there was no way that he could return
1442. 01:00:01 without completing this World Marathon Challenge.
1443. 01:00:06 And so he was able to do it,
1444. 01:00:09 and it just really showed that story in particular,
1445. 01:00:12 the power of your belief system.
1446. 01:00:16 And so when it comes to Acresia and procrastination,
1447. 01:00:21 and these things that we talk ourselves out of
1448. 01:00:23 because we're so dang lazy,
1449. 01:00:25 we're capable of so much more than we realize a lot of times.
1450. 01:00:30 And he talks about those four general parts to Acresia.
1451. 01:00:33 So number one is the task.
1452. 01:00:35 Number two is the desire of the want.
1453. 01:00:37 Number three is a should.
1454. 01:00:39 So I should do this thing because I want this result.
1455. 01:00:42 And then number four is the emotional experience
1456. 01:00:44 of resistance.
1457. 01:00:46 That is where the rubber meets the road,
1458. 01:00:49 is that emotional experience of resistance.
1459. 01:00:51 Most people, when they encounter emotional resistance,
1460. 01:00:56 I don't wanna do this thing because it'll make me uncomfortable.
1461. 01:01:00 That is the hardest battle for people to win.
1462. 01:01:03 And I think that you can actually condition yourself
1463. 01:01:07 to overcome this on a daily basis.
1464. 01:01:10 If you wanted to, simply by employing something
1465. 01:01:12 like at Asian efficiency to talk about eating that frog,
1466. 01:01:15 doing your most important task,
1467. 01:01:16 the hardest thing at the beginning of your day.
1468. 01:01:19 Because this is a muscle.
1469. 01:01:20 If you can just consistently take action on those things
1470. 01:01:24 that you know you need to do,
1471. 01:01:25 and you don't feel like doing them,
1472. 01:01:28 you can develop the ability to overcome this kind of at will.
1473. 01:01:33 And I think that ultimately that could play it out,
1474. 01:01:36 that could play out as something like Matthew Barnett
1475. 01:01:39 being able to finish those marathons.
1476. 01:01:40 Maybe you're not trying to finish a World Marathon Challenge.
1477. 01:01:43 Maybe you're trying to get your product launched
1478. 01:01:46 or your book written or whatever.
1479. 01:01:48 Consistently look for those ways
1480. 01:01:51 and create those situations where you can win every day,
1481. 01:01:55 where you can overcome a crazier and procrastination
1482. 01:02:00 because it's a habit.
1483. 01:02:01 Winning and losing are both a habit.
1484. 01:02:03 And if you can consistently win over a crazier
1485. 01:02:06 and procrastination, then that will take you a long way.
1486. 01:02:11 - We had like three to four books in a row
1487. 01:02:16 where a certain person was mentioned.
1488. 01:02:19 How do you say this Mike Mahali?
1489. 01:02:21 - Me Holly, me Holly Cheeks sent me Holly.
1490. 01:02:24 - Yes. - He was on page 255.
1491. 01:02:27 I was like, "Oh, here we go again.
1492. 01:02:31 Mike, you're going to say this for me again."
1493. 01:02:33 Anyway, I didn't have anything about that
1494. 01:02:36 that I wanted to talk about other than,
1495. 01:02:38 we got Mahali back.
1496. 01:02:40 - Yep, absolutely.
1497. 01:02:42 - But this is, Mahali came up in a section
1498. 01:02:44 that was talking about working with yourself,
1499. 01:02:46 which I felt like was a,
1500. 01:02:49 it was pretty much a productivity crash course,
1501. 01:02:52 which is partly why I felt like I was more fascinated
1502. 01:02:56 by that section than a lot of the others.
1503. 01:02:59 Go, okay, here we go.
1504. 01:03:00 Yeah, I know this one.
1505. 01:03:01 Oh, I know this one.
1506. 01:03:02 Oh, I know this one.
1507. 01:03:03 I think there was a lot of those.
1508. 01:03:05 It was fun.
1509. 01:03:06 Anyway, the one that was interesting to me
1510. 01:03:08 is the, this whole multitasking thing.
1511. 01:03:10 It amazes me that people still think multitasking
1512. 01:03:14 is something that's positive.
1513. 01:03:15 But it seems to be just being,
1514. 01:03:17 it's driven down our throats.
1515. 01:03:18 Like you can't multitask.
1516. 01:03:19 Like this is not possible.
1517. 01:03:21 It's one of those things that I get tired of seeing
1518. 01:03:24 over and over and over again.
1519. 01:03:25 And yet I realize people do it constantly.
1520. 01:03:28 It's like, come on people.
1521. 01:03:29 You're listening to this, stop multitasking.
1522. 01:03:31 We all know it's bad for you and you can't actually do it.
1523. 01:03:34 - Yes, you cannot actually do it.
1524. 01:03:37 In fact, on page two, 50, 80 says,
1525. 01:03:38 neurologically it's impossible to multitask.
1526. 01:03:41 When you try to do more than one thing at a time,
1527. 01:03:43 you're not really parallel processing,
1528. 01:03:45 which is what most people think
1529. 01:03:46 when they're a multi, quote unquote, multitasking.
1530. 01:03:49 But you are rapidly switching attention
1531. 01:03:51 from one thing to another.
1532. 01:03:54 If you really understood that,
1533. 01:03:56 there are a lot of things that you would stop doing.
1534. 01:03:58 You would stop trying to multitask
1535. 01:04:00 in particular situations because you would identify
1536. 01:04:04 that this thing that I'm supposed to be working on,
1537. 01:04:06 this is really important.
1538. 01:04:07 And this is where Mahali comes into.
1539. 01:04:09 I mean, he's the guy who really wrote the book on flow.
1540. 01:04:13 And so getting into the whole idea of deep work,
1541. 01:04:15 where you're going deep on a specific topic
1542. 01:04:17 or a specific work area or specific task
1543. 01:04:20 because this is the thing that's of most importance,
1544. 01:04:23 you're sabotaging yourself when you try to multitask
1545. 01:04:26 or even you're not trying to multitask,
1546. 01:04:28 but you leave the door open to interruptions.
1547. 01:04:30 Like you leave your email open
1548. 01:04:32 and you hear those dings and those notifications.
1549. 01:04:34 And it changes what you're able to do drastically
1550. 01:04:39 because you have to switch your cognitive context
1551. 01:04:43 every time that you do it.
1552. 01:04:44 He talks about the cognitive switching penalty
1553. 01:04:46 in this book.
1554. 01:04:47 And basically have to load the context
1555. 01:04:50 for the tasks that you are switching to
1556. 01:04:52 every single time that you switch.
1557. 01:04:55 And so the solution to this is to batch your tasks
1558. 01:05:00 to identify that, okay, from this period,
1559. 01:05:03 I am going to work on email and I am not going to touch it
1560. 01:05:07 before then because I know that jumping back and forth
1561. 01:05:09 all the time is not going to make me productive.
1562. 01:05:12 And this is something that is really basic
1563. 01:05:14 in the productivity world.
1564. 01:05:16 Like you said, it really makes me want to cry
1565. 01:05:19 whenever I see people doing this.
1566. 01:05:20 Like you're hurting yourself, you have to stop this.
1567. 01:05:24 And I kind of along the same lines here,
1568. 01:05:26 he presents a method, the 31020 method.
1569. 01:05:31 Did you catch that?
1570. 01:05:32 - I did not, it sounds familiar, but I can't place it.
1571. 01:05:36 - Okay, so this is, I thought, a really great idea
1572. 01:05:40 for identifying what you're going to work on
1573. 01:05:43 in any particular day because that's something
1574. 01:05:45 that we hear at Asian efficiency all the time.
1575. 01:05:46 It's how many tasks should I identify to work on
1576. 01:05:49 in my task manager?
1577. 01:05:51 And it's going to be different for every person,
1578. 01:05:53 but he lays out this 31020 method as a way of providing
1579. 01:05:58 like a benchmark of this is what you should kind of shoot for.
1580. 01:06:02 Okay, so three major tasks, okay, in any given day.
1581. 01:06:06 So you want to have three major tasks
1582. 01:06:09 and 10, that's 10 minor tasks.
1583. 01:06:11 And the distinction here is that major tasks are tasks
1584. 01:06:15 that take more than 20 minutes.
1585. 01:06:17 And I think that articulating it this way
1586. 01:06:20 provides a really good framework for anybody
1587. 01:06:22 who's using OmniFocus or any other task manager
1588. 01:06:24 when they're sitting down and they're planning their next day.
1589. 01:06:28 And you're trying to decide what am I going
1590. 01:06:30 to try to get done tomorrow?
1591. 01:06:32 I think this provides a framework
1592. 01:06:34 that is a great place to start.
1593. 01:06:36 - The golden trifecta.
1594. 01:06:44 - I like the title of this section.
1595. 01:06:47 Effectively what this is, he has a personal three word summary
1596. 01:06:52 of the book, How to Win Friends and Influence People,
1597. 01:06:57 which is a book by Dale Carnegie, if I remember correctly.
1598. 01:07:01 - Believe that's correct, yep.
1599. 01:07:02 - Yep, so the three word summary,
1600. 01:07:07 appreciation, courtesy and respect.
1601. 01:07:12 So expressing gratitude for what others are doing for you,
1602. 01:07:16 even if it's not perfect, having the courtesy
1603. 01:07:19 to be polite, pure and simple.
1604. 01:07:23 Don't drag things out, don't be too wordy.
1605. 01:07:26 Respect, a matter of honoring the other person's status,
1606. 01:07:31 no matter how you relate to the person you're communicating with.
1607. 01:07:35 And I thought this was helpful
1608. 01:07:38 because I've not read that book
1609. 01:07:39 and I know that I should.
1610. 01:07:41 Sorry, someone probably needs to get it on our list.
1611. 01:07:44 But it's something that it makes a lot of sense,
1612. 01:07:49 especially when you think about
1613. 01:07:53 how you get work done with other people.
1614. 01:07:55 How do I go about working with my potential clients?
1615. 01:08:00 How do I sell to them?
1616. 01:08:02 How do I have my relational interactions
1617. 01:08:05 with existing clients and my continuing
1618. 01:08:10 customer relationships, I guess?
1619. 01:08:12 How do I go about building those
1620. 01:08:14 and making sure that they are top notch?
1621. 01:08:16 And this simple three word appreciation, courtesy and respect.
1622. 01:08:21 It really struck home.
1623. 01:08:22 It was a good way for me to summarize a lot of
1624. 01:08:25 how I want to be to the people that I'm working with.
1625. 01:08:29 - Yeah, when I read this, I thought of Chris Bailey,
1626. 01:08:32 the productivity project.
1627. 01:08:34 And when he talks about how people are the reason
1628. 01:08:37 for productivity.
1629. 01:08:39 All you really have to do is not focus on yourself,
1630. 01:08:41 focus on other people and basically the rest
1631. 01:08:46 of it's gonna take care of itself.
1632. 01:08:47 But along with this, I still am having a little bit
1633. 01:08:51 of trouble reconciling this
1634. 01:08:53 because actually right before this section,
1635. 01:08:55 he shares a quote by Charles Boyle.
1636. 01:08:57 It says, "If not controlled, work will flow
1637. 01:08:59 "to the competent man until he submerges."
1638. 01:09:02 I've experienced this.
1639. 01:09:04 So how do you balance, I guess I'm just
1640. 01:09:08 wanting to hear your perspective,
1641. 01:09:10 how do you balance serving other people
1642. 01:09:14 via the golden trifecta,
1643. 01:09:15 showing them appreciation, courtesy and respect
1644. 01:09:17 while still standing up for your own rights
1645. 01:09:21 and setting those limits which you need to do
1646. 01:09:24 if in order to be productive?
1647. 01:09:26 I would say one area where this can be extremely difficult
1648. 01:09:31 would be in a church setting
1649. 01:09:33 because a lot of the people that are in a church,
1650. 01:09:35 it's basically my pastor has described it
1651. 01:09:36 as a volunteer army.
1652. 01:09:38 So you're trying to coordinate all of these people
1653. 01:09:40 who this isn't their job, they're not getting a paycheck,
1654. 01:09:44 you can't tell them, do this or you're out of here.
1655. 01:09:47 So how do you look to serve people
1656. 01:09:50 while still maintaining your own personal integrity
1657. 01:09:54 when it comes to your schedule
1658. 01:09:56 and making sure that you are becoming
1659. 01:09:59 the best version of yourself so that you can be
1660. 01:10:01 of more value and more benefit to other people?
1661. 01:10:04 See, that's a coaching time to me.
1662. 01:10:07 And so I'm director of IT at our church
1663. 01:10:10 and I deal with a ton of volunteers,
1664. 01:10:12 that's the mass of our team is volunteers
1665. 01:10:17 and a lot of times I will run across situations
1666. 01:10:21 where someone's potentially breaking a boundary,
1667. 01:10:25 they're crossing a line that shouldn't be crossed
1668. 01:10:27 and what do you do?
1669. 01:10:29 I mean, you can't fire them, you can't get upset,
1670. 01:10:32 you can't say, no, you gotta do it this way.
1671. 01:10:34 Like, well, it takes a little more on my side
1672. 01:10:38 to show the respect to teach them,
1673. 01:10:42 hey, if you go this route,
1674. 01:10:44 you're gonna have a better situation,
1675. 01:10:46 like it'll be a lot better for you if we go this way.
1676. 01:10:49 Now, I'm summarizing that so it sounds harsh
1677. 01:10:52 and the way I just said that,
1678. 01:10:54 but if you take the time to understand that person well enough
1679. 01:10:59 to be able to speak into their life that way
1680. 01:11:02 and if I'm doing my job well as a director of IT
1681. 01:11:05 and building those relationships,
1682. 01:11:07 it's a simple flow of a normal conversation.
1683. 01:11:11 Does that make sense?
1684. 01:11:12 They're not in competition with each other.
1685. 01:11:15 - It makes sense,
1686. 01:11:16 but I think it can be difficult
1687. 01:11:18 when you've got different teams, different organizations
1688. 01:11:22 that are maybe playing by different rules.
1689. 01:11:25 But I think that there's a key
1690. 01:11:27 in one of the things that he mentions
1691. 01:11:30 where he says, don't focus on the problem,
1692. 01:11:32 focus on the options.
1693. 01:11:34 So let's just use the church context
1694. 01:11:37 and the golden trifecta where you want to put other people first,
1695. 01:11:41 but at the same time, maybe there's some systems here
1696. 01:11:43 that are broken and we want to fix them.
1697. 01:11:47 So we've talked about this in previous podcasts.
1698. 01:11:51 Take responsibility, take accountability
1699. 01:11:54 and don't focus on, well, whose fault is it?
1700. 01:11:57 How did we get here?
1701. 01:11:59 That's not going to necessarily help,
1702. 01:12:01 although that's probably my initial response
1703. 01:12:04 every single time I try to deconstruct things
1704. 01:12:06 and identify what are the actions
1705. 01:12:09 that got us into the situations that we can't do this again.
1706. 01:12:12 But if you're really going to embrace the golden trifecta
1707. 01:12:16 and you're going to live this out,
1708. 01:12:17 what you want to focus on is where do we go from here?
1709. 01:12:21 Not necessarily whose fault is it,
1710. 01:12:23 but what can I do specifically to fix this
1711. 01:12:26 so that the team and the organization
1712. 01:12:29 can be successful going forward,
1713. 01:12:31 but I think that's a lot easier said than done a lot of times.
1714. 01:12:35 - I don't know, I stick by the,
1715. 01:12:39 if you got to know people
1716. 01:12:41 and if I'm going to have a conversation
1717. 01:12:43 and something's not going right,
1718. 01:12:45 that I need to step in and do something,
1719. 01:12:48 a lot of times like, okay,
1720. 01:12:49 here's something that I feel we need to do.
1721. 01:12:53 And as director of IT, I can do this.
1722. 01:12:55 So that situation might be a little different
1723. 01:12:58 because in my case, if something's off
1724. 01:13:01 and the sound team needs to be taking control of something
1725. 01:13:06 and currently the video team is doing it
1726. 01:13:08 or vice versa, people may not be happy about those changes
1727. 01:13:13 and what I see as my goal is to help them
1728. 01:13:16 see the benefit to them or help them come up
1729. 01:13:20 with the idea itself.
1730. 01:13:22 To me, that's my job more than anything
1731. 01:13:25 is helping people come up with that,
1732. 01:13:27 even though I'm in IT.
1733. 01:13:28 Welcome to tech support.
1734. 01:13:29 Like that's how I come at it.
1735. 01:13:33 It takes a lot of,
1736. 01:13:34 I have to really appreciate what the people are doing
1737. 01:13:39 and help them see that I'm appreciative
1738. 01:13:41 of what they're doing and have the constructive criticism
1739. 01:13:46 at the same time.
1740. 01:13:46 Something I do quite a bit,
1741. 01:13:47 I did this quite a bit whenever I worked in corporate
1742. 01:13:50 was this concept of yes, no yes.
1743. 01:13:53 Are you familiar with this at all?
1744. 01:13:55 Mm-hmm.
1745. 01:13:55 Okay, so whenever I have something that needs to change,
1746. 01:13:58 someone's not gonna like it.
1747. 01:13:59 I use the yes, no yes process.
1748. 01:14:00 So very, very dumb down and very basic.
1749. 01:14:04 Thank you so much for the help you're doing.
1750. 01:14:06 Here's something you need to get better at.
1751. 01:14:08 This is awesome, let's continue working together.
1752. 01:14:10 Like that's a very dumb down way of saying it.
1753. 01:14:12 Now it's gonna be a lot more drawn out.
1754. 01:14:14 It's gonna be a lot more detailed
1755. 01:14:15 and the more I can put into the yeses,
1756. 01:14:17 as opposed to the no, better off we are in the long run.
1757. 01:14:20 And I use that quite a bit.
1758. 01:14:22 Even there's a couple of guys on the team that know
1759. 01:14:23 that I do it and they still tell me
1760. 01:14:26 they're grateful that I do it.
1761. 01:14:27 So it's like, okay, this is something I know helps
1762. 01:14:31 because I want you to know that I like what you're doing
1763. 01:14:33 and it's helpful and it's great for the team
1764. 01:14:36 as a broader sense.
1765. 01:14:38 And yet this is an area where I feel like we could grow
1766. 01:14:42 and I know that if I spell it out in that way,
1767. 01:14:45 everybody's happy in the end, typically.
1768. 01:14:48 Every once in a while you got somebody
1769. 01:14:49 that's just always going to be negative.
1770. 01:14:52 And even though it's volunteer based,
1771. 01:14:54 I have been known to let other people,
1772. 01:14:57 you're not allowed to volunteer here
1773. 01:14:59 until we get this figured out.
1774. 01:15:00 We have had to do that before.
1775. 01:15:02 And those are very rare and it kind of hurts
1776. 01:15:05 whenever you have to do that.
1777. 01:15:07 But sometimes the people who are there
1778. 01:15:09 are more toxic than they are helpful.
1779. 01:15:11 And you have to know where to draw that line
1780. 01:15:12 and it's different in every situation.
1781. 01:15:15 - Yep, I definitely agree with you.
1782. 01:15:17 I just think that that can be difficult,
1783. 01:15:21 especially with people who you're going to see
1784. 01:15:25 on a regular basis to have that conversation
1785. 01:15:27 and be like, you know, you're not really
1786. 01:15:30 in the right position to do this thing right now.
1787. 01:15:33 That can be really difficult,
1788. 01:15:34 but it kind of gets into the next point here,
1789. 01:15:37 the six principles of management as well.
1790. 01:15:39 You should just run through these real quick.
1791. 01:15:42 - Yeah, yeah.
1792. 01:15:44 - Okay, so number one is recruit the smallest group
1793. 01:15:47 of people who can accomplish what must be done quickly
1794. 01:15:49 and with high quality.
1795. 01:15:51 I think this is a really important piece
1796. 01:15:53 and I think that the tendency can kind of be to
1797. 01:15:56 recruit a bunch of people to these teams
1798. 01:16:00 and the bigger that they get,
1799. 01:16:02 the less agile they are and the harder it is
1800. 01:16:05 to actually take action and accomplish our goals.
1801. 01:16:10 So I think that's important to recruit
1802. 01:16:11 the smallest group of people you can
1803. 01:16:13 and still accomplish the goal.
1804. 01:16:14 Number two, clearly communicate the desired end result
1805. 01:16:17 who's responsible for what and to the current status,
1806. 01:16:21 number three, we just talked about treat people with respect,
1807. 01:16:24 number four, create an environment where everyone can be
1808. 01:16:27 as productive as possible, then let them do their work.
1809. 01:16:31 Number five, refrain from having unrealistic expectations
1810. 01:16:34 regarding certainty and prediction
1811. 01:16:36 and then number six, measure to see
1812. 01:16:38 if what you're doing is working
1813. 01:16:39 and if not, try another approach.
1814. 01:16:42 - I feel like if everybody would go through
1815. 01:16:47 and do this when they're in management,
1816. 01:16:49 life would be a lot better for the broader world.
1817. 01:16:52 - Yep, definitely.
1818. 01:16:53 - How many managers break at least half of these?
1819. 01:16:59 - Yep.
1820. 01:16:59 - Anyway.
1821. 01:17:01 - Yeah, and that kind of actually leads into
1822. 01:17:03 the next point here, the analytical honesty.
1823. 01:17:06 I mean, especially the six point where we want to measure
1824. 01:17:08 and then we want to change things
1825. 01:17:09 if what we're doing isn't working.
1826. 01:17:11 Analytical honesty, he defines it in the book
1827. 01:17:14 as measuring and analyzing data dispassionately,
1828. 01:17:18 which is a really,
1829. 01:17:20 I don't know, I think just about anybody
1830. 01:17:24 who is in charge of pulling together numbers
1831. 01:17:27 for the purpose of interpreting data to tell a story
1832. 01:17:31 is guilty of this in some way, shape or form,
1833. 01:17:34 where they pull numbers together,
1834. 01:17:36 which will paint the situation in a positive light
1835. 01:17:39 to tell their version of the event
1836. 01:17:41 so the story that they want to communicate.
1837. 01:17:43 So analytical honesty is literally just not approaching
1838. 01:17:47 the numbers or the data with any sort of agenda
1839. 01:17:52 or feelings, but just looking at it to say,
1840. 01:17:56 okay, what is actually going on here?
1841. 01:17:59 And I think that's a lot harder to do than it would seem.
1842. 01:18:04 - So story time, Joe used to be a data analyst.
1843. 01:18:08 I used to work corporate and I had at my disposal
1844. 01:18:15 some massive databases.
1845. 01:18:17 And by the time I was there for probably two months,
1846. 01:18:22 I had developed a habit of sending my data results
1847. 01:18:27 in PDF formats.
1848. 01:18:30 And the goal of that was to stop anybody up above me
1849. 01:18:35 from editing the data.
1850. 01:18:37 Because it was a problem for me to see a document
1851. 01:18:42 that I had prepared with data
1852. 01:18:46 that was not entirely accurate.
1853. 01:18:48 It was technically correct,
1854. 01:18:50 but it painted the wrong story.
1855. 01:18:53 And it drove me crazy.
1856. 01:18:56 'Cause that's not what the data says.
1857. 01:18:59 Like, you can't do that.
1858. 01:19:00 Like that.
1859. 01:19:01 (laughs)
1860. 01:19:03 That was one, a very small reason I left there,
1861. 01:19:06 but I mean, there was a lot of things
1862. 01:19:08 that played into that.
1863. 01:19:09 But so much of the integrity of the data,
1864. 01:19:12 even down to how you put a chart together,
1865. 01:19:15 like I could put together a chart
1866. 01:19:18 that shows technically correct data,
1867. 01:19:22 but makes you think the opposite of what the data says.
1868. 01:19:24 Like, you can do that.
1869. 01:19:26 And I'm hypersensitive to it.
1870. 01:19:28 You're gonna get me on a soapbox.
1871. 01:19:29 I need to stop.
1872. 01:19:30 Anyway, it's a problem.
1873. 01:19:32 If you have a lot of data, you're measuring things
1874. 01:19:34 and you have a story you hope or want to be true,
1875. 01:19:39 you have to stay objective.
1876. 01:19:40 You can't let your preconceived notions or theories
1877. 01:19:46 impact how you run the data.
1878. 01:19:48 You have to use tried and true principles into it.
1879. 01:19:50 Okay, I'm done.
1880. 01:19:51 - Yeah, the other thing I'll add to this
1881. 01:19:54 is that the correlation is not necessarily causation
1882. 01:19:57 when it comes to interpreting data.
1883. 01:19:59 So if you're looking for a way to show
1884. 01:20:01 that something is growing or something is shrinking
1885. 01:20:03 or whatever, you can usually find some sort of correlation
1886. 01:20:06 between things, but you have to dig deeper
1887. 01:20:08 and you have to understand exactly what the numbers are
1888. 01:20:10 telling you and depending on the specific situation,
1889. 01:20:13 that is a lot more work than people think.
1890. 01:20:18 It's easy to just kind of cherry pick specific statistics
1891. 01:20:24 and say, oh, look, the podcast numbers are growing.
1892. 01:20:27 The downloads are going up, that sort of thing.
1893. 01:20:29 But if one month there were five Mondays
1894. 01:20:33 and you release every Monday and the next month
1895. 01:20:35 there were four, it's gonna come back and bite you
1896. 01:20:38 at some point if you're trying to manipulate the data
1897. 01:20:40 and make it tell a specific story.
1898. 01:20:43 The other thing I wanna tease out here
1899. 01:20:46 is the whole section on systems at the end.
1900. 01:20:50 I thought that there was some good stuff in here,
1901. 01:20:53 but like I mentioned at the beginning,
1902. 01:20:55 I also thought it was pretty elementary
1903. 01:20:58 when it comes to systems.
1904. 01:21:01 And I was kind of disappointed that there wasn't a whole lot
1905. 01:21:06 new or deep here other than on page 400,
1906. 01:21:10 he talks about standard operating procedures,
1907. 01:21:12 reducing friction, minimizing willpower depletion.
1908. 01:21:15 We've talked with the checklist manifesto,
1909. 01:21:17 how checklists are actually externalized SOPs.
1910. 01:21:20 But a lot of this stuff I thought was really, really basic.
1911. 01:21:24 So kind of disappointed in that particular section,
1912. 01:21:27 but very end, last thing here,
1913. 01:21:30 and I love the way that he ended this book.
1914. 01:21:31 He talks about how self-education is never done.
1915. 01:21:33 So just because you've gone through this particular book,
1916. 01:21:38 there is always going to be more ground to take.
1917. 01:21:41 You want to keep changing your reference levels.
1918. 01:21:44 And I thought that how we ended the book
1919. 01:21:47 was a really good call to action
1920. 01:21:48 to keep going and keep growing.
1921. 01:21:51 - That's why we do bookworm, always getting better.
1922. 01:21:54 Always learning something more.
1923. 01:21:55 Here we are.
1924. 01:21:56 Action items, you got a handful here, you go first.
1925. 01:22:00 - Yeah, there were a lot of these.
1926. 01:22:03 Okay, so the ones that I wrote down here
1927. 01:22:06 were number one, create a back burner context
1928. 01:22:10 in Omni Focus.
1929. 01:22:11 So things that I don't necessarily want to work on right now,
1930. 01:22:16 but having a kind of like a waiting, waiting for,
1931. 01:22:20 or a list of things that are ready to be picked up
1932. 01:22:25 and move forward, but it's not just a someday,
1933. 01:22:28 maybe a list if that makes sense.
1934. 01:22:29 I don't know if I'm describing that real.
1935. 01:22:30 - That doesn't make any sense to me at all.
1936. 01:22:32 (laughs)
1937. 01:22:33 - Okay, so let me see if I can find a specific section
1938. 01:22:36 where he talked about this,
1939. 01:22:37 'cause we did not talk about everything in this book.
1940. 01:22:42 - Oh yeah, there's a lot.
1941. 01:22:43 - There's a lot.
1942. 01:22:44 - There's 400 something pages.
1943. 01:22:45 Yeah, basically just the back burner context,
1944. 01:22:49 these are things that I want to say right now,
1945. 01:22:54 I'm not going to work on these things,
1946. 01:22:55 but it's kind of like an on-decker next up list,
1947. 01:22:59 because there are things that on a day-to-day basis,
1948. 01:23:01 I do not want these things appearing in my task list.
1949. 01:23:05 These are not things that I want to work on,
1950. 01:23:07 right now they're not available yet, so to speak,
1951. 01:23:10 but the back burner context is basically a bunch of things
1952. 01:23:14 that I know I want to do when I have a little bit of time,
1953. 01:23:19 and it's kind of like a curated waiting for a list already.
1954. 01:23:24 I don't know if that makes sense.
1955. 01:23:25 - How is it different than a someday maybe?
1956. 01:23:28 - Yeah, well for the GTD purists,
1957. 01:23:30 they're gonna say this and they're gonna say,
1958. 01:23:32 "Well, you're going through your weekly,
1959. 01:23:34 your someday maybe list every week anyway."
1960. 01:23:36 - Maybe I'm a GTD purist then.
1961. 01:23:37 (laughing)
1962. 01:23:38 - I don't think of myself that way.
1963. 01:23:40 - Yeah, I guess my specific scenario,
1964. 01:23:43 I tend to throw things on to the someday maybe list,
1965. 01:23:46 and then that's kind of the place that they go to die.
1966. 01:23:50 - Okay, so instead of deleting things,
1967. 01:23:52 you put them on a someday maybe,
1968. 01:23:53 which means that your someday maybe is completely diluted.
1969. 01:23:56 - Exactly, yeah, and so the back burner context
1970. 01:24:00 level of someday maybe.
1971. 01:24:01 - I guess, yeah.
1972. 01:24:03 - I'm just giving you grief now.
1973. 01:24:06 (laughing)
1974. 01:24:06 It's not necessarily different priority levels
1975. 01:24:10 because I don't like the fact that some people
1976. 01:24:13 have test management systems,
1977. 01:24:14 we have priority one, priority two, priority three.
1978. 01:24:17 And really, if you've got a bunch of things
1979. 01:24:19 that are priority, that just means that nothing is.
1980. 01:24:21 It's not necessarily different priority levels,
1981. 01:24:24 but it is the next place to look
1982. 01:24:29 when I want to move something else forward
1983. 01:24:33 instead of going back to the someday maybe list
1984. 01:24:36 and going through the big archive of things that,
1985. 01:24:39 talk about the six different horizons at GTD,
1986. 01:24:41 the 50,000, the 40,000, 30,000,
1987. 01:24:43 like the three to five year thing,
1988. 01:24:45 that's not gonna be on my back burner context,
1989. 01:24:48 but something that I want to do in the next three to six months,
1990. 01:24:52 that would be there.
1991. 01:24:53 I'm not sure if I'm explaining this very well.
1992. 01:24:55 - Okay, I'm gonna, yeah, I'll let you go with it.
1993. 01:24:57 Okay. (laughing)
1994. 01:24:59 Okay, another thing that they talked about in here,
1995. 01:25:03 the next action item I have is to look into speed reading.
1996. 01:25:07 I think he called it priming.
1997. 01:25:09 And there's actually a course by Abby Mark's Beal,
1998. 01:25:14 which is on speed reading,
1999. 01:25:15 and I believe I have access to it,
2000. 01:25:18 so I'm going to look into this,
2001. 01:25:20 and I am going to try to embrace speed reading,
2002. 01:25:24 maybe not for this podcast,
2003. 01:25:26 where we're going through these books
2004. 01:25:27 and we're trying to tease out the things
2005. 01:25:29 that are really standing out to us,
2006. 01:25:30 but for the gap books that we had talked about
2007. 01:25:33 and the things that I want to get through these,
2008. 01:25:36 but I don't necessarily want to try and tease out
2009. 01:25:39 everything that I possibly can out of this book.
2010. 01:25:42 I just want to get the 80/20 of what the subject here is.
2011. 01:25:46 That sort of thing, I'm gonna give speed reading a shot.
2012. 01:25:50 Okay.
2013. 01:25:51 Number three is to have a set time
2014. 01:25:58 for my most important tasks to be done by,
2015. 01:26:00 which I am going to say is 10 a.m.
2016. 01:26:04 And this was just something that he talked about,
2017. 01:26:08 and I really liked that idea
2018. 01:26:11 of putting a deadline on there for my most important task.
2019. 01:26:13 I think I've done a pretty good job
2020. 01:26:15 in the past of identifying my most important tasks
2021. 01:26:18 and then saying, okay, I'm gonna work on these today.
2022. 01:26:20 I'm gonna get these three major things done,
2023. 01:26:23 but having a specific time
2024. 01:26:25 where I'm gonna have those things done by,
2025. 01:26:27 I think that might help a lot.
2026. 01:26:30 And then the last one is to review goals every single day,
2027. 01:26:36 which this is.
2028. 01:26:37 No, I'm pretty terrible at this.
2029. 01:26:39 Okay.
2030. 01:26:40 I need to not just write down specific goals,
2031. 01:26:45 but I wanna write them in such a way
2032. 01:26:47 that I look over them every single day,
2033. 01:26:50 and I wanna actually incorporate this into my morning routine.
2034. 01:26:54 One of the gap books that I read while we were in Florida
2035. 01:26:57 was the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod.
2036. 01:27:01 And he has a very specific format that he uses
2037. 01:27:04 for the morning ritual.
2038. 01:27:07 And part of that is affirmations and gratitude
2039. 01:27:11 and stuff like that.
2040. 01:27:12 And visualization, that's where the goals come in.
2041. 01:27:16 So I want to articulate them in a way
2042. 01:27:19 where I can very briefly say in three to five years,
2043. 01:27:21 I'm gonna have this specific thing
2044. 01:27:23 where I've got that stuff kind of
2045. 01:27:26 in different places right now,
2046. 01:27:28 but I wanna make sure that it is clean, concise,
2047. 01:27:31 it's condensed and I can go through it
2048. 01:27:32 in a couple minutes every single morning,
2049. 01:27:34 just to kind of center myself
2050. 01:27:36 and make sure that I'm connected to the Y
2051. 01:27:38 and I'm moving things forward.
2052. 01:27:39 - So for my goals,
2053. 01:27:42 so I'm still in the 12-week year thing,
2054. 01:27:44 and I treat those as my daily goals that I review.
2055. 01:27:48 And I've got the breakout per week
2056. 01:27:50 of where I need to be on each one of those.
2057. 01:27:52 That's what I use for it.
2058. 01:27:53 Seems to work well.
2059. 01:27:55 Anyway, there we go.
2060. 01:27:57 Okay, so I've got a couple here.
2061. 01:27:59 First one is get back on the horse.
2062. 01:28:01 It bugs me to say this,
2063. 01:28:06 have been bad at sticking with OmniFocus,
2064. 01:28:09 and I've been not so great about sticking to my lists
2065. 01:28:13 and using my checklists and yeah,
2066. 01:28:16 things kind of got chaotic with me from a business standpoint
2067. 01:28:18 and it started to stress me out really bad
2068. 01:28:21 and this book made me realize,
2069. 01:28:22 oh, I'm stressed out because I'm not working my own systems.
2070. 01:28:26 I write about this stuff.
2071. 01:28:29 What's wrong with you, Joe?
2072. 01:28:30 Anyway, thus, I'm admitting publicly
2073. 01:28:34 I need to get back on the horse.
2074. 01:28:36 The second, I want to rethink some of my marketing strategies.
2075. 01:28:40 I've been pretty bad about the whole self-promotion piece
2076. 01:28:43 and it's because,
2077. 01:28:45 and I'm only just now learning this,
2078. 01:28:47 it's because I have a reservation
2079. 01:28:51 with forcing my thoughts onto somebody else.
2080. 01:28:54 I don't want to run something down another person's throat
2081. 01:28:59 because I think it would be good for them.
2082. 01:29:03 I want to help them see that it's the right thing
2083. 01:29:05 and that's what I mean by rethinking my marketing strategies
2084. 01:29:09 because I feel like if I think it through the right way,
2085. 01:29:12 I can do that online,
2086. 01:29:15 I just don't have the answer right now.
2087. 01:29:17 So I want to take some time and figure that out.
2088. 01:29:19 Nice, that's what I got.
2089. 01:29:21 Author style, I need you to go first on this one.
2090. 01:29:25 So I really liked the author's style.
2091. 01:29:30 Basically, the way the book is set up,
2092. 01:29:32 we mentioned at the beginning, it's 268,
2093. 01:29:36 small sections,
2094. 01:29:38 and at any one of those, you could go deeper
2095. 01:29:41 and have an entire book worth of content,
2096. 01:29:45 but it's kind of jumps from thing to thing,
2097. 01:29:47 which can be positive or negative.
2098. 01:29:49 I happen to really like it.
2099. 01:29:51 And in fact, a couple of the different sections,
2100. 01:29:54 he mentions additional resources and additional books
2101. 01:29:57 if you wanted to dive deeper on one of those things.
2102. 01:29:59 And that's one of the gap books actually
2103. 01:30:01 that I've got it from going through this one.
2104. 01:30:04 But I really liked it.
2105. 01:30:05 And with the exception of the system section,
2106. 01:30:08 I got a lot out of this book.
2107. 01:30:09 That was the only point where it was kind of hard
2108. 01:30:12 for me to read just because I guess I'm around systems
2109. 01:30:16 all the time and something that we preach
2110. 01:30:18 at Asian efficiency a lot.
2111. 01:30:19 So it was kind of elementary to me.
2112. 01:30:22 Other than that, I absolutely love this book.
2113. 01:30:24 So I am gonna give it 4.5 stars.
2114. 01:30:27 - Wow, nice.
2115. 01:30:29 So I'm conflicted by this one because I'm with you.
2116. 01:30:32 There's a lot of great information here.
2117. 01:30:34 There's a lot of great stuff to glean from it and enjoy it.
2118. 01:30:38 But if I go back to the book, The Shallows,
2119. 01:30:43 and there was a whole section in there
2120. 01:30:45 about how books in print form
2121. 01:30:49 may start to take some of the online
2122. 01:30:52 and the digital form formats.
2123. 01:30:54 And when that starts to happen,
2124. 01:30:57 you start to lose some of the comprehension
2125. 01:30:59 that can come with how the book's written.
2126. 01:31:02 To me, when I read this, it made me angry
2127. 01:31:06 because I wanted him to spell some things out.
2128. 01:31:09 And I felt like he skimmed over some pieces
2129. 01:31:12 and it just got under my skin.
2130. 01:31:14 Maybe that's just my personality,
2131. 01:31:16 but I felt like I was reading hundreds of blog posts.
2132. 01:31:19 Like that's what it feels like.
2133. 01:31:21 They're a page and a half, two pages,
2134. 01:31:23 maybe three pages long for each quote unquote chapter.
2135. 01:31:27 And it bugged me.
2136. 01:31:30 I was fine at first.
2137. 01:31:31 And then once I think I got to maybe the finance section,
2138. 01:31:35 maybe it was the finance section that I didn't like,
2139. 01:31:37 but the overall layout of it just got under my skin.
2140. 01:31:42 That's what I got on that.
2141. 01:31:43 But I do, I agree with you.
2142. 01:31:45 I think the material itself is top notch.
2143. 01:31:48 I think there's a lot of good things there.
2144. 01:31:51 I just didn't care for the layout.
2145. 01:31:53 But again, I understand why I did it that way.
2146. 01:31:56 He's trying to cover a lot of ground.
2147. 01:31:58 And the only way to cover that amount of ground
2148. 01:32:00 in that few pages,
2149. 01:32:03 like he's, how many pages did you say this?
2150. 01:32:05 It was 400, 107, something like that.
2151. 01:32:08 If you're gonna cover an entire MBA's worth of information
2152. 01:32:12 in a single book, you have to do this.
2153. 01:32:15 I'm not gonna say that he made a bad decision here.
2154. 01:32:18 I think that just the choice of book her, my personality
2155. 01:32:23 maybe doesn't mesh real well.
2156. 01:32:26 But I don't have anybody to blame but myself on that one.
2157. 01:32:29 - I think that's completely fair.
2158. 01:32:32 And I guess my perspective is maybe tainted a little bit
2159. 01:32:35 because I recognize the fact that these are basically blog posts.
2160. 01:32:40 I think that's actually how the project started
2161. 01:32:41 was just a bunch of blog posts that he turned into a book.
2162. 01:32:44 But I think that he does a really good job
2163. 01:32:45 of recommending good resources.
2164. 01:32:47 In fact, I've finished this book
2165. 01:32:50 as we're recording this now several weeks ago
2166. 01:32:53 because we've tried to record it a couple of different times
2167. 01:32:55 and it had been sick.
2168. 01:32:57 But I actually flew through this
2169. 01:32:59 and I ordered some of the additional resources.
2170. 01:33:01 Like one of the books that you mentioned the accounting
2171. 01:33:02 that he recommends is financial intelligence
2172. 01:33:05 for entrepreneurs.
2173. 01:33:07 And I have not been disappointed by the follow up books
2174. 01:33:11 that he recommends if you did want to go deeper
2175. 01:33:13 on specific topics.
2176. 01:33:15 But I can totally understand where you see
2177. 01:33:18 that he's only spending three pages on accounting
2178. 01:33:23 and you're like, that's not enough.
2179. 01:33:24 You need to know so much more.
2180. 01:33:25 You're absolutely right.
2181. 01:33:26 You do need to know so much more.
2182. 01:33:28 The fact that you've read through this book
2183. 01:33:29 does not necessarily equate to a MBA degree
2184. 01:33:33 but in my opinion, a lot of great information here.
2185. 01:33:36 - I think it does a very good job of introducing things.
2186. 01:33:38 Like it does a, maybe that's my problem
2187. 01:33:40 is I had my expectations set differently.
2188. 01:33:43 And whenever I go through this,
2189. 01:33:45 I'm like, I thought it was a book,
2190. 01:33:47 not a bunch of blog posts.
2191. 01:33:49 Like that's cranky old Joe here.
2192. 01:33:52 But all that said, I'm very conflicted on how to rate this
2193. 01:33:57 because the material I absolutely loved,
2194. 01:33:59 it was the format that gave me all kinds of problems.
2195. 01:34:02 So I'm gonna, part of me wants to give it a three.
2196. 01:34:04 It's a part of me wants to give it a five.
2197. 01:34:06 So I'm gonna give it a four and stop there.
2198. 01:34:10 (laughs)
2199. 01:34:12 - All right, sounds good.
2200. 01:34:13 So upcoming books, the one that we've got coming up next
2201. 01:34:17 with a special guest, we wanna announce
2202. 01:34:19 who the special guest is gonna be?
2203. 01:34:20 - We did last time.
2204. 01:34:22 - Oh, did we?
2205. 01:34:23 Okay, well, yeah, I guess then go back.
2206. 01:34:25 - And you did earlier in this show too.
2207. 01:34:27 - I don't think I teased it at the beginning of the show.
2208. 01:34:29 I mentioned we're gonna have a special guest
2209. 01:34:31 but Sean Blanc is gonna be joining us for the 10X rule.
2210. 01:34:34 That is gonna be by Grant Cardone.
2211. 01:34:37 And this one I'm excited to talk about.
2212. 01:34:40 I'm interested to get Sean's perspective
2213. 01:34:41 and how he's applied this to his business.
2214. 01:34:43 But this is one of those books that we talked
2215. 01:34:46 about reference levels that can really change
2216. 01:34:47 your reference levels.
2217. 01:34:48 - Yeah, yeah.
2218. 01:34:49 Hey, I'm three-fourths the way through this.
2219. 01:34:52 Well, no, I'm further than that.
2220. 01:34:53 So as we record this, we're recording that one tomorrow.
2221. 01:34:57 So that'll be interesting.
2222. 01:34:58 (laughs)
2223. 01:34:59 But yeah, that'll be a good one.
2224. 01:35:02 I'm excited about that conversation.
2225. 01:35:04 Following the 10X rule, we are jumping back into,
2226. 01:35:09 we've talked about the Dave Ramsey books
2227. 01:35:11 that he has his new hires read.
2228. 01:35:14 And this is another one of those Rhinoceros Success
2229. 01:35:18 by Scott Alexander.
2230. 01:35:19 I don't know much about it other than that.
2231. 01:35:23 Other than I think it'll be interesting to read
2232. 01:35:26 a book about success after we read the 10X rule,
2233. 01:35:29 which seems to be all about success.
2234. 01:35:31 (laughs)
2235. 01:35:32 That'll be interesting.
2236. 01:35:33 For gap books, I'm finishing up a book
2237. 01:35:38 called Starting Strength by Mark Rippetto.
2238. 01:35:41 I've wanted to get into barbell training for a while.
2239. 01:35:45 And I figured Mark Rippetto is one of those guys
2240. 01:35:47 that seems to have it all together and knows it really well.
2241. 01:35:49 And he teaches you the process of actually doing them
2242. 01:35:52 the right way in that book.
2243. 01:35:54 So I'm going through it.
2244. 01:35:55 I've got a gym out in the woodshop
2245. 01:35:57 that I'm planning to use for it.
2246. 01:35:58 So we'll see how that goes.
2247. 01:35:59 I've never really been one that works out
2248. 01:36:01 for exercises, so we'll see how this goes.
2249. 01:36:04 (laughs)
2250. 01:36:05 - All right, and my gap book,
2251. 01:36:07 I'm gonna put one that I picked up
2252. 01:36:09 from the personal MBA here,
2253. 01:36:12 and that is Mindfulness in Plain English.
2254. 01:36:14 'Cause we didn't talk about this,
2255. 01:36:15 but he also talked about meditation yet again.
2256. 01:36:18 And this was the one that he recommended for this.
2257. 01:36:21 I'm not even gonna try to pronounce the guy's name.
2258. 01:36:24 (laughs)
2259. 01:36:25 But this was one that he says,
2260. 01:36:28 like this is the definitive book on this.
2261. 01:36:30 So I've been pleasantly surprised
2262. 01:36:33 with the financial intelligence for entrepreneurs.
2263. 01:36:35 Haven't started this one yet, but I intend to.
2264. 01:36:38 Maybe this is one of those ones
2265. 01:36:39 that I'll try out my new speed reading technique on.
2266. 01:36:43 - There you go.
2267. 01:36:44 That'll make a lot of sense.
2268. 01:36:46 Let's speed read a book about Mindfulness.
2269. 01:36:48 (laughs)
2270. 01:36:50 (laughs)
2271. 01:36:51 - Yeah.
2272. 01:36:52 So if you wanted to recommend a book, you can do that.
2273. 01:36:56 We love it when people recommend books.
2274. 01:36:59 We've got a growing list.
2275. 01:37:00 You can go to bookworm.fm/list
2276. 01:37:03 and you can see a list of all of the books
2277. 01:37:06 that we've covered so far,
2278. 01:37:08 as well as the ones that are planned.
2279. 01:37:10 And there's a link right at the top to recommend a book.
2280. 01:37:13 So if you wanna go there and recommend something,
2281. 01:37:16 you wanna hear us talk about,
2282. 01:37:17 that would be the place to do it.
2283. 01:37:19 - And we're always interested in the feedback
2284. 01:37:25 that people have on what we're talking about.
2285. 01:37:27 There's a couple different ways
2286. 01:37:28 that you can leave feedback on what you're hearing here.
2287. 01:37:31 One is to go to iTunes, leave a review there.
2288. 01:37:35 There's a link to the podcast on iTunes and the show notes.
2289. 01:37:39 That's extremely helpful.
2290. 01:37:40 We've talked about every week.
2291. 01:37:41 It's a great way to help other people find the show.
2292. 01:37:43 Another way to leave feedback,
2293. 01:37:45 I didn't vet this with you, Mike.
2294. 01:37:47 And I didn't even really intend this,
2295. 01:37:49 but it's kind of morphed into that,
2296. 01:37:52 is that the discussion site that I have behind my website
2297. 01:37:56 at joebullig.com,
2298. 01:37:58 I have a discussion forum that follows up
2299. 01:38:01 with comments on every article I post out there.
2300. 01:38:04 And there's been a handful of people
2301. 01:38:06 that have been starting to have conversations
2302. 01:38:07 about the books and the shows there as well.
2303. 01:38:10 I didn't really intend that.
2304. 01:38:12 It just kind of started happening.
2305. 01:38:13 But there you go.
2306. 01:38:14 If you wanna follow up on that,
2307. 01:38:15 the one that we've been talking about a lot lately
2308. 01:38:16 is the checklist manifesto.
2309. 01:38:17 It's been good.
2310. 01:38:18 There you go.
2311. 01:38:19 - Yep, you dragged me into that as well.
2312. 01:38:21 - I know.
2313. 01:38:22 - It's like, oh, Mike's not over here.
2314. 01:38:23 We need to get Mike drug into this.
2315. 01:38:26 - Yep, so definitely check out Joe's discussion site,
2316. 01:38:30 give us feedback.
2317. 01:38:31 We wanna know how you are implementing some of the stuff
2318. 01:38:35 that we're talking about, the changes that you're seeing.
2319. 01:38:37 But thanks everybody for joining us
2320. 01:38:39 and we'll talk to you next time.