209: Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman

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1. 00:00:00 So welcome back Corey. We've got some follow up items here. They're all yours. So what
2. 00:00:07 is your positive edge? Did you figure it out? Not really. Not to where I came to like some
3. 00:00:14 real strong, you know, like, I mean, it's got to be teaching. Like, I think that's, that's
4. 00:00:19 the helping people get from one place to another. What I don't know about and what I wasn't
5. 00:00:26 able to like resolve is like, does that mean classroom teaching? Does that mean mentoring?
6. 00:00:31 Does that mean coaching? So it's like, there's a bunch of words there that all kind of work
7. 00:00:36 together. And I don't know what it actually means. But it's got to definitely be helping
8. 00:00:39 people advance or, you know, get better at value to their life. I don't know what it
9. 00:00:47 might be. I'm trying not to like say the same thing that yours is because it's like mine.
10. 00:00:51 I can tell you that when you say yours, mine is different than yours. I can tell you that
11. 00:00:55 like, I know that inherently it's different, but I don't know exactly know how. So now
12. 00:01:00 that's the best I can give you on my on my positive edge is still needs to be sharpened
13. 00:01:05 or refined. I want to double click on that because you mentioned it has to be teaching.
14. 00:01:10 Is that because you feel like if it's something else, then your whole life is lie or not?
15. 00:01:17 You know that it's teaching and you just have to dial it in a little bit more. No, but I
16. 00:01:21 think it's like whatever, whatever this word is teaching, coaching, mentoring, whatever
17. 00:01:24 it is. Like I've known that since I was, you know, I don't know, 10, you know, 11, like
18. 00:01:29 it's been a really long time that I've known that. It just so happens that it aligns with
19. 00:01:34 my current profession, which is good because, you know, it all works out kind of a kind
20. 00:01:39 of that way. But but even like I think about leading the boys, you know, different groups
21. 00:01:44 that the I do with the boys or volunteer in a church or whatever it might be, it's all
22. 00:01:48 around this idea of like education, mentoring, you know, kind of thing. So I think that's
23. 00:01:53 just the thing that I'm naturally going to do. You know, and that's the thing that I think
24. 00:01:58 I the, you know, God has gifted me at doing, which is, which is pretty cool. Gotcha. Yeah,
25. 00:02:03 I figured that was the case, but the way that you said it, it was kind of like, we have
26. 00:02:07 to clarify. I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. Okay, so the next one I had was what's
27. 00:02:13 the thing I can't not do? What am I, what am I naturally doing? What does that mean?
28. 00:02:18 So like I told you naturally teaching, but I don't think that's the thing I can't not
29. 00:02:22 do. Like I, I don't see those two things as being, as being true. I think the thing
30. 00:02:28 I could, like I couldn't not do is care about technology. Like I really like technology.
31. 00:02:35 I've always really liked technology. I mean, ever since I would take computers apart from
32. 00:02:39 like, like sit on my sitting on, you know, my parents kitchen table. And my mom would
33. 00:02:43 be like, what are you doing? And I'd be like, I'm taking the computer apart. And she'd
34. 00:02:45 be like, why? And I'm like, why not? I mean, let's see what, let's see what it's made
35. 00:02:48 of. And let's see if we can put it back together. And she's like, yeah, but that's really expensive.
36. 00:02:51 And I'm like, oh, it'll be fine. And everything's going to be okay. And then even when like,
37. 00:02:55 I have gone through seasons where I tried to delete all of my nerdy tech podcasts, and
38. 00:03:01 like, I'm just like, I'm not going to listen to nerdy tech podcasts. I'll last, you know,
39. 00:03:05 like a couple weeks. And then it's like, nah, like, I just naturally find myself like walking
40. 00:03:10 to my car, downloading the latest episode of, you know, whatever nerdy tech podcast, just
41. 00:03:15 to see what's going on in the world in the, in the tech world. So I think that's the
42. 00:03:20 thing I at this point in my life I can't not to do, which is kind of weird, kind of telling.
43. 00:03:25 But there you go. Nice. So all of this, and actually the last episode leads very well
44. 00:03:33 into the, the life theme cohort, which I have to mention here briefly, I don't actually
45. 00:03:37 have any follow up action items from the last book we did, which was good work by Paul Millard.
46. 00:03:42 And I still am very excited about that one two weeks later. How do you feel about it?
47. 00:03:47 You still think it's a double five star book? Oh, yeah, I think so. I think so. I, I got
48. 00:03:52 a lot of that when I reflect on the different aspects of it, you know, a good bit in the
49. 00:03:56 last two weeks, even while we're reading another book or another book and a half, depending
50. 00:03:59 on what you're reading right now. So yeah, I like that book a lot. I'd definitely recommend
51. 00:04:04 it. Me too. So it's kind of interesting that that leads into the whole concept of the life
52. 00:04:10 theme you talked about the positive edge and comparing it to, to mine. And that was a conversation
53. 00:04:15 that we had in that last episode was kind of what makes us, what makes us tick. So the
54. 00:04:21 life theme cohort basically is a six week cohort that my wife and I co lead on helping
55. 00:04:28 people dial in their personal mission statements. So there's a five step process that we walk
56. 00:04:33 through where you first you identify the moments of impact, the moments where you really came
57. 00:04:37 alive, you dream big, you create an image, a specific image of your ideal future that
58. 00:04:43 you're working towards, you identify your personal core values, then you can dense it
59. 00:04:46 all into a single sentence life theme. And then the sixth week is basically everybody
60. 00:04:50 gets on a call and we share ours. I really can't overstate how much more valuable this
61. 00:04:56 process is when you do it together. I mean, I basically just gave you the whole process
62. 00:05:02 in those, those five different steps. And I do have a free email course for people who
63. 00:05:07 are just kind of kicking the tires on this sort of thing. But as as this episode is published,
64. 00:05:13 that life theme cohort is actually kicking off on Monday. So it starts on November 11th,
65. 00:05:17 you could probably join after that if you wanted to, and you wouldn't be too far behind.
66. 00:05:22 But I did want to make sure that people knew that this was happening. And I kind of revamped
67. 00:05:26 how I do my cohorts. Everything is now bundled inside of the community. So this is actually
68. 00:05:33 the first time now that the community is open under this new format. But essentially, when
69. 00:05:38 you join the community, you get access to all the cohorts that happened within one calendar
70. 00:05:43 year. So that would include this life theme cohort, which starts on November 11th. And
71. 00:05:46 it wraps up, I think December 16th, it's basically a Monday to a Monday. And then there's a practical
72. 00:05:51 PKM cohort, which is all the obsidian stuff that's going to happen in January. There's
73. 00:05:56 also monthly workshops. So I did a personal retreat workshop, did a mind mapping workshop,
74. 00:06:01 went into a journaling workshop. All of those video replays and everything are in the community
75. 00:06:06 as well. And the cost of the community is 500 bucks a year. So if you are interested
76. 00:06:12 in joining the life theme cohort, you actually just join the community. And then you can opt
77. 00:06:17 into the cohort and everything is is there. And that website, if you want to learn more
78. 00:06:23 about the life theme cohort specifically is mikeschmitz.com/lifetheme. I didn't actually
79. 00:06:28 even share this with you, but yesterday I recorded a little promo video, which is at
80. 00:06:33 the top of that, that page now, which, which I like a lot. Nice. Just like a little two,
81. 00:06:40 three minute promo video. And yeah, so that's happening. And if you want to, to walk through
82. 00:06:47 the process with us, then mikeschmitz.com/lifetheme is where you would go to do that.
83. 00:06:52 Very cool. I think that's clean, right? Like that, that seems like a very clean way to
84. 00:06:56 do it, where it's like a one time thing for the year, right? Am I understanding that correctly?
85. 00:07:01 Yep. It's a one time cost for the year, but then I can participate in as much as I want
86. 00:07:05 to. Um, throughout that year, I like that a lot. It's good. Yeah. And so just for, for
87. 00:07:10 disclosure here, like, I've kind of, I'm trying to, I'm experimenting still, but my thought
88. 00:07:16 with this is I want it to be simple. And this is either going to make sense and you're in
89. 00:07:20 or it's not for you. And that's fine. But what I don't like is the escalating cost of
90. 00:07:26 the cohorts. Like I'm going through, right, a passage right now. It's the last one,
91. 00:07:30 but it was $4,000. And I applied for a scholarship and I got in for $500. And I was like, okay,
92. 00:07:36 yeah, I'll do this for $500. I can't do it for four grand. Yeah. And then I was like, well,
93. 00:07:39 why don't I just charge 500 bucks, you know, for the year and then whoever wants to join,
94. 00:07:44 can join. And I don't have to worry about trying to get as many sales as I can during
95. 00:07:48 the initial period. So that's the, the thought process there. Yeah, I like it. I like it. It's
96. 00:07:54 a good thing. It's a good way to do it. And if nothing else, you'll learn, right? I mean,
97. 00:07:59 you know, you'll, you'll learn from it. So all right. Well, let's, let's jump into today's book,
98. 00:08:06 which is Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Berkman. I didn't really know what this was when I picked
99. 00:08:15 it. And I feel like I owe you a little bit of an apology. No, no, this is so good. Because I'm
100. 00:08:20 thinking the same thing. I start reading this book and I thought this book is nothing like I thought
101. 00:08:24 it was going to be. And it was the title for me. I thought it was Meditation for Mortals.
102. 00:08:32 It's Meditations for Mortals. And that S really changes the book. So I'm so glad you said that.
103. 00:08:37 I'm sorry I cut you off, but I was so excited that you said that. Okay.
104. 00:08:40 Well, the reason I said, I think I owe you an apology is that this really isn't a great format
105. 00:08:46 for a bookworm book because it's essentially, it's an Oliver Berkman book. And I really liked
106. 00:08:51 4,000 weeks. I highly recommend people go read that one. And that there's a lot of the 4,000 weeks.
107. 00:09:00 A lot of those ideas show up in, in this one as well. But the way this one is formatted is it is
108. 00:09:08 essentially like 28, it's a 28 day personal study. And I didn't know that when I picked it.
109. 00:09:16 I think that the quote unquote correct way to go through this book is probably one of these
110. 00:09:22 per day, although the Amazon listing says you could do one a day or you could just do it in a
111. 00:09:25 couple of different settings. I did the couple of different settings. I do think it's probably
112. 00:09:30 better if you bite off one of these a day and then you just kind of chew on it. But I don't know,
113. 00:09:36 it's still a cool book, but it's broken up into four different weeks, which are kind of the sections.
114. 00:09:42 And I feel like that's probably the best way to tackle this book. So week one is on being infinite.
115. 00:09:47 Week two is on taking action. Week three is on letting go week four is on showing up.
116. 00:09:52 So if you are listening to this in a podcast player that supports chapters, those will be the
117. 00:09:58 chapters is those different sections. And then inside those different sections, I think we probably
118. 00:10:04 each pick one day with a key idea that we really want to talk about. Sound good? Sounds great.
119. 00:10:12 Okay, so this is a pretty short book. There's lots of different chapters because each day is a
120. 00:10:19 chapter, essentially. And I think it's still only like 160 pages, but a lot of those, you know,
121. 00:10:25 because there's so many chapters, you have a couple sentences on the last page, and then
122. 00:10:28 there's a whole bunch of blank space. So there's not a whole lot here in terms of, you know,
123. 00:10:34 I got to I got to get through a bunch of material. It's a very easy read, I would would say,
124. 00:10:40 although, as mentioned, we did it wrong. We probably should have taken more time with this.
125. 00:10:47 There's those four parts, and then there's also an introduction at the very beginning,
126. 00:10:50 and then an epilogue. So I think we probably jump in to the the introduction here first,
127. 00:11:00 which is on the imperfect life. There's a couple of quotes here. The one I really liked is things
128. 00:11:11 look, shoot, I wrote this down wrong. I said things a book about how the world opens up once you
129. 00:11:16 realize you're never going to sort your life out. Things are like a book about how the world
130. 00:11:25 opens up. I have to look that up again. Dang it. I wrote down wrong. I'm seeing if I if I called
131. 00:11:30 that out too. You're going to help me out. Well, I'm trying. I'm seeing if I quoted that same thing.
132. 00:11:35 You and I actually quote a lot of stuff similar, which is kind of funny, but I don't think I have
133. 00:11:39 this one. Probably. You know what? It's probably this is a book about how the world opens up once
134. 00:11:44 you realize you're never going to start your life out. There we go. Change that in the mind.
135. 00:11:47 Yeah, that would actually make sense. Yeah. Yeah, which I think is the perfect introduction to
136. 00:11:51 this, which is why I wanted to call out the quote. I mean, on the tin, it's a 28 day guided
137. 00:11:59 whatever. It's not a course. It's not even like a daily reader. I don't know what you would call it,
138. 00:12:04 but I feel like this just sets the stage really well. He also talks about how most entrepreneurs
139. 00:12:11 are just a walking anxiety disorder harnessed for productivity. And I felt a little bit targeted by
140. 00:12:18 that. That's funny. Yeah, but also, I think the other thing I jotted down here, which is really
141. 00:12:26 important going into the rest of this is you have to take it as a given that you'll never
142. 00:12:33 get on top of everything. Okay, I told you we quoted a lot of stuff together because I had that
143. 00:12:37 exact same one I wanted to bring up to. So keep going. Okay, well, I'll actually hand it off to
144. 00:12:42 you there because that's harkening back to 4000 weeks a little bit. And I'm curious as to your
145. 00:12:47 perspective here with the imperfect life in the introduction. Yeah, so what's really interesting
146. 00:12:52 to me on this is it takes a very defeatist start and like not, I don't mean defeatist in like a
147. 00:13:00 give up on the world kind of defeatist way, but in this idea of like get rid of this thought that
148. 00:13:06 you can actually do some of the stuff that you want to do or that you can have this perfect life
149. 00:13:11 or you can do all the stuff. And here are the key words I would have for this. You'll never get on
150. 00:13:17 top of everything. Imperfectionism is the outlook that understands when you give up on the unwinnable
151. 00:13:23 struggle, right? Like, I mean, there are all these like, it's a very negative opening section,
152. 00:13:28 like this introduction is incredibly negative. But like, not in a way that turns turned me off
153. 00:13:34 from reading the rest of the book, almost in like a refreshing way of like, it wasn't self-help
154. 00:13:41 motivation. It wasn't this like, rah, rah, sis boom, bah, like, go out and slay the day, you know,
155. 00:13:47 blah, blah, blah. It was more or less like, all right, here's the deal. You're not going to do this.
156. 00:13:51 You're never going to win. It's it's get rid of perfectionism. And then once you've accepted that,
157. 00:13:58 now let's take 28 days and think about, you know, like what what we can do in spite of this whole
158. 00:14:03 thing. So like, in spite of might be the phrase that I come out to is like, in spite of this being
159. 00:14:07 reality, what do we do with the 28 days? So it was a it was kind of a refreshing. I'm by no means
160. 00:14:13 like an overly negative person, but it was kind of refreshing take on on a way to look at, you know,
161. 00:14:20 not meditation, because that's what I thought it was. But on this way of thinking about life,
162. 00:14:26 and about productivity, and about, you know, being successful.
163. 00:14:29 Yeah, so this is kind of harkening to in 4000 weeks, he talks about the cosmic insignificance
164. 00:14:35 theory. Have you heard me bring this up before? I have yeah. Yeah. And every time I try to explain
165. 00:14:41 this to somebody, it sounds kind of depressing. But the whole idea behind the cosmic insignificance
166. 00:14:46 theory is that you have such a small part to play in the universe that what you do doesn't really
167. 00:14:50 matter. It's sort of the idea behind Memento Mori. Also, it's like, remember, you're going to die
168. 00:14:56 someday. You're not not such a you're not so great. They're hotshot. And I actually built that
169. 00:15:02 Memento Mori piece into my obsidian daily note. I see the percentage of my life that has has
170. 00:15:08 passed by on the average 80 year lifespan every single day on my journal, which freaks some people
171. 00:15:14 out. But the he talks about in 4000 weeks, and he leads to it in this book to a little bit. The
172. 00:15:22 idea that it's actually pretty comforting, because now you don't have to put all this pressure on
173. 00:15:28 yourself to completely change the world. And maybe some people, they don't really get that. They
174. 00:15:33 don't think that's that big a deal. Like, why don't you just chill out, dude? But that that's me.
175. 00:15:39 That's me in a nutshell right there. So when he when he said that in 4000 weeks, I was like,
176. 00:15:44 I really needed to hear that. And he gets into it in this book a lot more, which I appreciate the
177. 00:15:50 fact that doesn't mean you're not trying to do things. It doesn't mean that what you do doesn't
178. 00:15:55 matter at all. But it's sort of like you have to accept the fact that you are limited in the
179. 00:16:02 amount of impact that you can really have, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I mean,
180. 00:16:08 you could completely change somebody's world. You just can't change everybody's life in the
181. 00:16:12 entire world, probably. But yeah, I don't want to get too far ahead of myself because he does kind
182. 00:16:17 of address that specific thing later on in the book. So let me let me hit on one thing. We had a
183. 00:16:22 campus pastor when I was in college, right? And I understand people have a bunch of different
184. 00:16:27 worldviews, but this is what made me think of is he would draw this line on the on the white border,
185. 00:16:32 the chalkboard or the screen, right? He would talk about like our time on that line where the line
186. 00:16:38 is like in eternity, right? And it's like God's perspective is this gigantic line. And then he'd
187. 00:16:44 come in with like the tiniest little dot and he'd be like, boop, and he'd like put the dot on there.
188. 00:16:49 He'd be like, that is your impact. And that is like where you stand on God's eternal line. And I was
189. 00:16:55 like, Oh, dang, like that is so such a small piece of that. And I got to got a same vibe here as just
190. 00:17:01 there wasn't the Christian, the Christian aspect of it as well. So I liked, I liked the approach to
191. 00:17:07 it. All right, let's move into part one. Okay, cool. So part one is really week one. And that is
192. 00:17:16 being finite. And I don't know if you were to summarize this whole thing, it's probably a lot
193. 00:17:24 like we were just talking about, but how would you describe the whole week one in a in a single
194. 00:17:30 sense? I don't know. I think it's I think setting, is it setting expectations? Is that what I would
195. 00:17:37 say? It's this idea of like, let's look at the way the world thinks about this. And then let's look at
196. 00:17:47 the reality of it or let's look at a different perspective on it. So like in some of these turn
197. 00:17:53 to me away. So I think about like day one title, it's worse than you think, you know what I mean?
198. 00:17:57 It's like, oh man, that's incredibly, it's incredibly negative. And then he talks about the idea of
199. 00:18:03 the kayak and the super yacht, right? Like, so I think about like, like, I think about all these
200. 00:18:08 things. And like it, it's basically like resetting the foundation for a way to think about life.
201. 00:18:18 Like, I think that's what I would, that's how I would summarize part one.
202. 00:18:22 Okay. Yeah, I like that. And you brought up the kayak and the the super yacht. I mean, we could
203. 00:18:29 talk about that specific thing too. That that was day two. And there's a whole bunch of those
204. 00:18:35 visuals that he gives you. And he kind of alludes to again throughout this book. That was a good
205. 00:18:40 one that I liked. But the one that I wanted to call out was day five, too much information.
206. 00:18:46 There's a quote here from Idris Shah that says, "People today are in danger of drowning in information,
207. 00:18:52 but because they have been taught that information is useful, they are more willing to drown than
208. 00:18:56 they need be." And this, that quote kind of feels like justification for, I just got back as we're
209. 00:19:05 recording this. I was in Boise last week recording videos for the PKM stack video course that's
210. 00:19:10 going to be part of Life HQ. I'm going there on Monday to record another one. I'm the creativity
211. 00:19:14 flywheel. So I just recorded a whole bunch of videos on this PKM stack concept. And it was really
212. 00:19:20 around being intentional about the stuff that you consume. You can't collect everything that just
213. 00:19:27 feeds FOMO. There's the answers out there somewhere. Really, it's just, let's find what's useful and
214. 00:19:32 let's get more on what we have. But he has a way to describe this in this chapter, which I thought
215. 00:19:40 was brilliant. He says, "Treat your to read pile like a river, not a bucket." And this, I've fallen
216. 00:19:51 into this with RSS. I kind of felt like, well, I'm bad at RSS because I never can keep up with it.
217. 00:19:57 I set all these things up and then I go look at it and I get overwhelmed by the number of things
218. 00:20:02 there. And I kind of have always had this completionist attitude towards the RSS stuff because
219. 00:20:06 this is stuff I've chosen to subscribe to. I should be listening to this. I should be reading this.
220. 00:20:09 Same with podcasts, I think. And this is the best way I've heard this articulated where you don't
221. 00:20:15 have to complete all this. And the idea of the river, I mean, that was actually one of the videos
222. 00:20:20 that I record, is be a river and not a reservoir. The whole idea of things just flowing in front of
223. 00:20:27 you, I think, is really cool. And it reminded me of, there's this sushi place my wife and I go to.
224. 00:20:33 We never do the all-you-can-eat, but they have an all-you-can-eat. And they have the chefs in the
225. 00:20:38 middle and they're chopping the stuff up and they'll do the special requests sometimes if it's slow.
226. 00:20:43 But essentially, they just make things and they put them on these plates and the boats drive like
227. 00:20:47 we'll go by in the channel and you just pick the things off that you want. And I was like,
228. 00:20:52 that's the right approach to RSS. I love that idea. So I could not agree with you more. This
229. 00:20:58 was the one I wanted to bring up from day five. And so you further that statement says,
230. 00:21:05 that is to say, think of your backlog, not as a container that gradually fills up,
231. 00:21:10 that it's your job to empty, but as a stream that flows past. And I think about this too,
232. 00:21:14 not only with read it later or podcasts or whatever it is, but I started to think about this with
233. 00:21:20 email. Like, I just can't keep up with all the email. Like, I just can't do it. And I understand
234. 00:21:26 this is going to tie into a principle later on down the road that we're going to talk about later
235. 00:21:29 on in this episode. I understand there's going to be consequences for that. But like, what I found
236. 00:21:34 is if I try to respond to every email that comes in and do it in the way that I would want to,
237. 00:21:40 I like, it bothers me. I freak out. Like, I am really stressful and really, really anxious,
238. 00:21:45 because I'm like, I can never hit anyone zero. I can never have a zero inbox. And then as soon as
239. 00:21:49 I do it, it fills back up again. And like, it's super stressful to me. And I was like, Oh, not just
240. 00:21:53 my, my to read pile. What if I do this with my email to? Yeah, I was like, Oh, beautiful with
241. 00:22:00 any sort of information input. This is the right mindset. Because the other thing is to resist the
242. 00:22:07 urge to stockpile knowledge. That's what people did with Evernote is they just stockpiled these
243. 00:22:12 things and they stuck them in there. I can find that again. If I, if I need it, which I think is
244. 00:22:16 totally the wrong approach for reasons I get into the big cam stack course. Yeah, it's all,
245. 00:22:22 it's all fresh in my mind right now. But yeah, you don't really need to collect more things. You
246. 00:22:27 just need to make more out of the stuff that you've already got. If you were able to
247. 00:22:30 make that one single change, you'd feel a lot less stress and anxiety about how much information
248. 00:22:35 is out there. Yep. All right. So let me go to my day. My day was day three here. And it might
249. 00:22:40 give this isn't how you want to do this. I let me know. But we both get to pick a day, don't we?
250. 00:22:46 Yes, go for it. Okay. All right. Cool. So my, my day was day three. Day three has the title of,
251. 00:22:51 you need, you need only face the consequences. And what I like about the intention of this,
252. 00:22:56 this whole day is basically like, nobody's making you do anything. I love this.
253. 00:23:01 I almost picked this one. I'm glad you picked it. They never have been making you do anything.
254. 00:23:06 You are making up the fact that you think they're making you do anything. But what you need to
255. 00:23:11 understand is the choices you make have consequences and be okay with that. Right. Like, and I was
256. 00:23:16 like, oh my goodness, like what an interesting way to think about life. Like, and I'll say one
257. 00:23:21 quote. I mean, I could, I could list a bunch of them, but it's like, freedom isn't a matter of
258. 00:23:25 somehow wriggling free from the cost of your choice. That's never an option. Right. It's,
259. 00:23:32 it's basically just, are you willing to pay the cost? And I'm like, that is such a good idea.
260. 00:23:36 Freedom is about being willing to pay the cost for doing what I want to do. And I hadn't thought
261. 00:23:41 of it that way. And I think that's a really, it's a really fun way to, to think about it.
262. 00:23:46 Yeah, you know, it, it's interesting to me because I sort of went through this
263. 00:23:53 when I quit the day job, I wrestled with this. Like, well, how can I quit my, my day job? I've got
264. 00:24:00 five kids at home. I've got a family to feed. I've got bills to pay. And it's not that I was
265. 00:24:06 making a ton of money at the day job and had these golden handcuffs, so to speak. But yeah, yeah,
266. 00:24:11 I empathize with like the general advice you would get from some of the brash online personalities
267. 00:24:17 is, well, just quit your job. You can do it. It's like, well, no, I can't. Yeah. And I had to work
268. 00:24:24 through that. And Rich, I went through, if you're setting exercise, kind of thought, you know,
269. 00:24:28 what is the worst case scenario? What, what if everything went wrong? You know, what, what,
270. 00:24:33 what would we do? And that kind of helped us work through it. But this is the best way I've
271. 00:24:38 heard this articulated. Like, yeah, you are free to do whatever you want. You just have to face
272. 00:24:44 the consequences. And he also said that the consequences aren't optional. Basically, whatever
273. 00:24:50 choice you make, there are going to be consequences. Because I think we can often get real stuck in
274. 00:24:56 what's familiar and what we know and what we're currently doing. And we feel like there are no
275. 00:25:01 consequences if we just maintain our, our current path. But that was one of the things that was
276. 00:25:07 highlighted to me as I was thinking through the process and should I quit my job. The thing that
277. 00:25:12 really got me to do it was we've got kids at home and they've all got this kind of entrepreneurial
278. 00:25:17 bent. And we tell our kids, because this is what good, good parents do, like you can do anything,
279. 00:25:23 right? Whatever you put your mind to, I mean, there's limits there. But you get the idea,
280. 00:25:29 you want them to feel like they are capable. And we want to infuse a growth mindset into our
281. 00:25:35 kids where if they fail at something, it doesn't mean that they're terrible human beings or they
282. 00:25:41 can't do something that just means that you got to figure out a different way to get what you want.
283. 00:25:45 So this has kind of always been at the forefront of our minds. And I was thinking through it like,
284. 00:25:50 well, I tell my kids this, I have to model it, because more is going to be caught than is taught.
285. 00:25:56 And if I'm telling them, yeah, go, you know, do your thing. I guess a side note here,
286. 00:26:04 it's easy to think like, well, I am, let's just say over 40. So I wish I could be 18 again, and I
287. 00:26:14 would start a blog and I would do all these things. But my time has passed. You know, that's sort of
288. 00:26:18 the argument that happens in your head. And I think like there may be a little bit of truth to
289. 00:26:22 that, but it's not totally true either. And so I had to fight that, you know, I really just embrace
290. 00:26:28 the, the, the belief that, you know, if I really do believe these things that I am telling my kids,
291. 00:26:35 then it's not too late for me, I can make this happen. And as we talked about in the last episode,
292. 00:26:40 feel like it's taken a while, but we're kind of there now. So it's a different conversation than,
293. 00:26:45 you know, a couple of episodes ago, if we would have, would have read this. But that was the thing
294. 00:26:50 for me is like, well, if I'm going to teach my kids this mindset, I really have to show them
295. 00:26:57 what it, what it looks like. And that was, that was the thing that, that got me to pull the trigger.
296. 00:27:04 It's like, I can't get to the end of my life and wonder, you know, what would have happened if I,
297. 00:27:10 I did that, I would have, I felt like if I, if I didn't have the guts to do this right now,
298. 00:27:15 it was sort of like, well, then everything that I've been saying is kind of a lie.
299. 00:27:19 Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you really like, what's that that's seen from Indiana Jones, you know,
300. 00:27:27 where he's got to step out into the, the chasm is like, now we find out what you really believe.
301. 00:27:31 Yeah. Yep. I got you. No, I, I mean, it's a matter of, you know, what you're dealing with,
302. 00:27:38 there's opportunity costs, right? Like, okay, like, like, if you stay in the same path,
303. 00:27:43 then there are opportunity costs to you, but you don't have to call those consequences.
304. 00:27:47 You just think of those as like, oh, that's just the, you know, thing I'm going to give up. But like,
305. 00:27:51 there's 100% opportunity costs there. Yep. All right. We're ready. We moved to week two,
306. 00:27:56 you want me to take week two for a minute? Go for it. All right. So week two is taking action.
307. 00:28:01 And essentially what we're going to do now is we're going to like, kind of go from this, okay,
308. 00:28:07 we realized that our current status, we realized how we are, we realized some of these details.
309. 00:28:12 And now we're going to think about like, how do we move forward? Right? How do we actually do
310. 00:28:15 something? So you get a lot of different, the days here are all around this idea of doing
311. 00:28:20 something or take it, you know, and it's called taking action, but like go to the shed, the three
312. 00:28:26 hour rule, rules that serve life, you know, all these things. So my day in this one is day 12,
313. 00:28:32 and it's rules that serve life. And he references Jerry Seinfeld, and he references the process that,
314. 00:28:39 you know, Seinfeld would go through. And what I, what I like about this is basically like,
315. 00:28:44 he calls out the rule that people think Jerry Seinfeld lived by. And then the actual rule that,
316. 00:28:49 that makes sense. He says a much better rule. Indeed, one that I think more accurately reflects
317. 00:28:54 Seinfeld's approach to his work is do things daily, right? Just show up and do stuff, you know, like,
318. 00:29:03 and can I kind of jump in real quickly because the Seinfeld strategy that you're talking about,
319. 00:29:07 this is something that's prevalent in the, the productivity space. And it's basically the story
320. 00:29:11 of how Seinfeld meets this young comic and the comic has some, how can I become good? And he's like,
321. 00:29:15 well, the way to become good is to write good material, the way to get right good materials to
322. 00:29:20 write every day. So get this big calendar, put a big red X on every day. Like, that was one of
323. 00:29:24 the first things that I encountered when I started studying productivity. So people kind of hold up
324. 00:29:31 this thing is it's got a high like elevated rank in the productivity world. But it was, he mentions
325. 00:29:39 because he was talking to Seinfeld. So this is like direct, directly, a direct source. Seinfeld
326. 00:29:45 said that that was a throwaway comment that he made and he forgot all about it. He thought it
327. 00:29:49 wasn't that big a deal. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which is an interesting detail that you miss in all the
328. 00:29:55 other places that you will hear about the Seinfeld strategy. Yep. So basically it's do things daily
329. 00:30:02 ish, right? Like just keep doing, keep doing. And then what the other one I like here is it's a,
330. 00:30:07 it's a real small phrase, but it's like, make concrete imperfect progress here and now.
331. 00:30:13 Love that. Make concrete imperfect progress here and now. And what I like about this is,
332. 00:30:18 I think a lot of times we get in our own way that says, ah, well, the context around me working
333. 00:30:22 right now isn't right. Or I'm just not in the mental space to do the work right now. Or I'm not
334. 00:30:28 gonna do good work. So I'm just not gonna do anything at all. And like, I think we make a lot of excuses
335. 00:30:31 in terms of actually doing the work, right? And actually getting things done when if we really just
336. 00:30:38 sat down or stood up or do whatever it was and like took the five minutes to work through that
337. 00:30:43 little bit of friction, then everything would just start flowing. Like, and it may not be great.
338. 00:30:49 It may not be our best day or highest quality of writing or anything like that. But at the same time,
339. 00:30:54 we did something that day. We created something that day. And I know you have principles that tie
340. 00:30:59 right into this that you may want to unpack too. But it's like, I love this way of thinking about
341. 00:31:04 it. In terms of show up daily ish, don't let there's the other rule that says like, don't let two
342. 00:31:09 days go. So okay, you miss one day, don't miss two. So like get back on the wagon, you know, the next
343. 00:31:14 time. And I just really like this principle. So that's day 12. Yeah, I love this principle too.
344. 00:31:19 And again, I almost picked this one. But the other thing that jotted down from this, which I love,
345. 00:31:25 the unstated appeal of lost productivity advice, of lots of productivity advice lies in the
346. 00:31:31 bewitching idea that there might be a rule or set of rules that would force accomplishment
347. 00:31:36 to occur. So essentially, it's like, if we dial in these, these simple things, which is why like
348. 00:31:44 the standard advice is just do these three simple things, and you'll save an hour a day every day
349. 00:31:48 for the rest of your life. Like, it's these little life hacks. That's what is appealing to people.
350. 00:31:55 But I like the fact that he takes the contrarian approach to that regarding doing things daily
351. 00:32:01 ish. I guess the way that I do this is I do track some habits on my daily note and obsidian. And
352. 00:32:08 I try to get to the point where I can check the box at the end of the day. I can't always do it.
353. 00:32:13 I've got the the charts so I can see the the chains. But I think you're right that I have
354. 00:32:18 gotten to the point where I'm not putting the pressure on myself to don't break the chain and
355. 00:32:25 like that's just this big thing that's hanging over me. I would prefer to write every day.
356. 00:32:30 If I don't write, then I'm a little bit disappointed, but I'm also not beating myself up. I know that
357. 00:32:36 if I write more often than I don't write, then I'm going to have material. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
358. 00:32:42 The one that I picked from this, which probably just because I'm thinking about the life theme
359. 00:32:47 stuff, but look for the life task. The life task he mentions is something that your life is asking
360. 00:32:53 of you. So it's a little bit different than our approach to the the life theme, but I like this,
361. 00:32:58 this framing where the life task is really about not, you know, what do you want to get out of life,
362. 00:33:06 but what is life asking of you? It kind of reminds me of that that famous quote. I forget which
363. 00:33:13 president said it, but don't ask, you know, what your country can do for you, but ask what you can
364. 00:33:17 do for your country. It's sort of that idea, but I think there is something powerful here. I think
365. 00:33:26 it is very much aligned with some of the stuff that we talked about in the life theme cohort.
366. 00:33:31 So for example, he mentions in this chapter or this day that a life task is something that only
367. 00:33:36 you can do. I do believe that your life theme is really tied into the things that you are
368. 00:33:48 uniquely positioned to do. So like, if you're going to talk about passion, passion isn't doing
369. 00:33:53 what you love. It's actually actually means to suffer. So you're going through some things,
370. 00:33:58 but it's so important to you that it's worth making it happen. So it's really like things
371. 00:34:02 that are important and things that suck. And if you had a Venn diagram, it would be, you know,
372. 00:34:06 the place where that overlaps. And I feel like you could also kind of take that Venn diagram
373. 00:34:12 approach and that place where it overlaps that sort of you could relabel that your duty
374. 00:34:16 in terms of the life task. And I think if you are looking for that, the fulfillment and the meaning
375. 00:34:24 and the purpose kind of come along for the ride. If you're able to to to really narrow that that
376. 00:34:32 in. Now, I don't think it's super simple. And you probably have to try a bunch of stuff. And
377. 00:34:38 you might be surprised at the things that really bring you life. I mean, that's the whole part of
378. 00:34:43 the life theme process. The very first thing we do is the moments of impact. Like when were the
379. 00:34:47 moments where you really came alive? It's probably, you know, we've we've seen this a lot of people
380. 00:34:51 that we work with in that cohort. They're probably things that were scary to you at the moment. But
381. 00:34:56 you went out and did it anyways. And then afterwards you found, Oh, actually, that was really cool. I
382. 00:35:00 think I want to do that again. Doesn't mean you're not terrified of it. But it's worth it.
383. 00:35:06 Yeah, so let me ask for a clarification, because I interpreted something differently. And I don't
384. 00:35:10 know. So does he say in here that the the life task is something only you can do or that it's
385. 00:35:18 something you can do? Or does he say both of those things? Because I grabbed it as like it's
386. 00:35:23 something you're actually able to do. Like even though it's hard, you actually can do it.
387. 00:35:28 Well, the thing I jotted down was the line a life task is something that only you can do. Okay,
388. 00:35:34 but also the very first thing I jotted down under this section was never mind what you want. What
389. 00:35:41 does life want view? So I think there's probably a little bit of overlap there. I think the thing
390. 00:35:49 that that he's really hitting on here, not saying explicitly, but you know, I mentioned the passion
391. 00:35:56 doesn't mean what a lot of people think it it means. So the idea here is not look for the things
392. 00:36:03 that are fun. But if you're looking for the things that only you can do, you're finding these things
393. 00:36:10 and you're thinking to yourself, or somebody should really do that. But then you look around and
394. 00:36:15 you're like, well, no one else is in a better position to do this than I am, I may as well
395. 00:36:21 do that. And those are the things that ultimately I think become meaningful. Those are the hard
396. 00:36:27 things. So it does require you to have that a little bit of that sense of duty where it's like,
397. 00:36:32 this is something that needs to be done. Nobody's doing this. I'll raise my hand and I'll, I'll do
398. 00:36:37 it. Obviously there's a caveat with that because you can't just, you know, assume all of the world's
399. 00:36:42 problems and try to fix them all. That's very much contrary to what he was talking about at the
400. 00:36:46 very beginning of the book. But I think you get what I'm saying here. Yeah, I do. All right. All
401. 00:36:52 right. So go to week three. All right. So week three is titled letting go. And again,
402. 00:37:05 seven different sections here. The one that I wanted to talk about is day 21. But I have a
403. 00:37:13 little bit different reason for doing that. So I'll let you go first here if you want.
404. 00:37:18 What do you want to talk about from week three? So Mike and I both actually picked 21. And 21
405. 00:37:23 has the title of what's an interruption. Now the reason why I picked what's an interruption is because
406. 00:37:29 lately, and I don't know how long this has been, it might be years. Like it might, I have no idea
407. 00:37:34 how long this has been going on. But there is this thing where I feel like, oh, I'm constantly
408. 00:37:40 being interrupted. I'm constantly being interrupted. I'm constantly being interrupted. I'm trying to
409. 00:37:43 do a thing. And I'm constantly being interrupted. And it's not by any specific thing. It's kind of
410. 00:37:48 by everything. And I start to think to myself, well, hold on, right? Like, I don't think everything
411. 00:37:54 else is the problem. I think you are the problem. Like, I think this is a, this is a you thing,
412. 00:37:59 Ikori. And I'm like, ah, dad gone at it. It probably is a me thing. Like, it's probably
413. 00:38:04 something that I have to work through. And this one really made me think about like,
414. 00:38:13 how do you live in a world where this stuff is going to happen? And you don't treat it like an
415. 00:38:21 interruption, but you treat it like part of everyday life. And you treat it like this is the way the
416. 00:38:25 process works. And how are you okay with that? Because like, I put like right now, I can tell
417. 00:38:30 you that I don't feel like I'm okay with it. Like I don't feel like I want to keep living
418. 00:38:33 in a world where I feel like I'm being interrupted. But I think I'm the problem. So I have to figure
419. 00:38:37 out what do I do about that? Yeah. Okay. So the what you do about that, I think there is
420. 00:38:48 a strategy you can take here. So as I was reading this, I was remembering hyper focus by Chris Bailey.
421. 00:38:57 And he's got a grid in that that book, one of those like two by two grids that like kind of like
422. 00:39:04 the Eisenhower matrix. Yep. And it was about dealing with distractions and interruptions.
423. 00:39:10 And I'm trying to do this from memory. So forgive me if I get the labels wrong on the top. So from
424. 00:39:16 left to right, there were things that are annoying. And then things that are fun. And then on the
425. 00:39:28 Y access and top to bottom, there are things that you can control and things that you can't control.
426. 00:39:33 Okay. So hopefully that gives you a picture. The things that you that you can't control,
427. 00:39:42 that's where the approach is simply if it's annoying, you deal with it, and you get back to
428. 00:39:47 what you were doing. If it's something that you can control, whether it's annoying or fun,
429. 00:39:52 you really want to do what you can to set the boundaries so that that doesn't happen.
430. 00:39:58 But then the one that was kind of shocking to me was the things that you can't control,
431. 00:40:02 but are kind of fun. Just go enjoy them. And I remember reading that thinking to myself,
432. 00:40:07 I was working at home, having little kids that will just barge into my office.
433. 00:40:11 It's like, well, I was writing and I was in in flow state. And now like that's completely
434. 00:40:16 out the window because you wanted to play. And I can be upset about that, which actually means
435. 00:40:22 that it's going to take me longer to get back to what I was doing. Or I could just, well, I'm
436. 00:40:26 interrupted. I may as well just go shoot hoops for 15 minutes and then come back and pick it up
437. 00:40:33 again. So hold on. Let me read the quote. Once your focus has already, once your focus has been
438. 00:40:38 diverted, once the child has burst into the room, or the anxious thought, blah, blah, blah, blah,
439. 00:40:43 blah, don't fight that fact. And I was like, Oh, dang, like that's really good.
440. 00:40:48 Yeah. So that grid that Chris Bailey talked about, that really what came up in the way that he was
441. 00:40:54 describing it here. And I think there's a lot of a lot of good stuff there. The reason I called
442. 00:40:58 this one out, and I might actually pick a different one now, because I didn't realize that you had
443. 00:41:03 picked this one too. But my talking point here comes from the very beginning. And all I wrote was,
444. 00:41:09 don't be talking bad about time boxing. And I should say that I don't disagree completely
445. 00:41:19 with what he's what he's saying. He's basically saying like, don't hyper schedule a bunch of stuff,
446. 00:41:24 and then get all bent out of shape when it doesn't go exactly according to plan. But when I'm talking
447. 00:41:29 about time boxing, which I think is one of the most effective productivity strategies I've ever
448. 00:41:35 implemented. But it has required me to get to the point where okay, this is the intention. It's never
449. 00:41:40 going to go exactly this way. And that's completely fine. And I've also over time gotten more and
450. 00:41:45 more loose with it. So my blocks are bigger. And it's more just like a couple of things I'm trying
451. 00:41:49 to get done throughout the day, as opposed to I got to figure out where all 12 of these tasks are
452. 00:41:54 going to going to happen like that doesn't work. So if that's what he's talking about with time
453. 00:41:58 boxing, then I totally agree. But time boxing in general, I think is actually worthwhile or time
454. 00:42:05 blocking. So well, and that's what changed time boxing for me too, right? Because I it never resonated
455. 00:42:10 with me when it was super fixed and super structured. But as soon as I said, really what time boxing
456. 00:42:16 is, it's a structured way for me to plan. And then by doing that planning process, you know,
457. 00:42:24 I'm more productive throughout the week than it actually is having the plan that I've checked
458. 00:42:29 everything off of that list. It's like, otherwise, I'm just kind of going into it haphazard. So
459. 00:42:33 I agree with you. I could not agree with you more. All right. So did you want to pick another one
460. 00:42:36 for this week? Yeah, I do want to just touch on one other thing, which was day 20 set a quantity
461. 00:42:41 goal. Because this is also something that I talk about a lot, but he articulates it differently,
462. 00:42:48 which I really appreciated. He said that often the way to do the best work is to forget about
463. 00:42:55 the quality. And the easiest way to do that is to focus on the quantity instead. There's, I mean,
464. 00:43:03 that makes a ton of sense. When I presented at max stock a few years ago, I actually talked about
465. 00:43:11 the creativity flywheel piece. And one of the things that I mentioned in there was
466. 00:43:17 that quantity produces quality. And the slide that everybody liked the best was where I've got like
467. 00:43:25 three different poop emoji and then the diamond. Okay. And I really do believe that that if you
468. 00:43:32 want to get good at something, really what you need to do is not be a perfectionist about it,
469. 00:43:36 but you need a whole bunch of feedback loops. Yep. And the thing that stood out to me as an
470. 00:43:41 example of this was when I first started podcasting, the very first podcast that I did, I remember
471. 00:43:47 Zach and I recorded like a demo episode for the productivity show before it came out.
472. 00:43:53 And it was like a 30 minute podcast. And it took me like five hours to edit it because I said
473. 00:44:01 I'm probably about a thousand times. And when I went back to edit it, I was trying to get out
474. 00:44:08 every single imperfection. So I was trying to edit out every album. And then I remember getting
475. 00:44:12 done with it and being like, this doesn't sound natural. And at that point, I was like, you just
476. 00:44:16 got to get better at speaking dudes. So I went and joined a Toastmasters group and that helped out a
477. 00:44:21 ton. But I looked like I don't go back and I don't listen to those old episodes. And I don't go back
478. 00:44:28 and I don't read things that I wrote a long time ago. And even like some of the video courses that
479. 00:44:33 I made a long time ago, I have a real hard time going back and watching them again. Because I just,
480. 00:44:39 it's very obvious to me how much I've learned and grown since I did that. And it's painful to go
481. 00:44:48 back and watch the the early work. So I guess the thing that I would echo here
482. 00:44:55 is just keep going and just keep growing. Don't worry about producing something good. Just produce
483. 00:45:02 something he talks about focusing on quantity is the thing that overpowers perfectionism.
484. 00:45:08 And that was exactly what I needed several years ago. Having gone through it, I can tell you this
485. 00:45:13 is really good advice. Yeah, there were two aspects of this that I've been taught elsewhere in life
486. 00:45:19 that I think are really, really great. So my doctoral advisor, basically, when we would write
487. 00:45:23 a paper, when we'd write anything, she would, no matter what stage of the writing process we were
488. 00:45:29 in, it would come back and have read all over every aspect of it. And you're thinking like,
489. 00:45:35 this is the fifth revision of this. Like, why is it still read everywhere? Like, at some point,
490. 00:45:40 we have to stop doing this. And then, you know, at one point, she explains to us, she's like,
491. 00:45:46 she's like, writing is revision, right? It's 100% revision. And she's like, you're never done
492. 00:45:50 revising. You just hit a deadline. And like, those were the two, the two concepts that I that I took
493. 00:45:56 away from that is one, writing is revision. I'm just going to keep writing. I'm going to write,
494. 00:46:00 and I'm going to write, and I'm going to write, and I'm going to write, and I'm going to write,
495. 00:46:02 and then I'm going to revise and revise and revise and revise. And then the other thing is like,
496. 00:46:06 I'm never done doing that. I just hit a deadline where I actually have to hit submit. And therefore,
497. 00:46:11 it's going to be as good as it's going to be when I hit, when I hit that submit deadline.
498. 00:46:14 And that has really changed the way I think about a lot of different things.
499. 00:46:18 Don't try like, I mean, it's not that you're not trying to hit a goal. It's almost like you're
500. 00:46:22 trying to get above a floor. Yeah. Realizing that you'll never get to the top of the ceiling.
501. 00:46:28 Because that the ceiling keeps going up as you get better, the ceiling goes up further. And that's
502. 00:46:33 okay. Like, that's a good way to live life. Yeah, which kind of gets into the whole idea of goals
503. 00:46:38 versus versus habits. But yeah. So I think that's all I got to say about that, though. Anything else
504. 00:46:46 you want to say before you move on to week four? Nope. I'm ready to go to week four.
505. 00:46:50 Okay. So week four is titled showing up. And this is kind of where he focuses on doing the actual
506. 00:47:00 work. And I like this one. I think this is a real effective way to end it. And he's sort of is
507. 00:47:09 he's addressing maybe some concerns that you've had from the very beginning about being finite,
508. 00:47:15 and nothing I do really matters. This is kind of where he's like, well, it does matter. It just
509. 00:47:20 doesn't matter, maybe as much as you thought it did prior to this whole journey. But the one
510. 00:47:26 that I really wanted to talk about from here, although I could probably talk about any of these,
511. 00:47:32 I really like this, this, this whole section. But day 23 is how to start from Sandy.
512. 00:47:40 And I think this is something I have fallen into where you get into this thing where you're
513. 00:47:48 chasing sanity. And you and this is sort of coupled with that goal mindset, where once I
514. 00:47:54 achieve this goal, once I do this thing, once I have this, then everything else gets easier and
515. 00:48:03 things settle down a little bit. So with the goals, you're kind of are attaching this sanity to
516. 00:48:14 once you get across the finish line, or once you get the ball into the end zone. And once you
517. 00:48:21 achieve that goal, it never produces the result that you think it's going to, you just see the
518. 00:48:26 next step now, and you realize that the goal posts have moved and you have to keep going.
519. 00:48:30 So chasing sanity is sort of a pointless endeavor. And he says, you can't strive for
520. 00:48:37 sanity, you have to start there, which he defines sanity as groundedness, even in times of unpleasantness.
521. 00:48:44 So this actually ties to task management as well. So we mentioned the RSS being the river,
522. 00:48:53 and I really liked that that visual. The other visual I really, really liked comes from this
523. 00:48:58 section where he says, treat your to do list as a menu. And I was like, yes, this is it,
524. 00:49:05 because I again, like I've been working on these scripts and recording these videos on
525. 00:49:11 like the life HQ stuff, all the task management, my philosophy with the essential lists. And every
526. 00:49:17 time I talk about this is the brain and it's giving me the suggestions, but I'm making my own list,
527. 00:49:23 and I'm choosing three things that I'm going to add to that people are like, but those things are
528. 00:49:27 do. And I never really could articulate exactly how I was able to just like disconnect from that.
529. 00:49:35 It's like, well, yeah, I might have a whole bunch of things that I do, but the reality is,
530. 00:49:40 I'm not going to get to all that stuff. I have to be picky about the things that I'm going to
531. 00:49:44 engage with. And I'm not trying to optimize for urgency. I'm trying to optimize for importance.
532. 00:49:50 What's the really important thing for me to do today? And embracing my limits and my limited
533. 00:49:55 time, I limit a resources. And the analogy of the todo list is a menu is perfect.
534. 00:50:00 Because there's all these different things that are presented before you. And you could pick any
535. 00:50:04 of these that are associated with all these different projects. That's essentially what my
536. 00:50:08 task dashboard is in life HQ. Yep. That's the menu. Right. And then the things that I am choosing,
537. 00:50:16 you know, by by forcing myself to just pick a couple of things, it's sort of like you get an
538. 00:50:21 appetizer, you get a main course, you get a dessert. But you're not going to you're not going to
539. 00:50:26 bite off more than you can chew. You may like 12 different things on the menu, but you can't eat
540. 00:50:32 them all. It's a really good analogy. Yeah, I love this analogy. And I was curious if it resonated
541. 00:50:38 with you too. But yeah, I was going to call this one out. But since since you called this one out,
542. 00:50:41 I get to call it my other one from the section. Okay. So in the last, I don't know, in the last
543. 00:50:49 two or three years, I have fallen into something that he describes really, really well. Basically,
544. 00:50:57 I'll get like a year and a half, two years of like email. And then I'm like, okay, I'm never
545. 00:51:03 going to get back to the beginning of that. And by this time, like whatever was written,
546. 00:51:07 you know, a year and a half or two years ago, it doesn't matter anymore. Like nobody really cares.
547. 00:51:11 So I create a folder that says like 2024 2025, right? Because I work in academic school years.
548. 00:51:17 And I take all those emails and I dump them into that folder, because I know I can search for
549. 00:51:23 things if I need them. So therefore, if I need to get to it, I can, if I need to find that random
550. 00:51:27 email from a year and a half ago, I can. But it clears up my inbox and I, and I don't have all
551. 00:51:33 that weight, you know, it's sitting on me. The same thing happens with my desktop,
552. 00:51:37 because I use my desktop as a working interface, right? Like files go there that I'm working on in
553. 00:51:42 real time, but then I'll forget to go off and clear it. And like, you know, so then there's like a
554. 00:51:46 million files all stacked on top of each other on the desktop. Well, every so often, you just create
555. 00:51:50 a new folder, you put them together, you drag and you drop all those files in there, and you're like,
556. 00:51:54 I can find the stuff if I need to, you know, if I ever need to do down the road. Like, and there's,
557. 00:51:59 this just happens in so many areas of my life to where it's like, okay, all of that cruft that I've
558. 00:52:04 built up, you know, over the last year and a half, if I just pile that up, and then I put it in a
559. 00:52:10 box somewhere, and I've not had many instances, maybe even any instances, where that's come back
560. 00:52:18 to bite me and say, Oh, you really should have kept all of those emails, all those thousand emails
561. 00:52:25 because of that one. And it's like, no, it just hasn't happened. Yeah. And he describes this really,
562. 00:52:29 really well in this chapter. And I like, I like it a lot. So I want to give you maybe a suggestion.
563. 00:52:37 I'll share something that I do to, to battle the the cruft, not with the emails specifically,
564. 00:52:43 but with the desktop. Okay, so most people have a computer desktop and the put files on there so
565. 00:52:49 they can drag them into other places. I don't do that. The place that I put things that I can
566. 00:52:54 drag them other places is actually an app called drop zone. It's a shelf app. But there's an app
567. 00:52:59 called desktop curtain. Have you heard of this? I have not heard of this. Basically it hides all
568. 00:53:04 the icons on your desktop. I'm going to look at this. So that's what I do. And I initially came
569. 00:53:11 across this app because I had a couple things on it that I didn't want to, didn't want to move yet
570. 00:53:15 when I was doing screencasts. And now I just leave this running all the time. And the desktop is
571. 00:53:21 essentially like a folder, like my, my to review folder, the things that sit, they sit on the desktop
572. 00:53:27 until I, I actually process them. But because desktop curtain is always running, it just hides
573. 00:53:33 all those files. So it's not cluttering when I'm looking at my my computer. This is a great tip.
574. 00:53:38 I'm going to have to look into this tip. This is a great tip. It's either a great tip or my
575. 00:53:42 secret shame. No, no, no, no, no, no, because I mean, it, I've learned about myself over the,
576. 00:53:48 over the many, many years now, I'm not going to stop doing this. Like I've had fun of me about this.
577. 00:53:53 You know, I've looked at it and felt bad about it. And then I'm like, this is just how I operate.
578. 00:53:58 Like this is how my computer works. And I'm okay with it. Like at this point, it's just like,
579. 00:54:02 I'm, I'm stopping fighting it. I'm not going to fight it anymore. All right. So are we ready to go
580. 00:54:06 to my day next? Yeah, let's do it. All right. So my day is day 24. And it's called scruffy hospitality.
581. 00:54:13 And the reason why I like scruffy hospitality. And I was thinking through this is I grew up
582. 00:54:18 in a scruff, a scruffy hospitality home. So this feels very like home to me. So it means you're
583. 00:54:25 not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends.
584. 00:54:31 Right? It means that like basically you're okay with who you are and that things exist in a certain
585. 00:54:37 way. And it doesn't mean that you're like, you don't do anything. It just means you don't try to
586. 00:54:43 reach perfectionism before you go out and like serve others and share with others. And I really
587. 00:54:50 love this idea. And what I really like about what he brings into it later is he talks about the
588. 00:54:55 fact that you're being generous towards these other people too. Because like they walk into your house
589. 00:55:01 and the house is the best example of this. But like they walk into your house and like everything's
590. 00:55:04 put together. It looks like nobody's lived there. And it's like, we've got four kids. We've got four
591. 00:55:10 boys. Trust me. People live in our house, right? Like the the banisters are going to be scuffed.
592. 00:55:16 You know, the the what is the thing on the bottom? Where the floor beats the wall? You know what I'm
593. 00:55:23 talking about, right? The floorboards? The floorboards like that stuff's going to be scuffed because
594. 00:55:28 kids are throwing toys at it. And you know, like matchbox cars and stuff. So you can't live like
595. 00:55:34 this perfect life. And when people walk in and they go, Oh, okay, normal people live here. Like,
596. 00:55:38 this is a this is a house where normal people live. And it's not some house where, you know,
597. 00:55:42 it's like you're walking around and like bubble or like eggshells and stuff. And I'm like, this is
598. 00:55:48 this is the way my brain works. Yeah, I won't tell you that this is exactly the way my home works.
599. 00:55:54 So Mike, you can read between the lines on this one. But what I will tell you is, this is the way
600. 00:55:59 my brain works. And I really, I really like this idea. Well, I think that's kind of the whole point
601. 00:56:04 of this particular day is he calls out that, you know, if you're going to have people over,
602. 00:56:13 then you want everything to be perfect. But if you are going over to somebody's house and you see
603. 00:56:19 imperfection, you actually feel better about that than so it's sort of like this double standard,
604. 00:56:27 where you want things to not be like completely buttoned up for other people. You want to,
605. 00:56:34 you want things to be authentic and real when you go somewhere else. But then when people come
606. 00:56:39 to your house, you want everything buttoned up and perfect, which just the way that he describes
607. 00:56:44 it, as he does so often throughout this book, it's just kind of like, yeah, what the heck? Yeah,
608. 00:56:50 exactly. But you don't, you don't live that way. Like, so, yeah, because I walk into somebody's
609. 00:56:54 house in. So like, Mike, if I came over to your house and it looked like normal people lived there
610. 00:57:00 and there were toys on the floor and there was like homework setting on the table and all this
611. 00:57:03 stuff, I would think, Oh, yeah, like, these are real people, like these are normal people.
612. 00:57:07 There's a couple dishes in the sink, but there's not, you know, they're not slobs, you know, kind of a
613. 00:57:12 thing. And it's like, Oh, I'm in a home. Like, I'm not in like some fancy facility that where they
614. 00:57:19 have servants walking around, like taking care of everything. I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
615. 00:57:26 I should actually call out one other thing from the day that that I picked, if you're cool at this,
616. 00:57:32 before we go to the blog, he mentions a book, which I think is very intriguing, just based on the title,
617. 00:57:40 which is anti time management by Richie Norton. You're pumping your fist. You're excited.
618. 00:57:46 I'm pumping my fist because I wanted to do the same thing. I wanted to call it out and I actually
619. 00:57:50 was going to maybe think about it as a bookworm book for the. Okay, so. Well, I mean, I technically
620. 00:57:57 don't have a book yet for my next one. If you look at the notion document, I forgot to fill that out.
621. 00:58:02 So we'll cross that bridge and we get to it, but I ordered this one already.
622. 00:58:09 I called it out because I wanted to read it for sure. Cool. All right. Shall we talk about the
623. 00:58:14 epilogue? Let's do it. Epilogue. Okay, so the epilogue is just an effective way to end this,
624. 00:58:21 I think. He's tying everything together, but it's not, you know, this is everything you need to know
625. 00:58:28 and now do these 12 things, which seems like that's sort of the formula for a lot of these
626. 00:58:34 productivity books is I'm going to give you one topic for each of these chapters. And then I'm
627. 00:58:39 just going to recap them all in a bunch of single statements at the end to really drive my points
628. 00:58:44 home. So you really get this. The first thing he says in the epilogue is that the journey is
629. 00:58:48 never complete and it's certainly not going to be done in four weeks. So it's like, hey, thanks
630. 00:58:53 for coming along on this journey with me. But by the way, this is just the beginning. You get a lot
631. 00:58:57 more work to do. I don't know how that makes you feel, but this is very in line with what I know
632. 00:59:05 of Oliver Berkman. And I was like, of course, he's going to end it this way. And it feels very
633. 00:59:09 authentic and real, which I actually appreciate. He quotes a guy in here and he says, pick a trait
634. 00:59:16 that bothers you the most, right? And then ask yourself, like, how do you feel if that
635. 00:59:23 bugs you? And he literally says, it might dog you until the end of your days.
636. 00:59:28 And I'm thinking to myself, what a terrible way to think about this. Like, think about the thing
637. 00:59:32 that bothers you and say, it's never going away. You're going to do that forever until you die.
638. 00:59:38 Like, you're going to do this. Right. And basically, he's basically, he's just saying like, Hey,
639. 00:59:44 you could be like all upset about this. And you could be all whiny about this.
640. 00:59:47 And then you could just be like, well, if that happens, it's not that big of a deal.
641. 00:59:51 Like everything's going to be okay. And I need to just stop letting this bother me.
642. 00:59:55 And I was like, man, what a, what a different perspective on life.
643. 00:59:59 Yeah. So one of the things that he that I jotted down from this is that in some ways you may never
644. 01:00:07 change your life at all, which I think is sort of addressing, I shouldn't say addressing,
645. 01:00:13 it's sort of like challenging this belief behind why a lot of people read these types of books.
646. 01:00:23 Is I am going to read this book because this guru has this system, which is going to fix
647. 01:00:30 this pain point that I have. And I think there's some good in that, specifically the addressing
648. 01:00:37 the pain points, I think like that's actually pretty good advice. Look for books that
649. 01:00:42 are attempting to solve a problem that you are facing. I think that's actually,
650. 01:00:47 that's a good way to a good filter for picking books to read. But I think the other side of that
651. 01:00:52 is no single system is going to just fix everything. And this is sort of something that I've learned
652. 01:00:58 over the hundreds of books that I've read as part of this bookworm process. Both of the books for
653. 01:01:03 the podcast and also all the gap books is you have to pick and choose the individual things from
654. 01:01:11 each book that resonate with you and figure out how that fits in your own life. You can't just
655. 01:01:16 copy paste somebody's system, which going all the way back to the very first bookworm book was
656. 01:01:22 getting things done by David Allen. And this is the issue that everybody has with getting things
657. 01:01:28 done. Is it is this prescriptive system, you buy 43 folders, you stick them in a filing cabinet,
658. 01:01:34 and now everything has a place and everything just clicks. And first couple weeks people are
659. 01:01:40 doing stuff like, yeah, this really works. And then eventually it just becomes too much. And all
660. 01:01:45 this doesn't work at all. The truth is somewhere in the middle. There's some good ideas here that
661. 01:01:49 you figure out, you have to figure out how to apply for yourself. So I don't know, I mean,
662. 01:01:55 I know Oliver Berkman well enough at this point, because I've read a couple of his books that I
663. 01:02:00 knew he was going to kind of take the contrarian approach to this. And I don't think that you can't
664. 01:02:08 make change by reading books. I think you can change quite a bit from reading these books.
665. 01:02:13 But there's something valuable about recognizing that you may read the book, you may understand
666. 01:02:19 some things, you may try some things, they may not work. And you may not change at all from that
667. 01:02:26 whole process. And learning to be okay with that is a little bit difficult sometimes. But I think
668. 01:02:32 it's important. Yep, I don't have anything else from the Apple log mic. So I'm good to start wrapping
669. 01:02:38 it up. Okay, well, I got I got a couple more things I'll just real briefly touch on. He mentions
670. 01:02:43 that our limitations actually make fresh starts impossible. I'd never really thought about this
671. 01:02:48 before. And I feel like again, this is a little bit of a contrarian take. But sort of there's some,
672. 01:02:53 there's an element of truth that I completely agree with in this as well. Where the fresh start
673. 01:02:58 thing that really just reminds me of like the annual New Year's resolutions. This is the year
674. 01:03:03 I'm going to make fresh start. And those never work. My approach to that has been the personal
675. 01:03:09 retreat process, where I do a personal retreat every quarter. And I'm not making a fresh start
676. 01:03:16 with that though. So I feel like the term fresh start, this is very carefully chosen and probably
677. 01:03:21 is central to this argument. Yeah, you probably can't make a complete fresh start. That doesn't
678. 01:03:25 mean that you can't change certain things. You just can't change everything. And so the fresh start,
679. 01:03:31 that's kind of like the big sweeping change. I think the better approach here is the small,
680. 01:03:36 you know, I'm already doing this thing and I'm going to tweak this habit a little bit and change
681. 01:03:40 some routines. And that's ultimately going to produce the results that I'm looking for.
682. 01:03:47 But the whole like fresh start, the whole annual goal setting, those dates are completely arbitrary.
683. 01:03:53 So the last thing that he mentions here is that each moment represents a choice to be made.
684. 01:03:58 So it's not like January 1st came and went, you missed your opportunity to set goals this year
685. 01:04:05 to achieve something. You have the moment, you have the opportunity at any given moment
686. 01:04:10 to make the choice. And the way that he says this kind of implicit, I think in here is that
687. 01:04:17 any one choice is not more important than any other choice. And I think there's some truth to that.
688. 01:04:23 I don't know. There's a lot of choices that are being made and you are the sum total of the choices
689. 01:04:28 that you've made. So we just need to get better at making better choices. But I also don't think
690. 01:04:36 they're all exactly the same. You know, the choice to leave my job or not was more significant than
691. 01:04:42 the choice of what I'm what am I going to eat for lunch today. Yeah. So recognize that that's
692. 01:04:48 not that's not what he's saying here either. But I just in the course of the conversation,
693. 01:04:52 I feel like that's important to call out. All right. So I got for the epilogue. You ready to move on?
694. 01:04:56 I am. Okay. So next is action items. And I actually have to grab mine from my outline
695. 01:05:08 here. And I'm jotting down the time code. So if you're good with it, why don't you go first?
696. 01:05:13 Okay. So I only had one. And I'm trying to. Okay, it's from the interruption one. So I'm trying to
697. 01:05:21 figure out what chapter that was or what day that was this day 21. So mine is I want to try
698. 01:05:27 to actively rethink interruptions. And I want to try to like ingrain this into my daily activities,
699. 01:05:37 right? So I think all of this is going to look like from an action item standpoint is I'm in
700. 01:05:42 the middle of working. I'm in the middle of doing something. My kid busts into the room. And all I
701. 01:05:46 want to do is not think interruption. You know what I mean? Like, I want to think like, okay,
702. 01:05:51 engage with your child and then get back to work. Or I'm in the office at work. And I'm working on
703. 01:05:57 the lesson prep and a student walks in, right? And I don't think interruption, I think, help
704. 01:06:01 that student, right? Like be hospitable, help that student, and then get back to your work afterwards.
705. 01:06:05 And if I can, in, you know, a couple weeks, a month or whatever it might be, if I can like reframe
706. 01:06:11 that to be like, this is life. And you don't get this perfect little cocoon of, you know, focus
707. 01:06:17 thought with your non lyrical music in the background. You know, like, if I can think that,
708. 01:06:22 that's a win. Like, that's a win on this action item for me. So that's my only one that I'm going
709. 01:06:26 to take away from this book. What about yours, Mike? All right. Well, I've actually got two of them.
710. 01:06:33 Well, the first one is actually related to a previous action item. So this is sort of long-term
711. 01:06:39 follow up. But from Storyworthy, I talked about how I wanted to start capturing those stories.
712. 01:06:46 And I've done that a couple of times. But one of the things that he mentioned in this book,
713. 01:06:54 and let me find the specific spot this comes from, I think it's day 19, a good time or a good story.
714. 01:07:02 So basically, everything that happens to you is either a good time or a good story. And
715. 01:07:09 I want to recognize the things that don't go my way, the quote unquote bad things. I want
716. 01:07:16 to start recognizing, oh, there's a story here. And I'm hoping that by, because there are those,
717. 01:07:24 those things that happen that I get frustrated about. And that's really what I'm looking for with
718. 01:07:29 this is that frustration trigger that actually causing me to think about what is the story that
719. 01:07:36 I can capture from, from this moment that's, that's happening right now. That's the first one. And
720. 01:07:41 then the second one is from the day 23, how to start from sanity, where sanity being groundedness.
721. 01:07:49 The action item here is to pay yourself first with your time. And I sort of already started
722. 01:07:56 doing this, the goal with this one. I think we talked about this a little bit in the pro show,
723. 01:08:01 because I got the crazy new studio set up. And then I've been going to the co-working space and doing
724. 01:08:06 the writing there because it's a better environment for that. That's how I see that playing out is me
725. 01:08:13 going to the co-working space, which talked about the coffee maker and things like that. That's
726. 01:08:18 because I want to get there early. And I wanted the stuff there to make the coffee when I get there
727. 01:08:22 as opposed to making it at home, waking people up and then just dragging out my being able to get
728. 01:08:29 into the office. I want to be able to go there, do my thing. Lunchtime comes. Now, you know,
729. 01:08:36 whatever happens happens. I'm going to go home and record some videos. I'm going to do whatever.
730. 01:08:44 That's the goal with that. That's what I mean by pay yourself first with your your time. The thing
731. 01:08:50 that I want to really just kind of focus on with that is the writing. That is the place where the
732. 01:08:55 writing happens. If I end up going there early, paying myself first and then falling into admin
733. 01:09:01 mode, that is a failure in my opinion. So that's not what I'm going for with this kind of specifically
734. 01:09:08 I want that that place and that environment to kind of be for writing and the creative process.
735. 01:09:16 And I feel like if I could just do that for a couple of hours every single day, he talks about
736. 01:09:21 that in here too. We didn't talk about that one. I think it was maybe taking action week two,
737. 01:09:25 about the three hours. The three hours, yeah. Three hours is all you're going to get in terms of
738. 01:09:29 real deep creative work. Well, if I can get there by eight, do my three creative hours, take a break
739. 01:09:35 in the middle for a cup of coffee, I can still be done by noon. Exactly. Exactly. So those are mine.
740. 01:09:42 Awesome. Okay. Style and rating. Your book, you start. Yeah. It's hard to to rate this one
741. 01:09:53 just based on the format of it. And I don't know if that's just me not being able to get over the
742. 01:09:59 fact that I picked like a daily reader for a bookworm book, which is a terrible idea.
743. 01:10:06 Okay. It's not you. I'm struggling with the same thing. Yeah. So the stuff that's in here is really
744. 01:10:11 good. A lot of the stuff that's in here is I'm not going to say a rehash of four thousand weeks,
745. 01:10:18 but it is he has talked about these things before. I actually got a lot out of reading this after
746. 01:10:26 reading four thousand weeks, he lose the four thousand weeks a couple times. But I feel like at
747. 01:10:31 this point, he's had more time and more experience. And so he's sort of gone through a process of
748. 01:10:36 distilling these ideas down. And so when he talks about him again in this book, it doesn't read
749. 01:10:41 like the same sort of thing. It really reads fresh, but it's also very much in alignment with the
750. 01:10:47 material from from that book. Man, I don't know. I don't know how to how to rate this. I think if
751. 01:10:56 I was doing this myself, I would tend to rate this a little bit lower just based on the four week
752. 01:11:04 28 day format. I will say that the way we worked through the outline, I think was was cool. And I
753. 01:11:13 got a lot out of the conversation. I think that probably bumped it up a little bit in in my
754. 01:11:20 estimation. I also absolutely love four thousand weeks. I really like Oliver Berkman. I don't think
755. 01:11:27 I can rate this a five star book though, just based on the format. I think this is I definitely
756. 01:11:32 would recommend this one. I think everyone should pick this one up. If you are interested in a
757. 01:11:38 bookworm at all, I mean, this is going to speak to a lot of the topics that we talk about. But as
758. 01:11:45 we mentioned throughout this episode, he presents things in a different way than most other people
759. 01:11:51 in the space. And that is very refreshing. I like Oliver Berkman's tone. It's almost like I'm a
760. 01:11:58 productivity guy, but I'm going to be sarcastic and make fun of it a little bit. Yep. Yep. Which I
761. 01:12:06 appreciate. I think that's that's that's needed in in this space. So I'm going to rate it at four
762. 01:12:14 stars. I'm kind of curious where you land on this. And that's just my own, you know, I'm not doing
763. 01:12:18 half stars anymore. I think, you know, if you look at the the five star books that we have
764. 01:12:25 have read, even the most recent one with with good work, it's it's not quite to that level.
765. 01:12:33 But it's almost not the book's fault. It's like it's not trying to be that. It's more approachable.
766. 01:12:40 Let me just give you a bunch of things to think about as opposed to let me completely change your
767. 01:12:46 world. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's I think that's a good thing. You know, that's that's not a
768. 01:12:52 that's not really an argument could be made that that's not a reason to to dock at a star. You could
769. 01:12:58 make the opposite argument that's actually a reason to give it another star. So but I really do I
770. 01:13:03 really do like this book. I think I think people should pick it up. It's a really easy read. I would
771. 01:13:08 recommend you probably read through it the way that it's designed to be read, not the way that
772. 01:13:12 we did it. So a day at a time go through it and really marinate on the the ideas that are
773. 01:13:18 are in here. But a lot of this stuff is not, you know, brand new transformational never thought
774. 01:13:24 of it that way before. But definitely add some some context and some commentary for a lot of the
775. 01:13:30 things that I have been chewing on just based on all the other productivity books that we've read.
776. 01:13:35 And really am glad that we took the time to go through this one.
777. 01:13:41 All right. So I said earlier, I came into this one thinking it was a very different book, right?
778. 01:13:45 I thought it was meditation for mortals. And he was going to talk to us about meditation
779. 01:13:50 and quickly realized that it was meditations for mortals. And it was very different than what
780. 01:13:53 I thought it was going to be. But what I'll say from that is I really like this book. So I have
781. 01:14:00 read four thousand weeks before. I came in with a positive view of Berkman and his style and
782. 01:14:07 the content that he produces. I thought it was I thought it was good. I thought it lived up to
783. 01:14:13 you know, the expectation that I had coming in from from one of his books. I would wholeheartedly
784. 01:14:18 agree with you that if if somebody's going to read this, do it in the way that he suggests you
785. 01:14:22 read it. Do it as a four week book, do one day at a time. I think it'll it'll be a better book.
786. 01:14:30 It'll sorry, you'll have a better experience with the book doing it that way. I think the things that
787. 01:14:35 he talks about are very relevant. There are a few caveats where like, I just didn't resonate
788. 01:14:43 as much with one of the days, right? And I was just like, ah, well, you know, that day was fine. But
789. 01:14:48 I don't really care. Like I could never read that again and be be okay. But then there were other
790. 01:14:52 days where I was like, man, that that's a good one. I need to remember that and like reread that
791. 01:14:56 later on down the road. Just to kind of, you know, re rehash that point when it becomes relevant for
792. 01:15:03 me. I thought this one was a fun one to talk about even though we read it in a way that it wasn't
793. 01:15:09 meant to be like it was it was a fun one to break down because the ideas were very distinct in like,
794. 01:15:14 you know, day by day. So you could actually get to those individual ideas. But at the same time,
795. 01:15:19 they were bundled in a in what I thought was a really authentic and kind of reasonable way,
796. 01:15:23 even though he was probably trying to get it seven of them, you know, wrapped up into a week,
797. 01:15:28 you know, kind of a thing. But I didn't think it felt forced, which was which was really good.
798. 01:15:32 All right. So now we get to the rating. I think so I'm going to rate this book four stars.
799. 01:15:39 I feel strongly that if we'd have read it in 28 days, the way it was designed, I think I'd rate
800. 01:15:46 it a four and a half. I don't think this book gets to a five for me. Like, it's good. It's not that
801. 01:15:52 it's bad or any anything like that. I just don't think it raises to the level of the books that I've
802. 01:15:58 thought were five stars or the takeaways that I've gotten from from other books. This one was more of a
803. 01:16:04 confirming things that I'd thought about and in a lot of times expressing them more clearly than I've
804. 01:16:09 expressed them in my own head. So that's what stands a four and a half star book from a five star book.
805. 01:16:15 And then the other half a half a star is probably our fault, right? Like in the way that we chose
806. 01:16:20 in the way that we chose to read it. So that's probably not fair. But at the same time,
807. 01:16:24 this is our ratings scheme and it's our show. So we get to we get to do it. We're going to do it.
808. 01:16:28 So hopefully, hopefully people don't read that and think like, Oh, four star book, you know, less
809. 01:16:34 good. It's more a four star book. That's because it's meant to be read in a certain way. But overall,
810. 01:16:40 I definitely recommend this to people, especially people who are, I'm going to say this and hopefully
811. 01:16:47 it doesn't offend people. Especially people who are like more type A, more goal driven,
812. 01:16:52 more perfectionist type people. I think this would be a really, really good book for them to
813. 01:16:57 just have a different perspective to think through. And they may hate it. They may not resonate with
814. 01:17:02 it. But at the same time, I think it'd be a really good read for them to like, just kind of see a
815. 01:17:07 different a different what a different but well articulated way of thinking. So that's that's where
816. 01:17:14 my rating goes. Yeah, I think this might be the only double four book that I would absolutely
817. 01:17:24 unequivocally recommend to absolutely anybody. That's interesting. That's that's an interesting,
818. 01:17:30 you're kind of like the baseball stats guy, right? Like where you can find a stat for anything, Mikey.
819. 01:17:37 Well, I don't know that that's completely true. I'd have to look back to the catalog. But
820. 01:17:42 I agree with you. He directly addresses the entrepreneurs that you were describing at the
821. 01:17:50 beginning of the book. So those are the people who need this the most, I would argue. And I think
822. 01:17:54 I'm probably one of them. So yeah, well, there was a lot that I resonated with in this book too.
823. 01:17:59 So I'm with you on that. Cool. So let's put meditations for mortals on the shelf. What is next, Corey?
824. 01:18:10 So the next book is called free time, lose the busy work, love the business by Jenny Blake.
825. 01:18:17 And Mike, this is one that you recommended that I stole from you. And I'm happy to steal it.
826. 01:18:23 It actually, interestingly enough, Oliver Berkman, endorses this book. So he's he's one of the people
827. 01:18:29 that that yeah. So he's one of the people that endorses this book. And it's basically a book about
828. 01:18:37 time and a book about the importance of time. And then how like free time plays into that.
829. 01:18:45 You get into this idea. She's going to walk us through this three staged free time framework,
830. 01:18:51 which I'm interested to see how that goes. But she is co-creator of Google's career guru coaching
831. 01:18:59 program. So interesting background, interesting context for a book. It's basically not about being
832. 01:19:06 lazy or about not doing work. It's about rethinking about your time and how that that goes into it.
833. 01:19:11 So our next book is free time, lose the busy work, love the business by Jenny Blake.
834. 01:19:16 Pick that up if you're reading along with us. Mike, how about you? What's two books from now?
835. 01:19:21 I'm going to go ahead and pick the one that you were excited about the anti time management
836. 01:19:27 by Richie Norton. I have heard of Richie Norton before. I've never actually read
837. 01:19:33 anything that he has written. I know I have another Richie Norton book in my house somewhere.
838. 01:19:40 But the whole idea of the anti time management, I just think that at the very least,
839. 01:19:46 that's going to be a really fun conversation. Reclaim your time and revolutionize your results
840. 01:19:53 with the power of time tipping. Interesting. Time tipping sounds interesting. You got any
841. 01:19:59 gap books? So I started a gap book last time. It's called just do something. I'm going to keep
842. 01:20:06 doing that one. I got about halfway through it. So I'm going to finish that one in this gap period.
843. 01:20:11 Okay. I probably will not get to a gap book. I didn't even pick up my gap book from last time.
844. 01:20:17 And I'm going to be gone all next week. I'm going to be recording more videos and then I'm
845. 01:20:20 going to a conference. So I probably will read something, but I don't know what it's going to
846. 01:20:27 be yet. And it might just be free time. Awesome. We'll see. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you
847. 01:20:36 for listening and thank you specifically to the Bookworm Pro supporters. If you want to become a
848. 01:20:43 Bookworm Pro supporter, help us keep the lights on. That would be very much appreciated. You can go
849. 01:20:48 to patreon.com/bookwormfm. And for seven bucks a month, you can support the show. And you get a
850. 01:20:55 couple of bonuses. You get access to a bootleg feed, which gets uploaded right after we get done
851. 01:21:02 recording. So there's no editing in this bootleg episode. You get to hear me stop the episode and
852. 01:21:10 go yell at my kids because they're being noisy outside my office door. All that stuff gets edited
853. 01:21:14 out of the main show, but bootleg, you get to hear it all. There's also a pro show which has a bonus
854. 01:21:20 topic and no ads. So today we talked about my new studio setup and all the fancy camera gear that I
855. 01:21:29 got for new video projects that I'm working on. There's also a 4k Bookworm wallpaper that you can
856. 01:21:36 download. And all of those are available to the the Bookworm Pro members. So again, if you want to
857. 01:21:43 support the show, you can do that patreon.com/bookwormfm for seven dollars a month. Thank you all. And if
858. 01:21:50 you're reading along with us, let's pick up free time, lose the busy work, love the business,
859. 01:21:55 by Jenny Blake and we'll talk to you all next time.