210: Free Time by Jenny Blake

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1. 00:00:00 Welcome back, Mike. Are you ready to unpack another book?
2. 00:00:04 I am mentioned to you previously before we we hit record.
3. 00:00:10 I've been traveling quite a bit. Um, and I sent you a message.
4. 00:00:15 Well, I was in Boise recording videos for a course that I'm getting ready to
5. 00:00:19 release. So I don't have a link for anybody yet, but it's on the creativity
6. 00:00:22 flywheel. If you're in an end of that, that concept. Um, but I was sitting in
7. 00:00:27 the coffee shop, across from the studio, before the studio opened,
8. 00:00:29 before I was going to go record the videos. And I was reading this, this
9. 00:00:31 book and taking my notes and, um, sent you a message that this may be a record
10. 00:00:37 for the highest number of action items. I'm basically making up for all of the
11. 00:00:42 books in the last couple of months where I haven't had action items.
12. 00:00:44 They're all part of this one.
13. 00:00:46 What I can tell you folks is looking at our notes document. Um, Mike's action
14. 00:00:51 item list is extensive, right? Like it is extensive. This there may not have
15. 00:00:57 been a book that was like, that you, you're the target audience for that's
16. 00:01:01 more, you know, on spot than this one. I don't know how to say that better way.
17. 00:01:04 But do you know what I mean? Like, like, I, I'm reading this book thinking this
18. 00:01:08 was written for Mike. This section was written for Mike. Oh, this section was
19. 00:01:10 written for Mike. Like, so I don't know. Did you know of Jenny Blake before,
20. 00:01:15 before reading this? Um, before reading it. No. So I have trouble. I'm
21. 00:01:22 hesitating answering that because the story behind this book is that I bought
22. 00:01:27 this when it came out a couple of years ago, I think, or at least I bought it a
23. 00:01:31 couple of years ago. But then I went to Sean Blanc's focus like a boss session
24. 00:01:37 in Kansas City. And Sean, when he does live events, he does them right. So what
25. 00:01:42 he did for everybody who came is he put together these gift bags. And in there
26. 00:01:47 was this fancy Uggmunk pen, which is now one of my, my favorite pens, a notebook
27. 00:01:54 with your, your name on it. And one of the things that he put in that gift bag
28. 00:01:58 because he knows Jenny was a, uh, assigned copy of the, the book. So mine
29. 00:02:05 actually has a personalized note on the inside of it. And I had bought the book
30. 00:02:10 years before, right? So then when I got this book, I was like, Oh, I have that
31. 00:02:13 one. And then I opened it up. Oh, this is really cool. And then that got me
32. 00:02:16 thinking, you know, as I was poking around at him, like, why haven't I read
33. 00:02:19 this yet? This seems like one of those books that like, um, you know, two
34. 00:02:25 years ago, Mike, you know, it would have been like goldmine. And then now, now
35. 00:02:30 Mike is still going to get like a ton of value out of it. Although it's one, it
36. 00:02:33 might be one of those ones where the experience of your, your last two years
37. 00:02:36 has really like allowed you to reflect well on things you could adjust, you
38. 00:02:40 know, so that would be right. Yeah, it's going to be interesting to hear. But
39. 00:02:43 before we do that, we're, we're putting the cart before the horse. Let's let's
40. 00:02:46 back up a little bit. Let's talk about follow up from last week. So I'll
41. 00:02:51 start. My follow up was to rethink interruptions. And I'll tell you what,
42. 00:02:57 like if I'm rating this on a red as fail, yellow is mediocre, orange is
43. 00:03:01 mediocre. And then green is good. I'm going to say I'm between like yellow
44. 00:03:05 orange and green. And in particular, where I wanted this to happen, and I
45. 00:03:09 don't know if I expressed it well enough on the on the last episode, but
46. 00:03:11 like, where I really wanted this to happen was with my kids, like I didn't
47. 00:03:15 want my kids to come in and me to think of that as like this major
48. 00:03:18 interruption in in my day. Yeah. And I think I've done a better job at that
49. 00:03:23 that it's like, nope, like, come on, little child, but like, let's engage.
50. 00:03:27 It's only going to take me five or 10 minutes. I probably wasn't doing
51. 00:03:30 anything that important anyhow, even though I thought I was doing
52. 00:03:33 something important. reality is I probably was just reading a book for a
53. 00:03:36 bookworm or, you know, or looking at some silly, you know, thing on the
54. 00:03:40 internet. So those two things are not equal, by the way, they are not
55. 00:03:44 equal, but I'm just saying neither of them are as important as my children,
56. 00:03:47 right? Like, so my children are on a much on a much higher scale or higher
57. 00:03:51 level. So it's like, I think I've done a pretty good job. I would rate
58. 00:03:54 this one between a orangy or yellow in a green. How about you? You had two.
59. 00:04:01 Yeah. So the one that I think I did fairly well on was paying myself first
60. 00:04:07 with my time. I think I shared it's been a bit, but I mentioned that I had
61. 00:04:17 this vision for what this would look like, where I would go to the
62. 00:04:20 co-working space at the beginning of the day, and I would do the, the
63. 00:04:24 deep work, the writing, the creative work there. And then after that, I
64. 00:04:31 would come home. And that would be when I typically would be recording
65. 00:04:37 or when I, when I would be doing admin type stuff. And I can say
66. 00:04:44 that when I have been here, this has worked fairly well. Okay. I think
67. 00:04:50 I've been able to make traction on it, although I haven't had 100%
68. 00:04:53 control over my schedule. For example, we're recording this on a
69. 00:04:58 Wednesday morning, which is totally fine. But I have other people
70. 00:05:04 that I record podcasts with. So it's not completely up to me. I
71. 00:05:07 recorded focused yesterday morning. So that's two of my, my five
72. 00:05:12 mornings now that have been interrupted per se. But for the most
73. 00:05:16 part, I feel like this is this is working. And then I've also been
74. 00:05:19 traveling. So there have been days where this was just not even an
75. 00:05:23 option because I was at a conference. And then I was recording
76. 00:05:26 videos. So that is what it is. But I like this. And I want to keep
77. 00:05:32 this, this going, I feel like I'm still at the point where there's
78. 00:05:37 some holes that I have to feel that I feel a sense of urgency for
79. 00:05:42 some of the life HQ stuff and the ancillary things around it like
80. 00:05:44 the creativity flywheel course, the practical PKM or the PKM
81. 00:05:48 stat course. But once those are done, I know there's always going
82. 00:05:51 to be a list, but I feel like once those are done, I can kind of
83. 00:05:55 see how the system is is going to work. And at that point, I can
84. 00:06:00 add a less hurried pace, just pick the next thing to fix tweak it,
85. 00:06:06 etc. So let me interrupt for a second. What is your considering
86. 00:06:11 you're paying yourself with your time? Do you have a planned not
87. 00:06:15 going to go crazy period of time in the next three, four months,
88. 00:06:20 you know, like not going to work on like a fairly major thing
89. 00:06:23 because you release life HQ. Now you're doing these two courses
90. 00:06:25 and you're and you're going, you're going hard on these two
91. 00:06:27 courses. And we've got the like same cohort going. Yeah.
92. 00:06:31 You can give yourself a little bit of like breathing room, you
93. 00:06:34 know, to like let those creative juices like reengage.
94. 00:06:38 Yes, but probably not until end of December. Okay. So the plan
95. 00:06:45 is to take two weeks off around Christmas and New Year's.
96. 00:06:53 I will be in Door County over Thanksgiving. However, I, the
97. 00:07:01 reason I'm kind of hustling with these courses is I want them
98. 00:07:04 to be part of a Black Friday Cyber Monday promotion. I feel
99. 00:07:09 like Black Friday Cyber Monday maybe has gotten a bad rap, but
100. 00:07:14 it's really important for creators. And you don't have to
101. 00:07:18 just like spam people with a bunch of offers for stuff that
102. 00:07:20 they just bought at a lower price and make them feel bad.
103. 00:07:24 There's ways that you can do it where it's it's legit. So I've
104. 00:07:27 got a plan for that. And yeah, that's that's got to happen.
105. 00:07:32 So yeah, it's it's coming. And then starting next year, I want
106. 00:07:37 to regularly take so bad. So I'm calling them sabbaticals. It's
107. 00:07:40 not what probably what you're thinking of in terms of
108. 00:07:43 sabbaticals because it's not, you know, I'm taking a whole
109. 00:07:45 semester off. But every eighth week, basically, I want to have
110. 00:07:49 nothing scheduled. Oh, nice. And that that'll that's part of
111. 00:07:53 the the strategy going into 2025. Very nice. All right, the
112. 00:07:57 other action item I had was to recognize the bad things that
113. 00:08:00 happened as stories. I have thought about this action item
114. 00:08:05 several times. I don't think I've had bad things happen to me.
115. 00:08:09 All that to say, I have not captured any bad things as
116. 00:08:13 stories. I've captured a couple of stories, but not many. So this
117. 00:08:19 homework for life, going back to the story where the episode
118. 00:08:21 with Matthew Dix, I still think this is valuable. And I want to
119. 00:08:25 continue to think about how to how to do this. But it's not
120. 00:08:29 not gaining the traction yet. And that's partly, I think, just
121. 00:08:33 because I've been running around like a chicken with my
122. 00:08:36 head. Yeah, like real quick, right? Try not to wow, like, you
123. 00:08:42 been traveling a lot. Like in the last like two weeks, I mean,
124. 00:08:46 you've been in you've been traveling, I would say what 10 or
125. 00:08:49 no, maybe not that long 10 out of 14 days, 714 days. It's it's
126. 00:08:55 been a bit so at the end of at the end of October, we were in
127. 00:08:59 Tennessee for the National Homeschool Soccer Tournament, which
128. 00:09:02 was pretty cool. There's like 70 teams there from 36 different
129. 00:09:06 states, I think that was a pretty neat experience. Then we
130. 00:09:10 got back Sunday night from that and Monday morning, I went to
131. 00:09:13 Boise to record PKM stack videos, came back, I think on
132. 00:09:18 Wednesday, Thursday, we had our big outreach. And then the next
133. 00:09:22 week, I left Monday to go back to Boise. And recorded
134. 00:09:27 creativity, flywheel courses, went to the conference, got
135. 00:09:31 back Saturday. And yeah, it's, it's been a bit of a blur.
136. 00:09:39 Yeah, well, good, good. I mean, it sounds like you're doing
137. 00:09:41 awesome stuff. So keep it up, keep it up. Now you're ready to
138. 00:09:44 move on to our book. Let's do it. Alright, so our book today is
139. 00:09:49 by Jenny Blake, as we talked about before, it's called free
140. 00:09:52 time, lose the busy work, love your business. Jenny Blake was
141. 00:09:57 at Google, moved up fairly quickly, and then realized that
142. 00:10:02 she was not thriving, decided that and this is all part of the
143. 00:10:06 the kind of the backstory of the book that you'll you learn if
144. 00:10:09 you read it. But learned that she wasn't thriving, she wanted to
145. 00:10:12 kind of start her own thing and kind of move out into her own
146. 00:10:16 her own consulting business, her own, you know, coaching,
147. 00:10:19 speaking kind of business takes that on. And then she's written
148. 00:10:25 pivot. And that was her, I believe that was her first book. Am I
149. 00:10:28 right, Mike? pivot was her first one. I think there was another
150. 00:10:32 one before that pivot was the last one before free time. And
151. 00:10:36 that's where the majority of the references to her previous
152. 00:10:41 work came from.
153. 00:10:42 Yeah, there's one, there's one about college, something about
154. 00:10:46 college, I can't remember what it is. But so and then you have
155. 00:10:49 pivot, and then you have this book. So let's just move right
156. 00:10:55 into it. The introduction, right? So we're going to break this
157. 00:11:00 book into kind of introduction, we're going to outline her
158. 00:11:03 framework, then she has three different parts of the book. So
159. 00:11:06 align design and assign conclusion, and then we'll wrap it up.
160. 00:11:10 So let's start with the introduction. She basically starts
161. 00:11:14 out with this backstory of like, I kind of was in burn it all
162. 00:11:18 down mode, like I kind of was in this idea of, you know, I'm
163. 00:11:22 freaking out, there's all the stress, all of these things. One
164. 00:11:26 of the things she gets into very, very quickly, which Mike and
165. 00:11:28 I, I'm going to speak for you, Mike, and correct me if I'm
166. 00:11:31 wrong, Mike and I resonate with this very, very much. She is a
167. 00:11:34 very devout systems thinker, and she's a very devout systems
168. 00:11:38 person, which resonates with me more than I can I can explain.
169. 00:11:42 And I know Mike in your operations side of your world, I'm
170. 00:11:45 sure that resonates with you as well. So she the whole the
171. 00:11:49 introduction is really about like these ideas of kind of where
172. 00:11:53 I was coming from and wrong way of thinking. And then she
173. 00:11:56 introduces what she calls heart based business, which is like
174. 00:11:59 her business strategy framework and her like, am I wrong to say
175. 00:12:04 it's her coaching side, Mike? Like, I mean, like that's that's
176. 00:12:07 kind of what she coaches folks in is this heart based business.
177. 00:12:10 Yeah, I'm not sure exactly what she does, to be honest, but I I
178. 00:12:19 think this this book is really about the mechanics of how the
179. 00:12:21 business works. So I actually appreciate the fact that she
180. 00:12:25 didn't go super deep into that. But the heart based business
181. 00:12:27 essentially the key question from that section of the
182. 00:12:30 introduction is how can we earn twice as much in half the time
183. 00:12:35 with ease and joy while serving the highest good. And that is a
184. 00:12:38 mouthful, there is like four different components in there.
185. 00:12:43 Obviously the the profit and revenue we want to earn twice
186. 00:12:45 so much we want to be efficient. So half the time with ease
187. 00:12:48 and joy, how do we make it fun while serving the highest good
188. 00:12:51 connection connecting to our vision and our values as how I
189. 00:12:55 would would frame that. But it's not just a business in order
190. 00:12:58 to make money is the the big takeaway here at the beginning.
191. 00:13:02 Yeah, and I think she does a really good job shooting down
192. 00:13:06 for lack of a better way to word it these existing or past
193. 00:13:11 ideas of what it meant to run a business, right? So you run
194. 00:13:14 your own company hard work no longer directly correlates to
195. 00:13:16 this idea of hard work hustle, you know, that entrepreneurial
196. 00:13:20 kind of bent toward it. And she talks about which by the way,
197. 00:13:24 let me let me just double click on that for a second. If that
198. 00:13:27 was the only revelation I got from this book, it was worth
199. 00:13:30 it. But I recognize that I often will tackle hard projects
200. 00:13:37 because I believe that there will be something good that comes
201. 00:13:40 from these hard projects. And she basically blowing that up
202. 00:13:42 right at the beginning. Yes, by saying that it has nothing to
203. 00:13:46 do with how hard you work, like no one owes you anything. It's
204. 00:13:51 really about the value that you're able to deliver to the
205. 00:13:54 marketplace, which when you think about it makes total sense.
206. 00:13:58 But that was kind of a pivot or a shift in my my thinking right
207. 00:14:03 from the beginning of of this book, which I was very
208. 00:14:06 appreciative of.
209. 00:14:08 And later on, we're going to talk about the fact she actually
210. 00:14:11 tells tells you it's the opposite of that like you essentially
211. 00:14:13 want to do the easiest work that adds the most value. And if
212. 00:14:16 you're not doing the easy like you need to make it easier,
213. 00:14:18 like figure out a system to make it easier, which is really,
214. 00:14:20 really like a different way to think about business. And then
215. 00:14:24 especially the, you know, the, the, the, the CEO or the
216. 00:14:27 operation side of it. She talks another one of the these things
217. 00:14:30 she's going to address directly or she like calls out in this
218. 00:14:32 very introduction. The hungry ghosts of money, fame, power and
219. 00:14:36 control, she calls them the four horsemen of the business
220. 00:14:39 ambition apocalypse, which I really I just like the way she
221. 00:14:41 framed that I was like, Oh, yeah, like, why do we do this? Well,
222. 00:14:44 we're chasing money, we're chasing fame, we're chasing power,
223. 00:14:45 we're chasing control. She calls that out as a as a bad way to
224. 00:14:48 do it. And then basically she says that forward, like moving
225. 00:14:54 forward with your business is not some financial threshold or
226. 00:14:57 some vanity, which we see all over the place, right? Like, I
227. 00:15:00 mean, if you watch YouTube for four minutes, you know, you're
228. 00:15:03 going to figure out somebody's telling you to chase this
229. 00:15:05 financial goal or chase this vanity metric, that it's peace
230. 00:15:08 harmony, progress towards a larger mission, abundant cash
231. 00:15:11 flow. So she does acknowledge, Hey, if you're going to run a
232. 00:15:13 business, like you actually need to make revenue, you actually
233. 00:15:16 need to make profit, you actually need to have a cash flow. She's
234. 00:15:19 not like hippie dippy in a way that it's like, Oh, it's just
235. 00:15:22 all feeling good and everything like that. Like, she's very,
236. 00:15:24 very logical about it at the same time as saying, but it's
237. 00:15:28 also not all these vanity metrics, it's not also all of these
238. 00:15:31 things that really don't matter like you got to think about the
239. 00:15:34 bigger picture. And it clearly comes out of her idea that when
240. 00:15:38 she was in Google, she was stressed out of her mind and wasn't
241. 00:15:41 thriving, you know, according to her, like she was not thriving
242. 00:15:44 by any means. This is probably like in this introduction is
243. 00:15:48 probably where I realized I may not be the ideal audience for
244. 00:15:52 this book. Just as much as I realized, you are the ideal
245. 00:15:56 audience. So like, we could not be on further sides of this
246. 00:16:00 spectrum, because it's like, I am working a, you know, standard
247. 00:16:04 job job, right? Yeah, although what I will say is maybe I lean a
248. 00:16:08 little bit your way in terms of like as a faculty member, I do
249. 00:16:11 have a lot of autonomy, like a lot of autonomy, autonomy and the
250. 00:16:14 way things get done. And in like the work that I take on on any
251. 00:16:16 given day, there are some things where it's like, okay, I just
252. 00:16:19 have to do this because this is part of the job. But I have a
253. 00:16:22 lot of autonomy when it comes to it, you have all the autonomy,
254. 00:16:26 right? Like, I mean, I've got it on. Yeah, if you wake up, if you
255. 00:16:30 wake up and say I'm not doing it today, you're not doing it
256. 00:16:33 that day, right? Like, I mean, nobody's gonna tell you to do
257. 00:16:35 it. So this is maybe where I saw a disconnect from my side, but I
258. 00:16:39 saw a strong, strong connection to your side.
259. 00:16:42 Yeah, thank you for picking this book for me. I think you
260. 00:16:46 picked it, didn't you?
261. 00:16:48 Well, I suggested it. And when you said, yeah, that looks great,
262. 00:16:51 I was kind of like, really? Okay. But yeah, I know you talk
263. 00:16:57 about some of the stuff with your students too. So I'm sure that
264. 00:16:59 it will trickle its way down. One of the things that I liked in
265. 00:17:03 the introduction here, which we should call out because it's
266. 00:17:05 gonna pop up bunch throughout the rest of the book probably is
267. 00:17:09 the delightfully tiny team concept, which according to her
268. 00:17:13 definition is three other part time people. And later on in the
269. 00:17:19 book, she talks about why it's capped at that number, because
270. 00:17:21 if you go beyond that exponentially in the number of
271. 00:17:24 connections between the different people in the organization,
272. 00:17:27 increases and things just get way more complex. She talks
273. 00:17:31 about later on in the book about the integrator versus
274. 00:17:35 visionary, which I mean, I wasn't integrator. So maybe we we
275. 00:17:38 chat about that a little bit later. But the big takeaway from
276. 00:17:42 this, I think at the beginning here is that you don't have to
277. 00:17:47 just scale, which I think was kind of kind of the prevailing
278. 00:17:51 message, especially on social media, like the hustle bros and
279. 00:17:55 the hashtag startups founder mode, all that kind of stuff is
280. 00:18:00 just get as big as you can as fast as you can. And she's
281. 00:18:03 basically saying, maybe don't maybe just find a small
282. 00:18:07 business that makes you a good amount of money and doesn't
283. 00:18:11 completely stress you out and live that life because it's
284. 00:18:14 awesome, which I appreciate. This is a breath of fresh air to a
285. 00:18:17 lot of the business books that I've read.
286. 00:18:19 Yeah, and it, and it comes from like she's very clear, it comes
287. 00:18:22 from experience, which I, which I like all always adds value to
288. 00:18:26 me is like, she's not just talking theoretical here, she's
289. 00:18:28 talking like, this is the life I live, I've lived this life for
290. 00:18:31 what like 10 years now, I think is what she said at one point,
291. 00:18:33 that she's been in this in this world for about 10 years. So
292. 00:18:36 all right, let's move to the free time framework, which is the
293. 00:18:39 next section. She says free time has a double meaning, as a
294. 00:18:42 verb, it's a continual process of freeing your time to do the
295. 00:18:46 to do your best work. And then it's a philosophy, re imagining
296. 00:18:50 how we work, optimizing freedom, and values, instead of
297. 00:18:54 orienting toward money and growth at the expense of time and
298. 00:18:57 health. So that's how she categorizes free time, which I
299. 00:19:00 appreciated that she did this early, and she didn't make us
300. 00:19:03 wait until three quarters of the way through the book to then
301. 00:19:05 tell us what she meant by free time. So she's calling it a verb
302. 00:19:08 and a philosophy. One of the key points that she brings up in
303. 00:19:12 here is this idea of friction, and that you can have different
304. 00:19:16 ways that friction arises. So she calls out, and I'm not gonna go
305. 00:19:20 into like the details of how she describes it, but she calls
306. 00:19:23 out pressure, prices, and then porous boundaries as these ways
307. 00:19:26 that friction can arise, and these friction points can arise. I
308. 00:19:30 really like that, she ties into your, you know, what you've
309. 00:19:33 taught for for a while, that basically your values drive a
310. 00:19:37 lot of things, right? But then she adds in to energy and your
311. 00:19:42 strengths into that into that as well, right? So and that's kind
312. 00:19:47 of before optimizing the project. So she's laying out this
313. 00:19:49 free time framework of how do we do this? How do we set this up
314. 00:19:53 to again, lose busyness and in that value? Yeah, I really like
315. 00:19:58 this framework. She's got one of these circles align design
316. 00:20:01 and then there's three different things underneath each one of
317. 00:20:05 those, which lays the framework for the rest of the book. I like
318. 00:20:10 the three common points of friction. You mentioned pressure
319. 00:20:12 prices and porous boundaries, specifically prices that are
320. 00:20:16 too low, which is something that I struggle with. There's lots
321. 00:20:23 of people who tell me that I need to charge more for things
322. 00:20:26 just as an example. I mentioned the rite of passage cohort
323. 00:20:29 time. I just wrapped up in the pro show the list price of that
324. 00:20:34 was $4,000 for a single cohort. I am charging $500 for a year's
325. 00:20:40 membership to my community, which includes four cohorts. So part
326. 00:20:45 of that is just the imposter syndrome and trying to figure
327. 00:20:47 this out. If I really, you know, felt confident I could deliver
328. 00:20:50 $4,000 worth of value, then I should I should do that. But the
329. 00:20:53 bottom line is that I tend to price things fairly low, according
330. 00:20:58 to some of my business friends anyways. The other thing that
331. 00:21:02 was really interesting about you're getting into like the
332. 00:21:03 missing metric stuff. There was a statistic where there are
333. 00:21:09 31.7 million small businesses in the US. The definition of a
334. 00:21:17 small business is under 500 employees. So that feels like,
335. 00:21:24 well, I'm a solopreneur, my business must be microscopic
336. 00:21:29 compared to most of the other businesses that are out there.
337. 00:21:33 And then she said that of those 31.7 million small businesses,
338. 00:21:36 25 million of them have no employees. They are not employer
339. 00:21:42 businesses. That was interesting to me because one of the people
340. 00:21:45 that I follow online is Justin Welsh. And his whole thing is
341. 00:21:48 like solopreneurship. And it really made me realize that that
342. 00:21:54 is a viable path. Now, delightfully tiny team, she's not
343. 00:21:59 advocating that you stay a solopreneur forever. But the big
344. 00:22:02 takeaway here is that you don't have to be huge. Also interesting
345. 00:22:06 to me with this is that over 50 million people consider
346. 00:22:09 themselves content creators, which is the fastest growing small
347. 00:22:13 business segment, which it would be interesting, you know, a
348. 00:22:17 couple years later to see how these concepts that she's talking
349. 00:22:21 about have been applied by those creators. I don't know anyone
350. 00:22:25 who would write a book that niche necessarily. But it's
351. 00:22:31 interesting to me, you know, there's 31.7 million small
352. 00:22:33 businesses. A lot of those have no employees. But then there are,
353. 00:22:37 there's a higher number of that that people who consider
354. 00:22:40 themselves to be content creators. And I think if you're
355. 00:22:42 going to do content creation, even as like a side hustle, you're
356. 00:22:46 maybe in a position where you're going to start a business. So
357. 00:22:50 that just is that that math is interesting to me. Like I expect
358. 00:22:55 that 31.7 million small businesses to go up considerably in
359. 00:22:59 the near future, the percentage that have no employees to go up
360. 00:23:03 as well. And the real question I have is just how much is it
361. 00:23:08 going to go up? How many of those 50 million people who consider
362. 00:23:11 themselves to be content creators are going to be brave
363. 00:23:14 enough to take the leap? But I think for the people who do the
364. 00:23:18 framework that she's outlining here is amazing. It's it's
365. 00:23:21 perfect. It's what you need. And the metric that is important to
366. 00:23:25 pay attention to is not how much money you make. I mean, you
367. 00:23:29 need to pay attention to how much money you make, especially at
368. 00:23:31 the beginning, because regardless of how hard you work, you
369. 00:23:33 have bills that you need to pay. But the metric she talks about
370. 00:23:36 is your time to revenue ratio. Basically, how much are you
371. 00:23:40 making for the hours that you are investing in the different
372. 00:23:44 activities in your business? So the things that are a high
373. 00:23:48 return on investment do more of that delegate the other stuff
374. 00:23:51 that's not a great investment, which when she explains that
375. 00:23:54 you're kind of like, yeah, duh, why haven't I done that yet?
376. 00:23:59 So how do you ever heard of that metric before? No, not that
377. 00:24:02 one. I've heard of the concept. It's something that I've tried to
378. 00:24:05 to keep in mind. But I haven't had a formal way to measure it. I
379. 00:24:09 still don't think I have a real great formal way to measure
380. 00:24:12 this. The way she just describes to do it is to divide your
381. 00:24:15 company revenue by 1000 divide that figure by the number of
382. 00:24:18 hours worked in that time period and then multiply that by 100
383. 00:24:21 to yield a percentage. So I don't really see how that is
384. 00:24:25 necessarily all that valuable. But the one of the things I pay
385. 00:24:30 attention to in my personal retreat framework every single
386. 00:24:33 quarter is what's working and what's not working. So just by
387. 00:24:36 asking those questions, I feel like I'm getting the 80/20 of
388. 00:24:39 this. But an argument could be made that I should be tracking
389. 00:24:41 that number specifically. So I don't know if you listen to
390. 00:24:44 Cortex or not, but like I listened to that in CGP Grey. And I
391. 00:24:49 don't know if he got this from Blake or not, but it was a
392. 00:24:52 couple years ago, he's super big into time tracking. And it's
393. 00:24:56 because he's doing this, right? Like he's 100% doing the time
394. 00:25:00 to revenue or time to profit ratio. He just never called it
395. 00:25:04 this like he never described it as this way. But that was the
396. 00:25:07 first thing I thought of as I was like, Oh, this is what what
397. 00:25:09 Grey described like a long, long time ago is, you know, how he
398. 00:25:12 does this for every video and then the different parts of his
399. 00:25:15 videos and why he actually cares about time tracking. The
400. 00:25:18 other one I want to call out in this section is she spends
401. 00:25:21 approximately $1,500 per month on software to achieve greater
402. 00:25:26 efficiency. Now if this was like a company, like a big, you know,
403. 00:25:30 it's like, that's nothing. That's a drop in the bucket. Like
404. 00:25:32 we spend, you know, we've got these contracts that cost you
405. 00:25:34 to whatever they cost. I just can't even fathom this as like a
406. 00:25:38 as a me, right? Like as a person is doing the work, spending
407. 00:25:41 that much money per month on software. But I don't know, like
408. 00:25:45 Mike, does that number shock you or is that number like
409. 00:25:47 reasonable? Does I mean,
410. 00:25:51 that number is pretty reasonable. I think I do think it is
411. 00:25:56 definitely a mental hurdle to get over, especially for a solo
412. 00:25:59 preneur. But I've seen how much you can spend on software in
413. 00:26:07 your business. I know how much business software costs. So you
414. 00:26:13 have a have a couple different recurring costs and it quickly
415. 00:26:17 approaches that number even with a tiny team. However, I think
416. 00:26:23 my thinking around this was shifted a little bit as she went
417. 00:26:27 on because I started to think of these things that I wanted to
418. 00:26:31 do in the business. Some of the things that she was talking
419. 00:26:33 about in the stories that she was sharing. And it's something
420. 00:26:37 that I've known that I should do for a long time, like having
421. 00:26:39 feedback forms. How much is that actually costing me to not
422. 00:26:43 have a feedback form? But the reason I don't have a feedback
423. 00:26:46 form is because every time I think about, well, I need to add
424. 00:26:50 this to the library, for example, so people can share their
425. 00:26:52 their feedback, what they like, what they don't like, and I can
426. 00:26:55 improve the programming and the the community over time. I go
427. 00:26:58 and I look at the software that's available, and I see type
428. 00:27:02 form and it's 50 bucks a month and I'm like 50 bucks a month for
429. 00:27:07 a form. Yeah. But really, you know, if I got even one or two
430. 00:27:11 insights every single month, that's more valuable than the
431. 00:27:14 $50 a month. So you have to get over the sticker shock. And
432. 00:27:17 also, you have to be very clear on what are the important
433. 00:27:20 things that you need to do in your business. Because I think
434. 00:27:23 there's a lot of business software that's like, Hey, wouldn't
435. 00:27:25 it be great if you could do this thing that you never really
436. 00:27:27 thought about before. Oh, yeah, that might be cool. Well, that's
437. 00:27:30 only only $200 a month. And then you sign up for the free trial
438. 00:27:33 and you forget to cancel. So I think she has a great job of
439. 00:27:36 kind of identifying the critical activities and the things that
440. 00:27:41 you should be paying attention to. And then you want to solve
441. 00:27:43 for those problems, not discover new problems, like those new
442. 00:27:47 problems are always out there if you look for them. But focus on
443. 00:27:50 the stuff that that really matters. I think a lot of business
444. 00:27:53 owners, myself included, I think, to some degree, they think
445. 00:27:58 that the problems in their business are because they don't
446. 00:28:03 have the right information that they're looking for some new
447. 00:28:09 tool, some new system, some new framework that's just going to
448. 00:28:13 solve things for them. And I see there's some personal
449. 00:28:16 productivity as well. It's like GTD and all these different
450. 00:28:19 things. It's like, that's the thing I'm going to do that. And
451. 00:28:22 it's going to make everything easy. And it's not the case, you
452. 00:28:24 got to figure out what are the key elements to add to the
453. 00:28:27 system that I'm currently using. And you tweak things. And
454. 00:28:31 maybe there are some things, you know, you never really
455. 00:28:33 considered having a feedback form or you never paid attention
456. 00:28:36 to net promoter score. And you have to build that from scratch.
457. 00:28:39 But most small businesses, I think, that have been around for
458. 00:28:41 a little while, they've got a lot of the key components in
459. 00:28:44 place. Otherwise, they wouldn't be around for a while. It would
460. 00:28:47 disappear. So I think that's the TLDR here is to get clear on
461. 00:28:54 the critical activities. And you know, use, use, use money, use
462. 00:29:01 tools, like pay, pay monthly for a software that will solve those
463. 00:29:04 things, but don't chase the shiny new new objects.
464. 00:29:08 Alright, so we're going to move into a line design and assign. So
465. 00:29:11 that's part one, part two and part three of the book. Let's go
466. 00:29:14 to a line first. A line encompasses how many of these
467. 00:29:20 chapters. So it's the first nine chapters of the book. The book
468. 00:29:24 has like 27 or something like that, chapters, overall. So the
469. 00:29:28 first third of the book.
470. 00:29:29 Yeah. So by the way, the frame, the the setup for the rest of
471. 00:29:33 this book, each, there's three parts. Each part has three
472. 00:29:37 sections. Each section has three chapters. It's very symmetrical.
473. 00:29:44 Yes. So so in the align section, right, she's going to say you
474. 00:29:49 need to align your business with three core elements. You need
475. 00:29:52 to align it based on values. You need to align it based on the
476. 00:29:55 energy about, you know, like, whether it drains you or whether
477. 00:29:58 it gives you energy. And then you need to align it based on the
478. 00:30:00 strengths. So your biggest strengths in the business, what
479. 00:30:03 sets you apart. And then she's going to break down the
480. 00:30:06 chapters in the following way. Like, I think the best way to do
481. 00:30:10 this is not going to be go to go chapter by chapter. Right,
482. 00:30:13 but it's just going to be talk about the key ideas that we
483. 00:30:15 that we called out. So we may want to just, you know, back and
484. 00:30:18 forth this, just to kind of give us a good flow. I'll start
485. 00:30:21 out with the first one I have. She talks about Annie Murphy
486. 00:30:24 Paul. So she references the extended mind. And basically
487. 00:30:28 saying that Annie describes how the habit of continuous
488. 00:30:32 offloading clear space for making fresh observations and
489. 00:30:35 synthesizing. This idea that basically we need to offload the
490. 00:30:41 details of things into systems that are going to then retain
491. 00:30:46 that for us to where we don't have to constantly have that in
492. 00:30:49 our brain. Now, I can't remember in her book, if she gets into
493. 00:30:53 the manager manual this early, but the manager manual is
494. 00:30:57 something she's going to talk about. Oh, she does. Yeah,
495. 00:30:59 actually, she does in chapter two. Yeah. So the manager manual
496. 00:31:03 is going to be something she talks about throughout the book,
497. 00:31:05 which this is like, she calls out these different things.
498. 00:31:09 Essentially, she says, okay, if this is something we had to
499. 00:31:13 think about or this is a problem we have to solve, document it
500. 00:31:15 somewhere. Right, it might be in the manager manual, it might
501. 00:31:17 be in these onboarding procedures, it might be in whatever it
502. 00:31:20 is. But she's like, get that out of your mind, get it on to
503. 00:31:23 something. All I can tell you is like, if I did this alone, with
504. 00:31:28 my job, like next year would be so much smoother, it'd be so
505. 00:31:33 much cleaner. And I tell myself this all the time, it's like,
506. 00:31:35 you need to document that somewhere, you need to document
507. 00:31:37 that somewhere, you need to document that somewhere. I'm just
508. 00:31:39 not good at it, like I'm not consistent at documenting it
509. 00:31:42 somewhere. But there are things that I know that if I got that
510. 00:31:45 out of my mind and just said, Oh, just go look here, you know,
511. 00:31:48 like, when that when that arises again. So I really need to do
512. 00:31:51 like an SOP like standard operating procedure for my job
513. 00:31:55 and or the, you know, the school kind of a thing. I think
514. 00:31:58 that would help out a lot.
515. 00:31:59 Yeah, the operating principles document was one of my action
516. 00:32:05 items. That's different than the manager manual, by the way.
517. 00:32:08 But the operating principles reminds me of the life team
518. 00:32:12 cohort. We started this week. One of the things, the stories
519. 00:32:15 that we tell in there, my wife and I is that when we were
520. 00:32:20 thinking about when our kids were, we're still young, we got
521. 00:32:22 away overnight. And the next morning, we went to a coffee
522. 00:32:25 shop. And I wanted to call it Schmidt's family standard
523. 00:32:28 operating procedures, but she wouldn't let me. So we ended up
524. 00:32:30 on something like guiding principles. And it was basically
525. 00:32:34 the vision of what we want our family to look like when our
526. 00:32:36 kids got to be teenagers. So it's kind of where we're at. We
527. 00:32:38 wanted to have the platform to speak into their lives as they're
528. 00:32:41 going through the hard things and trying to make the difficult
529. 00:32:43 decisions on their own. And then we thought about, you know, what
530. 00:32:47 are the habits and routines that we need to identify? Like, if we
531. 00:32:51 do these consistently, it's going to build that platform. One of
532. 00:32:54 those things is a weekly one on one. I just got back from mine
533. 00:32:56 today with Joshua, my 14 year old. And we just get coffee, play
534. 00:33:01 games, talk about whatever they want to talk about. I rotate
535. 00:33:05 the kid every week. We also brought in the Schmidt's family
536. 00:33:09 core values. We've got our life themes, all that kind of stuff
537. 00:33:12 in it, kind of all aligns. So I understand the importance of
538. 00:33:17 this. I've even applied it personally to my family. I have
539. 00:33:20 not gone back and applied it to my own individual creator
540. 00:33:23 business. Which is a theme, which is why there are so many
541. 00:33:27 action items here. There's no way I'm getting through all these
542. 00:33:29 action items, by the way, by next next time. But this is
543. 00:33:31 basically, these are going into my city and tasks database. I'm
544. 00:33:34 going to slowly start building these out. So yeah, I think the
545. 00:33:38 manager manual, the operating principles, these are all
546. 00:33:41 really important. And it's not something that you really
547. 00:33:45 think about in the moment, you're just like, Oh, I just need to
548. 00:33:47 solve this problem that someone needs this information. So I'll
549. 00:33:50 just send it to him. And she starts with a story about she's
550. 00:33:53 visiting somebody and she has to text them and ask for the
551. 00:33:56 Wi-Fi password. And then she frames it as how about I help you
552. 00:33:59 put together this document for the next time that you have
553. 00:34:01 guests come over. I was like, that's brilliant. And you and
554. 00:34:06 you could tell this is like embedded in her being, right? Like
555. 00:34:09 she's like, yeah, I'm just gonna make this document for you. And
556. 00:34:11 you know, it's gonna help you out. Yep. I mean, there's so much
557. 00:34:15 in here. It's it's all so good. You know, there are different
558. 00:34:20 avenues of that that she she talks about. I think she has a
559. 00:34:22 really good job of completing the picture. So it's not just
560. 00:34:26 here's one area. She really like one of the things that came up
561. 00:34:29 in chapter two is to put together the brand style guide. Like I
562. 00:34:33 never really even thought about that before, but it's like,
563. 00:34:36 well, yeah, if I'm gonna start delegating, I should have a
564. 00:34:38 style guide. These are the colors, these are the fonts, these
565. 00:34:40 are the logo files that makes it easier for anybody else to make
566. 00:34:44 any sort of assets, whether they be, you know, title banners for
567. 00:34:49 workshops inside the community or social media posts, like of
568. 00:34:55 course, I should be putting that stuff together. She talks about
569. 00:34:58 creating a gifting database. I mean, there's there's so much
570. 00:35:02 stuff that is is in here. But I think the thing that I really
571. 00:35:06 want to mention from this section comes from chapter eight,
572. 00:35:11 which is the whole idea of the bottleneck effect where one
573. 00:35:13 broken piece can prevent or delay all your progress. As the
574. 00:35:17 owner of the business, you are the bottleneck, she says later on,
575. 00:35:23 I'm totally the bottleneck for a lot of different things. So on
576. 00:35:29 the one hand, I'm reading this and I'm thinking, Oh my gosh, I
577. 00:35:33 really suck. But on the other hand, it's identifying the
578. 00:35:37 places where things can be improved. She mentions that back
579. 00:35:41 in the previous section about friction versus flow, flow is the
580. 00:35:46 good one. That's where you you want to be where you're focusing
581. 00:35:49 on a vital few projects or clients. But friction is the is the
582. 00:35:53 disharmony, which is producing the resistance. And so a lot of
583. 00:35:57 people view friction as well, it's got to be eliminated. We got
584. 00:35:59 to get rid of that as quickly as possible. And there's some
585. 00:36:01 truth to that. But she kind of frames it interestingly where
586. 00:36:03 friction indicates an opportunity. So that's a positive
587. 00:36:06 thing. It's an opportunity to transform your your business. So
588. 00:36:11 making that list of the the things that I am the bottleneck
589. 00:36:13 for while it may make me feel bad in the moment. Ultimately,
590. 00:36:16 that I believe that's going to be a long term significant net
591. 00:36:20 gain for the the business. So yeah, I've got I'm thinking about
592. 00:36:25 bottlenecks and limiting factors. And what are my most
593. 00:36:28 valuable activities versus my less valuable activities and all
594. 00:36:32 that kind of stuff. Can I pause you there? Because like, that
595. 00:36:34 was one of the things that really stood stood out to me is
596. 00:36:36 this idea of most value value activities, it makes so much
597. 00:36:39 sense. And she says the more time the business owner spends on
598. 00:36:42 their most valuable activities, I think this is true with any
599. 00:36:45 worker in the in the business. Yeah, the more time that person
600. 00:36:47 spends on their most valuable activities, because it's most
601. 00:36:50 valuable, right? Like it's the most valuable activities to the
602. 00:36:54 business. So therefore, if you're really, really good at this
603. 00:36:58 thing, that's what you should do. Because that's going to be the
604. 00:37:00 most valuable to the business. We should try to offload these
605. 00:37:04 other things that aren't your skill set that aren't your
606. 00:37:07 interest. And let's find somebody who they're really good at
607. 00:37:10 that. And they actually like doing it. And let's give that job.
608. 00:37:13 Let's give that job to them. So I'll give you an example from
609. 00:37:15 academia. You see it more now, but you never used to see it
610. 00:37:19 before where you have teaching faculty and you have research
611. 00:37:22 faculty, right? Like, so you have teaching faculty who their
612. 00:37:25 primary job is to teach. And they might do a little bit of
613. 00:37:28 research, but their job is not to research. Then you have
614. 00:37:31 research faculty and their primary job is to research and
615. 00:37:33 they might do a little bit of teaching as well. And it's like,
616. 00:37:35 it's so much clearer of a system, because like, people can do
617. 00:37:41 what their strengths are. And if somebody wants to like work a
618. 00:37:44 hybrid job, they can figure out a way to work that hybrid job
619. 00:37:46 where they do both research and teaching kind of at a 5050
620. 00:37:49 level. But you're not making, you're not forcing people, you
621. 00:37:52 know, square pegs into round holes anymore, you're giving
622. 00:37:54 them this idea. So I love this idea, this most valuable
623. 00:37:56 activity, and as it relates to bottleneck. Can I? Yeah,
624. 00:37:59 there, there's a concept from Dan Sullivan, called unique
625. 00:38:04 ability. And his whole thing is really, if you are a business
626. 00:38:10 owner, you want to function in your unique ability. So if you're
627. 00:38:14 the visionary, you want to be doing visionary type
628. 00:38:16 activities. But then he kind of mentions that the real magic
629. 00:38:20 happens in an organization, when you hire people who have
630. 00:38:24 complementary unique abilities, and everyone is able to work in
631. 00:38:28 their unique abilities. Another way to say it would be your
632. 00:38:30 zone of genius. I mean, this is not a completely original
633. 00:38:33 concept. There's lots of lots of ways that people talk about
634. 00:38:36 this. But yeah, you want everybody in the right seats doing
635. 00:38:40 the right things. And when you can get that, that's when
636. 00:38:46 things are that's when the magic happens.
637. 00:38:49 Yeah, the last one I'll pull out for me on this first align
638. 00:38:53 section is this idea of golden hours. And golden hours
639. 00:38:58 relates back to something she talks about in the
640. 00:39:00 introduction, which is this founder time. So kind of the end
641. 00:39:03 of the introduction, she says, Hey, you need to dedicate the
642. 00:39:05 founder time and you need to protect that founder time where
643. 00:39:08 you have a calendar block that nobody's allowed to mess with
644. 00:39:11 that nobody, you know, adjusts, nobody schedules over. It's
645. 00:39:15 your time to do founder type work to do business alignment or
646. 00:39:19 thinking type work. And then she brings in the idea in chapter
647. 00:39:23 six about this idea of golden hours, the one or two times a day
648. 00:39:25 that are optimal for your peak energy and creativity, given
649. 00:39:29 your unique rhythms and all of those other things. I get an
650. 00:39:33 action item out of this that basically says, I want to align
651. 00:39:36 or try to align. For me, founder time doesn't really work. But
652. 00:39:41 it's like this idea of golden hours like I want to identify
653. 00:39:43 when my golden hours are and say like, these are the times when
654. 00:39:46 I can do my most productive best thinking work. And then I want
655. 00:39:50 to align it with essentially the most important activity that I
656. 00:39:54 have, like, I don't know how to say it like I'm not really
657. 00:39:57 worried about the founder time phrase. It's that most important
658. 00:40:00 activity and how do I align those two things? Because I can tell
659. 00:40:02 you that right now I don't do that. Like I can tell you
660. 00:40:06 confidently that I don't do that. I probably try to do my most
661. 00:40:09 important activities at the absolute worst time I could do
662. 00:40:12 that. And that's after the kids go to bed in the evening, you
663. 00:40:15 know, like so. So it's like, I want to rethink that. So that's
664. 00:40:18 that I get an action item out of this first section for sure.
665. 00:40:21 Nice. Yeah, the whole idea of the golden hours of her Chris
666. 00:40:26 Bailey defined it as like the biological prime time. It's
667. 00:40:28 aligning the right things at the right time of the day. That's
668. 00:40:31 really powerful. Sometimes there's nothing you can do about
669. 00:40:34 it though. Sometimes you just got to do the best you can with
670. 00:40:36 what you've got to work with. So it's it's great if you can
671. 00:40:40 align that stuff, but don't beat yourself up if you can't.
672. 00:40:43 So do you have anything else from this first section? I mean,
673. 00:40:47 we could talk for another couple hours about the first
674. 00:40:49 section, but I think we should move on to the next one.
675. 00:40:50 Okay, so let's move on to the second section. The second
676. 00:40:53 section is design. So part two, she's going to break this down
677. 00:40:57 into three different sub areas, as Mike described before. So
678. 00:41:00 before starting any new project, you'll clearly define three
679. 00:41:03 areas, the ideal outcomes, the impact and then the process.
680. 00:41:06 And then the the chapters are going to the chapters are going
681. 00:41:08 to break down through those those three ideas. So I'll start
682. 00:41:13 off with what I thought was a really interesting one coming
683. 00:41:16 out of this one happens early in the chapter, the Zen saying
684. 00:41:19 of don't push the river. And I was like, Oh my goodness, this
685. 00:41:22 makes like so much sense. You know, it's like, there are
686. 00:41:25 certain things that you have to identify as, Hey, things are
687. 00:41:30 just flowing and they're going to flow this way. And regardless
688. 00:41:33 of what you do, that's the way it's going to be. And I don't
689. 00:41:37 mean that in like a get out of jail free card, like, don't
690. 00:41:39 try to change systems, don't try to do hard work, you know,
691. 00:41:42 don't try to like, you know, it's not a scapegoat. But then
692. 00:41:46 there are there are truly times when it's like, all right, this
693. 00:41:49 one, you're not going to impact right now, or as directly as
694. 00:41:53 you want it to, how can you swim in that river and still get
695. 00:41:58 done what you want to get done, still have do the outcomes that
696. 00:42:01 you want to do, still have the impact that you want to have
697. 00:42:04 and still run the processes that you want to run within that
698. 00:42:08 that river. So I'll give you an example for me, example for
699. 00:42:11 me, email as a form of communication. Like, I would
700. 00:42:15 I would bring this up. I would burn it down tomorrow, right?
701. 00:42:19 Like, I mean, I would just completely erase it from the
702. 00:42:22 existence of any way to communicate. But I'm in a I'm in
703. 00:42:25 a world where that is going to stay around. And I have to
704. 00:42:28 swim in that river. I just have to figure out how do I swim in
705. 00:42:32 that river to where it doesn't completely drain and stress me
706. 00:42:35 out. And that's just something I have to do. And that might be
707. 00:42:38 to like, I don't know, trivial of an example, but that was the
708. 00:42:42 one that came into my head is like, hey, Corey, this is the
709. 00:42:44 river, just swim in it, like, don't try to get the university
710. 00:42:47 to stop using email because that's not going to happen.
711. 00:42:50 Yeah, she equates the modern equivalent of Sisyphus with
712. 00:42:54 never ending email inboxes in in chapter 12. So I don't think
713. 00:43:01 that is that is overstating it at all.
714. 00:43:05 All right, what's one of your big takeaways from this section?
715. 00:43:08 One of my big takeaways, well, there's a bunch of them here,
716. 00:43:13 but one of the things I really liked was from chapter 11,
717. 00:43:17 where you never have full control over how the work that you do
718. 00:43:20 lands in the world. So surrender the outcome. I think this
719. 00:43:24 is the important thing when it comes to what we were talking
720. 00:43:27 about with the Pro Show and some of the writing advice, you
721. 00:43:32 would ask me, how do you figure out, you know, what, what is
722. 00:43:35 the thing that really is your thing to write about? And I
723. 00:43:38 mentioned that you you make noise and you listen for signal.
724. 00:43:43 But you can't force the results, you can't force people to pay
725. 00:43:47 attention to something as much as you would maybe like to
726. 00:43:50 sometimes. All you can really do is consistently make stuff and
727. 00:43:53 pay attention. Oh, this one seemed to get a little bit more
728. 00:43:57 response than the previous one. Why do I think that is? And I
729. 00:44:02 like to do this from a topic level or a content level, not a
730. 00:44:07 like subject line or YouTube thumbnail level. Yeah, although
731. 00:44:11 there is there is some truth to that kind of stuff as well. But
732. 00:44:15 I would prefer to think you just just make good stuff. And
733. 00:44:17 eventually, the people will reward you for that with their
734. 00:44:21 time and their attention. But from the same section, there's
735. 00:44:26 also a whole thing about disagreeing with the traditional
736. 00:44:29 advice of setting specific business goals. I'm, I'm not
737. 00:44:33 sure if I have railed against goals since you joined the
738. 00:44:39 podcast. You may have yes, you may have. But go ahead, just do
739. 00:44:44 it again. Let's hear it again. My friend Bodhi has long been
740. 00:44:50 encouraging me to be nicer to goals. So for a while, I was
741. 00:44:53 trying to do that. But I really think that we just have this
742. 00:44:56 natural attraction towards goals and specifically smart goals,
743. 00:45:02 they got to be specific, they got to be measurable, they got to
744. 00:45:04 be realistic, yada, yada, yada. And I kind of don't like that. But
745. 00:45:09 anytime you read a business book, typically, they're like, well,
746. 00:45:13 you need to have these specific goals. And I get, you know,
747. 00:45:16 what they're going after with that, because you have to have a
748. 00:45:19 direction. But the problem with goals is that they're binary,
749. 00:45:23 you either achieve them or you don't. And she brought up a
750. 00:45:26 reference to a book that I had actually read, I forgot, I
751. 00:45:29 haven't read it in quite a while, but it doesn't have to be
752. 00:45:32 crazy at work. And that's by the base camp, base camp guys, but
753. 00:45:38 they actually don't have goals for their company. And I
754. 00:45:41 actually like that a lot. I think the thing that makes that
755. 00:45:47 work is that you have these intentions and you, you are
756. 00:45:50 moving in specific directions for short periods of time. So I
757. 00:45:54 think they do like the agile business, the sprint model. And
758. 00:45:59 you have all these opportunities then to reassess. But I think
759. 00:46:03 that the 80 20 in terms of setting the goals is having the
760. 00:46:07 the direction. One of the things that she talks about here is
761. 00:46:10 that goals force the focus onto milestone metrics, which I
762. 00:46:13 don't really like that was an interesting way of a framing
763. 00:46:17 that. And I never really realized it or would have been able to
764. 00:46:20 articulate it that way before. But yeah, these milestone metrics
765. 00:46:24 where once we get to this point, that's when the switch gets
766. 00:46:29 flipped from a zero to a one. And now the thing is, is done or
767. 00:46:33 better or whatever. But that isn't how things play out in the
768. 00:46:38 real world. So don't get caught up in those higher status symbols,
769. 00:46:43 you know, the certain number of email subscribers or the $1
770. 00:46:48 million in revenue or anything like like that. That's not
771. 00:46:53 necessarily strategy. And so I don't have a specific takeaway
772. 00:46:59 from this part of the book. But I do like the way that she spoke
773. 00:47:03 to the the dangers of goals, I guess, and sort of what you
774. 00:47:06 should do. Instead, where you you really are just paying
775. 00:47:11 attention to the things that work, you know, come back to the
776. 00:47:14 very beginning, she's talking about doing more of the things
777. 00:47:17 that produce more revenue in your your business. And in this
778. 00:47:20 section, she kind of talks about serendipity and and you
779. 00:47:22 discover those those moments where this really worked. Okay,
780. 00:47:26 let's let's shift or let's pivot, let's do a little bit more of
781. 00:47:30 that. I feel like you can be more flexible or agile when you
782. 00:47:34 aren't anchored in those those goals. This is what we have to do
783. 00:47:37 by the end of this quarter or the end of this year, etc.
784. 00:47:41 Yeah, I mean, I've heard you talk about this before from a, oh,
785. 00:47:45 my goal was to run the marathon, right? And then you run the
786. 00:47:47 marathon and you're like, Well, now what versus my, I'm going to
787. 00:47:52 develop the habit of being a runner, right? Like, and there's a
788. 00:47:55 very different ways to think about outcomes. You know, it's
789. 00:47:59 like, Oh, well, I look back on my my habit tracking and I've I've
790. 00:48:02 run, you know, 90% of the days in the last six months, I've
791. 00:48:07 become a runner versus I've run a marathon. And you know, am I
792. 00:48:11 a runner or not? And like, in the feeling you have at the end of
793. 00:48:13 it, this leads quickly into to one of mine from the next section,
794. 00:48:17 this impact, where she describes like, desiring, basically
795. 00:48:23 the highest good for those involved, right, for all of those
796. 00:48:26 involved. So you're trying to make the highest good for those
797. 00:48:29 involved. So if you produce something that makes the most
798. 00:48:33 revenue and it destroyed your team, is that the impact you want
799. 00:48:37 to make? If you're producing something that has super low
800. 00:48:40 revenue, but your team loved it, is that the impact you kind of
801. 00:48:43 like, you know what I mean? Like, it's not an either or kind of
802. 00:48:46 thing. You have to think through what does impact look like, but
803. 00:48:50 not just from a business perspective, like a business
804. 00:48:54 metric perspective, not just from a team metric perspective, but
805. 00:48:57 also from like a external community, a branding, like,
806. 00:49:01 essentially look at it from all of these different places, and
807. 00:49:06 say like, what is the impact that I want to have with this
808. 00:49:09 thing that I'm working on right now? And I really just like the
809. 00:49:12 way she framed, like, she kind of framed that and then she gets
810. 00:49:15 into like, you know, I'm, she quotes go on Gary Gunnaross,
811. 00:49:19 which I don't know if you get that quote or not, but the always
812. 00:49:21 be closing sales. They're always be closing. And she's like,
813. 00:49:24 shift this to always be listening. And I was like, Oh, well,
814. 00:49:26 what a what a great like, you know, little little shift in that
815. 00:49:29 because it does set up this idea of like, if you're listening,
816. 00:49:33 if you're paying attention to it in the education where we would
817. 00:49:35 call that formative assessment. So your summative assessment is
818. 00:49:38 did you pass the test? Like, did you get the 70 or above on the
819. 00:49:41 test that we actually cared about? And the formative assessment
820. 00:49:44 is like, every day I'm looking at you in class, and I'm saying
821. 00:49:47 you have no idea what you're doing. Or like, every day I'm
822. 00:49:50 looking at your class, you're like, you need to be four steps
823. 00:49:53 ahead of where we are. How do I, how do I get you up, get you in
824. 00:49:55 front of everybody else, because you're bored right now. And this
825. 00:49:59 ties into that idea of developing habits versus outcomes. You
826. 00:50:03 know, like, I want you to be in the habit in the educational
827. 00:50:06 world of being a learner. Like, I want you to learn and give
828. 00:50:10 effort and be motivated just by the idea of learning. I don't
829. 00:50:14 want you to be motivated because at some point you're going to
830. 00:50:16 get an A or a B or a C, you know, in the class, because when
831. 00:50:19 you leave here, like, nobody gives you A's and B's and C's
832. 00:50:21 anymore. They stop giving you grades when you go when you
833. 00:50:24 leave the university. So
834. 00:50:26 that was that was a bit for me.
835. 00:50:28 Speaking of when you leave university, another thing that I
836. 00:50:32 liked was chapter 14, which is titled scale be ready for a big
837. 00:50:37 break. I tend to think the big break is going to be because I
838. 00:50:40 worked super hard, as we mentioned in earlier discussion. But
839. 00:50:44 one of the things that she mentioned here is that musicians
840. 00:50:48 don't get paid by how long it takes to write a song. And for
841. 00:50:51 whatever reason, the way she framed that is like, well,
842. 00:50:54 yeah, that makes a ton of sense. So again, I don't have a
843. 00:51:00 specific action item from this particular section, although I do
844. 00:51:03 have lots of action items. But I guess the mindset shift that
845. 00:51:07 this has started to put into place for me is, you know, what
846. 00:51:12 if you were really successful? What if the thing that you made
847. 00:51:17 people really liked it? I feel like I've gotten, you know, a
848. 00:51:21 little bit of a glimpse of what that could look like with life
849. 00:51:25 HQ, which is the launch has gone really well. But I don't want
850. 00:51:30 it to just be encapsulated in that one time event. So I don't
851. 00:51:37 know, I feel like I would probably be a lot more energized,
852. 00:51:42 a lot more optimistic. If I could remember this going forward,
853. 00:51:48 but then also this is a reason to pay attention to the systems
854. 00:51:53 because she mentions that if you scale a sloppy systems, your
855. 00:51:56 problems are only going to multiply. Yep. And there's a
856. 00:51:59 quote that she shares from Bill Hewlett says more companies
857. 00:52:02 dive indigestion than starvation. And I realized the truth in
858. 00:52:08 that when I read it, I went back and I started looking at how
859. 00:52:12 much have I made in my my business? And if you really are
860. 00:52:17 paying attention to the numbers and you know what's coming in,
861. 00:52:20 you know what's going out. I think a lot of times in small
862. 00:52:24 creator businesses, you you might be shocked at the end of the
863. 00:52:27 year when you're filing your taxes as an LLC or whatever. I
864. 00:52:31 made that much. Where did it all go? Well, we got some sloppy
865. 00:52:35 systems and I was paying for the software that I wasn't using
866. 00:52:39 and yada yada yada. So just being aware of that stuff, making
867. 00:52:42 sure that it's it's tight. Because I don't want to if you've
868. 00:52:47 got holes in your pocket, the more that you pour in, the more
869. 00:52:49 you're going to lose. So it pays, it pays to fix that stuff
870. 00:52:54 before the big break happens.
871. 00:52:57 Yeah, you'll you know, having done this with me multiple times
872. 00:53:02 at this point. And I like this section because it's really
873. 00:53:04 practical, right? Like if you just look at the chapter titles,
874. 00:53:08 you know, these are like go do go do go do you know, like time
875. 00:53:12 blocking and you know, be ready to scale and you know, use
876. 00:53:16 different language and like so these are very like actionable
877. 00:53:19 practical things, which I think if I was in the point of
878. 00:53:24 trying to restructure a business or running a business in this
879. 00:53:29 way, like that I would get a ton a ton out of how do I do this?
880. 00:53:32 How do I do this? How do I do this? How do I do this? And
881. 00:53:34 almost break it down, you know, by by chapter to figure out how
882. 00:53:37 I would do this. Are you ready to move to part three? Yeah, let's
883. 00:53:41 do it. Okay, so part three is now a sign. So essentially, she's
884. 00:53:44 taking us through, we're going to align the way we want to work,
885. 00:53:49 you know, the systems that allow us to work the way we want to
886. 00:53:51 work. Then we're going to design and we're going to re invigorate
887. 00:53:55 or you know, revamp our systems to to accomplish the things we
888. 00:53:59 want to accomplish. And now essentially, we're going to assign
889. 00:54:01 those. And we're going to, I mean, tell me if I'm wrong, Mike,
890. 00:54:05 but we're basically going to try to offload as many of those
891. 00:54:07 things as we can to either the system itself in an automated
892. 00:54:11 way, or to someone else that allows us to do our most valuable
893. 00:54:15 work, our most valuable activities. And this is where she
894. 00:54:18 gets into the idea of cheap everything officer, delightfully
895. 00:54:21 tiny teams, and kind of unpacks this whole thing. I'm
896. 00:54:26 trying to remember the three that she breaks down here. It's
897. 00:54:29 what who when and what are those the three that she breaks
898. 00:54:32 down? Yeah, who what and when in that order? Yeah, so who who
899. 00:54:36 what and when so assign? Who do you assign it to? What do you
900. 00:54:40 assign? And then when do you when do you assign it to them? So
901. 00:54:42 we'll we'll break out again, just like we did before for the
902. 00:54:45 last ones. What things stood out to you? I'll start with the
903. 00:54:49 delightfully tiny team. You mentioned it before. What I think
904. 00:54:52 is really interesting about the lightfully tiny team is the
905. 00:54:54 fact that these aren't full time employees in most situations,
906. 00:54:57 the way she's describing it there. I don't know, would you
907. 00:54:59 call them fractional employees? Like they're they're going to
908. 00:55:01 work for you, but they're also going to work for other people.
909. 00:55:03 So they're going to get their full time status by working for
910. 00:55:06 a bunch of different people or for a bunch of different
911. 00:55:08 projects. And that's okay. Like be totally fine with that. Like
912. 00:55:13 don't think that they have to be solely dedicated to your
913. 00:55:15 world. No, like if they're really good at what they do, and
914. 00:55:19 they work for you for six hours a week, great. Pay them for
915. 00:55:22 their six hours a week, get the value out of them and be
916. 00:55:24 totally fine with the fact that they're not full time
917. 00:55:26 committed to your to your business. That was an interesting
918. 00:55:30 way to think about this for me. And I and I liked getting to
919. 00:55:33 reframe that idea. Yeah, so I'm familiar with the term
920. 00:55:38 fractional employees. And I think that probably applies here.
921. 00:55:42 When I left the digital marketing agency, that's actually
922. 00:55:45 what I thought I was going to do was to be a fractional
923. 00:55:49 integrator. And I quickly discovered that the the business
924. 00:55:57 owners that I knew who I talked to about this, they didn't see
925. 00:56:02 it the same way that they were anchored in that paying by the
926. 00:56:06 hour. And so that is a mindset that I think is important. I
927. 00:56:14 think it's the ideal way to run a business. You have to view
928. 00:56:19 it through the value that you're getting, not the amount of
929. 00:56:21 effort that people are putting into it. I think that's kind of
930. 00:56:23 the direction the world is going. However, there are a
931. 00:56:25 significant number of people who aren't looking at it that
932. 00:56:28 way. So just recognize it might be a little bit tricky. But yeah,
933. 00:56:33 I think that's the the approach is I've got this job that needs
934. 00:56:38 to be done. And it's a low value activity for me. It's
935. 00:56:44 valuable for the business. Otherwise, I might just stop
936. 00:56:46 doing this thing altogether. So who is the best person to do
937. 00:56:50 this? And how do I put them put someone in that that spot who
938. 00:56:55 can do it better than I can? I don't have to worry about it. If
939. 00:56:58 you are anchored in the hourly mindset, you're going to find
940. 00:57:01 the cheapest person you can find. And then you're you haven't
941. 00:57:05 really delegated it because they're just going to keep coming
942. 00:57:07 back to you and asking for input and have a million questions
943. 00:57:12 regardless of all the processes and documentation that you make,
944. 00:57:15 like they're not going to do it up to your your standard and
945. 00:57:18 you're always going to be involved in it. So yeah, I think
946. 00:57:22 it's cool that you called that one out. I think it's it's an
947. 00:57:26 important detail that can easily be missed in the conversation
948. 00:57:33 here. If you're going to take that approach, what are the key
949. 00:57:37 positions that you would hire for? I don't think there's like a
950. 00:57:40 formula for that. I agree. Maybe the one that's probably the
951. 00:57:43 most general is something like an executive assistant for a
952. 00:57:47 business owner. But that's where my mind went when I was
953. 00:57:52 thinking about that is like, well, who are the people that I
954. 00:57:54 would hire for for that kind of stuff? And I do have somebody
955. 00:57:58 who's helping me out with the community. So I think like, in
956. 00:58:02 terms of all the action items I'm about to share, that's the
957. 00:58:05 area I want to kind of focus a lot of this advice is okay, with
958. 00:58:09 the library, how do we create the systems and the procedures and
959. 00:58:13 the documentation for the library and just make that
960. 00:58:16 experience as good as it can possibly be. But yeah, it's
961. 00:58:24 cool. I like this section a lot. There's a heavy emphasis on
962. 00:58:28 delegation here. One of the things that I wanted to talk
963. 00:58:32 about from here was from chapter 26 about answering less and
964. 00:58:36 how every question lives three lives. The three lives of
965. 00:58:39 questions are the first time a question is asked and answered.
966. 00:58:42 The second time is when you document the question and
967. 00:58:45 response and you add it to your manager manual, the third one
968. 00:58:48 is when you add that Q&A to a public facing resource, I'm sort
969. 00:58:52 of going through this right now. So I launched LifeHQ and
970. 00:58:57 there's this annoying thing that I missed with the launch,
971. 00:59:03 where when you download the file, you unzip the file, it
972. 00:59:06 creates like a LifeHQ version 1.0.2 folder on your your
973. 00:59:13 computer. And if you open that folder as the vault, none of
974. 00:59:19 the plugins will load because if you open that folder, there is
975. 00:59:21 another folder, which includes a read me and then the LifeHQ
976. 00:59:24 vault. And I just this is a failure on my part. I didn't
977. 00:59:27 explain clearly enough that once you unzip that folder, you
978. 00:59:30 have to open it and then open the actual LifeHQ folder. So I
979. 00:59:34 get all these responses from people who are saying, you
980. 00:59:37 know, I'm opening this and the content looks great, but it
981. 00:59:40 seems like all the plugins are broken. And I was like, well,
982. 00:59:43 this is probably what's happening. You're opening the
983. 00:59:44 wrong folder. And here's what you actually have to do. So I've
984. 00:59:47 created a text expander snippet from that. But I haven't
985. 00:59:50 followed through on the other the other pieces of the the lives
986. 00:59:53 of this question. And I'm sure if I'm if I'm going to dig
987. 00:59:56 deeper, there's there's lots of other things with that. Sort
988. 01:00:00 of related to this is the whole idea of calm communication
989. 01:00:03 from this section. And she's got a whole bunch of guidelines on
990. 01:00:07 pages 263 through 265. I want to actually talk to you about
991. 01:00:11 about this, because this was one of the things that I
992. 01:00:14 championed when I was at the the day job, I created the
993. 01:00:19 communication expectations for everybody in the organization.
994. 01:00:22 Because we had a team of like 20 people and well, this is how
995. 01:00:25 we're going to use Slack is how we're going to use email. This
996. 01:00:28 is, you know, we have these regular meetings. So if you have
997. 01:00:31 something that you need to talk about this, add it to the
998. 01:00:33 agenda. This was difficult. But the guidelines, I think are
999. 01:00:39 really important. The hardest part for me was the when you have
1000. 01:00:44 people who are higher up in the organization, and they've been
1001. 01:00:47 doing things a certain way, it's hard for them to break those
1002. 01:00:50 behaviors. So you could document to the whole team and
1003. 01:00:53 everybody, yeah, we're not going when you post something on
1004. 01:00:56 Slack, the expectation is that somebody is working. And they'll
1005. 01:01:02 come up for air in a couple of hours, and then they'll get back
1006. 01:01:04 to you. But when the CEO sends a message on Slack, you feel like
1007. 01:01:08 I need to respond to it right away. So what's your experience
1008. 01:01:13 with these, these communication expectations in, in your
1009. 01:01:18 organization? And then do you think something like these, these
1010. 01:01:22 expectations that they outlined here could actually be
1011. 01:01:24 beneficial for your, your program? Okay, so the question I
1012. 01:01:28 have for you, when you're doing it, how many people were on the
1013. 01:01:30 team, roughly? I think they were roughly about 20 people on the
1014. 01:01:34 team. And I did not interact with all of them. And I think this
1015. 01:01:37 is where it breaks. If you don't have a delightfully tiny
1016. 01:01:39 team, right? Like if you have a delightfully tiny team, I think
1017. 01:01:42 this makes perfect sense, you can implement this. It's not that
1018. 01:01:44 hard to follow. And then it's also not that hard to monitor in
1019. 01:01:50 correct, because the team is so small, right? Like, and you
1020. 01:01:53 can work this out. When you get above 678 people, you know,
1021. 01:01:59 people are just going to do the most natural thing. And like, I'm
1022. 01:02:02 guilty of this too. Like I despise email. So even if we would
1023. 01:02:07 establish this thing where it's like, Oh, you should send an
1024. 01:02:10 email for this activity. Like, I'm going to try to do that. I'm
1025. 01:02:14 going to try to follow the rules because that's how I work. And
1026. 01:02:17 like, I'm going to try to go, okay, yes, this is the community
1027. 01:02:19 of practice we established. So therefore, that's what I'm going
1028. 01:02:21 to do. But like, I'm going to forget at some point, and I'm
1029. 01:02:24 going to send you a message on zoom or slack, right? And I'm
1030. 01:02:26 just going to be like, Hey, this isn't worth an email. And
1031. 01:02:29 especially I'm going to do that when I just talked to you in the
1032. 01:02:32 hallway, and you were complaining about how you got 175 emails
1033. 01:02:34 over the weekend, and you're so tired of going through email, I
1034. 01:02:36 was like, I don't want to be that guy, like I don't want to add
1035. 01:02:39 one more to you. But I don't think about it the same way with
1036. 01:02:42 zoom or slack or whatever it is, the chat features of this. So
1037. 01:02:45 it's like, I, I was working through this in my head going,
1038. 01:02:49 how would I redesign the internal structure of our
1039. 01:02:53 communication system in the school science and engineering at
1040. 01:02:56 CCU? And I'm like, I'm not sure how I would do that, because I
1041. 01:02:59 would have ways of wanting to do it. And then my colleague
1042. 01:03:01 across the hall would have a different way. And the dean
1043. 01:03:03 would have a different way. And it's like, could we actually
1044. 01:03:06 get to something? I don't know if we could, because we're like
1045. 01:03:10 14 15 20 people, you know, and it's like, there's just too many
1046. 01:03:14 there's too many cooks in that kitchen. So that's my that's
1047. 01:03:16 my take on it.
1048. 01:03:18 Well, I tend to think that even in large organizations, you can
1049. 01:03:25 implement these, but it requires everybody to buy into it.
1050. 01:03:30 Like there's got to be a real strong champion for creating
1051. 01:03:35 this company culture where this is how we do things. And then
1052. 01:03:39 you can't deviate from that. When you make exceptions, it's
1053. 01:03:43 deadly to the processes that you're trying to to create. So I
1054. 01:03:50 think it's a larger organization, if you're going to try to
1055. 01:03:52 implement something new, then it becomes harder to steer a
1056. 01:03:56 bigger, bigger ship takes more, more effort. But I think it's
1057. 01:04:01 worthwhile doing.
1058. 01:04:04 I think that champion also needs the authority to actually
1059. 01:04:08 like push this through, because if they can be the champion, all
1060. 01:04:11 they want, but if they don't have any authority to hold people
1061. 01:04:13 accountable to it, then it falls down real fast.
1062. 01:04:16 Yes. Yeah, exactly.
1063. 01:04:19 Okay, so I just could call this one out. This would be real fast.
1064. 01:04:23 The Fiji test. So chapter 22 is the Fiji test. And what I think
1065. 01:04:27 is funny is I always will say if I get hit by a bus, yada yada yada.
1066. 01:04:31 And like she's like, don't think about it like getting hit by a
1067. 01:04:34 bus. Think about it. If I go on this, you know, vacation to Fiji
1068. 01:04:37 for weeks, I was like, Oh, what a what a better way to describe
1069. 01:04:41 that. Like instead of thinking negatively, think positively,
1070. 01:04:43 like if I go away for X number of weeks, well, the business still
1071. 01:04:46 run. So that was just a funny one that I that I thought a more
1072. 01:04:50 serious one of these, well, I want to know what you thought
1073. 01:04:52 about the five T's audit for for the different like tasks that
1074. 01:04:57 you're creating and like how much you delegate. So one was
1075. 01:05:00 tiny, two was tedious, three was time consuming for your
1076. 01:05:04 terrible at it. And then five, it was time sensitive. Like, what
1077. 01:05:08 do you think about those those five T's?
1078. 01:05:10 I think it's pretty brilliant. I think I've got a lot of a lot
1079. 01:05:14 of work to do here. Yeah. Yeah. I like that a lot. The the
1080. 01:05:22 other thing from that same section talks about different
1081. 01:05:29 ways to decide kind of how you're going to do things or who's
1082. 01:05:35 going to do what what projects you're going to engage with.
1083. 01:05:38 There's a section where she talks about a couple different
1084. 01:05:41 concepts from the aforementioned Dan Sullivan, the impact
1085. 01:05:45 filters. I've actually used these. These are pretty nice. It's
1086. 01:05:48 essentially a form that you fill out about a project that you
1087. 01:05:51 want to engage with. And then it kind of creates the why this
1088. 01:05:55 is going to be valuable. It's not the only thing that you could
1089. 01:05:57 use for that. But I think that was there's there's tools out
1090. 01:06:01 there that that help help you figure out what is actually
1091. 01:06:04 worth doing. And then the other thing, which they mentioned
1092. 01:06:07 very briefly after that, which there's a whole book written on
1093. 01:06:10 is look for who not how. So as it pertains to a business owner,
1094. 01:06:15 and the things that you're trying to delegate here, there are
1095. 01:06:18 things that you will want to delegate where if you're an
1096. 01:06:21 analytical logical planner, like me, you'll think, well, I need
1097. 01:06:25 to create all this documentation and identify all the individual
1098. 01:06:27 details. Maybe that's the best way to do it. But maybe you're
1099. 01:06:31 not the best person to do this task anyways. And so who not how
1100. 01:06:36 is really thinking about not how the thing needs to get done?
1101. 01:06:41 And you just have to follow these steps. And anybody can do
1102. 01:06:45 this. But who is the best person to do this, getting going back
1103. 01:06:49 to like the the unique ability or the zone of genius when you've
1104. 01:06:52 got the right people in the right seats? It's better sometimes
1105. 01:06:55 to be like, okay, you know what, this is your project, you
1106. 01:06:58 figure out how to make this successful. And I'm going to stay
1107. 01:07:01 out of the way.
1108. 01:07:03 No, I agree. I agree. So stop meddling, I guess is the
1109. 01:07:06 takeaway. Yeah, stop meddling where you don't belong. Yeah.
1110. 01:07:12 I thought this chapter again was very actionable. I think this
1111. 01:07:14 chapter stretched me in terms of I found myself saying a couple
1112. 01:07:19 different times like that's nice, but that's nice, but right. Yeah.
1113. 01:07:23 And and I think part of the reason why I was doing that is
1114. 01:07:26 because I'm not a solopreneur. I don't have a small team that
1115. 01:07:30 I'm working with. Like I'm working in a bigger kind of a place
1116. 01:07:35 where some of this stuff doesn't work as well. Now, one of the
1117. 01:07:39 things that I would love is like from chapter 25 track every task
1118. 01:07:43 and assign one owner. Like if we had like a master database for
1119. 01:07:48 let's say the school of science and engineering about the things
1120. 01:07:51 that we're thinking about together and then who's who owns
1121. 01:07:53 those? Man, that like I think that would be incredibly valuable
1122. 01:07:57 for for our organization. I just don't know if we if we would
1123. 01:08:01 do it and actually keep up with it. Like I like I worry that we
1124. 01:08:04 wouldn't keep up with it moving forward. That is the danger.
1125. 01:08:08 Yep. Yeah. So overall, I mean, I think, you know, this section
1126. 01:08:12 was really good too. If we move forward to the conclusion, what
1127. 01:08:18 were your or your key takeaways from the conclusion like the
1128. 01:08:22 conclusion? This is kind of an interesting conclusion. I think
1129. 01:08:28 it really isn't a whole lot. There's just a couple of pages.
1130. 01:08:32 And most of the time in the conclusions, at least in the
1131. 01:08:35 books we've read recently, it seems like they try to restate
1132. 01:08:38 everything that they've told you in a very brief form. Just like
1133. 01:08:41 don't forget this stuff. And she shares a personal story in the
1134. 01:08:48 last section here about lifting your focus from the the ground,
1135. 01:08:51 which I think is a really important concept. There really isn't
1136. 01:08:54 a whole lot of like reminding you like your the last chance don't
1137. 01:08:58 forget this sort of a thing. It's really just sort of an
1138. 01:09:01 encouragement that you can design a business that thrills you
1139. 01:09:05 freedom can mean a lot of different things and kind of ends
1140. 01:09:09 it with a twist on the the tick not Han quote that she shared at
1141. 01:09:14 the beginning that there is no way to free time free time is the
1142. 01:09:19 way. And I think it's a it's an effective way to wrap up this
1143. 01:09:24 book. So this book is 280 pages ish. Yep. And I don't think it's
1144. 01:09:30 any longer than it needed to be. I would agree. I did not read
1145. 01:09:34 this one thinking like oh my gosh, this this section was so
1146. 01:09:37 extended and you know, so boring. The one thing I wanted to say
1147. 01:09:42 about the the I agree with you completely it was much more of a
1148. 01:09:44 motivational conclusion like go use these tools to develop a
1149. 01:09:50 system, go knock it out. So I don't know if you had something
1150. 01:09:53 else to say, but I'm sorry, I've got no that was that was
1151. 01:09:56 basically it which is kind of interesting but also I think
1152. 01:09:58 the perfect way to attend this book. Yeah, from a structure
1153. 01:10:03 standpoint, we'll get to this a little bit in style of writing
1154. 01:10:05 but just so we didn't we haven't mentioned it yet. Essentially
1155. 01:10:09 every chapter has like, I don't know, like would you call it an
1156. 01:10:12 anecdote built into it where like, you know, you get the core
1157. 01:10:15 principles of the chapter, then she's going to like run you
1158. 01:10:18 through this little anecdote, and then she's going to tell you
1159. 01:10:20 more and like kind of put a bow on that. And then every chapter
1160. 01:10:23 also has like a summary afterwards, like, yeah, you know,
1161. 01:10:27 hey, here are the highlights of what I just hit. And I like that
1162. 01:10:30 from a reference standpoint, because there's so much in here
1163. 01:10:33 that as Mike will tell you from all of his action items, there's
1164. 01:10:37 so much in here that you may want to act on if you're running a
1165. 01:10:39 small business, if you're a solopreneur, if you're doing
1166. 01:10:41 something to like go back and reread the whole book, doesn't
1167. 01:10:45 make sense, but you could be like, what chapter was that in and
1168. 01:10:47 then just go hit the summary chapters, find or sorry, the
1169. 01:10:50 chapter summaries, find where you want to go and then go back
1170. 01:10:52 into it, which I thought was was a good way to use summaries
1171. 01:10:57 didn't cover too much didn't cover too little kind of put a
1172. 01:11:00 nice bow on the on each chapter. So
1173. 01:11:03 Yeah, the the chapters are the way that they're they're
1174. 01:11:07 formulated. There's usually like a personal story at the
1175. 01:11:10 beginning. And then the application of the principal in a
1176. 01:11:14 business context, there are frequently these large blue
1177. 01:11:17 boxes, where she'll introduce tangential ideas. They're
1178. 01:11:23 usually unique, but also compliment what she's talking
1179. 01:11:28 about in the chapter. And there's some really valuable stuff in
1180. 01:11:32 those. And then there's a box at the end, which is a summary
1181. 01:11:36 with a couple different sections, including the takeaway, like
1182. 01:11:39 this is what you should take action on from this section. I
1183. 01:11:42 think probably about half of my action items come from that. But
1184. 01:11:46 half of them were just triggered by something small that she
1185. 01:11:50 said in the the chapter itself.
1186. 01:11:54 All right, so let's move to action items. I think I'm going to
1187. 01:11:56 clear the clear the way I'm going to get my two out do it.
1188. 01:12:00 And then I'm just going to let you go right like you're just
1189. 01:12:02 going to unleash on us. So I had to primarily ones coming from
1190. 01:12:07 this, which actually makes sense considering my stage and where
1191. 01:12:09 I'm where I'm working and the way things are going, create a
1192. 01:12:12 document to start it right now to figure out like these SOPs of
1193. 01:12:19 my job, like create this document and start adding to it,
1194. 01:12:22 you know, and writing down these different things for how I
1195. 01:12:27 actually do my work. Okay, then the next one would be like
1196. 01:12:31 identify these golden hours, and then have them meet or have
1197. 01:12:35 them align with the founder time, right? So how do they meet and
1198. 01:12:39 align with this founder time that I've put into my calendar?
1199. 01:12:42 And then the harder part of that for me will be actually
1200. 01:12:44 sticking to that and honoring that and not allowing other
1201. 01:12:47 things to come in, but that's a whole other that's one of the
1202. 01:12:50 world. So those are my two action items from this book.
1203. 01:12:52 Okay, and then let me see, let me count these four, five, six,
1204. 01:12:57 seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 different action items for me.
1205. 01:13:02 The first one is to create a two hour founder time
1206. 01:13:07 calendar block on my calendar. And this is where you are
1207. 01:13:12 thinking about the big picture stuff in the business. So I
1208. 01:13:18 want to do this weekly. There is also in the first section, a
1209. 01:13:23 quiz that she put together is also a toolkit, which I actually
1210. 01:13:26 haven't looked at yet. But there's a URL in the book where you
1211. 01:13:29 can get a list of all the recommended apps and tools and
1212. 01:13:33 different forms and things like that that she she
1213. 01:13:35 mentions. So I think that is actually a pretty valuable
1214. 01:13:39 bonus for this this book in addition to like explaining how
1215. 01:13:42 she uses these things. If you can have the templates and things
1216. 01:13:44 that she uses, that's that's great. So there is an escape
1217. 01:13:48 velocity quiz there, which is basically how you can disconnect
1218. 01:13:51 yourself from the day to day operation of your your business.
1219. 01:13:54 I want to take that. I want to start an operating principles
1220. 01:13:59 document. This is going back to the chapter one. And you know,
1221. 01:14:01 the Wi-Fi password for the the people who would stay in your
1222. 01:14:05 apartment kind of like everything that you would need to know
1223. 01:14:07 about staying at an Airbnb. I started an Airbnb last week. So I
1224. 01:14:10 kind of have a picture of what this could look like. But I
1225. 01:14:13 want to create that inside of notion for again, I'm going to
1226. 01:14:17 start with the library. I want to put together a brand style
1227. 01:14:22 guide. I sort of have this already with like the colors and
1228. 01:14:26 the fonts and things like that. But I want to be a little bit
1229. 01:14:29 more specific with this because I actually have some design
1230. 01:14:33 tasks that I want to delegate already in mind. And I need the
1231. 01:14:37 style guide in order to do that. Creating a gifting database, I
1232. 01:14:41 really like this idea. I want to keep this in notion. And
1233. 01:14:46 basically, anytime I have an interaction with somebody in
1234. 01:14:50 the community or somebody professionally, I want to just
1235. 01:14:54 be able to add a record to this notion database. This is the
1236. 01:14:57 person. And this is the thing that I want to to gift to them.
1237. 01:15:00 And at the end of the year, you know, you've got some some
1238. 01:15:04 cool things that you can you can do around the holidays. I want
1239. 01:15:09 to identify the projects that are draining me the most. I think
1240. 01:15:12 I already have some identified, which isn't real exciting, because
1241. 01:15:17 it means some difficult conversations at some point. I
1242. 01:15:21 want to set Monday and Friday as no meeting days. And for the
1243. 01:15:26 most part, like I don't have a whole lot of meetings. But every
1244. 01:15:29 once in a while, I get a request, Hey, can we chat about this
1245. 01:15:33 this thing? And I want to set firm boundaries around Mondays
1246. 01:15:37 and Fridays. In the the the book, she talks about the
1247. 01:15:46 personalization and like the feedback and stuff like that.
1248. 01:15:50 And that reminded me of a tool that I had used previously, and
1249. 01:15:55 I want to start using in my creator business, kind of as a
1250. 01:16:01 way for people to leave feedback that the tool itself isn't
1251. 01:16:04 necessarily for feedback. But I think it's called right message.
1252. 01:16:07 And basically, you can embed this on your website, and people
1253. 01:16:10 can, you know, click the different options. This is what I'm
1254. 01:16:12 interested in. And then you can speak directly to the outcomes
1255. 01:16:15 they're trying to achieve or the things that they are
1256. 01:16:18 specifically interested in. So if someone has decided, you know,
1257. 01:16:24 obsidian just isn't for me, then they can get my newsletters.
1258. 01:16:28 But there's every mention of life HQ has been removed, because I
1259. 01:16:31 know it's not appropriate for them. It just makes it a little
1260. 01:16:35 bit nicer experience for people. So I want to basically have
1261. 01:16:38 mechanisms like that where I can be more personal and essentially
1262. 01:16:43 listen more about what people are are struggling with and how I
1263. 01:16:48 can can help them. I feel like terms of stuff that I make, that
1264. 01:16:51 could be, that could be valuable. Also want to create a general
1265. 01:16:54 feedback survey. I've been looking at some different tools.
1266. 01:16:58 For that, and I think I figured out which one I want to use. I
1267. 01:17:02 want to create for personal use a shared list of big budget items
1268. 01:17:07 to review during our family meetings. I recognize that we do
1269. 01:17:11 tend to talk about this stuff. But I've been telling people when
1270. 01:17:16 I was, you know, doing some sort of operations consulting, and
1271. 01:17:19 then when I was with an integrator, as an integrator, it's
1272. 01:17:21 like, you want to talk about this thing? Put it on the agenda,
1273. 01:17:24 realizing that in terms of the big budget stuff, that would be
1274. 01:17:28 really easy to do. Just create the shared list. We look at it
1275. 01:17:30 real real briefly. There's there's a container for that now as
1276. 01:17:33 opposed to after remember to bring that thing up. On page 220,
1277. 01:17:38 she talks about a home assistant, which is somebody who comes and
1278. 01:17:43 helps with cleaning, the laundry, meal prep, stuff like that. I
1279. 01:17:47 know that this is something Rachel has wanted for a very
1280. 01:17:50 long time. We have not been in a position where we could afford
1281. 01:17:56 it necessarily, because this is kind of like in addition to
1282. 01:17:59 doing the grocery shopping, you're paying for someone to cook
1283. 01:18:02 the meals and things like that. And this is one of those things.
1284. 01:18:04 Well, we'll just figure out how to make how to make it work.
1285. 01:18:07 But I want to I want to be thinking about how maybe we can
1286. 01:18:11 even do this on a small scale, just to help her out a little
1287. 01:18:14 bit with stuff around the house since she homeschools are our
1288. 01:18:17 five kids. And sounds like she will probably be director of our
1289. 01:18:21 classical conversations campus next year. So we got to figure
1290. 01:18:24 out how to get rid of some things off of her plate. Yeah. And
1291. 01:18:28 then kind of the larger one is making the manager manual. This
1292. 01:18:33 is going to live inside of notion. And this is going to in
1293. 01:18:36 addition to the operating principles have all of the
1294. 01:18:38 procedures, standard operating procedures, all that kind of
1295. 01:18:41 stuff. So I'm starting to build this out. I have someone that I'm
1296. 01:18:44 working with on this, but if you like, this is going to take a
1297. 01:18:49 long time before it is a for it's officially done. So I have no
1298. 01:18:54 idea how many of these I will actually be able to take action
1299. 01:18:58 on before next recording. There's a good chance that none of
1300. 01:19:04 these are actually done. Well, the skate velocity quiz, that one
1301. 01:19:07 will be pretty easy, I think. And the two hour founder time
1302. 01:19:11 calendar blocks, you know, that that's not going to take me
1303. 01:19:13 super long to to create those. But a lot of these are just, you
1304. 01:19:18 know, I recognize this is something that I need to implement
1305. 01:19:21 into my creator business. And I'm trying to disconnect from the
1306. 01:19:24 urgency, I look at this list, and it's a little bit
1307. 01:19:26 overwhelming. The plan is to just dump all of these into a
1308. 01:19:29 list in obsidian, and to continually just kind of chip away
1309. 01:19:34 at these, essentially have a big long list of general improvements
1310. 01:19:37 that I want to make. But there's no specific timeframe associated
1311. 01:19:41 with any of them. And then I just every single week, develop a
1312. 01:19:44 couple of hours to fixing the holes in the systems in the
1313. 01:19:48 business and some of this stuff gets taken care of. Yeah, you
1314. 01:19:51 addressed the one question I had with these is because these
1315. 01:19:54 read more like projects, right? Yeah, less and less like tasks.
1316. 01:19:57 So therefore, I wondered where you were going to put them in the
1317. 01:19:59 obsidian list makes makes total sense, right? You'll move the
1318. 01:20:02 subtasks into a task system when it when it's appropriate to
1319. 01:20:06 move into there. Well, good. I mean, that's that's an ambitious
1320. 01:20:10 ambitious set there, Mike. But like looking or listening to you
1321. 01:20:14 talk about them and looking at the list, it all makes sense,
1322. 01:20:17 right? Like this book would have pushed this kind of stuff, you
1323. 01:20:22 know, directly to you. And that it's so that makes makes total
1324. 01:20:26 sense for me. Okay, let's move on to style and rating. It's my
1325. 01:20:29 book. So I get to go first. I really like the style of this
1326. 01:20:34 book. I like the way it was organized. I like the way it was
1327. 01:20:37 structured, even though it was 333, you know, like the whole
1328. 01:20:41 like repeated cyclical structure. I didn't feel like it got in
1329. 01:20:45 the way like I don't feel like it was overly artificial. Her
1330. 01:20:49 her writing style made sense. Her writing style connected with
1331. 01:20:52 me in terms of the way she intermixed anecdotes and stories
1332. 01:20:57 with different examples with different key principles, how she
1333. 01:21:01 tied back into other works. And did that, you know, very
1334. 01:21:04 thoroughly, I thought, in a way, one of the things that you'll
1335. 01:21:08 talk about what you might end up talking about when you do this
1336. 01:21:11 is the level of like depth or like how well she hit certain
1337. 01:21:15 things. Like I thought she did a really good job. Like I did not
1338. 01:21:17 think there were any that she overly glossed over, or that
1339. 01:21:22 went like, Oh, my gosh, like, why did we just spend 19 pages
1340. 01:21:26 talking about like this idea that's loosely connected with
1341. 01:21:28 everything else? I thought she had a good balance there. So
1342. 01:21:31 you're hearing me say many, many positive things. I don't know
1343. 01:21:34 if I have any negatives. Do I have any negatives with this? I
1344. 01:21:40 don't think I have any negatives with this one. Like this one,
1345. 01:21:42 this one's good. This is a five star book for me. If you are
1346. 01:21:47 in your position. So it's like, help me like, I don't know how
1347. 01:21:51 to rate this rent like, it's definitely a five star book for
1348. 01:21:53 me. For you. For me, it drops to a four and a half star book.
1349. 01:21:59 Because it's still a really, really good book. It's still
1350. 01:22:01 really made me think critically about a lot of different
1351. 01:22:03 things and about just general operating procedures and
1352. 01:22:06 systems. And and I got into it for that. But like, I think
1353. 01:22:11 that if I'm recommending it to other people, and I'm saying
1354. 01:22:14 like, where would you where would I rate this if I were not
1355. 01:22:17 somebody in your position, Mike, I would probably rate it a
1356. 01:22:20 four and a half. I would not rate it a five just because you
1357. 01:22:22 may not be able to connect with it as well, you know, through
1358. 01:22:26 reading the book. So I'm going to give it a four and a half.
1359. 01:22:28 But I want to be very, very clear. I think it's a five star
1360. 01:22:32 book. If if somebody's in your context, or they're thinking
1361. 01:22:35 about going into your context.
1362. 01:22:38 Nice. So you basically said that I better rate it to five
1363. 01:22:40 star. You know, my star book, I'm going to throw this out there
1364. 01:22:44 and I don't mind biasing you or whatever. Like, if you don't
1365. 01:22:47 rate this a five star book, like, I'm done, right? Like, I'm just
1366. 01:22:50 going to pull the plug. I'm not going to hit stop on the
1367. 01:22:52 recording. I'm not going to send you a file. I'm just done. If
1368. 01:22:55 this isn't a five star book for you, I don't know what a five
1369. 01:22:57 star book. All right. Well, I've been blackmailed. No, just
1370. 01:23:00 kidding. I was going to rate it five stars anyways. I think
1371. 01:23:02 they were really good. Yeah. So it's interesting because it is a
1372. 01:23:07 business book where she has a framework that does not feel
1373. 01:23:11 like a system. So a lot of times you read these business books,
1374. 01:23:15 and it's you got to have these meetings and they got to be
1375. 01:23:18 this long and this is the agenda. And I actually like some of
1376. 01:23:21 that stuff. But the problem with those systems books is that
1377. 01:23:24 they're very prescriptive work this throughout your entire
1378. 01:23:28 organization. And that's all you need to do. And that's not the
1379. 01:23:32 case. You really need to figure out what elements of this am I
1380. 01:23:35 going to add to my organization? And sometimes there's larger
1381. 01:23:38 changes that you make structurally. But a lot of times
1382. 01:23:40 it's just tweaking some things and adding certain elements that
1383. 01:23:44 provides the big takeaway. So this is very the typical anti
1384. 01:23:49 business book, because yeah, there are the three different
1385. 01:23:51 sections. And yeah, there are three different chapters in each
1386. 01:23:54 one of those sections. And it's very symmetrical. But there is
1387. 01:23:57 very little prescription. And this is exactly what you need to
1388. 01:24:01 do. There's lots of examples of this is how I use this in my
1389. 01:24:03 organization, even something like the delightfully tiny team,
1390. 01:24:06 she says that you have to figure out what the size of your
1391. 01:24:09 delightfully tiny team is minus three. It could be more than
1392. 01:24:13 that. So this book does a great job of kind of planting seeds
1393. 01:24:17 and getting you to think about things, asking some thought
1394. 01:24:20 some thought provoking questions to get you going down these
1395. 01:24:23 paths and decide for yourself what is really important here. I
1396. 01:24:27 think it is the perfect thing for me personally, just the stage
1397. 01:24:32 of business that I'm I'm in, I'm kind of at the point where I am
1398. 01:24:34 a solopreneur, but I'm growing a little bit and I'm looking to
1399. 01:24:37 delegate some of this stuff and offload some stuff. And how do
1400. 01:24:40 I actually do that? So there's lots of stuff in here for me. I
1401. 01:24:43 think that if you are interested in the idea of
1402. 01:24:47 entrepreneurship at all, whether that means that you want to
1403. 01:24:51 start a side hustle, or you want to be a full time independent
1404. 01:24:53 creator, or you're just interested in how small businesses
1405. 01:24:56 work, then this is a really good book that you should read. I
1406. 01:25:02 think there's even personal application in here for someone
1407. 01:25:06 who is not necessarily wanting to start their own business. Like
1408. 01:25:10 I mentioned, the the home assistant, that was something
1409. 01:25:14 very small section. But I could see that being applicable for
1410. 01:25:19 people who aren't running their own businesses. So I think if you
1411. 01:25:24 if you make the con the the principal, you can apply the
1412. 01:25:28 principles a little bit more generally, you could view your
1413. 01:25:32 home as a business, you could view your family as a business if
1414. 01:25:35 you really wanted to. And then the principles would apply. So I
1415. 01:25:39 think it's a little bit more broadly applicable than than I
1416. 01:25:44 would say it's a little bit more broadly applicable, maybe
1417. 01:25:45 than the framing that you were thinking about it in. And I
1418. 01:25:49 think that just about everybody who listens to bookworm would
1419. 01:25:54 benefit from going through this. Now there probably are a few
1420. 01:25:57 people somewhere who they pick this up, you start reading it
1421. 01:26:00 and you're like, yeah, I just this isn't clicking for me. And
1422. 01:26:04 that's fine. You know, go ahead and put it down at that point. But
1423. 01:26:07 I think people should give this one this one a shot. And then
1424. 01:26:11 the last thing that I'll say about this is that in the business
1425. 01:26:15 book world, this is so needed. There are so many books by
1426. 01:26:26 hustle bros who are going to show you how to kill it. You
1427. 01:26:30 know, I'm kind of done with the the Gary V's and the the
1428. 01:26:35 Alex Hormozis. Now I have to say like the Alex Hormozi books, I
1429. 01:26:39 think there's some really good stuff in those. But again, I'm
1430. 01:26:42 not going to take the whole system. And this is, you know,
1431. 01:26:45 this is exactly what I what I do. But like hundred million
1432. 01:26:48 dollar offers, I got a lot out of reading that. So I'm not
1433. 01:26:52 reeling against the stuff that they make necessarily. But just
1434. 01:26:55 the whole vibe. If you follow Alex Hormozi online, there is a
1435. 01:27:00 whole vibe associated with that, which just pushes me. It's
1436. 01:27:07 greats against the it's sandpaper on my soul. It's fingernails on
1437. 01:27:12 on the chalkboard every time I see him in his muscle shirt, you
1438. 01:27:16 know, telling you just got to kill it, you know, jocko willing
1439. 01:27:19 style get get get tough basically. Business doesn't have to
1440. 01:27:25 be that way. And I'm really glad that this book exists. And I
1441. 01:27:32 wish more people would would read it, specifically more
1442. 01:27:35 business owners that have teams, you know, if you read this,
1443. 01:27:38 your team is going to thank you. So yeah, highly recommend this
1444. 01:27:42 one. And we'll write it five stars. All righty. So it's time
1445. 01:27:48 to talk about upcoming books. Mike, your book is next. What
1446. 01:27:51 are we reading next?
1447. 01:27:53 Yeah, so I'm going to return the favor and pick a book that you
1448. 01:27:56 wanted to read, which is anti time management by Richie
1449. 01:27:59 Norton. Last episode, you got real excited when I brought this
1450. 01:28:03 one up. So again, I did a fist pump. All right, cool. Yeah, my
1451. 01:28:07 wife started reading this one too. And she said that the
1452. 01:28:10 beginning of the book is the best beginning of any productivity
1453. 01:28:14 book she's ever read. Oh, nice. So high, high praise, at least
1454. 01:28:19 initially for for this one. After that, what do we read?
1455. 01:28:24 Awesome. After that, we'll be reading Never Play It Safe by
1456. 01:28:27 Chase Jarvis. Mike, do you have any gap books for this
1457. 01:28:33 period of time? I do. I cranked through actually a very big gap
1458. 01:28:39 book because we talked about it on the Focus podcast. And that
1459. 01:28:44 is the anxious generation. Have you heard of this book? I have
1460. 01:28:49 heard of this book. Okay, Jonathan height, right? Yeah, it's
1461. 01:28:54 basically the dangers of social media. Okay, the takeaways
1462. 01:28:58 from the book, we're actually pretty encouraging because it's
1463. 01:29:01 a lot of stuff that we've been doing already as a family. So
1464. 01:29:04 maybe it's not anything that is, you know, completely original.
1465. 01:29:07 But there's a lot of research that he has done on the topic. And
1466. 01:29:12 it was interesting because he mentions in this book that he
1467. 01:29:14 had actually set out to write a book about how social media was
1468. 01:29:19 a threat to democracy. And instead he discovered the larger
1469. 01:29:24 story was the negative effects that social media was having on
1470. 01:29:28 kids. So it's a sobering read, for sure. And it's not all, you
1471. 01:29:36 know, this stuff is terrible and just avoid it completely. So
1472. 01:29:38 I appreciate the tone that he takes towards it and gives a
1473. 01:29:41 practical like, this is these are some of the things that we
1474. 01:29:44 can do. But it's something that I think people don't really
1475. 01:29:48 think about. And you should, you're looking for something that's
1476. 01:29:51 going to give you some, some research based strategies on how
1477. 01:29:57 to deal with maybe unanticipated negative ramifications of
1478. 01:30:02 having the social media on your your smartphone and being so
1479. 01:30:07 attached to it all day every day. This is this is a good one.
1480. 01:30:11 Yeah, I haven't read that one, but I listened to a very long
1481. 01:30:15 form, like two and a half, three hour podcast of height being
1482. 01:30:19 interviewed. And man, it was it was really telling like he
1483. 01:30:22 summarizes a decent amount of that book. And it was it was
1484. 01:30:25 really telling. So mine is I have to ask a clarifying question
1485. 01:30:29 first. And maybe I've asked this before. And if I have, I'm
1486. 01:30:31 sorry. Do audio books count in gap books? I think can. That's
1487. 01:30:37 fine. Okay, because if they can, I mean, I got a ton of I got a
1488. 01:30:40 ton of gap books, right? Because I'm like, there's always
1489. 01:30:43 something in my, in my ears, sometimes podcast, sometimes
1490. 01:30:45 audiobooks. So the one that I'm gonna plan on listening to is
1491. 01:30:49 called deep discipleship. So JT English is a pastor at a local
1492. 01:30:53 church near us. And I've just been interested in discipleship
1493. 01:30:58 from the Christian perspective. So I want to listen to deep
1494. 01:31:01 discipleship. Kate, my wife is reading this as well right now.
1495. 01:31:03 So it'll be fun to talk to her about it and what we're both
1496. 01:31:06 getting out of it. So cool. I'm like, what do you think? Well,
1497. 01:31:10 ready to close it down. Let's do it. So thank you, everyone, for
1498. 01:31:15 listening. Thank you specifically to the Bookworm Pro
1499. 01:31:20 members. We really appreciate you being willing to support the
1500. 01:31:24 show financially. If you want to become a Bookworm Pro
1501. 01:31:28 supporter, you can go to patreon.com/bookwormfm. And for
1502. 01:31:33 $7 a month, you will get a couple of additional feeds, you'll
1503. 01:31:37 get access to a pro show, which has an extended ad free version
1504. 01:31:42 of the show that typically goes out the day before the regular
1505. 01:31:45 show is live. There's also a bootleg episode, a bootleg feed
1506. 01:31:50 that the raw audio gets uploaded right after we get done
1507. 01:31:54 recording. So you get to hear all the mistakes that that we we
1508. 01:31:58 make. And there's a 4k wallpaper that I put together a couple
1509. 01:32:03 other goodies there. But like I said, if you want to support
1510. 01:32:06 the show, that is the best way to do it. And you can do so for
1511. 01:32:09 $7 a month by going to patreon.com/bookwormfm.
1512. 01:32:13 outstanding. So if you're reading along with us, let's put free
1513. 01:32:17 time on the shelf, pick up anti time management by Richie
1514. 01:32:20 Norton, and we'll talk to you next time.