219: Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff

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1. 00:00:00 All right. So we are going to be talking about a book today that I think is one of my all-time
2. 00:00:06 favorite books. And you sent me a text message saying that you were mad at this book for making
3. 00:00:12 you rethink a bunch of things. I had a feeling like you were going to start the show off with that.
4. 00:00:18 And it's like, it's so true. Like, I read this book and I got to the end of it. And all I could
5. 00:00:22 think was, well, can I reread it right now before we record again? Like, I wanted to read it a second
6. 00:00:29 time just because I felt like there was so much I was missing. Like, I probably took more notes
7. 00:00:33 in this book than I've taken in a book in a really long time. So good choice, Mike. Good choice.
8. 00:00:40 I mean, we're putting the cart before the horse, but good choice on this one.
9. 00:00:45 Yeah, well, this one has been a long time coming. I, yeah, we interviewed Ann Lor for the Focus
10. 00:00:53 Podcast, which at this point, it's out now. So I can finally put the link to that episode in the
11. 00:00:58 show notes. But this has been on, you know, I've been looking forward to this day to be able to
12. 00:01:03 talk through this book with you. Before we get there, I guess we should do some follow up with
13. 00:01:08 these these action items. So I've got one. And it was, how can I make it easier for people to try
14. 00:01:15 my products and services? I actually have something made for this, but it's not available for this.
15. 00:01:23 That makes any sense. So we talked about the different things that I could do with life HQ,
16. 00:01:30 the community, stuff like that. So I'm in the middle of significantly revamping the community.
17. 00:01:35 I'm starting to do these free hot seat coaching sessions, which are 30 minutes we connect,
18. 00:01:39 and then other people can join the call and they can ask questions and comment in the chat. But
19. 00:01:43 otherwise it's like a private coaching call. It's happening in front of other people. I've done
20. 00:01:48 one of those went really, really well this week. I've got another one scheduled for when we get back
21. 00:01:52 from our vacation. I did a separate coaching call also this week and coaching is fun. It's
22. 00:01:58 kind of my jam. I like it a lot. So the library as it exists is going to have all my courses. It's
23. 00:02:07 going to have these hot seats. It's going to have these Q&A sessions. There's going to be a whole
24. 00:02:12 bunch more programming in the library. And that's the one that's going to be, I'm thinking $597 a year.
25. 00:02:20 It's got thousands of dollars worth of courses that are going to be included in it. And once you
26. 00:02:25 have life HQ, you've got it. So all that stuff is going to be rolled in there. But then I'm going
27. 00:02:32 to make a light version of that, which I'm committing to this publicly now, I guess. But
28. 00:02:39 my thought is I'll take just the forum part and I'll make that available to people so they can kind
29. 00:02:45 of have a feel for what the community is like. And I will charge $47 as a one time payment for
30. 00:02:53 that. So $47 once you get in there. And I feel like having the paywall there is important because
31. 00:02:59 it shows that people are a little bit more serious about this stuff. But my whole goal of that part
32. 00:03:05 is like the obsidian discord and the obsidian forum. But nobody is yelling at you because you
33. 00:03:11 didn't search for something first or you formatted something a little bit wrong. It drives me nuts
34. 00:03:16 when I see stuff like that. It happens all the time. I want it to be a nice place for curious
35. 00:03:21 sense makers who want to use their PKM systems to achieve their goals and do their best knowledge
36. 00:03:27 work, stuff like that. So yeah, I'm thinking of doing that. And it's like such a big leap there.
37. 00:03:33 I'm not sure if it's actually going to work. But that's kind of my thought is you can trial it for
38. 00:03:36 a little bit without any of the live stuff, essentially, without any of the courses. And then if you like
39. 00:03:40 it, you like the vibe, you like my my approach, then then you can make the investment in in the
40. 00:03:47 the upgrade. And then there'll be another tier, which is really just like more consistent one-on-one
41. 00:03:53 in group coaching actually to call with somebody yesterday who has a successful group coaching
42. 00:03:57 program. And I picked his brain about how do you set this up? What are the types of things that you
43. 00:04:02 do? What are you looking for in terms of delivering success to the people that are in your program?
44. 00:04:06 So I got a lot more clarity on what that could look like. But really the exciting part to me
45. 00:04:11 is just that entry level tier being able for people to try it out without committing to a pretty
46. 00:04:18 hefty subscription. What's your like in the next six months in the next year? Like how soon do
47. 00:04:25 you want to try to roll this thing out? That is a great question. To be honest, I don't know.
48. 00:04:31 I am working on like a whole practicalpcan.com revamp. The website's going to change, but also
49. 00:04:39 I'm also launching several like mini sites. So there'll be one for the cohort, which is going to
50. 00:04:46 become a hybrid cohort. That one actually was like the first step. So when I launched the live cohort
51. 00:04:51 last time, that was the new look and feel. That same design is going to be applied to the starter
52. 00:04:56 vault page so that like the free starter vault that people can download in the library page, the life
53. 00:05:01 HQ page. So those are all like micro sites that are going to go live and they're all kind of tied
54. 00:05:07 together. So like life HQ, there's two versions there. You can get just life HQ or you can get it
55. 00:05:12 with a year, you can get access to the library and you can get it get it for free along with all
56. 00:05:15 the other stuff. With the library, there's multiple tiers there. One of them includes life HQ, right?
57. 00:05:20 So there's things that connect these different pages. They're separate, they're independent,
58. 00:05:27 but they're interdependent if that makes sense. So that's all going to launch when it's ready
59. 00:05:32 essentially. And it's close. If I had to guess, probably the next month or so.
60. 00:05:37 All I can think is like your systems integrator hat is like your neurons are firing like crazy
61. 00:05:44 because it's like, how do I connect all these dots and how do I get people to flow from here to
62. 00:05:46 here and go in the right direction and all that stuff. So that's not too far off.
63. 00:05:53 It's a lot though. It's a lot to keep track of and there's multiple pieces here from multiple
64. 00:06:00 projects managed by multiple people. So I'm ready for it to be done. But anyways, all that to say,
65. 00:06:07 I think that I do get a green check mark for my action item this time.
66. 00:06:12 Good. Good. Okay. So I'm up now. I'm 50/50. So where am I settling for good instead of great?
67. 00:06:19 That was my first one. I think one of the areas where I'm settling for good instead of great is
68. 00:06:25 leadership at home right now. So like it's one of those, you know, not to get too
69. 00:06:30 into the weeds on it or too personal, but it's like, I just keep getting that feeling of it's like,
70. 00:06:34 I should be doing more. I could be doing more and not in like a
71. 00:06:39 woe is me kind of way, but in like a, okay, Corey, step up, like step up, you could be doing more,
72. 00:06:44 you should be doing more in the reason you're not isn't a lack of ability. It's not anything
73. 00:06:48 like that. It's just the fact that you're not prioritizing it enough. So you need to prioritize
74. 00:06:53 it more. Now the other thing on this one, so I'm going to give myself a green check mark on that
75. 00:06:57 one because I identified like a really major one for me. But the other one is like this book
76. 00:07:03 kind of goes against that idea like completely not, not like, you know, today's author isn't
77. 00:07:11 trying to say like, don't do great things, but it's like, give yourself the ability to try and
78. 00:07:15 experiment and learn as through these growth loops. So I kind of like am conflicted now because
79. 00:07:20 it's like, yeah, I want to be, you know, I want to go for great, but I don't want to go for perfection.
80. 00:07:24 And we're going to talk about that later as we as we move into this today. The next one was
81. 00:07:28 do a force field analysis on something. And I just lost this one completely lost it. I'm going to
82. 00:07:34 blame it on sickness. So I mean, I get a I get a red X, but no, I just completely completely lost
83. 00:07:40 that one. You may may have just not bubbled up to the top of the week that there was nothing
84. 00:07:46 pressing from a force field analysis standpoint. So I'm 5050 today. All right.
85. 00:07:52 Well, you're ready to talk about today's book. I am. I am. All right. So as alluded to,
86. 00:07:59 this has been a long time coming for me. We are going to be talking about tiny experiments by Ann
87. 00:08:04 lore they coonf. And this has been this is just released. But this is something that
88. 00:08:14 Ann and Laura has been working on for quite a while. I think it's safe to say
89. 00:08:20 that everything that she wrote at her website, nest labs has kind of led up to this. But I don't
90. 00:08:27 think this was her goal at the beginning. You know, I'm going to do all this stuff with the end goal
91. 00:08:33 of I'm actually going to publish this book. Now, I have been following Ann lore for a long time.
92. 00:08:40 I am a paying member of the nest labs community. She has a little bit different take on community,
93. 00:08:46 which we'll probably talk about in the last section of of this book. And yeah, I don't know
94. 00:08:54 what else to say of I guess we should just jump into it. I guess I could talk about the structure
95. 00:08:57 because we're not going to tag tackle it chapter by chapter. Can I say one thing first? Yeah, go
96. 00:09:02 for it. Mike, are you looking at the that is a physical book? I see this is a very nice book.
97. 00:09:08 Okay, this is a physical book. I want you to know that Mike, I read the entire physical book.
98. 00:09:12 And I took notes via the physical book, and I hated every second of the physical book process.
99. 00:09:18 You don't have to do that. I know you mentioned the same thing last time, like, yeah.
100. 00:09:24 I tried again, right? I tried again, and it just doesn't work. Like it just doesn't make any sense
101. 00:09:29 to me what we do. So now we can go in and talk about the book. Tell me about the structure of
102. 00:09:34 the book. So there's an introduction. There's a conclusion. And then in between, there are four
103. 00:09:39 parts. So the first part is packed commit to curiosity. Three chapters, part two act practice
104. 00:09:47 mindful productivity, part three react collaborate with uncertainty and part four impact grow with
105. 00:09:53 the world. So 12 chapters, but like I said, it kind of fits into those those four different
106. 00:09:59 sections. And I will tackle this section by section thoughts on the overall structure of the book
107. 00:10:07 before we get into the specifics here. Yeah, I didn't have any issues with the overall structure
108. 00:10:12 of the book. Like sometimes it just kind of rubs you the wrong way and you can't figure out why.
109. 00:10:16 And then eventually like you'll figure it out. This one, I mean, it was your standard multiple parts,
110. 00:10:22 three sections in each part, kind of a thing, but like it didn't feel forced. It didn't feel like,
111. 00:10:27 I can't even tell you that I think any of the chapters felt like fluff, like they didn't need
112. 00:10:31 to be there. Like it just actually flowed well, made sense. I, you know, the the packed act react
113. 00:10:39 impact. Like I thought that was pretty pretty clever in this sense and not like overly forced.
114. 00:10:44 So no, like there really wasn't anything about the structure of this. I thought it worked worked
115. 00:10:51 really well. Cool. So let's start with the introduction then. And this is where you basically get a
116. 00:11:00 little bit of Anler's backstory. She was an employee at Google and kind of had considered that her
117. 00:11:09 dream job. And then quit and her parents kind of thought that she was crazy when she did that.
118. 00:11:15 She went from there and started a company with a co-founder, a tech startup that failed. And then
119. 00:11:24 from there, she started writing online with a single pack to write a hundred articles in a hundred
120. 00:11:30 days. It's kind of how she got her start. She wrote all these articles. She was going to school at
121. 00:11:37 the time. She has since gotten her PhD. So she is taking a lot of these neuroscience classes. And
122. 00:11:47 she's writing about the things that she's learning on on her blog. And that's probably the reason
123. 00:11:54 that she came on my radar, to be honest, I've always kind of been interested in the topic of
124. 00:11:59 neuroscience and the plasticity of the brain and how we learn and stuff like that. And there is a
125. 00:12:05 good bit of that, I think, in here, but it's it's also, I think, very focused. It's sort of like
126. 00:12:15 a productivity book on how to how to achieve great like big things, I would argue. But the way
127. 00:12:25 it's framed with the tiny experiments is very unique. And it kind of gives it a very, a very
128. 00:12:34 approachable on ramp for a lot of people. Yeah, so I was going to ask you this question in the in
129. 00:12:40 the intersection here. I didn't feel like this was as much a productivity book as it was like a
130. 00:12:48 life direction book or, you know what I mean? Like I didn't see this as a as much of a productivity
131. 00:12:54 type of a book the way I typically think of a productivity book. So, you know, reading the blurbs
132. 00:13:00 on the back and the different people would refer to it as, you know, productivity. And I'm like,
133. 00:13:04 no, it's not really that. And then, you know, Newport, Cal Newport says linear goals,
134. 00:13:11 falling uncertainty, bloomin possibility, and emerge organically. It's a life design book. Like,
135. 00:13:15 I felt like it was much more on the on in lines with design your life than it was something like,
136. 00:13:22 how do I get more productive in, you know, this the 168 hours I have every week, right? So,
137. 00:13:28 I thought that's maybe what made it better for me. Like, as I was working through it, it was like,
138. 00:13:34 okay, it's this exploration book, not a here's another system, put your put your info into the
139. 00:13:41 system and crank it, you know, like it was much more of a here's a possible way to explore
140. 00:13:47 life and what you want to do and how you want to be creative and how you want to generate
141. 00:13:50 things. So, I like that one that this is kind of summarized in, you know, I think it's the last
142. 00:13:54 line on what she writes in the introduction or it's very close to it, but ask big questions,
143. 00:13:58 design tiny experiments. And I think that's a really cool way to, to orient, you know, thinking
144. 00:14:04 about things is like, what are the big things that I care about? And then how do I design like,
145. 00:14:08 the smallest possible way to learn more about that or to get exposure to that? So, yeah, like,
146. 00:14:14 I really like the, I guess, the goal of this book, if you will, it kind of resonates with me a lot.
147. 00:14:20 Yeah, and I guess I talk about it being a productivity book because that's kind of the on ramp with
148. 00:14:26 the first couple sections specifically. But then you're right, it does kind of get to the point
149. 00:14:32 where it is more talking big picture. And that's part four, you know, impact grow with the world.
150. 00:14:40 That's really how do you fit in in the larger worldwide community and gets into like this idea
151. 00:14:48 of social flow and the protege effect and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, so there's a really
152. 00:14:54 unique arc here, I think. And it's quite the journey she takes us on. I think it's a pretty
153. 00:15:01 effective journey, obviously. So I've talked pretty glowingly about this book because I've read it
154. 00:15:06 actually a couple months ago at this point. I've actually read it again for the podcast here and
155. 00:15:13 did not disappoint rereading it. Well, and I told you, I can't, did I tell you, I don't know if it was
156. 00:15:20 the start of the show or if it was in the pro show, but it was like, this is one of the books I wanted
157. 00:15:23 to read again, like as soon as I got done with it, I wanted to read it again. So I agree with you
158. 00:15:27 completely like really good off as soon as you open it up, it seems really good. Yeah, so let's
159. 00:15:33 start with the first section. And I'll mention the chapters here, but we can kind of pick from
160. 00:15:38 whatever you want to talk about inside these chapters. I am kind of curious, you know, this is
161. 00:15:44 the second time that I've gone through it. You've gone through it once you've got a different
162. 00:15:50 perspective on this, maybe than than I do. So I want to give more room, maybe than I normally do
163. 00:15:55 for any questions or perspective that you want to share and discussion discussing this. It's
164. 00:16:00 my book. I picked it. So typically, you know, I'm going to initiate the discussion here as we go
165. 00:16:04 through the outline, but feel free to jump in here wherever you want. So the first section,
166. 00:16:10 commit to curiosity. What is not explicit in that first section is explicit in the first chapter.
167. 00:16:17 Why goal setting is broken. I love that, obviously. She gave you a gigantic hug with chapter one.
168. 00:16:23 Yeah, it's true. Chapter two, escaping the tyranny of purpose. And then chapter three is a pack to
169. 00:16:28 turn doubts into experiments. So I like the right away, first chapter, addressing the elephant
170. 00:16:38 in the room, basically. Why goal setting is broken. And if I were to summarize this,
171. 00:16:45 it would be that when most people think of goal setting, they think of smart goals.
172. 00:16:50 And if you follow that format, it ends up being a very linear approach in her words,
173. 00:16:56 which is wildly out of sync with the way that how many of us live our lives. When you are using
174. 00:17:02 these linear goals, they often stimulate fear. They encourage toxic productivity. And they're
175. 00:17:07 based on competition and isolation. I think that last one maybe is a, you could argue is a little
176. 00:17:12 bit of a stretch, but the other two, I think are absolutely non-negotiable. They 100%
177. 00:17:18 push you down that path. I don't think it has to necessarily trigger
178. 00:17:25 competition and isolation. But I do think that is kind of a natural byproduct of goals. There's
179. 00:17:30 this scarcity mindset that comes along with it a lot of times. And it's because you're so focused
180. 00:17:35 on, I've got to get to this outcome that you kind of really don't care what else happens.
181. 00:17:39 And so it sort of forces you to do whatever is necessary in order to achieve the outcome.
182. 00:17:46 And I've fallen into this myself. This is kind of the reason why I don't like goals. Now in the past,
183. 00:17:54 I have kind of said, disconnect from the project based, you know, we're going to set a specific
184. 00:18:00 smart goal around this thing. And instead, how do we just develop a habit and learn to love the
185. 00:18:07 process? I do think that is generally speaking the right direction here. But the whole kind of
186. 00:18:14 approach with the, the pact is putting a time limit on that. It's, I'm going to do this for a
187. 00:18:20 little while. And then I'm going to take a step back and I'm going to look at the feedback that
188. 00:18:24 I've gotten. And I think that actually maybe is a little bit more approachable because you're
189. 00:18:29 not committing to this thing forever. It's kind of like I'm trying this out and I'm going to
190. 00:18:34 see what happens. But the, the desired effect, I think, is that we break free from this,
191. 00:18:45 this outcome oriented, smart goal approach. And then when we do that, we, we replace it with
192. 00:18:54 this curiosity. And that's where the experimental mindset comes in. So it doesn't mean that we're
193. 00:18:59 not ambitious. We're not trying to get things done. But we're also going to hold things lightly
194. 00:19:04 and we're going to see what comes from, from stuff as we play with it.
195. 00:19:09 Yeah. I think of this, her description of this and, you know, this first chapter, the second chapter,
196. 00:19:16 even into the third chapter, it kind of smushes together what I've heard you talk about with habits,
197. 00:19:21 right? And moving from goals to habits, or, you know, James Clear's atomic habits or BJ Fogg,
198. 00:19:27 you know, tiny habits, like what I've heard in all those different places talking about habits.
199. 00:19:31 And then themes. So life theme, yearly theme, right? Like it kind of takes those two ideas
200. 00:19:37 and it smushes them together. In my mind, like the theme can be too like, ethereal, right? Like,
201. 00:19:44 oh, I have this theme, but like, what does that mean? Like, I don't know what that, like,
202. 00:19:47 am I going to do anything about it? Or I'm just going to have the theme, right? Whereas the goal
203. 00:19:51 on the other side of the spectrum is like, Oh, if I don't achieve it, I failed. If I don't, you know,
204. 00:19:58 live up to it, I failed or whatever it is. And like that, I fall into that trap all the time
205. 00:20:02 where it takes this idea of habits, but it gives it more, you know, like I hate to use the word
206. 00:20:07 purpose because the second chapter is escape the tyranny of purpose, but it gives it more of a goal.
207. 00:20:11 It gives it more of an objective, if you will, right? Like, so my habits now have a goal,
208. 00:20:16 but they're, as you said, they're like time limited. So I can then reevaluate and I'm given the ability
209. 00:20:22 to, or I'm given the emphasis or the, what's the word I'm looking for, Mike? Like, the encouragement,
210. 00:20:29 right, to actually look at those, you know, in six weeks or in four weeks or in a week or, you know,
211. 00:20:34 100 essays or 100, whatever it is. Like, I really like the kind of smushing together. And I think
212. 00:20:40 she did a really, really good job making that very clear. Like, when I came out of this, I was like,
213. 00:20:45 oh, I clearly understand. Here's a question for you. Did you realize Pact was an acronym at first?
214. 00:20:55 Uh, yes. But I think, so that I think I heard about on her blog first. Like, I, I knew it was
215. 00:21:07 an acronym, but I did not know what it stood for. Okay. I like it, you know, purposeful, actionable,
216. 00:21:14 continuous, trackable. And that is very different than the smart goals. That trackable piece seems
217. 00:21:20 like it maybe is a little bit, a little bit contradictory, but it's really, it's not tracking
218. 00:21:26 progress towards the completion of a goal and the, you know, achieving an outcome. It's really,
219. 00:21:31 did I do the thing today? Yep. Yep. And the reason I ask you the question is because she
220. 00:21:36 actually doesn't write it in a way that you would know it's an acronym unless you pay attention to
221. 00:21:42 it. Right? Like, so this is, this is an interesting aspect of the way she writes, right? Which I
222. 00:21:47 actually like a lot. It was almost like there was an Easter egg in there. It was like, it took me,
223. 00:21:52 you know, until like a little bit later in the book, I was like, wait a minute, Pact, purposeful,
224. 00:21:55 actionable. I was like, oh, that, like she's, she wrote Pact because it's an acronym for the
225. 00:22:00 part, the points that she wants to bring up. And it just didn't, you know, she never called
226. 00:22:04 that out explicitly. So some people might think that's a flaw. I thought that was actually pretty,
227. 00:22:07 pretty cool. But then this gives like credence to, you know, ship 30 for 30, which you've done before,
228. 00:22:14 you know, the idea of some of these different, so there's one in the fitness world. It's basically
229. 00:22:20 all marketing, but it's called 75 hard, right? Where you do these things for 75 days and you set
230. 00:22:24 the specific, specific timeline on it. Like there's a bunch of these different things and it gives
231. 00:22:28 some of this idea of, okay, it's, it's purposeful, not a grand life purpose, but just like, I want
232. 00:22:34 to learn X, then it's, you know, oh, I have the resources to do this. So I can actually do it.
233. 00:22:40 It's repeatable. I can try and try and try and like get that iterative nature in it. And then I can
234. 00:22:44 track it, which I agree with you completely 100% that it's, it's yes, I did or no, I didn't. It's not,
235. 00:22:50 I achieved this level of success or, you know, didn't achieve this level of success or whatever.
236. 00:22:54 So I liked, I really liked that. She also calls out the fact that a Pact isn't a habit.
237. 00:23:00 It's not a New Year's revolution. It's not a performance metric. And it's not a resource
238. 00:23:03 intensive project. So I like that she gave us the counter of that because that's, you know,
239. 00:23:08 where my brain starts to go is like, oh, I'm trying to make, I'm trying to make this into a habit.
240. 00:23:12 No, no, no, no, a Pact is not that a Pact is not a habit. You know, it has a, it has a start and an
241. 00:23:17 is more contained than that. Yeah. One thing I picked up right after that, I wasn't familiar with this,
242. 00:23:26 this statistic before, but the fact that most New Year's resolutions are abandoned by January
243. 00:23:31 12th, and that's actually called Quitter's Day, which 12 days, that's, that's not a very long time
244. 00:23:38 for a resolution to, to last. The, the Pact thing, by the way, to come back to that, it's,
245. 00:23:46 it sets the tone for the other sections, obviously, the Act, React, Impact, but I don't think that there
246. 00:23:50 are the acronym basically just applies to this first section. So it was like, this was the thing
247. 00:23:57 that she had written about before that kind of sparked the idea. And then how far can I take this?
248. 00:24:02 And that's where the rest of the stuff comes from. I, I like the, the formula she has for a Pact,
249. 00:24:11 which is I will action for, and then trial period. Yep. So having the trial period,
250. 00:24:19 I feel like that makes it much less intimidating. It's a lot less scary. If you're going to commit
251. 00:24:26 to writing online for 30 days, that's different than I'm going to commit to writing online every
252. 00:24:31 day for the rest of my life. Yeah. Or just setting, or just setting up an open ended, like, I'm going
253. 00:24:35 to build a habit of writing every day. Exactly. And it's like, are you really like, probably not.
254. 00:24:41 So yeah, like, I like that a lot. Like, I like that it's more confined. Yeah, the other thing,
255. 00:24:47 which really stands out to me is chapter number two, escaping the tyranny of purpose.
256. 00:24:52 So this seems a little bit contradictory to a lot of the life theme stuff, right? Finding your
257. 00:24:58 purpose. Life theme is a single sentence mission statement. And I would argue that it's not, but
258. 00:25:06 that's only because having gone through it a bunch of times with a bunch of people,
259. 00:25:11 there's a couple important aspects of this that people often overlook. It's not written in stone.
260. 00:25:17 It's going to evolve and change. And then even if it stays the same, how you exercise that or live
261. 00:25:23 it out is going to change. And you basically use it in its form as long as it is useful.
262. 00:25:30 And then you give yourself permission to change it when it's not. And so she talks about with
263. 00:25:36 the tyranny of purpose, these cognitive scripts that we get stuck in, which I think is a really
264. 00:25:43 interesting concept. I hadn't heard it described this way before, but she mentions it. Cognitive
265. 00:25:49 scripts basically create a predictable mode where the outcomes are predefined. And there's
266. 00:25:54 three categories of cognitive scripts. There's the sequel where we follow our past, the crowd
267. 00:25:58 pleaser where we follow the crowd and the epic when we follow our passion. And again, the word
268. 00:26:03 passion, like every time I hear that, I want to, I want to argue about it because it's not really,
269. 00:26:09 I don't use it the same way that a lot of other people use it. For context, you know, my definition
270. 00:26:14 comes from Todd Henry, who I forget what book it was, but he defined passion as the root word is
271. 00:26:21 the Latin word petit literally means to suffer. So it's not, you know, do the thing that you love,
272. 00:26:26 but really the thing that's important to you, you want to see this thing come to be. So you're
273. 00:26:31 willing to go through some stuff in order to see that happen. You know, that's really what
274. 00:26:35 following your passion is. It's kind of the, the Venn diagram, you know, it's the over, over the
275. 00:26:42 middle ground of the things that are important and the things that suck. That's, that's really
276. 00:26:49 what passion is. And the big takeaway though, I think, is not to get stuck into one of these
277. 00:26:56 cognitive scripts. I think it's really, really easy to do. And just the way that she defined it,
278. 00:27:00 I feel like can help people identify that. And I think if you identify it, you've got a much
279. 00:27:05 better chance, obviously breaking free from some of that stuff. It's not automatic. And there are
280. 00:27:09 questions that she gives us that we can use to help avoid traps. But I think that's a really cool
281. 00:27:17 framing. And then there's an action item that comes from this chapter for me, which really isn't
282. 00:27:22 associated with what I was just talking about. But it's consider what's missing. And so what
283. 00:27:28 that means is when I am doing my reflection at the, the end of the day, and I'm jotting down these
284. 00:27:36 things, I'm kind of noticing the things that are going on in my life. I'm always asking myself,
285. 00:27:43 basically, is there something that should be here that isn't here? Kind of my interpretation of that.
286. 00:27:48 I don't have a formal process for that. I don't know what that's going to look like.
287. 00:27:51 She does actually have a formal process for a, a review template, which we'll talk about,
288. 00:27:56 I'm sure later. But yeah, I like the whole, the whole message of this first part, like observation,
289. 00:28:04 question, hypothesis, and being willing to try these things out. And the emphasis on thinking
290. 00:28:10 tiny, you know, what's the smallest version of the experiment that you can run? Very, very
291. 00:28:15 important in terms of creating that initial action, which you're going to need to follow
292. 00:28:21 through with the rest of what she's going to talk about in this book. I think the difference
293. 00:28:26 between the way she's talking about purpose and then something like you do in, in the life theme,
294. 00:28:33 right, is I think what you do in the life theme actually sits as like this bigger umbrella over
295. 00:28:38 top of running than these packed, like designing these tiny experiments and having this packed
296. 00:28:44 below it. So I think if you, if you do what she's describing in this book and you are completely
297. 00:28:49 aimless, you're like, you have like absolutely no direction at all. I think there is a chance
298. 00:28:56 you're going to sit there and you're just going to spin and spin and spin and spin. And the growth
299. 00:29:00 loops are be fine and you'll grow. But I think it's actually a little bit better, right? And I don't,
300. 00:29:06 I don't know how much she talked about this and not. So you can correct me where I'm wrong. But
301. 00:29:09 it's like, if we're like growing in a direction, you know, like, if we're growing in like a confined
302. 00:29:15 space or it's like, you know, I want to grow in relation to this following thing, well, I think
303. 00:29:20 that's where your, your stuff really, you know, adds value on top, on top of this. I think what
304. 00:29:26 she's trying to talk about is the fact that it's like, I'm going to be a doctor, right? Like my
305. 00:29:31 purpose is to be a doctor. Well, why? Okay, and then like you get like 30 years later and you're like,
306. 00:29:37 my purpose is to be a doctor. And it's like, is it really still to be a doctor? Or is there this
307. 00:29:41 other thing that you've been really, really passionate? Sorry for the word, but it's like,
308. 00:29:45 is this other thing that you really, really want to dive into? And you're just afraid to do it,
309. 00:29:48 right? That you're trying to do the crowd pleaser, you're trying to, you know, so it's like, I really
310. 00:29:53 like the way she kind of, I guess, here's, here's the way I'll say it. It's easy to see me doing
311. 00:30:00 this or ways that I've done this or me doing this in the future. So like, like, I like that she
312. 00:30:09 almost directly calls you out and is like, Hey, are you doing this? Like, if you're doing this,
313. 00:30:13 you're not, you know, I don't think you're you're living in the right way from a purpose standpoint.
314. 00:30:18 Why don't you think about it from this other perspective? And then the other perspective in
315. 00:30:22 chapter three, like, I haven't heard a lot of people try to pitch pitch it and they definitely
316. 00:30:26 haven't pitched it in the way she has. So she's unique in her space the way she does. So let me
317. 00:30:31 let's we may as well go out and define the four aspects of the tiny experiment because she does
318. 00:30:35 that in chapter three. So unlearn your cognitive script, whatever's blocking you, collect data
319. 00:30:40 on your life, brainstorm a potential thing to test and then make the pact. So we went straight to
320. 00:30:44 the pact, we went to step four of that, but there are actually three steps before that. So unlearn,
321. 00:30:49 collect data, figure out what you're going to do, and then make a pact. So I get to my first action
322. 00:30:55 item right here, right where I'm trying to do the unlearning collect part right now, to figure out
323. 00:31:02 what I want to test and what I want to be my pact. And what I'm struggling with right now is there's
324. 00:31:09 there's a professional one and a personal one. And I don't want to do them at the same time.
325. 00:31:15 Like I just think that's going to be too much to do. So I'm fig I'm figuring out, do I do the
326. 00:31:20 professional one or do I do the personal one? And I haven't I haven't made a decision yet. But what
327. 00:31:25 I'll tell you is I have to make a decision by next Friday, because there's a whole there's another
328. 00:31:29 thing that's kind of coming at the same time. And I want these two things to overlap with each
329. 00:31:33 other. So by next Friday, I'll have made a decision. I just don't know what it's going to be.
330. 00:31:36 All right. Well, we'll have to follow up on that for sure. You will. You will.
331. 00:31:42 One other thing I want to mention about the packs is that it focuses on outputs rather than
332. 00:31:47 outcomes, which sounds the how profound that statement is can be lost just by just by hearing it.
333. 00:31:58 But the the output really that's what action are you taking in terms of conducting the experiment.
334. 00:32:04 So actually the did I do the thing today? Yes or no, that's not exactly what trackable means.
335. 00:32:12 She uses the example in one of her blog posts on this of like a heat map style thing for words
336. 00:32:19 written. If you seem like those things on GitHub, I actually added one of these to my obsidian
337. 00:32:25 daily note recently using a plugin called keep the rhythm and basically you tell it don't look
338. 00:32:30 at my daily notes folder, but everything else that I write an obsidian counts, you know,
339. 00:32:34 show me the number of words that I wrote today. You can kind of define the ranges and based on
340. 00:32:38 the number of words that you wrote, the green gets lighter, brighter, whatever. So you can kind of
341. 00:32:44 see a heat map of of what you were able to do. And she's got one in that blog post of her writing
342. 00:32:50 during the those hundred hundred days, I think. So it's it's not necessarily binary, but it is
343. 00:32:59 important to focus on. Did I do the did I do what I could do? And it's it's not just semantic,
344. 00:33:08 but it's important that you disconnect from the outcome. So the outcome isn't did I publish the
345. 00:33:14 blog post? Yes, or no, that's kind of getting back into the smart goals. Right. And in the in
346. 00:33:21 the blog post, which I'll try to dig up for the the show notes. There's so many of them though,
347. 00:33:26 so I don't know if it's going to be the exact same one that I initially found. But I remember
348. 00:33:30 reading that and she had some examples there of like learning to code. And the question that she
349. 00:33:37 kind of asked was at what point do you consider yourself having gone from not learning to code
350. 00:33:44 to being able to code? Yeah, there's no binary state there. So looking for the point where that
351. 00:33:51 is completed is kind of pointless. It's really, am I going to show up in code for however many
352. 00:33:58 days in a row? And it's kind of like you're focused on constant progress as opposed to
353. 00:34:05 I've moved this far towards this destination that I have arbitrarily identified as this is what I
354. 00:34:12 got to get to. Yeah, so this is a good place where I told you like I felt like the spotlight was put
355. 00:34:17 right on me. We've talked about the we've talked about the Children's STEM book before. And it's like
356. 00:34:22 I was trying to the goal or the end of that was have an agent have a contract. Right? Like that
357. 00:34:31 was the thing. So therefore I've told you before like I lost steam on that because that wasn't
358. 00:34:35 happening. My goal wasn't to get better at being a children's book writer. You know, which would
359. 00:34:42 have been a much better way to do it. Or my goal wasn't to write a page of a children's book every
360. 00:34:47 day, you know, for 50 days. It was get an agent and get published, which I don't think that's a
361. 00:34:54 really good metric anymore. Right? Like that's that's a bad if I do this practice, you know,
362. 00:35:00 there's a chance it'll happen. There's a chance it also won't happen. But I'll learn a ton through
363. 00:35:04 that through that process. So it's like this is where I felt like, you know, one of those
364. 00:35:08 spotlights was put right on me and I was like, Oh, dad on it. Like I messed up, you know, before
365. 00:35:12 like I did not do this the way she's describing. And I only say I messed up not that like her
366. 00:35:18 her idea is like the end, I'll be all in, you know, 100% right. But it just resonates so well
367. 00:35:23 that it's like, Oh, this would have been a much better approach. Write a page or two every day
368. 00:35:28 and just try to get better at the craft of writing children's books. And then eventually
369. 00:35:33 see how the author thing comes along. Yep, totally agree. Well, we should probably go on to the next
370. 00:35:40 section or this is going to be a three hour episode. We should. I thought the same thing. I was like,
371. 00:35:44 Should I even make the last comment that I just made? I was like, or should we just move on? No,
372. 00:35:47 no, that's a great, great, great point. All right. But the next section, section two
373. 00:35:54 is act. So practice mindful productivity. And this is basically a lot of the productivity advice
374. 00:36:00 that has been like catnip to me over the years starts it off with the discussion of a calendar
375. 00:36:11 called your life in weeks. Have you seen this calendar before? I have seen this calendar. Yes,
376. 00:36:16 I have. Okay, so this is a basically takes a 80 year average lifespan and lays it all out on a
377. 00:36:26 calendar. And the intention is that you fill in the boxes for however old you are and you see the
378. 00:36:33 portion of your life that has passed a related concept to this is a mental mori, which I'm actually
379. 00:36:42 a big fan of. I've got a code snippet in my daily note and obsidian, which is mental mori. And it
380. 00:36:49 shows how much of my my life has passed based on the 80 year lifespan. And some people will hear
381. 00:36:55 that. And they'll think that is really depressing. Why would you think think about things in that
382. 00:37:00 that way? For me, it does a couple of things. Number one, it places the emphasis on the fact that
383. 00:37:06 you're not going to live forever and the world's going to exist without you kind of like Oliver
384. 00:37:10 Berkman's cosmic insignificance theory. And for me, that's helpful because I tend to put the
385. 00:37:16 way of the world on my shoulders like, well, this is going to happen. I got to do it. It's like,
386. 00:37:19 you don't have to do it all. Yeah, just do what you can do. The other thing is it kind of
387. 00:37:26 encourages me to make the most of the time that I've got left. So essentially, like, you don't have
388. 00:37:33 a data waste. And that again, you know, this is a fine line between, well, I got to be super,
389. 00:37:39 super productive today, then it's really just like show up and do the best that you can with
390. 00:37:45 what you've been entrusted with. So that's really cool. You know, that's from chapter four, a deeper
391. 00:37:51 sense of time. And she talks about mindful productivity here being, you know, managing your
392. 00:37:56 physical resources, your cognitive resources, your emotional resources. Chapter five is
393. 00:38:01 procrastination is not the enemy. There's a whole discussion we could have there. Chapter six is
394. 00:38:05 the power of intentional and perfection. You know, I can think of books that have been written on
395. 00:38:10 each of these different topics. So I'm not sure how it all really ties together. And I'm happy
396. 00:38:18 to talk about whatever you want. The one thing I really want to hit on, though, is probably the
397. 00:38:22 two Greek words for time from chapter four. Okay, before we move too far away from your life and
398. 00:38:27 weeks thing, I think the second version of this, because she actually puts two versions of this in
399. 00:38:33 the book, she puts the one that Berkman puts in, which is basically like all the weeks are evenly
400. 00:38:39 spaced or they're the same size. And then she puts the one that she actually thinks represents,
401. 00:38:43 you know, the real idea where some weeks are really short, some weeks are really long. And
402. 00:38:48 all I can say is like, if you've never had a child, like, oh my gosh, right? Like, because there are
403. 00:38:53 certain times when you're like, this week, we'll never end. Oh my gosh, I just need the baby to
404. 00:38:59 sleep. Like, please sleep, baby. Like, that's all I want you to do. And that week feels like it takes
405. 00:39:03 seven weeks. And then, you know, like, they're two years old and you're like, Oh my gosh, like,
406. 00:39:08 what just happened? Like, how did how did this go? So it's like, I really liked her second version
407. 00:39:11 of that because it just it resonated with me. It resonated with me a lot. So now we can go,
408. 00:39:17 because I didn't want to move too far away from that. So now we can go to the two different
409. 00:39:20 versions of time or it was time, wasn't it? Yeah. So are you familiar with these the
410. 00:39:26 kronos and the kyros? I've heard of them before, but not the way she described them. So this was good
411. 00:39:31 for me. Okay. Yeah. So kronos is the Greek word, which essentially means a quantity of time.
412. 00:39:39 And when you think about time management, this is really how most people approach it. It's like,
413. 00:39:44 how do I get more efficient? How do I preserve the time that's available to me? But then kyros is
414. 00:39:49 really the quality of time. Now my my wife is a former wedding photographer. And her business was
415. 00:39:56 called the art of kyros. So literally, like the writer opportune moment, that's another way to
416. 00:40:00 define it. So I guess I've got a little bit of a background here with with that term. But I feel
417. 00:40:06 like Andler does a good job of describing this and the big takeaway is that not all moments are
418. 00:40:10 created equal. So the the shift that needs to happen here is we need to shift from what we do
419. 00:40:17 with our time to how we experience each moment. And that's a general idea that's been communicated
420. 00:40:24 probably 1000 different ways in the books that we've read so far about you got to be in the
421. 00:40:28 moment you got to be mindful. But there's something about the way that she described it,
422. 00:40:32 where it's like, Oh, yeah, that makes sense. I'm gonna do that. It does. I don't know if it's,
423. 00:40:37 you know, just she's an incredibly intelligent person. Or if the neuroscience side of it came
424. 00:40:44 through or whatever it was, but like it just like there's so many times in this book, I was like,
425. 00:40:47 Oh, that just makes a lot of sense. Like this is this is like thinking about your life and or
426. 00:40:52 productivity or whatever you want to call it. And I was like, and that just makes like a ton of a
427. 00:40:55 ton of sense the way you described that. And by the way, I've been doing it the way you told me
428. 00:41:00 isn't the ideal way for a really long time now. Yeah. Yeah. And then that's kind of like the
429. 00:41:07 mindful productivity piece being where you're managing these different things because it's not
430. 00:41:11 just managing your time. That's kind of like the low level, you can have the time to do something.
431. 00:41:14 But if you don't have the energy, or you don't have the attention required to do the thing because
432. 00:41:20 you're just spent at the end of the day, you know, it's not going to happen. Well, and this is where you,
433. 00:41:26 you know, David, like when you're when you're talking about it's more than just cranking widgets,
434. 00:41:29 right? Like, so that you're getting at Kairus, right? Like that's 100% what you're doing is you're
435. 00:41:33 saying if we're going to use our time, let's use it wisely, let's use it for quality activities.
436. 00:41:39 And then, you know, you think about Newport, and you think about like minimalism and block scheduling,
437. 00:41:44 and you think about like all these other other tools, they all serve to fill this. How do I make
438. 00:41:50 the time that I'm going to commit to something higher quality? Like, I'm just trying to make it
439. 00:41:55 higher quality. So, like, your point is really, really well made. If you're thinking about it
440. 00:42:00 from a like, how do I fill out the hours on a day, like a time sheet kind of a thing, you're
441. 00:42:03 thinking about it all the wrong way, you got to think about it from how do I do the most valuable
442. 00:42:08 items during my day? And, you know, and I do I even know what those valuable items are, you know,
443. 00:42:14 like, and do I learn from them? The other thing that I think is a mistake that people make when it
444. 00:42:19 comes to like that low level time management is they assume that if they've got the time,
445. 00:42:24 then they're going to be able to follow through. So, they kind of disregard the fact that as Ann
446. 00:42:29 Laura says, you can't always be at your best. You're going to have these natural energy rhythms
447. 00:42:36 and learning to navigate those, I think is an important part of this. Now, the next chapter
448. 00:42:41 is sort of a book into this because when you don't manage your time as well as you think you should,
449. 00:42:48 you don't get all the things done that you thought you should have because you haven't taken into
450. 00:42:52 consideration. All the other factors besides, is there something on the calendar right now,
451. 00:42:58 is that you tend to procrastinate and procrastination, she says, has two arrows. The first one is what
452. 00:43:05 we do instead, the actual procrastination. And then the second one is our emotional response to it.
453. 00:43:10 And that's the one that hurts the most. Yes, it absolutely does. We beat ourselves up about the
454. 00:43:15 fact that we were procrastinating instead of doing the thing and what the heck is my problem? And
455. 00:43:19 she actually says procrastination is not a moral failure, it is a listening failure. I like this
456. 00:43:25 chapter and I like the framing of procrastination because she defines it as simply not doing what
457. 00:43:30 we think we should be doing. And then, you know, why do we not do the thing that we think we should
458. 00:43:36 be doing? There's questions that we should be asking and there's sources or reasons for this
459. 00:43:40 procrastination. It could be your head, it could be your heart, it could be your hands. So, you know,
460. 00:43:44 is the task appropriate? Is the task exciting? Is the task doable? There's solutions associated
461. 00:43:50 with each one of these, we can redefine the strategy, we can redesign the experience,
462. 00:43:54 we can request request training or support. And this kind of, you know, gets into some of the
463. 00:43:59 feel good productivity by Ali Abdahl territory, which when you just hear that title, you're kind
464. 00:44:05 of, you kind of feel like, well, what would this look like if it were fun? That's that's stupid. He
465. 00:44:09 obviously doesn't work in an office like I do. But the book is really good. You know, spoiler alert,
466. 00:44:14 it was one of my top eight books from 2024 with that video that I did. I think it's, I think there's
467. 00:44:20 a lot of things in there. And this is sort of getting, it's complimentary to that idea, I think,
468. 00:44:26 and it's really just figuring out, you know, what is the thing that is causing me the resistance?
469. 00:44:32 What is adding the friction right here where I'm not following through with this thing that I have
470. 00:44:37 confessed is important and I should be doing, you know, finding out why and so that I can
471. 00:44:43 fix the system. And that's a totally different approach than, well, I just got to, you know,
472. 00:44:48 make the plan and then I do my best to stick to the plan. And if I don't stick to the plan,
473. 00:44:52 then I'll beat myself up so that next time, you know, maybe I'll stick to the plan like that
474. 00:44:56 that sounds stupid, but that's what we do. Yeah. Yeah, like, this section, this procrastination
475. 00:45:03 section, um, was was so spot on in terms of, I've been feeling this, I don't know for the last,
476. 00:45:10 you know, year two or whatever it is, like, there are certain things where I'm like,
477. 00:45:13 I'm going to do this. I know I'm going to do this. I'm without a doubt going to do this. And I don't
478. 00:45:17 do it. And I could never like put my finger on why I wasn't doing it. Like, I just knew that there
479. 00:45:22 were reasons why I was procrastinating on a thing. And this almost gives you like a license to then
480. 00:45:28 go meta on that, right? And go, hold on. You've said you're going to do this for the last four weeks.
481. 00:45:34 You haven't done a thing on it. Why? Like, what is the reason why you're not doing that?
482. 00:45:40 Here, it might be in these three buckets. But then the other thing that I loved about this
483. 00:45:44 section was what she says, kind of towards the end of the chapter, the activities we turn to when
484. 00:45:48 procrastinating are expressions of our gender, our genuine interest. And I was like, Oh, dang,
485. 00:45:54 right? Like, okay, so I'm not doing the thing. So what am I doing? I'm probably distracting myself
486. 00:46:00 by doing some other thing. Yeah, that's, that's really what I want to do. Like, those are the
487. 00:46:04 things I really am like passionate or interested in. And I don't think that's true all the time,
488. 00:46:08 because you might like be doing something just to pass the time or just to avoid that. But I think
489. 00:46:13 there's a lot of truth in that in that second statement that like, it might just be something
490. 00:46:18 that you're more passionate about or is rising to a level that your other thing isn't. And then
491. 00:46:24 go back and critically analyze. Why are you doing that? Like, why are you procrastinating? And this
492. 00:46:30 is, I think, especially true for people who let's just say, I'm trying to figure out how to word
493. 00:46:36 this and not sound terrible. People who actually like achieve in life, right? Like, so people who
494. 00:46:42 aren't just chronic procrastinators, right? Like, so you've had some level of success in some area
495. 00:46:46 of your life. So it's not a matter of like, you're just this chronic procrastination personality.
496. 00:46:50 Like, there are those people, the people who it's like, what do they do? I procrastinate for a living.
497. 00:46:54 Like, that's, that's what I do. Like, I don't do, you know, but like for the people who don't,
498. 00:46:59 but then you're finding these areas where you procrastinate and you're like, wait, why?
499. 00:47:02 I don't procrastinate in this other area, but I'm really struggling in this one area.
500. 00:47:07 It gives you a framework to look at and say, like, why? Oh, is it rational? Is it
501. 00:47:10 affectional? Is it practical? And I liked, like, I thought that was very helpful to me, personally.
502. 00:47:17 Yeah, I love the description of this. I also love the description of intentional and perfection in,
503. 00:47:23 in chapter six. I guess framed a different way. This is sort of like intentional imbalance,
504. 00:47:29 which is a key tenant of my personal retreat stuff. It's like you're in focus on one area for a
505. 00:47:35 little while and then you're going to, you're going to get some feedback and then, you know,
506. 00:47:39 you'll make some adjustments. You'll focus on a different area for a little while,
507. 00:47:43 but you're not going to try to like touch everything all the time. You can't split your focus that
508. 00:47:48 many ways. So you got to, you got to choose where you're going to focus. But the singular
509. 00:47:54 phrase from this, which I will never forget, is that intentional imperfection, which is
510. 00:47:59 basically just us choosing to focus on one area and bolster it to get it better while
511. 00:48:05 neglecting another area just for a little while is the adult version of you have to put down the
512. 00:48:11 ducky if you want to play the saxophone. So good. Yeah, I, this, this got me to when she was talking
513. 00:48:21 about Shonda Rhimes. So Shonda Rhimes is a show writer, made a bunch of really, really popular TV
514. 00:48:27 shows. And basically the quote that she, she brings in from Shonda Rhimes is, if I'm excelling at one
515. 00:48:34 thing, something else is falling off and that's completely okay. And the part of that that like I
516. 00:48:38 really like is that's completely okay. Because this gets at it really hits at that like work-life
517. 00:48:44 balance thing, right? Where you and I've talked about this before, like there is no such thing
518. 00:48:48 as work-life balance, right? Like you know, like that's, that's a completely ridiculous idea.
519. 00:48:53 There are ebbs and flows in where, in what gets more of my attention at any given time.
520. 00:48:59 So I need to acknowledge that that I only have a certain amount of cognitive attention, emotional
521. 00:49:05 attention, whatever it might be. And that's going to ebb and flow throughout my life. And really what
522. 00:49:11 I think makes sense to look at is I look at it on the balance of the year, or I look at it on the
523. 00:49:16 balance of the quarter, or you know, whatever your time period is and say, all right, so this past
524. 00:49:21 quarter, I gave a ton of attention to, to my work, like my job. Is that okay? Well, yeah, it was. I had
525. 00:49:28 a bunch of proposals do, you know, this thing was really, really difficult, whatever it might be.
526. 00:49:32 Okay, cool. For the next quarter, I'm not going to do that. Like I neglected this one area. I got,
527. 00:49:36 I got to shift that around. And like, not trying, because what my gut reaction is, is my gut reaction
528. 00:49:42 is to try to say like, I'm going to give everything the attention it deserves always. And I'm never
529. 00:49:48 going to mess that up. And I'm going to, and it's like, no, because you don't have 300% attention,
530. 00:49:53 yeah, to where you can actually do that. So stop, stop setting up that, that, you know, goalpost
531. 00:49:59 you'll never achieve or that, you know, that, that bar you'll never hit. Exactly. Ready to go to part
532. 00:50:05 three. Let's do it. All right, because I really want to talk about part three. Part three is react,
533. 00:50:12 collaborate with uncertainty. And again, three chapters, I'll just name these pretty quick. So
534. 00:50:18 chapter seven is creating growth loops, chapter eight, the secret to better decisions, chapter nine,
535. 00:50:22 how to dance with disruption. But the big thing that stood out to me from this section is that
536. 00:50:29 creating growth loops. So first of all, growth loops, I think is a great visual, like that definition
537. 00:50:36 is not one that I had heard before, or that term is not one that I'd heard used to describe this,
538. 00:50:41 like trial and error, and you're learning from the feedback. But that makes so much sense. And she's
539. 00:50:46 got this visual where trial and error creates a circle and growth is in the middle. So you kind of
540. 00:50:50 have to have quantity that produces the quality, the trial and error are inseparable. She says that
541. 00:50:57 you don't go in circles, you grow in circles. Kind of cutesy way to say it. But I think it's true.
542. 00:51:04 However, there is a specific exercise in here that I think is pretty genius. And that is the plus
543. 00:51:10 minus next. And this is basically you take a sheet of paper and you make three columns plus
544. 00:51:17 minus a next. And then these are positive observations, negative observations, and what's next.
545. 00:51:23 And talks about how this is this works because it's fast, it's flexible, and it's future focused.
546. 00:51:28 I think she hits me on the head with that. I think it's a pretty brilliant approach to kind of like
547. 00:51:34 a weekly review. And weekly review has always been something that was difficult for me to do.
548. 00:51:40 I now have a weekly note inside of obsidian, which is primarily used for planning,
549. 00:51:45 because I use it to identify this is the stuff that I big things I want to get done this week.
550. 00:51:50 I paint success. Here's the one sentence definition of what this week is successful. If this, you know,
551. 00:51:56 this happens. But I don't have a current way of review it like a formal process for my weekly
552. 00:52:06 review. It's really just looking back at that note. How do I feel like I did? So plus minus next,
553. 00:52:12 I think is really an interesting approach. And I'm going to try this. So this is my an action item.
554. 00:52:18 Now I've already taken action on it. Hold on. So so the non technology people would get out
555. 00:52:25 their piece of paper. Yeah. And they would draw this table that she draws and have a plus and
556. 00:52:29 minus next. Yep. Mike, you didn't do this. I did not. You sent me a video. Tell me what you did.
557. 00:52:34 Yeah. So here's the thing. I don't want to sit down at the end of the week and make a list of
558. 00:52:41 things in each one of these columns that I know right now is too much friction. And I will just
559. 00:52:48 not do it. Or I'll just put some really lame stuff on there. And I'm not going to get much out of it.
560. 00:52:53 Okay. When I really feel strongly about something is in the moment. So I want a way
561. 00:53:01 to capture this. And I'm not always going to have that piece of paper with me. So like I said,
562. 00:53:07 there's this periodic note stuff that's built into obsidian. I've already got a weekly note.
563. 00:53:12 So what I did is I created a section in that that weekly note where it's a level two header
564. 00:53:20 and it says review. And then underneath that are level three headers for plus minus and next.
565. 00:53:26 Then I used I created a shortcut, which pops up a button basically. So it's like a review shortcut.
566. 00:53:32 And then it'll ask you which category do you want plus minus or next. You tap on the category
567. 00:53:39 that you want and then it asks for the feedback. So you type in your one sentence thing. It turns
568. 00:53:44 it into a bullet and it sticks it on a new line underneath that third level header. So there's
569. 00:53:50 basically like three branches of this depending on which list item I choose at the beginning.
570. 00:53:57 And this I shared with you because I knew when I saw this job to the sound as an action item,
571. 00:54:03 like there's no way this is going to be successful unless I have a mechanism to capture this stuff
572. 00:54:08 in the moment. Let me see how difficult this would be to create this. So 15 minutes later,
573. 00:54:14 I had the shortcut. Not share the video with you. I was going to ask you how long did it take you to
574. 00:54:19 make it. My next question is, did you record the video yet for practical PKM? And then my third
575. 00:54:26 question is why haven't you recorded the video yet? So you don't have to answer any of those
576. 00:54:31 questions, but there you go. I think that would be a video that everybody would eat up. So yeah,
577. 00:54:36 I'm going to make a YouTube video on this and I'll make the shortcut available with the starter vault
578. 00:54:43 when it's when I actually get to that point. I'm working on a different video currently,
579. 00:54:48 which is going to have another resource, which is going to get added to the starter vault. So
580. 00:54:52 it's it's going to be coming. It's not coming probably by the time this is out yet. If it is out,
581. 00:54:58 I will add the link in the the show notes. But otherwise, yeah, I don't think it's it's going to be
582. 00:55:06 available yet. And you know, I really wasn't planning on saying like I built this this thing
583. 00:55:12 necessarily. I just wanted to share with you. Like I'm taking this action item seriously. I know
584. 00:55:17 this is like a prerequisite to the actual action I don't want to be sharing. So but yeah, I now
585. 00:55:23 having used it, I think it's pretty cool. And I think that other people will benefit from it. So I
586. 00:55:28 do intend to share the shortcut when once I have a chance to make that video. Well, in my goal
587. 00:55:33 wasn't the social pressure. You might go was like, I looked at this thing and went, Oh my gosh,
588. 00:55:37 that's genius. Like that is absolutely the way you should do this because it just eases the the
589. 00:55:44 burden of entering it or remembering to write down what you thought you were going to write down.
590. 00:55:48 Like it's just so smooth. It's so I will say the thing that makes this work is an application
591. 00:55:55 called actions for obsidian, where you can insert things in not just a specific note based on the
592. 00:56:04 note title, but it ties into like the periodic note stuff. So you can have it added to a weekly
593. 00:56:10 note, for example. And then once, you know, once I had that, I'm like, I know I can make the rest
594. 00:56:15 of it work. It's just going to be some trial and error till I I figure it out and I figured it out.
595. 00:56:23 Nice. All right. Where are we at? So we did growth loops. We did plus minus next. So here,
596. 00:56:31 here was one of the other things I got out of this react section is she throws out these ideas
597. 00:56:37 that we have three options at the end. So we've got persist, we've got pause and we've got pivot.
598. 00:56:43 And I like that, you know, like again, I say again, I think we've talked about this. None of this
599. 00:56:49 is really new. But the way she packaged it in the order in the flow, like the logical flow with
600. 00:56:54 but she packaged it is really, really well done in terms of like, okay, I do this loop. What's my
601. 00:56:59 off ramp? Well, my off ramp is I just I just go, okay, I'm done. I learned from that, I acknowledge
602. 00:57:05 it. I think it's either in this section or later, she talks about doing a postmortem on it,
603. 00:57:10 where it's like you actually figure out you reflect on the learning that you got from it. And you're
604. 00:57:14 done, like you just you call it a day and you pause that that pact. Or I say, I didn't learn what I
605. 00:57:20 wanted to learn. I'm going to extend this another 10 days. And I'm going to see if I can, I can get
606. 00:57:24 to what I want to get to. Then the last one will be, you know, you actually tweak and you you change
607. 00:57:29 the pact a little bit, keep doing it, but you you change that that pact a little bit. So I thought
608. 00:57:33 this was a really good way to like say, okay, what do I do when I'm inside of this growth loop moving
609. 00:57:40 forward? This ties into my nerd engineering world, because this is what we do in the engineering
610. 00:57:47 design process. This is what we do in the continuous improvement process. Like we 100% do these things.
611. 00:57:55 We just use different words for them. And then they're like more or less engineering. Like, so
612. 00:58:01 like this, maybe I guess I didn't think about that until right now. Maybe that's why this
613. 00:58:04 resonates with me so much is because she's just doing personal continuous improvement.
614. 00:58:10 Like this 100% what she's doing. And now I was like, oh, that actually is really cool.
615. 00:58:15 Yeah, I agree. I really like the approach here. I think the main point she's making with those
616. 00:58:22 three options is that you don't necessarily have to automatically just go chase the next big goal,
617. 00:58:29 which is sort of the default. At least for for people who are driven individuals like like myself,
618. 00:58:38 it's like you achieve a goal. There's this vacuum. What do you do? You fill it with a bigger goal.
619. 00:58:43 Bigger goal. That is not necessarily the right way to do it. I don't think there's a whole lot of
620. 00:58:48 anyone hit on from chapter nine, but it's sort of getting into the the stuff behind why that is,
621. 00:58:56 you know, and when things don't go exactly according to plan, how do you deal with that disruption?
622. 00:59:02 And she mentioned specifically that it's not, you know, the emotions that we feel, but it's how
623. 00:59:10 we interpret those emotions that are the thing that causes suffering, which is kind of interesting.
624. 00:59:15 So, you know, why am I feeling this way? And, you know, we kind of just label things as good or bad.
625. 00:59:24 And I think she would encourage us to to dig a little bit deeper. You know, what am I actually
626. 00:59:28 feeling right now? And then air on the side of acceptance rather than control some pretty profound
627. 00:59:35 profound stuff in there, but it's it's not, you know, this is the action item associated with this
628. 00:59:40 necessarily. I this was more, like you said, background, the idea of active acceptance. I had
629. 00:59:46 not heard of that, but I like that like that seems like a good tangible way to process these
630. 00:59:52 things that, you know, okay, when it goes wrong, or when it doesn't go the way you thought it was
631. 00:59:56 going to accept that, acknowledge it, learn from it, and then boom, move on. So, you know, this is a
632. 01:00:02 concept that you you get in the startup world, right? Like, so the entrepreneurial startup world,
633. 01:00:07 where it's like, fail forward fast. So it's like, if we're gonna fail, we're gonna fail, and we're
634. 01:00:11 gonna learn and fail forward, and we're gonna try to do that as quickly as possible, because then
635. 01:00:15 we don't waste as many resources. So this active acceptance tied me into this idea of fail forward
636. 01:00:19 fast. So it resonated, but at the same time, chapter nine wasn't, you know, there wasn't a lot of
637. 01:00:28 stuff I was gonna take away from that one either. All right, cool. Let's go on to the last section,
638. 01:00:33 then, which is section four impact grow with the world. And the first part here, chapter 10,
639. 01:00:44 how to unlock social flow hits on the community stuff. So I definitely want to unpack that a little
640. 01:00:49 bit. Chapter 11 is learning in public. Chapter 12 is life beyond legacy. But the whole idea and
641. 01:00:55 emphasis on community here, I think is kind of interesting. Now, I've been thinking about community
642. 01:01:03 for a while. And I think I've got a different perspective on this a little bit than what
643. 01:01:12 she's coming at this from, not based on the content of the book, just based off of my experience in
644. 01:01:18 her community. Okay, so her community is, I think it's like 50 bucks a year. And I'm involved in that
645. 01:01:28 community. I'm also involved in some other communities that are much more expensive than that. And I
646. 01:01:32 can tell you there's a difference in the interactions that happen in the $50 per year community versus
647. 01:01:38 the $2,000 per year communities. And that's kind of to be expected. And I don't think one is necessarily
648. 01:01:46 right or wrong, which is why, you know, going all the way back to the beginning, one of my actions,
649. 01:01:50 I kind of want to try both. I'm going to experiment, right? I'm going to offer a version of this,
650. 01:01:56 which makes it easy for people to try it. I'm not on the hook for a whole bunch of stuff.
651. 01:02:02 So if it doesn't work, you know, we can figure something else out, but I'm not, you know, committing
652. 01:02:07 to doing live calls for people who paid me 50 bucks once. And only, you know, a handful of
653. 01:02:12 people do that. We can just kind of kind of try this out. But she talks about something
654. 01:02:17 specifically with community, which I think kind of tap into this larger need for being a part of
655. 01:02:22 a community. And that's why I want to offer something like that in the PKM space. It's like,
656. 01:02:27 okay, so you want to talk about this sort of stuff. Where do you go? You go to forums,
657. 01:02:31 you go to discord. I don't like either of those places.
658. 01:02:35 Me either. I agree with you me either. So why don't I try to build a place that's actually
659. 01:02:39 cool and can kind of build on the things that she's hitting on here, you know, where it's something
660. 01:02:47 where you kind of are committing to learning, growing together. Like, that would be pretty cool.
661. 01:02:54 So I think, you know, there's not one right approach to this. I think her community is actually
662. 01:03:02 pretty neat. But it's also not the type of place where I find myself hanging out a ton.
663. 01:03:08 So kind of ask myself, like, well, why is that? You know, and the things that she really hits on
664. 01:03:14 here that I want to figure out how to incorporate into my own community and the different levels
665. 01:03:19 of that, like how it actually works. There's this pooling effect she talks about where a community
666. 01:03:24 gives you access to a collective set of knowledge skills and assets that far exceeds your own.
667. 01:03:28 I feel like with PKM and obsidian, you know, a forum based solution where people aren't going
668. 01:03:32 to yell at you because you formatted your post wrong or whatever is like, I can see that being
669. 01:03:37 a great way to accomplish that goal. There's three levels of community engagement, the apprentice,
670. 01:03:42 the artisan, and the architect. I feel like with that, you know, if you're going to follow those
671. 01:03:48 different levels, you're going to naturally kind of look for what is next. And so offering
672. 01:03:55 another level for people to go to makes a lot of sense. But the big thing here, and this is the
673. 01:04:01 thing that drives me nuts about a lot of the stuff that I see online. She mentions a curiosity circle.
674. 01:04:07 Community center out a genuine connection and pure learning. You know, that's the part that you
675. 01:04:12 don't get in a forum or in discord. That's the type of, you know, those are places where people go
676. 01:04:18 because they want a prescriptive answer to a specific question. And just by asking the question
677. 01:04:25 in a way that they're not going to get yelled at at those forums, they're dampening the curiosity.
678. 01:04:32 It's like, I don't even know what the other options are, but I'm not going to explore them
679. 01:04:35 because someone's going to yell at me if I, if I do. I don't want to take us too far down a
680. 01:04:42 down a rabbit hole here, but this is in my mind one of the, one of the benefits of AI,
681. 01:04:46 right? Like in LLMs, right? So it was one of the benefits LLMs is I can engage with those forums
682. 01:04:51 without having to risk that. So I can still be curious, but I'm being curious with the LLM,
683. 01:04:58 you know, and like actually asking my questions and interacting with it that way.
684. 01:05:02 And I'm not worried about the fact that it's like, Hey, you know, you capitalized the first four
685. 01:05:07 letters of that word accidentally, you know, like so, I mean, it would be facetious. But, but like,
686. 01:05:12 no, your point, your point is incredibly, incredibly well made. I do have a question for you. And if
687. 01:05:17 I take us too far, let me know what she's describing sounds a lot like mastermind groups.
688. 01:05:24 It could be. I don't think it has to be. I think that is a very specific form of community,
689. 01:05:31 which allows you to go a lot deeper than some of the, some of the more obvious ones. But I think
690. 01:05:40 the whole idea of community is going to become a very big deal. I was at the newsletter marketing
691. 01:05:47 summit talked about that in the last episode. And there was a Q&A session with Sam Parr from
692. 01:05:55 the hustle and one other person. And they made a throwaway comment about how, you know, everyone
693. 01:06:00 who's there is there to talk about newsletters. Right. So there's independent creators. And then
694. 01:06:05 there's like VC funded startups. And they're all talking about how newsletters are the growth
695. 01:06:10 engine for their business. And Sam Parr makes this comment about how he thinks that the next big
696. 01:06:16 opportunity is communities. And the way that he was talking about it was sort of like a private
697. 01:06:23 discord or a WhatsApp group for people to connect with other people. I think that's the thing you
698. 01:06:28 want a place for people to connect with other people. A lot of the communities that I've seen,
699. 01:06:33 it's kind of based on a personality. You know, so I don't want the library to become the Mike Schmitz
700. 01:06:38 show. Like I will set the tone because I have the vision for what this could be. But I recognize
701. 01:06:44 that the thing that makes it valuable is the people that are in there and the way that they
702. 01:06:48 interact with each other. So I want to, you know, kind of set the culture and the tone
703. 01:06:54 for that and then get out of the way in a sense. There's another thing in the next chapter,
704. 01:06:59 the protege effect where you explain something to somebody else and it reinforces your own
705. 01:07:03 understanding. So as I'm thinking about like the library metaphor for this community,
706. 01:07:08 show up and do a presentation at the library, you know, just by sharing something that you know,
707. 01:07:13 it's solidified in your own workflow and other people can benefit from it. I mean,
708. 01:07:17 it's exciting to think about that stuff for me. But I'm still kind of noodling on like,
709. 01:07:21 what are the best ways to do this? But I have a lot more clarity now than I did a couple of
710. 01:07:25 weeks ago when I was still kind of noodling on this stuff. And I think, you know, Sam Power is
711. 01:07:31 right. I think Ann Lawr is right. I think my version of applying what either of them talked
712. 01:07:38 about is going to look totally different than what either of them have in mind.
713. 01:07:43 Yeah, I would agree with that too. I mean, like, it's hard to read chapter 10
714. 01:07:47 and not think about creating a community. Yeah. Right. Like, so like you work through that and
715. 01:07:52 you think of the ones that you've been part of. And then you think of the ones that you've like
716. 01:07:56 wanted to grow in and then you think of like, Oh, okay, if I was going to start a community,
717. 01:07:59 this is what I would I would make it look like. Right. So I think from a launching standpoint,
718. 01:08:05 you know, that it's a it's a really cool chapter. Are you okay to move to chapter 11?
719. 01:08:09 Yeah, that's pretty much, you know, what I had to say about this whole section, to be honest,
720. 01:08:14 I know chapter 12 is, you know, life beyond legacy. So go wherever you want.
721. 01:08:17 Well, so chapter 11 resonated with me a lot more than chapter 10. It seems like chapter 10
722. 01:08:21 resonated with you because of where you're at chapter 11 with me because I think this is going
723. 01:08:26 to have something to do with that pact. I talked about my action item. Okay, is it's going to have
724. 01:08:31 to be it's going to be something around learning in public. So I have two different
725. 01:08:38 app ideas. One is an Apple Watch app and one is a iPad app. And it's like, I want to learn how
726. 01:08:46 to do this. Like, I actually am not as worried about the app actually ever getting out there and,
727. 01:08:51 you know, being something that you can download from the app store. I want to learn how to develop
728. 01:08:55 apps just for fun, like just to goof around with it. But then I feel guilty because I'm like,
729. 01:09:00 Oh, yeah, but that's like, that's kind of dumb, right? Like, you know, like you don't really care
730. 01:09:03 if it gets out there. And you don't have this bigger goal. And, you know, and again, we're going
731. 01:09:08 back to the previous chapters where I'm, I'm essentially like shutting down my own creativity,
732. 01:09:14 you know, growth growth loop. But it's like, is that okay in this situation? Because there's,
733. 01:09:18 there's a personal, you know, there's some personal ones that I think might be
734. 01:09:23 more valuable or aligned with my values a little bit more, especially right now with where I am.
735. 01:09:28 But even then, I want that to be a learning and public type of a thing. So it's like, how do I,
736. 01:09:34 you know, how do I do that in a way that I'm comfortable with? The bigger one is, how do I
737. 01:09:39 do it in a way that I actually have time to do it? And it doesn't suck a bunch of time
738. 01:09:43 out of a different responsibility that I have, because it's like, yeah, you know, I don't have,
739. 01:09:48 like, just, you know, hours a day just sitting around to like figure out how to learn in public.
740. 01:09:53 So I'm trying to figure out what is the least friction source that allows me to learn in public
741. 01:10:00 around the thing I want to. And I don't know, I don't know what that is yet. But like, I really
742. 01:10:05 like this idea, you know, she, she gives out a bunch of different ideas of like what learning
743. 01:10:08 in public is. And then she has this, this really clean, super simple. It's a public pledge. I say
744. 01:10:14 I'm going to do something. I put it on some sort of public platform. Here's where I'm going to post
745. 01:10:19 my updates. And then I actually do the thing, public practice, right? Like, actually practice
746. 01:10:23 that thing. And it's like, it's so simple. Like, I just need to figure out what's the public pledge,
747. 01:10:27 what's the platform going to use? And then what's the public practice? And my challenge is,
748. 01:10:32 every time I start to look at like, what's the public platform, I get lost in the weeds of like,
749. 01:10:36 is this the right platform? Or is this the right platform? Is this, you know, do I, you know, like,
750. 01:10:40 so that's where I'm struggling right now. But that's my, I would say my section action,
751. 01:10:44 my second action item out of this book is definitely going to be thinking about that pledge platform
752. 01:10:50 practice. And again, that's going to roll out by the 21st, right? Or, you know, it's going to roll
753. 01:10:56 out by next Friday. Nice. The thing about, you know, where is the platform? And you're talking about
754. 01:11:02 like doing it in public. She has a question here, you know, when choosing who you're going to share
755. 01:11:09 this with, you have to ask, will they support my learning journey or promote unhealthy comparison?
756. 01:11:15 So I think there's a balance to be struck here between what she's talking about here with the
757. 01:11:20 pillars to learning in public. And then the public platform that you would use as the attention mechanism
758. 01:11:30 for like a creator business. So I 100% would say, you know, YouTube is not the place to that that's
759. 01:11:40 not necessarily doesn't fit with the model that she's describing here or posting to LinkedIn or
760. 01:11:46 any other place publicly on the internet. That's sort of like where the stuff lives. But that's not
761. 01:11:54 where that's not that's outside the met the model that she's sharing here, I would argue, where so
762. 01:12:00 the public pledge public platform public practice in her experience, I think this is all based on her
763. 01:12:07 experience within her community. So she's sharing with her community that she's going to do these
764. 01:12:11 things. And then she's posting in there, I did this thing. Here's the link to the thing that I made.
765. 01:12:16 But that's where you want the peer pressure is with this smaller group of people who are aligned with
766. 01:12:23 the what you want to actually have happened. If you try to do that publicly without some sort
767. 01:12:28 of boundary, it's really easy to get frustrated by all the trolls and the people who think you're
768. 01:12:34 stupid. And we're going to point out every single mistake that you ever made. You know,
769. 01:12:38 but that's going to happen the minute that you share something online. So I just want to call
770. 01:12:42 out that difference there. That's good. It's good. All right, life beyond legacy is chapter 12.
771. 01:12:51 I like this idea. The biggest rub I have with this chapter is like the word generativity.
772. 01:12:59 Like the word generativity, right? And you had to read it a lot in the chapter. It was in there a lot.
773. 01:13:03 But in terms of what she's getting at is I really like the framing of this where legacy is
774. 01:13:10 something that is realized after I'm gone, right? Or a long time into the future, right?
775. 01:13:16 It's this idea of legacy. But that's the way it's always like, what's your legacy? What do you
776. 01:13:20 want your legacy to be? And like, it's always bothered me because it's like, I don't know if I
777. 01:13:24 care. And then I kind of feel bad that I don't know if I care what my legacy is. But hers is more
778. 01:13:30 focused on generativity, which she calls a psychological principle that emphasizes using
779. 01:13:36 your personal growth to positively impact those around you. I like that a lot. Like,
780. 01:13:41 what am I going to do? I want to impact the people around me every day in a positive way.
781. 01:13:44 Like that's what I want to do. I want the people who are around me every day to leave better than
782. 01:13:49 than when they came in. Am I good at that? Some days? Am I bad at that? Some days?
783. 01:13:54 But that's what I would want to have happen. So I really liked that. And she lays out five
784. 01:13:58 points. I'm not going to call it the five points you can if you want to. But she lays out five
785. 01:14:03 points on how to do that, like how to use this more generative approach.
786. 01:14:09 Yeah. I think the big thing that she's hitting at here is kind of tied to the
787. 01:14:13 cosmic insignificance theory that I mentioned earlier, where you don't want to put all this
788. 01:14:17 pressure on yourself to make all this big impact. But you want to show up every day and do what you
789. 01:14:22 can. So it's really disconnecting from the goal setting mindset again. It kind of comes full circle
790. 01:14:31 to this whole concept of legacy. And this is a great bookend to this book, to be honest.
791. 01:14:38 We went through the four different parts. There's still the conclusion, but this is essentially
792. 01:14:42 the end here. And it's a great way to end it. And the conclusion is just the two-sentence summary
793. 01:14:47 of every chapter, which I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's what I got out of it.
794. 01:14:54 We're going to essentially use two sentences to wrap up every chapter.
795. 01:14:57 Essentially, yeah. Which, actually, I'll just share what I jotted down for these if you want,
796. 01:15:05 because I don't even have two sentences. I have, "Forget the finish line, unlearn your scripts,
797. 01:15:09 turn doubts into experiments, let go of the chronometer, make friends of procrastination,
798. 01:15:14 embrace imperfection, design growth loops, stay nimble, dance with disruptions,
799. 01:15:17 seek fellow explorers, learn in public, and let go of your legacy."
800. 01:15:21 And what was more beneficial to me, and you won't be surprised as you're probably picking up my
801. 01:15:26 pattern at this point with these books, the appendix was more valuable to me.
802. 01:15:34 That experimentalist toolkit, the image, where can I start, how can I maintain momentum,
803. 01:15:39 what can I do next, what can I keep growing with? I really, really loved that visual,
804. 01:15:47 and I thought that was a great way to wrap up the overall book.
805. 01:15:52 Yeah, there was a lot of great stuff back there. So I got the digital version initially
806. 01:15:58 for the book was actually published, obviously. And it was kind of like a final proof. They give
807. 01:16:03 you the version, and it even says, this isn't the final version, wording may be slightly different,
808. 01:16:07 whatever. Most of the time the text is the same at that point, but I don't remember all that stuff
809. 01:16:13 in the appendix being in the digital version that I saw, which would make sense that she got
810. 01:16:17 basically the text done, delivered it, and then focused on all the other bonus stuff that she
811. 01:16:21 could add to it. So that's probably what happened there, but I don't know that for sure.
812. 01:16:26 Well, and in true books these days fashion, so this is not a slight, I will freely tell people
813. 01:16:34 when I disagree with it or when I think they're doing it wrong. She points you to her website
814. 01:16:39 and her email list in order to get the digital copy of Appendix A or whatever it is. And it's like,
815. 01:16:44 and that's, in my mind, completely appropriate. She's telling me what she's doing. I understand
816. 01:16:48 what she's trying to do. One of the ways that you promote yourself is through newsletters and
817. 01:16:53 things like that. So I'm totally good with that. The ones that always get me is at the end of every
818. 01:16:57 chapter. Go to my blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, geez, do we have to do this every time?
819. 01:17:03 But I thought she did it tactfully in this book and it didn't bother me. I get it. You run a
820. 01:17:08 community. You want me to go sign up for it? Okay, I get it. The other thing is with the newsletter
821. 01:17:15 list specifically, that's kind of the thing that led to the book. She was creating these blog posts.
822. 01:17:24 She was building her newsletter list. The newsletter list, I forget which one came first,
823. 01:17:29 the blogger, the newsletter. But I know the newsletter has been around for a really long time,
824. 01:17:33 and she's had a bunch of subscribers for a really long time. I remember when I first came across it
825. 01:17:37 a couple of years ago at this point, it was like 60,000 subscribers. I was like, holy cow.
826. 01:17:41 And you could just look at all the things that she had written and the consistency that she had
827. 01:17:45 and just like this high quality stuff. So this is not something that
828. 01:17:52 someone wrote a book and they're trying to start a business off of it. And so the reason
829. 01:17:56 that they put stuff at the end of every chapter is like, I got to grow this newsletter list as
830. 01:17:59 fast as I possibly can. She's playing the long game. It feels much more authentic.
831. 01:18:07 Which she says in the beginning of the book, her goal is to share a set of practices that are the
832. 01:18:12 antidote to burnout and boredom, a counterforce to fear, overwhelm confusion and loneliness.
833. 01:18:16 Basically, I'm going to take all of the experiments I've done so far and all the stuff I've learned
834. 01:18:20 in this community. And I'm just going to package it into a book and I'm going to give it to you
835. 01:18:24 all to hopefully make your life better. So yeah, I mean, I agree with you completely.
836. 01:18:29 Really well done. I think it's probably time for action items.
837. 01:18:33 Yep. Okay. Would you like me to go first? Sure. Go for it. Okay. All right. So I have two.
838. 01:18:41 The first one is to determine a pact by next Friday. So I'm going to determine a pact by next
839. 01:18:48 Friday. And the second one relates right to that. This pact, I would like it to be public in some
840. 01:18:54 form. So a form of learning in public. So I need to figure out what the pledge is or what the
841. 01:19:00 pact is. I need to figure out what the platform is going to be. And then I need to figure out what
842. 01:19:04 the actual practice is going to be. So those are my two action items for this book. And I guess my
843. 01:19:14 third action item, which I'm not going to write down. But my third action that I want to do that
844. 01:19:18 I'm not going to be able to do is reread the book. Like I actually want to read the book again.
845. 01:19:22 So what I might do is I might get the audio version and I might listen to it while I
846. 01:19:26 exercise or while I run, that'll be a good enough version of reading it again for right now.
847. 01:19:33 I did. I did check the audible listing. She reads the book. So anytime an author reads
848. 01:19:39 the book, that's ideal, but she's got a really awesome accent. So just don't get distracted by
849. 01:19:44 the accent. Okay. Yeah, you got her when you're listening to it. All right, Mike, how about you?
850. 01:19:50 What are your actions? All right. So I've got to also, I'm going to, in my words, consider what's
851. 01:19:59 missing whenever I'm doing my review processes. And I feel like that's really just filling in the
852. 01:20:06 blanks with the ideal future. I don't know. It's hard for me to explain exactly why this sort of
853. 01:20:13 triggered me this time. But I feel like I do a pretty good job of reflecting on, you know, what
854. 01:20:19 happened? And then I do a pretty good job of creating this vision of where I'm going. But the
855. 01:20:25 way that she framed that of like considering what's missing right now, it felt like a bridge between
856. 01:20:30 those two, it's kind of like where are the holes? And what can I do right now? It's going to fill
857. 01:20:36 those if that makes sense. So yeah, I want to, I want to take that approach with some of my
858. 01:20:43 reflection stuff. And then also using plus minus next for the weekly review, for I got the shortcut
859. 01:20:47 built. So I got no excuses. Now I can start capturing things. I'll be on vacation next week.
860. 01:20:53 But so I'm not sure how much, you know, valuable stuff I'll have there for a review. But that's the
861. 01:20:59 intention is to use that process going forward. Outstanding. All right, style and rating. You ready?
862. 01:21:09 I am ready. Okay. You're going first because it's your book.
863. 01:21:12 Yeah, well, so I guess, you know, this, my rating, it was probably known for like the last couple
864. 01:21:21 of months that I really liked this book. I'm going to give it five stars. I think it is a five star
865. 01:21:27 book. I think this is on the level of something like atomic habits. I don't know that it'll get
866. 01:21:38 to that level of success. I think and Lord told me that she and James Clear had the same agent.
867. 01:21:45 So maybe I don't know, but I think this is a really well thought well articulated book about a
868. 01:21:52 very important topic presented in a way that is very approachable and done better than just about
869. 01:22:01 every other productivity book I have ever read. If you want a productivity book that is not your
870. 01:22:08 standard productivity book, like if the whole idea of reading a productivity book rubs you the
871. 01:22:12 wrong way, this is the one that you should pick up because it's very different. Her background
872. 01:22:20 definitely comes through in a lot of the stuff that she talks about. She is a neuroscientist,
873. 01:22:25 but that doesn't mean that there's going to be a whole bunch of big words. And it's going to go
874. 01:22:29 over your head, which honestly, that's sort of what I was expecting. Like I've read some of those
875. 01:22:36 other books. I'm interested in that topic. So I've read even some different research papers on
876. 01:22:41 that sort of thing. And it's kind of like, well, I don't like this, but I'll muscle through it
877. 01:22:47 because I really want to understand it. And this was like a breath of fresh air. It's not watered
878. 01:22:55 down material, in my opinion. Some academics who are neuroscientists may disagree with that because
879. 01:23:01 they're used to the academic format of the papers and stuff like that, which she's written those.
880. 01:23:07 But she, I forget where I heard her talking about this, but she's been on so many podcasts
881. 01:23:12 recently because her book just came out. One of the interviews she was talking about how
882. 01:23:18 the writing the 100 posts in 100 days, the exercise of that was kind of like forcing herself to learn
883. 01:23:25 to write in a way that normal people could understand it. And I feel like that was a worthwhile
884. 01:23:33 investment. Like it comes through in this book, I don't know how to describe it. Like, you want
885. 01:23:40 something that's fun and entertaining to read, but you also don't want to be talked to like
886. 01:23:47 you're a little child. And she strikes the perfect balance there. The stuff that she talks about,
887. 01:23:54 the stories that she tells, the different research-based anecdotes, you know, she makes a really compelling
888. 01:24:02 case for the whole tiny experiments framework. If I had one nitpick with the book, I think it's
889. 01:24:09 just the naming of the four different parts. Like the pact I really like act makes sense, react, maybe,
890. 01:24:18 and then impact. Okay. Like the whole, not metaphor, but whatever. Like, I don't think you needed
891. 01:24:28 that for the four different sections of the book. And maybe it's just coming off the heels of the
892. 01:24:32 catalyst where it was very forced. It was like, okay, here we go again. It's not nearly that bad,
893. 01:24:38 you know, but it does feel like maybe a little bit of a stretch and maybe you didn't have to name
894. 01:24:42 it that way. Not that I have a different suggestion like I did with a catalyst like, hey, you should
895. 01:24:46 name this chapter social proof because that's what it is. You know, I really have nothing like that
896. 01:24:50 for this particular book. But that was the one thing, you know, looking at it, it's kind of like,
897. 01:24:56 but everything else, like, I absolutely love this book. And I think that five years from now,
898. 01:25:03 I will have recommended this book more than any other book in my library. You know, time will tell
899. 01:25:09 whether that that's true or not. But I've already recommended it a bunch. And everybody that I
900. 01:25:13 recommended it to now that they picked it up now, if they've read it, they're like, that was really
901. 01:25:17 good. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I know. I kind of am curious where she goes from here. Because
902. 01:25:24 she's got her PhD, right? She's got her community. She's written a really great book. So is the
903. 01:25:32 pressure now to like, make another book? What's that one going to be? I don't know how you top this,
904. 01:25:38 basically, kind of like James Clear with atomic habits. Where do you go from there? I don't know,
905. 01:25:42 but atomic habits just continues to to sell like gangbusters. So I hope the same is going to be
906. 01:25:47 true of tiny experiments. Yeah. Yeah, I, without a doubt, five stars. This is a five star book. So
907. 01:25:54 this is one of those ones that what do we call it like when we go to book a golden book? There you
908. 01:26:00 go. Great. So this is definitely a golden book for us. Check your own chapter artwork for updated
909. 01:26:05 version for the golden book. Yeah. So one of, and one of my takeaways with this is this is 100%
910. 01:26:15 a book I would refer students to. So I get students to come in and they're just like, I'm just not
911. 01:26:20 sure like what I want to do or like where I want to go or anything like that. And like, there weren't
912. 01:26:25 a lot of books you could point them to before to like help them get direction or help them figure
913. 01:26:29 that out and, and try to help them kind of organize their mind around that idea. And this is without
914. 01:26:35 a doubt the best one I've ever found that it's like, okay, go read tiny experiments, like just go
915. 01:26:40 read tiny experiments and, and think about what your next step would be and what the next, you know,
916. 01:26:46 tiny experiment that you could do that's going to help you get closer to learning and get closer to
917. 01:26:50 learning and closer to learning. But it doesn't just apply to college students, right? Like I think
918. 01:26:57 if you had a mature high school student, right, they could, they could read this book and, and get
919. 01:27:02 a ton out of it. I think if you had, you know, somebody who's graduated college or has been out
920. 01:27:07 or said they're 70 years old, right? Like, I think it spans such a wide range of applicability for,
921. 01:27:13 for people. In terms of the style, like, the biggest thing is it wasn't distracting for me,
922. 01:27:18 right? So, you know, it was easy to read. It wasn't distracting. Things made sense. Things,
923. 01:27:24 you know, flowed in a logical way when, when the figures and images and tables came up,
924. 01:27:30 they made sense. I understood why they were there. You know, the, the stories when, when she broke
925. 01:27:35 into story, they made sense. When, you know, she didn't feel the need to over, over flood us with
926. 01:27:41 stories that, you know, weren't really relevant. But when the stories came in, they, they made sense
927. 01:27:44 and they fit into what they were doing or they launched the chapter forward or whatever it might
928. 01:27:48 be. Without a doubt, five star book liked pretty much everything about it. The biggest thing I
929. 01:27:53 didn't like was not her fault. It was the fact that I read it in a paper, paper form and not an
930. 01:27:58 additional form. So had I, had I not done that, it would have been even better debatable. But sure.
931. 01:28:08 And the ever going saga between Mike and I will continue
932. 01:28:11 forever until the end of time. All right. So let's put the paperback version of tiny experiments on
933. 01:28:17 the shelf when we read the next. Oh my. All right. So next we're going to read a book called Inner
934. 01:28:23 Excellence. And Inner Excellence is by an individual named Jim Murphy. Part of the reason why we're
935. 01:28:29 reading Inner Excellence is because it kind of got popular by accident via a NFL football player
936. 01:28:37 reading it on the sideline of football games. And then oh, by the way, we wouldn't looked at it and
937. 01:28:42 it looks like a pretty good book. So Inner Excellence, train your mind for extraordinary
938. 01:28:46 performance and the best possible life. It is touted by a bunch of professional golf coaches
939. 01:28:53 and or professional golfers. So that's kind of interesting and wild. It has a disclaimer that I
940. 01:28:59 think it's very interesting. So on the Amazon listing, it says the number one New York Times
941. 01:29:04 bestseller 200,000 plus copies sold in three weeks. So I mean, that's a really interesting
942. 01:29:08 statistics. It's just like in three weeks, like you can't just say it sold over 200,
943. 01:29:13 you know, plus a thousand copies, like you got to say in three weeks. So so that's interesting.
944. 01:29:17 But if you're reading along with us, Jim Murphy, Inner Excellence, pick up a copy of it. And hopefully
945. 01:29:24 we get a lot out of that one as or as much out of that one as we did out of tiny experiments. Yeah.
946. 01:29:30 Mike, what's after Inner Excellence? All right. So after that, we're going to
947. 01:29:33 read the five types of wealth by Saheel Bloom. I saw Saheel Bloom speak at Craft & Commerce a
948. 01:29:39 couple of years ago and was a really smart dude. This book has kind of been on my radar for a long
949. 01:29:46 time. So I've been following him ever since. And it's kind of cool to see how popular this has
950. 01:29:52 become. When he spoke at Craft & Commerce, he was kind of publicly setting this goal. You know,
951. 01:29:57 I want to get a million email subscribers before I launch this. And at the time, he had a couple
952. 01:30:02 hundred thousand. So it wasn't like crazy, crazy, but it was still a lot more than he had currently.
953. 01:30:09 So he was talking about the flywheel he was going to build. And I don't know, his session was really
954. 01:30:12 good. And I just like the way that he he presents this stuff. So I bought this book when it first
955. 01:30:20 came out. So we've had it in my house for several weeks now. My wife has picked it up and started
956. 01:30:26 going through it. And she's really liking it. I don't think there has ever been another productivity
957. 01:30:32 type book that she has picked up before me and finished before me. So Rachel, I'm putting a lot
958. 01:30:41 of pressure on you with this one. But it sounds like this is going to be very broadly applicable.
959. 01:30:48 And yeah, I really don't know a whole lot. I don't know a whole lot about what to expect
960. 01:30:52 from this other than, you know, Sahil Bloom wrote it. I haven't spent enough time to really,
961. 01:30:56 really dig into it. But yeah, so far, all of the reviews, both what I've seen online and from
962. 01:31:05 within my own house have been very positive. That's good. That's good. Rachel, the challenge
963. 01:31:11 has been posted and hopefully you can step up and beat her. Hopefully vacation doesn't get in the
964. 01:31:18 way of that. Yeah, we'll see. All right, any gap books? So no, because Inter Excellence is, at least
965. 01:31:28 on face value, listed as 360 pages. Yeah, it's a big one. And because it's listed as 360 pages,
966. 01:31:33 I'm not going to take on a gap book right now. Yeah, and I'm going on vacation. So I don't got a
967. 01:31:37 gap book. Yeah, you're going to read like seven books while your own vacation. Probably. That is
968. 01:31:43 what happened last time. Yeah, so like you don't have a gap book, you have a whole stack that's many
969. 01:31:50 as we'll fit into the in the suitcase. All right, so thank you, everybody, for listening. Thank you
970. 01:31:58 for supporting the show. And specifically, thank you to the Bookworm Pro members who
971. 01:32:04 support the show financially means a lot to us helps us keep the lights on. We are working on
972. 01:32:09 getting some ads. We've got some book now. So that's cool. But the $7 a month that the the
973. 01:32:17 pro members contribute helps us out a ton. When you sign up for the pro show, you get a couple of
974. 01:32:24 things. You get the pro show has an ad free extended version of the show. So when there are ads,
975. 01:32:30 they are removed. And then also you get a bonus section. So in this, this episode, Corey helped
976. 01:32:35 me talk through some shall we say live event logistics. You also get a pro feed. So that's a
977. 01:32:44 pro feed. You also get a bootleg feed. The bootleg comes out after we get done recording this,
978. 01:32:49 which is typically about two weeks before the actual episodes get gets released. That bootleg
979. 01:32:53 gets uploaded the moment that we get record we get done recording. So you get the episodes early,
980. 01:32:59 you get a 4k book or wallpaper. And if you want to sign up to support the show, that way you can do
981. 01:33:04 so by going to patreon.com/bookwormafem. Alrighty. Thanks for reading tiny experiments with us.
982. 01:33:12 Pick up Inter Excellence by Jim Murphy. And we'll talk to you next time.