231: Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy

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1. 00:00:00 Okay, so before we get into follow up, if you could give me just a moment for some shameless self-promotion here to worry, I have a personal retreat planner that I have been working on.
2. 00:00:12 And by the time this episode goes live, I believe you will be able to purchase it.
3. 00:00:17 Actually, I know you'll be able to purchase it.
4. 00:00:19 Heads them back and forth with Jesse at New Year, who has helped me bring this product to life.
5. 00:00:25 And there is a product page for it, so the link will be in the show notes.
6. 00:00:30 It's basically the planner that I have always wanted, like we even got some fountain pen friendly paper for it.
7. 00:00:37 And it follows my personal retreat process, so that's kind of like a quarterly plan, then there's your weekly plans and your daily plans with the goals that they all align.
8. 00:00:48 And when you have that alignment, it creates the motivation to show up every day and take action on the things that are important and the clarity to cut things that aren't.
9. 00:00:55 And personal retreats are something that's very important to me, so this is basically something you could bring and do your personal retreat right in the notebook.
10. 00:01:02 There's an example.
11. 00:01:03 There'll be a video on the sales page so you can see what it looks like.
12. 00:01:06 And once you have that personal retreat, then you can use that as your weekly and your daily planners, you go through your day, do the time blocking and a lot of the tactics that we're going to talk about actually today's book.
13. 00:01:17 So I'm pretty excited about this.
14. 00:01:19 Like I said, the link will be in the show notes.
15. 00:01:21 I believe it's going to be $29 and we'll have a discount if you want to get a subscription, which is basically like four of them at a time.
16. 00:01:28 So you'll get a little bit of a discount and you'll get access to my video course.
17. 00:01:33 As we talked about the pro show, personal retreats is where I want to plant my flag.
18. 00:01:37 So I guess check out the bookworm patreon.com/bookworm if you want to join the pro show and find out about my takeaways from CX and why I think I need to write a book on that.
19. 00:01:49 This fits in very well, doesn't it, that you're aligning the stars right now?
20. 00:01:53 Like the stars are coming together to align.
21. 00:01:56 Well, actually I hadn't intended to go that deep on what's the word that you're going to own.
22. 00:02:02 That was just one of my big takeaways from from CX.
23. 00:02:04 It's great.
24. 00:02:05 But yeah, the planner though, I've got the prototype and I've shown it to a couple of people.
25. 00:02:12 Actually, I brought it with me to CX and showed it to a couple of people.
26. 00:02:15 Like, hey, do you use a planner? Oh yeah, I use like Michael Hyatt's full focus or whatever.
27. 00:02:19 Like, well, here, what do you think of this?
28. 00:02:20 Oh, dude, this is awesome.
29. 00:02:22 Yeah, that's great.
30. 00:02:23 That's great.
31. 00:02:24 So yeah, it'll finally be available and just in time for you to get it for your Q4 personal retreat.
32. 00:02:31 Very cool, very cool.
33. 00:02:32 I'm excited to see that come out.
34. 00:02:34 Me too, me too.
35. 00:02:36 All right, so follow up with the action items.
36. 00:02:40 I had one which was to consider what am I optimizing for?
37. 00:02:44 I did this a bunch of times and I still don't have an answer.
38. 00:02:48 Because I'm not quite sure exactly how to answer that question.
39. 00:02:54 But I do have some things that I've done as a result of asking that question.
40. 00:03:01 So I put together a business dashboard for my creator business that I probably should
41. 00:03:07 have had a long time ago where I'm tracking the number of new email subscribers every day.
42. 00:03:15 I'm tracking the total number of email subscribers, number of YouTube subscribers,
43. 00:03:21 things like that.
44. 00:03:21 So I have to go into the services and find the numbers, basically.
45. 00:03:26 And I'm pulling some of those numbers from my kit account, by the way, using Zapier
46. 00:03:32 and writing them to a Google sheet.
47. 00:03:33 Zapier has this thing called co-pilot now, where if you choose, have you used Zapier much?
48. 00:03:38 I have you in the past.
49. 00:03:39 In the past, I don't currently, but I've used it in the past.
50. 00:03:42 Okay, so you know how you can select an app and it'll show you all the different
51. 00:03:46 actions that you can take?
52. 00:03:47 Well, basically what they have now is this AI feature where you can say,
53. 00:03:51 "I don't want any of those actions.
54. 00:03:52 I want something that does this and then it'll build it for you."
55. 00:03:56 So getting the number of new email subscribers from kit is not an action that is supported.
56. 00:04:01 You can write something to a specific subscriber's account.
57. 00:04:06 But using the co-pilot AI thing within 45 seconds, I had that action that I...
58. 00:04:11 Your vibe, your vibe coating Zapier is what you're doing.
59. 00:04:15 Yes, exactly.
60. 00:04:17 And it's amazing.
61. 00:04:19 When I started, I was like, "There's no way this is going to work."
62. 00:04:21 The first thing that went through my head was you said you were going to pull all these metrics.
63. 00:04:25 I was like, "Are you really going to manually update all those metrics?"
64. 00:04:29 And then the second thing that went through my head is,
65. 00:04:30 "Do these services really offer you the metric via an API or via something else?"
66. 00:04:36 And you've obviously found a way to do it.
67. 00:04:39 So that's crazy.
68. 00:04:41 Yeah, they do not, but Zapier at least, because they have access to the API endpoints,
69. 00:04:48 can cobble something together based on some natural language vibe coating,
70. 00:04:55 which I was really impressed with.
71. 00:04:57 The reason that I use Zapier in the first place was there's an app that's part of
72. 00:05:01 set app called Numerics, where you can have certain integrations,
73. 00:05:04 but they don't integrate with kit for whatever reason.
74. 00:05:07 So while they integrate Google Sheets, maybe I could grab that number from Zapier,
75. 00:05:12 write it to a Google Sheet, and then pull it in.
76. 00:05:14 Still not 100% sold on that solution.
77. 00:05:17 The Numerics app looks really nice.
78. 00:05:21 And if it has the numbers, you need, it's great.
79. 00:05:24 But it's very picky about the way that it wants things formatted.
80. 00:05:28 So the data it wants in a different format than Zapier really is designed to write it.
81. 00:05:35 Okay, and I got to figure all that out yet.
82. 00:05:38 But yeah, Zapier has been very impressed with the tools that are
83. 00:05:45 available there to basically build whatever automation you want.
84. 00:05:48 Yeah, that's really cool.
85. 00:05:50 All right, so are we ready for my follow-up item?
86. 00:05:53 Yeah, go ahead.
87. 00:05:54 So my follow-up item was ask myself the questions at the end of the
88. 00:05:57 Science of Scaling book.
89. 00:05:58 And what I'll tell you is based on our conversation last time,
90. 00:06:03 you'll hopefully I'm not giving away anything too much for people who haven't listened yet.
91. 00:06:09 It didn't really apply a ton to my world.
92. 00:06:12 It was a book written for a different audience.
93. 00:06:14 So I thought about this idea of impossible goal.
94. 00:06:16 And I'm working down through these utilized time as a tool and all this stuff.
95. 00:06:20 And really, I tried to just make it with a personal goal.
96. 00:06:23 And it went okay.
97. 00:06:24 Like I asked these questions and it went okay.
98. 00:06:26 Like it wasn't great.
99. 00:06:28 It was still like a decent framework to work through the questions and just think about
100. 00:06:33 things that I wouldn't normally think about.
101. 00:06:35 But overall, it was all right.
102. 00:06:38 Like I'm left with like a lukewarm feeling about, you know, one of the questions is,
103. 00:06:43 you know, what we let go of keeping you where you're at now.
104. 00:06:45 Well, okay, like that was a good question.
105. 00:06:47 It taught me what one of the things I need to let go of.
106. 00:06:51 But it really wasn't for scaling.
107. 00:06:52 It was really just for me to achieve the goal that I want to achieve.
108. 00:06:55 So I can't tell you that anything like monumental came out of it.
109. 00:06:59 But it was a good, it was a decent framework to work through those.
110. 00:07:02 All right.
111. 00:07:03 So you haven't decided to quit your job and move to the mountains or anything yet?
112. 00:07:08 Well, listen, I would move to the mountains tomorrow.
113. 00:07:10 Like, I don't want you to ever, I don't want you to ever get confused about this.
114. 00:07:14 Like I, yeah, like Katie would not.
115. 00:07:17 So Katie is Katie is the anchor.
116. 00:07:19 She is the rock that keeps us, keeps us where we are.
117. 00:07:22 But no, if it was up to me, like, I mean, that we'd be over there.
118. 00:07:25 Over West, out West yonder somewhere farming and figuring out.
119. 00:07:30 And Katie, it's hilarious.
120. 00:07:31 Katie tells me, she's like, you would hate that life.
121. 00:07:33 Like you would absolutely hate that life.
122. 00:07:34 And I'm like, nah, it'd be amazing.
123. 00:07:35 It'd be wonderful.
124. 00:07:38 Go West, young man.
125. 00:07:38 Yeah.
126. 00:07:39 I mean, I can read books.
127. 00:07:40 I can read as long as I have an internet connection, right?
128. 00:07:42 Like Starlink's, Starlink's great now.
129. 00:07:44 So, you know, I can read books and talk to you and do other fun stuff.
130. 00:07:49 But no, we're still here.
131. 00:07:51 We're still plugging.
132. 00:07:52 All right.
133. 00:07:53 Yeah.
134. 00:07:55 Ready to talk about today's book?
135. 00:07:56 Let's talk about frogs.
136. 00:08:00 All right.
137. 00:08:00 Yeah.
138. 00:08:01 So today's book is Eat That Frog by Brian Tracy.
139. 00:08:05 This was, I think, the first productivity book that I ever read.
140. 00:08:09 We read the fourth edition, right?
141. 00:08:10 That's the one that you have.
142. 00:08:11 Yes.
143. 00:08:12 Fourth edition.
144. 00:08:13 Okay.
145. 00:08:13 Which is why I picked it, honestly, because the fourth edition was just released.
146. 00:08:18 And I remember when I first read this thinking this book is amazing.
147. 00:08:22 It's completely life changing.
148. 00:08:24 And I've gotten some distance from it.
149. 00:08:26 And I have kind of embraced a different perspective on some of the productivity advice
150. 00:08:33 that I've accumulated over the years, shall we say.
151. 00:08:36 And I was curious if rereading this, I would still think of it fondly.
152. 00:08:41 Or if I would be like, this is complete garbage.
153. 00:08:44 And we need to burn this book and make sure nobody reads it again.
154. 00:08:52 Those are the two extremes in my head.
155. 00:08:54 That sounds ridiculous.
156. 00:08:55 But that was my thinking going into this.
157. 00:08:59 I'm either going to love this or I'm going to hate this.
158. 00:09:01 So I have to ask you a question.
159. 00:09:03 In the academic world, we will get a new edition of a book.
160. 00:09:07 And they'll do certain books that are time tested,
161. 00:09:10 and they're like these seminal work and whatever it is.
162. 00:09:13 You'll be on the 17th edition of the book.
163. 00:09:16 And if you look at the first edition compared to the 17th edition,
164. 00:09:20 yeah, some of the figures are better.
165. 00:09:22 They've introduced new problems.
166. 00:09:23 You know, the examples are more modern, whatever it might be.
167. 00:09:26 But like 95% of the book, 97% of the book is exactly the same.
168. 00:09:31 All we did was wrap a new cover around it.
169. 00:09:33 And that allowed us to charge $160 again compared to letting everybody buy it on Amazon used for 43.
170. 00:09:42 So my question for you, by no means am I thinking that Brian Tracy did this in that way.
171. 00:09:48 I'm just curious, do you remember from the first edition of the book?
172. 00:09:50 Like if you did like a compare and contrast between the two,
173. 00:09:53 is it a lot different?
174. 00:09:55 Is it a little bit different?
175. 00:09:56 Do you have any gauge on that?
176. 00:09:57 Or is it too far too long?
177. 00:09:59 Too long ago since you read it.
178. 00:10:00 Well, to tell you the truth, I probably have the original on my bookshelf back there.
179. 00:10:05 But I did not dig it out and do this side by side comparison.
180. 00:10:08 And that being said, this book is only 114 pages with two new sections.
181. 00:10:19 And so what I think happened is it is significantly tighter than the one that I read.
182. 00:10:28 So as an example, the title eat that frog comes from the Mark Twain quote,
183. 00:10:34 where if you have to eat a live frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning
184. 00:10:40 because nothing worse will happen to you that day.
185. 00:10:43 He went through that so fast that he didn't even attribute the quote to Mark Twain,
186. 00:10:48 and he didn't use the full quote.
187. 00:10:49 It was just the key idea.
188. 00:10:51 So it came off to me as like, I've been talking about this for years.
189. 00:10:58 You don't need all of that background.
190. 00:11:00 Here is the core essence, and I'm kind of curious whether you picked up on any of that.
191. 00:11:07 Like if you thought there's pieces missing to this,
192. 00:11:10 or if you were able to grok it, just the way that it was,
193. 00:11:14 because he covers a lot in those 114 pages.
194. 00:11:17 Yeah, I knew of the book.
195. 00:11:20 I'd always heard of the book, and I knew of the concept of the eat the frog type of thing.
196. 00:11:24 But I never had looked into the book.
197. 00:11:26 It never seemed interesting to me.
198. 00:11:27 The funny thing about this is it's 21 rules or principles.
199. 00:11:32 I forget how he words it.
200. 00:11:34 But it's 21 ideas that you're working through to be more productive.
201. 00:11:38 In all of these, I've implemented at some point in my life,
202. 00:11:42 or I've heard about elaborated on in much more detail in different places.
203. 00:11:47 So to kind of like back my way into the question you asked me,
204. 00:11:51 reading this, I didn't feel like he was too light or too short,
205. 00:11:57 or needed to provide a lot more detail on any one of them.
206. 00:12:01 I thought like, oh yeah, I got that.
207. 00:12:02 Now, I might have been biased because I've heard people talk about them in more detail
208. 00:12:07 in other places.
209. 00:12:08 So if these are brand new to you, you might go,
210. 00:12:11 "Wow, but I don't really get that."
211. 00:12:13 But even in here, like you're talking about it being like tight and being concise.
212. 00:12:17 When he gives you the principle, he gives you a good example,
213. 00:12:20 at least for the most part, he gives you a good example that like,
214. 00:12:22 "Oh, I can implement that tomorrow."
215. 00:12:23 Like I can easily implement that tomorrow.
216. 00:12:26 I think it's a, I was not left wanting dramatically more on any of the 21 ideas.
217. 00:12:34 Yeah, so that, I think, well, we'll get into, I want to, for this episode,
218. 00:12:42 crank through all 21 of these ideas.
219. 00:12:45 Because I don't know how to like pick and choose individual ones.
220. 00:12:48 I think we can go through them very quickly.
221. 00:12:51 And if there's one that we want to kind of unpack further,
222. 00:12:55 we can just do it, do it in line there.
223. 00:12:59 But I think it's intended to, you read through these and you're going to pick
224. 00:13:06 one or two to implement the whole subtitle that I've got on the physical book right here.
225. 00:13:13 See, physical books for you for the win.
226. 00:13:15 I don't read this.
227. 00:13:17 21, a great way is to stop procrastinating and get more done in less time.
228. 00:13:21 So when you find yourself procrastinating, basically these are all tactics that you can use to overcome
229. 00:13:26 that procrastination is maybe the best way to frame this.
230. 00:13:30 Before we get into the individual tactics, though, there is an introduction section
231. 00:13:36 which I think is important.
232. 00:13:38 You want to mention something before we get there?
233. 00:13:40 Let me pause you one second.
234. 00:13:41 If you had to say the like main thesis of this book or the thing that is the most important
235. 00:13:48 without looking at your notes, like try to just like just think of it outline what we're out
236. 00:13:53 top of mind.
237. 00:13:54 What would you say is the main most important thing of this book?
238. 00:13:58 I think it's actually in the introduction.
239. 00:14:00 I think there's more for you to do than you can possibly get done.
240. 00:14:05 And so you have to get real clear on what is the most important thing to do.
241. 00:14:11 And laser focus on that.
242. 00:14:12 Okay, we're in the same boat then because mine was pick the one thing that matters
243. 00:14:17 and don't do anything else until that thing is done.
244. 00:14:20 Like we're saying the same thing, we're just saying it differently.
245. 00:14:23 It's like pick the one thing that actually matters and don't even think about anything
246. 00:14:27 else until that one thing is done.
247. 00:14:29 And I think that's a really if you get nothing else out of the book,
248. 00:14:32 I think that's a really strong, helpful idea.
249. 00:14:38 Absolutely.
250. 00:14:40 Yeah, so let's get into the introduction,
251. 00:14:43 which I actually have the most notes of any of the chapters in the introduction.
252. 00:14:51 So he mentions new tasks keep rolling in like the waves of the ocean.
253. 00:14:55 You'll never get caught up with everything.
254. 00:14:57 You need to be able to select the most important task.
255. 00:15:00 It started on it and get it done both well and quickly.
256. 00:15:02 I think that is the most succinct explanation of productivity that I have ever heard.
257. 00:15:09 That I don't think anybody anywhere could possibly argue with.
258. 00:15:15 It has nothing to do with, well, you just got to do more.
259. 00:15:19 It's really just pick the thing you want to do, follow through on it.
260. 00:15:23 And then he also mentions the frog eating in this section,
261. 00:15:27 which I talked briefly about.
262. 00:15:28 There's two rules for frog eating.
263. 00:15:30 First one, if you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first.
264. 00:15:37 So if you have two things that you're procrastinating on,
265. 00:15:40 the one that you are most repelled by, that's what you should do earlier in the day.
266. 00:15:44 And then the second rule of frog eating, if you have to eat a live frog at all,
267. 00:15:47 it doesn't pay to sit and look at it for very long.
268. 00:15:50 Guilty.
269. 00:15:52 Absolutely the same.
270. 00:15:53 I can tell you there are 10 tasks in my head right now
271. 00:15:56 that I think are ugly frogs that I put off doing every day.
272. 00:16:00 Like I try to not have to do those every day,
273. 00:16:02 but they're the important ones.
274. 00:16:03 They're the ones that are going to mean something and move the needle.
275. 00:16:07 And I just try to put those off every day.
276. 00:16:10 Yeah, like I completely agree.
277. 00:16:13 This whole introduction was just a gigantic gut punch.
278. 00:16:17 And at the same time that you're being like punched in the gut of like,
279. 00:16:20 oh, yes, I should be doing this.
280. 00:16:21 He's also motivating you at the same time because he's like, oh,
281. 00:16:25 and these are learnable skills and, you know, be the person that you intend to be.
282. 00:16:30 And, you know, like all the stuff, so you're feeling bad and good at the same time.
283. 00:16:34 And it just is like this mind bender of a first introduction chapter,
284. 00:16:38 not in a bad way and like a really good way.
285. 00:16:40 Like I think in a really good way.
286. 00:16:43 Yeah, anything else in the introduction before we get into the the tactics?
287. 00:16:48 One of the things that I find interesting in the introduction is,
288. 00:16:50 and I'd have to think about this a lot harder to make it like a definitive statement, but
289. 00:16:56 I feel like he covers a lot of bass as well.
290. 00:16:59 You know, like he doesn't, I don't feel like there's any major gaps in his argument.
291. 00:17:02 Like he covers it well where he's basically saying like, hey, here's the rule.
292. 00:17:07 And then here's like why this matters.
293. 00:17:10 And then here are ways to do it.
294. 00:17:11 And oh, by the way, you can learn this.
295. 00:17:13 And here are some like things to think about, you know, like one of the things to think about.
296. 00:17:17 Activity's not accomplishment.
297. 00:17:19 Okay, that's huge in the productivity space.
298. 00:17:21 Like I can feel productive by checking my email every 14 seconds,
299. 00:17:25 but I'm not really accomplishing anything.
300. 00:17:27 I'm just like doing some mindless activity.
301. 00:17:29 My point being is I think he does a really good job at covering the bases
302. 00:17:34 before he launches into what really could be, and he even says it, right?
303. 00:17:39 Like a choppy book.
304. 00:17:42 It's like a choppy hundred pages of 21 things.
305. 00:17:45 And it's like he calls them.
306. 00:17:46 He says they're complete in themselves.
307. 00:17:48 So essentially you don't need a thread to run through all of this.
308. 00:17:52 Productivity is the thread, but you don't need one.
309. 00:17:54 Like here's an idea.
310. 00:17:55 Here's an idea.
311. 00:17:55 Here's an idea.
312. 00:17:56 And I just think he does a good job on the launch covering all his bases.
313. 00:18:00 So at this point, I can launch into number one.
314. 00:18:03 All right, so I guess we should mention before we get into the tactics, the format.
315. 00:18:10 So each one of these after the introduction has the tactic.
316. 00:18:18 So set the table, for example, and then a quote, the content.
317. 00:18:24 And then at the end, there is a little box.
318. 00:18:27 Eat that frog where he has a couple of specific action steps that you can take.
319. 00:18:33 And so that means that this book is not even 114 pages.
320. 00:18:37 It's probably closer to a hundred.
321. 00:18:39 We'll put this now, even though it should wait till the end.
322. 00:18:42 If you add the section at the end, where he essentially like gives you the highlights
323. 00:18:47 of the entire book, now we even have less Mike.
324. 00:18:50 Like, because we're telling everybody again in a much more concise way.
325. 00:18:55 Yeah, it's just wild.
326. 00:18:57 It's the tightest productivity book you will ever read.
327. 00:19:01 All right.
328. 00:19:01 So the first tactic, I guess we'll call them chapters, but basically they're their tactics.
329. 00:19:07 And chapters typically imply like a whole bunch of texts, then that's not what these are.
330. 00:19:10 So just know that the first chapter though is set the table.
331. 00:19:13 And this is really about getting clear on what is the most important thing for you to do.
332. 00:19:19 He's got a quote here on page seven, which I think is absolutely brilliant and important.
333. 00:19:27 Clarity is perhaps the most important concept in personal productivity.
334. 00:19:32 So if you're not clear of what the most important thing is that you're supposed to be doing,
335. 00:19:35 you will not be at least as productive as you would most likely like to be.
336. 00:19:41 So this is it's he states it.
337. 00:19:44 And then you think about all the different productivity things you listen to.
338. 00:19:47 And whether they stated explicitly or not, like you guys on focus talk about clarity all the time,
339. 00:19:52 you personally with your, you know, PKM stuff and all that you talk about clarity all the time,
340. 00:19:57 personal retreats clarity, the workshop that I lead, we have a whole section on clarity, like
341. 00:20:01 almost everything I've ever been to about personal success or productivity or anything talks about
342. 00:20:08 clarity on some level. It's such a huge concept. And it's the part that if you don't get it right,
343. 00:20:14 everything else doesn't matter. Like you can have the best systems in the world. What's the,
344. 00:20:18 what's the quote about, you know, it's the Covey quote. If I put my ladder on the wrong wall,
345. 00:20:23 it doesn't matter how fast I climb the ladder. He does mention that.
346. 00:20:29 Yeah, that's a good quote. You know what else he talks about in this first chapter?
347. 00:20:33 What's that goals? He says goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement.
348. 00:20:41 Oh my, come so sorry for you. Yeah, so I think I'm coming around a little bit on this. I still
349. 00:20:50 think that smart goals specifically for all the reasons shared previously are not the thing you
350. 00:20:59 really want to focus on every single day. If you want to consistently show up and take action on
351. 00:21:08 something, but in terms of gaining clarity at the beginning, it is hard to do that without the
352. 00:21:16 seven steps for setting and achieving goals that he mentions here. So real quickly, step one,
353. 00:21:21 decide exactly what you want. Step two, write it down. Step three, set a deadline and sub deadlines
354. 00:21:27 if necessary. Really, all that's doing is forcing you to act. Step four, make a list of everything
355. 00:21:33 you can think of that you are going to have to do to achieve your goal. Again, thinking on paper
356. 00:21:38 as another topic he talks about in this this chapter, just writing all that stuff down that
357. 00:21:42 provides a immense amount of relief a lot of time. Clarity and clarity. Yes, exactly, exactly,
358. 00:21:48 because then you organize that list into a plan. That's step five. Step six, take action on your
359. 00:21:52 plan immediately. Step seven, resolve to do something every single day that moves you toward your
360. 00:21:56 major goal. That's the one that I think is maybe easy to overlook how profound that is.
361. 00:22:03 I remember seeing somebody during Nick Milo's "Linking Your Thinking" workshop who ran seven
362. 00:22:09 different companies out of Obsidian. What he did was he had a note for each business that he ran,
363. 00:22:17 and it rolled up all the tasks that he had throughout his entire vault into the task for that particular
364. 00:22:24 company. Every single day, he looked at those seven different notes for the seven different
365. 00:22:28 companies, and he completed the top one. That's really, I mean, it's eat that frog, but at an
366. 00:22:37 exponential scale. If you want to make progress, though, that's what you do. You don't have to
367. 00:22:44 absolutely crush it this one day, and they don't have to think about it for another week.
368. 00:22:48 You consistently do something, and then before long, that compounds, and you've
369. 00:22:54 achieved your goal. Where have we read about the principle before, about the one percent,
370. 00:22:57 do get 1% better every day, and the next thing you know, you're dramatically better than you were
371. 00:23:04 before, instead of trying to make 100% gains in a week. That 1% rule, I think that actually comes
372. 00:23:11 from atomic habits with James Clear, but the compound effect is really what you're describing
373. 00:23:19 there, and that lots of people have written about. I think this is where your emphasis,
374. 00:23:27 and I don't mean to put that on you in like a negative way, but like your emphasis on habits,
375. 00:23:31 right? Because I agree, like I think habits are the building block of continual progress.
376. 00:23:35 It just fits into his number six, or number seven. Resolve to do something every single
377. 00:23:40 day of the movie tour to goal. Develop the habit, not necessarily of doing a specific thing every
378. 00:23:45 day, but doing something in that category every day. Oh, I'm going to do something in that category
379. 00:23:50 that achieves the goal. I'm going to do something in that category that achieves the goal. So it's
380. 00:23:54 almost like I'm seeing like layers to this where goals are one layer, habits are the more daily
381. 00:23:59 layer. If you think about it from your personal retreat type standpoint, there's my daily activities,
382. 00:24:05 those are my habits, then there are my weekly or sprint activities, those are my goals,
383. 00:24:10 and then there are different levels of goals, but I'm trying to think about that out loud.
384. 00:24:15 Well, you're actually getting into the next point here. So let's go to number two, plan
385. 00:24:20 everyday in advance, because he talks here about making your list the night before
386. 00:24:27 and the different types of lists that you should have. He mentions a master list, a monthly list,
387. 00:24:32 a weekly list, and a daily list. So I would take, I would redefine those a little bit,
388. 00:24:38 the master list, yeah. And then instead of monthly, I would say quarterly, weekly, and daily. That's
389. 00:24:43 really what the personal retreat is built off of is the quarterly, weekly, and the daily. But
390. 00:24:49 I think the important thing is the alignment there between those, those different things.
391. 00:24:53 Also, I have an action item from this section, which was kind of a throw away
392. 00:24:58 comment that he made, because this was really just about planning your day in advance. It's
393. 00:25:02 right in the title. But he mentions never complete something without adding it to your list,
394. 00:25:08 because humans are motivated by being able to check things off. I'm so guilty of this.
395. 00:25:16 And I want to, I want to, even if it, you know, I'm going to add it, and then five seconds later,
396. 00:25:21 I'm just going to check it off. I want to start, start doing that. I do it all the time, like,
397. 00:25:25 like, I write the thing down that I just did, and then I go check, and like, I feel good about the
398. 00:25:28 strike through that goes through it, and like, you know, the warm fuzzy. I have a question for you,
399. 00:25:32 though, because you might know this, I've not come across an application that helps you plan
400. 00:25:41 activities or actions in this way. I'm thinking about like OmniFocus. OmniFocus doesn't really do
401. 00:25:46 that. It's much more GTD focused. Like it is your life HQ is probably the closest one
402. 00:25:53 that gets to this, where you've got these bigger tasks, and then you move them into weeks,
403. 00:25:59 and then you move them into day. Is there a, is there a task app that organizes this way?
404. 00:26:07 Hmm. I don't know. I think the tasks wouldn't necessarily be on the monthly list. Maybe they
405. 00:26:15 would be on the weekly list, but the kind of the objectives are the things that you want to keep
406. 00:26:23 in mind. So those would be, in my opinion, for the quarterly goals or the personal retreat,
407. 00:26:28 you know, your quarterly list, the things that are on there are the big things that you're trying
408. 00:26:32 to make progress on. So for me, it's getting those email subscribers up to 20,000. I think that's
409. 00:26:43 what we talked about last time as the impossible goal for me. And where would you put that? Would
410. 00:26:47 you put that on the annual, the quarterly, or like, where would you put that? So that would be
411. 00:26:52 quarterly. Okay, quarterly. And then weekly would be something like publishing, you know, my big
412. 00:27:00 YouTube videos, right? And then daily would be publishing the shorts or whatever thing I could do
413. 00:27:07 in a day, which is going to move me in that direction. But the weekly stuff tends to be
414. 00:27:13 bigger. When I'm looking at my weekly list, it's things like write the newsletter. And there are
415. 00:27:18 a whole bunch of individual tasks that go into that. I've got to record the audio version. I've
416. 00:27:22 got to upload it to ghost. I've got to upload it to kid. I've got to get the screenshots. You know,
417. 00:27:27 all of those things can be done individually. So that's where you may break those out into
418. 00:27:33 daily tasks. But they're aligned with the larger tasks, which are aligned with the
419. 00:27:38 bigger outcomes, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think there's a there's an app or a tool for that
420. 00:27:44 that doesn't exist right now, or at least it doesn't exist in a way that allows you to package it
421. 00:27:48 cleanly from opening up the app. Like you have to work hard to figure out contexts and views and
422. 00:27:55 different things to do that. Well, the problem with doing that in an app is you have to clearly
423. 00:28:00 define what each one of the items is. And I think if you were to do that, it's possible you spend
424. 00:28:09 more time fiddling with your tasks and your subtasks than you really need. So for me, I've kind of
425. 00:28:15 pushed back against that where I just got to know, like, this is the thing that I'm supposed
426. 00:28:18 to be thinking about. This is the thing that I should be working on. And then I've got enough
427. 00:28:22 definition as to what actually needs to be done there, that I don't feel any sort of resistance
428. 00:28:27 from a lack of clarity when I sit down to work on it. But I also don't want it all scripted out
429. 00:28:32 for 15 minutes, you're going to do this for 13 minutes, you're going to do this, like that's
430. 00:28:35 where you can get to the, you can kind of over schedule this. But this is he mentions in this,
431. 00:28:41 this chapter, this tactic that 10 to 12 minutes planning your day will save you two hours,
432. 00:28:46 100 to 120 minutes in wasted time. And I think that's the, the key is figuring out the intention
433. 00:28:56 for how you want to go about your, your day, even if you don't have all of the details exactly
434. 00:29:02 figured out. All right, let's hit three. All right, you want to kick off three?
435. 00:29:08 Yeah, three is apply the 80 20 rule to everything. So for those of you who are less familiar with
436. 00:29:13 the 80 20 rules also called the Pareto principle. And essentially it says that 20% of your activities
437. 00:29:18 will count for 80% of your results. The way we use this in the engineering world is often like 20%
438. 00:29:24 of causes cause 80% of failures. That's the way we'll think about it from an engineering standpoint.
439. 00:29:29 And he applies this here in this chapter and he gives examples of it here in this chapter,
440. 00:29:34 but he applies it throughout the rest of the book as well. So he basically his art, his main
441. 00:29:39 argument here is that we will procrastinate on the top 10 or 20% of the items that will give us
442. 00:29:46 80ish percent of our success or 80% of the, you know, accomplishment that we're, that we're looking
443. 00:29:53 for. And the interesting thing he's, he doesn't talk about why as much. So like there's no like
444. 00:29:59 psychological analysis of that. I mean, maybe the best you could get was because they're harder
445. 00:30:05 or, or whatever it is, but he, he just kind of says like we don't, we don't concentrate on this. So
446. 00:30:09 that's the, just to this chapter is get rid of those low value activities and really just,
447. 00:30:15 whether you delegate them or whether you delete them or whether you just ignore them, but really
448. 00:30:20 focus on that 10 to 20% that cause 80% of the, of the return. Yeah, and I think this is a really
449. 00:30:27 important idea. And he kind of specifically addresses one of the things that is difficult
450. 00:30:37 about this maybe is that the most valuable tasks are often the hardest and the most complex. So
451. 00:30:42 if you don't spend the time thinking about them, that ambiguity means you're going to find something
452. 00:30:47 simpler, easier for you to do. And those small things tend to multiply. So
453. 00:30:54 if you know what the most important thing is, but you haven't clearly defined it, which is why I
454. 00:30:58 have a to clarify section on my task dashboard, then you'll just grab whatever is easy. And then
455. 00:31:05 by doing that, you open up, you know, oh, I could do this other thing that's easy. And then to get
456. 00:31:09 to end of the day, and you didn't take action on the things that are really valuable. So I like
457. 00:31:15 the 80 20 principle. I think you can take this actually a step further. So you can 80 20 the 80 20.
458. 00:31:21 And you really get clear on the one thing that's going to provide the most value. But he defines
459. 00:31:27 this really well. I mean, there are whole books written on 80 20 principle, but very great. I
460. 00:31:33 think there's a great summary in just a couple of pages. If you wanted to elaborate on this,
461. 00:31:37 right, he could have used the example of Buffett. We read about that in Charlie Munger's book about
462. 00:31:43 how Buffett will say like write down 25 things, get rid of the bottom 20, you know, so only keep
463. 00:31:49 the top five. And then from the top five, only work on the first one or whatever it is. Like,
464. 00:31:54 you know, it's that it's that sectorless, which is exactly what you just said is take the 20 take
465. 00:31:59 the 80 20 take that 20 and then do 80 20 on it again. And that's really what you should care about,
466. 00:32:04 which is which is awesome. I think it's a good good advice. All right, number four is consider
467. 00:32:10 the consequences. Dr. Edward Banfield from Harvard is a researcher that he quotes in this chapter,
468. 00:32:18 who had been did 40 years of research that showed long time perspective is the most accurate single
469. 00:32:23 predictor of upward social and economic mobility in America. Basically, if you think with the future
470. 00:32:31 in mind, you will be more successful. There's a couple of reasons for this. I think the big thing
471. 00:32:40 is you connect to the the why it creates that motivation motivation requires motive. He mentions
472. 00:32:46 more clearly you define the potential positive impact, the more motivated you will become. And
473. 00:32:52 really the goal is to have that future intent influence your present actions. He's got three
474. 00:33:00 questions for maximum productivity, which I think are pretty good. What are my highest value
475. 00:33:04 activities? What can I and only I do that if done well will make a real difference. And what is the
476. 00:33:13 most valuable use of my time right now? Can I interject? If you just asked the third one,
477. 00:33:21 like if you just asked the third one, like you talk about the 80/20 rule, you're in my mind,
478. 00:33:25 you're 80% of the way there. Like if I stopped teaching class, you know, got done with my classes,
479. 00:33:30 and I hit my office and I just went, what is the most valuable thing I could do with my time right
480. 00:33:35 now? And I took 10 seconds to reflect on that. And then I did the thing that came to my mind.
481. 00:33:41 I would have a significantly more productive day than I normally do because I hit my office
482. 00:33:46 and I go, man, I'm tired. And you know, I'm worn out before my next class, whatever. Like I don't
483. 00:33:51 think about what the next most valuable thing for me to do is and then I end up getting distracted
484. 00:33:55 and doing something silly. What a cool principle. Like what a cool principle.
485. 00:33:59 Yeah, I do like the three questions though, because I think for executives specifically,
486. 00:34:06 which is probably his target market, you have all these things that you quote unquote have to do.
487. 00:34:11 Right. So what are the highest value activities that brings your list down to still way more than
488. 00:34:16 you can possibly do today? Then you ask, what can what are the things that only I can do? Okay,
489. 00:34:21 well, that eliminates half of the things on the list. So now I've got a smaller list to work for
490. 00:34:26 him. Okay, so now what is the most valuable thing? That ultimately is where you want to get to.
491. 00:34:30 There's a principle in here he mentions do first things first and second things not at all.
492. 00:34:35 Exactly. I like, I like the law of forced efficiency. There's never enough time to do
493. 00:34:41 everything, but there's always enough time to do the most important things. And I think that's a
494. 00:34:44 really good framing of getting you out of that mindset of like, well, I don't have enough time
495. 00:34:49 to do it all. So I'm just not going to do anything or I'm going to like be really lazy about the
496. 00:34:53 things that I can do. I like the reframing of that. That's that's very valuable and powerful, I think.
497. 00:34:59 Me too. That's really good. All right. Number five is practice creative procrastination.
498. 00:35:05 This actually gets at something that I don't know if if you've read the book procrastinate
499. 00:35:13 on purpose by Rory Vaden. I haven't. Okay, so that was one before you joined the show,
500. 00:35:18 but that is basically this principle expanded into an entire book. And really it's just deciding
501. 00:35:25 what you're going to procrastinate on. So he hits on the main point there. Everybody procrastinates
502. 00:35:32 the difference between high and low performers is that they choose what they are going to procrastinate
503. 00:35:36 on instead of just giving in, which I think is really brilliant. So you want to continually
504. 00:35:41 review your life, find those low value activities that you can abandon. Those are the ones that you
505. 00:35:47 want to put off. And then you want to make sure that you do the most important stuff right away.
506. 00:35:53 Have you ever heard of the word posteriorities before? Because I've never seen the word posteriorities
507. 00:35:59 before, and I thought that was an impressive thing. So basically posteriorities are those things that
508. 00:36:04 you shouldn't do. They're the ones you should intentionally procrastinate on and get rid of
509. 00:36:09 if you can. And I just thought that was hilarious. I thought this chapter was great.
510. 00:36:13 Yeah, I'd never heard that word before, but I get what he's saying there.
511. 00:36:18 So yeah, interesting chapter. I'm not sure seems like these kind of go in a specific order. I'm not
512. 00:36:25 sure I would have slotted this one in at number five, but I think it's a good one. I was going to
513. 00:36:29 talk to you about that later. And maybe in silent raining, it's like they're connected.
514. 00:36:34 So he says that they're completing themselves, which they are. I agree. But they are definitely
515. 00:36:38 connected. You know, like, and if you are attuned while you're reading it, you're like, Oh, this ties
516. 00:36:44 into that last principle, or this ties into the one we talked about two principles ago. So
517. 00:36:49 there was, there's definitely thinking in, in these principles and how they relate to each other.
518. 00:36:54 He just doesn't go to the length of saying, like calling it out, I would say.
519. 00:36:59 Yeah, they do kind of stand alone as, you know, if he had a blog, these are individual blog posts,
520. 00:37:04 but there's definitely some backlinks here. Yeah. Can I do, can I do six? Because this is my least
521. 00:37:09 favorite chapter. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So this is my least favorite chapter. It's the ABC method.
522. 00:37:14 So he says use the ABC DE method continually. It's a priority setting technique where basically
523. 00:37:21 you have A items that are very important, something you must do. And then you can, if you have some
524. 00:37:26 items, you go A1, A2, A3, B items, defined as a task that you should do, but there are mild
525. 00:37:33 consequences, C items or tasks that are fine as something would be nice to do. But there are no
526. 00:37:37 consequences at all. D is tasked for something that can delegate to someone else. And then E is
527. 00:37:40 something that you should eliminate altogether. I'm not going to tell you, I don't think this
528. 00:37:44 is a good principle. I don't like the thought of doing this at all, Mike. Like, like, to actually
529. 00:37:51 go and do this. But I think he says in the beginning of this is like, this might be the
530. 00:37:54 most valuable or one of the most valuable things you can do with your, with your,
531. 00:37:59 your tasks and your actions. I just don't like this one at all. It feels wrong to me,
532. 00:38:05 even though I think it would be crazy effective. Well, that's the thing. I do think it would be
533. 00:38:09 crazy effective. And the ABC DE, I think at some point you want to drop the D's and the E's. But
534. 00:38:17 if you're thinking, I think the intention is someone who just, they, they have to pick up the slack
535. 00:38:26 for their team or their company, because they're the leader and no one else is doing the thing. So
536. 00:38:33 I got to do the thing. And so their, their task just keeps growing. And you have your list of 100
537. 00:38:40 things, because I've definitely been in that place and worked with people who are in that place.
538. 00:38:46 More recently. And so I've heard the excuse that I gave at one point, well, it's all got to get
539. 00:38:52 done. There's no way you're going to get it all done. So you have to, for some, for that person,
540. 00:38:59 if you tell them you're not going to get out this all done, they're going to like bristle and
541. 00:39:04 all of a sudden they're combative and what do you mean? So you have to give them something that
542. 00:39:09 they can use to approach that list. I think this is almost like a covert strategy to get them to
543. 00:39:16 accept the fact that you can't do all this. I still, I still don't like it. I still think
544. 00:39:20 I'm going to do it. But at the same time, I get, I get it. Yeah, I think, I think you're right. But
545. 00:39:26 the thing he's after, I think, is to figure out what is the most important task. Well,
546. 00:39:30 they're all most important tasks. They're all a priority. No, they can't all be a priority. So
547. 00:39:35 let's just do this exercise. Exactly. And I do think there is a potential that you have a list
548. 00:39:41 and you get done and you're like, well, there's still a whole bunch of A's on that list. And at
549. 00:39:43 that point, you still got to have a hard conversation and wrestle with the fact that you can't get
550. 00:39:47 all those done. But I think most normal people, you go through this exercise. Oh, well, this,
551. 00:39:52 or these two things, at least these are the ones that I should be focusing on as opposed to the
552. 00:39:56 20 things. So I wouldn't have thought about this until you just made that statement right there.
553. 00:39:59 And maybe my problem with this is everything's at A and a B. If it makes the list, everything's
554. 00:40:03 at A and a B. And that's that is that is fundamentally wrong. Like that statement right there is not
555. 00:40:09 true. But my brain says, if it goes on the list, it's an A or a B. And I don't want to come to the
556. 00:40:13 reality of it's not all A's and B's. Yeah, that's fair. All right, number seven focus on key result
557. 00:40:24 areas. Key result areas are, for example, management planning, organize for for management would be
558. 00:40:35 planning, organizing, staffing, delegating, supervising, measuring, reporting. He has some
559. 00:40:40 example, key result areas for sales, prospecting, building rapport and trust, identifying needs,
560. 00:40:45 presenting persuasively answering objections, closing the sale, getting resales and referrals.
561. 00:40:51 I think the way I would try to redefine this are like, what are the stages in the pipeline for you?
562. 00:41:01 So pipeline doesn't just mean sales pipeline, although that's probably where most people's
563. 00:41:09 minds will go. And that is a good example. How many people are at this stage, this stage, this
564. 00:41:14 stage? And the thing is, how do you get people to move from one stage to the next? When I was
565. 00:41:19 doing some operational consulting, when I just gone independent, I worked with people and identifying
566. 00:41:26 and what are the major stages in the customer lifecycle? Step one, they got to become aware
567. 00:41:33 of you. So how do they do that? What platform are you showing up at and creating content for?
568. 00:41:39 And then what's the action that you want to take to get them onto your email list? From there,
569. 00:41:43 you know, what are you doing to build trust with the individual? What is the thing that you want
570. 00:41:46 them to buy? You know, where they actually go from a lead to a customer? Once they're a customer,
571. 00:41:51 what does that journey look like? Are there, is there a ladder of products and services that you
572. 00:41:56 want to offer your ideal customer? So thinking through all that stuff, in terms of what is it
573. 00:42:03 that you do? I think I have a general idea of this, but I could definitely get more clear on it.
574. 00:42:12 Related to that, my I have an action item from this section, which is not, you know,
575. 00:42:16 build all that stuff out. It is to answer the question, what one skill if I developed and did it
576. 00:42:22 in an excellent fashion would have the greatest positive impact on my career?
577. 00:42:27 Mike, you're speaking my language here because, like I said, chapter, chapter six was my least
578. 00:42:32 favorite. Chapter seven might be my favorite. And the reason why is because why am I on the payroll?
579. 00:42:38 Now, granted, that's very like business focused. But like, why am I here? Like, why am I the person
580. 00:42:44 who needs to do this thing? And if you can answer that question, I mean, like, it gives you so much
581. 00:42:50 clarity. So we talk about tying back into these other concepts. It gives you so much clarity on
582. 00:42:54 what should I be doing right now with my time? How do I prioritize things? What do I rate an A? What
583. 00:42:58 do I rate a B? What do I rate a C? But if you don't know the answer to that question, like, why am I
584. 00:43:02 here? Why am I on the payroll? Like, why is it? Why do they care about me? And then the other piece
585. 00:43:07 of that you get down into the what's the one skill that if I did it in excellent fashion,
586. 00:43:11 one of the greatest positive impact? Like, if you just thought about that, the clarity that that
587. 00:43:15 brings, you know, like, oh, my gosh, but we don't often do that, we allow ourselves to be distracted.
588. 00:43:21 But if you did that, and you said, okay, in even if it's not like the main priority, but like in my
589. 00:43:26 free time, in my spare time, in that little extra time, I'm going to develop that skill,
590. 00:43:30 I'm going to develop that skill. Man, oh, man, like, how, how, how quickly you'd advance or how
591. 00:43:36 much progress you'd make. I just, this chapter just killed it. Like, I thought this chapter was
592. 00:43:41 amazing. It's so good. And kind of the, the thing that is implicit here is that everything is
593. 00:43:47 figureoutable. If you're curious, and you really want to learn, which I think is absolutely true.
594. 00:43:52 And I think this chapter is the one where he said, basically, go ask everybody,
595. 00:43:56 right? Like, so he's like, okay, hey, hey, Mike, what's the once go I need to develop for
596. 00:44:00 the bookworm podcast? Hey, audience, what's the once go I need to develop for the bookworm pod,
597. 00:44:03 you know, like, go out and actually like crowdsource that and let them tell you, he's like,
598. 00:44:07 people will gladly tell you, your boss will tell you, your boss's boss will tell you, right? Like,
599. 00:44:11 and, and it just takes the barrier from like, oh, that's difficult. Like, I'm going to have to,
600. 00:44:16 like, you know, I don't know how to do that. No, no, just let other people tell you and then think
601. 00:44:19 about it. You're, you know, you're a smart person. I just, I loved it. Like, you can hear it in my
602. 00:44:24 voice. Like, I just love this chapter. All right, the next one is the apply the law of three.
603. 00:44:33 And the law of three says that three of your core tasks contain most of the value you contribute
604. 00:44:39 to your business or organization, your rewards, both financial and emotional will always be in
605. 00:44:45 direct proportion to the value of your contributions. So it's worth figuring out what are the three
606. 00:44:50 most important goals in your life right now. There's a lot of ways, I think that you could
607. 00:44:56 apply this. So one of the obvious ones is if there are three things that contain most of the value
608. 00:45:03 pick three things to work on every day and everything else is a distraction. There's a,
609. 00:45:08 there's a bunch of tangential stuff in here though. Like he has a, a bunch of questions that you can,
610. 00:45:14 can ask kind of like an informal survey slash assessment. And he set actually says in there,
611. 00:45:21 whatever your initial response is, go with that. You'll be surprised by the accuracy of your
612. 00:45:25 answers when you force yourself to answer in 30 seconds or less. I like that forcing function.
613. 00:45:31 He also mentions that time management is a means to an end, which for a book on time management
614. 00:45:39 to frame it that way feels refreshing in my opinion. He's basically saying, so we're talking
615. 00:45:47 about time management, but this really isn't the most important thing. The most important thing is
616. 00:45:50 your relationships and 85, 85% of your happiness is going to come from relationships. So just like,
617. 00:45:55 do what you got to do at work and then do what you want to do at home. Mike, I live this guy's
618. 00:46:01 rule right here. His rule is it's the quality of time at work that counts and the quantity of time
619. 00:46:07 that home that matters. And like, I would have never been able to express this, but like, I,
620. 00:46:12 I try to live this. It's like, when I'm at work, it's go time. Like we're, we're putting in quality
621. 00:46:18 time from the time I hit the, the floor to the time I leave or the time I leave the car to the
622. 00:46:22 time I hit the car again. And it's because I want to get home to be with my family. I love you all.
623. 00:46:29 I love my job. I don't like, I'm not, you know, it's not a matter of me trying to rush through
624. 00:46:32 things. It's a matter of me wanting to be the focus I can be so I can at home with my family.
625. 00:46:37 And the reason why this, this resonates is because I think it's so true. What does work care about?
626. 00:46:43 Work cares about the results. That's what they're measuring. That's what they care about. What
627. 00:46:48 is your family care about? Your family actually doesn't care about the results nearly as much as
628. 00:46:52 they care about this. The fact that you're there and you're hanging out and you're spending time.
629. 00:46:56 Now, results matter at some point there. But like, if you don't do the best job coaching soccer
630. 00:47:02 tonight, what are your kids going to remember? Are they going to remember that you didn't do
631. 00:47:05 the best job coaching soccer tonight or that you were their coach for the season? Like,
632. 00:47:08 they're going to remember that you were their coach. Like, it's, it's just so,
633. 00:47:13 oh, it's just so good. Like, I can't even explain it. It's just so good. Yeah, it is a, it is a, I
634. 00:47:19 definitely like that, that quote. And I put a little key emoji next to it, which is, you know, this is
635. 00:47:24 something that, that is important. And my action item from this section is to work all the time
636. 00:47:31 that you work. Yes. Yes. Because I don't have the place that I can go to do the work. I do have
637. 00:47:38 the co-working space and I've toyed around with that. But I can't record there. And there's so
638. 00:47:43 much of my work that involves me recording podcasts or videos or showing up for calls.
639. 00:47:51 And just the variables of, is there going to be noise downtown outside the window,
640. 00:47:56 you know, when I'm, when I'm there or are people going to be loud in the common space right outside
641. 00:48:01 my door, I can't deal with that. You know, so I have a quiet place I can close the door here. But
642. 00:48:08 also the minute that I open it, my family is right there. Most of the days. So there are plenty of
643. 00:48:15 opportunities for distraction if I allow them. But if I'm real clear on what my top priority is,
644. 00:48:23 with the main thing that I'm trying to get done in a day, then I feel like I should be able to
645. 00:48:28 just focus on that, get it done. And then, you know, because it's based on what I get done,
646. 00:48:33 the quicker I get my work done, the quicker I don't have to worry about it. And there's nothing
647. 00:48:39 to say that I can't be done with work by 1 p.m. and then just hang out with my family in the
648. 00:48:44 afternoon. The only thing that's preventing me from doing that is me. Yep. And one of the things
649. 00:48:50 I want to make sure we state here is he doesn't go into this. But I think the things we've read
650. 00:48:54 about in other places are the things we've thought about in other places. So you think about like a
651. 00:48:57 Pomodoro timer. If you do a 45 15 Pomodoro timer, that doesn't mean that that 15 minutes is wasted
652. 00:49:05 time. No, what that's letting you do is that's letting your reset that way the 45 minutes is
653. 00:49:10 focused time. Or it doesn't mean that the lunch outside in the sunshine for 30 minutes is wasted
654. 00:49:17 time. That's that's allowing you to be productive for when you're planning that productive time.
655. 00:49:22 It's more just like, okay, if I'm going to stand at the coffee machine or the water cooler or whatever
656. 00:49:27 you want to say and talk to my colleagues for 45 minutes, that's probably not the most effective
657. 00:49:33 use of my time. If I want to get home to my family and spend quality time with my family,
658. 00:49:38 like, you know, and I just, I think this is a really solid advice and solid, you know, role to follow.
659. 00:49:46 Yep, 100% agree. All right, the next one, number nine, prepare thoroughly before you begin.
660. 00:49:55 This is basically about preparing your environment before you sit down to start to work. So he talks
661. 00:50:03 about cleaning up your your desk and eliminating the friction so that, you know, you've got one
662. 00:50:09 thing that you're working on at a time. I don't have an action item from this chapter, but one of
663. 00:50:14 the things that stood out to me is assuming the body language of a high performer. I tend to
664. 00:50:18 slouch a lot. And I never thought that that was a big deal. I'm going to try not to do that as much
665. 00:50:26 anymore. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, that makes total sense. I've thought about that with
666. 00:50:31 my dress. So my version of that is the dress. It's like, oh, it doesn't matter what I wear. I can
667. 00:50:34 wear a hat. I can wear a hoodie, you know, yada yada. And then I think about like, no, actually,
668. 00:50:39 it matters when you walk into a room when the students are looking at you and you're in like a
669. 00:50:42 hoodie versus a button down shirt. So but my action item, my first action item out of the book
670. 00:50:48 comes out of this one is basically any flat space or any flat surface becomes a place for me to pile
671. 00:50:55 things. And what I'll tell you, Mike, is my work surfaces are chaos, like they're absolute chaos.
672. 00:51:02 And I need to get that organized because I think I would feel a lot better walking in.
673. 00:51:07 And I wouldn't feel as just crazy. So I mean, that's one of mine is get your work spaces organized
674. 00:51:13 that way you can prepare well. I literally just just cleaned my whole office and did that exact
675. 00:51:19 thing. The closet is still a mess. But my desks are are clean, well, cleanish. The YouTube desk
676. 00:51:27 here is probably the message is just because there's a bunch of stuff on it. But like I have a
677. 00:51:33 notepad where I'm taking notes with my pen as we're going through here, just so that you don't
678. 00:51:39 hear me clicking on the keyboard all the time. All the ink and stuff is over there. But my main
679. 00:51:47 desk, which is behind the camera, that's where I do most of the writing, that one is very clean.
680. 00:51:54 It's got my my keyboard. And then the rest of it is blank. And I actually have the top down camera.
681. 00:51:59 So I can grab my notepad, just like doodle something if I wanted a top down camera view.
682. 00:52:04 And having everything clean so that I can actually just walk in and use any of the areas of my office
683. 00:52:13 has eliminated a lot of friction. Yeah, I need to do that. That's that's that's an action item
684. 00:52:17 for me for sure. All right. Let's see. The next one is number 10. If I recall, correct. Yeah, you
685. 00:52:27 want me to take it is. Yeah, go for it. Okay, so this one's take one barrel to time. It took me a
686. 00:52:32 little while to figure out why it was titled take one barrel at a time. He gives an example of what
687. 00:52:37 is it running like this this major race? And essentially, the way you know where to go is they
688. 00:52:42 put like an oil barrel every like half mile or whatever it is. And all you're doing is looking for
689. 00:52:47 the it was every five kilometers. Is that what it was? So every 3.1 miles, which that that clicked
690. 00:52:53 for me then because he's talking I think about like running through the desert. Yeah, yeah. And so
691. 00:52:58 you can barely see the next one that you got to run towards. But yeah, that's all you need is just
692. 00:53:05 that's the direction, you know, that the compass we're going that way. Yeah, so so it took me a while
693. 00:53:11 to get that like to understand like, wait, why did he call it one oil barrel at a time? And then
694. 00:53:15 I understood, right? Like what he was meaning at. But basically saying get rid of that huge,
695. 00:53:21 the huge task. And another way I would word this is get rid of the project, stop thinking about it
696. 00:53:25 as a project and start start thinking about it as single actions. You know, something about the
697. 00:53:30 huge tasks are thinking about a single actions and basically just do the next single action,
698. 00:53:34 the next single action, the next single action. And you'll you'll notice that over time,
699. 00:53:39 those single actions come together and the project gets done or the big milestone is achieved or
700. 00:53:44 whatever it is. And his his example here that I mean, just caught me, you know, off guard and was so
701. 00:53:50 appropriate is health and fitness are accomplished by eating a little less and exercising a little more
702. 00:53:56 day after day, month after month. And it's like, it's so true. Like if you if you read the research,
703. 00:54:01 you do you know, whatever it is, like, yeah, these fad diets, there's all the stuff. But really what
704. 00:54:04 you do is just eat a little bit less than you did the night the day before. And you're going to be
705. 00:54:09 fine. Exercise a little bit more than you did the day before. And you're going to be fine. And that's
706. 00:54:13 what's so hard. Like that is what's so hard about it is the consistency aspect of it.
707. 00:54:18 Yeah, it's simple, but not easy. And the major point, I agree that take a one oil barrel at a time
708. 00:54:24 that feels a little bit clumsy, maybe for most people, especially because you need the story in
709. 00:54:30 order for that to make sense. Yep. But the main point is that you don't need to get all the way
710. 00:54:37 to the goal you just need to get as far as you can see. So focus on that single action that you
711. 00:54:42 can take. And then he says that you can accomplish extraordinary things by just focusing on the
712. 00:54:47 next action. And I agree with that as long as you're clear on the overall direction that you're
713. 00:54:52 trying to go. All right. Number 11, we finally talk about habits. Actually, he talked about habits
714. 00:55:00 in the beginning to, I think, in the introduction, but form new habits become a new person. And
715. 00:55:11 really it's about habit formation, but not just getting rid of old habits, but replacing them
716. 00:55:16 with new habits. And then he's got 12 steps to habit formation. Identify your desire, believe in
717. 00:55:21 yourself, write it down, make a list of three or more benefits, analyze your starting point,
718. 00:55:26 set a deadline, make a list of all your obstacles, identify any necessary information,
719. 00:55:31 make a list of all the involved parties, make a plan and get started, practice visualization,
720. 00:55:35 decide not to quit. That feels overly complicated. But I get why he does that. And I think that for
721. 00:55:45 the intended audience, maybe all those additional steps, there's a good chance one of those
722. 00:55:51 addresses a specific pushback or concern that they may have. I don't think if you're trying to
723. 00:56:00 change your habits, that this is the book you read. There's lots of better ones, but I agree.
724. 00:56:05 There is one specific thing in this chapter that I really liked. And that is the just for today
725. 00:56:11 mantra, he says that you can do just about anything new and different if it is just for
726. 00:56:16 one day. And so if you find yourself procrastinating, because that's really the topic of the book,
727. 00:56:21 right, overcoming that procrastination and doing the things that you know you should be doing,
728. 00:56:27 no, you need to do, but you just have trouble following through and doing it, you can kind
729. 00:56:33 of trick yourself if you say, Oh, I'm just going to do it, you know, for this short period of time,
730. 00:56:37 I'm just going to do it this once. I just have to commit to doing it this once. I don't have to
731. 00:56:40 commit to doing it every day for the rest of my life. And then pretty soon, you know, you've got
732. 00:56:44 enough momentum that you are doing it every day for the rest of your life.
733. 00:56:48 No, I agree with you. I think I think running the 12 for everything would be
734. 00:56:53 demotivating to me. But I think for the big ones, you know, there's things that I really want to
735. 00:57:00 get rid of an old habit and replace it with a new better habit. I think this would be really,
736. 00:57:07 really good. I think doing essentially a negative version of this too, would be would be valuable.
737. 00:57:13 So it's like, I have a bad habit that I'm doing. And thinking about these, I would have to think
738. 00:57:17 about it more in terms of how I would talk about them. But thinking about the negative consequences
739. 00:57:21 of that habit or what caused that habit or what's allowing it to continue and running down through
740. 00:57:27 this from like the reverse side of this as well would be would be interesting too. So overall,
741. 00:57:32 I'm good with it. But I would only do this on like the really big habit changes that I wanted to make.
742. 00:57:36 Yeah, absolutely. All right. The next one, number 12, upgrade your key skills.
743. 00:57:47 I think that the title is maybe a little bit misleading. But the key idea here is that a
744. 00:57:56 major reason for procrastination is a feeling of inadequacy. So you should constantly be striving
745. 00:58:03 to get better at something, the better you are at something, the more energy and enthusiasm you
746. 00:58:08 have, the easier it is to overcome procrastination, continuous learning is the minimum requirement
747. 00:58:13 for success in any field. Everything is learnable. And then he gives three steps to mastery, which
748. 00:58:19 I actually, so I recall reading these before, but they hit me a little bit different, I guess,
749. 00:58:28 when I read them this time, read in your field for at least one hour every day. I don't have an
750. 00:58:33 action I'm associated with that. But I do want to start reading more about personal knowledge
751. 00:58:41 management in particular. So it's not necessarily books. But it's spending time on social media,
752. 00:58:48 probably linked in YouTube, watching other people's videos and seeing the other stuff that people
753. 00:58:52 are making, what they're talking about, and joining in the conversation, not just going into my
754. 00:58:57 focus cave and making stuff. The second one, take every course in seminar available on the key
755. 00:59:02 skills that can help you. I've been doing this. I was gonna say, I feel like you're pretty good
756. 00:59:06 on this one. Yeah. Yeah, anytime it's like, Oh, I don't know how to do that. Well, I'll figure out
757. 00:59:12 something, some some program. I probably do too much of this, to be honest. But I think this is
758. 00:59:21 this this part encouraged me that I'm approaching this at least the right way and then listen to
759. 00:59:26 audio programs in your your car was the last thing that he mentioned. I do have a bunch of audio
760. 00:59:30 programs. I guess the audio programs, that's maybe a little bit different now for me because it's not
761. 00:59:40 like courses or teaching tapes. It's really just like audio books. Podcasts to a certain degree,
762. 00:59:49 although I think a lot of podcasts are merely entertainment. Like, that's fine. If you don't
763. 00:59:55 have to just be productive and accomplish things all the time, but there's a spectrum and with all
764. 01:00:03 the information that you consume, whether it is, you know, purely entertaining, or it is actually
765. 01:00:08 useful. And there's definitely things that are more useful than others, and they're still fun for
766. 01:00:14 me. So I don't know, I want to think through my, my audio diet, I guess, a little bit more, but
767. 01:00:22 that's that's the key is to continuously be developing these these skills. And I do think that there is
768. 01:00:31 that this is this is 100% true. If you develop the skills, then eventually you will be compensated
769. 01:00:38 appropriately by the value that you bring to the marketplace. So if you become more valuable,
770. 01:00:42 you can make more money. You can live life on your terms. Yeah, I don't have much to add on this
771. 01:00:48 chapter other than the fact that, you know, he ties this to the key results areas, which I think
772. 01:00:53 is important, right? If you've identified your key results in areas, you've identified your areas
773. 01:00:56 where you had the most value. And those are the skills you're developing. I think it's a vicious
774. 01:01:02 cycle in a positive way, right? Like not in a bad way, but it's like a virtuous cycle, I guess,
775. 01:01:06 it's a virtuous cycle that will increase, you know, where you're at and the value that you're able to
776. 01:01:12 add in the future. Yep. Alright, next one, 13 identify your key constraints. I like this one a lot.
777. 01:01:24 The basic idea is that there's always a bottleneck between where you are today and any goal you want
778. 01:01:32 to accomplish is one major constraint. So it's worth thinking about what is holding you back,
779. 01:01:41 but then he directly addresses the follow up, which is that once you eliminate that constraint,
780. 01:01:50 there is another one that will appear. And I think that's where people don't necessarily
781. 01:01:55 describe that part of it all that often. And so if you keep running into roadblocks, you can quickly
782. 01:02:05 feel discouraged. So it's important to know, I think that behind every constraint or chokepoint,
783. 01:02:11 you're going to find another one. I want I have an action item from this one of identifying the
784. 01:02:17 limiting factor in my business. I think I could answer this maybe right now on the surface level,
785. 01:02:24 being like the number of email subscribers, but I think there's maybe multiple limiting factors.
786. 01:02:30 And I want to think a little bit further to where, you know, once I get to 20,000 email subscribers,
787. 01:02:35 what's the next limiting factor from from there? And hopefully I'll have some some things to share
788. 01:02:43 next time we record this. Yeah, I like that he has a section here in personal accountability.
789. 01:02:50 That basically is what is it in me that's holding me back in except responsibility? He says you need
790. 01:02:55 to have courage, but at the same time, it there's probably something internal that's holding you back
791. 01:02:59 from from this or that's acting as a constraint. And then I really love the quote that he gives
792. 01:03:05 in this chapter. For every problem under their son, there is a solution. There is a solution or
793. 01:03:10 there is none. If there is one, go find it. If there is none, never mind it. And I think I just
794. 01:03:15 think it's really, really clever. It's like, Oh, yeah, like there probably is a solution. And what's
795. 01:03:20 holding you back from going to, you know, to stop that to fix that, whatever it might be. Is it laziness?
796. 01:03:27 Is it a lack of understanding? Is it, you know, not being willing to hire somebody to take care
797. 01:03:32 of that? So I think though you need the clarity of understanding what the constraints are. And
798. 01:03:37 this is where like kind of these ideas tie together. Okay, you know, you figured out what the constraint
799. 01:03:42 is now go address it, go do what you need to do to address it. And if it's really that important,
800. 01:03:48 focus your energy on fixing that thing right now, don't let it fester, don't let it sit there,
801. 01:03:54 fix it, fix it right now. So I like, I like this chapter a lot to thinking about constraints to
802. 01:03:59 to upward mobility. Yeah, it's an important one. All right, the next chapter is 14, put the pressure
803. 01:04:09 on yourself. And really, it's about self direction, I guess, mentions a statistic that only about
804. 01:04:20 2% of people can actually work with a supervision. I wonder if that is still accurate, but I would
805. 01:04:28 wager that it is talks about how you increase yourself esteem whenever you go beyond the point
806. 01:04:34 where the average person would normally quit. And I've been thinking about this a lot lately.
807. 01:04:41 I mean, I mentioned, was it the pro show was talking about the YouTube stuff and creating
808. 01:04:48 shorts every day, maybe that was yeah. So that that's something that I was challenged by Doc Rock
809. 01:04:55 to do on one of the live calls that I attended with him. And I committed on the call, he's like,
810. 01:05:01 yeah, we're gonna we're gonna do this. And I don't know if anybody else followed through,
811. 01:05:04 but I was like, okay, I admit, I committed to doing this, I'm gonna figure out a way to do this.
812. 01:05:10 I'm recognizing that there are things in my creator business where if I take that approach
813. 01:05:16 that naturally elevates me above a bunch of other people, I need to figure out what that looks like
814. 01:05:23 for LinkedIn, that's gonna be my text based platform of choice. And it's scary to think about, well,
815. 01:05:32 I'm gonna show up and create something for LinkedIn every day. But I actually have
816. 01:05:38 committed to doing that also for the month of September for you. And every time you get past
817. 01:05:45 one of those points, and you figure something out, I feel like you do you do leave a changed,
818. 01:05:53 better person, whether it's, you know, you've got a system now which is going to allow you to do this.
819. 01:05:58 I think you probably can over commit also. So you got to be careful with with that. But kind of
820. 01:06:05 strategically choosing these challenges, which are going to force you to change the way that
821. 01:06:10 you do things can be a good way to grow. Yeah, I'm mixed on this chapter. So there's parts of this
822. 01:06:17 that I like, there's parts of it that I don't. Examples with that would be he has a Thomas Edison
823. 01:06:22 quote in here that basically if you if you apply your physical and mental energy to one
824. 01:06:28 problem incessantly without growing weary, then you'll be successful. I like that idea. Like,
825. 01:06:33 can I apply my physical and mental energy to that one most important thing that I've already
826. 01:06:37 determined is the clarity or is my key results area or whatever it might be. He then makes a
827. 01:06:42 statement though towards the end of the chapter, he says you want to have the reputation that
828. 01:06:46 if people want something then quickly and well, it should be given to you. I don't I don't want
829. 01:06:51 that like there are times when I really, really don't want that situation is if it's in my wheelhouse,
830. 01:06:57 sure, right? If it's in my key area or if in the area that I'm passionate about, yes, like if you
831. 01:07:02 want it done quickly and well, kind of mean, but where this becomes a problem is people will abuse
832. 01:07:07 this. Like they will use this in a way that is not healthy to you. And then you don't have a ton
833. 01:07:13 of control over that. Now, will you make friends this way? Sure. Like if your boss comes to you with
834. 01:07:19 two days notice and is like, we need this 70 page report done in two days and you can turn that
835. 01:07:25 around. You'll probably make a friend with your boss, but you also might enable your boss to then
836. 01:07:30 only give you two days the next time that that needs to happen. And that that's a problem. So
837. 01:07:35 I'm mixed on this chapter. I do agree that putting the pressure on yourself matters. But I think
838. 01:07:39 that putting the pressure on yourself for me looks more of like setting ambitious goals or
839. 01:07:44 tying back to the science of scaling setting those impossible goals with those impossible
840. 01:07:48 deadlines and saying do this, Corey, like step up and get this done. That's where putting the
841. 01:07:53 pressure on yourself means more to me. I think there's a difference between putting the pressure
842. 01:07:57 on yourself and meeting the expectations that someone else puts on. So yeah, I think when he's
843. 01:08:08 talking about putting the pressure on yourself, it's indirect alignment with the things that are
844. 01:08:11 going to create the ideal future that you've identified for yourself and you're not just doing
845. 01:08:19 what somebody has asked you to do. I think that's an important distinction. All right,
846. 01:08:25 the next one number 15, motivate yourself into action. This is an interesting chapter,
847. 01:08:32 which is basically about optimism. To perform at your best, he says you must become your own
848. 01:08:37 personal cheerleader. Most of your emotions are determined by how you talk to yourself.
849. 01:08:42 He gets into refusing to complain about your problems. And even if someone if someone asks
850. 01:08:49 and says, you know, how are you feeling today? Even if you feel like garbage, you're going to say,
851. 01:08:53 I feel great. And I, I struggle with this one. Okay. On the one hand, I think what he's saying is
852. 01:09:03 absolutely correct. There is power in your words. And you don't want to just let your future be
853. 01:09:12 determined by a temporary constraint, right? Especially if it's, if it's linked to something
854. 01:09:20 so fickle as how you feel. Like you can't necessarily trust your feelings. I also,
855. 01:09:28 I also don't know what to do with that, though, in terms of like, you don't want to just ignore
856. 01:09:33 that stuff. Like, how do you actually deal with it positively? I don't know exactly what that
857. 01:09:43 means. But I do have an action item out of this chapter to become an optimist.
858. 01:09:46 Okay. All right. That's, that's good. That's good. I don't know exactly what that means. He mentions
859. 01:09:51 optimism for special behaviors, though. So maybe this is, you know, my, my action plan here. They
860. 01:09:57 look for the good in every situation. They always seek the valuable lesson in every setback or
861. 01:10:01 difficulty. They always look for the solution to the problem. They think and talk continuously
862. 01:10:04 about their goals. So it's really not just, if I were to summarize this, you're not really focused
863. 01:10:10 on where you are or what you're going through, you're focused on where you're going.
864. 01:10:15 I think the action item I would give to you on this one, whether you, I mean, you didn't
865. 01:10:18 ask for it, but here you go. It would be like, ask yourself the question, what would the optimist
866. 01:10:23 think in the situation? That's great. So something happens to you and you go, what would the optimist
867. 01:10:27 think in the situation? Oh, well, at least I learned a ton. But what would the optimist think
868. 01:10:31 in the situation? Oh, well, you know, I made a good friend, you know, like, in that terrible
869. 01:10:36 situation, I at least made a good friend, right? Like, you know, something along, along those lines.
870. 01:10:40 So what would the optimist think in this? Yeah, I'm going to add that to my action item. I like that.
871. 01:10:46 Yeah, I mean, I don't I don't have a ton, ton out of this one. Basically, I agree that, you know,
872. 01:10:52 emotions are drive a lot of this and we need to be able to have self control within our emotions
873. 01:10:58 and that that'll help us. And, you know, the positive mental orientation is better than a
874. 01:11:06 negative one. You know, I think anybody who's ever had a depressive depressive state can tell
875. 01:11:12 you that that's, you know, that's valid at face value. So yeah, nothing, nothing major in this one.
876. 01:11:19 All right, the next one is make technology work for you. Technology can be your best friend or
877. 01:11:26 your worst enemy. And really you should treat your technology like a servant, not a master.
878. 01:11:33 I think that's the gist of this one. He does talk about detaching from it on a regular basis,
879. 01:11:38 which I think is important. But there's nothing groundbreaking here for me, because I've already
880. 01:11:44 have my device modes and things optimized for what I want to be doing when I pick up the devices and
881. 01:11:50 things like that. So I would agree we can we can fly through this one. Basically, it's, you know,
882. 01:11:54 don't be distracted by your technology and have it do things for you. I think interesting if I'm
883. 01:11:59 remembering correctly, this is where he mentioned AI. I can't remember if this is if this is the
884. 01:12:04 area where this is the one where AI would fit. I don't have any notes on that though. So I can't
885. 01:12:08 remember. I don't either. He mentioned AI once though. That's how I that's how I was like, oh,
886. 01:12:11 yeah, this is the updated version because he wouldn't have said AI in, you know, older older
887. 01:12:16 versions of this book. But just I agree with this, like, you know, like have technology if your
888. 01:12:22 technology isn't working for you, you're probably working for it. And that's a that's a good way for
889. 01:12:26 you to think about life. Yep. All right. So the next one is focus your attention. And this is
890. 01:12:37 really about just focus on the thing that matters. He talks about multitasking, how it's a myth,
891. 01:12:43 it's really task shifting was nice to hear him talk about that. And then responding to the
892. 01:12:48 notifications gives your brain that hit a dopamine, but it really doesn't make you more productive.
893. 01:12:53 He tells you to check your email only twice per day, which I think is great advice.
894. 01:12:57 And then he has a list here of how to double your productivity. And this sounds a little bit
895. 01:13:02 sensational, but I think it's probably accurate. What I plan each day and sorry, go ahead.
896. 01:13:07 No, go ahead. Tell them the plan and then I'll make my statement.
897. 01:13:10 Okay. So planning, stay in advance, work nonstop for 90 minutes, give yourself a 15 minute break
898. 01:13:15 and repeat. I think that's actually a pretty good way to double your productivity.
899. 01:13:19 What I love is he might be one of the first people that is actually given an appropriate
900. 01:13:24 amount of time for the working session. Most people are like, Oh, 20 minutes on, you know,
901. 01:13:29 25 minutes on, five minutes off, or 50 minutes on, 10 minutes off. And it's like, no, like,
902. 01:13:34 that's just too short, right? Like, it's just too short. We got to go longer than that. So he
903. 01:13:38 actually hits it. He says 90 minutes. And I'm like, yeah, 90 minutes is an appropriate amount
904. 01:13:42 of time you get in, you get into flow, you're doing it, you get tired at about 80 minutes.
905. 01:13:48 So then when 90 rolls around, you've wrapped up, whatever you're doing, like, I'm like, yeah,
906. 01:13:51 like, so that was my, my biggest takeaway is I was like, Brian Tracy, you validated me
907. 01:13:56 in terms of the longer working window on those focus time, focus time and attention thing.
908. 01:14:02 I'm kind of tired of being told, you know, not to check my email and, you know, like all the
909. 01:14:07 dopamine stuff. I agree with it. I think it's absolutely right. Yeah, just kind of old story at this point.
910. 01:14:13 Yeah. Well, the, the shorter, shorter, uh, durations, that's kind of the, the idea behind the Pomodoro
911. 01:14:20 method. But I agree that that's one of the things, especially high achievers struggle with is you
912. 01:14:27 mean I have to stop after 25 minutes or 30 minutes or whatever. Um, and if you're in flow and you
913. 01:14:35 actually want to be productive, like you keep going. Exactly. 90 minutes feels, feels, uh, feels
914. 01:14:40 accurate. Now I don't know how actually applicable that is because your day is going to get
915. 01:14:45 chopped up with meetings and things like that. But that would be the ideal version for sure.
916. 01:14:51 All right. The next one, slice and dice the task. And there's two methods that he talks about here
917. 01:14:57 for basically breaking down bigger things, the salami method and then the Swiss cheese method.
918. 01:15:04 I love it. I love it. I absolutely love it.
919. 01:15:07 Yeah. So this, the salami method, you're slicing off a very thin slice of the, the thing. That's
920. 01:15:12 what you're going to, uh, to work on. And then Swiss cheese is where you're poking holes in
921. 01:15:17 them with small time increments. I think these are helpful metaphors. Maybe if you find yourself
922. 01:15:23 procrastinating on something big that you need to do, I don't think I will use either of these.
923. 01:15:29 You said you love it. So are you planning on doing it? I just love the metaphor.
924. 01:15:32 Like I do. I absolutely love the, the, the story of the picture. But no, I'm probably not going to,
925. 01:15:38 the one I would use more is the Swiss cheese one where, okay, it's big. Like I'm just going
926. 01:15:42 to try to like knock off a little bit of a little piece of this. Now I actually think it's much more,
927. 01:15:49 better picture is like knocking off the edge as opposed to slicing a hole through it. But you
928. 01:15:53 know, whatever, yeah, teach their end. I think I agree with that. But yeah, you get the, you get
929. 01:16:00 the point. And, um, this is, I think where we're starting to see some diminishing returns in terms
930. 01:16:05 of the value. Well, ideas that he's presenting. Well, and I think the, the bigger idea out of this
931. 01:16:11 one and the, and the one that, that means more is this urge to completion or this compulsion to
932. 01:16:15 closure, uh, concept that he brings into here where, and I can tell you that from personal
933. 01:16:20 experience, this is real. The, the, um, activation energy for me to get started on a task can be
934. 01:16:27 really, really high. But if I pick up the smallest little piece of that, then I'm like, okay, that
935. 01:16:31 was fun. And then I just keep going. And next thing I know I've got five or 10 different things
936. 01:16:35 knocked off of that big, huge task. I think that is the, that's the bigger takeaway for me. It's not
937. 01:16:40 the specific methods in this, in this section. Yeah, agreed. All right. The next one is to create
938. 01:16:49 large chunks of time, which you have done, if you are already using his advice to double your
939. 01:16:56 productivity, double thums, a pretty big chunk of time, double thumbs up on this one. Yeah. So
940. 01:17:03 essentially he talks about scheduling blocks of time for things that are important. So time
941. 01:17:07 blocking for the win. He mentions that you should use a planner and you should make every minute
942. 01:17:12 count, which I completely agree with. I got a planner if you want to do that. I, I completely
943. 01:17:18 agree with this and we can move on to 20. I'm Corey Ixton and I approve this message. Yeah,
944. 01:17:23 exactly. I'll stay up the screen. I'll take, I'll take 20. So just to give you a break. So 20 is
945. 01:17:31 develop a sense of urgency. Basically that he makes the statement that high performing men and women
946. 01:17:37 are action oriented. So he gets into this idea of, you know, being action oriented or, or doing the
947. 01:17:44 thing now. It talks about the momentum principle of success that although it may take a tremendous
948. 01:17:50 amount of energy to overcome inertia and get started, but it takes less energy to keep going. So that's
949. 01:17:54 a, that's a fairly kind of understandable concept. And you want to be, again, he, he doubles down on
950. 01:18:00 this idea that you want to be the kind of person who does good work and does it efficiently or does
951. 01:18:05 good work and does it quickly. So basically this idea of this sense of urgency comes in. What,
952. 01:18:10 what's interesting to me about this is I reflect on the different work environments that I've been in.
953. 01:18:16 Academia doesn't always have a big sense of urgency. Like there are times when academia is,
954. 01:18:22 you know, we move at a different pace. And when you, when you tie that with business. So when I do
955. 01:18:27 university industry partnerships, industry always moves faster than we do. And they always want to
956. 01:18:33 move faster than we do. So they have a massive, massively faster sense of urgency or massively
957. 01:18:38 higher sense of urgency than, than we do. And it becomes a conflict at some point. Like you really
958. 01:18:43 notice that you're like, Oh, industry wants us to move in like two weeks. And our typical timeline
959. 01:18:47 is a semester or, you know, half a semester, whatever it is. And, and you see the, the people but heads
960. 01:18:53 about that. So yeah, I like the couple of things from here. He talks a lot about flow in this chapter.
961. 01:19:01 And one of the interesting things for me is that you can trigger flow through a sense of urgency. So
962. 01:19:06 obviously you don't want everything to be urgent all the time. But interesting to think about that
963. 01:19:11 as a specific tactic to get into a state of flow, because that's the goal to get into flow as
964. 01:19:16 often as you can. He also mentions that the faster that you move, the more energy you have. And I
965. 01:19:23 think that's probably true. And so if you haven't started on anything, then even something small
966. 01:19:31 feels like a Herculean task and it's hard to, I can't even, you know. But if you are moving quickly,
967. 01:19:40 some of that stuff, maybe it's, Oh, yeah, I can do that quick. And so I've noticed this myself in
968. 01:19:46 the last several months. So I think there is, there is definitely some truth to this. And I don't,
969. 01:19:52 I don't know exactly where I land on the optimal amount of, of drive you should have
970. 01:20:00 related to urgency. But I like the idea here. All right. And then the last one, if I am counting,
971. 01:20:08 right, you are a single hand, every task, and really just focus on one thing at a time,
972. 01:20:17 mentions that by focusing on only one task, you decrease the amount of effort required to complete
973. 01:20:20 it by up to 50%. And in general, he mentions that you should probably refuse to stop until
974. 01:20:28 it's done. I think that is some some great advice. I think this is the hardest one for me, but the
975. 01:20:35 most, the one that would have the largest impact on my life, if I would stop trying to run multiple
976. 01:20:43 tasks at the same time, or if I would stop trying to balance so many things, one of the challenges I
977. 01:20:49 have is this is a direct conflict with the work that I do at the university, right? Like, I mean,
978. 01:20:54 so, and that's kind of like externally put on me. And I have to figure out a way to do this, right?
979. 01:21:00 So it's going to probably look like, you know, time blocking in a better way. How do I time
980. 01:21:05 block in a way to where my teaching activities, I'm single minded, solely focused on the teaching.
981. 01:21:12 But then my creative activities, I'm solely minded on the creative activities, where the big,
982. 01:21:18 you know, the big hurdle that comes in is office hours. So office hours are often a time where I
983. 01:21:24 can work on something else, whether it's prep for the next class, or whether it's some creative
984. 01:21:29 project or something like that. But you never know when a student's going to pop in. And when
985. 01:21:35 they pop in, you have to stop what you're doing. So it immediately breaks down the single minded,
986. 01:21:39 or the single handed idea. So this is one of the ones, this is actually a second action item for
987. 01:21:44 me is like, I need to rethink my schedule. I need to rethink my work day. I need to rethink what
988. 01:21:49 I'm doing. Does it mean that my schedule shifts to where the single minded tasks are in a block
989. 01:21:56 that's more protected, you know, or that the ones that I really, the most important ones that I
990. 01:22:01 want to be single minded are in the protected block to where they aren't as susceptible to people
991. 01:22:08 coming in and messing around with them. So that's an action item for me.
992. 01:22:13 Nice. All right. And then there's two more sections to the book, but I think at least the first one
993. 01:22:19 we can cover here pretty quickly. The next part of the book is a discussion and action guide.
994. 01:22:27 And this basically restates all 21 tactics with some follow up questions. So if you were to,
995. 01:22:35 if we were to have a discussion about this, we're going to start to eat that frog book club.
996. 01:22:40 We could tackle one of these a week, for example, set the table,
997. 01:22:45 is decide exactly what you want, clarity is essential. What are your short term and long term goals,
998. 01:22:50 right? So that is the big takeaway from that particular section. And there's little,
999. 01:23:01 you know, one liners and questions associated with each one of these. I don't think this particular
1000. 01:23:09 section is, I'll just say, I don't think it's all that valuable. I think the real value comes from the
1001. 01:23:19 action boxes where they say at the end of every single chapter with the eat that frog and they've
1002. 01:23:25 got a couple different steps. I feel like those are, those are better. They offer a little bit
1003. 01:23:30 more detail, but the things that are in that action discussion guide are kind of like a simplified
1004. 01:23:36 version of that. In terms of you as an individual listening to this podcast, applying the principles
1005. 01:23:42 from the book, I don't think there's a whole lot in this action discussion section.
1006. 01:23:45 I would agree. It was a, it was a summary with maybe a little bit more, but I don't think,
1007. 01:23:50 I don't think it added that much to it, to the book.
1008. 01:23:54 Yeah, the next section though is new. And I think there is some good stuff here. And that is the
1009. 01:24:00 four accelerators. So the four accelerators here are calendar organization, productivity,
1010. 01:24:08 self-discipline and task completion. And it's really a bunch of numbered lists for things to
1011. 01:24:16 keep in mind. You know, if you really want to accelerate your calendar organization, for example,
1012. 01:24:20 set clear goals for yourself every day, time block your schedule, prioritize your tasks,
1013. 01:24:24 work on high priority tasks during your peak productivity hours, limit meetings whenever
1014. 01:24:27 possible to be patient with yourself and corporate breaks and self-care. That'll give you an idea
1015. 01:24:31 for what the other ones are like. We don't need to run through all of them. But I think if you
1016. 01:24:37 are just wanting, and this sounds stupid because the book is so short, but people who love services
1017. 01:24:44 like Blinkist, where they just want the summaries, like just give me the information,
1018. 01:24:49 information is not going to solve your problem, but whatever, you do you, this is where you go.
1019. 01:24:54 Because these individual steps are really great. And if you applied them, you would
1020. 01:25:00 transform your life. You're not going to because there's a not there's not enough there. But
1021. 01:25:05 there's the information. This is where he takes the 120 page book and he makes it a 200 page book
1022. 01:25:12 because he just flushes out these four extra sections at the end. But he didn't do it. He was
1023. 01:25:18 just like, and yeah, boom, like here you go. Here's like, I don't even know how long it was. I don't
1024. 01:25:23 remember how long it was, but they were super short. Each of those those last little little bits.
1025. 01:25:28 Oh, let me let me look it up. So it's pages 108 to 115.
1026. 01:25:35 It's all four. All four of them. Yeah. All four of them together that that whole section.
1027. 01:25:42 Yeah. But there is the rest of your 200 page book right there. And he just he was just like,
1028. 01:25:46 no, I'm good. And I'm not going to the fourth edition. I'm done. But he's in the fourth edition.
1029. 01:25:53 Like, I don't remember how many of these have sold, but it's like a popular book. Obviously,
1030. 01:25:58 it wasn't necessary. I mean, in these, he's done well with it. Yep. So I'm actually happy with that,
1031. 01:26:07 that decision, but all right. So action items, that is the entire book. And we talked about it
1032. 01:26:17 longer than you could actually listen to the audio. Probably. I hope that's not true.
1033. 01:26:26 I mean, there's so much in here, though, that there are entire books written on a lot of this
1034. 01:26:32 stuff. And I think if you just read this book, you're missing out. Like a lot of the value comes
1035. 01:26:40 from that context. I didn't realize how profound this book was first time I read it, but not
1036. 01:26:45 celebrating quite yet. So action items, I've got several. Yeah, I was going to say, what happened
1037. 01:26:52 to you? You just went crazy. Yeah. Yeah. And they're not the ones that I had the first time that I
1038. 01:26:57 read this too. So that's interesting. They're all different. Never complete something without
1039. 01:27:01 adding it to my list. Answer what one skill if I developed it and did an excellent fashion would
1040. 01:27:06 have the greatest impact on my career. Work all the time that I work, identify the limiting factor
1041. 01:27:11 of factors in my business, become an optimist, and you added some context to this. What would the
1042. 01:27:15 optimist think? Yep. Actually, no, that's it. So I've got five of them. And then you've got a couple.
1043. 01:27:21 Yeah. So I've got to get your workspace organized. And that's part of preparing well. And then how
1044. 01:27:27 can I single handle more tasks? Right? How can I set up my schedule or reprioritize things to where
1045. 01:27:34 when I'm doing a thing, I'm solely focused on that thing. Yep. Makes sense. Yeah. All right.
1046. 01:27:42 Stop writing and writing. I've been dreading this moment.
1047. 01:27:50 I don't know what to make of this, to be honest, because there is a lot of really
1048. 01:27:56 great stuff in here, but it's very short. It's kind of intentionally surface level.
1049. 01:28:04 That being said, I think it's kind of absolutely brilliant in the way that he condensed it and the
1050. 01:28:13 simplicity of the focus. I think if you were really going to nitpick the content of this book,
1051. 01:28:20 you could probably shave off between five to seven of these tactics.
1052. 01:28:29 But I have no problem with the 21 that are there. And I really love the style of this.
1053. 01:28:37 There's a quote at the beginning of every chapter, which by looking at those quotes,
1054. 01:28:43 I realized I forget which chapter it was, but I've mentioned this Dwight Eisenhower quote,
1055. 01:28:47 and I could never put my finger on where I heard it, where plans are worthless of planning is everything.
1056. 01:28:53 And then he talked about that quote in this book and I realized, oh, this is actually where I heard
1057. 01:28:58 that. I think that the fourth edition of this is the best version of it. Like I mentioned,
1058. 01:29:09 he cut out all the mentions of Mark Twain. And that's a quote that's attributed to Mark Twain,
1059. 01:29:16 which is really where the title of the book comes from. But he isn't reframing it and claiming
1060. 01:29:24 credit for it or anything like that. He's just removed all of the filler from this book.
1061. 01:29:30 This is so different than your standard productivity book. I mean, you could arguably take these 21
1062. 01:29:40 different chapters and create multiple videos on different aspects of each one of these chapters
1063. 01:29:53 and have a 12 hour video productivity masterclass. You could absolutely, you could.
1064. 01:30:01 But that's not what he did. He wrote a very short book that you can probably finish in one
1065. 01:30:06 evening if you're not taking any notes on it. I mean, this is one of the biggest mind maps,
1066. 01:30:12 I think that I have created. And it's one of the shortest books that we have ever read.
1067. 01:30:18 That's amazing. So I think this is a five star book. I think it holds up.
1068. 01:30:24 I think it hit me a little bit different this time than it did when I initially read it.
1069. 01:30:32 But I also think that it is just as valuable having read it this last time as it was when I
1070. 01:30:40 first picked it up all those years ago. I think it's quite possible that depending on where you
1071. 01:30:46 are in your productivity journey, there will be something different in here every single time
1072. 01:30:52 that you pick this up where you're like, oh, that's really good. That's speaking directly to my
1073. 01:30:56 situation. He's reading my mail. So I think in terms of who's this for and who do I recommend
1074. 01:31:05 it for? Literally everybody should pick this one up. Worst case scenario, you spend two hours
1075. 01:31:12 reading a book and you're like, yeah, I didn't really get that much out of it. But if that's the
1076. 01:31:16 case, you're probably not listening to bookworm anymore. I would agree. I would agree. So yeah,
1077. 01:31:22 five stars. All right. So I don't know why I feel strange about this, but this is easily a
1078. 01:31:28 five star book. It's not even close. It's not even a question. It's 114 pages. The whole last
1079. 01:31:37 section is kind of like, well, that's a good point. That's a good point. That's a good point.
1080. 01:31:40 And it was seven pages long, but they're good points. He somehow threaded the perfect needle of,
1081. 01:31:49 I'm going to give you just enough. In most of the right areas, I would say like, for me,
1082. 01:31:56 18 out of the 21 really hit, right? Like the other three were just like, okay, whatever. But
1083. 01:32:01 like 18 out of 21, that's good. Like that. I mean, that's a good hit rate. So if everybody gets,
1084. 01:32:06 you know, 15 plus of these that are that are valuable to them, that's great. I mean, that's
1085. 01:32:11 a great thing because the other ones, even if they're not that valuable, they're not that long.
1086. 01:32:15 So you just like, you know, you blaze through and you go to the next one, but then he repackages
1087. 01:32:20 it at the end of each chapter in a way that's even more concise and usable than he repackages
1088. 01:32:26 it at the end in a way that's even more concise, although I would argue a little less usable,
1089. 01:32:30 but even more concise at the end. Mike, like, this is, it's very, very difficult for me to say,
1090. 01:32:38 this isn't the first productivity book I recommend to somebody that's new to productivity.
1091. 01:32:43 Yeah. And I'm, and I'm not going to tell them it's the best. I'm going to tell them, like,
1092. 01:32:48 this is the one, like, if you want to make immediate gains and you want to become more productive
1093. 01:32:54 tomorrow, go read this book tonight because you'll be able to read it tonight. Like, and even if
1094. 01:32:59 you can't read all of it tonight, you'll be able to apply the things you read tomorrow.
1095. 01:33:03 Guaranteed. Yes. Guaranteed. And then what you'll do is you'll use this book as a jumping off point
1096. 01:33:08 to say, Oh, I want to think more about motivation and boom, you'll go and you'll do the other
1097. 01:33:13 motivation book or I want to think more about habits and boom, you'll go run the other habits
1098. 01:33:16 books. Like, I just think this is the, ah, I just, I just found the word, Mike. This is the
1099. 01:33:24 productivity primer. It is the, it is the book that says like, Hey, you want to learn about
1100. 01:33:30 productivity? Eat that frog. That's your book. Like that's your book to start off. And when you have
1101. 01:33:36 that so clearly in your brain, it has to be a five star book, like it can't not be a five star
1102. 01:33:41 book. Even though it's 114 pages and you and I could read this in our sleep because we've read
1103. 01:33:47 enough books at this point and we've read enough long complicated books. And this is by no means
1104. 01:33:52 a long and complicated book is a very straightforward, very actionable, very, you know, every person
1105. 01:33:59 book. Like that's the best way I can describe it. It's for everybody. So five stars.
1106. 01:34:04 Yeah. So I need to, before we get before we close out this section, I have to share,
1107. 01:34:10 this is the fourth edition, right? So this is like the ideal update. I need to share
1108. 01:34:16 the other end of this spectrum. Okay. And I, I, I hesitate because I don't really like shaming,
1109. 01:34:27 shaming books, but I will say that when I first read, because you mentioned this during the show,
1110. 01:34:32 GTD getting things done, right? Do you remember when the updated version of GTD came out?
1111. 01:34:38 No, not at all. I don't remember. Okay. So I was working for Asian efficiency at the time,
1112. 01:34:42 and we heard it was coming. Oh, this is going to be amazing because he's updating it to talk
1113. 01:34:45 about new tools and things because the previous version was all about Evernote, right? And there's
1114. 01:34:52 other stuff out there now and it's going to be updated because that was his whole thing was,
1115. 01:34:56 I'm going to update this to reflect the current state of the technology. You know what he did?
1116. 01:35:00 He just removed all discussion of the tools, right? So what ended up happening was instead of
1117. 01:35:08 getting tighter and more direct, like eat that frog did, it got more general and more
1118. 01:35:17 loosey goosey and like, well, you could apply it lots of different ways. Like,
1119. 01:35:21 that's not what you need from these types of books. And I would call that out specifically
1120. 01:35:26 because I think that's probably the other one that people think of when they think of productivity
1121. 01:35:31 books is like getting things done and eat that frog. Those are probably two on the high on the
1122. 01:35:35 list of if you're just going to search for productivity books, what are the best ones,
1123. 01:35:38 I'm just going to read them. This is so anti getting things done, like not at all like that book.
1124. 01:35:46 And if you had to pick one, this is the one. No, there are some good things in getting things
1125. 01:35:49 done. I mean, it's successful for a reason. David Allen is successful for a reason.
1126. 01:35:53 But this is not that. This is apples and oranges comparison. And I will say that it's this good
1127. 01:36:00 and it's got a terrible name. Like, I understand eat that frog. Like, I get the story like all
1128. 01:36:05 that makes sense. Any other name, like, I mean, any other productive associated name would have
1129. 01:36:10 made more sense. Although it's catchy and it's clever and people go, Hey, you should read that
1130. 01:36:14 book called eat that frog. And everybody's like, what eat that frog? Yeah. Yeah. But your
1131. 01:36:19 your points well made like I get the I think he tightened it up. I mean, I don't know the original
1132. 01:36:23 one, but from the sounds of it, he tightened it up and he did a good job on it. So yep,
1133. 01:36:27 absolutely. All right. So let's put eat that frog on the shelf. What's next, Corey?
1134. 01:36:34 All right. So the next book we're looking at is called published, the proven path from blank page
1135. 01:36:40 to 10,000 copies sold. You know, Mike and I are both interested in creating content. Mike and I
1136. 01:36:46 are both interested in this idea of publishing he's published before I've attempted to publish
1137. 01:36:52 before and done it unsuccessfully. So we're gonna read a book that's about moving from the thought
1138. 01:37:01 of writing a book to actually trying to write a book. It's the the second edition, I believe, is
1139. 01:37:08 the is the version the latest version, Mike, can you correct me if I'm wrong on that? I think it's
1140. 01:37:11 the second edition. It's from 2021. So if ever if you're looking for it, it's by Chandler Bolt.
1141. 01:37:17 And I'm just looking at getting some advice on what it's like to go from an idea the whole way through
1142. 01:37:23 to, you know, trying to sell some copies of something. And I'm not going to commit to this yet. But
1143. 01:37:30 Mike, I'm going to like soft commit to talking more about this. I would love to set a deadline,
1144. 01:37:36 right? Set one of these impossible goals like we read before of like actually having a book written,
1145. 01:37:43 you know, come, you know, the end of the year, something like that. I think I think it'd be fun
1146. 01:37:47 for us to do that and see what it's like. I mean, we read enough books. We may as well be in the
1147. 01:37:51 author community. You already are, right? So I'm not taking that away from you. But yeah, you are.
1148. 01:37:57 I don't know. You are. You are. So so the next one. So by the way, I need to find you mentioned
1149. 01:38:03 the second edition. I actually don't have the second edition. And I can't find the second edition.
1150. 01:38:08 So looking on Amazon, it's like this reddish color 2016. If you've got a link to the book
1151. 01:38:15 that you're reading, that would probably be good. Okay. So hold on. I need to make sure I'm clear.
1152. 01:38:21 No, this is this is the second edition. You're right. But it is publication date 2016. So it is a
1153. 01:38:26 little bit older. Okay. So the Kindle one was released in 2021. So I see I'm looking at the Kindle
1154. 01:38:33 version. And I see, okay, released December 2021. But if you look at the actual publication date,
1155. 01:38:40 it's 2016, right? Yeah, publication date 2016. We're in the same way. And again, Mike, I don't
1156. 01:38:46 think they're going to be that far off. So we're going to be true. All right. So that's the next
1157. 01:38:51 one. Mike, what is going to come up after that? Okay. So I have maybe the other end of the spectrum
1158. 01:38:59 in terms of what we just read. Do you know who Chris Gillibo is? I feel like you've mentioned
1159. 01:39:04 the name before, but I don't know off the top of my head. Okay. So Chris Gillibo is famous for
1160. 01:39:10 the $100 startup. And he was one of the people, I think, behind the World Domination Summit
1161. 01:39:15 conference back in the day in Portland. Okay. He has a book which has blurbs from Gretchen Rubin,
1162. 01:39:20 Cal Newport, Susan Kane, Daniel Pink. And it is called Time Anxiety. Nice. The illusion of urgency
1163. 01:39:28 and a better way to live. Okay. And I just picked it because I am a fan of Chris Gillibo. I've had
1164. 01:39:35 this book for a little while. And I think it's an appropriate follow-up to eat that frog. It was
1165. 01:39:41 also spurred by a Cal Newport podcast episode that I was listening to today as I was biking before
1166. 01:39:50 we recorded where he was responding to some op-ed somewhere about how you've really just got a
1167. 01:39:58 hustle when you're in your 20s, if you want to be successful later on in life. Like you got a front
1168. 01:40:02 load, the front load, the hustle, basically, like the work that you got to over index for work,
1169. 01:40:10 you got to sacrifice sleep. And Cal was kind of responding to that. And you know, there's an
1170. 01:40:16 element of truth to that, but he doesn't define what success really is, yada yada yada. So I don't
1171. 01:40:22 know, just a topic that's kind of kind of interesting to me. I'm looking forward to it. That's exciting.
1172. 01:40:27 All right. You got any gap books? Yes. So I'm doing a kind of like a mini seminary at a local
1173. 01:40:34 church. And I'm reading a lot of theology books right now. So the gap book that I'm reading right
1174. 01:40:39 now is called Delighting in the Trinity. And it's about the Christian faith and, you know,
1175. 01:40:44 the Trinity and God being the Trinity and those type of things. So not really related to what
1176. 01:40:50 we what we talk about on bookworm, but that is the that is the gap book of the of the moment.
1177. 01:40:55 How about you? All right. I do have one. So I believe we are going to be talking to
1178. 01:41:04 Donald J. Robertson for the Focus Podcast at some point. And he wrote how to think like a Roman
1179. 01:41:11 emperor. So I'm going to be reading that before we talk to him. Okay. Even though it is about my
1180. 01:41:17 favorite topic. Stoicism. Yes. Congratulations, Mike. Yeah. All good. All right. Well, thank you
1181. 01:41:27 for listening. We really appreciate your support. If you are listening to the podcast and want to
1182. 01:41:35 leave it a rating and review, that would be great. I hope so that people find out about the show.
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1185. 01:41:48 We've got a pro show that has a it's an extended podcast with a special section, no ads. There's
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1188. 01:42:07 things that we can we can provide just to say thanks for supporting the show. We record these live
1189. 01:42:14 and if you are a pro pro subscriber, you get access to the private YouTube link when we go live. So
1190. 01:42:23 you can join us recording live and engage in the chat if you want. If you want to join those lovely
1191. 01:42:29 folks who are actually giving us money to keep the lights on, we really appreciate it. And as
1192. 01:42:35 mentioned, you can find out more patreon.com/bookwormfm. If you want to recommend a book,
1193. 01:42:40 we are always taking recommendations and looking over that list. There will be a link in the show
1194. 01:42:45 notes to recommend a book for the show. Otherwise, let's pick up published the proven path from blank
1195. 01:42:53 page to 10,000 copies by Chandler Bolt. And let's read that one for next time. See y'all soon.