24: Step by Chris Capehart (with Chris Capehart)

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1. 00:00:00 Welcome back to Bookworm. We've got another little bit different type of episode for you today.
2. 00:00:05 We will be discussing the book Step by Chris Capehart and we actually have Chris on the podcast.
3. 00:00:11 So welcome to Bookworm, Chris. Thanks, Mike. Thanks for having me.
4. 00:00:15 Absolutely. I actually met Chris at the Christian Men's Network Conference. I think that was last
5. 00:00:21 November down in Dallas. And Chris spoke about the process of writing his book and some of the
6. 00:00:27 key takeaways from his book. And it really resonated with me because I feel like my story is very
7. 00:00:32 similar where Chris, I'll let you kind of tell your story, but you were doing something and then
8. 00:00:37 you had this vision and rather than just say, Oh, I wish I had time to do this, you kind of made
9. 00:00:41 the time to do it, which is really what your book is all about. So I picked this book originally
10. 00:00:47 before we knew we were going to have you on because I really liked the idea of it. I've read
11. 00:00:52 through the whole thing after I brought it home from Dallas. Really liked it. And I think that
12. 00:00:57 it's very appropriate for the Bookworm audience. But why don't you tell us a little bit just very
13. 00:01:02 high level. We'll get into some of the details later. But the overview process of how you actually
14. 00:01:09 wrote the book, how the book came to be. Sure. Well, Mike, I'll tell you I, it's been something I've
15. 00:01:15 been wanting to do for a long time. And I finally, I knew I was going to write and I've been talking
16. 00:01:20 about and thinking about the topics I was going to write on. And always knew one of the things I
17. 00:01:24 was going to write on is how to help other people go after and start doing the things that they've
18. 00:01:29 always wanted to do and accomplish the things they've always wanted to accomplish. And I've been
19. 00:01:34 not doing it myself. And one day as I said, man, I know what I want to write about and it's helping
20. 00:01:41 people get started and go and do the things they need to be doing. And I am not even doing it myself.
21. 00:01:45 So I really should get going on this. And so for me at the time, I was running a tech company
22. 00:01:54 called Evan Bits, do a lot of development for large companies across the world. And so I worked
23. 00:02:00 quite a bit and I traveled quite a bit. And the whole concept of the book step is about taking steps.
24. 00:02:05 I know we'll get more into that. But what I did is I found my step and I said, look, I don't know
25. 00:02:10 how long it's going to take. It's not the perfect situation. The circumstances aren't all perfect,
26. 00:02:16 but I can find two hours a week. And for me, it was 7 to 8 a.m. at a coffee shop outside of my office
27. 00:02:25 or typically in a hotel room across the world somewhere, sometimes 6 a.m. And it was that Tuesday
28. 00:02:31 and Thursday. And I did that for more or less two years. And so I wrote the book while I was also
29. 00:02:38 doing all these other things. And that's kind of the tagline of the book is how to pursue your dreams
30. 00:02:42 in the midst of everyday life. And I was basically doing everyday life from my job, my company,
31. 00:02:48 my family, I have a young daughter, my wife. And so I was doing everyday life. But at the same time,
32. 00:02:53 I was pursuing this dream that frankly, most people would think I didn't have time for.
33. 00:02:58 And my big thing and my big encouragement to people and one of the reasons I wrote the book is that
34. 00:03:02 I believe that we all have time to do the things we dream, the things we want to do and start taking
35. 00:03:07 steps towards those things. Sometimes we just don't realize it. Sometimes we don't realize how
36. 00:03:11 powerful that step can truly be. And so that was kind of the process for me of jumping into this.
37. 00:03:16 It's finally getting to the point where I realized, man, I've been talking about the fact that I want
38. 00:03:20 to really help people do this thing. And I've not been doing it because I've been using the same
39. 00:03:24 excuses I'm trying to challenge other people to get over. And so I started doing that. And that
40. 00:03:29 journey started, I guess it's almost three, maybe three and a half years ago now, when I first took
41. 00:03:35 that first step and got to the coffee shop in Dallas, Texas at 7am the first morning and opened up
42. 00:03:41 my computer and said, okay, what am I going to write? So that's a little bit of my story. There's a
43. 00:03:46 lot more to it, which I'm looking forward to getting into. But Mike, that's the high level on why I
44. 00:03:52 wrote it, how I wrote it, and how we got to where we are today. That is awesome. And I mean, it's very
45. 00:03:58 much in line with my story and what I really liked when I heard you tell me that story
46. 00:04:04 in Dallas was the fact that I'm not weird, basically, that other people are doing the same thing.
47. 00:04:09 Because I was getting up early and writing at a coffee shop before going to work also. I guess a
48. 00:04:14 lot of books get written in coffee shops in the early morning. I love that your story is about
49. 00:04:20 you wanted to write a book and you had the difficulty of coming up with a motivation and
50. 00:04:28 everything to do it. And yet your book is about writing a book, in a sense, it's very meta in that
51. 00:04:34 I'm reading a book about writing a book. It's very cool. And I like that. And because I really
52. 00:04:39 like it because there's a lot of folks out there who have these aspirations of writing books. It
53. 00:04:44 seems like everybody I talk to feels like they have a book in them. They feel like they have
54. 00:04:49 some story or something that they want to share with the world. And they don't ever take that first
55. 00:04:56 step to get it done. And it's fun to read a book about writing a book and how to make that happen.
56. 00:05:03 So thank you for that. You're very welcome. I think you're right. Everybody does have a story.
57. 00:05:10 It's something I talk about a lot. We all have a story and that story will impact someone.
58. 00:05:15 Some of our stories, maybe it's 10 people or five people or a million people. You don't really
59. 00:05:19 don't know. But at the end of the day, we all do have that story. And I'm just trying to encourage
60. 00:05:24 people to write that story, whether it be a book, whether it be a different type of a dream or a
61. 00:05:30 company they want to start or something with their family. I want people to write that story
62. 00:05:33 and realize that they can do it. And I think that's been my big goal. So yeah, thanks for saying
63. 00:05:38 that because that's really a lot of the reason behind why I did it. There's actually some statistics
64. 00:05:44 that I found when I was putting together a deep work webinar for Asian efficiency. And there was a
65. 00:05:50 study that said that 81% of Americans feel they have a book in them and that they should write it.
66. 00:05:57 At the time, a survey was done that comes out to around 200 million books. But there are 80,000
67. 00:06:04 that get published every year, which means that 0.4% actually do it. The rest just talk about it and
68. 00:06:10 never find their step, like you said, Chris. So I'm kind of curious. You made it get sound
69. 00:06:16 when you that phrase, you know, you found your step. It's like this thing that you have to discover
70. 00:06:21 and like the light bulb goes on and aha, this is the thing. But I know for me personally,
71. 00:06:25 the process wasn't quite that simple. So maybe you can kind of talk us through how you found your step.
72. 00:06:31 Yeah. Well, and let me say that's the reason when I talk about step as a general concept,
73. 00:06:38 everybody goes, oh, yeah, that makes sense. And then they ask, well, why do you have 200 plus pages
74. 00:06:44 about it in a book? I said, well, because it's not always as straightforward as you think. It is
75. 00:06:50 very simple, but at the same time, it's very difficult and very challenging. And I think one of the
76. 00:06:54 things that happens to a lot of us is we look at in the book, I talk about something called
77. 00:06:59 the proverbial mile. And the proverbial mile is just the what I label as the infinite distance
78. 00:07:05 between you and the person you want to be or the thing you want to achieve. And in this context,
79. 00:07:09 you know, the books that people want to write. And you have this big mile. And I remember sitting
80. 00:07:13 at the beginning of it and thinking, okay, I've got to somehow get a couple hundred pages,
81. 00:07:17 written, not only written, they've got to be good. They've got to be edited. They've got to,
82. 00:07:23 you know, go through this thing. And it just looks crazy. Like it's so far away. I didn't
83. 00:07:28 per se see myself as a writer at that point. And so I looked at all these things and I'm going,
84. 00:07:33 you know, where did I start? Where did I start? You want to have a full agenda? You want to have,
85. 00:07:37 you know, your full list of this is that chapter, this is that chapter, this is that chapter,
86. 00:07:41 how you're going to do everything. So I didn't have any of that. And I couldn't figure it out,
87. 00:07:45 frankly, and this is what I think I'd love to talk to people about. I didn't know what chapters
88. 00:07:49 I was going to write. All I knew when I sat down to start writing was this. I knew that if I was
89. 00:07:55 going to write a book that had any amount of pages, the first thing I had to do was write a page.
90. 00:08:00 And as I know with all books, and this is with everything we do in life, pretty much anything of
91. 00:08:08 any significance that's ever done has edits and rewrites as a part of it. So if I took out the
92. 00:08:13 pressure of being perfect the first time, if you will, in my first step and just said, well,
93. 00:08:18 you know, if I got to write two or three hundred pages, I got to re-
94. 00:08:20 I got to re-
95. 00:08:21 at least write one page. So I might as well just start with that. And for me, I have a whole
96. 00:08:27 concept to talk about breaking down the mile into the steps. And I talk about how every
97. 00:08:31 single mile is made up of feet, inches, yards, the things we know. And our challenge is getting
98. 00:08:38 our eye off of the mile and finding those steps inside of the mile. And there's a lot of different
99. 00:08:44 strategies and techniques to doing that. But a lot of it is just realizing that
100. 00:08:48 you've got to take every single one of the steps that are a part of that mile to go the whole mile.
101. 00:08:51 And so you shouldn't overlook the small steps and not take them because you think you've got to do
102. 00:08:56 something much more big or impactful if you think it is. Like, write a whole chapter at a time. You
103. 00:09:02 know, writing a chapter at a time can be actually pretty difficult. But writing a page, that's pretty
104. 00:09:07 doable. You could sit down and write a page. I mean, if you look at a page of a book once it's
105. 00:09:11 done, I mean, it's only a couple of paragraphs. And so for me, you know, Mike, when we talk about
106. 00:09:16 this, talk about how do you find that step? A lot of it was just that. It's really basic in the
107. 00:09:20 beginning. It's those small things that you can break down inside of your mile that, you know,
108. 00:09:24 you've got to get done. And you may not even know how to correctly form, in this case, like a chapter
109. 00:09:30 using this example of writing a book. You may not know how to even write a whole chapter, but
110. 00:09:34 you can start with that page. And then you can even break it down smaller, start with that first
111. 00:09:37 sentence and go from there. Because as you take one step, you can build on that step. And I've
112. 00:09:41 always been a big believer that as we take a step, or as we take an action towards anything,
113. 00:09:47 we start to see other actions we can take. And then there's other things when we get into this. I
114. 00:09:52 don't want to spill all the beans right here right now. But we can talk about ways when we
115. 00:09:57 find it hard to find that first step to do it either through a tool that I have in the book or
116. 00:10:02 through other people, other perspectives and things like that. But really for me, that's what it's
117. 00:10:07 about. It's about finding the things that you actually already probably know to do. But you're
118. 00:10:11 not doing them because you don't think they'll be impactful enough in doing those things.
119. 00:10:15 That's so good. Yeah, most people I think just realize that this is such a simple thing. How can
120. 00:10:20 this possibly add up to me having a book written? One of the quotes from the book, I didn't write
121. 00:10:26 down the page number, but you said if you can't quite believe you can achieve the thing you desire,
122. 00:10:29 find the thing you do believe you can do and start there. Which, like you said, for writing the book
123. 00:10:34 was not writing a chapter but breaking that down even further and writing a page. For me,
124. 00:10:38 I didn't even put a quantity on there. I just created the time and space and it was a time
125. 00:10:46 period. I'm going to show up at 5 a.m. every day and I'm going to write for an hour and whether I get
126. 00:10:51 1,000 words or 100 words doesn't matter. I just need to do this consistently. And that's the key
127. 00:10:58 is like showing up once and writing a page. That's no big deal. But if you crease that
128. 00:11:02 into your schedule and you create regular time, like you said, two hours a week, even, that's
129. 00:11:06 not a lot of time. Pretty much anyone can find two hours a week to pursue their dream or their
130. 00:11:11 vision. And then you just got to do it consistently. Just show up every day like Sean Blanc has said
131. 00:11:16 and the results take care of themselves at that point. Yeah, one thing I'll add to that is this,
132. 00:11:22 even you're right, two hours a week is not difficult to find. You can find that time,
133. 00:11:27 you can sacrifice a little bit of sleep, a little bit of fun, whatever it is to find that time.
134. 00:11:32 And here's where people get tripped up because you said it's right. It's consistency over time.
135. 00:11:37 But here's what happens. People start, they do the two hours, they do it one week, they do it
136. 00:11:43 the next week, they do it the next week, and then they miss it. And they miss it and they feel like
137. 00:11:47 they've like they crash their entire dream. When just like you said, two hours isn't a lot to find,
138. 00:11:54 when you mess up, getting right back up and doing the two hours the next week is not hard to do and
139. 00:11:58 you can get right back on track. And one of the things I really like to encourage people and I want
140. 00:12:02 to say it straight off is you're not going to be consistent all the time. I'm a very disciplined,
141. 00:12:08 consistent person, probably to the extreme. And there were weeks and times where I didn't
142. 00:12:14 write as a part of this because things happen and life comes up. And so even finding those two
143. 00:12:19 hours was difficult for me at times. But I got back up and I started doing it again. And so that
144. 00:12:24 consistency over a period of time, even if I messed up on one step, if you will, or one week or two
145. 00:12:29 weeks, didn't stop me from getting back up. And I think that's a really important message for people
146. 00:12:33 to hear. Because some people hear that message, you do it, do it over and over and over again.
147. 00:12:38 And I, that's my message. But I also want to tell people, if you mess up, that's okay. Just as two
148. 00:12:44 hours is not going to, you're not going to accomplish your whole goal in two hours. You got to do it
149. 00:12:49 over time. If you missed two hours, you're not going to lose your momentum either.
150. 00:12:53 Chris, something that you had said was that this is a really simple concept. And people are like,
151. 00:13:00 why is there 200 pages here? And I almost hesitate to say this with the author of the book on the
152. 00:13:06 show. But okay, this book really frustrated me because of that. It's like, okay, this is crazy
153. 00:13:11 simple. Yeah, I get it. Okay, figure out what the next step is and go do it. Great. Now what?
154. 00:13:16 Like that was kind of my first instinct on it. And yet I found that after like two or three days of
155. 00:13:21 reading into it, I found myself like, wait a second. I've got these other two big goals here
156. 00:13:28 that I don't even know what the first step is. It's like, okay, all right, you win. I needed this.
157. 00:13:36 It's like, okay, so it was frustrating in one sense that this is incredibly simple. And yet,
158. 00:13:41 we don't take the time to stop and think about it in this way. And I think you're dead on that if
159. 00:13:47 we stop long enough to quantify it and say, okay, here's what I'm planning to do. And it's going to
160. 00:13:53 take me two years to pull this off. Great. What does that mean for the next 24 hours or even the
161. 00:13:58 next 20 minutes? Yeah, break it down that far. That was a big takeaway for me. Like, okay, I've got
162. 00:14:03 these big goals. What does that mean right now? And it made me think, are you familiar with getting
163. 00:14:09 things done with David Allen? Yeah, I am. Yeah. Okay, I immediately started thinking of his,
164. 00:14:15 what's the next action? Like, I immediately thought of that. So I think it plays in really well with
165. 00:14:20 that whole framework. Yeah, you know, and I've heard the statement said, you know, it's funny,
166. 00:14:25 you know, there's the statement that there's nothing new under the sun, right? But what I've
167. 00:14:30 also heard in self development in this world is that we need to hear the same thing over and over
168. 00:14:37 again, just like we need consistency to accomplish anything. We need to hear the same thing over and
169. 00:14:41 over again and typically need to hear it from different perspectives. And a lot of the principles
170. 00:14:46 that I have in here, I think do really align very well with books that have been written,
171. 00:14:51 you know, over the ages that really help people and have hallmarks of these principles inside of
172. 00:14:55 them. But it's just taking those same principles and rephrasing them in a new light in a new way,
173. 00:15:00 where hopefully people are encouraged to see things from a different perspective and that
174. 00:15:04 different perspective can give them the motivation and the encouragement to realize they can do it.
175. 00:15:09 That's awesome. I'm glad you brought that up because that was a huge roadblock for me when it
176. 00:15:15 came to really creating anything for a very long time. I'm also a musician. I play guitar
177. 00:15:20 and I sing on the worship tune of my church. And I've always had a passion for writing songs.
178. 00:15:25 And for a while, I would write songs and then be proud of what I produced. And then at the end,
179. 00:15:31 I would realize that I took the chord progression or the melody from this other song and I didn't
180. 00:15:37 even realize it. And I get frustrated and be like, Oh man, I can't come up with anything.
181. 00:15:41 And then I had a revelation when I read this book, "Steal Like An Artist" by Austin Cleon.
182. 00:15:46 And he basically said that you are the sum total of all of your different inputs, all your different
183. 00:15:52 experiences. And when you create something new, all you are doing is you are connecting the dots
184. 00:15:58 in a way that hasn't been done before. But the dots are not completely original. You're not getting
185. 00:16:03 these completely out of right field. These are things that other people have said, other different
186. 00:16:08 ways like you were saying. And then when you put your own spin on it, you are creating something
187. 00:16:12 original that can resonate with somebody who, like getting things done, for example, Joe, you brought
188. 00:16:17 that up. There's a lot of people who read that book and they just, they don't get it. Some people
189. 00:16:21 just completely love it. Personally, it was pretty transformational. My productivity journey,
190. 00:16:27 it illuminated a lot of light bulbs for me. But I know people who read it and they're just like,
191. 00:16:31 this is dry, this is boring. I completely don't get it. They'll read something like step and
192. 00:16:36 be like, Yeah, I can totally do this. You just never know. You just never know.
193. 00:16:41 Yeah. So, you know, for everybody who's listening who maybe has encountered that same situation,
194. 00:16:48 don't be discouraged by the fact that somebody else has said something a little bit differently
195. 00:16:52 than how you would say it. That doesn't mean that you have nothing of value to add to the conversation.
196. 00:16:57 It's true. And if you look at, so the world I live in is development and writing code. And
197. 00:17:04 it's very common to have an idea for say a new website, a new web app of some sort.
198. 00:17:10 And you want to go figure out what the marketplace looks like. And inevitably, you find four or five
199. 00:17:16 that already exists. It happens all the time. Development is a very hot and fast moving industry.
200. 00:17:23 So it's very easy to find things that already exist. The trick is finding one that isn't doing
201. 00:17:28 real well and try to become a competitor. So, it's my take on it anyway. And Joe, I mean,
202. 00:17:35 one really great example, if you're in the tech world, you know, obviously I am as well,
203. 00:17:38 there was a product called Hip Chat by Atlassian, which is still out there and does really well for
204. 00:17:45 chat communication. And then something came around called Slack. And Slack is really,
205. 00:17:51 frankly, the same thing, but just done, you know, what a lot of people would say a little bit better.
206. 00:17:58 And they just exploded and they took off. And so, listen, at the end of the day, yeah,
207. 00:18:02 I think things have always been done and they've been done a certain way. Our job is to go find
208. 00:18:08 those things, make them better, make them easier for people. And I think this is done in software,
209. 00:18:14 like you said, all the time, because you got so many guys out there doing it. I think it's done
210. 00:18:17 in books all the time too. And it's good. We need it, you know, we need to hear the same message
211. 00:18:24 over and over again, just like we need to do the same things over and over again to get results
212. 00:18:28 that we want. And, you know, using other people and other people's creatives motivation to help
213. 00:18:34 spur our ideas is I think one of the best things we can do. Yeah, absolutely. I want to go back to
214. 00:18:40 something that you said regarding the consistency, because you mentioned that just like two hours
215. 00:18:46 a week isn't going to instantly get you to your goal when you fail. That's not instantly going to
216. 00:18:53 break all of the momentum that you had built towards accomplishing that goal. And I think on page 54,
217. 00:19:00 there's a key here. You wrote that we will only accomplish our goals if we create our feelings
218. 00:19:05 instead of letting them create us. And I'm hypothesis here, you know, from my own personal experience,
219. 00:19:11 I'd love to get your view on this as well, is that when you fail instantly, you get those emotions
220. 00:19:18 in those feelings that say, see, you connect, you'll never be able to do this. And the key is to not
221. 00:19:25 let that voice be the loudest. And like you said on page 54, you have to create your feelings rather
222. 00:19:30 than letting them create you. You have to say, no, look at what I've done. And then allow that to
223. 00:19:35 create the feeling of, yes, I can accomplish this. Look at I'm doing this rather than, oh, look,
224. 00:19:41 you failed. You're right. I guess because I feel this way, I am a failure. Yeah. And you know, I'm a
225. 00:19:47 really big believer that our actions dictate our results and our actions also dictate our feelings.
226. 00:19:53 So a lot of times we think of feelings and we think of them as just this, I don't know, mystical
227. 00:19:58 thing that happened to us and we have no control over. But if you really start to evaluate your
228. 00:20:02 feelings, there's always some kind of preceding event or action that caused those feelings.
229. 00:20:08 And so in order to change your feelings, you need another event or action to change those feelings.
230. 00:20:13 And what a lot of people don't realize is that we have control to do that. I think I share this in
231. 00:20:18 the book, but it's one of the examples. I actually heard this said a little bit differently. Originally
232. 00:20:24 at a marriage conference with my wife. And one of the things that the gentleman was talking about,
233. 00:20:28 is he was just saying that, hey, look, you know, when you don't feel in love, because you won't
234. 00:20:33 always feel in love with your wife, act like you're in love, act like you would when you feel in love.
235. 00:20:38 So maybe you had a fight and you're coming home from work. And the last thing you want to do is
236. 00:20:42 stop and get flowers or do something nice for your wife. Do that and see how you feel once you do it.
237. 00:20:48 And you'll see that your feelings will start to change if you act the way you want to feel.
238. 00:20:53 And I'm a big believer. I've seen this happen over and over again. I have another example.
239. 00:20:57 My grandfather used to always tell me growing up the best time to make another cell is right
240. 00:21:01 after you've made the first cell, because after you, if you're in cells and you shape or form,
241. 00:21:05 you make a cell and you're like, ah, take a deep breath. I can relax. And he goes, no, you need
242. 00:21:09 that momentum, that feeling that you have to go and have confidence to make your next one.
243. 00:21:13 And I'm a big believer that we have to create our own feelings. We're going to have feelings
244. 00:21:19 are going to hit us. And there's going to be circumstances and things that we can't control.
245. 00:21:22 But what we can control is our actions. And if we determine to control our actions,
246. 00:21:26 our actions will ultimately result in the feelings you want. And I have this. So I get up,
247. 00:21:30 I say every day, but it doesn't happen every day. Life gets in the way. Last night, I think we had
248. 00:21:37 tornado warnings coming through. So we're up at 2.30 in the morning and my 5 a.m. wake up call.
249. 00:21:42 I just wasn't doing it this morning. So 5 a.m. became 6.30. But on a typical weekday basis,
250. 00:21:48 my goal is to get up around 5 and I ride at 6. And every time I wake up at 5, I would say this,
251. 00:21:54 20% of the time I wake up at 5, I feel great. And I'm just like, wow, why to wake. And I've
252. 00:21:59 been doing this for a long time. And the other 80% of the time, I need 5 to 10 minutes to, you know,
253. 00:22:05 get a little bit awake and I'm to get past my questioning of why am I waking up this early in
254. 00:22:10 the morning, all these types of things. And as soon as I do it, I get up and I go and I write and
255. 00:22:16 I finish, you know, writing, I write different things, whether it's a script or a blog or a part of a
256. 00:22:21 book. I write that typically for about an hour or six to seven. When I get done with that,
257. 00:22:26 I feel phenomenal. The fact that I woke up early that morning and was tired is all gone.
258. 00:22:32 I'm ready to conquer the world. And I've done something that puts me on the track to the person
259. 00:22:36 I want to be in, the things that I want to achieve. And it completely changes my outlook on the day
260. 00:22:41 and my feelings on the day as well. And those feelings will propel me through the rest of the day with
261. 00:22:47 a positive attitude, a positive outlook and a positive mindset versus the days when like today,
262. 00:22:52 I didn't get up and do that. I didn't write this morning and I still feel great. But I'm kind of
263. 00:22:57 like, man, what if I would have just gotten up a little bit earlier and done this? I feel good still,
264. 00:23:03 but man, I would have felt even better. And so I think a lot of times we allow our feelings to
265. 00:23:09 dictate our actions. And that's the exact opposite thing of what we should be doing when those feelings
266. 00:23:16 are bad. The feelings are good. Go with it. That's what I say. But if the feelings are bad, which
267. 00:23:21 typically when we're talking about feelings, it's not great feelings. It's the ones that are
268. 00:23:24 telling you you shouldn't do it or you don't want to do it or you can't do it or you're going to fail
269. 00:23:27 if you do it. Those are the ones you got to change and you change them through action.
270. 00:23:31 Yeah, that actually leads into the next thing on the outline here, which I think is a really
271. 00:23:35 powerful concept because a lot of people, they think that if they do nothing, that's kind of just like
272. 00:23:42 staying in the middle. But you have in the book, you say that a step not taken is a step in the wrong
273. 00:23:48 direction. So a lot of people have these dreams and these visions of where they want to get to.
274. 00:23:52 But I don't think people view it as if I do nothing, I'm actually walking the opposite direction.
275. 00:23:57 Yeah. And I like to use a, if you will, borrow a concept from the financial world.
276. 00:24:05 When you're young or junior high school college, you get taught about this concept called time
277. 00:24:10 value of money, which we all know that if we start putting money in a 401k or an IRA or one of
278. 00:24:16 these types of tools when we're young, over time, there's compound interest. And as the more and more
279. 00:24:21 time goes by, that money becomes worth more and more, even if we only are putting a small amount
280. 00:24:26 inconsistently over time. And they say, the problem is if you start that when you're 35 or 40,
281. 00:24:31 you don't have as much time. And so you got to figure out how to put a lot more money in to make up
282. 00:24:37 all of the time that you didn't do it. And the same thing kind of rings true here, which is,
283. 00:24:44 if you've got a big dream and a big goal, something you want to achieve, time is what's on your side
284. 00:24:49 with the concept of step, because the concept of step is that in the middle of
285. 00:24:53 everyday life, you can still take these steps. Let me be honest, I could have written step in
286. 00:24:57 three months if I was doing it full time, but I didn't have full time availability to be able to do it.
287. 00:25:03 So since I didn't have that, I had to start and that took me two years to get the book launched.
288. 00:25:08 So two years is a lot longer than three months. And if I wouldn't have taken any of those steps,
289. 00:25:15 I would have every day that I had not taken a step. I would have been two years farther away.
290. 00:25:20 And maybe even longer because of the more responsibilities, the more habits that I'd created.
291. 00:25:25 And so I'd like to encourage people, like, you think if you're not taking a step forward,
292. 00:25:29 then you're just staying still, but you're not. If you're not taking a step forward,
293. 00:25:33 you're moving in the opposite direction because there's more time that is going between you and
294. 00:25:38 the thing you want to achieve. And your ability to achieve it, your energy, your time, your focus is
295. 00:25:44 continuing to be pushed further and further out, which means the hope inside of you is continually
296. 00:25:49 being deferred, which means you're going to feel worse about it. Like there's all these
297. 00:25:52 compounding effects, kind of like when you don't eat right, which I don't always eat right,
298. 00:26:00 when you don't eat right, there's a lot of potential compounding effects that can come from that
299. 00:26:03 one thing other than things you can see. And it's the same thing when you don't take steps.
300. 00:26:08 It's not just taking a step in the wrong direction. It's also your emotions, your feelings, your
301. 00:26:13 outlook on life, like all of these things are affected. And so I really do believe that when
302. 00:26:19 you're not taking a step in the direction of the goals, of the dreams that you have, you are definitely
303. 00:26:24 taking a step back and maybe just maybe even a bigger step back than if you would have taken a
304. 00:26:29 small step forward. So I really encourage people, don't worry about the size of the step, but always
305. 00:26:35 be taking a step forward so that you're taking a step in the direction of your dream. You're not
306. 00:26:39 taking a step away from it, which makes a lot of sense whenever you tie that into the feelings
307. 00:26:44 bit. Because if you take your actions based on how you feel, most cases, I'm not going to take any
308. 00:26:52 action because I really don't feel like it. It's like, how many times do I, I would rather just sit
309. 00:26:59 and watch Netflix at night or I don't want to get up at 5 a.m. because I'm a 5 a.m. guy as well.
310. 00:27:05 I could get a lot done. I can write a lot of code in the morning. I could write for my blog. I could
311. 00:27:10 do a lot of things in that time, but I usually just don't want to. I do it anyway, but I don't want to.
312. 00:27:16 So if I go off of my feelings, you're absolutely right. I'm going to end up in a spot where most
313. 00:27:22 of the stuff that I feel is important is never going to get done. I'm going to be heading backwards
314. 00:27:27 if I don't do anything about it. But that's all independent of, or dependent on how I feel
315. 00:27:34 if I were to follow through on that, which I'm not going to do. Yeah, in page 146, you say,
316. 00:27:40 courses can be corrected, but there is not a silver bullet for inaction. So like you said,
317. 00:27:45 even if you just take the same step, I haven't heard that in a while. I need to go back and read
318. 00:27:50 that. I don't know who wrote that, but I like that. Wise man, what's that?
319. 00:27:55 So yeah, even if you're just taking a small step, it doesn't matter if you mess up and if you
320. 00:28:02 have to course correct, that's kind of how I've ended up where I'm at. Like, I never really
321. 00:28:08 considered myself a writer. I decided to try it. Oh, hey, I'm actually okay at writing. And that led to
322. 00:28:13 creating videos and public speaking and a lot of other things that actually are 100% in line with
323. 00:28:23 my skillset, which I never even realized. This was a really important thing that you called out here.
324. 00:28:27 Yeah, on page 174, you said that the thing we fear the most may one day be the thing that we do
325. 00:28:31 the best for me. That was public speaking. I was, I was the stereotypical person who their number one
326. 00:28:37 fear was public speaking, number two was death. But I joined a Toastmasters group and it wasn't just
327. 00:28:43 me doing that. It was all these little things, these one steps at a time that led me to this
328. 00:28:47 space where now like I've been in the group and I've kind of found my niche and I get people who
329. 00:28:54 comment all the time like, Oh, you've obviously done this for a long time. No, actually, I just
330. 00:28:58 started in January, but it's the thing that I never really saw myself doing. And I kind of
331. 00:29:04 discovered that through this whole process of trial and error, which again, comes down to just
332. 00:29:10 taking that step. And I want to ask you specifically, Chris, because you mentioned one story already
333. 00:29:16 just from today where you had the tornado warning last night, you'd feel like getting up at five.
334. 00:29:22 But that's a fairly minor thing. And you have a lot of stories in the book, which kind of illustrate
335. 00:29:29 some of the bigger stuff that people deal with. And you share a lot of your own story in the book as
336. 00:29:34 well. You mentioned your grandfather, there's a lot in the book about your grandfather, who sounds
337. 00:29:38 like an awesome guy. And I wish I wish I could have met him. But I'm curious from your own
338. 00:29:43 experience, has there ever been a time where there was like a major life crisis in the middle of
339. 00:29:46 this two years where you just thought, you know, maybe this isn't worth it. And you were tempted
340. 00:29:51 to quit. And then maybe specifically how you overcame that. Yeah, you know, there's there's a
341. 00:29:58 story and I actually do write about the story in the book. During during the two year period,
342. 00:30:04 it's probably about there's actually a couple. But one is about a year in maybe a year and a half
343. 00:30:11 and something like that. I can't remember the exact amount of time. And my work travel had
344. 00:30:17 exponentially increased. I was traveling almost every week. And in my travel, it wasn't like I
345. 00:30:26 would go and have this free time at a hotel. And I would leave my hotel room at, I don't know,
346. 00:30:32 seven in the morning. And I would be out with people and clients until 11 or 12 at night.
347. 00:30:38 I get back and have to get up and go do it all over again the next day and do that for several
348. 00:30:42 days in a row. And then the days you're not doing that, you're hopping on a flight and a plane and
349. 00:30:46 things like this. And I got to a point where I just I was having a really difficult time,
350. 00:30:51 like finding any time to do this because I was so tired. That was really one of the big issues.
351. 00:30:57 I was just so tired. And I had a mentor who had written several books and we were talking about
352. 00:31:05 this and he goes, Chris, you know, maybe you just need to take the pressure off yourself to write
353. 00:31:09 and finish the book. And maybe you just journal, just journal some at night. And then once you get
354. 00:31:14 past the season, you can pick back up your step and your step's just going to adjust. It's just
355. 00:31:19 going to change for a time period. And I really didn't want to hear that because I wanted to
356. 00:31:24 continue on the same step that I was taking. So it goes, isn't it? Yeah, I didn't want to hear
357. 00:31:29 exactly. And so, you know, I didn't want to take what I thought to be a step back. But
358. 00:31:34 because of this seasonal life to do what I needed to do, I realized like even my two hours a week
359. 00:31:40 wasn't going to be possible consistently. And so I needed to give myself a reprieve and say,
360. 00:31:47 okay, for the next couple of months, if I get to it and can write it, like I'm going to still try to,
361. 00:31:53 but I'm going to take the pressure off of having to finish the book by x-date. I didn't have that
362. 00:31:57 pressure on me. And I'm just going to journal when I get a chance about what happened during the day.
363. 00:32:03 And I know that at some point that might turn into stories that I can use. And so, you know,
364. 00:32:08 that was a really good thing just mentally for me to take the pressure off of, you know,
365. 00:32:12 I've been putting this pressure on myself. I've got to do this, got to do this, got to do this,
366. 00:32:16 and has someone come in and say, you're life's crazy right now. Look at this thing in a complete
367. 00:32:21 picture. It's going to be okay if you don't go as fast for the next three months. And there's a
368. 00:32:28 lot of times where that type of thing happens. And what we tend to do in that situation is we
369. 00:32:32 tend to just not step at all. And it gets really hard to pick it back up instead of finding what
370. 00:32:38 I call a modified step. And being okay with the fact that sometimes your step actually shrinks.
371. 00:32:44 When we typically think that as we go, our steps should grow and increase. And it does in a lot of
372. 00:32:49 ways. There's times where we actually are step past a shrink, but we can still keep taking a step.
373. 00:32:55 And that's something that happened to me when I was writing the book.
374. 00:32:57 Yeah, just don't stop.
375. 00:33:00 Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's, you know, you may only be going five miles an hour instead of 15 or 20 or
376. 00:33:05 wherever you were. But don't stop. I'm curious, when you found your step, like you said, and you
377. 00:33:14 started creating the time and space to write for the two hours per week, what was your vision,
378. 00:33:22 like what was your ideal future? Like, I guess, when you started that process, did you just have
379. 00:33:27 the book in mind? If you go to your website, you obviously do like public speaking and stuff like
380. 00:33:31 that now as well. Was that part of the dreamer vision or how did that evolve to where you are
381. 00:33:38 today? Yeah, actually, you know, so going back to when I was very young, I actually, for me,
382. 00:33:46 public speaking, I was kind of the opposite. I love public speaking and writing was something I
383. 00:33:52 didn't like to do. And so I finally got to a point, I always had a plan, if you will, or a goal,
384. 00:34:00 that this would be something I would do as part of my main competency. And I'd done a lot of it
385. 00:34:06 throughout the years. But when I got to the point of, okay, I want to get serious about my public
386. 00:34:12 speaking. And I've also been wanting to do the writing as well, so I realized that was an important
387. 00:34:16 piece. As I took a step back and evaluated, I felt and realized that I actually needed to write the
388. 00:34:24 book first. And writing the book would help give me the platform that I needed from a speaking
389. 00:34:30 standpoint. And so really, for me, the book was not necessarily my primary thing. The speaking was
390. 00:34:37 the primary thing that I wanted to do. And so yeah, I did have bigger plans from the beginning.
391. 00:34:43 But those plans have been developing and unfolding over years now. And I think that's one of the
392. 00:34:48 things that I get three years or three and a half years, whatever I am, from when I really
393. 00:34:53 started aggressively going after this, and I look back and I realize, but it does take time.
394. 00:34:59 Almost everything is great. Anything that we want to do and accomplish, it takes time.
395. 00:35:02 But when I look back over the three years, it's not been bad time. And it's not been anxious time.
396. 00:35:08 It's been great time because I've been pursuing something I wanted to pursue the whole time.
397. 00:35:12 And I think that's one of the things that we forget really quickly. And so for me, I definitely
398. 00:35:18 always had a bigger goal. This is something I wanted to do as my life. There's other books,
399. 00:35:22 there's other messages, if you will, inside of me that I want to share from a book, from stage,
400. 00:35:28 from video courses, and a lot of different things that I do. And that's always been a part of me.
401. 00:35:32 I really just want to help people do, frankly, what I talk about, which is figure out how to pursue
402. 00:35:37 their dreams in the midst of everyday life. And it's going to go beyond the book as is.
403. 00:35:41 It goes into a lot of other things. But yeah, there was definitely a bigger dream from the beginning.
404. 00:35:46 Chris, most times whenever people talk about writing books or they start asking about big
405. 00:35:54 projects that people have completed, big achievements, they always want to know what was the most
406. 00:35:58 difficult thing you encountered. Well, what if you flip that? What was the easiest part of writing
407. 00:36:04 the book? Because it took two years. And I know there's a lot of difficulties that come with that.
408. 00:36:08 But what were the easy parts? That's a great question. I really think it plays right into my whole
409. 00:36:16 philosophy. The easy part was just taking a step and doing that hour of writing, like that,
410. 00:36:24 and putting that on my calendar, and just saying, this is going to be a part of my life and my routine.
411. 00:36:29 Frankly, that was the easiest part. And that's really the thing that kind of set me up for
412. 00:36:36 everything else that I was doing. But the easiest part was the step. And that's the whole thing.
413. 00:36:42 There are days when the step is hard. But the step typically is not a hard thing in and of itself
414. 00:36:48 to do. And that's been one of my mantras that I talk to people about, people that don't believe
415. 00:36:53 they can do things. They'll say, well, let's break down your big goal into steps. And I'm
416. 00:36:57 pretty confident that I can always get you to agree that you believe you can take the step that we
417. 00:37:01 break it down into, because the step is typically easy. And it's just combining those steps together
418. 00:37:07 and adding consistency and time and all these things on top of them that gets a little more,
419. 00:37:12 we have to put a little more commitment into that. So for me, honestly, the step was the easiest part.
420. 00:37:16 That was the easiest thing to do in scheduling that step.
421. 00:37:20 Just dead water and time.
422. 00:37:24 Yeah. I mean, you know, like I said, there's obviously there's the other pieces to it and,
423. 00:37:29 you know, to make sure we're taking the right step and have an accountability and
424. 00:37:33 continuing to do it and continuing to keep our perspective on why we're doing it when we feel
425. 00:37:37 like it's monotonous and we're a little bit stuck in the mud, if you will. But at the end of the day,
426. 00:37:43 the whole principle is that that step is easy. And even in taking that step, you sometimes feel
427. 00:37:49 like that step's hard when it typically isn't. It's just everything else that's going on in your
428. 00:37:53 life. And so that's a big piece of this. But the step is easy. It really is.
429. 00:37:58 I like what you said that I think it's worth going back and teasing this out. You mentioned that you
430. 00:38:06 put it on your calendar. And I think that your calendar for a lot of people is kind of sacred space.
431. 00:38:13 And when something goes on your calendar, it indicates, at least to me, that this thing is a
432. 00:38:19 priority. And I think where a lot of people get stuck is they say, "Oh, yeah, this thing is a
433. 00:38:24 priority." But how you're spending your time isn't confirming that, then you're not going to get
434. 00:38:31 any progress made on that goal or that vision that you say is a priority.
435. 00:38:35 Yeah. And, you know, I am, we have a rule with my friends, family, and the rule is simply this.
436. 00:38:46 We always want to hang out with our friends and our family, right? But life's busy. So every time
437. 00:38:51 we do hang out with them, we have a rule that we will schedule our next time to hang out on the
438. 00:38:55 calendar before we leave. And that allows us to have consistency. There is something powerful about
439. 00:39:00 putting something down on a calendar or however you schedule your life. We all have different ways
440. 00:39:05 of scheduling it. I think probably 70% of us now use G-Cal. But for those 30% that don't, or maybe
441. 00:39:13 it's only 10% that don't, you have a way of doing it. Write it on your calendar. Write it somewhere
442. 00:39:17 wherever it is. But there's something about being intentional about scheduling. Because when we
443. 00:39:22 schedule, we start to eliminate the excuses we would typically have to not do the step or do the
444. 00:39:30 task or the action that we're wanting to take. And our goal with scheduling is really just to
445. 00:39:34 eliminate more barriers that we won't do it. So if you have in the book four ways to accelerate
446. 00:39:39 your time, four ways to accelerate your step. Number one is time. Number two is team. Number
447. 00:39:44 three is learning. Number four is kickstart. You want to kind of walk us through those real quick?
448. 00:39:48 Yeah. So just using my example on an hour, I guess it was two hours a week, an hour a day,
449. 00:39:57 twice a week. An easy way to accelerate my step would have been simply to bump that up to two hours
450. 00:40:04 a day or four hours a week. If we add time to our step, typically, that gives us the ability to take
451. 00:40:15 a larger and longer step. And so time is one of the easiest ways. But it's also one of the more
452. 00:40:20 difficult things that we can do because time is precious, right? But I always say and I always
453. 00:40:25 like to mention the fact that time is a really easy way. Even if you add just a small amount of
454. 00:40:30 time, we always typically start with this hour. And maybe we jump it up to an hour 15, an hour 10,
455. 00:40:36 you know, start to inch the time up a little bit. And that's a great way to be able to take a
456. 00:40:42 bigger step because we still got to take the same amount of steps no matter what. But when you have
457. 00:40:46 time, you can take a more, you can take more steps or a bigger step, however you want to
458. 00:40:51 talk about it in that time, because you have more time.
459. 00:40:55 There's a concept from another book that we read. Joe, maybe you're thinking the same thing
460. 00:40:59 from Decisive by Chippendan Heath, where they have this term called "Uching," where you're kind of just
461. 00:41:03 stepping a little bit further out into the unknown. And that's what I thought of when you're talking
462. 00:41:10 about extending your time. Just another five, 10, 15 minutes is "Uching your time."
463. 00:41:16 Oh yeah, I do this. I do it in software all the time. So we're building something and,
464. 00:41:20 well, I shouldn't say we. I'm building something. And then I know that the first round, it's gonna
465. 00:41:26 have a lot of bugs, it's gonna have a lot of problems, it's gonna take longer to build than I
466. 00:41:31 always budget to begin with, even if I double at the time. I think it's gonna take, always happens.
467. 00:41:36 And it seems like if I continue to add more time to it slowly, or I continue to grow the scope of
468. 00:41:43 it slowly, start with something very basic, and then build on to it over time once I've got some
469. 00:41:48 people into a given software, it always goes way better. You know, if I slowly build it up as
470. 00:41:55 opposed to trying to bite off a whole bunch all at once. Yeah, definitely. So the second one here is
471. 00:42:02 team. You want to kind of talk us through that one? Sure. Yeah, team, you know, a lot of these kind
472. 00:42:08 of build off the same principle, but with team, it's just simply this. So for instance, with me
473. 00:42:14 right now, I think I kind of mentioned you guys have somewhere between eight and 10 people on my
474. 00:42:19 team right now. I use some freelancers and contractors to help me do a lot of the work that I do
475. 00:42:25 and this is on my kriskapart.co writing, speaking courses. And then I have another company, a tech
476. 00:42:31 company that I work in as well full time. So we have a team over there. And what I realized is that
477. 00:42:36 as I was wanting to grow this part of my life, this business, if you will, I didn't have the time
478. 00:42:42 because of my other responsibilities to add. So since I couldn't at the time, I had to find
479. 00:42:48 someone else that could do the task. And so it's pretty simple. You know, if you want to accelerate
480. 00:42:53 what you're doing, you can find a team. And you know, there's a lot of different ways to go about
481. 00:42:56 doing a team. There's volunteer based teams, there's paid teams. And there's things somewhere in the
482. 00:43:00 middle. But at the end of the day, at some point, if you're doing something, you're going to need
483. 00:43:07 more time. Anything that's growing and that you're doing well, you're going to need more time than
484. 00:43:11 you can physically put into it. Even if you have all the time available to you in a day, because
485. 00:43:16 there's still a limited number of time. And while there is a limited number of people in the world,
486. 00:43:21 there's a lot more people than there is time you have in a single day. And when you start building
487. 00:43:26 a team, you can start to accelerate your efforts and multiply your efforts by having other people
488. 00:43:31 take tasks off your plate. I'm a big fan of it. I'm a big fan of a book called Essentialism.
489. 00:43:37 And I think a lot of the principles, we share a lot of the principles in my book. And the point is
490. 00:43:42 this, like in this company of mine, and what I do with Chris Cape Art.co, writing is something that
491. 00:43:50 really I can be the only one that can really create the content. I have people that help me
492. 00:43:55 edit it and do things like that and make it even better. But I'm the only one that can create it.
493. 00:43:59 Like it's in my head. So I've got to somehow get that down. Going back and forth on emails and
494. 00:44:06 managing calendars and things like this, those are things that other people can do that don't
495. 00:44:10 require me. And so I have to make conscious decisions to find the things that my team can do
496. 00:44:17 that will allow me to do the things that actually really matter to what I'm trying to pull off and
497. 00:44:21 accomplish. And so team is valuable. So that's what I would talk about with team.
498. 00:44:24 That can be really scary because for me personally anyways, the tendency is to think that I'm the
499. 00:44:33 only one who really knows 100% how this thing works. And when you start adding additional people who
500. 00:44:38 don't have all the benefit of your experience and your knowledge and obviously standard operating
501. 00:44:43 procedures and documentation can help with this is the way you do things. But there's always
502. 00:44:47 those edge cases and there's always bumps in the road. But I guess what you're saying here and I
503. 00:44:53 agree from an intellectual standpoint, I just have trouble doing this practically I guess,
504. 00:44:59 is that those bumps in the road and those difficulties and problems that may arise once you figure those
505. 00:45:06 out, it's worth it in the long run. Yeah and I think a lot of times, frankly, there's always
506. 00:45:11 somebody that's better than us at what we're trying to do. It's one of the reasons why when I was
507. 00:45:16 writing step, you know, I wrote step, I wrote the entire first draft myself, and then I had what's
508. 00:45:24 called a developmental editor that helped me take my draft and develop it. And then I had a copy
509. 00:45:29 editor that comes in and actually make sure that everything is, you know, the way it needs to be
510. 00:45:33 from a copy standpoint, from a grammar standpoint. And you know, I went through three developmental
511. 00:45:39 editors, one of the reasons it took so long to do the book, it didn't actually take me the whole
512. 00:45:43 two years to write the original content for the book. But what I ran into was I needed help
513. 00:45:52 developing some of my concepts and figuring out the right ways to develop them in ways that people
514. 00:45:56 would want to read or want to engage with. And it took me going through three or four different
515. 00:46:01 tests with editors to find a person and the person I ended up working with, her name is Maria,
516. 00:46:08 she's phenomenal, she did a book for a guy named John Acup, she did another book for a
517. 00:46:11 lady named Sophie on Maruso. Both of those books at the time were in my category in
518. 00:46:15 New York Times bestsellers. And so for me, she is a much better writer, she actually did one
519. 00:46:22 recently for Simon Sinek as well called I think Eaters, Eaters, Eaters, not Eaters, leaders last.
520. 00:46:29 And so what I did is I actually found people that were better than me, in some cases, to do even
521. 00:46:37 the things that I wanted to do which made me better at doing the thing that I wanted to do,
522. 00:46:40 which was writing. And so a lot of times, you know, we, and I'm very guilty of this, we
523. 00:46:46 think more highly of ourselves than we ought, and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
524. 00:46:52 When a lot of times there's people out there that can do the things that we feel like is
525. 00:46:58 intimidating with just a little bit of training, a little bit of work, or frankly, in the case of
526. 00:47:02 Maria and just better than me. And I started learning from her, and that's one of the things
527. 00:47:07 I think that made the book good. I think there's a lot of value in knowing where your limits are,
528. 00:47:14 and being willing to seek out people who are better at you in some areas. Like it's scary to
529. 00:47:18 delegate because I know the whole system and I know what needs done and I know how to do it.
530. 00:47:23 And it's going to take me twice as long to train and teach someone else to do it.
531. 00:47:27 And I hate that, but at the same time, I feel like you have to do it once and have a good
532. 00:47:35 experience with it to realize that you can trust and find other people who are better at certain
533. 00:47:41 areas. Like I can come up with a design for a logo, but it will take me three or four months
534. 00:47:47 to do it. I'm going to learn Illustrator more than I care to know, and it's probably going to be
535. 00:47:53 okay. But if I'd foot the bill to pay somebody to do it and just get it off my shoulders,
536. 00:48:00 I'm going to feel a lot better about it in the long run.
537. 00:48:02 But I'm just going to say, just being willing to get it out there,
538. 00:48:06 and being willing to trust somebody who's better than me, typically results in something way better
539. 00:48:12 in the end. Yeah, and I think the other thing is this, listen, I can write a whole book on
540. 00:48:18 team and on management. There's been volumes of books written about how to do it. So it's not
541. 00:48:22 necessarily an easy thing to do, but obviously any company, if you will, or organization that's
542. 00:48:29 successful has to figure it out because they need multiple people. And so it is able to be done,
543. 00:48:34 and it can be done and can be done well. And I think it's actually easier to do on a smaller level
544. 00:48:40 because you don't have as many wildcards if you will. But yeah, I mean, it's definitely,
545. 00:48:45 it can be a scary thing jumping into that, but being willing to trust other people. And then
546. 00:48:50 I think this is what happens is people go, "Okay, I'm going to trust them to do this." And then they
547. 00:48:54 come back and they don't do it exactly the way you want to, and you get frustrated instead of
548. 00:48:57 realizing you need to work with them, challenge them, encourage them, and know that just like
549. 00:49:03 maybe in a situation where you were asked to do something and didn't do it perfectly the first time,
550. 00:49:08 because you needed a little bit of extra coaching, tweaking on the process and things like that.
551. 00:49:13 And somebody helps you and gave you that time. If you do the same with the other person,
552. 00:49:17 there's a good chance you can get them to a place where they can actually accomplish it and take
553. 00:49:21 that load off of you. But sometimes we think, "Oh, I can just hand it to somebody and then walk away
554. 00:49:25 and it's done." And that rarely happens. That rarely happens. Having kids is great practice for
555. 00:49:32 this, I feel, because you have to say that over and over again. Yeah, sure.
556. 00:49:35 Third one, you kind of touched on it a little bit. You mentioned it at least a couple of times
557. 00:49:41 you were talking about the team, but that is learning. You want to talk us through that one?
558. 00:49:45 Sure. I think one of the things that Joe was talking a little bit about this,
559. 00:49:50 if you know Illustrator and you know Design, it might be quicker for you to do your logo design
560. 00:49:56 than to have someone else do it. If you don't, you don't. And sometimes you're in situations where
561. 00:50:01 you don't have the funds or the people that are willing to do it for you for free, so you've got
562. 00:50:07 to do it. And so one of the things that we can always do is we can always educate ourselves.
563. 00:50:12 There are so many resources available to do this free these days, and I'm paid as well,
564. 00:50:17 but there's so many things to do. I've been integrating this into a lot of the talks that I've
565. 00:50:22 done recently and just talking about, "Hey, what's the difference between you and a doctor?" And
566. 00:50:26 people start talking about a lot of different things. And I say, "Well, the only difference
567. 00:50:28 between you and a doctor is the time you spent learning." And I like to demystify the fact that
568. 00:50:35 sometimes when we learn how to do something and we learn how to do it right, we eliminate a lot
569. 00:50:40 of the time we spent doing it wrong. And so sometimes just taking the time to learn, and I'm not good
570. 00:50:47 at this one, I jump into things before I learn typically and I learn on the fly, it takes some
571. 00:50:53 time to learn, takes some time to get educated and go take some courses on Illustrator before you
572. 00:50:58 just jump right into it and you'll probably save yourself five or six hours or maybe 20.
573. 00:51:02 I don't know how many you might save. And so I think a big thing is this is you can narrow the gap
574. 00:51:07 between you and a step that you might not be today capable of taking because of education with just
575. 00:51:13 a little bit of education or learning. And we should always feel free to do that and feel free to make
576. 00:51:18 learning a part of our step and not feel like that is a non-worth while exercise. It's actually a very
577. 00:51:26 worthwhile exercise because when we learn something, even if we're going to delegate it later,
578. 00:51:31 knowing the ins and outs of how something works actually helps us be a better manager and a better
579. 00:51:34 delegator of making that happen. Nice. Yeah, I think that from the how to do a specific task
580. 00:51:43 perspective, there's a lot of value in this. But I also think that it's got broader application just
581. 00:51:48 in the whole idea of personal growth. I mean, that's really the whole idea behind this podcast is
582. 00:51:53 Joe and I decided that we were going to read these books because I found an article that said that
583. 00:51:58 the top CEOs, the difference that separated the top from everybody else was the fact that they
584. 00:52:03 read 24 books a year. So we're like, we're going to read a book every couple weeks and we're going
585. 00:52:08 to hold each other accountable to stuff and we're going to continue to grow. And the things that we
586. 00:52:12 learn are going to affect the choices that we make and how we approach problems is essentially
587. 00:52:17 going to increase the size of the toolbox that we've got to work with. Jim Marone said that your
588. 00:52:22 level of success will rarely exceed your level of personal development because success is something
589. 00:52:25 you attract by the person that you become. And you have to be intentional about becoming a better
590. 00:52:30 person. You have to consistently keep learning. But that's kind of a tangent. We'll go back to
591. 00:52:37 specifically how to accelerate your step. You the fourth one here and this one, I think,
592. 00:52:42 is not quite as clear as the other three. So maybe you can explain what you mean by kickstart.
593. 00:52:47 Yeah. So a kickstart and I'll give it an example from when I was writing the book.
594. 00:52:53 So I did my two hours a week and then every once in a while I would start to get a little more
595. 00:52:59 time by taking a weekend afternoon or a week yesterday morning and going and writing. But sometimes
596. 00:53:05 we need to and I couldn't think of a better way to describe this than calling it a kickstart.
597. 00:53:11 But I'll give you an example. One of the kickstarts that I did was I took an entire week off and
598. 00:53:16 instead of taking a vacation, which would have been a nice thing to do, I took a week and all I did
599. 00:53:22 is I worked my, if you will, eight hours a day and I wrote. And so I was able to do,
600. 00:53:28 let's see, so roughly 40 hours, what it would have taken me, what 10 weeks to do in one week.
601. 00:53:35 And that was a little bit of a kickstart. It did a couple things for me. It gave me some momentum
602. 00:53:42 again. It gave me that time and that place to focus. And when I talk about a kickstart, the reason
603. 00:53:49 I call it out as something different is I define it in the book as something that is not sustainable
604. 00:53:55 over the long term. It wasn't at that time in my life, sustainable to do 40 hours a week on writing
605. 00:54:01 for any significant period of time. I could do it for a week or two, but beyond that I had to get
606. 00:54:07 back to my other realities to pay the bills and do the things that I needed to do. And so typically
607. 00:54:11 a kickstart revolves around you're in a position where you need to do something to really push yourself
608. 00:54:18 over some kind of hump, over some kind of hill, some edge, something you haven't been able to get
609. 00:54:23 past because you haven't had enough time to focus on that thing or to learn that thing or whatever it
610. 00:54:27 is, build that team maybe. And so you take and you work hard and maybe you're still working and
611. 00:54:33 you're just working, you know, you get home at, let's say it's five and you work from five to
612. 00:54:38 midnight every day for a week or two weeks and you're not going to be able to continue that pace
613. 00:54:44 forever. Maybe some people can, typical people can't continue that pace forever. So you find
614. 00:54:49 something that you can do for a short period of time that's going to move you a lot faster down
615. 00:54:52 the road. It's going to give you momentum, it's going to give you excitement, and it's going to help
616. 00:54:56 you start to see a new milestone or a finish line, if you will, in your book or task or goal or dream
617. 00:55:04 or whatever it is. But in my example, I was talking about one of when I did it with the book.
618. 00:55:10 That's awesome. I like that a lot. And I think that that is more sustainable than what we had,
619. 00:55:16 the previous book we did was the 10x rule. And that was one of the things that I had issues
620. 00:55:21 with in that book. I like the book a lot. But he mentions in their Grant Cardona as the author
621. 00:55:27 that you have an unlimited supply of energy and creativity to throw out your problems. I'm like,
622. 00:55:32 well, I don't know that that's necessarily sustainable. And I get the point that he was trying to make,
623. 00:55:37 but really the fact is you need that margin. And I think that's really important to recognize that
624. 00:55:44 sometimes it's okay to slow your step for a season, like you said, and then there's also going to be
625. 00:55:48 other seasons where for this particular week, for example, you're going to apply 10x effort to move
626. 00:55:55 this thing forward. And I think that really leads into the other thing here I wanted to really get
627. 00:56:00 your perspective on is on page 176, you said everything we want to accomplish will require
628. 00:56:04 more effort than we first thought. So my question to you is how much more effort did the book take
629. 00:56:10 than you initially first thought? Yeah, that's that's a great question. Well, I may answer that
630. 00:56:15 indirectly and just say, you know, there's always a statement, I've been in the startup world,
631. 00:56:20 software startup world for a long time, and then quite a few startups there. And
632. 00:56:24 there's always this saying when you go to raise money, that it's always going to take double the
633. 00:56:29 money and double the time to do anything. And a lot of times I found that to be even somewhat
634. 00:56:34 generous, it's sometimes even more than that. And typically with time, it's usually more than that.
635. 00:56:40 And you know, so when I set out to write the book, I'll be honest in the beginning, I really didn't
636. 00:56:45 know. I really didn't know how long it's going to take. And so for me, the tough thing about that
637. 00:56:51 was, I was sitting there going, I have no clue. And then after about four, I suppose about four to
638. 00:56:57 six weeks in, I started realizing how much I could write. So I started doing the math. And I started
639. 00:57:02 really, man, I think I can get this book done in six to eight months, because I realized how many
640. 00:57:08 pages I was able to write every day once I got into a groove. And then I'd written a couple chapters,
641. 00:57:13 and then I went back and I had done an outline. And so then I was kind of able to track this thing
642. 00:57:18 and go, Oh, I think I can have this sucker finish this year. And it took me an extra year. So, so
643. 00:57:27 I was spot on on the double the time and double the money. We won't talk about the money because
644. 00:57:33 it was probably more than that. But it was a little bit different because I was doing it on my own.
645. 00:57:40 So I, I, yeah, I mean, that it's so true. Everything takes time and effort. And especially,
646. 00:57:47 it's funny, you get around old guys that have been in business or done something before. And
647. 00:57:52 when you're young, you start talking about an idea, something you want to do, and they're like,
648. 00:57:56 well, it's going to take you this long as you do this and this long as you do this. And you're just
649. 00:57:59 going, you're like, you don't really know what you're talking about. You just, you're doing
650. 00:58:03 things the old way. You don't really understand. And then once you've done a few of them, you've
651. 00:58:07 started a few businesses and you've written a book or two, you realize there are so many things
652. 00:58:12 that even when you know everything it takes to do it, you don't really know, because there's a lot
653. 00:58:17 of unforeseen events, there's a lot of just challenges and loopholes. I mean, I, I said so I also run a
654. 00:58:23 software company and we work with a lot of really large brands and build apps and web apps and
655. 00:58:29 native apps for them. We did one for Vogue this last year. We did a lot for L'Oreal and Hilton,
656. 00:58:35 a few others. And I've been working on a project with a client for, I've been working to get a
657. 00:58:44 project with a client. We've been talking about it. They've been wanting to do it for almost three
658. 00:58:48 years. And like, if you would have told me it would have taken three years and I can't count how many,
659. 00:58:55 literally thousands of emails, flights, trips to get this project, I would have thought you're crazy.
660. 00:59:00 But one of the things I've realized, and you hear people say, ah, big companies move slow,
661. 00:59:04 etc, etc, etc. And I realized how true that is and realized all the inner workings and all the
662. 00:59:09 different people that have to have sign-offs and approvals and budget cycles. And if you miss a
663. 00:59:13 budget cycle year, you're off now. And so there's all these things that with everything we do,
664. 00:59:18 it's hard to know. And it's hard to know. I mean, you could plan it perfectly. Like I said,
665. 00:59:22 when it comes to closing a big software deal, you plan it perfectly and somebody goes on vacation
666. 00:59:27 and you don't get your deal signed and it moves into a next budget cycle and you're a year out,
667. 00:59:33 like, how do you control that? And that's the thing I think when people start companies and when they
668. 00:59:37 go after dreams, there's things like that that they don't realize exist. And it's those things
669. 00:59:43 that throw them off track. And so when you aren't realistic about that in the beginning,
670. 00:59:49 you can really easily get discouraged. And you can get discouraged because you put this time frame,
671. 00:59:56 which I am a big believer in putting a time frame on the goals we want to achieve. I think you should
672. 01:00:00 do that. But when we aren't realistic about it, we really can do a disservice to ourselves.
673. 01:00:06 You know, I'd rather kind of be that under promise over deliver when it comes to my personal goals
674. 01:00:12 than the other, you know, and let people that we're staying accountable with or that are on our team
675. 01:00:17 challenge us to move faster than what we expect versus what you don't want is that person that's
676. 01:00:23 a mentor that's done it before saying your expectations are too big. You want that person
677. 01:00:28 saying, no, they need to be bigger. And this is a think a delicate balance that is it's hard to
678. 01:00:35 quantify the exact right and wrong way to do it. But at the end of the day, anyone that's accomplished
679. 01:00:41 anything of significance, I almost put 10 bucks on it every time. So if I lose money, I'll maybe
680. 01:00:46 only lose it once, but they're going to say it took more time than they thought. It took more effort
681. 01:00:50 than they thought. It was harder than they thought. So Mike, are you listening to this? Because you and
682. 01:00:55 I have had some stuff back and forth with some clients and it's taking way longer than Mike thought
683. 01:00:59 it would. That's life. It's just five. And I'll tell you what, you know, I'll speak to that one
684. 01:01:07 situation, that one client right now. So that one client, the deals that we have done with that
685. 01:01:13 client now are exponentially larger than any other deals we've done. And so you look at it, you go,
686. 01:01:22 when you have more time, you have more effort into something, a lot of times the payoff can be bigger too.
687. 01:01:26 So it works. I don't know how many times I've had conversations with clients and I get all the way
688. 01:01:35 to the end. And everybody's a go. I send over the contract and then it sits for six months.
689. 01:01:40 Yeah. All right. I just plan on it. I don't do anything until everything is signed.
690. 01:01:46 I'm not going to touch it. Yeah. So true. So true.
691. 01:01:51 So in that particular situation, how do you keep stepping when your dream maybe is that big business
692. 01:02:01 deal and it's kind of out of your control? How do you maintain momentum? Any tips for maintaining
693. 01:02:06 momentum when it doesn't look like the balls in your court? Yeah. I mean, here's what I'd say.
694. 01:02:13 We could dig into that for a long time and every situation is a little bit different.
695. 01:02:17 In the case of a business deal, if you will, or in a company, one of the things there is just
696. 01:02:24 consistency. You want to consistently stay on the radar and be the top of mind person for whoever
697. 01:02:30 that client is or that relationship is. So you find things creative and unique to do
698. 01:02:35 along the path to still let them know you're there, you care, and you're waiting for them
699. 01:02:39 whenever they're ready without being rude in that case. And it can be things like sending nice
700. 01:02:45 little notes and little gifts, being respectful. And when the time comes, those people will remember
701. 01:02:51 and they'll think of you as a percentage. Obviously, there's always going to be situations where it
702. 01:02:55 doesn't happen. So do that. And then the other thing is this. If we're talking business for a second,
703. 01:03:00 it's don't bet your whole, don't bet your whole load on one client or two clients.
704. 01:03:06 Have backups. That's why there's something in sales and business called a pipeline, right?
705. 01:03:12 You have a pipeline of other clients because you don't know what's going to come through when.
706. 01:03:15 And so you've got to use the law of averages, if you will, in law of numbers and those kind of
707. 01:03:21 situations where if you're counting on one thing, so for instance, if you're wanting to get a book
708. 01:03:25 deal and you're talking to one guy and it's your first book deal, probably not the right thing to do.
709. 01:03:30 You should be talking to every single person you can about the book deal. Because there's power
710. 01:03:36 in that and there's power in numbers. And everybody in a friend negotiation standpoint always says,
711. 01:03:41 "Man, if you can ever get two people negotiating for you or against you, that's the cream of the crop."
712. 01:03:46 Well, the way you do that is you have like 20 people you're talking to. And sometimes you get
713. 01:03:50 lucky and get two people at the same time that want the same thing from you. And you're able to
714. 01:03:54 negotiate them, but you don't typically get that from just talking to two people.
715. 01:03:58 Right. Now, this isn't exactly in line with the book, but one of the other things that stood out
716. 01:04:05 to me was... What, really? One of the other things that stood out to me was the... And you mentioned
717. 01:04:10 it in that last section there, you mentioned giving gifts. And you kind of talk in the book about...
718. 01:04:15 Sounds like you are a pretty extravagant gift giver. I try. I try. We try. I mean, do it. We can.
719. 01:04:23 Do you mind explaining just a little bit the philosophy behind that? Because I think it's
720. 01:04:27 it's really important. And I think that a lot of people don't realize the importance of the
721. 01:04:34 thoughtfulness of the gifts. And you kind of use it in the book to talk about the
722. 01:04:39 intentionality and showing people that you care real simple ways. And you mentioned, you know,
723. 01:04:45 like different clients and things like that. But maybe just kind of walk through the thought
724. 01:04:50 process there a little bit. Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, at the end of the day, and I'm actually doing a
725. 01:04:56 in the process of writing about this specifically for another project, but at the end of the day,
726. 01:05:01 pretty much everything you do in life has some form of relationship as a part of it.
727. 01:05:07 Whether it's a customer relationship, a friend relationship, a family relationship,
728. 01:05:11 or whatever. And people just want to be valued. They want to feel respected. They want to feel like
729. 01:05:17 they're thought about, they're on the top of your mind. And so when you take those
730. 01:05:23 things that we typically apply into a family situation, and a lot of us don't do them well
731. 01:05:27 in a family situation. So that's an issue in and of itself. But we take those kind of same
732. 01:05:31 principles and we apply them to everything we do in business or wherever we are. We find that
733. 01:05:36 people really respond well to it. People respond well when they feel like you really care.
734. 01:05:40 And you show you really care by the things you do for people, whether it be a gift, a way you
735. 01:05:46 communicate, the way you talk to them, the way you prepare. All of these things make up a bigger
736. 01:05:51 picture of whether or not a person feels valued by you. And when people feel valued,
737. 01:05:54 they want to work with you, they want to do business with you, they want to find ways to help you be
738. 01:05:58 successful because you found ways to help them be successful. And so yeah, what we've done from a
739. 01:06:02 business standpoint, what I've always done is we try to go out of our way to surprise and delight
740. 01:06:07 people with things. I mean, we would send cakes to people, we send cookies to people, we send books
741. 01:06:14 to people, we send framed pictures to people. We do all kinds of things just to show people that
742. 01:06:20 we really care. And it's not just about their business, it's more than that. And people have
743. 01:06:25 always been really receptive to that. And I think when it comes to building your team, when it comes
744. 01:06:29 to everything we do, if we treat people that way, it will come back on us in great measure
745. 01:06:34 when we least expect it. Totally agree. And I think that's a really overlooked point, especially
746. 01:06:42 when you're approaching your dream of your vision through the lens of what can I do to make sure that
747. 01:06:50 this thing gets done and accelerate it. Like you said, whatever you give tends to come back to you
748. 01:06:56 in the greater multitudes in my experience. So I think that it's really important to call that
749. 01:07:06 out that you're not on this journey alone. We talked about in the Productivity Project, Chris
750. 01:07:11 Bailey, like people are the reason for productivity. And everything that you do is going to impact
751. 01:07:17 other people, which is really the reason for the step. And maybe we'll kind of end here and then
752. 01:07:22 you can add any additional closing thoughts that you want. But on page 210, you say that we are
753. 01:07:26 the answers to the world's problems, all we have to do is start stepping. So I guess I want to just
754. 01:07:30 leave it as my final thought here. Everybody who's listening to the podcast, I believe that there's
755. 01:07:35 a lot of people who fall into that 81% of Americans who want to write that book and just start doing it
756. 01:07:41 because you have something for other people. The world needs what is inside of you.
757. 01:07:46 Yeah. And I ended the book on a chapter called The Most Powerful Step. And I went through a
758. 01:07:54 couple different iterations in the name of that. One of the iterations was a step for someone else.
759. 01:07:58 And I really believe that our step has an impact beyond what it does for us. I believe that our
760. 01:08:04 step has an impact in the way that it opens up other people's minds to what's possible for them
761. 01:08:10 in the way that it empowers other people. And so we are our own person, but our step is,
762. 01:08:16 our step or our non-step is going to affect people positively or negatively. And when we think about
763. 01:08:20 it in that perspective, when we do our best to do things for other people and take a step because
764. 01:08:24 there's other people watching us, whether it's family, friends, co-workers or people we don't even
765. 01:08:28 know yet. And we do that. We're going to make the world a better place. And I've been working on
766. 01:08:32 kind of my personal vision and mission recently and kind of realigning it. And one of the things I
767. 01:08:37 realized is this, it's if we do our best to make ourselves the best version of ourselves, we will
768. 01:08:43 make the world the best version of the world. And it's our responsibility and it's only our
769. 01:08:49 responsibility to make ourselves the best version of ourselves. And we can do that one step at a time.
770. 01:08:54 And I want to encourage everybody out there, no matter what your dream, no matter what your
771. 01:08:58 goal, no matter what it is you've wanted to do, you haven't done, you fell that and didn't want
772. 01:09:02 us try it again. Start taking steps again today towards that dream and towards that goal. It's
773. 01:09:08 going to make a difference in your life and you can do it. You can accomplish those things that
774. 01:09:12 you've always dreamed and always wanted to. I believe in you. We're here for you. And if there's
775. 01:09:17 anything that we can do to help, please let us know. Awesome. So maybe jump into actions items, Joe?
776. 01:09:24 Sure. All right. So the actually the very last thing you have in the book is once you've read it,
777. 01:09:30 give it to somebody else. So that was my first action item. And that one I am proud to say is done.
778. 01:09:35 Second action item I had when you were talking about the season where you were just you got the
779. 01:09:42 advice to just journal the things that you were getting rather than creating the time to write
780. 01:09:46 really reminded me of the importance of journaling, which I completely get from an intellectual
781. 01:09:52 perspective. I know how important it is. And I still find myself falling off the wagon from time to
782. 01:09:59 time. So that's where I'm at right now. I need to get back into the habit of journaling every single
783. 01:10:04 night, not missing those those days because whenever I miss a day that really I'm what I
784. 01:10:11 recognize from reading this book is that I have robbed myself of the opportunity to learn and to
785. 01:10:16 glean into even repurpose the things that I discovered and learned throughout that day. That's
786. 01:10:21 completely gone because I'm not going to just remember that down the road. And a lot of that
787. 01:10:26 stuff has a lot of value in the things that I would write and create. So having a record of that is
788. 01:10:33 very important. Yeah, one of the things that I have on my list, and I just have one here that
789. 01:10:41 doesn't speak to Chris in any way, simply one big glaring thing I need to do. I have two decent
790. 01:10:51 size projects that I've been picking and choosing what needs to come next on them, but not
791. 01:10:58 far enough, I guess would be the way to say it. So I've been defining not necessarily a proverbial
792. 01:11:06 mile, but like a proverbial quarter mile that I've been trying to work towards. But I haven't broken
793. 01:11:12 them down far enough to where I can say, okay, today, this hour, this is what I need to do. I
794. 01:11:19 haven't gone that far with it, which is weird because I feel like that's something I do. But
795. 01:11:23 it's weird how I have something I think I do, but I don't do it because somebody like Chris is able
796. 01:11:29 to help me see that I don't do what I think I do. Follow that train of thought at all. That
797. 01:11:34 was a weird way to say that. Sorry about that. So I have two big projects that I need to break
798. 01:11:39 down a little bit further so that I can actually make progress on them. I don't think I can share
799. 01:11:45 what those are. I wish I could. That would be easier, but I can't do that. Sorry.
800. 01:11:49 That's what I got, Mike. All right. So upcoming books.
801. 01:11:54 All right, right. Because what is it? Next time around, it's my choice.
802. 01:12:00 And I selected Grit by Angela Duckworth, which is one that I have seen recommended in a number
803. 01:12:08 of places, New York Times bestseller. It has accolades from Daniel Gilbert, Susan Kane, Malcolm Gladwell,
804. 01:12:16 Dan Heath, who we read decisive here. So lots of great feedback I've heard on that one.
805. 01:12:23 Kind of following some of the same thread we've been jumping into lately with success and taking
806. 01:12:30 the next step as we've seen here today. And then how do I have the power of the passion and perseverance
807. 01:12:39 to continue working those next steps into my life? So that's what the book's about. That's the
808. 01:12:43 goal. And I'm going to drag Mike along with me. I started this one and I really like it so far.
809. 01:12:48 My next book then is The Sleep Revolution by Ariana Huffington, which was the one that
810. 01:12:54 you were with me when I bought in Woodstock. Right. And I saw it on my shelf. I was going to
811. 01:13:00 make Joe read this with me. So it's time to do it. That was like three, four months ago,
812. 01:13:05 you told me you're going to make me do that. Or it's a longer than that. Exactly. So
813. 01:13:10 decided to follow through in that. It's about time. Considering I have a three month old and
814. 01:13:15 adult sleep. Thanks for that. Yeah. So maybe you can get some tips. There you go. There you go.
815. 01:13:21 Uh, gap books. So I haven't picked up grit yet. I'm planning to read a book before I get to that
816. 01:13:28 one. And I picked up this morning, uh, The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. This is actually a
817. 01:13:34 transcript of a conversation that was held between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell about
818. 01:13:40 symbolism and mythology and its impact and prevalence in our culture today. So it was a conversation in
819. 01:13:49 when was it late eighties, mid eighties, eighty five, eighty six, somewhere in that range.
820. 01:13:55 Um, yeah, anyway, should be interesting. I'm curious symbolism and mythology in our world.
821. 01:14:01 Where is it? Uh, my gap book is unsubscribed by Jocelyn. Not sure how to say last name,
822. 01:14:09 Lee. Lee? Yeah. Uh, it's a book about email, which is one of my favorite topics. You're obsessed.
823. 01:14:16 I am. But I actually saw this recommended on tools and toys, I believe. Uh, it looks very
824. 01:14:24 interesting. It's got a lot of, there's a lot of illustrations and it's got a very, uh, very, uh,
825. 01:14:31 peculiar art style that I think is going to provide a little bit more entertaining and
826. 01:14:36 interesting take on the whole topic of email. So I'm interested to see what they have to say,
827. 01:14:41 but I've heard a lot of good things about this book. It looks like an easy read. Cool. Cool.
828. 01:14:46 Chris, what are you, what are you reading? I'm sure, you know, authors always read a lot. So,
829. 01:14:51 yeah, yeah, you know, it's kind of a mix between reading and creating. I'm actually grits when
830. 01:14:56 that's on my reading list. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. I've seen a bit of sleep revolution
831. 01:15:01 by Ariana Huffington. One that I recently read that I really love is the, I always get this wrong,
832. 01:15:09 the War of Art. Uh, is it because there's the art of war, which I've read as well, but it's
833. 01:15:14 the War of Art, which is a phenomenal book. But grit is actually one of my next up books that I
834. 01:15:19 need to read. Nice. You read it with us? I might. Yeah, I might. I just might do that.
835. 01:15:25 Well, we did the War of Art, didn't we, Mike? That was like the second one that we did.
836. 01:15:31 Number two, I think. That was a really, really good book. Yeah. I really like that one. You'll like it.
837. 01:15:37 So Chris, where can people go to find you online? Yeah, Chris Capeart.co. That's pretty simple.
838. 01:15:46 You can find me there. I'm on every other channel, Instagram, Facebook, and pretty much all of them.
839. 01:15:50 It's just forward slash Chris Capeart. I've been around the tech world long enough that I was
840. 01:15:55 fortunately able to get my name on almost everything. So you can find me there, but yeah,
841. 01:16:00 chriskapart.co, not.com. I've been going back and forth. There was a, there's a man, if you
842. 01:16:06 search Chris Capeart, that's a, he's a magician and he's had Chris Capeart.com. He's a lot older than
843. 01:16:12 I am for a long time. And I even called him back in the day to get it and never could get him to
844. 01:16:18 give it to me. And then all of a sudden, probably about two years ago, it switched. And now it's a
845. 01:16:22 dentist blog. And I've been trying to, you know, with not a lot of updates, I've been trying to get
846. 01:16:28 the .com from him for a long time too, but can't seem to make the connection. So I'm having no luck
847. 01:16:33 with the .com. So I'm going hardcore on .co these days. Nice. Just got to take the next step.
848. 01:16:40 Yeah, take the next step. So find me there. We're actually, I'm really excited about it. We,
849. 01:16:44 we are in the middle of a complete redesign and redeveloped the website. I've been seeing some of
850. 01:16:51 the initial comps. I'm really excited about it. Got a lot of new features and functionality.
851. 01:16:56 We're also launching in the process of launching a year long program, which I think we just landed
852. 01:17:04 on the name of today. So I'm not going to say anything yet. But we're really excited about that.
853. 01:17:10 You know, to really take people through, you know, the kind of process of implementing step in their
854. 01:17:14 life. And it's a lot of fun things going on. So be watching over the next couple of months.
855. 01:17:18 You'll see new branding, new logos, new website design, a lot of new things you can sign up and
856. 01:17:24 get. So it's going to be fun. Cool. Cool. So we've mentioned a lot of books here. And we always try to
857. 01:17:33 get some listener feedback on what you'd like to hear us go through. So if you have a suggestion,
858. 01:17:40 that you want us to go through, you can do that over on our website bookworm.fm/recommend.
859. 01:17:47 And you can find a full list of the books we've been through, the ones we've got planned for
860. 01:17:51 the future, as well as any that have been recommended so far. Nice. And if you want to help people
861. 01:17:58 find the show, help us out a lot. If you would go to iTunes and leave us a quick review,
862. 01:18:02 it really, really bugs me that when you go search for Bookworm, there's a radio station that has
863. 01:18:06 a Bookworm podcast that shows up in front of ours, even though it's a really long title.
864. 01:18:10 So help us skip Bookworm at the top of the search results by going and leaving a review,
865. 01:18:15 helps other people find the show. And we take all of your feedback really seriously. We want to
866. 01:18:20 implement the things that people have recommended. So the iTunes reviews are a great place to do that.
867. 01:18:26 So a great big thank you to you, Chris, for joining us today. It's been a pleasure to have you
868. 01:18:33 on the show. Thanks guys. Thanks so much for having me today. It was a pleasure.
869. 01:18:37 If you guys want, just go take a look at Chris's stuff online. He's got a lot of great stuff out
870. 01:18:43 there. We really appreciate you joining us today, Chris. And if you are reading along with us,
871. 01:18:48 the next book up on the list is Grit. So you can pick that up and we will go on a journey with
872. 01:18:54 Angela Duckworth.