243: The End of Burnout by Jonathan Malesic

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1. 00:00:00 Okay, so for follow up this time, we only had the one action item, which I'm not sure if you did.
2. 00:00:07 I actually deleted from the notes because I didn't want to put any pressure on you.
3. 00:00:09 But you did say you were going to take the PKM quiz.
4. 00:00:12 Did you take it?
5. 00:00:13 Did you get your score?
6. 00:00:14 No, I didn't even remember.
7. 00:00:15 I was supposed to take this thing.
8. 00:00:16 Ah, it's okay.
9. 00:00:17 Sorry.
10. 00:00:18 Like, I have no idea.
11. 00:00:19 I was supposed to take a PKM quiz.
12. 00:00:21 Hold on.
13. 00:00:22 I was supposed to take a PKM quiz.
14. 00:00:23 Remind me of the PKM quizzes.
15. 00:00:25 I put together, I put together a PKM quiz, but as we record this,
16. 00:00:29 but, you know, the old other episode has not been published yet.
17. 00:00:33 Podcasting is weird, but I have some work to do on that thing yet.
18. 00:00:37 So I kind of don't don't care that it's that you didn't take it.
19. 00:00:42 It's not it's lacking a little bit of polish.
20. 00:00:44 I've had a few people take it.
21. 00:00:45 They said it's pretty good, um, that it was helpful on highlighting a couple of things, but, uh, yeah, still work in progress.
22. 00:00:52 Well, here's where I'm at on that.
23. 00:00:53 Like this was like a so fast, like with life right now, I didn't even remember that that was a thing.
24. 00:00:59 So I'm sorry.
25. 00:01:00 Forgive me.
26. 00:01:01 Yeah, no big deal, no big deal.
27. 00:01:03 Let's just move right past that.
28. 00:01:04 I don't have any other follow up though.
29. 00:01:06 So I didn't either.
30. 00:01:10 And when I, and when I saw that quiz, I was like, Oh, maybe he means the MPI thing, right?
31. 00:01:14 Like I'm supposed to take the MPI thing, which I, which I did do that one.
32. 00:01:18 Um, yep, I didn't remember the PKM quiz.
33. 00:01:21 Okay, cool.
34. 00:01:21 Well, let's, uh, save the burnout inventory results until the end, I think, because that's going to be based off of the
35. 00:01:29 conversation that we have here today.
36. 00:01:32 Um, I guess just one other point of, uh, follow up then, uh, I built an app.
37. 00:01:38 If you want to know more about it, you should join the pro show because I demoed it live for the YouTube audience.
38. 00:01:46 And we talked through, uh, this thing that I, I made.
39. 00:01:49 So, uh, you want to end on the, uh, well, thank you.
40. 00:01:53 I, I, I don't think it's that awesome.
41. 00:01:56 I think it is very, very particular and it's only going to be relevant for a handful of people, but this is the most
42. 00:02:03 John Syracuse, the thing I've ever done, but Mike did a thing and it's awesome.
43. 00:02:07 And he's too humble and it's cool.
44. 00:02:09 So do you have, okay.
45. 00:02:11 So yeah, we talked about that in the pro show.
46. 00:02:13 Otherwise you can wait till, uh, we iron out the bugs and then I will open, uh, open it up to the rest of the world.
47. 00:02:20 But for now, let's talk about burnout, uh, first impressions.
48. 00:02:26 When you think about burnout Corey, um, what do you, what do you think of?
49. 00:02:31 Is it, and is it something that you thought before we read this book that you were quote, unquote, suffering from?
50. 00:02:40 So Mike, I am not happy that you picked this book.
51. 00:02:43 I knew this book would be relevant to me.
52. 00:02:45 I knew this book would be good for me.
53. 00:02:47 I knew this book would do the right thing, which mostly it did.
54. 00:02:51 I won't say it did a hundred percent, mostly it did, because like, I'm in a weird season right now and I'm going to try to not get to like.
55. 00:03:01 Personal or overdo it with details.
56. 00:03:04 I'm in a weird season right now because it's like, I've thought multiple times in the last like year ish.
57. 00:03:09 It's like, is this burnout?
58. 00:03:11 I mean, like, where are we at?
59. 00:03:12 I mean, like they, when you get hired as a faculty member, one of the things they warn you about, they're like, okay.
60. 00:03:16 Pace yourself, be careful, right?
61. 00:03:19 Like burnout's a real thing.
62. 00:03:21 You got to, you got to take care of yourself and all this stuff.
63. 00:03:23 And like, my boss will ask me every so often and be like, how are you doing?
64. 00:03:26 How are you feeling?
65. 00:03:27 Like what's going on?
66. 00:03:27 And he won't say the word burnout.
67. 00:03:29 It's one of those things that's like, if you don't want him to see the color red, don't say the color red.
68. 00:03:32 So it's like, you know, he won't like call it out because he's like, how's everything?
69. 00:03:36 And he'll do it for all the faculty, right?
70. 00:03:38 Like, so how are you doing?
71. 00:03:38 Everything okay?
72. 00:03:39 Like, how are you feeling?
73. 00:03:40 Are you, you know, anything, do you need anything?
74. 00:03:42 Can I help you anything?
75. 00:03:43 So he's awesome when it comes to that.
76. 00:03:45 But like, this is something that I've thought about not once, but multiple
77. 00:03:51 times in the last, I don't know, year, year and a half, whatever it is.
78. 00:03:54 So yes, to say that like, this book wasn't on the nose would be a complete lie.
79. 00:04:02 And I can't tell if I'm happy with you because of it.
80. 00:04:06 Or if I'm unhappy with you because of it.
81. 00:04:09 And we'll figure out how that's conversation fair.
82. 00:04:11 That's fair.
83. 00:04:12 So I actually texted Corey in the middle of reading this book, basically said, I'm
84. 00:04:18 sorry, because the author of this book is a former university professor.
85. 00:04:26 And shares a lot of details.
86. 00:04:27 Well, I guess not former because they still an adjunct professor, but
87. 00:04:30 they were a full-time professor.
88. 00:04:31 They were living their dream and they were like, this is awful and quit.
89. 00:04:35 And that was not the subtext that I was trying to get across to Corey.
90. 00:04:40 This you should quit your job.
91. 00:04:42 That's definitely the vibe and here's what I'll say though.
92. 00:04:46 Like if you are, if you're unfamiliar with academic work, right?
93. 00:04:52 Like by no means am I going to say it's the hardest work in the world, by no means
94. 00:04:55 am I going to tell you that like, there aren't very, very positive things about it.
95. 00:04:59 But I will tell you that the sentiment, this individual portrays in throughout the
96. 00:05:04 book, especially in the first part of the book, the sentiment he portrays about
97. 00:05:06 academic work is very, very common.
98. 00:05:09 Like this is not him.
99. 00:05:11 Like what I want to stress here is like, this is not the author who has a unique
100. 00:05:15 perspective on academic work.
101. 00:05:17 This is like very, very true to the academic mentality kind of when it comes to
102. 00:05:25 just the way you think about your job and the way you think about work.
103. 00:05:27 And it's especially true if you're, especially if you're in the tenure track.
104. 00:05:34 So the tenure track changes this, which I don't want to get into that right now
105. 00:05:37 unless you want me to.
106. 00:05:38 But like, if you're on the tenure track, it amps all of this up and he was.
107. 00:05:41 I'm not on the I'm not on the tenure track.
108. 00:05:43 So I don't have that, that to deal with.
109. 00:05:46 Gotcha.
110. 00:05:47 Okay.
111. 00:05:48 Yeah.
112. 00:05:49 So, um, the long story short is that Jonathan Mausich, the author of the end
113. 00:05:56 of burnout had a very positive college experience, loved hanging out with his
114. 00:06:05 professors, thinking the deep thoughts, having the serious conversations and
115. 00:06:09 was like, I can't think of a better life than to be this person who I looked up
116. 00:06:15 to and did everything to get there.
117. 00:06:19 And once he got there was like, Hey, this is kind of awful.
118. 00:06:25 I've got, I've got to pause you here because this is where he is a little bit
119. 00:06:30 different than most people is because most college students are like, he refers
120. 00:06:34 to it later on in the book where they're just like, I'm just here, like
121. 00:06:37 transactionally, like, I need to know what I need to know.
122. 00:06:40 I want to get a degree and I want to get out of here.
123. 00:06:41 So his like love for the dialogue, his love for the deep thoughts, that's
124. 00:06:46 probably I'm making up a number, but that's 5% of the book, right?
125. 00:06:49 Like a, or 5% of the population of students that come through.
126. 00:06:53 That is not a lot of students that come through.
127. 00:06:55 So that actually leads to a topic which he doesn't address real directly.
128. 00:07:02 I feel because for me, I definitely feel the frustration, which is at the source
129. 00:07:09 of burnout, but a lot of times it comes from unrealized expectations.
130. 00:07:14 So right at the beginning, you just hit it on the head and he's got a
131. 00:07:20 inaccurate view of what life as a professor working with college
132. 00:07:25 students is actually like.
133. 00:07:27 So the argument could be made like you didn't really know what you were doing.
134. 00:07:31 It's not the system's fault.
135. 00:07:33 You should have maybe researched that a little bit more before you decided to
136. 00:07:37 and in his words, that world and in his word, he would call this like the ideal,
137. 00:07:41 right? Like his ideal for what the work was, is not on on point.
138. 00:07:45 So yeah, like, yes.
139. 00:07:48 But that I don't think discredits the ideas that he talks about in the book.
140. 00:07:53 So let's get into the specifics here.
141. 00:07:57 And there are two parts, but I think since there's only eight chapters, we
142. 00:08:00 tackle this chapter by chapter.
143. 00:08:02 Yeah, I agree.
144. 00:08:03 That's great.
145. 00:08:03 Okay.
146. 00:08:04 So the first official part of the book is the introduction where he tells his
147. 00:08:10 story of how he went from college student to parking lot attendant to college
148. 00:08:17 professor, climbing the ladder, getting tenure, doing the thing and experiencing
149. 00:08:23 burnout.
150. 00:08:24 He defines burnout at the beginning here as the experience between experience
151. 00:08:29 and being pulled between expectation and reality at work.
152. 00:08:32 So he does talk about that at the beginning.
153. 00:08:35 But also, like there's the burnout inventory, which we'll talk about
154. 00:08:41 has a couple different components that we both took it.
155. 00:08:43 So we'll we'll share those at the end and maybe some insights from that.
156. 00:08:48 I feel like that's kind of sort of a disclaimer at the beginning, but then it
157. 00:08:52 gets very much into personal story as opposed to a lot of science.
158. 00:08:56 This is a very, a very story driven book about burnout.
159. 00:08:58 It is a very story driven book about his story.
160. 00:09:01 And then it makes a shift to like culture.
161. 00:09:04 And then, you know, it comes back to him in his story.
162. 00:09:06 But I want to make sure just, I mean, if I'm giving too much nuance here, Mike,
163. 00:09:11 you can shut me up and I won't be offended on any level.
164. 00:09:13 Some of you can share as much as you want, because you are this guy, basically.
165. 00:09:17 Well, some people, some people might think, right, without quitting my job.
166. 00:09:21 Yes.
167. 00:09:21 I'm like, but with some people might think like, Oh, how do you go get a PhD?
168. 00:09:27 And I can't remember what is religious studies, something like that.
169. 00:09:30 Like he ends up being a prof of professor of religious studies.
170. 00:09:32 But like, how do you get a PhD in religious studies and ended up working
171. 00:09:34 as a parking lot attendant?
172. 00:09:36 And let me very clearly tell you how this happens.
173. 00:09:39 You come out with your PhD.
174. 00:09:41 You've gotten really, really good at being a pseudo expert, kind of an expert, sort
175. 00:09:47 of an expert, maybe in one tiny little thing.
176. 00:09:51 Like imagine the tiniest little thing possible.
177. 00:09:54 And that's what you're good at.
178. 00:09:55 And then you go in the job market for maybe four jobs.
179. 00:10:01 Like there's maybe four possible holes for you to fill, like on the job market
180. 00:10:06 for that entire year.
181. 00:10:07 And the way academic cycles work is there won't be new jobs until the very next year.
182. 00:10:13 Right.
183. 00:10:13 Like, I mean, there's no, and like, and it's not even early in the year.
184. 00:10:16 It's like late in the year.
185. 00:10:17 It's like you do because a lot of people don't retire early.
186. 00:10:19 Like they don't say, you know, Hey, I'm going to retire next year.
187. 00:10:22 Like they wait until March or April and they're like, Hey, I'm
188. 00:10:25 not coming back in the fall.
189. 00:10:26 So then the school was like, Oh, we got to find somebody else.
190. 00:10:30 So he gets his PhD.
191. 00:10:31 He goes on the job market.
192. 00:10:32 He can't land one of the three or four openings that's out there at, you know,
193. 00:10:37 whatever school he wants to, like whatever type of school you want to be at.
194. 00:10:40 Cause that narrows the field even more.
195. 00:10:42 And what do you do?
196. 00:10:43 You do anything you can.
197. 00:10:45 Because all you're trying to do is wait until the next round of jobs open.
198. 00:10:50 And like that's the nature of the game.
199. 00:10:52 So it's, it's brutal.
200. 00:10:55 Like that's what I can, I can describe it as is like trying to find a faculty
201. 00:10:59 job is brutal.
202. 00:11:00 And then I don't even talk about the interview process because it's like days
203. 00:11:04 long. It's, it's insane how, how crazy it is.
204. 00:11:08 And it has to do with tenure and has to do with all this stuff, but I'll stop there.
205. 00:11:10 So I just want to make sure people know that like him taking a year as a parking
206. 00:11:14 lot attendant, like you might think it'll be like, wait, what?
207. 00:11:16 Like you just wanted to hang out.
208. 00:11:17 No, he did not want to hang out a year.
209. 00:11:20 He was figuring or he was buying time to get to the next round of applications
210. 00:11:24 in the next round of openings, so he could apply for more jobs.
211. 00:11:27 That's really probably what he was doing.
212. 00:11:29 Yeah.
213. 00:11:29 And he was in the middle of a long distance relationship at the time, which was also
214. 00:11:35 stressful.
215. 00:11:35 And yeah, there were, there were, there was a lot going on.
216. 00:11:39 But yeah, thank you for the context there.
217. 00:11:41 Cause I guess I did, it makes sense, but I didn't really realize that, yes,
218. 00:11:45 there's a small pool of jobs, but they're only open at a certain time.
219. 00:11:48 Oh, yeah.
220. 00:11:49 And in the, all those pools of jobs, like, I mean, there will be, you know,
221. 00:11:53 tens, if not hundreds of applicants or the job will be so specific that there's
222. 00:11:58 only one person in the world that can fill that.
223. 00:12:01 You know, like, I mean, it's just a weird, it's a weird market.
224. 00:12:03 It's an absolutely weird job market.
225. 00:12:06 And then you're also hiring people.
226. 00:12:07 If it's a tenure track, you're hiring people for life.
227. 00:12:09 So like if they get tenure, which you want them to do, it's really, really
228. 00:12:13 hard to fire them.
229. 00:12:14 So you don't hire people willy nilly.
230. 00:12:16 You hire them with the idea that they're going to work there for 30, 40, 50 years
231. 00:12:20 because it's really hard to fire somebody who gets tenure.
232. 00:12:24 So gotcha.
233. 00:12:25 Okay.
234. 00:12:25 Sorry.
235. 00:12:25 I went too far off the rails there.
236. 00:12:28 No, I mentioned to you, like I want to create as much space for you to provide
237. 00:12:33 context on what he's sharing here, because you have a better lens on this
238. 00:12:36 than, than I could possibly have being in that world.
239. 00:12:39 Yeah.
240. 00:12:40 But it's so much of this book is about him, right?
241. 00:12:42 Like so much of this book about his personal, his personal trip through this,
242. 00:12:45 through the story.
243. 00:12:46 So yeah, it's, uh, it's an interesting book and he has, you know, different
244. 00:12:51 experiences and he shares those stories and his research and trying to get to the
245. 00:12:55 bottom of the, the burnout thing.
246. 00:12:57 But a lot of the experiences that he has is kind of like, well, that's random.
247. 00:13:03 Yeah.
248. 00:13:04 Um, the, the one thing I want to mention before we move on, I don't know if you were
249. 00:13:07 getting ready to move us to the first chapter, but he, he does throw three caveats
250. 00:13:11 out there and I violate the first caveat the entire time I read this book, like
251. 00:13:16 without a doubt, he says this is not a self-help book for individuals.
252. 00:13:19 I will tell you that yes, he stated that as a caveat.
253. 00:13:23 I don't think that was his goal, but like if you are, if you fit the mold and
254. 00:13:29 you are like him or in a position that's like him, it is very, very hard for you
255. 00:13:33 to not read this book, like a self-help book.
256. 00:13:36 And like that's a bit of a cop out, I feel.
257. 00:13:39 Yeah.
258. 00:13:39 Like, so I get why he says it.
259. 00:13:41 We'll talk about it later.
260. 00:13:42 Like I get why he says he's got some bigger grinder goals that he's trying to
261. 00:13:45 accomplish with the book, but that first caveat is not a self-help book for individuals.
262. 00:13:49 The second one is the core of the argument is not that burnout is direct
263. 00:13:53 result of capitalism or late capitalism.
264. 00:13:55 So you do get a vibe here in this book that he is anti-capitalist and you do get
265. 00:14:01 a vibe that he is Marxist and you do get a vibe like from some of these other
266. 00:14:04 things.
267. 00:14:05 And I don't want to go into the politics of that.
268. 00:14:07 I don't want to go into my personal opinion on any of that stuff.
269. 00:14:09 What I do want to say is I can understand it's almost as if he wrote the book
270. 00:14:14 and then said, people are going to think and then I'm going to go write these caveats,
271. 00:14:17 right?
272. 00:14:18 Like people are going to think this is a self-help book.
273. 00:14:19 Yeah.
274. 00:14:19 I'm going to write the caveat.
275. 00:14:20 People are going to think this is a book about me not liking capitalism.
276. 00:14:22 I'm going to go, right?
277. 00:14:23 You know, then the last one is the book is mainly about burnout and paid employment.
278. 00:14:29 And I think that's the most relevant of his of his caveats because all we
279. 00:14:36 talk about here is paid employment. He doesn't talk about burning out in a volunteer role.
280. 00:14:39 He doesn't talk about burning out like, for instance, you and I volunteer in a church or
281. 00:14:43 doing all of these other things that we do that we aren't paid for.
282. 00:14:46 Like that's that's there's burnout there too.
283. 00:14:48 But that that's a different class of burnout, I think.
284. 00:14:51 Yeah, I feel like the whole thing about it not being a self-help book for individuals
285. 00:14:55 for an entire society, that makes it really weird.
286. 00:14:59 I mean, if you want to change a society, you got to start by changing one person.
287. 00:15:05 Well, as you were describing that, the picture I get is the academic
288. 00:15:09 version of Martin Luther's Theses, except there's not a single door.
289. 00:15:15 He should go nail that on on some university somewhere.
290. 00:15:23 All right, so yeah, there's two sections.
291. 00:15:25 Let's get into the chapters.
292. 00:15:26 The first section is burnout culture.
293. 00:15:28 The second section is counterculture.
294. 00:15:31 So the first part, burnout culture has five chapters in it.
295. 00:15:35 The second part has three chapters.
296. 00:15:37 So the first part is really about where we are.
297. 00:15:40 And then the second part maybe is what we can do about it.
298. 00:15:43 Kinda, kinda, kinda, yeah.
299. 00:15:46 All right, so let's go to chapter one.
300. 00:15:50 Chapter one is everybody is burned up, but no one knows what that means.
301. 00:15:54 I thought this was actually pretty profound.
302. 00:15:56 He talks a lot in here about the origins of burnout.
303. 00:16:01 And how it's gone up considerably in the last 50 years, but nobody has a single
304. 00:16:08 definition that they can really use for this.
305. 00:16:11 Yep.
306. 00:16:12 The source that he uses for a lot of the stuff about burnout is the research
307. 00:16:18 done by Christina Maslak, the author of the Maslak Burnout Inventory,
308. 00:16:22 which we both took, and we'll talk about later.
309. 00:16:26 And there's a book that she wrote called Burnout the Cost of Caring,
310. 00:16:30 which talks about those who burnout tend to be idealistic.
311. 00:16:33 If you lack close relationships with friends and family, you're more
312. 00:16:36 likely to be dependent on colleagues or coworkers for sides of appreciation.
313. 00:16:39 And when the workplace does not recognize the human side of work,
314. 00:16:42 then the risk of burnout grows, carrying a high price with it.
315. 00:16:46 Individuals aren't to blame for burnout.
316. 00:16:48 He says at the beginning here, which is probably connected to his argument
317. 00:16:52 that this is a societal thing and not an individual thing.
318. 00:16:55 And then talks about how there are three different dimensions to burn out.
319. 00:16:58 I love to get your take on these.
320. 00:17:00 Exhaustion, cynicism or depersonalization and a sense of ineffectiveness
321. 00:17:05 or diminished accomplishment.
322. 00:17:07 All right.
323. 00:17:07 So the, the one that doesn't connect with me as much, the exhaustion makes total
324. 00:17:14 sense, right?
325. 00:17:15 Like there is just a way that, like, if you're experiencing some sort of
326. 00:17:19 burnout symptom, you're just tired, like you just feel tired and you wake up and
327. 00:17:22 you're like, Oh man, do I really have to go do this again today?
328. 00:17:25 Like am I really going to go do this?
329. 00:17:27 And, and this is not a personal thing.
330. 00:17:28 I mean, I'm not saying that I experience this all the time, but it's like, I get that.
331. 00:17:31 Like that, that actually makes sense.
332. 00:17:33 That seems pretty natural.
333. 00:17:34 Like if I'm experiencing burnout, this just feeling of tiredness.
334. 00:17:38 Now later on in the book, and I don't remember exactly where he's going to relate
335. 00:17:42 this to depression and he's going to relate this to other things, like melancholy
336. 00:17:46 and all this stuff.
337. 00:17:47 And I think that's, I think he does a really good job as he relates this.
338. 00:17:51 So I'll, I'll pause on that for now.
339. 00:17:52 But is it exhaustion?
340. 00:17:54 Is it depression?
341. 00:17:55 Is it just a general like sadness or apathy or whatever it might be?
342. 00:17:59 That's a great one.
343. 00:17:59 Like I like, I like that category.
344. 00:18:02 The next one is the diminished accomplishment or this idea of personal
345. 00:18:06 accomplishment.
346. 00:18:08 I don't know how much I, I connect with this one.
347. 00:18:10 Like I can, I can kind of see where it comes from, but this one was like newer to
348. 00:18:15 me or it's kind of a surprise to me.
349. 00:18:18 The depersonalization was the one that shocked me the most.
350. 00:18:21 It's, it's like, oh, do I start to like think of the job less about the people in
351. 00:18:28 the job or less about my colleagues or less about the people I'm serving or less
352. 00:18:31 about like all these other things.
353. 00:18:32 And it's more of like the, the work and it's more of the, you know, the nuts and
354. 00:18:38 bolts of what I'm doing.
355. 00:18:39 Like I'm pushing this paper, not I'm helping a student get to graduation.
356. 00:18:44 You know what I mean?
357. 00:18:44 Like it's a big difference between the way I think about those two things.
358. 00:18:48 So I like, I don't mind these three.
359. 00:18:53 I would have to think hard about whether I think these three are the three.
360. 00:18:56 If Maslek did the research the way, like I would think about doing the
361. 00:19:01 research is she's going to go ask a bunch of people about like, how do you
362. 00:19:05 experience burnout?
363. 00:19:06 And they're going to give her answers and she's going to be like, I feel this
364. 00:19:08 way, I feel this way, I think this, I feel this, I think this, and then she's
365. 00:19:11 going to aggregate those back into the most essential characteristics that she
366. 00:19:16 can, like that's the way I would do this research is I would go out and ask a
367. 00:19:19 bunch of people about burnout and just ask them and say, tell me whatever you
368. 00:19:22 want to tell me about burnout.
369. 00:19:24 And then I'm going to go back and I'm going to figure out how to get those
370. 00:19:26 into categories.
371. 00:19:28 And I can see these three categories coming out as three relevant categories
372. 00:19:33 in this, in this world.
373. 00:19:35 Nice.
374. 00:19:36 Yeah.
375. 00:19:36 I, I think the, the research done by Christina Maslek, I want to dig into that
376. 00:19:43 more, the burnout, the cost of carrying that might be one that I'll have to pick
377. 00:19:47 up at some point.
378. 00:19:49 What do you think about this statement that if almost everyone suffers from
379. 00:19:52 burnout, then no one does?
380. 00:19:53 That kind of goes against his argument that this is a societal thing, not an
381. 00:19:57 individual thing, right?
382. 00:19:59 So I don't connect with this statement as much.
383. 00:20:02 If everyone suffers from burnout, no one does.
384. 00:20:04 Like it just becomes the water you swim in.
385. 00:20:07 Like I understand, I understand that, that argument is like, Oh, if everybody's
386. 00:20:12 burned out, then really, this is just normal.
387. 00:20:14 This is what we call normal.
388. 00:20:15 And, and there is no like person who's actually burned out.
389. 00:20:18 Like I, I kind of get that where I like later on in the book and I, and I had it
390. 00:20:24 and it is evading me right now, but like, I'll see if I can think about it, come
391. 00:20:29 back to it.
392. 00:20:29 But it has to do with this idea that like burnout is the norm now.
393. 00:20:34 And like everybody's experienced it and everybody's feeling it.
394. 00:20:38 And like that, I think that is a cultural thing.
395. 00:20:41 Like I think that is something that, that we do it.
396. 00:20:43 Oh, it's the sense of, um, like the sense of honor that comes with it.
397. 00:20:47 Like, Hey, I'm burned out.
398. 00:20:49 Look how, like, look how hard I'm working.
399. 00:20:51 Like I'm burned out.
400. 00:20:52 Like, Oh man, I'm, I'm, I'm going after it.
401. 00:20:54 I'm hustling more than you are, right?
402. 00:20:55 Which I know you're feeling about hustle, right?
403. 00:20:57 Like, so, you know, like, I, I think there's a, there's a very big truth to that.
404. 00:21:02 So I get what he's, I get where he's coming from here.
405. 00:21:05 I don't know if I, if I love it or hate it.
406. 00:21:08 Yeah, so the, the point that he makes right before that is that different studies
407. 00:21:12 have different definitions of burnout and the message that I got was basically
408. 00:21:19 people keep watering down the definition.
409. 00:21:22 And so if we do that so that all these people suffer from burnout,
410. 00:21:27 then no one is really burnt out.
411. 00:21:30 We don't really understand at all what this, this means.
412. 00:21:34 And there is a little bit of truth to that because the different studies have
413. 00:21:36 different definitions of that and he shares some of the statistics.
414. 00:21:39 Like one study says it's this much, one study says it's that much.
415. 00:21:42 But if it's this much of millennials and this much of the total workforce,
416. 00:21:46 that's impossible, you know, at some point, at some point, he talks about
417. 00:21:51 the fact that, you know, for different genders, burnout looks differently.
418. 00:21:55 And then for different races, burnout looks different.
419. 00:21:57 But the data doesn't back that up.
420. 00:21:59 Like that's like kind of the anecdote that's, that's said about it.
421. 00:22:02 So I think the, the drive home, when, you know, when I think about burnout in
422. 00:22:06 general is there's some stuff we know, but there's still a lot of stuff we don't
423. 00:22:11 know. Like it's this fuzzy concept.
424. 00:22:13 It's not, you know, um, this hard concept.
425. 00:22:16 He compares it to strep throat, right?
426. 00:22:18 Like if you get strep throat, there's a test and it's like, you have strep throat.
427. 00:22:22 We know it.
428. 00:22:23 It failed this test or it passed this test or whatever it is.
429. 00:22:26 And for this, it's like not that clean.
430. 00:22:28 It's you maybe you kind of do, you kind of don't, which I know, I'm, I'm
431. 00:22:33 merging a bunch of chapters together, but it's this idea of that spectrum, which
432. 00:22:36 is chapter three, but we'll get there.
433. 00:22:38 We're not there yet.
434. 00:22:39 Yeah.
435. 00:22:40 All right.
436. 00:22:41 So let's go to chapter two, then, unless you got something else in chapter one.
437. 00:22:44 No, I'm good.
438. 00:22:46 Okay.
439. 00:22:47 So chapter two is burnout the first 2000 years.
440. 00:22:53 And, uh, yeah, I kind of don't, don't know how to frame this one.
441. 00:22:58 Um, he gets into some of the burnout before burnout definitions.
442. 00:23:03 Like Neerasthenia, um, probably butchering that, that term, but, um, that was kind
443. 00:23:12 of the precursor to, uh, to burnout.
444. 00:23:15 And I felt like as he was going through these, these different definitions of
445. 00:23:20 these terms, just like burnout, they didn't really have solid definitions.
446. 00:23:24 So I think it's fine to sit.
447. 00:23:26 That's kind of a precursor to burnout.
448. 00:23:29 Um, and then he also says that eventually it disappeared because the
449. 00:23:31 definition of what that was got stretched too far.
450. 00:23:36 And, uh, I, the major point though, I think is that, um, over the last 50 years,
451. 00:23:46 the topic of burnout has really become more popular and, uh, awareness of burnout
452. 00:23:53 has grown significantly in those five decades, but understanding of it has not.
453. 00:23:59 So his point that he's making in this chapter is that we've essentially been
454. 00:24:04 having the same conversation about burnout for the last 50 years.
455. 00:24:08 And we're not getting anywhere.
456. 00:24:09 Is that fair?
457. 00:24:11 Yeah.
458. 00:24:11 Yeah.
459. 00:24:11 And just to add a little, a little color to it, right?
460. 00:24:14 So he talks about ancient melancholia, a CD, uh, modern melancholia, right?
461. 00:24:19 And then, um, the word that you said that I can never remember neuro something or
462. 00:24:24 other, right?
463. 00:24:25 And it's not going to try that again.
464. 00:24:26 Yeah.
465. 00:24:27 Like, I think he's trying to get at this idea of like, we don't have a definition of
466. 00:24:31 it.
467. 00:24:31 We're trying to make a definition of it.
468. 00:24:33 I'm trying to make a definition of it, but nobody's going to accept my
469. 00:24:36 definition of it because we've been dealing with this for 2000 years.
470. 00:24:39 And he's just trying to lay the land.
471. 00:24:41 I think of if you can't find the, this is what burnout is.
472. 00:24:46 There's a good reason why you can't find this is what burnout is.
473. 00:24:50 And here are all the ways we've talked about it, uh, in the past.
474. 00:24:53 So like he talks about Freudenberger and it's precisely because we are dedicated, uh,
475. 00:24:58 to what we do, we burnout, burnout trap.
476. 00:25:00 We work too long and too intensely.
477. 00:25:02 So he gets this idea of like working too long, working too intensive.
478. 00:25:05 He gets this idea of the internal pressure to meet some ideal with not, um,
479. 00:25:12 achieving that in the reality or not achieving, achieving that in the workplace.
480. 00:25:17 And like, I don't remember, Mike, so I'm going to ask you to see if you remember,
481. 00:25:20 if you wrote it down in your notes, does he ever actually like straight up define it?
482. 00:25:26 Um, I'm trying to think of he does it in the very beginning.
483. 00:25:29 All right.
484. 00:25:30 Well, you mean burnout specifically?
485. 00:25:31 Yeah.
486. 00:25:32 He does.
487. 00:25:32 Okay.
488. 00:25:33 Yeah.
489. 00:25:33 The experience of being pulled between expectation and reality at work.
490. 00:25:36 And that actually leads to the stilts analogy that he shares in the next chapter.
491. 00:25:40 Yeah.
492. 00:25:40 So, but it's like even there when he says like the difference between the expectation and the reality at work.
493. 00:25:46 I like that for me doesn't fully jive with, you know, this whole chapter two discussion,
494. 00:25:54 right?
495. 00:25:54 About all this melancholy and all this stuff.
496. 00:25:57 Yeah.
497. 00:25:58 So like, I don't know, like I'm kind of torn on this.
498. 00:26:01 And hopefully I'm not sounding like I'm negative about the whole discussion he's having in these
499. 00:26:06 first two chapters because for somebody who is thinking about this or who has thought about this,
500. 00:26:13 this is a really good, informative two chapters, right?
501. 00:26:15 Like I'm learning a lot and I'm engaging a lot with what he's writing here.
502. 00:26:20 I just, I also like a pretty bow put around things that way I can walk away and say like,
503. 00:26:25 hey, here's the pretty bow that was put around this in the first two chapters.
504. 00:26:28 And I didn't get a pretty bow.
505. 00:26:30 So let me ask you about that because if you, I know he's writing this for the society at large,
506. 00:26:36 not for individuals, which I don't understand that approach, but that it, he said that.
507. 00:26:41 So we'll give him that.
508. 00:26:42 Okay.
509. 00:26:44 If you're coming to this and you are dealing with burnout, you're probably like, yeah,
510. 00:26:49 I don't care.
511. 00:26:50 Just make the pain go away, right?
512. 00:26:53 The people who really need to understand the causes for this are the people who are not dealing
513. 00:26:59 with burnout.
514. 00:27:00 And so you're just relying on them to do everybody else who is a solid.
515. 00:27:05 Okay.
516. 00:27:05 So, so this actually, this squares the circle well.
517. 00:27:11 He wrote it that it's not an individualistic book.
518. 00:27:13 So he's not writing for you, the individual who's coming for help with burnout.
519. 00:27:18 He's writing for the political leader, the manager at the company, the, you know,
520. 00:27:25 he's writing for those people who care about helping this culturally or care about changing
521. 00:27:32 this in their workplace.
522. 00:27:33 So in my mind, that all checks out.
523. 00:27:36 Like everything seems to work out well in that situation.
524. 00:27:39 If he was writing it for the individual who wants help, right, then the whole background
525. 00:27:45 section is okay, but you could shorten it down to 10 pages.
526. 00:27:48 Like give me the 10 page cliff notes of it.
527. 00:27:51 Yeah.
528. 00:27:51 So this is the thing I don't understand though is maybe it's different in academia.
529. 00:27:56 Maybe you really need to have all this research basis.
530. 00:27:59 But again, it's not like a very pretty bow.
531. 00:28:02 And like, this is why we got to do this.
532. 00:28:04 So you nailed it, right?
533. 00:28:06 And I didn't think about it.
534. 00:28:07 Like he's an academic.
535. 00:28:08 He's a tenure track academic.
536. 00:28:09 He writes.
537. 00:28:10 He loves writing.
538. 00:28:11 It's his lit review.
539. 00:28:13 Like the first two, like the first two, sorry, first one, two, three, four chapters,
540. 00:28:20 or like his lit review.
541. 00:28:21 I didn't even think about it.
542. 00:28:23 Mike, good job.
543. 00:28:25 Well, I mean, I worked at companies and the digital marketing agency specifically,
544. 00:28:30 I feel like that's the one where you really can burn people out just based on the pace
545. 00:28:36 of the work that's being done.
546. 00:28:38 And I wasn't the HR person, but I worked with the HR person on the leadership team
547. 00:28:43 and the HR person would absolutely love to help the people at the company overcome burnout.
548. 00:28:52 If I gave the HR person this book, they don't make it through the first two chapters because
549. 00:28:58 they're like, I'm not even sure this is a thing.
550. 00:29:01 And I don't understand what we're even trying to solve here.
551. 00:29:07 You know, cool story, bro.
552. 00:29:11 About your experience.
553. 00:29:12 But like, what do I do with this valid?
554. 00:29:16 That's a valid point.
555. 00:29:17 I can't.
556. 00:29:18 I can't say much to that.
557. 00:29:19 That's a valid point.
558. 00:29:20 Okay.
559. 00:29:21 Well, let's go to chapter three because this one, I think, this whole idea of the spectrum
560. 00:29:26 is really good.
561. 00:29:27 So chapter three is the burnout spectrum.
562. 00:29:31 And the analogy that I alluded to is that you've got these stilts and you're walking
563. 00:29:36 on them and they keep getting further and further away.
564. 00:29:38 The further you go down this path, the higher up on the stilts you go.
565. 00:29:42 So you can get even more stretched out and the crashes even greater.
566. 00:29:48 Mentions that you can experience burnout without being burned out.
567. 00:29:53 And the gap between our ideals for work and the reality of our job is burnout's origin point.
568. 00:29:58 Then they get into the definitions that pertain to those three components of burnout.
569. 00:30:05 And I think this is interesting.
570. 00:30:07 So the first one is that we're engaged with our work.
571. 00:30:10 And if we were taking that Maslek burnout inventory, maybe this is the place to talk about that.
572. 00:30:15 I don't know.
573. 00:30:16 It keeps coming up.
574. 00:30:17 But there's the three different scales, basically.
575. 00:30:20 Exhaustion, cynicism, and then the sense of ineffectiveness or diminished accomplishment.
576. 00:30:24 Okay.
577. 00:30:24 So if you score high, let's say, well, that's kind of inverse.
578. 00:30:31 So if you're high exhaustion, that's bad.
579. 00:30:35 So you score in the good range for exhaustion, cynicism, and then that sense of ineffectiveness.
580. 00:30:41 Then you are engaged.
581. 00:30:42 If you score high on that first one, you are exhausted, basically, but not the other two.
582. 00:30:50 You're overextended.
583. 00:30:51 If you're high on cynicism, then you are, surprise, cynical.
584. 00:30:57 If you are high on the sense of ineffectiveness or diminished accomplishment, you are frustrated.
585. 00:31:01 And that's assuming that there are no other scales that are very high.
586. 00:31:05 But if you have more than one of them, you are burned out.
587. 00:31:08 Okay.
588. 00:31:08 So the percentages here for like where people fall into these buckets is, I think, 40 to 45%
589. 00:31:18 were engaged.
590. 00:31:20 15% roughly were overextended.
591. 00:31:23 10% were cynical, 20 to 25% were frustrated, and then 5 to 10% were burned out.
592. 00:31:29 So there's a couple of ranges there, which means it doesn't quite add up to exactly 100%.
593. 00:31:35 But I think that gives some context now for burnout.
594. 00:31:40 And I like this positioning.
595. 00:31:44 Again, though, there's like anecdotes here, which is kind of like, well, what do we do with this?
596. 00:31:49 So he says burnout may be a form of depression because this one study showed that 86% of school
597. 00:31:55 teachers who were burned out also met criteria for depression.
598. 00:31:59 So, okay, that seems like there's a strong correlation there, but it's one specific
599. 00:32:05 cherry-picked example.
600. 00:32:07 And yeah, I wish there would just would have been a little bit more.
601. 00:32:11 This is the conclusion from the hypothesis based on all the research that we looked at.
602. 00:32:16 And maybe that just doesn't exist.
603. 00:32:17 But I kind of think Christina Maslek has some of that stuff.
604. 00:32:20 I would be shocked if she doesn't.
605. 00:32:22 Like if she doesn't have more of that that locked in, but I don't know.
606. 00:32:26 I mean, you're right.
607. 00:32:27 Like all of the things you're saying make total sense is like, that being said,
608. 00:32:32 I think his main point here is that it's on a spectrum.
609. 00:32:35 It sits at face value.
610. 00:32:38 Like that actually works, right?
611. 00:32:40 Like there is the idea of burned out or not burned out.
612. 00:32:43 Where do I reach that?
613. 00:32:44 Where do I achieve that?
614. 00:32:45 When am I burned out?
615. 00:32:46 When am I not burned out?
616. 00:32:47 And really, it's like, are we all just on this scale of burnout?
617. 00:32:50 And this is, it's funny that somebody in the chat brought up nihilism, right?
618. 00:32:56 Like a book on nihilism.
619. 00:32:57 And the funny thing is because I feel like as I'm reading this, excuse me, I think,
620. 00:33:02 as I'm reading this, right?
621. 00:33:03 He's moving more towards a nihilistic view.
622. 00:33:06 Like listen, we're all screwed.
623. 00:33:09 We're all, you know, we're all going to suffer on the spectrum of burnout.
624. 00:33:14 It's really just where you are on that spectrum.
625. 00:33:17 And, you know, there's no getting out of it.
626. 00:33:19 There's no, there's no overcoming it, anything like that.
627. 00:33:23 So here we go.
628. 00:33:24 And then I'm going to move into part two.
629. 00:33:27 And he's got 200 years of data.
630. 00:33:30 He would say in the last 50 years and then he ends the last chapter with actually,
631. 00:33:32 it's in the last 200 years if you consider these other things.
632. 00:33:35 So it's like he's building this argument of basically like,
633. 00:33:40 there's no getting away from this.
634. 00:33:42 So, and then he's going to drop the bomb in the next one.
635. 00:33:46 He's going to drop the bomb in the next one.
636. 00:33:47 But like, I don't have that worldview.
637. 00:33:50 Like I don't, like that's just not my take on it is we're not all in this soup of,
638. 00:33:56 you know, burnout, you know, where there's no way to get out of it.
639. 00:33:59 It's just a matter of, are some of us experiencing it?
640. 00:34:01 Yeah, like it's so it's like, I'm very torn on aspects of this book to where like,
641. 00:34:05 I agree with his overall premise of certain things.
642. 00:34:08 And then I completely disagree with some of the other premises that he's,
643. 00:34:11 that he's got or the worldview that he's got.
644. 00:34:13 So it's, it's a very, there's a very weird read for me, Mike.
645. 00:34:15 Like a very weird read for me.
646. 00:34:17 Well, speaking of disagreements, let's go to the next chapter.
647. 00:34:20 Let's wrap up this section.
648. 00:34:21 I think then talk about our results before we go to part two.
649. 00:34:25 Okay.
650. 00:34:25 All right.
651. 00:34:27 All right.
652. 00:34:27 So the next chapter, how jobs have gotten worse in the age of burnout.
653. 00:34:33 There are a couple of things specifically that I mentioned here.
654. 00:34:35 I'll start with the, the good stuff.
655. 00:34:36 I think the six areas or workers tend to experience mismatches between people
656. 00:34:39 and their jobs, workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values.
657. 00:34:43 I think that's probably accurate.
658. 00:34:45 I think you could condense this though.
659. 00:34:47 Okay.
660. 00:34:47 I came across a statistic somewhere at some point several years ago,
661. 00:34:52 which was basically people want three things at their, their job.
662. 00:34:57 Okay.
663. 00:34:57 Number one was autonomy.
664. 00:35:00 And so I feel like the workload and control kind of can be combined into that.
665. 00:35:04 If that makes sense, I forget what the other two were.
666. 00:35:06 But those are probably accurate, but I think I think it could be simplified, basically.
667. 00:35:10 It's funny that you say that because the one that when you were saying this,
668. 00:35:12 I came across the thing.
669. 00:35:13 I was like, autonomy is the first one.
670. 00:35:14 Like I guarantee autonomy is one of them.
671. 00:35:16 And okay, I was glad I was right.
672. 00:35:18 Yeah, I wish I could find that now, but anyways, so conditions in the workplace
673. 00:35:23 contribute greatly to whether a worker will burn out.
674. 00:35:26 And for three decades, jobs have gotten worse.
675. 00:35:30 There's an interesting point here about the emphasis on right sizing,
676. 00:35:33 which has led to less people doing more.
677. 00:35:37 As a former integrator who had to go through right sizing,
678. 00:35:44 I get the larger societal point, but I could tell you that in the individual scenario,
679. 00:35:50 like this absolutely needed to be done.
680. 00:35:54 Everybody was going to lose their jobs if some people did not.
681. 00:35:57 And it was just because, I don't know, I get into specifics,
682. 00:36:01 but what happens in these scenarios is like all this person's been here forever.
683. 00:36:05 They're not really good at their job, but they're really trying really hard.
684. 00:36:08 Let's create a position for them.
685. 00:36:10 Great.
686. 00:36:10 If you have unlimited resources, and this is at the heart of like the capitalism argument,
687. 00:36:16 but that's where we live currently in the United States.
688. 00:36:21 So we kind of have to play by the rules that exist here to a certain level.
689. 00:36:26 I mean, if you don't have to worry about that, awesome.
690. 00:36:29 Go change the world.
691. 00:36:31 And I'm not saying don't try to not change the world because you have to have a family
692. 00:36:36 to feed there's a line here.
693. 00:36:39 But anyways, I think there's exceptions to this.
694. 00:36:42 I came across a website the other day that had like for your creative entrepreneur,
695. 00:36:50 like I am, and I'm not at the point where I can really hire somebody full time for this.
696. 00:36:53 But if you wanted a full time executive assistant, a video editor, whatever what they do is they
697. 00:36:59 find people in countries that are going through economic turmoil, like Venezuela.
698. 00:37:04 And for a long time, people have worked with people from the Philippines.
699. 00:37:06 And some of those are just like, we're trying to get labor as cheap as we possibly can.
700. 00:37:10 And I don't like that.
701. 00:37:11 But I have personal stories associated with specific people in those countries,
702. 00:37:16 where they were thrilled to get that opportunity because it's better than anything else that
703. 00:37:21 they could have gotten.
704. 00:37:23 And if you can do it right, you know, you can care about the people that you work with.
705. 00:37:27 You can pay them to do this job that you're quote unquote outsourcing,
706. 00:37:32 you know, without having the, you know,
707. 00:37:38 diminished human dignity, which is really his larger point.
708. 00:37:42 My issue with this chapter though, is a couple of examples that he shares,
709. 00:37:45 which I think are not great mentions Toyota and Kaizen as a means of wearing out people's minds
710. 00:37:51 to be or as wearing out people's people's minds.
711. 00:37:54 My note is that I think the mention of Toyota and Kaizen as a means of wearing out people's
712. 00:37:57 minds is a bit of a stretch.
713. 00:37:59 The argument he doesn't present is the other side of this coin though.
714. 00:38:03 Sorry, make your point.
715. 00:38:04 I interrupted you a little bit.
716. 00:38:05 Well, so like just Kaizen in general is small improvements.
717. 00:38:10 And the people who actually can make the call on what should be improved are the people who
718. 00:38:15 are doing the work.
719. 00:38:16 So you can view this as like, oh, you're asking them to do more and you're wearing them out.
720. 00:38:20 But actually, if you do it right, these people feel empowered because they can make their job
721. 00:38:27 better.
722. 00:38:28 They noticed that this thing is causing friction.
723. 00:38:31 And this is the simple solution to fix it.
724. 00:38:34 Let me just fix it quick because I'm the one who has to deal with this eight hours a day every day.
725. 00:38:40 Okay.
726. 00:38:41 So study of work, we took at the history of work, right?
727. 00:38:44 I teach a classical work methods where we actually study how humans do jobs.
728. 00:38:48 And the history prior to this was the foreman told you what to do and you did what the foreman
729. 00:38:54 told you to do.
730. 00:38:55 And the foreman told you how to do it.
731. 00:38:56 And you did it the way the foreman told you to do it.
732. 00:38:58 And if you didn't, you got in trouble.
733. 00:39:01 And if you continued to not listen to the foreman, you got fired, right?
734. 00:39:04 Like, so like the history of work or labor based work up until then was very much like,
735. 00:39:13 do what I say because I'm smarter than you and this is the right way to do it.
736. 00:39:19 And you had no voice, like you had no ability to come in and say, well, what if we just tweaked
737. 00:39:23 this aspect, we would do this faster and I wouldn't be as tired at the end of the day.
738. 00:39:28 You know, like, and in my mind, Kaizen did some of that, right?
739. 00:39:33 Like it said, like, hey, if you have, if you have ideas on how to improve this system to make
740. 00:39:40 everybody better, we'd love to hear those ideas.
741. 00:39:42 And then we're going to actually listen to those ideas.
742. 00:39:44 Now, does it engage the, um, does it engage the brain of the person in a different way?
743. 00:39:51 Yes.
744. 00:39:52 So instead of me pulling the handle that goes stamp, stamp, stamp, stamp, I go, huh,
745. 00:39:59 I wonder if there's a different way that I could do stamp, stamp, stamp, right?
746. 00:40:02 So yes, does it do that?
747. 00:40:05 But this is where you have to go back up to, um, male six main argument or his,
748. 00:40:10 his overall worldview, and you have to look at this and he goes, he's automatically looking
749. 00:40:14 this as there's a problem between management and labor.
750. 00:40:18 This vision has been created to where all we're trying to do is get more effort out of the
751. 00:40:25 laborer for, to make higher profits, right?
752. 00:40:28 Like, so we're treating them like a machine.
753. 00:40:29 We're treating them like a machine.
754. 00:40:31 And while I can't say any of that is 100% wrong, what I can say is like, if you go too far in
755. 00:40:38 either of these directions, you can, you can, um, what, what's the, what's the thing?
756. 00:40:45 Like you can oversell your argument if that makes sense or you can like go, you can go
757. 00:40:49 too far.
758. 00:40:50 Um, and it, and this is what I'm worried there.
759. 00:40:52 This is what I think he does.
760. 00:40:54 Like I think he, he goes too far and this is yes.
761. 00:40:56 Are you then engaging their brain in a way that you weren't engaging their brain before
762. 00:41:00 that's making them more cognitively tired and or likely to burn out?
763. 00:41:04 Maybe, but are you also empowering them, which I'm so glad I stopped and let you say the word
764. 00:41:11 because I wanted to say that too.
765. 00:41:12 I'm so, you're, you're also empowering them to actually improve the system.
766. 00:41:15 And that's a positive thing in their life.
767. 00:41:16 So that's the autonomy that we were talking about.
768. 00:41:21 But then like, I think, I think that couldn't go too far as well, right?
769. 00:41:23 Like, so now they go, well, hold on.
770. 00:41:25 I'm adding all these improvements and I'm not getting any other benefit from this.
771. 00:41:29 Like yes, I feel more empowered.
772. 00:41:31 I feel more autonomous, but like I'm still, you know, pulling the handle a thousand times a day.
773. 00:41:36 So come on, like something's got to give here.
774. 00:41:38 And I think that's the challenge of it is what's the balance?
775. 00:41:41 How much autonomy do we give versus having them still do the job they got hired to do?
776. 00:41:48 And that's a, that's a struggle.
777. 00:41:50 Okay.
778. 00:41:51 So I have one other bone to pick with this, this chapter, but I have to ask you first, Corey,
779. 00:41:56 since you're in this world, would you say that in academia, emotional, intelligent skills are overall
780. 00:42:03 high or overall low?
781. 00:42:05 Okay.
782. 00:42:05 So say it again.
783. 00:42:07 In the academic world that you live in, the professors that you work with, the staff at the
784. 00:42:12 college's universities, would you say that emotional, intelligent skills on average or
785. 00:42:17 are high or on average are low?
786. 00:42:20 That's a really interesting question. If you mean my current location, Colorado Christian
787. 00:42:28 University, I think our emotional, intelligent skills are, skills are higher than other places
788. 00:42:34 in academia.
789. 00:42:34 Okay.
790. 00:42:35 I think, I think, yeah, I think we are above the mean because of the Christian nature of our
791. 00:42:42 institution and the Christian worldview that we have, I think if you look more broadly at
792. 00:42:49 state schools and you look more broadly across the spectrum, they are not, they're at the mean
793. 00:42:54 and or certain places they're below.
794. 00:42:56 I think if you look in the engineering disciplines, they are below.
795. 00:43:00 So, you know, like, take that for, for what it's worth.
796. 00:43:04 But like, that's my, that's my gut reaction to your, to your question.
797. 00:43:08 Okay.
798. 00:43:08 So I think it's pretty clear throughout this book that he also has, I mean, religious studies major
799. 00:43:15 and the experiences that he shares, he's also coming at it from a Christian perspective.
800. 00:43:22 But I can see all sorts of signs here about the place that he was in not being a place
801. 00:43:29 where emotional, intelligent skills were prioritized.
802. 00:43:35 One of the statements that he makes here is that talking about the people who are able to
803. 00:43:40 escape exhaustion says, or they have the rare quality of resiliency.
804. 00:43:46 Okay.
805. 00:43:46 So background, I, my dad, family business, emotional intelligence, right?
806. 00:43:52 They built this emotional intelligence assessment.
807. 00:43:55 It's been used 10 million times, places like Apple, Boeing, Michelin, tire, all over the place,
808. 00:44:01 colleges, high schools.
809. 00:44:02 It was actually developed in conjunction with Texas A&M University, 140 doctoral level papers
810. 00:44:09 and books written on the effectiveness of this assessment, right?
811. 00:44:12 One of the scales in that assessment is resiliency.
812. 00:44:15 So this is what people nowadays would call grit.
813. 00:44:18 Also an emotional intelligence skill in that assessment is empathy, which I think
814. 00:44:25 he could very much point to, oh yeah, there was definitely a lack of empathy in the environment
815. 00:44:29 that I, I was in, I'm projecting here, but I think, I think the author would, would agree with that.
816. 00:44:35 So to me, this is, okay, and then the other thing I guess with emotional intelligence is that
817. 00:44:39 this isn't a rare skill.
818. 00:44:41 Okay, it maybe is less common.
819. 00:44:46 And kind of the basis of my question is maybe it's even more less common in this particular
820. 00:44:51 world.
821. 00:44:52 I don't know that for sure.
822. 00:44:54 But resiliency is not, it's not rare, like he says, and you can develop this.
823. 00:45:04 This is not something that you are born with.
824. 00:45:07 Okay, you don't either have this or you don't.
825. 00:45:10 You have the ability to develop that skill.
826. 00:45:13 Just like all the other emotional intelligence skills.
827. 00:45:15 So I kind of think there's a link here maybe between emotional intelligence and burnout,
828. 00:45:21 which I don't think we can really explore that here because there's not enough to go on.
829. 00:45:27 But the sign I'm getting from here is from this chapter is sort of like old man yells at
830. 00:45:35 cloud without really understanding the whole picture and that kind of bugs me.
831. 00:45:39 Would it be safe to say that he, and again, I don't want to put words in his mouth.
832. 00:45:44 We're just trying to think about the way he's constructed these arguments.
833. 00:45:47 Would it be safe to say that he would put a high EQ work environment as an ideal environment.
834. 00:45:56 And the reality of it is it's not that.
835. 00:45:58 Like it's not a high EQ environment.
836. 00:46:00 So therefore it goes back to his main argument of this
837. 00:46:03 distinguish or the separation between his ideal work environment and his reality work environment.
838. 00:46:09 Like would that be safe to say?
839. 00:46:13 Maybe I guess the tell I get here is that, and this is not uncommon.
840. 00:46:20 And this is not just to this author. This is totally just my perspective being brought to this book.
841. 00:46:28 I think there's enough evidence in this chapter to point to the fact that he doesn't really understand
842. 00:46:33 emotional intelligence as a topic and its role in burnout.
843. 00:46:39 And I feel like that if you if you developed your own emotional intelligence skills
844. 00:46:45 that your job would get better magically and you wouldn't really be able to connect why,
845. 00:46:49 but it totally would. Got it. Got it. Anyways, exit soapbox chapter five.
846. 00:46:58 Hold it. Can I make one more statement about chapter four?
847. 00:47:00 Sure. He uses an expletive that I won't, but he talks about like
848. 00:47:06 jobs that are, you know, like busy work jobs.
849. 00:47:10 They're a charade. They look like work, but they accomplish a little social value
850. 00:47:13 and performing and those people performing the labor often realize it.
851. 00:47:18 I can tell you that like for me personally, this is a Corey statement, nothing demotivates me more.
852. 00:47:26 And I am trying to think about emotional exhaustion or exhaustion, cynicism, and then personal achievement.
853. 00:47:33 Nothing makes me lower on personal achievement and more cynical that if you give me a bunch of stuff
854. 00:47:38 that like everybody knows, this doesn't matter. Like we are collecting this metric because somebody
855. 00:47:44 decided they wanted this metric and it really isn't going to be used. Like nobody really cares.
856. 00:47:50 Nothing is more demotivating to me in work than that. It's unbelievable. So I think that statement
857. 00:47:56 was golden. Like I think that's a really, really good statement.
858. 00:47:59 Yeah, I agree with that, but also I don't think your hope, like you're not stuck in a
859. 00:48:08 system where you just have to do that all the time. Maybe he was specifically at his
860. 00:48:13 college or university. And I can think of jobs where I've been in where, yeah, I've experienced
861. 00:48:18 that, but you know what, you can quit that job. You can find a better job. You can find a better
862. 00:48:23 situation. This might be a nuanced thing too, because Mike, in academia, we have to do these
863. 00:48:28 these things called portfolios. And especially if you're on the tenure track, you have to submit
864. 00:48:32 a portfolio and then it gets reviewed. But like I even have to submit a portfolio. And essentially
865. 00:48:38 what a portfolio is, is it's a multi-hundred page document. It used to be in paper and you put it
866. 00:48:46 in a binder and then we've gotten to more digital forms of it now. But it's a multi-hundred page
867. 00:48:50 document of essentially you justifying why they should keep you on the faculty. Like that's,
868. 00:48:58 that's really what it is. And like you have these buckets that you have to like fill in and you
869. 00:49:02 have to like, now, I like I'm not, how do I say this? This is the way academia is. So my
870. 00:49:10 institution is not any different than any other institution. And what I'll tell you is it's worse
871. 00:49:16 in the tenure track. It's worse in these, these tenure track jobs. But then the other thing Mike
872. 00:49:21 is it'll be like, okay, well, what's my benchmark that justifies like that you should keep me.
873. 00:49:26 And the problem is there is no benchmark. Like there are these things that we are, we should be
874. 00:49:33 doing, right? We have these job descriptions in these different areas of our work. So typically
875. 00:49:37 they're teaching research and service and, and they're these three categories and the different
876. 00:49:42 institutions will weigh them differently, right? So like I'm at a teaching focused institution. So
877. 00:49:46 teaching rates higher in my priority scheme, then it would go teaching service and then research.
878. 00:49:52 Like that's how my, that's how mine would would go. And, and they even, they even generalize ours
879. 00:49:57 a little bit more to scholarship, right? Because research looks different in the music department
880. 00:50:02 that it does in the engineering department that it doesn't bio, right? Like so they, they open that
881. 00:50:05 up. But like, what's the bar? There's no bar. Like nobody knows a bar. Like it's, well,
882. 00:50:12 we're going to put your portfolio in a room. And it's going to stack up against these other
883. 00:50:15 portfolios. And then there's going to be people who have made, they've achieved the level that you
884. 00:50:20 want to, and they're going to review it and they're going to say whether you've done a good enough
885. 00:50:23 job. And what I'll tell you is, it's really, really, really easy to get really, really, really
886. 00:50:29 cynical when that is the, when that's the process. Like it's super easy to get really
887. 00:50:34 cynical when that's the process. Yeah, that's fair. I haven't experienced that in, in academia,
888. 00:50:43 so I don't have any sort of reference point. But I, I sort of get it. I, I do think that there is a,
889. 00:50:52 a scenario where he doesn't end up drawing the same conclusions that he drew and doesn't have
890. 00:51:00 the same experiences that he had, doesn't get burnt out like he did. But, you know, you can't
891. 00:51:06 argue with the lived experience. So it's good to just understand that as the backdrop.
892. 00:51:13 Let's go to chapter five, which is work saints and martyrs. The problem with our ideals.
893. 00:51:23 Let's see. So the ideal, yeah, go for it. Okay. I love this chapter. And, and I think
894. 00:51:29 the reason, like, so here, here's what, here's what I love about this chapter is he talks about
895. 00:51:34 the Benedictines in this chapter and, oh, hold on. Is that chapter seven in my way too early?
896. 00:51:43 I think it might be chapter seven. Yeah, it's specific into that. But I think he maybe mentions
897. 00:51:49 it here. Let me start that. Let me start chapter seven then, because I love the Benedictines chapter.
898. 00:51:55 Yeah. So the ideal that he mentions here is if you work hard, you will live a good life.
899. 00:52:01 And he mentions that this promise is mostly false. I mean, that sounds very cynical.
900. 00:52:08 I mean, maybe it's true. Or maybe it's, I mean, maybe that, that his statement,
901. 00:52:13 yet most of that is false is true, but I don't really know, mentions that work makes a couple
902. 00:52:18 of promises, which I think this is, this is, this is good stuff work promises to build character
903. 00:52:24 and work promises us a pathway to purpose. So the larger point that he makes with this whole book
904. 00:52:33 is that we shouldn't look to work for our purpose. We should maybe bring our purpose with us when we
905. 00:52:41 do our work. And I think that's probably a good approach. Let's see. So engagement and flow we
906. 00:52:48 talks about here, the idea of flow is universal. You don't have to be a surgeon in order to experience
907. 00:52:53 that flow is from me high, cheek sent me high. The researcher about how when you try to do things
908. 00:53:00 that are just outside your ability level, like that's where you engage with flow things that
909. 00:53:03 are difficult, require your full attention. That also leads to being the most fulfilled.
910. 00:53:09 And yeah, I don't know. The other thing I jotted down from here, which I thought was relevant to
911. 00:53:15 me is that when you are overworked, the thing that decreases is your ability to be creative.
912. 00:53:22 It's not the ability to do the math. So you can be burned out and still crunch the numbers.
913. 00:53:29 You can't be burned out and actually make stuff, which I've experienced that. I know what that
914. 00:53:34 feels like. I think this chapter, so I did get mixed up on chapter seven versus this chapter.
915. 00:53:43 This chapter was, I felt like it was all over the place for me. But it's important that I come
916. 00:53:51 in with my background on the idea of work. He talks about work saints and martyrs.
917. 00:53:58 I believe work is something that we are supposed to do. Now, I don't know if I am required to say
918. 00:54:06 that paid work is something we are supposed to do. Or work in the current form is what work is
919. 00:54:12 supposed to look like. But I think working, doing something, but then the key to my understanding
920. 00:54:20 of work is working that enhances human flourishing. That's the way I'm going to describe it for our
921. 00:54:26 show. Working that work that enhances human flourishing is essential to what we are supposed
922. 00:54:31 to do on this earth as humans. So I look at that and I say now, what are all the ways that work
923. 00:54:40 that enhances human flourishing has potentially been co-opted or has been taken and made negative
924. 00:54:48 or all this stuff. And I don't know if it's my optimism in life or whatever it is. But I feel
925. 00:54:55 like we just go down this spiral of this negative and this negative and this negative and this
926. 00:55:02 negative. And it's like, I just didn't resonate with me. I'm not saying the things that he said
927. 00:55:09 weren't accurate. I'm just saying it just felt like a very unnecessary or soapbox is the only
928. 00:55:20 word I can think of. A very soapboxy way to put this. And I'll give you an example of something I
929. 00:55:25 agreed with. The top reason college students give for pursuing a degree is to be able to get a better
930. 00:55:29 job. Hands down 100%. That is true. Like there are very few students who come here and they say,
931. 00:55:35 I want to better myself in the next three to four years. They really go like, I just want to graduate
932. 00:55:39 and get a good job or, right, I want to, you know, like meet a group of people that I connect with
933. 00:55:49 or something like that. Like they don't come here to say like, I'm passionate about the learning. But
934. 00:55:53 what do I go into work every day thinking? Learning. You know, value, making you better,
935. 00:56:00 you know, all those things. So it's like, it's, there's a discrepancy there. Like I agree with
936. 00:56:03 there's a discrepancy there. But like, I don't go into this like thinking that, you know, my
937. 00:56:10 colleagues should be let go without any warning, right? And then he talks about the neoliberal era,
938. 00:56:13 like the college, college can just go management can just let you go without warning. And I also
939. 00:56:18 don't think CCU does that. Like I don't think our culture is that like, there's no willy-nilly,
940. 00:56:23 like look at that person. They can like, we can just get rid of them at the same time. So
941. 00:56:26 I'm very torn on this chapter. The idea of flow, honestly, like feels like it comes out of nowhere.
942. 00:56:33 Like I don't understand why flow is even in this book. I get it maybe to like burn out is the opposite
943. 00:56:40 of flow. So like there, but I think that's a really loose connection. So anyhow, like I just
944. 00:56:46 felt very conflicted with this chapter. Yeah, I think this chapter is the weakest one in the
945. 00:56:52 first section. And maybe it's there just for the title to be a lead into chapter seven like you
946. 00:57:00 were talking about. So want to talk about our results here? Oh, yeah, let's talk about our results.
947. 00:57:06 Okay. So we both took the Maslak burnout inventory. I took mine through the mind garden.
948. 00:57:16 Okay. Do you took the same one? No, but I saw that one. Okay. That's her official one though.
949. 00:57:23 Like the mine garden one is Maslak's official one. Okay. So the one that I took
950. 00:57:29 has, it gives you a profile based off of the categories that they mentioned earlier. Did
951. 00:57:35 the one that you took, did it give you a profile? Like so I have, I've made my own profile. Like I
952. 00:57:39 analyze this and made my own profile. So yes. But it's not the profile that you have now.
953. 00:57:44 Okay. So what was your profile? Okay. And so, because my profile, my profile match matches one of
954. 00:57:51 those five that we talked about earlier. Okay. So I'm high on the E.E. score. I'm moderate on,
955. 00:57:59 sorry, E would be exhaustion score. I'm moderate on the personal, depersonalization. And then I'm low
956. 00:58:06 on the, the accomplishment, the personal accomplishment. Okay. Professional. So mine are
957. 00:58:11 exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy is how she describes it. Okay.
958. 00:58:15 So what I will tell you though, is one of the things when I was looking at the different surveys,
959. 00:58:20 right? Like I found one that lists all of her surveys out because that's really what I wanted
960. 00:58:23 to see is like, I want to see how are they different? Like how is the general survey different from
961. 00:58:26 the medical person survey from the educator survey and all these things? And what I'll tell you is,
962. 00:58:32 I would, I would have scored differently. I don't know if my, the buckets I fell into,
963. 00:58:39 which were like high degree, moderate, and then low degree, like if they would have changed.
964. 00:58:44 But like, if you'd have given me the general survey, where it didn't frame it in terms of
965. 00:58:47 students in education, and it framed it in terms of work and colleagues, I'd have gotten a different
966. 00:58:53 score. I can tell you right now, I'd have, I'd have gotten a different score.
967. 00:58:56 Okay. So did you, did you get a profile though? Like if you're, which were those five buckets do
968. 00:59:01 you fall into then? I don't remember the five buckets. So what, what were they engaged is none
969. 00:59:07 of them are high, overextended is exhaustion is high, cynical is the cynicism is high,
970. 00:59:13 frustrated is the efficacy, I think is low. And then burned out is more than one of them are.
971. 00:59:19 Oh, so I'm burned out. Yeah, me too.
972. 00:59:21 Because I'm, because I'm low, I'm low on two of them. Like I'm in the low, the higher low bucket,
973. 00:59:26 I'm in the red on two of them. And I'm in the, the yellow on one of them.
974. 00:59:30 Okay. So here's what mine says, says your burnout profile is characterized by high
975. 00:59:33 frequency scores on exhaustion and cynicism. And then professional efficacy scores may vary
976. 00:59:40 and even a high professional efficacy score can be outweighed by exhaustion and cynicism
977. 00:59:43 resulting in burnout. So if you have high efficacy, basically, you can battle burnout for a while,
978. 00:59:47 you've got to why, you've got a reason. So my scores, kind of the numbers don't really matter,
979. 00:59:54 but the percentiles are interesting. For exhaustion, I am in the 98th percentile. Cynicism 93.
980. 01:00:06 I would not have guessed that. Now this is interesting.
981. 01:00:09 So that's the interesting part is the percentiles are very different than the scores.
982. 01:00:14 So my score, you know, the assessment I took, you answer, you know, never a few times a year
983. 01:00:20 or less, once a month or less, a few times a month, once a week, a few times a week or every day.
984. 01:00:25 So my score for exhaustion was 5.4. My score for cynicism was 3.8. That's kind of in the middle
985. 01:00:31 almost, but it's still a high percent or percentile score. And the professional efficacy was a five.
986. 01:00:38 So that was actually pretty, pretty high as well. But the percentile score for efficacy actually
987. 01:00:44 was 70th percentile. So I'm able to battle it pretty well, but there's definitely signs of burnout
988. 01:00:52 here. And then, you know, what can you do about it? That's what the rest of the report is about.
989. 01:01:01 I haven't decided exactly what I am going to do about this yet, but obviously something needs to
990. 01:01:08 change. And I've actually taken this before and to my recollection, I couldn't find my old results.
991. 01:01:16 But I do recall the first time I took this assessment, I was trending towards burnout.
992. 01:01:23 It was kind of like, Hey, you should be careful. Well, now I'm there.
993. 01:01:27 How did you hear about this before? Oh, Chris Bailey. He mentioned it to me. I think when he was
994. 01:01:33 doing research for his last book, Intentional. Maybe he mentions it there, but I can't recall.
995. 01:01:40 So I'll unpack mine a little bit more. So I'm a high degree of exhaustion.
996. 01:01:44 And I can tell you that like that checks out. Like if I'm thinking about it from, you know,
997. 01:01:49 like there are more days than not that I wake up and I'm like, I'm tired, like I'm just tired.
998. 01:01:54 And I can't really peg it to any one thing. It's just like, man, I'm just kind of tired, right?
999. 01:01:59 And then the other way that I'll say like I know exhaustion is what's the first thing I think
1000. 01:02:04 about doing when I wake up? And the first thing I think about doing when I wake up
1001. 01:02:09 is some sort of movement. Like I, it's not, it's not like prep a lesson. It's not great a paper.
1002. 01:02:16 It's not like do any of that. It's, it's, I want to move physically because I think
1003. 01:02:20 that tiredness I'm trying to overcome with like endorphins. You know, like, so I think that's
1004. 01:02:25 that's the nature of it. The depersonalization that I'm moderate there. And the reason why that
1005. 01:02:29 checks out for me is because I'm in a people focused organization. Like the better my relationships
1006. 01:02:37 are with my colleagues, the better the, the whole organization runs, the better my relationships
1007. 01:02:43 are with my students, the better the educational processes, right? Like if you want to shut down
1008. 01:02:47 the educational process, depersonalize your students and or just not have like you to say,
1009. 01:02:53 like emotional intelligence or not like, you know, just be kind of mean. Like, and it shuts down
1010. 01:02:58 the learning process right now. Like, and I don't mean mean is the only emotional, you know what I
1011. 01:03:02 mean? Then the one with personal accomplishment, right? Like, I actually was, that's my surprising
1012. 01:03:08 one. Like, so when you said your results, the cynical one, like, I don't think you view as a
1013. 01:03:12 cynical person at all. So like the one was surprising to me for mine is like the personal
1014. 01:03:17 accomplishment that it's low, right? And the way, the way it works that personal accomplishment
1015. 01:03:21 assessment is a feeling that acts as a safety valve and contributes to bringing about a balance
1016. 01:03:27 if occupational exhaustants and depersonalization occur and ensures fulfillment in the workplace
1017. 01:03:31 and positive view of professional achievements, right? And I was like, well, I have a positive
1018. 01:03:36 view of my professional achievements. Like, I think I'm doing a, like a pretty good job and
1019. 01:03:39 like everything. But like, obviously something's off there. So like, if I'm going to look at this,
1020. 01:03:44 it's like, okay, what, what's, why is that off? Like, there's something about the achievements I
1021. 01:03:50 have at work that aren't resonating. I don't even want to say correctly, but they're, they're
1022. 01:03:57 resonating in a weird way. And I don't know what that means. So that's the one that I,
1023. 01:04:00 yeah, it's surprising to me. Well, we're both burned out. Maybe we should talk about counterculture
1024. 01:04:07 now and what we can do about it, except I'm not sure that there's a whole lot we can do about it
1025. 01:04:12 based on what's in this section. Oh, man. So we can have it all a new vision of the good life.
1026. 01:04:20 Yeah. All right. So the first chapter here is chapter six. Yeah, like you mentioned, we can have
1027. 01:04:25 it all a new vision of the good life. And there wasn't a whole lot in these chapters for me.
1028. 01:04:33 So it does mention that the call for work and not the worker to gain dignity is the first step
1029. 01:04:39 toward closing the gap that causes burnout. That may be true, but what are you going to do with that?
1030. 01:04:47 I mean, kind of tied back to idea of emotional intelligence, again, is this idea of self-determination,
1031. 01:04:53 the belief that you have the ability to set your own course. That's not just an American
1032. 01:05:01 ideal, that is an emotional intelligence skill. The, the fact Martin is in the chat, I think,
1033. 01:05:10 Martin, maybe you are the one who recommended for me back in the day that it's a purplish book.
1034. 01:05:20 I'm blanking on it now. What was it? Susan Fowler,
1035. 01:05:26 talking about how the motivation one, master your motivation, and how motivation really is tied
1036. 01:05:33 back to a couple of factors, one of them being choice. And you don't actually have to, it have
1037. 01:05:41 to take the choice. Like if you are feeling like you're not motivated, one of the things that you
1038. 01:05:47 could do is recognize that, yeah, I could actually quit my job. And that ability to choose a different
1039. 01:05:54 option gives you more motivation to show up even if you don't quit your job. So like, I don't know,
1040. 01:06:01 there's that sort of thread throughout this whole book for me. It's like, well, you may be right in
1041. 01:06:12 diagnosing the cause here, but I also think the place to start for anybody who would be reading
1042. 01:06:18 this is, you know, how can I apply this where I'm at right now? And again, he mentioned at the
1043. 01:06:25 very beginning, so there's like this inner turmoil throughout is like, is this a big deal? Is this
1044. 01:06:29 not a big deal? He said he wasn't going to do this, but in the back of my mind, I guess, as we're
1045. 01:06:32 working through this, I'm like, that is the right way to do this. I will say I got one action item
1046. 01:06:39 from this chapter has nothing to do with the content of the chapter. And that is to read Walden.
1047. 01:06:46 So I have ordered this book, we're going on vacation next week, I am bringing this one with me.
1048. 01:06:51 Let me know how that goes. There's no way I'm jumping on that one. Like, I have no interest in
1049. 01:06:56 reading Walden. Yeah, that's fair. I understand the basic idea of the book. And I've heard that
1050. 01:07:04 there's, you know, a lot of stuff in it that I'm not going to like, but it's come up over and over
1051. 01:07:09 and over and over and over again. So I just want to be able to say that I read it. And I want you
1052. 01:07:12 to tell me whether I should. So this is going to work out well. Okay, Mike, so I'm going to put
1053. 01:07:18 you on the spot here. And I didn't tell Mike I was going to do this. I feel bad a little bit.
1054. 01:07:23 Mike, what where do people get dignity from? Like, where does a human get dignity from in your mind?
1055. 01:07:30 Well, I don't think it comes from the work that you do. I would agree with them there
1056. 01:07:34 that people have value and they have dignity regardless of their job. However, I also personally
1057. 01:07:40 believe that you should do the best you can with what you have. And the whole stewardship idea.
1058. 01:07:49 So regardless of your job, regardless of your situation, feel like there should be some sort of
1059. 01:07:55 motivation to, well, I said it before, do the best you can with what you have. But really,
1060. 01:08:01 it's like multiply your, your talent, not money. Okay. But multiply the abilities, reach the full
1061. 01:08:10 potential that you have inside of you, make the biggest dent in the universe that you can.
1062. 01:08:17 Okay, good. So I think this is probably the chapter where
1063. 01:08:25 I don't want to say everything like came clear to me, but everything like his perspective
1064. 01:08:29 really started to shine through. And I started to understand like, oh, the position he's writing
1065. 01:08:34 this book from. And it wasn't until now, like, which is crazy to me that it took me six chapters
1066. 01:08:39 to really start to really start getting it. The idea is like, I think he gets dignity
1067. 01:08:48 from the work that he does, or he got dignity from the work that he did, right? Like, and it was
1068. 01:08:53 100%, not 100%. It was largely related to the work that he was doing. And I like, so in dignity,
1069. 01:08:59 the state or quality of being worthy of honor and respect, the state or quality worthy being
1070. 01:09:03 honor and respect. Okay. So now I think about like, I turn this internal, which he told me, he told
1071. 01:09:09 me not to do, like, but at the same time, that's what I'm going to do, right? Like, so I'm going to
1072. 01:09:12 turn this internal, I'm going to say, well, do I try to get dignity, honor and respect from the
1073. 01:09:17 work that I do? And the answer is, yeah, unfortunately, I do, right? Like, so sorry for those of you who
1074. 01:09:26 out there who don't hold the Christian worldview, but like, I should get dignity of, you know, I
1075. 01:09:32 actually get dignity being worthy of honor and respect from the fact that I made in the image of
1076. 01:09:36 God, right? Like, that's where I should get my, my honor and my dignity from. Now, because of that,
1077. 01:09:41 I should go do good work. I should do work that enhances human flourishing. Like, that's a result
1078. 01:09:46 of the fact that I made in the image of God. Okay. So sorry, like, I don't want to go too far down
1079. 01:09:50 that rabbit hole, but we can talk about it later if you want to, like, reach out. But like, I think
1080. 01:09:55 that's the big issue in this book, right, where he talks about the ideal being different than the
1081. 01:10:00 reality. And the ideal is so much of people who are burned out or who say they're burned out, and
1082. 01:10:09 whatever level of that spectrum is, are they looking for dignity from the actual work that they're
1083. 01:10:16 doing? And then I go, am I looking for dignity, honor and respect from the work that I'm doing?
1084. 01:10:22 And you know the thing I don't like, Mike? The answer is, yes, I probably am, right? That I am
1085. 01:10:29 looking for that honor and respect from the work that I do every day. And that's a problem. Now,
1086. 01:10:36 where I fail to follow his same logic and where I fail to, like, go as far as he's willing to go,
1087. 01:10:44 is like, essentially, it's almost as if, and I'm going to be too dramatic here, but it's like,
1088. 01:10:49 it's almost as if he likes wants to burn the work ship down. Like, he's like, uh, well, like,
1089. 01:10:54 let's just torch this whole thing and let's just redo it. And I don't think that's the right
1090. 01:10:58 approach either. Like, there's, there's somewhere in between there. Like, you know what I mean? Like,
1091. 01:11:04 there's, yes, I shouldn't be looking for dignity in my work, or not all of my dignity in my work,
1092. 01:11:11 or maybe not even most of my dignity in my work. But at the same time, like, that doesn't mean
1093. 01:11:17 CCU is trying to milk or eat every ounce of productivity they can out of me for the smallest
1094. 01:11:24 amount of pay that they've ever paid anybody. You know, like, I don't think those two, and I feel
1095. 01:11:28 like that's what he does. Like, he, he says, we're looking for dignity in the wrong place,
1096. 01:11:34 and this work environment is also trying to destroy you and look at these two things when they come
1097. 01:11:41 together, they swirl into the world of burnout. And I just can't go that far. Like, I just, I can't
1098. 01:11:46 take it that far. Yep. I agree. I agree. I would argue that it's, there's a very fine, like,
1099. 01:11:55 nuance to this, where the fact that you are working, I feel it could bring you dignity. That's not
1100. 01:12:02 necessarily bad. But if you're trying to get the dignity from the specific role, yes, that is where
1101. 01:12:08 the problem lies. Yes. What's the guy's name? 30, 30 jobs guy, Mike Rowe, talked about, talked about
1102. 01:12:15 passion, right? He's like, don't follow your passion, but always bring it with you. I think
1103. 01:12:19 that's a great way to encapsulate it. Yeah, exactly. All right. Chapter seven, take it away.
1104. 01:12:27 All right. So chapter 77 is how Benedictine's tame the demons of work. For some reason, Mike,
1105. 01:12:34 and I don't know why there was another book by Rob Drayer that I can't remember the name of it
1106. 01:12:39 right now, but like, there's another book about the Benedictines where he basically goes and lives
1107. 01:12:42 with them. He does very similar to what Milsick does, and he goes and lives with them, and he,
1108. 01:12:47 like, understands them and studies him, and he looks at the roles that they have, the Benedictine
1109. 01:12:51 roles and all that stuff. I think this is fascinating. I love every time I read about the Benedictines.
1110. 01:13:00 I love, like, just the thought of separating ourselves from the world with a purpose. Like,
1111. 01:13:10 we're not separating ourselves to, like, never interact with the world. We're separating ourselves,
1112. 01:13:13 like, with a purpose, and then there's work built into the day, but, like, we don't prioritize the
1113. 01:13:19 work. We prioritize prayer and liturgy and all these other things. And, like, I don't know why,
1114. 01:13:24 Mike, but, like, I don't have anything really specific to say about anything in chapter seven,
1115. 01:13:30 but I soak this stuff in. Like, I love it. Like, it's just fun to read about. I think it's so
1116. 01:13:38 fascinating. I think it's so fun to read about. And it's like, I want to do it. I think that's
1117. 01:13:42 part of the reason why. It's like, I want to take a year of my life, and I want to just go, like,
1118. 01:13:47 figure out either this lifestyle is going to be awesome and amazing, and I'm going to learn a
1119. 01:13:53 ton of stuff from it, or I'm going to hate every second of it. And I'm going to, like, want to get
1120. 01:13:57 out of there as fast as I can. And it's almost like the idea of not knowing, you know, what you
1121. 01:14:03 don't know. And it's like, how would I do in that environment? Would I thrive in that environment?
1122. 01:14:08 Or would I absolutely hate that environment? Like, what do you do today? Today, I take the weeds
1123. 01:14:13 out of the garden. But that's not really my job today. My job today is to be in prayer and to do
1124. 01:14:18 liturgy and to serve a community. And, like, I know, by the way, I pick, I pick weeds as the way I
1125. 01:14:23 serve the community. It's like, I don't know if I would love it or hate it, but it's just really
1126. 01:14:27 interesting. I can tell you my wife would tell me I would hate it. Like, she would tell me, Corey,
1127. 01:14:31 you would hate every second of that. And I don't know if that's true or not. But, like,
1128. 01:14:35 I just love reading about it. I love hearing about it. I think it's so cool.
1129. 01:14:39 I think it's interesting. And I also found it fascinating that not all Benedictines are so
1130. 01:14:47 strict about deprioritizing work. And the example that they share is actually close to us St. John's
1131. 01:14:53 and St. Benedict's is in Minnesota. It's next state over. So I've, I'm familiar with those colleges
1132. 01:15:00 and universities. And I obviously knew that they were connected to the Benedictine order, which I
1133. 01:15:06 think is like a branch of the Catholic Church, if I remember, right? So yeah, interesting, but also,
1134. 01:15:14 like, what is the point here? Interesting story. Cool that you went and you lived with these people
1135. 01:15:21 in the middle of the desert for a while who were building web pages, right? But what do we do about
1136. 01:15:28 this? I think it can all be encapsulated in a single sentence towards the end where it's a
1137. 01:15:33 challenge. Keep work in perspective. Yeah. Yeah, it comes with this ideal. Like, I think he's trying
1138. 01:15:39 to reframe our minds with what the ideal of work is, and that we hold work up to be that,
1139. 01:15:44 like, highest ideal, or sorry, many of us hold work up to be that, that highest ideal. And we
1140. 01:15:49 shouldn't, like, we should just think of it as think of it as work as something that we do in
1141. 01:15:54 addition to all these other things. So it's like, I don't know if he just wanted to go hang out with
1142. 01:15:59 the Benedictines, or like, if I didn't, I agree with you, like, I don't think I see the really strong
1143. 01:16:05 thread to the rest of his argument. But I like reading about him. Yeah, yeah, me too. All right,
1144. 01:16:13 chapter eight, varieties of anti burnout experience. I didn't really care for this chapter, particularly
1145. 01:16:21 because there's an emphasis here on the negative effects of charismatic leaders,
1146. 01:16:30 which I think in and of itself shows a cynical attitude. So leadership, I get that it can be used
1147. 01:16:39 in a in a bad way to get people to overextend and do a bunch of stuff that maybe they shouldn't be
1148. 01:16:45 doing. However, I feel like overall, this is a good thing. And if you had to pick, is this good or
1149. 01:16:54 as bad, it's good. And it's not even close. In the emotional intelligence assessment, again,
1150. 01:17:01 there's a scale, we call it sales orientation, but it's basically leadership, because leadership
1151. 01:17:06 is selling someone on an idea that you can help them get where they want to go. And leadership,
1152. 01:17:14 for context, the way I like to think about this is John Maxwell wrote a book, The Five Levels of
1153. 01:17:19 Leadership. And essentially, the higher you climb on that ladder, the less it is about you.
1154. 01:17:26 So I think this just kind of locates them, like all these people, they're real
1155. 01:17:30 charismatic, these quote unquote leaders, they're just trying to manipulate people to
1156. 01:17:34 serve them. Like, that's not actually it. And it probably gets twisted and manifested in wrong
1157. 01:17:43 ways in certain scenarios, but didn't really care for that. Having hobbies is a good way to
1158. 01:17:48 get invested in other communities and keep us from becoming obsessed with our work. I like that.
1159. 01:17:53 And the emphasis that you're worth so much more than your productivity that I agree with.
1160. 01:17:56 On the topic of the hobbies in the additional communities, I was going to put this as an action
1161. 01:18:01 item, but I'm actually already doing this. Recently, I joined a Sunday night basketball
1162. 01:18:07 league. So we have church on Sunday nights, I typically have just been like, yeah, I can't do
1163. 01:18:10 anything because we got church at six p.m. And by the time we would get done, you know,
1164. 01:18:14 everything's going to be over. Well, I found this, this church group that plays at like eight
1165. 01:18:20 eight p.m. on Sunday nights. And the reason they play at eight p.m. is because they have
1166. 01:18:23 service in the morning and then they have this gym and they let a Congolese community use it as
1167. 01:18:30 for their church services at two in the afternoon. And the person who organizes it told me sometimes
1168. 01:18:36 they're done by seven. So they have these five hour services. Then they pick up the chairs,
1169. 01:18:43 they sweep the gym and then they play. So I was like, Oh, I could actually make that work. You know,
1170. 01:18:49 and it's been a while since I've been part of a group that played like that. I've been in groups
1171. 01:18:53 previously, but it's probably been 510 years since I had a group of guys that I played basketball
1172. 01:18:57 with on the regular. So I'm excited about that. All right, Mike. So again, there's there's big
1173. 01:19:05 issues I have. And like what I struggle with when I'm evaluating these books and when I'm reading
1174. 01:19:08 these books is I don't believe that if you took the time to write a book that there are any
1175. 01:19:14 flyaway comments in that book, or that there should be any flyaway comments in that book.
1176. 01:19:19 Like, this is a book. Like if you're writing a blog post, maybe there's a flyaway comment,
1177. 01:19:23 right? Like, Oh, okay. Like I was passionate that morning and I, you know, wrote it in 15 minutes
1178. 01:19:28 and then hit send and okay, I was too, I was too aggressive on whatever it might be. When you're
1179. 01:19:32 writing a book, it's not like you're writing it in a day. You know, you're you're taking the time
1180. 01:19:37 and especially I don't remember who the publisher is on this one. Do you remember who the publisher
1181. 01:19:40 is on this one? Like, is that a big house? Don't but I can look it up university of California press,
1182. 01:19:46 right? Like, so not a small, not a small publisher. Like, that's my point is it's not a small publisher.
1183. 01:19:52 Okay. He makes a statement in here. He's quoting somebody else and I can't, I didn't write down
1184. 01:19:57 who he's quoting, but the right not to work is the right not to have your value determined
1185. 01:20:05 by your productivity as a worker by your employability or your salary. Now, here's the challenge I have.
1186. 01:20:11 So I like that, but the word value, we got to unpack. Okay. I agree that I should not look at
1187. 01:20:18 Mike, the creator and should not make a value judgment of Mike, the creator as a human based on
1188. 01:20:24 the fact that he's a creator, based on whatever he makes as a salary, based on whether he would
1189. 01:20:29 be employable anywhere else. I agree completely with that. But like, the idea of the right not to
1190. 01:20:36 work brings so much other baggage and other common connotation into this. Like, I have a right not
1191. 01:20:43 to work. Well, okay, but then that means you also have a right not to be able to afford food and not
1192. 01:20:49 to be able to afford a house. Like, and I'm sorry that that's the way our society is, but like,
1193. 01:20:55 that's how it is. We are not devaluing you as a human, but like I teach, I talk to the boys all
1194. 01:21:00 the time and I'm sure you talk to your kids about the consequences or actions have consequences.
1195. 01:21:05 So therefore, like, I'm not saying that I should have any right to value you based on what your
1196. 01:21:11 employment status is or any of that other stuff. But that is separate from consequences for those
1197. 01:21:18 decisions and those actions. And like, what I fear is, is I fear, like, you're going to read
1198. 01:21:24 this chapter and you're going to think, yeah, like, we should all have the right not to work.
1199. 01:21:28 And it's like, well, okay, then you also are giving yourself the right for other things
1200. 01:21:32 that you probably don't want in your life. And like that, and that's, I've had this
1201. 01:21:37 disconnection with multiple different things that he's done and multiple different ways he's
1202. 01:21:41 framed arguments. That's really, really like, lessened the book for me, if that makes sense.
1203. 01:21:46 So let me let me unpack that a little bit because I generally agree with everything that you said.
1204. 01:21:50 I think there are some nuance there to that, though, like, yes, you have the right not to work,
1205. 01:21:55 and there are certain things you're not going to have because you're not working.
1206. 01:21:59 I think the argument could be made though that there are certain things that you should get
1207. 01:22:02 regardless of whether you are working or not. The probably low level one there is like the
1208. 01:22:06 universal health care example. And I'm not 100% for, you know, everybody should be able to just walk
1209. 01:22:12 into whatever doctor at any given point and not have to pay anything. Maybe there's a scenario where
1210. 01:22:16 that works. I haven't studied that out far enough. But I can tell you, because I have been diagnosed
1211. 01:22:21 with epilepsy, that if I were to try and get some sort of health insurance now prior to that
1212. 01:22:28 diagnosis, I have this pre-existing condition and I can't get it. And that just feels a little bit
1213. 01:22:33 icky. I agree. You know, I have no issues. I have it under control. But the fact that I cannot get
1214. 01:22:38 it anymore, like, that should be that should be dealt with. So there's probably some some things
1215. 01:22:43 there that you could argue, you know, yes, you should be able to get this and the other thing. But
1216. 01:22:48 I don't think you should be able to have a three bedroom, two bathroom house on a half acre lot
1217. 01:22:53 with a white picket fence and a food budget and all these different things. Like, yes,
1218. 01:22:57 we should be taking care of the people who are in need. But I don't think to your point that just
1219. 01:23:02 because you showed up and you exist that you get this big list of benefits. Yeah. And my thing is,
1220. 01:23:10 I'm not even saying that he is saying that. What I'm saying is it's too easy for it to be
1221. 01:23:15 misconstrued. And that is the vibe. That is the vibe, though. Yeah. Like, I'm alive. So therefore,
1222. 01:23:21 you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. When really it's the, you should not be valuing me as a human
1223. 01:23:27 based on the fact that I'm a professor or you should not be valuing you as a human based on the fact
1224. 01:23:31 that you're a computer or that I make X amount of dollars and you make X amount of dollars or
1225. 01:23:35 Y amount of dollars or whatever it is. I agree with that part completely. I just think it's too easy
1226. 01:23:39 to muddy that water and like lose the threat of the argument. And maybe that's what it is. It's like,
1227. 01:23:44 I don't see a clear argument thread through here throughout this book. And I'm not a big fan when
1228. 01:23:51 that happens. I don't like books when they don't have a good clear thread. All right. Well, let's get
1229. 01:23:56 to that in just a minute here. We do have one more part, which is the conclusion. Hopefully, we can
1230. 01:24:01 do this one quick. This conclusion is pretty, pretty short. And this is where he talks a little bit
1231. 01:24:09 about how the pandemic disrupted things. Yes, the question on social media, which this was interesting.
1232. 01:24:15 Has anybody, is anybody enjoying the pandemic to this day? If you were to ask some of our older
1233. 01:24:20 kids specifically, because they were old enough, I think, to understand what was going on. They
1234. 01:24:24 would say that when everything got shut down, that was the best time of their life. But specifically,
1235. 01:24:29 day one, I remember having a conversation saying, okay, everything's going to look different now.
1236. 01:24:34 We're going to be spending a lot of time together. This can either be awesome or this can really
1237. 01:24:38 suck. It's kind of up to us. And it was enjoyable for us, to be honest. It was a forced reset. You
1238. 01:24:45 had to reconsider all of the things that you had made commitments to. And for us, we used that
1239. 01:24:53 as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean. And okay, we're going to do the best version of this,
1240. 01:24:57 the best version of that. And there were times where we would go up to Door County and be up there
1241. 01:25:01 for two months. We couldn't do that normally. But because we didn't have to be specific places,
1242. 01:25:08 we couldn't meet together physically. We would go to the grocery store or come back home to get
1243. 01:25:13 supplies and then go back up there. It was great. He also mentions the robot revolution,
1244. 01:25:20 which is sort of a nod to AI and taking over people's jobs. That is a whole other 20-minute
1245. 01:25:28 conversation that we don't have time to get into. Agreed. But there's one specific line at the
1246. 01:25:33 very end, which I think is brilliant. Let the machines burn out. We have better things to do.
1247. 01:25:39 Chef's Kiss. Yes. It was a really good line. This is one of the first books that I remember,
1248. 01:25:46 and I'm sure somebody else has done it, where the COVID conversation stood out so starkly that
1249. 01:25:55 we got to the conclusion. It was all about COVID. And I was like, "Oh, wow. What's this going to
1250. 01:26:00 read like in 30 years? What's this going to read?" And I was like, "Oh, this is very interesting."
1251. 01:26:06 So that was an interesting point of the conclusion to me. But I agree with you completely. We'll
1252. 01:26:09 end it here. Let the machines burn out. We have better things to do. Couldn't agree more.
1253. 01:26:14 If you told me that machines were ethically running the world, and we all had the free
1254. 01:26:19 time to do exactly what we wanted to do, I'm there, man. I'm in. I'm in for that.
1255. 01:26:25 Nice. All right. Action items. I had a couple that I jotted down in my map file. The first one was
1256. 01:26:32 to take the burnout inventory, but I texted you and said, "Hey, you want to take this talk about it?"
1257. 01:26:36 So that one is actually done already. The second one was to read Walden. And so that'll be my
1258. 01:26:45 gapbook as well, probably. And then you added one here where the app that I made, I'm calling it
1259. 01:26:51 feed deck. That has a test flight. Again, more details on that in the Pro Show. But do you have
1260. 01:26:57 any action items from this? So I don't have any action items from this book, and I'm okay with
1261. 01:27:02 that. Like I feel good about that. But my action item is take Mike's quiz. Can I still take your
1262. 01:27:06 quiz? Sure. Yeah, and you need to leave this in here so I don't forget. I added it to my
1263. 01:27:13 the problem was I didn't add it to my list before. So I'm going to take your quiz. I'm going to take
1264. 01:27:16 your PKM quiz. All right. Okay. Style and rating. Style and rating. The style of this book. I
1265. 01:27:28 think I actually like. I like the personal story. He had some very cool experiences hanging out with
1266. 01:27:36 some some Benedictines. I do feel like those experiences in the story that he tells are very
1267. 01:27:44 opinionated and not maybe not very generalizable. The question I was kind of asking myself as I
1268. 01:27:52 went through this whole book was how does this apply to me? And sometimes it was easy
1269. 01:27:57 to make the connections. A lot of times it wasn't. And there were quite a few times where as I
1270. 01:28:02 talked about, you know, it's like, Oh, well, he's a little bit jaded by his experience here.
1271. 01:28:06 And I'm not sure that that has to be the case. So yeah, I it's interesting. Who do you who
1272. 01:28:14 should read this book? Like on the one hand, I love that he's bringing attention to this topic
1273. 01:28:18 of burnout. I think he does a pretty good job in the first section for the first four chapters.
1274. 01:28:22 Anyways, talking about the different aspects of this. There isn't like a real concrete. This is
1275. 01:28:28 what you do about it. But that's okay. I think you really need to just kind of think about this. And
1276. 01:28:35 it's probably going to take some time before people would make the drastic changes, which is
1277. 01:28:38 really going to contribute to reduce burnout in their lives. But as a manifesto for culture,
1278. 01:28:46 I kind of don't think this this works. Maybe it would be interesting to find out numbers
1279. 01:28:54 about this. And I also don't know if he wrote any other books. Like, is this, you know, really his
1280. 01:28:59 his thing that he's a champion? Or is this just, you know, I wrote this book and now he's on to the
1281. 01:29:03 next book? I don't know. But as a, you know, fight against the societal issue of burnout and we need
1282. 01:29:11 to burn it all down and rethink how we approach work. I think I think it's not super effective
1283. 01:29:20 from that perspective. I'm going to rate this two stars. I think I'm glad that I read it.
1284. 01:29:31 I do want to read Christina Maslek's book now. And honestly, an academic book about burnout
1285. 01:29:37 may be too boring for me to get through. So it's an entertaining read and an interesting read.
1286. 01:29:46 But I found myself disagreeing with a good chunk of it. And that's not necessarily bad if it gets
1287. 01:29:52 you to do something about it. But there's really nothing to do about it other than really take the
1288. 01:29:58 inventory figure out where you're at, which he tells you this is not the purpose of the book
1289. 01:30:02 and then do something with the information that you glean from that. So I just don't think it's a
1290. 01:30:07 great fit for for a bookworm. And I'll write it at two stars. My biggest knock on this one is that
1291. 01:30:15 thread. Like I didn't feel like we stayed connected to that thread. We took some divergence here and
1292. 01:30:23 there. And then did we get back to it or did we clearly get back to it? So I think that's my biggest
1293. 01:30:28 style issue with it. I actually liked his writing. I thought it was good. I thought the personal
1294. 01:30:35 story was good. It drove a lot of a lot of what we were thinking about as we go through this.
1295. 01:30:42 Where I'm conflicted on thinking about this, Mike is like, I feel like you and I have had a
1296. 01:30:47 really good discussion about this book. And when I say discussion, I don't mean like we agreed with
1297. 01:30:53 everything. So therefore we're like, yeah, yeah, Sisboomba or like we completely like thrashed
1298. 01:30:58 everything. It was a good back and forth. Like it was a good like thought experiment to read this
1299. 01:31:03 book and say like, what do I think about this? Like, how do I engage with this idea? Like,
1300. 01:31:08 do I like it? Do I not like it? Do I agree with it? Do I not agree with it? I know that that wasn't his
1301. 01:31:12 intention. His intention wasn't for me individually to do that. His intention was more to, I think,
1302. 01:31:19 drive culture change. Like, and drive like work culture change and like the way we think about
1303. 01:31:24 work and the way we approach work. And I don't think that is as clear or as effective as he
1304. 01:31:32 wanted it to be as the author wanted it to be. So like from you and I talking about this,
1305. 01:31:38 awesome. Like, I think it's a really, really good book from the goal of what he was trying to do.
1306. 01:31:43 I don't know. So like, that's where I'm torn. I'm torn on this. Easy, easy read. I didn't think
1307. 01:31:47 it was confusing. All that stuff. Didn't it lack the thread? So essentially what I'm trying to
1308. 01:31:52 figure out is I'm between a two and a three. Like, like I, I personally engaged with it too much. I
1309. 01:31:58 feel like for it to be a two for me. Like, you know, I mean, I just gave a book of one, right?
1310. 01:32:04 Like, I just gave a book of one. So folks don't, don't think I'm afraid to give books low ratings.
1311. 01:32:08 But like, I just don't, I think I engage with it too much to give it a two. But at the same time,
1312. 01:32:12 I don't know if it rises to the level of the three in my one. So I'm going to give it a two and a
1313. 01:32:17 half. I'm going to give something I don't do. I'm going to give it a two and a half because I can't,
1314. 01:32:20 I can't pick between the two. Do I think everybody should read this? No. Do I think that you should
1315. 01:32:26 skim it? Maybe listen to us talk about it and see if you, if there are parts of it that you think
1316. 01:32:31 are more interesting and then just read the parts that are, that are more interesting to you. That's
1317. 01:32:35 what I think you should do. I don't think everybody should pick this one up and read it. I don't think
1318. 01:32:38 it's, it's necessary. All right. Well, let's put the end of burnout on the shelf. What's next, Corey?
1319. 01:32:47 So next we are reading the coaching habit, say less, ask more and change the way you lead
1320. 01:32:55 by Michael Bungay Stanier. And basically, it's this idea of, you know, he's got experience in these
1321. 01:33:04 training environments with managers and like, how do you kind of help people get more out of what
1322. 01:33:10 they do? I like the idea of he's got these questions, the kickstart question, the aw question, the lazy
1323. 01:33:17 question, the strategic question. So this book's a little bit older from 2016, but I think it's going
1324. 01:33:23 to be interesting to think about leadership and thinking about like how we do what I assume is going
1325. 01:33:29 to be leadership through coaching, which this is very, very on the nose for me. I do this a lot. I
1326. 01:33:35 help people think about leadership as I coach them and mentor them in my job. So if you're reading
1327. 01:33:41 with us, the next book will be The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier. And after that, what are
1328. 01:33:46 we doing? Like the science of storytelling by Will Store, this one was recommended to me recently. And
1329. 01:33:53 I like the idea of storytelling. There's a lot of good storytelling in the book we just finished.
1330. 01:33:58 And I feel like this is one of those universal skills that I would like to get better at. So
1331. 01:34:03 let's read the science of storytelling. Got any gap books?
1332. 01:34:08 I have a bunch of gap books that I'm working through right now. The one I'm doing right now
1333. 01:34:15 is called Gentle and Lowly by Dane Orton. So that's the one I'll state for here. But yes,
1334. 01:34:20 there's this one. And then I think there's probably gonna be two more that get read
1335. 01:34:24 in addition to the bookworm book between now and our next recording. So gentle and low by Dane
1336. 01:34:29 Orton. Well, I am, as I mentioned, reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau going on vacation.
1337. 01:34:36 That one should arrive today. So I'll report back. Nice. Thank you, everybody, for listening.
1338. 01:34:43 If you want to support the show, consider becoming a bookworm pro member. You can do so
1339. 01:34:48 by going to bookworm.fm/pro. And for $7 a month, you get a longer ad-free show where we have an
1340. 01:34:55 extra segment. Today, we talked about the app that I built. You also get a bootleg recording,
1341. 01:35:01 which is released right after we get done here. So typically that's about two weeks before the
1342. 01:35:06 actual episodes go out. There's a 4k bookworm wallpaper. There's access to a reading master class
1343. 01:35:12 workshop that I did. And again, all of that is $7 a month helps us keep the lights on. So thank
1344. 01:35:17 you to everyone who is a pro member. If you want to become a pro member yourself, go to bookworm.fm/pro.
1345. 01:35:24 If you're reading along with us, pick up the coaching habit and we'll talk to you next time.