256: Uncommon Sense by William Brody

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1. 00:00:00 Okay, Mike, we're back and we're going to talk about uncommon
2. 00:00:03 sense today. But before we do that, we need to talk about
3. 00:00:08 follow up, which I don't have any, which is great. So I don't
4. 00:00:12 have to talk about my follow up because I had none follow up
5. 00:00:15 from the last book. Mike, feel free to tell us about yours. Are
6. 00:00:20 you standing out in any way?
7. 00:00:23 So mine, mine are a little bit tough. Yeah, you mentioned you
8. 00:00:27 kind of alluded to the first one was, how can I stand out? And
9. 00:00:31 this is from a book on saving money. So this was a weird one
10. 00:00:37 for me kind of where it came up. And I think the thing that I've
11. 00:00:42 landed on with this is that my competitive advantage per se,
12. 00:00:47 when it comes to my personal branding is video. So I am
13. 00:00:55 hoping to do much more video across all the different things.
14. 00:01:02 So that means my YouTube channel has slowed down a little bit
15. 00:01:06 while the primary YouTube channel, which is the one where I
16. 00:01:10 usually talk about obsidian, but I've been talking a little bit
17. 00:01:12 about creative flywheels and stuff like that. So I want to get
18. 00:01:17 into a more regular cadence with that, I would love to produce
19. 00:01:20 a show every single week. That feels like a bit of a stretch
20. 00:01:26 right now. But that's where we're going to try to get to. The
21. 00:01:31 other thing, though, is like all the other video I'm recognizing
22. 00:01:34 there's so many opportunities I have for turning video that I
23. 00:01:39 record into some additional assets. So I've been rebuilding
24. 00:01:45 things inside of the library, my online PPM community. And I'm
25. 00:01:50 sort of revamping things there and I'm building out all these
26. 00:01:53 individual sales pages for my individual courses. So the
27. 00:01:58 library is just going to be its own separate community
28. 00:02:01 subscription. It's going to be much less than the thing I was
29. 00:02:05 trying to do, which was you get all the cohorts and things just
30. 00:02:08 let people join the community. And then if they want to buy the
31. 00:02:11 courses cohorts, all the cart, they can they can do that. So
32. 00:02:15 circles, the background for all this or the infrastructure for
33. 00:02:18 all this and circle, you need to have like separate pages for
34. 00:02:21 all those individual courses, I'm building all of those out and
35. 00:02:25 I'm recognizing that I have all this material, right? And the
36. 00:02:29 bottleneck is I need to sit down and I need to re record it,
37. 00:02:32 then I need to edit all that, put it all up there, we need to
38. 00:02:35 record like promo videos for all those courses. And so I have a
39. 00:02:38 video editor that I've been working with on my secondary
40. 00:02:41 channel, which is like the 15 minute book review videos that
41. 00:02:43 point people to the bookworm episodes that we talk about
42. 00:02:46 some of these books. And he's doing a great job and has
43. 00:02:50 capacity. And is like, Hey, I could help with this. That the
44. 00:02:54 other thing is like, you mentioned a cohort, like I could
45. 00:02:58 take your cohort videos and break them apart. You can have
46. 00:03:00 like a self paced version. And I was like, that all sounds
47. 00:03:03 fantastic. So starting in September, I'm going to be up in
48. 00:03:08 the stuff that I throw at him a little bit. And we're just
49. 00:03:11 going to create so many video assets. I'm going to start doing
50. 00:03:15 a little bit more in terms of shorts and the social media
51. 00:03:19 stuff. Just today, by the way, long term follow up, I started
52. 00:03:23 working with an assistant, we scheduled out a week's worth of
53. 00:03:27 social media posts. I'm posting three times per day across
54. 00:03:32 different platforms. And it feels amazing. We've got the whole
55. 00:03:35 week scheduled out.
56. 00:03:37 Are you auto posting those or are you like manually posting
57. 00:03:40 those every time you're doing it? Oh, no, we're scheduling them
58. 00:03:42 in and typefully. I'm probably going to dip into the specific
59. 00:03:48 platforms. And you know, if people comment or engage, you
60. 00:03:51 know, that way. But I don't know exactly what that's going to
61. 00:03:53 look like. I'm not just going to turn on the notifications on my
62. 00:03:56 my phone so I can get that part out yet. But step one post
63. 00:04:02 consistently seems to be working. Yeah, so I think videos is
64. 00:04:07 one of videos, the big way that I I stand out. And I want to do
65. 00:04:12 more of that. But other than that, I don't have anything super
66. 00:04:15 specific. I still would consider that to be a completed
67. 00:04:19 action item, though. So I don't think it necessarily was I'm
68. 00:04:23 going to talk about this or I'm going to use this angle or that
69. 00:04:26 sort of thing. I really think that one's done in my my
70. 00:04:29 perspective. The other one is save more while we're moving.
71. 00:04:33 That's not happening. So you're buying a house. Yeah, I've been
72. 00:04:38 selling a house and stuff. Yeah, so I will. I do think we've
73. 00:04:44 made progress on this one too, though, because what that has
74. 00:04:48 basically done is reset everything. And so we've kind of
75. 00:04:51 gone back to the basics with budgeting and looking at expenses
76. 00:04:57 and do we do this? Do we not do that all that kind of stuff?
77. 00:05:01 So we're reconsidering everything and cutting a few things. So I
78. 00:05:06 think that will translate into saving more, but there's just
79. 00:05:10 not a specific savings account that we're going to see ticking
80. 00:05:13 up just yet. Yeah, good. Good, good, good. Well, that's great.
81. 00:05:21 I mean, I think the video move is like the chopping it up and
82. 00:05:25 getting it out in more and more in different places. The hard
83. 00:05:28 part, that's a moving target, right? Like, you know, you can
84. 00:05:31 do certain things and then they change things on you and you
85. 00:05:33 can do certain things. But I'm excited to see see you putting
86. 00:05:35 things out in different places. That's awesome.
87. 00:05:38 Yeah, I did this YAP challenge not too long ago. And that got me
88. 00:05:44 doing some different type of types of video right after I
89. 00:05:46 started that I got crazy busy with everything else. So I sort of
90. 00:05:50 dropped it a little bit. But yeah, I want to do some of those. I
91. 00:05:54 want to do these shorts, which tie to the long form book
92. 00:05:59 reviews, which tie ultimately to bookworm. So lots of ideas for
93. 00:06:06 video that I want to do. But just the live me on video, I think
94. 00:06:10 that is the competitive advantage. Or I'm not even know if it's
95. 00:06:14 competitive advantage. It's the most authentic way that I can
96. 00:06:18 connect with my ideal customer, my audience per se. The bottleneck
97. 00:06:25 to me doing that at a higher level is really a lot of the
98. 00:06:29 editing and the publishing and get more help with that. So
99. 00:06:34 quickly, I'm not the bottleneck pretty soon. Yeah, it's awesome.
100. 00:06:39 Alright, so let's go ahead and move on. And let's talk about
101. 00:06:41 today's book. We are covering uncommon sense, rethinking
102. 00:06:47 ordinary problems in extraordinary ways by William R. Brody
103. 00:06:51 with Mike Field. Now, William R. Brody is the main author of
104. 00:06:55 this. It came out of a class that he taught at Johns Hopkins
105. 00:07:00 University. What's interesting about this, Mike, is I actually
106. 00:07:05 have in my notebooks before I ever knew anything about this
107. 00:07:09 book. So this book was published in April of 2026. Before I ever
108. 00:07:14 knew anything about this, I have a class called not so common
109. 00:07:17 sense written down in the courses I would like to teach one
110. 00:07:21 day. And it would be a university level class. So not to go too
111. 00:07:25 deep into this, but I teach engineering here at CCU. The
112. 00:07:28 most I get to expand outside of my engineering world at CCU is
113. 00:07:33 every so often, I will teach a statistics class for non science
114. 00:07:37 and engineering students. So just the general population of
115. 00:07:40 student here, statistics, and then very, very seldom at this
116. 00:07:44 point, I teach a science for non science majors class. But
117. 00:07:47 that's like, I mean, that doesn't even happen very often at all.
118. 00:07:50 It hasn't happened in like three or four years. So I was like,
119. 00:07:53 well, I want to interact with more than just the engineers. I'm
120. 00:07:55 going to teach this not so common sense class. I don't care
121. 00:07:57 if the university gives me credit for it. I don't care about
122. 00:07:59 anything. Like, I'll do it. Like, and the challenge of it has
123. 00:08:02 been finding a time to do it, because the best time to do it
124. 00:08:07 would be in the evenings. And it would be an evening where
125. 00:08:10 they don't have a lot of other stuff. But it's like, I don't
126. 00:08:12 want to give up one of my evenings for a class that nobody,
127. 00:08:14 you know, is crediting or anything like that. And I'm like,
128. 00:08:17 okay, I'm not going to do that yet. But this is why this book
129. 00:08:20 struck me as I was like, Oh, he's gonna, he's gonna do an
130. 00:08:23 uncommon sense book. It's like, these are just things that you
131. 00:08:25 should know. If you're going through university, I was like, I
132. 00:08:28 have this. And Mike, I have like 15 different topics written down
133. 00:08:32 in, in my thing, because I'm trying to do like, okay, I could
134. 00:08:35 do one a week, I could do one topic a week. And I really want
135. 00:08:39 to do this still. So this is why this book hit me. This is like
136. 00:08:43 the background of why I was like, Mike, we got to do this book.
137. 00:08:45 This book sounds, sounds awesome. So I assumed you knew
138. 00:08:49 nothing about this book had never seen this book or never
139. 00:08:51 like, it never even crushed a radar. But I wanted to see how he
140. 00:08:54 did it because that it influences if I ever get a chance to do
141. 00:08:57 this, how I'm going to do it. Nice. Yeah. The the class sounds
142. 00:09:04 pretty interesting. And so you've basically just been collecting
143. 00:09:08 ideas for this, right? You haven't done anything with this
144. 00:09:10 yet? Okay. After reading this book, are you more or less likely
145. 00:09:14 to do it? Oh, so I'm more likely to do it because I think some of
146. 00:09:17 the things he covers in this class are good. But I think
147. 00:09:21 they're a little too, a little too theoretical and not
148. 00:09:27 tangible enough. And my version of the class is actually much
149. 00:09:30 more tangible. It's like, these are common sense things that you
150. 00:09:34 will experience when you leave this university, and you must
151. 00:09:37 know how to do them. Like you must know how to do this. So an
152. 00:09:40 example of this would be, and I do this with my my seniors in
153. 00:09:44 their first semester before they before they was our first
154. 00:09:47 semester senior year. So, you know, right before they
155. 00:09:50 graduate, we buy a house. Like we buy a we buy a fake house,
156. 00:09:54 right? And I go, okay. And like the way I start them off on it
157. 00:09:57 is I say, what do you want in your house? And they all, oh, we
158. 00:10:00 want three bedrooms and two bathrooms. And I want this and I
159. 00:10:03 want an acre and a half a land. And I want blah, blah. And I
160. 00:10:05 say, okay, where do you want to do it? And they tell me where
161. 00:10:07 they want to do it. And we go to those markets, and we look
162. 00:10:10 up, we go to Zillow or Redfin or whatever, and we look up that
163. 00:10:13 house. And then they immediately go, and like their eyes get
164. 00:10:17 real big. And they're like, well, how on earth does anyone ever
165. 00:10:22 afford this thing that I really want? And I go, and we've just
166. 00:10:27 reached the point. But like through that, I teach them the
167. 00:10:30 idea of like the rent versus buy curve. I teach them primary
168. 00:10:34 mortgage insurance and like 20 80 20, you know, putting 20% down
169. 00:10:40 versus not putting 20% down having to pay PMI. So it's like
170. 00:10:42 there's all these like common sense things that aren't common
171. 00:10:46 sense until you've been through them once. Because nobody
172. 00:10:50 teaches you like, you know, you just get this bill, it's like,
173. 00:10:53 what's this extra couple hundred dollars I have to pay every
174. 00:10:55 month? It's like, Oh, well, that's because you didn't put 20%
175. 00:10:57 down. And the bank thinks you're a flight risk. So they are going
176. 00:11:01 to cover their own self by having you pay for their insurance
177. 00:11:04 policy. And it's like, whoa, like everybody kind of gives you
178. 00:11:07 that look. And then we talk about strategies, it's like, okay,
179. 00:11:09 if you want to buy that house eventually one day, how do you
180. 00:11:13 start? Then how do you turn that in that equity into the next
181. 00:11:16 equity until you get up to the house that you want to buy? But
182. 00:11:18 it's like, this has nothing to do with my engineering world.
183. 00:11:21 Like, you know, like the closest I can get into my engineering
184. 00:11:23 world is this like engineering economics, but it's really not
185. 00:11:26 engineering economics. It's just economics. It's just home
186. 00:11:29 buying. So like, that's an example of why, like, I love this
187. 00:11:33 stuff because it helps the students like really, really
188. 00:11:35 helps the students figure out life when they leave here.
189. 00:11:39 Yeah, one of the things that Toby had to do last year, I
190. 00:11:42 believe, with the classical conversation stuff is they have
191. 00:11:46 this cost of living exercise, where they go through all that
192. 00:11:50 stuff. And it's okay, so where are you going to live? But they
193. 00:11:55 go further than like the grocery stuff, the car,
194. 00:11:58 transportation stuff, you know, the full cost of living once
195. 00:12:03 you're out on your own. And I always thought that was a
196. 00:12:08 pretty cool, pretty cool exercise. I think that's cool,
197. 00:12:10 even if it is a little bit later than Toby came to it, I
198. 00:12:14 think it is neat that you incorporate that into your
199. 00:12:17 curriculum, because I think the scenario you described, which
200. 00:12:19 is, oh, I never really thought about this before, is
201. 00:12:22 probably pretty common. That was probably me back in the day,
202. 00:12:26 if I had been in that situation too. So good on you for doing
203. 00:12:30 that sort of thing. But yeah, interesting, because I'm not
204. 00:12:36 sure, is that the type of stuff that he's covering in his
205. 00:12:39 uncommon sense class? Because he's, you know, former Dean of
206. 00:12:43 John Hopkins Hospital, right? And yeah, a lot of like medical
207. 00:12:49 stories and stuff in here, which is not what I was expecting.
208. 00:12:53 - His are much more like proverb, like his are much more
209. 00:12:57 wisdom, like key, big idea, which is good. And like I'm not
210. 00:13:02 knocking his at all, mine is just much more tangible,
211. 00:13:06 practical, like go out into the world and have common sense.
212. 00:13:10 So that's the nature of the book. That's why I wanted to
213. 00:13:12 cover the book. So thank you for coming along on this journey
214. 00:13:15 with me. This by no means, this book by no means, like, told
215. 00:13:19 me, oh, somebody's already done it. Like, you know, there's no
216. 00:13:22 point in doing it, because the other thing is like, there's
217. 00:13:25 students everywhere that don't get to go through this guy's
218. 00:13:28 class. So, I mean, like everybody needs this stuff. And then
219. 00:13:31 there may have been a couple things. Like, for instance, one
220. 00:13:34 of the chapters to chapter four we'll get to is the Turtle
221. 00:13:37 and the Fence post. I think that principle is absolute genius.
222. 00:13:42 And I was like, so that's one that I'll be like, okay, I would
223. 00:13:45 steal that one. I would bring that one into my class and be like,
224. 00:13:48 listen, if you see a Turtle and Fence post, it didn't get there
225. 00:13:50 by itself. You got to figure out why, you know, why it's there.
226. 00:13:53 So, but before we do that, let's get into the introduction of
227. 00:13:56 the book. We kind of talked a little bit about it. He is a
228. 00:14:00 he is basically his most recent stint was the former president
229. 00:14:05 of Johns Hopkins. He was an MD, got into radiology, I believe.
230. 00:14:11 And then started a company dealing with like X-ray technology.
231. 00:14:17 What was it like the 90s mic 80s 90s something like that? I
232. 00:14:20 can't remember exactly when it was. Yeah, I don't I don't know
233. 00:14:24 and I I'm not sure it really matters. Yeah. Some of the
234. 00:14:30 stuff that he he describes in the book in terms of like the
235. 00:14:35 dating of when these things happened. I get probably why he he
236. 00:14:40 did it. He's talking about this breakthrough technology in the
237. 00:14:43 the medical field where people are like, Oh, yeah, well, that
238. 00:14:45 was, you know, a long time ago. But honestly, he could have left
239. 00:14:48 out the dates completely and it would end the exact same
240. 00:14:50 effect for me. Exactly. I I agree completely. The the core is I
241. 00:14:55 got my MD or my MD. I was an entrepreneur through a bunch of
242. 00:15:00 like craziness. I ended up becoming the president and I got
243. 00:15:02 to teach this class. And here's my book right now. And this this
244. 00:15:05 book comes out of this class. That's like the gist of the
245. 00:15:08 introduction for me. And where this book comes from. Is there
246. 00:15:12 anything else that you think is relevant in terms of the
247. 00:15:15 introduction? No, I didn't jot down anything from the
248. 00:15:19 introduction. I thought it was kind of useless to be. Yeah. Yeah.
249. 00:15:23 Yeah. Okay. So let's let's roll right into chapter one. So
250. 00:15:25 there's 12 chapters in this book. Basically, the format of the
251. 00:15:28 book is every chapter is around a story. And then there's a key
252. 00:15:33 learning about that. And that's the uncommon sense principle he
253. 00:15:36 wants to teach you. And then there's stories. So I'm going to
254. 00:15:39 probably do I'm going to do my best to get most of the high
255. 00:15:41 level stories. Mike, if I forget one, or if I leave it out,
256. 00:15:44 just accidentally, help me help me out with the stories. But
257. 00:15:47 chapter one is called only the strong survive. And basically,
258. 00:15:52 he is sent to Greece to vet this doctor who has a miracle cure
259. 00:15:58 for cancer. And like the people were like, Oh my gosh, like we
260. 00:16:04 need to know if this guy's like actually got a cure or what's
261. 00:16:07 going on. And he gets there and he starts talking to the
262. 00:16:09 individual. And he realizes this guy doesn't like he doesn't
263. 00:16:13 have anything. It's just a matter of the people who are
264. 00:16:16 still around are the ones who are promoting him, right? The
265. 00:16:20 survivors are the ones who are promoting like what he did.
266. 00:16:23 He's not going and following up with any of the people who
267. 00:16:26 either passed away from cancer or didn't have success after
268. 00:16:30 having seen him. And like that's the core principle. The core
269. 00:16:33 principle is like you have to look at the entire picture. You
270. 00:16:37 can't just look at the positive cases of what you want to do.
271. 00:16:41 But so often marketing and PR and all these other places,
272. 00:16:45 they'll just tell us about the positives. They won't tell us
273. 00:16:48 about the full the full gamut. So the nature of only the strong
274. 00:16:51 survive, at least from my perspective was, Hey, look at the
275. 00:16:54 whole look at the whole perspective or the whole spectrum,
276. 00:16:58 not just the survivors.
277. 00:17:00 Yeah, the the stories, to be honest, like they were
278. 00:17:04 interesting, but the significance of them, I feel was
279. 00:17:07 completely wasted on me because I have zero medical background.
280. 00:17:11 Me to me to the same way. Yeah, so most of my notes here are
281. 00:17:16 regarding the the big ideas from the the different chapters. So
282. 00:17:21 a couple of things I jotted down in this first one. The first is
283. 00:17:26 the infinite monkey theorem. Okay, which is basically any
284. 00:17:31 sequence of events will eventually occur if the event
285. 00:17:34 has a non zero probability of happening and we are provided
286. 00:17:38 with an infinite amount of time. It's the infinite time scale
287. 00:17:41 argument from ATP. And then there's the survivorship bias, I
288. 00:17:46 would argue that's probably the the bigger idea from this
289. 00:17:49 chapter. Because we tend to think that because somebody or
290. 00:17:55 something survived that it was better or stronger and we
291. 00:17:58 discount the role of luck, Americans in general,
292. 00:18:03 significantly discount the role of of luck. I guess the term
293. 00:18:07 for that would be like the individualism, right? We think
294. 00:18:12 it's based on our ability or our smarts. A lot of times it's
295. 00:18:16 just we were in the right place at the right time. And he
296. 00:18:19 mentions that good luck is hard to detect. It looks like
297. 00:18:21 something that you've earned, which just feeds into that
298. 00:18:24 American ideal of, well, you know, this happened to me because I
299. 00:18:27 deserved it because I did these things prior. And that's, you
300. 00:18:30 know, the reason. And I know that I am susceptible to this and I
301. 00:18:35 fall into this. But I also like, don't really know what to do
302. 00:18:39 with this. I've had conversations with people about this
303. 00:18:42 before. It's like, yeah, you're probably right. But what do
304. 00:18:46 I, what am I supposed to do? Just stop trying.
305. 00:18:52 Well, it said that a couple of things came out of this for me
306. 00:18:55 is this is like where you see that person who is incredibly
307. 00:18:58 successful. They they leave the company to go start their own
308. 00:19:01 company. And it's absolutely a miserable failure. And it's
309. 00:19:04 like, it's not necessarily that they're a failure. You know,
310. 00:19:08 it's a matter of like, listen, sometimes things work out and
311. 00:19:11 sometimes they don't. Sometimes you're in the right place at
312. 00:19:13 the right time. And sometimes you're not, you know,
313. 00:19:15 sometimes you walk into the room and there's four people in
314. 00:19:18 there who, you know, lift your sails in a way that like just
315. 00:19:21 have you take off. The second one was I love the the 70s study
316. 00:19:26 that he references here, where they they followed these
317. 00:19:30 families. It's a 20 year study that follows these families. And
318. 00:19:34 basically, there were two characteristics that separated
319. 00:19:37 successful from unsuccessful. The first one was that you are
320. 00:19:40 competent at your job. And the second one was that you were
321. 00:19:43 lucky. And it's like it had nothing to do with the right
322. 00:19:47 schools, high IQ, strong college test results, good grades,
323. 00:19:50 or even choosing it was like, one, are you competent at what you
324. 00:19:54 do? And two, are you lucky? And I was like, man, what are we
325. 00:19:57 going to do? Like, holy cow. So, but I still think like the points
326. 00:20:01 coming out of this chapter are valid, you know, like, watch
327. 00:20:04 survivors should buy us and then think about how luck factors
328. 00:20:07 into into a lot of stuff. Yeah, I think the big takeaway with
329. 00:20:11 the conversation around luck is really just realizing that you're
330. 00:20:17 not as great as maybe you think you are, because you tend to
331. 00:20:23 look backward based on the success that you had and think
332. 00:20:26 that you built that you did that, right? And maybe there's a
333. 00:20:31 little bit of that, but being grateful for the opportunity
334. 00:20:35 regardless of how big a role you had in bringing it about. And
335. 00:20:39 likewise, if if things haven't gone your way, don't feel like
336. 00:20:44 your victim in life is unfair, really just keep trying, because
337. 00:20:51 at some point, your luck will change. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
338. 00:20:56 Exactly. Alright, you ready to move to chapter two? Yeah, let's do
339. 00:20:59 it. Okay, so chapter two is one that I think many of us have
340. 00:21:02 heard before it's perfect is the enemy of good. And basically,
341. 00:21:07 it's the idea that you're not always going to be able to do the
342. 00:21:12 perfect work or you're not always going to be able to do put
343. 00:21:15 the time into it. The story here is basically he had a
344. 00:21:18 radiologist friend who went to Germany and had all this whole
345. 00:21:23 like warehouse full of scans or like, what would they be
346. 00:21:28 photographs? I don't know what they are. X-ray photo X-ray
347. 00:21:31 photographs. And he had to look through them. And he basically
348. 00:21:33 just drew a line in the middle of the room. And he said, those
349. 00:21:35 ones are too old. We're not even going to care about this, like
350. 00:21:39 either people have moved on, or they've gone and gotten another
351. 00:21:42 one or whatever it is. And we just going to take those. And in
352. 00:21:45 a perfect world, I would look at all of these. In this world, I
353. 00:21:49 can only look at so many of them. So I'm just going to draw a
354. 00:21:51 line and I'm going to cut it over. And Mike, what's interesting
355. 00:21:54 about this to me is I think about this with your what you just
356. 00:21:58 said, from your follow up in terms of making more video
357. 00:22:01 content. And I say, Mike is perfect, the enemy of good here,
358. 00:22:06 right? Like, you on camera telling people information, that's
359. 00:22:11 the win. Is it you on camera telling them information with
360. 00:22:16 perfectly edited stuff or, you know, like this kind of thing? And
361. 00:22:19 it's like, I don't know if it is. It's not now granted. I'm not
362. 00:22:22 telling you, yeah, I'm not telling you to make poor quality
363. 00:22:25 stuff. By no means am I telling you to make poor quality
364. 00:22:27 stuff. But I know that your baseline having, having been
365. 00:22:31 friends with you and done this show with you, your baseline is
366. 00:22:34 10 times better than half of the stuff that's on YouTube right
367. 00:22:37 now. So which is why I have to delegate it because then it's
368. 00:22:41 good enough. I didn't do any of it. And it's not worth trying to
369. 00:22:45 tweak the last 10%. Because that's it's going to take forever.
370. 00:22:51 So so I mean, that's but that's the general gist of what we're
371. 00:22:53 talking about here is basically, hey, get to and there's another
372. 00:22:59 buddy or another person we've read, Mike, that I don't remember
373. 00:23:01 who it who it was. But basically, it's like most great leaders
374. 00:23:04 make decisions based on 80% information. They don't need that
375. 00:23:07 other 20% of the information and they can make a good enough
376. 00:23:09 decision on 80% of the information. And and that's the kind of
377. 00:23:12 gist I get around here. So this one didn't didn't really blow me
378. 00:23:15 away. It was kind of like, yeah, okay, I've heard that before.
379. 00:23:18 Makes sense. Yeah, I the the chapter, you mentioned this is
380. 00:23:23 something that we're familiar with, perfect being the enemy of
381. 00:23:26 good. I'm actually familiar with it in the inverse. And I'm not
382. 00:23:30 sure if that's true for you as well, where let's see, so good
383. 00:23:36 would be the enemy of the best in terms of like compromising. And
384. 00:23:41 this is good enough. Right, but this is this is backwards compared
385. 00:23:47 to that, which I think is intentional. And to your point,
386. 00:23:51 like, I'm the perfect case study for this, because I am a
387. 00:23:54 perfectionist, that will sit there and edit the thing over and
388. 00:23:57 over and over again, instead of just putting it out into the
389. 00:23:59 world. So that is the goal there, we got to get in the the reps.
390. 00:24:06 There's a concept in here about heuristic thinking that I kind of
391. 00:24:10 liked, which is an everyday method of employing rules with
392. 00:24:13 them inherited wisdom, mental shortcuts, etc, to simplify
393. 00:24:16 complex problems and almost instantly assess probabilities.
394. 00:24:21 But I don't like the term heuristic thinking. I really think
395. 00:24:25 what it's describing here, here is sort of mental models. And
396. 00:24:29 really, if I were to summarize this book, it's a sampling of
397. 00:24:34 of mental models that he's chosen to add to this, this, I
398. 00:24:38 don't know if this is meant to be a course curriculum per se. But
399. 00:24:41 that's definitely like the top topics that he talks about here
400. 00:24:47 could fit into a curriculum like that. But I didn't, I didn't
401. 00:24:50 now understand going into it, you know, do you know if this was
402. 00:24:52 actually like, this is what he teaches in that curriculum, or
403. 00:24:55 is this just the type of stuff that he covers? That makes
404. 00:24:59 sense? So so my gist on this is, and I don't know this or a
405. 00:25:03 fact, but I know this like thinking about universities, he's
406. 00:25:05 at a big university, he's the president of the big university,
407. 00:25:08 he gets zero time with students. So like, and like the most
408. 00:25:12 time he would get with students is somebody who's got a major,
409. 00:25:14 major issue, their world's on fire, and he's trying to solve
410. 00:25:17 that problem for them, or he like got got pulled into it. So
411. 00:25:21 this class, I bet you is run like a seminar class, where it's
412. 00:25:25 like once a week, he can do whatever he wants. It's just
413. 00:25:28 coming in and talking or doing everything. So when you say
414. 00:25:31 like curriculum, it's not like a business class that you're
415. 00:25:35 used to, or it's not like a communication class we're used to,
416. 00:25:38 it's really whatever he wants to do, and he just wants to do it
417. 00:25:41 to interact with students more because he loves interacting
418. 00:25:43 with students, like that would be my my take on the way this
419. 00:25:45 class ran.
420. 00:25:46 Okay, it's been a while since I was in a college classroom, I
421. 00:25:49 guess. But yeah, this is I mean, the mental models that he
422. 00:25:55 describes here are kind of interesting, but left me with
423. 00:26:00 the question of why did he choose the ones that he did,
424. 00:26:03 especially when you compare it to something like, super
425. 00:26:06 thinking, I can't remember, did you read that one with me?
426. 00:26:09 Yeah, we read super thinking. I didn't read, I didn't read the
427. 00:26:12 other mental models book, though, the one that you I know you
428. 00:26:14 liked it a lot. But I can't yeah, that's the the great mental
429. 00:26:17 models by Shane Parrish. Yeah, he republished those recently
430. 00:26:24 in the Solomon a box set now, which I liked those books, I
431. 00:26:29 think better than super thinking but super thinking is sort of
432. 00:26:33 like an encyclopedia of all the potential mental models. So I'm
433. 00:26:38 he's talking about these different chapters. And I was
434. 00:26:40 like, which one does this map on to without pulling up the
435. 00:26:42 mind map and seeing, you know, the hundreds that are available.
436. 00:26:45 Yep. I don't know, that was just kind of the question in the
437. 00:26:48 back of my head is like, why these ones? Yeah, it probably
438. 00:26:51 just because he liked them, right? Like, I mean, I don't I
439. 00:26:53 really don't think there was much more to it than that that he
440. 00:26:55 liked these ones. And that's a hard part for me with a book like
441. 00:26:58 this is what exactly are we trying to teach here? What is the
442. 00:27:07 outcome of having someone like me read this book? What am I going
443. 00:27:13 to be able to do after this that I wasn't able to do prior? Or
444. 00:27:17 how is this going to solve a specific problem that I'm facing?
445. 00:27:21 You know, unless your goal was to teach people about turtles on
446. 00:27:24 fence posts, I'm not sure what the value proposition necessarily
447. 00:27:29 is here. Okay, understood. I'm excited to hear your style in
448. 00:27:33 writing section. I'm very excited to hear your stuff. That's
449. 00:27:35 actually not foreshadowing. I do. I did like this book. I like
450. 00:27:41 the conversation and I love any conversation about mental
451. 00:27:44 models, to be honest. But like, why these, you know, it seems
452. 00:27:48 like a weird collection, other than, you know, he's got stories
453. 00:27:51 to, to anchor these two. And I like, I think that's it. Like,
454. 00:27:56 I really think that's it. I think it's like, Oh, well, what are
455. 00:27:58 these stories I've collected and the core principles out of them
456. 00:28:02 over the however many years I've taught this? These are what
457. 00:28:04 these are the ones that have run true with most students. I'm
458. 00:28:07 going to put into a book and it'll live forever. Right? It'll
459. 00:28:10 live beyond me forever. So let's roll to chapter three. All
460. 00:28:15 right. Chapter three is your salary will not make you rich.
461. 00:28:19 Right? So the story out of this one is Michael Bloomberg is on
462. 00:28:23 the board of Johns Hopkins. And he, I don't know, they go
463. 00:28:27 somewhere, some island or some retreat or I forget what they
464. 00:28:31 were doing. But Bloomberg invites him and he comes there and he
465. 00:28:33 goes, Hey, your entire job over this week, this next weekend is
466. 00:28:38 to convince me to not run for the mayor of New York. And like,
467. 00:28:42 the whole story is basically, you know, Michael Bloomberg has
468. 00:28:46 more money than anybody knows what to do with at this point.
469. 00:28:50 And why on earth would he want to take on the social
470. 00:28:53 responsibility and the civil servant duties of being the
471. 00:28:56 mayor of New York and basically just getting yelled at for like
472. 00:29:00 however long he's he's the mayor, you put out fires and you get
473. 00:29:03 yelled at. And he said, he told him he's like, you should not do
474. 00:29:06 this. This is dumb. And then Michael Bloomberg goes on to end
475. 00:29:09 up being the mayor of New York. And he I forget how long he was
476. 00:29:12 the mayor of New York, but it was not a small amount of time. It
477. 00:29:14 was actually a pretty decent amount of time. So like the idea
478. 00:29:18 is you need something more which we've we've read a bunch of
479. 00:29:22 books about this that like, you can get the big salary and
480. 00:29:26 you're still going to feel that whole you can get the accolades
481. 00:29:30 and the promotions and the titles and whatever it is. And
482. 00:29:33 you're still going to feel that whole that there's got to be
483. 00:29:36 some idea of like what your values are, what your goals are,
484. 00:29:42 and then what level was enough? Like what is enough for me to
485. 00:29:45 say like, Hey, I've I've done what I set out to do. And like he,
486. 00:29:51 this guy has like a really wide range of examples that he gives
487. 00:29:55 right because here he ties into Ecclesiastes, right? So like, I
488. 00:29:58 mean, he's pulling stuff from the Bible, he's pulling stuff from
489. 00:30:00 medical research, he's pulling stuff from social social science
490. 00:30:03 research. So it's like, it's kind of wild how diverse his
491. 00:30:07 examples are. And I just think, you know, it's it's a fun way
492. 00:30:13 to see how he puts this together. I don't know that I always
493. 00:30:17 loved it. But it's a fun it's a fun thing to see how somebody
494. 00:30:21 else puts puts this together. So that's the nature in my mind of
495. 00:30:25 this chapter is basically, Hey, there's always going to be a
496. 00:30:28 bigger, better thing out there. You've got to figure out what's
497. 00:30:31 enough for you and what your goals are and what your values
498. 00:30:33 are. That's what that's what I took away. Mike, how about
499. 00:30:35 the concept of enough is an interesting idea here. But
500. 00:30:40 otherwise, this is a really weird chapter to read after we
501. 00:30:44 just finished the psychology of money. Yeah, everything else
502. 00:30:48 is like, yeah, I'm gonna go listen to Morgan Howse will talk
503. 00:30:51 about this instead. He does talk about the the concept of you
504. 00:30:59 spend whatever is in your your pocket. And that just kind of
505. 00:31:05 hits home on the importance of having a plan for or budget for
506. 00:31:10 how you're going to spend your money going back to my action
507. 00:31:14 item. But yeah, the only other thing really here that I jotted
508. 00:31:19 down was the golden rule of wealth creation. People really
509. 00:31:22 become truly wealthy from just earning a big salary. They
510. 00:31:25 become wealthy by owning things. I jotted that down kind of
511. 00:31:28 because it feels like it's in contradiction to the psychology
512. 00:31:32 of money. And I get where he's coming from, you know, if you're
513. 00:31:35 going to become really wealthy, you got to have some assets that
514. 00:31:39 you're owning. But that's not the approach Morgan Howse will
515. 00:31:45 talked about. And I feel like that's the one that's more it's
516. 00:31:49 it's more interesting to me and also probably more palatable
517. 00:31:53 for just about everybody else.
518. 00:31:55 Yeah. And no, and nowhere did he mention savings at all in
519. 00:31:59 this chapter, which Morgan Howse goes goes wild on savings. Yeah,
520. 00:32:03 you ready to you ready to go chapter four? Let's do it.
521. 00:32:06 All right, chapter four is probably my favorite chapter.
522. 00:32:09 This is the turtle on the fence post. And basically, I don't
523. 00:32:15 remember where the story came from. Like, do you remember where
524. 00:32:17 the the fence post story came from?
525. 00:32:21 He mentioned it in the book, but I don't recall it. Basically,
526. 00:32:26 you know, if you see it, it's like when one of those old
527. 00:32:29 colloquial sayings, like a Mark Twain is him, you know, if you
528. 00:32:32 see a turtle on a fence post, he didn't get there by himself.
529. 00:32:35 Yeah. Or there's another one about like, if you, if you see a
530. 00:32:39 fence before tearing it down, ask somebody why the fence exists
531. 00:32:43 there. I forget who like there's another saying that's like that
532. 00:32:45 ask somebody why they built a fence. So the story, the story
533. 00:32:48 behind this one is he's the president of Johns Hopkins. There's
534. 00:32:51 this ugly plywood box structure, like in this one part of
535. 00:32:56 campus. And one of the board of trustees members says, Hey,
536. 00:32:59 William, why is that box there? That's ugly. It's terrible. Like
537. 00:33:04 there's no reason that that box should be there. So he, like
538. 00:33:07 either later that day or the next day, calls facilities and
539. 00:33:10 says facilities tear that box down, but get rid of that box. We
540. 00:33:13 don't need that box there. It's ugly and nobody likes it and
541. 00:33:15 all this stuff. So he does that. And it basically destroys this
542. 00:33:19 researcher's study. It messes up their whole lab. The number that
543. 00:33:24 he throws out is $75,000 to relocate the lab. It ended up
544. 00:33:27 costing the university because he said, and didn't ask enough
545. 00:33:32 questions. He didn't ask why the turtle was on the fence post. He
546. 00:33:35 didn't ask why the plywood box was there. And Mike, I like, if I
547. 00:33:40 got nothing out of this book, I love this idea. Like when you're
548. 00:33:44 walking through and you see something and you're like, Whoa,
549. 00:33:48 that's weird. Like that, like what's going on with that? Like
550. 00:33:52 just dig into it more. Ask the five wise, try to figure out what
551. 00:33:57 the heck is going on with that thing. Because usually that
552. 00:33:59 stuff doesn't just randomly happen. Like it's there for a
553. 00:34:03 reason. You know, there's something there. And that's that
554. 00:34:06 for me for this book, not that it's my only one I got out of
555. 00:34:09 this book. That's a win for me for reading this book, the turtle
556. 00:34:11 and the fence post analogy.
557. 00:34:13 Now you probably don't even need the five wise, you just need
558. 00:34:15 to ask why. Yes. When you see something that seems to have no
559. 00:34:19 purpose, dig deep enough and you'll probably find it. I think
560. 00:34:23 that's the the takeaway there. The other thing that jumped out to
561. 00:34:28 me from this chapter is always keep an eye out for turtles with
562. 00:34:31 dollar signs on them pointing out that sometimes if you ignore
563. 00:34:35 that stuff, it can be really expensive. It can be really
564. 00:34:38 expensive mistake to the point that you were talking about
565. 00:34:41 earlier. You know, if you were to summarize the advice though
566. 00:34:45 from this chapter, it's actually I think best put a little bit
567. 00:34:49 differently and towards the beginning of the chapter, he
568. 00:34:51 says the most crucial key to smarter decision making in
569. 00:34:55 situations involving other humans is paying close attention to
570. 00:34:59 human behavior. And the larger point associated with that in
571. 00:35:03 this chapter, basically, is that everyone is going to act in
572. 00:35:07 their own self interest. And if you recognize that, then you will
573. 00:35:12 understand why people do a lot of the things that they that
574. 00:35:16 they do. Actually, it's kind of getting into the next chapter
575. 00:35:18 two, I guess, but yes, it is. Yeah, the turtle on a fence post,
576. 00:35:22 it's a cool like metaphor or analogy. I'm not even sure which
577. 00:35:26 one which one that is. But I remember when I read that, I got
578. 00:35:32 done with it. I was like, okay, now, what do I actually do with
579. 00:35:35 this? Like, do I go around looking for things that are out of
580. 00:35:39 place? Or do I just when I noticed that stuff? Uh huh. Why
581. 00:35:43 in the world is that the way that it is? That's where I dig.
582. 00:35:46 And that feels weird to me not to have an immediate application
583. 00:35:49 of an action item like that is like, keep this in mind in case
584. 00:35:53 you come across this. But I do get that you absolutely will. So
585. 00:35:57 I do think it's one of the more I agree with you. It's one of
586. 00:36:02 the better chapters in the book because of that powerful
587. 00:36:04 visual. Yeah. Yeah, that and it's definitely the second for me.
588. 00:36:08 It's a matter of like, I'm not going to go around looking for
589. 00:36:10 turtles on fence posts, because I think there are enough of them
590. 00:36:14 that they'll find me. But I'm going to ask more questions about
591. 00:36:18 them now and it'd be like, wait a minute, that doesn't make any
592. 00:36:21 sense. Or that's unusual. Why are we doing it that way? And like,
593. 00:36:25 let somebody, you know, kind of convince me. And then I also
594. 00:36:29 understand that there are going to be certain turtles with dollar
595. 00:36:31 signs on them that I'm going to go. Yeah, I just don't, I don't
596. 00:36:34 care about that turtle. Like, we're just going to let that
597. 00:36:36 turtle, let that turtle be there. And somebody, somebody needs
598. 00:36:40 that turtle to be there for whatever they're doing. So no, I
599. 00:36:43 really liked, I really liked this chapter. But I'm ready to move
600. 00:36:46 to five if you are. All right, sure. Let's do it. Okay, so you,
601. 00:36:49 you alluded to this, which was, which was good is chapter five is
602. 00:36:52 called actually people do make sense. The story in this one is
603. 00:36:56 basically, he's talking to the CEO of a pharmaceutical company, I
604. 00:37:03 think, and then he's talking to somebody else that had had to do
605. 00:37:07 with Medicare Part D, right? So this was the kind of the drug
606. 00:37:11 portion of Medicare and how they they paid it. This is around
607. 00:37:13 2003. And the CEO was in a good mood. And then I the other
608. 00:37:18 individual that can economist or I forget who it was was in a
609. 00:37:21 really bad mood about it. And he was like, well, that doesn't
610. 00:37:23 make any sense. Like, why are these two people so so divided on
611. 00:37:27 it? And what ended up happening was the pharma guy, the CEO of
612. 00:37:31 the big pharma had like in when they wrote that legislation, it
613. 00:37:34 locked in like price fixing for like 20 years. So like they
614. 00:37:38 were just like, yes, this is amazing, right? Like we have, we
615. 00:37:41 are locked in for the next 20 years. And this is going to be
616. 00:37:43 great in terms of big profits. And the economist was just like,
617. 00:37:46 we just ruined everything. Like we absolutely just ruined the
618. 00:37:49 free market of this, of the way this works. And the whole point
619. 00:37:54 of what he's trying to get across here to kind of summarize it as
620. 00:37:57 high level as you can is both people are justified in the way
621. 00:38:02 they think about that. Like they're very different opinions.
622. 00:38:05 They both think kind of opposite about that. And they both
623. 00:38:08 have their their reason why they do. And both of those reasons
624. 00:38:12 are right from the perspective that you look at it. And I think
625. 00:38:17 this is a good one is like, okay, I may think one thing about
626. 00:38:21 something and somebody else thinks completely differently about
627. 00:38:23 it. Do I go that level deeper? And do I ask them, Hey, why do
628. 00:38:27 you think that way? Like, what's your reasoning for thinking
629. 00:38:30 that XYZ, you know, it's true and that you're either happy or
630. 00:38:34 really sad about that? But most of the time I don't do that. And
631. 00:38:37 I think with the internet, we really don't do that. Like with
632. 00:38:39 the internet, we dig into our little niche groups. And we
633. 00:38:44 say like, they're wrong and terrible and horrible. And can
634. 00:38:47 you believe they would even think that when we don't even go
635. 00:38:49 like, Hey, why, why are you concerned about whatever it is
636. 00:38:52 XYZ? So I think it's a really interesting kind of principle
637. 00:38:56 high level principle.
638. 00:38:58 I agree with you. It is a interesting high level principle.
639. 00:39:01 The thing that stood out to me the most from this chapter, though,
640. 00:39:05 was that people are driven more by fear than they are by greed.
641. 00:39:10 I don't know, like it just when I think about that, and then I
642. 00:39:15 taken into consideration the stuff that you were talking about
643. 00:39:17 and people always act on their own self interest. Instead of
644. 00:39:21 going into it thinking, what are they trying to manipulate and
645. 00:39:27 make happen, you know, behind closed doors? Really, it's what
646. 00:39:31 is the thing that they are afraid of? I don't know, it's like
647. 00:39:35 that, that shift makes it more human and relatable and not so
648. 00:39:42 much like their jerks just trying to screw me over.
649. 00:39:46 No, agreed. Yeah, agree completely. Yeah. I think that's
650. 00:39:49 where I get my first action item from Mike is asking this
651. 00:39:53 question. And it's not going to be a good one for me to follow up
652. 00:39:56 on when we record the next episode. But like, I want to have
653. 00:40:00 this on the top of mind where when I go into a meeting and
654. 00:40:03 somebody is, you know, going off or they're upset about
655. 00:40:07 something or they're trying to figure out it's like, instead
656. 00:40:09 of asking like, what do they want? What are they afraid of?
657. 00:40:13 Like, ask the question of like, what are they afraid of right
658. 00:40:15 now? Because something's driving this? And I want to see if
659. 00:40:17 that rings true. You know, a student comes into me and they're
660. 00:40:20 freaking out about something. It's like, what are you afraid
661. 00:40:21 of? Oh, it might be that I'm not going to graduate or that,
662. 00:40:24 you know, financial aid or whatever it might be. So that's
663. 00:40:27 my first action item coming in, coming into our book.
664. 00:40:30 Nice. All right, anything else from this chapter? No, let's
665. 00:40:35 talk about room 102 room 102. This chapter was weird to me,
666. 00:40:41 right? Like, this chapter was super weird to me. I get the
667. 00:40:43 point of it. But man, I was like, I'm not sure what I think
668. 00:40:47 about this chapter. So the gist of this is they're at a
669. 00:40:51 conference. And he is presenting on his x ray, his dual x ray
670. 00:40:58 technology and everybody's like over the moon about it. Everybody's
671. 00:41:01 excited to go see his presentation. He's like, getting all
672. 00:41:04 kind of like fanfare about it. The room is going to be packed
673. 00:41:07 and they're expanding it to a bigger room. And then room 102,
674. 00:41:11 you know, he's in room 101 room 102 is an MRI technology, so
675. 00:41:15 nuclear MRI technology. And basically, it's like a ghost
676. 00:41:19 room, like no one's there, just the presenter and like one or two
677. 00:41:22 other people. And the the reveal of the chapter is my dual x ray
678. 00:41:28 technology that everybody was so over the moon about. And I was
679. 00:41:31 getting all kind of fanfare and fame over turned out to not be
680. 00:41:36 the way the industry went. And the NMRI technology is the way
681. 00:41:39 the industry went. And if you can, you should try to be in room
682. 00:41:44 102, not room 101. And this is where it breaks down for me,
683. 00:41:48 Mike, is because yeah, that's great. Hindsight's 2020, right?
684. 00:41:54 Like when you look back on that and NMRI has taken has taken
685. 00:41:57 over the world or whatever. Sure, that's fine. But like, nobody
686. 00:42:01 knows that going into it. Like if I knew that going into it, I'd
687. 00:42:04 be in room 102 every time. How am I supposed to know that? Like,
688. 00:42:08 and how many other room 103s and 104s and 105s that could have
689. 00:42:13 been a room 102 turned out to not be like, and they were just
690. 00:42:16 like, so it's like, this one, I'm not as big of a fan of this
691. 00:42:21 principle. I get it in general, take the risk, think about the
692. 00:42:24 future, like, think about the new and innovative thing and all
693. 00:42:28 that stuff. But I just think it's, I don't think it's practical.
694. 00:42:32 Like, I don't think I think this one's really hard to do well.
695. 00:42:35 So box, soapbox over. Good. All right. Interesting. I get it
696. 00:42:40 from one perspective, you really don't know where things are
697. 00:42:45 going to go. But I didn't have the same visceral reaction to
698. 00:42:51 this that you did. And maybe that's because I've sort of trained
699. 00:42:59 myself over the years to look for the next thing that's coming.
700. 00:43:03 Okay. I mean, I've spent quite a few years creating on the
701. 00:43:06 internet. And it was primarily about technology. So there's always
702. 00:43:12 a new app, there's always a new system. There's always something
703. 00:43:17 that is going to revolutionize things. And you kind of realize
704. 00:43:21 after a while that the same boring principles apply throughout
705. 00:43:26 throughout history. And they just, you know, they get a
706. 00:43:28 different coat of paint. So I think the metaphor breaks down at
707. 00:43:33 at some point. But the question in the back of my mind is always
708. 00:43:38 like, what is the thing that's going to replace what I am
709. 00:43:43 currently doing? That part translates, I think. I think it's
710. 00:43:48 a big reason why I'm so all in with obsidian, because those
711. 00:43:54 plain text markdown files literally can be anything. And
712. 00:43:59 they could be nothing, you know, that's technology that's
713. 00:44:01 been around for 20 years. So there's a very foundational layer
714. 00:44:06 there. And I think I'm having a hard trouble describing this, but
715. 00:44:11 he talks a lot about the contrarians and being open to new
716. 00:44:15 ideas, new experiences, new people, new places, right? If you
717. 00:44:20 are stuck in, well, this is the way things are. And these are the
718. 00:44:27 systems that are in place, you're kind of limited in how you
719. 00:44:31 think about those things, all you can really do is tweak those
720. 00:44:35 and make adjustments and hope to improve the performance or the
721. 00:44:39 efficiency of those things to a certain level. But not that I've
722. 00:44:43 been around forever, but I feel like I've been around long
723. 00:44:46 enough to recognize that there are occasionally these completely
724. 00:44:51 disruptive shifts that happen. And everything that you knew was
725. 00:44:54 was wrong. Right. And I feel like if you have, if you can
726. 00:45:02 develop some sort of taste for that sort of stuff, you have at
727. 00:45:08 least a little bit of an inclination when room 102 is going
728. 00:45:14 to be interesting. Okay. And this may be a terrible, terrible
729. 00:45:19 analogy, but I think I think this is a little bit what we see
730. 00:45:26 currently with AI, because people are used to using AI in
731. 00:45:31 specific ways, generates text, I don't like this text that it
732. 00:45:35 generated. I think in terms of the AI adoption curve, the people
733. 00:45:42 like me who are actually using it to code their own tools,
734. 00:45:45 that's probably a very small percentage of people who are
735. 00:45:48 doing that. But even that, I feel like is still room 101 type
736. 00:45:55 stuff. And I'm kind of always curious about what is the
737. 00:45:58 application of this technology that feels so off the wall right
738. 00:46:05 now, but could end up changing the world in the future. Because I
739. 00:46:07 think it really is a disruptive technology, it is going to
740. 00:46:10 change the world. I don't know if that's a great, great
741. 00:46:12 description. But those, those types of things where it's like,
742. 00:46:15 okay, I kind of understand a little bit what this is about,
743. 00:46:21 but letting your mind kind of wander and think about, wouldn't
744. 00:46:25 it be crazy if, you know, that's sort of the whole premise of
745. 00:46:29 the amplify cohort, I get that right now, it feels completely
746. 00:46:33 ridiculous to say that you can actually use AI in the creative
747. 00:46:36 process to make yourself a better writer. But I am 100%
748. 00:46:41 confident that history will bear that out. Right, we don't
749. 00:46:44 know how we get to that point right now. People are struggling
750. 00:46:47 with it. I don't want to read all this AI slop. I keep coming
751. 00:46:52 across these tools that will tell you like, how much percent of
752. 00:46:56 this was written by AI, you know, that type of stuff. Yeah, like
753. 00:47:00 in the academic world in the journalistic world, I understand
754. 00:47:04 where that stuff can be useful. But also, that stuff kind of
755. 00:47:06 bugs me because it's like, who really cares? That's focusing
756. 00:47:10 on what problem right now, which is going to be relevant in six
757. 00:47:14 months, how's it going to be relevant? I have absolutely no
758. 00:47:16 idea. I just know it's going to change, it's going to change a
759. 00:47:18 lot. It's changing so fast that like six months from now, you're
760. 00:47:21 not going to be able to remember what the use case was for
761. 00:47:24 something like that. So being able to surf those waves, I feel
762. 00:47:28 like that's the thing that maybe, I don't know, you do it enough,
763. 00:47:31 you start to get a feel for this wave is actually going to turn
764. 00:47:35 into something.
765. 00:47:36 Yeah, I fight that battle all the time where it's like, you
766. 00:47:39 know, people put their head there. But the percentage calculator
767. 00:47:42 came back and I'm like, yeah, but do we really care? Like, I mean,
768. 00:47:45 did they like, what have they coached it? Well, like, that's
769. 00:47:47 okay. Like, they're still doing something behind there. You're
770. 00:47:50 to your point, though, what I really liked that you brought up
771. 00:47:52 is this chapter was good in the contrarian thing that like, I
772. 00:47:57 really liked how it wasn't just being negative is the wrong
773. 00:48:01 word. It wasn't just being counter for the sake of being
774. 00:48:03 counter. It's like thinking independently. It's like seeing
775. 00:48:07 these new ideas. So thank you for reminding me of that, because
776. 00:48:10 that like, that was a good part of this chapter that I got in a
777. 00:48:14 little too focused on the future aspect of it is like, how are
778. 00:48:16 we going to know? But really, it's just being open, like to new
779. 00:48:20 ideas. I think that's more of the driver of this than anything. So
780. 00:48:22 thank you for that. That helps me out.
781. 00:48:24 Yeah. And then he also mentions in this chapter, Richard Feynman,
782. 00:48:28 and his approach to things, the guy with the 12 favorite
783. 00:48:33 problems, had an action item with that not too long ago, I
784. 00:48:37 figured a book that was actually from, but says that Richard
785. 00:48:40 Feynman didn't just challenge assumptions, he destroyed them.
786. 00:48:44 That's the approach I want to have, you know, when everybody's
787. 00:48:47 like, you can't use AI in the writing process, like, Oh, yeah,
788. 00:48:50 watch me.
789. 00:48:52 Watch me. There's probably probably a little bit like, I'm a
790. 00:48:55 little bit of a that's part of that is my personality. And that's
791. 00:49:00 probably not necessarily a good thing all the time. I was
792. 00:49:03 talking to Kat Mulvahill for the Focus podcast. And she does
793. 00:49:08 this thing. She does this like coaching stuff on like immunity
794. 00:49:12 to change. And we ended up talking a little bit about Gretchen
795. 00:49:16 Reuben's four tendencies. And basically, the four tendencies
796. 00:49:22 are the combinations of how you react to internal and external
797. 00:49:27 expectations. Right. So if you tend to accommodate externally,
798. 00:49:33 but resist internally, you're sort of like an obliger as an
799. 00:49:38 example. Well, I am a rebel. I resist all expectations all the
800. 00:49:42 time. Nice. This explains so much Mike, this explains so much in
801. 00:49:47 our multiple years of doing this thing. I know, right? I'm
802. 00:49:50 kidding. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. All right. Let's move to
803. 00:49:54 chapter seven if you're good with it. Yep. All right. So
804. 00:49:57 chapter seven is living your life in reverse. And essentially,
805. 00:50:03 the nature of this one was he's riding in his car in India.
806. 00:50:12 The and he's with his wife. And basically he's describing like
807. 00:50:16 the way they drive and like it's kind of crazy. And there's not
808. 00:50:20 seat belts and all this stuff. And then this little five year old
809. 00:50:22 girl runs out in front of the car. They she ends up getting hit
810. 00:50:26 and she ends up getting killed. And in the thing that I kind of
811. 00:50:32 was like frustrated by this was his like takeaway was like, I'm
812. 00:50:35 gonna eat the chocolate chip cookies, right? Because like he
813. 00:50:38 was talking about this high cholesterol and chocolate chip
814. 00:50:40 cookies. But basically it was like, it's this idea of each day
815. 00:50:47 try to do something meaningful. I think that was the bigger thing
816. 00:50:50 I took away from this was like, you don't know what's going to
817. 00:50:52 happen in the future. So each day, try to do something meaningful.
818. 00:50:55 He does talk about David Brooks, which we've read that book,
819. 00:51:01 you know, that was how to live a meaningful life, wasn't it? No,
820. 00:51:04 David Brooks, I mixed up David Brooks and Arthur Brooks. I want
821. 00:51:08 to say David Brooks was the second mountain.
822. 00:51:12 Yeah, so anyhow, so you referenced as David Brooks in this in
823. 00:51:15 terms of meaning and those kind of things. But like, essentially,
824. 00:51:20 the nature of this is it's the I've heard this put this way
825. 00:51:24 before, whereas you write your eulogy, and you write what you
826. 00:51:27 want people to read about you, and then you try to live your
827. 00:51:31 life in a way that that becomes that becomes true in terms of
828. 00:51:34 that. So big story to tell us are a big like dramatic story.
829. 00:51:39 This one, I thought this one was really dramatic. I wasn't
830. 00:51:41 ready for for that to be the end of the story. But it's this
831. 00:51:45 idea of like, Hey, think about the way you want things to end,
832. 00:51:47 and then how do we live lives in a way and structure our lives
833. 00:51:50 in a way that actually achieves that.
834. 00:51:53 Yeah, he had a phrase in here. I heard somebody from some other
835. 00:51:57 book that we read mentioned this, the similar idea about like,
836. 00:52:01 what it's the movie of the life that you're making. He says
837. 00:52:04 you're regularly and often you should play back the video of
838. 00:52:06 your life and see what kind of movie you're making. I think
839. 00:52:08 that's a cool idea. He did mention the the eulogy thing. That's
840. 00:52:13 one of the things I jotted down and talked to you about that
841. 00:52:15 actually comes from Warren Buffett. He said that you should
842. 00:52:17 write your obituary and then figure out how to live up to it.
843. 00:52:20 Have you done this? I have not I've not done this. You're gonna
844. 00:52:24 do it? I should. You should. Yeah, I should. I should. I'll
845. 00:52:28 share mine. I have it as an obsidian note. I was gonna say,
846. 00:52:31 isn't this it wasn't this in your in the oh my gosh, well, I
847. 00:52:36 want to say the vault, but that's not right. Help me with the
848. 00:52:39 name of the the asset that people buy from you. Life HQ. Life
849. 00:52:44 HQ. I was gonna say, I couldn't think of it. I was like, it's
850. 00:52:46 not life theme, but life theme was the only thing that was
851. 00:52:48 running out of their head. Isn't this part of your life HQ?
852. 00:52:51 I mean, kind of it's also part of the life theme stuff. I
853. 00:52:54 mean, it's in life HQ because life HQ, a big part of that is
854. 00:52:57 like the personal retreat stuff. So all the temple files are in
855. 00:53:00 there and then they're linked and things like that. But just to
856. 00:53:03 give you an example, I can share my I have a note. It's called
857. 00:53:07 my eulogy. I read it every quarter. So Mike Schmitz was a
858. 00:53:10 loving husband to his wife Rachel and ever present father
859. 00:53:13 to Toby Joshua, Jonathan Malekai and Adelaide, his family was
860. 00:53:15 his first ministry. He always made sure they were priority.
861. 00:53:18 You frequently said no to work and business opportunities to
862. 00:53:21 spend quality time and go on adventures with the people he
863. 00:53:23 valued the most. Mike was also a committed member of his
864. 00:53:25 church when he wasn't spending time with his family. He could
865. 00:53:27 often be found serving there. He believed that God had blessed
866. 00:53:30 him richly. He gave generously of his time and treasure to
867. 00:53:32 those who had need. He invested heavily in others and did his
868. 00:53:35 best to help them reach their full potential. Mike's life was
869. 00:53:38 driven by a desire to be a good steward of what was entrusted
870. 00:53:41 to him by God. He desired to inspire, encourage and teach
871. 00:53:44 others to connect to their calling, discover their destiny,
872. 00:53:46 live the life they were created for. Everything he did was
873. 00:53:49 filtered through his life theme and he helped others to accept
874. 00:53:52 responsibility, gain clarity, take action and living a purpose
875. 00:53:55 driven and meaningful life. He helped countless people find
876. 00:53:57 their why, multiply their time in town, leave a bigger dent in
877. 00:54:00 the universe. This is the part that always freaks me out when I
878. 00:54:03 read it. He was an entrepreneur who loved building businesses
879. 00:54:06 and making art before he died. He wrote several New York Times
880. 00:54:09 best-selling books and gave away over $10 million to causes he
881. 00:54:12 believed in. He taught his kids to be lifelong learners and to
882. 00:54:16 discover their own creativity. They have followed his footsteps
883. 00:54:18 as creative entrepreneurs who live life on their own terms.
884. 00:54:22 That's awesome, man. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And I share
885. 00:54:26 that because every time I share it in the cohorts that we do
886. 00:54:31 inside the library, people are like, wow, that's amazing. And
887. 00:54:36 every time I'm, I don't want to share it. I feel I don't like
888. 00:54:39 being the in the spotlight. But I like giving people an example
889. 00:54:44 of what that looks like. And then once people can see it, then
890. 00:54:48 they're like, I now get why this would be valuable for me to do.
891. 00:54:53 And then when people come back and they say they did it, like,
892. 00:54:56 that was the most fulfilling exercise I ever did.
893. 00:55:01 Oh, and it's really good. Like it actually is inspiring to like
894. 00:55:04 think about like, what would I want it to say? And then you
895. 00:55:06 also think about like, okay, I don't want it to be vain, but I
896. 00:55:10 want it to be honest. But like, I want it to also be like, what
897. 00:55:15 am I thinking? Like reaching like, I want it to like,
898. 00:55:17 aspirational. Yep, aspirational. There you go. Like, I want
899. 00:55:19 it to be aspirational. Like, so man, like that, that's really
900. 00:55:22 good. I like that a lot.
901. 00:55:23 I support this action item. Yes, I have added this as an
902. 00:55:27 action. I need to. I'm not looking forward to this. I don't
903. 00:55:30 want to do this because this is going to take me entirely too
904. 00:55:33 long because I care about it. And I don't want to care about it.
905. 00:55:36 Like I want to say. Thanks for that, Mike. Sorry. Yeah. Okay.
906. 00:55:44 Anything else on this one? No, it's going to hit up. Okay. So
907. 00:55:48 chapter eight, the calculus of success. So the story behind
908. 00:55:53 this one is he's putting together the reunion, the reunion
909. 00:55:58 for MIT, where he got his undergraduate engineering degree.
910. 00:56:01 Oh, yeah, I forgot he also graduated with an engineering
911. 00:56:03 degree. But he, where he's undergrad at MIT, put the other
912. 00:56:08 union and they always give a gift. The class gives a gift. So
913. 00:56:11 he's trying to raise money and help raise money for the gift.
914. 00:56:14 And this is the typical old, the guy slept in the back row, he
915. 00:56:18 never turned in his homework, you know, da, da, da, right? And
916. 00:56:23 he ends up finding Vodafone, or sorry, Veraphone, excuse me,
917. 00:56:27 Veraphone, which basically verifies all the like credit card
918. 00:56:30 transactions. And this guy's like uber millionaire, like super,
919. 00:56:35 super wealthy and all this stuff. So that's the story that he
920. 00:56:38 tells behind it. He basically then goes into the calculus,
921. 00:56:42 which I think is like a clever wordplay, because he starts to
922. 00:56:44 put in some equations here. Success equals preparation plus
923. 00:56:47 opportunity. Preparation equals innate ability plus hard
924. 00:56:50 work. Opportunity equals luck plus the ability to recognize
925. 00:56:53 it. Now, where I as a math guy go, wait a minute, you totally
926. 00:56:58 missed the opportunity here. Why didn't you combine all of
927. 00:57:02 these into it and have it say success equals innate ability
928. 00:57:05 plus hard work plus luck plus ability to recognize it. But he
929. 00:57:08 didn't do that. He left it in the separate chunks of it.
930. 00:57:12 I actually think like what he what he's describing here is
931. 00:57:15 is really good. Like you need to be prepared for when the
932. 00:57:18 opportunity arises for you to be prepared. There is some level
933. 00:57:22 of ability that you need to do, but you also need to work hard.
934. 00:57:25 And then opportunity is luck. And then can you recognize when
935. 00:57:30 when luck hits you? Like I think these ideas are, I mean,
936. 00:57:34 really, really valuable in terms of just kind of setting the
937. 00:57:38 stage for kind of seeing things come and it depends on how you
938. 00:57:44 define success. But I think this actually makes a lot of sense
939. 00:57:46 in terms of giving you a different way to think about
940. 00:57:49 success. If I'm if I'm remembering correctly, Mike, does he
941. 00:57:53 talk about here the the adage of Oh, yeah, be nice to your A
942. 00:57:59 students, because they are your future colleagues and fellow
943. 00:58:03 faculty members, but never, but be even nicer to your C
944. 00:58:06 students when they're going to come back one day, they're going
945. 00:58:08 to come back and they're going to buy you a new building. That's
946. 00:58:10 for for academia. And there's another one that it's like, I
947. 00:58:14 don't remember what is a a students end up teaching or C
948. 00:58:18 students end up getting the work done. Like there's another
949. 00:58:20 saying there too. So what I'm getting out of this chapter is
950. 00:58:24 you should be a C student because they're the most successful
951. 00:58:26 people that's ever, well, I think the the point he's making is
952. 00:58:33 that the successful people aren't always the ones that you
953. 00:58:35 thought they would be. I feel a little bit silly because I
954. 00:58:37 didn't I didn't make make the connection that success equals
955. 00:58:41 preparation plus opportunity. Then he broke those two down into
956. 00:58:44 the other other pieces and you could have just come back
957. 00:58:47 to home. Yeah, bother me the whole time. But the thing
958. 00:58:53 that that stood out to me the most from this section is towards
959. 00:58:56 the end. And I feel like this is really the best advice in
960. 00:59:00 terms of like, what do you actually do with this? If you're
961. 00:59:03 not an academia, and you don't need the reminder to be nice to
962. 00:59:05 see students because they might come back and be your biggest
963. 00:59:09 beneficiaries, says that bad luck will come to you. But those
964. 00:59:14 who get lucky have just prepared themselves to accept
965. 00:59:16 occasional setbacks and troubles as inevitable and take
966. 00:59:20 advantage of good opportunities when they come. So I feel like
967. 00:59:24 the skill that the C students have that allows them to be so
968. 00:59:29 successful in the long run really is like resilience. And
969. 00:59:33 they're playing the long game, they just keep doing the thing
970. 00:59:37 long enough that success comes. That's not exactly what he's
971. 00:59:41 saying. But that was the big takeaway for me. I don't have an
972. 00:59:43 action. I'm associated with it. But just stick with it. You
973. 00:59:47 know, don't quit. And eventually it will it will all work out.
974. 00:59:52 Yeah, he ties back into a earlier chapter here where he talks
975. 00:59:56 about the most important of all in the calculus of success is
976. 01:00:00 understanding your own internal clock and your own your own
977. 01:00:04 honest feelings about what makes you happy. And then it might
978. 01:00:06 change. And it's like, that's interesting as well, because
979. 01:00:10 you know, like, I've heard multiple people talk about this
980. 01:00:12 that it's like, what, what is the goal when you're 20? What the
981. 01:00:16 goal is when you're 20 may not be the goal when you're 40. And
982. 01:00:19 it may not be the goal when you're 60. And it may not be the
983. 01:00:21 goal when you're 100. And it's like, I totally understand how
984. 01:00:25 that's the case being, you know, 41 at this point. It's like, man,
985. 01:00:30 man, if my goals change, like if I go back and look at my
986. 01:00:32 journal from when I was in college, it's like the things I had
987. 01:00:35 written down in that journal are still cool. Like I'm okay with
988. 01:00:39 those. But my perspective on life has just changed so much in
989. 01:00:42 the in the 20 years or 20 plus years since I've written those
990. 01:00:45 down, it's kind of wild. So I think the core crux of this of
991. 01:00:50 this chapter is good. I just really wanted them to put it
992. 01:00:54 together as one equation.
993. 01:00:55 Yeah, I get that. Mind if I do the next chapter, I'd love it.
994. 01:01:00 Okay, so chapter nine career planning is an oxymoron. And
995. 01:01:06 the story here is the most interesting one to me of the
996. 01:01:09 entire book, because I have been a fan of the Bose company for a
997. 01:01:14 long time. But I never really understood the story. It was
998. 01:01:17 started by a guy named Omar Bose. And the story in the chapter
999. 01:01:21 is about this like breakthrough suspension system they have for
1000. 01:01:27 cars. And that's not what we think of Bose. That's not the
1001. 01:01:33 picture that comes to mind when we picture the Bose brand. And
1002. 01:01:36 I'm curious, Corey, what do you think of when you think of
1003. 01:01:39 Bose?
1004. 01:01:40 Oh, speakers, speakers and their curve and their their software
1005. 01:01:44 based curve that I think of. Yep, yeah, absolutely. So it's
1006. 01:01:49 interesting, like they've they're always considering, I think
1007. 01:01:54 that's evidence of the fact that they're always considering
1008. 01:01:57 that the tangential problems and opportunities that are sort
1009. 01:02:02 of related to the problem that they're they're currently
1010. 01:02:04 solving. Now, Omar Bose sounds like a very interesting guy. And
1011. 01:02:08 there's a quote that I jotted down here from that story. He
1012. 01:02:10 says, I don't care what answers you get. He's talking about
1013. 01:02:13 when he was teaching at at, I forget this, the specific school.
1014. 01:02:18 Maybe it was John Hopkins, I don't remember. But before he went
1015. 01:02:21 out and he started all the companies and doing all these
1016. 01:02:23 crazy things, he was teaching and he said, I don't care what
1017. 01:02:25 answers you get. I already know the answers. What I want to see
1018. 01:02:28 is how you approach solving the problems. I love that. That
1019. 01:02:32 might be my favorite line in the whole book. I mean, this
1020. 01:02:36 chapter in and of itself, Career Planning is an oxymoron.
1021. 01:02:39 That's interesting to me because I have a freshman going into
1022. 01:02:43 college and he's trying to figure out what are the classes
1023. 01:02:46 that I sign up for and got an email today as a parent, you
1024. 01:02:50 know, they have major specific tours so you can go through and
1025. 01:02:54 see all the buildings for the major that you've chosen. And I
1026. 01:02:58 remember he made a comment about one of the statistics. Maybe it
1027. 01:03:04 was the last book I read. I'd remember something like 29% of
1028. 01:03:09 people who actually get a degree have a job in that particular
1029. 01:03:12 field. And he's like, yes, wow, that's not, that's not very
1030. 01:03:15 much. Like, yeah, I know. Isn't that crazy? So I don't know,
1031. 01:03:20 like, it's kind of interesting to me how all this stuff comes
1032. 01:03:22 together in this chapter and I think he weaves it together
1033. 01:03:24 really well. Because he talks about how you can't predict the
1034. 01:03:29 future. In fact, you can't even imagine what the opportunities
1035. 01:03:33 are going to look like when you get there. I feel like that is
1036. 01:03:36 a very important perspective to have. Just be curious, don't
1037. 01:03:41 try to plan it all out, figure it all out because you have no
1038. 01:03:44 idea how it's all going to connect. And instead of choosing
1039. 01:03:47 a career for the rest of your life, think about what's worth
1040. 01:03:50 trying next. What is the next problem that I want to try and
1041. 01:03:57 solve? So that doesn't go back to the title, it doesn't mean that
1042. 01:04:00 you shouldn't be thinking about what's the career trajectory or
1043. 01:04:04 your career arc, you shouldn't be thinking about what is the
1044. 01:04:08 major that you're going to declare for or, you know, how you
1045. 01:04:12 want to climb whatever ladder it is that you're trying to climb
1046. 01:04:15 to get to the position that you want to be in. But you should
1047. 01:04:18 absolutely be open to something coming in and disrupting all
1048. 01:04:22 of it. And looking for those things, because those those
1049. 01:04:26 catalyst events, I feel like there's a lot of opportunity
1050. 01:04:30 with those. Although a lot of times when they come, they feel
1051. 01:04:34 like that's the asteroid that just hit earth and wiped out all
1052. 01:04:37 the dinosaurs and life is over. We don't know where to go now. If
1053. 01:04:41 you can keep yourself from falling into that sort of emotional
1054. 01:04:47 state, I think you can navigate that stuff pretty well, you
1055. 01:04:50 navigate it much better regardless. But I think that's how
1056. 01:04:53 you really take advantage of those those opportunities and
1057. 01:04:56 those those sorts of sorts of times and periods.
1058. 01:04:59 Yeah, I mean, you you called out the one I wanted to call out
1059. 01:05:03 was basically, I'm like frustrated. I'm kind of mad because
1060. 01:05:07 like, you're growing up and everybody's like, well, go find
1061. 01:05:10 your calling, go find that thing you're supposed to do. It
1062. 01:05:13 was like, I feel like that has been more of a hindrance in my
1063. 01:05:16 life than it's ever been a help in my life. It's like, Oh,
1064. 01:05:19 there is one thing out there that you're supposed to do. It's
1065. 01:05:21 like, no, there might be like 75 things out there that you're
1066. 01:05:25 going to be really good at and you want to do. And you got to
1067. 01:05:27 figure out which one of those you want to do. And I love that
1068. 01:05:29 idea of what's worth trying next. You said it so well, that
1069. 01:05:34 doesn't mean you don't think about the long term, like, and
1070. 01:05:37 you don't think about like where this is going. So for
1071. 01:05:39 instance, if long term you think you want to work in
1072. 01:05:42 healthcare, but you're like not doing anything related to
1073. 01:05:46 healthcare, that's probably bad, right? Like, like, that's
1074. 01:05:48 probably not a great, a great plan. But like, it doesn't mean
1075. 01:05:53 you can't go from nursing to pediatric nursing to radiology
1076. 01:05:58 to whatever, like whatever it might be, like, there's a
1077. 01:05:59 bunch of different ways that you can fulfill that. And I just
1078. 01:06:01 don't think we teach people enough, especially young people,
1079. 01:06:04 I don't think we teach young people enough. And now we've
1080. 01:06:06 got a whole group of 40, 50, 60 year olds who have come into
1081. 01:06:11 this world and AI comes out and it's completely changed their
1082. 01:06:14 world and they're like, well, what do I do now? Like, and
1083. 01:06:17 they're like just completely lost. Like, they're absolutely
1084. 01:06:20 lost. And I think it's a, it's a travesty, honestly. And I
1085. 01:06:23 don't even think you need to pick one thing for right now. I
1086. 01:06:26 think it's possible that you can do multiple things. You just
1087. 01:06:30 can't do you can't go all in with multiple things. I remember
1088. 01:06:35 reading a book a while back. I think it was called How to Be
1089. 01:06:39 Everything by Emily Wopnick. And the idea behind it was that
1090. 01:06:45 there are like these different avatars for types of people who
1091. 01:06:50 go through life and the career arcs that they take. And the one
1092. 01:06:55 that Emily was advocating for was the multi potential light.
1093. 01:07:00 Right. So you want to be an artist, you want to be a writer,
1094. 01:07:05 you want to be all these different things. And then you
1095. 01:07:07 figure out how you can do those things together at the same
1096. 01:07:10 time. It doesn't mean you're going to be a professional
1097. 01:07:12 artist, a professional athlete and a professional writer all at
1098. 01:07:15 the same time. But if those are three itches that you want to
1099. 01:07:18 scratch, you can certainly figure out a combination of things
1100. 01:07:21 that lets you do that.
1101. 01:07:24 Yeah, I think I think you're hearing from us that this was a
1102. 01:07:27 pretty good chapter. This was an interesting chapter in terms
1103. 01:07:29 of the way it encouraged us to think differently. Okay, let's
1104. 01:07:33 move on to chapter 10. The bleeding always stops. So this was
1105. 01:07:38 a somewhat dramatic example on this one. But basically, there's
1106. 01:07:46 a guy he's teaching people how to do open art surgery, and to
1107. 01:07:50 work on, you know, the vessels and the aorta and all this stuff.
1108. 01:07:55 And one of his he would let his students or his residents do
1109. 01:08:00 the work and then he would like guide them and coach them while
1110. 01:08:02 they're doing the work. And what this one individual was doing
1111. 01:08:05 doing the work on and they they nicked the aorta. And basically
1112. 01:08:09 it started bleeding. And like the way they described the bleeding
1113. 01:08:11 is pretty aggressive in terms of like, it was like a fountain
1114. 01:08:14 shooting up in the air or whatever. And it was hitting the
1115. 01:08:17 lights in the operating room. There you go. Yeah. Okay, thank
1116. 01:08:20 you. I knew it was I knew it was dramatic. I couldn't remember
1117. 01:08:22 that phrase. And and basically he makes a statement. He's like,
1118. 01:08:26 well, the bleeding always stops, whether it stops because you
1119. 01:08:30 stopped it, or whether it stops because the person ends up
1120. 01:08:32 dying and the bleeding stops. And it was like, it's such a, it's
1121. 01:08:37 such like a aggressive yet true statement. You know, like, I
1122. 01:08:42 mean, it's just the way it is is like, it's going to stop. Are
1123. 01:08:45 you going to be, are you going to have agency in the way it
1124. 01:08:48 stops? Or are you just going to let it happen to you? And then
1125. 01:08:51 you're going to deal with the consequences of that, you know,
1126. 01:08:53 down the road. And he gets into here where he talks about
1127. 01:08:57 system one and system two thinking from Daniel Kahneman. He
1128. 01:09:00 talks about decision making and decision trees and checklists,
1129. 01:09:05 and these kinds of things. So it's all this idea around
1130. 01:09:10 basically, like, which set of thinking are we going to engage
1131. 01:09:15 in this process? And how are we going to engage in this process
1132. 01:09:17 to make better decisions overall? That's kind of what I took
1133. 01:09:20 away from this mic. I don't know if you if you took something
1134. 01:09:23 different away from this, but that's the gist of what I got
1135. 01:09:25 from this chapter. I don't even know what I took away from
1136. 01:09:28 this chapter, but the story is a little bit, it's extreme.
1137. 01:09:33 Yeah, it is extreme. And it it's a little bit jarring. And you
1138. 01:09:37 kind of like don't know where to go from there. I guess it's
1139. 01:09:39 kind of the point because he talks about fight versus flight
1140. 01:09:41 versus freeze a lot in here. And kind of like, what do you do
1141. 01:09:46 when you find yourself in dire circumstances? Because you're
1142. 01:09:51 nervous system is going to become overwhelmed with fear. And
1143. 01:09:54 then that's what kicks off that fight versus flight versus
1144. 01:09:57 freeze. I guess the thing that I took away from this is that
1145. 01:10:04 that fear response, when it kicks in, you have to recognize
1146. 01:10:10 it and then sort of steer it. Because if you just let it run
1147. 01:10:15 that fear response is often self destructive. I have no idea
1148. 01:10:21 like what to actually do from this, but the big aha moment, I
1149. 01:10:25 guess, is when you have one of those trigger moments and you
1150. 01:10:29 find yourself in that that situation, just not that that's
1151. 01:10:34 the time when you're when you're going to be like, okay, let's
1152. 01:10:36 just slow down and let's think rationally about this. But
1153. 01:10:39 recognizing what goes on, I guess is helpful because he also
1154. 01:10:43 says that it's common to seize an incorrect anchor when you're
1155. 01:10:46 in that state of fear. And that 100%. I agree with that 100
1156. 01:10:51 percent, that is absolutely true. But again, it's one thing to
1157. 01:10:54 say, well, next time I get upset emotionally, I'm going to
1158. 01:10:58 push back on that fear and see things more clearly. And it's a
1159. 01:11:04 totally different thing to actually do that.
1160. 01:11:07 Yep. Yeah, I this one is a hard one tangibly for me to take
1161. 01:11:11 anything away from like I like the higher level idea. But I had a
1162. 01:11:15 hard time taking anything away from that one too. Yeah,
1163. 01:11:17 exactly. Okay, so chapter 11, let's roll into the three snakes
1164. 01:11:22 rule. So you're gonna have to help me with the story on this
1165. 01:11:25 one, because I vaguely remember the story, but I didn't write
1166. 01:11:28 down enough notes on this one. I don't even remember the story
1167. 01:11:31 to tell you the truth. I did write down the three rules though.
1168. 01:11:33 Yeah, the three snakes rule is basically kill the snakes you
1169. 01:11:36 see. Don't play with dead snakes. And then the best
1170. 01:11:40 opportunities start out looking like snakes. Okay. And this
1171. 01:11:44 story had something to do with a guy named Jim Barksdale. And
1172. 01:11:48 he was the chief operating officer or former chief operating
1173. 01:11:51 officer of FedEx. And he became the Netscape CEO. But he
1174. 01:11:56 basically like dismissed the idea of I have to go to business
1175. 01:12:00 school to in order to be successful. And he was basically
1176. 01:12:03 like, no, I'm not gonna do that. I'm just gonna go out and get
1177. 01:12:05 it done. I'm gonna go do the work. So like, I don't remember a
1178. 01:12:09 ton about what what it was. I remember there's a story about
1179. 01:12:13 cubicles in here and how cubicles are terrible. I remember
1180. 01:12:16 that like we're we're looking at the idea of MBAs and whether
1181. 01:12:21 they make sense. And he there's an adage that I don't know if
1182. 01:12:25 folks have known this thing or not. But they say if you don't
1183. 01:12:27 get an MBA from one of the top 10 schools, it's pretty much
1184. 01:12:30 not worth getting an MBA. You're you're better off just going
1185. 01:12:32 to work in business, which I've heard that before because the
1186. 01:12:36 MBA at the top 10 schools is really for the network. It's
1187. 01:12:38 much less about the actual MBA. It's more for the network. And
1188. 01:12:42 then he ties into a general Brent Scowcroft and about how
1189. 01:12:48 the guy had a good idea for, you know, kind of knowing what
1190. 01:12:54 questions to ask. Yeah, I mean, like, it's an interesting
1191. 01:12:58 chapter. I guess we should go into the snakes thing before.
1192. 01:13:01 Okay. So rule number one, if you see a snake kill it, that
1193. 01:13:04 basically everywhere has a problem. Like all of these
1194. 01:13:07 organizations, any anything you're involved in has a problem.
1195. 01:13:11 Instead of just identifying it and saying, look, over there,
1196. 01:13:14 there's a problem, actually fix the problem. Like go in there,
1197. 01:13:18 get rid of the problem, kill the problem, kill the snake. That's
1198. 01:13:22 that's rule number one. Anything to add before we go to two,
1199. 01:13:24 like, no, I just think this is kind of ridiculous, to be
1200. 01:13:28 honest, like these don't even they're a little bit
1201. 01:13:30 contradictory. They, man, don't play with snakes, but keep
1202. 01:13:35 them around because rule number three, the best opportunities
1203. 01:13:37 to start out looking like them. Like, yeah, agreed, agreed.
1204. 01:13:41 So okay, rule number two, right? So we're going to realize
1205. 01:13:42 you don't play with dead snakes. Once you've taken care of a
1206. 01:13:45 problem, don't continue to fret or think about it, right? Like,
1207. 01:13:48 well, okay, I get that. But like, also, there's institutional
1208. 01:13:52 memory. So it's like, we got to fight institutional memory as
1209. 01:13:55 well. Like, we got to fight the fact that like, what I thought
1210. 01:13:57 was a snake that I went and killed, somebody else might have
1211. 01:14:01 thought that was the greatest thing ever. And I just killed
1212. 01:14:04 their their snake, right? Or I just killed their their thing
1213. 01:14:06 that they thought was great. And there might be consequences
1214. 01:14:09 for that. So yeah, I get it, like, don't look in the past, keep
1215. 01:14:14 moving forward. But at the same time, I may not be able to do
1216. 01:14:17 that. So that might be like really, really hard. That's two,
1217. 01:14:19 don't play with dead snakes. As Mike brought up the best
1218. 01:14:23 opportunity, start out looking like snakes. Well, I thought I
1219. 01:14:25 was supposed to kill all the snakes. Like, if it looks like
1220. 01:14:28 snake, I'm going to kill it. But maybe that was a good
1221. 01:14:30 opportunity. And it's like, well, what the heck do I do?
1222. 01:14:33 Like, how do I dig? Because he says, let's dig a little deeper,
1223. 01:14:37 get to the root cause think of how the problem could be fixed.
1224. 01:14:40 As a leader, it's important for your team to triage, right,
1225. 01:14:42 what they're facing. All of this is fine and good. But like, I
1226. 01:14:45 think there is also a lot of luck in this. Oh, like, there was
1227. 01:14:49 that snake over there. We didn't kill it. It turned out to be
1228. 01:14:51 really good for us. Like that actually turned out to work out
1229. 01:14:54 in our favor. Well, that's not always my wise decision. That
1230. 01:14:59 might be the fact that I got super lucky and wasn't able to
1231. 01:15:01 kill that snake fast enough. Yeah. So this chapter felt to me the
1232. 01:15:06 most like business advice talks about culture. You mentioned
1233. 01:15:13 the cubicle thing earlier. And that is sort of the reason that I
1234. 01:15:18 asked, like, how did he land on the chapters and the the different
1235. 01:15:25 concepts that he included in this particular book? Because some
1236. 01:15:31 of these he's talking about, you're still always not going to
1237. 01:15:33 make you rich in chapter three, that's, you know, financial
1238. 01:15:36 stuff. There's a lot of medical stuff in here. Chapter nine, I
1239. 01:15:40 think it was the career planning stuff. It's sort of like
1240. 01:15:43 education. Right. And the business one in particular, maybe
1241. 01:15:48 because that's the world that I have experience in. It's like,
1242. 01:15:53 you're not really speaking to this very well. This was my least
1243. 01:15:58 favorite chapter of the book. And I hate the three snakes rules
1244. 01:16:04 that he like hung all of this stuff on. I think there's probably
1245. 01:16:08 some pretty decent points to be made in this this chapter. But
1246. 01:16:12 the way that they're packaged together just did not work for
1247. 01:16:14 me. Okay. Yep. I mean, I don't need to be little this anymore. We
1248. 01:16:18 can move. We can move forward. This is not either of our favorite
1249. 01:16:21 chapters for sure. No. Okay. So we get in chapter 12, last
1250. 01:16:26 chapter, bring home a winner. And in this one, he's he basically
1251. 01:16:33 gives us a story about how a man gets reassigned, I think to
1252. 01:16:38 Singapore, if I'm, if I'm remembering correctly, but he gets
1253. 01:16:42 reassigned and he actually kind of like hides the losses, he
1254. 01:16:47 like pushes the losses forward and then they keep piling up and
1255. 01:16:51 they keep piling up and basically he then some creative
1256. 01:16:53 accounting going on for sure. Yes. He then basically like loses
1257. 01:16:57 it all because he did too much creative accounting and the
1258. 01:17:02 whole bank goes under like it was a bearings bank and the whole
1259. 01:17:05 bank goes under because this man basically was so shady that
1260. 01:17:09 he he hit all the stuff and embezzled or fraud deal dealings
1261. 01:17:14 and stuff like that. But there's like a story on top of that
1262. 01:17:16 story that he tells the students and it's like basically
1263. 01:17:19 you're a salesperson and you're you have these targets and
1264. 01:17:23 somebody's trying to tell you to to inflate those targets and
1265. 01:17:26 you like know in your heart of hearts, I don't want to inflate
1266. 01:17:28 those targets because those targets are going to be hidden
1267. 01:17:30 hard enough to hit already. What do you do? Like do you be the
1268. 01:17:33 negative person in the room that says, Hey, these targets are
1269. 01:17:35 already ridiculous. I don't want to inflate them or do you make
1270. 01:17:38 the bad decision to inflate them, which then causes you to make
1271. 01:17:42 more bad decisions down the road and all this stuff. Now, Mike,
1272. 01:17:46 for the life of me in all this stories, I don't remember how we
1273. 01:17:51 get to bring home a winner other than like somebody's grandma
1274. 01:17:57 or something. I forget. Okay, is that what it was? Yeah, could
1275. 01:18:01 you reply five commandments? And I don't know how we got there
1276. 01:18:04 either to tell you the truth. This is a little bit of an
1277. 01:18:06 extension of chapter 11, although I do like the stuff that he
1278. 01:18:09 mentions in this chapter better. Okay, so he mentions, you know,
1279. 01:18:13 people pay close attention if you miss your targets, not if you
1280. 01:18:16 hit them. So the stories don't really do anything for me. But
1281. 01:18:19 ethical behavior doesn't require complex calculation.
1282. 01:18:22 Yep, that's important success is not a zero sum game. agree with
1283. 01:18:25 that 100%. The flows five commandments. So yeah, these are
1284. 01:18:28 basically just like grandma flows five rules for life sort of a
1285. 01:18:32 thing. Good manners never go out of style. That's rule number
1286. 01:18:34 one. Our commandment number one number two never go to someone's
1287. 01:18:38 house empty handed. Number three, you can't buy a good name, but
1288. 01:18:41 you can earn it. Number four, give respect, get respect and
1289. 01:18:44 number five, bring home a winner. Now bring home a winner. What
1290. 01:18:47 the heck does that mean? Yeah, because at the end, he kind of talks
1291. 01:18:51 about how really what it's saying is you should come home a
1292. 01:18:54 winner. Yeah. But yeah, it's a little bit of a stretch to get
1293. 01:18:58 there, I feel. Yeah. Yeah, I think this chapter was probably my
1294. 01:19:04 least favorite chapter of all of them like yours was chapter 11
1295. 01:19:07 with the snakes. Mine was mine was this one. I just did not I
1296. 01:19:11 mean, there's decent principles in here, but it's kind of a
1297. 01:19:14 conclusion chapter and this other principle chapter like all in
1298. 01:19:19 the in the same thing. I felt like it got muddied. I might have
1299. 01:19:23 just been tired by chapter 12 and I was like, okay, you know,
1300. 01:19:25 whatever, but like, you know, and he's then talking about how
1301. 01:19:29 like common sense isn't so common and like that principle
1302. 01:19:32 resonates with me. So he's trying to wrap it up and give this
1303. 01:19:35 last principle at the same time. It just didn't hit that hard
1304. 01:19:38 with me. Didn't hit that well with me. I wasn't a super big
1305. 01:19:41 fan of the way the book ended. Yeah, I don't think I really am
1306. 01:19:46 either. I think I understand how he got there. But I don't know
1307. 01:19:51 that I would have anchored on bring home a winner. Yeah, I
1308. 01:19:56 think maybe if I were to edit this book, I would do something
1309. 01:20:04 like keep going, keep growing, you know, the whole premise of
1310. 01:20:08 the uncommon sense. And there's a lot that goes into you being
1311. 01:20:13 successful beyond what you would understand or learn in a
1312. 01:20:17 typical school setting. That's like, that's good. And I don't
1313. 01:20:22 know that when it comes to the topic of uncommon sense, you're
1314. 01:20:25 like, okay, there, I know everything I need to know. So
1315. 01:20:28 that to me seems like a good way to end it is like, okay, now
1316. 01:20:31 you've got some basics, but just take this curious, I'm going to
1317. 01:20:35 continue to work on my self attitude with you as you go. I
1318. 01:20:39 think that's what he was trying to say with bring home a
1319. 01:20:41 winner. But yeah, not the way I would have would have done it.
1320. 01:20:45 Yeah, I mean, and then that's the last chapter. There is no
1321. 01:20:48 conclusion. So at this point, we have finished up uncommon
1322. 01:20:52 sense. We should roll into action items. I'll start with my
1323. 01:20:56 action items. It's the first one I have is ask yourself more,
1324. 01:21:00 what are they afraid of? So when I get into a situation where
1325. 01:21:03 somebody's acting irrationally, or I feel like they're over
1326. 01:21:06 reacting or whatever, instead of saying like, you know, I guess
1327. 01:21:10 instead of having judgment, like ask myself before I do that,
1328. 01:21:12 like, what are they afraid of? Like, is there something that
1329. 01:21:14 they're afraid of? And then can we identify that? And can we
1330. 01:21:16 actually address that thing? My second one in this because Mike
1331. 01:21:19 pressured me into doing this. And I'm not looking forward to it.
1332. 01:21:22 I'm going to write my eulogy. So these are the two things I'm
1333. 01:21:25 going to do for my action items. Mike, what are your action items
1334. 01:21:29 for this book? All right, I just have the one which is coming
1335. 01:21:35 from chapter seven. I forget who exactly said this. But one of
1336. 01:21:44 the people that he mentioned in the stories, they had this goal
1337. 01:21:51 of every day trying to do something to help three different
1338. 01:21:54 people. And I think that's a pretty cool rule, like a pretty
1339. 01:21:59 cool metric, I don't know that I necessarily want to like track
1340. 01:22:05 the specific instances. But he used examples of like sending an
1341. 01:22:09 encouraging text message or something like that. I want to
1342. 01:22:12 be able to do things like that on a regular basis. And I'm just
1343. 01:22:17 going to try to look for those opportunities and do it
1344. 01:22:19 multiple times per day. Nice. That's awesome. Okay, so next,
1345. 01:22:26 we're going to talk about style and rating. So my book, I get
1346. 01:22:29 to talk about style and rating first. So I told you I was jazzed
1347. 01:22:33 about this, right? Like I have a class that I've prepped that's
1348. 01:22:38 similar and feel to this. He was more theoretical. I want to be
1349. 01:22:41 a little more practical in this. I think his style with like the
1350. 01:22:45 storytelling, I 100% easily see how this man does this in class.
1351. 01:22:52 He runs it as a seminar. He took what he what he did in class,
1352. 01:22:56 what he normally talks about. And he's just basically wrote
1353. 01:22:59 about it. Like he was just like, okay, each chapter is going to be
1354. 01:23:01 one of the lessons I teach. And I'm going to write about it. I'm
1355. 01:23:04 going to try to put a big bow around it and, you know, put it
1356. 01:23:07 into written form that way it can live on past me. Totally
1357. 01:23:10 understand that. I think for my taste, there was too much
1358. 01:23:16 medical in this. And I understand that that's where he came
1359. 01:23:20 from. He came from medical. He came from radiology. He came from
1360. 01:23:22 all this. Like, so his examples were a little too grounded in
1361. 01:23:27 that they weren't diverse enough for what I was looking for in
1362. 01:23:31 that. I think that the principles could have been called out
1363. 01:23:38 much more clearly, much more cleanly and much more clearly,
1364. 01:23:42 that like you some of them you had to dig for you and be like,
1365. 01:23:46 well, what's the principle in here? And I don't know if it's he
1366. 01:23:49 may have said it in every chapter. He may have said, like,
1367. 01:23:51 the core takeaway of this chapter is blah, blah, blah. And
1368. 01:23:53 like in some form of that. But like there, it's really easy to
1369. 01:23:57 then put that at the end of the chapter, like a summary, like
1370. 01:24:00 core principle, uncommon sense principle one, blah. And like,
1371. 01:24:03 tell us what the principle is. Or at the end of the book, just
1372. 01:24:06 give us a list of the uncommon, like, the uncommon sense
1373. 01:24:09 principles. Like, I don't think those were would have been that
1374. 01:24:12 hard to do. And I think it would have significantly increased
1375. 01:24:15 my liking of the style of the book. Overall, the stories didn't
1376. 01:24:20 bother me. I thought the writing was good. Like, I had no
1377. 01:24:23 issues with the reading of it. I thought it was an easy like an
1378. 01:24:25 easy read in terms of it wasn't overly complicated for no
1379. 01:24:28 reason. I didn't think it was circular. I didn't think any of
1380. 01:24:31 those things were true. So now I get to where I'm going to
1381. 01:24:34 rate this book. And the rating is hard for me. Because while
1382. 01:24:39 there were some things that I thought were like really good.
1383. 01:24:42 And, you know, like, good takeaways, like the turtle on the
1384. 01:24:45 fence post, like, I love that. Like, I absolutely love
1385. 01:24:47 turtle on the fence post. It justifies reading the entire book
1386. 01:24:49 for me. So I'm good with that turtle on the fence post. There
1387. 01:24:52 were other things where I was just like, man, I just, I just
1388. 01:24:55 don't resonate with that one or as much or like, yeah, okay,
1389. 01:24:58 that is common sense to me. Like, that's not uncommon sense to
1390. 01:25:00 me. Like, that actually makes sense to me. So where I'm at, I'm
1391. 01:25:05 going to rate this book a four. Because it wasn't the worst
1392. 01:25:09 book. Well, sorry, it wasn't it wasn't bad, right? But at the
1393. 01:25:13 same time, it didn't like blow me away. It kind of sat in that
1394. 01:25:17 four range. I thought about giving it a three and a half. Just
1395. 01:25:22 because I was like, like, I mean, I don't know what I recommend
1396. 01:25:25 this one to people. Not really, I probably wouldn't. I would
1397. 01:25:30 recommend and Mike, you're like, your muffs don't don't yell at
1398. 01:25:33 me. I might recommend the Blinkist version of this to people
1399. 01:25:36 and be like, you can probably get what you need out of out of
1400. 01:25:39 the Blinkist version of this. You probably don't need to read
1401. 01:25:42 the whole the whole book and get all the stories out of this.
1402. 01:25:45 Will you be upset? No, but you probably don't need to read the
1403. 01:25:48 whole book. So for that reason, this book is a four teetering on
1404. 01:25:54 a three and a half to me, but I'm officially going to put it in
1405. 01:25:56 the in the books as a four. Mike, what's your rating?
1406. 01:25:59 All right. Well, I agree with most of the things that you said
1407. 01:26:04 there, but I'm going to rate it a three. Okay, that's good. I
1408. 01:26:08 think this book is got some interesting has some interesting
1409. 01:26:14 stuff in it, but it's sort of like it doesn't know what it
1410. 01:26:15 wants to be when it grows up. You mentioned like, not sure I'd
1411. 01:26:19 recommend this one. I don't think I would recommend it simply
1412. 01:26:22 because I don't know what problem it solves. Yeah. Yep. If you
1413. 01:26:28 want mental models, there's other books that are better for
1414. 01:26:32 that. Interesting stories. You know, I think if someone has a
1415. 01:26:36 medical background and they're kind of exploring this stuff
1416. 01:26:41 that you should have learned in school, but didn't topic, that
1417. 01:26:44 would be interesting. A lot of the names that he drops because
1418. 01:26:48 he is really well connected. I mean, he mentioned Michael
1419. 01:26:51 Bloomberg and the billions of dollars that he was worth, you
1420. 01:26:54 know, he rolls with some really high level people. So a lot of
1421. 01:26:59 the the stories that he shares are sort of like behind the
1422. 01:27:02 scenes of some of the biggest moments, it feels like from the
1423. 01:27:06 medical industry in the last what 40 years. So I think for
1424. 01:27:12 someone who is in that world, maybe the stories are are much
1425. 01:27:17 more impactful than they were to you and I. But in terms of
1426. 01:27:20 the everyday life principles that he talks about here, not one
1427. 01:27:27 of my favorite books understood. All right. So let's put
1428. 01:27:31 uncommon sense on the shelf. Mike, what's our next book?
1429. 01:27:35 The next book is the goal by Elia who gold rat. It's the 40th
1430. 01:27:44 I have the 40th anniversary edition. There have been over 10
1431. 01:27:47 million copies sold according to the red letters on the cover. And
1432. 01:27:53 looking at the cover, you're kind of wondering how that is the
1433. 01:27:56 case.
1434. 01:27:58 Don't judge a book by its cover, Mike. It's true. It's by its
1435. 01:28:02 cover. Yeah. Well, I think Mortimer Adler would disagree
1436. 01:28:07 with that a little bit. That's true. That's true. Yeah. It is an
1437. 01:28:11 interesting book on 300 pages into it. It's sort of a narrative
1438. 01:28:16 Patrick Lencioni style story about the principles and really
1439. 01:28:20 it's an introduction into the theory of constraints. So we're
1440. 01:28:24 talking about this one. And I picked this one because it came
1441. 01:28:27 up in some book that we read. And then you mentioned that it was
1442. 01:28:30 one of your favorite books. And I can totally understand why as
1443. 01:28:34 a engineering professor, like if you're in the engineering world,
1444. 01:28:40 I feel like this is in your sweet spot. So I, I'm looking
1445. 01:28:47 forward to the conversation that we're going to have about
1446. 01:28:49 this. I also have, by the way, I guess I should mention this as
1447. 01:28:53 my cat book. So I'll do it now though, since we're talking
1448. 01:28:57 about the goal, I have the goal of business graphic novel. This
1449. 01:29:01 is like a comic book version of the goal. And this is, let's
1450. 01:29:08 see, 130 pages. So if you don't want to read the 400 tech
1451. 01:29:14 space pages, and you just want general ideas from 130 comic
1452. 01:29:19 book style pages, I'll put a link to that one in the show notes
1453. 01:29:23 as well.
1454. 01:29:24 That's awesome. All right, so you, you gave it away. That's your
1455. 01:29:27 gap book for this week. Do you have any other gap books before I
1456. 01:29:30 give mine?
1457. 01:29:30 No, no, that's it. And I only show that as the gap book, because
1458. 01:29:33 it is literally the same as the actual book that we're going to
1459. 01:29:37 be reading as well. All right, but after the goal we're reading.
1460. 01:29:41 Okay, after the goal, we're going to read, you can just do
1461. 01:29:45 things by Kate Hall. This is a listener recommendation. So we
1462. 01:29:50 do have a form that you could fill out to recommend books that
1463. 01:29:54 fit the kind of the bookworm style and the bookworm ethos. So
1464. 01:29:58 if you're interested in that, take a look at the link and
1465. 01:30:01 shoot us a recommendation. So after that, you can just do
1466. 01:30:04 things by Kate Hall. So Mike gave his gap book recommendation. I
1467. 01:30:10 will not have any gap books because the semester is starting
1468. 01:30:13 next week, and I will not have time for any gap books right
1469. 01:30:16 now. So there are no gap books on my plate. We want to thank
1470. 01:30:22 everybody for listening to the show. We especially want to
1471. 01:30:25 thank those pro show members. The pro show this week was us
1472. 01:30:29 talking about what the future of bookworm might look like, and
1473. 01:30:33 you know, what the video would look like and what, you know,
1474. 01:30:36 kind of books we would talk about and those kind of things.
1475. 01:30:39 It was a fun, it was a fun thing for us to think about, you
1476. 01:30:41 know, the future of the of the show and where we could go and
1477. 01:30:44 what opportunities there are there. But if you're not
1478. 01:30:47 familiar with the the pro show format, it's a longer ad free
1479. 01:30:50 pro show. There is a bootleg that's released a week or two
1480. 01:30:54 early, basically right after we record, we try to get that up
1481. 01:30:57 as soon as we can. There's a bookworm wallpaper. Mike has
1482. 01:31:00 shared his reading masterclass with the with the pro show
1483. 01:31:03 members. It's $7 a month. And you can go to bookworm.fm/pro.
1484. 01:31:09 And we appreciate everybody who has done that and who is
1485. 01:31:11 willing to do that for us. All right, if you're reading along
1486. 01:31:14 with us, pick up the goal by Eli Goldrat. And we will talk
1487. 01:31:18 to you in a couple of weeks.