258: You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall

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1. 00:00:00 all right, Mike, we're back. It's time to talk about agency. It's time to talk about doing things
2. 00:00:06 and getting what you want out of life. But before we do that, we have some follow up items,
3. 00:00:12 or at least I have some follow up items. So I'm about some follow up items. Let me just say,
4. 00:00:19 I did have a follow up item, which I kind of left off because it had nothing to do with
5. 00:00:25 reading books. But this is the first podcast I am recording since we moved in the new studio.
6. 00:00:31 So people watching the video version of this, this podcast are hopefully getting a treat.
7. 00:00:38 I'm very happy with the way that this turned out. That was like the biggest action item I could
8. 00:00:42 have possibly ever had. And I got it done, I think Sunday night. I was putting the finishing touches
9. 00:00:51 on things. So we had to delay this recording so I could finish it. But that feels like something
10. 00:00:57 that I achieved in the last fortnight. Yeah, for sure. It's a huge win and it looks great.
11. 00:01:02 I mean, it absolutely looks great. So good work. Good work on that. I'm glad that you're happy with
12. 00:01:06 it now that it's what he walls for the wind. Yeah, what do you what do you want? I asked him,
13. 00:01:10 so Mike sent me a message before we recorded or before we scheduled to record this one. And he's
14. 00:01:16 like, hey, studio is not done anymore time. And I was like, no problem. And then my first or one
15. 00:01:21 of my first questions was, was it the woody walls? And the response was, no, they've actually been
16. 00:01:26 quite seamless. Like the woody walls have worked out really great. So yeah, good job, woody walls,
17. 00:01:31 not a sponsor. But we'll take it if you want to, right? But should be. But you should be.
18. 00:01:37 All right. So my two action items, because I'm bringing an action item forward from two episodes
19. 00:01:43 ago. One, it was right my eulogy. Okay. And while I didn't formally write it, I thought about it.
20. 00:01:53 So I'm putting this in the yellow box of not a green check mark. But it's in the I actually took
21. 00:02:01 some time to think about this and what I want to be in my eulogy. And let me tell you, Mike,
22. 00:02:06 I still don't like this. I didn't like it before. I don't like this now. I just don't like it. And
23. 00:02:14 I think part of the reason why I don't like it. So I'm going to get a little bit vulnerable
24. 00:02:17 here with you, Mike and vulnerable with the audience is I feel like I'm setting myself for
25. 00:02:21 failure. Like I know that it's a it's an aspirational thing. And like, I want to shoot for this thing.
26. 00:02:26 But it's like, sometimes I I dream too high. And I'm going to say like, Oh, I really would love that
27. 00:02:32 for that to happen by the time I die. But I don't know if it's going to like, I don't know if that's
28. 00:02:35 realistic. And this is partially my wife, her realism coming in. And she knows I do this too,
29. 00:02:41 because she is my voice of reason. I will bring ideas up to her. And Katie will look at me and
30. 00:02:47 she'll go, Corey, come on, that's never going to happen. So like, I'm doing this to myself as I
31. 00:02:52 think about this eulogy and what I would want to write down. So yellow, it's a yellow stoplight.
32. 00:02:58 It's not a green check mark. We're okay. Can we can we talk about that for a minute?
33. 00:03:03 So like, let's come back and revisit this as we talk through this up this episode,
34. 00:03:08 because I feel like Kate Hall would have some specific advice around what you just what you just
35. 00:03:14 said about dreaming too big. The honestly don't think that's possible. Second of all,
36. 00:03:20 you're worried about letting yourself down at the end of your life. Like, you'll be dead. What do you
37. 00:03:25 care? Okay. All of what you're saying is accurate. And all of what you're saying is good. And none of
38. 00:03:30 that helped me when I was thinking about the eulogy that I would want to write as I drove to and from
39. 00:03:35 places in the car and went, man, I don't like thinking about this. So like this, like you are
40. 00:03:42 the reason why this is on my to do my follow up action item list. And I'm still not happy about
41. 00:03:47 it. Like I don't I don't like it. But for some reason, I feel very convicted that I need to do
42. 00:03:51 it. Like it's important enough. It's an important enough activity that I actually need to do it.
43. 00:03:55 So not everyone is a weirdo who likes to think about death. I get it. Not that that sounds a
44. 00:04:01 little bit weird. It's not what I meant. Is your momentum worried? Is it still on your desk?
45. 00:04:06 Did you keep it on your on your desk? Or where is my my obsidian? Yeah. Yeah, it's it's there.
46. 00:04:11 Okay, good. I thought you had a coin. Did you have the coin or do you have a different coin?
47. 00:04:14 Oh, it's a different one. What does that say? Amor Fatih basically is like,
48. 00:04:21 enjoy the journey. So like the suffering is is part of it. I knew you had one of those coins.
49. 00:04:26 Yeah, okay. Yeah, I'm like the closest thing to a stoic without being a stoic that you can
50. 00:04:30 possibly get to. It's so funny how much you didn't like the stoic book and you have all these.
51. 00:04:35 True. All right. So my second one was ask the change the three change questions from the goal,
52. 00:04:41 which was our last book, and develop the details of each of them. So the three change questions
53. 00:04:46 were what do we change? What do we change to? And then how do we cause the change? And what I'll
54. 00:04:52 tell you is I am not at liberty to go into many of the details here. It was part of my action item,
55. 00:04:59 develop the details. But like, what do we change? We at a university need to think about more hands
56. 00:05:10 on more doing less lecturing to students. There are times when we need to communicate ideas,
57. 00:05:17 there are times when we just need to actually like teach them the way we always think about
58. 00:05:20 teaching. But like students these days really want to do stuff. Employers really want them to
59. 00:05:26 have done stuff. So we need to be exponentially more hands on. And this was a big deal even like
60. 00:05:33 20 years ago when you and I went to school, right? It was it was a big deal for a curriculum to be
61. 00:05:38 hands on. It's even more so now. So that's the what do what do we change? We need to be more hands
62. 00:05:42 on to what do we change to? Well, that would look like more project based learning that would look
63. 00:05:48 like more internships, more apprenticeships, more doing like learning by doing and we get
64. 00:05:54 industry clients and we get all those stuff. So those are the two, right? Like those are two
65. 00:05:58 check, check, check. How do we cause the change? Yeah. How do we cause the change? Like that's
66. 00:06:05 that's where this one fizzled. I'm still counting this as a green checkmark because I did what I
67. 00:06:09 said I would do. But I will tell you, that's a hard one. And that's the one that like there's
68. 00:06:16 four different ways that we could do this. None of them are great. All of them are okay.
69. 00:06:22 They all will be like turning the Titanic when it comes to actually making the, you know, making
70. 00:06:28 the change happen in real life. So I'm taking this one as a green checkmark. I'm saying action,
71. 00:06:33 item complete. I've always feel good when I get those action items complete.
72. 00:06:37 Nice. But you know, Corey, you can just do things.
73. 00:06:40 I can just do things, which by the way, let's talk about today's book. This guy is he's a pro.
74. 00:06:46 So the book today is you can, you can do things. Is it you can't? Yeah, you can just do things.
75. 00:06:53 How agents, high agency people get what they want out of life. It's by Kate Hall and Sasha
76. 00:06:59 Chappen. Now, like help me understand something because as I was making the notes and I was getting
77. 00:07:04 ready for today, I read this book and didn't get Sasha Chappen. I got Kate Hall. Like, does it ever
78. 00:07:14 explain to us or did you read anywhere? Like, how is Sasha Chappen part of this? Because it's, I mean,
79. 00:07:20 it's literally on the front cover, Kate Hall with Sasha Chappen. And it's like, I don't know
80. 00:07:25 what Sasha's role was. Do you? No, but when I come across a book now with more than one
81. 00:07:33 author, this sounds terrible. But I basically just attribute the whole book to the first author.
82. 00:07:41 There was another one I read recently, not recently, maybe like a year ago. Noah Kagan,
83. 00:07:49 what is it? Million Dollar Weekend or something like that? The green one.
84. 00:07:52 And it was Noah Kagan with Taj, Taj Hall or something like that. Taj, it's like the best
85. 00:08:02 copy editor in the world. I'm mixing up the terms now. I remember him talking about it though. He was
86. 00:08:09 on some podcast I was listening to is like, why did you co-write this with this particular person?
87. 00:08:15 It was like, because this person has been the brains behind like all of these massively successful
88. 00:08:22 books that you have heard of. And the podcast was so long ago that I can't remember which ones they
89. 00:08:28 were. I want to say like, the four hour work week by Tim Ferriss, I have no idea if that's the
90. 00:08:34 specific one or not, but that's the type of like success level that we're talking about with these.
91. 00:08:40 So it was basically just like, this guy really knows what he's doing. If you're gonna write a book,
92. 00:08:43 this is the guy that you work with. But he's so good at his craft that he basically has a clause
93. 00:08:48 in his contract that his name has to be on the front cover as well. Got it. Got it, got it, got it.
94. 00:08:55 I looked up Sasha Chappen real quick. That's where I kind of got distracted by it. And coach,
95. 00:09:02 so they are a coach. They are an award-winning journalist and recovering chess enthusiast.
96. 00:09:08 So that's what we know about, because the book tells you a lot about... Wait, wait, wait, wait,
97. 00:09:11 recovering chess enthusiast? You don't need to recover from being a chess enthusiast.
98. 00:09:17 This individual wrote a book called All the Wrong Moves, which looks like it's a lot about
99. 00:09:24 chess. So in 2019, all the wrong moves. I would say respect, but it sounds like he's dialing that
100. 00:09:33 back. And enthralling Journey into the world of chess. Okay, sorry, we have to move on. But like,
101. 00:09:37 that is who Sasha Chappen was. Sasha Chappen was not talked about in any of the book. Kate Hall
102. 00:09:42 was talked about a lot. So I was curious about that. So thank you for helping me work through that.
103. 00:09:46 All right, now we move on to the actual introduction, if you're ready. Are you ready to intro this book?
104. 00:09:53 Yes, let's do it. All right, so the whole book is about agency, right? It's an intro, a conclusion,
105. 00:09:58 with 17 chapters. The 17 chapters are broken into five different sections. These sections have a
106. 00:10:06 non-uniform number of chapters within them, right? Because 17 doesn't get divided by five cleanly,
107. 00:10:12 which is fine. That's that's no big problem. But really, this book seemed like it came out of
108. 00:10:20 Kate Hall's experience. And she had a very dramatic experience. Like she talks about it very early
109. 00:10:26 in the book with drug addiction. And it seems like it came out of that experience that she had.
110. 00:10:32 That basically like she was in a situation where she's like, okay, I'm like, if I don't fix this,
111. 00:10:39 no one's going to fix it. And I'm going to stay in this world. So therefore, this idea of agency
112. 00:10:43 and this idea of personal agency came out of the book. So the intro chapter, I can't remember how
113. 00:10:49 much of her backstory she gets into in the intro chapter. But what I can tell you is that she does
114. 00:10:53 a really thorough job, I think it's thorough, of going through the idea of agency and responsibility
115. 00:11:00 and basically encouraging us or motivating us to say like, hey, if you want to make a change,
116. 00:11:06 get off your butt and do it. Like make that change. You know, she quotes in here, a journey
117. 00:11:10 of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Like, why if you're, if you want to do something,
118. 00:11:16 just go do it. Like, you know, I mean, the title, you can just do things, right? So she hits you hard
119. 00:11:23 right away with essentially, this is the nature of this book. And this is what I'm trying to get at
120. 00:11:29 with this book. That's kind of my big overview of introduction before we move into section one.
121. 00:11:34 What do you want to add, Mike? I really like how she had the two different versions of
122. 00:11:41 like her background. And she called them the LinkedIn version and the imposter version. Yeah.
123. 00:11:46 So I actually wrote these down. This might be my favorite part of the whole book, to be honest.
124. 00:11:50 The LinkedIn version, she graduated from Yale Law. She landed a job at a prestigious DC law firm
125. 00:11:55 and worked on cases for the Supreme Court. She left to play professional poker, became a top rank
126. 00:12:00 female player in the world. She co founded a pandemic medicine company called Alvia. She became
127. 00:12:08 CEO of a stare institute, a multi billion dollar private foundation focused on the best ways to
128. 00:12:13 use philanthropic money to drive technological progress. That's really impressive. The imposter
129. 00:12:19 version is she burned out during college and law school. She developed drug addiction playing
130. 00:12:22 poker, didn't know anything about pandemic medicine, but wanted to do something.
131. 00:12:27 So this is kind of interesting because they're both true. And which story do you tend to tell?
132. 00:12:39 I think I tend to focus on the imposter version a little bit myself.
133. 00:12:45 And I have a real hard time whenever, because I will occasionally speak at conferences,
134. 00:12:53 like I've spoken at max stock, I'm speaking at CX this year. And they'll ask for a bio.
135. 00:12:59 And I hate writing my bio because I feel like I have nothing, nothing useful or important to put
136. 00:13:08 there. And then when I like force myself to sit down and write it, I look at it and I'm like,
137. 00:13:13 that's like, I feel the imposter, the imposter syndrome is like, well, that's just all the
138. 00:13:19 highlights. That's not the real thing. I have so much trouble doing this.
139. 00:13:25 But it's not true, right? Because you have a ton of accomplishments, right? Like, I mean,
140. 00:13:29 so it makes sense. I felt a similar thing to you, Mike, when, so in the academic world,
141. 00:13:36 we write CVs, we don't write resumes. And essentially, like how many pages can it be? Because the more
142. 00:13:44 pages is the more stuff you did. And as I'm learning this in graduate school, it kind of got beat out
143. 00:13:49 of you of like, well, did you do that thing? Yeah, put on your CV, right? Did you do that thing?
144. 00:13:53 Yeah, we'll put on your CV. And it's like, well, hold on. Like, my CV is already like, you know,
145. 00:13:57 whatever, 13 pages long. And they're like, yeah, it needs to keep going. And I'm like, oh, this is
146. 00:14:02 so weird. So it's like, you have all that stuff. A lot of a lot of people that are in your position,
147. 00:14:09 meaning creator on the internet, right, will have the like now page or like the page of like past
148. 00:14:15 projects or whatever it might be. Like, I bet you if you did that, that thing would be stacked.
149. 00:14:20 Like, that would be super deep. I've heard you talk about it a bunch of times. I mean,
150. 00:14:24 I even interviewed you interviewed you about it, right? Way back, way back when. But like,
151. 00:14:29 it's there. So I don't know why they impostor syndrome. I don't know. Definitely does, though.
152. 00:14:35 Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So this, the one of the key takeaways from this section for me is she,
153. 00:14:41 I love it when an author tells you what their book is doing and what their book is meant to do.
154. 00:14:45 So she's got a section here says this book is my attempt to take agency cultivation. So, okay,
155. 00:14:50 we're going to do how are we going to cultivate agency out of the realm of chance
156. 00:14:55 and distill it into the most practical tactics or a series of practical tactics.
157. 00:15:00 And that's where we're going. We're going into 17 chapters of practical tactics,
158. 00:15:04 according to our author, that will help us become more agentic, if you will, or have higher agency.
159. 00:15:12 At this point, Mike, I'm ready to move on to section one. Let's do it. Okay. So section one is wake up
160. 00:15:18 and move. There are four chapters in section one. Stare into the abyss. Become your own crisis
161. 00:15:24 manager, quit living in movie logic, and then seek real feedback. So these are the chapters. So,
162. 00:15:30 we're going to basically, Mike and I talked earlier, we're going to rapid fire these chapters.
163. 00:15:34 Some of the ones we'll have more to talk about, some of the ones we'll have less to talk about,
164. 00:15:37 but we're just going to hit them chapter by chapter. So, stare into the abyss. Essentially,
165. 00:15:42 the nature of this is you're going to look out. It's going to go, oh my gosh, there's this big black
166. 00:15:48 hole. I don't know what to do. I'm so scared. What should I go out there and do? And she's saying,
167. 00:15:55 don't run away. Don't look at the abyss and then turn around and say, I want nothing to do with
168. 00:16:00 that. She's saying, get out there and just be okay with the fact that it's scary. Life might hit you
169. 00:16:08 and don't fall for the psychological trap that there's a whole bunch of downsides out there that
170. 00:16:13 I shouldn't go after. That's kind of my, that was my takeaway from staring to the abyss.
171. 00:16:18 Yeah, I like the metaphor here of staring into the abyss because the idea behind this is you have to
172. 00:16:25 look at the things that are uncomfortable, right? And she talks about how the human default is to
173. 00:16:32 voluntarily accept constraints, convincing ourselves that they are mandatory. So, staring into the abyss
174. 00:16:41 is intentional, intensive, self-questioning. And I feel like this is something that I sort of do
175. 00:16:50 every quarter with the personal retreat stuff. It's the reason why I don't have the issue that
176. 00:16:58 you shared with them during the follow up about writing the eulogy and the metomori and all that
177. 00:17:05 that kind of stuff. I guess I've long understood the value of this and when she was talking about
178. 00:17:12 this at the very beginning, I was completely on board. So, we're starting off real strong here
179. 00:17:19 with this book. The key idea as it pertains to the argument she's going to lay out here is that
180. 00:17:26 self-deception is the thing that will keep you from being able to just do things. And self-deception
181. 00:17:33 requires more energy than telling the truth. That is essentially the case she's making for this is
182. 00:17:38 like just deal with it. Just stare into the abyss because the alternative of trying to hide all this
183. 00:17:42 stuff is actually much harder and is going to take more out of you.
184. 00:17:50 We said in the introduction that it's practical tactics. She lists, like I don't remember how
185. 00:17:54 many questions there were here, but she gives you a list of questions to ask, are you currently
186. 00:17:59 accepting something as self-care that is in fact an addiction? If you could go back to college and
187. 00:18:04 start over, what would you like? So, these are very practical, a series of questions. Are they the
188. 00:18:08 right questions? It depends. Are one of those probably applicable to you? Yes. One of those is
189. 00:18:14 probably applicable to you to think through. And it's a good list. It's a pretty thorough list of
190. 00:18:20 questions. So, there's her practical. Let's talk about those questions real quick. I didn't actually
191. 00:18:24 write any of them down. And you know, I love me a good question. And this is a theme throughout the
192. 00:18:29 book. She has these lists of questions at different points. And I didn't think any of them were bad,
193. 00:18:35 but I also didn't think any of them were great. It's like a good starting point if you've never
194. 00:18:40 done this sort of stuff before, but they're not the questions I would have chosen for a book like this.
195. 00:18:46 I agree with you completely. The reason I wrote them down is because we are doing a podcast on
196. 00:18:50 the book. If it was up to me, none of these stuck so much that I was like, "Oh, I need to roll that
197. 00:18:56 into a question I ask myself semi-regularly and think through something." I don't know if that's
198. 00:19:01 because of the nature of her questions or just because of, you know, I'm just in a different place
199. 00:19:06 where I've got a series of questions that I asked myself already. You, I mean, in your daily
200. 00:19:12 reflection, right? So, you've got daily reflection. You've got all these things built into your system.
201. 00:19:16 It would make total sense to me that you've already got this nailed-ish. It's always a work
202. 00:19:22 in progress. I'm always modifying things based on inspiration from books like this. So, it's a little
203. 00:19:28 bit of a curiosity that I didn't write any of them down and didn't apply any of them other than,
204. 00:19:34 yeah, I just didn't like them. All right, let's move to chapter two. So, chapter two has become
205. 00:19:40 your own crisis manager. A crisis manager is somebody who throws away the old task is what Kate would
206. 00:19:46 say and simply ask what is the most important priority and what is the next thing required to
207. 00:19:51 achieve it. Mike, I love this idea. I don't do this enough. Like, I don't go, hey, it's 8 a.m.
208. 00:19:58 I'm getting ready to roll into the workday. What's the most important priority for today
209. 00:20:03 and what's the next thing I need to do? Because I know and we've read in a bunch of other books,
210. 00:20:08 we've read in a bunch of other places, once the snowball starts rolling downhill,
211. 00:20:12 it will keep rolling downhill and it will keep picking up snow. Like, I know that is true,
212. 00:20:17 but I'm not good at being my own crisis manager. Like, I come in and I'm like, I sit down and I'm
213. 00:20:23 like, oh, there's 400 things that are either hitting me or on my brain or there's a calendar
214. 00:20:29 full of stuff and I don't go into crisis mode and go, stop. What's the most important priority?
215. 00:20:35 What's one thing I can do to move that forward? And if I did that, I would be better off. I know
216. 00:20:41 from chapter two, Kate Hall reminded me of it. I would be better off if I did that, but I still
217. 00:20:46 don't do it and that's a me. Well, okay, so becoming your own crisis manager, I actually had a little
218. 00:20:52 bit of a different approach to this. I interpreted this as the person who made the decisions that
219. 00:21:02 got you into the mess that you're in right now. That person is a different person.
220. 00:21:09 So crisis manager isn't, from my perspective, when I read this, I wasn't thinking of crisis
221. 00:21:14 manager as the person who's deciding, okay, the beginning of every day, what's the most
222. 00:21:19 important thing to do. I actually didn't like this section a lot because of the word crisis.
223. 00:21:26 Maybe it's the season I just just got out of. Just real briefly, my wife broke her leg.
224. 00:21:35 She's been on crutches for six weeks, still has a boot. Right after that, I got sick. Two
225. 00:21:42 weeks after that, we moved. I got thrown into the high school coaching position when the previous
226. 00:21:49 head coach kind of spur of the moment decided, yeah, I'm not going to coach this year. Like,
227. 00:21:53 it was always I'm going to take over this role. But then it was like, Oh, we're doing this now.
228. 00:21:57 Well, I guess we got to figure all this stuff out. Yep. So like, really, really crazy season that
229. 00:22:03 we're in. And I have been in crisis management mode. I mean, the last screencast online module
230. 00:22:07 that I did, I had to write three separate times, like, I'm sorry, I'm not going to get it done this
231. 00:22:12 week. I'm sorry. I'm not going to get it done this week. I'm sorry. I'm not going to get it done this
232. 00:22:15 week. You just have to like roll with the punches. It's a really stressful way to live. So if you're
233. 00:22:22 going to become your own crisis manager, this has to be, in my opinion, like a once in a great while
234. 00:22:29 sort of a thing. This is not something that you are doing consistently. A crisis manager is the
235. 00:22:36 person who shows up who is different than the person who made the mistakes. That's the important
236. 00:22:41 distinction. And they don't really care how we got here. Their job is just to make things
237. 00:22:48 quote unquote better. And that is intentional because like better is very generic. And she does
238. 00:22:54 say that if you consistently uphold a modest standard of better, it tends to have outrageous
239. 00:22:58 compounding benefits over time. So I get that. Let's consistently get better. Let's not set these
240. 00:23:03 specific goals about how much better we're going to get. Let's just try to clean up the mess.
241. 00:23:07 But this does not sound like like a mindset I want to consistently adopt going forward. It feels very
242. 00:23:15 anti focus, anti calm productivity, anti kale Newport, ask, you know, I just, it just sounds
243. 00:23:24 really stressful to me. Yeah. And this is where I think that her story, right, with the poker and
244. 00:23:31 the addiction, and then needing to go, Holy cow, how did I get into this, this mess crisis makes
245. 00:23:37 sense for her? Whereas if you're not in that same situation, crisis may not be the best word
246. 00:23:43 for for that. So yeah, okay. So chapter three, we're going to quit living in movie logic.
247. 00:23:50 Basically, in this one, she gives a couple tips. So I'm seeing six tips here that when we find
248. 00:23:58 ourselves living in these, I'm going to call them tropes. I don't know if that's the right word or
249. 00:24:04 not, but I think I think it's appropriate here. Like there's these movie tropes and we think we're
250. 00:24:08 living in this movie trope, like this is going to happen, then this is going to happen, then this
251. 00:24:10 is going to happen. So she's going to give these tips when we find ourselves living in these movie
252. 00:24:14 tropes to like bring us back into reality or bring us back into the real world. Take yourself out of
253. 00:24:18 the movie. Don't go on the attack. Don't jump straight in straight to advocacy. If you feel like
254. 00:24:24 you can't name the problem, say that, name things before you're sure of what they are, and then
255. 00:24:29 don't wait until you have a solution. So these are the six tips she's going to give that. So
256. 00:24:33 she's coming in practically again. I did not really resonate with this chapter, Mike. Like
257. 00:24:40 this one, this one didn't hit me that well. I wasn't like excited about it. I don't find myself
258. 00:24:45 often thinking that I'm living in a movie. I find myself thinking that, you know, like this is just
259. 00:24:50 the way life is and we're going to we're going to keep going with that. So this chapter three did
260. 00:24:54 not hit with me. These tips did not really hit with me. I don't really have much to take.
261. 00:24:58 I'm not a huge fan of the movie logic piece here either. I guess the big takeaway for me from this
262. 00:25:08 section though is that unlike the movies where you know something's going to happen and it's
263. 00:25:16 going to turn out okay, at least that's a general idea for most stories. You don't, you shouldn't
264. 00:25:24 just sit in and wait for that to happen. So I wouldn't describe it this way. I don't love,
265. 00:25:32 like I said, the movie plot metaphor here, but I think I do agree with the premise of the idea
266. 00:25:39 that she's sharing here, which is really sort of self-determination. You know, she's talking about
267. 00:25:44 agency a lot in this book. I don't think she used the term self-determination, but kind of can't
268. 00:25:49 believe she didn't. I mean, if you're going to use the word agency, self-determination is right there.
269. 00:25:56 Well, but none of none of this book was a research based book. That's true. So like,
270. 00:26:00 that actually makes sense to me is like it's all, it's probably the wrong word, but it's mostly
271. 00:26:05 personal experience. So that would make sense why she did use self-determination then.
272. 00:26:10 Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Agency feels like this is just my impression. Maybe this is completely
273. 00:26:19 off base, but agency sounds like one of those counselor type words, which is also how I think
274. 00:26:28 of self-determination. And I feel like the whole idea she's describing here of determining for
275. 00:26:33 yourself that you're going to walk down. Like, yeah, it's right there. But anyway, it's like,
276. 00:26:39 I think the overall point is something I agree with. One detail from this that I like, by the
277. 00:26:47 way, is don't wait to say something until you have a solution. I tend to be that person. Like,
278. 00:26:53 I got to have it all figured out before actually, actually do something about it. And I'm sort of
279. 00:26:59 learning, because I have to, to like figure things out as we go, it's still not what I would prefer,
280. 00:27:09 not the way I would prefer to work. But it's the way things are a lot of times. So I could
281. 00:27:15 probably listen to a lot of the advice that she shares in this chapter, to be honest.
282. 00:27:20 Okay. All right, let's move on to chapter four, seek real feedback. Obviously, I'm a big fan of
283. 00:27:27 this. I work in engineering and design. We should definitely seek real feedback from people.
284. 00:27:35 So in this situation, you know, I mean, I don't want, I don't know if there's a lot of color
285. 00:27:40 commentary here. Like, we should try to get feedback from others about where we are in life. And
286. 00:27:48 whether that's just directly asking them, you know, whether that's saying, Hey, you know, can you,
287. 00:27:53 can you tell me, I think the big thing here is the real, the word real in feedback. If we ask people
288. 00:27:59 that were that are nice to us to give us feedback, they're going to give us nice feedback. If we ask
289. 00:28:05 people who will give us real feedback, they will give us actually real feedback. So I think before
290. 00:28:10 you would do this, you have to really do a good assessment of like, who am I asking for this
291. 00:28:14 feedback? And, you know, like, will they actually give me legitimately good and real feedback? So
292. 00:28:22 I'm a fan, like I'm in, like, this is a, this is a very applied tactic that I think we should
293. 00:28:26 definitely do. I mean, I, I agree. As you were talking, you know, we're just talking about
294. 00:28:33 movie logic and it occurred to me that real feedback could be R E E L feedback, real feedback,
295. 00:28:39 as well. Wow. But he's here over. I so that's a corny joke, but also another avenue that I think
296. 00:28:49 this that feeds into the idea behind this, this chapter, like if you had, if you're able to watch
297. 00:28:56 the footage, so I'm in the middle of soccer season, right? And one of the things that I
298. 00:29:02 advocated for this year was getting one of those cameras that goes way up on the pole. So you can
299. 00:29:08 watch the entire game and they have them now where they're powered by AI and they don't have a
300. 00:29:14 subscription. You can just like go buy them at your local sports store, whatever, and it follows
301. 00:29:20 the action around. And so we've got one of those and I can highlight specific points,
302. 00:29:26 because in the game, I can pull people aside at halftime, whatever and say this is what I saw,
303. 00:29:32 but it's hard for them to relate to it. When I can show them the film, they can see it better
304. 00:29:39 and they can understand it. And that's when they actually like are able to fix things.
305. 00:29:45 So I think I think feedback can come in a lot of different forms. It can come in like, this is
306. 00:29:52 the tape. There's no arguing with what's on the tape. This is what happened. It could also be from
307. 00:29:57 people that you allow to speak into your life. So you got to be careful who you allow to speak
308. 00:30:02 into your life. Yes, we need to get real feedback. I do think that an important part of that,
309. 00:30:09 which really isn't addressed here, is like, how do you pick the people who are going to give you
310. 00:30:16 good feedback? I think she would probably didn't she say she has a form on her website where people
311. 00:30:22 can just submit like anonymous feedback. I think so. Yeah, I hate that idea. Because there's so
312. 00:30:28 many people whose opinions I just do not care about. And I tend to latch onto those
313. 00:30:36 negative comments and things like that. I know I shouldn't. It doesn't make it any easier not to,
314. 00:30:41 though. So I think that's the only thing I would add to this is that you do need to figure out
315. 00:30:49 who is actually worth listening to when it comes to the feedback.
316. 00:30:54 Yeah, the last thing I'll say is one of the things she calls out as a big theme that comes
317. 00:30:57 from this chapter is how much we get in our own way with a low curiosity, high ego mindset. So
318. 00:31:03 she's trying to one of the underlying themes of this book, and I can't remember if there's a
319. 00:31:08 chapter on this or not. One of the underlying themes on this book would be this be highly
320. 00:31:13 curious, right? And be humble, right? This is this idea that she's trying to get across here.
321. 00:31:17 Yep. All right, Mike, you're ready to go to section two. Let's do it.
322. 00:31:21 So section two is be willing to look stupid. In section two, there are three chapters,
323. 00:31:29 I believe. Am I getting that right? Yeah, there are three chapters, chapter five, six, and seven.
324. 00:31:34 Learn to love the moat of low status, court rejection, and then recognize failure as the
325. 00:31:40 cost of doing business. Okay, so she establishes in the intro to section two about this past of
326. 00:31:46 that we try to run this path of least embarrassment, right? And she's gonna try to kind of break us
327. 00:31:52 down from this idea of, you know, least embarrassment. So if you're good with it, we can just roll
328. 00:31:57 right into chapter five, Mike. Let's do it. Okay, so learn from the moat, learn to love the moat of
329. 00:32:03 low status. So essentially, I think what she's getting at here is this fear of being not awesome.
330. 00:32:14 This fear of not, you know, this high ego sense, like, oh, I'm gonna go do this podcast with Mike,
331. 00:32:20 and what's Mike gonna think about? Like, as I'm saying things and as I'm trying to explain things,
332. 00:32:24 is he gonna be sitting on the other side of this call judging me and thinking, Corey sounds so dumb,
333. 00:32:29 I can't believe him, right? Like, and then the idea of like, well, what if that is the case?
334. 00:32:34 Like, what if I am really, really terrible at this? And Mike comes to me and he goes, hey,
335. 00:32:40 that was a really rough session. Like, we should probably talk about that. That would be like the
336. 00:32:44 low status situation. And I, and I could learn from that, and I could get better from it, right?
337. 00:32:50 So she's saying, hey, we should always be looking for these areas where, I don't know, we might
338. 00:32:58 be in that situation, and we might be in a situation where we could significantly improve,
339. 00:33:04 because like, that's how we grow. That's how we become more curious. That's how we become,
340. 00:33:09 you know, we learn from different things. So it's this idea, like, I don't personally love the moat
341. 00:33:15 metaphor, but that's okay, right? Like, she's trying to tell us to jump into moats and she got it,
342. 00:33:20 she had a clever way to do it. I don't love the moat metaphor at all either.
343. 00:33:28 What is the purpose of the, the moat? Did you pick up on that? Because when I think of moat,
344. 00:33:34 I feel like, from a marketing perspective, moat is like the thing that keeps people from doing
345. 00:33:40 the thing that you're doing. So I see it as the thing that protects the castle from infantry.
346. 00:33:46 Yes, exactly. So like, they can't, they can't get across the moat. Well, I don't know if she
347. 00:33:52 actually like clearly said it. And if she did, I didn't like latch on to the way she said it.
348. 00:33:57 So I'm going to speculate here and say, it's the thing that prevents me from getting out of my own
349. 00:34:02 high ego castle into a world that would be more, you know, better for me and I would learn more
350. 00:34:09 and I would be more curious and all those things. Okay. But I don't know, I could be wrong. I don't
351. 00:34:14 remember her describing that. I do like the idea of the, the path of least embarrassment. I think
352. 00:34:19 you alluded to that. That's an interesting idea. Embarrassment, she says is the feeling of breaking
353. 00:34:26 the rules. So it comes with the territory. One thing that I liked from this chapter was she said
354. 00:34:33 that sometimes amateurs see things that others don't. And I like that a lot. So there's this concept
355. 00:34:41 of the, the curse of knowledge where once you've been in something for a while, you forget what
356. 00:34:47 it's like to be a beginner. But this is sort of the inverse of that where being a beginner actually
357. 00:34:52 has an advantage because you aren't forced into certain ways of thinking about things yet.
358. 00:35:00 So I don't know what you do with that necessarily. Like, I guess it's just sort of an encouragement
359. 00:35:08 if you're just starting out with something or you feel like you're not really good at it yet.
360. 00:35:11 Maybe there's some, some good that that comes with that, that beginner status. So just like,
361. 00:35:18 don't let it stop you. But I don't know that you tangibly take any action on that particular
362. 00:35:25 thing because you don't know what you don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think in this situation,
363. 00:35:30 chapter five and chapter six have to tie pretty tightly together because chapter six is court
364. 00:35:35 rejection. And I think like, so okay, we've got to find these moats where we might be humbled.
365. 00:35:42 You know, like we might be embarrassed, whatever that might be. And then essentially we have to like,
366. 00:35:47 be willing to go into them and be okay with the rejection. If the rejection comes, right? Like,
367. 00:35:54 so like, I see this as a stage, right? Like, there's the potential for embarrassment or potential
368. 00:35:59 to need to humble myself. Then there's like the flat out, listen, they just, they just don't like
369. 00:36:04 me. They told me no, like they're, they're like actively against the thing I'm doing. So it's
370. 00:36:10 embarrassment plus, plus, plus, right? Like, they've actually told me that I'm terrible. And I have
371. 00:36:15 to be okay with that. You know, and her mindset on this is the more times you hear the word no and
372. 00:36:20 notice that it's not lethal, you know, the lesser version to rejection that you feel, which I completely
373. 00:36:25 agree with that. Like, if you try, you try and you try. Now, one of the things I think about too is
374. 00:36:29 there's, there's wise trying and then there's not wise trying. So there was a principle in
375. 00:36:38 entrepreneurship when I was coming through grad school and we were teaching students about
376. 00:36:41 entrepreneurship and it was fail fast, fail fast, fail fast. And then some smart people got into it
377. 00:36:46 and they said, well, hold on, why are we trying to fail? Like, like the gist of this is not to fail,
378. 00:36:52 right? Like, yes, you want to fail fast, but the gist is to not fail. So then they, then they made
379. 00:36:56 it fail forward fast. So it's like, we're going to fail, but as we fail, we're going to learn,
380. 00:37:02 we're going to move forward. And we want to do that as quickly as we can, because every time we do
381. 00:37:06 that, we get better and better and better. And that's what she's getting at. Like, she's getting at
382. 00:37:10 the idea of, one, failure won't kill you, rejection won't kill you. And two, let's learn from it and
383. 00:37:16 let's move forward, let's learn from it and move forward. So I think five and six, though, need to
384. 00:37:22 be really tightly tied together to get the whole picture. Yeah, I think, I think that's true. The
385. 00:37:29 couple of things I liked about chapter six, were that unreasonable requests can open the door to
386. 00:37:37 reasonable requests, which is kind of an interesting idea. Like, so don't be afraid to make an
387. 00:37:43 unreasonable request because they'll counter with something that actually is reasonable,
388. 00:37:48 instead of just getting offended, never talking to you again. And then the other thing is making
389. 00:37:53 requests helps you build imagination for what is actually possible. She told the story, I think,
390. 00:37:57 in this chapter of the guy who, like, just kept making requests every day, till he would get
391. 00:38:06 rejected and it ended up, like, allowing him to do some crazy things that he never should have
392. 00:38:10 been able to do. Like, that was kind of inspiring to me, honestly. I don't have a specific way to
393. 00:38:17 take action on that yet, but I like that idea a lot. Mike, you just gave me my first action item.
394. 00:38:22 Yeah. So my first action item is make a ridiculous request once a week. All right.
395. 00:38:28 Is that too? Is that too soon? Is that too fast? Should it be once a month?
396. 00:38:32 Once a week sounds good. Okay. So once a week. Okay, cool. I got my first and maybe only action
397. 00:38:38 items because I didn't have any coming in. I do have a couple other action items, but not,
398. 00:38:42 not for this section. Okay. Are you ready to move to, are you ready to move to seven?
399. 00:38:48 Yep. All right. So seven, super quick, recognize failure as the cost of doing business. And I think
400. 00:38:54 this is just, it just makes sense, right? Like, so when we are doing things that are worth doing,
401. 00:39:01 I think failure is an option. And I think we have to be okay with that. Like, I've got this thing
402. 00:39:05 in the back of my mind. I might have said it to you before, Mike. But like, if I'm doing,
403. 00:39:10 like, I want to basically fail at like seven of the 10 things that I try, you know, any, any,
404. 00:39:17 70%, because that means I'm actually pushing myself to try hard. I'm actually pushing myself
405. 00:39:21 to try hard. I understand that like, do I really want to fail 70% of the time? No. But do I want
406. 00:39:26 to push myself? So I go, I go with it that route, as opposed to like, well, I can hit 100% of the
407. 00:39:32 shots from one foot away. But like, then I have to be a, I have to be one foot away every time.
408. 00:39:38 Whereas if I shoot, you know, and I get better and I get better and I get better. So that's my,
409. 00:39:43 that's kind of how I res, I resolved this chapter in my head.
410. 00:39:47 Nice. There was a quote in this section from Ira Glass, which I liked it says, if you're not
411. 00:39:54 failing all the time, you're not creating a situation where you can get super lucky.
412. 00:40:01 And that whole idea of luck is an interesting idea. I remember talking to Chris Bailey about
413. 00:40:11 it at one point. And just the role of, of luck in, in how successful people tend to be. And the
414. 00:40:21 rugged individual Western mindset likes to think that I'm a self made man and I deserve all the
415. 00:40:28 success that I got. We really, a lot of it is you were in the right place at the right time.
416. 00:40:35 Yep. It's a little bit uncomfortable to think about that. But I think there, so I think it's a
417. 00:40:42 little bit of a balance, to be honest. Yeah, you have to, you do have to get lucky in, in some sense.
418. 00:40:49 You can't manufacture success, but there are certain things that you can do, which is to this.
419. 00:40:55 Ira Glass quote that puts you in a position where those things, those good things can actually happen.
420. 00:41:02 So it's not, you know, like, you just follow these steps and you become best selling author,
421. 00:41:10 if that's your, your goal. But there are certain things that you can do, which will set you up for
422. 00:41:15 the chance to actually become a best selling, best selling author. And the loss of version mindset,
423. 00:41:23 which is the thing that is like, I just don't want to lose. I'm going to play not to lose.
424. 00:41:27 That will tell you not to play a game where you lose nine out of 10 games. But in that scenario,
425. 00:41:35 the one that you win might give you a 20 times return. So that makes it worth it to play that
426. 00:41:41 game. The loss of version mindset adds a whole bunch of negative value to the actual act of
427. 00:41:50 failing, though, where it just feels like I don't want to put myself through that again.
428. 00:41:54 If I'm honest with myself, I probably default to that more than I, more than I should. Don't
429. 00:41:59 have an action item with the associated with this yet. But I, that's kind of like a long-term thing,
430. 00:42:04 I think is just shifting that mindset a little bit and just trying things. Having that
431. 00:42:11 expected value mindset, maximizing your winnings over time, that's kind of the inverse of this.
432. 00:42:16 That's the goal. Yeah, she's got, she got three myths in this chapter as well. And I want to talk
433. 00:42:21 about the second one, the onlookers will judge you for your failures rather than your successes.
434. 00:42:25 And like, I agree that completely that's a myth because there are many, many people in this world
435. 00:42:30 that people look up to, that they respect that they think are just absolute amazing people. And if
436. 00:42:35 you look at their history, they've had some pretty epic failures in their past. Like they've, I mean,
437. 00:42:40 they've taken businesses to zero. They've, you know, lied, cheated, stolen, done whatever, you know,
438. 00:42:46 they did. But we see them now and we say, like, oh, they're a success now, right? Like, so I think
439. 00:42:50 that's a really interesting myth. She had three of them and their one success comes from minimizing
440. 00:42:56 failure. All onlookers will judge you by your failures. And then with enough planning, you can
441. 00:43:00 avoid failure. So I think those, those myths were actually pretty applicable to me.
442. 00:43:05 Yeah. And the other thing she said was you don't become successful by minimizing failure. So
443. 00:43:11 lots of version mindset. That's the bad one that will keep your world small.
444. 00:43:16 All right. So we're moving on to section three. Get out of your lane. So basically,
445. 00:43:22 the goal here is we want to be thinking about learning new behaviors and skills. We want to
446. 00:43:27 think about who we aspire to be. And then how do we do that that we often just kind of get in our
447. 00:43:33 groove and get in our rut. And we say like, okay, we're just going to stay in this, in this groove.
448. 00:43:37 And we will never try to venture out of that. And her encouragement here is to get out of the lane.
449. 00:43:43 And there are three chapters in this section, learn to see traits as skills,
450. 00:43:48 don't learn fake lessons, and then cross the cringe minefield. So chapter eight leads us into
451. 00:43:55 that anything before we go to chapter eight, Mike. Nope. Okay. Slap at these titles.
452. 00:44:00 Exactly. So learn to see traits as skills. Mike, I honestly don't remember what this chapter is
453. 00:44:06 about. Like I could try to on the fly, make something up. But do you remember what this
454. 00:44:10 chapter is about? Because I don't at all. Let's see. I think so. I'll do my best to explain this.
455. 00:44:19 Many attributes are nothing more than labels we attach to behaviors and skills that we can learn.
456. 00:44:24 So if you say I'm, you know, wired this, this way, et cetera, that's really a skill that you've
457. 00:44:32 developed. And if you wanted to develop the opposite skill, you could do that by creating
458. 00:44:37 the right habits. The big idea here, though, is that you don't need to develop every positive
459. 00:44:43 attribute that you wish you had. So all these traits are skills that you can develop, but does
460. 00:44:50 not mean that all these traits are skills that you should develop. And that's the key question here
461. 00:44:55 is should I work on becoming this type of person? Because you can't do everything. So some of them
462. 00:45:00 are like, yeah, that's real important. Let's do that. Some of them are like, yeah, it's just not
463. 00:45:04 worth the effort. The juice is not worth the squeeze for that one. And be okay with that.
464. 00:45:09 That's hard for me, by the way. Like I hate the imperfections. I hate the weaknesses and the
465. 00:45:15 natural tendency, I think, is for my personality is to try and fix those. But you don't want to
466. 00:45:21 just eliminate the weaknesses. You want to double down on your strengths. Like that's where the real
467. 00:45:25 advantage lies. Yeah. So that makes sense. I honestly had no clue what this chapter is about. So I
468. 00:45:33 thank you for taking the lead on that one. The next one was don't learn fake lessons. So basically,
469. 00:45:39 where we the emotional intensity of something tends to ring louder to us than the reality of it. So
470. 00:45:49 if we are in a situation where it's emotionally intense, we will then say that that was a better
471. 00:45:55 experience or a worse experience than it really, really was because of the emotional side of that.
472. 00:46:00 So, you know, huge wins, huge losses. And really, those are outliers. Like those aren't really what
473. 00:46:06 the true story is telling us. That she comes in and she says, you know, she refers to Richard
474. 00:46:13 Feynman, which I always love a good Richard Feynman reference. The first principle is that you must
475. 00:46:17 not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool, which I absolutely love that quote. Like,
476. 00:46:23 and I do it to myself all the time. Like, I think something is way bigger than it is. It really wasn't
477. 00:46:28 that big of a deal. Some like the people that love me and that are around me will tell me, hey,
478. 00:46:32 listen, that really wasn't that big of a deal. But because it either mattered to me a lot or because
479. 00:46:37 I thought it was a big deal, it tends to like stick into my brain. And I, I stew and I resonate
480. 00:46:43 on that. I stew and I resonate on it. So chapter nine was 100% written for me to say, listen,
481. 00:46:51 you need to step back. You need to be objective about this. And you need to say,
482. 00:46:56 was this really a big deal? Or was it was this a fake lesson? And it was like a one-off fluke
483. 00:47:01 and the thing just had to happen. And I think this is really where community matters a lot.
484. 00:47:06 She doesn't really get into this like in terms of it all that much. But I think this is really
485. 00:47:10 where like having a group of people to then talk about things with and say like, this happened to
486. 00:47:15 me the other day. I think it's a really big deal. And then have them come back to you and say,
487. 00:47:19 no, like, you're fine. Like, that wasn't a big deal. But people that you really trust,
488. 00:47:23 I think that would be, that's kind of my takeaway from this is I really need to have that good
489. 00:47:28 community around me to speak truth into my life. Yeah, the thing that I jotted down from this
490. 00:47:35 chapter that I keep chewing on is that the beliefs that you firmly adopt become the lens
491. 00:47:40 through which you see the world. And that reminds me of the Dave Gray visual from liminal thinking
492. 00:47:49 that you probably heard me talk about. There was a period where I was mentioning that. I think
493. 00:47:53 like every episode because it's stuck with me so much. But basically, if you've got all of the
494. 00:48:00 potentially knowable things, that's like the very bottom layer. You don't know all that you don't
495. 00:48:06 know you have a certain portion of that, which is your lived experience. So that's on top of that.
496. 00:48:12 But then even your lived experience, you're exposed to something like 11 billion data points
497. 00:48:24 of information per second, and your conscious attention can only grab on to like 40 of those.
498. 00:48:30 So the focused attention is like the needle on the record player, where you are really noticing
499. 00:48:38 specific things about what is going on right now. So in this exact moment, we are recording this
500. 00:48:45 podcast. I am noticing your facial expressions as I am describing this on the video. I'm not
501. 00:48:52 listening to the fans that are running in the background. I'm not aware of the new carpet smell
502. 00:49:00 in the studio, like all of those things, like they're present, but I'm not paying attention
503. 00:49:06 to those. I'm not even aware that those are there. So that focused attention, that is the thing
504. 00:49:13 at the lens that she's talking about here, by which we build as Richard, sorry, not Richard Feynman,
505. 00:49:20 Dave Gray, so many, so many names. He would say you build your beliefs, your judgments,
506. 00:49:29 your like everything you believe is on top is built on top of that. And then on the very top of of
507. 00:49:35 this like domino, you know, stack of cards that you're building here, you have the self-ceiling
508. 00:49:42 logic because we've got the bubble of belief that's reinforced by people who have had the same
509. 00:49:47 experiences and arrived at the same conclusions as we have. And it's just natural that we build
510. 00:49:53 these echo chambers to reinforce the things that we already believe, even though like there's so
511. 00:49:59 much more that's knowable, there's so many other conclusions that could have been drawn from even
512. 00:50:05 the experiences that we have, but that's what we chose to pay attention to. So recognizing that
513. 00:50:10 the beliefs you firmly adopt, right, that that becomes a lens through which you see the world.
514. 00:50:14 It's not the only lens. So how does it apply to don't learn fake lessons? Like there are many,
515. 00:50:19 many, many, many, many more lessons that can be learned. And I want to go find them. I want to
516. 00:50:26 intentionally go engaging conversations with people who believe different things, who are from
517. 00:50:32 different backgrounds. Like those uncomfortable conversations, those are the ones that can actually
518. 00:50:41 change your perspective. So strong convictions, lightly held being willing to say, yeah, you know,
519. 00:50:47 I guess I believe this thing for a while, but I believe something different now because I have
520. 00:50:53 more information. And if you're intentional about going and finding those data points
521. 00:50:57 that are outside this little cluster of dots, you know, if you're putting this on like a big graph,
522. 00:51:03 you know, you're collecting sample sizes from all over the place. That's the overall idea. Again,
523. 00:51:09 not an action item associated with this. So I agree. Whatever. Yeah, good, good principle.
524. 00:51:15 It's good principle, but we, yeah, we wonder what that action item that comes out of it is.
525. 00:51:20 Chapter 10. So last chapter in this section is called cross the cringe mind field. So basically,
526. 00:51:25 she describes cringe mind fields. There are the place where our biggest self-improvement gains
527. 00:51:30 are likely to come from. We haven't allowed ourselves to develop in those areas because she says it's
528. 00:51:37 a sensitive spot where a core fear or discomfort, right, we see as the possibility to be more hurtful
529. 00:51:44 than than other things. So there's these ideas, or this idea where there's hurtful areas that we
530. 00:51:48 could definitely gain from. And what we need to do is we need to be willing to cross the mind field
531. 00:51:54 of these places and take on this idea. So we're tying kind of back into like the moat metaphor
532. 00:52:01 where we're going to take on the low or the embarrassment situation, but this is one of those
533. 00:52:07 situations where it might actually hurt us pretty bad. We might fail and that might hurt us pretty
534. 00:52:11 bad. The whole principle here is we're getting like encouraged or motivated to like actually take
535. 00:52:19 on these things that we might have to endure some exploding mines and lift ourselves back up from
536. 00:52:26 that. But that's okay. We will in they're not real minds, right? So we will not die from these. We will
537. 00:52:31 be able to recover from this. And yeah, like it's just another example of, hey, go out and do this
538. 00:52:40 thing. Go get them. Tiger. You know, these cringe mine fields like this is where you hear it in my
539. 00:52:46 in the way of talking about it. I started to kind of get fatigued with this whole like up and Adam
540. 00:52:51 guy like go get him agency. Yay. I hate this metaphor. But I agree, I think with the principle.
541. 00:53:01 So she says that motivation is based on emotion. That is an interesting and powerful idea.
542. 00:53:09 Because I've taught as part of the life theme cohort for a long time that motivation is more
543. 00:53:15 powerful than willpower. But it to tie it to emotion makes it seem more fickle, I guess,
544. 00:53:25 which I don't can't say is wrong. So just an interesting, you know, observation there. She
545. 00:53:31 talks about your cringe mine field is probably connected to your core fear. And an existential
546. 00:53:37 cringe reaction is an automatic repulsion of the kind we might have to a poisonous substance.
547. 00:53:42 That all seems really extreme. And again, I hate the idea of the mine field. Like,
548. 00:53:48 your life is going to be over if you make a wrong step. But that's kind of her point is it feels
549. 00:53:55 that way, but it's really not that way. So kind of go with it. But I wish there was another way to
550. 00:54:02 say this. Maybe there is maybe there isn't. And it just like it was effective in getting her point
551. 00:54:08 across. I don't love it though. I don't love it. The core fear idea is interesting. She makes the
552. 00:54:13 connection there to the Enneagram. Have you looked into the Enneagram ever? I know of the Enneagram.
553. 00:54:20 Enneagram was like a big deal for a while there, but I kind of just stay away from it. Like it
554. 00:54:25 doesn't seem like an area I want to dip my toe into. I don't know if that's a good or bad mic,
555. 00:54:29 but I kind of choose to live in ignorance in this world. Yeah. So I forget there was a book
556. 00:54:37 we read for Bookworm on the Enneagram. And the hard part about the Enneagram is it's sort of like
557. 00:54:45 public domain. So there's so many people who talk about it. They all have their own version of the
558. 00:54:52 different personality types that she very briefly outlines in the table in this book.
559. 00:54:58 I can't remember the book that I went through, but I took a version of the test and I got my
560. 00:55:04 results at at some point. And I liked that version of it way more than the one she described in this
561. 00:55:11 this book. I don't think she sold the Enneagram very well here. No. However, I took the test,
562. 00:55:18 right? And I still, as we record this, I meant to go dig up my results so I could talk about them.
563. 00:55:23 I don't remember because I took this test a couple of years ago and then quickly forgot
564. 00:55:28 about it because I have the same sort of hesitation towards it. I think that you're describing. It's
565. 00:55:35 like, eh, this just feels a little bit weird. And in one sense, it's like it's a personality test.
566. 00:55:40 Who cares? There's a million of them out there. If it's useful in any way, shape or form, if you
567. 00:55:45 get even like one inside out of it, great. Like maybe it helps you with some of your relationship
568. 00:55:50 stuff, more power to you. But there's some people who just put so much stock into this. It's like,
569. 00:55:56 oh, well, I'm a type one. And therefore, this is what I do. And I'm like, no, I'm not going to be
570. 00:56:03 put into that box based on this arbitrary test. The other thing I didn't like about it now that
571. 00:56:09 we're talking about it. I'm starting to come back to me. There was like a core one and then there
572. 00:56:13 were like wing personalities. Yes. So the results are like, you're this, but you're also a part this.
573. 00:56:20 But then it's also like, if you don't like that, you can choose whichever one resonates with you.
574. 00:56:24 So there's no scientific, this is what you do with this, which is totally different than most
575. 00:56:31 of the assessments that I grew up with. So yeah, it's very like, I don't know, feelings focused.
576. 00:56:41 It's almost like a little bit spiritual woo in a sense, but it's not like, I don't know. And
577. 00:56:49 there's so many, I mean, I'm a Christian, right? There's so many Christians who put so much stock
578. 00:56:53 in this. And I never understood it. It's like, well, why? I'm telling you, like, I've always had that,
579. 00:57:02 like, just weird feeling about it to where I hear about it. I'm like, okay, cool. And then I just
580. 00:57:06 kind of walk away and I think it's like, I don't want to, I don't want to talk about this anymore.
581. 00:57:10 So yeah, it does make me a little bit a little bit uncomfortable. But I do like the idea of like,
582. 00:57:15 these different frameworks or these different ways of looking at things where it makes sense.
583. 00:57:20 And you're like, oh, I guess I could do this because this does point out, you know, I tend to
584. 00:57:24 fall into this trap or whatever. Like, if you can find that stuff in, in your grandma or whatever,
585. 00:57:30 other type of assessment, you know, that's great, more power to you. In the list of assessments,
586. 00:57:35 I would recommend this one's not high on the list. All right, let's move to section four.
587. 00:57:40 This is called walk through walls. And basically this is like her intro to this. The only thing I
588. 00:57:46 broke down was basically high agency people save their effort to work on the things that actually
589. 00:57:51 matter. They don't just run around with endless boundless energy. There are four chapters in this
590. 00:57:56 one. So we're on chapters 11 through 14 at this point, if you're keeping track, they don't assume
591. 00:58:01 it will be hard, take shortcuts, increase your surface area of your luck, and then find a way.
592. 00:58:07 Anything before we break into these four chapters, Mike? No, I wasn't a huge fan of these little
593. 00:58:12 mini section introductions in the book. I get why they're there. I think they can be useful,
594. 00:58:19 but I wasn't a huge fan. Yeah. So chapter 11, don't assume it will be hard. It's basically
595. 00:58:26 what's written on the tin, right? Like we often go into things thinking it's going to be hard,
596. 00:58:30 so therefore we make it harder that if we go into it with a better mindset, if we go into it,
597. 00:58:36 thinking like, hey, I can do this in your kind of your own advocate for not being emotionally
598. 00:58:45 charged that it's going to be super duper hard, that we're going to do it better. This is kind of
599. 00:58:49 like that growth mindset type thing. Like I think that ties into here, although she doesn't mention
600. 00:58:54 growth mindset here, but I don't know. I didn't get a lot out of this one that wasn't just in the
601. 00:59:02 title, right? Like don't assume it will be hard. Okay, like we're going to assume that we're just
602. 00:59:07 going to go after it and we're going to, you know, be agentic or have high agency or self-determination.
603. 00:59:14 Again, like I, this sounds like I'm saying terrible things and I'm not doing a good job because
604. 00:59:19 I don't know what I don't know what I was supposed to really, really take away from this one.
605. 00:59:24 Yeah, I'm of two minds on this one. Don't assume it will be hard in some instances,
606. 00:59:32 but I think it should be like you should assume it's going to be hard in other instances.
607. 00:59:37 Maybe it should just be coupled with the belief that like you should quit things quickly. Like
608. 00:59:44 if you get into something and you realize this is not the right thing to do, then feel free to
609. 00:59:49 pull the plug. But like the examples and the stories that she used to justify like the people
610. 00:59:54 starting the restaurant, you know, and the chef is like, absolutely do not do this. They're like,
611. 00:59:58 yeah, how hard can it be? We're just going to do it. And then they find out that it's really hard.
612. 01:00:03 In some scenarios, like sure, a cherry-picked example there of,
613. 01:00:09 had they known how hard it was going to be, they probably wouldn't have done it and now look how
614. 01:00:12 successful they are because they stuck with it. But that's great if you're in a situation where
615. 01:00:19 it's just you and your significant other and you're trying to build something at the beginning of
616. 01:00:22 your your marriage. Not something I would choose to do with five kids oldest going to college. Like
617. 01:00:32 the other example that comes to mind for me personally is when I quit the job at the
618. 01:00:37 digital marketing agency to go out on my own. If I knew I was really talking to somebody about
619. 01:00:41 this the other day, we had our 25th high school reunion a couple weeks ago. So I went and I was
620. 01:00:49 talking to people like, what are you doing now? I'm catching up with some of my best friends from
621. 01:00:54 high school and I was like, yeah, I was doing this and then I quit to do this. And a couple
622. 01:00:58 of times it came up where it's like, if I knew how hard it was going to be, I'm not sure I would have
623. 01:01:03 done it. Or at least not done it the way that I did it. I definitely could have done things a
624. 01:01:10 little bit a little bit differently. And I'm glad that I made that decision ultimately.
625. 01:01:16 I do like what I get to do now. But I don't know. I think that's that's a hard fast rule that cannot
626. 01:01:22 be hard and fast. She does say though, a couple other things here. If you expect things to be
627. 01:01:27 difficult, you'll think you're doing the wrong thing if you succeed easily. I can see that. I can
628. 01:01:32 definitely get on board with with that. She also describes the characteristics of a high growth
629. 01:01:40 learning environment where you've got rapid trusted feedback, direct learning, open-ended sessions,
630. 01:01:44 and a source of motivation. I love that. Then she describes reverse and posture syndrome where
631. 01:01:50 you understand that most people are basically imposters and it doesn't stop anyone else. So
632. 01:01:54 why should it stop you? I never heard this define this way, but this is exactly the perspective I
633. 01:02:01 have eventually landed on. So I've dealt with imposter syndrome for a very long time. Reverse
634. 01:02:07 imposter syndrome is a clever way. I feel like of defining this. And she very accurately described
635. 01:02:14 the approach there more succinctly than I could have.
636. 01:02:18 All right. Let's move on to chapter 12. Take shortcuts. Basically, this is the,
637. 01:02:25 we often shut ourselves down when we think like, oh, that's cheating, or that's the easy way out,
638. 01:02:30 or that's the whatever. It needs to be a more long, cumbersome, harder process.
639. 01:02:37 So she gives an example here of just right to the present and is the kind of shortcut,
640. 01:02:41 in my experience, high agency people are always looking for. So it's like, it's this idea of,
641. 01:02:45 well, I could go up the chain, or I could just email the president, right? Like, you know,
642. 01:02:50 I could do this. What I think the premise here is good. We should, and I don't think it's cheating.
643. 01:02:58 I don't think it's laziness. I don't think it's anything like that to look for the shortcut or
644. 01:03:02 look for the more direct path to get to where we want to get to. But I also think you need to have
645. 01:03:08 a little bit of tact and how you do this, and you got to be careful about when you're doing it,
646. 01:03:13 and when you're not doing it, and what bridges do you burn on the way to taking the shortcut,
647. 01:03:18 or the other one is if we're thinking about agency, what learning do I prevent myself from doing
648. 01:03:24 through taking that other way, right? Like, there may, I might learn a lot,
649. 01:03:28 whereas if I take the shortcut, I'm not going to learn a lot. Now, I think, if we think about what
650. 01:03:33 she's trying to do, she's trying to encourage people, she's trying to motivate people,
651. 01:03:36 and she's trying to get you to overcome the idea that everything is this incredibly long
652. 01:03:42 and arduous process. And then, oh my goodness, it's going to take me so long to do it. So, if we
653. 01:03:47 remember what the section is all about, the section is walk through walls. Like, the section is like,
654. 01:03:52 overcome these barriers. So, if this big, long journey is your barrier, we'll take the shortcut.
655. 01:03:57 So, an easy example of this would be I want to climb a 14er. Well, I could actually climb the
656. 01:04:02 14er, or I could ride the train up, you know, and it's like, listen, if your goal is to just see the
657. 01:04:08 top of the mountain and like, see from the top of the mountain, just take the train up. Like,
658. 01:04:13 you're achieving your goal. If your goal is to actually hike the 14er, hike the 14er. So, it's like,
659. 01:04:19 I get the premise. I don't have a problem with the premise, the key principle of what she's doing
660. 01:04:24 here. And yeah, take shortcuts. I love and hate this idea, because like you said,
661. 01:04:33 there are some things where shortcuts are just going to sabotage the progress that you're making.
662. 01:04:40 So, it's weird to, I don't know, like, I don't think there's a real great,
663. 01:04:50 real great explanation of like the criteria that I would personally use or figuring out
664. 01:04:55 whether to take a shortcut or not. But there is a question which I think is helpful. And that is,
665. 01:04:59 what is the simplest possible way I could get what I actually want? And that's to your point,
666. 01:05:03 you know, what is the goal that you're actually after here? So, I think that's useful. I do have
667. 01:05:08 an action item in this chapter, which has nothing to do with taking shortcuts. It talks about the
668. 01:05:14 idea of a manifesto. And I have, you know, my life theme, I have my personal core values. I've
669. 01:05:20 got my eulogy because I actually wrote it, even though you don't like that idea. I've got the ideal
670. 01:05:28 future. I don't have a manifesto though. And I've been meaning to write both a personal manifesto
671. 01:05:34 and then also like one for practical PKM. That's the one that I think I want to commit to as an
672. 01:05:38 action item. My personal brand, right? The thing that I publish all my newsletters and articles
673. 01:05:43 under, what is the manifesto there? Because I think that could be helpful, not just for me
674. 01:05:48 deciding, you know, what do I think about this stuff? But it could help readers and people who
675. 01:05:54 come to my YouTube channel, like decide if this is the right thing for them if they, you know,
676. 01:05:58 align with that manifesto, if it resonates with them as well. So, I have no idea how to actually
677. 01:06:04 do that necessarily. It would make sense. Yeah, it makes sense what you want to do.
678. 01:06:10 All right, chapter 13, increase your surface area for luck. So high agency people become
679. 01:06:16 luckier because they engineer the conditions that make them, you know, put them in that lucky
680. 01:06:22 situation. So the more times you interact with the outside world, the more chance you have to get
681. 01:06:26 lucky. So this is the whole like kind of networking. Also, put yourself in the right environments to
682. 01:06:33 do the things that you want to do. Essential to that would be that you have to know what you want
683. 01:06:37 to do in order to put yourself in those environments. And then you've got to do the research to get
684. 01:06:43 those there. I think this ties fairly well with the user energy in the right way idea. So it's like,
685. 01:06:51 okay, we're not just going to throw spaghetti at every wall. We're going to throw spaghetti at the
686. 01:06:57 walls that we think will make us or get us help us get what we want. Now the thing I don't like,
687. 01:07:03 can I understand what she's doing here? I don't like the idea of luck here, right? Like, yes, I get
688. 01:07:08 that some of this was luck. But I also, you're being strategic, right? And when you're being
689. 01:07:13 strategic, I think it moves more towards planned strategy than it does just random for to it as luck.
690. 01:07:20 That may be me nitpicking the idea of luck versus, versus strategy. But, you know, I'll take that
691. 01:07:25 hit. If you, if your comment for me is, hey, like your, your mince and words here, I get what she's
692. 01:07:31 trying to do here. But I don't like the idea of luck. Like, I think the surface area for something
693. 01:07:38 along the lines of like impact or the surface area for getting what you want. Like, I think
694. 01:07:43 that would be a better framing in my mind. But I get the point that she's trying to make is you
695. 01:07:47 got to get yourself out there, you got yourself around the people who are going to help you achieve
696. 01:07:52 whatever that goal is or help you do the thing that you want to do or become better at the thing
697. 01:07:57 you want to be better at. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. This is why a lot of people
698. 01:08:00 go to MBA programs at certain schools is because they want to be around the same kind of people who
699. 01:08:07 are either starting companies or the CEOs of big companies or whatever it might be. Like,
700. 01:08:11 that's a, it's a natural way that you increase your surface area to get what you want.
701. 01:08:16 Sure. Yeah. That, that makes sense. I don't mind the increase your surface area for luck,
702. 01:08:21 framing for this one. Because I think kind of implicit with this is that it's your success is
703. 01:08:28 not all up to you. You rely on help from other people. And as you mentioned, one of the things I
704. 01:08:35 wrote down here as well is the more times you interact with the outside world, the more chances
705. 01:08:41 you have to get lucky. So essentially, for myself as an introvert, I need to put myself out there
706. 01:08:50 and build relationships, not just with the people who are close to me, but it's why I go to the
707. 01:08:57 conferences. And, you know, I'm going to vidsummit next week as we record this.
708. 01:09:03 That might be the perfect example of this. Okay. Yeah, that might be the perfect example of this.
709. 01:09:08 Yeah, go ahead. Vidsummit in particular is one I actually don't want to go to because it's like
710. 01:09:13 thousands of people. It's huge. And as we record this just two days ago, I got a message from my
711. 01:09:19 booking.com host saying you can't come. So I had a call with the support people. And I booked
712. 01:09:29 this months ago, they confirmed my arrival time, all that kind of stuff now, like nine days before
713. 01:09:34 I'm going to get there. Oh, sorry, you can't come. Well, now all the hotels are like twice as much
714. 01:09:39 as what I was going to pay because it's right before it. And a lot of them are sold out. So talk
715. 01:09:44 to booking.com and like, Oh, yeah, well, if that it really is the case, your your your
716. 01:09:52 booking actually gets gets canceled will help you cover the cost. You know how much they were
717. 01:09:57 actually willing to cover the difference in cost. And I explained all this to the person, like,
718. 01:10:00 this is vidsummit. It's huge. All the hotels are like twice as much now. They will cover an extra
719. 01:10:05 $68 and 47 cents. I was like, you've got to be kidding. Yeah, exactly. So I'm putting it out there
720. 01:10:12 right now. I will never use booking dot com ever again, booking dot heck no, booking dot heck
721. 01:10:21 no. Yeah, it was what are they booking dot? Yeah, or whatever. Yeah, you're like booking dot heck
722. 01:10:26 no. Yeah, that's but but is it but your your point is really well made. Conferences are a
723. 01:10:31 way that you increase your surface area. I mean, you eat so many people with these things and you
724. 01:10:35 never know who you're going to meet and who you're going to sit down and have a sandwich with and
725. 01:10:39 be like, Oh my gosh, this is amazing kind of a thing. Yeah, that's a good point. All right,
726. 01:10:44 let's go to chapter 14. This is the last one in this section. It's find a way. And I like,
727. 01:10:50 I think the key takeaway from this one may not be the same thing she thinks the key takeaway from
728. 01:10:54 this one is but basically if there's something that you're having trouble doing or committing to,
729. 01:11:01 there may be an underlying reason why that's the case. So she asks here try completing this prompt.
730. 01:11:06 The reason it's hard for me to commit to wanting X is and then just let your natural answer come
731. 01:11:12 out of that. So it's like, okay, I really want to write this book. The reason it's hard for me to
732. 01:11:17 commit to writing this book is because and then write all that stuff down. And you may realize like,
733. 01:11:22 it actually has nothing to do with writing the book. It has to do with this other thing that's
734. 01:11:27 coming from left field. And you're like, wait, I didn't even know my subconscious was slowing me
735. 01:11:32 down from actually working on writing the book for the following reasons. So, you know, she goes
736. 01:11:40 further in here, refused to accept your brain's first order response that you can achieve go X
737. 01:11:44 because of restrictions, push through that, go adopt a puzzle solving mindset. So it's like,
738. 01:11:51 basically, don't accept your first response and figure out a way to do the thing that you want to
739. 01:11:56 do. Or I mean, the counter to that is, or it's really not something you want to do and you need
740. 01:12:02 to reevaluate the things that you think you want to do. Yep. Agreed. I hate the metaphor of tying
741. 01:12:13 yourself to the mast here, by the way. Yeah. Yeah. I get the story that it's from, I get the point
742. 01:12:21 that she's making. I wish there was another way to make this though. Important details here that
743. 01:12:29 matter. Commitment's not a matter of feeling committed. It's actually being committed. And she
744. 01:12:37 tells the story of her relationship with her husband, which I loved. Her larger point is that
745. 01:12:43 marriage, her marriage wouldn't have lasted if they'd given themselves an out. The details are a
746. 01:12:50 little bit extreme, I guess. I should have wrote this down. Within a month, they were moving in
747. 01:13:02 together. Within a couple of months, they were deciding they were going to get married. But it
748. 01:13:08 reinforces a belief that I have had for a long time. And my oldest is going away to college this
749. 01:13:16 year. So we've talked a little bit about this. There's sort of this prevailing message in culture
750. 01:13:23 today that like, oh well, I don't feel the love anymore. So the marriage has run its course. Now
751. 01:13:30 it's time to find somebody else because love is a feeling. No, love is the commitment. The reason
752. 01:13:37 that just like Kate here, the reason that Rachel and I are still married is because we haven't given
753. 01:13:44 ourselves an out. And I do believe that once you commit like that, and you're like, there's no
754. 01:13:53 alternative, we're going to make it work, it changes everything. I feel like I could also say that our
755. 01:14:02 marriage wouldn't have lasted if we had given ourselves an out. And I have a very limited sample
756. 01:14:12 size here to base this off of. But I feel like I would draw the same conclusion that Kate did that
757. 01:14:17 our relationship is better than what I would have stumbled into if I would have just gone from
758. 01:14:25 person to person based on how I feel. You get to a level of depth that you can't get to without
759. 01:14:31 having that level of commitment, because there is always going to be a point where you just don't
760. 01:14:37 feel it anymore. So kind of interesting that marriage is the thing that drives home this point,
761. 01:14:43 so so strongly in this personal development book. But I do think it's I do think it's it's
762. 01:14:52 effective. And the whole idea of like a commitment system being built on forcing functions, I think
763. 01:14:57 is a is a good one. Although maybe my forcing functions wouldn't be quite as extreme or severe
764. 01:15:05 as the ones that she would choose to use. Yeah, she I can't remember which ones do you remember
765. 01:15:10 do you write a M down what she chose I remember them being kind of not to. Yeah, but they were
766. 01:15:15 they're pretty aggressive. Her forcing functions. Okay, let's go to section five. This is find your
767. 01:15:20 limits to where we're bringing it home at this point, fifth chapters 15, 16 and 17 tie yourself
768. 01:15:26 to the mast, aim for hyper competence, and then do it yourself. And basically, this is where the
769. 01:15:34 tire self to the the side jumped ahead. Sorry. It's okay. I can't remember though. What's what's
770. 01:15:42 the Greek? The siren song is what? Yeah, whoever ties himself to the mast to get rid of the siren
771. 01:15:48 saw song. She's basically saying do whatever you have to do to not let yourself be, you know,
772. 01:15:56 taken from the path or to not let yourself be distracted from the thing that the commitment,
773. 01:16:03 you know, like you're saying, make the hard line. So you did you shifted that whole chapter up and
774. 01:16:07 I didn't catch you my fault, Mike. I didn't know how I completely missed chapter 14 find a way.
775. 01:16:12 Like I was listening to what you said. And then I like freaked out for a moment like,
776. 01:16:15 Oh, where are we in the outline? And I jumped to the next section. Totally fine. So so we're good.
777. 01:16:20 We're good on that. We're going to we're going to move on to this because I think Mike covered
778. 01:16:23 this this well. Let's go on to 16 aim for hyper competence. Basically, I mean, this one is like,
779. 01:16:31 you want to when you find the thing that you want to do, you find the thing you want to be
780. 01:16:36 have high agency in your goal is to be the best that you can be in that thing.
781. 01:16:43 You know, and like, I don't know, Mike, I guess I just get overwhelmed by this book,
782. 01:16:50 not in like a good way. Like I get overwhelmed by this book because I'm like, okay,
783. 01:16:54 I want to be hyper competent in this thing that like before I was exploring as one of my like
784. 01:17:00 cringe minefield things or this moat. And now like I've advanced so much that I'm going to become
785. 01:17:06 hyper competent in the thing that used to make me cringe or that I was really worried about being
786. 01:17:10 embarrassed for. And I feel like we just went from like one to 11, like just boom, like I mean,
787. 01:17:18 real real fast. I'm not saying that I think trying to become hyper competent is bad.
788. 01:17:23 I think that's really good. Like that's where we want to shoot for shoot for the moon,
789. 01:17:27 right? Be the best that we can be at this thing. But I just don't, I don't know how we got here so
790. 01:17:33 fast, right? And like, and I think what her point is, because the whole section side would find
791. 01:17:38 your limit is if you, if you aim, if you have a low bar, you'll never know what you can reach.
792. 01:17:45 So, okay, I like that principle. Like I like that point. If we aim for hyper competence,
793. 01:17:49 we'll know where our limit is and we'll have to push ourselves to get to that limit.
794. 01:17:54 There you go. Like I think, I think I talked myself into understanding it better, but I still
795. 01:17:58 don't think I like it all that much. Like it, there's something about it that bothers me.
796. 01:18:03 Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the, I'm going to be better at this thing than anybody ever was
797. 01:18:08 mindset. I feel like it's dangerous. I get what she's, what she's saying. And I do think that
798. 01:18:14 she provides both perspectives here, right? Because she's saying, you might be really bad at something,
799. 01:18:20 you should just do it anyways. But then also, like, this one for me is, is a slippery slope,
800. 01:18:27 where I want to be, I want to be careful, you know, I want to love the process, not
801. 01:18:34 try to become excellent at the thing. And the, the story that fits with this is just the running
802. 01:18:40 story when I was running my first half marathon. Ultra short version here, I overtrained, I,
803. 01:18:48 I hurt myself the week before the race, my patella tendon slipped off my kneecap on the side of my
804. 01:18:53 leg. And I had physical therapy after I ran the race anyways for a very long time. That race,
805. 01:19:00 I realized I'm actually not very fast. I finished, like, I met my goal, whatever, but then realized,
806. 01:19:06 like, I'm middle of the pack at best. I'm never going to be an excellent runner. I'm not going to
807. 01:19:12 win any races. So what do I do with that? You know, do I keep setting more goals? Do I keep
808. 01:19:17 finding more races? I couldn't. I was hurt. I had physical therapy ahead of me. So when I finally
809. 01:19:21 could start running again, I learned to love the process. And now I just do it because I like to run,
810. 01:19:26 not because I'm really, really good at it. I think there's a lot of enjoyment to be found from life
811. 01:19:31 and just doing things that you're never going to be really good at. I agree. I agree completely.
812. 01:19:37 I agree. All right. Chapter 17 is do it yourself. She basically talks about the fact that most
813. 01:19:42 people were winging it. Like they're just figuring out as you go, which I completely agree with. I
814. 01:19:47 think there's winging it and then there's winging it with experience. And, you know, do we ever get
815. 01:19:52 off that train of, you know, of winging it? I don't know if we do, but that's okay. Then I think the
816. 01:19:59 real takeaway home or takeaway point for me in this chapter, take a point is that doing it yourself
817. 01:20:04 has two steps. The first is to get curious about something, the problem, the world, the thing you
818. 01:20:10 want to do good at. And then two, ask yourself what the next action you could take is, which comes
819. 01:20:15 back to what we were talking about before, right? Like that crisis counselor kind of thing, right?
820. 01:20:20 So what do I want to get curious about? And then what's the next thing I can do in that? And then
821. 01:20:25 she literally says, repeated until the mountains start moving. And it's like, yeah, I think this
822. 01:20:30 is a really good, like one liner or like little paragraph that's like, listen, get curious,
823. 01:20:37 just do the next thing and just wash rinse repeat, wash rinse repeat, wash rinse repeat. And I like
824. 01:20:42 this take home from chapter 17. I like it as well. She also mentions there's no group of perfectly
825. 01:20:48 wise adults who know exactly what they're doing. So everyone's kind of faking it at some point.
826. 01:20:55 And then you don't need to know in advance how big of an impact you're going to make.
827. 01:21:00 I feel like that is maybe helpful in terms of actually trying some things.
828. 01:21:08 I can look back at coaching now because I've been doing it several years and say that I actually
829. 01:21:14 have had quite an impact in the lives of some of those kids that I've coached. But I didn't realize
830. 01:21:21 I would have that big of an impact at the beginning. And I think that was a good thing. I sort of
831. 01:21:26 stumbled into it and it was rewarding as I discovered it. But if I had gone into it thinking, well,
832. 01:21:32 what's the total impact I can have here? And in either way, you know, if I decided it's really
833. 01:21:37 not that much, maybe I wouldn't have done it. Or maybe if I had in my head, I'm going to
834. 01:21:41 completely change the lives of these these kids and then realize that actually I'm just one voice
835. 01:21:46 that sees them a couple times a week. And they've got other people speaking in their life too,
836. 01:21:50 who are also having an impact. Maybe I would feel discouraged by just not being able to have the
837. 01:21:56 impact that I projected I would either. So I like that. You know, you don't have to have it all
838. 01:22:00 figured out. Yeah, good. All right. So now we're at the conclusion. The conclusion is titled
839. 01:22:07 the God's will offer you chances. Okay, I'm just going to throw this out there. Right. Sorry if I
840. 01:22:13 I hate the title of this, like, absolutely despise the title of this. I think the world will offer
841. 01:22:18 you chances. I'm better with that. Right. Like, I just don't like that we went somehow to like
842. 01:22:23 the gods will offer you chances. I don't know that she thought about it that much, but it really
843. 01:22:28 irks me really bothers me. But basically, I think the premise of it is, you know, be open-minded,
844. 01:22:35 be ready for opportunities to come in your life and be ready to seize those opportunities. So
845. 01:22:40 people who who successfully opportunistic take big leaps that make them progressively more alive.
846. 01:22:47 I think that's true. Right. Like, I think this is a fairly decent conclusion that just kind of says
847. 01:22:54 keep going, keep looking for these opportunities and they will come. Keep going, keep looking for
848. 01:22:58 these opportunities and they will come. But really, I got that's pretty much what I got out of it.
849. 01:23:04 Yeah. So it was intentional, I think that she chose this, this phrasing because there's this
850. 01:23:10 motto. I don't know where she got it. She did say that she has this tattooed on her arm.
851. 01:23:17 And she does say that I forget how she said it was like in a moment of of like not in her right
852. 01:23:26 mind, she got this tattoo is kind of how she framed it. But the gods will offer you chances,
853. 01:23:30 take them, know them. Like that's the whole whole phrase. Oh, I didn't remember that
854. 01:23:35 tool. You just said that. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know where the origination of that,
855. 01:23:40 that really is. But I get, I get what you're not a huge fan of it. The, the, I actually think
856. 01:23:47 this is a really effective conclusion though. Not that that phrase was, was really great. But
857. 01:23:52 there's an idea in here about the call to adventure from the hero's journey. And in the movie logic
858. 01:24:00 and the storybook and things like that, the call to adventure is always like, oh, it's
859. 01:24:06 irresistible. I have to do this, this thing. And she says that in real life, the call to adventure
860. 01:24:12 isn't always irresistible. Sometimes it will make you uncomfortable. So it's, uh, makes it much less.
861. 01:24:20 I don't know. Uh, yeah, it's it's not a, it's kind of, we're pointing out that life is not,
862. 01:24:25 you know, a storybook. It's not going to be clean and convenient. And sometimes you're
863. 01:24:30 going to have to dig for it. It's not going to be glamorous. I think that's a really
864. 01:24:36 effective way to, uh, to, and to close up this, this book, especially given the whole like title
865. 01:24:42 and premise, like you can just do things. It'd be so easy to just drift into like, yeah,
866. 01:24:46 anything is possible. And like she keeps it pretty grounded, especially at the end.
867. 01:24:51 All right. So that's, that wraps up. You can just do things. Let's talk about action items
868. 01:24:56 from this book. I mentioned before I have one. And that action item is to make a ridiculous
869. 01:25:01 request once a week. Now I think for the refined action item, I'm going to make a list of ridiculous
870. 01:25:11 requests to make once a week, right? Because I think the goal here is for me to think about
871. 01:25:17 ridiculous requests and then I'll be more confident to make those ridiculous requests as we go. So I'm,
872. 01:25:22 I'm slightly modifying that. I want to, I want a list of ridiculous requests because I like this
873. 01:25:26 idea. I like the premise of what ridiculous thing could I ask for? And then what does ridiculous mean
874. 01:25:32 to me? That's kind of what I want to learn from this is what do I think is a ridiculous request.
875. 01:25:35 Nice. So that's mine. Mike, what do you got? All right. So I wrote a, I mentioned I want to
876. 01:25:41 write out my manifesto. The other thing that I wrote down is I do want to revisit my Enneagram
877. 01:25:46 results. I just want to look at them again because I have them somewhere on my computer. I want to
878. 01:25:51 look at it and see if my, you know, I kind of talked a little bit negatively about it in the,
879. 01:25:57 the episode. I have a feeling that's what's going to happen again once I read through that.
880. 01:26:00 But maybe not. Maybe I'll be like, Oh, actually, this was pretty accurate. And
881. 01:26:05 yeah, then I'll talk about that next time and follow up, I guess, if that's the case. But
882. 01:26:09 nice. Nice. All right. So we've got those two style and rating. It's my book. I'm going to go
883. 01:26:16 style and rating first. Oh, Mike. So I like the gist of this book. I like the idea of pushing us to
884. 01:26:27 do more, to be more agentic, to think about some of the common pitfalls and some of the common flaws
885. 01:26:35 that we have when it approaches these things. I like that. I didn't mind the writing style,
886. 01:26:45 the stories were not like really gripping to me. Like, I understood them. They, they were using an
887. 01:26:51 example. Didn't really, you know, pull me in one way or another from a, you know, kind of interest
888. 01:26:59 standpoint. Overall structure was, was okay. I'm left feeling with this book like, meh. Okay.
889. 01:27:08 Like that's just like the best way I can describe my style and rating for this book was just like,
890. 01:27:13 okay, I can tell you that I don't think I'm going to remember much of this book. Like,
891. 01:27:18 I really don't think that like you get me a week from now, two weeks from now, three weeks from now,
892. 01:27:23 I'm going to go, Hey, do you remember that you can just do things? Like, do you remember what she
893. 01:27:27 said in that one chapter? I don't, I can't really put my finger on why that is because like, I think
894. 01:27:33 there were some of the principles that were really, you know, well stated and they, I think they would
895. 01:27:39 have a lot of value. I just don't think this one's going to resonate with me long term. I don't think
896. 01:27:44 it's going to stay around in a long term. So with all of that being said, um, I, okay, I guess I'll
897. 01:27:52 go a little bit more. I thought it was a little long, right? Like, I didn't think it needed to be
898. 01:27:56 quite this long. I have no idea how many pages this was. I remember at one point telling Katie,
899. 01:28:01 I'm tired of reading this book. Like, I want this book to be over. I, I, you know, in any time I get
900. 01:28:06 that inclination, it's usually not a good sign for styling rating. So the fact that there were
901. 01:28:13 things in this book that have merit that are valuable that I think people can learn from
902. 01:28:19 and I think they can become more agentic and they can do more stuff and achieve better goals,
903. 01:28:24 I think that's true. But because I didn't really care for the book all that much and I don't think
904. 01:28:29 it's going to have that much of an impact on me is a three star book. I'm going to give us a three out
905. 01:28:33 of five. Um, uh, Mike, what do you think about this book? What's your rating going to be?
906. 01:28:40 Uh, interesting. Um, I am torn. I think, uh, it was 192 pages, by the way, and I actually think
907. 01:28:52 it was not a long book, but it did feel longer than it was. I could have swore it was, I could
908. 01:28:59 have swore it was 320, right? Like I mean, we've gone from a quick 340 page book to a long 192 page
909. 01:29:07 book. The, the, the science and mystery of that will forever, you know, dumb found me because this
910. 01:29:14 book felt like it was 350 pages long. Like it felt really long. Yeah. I mean, just looking at the
911. 01:29:20 sections here, section one, wake up and move section two, be willing to look stupid. Section three,
912. 01:29:25 get out of your lane, section four, walk through walls, section five, find your limits. I mean,
913. 01:29:31 there's no way we need 17 chapters for this. You could make the argument that it could be those
914. 01:29:38 five chapters. Yeah. But as we talked about the pro show with ideal book format, you know,
915. 01:29:44 sometimes the short chapters are actually better. So I'm not going to hold that against her. Um,
916. 01:29:48 I think it was a fairly entertaining read. Uh, I did like you feel like, okay, I'm done with this
917. 01:29:54 one now for a while. The strongest parts to me were the introduction and the conclusion.
918. 01:30:01 Everything in between. Um, I, I, I don't know, there's, there's good stuff there, but I think just
919. 01:30:07 personality wise, um, I don't think it, it really jived with, with my vibe. Um, but I'm gonna, so I'm,
920. 01:30:15 I'm basing it off of my experience, but also not trying to hold that against her. I, I do think
921. 01:30:21 this is a good book that I would probably recommend overall. And for the right person, I think this
922. 01:30:28 could be an absolutely life changing book. Um, so I will give it four stars, but I totally understand
923. 01:30:36 why, uh, why you gave it three. And there's a little bit of a tendency, just personality wise
924. 01:30:41 for me to, uh, to do the same, but I think I'm going to try and look past that, just look at the,
925. 01:30:46 the material, the questions that she's sharing, you know, things like that. I think those could
926. 01:30:49 honestly be helpful. Good. Good. Good. So let's put, you can just do things on the shelf. Mike,
927. 01:30:55 what's our next book? Next book is The Meaning of Your Life by Arthur Brooks. Um, we've read
928. 01:31:03 Arthur Brooks before. This is the, the new one, uh, interesting follow up to this one, perhaps.
929. 01:31:09 I haven't started it yet, but, uh, I think it might take some of this stuff, maybe in a little bit
930. 01:31:14 different direction. We'll see. And after that, we are going to be reading Angela Duckworth's new
931. 01:31:20 book. It's called Situated. Uh, it's, I believe, and Mike loosely confirmed this. I think he might
932. 01:31:27 have confirmed this to me. I think this is her second book after grit. So she got super famous
933. 01:31:33 with, with selling grit. Um, and then this is her next book, but the subline in this one is find the
934. 01:31:38 people and places that bring out your best. So situate yourself with the people in the places
935. 01:31:44 that bring out your best. Mike, do you have, do you have any gap books for us right now? I do not.
936. 01:31:51 I am still trying to get caught up with the move, but hopefully next time around, I will have a
937. 01:31:58 gap book for you. Nice. Nice. I also do not have any gap books right now. Um, I've got gap projects.
938. 01:32:04 There are multiple of them that are in, in the works right now, but they are preventing me from
939. 01:32:08 reading anything else other than the required book that we will talk about in our next episode. So
940. 01:32:15 no gap books there. Uh, for those of you who are pro members, we just want to thank you so much.
941. 01:32:20 Uh, we talked about the structure of books in our pro show. So for those who are interested in
942. 01:32:26 learning more about that, um, we have a longer ad free pro show. We had a segment on there that,
943. 01:32:32 you know, whatever Mike and I decide that we're, we're interested in talking about, uh, for that
944. 01:32:36 time. Uh, we have a bootleg that releases right after the recording. So it's usually about one
945. 01:32:41 to two weeks early, depending on, on when we record. There's a bookworm wallpaper that you get access
946. 01:32:46 to. Mike has shared his reading masterclass with everybody, uh, to kind of just give him, uh, his
947. 01:32:51 perspective on, on reading. It's seven dollars a month. If you're interested in joining us, it just
948. 01:32:56 helps us run the back end of the show, uh, kind of keep the lights on. If you go to bookworm.fm/pro,
949. 01:33:02 that'll take you right there. And we really appreciate everybody who's willing to support
950. 01:33:06 the show that way. And if you are reading along with us, pick up the meeting of your life by Arthur
951. 01:33:12 Brooks and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.