32: The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli

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1. 00:00:00 -Do you want a Yeti?
2. 00:00:01 -I am.
3. 00:00:01 This is my portable podcasting studio.
4. 00:00:07 -Okay.
5. 00:00:07 So that means you are mobile.
6. 00:00:09 Where are you?
7. 00:00:10 -I am in Door County, sister Bay, to be precise.
8. 00:00:15 -Okay, vacation?
9. 00:00:17 -Mm, kind of working vacation.
10. 00:00:20 -Okay.
11. 00:00:21 -My parents have a place in sister Bay,
12. 00:00:23 and I can work from anywhere.
13. 00:00:26 So we came up Sunday night,
14. 00:00:29 and we just been hanging out up here,
15. 00:00:31 and I've been working remote.
16. 00:00:34 Even funny anecdote about this,
17. 00:00:38 sister Bay, which is about 800 people,
18. 00:00:40 actually has better internet than I can buy
19. 00:00:43 in Nina, Wisconsin, where I live.
20. 00:00:45 So this is better internet than my house,
21. 00:00:49 even though Nina is probably,
22. 00:00:52 gosh, I don't know, 20 times the size?
23. 00:00:56 No, not 20 times.
24. 00:00:58 Yeah, 20 times the size.
25. 00:01:01 Wow.
26. 00:01:02 -And you have pretty good internet at home.
27. 00:01:04 I feel like--
28. 00:01:05 -Yes, it's okay.
29. 00:01:06 Usually when I record, I'm at the co-working space,
30. 00:01:08 which is in Appleton.
31. 00:01:09 It's a little bit bigger town,
32. 00:01:10 and that actually has a fiber connection.
33. 00:01:12 -Right, right.
34. 00:01:13 'Cause I remember you telling me
35. 00:01:14 that you had a pretty good data connection
36. 00:01:16 at your co-working space,
37. 00:01:20 but I guess I was comparing it to that.
38. 00:01:23 So your co-working space,
39. 00:01:25 in comparison to your house,
40. 00:01:28 is there a big difference in speed there?
41. 00:01:31 -Upload, yeah.
42. 00:01:32 I mean, the fastest I can get at home is five up,
43. 00:01:36 but at the co-working space, it's 50 down, 50 up.
44. 00:01:40 -Oh, wow.
45. 00:01:41 See, everybody looks at the download speeds,
46. 00:01:43 but--
47. 00:01:44 -Doesn't matter.
48. 00:01:45 - --it has to be a master's,
49. 00:01:45 and we do--
50. 00:01:46 like, we're uploading video files and stuff.
51. 00:01:49 They're big files, so upload speed is very important.
52. 00:01:53 -Definitely.
53. 00:01:55 -Right.
54. 00:01:56 I'm gonna--
55. 00:01:57 you're gonna have to cut this part out,
56. 00:01:58 but I'm gonna have to move my microphone up a little bit
57. 00:02:00 'cause I can't hunch over the entire episode.
58. 00:02:02 There we go.
59. 00:02:04 -Hmm, maybe I should leave this in.
60. 00:02:05 [laughs]
61. 00:02:09 I created a makeshift standing desk.
62. 00:02:12 -A makeshift standing desk.
63. 00:02:13 Now, see, right before we started,
64. 00:02:15 because I know that you record standing up, right?
65. 00:02:18 You like to stand up and talk.
66. 00:02:21 I always sit at my desk with--
67. 00:02:26 I have a Herman Miller Airon that I use for a desk chair.
68. 00:02:31 Super nice chair.
69. 00:02:31 Love them.
70. 00:02:32 Crazy expensive.
71. 00:02:34 Don't-- yeah.
72. 00:02:36 OK, we're not gonna go down that train.
73. 00:02:37 But I have debated trying to find a way to raise my microphone
74. 00:02:42 so that I can stand and podcast.
75. 00:02:45 I don't know if that would change the way
76. 00:02:46 that I have conversations on a mic or not.
77. 00:02:50 I know a lot of people seem to think it makes a big difference.
78. 00:02:53 I've never tried it, so I can't speak to that in any way.
79. 00:02:56 But you seem to like it.
80. 00:02:57 -I do.
81. 00:02:58 Now, maybe listeners to Bookworm
82. 00:03:02 might think a little bit differently,
83. 00:03:04 but I am much more animated when I'm standing up.
84. 00:03:06 [laughs]
85. 00:03:08 And that's something that I've had to learn and develop
86. 00:03:10 as I've done podcasting is--
87. 00:03:13 and it just comes from recording
88. 00:03:15 and then hearing the episodes after they go live.
89. 00:03:20 When I first started, it was very, very monotone,
90. 00:03:23 and honestly very boring to listen to,
91. 00:03:25 so I'm hoping that that is not the case anymore.
92. 00:03:28 [laughs]
93. 00:03:30 But one of the things that I do to kind of trick myself
94. 00:03:33 to being a little bit more animated is I don't normally do this,
95. 00:03:37 but when I podcast, I try to talk with my hands.
96. 00:03:40 So having a microphone on a desk, though,
97. 00:03:43 this could be tricky.
98. 00:03:44 I might accidentally whack the microphone a few times.
99. 00:03:48 Well, don't hit the mic because then I have to edit more.
100. 00:03:51 [laughs]
101. 00:03:52 So that would mean that if I stand up,
102. 00:03:56 well, you normally record--
103. 00:03:57 like you have a boom stand for your mic,
104. 00:04:00 so that way you're not whacking it.
105. 00:04:02 Okay, that makes sense.
106. 00:04:03 Okay.
107. 00:04:05 I may try this the next time we record or something.
108. 00:04:08 I don't know.
109. 00:04:08 I have to find a way to mount it
110. 00:04:10 because I'm currently mounting my boom stand.
111. 00:04:13 It's not on my desk,
112. 00:04:15 but it's attached to a shelf
113. 00:04:17 that's the same height as my desk,
114. 00:04:19 and I can't get it up high enough to stand for it.
115. 00:04:21 I tried.
116. 00:04:22 So I would need to do something,
117. 00:04:25 like mount something to the wall
118. 00:04:26 so that I can then mount the mic to the thing
119. 00:04:28 I mounted to the wall.
120. 00:04:30 It's not as simple as just raise it up.
121. 00:04:33 So I want to try this at some point.
122. 00:04:36 Yeah, I have an electric standing desk
123. 00:04:39 and it's awesome because you can program the heights,
124. 00:04:42 so I have one for sitting, one for standing,
125. 00:04:44 and I don't know why,
126. 00:04:45 but I absolutely love hitting the button here
127. 00:04:47 and go, "Mmm."
128. 00:04:49 (laughs)
129. 00:04:50 This is what you do in your breaks, right?
130. 00:04:51 You just raise your desk and lower it back and forth.
131. 00:04:53 I'm gonna take advantage of that harvest seven year warranty.
132. 00:04:56 (laughs)
133. 00:04:58 See if I can get this thing to wear out.
134. 00:05:00 That I can get a new one.
135. 00:05:02 Let's go through our follow up.
136. 00:05:04 We've got some fun things here.
137. 00:05:05 You put on Roger Bustle's poetry.
138. 00:05:08 I haven't looked at this.
139. 00:05:09 I'm gonna click the link now.
140. 00:05:10 Yeah, so we mentioned this in the last episode,
141. 00:05:14 and I dropped the ball and didn't get you the link.
142. 00:05:17 So I wanted to just throw that in here
143. 00:05:21 because Roger listened to the episode
144. 00:05:23 and was pretty thrilled that we gave him a shout out.
145. 00:05:25 So here's another one, Roger,
146. 00:05:26 and we're actually gonna include the link this time.
147. 00:05:27 (laughs)
148. 00:05:28 It's totally my fault because I didn't get it to you right away
149. 00:05:33 and then was kind of surprised
150. 00:05:35 when the episode came out a few days later.
151. 00:05:36 So good job, Joe, I'm turning that one around.
152. 00:05:39 (laughs)
153. 00:05:40 So for the listeners, I'm usually quite slow
154. 00:05:43 at getting episodes released.
155. 00:05:45 I think Mike's probably used to my one and a half week turnaround
156. 00:05:49 after we record,
157. 00:05:51 and that one I got out in like two days.
158. 00:05:53 So I will say that's my fault more than Mike's fault.
159. 00:05:57 (laughs)
160. 00:05:58 Well, I did honestly, I will admit that I forgot
161. 00:06:02 about the link.
162. 00:06:03 I probably would have remembered it at some point,
163. 00:06:05 maybe when I saw you at Macstock,
164. 00:06:07 and I think that's why you turned it around so quick.
165. 00:06:09 Right, 'cause I knew that we were gonna be seeing each other
166. 00:06:13 at Macstock and I wanted that one out before.
167. 00:06:17 We saw each other, that way we would potentially,
168. 00:06:20 'cause we potentially were going to record at Macstock
169. 00:06:22 but it didn't work out.
170. 00:06:23 We always plan to do that but it needs, yeah.
171. 00:06:26 So we get busy and yeah, it just doesn't work out,
172. 00:06:31 I don't think, but it's something that--
173. 00:06:33 Planning fallacy.
174. 00:06:34 Yeah, there's one of these,
175. 00:06:36 we're gonna jump into the book here quick.
176. 00:06:38 So there's a lot of reasons that we just don't get there,
177. 00:06:42 but we always intend to, but yeah.
178. 00:06:45 So anyway, I got this one out,
179. 00:06:48 the last one out in a couple days,
180. 00:06:50 and Mike didn't have a chance to send me this.
181. 00:06:52 So I'm now looking through Roger's poetry.
182. 00:06:56 I like this stuff, it's good.
183. 00:06:59 I know, that's really good.
184. 00:07:00 That's why I wanna include the link to it.
185. 00:07:01 It's not just somebody who's like,
186. 00:07:04 "Yeah, I'm gonna post something."
187. 00:07:06 Like, I'm really impressed by the quality of this poetry.
188. 00:07:10 I could not do this.
189. 00:07:12 I played around with poetry at one point.
190. 00:07:15 There is a reason I don't publish it anywhere.
191. 00:07:18 (laughs)
192. 00:07:20 I don't ever plan to do this.
193. 00:07:22 Go Roger, well done.
194. 00:07:24 So next one here, speaking of MaxTock,
195. 00:07:27 and I just threw this on here,
196. 00:07:29 so I'm kinda putting you on the spot.
197. 00:07:31 You are putting me on the spot,
198. 00:07:32 I realize this as I'm finishing up
199. 00:07:35 this conversation on Roger.
200. 00:07:37 Oh, Mike threw this in here, okay.
201. 00:07:38 Yeah, so we were at MaxTock
202. 00:07:40 and I spoke at MaxTock
203. 00:07:42 and I gave a deeper dive,
204. 00:07:44 both of them on the topic of email.
205. 00:07:46 And since we talked about email
206. 00:07:47 multiple times on Bookworm,
207. 00:07:49 I feel like we have to have at least one takeaway
208. 00:07:53 that you got from either of my talks at MaxTock.
209. 00:07:56 So here's the thing I got.
210. 00:07:58 There's, I will tell you,
211. 00:08:00 there's one big thing that's made a pretty big impact
212. 00:08:03 on my email habits,
213. 00:08:04 because I get a lot of email.
214. 00:08:06 We've talked about this before.
215. 00:08:07 I did some things,
216. 00:08:08 it cut back on my email,
217. 00:08:09 then I did some more client work
218. 00:08:10 and got more into that,
219. 00:08:11 which means my email started to get heavy again.
220. 00:08:15 So despite all of my work to make sure email
221. 00:08:18 doesn't bombard me,
222. 00:08:19 I'm still bombarded by email.
223. 00:08:21 So I have learned that I can't say that I like email,
224. 00:08:26 I really don't like going through email,
225. 00:08:28 I don't like the process of processing it
226. 00:08:30 to use the same word twice there.
227. 00:08:32 But I do know that there's a very specific pattern
228. 00:08:38 that you should go through when you're doing email.
229. 00:08:40 And whenever I listen to you,
230. 00:08:41 my talk about email flow and how all that should work,
231. 00:08:46 I have followed that for a long time.
232. 00:08:48 So it's great to have the confirmation
233. 00:08:49 that I'm doing the right thing
234. 00:08:51 from an Asian efficiency professional here.
235. 00:08:53 - Comformation bias.
236. 00:08:55 - There you go.
237. 00:08:56 So I really appreciated the confirmation piece there,
238. 00:09:01 'cause I feel better about myself,
239. 00:09:02 'cause that's the way our cognitive biases work.
240. 00:09:06 But in the process,
241. 00:09:08 one of the things that you mentioned offhand, I think,
242. 00:09:12 'cause you didn't really dive into it
243. 00:09:13 and much detail was the inverse sorting,
244. 00:09:17 so that you've got the oldest at the top.
245. 00:09:19 And it seems like a lot of people don't do this.
246. 00:09:22 I have wanted to do this for a long time,
247. 00:09:24 but I've used Gmail for a long time.
248. 00:09:26 And I talked about a few episodes ago now on WIMS@Work
249. 00:09:30 that I moved away from Gmail over to Apple Mail,
250. 00:09:35 which a lot of people really didn't like
251. 00:09:37 and sent me emails about,
252. 00:09:38 which is great and interesting at the same time,
253. 00:09:41 because, okay, so long story short,
254. 00:09:44 the only reason I made that shift was because of Touch Bar,
255. 00:09:48 which I know a lot of people don't care for, love it,
256. 00:09:50 so you guys can just, you send me the Haiti Mail
257. 00:09:54 if you want on that, I still like Touch Bar,
258. 00:09:56 you're not gonna convince me otherwise.
259. 00:09:57 But I realized in the process of using Apple Mail
260. 00:10:02 as compared to, as the in conjunction with Touch Bar
261. 00:10:06 that it works a lot like Gmail with the single keystrokes.
262. 00:10:10 You can set up the Touch Bar in order to enable that functionality.
263. 00:10:14 Well, I was considering a move to Mailmate per mic,
264. 00:10:19 and I downloaded Mailmate, I was trying it
265. 00:10:22 'cause it's the one that Mike likes to use,
266. 00:10:24 and I figured if Mike is using it, hmm,
267. 00:10:27 maybe I should consider this,
268. 00:10:29 but I didn't follow through with that, Mike,
269. 00:10:34 so that's not the one thing,
270. 00:10:36 but it did at least prompt me to explore Apple Mail a little bit,
271. 00:10:39 and I realized you can inverse sort in Apple Mail now.
272. 00:10:43 I did not know that until I started trying to figure out
273. 00:10:46 how I could do it, and it's built in.
274. 00:10:48 I just had to turn it on.
275. 00:10:51 Nice.
276. 00:10:52 So I did do that, and it means the old stuff showed up at the top,
277. 00:10:57 and I didn't realize that I was holding things in my inbox,
278. 00:11:00 so between those two, I'm getting better at email, Mike,
279. 00:11:03 so thank you for that.
280. 00:11:05 Sweet, one step at a time.
281. 00:11:06 So there you go, there's my one thing from MaxDoc
282. 00:11:10 from your talk, well done, sir.
283. 00:11:11 Now, I should point out, Mike did something at MaxDoc
284. 00:11:14 that kind of caught some people off guard,
285. 00:11:17 because when you're giving talks,
286. 00:11:19 especially about Mac computers,
287. 00:11:21 it's very tempting to want to do like a live demonstration
288. 00:11:26 of a specific application,
289. 00:11:28 and a few people tried to do this.
290. 00:11:31 Some of that is dependent on getting a good Wi-Fi signal,
291. 00:11:35 which there were issues with this year at MaxDoc,
292. 00:11:38 and it has a lot of problems
293. 00:11:42 if you try to just play a recorded video.
294. 00:11:45 So if you're giving a talk
295. 00:11:47 and you're going to do something like a live demo,
296. 00:11:48 you need to do something like what Mike did,
297. 00:11:50 which was to record the demo as a screencast,
298. 00:11:54 and then break said screencast up into little bits
299. 00:11:57 such that you can advance it as you want.
300. 00:12:00 Mike did a very good job with this, well done, sir.
301. 00:12:02 So it was very interesting to watch
302. 00:12:04 because you were able to take that,
303. 00:12:07 what would have been a very difficult screencast
304. 00:12:09 to do a voice over on live and get it to work perfectly.
305. 00:12:14 I know there were a few people that boasted
306. 00:12:16 about this afterwards, Mike, that were sitting there.
307. 00:12:18 They missed out on like what you were talking about
308. 00:12:21 with email because they were so caught up
309. 00:12:23 and how is he doing that?
310. 00:12:25 Like that is, what is he doing?
311. 00:12:27 So yeah, there was a few folks that were very impressed
312. 00:12:29 and I was too, so well done.
313. 00:12:31 Cool, yeah, just a little bit more description, I guess,
314. 00:12:34 on exactly what I did for anyone who wants
315. 00:12:36 to steal the strategy.
316. 00:12:38 Like Jodit said, I recorded the video on screen flow
317. 00:12:41 of like getting notifications, things like that,
318. 00:12:44 and then I cut it up into tiny videos
319. 00:12:48 and then placed those videos in a keynote presentation
320. 00:12:51 on separate slides, which autoplayed
321. 00:12:53 when you loaded the slide.
322. 00:12:55 So that meant that while I was presenting,
323. 00:12:57 I didn't have to be at my computer even.
324. 00:12:59 I had the clicker and every time I hit the forward arrow
325. 00:13:02 on the clicker or the forward button on the clicker,
326. 00:13:05 then it would play the next piece,
327. 00:13:07 but on the screen behind me, it just showed my screen.
328. 00:13:11 And so it would hold the last frame of the video,
329. 00:13:14 my mouse in a certain position,
330. 00:13:16 and then I'd pick up the video there on the next one.
331. 00:13:19 And it looked like I was controlling everything
332. 00:13:23 with the clicker, but I wasn't.
333. 00:13:25 I was just playing a bunch of little videos
334. 00:13:27 with the spacing so that I could narrate over them.
335. 00:13:31 Does that, does that make sense?
336. 00:13:33 - It makes sense to me, but I got to see it behind the scenes.
337. 00:13:36 So that happens, but it was interesting.
338. 00:13:41 I hadn't thought to do something like that.
339. 00:13:43 I don't do screencasts live like that really ever,
340. 00:13:47 but if I ever need to, you can be sure I'm stealing this one.
341. 00:13:51 - Yeah, so what that allowed me to do is like,
342. 00:13:55 there's one spot in particular where I wanted a notification
343. 00:13:58 to play at the exact right time with the sound,
344. 00:14:01 and I was able to trigger that with the clicker
345. 00:14:03 rather than sending the email and waiting
346. 00:14:06 sometimes five seconds, sometimes five minutes
347. 00:14:08 for the email to show up and then the notification to play
348. 00:14:11 and having to sit there be like,
349. 00:14:12 okay, just wait for it, wait for it.
350. 00:14:14 - Yeah, and that was the piece that really confused people
351. 00:14:17 because they were like, how did he,
352. 00:14:19 'cause there were a couple of folks that thought
353. 00:14:21 you were actually doing the live demo,
354. 00:14:23 and they could not figure out how you had triggered
355. 00:14:26 the notification to come exactly when you wanted.
356. 00:14:29 There was a few folks in front of me that were like,
357. 00:14:30 look at each other, like, what?
358. 00:14:33 They were so confused, it was great.
359. 00:14:34 - That's funny.
360. 00:14:35 - So that was Max Talk, I enjoyed it.
361. 00:14:39 It was a good time, I like Max Talk.
362. 00:14:42 - And if you like Max or Apple Things,
363. 00:14:45 you should come to Max Talk next year, dear listener.
364. 00:14:49 - And we can hang out, like we can meet each other,
365. 00:14:52 it'd be fun.
366. 00:14:53 We'll talk about books at a max conference.
367. 00:14:55 (laughing)
368. 00:14:58 - All right, then I've got a whole bunch here.
369. 00:15:01 - Yeah.
370. 00:15:02 - You're not gonna be able to hold me accountable too
371. 00:15:04 because I don't know how to quantify these necessarily.
372. 00:15:07 I'm not tracking every time I don't use a power base, no.
373. 00:15:10 (laughing)
374. 00:15:11 But just running through these real quickly,
375. 00:15:13 these are the things I wrote down from last time.
376. 00:15:16 I wanted to show respect to other people before responding.
377. 00:15:18 I wanted to not use power base nose.
378. 00:15:21 I wanted to not use nose without proposing a yes.
379. 00:15:24 I wanted to use positive framing when proposing a yes.
380. 00:15:26 And I wanted to use, I would prefer not to.
381. 00:15:29 So I can tell you that progress has been made,
382. 00:15:32 but I can also tell you that I have not used
383. 00:15:34 I would prefer not to yet.
384. 00:15:37 And that probably means that I'm not saying no enough,
385. 00:15:41 but I don't know that for sure.
386. 00:15:44 I feel like in the last couple weeks,
387. 00:15:46 even couple months, I've done a pretty decent job
388. 00:15:50 of editing the things that I am committed to
389. 00:15:53 and the things that I am doing now really are the right things.
390. 00:15:58 And so I kind of think that partly this has kind of been
391. 00:16:03 set in motion before we read this book.
392. 00:16:04 And so I haven't had the opportunity to use these
393. 00:16:08 in practice as much as I maybe would have, you know,
394. 00:16:12 six months ago.
395. 00:16:14 But yeah, I do think that my mindset has shifted specifically
396. 00:16:21 the one about showing respect to other people before responding.
397. 00:16:24 Like that one really hit me.
398. 00:16:26 And I try to every single request that I get
399. 00:16:30 have that different mindset where it's not just like,
400. 00:16:33 well, no, I can't do that.
401. 00:16:34 Example, the other day, I'm in Door County.
402. 00:16:37 So I am two hours from home and I got a text message
403. 00:16:41 from somebody who isn't necessarily like a really close friend,
404. 00:16:45 kind of an acquaintance.
405. 00:16:45 It goes to my church, like we're friends,
406. 00:16:48 but we don't hang out, that sort of thing.
407. 00:16:50 And he was asking if he could get a ride down to Oshkosh.
408. 00:16:54 And it'd be real easy for me to just be like,
409. 00:16:55 well, no, I'm not around.
410. 00:16:57 Sorry.
411. 00:16:59 But I caught myself, I shouldn't even say I caught myself.
412. 00:17:03 I noticed that like I approached that text message
413. 00:17:06 different than I would have in the past.
414. 00:17:08 Like, I honestly felt for this guy and was trying to figure out
415. 00:17:11 a way that like, oh, do I know anybody in the Appleton area
416. 00:17:14 that could give this guy a ride down to Oshkosh.
417. 00:17:16 And so I consider that a win, even though from his perspective,
418. 00:17:21 I wasn't able to help him out.
419. 00:17:23 Right.
420. 00:17:23 I think that over time, like there are going to be definitely
421. 00:17:27 more positive outcomes from this.
422. 00:17:31 Yeah, I can see that there's a lot of value in thinking
423. 00:17:34 through how do I deliver a no in a good way.
424. 00:17:38 I do it with clients all the time.
425. 00:17:40 I kind of hate doing it with clients all the time,
426. 00:17:42 but it's a good thing to do it with clients all the time.
427. 00:17:45 So like, OK, I need to make sure that they know one,
428. 00:17:51 that I'm trying to help them.
429. 00:17:53 Two, I'm the wrong person to help them.
430. 00:17:55 And three, where they should go from there, which is exactly
431. 00:17:59 what my follow up was, is trying to use the yes, no, yes.
432. 00:18:03 Every time a big decision needs a no.
433. 00:18:05 And it's something I have found is most important in my client
434. 00:18:11 relationships whenever I need to tell them no on a specific thing,
435. 00:18:16 like take, for example, I have one in particular right now
436. 00:18:19 that wants-- and I don't know why certain people do this.
437. 00:18:22 They want to dictate the way that I'm storing data
438. 00:18:25 for their plugin, for say, discourse.
439. 00:18:28 And if they want that level of detail,
440. 00:18:32 I typically need to find a very strong way to say, no,
441. 00:18:37 I do this for a living.
442. 00:18:38 I know what I'm talking about.
443. 00:18:40 This is the way it should happen.
444. 00:18:41 I'm a discourse expert.
445. 00:18:43 Yes, I am a professional at this.
446. 00:18:46 Please stop arguing with me on this.
447. 00:18:48 Unless you are one of the top data analysts in the world,
448. 00:18:50 you should not be arguing with me on this.
449. 00:18:53 And if you're one of the top data analysts in the world,
450. 00:18:55 you are likely not going to employ my services in this scenario.
451. 00:18:59 You would simply do it yourself.
452. 00:19:01 So let's say no here.
453. 00:19:05 Right.
454. 00:19:05 Those are entertaining conversations.
455. 00:19:07 Yeah, I feel like if I was still doing client work,
456. 00:19:09 I would probably have a lot more opportunities
457. 00:19:11 to practice this stuff.
458. 00:19:12 But I'm glad that I'm not.
459. 00:19:14 I can pass them on to you if you want.
460. 00:19:16 I'm good.
461. 00:19:17 You could pose as my admin that says no.
462. 00:19:21 I will pass.
463. 00:19:22 But thanks.
464. 00:19:24 I'd prefer not to jump.
465. 00:19:25 Just do.
466. 00:19:27 There you go.
467. 00:19:30 All right, we've been alluding to our book for the day.
468. 00:19:32 Why don't you introduce it for us?
469. 00:19:33 Sure.
470. 00:19:34 This is The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf DeBelly.
471. 00:19:37 And I probably slaughtered that name and I apologize.
472. 00:19:40 But this is a book all about cognitive biases.
473. 00:19:44 And it's really laid out, interestingly,
474. 00:19:46 because every chapter, I think, is exactly three pages.
475. 00:19:50 I don't think I saw one that was longer when that was short.
476. 00:19:53 Right.
477. 00:19:53 They're like two and a half, three every single time.
478. 00:19:56 Yep.
479. 00:19:56 But there are 100 mini chapters, each one covering
480. 00:20:00 a different cognitive bias.
481. 00:20:03 And so in this episode, what we're going to do
482. 00:20:05 is something a little bit different.
483. 00:20:06 We're not going to try and encapsulate
484. 00:20:07 the thoughts of the entire book, because it's impossible to do.
485. 00:20:12 We're also not going to go through all the cognitive bias.
486. 00:20:14 We're truly biased.
487. 00:20:16 Like, everything is biased.
488. 00:20:17 I can't control anything.
489. 00:20:19 Yep, exactly.
490. 00:20:21 So we're not going to go through all 99 of them either.
491. 00:20:24 We're going to pick some of our favorites.
492. 00:20:26 And then you've got a couple--
493. 00:20:28 or actually one specific talking point, which
494. 00:20:30 was something that I was thinking about the entire time also,
495. 00:20:33 is like, where is the line of the ethical use of these biases
496. 00:20:36 when it comes to selling and marketing?
497. 00:20:38 And that is maybe a niche discussion
498. 00:20:43 off of this general topic of cognitive biases.
499. 00:20:45 But given what we do for a living,
500. 00:20:49 I think it's very important.
501. 00:20:51 Well, it was interesting to me that going through this,
502. 00:20:56 I work with clients and I work on my own projects.
503. 00:20:59 And 99% of the time, that is all online business-ish.
504. 00:21:06 The 1% is cases where I'm helping someone set up
505. 00:21:08 like a point of sale system in their brick and mortar.
506. 00:21:13 So I could not help.
507. 00:21:16 Every time a new bias was introduced,
508. 00:21:20 I could not help but see that bias being exploited
509. 00:21:24 in certain areas of business or online marketing
510. 00:21:28 in some form or another.
511. 00:21:30 It seems like almost every single one of these
512. 00:21:32 has a form of extortion of sorts put into it
513. 00:21:37 in order to get people to buy.
514. 00:21:39 And the question I have-- and we can get into it either now
515. 00:21:43 or later.
516. 00:21:43 It doesn't matter to me, Mike.
517. 00:21:45 I felt like it would be very easy to sell a lot of things
518. 00:21:49 if you employ like five or six of these.
519. 00:21:52 In your online business, you could
520. 00:21:53 sell as much as you want every single day.
521. 00:21:57 Question is, should you do that?
522. 00:22:01 Personally, I feel like the answer is no.
523. 00:22:03 But at what point-- because it's almost impossible to market
524. 00:22:07 without doing something here.
525. 00:22:08 So what do you do?
526. 00:22:12 Yeah, this is a very, very interesting question.
527. 00:22:14 And I'm sure that there's going to be people
528. 00:22:16 on both sides of this argument.
529. 00:22:21 In the-- OK, so there was a book that I read a while back,
530. 00:22:24 which kind of changed my opinion and perspective
531. 00:22:27 on this topic.
532. 00:22:28 And that is "Influence" by Robert Sealdini.
533. 00:22:32 Have you read that one?
534. 00:22:33 I have not, but it's on my list.
535. 00:22:35 OK, so this is often referred to as the marketing Bible.
536. 00:22:40 And what it talks about is seven specific marketing
537. 00:22:44 strategies which are wrapped up in these cognitive biases.
538. 00:22:48 And he explains how they work and then also
539. 00:22:51 how to combat them.
540. 00:22:53 And so he uses stories in that book
541. 00:22:55 of people who are trying to use these marketing tactics
542. 00:22:59 or cognitive biases against him and how he spun them around.
543. 00:23:05 And I think that when it comes to these cognitive biases
544. 00:23:09 and the marketing strategies that you would use
545. 00:23:11 to either play-- to play off of these, what really--
546. 00:23:16 the really the fine line here is in what are you actually
547. 00:23:21 promoting?
548. 00:23:21 What are you selling?
549. 00:23:23 If you are marketing junk, if you are marketing
550. 00:23:26 a pyramid scheme, which actually was referred to specifically
551. 00:23:30 in one of these cognitive biases,
552. 00:23:33 if you know that the thing that you are selling
553. 00:23:36 is not the thing that the person needs,
554. 00:23:40 then I think that, yeah, there's definitely
555. 00:23:43 a lot of opportunity to use these in a negative way.
556. 00:23:47 I think if you are honest, it is fine to use story
557. 00:23:51 to sell your product.
558. 00:23:53 Story bias is one of the biases.
559. 00:23:55 You don't want to manipulate people
560. 00:23:57 and you don't want to play to their fears necessarily,
561. 00:24:02 but you want to give people an opportunity
562. 00:24:05 to buy the thing that you've created
563. 00:24:07 if you really think it is going to help them.
564. 00:24:10 And so I think, obviously, there's
565. 00:24:12 some gray area there between what is a legit product
566. 00:24:15 and what is a junk product that you're just trying to sell
567. 00:24:18 because you want to make a bunch of money.
568. 00:24:20 But I think that that is really the distinction
569. 00:24:23 between when this is OK and when it's not.
570. 00:24:26 Really, it comes down to, do you trust the person
571. 00:24:28 that you're buying from?
572. 00:24:30 If you trust the person that you're buying from,
573. 00:24:32 then the cognitive biases that play into this,
574. 00:24:35 that is, in my opinion, that's OK to a certain degree.
575. 00:24:39 They might be using different strategies, different tactics.
576. 00:24:41 That's OK if you trust that they really
577. 00:24:43 do have your best interests at heart.
578. 00:24:44 Like if you align with their core values,
579. 00:24:47 you can trust the end result of the product
580. 00:24:49 that they're selling.
581. 00:24:50 So an example of this would be Apple
582. 00:24:53 stands on privacy versus somebody like Google
583. 00:24:55 stands on privacy.
584. 00:24:58 I will spend a bunch of money on Apple products
585. 00:25:01 because I align with the company's values and vision.
586. 00:25:04 And I believe them when they say that they're not
587. 00:25:07 going to sell my data because that is important to me.
588. 00:25:09 Now, there are lots of other people
589. 00:25:10 who are like, I don't care.
590. 00:25:11 I got nothing to hide.
591. 00:25:12 Go ahead and sell my data as long as I get Gmail for free.
592. 00:25:15 That's fine.
593. 00:25:16 But you have to recognize that both of those products
594. 00:25:19 are being marketed using these cognitive biases.
595. 00:25:22 And that's going to taint how you view the company based
596. 00:25:25 on your values and your vision.
597. 00:25:27 So I personally don't like the fact
598. 00:25:30 that my mail is being read through.
599. 00:25:32 So when I see Google using those cognitive biases against me,
600. 00:25:36 I'm going to think, oh, those jerks, what the heck are they doing?
601. 00:25:39 But when I see Apple do it, it's not a big deal if that makes sense.
602. 00:25:45 Because your biases towards their motivation.
603. 00:25:48 Like you're trusting them simply because you
604. 00:25:52 know that they have a core value of letting you keep your own data
605. 00:25:57 and not using it for their own purposes.
606. 00:25:59 So because you buy into that, it's
607. 00:26:01 OK if they do something that is either very similar to or at least
608. 00:26:06 along the same lines of what Google does.
609. 00:26:09 So you tend to be OK with that.
610. 00:26:12 I think I tend to fall into a lot of the same category there.
611. 00:26:15 The question is that if I look at how
612. 00:26:19 I market certain websites of my own,
613. 00:26:22 even take like Bookworm, how do you want to market that?
614. 00:26:25 Well, we don't really market it at all.
615. 00:26:28 We just kind of let it grow on its own.
616. 00:26:30 And we let people share it with their friends
617. 00:26:32 and let it grow that way.
618. 00:26:34 We don't really do a lot of marketing per se.
619. 00:26:38 We tend to do the whole word of mouth thing, which
620. 00:26:42 has kind of its own bias in it as well,
621. 00:26:44 because you're taking advantage of the friendship side of things,
622. 00:26:47 letting story play into it.
623. 00:26:50 But at the same time, I would like it to grow more, of course,
624. 00:26:55 like who wouldn't, right?
625. 00:26:57 So if you want it to grow more, then what do you do about it?
626. 00:27:00 And that's something that I have been struggling with,
627. 00:27:03 specifically with my business as a whole.
628. 00:27:05 It's something I've talked about on theoretical a number
629. 00:27:07 of times, and I'm working through over the next couple
630. 00:27:09 of months in a week or so and trying to figure out, well,
631. 00:27:13 what is the right way to market without exploiting
632. 00:27:16 some of these things?
633. 00:27:17 Because there's some of them, like you mentioned the story
634. 00:27:19 bias.
635. 00:27:21 I like telling stories about how something has helped me.
636. 00:27:25 I like doing that.
637. 00:27:27 And I feel like that's a way for me to convey something
638. 00:27:29 to the folks who follow me so that they can see,
639. 00:27:35 this is what I struggle with.
640. 00:27:36 This is how I work through things.
641. 00:27:37 This is something I'm trying to nail down.
642. 00:27:40 But the trick comes in whenever I feel that the intent behind
643. 00:27:46 that story is to try to get a sale.
644. 00:27:48 I think part of this is what's the purpose?
645. 00:27:51 Like what's your underlying intent of said marketing
646. 00:27:55 strategy, which is darn near impossible to drag out
647. 00:28:02 of somebody else.
648. 00:28:02 Like you can never nail down what someone else's intent is.
649. 00:28:06 But you can see what their actions are
650. 00:28:08 and try to extrapolate out to it.
651. 00:28:10 But you have to be careful with that because there's a bias
652. 00:28:12 that comes with that one as well.
653. 00:28:13 So this is kind of the slippery slope of, OK, well,
654. 00:28:16 this bias and that bias.
655. 00:28:17 And if I try to do this, well, then what about that?
656. 00:28:20 It can get to be a bit fatalistic almost,
657. 00:28:23 where there's not an answer here.
658. 00:28:25 So just do nothing, which I think
659. 00:28:28 I have fallen into even that trap in the fence.
660. 00:28:32 Yeah, I don't think you can judge other people's motives
661. 00:28:35 necessarily, but you can judge the thing
662. 00:28:37 that they are trying to sell.
663. 00:28:39 And you can say that you're selling this thing for X amount
664. 00:28:42 of dollars.
665. 00:28:43 It's really only worth this amount of dollars because of X.
666. 00:28:48 And obviously even the value judgments
667. 00:28:51 are going to be different.
668. 00:28:52 But there's definitely going to be times
669. 00:28:53 where you can identify that the product that is being sold
670. 00:28:58 or marketed isn't being sold or marketed honestly.
671. 00:29:03 And so it really comes down to the integrity
672. 00:29:06 and the character of the marketer, in my opinion.
673. 00:29:10 We used Apple and Google as an example.
674. 00:29:13 But you mentioned the online space.
675. 00:29:14 Like there's a lot of people selling stuff in the online space.
676. 00:29:18 And I think that whether you trust the person or not
677. 00:29:21 really comes down to what does the person stand for.
678. 00:29:24 And is it in line with your core values, which
679. 00:29:27 is probably one of these kind of biases to begin with.
680. 00:29:33 But I think that there are definitely certain things
681. 00:29:36 that you can just say, like, yeah, that's really not worth it.
682. 00:29:38 That is a scam in essence.
683. 00:29:41 But I do think that those are few and far between.
684. 00:29:44 And I also think that from the Joe Buleg perspective
685. 00:29:48 and you're talking about, how do I--
686. 00:29:50 I want Bookworm to Grow, what my business to grow.
687. 00:29:53 But I also don't want to be a sleazy marketer guy.
688. 00:29:56 I don't think that there is anything wrong with being
689. 00:29:59 marketer guy.
690. 00:29:59 You don't have to be sleazy.
691. 00:30:01 But you can definitely tell stories.
692. 00:30:03 And framing is another one of these cognitive biases.
693. 00:30:07 You can frame your offering in a positive way.
694. 00:30:09 There's nothing immoral about that.
695. 00:30:12 And in fact, when you do that, it opens the door for you
696. 00:30:16 to actually help people.
697. 00:30:17 I think the intention is really important.
698. 00:30:19 Like, if you are in the productivity space,
699. 00:30:24 you are either capitalizing on the audience,
700. 00:30:28 and you're just trying to make a quick buck,
701. 00:30:30 or you are honestly trying to help people do more with what
702. 00:30:34 they have been given and do the right things, maybe not even
703. 00:30:36 do more, but make sure that what they're doing
704. 00:30:38 is the right things.
705. 00:30:40 And I think there's a lot of people
706. 00:30:41 in this space who that is their intention.
707. 00:30:43 They do want to help people.
708. 00:30:46 And I think that comes through in how you market.
709. 00:30:49 It's almost like you can, in my opinion, anyways,
710. 00:30:52 like you can kind of smell a phony if you do any amount
711. 00:30:56 of research or digging.
712. 00:30:58 Like, you can see pretty quickly when something is fake.
713. 00:31:03 You go on Amazon and you search for something,
714. 00:31:06 and you get the real product at $300,
715. 00:31:10 and you get all the knockoffs at $15.
716. 00:31:12 You know that those aren't going to meet your needs.
717. 00:31:14 Right.
718. 00:31:16 And I think there's something to that,
719. 00:31:18 because so many of these online businesses,
720. 00:31:22 they want to use a lot of these tactics.
721. 00:31:25 They want to frame things in a certain way,
722. 00:31:26 even though they don't necessarily--
723. 00:31:29 like, it's a sales thing.
724. 00:31:30 It's not a integrity thing.
725. 00:31:33 If you get the difference between those two in that case,
726. 00:31:36 because they're trying to get a sale, as opposed
727. 00:31:38 to trying to accomplish something for that person.
728. 00:31:41 I think this is where, like, personally--
729. 00:31:44 and I can see this because I'm me.
730. 00:31:46 This is even a bias.
731. 00:31:47 But I feel like whenever I'm trying to do some of this marketing
732. 00:31:51 and I'm trying to share certain things,
733. 00:31:53 I'm genuinely trying to find a way to get things out to people
734. 00:31:56 because I think it can help them.
735. 00:31:57 Like, just hearing the struggles that I'm going through,
736. 00:32:00 because this is kind of my take on the productivity space,
737. 00:32:02 is trying to share what I'm going through
738. 00:32:05 and what I'm struggling through,
739. 00:32:06 the things I'm working through from a nap or a services
740. 00:32:10 standpoint.
741. 00:32:12 I feel like that's a way to help people with it
742. 00:32:15 because they can see my way of working through it.
743. 00:32:19 And if they can understand my mindset
744. 00:32:21 on how I've got to where I'm at, my hope is that they can take that
745. 00:32:24 and then grow from it and nail it down from--
746. 00:32:28 nail their own system down using that as a base.
747. 00:32:31 And that's OK.
748. 00:32:33 I think to try to genuinely find a way to share your own story
749. 00:32:37 so that it helps other people work through their own,
750. 00:32:40 I think it's also very easy to use that and say that I'm
751. 00:32:44 going to do this because it's a good way to sell
752. 00:32:48 and people tend to trust you if you do this.
753. 00:32:51 It's very easy to come across that way.
754. 00:32:53 Like, some people, I'm sure, will interpret
755. 00:32:55 what I'm doing in that way, even though that is far from my intent
756. 00:32:59 and that's not what I'm doing.
757. 00:33:00 I'm trying the best I can to show that I'm genuine in that.
758. 00:33:03 And I think you would be the same, Mike.
759. 00:33:05 You love to help people with their apps, with their tools,
760. 00:33:10 with their time, email.
761. 00:33:11 I mean, you love helping people in the same way.
762. 00:33:14 I think you would say the same.
763. 00:33:15 You genuinely love helping people.
764. 00:33:16 The trick is how do you convey that without crossing
765. 00:33:21 these lines, whatever those lines are?
766. 00:33:24 Right.
767. 00:33:24 Well, I think that a big key to this
768. 00:33:26 is in what sort of feedback people give you
769. 00:33:30 after you've offered the assistance
770. 00:33:32 or they've gone through the product.
771. 00:33:34 So at Asian Efficiency, we're implementing
772. 00:33:36 a net promoter score system.
773. 00:33:38 And that is basically after you've gone through the product,
774. 00:33:40 what do you think of it?
775. 00:33:41 Did it help you?
776. 00:33:43 Did it not help you?
777. 00:33:44 And then if it didn't help you, like, if you're honest,
778. 00:33:47 you're going to try to fix that so that it can actually
779. 00:33:49 help the person.
780. 00:33:50 In fact, if you implement MPS the right way,
781. 00:33:53 you don't give up on that person until you've closed that loop
782. 00:33:56 and they are happy.
783. 00:33:57 And I think that if you actually track,
784. 00:34:00 what do people think of the product itself?
785. 00:34:01 And this is not the trolls and the haters who are sending you
786. 00:34:04 emails saying that you should kill yourself
787. 00:34:07 because I know that you get those.
788. 00:34:08 You want some?
789. 00:34:10 No, that's OK.
790. 00:34:12 Those people, you don't want to try to win over.
791. 00:34:14 There's always going to be people who take issue
792. 00:34:15 with how you are promoting your product,
793. 00:34:18 unless you don't promote your product and then they win.
794. 00:34:20 But if you are promoting it and your product is good,
795. 00:34:24 then if people go through the process
796. 00:34:25 and they go through your product,
797. 00:34:26 like those testimonials in essence,
798. 00:34:28 like those should be generated automatically
799. 00:34:31 as long as you follow up with the person.
800. 00:34:33 I mean, they're not always going to come out and say,
801. 00:34:34 yeah, this was great.
802. 00:34:35 This changed my life.
803. 00:34:36 But if you give them the opportunity to,
804. 00:34:38 that can give you a baseline on whether you are actually helping
805. 00:34:42 people or you've transitioned into sleazy marketing guy.
806. 00:34:45 Because I think the key there is,
807. 00:34:48 what do you do with that negative feedback?
808. 00:34:50 Do you actually change?
809. 00:34:51 Do you try to improve it?
810. 00:34:52 Or you just say, well, I got your money already,
811. 00:34:54 so I don't care.
812. 00:34:56 Yeah, I think that's tricky.
813. 00:34:57 Kind of a side note on the troll thing.
814. 00:34:59 I talked to somebody at max talk about trolls
815. 00:35:03 as a side conversation and got this really cool idea
816. 00:35:06 on how to respond to them.
817. 00:35:07 This person told me that he likes to send a lorum.
818. 00:35:12 Lorum Ipsum to trolls.
819. 00:35:15 So he gets the troll telling him his product is junk.
820. 00:35:19 And he has, you know, I have, as a web developer,
821. 00:35:23 I've got these text expander snippets that have lorums.
822. 00:35:27 And for those of you who don't know, a lorum Ipsum
823. 00:35:29 is essentially, it's Latin text and it's just nonsense to us.
824. 00:35:34 So it's just this long text,
825. 00:35:37 it's just this long text that has a way
826. 00:35:39 of just filling in paragraphs.
827. 00:35:41 It's just a filler is all it is.
828. 00:35:43 It doesn't mean anything.
829. 00:35:44 There's nothing in it.
830. 00:35:45 Like it's not meant to be read, it just fills space.
831. 00:35:48 And this guy likes to send those to trolls
832. 00:35:52 and they get so confused because they think
833. 00:35:54 you buried something in there for them to read
834. 00:35:58 and they pour through it and they sometimes find patterns
835. 00:36:01 that don't exist, which is another bias that's in here.
836. 00:36:04 It's very entertaining to get some of their pies.
837. 00:36:07 Now he did tell me that you have to be careful with that
838. 00:36:09 because they will send you a whole bunch of emails
839. 00:36:10 and follow up trying to figure out what you were telling them.
840. 00:36:12 So you'd feel okay with that.
841. 00:36:14 - Interesting.
842. 00:36:16 Yeah.
843. 00:36:17 I can see where that would just drive some people nuts
844. 00:36:19 and why you might want to do that.
845. 00:36:22 But I think ultimately the long term
846. 00:36:24 that maybe isn't helping.
847. 00:36:25 - No, it's not at all.
848. 00:36:26 It's purely entertainment value at that point.
849. 00:36:28 So it's not something I plan to do.
850. 00:36:31 So for a while I was just sending blank emails to them
851. 00:36:35 which confused them as well.
852. 00:36:37 Like wait, did he mean to send a blank email?
853. 00:36:40 What did he forget to type it in?
854. 00:36:41 Like it really confused them
855. 00:36:42 but it just meant more email.
856. 00:36:43 So I stopped doing that.
857. 00:36:45 - Do you want to talk about some of the biases themselves?
858. 00:36:53 I mean, we talked a lot about them generally
859. 00:36:56 but we'll be diving into some specific ones.
860. 00:36:59 - I think we've talked around this ethical use of them thing.
861. 00:37:03 I don't, we're not going to come up with an answer here.
862. 00:37:05 I think if you could nail down an answer,
863. 00:37:07 a lot of people would be excited
864. 00:37:08 and then they would exploit your answer to get something.
865. 00:37:11 So I don't think you're going to nail,
866. 00:37:13 I think it's going to be something
867. 00:37:15 that we each have to nail down how we want to go
868. 00:37:19 about doing marketing in an honest and integrity filled way
869. 00:37:24 so that people are genuinely excited
870. 00:37:26 about the things we're creating
871. 00:37:28 and they're happy with the way that we sold them on it.
872. 00:37:30 So I don't think we need to go over that anymore.
873. 00:37:34 So I'm good with jumping into the next one
874. 00:37:36 which is three biases to which were most susceptible.
875. 00:37:40 So that means we get to talk about some of these Mike.
876. 00:37:43 - Picking three out of these 99 is going to be
877. 00:37:46 maybe pretty difficult but we'll give it a shot.
878. 00:37:50 - That's why I wrote down that we're most susceptible to,
879. 00:37:55 not three that were susceptible to
880. 00:37:57 because I felt like I was susceptible
881. 00:37:59 to like all of them in some way.
882. 00:38:01 - Yep, that's terrible.
883. 00:38:02 - I think Rolf de Belly would agree
884. 00:38:04 that these all come into play at some point.
885. 00:38:08 But yeah, let's dive in here.
886. 00:38:10 Do you have a clear winner?
887. 00:38:14 - I don't have a clear winner.
888. 00:38:16 I've got three written down.
889. 00:38:18 How about this?
890. 00:38:19 We'll just alternate, go back and forth.
891. 00:38:21 So one of them that I know that I'm susceptible to,
892. 00:38:24 I don't have, like I didn't rank these
893. 00:38:27 but one of them I wrote down is what's called
894. 00:38:29 the gambler's fallacy.
895. 00:38:31 So it's the concept that if something is happening
896. 00:38:35 repetitively and the example that he gave in the book was,
897. 00:38:40 what was the game?
898. 00:38:40 I'm terrible at gambler's games.
899. 00:38:43 - Roulette, I think.
900. 00:38:44 - Was it Roulette?
901. 00:38:46 - Pretty sure because it had been a certain color
902. 00:38:49 so many times in a row so people kept betting
903. 00:38:51 on the other color thinking,
904. 00:38:52 "Oh, it's gonna be the other color this time."
905. 00:38:54 And it never was.
906. 00:38:55 - Right, so they're at a Roulette table
907. 00:38:57 and the ball kept landing on black
908. 00:39:01 and it landed 20 times in a row on black
909. 00:39:04 and people started betting on red like crazy
910. 00:39:07 because it has to eventually go red
911. 00:39:11 and a lot of people lost millions of dollars
912. 00:39:13 on betting on red and it kept landing on black
913. 00:39:17 and it didn't actually go to red until the 27th spin.
914. 00:39:21 So at that point there was a lot of money on the table
915. 00:39:24 and a lot of people went bankrupt.
916. 00:39:26 So the concept there is that if something is happening
917. 00:39:30 repeatedly you tend to expect the opposite to happen
918. 00:39:35 very quickly or right away because it can't just keep
919. 00:39:39 going in that line forever.
920. 00:39:42 So in that particular case, every single role,
921. 00:39:46 it has a 50/50 chance of black over red.
922. 00:39:50 Even though it's been 20 times on black,
923. 00:39:52 it's still 50/50 on roll 21.
924. 00:39:55 But we tend to think that, "Oh no, it has to be like 90/10.
925. 00:39:59 "It's gonna land on red because it's been black
926. 00:40:01 "so many times."
927. 00:40:02 It doesn't actually matter.
928. 00:40:04 It doesn't, the probability that it doesn't work out.
929. 00:40:06 It's still 50/50 every single time.
930. 00:40:09 We just don't like to think that way.
931. 00:40:10 And this is something that I know I fall into.
932. 00:40:12 I know there have been cases where I've had a handful
933. 00:40:16 of rough client projects.
934. 00:40:18 Surely the next one's going to be good
935. 00:40:20 because I've had so many bad ones.
936. 00:40:22 It has to balance out some time.
937. 00:40:24 Oh no, it doesn't actually work that way.
938. 00:40:27 So this is one that I know I need to make myself familiar
939. 00:40:30 with and be okay not falling into.
940. 00:40:33 - Yeah, and this is interesting because it basically
941. 00:40:37 works against another cognitive bias,
942. 00:40:40 which is the regression to mean error.
943. 00:40:43 And he used the example there of somebody
944. 00:40:45 who their back pain went away after they visited
945. 00:40:48 a chiropractor or their golf game got better
946. 00:40:51 after they visited a professional.
947. 00:40:54 And his point with the regression to mean
948. 00:40:56 is that it would have improved on its own
949. 00:40:57 because these things tend to average out.
950. 00:41:00 But with the gambler's fallacy, that doesn't work
951. 00:41:03 because there is no balancing force in the universe.
952. 00:41:06 So like when you're playing roulette
953. 00:41:09 or when you're flipping a coin, for example,
954. 00:41:10 there's nothing that says it has to be this
955. 00:41:13 a bunch of times in a row in order to make this balanced
956. 00:41:17 like for example, a system like the weather.
957. 00:41:21 And this was really, really interesting
958. 00:41:23 because this was on my list too.
959. 00:41:25 So I have to pick a different one now.
960. 00:41:26 (laughs)
961. 00:41:28 I know that I've fallen into this
962. 00:41:30 where you see something happen a bunch of times in a row
963. 00:41:32 and you're like, oh well, it's probably going to be
964. 00:41:34 the other one now.
965. 00:41:35 But what you just said is that like if you flip a coin
966. 00:41:37 10 times and it's had 10 times in a row the next time
967. 00:41:40 and it's still got that 50% chance
968. 00:41:43 of being had 50% chance of being tails.
969. 00:41:46 That kind of boggles my mind.
970. 00:41:48 It's not the way my mind works.
971. 00:41:51 So yeah, I definitely believe that I am susceptible
972. 00:41:53 to this one as well.
973. 00:41:54 - Yeah.
974. 00:41:55 And because our mind doesn't work that way,
975. 00:41:57 we just expect like the probability of it happening
976. 00:42:00 that many times in a row has to be different
977. 00:42:02 than 50/50 on the next roll.
978. 00:42:04 Like it just has to.
979. 00:42:05 Like it's a mathematical thing, but it's not.
980. 00:42:08 (laughs)
981. 00:42:09 It's purely 50/50.
982. 00:42:11 Okay.
983. 00:42:13 So this one was on your list too.
984. 00:42:14 So that mean I have to go again?
985. 00:42:16 - No, no, I'll pick one.
986. 00:42:17 - Okay, you go next.
987. 00:42:19 - Okay, so this one I've known about for a really long time.
988. 00:42:22 I still find myself falling for this though
989. 00:42:26 and that is the planning fallacy
990. 00:42:28 where we tend to underestimate how long
991. 00:42:31 projects are going to take.
992. 00:42:34 And the point behind this one is that there really is
993. 00:42:37 no learning curve for us when it comes to planning,
994. 00:42:41 which again seems counterintuitive.
995. 00:42:45 Seems like we should be able to learn that,
996. 00:42:47 you know, last time I did this project,
997. 00:42:48 it took this many hours.
998. 00:42:49 So next time I do this project,
999. 00:42:50 it's gonna take that many hours.
1000. 00:42:53 It's not going to be less than that
1001. 00:42:55 because things are never gonna go
1002. 00:42:57 exactly the way that they're supposed to.
1003. 00:42:59 But I am ashamed to admit that I fall for this more often
1004. 00:43:02 than I probably should.
1005. 00:43:04 The example that they use here,
1006. 00:43:06 I thought was really interesting.
1007. 00:43:08 That's the Sydney Opera House, which was built in 1957.
1008. 00:43:12 And they projected that this is gonna be done in 1963
1009. 00:43:17 for $7 million.
1010. 00:43:19 It was actually completed in 1973
1011. 00:43:21 and the total cost was $102 million.
1012. 00:43:24 Even people who do this, like for a living,
1013. 00:43:27 they suck at this as well.
1014. 00:43:30 - Makes me feel a little better.
1015. 00:43:32 - Yep, yep.
1016. 00:43:33 - Yeah, I know that it's something that,
1017. 00:43:35 and you know, let's go task management here.
1018. 00:43:37 I have played around with the estimated time thing
1019. 00:43:40 and I'm gonna focus a few times
1020. 00:43:43 and I've dabbled with it even here recently,
1021. 00:43:46 trying to figure out if I could find a way
1022. 00:43:48 to calculate how much time I'm spending on certain things
1023. 00:43:51 or trying to get a feel for how much I can do in a day.
1024. 00:43:55 But it's so hard to nail down
1025. 00:43:57 how much time something's gonna take.
1026. 00:43:58 My typical method of doing that is knowing
1027. 00:44:02 that I think something's going to take me 15 minutes
1028. 00:44:04 so I set aside 45 for it.
1029. 00:44:06 Like that's the best way I can do it.
1030. 00:44:09 But even then I sometimes am off,
1031. 00:44:11 but yeah, I know that I'm terrible at this as well.
1032. 00:44:14 - Yeah, actually this is interesting.
1033. 00:44:16 We just had a scrum meeting this week
1034. 00:44:19 for Asian efficiency and Marmal just got back
1035. 00:44:22 from scrum leaders training, forget exactly what it was.
1036. 00:44:26 But one of the things that they said was
1037. 00:44:28 you do your, they call it planning poker
1038. 00:44:30 where you kind of identify how many story points
1039. 00:44:33 something is gonna be and then you bump it up one.
1040. 00:44:36 So if you were to say like this is gonna be
1041. 00:44:40 in the way that the story points work in scrum,
1042. 00:44:42 it's the Fibonacci number sequence.
1043. 00:44:44 So the number of story points is equal
1044. 00:44:46 to the sum of the previous two.
1045. 00:44:48 So it goes one, then two, then three
1046. 00:44:50 because three is the sum of one plus two
1047. 00:44:52 but then the next one is five
1048. 00:44:53 because it's three plus two.
1049. 00:44:55 The next one is eight, five plus three, 13, 21, whatever.
1050. 00:44:58 So that means that if the Asian efficiency team
1051. 00:45:01 is planning our sprint and we say this issue
1052. 00:45:04 is gonna take 13 story points, everybody agree?
1053. 00:45:06 Yes, we don't leave it at 13, we bump it up to 21
1054. 00:45:09 which is actually a much, much larger estimate.
1055. 00:45:13 - Right, interesting.
1056. 00:45:15 Yeah, I've just, yeah.
1057. 00:45:17 It makes a lot of sense to bump things up
1058. 00:45:19 from where you think they should be.
1059. 00:45:21 All right, so another one on my list here
1060. 00:45:24 of ones that I know I'm susceptible to
1061. 00:45:26 is the self-serving bias.
1062. 00:45:29 So essentially if something goes well,
1063. 00:45:34 say I build a new product, I create a new website,
1064. 00:45:38 I launch said website and it's a success,
1065. 00:45:41 I will attribute that success to my own professional prowess
1066. 00:45:46 and how great I am (laughs)
1067. 00:45:48 at building websites.
1068. 00:45:49 I will say that that's something I did.
1069. 00:45:52 If it goes badly, I tend to assume
1070. 00:45:56 that it's because I hit the timing wrong
1071. 00:45:59 or the technology was not working the way it should.
1072. 00:46:03 It's something external, it's not my fault.
1073. 00:46:06 So I like to take credit for the successes
1074. 00:46:08 and pass the blame to the failures, to something else.
1075. 00:46:11 Not usually to other people,
1076. 00:46:12 usually to other circumstances in my case,
1077. 00:46:15 but I like to make sure that things are self-serving.
1078. 00:46:17 And whenever I read this about the self-serving bias,
1079. 00:46:22 I wanted to stop reading.
1080. 00:46:24 (laughs)
1081. 00:46:25 It's like, I don't wanna know about this
1082. 00:46:27 'cause I know I do this.
1083. 00:46:28 - Yeah, a lot of these are kinda related and the self-serving bias.
1084. 00:46:34 Yeah, basically we attribute success to ourselves
1085. 00:46:43 and failure to other people.
1086. 00:46:46 I definitely can see that one applying to myself as well.
1087. 00:46:51 But it wasn't one of my top three,
1088. 00:46:53 so you didn't steal it from me.
1089. 00:46:54 (laughs)
1090. 00:46:55 - Okay, good.
1091. 00:46:56 All right, I'm having trouble picking these.
1092. 00:47:00 Man, there's so many.
1093. 00:47:01 Let's say availability bias,
1094. 00:47:04 where the availability bias is where we create a picture
1095. 00:47:08 of the world using the examples that most easily come to mind.
1096. 00:47:13 So I am aware of this and I know that I have done this,
1097. 00:47:17 but I've also taken steps to overcome this,
1098. 00:47:20 I believe, and that's one of the reasons, in my opinion,
1099. 00:47:23 why Bookworm is so important because when we read
1100. 00:47:25 these different books, we hear these different stories,
1101. 00:47:27 we get these different perspectives.
1102. 00:47:29 It causes us to rethink and reevaluate what we quote unquote,
1103. 00:47:32 no.
1104. 00:47:33 So we're in the examples of the availability bias
1105. 00:47:36 that they use in the book is the phrase,
1106. 00:47:38 smoking can't be bad for you because my grandma smokes every day
1107. 00:47:41 and she lived to be 100.
1108. 00:47:42 Okay, that's one data point.
1109. 00:47:45 But when you don't understand all,
1110. 00:47:49 when you don't really understand the information
1111. 00:47:50 that is available on a particular topic,
1112. 00:47:53 then you focus on that one data point and you're like,
1113. 00:47:55 oh, it's not so bad.
1114. 00:47:56 It can cause you to overestimate,
1115. 00:47:58 overestimate, for example, the chances of a plane
1116. 00:48:03 or a car crash or you underestimate the chances
1117. 00:48:05 of diabetes or cancer.
1118. 00:48:06 Most people are terrified, well, I shouldn't say most people,
1119. 00:48:09 there are a lot of people who are terrified
1120. 00:48:10 of getting on an airplane because they don't have
1121. 00:48:12 the control over the outcome, but it's actually much, much safer
1122. 00:48:17 than even getting in a car.
1123. 00:48:20 Likewise, a lot of people don't think about their life
1124. 00:48:25 or their mortality, I guess, don't wanna make this
1125. 00:48:27 a downer of an episode, but like, it is a very real possibility
1126. 00:48:32 that you could end up getting one of these diseases.
1127. 00:48:34 And in fact, it's much higher than you getting
1128. 00:48:37 in a plane crash, but that's where people's minds go
1129. 00:48:40 if they have this availability bias.
1130. 00:48:43 Because we prefer wrong information to know information.
1131. 00:48:48 Ignorance is not bliss.
1132. 00:48:51 And that's why, like I mentioned Bookworm,
1133. 00:48:54 the benefit of reading these books for me is that
1134. 00:48:58 it gives me a bigger mental toolbox, even if I don't,
1135. 00:49:03 even if I don't create these really elaborate notes
1136. 00:49:08 or mind maps, which for this one actually, it's pretty huge.
1137. 00:49:11 - I bet.
1138. 00:49:13 - If I don't go back and reread those things,
1139. 00:49:14 even if I don't internalize those things
1140. 00:49:16 where like I can spit back these statistics,
1141. 00:49:18 they do impact my overall view of a particular subject.
1142. 00:49:23 And it becomes a more informed point of view.
1143. 00:49:26 And I know we've talked about this before,
1144. 00:49:27 but I'm okay with the subconscious effect that that has
1145. 00:49:32 on my worldview without having to know all of the specific
1146. 00:49:36 points or all the specific ways that it has benefited me.
1147. 00:49:39 Does that make sense?
1148. 00:49:40 - It does, it does.
1149. 00:49:42 It's very similar to, and I'll get into this one
1150. 00:49:46 as far as one of them that fascinates us.
1151. 00:49:49 I'll get into that one here in a minute, but survivorship.
1152. 00:49:51 I'll just table that one.
1153. 00:49:54 We'll come back to that one here in a minute.
1154. 00:49:56 The last one on my list for,
1155. 00:49:58 'cause we've been three or three now.
1156. 00:50:01 - Two.
1157. 00:50:02 - You're most susceptible.
1158. 00:50:03 - Two, you started.
1159. 00:50:05 - Right, but you did the gamblers fallacy on top of me.
1160. 00:50:08 - True, I do have one more I wanna mention
1161. 00:50:10 because this is one that I definitely fall for.
1162. 00:50:14 - No, okay, all right, so you go ahead with that one.
1163. 00:50:17 - Okay, so my third one then is overthinking.
1164. 00:50:20 - What, you overthink things, Mike?
1165. 00:50:23 - Oh yeah, all the time.
1166. 00:50:25 And this is sort of related to the ambiguity aversion
1167. 00:50:30 because I wanna know things.
1168. 00:50:33 The things that I don't know freak me out.
1169. 00:50:35 But overthinking exactly what it sounds like,
1170. 00:50:39 you think too much and you cut off your mind
1171. 00:50:41 from the wisdom of your feelings.
1172. 00:50:43 The way that he framed this was really, really interesting
1173. 00:50:46 because we tend to think myself included,
1174. 00:50:49 we tend to think of emotions as bad things,
1175. 00:50:51 like the flight or fight response in the productivity space.
1176. 00:50:54 We talk about that and say like,
1177. 00:50:55 you need to escape that because those emotional decisions,
1178. 00:50:58 that's actually gonna lead to bad decisions.
1179. 00:51:00 You need to see the problem the right way.
1180. 00:51:02 Well, the way he framed it in this book,
1181. 00:51:05 the emotions that form in your brain,
1182. 00:51:07 they form the same way that the rational thoughts do.
1183. 00:51:10 And they're merely a different form of information.
1184. 00:51:14 So if you're making a decision based on collecting
1185. 00:51:17 all of the information and making the best decision,
1186. 00:51:19 you need to weigh that stuff.
1187. 00:51:21 And sometimes it needs to be weighed more
1188. 00:51:23 than the facts and the data that you collect.
1189. 00:51:28 And that's where I believe I fall into the overthinking thing
1190. 00:51:30 is I tend to do tons and tons of research,
1191. 00:51:34 give you an example, whenever I have to book my own flights,
1192. 00:51:37 I sit there and I look at flights for like two or three hours.
1193. 00:51:40 And I'm stressed out 'cause I'm like,
1194. 00:51:41 "I can't find the flight I want."
1195. 00:51:43 All of them leave at like six in the morning,
1196. 00:51:44 I gotta be at the airport at four.
1197. 00:51:46 I don't wanna do that.
1198. 00:51:48 And I've started working with an executive assistant
1199. 00:51:51 and that's one of the things that she does for me
1200. 00:51:52 is she books my flights whenever I need them
1201. 00:51:54 and she'll just go and she'll find them
1202. 00:51:55 and she's much better at it than I am
1203. 00:51:57 and she'll show me the flights and be like,
1204. 00:51:58 "Well, no, I prefer not to leave."
1205. 00:52:00 Or this layover right here, this is too short.
1206. 00:52:03 I gotta change plans, I'm gonna have to run across Chicago,
1207. 00:52:05 whatever, like that's a big load off of my brain,
1208. 00:52:10 I don't have to think about that stuff.
1209. 00:52:14 And when she presents the flights to me,
1210. 00:52:16 I can look at it and I can use my gut reaction,
1211. 00:52:19 my initial feeling on the thing,
1212. 00:52:21 like, yes, this is good, no, it is bad
1213. 00:52:23 instead of having to comb through all of the thousands
1214. 00:52:25 of flight options that are available that day.
1215. 00:52:28 And that really gets into like the very end of this,
1216. 00:52:30 which we can talk a little bit about it,
1217. 00:52:32 but just real briefly, what he says is that
1218. 00:52:36 there's a time to recognize all these cognitive biases
1219. 00:52:39 and overcome them.
1220. 00:52:40 And there's also a time when the decision
1221. 00:52:42 really doesn't matter that much to go with your gut
1222. 00:52:44 and to go with those emotional responses
1223. 00:52:47 because to go through the 99 point checklist
1224. 00:52:51 for every decision you make, including like,
1225. 00:52:53 where do you wanna go out to eat, that's ridiculous.
1226. 00:52:56 - Yes, to all the things.
1227. 00:53:02 - Yeah, there's a lot there, but I'm with you on,
1228. 00:53:05 you know, if you've got too many things available to you,
1229. 00:53:08 or you've got too many options,
1230. 00:53:10 which is another thing in here, you know,
1231. 00:53:12 if you've got too much to choose from,
1232. 00:53:15 it can be overwhelming and it gets hard
1233. 00:53:17 to actually make a decision.
1234. 00:53:19 This is why a lot of cases,
1235. 00:53:20 like if my wife and I are gonna go out for dinner or something,
1236. 00:53:23 it's not uncommon for me to pick two or three options
1237. 00:53:27 and then let her pick from that.
1238. 00:53:29 'Cause I can typically get it whittled down fairly quickly
1239. 00:53:33 and she's pretty good at making that final decision.
1240. 00:53:35 So I just know that sometimes this is better
1241. 00:53:37 for us to just work in that way.
1242. 00:53:39 Otherwise, it gets to be kind of a mess and takes forever.
1243. 00:53:44 I get you.
1244. 00:53:45 - I like that strategy.
1245. 00:53:46 I may have to employ that.
1246. 00:53:47 - Or work it the other way around,
1247. 00:53:50 let her filter it and you pick the final,
1248. 00:53:52 depending on how you do it.
1249. 00:53:53 - Yeah, you do it.
1250. 00:53:55 - The last one on my list of ones I'm susceptible to,
1251. 00:53:57 inability to close doors.
1252. 00:53:59 And I've gotten better at this one,
1253. 00:54:01 but essentially it is,
1254. 00:54:03 you think that everything just either needs a little more time
1255. 00:54:07 or that the next thing that's brought up
1256. 00:54:10 is potentially the big thing.
1257. 00:54:13 So in the world of online stuff,
1258. 00:54:16 I am currently a part of three podcasts.
1259. 00:54:18 I've got at least two fairly substantial website builds
1260. 00:54:22 that I'm going through right now that could become businesses.
1261. 00:54:25 And then I've got all my client stuff.
1262. 00:54:27 So I've got a ton of things going on.
1263. 00:54:29 And that's just the work I do for my own business.
1264. 00:54:33 There's also the stuff I do at the church.
1265. 00:54:35 There's also another commercial contractor client that I have.
1266. 00:54:38 Like there's a lot of these things that I do
1267. 00:54:42 that can very quickly overwhelm my time.
1268. 00:54:46 So I tend to see opportunities
1269. 00:54:48 and I want to say yes to them,
1270. 00:54:50 but that quickly leads me to having too many projects going on.
1271. 00:54:55 Thus we come back to Joe needs to use yes, no, yes more often
1272. 00:54:59 and continue saying no to things.
1273. 00:55:02 So I am in a place now where I know
1274. 00:55:05 that I can maintain what I'm currently doing.
1275. 00:55:07 I don't need to kill any of these things
1276. 00:55:09 that I'm working on right now,
1277. 00:55:11 but I sure need to stop saying yes to anything new for certain.
1278. 00:55:16 So I'm up against a brick wall on this one right now, Mike.
1279. 00:55:19 So I have to start saying no more often.
1280. 00:55:24 Nice.
1281. 00:55:25 Do you want to, I mean, we could definitely keep going
1282. 00:55:28 on the ones that were susceptible to.
1283. 00:55:31 There's a couple that I just wanted to talk about
1284. 00:55:33 because they were really interesting to me.
1285. 00:55:35 What do you want to do?
1286. 00:55:36 Do you want to keep talking about those?
1287. 00:55:37 I've got three that I'm fascinated by.
1288. 00:55:41 So I'll let you start this round.
1289. 00:55:44 Okay.
1290. 00:55:44 So I'll start with one that I am scared I am susceptible to.
1291. 00:55:48 And that is the chauffeur knowledge.
1292. 00:55:52 He uses the story of this world-renowned speaker
1293. 00:55:57 and he goes and he gives all these talks
1294. 00:55:59 and the chauffeur has heard the talk
1295. 00:56:01 over and over and over again.
1296. 00:56:02 So he floats this idea one time.
1297. 00:56:04 He's like, "Hey, I know your talk.
1298. 00:56:05 "Why don't you let me give it?"
1299. 00:56:06 And the expert's like, "Yeah, that sounds interesting."
1300. 00:56:10 And then he gets up and he gives the talk
1301. 00:56:12 and somebody asks him to question that he can't answer.
1302. 00:56:14 And he says, "That is such a simple question.
1303. 00:56:17 "I'm gonna let my chauffeur answer it."
1304. 00:56:19 And then he calls on the quote unquote chauffeur,
1305. 00:56:21 which is actually the expert to come on and take over.
1306. 00:56:25 But the point of the story is that
1307. 00:56:27 what you can recite doesn't necessarily mean that you know.
1308. 00:56:32 True experts recognize the limits of what they know
1309. 00:56:35 and what they don't know.
1310. 00:56:36 And he talks about the circle of confidence.
1311. 00:56:38 What lies inside your circle of confidence,
1312. 00:56:40 you kind of understand intuitively what lies outside.
1313. 00:56:42 You may only partially understand.
1314. 00:56:44 So one of the things that I do for Asian efficiency
1315. 00:56:48 is I host the Productivity Show podcast
1316. 00:56:50 and I go on and I do research every single week
1317. 00:56:53 for a Productivity topic.
1318. 00:56:56 And I am scared that I am a poser,
1319. 00:57:00 that I am a chauffeur.
1320. 00:57:02 Because even though I live in this space,
1321. 00:57:05 I eat and breathe this stuff.
1322. 00:57:08 I am scared that I am spouting off information
1323. 00:57:13 that I have not fully internalized and really understand.
1324. 00:57:18 I guess I'm a little bit scared that I am missing
1325. 00:57:22 the real point of some of this stuff.
1326. 00:57:26 And I do not want to come across as not being authentic
1327. 00:57:30 or genuine.
1328. 00:57:31 And I want to make sure that the stuff that I do
1329. 00:57:35 give as advice, it is stuff that I know works.
1330. 00:57:40 I don't wanna mislead anybody,
1331. 00:57:42 which is why I try to talk about my own personal experience
1332. 00:57:45 as much as possible.
1333. 00:57:46 Because it's hard to dispute that.
1334. 00:57:50 This is what I did, this is the result that I got.
1335. 00:57:52 I can't really argue that.
1336. 00:57:53 But if you're trying to spout off something else
1337. 00:57:56 that you've gotten from somebody else
1338. 00:57:58 and like, hey, you should totally do this,
1339. 00:58:00 then that's dangerous, I think.
1340. 00:58:04 - This one was on my list too.
1341. 00:58:06 So you took this one from me as well.
1342. 00:58:08 But I have this on here because of one,
1343. 00:58:11 it's fascinating to me too.
1344. 00:58:13 I am with you in that I don't want to fall into this one.
1345. 00:58:16 So I'm aware that it would be very easy for me to,
1346. 00:58:19 like in the, especially in the productivity space,
1347. 00:58:21 we talk about this all the time.
1348. 00:58:22 And we went into this earlier with the ethical use bit.
1349. 00:58:26 But I know that it would be very easy for me to say,
1350. 00:58:30 here's what you should do and here's how this should work.
1351. 00:58:33 And this is what everybody recommends
1352. 00:58:35 and spout it off as if I am very familiar with it
1353. 00:58:39 and it's something I do all the time.
1354. 00:58:41 Now in some cases, that's true.
1355. 00:58:43 I do the exact thing.
1356. 00:58:45 And I try to explain the exact process
1357. 00:58:47 that I go through on that.
1358. 00:58:48 There's a lot of cases where I just suck at it
1359. 00:58:52 and I'm terrible at this thing.
1360. 00:58:53 And I do the best I can to explain that
1361. 00:58:55 'cause I don't want people to think
1362. 00:58:58 I'm a hundred percent expert in this.
1363. 00:59:00 I'm just maybe a step ahead of some folks that follow me
1364. 00:59:03 and that's exactly where I need to be.
1365. 00:59:05 So I'm still struggling through all this
1366. 00:59:06 and this is exactly why I brought up the ethical thing
1367. 00:59:09 because I don't want that,
1368. 00:59:12 I don't want to get to a point
1369. 00:59:12 where people have that correlation of thinking,
1370. 00:59:16 oh, he's just spouting off stuff, he's learned elsewhere.
1371. 00:59:19 Like, I don't want to do that.
1372. 00:59:20 So I have a pretty strong knee-jerk reaction
1373. 00:59:23 to folks that I feel like are doing that
1374. 00:59:25 and don't want to go there.
1375. 00:59:26 - Yep, totally agree.
1376. 00:59:29 - Some with you on that one.
1377. 00:59:30 One of the others that I have,
1378. 00:59:33 and I mentioned this earlier is the survivorship bias
1379. 00:59:37 which is the first bias he mentions in the book
1380. 00:59:41 and I thought it was very interesting
1381. 00:59:44 and it's something that I see a lot of in,
1382. 00:59:48 especially entrepreneurs because they will see
1383. 00:59:51 someone who did a thing and it's highly successful
1384. 00:59:54 and people want to emulate it.
1385. 00:59:55 So one example that I would give on this
1386. 00:59:58 is the lore podcast, so Aaron Mankey runs that.
1387. 01:00:02 It is crazy how many people are now starting to do things
1388. 01:00:06 very similar to him and his podcast.
1389. 01:00:09 They see the thing he's doing, they're trying to emulate that.
1390. 01:00:11 He made it big.
1391. 01:00:13 Surely I can make it big too if I simply do what he's doing.
1392. 01:00:17 The example in the book was rock stars.
1393. 01:00:19 There was a guy who saw he was seeing
1394. 01:00:21 all these successful rock stars.
1395. 01:00:23 I could be a rock star.
1396. 01:00:24 Well, what you're not seeing is all the failures
1397. 01:00:27 and all the people who didn't make it.
1398. 01:00:30 So the title of that chapter is,
1399. 01:00:32 "Why You Should Visit Cemeteries"
1400. 01:00:34 that way you can see all the people who didn't make it
1401. 01:00:36 and all the people who didn't become overnight success
1402. 01:00:41 in that case, quote unquote, overnight.
1403. 01:00:43 But it's something that I see a number of people trying to do.
1404. 01:00:47 I have even helped some people try to get businesses
1405. 01:00:51 off the ground that are kind of borderline this
1406. 01:00:54 because they feel like they see something,
1407. 01:00:57 they want to emulate another site,
1408. 01:00:58 they want to follow the pattern
1409. 01:01:01 of a bigger successful business.
1410. 01:01:04 And although that's a good thing to do in some cases,
1411. 01:01:06 you don't want to copy them verbatim.
1412. 01:01:09 It's going to go badly because they've been successful.
1413. 01:01:12 That's them, they're being true to themselves.
1414. 01:01:14 You're not in that case.
1415. 01:01:16 So it can be kind of dangerous to fall down that slope,
1416. 01:01:20 but just be aware that people tend to do this.
1417. 01:01:24 And I'm fascinated by it because I'm,
1418. 01:01:26 I don't struggle with this one at all
1419. 01:01:29 because I know there's a lot of failures
1420. 01:01:30 and you have to get through some of those failures
1421. 01:01:32 to get to the success.
1422. 01:01:34 And I know that a lot of people have just had
1423. 01:01:38 to completely give up the thing that they had as a dream
1424. 01:01:41 because it didn't work out for them
1425. 01:01:43 because they didn't have X, Y, and Z
1426. 01:01:45 that made it possible.
1427. 01:01:46 So I see this, so I try to help people see it,
1428. 01:01:50 but I'm not one that struggles with,
1429. 01:01:52 oh, they made it big, I can do it too.
1430. 01:01:54 Like I don't typically go that far out.
1431. 01:01:58 - Yeah, this is interesting because I think it touches
1432. 01:02:00 on another cognitive bias, which is exponential growth
1433. 01:02:03 because people see the success of lore
1434. 01:02:07 and they view it as overnight success,
1435. 01:02:11 but in my opinion, suddenly never comes suddenly.
1436. 01:02:15 I was actually on the Homework Podcast,
1437. 01:02:17 which Aaron Maki hosted with Dave Kalo
1438. 01:02:21 before lore became big.
1439. 01:02:24 And like I remember when I recorded him with them,
1440. 01:02:28 he had mentioned that this was kind of a side project
1441. 01:02:30 that he was doing and he had just launched,
1442. 01:02:32 I think at that time he had just been on
1443. 01:02:33 Systematic with Brett Turpstra and talked about it,
1444. 01:02:36 but it really hadn't taken off yet.
1445. 01:02:38 I thought it was cool, but he was still pretty excited
1446. 01:02:43 about it and it was still pretty new.
1447. 01:02:45 Not saying that he's not excited about it now,
1448. 01:02:47 but like when you start something new,
1449. 01:02:48 you're usually like super excited about it
1450. 01:02:50 because you have no idea where it could actually go.
1451. 01:02:53 And in this particular instance, it ended up taking off.
1452. 01:02:56 Even if these copycats had something a little bit unique
1453. 01:03:00 about their story, it's gonna take a long time
1454. 01:03:05 before they would achieve a success that Aaron has
1455. 01:03:08 because Aaron did this for a long time.
1456. 01:03:10 It was essentially a passion project
1457. 01:03:12 and that term gets thrown around a lot.
1458. 01:03:13 And I think it kind of has a negative connotation,
1459. 01:03:16 but it's something that he was doing for fun
1460. 01:03:19 before it was going to pay all of his bills
1461. 01:03:22 and lead to the lifestyle that he now has.
1462. 01:03:24 And that's what makes it successful.
1463. 01:03:26 The exponential growth, that's the concept of,
1464. 01:03:29 we don't understand exponential math
1465. 01:03:35 as well as we understand linear math.
1466. 01:03:36 We can add things, but we don't multiply things very well.
1467. 01:03:39 And the story that he uses there
1468. 01:03:41 is like the penny doubled every day
1469. 01:03:43 that results in over $5 million.
1470. 01:03:45 Most people you say you want a penny doubled every day
1471. 01:03:47 or $1,000 for 30 days.
1472. 01:03:49 So you have $30,000 at the end of the 30 days.
1473. 01:03:51 A lot of people without doing the math,
1474. 01:03:52 just thinking about it, they take the $30,000.
1475. 01:03:55 But the penny doubled, the exponential growth,
1476. 01:03:58 that's the key to growing.
1477. 01:03:59 That's the key to success.
1478. 01:04:01 And you don't see that when you just look at the result,
1479. 01:04:04 and you just look at Laura and you'll be like,
1480. 01:04:05 oh, I could do that.
1481. 01:04:07 Well, you could, but you won't.
1482. 01:04:10 You're gonna give up long before Aaron did,
1483. 01:04:15 because you're not seeing that exponential growth yet.
1484. 01:04:18 - You're also not seeing all the difficulties
1485. 01:04:21 that he has to deal with on that.
1486. 01:04:23 - Exactly.
1487. 01:04:24 - So you don't know the backstory.
1488. 01:04:26 - Yeah, if you don't really have the Y
1489. 01:04:30 to get you through that initial,
1490. 01:04:33 before the hockey stick growth,
1491. 01:04:36 you won't make it.
1492. 01:04:39 There is gonna be, like you said,
1493. 01:04:40 a lot of trials to overcome.
1494. 01:04:42 There's gonna be a lot of adversity
1495. 01:04:43 you're gonna have to overcome,
1496. 01:04:45 but it can be worth it in the end,
1497. 01:04:49 but you have to have your own reason for it.
1498. 01:04:52 You can't just be like, oh, I wanna copy this guy over there.
1499. 01:04:54 Like that is not gonna be enough to see you through.
1500. 01:04:57 - So what else fascinates you?
1501. 01:05:01 - So many winners, Chris, this is interesting,
1502. 01:05:04 because if you think about any sort of auction,
1503. 01:05:08 the specifically the example that comes to mind for me
1504. 01:05:12 is free agency for sports.
1505. 01:05:14 The winner of the auction often turns out to be the loser,
1506. 01:05:20 because by definition of the auction,
1507. 01:05:23 they are willing to pay more than anybody else,
1508. 01:05:25 so they are paying above market value.
1509. 01:05:28 And as we're recording this, kind of the NBA free agency,
1510. 01:05:32 when it has been going on the last month or so,
1511. 01:05:36 and there's people who are signing like $200 million contracts,
1512. 01:05:39 and you just see that stuff and you're just like,
1513. 01:05:42 wow, that is ridiculous.
1514. 01:05:44 I won't, I'm won from, 'cause it is a lot of money,
1515. 01:05:47 but that's a separate discussion.
1516. 01:05:48 I mean, if the market is going to pay that,
1517. 01:05:50 then more power to you.
1518. 01:05:52 But even if you understand the market,
1519. 01:05:54 and you say that, yeah, that salary,
1520. 01:05:55 like the money is justified.
1521. 01:05:59 Generally speaking, what I've noticed is that
1522. 01:06:01 you find out that this certain player
1523. 01:06:03 signed for this much money, and you're like, what?
1524. 01:06:06 Like they're not a superstar,
1525. 01:06:08 how did they get that much money?
1526. 01:06:10 And it's because of this winner's curse,
1527. 01:06:13 and this can obviously play out in a lot of different arenas,
1528. 01:06:17 but that's the one that I kind of see in the news,
1529. 01:06:20 but I mean, eBay auctions, whatever,
1530. 01:06:23 like there's a lot of different ways
1531. 01:06:25 that this could manifest, and I think it's interesting
1532. 01:06:29 to see that any sort of auction,
1533. 01:06:32 like you are going to be overpaying.
1534. 01:06:34 (chuckles)
1535. 01:06:35 - Yes, that's the whole purpose of that thing.
1536. 01:06:38 Like the way an auction works is designed
1537. 01:06:41 to raise the prices as you can.
1538. 01:06:44 Yeah, don't call that that.
1539. 01:06:45 - You basically can't win with an auction style.
1540. 01:06:49 - Right, right.
1541. 01:06:50 Unless there's no one else there that's interested in it,
1542. 01:06:52 you know what it's worth, and you don't pay up any more,
1543. 01:06:55 unless you come in it that way,
1544. 01:06:57 and you just get lucky that no one else is there,
1545. 01:07:00 it's never gonna work out well.
1546. 01:07:02 - Yeah, but see, that's the thing I think
1547. 01:07:04 is interesting about this,
1548. 01:07:05 is that's a very dangerous assumption to make,
1549. 01:07:07 is like, oh, look, I discovered this thing,
1550. 01:07:09 and there's so many other people out there
1551. 01:07:10 that would pay more for this,
1552. 01:07:11 but they don't know about it.
1553. 01:07:13 - Right. - Especially in today's society,
1554. 01:07:15 like people know about it. (chuckles)
1555. 01:07:17 - Yeah, it's kind of the way it works.
1556. 01:07:19 The last one here on my list of those
1557. 01:07:21 fascinate me, and I shouldn't say it's the last one
1558. 01:07:25 that fascinates me because a ton of these fascinate me,
1559. 01:07:28 but the one that I wrote down, anyway, is anchoring,
1560. 01:07:31 and you see this a lot with pricing strategies,
1561. 01:07:34 especially when prices are up for negotiation,
1562. 01:07:39 because someone will drop a number,
1563. 01:07:41 and that sets the baseline by which
1564. 01:07:43 all other numbers are judged.
1565. 01:07:45 So if you think about walking into, say, a car dealership,
1566. 01:07:49 and you see $10,000 on a car,
1567. 01:07:52 you're probably more apt to spend, say, 9,000 on it,
1568. 01:07:57 or 9,500 because your baseline was 10,000,
1569. 01:08:00 but if you do some more digging,
1570. 01:08:01 you may find out that that car is worth 6,000,
1571. 01:08:04 but because they had the baseline so high,
1572. 01:08:06 they anchored it so high,
1573. 01:08:08 you tend to not go down that far
1574. 01:08:10 when you're talking about it,
1575. 01:08:11 and you see this a lot of times,
1576. 01:08:12 it doesn't have to be the same thing,
1577. 01:08:14 even if you're talking about something completely unrelated,
1578. 01:08:17 let's talk about, say, consulting prices.
1579. 01:08:20 I'm going to charge, say, $1,000, $1,500
1580. 01:08:25 for an hour of my time to talk through something,
1581. 01:08:28 or we could spend $400 on this whole thing,
1582. 01:08:32 like this other, say, video course of sorts.
1583. 01:08:35 These are things that Mike and I work on quite a bit,
1584. 01:08:37 and I'm just throwing numbers out there.
1585. 01:08:39 I'm not pulling anything out specifically,
1586. 01:08:41 but if you use that baseline as the $1,500,
1587. 01:08:46 $400 seems crazy cheap,
1588. 01:08:47 so of course, let's jump in and buy that.
1589. 01:08:50 Even though it's two videos,
1590. 01:08:51 and they're both 30 seconds long,
1591. 01:08:53 it's not worth $400.
1592. 01:08:55 So that doesn't add up,
1593. 01:08:57 that's not what you spend on that,
1594. 01:08:59 but people would do it because of how it's anchored.
1595. 01:09:02 - Yep. - There you go.
1596. 01:09:04 - I really like the anchoring bias as well,
1597. 01:09:08 and this isn't one of those ones
1598. 01:09:09 that is used in marketing all the time,
1599. 01:09:12 and really this is why you really have to trust
1600. 01:09:15 the person who is marketing to you,
1601. 01:09:17 because if they say this thing is worth $10,000,
1602. 01:09:20 and you buy the one that's worth $9,500,
1603. 01:09:23 you have to really believe them when they say
1604. 01:09:25 this is worth $10,000.
1605. 01:09:27 That's where in the past,
1606. 01:09:29 I've seen, you go to anywhere,
1607. 01:09:31 even, well, it's used something like Slack,
1608. 01:09:34 and you go to sign up for Slack,
1609. 01:09:35 and you see the different plans that are available.
1610. 01:09:37 It's like the free, the basic,
1611. 01:09:38 and the enterprise or something like that.
1612. 01:09:41 They're anchoring off of the enterprise,
1613. 01:09:42 and you work backwards,
1614. 01:09:43 and you find the one in the middle.
1615. 01:09:46 And Slack is an awesome service.
1616. 01:09:48 I love it, we use it with Asian efficiency,
1617. 01:09:50 we use it a couple other teams that I'm involved with.
1618. 01:09:54 I know a lot of people,
1619. 01:09:55 I haven't personally had to pay for any of the premium features
1620. 01:09:59 because of the way that we use it,
1621. 01:10:01 but I know a lot of people who do.
1622. 01:10:03 They trust the company,
1623. 01:10:05 but that anchoring bias,
1624. 01:10:06 that's not a bad thing in Slack's case,
1625. 01:10:10 because they're providing the different options,
1626. 01:10:13 but any sort of web service that you go to,
1627. 01:10:15 they'll use the same sort of thing.
1628. 01:10:18 And if you just go there cold
1629. 01:10:19 and you have no idea who it is,
1630. 01:10:20 or what the service is all about,
1631. 01:10:23 that's where you really have to be aware
1632. 01:10:25 of that type of stuff.
1633. 01:10:26 And so, you mentioned buying a car, for example,
1634. 01:10:29 really important who you buy your car from.
1635. 01:10:31 You don't wanna buy it from the sleazy car salesman
1636. 01:10:35 who is gonna sell you a lemon,
1637. 01:10:37 but if you really trust the person that you're buying from,
1638. 01:10:39 and they say, "This one's worth $10,000,
1639. 01:10:41 "this one's worth $9,500,
1640. 01:10:42 "doesn't have this sister this."
1641. 01:10:45 You can use anchoring bias,
1642. 01:10:47 and it doesn't have to be a negative thing.
1643. 01:10:49 - Yes, yes, I'm with you.
1644. 01:10:51 - A little bit of a tangent, sorry.
1645. 01:10:53 (laughs)
1646. 01:10:54 - That's all right, I'm with you.
1647. 01:10:55 We see this stuff a lot.
1648. 01:10:57 - All right, so, there's two I wanna call out.
1649. 01:11:02 The one I wanna call it just because it's appropriate
1650. 01:11:07 for our audience is the zygronic effect,
1651. 01:11:09 which I think maybe we've even mentioned
1652. 01:11:11 on this podcast before.
1653. 01:11:13 This was interesting because he talks about
1654. 01:11:15 David Allen specifically,
1655. 01:11:16 and I got more about the science behind David Allen's approach
1656. 01:11:19 from the three pages here
1657. 01:11:20 and the end of the getting things done,
1658. 01:11:22 but I think he talks about how we keep
1659. 01:11:25 uncompleted things in our head,
1660. 01:11:28 and we clear them when they are finished.
1661. 01:11:29 But what's interesting about this
1662. 01:11:31 is that those outstanding tasks only nod us
1663. 01:11:33 until we know how we're going to deal with them.
1664. 01:11:37 And that's why task managers are so important.
1665. 01:11:39 Okay, so that one I think is interesting
1666. 01:11:42 from a productivity perspective,
1667. 01:11:43 but the one that I have an action item for
1668. 01:11:46 is the news illusion where we are incredibly well informed,
1669. 01:11:51 yet we know incredibly little.
1670. 01:11:54 There's, I mean, especially now, I think,
1671. 01:11:58 with this current state of news,
1672. 01:12:00 you get very biased information no matter
1673. 01:12:03 what side you associate with.
1674. 01:12:07 And there's a book by Simon Sinek
1675. 01:12:10 where he kind of explains why this is the case
1676. 01:12:12 called leaders eat last, I believe.
1677. 01:12:15 And he talks about some of the regulations that were passed
1678. 01:12:18 and basically when news companies had,
1679. 01:12:21 they didn't have as strict guidelines
1680. 01:12:24 on presenting different sides of the story.
1681. 01:12:27 You got people who sensationalized one side of the story
1682. 01:12:30 because it resulted in higher ratings
1683. 01:12:32 and you find yourself in situation we are today.
1684. 01:12:35 But really the thing that I took away from this
1685. 01:12:39 is that we don't need all of that news.
1686. 01:12:42 We don't need to know everything that is going on
1687. 01:12:44 because it doesn't have any positive benefit.
1688. 01:12:48 And so one of my takeaways here is no news,
1689. 01:12:52 except for tech news.
1690. 01:12:53 And that's just because I find it interesting
1691. 01:12:55 and I want to know about that sort of stuff.
1692. 01:12:58 It has a direct application to a lot of the work that I do,
1693. 01:13:02 but I don't need to necessarily go on to CNN
1694. 01:13:05 or Fox News or MSNBC or any of those other stations
1695. 01:13:08 that just find out what's going on in the world.
1696. 01:13:10 I've often told people, and this is not something
1697. 01:13:14 that I've really firmly internalized,
1698. 01:13:17 but I use Twitter fairly often.
1699. 01:13:19 That's really the only social media network I'm on.
1700. 01:13:22 And I like to look at the trends every once in a while
1701. 01:13:24 because I feel like that gives you a pretty accurate view
1702. 01:13:27 of what people think about what is going on in the world
1703. 01:13:30 as opposed to it being colored or tainted by one side
1704. 01:13:35 or the other.
1705. 01:13:36 And so I guess this was justification for me to use Twitter
1706. 01:13:39 as my news since I'm already there
1707. 01:13:41 and not feel like I'm missing out
1708. 01:13:43 because I don't subscribe to a quote unquote real news source.
1709. 01:13:46 - I don't like the news at all.
1710. 01:13:49 I have avoided it for a while 'cause even if, like,
1711. 01:13:54 of course there's the confirmation bias that comes in.
1712. 01:13:57 You're only gonna listen to the one that talks about
1713. 01:13:59 the things that you like and in the way that you liked them.
1714. 01:14:03 But at the same time, ratings go up
1715. 01:14:07 if negative things are talked about.
1716. 01:14:09 - Exactly.
1717. 01:14:10 - As opposed to positive.
1718. 01:14:11 So every time I come away from watching the news,
1719. 01:14:14 which the only time I really watch the news
1720. 01:14:16 is when I am somehow stuck in front of a TV at, say,
1721. 01:14:20 a hotel, try and eat breakfast, and they've got the news on.
1722. 01:14:23 That's about the only time I really watch the news,
1723. 01:14:26 which is awesome.
1724. 01:14:27 But it's something that I know if I spend time watching the news.
1725. 01:14:31 I only have to watch it for about five or six minutes.
1726. 01:14:34 And they've, like, jumped through, like, seven stories
1727. 01:14:36 in that amount of time.
1728. 01:14:37 And I just feel like the world is going to collapse
1729. 01:14:40 because of what they're presenting.
1730. 01:14:42 It doesn't matter what it is, what station it is.
1731. 01:14:45 It seems to always be the same.
1732. 01:14:47 - Yep, yep, definitely agree.
1733. 01:14:50 - All right, so how do you overcome this stuff?
1734. 01:14:53 Do you overcome it?
1735. 01:14:54 I think you alluded to this earlier
1736. 01:14:57 of being aware of them but being okay,
1737. 01:14:59 not worrying about them in some cases.
1738. 01:15:02 And I think there's a lot of value in that
1739. 01:15:03 because if you're trying to overcome all of these,
1740. 01:15:06 how many are in here, Mike?
1741. 01:15:07 Did you, what was the number?
1742. 01:15:08 It was like 100--
1743. 01:15:09 - I believe there were 99 of them.
1744. 01:15:12 And so that's a pretty big checklist.
1745. 01:15:14 (Mike laughs)
1746. 01:15:15 - See, he should have come up with one more.
1747. 01:15:17 (Mike laughs)
1748. 01:15:18 But biases against biases, maybe.
1749. 01:15:21 But I feel like if you're trying to overcome these things,
1750. 01:15:25 like, this is not gonna happen.
1751. 01:15:27 Like, you're not going to overcome all of them.
1752. 01:15:29 I think over time, you can slowly build up resolve
1753. 01:15:32 against certain ones and know which ones you're susceptible to
1754. 01:15:36 and find ways to overcome those.
1755. 01:15:38 There's probably some value in doing that.
1756. 01:15:39 I know that from us reading so many books
1757. 01:15:43 and in such short time frames,
1758. 01:15:44 you tend to hear about certain ones.
1759. 01:15:47 On occasion that get talked about in more detail,
1760. 01:15:50 I know going through this, there was probably six or seven
1761. 01:15:52 of them that I know we've talked about in other books.
1762. 01:15:56 And they're things that I feel like
1763. 01:15:57 I've been working to overcome as it is.
1764. 01:15:59 So I think there's some value in reading through this
1765. 01:16:02 and just seeing what they are and knowing
1766. 01:16:03 that you're gonna have to try to beat some of them.
1767. 01:16:05 And then just building that over time.
1768. 01:16:07 I don't think you're gonna just sit down and say,
1769. 01:16:08 I'm gonna beat this one today.
1770. 01:16:11 It's not gonna work that way.
1771. 01:16:13 - Right, actually when I was reading this,
1772. 01:16:15 I was thinking about the decision-making framework
1773. 01:16:17 from decisive, the rap format.
1774. 01:16:20 Widen your options, reality test your assumptions,
1775. 01:16:25 attain distance and prepare to be wrong.
1776. 01:16:28 And the four specific villains of decision-making
1777. 01:16:31 that they address in that book,
1778. 01:16:33 a couple of them are cognitive biases.
1779. 01:16:36 So it's addressing them specifically.
1780. 01:16:38 And as I was reading this, let's think back to that.
1781. 01:16:40 And that's a great framework,
1782. 01:16:41 but it's assuming that these are the cognitive biases
1783. 01:16:44 that impact you or you're most susceptible to.
1784. 01:16:47 And so I think there's some value
1785. 01:16:48 in identifying where your weaknesses are.
1786. 01:16:51 The strategy to overcome them, I kind of alluded to this,
1787. 01:16:54 but he's got in the epilogue, the strategy.
1788. 01:16:57 And he starts it off by saying that just because you,
1789. 01:17:01 you've read through these doesn't mean
1790. 01:17:03 that you're not gonna struggle with them anymore.
1791. 01:17:04 He admits that he struggles with them.
1792. 01:17:06 Kind of the way that he attacks this is that
1793. 01:17:11 he recognizes these cognitive biases
1794. 01:17:15 and tries to overcome them
1795. 01:17:16 when he's making a really important decision.
1796. 01:17:17 But the trivial stuff, the day-to-day stuff,
1797. 01:17:20 he's fine letting his emotions handle that
1798. 01:17:23 because if you were to employ a framework
1799. 01:17:26 for every single decision that you make,
1800. 01:17:28 the average person makes 35,000 decisions a day.
1801. 01:17:32 So if you're gonna go through a 99-point checklist
1802. 01:17:34 for every one of those 35,000 decisions,
1803. 01:17:36 you'll have, well, you won't even get through all 35,000.
1804. 01:17:40 You won't actually do anything and you'll be exhausted.
1805. 01:17:44 So the efficiency mechanism is where you do allow
1806. 01:17:47 your emotions to make some of the decisions
1807. 01:17:50 and you don't worry about the fact that
1808. 01:17:53 these cognitive biases may come into play
1809. 01:17:54 when you're choosing which restaurant you're gonna go
1810. 01:17:56 out to eat at or what you're gonna wear in the morning.
1811. 01:18:00 You're not gonna go through, oh, the overconfidence effect
1812. 01:18:04 is kicking in here as I'm choosing which shirt to wear.
1813. 01:18:07 It doesn't matter.
1814. 01:18:08 - Just run with it.
1815. 01:18:10 - Yeah, yeah.
1816. 01:18:11 And so I think everybody's gotta find their own balance
1817. 01:18:14 with this, but basically, I think it's the knowledge
1818. 01:18:18 of these things that they exist that is beneficial.
1819. 01:18:21 Going through all 99 of these
1820. 01:18:22 and not being able to recite all 99 of these,
1821. 01:18:24 not having them all written down in a book,
1822. 01:18:26 even in my notes, which I have this huge mind node,
1823. 01:18:29 I did not write down every single one.
1824. 01:18:31 I wrote down most of them, what they were
1825. 01:18:33 and the big takeaways to me,
1826. 01:18:35 like what spoke to me as I read through it.
1827. 01:18:38 But you don't need to recognize every single decision
1828. 01:18:41 that you make that all of this stuff is coming into play.
1829. 01:18:44 You just need to know what are the ways that you could fail
1830. 01:18:47 when you really do need to make a good important decision.
1831. 01:18:51 And then what are the steps that you personally
1832. 01:18:53 should take in order to overcome that?
1833. 01:18:55 And I think that's where this book offers a lot of value.
1834. 01:18:58 He doesn't give specific strategies
1835. 01:19:00 for every single one of these,
1836. 01:19:02 but in the words of G.I. Joe,
1837. 01:19:04 now you know and knowing is half the battle.
1838. 01:19:07 Way to go, G.I. Joe.
1839. 01:19:09 So for action items here, one of the things that I,
1840. 01:19:15 well, the only thing I wrote down here,
1841. 01:19:17 'cause so much of this is just be aware of this,
1842. 01:19:20 which that's a lot of books, it seems like,
1843. 01:19:22 okay, just use this as knowledge
1844. 01:19:25 when you're making decisions and talking in the future.
1845. 01:19:27 But in this case, the one that I wrote down specifically here
1846. 01:19:31 is working through my marketing strategies online.
1847. 01:19:34 And we talked about this a lot earlier.
1848. 01:19:36 It's something I've been struggling with.
1849. 01:19:38 I'm working through it on theoretical,
1850. 01:19:39 to a point, and it's something it's,
1851. 01:19:42 I've kind of been painfully aware of it lately,
1852. 01:19:45 and I say painfully aware very intentionally I do that
1853. 01:19:49 because it has literally caused pain to my brain at times.
1854. 01:19:52 So, okay, I need to figure this out.
1855. 01:19:55 What is it I want to do?
1856. 01:19:56 'Cause I want to grow so many of these things online
1857. 01:19:59 that I'm doing, but I don't want to do that
1858. 01:20:01 in a scammy way, I guess, would be the way to say that.
1859. 01:20:05 So I'm just trying to nail down,
1860. 01:20:06 what is it I'm okay with?
1861. 01:20:08 What is it that I like to do,
1862. 01:20:09 and how do I find a good way to do that?
1863. 01:20:13 That's what I got.
1864. 01:20:14 - Yeah, it makes sense.
1865. 01:20:16 The action items that I had,
1866. 01:20:18 one of them I talked about already,
1867. 01:20:19 that is the no news, except tech news,
1868. 01:20:23 just because I find that specifically interesting
1869. 01:20:26 and that's not gonna depress me.
1870. 01:20:28 The other one, I wrote it down here
1871. 01:20:32 as no when to hold them and when to fold them.
1872. 01:20:34 This is being the epilogue,
1873. 01:20:36 and just recognizing what are the decisions
1874. 01:20:39 that I should be considering my cognitive biases.
1875. 01:20:43 For example, if I were going to change careers,
1876. 01:20:46 take a different job, whatever,
1877. 01:20:47 like the big decisions, like that where I want to move
1878. 01:20:50 to that sort of thing, like that's where I want to recognize
1879. 01:20:53 that this stuff is actually coming into play.
1880. 01:20:56 And then recognizing when not to consider
1881. 01:21:00 the cognitive biases.
1882. 01:21:02 For example, when booking a flight, choosing a restaurant,
1883. 01:21:05 whatever, recognize that,
1884. 01:21:07 I don't need to collect all of the information,
1885. 01:21:09 I can just offload this,
1886. 01:21:10 I can make the emotional decision, and it's gonna be fine.
1887. 01:21:14 - And you have to be okay with that.
1888. 01:21:16 - So I guess the takeaway from that,
1889. 01:21:19 if you were gonna try to hold me accountable to this,
1890. 01:21:22 is did I make any stupid decisions take much longer
1891. 01:21:26 than they needed to be?
1892. 01:21:27 (laughs)
1893. 01:21:29 - Okay.
1894. 01:21:30 I will ask you that question next time, Mike.
1895. 01:21:33 - Okay.
1896. 01:21:34 (laughs)
1897. 01:21:36 - So author's style,
1898. 01:21:37 I like kind of the rapid fire of this one,
1899. 01:21:41 and a lot of cases I don't like that,
1900. 01:21:43 but he spells it out in the intro
1901. 01:21:45 that I'm not going to explain how to beat these things,
1902. 01:21:48 I'm just going to share with you this list
1903. 01:21:50 that I have collected over time.
1904. 01:21:52 And he does a very good job of giving you tons and tons
1905. 01:21:56 of examples, there are hundreds of examples in this thing.
1906. 01:21:59 And I think there's like two or three examples per cognitive
1907. 01:22:03 bias, and when you think about them being two and a half,
1908. 01:22:05 three pages long, each, like that,
1909. 01:22:07 he's covering stories quick, and it's a lot of them.
1910. 01:22:10 It's one that would be very hard to skim, I would say.
1911. 01:22:14 Like there's no way you could really skim through this
1912. 01:22:16 and understand each one of them at the depth that you could,
1913. 01:22:20 like you would just miss a bunch of things.
1914. 01:22:22 If you did that.
1915. 01:22:23 So he has a very engaging style,
1916. 01:22:25 'cause it's interesting to read,
1917. 01:22:27 and you want to just keep going on it.
1918. 01:22:29 It is, there's not a real easy way to summarize it.
1919. 01:22:32 That's why we didn't really try to go through it at all.
1920. 01:22:36 There's not a way to just say,
1921. 01:22:38 this is something you need to do,
1922. 01:22:39 'cause there's so many different things here.
1923. 01:22:43 It's like a whole bunch of little stuff,
1924. 01:22:45 which are all helpful, but really hard to summarize.
1925. 01:22:48 So I do really like it.
1926. 01:22:51 I'm not really sure how to rate this one though.
1927. 01:22:54 Like I've been sitting here trying to figure out
1928. 01:22:55 what to put this at.
1929. 01:22:57 I'm inclined to put it at a 4.0,
1930. 01:23:00 'cause I really like the book,
1931. 01:23:02 but I'm not real sure what else I want out of it,
1932. 01:23:04 but it doesn't feel like it's a five or even a 4.5.
1933. 01:23:08 I'm not really sure, but I think I'm putting it at a 4.0,
1934. 01:23:10 but I don't really have a good rationale for that one, Mike.
1935. 01:23:14 - Fair enough.
1936. 01:23:15 Yeah, I struggled with that as well,
1937. 01:23:17 partly because I felt like,
1938. 01:23:20 because we're reading it for Bookworm,
1939. 01:23:22 I needed to take good notes on this.
1940. 01:23:26 The, I think it would have felt totally different
1941. 01:23:29 if I was just reading this for fun,
1942. 01:23:30 and I could read these three page chapters and just be like,
1943. 01:23:33 oh, that was interesting.
1944. 01:23:34 We'll find the next one,
1945. 01:23:36 which is what I did sometimes,
1946. 01:23:38 but most of these I tried to at least write down
1947. 01:23:40 like what it actually was so I could decide
1948. 01:23:43 if it's something that was worth talking about.
1949. 01:23:45 So in some ways, this was kind of stressful to read.
1950. 01:23:50 I'm gonna share with you the PDF version of my Mind Node file,
1951. 01:23:55 and you can feel free to put this in the show notes
1952. 01:23:57 if you want, excuse any typos
1953. 01:23:58 because most of it was done on my phone,
1954. 01:24:01 but it's enormous.
1955. 01:24:02 And I don't know, I mean, there's definitely,
1956. 01:24:08 I got a lot, I got a lot out of this book.
1957. 01:24:10 There's a lot in here and his stories are great.
1958. 01:24:13 I mean, every single three page section,
1959. 01:24:15 he's got powerful stories.
1960. 01:24:16 He's got a lot of research that he cites.
1961. 01:24:19 Like I'm very impressed by the amount of work
1962. 01:24:21 that went into this book.
1963. 01:24:23 But that being said, it's definitely not
1964. 01:24:26 a five star, in my opinion either.
1965. 01:24:28 And because of the way that I went through it,
1966. 01:24:34 I kind of dreaded it in some sense
1967. 01:24:39 because I guess it comes back to the chauffeur
1968. 01:24:42 knowledge thing.
1969. 01:24:43 I knew that he really understood this stuff
1970. 01:24:45 a lot better than I did.
1971. 01:24:47 I felt a little bit inadequate, I guess,
1972. 01:24:51 getting on the microphone today and talking about this stuff
1973. 01:24:53 because I'm like, I don't really understand
1974. 01:24:54 what all this stuff is.
1975. 01:24:55 You have three pages is enough to help me understand
1976. 01:24:57 procrastination or the gambler's fallacy
1977. 01:24:59 or any of that stuff.
1978. 01:25:02 So I struggle with this as well.
1979. 01:25:04 I think I'm gonna meet you at the foro.
1980. 01:25:07 It's definitely like a lot of great content
1981. 01:25:09 which is why I can't really justify reading it
1982. 01:25:11 lower than that, but it also wasn't anything
1983. 01:25:15 that just blew me out of the water
1984. 01:25:17 and it's like, oh, this is amazing.
1985. 01:25:18 I can't wait to tell everybody I know about this book.
1986. 01:25:21 Certain people I think will get a lot out of this book.
1987. 01:25:23 I also think that it's gonna be completely overwhelming
1988. 01:25:27 for some people as well.
1989. 01:25:28 - Right, yeah, I'm with you.
1990. 01:25:30 I think a lot of what we do on Bookworm
1991. 01:25:32 could come across as the chauffeurs thing,
1992. 01:25:36 but just know listeners, we're learning this as we go.
1993. 01:25:40 Like we just finished the book
1994. 01:25:42 so we're talking about something we just read.
1995. 01:25:44 So just be aware of that.
1996. 01:25:46 So I don't know that we really need to change anything
1997. 01:25:48 for that.
1998. 01:25:49 It's just something that,
1999. 01:25:51 this is the nature of the show.
2000. 01:25:52 So it goes.
2001. 01:25:53 So we got a couple foros there
2002. 01:25:57 and what we've got for upcoming books.
2003. 01:26:01 See, this one was your choice.
2004. 01:26:02 Next one's mine.
2005. 01:26:04 Upcoming is The Legend of the Monk and the Merchant
2006. 01:26:07 by Terry Felber.
2007. 01:26:09 And this is the last of the Dave Ramsey books, Mike.
2008. 01:26:12 - Nice.
2009. 01:26:14 We get through this one and no more Dave Ramsey books.
2010. 01:26:18 I don't know if I'm excited about that.
2011. 01:26:20 Sad about that.
2012. 01:26:21 It just is.
2013. 01:26:22 - It means we can go work for Dave Ramsey, right?
2014. 01:26:24 - Ooh, there you go.
2015. 01:26:26 We get after that.
2016. 01:26:29 - I mentioned I actually met him,
2017. 01:26:30 well, didn't actually meet him.
2018. 01:26:32 I saw him at an Anshia Leadership one day event.
2019. 01:26:36 And he's an interesting guy.
2020. 01:26:40 I really appreciate his perspective
2021. 01:26:43 on leadership specifically.
2022. 01:26:45 Everybody kind of knows him as the money guy,
2023. 01:26:47 but I think that the money principles
2024. 01:26:50 that he teaches on a show and stuff like that,
2025. 01:26:52 those have application in a lot of different ways,
2026. 01:26:54 which is why Anshia Leadership is kind of a cool brand.
2027. 01:26:58 The whole time I was sitting there though,
2028. 01:26:59 I was kind of thinking to myself,
2029. 01:27:01 there's no way I could work for this guy.
2030. 01:27:03 (laughing)
2031. 01:27:05 - That is actually a conversation I've had to have
2032. 01:27:08 with my wife before because he is always looking
2033. 01:27:11 for Ruby on Rails developers, which is my bread and butter.
2034. 01:27:15 So I have had to have this conversation before,
2035. 01:27:19 but always the bullet that kills it every single time
2036. 01:27:23 is you have to live in Tennessee to work for him.
2037. 01:27:28 And we're pretty firmly rooted in Minnesota.
2038. 01:27:30 So that's not something that I would need
2039. 01:27:34 to consider in reality, but it is a conversation
2040. 01:27:38 I've had to have before.
2041. 01:27:40 - Yeah, yeah. (laughing)
2042. 01:27:43 One after that is one that I picked up a little bit ago
2043. 01:27:47 and is one of those classics, I guess.
2044. 01:27:51 Thinking Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill.
2045. 01:27:56 And I think this will be interesting to cover
2046. 01:27:59 on Bookworm and it kind of fills a spot
2047. 01:28:02 in the library kind of like seven habits
2048. 01:28:04 of how the effect of people did,
2049. 01:28:06 where it's like, okay, you guys talk about productivity books,
2050. 01:28:08 but you haven't covered this one yet.
2051. 01:28:11 So that's really a justification.
2052. 01:28:13 I don't know much about this book
2053. 01:28:14 other than a couple of people that I really respect
2054. 01:28:17 have recommended it.
2055. 01:28:18 It was written quite a while ago though,
2056. 01:28:20 so it'll be interesting to go through this.
2057. 01:28:23 - Yeah, I'm excited about that one as well.
2058. 01:28:26 For a gap book, I am reading Getting Things Done, Mike.
2059. 01:28:30 (laughing)
2060. 01:28:32 - The other one.
2061. 01:28:33 - Oh, right, the other one.
2062. 01:28:34 Yeah, it's by Edwin Bliss.
2063. 01:28:37 So this is one, and maybe we should be doing this one
2064. 01:28:41 for a bookworm, I don't know,
2065. 01:28:42 but I had this one recommended to me by Mike Vardy
2066. 01:28:45 over on the Productivitiest.
2067. 01:28:47 And he mentioned that he shared this on Instagram.
2068. 01:28:52 People kind of went nuts wanting to know something about it
2069. 01:28:55 and I happened to order it
2070. 01:28:57 and I didn't really think about that a whole lot.
2071. 01:29:00 So I posted a picture of the order of books I had come in
2072. 01:29:03 and everybody wanted to know about this one.
2073. 01:29:05 - Oh, I get what you're saying, Mr. Vardy.
2074. 01:29:08 That's, yeah, people always, what is that?
2075. 01:29:11 Oh, yeah, well, it's from way back before David Allen did.
2076. 01:29:15 His book, this one is, what was it?
2077. 01:29:17 It was published in 1976.
2078. 01:29:20 So it's an older one.
2079. 01:29:22 So I'm gonna go through that one,
2080. 01:29:24 just kind of curious as to what a mid '70s version
2081. 01:29:27 of Getting Things Done is.
2082. 01:29:29 - And the one that I have for a gap book,
2083. 01:29:32 I don't think I've mentioned this one before,
2084. 01:29:34 but I couldn't go back and see if I mentioned on the last show
2085. 01:29:38 or not.
2086. 01:29:38 And that is Confessions of the Pricing Man by Herman Simon.
2087. 01:29:43 And this is an economics book in a lot of ways.
2088. 01:29:50 It talks about, like the subtitle says
2089. 01:29:54 how price affects everything.
2090. 01:29:56 It uses a lot of stories and a lot of examples
2091. 01:29:59 of what happened when companies did this sort of thing.
2092. 01:30:03 And so that's kind of right up my alley.
2093. 01:30:05 I'm a little bit of a nerd when it comes to that sort of stuff,
2094. 01:30:07 understanding why companies launch a product
2095. 01:30:10 at a specific price point and the impact that it has.
2096. 01:30:13 He uses stories in there about how people were like,
2097. 01:30:14 on the verge of bankruptcy, they doubled their price
2098. 01:30:17 and all of a sudden they're doing really well,
2099. 01:30:18 even the product didn't change.
2100. 01:30:21 Like the number of sales goes up
2101. 01:30:23 because they just raised the price.
2102. 01:30:24 And so this kind of goes along with our discussion
2103. 01:30:27 on the marketing, but I wanna understand
2104. 01:30:29 how this really impacts selling products.
2105. 01:30:34 And I wanna be able to use the principles that are in here
2106. 01:30:38 in a lot of the projects that I'm working on,
2107. 01:30:40 not in a manipulative way like we talked about today,
2108. 01:30:42 but just understanding the economics behind things.
2109. 01:30:46 - Yeah, last time you were talking about 10% happier.
2110. 01:30:50 - Oh yeah, yeah.
2111. 01:30:51 - That was the one you were going to last time.
2112. 01:30:52 So, I don't know, it sounds interesting.
2113. 01:30:54 Maybe I should pick this one up as well.
2114. 01:30:55 That looks like an interesting topic.
2115. 01:30:58 This is a recommendation by Tan and also Brooks
2116. 01:31:02 from Agent Efficiency.
2117. 01:31:03 And I have not been disappointed yet
2118. 01:31:06 by a book that Tan has recommended.
2119. 01:31:08 - Okay, good to know.
2120. 01:31:11 I know that I've got,
2121. 01:31:14 I'm wrapping up the list of books that I had,
2122. 01:31:18 'cause I tend to select my books like five in a row
2123. 01:31:20 and just plan them all out.
2124. 01:31:21 And I'm coming up to the end of that
2125. 01:31:22 and I need to start filling in what my next five
2126. 01:31:26 are going to be and I'm planning to do that 100%
2127. 01:31:30 from the book recommendations from listeners.
2128. 01:31:33 At least on my end of things,
2129. 01:31:34 I don't know what Mike's gonna do,
2130. 01:31:35 but listeners, if you're listening to this,
2131. 01:31:37 'cause if you're hearing this, you're listening to this,
2132. 01:31:39 but I am going to be going through those book recommendations
2133. 01:31:42 and selecting at least five for my selections
2134. 01:31:46 in the upcoming list.
2135. 01:31:47 So if you want to get your book on that list,
2136. 01:31:51 bookworm.fm/recommend, fill it out, send it in,
2137. 01:31:55 I'll get it and I'll put it on the book list
2138. 01:31:57 and I'll look through that book list
2139. 01:31:59 whenever I'm selecting those
2140. 01:32:00 and maybe yours will be selected.
2141. 01:32:02 There you go.
2142. 01:32:04 - Nice.
2143. 01:32:05 Yeah, I've selected a couple from the list.
2144. 01:32:07 I've not batched them like you're talking about,
2145. 01:32:10 but yeah, I'll definitely pick some from the list as well.
2146. 01:32:14 I try to balance them between books
2147. 01:32:16 that I've been recommended and books
2148. 01:32:18 that I wanted to read for a while.
2149. 01:32:20 But if you want to give us some feedback,
2150. 01:32:25 we would really appreciate it
2151. 01:32:26 if you wanted to leave us a five-star review
2152. 01:32:28 so we could end KCRW from the top spot
2153. 01:32:33 when you search for bookworm on iTunes,
2154. 01:32:35 we would really appreciate it.
2155. 01:32:37 But all of that feedback really helps guide the show.
2156. 01:32:42 We do listen to it and we want to hear what you think.
2157. 01:32:46 So you can either contact us via the website
2158. 01:32:49 or give us an iTunes review if you've got a moment
2159. 01:32:51 that would really help other people find the show
2160. 01:32:53 and we would really appreciate it.
2161. 01:32:56 - Yeah, I'm one that's going to go through the list
2162. 01:32:58 for sure for selecting next books.
2163. 01:33:00 I know that I tend to get some other recommendations
2164. 01:33:03 here and there.
2165. 01:33:05 For some reason I seem to do those as gap books
2166. 01:33:07 for some reason.
2167. 01:33:08 They tend to fall into that category for me,
2168. 01:33:10 but I don't know.
2169. 01:33:12 We'll see where I land.
2170. 01:33:14 So get your recommendations in.
2171. 01:33:15 I'm going to be selecting from that.
2172. 01:33:17 And if you're reading along with us and listening along,
2173. 01:33:21 the one that we're doing up next
2174. 01:33:23 is the legend of the monk and the merchant.
2175. 01:33:25 We'll go through that one next time.