35: The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer

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1. 00:00:00 I got a bone to pick with you though, sir, over this book.
2. 00:00:02 Okay.
3. 00:00:05 I kind of figured there was something along these lines that was coming.
4. 00:00:10 Yeah, but we'll get there.
5. 00:00:13 Okay.
6. 00:00:15 So other than the book, what's new in Mike's world?
7. 00:00:21 Well, I had the, actually the second round of the humorous speech contest on
8. 00:00:28 Saturday.
9. 00:00:29 So the first round was the club and the second round, I always get these
10. 00:00:33 terms mixed up.
11. 00:00:34 I think it's the area and then it's division or it might be get a way around.
12. 00:00:40 Uh, but basically I won the, the one, uh, on Saturday, which was the second round.
13. 00:00:47 So now I have to go to the next, next level up, uh, which is in green Bay in
14. 00:00:53 October and then if I get past that one, I go to the district conference and
15. 00:00:59 compete there.
16. 00:01:00 That's basically, I think the, the farthest you can go with the humorous speech
17. 00:01:03 contest.
18. 00:01:04 So it's going really well, but it's also pushing me way outside my comfort zone.
19. 00:01:09 I'm not a funny guy, but, uh, I'm learning I can, I can become one.
20. 00:01:14 Well, congratulations for one.
21. 00:01:18 I saw the picture of your trophy on Instagram.
22. 00:01:21 I was, I was very proud and I was very happy for you.
23. 00:01:24 Thank you.
24. 00:01:25 That was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do because like I said,
25. 00:01:28 I've never really considered myself a funny guy because I've never been very
26. 00:01:33 loud or outgoing or, I don't know, my personality just, despite what you may
27. 00:01:39 think from listening to a podcast, isn't like look at me type of person.
28. 00:01:42 And so when you are competing in a humorous speech contest, you are saying,
29. 00:01:47 look at me, I'm going to entertain you and I'm going to be funny.
30. 00:01:50 Like that's, that's a pretty big boast for, for me.
31. 00:01:53 And it's really stressful to have to back that up, but at least for the first
32. 00:01:57 round or first and second round now I've done it.
33. 00:01:59 Well done.
34. 00:02:01 Well done.
35. 00:02:02 I don't think, you know, I think this is a very common misconception.
36. 00:02:07 Cause I think my view of a funny person per the stereotype you just laid out is
37. 00:02:11 very different because I tend to think of people who are clever with words and
38. 00:02:17 can lay out like the facial expressions and the emotion that goes with them.
39. 00:02:21 I think of that as very funny.
40. 00:02:24 I, I will not disagree with you that typically that comes in a loud,
41. 00:02:28 boisterous package, but I don't think it needs to be that per se.
42. 00:02:35 I think my wife would agree with you because, or agree with that because she,
43. 00:02:39 she's very picky in what she finds humorous.
44. 00:02:43 And it has to be a very clever play on words and a lot of cases to get her to laugh.
45. 00:02:50 And if you can do that, it's, it's really entertaining because she has a hard time
46. 00:02:53 stopping.
47. 00:02:54 That's funny.
48. 00:02:57 Um, also something super cool that happened actually just yesterday,
49. 00:03:02 I'm going to send you a picture that somebody else took, not my wife.
50. 00:03:06 Um, so the, the picture is not the greatest, but, uh, let me know when you,
51. 00:03:12 when you get that link and you, you get that picture down.
52. 00:03:15 I'll explain what's going on there.
53. 00:03:17 Okay.
54. 00:03:19 Loading.
55. 00:03:20 I see a picture of a dude playing guitar in front of a microphone.
56. 00:03:26 I see another dude in the background playing what looks to be a violin.
57. 00:03:31 Okay.
58. 00:03:32 Dude in the background appears to be user.
59. 00:03:34 Yeah.
60. 00:03:34 So that's me and the other dude in this picture, the guy sitting at the piano is
61. 00:03:41 Phil Driscoll, Grammy award winning, played for five presidents, like really,
62. 00:03:46 really awesome musicians.
63. 00:03:47 So he came to our church and I got to jam with them, which was super cool.
64. 00:03:51 That is sweet.
65. 00:03:53 That is really cool.
66. 00:03:54 It was awesome.
67. 00:03:56 Well done.
68. 00:03:57 He looks like he's very comfortable.
69. 00:03:59 He knows exactly what he's doing.
70. 00:04:01 Uh, he is the stereo.
71. 00:04:03 It's been on the stage of cool musician.
72. 00:04:04 Yeah.
73. 00:04:04 But he's what I like about him, uh, is he's very authentic.
74. 00:04:08 It's not, it's not fake.
75. 00:04:09 He's not too cool for school.
76. 00:04:10 Like he'll sit there and talk to you and chat about stuff.
77. 00:04:13 Like he's very approachable.
78. 00:04:14 Uh, he's just very real.
79. 00:04:16 And, uh, it was, it was a blast playing with him.
80. 00:04:19 That's cool.
81. 00:04:21 That's cool.
82. 00:04:22 When was this?
83. 00:04:23 This is past Sunday.
84. 00:04:24 Yeah.
85. 00:04:24 As we're recording this, it was literally yesterday.
86. 00:04:26 Nice.
87. 00:04:28 Nice.
88. 00:04:29 So you're still flying high on this one.
89. 00:04:30 Yep.
90. 00:04:31 Cool.
91. 00:04:33 Cool.
92. 00:04:34 Well, you've been busy.
93. 00:04:35 Wow.
94. 00:04:35 Go Mike all over the place.
95. 00:04:37 And it kind of ties into my, uh, my action items.
96. 00:04:41 So you want me to go first?
97. 00:04:42 Yes.
98. 00:04:43 All right.
99. 00:04:44 So my first action item, uh, which you put on here and I don't know how you're going to hold me accountable to this unless I just keep doing awesome stuff.
100. 00:04:53 That's most of them.
101. 00:04:54 It's kind of him.
102. 00:04:54 That's how it goes.
103. 00:04:56 Yeah.
104. 00:04:56 But it was a dream bigger.
105. 00:04:57 Don't compromise the vision.
106. 00:04:59 So, um, yeah, and these specific things that I just shared, shared with you and now the rest of the internet since this is going to be published.
107. 00:05:08 Uh, these aren't directly correlated to like a professional goal or a 12 week year or anything like that.
108. 00:05:14 But it is, I think still in line with this action item where if I am learning to dream bigger and not compromise, then I don't have to think to myself, like, Oh, that'd be really awesome if I could jam with Phil Juskel, but it'll never happen.
109. 00:05:29 You know, it did happen.
110. 00:05:31 So that's, that's.
111. 00:05:32 Yesterday to be.
112. 00:05:34 Yeah.
113. 00:05:35 So it's more just taking that mindset to, to the rest of my, my goals and the rest of my life.
114. 00:05:41 Uh, I guess, you know, the, the follow up from last time is that there is some cool stuff happening and it's stuff that I wouldn't have identified as like, yeah, I'm going to try and make this happen.
115. 00:05:50 So it's cool to see that that, uh, there's, I guess it's, it's kind of like validation for the, the concept.
116. 00:05:57 So are you, yeah, it does.
117. 00:06:02 And are you, are you continuing, continuing to push even further?
118. 00:06:07 Well, like, my concern there is that you would eventually find a place to be, not necessarily, I don't want to say complacent, but comfortable, I guess would be the better term.
119. 00:06:16 Yeah.
120. 00:06:18 Um, that, I guess, you know, there, that time will tell in terms of whether that is the case.
121. 00:06:25 I could see that too.
122. 00:06:26 Uh, I can tell you that for the time being, I have no problem thinking of other cool stuff that I want to do someday that, uh, it would be cool if I ever got there and I don't really know how I would ever get there.
123. 00:06:38 Uh, really big bucket list.
124. 00:06:39 Yeah.
125. 00:06:40 Yeah.
126. 00:06:40 Exactly.
127. 00:06:41 And that kind of gets into some of these other action items, but another thing just right now, I guess this is kind of both personal and professional.
128. 00:06:49 I really want to get a book deal, like a, a legit book deal, not publishing it yourself on Amazon.
129. 00:06:55 Like major publisher book deal.
130. 00:06:56 And, uh, there's, I've had somebody kind of make some introductions and get me rolling in that direction, which is super cool, but I guess like that's the next, the next thing that's like, this is way too big for Mike to do.
131. 00:07:10 So he's going to need some help from, uh, from God, the universe, you know, whatever your religious belief system, I'm going to say specifically since we threw it out there in the, and the, the monk and the merchant, you know, I really believe that.
132. 00:07:24 By me embracing this mindset that God is opening some doors for me that is just like, I never even thought to look there before.
133. 00:07:32 Which is always exciting and terrifying.
134. 00:07:36 Yep.
135. 00:07:37 Yep.
136. 00:07:37 Exactly.
137. 00:07:38 So do we get to know what the book concept is or you keep in that close to your chest at the moment?
138. 00:07:43 Well, uh, so I had a conversation with a New York Times best selling author.
139. 00:07:52 That's all I can really say for now.
140. 00:07:54 Publicly anyways.
141. 00:07:55 Okay.
142. 00:07:56 And all right.
143. 00:07:58 I see that my book was kind of the right thing at the right time for some major Christian book publishers like Thomas Nelson and Tyndale.
144. 00:08:08 They basically told me, oh, you need to talk to these two people specific or these, these two publishers specifically.
145. 00:08:14 And I'm like, well, yeah, I know, but I can't get in there.
146. 00:08:16 Like they don't even accept submissions.
147. 00:08:19 Like it's not even a fact of like, well, you're going to throw it out there and there's thousands that they have to comb through.
148. 00:08:24 They literally do not even take them unless you know somebody.
149. 00:08:27 And this person said that, oh, yeah, you got to talk to this person at Tyndale and this person at Thomas Nelson.
150. 00:08:33 Don't worry.
151. 00:08:34 I'll make the introduction.
152. 00:08:35 So basically what he told me was that the theme of the book that I had currently was pretty good.
153. 00:08:42 And he thought that they would want to kind of reclaim the term hustle from the Gary V's in the Grant Cardones of the world,
154. 00:08:49 which I thought was kind of funny because I do have like a different definition of it where it's not just doing more things.
155. 00:08:55 It's doing the right things.
156. 00:08:56 And that's another bookworm episode, maybe on my books.
157. 00:09:01 I won't get into all of it here.
158. 00:09:03 But basically he says that.
159. 00:09:04 I feel like we need to do like bookworm after dark series.
160. 00:09:07 There we go.
161. 00:09:08 Yeah.
162. 00:09:08 Besides.
163. 00:09:09 We need to just talk about whatever.
164. 00:09:10 Yep.
165. 00:09:11 So I I've been taking a lot of notes and writing down a lot of things as I've continued to research
166. 00:09:19 a topic and I've got a whole bunch of stuff that actually I've wanted to implement into an update,
167. 00:09:24 but also with with it with the stuff going on with potentially a book deal, like I'm not going to rush that out the door now and.
168. 00:09:33 And then, you know, basically if they're going to republish it, quote unquote, like there's a bunch of stuff that I would add,
169. 00:09:42 but I would want to work with an editor in order to revise it before I actually go through all the work of adding it, if that makes sense.
170. 00:09:49 It does.
171. 00:09:50 So it would be like a version to it would be essentially a new a new book because there's so much that's changed.
172. 00:09:57 But the topic and the title feedback I've gotten is that it's really good.
173. 00:10:02 And it's just the sort of thing that Christian publishers specifically would be looking for.
174. 00:10:08 So we'll see.
175. 00:10:09 This is really cool.
176. 00:10:11 I like this.
177. 00:10:12 I like that you're kind of telling the world about this on a bookworm episode.
178. 00:10:16 That's kind of cool.
179. 00:10:18 Well, that leads into the third action item here, kind of, you know, writing up my statement and normalizing the dream.
180. 00:10:24 I mean, it's really easy for you today.
181. 00:10:25 Well, this one, honestly, I almost deleted this off the list because I'm really nervous saying this because this is specifically from Think and Grow Rich.
182. 00:10:34 This is this is Napoleon Hills.
183. 00:10:37 Basically, it's a definition of the income that you want to have.
184. 00:10:41 So this is going to sound.
185. 00:10:43 I don't know.
186. 00:10:45 Some people may be turned off.
187. 00:10:46 You can you can bleep out the stuff yourself if you want that you don't want to.
188. 00:10:51 I don't care.
189. 00:10:52 I mean, if I had not gone through Sean and the Cabs book and heard him say that Sean Sean West is going to be a billion dollar brand by whatever year he said, I would feel a little bit more uneasy about this.
190. 00:11:05 But, you know, the fact that he's done it like I when he did that, I really respected it.
191. 00:11:09 So you may really respect this.
192. 00:11:11 You may think I am off my rocker.
193. 00:11:13 You may think I'm conceited, whatever.
194. 00:11:15 But this is this is what I got from Think and Grow Rich because I talked to my wife about this too.
195. 00:11:20 So, okay, as a recording right now, you can leave this in.
196. 00:11:24 But my statement, normalizing the dream is I will be a multi-millionaire by the time I am 40 years old.
197. 00:11:32 And I'm not going to tell you how old I am right now, but I did just have a birthday.
198. 00:11:35 So you can do the math yourself.
199. 00:11:36 Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.
200. 00:11:41 I like it. I like it.
201. 00:11:45 So this this means that you have the goal, which then leads into.
202. 00:11:52 You have to lay out the the actual action items that make that happen, which I guess plays back into your number one of dream bigger.
203. 00:12:01 Pretty well.
204. 00:12:02 Yeah.
205. 00:12:04 And then that goes into the book deal.
206. 00:12:06 Yeah, I could see.
207. 00:12:07 I could see you're kind of getting pieces put together for that.
208. 00:12:12 Yeah. So the book deal, the thing that makes me nervous about the book deal specifically is that this is completely out of my hands.
209. 00:12:18 I am completely relying on the kindness of somebody I have never met other than on Skype.
210. 00:12:23 It was a good time to read the book for today.
211. 00:12:26 Yeah, yeah, actually it was.
212. 00:12:29 But we'll get to that.
213. 00:12:32 Following the Think and Grow Rich formula, though, like really the statement, this specific action item is kind of.
214. 00:12:41 You know, tying all of this productivity and bookworm stuff together, like Stephen Covey begin with the end in mind.
215. 00:12:46 Like this is where you want to be.
216. 00:12:48 And Napoleon Hill from Think and Grow Rich would say that once you know where you want to be,
217. 00:12:52 then you'll start to see the strategies that you can take to get there.
218. 00:12:56 So yeah, the book deal is a potential strategy that could help me get to that point.
219. 00:13:00 But again, it makes me nervous because it is 100% completely outside of my control.
220. 00:13:06 Yes, I wrote the book that the person looked at.
221. 00:13:09 And I've got something to send to the publishers, but I'm completely relying on him to make the introductions.
222. 00:13:15 Otherwise, this goes nowhere.
223. 00:13:16 Yeah, and I guess then the question becomes, you know, if they say no, then what do you do?
224. 00:13:23 Because yeah, I don't know.
225. 00:13:26 It comes so good they can't ignore you.
226. 00:13:29 So hard.
227. 00:13:29 Keep winning humorous speech contests.
228. 00:13:31 Build the brand, keep writing.
229. 00:13:36 Yep, that's how it goes.
230. 00:13:38 Well, I, one of the reasons that I entered the humorous speech contest, actually, the main reason that I entered the humorous speech contest
231. 00:13:44 is that when I competed in the inspirational contest last fall at the area level, the third level,
232. 00:13:53 I completely blanked on my speech.
233. 00:13:57 Like I was going great.
234. 00:13:59 And then all of a sudden, just like nothing, silence for like 15 seconds, which obviously meant that I did not move on to the next
235. 00:14:08 round.
236. 00:14:08 Right.
237. 00:14:09 But I've never had that sort of thing happen to me before and when it happened, like I was crushed.
238. 00:14:14 I could not believe that I did that.
239. 00:14:17 I mean, I was speaking on a topic that I literally wrote a book about.
240. 00:14:21 So how stupid does it look if I'm up there with nothing to say?
241. 00:14:24 But it happened.
242. 00:14:25 And so I said to myself, basically, the next opportunity that I got, I was going to prove to myself that that's not normal, that
243. 00:14:33 basically I could fix it the next time around.
244. 00:14:36 And that's that's kind of what happened with the first first round, anyways, of this humorous speech contest.
245. 00:14:41 So this has nothing to do with me figuring out how to be funny or the humor.
246. 00:14:46 It's just the next opportunity to compete and prove to myself that I can actually do this.
247. 00:14:51 Fair enough.
248. 00:14:53 Fair enough.
249. 00:14:54 You have some big stuff going there, but I do.
250. 00:14:57 You still have you have one more follow up item here.
251. 00:15:00 How's the the personal communication room?
252. 00:15:02 How's that going?
253. 00:15:03 Yeah, I don't know how you're going to be able to hold me accountable to this in the near future.
254. 00:15:08 I mean, basically I have the plan to finish off a room in our basement, which will eventually become my office.
255. 00:15:14 But that is not something that's happening in the next couple of weeks, anyways.
256. 00:15:20 And so I would hope that we'd be able to do that by the end of the year.
257. 00:15:25 And if that happens, that's going to become my personal communication room.
258. 00:15:30 But I don't really see how it works until until we finish that space.
259. 00:15:34 OK, for this space, what is it that needs done?
260. 00:15:37 Is it like studs need to put up sheet rock and mud it and paint it and everything?
261. 00:15:41 Or is it?
262. 00:15:42 We've got it for.
263. 00:15:43 It needs so it needs electrical and it needs.
264. 00:15:48 Yeah, drywall and I want it to I basically I just don't want to do it.
265. 00:15:53 I want somebody else to do it.
266. 00:15:55 I want to pay somebody to do it.
267. 00:15:56 I don't have time for that.
268. 00:15:58 And I'm not good at it either.
269. 00:16:01 Maybe if we were closer, I'd pay you to come help me out.
270. 00:16:04 Well, that's what I'm saying here.
271. 00:16:04 They like, do I need to come over there for a week and we just do this or what?
272. 00:16:08 Maybe.
273. 00:16:09 I mean, babies do in a couple of weeks.
274. 00:16:11 So I'll be home for a while.
275. 00:16:13 You know, if you want to come work from Appleton, that's right.
276. 00:16:16 This is going to go well.
277. 00:16:17 OK, Rachel, you take care of the baby.
278. 00:16:19 We're going to go make a whole bunch of noise downstairs.
279. 00:16:22 Yeah.
280. 00:16:23 Yeah.
281. 00:16:24 No, I've got I've talked to a couple of people about estimates and things.
282. 00:16:28 I've got the estimates down.
283. 00:16:29 Maybe that's one of mine next 12 week year goals.
284. 00:16:32 You know, like you had the financial goal related to the car.
285. 00:16:35 Maybe mine is related to the office.
286. 00:16:37 We're like, that's it's not done unless that that sort of thing happens.
287. 00:16:41 I think it's not it's not going to be a whole lot longer until we're going to be
288. 00:16:45 able to do it, but I'm not going to go out and spend a bunch of money right
289. 00:16:48 before we have a kid.
290. 00:16:49 So.
291. 00:16:50 Yeah, it's it's on hold for now.
292. 00:16:53 OK.
293. 00:16:56 All right, well, I'll bring it up every time we record just a rough salt in the
294. 00:16:59 moon.
295. 00:16:59 Thanks a lot, Joe.
296. 00:17:01 I guess that means I have to go now.
297. 00:17:06 Your turn.
298. 00:17:07 Yep.
299. 00:17:07 All right.
300. 00:17:09 So first one on this list changed my morning and evening self talk.
301. 00:17:13 So this was not going so great.
302. 00:17:16 I I think I did really good for about four days after we last recorded.
303. 00:17:23 And to be honest with you, I'm not sure I could tell much difference.
304. 00:17:28 Now, granted, it takes much longer than four days for that to really
305. 00:17:32 have the effect that it should because the the goal there is to start dreaming
306. 00:17:37 much bigger and get the motivation to go.
307. 00:17:39 And I will say that I have been better about the second piece of this, which
308. 00:17:44 is visualize the day ahead of time.
309. 00:17:46 I've been a lot better about that.
310. 00:17:47 I completely screwed up all of my Omni focus context and redid it to make this
311. 00:17:53 easier and yeah, that deserves an article or something by itself.
312. 00:17:58 That's way too big to even mention here, really.
313. 00:18:00 But the thing it helps me do is figure out what does the day look like
314. 00:18:05 and what is my plan for the day and actually decide when things are going to
315. 00:18:10 happen mentally.
316. 00:18:12 I don't have to write them down per se, but just knowing what the plan is helps
317. 00:18:17 me a lot.
318. 00:18:19 But the whole self talk thing, yeah, that one, I'm going to leave it on the list
319. 00:18:25 for next time.
320. 00:18:26 I'll put it that way.
321. 00:18:26 Okay.
322. 00:18:28 So the visualizing thing that's been going well, I've been trying to keep that
323. 00:18:32 piece going because that is helpful.
324. 00:18:34 The last one I've got here, take advantage of location shifting.
325. 00:18:39 And I talked about this a little bit where I tend to jump from place to place,
326. 00:18:42 both in my office and where I'm working throughout town, it seems.
327. 00:18:49 And I've got at least one more client in town that I've been doing a website for.
328. 00:18:54 So it's kind of fun.
329. 00:18:55 I can go over to her, her shop and do some things from time to time.
330. 00:18:58 So I've been, I've been trying to make sure I move around a little bit more.
331. 00:19:02 But one of the things I've specifically tried to do is I have a whiteboard here in
332. 00:19:06 my office.
333. 00:19:07 I suppose you've never been in my office yet, Mike.
334. 00:19:08 I have not.
335. 00:19:09 You need to come over and we'll hang out.
336. 00:19:10 All right.
337. 00:19:12 We'll be productive.
338. 00:19:12 On the, I'll come over and we'll build your communication room and then you can
339. 00:19:17 come over here and we'll sit around and dream stuff on a whiteboard.
340. 00:19:20 There we go.
341. 00:19:20 And eat Josh's bacon.
342. 00:19:22 Yes.
343. 00:19:23 And we'll invite Josh over.
344. 00:19:24 You know, you should just come over tomorrow for the Apple event.
345. 00:19:27 There you go.
346. 00:19:28 I people know who are for now.
347. 00:19:30 I might get there in time.
348. 00:19:31 Here you go.
349. 00:19:34 So the, the location shifting thing, I've been trying to do that more.
350. 00:19:39 And I go up and I do things on the whiteboard and then I'll go over to my desk
351. 00:19:43 and I'll go over to the couch like that sort of thing.
352. 00:19:44 And I tend to move around a little bit.
353. 00:19:46 And it's been helping me get a few things done, a few more things done in a day, which is helpful.
354. 00:19:51 But at the same time, I also know the whole cyclical thing of go work, take a break, go work, take a break.
355. 00:19:58 So I'm trying to get some of that balanced out at the same time.
356. 00:20:01 All these little tools and tricks.
357. 00:20:03 Life hacks.
358. 00:20:05 Although I hate to do them.
359. 00:20:07 I know.
360. 00:20:09 I like the idea of location shifting though.
361. 00:20:11 I think that if you have the space to do that within
362. 00:20:15 the place that you live, that's ideal.
363. 00:20:17 I really, really don't, but I implement that basically by hopping around from different,
364. 00:20:23 different places.
365. 00:20:23 And, and we've talked about this on bookworm before, where just the process of getting
366. 00:20:27 in the car and driving somewhere else is enough to kind of reset and then enter
367. 00:20:32 into a new mental state where, okay, now I can actually get done what I need to get done.
368. 00:20:36 Yes.
369. 00:20:37 That's, that's actually one reason I've debated adding like a one day a week going to,
370. 00:20:44 there's a caribou coffee not far from where we live.
371. 00:20:46 To be honest, it's about a mile and a half.
372. 00:20:49 If that, it takes like 10 minutes to get there, but that's the nature of a city or a town.
373. 00:20:56 But I've really debated spending one morning there a week and doing a bunch of writing
374. 00:21:02 because that's an area where I want to spend some more time.
375. 00:21:05 Again, I've kind of fallen off that bandwagon, but I want to get back into it.
376. 00:21:09 So I've really thought about doing that.
377. 00:21:10 It'd be a good way to take advantage even more of location shifting.
378. 00:21:14 How about like a co-working space?
379. 00:21:16 Are there any that are close to where you live?
380. 00:21:18 I don't know of any in, in our town at all, but I also haven't spent a lot of time
381. 00:21:25 looking for them, but it's something I probably should look into, but I haven't.
382. 00:21:32 But some of the, some of the reason I haven't is because I work at the church.
383. 00:21:36 So it kind of acts as a co-working space because it's definitely an office.
384. 00:21:42 My desk is right inside the main office door.
385. 00:21:45 So you can't go anywhere in the office area without passing my desk.
386. 00:21:48 So I'm usually not at my desk.
387. 00:21:52 I was going to say, but I realized the problem.
388. 00:21:56 I know.
389. 00:21:58 So I end up all over the building doing things in a lot of different places,
390. 00:22:03 but it kind of acts as a co-working space for me because it's not uncommon for me to go
391. 00:22:08 finish things up at the church and then continue working on my own stuff, just get
392. 00:22:13 off the clock or whatever you want to call it.
393. 00:22:15 That's not uncommon for me to do.
394. 00:22:17 That makes sense.
395. 00:22:19 If you need just like a place to, to, if you need to find a quiet corner somewhere
396. 00:22:24 and, and work on something, but what I have grown to like about the co-working space
397. 00:22:29 is like, I'm recording this in my office.
398. 00:22:31 There are a couple of people who are in the shared space right outside my office.
399. 00:22:35 When I get done with this recording and I need like just something to, to location
400. 00:22:42 shifting, you know, if I need, and I need to kind of reset, I can go out there, talk
401. 00:22:46 to people for a couple minutes, people who are of the same mindset and who are doing
402. 00:22:50 cool things.
403. 00:22:50 And then I can come back in, reenergize, ready to work again, as opposed to having
404. 00:22:56 to maintain that motivation and seclusion.
405. 00:22:58 Like that's the hard part for me.
406. 00:23:00 Yeah, I totally get that.
407. 00:23:03 The whole brainstorming thing tends to be a big motivator, which is why a lot of
408. 00:23:08 times whenever I get done recording a podcast, I can go crank out some really cool stuff.
409. 00:23:13 This is another reason I like keeping all the my podcasts around because it serves as
410. 00:23:18 a self motivator of sorts.
411. 00:23:20 Nice.
412. 00:23:22 Great fun.
413. 00:23:24 You want to jump into our book?
414. 00:23:25 I'm interested in what your beef with me on this one is.
415. 00:23:27 So I'll, I'll introduce it first.
416. 00:23:30 The, uh, so the book for today, the art of asking by Amanda Palmer.
417. 00:23:34 And I'm trying to remember where I first heard of this.
418. 00:23:38 I think, I think the first time I was introduced to Amanda Palmer was through her
419. 00:23:42 TED talk.
420. 00:23:43 Did you get a chance to go watch this?
421. 00:23:44 I was too scared to watch the TED talk after reading this book, to be honest.
422. 00:23:48 That's, that's a very fair point.
423. 00:23:50 I do not discredit that whatsoever.
424. 00:23:53 I will say that the TED talk is very tame compared to the productions and
425. 00:24:00 entertainment stuff she talks about on the book.
426. 00:24:02 And I in no way would have guessed her normal way of entertaining after having
427. 00:24:09 watched the TED talk.
428. 00:24:10 So it was only after I looked her up post TED talk that I realized she's a
429. 00:24:17 little bit crazy for me, but she's a whole lot of crazy, which is, it just, okay.
430. 00:24:23 I mean, everybody's their, their own form of crazy, but, uh, since you asked the
431. 00:24:28 things that I did not like about this book, well, first of all, I can deal with
432. 00:24:33 swearing.
433. 00:24:34 I've, you know, Josh has brought up like how, how could I possibly like Grant
434. 00:24:38 Cardone's book because they're swearing in that?
435. 00:24:40 Well, this is Grant Cardone times about a thousand and I've also
436. 00:24:44 I had to warn you on this.
437. 00:24:45 Yeah.
438. 00:24:46 But here's, here's the other thing.
439. 00:24:47 Not all language is the same, at least to me.
440. 00:24:51 And so a lot of times I felt that Amanda Palmer fit the stereotype
441. 00:24:58 of I'm using swear words because I can't think of something else to say.
442. 00:25:02 And I know that a lot of that is the culture that she is in, but I honestly,
443. 00:25:07 I honestly like every, almost every single time she used a swear word, I was like,
444. 00:25:12 you got to be kidding me seriously.
445. 00:25:14 Like it wasn't even for shock value.
446. 00:25:17 It's just, I can actually, there's one time where I was like, oh, that, that's
447. 00:25:22 a creative use of that.
448. 00:25:23 But every other time I was like, you got to be kidding me.
449. 00:25:27 This is just like out of nowhere and you're throwing it out there just because
450. 00:25:30 that's who you are.
451. 00:25:32 You're this raw, emotional musician.
452. 00:25:34 And I'm just like, no, I'm not interested at all in what you have to say,
453. 00:25:39 coupled with the other thing here is the complete irreverence for religion.
454. 00:25:44 OK, now I don't care if you don't agree with me, but you don't have to slam
455. 00:25:50 my belief system, which is directly what she's doing.
456. 00:25:53 She's, she made direct comparisons between the church and the sin eater and the
457. 00:25:59 savior and all of this type of stuff.
458. 00:26:01 And I'm sitting there going, that's not what that means at all.
459. 00:26:06 Like you're taking this completely out of context.
460. 00:26:08 And I know that I'm, I'm different because I've got a Bible college degree.
461. 00:26:11 So not everybody's going to have the same perspective as I do, but you cannot
462. 00:26:15 just flippantly attack people's personal belief systems and expect to have an
463. 00:26:22 authentic dialogue, which is what she's after.
464. 00:26:25 So those couple of things, like right at the beginning, I, I had a really hard
465. 00:26:30 time getting through this one.
466. 00:26:31 In fact, I bought this on audiobook so that I could listen to it when I went
467. 00:26:37 from my, my longer runs, which I'm now up to over 10 miles.
468. 00:26:41 So I just let it go.
469. 00:26:43 And then whenever she said something that I wanted to jot down, which was
470. 00:26:46 few and far between, I would use drafts on my Apple watch to capture it.
471. 00:26:51 But otherwise I just like, I got to get through this.
472. 00:26:52 I got to get through this.
473. 00:26:53 I'm glad I could push you a little bit.
474. 00:26:57 I can tell this definitely struck a chord with you.
475. 00:26:59 Oh my gosh.
476. 00:27:00 Yes.
477. 00:27:01 I, I actually have in my outline here, I hated this book, exclamation point.
478. 00:27:07 And yet you have takeaways.
479. 00:27:12 I do have takeaways.
480. 00:27:13 We'll wait on those, but all right, it's fun to get you fired up again.
481. 00:27:19 So I, I don't think I had near the guttural reaction to this that you did.
482. 00:27:24 And I think that's partially because I've dealt with, uh, I don't want to say a lot
483. 00:27:29 of people that work in this industry, uh, as much as I've just worked with people
484. 00:27:33 that are, you know, as, as we would say in Christian circles, very broken.
485. 00:27:37 And it's, it's a sector that I tend to try to understand.
486. 00:27:46 And I know that I can't fully understand because I'm, I completely understand what
487. 00:27:51 you're saying, like, what on earth are you thinking?
488. 00:27:53 That that's not the way it is.
489. 00:27:54 That's not what that means.
490. 00:27:55 I'm totally with you there, but at the same time she's not trying to understand
491. 00:27:59 that.
492. 00:28:00 It's just her understanding and the way that she was brought up to see something
493. 00:28:04 or was taught so she knows and know any better on some of that.
494. 00:28:08 And I try to relate to that.
495. 00:28:10 It was very hard in this case, to be honest with you, but the, there are some things
496. 00:28:15 that I thought were positive in here.
497. 00:28:18 I don't think it's all doom and gloom.
498. 00:28:20 Like there's definitely some positive things in what she had to say, but to me,
499. 00:28:26 it's, it's so, it was, it was extremely difficult to connect with anything, which
500. 00:28:32 is like, that's the whole point of the book is she was talking about making these
501. 00:28:37 connections and showing people love.
502. 00:28:39 And I'm just like, okay, it comes back to how most people, uh, and I,
503. 00:28:45 I believe I'm justified in saying the word most.
504. 00:28:47 I know that's a generalization, but I know a whole lot of people who, if they,
505. 00:28:52 if they don't understand the real Christian belief system, they'll look at the,
506. 00:28:55 the Westboro Baptist and they'll be like, you guys are so intolerant.
507. 00:28:58 And what that does is they, they create this picture in their heads of like,
508. 00:29:01 Christians are intolerant.
509. 00:29:02 And so that's the attitude that they project as soon as they have an interaction
510. 00:29:06 with me.
511. 00:29:06 And I'm like, I'm the one that's intolerant, but I can hear from your voice that you're
512. 00:29:12 intolerant of just the fact that I even have this belief system, like what is
513. 00:29:16 wrong with this picture?
514. 00:29:17 And that's the thing that just like from the very onset, I was like, okay, we're,
515. 00:29:22 we're not going to agree on just about anything here.
516. 00:29:24 Uh, why, why even have the conversation, you know, because you can tell that the
517. 00:29:29 other person is coming from their perspective, which is so set and they're
518. 00:29:33 so enlightened that it's like everything that you say is going to be wrong.
519. 00:29:37 Oh, you're so close minded.
520. 00:29:40 What do you do in that position?
521. 00:29:42 Like I, that's what's really frustrating to me is she's talking about, uh, about
522. 00:29:48 the, the, all the religion stuff and the sin leaders and, and then she's talking
523. 00:29:52 about like, do you love me?
524. 00:29:54 And obviously like love is a, a really important theme.
525. 00:29:57 And it's something that if she just talked about that, like we could have a
526. 00:30:00 conversation about that.
527. 00:30:01 We could find agreement on that.
528. 00:30:03 But when she's talking about like, oh, you can't experience love until you've
529. 00:30:07 slept with all these other guys.
530. 00:30:08 And that's not exactly what she's saying, but she's like telling all of this
531. 00:30:12 all of her experiences as creditation for her perspective and her narrow view of
532. 00:30:19 something that she doesn't understand.
533. 00:30:20 That's the thing that drove me nuts.
534. 00:30:21 It's like, well, this was my experience.
535. 00:30:23 Well, that's fine.
536. 00:30:24 You can experience something doesn't mean that it's right.
537. 00:30:28 Like you can believe something and I don't want to make this like, right
538. 00:30:32 religious belief systems or anything like that.
539. 00:30:34 You can believe something and it can be wrong.
540. 00:30:37 I have held many wrong beliefs over the years.
541. 00:30:40 And the fact that I thought something once doesn't mean that that that's
542. 00:30:44 justification for that point of view.
543. 00:30:45 So I don't know that I, I don't think I took the whole religion thing nearly as far as
544. 00:30:54 as you did.
545. 00:30:56 Because I think she's, she has her own views on it for sure.
546. 00:31:01 And I understand where that was laid out very early.
547. 00:31:05 And to me, it seemed to stop there.
548. 00:31:08 And then I was trying to, because part of, part of the reason I picked this book,
549. 00:31:13 which I'm sure you're completely confounded by, what on earth is Joe doing?
550. 00:31:18 So part of the reason I picked this book is because listening to Amanda Palmer talk
551. 00:31:27 during her TED talk, giving that, that speech, speech, giving that.
552. 00:31:31 Yeah, I'll call it a talk.
553. 00:31:34 Uh, as she's giving that, I was struck by how.
554. 00:31:40 I don't want to say enlightened, but how much she comprehended that inner workings
555. 00:31:49 and the depth of human connection.
556. 00:31:51 She's very good at that.
557. 00:31:53 That's something that Amanda is excellent at is connecting with and helping people.
558. 00:31:57 And seeing that even in her TED talk and then knowing that she had written this book about asking,
559. 00:32:05 one, I didn't realize it was a story of her life.
560. 00:32:08 That I did not realize that until I started reading it.
561. 00:32:11 I was like, oh, she's just going to give us basically a memoir of how she got to where she is today
562. 00:32:17 and asking people for things.
563. 00:32:19 And that's something that I know I personally struggle with.
564. 00:32:25 I tend to be of the sort where I want to do it on my own.
565. 00:32:30 I can take care of this.
566. 00:32:31 I don't need to ask for help because I'll figure it out.
567. 00:32:34 Like even take my business.
568. 00:32:36 I tend to say yes to things and not ask for help.
569. 00:32:38 I'll go figure it out on my own.
570. 00:32:40 Like, oh, sure, I'll take that project.
571. 00:32:42 Do you know how to do that?
572. 00:32:43 You know how to write in the the Go language?
573. 00:32:46 Nope, but I'll figure it out.
574. 00:32:47 I'm not going to ask anybody.
575. 00:32:49 I'll figure it out.
576. 00:32:50 Like, that's just the way that I tend to work.
577. 00:32:53 And I know that that's not necessarily detrimental, but it's also not incredibly healthy.
578. 00:32:58 So knowing that she's been through a lot and knowing that she has a lot of experience with
579. 00:33:07 connecting with people and allowing people to help her, that's what drew me to the book.
580. 00:33:12 I was mostly interested in what her take on that was.
581. 00:33:15 Again, not realizing it was a story of her life, but it is a very interesting story.
582. 00:33:22 I will tell you that.
583. 00:33:23 I thought it was an interesting story.
584. 00:33:25 I do not agree with most of her life decisions, but it at least shows if you can look past some of the
585. 00:33:34 bad decision making that was going there.
586. 00:33:38 And that's, I guess, I don't know if you want to call it relative.
587. 00:33:42 It depends on your worldview and how you see things, but I was able to see a lot of the
588. 00:33:49 inner workings of her intent and how she wanted to connect with people, which is where some of
589. 00:33:55 our action items come in that we'll get into later.
590. 00:33:57 But she's very good at seeing where other people are and seeing ways to help them and trying to
591. 00:34:03 figure out how to connect with them to help them that way.
592. 00:34:06 That was the positive side of it that I saw.
593. 00:34:07 Yeah, I will agree with you there.
594. 00:34:10 The issue here for me is that the audiobook is 11 hours and 27 minutes.
595. 00:34:15 And there are probably about 18 minutes worth of bookworm type material,
596. 00:34:21 basically her TED talk where she shares the takeaways.
597. 00:34:25 The rest of it is all about, well, I mean, I'm not going to get into the specifics,
598. 00:34:32 but most of the details, I was like, why are you telling me this?
599. 00:34:36 And maybe that is the lens that I approach the book from, not as a biography, but as a productivity
600. 00:34:42 quote-unquote type book where it's like, what can I, I learn from this?
601. 00:34:46 But yeah, it just left me with a very bad taste in my mouth.
602. 00:34:51 And literally every time I would listen to it, I'm like, I got to go take a shower now.
603. 00:34:55 This is ridiculous.
604. 00:34:56 That's very fair.
605. 00:35:00 That's very fair.
606. 00:35:01 But alas, you still had a talking point you want to talk about.
607. 00:35:05 That was the fraud police.
608. 00:35:07 Yeah, well, that's that's the one that I thought was best in terms of the outline here.
609. 00:35:13 There are a couple other things like there's, she makes some really good points.
610. 00:35:17 That's the thing.
611. 00:35:18 If I wasn't so turned off by, and it's not even just her oversharing,
612. 00:35:24 it is the attitude with which she shares.
613. 00:35:27 And I don't know how to describe it any better than that.
614. 00:35:30 But she, so on the audiobook, is she the one that reads it?
615. 00:35:34 Yep.
616. 00:35:36 Okay, so you, you got to listen to her herself.
617. 00:35:38 Okay.
618. 00:35:39 Yep.
619. 00:35:40 And you can tell the points when I like listening to books that are narrated by the author,
620. 00:35:45 because you can tell when they are very connected to the material that they are,
621. 00:35:51 sharing versus, you know, something that their editor told them to put in.
622. 00:35:55 And I could definitely hear the emotion every time she swore.
623. 00:36:00 But so in this case, it was a bad thing, at least for me.
624. 00:36:03 Because it's just like, I'm waiting for the next opportunity.
625. 00:36:06 I'm going to sound, you know, basically, it kind of read to me like a poem,
626. 00:36:12 and she would set up the opportunities for her to swear.
627. 00:36:15 It was kind of the way that it appeared to me.
628. 00:36:17 And every time it happened, I'm like, are you kidding me?
629. 00:36:20 Like, why?
630. 00:36:21 And again, maybe it's just the perspective and the lens that I had going into it,
631. 00:36:27 where I was like, if the goal here is to share the message about how you need to
632. 00:36:31 make yourself vulnerable and ask for things, you're alienating a whole bunch of people
633. 00:36:36 by sharing a whole bunch of things that really aren't that necessary.
634. 00:36:40 And I don't think all those details were necessary.
635. 00:36:42 I think some of the stuff was really cool, and it gave a perspective.
636. 00:36:45 Like she talks about her experience as the, she would get dressed up,
637. 00:36:50 and she would, as a bride, and she would stand on that milk crate,
638. 00:36:53 and she'd be silent.
639. 00:36:55 People would come and they'd throw a dollar in her hat, and then she'd give them a flower.
640. 00:36:58 Like, that part, I thought, was actually kind of cool.
641. 00:37:01 But after you get past that part, and after you get past the, what do they call it,
642. 00:37:06 Cloud City or whatever, like there's a lot of stuff where it's just Cloud Club.
643. 00:37:11 Yeah, that's what it was.
644. 00:37:12 Like a lot of it is just, it felt on the audiobook version anyways, like rehashed,
645. 00:37:18 or retold, or telling the same stories through a different perspective.
646. 00:37:22 I'm sure they're like slightly different, but it's like new opportunities to swear.
647. 00:37:26 And I'm just like, I could not connect to it for any length of time because of that,
648. 00:37:33 because even while I was out for a run, like I would have the urge,
649. 00:37:36 well running to be like, why am I listening to this?
650. 00:37:40 It felt like, so you've got like, if you're in, in terms of reading material,
651. 00:37:45 you've got traditionally people have, have viewed like non-fiction books as like the meat.
652. 00:37:52 This is the stuff that you, you have to, you have to read because it's going to make you a better
653. 00:37:56 person. And that's kind of the goal, I would argue, of bookworm.
654. 00:37:59 And then you've got the stuff that is just pure entertainment.
655. 00:38:03 Sometimes that's fiction, although in this case, I would say it's almost like the tabloids,
656. 00:38:08 you know? It's the really sensational stuff because that was totally her goal with the way
657. 00:38:13 that she told a lot of these stories. She wanted to make it so sensational, so shocking that like,
658. 00:38:18 she jolted you from the page and we're paying attention to what she was saying.
659. 00:38:23 And I guess maybe the audio book that came across even more, but, but anyway, so yeah, fraud police.
660. 00:38:31 This is kind of entertaining. I really got you fired up this time. So this is probably inadvertently,
661. 00:38:40 Wendy, do you do your running in the morning?
662. 00:38:44 Usually in the morning, except on Saturdays when I go for my longer runs, I usually do that a little
663. 00:38:51 bit later. So late morning, early afternoon.
664. 00:38:54 So you were listening to this in the morning, which meant that you were starting your day
665. 00:39:00 with a very negative jumping off point. So I may have wrecked your days because of this.
666. 00:39:06 Well, I don't think you wrecked any of my days, though. I guess my wife would be able to tell
667. 00:39:10 you for sure. But Rachel sent me an email.
668. 00:39:14 Yeah. So anyways, fraud police. So the idea here.
669. 00:39:21 Okay. The idea because I want to stop
670. 00:39:22 parping on the negatives of this book and try to find something positive.
671. 00:39:26 All right. I'm good with that.
672. 00:39:27 So fraud police, this is her term for all of the people who are going to tell you that you
673. 00:39:34 shouldn't be doing what you're doing. And this is a really, really cool idea, like the whole
674. 00:39:41 mental picture of like, there's an organization that there's a association of people who are
675. 00:39:49 literally out there to stop you from doing things that you are unqualified to do,
676. 00:39:53 even if this whole thing just plays out in your head.
677. 00:39:55 Like any person who's creative can totally relate to that.
678. 00:39:59 And I know that that I've been there. In fact, my humorous speech contest, I talk about how
679. 00:40:05 I'm a quote unquote productivity expert. And then I talk about how I hate that term,
680. 00:40:10 because I didn't go to school for this. I don't have a degree from productivity university.
681. 00:40:13 I don't have any certifications for any big name organizer gurus.
682. 00:40:17 And like I wrap up my opening statement by saying, I'm a productivity poser.
683. 00:40:20 You know, this isn't something that like, I decided I'm going to make this my life's work.
684. 00:40:26 I kind of stumbled into this. And I'm sure you probably can relate to some degree in the
685. 00:40:32 stuff that you do to Joe, where it's like, I don't have the right to do this sort of thing.
686. 00:40:38 But yes, yes, you do. No one has to give you permission to do that cool thing that you have that,
687. 00:40:44 that, and I would say the word anointing, you know, the gift that that you have inside of you,
688. 00:40:50 like that is that has to come out. And there's no, there's no fraud police. There's no organization
689. 00:40:56 that is going to sign off on that once you've reached a certain level of mastery. Like you have
690. 00:41:00 every right just to do it. And then if people hated, if there's trolls, whatever, like you
691. 00:41:05 don't have to listen to them. All you have to do is be authentic, be who you really are,
692. 00:41:11 and get the stuff out that is already inside of you.
693. 00:41:14 So when I started doing custom development, I had to come to grips with the fact that I had no
694. 00:41:22 training in development or computer science at all. And I was relying on my own self learning
695. 00:41:32 process to do what I do. And I charged very low rates in comparison to where I'm at now.
696. 00:41:38 And it was because I felt like a complete phony. It's like, okay, I'm going to go do development
697. 00:41:44 work. I'm going to be a coder. I don't really know what I'm doing. Like, this is all, this is all
698. 00:41:51 fake. Like, I don't really know what I should be doing. How does this work? It was, it was very
699. 00:41:58 disheartening, I guess would be the right term for that because it's not something that I felt
700. 00:42:04 like I should be doing. You know, like you're talking about the productivity space. I'm a phony.
701. 00:42:08 I work in the productivity space as well. And people think I have my act together. People assume,
702. 00:42:16 well, he writes and he does all this stuff. And he's always got the scripts and he's got
703. 00:42:19 omni focus all put together. He's like, you realize that the reason that all of that is there is
704. 00:42:23 because I can't get my act together, right? You know that the reason I try to do this stuff is
705. 00:42:28 because I can't handle it without that. My wife is the complete opposite. She's very disciplined.
706. 00:42:35 She doesn't understand productivity at all. She's like, it's just things that you have to get done.
707. 00:42:40 Just do it. Like, what's the big deal? Just just do it. Like, just go. Like what? She doesn't
708. 00:42:45 understand. But she has a very high level of self-discipline and ability to get a lot of
709. 00:42:52 stuff done in a short amount of time. So she's just naturally falling into that stuff. So she
710. 00:42:57 does a lot of the productivity stuff. She just doesn't realize it. She's doing it. Whereas I think
711. 00:43:01 you and I tend to struggle with it more. So we have to put more systems in place.
712. 00:43:06 Well, I think that if you are going to say that, yes, this is who I am, like you will never be able
713. 00:43:14 to feel unless you were to devote every single waking moment towards the mastery of whatever subject.
714. 00:43:22 It's hard to say, yes, I am. So for example, I know when we were at Macstock, you were having
715. 00:43:29 trouble embracing the term discourse expert, probably because you're not in discourse all the time.
716. 00:43:35 But the truth of the matter is, you're pretty dang good at discourse. It's to the point where
717. 00:43:41 some of the stuff that you shared with me, like the team has reached out to you and your code is
718. 00:43:45 included in some plugins that have been used a gazillion times. Like that makes you an expert.
719. 00:43:52 But still in your head, you feel like the fraud police are breathing down your neck and be like,
720. 00:43:56 why, when's the last time you looked at discourse? It's been two weeks so much has changed since
721. 00:44:00 you were in their last like, you don't know anything anymore. Like that's very real.
722. 00:44:04 Yeah, the number of times that I go, this is almost embarrassing to say the number of times
723. 00:44:11 that I go upgrade discourse on it. Wait, what's that? Like, what's that feature? What's that
724. 00:44:17 button do? I've never seen that before. What is that? Like, oh, right, you're an expert, right?
725. 00:44:22 You're supposed to know all this stuff. Oh, here we go again. But the thing is, you have to,
726. 00:44:30 in a manna fights the fraud police in her mind, pretty much the whole book. Like, even though,
727. 00:44:37 like she did a million dollar Kickstarter campaign, the first time ever that's been done in a music
728. 00:44:43 world and completely has been changing a lot of how the music industry works to an extent
729. 00:44:50 because of the way that she's doing things. And yet she still feels like a fake. So it's like,
730. 00:44:57 okay, here's the thing. When it comes to art, when it comes to creativity, and I would tell you
731. 00:45:01 that development is a very creative field to work in, very different than coding. I make the big
732. 00:45:09 difference between development and coding. So stick with me there. That's a rant for another day.
733. 00:45:15 So development, I see as very creative, you're trying to solve problems, you're trying to figure
734. 00:45:19 out how to make things work. You have to be very artistic in how you make that happen.
735. 00:45:25 And it's not a simple process. So there's always this little bug in the back of your mind,
736. 00:45:31 just waiting to say, uh, that's not it. You're wrong. You're fake. They're going to see you now.
737. 00:45:38 Like that thing's always there. I hate that thing. I want to squish the bug.
738. 00:45:42 You know what the most effective, uh, and this is something that Amanda really has hit on with
739. 00:45:52 this book and probably is the reason that she shared all the stuff that I had issues with.
740. 00:45:57 Like the reason to overcome or the way to overcome that though is just to share who you really are.
741. 00:46:04 And not to not to pretend not to hold back when it comes to this is who I am, but I think the thing
742. 00:46:12 that that really turned me off was the almost the force feeding of that stuff. Like if I want
743. 00:46:20 to know about your background, yes, like don't hide anything, let me know. But I really don't need
744. 00:46:26 to know everything that happens in the the back rooms at events and all that stuff. And
745. 00:46:32 honestly, like I can't even think of a specific thing anymore because after a while, like I
746. 00:46:36 just tuned it all out. But, uh, like all the stories, like you just tune them all out.
747. 00:46:42 Not well, not, not all of the stories. I know like she talked about the
748. 00:46:48 her friend Anthony and how he was going through cancer and stuff like that.
749. 00:46:52 The stuff with her, her husband, Neil, I believe his name was. I actually finished this book a couple
750. 00:47:00 weeks ago. So it's. Yeah, I'm the slacker here. And it's, uh, it was audio book versions. So I
751. 00:47:07 didn't write down all of the details of all that stuff. And I'm having a little bit of a hard time
752. 00:47:11 going back now and recalling the specific stuff I didn't like. But I guess my point of making this
753. 00:47:19 my point of making this specific comment though is a little bit of justification for the approach
754. 00:47:25 that I found so appalling. Uh, the fact that I'm sure that that is the reason behind that is that
755. 00:47:31 she does not want to appear to be a phony. She wants to overcome the fraud police. And so she's
756. 00:47:39 just going to share like, this is who I am, take it or leave it. And I think that that approach
757. 00:47:44 is effective. But I also think that you can do it a lot more tactfully than she did.
758. 00:47:49 Does that make sense? Is that fair? Yes. Yes.
759. 00:47:54 But one thing I think I'm going to transition a little bit here because I think a lot of us know
760. 00:48:00 we've dealt with this whole imposter syndrome. Like we're very familiar with that, which is
761. 00:48:06 what she's talking about. And it's something that a lot of, if not all of us, fight in some form
762. 00:48:13 or another. I think she even calls that out. Everybody fights the fraud police in some form
763. 00:48:18 or another. But despite all of that, and she's very brutally honest and she shares way more than I
764. 00:48:25 think she should, but that's the point is she's trying to be authentic. She's trying to be real.
765. 00:48:30 She wants you to see her. And I think that's one of the reasons that she loves connecting with
766. 00:48:36 people so much. And she does this in a lot of ways primarily online. But the part that was
767. 00:48:45 interesting to me because so much of, you get into these tech conversations and how is technology
768. 00:48:51 changing the way that we connect with people. It seems like there's a lot of detrimental things
769. 00:48:57 that come from online relationships. Whether it's friends, whether it's an intimate relationship,
770. 00:49:05 it doesn't matter. It's very detrimental to only have online relationships, which is why people
771. 00:49:12 tend to recommend, we'll meet people in person, connect in person, blah, blah, blah, blah. You
772. 00:49:16 guys get the story. The part that struck me was that Amanda is very good about using the online space
773. 00:49:26 as a jumping off point to get to the in-person relationships. Totally.
774. 00:49:34 She's kind of a professional with that. I was, she's an expert at that. She's very good at
775. 00:49:42 using primarily Twitter and her blog to start conversations that are very difficult
776. 00:49:48 and then follows them up with personalized conversations. Not everyone gets a response,
777. 00:49:56 but if something strikes her, she'll respond personally to them. She tries to share other
778. 00:50:00 people's work as much as she can because she wants to help people. She's awesome at that.
779. 00:50:07 But I thought it was very interesting that she uses these tools as ways to create in-person
780. 00:50:15 contact. I don't know many people that do it that way. They tend to think of it as one or the
781. 00:50:22 other. I'm going to be at a conference, so I'll meet with people then. But you're going to just do
782. 00:50:28 the online thing up and to that point, not just throw something together last minute,
783. 00:50:34 whereas that's exactly what she does. She does what she calls ninja shows,
784. 00:50:37 she throws something together day of or day before and does something very random.
785. 00:50:43 I thought she was very good at that. I so want to do that sometime.
786. 00:50:48 It's probably not going to work with my 140 followers or whatever I have.
787. 00:50:53 I thought of that. It's like, okay, well, the only reason this really works for you is you have
788. 00:50:58 millions of followers. You can put a tweet out saying, I'm going to be in Times Square in two hours,
789. 00:51:05 and there will be a couple hundred people that show up. That's more than a lot of people have
790. 00:51:10 for followers. It just doesn't add up.
791. 00:51:13 Now, the reason that she's been able to get it to that point, and specifically to the point that
792. 00:51:20 you just made, was one of the things I jotted down, she said that fame doesn't by reach connection
793. 00:51:26 does. If you're able to provide a real connection to a small group of people, then that base that
794. 00:51:36 you have will grow. At least, that's my personal belief. It doesn't really matter
795. 00:51:42 how many people you're connected with at the beginning. Really, the takeaway here is that
796. 00:51:50 whether you've got 10 people or 10,000 people who you're "connected with," do you really have a
797. 00:51:56 connection with each one of those people? That's the thing that she really values, and she'll
798. 00:52:01 reply to every single blog comment, and she'll reply to every single email. I thought it was
799. 00:52:05 interesting that she actually created an email newsletter in 2001. That's 16 years ago.
800. 00:52:12 Yeah. She was one of the first people, it sounds like, to really embrace the whole idea of
801. 00:52:19 email marketing as an artist. That's interesting to me, but I think it's just the approach that
802. 00:52:26 she's looking for those ways to make those connections. She sees the tools not as a way of
803. 00:52:32 selling more records, obviously, but just making more authentic connections with people. I think
804. 00:52:37 that that's completely noble. I can completely relate to that belief. I'm 100% in agreement with
805. 00:52:47 that. You said specifically that she wants to be seen. Another really, really great point,
806. 00:52:53 related point that she made. She mentioned the Joshua Bell experiment. I was actually
807. 00:52:58 familiar with this. Do you know who Joshua Bell is? No, I don't even remember that name being in
808. 00:53:04 there. I think I know the experiment you're talking about, but I don't recall him. She maybe
809. 00:53:09 didn't even use the term Joshua Bell. She mentioned a world famous violinist. I just shared a link with
810. 00:53:14 you. I know that. I'm a violin nerd, and I know Joshua Bell is. I had heard of this when he did it.
811. 00:53:23 The article that she referenced is this experiment that was done where Joshua Bell,
812. 00:53:28 who is literally a world-class violinist, people pay hundreds, thousands of dollars to go see him
813. 00:53:35 in concert. He dressed down and went to the subway, opened up his violin case, and started playing.
814. 00:53:42 There were only a handful of people who even recognized him. There was one person who actually
815. 00:53:48 recognized who he was, I think is what the article said, but I didn't really read the whole thing.
816. 00:53:53 Most people just walked right on by because they're so consumed with their commute and heading to a
817. 00:53:59 job that they dread. They didn't even notice the gift that was in front of them. I think
818. 00:54:05 she used this as a justification or an intro into the thing that she was doing with the bride,
819. 00:54:12 which I thought was cool. I thought that the point from that whole section of the book,
820. 00:54:17 where it's like most people aren't even going to notice you, that's really sad. That leads into
821. 00:54:23 one of my action items. Not trying to get out of the content of the book. I think there's still a
822. 00:54:28 bunch more here that we could discuss. One of my action items that I wrote down was,
823. 00:54:33 "Have at least, I forgot to put a number in there, at least one conversation,"
824. 00:54:38 where the only goal is to listen and understand what the other person is feeling. We're going to
825. 00:54:45 have a conversation. I'm going to listen to you, but at the end of this, we're going to have a plan
826. 00:54:49 to move forward. Literally, there is no plan other than just listen. The obvious place that I could
827. 00:54:59 start with this would be with my wife. I don't think that that's too easy, but it's not
828. 00:55:08 I want something that I would have to work a little bit harder for. I live in the same house as my
829. 00:55:14 wife, where literally if I am paying more attention, nothing else needs to change in order for that
830. 00:55:20 to happen. I want people to have this impact not just with my family members, but with other people
831. 00:55:26 too. I'm going to more broadly or more narrowly define this as one other conversation where the
832. 00:55:34 only goal is to listen and understand what the person is feeling who is outside of my normal
833. 00:55:40 sphere of influence, if that makes sense. Somebody that I'd have to go to a specific place in order
834. 00:55:46 to see. This is inspired by the whole experiment that she did, where she would set up and she'd
835. 00:55:54 stand in the bride costume and people would just walk on by. I don't want to just walk on by. I want
836. 00:55:58 to be one of the people who notices these things and notices the people and can even see if there
837. 00:56:04 if they're hurting, you can tell that in their eyes if you pay attention enough to see it. So
838. 00:56:10 that's what I'm going for. Literally two hours ago, I was sitting down for lunch. My wife,
839. 00:56:18 as soon as we got set down, she's okay, I have a dilemma and she's getting ready to lead into
840. 00:56:24 what this dilemma is. I stopped her quickly and I was like, okay, is this a problem-solving dilemma?
841. 00:56:31 Like you want my feedback? Or is this a listen dilemma? I just need to acknowledge that this is
842. 00:56:37 a thing that's going on. What are you expecting from me right here? So in that particular case,
843. 00:56:43 it was a problem-solving dilemma. This is a question that I ask her, I don't know, there's
844. 00:56:48 probably usually at least one conversation a week where something like that comes up and
845. 00:56:52 she'll ask me, no, this is just a listen dilemma. Like, okay, all right, all this listen, I can do
846. 00:56:59 that. I can sit here and feel with you, but knowing that there's not the intent of giving
847. 00:57:06 advice at the end of it, that's very helpful. Yeah, and maybe that's another action item is
848. 00:57:12 to embrace some sort of system like you've got where, okay, so am I supposed to be
849. 00:57:18 problem-solving or am I supposed to just be listening? I'm guessing most of the time I'm just
850. 00:57:21 supposed to be listening. I specifically remember the first time that I asked this question because
851. 00:57:26 when she said, okay, I have a problem. Because she phrased it that way, I just told her, it's like,
852. 00:57:33 okay, I'm male, I have a tendency to solve problems. Is this a problem I'm supposed to be
853. 00:57:39 solving? Like, I remember asking her that and she told me, no, I was very grateful that she told
854. 00:57:45 me, no, because I would have jumped in immediately and it would not have gone well.
855. 00:57:50 That seems like it would be pretty, it would alleviate a lot of stress too, if you know
856. 00:57:57 from the right from the beginning that you have to have all the answers.
857. 00:58:02 Because then you approach it very differently, I found, because you end up trying to like, okay,
858. 00:58:09 well, does that affect the way this impacts your thinking? Like, you can ask different questions
859. 00:58:15 versus, well, have you considered doing this? Like, you tend to just ask very different questions
860. 00:58:20 when you come at it that way. Yep, that totally makes sense. And I think I definitely need to do,
861. 00:58:25 I have some work to do in that area as well. Regarding my specific action item, really what I
862. 00:58:33 want to have happen here is I want to see somebody who has not been seen in a while, if that makes
863. 00:58:39 sense. Like, what's the time frame here? You can hold me accountable to this by the next time that
864. 00:58:46 we record. I think that's more than enough time to notice whether it's somebody sitting at a coffee
865. 00:58:51 shop alone or whatever, just finding somebody who you know that they're going through some stuff
866. 00:58:57 and just being there in order to solve their problems, but just to listen.
867. 00:59:05 So the other side of this, and this is maybe, it's not something she brought up in the book,
868. 00:59:11 it's not really, this is just my take on it after having a little bit of time to reflect on the book,
869. 00:59:17 is that she's very good at connecting with people. She's excellent at taking Twitter,
870. 00:59:25 an email newsletter, a blog, and turning that into real life relationships and conversations.
871. 00:59:33 Now she's very good at that. My concern with it was that it seemed like, at least in the stories
872. 00:59:39 that she shared, like whenever this happened, she would have a moment with people and it would
873. 00:59:45 typically stop there. Like, there was one moment and that was it. And I'm not saying that's bad,
874. 00:59:51 but you know, she's borderline oversharing, she wants to be seen. I wondered if there was more of
875. 01:00:02 the ongoing relationships that were built out of that that we weren't seeing, because it seemed
876. 01:00:08 like there was a lot of these one and done type conversations, which don't really lead to any
877. 01:00:15 long-term connections and any building of a relationship. That was maybe a minor point,
878. 01:00:23 I don't know, Mike, but it was something that struck me that these seem like very short-lived
879. 01:00:29 connection points. And again, those can be positive, especially if some of the stories
880. 01:00:35 involved kids who really looked up to her and that one moment likely changed their life forever.
881. 01:00:42 Like, I totally get that, but at the same time, I wonder how many of those she actually continues
882. 01:00:48 to follow up on or can follow up on and thinks it's worthwhile. I don't know. It was just something
883. 01:00:52 I thought was interesting. I completely agree with that. Like, that's something that
884. 01:00:58 is a struggle for anybody online, I would argue, because even in the limited success that my book
885. 01:01:07 has currently had, very limited success, I've had people who have emailed me directly and said,
886. 01:01:14 "Oh, thank you so much for writing this. This completely changed my life." And it's always great
887. 01:01:19 to hear that. And she, Amanda Palmer, talks about in this book that there are people who,
888. 01:01:24 as soon as you reply, like, they want a million other things from you, like, I've experienced that.
889. 01:01:29 And you literally cannot continue at scale to meet every single problem, that every single person
890. 01:01:38 that you've ever communicated with has. You have to nicely draw a line. And I don't think she really
891. 01:01:45 addressed that in this book about how to do that. She kind of shared one specific story where
892. 01:01:51 she thought someone was kind of over, stepping over the line in terms of her accessibility.
893. 01:01:58 And she ignored it for a little while and then turned out that the person wanted to kill
894. 01:02:02 themselves and she felt really bad about it and guilty about it. And I don't think that that was
895. 01:02:06 100% necessary. She even said in the book, "Most problems can be solved if you authentically communicate."
896. 01:02:16 I completely agree, but I also think that authentically communicating is clearly laying out the guidelines
897. 01:02:23 of the relationship, whether that is, you've responded to the person's blog post or you're meeting
898. 01:02:30 them every week for coffee. It doesn't matter. You both have to understand what the expectations are.
899. 01:02:37 You have to know when you have somebody's phone number, for example, whether you can text them
900. 01:02:43 in the middle of the night. And some people are going to abuse that. Hopefully, I've not abused
901. 01:02:47 that with you yet, Joe. I don't think I've texted you like midnight. But I don't know that it would
902. 01:02:52 go off even if you did. Right, right. Yeah. That's another thing. With the technology,
903. 01:03:00 it's available. Do not disturb things like that. Obviously, you can override a bunch of that.
904. 01:03:05 But I do think that this is kind of a lost art in terms of communication is outlining these
905. 01:03:11 guidelines because when all you want is to give love, which is what she's really saying in this book,
906. 01:03:17 it feels really, really selfish to say, "You know what? I can't handle this right now. I gotta go."
907. 01:03:23 But you have to do that. If you do not take care of yourself, you've got nothing left to give people.
908. 01:03:31 And I would argue that even the people who are closest to you, they matter more than the casual
909. 01:03:38 fans and the people who are going to show up at your shows and buy your merchandise and stuff like
910. 01:03:42 that. If you're trying to meet all of their needs, and in this particular case, she shared a couple
911. 01:03:47 different stories where her relationship with her fiancé and then husband was suffering because of
912. 01:03:54 that, that's messed up. And I'm not professing to have it all down. I know that there have been
913. 01:04:01 times when I have been too busy. I've been too stressed. And the people that suffer from it are
914. 01:04:07 the people who are closest to me. So I'm not saying that I've got it all figured out. But
915. 01:04:11 this is something that I think is worth visiting. And I wish she had talked about
916. 01:04:16 is the fact that you do have to have priorities laid out. And again, the word priority,
917. 01:04:23 you don't really like having multiples there. But you've got to have a hierarchy in terms of the
918. 01:04:27 things that are most important. And it's got to be the people that you care about the most and
919. 01:04:31 yourself. Like you need to be at the top of that list also. Because otherwise, you will never be
920. 01:04:37 able to meet all of the needs of all the other people. She actually mentions somewhere else in
921. 01:04:44 the book, everybody wants something from you and you can't give them what they really want. What
922. 01:04:48 you can give them is understanding. I think that was actually something that her husband told her
923. 01:04:52 when she was dealing with this, this sort of thing. But you have to recognize that there are
924. 01:04:57 always going to be people that you are going to let down. And so you have to be okay with that.
925. 01:05:02 You basically have to decide who you're going to let down because you can't say yes to everybody.
926. 01:05:08 Yeah, she even calls out that there's times like she wishes she could connect with each
927. 01:05:14 individual person. But there's just too much. She's called that out. She called that a couple
928. 01:05:20 times. But at the same time, think about it. Go back to the beginning of the book.
929. 01:05:25 When she was first starting with her band at that point, if you sent her an email,
930. 01:05:31 an email, what even around, I think at that point. But when you would send her a letter or a note,
931. 01:05:37 she responded to absolutely every single one of them. Like that's where she started. She would
932. 01:05:43 send out to all of them. And whenever the email thing did start off, if you emailed her, she would
933. 01:05:48 respond every time. Like that's where she started out, which is interesting because even think about
934. 01:05:53 people whenever they're starting to start a new business, they want to go the entrepreneur route.
935. 01:05:57 That's what a lot of people give you advice. Say yes to everything. Like that's what they'll tell you.
936. 01:06:02 And even as a developer, I can tell you that when I started doing custom development, yep,
937. 01:06:07 that's exactly what I did. Said yes to every single project. And now I'm trying for
938. 01:06:12 out how to get people to help me do the work because I can't do it all. So it's a good problem
939. 01:06:15 to have. But it's a thing that people start that way. And then eventually it grows to a point
940. 01:06:21 where you can't handle that anymore. And she's the prime example of that. That's exactly how
941. 01:06:27 it panned out for her. So I just found that it was, it's interesting that you and I both have
942. 01:06:34 action items here for Twitter. It's interesting how she's using Twitter to create connection points.
943. 01:06:39 And I think if she was starting on Twitter today without the big following, she would probably do
944. 01:06:44 the same thing where she would respond to absolutely everybody who mentioned her on Twitter and grow
945. 01:06:50 it that way. That's kind of my feel for how she would approach that and grow it to a point where,
946. 01:06:57 you know, you're talking about people continue to come in whenever you're connecting with people
947. 01:07:00 personally. Like it tends to grow that way as opposed to the big broadcast marketing methods
948. 01:07:06 that we see all the time. Like those don't always work. But connecting with people one-on-one really
949. 01:07:12 does. That was that was a big takeaway for me out of this book. Yeah, absolutely. And if I were to,
950. 01:07:19 I don't want to make it sound like I am giving a man to Palmer life advice. But the title of her
951. 01:07:25 book is the art of asking. How about asking for a little bit of margin? You know, that's the thought
952. 01:07:30 that kept going through my head during this section when she's trying to keep up with all this stuff.
953. 01:07:35 And I think that the reason that she has trouble with this is another belief which I completely
954. 01:07:43 disagree with. And this one is just it's not it's kind of sad, but she mentions in there that
955. 01:07:51 well, she kind of goes back and forth. But my takeaway at the end of this was that she basically
956. 01:07:57 believes that humankind is generous by default. And I completely disagree with that. I believe that
957. 01:08:07 humans are greedy, prideful, they're jerks by default. And as a parent, and this is maybe not
958. 01:08:15 the best example, but you don't have to teach your kids how to misbehave, you have to teach them
959. 01:08:21 how to behave. Their natural inclination is not to share with their brothers and sisters,
960. 01:08:27 their natural inclination is to take. And I think that she shares a lot of stories.
961. 01:08:35 And she's been very vulnerable. She's shown up at people's houses. She never met them before.
962. 01:08:39 And every time she's going into those situations, she shared a couple of them where it's like,
963. 01:08:42 I'm not sure if I should be doing this. And if she's thinking that like it's not a real great
964. 01:08:46 situation, and she always is like, Oh, I can't believe I ever thought that like I've completely
965. 01:08:51 changed these people's lives. And I basically when I read those, I was like, Oh, you've gotten lucky
966. 01:08:55 so far. And I don't think that she really does that anymore. But yeah, I definitely do not believe
967. 01:09:04 that we are prewired towards taking care of other people. And we're prewired for goodness and charity.
968. 01:09:13 Like, I believe that that is that is something that you have to work very hard at. And there's a
969. 01:09:23 lot of societal constructs and rules and things like that to kind of keep people in line. But if
970. 01:09:30 you were to take away some of those things, then you would you would have anarchy. You would have
971. 01:09:35 people who are just looking out for for number one there. There might be a few people who would try
972. 01:09:41 to, you know, spread the love amongst their their tribe or whatever, but it would be completely
973. 01:09:47 unsustainable without the without the parameters that we've kind of all agreed to. Yes, collectively,
974. 01:09:53 these are this is the best way to do it. Ready for action items.
975. 01:09:59 I believe so. Let me just look over my notes here. There was actually one other thing she
976. 01:10:08 mentioned, the impulse to connect the dots and shares what makes you an artist. I just want to
977. 01:10:13 call out that I really liked that phrase because it reminded me of steel like an artist by Austin
978. 01:10:17 Cleon, which maybe we should cover at some point. But that was one of the most influential books I've
979. 01:10:21 ever read because for a long time, I thought I wasn't creative because I couldn't come up with
980. 01:10:26 anything just completely original. And Austin Cleon's book basically gave me the license to be
981. 01:10:32 creative by saying that all you're doing when you create is you're connecting these dots in
982. 01:10:36 ways that nobody ever has before. It's not like you're getting this thing completely. You're getting
983. 01:10:41 inspired by a flash of lightning. You're literally just rearranging the inputs and creating a new
984. 01:10:48 output. So that's what I thought of when she read that. But I thought that was really good.
985. 01:10:53 She also asked at one point, like, what is your gift to the world? And I think that that is a very
986. 01:11:00 important question for anybody to answer. Figure out what is the thing that you have to add
987. 01:11:07 and then give that away as much as you can.
988. 01:11:14 That's a tough one. It is a tough one. I mean, I'm still struggling with that one. I don't think
989. 01:11:20 that's something that you ever really 100% from this point forward say, yes, this is the thing.
990. 01:11:25 It's going to be different at different seasons of your life. But it is something that you should
991. 01:11:30 be conscious of because until you figure out what your gift to the world is, I don't think that you
992. 01:11:36 can authentically communicate the love that you have for that person. Because the advice and the
993. 01:11:45 connection that you're going to make, it's going to be, I don't want to say tainted. I don't want
994. 01:11:52 to say influenced. I don't know what the right word is, but it is going to be colored a little bit
995. 01:11:59 by your perspective. And your perspective, if you haven't landed on what is your gift to give to
996. 01:12:06 the world, is going to be a little bit negative because you're going to be frustrated like you
997. 01:12:13 haven't landed on the thing yet. And so I think that once you land on the thing, it's kind of,
998. 01:12:18 it's freeing in a sense. You have more flexibility, you have more ability
999. 01:12:28 to give what is inside of you once you recognize what is in you to give, if that makes sense.
1000. 01:12:33 Yes. Yeah. I think everybody has something they're creative with.
1001. 01:12:39 But the trick is admitting that you're creative with it and knowing what to do with it.
1002. 01:12:44 That's not an easy thing to answer, which is why I say that's a hard question.
1003. 01:12:49 Definitely.
1004. 01:12:53 Okay. So the first action item I'm going to transition anyway, the first action item,
1005. 01:13:00 the only action item I had on this is change up my use of Twitter. I have, for a while now,
1006. 01:13:05 seen Twitter as kind of a time suck and not much comes out of it. And I'm realizing,
1007. 01:13:11 I've kind of been thinking about Twitter the wrong way. And I want to use that as an avenue
1008. 01:13:20 to connect with people more on a one-on-one basis and potentially try to find ways to
1009. 01:13:26 use that to do these in-person things. Because I think those are really cool.
1010. 01:13:30 I think there's a lot of potential, at least for me in that way. So I'm going to try it.
1011. 01:13:36 We'll see how it goes.
1012. 01:13:37 So all these years, you've been doing it wrong.
1013. 01:13:40 I think so. Maybe I'm doing Twitter wrong.
1014. 01:13:46 Well, Twitter specifically is interesting for me because that's how I got connected with Asian
1015. 01:13:51 efficiency. I think that's probably how I got connected with you and several other people.
1016. 01:13:55 I now have real relationships with, and not just my internet heroes that my wife rolls my eyes at
1017. 01:14:03 whenever I reference them. She knows that they are actually real people.
1018. 01:14:08 So Twitter specifically, what I like about it and what's worth calling out here in the podcast,
1019. 01:14:14 I think, is that Twitter, you choose who you want to follow. They don't have to follow you back.
1020. 01:14:21 And so you get to pick who you let in essence speak into your life. And if someone is going off
1021. 01:14:27 about something that you don't care about, you don't want to hear it anymore, you just unfollow
1022. 01:14:35 them. And there's no harm, no follow. Whereas Facebook, it's a reciprocal relationship. You have
1023. 01:14:41 to ask to follow somebody or become a friend with somebody. And then you basically are Facebook
1024. 01:14:48 friends at that point. What's ridiculous about Facebook, in my opinion, is that the average person
1025. 01:14:52 I read has like 500 Facebook friends. But those aren't really your friends. In fact, one statistic
1026. 01:15:02 I read said that the average American only has like one or two real friends. And so it's kind of
1027. 01:15:08 like a placebo. And it's getting back to what you were talking about a while back where the internet
1028. 01:15:13 is like this, these substitute relationships. And I think that Facebook kind of facilitates that.
1029. 01:15:20 So I always describe Facebook as like the people that you used to know. And Twitter is kind of the
1030. 01:15:25 people that you want to know. And that's why I prefer Twitter. And I'm never on Facebook.
1031. 01:15:32 I don't ever go to Facebook. I get made fun of it for it quite a bit with some of our small
1032. 01:15:41 group, the people in our short circle, small circle here. Yeah, I'm not not a Facebook person.
1033. 01:15:48 I don't think Amanda really talked about Facebook, but it must have been around.
1034. 01:15:52 And I'm wondering what her perspective on it would be.
1035. 01:15:58 That's a good question. I don't know. Someone had to explain to her Twitter.
1036. 01:16:05 Not. And it wasn't even a new thing. I think when she finally joined it, she resisted it. I think
1037. 01:16:10 she said for two years. And when she finally did get into it, she thought it was a one way street.
1038. 01:16:17 She thought everybody shared things, but you couldn't reply to it. So then whenever they showed
1039. 01:16:22 her that, oh, yeah, people can reply to what you post. It was like a gold mine for her completely
1040. 01:16:28 changed things. But I don't know what she would think about Facebook. That would be interesting.
1041. 01:16:32 Well, I had that view of Twitter initially too. I remember when I joined Twitter watching the
1042. 01:16:37 video and like how it's supposed to work. And it's like, you can post miniature updates and tell
1043. 01:16:40 people where you're at and things like that. And I'm like, okay. So there's tools out there where
1044. 01:16:47 you can go back and you can find like your first tweet ever. And mine was like stuffing my face at
1045. 01:16:51 Chipotle or something like that. It's just like, why the world does anybody care about that?
1046. 01:16:56 Oh, Chipotle. But I've grown up in on how I use Twitter as well. So that was one of my action items
1047. 01:17:07 too was to, I guess not change up how I use Twitter, but specifically use Twitter to ask for things.
1048. 01:17:13 I know that there are a bunch of people that follow me on Twitter now considerably more than a few
1049. 01:17:19 years ago. And that's because we do stuff like this. I'm host of the productivity show, my work
1050. 01:17:24 at Asian efficiency and other stuff on the web. But some of these people, like I've never actually
1051. 01:17:30 met them. And they still, what's cool about podcasts is you feel like you know the person,
1052. 01:17:38 even if you don't have a direct connection to them. And that's why I use the term internet heroes a
1053. 01:17:44 lot of times when I would describe people like you to my wife is like, these are people that I
1054. 01:17:52 really respect. I feel like I know what they think about things, but they don't, they have no idea
1055. 01:17:56 who I am. You know, they would they would never hang out with me. And I think that asking for things
1056. 01:18:04 on Twitter is a unique opportunity to create more of those connections. Because the holds
1057. 01:18:15 what I'll just speak for myself, I guess, what has held me back from asking for things on Twitter
1058. 01:18:20 previously was been like, well, that's kind of ridiculous to to ask for something like that.
1059. 01:18:25 Like that's way too big of an ask. But she she mentions in the book, the only person who can
1060. 01:18:31 judge whether request is fair is the person being asked. So if I'm going to throw something out there
1061. 01:18:36 on Twitter, and somebody who has bought my book and listens to every podcast I do, and
1062. 01:18:43 they've followed some of the advice that I've I've given, and it's really helped them out.
1063. 01:18:48 Like they want to reciprocate in some way, shape or form. Then why not give them the opportunity to do
1064. 01:18:55 that? Because then you're just getting in the way. Like you're not, you're not letting people step
1065. 01:19:03 in where they may want to. Yeah, exactly. So I think that there's obviously a lot of a lot of
1066. 01:19:10 back and forth here. There's a balance that needs to be be struck, and I have no idea where that line
1067. 01:19:16 is. But really the big takeaway from this book, I think, is that don't be afraid to ask for these
1068. 01:19:23 things because the fact that you are asking is giving more opportunities for these these authentic
1069. 01:19:30 connections to be made. And so it's almost like you're depriving people of an opportunity to benefit
1070. 01:19:38 them by refusing to ask for help. Makes it very real. I like that.
1071. 01:19:47 So your other one here is your conversation to listen. Do you have anything else you're adding
1072. 01:19:55 for action items? Is that it? No, I think that's it. Okay. Yeah.
1073. 01:19:59 Dare I ask what you felt about the author's style? I don't know that question.
1074. 01:20:05 All right, here you go, Mike. Author's style and rating. Oh, I feel like I've gotten most of it
1075. 01:20:09 out of my system by now. You've aired the dirty laundry. Yeah. So one of the things that Amanda
1076. 01:20:18 said in this book is that at the end of the day, we're all broken. And I completely agree with that.
1077. 01:20:26 The thing that I don't, I did not appreciate was the description of the brokenness. And it kind of
1078. 01:20:41 came across as like, you know, you hear people, sometimes people will get asked like, if you could
1079. 01:20:48 do it over, what would you change? And there's always, there's always those types of those people
1080. 01:20:52 who are like, well, I wouldn't change anything because my experiences have made me who I am.
1081. 01:20:56 Like that's what I envision Amanda Palmer being like, and it drives me crazy because
1082. 01:21:02 I admit that my experiences have made me who I am. But I also admit that I've made a lot of
1083. 01:21:08 mistakes along the way. And if I could go back and do them over and not hurt those people,
1084. 01:21:13 I would absolutely change what I have done. So didn't like the, didn't like her style, didn't
1085. 01:21:21 like the language, didn't like the comparisons with, with religion, because I felt like it was
1086. 01:21:27 completely unfair and didn't, didn't understand at all what she was, what she was correlating.
1087. 01:21:32 That being said, I do think that some of her, some of her stuff in here, which hopefully,
1088. 01:21:39 you know, Cranky Mike hasn't been the only one on the podcast and we've been able to tease out
1089. 01:21:43 some of the good stuff here as well. I do think there's some value here. I think it's way too long
1090. 01:21:49 from a bookworm perspective. If there is a biography, that's fair. Like I can't, I can't judge it through
1091. 01:21:55 that lens though, because I would never pick up and read a biography by Amanda Palmer necessarily.
1092. 01:22:00 Although, you know, now that I think about it, there probably is some value in reading
1093. 01:22:06 biographies of people who are just on all ends of the spectrum. I think I heard once Jim Roan say,
1094. 01:22:12 as you're building out your library, you should have a biography of Gandhi and you should have a
1095. 01:22:19 biography of Hitler because you got both ends of the spectrum then as reference points. So,
1096. 01:22:23 that being said, like total rating here, like, if I were doing this just on the author's style,
1097. 01:22:29 I'd give it a negative star if I could. But based on the content, I think that there is some,
1098. 01:22:37 some redeeming value here. So I'm going to say two stars, which I honestly, I think, as much as
1099. 01:22:44 I've complained about this book is pretty generous. I was completely expecting a one or a .5 or something.
1100. 01:22:52 What I was expecting from this. Well, there's some good stuff in here, but it's not
1101. 01:22:58 unpacked fully, I think. And then what is unpacked fully is the descriptions of all the stuff that I
1102. 01:23:07 don't care about. So, yeah, but some of the stuff that she says in here and the whole theme of the
1103. 01:23:13 book, I think, is really good. I just wish that she would have spent more time expanding on it.
1104. 01:23:20 Like one thing that we didn't even talk about here, but she references Brene Brown a couple times.
1105. 01:23:23 One of the quotes she said, she credited Brene with this was the opposite of lack is not
1106. 01:23:30 abundance. The opposite of not enough is enough. That's awesome. I completely love that, but it
1107. 01:23:37 was one quote, and then she's going on to the next disgusting story. So talk about that more.
1108. 01:23:43 All right. So I don't think I had near the negative feel that you did, which I think is apparent at
1109. 01:23:52 this point, but I felt like she's very good at writing. I'll give her that. But at the same time,
1110. 01:24:01 there's a lot of cases where I wondered, why are you sharing the story? Like I understand
1111. 01:24:07 the story. I understand what happened. How does it play into what you're trying to get across?
1112. 01:24:13 Like I struggled with that quite a bit. And maybe that's just me not having the artistic
1113. 01:24:18 mind that she has. I don't know. I don't know what that was. So that that was difficult for me.
1114. 01:24:23 I think whenever it comes to a rating, I found a lot of interesting. Like there's a lot of things
1115. 01:24:30 here that I'll probably use in the back of my mind to connect dots in the future. I won't
1116. 01:24:35 probably ever explicitly call out where I got them. Just saying, but I think time it's all said
1117. 01:24:42 and done. I'd put this one at about a three and a half because I feel like it was worth the read,
1118. 01:24:47 but I'm not going to recommend it to anyone. So bookworm listeners, if you're listening to this
1119. 01:24:53 and you haven't read the book, I don't recommend it. Listen to this. You'll pick up what you need
1120. 01:24:57 out of here. Exactly. This is the only book we have read where I have gotten angry while reading it.
1121. 01:25:06 It was The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen, which was boring and I almost put it down,
1122. 01:25:11 but this one legitimately made me mad. I can see that it's success.
1123. 01:25:16 Okay, you already set this one aside. Be done with it. Put it behind you. What's next?
1124. 01:25:25 Upcoming books. This is, okay, so listen up readers. We took your recommendations,
1125. 01:25:31 but I didn't look at how big this recommendation was until I ordered it and it showed up.
1126. 01:25:37 So the next book is Paid to Think by David Goldsmith and it is about 600 pages. It is
1127. 01:25:42 bigger than most of my college textbooks. So, well, I've started this book and it's really good.
1128. 01:25:50 I don't think I will be taking another recommendation like this. So, I don't know, do we want to define
1129. 01:25:58 what qualifies as a recommendation going forward? But I know we're going to shoot for doing this one
1130. 01:26:04 in the normal timeframe, but this is a big mammoth book. This is quite the tone.
1131. 01:26:10 So I texted Mike whenever this one showed up in my mail and I, so here's what I sent Mike.
1132. 01:26:20 Paid to think just showed up in my mailbox. This might be a two week book instead of one.
1133. 01:26:24 This might be a two month book. It's so dense. It's really good stuff. I'm not sure if you started
1134. 01:26:31 it yet, Joe. It's really, really good and it's very clearly articulated and maybe it's just the
1135. 01:26:37 subject matter that I'm so interested in that I'm getting a lot from it, but it's the kind of thing
1136. 01:26:41 where you read like five pages and then you have to stop and think for like a half an hour about
1137. 01:26:45 what you just read because they just taught you like an entire semester's worth of systems
1138. 01:26:52 in those five pages. So I'm taking a lot of screenshots and adding it to my my mind node file.
1139. 01:26:58 I think that that is the thing that's keeping me going through this at the pace that I'm currently
1140. 01:27:03 at is the fact that I'm creating this reference while I'm doing this, where I'll be able to go back
1141. 01:27:08 to this over and over again and it's going to prove really valuable. But just sitting down to read
1142. 01:27:13 this like, man, this is a lot of work. So the takeaway here, I guess, or the general guideline
1143. 01:27:21 in terms of making a recommendation is if you cannot- No, no, no, we're not putting a guideline down.
1144. 01:27:26 That's up to us to look into it ahead of time. Okay, okay, but I'm going to say this though,
1145. 01:27:31 that if you want your book to be accepted, like you fool me once, shame on me. But if you cannot
1146. 01:27:39 finish the book and I'm going to say an hour a day within a two week period, like I'm probably not
1147. 01:27:46 going to pick it next time. I'll just say me, okay? So you go ahead and pick the next thousand page
1148. 01:27:53 textbook that gets submitted. But this was, I'm going to say this was almost a mistake. I'll hold
1149. 01:28:00 off reservation until we get to the end. But this is going to be a ton of work.
1150. 01:28:06 There's a lot here. I started reading it and it's what I would call a very dense book. There's a
1151. 01:28:11 lot of information and a very short time frame. This is a big one. And you're not kidding when
1152. 01:28:17 you say you have to spend about an hour reading a day on this one. Like to get this one done for
1153. 01:28:21 the next one is going to be a challenge. For sure. Okay, so I inflicted Mike with pain on
1154. 01:28:28 art of asking, I suppose it's only fitting that he inflicts pain on all of us with paid to think.
1155. 01:28:34 Unintentional pain. Readers suggested pain or listeners suggested pain.
1156. 01:28:38 I'm going to have to go back and figure out who suggested it and we'll blame them.
1157. 01:28:42 All right, so following paid to think is another not short book. No, it's not.
1158. 01:28:51 It's anti fragile by, what is it? Naseem Nicholas Talib? I don't know how to say it.
1159. 01:28:59 So it's anti fragile. Again, it's a long one. I don't think that one's a small print though.
1160. 01:29:05 Like I don't think that one's near as dense. That one won't be as bad as paid to think.
1161. 01:29:08 So thankfully we're not doing two at that level back to back.
1162. 01:29:11 Right. Yeah. Anti fragile is one that I've been wanting to read for a long time. So I'm
1163. 01:29:17 actually excited to go through that one as well. For gap books. I know you've got a
1164. 01:29:21 not applicable because I'm not doing a gap book. Yeah, reading goes to think.
1165. 01:29:27 Yeah, yeah, but I'm going to go ahead and recommend Love is a Killer app by Tim Sanders.
1166. 01:29:33 I actually read this one already. So it's done. It's not something I'm committing to
1167. 01:29:38 read in the next week or two. But this book is awesome. And Tim Sanders is the former like
1168. 01:29:45 technical guy or operations guy at Yahoo, I believe. And it's it's a business book,
1169. 01:29:54 which is really talking about how you can advance your network and advance your career
1170. 01:30:02 by developing this mindset of giving stuff away. It's a really interesting perspective,
1171. 01:30:08 which I think would revolutionize a lot of a lot of people like the way that they do business
1172. 01:30:12 and was really refreshing to hear all of his stories and things where he's he's implemented
1173. 01:30:18 this in his own life and what's kind of come of it. So it's a really cool read. It's also a very
1174. 01:30:23 short read. It's very quick. So I'm going to go ahead and recommend that one.
1175. 01:30:27 I have that one. It's on my gap book list at the moment. Nice.
1176. 01:30:32 Well, don't read it this time, but definitely read it. Okay, in fact, maybe we'll come back
1177. 01:30:39 and revisit that one for bookworm at some point. There we go. There we go. So whenever we don't
1178. 01:30:43 feel like like when next time we have a paid to think and we just want to take a break, we'll just
1179. 01:30:47 do that one instead. Yeah, exactly. So if you want to recommend a book that is not 600 pages
1180. 01:30:55 and 20 pounds, you can go to bookworm.fm/list and you can see all of the books that are on the
1181. 01:31:04 schedule. And then there'll also be a button there where you can recommend a book. And obviously,
1182. 01:31:09 we are trying to incorporate more of those into the show, but be warned, dear listener,
1183. 01:31:15 we are not going to create a sensational amount of work for us for a side project
1184. 01:31:19 all the time. Just putting the expectations out there. We could ask them. We'll ask them.
1185. 01:31:25 So if you did like the art of asking, even though Mike certainly did not, and you wanted to tell
1186. 01:31:33 Mike how he did it wrong, let us know on iTunes or on the productivity guild, either one,
1187. 01:31:40 links to both of those in the show notes, let us know what you thought. I think we're still trying
1188. 01:31:44 to de-seat what is it? KCRW? Is that the one that you called out that you got to target on?
1189. 01:31:48 Yeah, that's right. So here's our ask, the art of asking, would you please go leave us an
1190. 01:31:53 iTunes review? They'd really help out. We would appreciate that. Thank you. We would absolutely
1191. 01:31:59 appreciate it. We got to figure out some sort of celebration when we finally do unseat KCRW,
1192. 01:32:03 by the way. We'll build your communication room. There we go. I like it.
1193. 01:32:08 All right, so if you're following along, we're going to be doing paid to think next by David Goldsmith
1194. 01:32:16 anti-fragile. After that, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time.