38: Mindset by Carol Dweck

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1. 00:00:00 I like new setups and they're fun, but it means that I have to get my act together, I guess.
2. 00:00:06 Are you using the Shure SM50, whatever?
3. 00:00:10 At the moment, I'm on the Shure Beta 87A, which I am quite the fan of, I will say. I highly recommend it.
4. 00:00:18 Sounds good.
5. 00:00:18 Do you think it sounds good? That'd be the ultimate question. You do this quite a bit and you listen to voices a lot in this way.
6. 00:00:25 Your dulcet tone sounds even dulcet-er.
7. 00:00:28 Ooh.
8. 00:00:29 That's probably not a word.
9. 00:00:30 Make one up if you want. I'm good.
10. 00:00:32 Put in a new soundboard. I put in a new microphone.
11. 00:00:36 I will be selling said Road Podcaster, which is a little sad to me,
12. 00:00:42 but at the same time, there's no point in keeping it around because I won't be using it.
13. 00:00:46 Even if I try to travel, I would probably still take the 87 and the soundboard with me.
14. 00:00:50 Really?
15. 00:00:50 Yes.
16. 00:00:51 I kind of went the other way. I bought a cheap USB microphone, so I didn't have to do that.
17. 00:00:55 That's fair. That's fair.
18. 00:00:58 I just know that I can get a carrying case for the soundboard.
19. 00:01:03 I would still be carrying the mic around and the stand and such for it anyway.
20. 00:01:08 So that's not any different. It would just be the one component.
21. 00:01:12 In every instance where I would travel with it, it's not a big deal to do that.
22. 00:01:17 I travel so little and record so little as in, I don't think I've ever actually done that.
23. 00:01:22 I've always recorded in my studio in some form.
24. 00:01:26 Well, I competed at the district level Humor Speech Contest last weekend as we record this.
25. 00:01:33 And?
26. 00:01:33 I did not win.
27. 00:01:34 Bummer.
28. 00:01:35 I did not place.
29. 00:01:36 They only tell you who took first, second, and third, and there were eight people there.
30. 00:01:40 Okay.
31. 00:01:40 The competition was much stiffer than it was the first couple of rounds, which I expected.
32. 00:01:46 But the guy who won was a professional comedian, so I don't feel too bad.
33. 00:01:52 I did what I had set out to do. This was the biggest Toastmaster stage I've competed on.
34. 00:02:00 And I wanted to prove to myself at the very beginning,
35. 00:02:03 and this only reason I entered the Humor Speech Contest was that I was competing in
36. 00:02:07 the inspirational contest last spring, got on stage and blinked.
37. 00:02:11 So I needed to prove to myself that I could do this.
38. 00:02:14 And I've now done it several times, including the last time on a stage with a Britney Spears
39. 00:02:21 style microphone attached to my head.
40. 00:02:22 It was the most formal setting I've had in quite a while.
41. 00:02:28 And definitely the most pressure-filled scenario I've spoken in.
42. 00:02:33 And I delivered it about as well as I could.
43. 00:02:35 I was happy with the performance, so I'm completely okay with not winning.
44. 00:02:40 While I was there, I got connected with the keynote speaker.
45. 00:02:44 His name is Aaron Beverly.
46. 00:02:46 And if you were to do a Google search for him, you would see he is the runner up from the 2016
47. 00:02:53 World Championship of Speaking.
48. 00:02:56 And he did it by breaking all the rules.
49. 00:03:00 So Josh would probably like this guy.
50. 00:03:02 All right.
51. 00:03:04 Like in Toastmasters, you're supposed to have a very short to-the-point title,
52. 00:03:08 because when you compete, they say your name, they say your speech title,
53. 00:03:11 then they repeat your speech title, and then they repeat your name, and then you go.
54. 00:03:16 And this guy had a 57-word title, which was just rambling.
55. 00:03:21 And he used it to make a point in his speech.
56. 00:03:23 But it was really funny because you've got this guy.
57. 00:03:26 It's a World Championship of Speaking.
58. 00:03:27 So I don't know if it was in India or wherever when he competed.
59. 00:03:31 But there was an Indian man who was announcing him.
60. 00:03:35 And so he's got this accident.
61. 00:03:36 And he's just this big run-on English sentence that like,
62. 00:03:40 I don't speak multiple languages, but I can, this sentence really only makes sense
63. 00:03:45 in my head in English.
64. 00:03:46 Like I don't know that this title would translate well at all.
65. 00:03:49 And you could tell like as he's reading through this, he's kind of having trouble
66. 00:03:53 piecing this together because it's grammatically incorrect.
67. 00:03:56 It's breaking all the rules and the audiences just cracking up for like two minutes before
68. 00:04:01 Aaron Beverly even gets on the stage.
69. 00:04:03 Well, anyway, so he took second in the world competition and he is going to be coaching me.
70. 00:04:10 So that's pretty cool.
71. 00:04:11 Nice.
72. 00:04:11 So I need to understand this.
73. 00:04:14 So he made the long speech title completely ridiculous because by the time he actually
74. 00:04:19 gets to speak, people are already laughing.
75. 00:04:21 Is that part of it?
76. 00:04:22 Pretty much.
77. 00:04:23 Yeah.
78. 00:04:23 And I am searching right now for the link.
79. 00:04:27 So maybe you can include this.
80. 00:04:29 Yeah, there it is.
81. 00:04:30 The title of it is the 57 word speech title.
82. 00:04:34 Okay.
83. 00:04:37 He's a really good speaker.
84. 00:04:39 He did a great job at the conference and then he had a booth set up.
85. 00:04:42 And he does coaching and he had a special package he put together for
86. 00:04:46 conference attendees.
87. 00:04:47 And so I've got my intro session with him on Monday.
88. 00:04:50 Nice.
89. 00:04:51 That sounds like a pretty good gig.
90. 00:04:54 From what he told me, like there's a lot of people who compete with the goal of becoming
91. 00:04:58 a coach and helping other people do this.
92. 00:04:59 And it sounds kind of like he's figuring out the business side of it.
93. 00:05:02 But in terms of the speaking and the content, he really knows his stuff.
94. 00:05:07 And so I'm excited to start working with him.
95. 00:05:09 Cool.
96. 00:05:10 Now, well, I hope that works out well.
97. 00:05:12 I know you've been doing more and more of the speaking thing.
98. 00:05:14 And the humorous speech was kind of a stretch for you.
99. 00:05:17 So kudos to you on this one.
100. 00:05:20 It was definitely a stretch.
101. 00:05:21 The clip that I sent you, that's from the world championship of speaking,
102. 00:05:26 that's the inspirational stuff.
103. 00:05:28 That's more my wheelhouse.
104. 00:05:30 And so in the little questionnaire that he sent over,
105. 00:05:32 it's like, what is your goal in the next two years?
106. 00:05:35 And I put to place at the world championship of public speaking.
107. 00:05:40 And so we'll see if I can get there.
108. 00:05:41 But I'll throw it out there for the podcast world to hold me accountable to, I guess.
109. 00:05:44 There you go.
110. 00:05:46 You have an item on the show notes here for follow up that says nothing more than
111. 00:05:51 Cortex sucks.
112. 00:05:53 Yeah.
113. 00:05:54 What do you mean by this?
114. 00:05:56 So I like, I like Cortex.
115. 00:05:57 I actually recorded a podcast the other day with Brooks for the productivity show,
116. 00:06:02 where we went through the books and the podcast that have been most influential to us.
117. 00:06:07 And I listed Cortex.
118. 00:06:09 Cool.
119. 00:06:09 But they also did their own version of the seven habits of highly affected people.
120. 00:06:14 And I disagree with them in every possible way.
121. 00:06:17 Okay.
122. 00:06:19 I've not listened to this.
123. 00:06:20 I saw that it came through and overcast.
124. 00:06:23 And I have not gone through it.
125. 00:06:27 So I got a feeling I'm not going to like it now because of this.
126. 00:06:31 No.
127. 00:06:31 You've positioned me to not like it now.
128. 00:06:33 Yeah.
129. 00:06:34 So an interesting thing happened when I was listening to this episode because
130. 00:06:38 Mike Hurley in CPG grade, they basically just listed all of the ways that the seven habits
131. 00:06:43 of highly affected people is just your stereotypical business book full of businesses.
132. 00:06:48 And it really makes no impact because all this stuff is these hypothetical scenarios that would
133. 00:06:52 never happen in real life.
134. 00:06:53 And so therefore you can't apply any of it to yourself.
135. 00:06:57 And I'm just thinking to myself the whole time they're reading this you spoiled millennials.
136. 00:07:00 You.
137. 00:07:00 I'm a millennial.
138. 00:07:02 So I get it, you know, but I'm just like, you have no, you have no idea.
139. 00:07:08 What, what this is like.
140. 00:07:10 And yeah, some of those examples are a little bit sensational.
141. 00:07:13 And when I was listening to it, I'm hearing Mike and I'm hearing CPG grade talk about it.
142. 00:07:17 And I know what they are saying is wrong.
143. 00:07:21 And at least according to my experience, you know, they're interpreting these same passages,
144. 00:07:28 exactly opposite it the way that I did.
145. 00:07:30 And so by the content of what they're saying, I'm like, I completely disagree.
146. 00:07:35 But I found myself occasionally because they are so persuasive, like they carry on with their
147. 00:07:40 arguments eventually be like, Oh, maybe yet.
148. 00:07:42 Wait, wait, no, no, this is wrong.
149. 00:07:44 Like I had to bring myself back.
150. 00:07:45 So it's an entertaining listen, but I just feel that they have a little bit of an isolated
151. 00:07:55 approach to this.
152. 00:07:56 And I'm kind of surprised that CPG grade specifically could not make the generalizations
153. 00:08:05 and and draw out the the kind of stuff that I did based on some of the other stuff that they
154. 00:08:10 talked about.
155. 00:08:11 He talked about the things that he got out of the Emith revisited.
156. 00:08:14 And that book compared to the seven habits affected people.
157. 00:08:18 I mean, I don't know, I don't want to spoil it.
158. 00:08:19 I guess if we ever do it for Bookworm, but you want to dry business style book.
159. 00:08:24 Like that's it.
160. 00:08:25 The seven habits, how affected people is not.
161. 00:08:28 So as soon as I heard the recovering the book though, and especially once they started
162. 00:08:31 with their content, I'm like, I got a rant with Joe about this because this is one of my favorites
163. 00:08:36 and they're just completely destroying it.
164. 00:08:38 But it got people fired up, didn't it?
165. 00:08:40 Oh, yes, it did.
166. 00:08:41 What we really need is we need to set up a podcast recording with you, myself,
167. 00:08:47 Mike Rillie and CPG Gray, where we can debate the seven habits of how they affected people.
168. 00:08:52 Ooh, that might be kind of fun.
169. 00:08:54 Yeah.
170. 00:08:55 Not sure how that would go over, but it would be entertaining at least.
171. 00:08:57 Yeah.
172. 00:08:58 So somebody out there in the podcast universe set that up for us because...
173. 00:09:01 I got a feeling that's a scheduling nightmare about to happen here.
174. 00:09:05 I will change my schedule.
175. 00:09:07 I will show up anytime, anywhere to defend Stephen Covey and the seven habits, how they affected people.
176. 00:09:12 All right.
177. 00:09:12 If it happens, I'm there.
178. 00:09:14 I'll make it happen, but I'm not going to hold my breath either.
179. 00:09:17 The only thing that I put in the show notes was kind of a sideways mouth emoji.
180. 00:09:25 And it was purely there because on our last book, we didn't have any action items on it.
181. 00:09:32 So it's like, okay.
182. 00:09:33 Yep.
183. 00:09:34 Not much for follow-up here.
184. 00:09:36 So now what?
185. 00:09:37 That's why I put that there.
186. 00:09:38 Nothing big.
187. 00:09:40 Now we rant about cortex and we talk about podcasting, obviously.
188. 00:09:43 Right.
189. 00:09:44 We get to go off script and do whatever we want, which means that we've now wrapped up our follow-up.
190. 00:09:49 All two points of pseudo follow-up.
191. 00:09:52 What's today's book, Mike?
192. 00:09:54 Today's book is Mindset by Carol Dweck.
193. 00:09:58 And I believe that this was a listener recommendation, but it's a book that has been on my radar for a
194. 00:10:04 long time.
195. 00:10:04 So I was excited to dive into this one.
196. 00:10:06 And at least in my opinion, it did not disappoint.
197. 00:10:11 I found myself.
198. 00:10:12 Okay.
199. 00:10:13 So when I read books, there are two set times, maybe three, when I'll read in a given day.
200. 00:10:21 One is early morning, roughly from seven to seven thirty.
201. 00:10:25 The other is at night before I start getting ready for bed.
202. 00:10:30 So in the midst of my day, I also sometimes have a single point, like before lunch or right
203. 00:10:38 after lunch or something somewhere in there.
204. 00:10:40 I'll sometimes pick it up for about 10 minutes, just as a good transition time between my working
205. 00:10:47 schedule and going up to see my family for lunch.
206. 00:10:49 So I will oftentimes read at those points.
207. 00:10:52 When I have a book that's especially interesting to me, I will sometimes pick it up just at random
208. 00:11:00 times.
209. 00:11:00 Like I'm waiting for the girls to get ready to go out the door.
210. 00:11:04 And I will grab my book and read for those two minutes or something like that.
211. 00:11:07 Well, girl is getting ready to go out the door.
212. 00:11:09 15 minutes.
213. 00:11:10 So with those little tiny bits, I don't often do that, but when I have a good book,
214. 00:11:16 I will do that.
215. 00:11:17 And this is a book that I did do that with.
216. 00:11:19 It's a good book.
217. 00:11:20 I will give it that.
218. 00:11:21 At the same time, this is one where I really wanted to understand the two mindsets that
219. 00:11:28 talks about, which we'll get into here in a few minutes, but I really wanted to know
220. 00:11:32 how do you shift from one to the other?
221. 00:11:36 Or is simple awareness what is at stake here?
222. 00:11:43 Because a lot of times you know this, we go through these books and it's like,
223. 00:11:46 okay, what do I do with this?
224. 00:11:47 I don't know, but it's a good book.
225. 00:11:50 It's a good thing to know.
226. 00:11:51 Maybe just being aware of it is all I need to take away from it.
227. 00:11:54 Like that was a thing that I was wondering with this.
228. 00:11:56 And not sure that I have a set answer on whether or not I got solid action items out of it.
229. 00:12:03 I think I did, but at the same time, it was one that I just really wanted to understand this
230. 00:12:09 as best I could.
231. 00:12:10 So I just kept reading and wanting to pick it up.
232. 00:12:14 So I read it quick.
233. 00:12:14 Yeah, I also read it quick.
234. 00:12:16 I brought it with me to the district conference for Toastmasters.
235. 00:12:20 I left on Friday morning.
236. 00:12:24 I went to Madison, found an extremely hipster coffee shop called Johnson Public House,
237. 00:12:31 sat there all afternoon and read, and then Saturday left the conference for a little while,
238. 00:12:37 went back to the hipster coffee house and read it again.
239. 00:12:40 I finished this book in two days.
240. 00:12:42 Nice.
241. 00:12:43 I personally could not put it down.
242. 00:12:45 If you look at it, if you're going to take an x-ray approach to this book,
243. 00:12:50 it maybe looks a little light on content, but I really liked the approach.
244. 00:12:54 Like the very beginning and the first talking point we've got here is the fixed versus growth
245. 00:12:58 mindsets.
246. 00:12:59 But then the rest of the book, she talks about how to apply fixed versus growth mindsets in
247. 00:13:05 different areas, like parenting or relationships.
248. 00:13:08 She's got a whole bunch of sports examples.
249. 00:13:10 There's business examples.
250. 00:13:12 And I thought that she did a really good job of showing how the fixed versus the growth
251. 00:13:17 mindsets play out in different arenas.
252. 00:13:19 And that's a piece that I can't say I was expecting that.
253. 00:13:23 You look at the front of this.
254. 00:13:24 So the tagline, well, it's got a couple taglines.
255. 00:13:28 The new psychology of success and then how we can learn to fulfill our potential.
256. 00:13:34 But then there's these four points down underneath of the book,
257. 00:13:36 Parenting Business School and Relationships.
258. 00:13:40 In my mind, I was thinking, this is a book that just touches everywhere.
259. 00:13:43 Like that was the point because every book wants to say, this will reach across your entire life.
260. 00:13:48 I get that and I love that it does touch so much of just life in general.
261. 00:13:54 But I can't say I was expecting it to actually go through and talk about teaching and relationships
262. 00:14:01 and how does this apply to business and what happened to Enron.
263. 00:14:05 Like I can't say that that was a thing I expected, but I really appreciated it.
264. 00:14:09 It definitely took this seemingly simple idea and applied it to a bunch of areas
265. 00:14:16 that we all either have been through or going through or will go through at some point most likely.
266. 00:14:22 I just found that fascinating.
267. 00:14:24 And again, it's a simple concept, but at the same time, it can be a bit profound.
268. 00:14:29 So I like the duplicity of the nature of the idea.
269. 00:14:33 Yeah.
270. 00:14:33 And in these individual areas, she has a lot of concrete takeaways.
271. 00:14:38 So I think Sir Ken Robinson, who we covered earlier, should write to Carol Dwecken
272. 00:14:43 ask for tips on writing action items for his books.
273. 00:14:46 Because that was another one where it's just like, let's talk about all this stuff at a high level
274. 00:14:50 and not give you anything concrete to hold on to.
275. 00:14:52 And while the teaching aspect of this particular book didn't really impact me because of my situation,
276. 00:15:00 a lot of it was just like, how do you take a bunch of struggling students and make them care
277. 00:15:04 about learning and get them invested in developing this growth mindset?
278. 00:15:08 So there's a lot of stuff for working with a group of kids and stuff like that.
279. 00:15:12 That didn't necessarily speak to me, but when I was reading that section,
280. 00:15:14 I noticed the prescriptive formula that she was giving.
281. 00:15:18 And I was like, wow, that's actually really good.
282. 00:15:20 A lot of people could benefit from that sort of thing.
283. 00:15:24 So let's jump into what these two mindsets are.
284. 00:15:27 Because I think the rest of this conversation, it's probably going to be a little bit different
285. 00:15:31 than we normally do for Bookworm since I kind of filled it out.
286. 00:15:36 And well, did I do all these? I did do all these.
287. 00:15:39 You did. So I saw your talking points here.
288. 00:15:42 That's not how I took notes on the book at all.
289. 00:15:45 I have the different areas broken out, but I liked your approach.
290. 00:15:48 And so I didn't want to add a bunch of things.
291. 00:15:51 I basically want to go off of what you've got there and see where it goes.
292. 00:15:54 Okay.
293. 00:15:55 And that's why I say it might be a little bit different because, well, let's just jump in.
294. 00:15:59 It'll make more sense once we get going, but this might feel different
295. 00:16:02 from what we normally do for Bookworm.
296. 00:16:05 Yeah. All right. So fixed versus growth mindsets.
297. 00:16:08 Go ahead. You jump in.
298. 00:16:09 Okay. Well, the definitions that I wrote down in the whole first section of the book
299. 00:16:14 is just elaborating on these two.
300. 00:16:16 But I think a good summary is the fixed mindset is saying, I am who I am,
301. 00:16:22 and I can't change. They are a non-learner versus a growth mindset says,
302. 00:16:27 I have the ability to become who I want to be.
303. 00:16:30 And they are a learner.
304. 00:16:32 So if you like to learn new things, you probably have embraced a growth mindset.
305. 00:16:37 If you resist learning new things and you want to stay where things are comfortable,
306. 00:16:41 then you probably have a fixed mindset.
307. 00:16:44 And that whole idea, I know if you're listening to this, maybe that makes you feel uncomfortable.
308. 00:16:50 It made me feel uncomfortable as well because I like to have things very
309. 00:16:54 systematized and I like to know what to expect. But the truth is that the struggle or the puzzle,
310. 00:17:01 the problem that you're trying to solve, that does a lot of good.
311. 00:17:04 And it creates the growth mindset because it makes you think outside the box,
312. 00:17:09 it makes you expand your approach and your mental toolbox and how you tackle these things.
313. 00:17:15 And then the process leaves you better.
314. 00:17:18 It's kind of like the obstacles the way by Ryan Holly.
315. 00:17:21 I thought about that book a lot when I was reading this one.
316. 00:17:23 That's a fair point. I hadn't thought of that one, that particular book when I was going through this.
317. 00:17:27 But it makes a lot of sense for sure.
318. 00:17:29 And I just think it's interesting that it's simple.
319. 00:17:32 You either think you can get better or you don't.
320. 00:17:34 That's, there's a gross summarization of the book.
321. 00:17:39 Can you get better or not?
322. 00:17:41 And my sense is that most bookworm listeners probably fall for the majority part into the latter
323. 00:17:48 camp where we think we can get better. And that's the mindset that we have of being able to always grow.
324. 00:17:55 That's just my sense because that's kind of the point with bookworm.
325. 00:17:59 Just trying to find, you know, we go through books in an effort to learn
326. 00:18:03 and then try to take something away from that that helps us improve some area of life
327. 00:18:09 or develop an idea in more fully in our minds.
328. 00:18:13 That's a lot of what we do on bookworm.
329. 00:18:16 And I have a feeling that a lot of people who listen to us tend to fall into that same camp
330. 00:18:21 simply because, you know, like-minded folks tend to gravitate towards each other.
331. 00:18:25 So welcome aboard listeners.
332. 00:18:27 And it's something that if you start to pay attention to other people that you interact with,
333. 00:18:34 it's kind of uncanny how you can pick up which mindset people are operating from.
334. 00:18:40 And very quickly, did you notice this? Like just from having conversations, you know,
335. 00:18:44 even with some of the youth at our church who volunteer, like just having conversations with
336. 00:18:48 them, you can very quickly pick up which mindset people have a tendency to come from.
337. 00:18:52 Oh yeah, for sure. And even the people who are listening to bookworm,
338. 00:18:57 well, I think you're generally correct that they fall into the growth mindset category.
339. 00:19:01 There are definitely areas of your life where even if you have embraced a growth mindset,
340. 00:19:05 even if you are looking to develop personally, there are areas where you've just closed down
341. 00:19:10 and accepted a fixed mindset. The fixed mindset, one of the other points I wrote down here is that
342. 00:19:16 they don't admit or correct their deficiencies. So think about all the things that you don't do
343. 00:19:21 and why you don't do them. For example, have you ever tried to learn an instrument or have you ever
344. 00:19:27 tried to draw or paint or do anything quote unquote artistic? You know, for a long time,
345. 00:19:32 I didn't. I was just like, ah, my brain doesn't work that way. It's not the way I'm wired. It's
346. 00:19:37 just not my thing. And Carol Duck would say that it is your thing. You just haven't chosen to make
347. 00:19:44 it your thing yet. And it's pretty astounding when you do make that mental switch to say,
348. 00:19:49 I am going to get good at this thing. And I'm going to apply myself. I'm going to push past the
349. 00:19:54 obstacle. I'm going to push past the barriers. I'm going to figure this thing out. No matter
350. 00:19:58 what area that happens happens to be in, one of those areas may be athletics. I think there's
351. 00:20:03 probably no better area that people are just like, Oh, they're born with talent or they're not
352. 00:20:07 born with it, which is the fixed mindset. Exactly. But a lot of the athletes that she shared their
353. 00:20:15 profiles in here, they didn't start off as the prototypical. This guy's going to be amazing. In
354. 00:20:22 fact, she shared a story about Billy Bean, the baseball player and how he had all the physical
355. 00:20:28 tools he was supposed to be, the most amazing baseball player. And that pressure got to him where
356. 00:20:33 he just eventually couldn't handle it anymore. He was never as successful as people thought he
357. 00:20:39 was supposed to be and how or as successful as he thought he was supposed to be because he
358. 00:20:43 bought all that hype. He listened to all that stuff. And that's an important point. You have to
359. 00:20:47 decide for yourself. You can't let other people set the set the bar for you. But on the opposite side
360. 00:20:52 of Billy Bean is somebody like Lenny Dykstra who just you look at this guy and you're like,
361. 00:20:56 there's no way he's a baseball player. But he ended up being really, really good.
362. 00:20:59 And so the mindset, the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, that's the key to going one
363. 00:21:07 way or the other. And I thought that sports was a really interesting application of that.
364. 00:21:11 Yeah. And it's an easy one to correlate it with for sure. Because we all seem to think,
365. 00:21:16 Oh, they're natural. Well, probably not. And if they are, if they don't work at it,
366. 00:21:22 they're not going to stay at the top of the competitive side of the league. Like you're just not going
367. 00:21:29 to stay there and your attitude with it will kill you in the end too, which is where, what was his
368. 00:21:35 name? McInroe, the tennis player? She talked about him quite a bit. That's John, John McInroe.
369. 00:21:40 And I grew, I was a tennis player in college. So I knew exactly who he was. And she described
370. 00:21:45 him very accurately. But for those who don't know, world class tennis player won multiple
371. 00:21:52 championships, but was less than pleasant to work with, I'll say, and was very full of himself and
372. 00:22:02 saw himself as Prince, if you will, of tennis. And if anything caused him to lose a tennis match,
373. 00:22:11 his, you know, the sun got in his eyes or the ref made a bad call on it or, you know, there was
374. 00:22:18 music playing over on the side and it distracted me. Like there was always a reason for the failure
375. 00:22:23 where, you know, where that comes in. And this is a big point that comes up quite a bit. If you
376. 00:22:28 have a fixed mindset and you're thinking like that, you're thinking in a way where you're blaming
377. 00:22:34 exterior external circumstances for a failure and you're fixating on that, that's where you're
378. 00:22:42 definitely in the fixed mindset. The growth mindset would come at that from a different stance and
379. 00:22:47 say, okay, this is a thing that's going on. How do I overcome that? How do I beat this thing? How
380. 00:22:53 do I get better because of this? It doesn't have to necessarily be a thing that you can control.
381. 00:22:59 That's a thing that is brought up in the book, Make Your Bed by a Navy Seal.
382. 00:23:05 Admiral William McCraven.
383. 00:23:07 Yep. He talks about that where sometimes things are terrible to you. You know, life comes at you
384. 00:23:14 and terrible things happen and it's not your fault, but fixating on it and just being stuck on it
385. 00:23:19 isn't going to get you anywhere. So you have to learn to deal with it and move on. That's, I think,
386. 00:23:24 a lot of what she talks about with moving from the fixed mindset to the growth mindset
387. 00:23:29 and how do you do that in a way so that you can think about difficulties from a stance of getting
388. 00:23:37 better, which I think is why you mentioned The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
389. 00:23:41 That book talks exactly about that. It's all about these difficulties. That's what you need to
390. 00:23:49 struggle through and what you need to overcome.
391. 00:23:52 Yeah. It's not focusing on why am I losing, but it's focusing on what can I gain and grow from
392. 00:24:02 in this experience. That's where John McRiner had a fixed mindset. It wasn't that his fixed mindset
393. 00:24:07 necessarily limited his "success." He was very successful, but every time that he lost, he wasn't
394. 00:24:14 able to benefit from the loss because it was always somebody else's fault. He never took
395. 00:24:19 responsibility for the outcome, and so he could never get any better. That in a nutshell is
396. 00:24:24 the fixed mindset. One of the things that I found astonishing about this is she talked a lot about
397. 00:24:30 how people have a fixed mindset, even if they are really good at something, they tend to shy away
398. 00:24:35 from exerting the effort because exerting effort in a particular area, especially if you think
399. 00:24:40 you're good at it, is risky because if you don't get the outcome that you want, which is what happened
400. 00:24:45 with John McEnroe, it creates doubt about your abilities. His response to dealing with the doubt
401. 00:24:51 about his abilities was to just fly off the handle and yell at everybody and everything that contributed
402. 00:24:57 in any way, shape, or form to the result. Even a lot of times, not, but he just was completely
403. 00:25:03 emotional. He admits in this book, not a lot of fun to be around. When you put forth the effort,
404. 00:25:11 though, and you say, "This is the best I can do, maybe I don't measure up right now," what that does
405. 00:25:15 is it removes all of the excuses. I know a lot of people who will come up to me and say, "Hey,
406. 00:25:20 I've got a great idea for an app. I've got a great idea for a business. What do you think about this?"
407. 00:25:24 And I'm like, "Oh, yeah, it sounds pretty cool, but I know that they're never going to do anything
408. 00:25:28 with it," because the moment that they put forth any effort and they might fail, they've eliminated
409. 00:25:33 the excuse, "Well, I could do that someday." As long as they don't take action on it,
410. 00:25:38 that's in some ways comforting, because it's like, "Well, I could always choose to pursue this thing
411. 00:25:43 at some point, but once you do actually put forth a little bit of effort, you've either got a
412. 00:25:48 sink or swim. There's no middle ground there." And then you're not always going to swim. Sometimes
413. 00:25:54 you are going to sink, and the growth mindset allows you to look at the situation and say, "Oh,
414. 00:25:57 I could do this a little bit better or that a little bit better. I could change this approach."
415. 00:26:01 That's where you start to really get the results that you're looking for. As it applies to athletics,
416. 00:26:08 that's why you can't just put in effort. You have to put in the right effort. You have to practice
417. 00:26:12 the right way. And one of the things that she talks about is that the love of practice is a
418. 00:26:18 growth mindset. And if you practice the right way and you're looking for those things that you can
419. 00:26:23 improve instead of just looking to pad your ego and say, "Oh, yep, look, you were right. You're really
420. 00:26:29 good." Then you're going to develop your skills to the point where you are able to elevate them when
421. 00:26:35 you need to be. And that's her definition of a champion, is someone who can raise their level
422. 00:26:39 of play when they need to. So let's step into the different part of bookworm today.
423. 00:26:45 I've got a couple questions here. One is, "When do we show the fixed mindset?" The other obvious
424. 00:26:51 one that follows that is, "When do we show the growth mindset?" And then the third piece here,
425. 00:26:56 areas where we've moved from the fixed mindset to the growth mindset, because you can change,
426. 00:27:02 not that that's an easy thing to do, but it is a thing that you can do. And I've got these three
427. 00:27:06 here because I think it would be interesting, Mike, to, I guess, spell out a very personal way
428. 00:27:12 of how these things play out and what do these things look like in the real world.
429. 00:27:16 Because you can go through the book and you can understand it. I think this is one that we would
430. 00:27:19 recommend that people read. And although a lot of people I have learned listen to bookworms so that
431. 00:27:26 they don't have to read the book, this was a case where don't do that. Go read this one.
432. 00:27:31 And this is one that I do really appreciate, but I think it would have more teeth if we show
433. 00:27:38 some of these from our own experiences. Is that fair? Yeah, absolutely. Well, one area in particular
434. 00:27:44 where I've shown a fixed mindset I noticed after reading this book and I'm trying to change that
435. 00:27:52 to a growth mindset is in how we parent. One of the things that really hit me was at the end of the
436. 00:27:59 book, she's talking to people about growth mindset versus fixed mindset. And they're trying to
437. 00:28:05 encapsulate her whole thing into like one little phrase and they say something like,
438. 00:28:10 praise the effort, not the outcome. And she's like, no, no, no, no, that's not right. What you
439. 00:28:16 need to do is you need to praise the effort in light of the outcome. Like you have to take the
440. 00:28:21 outcome into consideration when you are praising the effort. And so there's kind of two levels of
441. 00:28:27 revelation here for me. Number one, you definitely do not want to say, wow, you're really good at that
442. 00:28:34 because even though you're trying to be encouraging as a parent, that may be enough to say like,
443. 00:28:39 oh, I'm really good at that. My parents, I'm really good at that. I better not try that again,
444. 00:28:42 because I might let them down. They might see through me. They might see that it's all, it's all
445. 00:28:46 hoax. You know, I'm really not as great as they think I am. And then the other level is that you
446. 00:28:50 also just can't praise the effort. You have to take it to the next level and teach them that,
447. 00:28:57 you know, your effort that you put forth this time, maybe it wasn't good enough to get the
448. 00:29:01 result that you were looking for. So we're not going to necessarily praise that effort at that
449. 00:29:06 moment. If it's the best that you can do, that's fine. But then how do we grow from here? How do we
450. 00:29:12 change what we did so that we get the result that we're looking for? And I haven't really
451. 00:29:18 synthesized exactly how to determine, you know, because I think there's some danger here, whereas
452. 00:29:23 a parent, you could be like, well, here's the goal that we're shooting for. And the kids like,
453. 00:29:26 nah, I don't want to do that. So there's got to be some collaboration and agreement and unity in
454. 00:29:33 defining this. But I do think that when it comes to, you know, we talked about it with
455. 00:29:40 grit and Angela Duckworth, like having the hard things that our kids are doing, praising them for
456. 00:29:44 trying the hard things, but also bringing the angles like, how could you do that even better
457. 00:29:48 next time? I think that's a real important piece. Yeah, absolutely. This is one that I don't know
458. 00:29:52 that this is a thing that I'm bad at, but I know I'm not good at it either, because I want to praise
459. 00:29:59 them. Like, it's the thing that we've been told, you know, build up their self esteem and self
460. 00:30:04 confidence, blah, blah, blah. But at the same time, she shows how that does have a fair amount of
461. 00:30:10 negatives that come with it, for sure. And that's what you don't want. And I've caught myself,
462. 00:30:15 oh, you're really smart. Like, I've said that probably more than I should. But it's something that I know
463. 00:30:22 praising our kids is something you want to do. But at the same time, it's the effort that goes into
464. 00:30:28 it. One of the stories that I think it was her husband was telling their daughter, if I got that
465. 00:30:34 right, Elizabeth, I think was the name. Maybe I misunderstood the relationship. Anyway, there's a
466. 00:30:38 gal named Elizabeth, who I think it was in gymnastics. And she didn't win the meet that they were doing.
467. 00:30:45 And she was kind of upset about it. And the dad, as opposed to trying to build her up and say,
468. 00:30:51 you know, you did a really good job. And, you know, they scored you wrong, you should have won.
469. 00:30:56 Like, instead of doing anything like that, he simply said that, you know, the other girls
470. 00:31:00 worked harder than you. They were better than you out there. Like, if you want to do this for fun,
471. 00:31:04 that's fine. But if you want to win, you're going to have to work harder than that. Exactly.
472. 00:31:07 Which is a really hard thing as a parent to say, like, I don't want to tell my girls that.
473. 00:31:12 Like, that's not a thing I want to say. Yeah, it sounds so mean. It does. It's like, how cruel are
474. 00:31:18 you? But that's exactly what she needed in that instance, because she went on to then win
475. 00:31:25 competitions left and right after that, because she realized it's the hard work that gets me to
476. 00:31:30 that point. And if I want that thing, if I want that trophy, if I want to win this competition,
477. 00:31:35 I'm going to have to work my tail off to get it. And she got that and ran with it. But
478. 00:31:40 being willing to say those words as a parent is not a thing I think I'm good at at all.
479. 00:31:46 And I don't think that's something that you can say, just like, if you were to read this book and
480. 00:31:50 say, okay, I'm going to embrace growth mindset with my kids, and I'm going to do everything the way
481. 00:31:54 that Carol Duch did it in the book. Like, you can't just go from 0 to 60. You've got to work up to
482. 00:31:58 that. Right. So this is her kid, I believe. And there's obviously, we're obviously joining a story
483. 00:32:04 in progress here. And so I think that how those words get interpreted makes a huge difference.
484. 00:32:12 I don't think that you like I said, you start there. But I think that's awesome to have that sort
485. 00:32:17 of relationship with your kids like to develop it to that point. And it doesn't have to be your
486. 00:32:21 kids. It could be literally anybody that you work with or anybody that you interact with.
487. 00:32:25 To have the kind of platform where you can be honest like that and have them receive it in
488. 00:32:30 the right way. I think that's that's a relationship goal that everybody has.
489. 00:32:35 So an area that I feel like I've struggled with and have this fixed mindset that I'm not sure,
490. 00:32:42 like, I may have been aware of this prior. But I can't say that I fully understood it
491. 00:32:51 until I picked this up. But it's definitely in the world of my business.
492. 00:32:57 And so much of what I do with my clients is just trying to speed things up and trying to help them
493. 00:33:07 get their thing done and out the door quicker. And it didn't go well when I did that. Because
494. 00:33:15 I had this mentality that I'm not good at client relationships. And I'm not always the best at
495. 00:33:24 responding in a timely manner. And I'm not always the best at getting things to them when they need
496. 00:33:30 them. So because of that, I've always just felt like I'm just not good at client work. And that
497. 00:33:36 led me down quite a path of potentially trying to find another place to work. So to join a company
498. 00:33:42 of sorts. And I've kind of thought through that quite a bit. This book, when I picked it up,
499. 00:33:47 helped me see some of this in a different light such that this is an area I need to stop.
500. 00:33:55 Stop thinking I'm terrible at client work or stop thinking I'm bad at client relationships.
501. 00:34:01 It doesn't necessarily mean I'm stuck this way. But I just haven't thought about it in that sense
502. 00:34:06 that I can get better at this. This is a thing I can improve on. I don't know that it's an
503. 00:34:12 enjoyment factor in there. We've talked about client work a number of times on this show.
504. 00:34:18 And I know I've talked about it a lot in other venues. But this is a thing that I know
505. 00:34:23 I've fought. Client work is not for everyone, for sure. But at the same time, thinking that I'm
506. 00:34:31 terrible at it doesn't really help me improve on it. And it doesn't help my business as a whole
507. 00:34:37 improve either. So it's a thing I need to change, Mike. Yeah. Client work is like,
508. 00:34:44 clients are kind of like kids. It takes a lot of patience.
509. 00:34:47 Like one of the things that she mentions in the parenting section is that a normal
510. 00:34:52 child misbehaves every three minutes. Oh, wow. And I was like, whoa. Yeah. I mean,
511. 00:34:57 to think that you're going to have that many opportunities to respond incorrectly and to
512. 00:35:03 trying respond the right way every single time, like that's a lot of pressure.
513. 00:35:07 But yeah, that's the cool thing about this book though, is that you can apply it to a lot of
514. 00:35:11 those different areas. And I definitely thought of the same thing regarding business. And fortunately,
515. 00:35:18 I don't have to deal with clients on a regular basis because I'm not good at it. Maybe I should
516. 00:35:23 maybe I should develop my growth mindset in that particular area. But it's just one of those things
517. 00:35:28 that I do not like to do. There you go, Mike. You could you could freelance with me. Yeah,
518. 00:35:34 definitely challenging for sure. But I'm curious what your thoughts are in terms of
519. 00:35:41 embracing this growth mindset. Do you think that it's the kind of thing where every opportunity you
520. 00:35:48 get, you should be saying yourself over and over again, growth mindset growth mindset growth mindset.
521. 00:35:53 Or should you be picking like one of these areas that you want to develop this growth mindset and
522. 00:35:58 work on that and then move to another one? Yeah, that's a good question. I know that for me,
523. 00:36:02 when it comes to client work specifically, I can do the work in a specified time frame. That's not
524. 00:36:11 an issue. It's the communication side in particular that I sometimes struggle with it.
525. 00:36:17 And it's because I get a lot of email and I don't want to do more email. So I know the general rule
526. 00:36:24 of thumb, the more email you send, the more email you get. So sending more email is not a thing I
527. 00:36:31 feel inclined to do. I tend to want to operate in a way that tells me that to the client,
528. 00:36:37 if I'm not talking to you, I'm working on your thing. But that's completely opposite of the way
529. 00:36:42 that they think like everyone assumes, if I'm not talking to you, I'm not doing anything.
530. 00:36:46 And that's a fair assessment from their standpoint. But when it comes to me and how I do that,
531. 00:36:53 I need to change that. That's a thing that I need to be better about communicating. I've been trying
532. 00:36:58 to, since I started this book, I've been trying to find ways to make sure that I'm like, sending
533. 00:37:02 end of day updates every single day on all the projects that I worked on, which is painful.
534. 00:37:08 It takes 30 minutes or better out of my day to do that. But at the same time, it does help a lot.
535. 00:37:15 And in the long run means I can charge more. We'll leave that where it lies. But at the same time,
536. 00:37:20 this is a thing that I know I can improve on. I've always struggled with it. I've always just
537. 00:37:25 thought of it as a thing that I'm, that's just the way I am. But it doesn't have to be.
538. 00:37:30 Right. Exactly. Now you mentioned communication, and that got me thinking because a lot of the
539. 00:37:35 stuff that she outlines in the book, parenting business school relationships specifically,
540. 00:37:42 that's all interpersonal communication. I get these terms mixed up. But in
541. 00:37:48 truck personal, I believe is the one where you're communicating with yourself. Yes.
542. 00:37:52 And as I'm reflecting on the areas that I have a growth mindset and the areas that I've
543. 00:37:58 finding myself leaning even occasionally towards a fixed mindset, I realize that when it comes to
544. 00:38:04 the intra personal stuff where I just have to take care of my own stuff, I do pretty well in that
545. 00:38:11 regard. That's where Bookworm was born out of. And we've talked about that a lot, so we don't
546. 00:38:15 revisit it. But it was just a recognition of the fact that I want to read more. And so who can I
547. 00:38:20 get to read more with me and hold me accountable? Hey, Joe, hi Mike. Even that like it's not dependent
548. 00:38:26 on you saying yes, for my focus to be on how do I develop myself personally. But all the other
549. 00:38:32 stuff, I feel like there's definitely areas for me to grow. The other area here that really kind of
550. 00:38:40 stood out to me was this whole idea of relationships. And she kind of talks about it specifically between
551. 00:38:47 like yourself and a significant other. So that was my lens as I approached this. But the thing that
552. 00:38:54 she said here that I really want to point out is that they worked happily ever after comes before
553. 00:39:01 they lived happily ever after. And when I think back to all the times where my wife and I have
554. 00:39:06 struggled for any sort of length of time, it's because we have not been diligent about making
555. 00:39:14 sure that we communicate. And she says again, in that section, mind reading instead of communicating
556. 00:39:21 inevitably backfires. Yes. So that was like one area where it was crystal clear to me. Like there
557. 00:39:28 are definitely times when I'm focusing on a serifix mindset. When you view your relationship
558. 00:39:33 as having the potential for growth, that is a pretty radical paradigm, especially with the way that
559. 00:39:43 the current culture is, where I kind of feel like, and I know this is a generalization, but I kind of
560. 00:39:49 feel like we're at this point where people are kind of just like, well, what's the what's the point
561. 00:39:54 with with marriage? Because at some point, like it's not it's just not going to work anymore. And I
562. 00:39:59 think that that is a fixed mindset approach to the whole idea of marriage, that people, you know,
563. 00:40:06 for right right or wrong, you can you can get on board with the idea, I think if you have a growth
564. 00:40:12 mindset of I'm going to marry this person and be with them the rest of my life. I think that's a
565. 00:40:16 very radical idea in today's culture. But if you have a growth mindset, I don't see why it should be.
566. 00:40:22 Because yeah, you're you're going to change. Hopefully you're both changing for the better. If you have
567. 00:40:28 any sort of intentionality and how you're changing, it will be for the better. She talks about how
568. 00:40:32 you can embrace fixed versus growth mindset in three different areas. You can you can look at your
569. 00:40:37 quality, your partner's quality, and the relationships quality. And so if you really want to have an
570. 00:40:42 awesome relationship with your significant other focus on how are you getting better? How are you
571. 00:40:47 helping your significant other get better? And then how is the relationship getting better?
572. 00:40:52 And as long as you pay attention to that stuff, I really don't see how this is that hard.
573. 00:40:57 Like it's one of those things where in terms of understanding the mechanics, it seems pretty
574. 00:41:02 straightforward to me. Now, obviously there's a lot it's a lot easier to say it than to do it. I
575. 00:41:08 think that that's where there's the potential for failure. But I just look at this and I'm like,
576. 00:41:13 as long as I'm careful, like we shouldn't have to go through that stuff. And now I know that
577. 00:41:19 there's going to be people who are even listening to this who like they've been through that stuff.
578. 00:41:23 And sometimes it's not it's not your fault. There's nothing you can do about it. But I guess from
579. 00:41:28 where I am right now, I am completely okay with assuming the responsibility for whether this
580. 00:41:35 relationship works out myself. Because I know from the 10 years plus that my wife and I have
581. 00:41:42 invested that if she's got an issue a lot of times, it's because I'm not doing what I'm supposed to
582. 00:41:49 be doing. And if I look at that and fix it, then the relationship benefits. Does that make sense?
583. 00:41:54 Yes. Because you both have the mindset of working at it and sticking with it.
584. 00:41:58 Yeah. And I guess you don't even have to have the mindset of when I say I do it's forever.
585. 00:42:05 But just having that mindset of the relationship that you have, it's not either.
586. 00:42:09 Okay. So this is the kind of like in direct contrast to the book that we read by Amanda Palmer.
587. 00:42:16 Like she talks about her different relationships. And how you love that book. I loved it. Yeah.
588. 00:42:20 You're right. Listeners don't buy that. Go listen to that episode. Yeah. Yeah. But in that book,
589. 00:42:27 she talks about a lot of her relationships. And she even talks about how they'll start off great
590. 00:42:32 and then they'll turn sour and then like she leaves and she finds somebody else. And that's the
591. 00:42:37 reason why she had so much trouble accepting the relationship that she had with Neil, I think it
592. 00:42:42 was at the end. And I think that that is a fixed mindset. I think that with every single relationship,
593. 00:42:51 you could look at it not as like either this fits or it doesn't. But either I put in the
594. 00:42:55 attention and the effort to make this thing grow or I didn't. I think the relationships piece was
595. 00:43:00 one I wasn't expecting in this book. It's right on the front. I should know this even, you know,
596. 00:43:04 it's big words there, but I still didn't really expect it for some reason. But at the same point,
597. 00:43:10 I get it. I mean, my wife and I spend a lot of time talking through struggles, things were
598. 00:43:15 fighting through personally, you know, some of our own mental battles that we're fighting right
599. 00:43:21 now. We talk about those things and it's not a venting sort of conversation. It's not a
600. 00:43:28 let me just air my dirty laundry right now. It's not that at all. It's a lot more. Here's the thing
601. 00:43:35 I'm working through. Let me just put this out there. If you have any ideas, help me out. Like,
602. 00:43:42 we do that sort of thing. And those are always very, they're difficult conversation to have.
603. 00:43:47 But at the same time, they're extremely valuable. But they're also not something you're going to do
604. 00:43:53 regularly, like at least for us, just because there's a lot of pieces to that that can make it.
605. 00:44:00 There's a lot of potential for scarring with that, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
606. 00:44:05 And at the same time, these are things that I know that we value these times
607. 00:44:11 because we know we come out better. If there's a thing that my wife is doing and it's just driving
608. 00:44:16 me up the wall, I am better off mentioning it to her, which is, you know, not fun.
609. 00:44:23 Like, I am better off starting that conversation so that we can work through it rather than just
610. 00:44:29 sitting on it. You know, it's the classic don't go to bed angry thing. If there's a thing that we
611. 00:44:34 need to work through, I need to get it out there. And she does the same. And if we have this
612. 00:44:38 understanding that we're both going to do this, the relationship can't help but get stronger and
613. 00:44:43 better in the long run. Exactly. And to bring it back to like the very beginning of the book,
614. 00:44:48 she talks about the kids that were doing those puzzles. And you could tell which ones had the
615. 00:44:52 fixed mindset because they're like, this is impossible. I don't want to do this anymore. I'm
616. 00:44:55 going to go back to the one that I know how to do. And the ones that the growth mindset,
617. 00:44:59 they're like, hey, mom, dad, go buy me this puzzle because it was really hard. I want to get
618. 00:45:03 better at it. Like a relationship is a puzzle. It's not impossible. You just have to put in the
619. 00:45:09 effort to figure out how all the pieces work. And I firmly believe that with any relationship
620. 00:45:13 that you have, some are going to be easier than others. And there's a lot of different factors
621. 00:45:17 that contribute to that. But I think that to just say, you know, this isn't this is impossible. We're
622. 00:45:21 incompatible. Like, that's the fixed mindset, easy button approach to just blowing the whole
623. 00:45:27 thing up. And I think that after reading this, it really it impacted me in a way I didn't expect
624. 00:45:33 it to, because I've got a good relationship with my wife. I like where we are. But looking,
625. 00:45:38 reading through this, the section, I realized that, you know, as great as things are, they could be
626. 00:45:43 even better if I'm a little bit more intentional about embracing the growth mindset in this particular
627. 00:45:48 area. All right, let's get off the negative side of this. Go over to the positive side.
628. 00:45:53 When do we show the growth mindset? And I think for me, in this case, I have always had the mindset
629. 00:46:02 that I can get better at doing coding and development work. This is where the actual rubber hits the
630. 00:46:09 road for my business, because you know, writing code is what keeps it going. But ever since I got
631. 00:46:14 into it, I've continually had the mindset that I can get better at it. At the same time, there's
632. 00:46:20 a few areas where I've had the fixed mindset that changed over, but I'll get to that a little bit
633. 00:46:24 later. But I have always had this mentality that if I don't know how to do a thing, if I don't know
634. 00:46:31 how to connect Ember to Rails, sorry, that went over a lot of people's heads. I don't know how to
635. 00:46:36 connect Ember to Rails. I can figure that out. I can nail down how that works. I don't know how to
636. 00:46:41 do it now. That doesn't mean I'm a bad developer. It just means that I am still growing in that
637. 00:46:48 area and I want to continue to get better at it. This is an idea that I try to share with as many
638. 00:46:54 students as I can who are going into computer programming or computer science of any form.
639. 00:47:01 I tell them all the time, if you're going to school for this, start now. Get in, get your hands dirty
640. 00:47:08 with building something online or if it's an app. It doesn't matter what it is. If you're going
641. 00:47:14 into an area that's got code involved, get started right away building a thing. I don't care if you're
642. 00:47:19 in school or not for it. If you want to do it, get your hands on it and start getting
643. 00:47:23 something built and figure it out. This is not hard, but you have to know that you can get better
644. 00:47:31 at this and you can always grow at it. If you don't, you're just going to say, "I'm a bad coder
645. 00:47:35 and walk away. You'll never touch it again." If you want to do it, do it. Keep going.
646. 00:47:41 This is a thing that I've always felt. If you have an area that you feel like you've always had
647. 00:47:47 the growth mindset, it's hard to imagine not having it in that area. Take the programming thing.
648. 00:47:53 I've always felt like I can get better at this. When someone says, "Oh, I'm just not a good developer."
649. 00:47:57 What do you mean you're not a good developer? You haven't tried. You haven't done anything.
650. 00:48:00 You're not building anything right now. Why aren't you?
651. 00:48:02 All right. Soapbox, I'm going to step off now. There's my growth mindset.
652. 00:48:06 Well, I mentioned already the trends that I saw in myself where the areas where I need to
653. 00:48:12 consistently develop the growth mindset are the areas where I'm working with other people.
654. 00:48:17 Though areas that I am focusing on myself, I do a pretty good job. I almost do it without
655. 00:48:25 even trying. That could be both good or bad because, let me give you an example. My 12-week
656. 00:48:29 year tends to get blown up every single time because in the middle of it, I'll find something
657. 00:48:34 where I'm like, "Yes, that's the thing. That's going to push me outside my comfort zone and I'm
658. 00:48:39 going to chase that thing." For me, the last couple months, that has been this humorous speech
659. 00:48:43 contest. That was never on my 12-week year. It ended up being something that I spent a lot of time
660. 00:48:50 investing in though because I knew that that was stretching me and it was forcing me to develop a
661. 00:48:55 growth mindset. The whole reason why I joined Toastmasters was that I knew it was going to make me
662. 00:49:00 uncomfortable but I knew it was going to make me better and it was going to develop confidence,
663. 00:49:03 which it definitely has done. Another recent example is I've always hated running, but the
664. 00:49:09 summer I'm just like, "I'm going to train for a half marathon." No big deal. If anybody knew me,
665. 00:49:14 they'd be like, "What? What caused Mike to do that?" Part of it was a little bit of peer pressure.
666. 00:49:20 The majority of it was that for me, this is the ultimate test of mind over matter because I hate
667. 00:49:28 just running. I've always played sports. I've played basketball, played tennis, played soccer.
668. 00:49:34 I enjoy competing, but just exercise for this exercise, which is what a lot of running is
669. 00:49:40 unless you're doing a race. That's just extremely, extremely boring for me. It's going to get even
670. 00:49:45 tougher now because as we're recording this, it's 28 degrees outside and it started snowing.
671. 00:49:51 Welcome to the north. I'm going to start running indoors on the treadmill, which is the epitome of
672. 00:49:59 boring in my opinion. These are all things that all of a sudden it became clear to me that this
673. 00:50:06 is the next challenge. I have no trouble finding areas to challenge myself personally and doing
674. 00:50:15 things that I didn't think that I could do. Also, I think that there's definitely areas where I don't
675. 00:50:21 want to chase that. You mentioned the clients thing, and even when I was saying that, I'm like,
676. 00:50:26 well, maybe that's one area where I really need to grow. I'm just like, nah, I don't want to.
677. 00:50:30 I don't want to focus my attention in that specific area right now. Why would I do that?
678. 00:50:36 Exactly. That's why I asked the question. Do you think that this is the kind of thing where you're
679. 00:50:42 either all growth mindset all the time or do you pick individual areas that you need to work on?
680. 00:50:49 Because what I've been doing, I noticed if I'm doing my own personal retrospective,
681. 00:50:55 is that I've got these different areas of my life. It's similar to the Wheel of Life exercise,
682. 00:50:59 if you're familiar with that, where you rate yourself in the different areas. Then you pick the one
683. 00:51:03 where maybe it's not quite where you want it to be. You find a challenge in that particular area.
684. 00:51:08 That's what I've been doing. In terms of myself personally, there's a lot of things that I do
685. 00:51:17 now that I never pictured myself doing. I like to think that there really isn't anything that is
686. 00:51:24 off limits per se that if I were to see something and be like, oh yeah, that's the next challenge.
687. 00:51:28 I wouldn't have the resistance like, oh no, I definitely am not wanting to do that. I'm not
688. 00:51:33 going to do that. I feel like at least recently I've done a fairly decent job of just being like,
689. 00:51:39 well, let's try it. Let's see what happens. So far, the results have been pretty positive.
690. 00:51:44 So you mentioned the 12-week year blowing up about six weeks in. Have you caught on to
691. 00:51:52 Jocelyn K. Glai? Hurry slowly. Yeah, I love that podcast.
692. 00:51:57 So very first true episode, she had a trailer that came out at the beginning, but Jason Freed
693. 00:52:03 was on there and he was talking about base camp and how at base camp, they do six-week cycles.
694. 00:52:11 And I have seriously considered moving myself over to six-week cycles instead of 12 because at 12,
695. 00:52:17 here's a classic example. As we record this, I'm going to be recording an episode of the
696. 00:52:23 Guild podcast tomorrow. And there's a good chance that depending on how things go tonight,
697. 00:52:29 I'm going to drop two goals and pick one up. So I'm like, okay, well, I'm six weeks in on it right
698. 00:52:36 now. That's about right. So if I make these things a little bit smaller in size and run six-week
699. 00:52:44 cycles instead of 12, it might make more sense to me to do that. I've seriously considered doing
700. 00:52:49 that. I haven't decided if I'm going to do it or not because I haven't thought it through in
701. 00:52:53 its entirety, but it sounded like a thing you might be interested in. Yeah, that's a cool idea.
702. 00:52:57 The thing you lose with that, obviously, is the buffer week. I don't know how you really
703. 00:53:01 account for that. You can take three or four days and do it. But I do think that there's a lot of
704. 00:53:08 value in that approach. And I think that it's important to be willing to modify your goals.
705. 00:53:16 Like if you were to be chasing something and it's just not working, to be willing to kind of shift
706. 00:53:21 or not even not even necessarily completely change direction, although maybe sometimes
707. 00:53:27 you do want to do that. But I think that a lot of times for me anyways, it's just like, well,
708. 00:53:32 this was the idea behind this. The idea is still good, but the execution isn't quite there. So we
709. 00:53:37 need to try a little bit different tactic in order to achieve the result. Fair enough. All right.
710. 00:53:41 So what are some areas where you've moved from fixed mindset to growth mindset? Well, I'd like to
711. 00:53:47 believe that I've made that shift in the parenting mindset. That area hit me really hard when I read
712. 00:53:54 it. Immediately after I talked to my wife about it, and I was like, we can't say this anymore
713. 00:54:00 with this specific kid, because what it's doing is this. She's like, what are you even talking about?
714. 00:54:05 That doesn't make any sense. You're off your rocker. What are you reading?
715. 00:54:08 No, just read this book. Read the first. Read pages one through 70 and then read this section
716. 00:54:14 right here. She's like, okay, okay. And then the other day, we were sitting on the couch at night
717. 00:54:19 and she's like, yeah, I'm beginning to see what you what you mean. And so with parenting specifically,
718. 00:54:25 it can't just be one person's approach. It's got to be a team effort. And so my wife is a critical
719. 00:54:34 piece to the acceptance criteria in that particular area. But I do feel that we have made a shift
720. 00:54:40 in the area of parenting where it's not focusing on who they are or there's the skills that they
721. 00:54:49 they currently have. So not saying, wow, you did a, you know, that was a really great, great job.
722. 00:54:54 You're really good at that specific thing, because we have said that in the past. And also not saying
723. 00:54:59 like, wow, you did a, you know, you put in a good effort. There's still some some figuring of this
724. 00:55:05 out, but we're both consciously aware of how we praise our kids now. And I think that that's
725. 00:55:12 that's good, because good parents, according to the book, you know, they set high standards when they
726. 00:55:17 show their kids how to reach them. That's that's what I want to do. I want to challenge and nurture.
727. 00:55:21 And I think that we're making progress in that direction. Good deal. Yeah, I know one of them,
728. 00:55:26 all of mine are business minded, for some reason. But it might be because I've been
729. 00:55:31 thinking about it a lot. And this book really challenged me from the business side of it.
730. 00:55:36 But one area that I didn't realize I hadn't fixed until, I mean, I probably didn't notice it
731. 00:55:44 until I read this book. But at the same time, I had a bit of a shift in mentality here about
732. 00:55:50 probably four weeks ago, close to a month ago, of, you know, whenever I build websites, when it comes
733. 00:55:57 to my own, I've never considered building something where I manage the hosting. And I put these things
734. 00:56:04 up for you. And I take care of making sure that the software runs for you. I've never gone that
735. 00:56:09 route simply because I don't always like, I don't know how to set up a server hosting system at that
736. 00:56:18 level. Like to get something that scales at that size of a company, you know, it take WordPress,
737. 00:56:24 for example, to sell the hosting for that is not a simple task. And being able to manage it is not
738. 00:56:30 simple. And any form of, you know, take MailChimp, convert kit, any of these software systems that
739. 00:56:36 you subscribe to to do it, the server system behind those are quite complicated. I've never jumped
740. 00:56:42 into any form of big scale, large scale app or web software of that size, because I don't know
741. 00:56:51 what I'm doing at that scale. But about four weeks ago, I finally just admitted to myself, you know
742. 00:56:57 what, I'm never going to learn this if I don't try it. So I need to just start working on doing
743. 00:57:03 something at that scale. Didn't know what that was going to be. I've since had an idea that I'm
744. 00:57:10 going to be working on. I shouldn't say I had an idea. I had an idea shared with me. So this is a
745. 00:57:15 thing that I want to pursue. But it's going to require a lot of large scale systems that I've
746. 00:57:25 never touched before. But I'm willing to move myself from that mentality of, I don't know what I'm
747. 00:57:32 doing. I'm not good at that. Take my own advice and get out there and try it and see how it goes.
748. 00:57:38 Because the other thing too is the nice thing with software and stuff like this,
749. 00:57:42 you can always migrate. All this fails, you write your own migration tools and you move on.
750. 00:57:47 Like you can always move it all over. It might be painful for a little bit, but you'll get it
751. 00:57:50 figured out. Like it's okay to do that. So I am glad that I've made that shift. I think it's
752. 00:57:57 got a lot of potential in what I'm pursuing in the future. Even if this current idea isn't the
753. 00:58:02 right one, I think it has enough learning that can come with it that'll eventually get to a bigger
754. 00:58:08 idea that I think will hit. But that's what I know. I think this is an area where it's been a very
755. 00:58:12 good thing for me to move from the, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm not good at this to,
756. 00:58:17 I think I can pull this off. I just need to spend some time with it and learn it and be willing
757. 00:58:22 to work through the setbacks. Makes sense. So she actually has in this book, by the way,
758. 00:58:27 the four points for converting from fixed to growth mindsets. I like these. Yeah, I thought
759. 00:58:33 you did, but I was also a little bit confused by your comment at the beginning about not being
760. 00:58:38 actionable. I kind of get that based on what these are. So let's run through these and then
761. 00:58:42 I want to get your input on this. So number one is to embrace your fixed mindset, recognize
762. 00:58:48 that you do struggle against this thing. Number two, become aware of your fixed mindset triggers.
763. 00:58:54 So we've all got these things that are going to set us off and force us back into that fixed mindset.
764. 00:58:58 Number three is give your fixed mindset persona a name. So it's kind of coming outside of the
765. 00:59:05 fixed mindset and saying that guy over there, he has trouble with the fixed mindset, but I don't,
766. 00:59:10 which is a little bit weird when you think of it that way. But kind of fun, but odd. Yeah,
767. 00:59:16 yeah. And then number four is educate your persona and take it with you and take it on the journey.
768. 00:59:21 Now, I can see you why you might say, well, how do I know if this is done? But there was one other
769. 00:59:28 thing that really impacted me in this book. And this kind of summarizes, I would say 80% of my
770. 00:59:36 action items that I've ever had. All right. And she says success equals full preparation and full
771. 00:59:45 effort. And so at that point, you know, especially as you're applying it to these four specific
772. 00:59:51 things and you don't have a very clear quote unquote definition of done, like this is now done.
773. 00:59:56 I have officially converted from fixed to growth. You know, that it's not so cut and dry as that.
774. 01:00:01 I think the real key here and the incentive behind a lot of the action items that I have
775. 01:00:10 is recognizing that this thing is a problem. And then doing as much as I can to fix it,
776. 01:00:17 putting in as much effort as I can. And at that point, being okay with any outcome. And so like,
777. 01:00:25 I definitely don't want to brag. But I've kind of seen this play out just in the toastmasters stuff
778. 01:00:34 and then also the running stuff recently. So I'm training for this half marathon,
779. 01:00:39 half marathon is not till May. I'm like, I got to do something in the meantime, I entered a 10k.
780. 01:00:43 All right. When I ran the 10k, no big deal, just a 10k. So yeah, 10k is 6.2 miles for
781. 01:00:51 somebody who never ran more than three and a half before this summer. Like, that was a long
782. 01:00:56 ways for me. I'd been training for a while though, and I crushed it. I took second in my age group,
783. 01:01:01 but no, I'm not going to tell you what age group that is. But I did, I did really well. My goal was
784. 01:01:06 not to do really well. My goal was to challenge myself. But turns out, I've done a pretty good job
785. 01:01:14 of that. Same thing with the humor speech contest. You know, I really had no expectations of this
786. 01:01:18 is how far I want to get. I just want to get up on stage and remember the words I was going to say.
787. 01:01:23 And did that and made it all the way to district before I lost to a professional comedian.
788. 01:01:31 So like, I think that this process, I guess my point in saying this though, and the reason why
789. 01:01:37 like I said, I'm not trying to break is that I don't think it's me that is achieving these results.
790. 01:01:43 I think it's this process. I think if you know what you need to do and you put for and you actually
791. 01:01:50 prepare, you practice, you put in the effort, and then when it comes time to perform, you give it
792. 01:01:56 everything that you've got, you kind of don't have to worry about the results. I think we're a lot
793. 01:02:00 of people miss this is they put forth the full effort, but they don't have the full preparation.
794. 01:02:07 They're kind of caught off guard. Now I'm going to run this half marathon and they don't train and
795. 01:02:10 then race day comes and they're dying halfway through. It's like, well, didn't you know how long the
796. 01:02:16 race was? It's 13.1 miles. Like, you've never run more than three. Like, how did you think you were
797. 01:02:23 going to finish this? Oh, my adrenaline was going to carry me or whatever. Like, when you look back,
798. 01:02:28 it becomes very obvious where the lapses and judgment are. But I think that the growth mindset can
799. 01:02:34 kind of see those things, call out those things, and you can prepare ahead of time. And when you do
800. 01:02:39 that, you can just let it rip and you'll get a lot further than maybe you think. You want to go to
801. 01:02:45 action items? Sure. Okay. So I have, well, one of them here is try to move my fixed mindsets to growth,
802. 01:02:52 which I wrote this part way through the book. I didn't actually get it translated to this,
803. 01:02:58 but I wrote this down about halfway through the book before I realized she actually had a method
804. 01:03:02 here. So what I need to do is change that to name my fixed mindset dude and start to make fun of
805. 01:03:11 him. Like, that's where I feel like I need to be on this. So I haven't named him yet, but I'm
806. 01:03:19 going to try to give him a name for the next show and maybe we'll talk about him randomly.
807. 01:03:23 What was that? There was a guy who was in the news during one of the presidential campaigns.
808. 01:03:29 It was like Joe the Plumber. That should be your fixed mindset persona. Joe the Plumber.
809. 01:03:33 But my name is Joe. It's funny. I was talking to one of my clients and he mentioned that he
810. 01:03:41 used to freelance. So he totally understands where I'm coming from on methods and how we do
811. 01:03:46 things and how we work together. He gets all that. And he said that he always struggled with
812. 01:03:50 sending invoices and he hated the process of asking people to pay their invoices. So what he did was he
813. 01:03:58 set up another email account for some random guy named, I think he said Daniel or something like that.
814. 01:04:03 And that was finance. Like that was the finance department. So he would have the conversations with
815. 01:04:08 his client and then refer to Daniel to actually send the invoice and do all the financial follow-up.
816. 01:04:15 But he didn't have to worry about it because his clients thought it was somebody completely
817. 01:04:18 different. So but he could throw Daniel under the bus all he wanted because he didn't exist.
818. 01:04:23 That's hilarious. That's a great idea. I know I've never done this but I totally
819. 01:04:29 understand why someone would. So that was one. I want to try to name this person,
820. 01:04:34 non-person, pseudo-person, this thing. And the second one I've got here is I want to start sending
821. 01:04:41 a note or an email of sorts to every author that I read. And that sounds like a really weird
822. 01:04:47 action item given this book. But it came about because she mentions letters that were sent to her
823. 01:04:53 constantly in this book, which I found I thought it was really interesting because she gets feedback
824. 01:04:58 on this stuff from her lectures and and such as a professor. So I just wanted to send a note to
825. 01:05:05 people. I haven't done it on this one yet but I'm going to send her a note probably later today or
826. 01:05:09 tomorrow and just say thanks for the book. But that's the thing I want to start doing because we read
827. 01:05:14 these books all the time and authors are people too. You know that for sure. But I know from experience
828. 01:05:21 that getting positive feedback on a thing you created is extremely uplifting and not always common.
829. 01:05:29 So going through this I realized I really enjoy when I get these emails. Why don't I send them?
830. 01:05:36 I mean I want to change that. So I'm going to send her a note on this one.
831. 01:05:39 Nice. I think that's a great idea.
832. 01:05:41 That's what I got. All right. So my action items like you right out my fixed mindset persona and in
833. 01:05:47 the book she's got a bunch of different examples of people who have done this. There's like a whole
834. 01:05:50 paragraph describing the person. So I'm going to do that by next time. I'm also hopefully by next time
835. 01:05:57 going to have a good answer for one of the questions that was brought to my attention when I was reading
836. 01:06:04 the relationship section. That is how am I helping my wife develop personally. That kind of gets into
837. 01:06:10 like the three different areas. Your quality, your partner's quality, relationships quality.
838. 01:06:15 Like I said I've done a pretty good job of my quality. I think I've done an okay job at the
839. 01:06:20 relationships quality. One of the things that we do is we have a date night every week and once a
840. 01:06:26 month we try to get away for an overnight. But one area where I could definitely improve is
841. 01:06:32 focusing on how can I help Rachel develop herself. Like not looking to get anything from this.
842. 01:06:37 Just how do I help her become the person that she wants to be. And she's going to listen to this
843. 01:06:41 and she's going to hold me accountable to it. So we'll see how this goes. Yeah. The other one
844. 01:06:47 and this is more of a reminder or a framing of the the tactic. Like I said the two areas
845. 01:06:57 specifically where I've kind of seen growth in this area are toastmasters and the running
846. 01:07:01 where these are not things that I pictured I would be doing at all. So it if I would have said
847. 01:07:06 can I do this I probably would have honestly said at the beginning of either of those no.
848. 01:07:11 But there are other areas that I want to take that same approach and so I want to shift it from
849. 01:07:17 can I do this to how can I do this. And that gets into the definition of success. The full
850. 01:07:22 preparation plus full effort. If I look at something and say how can I do this and I see all the
851. 01:07:27 effort that's required to get the result that I want and just decide you know I don't have
852. 01:07:30 the time or the effort to put forth in this particular area for right now that's completely fine.
853. 01:07:36 But just eliminate the word no from my vocabulary in essence in terms of what am I capable of.
854. 01:07:42 That's a tall task. A good one too. It is and this is not the kind of thing where
855. 01:07:46 like I said this is not something that I'm going to hit 100% every time. But if I'm aware of it and
856. 01:07:53 I'm making an effort to to change this then I'm okay with the results because it's going to mean
857. 01:07:58 that I'm going to think that way less than I would have otherwise. So success in this particular
858. 01:08:03 area is number one becoming aware of this and then doing what I can putting forth the effort
859. 01:08:08 to correct it. But whatever the results are basically I'm okay with this.
860. 01:08:13 Unless you know I wake up tomorrow and I'm just completely negative for the next three months and
861. 01:08:19 I constantly find myself saying can I do this. You know at that point I am going to look at the
862. 01:08:23 the actual results that I'm getting but I don't anticipate that happening. Fair enough. For
863. 01:08:30 author's style my thoughts are that Carol is very good at writing. Enough so that both of us
864. 01:08:36 went through this very quickly and really enjoyed a lot of her story. I'll let you speak for yourself
865. 01:08:42 though. But I did really like this. It's one that there's a lot in here and in seeing this very
866. 01:08:50 simple concept of can you grow or not like at your mentality on it. Seeing that very simple
867. 01:08:56 concept being explained in story after story in arena after arena is extremely helpful because
868. 01:09:04 you just don't see how many aspects of this affects and you can have the fixed mindset in one area
869. 01:09:10 and not in another. Like it's just interesting how all that works but you don't fully
870. 01:09:14 see that until you get to go through all these different areas. All that to say Mike I'm actually
871. 01:09:20 going to give this a five star. Nice. Rating. Because this is one that I feel everyone should
872. 01:09:26 read because I think this can impact a lot of how you do things in life especially as a parent
873. 01:09:33 but also like in my examples anyway as a business owner it makes a huge deal to me and how I
874. 01:09:41 how I interact with things. I think there's a lot here that people could learn from
875. 01:09:45 and cannot recommend this one highly enough. It's a good one. Awesome. The coveted five stars
876. 01:09:52 from Joe B. I know. I know. That's a tough one. I feel like you've had less five stars than me
877. 01:09:58 but I have to go back in the archives to look at that. I think so. I'm pretty picky with them. You
878. 01:10:02 are. I am. Five stars from Joe is no joke. So for me office now I found this book really refreshing
879. 01:10:09 because I think that most books in this genre tend to be here's 20 pages explaining the main idea.
880. 01:10:17 Now let me re-explain the main idea in the same way using slightly different words for the next 200
881. 01:10:22 pages and she didn't do that at all. She had a bunch of different stories a bunch of different
882. 01:10:28 contexts and it was applied differently in each one of those contexts. So I never got bored reading
883. 01:10:34 this. I felt like everything that she was talking about like it came together really well and it
884. 01:10:42 was very engaging and there was definitely stuff that you could apply from every every single area
885. 01:10:47 of this book. The one area I think this book falls a little bit flat in is the end. The book was so
886. 01:10:54 good up until the end and then she talks about the four steps to going from fixed to growth and
887. 01:11:00 I felt like there wasn't much of a crescendo there and you get done and you're kind of like
888. 01:11:05 well that's kind of impossible. So I don't know I don't even know exactly what I would change
889. 01:11:14 there. Maybe explaining that isn't so simple as just do these things and there is a lot of
890. 01:11:23 variation in here and it's going to be a struggle which she does do that but then
891. 01:11:27 maybe calling out some specific things to look out for. You know like when it comes to
892. 01:11:32 she's talking about educate your persona and take it on the journey with you maybe having like
893. 01:11:39 some specific statements that you can use whenever you recognize your fixed mindset
894. 01:11:45 showing up in this particular area. Does that make sense? It does. I like those phrases though.
895. 01:11:51 So like if you're going through like you were talking about I need I notice I need to work on my
896. 01:11:57 growth mindset in the area of business you've got a bunch of different affirmation statements
897. 01:12:01 specifically related to the area of business that you can use to educate your persona with
898. 01:12:07 something like that and that's just you know an idea off the top of my head but I feel like there
899. 01:12:11 was something a little bit more that she could have done to really make this concrete and feel like
900. 01:12:18 yeah now I know exactly what to do. I felt a little bit like I don't know exactly what to do.
901. 01:12:23 Even though I totally get the idea of a growth mindset this is something we literally teach
902. 01:12:28 growth versus fixed mindset at Asian efficiency all day every day. So like this is right in my
903. 01:12:33 wheelhouse but even for someone like me I felt like I really am not 100 positive what to do here
904. 01:12:40 you know fortunately we've got a podcast where we can talk through all this stuff and synthesize
905. 01:12:44 it but not everybody's going to do that. Whoo hoo start a podcast. Yes the world needs more
906. 01:12:49 podcasts completely serious. Yes if you want help starting a podcast then talk to me because I like
907. 01:12:56 helping people in that particular. I'm not going to do the work for you but I can point in the
908. 01:12:59 right direction. I was going to say are you? No no no but I will help you. I wrote an article on
909. 01:13:07 like how we launched a productivity show and I get occasionally people replying to that and like
910. 01:13:11 wow this is some great information. It's basically everything that I learned through the process
911. 01:13:16 and I feel like it's not as difficult as some people may think and just a little bit of guidance
912. 01:13:21 in a specific direction like that could really make a difference. So exit soapbox back to my rating
913. 01:13:26 I'm going to say 4.5 just for the reasons that I mentioned that the ending felt a little bit flat
914. 01:13:30 but it's a great book and honestly maybe it's just that I enjoyed the beginning of the book so much
915. 01:13:37 that the ending felt a little bit flat. Maybe there's nothing wrong with the ending. Maybe it's just
916. 01:13:41 from beginning to end it was just better than I expected. I don't know but when I think about the
917. 01:13:48 books that I've rated five stars the Deep Work by Kale Newport that Seven Habitat affected people
918. 01:13:53 by Stephen Covey. I felt like this is a really good book and it impacted me a lot but not to that level
919. 01:13:59 so for that reason I'm going to say 4.5. All right we're kind of switching places it usually
920. 01:14:06 goes the other way. I know. It's got to do that once in a while. All right so upcoming books
921. 01:14:12 the next one on the list is my choice. Speaking of Covey. I know the four disciplines of execution
922. 01:14:19 by Chris McChesney, Jim Healing and Sean Covey. This is a good one. I actually have finished
923. 01:14:25 this one already. I'm just itching to record it with you and I'm going to stop there. This is a
924. 01:14:30 popular one that I'm kind of surprised we haven't done yet. Well this will be interesting because I
925. 01:14:35 tried to read this book at one point and couldn't finish it. I know you said this. All right the
926. 01:14:40 one after that is one I actually got from you listening to whims at work. You and you were talking
927. 01:14:46 about the artist's way. I've ordered this and I think it comes today. I'm really intrigued by
928. 01:14:53 this whole idea of the morning pages and I want to dig into this book. I feel like
929. 01:14:59 this book, again I haven't read it and I don't know a whole lot about what the subject matter is
930. 01:15:05 other than what you and Drew had talked about. I feel like this one has the potential to significantly
931. 01:15:10 impact my work though. So I'm excited. Yeah I haven't read this one. I know enough about it to talk
932. 01:15:17 about it and I mentioned that on the show I think I meant to but it's it is an interesting
933. 01:15:22 concept that I don't fully understand. So I'm with you and I think this will be a good one. I saw
934. 01:15:26 that you had it on here like oh yes I'm excited about that one. Between here and there I'm reading
935. 01:15:31 a book that was recommended to me by Josh over on the Guild podcast. Algorithms to Live by Brian
936. 01:15:37 Christensen and Tom Griffiths. Applying math to daily life. That'll be interesting.
937. 01:15:43 A number of folks have recommended this since I've mentioned this on the Guild. So it'll be interesting.
938. 01:15:51 Yeah I'm curious to see what's what this one is all about but yes math as it applies to life.
939. 01:15:56 Cool and my gap book is one that I am rereading at the moment which is Work the System by Sam
940. 01:16:04 Carpenter. This is a book that is directly related to my 12 week year goal. This quarter just throwing
941. 01:16:12 it out there I guess one of the things that I've mentioned is that I want to create for our family
942. 01:16:17 kind of a standard operating procedures manual which sounds terrible when you think about it like
943. 01:16:22 that. I've explained this to my wife she's completely on board. Sounds horrendous. Basically what we
944. 01:16:27 want to do is we want to create a set of guiding principles for how we build our schedule. So
945. 01:16:34 we want to have documented for example that every Tuesday night between this time and this time is
946. 01:16:40 going to be date night and every third Friday is going to be field trip day and you know those
947. 01:16:47 sorts of things and I think that by codifying these and putting them in a document when it comes
948. 01:16:53 time to look at our calendar it will make things a lot a lot better because what I've noticed is that
949. 01:16:59 we typically when it comes to planning family trips and things like that if we look far enough
950. 01:17:06 ahead we're pretty flexible and we can pretty much create whatever time we want for our family but
951. 01:17:13 when it comes time to the execution and the day to day we'll quickly find that if we don't put
952. 01:17:18 that stuff first the big rocks then it doesn't happen and so this is an effort to make sure that
953. 01:17:25 first things remain first. Cool beans. So the book that I have selected for next time 40x as it's
954. 01:17:32 affectionately known is actually a listener recommendation and I've got a number of these that I've
955. 01:17:39 selected for the upcoming shows but those are all brought to us by listeners like you and if you
956. 01:17:46 have one that you would like to hear us go through you can do that over on bookworm.fm/recommend.
957. 01:17:52 You can also check out the existing book list there at slash list links to both these in the
958. 01:17:58 show notes make it easy for you but both of those will show you what we have we gone through what's
959. 01:18:04 on the planned list what have other people recommended and you can get yours on the list there as well.
960. 01:18:10 And if you want to help us take down kcrw we'd love to have you join the revolution just head
961. 01:18:16 on over to iTunes leave us a rating and review it will boost our search engine rankings and iTunes
962. 01:18:24 and it will help other people find out about this awesome show. Go bookworm. So if you're interested
963. 01:18:31 in 40x the four disciplines of execution and you're interested in why Mike is struggling to read
964. 01:18:36 it and why I like it you should check us out next time and we'll go through the four disciplines of
965. 01:18:43 execution.