45: What’s Best Next by Matt Perman

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1. 00:00:00 Take two check check check and we have success boom funny how's in cast her will screw with you sometimes it's true never trust a chrome app.
2. 00:00:08 Fair point very fair point you know i was listening to the as a recording this the last Mac power users where David sparks was talking to joslyn keg lie and she talked about how she uses and cast her for all her podcast recordings.
3. 00:00:24 Yep and david mention like i'm not sure if i would trust a web app like that is bad as skype is you know i just don't know if i'm ready to put everything in in a app like zencaster now sick and myself as i was listening to it will not from my run.
4. 00:00:37 Oh it's fine it's solid never have any issues and then of course today the day after we have issues my experience was in cast her has been roughly the same as skype getting on but it's the same as any form of.
5. 00:00:54 Video software or audio software like that like they're always a little bit tricky to get them connected it seems like once you get them connected they're usually okay the difference i have found is with zencaster it seems like it's a lot more stable once you're on because i feel like skype tends to drop me more often than zencaster does it's true skype is pretty horrible.
6. 00:01:15 If only we knew a developer who could develop a skypey place i don't know anybody nope you don't know a guy nope i don't know okay i don't want to touch that.
7. 00:01:26 That that world i don't even want to i don't even want to think about what goes into that that does not sound fun at all.
8. 00:01:34 You know it is fun podcasting from your new home office like this guy yeah okay all right i need some pics need pictures oh man you want me to do this right now.
9. 00:01:44 Yes i want it right now because if you're gonna bring it up we have to talk about this and i don't know what i like i know what your bookcase looks like give me two minutes while i put my headphones down and go take some pictures you don't even have pictures yet seriously you haven't taken pictures yet not current pictures so there's new developments here.
10. 00:02:02 Okay and go this makes for great podcasting no kidding so this is kind of a long skinny room which is just at the bottom of the stairs in our basement so this is like.
11. 00:02:14 The corner of the basement that is built in like underground and then the other side of it like our house is a walk out ranch the other side is like bright and open but there are no windows in my office and i kind of like it that way nice so everything that you see lighting wise in there is a.
12. 00:02:29 Phillips br 30 hula it's i have like eight of them.
13. 00:02:32 Nice and that's kind of cool because you can just like the modes and then you know i'll be concentrate i'll be focus or in the morning if i'm down here be kind of chill definitely like those the first picture which you'll see there.
14. 00:02:44 Is that there's this weird little cut out thing that the couch that we have was just in the basement but no one ever used it so it fits perfectly in that spot we put it there but you'll also see there's like that weird lip so there's a bunch of corners in that part of the room so in that first picture you'll see i've also got a bunch of acoustic foam to kind of eliminate the base traps.
15. 00:03:03 That's what that is yeah i was looking at this thinking okay that's kind of an odd architectural detail but now that you say it's yeah that makes way more sense yeah so it's not a square room it's kind of long and skinny and then on that side of the room there's a bunch of those corners because there's that weird lip and so it was causing some weird echoes so interesting so putting those in the corners eliminated echoes.
16. 00:03:28 It helps a little bit i tried that actually before we put the carpet in because it was a concrete floor and it just was not working so we bit the bullet and we got carpet you see the carpet in a few of those pictures to the right of the the couch is the standing desk with the fractures of the podcast that i do nice and then to the right of that on the back wall is the bookshelf and then to the right of that is a glass whiteboard the closet and then a couple more pieces of acoustic foam on the wall.
17. 00:03:57 Just for fun yep cuz i had a nice i have some questions alright okay so number one what on earth is under your desk there's like these foot pedals there what are these are you familiar with the apogee audio interfaces like the.
18. 00:04:13 I think the duet and then there's like a apogee one i think just like recording interfaces yeah okay well this is the apogee guitar rig what's called the geo gio and so really what it is it's a foot controller for logic.
19. 00:04:27 For guitar players interesting so using that controller you can alter the sounds that come out of your guitar.
20. 00:04:35 Yeah so with logic and i think it's called main stage to be honest i haven't really messed around with it a whole lot because i've had this thing for a while thinking i'll use this at church but then decided that it was too much of a pain to bring my macbook and get it all set up every single time it wasn't working so literally just been sitting at my house for a long time.
21. 00:04:52 And i haven't really started messing with it yet but there's two rows of pedals on there the top row is like your play pause record forward backward so you can control logic with your your foot and then the other ones where you see the lights those lights will change color depending on the type of effect that you have so in main stage you can have like a delay i think is purple or an overdrive is yellow or something like that.
22. 00:05:15 And so you can select the different effects for your guitar input from the bottom layer and then on the left and right side there's like these little rubber pads those are for going up and down different sound banks within logic and main stage.
23. 00:05:30 Okay this is really cool i kind of wish i was a way to alter it such that like one of those an inter button here's one that is gonna run this text expand or snippet like i could easily see trying to to use a foot pedal of sorts of these things out there.
24. 00:05:44 Anyway it just that's what i got to thinking of you probably could program it to do that but i'm not not.
25. 00:05:51 Going down that i'm at hole okay next question what is your monitor because this looks like a really large.
26. 00:05:57 Samsung of sorts now this is a cheap monoprice i think with the call is like a crystal pro or something it's a cheap 4k monitor it was like 300 bucks.
27. 00:06:07 I bought a monoprice 4k monitor a long time ago when i first got an off site office and it wasn't this exact one but it's i still use it to the co-working space and it works great have it had no issues with it.
28. 00:06:20 I haven't lost any of the pixels and so when it came time to buy one for here i immediately went to monoprice again nice it doesn't have like the the camera at some point i'd like to get like one of those lg ones that has the camera built in but you know this was 300 bucks as opposed to 1000 bucks and.
29. 00:06:37 It works fine right interesting okay so large bookcase lots and lots of books here how do you organize these this is this is a question i don't think we've really gone over but.
30. 00:06:48 There's a lot here and my assumption is you have some form of an organization method for these what is it well that would be a good assumption but it isn't true literally i threw books on the shelves i still have to organize these.
31. 00:07:02 See just got him up there yeah call a good yeah.
32. 00:07:06 All right it's fair my wife wants to take the books and stack them different ways like stacks on vertically stacks on horizontally i'm sure it's going to look awesome when she's done but she wants me to kind of organize them way i want them first and then she'll make them look pretty.
33. 00:07:21 Nice yes i'm jealous of this bookcase very much so.
34. 00:07:25 It's good bookcase going on around the room what is the whiteboard i've heard of these glass whiteboards before but i've not really seen one in the wild before.
35. 00:07:33 This is a frosted glass whiteboard which i think is like four feet by three feet so it's not huge but it's big enough and i bought this i think about two years ago when i originally was going to finish off this office alright it's been sitting in our house and honestly forgot we had it until.
36. 00:07:51 Start going through things like oh yeah i've got a whiteboard we should put that over there.
37. 00:07:56 Nice the frosted stuff is on the back so feels just like a glass whiteboard when you're writing on it and so it cleans really easily and it functions just like a whiteboard i just think it looks cooler last question.
38. 00:08:08 There's no chair here that is correct means this is a standing only setup correct at the moment yeah so the idea here that what wasn't like the reason i set it up the.
39. 00:08:20 I set it up this way but once i started putting the pieces in here i kind of had this idea that if i wanted to sit down for anything i've got a couch right there.
40. 00:08:30 Yeah and i can unplug the macbook and take it over there if i want to it's literally like three feet away.
41. 00:08:35 Nice also the type of work that i do i don't necessarily need my macbook so i'm also trying to do like when i'm recording or when i'm working on something i need my mac it's at the desk and then if i'm going to be doing something else.
42. 00:08:49 Doing that on my iPad and doing that over on the couch there or even taking my iPad upstairs if i want to get out of the basement dungeon.
43. 00:08:59 The bat cave i guess i'll call this is not very nice well looks like a pretty sweet setup it looks like you have spent some time thinking through how you're going to use it and how you want it set up so it's pretty cool to see that actually come come into reality.
44. 00:09:12 Yeah well i mean i originally said i was going to do this like two years ago and then thought through everything and then started it and stopped it.
45. 00:09:19 Yeah and then restarted it a couple other times so i've had a couple iterations and thinking everything through.
46. 00:09:25 Yeah can i remember you talking about this was this like episode three or something like it's been a long time ago at this point and it's come up i know two or three times since so kudos you for getting it done.
47. 00:09:38 Yep just to show you how dedicated i am to bookworm follow up i mean this is goes back to a Napoleon Hill thinking girl rich personal communication room.
48. 00:09:47 Nice that's okay now i have to look it up how far back is that one thinking girl rich not as far back as i thought that's episode thirty four.
49. 00:09:56 Yeah i probably mentioned it before then but that was the time when i was like okay i'm really going to do this and you're like hey i'll come over and help you throw up drywall.
50. 00:10:04 Right and then you never needed that help so well i probably needed it but i didn't do anything with it.
51. 00:10:09 That's fair.
52. 00:10:12 All right what else we got on this follow up list okay so you have on here for me look for opportunities to alleviate the suffering of others after Victor Frankl i really don't know how i can mark this as a success right other than to just try to keep thinking about this but kind of along with this is another one on here for developing my seeing skills and i've been doing this picture day thing.
53. 00:10:33 And i feel like those two together have been working and i don't have any specific examples of like this is how i alleviated somebody suffering and i don't think that unless you were to follow up with that person have an in depth conversation that they'd even admit to you that that that was actually what happened.
54. 00:10:51 But i've been noticing just noticing people noticing what they're feeling what they're going through i mean if you ever just go to a coffee shop and people watch like it's pretty clear when people are dealing with stuff.
55. 00:11:01 And so just trying to be a look up for that and when i have the opportunity to step in and do something even if it's just simple as like make eye contact with a stranger and smile at him yeah i've seen that sort of thing like just break stuff off of people and i've got lots of opportunities to do that throughout my day even when i do work from home in my.
56. 00:11:20 In my back cave yeah i've been following your pictures it's been entertaining for me so i've enjoyed watching for sure i've noticed not that i really care about the likes anyways but i noticed when i started this getting a ton of likes and then i think people are getting sick of my pictures because now i only get a handful of.
57. 00:11:37 Most of the one which i don't care whatever but just to just you know i'm probably not going to keep going with this i'm gonna finish out the month and then at that point whenever i got something cool to share i'll share it but i'm not gonna try and.
58. 00:11:50 Keep that cadence of you know posting something everyday right i know i am not a frequent instagrammer at all and it seems like whenever i've had like a two or three months to write into anything and then i post something out there it gets a lot of feedback but if i post something again.
59. 00:12:07 The next day it doesn't get anywhere near that it's like okay it seems like people want to comment and like on something as a way to encourage you to keep going and then when you do keep going they're not actually going to do that anymore at that point they're like okay go away.
60. 00:12:22 Yeah now i'm done okay i don't want to see your kids anymore like stop you take pictures of the dog this time well that's been the little bit difficult part of this is that.
61. 00:12:32 Like i don't consider developing seeing skills just being like i'm gonna take pictures of my kids that could definitely be an aspect of it but i've been trying to do is just notice the cool stuff that's just around me all the time that i would just walk by and never notice before.
62. 00:12:47 So you'll see you know if you were to go on my instagram lots of pictures of like outdoor wall art and things like that i'll be up for a run i'll see something looks cool and i'll stop and take a picture that sort of thing nice you ever take a picture yourself doing yoga nope i kind of want a picture of this.
63. 00:13:01 No i have not had a second yoga session my wife has threatened to come up with a routine for me but it hasn't hasn't happened yet i'm still open to trying that but yeah like i said originally like i don't think this is something that left to my own devices this is going to stick but i see the value in it so hopefully Rachel will listen to this and help me out.
64. 00:13:23 Well i've got a couple on here one is directly mine and that was to add transcendence to my weekly review so a time to really think about the projects and the things i have going on in life from a higher level and try to see them from i guess from without how do you say that outside of myself as a third person second person however you want to say that above and slightly outside your situation as Sam Carpenter would say and work system.
65. 00:13:49 There you go i'll go with that that's what i'm doing in my weekly review i've done it a couple times now and it seems to be working.
66. 00:13:57 Pretty well to get a view for what all what projects do i have going on and which one shooter should not be doing so it seems to help in that sense but i want to keep going with it so i'm probably not going to keep it on the follow up list but i'm also not going to say it's done can i cheat and do that.
67. 00:14:13 Sure can you give an example of what you what you're looking for when you do that.
68. 00:14:18 Yeah essentially what i'm wanting to do is make sure that the ventures in the projects that i have going on the right ones and if you listen to me for very long on pretty much any podcast you know that i have a tendency to say yes to things new and shiny gets me excited and i'm off to the races well that can mean i have a lot of ventures running all at one time.
69. 00:14:39 And that's not always a good thing because saying yes means you need to say no so that's that's a difficulty that i know i have to work through and the hope is that by trying to see these ventures and projects that i'm doing from someone else's point of view that i'm able to get a clearer picture on which ones are the right ones given the missions and goals that i have for myself that is the intent and that is something that.
70. 00:15:08 I can do on say a monthly basis but trying to do it on a weekly basis makes a lot more sense because it moves faster and that is not something i've been real good at so here we are putting it on a week with you hoping to make that work do you just then take each project that you're committed to say should i still be committed to this or is there some other framework that you're using to evaluate these like what does it look like when you get.
71. 00:15:34 Be oven slightly outside your situation and you apply the that transcendence to your weekly review is there a process you follow to do that.
72. 00:15:43 Not really that's fine i don't want to lock it in yep because the couple times i've done it have been very different each time both had roughly the same effect but i came at it differently depending on what what i felt like i needed at that time and the only consistent thing i've had across those two instances was looking at.
73. 00:16:04 At my list of projects and looking at some of the the longer term missions or goals that i have looking at those two and then basically grabbing a whiteboard marker or a pen and paper and just writing whatever seems to come to mind in one case i didn't even do that i just kind of stared at a wall and thought through it so i don't really have a set process on this one okay well the reason i'm asking is i feel like i've kind of gone through something.
74. 00:16:33 Similar myself recently so i'm going to pay something in the chat here and this is something that i put together and i've been using you'll be happy to hear pen and paper what last week or so.
75. 00:16:44 Did you design this would you find this thing somewhere i did i designed it because at some point i'll have somebody do a good design but i just wanted to play around with some of the elements that would contribute to me hitting the mark everyday.
76. 00:16:59 And so describing what Joe is looking at and no i'm not ready to make this available to everybody yet i created a document like a letter size document actually have these printed off and made into tablets so i just rip one off and fill it out everyday now but the way that i make sure that i moved in the right direction is i take the life theme that i identified in a different bookworm follow up item.
77. 00:17:21 And i put that at the top so i see it every single day and then i've got our blocks on the left side of this from seven a.m to eight p.m.
78. 00:17:29 Or nine p.m i guess so i would block my time for my meetings and where i'm gonna be what i'm working on that would be right there on the left hand side of the page and then on the right hand side of the page i've got my goals one two and three.
79. 00:17:43 These are blank intentionally because i think that having to write them out everyday is important and it's going to just ingrained into my head that this is what i'm working on.
80. 00:17:52 Yep and then m i t's are most important tasks so things i absolutely want to get done today and i've got space for up to five of those i don't go for five every single day then a short little space for what would make today awesome.
81. 00:18:05 And then at the bottom third maybe the page on the right hand side i've just got notes so things come up during the day i can jot some notes down there.
82. 00:18:11 Then a bible verse at the bottom which is going to lead into probably discussion for today the phoenix five fifteen sixteen yep in the amplified therefore see that you walk carefully living life with honor purpose encourage.
83. 00:18:23 Showing those who tolerate naval evil not as the unwise but as wise sensible intelligent discerning people making the very most of your time on earth recognizing and taking advantage of each opportunity and using it with wisdom and diligence so just.
84. 00:18:35 Reminder basically that what you do during the days important i like this there's one glaring problem with it though what's that it starts at seven a.m.
85. 00:18:43 Yeah that's really designed to start after the morning routine but for people who get up super early yeah you would ideally at some point be able to adjust that yourself okay.
86. 00:18:56 Yeah i like this i'm intrigued by this a lot i don't know if i would use it but it is very intriguing i've looked at some of these things what's the other there's a classic one.
87. 00:19:08 Emergent task planner something like that anyway i used to try those and although they seem to work okay i struggled with where to keep the piece of paper throughout the day because i move around a lot so it was a difficult thing for me at the time because i wasn't carrying a notebook around.
88. 00:19:25 But i am now so this may be something worth trying thanks for sharing this the inspiration for this by the way i was going through an online course called working smarter for Mac users i believe.
89. 00:19:37 By doctor mac bob of it is who i first heard about because he's going to be the keynote speaker at max stock.
90. 00:19:43 I bought his course and went through it and he referenced a couple times if you're not familiar with this guy like if you see the videos he's got like long curly.
91. 00:19:54 Silver hair he's in every every one of the videos he's got some different Hawaiian shirt on he's a very colorful personality.
92. 00:20:02 But he talked a couple times in that course because a big productivity aspect to it about this thing that he developed and he just called it super plan he's like you can download it for yourself and i looked at it it's got a lot of the same elements that i've seen in a lot of different planners.
93. 00:20:15 And then when i saw the fact that like he had put this together i thought to myself why don't i just make one the way i want it right because i've tried the self journal i've tried it.
94. 00:20:24 I've tried lots of different other things and some of them i've liked better than others but all of them have had some pieces where i'm just like i don't really want to do it that way like my big thing with the self journal is the morning and evening gratitude that's great if you never practice gratitude before.
95. 00:20:40 But once i got in the habit of that i much prefer to incorporate that into my journaling template in day one at the end of the day rather than having to write it physically.
96. 00:20:49 So i can view this as an opportunity like i know all the pieces i'm supposed to have here why not try to format them put them into a design that i would like to use every single day i like it i've debated doing something like this a number of times.
97. 00:21:03 I even when as far okay this will tell you how bad this is for me i even have still in my possession a folder that has paper in it like a bunch of.
98. 00:21:16 What do they call that sample paper from a local printer so that i could figure out which paper i like the best to go into a notebook.
99. 00:21:26 So that i could print it with something like this and have it bound on the specific in this case fountain pen friendly paper never went through with it cuz that gets expensive quick.
100. 00:21:38 So i never actually did it but it's been an interesting thing to explore so keep me informed on this one i'm very interested in it sure yeah and at some point maybe i would do something like that but because i'm like well i'm just gonna test this and see if this works for me work for this other guy and i know that a lot of other people really believe in this process but.
101. 00:21:56 Never found the tool that i can use consistently every single day so i designed this in a couple of hours and printed i think 200 of them i can't go is got a made in the tablets.
102. 00:22:08 And it was like 25 bucks or something nice very minimal investment already since i've done that i've noticed there's a couple things on here that i wanted to change right so that the pdf i sent you actually is a little bit different.
103. 00:22:18 The one that i have printed but that's okay i just want to be tested myself cool this is very neat i'm jealous a little bit to say that.
104. 00:22:27 Well feel free to rip off my design i have one more bit of follow up and this is from a listener john wittig and he sent me a link well it started off as a picture.
105. 00:22:41 Of a chart that intrigued me greatly and i asked him for a link to this that i could share so he sent it and what this is and i'll make sure this is in the show notes it is a spreadsheet.
106. 00:22:55 That john put together and it has all of the books that we've done for bookworm mike's rating and my rating and then a combined rating so that you can see which books and it's got the bar graph that goes with each one it makes a visual out of the ratings that we have.
107. 00:23:12 Free for books you can visually see which ones have the highest ratings and which ones have the lowest i was really impressed by this so thanks john.
108. 00:23:20 Yeah this is cool also interesting to go back and see what we rated stuff and then thinking about how we would rate it now select for example.
109. 00:23:30 Very first book we did was getting things done and there were a couple things that i didn't like about it i ended up giving it a four you gave it a five like do you still consider that a five now that you've got forty something episodes under your belt.
110. 00:23:43 No i think i've already go back i would make it probably at least a four like that's that's probably where i would land on it looking at it now but that's the thing with stuff like this is how do you actually.
111. 00:23:53 Staying consistent is incredibly difficult on something like this and it's also hard to stay consistent when you're evolving through the process like the first book that we did getting things and we picked that one because we're familiar with it right a lot of these other books that we read some of the ones that you know we each gave a five to like i never heard of before.
112. 00:24:12 Managing oneself decisive deep work obviously i kind of guess that one would be up there will power instinct we've gotten a little bit pickier as we've gone along also thought this was interesting and i had mentioned i think in a text message when you for share this with me.
113. 00:24:28 Like it might be kind of cool to have with the top ten books we've ever done on bookworm based on a chart like this and so at any point maybe you could go to the page and see.
114. 00:24:39 These are the the top ten books and it would be updated based on on this chart that's probably a lot of manual work so i guess what the wait till the listeners ask for that sort of thing but.
115. 00:24:50 That's the other thing i noticed from this though is that like if someone is new to the bookworm podcast it be cool to have a resource where they could just go straight to the books that we consider really good.
116. 00:25:00 Kind of like a top five running list for bookworm yeah exactly cuz i've heard from a lot of different people that you know it wasn't really the intention of the podcast when we started but people tend to listen to our listen to us deconstruct it and then decide if they're going to read it based on.
117. 00:25:15 What do we like it right so that's that's kind of cool but also big responsibility i guess yeah kind of kind of sobered by that realization whether not you're going to read this book which might change your life depends on what you hear us talk about like.
118. 00:25:30 Better be on my game whenever we said i record i guess.
119. 00:25:34 But i was just looking at the chart like that's naturally where my eyes gravitated to is like what are the what are the top books yeah yeah work managing oneself decisive and to be cool i'm sure not the only one who's got that question when they look at all the books that we covered for bookworm and that list continues to grow.
120. 00:25:50 Well thanks to john for putting this together and sparking that yeah thanks john it's very interesting all of that said today's book what's best next my choice is by matt perman.
121. 00:26:00 This was highly recommended to me by a new internet friend chris bowler who have been reading a lot of ever since when was this probably about three months ago maybe longer than that i don't know tell me chris but this book is one that.
122. 00:26:14 Kind of struck me because i didn't realize someone had written a productivity book specifically from a biblical.
123. 00:26:22 Perspective so there's your disclaimer for today we're gonna talk about god the bible a lot especially here up front so just gonna put that out there so this is something that.
124. 00:26:32 I'm very intrigued by i have a feeling that we're gonna have some strong opinions about this one yes especially some of the later.
125. 00:26:39 Parts in this because they have it broken out into what is it seven parts including an introduction and a conclusion so this is something that.
126. 00:26:48 I'm interested in your take on a mike but at the same time this is a book that i found very interesting i was fascinated by it especially whenever you start reading like some of the testimonials on it and like the tagline on it is how the gospel transforms the way you get things done.
127. 00:27:03 So yes i am interested in going through this conversation with you alright yeah so let me before we dive into the book itself just well two things one preface this like if this is the first episode of bookworm that you are a.
128. 00:27:18 Listening to they're not all going to be like this but this is going to dive into specifically the idea of faith in the spiritual why behind all the productivity things so if that's not your thing you know go back and check out one of the other episodes that we've done second.
129. 00:27:33 I have a little bit different perspective to this book because i did actually write a productivity book with a little perspective yeah not not a full like this is everything productivity wise based on the bible so it's it's different than this.
130. 00:27:48 But that does influence and color my approach to this book so i want to i want to get that that out of the way because there are going to be some things that i disagree with in here but it's basically because i've done research myself and arrived at some slightly different conclusions but there's a lot of stuff in here that i completely agree with mine is you know that i shall hustle it's really a biblical approach to productivity but in terms of like doing more than you thought you were capable of at the time that i wrote it there wasn't so much emphasis at least i wasn't aware of it.
131. 00:28:18 In the productivity space of just like being more busy you know never since then there's kind of been the push towards effectiveness minimalism essentialism all that type of stuff which i completely agree with and so that book is definitely do for an update but yeah it's apples and oranges in my opinion.
132. 00:28:32 Yeah i think whenever i when i consider cuz oddly enough i don't really think of your book as a productivity book for some weird reason not really sure why that is but i don't i think of it more as how to understand.
133. 00:28:48 The way that you operate in the world per the bible like that's how i tend to think of it it's basically an appeal to think bigger yeah that's a good way to say that.
134. 00:28:58 Though you wrote the book so you would know so.
135. 00:29:02 All right so let's jump in today what's best next this is i mentioned earlier it goes into seven parts.
136. 00:29:08 The introduction is really about does god care about getting things done and i think we would both agree yes.
137. 00:29:17 God does care and there's a lot of passages one of which you read just a minute ago the Ephesians five fifteen through sixteen that is a core verse that matt uses in this and he has a lot of scriptural references that call out.
138. 00:29:32 Different aspects of how and why god expects you to make the most of your time here on the earth and that is a thing that i think i could say i was aware of mike like i think that's something i could say i knew.
139. 00:29:45 But i don't think i understood it to the level at which he calls out here he talks about at the beginning part of this book a little bit about his story and his own productivity journey and he mentions that on page twenty five.
140. 00:30:00 His wife and he had two kids it wasn't going to be possible to keep working the way that he was working his working ninety hours a week and really the point that he's making is that kids are often the catalyst for change which i completely agree with that's kind of what made me stop and think about.
141. 00:30:15 Why am i doing all the things that i'm doing at that point and i think specifically with the longer work weeks when you don't have a lot of other responsibilities you can justify working really hard on these things but when all of a sudden you are wearing a bunch of different hats.
142. 00:30:31 And you're being pulled into a bunch of different directions you have to start saying no to stuff and that's really the heart of this book in my opinion this gospel driven productivity that he's talking about is like you have to take a step back and you have to.
143. 00:30:45 Ask yourself for every area of life are you doing what you are called to do in that particular moment are you doing the thing that you were created for are you doing the thing that you're anointed for are you doing the thing that like God has put this.
144. 00:31:02 Purpose and this mission in you and any really like the revelation for me was when i realized that i had that it was then time to take everything that i did and magnified under that glass and.
145. 00:31:15 Say okay is this thing in alignment with where i'm supposed to go is this thing in alignment with my my life theme you know is the way i would phrase it now on that worksheet that i put together.
146. 00:31:25 But you have to ask those those questions and when you ask those questions you arrive at some some answers which usually.
147. 00:31:34 You know that's why i wrote my book is i start asking those questions and arriving at these answers and i'm like oh my gosh this is amazing i can't believe no one has ever realized this before like.
148. 00:31:42 People do realize that but they have to go through the process yeah for themselves and so i think it's cool right at the beginning here the introduction he's explaining his journey his perspective where he's coming from.
149. 00:31:53 Because it helps you relate to his situation you understand a lot better the context with which he's presenting all the stuff yeah i think that's very fair.
150. 00:32:03 So stepping into part one here first things first is the title of it he goes into right towards the beginning of this there's a parable in Matthew 25 this is the parable the talents and if you can't recall the story this is where there are three servants and the master gives each of them a certain number of talents and then leaves for a while.
151. 00:32:27 And comes back to see how they did with it the first of which had invested that money in something we don't really know what it is and essentially doubled his money and of course well done servants the second one did something similar didn't earn as much back but still had a pretty good return.
152. 00:32:45 And that was considered an excellent thing as well the third however essentially just took the money and stuck in the ground so wouldn't lose it.
153. 00:32:55 And just return the money back to the guy saying here you go i didn't lose anything and he was the one that was ridiculed in the process and when i think about that story and i think about you know the first things first like getting the foundation laid here.
154. 00:33:12 We are expected to be i guess efficient and to be productive with what we are given and not just sit on it like we're not supposed to just sit back and wait for things to happen and expect that god will.
155. 00:33:25 Make people come to us in the conversations to help lead them to christ like he's not just gonna let that happen.
156. 00:33:32 For you you have to actually do something before those things will happen so i see this is an encouragement to don't sit on your hands.
157. 00:33:40 Get to work go go do something don't squander what you're given i guess yeah so i i have thoughts on this passage.
158. 00:33:48 All right go this is really the core of the reason why i wrote my book is i was studying this and i was i've got a bible college degree i was teaching a bible college class at the time on personal management.
159. 00:34:04 And i was going through this parable the talents and a couple things really stood out to me so first of all the the story goes the first guy who got five talents and talents represent an amount of money.
160. 00:34:15 It says that he went and got to work immediately and that kind of shows me because it doesn't say that about the the second guy that this guy who had gotten five talents in the first place like he was qualified for five talents like he had.
161. 00:34:29 Increased his capacity to the point where he could be trusted with five towns the second guy and this is a little this set of bad tone for me right away because in the book he talks about how the second guy got three talents and he went and made three more that's actually.
162. 00:34:45 Wrong if you read the passage he got two talents not three.
163. 00:34:49 Nice so but i'm probably the only one who picked up on that because i literally wrote a book on this specific passage but like that didn't that didn't put a good a good light on everything from that point forward it made me made me question basically everything that i read after that point.
164. 00:35:06 Yeah but the principal here is that the guy who got to he did what he was supposed to do doesn't say that he went and got busy right away you know he doubled what he had and that's the principal here is that god works by multiplication.
165. 00:35:18 And so it doesn't matter how you start it matters how you finish doesn't matter if you are fifty years old and you feel like you wasted your time up until this point if you start working what you have right now.
166. 00:35:31 This principal multiplication kicks in and you can quickly find yourself further than the person who started with the five talents if they're not going to be faithful but the key here is that you have to be faithful and i actually my church i got an opportunity to preach about a week.
167. 00:35:48 We could go and i actually taught on the principal of agreement from this particular passage and so just real briefly i think that there's a lot in here that you can dissect but.
168. 00:35:59 One of the things is that the guy who went and got to work immediately with the five talents like he had proven himself to his master his boss so his boss is like here's five talents i'm gonna leave.
169. 00:36:12 But i know you're gonna do the right thing and he did he went and got to work immediately so like he's completely on board with the vision or the direction of what the master what is boss is telling him to do.
170. 00:36:24 And i think that that's a really powerful concept when people understand the mission or the vision that got is placed inside of them like the specific purpose that they have for them there are other people who will wrestle with it.
171. 00:36:35 And they know that the best thing they can do is to do what they were created to do but maybe they want to do some other stuff first or they want to try a bunch of different things and they're gonna figure out for their own i kind of kind of view them as the guy who got the two talents yeah eventually you're gonna land on it you're gonna do it.
172. 00:36:51 But maybe you'll waste some time in the going through some things the very best thing you can do in my opinion is to understand what God has created for you to do what he's anointed you to do and then do that with everything that you've got the quicker that you do that the better off you're gonna be.
173. 00:37:05 Then there are a lot of people like the guy who got the one talent he probably knew what he was supposed to do but his boss left and so he's like i'm not gonna do that anymore like the boss had been there he maybe would have followed through and did what he was supposed to do.
174. 00:37:21 But the fact that he's unsupervised at that point like what that shows me is that that's like the lowest level of agreement.
175. 00:37:29 Okay so you could call yourself a Christian you could say that i believe this this and this but really do you like when no one's looking what are you doing because the lowest level agreement is like to compel somebody.
176. 00:37:44 Where you can force them to do something i can compel my four year old to do something but he'll have this look on his face like completely disgusted.
177. 00:37:53 And at that point like he's only doing it because he has to and then you take a step up from that and you've got.
178. 00:38:00 The people who are obedient i can tell my older kids hey clean your room and they roll their eyes at me like fine you know they go and they do it i don't have to monitor them.
179. 00:38:09 But they're not really on board and then the highest level is the agreement or you know someone says hey go do this you like yes amen i completely agree with that amen literally means like let it be so.
180. 00:38:20 And you can really locate yourself in your attitude with what you believe god wants you to do and if you find yourself like not knowing what god wants you to do in my opinion it's because you're not really paying attention like you're not asking the right questions.
181. 00:38:33 If you really ask and you say hey what am i supposed to do and you take the approach that he mentions at the beginning like your whole life your whole mission is to help other people and to advance the gospel like you'll figure it out it's only when you don't really want to in the first place that it takes a really really long time.
182. 00:38:52 This is a story that i think you can you can really pull a lot out of and you can continue to find different ways to tie it into life but i think there's there's something to be said for starting the whole book with this like starting the legit part of it.
183. 00:39:05 With this because you really have to understand that from a biblical stance we are given a mission and to fulfill that mission we're also given a lot of stories about ways to follow through on what god wants us to do.
184. 00:39:22 And this is not complicated it's hard to to put it into real life i would say but that's a lot of what we talk about in the productivity spaces all the little tips and tricks on how you get things done and he has a lot of those here in this book.
185. 00:39:37 But i think starting with the concept of how are you going to come at this and why should you come at this productivity thing with the goal of helping other people and why should you come at it in a way that.
186. 00:39:51 You're trying to be efficient you're trying to be effective you're trying to be productive with the things that you're doing which he gives you your mission and in this book matt gives us a mission but that mission comes from the bible itself and we'll get into that i think that a lot of people kind of view.
187. 00:40:09 Like well the fact that i don't get to choose what i do necessarily like if i'm really going to do what god call me to do like maybe it's something i don't want to do.
188. 00:40:19 I think that's the attitude a lot of people have it's kind of like that please don't send me to africa thing but really like the passions that you have and the desires of your heart you know like that's what god wants to give you in my experience anyways like you're no more satisfied.
189. 00:40:34 Then when you are in the will of god and doing what he's created you to do it like something inside of you comes alive when you do that.
190. 00:40:41 And i think that's a very important understanding like a lot of people will kind of tip to around this and they won't want to dive into because they're afraid that god's gonna tell them to do something that's completely radical and against their will and in my experience like that's just that's just not the way that works.
191. 00:40:56 So then that ties into this efficiency versus effectiveness because you can work efficiency you can do things well but if you're not doing the right things in essence it's a little bit of wasted wasted time what you need to do is you need to be effective and you need to hit the mark.
192. 00:41:15 All right so on page 43 he talks about this from Peter Drucker he by the way if you were to read whatever book it was by Peter Drucker that he mentioned and Peter Drucker maybe like there's a lot of essays and things so maybe it's like the big one but if you read that and then you read the Scott Belsky book.
193. 00:41:31 And then Jonathan Edwards you'd have most of right most of what he talks about it in this book.
194. 00:41:38 Both side note so Peter Drucker says on page 43 while efficiency is important it works only when we make it secondary not primary it doesn't matter how efficient you are if you are doing the wrong things in the first place more important than efficiency is effectiveness getting the right things done.
195. 00:41:54 And this is important because there are different levels of effectiveness there are different consequences associated with doing the wrong things you know so why focus on effectiveness over efficiency number one you can get the wrong things done.
196. 00:42:08 Number two efficiency doesn't solve the problem number three becoming more efficient can actually make things worse the more efficient you get at something that you're not supposed to be doing in the first place the more you validated in your mind you say oh this isn't so bad.
197. 00:42:20 But when you make that switch and you do the thing that you're supposed to be doing then you're like I can't believe that I stayed so long trying to make that thing work.
198. 00:42:27 It's because you're focused on being efficient instead of effective number four the quest for efficiency often undermines the true source of effectiveness in any organization.
199. 00:42:35 The people I totally agree with this and Chris Bailey talked about this people being the reason for productivity on number five efficiency is often the enemy of innovation yeah if you can do things better you can apply the band aid fix and you don't have to answer deal with the tough question or should we be doing this thing in the first place.
200. 00:42:51 And then number six the quest for efficiency often overlooks the importance of the intangibles which are now the main source of value in our knowledge economy.
201. 00:42:59 This is a really interesting point and gets into the whole idea of knowledge work which I did not know was a term that was coined by Peter Drucker way back in the day I kind of figured knowledge work was something that came about with the Internet and working remotely but it actually goes
202. 00:43:13 goes back a lot a lot further than that if you think about that if you don't have somebody managing you looking over your shoulder it's kind of like the the parable of the talents all over again.
203. 00:43:23 What are you going to be doing when you don't have somebody who's forcing you to do the thing that you're supposed to do it's hard to force yourself to do the right things but you have to you have to be effective you can't just be efficient.
204. 00:43:34 Well there's a lot there I think we've talked about like this effective efficient thing a little bit in the past and I don't really want to beat a dead horse here but this is something that I know and I guess this goes back to like this transcendence thing that I'm doing.
205. 00:43:48 It's very easy for me to continue to add projects and continue working through scheduling and time on the calendar and how am I going to fit all this stuff in and how am I going to get from one thing to the next and how do I manage my projects and how do I keep track of my list like all of this stuff.
206. 00:44:02 It can be a lot and I could be the absolute best at managing all of that and making sure I'm getting things accomplished but are they the right ones and that's exactly why I wanted that transcendence bit because I'm not always certain that I'm pulling that off the right way.
207. 00:44:17 So I'm grateful for having this reiteration even though I just had this as an action item from the last go around one of the things that he says on page forty nine which I think is a great way of summarizing this is that one of the best places for efficiency is being efficient with things so that you can be effective with people.
208. 00:44:38 And when you view productivity through the lens of gospel driven productivity where it's not about you and what you can get like that's amplified.
209. 00:44:45 Right and that's the second part here nice segue there gospel driven productivity.
210. 00:44:50 What does God want from you and what does this thing look like in one sense or another and he had a definition for productivity.
211. 00:45:00 Productivity is about making a contribution and giving more than we get so that God gets the glory not us.
212. 00:45:07 That's on page 71 I really appreciated essentially a biblical definition of productivity here just because you can see definitions of this all over the place and none of them really they don't mean a whole lot to me.
213. 00:45:20 Maybe that's just me being a stick in the mud but whenever I stopped and started thinking about this okay from a productivity stance and from a biblical stance you know how do those two mash up and what is the purpose like what does God want me doing even though like I'm really good at computers.
214. 00:45:39 What am I supposed to do with that and I think we've said this a little bit before your ultimate goal should be helping other people and that is what we should be doing and when I'm looking to do good for other people and building my systems and my life such that it makes me extremely good and effective at doing that.
215. 00:45:59 That's the sweet spot like that's where I want to be so I really resonated with this part I think this was probably one of the more valuable pieces in this book at least from my viewpoint like these first two or three parts here was where I really saw a lot of I guess original or unique things that I haven't really delved into before from a book especially not from a Bible stance.
216. 00:46:22 You may have given that you wrote a book similar to this topic so you probably didn't feel that way.
217. 00:46:29 Well I have the most notes that I took on this particular section so I feel like this section is really well done.
218. 00:46:37 There's a couple things in here that I've got some nitpicks with but overall like on page 75 he quotes John Wesley he says do all the good you can by all the means you can and all the ways you can and all the places you can and all the times you can to all the people you can as long as you ever can.
219. 00:46:51 I think that's that's gospel different productivity in a nutshell.
220. 00:46:55 He makes the point that good works should not be on your someday maybe list which I think for a lot of people they are.
221. 00:47:04 There's a principle of sewing and reaping which he doesn't spend a whole lot of time on in this particular book but I think the same thing applies here as it does when it comes to giving because I mean there's a lot of books not even Christian books which show that the people who have been in the book
222. 00:47:20 show that the people who are the most generous do the best.
223. 00:47:24 One of the books that he talks about is Love Is A Killer Out by Tim Sanders which I've read as a gap book and I'm guessing that if this section impacted you you probably want to read because he referenced it a bunch of times.
224. 00:47:36 I have it next to me on the desk right now.
225. 00:47:39 Awesome yeah it's a great book.
226. 00:47:41 Let me get to the list here before long.
227. 00:47:42 Yeah I love that book but the thing that really is worth calling out here is that like you can't just say once I get to a certain level I'm going to be able to do these good works or once I get to a certain level I'm going to be able to start giving.
228. 00:47:58 I have just re-listened to an audiobook The Art of Exceptional Living by Jim Rohn and he quotes I think it's Luke 4 with the people who are coming to give their gifts to the basically giving their offerings in the temple Jesus is watching and there's this old woman who comes up and puts in two
229. 00:48:17 two pennies basically and he says you see that she gave more than anybody else and Jim Rohn had some really great insights on this particular passage.
230. 00:48:25 He basically said that like you can't you can't just wait till you have a bunch in order to start giving because what matters when you give is not the amount it's the amount of yourself that it represents that matters.
231. 00:48:38 And so Jesus is able to say to that woman who gave the two pennies like that's all that she had she gave the most of what she had she essentially gave in faith and then when you give in faith when you perform the good works in faith when you're productive in faith not because you're going to start doing this when you get to a certain level but I'm going to start right now with what I have.
232. 00:49:01 Like that I believe is what gets God's attention and at that point he's like there that's the person who is doing the most of what they have going back to the parable of the talents like that's the person who I want to give the five talents to because they're going to work this thing
233. 00:49:16 and they're going to produce the harvest and the fruit from it.
234. 00:49:19 You're talking about building character here like that's exactly what at least what I'm hearing is when we look at productivity from God's perspective it has more to do with the mindsets and the character traits that you build in yourself as opposed to the technical things that you're doing.
235. 00:49:38 And you see this all over the place people who do good things for the exact wrong reasons.
236. 00:49:46 It's very easy to say that giving is an excellent thing to do and it always comes back around but I have seen and heard of stories of people who give so that they can manipulate their way into a position.
237. 00:49:59 I was like okay well it eventually does bite them in those specific scenarios but I think what you're talking about is if I want to be full of integrity and I want to help folks genuinely in a way that helps them long term not just here in the moment.
238. 00:50:17 I'm not saying that's bad but it seems like to me things are better when you can help someone in a way that will continue to help them even after you've had that initial contact so those character traits are ones that I think are extremely important and valuable and are spelled out in a lot of detail in the Bible.
239. 00:50:35 But they're not always easy to build and with this gospel driven productivity stance that's what we should be focusing on is building these character traits versus trying to build in all of the technical systems that get the right things done.
240. 00:50:52 I get maybe you don't get the difference there but those two things I think can be things that work together but don't have to.
241. 00:51:03 Yeah so EM Bounds who is a Christian author set out one point that man is always looking for better methods God is always looking for better men and I think that that's the principle that's at work here is doing the good works, the giving in the offerings and it's not just like giving in an offering at your church like this is really at the heart of my looking for opportunities to alleviate the pain of the people around me is like there are so many opportunities
242. 00:51:30 and Galatians six verse 10 I believe talks about how we should be giving for every good work like every good work there are so many opportunities to give to a good work but according to that verse like that's what God wants for us.
243. 00:51:48 He wants us to be able to give to all of those good works and that's kind of the challenge to me is like buying a coffee for the person behind me who I know because I saw them walk in is going through a rough time like that's a good work recognizing all those opportunities and then showing myself faithful so that I can have more means in order to do that but I think that you have to have the mindset shift before the means come like that's kind of what I was talking about with the generosity
244. 00:52:17 and the love is a killer app by Tim Sanders and even a lot of people who aren't Christians like they work this principle is a lot of philanthropists out there who like that's their mantra is like find the need and meet it but for a lot of Christians it's like well we have to go home and pray about that
245. 00:52:34 and that's one of the talking points that I have on here I mean if you're listening to this you kind of know I think probably where Joe and I land on a lot of political issues but this is one thing where I think that the conservative right could really learn from left is like the left is really good at thinking about the people who fall through the cracks and the people who need some help and the Christians are like well no I should have my own stuff and
246. 00:53:01 no like get your mind get your eyes off of your own situation and your own problems and invest you know really the heart of this book is invest in what God wants you to do God's heart is for people God's heart is that no one should perish you know so
247. 00:53:16 that means that if you are all in with the will of God and you are a faithful steward of the five talents that he's given you why wouldn't he double that and say okay now I'm going to give you more and you're going to have more to
248. 00:53:29 to meet more opportunity to give to those those good works I think that all you've got to really do is is work that that system and I'm challenged myself because you can view stuff from a scarcity mindset
249. 00:53:41 a scarcity mindset and this is really isn't covered in the book but a scarcity mindset says like there's only so much to go around and so if I give something then that means I'm not going to have enough for this stuff over here
250. 00:53:53 people who aren't Christians like they get this you know the more that I am generous and I give the more stuff comes back to me like it's a it's a spiritual principle I believe and at the root of it the root of generosity he points out in this book is love
251. 00:54:08 now I'd call who's another author that I really like he said that love is the desire to benefit others at the expense of self lust is the desire to benefit self at the expense of others so if we really say that we love people we love people the way that God loves people
252. 00:54:27 then we should desire to see them benefit even if it costs us something I don't know how to add to that that was really good well done Mike that really is like the heart of the character versus technique you know like the technique or the efficiency
253. 00:54:42 doesn't matter it's the character the effectiveness that that really does and that kind of gets into this next section here GTD and Philippians 4 so I'm curious to get your perspective on this because he uses this passage from Philippians 4 where it talks about the peace of God and he's equating that with mind like water getting everything out of your head and that's in essence making your requests known to God
254. 00:55:10 I do think that this ties into the things that we were just talking about because if you have the heart of love and if you are putting other people first then you can make those requests known to God you can say hey God I want you to help this person if God says well I told you to go do it like go do go do something with it then but once you make those petitions known to God like he's basically saying at that point you don't really have to worry about it anymore because that's when the peace comes that's when the mind like water comes so what's
255. 00:55:38 does that make sense what's your perspective on this yeah I I felt like he was stretching a bit at this point okay me too get it out of your head but he's referring to get it out of your head verbally and what I tend to think I was like well that's great I could I could say out loud the tasks that come to my mind but that's not going to get anything done and I'm still going to forget them later that's what I was thinking of
256. 00:56:07 like I'm still going to forget this even though I've verbalized it it felt like he was saying that you need to say it out loud and let God take care of it and I don't think I would disagree with that but if the answer to that is Joe go do XYZ I need to have that written somewhere because Joe's brain is not real great at remembering things so I don't know I was conflicted by it I get what he's saying I don't think that's a bad thing I think you know in something I've started doing it and I'm not going to do it.
257. 00:56:36 In something I've started doing as a result of this book is just praying over my task list for the day which sounds ridiculous the first time I thought about it but it makes perfect sense when you stop and think through like okay this is a list of things I'm here to do today.
258. 00:56:53 Why would I not talk to the creator of the universe about it like I have this direct contact with God why would I not sit down and say okay here are the things I'm thinking about doing today.
259. 00:57:05 Is that a good thing to do or do you think I should change that and depending on your perspective you'll get answers right away or you may not and I think there's there are a lot of different ways you can interpret things but.
260. 00:57:17 Personally I feel like whenever I do that I sometimes have to change what I have on that list and I'm totally cool with that because my days are usually way better whenever I make those alterations than if I try to ignore them and go my own path it's almost like God new better huh.
261. 00:57:34 So that I don't know that's my thoughts I just feel like this is a really important point that's worth discussing because I kind of disagree with the characterization of well all you need to do is.
262. 00:57:46 Pray about the things that you do and then you can forget about it and just go about your day which is kind of how I read it maybe that's not exactly what he's saying.
263. 00:57:54 But I understand like you need to be able to have that peace of mind without having everything under control so there's an element of surrender that needs to happen here but I also think that you can't just throw your hands up in the air and say well I prayed about it God will take care of the rest.
264. 00:58:10 Right, right. So like Proverbs 27 23 says know the state of your flocks and I think a really important principle here is by Dwight Eisenhower plans are worthless planning is everything best part of having a plan is being able to chuck it.
265. 00:58:24 And I think personally that the order here matters.
266. 00:58:28 So if you have your list and you go to God and you say God here's what I'm planning on doing today if there's anything you want to change change it.
267. 00:58:39 That is very different than approaching God with a blank slate and saying God what should I be doing today tell me what to do.
268. 00:58:47 Right.
269. 00:58:48 And I think that also the reason that this is so hard for people is it's never just like the hand coming out and writing on the on your whiteboard telling you exactly what you're supposed to do.
270. 00:58:59 It's not the audible voice just saying okay thou saith the Lord Joe you shall do X, Y and Z today.
271. 00:59:06 This can be a little bit difficult but I think the real key to making this work is pray without ceasing.
272. 00:59:12 So it doesn't mean that you are constantly praying every moment of every day but it means that the lines of communication are open for you at any time.
273. 00:59:21 So it's a minor point or a minor clarification but it makes a big difference in my opinion.
274. 00:59:27 Like you don't just come to God at the beginning of your day and say what are the things that you would change here.
275. 00:59:33 Yes do that at the beginning of your day absolutely and in fact that gets into another point later on which which we'll talk about.
276. 00:59:39 But also like having an ear open throughout the course of your day so that God can interrupt you at any given point and say go do this instead.
277. 00:59:49 That's really the important thing and that kind of ties into my action item from last episode of looking for opportunities to alleviate the suffering of others because I've had it happen before where I've got my plan I'm going to work on this thing.
278. 01:00:02 And then God says no you're not going to do that you're going to call this person and I call him man I'm so glad you called and we talked for an hour because that's what they needed at that particular moment.
279. 01:00:11 That's the stuff that really makes the difference and if you just approach God as like okay I need your approval on this before I go work this like you miss out on those opportunities but that's a learned skill I mean communication is something that you have to do consistently with anybody.
280. 01:00:30 So it doesn't matter if it's developing a consistent prayer time or if it is consistently communicating with your significant other like you have to learn to communicate and you have to learn to understand the voice of the person who is speaking to you learn exactly what they are saying and that takes that takes time so really there's no easy solution to this.
281. 01:00:51 But I would say that if you really want to stay in the will of God and be able to be led by God at any given moment you have to at least leave that door open you have to have that mental approach that like God you can mess this up at any given moment.
282. 01:01:06 And I think that plays into the third part here the third part here is define and the only real question here is what is your mission or vision and I think we would both agree that it's very clear our overarching life mission is to make disciples like that was given to us by Jesus himself like this is your goal and I think what what Matt would get into is how
283. 01:01:32 like how would how is your specific life play into that and how do you define that there are tons of books and tons of ways to go about figuring out theoretical life missions go you know meditate on a mountain for three months and you'll get it nailed down like that just doesn't fly because it's going to flex it's going to change
284. 01:01:50 your skills will continue to morph over time you'll go through different seasons the different areas that you need to apply your focus will continue to shift and that's all okay like that's fine and this is where I've got one action item here of defining my life goals in a little more clarity like I have these general areas I want to improve on but I've never actually sat down and nailed down.
285. 01:02:15 Okay in the next three years this is what I want to accomplish or this is where I want to be so I kind of want to shift to that point and get some of that clarity the cleanness of having that because I don't currently have that but that's a piece that I want to work towards
286. 01:02:31 right right yeah there's a lot of different ways that you can approach this and I feel like in this book he did a pretty good job of outlining a framework that you could use he's even got like the the sheet that with all the different sections
287. 01:02:45 right but I feel like there's a little bit more here than what he went into in this particular section so yes your mission or your vision is about other people
288. 01:03:00 but how you identify your specific mission what you were created to do is a little bit different now so he makes a point you know you don't choose your purpose you discover it which I completely agree with
289. 01:03:12 Proverbs 25 - says it's the glory of God to conceal a thing and the glory of Kings to discover it so I believe that like God's place these things inside of you and it's up to you to discover them and tap into them I believe that your mission statement should be tied to another way to say it would be your unique ability
290. 01:03:29 that's the thing that I had sent you a little bit ago it's from a book that I'm reading which is put out by the strategic coach Dan Sullivan and I believe that that unique ability that's a very important piece of your God given vision something from my own personal study on this topic recently I believe that when you tap into your God given vision when you understand your unique ability it'll do a couple of things
291. 01:03:55 Number one in the Bible there's a story of Joseph he had that the vision he held on to that and he went from the prison to the palace okay I believe that your vision will take you from the prison to the palace and number two your God given vision is always a solution to someone else's problem not just your own that's why the first piece why I believe that because it's not just about you God wants you to be faithful he wants you to be trustworthy he wants you to be a good steward but then once you've proven yourself
292. 01:04:24 then he will give you more so that you can make a bigger impact and that's going to look different for everybody but it's really really important that you're not just trying to become efficient with the two talents that you are so focused you need to get focused on doing the right thing so that you can qualify yourself for the five talents and there's different ways that you can do that one of the things that he talked about was like if there's a section here if you don't know your life goal
293. 01:04:53 there's a couple things that he mentions you could do what you know with excellence which I completely agree you can move forward imperfectly absolutely adjust and repair you can increase your opportunity stream absolutely 100 agree with that 100% agree with that and then he also says you could do what you love this is the one I a little bit disagree with and that's based on my research into the word passion which is usually what people think of when they hear the term do what you love but the word of passion is Latin word petit literally
294. 01:05:22 means to suffer so doing what you love could be framed that way but I don't think it comes across that way it's not really the things you enjoy doing it's the things that you are willing to suffer to see come about so maybe you'd really do love something and you really want to see it come about and you go through some things in order to see that happen
295. 01:05:41 okay but that's completely different than just saying I like doing this thing because it's fun and that's going to lead me to my life goal maybe or maybe that's the thing that could be keeping you small he mentions also on page 177 that you shouldn't be 30 years old still trying to figure out what to do with your life
296. 01:05:57 I felt bad when I read that because that was me and I think that it's worth calling out that you shouldn't be discouraged by that like life is literally adjust and repair you try some things you see what works you learn about it's not going to be a little bit more difficult
297. 01:06:10 what works you learn from your experiences and you try to do better and I think that you can apply that to your spiritual life as well you can say like God what you want me to do and believe that God told you do this thing and if you do it and it completely fails
298. 01:06:24 then dig a little deeper understand why that failed maybe you missed part of it maybe there was something that you overlooked maybe it's just something that you have to keep trying at you know Solomon famously in the book of Proverbs says that he offered a thousand sacrifices
299. 01:06:38 and then God came down and asked him what do you want just name it well what if he quit at 999 you know he said this doesn't work okay so sometimes you do have to make sure that you're doing the right thing and then just push through
300. 01:06:49 but other times you know if if God didn't author it he's got no reason to support it so you need to ask yourself is this the right thing and that kind of gets back to the transcendence thing that you talked about at the very beginning but
301. 01:07:01 right I don't think you can put an age limit on this is the time that you should be have this all figured out by so part four architect hi mapping and routines and you've got a rant so the first two here time mapping hyper scheduling you and I've talked about this a little bit but Matt Perman spells out this whole concept of putting together like a template week
302. 01:07:25 I've done this before I'm not going to do it again just because it doesn't always pan out the way you want but he does recommend you know here's a base for what your week should look like and then he does spell out like putting routines into that so that your week and your time map is a routine
303. 01:07:44 and trying to get those to the point where you can basically get to where you're operating on autopilot which is kind of nice I mean it's what I do in the morning I've got an evening routine that does something very similar I've got a shutdown ritual I do towards the end of the day but he spells out one that I have not attempted until
304. 01:08:04 what is this a week and a half ago I tried it I dropped it right away but this this morning routine of what did he even call it like a productivity routine of sorts but it was it was essentially clearing out your inboxes and getting one or two really important tasks accomplished before you get into the craziness of the day essentially it's a morning routine for your work day yep that was the way I took it
305. 01:08:31 yeah I called it the daily workflow and that was one of the the six core routines that he he talks about here and this is really where my rant comes in because I think the order of these is very important so number one he says get up early
306. 01:08:45 staying up very late is not the same as getting up early my personal opinion number two daily workflow number three weekly workflow number four parent scripture number five reading and development number six rest
307. 01:08:59 okay so number four prayer and scripture I feel like this is so so important and it's gotta be number one this is this is non-negotiable he even says in this section alternatively you can do it later at night before heading to bed and I put as my comment a thousand times no in all case
308. 01:09:21 because there's a principle here when do you let me ask this when do you do this I do mine first thing okay so I will wake up and I will grab my phone not to check my email but to go through my Bible reading plan I've got a discipleship group at my church with a bunch of guys and we've got a group reading plan through the Bible app and so you it's kind of cool because you're going through it together you can see who's read it who hasn't so you can hold each other accountable but also at the end of every section it asks you what did God speak to you today
309. 01:09:49 which is a really important piece a lot of people will just go through and read it just to say that they read it and they never ask themselves what is God saying to me well if you have to answer that question publicly every single day you'll be amazed at what God says to you
310. 01:10:04 so and that's just something that I've been doing this this last year and it's really really helped a lot and then from there we use another app called echo which has all of our per request so I've got personal requests in there and then I've also got the group per request
311. 01:10:16 so I'll go through through all those and pray for all those those first two things I do every single day
312. 01:10:21 God it's you do those first thing in the morning I do something similar when I come down from getting ready for the day while I'm getting breakfast I'll do my Bible reading at that time
313. 01:10:31 and I try to read through the Bible in a year so I use those plans that help me read it in a year I've done that the last two years so I'm on year three of that and I really like it just I don't know the day just feels better
314. 01:10:45 when I've done that yes and then and it's interesting how like I will do that and then I go through process of like checking out the projects that I have going and trying to figure out which ones of those I'm going to work on that day
315. 01:11:00 and then I'll pray over that list so it kind of all morphs together in some way and I have to say like these six routines I was really disappointed that this particular one of on prayer and scripture was easily the shortest
316. 01:11:15 it's like one paragraph and he spells the others out in a lot more detail but that one he just kind of wrote quickly it seems like you should know what this is like okay that's kind of anyway
317. 01:11:27 yeah and with you though it should be number one on this list yeah absolutely and there's that's because there's this principle of first fruits okay so first fruits is the first in place time order or rank Matthew 633 says seek you first the kingdom God and all of these things will be added unto you
318. 01:11:46 what you are doing when you put prayer and scripture number four is you are seeking you first all the things and then hoping that the kingdom of God will be added unto you
319. 01:11:57 it doesn't work that way you know there's another principle here in Psalm 19 7 and 8 says the law of the Lord is perfect converting the soul your soul needs to be converted you need to be sanctified
320. 01:12:10 and when you put God first what it does is it sanctifies the rest of the day this is the most important Christian productivity principle you can get is that when you do things God's way it's a whole lot better than trying to do it your way you have to ask him what are the things that I'm supposed to do Martin Luther famously said I have so much to do I shall spend the first three hours in prayer
321. 01:12:33 okay and I'm convicted when I read that because your initial reaction your non spiritual reaction is well I can't spend that much time putting God first like doesn't God know I got a bunch of stuff I gotta do I got a job I gotta go to all that type of stuff well it's really important though because you're three parts you're a spirit you have a soul you're in a body and you can live your life from the outside in or you can live your life from the inside out when you live life from the inside out when your spirit is dominant
322. 01:13:02 that's where things get really exciting that's where doors are opened that no man can open that's when the opportunities come that you could never create for yourself so I personally believe that if you don't put this first like you are trying to do it of your own strength your own ability you're not surrendering completely and doing it God's way he can't bless it my personal opinion
323. 01:13:26 I feel like that's a good jumping off point for part five here which is reduce and we're gonna talk about work life balance here or some people like to call it like a work life tension or some people just think it doesn't exist at all and I needed this chapter this section
324. 01:13:41 and the one piece here that really stood out to me was something he called the ringing effect he mentions that at like 90% capacity one small movement can cause ripples through everything else that's going on but if you're sitting at 75% capacity
325. 01:13:59 a ripple simply adds to or subtracts from back and forth so you have some wiggle room that you're able to operate so essentially you're building in buffer but if you don't give yourself that buffer and one small thing changes it can completely wreck your day
326. 01:14:17 so as an example say I've got eight hours in my work day and I plan eight hours of work that's fine but I'm in web development there's usually a bug or something that comes up every day so if I plan it at 100% that one little bug means I am going to either have to work late or I'm going to be stressed
327. 01:14:36 I'm just going to not get something done or be late and then stress so nothing good comes from that but if I had scheduled that day at 75% you know if I've got an eight hour day and I plan six hours of work it's pretty easy for me to flex and add to that or maybe get off work early that day
328. 01:14:57 so I'm going to freeze things up and it doesn't mean the entire day is going to be a complete disaster because I planned on having that buffer
329. 01:15:05 yep I completely agree and I think though that this is this kind of gets back to the point we just left on why those things have to be in the right order is because only God can tell you whether the things that you're doing are the right things
330. 01:15:18 you can decide for yourself but you got a much higher chance of being wrong there are going to be seasons when you ask God should I do this thing or this thing and he'll say yes do both that's kind of what got me into the situation that we're in now that's just a season though and then you constantly have to be going back and saying like what is the what is the right thing what's best next the very title of the book you know I think that there's a lot of value that comes from asking that particular question
331. 01:15:47 and you do have to build in that margin you cannot be at 90% capacity all the time because it's going to make everything a lot harder that was one of the action items that I wrote down was to plan my day for 75% and I think that when I do it on paper and I block off at least an hour for all of the things that I'm going to do like it's a lot easier to hit that makes me happy to hear you say you're doing things on paper not everything not everything
332. 01:16:14 we'll get there we'll get you there all right let's let's go into part six here which is execute I'm just going to say I didn't care for this section yep really at all it doesn't look like you cared for it either I felt like this particular arena I felt like had potential to be kind of a big deal and I left this with the sense that he's trying to mash up a bunch of productivity tools
333. 01:16:43 and tips and tricks like that's pretty much the entire section there yep I have this as a note if you ever wanted to mash up of all the major productivity books out there this is it like that that's exactly what I felt like especially in this section is that he's basically reiterating GTD he's reiterating things like the 12 week year to an extent he reiterates a bunch of these systems
334. 01:17:07 and kind of jams them all together and doesn't really give anybody credit for their own thing so yes if I have a hit on this book that's it is you know you've got a bunch of stuff here that I feel like you should have attributed to other people and he seems to have passed it off as his own thing
335. 01:17:26 and that bugged me a lot yep I wrote down the section on big rocks but no credit to Covey right and that's that's just one one example in my opinion by trying to mash together like everything that he's ever heard about productivity into this section
336. 01:17:44 what it leaves you with is this sense of like ugh I can never do this like it's way too complicated right I would have much rather he distill this down into a couple points and he kind of did that you know he's got the pod analogy at the top or acrostic whatever plan organize and do
337. 01:18:03 but then from there like it quickly goes off the rails just as an example like he tries to be all things to all people at this section he talks about managing email and the workflow and he's got this big idea of touch at once which I completely agree with
338. 01:18:16 and then he kind of ends the chapter by saying sometimes a two minute rule doesn't work in my note there is like well what do I do then like you just told me do this but it's not always going to work right and then you're just like oh well why should I do that then
339. 01:18:29 so I think we're in agreement although there are a lot of good things in this chapter I think if you're new to it which is what he's positioned this book as is it's it's a book for people who are new to productivity
340. 01:18:43 I think that section's hard that's a tough one and it's like here do this and do that and do this and do this and there's not really any why behind why do those things work the way they do and I kept hoping he would tie it back to the Bible in some way and he didn't
341. 01:18:58 so that that particular section I really struggled with it so yeah I'm glad he didn't end on that one you know he's got these different sections based on the the dare thing that he comes up with at the very beginning but I kind of feel like if you would have ended the book before he even went into dare it would have been a lot better
342. 01:19:17 fair enough all right last part living this out the four dimensions of productivity and the overarching mission and I'll let you explain the dimensions piece but the mission part I think we've gone over this a lot at this point it's like your mission is something that's and I've got this as a quote to your mission is discovered not chosen
343. 01:19:40 I wrote that down simply because so much of this book ties into the biblical mission of helping other people doing good for other people making disciples and carrying out that mission that Christ gave us that the way that you actually enact that and live that out is going to be unique to you
344. 01:20:00 and the best way to determine what those things are and to actually be productive is get off your tail and get to work and don't dislike don't spend tons of time trying to figure out what you should be doing just get to work if you're doing good keep going
345. 01:20:15 like that's that was one of the big takeaways I had
346. 01:20:18 yep I completely agree with that and I really like the emphasis of this section on like the greatest cause in the world the great commission finding the need of meeting it there's a couple couple things here though like he talks really the purpose of this section is to get you to think
347. 01:20:35 bigger but he kind of focuses it on at the end an organization and kind of the thing that he is really invested in which is great like go ahead pick your cause but again I have a nitpick here because I believe that the best thing you can do is not join a cause but build the local church I mean the local church is God's baby
348. 01:20:57 and so to say like yeah you gotta be focusing on organizations and society going back to like the four dimensions of productivity which I've got another minor rant there but you know the organizations and society like it shouldn't be some organization that you read about in a book that you're going to all of a sudden start giving to you if you're going to pick one thing to start giving to you it's gotta be the local church that's God's baby
349. 01:21:20 and so I didn't really like that part but then also going back to the four dimensions of productivity like he's got a distinction here between personal life and work life when I read that I was like you gotta be kidding me I actually wrote in my notes like what happened to do all for the glory of God there is no personal versus work there's like your life and you have to manage this then you can think bigger about organizations and society but I just really rubbed me wrong when I when he broke those two apart at that point cause I was like okay
350. 01:21:49 okay so what is it just felt kind of contradictory you know I'm having to go back and reconcile everything that I'm reading in this book and then it's almost like he wrote it at a different time and he had a different revelations at different points and he's when he was writing it but this one in particular just was like you know this doesn't make any sense given all the verses that you shared in the first part of the book but doing all for the glory of God like I could see you saying like everything that you are doing personally
351. 01:22:18 your individual life maybe that's the way I would have preferred he broke this down his individual organizations and society just three dimensions of productivity does that make sense or am I just being a jerk no I don't think you're being a jerk I think when he starts trying to spell out the two different arenas it gets complicated and quick and I can't say that I had the same guttural reaction that you did but I knew that something didn't quite feel right so I'm glad that you said something
352. 01:22:47 okay so thank you yeah and I guess you know if you were to put them in a particular order like yeah you gotta do you do have to take care of your personal stuff before your your work stuff but I just think that there really isn't a distinction there it's an artificial distinction and to view it that way is dangerous so overall is there anything else on the book as a whole that you want to go over we've spent quite a bit of time on it yeah so general thoughts this isn't really a a
353. 01:23:17 big deal but this is a gospel driven productivity book so there's lots of quoting people but lots of just referring to bible passages and I think it would have been a lot stronger if the scripture is that he's referring to would have been explicit in the book itself and you could say well that would have added a lot of length to the book but I feel like this is a paraphrasing of Scott Belsky David Allen Peter Drucker and Jonathan Edwards anyways
354. 01:23:47 so like I put what's new here not 324 pages yeah so if I would have flipped those two those two around I don't really care what what men say I care what God says especially if I'm picking up a book like this so action items I've got three I'm gonna go through two and then I'll come back to three after you've done yours okay is that fair yep so number one I want to reevaluate my personal mission statement I have one currently I'm not super happy with it.
355. 01:24:17 But I want to reevaluate that so that is on my to do list that is number one number two I mentioned it earlier I want to write out my life goals in that kind of plays into like three five ten year goals of some sort like that's what I mean by that just because I don't have clear focus at those levels and it would really help to have that to your point and the the classic quote of you know the plan isn't really worth anything but the process of planning is everything.
356. 01:24:47 So that's exactly what I want to go through so those are the two that I'll talk about right now that I want to do.
357. 01:24:53 All right yeah so I've got a couple that I want to implement right away planning the weeks at 75% I really liked that idea I think that makes a lot of sense and I think I've got the structure in place that I am able to do that.
358. 01:25:05 Another one I wrote down was give more than you get and this is a principle that I stole from a friend of mine Brandon Wentlan who is the president of optimal digital marketing here in Appleton Wisconsin.
359. 01:25:15 He's in my mastermind group and he's the one who told me about that unique ability stuff he has this quote that pops up in there they're slack it's the optimal slack and then it says give more than we get I think that's a really powerful principle and I think that it really is at the heart of gospel
360. 01:25:30 different productivity and being others focused and then the other one I've got on here which is long term because I really have no idea how I'm going to make this work but I really like the idea of a sabbatical.
361. 01:25:41 I'm not in a position right now in anything that I'm doing where I can just take off an extended period of time but I'm going to be looking for an opportunity to do that I think because everybody that I know who's done this has said like it's the best thing they've ever done.
362. 01:25:56 Sean McCabe who is the guy behind Sean West talks about this all the time Sean Blanks talked about it I just really like this idea and I feel like I've got to give it a shot at some point I just have no idea when that's going to happen.
363. 01:26:08 Yeah that sounds glorious. Okay so the last action item that I have is readjusting my online presence and the one thing that I didn't bring up earlier that I wanted to come back to was that working in productivity and writing for productivity.
364. 01:26:26 I have always tried to not let my faith be the driver for a lot of that because I wanted to use that platform to reach pretty much anyone.
365. 01:26:39 I wanted it to be approachable to anyone so that it could eventually lead to some relationships and maybe my faith would be able to have an impact on someone through those relationships like that's been a lot of my view towards my online audience and I think that because of that
366. 01:26:54 it's kind of a secular view of productivity because of that and because it's been such a long time that I've been doing it that way.
367. 01:27:02 There's so much of that space that is so focused on me and my projects and it has a strong focus on taking care of yourself and it struck me when I read this book that that's not the point and I'm coming at this completely wrong because if I'm not coming at this from a biblical stance
368. 01:27:21 and I'm not coming at productivity from the Bible's viewpoint, then I have no other viewpoint other than my own personal mental state to come at it from.
369. 01:27:30 I think that's led me to a very negative headspace, at least my own perspective of that.
370. 01:27:35 I think that's where I've landed on it and I don't like it.
371. 01:27:38 So as a result of reading this, I kind of want to shift and come at this when I'm writing about productivity or I'm writing about some tip or trick or whatever it is I'm doing.
372. 01:27:51 I'm going to do my best not to filter it like I have in the past and we'll see where that lands, how that all plays out.
373. 01:27:59 It might be offensive for some, I'm not going to apologize for that, but this is something that I want to start shifting to and because I've been on it so long in the other way, this might be extremely difficult and long drawn out trying to get there.
374. 01:28:14 So that's what I know. I'm going to give it a shot. We'll see how it turns out.
375. 01:28:18 Well, I can tell you from my experience because I went through and wrote the book before I really got plugged into the productivity space, so my journey is a little bit different.
376. 01:28:31 But from the very beginning, I've basically been very explicit about my beliefs.
377. 01:28:38 I can't think of a single time that I've had a negative response to that. I've had a lot of people who have responded positively by saying, you know, thanks for speaking up, but I think the real key to this is to just be authentic.
378. 01:28:51 You're not preaching, you're sharing your experience and your experience is influenced by your beliefs and the things that have happened to you.
379. 01:28:59 And I don't think you have to apologize for talking about your testimony in essence, your message.
380. 01:29:06 This is my personal experience. Nobody can disagree with that.
381. 01:29:09 Thanks for that.
382. 01:29:11 For sure.
383. 01:29:12 All right. So let's wrap things up. It's an author's style and rating.
384. 01:29:16 So I will agree with you on that.
385. 01:29:19 I didn't want to see tons of quotes.
386. 01:29:22 I felt like I was reading a mashup and a reiteration of a lot of things.
387. 01:29:27 There are a number of original points within that, I think.
388. 01:29:31 But I really struggled with the high volume of quotes specifically from like three or four men that he looks up to and loves.
389. 01:29:43 It seems like if you go read those guys, like if you read their books, you get a lot of what he has here.
390. 01:29:49 I think when it comes to a rating, if I had stopped about maybe a third to half of the way through this,
391. 01:29:59 I was pretty jazzed up on it at that point and really liked the first third.
392. 01:30:05 And if I had stopped there, I would probably put it at a four and a half, at least.
393. 01:30:10 I would maybe struggle with putting that five-o on it at that point.
394. 01:30:15 But as the book continued, the more frustrated with it I got.
395. 01:30:19 And I felt like it really fell on its face for a while because of the constant reiteration and the speed with which he tries to jam a bunch of stuff in there.
396. 01:30:31 So I left having a very bad taste in my mouth at the end of all that.
397. 01:30:35 So therefore, I am very conflicted as to how to rate this thing.
398. 01:30:39 So I'm going to land on a three and a half for this purely because I really liked the end and I really hated the beginning and I really hated a lot of the end.
399. 01:30:50 And really wish he had left a lot of it out and just ended it after roughly half way through.
400. 01:30:56 So three and a half is where I'm going to land.
401. 01:30:59 So I don't want to make it sound like I absolutely hated this book because I think I've talked a lot of talk fairly negatively about several things that I've disagreed with here.
402. 01:31:11 I'm glad that it's written.
403. 01:31:12 I'm glad that it's been as successful as it has been.
404. 01:31:16 I really think that the idea of gospel-driven productivity is really, really important, obviously like I said, because I wrote a book on the topic also.
405. 01:31:23 And my book, if I were to go back and look at my book, I'm sure I would not rate it very highly at this point either.
406. 01:31:31 So I also want to frame this as like I'm not comparing this to my book.
407. 01:31:35 I am reacting to the things that were taught and presented in this book.
408. 01:31:41 But there's a bunch of things in here that I didn't like.
409. 01:31:44 I feel like the gospel-driven productivity stuff is great.
410. 01:31:48 And then when you get into the practical stuff, it kind of is like backseat.
411. 01:31:52 Even in the time map that he shares because he shows how he mapped out his whole schedule.
412. 01:31:57 Like he's got on there church on Sunday mornings and then dinner time with family time like every evening from five to nine.
413. 01:32:05 I'm looking at that and I'm like, "Wow, that would be cool."
414. 01:32:08 But I'm at church almost every night.
415. 01:32:10 And I'm not saying that to say like, "Well, I'm more spiritual or anything like that."
416. 01:32:14 But I just think like there's the general tone of this book is like, "Well, you can check the spiritual box and then you can go about your day."
417. 01:32:21 And I really don't think that that's true.
418. 01:32:23 I also think that there's some stuff in here that's not consistent.
419. 01:32:28 He got one of my favorite passages.
420. 01:32:31 Like he didn't read it and check it against what the passage actually said.
421. 01:32:35 I'm going to have to go three stars.
422. 01:32:37 So we got a three and a three and a half.
423. 01:32:39 It kind of was hoping for more.
424. 01:32:41 Which is a bit surprising.
425. 01:32:42 You know, when I dove into this, I was like, "Oh man, this is going to be a good book."
426. 01:32:48 And then felt like it just kind of went downhill from there, unfortunately.
427. 01:32:52 Yeah.
428. 01:32:53 It happens.
429. 01:32:54 It's the life of reading books.
430. 01:32:55 All right.
431. 01:32:56 You're up next.
432. 01:32:57 What's our next book, Mike?
433. 01:32:58 All right.
434. 01:32:59 So the next book is a listener recommendation, which I have right here.
435. 01:33:01 And it is Busy by Tony Crab.
436. 01:33:04 And I have not started this one yet.
437. 01:33:07 But it is also not nearly as big as paid to think.
438. 01:33:10 So we will be able to get it done by next time.
439. 01:33:13 Fair point.
440. 01:33:16 I'm interested in that one.
441. 01:33:18 It's interesting how we are hitting that one immediately after what's best next.
442. 01:33:23 So curious how that's going to play out.
443. 01:33:25 I have a listener recommendation following that one.
444. 01:33:27 The three big questions for a frantic family by Patrick Lincioni.
445. 01:33:31 I believe this is the first time we're doing a repeat author.
446. 01:33:35 Is that true?
447. 01:33:37 I think this is the first time we're reading a book by an author we've read before.
448. 01:33:42 So kudos to your wife, Mike, for recommending this one.
449. 01:33:46 So thanks, Rachel.
450. 01:33:48 We'll jump into it after Busy.
451. 01:33:50 Yep.
452. 01:33:51 And then for gap books, I've got unique ability 2.0 by a strategic coach, which I mentioned.
453. 01:33:56 This is a book which is accompanied by a workbook.
454. 01:34:00 And there's a couple different paths that you can take.
455. 01:34:02 But the essence is discovering your unique ability.
456. 01:34:05 So the thing that only you are really, really good at.
457. 01:34:09 And then the idea being that if you can identify your unique ability, that's going to be the thing
458. 01:34:16 that is going to be valuable to the marketplace.
459. 01:34:18 And so strategic coach is a company that's built on the idea.
460. 01:34:22 It's one of those masterminds.
461. 01:34:23 You pay like, I forget, 20 grand or something to join it for the year.
462. 01:34:27 And then you go quarterly to Toronto, meet with Dan Solvin and all these other entrepreneurs,
463. 01:34:32 CEOs, and everybody there has bought into this idea.
464. 01:34:36 And everybody there is coming into that space with the same growth mindset.
465. 01:34:40 And so I know people who are involved in that.
466. 01:34:44 And they've talked about how they've just been able to grow a ton, both personally and also
467. 01:34:49 their business, by investing in something like that.
468. 01:34:52 So you don't have to pay a bunch of money to get unique ability 2.0.
469. 01:34:57 You can buy this off of Amazon if you're interested in it.
470. 01:34:59 I'm actually going through a couple gap books right now.
471. 01:35:03 Which is the inevitable by Kevin Kelly, understanding the 12 technological forces that will shape
472. 01:35:08 our future.
473. 01:35:09 Basically, what are the philosophical ideas that shape and lead our devices and the internet
474. 01:35:16 to what it will be in the future?
475. 01:35:18 Very interesting.
476. 01:35:19 So anyway, that's one of them that I'm going through.
477. 01:35:21 The other, I will probably talk about a little bit in the upcoming episode, probably the next
478. 01:35:26 two, because I'm going to be taking a little more time to read this one.
479. 01:35:29 So I'm doing two of them at once.
480. 01:35:31 I'm actually by Matt Perman that we just finished going over with What's Best Next.
481. 01:35:35 He has a new one coming out, How to Get Unstuck.
482. 01:35:38 And on a whim, I filled out his form for the pre-launch team and somehow got in.
483. 01:35:46 So I actually have an advanced reader copy of this.
484. 01:35:49 This book is not out yet.
485. 01:35:50 So that's kind of a new world to dive into.
486. 01:35:53 So yes, I'm interested in that one as well.
487. 01:35:56 I'm hoping that he's learned more about how to write a book since the last time he wrote
488. 01:36:01 it.
489. 01:36:02 That's my hope.
490. 01:36:03 So yes, those are the two I'm working in.
491. 01:36:04 Nice.
492. 01:36:05 And as Joe mentioned, the next two books that we're doing are listener recommendations.
493. 01:36:10 If you want to recommend a book, you can do that by going to bookworm.fm/list.
494. 01:36:17 And there will be a big button to recommend a book and you'll also see a list of all of
495. 01:36:21 the books that are planned and the ones that are currently recommended.
496. 01:36:25 And even all the ones that are completed, so links to all the previous episodes and also
497. 01:36:30 links to buy the books on Amazon.
498. 01:36:32 So if you want to help us out, you can buy using those affiliate links and we get a little
499. 01:36:38 bit from your purchase if you're going to read the book anyway.
500. 01:36:41 So thanks in advance for doing that.
501. 01:36:42 If you want to help out another way, you can do that with an iTunes review, link in the
502. 01:36:47 show notes that will help out tremendously.
503. 01:36:49 I think Mike, are we still after KCRW?
504. 01:36:51 Oh, yeah.
505. 01:36:52 Is that still a campaign for sure?
506. 01:36:53 You're wanting to promote?
507. 01:36:54 Yep.
508. 01:36:54 Okay.
509. 01:36:55 All right.
510. 01:36:56 So we're trying to be KCRW in the podcast list when you search for bookworm.
511. 01:36:59 Help us out, please.
512. 01:37:01 I did.
513. 01:37:03 And I think you kind of alluded to this.
514. 01:37:04 I had someone email me saying, "Hey, you put the books coming up next on your booklist,
515. 01:37:12 but you don't put the Amazon links there so that we can help you out through those."
516. 01:37:17 And it was kind of a duh moment for me.
517. 01:37:19 So I did redesign slightly the booklist at bookworm.fm/list.
518. 01:37:26 So you can go out and check that.
519. 01:37:27 The upcoming books are listed first, followed by the recommendations and then the ones we've
520. 01:37:32 completed are down below those.
521. 01:37:33 But we have the Amazon links for absolutely all of them now, not just the ones that we've
522. 01:37:38 completed.
523. 01:37:40 So if you're looking for any of these books or you're going to buy something from Amazon,
524. 01:37:44 we would love it if you'd use those links.
525. 01:37:46 It would really help us out, help pay for some of the hosting and give us a little bit
526. 01:37:49 of a kickback.
527. 01:37:50 So that's how you could help us.
528. 01:37:52 All right.
529. 01:37:53 So thanks everybody for joining us and we'll see you next time.