46: Busy by Tony Crabbe

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1. 00:00:00 I feel like we have a lot of follow up.
2. 00:00:01 We do just wait till next time.
3. 00:00:03 There's going to be even more.
4. 00:00:04 Oh, good.
5. 00:00:06 Yeah, I was looking towards the end of this outline and looking at the action items
6. 00:00:11 for the end of this show.
7. 00:00:13 And okay, we may need to hustle through the book part because we've got a lot of
8. 00:00:17 follow up.
9. 00:00:17 We've got a lot of action at the end.
10. 00:00:19 So we'll see how this actually lands.
11. 00:00:21 Sure.
12. 00:00:21 Uh, I'll go first here.
13. 00:00:22 I have three and I think I've only really touched one.
14. 00:00:27 So I am going to need to carry this over.
15. 00:00:30 And number one was reevaluate my mission statement.
16. 00:00:34 And to be honest with you, I really didn't get that done at all because I got caught
17. 00:00:39 up in a whole process of reevaluating a mission statement for one of my websites.
18. 00:00:43 So I didn't get my personal one done, but I've been working on mission statements a
19. 00:00:48 lot lately.
20. 00:00:48 So kind of the way it works.
21. 00:00:51 So that one I haven't touched at all.
22. 00:00:54 Sad day.
23. 00:00:56 All right.
24. 00:00:57 So what about the second one, readjusting your online presence?
25. 00:00:59 I assume these are related.
26. 00:01:00 So I'm kind of curious.
27. 00:01:02 Yeah.
28. 00:01:03 To a point, I was making this adjustment about being more open about my faith online.
29. 00:01:09 And this one, I don't know that you can say is ever really done, but at the same
30. 00:01:14 time, the mindset has been shifted.
31. 00:01:16 So I'm going to say this one's in good shape, but I haven't spent in a place where
32. 00:01:21 it's really become anything significantly different for what I normally do online.
33. 00:01:26 So I can't say that there's anything you can go look at to say this is done, but
34. 00:01:31 the mindset shift has definitely been adjusted.
35. 00:01:34 So I don't know what to say on that one other than it's on its way.
36. 00:01:38 So I'm going to say it's in good shape.
37. 00:01:40 I think you could check that one off, to be honest, as long as the mindset shift is
38. 00:01:43 has happened, then I think that's really all you need for a quote, unquote definition
39. 00:01:49 of done.
40. 00:01:50 I think that when it comes to your mission or really just anything that you throw out
41. 00:01:56 publicly, the only thing you can do is really be authentic from where you are right now.
42. 00:02:02 And I look back at some of the stuff that I wrote or created and I'm like, man, what
43. 00:02:07 was I thinking?
44. 00:02:07 But it's okay.
45. 00:02:10 Like it doesn't really bother me like I thought it would because I have this
46. 00:02:14 obsession, I guess, with being correct and not wanting to be wrong or share wrong
47. 00:02:19 information.
48. 00:02:19 And I think I've talked on this podcast for a long time that meant that like I like to
49. 00:02:24 write songs and in particular worship songs that we sing a couple of them at my
50. 00:02:28 church and for a long time, I didn't write anything because I didn't want to be
51. 00:02:30 theologically incorrect.
52. 00:02:31 And I realized finally that like that doesn't really matter.
53. 00:02:34 But trying to not make a mistake, you're getting away from the whole heart of it in
54. 00:02:38 the first place, which is just worship is supposed to be like coming out of your heart.
55. 00:02:42 It's supposed to be a reflection of who you are and your attitude towards something.
56. 00:02:46 And I was so paralyzed by not wanting to be wrong that really I was wrong because I
57. 00:02:51 wasn't being authentic.
58. 00:02:52 I think that there's a very important distinction between practicing what you preach and preaching
59. 00:02:57 what you practice, practicing what you preach.
60. 00:02:59 You know, you throw something out there and then you try to live up to it.
61. 00:03:03 But when you are preaching what you practice, like you establish the habits and it's things
62. 00:03:07 that you do consistently.
63. 00:03:08 And then that's what you write about.
64. 00:03:10 That's what you talk about.
65. 00:03:12 That's what you create.
66. 00:03:13 Like that's there's authenticity in that that people can see, which is important because
67. 00:03:17 if you're not authentic, you're going to lose credibility in the eyes of other people.
68. 00:03:21 But more importantly, you're going to lose credibility in your own eyes and you're going to say,
69. 00:03:24 "Well, I don't do what I say I do.
70. 00:03:26 So what's the point?"
71. 00:03:26 I think my action item just struck a chord with Mike.
72. 00:03:30 Yeah, it's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately.
73. 00:03:34 That's fair.
74. 00:03:35 That's fair.
75. 00:03:35 It's good to hear that we're kind of on the same path here.
76. 00:03:39 Hopefully you're encouraged by that though.
77. 00:03:41 Yeah.
78. 00:03:41 I mean, like it's not something that like you have to dot all the eyes and cross all the
79. 00:03:45 teas and then you're like, "Okay, finally my mission is now ready."
80. 00:03:48 Right.
81. 00:03:48 Like you are who you are and as long as you are who you are and you're not trying to be
82. 00:03:52 something that you're not, then you've succeeded.
83. 00:03:55 I like it.
84. 00:03:55 Last one here, write out my life goals.
85. 00:03:58 I thought about it once.
86. 00:04:00 That doesn't count.
87. 00:04:02 No, probably not.
88. 00:04:04 I'm going to let that one carry over.
89. 00:04:07 So not shooting too good here.
90. 00:04:08 I'm 33% on my action items from last round.
91. 00:04:13 So sad day, but we'll talk about them again next time, which means that next rounds follow-up
92. 00:04:18 for action items is going to be where it's outside like 45 minutes just to talk action items next time.
93. 00:04:24 We may have to have a B-sides just for our action items.
94. 00:04:26 I know.
95. 00:04:27 I know.
96. 00:04:27 Though we are coming up on number 50.
97. 00:04:29 So that's true.
98. 00:04:31 We're going to have to do something special for number 50, I think.
99. 00:04:33 Yeah, I'll have to have a thought about that.
100. 00:04:35 Just one thought.
101. 00:04:36 It's only four episodes away.
102. 00:04:37 Crazy.
103. 00:04:38 Just you only get one thought about it.
104. 00:04:39 Okay.
105. 00:04:40 Just one.
106. 00:04:40 All right, your turn.
107. 00:04:41 All right.
108. 00:04:42 So all of these, I was nervous about you putting these on.
109. 00:04:46 I'm like, how are we going to talk about these?
110. 00:04:48 But that's par for the course, I guess, at this point.
111. 00:04:50 Yep.
112. 00:04:50 So the long term one, which is kind of the one that I was hoping wouldn't get on here,
113. 00:04:54 because I have nothing to share with this.
114. 00:04:56 You realize I just copy paste, right?
115. 00:04:58 Yep.
116. 00:04:58 Like I just pulled the action items off last time and paste them in at the follow-up for the next.
117. 00:05:02 You're aware of this.
118. 00:05:03 Yeah.
119. 00:05:03 Yeah.
120. 00:05:05 Typos and everything.
121. 00:05:06 It all comes across.
122. 00:05:07 I don't know.
123. 00:05:08 I guess I kind of was hoping in the back of my mind you'd miss one, but
124. 00:05:11 oh well.
125. 00:05:12 So yeah, the long term planning is a bad deal.
126. 00:05:15 I don't have any progress with this.
127. 00:05:16 I really don't know when this is going to happen, how it's going to happen.
128. 00:05:20 I also right now don't really want it to happen any time soon, because I just went through
129. 00:05:27 reevaluating everything that I'm committed to.
130. 00:05:30 And I love all the stuff I get to do.
131. 00:05:33 So having to take a break from it seems kind of weird.
132. 00:05:37 But anyways, it'll happen at some point.
133. 00:05:40 Long term follow-up.
134. 00:05:41 Okay.
135. 00:05:41 Just like my office.
136. 00:05:42 Yes.
137. 00:05:43 Second one, plan weeks at 75%.
138. 00:05:46 I don't have a percentage, but I feel like I've done a pretty good job of this.
139. 00:05:49 And the way that I've implemented this is shared with you the Dominate Your Day template that I
140. 00:05:54 created.
141. 00:05:54 It's kind of the Cal Newport manual time blocking.
142. 00:05:58 And I've been breaking down my time throughout the day based on one hour time blocks and overestimating.
143. 00:06:05 So I have found that my most important test of things I put on that list that like I really
144. 00:06:10 want to get these done.
145. 00:06:11 And even the things that I'm like, it'd be awesome today if this happened.
146. 00:06:14 I've consistently been hitting all of those and not really being stressed out about it.
147. 00:06:20 Nice.
148. 00:06:20 Like I haven't felt a quote unquote time crunch.
149. 00:06:23 So I feel like I'm doing pretty good at this.
150. 00:06:25 I think if I need to dial it back and get close to that 75% would be where I have things on there
151. 00:06:30 that I'm just not able to complete.
152. 00:06:31 We can revisit that.
153. 00:06:32 It's probably worth revisiting maybe a couple months down the road to see if it's still
154. 00:06:38 still working because I don't really have a firm structure around that 75% how to implement that.
155. 00:06:43 Just because I don't know.
156. 00:06:45 I mean, I guess I could look at every single task and say, well, this should take an hour,
157. 00:06:48 but I'm in a budget too.
158. 00:06:49 So that's 50%.
159. 00:06:50 But that just seems like way more work than it's worth.
160. 00:06:53 I'm happy to know that 80/20.
161. 00:06:57 That sounds like a terrible idea.
162. 00:06:58 Yeah, exactly.
163. 00:06:58 Next one, give more than you get.
164. 00:07:01 I think that I've made the mindset shift here also and really it's not even a mindset change.
165. 00:07:09 It's more so just reinforcing something that I've believed for a long time,
166. 00:07:14 but I've tried to be more conscious about it.
167. 00:07:17 And there's, I'm recognizing that there are a lot of really small opportunities for this,
168. 00:07:22 which if you don't approach it through this lens, it's really easy to miss.
169. 00:07:27 So for example, I mean, this is a really, really minor example,
170. 00:07:30 but I was on Mac Power users a couple of weeks ago and have had quite a few people who have
171. 00:07:37 reached out to me via email after that.
172. 00:07:40 And one guy in particular is like, I almost spit out my water when I heard you say you were an
173. 00:07:45 Appleton.
174. 00:07:46 So like, I couldn't believe there was somebody else in Appleton.
175. 00:07:49 So I actually met him for coffee this morning.
176. 00:07:52 First time I met the guy, we don't really know each other and other than via email.
177. 00:07:57 And so what's standard protocol in that situation?
178. 00:08:00 Like, you just buy your drink, you go sit down, you talk, whatever.
179. 00:08:02 I just bought the guy coffee.
180. 00:08:04 You know, it cost me a couple bucks, but who cares?
181. 00:08:06 You know, and he made a comment.
182. 00:08:07 He's like, oh, I didn't know I was going to get free coffee.
183. 00:08:09 Like, that's cool.
184. 00:08:10 You know, like, I was able to, I was able to give and it cost me really nothing.
185. 00:08:15 You know?
186. 00:08:15 Those are cool.
187. 00:08:16 I think those instances are really fun.
188. 00:08:18 I used to be extremely cautious about meeting people that I met online and I don't really know why.
189. 00:08:25 And anymore, I feel like I'm doing that a fair amount.
190. 00:08:29 Like, it seems like about every four or six weeks I'm meeting up with somebody that I have no idea who they are.
191. 00:08:34 I don't know if that's a factor of me just doing client work or what that is.
192. 00:08:38 So first time I think I've done it and yeah, it was pretty cool.
193. 00:08:42 And I guess just a shout out to the Mac community in general.
194. 00:08:47 Like, I don't think I've met a single person from the Mac community who has turned out to be a jerk.
195. 00:08:51 In all my experience, and I drove down to Mac stock that one year just to see what it was like.
196. 00:08:57 And I didn't know anybody there.
197. 00:08:59 And a lot of the people that were there were like, they brought their Apple user groups and stuff.
198. 00:09:02 And Dave Ginsburg, I know, is the suburban Chicago Apple users group.
199. 00:09:06 I met him that first time I was down there.
200. 00:09:08 I sat and ate lunch with those guys.
201. 00:09:09 And they were just like completely welcoming.
202. 00:09:11 And I don't know, we bonded over nerd stuff.
203. 00:09:14 But like, it's cool because it's not that way in a lot of other places.
204. 00:09:20 And so, I don't know, I guess being that this was a guy who listened to Mac Power users.
205. 00:09:25 It's just another example of like these people tend to be really welcoming, really, really fun,
206. 00:09:31 really just open people.
207. 00:09:32 And so, I can't speak highly enough of the Mac community.
208. 00:09:35 And you should come to Mac stock if you're listening to this right now and use Apple devices at all.
209. 00:09:40 Yes, absolutely.
210. 00:09:41 And then you get to meet these really nice people.
211. 00:09:43 Like, for example, our friend who did the whole rating with the spreadsheets in bit,
212. 00:09:48 because they showed us that we had a missed rating for Monk and the Merchant.
213. 00:09:52 And I went back and I listened to the end of that episode and realized we did rate it.
214. 00:09:56 I just failed to get it on the website.
215. 00:09:58 So, we did rate it.
216. 00:10:00 And it is out there.
217. 00:10:02 So, there you go.
218. 00:10:04 So, I filled in the gap.
219. 00:10:05 So, we do just have the one episode we didn't rate.
220. 00:10:08 But other than that, they are all there.
221. 00:10:10 And then in other news, I think this is probably a big one.
222. 00:10:14 Is this a big one?
223. 00:10:15 I think this is a big one.
224. 00:10:16 It could potentially be a big one, which makes me a little bit nervous.
225. 00:10:19 But yes. So, last night, I got kind of a hair-brained idea.
226. 00:10:24 And I texted Mike and said, "Here's what I'm thinking.
227. 00:10:28 You cool with that?"
228. 00:10:29 And he said, "Sure."
229. 00:10:31 So then this morning, I put that thing in place and built it.
230. 00:10:37 And it now exists.
231. 00:10:38 We've played around with this concept a few times, I think.
232. 00:10:42 But we are introducing the Bookworm Club.
233. 00:10:46 And this lives at club.bookworm.fm.
234. 00:10:50 This is nothing less than a discourse community
235. 00:10:53 to jump in and have conversations about the episodes that we record and release.
236. 00:10:59 So, each of the books that we read, there is now a conversation dedicated to them.
237. 00:11:04 They did exist technically before on the productivity guild.
238. 00:11:09 But it just never really felt like it was cohesive.
239. 00:11:12 And basically what I did was I took that category from the guild,
240. 00:11:17 exported it, created a whole community around that one.
241. 00:11:20 So now it has its own, but then those also get to be comments underneath of the episodes themselves
242. 00:11:27 on the Bookworm.fm site.
243. 00:11:29 So, any of the episodes that you go to at Bookworm.fm,
244. 00:11:33 you'll see down at the bottom of those where you can have the conversations about those episodes.
245. 00:11:38 And it all revolves around this Bookworm Club site.
246. 00:11:41 And again, it's club.bookworm.fm.
247. 00:11:43 So, if you're interested in having a chat about these episodes, you can check us out there as well.
248. 00:11:48 And I would imagine this is going to end up being part of our end of episode spiel now.
249. 00:11:53 That would be the appropriate way to handle this.
250. 00:11:55 Yep. I would assume so.
251. 00:11:58 The thing that makes me a little bit nervous about this is just that I am pretty bad at checking comments on things.
252. 00:12:04 But I have pinned this tab, so hopefully I will look at it every day and just see what's new.
253. 00:12:10 But I think that this is a really cool idea and a really valuable resource for people who
254. 00:12:18 listen to Bookworm because they maybe don't want to read the whole book.
255. 00:12:22 They just want to hear us distill it.
256. 00:12:24 I think that that probably wasn't the original intention behind the podcast when we launched it.
257. 00:12:30 But I've talked to several people now who that's kind of what they do is they use this as their
258. 00:12:33 vetting source for books.
259. 00:12:35 And I think that anytime that you can have any sort of discussion about what you're reading,
260. 00:12:39 it helps solidify it in your own mind.
261. 00:12:41 So I've noticed even we'll get on the mic and we'll start talking about a particular book that we read.
262. 00:12:47 And I'll have a certain opinion and then I'll hear you talk about stuff and I'll think through
263. 00:12:52 things and be like, "Oh, well, actually, Joe's got a good point.
264. 00:12:54 Yeah, I guess maybe I was off in this particular area."
265. 00:12:57 So even while we've been recording, my opinion and rating of books have changed just as I talk through things.
266. 00:13:04 So I think it's cool that listeners can do that as well now too.
267. 00:13:08 I don't think there's any coincidence that we don't put...
268. 00:13:11 It's obvious we work off of an outline whenever we're recording and we always put the ratings
269. 00:13:17 bit at the bottom of that outline, but neither one of us ever fill in what our rating is until we get there.
270. 00:13:22 So it's always this surprise of even for us of what is this rating going to be because
271. 00:13:28 the conversation of getting there.
272. 00:13:30 Like right now, I have a feeling of where I'm going to rate today's book,
273. 00:13:34 but I would imagine by the time we get there that ratings changed.
274. 00:13:38 So I don't know if that's good or bad.
275. 00:13:40 Yep.
276. 00:13:40 But I think you made a good point here that we've learned a lot of people listen to bookworm
277. 00:13:46 to get a good overview of a book to help them to decide if they're going to read a book or not.
278. 00:13:51 Or sometimes they use it as a way to understand a book in and of itself with no plan to read it.
279. 00:13:57 So my thought on developing this club and this community is, you know, we talk about these books
280. 00:14:04 and sometimes we get questions about those on Twitter or email and sometimes I get the same
281. 00:14:10 questions multiple times and this would be a great way to consolidate all of those.
282. 00:14:15 So if you're listening to us and there's a point that you feel like we didn't clarify or
283. 00:14:21 there's a question about the book itself that you won our thoughts on, this is the one place we would
284. 00:14:27 point you to have that conversation and ask that question.
285. 00:14:32 It's kind of a way to keep it all in one place, if you will.
286. 00:14:34 Yep.
287. 00:14:35 Exactly.
288. 00:14:35 Is it fair to market bookworm now as the Internet's largest book club?
289. 00:14:39 Ooh, that's a good question.
290. 00:14:41 I guess I'll have to see how many people sign up.
291. 00:14:43 I even made it easy.
292. 00:14:46 You can one click sign in with Google or Twitter.
293. 00:14:49 So there you go.
294. 00:14:50 You know why people listen to us instead of reading the books for themselves, Joe?
295. 00:14:53 It's because people are too busy.
296. 00:14:56 See what I did there?
297. 00:14:57 Uh-huh.
298. 00:14:57 Nice.
299. 00:14:58 That's cheesy.
300. 00:14:59 Way to go.
301. 00:15:00 Yeah.
302. 00:15:03 Something else cheesy.
303. 00:15:04 I mean, we were originally set to record this last week, but you texted me and you're like,
304. 00:15:08 "Hey, can we move this?
305. 00:15:09 Because I'm not going to be able to finish the book.
306. 00:15:11 I'm too busy."
307. 00:15:12 Yep.
308. 00:15:12 "Smiley face."
309. 00:15:12 Exactly.
310. 00:15:13 Exactly it.
311. 00:15:14 Yep.
312. 00:15:15 We were going to record this a week ago and it didn't happen because I was busy.
313. 00:15:21 The title of the book for today is, in fact, busy.
314. 00:15:24 The subtitle is "How to Thrive in a World of Too Much" and it's by Tony Crab.
315. 00:15:30 And this is a listener recommendation that I picked up in a bookstore because I saw it
316. 00:15:35 and it looked somewhat interesting and I knew it was a listener recommendation at one point.
317. 00:15:39 So I figured, you know, it's a couple bucks.
318. 00:15:40 I'll just buy it and it's been on my bookshelf for quite a while.
319. 00:15:43 Didn't really know what to expect when we got into it, but I was pretty pleasantly surprised by this one.
320. 00:15:50 I didn't really think a whole lot of it based on the title or the cover,
321. 00:15:54 but you can't judge a book by its cover.
322. 00:15:58 Right.
323. 00:15:58 It turns out right.
324. 00:16:00 One thing really cool about this book, by the way, is right at the beginning and the
325. 00:16:03 preface and then the getting started, it's basically like how to find the time to read this book.
326. 00:16:08 And he's got 10 points here because he knows that what he's speaking to is the thing that can
327. 00:16:14 keep people from actually picking this book up and reading it.
328. 00:16:17 So I thought that was really cool.
329. 00:16:20 It's very meta at the beginning because he is talking about the fact that you picked up a book
330. 00:16:27 about busyness and that's likely because you're busy, but you're too busy to read it.
331. 00:16:33 So it's like the cyclical issue of this will help me overcome my busyness,
332. 00:16:39 but I'm too busy to help me overcome my busyness.
333. 00:16:42 So I did appreciate that he at least addressed that upfront because it was something that
334. 00:16:46 crossed my mind the moment that you mentioned that we were going to jump into this book.
335. 00:16:50 That was the first thing I went through my head is like, well, I feel like this is for an
336. 00:16:53 audience that won't read it.
337. 00:16:54 So very true.
338. 00:16:56 I was grateful he addressed that immediately.
339. 00:16:59 You know, I was talking to this guy at coffee this morning and we were talking about bookworm
340. 00:17:05 and the fact that we read so many books.
341. 00:17:09 And he mentioned to me that he doesn't read a ton of books, but he works in an industry
342. 00:17:14 where there are people who definitely could afford to read a couple books.
343. 00:17:17 And he made the comment something along the lines of like, the people who really need this stuff
344. 00:17:25 don't know that they need this stuff.
345. 00:17:26 And so like you can give them the book even.
346. 00:17:28 They don't have to buy anything.
347. 00:17:30 They don't even have to go to the library and get it.
348. 00:17:32 But they may not get anything from it.
349. 00:17:35 I've been listening to a lot of Jim Rohn stuff on Audible.
350. 00:17:39 He's the guy who mentored Tony Robbins and a lot of the other like big name success people.
351. 00:17:45 But Jim Rohn is really, really grounded and I really, I really like his stuff.
352. 00:17:50 And he's got this thing.
353. 00:17:51 He talks about this, the parable of the sewers, which is a Bible passage.
354. 00:17:55 But the basic idea is that you sow seed and then some of the seed produces a harvest.
355. 00:18:00 Some of it doesn't.
356. 00:18:02 He even uses the example like in the Bible verse it says that the birds come and take
357. 00:18:06 some of the seed.
358. 00:18:06 And he's like, well, at that point you got two choices.
359. 00:18:08 You can leave your field and go chase the birds or you can keep sowing more seed.
360. 00:18:12 And I thought that was really cool because like not all your seed is going to hit the mark.
361. 00:18:17 Not everybody that I give a book, give a copy of the five dysfunctions of a team for example.
362. 00:18:21 Because I buy every copy that I can find and just give it to as many people as I think would
363. 00:18:27 actually benefit from it.
364. 00:18:28 But his point was that if you give something to somebody and they don't do anything with it,
365. 00:18:32 it's not worth questioning why or trying to fix it or getting mad at them because they
366. 00:18:36 didn't do what they were supposed to do.
367. 00:18:38 He just has this phrase in his Jim Rohn inflection, which I can't imitate.
368. 00:18:42 He just goes, isn't that interesting?
369. 00:18:46 Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of, there can be a lot of angst around picking up books because
370. 00:18:52 we have so much going on.
371. 00:18:53 It's very much a cultural norm to have a lot of things moving, which is what we'll get into here.
372. 00:18:59 And whenever I tell people that I read a book a week or close to, that always strikes people as
373. 00:19:07 what?
374. 00:19:08 Like really?
375. 00:19:08 And the assumption is almost like you have no life.
376. 00:19:12 That's almost what you get the sense of.
377. 00:19:16 I can't help but think that people just haven't realized that to get into books,
378. 00:19:24 you build up this ability to read at that level.
379. 00:19:28 You're not going to just decide you're going to read a book a week and start doing that tomorrow.
380. 00:19:32 You're not going to do that, especially if you haven't read a book in its entirety
381. 00:19:36 within a year's span.
382. 00:19:37 I tend to tell people, and we've talked about this before, is find something that you want to
383. 00:19:42 solve.
384. 00:19:42 Like find a problem that you feel like you want to solve and find a book that talks about that.
385. 00:19:46 And that is, I think, one of the easiest ways to get really engaged in a book and to be drawn to
386. 00:19:52 it.
387. 00:19:53 And it makes it an easier read.
388. 00:19:54 And if you do that, then you start to build up over time the more you do that.
389. 00:19:59 You start to build up that endurance and that ability to read at longer levels.
390. 00:20:04 That's a great point.
391. 00:20:05 And I brought that up in my conversation this morning that you should look to read books that
392. 00:20:10 are going to solve a problem that you have.
393. 00:20:12 My friend, Brandon Wentlin, wrote a post on Asian efficiency.
394. 00:20:16 The title of it is, "Let your biggest problems speed up your reading."
395. 00:20:20 When you know that the information that you're about to get is going to solve a very real problem
396. 00:20:24 that you have, then that's going to provide the motivation to actually do it.
397. 00:20:27 For us, with bookworm books specifically, a lot of these self-development books,
398. 00:20:33 these have a lot of times direct application to the stuff that we create, at least for me,
399. 00:20:38 online.
400. 00:20:39 And so it's very easy to see the correlation there.
401. 00:20:42 Whereas if you're in an industry where self-development, maybe there's not such a clear path between
402. 00:20:50 reading these books and becoming the person who is going to be qualified for the position
403. 00:20:55 that you want someday.
404. 00:20:56 If it's not as a direct connection to your ideal future, I can definitely see where it would
405. 00:21:03 be a lot harder to follow through with that.
406. 00:21:05 But this book today can help us understand how to clear some time for it.
407. 00:21:10 So let's jump in here.
408. 00:21:12 Mastery, stop managing your time.
409. 00:21:14 Now I will say this section on stop managing your time.
410. 00:21:18 I really appreciate that because so much of what we've talked about,
411. 00:21:21 we even read a whole book about time management.
412. 00:21:24 The 168 hours, Laura Vanderkamp.
413. 00:21:26 With that, we were talking specifically about how to manage your time to the minute
414. 00:21:33 down, even further depending on how far you want to go.
415. 00:21:35 And he starts this whole thing off by saying, "Don't do that."
416. 00:21:39 So like, "Okay, well, at least we're not pigeonholed into one view of thinking here.
417. 00:21:45 We're at least looking at things that are at opposite ends of the spectrum."
418. 00:21:51 But I don't know.
419. 00:21:52 I really liked this section, mostly because it does help you get away from the strictness,
420. 00:22:00 if you will, of a lot of what we talk about with the productivity world.
421. 00:22:03 Okay, we're not going to go through this whole managing each minute bit.
422. 00:22:08 Like be okay with a little bit of sloppiness, which I was kind of grateful for.
423. 00:22:13 That way people aren't continuing to pound forever efficiency into you.
424. 00:22:17 Yeah, no, I totally agree.
425. 00:22:19 I do a presentation for Asian efficiency where we talk about the three different levels of
426. 00:22:24 productivity or the three different pieces to the productivity puzzle.
427. 00:22:28 Level one is time management.
428. 00:22:30 And I think that this is honestly pretty basic.
429. 00:22:34 If you've never done anything with time management previously,
430. 00:22:37 then yeah, look to manage your time and you'll see some immediate benefit.
431. 00:22:41 But for anybody who's been in this space for any length of time or read any sort of
432. 00:22:46 self development book, like that just gets harder and harder to realize gains from,
433. 00:22:51 because there's always additional things that you can be doing.
434. 00:22:54 So if you're not managing your time and you feel overwhelmed,
435. 00:22:56 yeah, managing your time a little bit more effectively can produce the efficiency that
436. 00:23:01 you need to create some space.
437. 00:23:03 But for everybody who's doing that at some point,
438. 00:23:05 there's a level of diminishing returns.
439. 00:23:07 And so you have to go beyond managing your time at that point,
440. 00:23:12 because everybody's got the same amount.
441. 00:23:14 You can't create more of it.
442. 00:23:16 And he talks about the three reasons why time management doesn't work.
443. 00:23:21 It doesn't help you regain control.
444. 00:23:23 Like I said, it can get you a few more minutes in your day, maybe,
445. 00:23:26 but it doesn't help you regain control of the direction of the day.
446. 00:23:29 Number two, it will not make you happier.
447. 00:23:32 And then number three, it will not make you more effective.
448. 00:23:34 That's really the key.
449. 00:23:36 If you want to be effective, if you really want to take action on the things that are
450. 00:23:39 going to create your ideal future, then a lot of times it's not the fact that you don't have
451. 00:23:43 time to do those things.
452. 00:23:44 It's the fact that you don't have the energy maybe to take action on it,
453. 00:23:48 or you can't focus long enough on something.
454. 00:23:51 You know, we covered deep work.
455. 00:23:53 That's what that book is all about is developing your focus muscles
456. 00:23:56 so that when you've got the time to work on something,
457. 00:23:58 you can create the energy and the motivation.
458. 00:24:00 You've got enough focus muscle that you can laser focus on that thing
459. 00:24:05 that you're supposed to be doing and cut out all the distractions and everything.
460. 00:24:08 And that's really where you see significant progress.
461. 00:24:11 Yes.
462. 00:24:11 Let's just jump into the next one here, churn.
463. 00:24:13 Why don't you explain this one?
464. 00:24:15 This one is related because when it comes to managing your time,
465. 00:24:21 many people will ask simply, in isolation, should I be doing this thing,
466. 00:24:27 or should I not be doing this thing?
467. 00:24:29 And this whole idea of churn here, this is relentless washing machine spin
468. 00:24:36 of gears and concerns.
469. 00:24:38 And he talks about Roy Baumeister, who is the guy who did a lot of the willpower studies.
470. 00:24:47 And in this study, there were three groups, those who were thinking about an exam before
471. 00:24:52 they took it, those who thought about the exam and had a study plan,
472. 00:24:57 and then those who didn't think about the exam at all and instead went to a party.
473. 00:25:03 And this whole idea of churn, this is basically like being worried about the test
474. 00:25:08 even before you would take it, whether or not you're doing anything to prepare for it.
475. 00:25:13 They suffered this idea of churn where it's kind of always in the back of your mind
476. 00:25:18 and you're thinking about these things.
477. 00:25:19 But the ones who had a plan, the ones who wrote down a plan, regardless of what that plan was,
478. 00:25:25 regardless of whether it was any good, it basically gave their brain permission to switch off
479. 00:25:30 and not worry about those things anymore.
480. 00:25:32 So how does this relate to the managing your time and choosing between the different things?
481. 00:25:38 Well, everything that you commit to, everything that you sign up for is going to be demanding
482. 00:25:46 your attention in the back of your mind to some level, whether you realize it or not.
483. 00:25:50 And on page 24, when he's talking about the choices, he mentions that the truth is every
484. 00:25:56 choice has a consequence. Each time you choose something, you un-choose something else.
485. 00:26:00 So when we try to do everything, we are un-choosing things.
486. 00:26:02 When we choose busy, we are un-choosing thinking, creativity, and focused attention.
487. 00:26:07 We are un-choosing quality time, relationships, and the joy of deep engagement.
488. 00:26:11 Instead, we should be consciously and deliberately choosing not to do things,
489. 00:26:14 killing off options in our lives, and work to allow a greater focus on fewer things.
490. 00:26:18 Instead of choosing more, we should choose less instead of gray, we should choose color.
491. 00:26:23 That requires a plan. If you were to write down what are the things that you want to do,
492. 00:26:29 what is your life mission, or bring it back to your action items?
493. 00:26:34 Oh, thanks. Once you have that and you've identified the things that you're going to be doing in any
494. 00:26:39 given day, any given month, every given year, you can then measure those things against what is
495. 00:26:45 your life mission, to be another way to put it. And you can ask yourself, is this moving me closer
496. 00:26:50 to achieving my life mission, or my ideal future, or whatever other term you want to plug in there?
497. 00:26:56 And if you take the time to think through those things and put them in the right order,
498. 00:27:00 it's very easy to say no in some of those instances, because you can very clearly
499. 00:27:03 see, like, yeah, this one thing, this opportunity that maybe an isolation seems like maybe I should
500. 00:27:08 be doing that. When I take it in context of who I really am and what I want to do, it's really
501. 00:27:13 not that important. But if you don't take the time to do those things, then you get stuck viewing
502. 00:27:17 those things in isolation. And it's not just a, where does this fit amongst everything that I need
503. 00:27:21 to do? It's just, should I do this? Yes or no? And we can always convince ourselves that yes,
504. 00:27:25 we should be doing one more thing. You get a few points here. I want to follow up on. And one is
505. 00:27:31 this concept of if you get it out of your brain, you're not continually rolling it over in your
506. 00:27:37 thoughts. And he brought up David Allen's Getting Things Done in this particular section. And I
507. 00:27:43 will say it was kind of interesting. He brought up a lot of books that we've read, which is kind of
508. 00:27:48 an interesting thing that you start to see happening. Like you start to recognize a lot of authors the
509. 00:27:54 more that you do this. But he did bring up the Getting Things Done methodology and the benefit
510. 00:28:00 that comes from externalizing the projects and the tasks, the things that are weighing on your mind.
511. 00:28:07 And I have to say that, you know, I've moved into an analog way of managing projects and tasks. But
512. 00:28:14 at the same time, I've been building out slowly over the last few years, like things like mission
513. 00:28:21 statements and higher levels of ideas and philosophies and that sort of thing. Like I've been storing a
514. 00:28:28 lot of that just because one, I need a place to write it down because I feel like I don't fully
515. 00:28:33 comprehend what I think about something until it comes out of my head in some way. What's the
516. 00:28:38 classic quote on that thoughts disentangle themselves across lips and pencil tips. And I think that's
517. 00:28:45 absolutely true because how many times we were just talking about this earlier, we don't fully
518. 00:28:49 understand what we think about this book until we get a chance to sit down and talk it through.
519. 00:28:53 So getting it out of your head, in this case, I find that it's a chance for me to really put down
520. 00:29:01 to the letter how I feel about a specific topic, whether that's, you know, giving in the church
521. 00:29:06 and how much you should or shouldn't give. And in what ways should you give? Do you give direct
522. 00:29:10 to the church? Do you give to people in need within the church? Like there's all kinds of different
523. 00:29:14 ways that you can do that. But whenever I need to externalize something like that, I have my own
524. 00:29:21 ways of and own places of doing that. So I think this can go even beyond the day to day churn to
525. 00:29:28 use his turn here. But at the same time, I think there's also this other aspect that gets involved
526. 00:29:34 here with the worry bit because that can be stressful as well. I mean, how many times have I
527. 00:29:41 mentioned that I've got something going on with my business and I start to worry about it and trying
528. 00:29:45 to make decisions for it and how do I how do I make the right decision in that case? We even read a
529. 00:29:50 whole book on making decisions. And those are things that I find in the same light can cause a lot of
530. 00:29:58 angst and makes me frustrated. And then I'm taking that out of my wife or my kids. Like that's not
531. 00:30:03 okay. But again, I feel like I have to, in some cases, talk to someone about it, whether that's
532. 00:30:10 talking to you about a book or talking to my wife about the frustrations I've got. You know,
533. 00:30:15 in any of those scenarios, I think he's correct here in that you really got to get it out of your
534. 00:30:20 head in some way because if you hold on to it, you tend to make it a lot worse. Like it's just,
535. 00:30:26 it's not good. Yep. Because you tend to make things like you tend to blow a matter proportion
536. 00:30:32 and you don't always have to articulate how you feel about it. So I totally resonated with that
537. 00:30:38 section. Yeah, he says a little bit later that externalizing your thinking is important. Like
538. 00:30:45 trying to remember everything you need to do is like trying to play chess only in your mind.
539. 00:30:50 It's a lot easier when there's an external board. Right. Just need a chess board. And then I think
540. 00:30:55 that that kind of leads into like the weather or not choices because when you can see the whole
541. 00:31:00 board, you can evaluate how important something is. And one of the quotes that really hit me was the
542. 00:31:07 one he shared by President Eisenhower, which really illustrates the fact that there are
543. 00:31:11 opportunity costs associated with your choices. The cost of one President Eisenhower once said,
544. 00:31:16 the cost of one modern heavy bomber is this a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
545. 00:31:21 And when you think of it that way, instead of just it costs so many millions of dollars,
546. 00:31:26 it's a lot more there's a lot more weight and importance put on that particular choice.
547. 00:31:32 And that importance is there whether you realize it or not. So it's important to note that that
548. 00:31:37 stuff is there because once you get all that stuff out on the external board and you don't
549. 00:31:42 have to try to keep it all in your head, then you don't have to constantly be jumping back and forth
550. 00:31:47 between different things. I mean, a lot of productivity books will speak to how bad multitasking is.
551. 00:31:52 There's a section in this one too. But what I really like about this book is that he uses research
552. 00:31:56 just about everywhere. These are not just his thoughts. And he quotes David Meyer's research
553. 00:32:01 specifically showing that the multitasking increases the overall time needed to complete
554. 00:32:06 tasks by 40%. He also says that the reason that a lot of people do this is that a small
555. 00:32:13 amount of dopamine is released in your brain, which is the pleasure chemical whenever you switch
556. 00:32:16 tasks. So you can switch tasks all day and you feel good about it. But when you look at the numbers,
557. 00:32:22 when you get it all on that external board, you look back at what you actually accomplished,
558. 00:32:27 it's nothing compared to what you thought in your head. Yep. This is why people tend to
559. 00:32:33 or want to quantify the whole self data process of collecting numbers on your own
560. 00:32:42 actions and thoughts and maybe not thoughts, but number of steps and heartbeat and that sort of
561. 00:32:48 thing. I think a lot of people want to capture that so that you have numbers that you can't
562. 00:32:53 argue with. Yep. Quantified self. Yeah, that's there you go. That's important because you are
563. 00:33:00 what you do. You're not what you think you do. And one thing that was kind of impressed on me
564. 00:33:05 recently was that consistency can't be inconsistent. So you want to establish a habit of getting up
565. 00:33:14 early or going to the gym or whatever it is, like, let's just use going to the gym as an example.
566. 00:33:19 You can't go to the gym two days a week and say, oh, for the five days that I excused myself from
567. 00:33:26 going and I had something else to do, like flip a switch and be like, don't form the habit off of
568. 00:33:31 those days only. And then turn it back on when you actually do follow through and go to the gym.
569. 00:33:36 Okay, there I did it. Now I want that one to count. Right. You're creating the habits for all
570. 00:33:42 seven days and the more that you do that, the stronger those habits become, the more ingrained
571. 00:33:46 they become. And you're developing those habits, whether you whether they are through neglect or
572. 00:33:52 maybe they're intentional, but they're still negative, or whether they're intentional and
573. 00:33:56 they're positive. So you have to recognize what you're doing and is it the right thing. Now, as it
574. 00:34:01 pertains to managing attention, managing your time, I think that a lot of people have developed
575. 00:34:07 this habit of distraction. He mentions a Boston College study which found that people underestimate
576. 00:34:13 their frequency of distraction by a factor of 10, which is crazy. He said participants estimated
577. 00:34:19 that they switched focus every four minutes, but they watched their eyes and they actually switched
578. 00:34:24 every 14 seconds. We're really good at this, aren't we? So you may think that you're focused and you can
579. 00:34:30 multitask, but you can't. Yeah, my my wonderful wife made the comments and I'm aware that I've
580. 00:34:39 been getting worse, but she mentioned over lunch. This is two hours ago as we're recording that
581. 00:34:46 I've gotten into the habit of checking my phone about every 10 minutes, even when I'm off of work.
582. 00:34:51 I was like, no, I don't. And then I started thinking about it like,
583. 00:34:53 all right. I think you're right. So yeah, we are what we repeatedly do, whether we are aware of it
584. 00:35:03 or not. And we talk about this all the time too. Yeah, yeah, I know. But knowledge, knowledge doesn't
585. 00:35:10 translate into action. I was just reading the other day about the four different levels of knowledge,
586. 00:35:16 level one. And this is taken from, I think it's the power of potential by Ed Cole. Level one is
587. 00:35:22 assumption. Level that's the lowest level. Level two is knowledge. So you know what to do. Level three
588. 00:35:31 is skills where you can do what you know you're supposed to do. And level four is practice or
589. 00:35:37 diligence, you know, where you're doing it every single day. It's become a part of who you are.
590. 00:35:41 And that's where leadership happens, whether you are leading other people or just leading yourself.
591. 00:35:46 And I think that that's really important because it does require personal leadership, personal
592. 00:35:51 management in order to put into practice any sort of diligence, any sort of habit that you want to
593. 00:35:58 create that's positive is going to be a little bit difficult at first. But the price of diligence
594. 00:36:05 upfront is much, much less than the price of regret at the end. Agreed. Let's talk about
595. 00:36:12 attention. Two types of attention. What are the two types of attention? First is directed,
596. 00:36:17 which is effortful or focused in Tony's words. And the second one is involuntary. And so the
597. 00:36:25 kind of the examples that he shares in the book are number one directed when you are working on a
598. 00:36:30 project or you're writing a paper or whatever, you have directed attention at the task at hand.
599. 00:36:36 And then involuntary, this is more like you're out for a walk. And you notice the birds chirping
600. 00:36:42 in the trees or you notice how beautiful your surroundings are. And that's probably at the heart
601. 00:36:47 of why so many people in the productivity space say that you should be going for walks outside
602. 00:36:52 because they don't explicitly at least I never heard people explicitly say that it's recharging
603. 00:36:57 your directed attention through involuntary attention. But that really just kind of clicked for me when
604. 00:37:01 I when I heard that. I think one of the pieces of this that really stuck out to me was he mentioned
605. 00:37:07 a book. Of course, I would notice this distracted by Maggie Jackson definitely wrote this one on my
606. 00:37:13 list. Because he goes into this whole ADHD thing a little bit. And I've talked about before how
607. 00:37:21 this is the thing I struggle with. And I think some of this where you know the context switching,
608. 00:37:28 you know, giving off dopamine or you know, the more that we can switch, the more pleasure that we get
609. 00:37:34 from that. And that all comes from or can come from distractions. And I can't help but think that
610. 00:37:42 there's so much of these different levels of attention that we continue to degrade a little bit simply
611. 00:37:47 because we are so caught up in these switches and distractions for lack of a better term.
612. 00:37:54 And I think this is something I struggle with definitely as my wife gratefully pointed out just a
613. 00:38:00 little bit ago. So like, okay, definitely a thing I need to work on. Certainly something that I need
614. 00:38:05 to continue to be aware of. I'm not really sure how to turn that into an action item here. I tried.
615. 00:38:11 But I couldn't really find a specific thing that I felt I wanted to put in place other than just be
616. 00:38:19 aware of it, which is never a great action item. Just be aware of this. It's like impossible to
617. 00:38:25 really quantify that because I'm not going to leave my phone elsewhere because I'm I end up making
618. 00:38:31 a number of phone calls and stuff here and there that I feel like I want to have around. And I don't
619. 00:38:36 think I'm at a point where I would try to find some other method to handle that. I just need to be
620. 00:38:42 aware of it. It's a thing I need to keep in mind. Nice. And I think that's that's fine. That's
621. 00:38:48 the starting point for all of this stuff and really the way that he he wrote this book,
622. 00:38:54 this whole first section on mastery, in my opinion, is kind of like just to show you how much you
623. 00:39:00 suck at this. So that he has your attention going forward. That's a good point. I hadn't thought of
624. 00:39:06 that. Everything you know is wrong. Now here's what you should do instead. All right, fair enough.
625. 00:39:12 All right. So differentiation. This is my my minor rant here. Yeah. He uses the term productive
626. 00:39:19 and I don't like the way he uses it. I was okay. So a thing that I do before we start recording
627. 00:39:26 is try to take about 15 minutes to look over the outline and then just kind of glance through
628. 00:39:30 each section that's on the outline just to kind of get a feel for it. In this case for the listeners
629. 00:39:36 here, I'm looking at Mike's list of items here. And the first two that we're going to talk about
630. 00:39:43 quickly, I believe are just kind of points of interest. And the first one, Mike wrote down a
631. 00:39:50 wrong definition of productivity. And I was looking through this section trying to figure out where
632. 00:39:56 this was at because I didn't recall him defining productivity. So I was trying to find that and
633. 00:40:02 realized, wait, Mike wants to rant on what he's talking about for this whole section. All right.
634. 00:40:09 So I will quit quit now. Hit me with your rant. Okay. Well, I, you know, the more people I hear
635. 00:40:16 kind of define productivity this way, the more I feel like maybe what I'm really getting at,
636. 00:40:22 then maybe isn't productivity per se. But I think that productivity is more than just cranking out
637. 00:40:29 widgets. And on page 81, that's basically how he frames it. He says productivity can provide
638. 00:40:35 important advantages over competitors, which can increase profitability. But it will rarely
639. 00:40:40 keep you ahead in the long term. So the big issue I have with this is that in his definition here,
640. 00:40:48 it's kind of implied that we are competing in an industry and there can be only one winner.
641. 00:40:55 And I can do things to increase my quote unquote productivity in the short term,
642. 00:41:00 which will put me above you, but they won't keep me there. And I think that in that context,
643. 00:41:06 I maybe agree with him, but I think that it really doesn't apply to this book. I mean,
644. 00:41:11 this book is not how to become a more productive company by being less busy. This applies to just
645. 00:41:16 about anybody. And this whole idea here about being first, about being tops, I believe that this
646. 00:41:23 is based on a scarcity mindset. And I think that's dangerous, really dangerous. When you think that
647. 00:41:29 there is only so much success to go around, then you have no problem stepping on people to get above
648. 00:41:35 them because it doesn't matter who you step on on your way up once you get there, you know,
649. 00:41:39 you're king of the mountain. All right, but just because I achieve my ideal future doesn't mean
650. 00:41:45 that you can't. There's not a limited number of ideal futures out there. And if I get one that
651. 00:41:51 means that there's less to go around, like, there's a lot of opportunity. And really, you're the
652. 00:41:57 captain of your own ship, you get to decide whether you get there or not, it's just going to be a
653. 00:42:02 matter of, are you faithful in the practices and the are you diligent in the habits that are going
654. 00:42:07 to get you there? I really think that the more that I read and study this stuff, like, that's what
655. 00:42:11 it comes down to is these simple habits, like it's not complicated. But a lot of people won't do it
656. 00:42:17 or don't do it simply because they don't make that connection. And they don't follow through on it.
657. 00:42:23 So I just want to call that out, I guess, that like this whole chapter is called Stop Being So
658. 00:42:28 Productive. And there's some good stuff in here, a couple of my action items come from here. But
659. 00:42:32 framed that way, it's incorrect. That's fair. I almost feel like there needs to be a different
660. 00:42:40 term for what you're talking about, because you're correct in that we hear productivity a lot. And
661. 00:42:47 in the vast majority of cases, you could do a simple find replace with productivity for efficiency.
662. 00:42:56 And that's what they mean. In most cases, that seems to be the way that they intend it.
663. 00:43:03 So I wonder if there's this mashup of essentialism, minimalism, productivity,
664. 00:43:10 sort of thing. Maybe you should coin a term for what you mean by all of this.
665. 00:43:15 Not a bad idea. And I know that as someone who works for a company called Asian efficiency,
666. 00:43:21 I get it. But I also think that there's so much more to productivity than just being efficient.
667. 00:43:31 We've read the book by Peter Drucker, and he talks a lot about effective versus efficient.
668. 00:43:36 And I think that there's middle ground where if you can achieve both, then you're really
669. 00:43:41 making progress. There's efficiency, that's important. You don't get to choose,
670. 00:43:47 I'm just going to apply this mindset to this one area of my life. Your values, your views,
671. 00:43:54 they're going to permeate everything that you do, unless you are intentionally
672. 00:43:59 a hypocrite. You say one thing and you do another. And so that's why it's dangerous to be in a
673. 00:44:06 situation like work-wise where you have to compromise on your morals or your standards.
674. 00:44:11 And the company wants you to do this, because if you start to make concessions in one particular
675. 00:44:16 area, those will apply to your entire life. You can't separate those two.
676. 00:44:20 Going back to the whole idea, the work-life balance and how that's completely not true.
677. 00:44:26 You don't get to choose between, "This is who I am at work. This is who I am in life."
678. 00:44:31 The habits that you establish are going to apply to every single area of your life.
679. 00:44:37 I don't know. The people that I've heard define it, they've always applied it to specifically a
680. 00:44:44 work context in terms of the actual output of a machine. And I just think that that is wrong,
681. 00:44:52 especially today. There's a whole industry built up around this idea of productivity.
682. 00:44:58 And I don't think that it's all just figuring out how to squeeze a few more
683. 00:45:03 hours out of the people beneath you. He mentioned Mahali in this book.
684. 00:45:07 He did. But we always have to point out.
685. 00:45:11 Mahali, I think, and we read his book. And I think it's interesting just how many different ways
686. 00:45:19 you can pull his research into so many different topics, from busyness to grit to willpower.
687. 00:45:27 It comes out a lot. We have to point it out. Hi, Mahali.
688. 00:45:34 Specifically, in this particular context, he calls out something which is a little bit different.
689. 00:45:43 He references the flow research. But the point that he was making in this particular book,
690. 00:45:47 I thought was a little bit different, which is why I wanted to call it out.
691. 00:45:51 He said that, according to Mahali's research, which this I don't think was really touched on
692. 00:45:55 in the book that we read, he said that finding the solution was easy, finding the right question
693. 00:46:01 was hard. Once the question was discovered, the ideas flowed freely.
694. 00:46:05 I think this is a really powerful idea. And I've kind of seen this happen
695. 00:46:10 myself in a couple of different areas. One of the things that I've done recently is we've kind of
696. 00:46:16 revamped our family meeting structure. And really, what we've focused on are three questions.
697. 00:46:23 What should we start doing? What should we stop doing? And what should we keep doing?
698. 00:46:29 And it's been amazing to me that when I have an hour of time, we go to dinner, whatever with my
699. 00:46:33 wife, we think about those questions, the results that we get and the clarity that we get regarding,
700. 00:46:39 like, okay, this is what we need to do next. And it just was a great illustration to me of this
701. 00:46:44 point that once you have the right questions, finding the solutions becomes a lot simpler.
702. 00:46:49 And I think those particular questions, I think they're designed to help you point
703. 00:46:56 yourselves in the right direction. Because I love those questions. It's a thing that I think I want
704. 00:47:00 to steal a little bit. But, you know, in the next section here is about building your brand. And
705. 00:47:07 I just want to pause and talk about the culture of busyness because we haven't really done that
706. 00:47:13 yet, Mike. And I feel like this is kind of a big point because there's so much of our general
707. 00:47:19 conversations where I'm busy, like, how are you? I'm busy, like, okay, great, not great.
708. 00:47:25 [laughs]
709. 00:47:26 So, he does call out, like, this is a thing where there's a competition of who has the more stressful,
710. 00:47:32 the more jam-packed schedule. And it comes out just in general social conversations all the time.
711. 00:47:40 And when I started reading this, I started trying to pay attention to that more. It's a thing I
712. 00:47:46 knew about, knew it was a problem, but I can't say that I've ever tried to focus on how often it comes
713. 00:47:53 out. And it's kind of nuts how frequently this whole dynamic of how much you have going on and
714. 00:48:01 how overloaded you are. Like, that comes out all the time. And just for fun, there was a... I was
715. 00:48:08 at church for a function a couple nights ago. And there was a member of our small group that was
716. 00:48:14 there. And he came up, I had just sat down, it was going to be there for about an hour, with nothing
717. 00:48:19 in particular I needed to be doing. And he just asked me how things were going. And I just, instead
718. 00:48:23 of saying I'm busy or anything along those lines, I just told him I'm learning to not be busy.
719. 00:48:28 That led to a one-hour conversation. So, like, okay, well, this is a thing that is a problem. And
720. 00:48:36 it's prevalent pretty much everywhere. But it's not easy to break. I still find myself talking about
721. 00:48:45 how much is going on and need to stop, I think, partially because I need to scale back on the
722. 00:48:51 number of things that I'm doing. And it's a thing, that's a piece I've been working on for a while.
723. 00:48:55 But the brand, you know, I use that term there, of busyness is just wrong. Like, we need to get
724. 00:49:03 away from that. Yeah, well, just to back up a little bit, because we're in section two,
725. 00:49:06 but section one was mastery on page 45. Right. He says, busyness is bad, but that doesn't mean
726. 00:49:12 full and active lives are bad. Days and lives crammed with deep immersion and projects,
727. 00:49:17 interactions and experiences that are truly meaningful to you are the juice of life. That
728. 00:49:21 is mastery. And so that's important to call out that just because you've got a bunch of things
729. 00:49:25 going on doesn't mean that you're, quote unquote, busy, right, and you need to dial stuff back. Now,
730. 00:49:29 maybe you are and you do have to dial stuff back. I think that that's probably a safe assumption.
731. 00:49:34 Yes. If you're just getting introduced to this concept, but I do want to call that out because
732. 00:49:39 you're right, busy as a terrible brand. I'm glad you brought up that example because that's exactly
733. 00:49:43 what I was thinking of is like you go somewhere to a social function, you see somebody that maybe
734. 00:49:48 you don't see every day and they ask you, Hey, how's it going? What's your initial response?
735. 00:49:54 Like try to do anything except, Oh man, I'm so busy. It feels weird.
736. 00:49:59 And that's wrong. I've been trying to shift that to call out like specific things. You're like,
737. 00:50:06 you know, your example, what have you been up to and be like, Oh yeah, you know, I've been working
738. 00:50:10 on this project or whatever. But busy is kind of like the easy answer where no one can push back.
739. 00:50:19 If you were to say to somebody like, Oh, I've been working on this project, like they could say,
740. 00:50:24 well, that's a dumb idea. All right, they could point out a hundred reasons why that's a waste of
741. 00:50:29 your time. But when you say, Oh man, I've been so busy, like what do you say to that?
742. 00:50:33 Right. You're not going to argue with me. Yeah, exactly. You might try to one up me,
743. 00:50:37 but you're not going to argue. Right. Which is sometimes what happens. But I think that that's
744. 00:50:41 maybe at the root of that is like, it's a protective thing where it's like, as long as I don't say what
745. 00:50:45 I'm actually doing, they can't have any issue with it. Right. So, but yeah, I like this whole idea of
746. 00:50:53 building your brand intentionally. I'm another thing that I thought of regarding your brand at the
747. 00:50:57 moment is if you were to have one word that describes your life and you were to ask your kids, for
748. 00:51:04 example, or your wife or whoever is closest to you, you know, what is that that word? It may shock
749. 00:51:10 you. I know like kids specifically, they're really perceptive. And there's a couple of things in here,
750. 00:51:15 which action items specifically that apply to my situation with my kids. But I think that you
751. 00:51:22 could apply this in a lot more, a lot more broad context. And if you really want to get an idea on
752. 00:51:27 what you're portraying, what brand you are putting out there, like do that exercise, ask somebody
753. 00:51:32 close to you, you know, what's one word that you would use to describe me? And if it's busy,
754. 00:51:38 like you know something's got to change. Right. Which is really where this whole idea of what
755. 00:51:44 are your five words comes in. I did it as I was reading it, just because I knew that if I left that
756. 00:51:50 page, I would probably forget about it. There's a whole bunch of words. And basically, you're
757. 00:51:55 supposed to select the five that best describe you. That's your personal brand. And there's a
758. 00:52:02 bunch of them on there, the ones that I came up with. And you know, this is just my perspective. So
759. 00:52:07 take that for what it's worth. But this was a cool exercise for me because part of it is what
760. 00:52:13 you currently do. But part of it also is recognizing that, Oh, this is what I want to be known for,
761. 00:52:17 because what I found is that there were more than five that I could apply to me. And then trying to
762. 00:52:22 rank those, this is kind of what I landed on logical, perceptive, purposeful, sincere, insightful. Now,
763. 00:52:30 depending how well you know me, you can probably point out at least one, one instance where I've
764. 00:52:35 failed in those things. But I think there's a lot of value in recognizing that this, these are the
765. 00:52:40 words that resonate with me. This is who I really am and who I want to portray whenever I master
766. 00:52:48 busyness enough to let these things come out. Like, this is who I am. But you know, if we're not
767. 00:52:54 careful, then busyness can drown these. Yeah, I like this concept a lot. And like, I've played
768. 00:53:00 around, and we've talked a lot about like goal setting and how do you hold yourself accountable
769. 00:53:06 to things. But I think this can be a way to do that. If you have these five things or these aspects
770. 00:53:16 of your character that you want to be known for, as opposed to being known as busy, which all of
771. 00:53:23 these are better, in my opinion. Exactly. That's really the point he's trying to make is like,
772. 00:53:28 any one of these things that you can pick instead of busy is going to be an improvement.
773. 00:53:33 Right. So I like this idea, and I've played around with the idea of people talk about their yearly
774. 00:53:38 themes. And I've played around with the concept of like quarterly themes, because I feel like the
775. 00:53:43 three month bit handles a lot better in my world. And so I've played around with that. But I feel
776. 00:53:48 like this can be kind of an overarching view. And there's a lot of these things that we've come
777. 00:53:53 across in the past, like life goals and missions and, you know, your areas of responsibility. And
778. 00:53:59 we come across these sorts of things quite a bit. But to be honest with you, whenever you
779. 00:54:03 review these sorts of things, they're pretty quick to review. So it doesn't seem like it's a huge
780. 00:54:09 deal to add one of these to it. So yeah, I'm going to try to figure out what my five are. I
781. 00:54:14 haven't done it, but I'll do my best to get it done by next time that way our action list doesn't
782. 00:54:19 continue to grow. This is kind of like beginning steps to figuring out really like what your own
783. 00:54:28 path is going to be. The next step is to come up with a sentence that describes you. And on page
784. 00:54:36 124, I put just in my notes, unique ability, because I think that what he was speaking to is
785. 00:54:43 directly what that book that I mentioned as a get book, our unique ability is all about.
786. 00:54:49 It's identifying what is unique about you. What is this the skill set that you have
787. 00:54:54 that really like only you can do the thing that you were made to do. What is the thing that really
788. 00:54:59 just is the sweet spot for you? And most people don't take the time to figure that out. Now,
789. 00:55:04 I've been going through that workbook, going through the exercises. I sent out these emails. I sent
790. 00:55:10 one to you, which is honestly really scary when you send those out. It feels so weird.
791. 00:55:16 And they give you a form template to work off of I customized the heck out of it, but I don't
792. 00:55:20 want it to seem like a form email. But that's really hard. We're basically part of the unique
793. 00:55:24 ability workbook is you send out these emails to 10 people or so that are close to you. And you
794. 00:55:30 ask them, what do you think my unique ability is? What are the things that you think I'm good at?
795. 00:55:34 What are the skills that you think I have? And then you kind of distill all that down and you see
796. 00:55:38 what the themes are and what other people say. And it was my experience that every single email
797. 00:55:44 that I got back, it was amazing to read through those. And it was really, really cool to see what
798. 00:55:50 other people projected about me. One thing that somebody said through one of those emails,
799. 00:55:56 which I thought was just awesome. And I never really thought about it this way, but really just
800. 00:56:00 shows the value of getting those outside opinions. They said that you connect people to their own
801. 00:56:05 creativity. And I was like, ah, that's my sentence. Is it fair if you steal what someone else says?
802. 00:56:12 Can you do that? I don't know. I mean, if going through all that feedback, I mean,
803. 00:56:16 that's kind of the theme, but the way that they said it, I'm like, oh, yeah, that really resonates
804. 00:56:20 with me. And so I guess I'll throw that out there just as I've just gone through that myself,
805. 00:56:24 that if you if this concept appeals to you, then it's a small section in this book, which is cool.
806. 00:56:30 But if you really want to dive into it, check out unique ability 2.0.
807. 00:56:34 Yeah, I put it on a list that lists as long. So.
808. 00:56:38 Yeah. And it's not quick. I mean, it's not one of the things where like, oh, I'm going to read
809. 00:56:44 this book this week as a gap book or anything. It takes time. You know, you send out these emails,
810. 00:56:50 and I procrastinate on it for days because I didn't want to do it. Yeah, I couldn't bring up the
811. 00:56:54 courage of like, hey, can you send me something nice about myself? That feels really, really weird.
812. 00:56:59 I'll put my ego on this. But it was one of the most, oh man, it was one of the most rewarding
813. 00:57:02 things I've ever done though. Like the feedback that I got was just amazing. And it really highlighted
814. 00:57:08 a lot of things. One of the things that one of my friends wrote in the email was in addition,
815. 00:57:13 like a piece of radical candor. He's like, you tend to give credit quickly to other people for
816. 00:57:20 your ideas, but by synthesizing them, and you always put your own spin on it, you really don't
817. 00:57:26 need to do that. You've earned the right to speak to these things. And immediately when I read that,
818. 00:57:31 I remembered when I was a freshman in college, I had a professor that did not like me. I was
819. 00:57:37 pretty vocal about my faith and we had differing views. Just leave it there. One of the papers we
820. 00:57:42 had to, we had to write was a book report. And she accused me of plagiarism and said she was going
821. 00:57:49 to take me in front of the academic court and get me kicked out of college. And I was like,
822. 00:57:54 you know, I didn't plagiarize that. Well, you didn't cite your sources correctly. I'm still
823. 00:57:58 going to give you an F. And so my grade in that class went from an A to a C because of that one
824. 00:58:03 paper. I never realized how much that impacted me until I got that email back. And instantly,
825. 00:58:09 I thought of that and I'm like, Oh my gosh, I am still changing how I approach stuff because
826. 00:58:14 that one person had a vendetta against me. And I realized that's completely wrong. I shouldn't
827. 00:58:18 be letting that dictate my course in my future anymore.
828. 00:58:24 So you procrastinated sending out these emails for a few days, but I will say that as someone
829. 00:58:29 who received one of these emails and having been through a lot of these books and through
830. 00:58:36 training seminars and such in the past, like this is a thing that I have done to some extent or another.
831. 00:58:42 And I know that they're really hard to send out, but a lot of people are more than willing to
832. 00:58:49 respond to those genuinely and understand the process that you're working through and what it
833. 00:58:55 is you're trying to accomplish. So for those listening, like if you're encouraged to do this,
834. 00:59:01 like don't be afraid of that because the vast majority of people are more than willing to help
835. 00:59:06 out. And I run across very few people who receive one of these and just don't understand and just
836. 00:59:12 don't do it. You just don't run across that very often. So it's rare. So send it out. Don't be
837. 00:59:18 afraid of it. Right. But bottom line, whatever format you use, definitely figure out what your
838. 00:59:25 unique, I guess I'll just use the term unique ability. I can't think of a better one. And start
839. 00:59:30 building your own personal brand. I think that that's a really important idea and one of the big
840. 00:59:36 things I got out of this book. Fair enough. Let's talk procrastination, the three causes of it.
841. 00:59:41 Yeah. So this is an interesting section here because I think there's a lot of people who speak
842. 00:59:46 to procrastination and give like tips and tricks, well, life hacks, whatever, to help you overcome
843. 00:59:53 procrastination. But he talks about three different causes, dependence. I'll do it when I basically,
844. 01:00:01 I need to the deadlines coming up inertia and mood and the the little acronym he's got for this
845. 01:00:06 is dim. The mood thing that's I don't feel like it. And then he explains that this is because
846. 01:00:12 your mood is determined by the balance of two different chemicals. So one is dopamine. And do
847. 01:00:17 you know how to pronounce this other one? I'm not sure it's like no repent of freeing. But basically,
848. 01:00:23 he breaks this down into those four different scenarios, basically, when you don't feel like
849. 01:00:29 doing something that it can fall into. And this just really just highlighted to me his approach
850. 01:00:35 to everything in this book. And I really like this where it's all based on research, but he
851. 01:00:38 distills it down and like these are the main points. So number one, if you don't have enough
852. 01:00:42 dopamine, that's the the pleasure chemical, then you should use the reversal theory and you should
853. 01:00:47 have fun with the tasks. Second, you could be having too much dopamine, in which case you should
854. 01:00:52 switch off all those distractions to reduce the multitasking which produces it. Number three,
855. 01:00:58 not enough of the other one, I don't know how to say it. And then the tactic in that particular
856. 01:01:03 case is you need to scare yourself with what could go wrong if you don't deliver. And then the last
857. 01:01:08 one you've got too much no repent of freeing or whatever you call it. And in that case,
858. 01:01:12 what you need to do is break the task down. So all of these tactics I've heard before,
859. 01:01:17 but it was cool to see him explain it in a way that you can figure out specifically what is the
860. 01:01:24 cause of you not feeling like taking action on this thing. And then you can use the correct
861. 01:01:28 strategy for that particular scenario. I thought that was a cool approach.
862. 01:01:32 I think it's either Nora Penifrin or Nora Epinephrine, one of those two I would go with.
863. 01:01:38 Both of those sound better than mine.
864. 01:01:39 Yeah, no, I did appreciate the specifically that piece with the mood side of it because I know
865. 01:01:47 that is a thing that I have struggled with in the past. And my wife will tell you that I used to
866. 01:01:53 put things off all the time just because I didn't feel like working on them at that time. And she
867. 01:01:58 mentioned to me at one point that if I don't feel like I'm going to be in the mood for something
868. 01:02:04 and I'm waiting for that mood to happen, I'll never get it done.
869. 01:02:07 Okay, you're probably right because she's usually right on those things. So I listened to her
870. 01:02:12 and that's been a long time as probably been six years ago or better now, maybe longer.
871. 01:02:17 And I have been actively working against that one for a long time. So I've been able to
872. 01:02:23 I think it passed that bit. But I think the key here is like there's going to be one of these three
873. 01:02:29 that I think you fall into the most. Not everyone I think falls into procrastination in general.
874. 01:02:36 I mean, everyone procrastinates to some extent on something, but some are way better at say the
875. 01:02:41 work instance than others. And I think the key is just knowing which of these causes you struggle
876. 01:02:46 with and then determine how you're going to overcome those.
877. 01:02:49 Yeah, the big takeaway, I think, is one of the first points he makes in this section is when
878. 01:02:55 under pressure to perform, don't act think. Yeah, figure out what's really going on. And then
879. 01:03:01 you have a much better chance of effectively dealing with the reason why you don't want to do
880. 01:03:09 this thing right now. And even like procrastination, this is something that everybody deals with.
881. 01:03:15 And there are some people who are just driven by those those deadlines. But I guess like the
882. 01:03:20 thing could be when you're doing your weekly review and you know this thing is coming up and
883. 01:03:24 you know you should start working on it, but you aren't yet. Like what are the ways in that particular
884. 01:03:30 scenario that you should try so that you don't have to be so stressed as it comes down to the
885. 01:03:36 wire. I think there's a lot of value in figuring figuring that out. And a lot of times what it takes
886. 01:03:41 is stepping back a little bit, not just doing something, but thinking about what is the right
887. 01:03:47 thing to do in this particular scenario. Section three engagement, the three sections here. So
888. 01:03:52 this is the last one. First one's mastery, second one's differentiation, and the last one is engagement.
889. 01:03:58 Yeah, so there's a there's a lot of really cool stuff in here. I think they have the most notes
890. 01:04:04 about this particular section. The first chapter in this section is called Stop Striving for More.
891. 01:04:11 And there's a research study that he quotes on page 167 by Mark Lepper and David Green,
892. 01:04:18 which I thought was really interesting. And this is the first point here, love versus job. So in this
893. 01:04:23 particular study, they asked children to draw for a couple of minutes. And they rewarded some of the
894. 01:04:31 children for their drawing. The kids that were not rewarded were twice as likely to draw afterwards
895. 01:04:38 when there was no reward. They had intrinsic motivation. They just liked drawing. The extrinsic
896. 01:04:44 motivation to get the reward made that joy into a job. And I think that there's a lot of people
897. 01:04:51 that this applies to. It's not just not just kids. If you're working on a side project, you know,
898. 01:04:57 and you finally get that thing launched and it becomes your your business at that point,
899. 01:05:01 like your whole attitude towards that thing could completely change. That's really sad.
900. 01:05:06 It doesn't have to be that way just because you figure it out a way to get paid for the
901. 01:05:12 thing that you really enjoy doing doesn't mean that you have to stop enjoying doing that thing.
902. 01:05:16 That's true. I think there's a lot of interesting points to this. But the one that I think that
903. 01:05:21 stands out the most to me actually is a recall of and I'm going to do it here too,
904. 01:05:28 Flow by Mahali. There's a lot of points in Flow that are geared towards finding the
905. 01:05:35 aspects of the work that you're doing that make it enjoyable. And he has all of his
906. 01:05:41 different aspects that help you understand how to do that. But I think the most important one is
907. 01:05:48 that you need to find an internal challenge or find something inside yourself that enjoys a thing
908. 01:05:53 and use that as your driver to accomplish something as opposed to higher dollar amounts or, you know,
909. 01:06:02 somebody's praise, like those pieces are nice, but they're not going to keep you going for 10 years.
910. 01:06:09 They'll keep you going for 10 weeks, maybe 10 months, but not indefinitely. So twisting it to
911. 01:06:16 a point where you're using that aspect internally, to me, that was the piece that I got out of this,
912. 01:06:22 which was trying to turn that inside to myself because I work with all kinds of clients on a
913. 01:06:28 weekly basis. And although it's great to see the excitement from them and frankly a paid invoice
914. 01:06:37 from them between those two, like that's great. But I take more joy in seeing the product completed
915. 01:06:43 and looking good than I do from either one of those. So I really do think you have to turn that
916. 01:06:49 internally. Yeah, exactly. He mentions that wealth doesn't equal what we have wealth equals what we
917. 01:06:54 can do. And the more resources you have, the more options you have, maybe, but the tendency can be
918. 01:07:03 to, especially once you start to realize some financial success, like, I got to have more,
919. 01:07:09 I got to have more. And I think that's really dangerous. You can, essentially, if you had that
920. 01:07:16 approach, you're never really going to be satisfied. If all you want is a little bit more, then once
921. 01:07:22 you get a little bit more, you're going to find that you feel hollow and empty and you're going to need
922. 01:07:27 just a little bit more. Joseph Campbell, he mentions in this section that the Holy Grail is your
923. 01:07:33 purpose in life. And the best way to success is to consciously focus on your values first and seek
924. 01:07:38 to grow your capabilities in those areas. Like, let's say you're working on something, maybe you're
925. 01:07:45 at the very beginning, Joe, you had a different job and you really wanted to become a web developer.
926. 01:07:52 And you just really craved the autonomy that that would provide you and you really liked writing the
927. 01:07:57 code. Okay, so the tendency can be once you achieve that situation, that you view your job,
928. 01:08:03 not as something that you get to do anymore, but something that you have to do. And I think that
929. 01:08:08 you can switch those at any point, and it's very important to do that. You have to view
930. 01:08:13 what you are currently doing, especially if it's something that is in line with who you want to
931. 01:08:19 become and what you like, what you want to your life mission, like if it's in line with your core
932. 01:08:23 values, then there's no reason to be looking for something else that's better. You can be satisfied
933. 01:08:29 in that thing that you get to do. And his main point here is that you're trying to
934. 01:08:34 become more engaged in the work that you do. And, you know, this is a thing we've talked about
935. 01:08:40 in a number of episodes and covered a lot of books on that. But we haven't really delved into
936. 01:08:46 too much of becoming more engaged in the relationships that we have with other people.
937. 01:08:53 We have a little bit, you know, I mean, we did "Brenae Browns" daring greatly, which kind of touches
938. 01:08:58 that realm to some extent. As much as we didn't care for the book itself, Amanda Palmer's book
939. 01:09:04 talked about it quite a bit. Maybe her methods are a little out there, but you know, but in this
940. 01:09:10 particular book, he does touch on this to a point more about the number of people that you
941. 01:09:16 should be engaged with. And one of those that he brought up, as far as the number of people,
942. 01:09:23 was Dunbar's number, which is kind of a semi-famous number, to some extent, which is basically the
943. 01:09:30 number of relationships that you are able to maintain mentally, basically the number of people
944. 01:09:36 that you're able to stay in contact with, to some extent or another.
945. 01:09:39 Yeah, so if you log on to Facebook and you see that you have 800 Facebook friends, that's not true
946. 01:09:44 because Dunbar's number is 150. That's the number of relationships a person can actually manage.
947. 01:09:49 That's important, but also he's got like three different tiers that he uses under Dunbar's number.
948. 01:09:55 So you have 150 people. The next group is 15. And then at the top, you've got your five people who
949. 01:10:01 are your closest circle. So, you know, from inside out, you've got five people who are really,
950. 01:10:06 really close to you. Next, you've got 15. And this is the group that he says determines your
951. 01:10:10 life satisfaction. That was the point that really stood out to me was who are these 15 people?
952. 01:10:16 And what am I allowing them to say and to speak over my life? Jim Rohn said it this way, you know,
953. 01:10:24 to ask yourself about the people that you're associated with, basically, who am I around?
954. 01:10:29 What are they doing to me? And then is that okay? So recognizing like the people that you're
955. 01:10:35 around all the time, they are speaking words over your life. And they're either words that are
956. 01:10:38 going to help you grow or they're words that are maybe going to keep you small. And I really think
957. 01:10:44 that is a lot of value in identifying those 15 people. So that's one of my action items is to
958. 01:10:49 write all those down. But then also, I've got another action item associated with that. How can I give
959. 01:10:53 to my 15? Because my last action item, you know, for today, give more than I give more than I take.
960. 01:11:00 I believe that the way to foster those relationships is not just to take, you know, going back to the
961. 01:11:05 seven habits of how they affected people, the emotional bank account, you know, how can I
962. 01:11:08 make deposits instead of withdrawals with those 15 people? Yeah, I wrote down that I want to figure
963. 01:11:13 out who these 15 people are as well as an action item. But I know that this isn't an easy thing to
964. 01:11:20 do. And it's also kind of odd to basically be ranking your friends. Like, that seems kind of weird.
965. 01:11:28 Right. So I was hesitant to even really talk about it just because it just seems weird to
966. 01:11:35 some level, like it seems very impersonal. But at the same time, I get what he's saying. And I think
967. 01:11:40 there is some value in it. It just feels a little odd. It does feel a little odd. I will give you that.
968. 01:11:46 Another thing related to this is on page 189. This is something that I texted my wife. He says,
969. 01:11:55 if we do allow business to steal the micro moments, we disembowel relationships. And I think that
970. 01:12:01 specifically with your 15, the people that you are probably closest to, there are lots of opportunities
971. 01:12:08 for busyness to steal those micro moments when like, I'll just use my kids as an example,
972. 01:12:14 because you can really see it on a kid's face. Like, if they're trying to tell you something,
973. 01:12:19 and then your phone, even if it's like over in the corner and it buzzes and you look at it,
974. 01:12:24 you can see the disappointment on their face. So that was a picture that I got when I read that
975. 01:12:29 section. But I think that this applies to just about everybody that you are close to, like,
976. 01:12:34 recognize that those micro moments are there. And then I texted my wife and I shared that section
977. 01:12:42 of the book. And then I'm like, new rule, no looking at your phone and we're together.
978. 01:12:47 Not just for her, for me too, because you need to recognize that this is actually happening.
979. 01:12:53 And no one would, I'm not going to say out loud, like, hey, this Twitter mention is more important
980. 01:13:00 than you. But that's really what I'm saying when I let that sort of thing happen. So I guess,
981. 01:13:06 if I were to give one piece of advice for once you list out your 15 and you really want to start
982. 01:13:11 building those relationships, it would be put the phone away. Yeah, fair point. And kind of
983. 01:13:16 tangential to this is our next point here, the lisado ratio, which I thought was interesting.
984. 01:13:23 Because I hadn't really thought about this, but man by the name of lisado, he transcribed
985. 01:13:29 some meeting minutes and essentially found that the number of positive comments compared to the
986. 01:13:36 number of negative comments, that ratio could be used to determine whether or not the business was
987. 01:13:41 in a good place or not. And the number, if I remember correctly, where the breakpoint was,
988. 01:13:46 was 2.9. So if you have 2.9 positive comments per one negative comment, you are much more likely to
989. 01:13:55 have a successful business on your hands. And I did think it was interesting that people have
990. 01:14:00 been taking this ratio and then determining what that ratio is for things like your marriage
991. 01:14:06 or a friendship and such. And if I remember, if numbers are sticking in my brain correctly,
992. 01:14:10 5.0, so 5 positive comments for one negative comment was an indicator of a healthy marriage.
993. 01:14:17 So I don't know, I thought this ratio was interesting. I hadn't really thought about that concept
994. 01:14:22 before, but it was an encouragement to think about, okay, within the relationships that I have,
995. 01:14:27 say I've got this list of 15, am I maintaining that I'll call it 3, 3.0 of three positive
996. 01:14:36 comments per one negative? Am I maintaining that? And I don't know that I am because I am not sure
997. 01:14:43 that I've really ever paid attention to it. But it is an interesting idea that I do want to make
998. 01:14:48 myself more aware of. Yeah, exactly. I mean, specifically in a marriage context, because I think
999. 01:14:55 that the people that are closest to you have the greatest potential to hurt you as well, Ed Cole
1000. 01:15:02 said it this way, marriage is the closest thing to heaven or hell. You'll know I'm sorry.
1001. 01:15:05 He also makes a distinction, by the way, of love being the desire to benefit others at the
1002. 01:15:11 expense of self and lust being the desire to benefit self at the expense of others. I think that's
1003. 01:15:17 really played out in these positive versus negative comments. Like if you are focusing on
1004. 01:15:25 everything that your spouse is doing wrong, this ratio is going to be low. And in that case,
1005. 01:15:30 I'd say you're in lust mode where it's like you're the one who's the problem, you need to fix things.
1006. 01:15:35 But there's a lot of people in Ed Cole, like he's kind of the father of the men's ministry
1007. 01:15:39 movement. So he's worked with lots and lots and lots of people. And he's seen marriages change when
1008. 01:15:47 I mean, he's a minister to men specifically. So when the man makes the change and says, hey,
1009. 01:15:53 changes the focus instead of like, hey, you need to fix this and this. But what can I do? What can
1010. 01:15:59 I change? What do I do that bugs you? You know, and then when you put the other person first,
1011. 01:16:05 that naturally is going to produce a lot of the gratitude in those positive comments. But also,
1012. 01:16:10 there's another section here about busyness making you more selfish. And he's got statistics of these,
1013. 01:16:16 these trainee priests were only 10% stopped to help a man when they were later in a rush,
1014. 01:16:20 but 63% stopped when they had more time. And there's a couple things that spoke to me from this
1015. 01:16:25 section, specifically with my kids, you know, when you say something like, wait a minute,
1016. 01:16:31 that is in a child's mind, specifically a negative comment. You may not think of it that way. But
1017. 01:16:37 the point that Tony makes in this book is to pause the busyness, not your kids. And so even if
1018. 01:16:42 you're going to measure this, if you were to record your entire conversation, you know, the Amazon
1019. 01:16:47 Echo is recording everything that you say and you play it all back. Think about this through the
1020. 01:16:52 perspective of the other person, because you may not see that, you know, wait a minute as a as a
1021. 01:16:58 negative thing, but it can be because it's showing where your priorities lie. You need to make the
1022. 01:17:05 main thing the main thing. Yeah, I use that phrase, pause the busyness, not your kids. And it sounds
1023. 01:17:10 kind of extreme, but really like that's what's happening. Like, I think you had an action item at
1024. 01:17:15 one point to whenever you were using your phone and somebody, someone was in your presence, you're
1025. 01:17:20 going to be saying what you were doing on your phone. Right. That's the acid test. Like, if I'm on
1026. 01:17:25 if I'm on Twitter instead of paying attention to you, then I am saying that Twitter is more
1027. 01:17:30 important than you, whether that's what I mean to say or not. Right. That was the thing I did.
1028. 01:17:35 Oh, you're going to make me bring this up again, aren't you? My oldest Emma. Basically, I told her,
1029. 01:17:40 it's okay to ask me what I'm doing on my phone if you see me on my phone. And there's a conversation
1030. 01:17:47 you don't really want to have a whole lot. Like, okay, I'm on my phone. Dad, what are you doing?
1031. 01:17:52 Oh, I told you it was okay to ask me that question. And I'm on Twitter and I don't want to admit it.
1032. 01:17:59 Okay, like that, that'll get to you quick. So given my current state of being aware that I'm back
1033. 01:18:08 into a bad habit with that, I should probably say it's okay that she does that again.
1034. 01:18:13 There's a lot of value in that because it's just it's making it abundantly clear what is
1035. 01:18:17 actually going on. And are you okay with knowing the truth about yourself? That's really what it
1036. 01:18:23 comes down to. And I think that that is the difference between somebody who has a growth mindset
1037. 01:18:32 and the whole quantified self. Like, that's all built on this idea of, what am I doing?
1038. 01:18:37 Not what do I think that I'm doing? And then how can I make improvements to this? How can I
1039. 01:18:42 do better? Because we've all got room for improvement, but it's just it's kind of sad to me sometimes
1040. 01:18:48 that I see people who just put on the rose colored glasses or maybe they just have resigned themselves
1041. 01:18:54 to the fact that like, this is the way things are. There's nothing I can do about this. Things
1042. 01:18:58 are never going to change. Jim Rohn said, it will all change for you when you change. And so I want
1043. 01:19:03 to know all the things that I'm doing wrong. In fact, I asked my wife the other day. So what
1044. 01:19:07 are the things that I do that drive you nuts? She's like, Oh, do I really have to tell you? I'm like,
1045. 01:19:11 yes. Because I want to not do those anymore. And yeah, it can be uncomfortable, but it's important.
1046. 01:19:21 Yeah, it really is. Change is hard. It's never fun. I get that. Yeah. And actually,
1047. 01:19:26 that's another thing that I really like about this book in particular is he's got
1048. 01:19:30 the all these different sections. He's got all this information and a lot of books,
1049. 01:19:35 like that's where they would end it. But he the last chapter here, he talks about page 229. He says,
1050. 01:19:41 we still seem to believe that if we know something and decide something and are sufficiently
1051. 01:19:44 motivated, we will change. And he's basically like, that's not going to happen. So he gives you seven
1052. 01:19:49 strategies for implementing the personal change. Just real quickly, I'll run through these seven
1053. 01:19:54 different strategies just to call them out. So number one, make your goals clear. Number two,
1054. 01:19:58 keep it really small. Number three, plan your next step. Number four, use social influence.
1055. 01:20:03 Number five, slipstream your habits. Number six, reward, good behavior. And then number seven,
1056. 01:20:09 I've titled what the heck. And basically, the idea here is he uses the example of dieting,
1057. 01:20:15 where if somebody has something and breaks their diet, they're much more likely to keep overeating,
1058. 01:20:20 then they are to say like, okay, well, I've done that. Now I can go back to the way that I should
1059. 01:20:25 be acting. And so basically defeating that behavior and recognizing that just because you messed up
1060. 01:20:32 once doesn't mean that everything that you've done previously is now out the window. There's value
1061. 01:20:36 in establishing these habits, and you're not going to be perfect. But just recognizing the fact that
1062. 01:20:42 these are going to produce the change that you are looking for. And if you mess up, give yourself
1063. 01:20:46 some grace, don't beat yourself up. Just keep going. Don't say, well, I guess that I'm completely
1064. 01:20:52 off the rails now, it didn't work. Just be willing to adjust and repair. And I thought this was great
1065. 01:20:58 because it's like, okay, so you've read this, maybe you're convinced of this. Now while you're
1066. 01:21:03 convinced before you even put this book down, here are some suggestions for actually translating
1067. 01:21:08 this into action. That might be a good place to end it right there. Like this is all about how much
1068. 01:21:13 you have going on, how we have this culture of saying how much we have going on, and a lot of
1069. 01:21:20 tactics around how to get away from that. And when you work through all of these tactics, and you know
1070. 01:21:27 a lot of the aspects that lead up to a too busy life, you have to put certain things in place.
1071. 01:21:35 And you have to follow through on those. I mean, this is, we talk about it all the time, maybe every
1072. 01:21:40 show about how the action items and the follow up that comes with those and holding each other
1073. 01:21:44 accountable to these is one of the best things that comes out of the show. And that is a piece
1074. 01:21:49 that he is asking you to do here is decide and actually move forward with some change and don't
1075. 01:21:56 just be complacent and just run with status quo of busy. All right, so let's talk action items.
1076. 01:22:02 I have three. Mike has a bunch. I probably could have had double, to be honest. You decided to cut it
1077. 01:22:10 in half. Yep. All right, so the three I have, and I think I've talked about, I think I've talked
1078. 01:22:17 about all of them, I want to stop saying I'm busy and replace that with the phrase I've decided not
1079. 01:22:23 to be busy. And I chose that wording carefully, because my hope is that whenever that phrase is
1080. 01:22:31 used, it can convey the idea that this is a decision, number one, and that I am deciding against it.
1081. 01:22:37 So it does convey those two different aspects to the busy culture or against the busy culture,
1082. 01:22:44 if you will. So that's that is number one. I will probably screw that one up a few times,
1083. 01:22:49 just saying. Two, I want to list my 15 closest peeps. Like that's a thing that I want to do.
1084. 01:22:55 I think there's some value in that just still feels weird, still weird. And then one that I
1085. 01:23:00 developed in the middle of recording this, what are my five brand words? I knew that I
1086. 01:23:05 wanted to do this, I just didn't get it written down. So I am going to go through with that. I'll
1087. 01:23:09 share them next time if I've got them done, because it's been busy. All right, so for me,
1088. 01:23:18 I've also got listing out my 15 related to that, how can I give to my 15? So I don't know exactly
1089. 01:23:24 how I'm going to do that. Maybe for every person that I identify, I have one specific thing that
1090. 01:23:29 I could do to make a deposit instead of a withdrawal. Might be a way to implement that. I've also
1091. 01:23:35 put on here a stop saying, wait a minute to my kids. And this really impacted me when I read that.
1092. 01:23:40 So I feel like I've kind of already been doing this. But yeah, we should definitely check in on
1093. 01:23:46 that next time. I put make time to help people. I forget specifically which section this came from,
1094. 01:23:53 but I don't want to be selfish because I'm busy. I want to be able to give more than I take. And I
1095. 01:24:02 think that putting aside specific time in order for that to happen is one way to make sure that it
1096. 01:24:08 does happen. Kind of along those same lines, there's a, there's a, he mentioned in the first section,
1097. 01:24:14 this concept of rules of engagement, which I don't think I've ever really done. So basically,
1098. 01:24:22 what this is going to be is clearly written guidelines for if somebody wants me to do X, you know,
1099. 01:24:31 then that these are the rules that pertain to me being able to say yes to that sort of a thing.
1100. 01:24:37 And I think that being able to define that for side projects, even for things like people want
1101. 01:24:43 to meet for coffee or whatever, like I think that if I created rules of engagement around that,
1102. 01:24:47 it'd be a lot easier to just look at my calendar be like, oh yeah, I said I said Friday mornings
1103. 01:24:50 for this. Okay, Friday mornings are open. You know, so it'd be a lot easier to say yes to the right
1104. 01:24:55 things for that as well. So that's kind of my definition of the rules of engagement.
1105. 01:25:00 He also mentions creating a monthly plan template, which is I think a really good idea. I've already
1106. 01:25:07 done that for my daily thing. So I want to take that a step further and create something to help me
1107. 01:25:12 theme my my months. And then the other thing I have on here, he introduces this idea by these
1108. 01:25:18 two guys for a balanced scorecard. And I think this specifically pertains in the business world.
1109. 01:25:25 But I want to apply this to my own life. So what are the four things basically that I want to
1110. 01:25:30 keep score on that are going to be true indicators of whether what I am doing is is working. Going
1111. 01:25:38 back to like the four disciplines of execution, you've got the lead measures, you've got the lag
1112. 01:25:42 measures. Well, I think when it comes to businesses, even if you're focusing on the lead measures,
1113. 01:25:47 you can have 200 different lead measures to be tracking and not have any time to do the actual
1114. 01:25:53 work. And so my takeaway from that particular section was that whatever your situation,
1115. 01:25:59 organization, whatever, you can distill it down to just the handful of things that are really
1116. 01:26:05 moving the needle, the 80 20. And so I want to identify what my four things are.
1117. 01:26:09 All right, it's quite the list. That is quite the list. You think you can get through all this in
1118. 01:26:14 two weeks? We will see. All right, we'll talk about it next time and go from there. So talk to me
1119. 01:26:23 about author style. And what do you rate this? Well, I mentioned at the beginning, I was a very
1120. 01:26:29 pleasantly surprised by this book. I really did not expect a whole lot to be honest, kind of figured
1121. 01:26:37 that just skimming through it, that it was going to be a rehash of a lot of productivity stuff and
1122. 01:26:42 then put in a specific order. And the guy was going to say, Hey, here's my system sort of a thing,
1123. 01:26:46 but that's not really what it was at all. Right. It was a lot of great information, a lot of research
1124. 01:26:50 behind everything. He did a great job of distilling down the main points, I thought. I really like
1125. 01:26:54 the flow of the entire book. I really like how he starts by addressing the main objections for
1126. 01:27:00 even reading it in the first place. And he ends with the action steps to make sure strategies to
1127. 01:27:04 put this into action. So I really liked a lot of this book. The one thing that is going to keep me
1128. 01:27:09 from giving it five stars is the whole section on stopping so productive just because I personally
1129. 01:27:14 have an issue with how we defined it. All right. And it's more than just it's more than just the
1130. 01:27:18 definition. Like I said, the scarcity mindset versus the abundance mindset. I think that for me,
1131. 01:27:25 anyways, like that was a really big revelation. That was something that really changed a lot of
1132. 01:27:30 things for the better in my life. And so I think that that's, like I said earlier, when we were
1133. 01:27:35 discussing that section, I think it's dangerous. And even if you were to recognize that, you know,
1134. 01:27:41 this is a little bit off, maybe there's there's limited value in that that particular section.
1135. 01:27:46 But the rest of it, I thought was great. So I'm going to give it four and a half stars.
1136. 01:27:49 I can say that I really appreciate the vast number of stories and research that he put into this.
1137. 01:27:55 There's a lot there and makes it really hard to argue with the piece that I struggled with was
1138. 01:28:03 connecting some of the dots on like, okay, how does this apply to being busy? Like that,
1139. 01:28:10 that part I got a little bit confused by to an extent, not a lot, but just to a point there.
1140. 01:28:16 I had a number of points where like, okay, well, why are we talking about this? Because this book's
1141. 01:28:21 about busyness, right? So I had a few points where I was a little bit thrown off because of that.
1142. 01:28:27 Those are minor overall, but I will say I'm going to rate this at a 4.0. And part of the reason for
1143. 01:28:33 that is that I really enjoyed reading this, but I can't say that there was any major like, oh, yeah,
1144. 01:28:41 that that'll change my life. Like, I really didn't feel like there was, I mean, there's a lot of
1145. 01:28:45 little stuff that you can pick up from this, but there was anything major that I felt like was
1146. 01:28:50 stand out. You got to read this. This is exactly what you need right now. It doesn't really hit that
1147. 01:28:55 spot on the radar for me. So I'm going to put it at the 4.0.
1148. 01:28:59 Yeah, that's it. I definitely agree with you on that, by the way. And I think that it's interesting
1149. 01:29:03 depending on your position as you read this particular book, because there's a lot of books
1150. 01:29:09 that we talked about last time, I think that if we were to go back and reread getting things
1151. 01:29:14 done, we're not going to rate that a 5 anymore. But when it's the first time that you're introduced
1152. 01:29:19 to a particular subject, like it really can rock your world. For this one, I guess going into it,
1153. 01:29:26 I wasn't looking for a radical new idea. But what I found were a lot of great suggestions based on
1154. 01:29:33 the number of actionatives that I have. Like, I think that there's a ton of value in this for me,
1155. 01:29:38 but it's in the small adjustments to things that I'm currently already doing. Or, you know, maybe
1156. 01:29:45 I'm doing them in a little bit different way and the way that he phrased it makes more sense to me.
1157. 01:29:49 So I think that, yeah, you're right, depending on the approach that you take to this, and also
1158. 01:29:54 your position in life, like that could determine what you get out of this. It's not going to be,
1159. 01:30:00 okay, just follow these three steps and your life is going to change forever. But there's
1160. 01:30:04 going to be a lot of little things in here. Yes. So upcoming books, we've talked a little bit about
1161. 01:30:09 relational books coming up and talked a little bit about family bits. So our next one is actually
1162. 01:30:18 a repeat author, which I don't think we've done before, have we? We've not repeated an author,
1163. 01:30:22 I don't think. I don't think so. So this is Patrick Linciones, the three big questions for a
1164. 01:30:28 frantic family. And I believe the only thing I need to say about this is that it was recommended
1165. 01:30:33 by your wife. Yeah, that's a lot of pressure to rate this highly. But I promise to give it a
1166. 01:30:40 fair and objective rating. Okay. All right, I'll hold you to that. All right. The one after that
1167. 01:30:46 is "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie, which is another one of those books
1168. 01:30:51 that probably everybody has heard about. And I'm kind of thinking based on our experience with
1169. 01:30:58 like the seven habits of how they affected people, thinking girl rich, stuff like that,
1170. 01:31:02 even Victor Frankl, that maybe it isn't what I think it is. And so I want to dive into it and
1171. 01:31:08 really understand what he's saying. Because everything I've heard about Dale Carnegie has been
1172. 01:31:12 real, really positive. But generally speaking, like if you were to go out on the street and take
1173. 01:31:17 a poll of what people think about "How to Win Friends and Influence People," I would say that
1174. 01:31:20 the public perception of this book is not that positive. So I want to get to the heart of this one.
1175. 01:31:26 I feel like this book is a polarizing book. Exactly. Yep. Some people absolutely love it,
1176. 01:31:32 which I feel like are usually upper management CEO types. Maybe I'm off on that. And a lot of
1177. 01:31:38 other people don't get it and think it's a terrible book. Like that's my perception. Could be. I mean,
1178. 01:31:43 you remember what I thought of who moved my cheese. So fair. All right. And then for gap books,
1179. 01:31:48 I'm reading "Profit First," which is really written to business owners. And the basic idea is set
1180. 01:31:56 aside money for your profit first. If you were to apply this in a personal context, it's set aside
1181. 01:32:01 money for your savings account before you try to pay your bills. It's pretty simple and straightforward,
1182. 01:32:06 but it's an entertaining read. Yeah. I saw the pumpkin plan on our recommended list. And that
1183. 01:32:11 one may actually make it into the mix sooner rather than later, just because I was looking at
1184. 01:32:18 all of our recommended books on Amazon. And noticed that that one has a large number of reviews,
1185. 01:32:23 and yet it's still a 5.0 rating on that particular one. So that's kind of rare for that level. My
1186. 01:32:30 gap book is Unstuck by Matt Perman. This is a pre-launch advanced copy that I was given. I think I
1187. 01:32:37 mentioned this last time, but I'm actually diving into it in depth. I guess it's tonight. So I'm
1188. 01:32:43 jumping into that one and plan to chronicle my path through it. I'll note he's the author of
1189. 01:32:49 What's Best Next, the book we did last time. So kind of a follow-up to that one. But something
1190. 01:32:54 you'll notice with some of these is we're starting to pull from our recommended book list quite a bit.
1191. 01:32:59 So if you have one that you want to get onto that list, bookworm.fm/recommend, fill out that form,
1192. 01:33:05 send it in, hits my email, and then I do my best to get it into that recommended list on the site
1193. 01:33:10 as soon as I can. And if you want to see the ones that are already recommended, again, bookworm.fm/list,
1194. 01:33:15 and you can see all of those there as well. And if you are following along and want to help support
1195. 01:33:20 the show in some way, if you go to that list, it has the Amazon link. Those are affiliate links.
1196. 01:33:26 So if you want to pick up any of these books, you do us a favor and click on those particular
1197. 01:33:31 links, and we get a little bit of a kickback from that. Yeah, and you can also help us out
1198. 01:33:34 if you are so inclined by going to iTunes and leaving us a review. KCRW is still the number one
1199. 01:33:42 result for bookworm, which made it my personal mission to dethrone them. So please help me out.
1200. 01:33:48 And then as we talked about at the beginning, if you want to join the podcast book club,
1201. 01:33:53 the Internet's largest book club, unofficially. The unofficial largest internet book club.
1202. 01:34:00 Yeah, club.bookworm.fm. Like if you are all right. You got it right. All right, cool.
1203. 01:34:06 Well done, Mike. Yeah, I would love to see some of those conversations take off there. I think
1204. 01:34:12 that's a cool idea. But if you are reading along and want to join us on the next journey,
1205. 01:34:19 the three big questions for a frantic family by Patrick Linceyone, and we will dive into that one