49: Peak by Anders Ericsson

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1. 00:00:00 How's Mike doing good? How are you?
2. 00:00:03 I am doing well. I see a note about new podcast gear in the set outline.
3. 00:00:08 I think maybe I texted you a picture when I got this thing, so I was so excited about it anyways,
4. 00:00:12 but yeah, I am running all of my audio stuff now through a channel strip, which is a DBX 286S,
5. 00:00:19 which I had no idea what it was until I started getting frustrated because I didn't have enough gain in my,
6. 00:00:26 my Audient ID4 interface to power the the Sure Beta 87A the way I wanted it to.
7. 00:00:31 I was getting a lot of like, hissing in the background, and you can remove that after the fact, but it just
8. 00:00:36 bugged me every time I recorded anything.
9. 00:00:38 So I started looking at preamps. Preamps are really expensive turns out.
10. 00:00:42 I quickly was priced out of my price range and found this thing and it was so cheap audio gear wise.
11. 00:00:48 It was like 200 bucks. I was like, there's no way this thing works, but I have a local audio place nearby me
12. 00:00:55 I think I've mentioned before, Pixel Pro Audio, and I really like those guys.
13. 00:00:58 They know what they're talking about and they basically will sell me anything and if I don't like it for any reason,
14. 00:01:03 I'll just bring it back because they know I'll be back again later.
15. 00:01:06 There you go.
16. 00:01:07 So they said, yeah, take it for spin. And I really like it.
17. 00:01:10 The thing I really like about this in addition to the preamp, which makes my mic sound better,
18. 00:01:14 there's a couple of things that happen prior to the audio even getting to my interface.
19. 00:01:18 So before it even gets into logic, it's already got a little bit of compression.
20. 00:01:22 It's already got a little bit of a de-essing, so it's less harsh.
21. 00:01:25 It's got a little bit of an enhancement, not a whole lot.
22. 00:01:28 The thing I absolutely love about it though is this expander gate.
23. 00:01:31 And since you have kids at home who may or may not decide to melt down whenever you record something,
24. 00:01:35 you should look into this too because this noise gate is magical.
25. 00:01:39 I have this little light on my channel strip right below my monitor.
26. 00:01:42 It's red most of the time, which is where I have it set.
27. 00:01:45 So anything in the background, like the home of the air conditioner or whatever, you're not going to hear.
28. 00:01:48 When I start talking, it turns green, letting the sound in.
29. 00:01:51 But what I can't figure out how this even is possible is that it does a phenomenal job of removing all the background noise,
30. 00:01:58 even when the noise gate is open and it's recording my audio.
31. 00:02:01 I'm not an audio engineer, so I have no idea how it does it, but it's magic.
32. 00:02:05 Yeah.
33. 00:02:06 Basically, it drops out anything that's under a certain decibel range.
34. 00:02:11 That's fundamentally how it works.
35. 00:02:14 So anything that, say you have it set at, I'm trying to recall a normal number on it because I know where it sits on the gauge
36. 00:02:24 whenever I work on audio, but it's like two, three, maybe five decibels, maybe it's even up to ten sometimes.
37. 00:02:31 But it's basically dropping anything below that level out entirely.
38. 00:02:35 So that way it doesn't ever make it into the final recording or out into the system.
39. 00:02:42 So what I know is that I don't have to worry about anymore people making noise in the background.
40. 00:02:47 Like my kids can be playing literally outside my office door and you would not hear them with this thing.
41. 00:02:53 It's crazy.
42. 00:02:54 I will also say that the Sure Beta 87A that you are now using, right?
43. 00:03:00 That's the right mic?
44. 00:03:01 Yep.
45. 00:03:02 That's also the mic that I'm on currently.
46. 00:03:05 And those particular microphones, if you get the gain set correctly on those, they do a pretty good job of dropping out anything that's not right on the mic as well.
47. 00:03:18 So depending on how you have your settings on it, I'm not using a gate or a limiter on mine at all.
48. 00:03:26 And I've managed to fine-tune the gate, not the gate, the gain and compressor on it such that it drops a lot of that stuff out.
49. 00:03:36 So for those listening, if you're not into audio gear or any audio engineering at all, this is all Greek, I'm sorry.
50. 00:03:43 But if you do any recording at all ever, go by yourself a DBX 286S now and thank me later.
51. 00:03:50 Or buy a soundboard.
52. 00:03:52 So here's the other route you can go, Mike.
53. 00:03:57 So you went that direction, which is totally cool.
54. 00:04:00 And depending on how you want it set up, that is the better route, depending on what you want to accomplish.
55. 00:04:06 On my end, I simply bought a full-on soundboard that has a built-in compressor.
56. 00:04:13 It's got the whole EQ settings.
57. 00:04:15 I can run effects on it if I wanted to.
58. 00:04:18 But it comes with preamps and a lot of gain to it.
59. 00:04:23 So Mike's like a high LPR40, that thing is super gain hungry.
60. 00:04:29 And you can run those on this particular one.
61. 00:04:33 With the Beta 87, it's fairly gain hungry too, not nearly as much, I don't think.
62. 00:04:40 But even on this particular board, I can drop the pad off of it and run it at like a quarter on it.
63. 00:04:48 So I still got a 75% higher I could go with this particular one.
64. 00:04:53 So it's, and what am I using?
65. 00:04:55 It's the Behringer 1204 USB.
66. 00:04:58 So it's a USB soundboard.
67. 00:05:00 So I'm running everything through that.
68. 00:05:03 And because it's a full soundboard, I actually pull the output off of my computer and run it as a separate input
69. 00:05:09 into that board.
70. 00:05:10 And then I'm picking and choosing what I want to go into my headphones out of all of that.
71. 00:05:15 So I'm like treating my output on it like a full monitor setup.
72. 00:05:19 So that's way more information than most people wanted.
73. 00:05:23 But that's the route that I'm going to get a lot of those features.
74. 00:05:26 But you have a lot more in your setup than what I do.
75. 00:05:30 Yeah, but nobody cares about that.
76. 00:05:32 What they really care about is the bookmarks that you mentioned in the last episode.
77. 00:05:35 So I have follow up for this also.
78. 00:05:37 I think I sent you a picture, but I have bookmarks right here.
79. 00:05:41 I'm going to grab one.
80. 00:05:43 Okay, wave it in front of the microphone.
81. 00:05:45 You can't hear it.
82. 00:05:47 That's a bookworm bookmark.
83. 00:05:48 On the front it has the logo and it says the Internet's largest book club with a disclaimer
84. 00:05:53 that this is all me and you assume no responsibility.
85. 00:05:56 And then on the back there's the bookworm logo with the glasses, like the long skinny one on the top of the website.
86. 00:06:02 And these are not just your run of the mill cheap little bookmarks.
87. 00:06:07 These are two by six.
88. 00:06:09 So they're two inches wide and then six inches tall.
89. 00:06:12 And they are the thickest cardboard mat I could find from you printing.
90. 00:06:18 So I think they started at like eight or ten.
91. 00:06:21 And I'm like, I don't want some flimsy little bookmark to be marking my page in my books.
92. 00:06:24 I'm going to go all up.
93. 00:06:25 Yeah.
94. 00:06:26 So I have these are 16 pound or whatever the mat ones in there.
95. 00:06:30 They're really nice.
96. 00:06:31 They don't bend.
97. 00:06:32 They're not going to get ruined just because you're using them in normal day to day use.
98. 00:06:37 Also, it turns out when you order stuff off the Internet, if you buy like a hundred of them,
99. 00:06:42 it's fairly expensive.
100. 00:06:44 If you buy like a thousand, it's only a couple bucks more.
101. 00:06:47 So I have a thousand of these bookmarks waiting to be given out to people.
102. 00:06:52 Now, I'm not going to tell you how you can get them yet.
103. 00:06:54 You're going to have to tune in next episode to find out how you can buy one of these from where you are right now.
104. 00:07:00 But I will say that I will bring these with me to max stock this summer.
105. 00:07:05 So if you listen to the podcast, come say hi and I will give you a bookworm bookmark.
106. 00:07:10 Nice.
107. 00:07:11 I did not know you got a thought.
108. 00:07:12 I saw that you sent me the preliminary on these things and a thousand.
109. 00:07:19 Holy buckets, Mike.
110. 00:07:20 Yeah, I got this great big box.
111. 00:07:22 And as soon as I got it, I'm like, this maybe was a mistake.
112. 00:07:26 I opened it up and there's just bookmarks for days.
113. 00:07:29 Wow.
114. 00:07:30 Like I said, it was only a couple bucks more to get a thousand as opposed to a hundred and fifty.
115. 00:07:33 So I'm like, go big or go home.
116. 00:07:35 That's nuts.
117. 00:07:36 Well, now you're going to have to tune in next time to figure out how to get these.
118. 00:07:40 I know the answer to this.
119. 00:07:41 Yeah, next episode is episode 50.
120. 00:07:43 So we've got something special planned.
121. 00:07:44 You're definitely going to want to catch that one.
122. 00:07:46 Okay.
123. 00:07:47 So we got a new podcast here.
124. 00:07:48 We got bookworm bookmarks coming down the pipeline.
125. 00:07:52 Say that five times fast.
126. 00:07:54 Bookworm bookmarks.
127. 00:07:55 See, it's hard.
128. 00:07:57 You got a couple of other things here for follow up outside of fun toys and such.
129. 00:08:02 Yep.
130. 00:08:03 So real follow up.
131. 00:08:04 I've got use and instead of but and I've also got eliminate fixed opinion words and use
132. 00:08:10 personal words.
133. 00:08:11 These are both kind of aspirational action items that there's no way you're going to be able
134. 00:08:15 to hold me accountable to these, but I have done these.
135. 00:08:18 Kind of typical for us, right?
136. 00:08:19 Yeah, exactly.
137. 00:08:20 I do have some real ones for this time.
138. 00:08:23 Quote unquote real ones.
139. 00:08:25 Right.
140. 00:08:26 And then the other one was to invite people to tell their wins.
141. 00:08:29 This I haven't officially implemented.
142. 00:08:33 I will actually do this today though later on.
143. 00:08:35 So I think I mentioned in the last episode that I've got a discipleship group of guys
144. 00:08:39 at my church where I think this would be perfect.
145. 00:08:42 And I've forgotten the last couple times that we've met our meetings.
146. 00:08:46 We tend to go like wire to wire, trying to cram everything in anyways, but I'll be a
147. 00:08:50 little bit more time this afternoon and it's fresh of mine.
148. 00:08:53 So I'm definitely going to implement this this afternoon.
149. 00:08:55 Okay.
150. 00:08:56 And then you've got some and I want to know right away.
151. 00:08:58 These are not in correct order.
152. 00:08:59 I want to know what are your five brand words.
153. 00:09:01 You want me to start there?
154. 00:09:02 Okay.
155. 00:09:03 Yep.
156. 00:09:04 This is follow up from like two episodes ago.
157. 00:09:05 So we got it.
158. 00:09:06 We got to get this one or three maybe.
159. 00:09:09 I don't know.
160. 00:09:10 I did it.
161. 00:09:11 That's that's at least a step in the right direction.
162. 00:09:13 I suppose this comes all the way back from I'm going to have to look it up now.
163. 00:09:19 It is from doing the book busy.
164. 00:09:22 Yep.
165. 00:09:23 So whatever episode busy was that would have been 46.
166. 00:09:28 It looks like so episode 46.
167. 00:09:31 So this being 49.
168. 00:09:32 I'm now what three episodes behind on this one, but at least you got it done.
169. 00:09:37 I got it done.
170. 00:09:39 All right.
171. 00:09:40 So five brand words and just as a refresher, like the purpose of this was to change your
172. 00:09:45 brand from one of exhaustion and being overworked and constantly hustling from one thing to the
173. 00:09:54 next and just being overwhelmed.
174. 00:09:57 So changing away from that and then using these as a way to guide your conversations
175. 00:10:04 and what it is that you do day to day.
176. 00:10:05 So five brand words.
177. 00:10:07 Number one, authentic.
178. 00:10:10 There was a whole list of these in the book.
179. 00:10:12 I didn't necessarily follow them to the letter, but I picked a couple of my own, but one of
180. 00:10:18 those was authentic and I have kind of a push for this across a lot of the platforms and
181. 00:10:23 conversations that I have.
182. 00:10:24 Like I want to be very real with people.
183. 00:10:26 I don't like it when people sugarcoat things.
184. 00:10:29 I'm pretty particular with making sure or hunting down when people are trying to put
185. 00:10:36 one over on me and I don't want to be that person.
186. 00:10:39 So I've tried for a long time to be very real with things and I want that to continue to
187. 00:10:44 be something that comes out.
188. 00:10:46 So number one is authentic.
189. 00:10:48 Number two, I feel like this one fits me pretty well.
190. 00:10:50 Entrepreneurial.
191. 00:10:51 I feel like I'm always looking for an angle to develop my business or a new business in
192. 00:10:56 some way.
193. 00:10:58 Like I'm always trying to build something that could be helpful to other people and that
194. 00:11:02 would potentially drive a future income.
195. 00:11:04 Doesn't have to be right away, but could be in the future.
196. 00:11:07 So I feel like I'm always trying to build or develop something in some way.
197. 00:11:13 So that would be number two.
198. 00:11:15 Number three, I deviated a little bit from the list and just wrote down white space.
199. 00:11:21 And this is something that if you remember, I don't remember if it was two episodes ago
200. 00:11:26 now, maybe last episode about developing white space in our family, that has become
201. 00:11:32 something that's really important to me is making sure that we have the space to just
202. 00:11:37 go play as a family and not necessarily just hustling quite a bit.
203. 00:11:43 So this maybe coincides a little bit with the book, Busy, or directly contradicts the
204. 00:11:48 cultural norm there.
205. 00:11:49 But we really like to have those buffer zones.
206. 00:11:52 And although that kind of started with our family, I've been seeing that start to morph
207. 00:11:57 into, you know, the timelines that I put together for clients on development projects.
208. 00:12:03 It can come in on the amount of time I allocate towards certain tasks in a day, like how much
209. 00:12:10 time am I going to spend on email?
210. 00:12:12 Or you know, even, you know, I'm going to go run a gig for a local band, run sound for
211. 00:12:18 them.
212. 00:12:19 Like, okay, well, I'm going to give myself an extra amount of time before and after that,
213. 00:12:23 just to show up early and just have conversations and have some fun.
214. 00:12:26 So, you know, creating those buffer zones in that white space between things, I've found
215. 00:12:31 to be something that I really see as important and want to help other people to develop as
216. 00:12:37 well.
217. 00:12:38 So authentic entrepreneurial white space, number four is innovative, which can kind
218. 00:12:44 of go with entrepreneurial.
219. 00:12:47 But I like to be or try to find ways to think outside the box and find a different angle
220. 00:12:55 on or a different way of doing something that is already being done, which would lead me
221. 00:13:01 into number five of being a problem solver.
222. 00:13:04 So I can see how there's a pretty strong theme here of trying to be someone who's very real
223. 00:13:09 and finding something new in that.
224. 00:13:12 So that comes out and being innovative, trying to find a new way to do things.
225. 00:13:15 But also, I just really love helping people solve their problems.
226. 00:13:18 Maybe that's why I do the development thing because someone brings a problem with their
227. 00:13:23 website or, you know, you name it and it is now my goal to try to meet that and solve
228. 00:13:30 that problem in some way.
229. 00:13:32 So there you have it, Mike.
230. 00:13:35 Authentic entrepreneurial white space, innovative problem solver.
231. 00:13:39 There you go.
232. 00:13:40 Nice.
233. 00:13:41 I will send every website problem I have over to you now so you can solve that.
234. 00:13:46 All right.
235. 00:13:47 I have three follow up items.
236. 00:13:48 That was number three that Mike made me jump ahead to.
237. 00:13:51 So do I have to do them backwards then if you made me start at the end?
238. 00:13:55 No, you can pick whatever other ones you want.
239. 00:13:57 I just wanted to make sure you did that one.
240. 00:13:58 I'm going to go backwards.
241. 00:13:59 All right.
242. 00:14:00 So number two is avoid arguments.
243. 00:14:02 I think I've been better about this.
244. 00:14:04 No, you haven't.
245. 00:14:06 I haven't.
246. 00:14:07 I'm just kidding.
247. 00:14:08 I'm creating an argument right now.
248. 00:14:09 See, I even responded with a question.
249. 00:14:13 No, this comes from our last book of how to win friends and influence people of trying
250. 00:14:21 not to prove that I'm right, especially with my clients.
251. 00:14:27 So trying to guide them instead of saying, no, this is wrong.
252. 00:14:33 And I don't feel like I've done a lot of arguments in the past, but it is a thing that
253. 00:14:38 I wouldn't say has never happened.
254. 00:14:40 So is it actually done?
255. 00:14:42 I don't know.
256. 00:14:43 I'm going to mark it off and say yes, but I haven't been having arguments as much lately.
257. 00:14:48 There we go.
258. 00:14:49 Success.
259. 00:14:50 Number one on my list since I'm going backwards is developing a checklist for client calls
260. 00:14:56 for right before I jump on a client call.
261. 00:14:59 I did do this.
262. 00:15:00 I have a checklist of things that I am going to do as far as doing a little bit of research
263. 00:15:06 about the company, what are their websites, what kind of design and stuff is involved
264. 00:15:11 with their current process, and then looking over what they have sent me already because
265. 00:15:18 they usually send me a series of what their problem is that they're trying to solve in
266. 00:15:22 some way, what their idea is and trying to go through some of that.
267. 00:15:26 I've been using it for a few calls already and it has sped them up significantly, which
268. 00:15:32 I was not expecting.
269. 00:15:34 I was more just trying to use that as a way to understand their company quicker.
270. 00:15:40 And I have found that if I start a call, Mike, and just say, you know, I was doing some research
271. 00:15:45 about your site and how you guys do things.
272. 00:15:48 And this is my view on that as it pertains to your idea here.
273. 00:15:53 For whatever reason, saying that and being able to be very genuine in that because I
274. 00:15:57 did do that, they trust me quicker on what's going on.
275. 00:16:03 They trust my opinion on things.
276. 00:16:05 And I get more of those projects and they seem to go way smoother.
277. 00:16:11 That's just been my experience so far.
278. 00:16:14 Awesome.
279. 00:16:15 That has had a much bigger impact than I was expecting.
280. 00:16:18 So if you do client work, I highly recommend this.
281. 00:16:23 Just saying.
282. 00:16:24 Sweet.
283. 00:16:25 Go Joe.
284. 00:16:26 Go follow up.
285. 00:16:27 Follow up.
286. 00:16:28 Check.
287. 00:16:29 Which brings us to today's book, Peek by Andrew Erickson.
288. 00:16:32 This was a listener recommendation.
289. 00:16:34 I tried to figure out who recommended this and couldn't find it for whatever reason.
290. 00:16:38 Maybe I deleted the email because this is back when we did recommendations via email.
291. 00:16:43 I could not find that.
292. 00:16:45 So sorry, whoever recommended this, you're free to reach out to me and say, "Hey, that
293. 00:16:49 was me."
294. 00:16:50 Whoever recommended this, definitely recommend another book.
295. 00:16:54 I like this one.
296. 00:16:57 So yes, Peek, tagline on this is secrets from the new science of expertise.
297. 00:17:04 Very in-depth book about the process of becoming an expert in your field.
298. 00:17:10 And take your pick on what field you would like to talk about.
299. 00:17:13 I'm guessing that there was some piece of that field discussed somewhere in this book.
300. 00:17:17 I was very comprehensive on covering a lot of different sectors.
301. 00:17:21 Yeah, there was tons of stuff in this one.
302. 00:17:22 I put down some talking points just because there wasn't anything.
303. 00:17:26 How long was this yesterday or today when I opened up the document?
304. 00:17:29 You always fill this in.
305. 00:17:30 I never touch this.
306. 00:17:31 Yeah.
307. 00:17:32 Well, I feel kind of bad because this one I was like, "Well, we should probably condense
308. 00:17:35 this down and skip certain sections."
309. 00:17:37 And I didn't feel like there was anything in here that we should skip.
310. 00:17:39 That's also good.
311. 00:17:40 Okay.
312. 00:17:41 People just try to crank through all nine of these as quick as we can.
313. 00:17:45 First one here is the power of purposeful practice.
314. 00:17:48 And this kind of sets the stage for everything that he's going to talk about.
315. 00:17:53 What's interesting here though is that he doesn't really get to the gold standard, that's
316. 00:17:57 section four, till a little bit later.
317. 00:18:00 But he does talk about the usual approach that people take when they try to learn things.
318. 00:18:05 And he's got some stories in this first chapter which explain why those initial or those usual
319. 00:18:10 approaches don't really work.
320. 00:18:11 And then some purposeful practice examples of how people have used this to achieve some
321. 00:18:15 pretty crazy results.
322. 00:18:16 But like I said, he's kind of holding back a little bit because he's going to give you
323. 00:18:20 the formula a little bit later.
324. 00:18:23 But even right away at this beginning section of the book, he's got me hooked.
325. 00:18:26 He starts off with this story about a guy named Steve who randomly is trying to remember
326. 00:18:32 and memorize strings of numbers, random numbers.
327. 00:18:36 And when they start doing this experiment with this guy, he can only remember like nine
328. 00:18:39 in a row.
329. 00:18:41 But he keeps doing it.
330. 00:18:42 He basically plateaus and he's frustrated with himself because he wants to get better
331. 00:18:46 than he breaks through.
332. 00:18:47 And eventually two years later, he can remember 82 random characters in a row, which is nuts
333. 00:18:52 when you think about that.
334. 00:18:54 Like I have trouble remembering a phone number, seven characters.
335. 00:18:57 I honestly think that a lot of those security codes that you get from places for two factor
336. 00:19:02 authentication, they're never more than six characters because it seems like six is like
337. 00:19:06 the logical place where yeah, people can remember that and anything above that.
338. 00:19:09 Like there's a good chance they're going to get it wrong.
339. 00:19:11 So 82 characters.
340. 00:19:13 What?
341. 00:19:14 Yep.
342. 00:19:15 And this is a completely, I don't want to say completely useless, but kind of like you're
343. 00:19:20 not going to make a living with this type of skill probably.
344. 00:19:24 But it just shows you the kind of thing that people kind of struggle with a little bit
345. 00:19:29 in their everyday life.
346. 00:19:30 It's not enough to really think like, oh, I should really develop this skill and fix
347. 00:19:34 this problem that I have.
348. 00:19:35 But everybody can relate to this.
349. 00:19:37 Like they've all experienced that.
350. 00:19:38 It's like, oh, yeah, just tell me the number and then I can't remember it.
351. 00:19:41 So it just shows you like you have trouble with this one little thing.
352. 00:19:45 But here's an example of a guy who's gone so much beyond that.
353. 00:19:48 And it's because he's not taking this usual approach, memorizing these things.
354. 00:19:51 He's applying this whole idea of purposeful practice to get better.
355. 00:19:55 Yeah, I really liked this section just because it explained that you don't have limits.
356. 00:20:02 And this will we'll get into this in the next one.
357. 00:20:04 But we tend to think there are certain limits to what the human brain can accomplish.
358. 00:20:11 And this is a good example of that because we typically didn't really think about how
359. 00:20:15 many numbers you could hold in your memory before repeating them.
360. 00:20:22 I feel like I personally have been better at the whole number of memorization thing than
361. 00:20:27 most like I have a handful of numbers in my head that are non typical like driver's license
362. 00:20:35 numbers and more social security numbers than I probably should have in my brain like all
363. 00:20:40 of my kids, my wife and mine.
364. 00:20:43 And I've even had cases where there's a couple of social security numbers in my head because
365. 00:20:48 someone rattled it off just to prove that I couldn't remember it.
366. 00:20:52 And I did.
367. 00:20:54 So I have a few numbers in my head just because of that.
368. 00:20:58 But that's more long term not even like this whole test was for short term memory.
369. 00:21:06 And they go on to explain later on the book that even he gets to the point where he's
370. 00:21:12 recalling 82 numbers or whatever it was 80 something.
371. 00:21:16 And since that time that number has been grown to over 300 that the records continue
372. 00:21:23 to be broken on how far people can go with that.
373. 00:21:27 That just kind of blows my mind like to your point.
374. 00:21:30 Why?
375. 00:21:31 Like what am I supposed to do with this?
376. 00:21:32 Yeah, it's a cool trick.
377. 00:21:34 It's a fun party, you know, trick of sorts, but I don't really see the usefulness in
378. 00:21:39 that.
379. 00:21:40 But it did show a good point in that if you are smart with the way that you practice,
380. 00:21:47 which I, you know, this is what I took as the point here is if you're smart with the way
381. 00:21:51 that you practice, then you can improve on any goal or tasks that you set your set yourself
382. 00:21:58 to.
383. 00:21:59 Exactly.
384. 00:22:00 So the usual approach and he has another person in this section, Renee, who's not able
385. 00:22:04 to memorize that much, they repeated the same experiment and she plateaued a long time before
386. 00:22:09 Steve did.
387. 00:22:10 And they're like, well, why is that the usual approach is to get to a quote unquote acceptable
388. 00:22:15 level and then plateau because that's good enough.
389. 00:22:20 And at that point, additional traditional practice doesn't help you.
390. 00:22:26 You have to push yourself if you want to continue to get better.
391. 00:22:29 So a step up from that is this purposeful practice, which is different than what he calls
392. 00:22:33 naive practice, which is just doing something a bunch of times.
393. 00:22:36 And I think this is the thing that's really important is we can probably all identify
394. 00:22:40 situations in our lives where we've applied this naive practice.
395. 00:22:45 We've hit a plateau.
396. 00:22:46 We're like, oh, that's as far as I can go.
397. 00:22:48 Maybe somebody can go further, but that's it for me.
398. 00:22:50 And really his point is like, no, that's just the tip of the iceberg.
399. 00:22:54 Like there's a whole lot more ground to take in this particular area if you really want
400. 00:22:57 to, but you have to approach it the right way.
401. 00:23:00 And the thing that Steve used to help him remember this stuff, and this is really the
402. 00:23:04 thing that was interesting to me in this section, is like your short term memory is limited.
403. 00:23:08 You've only got so much RAM in your biological computer, but you can create these mnemonics
404. 00:23:13 or these mental modes to help you transfer that into long term memory.
405. 00:23:17 And then that exponentially increases what you're able to get done.
406. 00:23:20 And the purpose of practice is the thing that allows you to recognize these patterns, which
407. 00:23:25 are there.
408. 00:23:26 So a lot of it is like awareness.
409. 00:23:27 It's just like seeing this stuff for what it really is as opposed to just a bunch of
410. 00:23:31 random numbers.
411. 00:23:32 Yeah, I think this this moves us into the second here of harnessing adaptability because so
412. 00:23:40 much of what we've known historically is that, you know, you're born within an innate talent
413. 00:23:46 and you can only be as good as what you're born with.
414. 00:23:48 Like that has been a, we know now a myth for a long time.
415. 00:23:52 And the second section, he really gets into some of the, like the neuroscience behind some
416. 00:24:00 of this with homeostasis and plasticity of the brain and how you can, if you focus on
417. 00:24:06 a certain area, continue to get better at it.
418. 00:24:09 I believe this is a section where he brought up the London taxis, taxi drivers and how
419. 00:24:15 certain parts of their physical brain are larger than the normal human being.
420. 00:24:22 And the hippocampus, that whole section was like the spatial recognition part of the brain.
421. 00:24:28 And number one, London taxi drivers, holy buckets, you have to remember a lot.
422. 00:24:34 Yeah.
423. 00:24:35 Like that was intense whenever he was explaining some of the details that those particular drivers
424. 00:24:42 have to remember or in the tests that they go through to even get their license.
425. 00:24:46 That was just bonkers to me.
426. 00:24:48 But I thought it showed a really cool aspect of how the brain can evolve and adjust to
427. 00:24:56 being deliberately practiced on a certain area.
428. 00:25:00 So I thought it was kind of cool.
429. 00:25:01 Yeah.
430. 00:25:02 I mean, necessity is the mother of invention, right?
431. 00:25:05 Like if you're going to be a taxi driver in London, you have to learn this stuff.
432. 00:25:08 So your brain adapts so that you can learn this stuff.
433. 00:25:11 On page 47, he says, "The reason that most people don't possess these extraordinary physical
434. 00:25:15 capabilities isn't because they don't have the capacity for them, but rather because
435. 00:25:19 they are satisfied to live in the comfortable rut of homeostasis and never do the work that
436. 00:25:23 is required to get out of it.
437. 00:25:25 They live in the world of good enough."
438. 00:25:27 And now this whole idea of homeostasis, he does a good job of explaining this.
439. 00:25:30 I had no idea what this was before I read the book, but I feel like I kind of understand
440. 00:25:34 it now.
441. 00:25:35 Okay.
442. 00:25:36 So I'm going to talk about it like an expert on a podcast.
443. 00:25:38 No, I'm just kidding.
444. 00:25:39 Perfect.
445. 00:25:40 So homeostasis is the tendency of a system to act in a way that maintains its own stability.
446. 00:25:45 So how does that apply to your brain changing or your body changing?
447. 00:25:48 Well, your body is going to try to maintain a status quo.
448. 00:25:53 And if you push your body, your muscles and your cells are forced to change and find
449. 00:25:57 a new comfort zone.
450. 00:25:58 This is what exercise does.
451. 00:26:00 Okay.
452. 00:26:01 So when your body is pushed to the point where homeostasis can no longer be maintained, the
453. 00:26:05 body has to respond with changes which are intended to reestablish that homeostasis.
454. 00:26:10 That new normal.
455. 00:26:12 And this works in your brain too because your brain and it, like in your body, you would
456. 00:26:15 use this to develop muscle, for example.
457. 00:26:17 But your brain requires these networks and develops new neurons which creates new connections
458. 00:26:23 and it produces myelin, which is something that we learned about in deep work by Kale
459. 00:26:28 Newport, I believe it was.
460. 00:26:30 Myelin is the substance around your nerve cells that allows them to fire faster and
461. 00:26:35 cleaner.
462. 00:26:36 And in this book, he mentions that it allows them to fire up to 10 times faster.
463. 00:26:40 So it's the stuff that allows your brain to work better, but then also it's building
464. 00:26:44 your brain.
465. 00:26:45 That's just why the hippocampus and the London taxi drivers grew.
466. 00:26:48 And this is a really cool idea because it means that like London taxi drivers, this
467. 00:26:53 wasn't when they were six, 10, 12 years old.
468. 00:26:56 I mean, they're grown adults and they're still able to change their state.
469. 00:27:00 Now a lot of the research behind the brain that I've heard in the past is like by the
470. 00:27:03 time you're 12, the majority of this is developed or whatever.
471. 00:27:08 And so I think if you read those stats, you can be like, oh, well, I kind of missed my
472. 00:27:11 chance to develop my brain to the maximum capacity for the rest of my life.
473. 00:27:16 And really this section is saying that no, like your brain is always changing, your body
474. 00:27:20 is always changing.
475. 00:27:21 And so if you apply this idea of purposeful practice, you can make it change in the way
476. 00:27:25 that you want and develop the skills that you want to have.
477. 00:27:27 As long as you do it the right way, that was the takeaway I had from a lot of this is,
478. 00:27:32 and it didn't even translate into an action item for real.
479. 00:27:35 I don't think, you know, for me.
480. 00:27:38 These items were tough to come by in this particular book, but seeing how there's not
481. 00:27:45 really a timeline that could lead you to the point where you can't get better.
482. 00:27:52 There are obviously some things that like, I will never be a better swimmer than Michael
483. 00:27:57 Phelps guaranteed.
484. 00:27:59 I do not have the physical makeup for that.
485. 00:28:02 So he has a definite edge from a physical stance than I do.
486. 00:28:08 So I will never keep up with him.
487. 00:28:10 Well, we'll get into that in a little bit, but I would argue against that because what
488. 00:28:15 matters is the approach that you take.
489. 00:28:16 So just the fact that Michael Phelps is born with the DNA that he has means nothing if
490. 00:28:21 he's not applying the same purposeful practice that you are.
491. 00:28:24 Now I know a little bit about Michael Phelps and his regimens.
492. 00:28:26 So yeah, there's no way you're going to catch him because he's got a disciplined machine.
493. 00:28:29 Like he's got this purposeful practice down to a science.
494. 00:28:32 So given where he is now, where you are now, if you both apply this, like you'll never
495. 00:28:35 catch him, but he uses examples even in the physical arena of sports of people who like,
496. 00:28:41 if you're five foot tall, it's going to be hard for you to make it to the NBA.
497. 00:28:44 But that doesn't mean you can't.
498. 00:28:45 Like if you apply purposeful practice, you literally can achieve any goal that you want,
499. 00:28:49 which is really exciting.
500. 00:28:50 Like Alan Iverson, good luck.
501. 00:28:53 Super short dude, but he'll kill you on the floor.
502. 00:28:56 Yeah, exactly.
503. 00:28:58 One other thing I want to call out here is the whole section about the musicians.
504. 00:29:02 He talks a lot about musicians and in particular violinists, which I liked because I grew up
505. 00:29:08 playing violin.
506. 00:29:09 You're not biased on this at all, are you?
507. 00:29:11 No, not at all.
508. 00:29:12 Well, it resonated with me because he talks about the changes that happen as you practice
509. 00:29:17 the violin in particular.
510. 00:29:18 And I grew up learning the Suzuki method, which is a lot about memorization.
511. 00:29:22 I remember when I was 12 years old, I had like eight volumes of music memorized.
512. 00:29:26 I could play like with all these four seasons from memory.
513. 00:29:28 And I would do that in front of people and they'd just be like, how can you do that?
514. 00:29:32 And I recognize now after reading this book that like, I wasn't special.
515. 00:29:36 Like I just applied this principle of purposeful practice.
516. 00:29:39 I had a good teacher who taught me these fundamentals and I just did them every day.
517. 00:29:43 Right.
518. 00:29:44 And that purposeful practice is what allowed me to memorize all this stuff and develop
519. 00:29:47 the musical year that I now have.
520. 00:29:49 And I'm grateful that my parents had me stick with that when I was younger.
521. 00:29:53 I mean, there's all sorts of people who were like, oh, I wish I would have stayed playing
522. 00:29:56 piano or whatever.
523. 00:29:58 But really it also doesn't matter when you start.
524. 00:30:00 Like it is easier when you start because I started when I was five years old.
525. 00:30:04 And I took lessons up until the time I was 18 and I still play today.
526. 00:30:08 Like the stuff that was instilled in me from five to 18 is carrying over through the rest
527. 00:30:12 of my life.
528. 00:30:13 That's a good foundation that I had.
529. 00:30:14 But just because you don't have that foundation doesn't mean you can't do this.
530. 00:30:18 That's the thing about this book that's really exciting to me is like, it doesn't matter
531. 00:30:22 where you start, whether you're 15 or 55, just where are you going to go right now?
532. 00:30:28 Like what are you going to do right now going forward that's going to produce the results
533. 00:30:31 that you want?
534. 00:30:32 Because you're in control.
535. 00:30:33 Like you're the captain of your own ship.
536. 00:30:35 All you have to do is apply this purposeful practice.
537. 00:30:38 And whenever you hit that plateau or that ceiling, because you're going to hit it at
538. 00:30:41 some point, recognize that that's not the end of the line.
539. 00:30:44 That's just an obstacle for you to overcome.
540. 00:30:46 But the musicians part here, I really like this because that's a great example of learning
541. 00:30:51 to develop this purposeful practice on a regular basis.
542. 00:30:54 If you were to discipline yourself, regardless of your age, to learn how to play an instrument,
543. 00:30:58 you're practicing purposeful practice every day.
544. 00:31:02 And I think that that skill, that purposeful practice, like that deep work that Kel Newport
545. 00:31:06 would talk about, that translates to just about any other area.
546. 00:31:11 So if you read this book and you really like the principle behind it, like apply it to
547. 00:31:15 whatever domain you want, but just do it over and over and over again.
548. 00:31:20 And then as you do that, as we're talking about in this particular chapter, homeostasis,
549. 00:31:24 the plasticity of the brain, like your body is going to adapt to develop the capacity for
550. 00:31:29 the thing that you want to do.
551. 00:31:31 Which brings us to part three of mental representations, because I think that's exactly what's going
552. 00:31:37 on.
553. 00:31:38 Like this is something I've referred to quite a bit as connecting the dots.
554. 00:31:41 You know, mental representations are basically little tiny pieces that you create and become
555. 00:31:48 so ingrained in the way that you do things that they then become building blocks to develop
556. 00:31:53 even more mental representations or connect even more dots.
557. 00:31:57 And there are a lot of ways that you can think through this, but you know, coming from my
558. 00:32:01 world of development, like I have a very large number of these mental representations around
559. 00:32:08 ways to put code blocks together.
560. 00:32:11 It doesn't necessarily come down to syntax on how do you actually write the code anymore
561. 00:32:17 for me?
562. 00:32:18 Because I've done that so much that it's not a thing that I have to think through.
563. 00:32:21 I start thinking through logistics on how data transfers.
564. 00:32:25 Now that may be over the top of your head for some people, but essentially what it is is
565. 00:32:30 you're memorizing bits over time that then help develop into bigger bits.
566. 00:32:36 The classic example here is learning to read.
567. 00:32:39 You learn letters and letters become your mental representations that then develop into
568. 00:32:45 another mental representation of a word.
569. 00:32:48 And then that builds into a sentence and then sentences into paragraphs and then, you know,
570. 00:32:53 entire essays, books, and then it continues to develop beyond this.
571. 00:32:58 But each step of that process is a mental representation.
572. 00:33:03 And you know, the point in the book ends up being that if you want to improve on an area,
573. 00:33:10 then you need to determine what these mental representations are that you need to develop
574. 00:33:16 and then continue to build on top of them.
575. 00:33:17 And that is the mechanical process that you go through to build into your practice routines
576. 00:33:25 that continue to push you towards that expert level of experience in a certain realm.
577. 00:33:30 Yeah.
578. 00:33:31 Mental representations are basically patterns that help you to remember things.
579. 00:33:35 And like the code example, another example would be scales for a musician.
580. 00:33:39 Yeah.
581. 00:33:40 Another example would be chess openings.
582. 00:33:42 This is where he talked a lot about chess.
583. 00:33:44 He's kind of obsessed with chess.
584. 00:33:46 Yeah.
585. 00:33:47 Yeah, he is.
586. 00:33:48 And I like that though, because I think that that's a great example.
587. 00:33:51 I mean, I grew up playing chess.
588. 00:33:53 I went to tournaments and stuff.
589. 00:33:55 I totally understand what he's talking about where he mentions that there's all these
590. 00:34:00 different patterns in chess.
591. 00:34:01 And specifically, there's different openings in chess.
592. 00:34:04 So there's only a certain number of good moves you can make at the beginning.
593. 00:34:10 And there's whole books written, which are just filled with these openings where if you
594. 00:34:14 open with this, then you counter with this.
595. 00:34:17 And so good chess players, the first part of the game is automatic.
596. 00:34:22 They just choose the opening that they're going to use.
597. 00:34:24 The person chooses the response they're going to use and like the first 10 moves, like there's
598. 00:34:28 no thought that that's required for the most part.
599. 00:34:32 And what's really interesting is when you play somebody who's really good at chess and
600. 00:34:35 they open with a particular opening and you respond with something that's completely crazy,
601. 00:34:41 it breaks their brain.
602. 00:34:43 They look at you and they just have to stop.
603. 00:34:47 These guys, maybe they've played thousands of hours of chess and they're really, really
604. 00:34:52 good and they can figure out anything.
605. 00:34:53 And then you just do something that's out of the ordinary and it's like, whoa, what
606. 00:34:56 are you doing?
607. 00:34:57 Put on the breaks.
608. 00:34:59 Let's figure out what's going on here.
609. 00:35:00 Because you've broken the mental model, you've broken the pattern and then they have to figure
610. 00:35:05 it out.
611. 00:35:06 So these patterns, what they do is they allow you to accurately size up the situation quickly
612. 00:35:11 and identify strengths and weaknesses, which is what's happening in the game of chess when
613. 00:35:14 you do these openings.
614. 00:35:16 And it also gives you the ability to zero in on individual details and pieces, which
615. 00:35:20 is what you force people to do when you do something out of the ordinary.
616. 00:35:23 It's like, okay, so now I really have to figure out what's going on here.
617. 00:35:26 And then you have to look at like each individual piece on the board.
618. 00:35:29 And again, there's different patterns that are applied to this.
619. 00:35:32 So you know, like if your king is castled on the right side of the board and you've
620. 00:35:35 got certain pieces in front of it, like it's fairly well protected, you don't need to
621. 00:35:38 worry about whether that pawn is in the right place.
622. 00:35:42 But it is interesting how like when you watch somebody playing a game of chess, especially
623. 00:35:46 at a high level, you can kind of see like the efficiency that's happening there is pretty
624. 00:35:52 crazy because at any time when they make a move, it's impossible for them to fully consider
625. 00:35:57 every single piece on the chessboard, they have to rely on these patterns, which is why
626. 00:36:03 computers can sometimes beat the best players in the world because they can analyze all
627. 00:36:07 the patterns at the same time.
628. 00:36:08 But also like the ability to think outside the box and go around the patterns is pretty
629. 00:36:13 cool too.
630. 00:36:14 One of the things that they mention in here is that you need to have options.
631. 00:36:19 They give another example with the mental representations with the doctors where they assimilate the
632. 00:36:24 facts about the patient, then they recall the relevant medical knowledge and they use the
633. 00:36:27 facts and the knowledge to identify possible diagnoses and choose the right one.
634. 00:36:31 But a common mistake that he mentioned that a lot of doctors make is that they fail to
635. 00:36:35 generate multiple options.
636. 00:36:36 It's that confirmation bias that we read about in whatever book that was.
637. 00:36:41 Man, so many books.
638. 00:36:42 I started thinking clearly.
639. 00:36:43 That's what it was.
640. 00:36:44 Rob DeBelly, I think.
641. 00:36:45 Yeah, yeah.
642. 00:36:46 That was really interesting to me too is like, so these mental models, mental representations,
643. 00:36:51 yes, they do make it easy to accurately identify what's going on in all of these different
644. 00:36:56 informations.
645. 00:36:57 But in the case of a doctor, when it's life and death, you have to be able to break away
646. 00:37:00 from those mental models and not get sucked into.
647. 00:37:03 Well, this is what's going on here.
648. 00:37:05 Like you really need to understand all the details.
649. 00:37:07 A lot of interesting things with patterns, I think.
650. 00:37:10 And again, he talks about chess a lot in the book.
651. 00:37:14 And I don't see that as a bad thing.
652. 00:37:16 I played chess quite a bit in elementary and high school.
653. 00:37:20 So I have a thing for chess as well.
654. 00:37:23 I haven't played it in recent years, just because I don't really know a lot of people
655. 00:37:28 that play it.
656. 00:37:29 So yes, I am with you on the whole chess thing.
657. 00:37:32 I totally get-- and I like that he talked about it quite a bit.
658. 00:37:35 Chess is one of those games where it's very quantifiable as far as how good you are and
659. 00:37:41 obviously who wins or not.
660. 00:37:43 But it's an interesting game.
661. 00:37:46 So I'm fascinated by it.
662. 00:37:47 You have another point here under mental representations for two forms of writing.
663. 00:37:50 I thought this was cool because I write a lot.
664. 00:37:52 And so this showed me there's two ways that I can practice this on a regular basis.
665. 00:37:58 So the two forms of writing that he mentioned, I'll do these out of order.
666. 00:38:01 But the first one that I want to stay away from is knowledge telling.
667. 00:38:06 That's the beginner way.
668. 00:38:08 Knowledge telling is just spitting out a bunch of facts.
669. 00:38:13 And that doesn't really tell a compelling narrative, I feel.
670. 00:38:17 The other way is to plan it.
671. 00:38:20 And this is what he calls the expert way.
672. 00:38:23 And on page 76 he talks about to write well, develop a mental representation ahead of time
673. 00:38:27 to guide your efforts.
674. 00:38:28 Then monitor and evaluate your efforts and be ready to modify the representation as necessary.
675. 00:38:33 So what does this look like?
676. 00:38:34 It means that when I sit down to write, I'm thinking about who I'm writing to and what
677. 00:38:39 the goal of the thing that I'm going to be writing is.
678. 00:38:42 I'm not just sitting down and whatever comes to mind, like I'm putting words on the page.
679. 00:38:46 And maybe you could get some benefit from that.
680. 00:38:49 But I do think that as a content creator on the interwebs that there's a lot more value
681. 00:38:55 to taking this approach.
682. 00:38:56 I feel like you're going to hit the mark a lot better if you plan your approach to writing.
683. 00:39:00 Yeah, I'm with you there.
684. 00:39:02 I mean, I do a fair amount of writing.
685. 00:39:03 I spend more time writing emails than anything.
686. 00:39:06 And that's fine.
687. 00:39:07 But email has its own.
688. 00:39:08 If you think it through ahead of time instead of just transferring information, even that
689. 00:39:13 can be in the same sector as what you're talking about.
690. 00:39:17 But it's not near as long and it doesn't have to be as thought through because it's not
691. 00:39:20 as comprehensive, if you will.
692. 00:39:23 So I think I do a fair amount of writing yet for a few projects.
693. 00:39:29 But I don't know that it's nearly like it's not even we're close to what you do, like
694. 00:39:34 at all.
695. 00:39:35 I definitely like the latter of the two for sure.
696. 00:39:38 But I don't know that this is a thing that I would see as a big point that I need to
697. 00:39:44 take.
698. 00:39:45 Fair enough.
699. 00:39:46 I just really like this idea because Tana's been talking about this Asian efficiency with
700. 00:39:52 these stories and we've been putting these in our acceptance criteria of like the blog
701. 00:39:55 posts that we write and the podcast that we record is thinking through ahead of time,
702. 00:40:00 like, okay, someone is going to give us their time to read this thing or listen to this
703. 00:40:03 thing.
704. 00:40:04 What can they get from this?
705. 00:40:06 Like, how are we delivering value to them?
706. 00:40:09 And if you don't think about that, there's a chance that you may not deliver value.
707. 00:40:14 That's kind of kind of scary to me.
708. 00:40:16 I take that responsibility, I guess, seriously.
709. 00:40:20 And I know that people tune in because it's entertaining, but I don't want to waste anybody's
710. 00:40:26 time.
711. 00:40:27 And ultimately, like, I don't want to waste my time either.
712. 00:40:29 Like, why write something that isn't going to help anybody and nobody reads.
713. 00:40:32 Right.
714. 00:40:33 So I take whenever I go to share things like this, like, this is where that innovative piece
715. 00:40:38 comes in with those brand words because like, I'm pretty particular with, you know, if I'm
716. 00:40:44 going to write an article or talk about something that involves discourse with that, I'm going
717. 00:40:49 to be very particular about making sure that if I'm going to share how to do something,
718. 00:40:54 it's something I have not seen talked about yet.
719. 00:40:57 And it's a new way of doing things that hasn't been conveyed.
720. 00:41:02 And I deal with it enough that I'm usually pretty good about finding those things.
721. 00:41:05 Same thing in like the productivity space.
722. 00:41:08 If I'm going to share something, like I've gotten to where I want to make sure that this
723. 00:41:12 is a new way, like it's a new workflow I've written or, you know, it's a different way
724. 00:41:19 of using the calendar or whatever it is to try to help people find their own ways of
725. 00:41:24 using things instead of, you know, here's the best way to manage your email.
726. 00:41:29 Like I have some pretty strong opinions on how that stuff should be shared or what I should
727. 00:41:34 be sharing.
728. 00:41:35 So I'm pretty particular with trying to make sure it's new.
729. 00:41:37 So whenever I'm thinking about, you know, how I'm conveying that, it's usually some of
730. 00:41:43 its knowledge transfers.
731. 00:41:44 So maybe some of that's the former, but I try to make sure I'm explaining the wise behind
732. 00:41:48 it so that it can resonate with people.
733. 00:41:51 But I don't do it a lot.
734. 00:41:53 But when I do, that's, that's the path I try to take.
735. 00:41:56 I don't know if that is what you're talking about, Mike.
736. 00:42:00 It sounds like you're maybe kind of getting at it from the sense of this is a thing I
737. 00:42:04 want to convey and this is the best way to do it so that it actually helps someone.
738. 00:42:09 It doesn't necessarily have to be a completely new way to do things.
739. 00:42:12 It just has to have some value in itself.
740. 00:42:14 Does that make sense?
741. 00:42:15 I don't know if I'm making those two distinctions very clearly.
742. 00:42:18 Yeah.
743. 00:42:19 So you're talking about things that could be under the second form of writing that I'm
744. 00:42:25 describing here, but I don't think it necessarily has to be.
745. 00:42:29 So one important distinction I think to make here is that like a lot of the stuff that
746. 00:42:33 I write about, it's not new.
747. 00:42:36 It's new to me.
748. 00:42:37 Right.
749. 00:42:38 But if I search the internet for something, I'll find somebody else who said something
750. 00:42:41 similar and I used to do that.
751. 00:42:43 I used to get discouraged by that and be like, oh man, I can't come up with anything.
752. 00:42:46 I'm not creative.
753. 00:42:47 And what I've learned is that all you can do is share what you know.
754. 00:42:52 Sean McCabe talks about teach everything that you know.
755. 00:42:56 And I think maybe he picked that up from Nathan Berry at one point.
756. 00:42:59 I was going to say that's a Berry is in there.
757. 00:43:01 Yeah.
758. 00:43:02 And the real point is like you don't have to be an expert in something before you can
759. 00:43:06 help somebody.
760. 00:43:08 There are always going to be people who are not at the level that you are.
761. 00:43:11 So you don't have a responsibility to try to teach an expert, hey, this is the way that
762. 00:43:15 I think you should be doing this.
763. 00:43:17 Like somebody above you.
764. 00:43:19 That's not going to provide any value and you're just going to look like an idiot.
765. 00:43:24 But if you find somebody who's struggling with email and you say, hey, this is what
766. 00:43:27 has worked for me, maybe you want to try this, you know, and you present it in the right
767. 00:43:31 way because you've read how to win friends and influence people.
768. 00:43:35 Then that's absolutely something that you should do.
769. 00:43:38 Like don't keep stuff in just because somebody else wrote about something.
770. 00:43:43 But what I want to do is when I sit down the right, like have a goal.
771. 00:43:46 What is the outcome I want to achieve?
772. 00:43:49 I don't want to just write to write.
773. 00:43:51 I've done that and it produced some stuff.
774. 00:43:53 But I feel if I had had this revelation earlier, it would have significantly shortened the
775. 00:43:58 process of writing the book.
776. 00:44:00 If I had an idea of what I wanted to end up when I had started to show up and write every
777. 00:44:03 day, does that make sense?
778. 00:44:05 It does.
779. 00:44:06 Okay.
780. 00:44:07 And so I think that planning that ahead of time, having a vision for where you want to
781. 00:44:10 go and this applies to anything in life, not just writing.
782. 00:44:12 Like if you know where you want your family to end up, if you know where you want your
783. 00:44:17 career to end up, then you can do the things that are going to get you there.
784. 00:44:20 And a lot of this, you know, this is maybe a recurring theme in the book of think about
785. 00:44:25 the thing that you need to do and then go do it.
786. 00:44:29 Like, what is the best way to get better at learning a larger vocabulary?
787. 00:44:34 Well, what are the steps you should go through to learn words and learn how to use them correctly?
788. 00:44:39 Well, do that.
789. 00:44:40 We tell my kids all the time, stop.
790. 00:44:43 Think about what you're going to do.
791. 00:44:44 Okay.
792. 00:44:45 Now.
793. 00:44:46 Yeah.
794. 00:44:47 Like why shouldn't I do the same thing?
795. 00:44:49 Right.
796. 00:44:50 Which there's your perfect segue to part four, the gold standard of deliberate practice.
797. 00:44:54 Like that's what we're talking about.
798. 00:44:56 Yep.
799. 00:44:57 So you just gave away what the gold standard was because earlier we talked about the usual
800. 00:45:00 approach and then purposeful practice, but the gold standard is like you said, deliberate
801. 00:45:05 practice.
802. 00:45:06 Right.
803. 00:45:07 And you know, this is if I have a qualm with the book, it's that he repeats the same theme
804. 00:45:12 multiple times over and over again, just in different ways.
805. 00:45:15 With this particular piece, like this is the core of it in that thinking through what
806. 00:45:22 it is that you need to do to hone in on a nuanced piece of your trade or to develop a
807. 00:45:31 skill at a more fine level, you know, decide what it is that you need to do and do it.
808. 00:45:39 Like, there you go, deliberate practice.
809. 00:45:42 First of all, let me just run through real quickly the seven characteristics of deliberate
810. 00:45:46 practice that he has in here.
811. 00:45:47 And there's lots of lists in this chapter.
812. 00:45:48 We're not going to go through all of this.
813. 00:45:50 But this one, I think, is going to help people understand the difference between deliberate
814. 00:45:54 practice and purposeful practice.
815. 00:45:56 So characteristics of deliberate practice, number one, develop skills that other people
816. 00:46:00 have already figured out how to do and for which effective training techniques have been
817. 00:46:03 established.
818. 00:46:04 Number two, takes place outside of one's comfort zone and requires a student to constantly
819. 00:46:08 try things that are just beyond his or her current abilities.
820. 00:46:12 So failure here is not a bad thing.
821. 00:46:14 Number three involves well-defined specific goals and often involves improving some aspect
822. 00:46:19 of the target performance.
823. 00:46:21 Number four requires a person's full attention and conscious actions.
824. 00:46:24 Sounds a lot like deep work to me.
825. 00:46:26 Number five involves feedback and modifications of efforts in response to feedback.
826. 00:46:31 Number six, both produces and depends on effective mental representations.
827. 00:46:36 So this is interesting because it means that in order to apply deliberate practice, you
828. 00:46:40 have to have these mental representations, but the more you do deliberate practice, the
829. 00:46:43 more mental representations you develop.
830. 00:46:45 So it gets easier and easier to do this.
831. 00:46:48 Number seven, nearly always involves building or modifying previously acquired skills by
832. 00:46:52 focusing on particular aspects of those skills and working to improve them specifically.
833. 00:46:58 So that's a lot there.
834. 00:47:01 There's another section in here where it kind of compares them side by side.
835. 00:47:05 So deliberate practice requires a field that's reasonably well developed and it requires
836. 00:47:10 a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve his or
837. 00:47:13 her performance.
838. 00:47:14 That teacher could be an actual person.
839. 00:47:16 It could be a YouTube video.
840. 00:47:18 It could be a blog post.
841. 00:47:19 It could be a podcast.
842. 00:47:20 But the difference here is that purposeful practice is pushing oneself hard to improve.
843. 00:47:26 Deliberate practice is purposeful and informed.
844. 00:47:30 So deliberate practice is purposeful practice that knows where it is going and how to get
845. 00:47:36 there.
846. 00:47:37 It's a very important difference.
847. 00:47:38 And he mentions Malcolm Gladwell in this whole process because Malcolm Gladwell I
848. 00:47:42 think is the one that really I guess popularized a lot of this I think.
849. 00:47:49 With the 10,000 hour rule to become an expert, we can dive into this a little bit more.
850. 00:47:54 But I think it's interesting that this is a topic that a lot of people have referred
851. 00:48:01 to of what does it take to become an expert in a field.
852. 00:48:05 And they refer to 10,000 hours of doing something or practicing something to get to that point.
853. 00:48:14 But the distinction that you just made is the key to that whole process that a lot of
854. 00:48:21 people miss out on.
855. 00:48:22 It's like, well, you have to know what it is you're doing and why and specifically seeking
856. 00:48:28 out ways to find the areas that you're lacking and do something about it.
857. 00:48:34 That that's a key distinction that I feel like Malcolm Gladwell didn't like that didn't
858. 00:48:39 come out of his book.
859. 00:48:42 What was the outliers was the book and that didn't really come out in that at least people
860. 00:48:48 didn't catch it.
861. 00:48:49 If he goes through and he spells it out, I've not read the book, you know, disclaimer there.
862. 00:48:53 So if he spells it out, it didn't make it into to public translation and the media of
863. 00:48:58 any kind.
864. 00:48:59 So I was a little bit bummed about that.
865. 00:49:01 Yeah, I also have not read outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.
866. 00:49:04 So when Andrew Zarex and kind of badmows Malcolm Gladwell a little bit kind of picks
867. 00:49:10 on his research, like for example, he mentions that Malcolm Gladwell claimed all of the violinist
868. 00:49:16 that he studied at age 20 had put in the 10,000 hours, but only half of them did.
869. 00:49:23 So like right away, he's destroying his credibility.
870. 00:49:26 Yep.
871. 00:49:27 And my note in the document we're working off here is Malcolm Gladwell.
872. 00:49:29 What a chump.
873. 00:49:30 But again, I have no idea I've read the book.
874. 00:49:32 So I really can't speak to it.
875. 00:49:34 But I do think that and there's Erickson is right.
876. 00:49:37 The point he makes is that there is no distinction between that practice and that deliberate
877. 00:49:43 practice, which I do totally agree with.
878. 00:49:45 Even in this section, they talk about the musicians and the violinists and they talk
879. 00:49:49 about how there are no prodigies, there are no shortcuts to become an expert on the violin
880. 00:49:54 requires several thousand hours of practice.
881. 00:49:57 And the biggest predictor of success is how many hours you put into it.
882. 00:50:01 So in that case, Malcolm Gladwell's point about 10,000 hours to become an expert on the
883. 00:50:07 surface level, it's absolutely true.
884. 00:50:09 But if you dig into it on an individual basis, how you practice is more important than whether
885. 00:50:14 you practice in terms of becoming like the very elite of whatever field you want to be
886. 00:50:18 in.
887. 00:50:19 So the key here is deliberate practice.
888. 00:50:21 It's the way to go.
889. 00:50:23 It's the gold standard.
890. 00:50:25 Question there though, Mike, is how do you actually do that?
891. 00:50:29 Thankfully, the next section is principles of deliberate practice on the job.
892. 00:50:33 And he kind of starts to delve into in these next few sections, like how do you go about
893. 00:50:39 putting this into place and what are the like, how do we actually do this when you're going
894. 00:50:44 to work?
895. 00:50:45 Or, you know, when you're at home, like these are some places where he starts to dive into
896. 00:50:50 that.
897. 00:50:51 But you have a point here, three myths.
898. 00:50:52 I don't recall this.
899. 00:50:53 What are the three myths?
900. 00:50:55 Yeah.
901. 00:50:56 And actually before we get there, because this is where he started to lose me in this book,
902. 00:51:00 honestly.
903. 00:51:01 But he has a blue, he has a blueprint in the gold standard, which I just want to call
904. 00:51:04 out real quick before we get into the principles of deliberate practice on the job.
905. 00:51:08 He says that the blueprint for getting better in any pursuit is to get as close as deliberate
906. 00:51:11 practice as you can.
907. 00:51:12 And then he gives three steps, identify the expert, expert performers, figure out what
908. 00:51:17 they do that makes them so good.
909. 00:51:19 And then number three, come up with training techniques that allow you to do it too.
910. 00:51:23 And I think that approach you could apply to any specific area.
911. 00:51:26 Like you said, the next section he gets into, how do you apply this in these different arenas?
912. 00:51:31 And this, I thought was kind of the weakest section of the book because I really liked
913. 00:51:34 the principles.
914. 00:51:35 And I was thinking, my mind was racing as I was reading this first part of the book, like,
915. 00:51:38 Oh, I could apply this here.
916. 00:51:39 I could apply it there.
917. 00:51:40 I could play more chess.
918. 00:51:41 That's going to help me.
919. 00:51:42 I was like, okay, this is how you practically do it.
920. 00:51:44 Well, maybe.
921. 00:51:47 But the three myths that he talks about here, this is regarding the improvement only being
922. 00:51:52 possible if participants abandon the business as usual practices and they reject these three
923. 00:51:56 myths, which are typically found on the job.
924. 00:51:58 Okay.
925. 00:51:59 So number one, your abilities are limited by your genetically prescribed characteristics.
926. 00:52:04 Myth number two, if you do something long enough, you're bound to get better at it.
927. 00:52:07 Myth number three, all it takes to improve is effort.
928. 00:52:10 You can try really hard, you can do something a lot.
929. 00:52:13 And usually if you don't see any progress at that point, you fall into that first myth
930. 00:52:17 and you say, well, I guess I just wasn't made to do this.
931. 00:52:20 Okay.
932. 00:52:21 And his point is that, well, any one of those things could have been contributing to the
933. 00:52:25 fact that you failed at this thing, but what's required is not that you give up, but that
934. 00:52:30 you think about it differently and you figure out how to solve this thing.
935. 00:52:33 I do have another thing here in this section where he talks about focusing on one particular
936. 00:52:37 skill.
937. 00:52:38 I just want to start with this part because this is exactly what Toastmasters does.
938. 00:52:42 On page 122, he talks about art, Turak, I believe, telling presenters to focus on one
939. 00:52:47 skill.
940. 00:52:48 And Toastmasters, what they do is, yeah, you have to go through and you give 10 speeches,
941. 00:52:51 but there's an emphasis on each individual speech.
942. 00:52:54 Like the first one is the icebreaker.
943. 00:52:56 All you're focusing on is getting up in front of people for the first time and telling
944. 00:52:59 your story, something that you're familiar with.
945. 00:53:02 The next one, I don't have these in front of me, but the next one that gives you like
946. 00:53:04 a couple of basic points on like, if you're going to structure a speech, this is what
947. 00:53:07 it should look like.
948. 00:53:09 And then there's one later where you're focusing on your body language and all these sorts of
949. 00:53:13 things.
950. 00:53:14 There's advanced curriculum, which like there's a whole book on just how to tell better stories,
951. 00:53:19 things like that.
952. 00:53:20 And I think like that approach, whether you're trying to get into public speaking or you're
953. 00:53:23 trying to become a better, you know, you want to learn more scales on the guitar or the piano,
954. 00:53:28 whatever, you want to lower your golf handicap, whatever it is, like you can apply this, this
955. 00:53:33 approach and just focus on one little aspect of it.
956. 00:53:36 Another in the book he talks about how like trying to improve a general skill, like memorization
957. 00:53:41 isn't really going to work.
958. 00:53:42 You have to improve one specific thing.
959. 00:53:44 I also wanted to ask you regarding this section because he talks about video, I believe, and
960. 00:53:52 I think there's a very important difference between YouTube videos, which is something
961. 00:53:58 that you would watch and you would acquire knowledge versus something like video modeling
962. 00:54:03 where you see the activity and then you translate it.
963. 00:54:06 Does that make sense?
964. 00:54:07 One side of it being like a video that explains to you how something operates and the second
965. 00:54:15 being an explanation of how to accomplish a task that you can then translate and do yourself.
966. 00:54:21 Yeah.
967. 00:54:22 So like backing up a little bit in this section, he talks about what you're able to do, not
968. 00:54:25 what you know is what's really important.
969. 00:54:27 And traditional business training typically focuses on knowledge at the expense of skills.
970. 00:54:32 He talks about passive learning, like lectures that don't improve the care that patients
971. 00:54:36 receive from doctors.
972. 00:54:37 Okay.
973. 00:54:38 And that's what got me thinking about these YouTube videos because I think that that's
974. 00:54:42 a form of passive learning a lot of times.
975. 00:54:45 You sit down and you watch a YouTube video and you have no goal of actually learning
976. 00:54:48 how to do one specific thing and applying it.
977. 00:54:50 Now sometimes you do and you're trying to figure out how to change the oil on your specific
978. 00:54:55 make of car.
979. 00:54:56 Like you can go on YouTube and you can find that video and you can, it'll show you exactly
980. 00:54:58 what to do.
981. 00:54:59 It's a little bit different because then you're translating that into action.
982. 00:55:03 But I think that a lot of our consumption based society is focusing on this knowledge
983. 00:55:07 and it's kind of scary.
984. 00:55:09 One it's annoying because you get people who watch the video made by YouTube guy who has
985. 00:55:14 no basis for anything that he believes but he's throwing something up on the internet
986. 00:55:18 and then all of a sudden they're the expert on whatever topic.
987. 00:55:21 Yeah.
988. 00:55:22 That's annoying.
989. 00:55:23 But also like if you just get in that consumption mode for the sake of consuming, you're getting
990. 00:55:29 away from deliberate practice and all of the stuff that we talked about earlier where
991. 00:55:33 as you practice deliberate practice and you develop these mental representations and it
992. 00:55:37 makes it easier to develop more mental representations, I think the opposite of that is true where
993. 00:55:42 if you sit down in front of the TV and you become mindless, like the more, easier it
994. 00:55:47 is to be mindless whenever you sit down to watch something.
995. 00:55:51 But what's interesting here is that it doesn't have to be that way.
996. 00:55:54 The video medium is not the bad guy here.
997. 00:55:59 It's your approach when you sit down to watch it because there's this very powerful principle
998. 00:56:03 of video modeling.
999. 00:56:05 And just to give an example, this isn't from the book, but there was a study done depending
1000. 00:56:10 on where you look at says University of Chicago or someplace in Australia.
1001. 00:56:14 But the basis of it is that they took basketball players and they split them into three groups.
1002. 00:56:19 The first group practiced shooting free throws for an hour every day for 30 days.
1003. 00:56:24 They improved by 24%.
1004. 00:56:26 The second group did not touch a basketball, but they practiced mental rehearsal and visualization,
1005. 00:56:31 which is exactly what video modeling does.
1006. 00:56:34 You picture yourself doing the activity the correct way.
1007. 00:56:37 You're applying deliberate practice specifically to visualization and how you're going to do
1008. 00:56:41 this.
1009. 00:56:42 They even though they never touched a basketball for those 30 days, they improved by 23%.
1010. 00:56:47 It's virtually the same thing, which is crazy when you think about it.
1011. 00:56:51 But this is also the thing that makes Michael Phelps, we talked about him earlier, so successful.
1012. 00:56:55 He's got a thing where he gets up on the platform and his coach yells, "Put in the videotape."
1013. 00:56:59 And he's playing through in his head the race that he's about to swim.
1014. 00:57:04 One of my favorite stories of him is, I forget which Olympics it was, but it was the Beijing
1015. 00:57:10 Olympics.
1016. 00:57:11 He was doing the 100 meter butterfly final or something like that.
1017. 00:57:13 His goggles broke as soon as he jumped into the water.
1018. 00:57:15 So he was swimming blind.
1019. 00:57:17 He had practiced this in his head so often that he knew exactly where everything was.
1020. 00:57:22 He wasn't rattled.
1021. 00:57:23 And that was the one where if you remember, he stretched out at the end.
1022. 00:57:25 He didn't take another stroke.
1023. 00:57:27 The other guy did and he won by a 100th of a second.
1024. 00:57:30 And they asked him afterwards, "What did it feel like to swim blind?"
1025. 00:57:32 He's like, "It felt exactly like I imagined it would."
1026. 00:57:35 So you can use a video like this to apply deliberate practice in any area, in that particular
1027. 00:57:41 scenario.
1028. 00:57:42 No, he's an athlete, so he's applying it to his job.
1029. 00:57:45 But you can apply it to your job too, whether you're working in a factory cranking out widgets
1030. 00:57:49 or learning to develop your writing skills, podcasting, whatever, by just thinking through
1031. 00:57:54 ahead of time, what is this going to look like?
1032. 00:57:56 Yeah.
1033. 00:57:57 So I'm going to go back to the original point here of focusing on one skill.
1034. 00:58:02 Because this is the point at which I started to really struggle with this book.
1035. 00:58:08 Because I felt like this is where he calls out deliberate practice and explains how that's
1036. 00:58:13 different than purposeful practice, which to me was borderline splitting hairs into some
1037. 00:58:20 degree.
1038. 00:58:21 Like, okay, sure.
1039. 00:58:22 I get it.
1040. 00:58:23 I understand what he's saying.
1041. 00:58:25 But then he spells out focusing on one skill.
1042. 00:58:28 And I feel like he starts to repeat that throughout the rest of this.
1043. 00:58:32 So this is where I felt like there was a turning point in the book.
1044. 00:58:37 And I started to struggle with it.
1045. 00:58:40 Because then it starts to feel like a repetitive, find the point where you're weak, figure out
1046. 00:58:45 how to work on it and work on it.
1047. 00:58:47 And he continues to repeat that story in different ways throughout the rest of it.
1048. 00:58:54 Maybe that's just my perception of it.
1049. 00:58:56 But that was kind of my take on it.
1050. 00:58:58 I don't know.
1051. 00:58:59 Did you get this feeling at all?
1052. 00:59:00 I mean, you said this was where you kind of got lost.
1053. 00:59:03 A little bit.
1054. 00:59:04 I do think that the difference between deliberate practice and purposeful practice is important.
1055. 00:59:09 And I can see how this plays out though in the next section where you're talking about
1056. 00:59:15 the plateaus.
1057. 00:59:16 Okay.
1058. 00:59:17 So we can come back here, you know, if you had something else to say regarding this section.
1059. 00:59:20 No, go on because I think it'll continue to come out.
1060. 00:59:22 Okay.
1061. 00:59:23 Yeah, because this directly applies to what you just said.
1062. 00:59:25 Page 162, he says, when you first start learning something new, it is normal to see rapid or
1063. 00:59:29 at least steady improvement.
1064. 00:59:30 And when that improvement stops, it's natural to believe you've hit some sort of impassable
1065. 00:59:34 limit.
1066. 00:59:35 So you stop trying to move forward.
1067. 00:59:37 You settle down to life on that plateau.
1068. 00:59:38 This is the major reason that people in every area stop improving.
1069. 00:59:41 I think that when you reach that plateau, you really have to drill down on one specific
1070. 00:59:48 skill.
1071. 00:59:49 So maybe let's just use golf as an example because I used to golf.
1072. 00:59:53 I don't golf a whole lot anymore, but I've taken a few lessons in golf and most people
1073. 01:00:00 when they have a lesson, they're like, I want to fix my slice.
1074. 01:00:03 I want to do whatever, you know, and the pro will tell them like there may be six or
1075. 01:00:08 six different things that they should change, but you can't have somebody change all those
1076. 01:00:13 things at once.
1077. 01:00:14 So they'll have them do like the simplest change they can implement like, okay, we're
1078. 01:00:17 going to just change your grip a little bit.
1079. 01:00:19 Now get used to this and then they come back and they make another little change and another
1080. 01:00:21 little change.
1081. 01:00:22 They're all like micro improvements of the bigger issue of that.
1082. 01:00:26 The fact that every time I hit a drive, it slices off to the right.
1083. 01:00:30 And so I think you can apply that approach to any time that you would hit one of these
1084. 01:00:34 plateaus is like, regardless of the skill, there's always going to be one specific thing
1085. 01:00:40 that you can drill down deeper to.
1086. 01:00:43 And that may be the thing that breaks everything open.
1087. 01:00:46 He talks about how the best way to move beyond a plateau is to challenge your brand of your
1088. 01:00:49 body in a new way and the best way to challenge it in a new way is to get as specific as possible.
1089. 01:00:55 You know, niche down and identify what is the smallest thing I can do right now.
1090. 01:01:03 What is the smallest thing I can improve right here that may just be the thing and the catalyst
1091. 01:01:08 that makes everything else simpler?
1092. 01:01:10 I've seen this myself in my study of learning to play the violin.
1093. 01:01:15 There have been plateaus where it's like, I'm never going to learn how to do vibrato
1094. 01:01:18 or I'm never going to learn how to play in third position or whatever.
1095. 01:01:22 There's definitely places like that where you feel discouraged and you're like, well,
1096. 01:01:25 those guys can do it so easily.
1097. 01:01:26 Like, what's the problem for me?
1098. 01:01:29 And usually it's just figuring out like one specific thing like with vibrato, it was one
1099. 01:01:34 specific movement on one specific finger.
1100. 01:01:37 You know, and that one thing rather than trying to develop this vibrato, which sounded good
1101. 01:01:42 all the time, wherever I played it, you know, just doing it, that there's one finger in
1102. 01:01:45 this one position.
1103. 01:01:46 Once I got that, like everything else just kind of clicked into place.
1104. 01:01:50 And so I think that you can apply this not just on the job, but you know, we're talking
1105. 01:01:53 chapters six now at principles of deliberate practice and everyday life.
1106. 01:01:57 I think that this is really valuable if you really want to bust through things.
1107. 01:02:00 I feel like this is more of the same.
1108. 01:02:05 It has a lot to do with, again, the recurring theme that I continue to see is, and maybe
1109. 01:02:12 I'm just biased here because once you notice it, I continue to notice it.
1110. 01:02:18 And I do see how there is a difference between, you know, choosing to go practice and be in
1111. 01:02:26 being intentional in doing your practice and then turning that around and saying, I'm
1112. 01:02:31 going to find the one thing that I need to work on right now and work on that one thing
1113. 01:02:35 and that being the difference that he's talking about.
1114. 01:02:40 But regardless, and maybe this is just because I've always practiced this way, that whenever
1115. 01:02:47 I'm working on something, I'm always looking for the place where I'm the weakest.
1116. 01:02:50 And right now, maybe the example here is that I have a thing for running sound and audio.
1117. 01:02:58 I'm not necessarily in a place where I would spend the money to solve some of the problems
1118. 01:03:04 that I'm currently seeing and say my current, you know, what you're hearing right now, like
1119. 01:03:09 I'm not necessarily in a place where I would do that, but I'm continually trying to see
1120. 01:03:14 and notice the little nuances and certain frequencies of certain audio sources and how
1121. 01:03:21 do I tweak that to make it sound more clear and more real.
1122. 01:03:25 That is a place where I've been spending probably the last two years continually trying to improve.
1123. 01:03:31 And that goes for live performances.
1124. 01:03:33 It goes for podcasting.
1125. 01:03:35 Anything to do that has to do with audio, you know, video editing and grabbing the audio
1126. 01:03:39 off of that.
1127. 01:03:40 Many of those things, I feel like I've been trying to get better at that.
1128. 01:03:45 So I've been specifically finding places where I am subpar in my mind and then continuing
1129. 01:03:52 to work on those.
1130. 01:03:53 But I also don't see that as different than practice in general, but that might just be
1131. 01:04:02 a factor, Mike, of me just always seeing practice in that way.
1132. 01:04:06 Like, okay, well, this is where I need to improve on X, Y, Z.
1133. 01:04:10 So go.
1134. 01:04:11 That's the thing I need to work on.
1135. 01:04:12 Like, I feel like I've always done that.
1136. 01:04:15 So the concept of just doing the thing without focusing on that seems a bit weird.
1137. 01:04:22 So maybe that's my, my qualm here like that just seems odd to not do that.
1138. 01:04:27 Maybe I do think that, and I don't think this is something that you do, but based off of
1139. 01:04:32 what you just said, I think the, you could interpret that as focusing on your weaknesses
1140. 01:04:38 and trying to develop those.
1141. 01:04:41 And in specific areas, maybe you want to do that, but generally I would say that the
1142. 01:04:46 things that you're no good at doing, unless you really have a reason to develop that skill,
1143. 01:04:50 then be fine with not being good in those areas.
1144. 01:04:53 And that's completely fine.
1145. 01:04:54 Just choose something that you want to become excellent.
1146. 01:04:55 In fact, he uses an example, I forget what chapter it's in, but this guy he's never played
1147. 01:05:00 golf before and he's just going to prove to himself that this deliberate practice works
1148. 01:05:03 and he's going to become a PGA Tour professional.
1149. 01:05:06 Like he's going to be on the tour competing against Tiger Woods.
1150. 01:05:08 Yeah.
1151. 01:05:09 And at the time of the writing, he hadn't quite gotten there, but he had gotten pretty far.
1152. 01:05:13 And I think that's, that's cool.
1153. 01:05:14 But again, like figure out what's important to you and then apply deliberate practice
1154. 01:05:18 to it.
1155. 01:05:19 That I think is an important idea.
1156. 01:05:21 And maybe like you said, you've kind of, you've applied this intentionally, unintentionally,
1157. 01:05:26 whatever for a while, I really got a lot out of this.
1158. 01:05:29 Now he is kind of repeating the same principles in these different sections.
1159. 01:05:33 How it plays out in your job is the same way it's going to play out in everyday life.
1160. 01:05:37 But there is some really important stuff in this particular section though, which I think
1161. 01:05:41 will resonate with people as they set personal goals as opposed to professional.
1162. 01:05:46 So for example, he talks about the New Year's resolution effect.
1163. 01:05:50 And he talks about how at first it's easy, the experts are the ones who figure out how
1164. 01:05:55 to keep going every day.
1165. 01:05:57 And this is where he gets into this whole idea of willpower versus motivation.
1166. 01:06:02 I think maybe this is in this section and maybe that he feels like he needs to call this out
1167. 01:06:07 in everyday life because when you're getting paid to do something and you have a manager
1168. 01:06:11 who's holding you accountable for doing something, you've got the intrinsic motivation to do
1169. 01:06:16 what you're supposed to do so you don't get fired.
1170. 01:06:19 So maybe that's the justification for this particular section.
1171. 01:06:24 But this whole idea of motivation versus willpower was really interesting to me.
1172. 01:06:28 This probably was my favorite part of the book.
1173. 01:06:30 Do you want to unpack this?
1174. 01:06:32 Yeah, I want to hear why you felt like this was your favorite part because I think I
1175. 01:06:37 glossed over it.
1176. 01:06:38 Okay.
1177. 01:06:39 So it's fascinating to me that you loved this and I am having a hard time recalling it
1178. 01:06:45 at all.
1179. 01:06:46 Okay.
1180. 01:06:47 So we read the willpower instinct and it was one of my favorite books.
1181. 01:06:51 Okay.
1182. 01:06:52 I really liked that book.
1183. 01:06:53 The point that he makes in this book is that willpower is a situation specific attribute
1184. 01:07:02 and willpower and natural talent are both things that people tend to assign after the
1185. 01:07:07 fact.
1186. 01:07:08 I think this is absolutely true.
1187. 01:07:10 So you can say, well, I joined the gym.
1188. 01:07:13 I went every day for three weeks at the beginning of the year, but then I stopped going, oh,
1189. 01:07:17 I ran out of willpower.
1190. 01:07:19 But how does that help you today?
1191. 01:07:22 The fact that you didn't have willpower and you can see that after the fact that's the
1192. 01:07:25 thing that caused you to fail, how do you make sure that you don't fail next time?
1193. 01:07:30 It's not like you've got a gauge in your car and you can see, oh, my willpower is full.
1194. 01:07:33 I should try to do this now.
1195. 01:07:35 I mean, there's certain principles like eating your frog doing the important things at the
1196. 01:07:38 beginning of the day when you have the most willpower.
1197. 01:07:41 Like those are general principles that I absolutely agree on.
1198. 01:07:44 But I really like the idea here.
1199. 01:07:46 He says the real secret to sticking with something is maintaining your motivation because
1200. 01:07:51 in any given instant, you can create motivation.
1201. 01:07:56 It doesn't matter how tired I am.
1202. 01:07:58 If my kids are running out into the street and they're about to get hit by a car, I've
1203. 01:08:00 got motivation to go save their life.
1204. 01:08:03 And that's a really extreme example.
1205. 01:08:05 But I mean, you can think of your own scenarios where all of a sudden the situation dictates
1206. 01:08:11 the fact that you have to do something and you don't even think about, well, I don't
1207. 01:08:15 know if I can.
1208. 01:08:17 Like you just do it.
1209. 01:08:18 And that's because of motivation.
1210. 01:08:21 There's two parts he calls out to maintaining motivation, the reasons to keep going or the
1211. 01:08:25 reasons to stop.
1212. 01:08:27 I love this idea.
1213. 01:08:28 So anytime you find yourself having trouble sticking with something and he talks about
1214. 01:08:32 in here really what makes people successful is they've developed these habits.
1215. 01:08:37 And then again, he talks about violinists in this section and how the successful violinist
1216. 01:08:41 develop these habits and they start early in the day.
1217. 01:08:43 So again, there is some general principles from the whole idea of willpower and starting
1218. 01:08:48 early that we can apply here.
1219. 01:08:50 But when it comes down to any moment, any given day, you find yourself with not enough
1220. 01:08:54 motivation to do the thing that in your heart, you know, you want to do, you can either strengthen
1221. 01:09:01 your reason to keep doing this thing or you can decrease the reason to stop doing this
1222. 01:09:06 thing.
1223. 01:09:07 And again, if it's, and if it's something you want to stop doing, you could apply this
1224. 01:09:09 inversely, but this is specifically talking about deliberate practice.
1225. 01:09:12 So how do we keep going with this deliberate practice?
1226. 01:09:15 I think this is a revolutionary idea.
1227. 01:09:16 And it's really cool because it puts you in control of the situation at any given moment.
1228. 01:09:20 It does not matter what has happened up until this point today.
1229. 01:09:24 There are things that you can do.
1230. 01:09:25 You can renew your motivation to go to the gym no matter how dead tired you are.
1231. 01:09:29 But you have to have the willpower to, you know, set that motivation.
1232. 01:09:33 Kind of.
1233. 01:09:34 But I think that it's not necessarily true.
1234. 01:09:37 Like you could, you could have your willpower depleted.
1235. 01:09:41 And if it's a life and death situation, all of a sudden you've got the motivation to act
1236. 01:09:47 the right way.
1237. 01:09:48 So how do you trick yourself, hack yourself, whatever?
1238. 01:09:53 How do you manufacture that motivation on demand?
1239. 01:09:56 I believe that there are ways that you can do that.
1240. 01:09:59 I think the simplest way to do it would be just to write down the list of the reasons
1241. 01:10:03 why you want to keep doing something.
1242. 01:10:05 And you look at that, you take it out, you read it out loud if you have to.
1243. 01:10:08 Like before you decide that, okay, I really am going to follow through on this commitment
1244. 01:10:12 that I made to myself.
1245. 01:10:13 A lot of times motivation can be like social pressure, social like positive peer pressure,
1246. 01:10:19 accountability.
1247. 01:10:20 I don't want to have to go to my next podcast recording with Joe and tell him that I just
1248. 01:10:24 was too lazy to follow through on my action items.
1249. 01:10:27 You know, like that's, that's an example of this motivation.
1250. 01:10:30 We manufactured that motivation by starting this podcast.
1251. 01:10:34 I had trouble following through with those things prior to having to tell you publicly
1252. 01:10:38 that I failed.
1253. 01:10:41 So I think that there's lots of things you can do that don't necessarily have, you don't
1254. 01:10:45 have to start a podcast.
1255. 01:10:47 You can do it to sign a micro level.
1256. 01:10:49 But there are things that you can do every single day to manipulate your motivation and
1257. 01:10:53 that's a good thing.
1258. 01:10:54 So moral of the story is find a buddy and start a podcast.
1259. 01:10:58 That's what I heard.
1260. 01:10:59 Well, it's one way you could do it.
1261. 01:11:01 But yeah, there's lots of things that you could do to either strengthen your motivation
1262. 01:11:06 to keep doing it or weaken your motivation to stop.
1263. 01:11:09 I think just doing that for the first time can be really powerful.
1264. 01:11:14 So if you've committed at the beginning of the year, you know, you want to go to the
1265. 01:11:18 gym and then you find yourself struggling with the motivation to go at the end of the
1266. 01:11:23 day when you've set aside the time to do so.
1267. 01:11:25 Take out a piece of paper.
1268. 01:11:26 If you've never done it and list all the pros and the cons, if you, if you, if you go and
1269. 01:11:30 if you don't go and then figure out how to make the pros stronger and how to weaken the
1270. 01:11:36 cons.
1271. 01:11:37 So it just makes it inevitable.
1272. 01:11:39 Like this is where packing your bag the night before and putting it by the door, like
1273. 01:11:43 little things like that, that's a way of, of weakening the reasons to stop doing this
1274. 01:11:48 because you no longer have to think about getting everything ready to go.
1275. 01:11:52 And yeah, I guess you could view that as you're not spending as much willpower.
1276. 01:11:56 But I think like that's a lag measure, whereas a lead measure is the motivation.
1277. 01:12:00 And that's the thing that you can influence at any given moment.
1278. 01:12:03 So I think I'm with you in that I finding motivation that and the type of motivation
1279. 01:12:10 that works for you, take my business, for example, I have a pretty strong motivator
1280. 01:12:15 to continue speccing projects and sending estimates and invoices because by doing that,
1281. 01:12:22 well, and the business continues to work, but that's really not the, the main motivator
1282. 01:12:27 there.
1283. 01:12:28 The main is that I have people waiting for me and I do not like it at all when people
1284. 01:12:34 are waiting on me.
1285. 01:12:35 Like I just don't like that at all.
1286. 01:12:37 I, I, I feel myself tensing up at the thought of people waiting on me to get information
1287. 01:12:44 back to them.
1288. 01:12:45 So when I have a handful of developers who are potentially waiting on me in order for
1289. 01:12:52 them to do their job, like that's a pretty strong motivator for me.
1290. 01:12:56 Yeah, it doesn't matter if your willpower is higher low at that moment because they're
1291. 01:12:59 waiting for the thing, you're going to get it done.
1292. 01:13:01 Correct.
1293. 01:13:02 Deadlines do the same thing.
1294. 01:13:03 You know, if I have to get this thing done by a specific date and you put it off until
1295. 01:13:07 the last possible moment at that moment, all of a sudden you've got motivation.
1296. 01:13:11 Well, why don't you create that motivation prior to that?
1297. 01:13:13 Yep.
1298. 01:13:14 You can say, well, you know, if I wait until, if I wait until a week from now to start working
1299. 01:13:18 on this thing, that's going to make the weekend really crazy and stressful.
1300. 01:13:22 I don't want that to happen.
1301. 01:13:23 Okay.
1302. 01:13:24 Now I've got the motivation to start now.
1303. 01:13:26 So the next part here, here you go listeners.
1304. 01:13:29 Before we jump on the call, I typically read through this list of talking points that Mike
1305. 01:13:33 has put up here because his is usually way more extensive than what I would put up there.
1306. 01:13:37 So I usually don't add to it.
1307. 01:13:39 So there's, there's my preface.
1308. 01:13:41 But when I went through it, I saw this part seven, the road to extraordinary, and then
1309. 01:13:46 Mike writes down page 205 and types in Mike's rant.
1310. 01:13:50 It doesn't tell me what the rants on.
1311. 01:13:52 It doesn't tell me what particular part of page 205 we're talking about.
1312. 01:13:56 So this entire time I've had this like down here, just kind of curious as to what is Mike's
1313. 01:14:03 rant.
1314. 01:14:04 He every once in a while has a good rant.
1315. 01:14:06 Okay.
1316. 01:14:07 I need to know what this is, Mike.
1317. 01:14:10 Okay.
1318. 01:14:11 So section seven is the road to extraordinary.
1319. 01:14:14 And there's lots of good stuff here.
1320. 01:14:16 And on page 205, he starts off with something that I agree with.
1321. 01:14:19 He says, research on the most successful creative people in various fields finds that creativity
1322. 01:14:24 goes hand in hand with the ability to work hard and maintain focus over long stretches
1323. 01:14:28 of time, exactly the ingredients of deliberate practice that produced their expert abilities
1324. 01:14:32 in the first place.
1325. 01:14:33 All right.
1326. 01:14:34 So that's deep work.
1327. 01:14:35 Great.
1328. 01:14:36 Yep.
1329. 01:14:37 Later on, he says that creativity will always retain a certain mystery because by definition,
1330. 01:14:43 it generates things that have not yet been seen or experienced.
1331. 01:14:47 And I say, Baldard ash, Mr. Erickson.
1332. 01:14:50 Okay.
1333. 01:14:51 And I feel very strongly about this because if I had this view, I would not be doing what
1334. 01:14:59 I am doing right now.
1335. 01:15:00 I've shared, I believe on this podcast before how I viewed myself as a long time as not
1336. 01:15:07 creative.
1337. 01:15:08 I grew up playing violin.
1338. 01:15:10 Like I'm a fairly accomplished musician.
1339. 01:15:13 I like to write songs.
1340. 01:15:14 Okay.
1341. 01:15:15 But I will write a song and I will see that the chord progression that I used or the melody
1342. 01:15:19 line that I came up with realized like I listened to the radio and I hear where I got that
1343. 01:15:24 from and I'd get so discouraged and I'm like, Oh man, I am just not creative.
1344. 01:15:28 All I can do is rip off other people.
1345. 01:15:30 Okay.
1346. 01:15:31 And the tipping point for me where I finally got over that and this thing like paralyzed
1347. 01:15:37 me for years for a long time.
1348. 01:15:38 Like I wrote nothing musically or words on the page because I was just like, I can't
1349. 01:15:45 come up with anything new.
1350. 01:15:46 I don't know what it is, but I'm just not creative.
1351. 01:15:49 Other people have this thing.
1352. 01:15:50 I do not.
1353. 01:15:51 But the tipping point for me was when I read Austin Cleon steel like an artist and he basically
1354. 01:15:56 said that when you what you do when you create is that you connect all these dots, all these
1355. 01:16:02 inputs, everything that you're bringing in your mental toolbox, your brain, when you
1356. 01:16:08 create something, you're taking those dots, which are not original and you are connecting
1357. 01:16:12 them in ways that have not been connected before.
1358. 01:16:16 Now when you do that, you are not coming up with something that's mysterious.
1359. 01:16:20 Like that gave me a formula for this.
1360. 01:16:23 And my entire career is based on the working of this formula.
1361. 01:16:27 More good ideas in, more synthesis of good ideas out.
1362. 01:16:31 And I can't tell you like how many people have written to me and encouraged me like,
1363. 01:16:37 Hey, you mentioned this that really helped me.
1364. 01:16:40 And it makes me upset when I think about the fact that like I held back on that for so
1365. 01:16:44 long.
1366. 01:16:46 And I see the positive impact that that has when I just put stuff out there.
1367. 01:16:51 And I feel like there's a lot of people who were in my shoes and they're just like,
1368. 01:16:55 I have nothing to contribute.
1369. 01:16:56 And I'm like, yes, yes, you do.
1370. 01:16:58 Like we need what you have.
1371. 01:17:00 Throw it out there because you don't know who it's going to help.
1372. 01:17:02 You don't know who's on the other side of your faithfulness to this idea that you have
1373. 01:17:07 in your heart.
1374. 01:17:09 And the more that you hold back on it, like the more the world gets ripped off.
1375. 01:17:13 I don't have the specific quote in front of me, but right now I'm thinking of there's
1376. 01:17:16 a quote in the, the accidental creative by Todd Henry where he's talking to this guy.
1377. 01:17:21 And this guy asks him something like, where do you think the most valuable land in the
1378. 01:17:26 world is?
1379. 01:17:27 And it's not real estate Manhattan.
1380. 01:17:29 It's not the oil fields in Saudi Arabia.
1381. 01:17:31 The guy says, it's the graveyard because that's the place where all the unwritten books
1382. 01:17:35 on founded businesses, like all the things that people said, I'll get to that later.
1383. 01:17:40 And I would say like those people who are like, I'm going to get to that later.
1384. 01:17:43 Maybe it's not doesn't manifest like that.
1385. 01:17:45 Maybe it's just, well, I don't have the skill to do that quite yet.
1386. 01:17:47 I need to get better.
1387. 01:17:48 Okay.
1388. 01:17:49 But the problem is you put it off till tomorrow and eventually you run out of tomorrow's.
1389. 01:17:53 And so this is just a very small part in this book, but I think it's really, really dangerous.
1390. 01:17:59 And this is the thing that kept me stuck for a really long time.
1391. 01:18:03 So I definitely disagree with him on this particular point.
1392. 01:18:06 Creativity is not something mysterious.
1393. 01:18:07 Yeah, it is.
1394. 01:18:08 There is pieces to it that kind of seem like you don't really understand.
1395. 01:18:11 I mean, we read the war of art by Stephen Pressfield.
1396. 01:18:14 He talks about the resistance in like the spiritual realm, you know, and it kind of makes it seem
1397. 01:18:19 like something that you can't see, you can't touch.
1398. 01:18:22 Like, it's kind of mysterious in that sense, but it doesn't have to be.
1399. 01:18:26 Like it doesn't have to be this thing that just is paralyzing you because you don't understand
1400. 01:18:31 how it works and it's so much smarter than you and it's always working against you.
1401. 01:18:34 Like, yeah, it's going to be there.
1402. 01:18:35 But if you apply this principle of deliberate practice, you can do the thing that you're
1403. 01:18:41 too scared to do right now.
1404. 01:18:42 One of the thoughts around this that I've had for a long time now is that if I'm going
1405. 01:18:46 to write an article, if I'm going to create a video, if I am going to, you know, take
1406. 01:18:52 a project, I only really have to have the knowledge to share such that there is one person
1407. 01:19:04 that doesn't know it yet.
1408. 01:19:06 Even if it's the same thing that's already in existence.
1409. 01:19:09 And the more that you create in a given area, the more, you know, this is right up this book's
1410. 01:19:15 alley, the more that you work on that specific area and continue to write for it, you know,
1411. 01:19:21 take writing, for example, say a blog, the more blogs that I write, the better at writing
1412. 01:19:26 them I get if I'm continually trying to improve, you know, my grammar, the vocabulary that
1413. 01:19:33 I'm using, the comprehension around the topic itself.
1414. 01:19:38 If I'm continually finding, you know, the one thing to focus on and continuing to get better
1415. 01:19:42 at it, then over time you start to develop more and more skills.
1416. 01:19:49 And the number of people who don't know that level of skill continues to increase as your
1417. 01:19:54 experience continues to increase.
1418. 01:19:56 So, you know, if you're ahead of one person and you're writing, well, then you can help
1419. 01:20:01 one person, but the more you write, you make it to the point where you're ahead of 10 people.
1420. 01:20:06 And now you've got 10 people that you can write for.
1421. 01:20:09 And as you get better, now you've got a thousand or 10,000 or a million.
1422. 01:20:13 The more that you do it, the better you get, which means the people that you understand
1423. 01:20:19 more than or have developed your skill more than continues to grow.
1424. 01:20:23 But you could probably correlate that to the process of building an audience online.
1425. 01:20:28 The more that you work at it, the more you develop and practice and develop your skills,
1426. 01:20:34 the more creative dots that you're able to connect.
1427. 01:20:38 And to some people, it may look like you're developing something brand new.
1428. 01:20:44 When really you've just connected dots that have already been connected in one way or
1429. 01:20:48 another, you're just expressing them differently, which means that it strikes different people
1430. 01:20:52 in different ways.
1431. 01:20:54 And eventually you may have a completely original idea, but I would say it's going to be likely
1432. 01:21:00 a rare occurrence if you haven't already been developing the expertise over time and trying
1433. 01:21:07 to connect a lot of dots historically.
1434. 01:21:11 It's going to take you a while to get to the point where you can start to connect dots that
1435. 01:21:16 have never been connected before or in ways that have never been done before.
1436. 01:21:20 And it does take a lot of hours to get to that point.
1437. 01:21:24 So if you're one that says that you don't have something unique to share with the world,
1438. 01:21:31 of course not, especially if you've never done it before, you're likely not to if you
1439. 01:21:38 don't ever get started.
1440. 01:21:39 If you feel like you have something unique to share to the world, go for it.
1441. 01:21:43 But if you feel like you don't, how do you expect to get to that point if you don't start
1442. 01:21:48 doing something about it?
1443. 01:21:49 So there's your motivation.
1444. 01:21:52 Get to work.
1445. 01:21:53 Yeah, and don't wait until you have the pedigree that you feel you need to share something.
1446. 01:22:00 Just do it because everybody that I know deals with imposter syndrome to some degree.
1447. 01:22:08 And I deal with it a lot.
1448. 01:22:10 I think about the fact that I write and I podcast now on the interwebs and this was
1449. 01:22:17 not something I went to school for.
1450. 01:22:19 This is something I literally decided to start like three or four years ago.
1451. 01:22:23 And I've applied to Libert practice and I've gotten to this point, but still like I've got
1452. 01:22:27 to fight those demons in my own head where it's like, who are you?
1453. 01:22:30 Who do you think you are that you can say this or you can do this?
1454. 01:22:35 Like there's lots of other people out here that people would rather listen to than you.
1455. 01:22:41 Like that's what goes on in my head.
1456. 01:22:43 And I just got to I just got to say, shut up.
1457. 01:22:45 I'm doing it.
1458. 01:22:46 I'm going to iterate in public as Sean McCabe says.
1459. 01:22:50 And like I said, when I do that, I hear back from people.
1460. 01:22:53 I get the feedback.
1461. 01:22:54 That's kind of what he's talking about in here.
1462. 01:22:56 He's like, you get to focus on the work that you're doing and get to get the feedback and
1463. 01:22:58 then whatever you messed up, fix it.
1464. 01:23:01 But if you never throw it out there, you're never going to get any feedback.
1465. 01:23:04 And obviously you want to be careful who you listen to feedback from.
1466. 01:23:07 Fortunately, I mean, especially in the Mac community, like there's a lot of people who
1467. 01:23:11 are really, really supportive.
1468. 01:23:12 The productivity community is a lot like that too, where there's a couple of people specifically
1469. 01:23:17 who like commented on something that I did when I was first throwing stuff out there and
1470. 01:23:21 it was super, super scary.
1471. 01:23:22 And they're like, yeah, that's good.
1472. 01:23:24 You should keep going.
1473. 01:23:25 And I can't tell you like what that did to me and the motivation that that gave me and
1474. 01:23:29 the confidence like, hey, maybe this is something that I can do because for a long time, that's
1475. 01:23:35 what I battled was like, you don't have the ability to do this.
1476. 01:23:39 And I think that there's a lot of people who maybe want to do something, they've got to
1477. 01:23:43 dream to do something, they've got a vision for something.
1478. 01:23:46 And that fear is keeping them back because they look at all the other people who are
1479. 01:23:51 doing quote unquote extraordinary things.
1480. 01:23:53 And I want to tell those people who are listening to this right now, like you don't know what
1481. 01:23:57 you're capable of, but you will never get there if you don't start.
1482. 01:24:02 And really like this whole, the thing I want to make a point on in this particular section
1483. 01:24:06 is like, don't worry about the fact that this creativity to you right now might seem mysterious.
1484. 01:24:13 Like just understand the formula and then follow it.
1485. 01:24:16 And then these things will come like it's going to take care of itself as long as you've
1486. 01:24:21 got the right mindset.
1487. 01:24:22 Yeah, you can't just hit publish and expect to get a thousand downloads of your of your
1488. 01:24:25 podcast or a bunch of social shares on your blog posts just because you threw it out into
1489. 01:24:30 the world.
1490. 01:24:31 But if you throw it out there and then somebody says something and you look at it and you say,
1491. 01:24:35 why I could develop this particular skill a little bit better, I could improve my voice.
1492. 01:24:41 When I first started podcasting, I almost didn't because I hated my voice.
1493. 01:24:44 I hated hearing my own voice.
1494. 01:24:47 And I still don't really like hearing myself talk, but I get comments from people now who
1495. 01:24:51 are like, I actually, I think you've got a really good podcast voice.
1496. 01:24:54 I'm like, really?
1497. 01:24:55 Like, but a lot of that is just because I've been doing it long enough and I've been going
1498. 01:24:59 to Toastmasters and I get up and I've learned the voice inflections and to bring the energy
1499. 01:25:05 and to talk with my hands and all this type of stuff.
1500. 01:25:07 Like, if you go back to the first thing I did, you know, I look at it now and I'm like,
1501. 01:25:10 well, that was garbage.
1502. 01:25:13 But I didn't view it that way at the time.
1503. 01:25:15 And I also didn't view that as the ceiling for what I could do.
1504. 01:25:18 It was just like, okay, I'm going to throw this out there.
1505. 01:25:20 This is the very best I can do right now.
1506. 01:25:23 And I'm not going to be ashamed of that.
1507. 01:25:24 It is what it is.
1508. 01:25:25 And if you're going to compare it to somebody like David Sparks or Joe Buleg at the time,
1509. 01:25:31 you know, like any of these other people who I look up to, my quote unquote, Internet
1510. 01:25:35 heroes, like, yeah, I'm not as good as them.
1511. 01:25:37 And maybe I'll never get to that point, but I don't know until I try.
1512. 01:25:40 Which begs the question.
1513. 01:25:42 What about natural talent?
1514. 01:25:45 Natural talent is garbage.
1515. 01:25:46 Now, this is a, this is an interesting section because this is, I mean, we see this played
1516. 01:25:52 out in almost every single arena.
1517. 01:25:55 So he uses the example here of musicians, he uses the example of athletes.
1518. 01:26:01 Those are probably the two biggest things where I think people kind of view, like either
1519. 01:26:07 you're born with it or you're not.
1520. 01:26:09 Like you hear the stories in, if you're a musician of Mozart when he's five and his
1521. 01:26:14 dad plays like a chord on the piano and it's got one wrong note and he runs downstairs and
1522. 01:26:18 he plays the same chord with the, with the corrected note.
1523. 01:26:20 And we think like that's, that's crazy.
1524. 01:26:23 But when he talks about in this, in this section is that even those quote unquote prodigies,
1525. 01:26:28 like they have to apply this, this deliberate practice principle and they're not just born
1526. 01:26:34 with this.
1527. 01:26:36 They have to follow the same formulas as everybody else.
1528. 01:26:39 And yeah, maybe you have some more natural ability that makes it easier at first, but
1529. 01:26:44 this principle of deliberate practice more than makes up the difference.
1530. 01:26:48 And the biggest limiting factor that people have is their limiting beliefs about themselves.
1531. 01:26:55 They've accepted the fact that they quote unquote can't do something.
1532. 01:27:00 He mentions that one sixth of adults think that they are tone deaf.
1533. 01:27:05 And because they think they are tone deaf, they are tone deaf, but they don't have to
1534. 01:27:08 be tone deaf.
1535. 01:27:09 And in fact, a lot of them are not really tone deaf.
1536. 01:27:12 They just have said this about themselves.
1537. 01:27:14 And so it's a self fulfilling prophecy.
1538. 01:27:17 But I think that this is something that you could apply to any, any arena, I'll just use
1539. 01:27:20 an example of myself as a musician.
1540. 01:27:22 And I mentioned when I was five years old, I was in the Suzuki program, I learned to
1541. 01:27:26 play classical music.
1542. 01:27:27 I could read notes on a page.
1543. 01:27:29 I could play technically very, very well.
1544. 01:27:32 I went away to college, met some other musicians and like, Hey, come on over.
1545. 01:27:36 Let's jam.
1546. 01:27:37 And I was like, Oh, what?
1547. 01:27:38 Like, where's, where's the sheet music?
1548. 01:27:41 You know, even just like chords on the page, I had trouble playing along with those, but
1549. 01:27:46 I've learned to jam.
1550. 01:27:47 I've learned to improvise.
1551. 01:27:48 It's a very different set of skills, but it's something that you can apply this to
1552. 01:27:53 liberal practice to.
1553. 01:27:54 And you know, that's one small example of when you're becoming a musician, like there's
1554. 01:27:59 different, different avenues and that you can go down and there's different specific
1555. 01:28:03 skills that you can develop through this concept of the deliberate practice.
1556. 01:28:06 That was something that even though like on the surface, people would look at me and
1557. 01:28:09 like, well, you're, you're pretty skilled by a lens.
1558. 01:28:11 You put me in a room and asked me to do it a little bit different way.
1559. 01:28:15 I was completely uncomfortable.
1560. 01:28:18 That really helped me realize that, you know, there's more to being a musician than being
1561. 01:28:21 able to play the notes on the page.
1562. 01:28:24 And I think that like you can apply that skill and really have to apply that skill.
1563. 01:28:27 If you want to become an expert in any given field, there's going to be things to your
1564. 01:28:31 point earlier where you mentioned like, I see these things that I need to improve.
1565. 01:28:36 I think that you're playing this out in your own arena then, but don't accept the fact that
1566. 01:28:41 just because you can't do this thing right now, it doesn't mean that you can't develop
1567. 01:28:44 the ability to do that.
1568. 01:28:45 You just got to figure out the right thing to focus on.
1569. 01:28:47 Maybe you got to get a coach or a tutor who can show you the right things to do, but this
1570. 01:28:51 deliberate practice more than makes up any natural talent deficiency you may have.
1571. 01:28:56 I think there's sometimes that we have, we may have limiting beliefs we don't know about,
1572. 01:29:03 but sometimes like I may know that I have a limiting belief, but it's not in an area
1573. 01:29:11 where I really feel like doing anything about it.
1574. 01:29:13 So, yep.
1575. 01:29:14 Like, okay, well, you know, I am not a singer and don't claim to be.
1576. 01:29:21 Could I get better at it?
1577. 01:29:23 Probably.
1578. 01:29:24 Do I have a limiting belief on it?
1579. 01:29:26 Maybe, maybe not.
1580. 01:29:28 Like, I'm not terrible.
1581. 01:29:30 If you think you're not a singer, you do have a limiting belief, but whether or not you choose
1582. 01:29:34 to overcome it is completely fine and completely up to you.
1583. 01:29:37 I am not going to take the time to continue to work at my ability to sing.
1584. 01:29:42 I'm just not.
1585. 01:29:43 Will I take the time to get better at running sound and running live performances?
1586. 01:29:48 Sure.
1587. 01:29:49 Yeah, I'll do that because that's an area I care about, but I'm not too concerned about
1588. 01:29:55 a limiting belief around my singing ability.
1589. 01:29:57 Like, that is not a thing that I'm going to work on.
1590. 01:30:00 So, like, do these limiting beliefs exist?
1591. 01:30:05 Yes.
1592. 01:30:06 Should you do something about them?
1593. 01:30:08 I would say if you want to.
1594. 01:30:10 Exactly.
1595. 01:30:11 The goal, you know, growing up, if your dream was to become a singer, then yes, you should
1596. 01:30:16 do something about that limiting belief because it's keeping you from doing what is inside
1597. 01:30:19 your heart.
1598. 01:30:21 But if it's something that you are completely fine with not being the greatest at, then
1599. 01:30:24 don't do anything with it.
1600. 01:30:26 I mean, you can't apply the 10,000-hour rule to everything that you do.
1601. 01:30:30 You got to pick and choose how you're going to invest your time, attention, your energy,
1602. 01:30:33 your focus.
1603. 01:30:34 I mean, these are all related to this whole idea.
1604. 01:30:36 You can't deliberate practice every single thing that you're ever going to do.
1605. 01:30:40 You're going to have to not be an expert at something and that's completely fine.
1606. 01:30:43 In fact, the more you specialize, the more valuable you become.
1607. 01:30:47 So, Mike, section 9, where do we go from here?
1608. 01:30:52 We learn to create mental representations.
1609. 01:30:55 That's the important thing, I think.
1610. 01:30:57 If you were to boil this book down into a single sentence, it is look for ways to create
1611. 01:31:03 mental representations in the way that you practice anything.
1612. 01:31:07 And if all you did was try to do that, then you've kind of activated the whole formula
1613. 01:31:13 that's outlined in this book, in my opinion.
1614. 01:31:16 The ability to create those mental representations, though, is extremely valuable.
1615. 01:31:20 And that's something that I want to instill in my kids.
1616. 01:31:26 I think this is something and this could open up a can of worms.
1617. 01:31:29 But he talks in this last section about the education system and how deliberate practice
1618. 01:31:36 is focusing on the acquisition of specific skills, right?
1619. 01:31:39 It's not just knowledge, it's things that you know how to do.
1620. 01:31:42 That is absolutely not the way that you study for a test.
1621. 01:31:45 Knowledge just for facts stays in your short term memory.
1622. 01:31:48 There is nothing that you gain long term from that.
1623. 01:31:52 And you can totally see this.
1624. 01:31:53 I was this way.
1625. 01:31:54 I'm a pretty good test taker.
1626. 01:31:55 I could sit down with the book the night before and memorize everything, ace the test,
1627. 01:31:59 and then a week later, you asked me what was on it and I have no idea because I never
1628. 01:32:03 developed those mental representations.
1629. 01:32:06 And so like that's what I, my big takeaway from this whole thing is I want to learn to
1630. 01:32:10 do this more myself.
1631. 01:32:11 I'm going to create some specific habits and rituals, which will help me to do that.
1632. 01:32:15 And then also I want my kids to be able to develop the skill because that's what's going
1633. 01:32:20 to make them excellent in whatever they decide to do.
1634. 01:32:22 That said, do you anything else do you want to say on the book?
1635. 01:32:25 Well we hear Mahali in this last section.
1636. 01:32:27 Every book has to have Mahali in it.
1637. 01:32:28 It's true.
1638. 01:32:29 It's a requirement.
1639. 01:32:30 The last thing I'll mention here is page 257.
1640. 01:32:34 There's a quote I liked.
1641. 01:32:35 He said, "It is as if they are on a constant stimulating journey where boredom is never
1642. 01:32:40 a problem because there are always new challenges and opportunities."
1643. 01:32:43 I love this.
1644. 01:32:44 I want to apply this myself.
1645. 01:32:45 I want my kids to adopt this.
1646. 01:32:47 And kids are a great acid test for this because think about it.
1647. 01:32:51 Like what do you hear from kids all the time?
1648. 01:32:53 I'm bored.
1649. 01:32:54 Yep.
1650. 01:32:55 If we're honest with ourselves, we say the same thing.
1651. 01:32:58 That's why we veg out and watch Netflix for eight hours and go through an entire season
1652. 01:33:02 of whatever.
1653. 01:33:03 Speak for yourself.
1654. 01:33:04 I don't do that.
1655. 01:33:05 But I'm saying like people do do that.
1656. 01:33:07 I've honestly never understood the Netflix and the YouTube.
1657. 01:33:10 Here's the next show, next episode.
1658. 01:33:13 I have trouble getting through one.
1659. 01:33:15 But I do understand that this is a conditioned behavior.
1660. 01:33:20 And I do think that boredom is not necessarily a bad thing as we've talked about with the
1661. 01:33:24 mindfulness, which book that was that we read more or less maybe.
1662. 01:33:29 You gotta give yourself space to just think.
1663. 01:33:32 You can't just be busy all the time.
1664. 01:33:34 But I do think that there's a lot of value in viewing the world through a lens that's
1665. 01:33:37 like I'm going to figure out how this works.
1666. 01:33:40 I'm going to make the most of my time here.
1667. 01:33:43 And I'm going to be fascinated with whatever problem or obstacle that comes before me because
1668. 01:33:47 it's a challenge and an opportunity for me to grow.
1669. 01:33:50 All right.
1670. 01:33:51 You ready for action items?
1671. 01:33:52 Let's do it.
1672. 01:33:53 Matt, you got four here.
1673. 01:33:54 I have two.
1674. 01:33:55 There's a couple specific ones which you can hold me accountable for.
1675. 01:33:59 A couple which you will never be able to hold me accountable for.
1676. 01:34:03 So one of the things kind of related to that last section, but also he mentions this a
1677. 01:34:07 little bit earlier.
1678. 01:34:08 I want to teach my kids to look for why, not how.
1679. 01:34:12 One of the authors that I really like, Ed Cole, who wrote the men's curriculum that we
1680. 01:34:15 have at our church, said that the man who knows how will always have a job.
1681. 01:34:21 The man who knows why will always be his boss.
1682. 01:34:25 And I think that applies to this whole idea of excellence and peak.
1683. 01:34:28 Like the whole theme throughout this book is like, if you really want to develop your
1684. 01:34:31 skills, you got to understand why, not just how.
1685. 01:34:35 And so I want to teach my kids to do that.
1686. 01:34:36 I also want to still in my kids what he calls a self-fueling, self-motivating drive for
1687. 01:34:40 tremendous work.
1688. 01:34:41 I define this as a standard of excellence.
1689. 01:34:43 So there's a little bit of a two-edged sword because a lot of people deal with perfectionism
1690. 01:34:50 and not shipping something because it's not quite ready.
1691. 01:34:53 And I've been there too.
1692. 01:34:55 But I think that's different than just doing the very best that you can.
1693. 01:34:58 Really that's what I want to instill here is like, don't mail it in.
1694. 01:35:00 Give it your very best effort, whatever you're trying to do.
1695. 01:35:03 So those are the two that there's no way you're going to be holding me accountable to.
1696. 01:35:06 All right.
1697. 01:35:07 The two that you can hold me accountable to are learn to type faster.
1698. 01:35:10 So this was, I forget which section this was.
1699. 01:35:13 Oh, the plateaus, I think.
1700. 01:35:14 Dvorak.
1701. 01:35:15 Dvorak.
1702. 01:35:16 Dvorak.
1703. 01:35:17 No, not Dvorak.
1704. 01:35:18 Oh, come on.
1705. 01:35:20 That would drive me nuts looking at my keyboard and having the keys printed wrong.
1706. 01:35:25 I just could not do that.
1707. 01:35:27 You can fix that.
1708. 01:35:29 But I do think, especially for somebody like me who writes a lot on their computer, that
1709. 01:35:35 this would be a skill that would provide a lot of benefit.
1710. 01:35:40 And I know that I've hit a plateau with my typing speed and I've been okay with that.
1711. 01:35:45 I know that there are tools out there.
1712. 01:35:47 In fact, somebody sent me a promo code for some typing tutor in the Mac App Store.
1713. 01:35:52 So I'm going to give that a shot and I'm going to try to boost my typing speed by the
1714. 01:35:56 time we record next.
1715. 01:35:58 The other one that I want to hold me accountable for.
1716. 01:36:03 Hold on.
1717. 01:36:04 Before you do that, you need to check your eye message.
1718. 01:36:07 Complaint against Dvorak.
1719. 01:36:09 I need to address.
1720. 01:36:10 Keyboard cover for Mac.
1721. 01:36:11 Yeah.
1722. 01:36:12 Unless you've got one for my code keyboard, it's probably not going to happen.
1723. 01:36:15 Oh, I bet I could do that too.
1724. 01:36:17 All right.
1725. 01:36:18 Well, follow up.
1726. 01:36:21 The other one is I want to start playing chess.
1727. 01:36:24 I think that he shared a lot about how that's a great way to develop mental models, mental
1728. 01:36:27 representations.
1729. 01:36:28 That's something I used to do.
1730. 01:36:30 I just got to find somebody to play with.
1731. 01:36:31 Sounds like he used to play chess.
1732. 01:36:32 So you win?
1733. 01:36:34 I am in.
1734. 01:36:35 So I have this was one of my ex-names as well as I wanted to get back into chess.
1735. 01:36:39 But I was asking around for a few people to figure this out and did not find anyone.
1736. 01:36:45 You will probably kill me to begin with.
1737. 01:36:48 Just going to say that because it's been a while.
1738. 01:36:51 It has.
1739. 01:36:52 But I want to get back into it.
1740. 01:36:53 Me too.
1741. 01:36:54 Is there like some app or something we can do this with?
1742. 01:36:58 Because we are definitely not in the same area.
1743. 01:37:00 There's got to be an iOS version.
1744. 01:37:01 Okay.
1745. 01:37:02 I know that there's one called really bad chess, which a lot of people were talking about.
1746. 01:37:05 I'm not sure if that's like real chess.
1747. 01:37:07 Okay.
1748. 01:37:08 But I'll find something.
1749. 01:37:09 Okay.
1750. 01:37:10 You find something I will accept whatever and run with that.
1751. 01:37:14 So I'm cool.
1752. 01:37:15 I'm good with that.
1753. 01:37:16 So that was one of my actions.
1754. 01:37:18 I had the two.
1755. 01:37:19 That was one of them.
1756. 01:37:20 I was going to say get back into chess.
1757. 01:37:21 The other one was trying to apply deliberate practice to client management.
1758. 01:37:27 And I don't really know what that looks like right now.
1759. 01:37:29 I know that there are a few points of frustrations that I have with communication in general with
1760. 01:37:37 client management processes.
1761. 01:37:40 So I may be trying to solve some of that.
1762. 01:37:41 But basically I need to nail down what that one area I need to focus on with client management
1763. 01:37:47 is and work on that.
1764. 01:37:49 So I'm essentially this is a broader area to start applying to how I handle clients in
1765. 01:37:57 my business.
1766. 01:37:58 So that is that is my other one.
1767. 01:38:01 I don't know what that looks like quite yet, but that is a that is a thing that I would
1768. 01:38:05 like to do.
1769. 01:38:06 Nice.
1770. 01:38:07 There you go.
1771. 01:38:08 Author style and rating.
1772. 01:38:09 I can go first on this one.
1773. 01:38:10 I have a point here for style because it's it's been slowly occurring to me the different
1774. 01:38:16 types of books that we've been selecting, Mike.
1775. 01:38:19 And how some of these are they're written very concisely and they are designed to get
1776. 01:38:26 a point across to do it really well, but in the shortest amount of space that you can
1777. 01:38:33 comprehend.
1778. 01:38:34 And then there are other books like peak that are more designed towards like a meandering
1779. 01:38:39 journey across a topic.
1780. 01:38:42 And how long is this one 260 pages just shy of something like that?
1781. 01:38:48 Yeah, something like that.
1782. 01:38:49 It's not a short book, but personally I felt like it could have been significantly shorter
1783. 01:38:56 and gotten the same points across.
1784. 01:38:59 And part of this is I've been realizing that if you pick up a book that's written by doctors
1785. 01:39:07 or PhDs or people who do research for a living, those are always going to be long meandering
1786. 01:39:15 journeys.
1787. 01:39:16 And I think that I had false expectation on this book when I started thinking it was
1788. 01:39:23 one of these more concise, get a lot of points across type of book and ended up on a meandering
1789. 01:39:32 journey through a topic.
1790. 01:39:35 And that made it hard for me to continue through some of those more difficult points, at least
1791. 01:39:42 what I saw as more because I kept wondering why are we talking about this again?
1792. 01:39:46 That was what I kept.
1793. 01:39:48 He has a ton of stories.
1794. 01:39:49 It was fairly easy to read.
1795. 01:39:51 It wasn't like I was trudging through it.
1796. 01:39:53 I just couldn't figure out why we were talking about certain things again.
1797. 01:39:57 So that was my qualm with it.
1798. 01:40:00 So I love the topic and I love the concepts that are in here.
1799. 01:40:04 I just felt like the writing style on it.
1800. 01:40:08 I felt like I didn't do it justice.
1801. 01:40:11 Like I could have been done a little bit better in that sense.
1802. 01:40:14 So as far as the rating, I'm going to put it at a four because from a writing style,
1803. 01:40:19 I would put it lower than that, but from a conceptual level, I put it higher than that.
1804. 01:40:24 So the difficulties with rating things, but I'm going to leave it at a 4.0 on this case.
1805. 01:40:31 All right.
1806. 01:40:32 Well, I can tell you, even with my rant, which was based off of less than half a page out
1807. 01:40:39 of this 260 page book, I'm going to rate this a five.
1808. 01:40:43 I really enjoyed this book.
1809. 01:40:45 Wow.
1810. 01:40:46 The guys who wrote it are really, really smart.
1811. 01:40:48 I didn't feel like they were making themselves out to be smarter than me though.
1812. 01:40:54 Like I felt it was very approachable even for somebody who doesn't really like the scientists
1813. 01:40:59 explaining every single facet of every single thing.
1814. 01:41:01 I really, really enjoyed this.
1815. 01:41:02 I got something out of every single chapter.
1816. 01:41:05 I kind of thought, you know, when I looked at the table of contents, because I know how
1817. 01:41:09 to read a book now, thanks to Mortimer Adler, that like they would be repeating a bunch
1818. 01:41:13 of stuff and they did a little bit.
1819. 01:41:15 But for the most part, I understood why they express things in different ways.
1820. 01:41:19 It didn't feel, feel, I didn't feel like when I read a section, they didn't need to
1821. 01:41:24 say this because they said this, this earlier.
1822. 01:41:27 They always applied a different perspective to it, which I found to be fresh.
1823. 01:41:31 So I really, really enjoyed this book.
1824. 01:41:33 I'm really glad that you picked it.
1825. 01:41:34 I'm really glad whoever recommended it, definitely recommend another book whoever you are.
1826. 01:41:40 And yeah, I would definitely recommend this one to just about anybody.
1827. 01:41:44 I think that this really has the potential to change your life if you really apply what
1828. 01:41:48 they're talking about here.
1829. 01:41:50 And I feel like they presented in a way where it really makes you feel that it's possible.
1830. 01:41:55 And so I left this book feeling very encouraged and I think that anybody who's new to this
1831. 01:42:01 idea, they're not read deep work and a lot of the other books that we've read, like even
1832. 01:42:05 so, this would be a great introduction to the topic.
1833. 01:42:09 So we've alluded to this a couple times, I think, at least early on, about episode 50,
1834. 01:42:15 which will be next.
1835. 01:42:16 Mike, we've had some ideas on it.
1836. 01:42:18 I don't know how much of this you want to share.
1837. 01:42:20 I'll just tell you that if you tune into bookworm because you want to know what we think about
1838. 01:42:28 books as kind of like a pre screening for whether you should read them, whether it's
1839. 01:42:33 worth your time, that episode 50 is going to be awesome.
1840. 01:42:39 It's going to be gold.
1841. 01:42:40 This is going to be the most, I don't want to say most value-packed episode, but basically
1842. 01:42:47 if you're looking to grow your reading list with the very best books that are out there,
1843. 01:42:52 you're going to want to tune in for this one.
1844. 01:42:55 And we're also going to make another surprise announcement about how you can get those bookmarks.
1845. 01:42:58 Yeah, I'm excited about that part.
1846. 01:43:00 Got some things in the works.
1847. 01:43:01 This is going to be cool.
1848. 01:43:02 I've shown you some stuff and I'm excited to share this with the world in next episode.
1849. 01:43:06 That'll be fun.
1850. 01:43:08 So tune into that one for sure.
1851. 01:43:09 So because episode 50 is a special one, I think that means 51 is your choice, Mike,
1852. 01:43:15 since Peak was mine.
1853. 01:43:16 I thought so, but I wasn't sure.
1854. 01:43:17 So I don't actually have a book for episode 51 yet.
1855. 01:43:21 So get those recommendations in.
1856. 01:43:23 All right, so episode 50, you may have some ideas on that, but we have some cool ideas
1857. 01:43:30 with it too.
1858. 01:43:31 Mike will hopefully tell us next time what he's going to choose for episode 51.
1859. 01:43:37 I have 52 picked, but that's two episodes out.
1860. 01:43:40 We're not going to divulge that.
1861. 01:43:43 So that brings us to Gap Book's, Mike.
1862. 01:43:44 What do you have for Gap Book?
1863. 01:43:46 I am reading right now, Thou Shall Prosper by Daniel Lapehan, I believe.
1864. 01:43:52 He's a Jewish rabbi.
1865. 01:43:54 And this is a book that Dave Ramsey recommends.
1866. 01:43:57 He talked a lot about it when I was at the Entre Leadership Summit a few weeks ago.
1867. 01:44:01 I was recording this and it's been on my bookshelf for a long time.
1868. 01:44:05 And I've been going through it.
1869. 01:44:07 It's interesting.
1870. 01:44:08 Daniel Lapehan, he's talking about like the 10 commandments to wealth building and he
1871. 01:44:13 talks about it from a Jewish perspective, which I am not Jewish.
1872. 01:44:16 But it is interesting because they have a spiritual reason to believe why they should
1873. 01:44:21 be successful and they are successful.
1874. 01:44:24 It's a crazy percentage of the world's wealth that's controlled by a very small percentage
1875. 01:44:28 of the Jewish population.
1876. 01:44:31 And I do think that there's a lot of truth to the fact that they think they're going
1877. 01:44:35 to be successful.
1878. 01:44:36 So they are very enlightening read.
1879. 01:44:37 I'm about halfway through it.
1880. 01:44:39 Nice.
1881. 01:44:40 So I picked up here a couple days ago a book, The Revenge of Analog.
1882. 01:44:46 Real things and why they matter by David Sachs.
1883. 01:44:49 Partially because, and I may make this a bookworm book at some point.
1884. 01:44:54 We'll see.
1885. 01:44:55 It's an interesting book.
1886. 01:44:56 It talks about the return of vinyl records, the return of paper notebooks and such.
1887. 01:45:04 So you can probably guess why I'm interested in this.
1888. 01:45:08 It talks about the return of board games.
1889. 01:45:10 So it's an interesting book and the author, David Sachs, he is a writer and reporter for
1890. 01:45:19 Bloomberg Business Week, New Yorker, you know, those types of things.
1891. 01:45:23 So he's a very good writer, very entertaining writer.
1892. 01:45:26 So it's an easy book to read.
1893. 01:45:27 So yeah, I recommend it.
1894. 01:45:29 It's an interesting one.
1895. 01:45:30 Awesome.
1896. 01:45:31 I've heard of that.
1897. 01:45:32 I'm going to have to give that a shot.
1898. 01:45:33 Yeah.
1899. 01:45:34 So if you send a book, you can do so at bookworm.fm/list.
1900. 01:45:40 We'll give you a list of all of the books that we've covered, all the ones that are
1901. 01:45:43 recommended, all the ones that are planned and there'll be a button right next to that
1902. 01:45:47 where you can recommend a book.
1903. 01:45:49 I know you're going to talk about another way that people can recommend a book.
1904. 01:45:52 Yep.
1905. 01:45:53 And that is on the Bookworm Club, which club.bookworm.fm.
1906. 01:45:58 You can get there from bookworm.fm as well, just in the menu.
1907. 01:46:01 But basically that is our online community around the Bookworm podcast.
1908. 01:46:07 And there's a fancy button in the top that says recommend that you can click on and it
1909. 01:46:12 will help you to create that topic for a new book.
1910. 01:46:17 Whenever you do that, you can also vote for them once they are on that list.
1911. 01:46:21 So if you recommend a book, make sure you click the vote button once you've done that.
1912. 01:46:25 And the highest voted books are the ones that I tend to look at when I'm selecting what
1913. 01:46:30 comes up next and I'm getting ready to select like the next bank of three books because
1914. 01:46:35 I tend to do it in batches like that.
1915. 01:46:37 So get your recommendations and get your votes in on those recommended books and we'll have
1916. 01:46:43 some of those start to come up here in the near future.
1917. 01:46:47 That's one way that you can get involved in the community, but another way that you can
1918. 01:46:50 help out the podcast.
1919. 01:46:51 There's two ways really.
1920. 01:46:52 One is to click the links in the show notes for the episode because those are Amazon links.
1921. 01:46:58 So we get a little bit of a kickback on the particular books that you've bought through
1922. 01:47:03 Amazon if you use those links, but you can also leave us an iTunes review that helps out
1923. 01:47:07 a lot and helps other people find us.
1924. 01:47:10 And it's just a super helpful way to let us know how you feel about the show.
1925. 01:47:14 So if you get a moment, click the link in the show notes and you can leave us a review
1926. 01:47:19 on iTunes.
1927. 01:47:20 All right.
1928. 01:47:21 So thanks for joining us.
1929. 01:47:22 Tune in next time for a crazy value packed episode and find out how you can get your own
1930. 01:47:27 Bookworm bookmarks and we'll talk to you next time.