8: The Power Of Full Engagement by Jim Loehr, Tony Schwartz

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1. 00:00:00 I'm back from the wilderness.
2. 00:00:03 Where did you go?
3. 00:00:04 I saw some pictures between you and your wife.
4. 00:00:07 You were posting pictures and I couldn't figure out where you guys went.
5. 00:00:10 Which is probably a good thing.
6. 00:00:12 Yeah, our sole goal was to be unfindable by Joe Buellig and friends.
7. 00:00:17 Awesome.
8. 00:00:18 Well, you did good.
9. 00:00:19 No, we went to Manaco, Wisconsin.
10. 00:00:22 So I'm not sure if you've heard of Manaco, it's a little island town in Northern Wisconsin,
11. 00:00:26 which is, it's a little touristy town.
12. 00:00:29 But it's a cool little place.
13. 00:00:31 And it's really nice in the summer.
14. 00:00:33 So my parents rented a place on the lake and we went up there for the week.
15. 00:00:39 And I would go into town in the morning to work a little bit on some Asian efficiency stuff.
16. 00:00:46 I had a coffee shop, other than that.
17. 00:00:48 Did not have a cell signal, did not have Wi-Fi.
18. 00:00:50 So I was able to disconnect and get actually a lot of reading done.
19. 00:00:55 I read two and a half books while we were up.
20. 00:00:58 Whoa, nice.
21. 00:00:59 So what were the books?
22. 00:01:00 Well, I finished the one we're going to talk about today.
23. 00:01:03 Okay.
24. 00:01:04 Powerful engagement by Jim Lear and Tony Schwartz.
25. 00:01:06 Also read Born For This by Chris Gillabro.
26. 00:01:09 I think that's how you say his name.
27. 00:01:11 Gillabro?
28. 00:01:12 And then I...
29. 00:01:13 Is that what you're trying to say?
30. 00:01:16 Yes.
31. 00:01:17 Okay.
32. 00:01:18 So I threw an extra R in there, I guess.
33. 00:01:19 Guirbo.
34. 00:01:20 Okay.
35. 00:01:21 Got it?
36. 00:01:22 And then I started the...
37. 00:01:24 I think it's The Blessed Life by Robert Morris.
38. 00:01:26 Okay.
39. 00:01:27 Nice.
40. 00:01:28 Wow.
41. 00:01:29 So a reading vacation.
42. 00:01:31 Yeah.
43. 00:01:32 Turns out when you don't have any internet connection and you can't check any social media
44. 00:01:38 accounts and no one can get a hold of you to interrupt you, you can get a lot of reading
45. 00:01:43 done.
46. 00:01:44 Oh, I bet.
47. 00:01:45 I bet.
48. 00:01:46 So here's...
49. 00:01:47 I'm going to go through this follow up piece because there's one of these questions I really
50. 00:01:50 want to know.
51. 00:01:51 So we were talking last time about how...
52. 00:01:53 So last time it was deep work and we were talking about scheduling your day.
53. 00:01:59 I want to know Mike, how did the digital calendar thing work out?
54. 00:02:02 Did you do it?
55. 00:02:03 Did it work?
56. 00:02:04 I did.
57. 00:02:05 Obviously last week I was gone.
58. 00:02:08 So I didn't really have much use for it last week.
59. 00:02:10 True.
60. 00:02:11 But I did do it this week and I like it so far.
61. 00:02:16 It doesn't really provide very rigid constraints.
62. 00:02:20 Like I think most people think of digital calendars.
63. 00:02:23 I don't have alarms turned on at all.
64. 00:02:25 So it's not telling me, you know, in five minutes you have to be here working on this.
65. 00:02:29 But I do find it helpful to the night before create all of those blocks on my calendar
66. 00:02:35 and plan out how I'm going to go about my day.
67. 00:02:38 And I've found that by sticking to hour long blocks at least.
68. 00:02:44 So really I try to keep the breaks on the hour.
69. 00:02:48 Sometimes I'll have to compromise that and do them at 30 minute intervals.
70. 00:02:52 But I don't stack like a bunch of 30 minute time blocks together.
71. 00:02:55 I try to keep like big chunks on my calendar that I'll set aside time to work on something.
72. 00:03:01 I'll work on it knowing that I have the time and space to work on it.
73. 00:03:04 And a lot of times I'll get done a little bit early.
74. 00:03:07 And that gives me a little bit of a chance to relax and do something else or start on
75. 00:03:12 the next task, whatever I want to do.
76. 00:03:15 But it provides more framework and direction I think for my day.
77. 00:03:22 And I think it's helping me get more done just by making me think through this stuff
78. 00:03:28 that really the night before.
79. 00:03:31 That's the key in my opinion.
80. 00:03:33 So whenever you, I'm still going to get my head around how you can do this because it
81. 00:03:39 doesn't work for me.
82. 00:03:40 I really want this to work for me.
83. 00:03:43 How do you have your calendar open all day?
84. 00:03:47 Like whenever you're going through your regular day, do you keep a digital calendar like up
85. 00:03:52 on your Mac the whole time?
86. 00:03:54 Is that what you're doing?
87. 00:03:55 Well, I do have a fantastic account in my menu bar.
88. 00:03:58 But I don't really work off of that.
89. 00:04:03 Like I'm not constantly checking that.
90. 00:04:06 By looking at it the night before and filling out the big blocks of time.
91. 00:04:12 I know pretty much what my day is going to look like without having to consult the calendar.
92. 00:04:18 But one thing I've done is on my iOS devices, so my phone in particular, I've hidden every
93. 00:04:25 other calendar except the one that I created for this, which I've called a Canvas calendar.
94. 00:04:31 And so when I do check my phone, that is the only thing that I see.
95. 00:04:36 And then I also use that Canvas calendar whenever people want to schedule additional,
96. 00:04:42 they want to meet for coffee or they want to record a podcast, whatever.
97. 00:04:47 That's the calendar that I'm basing my availability off of.
98. 00:04:50 Okay.
99. 00:04:51 So that makes sense.
100. 00:04:52 But I'm really jealous, Mike.
101. 00:04:55 I want a digital thing to work, but it doesn't.
102. 00:04:58 Because I still have to do mine on paper.
103. 00:05:00 I've just got a notebook that I have to write it all down in.
104. 00:05:04 And I do mine.
105. 00:05:05 I think I'm like you.
106. 00:05:06 I do mine the night before.
107. 00:05:08 And then whenever I get up in the morning, I'm looking at it while I'm grabbing breakfast
108. 00:05:12 for the first time in the morning.
109. 00:05:14 So anyway, that's something I'm very jealous of.
110. 00:05:18 So I'm glad it's working for you.
111. 00:05:20 Okay.
112. 00:05:21 So I have to ask you, said breakfast for the first time.
113. 00:05:24 How many breakfast do you eat?
114. 00:05:26 Depending on the day, it's typically...
115. 00:05:28 You a hobbit?
116. 00:05:29 Do you eat 11sies?
117. 00:05:30 Yeah.
118. 00:05:31 I see.
119. 00:05:32 Mm.
120. 00:05:33 It's first...
121. 00:05:35 I get up at five in the morning.
122. 00:05:36 The lately I've been getting about four.
123. 00:05:38 I'm not sure if that's such a smart idea.
124. 00:05:41 Especially after this book.
125. 00:05:43 I'm going to get really cool for that one.
126. 00:05:45 But I've been getting up at four because I've been working on that Omni Focus course.
127. 00:05:50 And I really want it done.
128. 00:05:51 So I've been getting up an hour early to do that.
129. 00:05:53 Anyway, whenever I get up, whether it's four or five, one of those two, I go downstairs
130. 00:05:58 and I grab breakfast then, which is usually two eggs and a banana.
131. 00:06:02 I'm...
132. 00:06:03 Creature habit.
133. 00:06:04 I eat the exact same thing every single morning.
134. 00:06:06 And then I go to work until roughly eight o'clock when the girls start to get up for
135. 00:06:11 the day.
136. 00:06:12 And once they're up for the day, I go up and grab breakfast with them again.
137. 00:06:17 And then I go back to work somewhere around nine and then somewhere mid-morning...
138. 00:06:23 Well, at that point, late morning, I get hungry and I go upstairs and I grab something.
139. 00:06:29 And it's usually around 11.
140. 00:06:30 So maybe...
141. 00:06:32 I might be a Hobbit.
142. 00:06:35 Yes, suppose I'm...
143. 00:06:36 You have Hobbit tendencies.
144. 00:06:38 Yes, I would say I have Hobbit tendencies, of course.
145. 00:06:42 And it's interesting and we'll get into this a little later, but the whole...
146. 00:06:47 Because I've kind of set up my day like that.
147. 00:06:52 Not intentionally, it's just kind of morphed into that just because I know I've just been
148. 00:06:56 paying attention to when I get tired and when I feel like I can't keep going anymore.
149. 00:07:01 And once I've gotten to a point where I know I just can't go anymore, I take a break in
150. 00:07:06 some form or another.
151. 00:07:08 And it just kind of happens to put me in these oscillations of go work your tail off, take
152. 00:07:12 a break, go work your tail off, go take a break.
153. 00:07:14 Like I just kind of go through that cycle throughout my day, which is just because I
154. 00:07:19 get tired and I'm lazy, Mike.
155. 00:07:22 I think it actually is you've been implementing this managing your energy stuff that Jim
156. 00:07:27 Leer and Tony Schwartz have been talking about without even realizing it.
157. 00:07:31 That's a nice segue there.
158. 00:07:32 Well done.
159. 00:07:33 Yeah, before we actually jump into the book though, you want to talk about your follow
160. 00:07:39 up stuff?
161. 00:07:40 Oh, right.
162. 00:07:41 Yeah.
163. 00:07:42 I think we'd discussion site over the social media and then also the email update.
164. 00:07:45 Yeah.
165. 00:07:46 So let me go with the discussion site first.
166. 00:07:47 So I started, I created a new category on that thing for links because that was the one
167. 00:07:51 thing I was missing with that whole forum is a way to share links that I think are interesting.
168. 00:07:59 And that's been going pretty well.
169. 00:08:00 There's a couple of people that have been responding to that, which is about identical
170. 00:08:04 to what I saw on Twitter anyway.
171. 00:08:05 So it's not really any different, even though there's fewer people following me there.
172. 00:08:10 So yes, so I've been focusing on the discussion site more than Twitter and that's gone.
173. 00:08:14 I think really, really well, it hasn't really changed anything, which is probably saying
174. 00:08:19 something since it takes much less time to do my activities on the discussion site than
175. 00:08:24 it does on Twitter.
176. 00:08:25 So there's probably something to be said of that.
177. 00:08:28 The other one was email.
178. 00:08:30 And I think I mentioned that I changed my contact form or put in a contact form and did
179. 00:08:34 some things there.
180. 00:08:36 Mike, my email went from about 300 in a day down to about 40.
181. 00:08:39 Nice.
182. 00:08:41 I can handle 40.
183. 00:08:42 I can do 40 quick because I was used to 300.
184. 00:08:45 So doing 40.
185. 00:08:47 Holy cow.
186. 00:08:48 That's significant progress.
187. 00:08:51 Yeah, no kidding.
188. 00:08:53 And oddly enough, because I don't know if it's because of or as a result of, but I've had
189. 00:09:00 a lot more leads on building websites lately and they've been coming via phone calls instead
190. 00:09:05 of emails.
191. 00:09:06 I don't know if that's good or bad, but I've had more business pick up at the same time.
192. 00:09:11 Feels like it's related in some form, but I'm not real sure.
193. 00:09:14 It's interesting at least.
194. 00:09:16 So long story short email, I think I'm in a really good place now.
195. 00:09:21 Cool.
196. 00:09:22 I think I'm going to say, I think.
197. 00:09:25 Okay.
198. 00:09:26 So we keep alluding to it.
199. 00:09:28 What book did we go through?
200. 00:09:30 The powerful engagement and why did you pick this, Mike?
201. 00:09:33 I honestly just picked it because it's been one of those books that I think everybody
202. 00:09:38 except me in the productivity space has read over the course of the last several years.
203. 00:09:44 And I was kind of ashamed of it.
204. 00:09:46 So I'm like, "Hey, let's read it for bookworm."
205. 00:09:49 Well, as a good example of that, up until probably about three months before we started
206. 00:09:56 this podcast, I really didn't read much at all, if ever, as far as books go.
207. 00:10:02 So even in my limited state and not ever really reading books, this was still a book that I
208. 00:10:09 read.
209. 00:10:10 So you're finally caught up like.
210. 00:10:13 Thanks.
211. 00:10:14 Not to rub salt in your wounds there, but.
212. 00:10:19 Yeah.
213. 00:10:20 So he starts off, well, I suppose I shouldn't say he, they, I wish they would spell out who
214. 00:10:28 did most of the writing and who was writing each individual piece.
215. 00:10:32 That's the thing I always struggle with whenever they're co-authored is who wrote what part?
216. 00:10:36 I always want to know because I want to know who to blame for certain quotes.
217. 00:10:42 True.
218. 00:10:43 Sometimes you got one guy's name that's bigger on the front, but there's no visual cues.
219. 00:10:48 Right.
220. 00:10:49 This one has nothing.
221. 00:10:51 But I love that they start the whole book off.
222. 00:10:54 And the premise of the book is that managing energy, what's the byline?
223. 00:10:59 Managing energy, not time is the key to high performance and personal renewal.
224. 00:11:04 And I think there's some value in that.
225. 00:11:06 We'll get into a lot of this, I'm sure.
226. 00:11:08 But to make his point, make their point, man, I'm going to do that this whole episode.
227. 00:11:12 I know I am.
228. 00:11:13 Like to make their point, they tell the story of Roger B and they have a ton of stories
229. 00:11:21 through this whole book, which is awesome because it really helps cement and help you
230. 00:11:25 to understand the concepts that they're getting at.
231. 00:11:28 But he tells a story about this guy by the name of Roger B and how he feels overworked.
232. 00:11:35 He's tired, stressed, has no time for family.
233. 00:11:38 Just overall miserable guy.
234. 00:11:42 I know, because this is a reread for me as I was talking about earlier, but the first
235. 00:11:48 time and this time, both, whenever I go through that story, it does two things.
236. 00:11:53 One, it makes me really excited to read the rest of the book.
237. 00:11:56 And two, it reminds me an awful lot of my corporate days, Mike.
238. 00:12:00 It just sounds an awful lot like not necessarily me than what I was doing and how I was living,
239. 00:12:06 but a lot of the executives that I worked under and for.
240. 00:12:10 Yeah, it definitely reminded me of a lot of their lifestyles, just in general.
241. 00:12:16 So it kind of hit home for me.
242. 00:12:18 Yeah, the story of Roger B is, they started off and they say, "We're going to tell you
243. 00:12:24 a story about this guy and we're going to tell you about all the improvements that he
244. 00:12:28 made at the end."
245. 00:12:30 And if that was the only story that they used, that I think, at least for me, may have been
246. 00:12:40 a little bit more effective, but they used so many stories throughout this book that
247. 00:12:46 it was kind of like, "Oh boy, here's another one."
248. 00:12:49 I lost count.
249. 00:12:50 There's got to be at least 30 different stories.
250. 00:12:52 I mean, it makes sense.
251. 00:12:54 Another one of Jim Lear's books is The Power of Story.
252. 00:12:57 Well, yeah, that makes sense.
253. 00:12:59 Because there's what?
254. 00:13:00 11 chapters.
255. 00:13:01 The last one's all about Roger, though.
256. 00:13:05 So probably 10 chapters.
257. 00:13:07 I know they go through at least three.
258. 00:13:09 Some are between three to five stories per chapter, so it might be over 30.
259. 00:13:13 Yeah, that part got a little bit repetitive for me personally.
260. 00:13:18 I know some people really connect with those stories and I did for a couple of them, but
261. 00:13:23 towards the end, I was like, "Okay, yeah, I get it.
262. 00:13:26 You're telling me another story."
263. 00:13:27 And a lot of them even sound, I'm sure they're real because they've done the research behind
264. 00:13:32 this and they've got the corporate training university or whatever they call it, where
265. 00:13:36 people actually go through this program, but they almost sound like they're made up, don't
266. 00:13:42 they?
267. 00:13:43 Oh, yeah, because they're using a first name and then they always use a letter for the
268. 00:13:46 last name.
269. 00:13:47 Yeah.
270. 00:13:48 I don't know if it's the real name and they just didn't give you the last, but I've got
271. 00:13:52 George D and I've got Roger B and I've got...
272. 00:13:56 I just found those just from flipping it open.
273. 00:13:59 That tells you how many stories are in this thing.
274. 00:14:01 Peter D.
275. 00:14:02 I mean, they just have tons of these and they're kind of generic names and then a single letter.
276. 00:14:06 So there's times I'm like, "Okay, is this the same person?
277. 00:14:10 Is this a different one?
278. 00:14:11 Are you going back to an old one?
279. 00:14:13 I'm with you."
280. 00:14:14 It just seemed like there was a ton of stories and they're easy to get confused.
281. 00:14:17 And honestly, a lot of the principles between the stories were fairly similar.
282. 00:14:21 Exactly.
283. 00:14:22 It was pretty easy to get lost in them.
284. 00:14:25 It's like you read one at the beginning of a chapter and then they talk about the principal
285. 00:14:29 who likes that person and they tell another story and then they continue on telling the
286. 00:14:33 principal and then they tell another story and at that point you're just like, "Okay,
287. 00:14:37 I get it."
288. 00:14:38 Are we done yet?
289. 00:14:39 A lot of examples of how this works.
290. 00:14:41 But I mean, yeah, it's not necessarily bad.
291. 00:14:45 It just got a little bit repetitive for me, but all of the stories that they tell, they
292. 00:14:49 kind of illustrate the four basic principles that they cover in here and Roger B is probably
293. 00:14:56 the most...
294. 00:14:59 It's the one they go deepest in.
295. 00:15:01 They tell his story.
296. 00:15:04 They use more pages, I guess, devoted to Roger B.
297. 00:15:08 But really even the way that they tell the stories, it doesn't even seem like it's really
298. 00:15:13 deeper.
299. 00:15:14 The way that they bring more details to it, at least when I read that story, it didn't
300. 00:15:20 really seem like they were fleshing out this character where I felt like I knew him more.
301. 00:15:24 It was just more like, "Oh, now he's doing this sort of a thing."
302. 00:15:29 I think it could have been a lot more powerful if we were able to really dissect the life
303. 00:15:34 of Roger B.
304. 00:15:35 Not just, "Here's exactly what happened to him," and he went from point A to point B.
305. 00:15:38 Now his life is a whole lot better.
306. 00:15:42 But anyways, the four principles that he really hit home through all of these stories, and
307. 00:15:47 specifically the life of Roger B are that...
308. 00:15:51 I'll just go through these real quickly because I wrote them down.
309. 00:15:55 Full engagement requires drawing on four separate but related sources of energy.
310. 00:15:59 I thought this was a really cool point.
311. 00:16:01 Physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual.
312. 00:16:06 We can come back to that in a little bit, but the spiritual one in particular, that really
313. 00:16:11 hit home with me and it was kind of like a naha moment like, "Hey, that makes sense."
314. 00:16:16 Number two was because energy capacity diminishes both with overuse and underuse.
315. 00:16:21 We have to balance our energy expenditure with intermittent energy renewal.
316. 00:16:28 You can't just keep going, you have to recharge.
317. 00:16:31 Number three, to build capacity, we have to push beyond our normal limits, training in
318. 00:16:36 the same systematic way that elite athletes do, which is kind of along the lines of deep
319. 00:16:43 work where we talked about how this is a skill that you can develop and it gets easier to
320. 00:16:48 click in and do deep work and establish flow and all that.
321. 00:16:52 And then the fourth one, the positive energy rituals, highly specific routines for managing
322. 00:16:58 energy are the key to full engagement and sustained high performance.
323. 00:17:03 I thought that one in particular was really cool and I like that that's the emphasis at
324. 00:17:10 the end of the book.
325. 00:17:12 I mean, kind of jumping all around here, but we already mentioned Roger B at the beginning.
326. 00:17:17 At the end, they kind of talk about what Roger B was doing to establish these rituals.
327. 00:17:23 And I think that's a really important key where if you just read the book, you can miss
328. 00:17:29 that one if you're not careful, but because I guess my perspective and working with Asian
329. 00:17:36 efficiency where we've got a product based on rituals, like I understand the science
330. 00:17:41 behind this, I understand why those are so important, how those are really your body's
331. 00:17:45 efficiency mechanism.
332. 00:17:47 Like if you really want energy management to stick, you can't skip that last part.
333. 00:17:52 And there I think could be a tendency to look at this and say, oh yeah, I get the first
334. 00:17:57 three principles.
335. 00:17:58 I understand the areas.
336. 00:18:00 I understand that it diminishes.
337. 00:18:02 I understand I need to increase my capacity.
338. 00:18:04 And then if all you did was try to formulate a plan from there, you're going to make it
339. 00:18:09 a lot harder than if you actually apply the fourth principle, which is the positive energy
340. 00:18:14 rituals.
341. 00:18:15 I think there's, because you go through these and now that you've said those principles
342. 00:18:20 out loud, I'm reflecting on those as compared to the four levels that he called out.
343. 00:18:28 Did we mention those?
344. 00:18:29 Did you just mention those?
345. 00:18:30 I'm losing my mind here, Mike.
346. 00:18:32 Yeah, the first principle, I don't know that they were, I don't know if I qualified them
347. 00:18:37 as levels, but there were four different areas, the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual.
348. 00:18:44 Is that what you're talking about?
349. 00:18:45 Yeah.
350. 00:18:46 And I know why I think of it as levels, Mike.
351. 00:18:50 It's honest.
352. 00:18:51 Well, it's Asian efficiency.
353. 00:18:53 They have a, they have an article, I'm going to hunt this down for the show notes.
354. 00:18:58 They have an article about this book somewhere.
355. 00:19:02 I know you didn't write it.
356. 00:19:04 And they have a pyramid, there's a picture of a pyramid in there and they spell out the,
357. 00:19:10 because I know physicals on the bottom, physical, emotional, mental and then spiritual.
358. 00:19:16 So they build on top of each other in the pyramid on Asian efficiency.
359. 00:19:20 I haven't, I don't think I saw that in this book at all, but I remember seeing it on, so
360. 00:19:25 I think tan is the one that put that together.
361. 00:19:28 And ultimately what that was showing me is you got to get your physical side figured out
362. 00:19:32 first.
363. 00:19:33 And then you can go to mental and then spiritual, you kind of build from the bottom up.
364. 00:19:38 I know we talk about this a little bit with GTD where in theory you should start at your
365. 00:19:43 life mission and your life goals.
366. 00:19:45 And these guys are kind of saying the same thing with the spiritual side.
367. 00:19:50 If you got to figure out what your core values are, you need to figure out what your weaknesses
368. 00:19:54 are, what's your, what's your mission, what are you shooting for?
369. 00:19:58 And then you use that to craft these rituals and the goals that you're shooting for and
370. 00:20:03 your positive energy habits.
371. 00:20:06 And I think there's a lot of value in that, but I also think there's a little bit of a
372. 00:20:11 danger in going all high and mighty, if you will, of what am I supposed to be doing?
373. 00:20:18 What's the best case scenario?
374. 00:20:19 How do I do all of this and getting to a point where you're just focused to high level and
375. 00:20:25 not so much in the day to day?
376. 00:20:27 How do I actually get the energy to keep going in the afternoon?
377. 00:20:31 A lot of people struggle with trying to keep moving right after the lunch.
378. 00:20:35 There's kind of that little period that we all deal with.
379. 00:20:37 And I think the Spaniards have that figured out with the siesta.
380. 00:20:40 Come on, bring it back.
381. 00:20:42 I think there's a lot of that that has some traditional and historical value, but we don't
382. 00:20:48 see that in today's world.
383. 00:20:50 And I think that's, I think these guys would say that there's a lot of value in maintaining
384. 00:20:55 that even as a culture.
385. 00:20:57 But we really don't do that anymore.
386. 00:20:59 If you were corporate and you went over and you took a nap in the early afternoon and
387. 00:21:04 they'd make fun of you, you might lose your job.
388. 00:21:06 There's just a lot of negatives that can come with that.
389. 00:21:10 True.
390. 00:21:11 They did share in there that Winston Churchill was a napper though.
391. 00:21:14 So if you shared that, maybe that would help your case.
392. 00:21:17 Wasn't Teddy Roosevelt an app or two?
393. 00:21:19 There was some other president that was not other president, but a president, I remember
394. 00:21:25 that was doing that.
395. 00:21:26 Churchill wasn't a president.
396. 00:21:29 Yeah, gotta get your fans.
397. 00:21:32 I don't remember who it was, but there's a lot of really successful people who actually
398. 00:21:35 do take naps in the middle of the day.
399. 00:21:39 Going back to your point though about the different levels, they didn't explicitly have
400. 00:21:43 that diagram, but I have seen those diagrams.
401. 00:21:46 And I shouldn't say they didn't explicitly have it because I just don't remember seeing
402. 00:21:49 it.
403. 00:21:50 I did write down though a quote which they said, the quantity of energy that we have
404. 00:21:56 to spend at any given moment is a reflection of our physical energy.
405. 00:21:59 Our motivation to spend what we have is largely a spiritual issue.
406. 00:22:03 So the spiritual level of energy really is all about finding your why and that kind of
407. 00:22:09 drives everything else.
408. 00:22:12 So I think you could articulate that or frame that as different levels and that's going
409. 00:22:19 to be, you know, that if you headed a pyramid and that's at the top really, or what you're
410. 00:22:24 saying is that you're working down, you know, that's going to really permeate through all
411. 00:22:29 the different levels below it until what you actually do on the surface your day to day,
412. 00:22:36 your work, your tasks that you do, how you manage your time, that is going to be, that's
413. 00:22:44 going to originate, that motion is going to originate from the spiritual level.
414. 00:22:48 Okay, so I found it.
415. 00:22:50 If you have your book in front of you, page 201, it's in the resources section number
416. 00:22:55 24.
417. 00:22:56 I'm going to get specific here.
418. 00:22:59 Number 24 on page 201, there's that pyramid and it's exactly what I was thinking of.
419. 00:23:04 So physical, emotional, mental and spiritual from the bottom up and then next to it, they
420. 00:23:08 have an arrow pointing down and in the arrow it says change, which I think is what you're
421. 00:23:13 saying is if you want to really make change to what you do to stay fit.
422. 00:23:19 If you're going to start going to the gym and you're going to start running or lifting
423. 00:23:23 weights or whatever it is you decide to do, if you're going to make that decision and
424. 00:23:26 do it, you have to have some core value that you connect with on an internal deep level
425. 00:23:35 that's not some external factor, like you're not turning look good for your wife, you're
426. 00:23:38 not like that doesn't always work.
427. 00:23:41 It can temporarily, but it doesn't work long term.
428. 00:23:43 But if you have something internal of value that you hold that can drive that change,
429. 00:23:49 that's where those rituals come from.
430. 00:23:51 Is that what you're getting at?
431. 00:23:53 Yep, exactly.
432. 00:23:54 Although, I don't necessarily think it just applies to change.
433. 00:23:58 I think it really applies to any sort of action that you take in your life with the exception
434. 00:24:05 of the rituals.
435. 00:24:06 Obviously, like I said, that's your body's efficiency mechanism.
436. 00:24:09 So it's easy to just once you've creased that into your psyche, that is just something
437. 00:24:15 that you do, it becomes a lot easier.
438. 00:24:17 You don't have to reference that why all the time.
439. 00:24:21 But if you're in the middle of doing hard work, if you're doing deep work, that why is
440. 00:24:26 really important because if you don't keep going back to the drawing board, if you don't
441. 00:24:31 keep consulting your goals or your vision, if you don't write it down in a place where
442. 00:24:34 you can actually see it, then it's easy to lose momentum and then just give up.
443. 00:24:39 I mean, you see that every January when people are like, "I'm going to join the gym.
444. 00:24:43 I'm going to get in shape."
445. 00:24:44 And then by January 31st, 9/10 of them are gone.
446. 00:24:47 Yeah.
447. 00:24:48 It's because they don't have, like you said, strong enough.
448. 00:24:51 Why?
449. 00:24:52 Though sometimes you can take advantage of that because I know not, well, I think it
450. 00:24:57 was three years ago, three years ago.
451. 00:25:00 I was looking to get into cycling.
452. 00:25:03 So I have a road bike and I go cycling occasionally whenever the girls, I've got a little trailer
453. 00:25:09 that I can pull behind the bike.
454. 00:25:11 So I'll take the road bike out and go for a spin occasionally.
455. 00:25:16 And I've been looking to do a lot more of that.
456. 00:25:18 So I have been grabbing my bike and doing that a little bit more lately.
457. 00:25:22 And I told my wife, "Okay, I'd like to upgrade my bike and get something a little nicer, but
458. 00:25:28 I'm just not ready to do it this summer.
459. 00:25:30 I might do something over the winter."
460. 00:25:33 And just in the midst of that conversation, it struck me as like, "Oh, right.
461. 00:25:37 The best time to buy bikes because I have a friend who likes to buy these types of,
462. 00:25:42 like these higher end road bikes.
463. 00:25:43 He likes to buy them, fix them up and then resell them."
464. 00:25:46 And he has found that the best time to buy them is about the first week of February because
465. 00:25:53 people buy them around New Year's and then they realize that they're not going to stick
466. 00:25:57 with it so they go to sell them somewhere in February.
467. 00:26:01 So, okay, you can take advantage of that too.
468. 00:26:04 Let's talk about the energy quadrant because that was one of the things that I really liked
469. 00:26:08 about this.
470. 00:26:09 This made so much sense to me.
471. 00:26:13 And it was kind of illuminating, I guess, to see how I would typically naturally manage
472. 00:26:22 my energy according to this quadrant.
473. 00:26:24 So the quadrant is really two axes, X and Y with a center point and then you've got
474. 00:26:33 the upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right.
475. 00:26:36 And so if you were going on the Y axis, so the top would be high and the bottom would
476. 00:26:43 be low and then on the right side, so right of the zero zero point would be positive and
477. 00:26:48 left of that would be negative.
478. 00:26:50 Now what they said in here is that the key to full engagement is to manage the ebbs and
479. 00:26:58 flows of your energy between the high and the low instead of bouncing all over the place
480. 00:27:06 from positive to negative.
481. 00:27:08 I personally think that I tend to bounce back and forth between positive and negative but
482. 00:27:16 still the high part of this quadrant.
483. 00:27:22 And what they're suggesting and this makes so much sense to me is instead of going back
484. 00:27:27 and forth, in my case, on the X axis, maybe we can find an image here that we can put
485. 00:27:32 in the show notes so people can reference this.
486. 00:27:35 But instead of bouncing back and forth on the X axis between the positive and negative,
487. 00:27:39 stay in the positive, but bounce back and forth on the Y axis.
488. 00:27:42 So you've got those high intensity positive experiences and then by being proactive and
489. 00:27:51 being intentional and choosing to come down off of that euphoric high and manage your
490. 00:27:56 energy in a way where you can be more relaxed, you can be more mellow, it's more peaceful
491. 00:28:02 or tranquil.
492. 00:28:04 You're able to allow your body to recover and ramp up for that next period of high intensity
493. 00:28:11 that you don't have to drift over into the negative.
494. 00:28:15 I think this is what I was talking about at the beginning with kind of my daily routine
495. 00:28:19 and how I do things because when I get up in the morning, I have kind of a relaxing,
496. 00:28:24 you know, get myself ready and go for the day, grab a shower, grab breakfast and I don't
497. 00:28:29 rush through that.
498. 00:28:30 I just kind of take my time going through it.
499. 00:28:32 And then once I've done that, I go into my work mode and after reading deep work, I've
500. 00:28:37 kind of just treated that as a deep work session.
501. 00:28:41 So I don't check email.
502. 00:28:42 I don't deal with anything up until second breakfast rolls around.
503. 00:28:47 But I go through one of those deep work sessions leading up to breakfast and that's roughly
504. 00:28:53 two to two and a half hours kind of depending on the day and what time I get up in the morning.
505. 00:28:57 But once I've gotten through that and I go up for breakfast, it's always fun because I
506. 00:29:01 get to go see my girls.
507. 00:29:02 They're always excited in the morning.
508. 00:29:04 We run around the house.
509. 00:29:05 We have fun.
510. 00:29:06 Make breakfast.
511. 00:29:07 We've got an hour to do.
512. 00:29:08 Breakfast is probably longer than necessary, but we have fun while we're doing it.
513. 00:29:12 And then I can go back to work for a few hours, do another deep work session until lunch,
514. 00:29:17 take another 30 minutes to an hour for lunch, do the same thing.
515. 00:29:20 And you get this.
516. 00:29:21 I mean, it's a cycle throughout the day and it's kind of the same process where you go
517. 00:29:26 through a really intense process of doing your work and spending a lot of energy and
518. 00:29:33 then you go do something that's refreshing and fun and re-energizing and then it gives
519. 00:29:37 you the boost to get back into it.
520. 00:29:40 And that's, I'm going to kind of summarize the whole book here.
521. 00:29:44 To me, whenever I finish this book, and again, this is the second time I'm through it, so
522. 00:29:49 for me, I've known about some of this oscillation process and this burn energy, build energy
523. 00:29:56 process for a while.
524. 00:29:58 And I can't say that I've been awesome at it.
525. 00:30:00 We talked about how we sometimes have these grandiose plans and these awesome action
526. 00:30:05 items that we're going to take and they tend to fall off.
527. 00:30:09 Well, this is a prime example of that because I came off of this book, I think it was a
528. 00:30:13 year and a half, two years ago when I read it.
529. 00:30:16 And I did the whole mission statement, did the values and weaknesses thing.
530. 00:30:21 And I have been reviewing those for a long time, but I haven't really seen them in the
531. 00:30:26 right light, I guess would be the way to say it, Mike.
532. 00:30:29 Just because it's not something that I've actively tried to make decisions on and change rituals
533. 00:30:35 based on those has just been kind of a, well, here's what I value.
534. 00:30:39 That's interesting.
535. 00:30:40 I'll just kind of keep that in mind.
536. 00:30:41 And then that's where it dies.
537. 00:30:42 And I've never really done anything with it.
538. 00:30:45 But I just want to make that point that sometimes we put some of this stuff in place.
539. 00:30:50 It sounds awesome at the beginning and then over time, it kind of falls away.
540. 00:30:53 And then you do something, you read another book and you reread the original book.
541. 00:30:57 And then it rekindles some of that energy and that motivation to get it up and running
542. 00:31:01 again.
543. 00:31:02 And this is a prime example of that for me, because this is a case where I feel that need
544. 00:31:07 to just be more intentional with that daily cycling that I have going on.
545. 00:31:12 So I've got that, that cycling ritual built in.
546. 00:31:15 I just need to make sure that I'm doing it intentionally.
547. 00:31:18 But that's to me, the ultimate behind the whole of the book is that you have to figure
548. 00:31:24 out where you value things and then where your points of potential lack are, like where
549. 00:31:31 you're potentially weak.
550. 00:31:33 And then look for ways to either increase those or focus on your values.
551. 00:31:37 And whenever you go through the process of building in these daily rituals where you have
552. 00:31:41 these set periods of time and these set ways of doing things to calm yourself down, to
553. 00:31:47 make the transition from work to home, to get yourself fired up at work, you know, to do
554. 00:31:51 a lot of these things.
555. 00:31:52 You have to have these rituals to make those transitions.
556. 00:31:56 And I think if you just think of the whole book as understanding how things oscillate,
557. 00:32:02 take the oscillations and take advantage of building in energy building rituals to help
558. 00:32:08 you combat some of the areas that you tend to be lacking in, I think that sums up the
559. 00:32:14 mass of the book because a lot of the stories they tell are based around those exact principles.
560. 00:32:21 Yeah, I agree.
561. 00:32:23 The big thing that you don't get from the stories though and is the whole sprint and
562. 00:32:31 then recover idea that they talk about.
563. 00:32:35 They mentioned that life is not a marathon.
564. 00:32:37 It's a series of sprints and going back to the energy quadrant, you know, understanding
565. 00:32:45 that I want to bounce back and forth between a high intensity and low intensity to stay
566. 00:32:50 in the positive.
567. 00:32:51 I think that mapping out my day using large blocks on my calendar, just the fact that
568. 00:32:58 I'm putting those in place actually helps me do that better because if I set aside two
569. 00:33:05 hours to work on this video for Asian efficiency and I get done in an hour and a half, then
570. 00:33:13 I have a half an hour to wind down and I'll go do something for that half hour that is
571. 00:33:18 not high intensity.
572. 00:33:20 I'll go do productive meditation like we talked about last time and take my dog for a walk
573. 00:33:25 or something.
574. 00:33:27 And those little pockets of time when you actually set aside, I'm going to work on this
575. 00:33:33 for two hours and the next thing that you're going to work on doesn't have to start for
576. 00:33:37 another 30 minutes.
577. 00:33:39 Like that's the natural inclination then.
578. 00:33:42 In the past, what I would have done is have my list of things which I need to do and I
579. 00:33:49 would still not get everything done.
580. 00:33:51 But as soon as I got done with one thing, I would instantly maintain that high intensity
581. 00:33:55 and jump into the next thing.
582. 00:33:57 But just by framing it a little bit and not having specific times that I'm going to do
583. 00:34:02 this exact thing at this exact time, but just like the blocks of time, I'm finding that
584. 00:34:07 is helping me manage my energy more effectively and that's really the key.
585. 00:34:15 That's what they say in the book anyways and I'm beginning to see that in my own life
586. 00:34:18 is that the real key to high performance is not how you manage your time, but it's really
587. 00:34:24 how you manage your energy because if you manage your energy well, then during those
588. 00:34:28 times when you are head down on a task, you're going to get it done quicker.
589. 00:34:34 You'll be more productive, you'll be more efficient and then you'll have more time,
590. 00:34:39 more disposable time I guess if you want to use the idea of disposable income, not finances,
591. 00:34:45 but time on your calendar.
592. 00:34:46 You'll have more disposable time like that where you can then intentionally ramp down
593. 00:34:51 and I think that is the biggest thing that I got out of this book is recognizing that
594. 00:34:58 those ebbs and flows, those have to take place.
595. 00:35:02 It is impossible to just go, go, go, go, go, go all day long because you will wear out
596. 00:35:07 by the end of the day and you will not be as productive the next day.
597. 00:35:12 If you continually burn yourself out and you do not give yourself a chance to recover,
598. 00:35:17 you don't even realize it a lot of times you think that you've got this, that we're super
599. 00:35:21 human and we're stronger than we think we are, but if you actually look at how effective
600. 00:35:25 you are and a lot of times we just don't ever keep score so we don't have the metrics
601. 00:35:30 in front of us, that's what putting stuff on the calendar is done for me is I can say,
602. 00:35:34 well this task usually takes me two hours to do and then if I manage my energy well,
603. 00:35:39 it doesn't take me two hours to do, it takes me an hour to do it and then I look at that,
604. 00:35:42 I see a consistent pattern there and I'm like, oh yeah, I guess I actually am way more efficient
605. 00:35:47 at this, I get a lot more good ideas, a lot sooner there, there in quicker succession when
606. 00:35:54 I actually apply this stuff.
607. 00:35:55 So the calendar is the way that I'm keeping score I guess, but that's really illuminated
608. 00:36:00 to me that yeah, this is like next level productivity stuff.
609. 00:36:04 A lot of people will focus on the time management and that's good, I mean you do need to look
610. 00:36:09 at your tasks and what you say you're going to get done in the span of a day, all of that
611. 00:36:14 stuff does need to take place within the context of your calendar, what time you've got to
612. 00:36:18 work with.
613. 00:36:20 But if you can take that a step further and start managing your energy, then it just makes
614. 00:36:26 everything simpler, it's a cheat code, it's like the mushroom in Super Mario, your productivity
615. 00:36:33 superhero now, which sounds a little bit extreme and grandiose, but I really do think like I've
616. 00:36:39 seen that just in this week and I have every intention of continuing to manage my time
617. 00:36:44 this way but yeah, it's been really cool.
618. 00:36:48 I can tell you love this.
619. 00:36:50 I do, I do.
620. 00:36:51 Well I didn't really care for the writing style, like the ideas that were in this book.
621. 00:36:56 Right.
622. 00:36:57 I absolutely resonated with me.
623. 00:36:59 Yeah, I know it's fun listening to you kind of go on a little rant, but it seems like
624. 00:37:06 whenever, and I'm prime example of this, I'd fall into this, it's me to a T. When I first
625. 00:37:13 got into the whole productivity space, I was working corporate, I mentioned that all the
626. 00:37:17 time, I had too much stuff trying to pull at my time.
627. 00:37:21 So I did the whole time management thing.
628. 00:37:22 How do I schedule my day?
629. 00:37:24 And then you get into something like this, how do you manage your energy and how do you
630. 00:37:27 make sure that you're on point during that time?
631. 00:37:31 But the funny thing to me is that it's almost like a chicken and egg conversation because
632. 00:37:35 you almost need the energy to make sure that you're planning your time the right way so
633. 00:37:39 that you can manage your energy, but you need to manage your time so that you can build
634. 00:37:42 the energy.
635. 00:37:43 And I get like there's this little cycle that seems to be going on.
636. 00:37:47 It's easier, of course, to do your time management than it is the energy management, in my opinion.
637. 00:37:52 But I'm with you on once you get this kind of time management thing figured out.
638. 00:37:58 And I think honestly, Cal Newport last time hit this to a T of scheduling your time and
639. 00:38:04 how do you focus for a certain amount of time?
640. 00:38:08 He seems to nail that really well.
641. 00:38:09 And then this tells you how do you build the energy so that you can endure that so that
642. 00:38:16 it's not just going to kill you whenever you sit down to do three hours of deep work.
643. 00:38:20 Exactly.
644. 00:38:21 There's a quote in here that I absolutely love.
645. 00:38:23 It said, "Without time for recovery, our lives become a blur of doing unbalanced by much
646. 00:38:29 opportunity for being."
647. 00:38:31 I really think especially for a knowledge worker that is so important and really it
648. 00:38:36 doesn't apply just to knowledge workers, I think probably the people that they're targeting
649. 00:38:41 with their corporate fitness or corporate training, university or whatever, they are
650. 00:38:47 going to be more like management level CEO type people that really understand these concepts.
651. 00:38:54 But I think that this is key in this applies to just about anybody.
652. 00:38:59 Yeah, I would agree with that.
653. 00:39:01 I know there's, and he even has some points in here that because if you talk to the older
654. 00:39:08 crowd, I don't know how else to say it, but if you talk to folks who are starting to deal
655. 00:39:13 with say memory loss or physical fitness isn't there, they have to use a cane or a wheelchair
656. 00:39:19 at times.
657. 00:39:20 There's a lot of instances that, and he calls out a few of them, like as we get older, just
658. 00:39:25 the muscles that it takes to take learning a language for example.
659. 00:39:30 He mentioned that because of our society and the way that we tend to do things, we Google
660. 00:39:35 everything, we say we ask our devices to give us the answer to questions.
661. 00:39:41 Whenever you have that ability, you just don't have the need to work your memory muscles nearly
662. 00:39:47 as much and nearly as often.
663. 00:39:49 I've been reading a bunch of articles, like scholarly articles about how helping kids
664. 00:39:56 memorize, because we don't memorize in school really at all anymore, we're always trying
665. 00:40:00 to learn how to find the information instead of memorizing the information itself, such
666. 00:40:05 as like poems and such, but there seems to be a lot of research going on right now about
667. 00:40:09 how having kids memorize things like poems or long blocks of text can actually help them
668. 00:40:18 be top of class and have better writing skills, better speaking skills, and it's purely based
669. 00:40:25 on the memorization versus doing actual training in those areas.
670. 00:40:30 He calls this out a little bit in here too of how if you were to work your memory muscles
671. 00:40:34 in that way, if you're constantly working on memory, then learning a language is not
672. 00:40:39 nearly as difficult as it is for most of us today, because we don't memorize really ever
673. 00:40:46 right now, at least I don't.
674. 00:40:50 I've thought about, do I pick up another language at some point?
675. 00:40:53 I don't really want to do that because it's a pain in the rear and I don't have the time
676. 00:40:56 for it.
677. 00:40:57 Well, it's also partly that I don't have the memory skills right now to handle that because
678. 00:41:01 I haven't been working that muscle.
679. 00:41:04 That's one of the premises here is in order to build a muscle in order to get better at
680. 00:41:09 one of these energy levels, you have to work it a certain amount and then let it recover.
681. 00:41:13 You don't want to overwork it like you were saying earlier, you don't want to underwork
682. 00:41:16 it, but you need to work it so that it can grow and continue to build.
683. 00:41:20 Does that make any sense?
684. 00:41:21 I feel like I just went on a long goat trail.
685. 00:41:24 No, it does make sense.
686. 00:41:27 I think that it really comes back to establishing the why.
687. 00:41:36 You said it's a chicken and egg situation.
688. 00:41:38 You need to establish your why to establish the need to manage your energy to really take
689. 00:41:46 the time to figure out what your why is.
690. 00:41:50 There's a quote in there, "This clarifying purpose takes time, quiet, uninterrupted time,
691. 00:41:54 which is something that many of us feel we simply don't have."
692. 00:41:58 It's true.
693. 00:41:59 If you just look at your schedule right now, you might say, "Well, I don't have the physical
694. 00:42:05 time to sit down and think high level about my life, but if you don't do it, things won't
695. 00:42:11 get easier."
696. 00:42:12 There's going to be pain in the short term, but it really is important.
697. 00:42:20 Where is that other quote he says?
698. 00:42:22 "Oh, the most compelling source of purpose is spiritual.
699. 00:42:26 The energy derived from connecting to deeply held values beyond self-interest.
700. 00:42:33 Purpose creates the destination.
701. 00:42:35 It drives full engagement by prompting our desire to invest focus energy in a particular
702. 00:42:39 activity or goal.
703. 00:42:40 We become fully engaged and we care deeply when we feel what we are doing really matters.
704. 00:42:44 Purpose is what lights us up, floats our boats, feeds our souls."
705. 00:42:50 You could say, "I don't have the time to establish my purpose, but once you take the
706. 00:42:54 time to establish the purpose, everything else gets easier.
707. 00:42:57 If you establish a purpose for wanting to memorize something or learn a new language,
708. 00:43:03 that gets a whole lot easier.
709. 00:43:06 But a lot of people won't take the time to figure that out."
710. 00:43:11 I think it really ties into what he calls a hero's journey.
711. 00:43:17 There's four parts to the hero's journey.
712. 00:43:19 He says the first part is the call to adventure.
713. 00:43:22 The second part is the supreme ordeal.
714. 00:43:24 Third part is the victory and the celebration and the fourth part.
715. 00:43:28 You repeat it.
716. 00:43:29 But most people don't pursue that hero's path.
717. 00:43:33 He says the simple, almost embarrassing reality is that we feel too busy to search for meaning.
718. 00:43:39 I think that's really, really sad.
719. 00:43:41 It's the most important thing I think that we could do is to establish that meaning.
720. 00:43:45 Isn't that pathetic?
721. 00:43:47 I feel like I hate my job.
722. 00:43:50 Well, have you ever figured out what you want to do?
723. 00:43:52 Well, no, I don't have time to figure out what I want to do because I'm too busy hating
724. 00:43:55 my current job.
725. 00:43:57 Exactly.
726. 00:43:59 It just doesn't make sense.
727. 00:44:01 It's so simple.
728. 00:44:03 It seems so simple.
729. 00:44:04 Just sit down and figure out what's your purpose in life?
730. 00:44:07 What's your in mission in life?
731. 00:44:09 I just had a meeting with some guys about a month ago about this of how do you come up
732. 00:44:12 with a mission statement for yourself?
733. 00:44:15 And ultimately what we were getting at is you have to find the way that suits you using
734. 00:44:21 the skills and talents that you have and have been given and find a way to help other
735. 00:44:25 people using those skills.
736. 00:44:27 If you can find a way to help other people do that because if you can help other people,
737. 00:44:31 I mean, you talk to people who are in their 80s and 90s and you ask them, "What's the meaning
738. 00:44:36 in life?"
739. 00:44:37 They'll tell you there's a lot of meanings in life.
740. 00:44:39 And the ultimate that a lot of them ever mention is that they derive a lot of joy and
741. 00:44:46 pleasure out of helping the people around them.
742. 00:44:48 Like that's giving to other people, whether it's time or money, it doesn't matter.
743. 00:44:53 But giving to other people can bring you to that ultimate joy in life.
744. 00:44:57 And if you're finding ways to help others and you make that as part of your vision and your
745. 00:45:02 mission in life, I mean, you've got a pretty good goal to shoot for.
746. 00:45:05 But we don't take time to do this.
747. 00:45:07 I mean, we just don't.
748. 00:45:09 We don't stop long enough.
749. 00:45:10 We're too busy going to soccer practice to figure out what it is that we want to actually
750. 00:45:15 do what the skills we have.
751. 00:45:16 Right.
752. 00:45:17 And he shares a quote in there by Arthur Ashe, who is a pretty famous tennis player, said
753. 00:45:21 "From what we get in life, we make a living.
754. 00:45:24 From what we give, we make a life."
755. 00:45:26 And I completely agree that giving and the focus on others is really, really important.
756. 00:45:34 It's one of the things that attracted me to Asian efficiency in the first place is their
757. 00:45:39 core values line up very much with my family's core values.
758. 00:45:42 The first one is glow green.
759. 00:45:43 Become the best version of yourself that you can.
760. 00:45:46 So that number two, you can pull others up.
761. 00:45:49 It's all about helping people reach their full potential, not just you achieving a certain
762. 00:45:55 milestone or accumulating enough stuff.
763. 00:45:59 That's really, really important.
764. 00:46:03 We've actually articulated our core values as a family.
765. 00:46:08 And I had a graphic designer friend, Jared Picker.
766. 00:46:11 I wish Jared had a Twitter handle.
767. 00:46:13 It's like a point people to him because he's really talented.
768. 00:46:15 But if you have any design needs, he's the one who did the logo for Bookworm by the way.
769. 00:46:21 Does he have a website?
770. 00:46:22 He does not.
771. 00:46:23 Does he know what the internet is?
772. 00:46:28 Yeah.
773. 00:46:29 He's a full time graphic designer for a local company here and he's pretty happy with his
774. 00:46:35 situation, but he does some stuff on the side and he's really, really talented.
775. 00:46:38 But I'll give you a copy of this.
776. 00:46:40 You can put it in the show notes, but he designed the core values that we use for our family.
777. 00:46:46 And there are five of them.
778. 00:46:49 I just want to pull up the image here real quick so I don't mess them up.
779. 00:46:53 The first, yeah, that would be bad.
780. 00:46:58 First one is love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength.
781. 00:47:01 And so that specifically, like heart, soul, mind and strength, everything that you have,
782. 00:47:05 which is why I wanted to pull this up before I just rattled these off.
783. 00:47:08 All right.
784. 00:47:09 Second one, give selflessly by finding the need and meeting it.
785. 00:47:12 I mean, that really is what you're talking about, but that's really important to us.
786. 00:47:16 And then the rest of them, just so people have reference to these, if you haven't ever
787. 00:47:20 taken the time to do core values, especially as a family, like definitely recommend it.
788. 00:47:23 But third one, lead courageously, always stand for the truth.
789. 00:47:27 Fourth one is impact the culture, leave your own legacy.
790. 00:47:30 And then fifth one is determined to be different and don't settle for average.
791. 00:47:34 And I think specifically in context of this book, average people will be completely, I
792. 00:47:42 won't say happy, but they'll be content.
793. 00:47:44 They won't, there won't be enough pain for there to actually be a change.
794. 00:47:48 I think it was my dad who told me that when pain is sufficient, change will come.
795. 00:47:52 There will be a lot of people who will read this type of material, maybe listen to this
796. 00:47:56 podcast and the pain isn't sufficient enough for them to change.
797. 00:48:01 They're going to be content to complain about their job that they hate and they're not going
798. 00:48:08 to do anything about it, which I think is really, really sad.
799. 00:48:11 There's going to be a lot of people who are going to be stuck in the level one, you know,
800. 00:48:17 trying to manage their time just a little bit better, trying to squeak out a few more minutes
801. 00:48:21 of their day.
802. 00:48:23 And I really, I guess my whole point going down this rabbit trail is establish those core
803. 00:48:29 values and be willing to go deeper, be willing to go beneath the surface, be willing to go
804. 00:48:34 to the next level and manage your energy because I've seen myself a bunch of positive benefits
805. 00:48:43 from this.
806. 00:48:45 And even looking back retrospectively at my life and some of the successes that I've
807. 00:48:51 had, I realized that this is what I was doing at that particular time.
808. 00:48:55 I maybe wasn't aware of it.
809. 00:48:58 And because of that, I wasn't able to keep it going.
810. 00:49:01 You know, I was bouncing back, like I said, between the positive and the negative instead
811. 00:49:04 of just bouncing back and forth between the high and low intensity.
812. 00:49:08 But I really do think that this is really, really critical and people really need to
813. 00:49:13 understand this.
814. 00:49:14 It's fun to me that you have your family mission printed and put on, you put it up
815. 00:49:21 on the wall?
816. 00:49:22 Is that right?
817. 00:49:23 Yep.
818. 00:49:24 Yeah, we did the same thing, which is funny to me because I've never seen anyone else
819. 00:49:28 do it.
820. 00:49:29 It's interesting.
821. 00:49:30 But yeah, we have one too.
822. 00:49:33 It's yeah, I'll grab a picture of that and we can put both of them in the show notes and
823. 00:49:38 that way people can see them.
824. 00:49:40 But I do think, because we need to start wrapping some things up here, but it's interesting
825. 00:49:45 to me whenever you read a lot of books in a similar realm that you run across some names
826. 00:49:53 and they're like researchers or doctors in some form and you run across them in multiple
827. 00:49:58 books and it's sometimes the same study, but coming from a different light and they look
828. 00:50:03 at it a little bit differently.
829. 00:50:05 Okay, I need you to say this name.
830. 00:50:07 Mihali, Cheekset, Mihali.
831. 00:50:10 Yeah, okay, you looked it up.
832. 00:50:11 Good, thank you.
833. 00:50:12 But Mihali was brought up in this book as well and was also in, was it in Deep Work?
834. 00:50:18 What was the other one that they were in?
835. 00:50:21 Yep, it was Deep Work.
836. 00:50:22 Mihali's my boy.
837. 00:50:23 Okay, so Mihali, I just thought it was fun that came up again.
838. 00:50:29 But anyway, for what it is.
839. 00:50:30 Yeah, it talks about flow and I mean it absolutely lines up with what they're talking about here.
840. 00:50:36 It was in the power of full engagement.
841. 00:50:38 I actually wrote down a quote by Mihali in, which I'll share really real quickly.
842. 00:50:43 It says, "The best moments usually occur when a person's by your mind is stretched to its
843. 00:50:47 limit in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile."
844. 00:50:52 And that ties back to the four principles.
845. 00:50:56 That's going to be the third one where in order to build capacity, we have to push beyond
846. 00:51:03 our normal limits, which is really interesting because most people will try to avoid stress.
847. 00:51:09 But stress isn't actually bad.
848. 00:51:12 There can be bad stress.
849. 00:51:13 There can be stress that you're under because of a situation that is totally avoidable and
850. 00:51:18 you just drop the ball and you're living out of emergency scan modality like David Allen
851. 00:51:21 would say.
852. 00:51:23 But the fact that there is stress is not enough to say that this is a negative situation.
853. 00:51:28 Although I guess Ryan Holiday wouldn't even call it a negative situation.
854. 00:51:33 But as a quote near it says, "With stress is not the enemy in our lives.
855. 00:51:36 Paradoxically, it is the key to growth."
856. 00:51:39 So again, managing your energy.
857. 00:51:42 You want to go high intensity.
858. 00:51:43 You want to push the limits of what's possible.
859. 00:51:46 You want to push your boundaries.
860. 00:51:48 And that's what Mihali's talking about.
861. 00:51:50 You want to do that.
862. 00:51:51 You want to get into that state of flow.
863. 00:51:53 You want to enlarge your capacity, so to speak.
864. 00:51:55 And then you want to dial back and you want to recover.
865. 00:51:59 So I want to move on to action items.
866. 00:52:01 And I only have one down this time.
867. 00:52:04 And I want to say it's a cop out, but it might be a cop out.
868. 00:52:08 You can call me out on this if you want.
869. 00:52:11 I simply put down be intentional about my daily routines or my daily rituals.
870. 00:52:19 Just because I do take time, you know, we were talking about this whole cycle of my
871. 00:52:25 day thing a couple of times here.
872. 00:52:27 I do take that time, but I don't always do a good job of making that a renewal time,
873. 00:52:33 I guess.
874. 00:52:34 I'm pretty good about taking the time off, but it's sometimes hard for me to make sure
875. 00:52:39 that my mind is shut off from work so that I'm not focused on, did I get that video
876. 00:52:44 edited?
877. 00:52:45 Did I get that one record?
878. 00:52:46 Where am I at in that process?
879. 00:52:47 Like, I'm not thinking through that.
880. 00:52:49 So I just need to make sure that I'm clearing my mind and maybe there's a ritual there of
881. 00:52:53 something I need to do before I start that.
882. 00:52:55 It's probably maybe an action item there, but I just need to be more intentional about
883. 00:52:59 those times.
884. 00:53:00 I'll let you get away with that one as long as you give me a definition of done.
885. 00:53:05 Like, what does it look like when you successfully do this or unsuccessfully do this?
886. 00:53:09 See, now you got to make it hard.
887. 00:53:11 I got to hold you accountable next time.
888. 00:53:13 It's true.
889. 00:53:14 Okay.
890. 00:53:15 All right.
891. 00:53:16 I'm going to put together a ritual of some sort of a mindset shift whenever I leave the
892. 00:53:24 work mode to go to family mode.
893. 00:53:27 So I'm going to put together some sort of a ritual in that transition.
894. 00:53:31 Does that work for you?
895. 00:53:33 Cool.
896. 00:53:34 Yep.
897. 00:53:35 Okay.
898. 00:53:36 All right.
899. 00:53:37 Your turn.
900. 00:53:38 All right.
901. 00:53:39 So my turn.
902. 00:53:40 The first one I have is to be fully engaged or strategically unengaged.
903. 00:53:43 And another way to say this would be to be in control of the how I manage my energy.
904. 00:53:51 Like I said, there's natural ebbs and ebbs and flows.
905. 00:53:54 You can either go from high to low intensity or you can go from positive to negative,
906. 00:53:58 at least in my experience, it seems to be how it goes.
907. 00:54:03 So instead of defaulting to positive to something, then we'll go wrong and switching
908. 00:54:10 to the negative being intentional about dialing down and then ramping back up.
909. 00:54:18 I believe that if I do that, then the variables in my life, the things that could potentially
910. 00:54:27 swing me into the high intensity, but negative quadrant will not be able to do that.
911. 00:54:34 And if there is something that maybe is not a ideal or good situation that I will be much
912. 00:54:40 being a much better place to deal with it when I am coming out of monk mode, where I'm
913. 00:54:46 laser focused on just doing this thing, cranking out high intensity positive energy.
914. 00:54:51 And then I'm coming down.
915. 00:54:52 Like if that's the point where I am when my wife says, hey, by the way, Malek, I fell
916. 00:54:58 off the slide and needs to go to the emergency room to get stitches, which is a true story,
917. 00:55:03 then I won't fly off the handle.
918. 00:55:07 That does not sound good.
919. 00:55:09 Yeah, no.
920. 00:55:10 So he's good now.
921. 00:55:12 So that's my first action point.
922. 00:55:15 And then the other one here is he they mentioned in the book that they use a they talk about
923. 00:55:22 tennis a lot, actually, and I used to play tennis.
924. 00:55:26 So that kind of resonated with me, but they talk about how the successful tennis players
925. 00:55:31 are the ones who implemented that ritual between points.
926. 00:55:36 And tennis is interesting because you will play a point.
927. 00:55:39 And even if you've got a rally, it's going to last like 30 seconds typically.
928. 00:55:43 And then you've got like another minute or so before the next point starts.
929. 00:55:48 And the really successful tennis players are the ones that during that minute, they have
930. 00:55:52 this ritual where they can kind of calm themselves and refocus.
931. 00:55:57 And that helps them execute better.
932. 00:56:00 And that is what I am seeing reading this book kind of crystallized it for me and showed
933. 00:56:07 me that this is what was actually happening when I was managing my calendar the way that
934. 00:56:12 I am.
935. 00:56:13 I want to not only have the space for those rituals to happen, but I want to figure out
936. 00:56:20 what is the best ritual that I can implement, which won't take very long, but I can use
937. 00:56:26 whenever I have that little bit of a break within my day to manage my energy, come back
938. 00:56:32 down, dial back up before the next point, before the next task and be more effective that way.
939. 00:56:37 It sounds like a tall task.
940. 00:56:40 It is a tall task.
941. 00:56:41 And I probably won't have it completely figured out by next time, but I hope to have something
942. 00:56:45 that I can show you is like, this is what I am doing at the moment.
943. 00:56:48 And these are the results.
944. 00:56:49 Okay.
945. 00:56:50 All right.
946. 00:56:51 I'll look for it.
947. 00:56:54 I wrote down repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat again.
948. 00:57:01 It could have been cut in half.
949. 00:57:03 So it just seemed like the two of them, they would put together a point and then they would
950. 00:57:09 talk about it and then would put the point together again and talk about it again and
951. 00:57:12 again and again and again.
952. 00:57:14 It just got to be long, in my opinion.
953. 00:57:17 I mean, the content, like what they're talking about is awesome.
954. 00:57:21 The concept of oscillations and managing energy.
955. 00:57:23 It's awesome, but it just got really long to me.
956. 00:57:26 Yeah, I agree.
957. 00:57:28 It was, I think, just under 200 pages, if you don't include the PENDX with all the resources,
958. 00:57:34 it probably could have been if you take out the stories and the repeats, maybe 50 or 60
959. 00:57:41 pages.
960. 00:57:42 Yeah, I could see that pretty easy.
961. 00:57:43 So yeah, it's long, in my opinion.
962. 00:57:46 I mean, the last couple chapters, well, I think it's the last three chapters maybe.
963. 00:57:51 No, the last four.
964. 00:57:53 Oh, wow.
965. 00:57:54 The last four, I didn't even underline anything at that point.
966. 00:57:58 I didn't take any notes on it.
967. 00:57:59 I didn't do anything about it.
968. 00:58:01 I just read it.
969. 00:58:03 Because nothing used.
970. 00:58:04 I definitely took way more notes at the beginning than I did at the end.
971. 00:58:10 I'll just reiterate that there were a ton of stories.
972. 00:58:15 So if you really like stories, then you'll probably really like this book.
973. 00:58:19 They got a little bit old for me, and it seemed like after a while, it's like, you're just
974. 00:58:25 making these people up.
975. 00:58:28 But I'm sure they weren't.
976. 00:58:30 That's just the impression that I got is like, okay, you're really trying really, really
977. 00:58:35 hard to show me that there are all these people that I personally can't connect with.
978. 00:58:40 So it seems like they're made up.
979. 00:58:43 And you're just telling me one side of their situation to illustrate your point and you're
980. 00:58:48 doing it over and over and over again.
981. 00:58:50 So it just seemed like, I don't know, if there were real names on the people, like really
982. 00:58:54 factual people, like Ryan holiday did this where he talked about historical people, like
983. 00:58:58 Abraham Lincoln, right?
984. 00:59:00 Teddy Roosevelt.
985. 00:59:01 That would have been a little bit different for me because I have a little bit more of
986. 00:59:05 a frame of reference.
987. 00:59:06 But these people, like you said, it's first name, last initial.
988. 00:59:09 It's like, okay, Roger B. Well, hope your life turns out well.
989. 00:59:13 If you're real.
990. 00:59:14 Yeah.
991. 00:59:15 Yeah.
992. 00:59:16 Like, and if all of them feel fake, they tend to feel like it's the same person.
993. 00:59:21 Like, it feels like it's the same story just going on and on and on and on and on.
994. 00:59:26 That's what it feels like.
995. 00:59:27 Exactly.
996. 00:59:28 That's a great way to describe it.
997. 00:59:29 Like, if you literally, if you change the person's name and it took the person's name
998. 00:59:34 out and just lined up all these stories, you've got the same story told different ways over
999. 00:59:40 and over and over again.
1000. 00:59:41 It's kind of the way it seems.
1001. 00:59:42 Yeah.
1002. 00:59:43 So we figure out like 30 to 40, since there's 30 to 40 of them, it feels like the same story
1003. 00:59:47 as being brought up 30 to 40 times.
1004. 00:59:49 That's what it feels like.
1005. 00:59:51 Right.
1006. 00:59:52 So that by itself, you know, that as compared to the content of it, I'm trying to get, figure
1007. 00:59:59 out what I want to read this because the actual subject, the content of the process of building
1008. 01:00:06 rituals and understanding cycles, like that I want to give a five, but the style of writing,
1009. 01:00:13 I want to give a three.
1010. 01:00:14 Like, it's just hard.
1011. 01:00:16 I don't know if it would go lower than that.
1012. 01:00:19 So part of me wants to average that and say a four, but I feel like it's a book, the writing
1013. 01:00:25 style and how you come about sharing the information is really important.
1014. 01:00:28 That's the whole point behind it.
1015. 01:00:30 So I think in this case, Mike, I'm going to have to dip into the three and a half range.
1016. 01:00:34 That's fair.
1017. 01:00:36 I am going to say, well, let me just say this, that the reason that we are doing this podcast
1018. 01:00:43 and the reason that we are reading a lot of books is because we want to improve ourselves.
1019. 01:00:51 And from that perspective, I feel like the information that he did share, even though
1020. 01:00:58 it was, it took a lot more words than it probably needed to, I believe that this book is very
1021. 01:01:06 transformational, especially if you've not read it before.
1022. 01:01:09 Like I have, if you've read it before, maybe you have a little bit different perspective
1023. 01:01:14 on it.
1024. 01:01:16 But for me, this gave me a lot of revelation and insight.
1025. 01:01:21 So even though I've got a few issues with the number of stories and maybe how it was
1026. 01:01:27 written based on the content alone, I feel like I've got to give it at least four, I'm
1027. 01:01:32 going to go four and a half.
1028. 01:01:34 That's fair.
1029. 01:01:35 That's fair.
1030. 01:01:36 I may be colored by the fact that I've read this one other time before.
1031. 01:01:42 So if that's probably getting in my way here, that might be part of it.
1032. 01:01:48 I just know that I have one naturally built in a lot of this and it just seems natural
1033. 01:01:53 to me.
1034. 01:01:54 It's just second nature.
1035. 01:01:55 And I don't know if that's because I read this or if that's just me.
1036. 01:02:00 So it didn't really, I don't think it had anywhere near the impact on me is what it
1037. 01:02:05 did on you, which is fine.
1038. 01:02:08 Just a difference.
1039. 01:02:09 Yeah, and that's completely fair.
1040. 01:02:12 But yeah, I really enjoyed the application of the principles in this book, not necessarily
1041. 01:02:18 so much reading the book.
1042. 01:02:21 But I can see the results, which is ultimately why we read the books in the first place.
1043. 01:02:29 So.
1044. 01:02:30 Yep.
1045. 01:02:31 Yep.
1046. 01:02:32 And speaking of reading books, the ones that we have coming up next.
1047. 01:02:35 So the next one up on the list is Daring Greatly by Brene Brown.
1048. 01:02:40 That one is my choice.
1049. 01:02:42 And I've got it here so I can read the tagline.
1050. 01:02:44 So the tagline on that one, how will the courage to be vulnerable transforms the way
1051. 01:02:48 we live, love, parent and lead.
1052. 01:02:51 So this one's going to step us out of some of the, how do you get work done and step
1053. 01:02:56 us into relationships, Mike.
1054. 01:02:59 We're going to step on the dangerous territory here.
1055. 01:03:03 So yeah, anyway, that's my choice.
1056. 01:03:05 What did you pick for following that?
1057. 01:03:07 I picked Start With Why by Simon Sinek.
1058. 01:03:11 I believe that's how you say his name.
1059. 01:03:13 I've read Leaders Eat Last, which is a phenomenal book.
1060. 01:03:18 And I've been told by several people that Start With Why is even better.
1061. 01:03:23 So I am really excited about this one.
1062. 01:03:25 Yeah.
1063. 01:03:26 Now this is interesting because both Brene Brown of Daring Greatly and Simon Sinek of Start
1064. 01:03:33 With Why.
1065. 01:03:34 I've done some of the most popular TED Talks out there.
1066. 01:03:38 I know Brene's I think is within the top five.
1067. 01:03:41 Simon's might be top five as well.
1068. 01:03:44 He's got a TED Talk by the same title.
1069. 01:03:46 Same title.
1070. 01:03:47 Yeah.
1071. 01:03:48 I went on a binge of TED Talks for a long time.
1072. 01:03:50 So every once in a while I'll say something about a TED Talk that I watch and how this
1073. 01:03:54 author was that is because I binged watched like a hundred of them across the period of
1074. 01:03:59 a few months at one point.
1075. 01:04:00 Yeah, I got into a big TED binge there for a while.
1076. 01:04:05 Anyway, getting off of that.
1077. 01:04:07 So that's the books coming up.
1078. 01:04:08 I do want to point out if you go over to bookworm.fm there is a link at the top right of that
1079. 01:04:15 page in the sidebar so you can recommend a book.
1080. 01:04:18 So if you have an idea of a book that you want to hear us read and talk about you can
1081. 01:04:24 go over there and you can recommend that book there.
1082. 01:04:27 There's also same place just scroll down a little bit.
1083. 01:04:31 There's a book list that has a list of all the books that we've read are planning to read
1084. 01:04:36 and that we've had recommended.
1085. 01:04:38 So you can see that full list over there on the website at bookworm.fm.
1086. 01:04:42 Nice.
1087. 01:04:43 Yeah.
1088. 01:04:44 And if you want to engage with us in our podcast book club experiment, you can go over to remarks.fm.
1089. 01:04:55 This is something where you can not only listen to the episode, but you can also leave comments
1090. 01:05:00 at specific time codes.
1091. 01:05:01 And we do check that get notified of any comments that people leave there.
1092. 01:05:06 We would also love it if you would go on iTunes and leave us a review.
1093. 01:05:11 iTunes is kind of a funky algorithm for how they rank podcasts, but reviews is one of
1094. 01:05:16 the things that they rate highly.
1095. 01:05:18 So if you are enjoying the podcast and you don't mind leaving us a review, that will
1096. 01:05:22 help other people find the podcast as well.
1097. 01:05:26 Good work, sir.
1098. 01:05:27 And we will get to work reading Daring Greatly.
1099. 01:05:30 If you want to join us, pick up the book and we will go through that one in a couple of
1100. 01:05:34 weeks.