82: Margin by Richard Swenson

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1. 00:00:00 This is your fault, Joe.
2. 00:00:01 -What did I do now?
3. 00:00:03 -I bought another fountain pen.
4. 00:00:06 -Ooh.
5. 00:00:08 That makes me really happy.
6. 00:00:10 -My wife is angry at you.
7. 00:00:12 -That's okay.
8. 00:00:13 I don't talk to her as much as I talk to you.
9. 00:00:15 -Sure.
10. 00:00:16 -All right.
11. 00:00:18 What did you get?
12. 00:00:19 All the details.
13. 00:00:20 -All right.
14. 00:00:21 I got a Twisbee diamond 580 and an ink set from Twisbee that I heard recommended on the
15. 00:00:29 Pen Addicts gift guide.
16. 00:00:31 I should have known when I started listening to that, I was going to buy something.
17. 00:00:36 The Twisbee 580 is a piston filler fountain pen.
18. 00:00:40 The first one I've had where you suction up the ink after you dip it in the bottle.
19. 00:00:45 I like it a lot.
20. 00:00:46 It's really nice.
21. 00:00:48 My first fine nib, I've got a medium nib, which is a Shafer 300, which I liked.
22. 00:00:55 The fine nib is definitely for me.
23. 00:00:57 I got six different inks in this ink set.
24. 00:01:01 A couple different greens.
25. 00:01:03 There's a blue, there's a pink, I think, a purple and an orange.
26. 00:01:08 I'm using the orange right now and it looks awesome in my Barenfig confidant notebook.
27. 00:01:13 -This makes me happy on so many levels.
28. 00:01:16 It's a little disturbing.
29. 00:01:20 That is my favorite pen that I own.
30. 00:01:24 The Twisbee diamond 580, that's my thing.
31. 00:01:28 I like the 580 a lot.
32. 00:01:29 I use a fine nib in it too, so I think we have the identical pen.
33. 00:01:33 It makes me happy.
34. 00:01:35 -Sweet.
35. 00:01:36 I'm a big fan.
36. 00:01:38 Only had it a day, it came actually while I was traveling.
37. 00:01:42 This is the first day that I've used it, but inking it up, I believe that's the term
38. 00:01:47 all the cool kids use was really fun.
39. 00:01:52 It feels really nice when I use it.
40. 00:01:55 I really like the fine nib.
41. 00:01:56 It feels a lot better than the medium nib did and far less feathering.
42. 00:02:03 This is the pen for me, at least until I find something else new and shiny.
43. 00:02:07 -Can I make things more difficult for you?
44. 00:02:09 -Oh, boy.
45. 00:02:10 Sure, go ahead.
46. 00:02:11 -They make an ink well specifically for these pens because you can unscrew the nib section
47. 00:02:19 and then it clicks onto the top and the ink well has a little tube that reaches down towards
48. 00:02:25 the bottom of the ink well.
49. 00:02:27 When you use the piston filler, it just sucks it up through that right into the pen.
50. 00:02:32 You don't actually have to dip the nib into the ink itself at all.
51. 00:02:37 -Oh, wow.
52. 00:02:38 -Which is addictive.
53. 00:02:41 I purchased this thing using gift card money a couple years ago, three years ago I forget
54. 00:02:46 now.
55. 00:02:48 I love it, but it's like 40 bucks for the ink well.
56. 00:02:52 I'm going to just stick that pen in the back of your mind and see how long it takes you
57. 00:02:57 to buy it.
58. 00:02:59 -Will Mike buy it before next episode?
59. 00:03:01 Tune in to find out.
60. 00:03:04 -Yes, there you go.
61. 00:03:06 I'm proud of you, Mike.
62. 00:03:08 You've stepped into the true analog world.
63. 00:03:10 I'm very happy for you.
64. 00:03:12 -Full analog nerddom achieved.
65. 00:03:14 -Totally.
66. 00:03:15 -All right, we've got some other follow-up here from last episode.
67. 00:03:19 Did you do your two-minute morning practice?
68. 00:03:23 -Sometimes.
69. 00:03:24 Yes, not entirely, but sometimes.
70. 00:03:27 I need to keep working on this one.
71. 00:03:29 I like having it there, the concept being just answering a few questions about my day
72. 00:03:34 and how things I'm grateful for and things I'm planning to do for the day ahead.
73. 00:03:40 Those are the things that I'm working towards implementing in my morning routine.
74. 00:03:46 Sometimes it works, sometimes I don't get it done.
75. 00:03:48 I know that when it happens, I'm more effective throughout the day.
76. 00:03:53 There's that.
77. 00:03:54 I should do it more.
78. 00:03:55 Thus, it's going to stay on the list, Mike.
79. 00:03:58 -All right, so we're checking in on it next time.
80. 00:04:00 Is that what I'm hearing?
81. 00:04:01 -I think that would be a fair thing to do.
82. 00:04:04 -Okay.
83. 00:04:05 -How about you?
84. 00:04:06 -We've got three action items from last time, which a lot of them are impossible to mark
85. 00:04:12 as completed via action.
86. 00:04:14 So typical for me?
87. 00:04:16 -Yep.
88. 00:04:17 I think you do this on purpose.
89. 00:04:20 -Maybe.
90. 00:04:21 Although the action items from this book aren't any better.
91. 00:04:26 The first one was to answer the question, "Who can I mentally release to?"
92. 00:04:30 The more I thought about this, the more I realized that I maybe don't need anyone.
93. 00:04:39 That sounds a little bit weird saying it, but let me clarify that.
94. 00:04:44 Someone had mentioned to me, and I apologize, I can't remember who said it specifically,
95. 00:04:50 but they said basically, "That's what journaling is for me.
96. 00:04:53 I'm able to write those things down, and it's like getting them out and confessing them
97. 00:04:56 to somebody."
98. 00:04:57 I realized that between that and the prayer habit that I have firmly established as part
99. 00:05:04 of my morning routine, I really should just quit whining about how I don't have anybody
100. 00:05:08 and just start doing this.
101. 00:05:11 -Yes.
102. 00:05:12 -So, lesson learned.
103. 00:05:15 I've also got one for sharing my failures.
104. 00:05:18 I have passed this one with flying colors.
105. 00:05:21 I just recorded an episode of Focused and shared all about all the things that I have failed
106. 00:05:29 at this year.
107. 00:05:35 That was inspired by this action item.
108. 00:05:39 It's episode 88, and we're really talking about the last year, because we started Focused
109. 00:05:44 at the beginning of the year.
110. 00:05:46 January, basically, was when we changed it from free agents to Focused.
111. 00:05:50 We've been talking about Focused for about a year.
112. 00:05:52 We're reflecting on that.
113. 00:05:53 Picking a word for the year, which is something that we did.
114. 00:05:56 I traveled to Kansas City this last week and spent some time with the Blanc Media Team,
115. 00:06:03 and we all went out to dinner, and Sean asked everybody, "Okay, what was your last year
116. 00:06:08 summarizing a single word?"
117. 00:06:10 I was like, "Oh, man."
118. 00:06:13 The one I landed on was Reset, and you can listen to Focused if you want all the gory details,
119. 00:06:19 but that really got me thinking about this topic more in depth, more detail, and that
120. 00:06:28 coupled with this action item, I was looking for an opportunity to share that type of stuff,
121. 00:06:34 and so I have done that.
122. 00:06:37 I've also done this a couple of times just talking to people face to face, so I don't
123. 00:06:43 have a record of those conversations, but I have done a better job of sharing the things
124. 00:06:50 that I have not done well in the last year, and it's actually been really freeing, which
125. 00:06:57 is the point in this action item from the last episode.
126. 00:07:01 You are awesome.
127. 00:07:03 I would say that this one I can mark as complete, but it's not something I want to be done with.
128. 00:07:09 I want to continue to do this.
129. 00:07:12 I think that this is something that is super helpful for anybody to do, but it's really
130. 00:07:18 hard to bring yourself to the point where you will do it.
131. 00:07:22 This is something that I've tried to follow this path and go down this path a lot in recent
132. 00:07:28 years, and I feel like you and I have been pretty frank with each other and on the show
133. 00:07:34 as well, but it's very different whenever you're intentional about using, at least in my case,
134. 00:07:40 the way I do it is I use my failures in order to tell a story for someone else so that they
135. 00:07:44 can learn from what I did wrong.
136. 00:07:45 That's a lot of what I end up doing.
137. 00:07:49 I assume you're doing something similar, but I have found it to be extremely freeing doing
138. 00:07:54 that as well.
139. 00:07:55 Yeah, honestly, sometimes people will approach me and they'll say this happened just the
140. 00:08:01 other day in my mastermind group.
141. 00:08:04 You know, I look at everything I got done and then I look at you, Mike, and I'm like,
142. 00:08:10 that's whole another level.
143. 00:08:11 And I immediately was like, well, I'm not so hot.
144. 00:08:15 I feel that this, that and the other thing, and I had to let this go and stop doing this
145. 00:08:20 because I just couldn't handle it.
146. 00:08:22 And the standard response when I share that type of stuff is like, oh, wow, I had no idea,
147. 00:08:28 which is kind of the point, I guess, is that people tend to project everything that's going
148. 00:08:32 right.
149. 00:08:33 And then you try to hold yourself to this impossible standard set by these other people
150. 00:08:37 that you're watching.
151. 00:08:38 And I don't want to contribute to anybody else's, anybody else not feeling good about
152. 00:08:44 what they're able to do because the truth is that I struggle with this stuff and make
153. 00:08:49 mistakes just like everybody else does.
154. 00:08:51 The important thing is the perspective and the adjustments that you make as you keep
155. 00:08:55 going, going back to the growth mindset thing.
156. 00:08:58 You know, if there was a drinking game for bookworm, it would be growth mindset related.
157. 00:09:03 I like it.
158. 00:09:06 I like it.
159. 00:09:07 Well, I can better be Holly continuing on this process.
160. 00:09:10 Yes.
161. 00:09:11 Flow Mahali growth mindsets.
162. 00:09:13 Always think about getting better.
163. 00:09:15 There you go.
164. 00:09:17 We just summed up 82 episodes of bookworm.
165. 00:09:22 Last action I had to my hand was to implement Untouchable Days question mark.
166. 00:09:27 That's because I'm not going to do this immediately.
167. 00:09:31 But as I mentioned in the last episode, I feel like I've kind of been doing this already
168. 00:09:36 and I'm going to continue to look for opportunities to do this because the work culture at Blanche
169. 00:09:42 Media is so awesome.
170. 00:09:44 That was a big takeaway, which we'll get into that as we get into today's book.
171. 00:09:48 But I recognize that I am just totally in love with this eight week cycle thing and for
172. 00:09:55 sabbaticals and things being chill and using base camp and not expecting an immediate
173. 00:10:00 response.
174. 00:10:01 Like, if you get the right people on the team, this is definitely the way to work.
175. 00:10:06 All right.
176. 00:10:07 I am on board with you.
177. 00:10:09 I just wish I could do that more.
178. 00:10:14 Well, that, I guess, let's just jump into today's book then because that's a perfect segue.
179. 00:10:20 So today's book is Margin by Richard Swenson, which I first heard about in red when Sean
180. 00:10:29 Blanche talked about it several years ago.
181. 00:10:32 And since then he has released a course called the margin course, which is pretty awesome.
182. 00:10:39 I've gone through that course.
183. 00:10:42 I work with the Blanche Media team, so I didn't help build that one.
184. 00:10:46 That one was in development before I joined the team, but it's kind of what you would
185. 00:10:52 expect from Blanche Media.
186. 00:10:55 It's the same sort of format as the focus course, but the entire focus is on margin in
187. 00:11:00 the different areas that you need it, which we'll jump into in a little bit.
188. 00:11:03 So I've read this book before.
189. 00:11:05 I liked it when I first read it.
190. 00:11:07 Then there was the margin course, which I have gone through.
191. 00:11:12 And then I read this book again.
192. 00:11:15 And I have to say that reading it the second time, it impacted me a lot greater than it
193. 00:11:20 did the first time that I read it.
194. 00:11:23 If I were to sum it up, I would say the first time I read it, I'm like, "Oh, that sounds
195. 00:11:26 nice, but this guy's probably just making a bigger deal about this."
196. 00:11:29 For where I am right now and what I've gone through in the last year, I read this and
197. 00:11:33 I was like, "Oh, man, I should have listened to this the first time."
198. 00:11:36 Yeah, for sure.
199. 00:11:39 I went through this and thought, "This is perfect timing.
200. 00:11:43 I really needed this."
201. 00:11:45 And a case in point, I told Mike this before we started recording.
202. 00:11:50 This is the first time I'll be recording this episode without book in hand.
203. 00:11:55 And I just sit, you know, we're talking about failures.
204. 00:11:58 I am certain I brought the thing home from church.
205. 00:12:01 I come home early on Fridays and we record this.
206. 00:12:05 And I set it down somewhere and I cannot find it.
207. 00:12:07 And if I had given myself the time between things, I would have had plenty of time to
208. 00:12:14 go back to the church, see if I left it there, come home.
209. 00:12:17 Like I could have done that, but I didn't give myself enough buffer, enough margin to
210. 00:12:22 do that.
211. 00:12:23 And that meant that I was hustling around for 15 minutes, trying to find this book.
212. 00:12:28 I still couldn't find it.
213. 00:12:30 So thankfully I have a handful of notes on my phone from going through it that I wanted
214. 00:12:35 to talk about for Bookworm, which I didn't know when we started recording Mike.
215. 00:12:38 I was looking while you were talking.
216. 00:12:40 And I'm going to be going off of that.
217. 00:12:42 But this is, again, case in point, if I had been building in margin where I should be,
218. 00:12:48 I would not have had to hustle and rush and start this whole episode with a little bit
219. 00:12:53 of stress on the back of my mind.
220. 00:12:55 So this is good timing.
221. 00:12:57 Thanks for picking this, Mike.
222. 00:12:58 I owe you.
223. 00:13:00 Thanks to the Bookworm Club for picking this because it had lots of votes.
224. 00:13:05 So but yeah, this is the right thing at the right time for me too, as I read through this
225. 00:13:12 and end of the year as we're recording this was reflecting on the last year.
226. 00:13:17 A lot of things became pretty clear to me, which we'll get into as we dive into the specifics
227. 00:13:23 of this book.
228. 00:13:24 The book is broken down into really four different sections, officially three.
229. 00:13:29 The first chapter is called Marginless Living.
230. 00:13:32 That's where we'll start.
231. 00:13:34 This first chapter really just talks about the state of the society or the culture right
232. 00:13:42 now and how we have all of this affluence.
233. 00:13:49 We're really prosperous.
234. 00:13:51 So he asked the question, if we're so prosperous, why are we so stressed?
235. 00:13:57 And they makes the point that pain and the absence of margin are related and pain isn't
236. 00:14:03 necessarily a bad thing because it causes us to focus.
237. 00:14:06 The next whole section of the book is part one, the problem pain and then it goes into
238. 00:14:13 part two, the prescription margin and then it ends with part three, the prognosis health.
239. 00:14:19 I think for today we'll focus kind of specifically on the three different parts and we're not
240. 00:14:25 going to go through all the different chapters in here, but we'll kind of call out the things
241. 00:14:29 that are important and talk about some of the main points unless you had anything you
242. 00:14:33 wanted to talk about as it pertains to the Marginless Living section, Joe, but that's
243. 00:14:37 kind of like the introduction.
244. 00:14:38 Yeah, I don't think there's anything specific other than I live it.
245. 00:14:42 So there's that.
246. 00:14:43 Yeah.
247. 00:14:44 All right, cool.
248. 00:14:45 Well, then we'll jump into part one, the problem, pain.
249. 00:14:51 And one of the things that stood out to me in this section was his definition of progress.
250. 00:14:59 Progress is proceeding to a higher level of development, but he makes the observation
251. 00:15:04 that progress always gives more.
252. 00:15:07 It never, progress is never associated with less.
253. 00:15:12 And there are some charts in the appendix of this book for different areas.
254. 00:15:19 And when you look at them, they're kind of like the hockey stick type curve where we've
255. 00:15:23 gone along for a little while and then all of a sudden the last 10 years like ramps way
256. 00:15:27 up.
257. 00:15:28 And then when you combine all of those together, it's kind of has an exponential effect in
258. 00:15:32 the bottom line is that we have more of everything that we've ever had before.
259. 00:15:37 And there's a quote, let me find this by Peter Drucker.
260. 00:15:42 This is not actually in the book, but when I saw this, it really impacted me and I thought
261. 00:15:47 it summarized perfectly what he's talking about in this section because Peter Drucker
262. 00:15:54 is the big management guy.
263. 00:15:57 He said at one point that in a few hundred years when the history of our time will be
264. 00:16:01 written from a long term perspective, it's likely that the most important event historians
265. 00:16:05 will see is not technology, not the internet, not e-commerce.
266. 00:16:09 It is an unprecedented change in the human condition for the first time.
267. 00:16:12 Literally substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices.
268. 00:16:16 For the first time, they will have to manage themselves and society is totally unprepared
269. 00:16:20 for it.
270. 00:16:22 So when I read that and then thought about everything that Richard Swenson says in margin,
271. 00:16:27 I'm like, yeah, he was totally right.
272. 00:16:29 And Richard Swenson is kind of talking about the current state of things in this first
273. 00:16:34 section here on the problem of pain.
274. 00:16:36 So I kind of struggled with this part, Mike, because and I understand it's his entire premise
275. 00:16:42 here, but he explains how progress just almost by definition means adding things.
276. 00:16:49 This is my summarization in that you're continually contributing more to what you're
277. 00:16:55 doing in life and what you're willing to take on.
278. 00:16:59 As we progress and we have smartphones, well, it didn't mean that we stopped communicating.
279. 00:17:07 It just changed the way we communicated and by proxy, we almost could say we communicate
280. 00:17:11 a lot more than we ever have just in a different way.
281. 00:17:15 And that's not necessarily allowing us to subtract in some form, which means we're constantly
282. 00:17:22 putting addition to the equation and putting more into our lives.
283. 00:17:26 So again, not by definition, progress equals addition, but it is something he kind of goes
284. 00:17:34 to.
285. 00:17:35 And the reason I somewhat struggled with it is because I like progress.
286. 00:17:38 Sure.
287. 00:17:39 And so like, OK, I really enjoy that technology continues to grow in advance and we continue
288. 00:17:45 to get better at things.
289. 00:17:48 He wouldn't argue with that.
290. 00:17:49 He was very careful to say he's not.
291. 00:17:51 This is not a we should go back to the way things were type book.
292. 00:17:56 That's not his point.
293. 00:17:57 His point is that if we're going to continue to accelerate progress, we have to be aware
294. 00:18:04 of what it's doing.
295. 00:18:06 This is more of an awareness thing than anything.
296. 00:18:09 So I could definitely appreciate that, but I do still like progress.
297. 00:18:13 Yeah.
298. 00:18:14 And I think the main point here is not that progress is bad.
299. 00:18:17 He's careful to call that out.
300. 00:18:19 His progress is not evil, but to be intentional about the areas that we want to apply progress
301. 00:18:27 in because more for the sake of more is not necessarily a good thing.
302. 00:18:32 In the second chapter, the pain of progress, he talks about the five different environments
303. 00:18:39 and he mentions that most of our progress has come from advances in the physical environment
304. 00:18:44 and the cognitive environment, but most of our pain is felt in the social, emotional
305. 00:18:49 and spiritual environments.
306. 00:18:51 And that is where a lack of margin can really show up.
307. 00:18:56 I actually let me redefine that.
308. 00:18:58 I think that's kind of where the absence of margin is experienced first.
309. 00:19:04 And then if you don't deal with some of the symptoms as they become evident in those areas,
310. 00:19:11 which is kind of why he's calling this out, then eventually they will cause you to completely
311. 00:19:15 break down and the physical and cognitive environments are going to be impacted as well.
312. 00:19:19 There's kind of two basic principles that he outlines in the book.
313. 00:19:23 One, that man has limited capacity and two, that overloading the system leads to serious
314. 00:19:28 breakdown and performance.
315. 00:19:30 You can't just rev your engine all the time.
316. 00:19:32 You've got to rest eventually, but a lot of us think, "Oh, I got this.
317. 00:19:37 I'll just push through this thing.
318. 00:19:39 I'm so guilty of this.
319. 00:19:40 I do that all the time."
320. 00:19:42 I'll just get to this point and then things will be better, but they're not better because
321. 00:19:46 the systems that have contributed to this haven't been addressed.
322. 00:19:49 And I haven't built in or prioritized margin into how I plan my day, my week, my year,
323. 00:19:58 how I manage myself and my family.
324. 00:20:01 And it's a systemic problem.
325. 00:20:02 That's not the result of something that went wrong, although there's a lot of value and
326. 00:20:07 simplicity too.
327. 00:20:08 We'll get to that in a little bit.
328. 00:20:10 I just think that he really does a great job of pointing out that we neglect certain
329. 00:20:17 areas.
330. 00:20:18 We experience pain in those certain areas and then we dismiss it because we see all these
331. 00:20:21 gains in these other areas.
332. 00:20:23 But those gains are temporary unless we recognize what's really going on.
333. 00:20:26 Absolutely.
334. 00:20:27 And I can say, because I live this lifestyle without margin, it is very painful.
335. 00:20:35 Can I just stop there?
336. 00:20:36 I feel like I have to keep saying I screw this up.
337. 00:20:39 Share your failures.
338. 00:20:40 Do that a lot today.
339. 00:20:43 Yeah.
340. 00:20:45 The thing about stress though, I want to call out here because he does talk about this in
341. 00:20:50 chapter four.
342. 00:20:52 Stress can be positive or negative.
343. 00:20:55 And he's a medical doctor.
344. 00:20:57 So he has a lot of great explanations for these different things.
345. 00:21:02 Positive stress is called you stress, which makes us especially creative before a deadline.
346. 00:21:06 We probably all experienced this and thought to ourselves, well, see stress isn't bad,
347. 00:21:11 but then there's negative stress also and that's distress.
348. 00:21:15 That's the systemic kind of stress where if you're constantly under stress or constantly
349. 00:21:19 under load, then eventually something is going to break.
350. 00:21:24 There's a whole bunch of effects from these stress disorders.
351. 00:21:27 Again, he's a medical doctor, so he breaks them down into psychological, physical, and
352. 00:21:30 behavioral.
353. 00:21:31 I'm not going to go into all of these, but it's pretty serious.
354. 00:21:36 Everything from depression to anxiety to forgetfulness to headaches to insomnia.
355. 00:21:45 It's pretty crazy to see all of the things that lack of margin can lead to.
356. 00:21:51 And I don't know about you, but when I read that list, I'm like, oh, yeah.
357. 00:21:54 That's been me.
358. 00:21:55 That's been me.
359. 00:21:56 Check.
360. 00:21:57 It was almost like a checklist of here's all the things I've screwed up.
361. 00:22:01 Yep.
362. 00:22:02 That's yep, that one and that one and that one.
363. 00:22:03 And to be honest, the thing that I, because he talks about knowing your limits, when it
364. 00:22:10 comes to how much can you lift, you pretty much know your limit.
365. 00:22:16 But when it comes to how many people can you help through a difficult situation, there
366. 00:22:23 is an emotional limit there, but we don't really think of it that way.
367. 00:22:27 We don't think about, you know, if you have a friend who's going through a difficult time,
368. 00:22:34 you know, maybe they found out they have cancer or something.
369. 00:22:36 Like that's traumatic for both them and you to help them through that.
370. 00:22:41 But multiply that by a hundred friends who have a similar scenario.
371. 00:22:46 Like you can't do that.
372. 00:22:47 Like that's like, that's an easy one.
373. 00:22:48 It's like, no, I cannot help a hundred friends.
374. 00:22:51 I wish I could and I would likely try, but I'm going to destroy myself and the process
375. 00:22:56 in order to do that.
376. 00:22:58 So there is an emotional limit there, but we don't really think about that.
377. 00:23:02 At least I hadn't really thought about it that way.
378. 00:23:05 So whenever he spelled all this out, like, okay, yeah, understanding limits when you
379. 00:23:08 go over those limits, it's when you're overloaded and stressors start, the stress starts to
380. 00:23:12 kick in.
381. 00:23:13 Like, yes, there can be good stress.
382. 00:23:15 I get that.
383. 00:23:17 Makes perfect sense.
384. 00:23:18 But it still means you have to be aware of it and know when you're over those limits
385. 00:23:23 because it's okay to go over those limits as long as you know it and are willing to get
386. 00:23:26 back off of it.
387. 00:23:28 That was at least the takeaway I had from that.
388. 00:23:30 Yeah, a lot of this comes just from recognition of the current state of things.
389. 00:23:36 But the thing is that he makes the point we've lived so long without margin that we kind
390. 00:23:42 of don't even know what to look for a lot of times.
391. 00:23:46 We just assume that this is the way things are.
392. 00:23:48 You know, because we don't even know what margin is, we don't realize when it's gone.
393. 00:23:53 And again, stress isn't necessarily bad.
394. 00:23:56 One of the things that jumped out to me as I was reading this section, I was thinking
395. 00:23:58 about flow by Mihaly and how we need to have a certain amount of stress in order to really
396. 00:24:06 feel fulfilled.
397. 00:24:09 And I totally believe that.
398. 00:24:11 But I also think there are a lot of things that can compound that stress that we voluntarily
399. 00:24:17 put ourselves in harm's way.
400. 00:24:18 And then when they all add up together, it's kind of like the straw that broke the camel's
401. 00:24:22 back.
402. 00:24:23 Some of the factors that he talks about and hear that can contribute to stress are change,
403. 00:24:27 mobility, expectations, time pressure, work, control, fear, relationships, competition,
404. 00:24:33 frustration, anger.
405. 00:24:35 And if you don't pay attention to any of those things, it's very easy to again view
406. 00:24:39 that as a checklist.
407. 00:24:40 And yep, got that one, got that one, got that one.
408. 00:24:43 And then you realize that, well, yeah, I guess kind of the reason I feel the way that I do
409. 00:24:48 is that all of these things are working against me.
410. 00:24:51 And even that can become normalized.
411. 00:24:53 So I, as I've been thinking about this, have been comparing where I'm at now with where
412. 00:24:59 I was at the beginning of the year.
413. 00:25:02 And I've recognized now that at the beginning of the year, I was not in a very good place.
414. 00:25:07 At the time, I felt I was fine.
415. 00:25:10 But when I compare it to the current state of things, I realized that the way things
416. 00:25:14 are right now is actually a whole lot better than they were.
417. 00:25:17 And it makes me very thankful for the situation that I'm in, the margin that I have created.
418. 00:25:24 And then also, it makes me want to never go back to that because I realized once I get
419. 00:25:29 some distance from that, how awful that was.
420. 00:25:32 And it, I hesitate sharing this, you know, we're sharing my failure.
421. 00:25:36 So I'm going to talk about this, but I feel a little bit of, well, I'm sharing this stuff,
422. 00:25:41 but it's really nothing compared to people who have like clinical depression or are dealing
423. 00:25:45 with suicidal thoughts or things like that, because I never had it to that degree.
424. 00:25:49 So who am I to complain about stuff?
425. 00:25:52 But there's, you got to recognize this stuff too.
426. 00:25:55 You can't just smile and say everything is fine.
427. 00:25:58 Like the, the meme with the dog and the house is on fire.
428. 00:26:01 That's looking back, I kind of realized that that's kind of what I was trying to do at
429. 00:26:04 the beginning of the year.
430. 00:26:06 And fortunately, some things played out and my situation changed.
431. 00:26:12 I'm able to look back at it now and realize how far I have come.
432. 00:26:17 And not to say that I've arrived, not to say that I figured everything out.
433. 00:26:22 I probably still have a lot of ground to take, but this feels way better.
434. 00:26:27 And as I'm reading margin, again, this is kind of like, now I feel for the first time,
435. 00:26:32 I am able to breathe.
436. 00:26:33 I am able to relax.
437. 00:26:34 I'm able to let my guard down.
438. 00:26:36 And that's what margin does.
439. 00:26:37 Well, I'm very grateful for where you are now.
440. 00:26:40 For sure.
441. 00:26:43 One thing I want to point out about this book, because I did not know this going in.
442. 00:26:48 And I, I think that's just because I didn't really look into this book a whole lot, but
443. 00:26:53 this is definitely a Christian book.
444. 00:26:55 Yes.
445. 00:26:56 I don't think that anywhere near detracts for us, of course, for some, I think it might.
446. 00:27:02 At the beginning of this, he doesn't talk about God and Christ and the Bible early on
447. 00:27:11 in this, not much anyway.
448. 00:27:13 But when he, like, as he goes through the book, it becomes, I don't want to say a focal
449. 00:27:18 point, but it's, it's a, a strong theme that runs through it later on the book, which,
450. 00:27:24 personally, I really enjoyed because it's kind of a breath of fresh air from what I
451. 00:27:28 feel like I normally do with some books where I'm like trying to translate the evolution
452. 00:27:32 talk and such.
453. 00:27:34 This is not that.
454. 00:27:36 This is just a straight up, you don't have to really translate it if you're a Christian
455. 00:27:41 at all.
456. 00:27:42 So definitely a breath of fresh air for me.
457. 00:27:45 But I did want to point that out.
458. 00:27:46 I feel like that's an important thing to bring up for some.
459. 00:27:49 Yes.
460. 00:27:50 I'm glad that you, you brought that up because I was asked just the other day by somebody,
461. 00:27:57 should I recommend the second mountain by David Brooks to somebody who would typically
462. 00:28:03 be put off by talk about faith?
463. 00:28:07 And I said that book, no problem.
464. 00:28:10 Like he talks about some of his personal beliefs, but it really doesn't color any of
465. 00:28:16 the points that he makes in that book.
466. 00:28:18 It's part of his personal story.
467. 00:28:20 That is not the case with this book.
468. 00:28:21 As I was thinking about that, I'm like, well, yeah, you could recommend the second mountain.
469. 00:28:25 Definitely don't recommend margin to that person.
470. 00:28:27 Yes.
471. 00:28:28 And actually to be fair, the first two sections is not a whole lot of that.
472. 00:28:33 And honestly, that's where the majority of the value from this book comes for me is talking
473. 00:28:38 about the pain that comes from a lack of margin.
474. 00:28:41 And then part two is the prescription.
475. 00:28:44 That's where we talks about creating margin in different areas.
476. 00:28:48 It's not till the third section, the prognosis where I think this is the weakest section
477. 00:28:54 in the whole book anyways, but that's really where he gets into a lot of the spiritual
478. 00:28:58 stuff and his own, like a lot of his lists of things, like three points, four points,
479. 00:29:04 whatever, you'll see a lot of that stuff in there.
480. 00:29:06 So if you're put off by that, then I would say just read the first two sections of this
481. 00:29:10 book, but there's still value in it for anybody.
482. 00:29:14 Yeah.
483. 00:29:15 No, I think it's a valid point because at the end of part one, and this is when he first
484. 00:29:19 brings it up in that God did not call us to a life of hectic overload.
485. 00:29:25 Like that's when he brings it up.
486. 00:29:28 And that's where like that theme starts around.
487. 00:29:31 It's like, this is not what was intended for you.
488. 00:29:34 And to be honest, like that's a bit of an alarm bell for me partially because some of
489. 00:29:42 the marginal living that I have is as a result of my job, which is working for the church.
490. 00:29:50 Sure.
491. 00:29:51 So that's something I'm going to have to wrestle with.
492. 00:29:53 And I don't really know what to do with that.
493. 00:29:55 It's one of those things like people expect you to be there during working hours, but
494. 00:29:59 a lot of the events are after hours.
495. 00:30:01 So what do you do with that?
496. 00:30:04 Do I just not do the extra events?
497. 00:30:06 Do I do some?
498. 00:30:07 Do I not work someday?
499. 00:30:08 Like, what does that mean?
500. 00:30:09 What does margin mean in that scenario?
501. 00:30:11 I don't have an answer to that because I feel like I need to be doing both and the pressure
502. 00:30:16 is to do both.
503. 00:30:18 But my wife obviously doesn't want me to do both and I would agree with her that I should
504. 00:30:22 not do both.
505. 00:30:24 So I haven't quite figured out what to like what the solution there is.
506. 00:30:28 I don't have an action item on this because I don't really know what it what I would write
507. 00:30:32 other than just think about it.
508. 00:30:35 But you know, trying to figure out how to simplify that and nail it down to where it's
509. 00:30:39 more accurate.
510. 00:30:40 I don't really know what that means quite yet, but it is something I need to explore
511. 00:30:45 because given the biblical background of this book, it definitely made me stop and think
512. 00:30:54 it through a little bit from a different angle.
513. 00:30:56 Sure.
514. 00:30:57 Well, I definitely have thoughts on that and it does pertain to this book, but we should
515. 00:31:02 probably have that conversation off air.
516. 00:31:04 All right, we can do that for the sake of the listeners.
517. 00:31:08 There's drafts here I come.
518. 00:31:10 Mike, tell me.
519. 00:31:12 The point which is general, which could apply to your situation and everybody else I think
520. 00:31:19 is not that you shouldn't be doing certain things, but to make sure that you're doing
521. 00:31:24 the right things.
522. 00:31:26 And that's really what this whole first section is designed to do is to highlight the fact
523. 00:31:31 that you're probably doing some things that are not the right things.
524. 00:31:36 And the fact that you're doing some things that are not the right things are what contribute
525. 00:31:40 to the current state of pain that you're experiencing.
526. 00:31:42 And everybody's experiencing this to some degree, I would argue, just because this is
527. 00:31:46 the default for our society and for our culture.
528. 00:31:50 Whenever we have any sort of margin, the tendency is to fill it.
529. 00:31:54 And if I've got three hours on my calendar, I'm going to find something to plug into those
530. 00:31:59 three hours.
531. 00:32:00 And he's saying basically, no, just leave those three hours there or better yet build
532. 00:32:05 a system that systemically produces those free hours or produces the savings margin or produces
533. 00:32:14 in the four different areas, which we'll get into in the next section.
534. 00:32:18 Don't be upset that those things exist.
535. 00:32:21 Just the fact that those things exist without an association or an allocation for that stuff,
536. 00:32:27 that's not a bad thing.
537. 00:32:28 In fact, that is actually a good thing because we're so used to functioning under overload
538. 00:32:34 and he's got all sorts of different descriptions of overload here, like activity overload, change
539. 00:32:41 overload, choice overload, debt overload, expectation overload, fatigue overload.
540. 00:32:47 This one was eye opening to me because he shared a statistic with this one that 54% of
541. 00:32:53 people say they are more tired at the end of a vacation than at the beginning.
542. 00:32:59 So this guilty, this just highlights exactly what I was saying.
543. 00:33:04 You've got the margin built in, right?
544. 00:33:06 You're doing everything technically correct.
545. 00:33:09 You've taken a week of vacation.
546. 00:33:11 You should feel better at the end of that vacation.
547. 00:33:14 But the fact that you don't is a red light that there's some other things that are broken.
548. 00:33:21 And so I don't think it's a prescriptive thing.
549. 00:33:24 Like you can just say, you've got to build in this amount of buffer, this amount of margin.
550. 00:33:28 As soon as you have three hours of margin in your week, then you're good.
551. 00:33:32 And now you can move on to the next thing.
552. 00:33:33 I don't think it's that simple, but it's the alignment of doing the right things and eliminating
553. 00:33:39 the wrong things that produces the margin.
554. 00:33:43 And you can't just do stuff all the time.
555. 00:33:44 You are going to have to take a break.
556. 00:33:46 But ultimately, you can't formulaize that.
557. 00:33:50 There's got to be some margin, but it's going to be different for every person in relation
558. 00:33:55 to what they should have in terms of what their prescription looks like, I guess, for
559. 00:34:02 the margin for the different areas.
560. 00:34:03 All right.
561. 00:34:04 So what's the prescription for all of this problem we've created, Mike?
562. 00:34:07 The prescription is margin.
563. 00:34:10 And as we've alluded to it, it wouldn't have guessed that one.
564. 00:34:14 It's true.
565. 00:34:15 It's true.
566. 00:34:16 He defines margin as the space between our load and our limits.
567. 00:34:21 Now the margin course that Sean Blunk put out has a visual for this, which is really
568. 00:34:28 powerful.
569. 00:34:29 It's like a bar graph.
570. 00:34:30 And the top part of it is red.
571. 00:34:32 And that shows basically the top part of the limit.
572. 00:34:38 And then at the bottom, you've got a yellow bar and that's your load.
573. 00:34:43 And then in between that is the blue and that's the margin.
574. 00:34:46 And so what you've got from this bar that stretches from the bottom of the page upward
575. 00:34:54 is essentially your total capacity.
576. 00:34:57 And there's a couple ways that you can achieve margin.
577. 00:35:01 You can increase your limit.
578. 00:35:04 You can move that top bar up or you can decrease your load.
579. 00:35:08 The problem is that for a lot of us, the load is at the limit or if not above.
580. 00:35:13 And so we've got to be an overdrive all the time and we get burned out.
581. 00:35:17 Now I agree with those two things, but I think probably everybody listening to bookworm.
582. 00:35:24 I know that is a generalization, but I think it is probably 100% true.
583. 00:35:29 We would default to, well, I'll just increase my limit.
584. 00:35:33 The problem is there's an 80/20 with this and we've already done this about a hundred
585. 00:35:37 times.
586. 00:35:38 So at some point you have to decrease your load and no one wants to do that.
587. 00:35:45 No one wants to go back on a commitment that they made or stop doing something that they
588. 00:35:49 enjoy on some level.
589. 00:35:51 But I've actually had to do this this last year and stop doing a couple different things.
590. 00:35:56 And I can tell you that Dr. Swenson is right once you do that things are way better.
591. 00:36:04 I really love doing this but saying no to it makes me even better.
592. 00:36:08 Yes, it's true.
593. 00:36:09 So just one example, sharing my failures here.
594. 00:36:12 I used to do screencast for screencast online.
595. 00:36:15 I really loved doing screencast for screencast online.
596. 00:36:18 Don McAllister, JF, Brissette, they are amazing to work with and I have learned so much from
597. 00:36:25 working with them.
598. 00:36:27 When I stopped working with Asian efficiency and I needed some additional work, they were
599. 00:36:33 the first ones who were like, "Yeah, you can do more screencast.
600. 00:36:35 You can do the tip videos."
601. 00:36:36 Like, I cannot speak highly enough about everybody in that organization.
602. 00:36:41 But it also became clear once I started working with Blonk Media that this was something that
603. 00:36:45 had to go.
604. 00:36:47 And it killed me.
605. 00:36:48 I struggled with that for like four months and I knew I needed to talk to Don about it and
606. 00:36:53 I just kept putting it off, kept putting it off, eventually sent him an email and he's
607. 00:36:58 like, "I knew this was coming."
608. 00:37:03 But I continued to operate under that heavy load for additional months.
609. 00:37:07 It caused myself and my family more stress even though it just, at the time it passed,
610. 00:37:13 that season was gone.
611. 00:37:14 It wasn't the right fit for me anymore.
612. 00:37:17 So that's one example.
613. 00:37:19 And ultimately I think everybody has to make those decisions.
614. 00:37:22 Not just with your work either.
615. 00:37:23 I mean with the different areas, you've got emotional energy, you've got physical energy,
616. 00:37:27 you've got margin in time and you've got margin in your finances.
617. 00:37:31 You've got to make those choices.
618. 00:37:33 And the problem is, I had this revelation when I was thinking about the margin with
619. 00:37:37 your finances.
620. 00:37:40 When you have margin in your finances, it's easier to save because you're saving towards
621. 00:37:48 some big goal maybe like paying off your house and you've made some progress already.
622. 00:37:52 So when you get additional income, you're just like, "Yeah, I'm going to contribute that
623. 00:37:56 to this thing over here."
624. 00:37:57 And you don't feel like you need to buy something.
625. 00:38:01 Whereas if you don't have any margin, because all these areas I think tend to be related,
626. 00:38:06 you don't have any emotional margin, don't have any financial margin.
627. 00:38:09 You're working really hard and you feel like you've earned something.
628. 00:38:11 So when the new airpods come out, you buy them because you deserve it.
629. 00:38:14 And that's 250 bucks down the drain.
630. 00:38:18 Whereas when you have that financial margin, when you have that emotional margin, you're
631. 00:38:22 like, you can see things more clearly and you don't have to just medicate the symptoms
632. 00:38:29 if that makes sense.
633. 00:38:30 It makes sense to me.
634. 00:38:31 I think with my specific case, like the one I struggle with the most likely right now
635. 00:38:37 is physical because I feel like I'm in a pretty good stance financially at the moment.
636. 00:38:44 But obviously, we've talked about all of my health issues that come and go.
637. 00:38:49 And this is where I have an action item in it.
638. 00:38:53 And I guess we'll go through these four areas.
639. 00:38:55 But I need to get back into, I was doing for a long time a daily yoga practice and had
640. 00:39:03 tried to whittle that down.
641. 00:39:05 This is talk about increasing limits instead of increasing margin.
642. 00:39:10 That's what I was trying to do in that I was trying to make sure that my morning routine
643. 00:39:15 I could add as many things to it as I could.
644. 00:39:18 Now when I couldn't add all the stuff to it that I wanted to, I debated moving the time
645. 00:39:24 back that my girls get up in the morning.
646. 00:39:26 It's like, oh, you guys need to sleep a little longer.
647. 00:39:28 That'll give me more time in the morning.
648. 00:39:29 I legitimately had this conversation with myself.
649. 00:39:32 That is a way that I could get more time in the morning.
650. 00:39:36 I also thought about getting up earlier, but I'm trying to make sure I don't cut on sleep.
651. 00:39:40 Well, then that made me think, well, can I go to bed earlier?
652. 00:39:43 It's like, well, then my wife has these seven things go wrong.
653. 00:39:47 Okay, so I really can't do that.
654. 00:39:49 And it's like, oh, well, I suppose I could cut out some of the stuff I do for fun in the
655. 00:39:56 morning, like just checking in on some stuff I want to do research on in the morning.
656. 00:39:59 It's like, oh, well, but I didn't want to cut that.
657. 00:40:03 So go ahead and cut it.
658. 00:40:06 Pick up the yoga practice.
659. 00:40:07 That's my action item is I need to be willing to do that.
660. 00:40:11 But I have not been good about making sure that even from a time stance that I've got
661. 00:40:17 those buffer times, like those buffer zones in there, I just don't.
662. 00:40:22 So again, this book was super helpful in helping me see that stuff because I normally
663. 00:40:28 wouldn't have noticed it.
664. 00:40:30 And sometimes you run across books that do that where this exposes something that you've
665. 00:40:35 just assumed as a default for a long time.
666. 00:40:40 And this is a cultural default answer of just fill all your time with all the stuff.
667. 00:40:46 And he just point blank says, no, that's not right.
668. 00:40:52 Even to the point where he's a doctor and is choosing to only work three days a week.
669. 00:40:57 Now he makes enough he can do that, but he made the choice to only be in his practice
670. 00:41:04 three days a week.
671. 00:41:06 Like that, that is awesome and terrifying to me at the same time.
672. 00:41:11 But you know, hey, if it works for him, go for it.
673. 00:41:14 I can't do that.
674. 00:41:15 I would lose my job if I did that.
675. 00:41:18 So I have to come about it in different ways in order to get to that point.
676. 00:41:22 But yes, the health thing is the one that I need to like the physical side of the margin
677. 00:41:28 is the one that I need to focus on the most.
678. 00:41:30 Yeah, well, since we're talking about some of the time stuff, this is a really interesting
679. 00:41:36 section to me.
680. 00:41:39 He shares some research at the beginning of that chapter where at one point people thought
681. 00:41:49 that we were headed towards a two day work week because we were getting so efficient
682. 00:41:55 that we would just get everything done and then we would have all this extra time, which
683. 00:42:00 kind of boggles my mind when you read that because that's obviously not what happened.
684. 00:42:06 We just find more stuff to fill it with.
685. 00:42:08 And that's kind of his point in that that chapter is he says, he's got all these axioms
686. 00:42:13 and this is the sixth one.
687. 00:42:15 He says, the spontaneous flow of progress is to consume more of our time, not less.
688. 00:42:19 You kind of can't really picture how that's going to work.
689. 00:42:24 It just sort of happens.
690. 00:42:26 If you're not not intentional, you're not protecting it.
691. 00:42:30 The big thing that stands out to me in this specific section, because he's got a whole
692. 00:42:35 bunch of practical things that you can do to restore time margin, everything from turning
693. 00:42:42 off the television to pruning your activities, separating time from your technology, getting
694. 00:42:48 less done but doing the right things, planning for your free time.
695. 00:42:52 But the one that really stands out to me is availability, be available.
696. 00:42:59 I've been thinking a lot about this and I've shared this before all the way back from the
697. 00:43:03 productivity project when you first read it by Chris Bailey, where he made a comment about
698. 00:43:08 how people are the reason for productivity.
699. 00:43:12 I'm reading this chapter and I'm like, what does time margin look like?
700. 00:43:16 It is being available to help other people and not feel bad about it, not feel like I'm
701. 00:43:24 not doing what I need to do because I'm helping this person and I'm able to devote everything
702. 00:43:28 that I have to assisting that person.
703. 00:43:33 My wife and I, one of my, one of my, my gap books was Life and Air and we've talked about
704. 00:43:37 this before and one of the things that came from reading that was this statement where
705. 00:43:43 even if we don't have a million bucks, we want to be able to make people feel like a
706. 00:43:47 million bucks.
707. 00:43:48 So to me, that's a great, that's summarized perfectly in availability.
708. 00:43:53 He says usefulness is nine-tenths availability.
709. 00:43:55 I think that's probably pretty accurate.
710. 00:43:58 So the action item for me associated with this is simply a question, am I interruptable?
711. 00:44:04 If someone were to call and say, hey, I just need somebody to talk to you right now, can
712. 00:44:08 I drop everything?
713. 00:44:09 Do I have enough time margin to drop everything?
714. 00:44:11 Go meet them for coffee or for lunch and to spend a couple of hours talking through things
715. 00:44:16 because I say that that's the stuff that's really important to me, but my actions really
716. 00:44:20 dictate and our evidence of what is a priority for me.
717. 00:44:26 And I'm not happy when I do a self-examination and I ask myself, like, am I interruptable
718. 00:44:30 because I think a lot of the time the answer is no.
719. 00:44:32 I want to get better at that.
720. 00:44:35 And I want to start thinking about systemic ways that I can create that into my schedule.
721. 00:44:41 When I was growing up, I had, well, I didn't, but my dad had a habit of if he saw someone
722. 00:44:47 on the side of the road, he always stopped and helped them because we could.
723. 00:44:51 We had the time to do that.
724. 00:44:53 And I think about the number of times I've driven past people I see parked on the side
725. 00:44:57 of the road.
726. 00:44:58 And I think that is, like, irks me that I don't stop, but I know that if I do, I'm going to
727. 00:45:04 cause a meeting to start late.
728. 00:45:07 I'm going to cause an event to start late.
729. 00:45:09 Like I'm going to cause those issues.
730. 00:45:11 And I would rather leave the person on the side of the road than do that.
731. 00:45:15 So like that bugs me.
732. 00:45:18 And if I had, if I give myself more time for things like that, I would gladly stop and
733. 00:45:23 help more people.
734. 00:45:25 I specifically remember when I was in college, I went to Nicaragua on a mission trip.
735. 00:45:33 It was a two week mission trip.
736. 00:45:35 It was basically two sub mission trips within that.
737. 00:45:39 The first week we were there, we were on a farm.
738. 00:45:42 And the purpose of the farm was to teach local farmers how to create a self-sustaining
739. 00:45:49 farm.
740. 00:45:50 Great idea, right?
741. 00:45:51 Well, the thing they had asked us to do is help a local farmer build a new structure
742. 00:45:56 for housing his cattle.
743. 00:45:58 Again, simple.
744. 00:46:01 What was difficult was that there were a handful of us guys on that team that had built structures
745. 00:46:09 like this before.
746. 00:46:10 We'd worked with concrete, we'd worked with a bunch of things.
747. 00:46:13 And whenever we got to the job site, we were going at it.
748. 00:46:17 We know how this works.
749. 00:46:18 Like, not going to think twice about it.
750. 00:46:20 But whenever we were working with the locals who were working on that project, like, we
751. 00:46:26 were doing all the work and they were just kind of watching us the whole time, which
752. 00:46:32 irked a couple of the other guys.
753. 00:46:33 I didn't think much about it because in my mind, I was thinking that this is why I'm
754. 00:46:38 here to do this with them or for them.
755. 00:46:41 Like that was my point.
756. 00:46:42 So it didn't really strike me.
757. 00:46:44 But one of the other guys on the team, it really bothered him.
758. 00:46:48 So he ended up having a conversation with them and they couldn't understand why we were
759. 00:46:54 working so hard and could not get it through their minds, why we were hustling so much.
760. 00:47:02 They kept saying we're trying not to help because we don't work at that pace.
761. 00:47:08 So they didn't even know how to jump in because they were so used to taking their time to
762. 00:47:14 go through it slowly because they gave themselves so much time.
763. 00:47:20 Because what happened, what we eventually found out was that structure did not need
764. 00:47:24 to be completely built for about nine months.
765. 00:47:28 And the pace we were on it was going to be built in about three weeks.
766. 00:47:32 So they had just planned to work on it a little bit each day.
767. 00:47:37 We were there to get it done while we were there in one week.
768. 00:47:39 Yeah, exactly.
769. 00:47:40 We had this same thing in Costa Rica.
770. 00:47:42 We showed up at this orphanage and we were going to rake the yard and they actually took
771. 00:47:47 the rakes away from us at one point.
772. 00:47:48 We went and got them back because we weren't done and then they took them again and hid
773. 00:47:51 them.
774. 00:47:52 Yeah.
775. 00:47:53 And it's interesting.
776. 00:47:56 And he does call this out in the book that there is a point at which third world countries
777. 00:48:03 are better than us in the United States, specifically when it comes to time and margin.
778. 00:48:09 Because they know how to give themselves that buffer and they do it on a much better scale
779. 00:48:15 than we do.
780. 00:48:16 And we always feel like we have to get things done as quickly and as efficiently as we possibly
781. 00:48:20 can shorten up the time frame, kick things out quicker.
782. 00:48:24 That leads to a more fulfilling life, right?
783. 00:48:26 Well, no, not exactly.
784. 00:48:29 They have it right in my opinion.
785. 00:48:32 Exactly.
786. 00:48:33 The real value for me in reading this book is just articulating another option where
787. 00:48:40 things don't have to be so hectic and so crazy.
788. 00:48:44 And again, you got to kind of wrestle with that yourself to define what that looks like
789. 00:48:50 for you.
790. 00:48:51 But I guess going through it the second time, the thing that I realized was how important
791. 00:48:56 this really is.
792. 00:48:57 Like don't put it off.
793. 00:49:00 So the tough questions, say no to something and start creating the margin because you
794. 00:49:05 really need it before you realize that you're going to need it.
795. 00:49:08 Yeah, absolutely.
796. 00:49:09 By the time you realize that you don't have margin, it's already too late.
797. 00:49:13 Now, question for you.
798. 00:49:15 So we've talked about physical.
799. 00:49:17 I feel like understanding physical margin, that's fairly easy, like making sure that
800. 00:49:21 you're in good health so that you don't have an overload of health issues.
801. 00:49:26 So that one's fairly easy to understand time.
802. 00:49:28 That one's pretty obvious.
803. 00:49:29 Like don't butt things up against each other so that you don't have time to find your book
804. 00:49:34 whenever you're getting ready to record on it.
805. 00:49:36 And finances live below what you earn.
806. 00:49:40 Like that's easy.
807. 00:49:42 And this is actually just real quickly.
808. 00:49:44 This is the thing that where I started to disconnect the first time I read it because
809. 00:49:48 he's talking about how he's only choosing to work three days a week, but he also is
810. 00:49:53 driving an old pickup truck and he's chopping his own firewood.
811. 00:49:55 Right.
812. 00:49:56 And I'm like, I'm not going to do that.
813. 00:49:58 Yes.
814. 00:49:59 So like those three areas, the physical, the financial and the time, but the emotional,
815. 00:50:08 to me, this is the hard one.
816. 00:50:11 Probably the most valuable of the four is in terms of like mental space.
817. 00:50:17 But how like, what was your take on this one?
818. 00:50:21 Because like the other three, I know I can get my head around and the emotional one I
819. 00:50:25 know I should get my head around, but I kind of struggled with, what am I going to do
820. 00:50:29 with it?
821. 00:50:30 Yeah.
822. 00:50:31 The emotional one, he makes the point in the book that this is the most important.
823. 00:50:37 And this is also probably the hardest one to measure.
824. 00:50:41 You can look at your calendar and you can see how busy you are.
825. 00:50:43 You can look at your body and you can say, I got to get to the gym more often or I got
826. 00:50:47 to eat better or I got to get more sleep.
827. 00:50:50 You can look at your bank accounts and you can say, I got to start saving.
828. 00:50:56 But when you look at your emotions, at least for me, the response is whenever you realize
829. 00:51:03 that you're making a big deal about something that really isn't a big deal, it's like, oh,
830. 00:51:06 we'll just suck it up, buttercup.
831. 00:51:09 Right?
832. 00:51:10 It's like you can change your attitude.
833. 00:51:12 You can change your emotions.
834. 00:51:14 But the light bulb moment for me was kind of that on a certain level, you can't.
835. 00:51:21 The way that you are feeling about things and the reason that things are such a big deal
836. 00:51:25 is because you have a whole bunch of things that have contributed to this lack of emotional
837. 00:51:31 margin.
838. 00:51:32 Again, he's got a whole bunch of things here, which you can do to restore margin and your
839. 00:51:36 emotional energy.
840. 00:51:37 You can cultivate social supports.
841. 00:51:39 You can serve somebody.
842. 00:51:41 You can laugh.
843. 00:51:42 You can cry.
844. 00:51:43 He talks about sabbaticals in here.
845. 00:51:45 All of that stuff is great.
846. 00:51:48 But the question for me as I was going through this was, how do I identify whether I have
847. 00:51:53 any emotional margin?
848. 00:51:55 Because I always thought that I did.
849. 00:51:57 And then as I look back at the beginning of the year, like I said, this has been probably
850. 00:52:03 the most difficult year I've ever gone through.
851. 00:52:05 I also feel like I'm in a really good spot right now.
852. 00:52:08 So I don't want to focus and dwell on the negative.
853. 00:52:11 But in sharing my failures, I will share that at the beginning of the year, I didn't
854. 00:52:15 know what my work life was going to look like or how it was going to provide for my
855. 00:52:20 family.
856. 00:52:21 I just knew I was supposed to get faith-based productivity out the door.
857. 00:52:25 So I knew that this is the thing I got to work on.
858. 00:52:28 And for a long time, that was what I did every single day from when I went to bed.
859. 00:52:36 And most days, it was fine.
860. 00:52:38 Most days, I was able to bring it.
861. 00:52:40 Most days, I was motivated to get this thing done.
862. 00:52:44 But there were occasional days where I would wake up and I look back at it now and I recognize
863. 00:52:50 I didn't have any emotional margin.
864. 00:52:51 And that's why as soon as I got up, I'm like, I just want to lay here for the next eight
865. 00:52:57 hours.
866. 00:52:58 I don't want to do anything today.
867. 00:53:01 And that's, I don't deal with that anymore.
868. 00:53:04 And that's because I have some emotional margin.
869. 00:53:07 The other kind of light bulb moment for me is it pertains to all this stuff.
870. 00:53:11 I mean, obviously you're talking about motivation and I believe motivation can be manufactured
871. 00:53:15 unlike willpower.
872. 00:53:17 So there are things that you can do in the moment to create the motivation to do certain
873. 00:53:21 things, but you do have your limits.
874. 00:53:23 And I recognize now that I was overloaded a lot of the time and that brought me really,
875. 00:53:30 really close to burnout.
876. 00:53:33 But the other thing is that all of these areas of margin, they're interrelated.
877. 00:53:39 And so the moment that I started getting more emotional margin was the moment that I started
878. 00:53:45 getting more time margin because I was more effective when I was working.
879. 00:53:52 And the moment that that happened, I started to get a little bit more margin in physical
880. 00:53:57 energy and I started to feel better.
881. 00:54:00 So I'm not going to be able to do that.
882. 00:54:04 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
883. 00:54:06 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
884. 00:54:09 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
885. 00:54:11 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
886. 00:54:14 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
887. 00:54:16 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
888. 00:54:19 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
889. 00:54:21 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
890. 00:54:23 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
891. 00:54:25 And I'm not going to be able to do that.
892. 00:54:27 And then also now that we have some financial margin, that makes it a lot easier to be excited
893. 00:54:33 about the work that I'm doing.
894. 00:54:35 And it's a positive cycle or a negative cycle.
895. 00:54:38 If you don't have any margin, it is definitely a negative cycle.
896. 00:54:41 And you do have to do something to stop that cycle and to reverse it.
897. 00:54:45 But when you start building this in and you prioritize margin and you're on a positive
898. 00:54:49 cycle, it also has an exponential effect as all of these things work together.
899. 00:54:54 That's kind of the big takeaway for me.
900. 00:54:56 And again, not that I've mastered this or I've arrived, but as I reflected on the last
901. 00:55:02 year and I'm thinking about how much things have changed, my word for the year was reset
902. 00:55:09 because I felt like everything that I knew was declared wrong.
903. 00:55:14 I had to relearn everything.
904. 00:55:15 Here we go.
905. 00:55:16 Time to start over.
906. 00:55:19 Complete reset.
907. 00:55:20 Yeah, exactly.
908. 00:55:21 I do feel that what I have in place now is much more sustainable, it's much more healthy.
909. 00:55:27 And so this book kind of brought clarity to that and it made me really grateful and appreciative
910. 00:55:32 for kind of the place I'm in now.
911. 00:55:36 But I also want to share, you know, like if you find yourself going through this and Dr.
912. 00:55:40 Swenson's reading your mail and you're like, yeah, that's me.
913. 00:55:44 I got to change this.
914. 00:55:45 Like don't get frustrated about where you're at because I kind of feel like my whole life
915. 00:55:50 has been changed over the last 12 months.
916. 00:55:53 It doesn't take that long.
917. 00:55:55 It just takes a little bit of a perspective shift and a prioritization of this margin
918. 00:55:59 to make a lot of that pain go away.
919. 00:56:02 Something I want to point out here is that because you're absolutely right, the emotional
920. 00:56:06 energy is one that can fuel the others.
921. 00:56:10 So restoring margin in emotional, the emotional sector can definitely help in the others.
922. 00:56:16 But some of the ways that you can do that, because it sounds great, but until you can
923. 00:56:21 really sink your teeth into it, I feel like it's kind of hard to get your head around.
924. 00:56:25 But some of the ways, at least that I caught out of it whenever I read this part was that
925. 00:56:31 helping other people being willing to stop and truly in reality connect with another person
926. 00:56:40 on a deep level and being willing to stop for other people.
927. 00:56:46 Like those areas are the ones that I see, at least for me, that could be the most helpful
928. 00:56:52 in creating this emotional margin because you're absolutely right, Mike, whenever you
929. 00:56:56 have the emotional reserves through helping others and through loving on other people,
930. 00:57:03 whenever you do that, it does fuel your own motivation.
931. 00:57:07 I can think of the times whenever I sit down and I go through either coaching or one-on-one
932. 00:57:15 conversations with friends and such, like whenever I do that and discuss anything remotely related
933. 00:57:20 to either work or the topics that I enjoy, I come out of that ready to go build six video
934. 00:57:27 courses over a weekend and let's go.
935. 00:57:30 That's what I come away from that as.
936. 00:57:33 There's a lot to that because yes, you can derive a lot of motivation from those conversations
937. 00:57:41 and from those instances, but they do fuel the others.
938. 00:57:46 Whenever I'm super excited because I helped someone else in, say, the productivity space,
939. 00:57:53 this past week I introduced somebody to the concept of task management.
940. 00:57:57 Never heard of it.
941. 00:57:59 In my mind, who hasn't heard of this?
942. 00:58:02 GTD has been around for how long?
943. 00:58:03 Who has not heard of this?
944. 00:58:06 Yet I run across people all the time.
945. 00:58:08 I introduced a person to task management and explained the concept of writing down the
946. 00:58:13 things you got to do and collecting those as they come up and going for it.
947. 00:58:19 Just explaining that simple concept you would think would be normal, but it was so new to
948. 00:58:24 them.
949. 00:58:25 Whenever I left that, I was like, "Yeah, I'm ready to go do a weekly review.
950. 00:58:29 I could do this right now."
951. 00:58:31 This is exactly what I needed.
952. 00:58:33 Thankfully, I did need to do a weekly review.
953. 00:58:35 I cranked it out quickly.
954. 00:58:37 That was super motivating for me.
955. 00:58:41 I think you're absolutely right.
956. 00:58:42 The emotional energy is the multiplier behind all the other areas and it can easily be the
957. 00:58:48 most valuable one to start driving towards.
958. 00:58:52 Again, they're all interrelated.
959. 00:58:54 In the finances section, he makes a comment on page 146 about how we need to develop a
960. 00:59:00 new depreciation of things and a new appreciation of people.
961. 00:59:06 That changes your view on money.
962. 00:59:10 I think it's worth calling out here that just because you have money in your bank account
963. 00:59:13 doesn't necessarily mean that you have margin.
964. 00:59:17 If you don't change any of the systems, then that margin is going to disappear.
965. 00:59:21 You have to build it into the decisions that you make.
966. 00:59:26 He shares some stats in here, which blew my mind.
967. 00:59:29 He said that every year Americans spend more eating out than the individual gross national
968. 00:59:33 product of 207 countries in the world.
969. 00:59:37 Man, we spend so much money eating out and we feel like we deserve that.
970. 00:59:42 We need that, right?
971. 00:59:44 But do we really?
972. 00:59:45 If we had to figure out a different way to do things, could we figure out a different
973. 00:59:48 way to do things?
974. 00:59:49 That's important to you.
975. 00:59:50 You're going to use that to build relationships.
976. 00:59:53 Go for it.
977. 00:59:54 But for me, it just kind of shows that we kind of default to the way that things are and
978. 00:59:58 then we don't ever stop to think about them again.
979. 01:00:01 He also shares that there was a guy who was running a marketing agency and he said that
980. 01:00:06 when people run out of money, they stop buying.
981. 01:00:08 But only for about six weeks at that point, they just start putting it on the credit card.
982. 01:00:14 Which, yeah.
983. 01:00:15 So that just shows that we medicate with this stuff and we need to be intentional with it
984. 01:00:19 instead.
985. 01:00:20 We need to determine the terms of engagement as it pertains to how we spend all of these
986. 01:00:27 things, our finances, our time, the things that we devote our physical and emotional
987. 01:00:31 energy to.
988. 01:00:32 And I think relationship building is one of the big ones as I'm going through this.
989. 01:00:36 I'm reminded of that back to Chris Bailey.
990. 01:00:39 People are the reasons for productivity.
991. 01:00:41 Relationships are really the reason for living.
992. 01:00:43 It's not about what you can make.
993. 01:00:44 It's about the people that you can help.
994. 01:00:47 And it's easy to lose sight of that.
995. 01:00:49 And it's easy for those things to be neglected, especially when you look at your task list
996. 01:00:52 and all the different things that you have to get done throughout the day.
997. 01:00:56 But really for me, and I don't have a system on how to do this necessarily yet other than
998. 01:01:00 ask myself that question, am I interruptable?
999. 01:01:02 Like I want to be able to be available when people need it.
1000. 01:01:06 But the next step would be kind of what you were talking about, where the things that
1001. 01:01:09 I'm doing, how are those depositing into somebody else?
1002. 01:01:15 If you can do that every time you talk about task management, then keep talking about task
1003. 01:01:18 management.
1004. 01:01:19 It gives you energy and motivation to do it.
1005. 01:01:22 It's when you just, okay, I got to write something now and you don't really think about the person
1006. 01:01:26 that you're writing it for, or you're not focusing on how you can help somebody that
1007. 01:01:30 it becomes a rote and meaningless.
1008. 01:01:32 Okay.
1009. 01:01:33 So let's, because I feel like we could keep going a long time on this.
1010. 01:01:38 The prognosis section, this might go fast.
1011. 01:01:43 I could see that.
1012. 01:01:45 But the prognosis he gets into, so part one, well, there's part zero, essentially the
1013. 01:01:49 marginless living.
1014. 01:01:51 Part one is the problem, pain.
1015. 01:01:53 Part two is the prescription margin, and the prognosis is health.
1016. 01:01:57 But he's got four different areas here that he talks about in this.
1017. 01:02:02 And as we talked about earlier, this is when it goes like very much, here's God's view
1018. 01:02:09 on this.
1019. 01:02:10 Like that's, that's when he makes this, I don't want to say a shift, but it gets very,
1020. 01:02:14 very prominent once you get here.
1021. 01:02:17 The first of which is contentment.
1022. 01:02:20 And how do you go about becoming content with your current situation, no matter what
1023. 01:02:26 it is?
1024. 01:02:27 And it's not a topic I really wanted to cover.
1025. 01:02:32 Which means we should cover it.
1026. 01:02:34 I know, I know.
1027. 01:02:35 That's the frustrating part.
1028. 01:02:36 It's like, I don't want to talk about this, but that means I probably should.
1029. 01:02:39 Yeah.
1030. 01:02:40 So, contentment he defines as the freedom that comes when prosperity or poverty do not
1031. 01:02:45 matter.
1032. 01:02:47 And this is interesting and difficult to look yourself in the mirror and ask yourself,
1033. 01:02:55 am I content?
1034. 01:02:56 Because we always want to have more.
1035. 01:02:59 And he shares a quote from a manual con.
1036. 01:03:00 He says, give a man everything he wants.
1037. 01:03:03 And at that moment, everything will not be everything.
1038. 01:03:06 Guilty.
1039. 01:03:07 Yep.
1040. 01:03:08 But that's kind of what has contributed to where we are today.
1041. 01:03:15 So we have to ask ourselves, what do I really need?
1042. 01:03:21 And when everything is going fine or you can make everything work, it's harder to answer
1043. 01:03:27 that question.
1044. 01:03:29 But I've had to do that.
1045. 01:03:31 My wife and I this summer, we were thinking about selling our house.
1046. 01:03:36 We were like, well, do we really need this house?
1047. 01:03:39 Or can we get by with something that is less expensive?
1048. 01:03:42 We need a certain amount of room because we have five kids.
1049. 01:03:46 But there was a house we found like half a mile from where we live.
1050. 01:03:50 That was not nearly as nice, but like half the price.
1051. 01:03:53 So we seriously contemplated moving.
1052. 01:03:57 And eventually, as we talked about it and we prayed about it, we decided that no, this
1053. 01:04:01 is where we're supposed to stay.
1054. 01:04:03 But just being willing to make those tough choices, that's really, you have to have that
1055. 01:04:09 in order to start creating any sort of margin.
1056. 01:04:12 And when you're able to keep things going according to the status quo, you just dismiss
1057. 01:04:20 this.
1058. 01:04:22 But contentment is being able to answer this question honestly and saying, these are the
1059. 01:04:26 things that I need.
1060. 01:04:28 I've got those things.
1061. 01:04:29 Okay.
1062. 01:04:30 Yep.
1063. 01:04:31 I'm good.
1064. 01:04:32 Difficult.
1065. 01:04:33 But yeah, because the things that I want always continue to show up all the time, like when
1066. 01:04:40 the AirPods Pro came out, my first thought was, oh, that'd be really cool.
1067. 01:04:45 I'm not spending 250 bucks on those.
1068. 01:04:47 Like that was my next thought.
1069. 01:04:50 But that doesn't mean I don't want them.
1070. 01:04:51 And I still think about it from time to time, even to the point where I've debated, it's
1071. 01:04:55 like, okay, how do I, can I pick up an extra side thing here and there and then be able
1072. 01:04:59 to buy those?
1073. 01:05:00 It crosses my mind on a regular basis now.
1074. 01:05:03 And that's not okay.
1075. 01:05:06 How many times have we talked about podcasting gear and I run a soundboard.
1076. 01:05:10 I have a sure beta 87A, like it's a nice microphone.
1077. 01:05:16 And yet there are others that I would like to upgrade to and I like, could I upgrade
1078. 01:05:20 the soundboard?
1079. 01:05:21 I'd like to have a different preamp.
1080. 01:05:23 There's all these things that go through your mind.
1081. 01:05:25 There's always another thing you could do.
1082. 01:05:29 But those things are for me, the vast majority of listeners aren't going to be able to hear
1083. 01:05:33 the difference in those things.
1084. 01:05:36 Like, I say this at our church all the time with events, like, I will find things wrong
1085. 01:05:40 with sound every time the sound system's on.
1086. 01:05:43 Like, I just will.
1087. 01:05:45 I will always hear those things.
1088. 01:05:47 But 99.999% of the people in that room have no clue.
1089. 01:05:51 Like they're not going to be able to tell the difference between, you know, that EQ setting
1090. 01:05:55 versus a different one.
1091. 01:05:56 Like, they just won't hear that.
1092. 01:05:57 So, like, there is a line where you have to say, this is okay.
1093. 01:06:03 And I'm okay with it being at this level.
1094. 01:06:06 Even though I think it could be better, it's not worth all the extra in order to get there.
1095. 01:06:11 And that is not a mindset that I like going to at all.
1096. 01:06:14 Yeah.
1097. 01:06:15 And I think the main area that this plays out for people is in the possessions.
1098. 01:06:20 So what do you, what do you need to have?
1099. 01:06:25 And progress continues to redefine what we need to have.
1100. 01:06:30 Uses the example in here of air conditioning.
1101. 01:06:33 And while I am not willing to live in a house without air conditioning, do I really need
1102. 01:06:37 it?
1103. 01:06:38 In Wisconsin?
1104. 01:06:39 Probably not.
1105. 01:06:40 It's not even on for nine months out of the year because it's too cold.
1106. 01:06:44 Snow on the ground for half of the year.
1107. 01:06:47 But it's the kind of thing where unless you are to really dig in with this, you just quickly
1108. 01:06:54 dismiss it of like, "Well, of course."
1109. 01:06:55 "Of course, my house has to have air conditioning."
1110. 01:06:57 But for a long time, people didn't have air conditioning.
1111. 01:07:00 They were completely fine.
1112. 01:07:01 So do you really need it?
1113. 01:07:03 And again, you can choose the things that you decide you need.
1114. 01:07:07 But the problem is when we decide we need all of the stuff, all of the things.
1115. 01:07:13 And that's why I think the practice of saying no to things is really good.
1116. 01:07:18 It's hard to do initially.
1117. 01:07:19 But as soon as you start saying no to one thing, then it's easier to do it again.
1118. 01:07:24 And a cheesy example of this, I have wanted for a very long time to get some dress clothes
1119. 01:07:32 that I don't have to iron because I'm not good at it and I'm not going to ask my wife
1120. 01:07:38 to do it.
1121. 01:07:39 I get up every Sunday morning and I iron my clothes.
1122. 01:07:42 It takes me 15, 20 minutes and it's just not...
1123. 01:07:45 I hate every moment.
1124. 01:07:48 But I continue to do that because I have a closet full of clothes that require ironing.
1125. 01:07:54 And recently I got to the point where I was just like, this is enough.
1126. 01:07:57 I need to let all of this stuff go.
1127. 01:07:59 I've tried to clean out that closet so many times and I look at this and I'm like, this
1128. 01:08:02 is nice stuff.
1129. 01:08:03 I can't just give this away.
1130. 01:08:04 Well, I just give away three trash bags full of clothes that had accumulated over the
1131. 01:08:09 years that I hadn't worn in forever.
1132. 01:08:12 I end up wearing the same couple shirts, same couple pairs of pants every single week because
1133. 01:08:17 they're easy to iron.
1134. 01:08:19 I'm like, what am I doing?
1135. 01:08:21 Yeah.
1136. 01:08:22 So I bought a couple of ministry of supply shirts, a couple of pairs of pants and it's
1137. 01:08:27 amazing.
1138. 01:08:28 I threw this stuff in my suitcase, traveled to Kansas City, took it out.
1139. 01:08:31 It didn't have a single wrinkle.
1140. 01:08:32 We shot video for a course that we're working on in that stuff.
1141. 01:08:36 And I'm like, oh, this is so much better.
1142. 01:08:38 Why did it take me so long to let go of those things?
1143. 01:08:42 And there's I think a lesson in that where you tend to cling to what you know and sometimes
1144. 01:08:50 releasing those things is what enables that to be replaced with something even better.
1145. 01:08:56 That could apply not just to your physical possessions that could apply to your work situation.
1146. 01:09:00 I reflect on where I was.
1147. 01:09:02 I kind of see maybe that was that was the case.
1148. 01:09:05 I saw where I was and I was comfortable there and I didn't want to even think about rocking
1149. 01:09:09 the boat, you know, but now I look back at it and I'm like, and this margin feels so
1150. 01:09:15 amazing.
1151. 01:09:16 Yeah.
1152. 01:09:17 Yeah, one of the areas I have another action item on and this is one that my wife and I
1153. 01:09:23 have talked about fairly regularly over the last year, year and a half.
1154. 01:09:28 I couldn't have connected it to margin, but the concept of a simple life and simplicity.
1155. 01:09:36 So we have a tendency to find like the best way to do something and or like the way that
1156. 01:09:43 would take the fewest number of batteries.
1157. 01:09:46 Can I do something without cables?
1158. 01:09:48 Because I'm an analog freak like that sort of thing crosses my mind a lot and I like
1159. 01:09:56 the process of things.
1160. 01:09:57 For example, I have a manual coffee grinder has a crank on the top and I crank it and
1161. 01:10:03 that's what grinds the coffee.
1162. 01:10:06 Is that ideal?
1163. 01:10:07 No, I take about 15 minutes every week to grind coffee for the week and that's what
1164. 01:10:12 I do.
1165. 01:10:13 I'm not going to do it.
1166. 01:10:14 I'm not going to do it.
1167. 01:10:15 I'm not going to do it.
1168. 01:10:16 I'm not going to do it.
1169. 01:10:17 I'm not going to do it.
1170. 01:10:18 I'm not going to do it.
1171. 01:10:19 I'm not going to do it.
1172. 01:10:20 I'm not going to do it.
1173. 01:10:21 I'm not going to do it.
1174. 01:10:22 I'm not going to do it.
1175. 01:10:23 I'm not going to do it.
1176. 01:10:24 I'm not going to do it.
1177. 01:10:25 I'm not going to do it.
1178. 01:10:26 I'm not going to do it.
1179. 01:10:27 I'm not going to do it.
1180. 01:10:28 I'm not going to do it.
1181. 01:10:29 I'm not going to do it.
1182. 01:10:30 I'm not going to do it.
1183. 01:10:31 I'm not going to do it.
1184. 01:10:32 I'm not going to do it.
1185. 01:10:33 I'm not going to do it.
1186. 01:10:34 I'm not going to do it.
1187. 01:10:35 I'm not going to do it.
1188. 01:10:36 I'm not going to do it.
1189. 01:10:37 I'm not going to do it.
1190. 01:10:38 I'm not going to do it.
1191. 01:10:39 I'm not going to do it.
1192. 01:10:40 I'm not going to do it.
1193. 01:10:41 I'm not going to do it.
1194. 01:10:42 I'm not going to do it.
1195. 01:10:43 I'm not going to do it.
1196. 01:10:44 I'm not going to do it.
1197. 01:10:45 I'm not going to do it.
1198. 01:10:46 I'm not going to do it.
1199. 01:10:47 I'm not going to do it.
1200. 01:10:48 I'm not going to do it.
1201. 01:10:49 I'm not going to do it.
1202. 01:10:50 I'm not going to do it.
1203. 01:10:51 I'm not going to do it.
1204. 01:10:52 I'm not going to do it.
1205. 01:10:53 I'm not going to do it.
1206. 01:10:54 I'm not going to do it.
1207. 01:10:55 I'm not going to do it.
1208. 01:10:56 I'm not going to do it.
1209. 01:10:57 I'm not going to do it.
1210. 01:10:58 I'm not going to do it.
1211. 01:10:59 I'm not going to do it.
1212. 01:11:00 I'm not going to do it.
1213. 01:11:01 I'm not going to do it.
1214. 01:11:02 I'm not going to do it.
1215. 01:11:03 I'm not going to do it.
1216. 01:11:04 I'm not going to do it.
1217. 01:11:05 I'm not going to do it.
1218. 01:11:06 I'm not going to do it.
1219. 01:11:07 I'm not going to do it.
1220. 01:11:08 I'm not going to do it.
1221. 01:11:09 I'm not going to do it.
1222. 01:11:10 I'm not going to do it.
1223. 01:11:11 I'm not going to do it.
1224. 01:11:12 I'm not going to do it.
1225. 01:11:13 I'm not going to do it.
1226. 01:11:14 I'm not going to do it.
1227. 01:11:15 I'm not going to do it.
1228. 01:11:16 I'm not going to do it.
1229. 01:11:17 I'm not going to do it.
1230. 01:11:18 I'm not going to do it.
1231. 01:11:19 I'm not going to do it.
1232. 01:11:20 I'm not going to do it.
1233. 01:11:21 I'm not going to do it.
1234. 01:11:22 I'm not going to do it.
1235. 01:11:23 I'm not going to do it.
1236. 01:11:24 I'm not going to do it.
1237. 01:11:25 I'm not going to do it.
1238. 01:11:26 I'm not going to do it.
1239. 01:11:27 I'm not going to do it.
1240. 01:11:28 I'm not going to do it.
1241. 01:11:29 I'm not going to do it.
1242. 01:11:30 I'm not going to do it.
1243. 01:11:31 I'm not going to do it.
1244. 01:11:32 I'm not going to do it.
1245. 01:11:33 I'm not going to do it.
1246. 01:11:34 I'm not going to do it.
1247. 01:11:35 I'm not going to do it.
1248. 01:11:36 I'm not going to do it.
1249. 01:11:37 I'm not going to do it.
1250. 01:11:38 I'm not going to do it.
1251. 01:11:39 I'm not going to do it.
1252. 01:11:40 I'm not going to do it.
1253. 01:11:41 I'm not going to do it.
1254. 01:11:42 I'm not going to do it.
1255. 01:11:43 I'm not going to do it.
1256. 01:11:44 I'm not going to do it.
1257. 01:11:45 I'm not going to do it.
1258. 01:11:46 I'm not going to do it.
1259. 01:11:47 I'm not going to do it.
1260. 01:11:48 I'm not going to do it.
1261. 01:11:49 I'm not going to do it.
1262. 01:11:50 I'm not going to do it.
1263. 01:11:51 I'm not going to do it.
1264. 01:11:52 I'm not going to do it.
1265. 01:11:53 I'm not going to do it.
1266. 01:11:54 I'm not going to do it.
1267. 01:11:55 I'm not going to do it.
1268. 01:11:56 I'm not going to do it.
1269. 01:11:57 I'm not going to do it.
1270. 01:11:58 I'm not going to do it.
1271. 01:11:59 I'm not going to do it.
1272. 01:12:00 I'm not going to do it.
1273. 01:12:01 I'm not going to do it.
1274. 01:12:02 I'm not going to do it.
1275. 01:12:03 I'm not going to do it.
1276. 01:12:04 I'm not going to do it.
1277. 01:12:05 I'm not going to do it.
1278. 01:12:06 I'm not going to do it.
1279. 01:12:07 I'm not going to do it.
1280. 01:12:08 I'm not going to do it.
1281. 01:12:09 I'm not going to do it.
1282. 01:12:10 I'm not going to do it.
1283. 01:12:11 I'm not going to do it.
1284. 01:12:12 I'm not going to do it.
1285. 01:12:13 I'm not going to do it.
1286. 01:12:14 I'm not going to do it.
1287. 01:12:15 I'm not going to do it.
1288. 01:12:16 I'm not going to do it.
1289. 01:12:17 I'm not going to do it.
1290. 01:12:18 I'm not going to do it.
1291. 01:12:19 I'm not going to do it.
1292. 01:12:20 I'm not going to do it.
1293. 01:12:21 I'm not going to do it.
1294. 01:12:22 I'm not going to do it.
1295. 01:12:23 I'm not going to do it.
1296. 01:12:24 I'm not going to do it.
1297. 01:12:25 I'm not going to do it.
1298. 01:12:26 I'm not going to do it.
1299. 01:12:27 I'm not going to do it.
1300. 01:12:28 I'm not going to do it.
1301. 01:12:29 I'm not going to do it.
1302. 01:12:30 I'm not going to do it.
1303. 01:12:31 I'm not going to do it.
1304. 01:12:32 I'm not going to do it.
1305. 01:12:33 I'm not going to do it.
1306. 01:12:34 I'm not going to do it.
1307. 01:12:35 I'm not going to do it.
1308. 01:12:36 I'm not going to do it.
1309. 01:12:37 I'm not going to do it.
1310. 01:12:38 I'm not going to do it.
1311. 01:12:39 I'm not going to do it.
1312. 01:12:40 I'm not going to do it.
1313. 01:12:41 I'm not going to do it.
1314. 01:12:42 I'm not going to do it.
1315. 01:12:43 I'm not going to do it.
1316. 01:12:44 I'm not going to do it.
1317. 01:12:45 I'm not going to do it.
1318. 01:12:46 I'm not going to do it.
1319. 01:12:47 I'm not going to do it.
1320. 01:12:48 I'm not going to do it.
1321. 01:12:49 I'm not going to do it.
1322. 01:12:50 I'm not going to do it.
1323. 01:12:51 I'm not going to do it.
1324. 01:12:52 I'm not going to do it.
1325. 01:12:53 I'm not going to do it.
1326. 01:12:54 I'm not going to do it.
1327. 01:12:55 I'm not going to do it.
1328. 01:12:56 I'm not going to do it.
1329. 01:12:57 I'm not going to do it.
1330. 01:12:58 I'm not going to do it.
1331. 01:12:59 I'm not going to do it.
1332. 01:13:00 I'm not going to do it.
1333. 01:13:01 I'm not going to do it.
1334. 01:13:02 I'm not going to do it.
1335. 01:13:03 I'm not going to do it.
1336. 01:13:04 I'm not going to do it.
1337. 01:13:05 I'm not going to do it.
1338. 01:13:06 I'm not going to do it.
1339. 01:13:07 I'm not going to do it.
1340. 01:13:08 I'm not going to do it.
1341. 01:13:09 I'm not going to do it.
1342. 01:13:10 I'm not going to do it.
1343. 01:13:11 I'm not going to do it.
1344. 01:13:12 I'm not going to do it.
1345. 01:13:13 I'm not going to do it.
1346. 01:13:14 I'm not going to do it.
1347. 01:13:15 I'm not going to do it.
1348. 01:13:16 I'm not going to do it.
1349. 01:13:17 I'm not going to do it.
1350. 01:13:18 I'm not going to do it.
1351. 01:13:19 I'm not going to do it.
1352. 01:13:20 I'm not going to do it.
1353. 01:13:21 I'm not going to do it.
1354. 01:13:22 I'm not going to do it.
1355. 01:13:23 I'm not going to do it.
1356. 01:13:24 I'm not going to do it.
1357. 01:13:25 I'm not going to do it.
1358. 01:13:26 I'm not going to do it.
1359. 01:13:27 I'm not going to do it.
1360. 01:13:28 I'm not going to do it.
1361. 01:13:29 I'm not going to do it.
1362. 01:13:30 I'm not going to do it.
1363. 01:13:32 It challenges me to now that I've hit the reset button, how can I reestablish these things
1364. 01:13:39 so that they're simpler?
1365. 01:13:40 One example of this is my journaling habit.
1366. 01:13:45 My journaling habit, I was using this shortcut and I asked myself all of these questions.
1367. 01:13:52 At the beginning of the year, when I needed it the most, I wasn't doing it.
1368. 01:13:57 I've gotten back into it and I've journaled every day now, the last couple of months.
1369. 01:14:01 The reason that it's worked this time is that I've simplified it.
1370. 01:14:03 I've eliminated some of those prompts that I've answered and I've just basically boiled
1371. 01:14:08 it down to the core elements.
1372. 01:14:10 When I started doing my meditation habit, which I'm still going with, I started with
1373. 01:14:15 headspace because it gave me the option to just do three minutes every day.
1374. 01:14:19 I can find three minutes at the beginning of my day every single day.
1375. 01:14:23 I can't sometimes find 10 minutes, which for something like calm, that's what it is.
1376. 01:14:28 The daily calm is 10 minutes long.
1377. 01:14:30 I find myself just saying, "I'm not going to do it today."
1378. 01:14:32 Then as soon as you say you're not going to do it today, then it's easier to skip it
1379. 01:14:35 again the next day, etc.
1380. 01:14:37 You've broken the chain, you've broken the system.
1381. 01:14:40 Making things as simple as possible with the definition of success, being simply that
1382. 01:14:47 this thing got done, not trying to focus on the quantity of the good that's produced
1383. 01:14:53 from it has been a big deal for me.
1384. 01:14:57 I'm with you.
1385. 01:14:59 I don't do simple while I don't.
1386. 01:15:01 I should, but I don't.
1387. 01:15:04 I feel like I could go on and on and on about it.
1388. 01:15:08 We both probably could.
1389. 01:15:12 I guess maybe this has been in the back of my head for a while.
1390. 01:15:16 It does play into my Omni Focus setup even right now.
1391. 01:15:20 I've simplified that down so much that it's really just one list I work from, broken apart
1392. 01:15:27 into other areas.
1393. 01:15:28 I've done that.
1394. 01:15:30 Drives people nuts that I don't use tags.
1395. 01:15:32 They keep saying, "Why don't you use flags?"
1396. 01:15:34 "Well, it's another tag.
1397. 01:15:35 I don't want to use that."
1398. 01:15:37 Exactly.
1399. 01:15:38 "Yeah, but you have all these features.
1400. 01:15:39 You can do all these things.
1401. 01:15:40 It doesn't matter when I add all those things.
1402. 01:15:43 It's not going to work."
1403. 01:15:44 Yep, exactly.
1404. 01:15:46 The one feature I want that doesn't exist is designed to simplify in that I do my weekly
1405. 01:15:52 review on a given day.
1406. 01:15:54 When I let a script I wrote take everything in Omni Focus so that it's reviewed on a certain
1407. 01:15:59 day.
1408. 01:16:00 That is a simplification of what it currently does.
1409. 01:16:04 It's not there.
1410. 01:16:05 Even when it doesn't simplify enough, I add on to it.
1411. 01:16:10 I've done this digitally, I think, in a number of ways.
1412. 01:16:14 Trying to cut back on the number of tools I use and trying to use some of these multi-purpose
1413. 01:16:20 types of setups.
1414. 01:16:23 I continue to do that, but I don't really take it outside of that.
1415. 01:16:29 I don't try to simplify the logistics of what I have going on in life.
1416. 01:16:33 I don't try to simplify the work that goes into taking care of myself from a health stance.
1417. 01:16:42 I just don't do those things.
1418. 01:16:44 Some of that's that I just haven't been thinking about it in that form.
1419. 01:16:49 This has opened my eyes to it.
1420. 01:16:50 It's definitely a good thing.
1421. 01:16:52 I just haven't been aware of it, I don't think.
1422. 01:16:55 At least not enough to act on it at all.
1423. 01:16:58 Exactly.
1424. 01:16:59 It occurs to me as we're talking through this that maybe we make things more complicated,
1425. 01:17:06 especially driven people who are high achievers.
1426. 01:17:14 We want a certain level of complexity because it's associated with the pride that we feel
1427. 01:17:20 when we get something done.
1428. 01:17:22 We got to break that.
1429. 01:17:23 I got to break that.
1430. 01:17:24 I'll make it personal.
1431. 01:17:25 You don't have to break that listener.
1432. 01:17:27 Just me.
1433. 01:17:28 I'm the one who deals with this.
1434. 01:17:29 Just my own.
1435. 01:17:30 Yeah.
1436. 01:17:31 But I make things way too hard and I just got to keep it simple, stupid.
1437. 01:17:37 That relates to the other chapters in this last section where he talks about balance
1438. 01:17:43 and rest.
1439. 01:17:44 I don't have a whole lot that I want to say here.
1440. 01:17:47 I actually hate the term balance.
1441. 01:17:49 He does have another book.
1442. 01:17:50 It's on my bookshelf.
1443. 01:17:51 It's in search of balance is the name of it.
1444. 01:17:54 It's a yellow book and I want to read it at some point as a gap book to contrast it with
1445. 01:17:59 this.
1446. 01:18:00 I think balance, people get the picture of the work life balance and I firmly believe
1447. 01:18:04 that there is no work life balance.
1448. 01:18:06 It's just your life and you got to manage it well.
1449. 01:18:08 His point with balance is that you've got all these different areas of your life and
1450. 01:18:10 you can't be excellent at work and neglect your family.
1451. 01:18:14 I totally agree with that point.
1452. 01:18:17 Just the term balance.
1453. 01:18:18 I think a lot of people strive for something that just doesn't exist.
1454. 01:18:22 The better term from the 12 week year is intentional imbalance where for a short period
1455. 01:18:27 of time you're going to focus on this thing and you're going to be excellent in this
1456. 01:18:29 area and you're going to make adjustments and then after that you're going to shift focus
1457. 01:18:33 and do something else.
1458. 01:18:37 We don't really need to talk a whole lot more about that section in balance.
1459. 01:18:41 But I do want to talk about something from this health through rest chapter because he
1460. 01:18:46 uses an analogy here of the four gears of the healthiest lifestyle.
1461. 01:18:51 The first gear is park and that's used for rest and renewal.
1462. 01:18:55 The second gear is low.
1463. 01:18:56 That's used for relationships, family and friends.
1464. 01:18:59 The third gear is drive which is our usual gear for work or play and then the fourth one
1465. 01:19:03 is overdrive which is reserved for times that require extra effort.
1466. 01:19:08 But he makes the point that much of our society never down shifts from overdrive.
1467. 01:19:15 And as I read that I'm like yes guilty.
1468. 01:19:21 And I think that this is a great idea and if all that happens from this is that you recognize
1469. 01:19:27 that there's these different areas, different gears and you have been working in overdrive
1470. 01:19:31 and you need to slow down a little bit, that's good enough.
1471. 01:19:35 But I totally see ways where you could apply this even at a task management level.
1472. 01:19:40 I am not recommending that anybody specifically do this but I immediately thought of the OmniFocus
1473. 01:19:46 or any task system where you have tags and managing your tasks using this as a tag.
1474. 01:19:51 Is this an overdrive type activity or is this a low energy activity?
1475. 01:19:55 And to me this is more useful than just a low energy context because I've seen people
1476. 01:20:01 do that sort of thing.
1477. 01:20:02 All this is all the stuff I can do when I'm dead tired.
1478. 01:20:05 But I think if all you do is look for things to do when you're dead tired that's a red flag
1479. 01:20:10 that you don't have any margin.
1480. 01:20:12 And I think if you manage this going back to when we were thinking about doing scrum inside
1481. 01:20:18 of OmniFocus and things like that, like if you assign point values to each of these
1482. 01:20:21 things and I only have 20 emotional points to spend today or 20 energy points to spend
1483. 01:20:29 today.
1484. 01:20:30 That might be a kind of cool way to manage the things that you have to do.
1485. 01:20:33 And if you set that at 20 that means you need to work on getting it to 15.
1486. 01:20:38 Yeah, exactly.
1487. 01:20:39 You know, like that's what I struggle with.
1488. 01:20:43 Because even if you look at my OmniFocus setup right now, the way that I manage all
1489. 01:20:48 of the stuff I have going on, a lot of it has to do with time.
1490. 01:20:52 And this is why I have buffer between task blocks on my action item list here because
1491. 01:20:59 I've done the opposite in that I've used that estimated duration slot in OmniFocus
1492. 01:21:06 to try to figure out how much time I think things are going to take.
1493. 01:21:09 And then I let those accrue into a day and then I can calculate how much of that I've
1494. 01:21:14 got set up for the day and whether or not I can get that done.
1495. 01:21:17 Like I have it set up that way, which is the antithesis to what Richard Swinson would
1496. 01:21:23 have us do in that it wants us to try to cram as much into the day instead of giving
1497. 01:21:29 us a lot of flexibility.
1498. 01:21:31 Exactly.
1499. 01:21:32 Yeah, it's just when you define things in terms of how long they should take.
1500. 01:21:36 You're setting yourself up for failure because something's going to take longer and then
1501. 01:21:39 everything gets thrown off and I'll estimate better next time.
1502. 01:21:44 No, you won't.
1503. 01:21:46 Also as I'm thinking through this and using these points in OmniFocus as an example,
1504. 01:21:52 I feel like this is kind of the opposite of scrum.
1505. 01:21:56 And the more distance I get from reading scrum, scrum you suck.
1506. 01:22:01 Because the whole idea is here's how many story points you can achieve.
1507. 01:22:05 And then once you do that, then raise the bar.
1508. 01:22:08 And that's the exact opposite of what Richard Swinson is saying is like when you figure
1509. 01:22:13 out what you're able to do, back it off a little bit and create that margin, which is
1510. 01:22:18 way healthier, way more sustainable.
1511. 01:22:20 Now the thing that this really is this last section, your rest, this one, it's one that
1512. 01:22:28 I know and it's not one that is groundbreaking.
1513. 01:22:33 But after you've been through all of this and him explaining how margin is helpful and
1514. 01:22:38 what to do about it in these four areas, it does strike you a little bit different than
1515. 01:22:43 normal because you hear like, naps are good for you.
1516. 01:22:47 Sleep well enough.
1517. 01:22:48 You know, give yourself that buffer time.
1518. 01:22:50 Like these are not new concepts.
1519. 01:22:52 But when you put it all together and he talks about rest and giving yourself the space to
1520. 01:22:58 rest, it's something I just need to do.
1521. 01:23:03 I just push and push and push.
1522. 01:23:05 I have all these time things and I have flexibility in that.
1523. 01:23:10 Like whenever I set up my day, I make sure I don't have more than about six hours worth
1524. 01:23:14 of work to do or sometimes five.
1525. 01:23:17 It's primarily because I know I'm going to have things come up in the day and I'm giving
1526. 01:23:22 myself that extra buffer there.
1527. 01:23:24 So I know that that's going to happen, but I also know that like I'm going to have two
1528. 01:23:28 to three hours of that in a day, which means I'm still filling up my eight hours.
1529. 01:23:34 Like I'm intentionally doing that.
1530. 01:23:37 It's not giving me the time to rest between things and reflect on what's happened and
1531. 01:23:42 all the good things you should do.
1532. 01:23:44 But I needed this book.
1533. 01:23:47 I think that's what I'm saying is I needed this right now.
1534. 01:23:50 Awesome.
1535. 01:23:51 Well, before we get to Stalin rating, let's talk about our action items and we've shared
1536. 01:23:56 these already, but just real quickly, I've got two.
1537. 01:24:00 First one is to answer the question, how can I simplify my life?
1538. 01:24:03 I shared this with my wife and we're both thinking about this.
1539. 01:24:08 So if we think of anything specifically by the time we record next, which I'm hoping we
1540. 01:24:12 do, then I will share those.
1541. 01:24:15 But even if we don't, the real value of this is getting us to think that way.
1542. 01:24:19 So when we are experiencing the pain from things that are more complicated than they
1543. 01:24:23 should be, we go, oh, yeah, we should change this.
1544. 01:24:27 Right.
1545. 01:24:28 That's what we should be doing.
1546. 01:24:29 Yep.
1547. 01:24:30 And then the second one I had was the question, am I interruptible?
1548. 01:24:34 Kind of already answered this.
1549. 01:24:35 I don't think I'm interruptible enough.
1550. 01:24:38 And I want to change that no specifics yet on how to do that.
1551. 01:24:43 Fair enough.
1552. 01:24:44 F3, I need to get back into my daily yoga practice for the health side of things.
1553. 01:24:50 I'm with you on how am I simplifying my life?
1554. 01:24:52 What are some ways I can do that?
1555. 01:24:54 And then I got to stop on this whole time thing.
1556. 01:24:56 Like I got to give myself more the margin in the time schedule throughout my day.
1557. 01:25:03 So maybe when we're done here, I'm going to ask you about this whole eight week thing.
1558. 01:25:07 I'm going to see that that's intriguing to me.
1559. 01:25:10 So those are my three yoga simple time.
1560. 01:25:13 All right.
1561. 01:25:14 Stylen rating.
1562. 01:25:15 What do you think?
1563. 01:25:16 That's your book.
1564. 01:25:17 You tell me.
1565. 01:25:18 I go first.
1566. 01:25:19 Okay.
1567. 01:25:20 You do.
1568. 01:25:21 This 82 episodes.
1569. 01:25:22 I don't think it's been different on any of them.
1570. 01:25:25 Okay.
1571. 01:25:26 Okay.
1572. 01:25:27 Well, I've kind of already shared that this isn't the first time I've read this.
1573. 01:25:30 It impacted me in a much greater way the second time that I read this.
1574. 01:25:36 And part of that is the season of life that I'm in and also the reflective contemplative
1575. 01:25:41 state I've been in towards the end of the year thinking about the last year and the
1576. 01:25:46 things that have happened, the progress that I've made, the goals I have achieved, the things
1577. 01:25:49 I have done well, but also all of the things that have gone wrong.
1578. 01:25:54 Going looking back at the things that have gone wrong can be a double edged sword because
1579. 01:25:58 you can beat yourself up for all the things that happened or you can look at it and chart
1580. 01:26:03 your, you know, as a progress indicator and say, look how much I've grown.
1581. 01:26:08 That's kind of the approach I'm trying to take.
1582. 01:26:10 Reading this book really helped me with that.
1583. 01:26:12 I actually shared with my mastermind group.
1584. 01:26:15 I made little charts on a visual representation of what I thought my margin was at the beginning
1585. 01:26:21 of the year versus where I am right now, just to kind of visually indicate like I really
1586. 01:26:28 feel my situation is totally, totally different.
1587. 01:26:30 And I know part of that is just simply my perspective.
1588. 01:26:33 Some of the specifics of things you would look at it and well, that hasn't really changed
1589. 01:26:37 that much, but it feels like it's night and day different.
1590. 01:26:41 And this book really helped me cement why and my hope is that that makes this stuff way
1591. 01:26:47 stickier.
1592. 01:26:48 I feel like reading this the first time I dismissed a lot of stuff and I hope the listeners
1593. 01:26:54 don't do that because the pain wasn't sufficient yet.
1594. 01:26:58 It would be much better for you to understand this stuff and start making some changes before
1595. 01:27:02 the crap hits the fan than when you get to your breaking point and you're at burnout
1596. 01:27:09 and then you have to make changes.
1597. 01:27:11 So that would be my plea to the listeners.
1598. 01:27:14 The book itself in terms of the writing style, there are, I don't really care for Dr. Swenson's
1599. 01:27:21 writing style to be honest.
1600. 01:27:23 I think the book itself is great.
1601. 01:27:24 The stuff that he shares is life changing.
1602. 01:27:27 It's not necessarily one of the most fun things I've ever, ever read.
1603. 01:27:31 I did read through it pretty quick though because the content was just so good and like I said,
1604. 01:27:36 it was what I needed to hear right now.
1605. 01:27:39 But I do want to call that out because I think if you're not in the right spot to receive
1606. 01:27:45 this, then you can quickly dismiss it, especially with some of the explicitly Christian language
1607. 01:27:52 that he uses towards the end of the book.
1608. 01:27:54 That being said, I do think this is a really important book.
1609. 01:27:58 It's an idea that really needs to be championed in our society right now because as he points
1610. 01:28:04 out, this is not the default.
1611. 01:28:07 We've got to kind of fight against this.
1612. 01:28:09 So balancing all of that out, I'm trying to decide whether I want to rate this as a
1613. 01:28:14 4.0 or 4.5.
1614. 01:28:16 I have to go 4.5 simply because of the impact that it has made in my life recently.
1615. 01:28:22 That being said though, I recognize this is not going to be for everybody.
1616. 01:28:27 I shared earlier that somebody asked me about recommending a book and this was, I had the
1617. 01:28:32 thought that this wouldn't be the right book to recommend to that person.
1618. 01:28:35 So this isn't something that I would just recommend that everybody listen to or everybody
1619. 01:28:40 read.
1620. 01:28:42 But I do think that at some point in your life, you're going to need this book.
1621. 01:28:48 Everybody will.
1622. 01:28:49 And whether that's now or 10 years from now, just keep it in the back of your mind if it's
1623. 01:28:55 not something you want to tackle.
1624. 01:28:58 But it is something that you're going to have to wrestle with.
1625. 01:29:01 It's going to cause you to dig deep.
1626. 01:29:03 It'll probably be a little bit painful as you look at yourself and you consider the different
1627. 01:29:10 systems that you have and the results that those have produced.
1628. 01:29:14 Not everybody's going to want to be told that you need to lower your load.
1629. 01:29:19 But it's one of the most powerful things I think you can do for your positive mental
1630. 01:29:25 state.
1631. 01:29:26 And so I think it's a great book.
1632. 01:29:29 The greatness comes not in how it makes you feel or the emotions that it conjures as you
1633. 01:29:37 read it.
1634. 01:29:38 Some of the books that we read, they're super motivational.
1635. 01:29:41 They just leave you happy.
1636. 01:29:43 That's the result of you are awesome, the last book that we did.
1637. 01:29:47 I read that and I felt good when I was done.
1638. 01:29:49 Don't necessarily feel great about margin when you're finished, but you have clarity
1639. 01:29:53 on, okay, I see.
1640. 01:29:54 I got to change these things.
1641. 01:29:56 And for me, that's really the reason why we read these books through Bookworm.
1642. 01:29:59 So it's a good book.
1643. 01:30:02 I'm going to drop a link in the chat and this is to a tweet because I had posted on the
1644. 01:30:09 posted that we were recording today.
1645. 01:30:13 And Isaac Smith, I think you know who Isaac Smith is.
1646. 01:30:16 Yes, I do.
1647. 01:30:17 Isaac and I went trail running.
1648. 01:30:18 Yeah.
1649. 01:30:19 So I had posted that we were recording margin today and Isaac replied to that and said that
1650. 01:30:26 book did things to my soul so good.
1651. 01:30:29 And I have to agree with Isaac because this particular book kind of struck me in a way
1652. 01:30:35 I was not expecting to be struck so much so that at one point I had this book sitting
1653. 01:30:39 on the kitchen table because I was reading before breakfast.
1654. 01:30:42 My wife saw it and says, hmm, I don't normally like the books you're reading, but that one's
1655. 01:30:47 intriguing.
1656. 01:30:48 Like that's that was her take on it.
1657. 01:30:52 And I have to say I this one hit me at exactly the right time at the same time.
1658. 01:31:00 You're right in that he's not a super easy author to read.
1659. 01:31:06 I'm not I couldn't quite figure out why that was for a while.
1660. 01:31:10 And I think it's because he's a doctor who really, really, really likes his science and
1661. 01:31:17 really likes to talk about it, but he feels like he shouldn't.
1662. 01:31:22 So then he doesn't.
1663. 01:31:23 But you can tell he wants to.
1664. 01:31:26 So it's kind of weird and like he kind of tries to get into that, but then doesn't.
1665. 01:31:31 And it's one of those things that if like if you are going to do that, go all the way
1666. 01:31:35 or don't do it at all.
1667. 01:31:37 Like it's, you know, when you're talking science and such like it's just that you can't allude
1668. 01:31:41 to it.
1669. 01:31:42 It just doesn't work.
1670. 01:31:43 And he does kind of I don't want to say drone on, but he does kind of just drag some things
1671. 01:31:48 out a little bit longer than he should.
1672. 01:31:50 So there's that piece of it as well.
1673. 01:31:52 So as far as his style goes, eh, it's okay.
1674. 01:31:57 It is one that you can read.
1675. 01:31:59 It's not so bad that you can't go through it.
1676. 01:32:02 And I don't want to downplay it too much either though, because it is a quick it was
1677. 01:32:06 a quick read for me.
1678. 01:32:07 Like it the content of what he's talking about made me want to go through it.
1679. 01:32:12 It probably could have been a little bit faster though.
1680. 01:32:14 So anyway, all that said, this struck me at exactly the right time.
1681. 01:32:18 I really needed this.
1682. 01:32:19 I feel like this is, you know, especially if you're in, if you are a Christian, like this
1683. 01:32:23 is a must, I would say.
1684. 01:32:25 I what do you rate this?
1685. 01:32:28 Exactly.
1686. 01:32:29 Okay.
1687. 01:32:30 This part, I really like that part not so much.
1688. 01:32:34 And it's the entire book, like it's just so odd, but it also changed my life.
1689. 01:32:38 Yeah.
1690. 01:32:39 Like it's something like, okay, you you illuminated an area that I really needed light shown on,
1691. 01:32:46 but I don't feel like I could give it a five because the book itself wasn't up to that level.
1692. 01:32:52 Like, that's just so weird.
1693. 01:32:54 I'm going to put it a 4.0.
1694. 01:32:55 Like that it's just weird to do that.
1695. 01:32:59 But I don't think I don't think it's a four like whenever I go 4.5, it's like not quite
1696. 01:33:05 a five.
1697. 01:33:06 And I don't feel like this is even quite there.
1698. 01:33:08 But the content of it is awesome, but yes, I am a quit talking.
1699. 01:33:14 I'm going to put it a 4.0.
1700. 01:33:15 I completely agree with you.
1701. 01:33:17 And I may look back at this and say, well, I wish I would have put it out a 4.0 because
1702. 01:33:22 I agree that content wise, it's not up there with the best books that we've read.
1703. 01:33:30 But in terms of the impact that it's had in my life, I think it could be a six.
1704. 01:33:35 Yeah.
1705. 01:33:36 Yeah, it's so weird.
1706. 01:33:37 So trying to balance that out is difficult.
1707. 01:33:41 But there we go.
1708. 01:33:42 That's margin.
1709. 01:33:43 So what's coming up?
1710. 01:33:45 The next one is actually, if you go three episodes ago, I played a game that made Mike
1711. 01:33:50 nervous and had a...
1712. 01:33:52 Still recovery.
1713. 01:33:53 Yeah.
1714. 01:33:54 I had a member of the club, a premium member, just flat out picked the book for me.
1715. 01:34:01 And awful otter on the club chose The Infinite Game by Simon Sennick.
1716. 01:34:06 Thank you, awful otter.
1717. 01:34:09 You eased Mike's anxiety.
1718. 01:34:11 So it's okay.
1719. 01:34:13 So yes, we'll cover The Infinite Game by Simon Sennick next time.
1720. 01:34:18 All right.
1721. 01:34:19 And I'm going to pick mine here from the recommendations.
1722. 01:34:23 So go into the recommendations section, sorting by votes, skipping sapiens.
1723. 01:34:29 We've got indestructible.
1724. 01:34:30 All right.
1725. 01:34:33 All right, this is one that I've wanted to read for a while anyways.
1726. 01:34:37 I started reading Hooked.
1727. 01:34:40 And this is by, I don't know how to say this guy's name, near I/O.
1728. 01:34:45 I started reading Hooked and got angry.
1729. 01:34:48 So I put it down.
1730. 01:34:49 Okay.
1731. 01:34:50 Hooked is basically how to build habit forming products.
1732. 01:34:53 And this book is kind of the cure for that.
1733. 01:34:57 So it's much more in line with the types of things that we talk about here on Bookworm
1734. 01:35:03 and we've done deep work, digital minimalism.
1735. 01:35:07 We talk about focus a lot.
1736. 01:35:09 And I think this might be coming from a different perspective.
1737. 01:35:13 I think this might give us a little bit different picture of focus.
1738. 01:35:18 And it looks really interesting.
1739. 01:35:20 So I'm glad this one is near the top and that's the one we'll go through after The Infinite
1740. 01:35:25 Game.
1741. 01:35:26 Got a gap book?
1742. 01:35:27 I don't.
1743. 01:35:28 Life is busy because, you know, no margin.
1744. 01:35:29 Got to fix that.
1745. 01:35:31 Do you have one?
1746. 01:35:32 I do.
1747. 01:35:33 I have strategy man versus the anti-strategy squad.
1748. 01:35:39 Okay.
1749. 01:35:40 And Josh told me that you'd be mad when I brought this one up.
1750. 01:35:42 This is by Rich Hoaaw and it's basically a business comic book.
1751. 01:35:50 You really have to see this in order for it to make any sense.
1752. 01:35:56 And it is a comic book format and it's like first chapter is on strategy defined.
1753. 01:36:05 Chapter two, mission visions of values.
1754. 01:36:06 Chapter three, the three A strategic thinking framework sounds a lot like a business book
1755. 01:36:10 but it is literally a comic book and every single page is illustrated.
1756. 01:36:15 So if you don't like reading the typical business book but you like the type of stuff
1757. 01:36:21 that we talk about on Bookworm and you happen to like comic books, you may really like this
1758. 01:36:25 one.
1759. 01:36:26 All right.
1760. 01:36:27 So that'll do it.
1761. 01:36:28 If you want to become a premium member, you can do so by clicking the link in the show
1762. 01:36:34 notes or by tapping on the icon in overcast, I'll take you straight to the page and we
1763. 01:36:40 want to say thank you to all the premium members who are giving five bucks a month to
1764. 01:36:46 keep Bookworm going.
1765. 01:36:47 Your support means a ton.
1766. 01:36:50 There's a couple of perks that come along with being a Bookworm Club premium member.
1767. 01:36:53 You get to attend the live recordings.
1768. 01:36:55 We've mentioned that a couple times here today where we share things in the chat.
1769. 01:37:00 There's links to all of the my node files that I create for the books that I read.
1770. 01:37:05 I upload those to the special section in the Bookworm Club and Joe also does a couple of,
1771. 01:37:10 you've done a couple of gap episodes on other books that you've read that we haven't covered
1772. 01:37:16 for Bookworm.
1773. 01:37:17 So if you want to get access to that stuff, you can do so by using the link in the show
1774. 01:37:21 notes.
1775. 01:37:22 Yeah.
1776. 01:37:23 Imagine on the shelf next time we'll go through the infinite game by Simon Sennick and we'll
1777. 01:37:27 talk to you then.