212: Never Play It Safe by Chase Jarvis

All right, Mike, welcome back. So you had a pretty interesting weekend, huh? I did. I got super sick, so I'm feeling a little bit better, but my voice probably...

Doesn't have the same dulcet tones, and I apologize for that. Dulcet tones. Well, I'm glad you're feeling better. I'm glad your voice is back. For those of you who... uh subscribe uh in our pro members uh the this is going to come out a little bit uh a little bit later because we delayed a little bit so we could actually talk and not lose his voice about 10 minutes into the end of the show so um in our pro show that we just did um

We talked about my creative ideas. Mike gave me a mini coaching session. He may charge me for that. He may not charge me for that. I don't know. But if you're interested, you can become a Bookworm Pro subscriber. We'll tell you about that at the end of the show. But today we need to think about follow-up items and then we think about playing it safe. But let's get the follow-up first. So Mike, you want to hit your follow-up items first? I guess.

the first one which was sort of the impromptu one as we were talking through the last episode you were doing a coaching session for me and telling me i needed to hire a video editor So I have actually, I'll say I've hired one. I've started a trial with a service called VidPros, which I heard about, I think, in Ali Abdel's part-time YouTuber Academy.

So basically it's a dedicated video editor that you get part-time and then they have a full-time option as well. But I started the trial for the part-time one. Then I got sick. So I'm like, hey, I'm ready to go. I've got this project. They said, great. Your account is up. Hours later, I was feeling like I was dying. So I haven't uploaded anything yet. I just emailed them.

this morning said, Hey, can you extend the trial? I'm going to get some stuff up later today. But basically the goal is like, you can do one video to see what it's like before you would commit to paying a thousand bucks a month or whatever it is, which sounds like a lot.

But if it allows me to double or triple my video output on YouTube, it will very quickly be worth it since I am monetized. And the thing that is holding me back from making money on YouTube is simply the number of videos that I can get out. Yeah, it's not the ideas. So that one is done. You have a follow up with that? Can you remind me or remind everybody where they would go to follow you on YouTube? Because you've done some rebranding and I don't...

I don't remember specifically what the channel is now and all that stuff. Yeah. So I actually have my name as the handle. So it's youtube.com slash Mike Schmitz, I believe. If you search for Mike Schmitz, you won't find me. you'll find a Catholic priest. That's not me. I'm the one that talks about obsidian. Thank you. All right. Any more?

I had one other one, which is to build a high ticket offer. So when you floated the idea of the creative coaching, I was like, well, maybe this will be a way for me to test my high ticket offer. And so, yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this. I've texted back and forth with you. And let me just talk through, I guess, like everything I've got so far. We've got the YouTube channel.

That basically builds the email list because of the starter vault that I mentioned and people download that for free. Then the product is basically LifeHQ, the done for you vault. To upgrade from there, it's really the cohort and the community that goes with that.

That is all like hundreds of dollars for the cohort and the community. So that's not, you know, small money. But when I'm talking high ticket, like what is the thing that I can do better than anybody in the world that's like insanely valuable? And I feel like I'm starting to get there. So I have success as an integrator at a digital marketing agency. I understand systems. I have gone through the, you know.

starting from nothing and creating stuff online. And I talk about, you know, the PKM stack and the creativity flywheel frameworks. I think what I'm going to try to do as my high ticket offer is like small group coaching. So there'll be a program that goes with it, but they'll also be like live group coaching calls, hot seats, things like kind of like what we did in the pro show. It's like, okay, you want to, but it'll be more defined because specifically it's going to be people who want to.

make something online and make money from it. So I'm still trying to decide if I want to like zero it in on writing because I feel like writing is going to be the basis of it, but it could be a podcast. It could be a YouTube channel. But essentially what I'm going to walk people through is, okay, you need to figure out what's the platform that you're going to get attention on. What are you going to offer those people so you can start building your list?

and then what are you going to create that you can monetize and sell as a product that those people would actually want and i feel like i could help people plug in the pkm pieces with that obviously like i do a lot of that through obsidian but mind node and capture you know all that kind of stuff figuring out the nuances of the different platforms and how are you gonna make scheduling these things easy you know all that kind of stuff

i know that i have trouble doing it myself that's kind of the thing that's holding me back right now is like well who am i to teach this because i don't do it myself i sort of do it myself i've had success publishing online with like the ship 30 cohorts and stuff like that But because I'm a one man band and I'm trying to do all these different things, I lose momentum. So I feel like I'm going to get there quickly now that I'm starting to get some help in some certain areas. I'm also looking at.

an assistant and delegating, uh, delegating different things that just like, I shouldn't be doing, um, not because, you know, I'm too fancy or, uh, you know, they're not worth doing, you know, they're below me or anything like that, but.

There are things that I could easily delegate to somebody else so that I could lean into the things that I do really well, which is great stuff. So right now the focus is on getting through the next cohort, but I think I'm going to try to test some things in that cohort. And then after that, probably do something with this, this high ticket offer. I guess if you're interested in that sort of thing, I don't have like a signup page or anything, but reach out to me.

I'm on Blue Sky now, as we talked about in the pro show. So yeah, but I'm excited about that. I feel like I could really help people in that particular way. I think so too. I think I'm excited for this as well because it's like... I told you via text, right? It's the natural next step, I think, in the work that you're already doing. Or sorry, not the. It's a natural next step in the work that you're already doing. And I'm really, really intrigued to see.

what you're able to you know do with people and for people through that like real intentional um you know kind of situation and then also what you learned from it right like i think you're going to get a lot of really creative and like clever ideas that'll feed into the rest of your of your business right like and you'll be able to like get new ideas and you'll be like oh i was working with these clients

I mean, I'm going to call them clients, right? I don't know if that's what you're going to refer to them as or not. I guess they are. It's funny because I just had somebody reach out to me. um via like a cold dm and i normally don't reply to those but i noticed a bunch of the people that follow this person or people that i look up to and so i started a conversation and he was talking about

Are the people that buy from you clients or customers? I'm like, they're customers. I don't do clients, you know, but you're right. This, this would be clients. I think when you get to this, it's much more of a client because it's more of a relationship, right? Like, that's the way I think about it.

customer is more of a transaction exactly this is more of a relationship um and um i mean i think i think you're going to learn a ton i think it's gonna be good for for you and then you know i mean we'll get into our book and not to not to to hit the book too early, like there isn't failure in this.

there is a bunch of learning in this, even if it doesn't go the way you think it's going to go, which I think is, is a really valuable thing. So awesome. All right. So those are Mike's follow-up items. Mine was to go back through the notes and pull out the visuals. So instead of doing this, I actually just went to Richie Norton's site and I got the anti-time management free starter kit.

So from him. So in my mind, smarter, not harder. In my mind, check that box. Right. So it checked that box for me. And I'm feeling good about the fact that I followed up on this. I'll give you a check mark for that. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. I told you last time, like anti-time management was like a real, it messed with my brain, my brain a lot. And it's one of those ones that.

So my work goes in seasons, right? So the fall season is crazy, you know, and the early part of the semester and the late part of the semester are... particularly crazy when then there's a little bit of a lull where you're prepping for next semester and you know kind of wrapping up the the previous semester and then it gets crazy again

in the spring and then you know early and late is crazy again and then summer this is one that i'll probably revisit in the summer anti-time management's one and i don't think i'll go back and read the book i think i'll look at my notes and i'll compare it to his um

uh, his starter kit and just try to figure out like, what does it mean? Like, does it mean anything for me? How does it, you know, how do I incorporate that into my, into my daily life and existing, you know, operations and stuff. So cool. All right, so today's book was Never Play It Safe by Chase Jarvis. And it's a book that's structured in terms of an intro.

You have seven different ideas that Chase walks you through. And then the conclusion is super tiny. So he's got a disclaimer in it, which I've not encountered this. many uh many times uh and uh it's basically like a hey read this first right so it's the it's the equivalent of the you download software

And it's like, read me, right? Like do the read me. But in this situation, I thought that was good. So we'll start with the read this first and introduction. And then I think, Mike, if you're good with it, we'll go through. each of the seven levers um the what he calls the levers for life and we'll work through the show that way sound good sounds good hopefully my voice will hold out i i think it will i think it will i feel i feel confident all right

So let's go through the read this first and the introduction. One of the things that... I got out of this was, you know, he has a Helen Keller quote that security is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. And I thought that was really, really interesting. It's like, we think about this safe life.

think about like trying to lead this safe life and like I don't think that is realistic I think we try really really hard to make that a reality but like I just I think we need to let that go and understand that life isn't safe, and that's okay. And then it turns safety into risk mitigation, which I think risk mitigation is something we've been doing.

for thousands of years and we've always done is like oh okay it the world isn't safe but i can mitigate i can mitigate my risks i can not run towards the edge of the cliff i cannot you know directly confront the wild animal in nature. So I really like that idea of restructuring this idea of safe. And he does that right off the bat.

Yeah, he mentions that safety is an illusion and that playing it safe is basically about fear, fear being optimized for survival and the best stuff being just outside of your comfort zone. which is kind of all stuff that we've tangentially discussed in other books that we've read, but he just smacks you in the face with it right at the beginning and makes you very uncomfortable.

which uh i'm curious you know you mentioned that anti-time management really challenged you in some ways i feel like this is a follow-up probably was a little bit unfair yeah yeah yeah i i would agree i mean like

We'll talk about it later in style and rating, but where you and I are in life and where he is, safety is a very, very different thing. The idea of... being able to take risks and what those risks look like now that doesn't mean i don't take away a bunch of stuff from this book it just means i think the contextual scenarios

matter in this but we'll i'm going to pause on that and we'll we'll push that till later well let me let me actually push back on that a little bit because i think that's the the traditional thinking and you're not wrong for thinking that if you're reading through this book i think but i think there's another argument to be made here where no it's still the same just maybe the stakes are higher because you hear these stories about the people who are really successful and

most of them went bankrupt multiple times before they hit it big so is it that you know they got to a point where you know the they can now play it

I don't want to say play it safe. Like, I'm struggling with terminology here. Like, it doesn't have the same amount of risk as somebody who's living paycheck to paycheck and trying to make ends meet. Like, does this... not apply to me because i'm still trying to dig out of some credit card debt that we amassed while i was trying to get my business off the ground i kind of think no at first i was like well yeah it probably does because i i have a very short runway to work with

And he's got, you know, multiple homes and talks about taking walks on the beach, like the ocean, you know, outside of his backyard. Like, aren't you fancy? Like, that's the easy excuse, I feel. So I would encourage people not to make that because I feel like if you accept that excuse, your world gets made a little bit smaller and you now have some options that are eliminated.

And again, kind of like what's the worst thing that can happen here? All these successful people who own these crazy big businesses, they filed bankruptcy before. So is that what I'm really afraid of? Like being in the position that... that they were you don't want to think of that as an option yeah but it is an option you know if the worst thing in the world happens that that could be something and it's as evidenced by other successful people

It's not the end of the world that your head tells you it is. Yep. And he, so you're. Yes, you're right in alignment with him because he makes a statement there. He's not talking about putting on sunscreen, wearing seatbelts and all that stuff. He's talking about the things that you do. And this is a quote that keeps most people living lives of a fraction of their potential or to a fraction of their potential. It's playing it small, right? Like, so yes, exactly what you said is.

It's these ideas of like, oh, you're intentionally limiting yourself.

because you're not willing to take that risk and to do that thing. And I'm on board with that, right? Like I'm on board with that. We'll get to more of my side of the argument later on down. Cool. All right, so... you know moving into the introduction anything else kind of really stand out for you i mean he goes out and he outlines the seven levers so i'll go through those real quick attention time intuition constraints play failure and practice and then those are literally the seven chapters

um that make up the the bulk or you know the majority of this book and he basically unpacks each of those yeah there there was a term he used um i think it's mimesis which is wanting the same thing everyone else wants because it's what we see when we look around. When he shared that definition, I realized that I have definitely fallen into that. And I kind of...

immediately recognized the danger of it in a more clear way than I ever have. It's still like something that you have to work through, that you struggle through. Because even with like my creator business, I'm starting to get some traction and it's like, okay, so what is the next step? The next step can never be exactly what it was for somebody else. I'm realizing like my path has to be.

Unique and just even like some of the other Creator circles that I run in, you know, I've noticed like oh This is the obvious next thing for me and I get excited about it I tell somebody and they're not excited about it. I'm like, why do they just not get it? It's like no

have a totally different path and i look at their business and you know what makes them successful and i'm like that would never work for me so why am i trying to to copy them because you know they've reached a level of audience size that i'm trying to get to like and once you get over that i can tell you like the place i'm at right now is like it's exciting because there's all sorts of options yeah yeah i can see that i can see that like one thing that i never really thought about before

Um, I saw somebody online who I look up to. I've actually done coaching with this person. Um, they have a pretty big YouTube channel and they mentioned that they had a sponsor dropout and, uh, they're trying to fill it. The ideal fit is. Some sort of productivity tool. And I was like, oh, well, I have a productivity tool. So I reached out and I'm like, hey, I'd like to try, you know, a YouTube ad.

And the more I think about it, you know, the rates and things like that, um, it's, it's an investment. Right. And I, at this point in my creator journey, I wasn't looking for like, well, now's the time I really got to focus on ads, but.

to the coaching call that we had in the pro show it's a tiny experiment i can do it once i can do it for a small amount of people or for a small investment and as i'm thinking about it i'm like you know if a couple people buy it it's worth it yeah yeah yeah plus you know it gets in front of all of these other viewers that this this person has like i don't know how many other opportunities are there like that for me you know that wouldn't be a good

thing for a lot of the other creators that i look up to like they don't have a product that that would be a good good fit for but it's like a great fit for me like just the audience and the product it's it's unique for the people that he's speaking to you know it's an opportunity for him because we can do an affiliate link i'm

feel very excited about it in a way that i haven't before and i'm looking for those things for sure and the whole message of this book of like don't play it safe it's like yeah go do that stuff exactly and then you know i mean the third point, the third lever he brings up in here is intuition. It's like, I can hear it, hear you talking about it. Like there's an intuition here that's like, I'm going to learn something from this. I'm going to get.

something from this that's not just me throwing money and burning it. Something's going to come out of this. And I think that's huge. I think you have to trust that. And you've been doing this. successfully. So it's like, you got to trust that intuition. You got to go with that gut. Okay, so one last thing in the introduction, then I'm going to move us to the attention to chapter one. But he talks about the explorer.

And how if somebody's off by just a degree that thousands of miles later, that's significantly different. Right. And I see this very much in the idea of safety and the idea of like, oh, OK. So it's like, I think I need to be. this safe and like you're saying do we really need to like what's the worst that happens but because I made that decision when I was 17 or 20 or 24 or whatever it was right like now

I'm in this situation, and I'm theoretically thousands of miles away from that, and I'm playing it way more safe than I actually would need to. And I haven't reanalyzed the situation. I haven't reassessed where I'm actually at. I think that's a really powerful idea to think about. Reassess. What are the non-negotiables, if you will? Once you figure out what the non-negotiables are, anything else...

You know, is you making up the illusion of safety, making up the idea of like, oh, I have to do these other things in order for it to be it to be safe. So I thought that was a really good mental framing for for what we're doing. Yeah. One of the.

the things that came to mind with that section for me is that when it comes to safety there is this huge unintended emphasis on the value of the sunk cost and he doesn't describe it this way but I have a economics degree so that's where my mind went it's like oh sunk cost fallacy

Yeah, you should just not take that into consideration and figure out what the right thing to do right now is. But what you're describing is that, and I've totally given into that before either. I've been doing this for a while. I've got all this momentum. just the name sunk cost fallacy when i thought of it that way this time around it was like obviously you need to chuck all that stuff it doesn't matter

But I spent all this money and I got the degree and doesn't matter if it was the right thing to do then. Like, that's great. It's probably still going to be the right thing to do.

now but if it wasn't the right thing to do then just digging in is going to make you more miserable so i i say it that way not to like pick on on you because i know like where you are like there are requirements and you have to have the degrees right you mentioned like the phd and stuff like that but for other people who are in that situation

I don't know, like I went to a private school. I assumed a whole bunch of of student loans that eventually I got out of. But I can see how like that sort of thing is like, oh, I got to see this through. and that that could very much be the wrong decision it could be the right decision too to be perfectly clear but just because you have made that decision previously does not mean

That is the right decision for you right now, dear listener. Yeah, for sure. All right, so we're going to move on to Lever 1. So Lever 1 is attention, and he calls it a superpower. So Lever 1 is attention, the superpower. He hits on... your one of your favorite

uh favorite people uh victor frankel right so i i was like oh mike mike's gonna be happy that he he touched victor frankel and mihali cheeks at mihali in the same chapter i didn't remember the second one but the first one i was uh i pegged so he calls out a bunch of different things in this chapter, but one of the things I thought was really interesting is he gives you a series of ways to focus your attention.

Meditation, mindfulness, prayer, journaling, gratitude. Again, I thought you would connect really, really well with that because these are things that I've heard you talk about either through... the library or through one of your courses or focused. I like that the idea of ditch the shiny object syndrome and focus on the one thing. I think the reason why I like that so much is because I think that's where I struggle. I struggle a little bit with that shiny object syndrome.

And then figuring out what is the one thing like what's the what's the one thing I'm going to focus on. And interestingly, like for me, where this is strange is it's not really with my day job. Like that's easy. Like I'm going to focus on the one thing. And what is that? That is helping the students learn as much as they can and helping them grow and personally develop as much as they can. Boom. Easy. Done.

check you know it's like but when it comes to these creative things on the side my goodness you want to talk about shiny object syndrome and like not having a one thing like i'm all over the place so um yeah so attention Yeah, there's definitely a focus on attention. He gives you three ways to practice paying attention, paying attention to your body, paying attention to the people around you, paying attention to your environment.

He talks about the different kinds of distractions and what we pay attention to expands. But the quote that he shared from here that really stands out to me from this section is from Andy Warhol. where he says, don't think about making art, just get it done. let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. And while they are deciding, make even more art, which I like that, that quote. And the emphasis there is on just make the thing.

As I shared with you in the pro show, though, I think there's another element to this that is a little bit missing. And that's kind of like the make noise, listen for signal. If you're going to use this, you mentioned the side hustle. creative pursuit but i think for anybody who's testing things recognizing what sort of impact it has is important So I agree with this, you know, focus on doing the thing and recognize that being able to direct your attention is.

kind of a superpower but also something you're going to be practicing the rest of your life he talks about how it's a lifelong practice later in this this uh this chapter but if you're trying to make something online let's say You do need to see what resonates with people. That's a data point. That's not the only data point. It's not the only thing that you pay attention to. Sometimes you just want to make something because it's stirring in your soul and you got to get it out there.

But I want to call that out because there's a lot of emphasis on that in here. And then one of my action items comes from this chapter as well, which is kind of to the point of that quote, you know, we tend to worry about. What other people think about what we do and maybe it's not the right people. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're trying to make something for somebody, you have an audience that you're trying to reach and you're trying to sell them something that.

you know solves a problem that they have you do need to care what they think but there are lots of people who are who will freely share their opinions and their iqs online and you shouldn't necessarily Listen to all of those. So one of my actions is to create that short list of people whose opinion of you really matters. And I like to tie into that. He talks about here deciding who you will let down.

And being okay with the fact that you're going to let some people down and you can't get away from that. No matter what you do, no matter how you try to hit everybody with everything that they need, you're never going to do that. It's never going to happen. So you're going to let somebody down, figure out who it is, figure out who you're okay with letting down. And then I think to tie to your action item, essentially like...

make that list and rank them and be like, okay, if I let these people down, I'm going to be really, really bummed. If I let these people down, I'm going to be bummed, but it's going to be okay. If I let these people down, I could... really not care about that at all you know and that's that's totally fine and i think like having like those tier you know the tier list of people the tier list of letdowns um i think would be good mike what did you think about the flashlight um metaphor

Do you remember the flashlight metaphor? It's basically... I'm a little foggy still, sorry. Okay, so attention's like a flashlight. You can choose where to focus it, right? So you think about a flashlight not having a super wide beam, but having one of the more narrow, narrow beams.

And it's like, oh, if I'm in a really dark, completely pitch black room, if I shine it on that thing, my attention is on the thing I shined it on. And nothing else, everything else kind of goes away. Whereas in our world anymore, it's almost as if like... everybody is lit up all the time or all the things are lit up all the time and we have a really hard time focusing on that. Did that resonate with you at all? Kind of. So when I think of a flashlight...

I don't think I heard him describe it this way, but I've definitely heard people talk about this way. You can adjust the focus so it can cast like a real wide light and then it doesn't. really light up anything or you can really focus it. But I actually would take that even further. In fact, I preached a message at my church not too long ago about the power of focus and like a laser beam, you know, because that is essentially focused light.

And it's really powerful when you can focus it on a single point. But if you can't focus it on a single point, like it really doesn't have much power or impact. So I... like the the metaphor but i didn't think actually his version of it was as powerful as it could have been okay okay all right good so definitely agree with it though yeah anything else on attention or are you ready to move to level two

lever two no let's go to lever two okay uh so lever two is time um time the magic of uh presence um and basically He is very, very similar to our last book where he talks about the fact that time management is broken. It doesn't work. So try to stop doing that. The old adage where time expands or contracts depending on the activity that we're doing, you tie this into flow states and you tie this into procrastination. So you can make a bunch of ties there.

I like the idea of infinite games versus finite games, where the finite game is like a game of chess and you have a clear winner and it's over at a certain time. And essentially what we want to be thinking about is infinite games and the fact that like... Really, we just want to keep moving forward. How are we going to keep moving forward? Where we're going to put our attention is going to be how we're going to keep moving forward.

So there's a bunch of good experiments here. We get in, or sorry, not experiments. I was looking at my next point. There's a bunch of good insights in here. One of them being the tiny experiment. Like how do I run the tiny experiment? How do I do that next thing that's going to help me learn? going to teach me about kind of where I want to go in this infinite game that I'm playing. Yeah.

Can tell you there's a couple things that were really impactful for me from this chapter, but I don't think they were the same things that That stood out to you. Okay, one of them is the concept of being a time billionaire He said that A billion seconds is roughly 31 years. And he said, most of us who are reading this book are time billionaires. And he uses that as a point.

to to support the point that he's making that we need to stop thinking about you know time being short and he actually says that the saying life is short kind of implies we can't afford to make any mistakes and i sort of agree with that so he wants us to disconnect from that he wants us to recognize that we have more time than we think we do and we can transform our relationship with time by being deliberate about what we do and how we do it

So I think that's a really cool idea. It's very much like you mentioned, complimentary to the book that we covered last time. And then he gives in here a whole bunch of triggers, which were from Stephen Kotler from the Flow Research Collective. I actually documented all of these in my mind map notes. There's internal triggers, there's external triggers.

creative flow triggers and group flow triggers and the idea here being you know flow is this elusive state we're trying to get into we've heard it takes so much time to get into a state of flow and i like these as like

maybe you can just use these to get into flow faster and create it you know kind of on demand that that's a cool idea i don't know what exactly to do with that i don't have an action i'm associated with that but i do have an action item associated with the story that he told at the beginning with the

friend that he was working with and i forget the person's name but um they were a successful business person you know and at dinner one night um someone asked him so what's your thing and he doesn't have a good answer it's like well and i forget the specifics of the story um like was he working on wall street or something and he's like living the new york nightlife or something you know i don't remember at all either so

Yeah, but then like he was struck when someone asked him like so what's your thing? He's like well basically I don't have a thing I do what all these other people do, but what I really want to do is this other thing, you know So I want to have an answer for the question, what's your thing? Now, when I was in Boise about a month ago, maybe a little more than that, recording the videos for the Creativity Flywheel course and then also the PKM stack course.

I bumped into Clay Herbert. He was there with Nathan Berry recording like a case study thing for his his course or for his podcast episode. And so. i was talking to him in like the little lobby thing you know we were both just like hanging out i stepped out for a breather between my videos like

Hey, you know, I'm Mike. Oh, I'm Clay. You know, what do you do? I didn't have a real good answer for what do I do? And it turns out he's the guy who teaches your perfect intro. He's got like a TED talk on it or something, but basically like. that question of like what do you do that he helps people answer that okay so the thing that he gave me kind of like an impromptu coaching session in the lobby of the kit studios in boise

Well, because he's a he uses obsidian. He's dabbled with it. Okay, so I was like, oh well you got this life HQ thing He's like, okay, so you know, you basically help people organize their life using an app. They've probably never heard of He gave you the perfect intro in the lobby. Yeah. I don't like 100% love that, but I love the direction that that's going. And then, you know, what's your thing? It's a different version of that. So it's like, I really got to.

Pay attention to that, and I got to nail that down. I'm already kind of thinking about it anyways, so might as well make an action item out of it. Yeah, so do you see that different than an elevator pitch? no i think it probably it probably is the same sort of thing but clay herbert has a framework for it which is really good and then in the podcast episode they did with nathan barry he's talking about

you help people verb their noun, right? So what is the thing that you help people do? So was that in this book as well? I think I have it later on in my notes about, you know, something. It was the doing the verb then allowed you to be the noun. Was it like Maya Angelou writing? I'm pretty sure it was Maya Angelou writing. And that was the verb denoun thing, which I thought that was a really clever turn of phrase as well. And like, it's really meaningful.

yeah so i don't know like i'm sure that's like one piece of clay's thing like i haven't actually watched the the video from him i've been scrambling it's been on my list like i gotta check this guy out you know follow him on whatever network he's on i don't know I think he might actually be at Craft & Commerce this summer. You've got to come to that, by the way. I know. You've told me that, and I need to figure out if I can and what the plan would be. They've got dates.

let's get you there okay um okay so there's something oh here's here's another question for you in this in this section um i'll go first but what is your if you had a flow trigger What is the one that works the most effectively for you if you have one? So I can tell you mine right now. would be to throw my over the ear headphones on. It has to be over the ear headphones. It can't be in earbuds. It's got to be over the ear headphones. And it's to put on some sort of music with no words.

So it could be like chill step. It could be a soundtrack. What I've actually been getting into lately is video game soundtracks that like. there's something about them and the repetitive nature choice yeah like the repetitive nature of them um that um man i put those on and like really really quickly

I'm doing meaningful work. I'm focused. I'm doing meaningful work. I'm not worried about if anybody's knocking on my door or if anybody's going to come in. The email tends to disappear and float away. That's a very effective flow trigger or flow state.

inducer if you will for me do you have one um not like that well okay so the flow triggers that he lists here i think are a little bit different than what you're talking about so i have different things in my environment that i try to use to create flow one of them is i go to the co-working space to do all my writing because sitting in that co-working space is just a better

environment for that kind of thing and i'm more creative when i'm when i'm there um but in terms of the triggers that he listed here i was thinking about that like which one am i actually going to use and i don't know that there's a whole lot of these i like okay okay uh a lot of them are kind of like it's great when you get there but it's it's hard to do that like i don't know i don't

like to go into a task if i don't know exactly what it's going to be but novelty is one of those triggers so i have experienced that does that mean that i want to use that tactically i don't know risk is another one

you know kind of like impending deadlines are a version of this in my opinion where you put off a task until you absolutely have to get it done and now there's a risk like you get into it and it's more involved than you thought it was going to be and you're not going to get the thing done before you have to present it on monday yeah as a random example yeah exactly but uh but i do that sometimes you know i don't really know how to how to do these i think the thing

Out of these that I really want to figure out a way to implement is the challenge part You know, what are the things where my skills are required for the task at hand and that kind of gets into the delegation stuff if I just pick the tasks that challenging for me I think I'll do better work I'll do like higher quality work I also think I'll probably do less of it because it'll be

heart yeah it's gonna zap my energy that makes sense so and then if you tap if you tap rest into that too you'll need to build in more rest to your schedule right like if you're doing really really hard work you got to build more rest in um you know so so that's good too all right um If you're good with it, lever three. All right, so lever three is intuition, the art of trusting yourself. Now...

I have a love-hate relationship with this chapter, and that's probably too strong. But you know what I mean? There are aspects of this chapter that I really, really like, and there are aspects of this chapter that are just too fluffy and ethereal for me. But that's okay. We'll move through. So it's really this idea of like, hey, what is...

your intuition telling you. And it's like, I know this is true. I know that like there are situations where, you know, you get that gut feeling. You get that thing that's like, okay, hold on. Something's off here. Like something's going on. Like I can tell you this week I have one.

I have a strong... uh one i had one two weeks ago right that ended up turning out to be exactly what i thought it was going to be so it's like i know this is true and i know this is here so let's get into what the chapter actually talks about more but um so he's got these signs of intuition quote unquote speaking or signs that you're feeling this intuition. So body signals.

um tense looseness gut feeling um immediate impressions right so that he he quotes the the hell yes or no right like i'm either gonna really do that thing or nope i'm i'm not doing it at all Past experiences, the energy alignment, what feels right, what produces your energy, emotional alignment, like the idea of rightness or wrongness or happy or sad, not quiet. So, you know, like.

How am I being mindful and being quiet and just listening to what's going on in my... subconscious if you will if you could even do that um and then like the athletic mind um and i love that he pulls the the pulls the yoda out of here right do or do not there is no try right like i think these are a really like good way to to wrap your head around this

He talks about the map and the compass, right? And the map is the rational, non-intuitive, non-intuitive thing. The compass is then the intuitive. I think I should be moving in this direction. You are smiling like ear to ear. So I'm really, really intrigued at what you're going to say right now. Go ahead. Yeah. So every once in a while, we'll read one of these books and I'm like, this is a really good book. And then they'll explain something that I think I explain.

better. And I'm like, I should write a book. You know, you've said this in the last, like probably three months, I think you've said this at least two or three times, right? About. Yeah. Which is, which is honestly hard for me to say.

publicly because I'm not that type of person who just naturally thinks that I'm better than other people at these things. But I have been talking about how you need a map and not a compass for literally years. Yes, I know you have. I've heard you say this for years. Yes. And in the back of my mind, you know, the thing is like, this makes sense to me, but is it really, you know, does it make sense to other people? And then I see other people talk about it and I'm like,

Man, I missed my chance. Nope. That's not true. I didn't actually miss my chance. But yes, all that to say, like the difference between a map and a compass, this is a really important idea. I guess I'll just go into like my version of this for a minute, if that's okay. Because yeah, like you, what you really need is not to have it all planned out. That's his his big point when he's talking about intuition is like.

the there's one way to approach things which is you've got the gantt charts and you know exactly when each part of the thing is going to be done and the waterfall method of project planning you're going to ship it by this date which means that you'll probably ship it about

It's going to take twice as long and cost about twice as much. But, you know, you can think that way or you can think, you know, I think I should go this direction. And so this this metaphor has resonated with me for a long time. Because this has been my creator path. Just the real brief version of this. I was working with the family business. I was basically going to take it over. And I.

got this itch to write a book. I had no idea how to write a book. I had always hated writing in English class in high school, but I figured, you know, if I'm going to write a book, I better start writing. So I did the thing that I told you to do in our coaching session. I started writing and publishing every day before I went to the office.

I did that for two weeks. I got connected with Asian Efficiency. They posted about a job that they were offering and I didn't want a full-time job, but I wanted to guest post. And they said, well, we don't really do anything like that, but if you have some samples of your work, send it over. So I did. They liked it.

that led to a part-time position they offered me full-time initially i said no then i eventually joined that team joined the blanc media team and all of that has led to where i am today but the path has been writing i never wanted to do that oh i guess i want to write and then

podcasting oh I don't want to do that because it's live and it's scary and okay I guess I want a podcast and then it was video presentations video courses which is you know even scarier than podcasting and then it was live presentations and then it was speaking in front of people not just over zoom like this you know at each point you know i was doing something that i didn't ever want to do and when i did it i realized oh that's the thing that made me come alive so i took a step

and then i looked around and i saw what is tangentially connected to this what is the uh there's a term for this from one of those stephen johnson books the adjacent possible okay now i walked into this room And now what doors are open to me? Oh, that looks kind of interesting. And I guess I'll open that one. And you have no idea where those are going to lead you. And if you are not going to play it safe...

You absolutely cannot have the plan figured out at the beginning because you have no idea where it's going to end up. All you can do is know this is the next step. So, yeah, you don't need a map. You need a compass, which is going to say this is the right direction. Take the next step. And as you do that, the path before you is going to become clear. I think you need to create an action item from this book that is sit down.

At least twice between now and the next recording. And think about this book. And think hard about this. Because this thing is in you. Now, is it the right time for it to come out of you? That might be a whole nother story, but it's like, this thing is in you, Mike, right? Like you want to do this. Like you really have this because you've talked about it. And I don't, I don't say that in any negative way at all. So don't hear that as a negative.

thing at all but it's like it's one of those things that just like randomly finds its way to seep out of you right in in as we're talking about things Well, so this is the high ticket offer in a nutshell is like helping people do this. And that's why I was struggling with, do I just focus on writing? Cause I don't think that's the version of it. I have experienced podcasting. I have experience with YouTube. I think people got to start with.

writing but then you find a different avenue for like the the right way for you to express this stuff so like i don't want to get so uh so defined as like ship 30 is for writing through social media and write a passage is you know writing online like that's an element of it but my unique version of this is really walking out

because i believe everybody is creative so people who want to create something and they want to make money online doing this thing you know i will help you walk this out by kind of walking the path of

the compass and not the map with you. Yeah. You'll, you'll help them. You'll help them direct the compass, right? Like, so you're, yeah, yeah. And there's frameworks we can use to help figure out, you know, what is the right thing? What is the wrong thing? You know, all that kind of stuff. You're, you're.

helping them orienteer, right? If you, if you will, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I, I mean, I love it. Okay. So let's get back into the, into the chapter. So we're, we're into intuition. I have an action item coming out of this. So Chase. challenges you to spend time thinking about an idea that excites you each day, right? And I think this is one of my action items is, what is the thing that excites me?

And then what does that mean? What do I do about it? Do I take action on it? Why does it excite me? What's the motivation behind it? So I want to do this because I think it combines... um the the previous few chapters right and and wraps this up really really well into an actionable thing

I'm gonna put my attention on it intentionally. It doesn't have to be the same thing, but it's going to be something that excites me every day, right? And then when I look back over those, when I do a review of those, are there commonalities, right? Like, oh, well, for the last two weeks or month or two months or whatever.

it is. I've been excited about this type of thing, whatever that type of thing is. What does that mean? What does that look like? So you're going to put your attention on it. You're going to give it time. So I'm going to do it daily. I'm going to give it time. And then I'm going to, through a review process or through the process, I'm going to see.

like what bubbles up with this intuition so I really really liked the way I don't think he necessarily brought it together tying it back to attention and time as well as he could have but like I really like the way those three those three ideas kind of come into this one action item where he challenges you to spend time thinking about something awesome love it okay anything else on intuition or are you ready to jump to chapter four

Let's talk about constraints. Okay, constraints. So, constrain to retrain. That is the subline. Now, he immediately, or very, very early in the chapter, hits on Edward DeBoto's... creative ideation process okay so you know we have a tie back into that from bookworm um i think that might have been the first book we did i don't remember for sure but i remember that was like right at the beginning you oh you and i

Yeah, the Six Hats. We did the Different Colored Hats book, yes. So he's got other books. De Bono's got other books. And I think what he calls it is lateral thinking. I think that's the phrase that he quote-unquote coined. and termed and kind of what made him famous was this idea of lateral thinking. But it's this creative ideation process. So I like that, that he tied into one of the...

You know, this book was really on target for Bookworm and the Bookworm audience. I mean, it really, really was on target. And for us. Yeah, for sure. So then he goes into these four different types of constraints, right? You have self-imposed constraints, externally imposed constraints.

perceived constraints, and then environmental constraints. And each of those has sub pieces underneath it. I'm not going to go into the sub pieces because that'll just take too long and be boring. But it's like, I like these four different categories. It's like, how am I constraining myself? How am I?

utilizing external constraints. How am I thinking about perceived constraints and how am I thinking about environmental constraints? And like what, um, what I like about this is it's oftentimes we hear the word constraint and we think bad.

you know like constraint like we think it's oh we're not doing everything we could do or there's something that's holding us back or whatever it is and i don't think that's that's the case he makes that that statement constraints limit breath which creates space for depth and interesting results. And I think reframing it that way is a great way to think about constraints. It's giving me the space to go deep in something because I'm constraining the outside or I'm constraining things around it.

I like this idea. I actually don't like this chapter a whole lot because I don't think he does the idea of constraints justice.

uh the the example here is that the four different types of constraints that he shares there's the four different categories that you talked about and then there's a whole bunch that he describes some of these are just purely negative like financial strain that's not a lack of money that is the stress that comes from not being able to afford things That is something that should absolutely be removed when at all possible.

Yeah. Can you think of a good application of financial strain or an unhealthy lifestyle? Okay. That's another one that he mentions. Okay. So I don't know if that was rhetorical or not, but I'm thinking about this from a business standpoint. What I'll say is there are certain situations where, let's say, we could go buy this new fancy machine for $750,000.

But the business right now can't afford $750,000 capital output. So what are we going to do? We're going to try to think and brainstorm really, really hard about other creative ways to solve that problem. And we end up coming to a solution that changes like the process, right? I'm thinking very industrial and systems engineering right now. Sure. But that allows us to then be more creative long term.

or more efficient long term than it would have been which was the easy button just pushing buying that 750 000 machine that would have allowed us to do the thing so it's like but i don't know if that's getting at what you're what you're getting at because you're you went well I'll give you that one then. But what about like an unhealthy lifestyle? Like that is not a constraint. That is a problem to be solved. Right. A messy, cluttered or uninspired living situation.

That's something you should change. And I feel like when you talk about constraints, I agree with the premise. When you are trying to figure out what to do, sometimes having specific constraints. helps you get more creative in defining potential solutions. That is why I love the whole idea of mental models. Mental models are basically applying constraints.

by looking at something from a particular perspective and ignoring the other data points so maybe that's what he's talking about here is like you may have these constraints and you recognize like you've really been leaning into the financial strain one or an unhealthy lifestyle one or whatever but that's not really that big a deal you can fix that so discard those for a moment and think about the other ones but that's not how the list is

presented. And one of the things that I jotted down is that the self-imposed constraints are a powerful point of leverage on the path of overcoming any challenge. Now, those are self-imposed constraints. That's one category out of the four. So maybe... he's that's the one he's telling us to look at as opposed to the the other ones are just kind of you know they are what they are and they're they don't belong in the same category but i don't know i just feel like the message of this chapter

While I agree with the idea and I think it's really powerful, it seemed a little bit muddy. Yeah, I can see that now. Yeah. Yeah, I didn't pick up on that while I was reading. But that actually makes sense as I look through these four different types of constraints. It's almost like the self-imposed and the externally imposed are more positive.

you know what i mean like like they're going to help us out more and then the perceived and the environmental are those that you want to get rid of yeah like i'm processing what you're saying out loud right now this is i see that

Yeah, that's all I got for this one, though. I like the emphasis of hustle culture never ending because I feel like some of the stories that he shares, I don't know. I think it's probably not where he is right now. But as he shares his story, you definitely get the vibe that. He was in that. Oh, yeah, for sure. So it's nice to hear him say, you know, that's not the ideal. Yeah, I agree. I agree. So I'm ready to move on to lever five play.

He titles it the most important work we do. So play, he describes it as the fuel of life. He talks about the fact that, you know, we get it. essentially like driven out of us this idea of play to become more serious and you know that happens by you know we shouldn't be doing those things we should be sitting down and doing getting our work done and we should be focusing and we should do all of those things

Not to go too far on a tangent here, but this is a big reason why we homeschool. And this is a big reason why I'm a proponent of homeschool is because... We do a lot of actual schooling. My wife does a ton of actual schooling during the day. But we are able to intermix it with the kids going and playing and the kids coming back and then doing more work and then going and playing. And I have four boys and with boys.

I mean, that's huge, right? Like especially young boys, like to try to lock them down to a chair and say, you're going to focus for the next six hours of the day with like a lunch break. It's just not realistic. But to say, hey, we're going to take 15 minutes and we're going to learn spelling. And then you're going to get to go and play with Legos for 15 minutes. And then you're going to come back and we're going to do this other thing. It's just so much more natural in my mind.

for an effective way. And then the other thing we don't get is, I mean, they don't hate it. They don't hate the idea of doing things and learning. So I didn't want to go down too far in a rabbit hole, but I know you homeschool as well. So I don't know if you have anything that you want to say on that. Not with the homeschooling thing in particular, but he does mention that when you were a kid, no one needed to tell you how to play. Yeah.

again this is you know a different version of this is something that i've talked about for years i remember presenting this at at max stock and uh saying that when you were a kid no one needed to teach you how to be creative and there were some people who came and and pushed back on that but i think it is generally true that when you give a kid a box of crayons

they are uninhibited so i that this actually like made the connection for me where creativity and play are actually connected why because when you play you don't really care what comes out of it you're just having fun in the moment and with creativity that i think the thing that keeps people from being creative is not wanting to lose not wanting to be wrong

not wanting to have someone look at something that you made and say, this is garbage. So there's this quote that I love by Hugh McLeod that goes something along the lines of, when you get to... We're all born creative. And then when you get to school, they replace your crayons with boring books on algebra and history.

And being struck with the creative bug years later is just a wee voice inside saying, I'd like my crayons back. So like, I kind of like to think of myself as an enabler for people to ask for their crayons back. Because I really do think like we've all got something in us. We have a unique way to create and everybody should tap into that because there's so many benefits that come.

from it i feel like the benefits of being creative are very similar to the benefits of of playing and it kind of struck me as i was thinking about this really you know if you were to condense it play is really just the the perspective that you should have towards your work and as you play with it you are naturally creative i think um also also i had an action item here though because uh i was a little bit mortified when i considered

Uh, what do I do for fun? Okay. Okay. I'm not sure. I mean, there are things that I enjoy doing. Like I enjoy going for runs and things like that. But at this point, I feel like I do that. kind of because I want to stay healthy and it feels good. It's not just something that it's like, I'm going to go do whatever the heck I feel like doing right now. I don't know what that would be.

Uh, I struggled with this actually a little bit the last couple of days being sick because I'm sick. Like if there was ever a time to just lay in bed and do what you want, it would be now. but i found my mind racing is like well when am i going to get this screencast online module done and how am i going to prep for the life theme cohort session that we have to do and what am i going to do about the podcast recordings that i'm supposed to do on

Monday and Tuesday. I had so much trouble quieting that down and just like watching a movie or whatever. And I think I need something that I just do for fun. I don't know what it is, so ask me next time. And I and... chase jarvis would agree with you uh play utterly destroys anxiety right like and you're in that situation where you need some play so you can overcome and utterly destroy um that anxiety

I didn't know and I should have, right? But I was taken back by the fact that there's the National Institute for Play, right? I was like, oh, what a cool institute. I mean, that's a pretty awesome institute. And I like the concept he has here where he says work becomes work because of our orientation towards it. And I think about that in my classes.

I think this is, it's not going to turn into a formal action item, but this is something that like, I want to keep stewing on. I think as I, as I go through is like, how do I make more of my classes like play where.

the students are going to learn just as much. It's just not going to feel like work. It's going to feel like, oh, we're playing with this problem. We're trying to solve it. We're playing with the software and we're trying to do it. And I understand I'm never going to hit every student, right? There's still going to be students that walk into there and they're going to be like,

I don't like this. I never liked it. I didn't like it before I walked into this class. I read the description and I don't like it. But how can I orient my schooling, my teaching, and what I'm doing with my university students to be more like play? I think that's what I want to do because I learn a ton through that. Like, oh, I want to get better at video editing. What am I going to do? I'm going to shoot some video. I'm going to play around with it.

I don't care if it's any good or not. I'm just going to play around with trying to figure out how to make cool transitions and put some background music behind it. So how can I do that? I think that's something I want to do in my formal teaching as well. Awesome.

All right. So lever six, let's move on to failure, failure, a feature, not a bug. Now, Mike, before we start this one and we talk about this one, was this chapter longer and did it feel longer than the other chapters or did I make that up? because it was an interesting part of my week but i felt like this chapter was like twice as long as every other chapter and i could have just made that up well

I feel like the beginning chapters were fairly long. I do think this one, I do have tons of notes for this one, not that many from the previous one. I think this is also the best chapter in the whole book. Okay, okay. For reasons being that it's a unique take on failure. So it would be very easy to share all of the platitudes about failure.

how it's necessary and you got to go through it but he kind of calls out the problem with that that i have experienced and so when i read this i really felt seen and i feel like he's probably speaking to a lot of people When he talks about how, yeah, it's true that without failure, there's no success and it may be necessary for growth, but it still feels awful. Yes. So you're going to naturally try to avoid it.

and when you just talk about it intellectually words on a page it's kind of like oh yeah you know all these successful people say jocko says you know even mentions extreme ownership in here that uh you just gotta just gotta go through it and uh It's not that easy because it still sucks. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So he talks about making it a frenemy. I like that framing a lot. Yeah. So it's not something that's just going to become your buddy along the.

the journey which is sort of the vibe i get when i hear other people talk about it he's like it's gonna have to be there and it's unfortunate but you can still kind of get some good out of it and i feel like just that framing kind of

changes the whole discussion about it for me. So I did a lot of work in the entrepreneurship community and entrepreneurship education community in the past. And like one of the things that... at the time everybody would say is fail forward fast fail forward fast fail forward fast right and he reframes this and he basically is like it's not fail fast

try not to fail, right? Which is something that always bothered me. It's like, well, we're going to like, we're going to try to fail, but it's like, try not to fail, but it's the idea of recover quickly. And like there. Yeah. And that, then he gets into the MVP stuff, which has always kind of bugged me about that fail fast thing too, because MVP is not, you know, failing, shipping a bad version of something. It's finding that balance between the speed and the quality.

Yeah. So I really like this idea of instead of fail forward fast, it's recover quickly from inevitable failure. It's going to happen. You don't want it to happen. If you can make it out without... Without failing, great. Do that. That's what you want to do. But then when it happens, learn and recover quickly. Learn and recover quickly. And I really like that reframing. Just to...

to kind of give a summary or like a little bit of an overview of the chapter. He talks about three basic types of failure, sorry, three types of failure, basic, complex, intelligent. I'd never heard anybody. pitch failure in that way. So I think those were interesting. He gives you five rules for failing. Don't fail or quit before you actually fail. Don't fail to suck. Fail a lot.

fail fast, and then fail publicly. So he gives you these ideas. So he not only throws... higher level like meta thoughts about failure out there but then he also like kind of says okay now when we fail here's what we should do classify it as a type of failure, and then here are some things that you don't want to do or that you want to do as it relates to failure.

I'll throw out here before I turn it back over to you for your thoughts. Rejection therapy, try and fail 100 plus times to desensitize yourself from failure. Now, this one I think is really, really interesting. Because again, he's not saying try to fail a hundred times. He's saying, try a bunch of things. You're going to fail a bunch of them. Sum that up to some big, large number of failures and then just be like, okay.

I'm still alive. I'm everything's fine. Like nothing broke majorly and we're just going to keep plugging on and failure is going to be part of life and I'm okay with it. Yeah. And you shared a story of, I forget the person's name, but they basically were, we're just going to try to get. a whole bunch of no's so they started asking for ridiculous things like a ride in a cop car and he walked into the donut shop he wants five donuts in the shape of the olympic rings and he wants it for free

You know, and he was blown away that people actually started saying yes. Yep, yep, yep, yep. That was a good story. Yeah, I think that is... That is powerful. That's sort of coupled with the one other thing that I got out of this is that the thing that keeps us from trying again is not failure itself. It's the fear of failure. It's the fear of hearing the no. And so.

Yeah, that's probably something that I could practice. I did not capture an action item from that specifically, but I can definitely see the benefits of that practice. Okay, so we've reframed failure. Now let's go to lever seven and let's practice. So practice success leaves clues. So he's big on practice here. He's got three pillars of practice, the fundamentals, the process.

and the Identity, 10 Principles of Practice. And different to some of the other books we've read, I didn't feel like these like... these principles these lists or whatever were like listicle styles they were much more like just things to think about like as you're as you're thinking about this big idea of practice or as you're thinking about this big idea of failure here are some ways to

I don't know, operationalize, maybe, maybe a word or just like, you know, like put a framework around it, which I really liked that it wasn't listically. It was more frameworky that, that, you know, it was valuable to me, but he's got these 10 principles of practice. So. I don't want to go through them all that we can hit ones if you want to. Then I get an action item out of this chapter. So every day for 30 days straight, write down what you want and how you want to be.

Commit to taking no longer than two minutes for this exercise. Just check your gut and spit out the answer. Every day refine it. Get clearer and take action towards your answer. So write down what you want and how you want to be. And I thought that was a... really interesting you know action item to come out of uh out of this chapter on practice yeah that was the action item that he gives you at the end of the book and i was kind of like no

But when I read it, I was like, I wonder if Corey's going to do that. Why did you go now? Because it feels to me like a different path towards a life theme. Okay. And I feel like I've got the clarity of that already. But I think that that's a cool way of framing it. And that probably feels a little bit more approachable. I don't think that gets you all the way there, but it definitely helps you.

It helps create, it helps move you in the right direction. I like this chapter a lot. I also have an issue with this chapter because he talks about deliberate practice and he mentions Anders Ericsson. And Anders Ericsson wrote the book Peak, which I really liked that book. He also kind of attributes Anders Ericsson with the idea of the 10,000 hours to become a master.

i didn't you know in the moment go back and and look at this but that feels off to me because having red peak the whole idea there is that how you practice matters and i think he even talks about how the 10 000 hours is a myth i think malcolm gladwell is the one who talked about that with the violinists now it becomes ten thousand dollars to become a master but i believe in that book andrews erickson kind of blows that up by saying

If they just go in a room and they practice sloppy or whatever, they're disengaged, they're not going to reach that level of proficiency. And actually, if you're deliberate about your practice, you can get to a level of mastery much quicker than the 10,000 hours.

Now I could be totally off with that. I read that book years ago, but that's the thing that sticks with me from that. So I feel like it's a little bit misattributed here and the 10,000 hours idea in general that he's talking about and how you really need to practice. is a little bit misguided. It really doesn't take away from his point. It really just stuck out to me because I have all of this context from other books that I've read. I'm probably the only person.

On the planet. It was like... I was going to say, I read it and I'm familiar with what you're referencing, but it didn't bother me. Not at all. I didn't think about it once. I was like, all right, whatever. Yeah, so there's that. But... the other thing that really stands out to me from this and i love this and is a big reason why i feel like me and chase jarvis should be friends okay he mentions that imagination plus action

equals identity and this is the second time in this book where i feel like he's talking about something that i talk about but i like the way that he frames this better so i actually have my pkm stack framework and when i went to boise and i recorded those videos

I reworked that framework because the top level, I actually changed it this time to identity. And the way that I talk about that, just real briefly, the PKM stack framework, you got information at the bottom level, stuff you don't have to do anything with. Then there's the ideas.

Those are things that you could potentially do something with. You got to figure out which ones are worth taking action on. Above that is the actions level. If you live a default life, you just are exposed to all this information that people throw at you.

determines the quantity and the quality of ideas that you have and the actions of projects you engage with not happy with the results change the process start from the top which is the identity and i that's the vision and the values and as i've been talking through this

with people i'm explaining this is like this is anchored in who you are but also who you want to become so my life theme cohort that we're going through right now one of the steps in there is help people create an image of their ideal future what would it look like if you had an abundance of life

So think big and then act small. How can you start living out pieces of that ideal future right now and moving in that direction? And he very succinctly describes what I've been trying to tell people to do in that life theme cohort.

Use your imagination, then take action on it. And then that becomes your identity. So that is the thing, you know, he's talking about habits in this book too. I think that's not in this chapter. That might've been a previous chapter. The identity-based habits. It's in this chapter.

It's in this chapter. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Identity is an incredibly powerful alignment tool for shaping our habits. Yeah. So he alludes to Atomic Habits by James Clear and great book. But I really like just that formula. Imagination plus action.

equals identity and i feel like framed that way it's exciting at least to me it's like my identity yeah there are you know there's there's uh There's a history there and there is decisions that I've made that have created the environment that I find myself in, but it's not set in stone. It's sort of like I was watching Back to the Future the other day when I was sick. And then the third one, you know, Marty's girlfriend comes back with the note from the future. He's like, it's erased.

And Doc's like, of course it's erased. No one's future has been written yet. That's the kind of picture I get with this. And it feels very enabling. I feel like it's exciting to me. And I hope that at the end of this book, this is the perfect place. to give people permission to go change their future now and and he i mean he

doubles, triples, quadruples down on that. This entire book has been in preparation to make you aware and give you a not so gentle nudge in the direction of your dreams. So he basically, I love that he like basically expresses it so clearly. He's like, I'm the whole thing I've been doing right now. is for this right here, to hit you with this right here. The last thing I have on this chapter.

is the Maya Angelou, the noun verb thing. It is in this chapter. In order to be the noun, she, Maya Angelou, did the verb. So she wanted to be a writer. So what did she do? She wrote. And it's like, that's a really cool, succinct way for me to think about if I want to be, boom, I need to that thing. Like I need to do that thing. I just really like that.

So just a point of clarification on how brilliant Clay Herbert is. Like that is, you know, what we should be thinking about as individuals, right? So Clay Herbert was talking about as a marketer. positioning your service or your product it's really when someone asks you or comes to your sales page trying to figure out what do you what are you doing you know as the the trusted guide i help people and you can define

People. So that's like a blank that you fill in. So for me, maybe it's, you know, aspiring creators verb there now. Yeah. Okay. So like they want to do the verb. They want to be the noun and then do the verb, right? But you help... these people. So you make it super clear. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm doing a bad job describing this. When I heard him describe it, I'm like, oh my gosh, that is so simple. Yeah. I'm writing this down right now because I think it's really interesting.

verb their noun, right? That's what you said. I help blank verb their noun. Yeah. Yeah. That's cool. That's really cool. Okay. Um, so we have just finished the seven levers unless you have anything else, Mike, I didn't want to. Okay. So now there is a, like, I don't know, three page, four page, something conclusion. I don't have anything to say on the conclusion. I don't know if you do or not. I don't know. I think.

Two points maybe. One of the things he says is that the unique life that you have lived has created a unique point of view. And I think that when it comes to never playing it safe, that means that you're... Career path should be unique as well. Doesn't mean it has to be completely original. No one's ever done this thing before, but how you go about it should be original and you should be creative in how you do the.

the work that you do. Um, so I guess, you know, just kind of think about, about, uh, what is the unique perspective that, that you bring to, to the work that you do. And then also he says that. life is a game where we only ever play against ourselves i think that there's a lot of temptation to compare yourself to other people when you do that you kind of enter into this

scarcity mindset and view success as a zero sum game. I think that is not accurate. I think just because somebody else has had success doing a thing. does not in any way diminish the amount of success that I can potentially have doing the exact same thing because I'm going to do it differently. If I had been there first and done the thing. My version of success would look different than whoever I tend to compare myself to. So I don't know. It's a good exhortation at the end.

Yeah, there's not a whole lot here, which I'm kind of actually glad for. Yeah, me too. I was sort of expecting. Here's a rehash of the seven different levers. you know, it was unnecessary and it's, it's not there. So that's a good thing. I remember, I remember reading it going, okay, that was good. And then it was done. And I was like, okay, I'm glad, I'm glad it's done. So action items. I have three.

No, I'm sorry. I have four that come out of this. So the one is my the one Mike gave me as part of the pro show. So I need to take something that I've written and I need to publish it online. Now I'm going to. roll this into the to the book and i'm going to say this is practice so i'm going to do practice with this so take something i've written and i have to publish it somewhere online okay my next one is um what's my thing

Like, so trying to figure out, you know, what's, what's the thing, what's the one thing that I want to, I want to talk about. Then, and I would say, what's the one thing not as a professor? because that'll define that better. Okay, then what's the one thing that excites me and what does that mean? All right, so what's the one thing that excites me? What's that mean? I need to think about that. Okay, my last one would be then every day for 30 days straight, I need to write down what I want.

and how i want to be and that will be the hardest one for me mike because remembering to do it every day for 30 days that'll be the hardest one for me and actually doing it yeah this i would encourage you to to like

Create a note where you collect all these. So I don't know where you're planning on doing it. Maybe it's just like you got a paper journal or something, no card at your desk, whatever. But make sure that you save those because it'd be cool to see how it changes throughout the 30 days. Okay, Mike, what are your action items?

All right, I have three action items. One is to create a short list of people whose opinion of me really matters. The second one is to have an answer for the question, what's your thing? And then the third one is to figure out what I am going to do for fun. And I would add to this, I think, have a plan to do this regularly.

I hesitate to add that to the action, but I feel like that's really where this is successful or not is if I figure out when I'm going to do this. So this could be, you know, more board games, video games, whatever. It's toying around with buying a steam deck. Cause they had a black Friday sale. I did not, but I'm proud of you now. Kind of wish maybe I would. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I got to find something though. That's just like not productive in the least. Okay.

All right. And then report back to me. I'm intrigued to see what you pick. I have no idea what you're going to pick. Like I really have no idea. I don't either. Okay. All right. So now let's move into style and rating. My book. So I'll start with style and rating. So I like the structure. I like the style of the book. I thought it laid out well. I think the seven levers was a good way to organize it.

I liked the integration of stories and the stories I felt like were appropriate and they weren't kind of forced or... Too long, too short, anything like that. I thought they did a good job supporting the book. I like the mix between some of the framework, theoretical, kind of like more meta stuff, and then some of the action item type stuff. I thought you got a good balance through there.

There wasn't really a point in this book where I was like, oh my goodness, I'm just so tired of listening to this. There was a little bit of... um what he calls out and we talked about this a little bit earlier in the show or at the beginning of the show right there was a little book where he calls out like hey don't immediately write yourself off like don't immediately say like this isn't for me and you know blah blah

What's interesting about that, and this is, I think, my biggest hang-up with the book or my biggest struggle with the book, is the book's called Never Play It Safe. And he talks about safety early on. But then I don't get a ton of tie to, like, safety. throughout most of the rest of the book except for maybe the failure chapter so it's like I feel like the title of the book and then the content of the book don't really match up

like super, super well for me. I don't think it's terrible. Like I don't think it's like this egregious thing where it was like, oh my goodness, I can't believe that's why I actually titled this book because it's not anything like the content of the book. But at the same time,

I just don't think it does. I don't have a better title. I don't know what I would have titled it. I like the seven levers. I think that's fine. I like the safety chapter or like the safety section where he's kind of framing this.

I just don't know if I think it's as clean from the title the whole way through the book as it would be. So that's a knock I'm going to give it from a style and rating standpoint. Now I'm going to get into the one where... I just think this is very, very different for someone who has four, five...

you know, however many children, right? Like I just think it has not started and exited like multiple companies, right? Like I just think it's different. Like I know Mike, you tried to correct me early on in the show and you're going to probably... try to correct me again, and I'm totally okay with that. I just think it's different. And I think there wasn't enough acknowledgement of that. Where you're at in life might change the way these things work. That being said, I don't think it...

impacts any of the frameworks. I don't think it impacts any of the chapters. I still think you get a lot of value out of the chapters. I think this book is good for anybody who reads it to get good valuable things out of there. about thinking about work, thinking about creativity, thinking about life, thinking about safety and how those things kind of blend together. But I wanted more of an acknowledgement of like different life.

phases or styles or choices and how that would play into it. So all of that being said, from that standpoint, I give this book a four. out of five, right? I think it was good. I think you have a benefit of reading it or it's beneficial to be read. I think it's good for the bookworm audience. I think they'll get a lot out of it. But there were a couple of things there that knock it down to a four for me.

All right. Well, I will disagree with the stage of life comment that you made at the beginning. Understood. Because I feel like I've gone through it. I think that this is an interesting book because this could totally just be my own personal journey that I went through. But the way I read this without him explicitly saying it is whatever you have been doing up until this point is likely wrong and you should rethink everything.

Do you think that's fair? Because you're in a totally different situation having read this. And I think it did not have that impact on you. And I don't think it necessarily has to, but... I think that's fair. I think that's kind of who he's writing it towards, I guess. I think that's fair. I think it's a very fair statement. Okay. So I don't know if that's good or bad. On the one hand, I feel like...

You don't want to just tell that person, hey, you should probably quit your job. But also, on the other hand... I feel a little bit more emboldened recently and I've, I've seen other people talking about this. Like the one that comes to mind for me is, um, Paul Millard with the pathless path and, and good work was kind of. alluding to that too and i think he would be more direct and say it more strongly be like hey maybe you should just chuck your job you know i feel like chase jarvis is

Playing it safe with the wording in never play it safe. Ah, interesting. Very interesting. And I don't know that that is necessarily the case. I think that there are definitely pros and cons to that. The pro is that I feel you get a more general book that has seven different levers that you can apply in a lot more broadly in terms of context. The negative of that, I think, is that the message loses some of its potency. And where he is, he's probably trying to write a book that is going to sell.

more copies maybe the first book that he writes you know that's the one where he really just sinks his whole heart into it this is the message i really want to get out into the world but it seems like your follow-up books those are the ones that especially if you're going through a publisher They're going to try and encourage you to make it more broadly palatable to more audiences. That's my not having worked with a publisher before impression of how these things would.

would go i really like his style i really like his stories i agree that you know he's talking about they don't have kids but they have a dog and it's he says it's not the same as a kid but sort of the language he uses that you can tell like he's the the one that the dog parent you know they have the bumper sticker in their car and that makes it a little bit less relatable to me uh

But I don't know. There's some really good stuff in here. The way that he talks through it is really good. I have some nitpicks with some different things. And I feel like there is a different version of this that would have come together even more solidly to support a specific point that I'm not sure he wants to make. So do I hold that against him? I don't know. Probably not.

I don't think this is a five-star book. I think there are some things in here that he sort of alludes to these powerful concepts that you can totally go much deeper in. And that's where if he's just focused on, here's how... identity-based habits is going to help you transition from the soul-sucking day job to living your passion or whatever. It's more, I don't know, that feels...

more like, well, this is a unique message and I want to lean into every word that you're saying as opposed to, oh, you're talking about identity-based habits now. I've already read something. on that, if that makes sense. Cause he mentions a lot of other books in here that speak to these different topics. So I feel like the way that you're going to, you know, if you're going to do like a general book like this, where you mentioned a whole bunch of these other.

topics where there are whole books written on them and try to bring them together you've really got to have a really specific way that you are or argument that you are making with this And that's not to say that never play it safe is not a specific argument. I think that there's a lot of good stuff in here and it'll challenge anybody in any situation.

but i think you're kind of exhibit a for why he should have maybe doubled down on some stuff because you're just kind of like ah well yeah maybe not for me because he doesn't really get it yeah yeah yeah it makes sense you know force people to do something with it If he says, if you follow the traditional path, you have been living a lie your entire life. And what you really need to do is quit your job and go do whatever because...

You know, all the things I have listed in my notes, you have more power than you realize. You can get more time than you realize. Just do the thing you really want to do. Now, someone like you, Corey, has to wrestle with like. Do I believe him or do I not believe him? Absolutely. Absolutely. And I feel like you should make people make that choice. You're like 90% of the way there. Yeah. Just.

Say the quiet part out loud. Yeah. Understood. Understood. So yeah, I think, but I, yeah, so I was going into it at the beginning. I'm like, oh man, this is totally gonna be a five-star book. Sort of lost some momentum and steam as we went. I still think it's really good. And I would encourage everybody in the bookworm audience to read it. If for no other reason, I mean, you may go through it and be like, yeah, totally not for me.

But I still think it's entertaining. I still think there's some things that he'll give you to chew on. And I still think it'll be fun. And you get a lot out of the stories that he shares. So I'll join you at the four stars. Okay. So a double four star. All right. So, Mike, what are you thinking about for the next book? The next one I'm really nervous about. We're going to read Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

And the reason I'm nervous about this one is I have a feeling I'm not going to like it a whole lot. Okay. All right. Have you started it yet? Have you picked it up yet? I've tried. Okay. All right. Cool. Yeah. I cracked it open this morning and, um, just the very like introduction on like who Marcus Aurelius was like, he's held up as this gold standard, uh, stoic philosopher.

where all of this productivity wisdom comes from and i think there's probably going to be some good stuff in there but i don't know like I just don't like that framing even at the beginning of the version that I've got. Understood. Mike, I'm trying to find it right now. Which version are we reading? Ray something, but I can't remember the last name. No, it's...

The last name is Hayes. It's got like a picture of a bird on the front. Gregory Hayes. Gregory Hayes. Okay, sorry. I was way off. So the one that I have, I have that version. I also have that same translation, but I have the fancy Ryan Holiday one. So if you're reading along, we're going to be doing the Gregory Hayes version. I personally have no idea how different the versions are, but I know that there are a bunch of them. There are a ton of translations of this and versions of this.

Yeah, because it was written in Latin, I think. Yeah. So that's another reason I'm nervous about it is like, how well is this going to translate? i'm excited i mean i'm excited even if it's a complete like absolute bomb and i don't think it's going to be but like i'm intrigued i'm intrigued for it for it so All right, and then I have the next book. So the next book is Simple Marketing for Smart People by Billy Broaz. And it's also got a tie to Tiago Forte.

Um, so, uh, they're actually, he's Tiago's, he's Tiago's marketing guy. Okay. So they're, yeah. So they're coauthors on this. Um, and I mean, full disclosure, the reason why I want to read this one is because I want to learn more about. marketing. And Mike has read this one before. And when I pitched it to me, he's like, yes, definitely. This would be a great book for both you and the bookworm audience. And I was like, all right, cool. We're in.

So before you completely write this off and you don't want to listen to that one because it's a marketing book, I will tell you this is not your standard marketing book. It's really more of a messaging and communication book. And he has a framework that we'll talk through in terms of like, how do you actually help people? We sort of talked about some of those same things even today with like the Clay Herbert stuff. It is so much not a marketing book.

In that I read through the whole thing and I loved it so much. I wanted to know what else he has done. And he mentions very briefly this larger like course that he does. but he doesn't give you the name. I spent hours trying to find the course that he does as a way to... to go deeper into this stuff why would he know right that's how like not pushy salesy it is which is what most people will think of when it comes to marketing okay all right so this is this is yeah you should listen to this one

Probably pick this one up and read it too, just for the fact that it's going to be so radically different from what you are expecting. Okay, good, good, good. Mike, do you have any gap books for between now and next time? I do. I feel a little bit bad sharing this as a gap book, but I shared something on Blue Sky, which by the way, we mentioned that we're on Blue Sky. The reason that I shared about this gap book. was that you are making an appearance in a Screencast Online video module. I am?

yeah okay cool i was showing how to i was showing how to mention people using the app croissant oh yeah and then i i like search for you because you can search for the person's name and i knew your your whole name wasn't going to be in there

so it's like oh well let's cut it off and look for hickson okay that's not there now you know ca and then with croissant it allows you to cross post to blue sky mastodon and threads so it shows like all the different options and you like tag the you select the options and then you can actually post it to three different places and have the app mentions.

be the correct app mentions in those three different places that's pretty cool yeah that's real cool yeah it's it's a cool app max stories just named it like the the app of the year i'm pretty sure for their max story selects or whatever um so anyways i mentioned this book I don't want to sound fancy, but one of the benefits of having podcasts is that occasionally people who write books that I want to read will reach out.

Anne-Laure LeCoumpf wrote a book called Tiny Experiments and her marketing director reached out to us and scheduled an interview for the Focus podcast. So we had that interview and it was amazing. And we're going to release that when the book comes out. Prior to doing those interviews, we always ask for copies of the book because I want to read through the whole thing before I talk to the author. So I did. And this book.

People, go pre-order this book right now. Okay. Let's blow this thing up and give Anne a great launch because this is a phenomenal book. I think you could probably already know what I'm going to rate it when we actually talk about it. But we do need to talk about this on Bookworm. It's not going to be out until February or March, I think.

Basically, what we got was the finished manuscript. Now they got to get them printed and all that kind of stuff. Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure de Kumpf is one that everyone who listens to Bookworm should read. man, I was thinking after I read this and like, I want to, I want to, cause it's end of the year. I was thinking about like those top books that I read this year. I want this to be the book of the year, but I can't name it the book of the year. It's not out yet.

it's so good it's so good so yeah go pre-order this one um and let's blow this up and mike how did you learn about it again I actually have followed and Laura for a long time. Okay. And I went back through my email and I realized that we had actually scheduled her to be on the focus podcast back in like episode 70 or something. She got super sick. After that, she sort of got. successful and we lost touch and she never came on the show.

I'm a paying member for her community, the Nest Labs. And so when I heard she was going to write a book, I was like, this is going to be good regardless. But it's so far exceeded my expectations. And she is just.

a super smart super thoughtful uh person like this is this is a good one and it's it's a productivity book uh but i it's very it's a breath of fresh air in uh in the productivity space i kind of felt a little bit bad going through this one because chase jarvis mentions tiny experiments a couple times right but she's got a whole different take on it it's sort of the same idea but you know She does a great job of putting this one together.

All right. So I have a... I got to stop pumping a book that's not out yet. So what are you reading? Yes, you do. Yeah. So my Gap book would be... It's a book called Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools by Tyler Staten. As you might be able to guess, it's about prayer. So I thought that was an interesting one that popped up and I'm taking a look at it. So that concludes our show. Let's put...

Let's put Never Play It Safe on the Shelf. Let's pick up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. For those of you who are interested in more, we do a pro show before. In this pro show, Mike gave me a coaching session on my creative endeavors or possible creative endeavors. It was a ton of fun to see him do a tiny experiment on coaching from a creative standpoint.

But you also get the bootleg version of the show, which gives you essentially the show from the moment we start the Zoom call. It gives it to you early. You get a bookworm wallpaper. If you're interested in those things, you can go to patreon.com slash bookwormfm. It's $7 a month and that'll get you access to the bootleg early and then the pro show, which has the additional content where we...

pick a pretty random topic and we talk about it before the main show. So thanks for listening and pick up Meditations by Marcus Aurelius for our next episode.