Why We Need to Find Awesome with Neil Pasricha

don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves us moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Neil pas Richa, an author, speaker, and host of the Apple Best Of Award winning podcast Three Books. Today, Neil and Eric discuss his fourth and final book of his New York Times million selling Awesome series, Our Book of Awesome. Hi, Neil, Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me here. It's good to be back. Yeah, it is a pleasure to have

you on. We're gonna be talking about your latest book called Our Book of Awesome, a celebration of the small joys that bring us together, and any other miscellaneous things that we come up with. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the Parable. You'll get another cut at it. I think it's this time number three, maybe, but it changes for people interestingly over

the years. So in the parable, there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says, well, which one wins,

and the grandparents says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking what does that parable mean to you? In your life and in the work that you do today. The message I get from the parable, honestly, is all about self care. I feel like we are living in a time today, Eric, where it is more and more difficult to focus on taking care of ourselves.

I think the algorithm derived addictive technologies that we surround ourselves with, that we sleep beside that we wake up, beside that we touch thousands of times a day, constantly pull us away from things that we know to be true, to be good for us, like walking in nature, like deep, reastful sleep, like time with friends and family without our cell phones. And so I want to hear the parable.

All I think about is focus on the things that matter so that I can live life, feeding the good wolf, the wolf of love, you know, away from all the things that the world is always trying to suck us into. So that gives us a place we might as well just jump in, which is you have some fairly strong positions on cell phone use. Here's my question. Everything you say I think I agree with, everybody agrees with right.

We all know this isn't the most helpful thing. We also know that the genie is kind of out of the bottle. So to speak, right, we as a society don't tend to go backwards technically, So is it really for you? Is the focus is on how do we use these tools intelligently and wisely? Yeah? Absolutely so. I think there's three problems with cell phones, Eric, they start with the letter P. First one is psychological. I think

we can't overestimate this one. You know, when I was a kid, I could be the best basketball player in my high school team. It was feasible for me to do. So. Now somebody's on YouTube throwing free throws with a blindfold on behind their back from half cour and no matter what it is, he can't be the best at it anymore. You're always a loser on the internet. And I think, no wonder we're seeing higher than ever rates of anxiety

one in three college students of clinical anxiety. Dr Geen Twinky at San Diego State University says, but we've never seen anxiety rates this this high. Jonathan Height and n y U is saying the same thing. So let's just be really aware of how psychological inferior we often feel online. Second, pe is physical. You know what, when you look at a bright screen within an hour of bedtime, you don't produce so much melotone and blame your peneel gland for

that one. But evolutionary biologists are now saying, you know what, actually, when you turn off a bright screen, you get a boost of energy. If you like me, ever, turn your phone off right before going to bed, don't you feel like it's time to like, you know, get the cave set up and build a fire, right, That's what probably is in us. So there's a huge, huge physical issue.

And then the third one is productivity. I think that right now when you look at the phone and they keep getting more and more gamified, right, things flying and flying out and everything's that a little number in the corner to hook your attention. We all know what hooks us. Now. What's happening is, you know, we're spending more and more of our time. Some reports are saying it's thirty one percent of our time now bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks.

So is the genie out of the bottle? Yes, it absolutely is. But are there simple tools and behaviors we can do to control it? I think there are, and I think honestly not very many of us are doing these things. I'll tell you right now, I'm talking to you from my basement. You know else isn't down in my basement are my cell phone charger. It lives in my furnace room, the most disgusting, you know, cobweb filled

room of my house. And by leaving my charger in this room, I'm forced to take a twenty second walk from here to my bedroom. And that prevents me from sending that email I'm gonna regret the next morning or quickly. You know, low resilience me grabbing my phone in the morning. So the first thing I think we need to do is we gotta get the phone out of the bedroom. When I do polls right now, I'll tell you people are sleeping with their cell phone beside them, and what

are they doing before bed? Check on the phone? What are they do when they come in the morning, check on the phone. If we're doing this with the battle of wine, we have no problem saying you're an alcoholic, But right now we don't have this phone a haul of term in society. We think it's just normal. So first thing we need to do is get the phone out of the bedroom. And if you want to go deep on it, I have a morning practice that I

use to fill in the anxious tendency. My brain wants to grip something and grab something when I wake up. We may get to that. It's interesting, this phone in the morning thing. It is a plague that I fight back and I am successful with for a while, and then somehow there I am I'm like, how has this happened again? We're like, I'm checking my email first thing in the morning. So then I go through the whole

process of trying to get it out. You know, I think that's a lot the way ubiquitous things that are around us all the time are like that. It's why, you know, if you didn't want to smoke cigarettes, you would get rid of them completely. It makes it easier than having cigarettes that you smoke some of the time. I think you're right, we need the distance if we

can get it. I mean, the cardinal rule of good and bad habits is, if you want to do something positive, make it as easy as possible to do it, and if you don't want to do something negative, make it as hard as possible to do it right, like give yourself those things. So putting it out of the bedroom certainly means you can't get to it. I mean I know people who locked their phone in one of those you know little boxes that has a timer on at

phone sell. Yeah. Yeah, there's a website phone cell dot me at p h O any celll dot me if people are interested, like a hundred dollars a glass case you can put your phone and set the timer. Yeah. Yeah. The two biggest bears that here on the cell phone bedroom thing are number one, it's my alarm clock. And I always say, have you heard of Walmart? Like can

you go by attend alarm clock? But even to this point now, I actually travel now with a little white box alarm clock because I noticed hotel rooms are taking them out of the rooms right because everyone they're just so used to peoples sleeping beside. And the second thing I say is get a landline. Get a landline and the cell phone. The phone compies are desperate to sell you one. They cost ten dollars a month because no

one wants one. But you give that phone number to your emergency people, and the idea that they can reach you in an emergency relaves you of the obligation of leaving that phone next to you with everything else that's got in it. Those are wise tips. There's lots of places to go here, but I would love to start with let's just hit the new book for a few minutes, because that's the the top thing on the list, and then I've got I've got lots of other things we

can go through. So the new book is called Our Book of Awesome, a celebration of the small joys that bring us together. You've got previous books around awesomeness. Why this one and what's different about it? Yeah? Absolutely so. More than ten years ago, my wife left me, my best friend took us on life, and I started a blog called one Thousand Awesome Things as a way to

cheer me up. Right, So, from two thousand and eight to two thousand twelve, I wrote one awesome thing every single day as a journaling practice to try to focus on the positive. I wrote about flipping to the cold side of the pillow. I wrote about wearing warm underwear from matter the dryer. I wrote about playing an old dangerous playground equipment. Right if you're if you're listening and you remember hot slides and you know, falling in the

cigarette butts, you know what I'm talking about. The blog, You know hit nobody at first, then my mom, then my dad, and my traffic double that got really big. It got really popular, and it turned into this book and I came out in two thousand and ten called the Book of Awesome. The Book of Auston came out, Eric, and you know, it became my life for a few years. You know, all these sequels and spinoffs and so on, And then for about a decade, I didn't write those books.

I felt like I was getting pigeonholed. I thought, you know the Krusty the clown imitation gruel clip from the Simpsons flashback and through my hand, I was like, I gotta focus on other things. And you know, I was also working a full time job at Walmart. That's on. So I started focusing on like exploring happiness and exploring resilience and exploring now and now I'm exploring trust these days, other big terms under this umbrella of how we live

our most intentional life. So the kind of why this book why now is honestly the last two years of the pandemic have completely beat me up. I have felt tired, anxious, overwhelmed. I have felt symptoms of depression. I felt I felt a lot of symptoms of stress, and so I started again. I started writing an awesome thing a day again as

a way to cultivate a positive mindset. We know from research from Emmons and McCullough that if you can write down ten things you're grateful for a week, okay they compared to test groups of roadtown hassles and test groups of roadtown events. Then after a ten week period, you're not just happier like you may expect, you're also physically healthier,

which is incredible. Right If you think you know this is a bicep curl, right, and I'm I'm flexing on screen here for those who are listening, Then gratitude turns out to be a pretty powerful brain curl. Because we've got something in our brain called our visual cortex. There's an area in there called area seventeen. And when you talk about wearing that warm under her from the dryer, or you write it down or you share it with

a friend, it jogs the memory in your mind. Right, So why did I write our Book of awesome for the first time in a decade. I'm looking to try to jolt the world back into a feeling of general positivity. When I feel like outside of the one you feed, which is endless positivity, you know, all these great positiveies, for the most part, when I look outside, it's pretty negative. So this is just, you know, a four hundred page hardcover book full of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of

new awesome things. And some of them the our part of the book, Oh you are not a r e, Oh you are, is that you took submissions from your community also of things that they loved. Yeah, you know, it's funny. In the Book of Awesome, at the very back page it put like, if you have your own awesome suggestion, you know, send it this email address. And hadn't checked any undreds and years, but there were over

ten thousand people who had submitted essays. Ten thousand, right, and some of them are like, here's what we've done in my classroom. Here's what we've done, you know. And I've got these letters over the years. I'm like, why don't we stitch these together? So the book feels like something we are talking about as people. And so I also to that point trying to take myself out of it as best as I could. I put Neil Pastricha

and Friends on the cover. I took up the photo, I took out the about the author, I took out the dedication, and took out the acknowledgements. At the end of the book, what happens is that if I did it right, it culminates in this sort of like cacophony of awesome from around the world, where these this voice gets louder and louder, and it's everybody from around the world screaming and sharing positive things. And so the last ten twenty pages of the book are literally just fade

to black with smaller and smaller awesome things. You know, I'm trying to sort of make it feel like you're flying out to outer space, but just surrounded by lots of simple pleasures, because to me, that is certainly the else I need, you know, right now, when I look at the news, when I look at doom scroll and social media and so on. So is writing down awesome things just a particular form of gratitude? Is that really

what it is? Or do you see it differently? Yeah, you know, we're not alive very long, right at the end of the day. It feels long when we're in it, but the average person is only alive for about thirty thousand days right now, that's like the North American number. It's about five thousand days lesson as a global average. So we're in live for thirty thousand days, and then a given day we are awake for about a thousand minutes. You start doing the math therek and like it starts

to feel shorter and shorter to me. What we feel like we're playing for what the greeting card industry is oriented around with the you know, the there's a baby industry, there's the wedding industry. We orient our industries in capitalism

around these big major life moments. Right the day you walk across the graduation stage, Well, that's a whole industry, that's the whole season, that's the whole event, right you know, you know this mother's day, father's day, graduation, and then we've got you know, when you get married, right then when you have a kid, and well, I think we're missing from this cultural focus on the big things is how many simple things you have in your day that if you just take an extra second to watch that

swirl of cream dissolve into coffee, you know, those little almost micro mindfulness moments. To use a phrase I've never used before I it sounded pretty good. They awaken you to how joyful life really is. And I say this as someone who has a tendency towards anxiety. I say this as someone who has a tendency towards feeling overwhelmed

and stress a lot. When I'm writing awesome things, when I'm reading awesome things, they have a pacifying quality that just sort of like reconnects me to the wider delight of consciousness, and it reconnects me to the wider appreciation for what this is. We don't know what it is, man, right, we don't know what this is. But if we can be like, oh, yeah, the the sound of the wind whispering through the trees, right, or something as funny, as simple as you know, texting your husband to do something

when he's upstairs and you're downstairs. Right. I wrote that one in the book, when my wife texting me to bring down the lattery, Like, wow, that's hilarious, Like how funny is this moment? Right? I remember seeing those vacuum shoot tubes at the side of office buildings I was a kid. I'm like, the future has arrived, you know, So is it just gratitude? Yeah? And that is the research there. But if you want to layer in other research, we could talk about Slatcher and Penna Baker at the

University of Texas to all the research on journaling. Perhaps it's a journaling practice, right. We can talk about all the research on mindfulness, on sort of living in the present moment. Perhaps there's some of that just pausing on things that typically take a micro second. So I think, you know, separate from all the research studies, there's just something about it. There's just something that's silly and joyful and fun makes me feel good and hopefully it makes

others feel the same way. I like it because we've talked about gratitude on the show countless times. It is one of the biggest effects in the positive psychology world. When people look at what has the strongest effect gratitude and kindness to others or you know, they just stand out as these extraordinarily positive interventions. However, gratitude can become very dry and dull if it's just what am I

grateful that I have? I mean, that's good to be like, it's good to be grateful that I have a house over my head. It's good to be grateful that I have a wonderful partner. It's good to be grateful that I get to do this amazing work, and I am and I do reflect those things. However, for me, I do need also, as you said, to be looking for those little moments. The word I often use and you

used it somewhere in there is appreciation, you know. Can I just find little things do appreciate throughout the day and emphasis on little like little, little like really little, you know, like when your kids don't hear you're opening a bag of potato chips, right, that's why I put in the book, or sending a private message during the video conference and seeing your coworker look down and silently smirk, you know that one Like that one I like write

when the cake plops flawlessly out of the pan. Part of it, to me, Eric is remembering that they got to be specific, right, so you know, writing down my husband, my kid, my dog, that ain't gonna that ain't gonna cut it. It's when my husband Eric put the toilet seat down, right when always happens, When our five year old daughters started writing her name out, when the rescue puppy we got during the pandemic stop peeing on the pillows.

So just something, be really specific, And I think a way to integrate this into your life is I know you're talking about gratitude a lot, but there's a game that my wife, Leslie and I play with our kids at dinner almost every night called Rose Rose Storm Bud. We force our family and it's hard at first, and nobody wants to do it. It It feels clunky and awkward to just say, Hey, what was your rose from the day.

The rose is the awesome thing. The rose is the gratitude when you force it to be from today, only your mind has a very limited timeframe to sort through and it picks out something smaller sweet. Hey there's a new doughnut at the coffee shop, or you know the crossing guard, remember my name, or you know I got a B plus on the on my math test. Whatever, you do it again, that's the second rose. Then you make space for a thorn. And I think this is missing from a lot of the gratitude practices we have

in society. You gotta have a place event, and so what we try to do is just say to the kids, Oh, that sucks. Just that's it. You don't try to solve the problem, just here the thorn, and then finally a bud. It's a nice way to end. That's b u d which is something you are looking forward to, and that's

not something that you are smoking with your children. Just from my stoner listeners, I want to clarify what we're talking about here, rose rose thorn bud a simple dinner time, dinner table practice, or you can do it with your partner at bedtime whatever, to get the gratitude or the awesome thing kind of into the conversation in a way where it doesn't feel like you were mentioning, you know, sort of dry or or repetitive. Right now, you're forced to think of one each day at dinner. Yeah, and

I think that practice. Any of these practices, right, there's different ways of doing them, but they get us looking for the positive. It's like when I went through a period where I was like, I'm going to take a picture every day, which meant that I was looking for something beautiful all the time, not just the one moment I took the picture that oriented the way I went

through the world. And it's the same way. If we're looking for what we appreciate, we're just naturally going to notice more things than if we're just kind of on autopilot. Have you been hearing all of this new research coming out on just the idea of expanding or dilating your pupils, sort of consciously expanding your vision. Yes, to that idea of seeing wider vistas because it relaxes you. Have you been following all of that, Andrew Humorman and so on. Yeah,

I've been following. And what's interesting is that my primary spiritual practices Zen, and that is a very old Zen technique. I mean that has been thousands of you know, thousands of years through the Zen well I wouldn't say thousands, a thousand years at least in the Zen tradition has had that as a practice, you know. So it's been really interesting to see it sort of show up in

the scientific literature. Yeah. I think it's amazing. It's amazing how much scientific literature just tells us what our grandma told us, you know, or just just like it's like we help. Why do I have to quote research about gratitudes and journaling and all, because that's what makes people agree that it's worth it, right, It just feels good. It's just the right way to do it, you know, not everything needs science behind it, but yeah, this convinced

us that's the right thing to do. Absolutely. Yeah, we are oriented that way. I've always said that I love it when there's like different points of support. So like if I read scientifically, okay, this thing is good, and then I can also see it in wisdom traditions that have been around for you know, thousands of years, then I'm like, okay, good. And then if I actually then have done it in my life and seen it to be good, then it's like I've got sort of the

triple crown there, and I'm like proof point trifecta. Yeah, the proof point trifecta. Yes, And I love that. Rose Rose bud Thorn. I think you also are doing a high low buffalo with your kids. Now. Yeah, if the kids protest Rose Rose thorn butt, and they sometimes do, because again, like I said, no one wants to play at the beginning. But you can't go around the dinner table and say say Roses without people feeling good about it. So the ending of it's like a workout. You feel

good when it's over. You gotta hold onto that thought the beginning. But if they protest, we say, okay, how about high low buffalo, and suddenly they're interested. Well, guess what The first two things are the same, right, High is an awesome thing, a rose, a gratitude to highlight.

Low is the same as a thorn. Buffalo is something weird that happened during your day, just something funny, something strange, and ah, a strange encounter, a little anecdote, and those end up being you know what people look forward to sharing and hearing. Oh, I'm sure, how old are your kids? Well less than I have four boys under eight years old. Oh, it must be must be spectacular buffalo world. Yeah, they often relate to candy, whether it's splashing, you know, like

random random stuff. But it's beautiful. I know, during those loud, chaotic, crazy moments when I can feel my overwhelmed rising, I'm just like, I'm gonna miss this. I gotta I gotta enjoy that. There's only a few years when they're going to be this small, So we're in those years right now. Yeah. Yeah, if I were in your shoes, I would be writing some of those buffalo things down. Because my son I thought, I'll never forget the things he said, and of course

I have forgotten the things he said. When he was a little I mean, I remember a couple of them, but not the vast majority of them. This is just the way my brain works. You're right, and actually this reminds me of a wonderful gift we got that I

might share with your listeners as well. When we sent out our birth announcement, which is in the form of an email to our friends and family, a couple Martin and Farah, who were friends with they took out a line from our own birth announcement and got to print it on a hardcover, blank white book with the name of the baby on the front and just lines in between, and they mailed it to us with the story saying, we've kept a book like this with our son, who's

now sixteen years old, of the funny and interesting things. He said, Well, of course we started doing that, especially on the first kid, right Eric, and then every subsequent birth announcement they've done the same thing, And so we wouldn't have done it for ourselves, like we just wouldn't have gone to the trouble of making a book with their kids name on the front. But because we have those books, we don't leave them in conspicuous locations, and

the quote. It's written in their right away. In an ideal world, we missed stuff all the time. But it's a nice you know, similar to the memory box idea that some people keep for their kids in their in their closet. Are an inbox that you said you BCC emails to for years and then you eventually give them the password. Right, I guess sold that from a Google commercial. But you know, there's these ways to kind of create future memories for kids and for yourself which are kind

of beautiful. Absolutely. All right, let's turn to your podcast, which is called three Books, and so what you do is well, I'll just let you tell people what you do. I don't need to tell them, you tell them, Okay, Well that's three books. So I have been obsessed with this number one thousand for a very long time. I started a blog called one thousand Awesome Things, as you know, and I talked about how we're awake for a thousand minutes a day, and I mentioned thirty five thousand days.

Guess what, that's also a thousand months, Like you know, you're alive for a thousand months. So I started feeling this number of thousands a really important number. It's bigger than a small goal and smaller than a huge goal, right, And so in two thousand and eighteen, I decided that is one of the methods to force myself to read more.

I introduced a number of systems in my life Eric, you know, moving the TV to the basement, putting a bookshelf at the front door, canceling my subscription to the two newspapers I was getting, and that includes news sites right online, little systems, Little systems, Little systems. One of the system was starting to podcast dedicated to uncovering the

one thousand most formative books in the world. It was partly inspired by the fact that I was endlessly frustrated with the I think the algorithms are terrible when it comes to book recommendations. I think Amazon back of the day used to be pretty good, and now when it's all sponsored and ad driven, you know, you don't actually get stuff that is related to the bookery, and they can't get off the you know, the money that they make from those sponsorships, and now you don't get a

good book recommendations. So what I'm doing on my podcast three Books is I'm spending almost fifteen years sitting down with three thirty three inspiring people, which is including Eric Zimmer on an upcoming chapter and asking them which three books more changed your life? So you give me your books. There, I buy the books, I read the books. That's my goal, and then I sit down with you and I talk

about the themes from those books. Okay. So I am skewing everywhere, from Quentin Tarantino, Judy Bloom, Brennie Brown, Malcom Lowell to uper drivers. I had variety star owners at the corner of my street and people I meet on the back of the bus. I mean, I'm trying to get as best I can a cross section of people with the only common characteristic is and they like books. If you like books, you like reading, let's talk about which three shaped too. And that's the whole idea behind it.

I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free, and listeners have told me that these texts really helped to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important. When you get a text for me during your day to day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what

you do. Positive messages when you need them for me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to one you feed dot net slash text and sign up for free. So I can't help but ask you what are three of your formative books. Maybe you've already been asked this, probably because it's an obvious question and you have them. If you haven't, then you can just pick three important

books to you. No, No, I always joke that that's going to be the very last chapter of the show because it buys me time until two thousand and thirty one with the last chapter of three books actually years um and I called them chapters right instead of episodes, just just to be bookish. But truthfully, I'll share a few with you for sure. The Babysitters Club Treasuries. When I was a kid, I read outside of my gender.

I'm using quotation marks because I crossed over to my sister's bookshelf and I found the idea that this woman and m Martin could write a book from five different girls perspectives where they alternated by chapter, totally fascinating and exposed me to the concept of voice in a book and the idea that a really good author could sort of remove themselves and enter into different perspectives. So why

do I mention that? Well, because our book of Awesome is written in a very different voice than You Are Awesome. I know the title sound the same, but you Were Awesome is my book about resilience that came out two years ago, and that's a little bit more of like research base. Here's some theories, and that's a different voice, and I'm not as good as her, but just the idea that I could be different people under the guise of letters was a very formative discovery for me. That's one.

Another one is The Black Swan by the seem Talent nonfiction Behavioral Economics. If I could boil down with that book taught me is the world is chaos, random and unpredictable. So your best bet is actually to put a chip on every single number on the roulette wheel and give it a spin. Why does Neil past Rich to have a blog called meal Dot Blog a speaking you know business, I'm giving speeches, I'm writing books, I'm doing podcasts. In a way, Eric, what I'm really doing is just constantly

trying new things. You know, As Seth Golden once said, I'm a big fan of Poof. I think somebody asked him when he starts and quit so many projects. Well, this is the black Swan theory. Expose yourself to as many opportunities as possible because you don't know which one's gonna take off, and when one does, you can then increase your personal resources onto that one with very very

little trade off costs. It's a important formative book to me because it constantly reminds me to try new things and not be too hung up on the outcomes because true, fully I can't control them that well, you know, I just can't. And so this book reminds me that the world is chaos and random, you know, written by someone way smarter than me, you know, so it sort of relaxes me into thinking, Okay, I'll do what I can, but the most important thing is to try new things.

One other metaphorical takeaway from this is go to parties where you don't know anyone. It's the same idea. Expose yourself to places and situations where you're more likely to learn a lot, but you're less likely to know a lot. We'll get to your third book in a second. But you've got something on your personal dashboard which is to

do some new experience every month. I also notice you have something called Nil's Night out each week, which is something I've started post pandemic, which is at least one night a week, I have to get out and do something. It doesn't matter what it is, but I have to be out and about, and ideally it be with a friend, because I just realized, like I've gotten comfortable being at home, and if I don't actually make a specific point of it,

it doesn't happen that often. It's amazing to me. I think some of that age maybe, but I share your basic thing of like how do I get a little bit of new experience into my life on a consistent basis absolutely a hundred percent. And so you know this, this little monthly dashboard that I draw is just a way for me to constantly, like right size where I'm going.

The top two boxes that I call strong core business and fastest learning, and they have things on them like, you know, give four speeches, write one chapter of a book, write one article, and things like read eight books a month, have one new experience. The bottom is self care, self care for my family. Right, number of nights away it's usually a four or less per month, number of dinners at home, you know, and number of nights out, that's what you're talking about. Eric's site out, Kneel's it out.

I forced myself to go. Also important to introduce new stories into the relationships I find. You know, as Leslie and I have now been married for almost nine years, you know, our tendency is to have all these experiences together. But when I go out or when she goes out, you come back with new energy, a new person you Matt, a new person you saw, etcetera. And then the bottom right quadrant is taking care of myself. This one's often read, but it's like number of workouts, number of number of

cardio experiences. So on, why do I do those two things? Well, the Neil's light off unless he's light off. Lessie is my wife? Ln know, is her night off? They pay for each other. That's really an important point. So when you have lots of kids, are a little kid or whatever at home, You've got responsibilities. Me taking off for a night is guilt ridden, right, I'm leaving her alone with the babies. But because she's got right off three

days from now, they pay for each other. You don't feel bad because she's got one coming, and am I not off. I'm happy to have no plan. I'll just go on a really long walk. I believe in the Jane Jacob's philosophy. And we live in downtown Toronto, you know, the urban center off for something other places cannot, namely the strange. I end up talking to a lot of people, you know, living outside or in the late night bookstores or on the street, and I'll tell you I learned

more from those conversations than anything else. It just puts me in constant situations and oftentimes it makes me feel very, very lucky, right just to have a roof over my head and so on. So I try to get out tonight. I'm going to a techno concert at an underground bar

um that somebody invited me to online. Okay, awesome. I don't know anything about any of those words I just said, but I'm sure something interesting will happen, and if not, that's a learning to So I do those things and the one weird growth opportunities, just like pushing myself to do something out of my comforence on each month. Yeah, so this techno event would count in that, right, because it's something you would never do. Yeah, it's not perfect.

The point of this dashboard is just to kind of right size my ship. Not everything's always green. I used as the way say, oh, next month, I need to invest a bit more in self care, or oh, you know, next month I need to read to get a bit more because I didn't really read many books this month, or whatever it is. Yeah, I really like the idea. It's very simple. We'll put a link in the show notes to where there's an article about that people can see this. I have a couple of questions about it, though.

Question one is do the four quadrants ever change or they always the same? And then do the things in the quadrants change? Yeah, And just to say, I stole this idea of doing this box from David cheese Right, David Cheeseer, it was my boss when I worked at Walmart. He was the president and CEO of the company, and he drew this model as the strategy for the organization. That's kind of weird to use an organizational strategy template as mine, but I really like the philosophy. Under opinion

which is in the center. He wrote, we save people money so they can live better. Well that was the Walmart purpose? Or is the Walmart purpose? I don't know. I no longer work there as I'm kind of doing this artistic stuff, like even full time. But in the center, I advise people to put your ikey guy right. This is a word we talked about in our last conversation. I K I G I the reason you get up

out of bed in the morning. So I write down, now, you know, helping people live happy lives or figuring out how to live an intentional life myself and sharing that with the world or whatever that is. It put that in the center. That's your That's gonna be your kind of north star. The top two boxes I mentioned, which I call strong core business and fastest learning are what I do the principal underpinnionlet's you or what I do right, and you should revisit and wrestle and change and examine right.

Otherwise that means you're kind of static. So so I I do change and tweak those things all the time. And I also might be I think it was like six speeches a month, and then I one can it was five speeches a month. Then I too because it was four speeches. You see what I mean? So like, I'm changing this also things in accordance with my life situation. Those are the top two boxes. The bottom two boxes

are how I do it. They're the energy source. That's why it's best family and best selve, because if I'm not properly investing in those dinners at home, those nights at home, those workouts, those meditations, I don't have the headspace and the energy to be able to do the stuff on the top. And so yes, to answer your question, the words and specific bullet points can change, but what doesn't change is the high level, the line of the dashboard. Ikey guy in the center, what you do on the top,

how you do it on the bottom? Got it? I feel a bit funny describing all of this verbally. So yeah, if you're listening to this and you're like, what is he talking about? Do check out the show notes right, actually show a graphical interpretation of this dashboards so people can actually see it. All Right, we got through two books. I don't think we got to the third. Yeah, and I'm picking not the three most formative, but three formative books. One the other one I really want to suggest is

on the Shortness of Life by Seneca. It's less of a book than it is a two thousand year old letter written by the Stoic philosopher Seneca. It's about twenty pages long. There's something about this letter, Eric. I don't know if you've read it or not. I have at some point in the past. Yes. Yeah, it's a really really thin They made a Penguin Classics version of it, which is out of print, but you can still get online. And that's also if you buy Letters from a Stoic

by Seneca. It's one of those letters. I keep a copy of this in my suitcase all times. I find it incredibly grounding and centering and stress relieving because here's the guy two thousand years ago, which is and it's written like an email from your buddy, Like it just sounds like I know it must be the translation, but it just sounds so current, it sounds fresh, and he's essentially arguing that life is long if you know how

to live it a lot of ways. It's an argument towards saying no to lots and lots and lots of things so that you can say hell yeah to the ones that really matter to you. And it's a grounding and are remembering force to me to you know, be a little more kind to myself and a little bit more selfish about what I you know, say yes and no to why do I travel with it? Like why do I travel with the same book in my suitcase?

Because I finally, when I land in hotels and a random city and a random times on in a random place, I'm stressed. And so I have two things in my suitcase at all times for that. One is On the Shortness of Life by Seneca, and two is I'll la cross ball so that I can rub my back and and you know, rub my arms out on the wall of the hotel and then you know Paris and but

nervousnys some kicks in and I fall asleep. Perfect. So now I'm gonna flip the question a little bit and ask about a couple of books that you have heard from others, you know, people who came on your show said this is a really formative book. A couple of those that turned out to be really meaningful to you. And again I'm not going to ask you to pick the most meaningful or anything, because I hate when anybody asked me, like, what's your favorite podcast episode, I'm like,

I don't know, but just any that come to mind. Yeah, absolutely, Okay, So which books have people mentioned on the show that have been really formative to me once I read them? You know what's interesting is they're often books I've completely never heard of. So this is one thing that just surprises me, although it shouldn't, is that people are allway suggesting books I've just never heard of. It's completely format

to them. I've never come across that, right. So I interviewed Shane Parrish back in chapter sixty of three Books. He's the guy that runs Farnham Street. For people that don't know, this is a wonderful self improvement page. It's f stop blog. I can't recommend that enough. He tipped me off to the book called Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charles T. Munger. Have you heard of it? I have? I have, and I know that book and some of the wisdom from it. It's kind of remarkable. It's a

remarkable book. This guy is still alive. In his mid to late nineties, Core founded Berkshire Hathway with Warren Buffett. In the way, he's kind of the I guess the quieter of the two of them are the less well known, but he's essentially amalgamated in a very very large, thick book, all of it sort of mental models, life advice, uh, commencement speeches and all these things. It's just a trove

of wisdom. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charles T. Munger one of the few books that you can go online. You have thousands of five star reviews and again, never heard of the thing. Another one that has been recommended to me recently, I interviewed the

filmmakers Daniels. You know, they did that movie everything everywhere, all at once, which it came out right at the end to the pandemic or not that the pandemic is over, but you know, Spring two thousand twenty two, let's say, And you know, it made like million at the box office, which is remarkable considering how few people were going to the movie theaters. And I think we're gonna hear about it a lot more as we get into Oscar season, because this movie is just really a revolutionary in terms

of how it was made and what it's about. But they took me off to a book called Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and Casilda Jake, again a book I never heard of, and the reason they picked it was because essentially, the moors of society are shifting rapidly when it comes to sexuality, and for years, growing up Eric, I have felt like inside myself, my feelings about sexuality have often been folded in with feelings of guilt, and with shame, and with all kinds of other emotions that

are largely negative. This book really helped me shirk a lot of those things I had been historically layering on and feel more accepting of myself for the places that my mind goes when it comes to sex, and exposes a lot of the evolutionary reasons why some of those thinking things might happen. So it is especially a good book to read for those people that may be curious, interested, or in a polly or non monogamous relationship, which is not the case with me. I am in a monogamous

relationship with my wife. However, the conversations it's spurred with my wife and I were remarkable and transparent, and I think enabled by this wonderful book. So I would not have expected the start of this podcast to be going on the record and saying Sex at Dawn is a great book, but I just think it's so underrated and people don't share it because of the content. Thank you to Daniels because they had the courage that you want to talk about it and to explore how we think

about sex in our society. And for those that have seen everything Every All once you know that that movie also has jarring explorations of sexuality. But we need to get sex out of the closet more, especially in regards to getting rid of some of the shame and guilt, if you like, may feel around it, around the things that you think, the things that you desire, the things that you may have felt or experienced, or even things around your body and how your body looks and how

it works and why it. Ah, there's a lot in that book. It's essentially a history of sex through an evolutionary perspective. Awesome, wonderful read. Got one more? Yeah? Sure you want me to keep going? Yeah? I love this. This is really fun for me too. I interviewed the slam poet in Q and he recommended that I read Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl strade such a good you know that I do that is you know, but most

people don't. I didn't that Cheryl Strayed pre Wild, So you know she wrote this famous book while to turn into the movie with Reese Witherspoon. That's kind of that's up boom right, like a big, big thing. But before that, she wrote an anonymous column and nobody knows her. She was called sugar right for an online and I'm maybe in print literary magazine called the Rumpest Again, maybe no one read this man crazy, But people would write these

deep emotional questions and she would answer them. What these thousands to two thousand word essays that showed a depth of emotional empathy that I've never experienced before. Obviously it speaks of the tremendous richness of her ability to do that.

But if you read this book, Tiny Beautiful Things, I'll tell you it's like an Anne Lander's column, you know, which I grew up reading in the Toronto Star for the modern emotional complexies that we feel, written by a star writer who was then writing under a total pseudonym. So Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Straight recommended to me by in Q, whose work I also recommended for those that may not know him. We had in Q on sometime in the last year. It was such a great

interview and episode. He's really remarkable and that book is an amazing book. You write, her depth of emotional empathy and wisdom is truly amazing. I think when you get that, and you get it with somebody who can write as well as she can, you have something really special. Because she's an exceptional writer. I mean one of the best. Yeah, one of the absolute best. I'm like desperate for a tiny, beautiful thing too, you know. Yeah, it's the kind of thing. Also,

I'll just say this book. I'm often seeking for ways to stop feeling so worried about things. I've got a book launched comming this while we're having this conversation. I'm always worried about it, man, I'm always stressed about it. Why when you read books like these Seneca books or this type of thing, it zooms you out of yourself. You stop caring so much about you, you you, and you're realize, Ah, the vast human experience that we all share.

It's just a wonderful thing to be part of. I go from living in a washing machine to looking at a washing machine through often the power of books. Part of the reason why I've made such a big steak on doubling down and reading because in addition to a reading based podcast, I have multiple newsletters, I have a monthly book club where I'm telling the people which books I've read every single month. Right, I'm posting every book I've read online, like I'm trying my best to get

out of my own head. But of course it's hard to It's hard to do that. And then as they put the camera on the front of the iPhone and we were asking for trouble with that one, totally selfies went up. We're all looking at ourselves all the time. Now. That zooming out time wise is such a powerful thing to do, and there's so many different ways to do it.

In the Spiritual Habits program I've created, we talk a lot about that perspective, and and the core principle is just when in doubt, zoom out, like any way you can time wise, space wise, other people wise. I mean, just the broader our perspective, the better off we are, and the more narrow our perspective is, the more we tend to suffer. It's such a simple idea, but we so rarely remember to do it, and it's so hard to see how we can. Tomorrow. I would love, I

think I will. I'm hoping to take the morning off to go bird watching. Okay, I got into bird watching during the pandemic. I have found it to be an incredible, wonderful way to connect with the natural world, to be part of something bigger than myself. These species have typically been here a lot longer than we have in they're

right there in your backyard, these dinosaurs. It's unbelievable, right, but in my head the tape on playing right now is well liken like, I gotta I gotta pre write an email last and you know, I've got all these tweets. There's so much pressure, especially on anyone, and there's most of the creating stuff to constantly be putting out stuff

across all channels at all times for everyone's consumption. And unfortunately, the side effect of that is the brash for all of us gets louder and louder, and we get a fragmented and a more fragmented reality, to the point where we're all just eventually talking to the ten people around us. Yeah, yeah, I agree, I mean as somebody who puts out two of these episodes a week, I worry a little about that element of it is like I am contributing to

the noise. Now. I think it's a positive contribution to the noise, and I think it's a long form conversation where you have a chance to slow down and settle in and think about important things. But it's still a lot of content, just bam, bam bam. But kudos to you for leaving it with all those tenants and principles

that you've always had, which are their long form. You aren't doing what the albums are talent you to do, Eric, which is slice it and dice it and put it in one minute morsels and two minute morsels to pump up the algorithm with your incredible daily distribute. That's what you quote unquote should be doing, right if you were feeding and to try to gamify yourself to the top of these charts to get more dollars per ads, etcetera.

I'm saying you're also listening to your inner voice on what you're doing and why you're doing it, and as long as you're holding onto that, well that comes through in the art, you know. Yeah, it's obviously a and I know you talk about this is as a creative in the world, you've got to make a living, so you've got to pay some attention to the external things. But if too much attention gets drawn to the external versus the intrinsic or the internal, then what are we

even doing? You know? And that's been a really interesting thing for me, is this has become what we do full time. Is how do you balance that? Like, Okay, now, I gotta make a living doing this, Like, but I don't want to let that corrode the thing that I started doing because I love doing it. And so how do you balance those things? And I think you talk really well about that in your three Essays? Yeah, okay, yeah,

I'm going to dip into the three essays. And I also have you read the essay The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace. No, I have not read that one. I would add this to your reading list. It's not available online. It's only available in a book called Both Flesh or Not, which is a collection of his essays released after he died. The title essay is about his essay and Roger Federer that he wrote for

The New York Times magazine. But in there's an essay called the nature of the Fund and essentially what he's arguing is that when you chase commercial success, as you undoubtedly do, because you're so excited that people want the thing you're making, finally you end up, you know, producing that second Strokes album that sounds kind of like the first or whatever it is, and then you have to eventually remember and hold on to the fact that what made that first thing good in the first place was

you did it for fun. You did it for fun, So holding onto that plus a question I would personally insert, and I wrote about this in the Harvard Business of your article around retirement, is would I do this for free? If you can keep answering yes to that question, would I do this for free? It tells you, it gets you the proof point to yourself that you're doing it for intrinsic reasons, because as soon as you say no, it feels like work. That's where you gotta watch out.

I'm not saying oh hard left, I'm just saying, just watch out. What could you put back in place? What could you disabled access to? Could you disabled access to your your stats or could you could you separate your ad recordings from your days that you do your creative interviews, or you know, what are the things can you put in place like that? Me personally, yes, I hold onto a little triangle in my mind that I called the three Essays of success because what happened to me after

the Book of Austin came out. The first one not our Book of Austin, which is, you know, the new one, but the Book of Awesome is people kept introducing me to their friends who wanted to write books. And whenever they introduced me to their friends, the friends would say, how do I do what you did? You sold a million copies of the Book of Ausom tell me how? And I'd say, well, what are your writing? And they'd say I'm writing my grandmother's memoirs And say, oh, well,

can I ask you why? And they're like, well, it's just been my life goal to like capture this incredible story she had. I was like, okay, what are you hope and do with there? Like, I just really want to get it done. I just really want to have it as a thing for our extended family, as a way to pass along her family history. Okay, that's a different kind of goal, right, And so I started joining this little triangle three s. The first s is sales.

This is commercial success. This is chasing the capitalism dream. Right, you made a million dollars, you sold a million books, you did a million whatever, you just got a million followers whatever. That's sales, the big number, and there's a reason as the front of a lot of people's minds. The secondness is social. We are social creatures. We often do things for social success social proof points. And there's

a huge dichotomy between the two. By the way, in the book world, as an example, sales success means it sold a lot of copies. Social successes. You're in New York Times Book reviewed book. Those books don't necessarily sell that Betty Right, you win the you're nominated for the pen Hemingway Award. Those books don't necessarily sell that many, right, But you see, you've got the social proof point. And

the third st is self. You're doing it because you want to, and I know it's in almost any industry. If you think of these three things like like an old school wobble board at a gym where you can kind of balance on two, but you can't get all of them. You just can't get all them at once.

Look at the movie industry. I'll guarantee you whatever's gonna win Best Picture this year was a relative box office flop to The Fast and the Furious twelve movie that came out Fast in The Furious twelve May seven hundred million. You know, Moonlight or The hurt Locker, or pick these movies that actually win Best Picture. They're thirty million dollar movies.

They're fifty million dollar movies. They're way smaller. Which would you rather have To be clear about those two things and the third st itself, you can't have all three of them. To pick the one you're going for and aim for that, don't try to get them all. I'll tell you what, Eric, none of my books have ever had a review in the New York Times or be nominated Freddie Litterar Enterprises. Ever, I'm saying not once. Right.

Mark Manson often talks about this because he says, you know, subtle, I'm not giving a funk came out, It got zero love from the social world of books. Nobody wanted to put the effort on TV right or magazines, so they won't covering the thing. So yeah, he sold fifty million books. But no one ever gave him a prize. You can have the opposite way too, Yeah, I think that's really wise. And you know, back to that question, I would you do this if you didn't have to, if you didn't

get paid. I think there's an important nuance in there, and that nuance is that it doesn't mean that every time you do it you want to do it. And what I mean by that is there are days that I don't want to record a podcast interview. I don't feel like doing it for whatever reason, I didn't get

enough sleep. The nuances you're not always going to feel like doing anything all the time, and so that's not the measure where after because something I think people can get hung up on that and be like, well, if I don't want to do it all the time, is it really my passion? Well, nobody wants to do anything all the time. But broadly speaking, that's it. You know, broadly speaking, more times than not, do I really want to do this? It's interesting for me. I took a

month off in June. I've never ever taken anything like that amount of time off in my entire life. I started working when I was thirteen. I mean, like it was unheard of, and boy, when I came back, I was like, I am ready to podcast. Like before I left, I was a little you know, a little tired, you know, a little ground down by it. So sometimes also if it's something you love, does a break help restore it?

Sometimes can be really helpful. Absolutely. You know, there's this word I've recently discovered called kuroshi, which is a Japanese word that means death by overwork. I don't know if you've heard of this, um so you know, in English, the highest word we have for working to artists called burnout, but that that word burnout doesn't include dying rights. It's been burning out. Whereas the late eighties in Japan, they had a number of executives and major companies all dropped

dead at the same time. So the huge cultural issue, and so they came up to kurochi, death by overwork. And to me, what's interesting is that thirty years of research have gone into this in Japan and they've come up with shin rin yoku. Shinr yoku with literal translation

is forest bathing. And I think about this metaphor a lot, because forest bathing doesn't mean taking a bath from the forest It means actually removing yourself from the clinical surroundings you're probably and if you're in an hotel room, if you're in a conference hall, if you're in an office building, if you're in your a basement, if you're in your basement, studio, whatever, like I am right now. You know you've got a hard pavement floor around you, You've got fake walls around you,

you're surrounded by artificial light. You gotta take a rest, strategic rest, and insert some shin ring yoku. Yesterday, Eric, I got off a plane back home in Toronto from Boston at one pm. I knew my kids were coming home at four. Yes, I got lots to do. What did I do? Three hour walk in the woods? Three hour walk in the woods. The pitons, eyes that trees release actually lower your cortisol and adrenaline. The birds that I was looking at make me happy, make me feel

part of something bigger than myself, you know. And I didn't take my phone. That's my new thing. Even though I want to use the e bird app to track the birds, I actually just resist and write it down on a piece of paper and enter them in the app. But I get back. So your month off huh is

very similar to my kind of strategic rest phenomenon. If people want to go deeper into that, I wrote an HBO article called why you need one untouchable day per week and how to get one, which is just this idea of becoming invisible to everybody one for at least one day a week so you can kind of figure out yourself. I think when I interviewed you last I came across this idea. I don't think it's that new

to you. I may be wrong, but I feel like in my mind at that time, I was like, there's no way I can do that right, in the same way that if you told me I could take a month off, I would have been like, are you out of your mind? That is impossible. But once I started really thinking about it, I was like, well, you know, okay, I have to do a lot to line that up. But as I was going back through your work again, I came across the idea of the one untouchable day

a weekend. I went, oh, yeah, Like that's a really good idea and I can see my way to it. But it's funny. This being able to take time started with me saying things like all right, I'm going to start taking two weekend days off. On the weekends, I'm actually not going to work. It may not sound revolutionary because I can relate to working all weekend, yeah, but

to me it was it was a big deal. And I would say, you know, it's no big deal, like I only take one or two coaching calls on the weekend, or you know, I only put an hour or two in. But I didn't really get that some extended time of break was important. So this all started with me just committing to weekends off. And then as I did that, I went, oh, that actually helps. That's restorative. It works not just for me personally, but for me business wise,

and so that's kind of grown. So I say all that to say, I'm going to be thinking about your Untouchable Day and I'm reinspired by it. I always write down after I go through somebody's work, kind of my key takeaway, and my key takeaway for years I wrote was untouchable day. So thank you. Yeah. People always challenge me on this, Eric They say, oh, I can't you don't know me, you don't know my boss, you don't

know how many emails I get. And I say, well, could you just start with lunch, because I spent ten years working in corporate at Walmart, and we tather ourselves at lunch. What's wrong? We're leaving your phone at your desk. You don't have to take it with you. You You can go up for an hour, you can go for a nap in the park. Try it for an hour. People aren't gonna harass you for one hour at lunch. If you can do that, tried two hours, you have taken

two hours off work. You're taking two hours off being connected to everything. What happens is the better thoughts, the creative thoughts, the making sure I'm doing the right things rather than just doing things right, And they naturally bubble to the surface, and so we have of to create space for them. Comparative, especially in our culture today, we've began the conversation by saying, I feel like we're drowning. How many emails do you get on a given day

that you have no memory of subscribing to? Those all take your attention. Thank god I have a filtering system, otherwise I would probably hang myself from the rafters. I mean, it's so many. What do you use? I use something called sane box s A N e b o X sane box. Yeah, it does two main things for me. It gives me in my inbox what it thinks is

most important. Then it has something called sane later, which it means like, I think this is somewhat important to you, but you don't need to get to it anytime soon. And then it's got something called sane news, which is all the newsletters, all the shopping, all the crap. And so I don't even see either of those categories until I go looking for them. I gotta get that. I still get too much email. But even then with all that filter, I still feel like I spend too much

time on it. But oh it makes a big difference, because, yeah, I like you. I'm like every little thing that you have to look at to decide whether to get rid of or scroll pass for the fourth time. It all

takes time. Plus, every single technology platform is integrating chat and messaging into their services, so most people now have like seven to ten different inboxes, including d MS on Instagram, DMS on Twitter, d MS on Facebook, text messages inbox, one inbox to the inbox you don't tell anybody about that, everybody finds out about, etcetera. Etcetera. So you know, then you suddenly now we've got another problem, which is we've got too many things to check. I know, I know.

So if you're listening to this and you want to contact me, doing it on any social media platform is a terrible idea. I will never I just won't see it, or I'll see it and I'll forget about it. To your point about take an hour away, take two hours away, I've shared this before, which is for the four years that I started this podcast, I was also working in a corporate job, and I wanted as much time to do this show as I could. Plus I had two kids.

I mean, so I got really good at ignoring a lot of things that I would have thought you can't ignore, and I got good at thinking about, like what's really important. And the ironic thing is that as I gave it less of my time, I got better at what I did. I mean, I kept getting promoted and they wanted to hire me, and I was like, part of me is feeling bad because I'm like, well, I'm not putting in nearly the amount of effort that people around me are,

but yet I'm still considered highly successful. And I think it was just as you said, thinking about what really matters here, what's the most important thing, what drives success in this role, and given an excessive focus instead of getting swept up in all the day to day, moment to moment answering every email, feeling like I had to be in every conversation, you know. And I'm not saying that everybody can do that, but I think the point is, and you made the point, is that I think we

tether ourselves more than necessarily we are being tethered. Again, that's not for everybody. There are toxic overwork cultures where you you know, you are driven way beyond what's reasonable. But my experience was I tethered myself a lot more than I needed to. Yeah, I can completely relate to that, and I do think that part of the design of the technology is to make us feel that way, you know,

in the happiest equation. I write a story about a CEO that I worked for who simply did not use email at all, and he had an inbox, he'd see the emails, he just wouldn't reply to any and he had just mentally reasoned that email was work given him by other people, and so he spent his time walking around the hallways actually talking to people, and while people were always upset that you know, he didn't reply to my email, I don't know if you got it, etcetera,

it freed his time to focus on what actually mattered. Now, it's a difficult practice to start, especially if like me, you're always trying to please. You want to reply, You want to reply with like thank you. You know that's the worst thing to reply, right, thank you? Just unnecessary. Email Number one is the reply just to just to say I got this, I appreciate it. But yeah, it's it's about baby steps, right. If you can't take an

a touchable day, take an untouchable hour. If you feel like you have too many emails, delete the one access point that you use the least first thing I've done, and the delete of every single social media app off my cell phone, so right away I only can get into them off a laptop. I do not save any passwords, so I have to enter the password because the two factor authentication, I have to go to my email box right and then log in to get the code to

type it in. So just creating these extra pieces of friction also helps me do what we're both advocating, still hard to do, but systematically designed to prevent me from being tempted to compulsively chack. All right, well, we're nearing the end of our time. I want to hit just a couple of things that you wrote in an essay called forty three things I've almost learned as I turn

forty three. And this one caught my attention because I agree with it and I sometimes feel like it's a bad rule, but I do live by it, which is you're not allowed to leave a bookstore without buying a book. Yeah. So, just as a quick background, I've never talked about this list publicly with anybody. You're this is the very first time I've talked about it. But I have just started stealing the idea from Kevin Kelly to write a list

of pieces of advice on your birthday. So just published just turn forty three, forty three things I've almost learned as a turn forty three. Yeah, one of my life rules, Eric is I cannot leave a bookstore without buying a book. And part of the reason I do that is because if you're in a bookstore, and if you're in downtown Toronto, you know, nine out of ten of the books are independent bookstores. There's a couple change. I'm surprised you've got ten of them. Yeah, we're very very well. The reason

we have them is because we keep supporting them. I just think, you know, this is somebody who's paying rent, you know, paying property, texts to the local town, which buys the flowers in the park and cleaning up the cigarette butts outside of the swings, Like, this is something I want to live and work in a society full of trust. So I think buying the book at a local bookstore should be a life rule for everybody. You

cannot walk out without buying a book. I agree. I always say if I want something to exist, which I always want bookstores to exist, I have to support them. Like I can't get mad when things go away that I didn't support, And so I'm the same way. I'm like, the last thing in the world I need is another book. I don't know if I'll ever read this book because I probably get mailed about five free a year. Two Oh.

I mean they just show up constantly. You know, I am indated with books, but I still it's the same thing. I'm like, I want this bookstore to be here because I love the ability to walk in and browse books, even as my reading patterns have changed dramatically towards e books, which I have very mixed feelings about, but I still every time I walk into an independent bookstore, yep, I'm like, I have to buy a book, yeah, and high level.

I want to just stay here. And this is something that took me a long time, just really just get stealed into my brain. You know, Amazon helps you find the book that you're looking for. Bookshers help you find the books that you aren't. It's the serendipitous and what's besides the thing on the shelf that is what you're finding and you can't find that online. You just it's very very difficult. Monocle magazine and I don't I don't

know if you know that magazine. They have a wonderful list that's published every year, like the twenty most livable cities in the world, and one of their key criteria is the number of independent books like p rhunder thousand, which I think it's just a wonderful metric to weave in because what a great sign of cultural health to have,

you know, independent bookstores. I'll tell you, I was just down in the Bronx interviewing Latania and Jerry, who drive around in the Bronx something called the Bronx Bound Books Bus. It's the only bookstore in the Bronx. Now, the Bronx has the same population as Manhattan. Manhattan is eighty bookstores. Wow, okay, So it's just like they're giving books to a book desert and driving around to different schools every single day to bring books. And they say, everyone tells us kids

don't want to read books anymore. Kids are addicted to their phones, kids like games. They say, when we pull up in the parking lot, you should see the delight, the excitement, the joy of perusing shells full of stories and fiction and nonfiction and touching. And they love it. And so part of it it's access. Amazon's got the bookmarket or something like that in the US. So we have to very consciously spend with our time and our attention.

And if you and I want to go on the record and say support your local independent books, so I'm very very proud and happy to do so. Also, I do think that at some point in my life I'm going to be the person running one of those books stars. You know, it's a it's it's a life dream of mine that has not yet been realized. You see it all over the plate. And Patch's running a bookstore in Nashville, Judy Blue's running a book during Key West, Florida. Ryan

Holidays running a book in Bastrop, Texas. You know, maybe that's the path for the author eventually to go down, is you just eventually fall into the world of books and just live there. That sounds pretty good to me. Yeah, yeah, it does. And then the last thing that will hit from your forty three things as we turn forty three is easiest way to love a park. Pick up one

piece of trash every visit. Yeah, you know, we lived near park and just every time I leave, I just say to my kids, so relieving, just meant it's a mental check. I gotta I gotta fly one piece of garbage and put it in, and I just you know, if they start to mimic that behavior of other people, start to do it, the park is just always clean,

and I've always dirty. Yeah, you know. The way this came about, by the way, Eric was I did a study at Walmart trying to compare why two stores across the country to be the same square footage d square feet, same labor dollars, you know, the same number of people that could feasibly work in the stores. One of them would be looking like trash and the other one would

be totally clean and spick and span. So I did a study at Walmart trying to compare the two stores, not just two specific stores, but like the idea of the two stores. And I'll tell you it came down to whether or not the store manager themselves picked up garbage on their way walking around the store. If that one person did, everyone mimicked and copied the behavior. So fascinating, that's it. It was just that if the stormager picked up a piece of garbage in the parking lot, the

parking lot was clean. When you're in a position of leadership, what you do is mimicked and copied and followed. So I'm a leader for at least a few little kids, so I'm gonna pick up trash. Open that they do it too, so far as always by the way, you know, they're like that, what are you doing. I'm like, just just trust me on this. You to pick up a

piece of garbage every time? Well, and also things you invest in, you care about, and picking up a piece of garbage is a very small investment, but it makes you care about that place more so. Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on. As always, I love talking with you. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can get your latest book, to your blog, to a couple of things we talked about. I always

enjoy it. Thank you so much for having me, Eric, and thank you for the gift of this wonderful podcast. It's a true delight. I really enjoy it listening. You have wonderful guests, you have thoughtful conversations. It's real, real gem in the world. Thank you, Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge,

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