Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► The screws aren't evenly done on my soundproofing thing here. That's annoying.

00:00:03 ◼   ► I recommend not touching it.

00:00:05 ◼   ► Right now. Please.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Let's not touch it.

00:00:09 ◼   ► You don't want me to touch the soundproofing?

00:00:11 ◼   ► I don't want you to touch the soundproofing.

00:00:13 ◼   ► I don't see why I shouldn't touch the soundproofing stuff.

00:00:15 ◼   ► Please don't touch the soundproofing.

00:00:17 ◼   ► Oh, the hook just came undone at the top of the soundproofing.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Did you touch it? Hold on.

00:00:21 ◼   ► See? I f***ing told you. Don't touch it.

00:00:23 ◼   ► I just saw the hook undo from the top. Hold on a second.

00:00:26 ◼   ► Ok, the hook's back in.

00:00:28 ◼   ► in. That thing only weighs like 300 pounds if it falls on me it's no problem.

00:00:32 ◼   ► Why does it weigh 300 pounds? What is it?

00:00:35 ◼   ► It's a mobile recording booth panel thing. You're supposed to have four of them. I don't

00:00:41 ◼   ► know who thinks this is mobile because when the guys delivered it, it weighed so much.

00:00:46 ◼   ► Why do you have to like, I don't understand why you have to construct a room inside of

00:00:51 ◼   ► your office.

00:00:52 ◼   ► Look, I'm basically building like a little black monolith in which I will reside to record

00:00:56 ◼   ► the podcasts and I don't see what's wrong with that or why you would disapprove of that.

00:01:01 ◼   ► Gray it is merch time.

00:01:03 ◼   ► Merch!

00:01:04 ◼   ► We have Cortex merchandise, we have new t-shirts and a hoodie for the first time.

00:01:09 ◼   ► We have a whole selection.

00:01:10 ◼   ► It's the first time we've ever done this.

00:01:12 ◼   ► We have four different styles of product for you to go and buy, Cortex listeners.

00:01:18 ◼   ► I want to give people a very brief rundown of what we've got.

00:01:22 ◼   ► You can go to cortexmerch.com to check out the range.

00:01:25 ◼   ► I love that URL by the way, Myke. I love that.

00:01:27 ◼   ► I figure you got to make it easy for people. I realized this in the past. It's always been

00:01:32 ◼   ► like, "Oh, go to here, find the link." No. Cortexmerch.com. That's where you go to buy

00:01:37 ◼   ► our merchandise.

00:01:38 ◼   ► Boom. Very professional.

00:01:40 ◼   ► We are partnering with our friends at Cotton Bureau. Cotton Bureau make the best quality

00:01:45 ◼   ► t-shirts that I've ever worn. They do worldwide shipping. They have great pricing for Europe

00:01:50 ◼   ► and places like that too. We have three t-shirts available and a hoodie. For the first time

00:01:54 ◼   ► ever we are selling merchandise with our logo on it.

00:01:58 ◼   ► A little behind the scenes here, listeners, because Myke is very excited about these t-shirts.

00:02:03 ◼   ► Very excited!

00:02:04 ◼   ► As I'm sure you can hear in his voice, he's very excited.

00:02:08 ◼   ► He's been working on this for a long time, sending me updates, images to approve.

00:02:12 ◼   ► That's my job, to give a little tap back reply, thumbs up on things.

00:02:17 ◼   ► But Myke has been, for literally years now, holding back merchandise with the brain logo

00:02:26 ◼   ► on it.

00:02:27 ◼   ► I wouldn't say holding back.

00:02:28 ◼   ► Holding back is maybe a harsher term.

00:02:31 ◼   ► Just waiting for the right time would be what I would say.

00:02:35 ◼   ► Alright, alright.

00:02:37 ◼   ► Myke has been waiting for the right time to do merchandise with the brain and I have to

00:02:44 ◼   ► agree with him.

00:02:46 ◼   ► This is the right time.

00:02:47 ◼   ► The stuff he's been sending me looks amazing.

00:02:50 ◼   ► But if you've been thinking, "Why don't they sell a t-shirt or a hoodie with that amazing

00:02:55 ◼   ► brand logo on it?"

00:02:56 ◼   ► Well, today is the day.

00:02:57 ◼   ► Today is the day.

00:02:58 ◼   ► Today is your day to buy some brand logo merchandise.

00:03:01 ◼   ► We have the original, which is the logo as you know it in the nice blue color that it

00:03:05 ◼   ► has.

00:03:06 ◼   ► And we have two special editions.

00:03:08 ◼   ► Now these two special editions, this may be the only time we ever sell these two.

00:03:12 ◼   ► One is the Kortek, which is a green brain, which is glow in the dark.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I love that.

00:03:20 ◼   ► I totally love that.

00:03:22 ◼   ► And then we have Kortek's Aversary.

00:03:24 ◼   ► It was the gold logo for our 50th episode, and we're coming up to like three years doing

00:03:29 ◼   ► this show, so it's about the right time that we do this.

00:03:32 ◼   ► So the Kortek's Aversary is super special gold foil.

00:03:36 ◼   ► The brain is made of gold foil on the t-shirt.

00:03:41 ◼   ► So you know, it's pretty special.

00:03:44 ◼   ► And obviously, as you can imagine, t-shirt prices change as you would expect them to

00:03:48 ◼   ► through that range.

00:03:49 ◼   ► And then we also have...

00:03:51 ◼   ► I think this might be my favorite part.

00:03:54 ◼   ► We have a hoodie.

00:03:55 ◼   ► So we have a hoodie that you can buy with the brain logo on it, but it's not printed.

00:04:00 ◼   ► It is embroidered.

00:04:02 ◼   ► And it looks awesome.

00:04:04 ◼   ► It looks so good.

00:04:05 ◼   ► I have to say, Myke sent me the images,

00:04:07 ◼   ► some of the pre-production images of the hoodie,

00:04:11 ◼   ► and my response was, "Give me 10 of those."

00:04:13 ◼   ► - Yeah. - They look really cozy.

00:04:16 ◼   ► I want them.

00:04:17 ◼   ► I wonder if you can put in the show notes

00:04:19 ◼   ► that close-up photo that you sent me

00:04:22 ◼   ► where you can really see the embossed-ness

00:04:25 ◼   ► of the Cortex logo on that hoodie,

00:04:28 ◼   ► because I think it looks really sweet.

00:04:29 ◼   ► - It looks really great.

00:04:30 ◼   ► So here's the deal.

00:04:32 ◼   ► For the time being, this will be a limited run.

00:04:35 ◼   ► So the hope is that we might be able to find a way

00:04:38 ◼   ► to sell these again in the future,

00:04:40 ◼   ► hopefully on a more permanent basis.

00:04:42 ◼   ► But for the time being,

00:04:43 ◼   ► all of this merch is available for three weeks.

00:04:46 ◼   ► It is available until April the 10th, 2018.

00:04:50 ◼   ► So if you want it, and trust me, you do,

00:04:53 ◼   ► go to cortexmerch.com, check out the range,

00:04:56 ◼   ► and buy everything that you like.

00:04:58 ◼   ► And maybe in the future,

00:04:59 ◼   ► we might be able to sell some of these items,

00:05:01 ◼   ► But I'll tell you the glow in the dark and the foil, this is the only time you're gonna get these.

00:05:06 ◼   ► So bear that in mind.

00:05:07 ◼   ► Yeah, those are the limited editions.

00:05:10 ◼   ► The Cortexiversary, it doesn't come around all the time.

00:05:13 ◼   ► It does not.

00:05:13 ◼   ► It happened.

00:05:14 ◼   ► We had that episode with the gold and, you know, that was it.

00:05:18 ◼   ► There won't be another Cortexepisode with the gold logo.

00:05:21 ◼   ► There won't be another Cortexiversary gold t-shirt.

00:05:24 ◼   ► Gotta get it now.

00:05:26 ◼   ► Especially, you only have three weeks to get this stuff.

00:05:28 ◼   ► Maybe if you want to look really cool at an upcoming conference this summer, this seems

00:05:34 ◼   ► like particularly good stuff to get.

00:05:35 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:05:36 ◼   ► I don't know if there's any conferences or cool events coming up this summer, but if

00:05:40 ◼   ► there were, I certainly would want to get one of these shirts for said cool person conference.

00:05:46 ◼   ► Especially, you know, if me or you are maybe at cool person conferences and, you know,

00:05:51 ◼   ► I like high fives.

00:05:53 ◼   ► So, you know, there are lots of high fives that could be given to people wearing the

00:05:56 ◼   ► cortex brain.

00:05:57 ◼   ► So, cortexmerch.com, go and buy some awesome merchandise.

00:06:02 ◼   ► B: Yeah, just to be really clear though, grey high fives not included with cortex merchandise.

00:06:06 ◼   ► N,o I was very careful about that.

00:06:10 ◼   ► Like high five only.

00:06:12 ◼   ► This little asterisk.

00:06:13 ◼   ► Grey high fives cannot be given.

00:06:14 ◼   ► You must check the purchase.

00:06:15 ◼   ► Yeah, we have a whole little thing.

00:06:17 ◼   ► B Yeah, no.

00:06:18 ◼   ► I don't even want to think about travel.

00:06:19 ◼   ► I have no idea what I'm doing.

00:06:20 ◼   ► But I'm just saying, summertime, conference time, you want to look cool.

00:06:25 ◼   ► What could be cooler than a glow in the dark brain t-shirt?

00:06:28 ◼   ► I don't know anything.

00:06:29 ◼   ► Or a gold one.

00:06:31 ◼   ► Can you imagine a gold foil with the hoodie?

00:06:34 ◼   ► You want to double up?

00:06:38 ◼   ► I mean I feel like you have to, right?

00:06:41 ◼   ► That's a pretty sweet situation you've got going on.

00:06:43 ◼   ► Be the bling master.

00:06:44 ◼   ► I want to talk about one of those events in a minute but should we do some yearly theme

00:06:48 ◼   ► updates?

00:06:50 ◼   ► So I've been, uh, I've not decided where my journal fits into my yearly theme yet.

00:06:56 ◼   ► I know it's in one of them.

00:06:58 ◼   ► I just haven't worked out which one.

00:07:00 ◼   ► Can you remind the listeners and me in this moment what your two themes are?

00:07:04 ◼   ► I feel like because you went with two, I can't remember either of them.

00:07:07 ◼   ► They've flown right out of my head.

00:07:09 ◼   ► The year of adulting.

00:07:10 ◼   ► Uh, okay, right.

00:07:11 ◼   ► Year of adulting.

00:07:12 ◼   ► And the year of branching out.

00:07:14 ◼   ► Year of branching out.

00:07:15 ◼   ► I feel like the journal is much more branching out than year of adulting.

00:07:18 ◼   ► The year of adulting is like for some very specific events, right?

00:07:25 ◼   ► The big theme for me this year is the year of branching out.

00:07:27 ◼   ► And this is one of those things in a way because it is a little bit different to any… it's

00:07:31 ◼   ► a little bit outside of my usual comfort zone to like sit and write a journal every day.

00:07:35 ◼   ► But I've been doing it every day.

00:07:37 ◼   ► I don't do it on weekends is what I've come to… it's just a thing that I don't

00:07:42 ◼   ► really feel like I need to because as well a lot of what goes in my journal is very work-focused.

00:07:46 ◼   ► focused, so I tend not to write on the weekends unless I'm having a working day on the weekend.

00:07:53 ◼   ► But yeah, I've been keeping it up. I added in one of your suggestions after the last episode

00:07:59 ◼   ► of the "What's on my mind?" heading. And I found that to be really helpful because sometimes I want

00:08:05 ◼   ► to write some stuff down that doesn't fit in something good, something bad, or priorities,

00:08:11 ◼   ► or something like that and a lot of the time it is just how I'm feeling and that has been a nice

00:08:17 ◼   ► edition which I don't use every day but it's good to have it there when I want it.

00:08:21 ◼   ► - I'm glad that's working for you. I'm still very impressed with your...

00:08:27 ◼   ► Now that we're... How long have you been doing this now? Must be what, a month? Is that about right?

00:08:32 ◼   ► Since you started? - I can tell you actually because I wrote the date down. I've been doing this

00:08:37 ◼   ► since the 20th of February.

00:08:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, okay, so yeah, it's just about a month.

00:08:41 ◼   ► I'm very impressed with that,

00:08:43 ◼   ► because when we discussed journaling,

00:08:47 ◼   ► and it got a little touchy-feely last episode.

00:08:51 ◼   ► - Sorry about that, by the way.

00:08:53 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, I don't know how that happens.

00:08:56 ◼   ► This is uncomfortable.

00:08:57 ◼   ► I need to discuss my feelings.

00:09:00 ◼   ► - This is one of those things I have to tell you, right?

00:09:03 ◼   ► Every now and then, just like you record something

00:09:06 ◼   ► it's done and like you put it out there and that's it. But sometimes you get people reaching out.

00:09:13 ◼   ► I had some friends like, "Are you okay?" I was like, "Yeah, I'm fine! I'm all good!"

00:09:17 ◼   ► I had a few of those messages like, "You doing all right?" I'm like, "Yeah, no, I'm fine,

00:09:22 ◼   ► I'm fine." Or like I've had people ask me things and then they're like, "I'm sorry to give you more

00:09:27 ◼   ► work." No, no, no, we're good, we're good, we're good. Oh yeah, yeah. It's like that time I put

00:09:31 ◼   ► out a video about death. I got a lot of messages from people and they're like, "Are you okay?"

00:09:35 ◼   ► I was like, "It's just an interesting topic."

00:09:38 ◼   ► It's just some kind of existential crisis going on.

00:09:40 ◼   ► I was like, "No, it's fine.

00:09:41 ◼   ► Like, if I ever put out a video about death again, people, you don't need to send me messages

00:09:44 ◼   ► about like, are you okay, right?

00:09:46 ◼   ► It's just an interesting topic."

00:09:47 ◼   ► Yeah, but I could see that on a show, if you start talking about your feelings, people

00:09:50 ◼   ► are like, "Oh, God, are you on the edge?"

00:09:52 ◼   ► Doing all right.

00:09:53 ◼   ► Some kind of breakdown, Myke?

00:09:54 ◼   ► You doing okay?

00:09:55 ◼   ► Yeah, so yeah, it got a bit emotional, but no, it's all good.

00:10:00 ◼   ► I'm pleased.

00:10:01 ◼   ► I'm enjoying it.

00:10:04 ◼   ► I may be thinking about doing some different stuff in it after having read Triggers, which

00:10:08 ◼   ► we're going to talk about today, but I haven't yet worked out how I would maybe add these

00:10:14 ◼   ► things in.

00:10:15 ◼   ► So that might, that's one of the things that I want to go over when we talk about the book

00:10:18 ◼   ► in a little bit to check in and get your thoughts on it, especially because I know that it influenced

00:10:24 ◼   ► your stuff when you do any journaling.

00:10:27 ◼   ► It was the case that after the last episode I was thinking, oh, I should really, I should

00:10:30 ◼   ► really make a real effort about trying to do the journaling again.

00:10:35 ◼   ► And then I immediately used the homework that I had assigned ourselves about

00:10:40 ◼   ► reading that book as an excuse to not do it. Like, well,

00:10:42 ◼   ► I can't do it until I've reread this book.

00:10:45 ◼   ► And I finished my reread of the book this morning.

00:10:49 ◼   ► So I have not, I have not done any journaling since the last episode. Again,

00:10:54 ◼   ► I find this a really hard habit to keep up outside.

00:10:56 ◼   ► So that's why I'm doubly impressed with your ability to do that.

00:11:01 ◼   ► So I think, I think that's, but I think it's good.

00:11:02 ◼   ► I think that's a good addition to the year of the year of branching out. It will,

00:11:07 ◼   ► it will help you explore your ideas about branching out. Like,

00:11:11 ◼   ► like what are you going to do? What does that mean for this upcoming year?

00:11:14 ◼   ► Year of adulting?

00:11:15 ◼   ► That's kind of a thing that the external world just pushes upon you. Yeah,

00:11:20 ◼   ► exactly. It's like here, carry this boulder,

00:11:23 ◼   ► this boulder labeled "Being an adult". But! Year of branching out, that's you looking

00:11:28 ◼   ► towards the horizon, figuring out which way are you and the boulder going to go.

00:11:32 ◼   ► I really wish you wouldn't describe it that way. I don't like the thought of the...

00:11:38 ◼   ► You don't like the mental pictures that I paint? You didn't like my forest fire last

00:11:42 ◼   ► time, although I'm still absolutely convinced that was the proper metaphor. I don't know

00:11:47 ◼   ► if you saw, but people were sending you pictures of what forest fires look like when they're

00:11:50 ◼   ► making a forest nice and clean by getting rid of all the underbrush. Did you find any

00:11:55 ◼   ► of these actual images of forests burning down helpful in understanding the visual picture

00:12:01 ◼   ► that I was trying to paint?

00:12:02 ◼   ► No, it just reinforced my original feeling of why this shouldn't be the metaphor that

00:12:07 ◼   ► we use.

00:12:08 ◼   ► No, I think it's great. And I think you should also just think of the year of adulting

00:12:12 ◼   ► as like a boulder that is being harnessed to your back that you carry around. Not a

00:12:16 ◼   ► thing that you choose, but a thing that is added on to you. And then the year of branching

00:12:19 ◼   ► out is you deciding where to walk with the boulder.

00:12:22 ◼   ► Oh, so like I put the boulder on top of the hill and then like drag it around.

00:12:27 ◼   ► Yeah, you haven't chosen it. It gets attached to you. That's what happens. That's Year

00:12:32 ◼   ► of Adulting. And then Year of Branching Out is where am I going to go now that I have

00:12:37 ◼   ► this attached to me? That's how I if I were you, that's how I would like to think about

00:12:41 ◼   ► it.

00:12:42 ◼   ► That sounds very encouraging. I'll try and keep that one in mind.

00:12:48 ◼   ► I think that's a healthy mental picture.

00:12:49 ◼   ► You want me to talk about another thing I'm doing to branch out? Is that what you want

00:12:52 ◼   ► me to do?

00:12:53 ◼   ► Yeah, that's where I'm leading. So where are you and the boulder going this year, Myke?

00:12:56 ◼   ► So WWDC is coming. This is Apple's conference where they announce all of their stuff for

00:13:02 ◼   ► the next year. It's happening in San Jose again from the 4th to the 8th of June. And

00:13:09 ◼   ► we're doing a live show. So last year we did not do a live show because we moved place.

00:13:15 ◼   ► there is going to be a Relay FM live show at WWDC on Wednesday June the 6th. This is branching out

00:13:22 ◼   ► because there is an audience of 900 people available in the room. The biggest live show

00:13:29 ◼   ► that I've ever done had 230 people, so 900 is a step to make.

00:13:36 ◼   ► B: It's quite an increase.

00:13:37 ◼   ► S: It is quite an increase, but I'm very excited about it. So you can go and get tickets. We're

00:13:43 ◼   ► We're doing this in partnership with a conference called AltConf, which is happening next door

00:13:48 ◼   ► to where Apple holds their conference.

00:13:50 ◼   ► I'll put links in the show notes, but you can go to altconf.com and they have tickets

00:13:54 ◼   ► there for Relay FM live on June the 6th.

00:13:57 ◼   ► You should come see us if you're going to be in town.

00:13:59 ◼   ► It's going to be a really good show.

00:14:01 ◼   ► We're planning out some fun stuff to do and yeah, I'm really excited about it.

00:14:06 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:07 ◼   ► And just to be clear, you don't have to be a developer who's gotten a ticket to go to

00:14:10 ◼   ► WWDC to be part of AltConf.

00:14:12 ◼   ► That's the whole point of AltConf.

00:14:15 ◼   ► Right, is that it's next door,

00:14:17 ◼   ► it's the alternative conference.

00:14:19 ◼   ► - And it's free.

00:14:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, if like me, you are not a developer,

00:14:22 ◼   ► you're not one of these gods who makes the apps for us,

00:14:26 ◼   ► you can go to AltConf and it's cool.

00:14:27 ◼   ► You check out things that are going on there

00:14:29 ◼   ► and really live show, AltConf.

00:14:31 ◼   ► - Tickets for our live show are $5

00:14:33 ◼   ► and all of that money goes towards supporting

00:14:35 ◼   ► what AltConf does, providing free content

00:14:38 ◼   ► for people that are gonna be in town.

00:14:39 ◼   ► So if you wanna come and see a great night

00:14:41 ◼   ► of podcast fun. Get on over to Relay FM Live at Alt Conf on June 6th.

00:14:46 ◼   ► So it's going to be awesome. And go get tickets at altconf.com to see the Relay FM Live show.

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00:16:59 ◼   ► How is the year of order going?

00:17:03 ◼   ► Sorry, I had something in my throat there.

00:17:05 ◼   ► Is it going okay? You sound ridiculous when you do that. Yeah, of course.

00:17:08 ◼   ► Of course. Nobody says order like that. That's crazy. Why would you? Yeah.

00:17:12 ◼   ► Why would you? That's ridiculous. But, um,

00:17:15 ◼   ► yeah. So year of order, year of order is,

00:17:21 ◼   ► is going well, but there's a thing.

00:17:23 ◼   ► I feel like I want to get it on the record now just to put this,

00:17:26 ◼   ► to put this at the beginning.

00:17:27 ◼   ► I have a very strong feeling that this is going to be much more like

00:17:33 ◼   ► the years of order. Like I think I have a feeling this is a theme that is not going to be done.

00:17:40 ◼   ► It is a regime.

00:17:41 ◼   ► Yeah, yes. You know what, that's even better. Yeah, it's like the regime of order. Yeah,

00:17:47 ◼   ► I like that. I don't have any specifics that I want to really talk about on the show,

00:17:52 ◼   ► but I can just say like, it's a thing that I'm being very deliberate and also very

00:17:57 ◼   ► slow about. Like, I'm trying not to rush a bunch of things. And also, we'll make it into a bit

00:18:05 ◼   ► later, but there are some things where I feel like the year of redirection/chaos didn't really end

00:18:13 ◼   ► until like mid-February. There were some projects that kind of lingered over and I'm just being very

00:18:19 ◼   ► deliberate with it. But I want to get it on the record now because future me might look like he

00:18:25 ◼   ► he just couldn't think of a new theme for the year when we have our next

00:18:30 ◼   ► discussion about like, what are the themes for the year? I want it.

00:18:33 ◼   ► I want current me to save him and get it on the record that if that guy thinks

00:18:38 ◼   ► it's,

00:18:38 ◼   ► we just need to have another year of order to lead into the regime of order that

00:18:42 ◼   ► he was already thinking about it way back at the beginning of the year.

00:18:47 ◼   ► It just, this feels like the more I think about it and the more I do it,

00:18:52 ◼   ► It just feels like a much bigger thing than actually a single year because I really do

00:18:57 ◼   ► feel like this is touching on lots of different aspects of my life.

00:19:01 ◼   ► So I feel like this may be the years of order.

00:19:04 ◼   ► That might be as well.

00:19:05 ◼   ► I might be able to help you here.

00:19:06 ◼   ► I've opened up the thesaurus.

00:19:08 ◼   ► What about the year of procedure or the year of structure?

00:19:13 ◼   ► The year of codification?

00:19:15 ◼   ► You could just keep doing that, right?

00:19:16 ◼   ► So it's like it's the same thing but you give it a different name every year.

00:19:19 ◼   ► No, that's dumb.

00:19:20 ◼   ► That's dumb.

00:19:21 ◼   ► of symmetry. That doesn't even make any sense there, Myke.

00:19:25 ◼   ► Ooh, Year of Harmony, I like that one. I could do some fun things talking about that.

00:19:31 ◼   ► Year of Harmony, though, that feels like a very different kind of year than the Year

00:19:34 ◼   ► of Order. Year of Order is not the same as Harmony. Year of Thesaurus is broken and it

00:19:39 ◼   ► needs to be better at thesaurizing. But no, I'm not going to try to pull one over on the

00:19:46 ◼   ► audience by giving the same thing a different name. I just wanted to get it on the record.

00:19:51 ◼   ► And this is also again why I like to speak in terms of seasons and even this idea of

00:19:55 ◼   ► the year of order, like, but when did, when does the year start?

00:19:58 ◼   ► Like who knows whenever, uh, years to me, they can be two years, they can be one year,

00:20:04 ◼   ► who knows?

00:20:05 ◼   ► But I just have a feeling like this is going to be a much, a much larger project and I

00:20:10 ◼   ► want to get it on record now for future me that that's, that's what's going to happen.

00:20:14 ◼   ► Also, I don't really have any specific thoughts about this, but I can already see what is

00:20:19 ◼   ► was going to be the first really major obstacle towards the year of order,

00:20:23 ◼   ► which is yesterday.

00:20:25 ◼   ► I was finishing up my travel schedule for the next couple months.

00:20:29 ◼   ► And you know how we've discussed, you have that feeling of overwhelmedness.

00:20:34 ◼   ► I definitely,

00:20:36 ◼   ► I was looking at the things that I have booked myself for for the next several

00:20:40 ◼   ► months. And I just thought, Oh God,

00:20:44 ◼   ► like I got that real tightness in much. And I had this feeling of like,

00:20:48 ◼   ► like travel sick without even going.

00:20:52 ◼   ► This is so awkward for me because I'm, I feel I'm, I'm so sorry.

00:20:56 ◼   ► I feel like I'm to blame for all of this.

00:21:01 ◼   ► But here's the thing, Myke, you're not to blame for all of this.

00:21:04 ◼   ► You are but a part of this, right? And of course you are part of it,

00:21:08 ◼   ► but not remotely all of it. But, but it was,

00:21:11 ◼   ► it was just a funny thing to be looking at the travel schedule and like,

00:21:15 ◼   ► Oh my God. And recognizing that this was really one of the things that,

00:21:19 ◼   ► that started me thinking about the year of order was doing all the travel last

00:21:22 ◼   ► year and feeling like, Oh, it threw my life into chaos.

00:21:25 ◼   ► And so I have like,

00:21:27 ◼   ► I'm just aware of trying to think about this in advance and I've been thinking

00:21:32 ◼   ► about some strategies that I'm just toying with right now about how to try to

00:21:35 ◼   ► maintain order in my life throughout a chaotic schedule.

00:21:38 ◼   ► But when I was running over the dates and plans and things with my assistant,

00:21:42 ◼   ► She threw out an idea which was the idea that made me feel sick because I thought, "Oh,

00:21:47 ◼   ► she's not wrong." But her suggestion was, "Well, why don't you just fly to America

00:21:52 ◼   ► in April and not come back until the end of June?" I was like, "No, that's crazy."

00:22:01 ◼   ► Oh, actually, it's not that crazy. It's not the craziest idea I've ever had.

00:22:06 ◼   ► It's a crazy idea. It is. It might make sense in your situation. It doesn't mean it's

00:22:11 ◼   ► That's crazy. It's a crazy idea. That is a wild thing to do.

00:22:13 ◼   ► Because like at that point, like if you were like, you have a special situation.

00:22:18 ◼   ► But if you were me, like I'd be pushing up against visa regulations.

00:22:21 ◼   ► Like that's when it's a problem. Right.

00:22:25 ◼   ► You overstayed your welcome in this country.

00:22:28 ◼   ► I have a question for you on this, right?

00:22:30 ◼   ► Yeah. Because you are a man who cannot be made to do things.

00:22:37 ◼   ► Right? Like if you don't want to do something, you won't do it.

00:22:41 ◼   ► And it kind of doesn't matter what it is. Like if you don't want to do it,

00:22:45 ◼   ► you won't do it.

00:22:46 ◼   ► Like people cannot pressure you into doing things because you're very strong

00:22:51 ◼   ► willed like that.

00:22:52 ◼   ► So considering you know how much of a stress this

00:22:57 ◼   ► travel might be to you, why are you doing it all?

00:23:00 ◼   ► I mean, why do we do anything, Myke? Because it seems...

00:23:02 ◼   ► Well that's not a good answer to that question, Greg.

00:23:03 ◼   ► No, no.

00:23:04 ◼   ► But you do a thing because it makes sense to do.

00:23:09 ◼   ► And this is one of the cases where I don't want to get into too many of the particulars right now,

00:23:14 ◼   ► because it's just like a long story, but part of it just is that at this stage in my life,

00:23:19 ◼   ► it makes way more sense and there's way more reasons to do traveling than there was before.

00:23:24 ◼   ► And that's why I feel like I'm willing to suck up a bunch of jet lag and disruption to my calendar.

00:23:33 ◼   ► And once I'm able to make that decision,

00:23:38 ◼   ► I always feel like if I'm traveling,

00:23:41 ◼   ► if I'm going to be flying to America anyway,

00:23:45 ◼   ► I might as well try to double or triple up

00:23:49 ◼   ► on what the trip actually is.

00:23:51 ◼   ► So there's a number of times where it's like,

00:23:54 ◼   ► oh, I'm flying into America for, I don't know,

00:23:57 ◼   ► maybe a thing on the West Coast.

00:23:59 ◼   ► And then immediately I start thinking about like,

00:24:02 ◼   ► well, is there something I can do on the East Coast on my way in and also on the East Coast

00:24:07 ◼   ► on my way out? And then I start planning things like that. So there are ways in which I am

00:24:13 ◼   ► sort of the the source of my own problem. But I don't I don't view it as a problem.

00:24:18 ◼   ► I view it as like, if I'm going to go through this anyway, how can I try to maximize this

00:24:22 ◼   ► time, either in like a business way or either in a family or a personal way. So that's partly

00:24:28 ◼   ► why my travel schedule does look a little crazy is I'm also taking things and expanding

00:24:34 ◼   ► them a little bit in either direction to say like if I'm going to be there anyway what's

00:24:38 ◼   ► nearby or can I combine this with another trip so that's why trips to America very quickly

00:24:43 ◼   ► become at least two trips to America for me.

00:24:46 ◼   ► Yeah see I'm still interested to see how this plays out though because that amount of travel

00:24:51 ◼   ► was part of a big contributing factor to what made last year a year of chaos but now you're

00:24:57 ◼   ► doing basically the same amount of travel but claiming it's going to be in order. So

00:25:01 ◼   ► I'm keen to see where that goes.

00:25:03 ◼   ► Just to be clear here, I'm not claiming it's going to be in order.

00:25:07 ◼   ► Oh, I demand.

00:25:09 ◼   ► I would demand, but this is a situation where you can't make demands of your future self

00:25:14 ◼   ► because that guy doesn't listen. I'm not saying that it's going to be

00:25:19 ◼   ► orderful. I fully expect there's going to be a lot of stumbling over the year of order during

00:25:25 ◼   ► a summer of busy travel, but I'm just, because I'm thinking of, like this is the benefit of the year

00:25:30 ◼   ► themes, it's like what do I want this year to be like? I want it to be more oracle than last year.

00:25:34 ◼   ► Then it naturally starts me thinking ideas about if I am going to be traveling and I know from

00:25:41 ◼   ► experience that it was kind of a chaotic disaster last year, what can I try to do to minimize that

00:25:48 ◼   ► while I'm traveling? So that's all. I'm going to have some ideas about ways I could try to make

00:25:54 ◼   ► it better. But no, there's the ideal of how I would want the travel to go and there's

00:25:59 ◼   ► the reality of how it actually will go, but maybe there are some strategies I can try

00:26:05 ◼   ► to implement to at least make it more like the way I want it to be than it was last year.

00:26:11 ◼   ► I think we've got some really interesting themes going on this year and I think it's

00:26:14 ◼   ► clear in the fact that we keep talking about them. There is like the two main things that

00:26:20 ◼   ► we have going on, they seem to be moving way more than last year's themes. You know, like

00:26:26 ◼   ► there seems to be more kind of like ongoing development with them. It's interesting. I

00:26:31 ◼   ► think we both really, I mean, I know I have at least really latched on to my theme idea

00:26:36 ◼   ► this year because it's branching out could mean so many things. So I may be putting too

00:26:42 ◼   ► much on myself because I want to keep like going by the theme, but I will say that right

00:26:49 ◼   ► now is pretty exciting.

00:26:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I think it is.

00:26:51 ◼   ► I feel like we both have particularly good useful themes this year.

00:26:57 ◼   ► From some of our private discussions as well, I feel like they are particularly relevant

00:27:01 ◼   ► themes related to like what has happened in the past year and what we expect to happen

00:27:04 ◼   ► in the upcoming year.

00:27:05 ◼   ► Like I think that they are good themes and it's nice to have the theme to orient your

00:27:12 ◼   ► life and your mind around to just like keep focused on this idea as opposed to goals,

00:27:17 ◼   ► which as we all know, goals are dumb.

00:27:20 ◼   ► - Gray, I want to return to the real kind of temp poll item

00:27:24 ◼   ► in the history of our show, email.

00:27:27 ◼   ► I wanna talk about email a little bit.

00:27:30 ◼   ► - Oh, the wheel, uh-huh, yeah.

00:27:32 ◼   ► - Because I hate email apps again.

00:27:36 ◼   ► - Oh, Myke.

00:27:37 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:27:38 ◼   ► - So--

00:27:38 ◼   ► - You're going through email

00:27:39 ◼   ► what I went through with task managers.

00:27:41 ◼   ► - Yep, I hate email,

00:27:42 ◼   ► well, I'm going through it with task managers as well.

00:27:45 ◼   ► I did, a couple of days ago,

00:27:46 ◼   ► I kind of looked at my iPad and I was like,

00:27:48 ◼   ► "I'm not happy with anything right now."

00:27:51 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:27:52 ◼   ► All systems that I have, I am unhappy with all of them.

00:27:56 ◼   ► I don't know why this is going on.

00:27:58 ◼   ► - I have this very clear mental image of you,

00:28:00 ◼   ► like a little child just with your arms crossed

00:28:02 ◼   ► and frowning at your iPad, like, "None of this is good."

00:28:05 ◼   ► - Kind of wagging my finger at it.

00:28:06 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:28:08 ◼   ► - So what's going on with your email?

00:28:10 ◼   ► 'Cause you've been using what, Air Mail?

00:28:12 ◼   ► - Air Mail is what, I've used Air Mail for a long time.

00:28:15 ◼   ► despite its many problems.

00:28:18 ◼   ► - Right, you have always been very upfront about that.

00:28:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, AirMail is a buggy app

00:28:23 ◼   ► and there are two problems that I have.

00:28:27 ◼   ► One has been persistent, which has been nagging away at me

00:28:29 ◼   ► in that when I have an email application

00:28:33 ◼   ► and I send an email,

00:28:35 ◼   ► what I don't want my email app to do

00:28:37 ◼   ► is to completely lock up, which is what it does.

00:28:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, that would seem bad, yes.

00:28:43 ◼   ► So every time I send an email with AirMail,

00:28:46 ◼   ► the app completely freezes for a period of time.

00:28:49 ◼   ► - Well, it's busy sending the email, that's what it's doing.

00:28:51 ◼   ► - I guess it is.

00:28:52 ◼   ► So like I'd send an email,

00:28:53 ◼   ► and then if I open another application into SplitView

00:28:56 ◼   ► whilst the email's sending, everything crashes.

00:28:58 ◼   ► And sometimes I can just leave it there

00:29:01 ◼   ► and the app will just crash.

00:29:02 ◼   ► What I will say for AirMail is they have a

00:29:06 ◼   ► no error rate of like not sending that email.

00:29:10 ◼   ► So like if the app crashes,

00:29:12 ◼   ► They will always send it when the app is opened again.

00:29:16 ◼   ► But I still just, I get frustrated every time

00:29:19 ◼   ► I use my email application to send an email

00:29:21 ◼   ► and my email application becomes unresponsive.

00:29:24 ◼   ► It just feels like something that shouldn't be happening

00:29:27 ◼   ► and this has been annoying me.

00:29:29 ◼   ► - It's concerning.

00:29:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, it is concerning.

00:29:32 ◼   ► And then a couple of days ago I opened airmail

00:29:34 ◼   ► and it sent every email in my inbox to the archive.

00:29:38 ◼   ► - Okay, all right now.

00:29:40 ◼   ► - I don't know why it did that.

00:29:41 ◼   ► And I don't know why it did it. I couldn't stop it.

00:29:44 ◼   ► And that was just the situation that I was in.

00:29:47 ◼   ► Okay. I just need to pause here for a little bit of clarification because

00:29:51 ◼   ► my understanding of your system is that you'll only ever have like seven

00:29:57 ◼   ► emails in your inbox. Is that right? Yep. So it's, it's not,

00:30:00 ◼   ► for other people, this, this is a huge disaster for you.

00:30:04 ◼   ► It's obviously no bueno,

00:30:06 ◼   ► but so you're losing like seven to 10 messages.

00:30:10 ◼   ► here's the problem. Oh, I know what the problem is. I just wanted to clarify.

00:30:14 ◼   ► I trust me. I'm not like, oh, you just lost seven messages.

00:30:19 ◼   ► No, no, I understand. These are messages that require a response.

00:30:23 ◼   ► Yep. They're all, they're the most important emails.

00:30:25 ◼   ► Yeah. They're the most important.

00:30:26 ◼   ► And they're over a period of time, which is not linear. Right.

00:30:31 ◼   ► So when they are gone, they, they're just gone. Right.

00:30:35 ◼   ► Like that's it now.

00:30:37 ◼   ► and I had to reconstruct them from memory

00:30:39 ◼   ► as to what was what I thought was in my inbox.

00:30:42 ◼   ► So this is one of those, this is the worst kind of,

00:30:44 ◼   ► for me, like data loss type problem.

00:30:47 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:30:48 ◼   ► - When you know something's gone,

00:30:50 ◼   ► but you don't know what it was.

00:30:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, I 100% agree.

00:30:54 ◼   ► That is definitely the worst kind of data loss problem.

00:30:57 ◼   ► That's like a known unknown.

00:31:00 ◼   ► Like, you know for sure there were seven to 10.

00:31:04 ◼   ► Exactly how many?

00:31:05 ◼   ► Did I get all of them?

00:31:06 ◼   ► Did I forget one?

00:31:07 ◼   ► Now, now you just live in a cloud of

00:31:10 ◼   ► uncertainty.

00:31:11 ◼   ► And also, that is the kind of thing

00:31:13 ◼   ► that that for me.

00:31:14 ◼   ► When an app does that kind of thing,

00:31:17 ◼   ► you suddenly feel like I can't trust

00:31:18 ◼   ► you to do anything.

00:31:19 ◼   ► I don't trust it anymore.

00:31:20 ◼   ► It doesn't matter if it's been

00:31:21 ◼   ► working perfectly for that kind

00:31:23 ◼   ► of error is the like, nope, I'm

00:31:25 ◼   ► gone.

00:31:26 ◼   ► I need to just say like I am on

00:31:28 ◼   ► the beta of M.A.

00:31:29 ◼   ► Right. Look, I am on a beta version,

00:31:31 ◼   ► but some of the problems

00:31:33 ◼   ► that it has, basically all of the

00:31:35 ◼   ► problems that it has still exist in the stable version. Maybe if I was on a regular version

00:31:40 ◼   ► it wouldn't have archived everything, but honestly that was just the straw that broke

00:31:45 ◼   ► the camel's back. I was already getting more and more frustrated with it. The reason I've

00:31:50 ◼   ► never switched from AirMail is because I have never found any email application that works

00:31:55 ◼   ► for me as good as that one does, like how my system works. So I've been trying to think

00:32:01 ◼   ► do I need from an email application? So I have a few things I want to list. I need a

00:32:07 ◼   ► unified inbox for multiple services, not just Gmail. It has to have great iOS apps, which

00:32:12 ◼   ► include things like drag and drop on the iPad or even split view. There's an app called

00:32:17 ◼   ► Edison mail that I thought was really nice, but they broke something and now it won't

00:32:22 ◼   ► do split view and they're not 100% sure when that's coming back to the application. Well,

00:32:26 ◼   ► that means I can't use it because now I don't trust them either.

00:32:30 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, but I would be like,

00:32:32 ◼   ► "Oh Myke, you can live without drag and drop."

00:32:34 ◼   ► But if it's Split View, forget it.

00:32:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, drag and drop I can live without,

00:32:38 ◼   ► even though it's like, it's really important to me.

00:32:39 ◼   ► If like, if it was the only feature that an app didn't have,

00:32:42 ◼   ► I would get used to it,

00:32:44 ◼   ► but I can't have an email application

00:32:46 ◼   ► that doesn't work in Split View on my iPad,

00:32:47 ◼   ► because that's how I use email applications.

00:32:49 ◼   ► - Email application has to be next to Safari,

00:32:51 ◼   ► otherwise it's 25% as useful.

00:32:54 ◼   ► - Ideally, it would have a Mac app,

00:32:58 ◼   ► but if it didn't,

00:32:59 ◼   ► it would play nicely with other applications.

00:33:01 ◼   ► Like I don't want an email app that like takes all of my email and does something to it,

00:33:06 ◼   ► right? Like I don't want that.

00:33:08 ◼   ► Asking for the Mac app has already set the bar quite high.

00:33:11 ◼   ► As long as it plays nicely with air mail or mail on the Mac, I'm fine with that, right?

00:33:15 ◼   ► Like that will do for me.

00:33:17 ◼   ► Yeah. And by play nicely, you mean it's not making special custom folders to do whatever it does.

00:33:23 ◼   ► But yeah, I agree.

00:33:25 ◼   ► At some point I did try a couple of email clients that did that kind of thing.

00:33:29 ◼   ► and immediately like, no, no, no, no,

00:33:31 ◼   ► you don't mess with the folder structure of my email.

00:33:34 ◼   ► Like, I don't care how good of an app you are.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Like, you're gonna use straight up IMAP with my folders

00:33:40 ◼   ► and you're gonna like it.

00:33:41 ◼   ► Like, that's what's gonna happen, email app.

00:33:44 ◼   ► None of these special folders and moving things around,

00:33:46 ◼   ► because that also feels like,

00:33:49 ◼   ► it's like the Evernote problem.

00:33:50 ◼   ► Like, how do I ever get out of this system, right?

00:33:52 ◼   ► Like, I'm gonna need to move at some point.

00:33:53 ◼   ► So yeah, that's a total deal breaker.

00:33:55 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:33:56 ◼   ► So I will say, I do use SaneBox right now,

00:33:58 ◼   ► which does some of this stuff, like filtering into folders.

00:34:01 ◼   ► But SaneBox can in theory work with any application,

00:34:03 ◼   ► 'cause all it's doing is applying Gmail labels to things.

00:34:06 ◼   ► Right, so I like that, it works for me.

00:34:07 ◼   ► But using SaneBox has introduced another requirement

00:34:11 ◼   ► for an email application,

00:34:13 ◼   ► that there has to be quick and easy access

00:34:15 ◼   ► to labels or folders, however it calls them,

00:34:17 ◼   ► and in a sidebar, which is customizable.

00:34:20 ◼   ► So I've used a bunch of apps

00:34:21 ◼   ► which shows me every folder or every label, that's no good.

00:34:24 ◼   ► Because I only ever wanna see two of them,

00:34:26 ◼   ► I don't need the rest.

00:34:28 ◼   ► And so there are some apps that will do this,

00:34:30 ◼   ► some that won't, any push notifications,

00:34:33 ◼   ► and a big one for me is a clear business model.

00:34:35 ◼   ► If I am gonna start using an email application,

00:34:40 ◼   ► I wanna be confident it's gonna be around next week,

00:34:42 ◼   ► and if there is no,

00:34:43 ◼   ► I don't care what the business model is to a point,

00:34:46 ◼   ► I just need to be able to trace

00:34:48 ◼   ► where the money's coming from,

00:34:49 ◼   ► and if I can't do that, I don't wanna use it.

00:34:51 ◼   ► - Don't you just want it to be free though, Myke?

00:34:54 ◼   ► Isn't free great?

00:34:55 ◼   ► No, I mean, I don't care.

00:34:58 ◼   ► I mean, so like I will pay.

00:34:59 ◼   ► I have no problem paying.

00:35:00 ◼   ► I'll pay a subscription.

00:35:01 ◼   ► I have no problem paying.

00:35:03 ◼   ► And I don't care if it's free, if it makes sense.

00:35:05 ◼   ► Right. So like Microsoft Outlook, I know why that's free.

00:35:08 ◼   ► Oh, that's a good comparison.

00:35:10 ◼   ► Yeah, that's that's a really good.

00:35:12 ◼   ► That is a free app that I could feel good about, too.

00:35:14 ◼   ► Most free apps, I feel like, oh, this is garbage.

00:35:17 ◼   ► Because what they want me to do is become an Office 365 customer.

00:35:21 ◼   ► Like that's the business model. Right.

00:35:23 ◼   ► Get me into the Microsoft ecosystem.

00:35:25 ◼   ► like I'm fine with that or like Gmail, I'm fine with Gmail being free.

00:35:29 ◼   ► You know, like I'm good with it as long as there's a reason for it.

00:35:32 ◼   ► If it's just like, hey, we're a start up and our email that's free.

00:35:35 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, but where's the money?

00:35:36 ◼   ► Because businesses need that.

00:35:39 ◼   ► And so, you know, and there are things right that I'm willing to accept.

00:35:42 ◼   ► So like Gmail being free, I know it's because they use it to serve ads to me

00:35:46 ◼   ► and I'm fine with that.

00:35:48 ◼   ► So I just want something, you know, I need to know where the money's coming from.

00:35:51 ◼   ► So I'm out in the email app wilderness once again.

00:35:55 ◼   ► nothing is making me happy right now to move away from airmail, but I also don't want to be on airmail.

00:36:01 ◼   ► So, I don't know, expect to hear more from me about this,

00:36:05 ◼   ► but I'm out in the wilderness and everyone's gonna have suggestions and I appreciate them.

00:36:09 ◼   ► Like if you think you have an app that can give me what I'm looking for, like I want to know in the Reddit,

00:36:15 ◼   ► but my cursory searching has told me that nothing, nothing exists.

00:36:20 ◼   ► - I assume that Gmail is free because the business model

00:36:24 ◼   ► is actually, there's an AI that is slowly improving itself

00:36:27 ◼   ► and it just needs access to more and more data.

00:36:29 ◼   ► That's what the actual business model is?

00:36:32 ◼   ► It's like, oh, the computer sent to you

00:36:33 ◼   ► and it wants to know everything about humans.

00:36:35 ◼   ► That's why Gmail is free.

00:36:36 ◼   ► - That's a business model, you know?

00:36:39 ◼   ► I don't care, as long as it's clear.

00:36:42 ◼   ► - Are you a sentient AI looking to take over the world?

00:36:44 ◼   ► That's good, at least I know what you're doing.

00:36:46 ◼   ► You're not some fly by night startup.

00:36:48 ◼   ► - I can accept it, right?

00:36:49 ◼   ► Like the AI needs its brain juice and if you know any way it is going to get it, I suppose.

00:36:55 ◼   ► That's a long list, Myke.

00:36:56 ◼   ► I wish you the best of luck with this.

00:37:00 ◼   ► But all I can ever think when I look at lists like this is just this fact of life that with

00:37:06 ◼   ► anything, if you're trying to make a decision or you're trying to find something, do you

00:37:11 ◼   ► have one requirement?

00:37:13 ◼   ► Okay, you're probably going to be pretty happy.

00:37:16 ◼   ► Do you have two requirements?

00:37:18 ◼   ► You can probably find something, two requirements, that's still like a market.

00:37:22 ◼   ► The instant you get to three or more requirements, I'm astounded about the non-linear descent

00:37:29 ◼   ► of options.

00:37:31 ◼   ► If you're looking for something that has three or four things, your options decrease to nothing

00:37:37 ◼   ► almost immediately.

00:37:38 ◼   ► I'm looking at this, I'm looking at Myke has six bullet points, and he's like, "No, the

00:37:42 ◼   ► universe is not large enough that anywhere has sentient life created an app that would

00:37:47 ◼   ► meet all of these requirements for you. I think that's the situation.

00:37:51 ◼   ► I'm willing to bend some of these. I don't know which ones, right? I think it depends

00:37:56 ◼   ► on what the application can do for me because there are always changes I can make to my

00:38:01 ◼   ► system. Like my requirements right now are built upon what I've learned in using air

00:38:05 ◼   ► mail for multiple years, right? So honestly, the application that does the most of these

00:38:10 ◼   ► is air mail and I am aware of that. But the plan is to try and move away from air mail.

00:38:15 ◼   ► So I will make compromise, but I don't know what those compromises will be yet, right?

00:38:21 ◼   ► Right, right, okay.

00:38:22 ◼   ► Because I need to find an application where I'm like, "Okay, I like this app.

00:38:26 ◼   ► It doesn't do this one thing, but I'm willing to look past that."

00:38:30 ◼   ► Now, Edison was the closest that kind of did a lot of it,

00:38:34 ◼   ► but its failing point might be the most important,

00:38:38 ◼   ► which is, has to feel like a really good iPad app,

00:38:42 ◼   ► because that's where I'm doing the vast majority of my email.

00:38:46 ◼   ► So, you know, maybe I'll look at it again, but I'm not so sure.

00:38:50 ◼   ► It looked like a good app.

00:38:52 ◼   ► But if you do something to your application that breaks split view

00:38:55 ◼   ► and you're not sure how long it's going to take to fix it.

00:38:57 ◼   ► Puts you at a warning for me, right?

00:39:00 ◼   ► Like, will this happen again?

00:39:03 ◼   ► So I'm out in the wilderness.

00:39:05 ◼   ► That's where I feel like I'm at right now.

00:39:07 ◼   ► Like just there's emails, there's envelopes and paper planes all around me.

00:39:11 ◼   ► That's what I was thinking.

00:39:12 ◼   ► That's all.

00:39:13 ◼   ► Those are the two that it's going to be, right?

00:39:15 ◼   ► Because I've installed a bunch of apps onto my iPad, right?

00:39:19 ◼   ► And I just have two rows of icons that are paper planes or envelopes.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Email is neither of those things.

00:39:26 ◼   ► There is no paper involved in email.

00:39:29 ◼   ► But the paper...

00:39:30 ◼   ► This is like the icon of the paper plane has just so become an email to me.

00:39:34 ◼   ► Like, what do you mean the paper plane is an email?

00:39:36 ◼   ► Obviously that's email.

00:39:38 ◼   ► you send it off with a little cute animation where it swirls over as it goes.

00:39:42 ◼   ► Like this is how we end up with a floppy disk icon as save.

00:39:46 ◼   ► Yeah, of course.

00:39:48 ◼   ► And we're in this world now where people don't actually send letters anymore, they send emails,

00:39:54 ◼   ► that's how you communicate with each other, but now emails is somehow synonymous with

00:39:58 ◼   ► paper from a design perspective.

00:40:01 ◼   ► It doesn't make any sense.

00:40:03 ◼   ► So like, I wonder the thing that replaces email, like what will its icon be?

00:40:07 ◼   ► Like what will the eventual icon for email be?

00:40:11 ◼   ► And then we're just going to keep going down that route forever.

00:40:13 ◼   ► But as I was thinking a lot about email, it brought me back to something that you had

00:40:18 ◼   ► mentioned last episode, that you were going to try and do something about your email

00:40:24 ◼   ► backlog. And you'd mentioned you hadn't opened email for months.

00:40:30 ◼   ► So my thought was kind of like, is it even worth it?

00:40:33 ◼   ► Like, how do you go through that?

00:40:35 ◼   ► Like, is it even worth going through it?

00:40:38 ◼   ► Or surely all of the questions asked have been answered by the fact

00:40:42 ◼   ► that you never replied.

00:40:43 ◼   ► So like, isn't it worth just like command A and archive?

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00:42:12 ◼   ► of this show. I got a lot of comments from the last show people were like, "Hey dude,

00:42:17 ◼   ► have you heard of email bankruptcy?" I was like, "Yeah, I've heard of email bankruptcy."

00:42:23 ◼   ► I think maybe for some people that can work, but that would not work for me.

00:42:29 ◼   ► I will say personally, I think email bankruptcy is a terrible idea in basically every situation.

00:42:35 ◼   ► I just don't think that's the right way. I don't know what the right way is to deal with

00:42:39 ◼   ► 20,000 emails, but I think it's not good because I feel like if you've done that once,

00:42:45 ◼   ► you'll be doing it forever. Yeah, I don't know. I can see situations where it makes sense.

00:42:50 ◼   ► I mentioned before, but like when I used to be a teacher and I'd, you know, be away for

00:42:54 ◼   ► being sick or something and come back and there were just like thousands of emails in

00:42:57 ◼   ► my inbox.

00:42:58 ◼   ► And that to me was like, oh, you're all, all of this is going away.

00:43:02 ◼   ► And it struck me as I think the optimal case for email bankruptcy, which is important things

00:43:08 ◼   ► will come back.

00:43:10 ◼   ► And that was my experience that like in a working environment, email bankruptcy is,

00:43:14 ◼   ► is in many ways much easier to do.

00:43:16 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:43:17 ◼   ► to do an element of this at the bank, but not all of it though. And I would look at

00:43:22 ◼   ► it, right?

00:43:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think that it's a totally useless idea. I just, I feel like, I don't know, maybe

00:43:30 ◼   ► you need to be, as I was, a very strategic slacker if you're going to properly implement

00:43:37 ◼   ► the email bank. Like you need to be at just the right position and you need to be able

00:43:41 ◼   ► to have the expectation that other people will put in the effort to re-reach you about

00:43:44 ◼   ► whatever it is that you need.

00:43:46 ◼   ► But the reason that I'm not doing it now is a couple of fold.

00:43:54 ◼   ► One of the things is I know that I will just never sleep well at night if I just archive

00:44:01 ◼   ► a year's worth of emails and never look at them.

00:44:04 ◼   ► I will not get the feeling that I want to get which is I have successfully dealt with

00:44:08 ◼   ► this thing that I've avoided for a really long time because if I just archive it, I

00:44:13 ◼   ► I will forever wonder about like,

00:44:16 ◼   ► is the tax man gonna show up at my door with the policeman

00:44:19 ◼   ► 'cause I forgot to fill out some form

00:44:21 ◼   ► that some accountant sent to me ages ago, right?

00:44:24 ◼   ► Or like, is there just something important in there

00:44:27 ◼   ► that I missed?

00:44:28 ◼   ► Like I just, I would not get the sense of relief.

00:44:32 ◼   ► - Yeah, 'cause a lot of those things that are super risky,

00:44:35 ◼   ► those people won't care enough to contact you again.

00:44:38 ◼   ► Like it's on you.

00:44:40 ◼   ► - That's exactly it, right?

00:44:41 ◼   ► And this is again, the difference about like the school scenario where email bankruptcy

00:44:45 ◼   ► is possible is being a strategic slacker there, it's like, ah, whatever.

00:44:50 ◼   ► Most of this stuff is not really my problem.

00:44:52 ◼   ► Like I know the nature of this work is all of this is somebody else's problem and they'll

00:44:56 ◼   ► they'll contact me again.

00:44:58 ◼   ► I'm reminded of this every time the account that I pay every single month to do all of

00:45:05 ◼   ► my tax stuff because I can't do it on my own when they send me an email and say, can you

00:45:11 ◼   ► confirm this is all right before we submit it." And I think to myself, "Why are we playing

00:45:16 ◼   ► this game? You know I don't know this, right? Like, you sending me this to be submitted

00:45:21 ◼   ► for the tax, man. What is the point in me looking at it, right? This is when I'm reminded

00:45:25 ◼   ► of this stuff. That drives me crazy. I hate that so much." I would do it on my own if

00:45:31 ◼   ► I knew what this was.

00:45:32 ◼   ► Yeah, I completely agree. That always strikes me as fraud. And especially in my situation

00:45:38 ◼   ► where it's like there's hundreds of pages going to two different countries and several

00:45:45 ◼   ► different legal structures.

00:45:48 ◼   ► It's just so complicated.

00:45:50 ◼   ► I was like, yeah, because also with three different citizenships, like it's crazy.

00:45:54 ◼   ► And I always feel the same thing.

00:45:56 ◼   ► Like, like my accountants arrange a signing day where I have come in and there is just

00:46:01 ◼   ► a table full of stacks of paper and they're like, well, you have to sign all of this.

00:46:07 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:08 ◼   ► you have to agree we did it correctly.

00:46:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, and we play the game where they're like,

00:46:12 ◼   ► do you want some time to read these 300 pages of,

00:46:15 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:46:17 ◼   ► - Go put a coffee on, it's time to go.

00:46:20 ◼   ► - And they're like, oh, we sent this to you

00:46:21 ◼   ► in PDF form yesterday,

00:46:24 ◼   ► and you agree that all of this is correct?

00:46:26 ◼   ► It's like, dude, I always feel the same thing,

00:46:28 ◼   ► like, I would never hire you if I could just do this.

00:46:31 ◼   ► Like, why would we even be doing this?

00:46:32 ◼   ► But anyway.

00:46:33 ◼   ► - I pay you a lot of money for this.

00:46:36 ◼   ► Yeah, it's always a strange, crazy making,

00:46:40 ◼   ► but there is that balance of who needs who more

00:46:45 ◼   ► in the email exchange.

00:46:46 ◼   ► And the other thing that's different here is,

00:46:51 ◼   ► I think the nature of being self-employed

00:46:58 ◼   ► is that you wanna make sure you've at least reviewed

00:47:00 ◼   ► all of the messages,

00:47:01 ◼   ► even if it's something from like six months ago,

00:47:04 ◼   ► there is a way in which I wouldn't feel good

00:47:06 ◼   ► about declaring email bankruptcy, being self-employed,

00:47:11 ◼   ► without having looked through those things.

00:47:13 ◼   ► And the other thing, which is not really,

00:47:18 ◼   ► it's not really broadly applicable,

00:47:19 ◼   ► but I just do sort of wanna say

00:47:21 ◼   ► so people understand the situation is that,

00:47:24 ◼   ► like when you're a person in the public view,

00:47:30 ◼   ► sometimes you get sent interesting emails

00:47:33 ◼   ► that are like, like the kind of thing that will happen

00:47:35 ◼   ► is someone will say like, oh hey, I listen to the show

00:47:38 ◼   ► and I work at Interesting Place X.

00:47:41 ◼   ► Next time you're in city Y, if you ever want to see

00:47:43 ◼   ► the behind the scenes, like let me know.

00:47:45 ◼   ► And that's the kind of thing where

00:47:49 ◼   ► if someone sent that email six months ago,

00:47:51 ◼   ► it doesn't exactly demand a reply

00:47:56 ◼   ► and it's a useful thing to kind of archive

00:47:58 ◼   ► for future reference of like, oh, when I'm in place Y,

00:48:03 ◼   ► someone sent me an email about this thing

00:48:05 ◼   ► and maybe it's cool to do, right?

00:48:07 ◼   ► Or people just contact you because they're like,

00:48:10 ◼   ► oh, hey, I'm interesting person Z and I like your work.

00:48:13 ◼   ► If you're ever in city, maybe we eat up for coffee.

00:48:16 ◼   ► So that's also part of the like,

00:48:18 ◼   ► why am I going through this?

00:48:21 ◼   ► Because I think of emails like that as like infrequent

00:48:25 ◼   ► and not even always accessible,

00:48:29 ◼   ► but like infrequent little gems.

00:48:32 ◼   ► And I do do my best to try to keep a record

00:48:35 ◼   ► of all of those kinds of things so that when I'm in a place,

00:48:38 ◼   ► I can try to search and be like,

00:48:39 ◼   ► oh, has anyone in this locale ever contacted me

00:48:42 ◼   ► about whatever?

00:48:44 ◼   ► And so that's also why I'm not gonna declare

00:48:48 ◼   ► email bankruptcy because almost certainly

00:48:50 ◼   ► there are messages like that that don't require a reply,

00:48:54 ◼   ► but are just like open doors in the future.

00:48:58 ◼   ► So it's a combination of all of these things,

00:49:00 ◼   ► like worrying about extreme negative downsides where the person sending a message doesn't

00:49:05 ◼   ► really care about me following up like eventually it'll just be a big problem and then also

00:49:10 ◼   ► like these very rare upsides. So that's why I am very slowly working my way through

00:49:19 ◼   ► this and yeah going through email. I actually only just started this morning a little bit

00:49:27 ◼   ► of trying to go through the email. Opened up the old email. Thought, let me do this.

00:49:32 ◼   ► Let me start digging.

00:49:33 ◼   ► How many are in there?

00:49:35 ◼   ► Is not as terrible as people are probably thinking. I have in like the high hundreds

00:49:40 ◼   ► of emails to go through. It's not thousands of messages.

00:49:44 ◼   ► How is it only that many? I mean, I'm a little bit confused about that because I'm assuming

00:49:47 ◼   ► that you also just get a lot of just like people contacting you for things, right? Like

00:49:52 ◼   ► viewers and stuff like that.

00:49:54 ◼   ► One of the things that is great is that years ago I took down my public contact email off

00:50:01 ◼   ► of the web and I don't think I've ever mentioned it but I've been really pleased that over

00:50:07 ◼   ► the years there's been like a half-life of random people sending messages to that address

00:50:14 ◼   ► that has gone down.

00:50:15 ◼   ► S: Because they come to you in other places right?

00:50:18 ◼   ► On Twitter and on Reddit and things like that I guess instead where you welcome it and engage

00:50:22 ◼   ► and want it to be.

00:50:23 ◼   ► I think that is partly the factor like I'm reasonably active on Twitter and fairly active on Reddit

00:50:29 ◼   ► Especially when shows or videos go up so people know that they can contact me there

00:50:33 ◼   ► I was just like I was just about to say a thing which is like oh

00:50:40 ◼   ► I'm I'm very likely to see messages on Reddit

00:50:43 ◼   ► But then I was thinking like do I want to say that out loud because then people will try to contact me on Reddit

00:50:47 ◼   ► Well, I don't know whatever but like that is the case

00:50:49 ◼   ► that people send me a lot of messages through Reddit and it's actually not a bad medium

00:50:55 ◼   ► because I often don't feel any real obligation to reply and still things are sometimes interesting

00:51:00 ◼   ► that come through there. So I think there is a side effect of like accessibility in

00:51:04 ◼   ► other areas plus like the internet and people kind of forgetting what my actual email address

00:51:12 ◼   ► is or just like not bothering to send stuff through there. So over the years the amount

00:51:18 ◼   ► of messages that I would get via email from people who just listen to the podcast or watch

00:51:23 ◼   ► the videos has dramatically decreased in this like half-life kind of way, which is quite

00:51:29 ◼   ► frankly fantastic.

00:51:31 ◼   ► It's really great.

00:51:32 ◼   ► And then the other main factors are the things that we talked about on earlier shows just

00:51:35 ◼   ► that again much to my astonishment, Slack has absorbed, I mean literally thousands of

00:51:43 ◼   ► messages and communications that would have been emails before.

00:51:47 ◼   ► Like it's just uncountable how many emails Slack has avoided.

00:51:52 ◼   ► So the real important communication happens through Slack.

00:51:58 ◼   ► And then the other bit of a contributing factor is,

00:52:02 ◼   ► which I do feel kind of bad about,

00:52:03 ◼   ► but like people who need to reach me for something important

00:52:08 ◼   ► have learned over the years, don't contact me directly.

00:52:12 ◼   ► They just contact my assistant directly.

00:52:14 ◼   ► and they know that she will get a reply back to them a million times faster than if they

00:52:22 ◼   ► try to contact me directly.

00:52:24 ◼   ► And in no small part often because she can just get the answer or like she knows what

00:52:28 ◼   ► the procedure is.

00:52:29 ◼   ► And so like there are a lot of messages that go to her that I don't even see.

00:52:34 ◼   ► So that's the only reason why my my situation of having not looked at email hardly at all

00:52:41 ◼   ► last year has not resulted in like 20,000 messages.

00:52:46 ◼   ► It's resulted in like a big number and there is a thing that like the messages that are

00:52:50 ◼   ► left there are all a little bit looking at things this morning like idiosyncratic or

00:52:56 ◼   ► difficult to deal with so they're not easy messages.

00:53:00 ◼   ► But it's not like a crazy pile that's going to take me an infinity of time to dig through.

00:53:09 ◼   ► just like a bunch of messages that I will hopefully clear eventually and that I do want

00:53:14 ◼   ► to clear eventually because I know that there is some stuff in there that I wouldn't want

00:53:17 ◼   ► to miss and I also want to be able to sleep well at night.

00:53:20 ◼   ► Is the plan though that you will continue to look at your email past the point of putting

00:53:28 ◼   ► it all into order again?

00:53:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I think I think what will happen or what I would like to happen for the year of

00:53:36 ◼   ► order is that I figure out where in my schedule I should put a clearing of the email.

00:53:47 ◼   ► And the problem is like as time has gone on, I have really found this interesting thing

00:53:52 ◼   ► with my brain that has changed where my brain just really hates and is repelled by what

00:53:58 ◼   ► I think of as administrative work in a way that it didn't used to be.

00:54:02 ◼   ► Like I used to be much better at dealing with administrative work and I have definitely

00:54:06 ◼   ► gotten way worse at that over the years. I mean my expectation would be it's because

00:54:10 ◼   ► you have an assistant who handles a lot of that stuff for you now.

00:54:14 ◼   ► Exactly like that like no doubt about it that's one of the main reasons is that it's like

00:54:19 ◼   ► oh there's a ton of this stuff that I don't have to do and then suddenly it switches to

00:54:24 ◼   ► like oh I have to do this administrative task like oh that's terrible like how annoying.

00:54:30 ◼   ► So I have definitely gotten way worse at that but I need to as part of the year of order

00:54:34 ◼   ► or kind of sit down and figure out

00:54:35 ◼   ► when is it that I'm going to clear through my email?

00:54:40 ◼   ► And it doesn't need to be on like a very frequent basis,

00:54:42 ◼   ► obviously, because I was able to get away

00:54:44 ◼   ► with barely looking at it last year.

00:54:46 ◼   ► But I need to do this so that I don't have

00:54:51 ◼   ► the nagging feeling in the back of my head of like,

00:54:53 ◼   ► oh God, is there something in email

00:54:55 ◼   ► that I need to deal with?

00:54:56 ◼   ► That's the main reason why I want to do it.

00:54:58 ◼   ► But I am very much aware that the email feels a bit now

00:55:01 ◼   ► like the physical mail that comes to my house,

00:55:05 ◼   ► where it's like, oh, this is a thing that I just,

00:55:07 ◼   ► I have to deal with, but it is in no way

00:55:11 ◼   ► my primary method of communication,

00:55:15 ◼   ► or do I feel like it's a useful thing.

00:55:17 ◼   ► Like email has really become a kind of janitorial task

00:55:22 ◼   ► for me over time in a way that I find interesting,

00:55:27 ◼   ► as opposed to being what it used to be,

00:55:29 ◼   ► which was like a much more primary communication method.

00:55:33 ◼   ► Well, I wish you luck in finding that app, Myke.

00:55:36 ◼   ► I think of the two of us,

00:55:41 ◼   ► one of us is going to have an easier time

00:55:43 ◼   ► with his future of email.

00:55:46 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:55:46 ◼   ► - I don't think it's gonna be you in a way.

00:55:48 ◼   ► - No.

00:55:49 ◼   ► - You're not gonna find that app.

00:55:50 ◼   ► - No, I don't think I am either.

00:55:53 ◼   ► - I'll let you know when I get to the bottom of my email

00:55:55 ◼   ► and we'll see if you found an app before then.

00:55:58 ◼   ► Ready, set, go.

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00:58:18 ◼   ► So it's Cortex Book Club time and we're gonna talk about triggers.

00:58:22 ◼   ► Anybody should need to get out of the way.

00:58:24 ◼   ► We're gonna talk about triggers a lot and there's multiple meanings for the word triggers.

00:58:28 ◼   ► But triggers are a specific thing which are in this book which don't really have any meaning

00:58:36 ◼   ► on the other word other meanings of trigger but like this is kind of where we are I guess.

00:58:40 ◼   ► The funny thing is the book really isn't even about triggers very much.

00:58:44 ◼   ► Like I find the title very funny in a whole bunch of ways and one of which is

00:58:47 ◼   ► It's like they picked a word that's not actually mentioned a ton in the book.

00:58:52 ◼   ► Triggers are one part of many more parts to the systems and ideas that Goldsmith is trying

00:59:00 ◼   ► to put across.

00:59:01 ◼   ► So I don't know why they chose triggers.

00:59:04 ◼   ► Triggers are a big part of it, but the daily questions and the questions that he talks

00:59:08 ◼   ► about, active questioning, is also as important.

00:59:12 ◼   ► It's very peculiar.

00:59:13 ◼   ► There's a whole bunch of other things and I'm absolutely convinced there was just a

00:59:17 ◼   ► meeting at the publisher somewhere where they were just trying to think of what the title

00:59:21 ◼   ► should be and just pick it and like "let's go for a thing that's a single word" and you

00:59:27 ◼   ► know "the book is published a few years ago before the word became slightly ridiculous"

00:59:30 ◼   ► and I think like "oh that's a good word let's go with that" and like "oh no years later

00:59:34 ◼   ► it makes readers snicker" but it was just I'm sure that's what happened they were just

00:59:40 ◼   ► trying to pick a bold word to be the title of the book and yeah I don't think it's a

00:59:46 ◼   ► a title that really suits the book very well. And it's kind of funny.

00:59:52 ◼   ► You want to hear my kind of overall meta comments about this book?

00:59:55 ◼   ► I'd, I, I, yeah, I am, I'm interested to know your general impression of this book.

01:00:01 ◼   ► So I liked that it wasn't too long, six hours, which is, you know, for a business book, that

01:00:07 ◼   ► is short. Yeah, that is rapid fire.

01:00:10 ◼   ► This was in part because for whatever reason, they decided to not fill this book with unnecessary

01:00:16 ◼   ► lists. There's not a lot of that in this book and that was a nice break to not have them

01:00:22 ◼   ► list 25,000 things for every one thing. And every time that there was a list, I felt like

01:00:29 ◼   ► that he was going somewhere with it, right? And he's actually only doing it to add context

01:00:34 ◼   ► as opposed to filling pages. It was read by the author, which is always a concern for

01:00:38 ◼   ► me, but I think he did a pretty good job.

01:00:41 ◼   ► That's interesting, I didn't realize it was read by the author.

01:00:45 ◼   ► Yeah, and that's always a red flag, but this guy actually did a good job.

01:00:50 ◼   ► It felt pretty genuine and he was actually pretty good at it and he didn't have any

01:00:55 ◼   ► really peculiar tics or anything that sometimes many people do, right?

01:01:00 ◼   ► But that's why there are professional audiobook readers.

01:01:08 ◼   ► I liked that it was modern, actually, because this is the first business-advicey-focused

01:01:15 ◼   ► book that has clearly been written in the modern era.

01:01:20 ◼   ► He very frequently mentions Facebook and Twitter and apps.

01:01:24 ◼   ► It's going to date this book horrifically, but I liked that it was modern because I felt

01:01:30 ◼   ► like these ideas have come at a time which is now, as opposed to these ideas were come

01:01:38 ◼   ► to 20 years ago and now they're just trying to make sure that they still apply.

01:01:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I am so used to these books being one of two things.

01:01:50 ◼   ► Old or how to put it, written by someone who feels really old.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:01:57 ◼   ► Right, like someone who has a mind that feels old and it was almost surprising every time

01:02:02 ◼   ► there's a mention of like, "Oh, that's a book from a few years ago this guy read."

01:02:06 ◼   ► Like, oh, right, that was that was a modern thing or talking about apps and things like

01:02:12 ◼   ► that. It's almost surprising.

01:02:13 ◼   ► He made a "there's an app for that" joke at one point, which I thought was kind of funny.

01:02:18 ◼   ► Yeah, I was like, all right, like, this isn't a very good joke, but I appreciate it anyway.

01:02:23 ◼   ► You know, so it was it was good in that sense. Right. And I will say, actually, I liked this

01:02:29 ◼   ► book. I actually liked it quite a lot. I was not annoyed at this book like I usually am

01:02:34 ◼   ► of these books. So I think for that reason that you were right to recommend this one

01:02:39 ◼   ► because it didn't drive me up a wall. So that was good. There was one there is one thing

01:02:43 ◼   ► that was really, really funny to me is like how very proud he is of his air miles. There's

01:02:49 ◼   ► like a whole section of this book where he keeps talking about his air miles, right?

01:02:54 ◼   ► Like air miles come up a bunch, then like he just throws in at one point that he has

01:02:59 ◼   ► the American Airlines like super mega amazing club thing like in that George Clooney movie,

01:03:05 ◼   ► which he even references the George Clooney movie up in the air.

01:03:09 ◼   ► Oh to explain it right.

01:03:11 ◼   ► He builds it into a story about talking to people in service industries and seeing how

01:03:15 ◼   ► they react and if they're engaged or not. But like it's all based around his super special

01:03:20 ◼   ► air miles thing. It was just it was really funny to me. But yeah, I thought it was good.

01:03:25 ◼   ► I thought it was good. I have some quite I want to dive into some of like the the theories

01:03:30 ◼   ► that put forward in the book, but I had a couple of questions for you. I was wondering

01:03:35 ◼   ► like why specifically you recommended this book for me like what parts in this book did

01:03:42 ◼   ► you think would be good for me in my current situation? And what did you learn from it

01:03:48 ◼   ► as well? I assume they're pretty similar things, but I'm keen to understand that.

01:03:52 ◼   ► Well, I wanted to get your overall impressions first because I felt after the last recording

01:03:59 ◼   ► that I had suddenly put myself on the hook a little bit and I feel like I had put myself

01:04:04 ◼   ► on the hook a little bit with the listeners because when we've done most of these book

01:04:09 ◼   ► clubs in the past, it's very much a, "Hey, we're going to read a book that's probably

01:04:14 ◼   ► intolerable."

01:04:15 ◼   ► Yeah, you took a risk, right?

01:04:17 ◼   ► That's a real easy thing to say, right?

01:04:20 ◼   ► Because you save most people from reading it and if someone reads it and it is intolerable,

01:04:26 ◼   ► like Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, it's like, well, Grey warned me, right?

01:04:31 ◼   ► Like it's my own dumb fault for reading this crazy book and if the reader reads the book

01:04:38 ◼   ► and they do like it, well, then they can just think, oh, he's wrong, but I didn't waste

01:04:42 ◼   ► my time.

01:04:43 ◼   ► Like I like this book, I got something out of it.

01:04:45 ◼   ► And I was just, I've suddenly felt very aware of like, oh, I actually recommended the book

01:04:49 ◼   ► and now I feel like, oh God, I'm on the hook, right?

01:04:52 ◼   ► If the readers don't like it and if Myke doesn't like it.

01:04:55 ◼   ► Recommended to me at a time when I really could do with not using six hours on something.

01:05:00 ◼   ► Yeah, I know, right?

01:05:02 ◼   ► That was like, I think you heard me in the show, like I was trying to back off because

01:05:06 ◼   ► I know like, oh, Myke's really busy already.

01:05:08 ◼   ► Somehow I felt like we got sucked into this vortex of I'm now going to steal six hours

01:05:12 ◼   ► of your life away with this audiobook. So yes, I felt very on the hook this time. So

01:05:19 ◼   ► I'm not gonna lie, I'm more than a bit relieved that you didn't start with a fiery tirade

01:05:26 ◼   ► about how much you hated this book and how it was not worth your time and how you didn't

01:05:31 ◼   ► need this nonsense right now in your life. So I'm feeling quite relieved.

01:05:35 ◼   ► I will say, with the exception of Creativity Inc, which is not really a business book,

01:05:40 ◼   ► right, of the books that we've done. It had some ideas in it, but it was mostly a biography.

01:05:44 ◼   ► B: I feel like it's an outlier.

01:05:46 ◼   ► S; Yeah. I would say that this is the best one. Just from an entertainment perspective,

01:05:52 ◼   ► and from a lessons perspective, I think it had the clearest ideas that were, in a lot of ways,

01:06:00 ◼   ► new to me, where a lot of these books feel like that they're kind of just telling you something

01:06:03 ◼   ► you already know but giving you a different way of thinking about it. I thought that this one was

01:06:08 ◼   ► was really smart and I liked it a lot.

01:06:10 ◼   ► - So that's why I felt like I could recommend it

01:06:13 ◼   ► at the end of the last show is,

01:06:15 ◼   ► this one was recommended to me by someone who said,

01:06:19 ◼   ► oh yeah, this is pretty good as these things go.

01:06:21 ◼   ► And I really think that if someone's generally thinking

01:06:25 ◼   ► about ideas about how to be productive

01:06:30 ◼   ► or how to improve their situation in life,

01:06:34 ◼   ► I think this is a pretty good recommendation

01:06:36 ◼   ► because it's partly like what I was joking about before

01:06:40 ◼   ► that the title triggers kind of makes no sense

01:06:43 ◼   ► because the book talks about so much.

01:06:45 ◼   ► I feel like it's relatively short,

01:06:47 ◼   ► but it also covers a lot of ground

01:06:49 ◼   ► and that almost certainly there are going to be

01:06:53 ◼   ► very different things in here that will resonate

01:06:57 ◼   ► with people at different stages

01:06:59 ◼   ► or needing something different in their life.

01:07:02 ◼   ► And so part of the reason why I mentioned it to you

01:07:04 ◼   ► was because we were talking about the journaling last time

01:07:07 ◼   ► and I was thinking about how, oh yeah,

01:07:08 ◼   ► there was this whole section that's like,

01:07:09 ◼   ► it's not exactly journaling,

01:07:11 ◼   ► but it's very journaling adjacent.

01:07:13 ◼   ► And that's the part that had stuck with me

01:07:16 ◼   ► and kind of made me want to read the book again.

01:07:19 ◼   ► But I also think for someone

01:07:23 ◼   ► who has read fewer of these books

01:07:26 ◼   ► or maybe someone who is more in the stage

01:07:30 ◼   ► of just like trying to become a more effective

01:07:32 ◼   ► or productive person, I feel like the first part of this book has a lot of great stuff

01:07:37 ◼   ► in it as well of like, here's a way of thinking about stuff you just might not have thought

01:07:42 ◼   ► about before.

01:07:44 ◼   ► And that's the stuff that it'll be no surprise to listeners of the show that I really love,

01:07:49 ◼   ► like trying to talk to and convince the reader like, hey, you're less in control of your

01:07:57 ◼   ► choices than you may think you are.

01:07:59 ◼   ► But there's also a lot that you can do to try to increase your autonomy or to make better

01:08:04 ◼   ► decisions in different circumstances.

01:08:06 ◼   ► And I think that's a good thing for people to hear.

01:08:09 ◼   ► I feel like he does a pretty good job talking through that idea in a bunch of different

01:08:14 ◼   ► ways.

01:08:16 ◼   ► And then there's just a lot of other ideas in the book, which I think are good even if

01:08:21 ◼   ► they're not applicable.

01:08:22 ◼   ► So I feel like in the middle third, there's a bunch of stuff about like working with employees,

01:08:26 ◼   ► I sort of skimmed over the first time and skimmed over again the second time. But this

01:08:32 ◼   ► is the same thing where it's like, "That section is not really for me. It's not super relevant

01:08:35 ◼   ► for me and it doesn't matter and it also doesn't feel like I'm slogging through 200 pages of

01:08:41 ◼   ► management theory."

01:08:42 ◼   ► That section included the air miles thing.

01:08:45 ◼   ► Oh, okay. So that's why it didn't register in my mind.

01:08:48 ◼   ► Because it's about employee engagement.

01:08:50 ◼   ► Right. And even there, it's just like, "Oh, okay. This is not for me, but I can still

01:08:55 ◼   ► see he has some interesting ideas about like, here's four different ways to think about

01:09:01 ◼   ► how your employees may respond to your feedback.

01:09:07 ◼   ► And from talking with other people who actually work in big like that seems to be a useful

01:09:12 ◼   ► section if you're in the right situation.

01:09:14 ◼   ► But it's like, I can just blow past this and it doesn't matter.

01:09:16 ◼   ► So I just felt like there's a lot in it.

01:09:19 ◼   ► I think most of it's good and I really deeply appreciated, like you said, that it is not

01:09:27 ◼   ► bogged down in a lot of the usual business book craziness.

01:09:31 ◼   ► I don't think I have a single note about crazy stuff.

01:09:34 ◼   ► One of the things that many business books do is to use examples of people, which we

01:09:39 ◼   ► talk about all the time because they sound so ridiculous.

01:09:42 ◼   ► And this book uses examples heavily, but I believe them because two reasons.

01:09:48 ◼   ► One, they feel like real people, and the other, sometimes they are real identifiable people

01:09:53 ◼   ► that he's talking about.

01:09:54 ◼   ► Like he has a whole section talking about Alan Mulally, the ex-CEO of Ford, right?

01:10:00 ◼   ► So like, it's legit.

01:10:02 ◼   ► The guy actually does do things and help with like really important executives.

01:10:09 ◼   ► And so if he's going to tell one story that I can see is true, then I'm willing to believe

01:10:14 ◼   ► the rest as well.

01:10:15 ◼   ► if I probably did some digging, I could probably work out who the people are, because he seems

01:10:20 ◼   ► to be interesting in that way and works with some interesting people, but they're real

01:10:24 ◼   ► people and that makes me respect the book way more if I believe that the person can

01:10:30 ◼   ► actually do what they're saying they can do because they have a track record, which you

01:10:35 ◼   ► can see exists if they've actually helped real successful people.

01:10:39 ◼   ► Yeah, the examples of the people in the book, they're not Sarah's.

01:10:46 ◼   ► Stories where they're just wowed with how amazing the author is, like in E-Myth Revisited,

01:10:52 ◼   ► and view the author as some kind of savior figure who is passing on amazing knowledge

01:10:59 ◼   ► and their entire life exists just to be a perfect parable of whatever the author wants.

01:11:03 ◼   ► They really do feel like actual people.

01:11:06 ◼   ► And like you said, he has named actual people.

01:11:08 ◼   ► Did you happen to look at, in the beginning, the section where, before the book starts,

01:11:13 ◼   ► but it's like people giving blurbs for the book?

01:11:15 ◼   ► Did you take a look at that?

01:11:16 ◼   ► It's not in the audiobook.

01:11:17 ◼   ► Oh, of course it's not in the audiobook.

01:11:21 ◼   ► This book has maybe the most impressive list of people I have ever seen giving blurbs for

01:11:29 ◼   ► the book and working with the author.

01:11:32 ◼   ► Give me some names.

01:11:33 ◼   ► Jim Kim, 12th president of the World Bank.

01:11:37 ◼   ► Holy moly.

01:11:38 ◼   ► All right.

01:11:39 ◼   ► It's not for the big guns.

01:11:40 ◼   ► Right.

01:11:41 ◼   ► It's like, I've had the great fortune of working with Marshall for several years and he has

01:11:45 ◼   ► helped me in so many ways, right?

01:11:47 ◼   ► It's like just glowing praise.

01:11:49 ◼   ► So then it's like CEO of the New York City public library system, CEO of the Harvard

01:11:56 ◼   ► Business Review.

01:11:57 ◼   ► I'm just like, there's so many, I'm trying to pick out the ones that are more recognizable,

01:12:01 ◼   ► but they're all, they're all just crazy.

01:12:04 ◼   ► CEO and managing partner at Goldman Sachs. CEO of Rothschild's Group. Founder and chairman

01:12:12 ◼   ► of Getty Images. CEO of Del Monte Foods, Inc. Managing partner at the Blackstone Group. CEO

01:12:20 ◼   ► of Herman Miller. I have gone through 25% of the "thanks for

01:12:30 ◼   ► working with me section at the beginning of this book. I have never seen anything like

01:12:36 ◼   ► it. It is just crazy. So I didn't notice that until after having read it, but going back

01:12:44 ◼   ► it was like, holy moly. This is no joke. And I think it's, I was astounded by the author's

01:12:51 ◼   ► business model where his business model is he will work with these high powered people

01:12:58 ◼   ► and he will not get paid unless people in the client's life agree that he has been effective

01:13:08 ◼   ► at implementing change two years after they start working together.

01:13:14 ◼   ► It's like, whoa, that is a man who has set himself up in a situation where he is going

01:13:20 ◼   ► to figure out what is actually effective and what is not.

01:13:25 ◼   ► And it is just remarkable that it's not even that the client gets to say, "Oh yes, I think

01:13:32 ◼   ► he was effective."

01:13:33 ◼   ► It's like, no, no, the client's spouse gets to determine whether or not he should get

01:13:38 ◼   ► paid.

01:13:39 ◼   ► And that is a much higher bar.

01:13:40 ◼   ► That is a way higher bar.

01:13:43 ◼   ► So yeah, the author is totally not messing around.

01:13:47 ◼   ► And I think that is why the examples in the book feel real.

01:13:52 ◼   ► They don't feel forced or imaginary.

01:13:55 ◼   ► He's just thinking about the clients he's worked with and people who are good examples

01:14:00 ◼   ► of whatever he happens to be talking about.

01:14:02 ◼   ► So let's go through a couple of the things that are focused on.

01:14:05 ◼   ► We won't go through everything because, as you said, I don't think that it's necessarily

01:14:08 ◼   ► all applicable for everyone.

01:14:10 ◼   ► And there are some parts of this book where I've heard things like this before.

01:14:14 ◼   ► The beginning section is about triggers and the triggers go hand in hand with behavioral

01:14:19 ◼   ► change.

01:14:20 ◼   ► That's kind of what the book is about, it's like changing your behavior.

01:14:24 ◼   ► And I love that it basically starts off with being like, look, adult behavioral change

01:14:29 ◼   ► is a really, really hard thing to do.

01:14:31 ◼   ► It's really hard to change your behavior as an adult.

01:14:35 ◼   ► I love this as the start of the book and I feel like it's something that really sold

01:14:38 ◼   ► me on it is because, and I haven't highlighted, his section, this is like literally page two,

01:14:48 ◼   ► is he's like, I'm going to tell you the truth.

01:14:49 ◼   ► And the truth is that meaningful behavioral change is very hard to do.

01:14:53 ◼   ► And it's a quote, "I'd go so far as to say that adult behavioral change is the most difficult

01:14:58 ◼   ► thing for sentient human beings to accomplish."

01:15:01 ◼   ► I love that quote so much.

01:15:03 ◼   ► It's great.

01:15:05 ◼   ► And what I love about it is I really think it's true.

01:15:08 ◼   ► And he spends the next couple of pages kind of forcing you to think about it.

01:15:14 ◼   ► And he's like, when was the last time you changed some behavior in your life?

01:15:18 ◼   ► and he kind of knocks down the things that people are going to mention where they just discuss

01:15:24 ◼   ► something that's actually different in there, like something that has happened to have changed,

01:15:29 ◼   ► but he's trying to find a case where like you have decided to do something differently

01:15:34 ◼   ► and you were successful in maintaining that change over a long period of time.

01:15:37 ◼   ► And it kind of makes me think of why I like to talk about the time tracking so much because

01:15:43 ◼   ► I think he does do a pretty good job of making you take a brutal look in the mirror

01:15:47 ◼   ► and see how horrifically ineffective you have actually been at deciding to change something

01:15:53 ◼   ► in your life. And he's like, and I think that's a great setup. It's like, this is going to be

01:15:58 ◼   ► really hard. What you need to do to change your behavior is simple, but simple doesn't mean that

01:16:03 ◼   ► it is easy. And almost everybody fails at this almost all of the time. And I just think that

01:16:07 ◼   ► is such a refreshing start to a book like this. Because he even uses smoking as an example of not

01:16:12 ◼   ► being enough because there are so many reasons that you might want to quit smoking that it's

01:16:18 ◼   ► not really a behavioral change. Like you're doing it because your health is at risk or you're doing

01:16:22 ◼   ► it because the people around you don't want you to do it anymore and so like it doesn't really

01:16:26 ◼   ► count as changing a behavior, you've just quit smoking. And it's like wow okay you're messing

01:16:32 ◼   ► around here Goldsmith, all right. Yeah that's exactly it. You're like don't tell me about your

01:16:36 ◼   ► quitting smoking, I'm not interested. So we should talk about the triggers and there's a couple of

01:16:41 ◼   ► different things that he talks about with the triggers but the real meaty one, the one that

01:16:46 ◼   ► I find really interesting, is what is referred to as environmental triggers. So how, and this is what

01:16:52 ◼   ► really hit me, your environment can make you react to things in certain ways. So like for example,

01:17:02 ◼   ► if somebody speaks to you softly, you will speak back to them softly. That is an environmental

01:17:09 ◼   ► trigger because something that you have no control over is making you react in a

01:17:16 ◼   ► way that you wouldn't normally react if you had complete control of the situation.

01:17:19 ◼   ► So somebody being softly spoken will make you do that too and there are these

01:17:24 ◼   ► types of things that happen in our lives constantly. These different situations

01:17:29 ◼   ► that we're in, different groups that we're a part of, that affect the way that

01:17:34 ◼   ► we react to certain situations and an individual throughout a day can go through a myriad of these

01:17:41 ◼   ► things in what may make somebody appear to do something that is in direct conflict of something

01:17:48 ◼   ► they did earlier in the day because they're in a different situation. And he uses a great example

01:17:53 ◼   ► of like a mother who is an executive. And at home in the morning getting the children ready for

01:18:00 ◼   ► school, that is your environment and in that environment you are top of the tree.

01:18:04 ◼   ► The kids will listen to you and you get them ready and you send them off. But

01:18:08 ◼   ► where you're like a mid-level executive at a company, you don't tell everyone

01:18:11 ◼   ► what to do anymore. You're in an organization and you may do something

01:18:16 ◼   ► for somebody that you wouldn't do at home and it's like wow like okay I get it

01:18:22 ◼   ► right? The environment that you're in can change the way that you react to

01:18:26 ◼   ► certain requests and certain actions.

01:18:28 ◼   ► - Yeah, I love this idea, and I feel like this really goes

01:18:31 ◼   ► to the core of some of my beliefs about how people act.

01:18:36 ◼   ► And just again, in this idea that you are,

01:18:41 ◼   ► in different circumstances, a different person.

01:18:45 ◼   ► I don't know, when I talk to people,

01:18:46 ◼   ► I find a lot of people have a weird resistance

01:18:49 ◼   ► to this idea, or they think of other people as like,

01:18:54 ◼   ► "Oh, this person should be totally consistent all the time."

01:18:57 ◼   ► But nobody is, people act differently

01:19:01 ◼   ► in different environments.

01:19:03 ◼   ► But I think he does do a very good job of trying to

01:19:05 ◼   ► not just discuss that idea that you are different

01:19:10 ◼   ► in different situations, but trying to bring it

01:19:13 ◼   ► to your attention about when are you acting

01:19:17 ◼   ► like a better self or a worse self,

01:19:20 ◼   ► and trying to identify what is it in this environment

01:19:24 ◼   ► is making me act better?" or really the thing that he's mostly focusing on is "What is the

01:19:30 ◼   ► thing in this environment that is making you act worse?" And he has a little detail which I really

01:19:36 ◼   ► like which is thinking about the human environment not just the physical environment. So he talks

01:19:42 ◼   ► about people as an environment. Like you know if someone is not getting along with a colleague like

01:19:47 ◼   ► he uses an example like a guy called Simon who's like causing problems for you with the office

01:19:52 ◼   ► that you need to think about it as like you are now in the Simon environment and recognize that

01:19:58 ◼   ► you have a history of acting poorly in this environment and like what can you do like step

01:20:05 ◼   ► one acknowledging that and then step two trying to think about how to react in those circumstances

01:20:12 ◼   ► but I just I really like that idea of people and combinations of people as a kind of environment

01:20:19 ◼   ► that they're not just like... it's not like what I normally think of as like the physical space is

01:20:25 ◼   ► the environment and the humans are like props inside that environment. It's like no no,

01:20:28 ◼   ► the environment is the combination of all of these things. I think that's a nice addition into how to

01:20:35 ◼   ► think about the way you are acting or reacting to what's going on. And this is where the triggers

01:20:40 ◼   ► come in. So you have the environment, right? So use the Simon environment, the person you don't

01:20:44 ◼   ► get on with while at work. That environment triggers you to react in a certain way. And that

01:20:50 ◼   ► might be that you become very short-tempered when you're around that person because they frustrate

01:20:56 ◼   ► you. And that's what you need to change. You need to change the trigger. You can't change

01:21:02 ◼   ► the environment. The environment is what it is, but you have to try and change the way that you

01:21:08 ◼   ► react in those environments and that's what the triggers are. The trigger is how you react.

01:21:14 ◼   ► So like there is a thing that happens and different people react to that thing differently

01:21:21 ◼   ► and every single person however they react that is the way that they are triggered. Some

01:21:25 ◼   ► people can deal with certain things that other people can't etc etc. The triggers are different

01:21:30 ◼   ► for different people depending on the environment that they're in and the triggered response

01:21:35 ◼   ► is the thing that you have to try and change if you want to make behavioral change. So like some

01:21:39 ◼   ► examples of ways that people have been able to deal with this stuff is like, here's an example

01:21:44 ◼   ► of a guy who writes things down on an index card to remind him how to react in a certain way,

01:21:49 ◼   ► or there's somebody who's taking friends out in a city and he's doing this a bunch and he's getting

01:21:55 ◼   ► bored of like showing people the same tourist things, so he has a reminder go off on his phone

01:22:00 ◼   ► to remind him like, "Don't be an idiot about this," right? Because his usual trigger would be to get

01:22:05 ◼   ► grumpy. Or if you're around Simon, your usual trigger is to get like really snappy with Simon,

01:22:11 ◼   ► but your trigger needs to be not that, right? The way that you react in that situation

01:22:16 ◼   ► needs to be not that, and you have to try and change the way that you react in those

01:22:20 ◼   ► instances in those environments. Yeah, like I think the practical example of the guy getting

01:22:25 ◼   ► board showing visitors around the same events in the city. Like what he's trying to suggest there

01:22:31 ◼   ► is you have a little reminder pop up on your phone because phones exist in this modern business world

01:22:35 ◼   ► right? I did note, I thought like this is so simple but it's a great idea of having your phone pop up

01:22:42 ◼   ► a reminder every 45 minutes asking are you enjoying the time with your friends right to

01:22:49 ◼   ► to change the mental framing from like,

01:22:52 ◼   ► "I'm at this statue of liberty for the 40th time."

01:22:56 ◼   ► That you change the framing to like,

01:22:58 ◼   ► "My environment is that I'm with my friends."

01:23:04 ◼   ► And the question is like,

01:23:05 ◼   ► "Am I enjoying this time with them?"

01:23:07 ◼   ► Like don't focus on like,

01:23:08 ◼   ► "Oh, I'm at the statue of liberty again."

01:23:10 ◼   ► That's not the relevant thing here.

01:23:13 ◼   ► And that like, that's actually a pretty great idea

01:23:15 ◼   ► to just have a little thing pop up

01:23:17 ◼   ► to constantly remind you.

01:23:18 ◼   ► It's like, yeah, it's simple.

01:23:19 ◼   ► And it's dumb, but I could totally see that being an effective thing to do.

01:23:24 ◼   ► And I've actually in a couple of scenarios used something like that, whereas like just

01:23:29 ◼   ► poke a little reminder to kind of ask me a question about the situation that I'm into,

01:23:33 ◼   ► like reframe it mentally.

01:23:35 ◼   ► And I think it's I think it's actually quite effective.

01:23:37 ◼   ► So you used an example there of what are called active or engaging questions as a way to change

01:23:44 ◼   ► the triggers.

01:23:45 ◼   ► this is an idea of having a question that you ask yourself,

01:23:49 ◼   ► which is like an open question that you have to react to.

01:23:53 ◼   ► And this is how Goldsmith recommends

01:23:56 ◼   ► that we change our triggers,

01:23:58 ◼   ► is by having these ways of checking in with ourselves

01:24:01 ◼   ► on a frequent and regular basis,

01:24:03 ◼   ► usually with some method of accountability

01:24:05 ◼   ► from another individual,

01:24:06 ◼   ► as a way to try and enforce a change in us.

01:24:09 ◼   ► So for example, I'm gonna give some,

01:24:11 ◼   ► like a short list of questions

01:24:14 ◼   ► that are given in the book as engaging questions.

01:24:16 ◼   ► So like, did I do my best to set clear goals today?

01:24:20 ◼   ► Did I do my best to be happy today?

01:24:22 ◼   ► Did I do my best to be engaged today?

01:24:24 ◼   ► And these are like questions that you have to give

01:24:26 ◼   ► some kind of answer to.

01:24:28 ◼   ► Like you have to like score them in some ways,

01:24:31 ◼   ► the way that he recommends it.

01:24:32 ◼   ► So like you give yourself a score out of 10 or something

01:24:36 ◼   ► for like how well did I do in each of these areas?

01:24:39 ◼   ► And this is one of the ways that you will change

01:24:41 ◼   ► your triggers, the way that you react to things,

01:24:43 ◼   ► because you start to frame your life slightly differently.

01:24:45 ◼   ► Yeah, and this was really the core of the section that I was thinking of when you were

01:24:50 ◼   ► discussing journaling last time because reading this book and sort of going through stuff

01:24:55 ◼   ► and this to me feels like prime journaling material and I think this to me was the part

01:25:02 ◼   ► of the book that stuck with me the most.

01:25:05 ◼   ► I noticed it, like as soon as I got to this section I could see why you recommended the

01:25:10 ◼   ► book to me.

01:25:11 ◼   ► Yeah, and there's a few things that I really like about this.

01:25:16 ◼   ► And, okay, so one of the things is, he has these questions that he asks himself every day.

01:25:23 ◼   ► And they all start with, "Did you try your best to?"

01:25:29 ◼   ► And when I first start reading this stuff, I kind of like roll my eyes a little bit.

01:25:34 ◼   ► But then he immediately addresses exactly what's going on.

01:25:38 ◼   ► And I thought like this is, this is actually a great linguistic change that he makes, he

01:25:43 ◼   ► makes the point that we totally treat effort as, as what he calls like a second class citizen.

01:25:49 ◼   ► And that what matters in behavior change is like, it's not actually the absolute record

01:26:00 ◼   ► of, of success or failure.

01:26:03 ◼   ► that what matters is you are keeping it in your mind as this is a thing that you are trying to do.

01:26:12 ◼   ► And so in with that framing like it's perfectly okay to fail to achieve behavior change on

01:26:20 ◼   ► particular days because that's not what the question is asking. It's asking like did you

01:26:25 ◼   ► try, I feel like this book really changed my mind on that kind of framing around

01:26:32 ◼   ► trying versus succeeding. That like effort really does count in this field in a way that in other

01:26:41 ◼   ► fields it totally doesn't count. Like there's many places where it's like A for effort means F for

01:26:47 ◼   ► achievement and I'm so used to that as being the default but I just I really like this this

01:26:53 ◼   ► different framing of things and that is the part that has stuck with me the most is thinking

01:27:00 ◼   ► about trying to rework a journal into my regular life with a series of these questions about

01:27:09 ◼   ► like did you try your best to whatever and I don't know I just I that that was the part

01:27:16 ◼   ► that really really struck me and I thought it I thought it's just it makes something

01:27:21 ◼   ► in my mind clear about these questions and when I've thought about the kinds of things

01:27:25 ◼   ► that I would want to change in my own life, I'm very aware that the trying framework

01:27:30 ◼   ► is different because it's like, you know, I often go on stretches where I'm stricter

01:27:36 ◼   ► or looser with say limiting the carbohydrates in my diet and when I've thought about that

01:27:42 ◼   ► for like, oh, I'm trying to reduce carbohydrates in my diet, there's something very different

01:27:47 ◼   ► about the decision moments in life,

01:27:51 ◼   ► where it's like, oh, maybe I could eat a pizza, right?

01:27:54 ◼   ► And there's something different about thinking like,

01:27:56 ◼   ► oh, I have failed today to do this thing,

01:28:01 ◼   ► versus it feels way worse to think like,

01:28:04 ◼   ► if I press a button and a pizza comes to my house,

01:28:06 ◼   ► I didn't even try, right?

01:28:09 ◼   ► And it's like, oh, that makes me kind of reframe this

01:28:14 ◼   ► in a very different way, where it's like,

01:28:16 ◼   ► It's somehow weird. It's almost more acceptable to just fail, right?

01:28:20 ◼   ► The difference is having a slice of toast is like,

01:28:23 ◼   ► "Okay, I didn't do the best I could have done today.

01:28:26 ◼   ► Maybe I scored a 7 out of 10."

01:28:29 ◼   ► As compared to if it was a binary yes or no,

01:28:33 ◼   ► you could eat an entire baguette.

01:28:35 ◼   ► Right, right.

01:28:36 ◼   ► And it wouldn't matter because you've already failed today,

01:28:39 ◼   ► so you may as well fail spectacularly.

01:28:41 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly.

01:28:42 ◼   ► As opposed to grading yourself on how well did I do

01:28:46 ◼   ► "Well, okay, I had a piece of toast, but I only have one piece."

01:28:49 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:28:50 ◼   ► As opposed to like, "Well, I just ate the entire loaf because why not?"

01:28:53 ◼   ► Right? Like, "I've already failed."

01:28:54 ◼   ► Yeah, like, yeah, it avoids a kind of cascade of failures where you feel like,

01:28:57 ◼   ► "I haven't done the thing at all, so I might as well really not do it."

01:29:01 ◼   ► And so like one of the, just a very, very, like if you're struggling to like conceptualize this,

01:29:08 ◼   ► Godsworth gives an example of a very simple question.

01:29:12 ◼   ► So, "Did you have a good day?"

01:29:14 ◼   ► Right?

01:29:15 ◼   ► And that is like a yes or a no. Right? Did I have a good day today? No, I didn't have a good day

01:29:19 ◼   ► today. This is very different to what he thinks is a better question, which is what did you do today

01:29:25 ◼   ► to make a positive impact? That is very different as a question because you may not have had a good

01:29:31 ◼   ► day, but you might have done one thing that was good. So now the day wasn't a complete failure.

01:29:37 ◼   ► Yeah, or even just a more simple rephrasing of "did I try to have a good day today?"

01:29:43 ◼   ► Immediately changes moments in your life where you feel like you were being grumpy just to be grumpy.

01:29:49 ◼   ► You weren't even trying to have a good day. Whereas it's way easier to score it as like,

01:29:55 ◼   ► "no, I didn't have a good day at all. I was super grumpy." And I think it really is just a

01:30:01 ◼   ► super great reframing of this. But he does suggest, and this is where the journaling

01:30:08 ◼   ► comes in, that you're keeping a record over time and that you're checking in at a particular

01:30:13 ◼   ► time and seeing how these things are going. And of course, I totally love that just like

01:30:19 ◼   ► the section in the beginning, he also acknowledges this is really hard to do. And if you are

01:30:25 ◼   ► scoring yourself honestly, he talks again about it's really hard to, at the beginning,

01:30:31 ◼   ► the reality that like you claim these things are important, but you're not even trying

01:30:35 ◼   ► if you're being honest with the scoring a lot of the times.

01:30:39 ◼   ► And again, I just think that's great.

01:30:41 ◼   ► And it again, it makes me think of the time tracking where it's like, it's just so brutal

01:30:44 ◼   ► to look at when you first begin, but that's kind of the point.

01:30:49 ◼   ► And so when you're trying to come up with a list of questions about behavioral changes

01:30:52 ◼   ► that you want, like you should totally expect that you're going to have a real brutal list

01:30:58 ◼   ► of numbers to look at sometimes.

01:31:00 ◼   ► and that's to force you to think about,

01:31:02 ◼   ► are you really trying?

01:31:03 ◼   ► Is this a thing that you actually want to do right now?

01:31:06 ◼   ► Or is this a thing that like,

01:31:07 ◼   ► is not really a priority in your life?

01:31:10 ◼   ► One of his little anecdotes is he's talking about

01:31:12 ◼   ► a discussion with Atul Gawande,

01:31:14 ◼   ► who is the author of "The Checklist Manifesto,"

01:31:17 ◼   ► which is a book I've talked about before as really liking.

01:31:20 ◼   ► The details of the anecdote--

01:31:21 ◼   ► - This is hilarious to me.

01:31:23 ◼   ► - Like, here's a guy who has written a book on checklists,

01:31:27 ◼   ► who is unable to do a simple thing in his life.

01:31:31 ◼   ► - It was to sign up for life insurance.

01:31:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's what it was.

01:31:34 ◼   ► Like just to sign up for life insurance.

01:31:36 ◼   ► And he just, his question then at the end of the day

01:31:40 ◼   ► is like, did you try to set up any kind of life insurance

01:31:44 ◼   ► for your family today?

01:31:46 ◼   ► And it's like an incredibly successful guy

01:31:49 ◼   ► who's a doctor who is a multiple New York Times

01:31:52 ◼   ► bestselling author who wrote a book on literal checklists.

01:31:56 ◼   ► Like even this guy has things on his mind that he feels like, "Oh, this is super important

01:32:01 ◼   ► and I should do," and has to face the grim reality of, "You didn't even try today

01:32:06 ◼   ► to do this thing that you claim is so important."

01:32:10 ◼   ► And eventually, like he guilt trips himself into doing it.

01:32:13 ◼   ► But I just always like to see that kind of thing that it's like even people who are

01:32:17 ◼   ► very successful have these kinds of problems.

01:32:20 ◼   ► So Atul Gawande says, like there was a quote from him in the book that like, "This system

01:32:25 ◼   ► changed his life, right? The thing is, I believe it because he named him, right? Because this

01:32:33 ◼   ► is an example of when in other books you would roll your eyes to be like, "Oh, someone who

01:32:38 ◼   ► wrote the book on checklists needed your question for his checklist to be able to actually do

01:32:42 ◼   ► a thing, but I will believe it because you named the guy, because he can say you were

01:32:48 ◼   ► lying." Right? So it's like, this is an example of why I'm willing to like, I'm more willing

01:32:53 ◼   ► to believe that this system works because the examples are believable. Because the examples

01:32:58 ◼   ► are supposed to show me the system works. So if I believe the examples, I believe that

01:33:02 ◼   ► there's value in the system. Now, I really, really liked this engaging questions thing,

01:33:09 ◼   ► and I have a problem for it. So I created a small list of questions for myself, but

01:33:12 ◼   ► I'm not sure how to integrate them into my journal. It wouldn't work. Like, I don't want

01:33:18 ◼   ► to write seven questions out every single day and then score them. So like, I'm trying

01:33:23 ◼   ► of find a way to make it make sense for me like maybe I have like a different part of

01:33:28 ◼   ► the book where I kind of keep a score maybe in the back or something I haven't worked

01:33:32 ◼   ► this out yet but I'm I'm gonna try and I'm willing to share the questions if you were

01:33:36 ◼   ► interested to hear them.

01:33:37 ◼   ► I am interested to hear them although I'm just I'm curious like if you use some sort

01:33:40 ◼   ► of digital paper system you could just I don't want to know template over and over.

01:33:44 ◼   ► So this is something I didn't mention earlier you know when you said to me that you were

01:33:46 ◼   ► you were really impressed that I kept the journal going like so easily. Part of it is

01:33:51 ◼   ► is because I love using my pens and paper.

01:33:54 ◼   ► - Right, of course.

01:33:55 ◼   ► - Right, so getting to do that every day

01:33:57 ◼   ► brings joy to me that doing it on my iPad wouldn't.

01:34:01 ◼   ► And so if I want to integrate this into my system,

01:34:04 ◼   ► I need to find a practical way of doing it.

01:34:05 ◼   ► And I just haven't worked out what that is yet.

01:34:08 ◼   ► - No, I understand, I'm just teasing you.

01:34:09 ◼   ► - I know you are, I know you are.

01:34:11 ◼   ► So let me, I have seven questions so far.

01:34:12 ◼   ► - Great copy and pastes.

01:34:14 ◼   ► All right, tell me what your questions are.

01:34:16 ◼   ► - Okay, did I do my best to be creative today?

01:34:20 ◼   ► Did I do my best to advance new ideas today?

01:34:24 ◼   ► Did I do my best to make sure revenue is being generated?

01:34:27 ◼   ► Did I do my best to make my colleagues feel valued?

01:34:31 ◼   ► Did I do my best to do something good for Edina?

01:34:35 ◼   ► Did I do my best to engage with my audience?

01:34:38 ◼   ► And did I do my best to improve my health?

01:34:42 ◼   ► They are my questions so far.

01:34:44 ◼   ► Yeah, those are good.

01:34:45 ◼   ► Those are good.

01:34:46 ◼   ► And I tried to keep them open.

01:34:48 ◼   ► I tried to keep them like vague, like the one, did I do my best to make sure

01:34:52 ◼   ► revenue is being generated?

01:34:53 ◼   ► There are like a bunch of different ways that I can answer that question.

01:34:57 ◼   ► And I could have said, did I do my best to make a sale today?

01:35:01 ◼   ► That's very different.

01:35:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:35:04 ◼   ► The revenue one is a way better question.

01:35:06 ◼   ► So I thought hard about that one because I wanted to have something in there,

01:35:08 ◼   ► right?

01:35:09 ◼   ► Cause I sell podcast sponsorships, but it's not the only way my company can

01:35:13 ◼   ► generate revenue.

01:35:13 ◼   ► And there are other things that I can do

01:35:16 ◼   ► to try and set a basis for doing this

01:35:20 ◼   ► as opposed to actually making a sale.

01:35:22 ◼   ► And I figured that that would be,

01:35:24 ◼   ► for my personal mental health, more important.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Because the sales don't happen every day,

01:35:29 ◼   ► because they don't need to.

01:35:31 ◼   ► They happen, if they happen every week,

01:35:33 ◼   ► then we're doing great, right?

01:35:35 ◼   ► You could get one sale a week and it's fine.

01:35:37 ◼   ► Because they happen in chunks of time.

01:35:41 ◼   ► So I wouldn't want to be every single day

01:35:43 ◼   ► beating myself up over not signing a contract.

01:35:49 ◼   ► The little detail that I like here in the book as well is, while it starts out with

01:35:54 ◼   ► that tough love of "guess what, this is going to be really hard" and "guess what,

01:35:58 ◼   ► you're going to say things that are important to you, you're going to not even try for

01:36:01 ◼   ► a week every day to do them", he immediately goes to this example of like "and guess

01:36:08 ◼   ► what, your questions aren't going to be that different from everybody else's questions".

01:36:12 ◼   ► "Oh, I loved that!" It's like, "You're going to be a cliché, but there's a reason!"

01:36:16 ◼   ► Yeah, he totally says, "You're going to be just like everybody else." To paraphrase

01:36:22 ◼   ► it slightly, he says, "Your goals will be plucked from a classic self-improvement menu,

01:36:27 ◼   ► the menu we all feast on. Lose weight, get fit, get organised, learn something new, quit

01:36:33 ◼   ► a bad habit, save more money, help others, spend more time with family, travel to new

01:36:38 ◼   ► fall in love and be less stressed. What's great is he finishes with, because you feel a bit like,

01:36:43 ◼   ► oh I guess I'm just like another sheep in this system, but I love that he acknowledges like

01:36:48 ◼   ► the fact that other people have similar goals doesn't make those goals less worthy and I feel

01:36:55 ◼   ► like that really does free you up to be able to have just like boring anodyne goals and that's

01:37:02 ◼   ► fine, right? This is the same goals everybody has and there is nothing wrong with that and I just,

01:37:07 ◼   ► I really like that he took a moment to explicitly call that out of like,

01:37:12 ◼   ► "Hey, you don't need to be super creative with these questions."

01:37:15 ◼   ► Like these are the things that as a human race we have agreed upon will make us happy.

01:37:19 ◼   ► Yeah, this is the stuff that everybody wants to do and there's a reason for it.

01:37:22 ◼   ► So I just, but I really like that little moment just to be like,

01:37:25 ◼   ► "Don't worry, you don't need to be super fancy with your 'did I generate revenue today' right?"

01:37:30 ◼   ► It's like, whatever, you want to lose weight?

01:37:32 ◼   ► Welcome to the Western world.

01:37:34 ◼   ► It's fine, it's perfectly fine to have as a goal.

01:37:37 ◼   ► There was one last part I wanted to touch on with this book, which happens before the

01:37:41 ◼   ► questions. So the questions are about creating a system of accountability, right? That's

01:37:46 ◼   ► what you do. You create these questions and then if you want to make your change, you

01:37:49 ◼   ► have to answer the questions and you're accountable to the questions, right? But before that,

01:37:54 ◼   ► he talks about like why we need this type of system and it's because as humans, we

01:38:00 ◼   ► are superior planners and inferior doers. So like saying that each individual is both

01:38:06 ◼   ► a leader and a follower. In the morning, at the beginning of our day, the leader is ready

01:38:11 ◼   ► for action, setting out our tasks and believing, "This is the stuff I want to do today, and

01:38:17 ◼   ► I'm going to achieve all of it." Then you hand over to the follower part of yourself,

01:38:22 ◼   ► who has to then execute on the leader's plan. And that doesn't work out, because we get

01:38:28 ◼   ► tired or we get distracted. It is in the same way that if you have anybody work for you,

01:38:34 ◼   ► You may ask them to do a task, but it doesn't get completed.

01:38:38 ◼   ► You do that to yourself every single day.

01:38:43 ◼   ► And this was like one of the most genius things I've ever heard in business training is the

01:38:48 ◼   ► systems of leadership and motivation that we learn to try and motivate and lead other

01:38:53 ◼   ► people, you have to do to yourself.

01:38:57 ◼   ► And this opened my mind.

01:39:01 ◼   ► That is genius, right?

01:39:03 ◼   ► learn all of these things about leadership styles and mentorship styles and like how

01:39:09 ◼   ► to motivate and engage people but we never think about the fact that you also have to

01:39:14 ◼   ► do it to yourself because you rely on yourself to do work every day and I was like oh my

01:39:20 ◼   ► god that is genius. I loved it.

01:39:24 ◼   ► Yeah it's a really great part of the book and it also goes to that idea of like not

01:39:29 ◼   ► being a consistent self that you react differently in these different environments, but also

01:39:35 ◼   ► the again, I love how he points out like, how many times have you successfully implemented

01:39:41 ◼   ► the plan the morning you had? It's like, wow, I can count those numbers of days like on

01:39:45 ◼   ► one hand, because morning you is always way optimistic about what can actually occur.

01:39:52 ◼   ► And it's like, oh, 2 p.m. you is real sleepy.

01:39:54 ◼   ► (laughs)

01:39:56 ◼   ► I just, I think it is a great framing.

01:39:59 ◼   ► It's a great way to be aware of things.

01:40:03 ◼   ► And I like it on both ends where he's trying to tamp down

01:40:06 ◼   ► planning you's desires and trying to do the thing.

01:40:12 ◼   ► Like you set up things for the you

01:40:17 ◼   ► who is going to be lazier in the future.

01:40:20 ◼   ► Right, and you try to make it easy for that guy

01:40:23 ◼   ► and that guy's gonna need some serious management help.

01:40:26 ◼   ► And for morning you, he has a hard time recognizing that.

01:40:31 ◼   ► And I do like that he just really calls out

01:40:33 ◼   ► that part of your plan about any kind of behavior change

01:40:36 ◼   ► has to include the easy to forget fact

01:40:40 ◼   ► that in the future, you will not be as motivated

01:40:43 ◼   ► as you currently are.

01:40:45 ◼   ► And you have to take that into account.

01:40:49 ◼   ► And I just, I think it's such, it's such an obvious,

01:40:51 ◼   ► like so many of these points,

01:40:52 ◼   ► like some of them are, they're very obvious,

01:40:55 ◼   ► but it's great to draw that in, to be like,

01:40:58 ◼   ► you need to explicitly think about this.

01:41:01 ◼   ► - All business book stuff is obvious once you hear it,

01:41:04 ◼   ► but it's about the way they codify it.

01:41:07 ◼   ► Like that's what's, so like another great example

01:41:09 ◼   ► is saying about weather forecasting.

01:41:13 ◼   ► Like people that care about the weather,

01:41:15 ◼   ► check the weather constantly and adjust their days to match.

01:41:19 ◼   ► It's like, why don't we do that for ourselves

01:41:22 ◼   ► in our tasks and motivations for the day?

01:41:24 ◼   ► Like, you set out with an idea in the daytime,

01:41:27 ◼   ► but you're keeping track of what is going on

01:41:29 ◼   ► and adjusting on the fly to deal with that.

01:41:32 ◼   ► And it's like, all of this stuff is just like,

01:41:34 ◼   ► this is a really good book.

01:41:36 ◼   ► This is a very good book.

01:41:38 ◼   ► I like it a lot.

01:41:40 ◼   ► - There's many, many more points in the book we could cover,

01:41:43 ◼   ► but I really think that this is a book

01:41:44 ◼   ► This is a book that has a lot in it and there's like a bunch of things that I would,

01:41:47 ◼   ► I highlighted because I feel like, Ooh, this really,

01:41:49 ◼   ► this really speaks to me in my particular situation,

01:41:52 ◼   ► but might not be interesting in a general conversation.

01:41:55 ◼   ► But he made one point that again is so obvious,

01:42:00 ◼   ► but to hear someone just talk about it in a clear way is like, you know,

01:42:04 ◼   ► it's an excellent point.

01:42:05 ◼   ► And one of the things he talks about is activities that have a certain kind of

01:42:10 ◼   ► inertia.

01:42:11 ◼   ► And he just talked about being aware that whatever you're doing,

01:42:14 ◼   ► it's often very hard to stop doing that thing.

01:42:18 ◼   ► And so it's like, Oh, hey, you sit down to watch a little bit of Netflix.

01:42:23 ◼   ► And nobody watches a little bit of Netflix. Right.

01:42:27 ◼   ► And it just,

01:42:28 ◼   ► it made me think about like one of these pieces of productivity advice that I've

01:42:31 ◼   ► always thought, like, is there a human on earth who can do this?

01:42:34 ◼   ► Because it's not me. You'll hear people say things like,

01:42:36 ◼   ► why don't you work for a little while? And then you give yourself a break,

01:42:39 ◼   ► a nice reward and you spend 10 minutes on social media and then you go right back to

01:42:44 ◼   ► work and you know it's a reward for having to like does anybody do that is there anybody

01:42:49 ◼   ► on the face of the earth who's like i'll just boot up mario kart for 10 minutes just play

01:42:53 ◼   ► a couple races and then i'll get right back into that important work i was doing like

01:42:57 ◼   ► nobody does that and so he talked about this this idea of inertia and there's something

01:43:06 ◼   ► that's been creeping up in my mind, which he doesn't talk about, but like, I've

01:43:13 ◼   ► started to think about the flip side of that because I was thinking like, wait a

01:43:16 ◼   ► minute, there are a bunch of activities that aren't this way.

01:43:19 ◼   ► Things like exercise, right?

01:43:23 ◼   ► Or things like writing a script or certain kinds of very intense work.

01:43:31 ◼   ► I feel like I've come to recognize this category of things that I'm thinking of

01:43:35 ◼   ► as self terminating activities.

01:43:38 ◼   ► I really think that there's an importance in recognizing

01:43:44 ◼   ► that there are a lot of things

01:43:45 ◼   ► that are self terminating activities

01:43:48 ◼   ► versus the stuff that he's talking about,

01:43:51 ◼   ► like inertial activities.

01:43:54 ◼   ► And I feel like this is,

01:43:56 ◼   ► I haven't quite settled my thoughts on this entirely,

01:44:00 ◼   ► but there's something here about gaining an understanding

01:44:04 ◼   ► of the distinction between these two things.

01:44:06 ◼   ► And that in general, self-terminating activities

01:44:10 ◼   ► are things that you'd rather spend your time on

01:44:14 ◼   ► than inertial activities where you can just do them forever.

01:44:18 ◼   ► That there's, I don't know,

01:44:20 ◼   ► I wish I could explain this better in my head,

01:44:25 ◼   ► but it's just something that has been on my mind

01:44:27 ◼   ► since I first read the book is this thought of like,

01:44:30 ◼   ► things worth doing are self-terminating.

01:44:34 ◼   ► and things that are enjoyable, but maybe less worthy in a way,

01:44:39 ◼   ► have this inertial quality that he talks about

01:44:42 ◼   ► that you just want to keep doing them for forever.

01:44:45 ◼   ► And it's just a thing that struck me,

01:44:47 ◼   ► and I'm gonna again recommend the book pretty highly

01:44:51 ◼   ► 'cause I feel like there's a lot in here

01:44:54 ◼   ► that even if some of it doesn't seem to resonate at all,

01:44:56 ◼   ► I think that almost everybody will find something

01:44:59 ◼   ► that you feel like sticks with you

01:45:02 ◼   ► after you've read the book.

01:45:03 ◼   ► Yeah, I recommend it. I really do recommend it. This is a good pick. There's a lot of

01:45:08 ◼   ► interesting stuff in there, as we've said. It's not a big book. I recommend going to

01:45:13 ◼   ► it. There's a bunch of still really practical things we've not even touched on.

01:45:18 ◼   ► Yeah, there's a lot we haven't touched on.

01:45:21 ◼   ► I think people could get a lot from this, so I recommend it. So again, it's Triggers

01:45:24 ◼   ► by Marshall Goldsmith. It's a very, very good book. Before we go, cortexmerch.com. Cortexmerch.com.

01:45:31 ◼   ► there buy merch at cortexmerch.com.