Speaker 1: I'm trying my best to get out of my own head,
Speaker 1: but of course it's hard to do that. They put
Speaker 1: the camera on the front of the eyePhone, and we
Speaker 1: were asking for trouble with that one. Selfies went up.
Speaker 1: We're all looking at ourselves all the time.
Speaker 2: Now, welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great
Speaker 2: thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
Speaker 2: quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
Speaker 2: you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
Speaker 2: our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
Speaker 2: self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
Speaker 2: have instead of what we do. We think things that
Speaker 2: hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
Speaker 2: just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent,
Speaker 2: and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
Speaker 2: podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
Speaker 2: the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3: Do you ever feel like life is just a series
Speaker 3: of problems to solve the constant hum of what's next, planning, fixing, optimizing,
Speaker 3: it can take over and before you know it, the
Speaker 3: moments of your life just become tasks to manage. I've
Speaker 3: been there, still am there a lot of the time,
Speaker 3: and I know how hard it is to break free
Speaker 3: from that mindset. In today's episode, I'm joined by Neo
Speaker 3: pasricha best selling author of the Book of Awesome, to
Speaker 3: talk about how focusing on small joys like a sound
Speaker 3: of birds, the taste of coffee, or the feel of
Speaker 3: warm laundry can help us step out of that loop.
Speaker 3: Neil shares practical tools for reclaiming our attention from distracts, actions,
Speaker 3: and finding happiness in the present moment. If you've ever
Speaker 3: felt too busy solving life to actually live it, this
Speaker 3: conversation is for you. Stick around and let's explore how
Speaker 3: to start seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary. Hi, Neil,
Speaker 3: welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me here. It's good
Speaker 1: to be back.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it is a pleasure to have you on. We're
Speaker 3: going to be talking about your latest book called our
Speaker 3: Book of Awesome, a celebration of the small joys that
Speaker 3: bring us together, and any other miscellaneous things that we
Speaker 3: come up with. But before we do that, let's start
Speaker 3: like we always do with the parable. You'll get another
Speaker 3: cut at it I think it's this time number three maybe,
Speaker 3: but it changes for people interestingly over the years. So
Speaker 3: in the parable, there's a grandparent talking with their grandchild
Speaker 3: and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
Speaker 3: of us that are always at battle. One is a
Speaker 3: good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
Speaker 3: and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
Speaker 3: like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
Speaker 3: and thinks about it for a second, looks up at
Speaker 3: their grandparents, says, well, which one wins, and the grandparents says,
Speaker 3: the one you feed. So I'd like to start off
Speaker 3: by asking what does that parable mean to you in
Speaker 3: your life and in the work that.
Speaker 1: You do today. The message I get from the parable, honestly,
Speaker 1: is all about self care. I feel like we are
Speaker 1: living in a time today, Eric, where it is more
Speaker 1: and more difficult to focus on taking care of ourselves.
Speaker 1: I think the algorithm derived addictive technologies that we surround
Speaker 1: ourselves with that we sleep beside that we wake up,
Speaker 1: beside that we touch thousands of times a day, constantly
Speaker 1: pull us away from things that we know to be
Speaker 1: true to be good for us, like walking in nature,
Speaker 1: like deep RESTful sleep like time with friends and family
Speaker 1: without our cell phones. And so when I hear the parable,
Speaker 1: all I think about is a focus on the things
Speaker 1: that matter so that I can live life feeding the
Speaker 1: good wolf, the wolf of love, you know, away from
Speaker 1: all the things that the world is always trying to
Speaker 1: suck us into.
Speaker 3: So that gives us a place we might as well
Speaker 3: just jump in, which is you have some fairly strong
Speaker 3: positions on cell phone use. Here's my question. Everything you say,
Speaker 3: I think I agree with. Everybody agrees with. Right, we
Speaker 3: all know this isn't the most helpful thing. We also
Speaker 3: know that the genie is kind of out of the bottle,
Speaker 3: so to speak. Right, We as a society don't tend
Speaker 3: to go backwards technically, So is it really for you?
Speaker 3: Is the focus is on how do we use these
Speaker 3: tools intelligently and wisely?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Absolutely so. I think there's three problems with cell phones, Eric,
Speaker 1: They start with the letter P. First one is psychological.
Speaker 1: I think we can't overestimate this one. You know, when
Speaker 1: I was a kid, I could be the best basketball
Speaker 1: player in my high school team. It was feasible for
Speaker 1: me to do so. Now somebody's on YouTube throwing free
Speaker 1: throws with a blindfold on behind their back from half four.
Speaker 1: And no matter what it is, you can't be the
Speaker 1: best at it anymore. You're always a loser on the internet.
Speaker 1: And I think, no wonder we're seeing higher than ever
Speaker 1: rates of anxiety. One in three college students have clinical anxiety.
Speaker 1: Doctor Gene Tweage at San Diego State University says, but
Speaker 1: we've never seen anxiety rates this high. Jonathan Heighten NYU
Speaker 1: is saying the same thing. So let's just be really
Speaker 1: aware of how psychological inferior we often feel online. Second
Speaker 1: P is physical. You know what, when you look at
Speaker 1: a bright screen within an hour of bedtime, you don't
Speaker 1: produce as much melatone and blame your pineal gland for
Speaker 1: that one. But evolutionary biologists are now saying, you know what, actually,
Speaker 1: when you turn off a bright screen, you get a
Speaker 1: boost of energy. If you, like me, ever, turn your
Speaker 1: phone off right before going to bed, don't you feel
Speaker 1: like it's time to, like, you know, get the cave
Speaker 1: set up and build a fire, right, That's what it
Speaker 1: privately is in us. So there's a huge, huge physical issue.
Speaker 1: And then the third one is productivity. I think that
Speaker 1: right now when you look at the phone, and they
Speaker 1: keep getting more and more gamified, right, things flying and
Speaker 1: flying out, and everything's got a little number in the
Speaker 1: corner to hook your attention. We all know what hooks us. Now,
Speaker 1: what's happening is, you know, we're spending more more of
Speaker 1: our time. Some reports are saying it's thirty one percent
Speaker 1: of O time now bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks.
Speaker 1: So is the genie out of the bottle? Yes, it
Speaker 1: absolutely is. But are there simple tools and behaviors we
Speaker 1: can do to control it. I think there are, and
Speaker 1: I think honestly, not very many of us are doing
Speaker 1: these things. I'll tell you right now, I'm talking to
Speaker 1: you from my basement. You know ELSEO is down in
Speaker 1: my basement or my cell phone charger. It lives in
Speaker 1: my furnace room, the most disgusting, you know, cobweb filled
Speaker 1: room of my house. And by leaving my charger in
Speaker 1: this room, I'm forced to take a twenty second walk
Speaker 1: from here to my bedroom. And that prevents me from
Speaker 1: sending that email I'm gonna regret the next morning or quickly,
Speaker 1: you know, low resilience, me grabbing my phone in the morning.
Speaker 1: So the first thing I think we need to do
Speaker 1: is we got to get the phone out of the bedroom.
Speaker 1: When I do polls right now, I'll tell you ninety
Speaker 1: five percent of people are sleeping with their cell phone
Speaker 1: beside them. And what are they doing before bed checking
Speaker 1: their phone? What do they do when they got up
Speaker 1: in the morning check on the phone. Look, we're doing
Speaker 1: this with a bottle of wine. We'd have no problems
Speaker 1: saying you're an alcoholic, but right now we don't have
Speaker 1: this phone a halic term in society. We think it's
Speaker 1: just normal. So first thing we need to do is
Speaker 1: get the phone out of the bedroom. And if you
Speaker 1: want to go deep on it, I have a morning
Speaker 1: practice that I use to fill in the anxious tendency.
Speaker 1: My brain wants to grip something and grab something when
Speaker 1: I wake up.
Speaker 3: We may get to that. It's interesting, this phone in
Speaker 3: the morning thing. It is a plague that I fight
Speaker 3: back and I am successful with for a while, and
Speaker 3: then somehow there I am I'm like, how has this
Speaker 3: happened again? Where Like I'm checking my email first thing
Speaker 3: in the morning. So then I go through the whole
Speaker 3: process of trying to get it out, you know, I
Speaker 3: think that's a lot the way ubiquitous things that are
Speaker 3: around us all the time are like that. It's why
Speaker 3: you know, if you didn't want to smoke cigarettes, you
Speaker 3: would get rid of them completely. It makes it easier
Speaker 3: than having cigarettes that you smoke some of the time.
Speaker 3: I think you're right, we need the distance if we
Speaker 3: can get it. I mean, the cardinal rule of good
Speaker 3: and bad habits is, if you want to do something positive,
Speaker 3: make it as easy as possible to do it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: And if you don't want to do something negative, make
Speaker 3: it as hard as possible to do it right, like
Speaker 3: give yourself those things. So putting it out of the
Speaker 3: bedroom certainly means you can't get to it. I mean,
Speaker 3: I know people who lock their phone in one of
Speaker 3: those you know little boxes that has a timer on at.
Speaker 1: Phone sell Yeah, yeah, there's a website phone sell dot
Speaker 1: me at pho any cel dot me. If people are interested,
Speaker 1: like one hundred dollars a glass case you can put
Speaker 1: your phone in, set the timer. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The two biggest bearers that here on the cell phone
Speaker 1: bedroom thing are number one, it's my alarm clock. And
Speaker 1: I always say, have you heard a Walmart? Like can
Speaker 1: you go buy a ten dollars alarm clock. But even
Speaker 1: to this point. Now, I actually travel now with a
Speaker 1: little white box alarm clock, because I notice hotel rooms
Speaker 1: are taking them out of the rooms right because everyone
Speaker 1: they're just so used to people sleeping beside them. And
Speaker 1: the second thing I say is get a landline. Get
Speaker 1: a landline and the cell phone call. The phone companies
Speaker 1: are desperate to sell you one. They cost ten dollars
Speaker 1: a month because no one wants one. But you give
Speaker 1: that phone to your emergency people, and the idea that
Speaker 1: they can reach you in an emergency relieves you of
Speaker 1: the obligation of leaving that phone next to you with
Speaker 1: everything else that's got in it.
Speaker 3: Those are wise tips. There's lots of places to go here,
Speaker 3: but I would love to start with let's just hit
Speaker 3: the new book for a few minutes, because that's the
Speaker 3: top thing on the list, and then I've got I've
Speaker 3: got lots of other things we can go through. So
Speaker 3: the new book is called our Book of Awesome, a
Speaker 3: celebration of the small joys that bring us together. You've
Speaker 3: got previous books around awesomeness. Why this one and what's
Speaker 3: different about it?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Absolutely so, more than ten years ago, my wife
Speaker 1: left me. My best friend took us on life, and
Speaker 1: I started a blog called one Thousand Awesome Things as
Speaker 1: a way to cheer me up. Right. So from two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight to twenty twelve, I wrote one awesome
Speaker 1: thing every single day as a journaling practice to try
Speaker 1: to focus on the positive. I wrote about flipping to
Speaker 1: the cold side of the pillow. I wrote about wearing
Speaker 1: warm underwear from out of the dryer. I wrote about
Speaker 1: playing an old dangerous playground equipment. If you're listening and
Speaker 1: you remember hot slides and you know, falling into cigarette butts,
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about. The blog, you know,
Speaker 1: hit nobody at first, then my mom, then my dad,
Speaker 1: and my traffic doubles. It got really big, It got
Speaker 1: really popular, and it turned into this book and I
Speaker 1: came out in twenty ten called the Book of Awesome.
Speaker 1: The Book of Austin came out Eric, and you know,
Speaker 1: it became my life for a few years. You know,
Speaker 1: all these sequels and spin offs and so on, and
Speaker 1: then for about a decade I didn't write those books.
Speaker 1: I felt like I was getting pigeonholed. I felt, you know,
Speaker 1: the krusty, the clown imitation gruel clip from The Simpsons
Speaker 1: flashed back to through my head. I was like, I
Speaker 1: got to focus on other things. And you know, I
Speaker 1: was also working a full time job at Walmart at
Speaker 1: the time, So I started focusing on like exploring happiness
Speaker 1: and exploring resilience and exploring and now I'm exploring trust
Speaker 1: these days, other big terms under this umbrella of how
Speaker 1: we live our most intentional life. So the kind of
Speaker 1: why this book Why Now is honestly the last two
Speaker 1: years of the pandemic have completely beat me up. I
Speaker 1: have felt tired, anxious, overwhelmed. I have felt symptoms of depression.
Speaker 1: I felt a lot of symptoms of stress. And so
Speaker 1: I started again. I started writing an awesome thing a
Speaker 1: day again as a way to cultivate a positive mindset.
Speaker 1: We know from research from Emmon's and mccallau that if
Speaker 1: you can write down ten things you're grateful for a week, okay,
Speaker 1: they compared it to test groups who wrote down hassles
Speaker 1: and test groups who wrote down events. Then after a
Speaker 1: ten week period, you're not just happier like you may expect,
Speaker 1: you're also physically healthier, which is incredible, right if you
Speaker 1: think you know this is a bicep curl, right, I'm
Speaker 1: flexing on screen here for those who are listening. Then
Speaker 1: gratitude turns out to be a pretty powerful brain curl
Speaker 1: because we got something in her brain called her visual cortex.
Speaker 1: There's an area in there called area seventeen. And when
Speaker 1: you talk about wearing that warm under from the dryer,
Speaker 1: or you write it down or you share it with
Speaker 1: a friend, it jogs the memory in your mind. Right,
Speaker 1: So why did I write our Book of Awesome For
Speaker 1: the first time in a decade. I'm looking to try
Speaker 1: to jolt the world back into a feeling of general
Speaker 1: positivity when I feel like outside of the one you feed,
Speaker 1: which is endless positivity. You know, all these great positives
Speaker 1: for the most part, when I look aside, it's pretty negative.
Speaker 1: So this is just, you know, a four hundred page
Speaker 1: hardcover book full of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of
Speaker 1: new awesome things.
Speaker 3: And some of them the r part of the book,
Speaker 3: Oh you are not ar Oh you are, is that
Speaker 3: you took submissions from your community also of things that
Speaker 3: they loved.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, it's funny. In the Book of Awesome.
Speaker 1: At the very back page, I put like if you
Speaker 1: have your own awesome suggestion, you know, send it to
Speaker 1: this email address. And hadn't checked that email utters and years,
Speaker 1: but there were over ten thousand people who had submitted essays.
Speaker 1: Ten thousand, right, and some of them are like, here's
Speaker 1: what we've done in my classroom. Here's what we've done,
Speaker 1: you know. And I've got these letters over the years.
Speaker 1: I'm like, why don't we stitch these together so that
Speaker 1: the book feels like something we are talking about as
Speaker 1: people and so well, I also to that point trying
Speaker 1: to take myself out of it as best as I could.
Speaker 1: I put Neil Pastwrica and friends on the cover. I
Speaker 1: took up the photo, I took out about the author,
Speaker 1: I took out the dedication, I took out the acknowledgments.
Speaker 1: At the end of the book, what happens is, if
Speaker 1: I did it right, it culminates in this sort of
Speaker 1: like cacophony of awesome from around the world, where these
Speaker 1: this voice gets louder and louder, and it's everybody from
Speaker 1: around the world screaming and sharing positive things. And so
Speaker 1: the last ten to twenty pages of the book are
Speaker 1: literally just fade to black, with smaller and smaller awesome things.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm trying to sort of make it feel
Speaker 1: like you're flying out to outer space, but just surrounded
Speaker 1: by lots of simple pleasures, because to me, that is
Speaker 1: certainly the dose I need, you know, right now when
Speaker 1: I look at the news, when I look at doom
Speaker 1: scroll and social media and so on.
Speaker 3: So is writing down awesome things just a particular form
Speaker 3: of gratitude? Is that really what it is? Or do
Speaker 3: you see it differently?
Speaker 1: Yeah? You know, we're not alive very long right at
Speaker 1: the end of the day. It feels long when we're
Speaker 1: in it, but the average person is only alive for
Speaker 1: about thirty thousand days right now. That's like the North
Speaker 1: American number. It's about five thousand days lesson as a
Speaker 1: global average. So we're alive for thirty thousand days, and
Speaker 1: then a given day we are awake for about a
Speaker 1: thousand minutes. You start doing the math, eric and like
Speaker 1: it starts to feel shorter and shorter to me. What
Speaker 1: we feel like we're playing for what the greeting card
Speaker 1: industry is oriented around with the you know, there's a
Speaker 1: baby industry, there's the wedding industry. We orient our industries
Speaker 1: in capitalism around these big, major life moments. Right the
Speaker 1: day you walk across the graduation stage, Well, that's a
Speaker 1: whole industry, that's a whole season, that's a whole event, right,
Speaker 1: you know, you know this mother's day, Father's day, graduation,
Speaker 1: and then we've got you know, when you get married,
Speaker 1: right then when you have a kid. And what I
Speaker 1: think we're missing from this cultural focus on the big
Speaker 1: things is how many simple things you have in your
Speaker 1: day that if you just take an extra second to
Speaker 1: watch that swirl of cream dissolve, been to coffee, you know,
Speaker 1: those little almost micro mindfulness moments. To use a phrase
Speaker 1: I've never used before, I've been sounded pretty good. Three Yeah,
Speaker 1: They awaken you to how joyful life really is. And
Speaker 1: I say this as someone who has a tendency to
Speaker 1: words anxiety. I say this as someone who has a
Speaker 1: tendency to words feeling overwhelmed and stress a lot. When
Speaker 1: I'm writing awesome things, when I'm reading awesome things, they
Speaker 1: have a pacifying quality that just sort of like reconnects
Speaker 1: me to the wider delight of consciousness. It reconnects me
Speaker 1: to the wider appreciation for what this is. We don't
Speaker 1: know what it is man. Right, we don't know what
Speaker 1: this is. But if we can be like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: the sound of the wind whispering through the trees, right,
Speaker 1: or something as funny or as simple as you know,
Speaker 1: texting your husband to do something when he's upstairs and
Speaker 1: you're downstairs. Right. I wrote that one in the book,
Speaker 1: when my wife texts me to bring down the lot. Really. Wow,
Speaker 1: that's hilarious, Like, how funny is this moment? Right? I
Speaker 1: remember seeing those vacuum shoot tubes of the side of
Speaker 1: office buildings I was a kid. I'm like, the future
Speaker 1: has arrived, you know. So is it just gratitudes? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And that is the research there. But if you want
Speaker 1: to layer in other research, we could talk about Slatcher
Speaker 1: and Panda Baker at the University of Texas, to all
Speaker 1: the research on journaling. Perhaps it's a journaling practice, right.
Speaker 1: We could talk about all the research on mindfulness, on
Speaker 1: sort of living in the present moment. Perhaps there's some
Speaker 1: of that just pausing on things that typically take a microsecond.
Speaker 1: So I think, you know, separate from all the research studies,
Speaker 1: there's just something about it. There's just something that's silly
Speaker 1: and joyful and fun makes me feel good. And hopefully
Speaker 1: it makes others feel the same way.
Speaker 3: I like it because we've talked about gratitude on the
Speaker 3: show countless times. It is one of the biggest effects
Speaker 3: in the positive psychology world. When people look at what
Speaker 3: has the strongest effect gratitude and kindness to others, you know,
Speaker 3: they just stand out as these extraordinarily positive interventions. However,
Speaker 3: gratitude can become very dry and dull if it's just
Speaker 3: what am I grateful that I have? I mean, that's
Speaker 3: good to be like, it's good to be grateful that
Speaker 3: I have a house over my head. It's good to
Speaker 3: be grateful that I have a wonderful partner. It's good
Speaker 3: to be grateful that I get to do this amazing work.
Speaker 3: And I am and I do reflect those things. However,
Speaker 3: for me, I do need also, as you said, to
Speaker 3: be looking for those little moments. The word I often
Speaker 3: use and you used it somewhere in there is appreciation. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know. Can I just find little things to appreciate
Speaker 3: throughout the.
Speaker 4: Day and emphasis on little like little little, yeah, like
Speaker 4: really little, you know, like when your kids don't hear
Speaker 4: you opening a bag of potato chips, right, That's when
Speaker 4: I put in the book, or sending a private message
Speaker 4: during the video conference and seeing your coworker look down
Speaker 4: and silently smirk.
Speaker 1: You know that one got I liked that one. I
Speaker 1: liked it right when the cake plops flawlessly out of
Speaker 1: the pan. Part of it, to me, Eric is remembering
Speaker 1: that the guy to be specific, right, So you know,
Speaker 1: writing down my husband, my kid, my dog, that a
Speaker 1: that ain't gonna cut it. It's when my husband Eric
Speaker 1: put the toilet seat down right when always happens, when
Speaker 1: our five year old daughter started writing her name out,
Speaker 1: when the rescue puppy we got during the pandemic stop
Speaker 1: peeing on the pillows. So just something be really specific.
Speaker 1: And I think a way to integrate this into your
Speaker 1: life is I know you talk about gratitude luck, but
Speaker 1: there's a game that my wife, Leslie and I play
Speaker 1: with our kids at dinner almost every night called Rose
Speaker 1: Rose thorn Bud. When we force our family and it's
Speaker 1: hard at first, and nobody wants to do it. It feels
Speaker 1: clunky and awkward to just say, hey, what was your
Speaker 1: rose from the day. The rose is the awesome thing.
Speaker 1: The rose is the gratitude when you force it to
Speaker 1: be from today only. Your mind has a very limited
Speaker 1: timeframe to sort through, and it picks out something small
Speaker 1: or sweet. Hey there's a new doughnut at the coffee shop,
Speaker 1: or you know, the crossing guard remembered my name, or
Speaker 1: you know I got a B plus on my math test. Whatever,
Speaker 1: you do it again, that's the second rose. Then you
Speaker 1: make space for a thorn. And I think this is
Speaker 1: missing from a lot of the gratitude practices we have
Speaker 1: in society. You got to have a place to vent,
Speaker 1: and so what we try to do is just say
Speaker 1: to the kids, oh, that sucks. Just that's it. You
Speaker 1: don't try to solve the problem. Just hear the thorn.
Speaker 1: And then finally a bud. It's a nice way to end.
Speaker 1: That's bud, which is something you are looking forward.
Speaker 3: To, and that not something that you are smoking with
Speaker 3: your children. Just for my stoner listeners, I want to
Speaker 3: clarify what we're talking about here.
Speaker 1: Rose rose, thorn, bud A simple dinner time, dinner table practice,
Speaker 1: or you can do it with your partner at bedtime whatever,
Speaker 1: to get the gratitude or the awesome thing kind of
Speaker 1: into the conversation in a way where it doesn't feel
Speaker 1: like you were mentioning, you know, sort of dry or repetitive.
Speaker 1: Right now you're forced to of one each day at dinner.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think that practice. Any of these practices, right,
Speaker 3: there's different ways of doing them, but they get us
Speaker 3: looking for the positive. It's like when I went through
Speaker 3: a period where I was like, I'm going to take
Speaker 3: a picture every day, Yeah, which meant that I was
Speaker 3: looking for something beautiful all the time. Yeah, not just
Speaker 3: the one moment I took the picture that oriented the
Speaker 3: way I went through the world. And it's the same way.
Speaker 3: If we're looking for what we appreciate, we're just naturally
Speaker 3: going to notice more things than if we're just kind
Speaker 3: of on autopilot.
Speaker 1: Have you been hearing all of this new research coming
Speaker 1: out on just the idea of expanding or dilating your pupils,
Speaker 1: sort of consciously expanding your vision. Yes, to that idea
Speaker 1: of seeing wider vistas. Yes, because it relaxes you. Have
Speaker 1: you been following all of that and your Huberman and
Speaker 1: so on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've been following. And what's interesting is that my
Speaker 3: primary spiritual practice is Zen and that is a very
Speaker 3: old Zen technique. I mean that has been thousands of
Speaker 3: you know, thousands of years through the Zen. Well, I
Speaker 3: wouldn't say thousands, a thousand years at least in the
Speaker 3: Zen tradition has had that as a practice, you know.
Speaker 3: So it's been really interesting to see it sort of
Speaker 3: show up in the scientific literature. Yeah. I think it's amazing.
Speaker 1: It's amazing how much scientific literature just tells us what
Speaker 1: our grandma told us, you know, or just like it's
Speaker 1: like we have Yeah, why do I have to quote
Speaker 1: research about gratitudes and journaling and all this, because that's
Speaker 1: what makes people agree that it's worth it, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just feels good. It's just the right way to
Speaker 1: do it. You know. Not everything needs science behind it,
Speaker 1: but yeah, the science convinces us that's the right thing
Speaker 1: to do.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. Yeah, we are oriented that way. I've always said
Speaker 3: that I love it when there's like different points of support.
Speaker 3: So like if I read scientifically, Okay, this thing is good,
Speaker 3: and then I can also see it in wisdom traditions
Speaker 3: that have been around for you know, thousands of years,
Speaker 3: then I'm like, okay, good. And then if I actually
Speaker 3: then have done it in my life and seen it
Speaker 3: to be good, then it's like I've got sort of
Speaker 3: the triple crown there, and I'm like, proof point trifecta, Yeah,
Speaker 3: the proof point trifecta, Yes, And I love that Rose
Speaker 3: rose bud thorn. I think you also are doing a
Speaker 3: high low buffalo with your kids now.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if the kids protest rose rose thorn butt, and
Speaker 1: they sometimes do, because again, like I said, no one
Speaker 1: wants to play at the beginning. But you can't go
Speaker 1: around the dinner table and say say roses without people
Speaker 1: feeling good about it. So the ending of you it's
Speaker 1: like a workout. You feel good when it's over. You
Speaker 1: got to hold onto that thought at the beginning. But
Speaker 1: if they protest, we say, okay, how about high low buffalo,
Speaker 1: and suddenly they're interested. Well, guess what The first two
Speaker 1: things are the same, right, Hi is an awesome thing,
Speaker 1: A rose, a gratitude, a highlight low is the same
Speaker 1: as a thorn. Buffalo is something weird that happened during
Speaker 1: your day, just something funny, something strange and aha, a
Speaker 1: strange encounter, a little anecdote, and those end up being
Speaker 1: you know what, people look forward to sharing and hearing.
Speaker 3: Oh, I'm sure how old are your kids?
Speaker 1: Well less than I have four boys under eight years old.
Speaker 3: Oh it must be must be spectacular, buffalo world.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they often relate to candy weather splashing to you know,
Speaker 1: like random random stuff. But it's beautiful. I know, during
Speaker 1: those loud, chaotic, crazy moments when I can feel my
Speaker 1: overwhelmed rising, I'm just like, I'm gonna miss this. I
Speaker 1: gotta enjoy that. There's only a few years when they're
Speaker 1: going to be this small, so we're in those years
Speaker 1: right now.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, if I were in your shoes, I would
Speaker 3: be writing some of those buffalo things down because my
Speaker 3: son I thought, I'll never forget the things he said,
Speaker 3: And of course I have forgotten the things he said
Speaker 3: when he was little. I mean I remember a couple
Speaker 3: of them, but not the vast majority of them. That's
Speaker 3: just the way my brain works.
Speaker 1: You're right, And actually this reminds me of a wonderful
Speaker 1: gift we got that I might share with your listeners
Speaker 1: as well. When we sent out our birth announcement, which
Speaker 1: is in the form of an email our friends and family,
Speaker 1: a couple Martin and Farah, who were friends with they
Speaker 1: took a line from our own birth announcement and got
Speaker 1: to printed on a hardcover, blank white book with the
Speaker 1: name of the baby on the front and just lines
Speaker 1: in between, and they mailed it to us with the
Speaker 1: story saying, we've kept it both like this with our son,
Speaker 1: who's now sixteen years old. Of the funny and interesting things.
Speaker 1: He said, Well, of course we started doing that, especially
Speaker 1: on the first kid, writer Eric, and then every subsequent
Speaker 1: birth announcement they've done the same thing, and so we
Speaker 1: wouldn't have done it for ourselves, like we just wouldn't
Speaker 1: have gone to the trouble of making a book with
Speaker 1: their kids name on the front. But because we have
Speaker 1: those books, we know leave them in conspicuous locations and
Speaker 1: the quote gets written in there right away. In an
Speaker 1: ideal world, we miss stuff all the time. But it's
Speaker 1: a nice you know, similar to the memory box idea
Speaker 1: that some people keep for their kids in their in
Speaker 1: their closet or an inbox that you send you BCC
Speaker 1: emails to for years and then you eventually give them
Speaker 1: the password.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: I think I told that from a goog commercial. But
Speaker 1: you know, there's these ways to kind of create future
Speaker 1: memories for kids and for you yourself which are kind
Speaker 1: of beautiful.
Speaker 3: Absolutely. All right, let's turn to your podcast, which is
Speaker 3: called three books. And so what you do is, well,
Speaker 3: I'll just let you tell people what you do. I
Speaker 3: don't need to tell them, you tell them, Okay, well,
Speaker 3: let's three books.
Speaker 1: So I have been obsessed with this number one thousand
Speaker 1: for a very long time. I started a blog called
Speaker 1: one thousand Awesome Things, as you know, and I talked
Speaker 1: about how we're awake for one thousand minutes a day,
Speaker 1: and I mentioned thirty five thousand days. Guess what, that's
Speaker 1: also a thousand months, Like you know, you're alive for
Speaker 1: a thousand months. So I started feeling this number one
Speaker 1: thousands a really important number. It's bigger than a small
Speaker 1: goal and smaller than a huge goal, right, And so
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen, I decided that as one of the
Speaker 1: methods to force myself to read more, I introduced a
Speaker 1: number of systems in my life eric, you know, moving
Speaker 1: the TV to the basement, putting a bookshelf at the
Speaker 1: front door, canceling my subscription to the two newspapers I
Speaker 1: was getting. And that includes news sites right online, Little systems,
Speaker 1: Little systems, Little systems. One of the system was starting
Speaker 1: a podcast dedicated to uncovering the one thousand most formative
Speaker 1: books in the world. It was partly inspired by the
Speaker 1: fact that I was endlessly frustrated with the I think
Speaker 1: the algorithms are terrible when it comes to book recommendations.
Speaker 1: I think Amazon back of the day used to be
Speaker 1: pretty good, and now when it's all sponsored an ad driven,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't actually get stuff that is related
Speaker 1: to the bookery and they can't get off the you know,
Speaker 1: the money that they make from those the sponsorships, and
Speaker 1: now you don't get good book recommendations. So what I'm
Speaker 1: doing on my podcast three Books is I'm spending almost
Speaker 1: fifteen years sitting down with three hundred and thirty three
Speaker 1: inspiring people, which is including Eric Zimmer on an upcoming chapter,
Speaker 1: and asking them which three books most changed your life?
Speaker 1: So you give me your books their I buy the books,
Speaker 1: I read the books. That's my goal, and then I
Speaker 1: sit down with you and I talk about the themes
Speaker 1: from those books. Okay, So I am skewing everywhere from
Speaker 1: Quentin Tarantino, Judy Bloom, Brende Brown, Malcolm Lavell, two Uber drivers,
Speaker 1: I had variety store owners at the corner, my reading
Speaker 1: people I meet on the back of the bus. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to get as best I can a cross
Speaker 1: section of people, what the only common characteristic is and
Speaker 1: they like books. Yeah, if you like books, you like reading,
Speaker 1: let's talk about which three shaped you. And that's the
Speaker 1: whole idea behind it.
Speaker 3: So I can't help but ask you, what are three
Speaker 3: of your formative books? Maybe you've already been asked this,
Speaker 3: probably because it's an obvious question and you have them.
Speaker 3: If you haven't, then you can just pick three important
Speaker 3: books to you.
Speaker 1: No, No, I always joke that that's going to be
Speaker 1: the very last chapter of the show because it buys
Speaker 1: me time twenty thirty one when the last chapter of
Speaker 1: three books actually airs, and I call them chapters right
Speaker 1: instead of episodes, just just to be bookish. But truthfully,
Speaker 1: I'll share a few with you for sure. The Babysitters
Speaker 1: Club Treasuries. When I was a kid, I read outside
Speaker 1: of my gender. I'm using quotation marks because I crossed
Speaker 1: over to my sister's bookshelf and I found the idea
Speaker 1: that this woman, Ann M. Martin could write a book
Speaker 1: from five different girls perspectives where they alternated by chapter,
Speaker 1: Totally fascinating. It exposed me to the concept of voice
Speaker 1: in a book and the idea that a really good
Speaker 1: author could sort of remove themselves and enter into different perspectives.
Speaker 1: So why do I mention that? Well, because our book
Speaker 1: of Awesome is written in a very different voice than
Speaker 1: You Are Awesome. I know the titles sound the same,
Speaker 1: but you were Awesome as my book about resilience. They
Speaker 1: came out two years ago, and that's a little bit
Speaker 1: more of like research base. Here's some theories on results.
Speaker 1: That's a different voice, and I'm not as good as her,
Speaker 1: but just the idea that I could be different people
Speaker 1: under the guy of letters was a very formative discovery
Speaker 1: for me. That's one. Another one is The Black Swan
Speaker 1: by Naesem Talib, nonfiction behavioral economics. If I could boil
Speaker 1: down with that book taught me is the world is chaos,
Speaker 1: random and unpredictable. So your best bet is actually to
Speaker 1: put a chip on every single number on the Roulette
Speaker 1: wheel and give it a spin. Why does Neil Pastrica
Speaker 1: have a blog called Neil dot Blog a speaking you
Speaker 1: know business, I'm giving speeches, I'm writing books, I'm doing podcasts.
Speaker 1: In a way, Eric, what I'm really doing is just
Speaker 1: constantly try new things, you know, as Seth Godin once said,
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of Poof. I think somebody asked
Speaker 1: him why he starts and quits so many projects. Well,
Speaker 1: this is the black Swan theory. Expose yourself to as
Speaker 1: many opportunities as possible because you don't know which one's
Speaker 1: gonna take off, and when one does, you can then
Speaker 1: increase your personal resources onto that one with very very
Speaker 1: little trade off costs. It's an important formative book to
Speaker 1: me because it constantly reminds me to try new things.
Speaker 1: I'll be too hung up on the outcomes because truthfully,
Speaker 1: I can't control them that well you know, yeah, I
Speaker 1: just can't. And so this book reminds me that the
Speaker 1: world is chaos and random, written by someone way smarter
Speaker 1: than me. Yea, So it sort of relaxes me into thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: I'll do what I can, but the most important thing
Speaker 1: is to try new things. One other metaphorical takeaway from
Speaker 1: this is go to parties where you don't know anyone.
Speaker 1: It's the same idea, expose yourself to places and situations
Speaker 1: where you're more likely to learn a lot, but you're
Speaker 1: less likely to know a lot.
Speaker 3: We'll get to your third book in a second but
Speaker 3: you've got something on your personal dashboard which is to
Speaker 3: do some new experience every month. I also notice you
Speaker 3: have something called Nil's night out each week, which is
Speaker 3: something I've started post pandemic, which is at least one
Speaker 3: night a week, I have to get out and do something.
Speaker 3: It doesn't matter what it is, but I have to
Speaker 3: be out and about, and ideally it be with a friend.
Speaker 3: Because I just realized, like I'd gotten comfortable being at home,
Speaker 3: and if I don't actually make a specific point of it,
Speaker 3: it doesn't happen that often. It's amazing to me. I
Speaker 3: think some of that's age maybe, but I share your
Speaker 3: basic thing of like how do I get a little
Speaker 3: bit of new experience into my life on a consistent
Speaker 3: basis absolutely.
Speaker 1: One hundred percent. And so you know this, this little
Speaker 1: monthly dashboard that I draw is just a way for
Speaker 1: me to constantly like write, size where I'm going. The
Speaker 1: top two boxes a I call strong core business and
Speaker 1: fastest learning, and they have things on them like, you know,
Speaker 1: give four speeches, write one chapter of a book, write
Speaker 1: one article, and things like read eight books a month,
Speaker 1: have one new experience. The bottom is self care, self
Speaker 1: care for my family, right number of nights away it's
Speaker 1: usually four or less per month. Number of dinners at home,
Speaker 1: you know, and number of nights out. That's what you're
Speaker 1: talking about. Eric's side out, neil zeide out. I forced
Speaker 1: myself to go. Also important to introduce new stories into
Speaker 1: the relationships I find. You know, as Leslie and I
Speaker 1: have now been married for almost nine years, you know
Speaker 1: our tendency is to have all these experiences together. But
Speaker 1: when I go out, or when she got that, you
Speaker 1: come back with new energy, a new person you met,
Speaker 1: a new person you saw, et cetera. And then the
Speaker 1: bottom right quadrant is taking care of myself. This one's
Speaker 1: often read, but it's like number of workouts, number of
Speaker 1: number of cardio experiences and so on. Why do I
Speaker 1: do those two things? Well, the neils light off and
Speaker 1: Lessie's night off. Lessie's my wife, l I know, is
Speaker 1: her night off. They pay for each other. That's really
Speaker 1: an important point. So when you have lots of kids
Speaker 1: or a little kid or whatever at home, you got responsibilities.
Speaker 1: Me taking off for a night is guilt ridden, right,
Speaker 1: I'm leaving her alone with the babies. But because she's
Speaker 1: got a night off three days from now, they pay
Speaker 1: for each other. You don't feel bad because she's got
Speaker 1: one coming. And in my night off, I'm happy to
Speaker 1: have no plan. I'll just go on a really long walk.
Speaker 1: I believe in the Jane Jacobs philosophy. And we live
Speaker 1: in downtown Toronto, you know, the urban center off for
Speaker 1: something other places cannot, namely the strange.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I end up talking to a lot of people, you know,
Speaker 1: living outside or in the late night bookstores or on
Speaker 1: the street, and I'll tell you I learn more from
Speaker 1: those conversations than anything else. It just puts me in
Speaker 1: constant situations and oftentimes it makes me feel very, very lucky,
Speaker 1: right just to have a roof over my head and
Speaker 1: so on. So I try to get out Tonight. I'm
Speaker 1: going to a techno concert at an underground bar that
Speaker 1: somebody invited me to online.
Speaker 3: Okay, awesome.
Speaker 1: I don't know anything about any of those words I
Speaker 1: just said, but I'm sure something interesting will happen, and
Speaker 1: if not, that's a learning too. So I do those things.
Speaker 1: And the one weird growth opportunity is it's like pushing
Speaker 1: myself to do something out of my comfort zone each month.
Speaker 3: Yep, So this techno event would count in that right,
Speaker 3: because it's something you would never do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's not perfect. The point of this dashboard
Speaker 1: is just to kind of right size my ship. Not
Speaker 1: everything's always green. I use this the way I say, oh,
Speaker 1: next month, I need to invest a bit more in
Speaker 1: self care, or oh, you know, next month I need
Speaker 1: to read to get a bit more because I didn't
Speaker 1: really read many books this month, or whatever it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I really like the idea. It's very simple. Link
Speaker 3: in the show notes to where there's an article about it.
Speaker 3: People can see this. I have a couple questions about it, though.
Speaker 3: Question one is do the four quadrants ever change? Are
Speaker 3: they always the same? And then do the things in
Speaker 3: the quadrants change?
Speaker 1: Yeah? And just to say, I stole this idea of
Speaker 1: doing this box from David cheese Right. David Cheeszer was
Speaker 1: my boss when I worked at Walmart. He was the
Speaker 1: president and CEO of the company, and he drew this
Speaker 1: model as the strategy for the organization. That's kind of
Speaker 1: weird to use an organizational strategy template as mine, But
Speaker 1: I really like the philosophy underpinning it, which is in
Speaker 1: the center he wrote, we save people money so they
Speaker 1: can live better. Well, that was the Walmart purpose or
Speaker 1: is the Walmart purpose? I no longer work there as
Speaker 1: I'm kind of doing this artistic stuff like you full time.
Speaker 1: But in the center, I advise people to put your
Speaker 1: ichy guy right. This is a word we talked about
Speaker 1: in our last conversation. I k I GEI the reason
Speaker 1: you get up out of bed in the morning. So
Speaker 1: I write down, now, you know, helping people live happy
Speaker 1: lives or figuring out how to live an intentional life
Speaker 1: myself and sharing that with the world or whatever that is.
Speaker 1: They put that in the center. That's your That's going
Speaker 1: to be your kind of north star. The top two
Speaker 1: boxes I mentioned, which I call strongcore business and fastest
Speaker 1: learning are what I do. The principal underpinning this to
Speaker 1: are what I do right. And you should revisit and
Speaker 1: wrestle and change and examine right. Otherwise that means you're
Speaker 1: kind of static. So I do change and tweak those
Speaker 1: things all the time. And I also might be I
Speaker 1: think it was like six speeches a month, and then
Speaker 1: I one can it was five speeches a month. Then
Speaker 1: I had two because it was four speeches. You see
Speaker 1: what I mean. I'm changing this Also the thing in
Speaker 1: accordance with my life situation. Those are the top two boxes.
Speaker 1: The bottom two boxes are how I do it. They're
Speaker 1: the energy source. That's why it's best family and best self,
Speaker 1: because if I'm not properly investing in those dinners at home,
Speaker 1: those nights at home, those workouts, those meditations, I don't
Speaker 1: have the headspace and the energy to be able to
Speaker 1: do the stuff on the top. And so yes, to
Speaker 1: answer your question, the words and specific bullet points can change,
Speaker 1: but what doesn't change is the high level design of
Speaker 1: the dashboard. Achy guy in the center, what you do
Speaker 1: on the top, how you do it on the bottom?
Speaker 3: Got it?
Speaker 1: I feel a bit funny describing all this verbally. So yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're listening to this and you're like, what is
Speaker 1: he talking about? Do check out the show notes. We're
Speaker 1: actually show a graphical interpretation of this dashboard so people
Speaker 1: can actually see it.
Speaker 3: Yeap, all right, we got through two books. I don't
Speaker 3: think we got to the third.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I'm picking not the three most formulta but
Speaker 1: three formative books. The other one I'd really want to
Speaker 1: suggest is On the Shortness of Life by Seneca. It's
Speaker 1: less of a book than it is a two thousand
Speaker 1: year old letter written by stoic philosopher Seneca. It's about
Speaker 1: twenty pages long. There's something about this letter, Eric. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you've read it or not.
Speaker 3: I have at some point in the past. Yes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a really really thin They made a Penguin
Speaker 1: Classics version of it, which is out of print, but
Speaker 1: you can still get online. And that's also if you
Speaker 1: buy Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. It's one of
Speaker 1: those letters. I keep a copy of this in my
Speaker 1: suitcase all times. I find it incredibly grounding and centering
Speaker 1: and stress relieving because here's the guy two thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: which is and it's written like an email from your buddy,
Speaker 1: like it just sounds like I know it must be
Speaker 1: the translation, but it just sounds so current, it sounds fresh,
Speaker 1: and he's essentially arguing that life is long if you
Speaker 1: know how to live it, and a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: It's an argument towards saying no to locked and lots
Speaker 1: and lots of things so that you can say hell
Speaker 1: yeah to the ones that really matter to you. And
Speaker 1: it's a grounding and a remembering force to me, to
Speaker 1: you know, be a little more kind to myself and
Speaker 1: a little bit more selfish about what I you know,
Speaker 1: say yes and no to why do I travel with it?
Speaker 1: Like why do I travel with the same book in
Speaker 1: my suitcase? Because I find that one I land in
Speaker 1: hotels in a random city and a random time zone
Speaker 1: in a random place, I'm stressed, and so I have
Speaker 1: two things in my suitcase at all times for that.
Speaker 1: One is On the Shortness of Life by Seneca, and
Speaker 1: two is a lacrosseball so that I can rub my
Speaker 1: back and you know, rub my arms out on the
Speaker 1: wall of the hotel and then you know, paris sympathetic
Speaker 1: nervous SYSM kicks in and I fall asleep.
Speaker 3: Perfect. So now I'm gonna flip the question a little
Speaker 3: bit and ask about a couple books that you have
Speaker 3: heard from others. Yeah, you know, people who came on
Speaker 3: your show said this is a really formative book. A
Speaker 3: couple of those that turned out to be really meaningful
Speaker 3: to you. And again I'm not going to ask you
Speaker 3: to pick the most meaningful or anything, because I hate
Speaker 3: when anybody asked me, like, what's your favorite podcast episode,
Speaker 3: I'm like, I don't know, but just any that come
Speaker 3: to mind.
Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely, Okay, So, which books have people mentioned on
Speaker 1: the show that have been really formative to me once
Speaker 1: I read them? You know what's interesting is they're often
Speaker 1: books I've completely never heard of. So this is one
Speaker 1: thing that just surprises me, all though I shouldn't, is
Speaker 1: that people are always agjesting books. I've just never heard
Speaker 1: of them. It's completely formal to them. I've never come
Speaker 1: across that, right. So I interviewed Shane Parrish back in
Speaker 1: chapter sixty of three Books. He's the guy that runs
Speaker 1: Farnham Street. For people that don't know, this is a
Speaker 1: wonderful self improvement page. It's fs dot blog. I can't
Speaker 1: recommend it enough. He tipped me off to the book
Speaker 1: called Poor Charlie's Almanac by Charles T. Munger. Have you
Speaker 1: heard of it?
Speaker 3: I have?
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 3: I know that book and some of the wisdom from it.
Speaker 3: It's kind of remarkable.
Speaker 1: It's a remarkable book. This guy is still alive in
Speaker 1: his mid to late nineties, co founded Berkshire Hathway with
Speaker 1: Warren Buffett. In a way, he's kind of the I
Speaker 1: guess the quieter of the two of them are the
Speaker 1: less well known, but he's essentially amalgamated in a very
Speaker 1: very large, thick book, all of it sort of mental models,
Speaker 1: life advice, commencement speeches and all these things. It's just
Speaker 1: a trove of wisdom. It's a wonderful, wonderful book. Poor
Speaker 1: Charlie's Almanav by Charles T. Munger one of the few
Speaker 1: books that you can go online. You have thousands of
Speaker 1: five star reviews and again, never heard of the thing.
Speaker 1: Another one that has been recommended to me recently, I
Speaker 1: interviewed the filmmaker's Daniels. You know, they did that movie
Speaker 1: Everything Everywhere, all at once, which it came out right
Speaker 1: at the end of the pandemic, and not that the
Speaker 1: pandemic's over, but you know, Spring twenty twenty two, let's say,
Speaker 1: and you know, it made like forty fifty million at
Speaker 1: the box office, which is remarkable considering how few people
Speaker 1: were going to the movie theaters. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 1: we're going to hear about it a lot more as
Speaker 1: we get into Oscar season, because this movie is just
Speaker 1: really a revolutionary in terms of how it was made
Speaker 1: and what it's about. But they tiped me off to
Speaker 1: a book called Sex at Dawn by Christopher Ryan and
Speaker 1: Casilda Jay Thupp. Again a book I never heard of,
Speaker 1: and the reason they picked it was because essentially, the
Speaker 1: moors of society are shifting rapidly when it comes to sexuality,
Speaker 1: and for years, growing up Eric, I have felt like
Speaker 1: inside myself, my feelings about sexuality have often been folded
Speaker 1: in with feelings of guilt, and with shame, and with
Speaker 1: all kinds of other emotions that are largely negative. This
Speaker 1: book really helped me shirk a lot of those things
Speaker 1: I had been historically layering on. I feel more accepting
Speaker 1: of myself for the places that my mind goes when
Speaker 1: it comes to sex, and it exposes a lot of
Speaker 1: the evolutionary reasons why some of those thinking things might happen.
Speaker 1: So it is especially a good book to read for
Speaker 1: those people that may be curious, interested, or in a
Speaker 1: pay or non monogamous relationship, which is not the case
Speaker 1: with me. I had been a monogamous relationship with my wife. However,
Speaker 1: the conversations it's spurred with my wife and I were
Speaker 1: remarkable and transparent, and I think enabled by this wonderful book.
Speaker 1: So I would not have expected at the start of
Speaker 1: this podcast to be going on the record and saying
Speaker 1: sex at dawn is a great book, but I just
Speaker 1: think it's so underrated and people don't share it because
Speaker 1: of the content. Thank you to Daniels because they had
Speaker 1: the courage to want to talk about it and to
Speaker 1: explore how we think about sex in our society. And
Speaker 1: for those that have seen everything ever all at once,
Speaker 1: you know that that movie also has jarring explorations of sexuality.
Speaker 1: But we need to get sex out of the closet more,
Speaker 1: especially in regards to get of some of the shame
Speaker 1: and guilt. If you like me, feel around it, around
Speaker 1: the things that you think, the things that you desire,
Speaker 1: the things that you may have felt or experienced, or
Speaker 1: even things around your body and how your body looks
Speaker 1: and how it works and why, oh there's a lot
Speaker 1: in that book. It's essentially a history of sex through
Speaker 1: an evolutionary perspective. Awesome, wonderful read.
Speaker 3: You got one more?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Sure you want me to keep going? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: love this. This is really fun for me too. I
Speaker 1: interviewed the slam poet in Q and he recommended that
Speaker 1: I read Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strade.
Speaker 3: Such a good thing.
Speaker 1: You know that book?
Speaker 3: I do, that is, you know.
Speaker 1: But most people don't. I didn't that Cheryl Strayed pre
Speaker 1: Wild So you know, she wrote this famous book while
Speaker 1: the terms of the movie with Reese Witherspoon. That's kind
Speaker 1: of boom right, like a big, big thing. But before that,
Speaker 1: she wrote an anonymous column. Nobody knows her. She was
Speaker 1: called sugar Right for an online and maybe in print
Speaker 1: literary called The Rumpust. Again, maybe no one read this magazine,
Speaker 1: but people would write these deep emotional questions and she
Speaker 1: would answer them. Well, these thousand to two thousand word
Speaker 1: essays that showed a depth of emotional empathy that I've
Speaker 1: never experienced before. Obviously it speaks to that tremendous richness
Speaker 1: of her ability to do that. But if you read
Speaker 1: this book, Tiny Beautiful Things, I'll tell you it's like
Speaker 1: an Anne Landers column you know, which I grew up
Speaker 1: reading in the Toronto Star for the modern emotional complexies
Speaker 1: that we feel, written by a star writer who was
Speaker 1: then writing under a total pseudonym. So Tiny Beautiful Things
Speaker 1: by Cheryl Strade, recommended to me by n Q, whose
Speaker 1: work I also recommend it for those that may not
Speaker 1: know him.
Speaker 3: We had in Q on sometime in the last year.
Speaker 3: It was such a great interview and episode. He's really remarkable.
Speaker 1: It's special, and that book.
Speaker 3: Is an amazing book. You write, her depth of emotional
Speaker 3: empathy and wisdom is truly amazing. I think when you
Speaker 3: get that, and you get it with somebody who can
Speaker 3: write as well as she can, you have something really special.
Speaker 3: Because she's an exceptional writer.
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the best. Yeah, one of the
Speaker 1: absolute best. I'm like desperate for a tiny, beautiful thing too,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, it's the kind of thing. Also, I'll
Speaker 1: just say this book. I'm often seeking for ways to
Speaker 1: stop feeling so worried about things. I've got a book
Speaker 1: launch coming, that's while we're having this conversation. I'm always
Speaker 1: worried about it, man, I'm always stressed about it. Why
Speaker 1: when you read books like these Santeca books or this
Speaker 1: type of think, it zooms you out of yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you stop caring so much about you, you you, and
Speaker 1: you realize, Ah, the vast human experience that we all
Speaker 1: share is just a wonderful thing to be part of.
Speaker 1: I go from living in a washing machine to looking
Speaker 1: at a washing machine through often the power of books.
Speaker 1: Part of the reason why I've made such a big
Speaker 1: stake on doubling down and reading, because in addition to
Speaker 1: a reading based podcast, I have multiple newsletters. I have
Speaker 1: a monthly book club where I'm telling the people which
Speaker 1: books I've read every single month. Right, Yeah, I'm posting
Speaker 1: every book I've read online, like I'm trying my best
Speaker 1: to get out of my own head. But of course
Speaker 1: it's hard. It's hard to do that. As soon as
Speaker 1: they put the camera on the front of the iPhone
Speaker 1: and we were asking for trouble with that one, totally
Speaker 1: selfies went up. We're all looking at ourselves all the
Speaker 1: time now.
Speaker 3: That zooming out time wise is such a powerful thing
Speaker 3: to do, and there's so many different ways to do it.
Speaker 3: In the Spiritual Habits program I've created, we talk a
Speaker 3: lot about that perspective, and the core principle is just
Speaker 3: win and doubt zoom out like any way you can
Speaker 3: time wise, space wise, other people wise. I mean, just
Speaker 3: the broader our perspective, the better off we are, and
Speaker 3: the more narrow our perspective is, the more we tend
Speaker 3: to suffer. It's such a simple idea, but we so
Speaker 3: rarely remember to do it.
Speaker 1: And it's so hard to see how we can tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I would love I think I will. I'm hoping to
Speaker 1: take the morning off to go bird watching. Okay, I
Speaker 1: got into bird watching during the pandemic. I have found
Speaker 1: it to be an incredible, wonderful way to connect with
Speaker 1: the natural world, to be part of something bigger than myself.
Speaker 1: These species have typically been here a lot longer than
Speaker 1: we haven't there right there in your backyard, these dinosaurs.
Speaker 1: It's unbelievable, right, But in my head the tape I'm
Speaker 1: playing right now is well, like can't like, I gotta
Speaker 1: pre write an email last and you know, I've got
Speaker 1: all these tweets. There's so much pressure, especially on anyone,
Speaker 1: and there's most of them creating stuff to constantly be
Speaker 1: putting out stuff across all channels at all times for
Speaker 1: everyone's consumption. And unfortunately, the side effect of that is
Speaker 1: the brash for all of us gets louder and louder,
Speaker 1: and we get a fragmented and a more fragmented reality,
Speaker 1: to the point where we're all just eventually talking to
Speaker 1: the ten people around us.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I mean, as somebody who puts
Speaker 3: out two of these episodes a week, I worry a
Speaker 3: little about that element of it. Is like I am
Speaker 3: contributing to the noise. Now, I think it's a positive
Speaker 3: contribution to the noise, and I think it's a long
Speaker 3: form conversation where you have a chance to slow down
Speaker 3: and settle in and think about important things. But it's
Speaker 3: still a lot of content, just bam bam bam.
Speaker 1: But kudos to you for leaving it with all those
Speaker 1: tenets and principles that you've always had, which are their
Speaker 1: long form. You aren't doing what the algorithms are telling
Speaker 1: you to do, Eric, which is slice it and dice
Speaker 1: it and put it in one minute morsels and two
Speaker 1: minute morsels to pump up the algorithm with your incredible
Speaker 1: daily distribute. That's what you quote unquote should be doing,
Speaker 1: right if you were feeding and to try to gamify
Speaker 1: yourself to the top of these tarts to get more
Speaker 1: dollars per ads, et cetera. I'm saying you're also listening
Speaker 1: to your inner voice on what you're doing and why
Speaker 1: you're doing it, and as love as you're holding onto that, well,
Speaker 1: that comes through in the art. You know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's obviously a and I know you talk about
Speaker 3: this is as a creative in the world, you've got
Speaker 3: to make a living, so you've got to pay some
Speaker 3: attention to the external things. But if too much attention
Speaker 3: gets drawn to the external versus the intrinsic or the internal,
Speaker 3: then what are we even doing?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 3: And that's been a really interesting thing for me, is
Speaker 3: this has become what we do full time. Is how
Speaker 3: do you balance that? Like, Okay, now, I got to
Speaker 3: make a living doing this, Like, but I don't want
Speaker 3: to let that corrode the thing that I started doing
Speaker 3: because I love doing it. And so how do you
Speaker 3: balance those things? And I think you talk really well
Speaker 3: about that in your three s's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, yeah, I'm gonna dip into the three essays.
Speaker 1: And I also have you read the essay The Nature
Speaker 1: of the Fun by David Foster Wallace.
Speaker 3: No, I have not read that one.
Speaker 1: I would add this to your reading list. It's not
Speaker 1: available online. It's only available in a book called Both
Speaker 1: Flesh or Not, which is a collection of his essays
Speaker 1: released after he died. The title essay is about his
Speaker 1: essay and Roger Federer that he wrote for The New
Speaker 1: York Times magazine, but in there's an essay called the
Speaker 1: Nature of the Fun and essentially what he's arguing is
Speaker 1: that when you chase commercial success, as you undoubtedly do
Speaker 1: because you're so excited that people want the thing you're making.
Speaker 1: Finally you end up, you know, producing that second Strokes
Speaker 1: album that sounds kind of like the first or whatever
Speaker 1: it is, and then you have to eventually remember and
Speaker 1: hold on to the fact that what made that first
Speaker 1: thing good in the first place was you did it
Speaker 1: for fun? Yes, you did it for fun. To holding
Speaker 1: onto that plus a question I would personally answert and
Speaker 1: I wrote about this in a Harvard Business of Your
Speaker 1: article around retirement, is would I do this for free?
Speaker 1: If you can keep answering yes today, question would I
Speaker 1: do this for free? It tells you. It gives you
Speaker 1: the proof point to yourself that you're doing it for
Speaker 1: intrinsic reasons, right because as soon as you say no,
Speaker 1: it feels like work. That's where you got to watch out.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying oh hard left, I'm just saying, just
Speaker 1: watch out. What could you put back in place? What
Speaker 1: could you disable access to Could you disable access to
Speaker 1: your stads, or could you separate your ad recordings from
Speaker 1: your days that you do your creative interviews? Or you know,
Speaker 1: what are the things can you put in place like that.
Speaker 1: Me personally, yes, I hold on to a little triangle
Speaker 1: in my mind that I call it the three s's
Speaker 1: of success because what happened to me after the Book
Speaker 1: of Austin came out the first one, not our Book
Speaker 1: of Austin, which is, you know, the new one, but
Speaker 1: the Book of Austin is people kept introducing me to
Speaker 1: their friends who wanted to write books. And whenever they
Speaker 1: introduced me to their friends, the friends would say, how
Speaker 1: do I do what you did? You sold a million
Speaker 1: copies of the Book of Austome tell me how. And
Speaker 1: I'd say, well, what are your writing? And they'd say,
Speaker 1: I'm writing my grandmother's memoirs. I'd say, oh, well, can
Speaker 1: I ask you why? And they're like, well, it's just
Speaker 1: been my life goal to like capture this incredible story
Speaker 1: she had. I was like, okay, what do you hope
Speaker 1: to do it? They're like, I just really want to
Speaker 1: get it done. I just really want to have it
Speaker 1: as a thing for our extended family, as a way
Speaker 1: to pass along her family history. Oh okay, that's a
Speaker 1: different kind of goal, right, And so I started drawing
Speaker 1: this little triangle three s's. The first S is sales.
Speaker 1: This is commercial success. This is chasing the capitalism dream. Right,
Speaker 1: you made a million dollars, you sold a million books,
Speaker 1: you did a million whatever, you just got a million
Speaker 1: followers whatever. That's sales, the big number. There's a reason.
Speaker 1: It's the front of a lot of people's minds. The
Speaker 1: second SS is social. We are social creatures. We often
Speaker 1: do things for social success social proof points. And there's
Speaker 1: a huge dichotomy between the two. By the way, in
Speaker 1: the book world, as an example, sales success means it
Speaker 1: sold a lot of copies. Social success is you're a
Speaker 1: New York Times book reviewed book. Those books don't necessarily
Speaker 1: sell that Betty Right, you win the you're nominated for
Speaker 1: the Penn Hemingway Award. Those books don't necessarily sell that many. Right.
Speaker 1: But you see, you've got the social proof point and
Speaker 1: the third s itself. You're doing it because you want to,
Speaker 1: and I know it's in almost any industry. If you
Speaker 1: think of these three things like an old school wobble
Speaker 1: board at a gym where you can kind of balance
Speaker 1: on two, but you can't get all of them. You
Speaker 1: just can't get all them at once. Look at the
Speaker 1: movie industry. I'll guarantee you whatever's gonna win Best Pitcher
Speaker 1: this year was a relative box office flop to The
Speaker 1: Fast and the Furious twelve movie that came out Fast
Speaker 1: and the Furious twelve May seven hundred million. You know,
Speaker 1: Moonlight or the hurt Locker. Pick these movies that actually
Speaker 1: win Best Picture. They're thirty million dollar movies. They're fifty
Speaker 1: million dollar movies. They're way smaller. Which would you rather have?
Speaker 1: So be clear about those two things, and the third
Speaker 1: s itself. You can't have all three of them, So
Speaker 1: pick the one you're going for and aim for that.
Speaker 1: Don't try to get them all. I'll tell you what, Eric,
Speaker 1: None of my books have ever had a review in
Speaker 1: the New York Times or beenminated ready literary prizes ever,
Speaker 1: I'm saying not once, right. Mark Manson often talks about
Speaker 1: this because he says, you know, Subtler, I'm not giving
Speaker 1: a fuck came out. It got zero love from the
Speaker 1: social world of books. Nobody wanted to put the effort
Speaker 1: on TV, right, yeah, or magazines so they won't covering
Speaker 1: the thing. So yeah, he sold fifty million books, but
Speaker 1: no one ever give him a prize. You can have
Speaker 1: the opposite way, too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that's really wise. And you know, back
Speaker 3: to that question of would you do this if you
Speaker 3: didn't have to or if you didn't get paid, I
Speaker 3: think there's an important nuance in there, and that nuance
Speaker 3: is that it doesn't mean that every time you do
Speaker 3: it you want to do it. And what I mean
Speaker 3: by that is there are days that I don't want
Speaker 3: to record a podcast interview. I don't feel like doing
Speaker 3: it for whatever reason, I didn't get enough sleep. The
Speaker 3: nuance is you're not always going to feel like doing
Speaker 3: anything all the time. And so that's not the measure
Speaker 3: we're after, because I think people can get hung up
Speaker 3: on that and be like, well, if I don't want
Speaker 3: to do it all the time, is it really my passion? Well, yeah,
Speaker 3: nobody wants to do anything all the time, right, But
Speaker 3: broadly speaking, that's it. You know, broadly speaking, more times
Speaker 3: than not, do I really want to do this? It's
Speaker 3: interesting for me. I took a month off in June.
Speaker 3: I never ever taken anything like that amount of time
Speaker 3: off in my entire life. I started working when I
Speaker 3: was thirteen. I mean, like it was unheard of, and boy,
Speaker 3: when I came back, I was like, I am ready
Speaker 3: to podcast. Like before I left, I was a little
Speaker 3: you know, a little tired, you know, a little ground
Speaker 3: down by it. So sometimes also if it's something you love,
Speaker 3: does a break help restore it? Sometimes can be really helpful.
Speaker 1: Absolutely. You know, there's this word I've recently discovered called karoshi,
Speaker 1: which is a Japanese word that means death by overwork.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've heard of this, no, So
Speaker 1: you know, in English, the highest word we have for
Speaker 1: working to our it's called burnout. But that word burnout
Speaker 1: does not include dying, right, it's burning out. Whereas the
Speaker 1: late eighties in Japan, they had a number of executives
Speaker 1: and major companies all dropped dead at the same time,
Speaker 1: so had the huge cultural issue, and so they came
Speaker 1: up with corochi, death by overwork. And to me, what's
Speaker 1: interesting is that thirty years of research have gone into
Speaker 1: this in Japan and they've come up with shinrin yoku.
Speaker 1: Shinriy yoku with literal translation is forest bathing. And I
Speaker 1: think about this metaphor a lot, because forest bathing doesn't
Speaker 1: mean taking a bathroom the forest. It means actually removing
Speaker 1: yourself from the clinical surroundings. You're probably in if you're
Speaker 1: an hotel room, if you're in a conference hall, if
Speaker 1: you're in an office building, if you're in your basement,
Speaker 1: if you're in your basement, studio, whatever, like I am
Speaker 1: right now. You know, you got a hard pavement floor
Speaker 1: around you, you got fake walls around you, You're surrounded by
Speaker 1: artificial light. You got to take a rest, strategic rest,
Speaker 1: and insert some shinrin yoku. Yesterday, Eric, I got off
Speaker 1: a plane back home in Toronto from Boston at one pm.
Speaker 1: I knew my kids were coming home at four. Yes,
Speaker 1: I got lots to do. What did I do? Three
Speaker 1: hour walk in the woods? Three hour walk in the woods.
Speaker 1: The fighton size that trees release actually lower your cortisol
Speaker 1: and adrenaline. The birds that I was looking at make
Speaker 1: me happy, make me feel part of something bigger than myself,
Speaker 1: you know. And I didn't take my phone. That's my
Speaker 1: new thing. Even though I want to use the e
Speaker 1: bird app to track the birds, I actually just resist
Speaker 1: and write it down on a piece of paper and
Speaker 1: enter them in the app. But I get back. So
Speaker 1: your month off, huh is very similar to my kind
Speaker 1: of STRATEGICSS phenomenon. If people want to go deeper into that,
Speaker 1: I wrote an HBr article called why you need one
Speaker 1: untouchable day per week and how to get one, which
Speaker 1: is just this idea of becoming invisible to everybody for
Speaker 1: least one day a week so you can kind of
Speaker 1: figure out yourself.
Speaker 3: I think when I interviewed you last I came across
Speaker 3: this idea. I don't think it's that new to you.
Speaker 3: I may be wrong, but I feel like in my
Speaker 3: mind at that time, I was like, there's no way
Speaker 3: I can do that, right, in the same way that
Speaker 3: if you told me I could take a month off,
Speaker 3: I would have been are you out of your mind?
Speaker 3: That is impossible. But once I started really thinking about it,
Speaker 3: I was like, well, like, you know, okay, you'n have
Speaker 3: to do a lot to line that up. But as
Speaker 3: I was going back through your work again, I came
Speaker 3: across the idea of the one untouchable day a week,
Speaker 3: and I went, oh, yeah, Like that's a really good
Speaker 3: idea and I can see my way to it. But
Speaker 3: it's funny. This being able to take time started with
Speaker 3: me saying things like, all right, I'm going to start
Speaker 3: taking two weekend days off on the weekends, I'm actually
Speaker 3: not going to work. It may not sound revolutionary but.
Speaker 1: Toughing because I can relate to working all weekend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but to me it was it was a big deal.
Speaker 3: And I would say, you know, it's no big deal,
Speaker 3: like I only take one or two coaching calls on
Speaker 3: the weekend, or you know, I only put an hour
Speaker 3: or two in. But I didn't really get that some
Speaker 3: extended time of break was important. So this all started
Speaker 3: with me just committing to weekends off. And then as
Speaker 3: I did that, I went, oh, that actually helps. That's restorative.
Speaker 3: It works not just for me personally, but for me
Speaker 3: business wise, and so that's kind of grown. So I
Speaker 3: say all that to say, I'm going to be thinking
Speaker 3: about your Untouchable day and I'm reinspired by it. I
Speaker 3: always write down after I go through somebody's work, kind
Speaker 3: of my key takeaway, and my key takeaway for years
Speaker 3: I wrote was untouchable day. So thank you.
Speaker 1: Yeah. People always challenge me on this, Eric. They say, oh,
Speaker 1: I can't you don't know me, you don't know my boss,
Speaker 1: you don't know how many emails I get. And I say, well,
Speaker 1: could you just start with lunch? Because I spent ten
Speaker 1: years working in corporate at Walmart, and we tether ourselves
Speaker 1: at lunch. What's wrong with leaving your phone at your desk.
Speaker 1: You don't have to take it with you. You can
Speaker 1: go up for an hour, you can go for a
Speaker 1: nap in the park. Try it for an hour. People
Speaker 1: aren't going to harass you for one hour at lunch.
Speaker 1: If you can do that, try two hours. Yes, you're
Speaker 1: taking two hours off of work. You're taking two hours
Speaker 1: off being connected to everything. What happens is the better thoughts,
Speaker 1: the creative thoughts, the making sure I'm doing the right
Speaker 1: things rather than just doing things right, actually bubble to
Speaker 1: the surface, and so we have to create space for them. Imperative,
Speaker 1: especially in our culture today. If we began the conversation
Speaker 1: by saying, I feel like we're drowning. How many emails
Speaker 1: do you get on a given day that you have
Speaker 1: no memory of subscribing to? Those all take your attention.
Speaker 3: Thank god I have a filtering system, Otherwise I would
Speaker 3: probably hang myself from the rafters. I mean, it's so many.
Speaker 1: What do you use?
Speaker 3: I use something called sane box, sane box, sain box.
Speaker 1: I don't know that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does two main things for me. It gives
Speaker 3: me in my inbox what it thinks is most important.
Speaker 3: Then it has something called sane later, which it means like,
Speaker 3: I think this is somewhat important to you, but you
Speaker 3: don't need to get to it anytime soon. And then
Speaker 3: it's got something called sane news, which is all the newsletters,
Speaker 3: all the shopping, all the crap. And so I don't
Speaker 3: even see either of those categories until I go looking
Speaker 3: for them.
Speaker 1: Oh that's good, I gotta get that.
Speaker 3: I still get too much email. But even then with
Speaker 3: all that filter, I still feel like I spend too
Speaker 3: much time on it. But oh, it makes a big difference, because, yeah,
Speaker 3: like you, I'm like every little thing that you have
Speaker 3: to look at to decide whether to get rid of
Speaker 3: or scroll pass for the fourth time. It all takes time.
Speaker 1: Plus every single technology platform is integrating chat and messaging
Speaker 1: into their services, so most people now have like seven
Speaker 1: to ten different inboxes, including DMS on Instagram, DMS on Twitter,
Speaker 1: DMS on Facebook, Text messages inbox one, inbox two, the
Speaker 1: inbox you don't tell anybody about that, everybody finds out about,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. So you know, then you certainly
Speaker 1: now we got another problem, which is we got too
Speaker 1: many things to check.
Speaker 3: I know, I know. So if you're listening to this
Speaker 3: and you want to contact me, doing it on any
Speaker 3: social media platform is a terrible idea. I will never
Speaker 3: I just won't see it, or I'll see it and
Speaker 3: I'll forget about it. Yeah, to your point about take
Speaker 3: an hour away, take two hours away. I've shared this before,
Speaker 3: which is for the four years that I started this podcast,
Speaker 3: it was also working in a corporate job and I
Speaker 3: wanted as much time to do this show as I could.
Speaker 3: Plus I had two kids. I mean, so I got
Speaker 3: really good at ignoring a lot of things that I
Speaker 3: would have thought you can't ignore, and I got good
Speaker 3: at thinking about, like what's really important. And the ironic
Speaker 3: thing is that as I gave it less of my time,
Speaker 3: I got better at what I did. I mean, I
Speaker 3: kept getting promoted and they wanted to hire me, and
Speaker 3: I was like, part of me is feeling bad because
Speaker 3: I'm like, well, I'm not putting in nearly the amount
Speaker 3: of effort that people around me are, but yet I'm
Speaker 3: still considered highly successful. And I think it was, just
Speaker 3: as you said, thinking about what really matters here? What's
Speaker 3: the most important thing, what drives success in this role
Speaker 3: and given it an excessive focus instead of getting swept
Speaker 3: up in all the day to day, moment to moment
Speaker 3: answering every email, feeling like I had to be in
Speaker 3: every conversation, you know. And I'm not saying that everybody
Speaker 3: can do that, but I think the point is, and
Speaker 3: you made the point, is that I think we tether
Speaker 3: our elves more than necessarily we are being tethered. Again,
Speaker 3: that's not for everybody. There are toxic overwork cultures where
Speaker 3: you know you are driven way beyond what's reasonable. But
Speaker 3: my experience was I tethered myself a lot more than
Speaker 3: I needed to.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I can completely relate to that, and I do
Speaker 1: think that part of the design of the technology is
Speaker 1: to make us feel that way. Yeah, you know, in
Speaker 1: the happiest equation. I write a story about a CEO
Speaker 1: that I worked for who simply did not use email
Speaker 1: at all, and he had an inbox. He'd see the emails,
Speaker 1: he just wouldn't reply to any and he had just
Speaker 1: mentally reasoned that email was work given to him by
Speaker 1: other people, and so he'd spend his time walking around
Speaker 1: the hallways actually talking to people and while people were
Speaker 1: always upset that, you know, he didn't reply to my email,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he got it, et cetera, it
Speaker 1: freed his time to focus on what actually mattered. Now,
Speaker 1: it's a difficult practice to start, especially if like me,
Speaker 1: you're always trying to please. You want to reply, You
Speaker 1: want to reply with like thank you. You know that's
Speaker 1: the worst thing to reply, right, thank you? Just unnecessary.
Speaker 1: Email Number one is the reply just to say I
Speaker 1: got this, I appreciate it. But yeah, it's about baby steps, right.
Speaker 1: If you can't take an untouchable day, take an untouchable hour.
Speaker 1: If you feel like you have timn emails, delete the
Speaker 1: one access point that you use. The lease. First thing
Speaker 1: I've done to a delete of every single social media
Speaker 1: app off my cell phone, so right away I only
Speaker 1: can get into them off a laptop. I do not
Speaker 1: save any passwords, so I have to enter the password
Speaker 1: because of the two factor authentication, I'd have to go
Speaker 1: to my email box right and then log in to
Speaker 1: get the code to type it in. So just creating
Speaker 1: these extra pieces of friction also helps me do what
Speaker 1: we're both advocating. Still hard to do, but systematically designed
Speaker 1: to prevent me from being tempted to compulsively check yep.
Speaker 3: All right, well we're nearing the end of our time.
Speaker 3: I want to hit just a couple things that you
Speaker 3: wrote in an essay called forty three things I've almost
Speaker 3: learned as I turned forty three. And this one caught
Speaker 3: my attention because I agree with it, and I sometimes
Speaker 3: fe like it's a bad rule, but I do live
Speaker 3: by it, which is you're not allowed to leave a
Speaker 3: bookstore without buying a book.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So, just as a quick background, I've never talked
Speaker 1: about this list publicly with anybody. This is the very
Speaker 1: first time I've talked about it. By I've just started
Speaker 1: stealing the idea from Kevin Kelly to write a list
Speaker 1: of pieces of advice on your birthday. So I just
Speaker 1: published just turn forty three, forty three things I've almost
Speaker 1: learned as it turn forty three. Yeah. One of my
Speaker 1: life rules, Eric is I cannot leave a book store
Speaker 1: without buying a book. And part of the reason I
Speaker 1: do that is because if you're in a bookstore, and
Speaker 1: if you're in downtown Toronto, you know nine out of
Speaker 1: ten of the books are independent bookstores. There's a couple chains.
Speaker 3: I'm surprised you've got ten of them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're very, very, very likeable. The reason we have
Speaker 1: them is because we keep supporting them. I just think,
Speaker 1: you know, this is somebody who's paying rent, you know,
Speaker 1: paying property, texts to the local town, which buys the
Speaker 1: flowers in the park and cleaning up the cigarette butts
Speaker 1: outside of the swings, Like this is something I want
Speaker 1: to live and work in a society full of trust.
Speaker 1: So I think buying a book at a local bookstore
Speaker 1: should be a life rule for everybody. You cannot walk
Speaker 1: out without buying a book.
Speaker 3: I agree. I always say if I want something to exist,
Speaker 3: which I always want bookstores to exist, I have to
Speaker 3: support them. Like I can't get mad when things go
Speaker 3: away that I didn't support, And so I'm the same way.
Speaker 3: I'm like, the last thing in the world I need
Speaker 3: is another book. I don't know if I'll ever read
Speaker 3: this book because I'd.
Speaker 1: Probably get mailed about five hundred for free a year two. Oh.
Speaker 3: I mean they just show up constantly. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 3: I am inundated with books, but I still it's the
Speaker 3: same thing. I'm like, I want this bookstore to be
Speaker 3: here because I love the ability to walk in and
Speaker 3: browse books, even as my reading patterns have changed dramatically
Speaker 3: towards ebooks, which I have very mixed feelings about. But
Speaker 3: I still every time I walk into an independent bookstore, yep,
Speaker 3: I'm like, I have to buy a book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and high level. I want to just stay here.
Speaker 1: And this is something that took me a long time,
Speaker 1: just really just get stealed into my brain. You know,
Speaker 1: Amazon helps you find the book that you're looking for.
Speaker 1: Bookstores help you find the books that you aren't. It's
Speaker 1: the serendipitous and what's beside the thing on the shelf
Speaker 1: that is what you're finding, and you can't find that online.
Speaker 1: You just it's very, very difficult. Yes, Monocle magazine, which
Speaker 1: I do. I don't know if you know that magazine.
Speaker 1: They have a wonderful list that's published every year, like
Speaker 1: the twenty most livable cities in the world, and one
Speaker 1: of their key criteria is the number of independent bookstores
Speaker 1: per hundred thousand, which I think is just a wonderful
Speaker 1: metric to weave in because what a great sign of
Speaker 1: cultural health. Yes, to have you know, independent bookstores. I'll
Speaker 1: tell you, I was just down in the Bronx interviewing
Speaker 1: Latagna and Jerry, who drive around in the Bronx something
Speaker 1: called the Bronx Bound Books Bus. It's the only bookstore
Speaker 1: in the Bronx. Now, the Bronx has the same population
Speaker 1: as Manhattan. Manhattan is eighty bookstores. Wow, okay, So it's
Speaker 1: just like they're giving books to a book desert and
Speaker 1: driving around to different schools ever single day to bring books.
Speaker 1: And they say, everyone tells us kids don't want to
Speaker 1: read books anymore. Kids are addicted to their phones, kids
Speaker 1: like games. They say, when we pull up in the
Speaker 1: parking lot, you should see the delight, the excitement, the
Speaker 1: joy of perusing shelves full of stories and fiction and nonfiction,
Speaker 1: the touching and they love it. And so part of
Speaker 1: it is access. Amazon's got seventy percent of the book
Speaker 1: market or something like that in the US. So we
Speaker 1: have to very consciously spend with our time and our attention.
Speaker 1: And if you and I want to go on the
Speaker 1: record and say support your local independent bookstore, I'm very
Speaker 1: very proud and happy to do so. Also, I do
Speaker 1: think that at some point in my life I'm going
Speaker 1: to be the person running one of those bookstores. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a life dream of mine that has not yet
Speaker 1: been realized. You see it all over the plate and patches.
Speaker 1: Running a bookstore in Nashville, Judy Bloms running a books
Speaker 1: during Key West, Florida. Ryan Holiday's running a book in Bastrop, Texas. Ye.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe that's the path for the author eventually
Speaker 1: to go down, is you just eventually fall into the
Speaker 1: world of books and just live there. That sounds pretty
Speaker 1: good to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, it does. And then the last thing that
Speaker 3: will hit from your forty three things as we turn
Speaker 3: forty three is easiest way to love a park? Pick
Speaker 3: up one piece of trash every visit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, we live near a park, and just
Speaker 1: every time I leave, I just say to my kids, oh,
Speaker 1: we're leaving. Just meant it's a mental check. I got
Speaker 1: I gotta find one piece of garbage and put it in,
Speaker 1: and I just you know, if they start to mimic
Speaker 1: that behavior, if other people start to do it, the
Speaker 1: park is just always clean. I've always dirty.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: The way this came about, by the way, Eric was
Speaker 1: I did a study at Walmart trying to compare why
Speaker 1: two stores across the country they had to be the
Speaker 1: same square footage one hundred and twenty thousand square feet,
Speaker 1: same labor dollars, you know, same number of people that
Speaker 1: could feasibly work in the stores. One of them would
Speaker 1: be looking like trash and the other one would be
Speaker 1: totally clean and spick and span. So I did a
Speaker 1: study at Walmarts trying to compare the two stores, not
Speaker 1: just two specific stores, but like the idea of the
Speaker 1: two stores. And I'll tell you it came down to
Speaker 1: whether or not the store manager themselves picked up garbage
Speaker 1: on their way walking around the store. If that one
Speaker 1: person did, everyone mimicked and copied the behavior.
Speaker 3: So it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: That's it. It was just that if the store manager
Speaker 1: picked up a piece of garbage in the parking lot,
Speaker 1: the parking lot was clean. Yep. When you're in a
Speaker 1: position of leadership, what you do is mimicked and copied
Speaker 1: and followed. So I'm a leader for at least a
Speaker 1: few little kids, so I'm going to pick up trash.
Speaker 1: Open that they do it too, so far and O
Speaker 1: what has by the way, Yeah, you know, they're like, Dad,
Speaker 1: what are you doing? I'm like, just just trust me
Speaker 1: on this. I'm pick up a piece of garbage every time.
Speaker 3: Well, and also things you invest in you care about
Speaker 3: and picking up a piece of garbage is a very
Speaker 3: small investment, but it makes you care about that place
Speaker 3: more so. Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on.
Speaker 3: As always, I love talking with you. We'll have links
Speaker 3: in the show notes to where people can get your
Speaker 3: latest book, to your blog, to a couple of things
Speaker 3: we talked about. I always enjoy it.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for having me, Eric, and thank
Speaker 1: you for the gift of this wonderful podcast. It's a
Speaker 1: true delight. I really enjoy it listening. You have wonderful guests,
Speaker 1: you have thoughtful conversations. It's a real real gem in
Speaker 1: the world.
Speaker 3: Thank you, Thank you.
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