Discover Your Core Values & Operating Principles | Taylor Pearson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 199

Taylor Pearson is an investor and writer. Your life is highly controlled by your values and principles, even if you haven't written them down, or even know what they are. I fell in love with Taylor's blog post on this topic at the start of 2020 and just had to bring him on to discuss it. Expect to learn why defining your values & principles can change your life, the importance of aligning your intentions with your actions, how values & principles relate and differ, how to identify & create your own list and much more... Sponsor: Shop Eleiko’s full range at https://www.shop.eleiko.com (enter code MW15 for 15% off everything) Extra Stuff: Taylor's Core Value List - https://taylorpearson.me/core-values-list/ Taylor's General Operating Principles - https://taylorpearson.me/principles/ Follow Taylor on Twitter - https://twitter.com/taylorpearsonme Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #corevalues #principles #lifehack - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You sort of have like implicit things. If you work for a company and if Amy, you know, Amy's my manager, Amy was looking at this, I know she would want it done this way. There's a certain principle and maybe I can't even make it explicit, but like Amy likes her Excel sheets formatted in this way because it, you know, it makes it easier to read or kind of whatever it is. And so, you know, I think maybe the easiest thing is just sort of like a level of abstraction, like a value one for me would be something like courage. It's not like super clear in most areas how you would apply. How would you be more courageous in your relationships? Or how would you be more courageous at work? And you there's, there's like lots of different ways that could go. Whereas to me, like principles are a little bit less abstract and like closer to where the sort of rubber meets the road. So like, you know, I always have time for a good friend. That's the sort of the more

• 0:44Speaker 00

  explicit calling like heuristics, like a rule of thumb, right? Like if this, then that if this happens, then I do that is kind of an operating principle. Whereas a value is going to be more like courage or integrity is a bad one. I think, cause like everyone should probably have integrity, but, but that's sort of level of abstraction.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  Before we get into today's podcast, I have to put a disclaimer out. It is absolutely sweltering in Newcastle. So I'm wearing a vest, got loads of stick. Last time I wore a vest, but it's not a lack of care about this podcast. I'm super excited to sit down with Taylor Pearson. It's just too warm, you know, I mean, under a bunch of lights and it's challenging today, but Taylor, man, welcome to the show.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Pleasure to be here. Glad you're staying cool.

• 1:27Chris Williamson?

  And try, well, the problem is in the UK, it's only hot for like five days of the year. So no one has air con, but to not have air con in a house in, in America would be ridiculous, right? But over here, it's like, why would you have air con? It's cold, like seven and a half months out of the year. And so it is what it is. So today we're going to talk about core principles and values. You've got a couple of blog posts, which just blew me away when I read them at the start of this year and have been a huge influence on me. And I just wanted to give you the opportunity to tell the audience about why core values and operating principles are so useful, why they're so important. And then kind of give us some insight into, into your thoughts on them. So to begin with, do we

• 2:10Chris Williamson?

  all have core values and operating principles? Cause you've got this big list on your site, 37 operating principles and your five core values and all this stuff. If someone hasn't written them out, do they still have them guiding their actions?

• 2:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think at some level, right, you all have intrinsic, you know, we all face decisions every day. You have like whatever mundane decisions, am I gonna have a salad for lunch or a burger for lunch? You have, you know, who, whatever, who am I gonna marry? Who am I, you know, what am I gonna do with the rest of my life, blah, blah, blah? And you're, there's some algorithms, so to speak, right? You have some internal way where you're like waiting what's going on in that decision and choosing it one way or the other. So, yeah, to me, it's, it's something that, um, I think everyone has to some extent internally. I, I found externalizing them, you know, sort of like making them explicit where I can, uh, kind of read them. One can like help me be a little bit more self-reflective, right? Like, is this actually something that I think is important? Do I want to do this?

• 3:06Speaker 00

  And then, you know, oftentimes also just, uh, I, I find out, I'll sort of treat one area of my life one way, another area of my life another way, right? And so I, you know, when I sort of like put all those things out on, on paper, it, it forces me to be a little bit more like, oh, like actually this is like a bit hypocritical. And, uh, you know, I could, I could apply this to there and that to there.

• 3:24Chris Williamson?

  So you use the learnings from certain areas of your life to progress your, uh, understanding in and insights in different areas of your life?

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, you know, to start maybe the general operating principles, the way that kind of like originated for me, and I'm sure like everyone should have this experience, is like you, you do something dumb, you make, you make some mistake or you, you have some like significant learning. You're like, wow, I really hope that in the future, like I don't do that thing that way again. Like this is the correct way to do that is actually this other way. And like, that's what I should do. And, uh, I guess I found myself like this, you know, despite thinking that, I would then just like proceed to make the same mistake in some slightly different way, uh, at some point in the future. And so, um, kind of the, the way my general operating principle started was like, okay, I, you know, this thing, like I want to remember this and so I'm gonna write it down. And I sort of put it in a place that I can look over once a week or every other week.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Uh, typically around sort of like when I, uh, once a week I'll plan out my week and kind of like, what am I gonna prioritize, what decisions am I gonna make? And I'll read through that and, you know, very frequently it's like, oh, like I'm about to make that mistake again. Uh, you know, for the 14th time kind of thing. But if, you know, if I, if I have it there and it's written and I can look at it, I go, ah, like this, you know, um, I can notice that I'm doing this thing again and I can be a little bit more. Deliberate about it. So having those externalized sort of written down has been really helpful for me.

• 4:48Chris Williamson?

  You've touched there on the fact that it's avoiding mistakes rather than kind of expediting successes. Is this a focus on not being stupid rather than trying to be clever?

• 5:03Speaker 00

  I think you can go either way. I guess I I probably spend more time trying not to be stupid than than trying to be clever.

• 5:11Speaker 00

  You know, yeah, if you can.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  You know, survival is the first rule, right? You know, if you can officially not make up any mistakes, and I think it's interesting. I've read a lot of books on like investing in businesses and, you know, there's many, many ways to get rich and there's only a few ways to go broke. And if you can just avoid all the ways to go broke for long enough, like you can probably make it work out. Okay. You know, like there's a there's a lot of ways to do it right, but only a few ways to do it wrong. And so I guess my my bias, I tend to focus on like, if I can just not make any major mistakes here, I'll probably be okay.

• 5:46Chris Williamson?

  Don't multiply by zero, man. No one wants to multiply by zero.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 5:50Chris Williamson?

  So why are core values and operating principles so useful? Is it just this sort of compounding of wisdom across different areas of your life? Is it just making

• 6:03Chris Williamson?

  decisions less arduous?

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it is.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  I think it's just, yeah, for me at least, it's sort of like being able to to be consistent. And I think part of it's, you know, I think you feel.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  It feels good when you're sort of, you know, quote unquote, in alignment, you know, there's this story, I was like, there's a author, Mikhaili Chinkinmihai, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name. But I've read a couple of his books and he has this great story talking about, there was a study done in the 1990s where they were looking at geneticists and journalists, they were with a bunch of different professions and they're basically seeing like who likes their job the most and why, like what makes someone like their job? And journalists were like the most unhappy with their jobs. And geneticists were the happiest. And basically what their, you know, their conclusion as to why that was, was um the way the incentives were structured. Uh with the geneticists is everything was aligned.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  The geneticists really believed that if they were just doing the best science they possibly could. Uh that was most likely about the, you know, the drugs or the pharmaceuticals, whatever, that were going to help the most people and would make the pharmaceutical company the most money. Right. So everyone, you know, this, if I can just do the best science I possibly can. Everyone else, you know, this is the best thing for everyone. And the nineties was kind of when journalism had started to, uh a lot like big conglomerates should come in and bought these media companies. And so a lot of people that started journalism careers, because they were like, I want to report the truth and tell important stories. All this kind of stuff were writing, you know, whatever the nineteen nineties version of BuzzFeed kind of clickbait headlines were. And that was what got the most uh sold the most newspapers and so generated the most advertising revenue. But they were like deeply unhappy uh doing that as a job.

• 7:49Speaker 00

  And so in in the same way, like, I think, you know, I certainly go through periods where like I just kind of get off course. You know, I just start like working on things or I start doing things and it's like, this actually isn't like, I'm not really enjoying, I'm not super happy about this. I'm not kind of enjoying this. And so, you know, I almost think it was like, uh, if you think about sort of like the way a plane navigation system works. Um, you know, it's always going slightly off course, right? The plane is never directly on the right. You know, if you're flying from Austin to London uh or whatever, you know, you're always going to be slightly off course. But it's always just sort of error correction, right? It's always, it's always just making it move back. And so like in practice, it's close enough to a straight line that it, that it works well. And it's like the same way here, right?

• 8:28Speaker 00

  I think the, the principles or the, or the core values are sort of that, that navigation system was just like, hey, like, you know. Actually, you, you wanted to go here and like, if you want to change your mind and go to uh Belarus or whatever, like you can do that, but like, let's be deliberate about the decision.

• 8:44Chris Williamson?

  I love that. I love the idea of being deliberate as well. Recently had Kyle Leshenroda on talking about working out what you want to want. Uh and so much of that is that the people, the things that people do are not done by design. You know, it's the way that you dealt with past traumas, societal norms, genetic programming, natural predisposition, whatever, all of these different things. Very easily, that can lead to you ending up in a place that you didn't want to be or even mean to end up in. And looking back on a life, looking back on a life that you regret is like. That's what we all are trying to avoid. So hopefully today we can give the listeners some tools that will help them to not lead a life that they regret. So first up, what's the difference between core values and operating principles? Is there a difference?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, so actually the concept I got is from a business book called Work the System, but it talks about this like in the context of a company. So if you ever worked for a company, like usually every company has their like five or six core values and usually they're like terrible and meaningless. It's like integrity, right? It's like, it's like, obviously you shouldn't lie to people. But then, you know, every company, again, I think this is, you know, the same with businesses or companies or individuals is you sort of have like implicit things. If you work for a company and you know, your manager, your manager's manager, you know, like, oh, if, if Amy, you know, Amy's my manager, Amy was looking at this, I know she would want it done this way, right? That's, I know she has, there's a certain principle and maybe I can't even make it explicit, but like Amy likes her Excel sheets formatted in this way because it, you know, it makes it

• 10:15Speaker 00

  easier to read or you can make charts better or, or kind of whatever it is. And so, you know, I think, I guess it's maybe the easiest to think is sort of like a level of abstraction, like a value, like one for me would be something like courage. It's a fairly, it's a fairly abstract concept, right? It's not like super clear in most areas how you would apply, you know, how would you be more courageous in your relationships? Or how would you be more courageous at work? And you, there's, there's like lots of different ways that could go, whereas to me like principles are a little bit less abstract and like closer to where the sort of rubber meets the road. So like, you know, I always have time for, for a good friend, right? Like that, that's, that's

• 10:57Speaker 00

  a much cleaner, simpler thing. Like if one of my best buddies from high school calls me, like whatever's going on, I can like make time to like talk to him about whatever's going on. So that's the sort of the more explicit, we call them like heuristics, like a rule of thumb, right? Like if this, then that, if this happens, then I do that. It's kind of an operating principle, whereas the value is going to be more like, yeah, like courage or integrity is a bad one, I think, because like everyone should probably have integrity, but, but that's sort of level of abstraction.

• 11:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's some core values which shouldn't be able, they shouldn't be listed as a core value. They should just be an accepted entry requirement for being a human. And that's someone that says honesty is a core value. It's like, well, what's the fucking opposite? Like, what? How's honesty? Honesty isn't a core value. Honesty is just the thing that you do. It's like one of my, one of my core values happens to be breathing. Like, no, it's just, it's how you, literally how you continue within the world. I like the idea of the, of the levels of abstraction. I think that's a good, a good way to, to sort of split

• 12:05Chris Williamson?

  the two apart. It's a little bit like, um, core values are the ingredients and operating principles are the meals that you can make from those ingredients, right? You can make multiple different meals from some of the ingredients that you've got, but the ingredients do actually influence, you know, if you've not got any dough, you can't make a pizza. You might not be a pizza guy, but if you've got tons of whatever it might be, you can make a different sort of a meal. Um, sure. Can you tell us what your core values are? That'd be quite cool.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have now, I have them written down because I actually forget them, which I think is case in point about writing them down. But, um, you know, I think one for me is like, uh, agency. And that's just kind of like, um, uh, it's important to me, it's a core value that I have a lot of control over sort of how I live my life. You know, like, I guess a lot of the ways these things sort of developed to me is just noticing things that like bothered me or just, just ways in which you behave differently. And so I just felt like most, most people could like put up with like a bad job or someone they didn't like. I just couldn't put up with it. You know, I would just, like 15 minutes in a conversation with someone I didn't like, like I just couldn't suck it up and deal with it and talk to them for the next hour at the conference or whatever. Like I just

• 13:16Speaker 00

  had to get out of there. Um, you know, whatever, we'd just do the Irish goodbye and like walk out of the conversation and, uh, and go for it. Um, so agency, sort of choosing how I live and, uh, and helping others. You likewise, um, like self-development in some capacity and like kind of like learning has always been like very important to me. Like I, if I don't read for long enough, I get like very cranky. My wife will tell me to like, go away and like take some time, just like do a little bit of reading.

• 13:42Chris Williamson?

  Taylor, leave, leave the kitchen, go and grab a book. You're on the naughty step with your book for 15 minutes until you come back.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's right. But then I'm in a much better, I'll come back and I'm just like, oh, that was so interesting. I really enjoyed that. Thanks.

• 13:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, courage was one I mentioned. That's another one that has come up for me a lot. And I think applies in sort of, there's a lot of different areas in my life where I found that I was basically unhappy because I felt like I was lacking kind of courage in retrospect.

• 14:10Chris Williamson?

  I think, sorry, so am I right in saying that courage was one of the ones that you put where you didn't feel like it was something you necessarily did naturally, but was a guiding value which helped you to operate more effectively when you had it? Is that that one?

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know how typical that is to me or in general, but you know, as like you face some challenging decisions, you're like, ah, maybe I'd rather not make this decision or I'd rather sort of make the easier path. But you know, at some point it became clear, like if I reflected on past decisions, like, you know, typically the more courageous choice I was happy with in retrospect.

• 14:46Chris Williamson?

  That's really interesting. So I remember reading the blog post, the first time I read it around about Christmas time and thinking that was a really clever way to identify one of your values. Because what's quite easy to do here is to reverse engineer, this is the sort of person that I am, therefore these are the five values which are most close to the person that I am. It's like, I am a person that is, you know, if your list of 67 was a list of 5,000 and it had all the bad stuff in there as well. It's like, I'm a person who is shy and timid and easily irritated and blah, blah, blah, you know, quick to judgment and all this sort of stuff. What you've done is you've set a north star for something that you

• 15:29Chris Williamson?

  want to be, not necessarily an existing disposition that you have, you know? Like that's the, the agency thing is something that is inherent and inbuilt into you, whereas the courage thing is something that you are looking to try and put more of into your life, right?

• 15:46Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think, you know, I guess those two, just as we're talking, I'm thinking about it. You know, something that's been sort of. Very influential on me. There's a guy named Joseph Campbell, you know, I've talked to him before. He's a professor, I think in like the seventies and eighties. But he wrote a book called Hero with a Thousand Faces. And then he kind of became well-known, to be honest, he was well-known. He was kind of the influence on George Lucas of the writing of Star Wars. That he had studied all these sort of like ancient myths, religious stories, like, you know, Bible, Northwestern, Native American, et cetera, et cetera. And the idea of the hero with a thousand faces is all these myths across all these different cultures are actually telling a very similar story. There's a certain structure underlying the story.

• 16:31Speaker 00

  And the reason that's evolved in all these different cultures is because it's it's a way of sort of teaching people how to deal with various things in their life, right? You can read these stories, you read a good like fiction book or kind of thing, and you can see how it could apply to your life. Oh, like, I'm not dealing with this exact problem, but something like that. And one of the key, and so he broke it down into twelve stages of this, the hero's journey, that, you know, the hero confronts a problem, they set off on a challenge, they overcome difficulties, and they come back and then they bring their knowledge to the world and they're sort of like teaching, right? You could like see this in Star Wars, you can see this in the Bible, like this is very sort of like universal mythology. But at the moment, sort of, I think it's like the third stage, and the way he describes it

• 17:17Speaker 00

  is what he calls the refusal of the call. That you have something that's calling you, you know, okay, like, if you're like Luke in Star Wars, right? It's like, he's being called by Obi-Wan to like go on this quest and do this thing. He's like, no, I have to stay on Tatooine.

• 17:33Chris Williamson?

  Unwilling hero, yeah.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  Take care of my parents and I can't go off with you. And then eventually you have the crossing of the threshold, right? Where the hero accepts the call to adventure and they step into this new world of, you know, and this out of Star Wars, it's like, if you remember the scene where Luke goes to this like weird bar, and there's like all these aliens there, and it's like crazy, and he's like never seen all these different sort of things. But you can think about that as sort of like a metaphorical thing. So anyway, going back to this idea of like, agency and courage, right? It's that, you know, I realized in retrospect, those times when I sort of approached the threshold, you know, there were times I had turned away and there were times I had chosen to cross the threshold, that I'd had some courage, say, I'm gonna step into this unknown world. And do something that you know, sometimes the end of the world is something that that's

• 18:19Speaker 00

  seemingly quite small, like, you know, going to a different school, whatever it's going to be. But in all those cases, that was meaningful. And so, you know, I sort of could reflect on those past experiences and say, actually, this thing, when I, when I sort of have courage in this capacity, when I accept this, this call to adventure, that ends up working out very well for me. You know, in retrospect, I can look at major life turning points and they all sort of had that, that archetype in common.

• 18:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, so that's a predisposition before making a good choice, tends to be something which comes just before a prelude to that. So, okay, we got the first three. What else have you got?

• 18:58Speaker 00

  So, soul in the game is another one for me. And I guess this one is a bit new. I got this from, there's a guy named Nassim Taleb, who's written a few books, probably the most famous is a book called The Black Swan. He was a financial trader. But he talks about this idea of, you know, there's skin in the game, which is kind of like Hammurabi's code, right? It's like, it's an eye for an eye. It's like, if you're going to, you know, the way in like ancient Babylonia, there are certain rules, like if you, if you built a house and the house collapsed and killed the people inside, you would also be killed, right? So you were very incentivized to make sure the house was a good house, right? Or, you know, if you're, if you're the architect building the bridge, you have to live under the bridge, right? If you want to make sure that the bridge does, you know, what you say the bridge is going to do.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's, it's, the idea is there should be a symmetry in risk, right? Like, you shouldn't be allowing others to take risk for you, right? You should have the same exposure. If I'm, yeah, I'm building houses, like, it's not fair that I'm going to live in a house built by someone else that's better at than me, and I'm not putting everyone else in my crappy house, that I don't know what I'm doing, and, you know, they're going to be at risk or whatever. And so soul in the game is kind of an extension of that concept. It's when, it's when you take on risk for others, right? You know, I think, you know, you do this with a friend or people in your family or whatever, is it's they, you know, they have something going on and you bear some of that, that burden or that, that risk for them. So that's, that's kind of the idea of. Of soul in the game. And again, that was sort of a, I, I got that from his book and I really liked it.

• 20:28Speaker 00

  And then I sort of again, kind of reflected on, I was like, you know, when I, when I sort of do this, when I'm, when I have skin in the game, when I have soul in the game and have that risk that I just feel better, you know, I can, I just feel better about it, right? Like I just feel confident when I'm doing.

• 20:42Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. And what's last? Is it five you've got?

• 20:45Speaker 00

  Uh, five. Yeah. And the last one is just reciprocity and to create more value than I capture. You know, there's a, I got that from, and you know, you could see a lot of these, I basically borrowed from other people and they resonated for some reason or another. And, and I put them down, but, um, the Tim O'Reilly from O'Reilly Media is a big, they do sort of like tech publishing books. And they had some funny moment. I think they had published a book on like, uh, C++ programming language. And they got an email from this guy that was like, I just sold a $5 billion company based on your like $50 book on C++ that I read and then built this software. So they were joking, they were like, well, at least we create more, create more value than we capture, right?

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Like, you know, we spawned this $5 billion company and made $50. And that's an extreme example, but it's like, yeah, like that, that, that to me seemed like an important principle, right? Like I want, I want there to be sort of more value created than I'm just capturing myself. You want it to be a sort of net positive.

• 21:40Chris Williamson?

  That's beautiful, man. They, I mean, you know, if you've got those things as the foundation to your life that sits below the building you build on top of it, or as the ingredients that are going in, you know, if those are the ingredients, I challenge you to make a shit meal out of that. I think it's going to be challenging to have a shit meal as long as you stick to those good ingredients and you build out of those. Um, so mine, I did mine, um, when I followed the exercise that you have on your blog and everyone that's listening, it'll be linked in the show notes below. I really, really highly suggest that once you've finished listening to this podcast, you go and do the five, the core values exercise. Take, you said 15 minutes, which.

• 22:22Chris Williamson?

  It might take someone 15 minutes, but it took me a couple of days because getting it down to five, it wasn't hard finding them. It was reducing it down to five. I can't get rid of that one. I can't, I can't, like, I can't get rid of that one. That's the, that's the, that's that one. So, but anyway, I've managed, I managed to get it down and mine spelled out an acronym, which actually helped me to bypass the forgetting them.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Oh, that's, that's smart. Yeah.

• 22:47Chris Williamson?

  I know. So it spells out cases, C A S E S. So curiosity, to be curious, to explore myself and the world around me, to meet new people. A adventure, to see new places, do new things. I want to live life to the fullest. S was actually a steal from you about the soul in the game, which was where you'd taken a concept and then reworked it and it was selfless development. So it was to improve myself, learn how to operate effectively, and then teach others what I have learned. E excellence, to make the most of minutes. I want to be precise with my thoughts, words and actions. I want to fulfill my potential. And then the final S was self-care. In order to be everything that I need to be for everyone

• 23:29Chris Williamson?

  else, I need to look after myself first and foremost. And having those, having that, those five principles, man, at the start of the year, has made a really profound impact because every time that I'm faced with one of the thousand Inquisition-sized questions that we ask ourselves about, do I go for a walk? Do I go to bed on time? Do I get up on time? Do I hit the snooze button? Do I look at my phone while I'm in the car? Do I do whatever it might be? Like, all of these different things. I'm like, well, okay, how does it, how does it apply to these? And having the balance, and I think this is why the cutting, the chopping task was so difficult, because you understand that the balancing

• 24:11Chris Williamson?

  act's quite important as well. If you're going to have a maximum of five. So for instance, for me, excellence actually is really, really applicable to a lot of the different things. But curiosity kind of guides the direction. So excellence can kind of be how curiosity and adventure are in motion and finding that balance. But yeah, everyone that's listening, you need to go and do the values exercise. If you can do it in the space of an hour, I'll be really, really impressed. Maybe you just happen to look upon it, but you give, it's like a big chunk of like 70 potentials and then other people can add their own in.

• 24:43Chris Williamson?

  But dude, I, I think it's a really lovely way to kind of just. Reset the way that you operate within the world, right? Ensure that you are aligned. As you said, that your thoughts, words and actions are aligned with actually who you want to be, who you are.

• 24:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's interesting. I know I'm curious. I know I found, I sort of sat down and did these once and I remember particularly like the soul in the game one, I kind of remember kind of coming to that and like, actually I see this is really important to me. And I find when I, when I would sort of write these down that, as I said, like I would, I would sometimes be applying them to one part of my life, but not others. And I just remember it's sort of like, I would have to, I would reprocess everything. I'm like, oh, like I'm doing this over here in this relationship and I'm doing this over here at work and I'm doing this in this other work project. And like, it's congruent here, but it's not congruent, you know, in one of these two places. And so like having an external arm, every time I would sort of like write one of these down, I'd be like, oh, I like think through everything again, a little bit, you know, just sort of

• 25:40Speaker 00

  like reprocess like, oh, like the reason I'm unhappy about this is actually because, you know, I'm, I'm avoiding, you know, some difficult conversation instead of being courageous about or whatever it is.

• 25:50Chris Williamson?

  That third party perspective makes a big difference, right? Treating yourself as if you're someone you're responsible for helping.

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it is a useful kind of construct, right? As you can sort of separate yourself, the thinker from yourself, the actor to some extent.

• 26:08Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that one and two level, it's, man, it's just, it's so, it's so interesting to me to see how this rolls forward in people's lives because everyone that's listening knows what their mums or their sisters or their partners' core values are. Sometimes they're actually living really, really bad core values. Like I constantly concern myself with what other people think of me. Like, so that would be like a, an hyper awareness or a hyper kind of self consciousness or whatever it might be. And if you, by writing them out and having them there, it's almost like a.

• 26:45Chris Williamson?

  A checklist, right, that you've got to go through. It's like, right, are you doing this? Are you being courageous? Are you having soul in the game, et cetera, et cetera? So moving on to the operating principles, of which you've got 37, and these are so cool. And I absolutely love the idea of creating this kind of compounding library, iterating on lessons and things, principles that you can do. So could you talk about where you started with this? Can you remember that story as well from, was it, were you in Vietnam or Thailand or something like that?

• 27:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want, I was, a friend of mine, it was actually my roommate at the time. I think, again, like one of these sort of daily decisions, it was like, I think Friday afternoon, like 3pm, and he was like going to the beach, and he was like, do you want to go to the beach? And this was like agonizing, because I was like, well, yeah, I kind of want to go to the beach, like hang out and like chill out and have a drink and whatever. But I also like have this like work project that I like said I was going to do on Saturday, and like I haven't worked out this week, so I should like probably stay and work out tomorrow. And so I was just, you know, it's like from 3 to 4pm on Friday, I'm sitting there, and it's, you know, to some extent, it's like, it doesn't matter that much, right? Like this individual decision doesn't matter, but, you know, I compounded, it does matter, right?

• 28:04Speaker 00

  Like if you, if you miss one workout, like it doesn't really matter if you miss every workout. It matters a lot. And so I started, I was like, okay, I need to like have some way to like make these decisions better, right? Like it's, I mean, I'm spending like an inordinate amount of time, you know, deliberating on these sorts of things. And again, like it's, this, this one in particular doesn't matter, right? Like, and I think I did, I ended up not going to the beach. But had I gone to the beach, like it's not, the trajectory of my life would not have been meaningfully different had all sort of other things stayed the same. And so I sat down that weekend, and I think I wrote through like the first version. At the time, it was maybe like 6 to 10 sort of operating principles.

• 28:47Speaker 00

  And they were just sort of like things that at that point in my life, I had in my head, right? You know, and I think one of them was sort of this idea of kind of like an integrated life. Like my bias is I tend to just get really sucked into. Uh, usually my work and like what I'm doing professionally and like I made this, it happens to me all the time. Uh, two months ago, I like, I tracked sort of my, um, how many work hours and I was like doing eighty, ninety hour weeks. And I was just like at the computer all the time. And I was like, I can't, you know, I can't do this, right? Like this is not, um, this is not sustainable. Um, and then what I would do is I, I just put, I have them in an Excel spreadsheet and I'll look at them, uh, usually like every Saturday morning, I sort of plan my weeks out. I usually do a weekly review and weekly planning, first thing Saturday morning.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  And, um, I would just notice, you know, I would, again, like these certain mistakes, right? I would just do the same dumb thing over and over and over. And I'd be like, oh, I should like stop doing, uh, I stopped doing that dumb thing. Or, you know, the inverse, it's like, oh, like when I do this thing, like I'm really happy about it and it like works out really well for me. I should just like do that thing, um, kind of more consistently. So, you know, periodically, weeks when those things came up to me, I would sort of add them to the list. Of like, here's sort of another kind of operating principle that I find, you know, I can look at multiple instances in my life where, where following this was beneficial. Yeah. Uh, you know, the other one I sure talked about this idea of the hero's journey and, uh, the crossing the threshold. There's a book called The War of Arc that I really like, uh, by a guy named Steve Pressfield.

• 30:16Speaker 00

  He's, um, he wrote, uh, The Legend of Bada Bagger Van came in a movie about the golfer. Uh, he has a couple of other famous books about, um, like I think Spartan, uh, sort of Spartan War or whatever. But he wrote this book about his sort of journey to becoming a writer. And he talked about this idea of the resistance, right? That we all have this voice in the back of our head whenever you're setting out to do something new, new. This says, you know, you can't do it right, whether you're going to start exercising or doing yoga or start a business or write a book or, uh, have a relationship, whatever it is, you just like, no, you can't do this, like this is gonna, it's gonna suck. And so he talked about sort of his own journey as a writer of like, uh, having this resistance in the back of his head.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  That he was basically bumming around and like waiting tables and doing a bunch of odd jobs for a decade. And he was like, this was just the resistance kind of kicking my ass, right? Like I just was getting beat down by this thing. And so part of this thing is, you know, you, we all need to sort of, uh, fight, fight the resistance. You know, you, you go to war with the resistance. You have to see where in your life is kind of that resistance. Where is the resistance? And, um, you know, how can you, how can you sort of like lean into that, right? Lean into whatever that thing is that you can, uh, feel yourself avoiding. And so that, you know, that was a good thing because I, having read that book, the sense for what he meant by the, by the resistance. And that does, that word doesn't mean that in a normal context, but if you, if you read the book, you get the sense for like, I can feel that, right? And, um, that's a question like I ask myself every week, you know, where, where am I avoiding the resistance, right?

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Where are the areas that I'm avoiding the resistance? And, uh, I mean, it comes up very frequently, you know, I'm avoiding a difficult conversation with a business partner. Or, you know, I'm avoiding, uh, letting go of a client because of blah, you know, whatever it is. Um, so that one, um,

• 31:58Chris Williamson?

  That's, that's awesome, like especially because our evolutionary predisposition is to avoid change, right? Like we, we try actively, we don't want to do the new thing because the new thing might have a tiger in it. Or the new thing might have a snake hiding under it or whatever it might be. Plus it's expensive, you know, energy wise and cognitively. And I always use the same example, but, um, I posted about your, um, Uda loop blog post.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:30Chris Williamson?

  A while ago, dude, I've nearly finished, uh, I've nearly finished the book on John Boyd as well. The, um, one of the biographies.

• 32:37Speaker 00

  The Robert Coram, yeah, no, great book.

• 32:38Chris Williamson?

  Massive though, it's so long. I just keeps on going. Um, anyway, this particular way of doing, uh, so decision making and, and kind of, um, reflecting on, on, on the way that you operate within the world. And I can like post some stuff up about that, which is a game changer, right? I really love it. I love the idea of that. Post that up, no one cares. Every time that I post up me using AlphaBrain by Onnit, which is a nootropic, my inbox gets ex-popped. Dude, is this any, I'm like, that's the resistance there. The resistance is that the trick is the five minute booty blaster app at home DVD for six pack abs in 20 seconds.

• 33:19Chris Williamson?

  That's what, that's what, because, uh, hey man, I'm, I'm really struggling with my motivation or my procrastination to get this thing done for university. Okay. Um, uh, what's, what's the best productivity app? Should I use Rescue Time or should I actually be doing Freedom tied in with Pomodoro's and blah, blah? And I'm like, do you have your phone out at your desk? Yes.

• 33:41Chris Williamson?

  Right. It's that, you know, like it's staring you in the face. But again, it's that it's the resistance, right? And it's often the things that we don't want to do. And then when you layer on top of that, that a lot of what we do is just signaling both to ourselves in terms of self deception and to other people to make them think that we're doing a thing and that we're actually in control. It is increasingly, as I read more and more evolutionary psychology, I realize that externalizing the the way that we operate is almost mandatory. Because like, if you make a decision based on just like what you think at the time, it's almost definitely going to be wrong. Like, the fact that we don't get hit by open traffic on a daily basis is a bit of a miracle. You know, like, why we just this just your decision making is awful at the time.

• 34:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:27Chris Williamson?

  It's terrible. And I'll tell you one of the ones that I absolutely adore, which I've started using. Number 20. I go into Terminator mode at 85% complete. Once I get to 85% complete, I start obsessively focusing on the project that's 85% complete. The mind will play all sorts of tricks on me if I let it. Trying to seduce me into doing something unrelated or new. I never give in to that. I get hungry and focused when I get to 85% complete. I get it done. Sebastian Marshall.

• 34:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mentioned, I got that from from my friend Sebastian. But I liked that, you know, in this kind of place of the resistance. But I don't know. I feel like everyone deals with this. You get when you start thinking about you get to that stage of the project where you start thinking about other people judging it, right? Like, other people thinking about it. Your head just starts to play all these little tricks on your it's like, well, maybe this isn't the appropriate thing for you to do at this point with where the brand is going. And, you know, maybe just put this on the shelf for a little while and like, do the the other thing. Or even, you know, I noticed I write like a weekly newsletter and maybe from the time I start, every time I'm done, maybe it's two hours. You know, it's not that long. But at like, 90 minutes, I'm like, nah, I don't know if this one's good. Like, maybe I'll just skip this issue. This one kind of sucks. And I'll just like

• 35:42Speaker 00

  wait and and do the next issue. And it's, I mean, it's like, I don't know how many I've published 300 something articles on the internet. It's like, every article basically was the exact same thing. Like, maybe there was like, two.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, like maybe two, I was like, oh, that was really good. But like most of them, I'm like, nah, this probably sucks. Like, I don't know. I could just kind of like go for it. Uh, kind of thinking. So that again, like, that was a mistake. I saw myself making it over and over. And I was like, okay. And then, you know, I was talking to Sebastian, I was like, that's a great rule, right? Like, if it gets to eighty five percent. If you get that close to getting it done, like, you just, you just do it, right? And the other way I've heard it phrased is, you know, take, take the, take the roast out of the oven, or take the turkey out of an oven. You know, if you cook a turkey eighty percent of the way, it's totally useless, right? You can't, you can't eat an eighty percent of the way cooked turkey. You might as well be raw. It's like, just finish cooking the turkey. And like, even if it's not the best turkey, like, that's okay.

• 36:35Chris Williamson?

  At least you got it.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  To make soup or something. You know, you've got something you can, uh, you can start with.

• 36:40Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome, man. What else you got? What else are some of your favorites from your operating principles that stand out?

• 36:47Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, I think another one that I come back to a lot is this idea of, um, uh, kind of like power laws or sort of how you, you frame decisions. I think like the, we tend to think of, you know, you talked about like resistance to change, but like, we tend to think of things in like, uh, as like relatively incremental, right? Like, I'm doing something this way. Maybe I can make it like, um, five or 10% uh, better. And the idea of a power law, power law is like a 10, a 10x improvement, right? And so it's, if as this force, it's like, how, what would it look like if this was like 10 times better?

• 37:22Speaker 00

  Um, or, you know, 10 times more, whatever the thing you want it to be is. Um, and as a, it forces you to think about it differently, right? You know, if you're, you're, um, running a business and you get, uh, your customers because you go to meetups in your local city or whatever, you can't go to 10 times as many meetups, right? Like, it just won't. There's, there's no way just doing more. You can't just do 10 times more of what you're doing. There's not enough time. So you have to think like, you know, it, it forces you to, to be fair. It's like, well, okay, like, you know, should I, do I hire people to go to meetups? Do I also do this other thing? It, it forces, I think, this sort of, uh, deforcing function of, um, you know, how to think about things,

• 38:04Speaker 00

  uh, differently. And I find that's often, you know, my, my bias is to just kind of like grind away, right? Like, I'll just keep running away at this and like, maybe it'll get five percent better this year and, and whatever. And, you know, there's something to be said for that at some point, but, you know, you also need to have this thing of like, you know, what would it look like to, to sort of make this thing 10 times better and? In some capacity and usually that means kind of reinventing the thing from the ground up.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's challenging that, though. We often, I often talk about this at work, that the boys, I run a nightclub events company, have done for 14 years, and a lot of the boys will come in and continue to grind away with the same strategy that got them a shit score for their team last week, and the week before, and the week before, and the week before, and the week before. And I'm like, man, like, if anything, what you've done is proven to yourself that this particular strategy is ineffective achieving the goal that you want.

• 38:58Chris Williamson?

  Like, this is an identifier. This is you constantly stepping on a mine, then getting an artificial limb refitted neck each week, and then going, wow, that mine. I know, I know the last, like, five times I've done it, that's happened, but this time, might be different. And it is, is that just that there's a, there's a cost, there's a challenge with that orthogonal lateral thinking? Do you think that's, that's a big part of it? We like to routineize stuff, therefore we continue to grease the groove we're already in?

• 39:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know why. I mean, I wonder, part of it's like, as you said, just there's some just like resistance to change. Like, you know, the way you're doing it's not working, but it's not working in a fairly predictable way, right?

• 39:43Chris Williamson?

  I know this isn't working. I know this isn't-

• 39:46Speaker 00

  This is gonna fail, but it's not gonna fail in some spectacular, embarrassing, terrible way. It's just gonna fail in a very normal, predictable way. And like, I think, and I guess that's true, right? Like, a lot of times, it's like, I would rather, people would rather fail in some, you know, they'd rather have it go badly in some predictable way than like, take some risks. Like, well, if I try doing it this weird, different way, it could, it could spectacularly go wrong, right? Like, this could end really badly.

• 40:09Chris Williamson?

  This is, this is why I think people have a aversion to driverless cars or self-driving cars. I think people would much sooner be killed at the, at the behest of a human than survive at the mercy of a robot. Like they just think, oh, well, like, there's a lot more. Look at every single stat that you've got, every single statistic about how many road deaths are, especially in America, it's crazy. Total number of road deaths that occurs, like, it's a real big number. You think if we had all of the appropriate technology moving forward, we think we could reduce road deaths by, and it's some stupid margin, that's like 80%, 90%, something like that. But there's an

• 40:52Chris Williamson?

  aversion to it. It's like, why? Well, like, you know, the deaths that we do have, like, the mistakes that I do make, at least I know that it's like mine to bear. I don't know. But I think that's, I think that's a lot of it. It's that sort of existing paradigms, right? People don't like new.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did visit, I, there's like the evolutionary psychology they take there is interesting. It's like, if you go, if I go forage over here, it kind of sucks, and I just barely get enough food to, to live. But like, there's no lions hiding in the bushes over there, right? Whereas, like, if I go to this other place, it could be way better. But like, there could be a lion in the bush, or there could be like poisonous snakes, or like, whatever it is. So like, maybe, and again, I think there's, I think that's, it's hard to parse out, because like, there is some wisdom in that, right? Like, if it is gonna fail.

• 41:36Chris Williamson?

  Don't multiply by zero. We said it at the start.

• 41:39Speaker 00

  Right. If there's a, there's a lion hiding in the bushes, like, you shouldn't go there, right? Like, it doesn't matter how delicious the berries are on the other side of the lion, like, it's not worth it.

• 41:48Chris Williamson?

  Don't go through the lion.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  You don't go through the lion. But I think it's, there is, you know, particularly for myself, and I think this is generally true, like, you know, you, you get hung up on other people's perception of, of whatever it is, right? Like, the quote unquote lion is something more like, you know, my friends are gonna think I'm dumb, or the people at this, then you're gonna think I'm dumb, or whatever it is. And like, that's, that's scary. Again, like, I think the evolutionary psychology explanation here makes some sense, right? It's like, if you get thrown out of the tribe, and you're left on the savanna all by yourself, like, You're screwed, right? So like you gotta even even if you're not, it's not the best thing like you gotta make sure that the tribe kind of likes you. And I think one of the one of the nice things at the present day, and you know, the internet is like, you kind of get to pick your tribe, right?

• 42:32Chris Williamson?

  Fuck the tribe.

• 42:32Speaker 00

  You kind of get to figure out who you want to hang out with.

• 42:35Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Um, how should people? So the core values, we've got that in an exercise that people can go and do on your blog. But the operating principles are a little bit more iterative, right? It's kind of a a compounding library that you acquire yourself as you see things. So how would you advise someone? Someone says, fucking hell. Like that Taylor guy told me, I need some core values and operating principles, and I haven't got any like, how do I start compiling my operating principles? What should they do?

• 43:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, uh, I mean, and you can link to the article, but like read mine, read other people's and like, maybe you get some idea. And I like, as a lot of mine, as you, you know, you quoted the Terminator one from Sebastian, like, that actually wasn't my idea, right? Like, he just said that. And I was like, oh, yeah, actually, like, if I did that, things would work out better for me. And I should kind of just start doing that. Um, so I think, yeah, you can use it from other people. And then I think, uh, having just some sort of reminder, I don't know, once a, once a week, once a month, where you sit down and you you read over whatever you have and you think about like, is there something else that I would, uh, add to this lesson? That's my, I think mine, uh, I sort of have my internal version. That's maybe like forty five or fifty now, but I don't know, maybe every year I find like three to five, right? Like it just kind of slowly incrementally,

• 43:49Speaker 00

  uh, grows as, you know, new things come up for me.

• 43:52Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. I'm going to give you a couple of mine. So I've only been working on my, I haven't taken any of yours, although a lot of yours are phenomenal. Um, but I've been building mine up in preparation as soon as we put this podcast in. So one of them is, uh, from Ethan Suppley, guy that was in The Butterfly Effect, and my name is early, he was on the podcast two weeks ago. And, um, he's got this thing from a coach that taught in martial arts called No Bad Reps. And basically it's that you're always drilling something. In a very, very real way, from a neurological perspective, everything is a habit. Whether you choose to continue to do an existing good habit, break the good habit, do a bad habit, break the bad habit, everything you do is building an action which is more likely

• 44:33Chris Williamson?

  to occur in future. And there's this, the partitioned brain approach, which is in Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright. And he talks about the modular brain, sorry. And he talks about that as well, that it's like which module wins. Does the I eat a cookie module win? Or does the I don't, does the I trade, decide to go to the gym or not? And Ethan's coach from martial arts is saying like, you're going to do this movement. You can either drill it and make the next time that you do it, compound on something that's better, or you can do it with poor technique. And next time you've got to undo that, plus then try and get yourself better again. So no bad reps. And I thought that was just like a sick operating principle. And it was like quite

• 45:15Chris Williamson?

  cool that it was just sort of three words. And then another one from Naval, and this is linked with Tiago Forte, who his most successful tweet of all time. Naval's is, escape competition with authenticity. No one can beat you at being you. And then Tiago has, you can't compete with someone who's having fun. But escape competition with authenticity, no one can beat you at being you is just, it ties in so much of the stuff that I've learned from doing this podcast and speaking to cool, interesting people like you. And the fact that your competitive advantage

• 45:54Chris Williamson?

  is your unique mix of background and talent and the funny way that you pronounce the letter T and, you know, all the stuff, the fact that you wake up and your back hurts, everything that you have coalesces to become your unique offering to the world. And that is your competitive advantage, because it's your ability for authenticity. So those are, those are my, the two that I've got for now, the no bad reps and the escape competition with authenticity.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  I like that. I think it is useful to sort of borrow them from, like the no bad raps, right? Like, obviously, that's applying to, like, martial arts or exercise or whatever, but you can, it's fairly easy to sort of, like, generalize that to, uh, other things, right? You know, whatever, you're, you're working on a podcast, you're working on an article, like, you don't sort of, everything is like some level of focus, right? Like, I'm not gonna just, like, mail it in on this one.

• 46:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, no, I agree. Um, so one of the things I wanted to touch on before we finished was, you got this really interesting article about the truth about working smarter, not harder. Could you take us through that? The, I think you, you say that there's five, there's only three ways to work smarter, not harder, but then when you read the article, there's five.

• 47:03Speaker 00

  Uh, well, there you go. Uh, truth in advertising.

• 47:08Chris Williamson?

  That's fine. Well, that's, that's what, how you sign up and you think you're just getting three, but actually.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  It's bonus, yeah.

• 47:14Chris Williamson?

  Actually, here's the, here's the DVD extras. So, um, prioritize tasks by energy level. What's that mean?

• 47:21Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, so I think, like, one way, you think about, like, sort of how many, I'm gonna have this much time, this much work in the week. We tend to, tend to chunk it up into time. Um, I think it's, it's probably more useful to think about it in terms of energy. So, like, uh, for me, like, 9:00 AM to 12:00 PM in the morning, like, my productive output at that time, relative to, say, 9:00 PM to 12:00 AM at night, is like a factor of 10. Like, it's vastly better. Like, I've never in my life created anything useful after 10:00 PM at night, right? Like, it's just nothing, nothing, nothing good happens there. Like, basically, everything has been, you know, between 9:00 and, um, and 12:00 kind of thing. And so, I, most people don't, you just wake up in the morning

• 48:05Speaker 00

  and you're just like, I just start kind of doing the things I gotta do, right? And like, you know, for example, like, for me, it's like, if I started and I just, like, do a bunch of administrative stuff. At the first thing in the morning. Now, like, my best energy, when I like my head was clear and everything was straight, I just spent like sorting out my bookkeeping. Or, you know, trying to set an appointment with someone that, you know, isn't coordinating well, or whatever it is. Uh, and, you know, it's just like, it's a bad use of that time. And so like, that kind of thing is like, I'll do that at like five o'clock in the afternoon. Cause like, I'm tired. You know, it's, I've already done a bunch of stuff for the day. I can like call the FedEx guy and like coordinate the delivery. Uh, and like, that's fine. It's not sort of energy. So thinking about like, what are the things you want to do? You know?

• 48:47Speaker 00

  Writing for me is a big one. That's like a high energy thing, right? So I try to, I'm looking at sort of how I'm organizing my time, right? Like, I want to have that in big blocks in the morning.

• 48:55Chris Williamson?

  Protect that.

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Uh, and then I want to sort of organize everything else, um, around that kind of stuff.

• 49:02Chris Williamson?

  Cool. Okay. I, I really like the idea, man. I think it's one of the, it's a unifying, no matter whether you're coming in from GTD or whether you're an OODA loop guy, or whether you're the optimizing for optionality dude, or whatever it might be. Like, no matter what your approach is, prioritizing, uh, matching the task with the energy level. Is definitely right. And you, you know, someone else might be, I've never created anything useful in my life before 3pm. I have a buddy, Alex O'Connor, Alex O'Connor, that runs the Cosmic Skeptic, uh, YouTube channel. And, um, his, his university, like, sleep and wake cycle makes me feel physically ill.

• 49:40Chris Williamson?

  Like, he, he starts writing his Oxford University Theology and Philosophy essays at 10, 11pm. It's like, he, he starts winding up for work at that time.

• 49:53Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 49:53Chris Williamson?

  And then will go to bed at like 5am or 6am, but he'll go into his halls of residence or whatever in Oxford. And, um, go to his, uh, uh, hallmates down the, down the hall. At 2am and play piano as a break for 30 minutes. Like, his hallmate will be, also be up at that time and they'll do a bit of piano and I'm thinking, fuck. 2:30 in the morning. Go to bed. But that's for him. That's the cadence that works, right? So he's matching his energy with the tasks that he's doing, even apparently playing the piano. So your second, your second one is learn new skills. How can that help us work smarter and harder?

• 50:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I mean, this one is maybe the simplest or the most obvious, but like being deliberate about it. I like this idea of like, of no bad reps. I was thinking about this. My, my first job was in marketing. That's my, my original professional background. And I would meet these people that had, you know, quote unquote, five years of marketing experience and would just do like really, you know, something that not someone what you wouldn't know like off the street or whatever. But like, if you'd been working in a career for five years, like you should have learned some things about like how things work there.

• 51:05Chris Williamson?

  That is the quote, that is the quote that I want to take away from this podcast. If you've been working in a career for five years, you should have learned some things. Like that's it. That you should have learned some things. And yet the same people that have been in a career for five years and are just like a slightly less shit version of the person that they were when they joined.

• 51:26Speaker 00

  Right. And I think it's, yeah, it's like, in any kind of like market, like there's like, I don't know, five or 10 books, maybe that you could like read on marketing and like, that's like probably 70% of the stuff you need to know. Like it's not like, at least the sort of like fundamentals are the basics kind of thing. So just like, you know, I think particularly if you, whatever you're doing, like if you're, if you're reading about something and you're doing it at the same time, you get that really tight feedback loop, right? You're like, I'm reading about how to, to do some, you know, email marketing or whatever. And then I'm like working on doing email marketing. I think, oh, actually like, well, what about this problem that I just ran into? And then, you know, you can go back and forth in that, that sort of loop of, of practicing and reading. It's much more productive than sort of either of those in isolation.

• 52:09Chris Williamson?

  Got you. The third one, use popular productivity hacks, which everyone on this podcast will be very, very familiar with. What's your current productivity setup in terms of the apps that you're most reliant on?

• 52:23Speaker 00

  I wrote, there's an app called Focusmate that I like a lot, which is basically virtual coworking. And so you basically pick a time, whatever, 11 a.m. and it matches you with someone somewhere else in the world that wants to do a 50 minute work session. And it's basically just like a video call. You get on there and they have some like protocols that they ask people to follow on the platform, but it's matched you with somebody. You say like, hi, my name's Taylor. I'm going to be working on, you know, writing the first of my newsletter in this session. And I find that, I used to have various times, we sort of had like writing buddies where, you know, we'd go meet and we'd sit in a coffee shop for two hours or they'd come to my place, I'd go to theirs. And that like social pressure is just like, we, it just works for, I mean, I think it works for almost everyone, but like it certainly works for me, right? When I know that person in like 50 minutes, is

• 53:08Speaker 00

  going to say like, did you do the newsletter? And I tell them like, no, like, it's just gonna be like, I should just do the newsletter because I don't want to like tell them I didn't do the newsletter. So yeah, that's a big one for me. Right now, I do, that's kind of like a version, you know, you mentioned sort of like the Pomodoro technique is sort of like breaking things down into chunks, right? So that's a 50 minute chunk. I think typically Pomodoro is like 25 minutes, but having this sort of like deliberate blocks and then I'll go, whatever, go for a walk, stretch, have a chat with someone.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  That's cool. I like the, I like the idea of that guy. Next up, you said you use software and automation. How can you use that to be smart and not harder?

• 53:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, again, some of this stuff seems sort of obvious, but like, you know, computers are much more reliable than humans for doing things, you know, generally including yourself, right? And so if you can get a computer to do something for you, that will usually work better. So like, as a simple example, I use a text expander app. And what that is, is you type in, like, one of the ones I use is a comma.

• 54:19Speaker 00

  Chat C H A T and it pulls out of the thing and says, hi, I'd love to set up a time to talk with you. Let me know what some times that are convenient are for. If you'd like to go ahead and book a time, I have my availability here. Right. And because I, I see, I do that, whatever, twice a day, every day, forever. And then it's, and then again, and instead of like spinning five emails back and forth, trying to figure out time to work. You know, they have all these calendar apps now. I use one called Calendly. There's a bunch of them. Uh, but it just like syncs up with my Google Calendar and the person can say, you know, Taylor's free at these times and they book.

• 54:52Chris Williamson?

  You talked about, you talked about Upwork and like Tiny Hands as well. Do you, do you outsource much of the stuff that you do, or are you quite sort of siloed?

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Uh, I do. Yeah. There's an app called Fancy Hands. It's like, I think you pay like five minutes per 20 to 30 minute task kind of thing. Um, so I do try and use, there's just like a lot of stuff that like they're just, I just can't figure out a good way to get out. Like, I don't know, you've got to call the credit card company to discuss it. Like it has to be you, right? Like it has to be your social security or whatever. Like some of these things that you can basically they'll call and they'll wait on hold for you and they'll get the operator. And they'll just dial you in as soon as they have the person. And then it's like a two minute thing, right? Cause you're like, hi, you know, my name is Taylor. This is my social security number, my information, whatever. Like I want to change this thing and, um, so yeah, I do, I do try to do that stuff.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  I, um, I guess I increasingly I had sort of like, uh, uh, so I didn't actually find them through Upwork, but just a person that worked on an ongoing basis. Um, that like helps manage a bunch of, um, of those kinds, you know, those kinds of things. And also higher levels of a project management, uh, type of stuff.

• 56:01Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you know what? I tweeted about this the other day and tons of people replied to me and said that they have the same challenge. There needs to be a how to.

• 56:12Chris Williamson?

  Find, train and work with a PA or VA course for entrepreneurs. I don't, there may be some out there. If you're listening and you've got one or you know one, please send it to me because I desperately need it. But like it's getting to the stage now where leveraging a personal brand is starting to hit some scaling limitations.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 56:33Chris Williamson?

  And which is great because I love being in control of it, of it being me. And there's tons of people out there. Zubey, my buddy, he's the same like he's, he has like billions of impressions on Twitter every month. And all of these different things, trying to sell a book and sometimes I do coaching for people and I do this, that and the other. And I'm just like, it's just him. And he replied to my tweet about, I need to learn how to find, train and work with a PA or VA. And he replied to it and he was like, I'm listening desperately like, cause he needs it too. So someone, anyone, just please for the love of God, make a course on how to work with one because you are right. It's, it's a challenge with that stuff.

• 57:17Chris Williamson?

  There's a website called gethuman.com which allows you to use a service that will wait on the phone until an operator picks up for you.

• 57:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 57:29Chris Williamson?

  Um, I don't know. I don't know if that's available in America, but it works in the UK. And I found out about that on the life hacks, first episode of second season that we released the other week.

• 57:40Chris Williamson?

  So that came out. Uh, final one, fifth, the fifth way to work smarter, not harder, develop courage. What does that mean? You mentioned it as one of your core values.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is, I think like, uh, like many people, uh, I love, I love a good life hack, right? You know, you love, it's like, ah, here's this thing and it's, you know, your example of like the on it supplement. Life hacks are kind of like the supplements of productivity or something, right? It's like, ah, I just like do this one quick thing and like I'm thinking my typing, yeah, right. Like my typing speed, I'm going to get it up by like 20% and then like everything's going to be like way faster and. Uh, did I, and, um, yeah, I was, yeah, I had, had done that many times and, and still do that. And, um, I, I, Miss Tala that I mentioned from the, the soul in the game had a tweet called use courage and wisdom, not labor, uh, to make money. Um, and I thought that just like so succinctly

• 58:33Speaker 00

  captured kind of the idea of, um, productivity for me that usually it's like, I'll just like work harder at it, or I'll come up with like some trick, right? Like I'll find some like hack that'll, that'll make this, um, better, but evidently for me at least, like usually it's some sort of act of courage that like ends up being more productive, right? It's like this, this hard conversation with my business partner that I've been avoiding having that is causing me to do all this extra work and then I'm angry about it and I start getting resentful or whatever. Like if I will just sit down and like have that uncomfortable conversation for 15 minutes, doesn't take any time at all, uh, you know, everything will, uh, will go better. The other

• 59:15Speaker 00

  example I think of, I, you know, uh, when you're in high school and, you know, the pretty girl or the pretty guy or, uh, whatever, like, you know, you obsess about them, right? Like, oh, they're like, they're never like me and they're like so cool and whatever. And this is, you know, you spend all this time like thinking about it and worrying about it. And like you could just like figure it out real quick, right? Like you just walk up and you say like, hi, I think you're cool. Like, do you want to go to the movies or whatever? And like they say, yes, or they say, no. And like, that's the end of it. And then like you go on with the rest of your life. But, uh, you know, like I, like everyone in high school, I suppose, but like I did it too, right? It's like there was some girl, I was like, oh, she's so cool and she's smart and funny and da, da, da. And I'm just going to think about this for four years or whatever. And it's like, I could have sorted it out in two minutes. It was a two minute job. Like it could have been in and out.

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  You know, there was no, there was no reason to, to drag that way, but it was, it was a courage thing. I was like, oh God, like, what is she going to say? Um, when I go talk to her, is she going to like say that I'm dumb or, you know, like whatever the thing is.

• 1:00:12Chris Williamson?

  That could be an operating principle. In fact, I think it might be one of yours that you've taken from David Allen, where you say, uh, just always look for the next action. Like, what is the way that I can act on this thing immediately? Um, and another way to look at that, man, I've been thinking about that sort of situation a lot, that there's an opportunity cost to ruminating about anything.

• 1:00:32Chris Williamson?

  Such an opportunity cost with tons of stuff. So I got this thing, this Modern Wisdom Academy, which I'm super excited about launching, which is just going to be a partner for the podcast. So every day that a podcast episode goes live, which is three days a week at the moment, you get a curated summary of all the key learnings from that episode on a partner blog and delivered in your email inbox. So you're never going to forget anything again. It's like, we could even down the line, look at trying to build spaced repetition into it. So you know, you listen to this podcast and in three months, you can't quite remember all the stuff you said. Do you have to go and listen to it again? No, you don't. You do this. And I've been thinking about it for ages. And I was like, do you know what it is? I've been thinking about this for so long. It would be simpler and quicker to just launch the fucking business so that I don't have to think about it anymore.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 1:01:19Chris Williamson?

  And that's the same as the girl, right? It's like, if you're going to think about that girl and maybe not go out with any other girls who would be even better or cooler, or you find out that actually she's got like bad breath, or she's really a bit of a bitch. You don't know, you don't know if this business is going to be a bitch, like, or whatever it might be. So yeah, the opportunity cost, developing the courage, looking for the next actions. I am, I love them, man. Look, final thing before you go, dude. Have you got any book recommendations? We get inundated with recommendations for books. As someone who's pretty well read, is there any that you think people might not have, might not know about? So an example from me would be John Boyd's biography, which I thought was phenomenal. But anything else that you think, if you're

• 1:02:03Chris Williamson?

  looking for something a little bit new that you maybe haven't heard of before, here's, here's a couple of examples.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think, I think The Fighter Pilot Who Changed Her to War by Robert Quorum is John Boyd biography, which is awesome. I use, I very rarely, I kind of just like chug along with books. Usually you're like, I'll start and I'll pick it up and put it down. And that one, I think it was like three days. Like I just picked it up and just like crushed the thing. It's like, this is so good. Yeah, I mentioned The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. That's, you know, I don't know how well known that is, but I liked that one a lot. And then I guess my sort of off the wall or underrated book that I've probably, I don't know, read four or five times now is Finite and Infinite Games by James P. Cars. He, yeah, I figured that would be a new one, but he is a professor at, yeah, he was, and he may have passed away now, but he was a philosophy professor

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  at New York University, I think in like the seventies and eighties. And Wrote this book called Finite Infinite Games and the premise is, you know, there are two types of games in life, finite games and infinite games. And finite games are played according to known rules towards a specified end. And infinite games are played by reinventing the rules with the purpose of extending play. And that's basically the summary of the whole kind of books. Like, for an example, like, when a father is playing catch with his son, it is not a finite, he's not trying to win catch, right? He's not trying to, there's, there's, there's rules to catch and I'm not trying to throw it the hardest

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  and win catch, right? You want to make catch fun, you're trying to invent new rules to catch, so you can keep playing catch with your son. And that's my American baseball analogy, but you know, you can use the football analogy or whatever you want, right? It's an infinite game. The success is like, we just get to keep playing catch into the future. And I think that, you know, that's true of so many different areas of life, right? You can approach like, well, once I get to this thing, then I will have won the finite game, whether that's, you know, the sport or the, the whatever it is. But, you know, there's, you know, there's this whole other way of looking at it, which is like, you know, how could I, how could I reinvent the rules of this game in a way that just made it interesting and able to be able to, you know, to continue extending play. So I come back to that book and just that. Really, you really like to read the first chapter, like, the rest of

• 1:04:20Speaker 00

  the book is good, but like, the first 30 pages, you get the whole, he lays, I mean, he lays out the whole idea, maybe even only the first 15 or 20, but the first chapter of that book is phenomenal.

• 1:04:30Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome. It's a much cooler, less cliche version of, like, the path is the destination, it's about progress, not perfection, and stuff like that. I actually prefer that. I prefer talking about the way that the game gets played and being able to continue playing the game as well. I think that's a, that's a cool way to do it. And we made it. We did it.

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  Great success.

• 1:04:54Chris Williamson?

  We made it through. Everything that we've gone through, the phenomenal blog, which, like you say, 300, 300 posts from the last god knows how long. What's next? Or is there any other stuff that you want to plug? Any stuff that people should go and have a look at?

• 1:05:09Speaker 00

  Uh, not yet. Check out the blog. I have a newsletter. I write random things on there. So if you're into that stuff, you know, go for it.

• 1:05:18Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome, man. Thank you so much for your time, Taylor. I've really, really enjoyed this.

• 1:05:23Speaker 00

  Cheers, Chris. Pleasure.

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