Focused - 180: A Focused Hodgepodge

Episode Date: June 20, 2023

David reflects on 18 months of freedom, Mike reports back from Craft + Commerce, and they both share their best advice for teaching kids how to focus.

Welcome to Focus, a podcast where we talk about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by your friend and mine, Mr. Mike Schmitz. How are you doing, Mike? Pretty good. How are you, David? I am doing great. I had a lot of fun. Both of us have had some travel under our belt. I got to go up to WWDC. You got to go to craft and commerce. I don't know about you, but when I go on a trip like that, I come back just jumped up. I want want to go make stuff i feel like it always kind of inspires me to see other people and kind of interact with the world once in a while absolutely i feel the same way coming back from boise and uh we'll talk a little bit about the craft and commerce experience a little bit later

but there is something to be said about getting around your people. Yeah. So true. So true. And today we've got a bit of a hodgepodge. We've got several topics, none of which probably justifies its own show, but each one is pretty good. And we wanted to kind of like jump around a bit. So we thought we would do that today for the show, uh, for deep focus. That's the, uh, paid version of the show where you get the ad-free version, some additional content. I want to talk about slow productivity. That's a term that we've heard from Cal Newport, but there's variations of a theme from a bunch of people. I think that's kind of an emerging idea. And I thought that would be a fun topic for Deep Focus today. So we're going to get on that for the Deep Focus folks.

And how are things going with the Obsidian course, Mike? They're going well. We had just over 60 people sign up and we had I think about 45 live for the first session as we record this happened yesterday. I thought the first session might be a little bit boring, but it is very foundational. It's essentially walking through all of the different settings and things in Obsidian. One tomorrow is going to be a little bit more exciting. That's the PKM 101 session. If you've watched any of my presentations, I do this thing where I record the screencast, I chop it up into little videos, and then I embed them in the keynote file. So that's basically what

I did to demonstrate every setting in Obsidian. Yeah, I do that whenever you're live speaking. That's a great way to do screencasting while you're talking because you just never know. I mean, I learned the lesson the hard way when I used to speak at the American Bar Association. They did it in the basement of the Hilton Hotel in Chicago and it's the basement and the internet was terrible. So everybody that would try and like do their, their demos at home and would show up and they wouldn't work because they didn't have a working internet. So I would always just screencast them and do exactly like you say. And the trick is just to chop it up. And with keynote, you can have it where you hit the advanced slide and it just continues. So that's a really great trick if you ever do any presenting you need to do screen sharing

yep that's uh that's what i did and uh i heard a lot of really positive feedback after that first session uh there's a circle community that's pretty hopping where all of the replays and things exist which i should mention probably, even though it has started, I mentioned this in the email I sent out to my list that I'm basically setting this up as like a lifetime deal. So there will be other cohorts, which are probably going to be more niche on digital journaling, or someone was requesting like a data view cohort where we just dive really deep on how to use data view and i want obsidian university to become the place where people can go to learn about obsidian so i'm going to continue to build that stuff out and basically anybody who signs up for the first one is going to have lifetime access to all of that that probably

shouldn't be mentioning that because i know there are going to be people who just buy it now and they'll come and look at it later yeah but i i't really care. I want to give more than I take, especially as this thing gets off the ground. So I'm going to leave it open. And if you do decide you want to hop on because you want to lock in like a lifetime deal, even though you're not able to attend the live sessions, there've been a couple of people who have, have done that. So it's at university.com if that is of interest to you. Yeah. And we'll put a link in the show notes and go check it out. Well, in our hodgepodge episode here, the first topic I wanted to discuss is something I've been thinking about lately. And that is that the topic is called David is enjoying life. And I don't know,

I just wanted to kind of acknowledge on this show, kind of the journey I've been on. We talked about On Focus a year and a half ago when I gave up two careers and went to one. I stopped being a lawyer and now I'm just a Max Barkey. And the thing that if you go back and listen to the old shows before I had done that, I was constantly feeling a little overwhelmed and lack of margin. And that was really bothering me. That's the reason I made the big move. And I used to talk on the show about running downhill. That was the analogy that made sense to me.

I always felt like I was running downhill. And when you're a little kid and you run downhill, it feels great until you hit the slightest stumble and then you land on your face. So it always felt like I was going to do that. And I knew that wasn't a way to live my life. So I gave up the law practice and now I'm a year and a half in, and I hadn't really thought about running downhill in a while. But when I was flying back from, from Cupertino, from the WWDC stuff I'd done up there, I was thinking, man, I do not feel stressed out right now. Usually when I come back from a little trip like that, I feel stressed out because I'm behind on everything, but I wasn't.

And that was the first time. It was like one of those moments where you stop and realize, oh, wait a second, things have changed. And it doesn't happen overnight when you make big changes in your life but if you whittle away at it i'm i'm just really shocked kind of looking in hindsight um how well things are going for me right now well i'm glad to hear that and i aspire to be where you are yeah having just made the leap to full-time creator, that's difficult anyways, but I didn't have a real big runway. So I feel kind of like I'm still building the airplane on the way down, but I do know it will even out eventually. And it's inspiring to hear that after a year and a half, essentially, I think you were, you've been full-time Mac Sparky, right? Yeah. Yeah. Started in January

of last year. Well, I will tell you, my experience was it wasn't an immediate, like, oh, what a relief, right? Shutting down law practice took a lot of work. Even though it was shut down and I had made my license inactive, I still kept hearing from clients saying, oh, I need a referral to somebody to do this or that. And you don't want to let them down. I wasn't giving legal advice, but I was still kind of in that world a little bit. So that happened for a while, but that's largely over now. And I started because I knew I was going to lose all that income from being a lawyer. I started the Max Barkey Labs.

And frankly, I just wanted to let people in on the process more and share more. And I felt like that was a great way to do it. But I didn't know what I was doing. You make one of these things, you're not sure how it's going to go or if anybody's going to sign up for it or what it is that they want. And so it took a year to really kind of get my sea legs with that piece of what I do. And then I did an addition on the house to make the studio space. And so now I'm sitting in a spot where I've got this great room where I can make stuff. I've got people that are supporting me that want to hear stuff and now I just need to execute. And it took a year and a half, really, to get to where I'm feeling pretty comfortable.

For me, a lot of it was getting out of what I call just-in-time production. And if you're listening, no matter what you do, if you're an accountant and a marketer or a YouTuber or whatever, it's very easy to get on this loop where you get things done just as they need to get out the door. And that adds to that running downhill mentality. And I felt like I was in that for a long time. But as I got settled in this, I realized I don't need to be doing that. I can get ahead. And like when Apple called and said, hey, you want to come up and watch a keynote? ahead. And like when Apple called and said, Hey, you want to come up and watch a keynote? I already had stuff in the bag for the various things that I produce and the podcasts were ready to go. So I could take a week to go up there and learn more and get more insight and become a better source for the people that want to hear from me. Whereas before that would have been very difficult and I

would have come back to just a train wreck. And now I'm not because everything is kind of running ahead. So I can, I'm not running downhill. Things I've observed in myself since that realization is, oh, I do have more time to think about work instead of just doing the work. So like I'm finding that I'm spending more time contemplating, well, what kind of content do I want to make or what kind of things do I want to cover? That was something that I had to kind of do on the fly before.

And also more time to not think about work, if you know what I mean. I was out in the woodshop planning away last night and spend more time with family when I can. One thing I observed, I looked at, I'm making less money, but that doesn't bother me in the slightest. I'm making enough money, so that's fine. I guess that, for me, that is one of the realizations as I went through the process is I wasn't looking to buy an Island in the Caymans, right? I just want to make enough to support the family and me and have a comfortable life and I'm doing fine. But you know, that that's not the primary motivator for me. It's more about the work and what I'm making. And it feels really

good, the stuff I'm making. And I get, I get really great positive email from, from listeners, subscribers, supporters, and people that are, people that are finding what I do of value. And that, to me, pushes more chemicals in my brain than a number in my bank account. But man, I'm just really feeling pretty good right now, gang. That's great to hear. And it's inspiring, like I said, to me. But a point I want to make out or point out here is that it is easy to put off the focus because of the tyranny of the urgent. now, the bills that have to be paid, all that kind of stuff. But I feel like you're at the point where you are realizing the fruit of the focused life that you've been living for the last year and a

half. And that is a tough decision or a tough choice for people to make. I know some folks who are going through that right now. They know that long-term they need to just pick one thing and, and go in on it, but they have trouble because they see all the short-term, well, I got to do all of these things. And as long as you stay in that mindset, you just keep doing all of those things. You never apply the focus, which gets you ultimately where you, you want to go. You got any tips for people who are kind of stuck in that loop? Well, I guess what I'd say is that the flywheel is real. You know, people talk about how if you pick one thing and go in hard on it, it pays off. That's really

easy to say and it's hard to do. Like for me, I never acknowledged that I didn't want to be a lawyer anymore until I did. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. The morning I decided to stop being a lawyer, I woke up thinking I would be a lawyer for the rest of my life. You know, it wasn't a career where I was in absolute misery and hated it and just couldn't wait to get out. We have friends that do stuff like this that are escaping a career they don't like. I felt like I was helping people and doing good work. But then I realized that this other stuff was calling me more. And maybe somebody told me, well, you just had a midlife crisis and that's what you did.

I'm like, I don't think so because I'm older than most people that have midlife crises. And I just think I've just got more focus where like, okay, this is the thing where I think I can make a bigger dent. And this is the thing where I think I can help more people. As a lawyer, you can help a few people in a big way, but as Max Farkey, I can help a lot of people and some of them in a big way too. And so it really just, once I kind of thought about it, it was really easy for me. And I made the decision in like 30 minutes and I haven't looked back, but it is a weird experience to, to think you're going to do something forever. And then one day that's not you anymore. And now I've kind of got used to it. Just recently, someone said, uh, you know, how do you know about this thing? So I'm a retired lawyer. And that's that just comes

out of my mouth. Now. It's not like conscious, but that's what I am. I mean, I don't see myself ever going back to it. And if this whole Mac sparking thing goes up in flames, I guess I'll get really good at making French fries or digging ditches or something else. But I think that was a part of my life. That's now over. And, um, and that's okay. I'm totally comfortable with it. But this is the thing when you're making, when you're contemplating it, it's really hard, especially when you've got obligations. I had a wife, uh, who, and, uh, who wasn't making a lot of money and two kids, uh, in college and just kind of

getting, you know, all the expenses that come with having a family. So it was really hard for me to say, even just acknowledge, oh, what if I did throw away all that lawyer income and tried to do something else? You know, that's super scary. But what I found is when you put all your effort into one thing, the flywheel, that's the thing that you start that you start building momentum and it runs on its own, really does work. And it's really hard to make that happen when you've got to spend half of your time on something else. But when you can put all your time into it, it just continues to grow on itself. And even to this day, there are still parts of the Max Sparky thing that i do that need a bunch of work but i'm slowly

getting through them all you know i'm getting there bit by bit yeah and i'm not there yet i'm not like claiming this is my victory lap but i'm just saying the urgency and stress that i had are no longer present and i didn't notice them leave. And if it doesn't work out, you can always get a job as the head of churro acquisition at Disneyland, right? Yeah. Well, I mean that there is that, I mean, nobody's had it before except me. I really feel like the,

the whole thing with this stuff is you really can play tricks on yourself. And like one of the things I've been trying to do since that realization is I've been thinking about the gap versus the game. You know, I do have a list of things I still need to do. Like I want to do more YouTube videos. I want to get better at being a newsletter guy. There's stuff I want to do, but I want to stop and appreciate how far I've come too.

That is good advice, especially for me right now. I feel kind of, you mentioned there's always something else to do. Well, there's like 25 other things for me to do, it feels like. And yeah, I've kind of been head down making stuff and building systems and doing things. And it's a good reminder to slow down and appreciate progress that has been made. The other interesting thing I find is because I've been in this like happy place for a couple of weeks now. And I was thinking now that I'm kind of celebrating that, hey, this has happened and this is my life now. I feel this compulsion to kind of go back to the beginning with Max Sparky and look at the whole thing again. Like what is working? What's not,

I call it in my journal, the revision loop. It's like, okay, I've kind of got things going now. I've got to kind of a peak of where I wanted to be at this point. Now I want to just revisit everything and figure out where I can refine and make better. Maybe it's like the 80-20 of the 80-20. And as you get to certain levels, as you make these transitions, being able to start over again and say, not necessarily I'm starting from scratch, but now that I've got this thing working the way I want, what did I miss on the way up that I can go back

and fix and change? And that's like the next thing I'm excited about. It's like, okay, well, now I need to sit down for a weekend and just really think it all through and figure out what I can improve upon. How do you decide this is the next thing to to work on i have a feeling it is probably tied to this idea of the the flywheels but if there's 20 different things how do you gain clarity on this is the one for right now oh i think part of it is where i feel like my voice can improve things right yep i feel like there's where there's something that i can i think my take on it can help people then i'm and i'm interested in it you know i have to bring an enthusiasm to it um someone said well you're a content creator now i said i really feel like

myself more as a teacher than a content creator but i need to be enthusiastic about it so there's like there's kind of a weird combination but i i know it when I see it, you know, just like the famous Supreme court case in pornography. And I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it. And, um, the, uh, I kind of feel like that with the way things develop. And I, I, um, I have a lot of ideas that have been, that I haven't explored yet. So it's like, I'm not out of ideas at all. For me, it's just making time to focus on the right things and sometimes making tough decisions about throwing old things overboard so I can make that time. That makes sense. But either way, it is an interesting experience for me. I feel like we really kind of go out of our way on the show to explain that we make a

ton of mistakes and this stuff is hard and nobody on a podcast has all the answers. But I would like to share a little bit of a success story in that I've been kind of living this and walking this and it has really made a material difference in my life. I definitely have room to improve. And that's why I like this idea of a revision loop. That's what I'm going to start exploring next. But just take a minute, take a breath, and appreciate that sometimes turning your life upside down can have some real positive benefits. Awesome. Glad to hear it.

This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move and enter offer code focused at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase. Just go to squarespace.com slash focus. If you're paying attention to the internet, you're realizing that you owning your own space on the internet is the way to go. Whether you're making a restaurant, you're setting a wedding, or you just got a new baby and you want to share it with the world, don't put your data on somebody else's thing. Instead, use Squarespace to set up your own space on the internet. Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand or growing your business online. You can stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything.

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focus to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for the focus podcast. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of the focus podcast and all of relay FM. Okay. So we heard from listener, Jason, I'm a regular listener and I get it. My son is 12 and I don't want him to be a zombie. I love that. Did we ever say zombie on the show? But I think that's a good description. How would you help teach children about focus? I have thoughts. This is something I've been thinking about a lot, uh, partly because my daughter is a, is a teacher. And the very first thing she, she's a high school teacher and she just finished her first year. I'm very proud of her. Uh, she, the very first thing she told me the first week,

she's like, dad, you gotta do something. We gotta do something about these phones. Like that's the first thing she told me about being a teacher. Uh, she's the kids, you know, they, they get on Tik TOK, they don't pay attention to class. They, they, they're completely lost. And it's so funny for me hearing this from my daughter, right. But, uh, she notes in high school kids, uh, I was in a restaurant recently. I saw a dinner table with the, um, the two adults not talking to each other and the two kids on iPads. And I was thinking that that was tragic. In fact, I got thinking as much as I like the idea of Apple's vision pro, can you imagine a future where all the kids have those things strapped to their faces at dinner?

I had that thought. Yep. And then, so you got the little kids, you got the older kids. Jason's son is 12. I think kind of in the middle. And I don't think the answer is that you, it's not the same answer for every kid or every age group. I think obviously with younger kids, parents have more control just to say no. Like we would never, I mean, my kids, we didn't have iPads when my kids were little,

but we would have never stood for them having an iPad at a dinner table. In fact, we made a point to keep the only computer the kids could access in a common area of the house. So we had complete control all through their childhood up until they were about 16. They didn't have laptops. They didn't have the ability. They have TVs in their room.

All that consumption took place in common area of the home. And I feel like that was a good solution for the time. I think it still makes sense. But if you've got younger kids, you as a parent, I think have a lot more control and the kids will accept it. But, you know, Jason's son is a 12th. I think he's getting old enough that he sees a friends who have, you know, a lot of options to them for consumption that, that aren't necessarily the right choices. And I think my advice to Jason, I haven't written him back yet, but I did tell him we're going to cover on the show is I would treat him as an adult. I think 12 is old enough. And I would explain your concern, you know, that, you know, you are at an age where people

are going to be trying to make money off your attention. And just talk about it. I did a speech at my daughter's school. They needed somebody to talk about something. So I used it as an excuse to address her biggest concern was TikTok, but in general, social media. And I was telling all these 18-year-olds, I was showing them how much money TikTok and Facebook and Instagram make off of them and how the algorithm works to drive them into

deeper depths of being lost in it. And it didn't land with all of them. I think some of them looked at me like an old gray haired dude who's just lecturing them. But afterwards, several of them came up to talk to me and it landed with them. So if you've got children, I think you have a much better chance of landing a discussion like that than some dude that comes in and talks to you at school. But I would, I think honesty is the answer to explain to them what's going on and why they are at risk if they're not careful.

I guess that's a stopping point. Where would you, I mean, let's just start there. What are your thoughts? Yeah, there's a lot to unpack with this. And my mind kind of goes in several tangential directions. But I'll just echo what you said about having an adult discussion about it. That doesn't mean that they need to know everything, but they do need to know essentially that the culture and especially the companies where all of this content that they consume online, their objectives are, and the control to make intentional choices about what they choose to engage with. And then following up on that, I think it's important that you let

them practice. So one of the ways that we've done that with our family, and this is not the blueprint for everybody, but it's just what we've done, is we have not given our kids phones when they have reached the age of 12 or 13. We've given them iPads. They don't have cellular, and that means that they can connect to the wireless network at home. It's more obvious when they're using the device, wireless network at home. It's more obvious when they're using the device and we can sort of coach them as to the proper ways to use the device. We have this mantra at our house, create, not consume. Now, that doesn't mean you're never consuming. In fact, I'll talk a little bit more about this later when we get to the craft and commerce section, but one of the people that was there was Sahil Bloom. And he is a very prolific creator. And he gave a great talk about creative systems. And one of the things he talked about was being intentional with what you

consume so that it can benefit you when it's time to sit down and create. So that's really what we want to get across to our kids is put up your own boundaries, put up your own gates and decide to open them intentionally to the things that you feel are going to benefit your life and close them to the things that are not. I will also say that by giving them the iPad first, they are able to engage with the technology. And like I said, we're trying to coach them as to what we consider to be the proper ways to use this. They're not perfect. They're going to make some mistakes, but we can help them through that, but then because they have that device and their friends have phones, frequently we'll

be at a church thing or they're hanging out with their friends and what happens? Their friends all pull out their phones. And at this point, I feel like it's been a parenting win that my kids are annoyed when that happens. They see the effect that it has on their friends. They'll be hanging out with their friends and everybody is staring at their phones. We kind of have this teasing term that we use called screenagers. So we'll drop that every once in a while. And my kids have kind of absorbed that to the point like,

I don't want to do that because they know what it's like when their friends do that to them. So they know what it feels like and it doesn't feel good. At this point, they would rather just all be in the same place, engaged in a shared activity like playing a board game. Again, probably because we used to do that every single night for a while. But they've seen the value of those sorts of things. And then not being alone with the devices.

So we have this thing. It's a Satechi USB charging station. It's got like 10 or 12 different slots. And it sits on the island in our kitchen. And all of the portable devices, not my MacBook or anything big like that, but all of the iPads and all of the iPhones, including all the old ones, they get charged there every night. And they get charged there every night because my wife and I have charged

our devices there. It hasn't just been, well, you guys need to do this, but we're not going to, we've really done our best to, to model it. And I feel like that's been effective. We're not perfect. Obviously we make mistakes, but they get the, the idea at least because we follow our own rules. No, I think the idea of we're all going to charge our devices downstairs and then go to bed without our devices is excellent. And if my kids were of the age now, as your kids, I would have the exact same thing. Something to acknowledge is this is a threat to children. I mean, there's no question. Undeveloped brains are more susceptible to this stuff than developed brains are.

And that's just, you know, it's provable science. There's a bunch of studies on it out there, particularly girls. Girls' self-image stuff with relation to social media is bad. And you can look and there's increased depression therapy and even teenage suicide because they've all spiked as social media has grown. And as parents and grandparents, we need to be aware of that. One of the members of the Max Perky Labs was telling me how he has this narrative with his grandson about being a product. You know, he had the discussion that, and you've probably heard this already,

but, you know, when you consume a lot of these social media products, you are the product. You know, they are getting information on you so they can sell advertising. And he had this conversation with his grandson, who I think was kind of in the 12-ish range. And every time he talks to his grandson, he says, so are you a product today? You know, and he says, no, Grandpa, I'm not a product. You a product you know and so like you get this mindset in this kid that like oh no i'm not

going to let them do that to me and i think that helps another thing i don't know how well how well this lands with a 12 year old i think it could land with an older kid if they were motivated is the advantage of not being a zombie you know know, the idea of having a focus muscle, I think there's a huge benefit to it. That's the reason we make this show. I think that a lot of people, adults, need to work on this. But kids even more so, because as my daughter discovered, a lot of teenagers are really hooked on their devices

and they don't have any focus muscles. So if you've got a young person in your life and you've got any influence on them, you can convince them, Hey, if you can learn how to focus, you are going to be more successful. You're going to make more money. You're going to get what you want out of life. And all these other zombies are not, if you can land that with a kid, I think that can be very inspirational for them. Absolutely. And the way that you do that kind of breaking from the technology stuff, I feel, is to kind of push your kids in the, at least this is what we've done, push them in the direction

of try to figure out the tough problem for yourself or be bored for a while. It's okay. Boredom is not a problem to be solved. And I get it. I remember when I was a kid, that was probably my most frequent complaint to my parents is, I'm bored. But when our kids tell us that, we don't fill the void for them. We frequently don't even make suggestions. It's like, well,

figure it out. And we'll do the same thing if they come to us with a problem that we know it's maybe slightly beyond their ability. They don't really know what to do, but they could figure it out if they sat down and wrestled with it. They don't want to sit down and wrestle with it. It's uncomfortable. I get that. There's a lot of adults that feel that way too. You were mentioning the brain isn't fully developed in kids, and that is true. But just because adults have a fully developed brain doesn't mean that they are any better equipped necessarily to deal with this stuff. It's a trained ability. It's a muscle, like you said, and you have to develop it. And just sticking with something until the end and figuring it out, even if it's

hard or uncomfortable, I feel like that sort of practice is really, really good. Yeah. My kids are more adults than kids anymore. But just the other day, I was in a grocery store with my daughter, and we got in line, and I said, look at all these day I was in a grocery store with my daughter and we got in line and I said, look at all these idiots. Everybody in all these lines has their phone. There wasn't a single person that could stop for five minutes and be alone with their thoughts. That's exactly how I said it to her. And you could see her just looking around, taking that in. Now, I don't know if that's going to change her life, but it shows my opinion of people that can't be alone with their thoughts. And to the extent I have some influence with her,

maybe it helps a little bit, but I think little touches like that, you know, sitting them down and lecturing at them, I don't think is the answer. You really have to understand the individual that is that child. Another thing Mike said that I think would be really helpful for people like Jason is admitting that it's a challenge for you too. Like Mike and I make a

show called focus. I have trouble with this stuff. They came out with a new star Wars game. I just want to go play it guys. I just want to go play that game. You know, I don't, you know, I got to work on stuff. I got to make things. I don't want to be a consumer. I know it's a little bit of a different thing, but you share that with kids and they're like, oh yeah, so adults have a hard time with this too. And I think admitting that it's difficult for you and talking about your experience with it maybe kind of helps them understand that, you know, we're all in this together. I a hundred percent agree. They need to see the authenticity, I guess, in your life as you admit your own struggles with it. It doesn't matter if they see you make mistakes. You just got to own your mistakes and be like,

I shouldn't have done that. It's got to be consistency in the message there. And the other thing I think that's really important is just helping them to understand that they have a choice in the matter, because there is definitely a default path. And if you don't recognize that you have that choice, you'll just continue down the default path and you will be the product. and you will be the product. And you can decide for yourself what the alternative path should look like in terms of focus, in terms of intentional technology use. I guess we're talking a lot about technology

because that's the portal for a lot of this stuff. But just recognizing what is coming into your life, what effect it's having, and deciding for yourself if that is in alignment with the type of life that you want to live. If you can get your kids thinking that way, it's going to benefit them for a very long time. Yeah. And the other piece I would add to it is I don't think the answer is telling them when you've got a 12 year old, I keep coming back to

Jason's son, but when, when, when the kid is that old, I don't think the answer is saying you don't get any access to Tik TOK or you don't get any access to this stuff because that has a rebound on it. I don't know about you. I had, I had friends growing up whose parents banned them from things. I got a friend whose parent wouldn't let him have toy guns, right? I had toy guns. We all, kids, we had toy guns. Maybe I'm dating myself, but we all had toy guns. He grew up, this guy has so many guns now.

He's like an armory, you know? I feel like there's a reaction when you just like ban it outright to kids. They eventually get even with you on that. But I think the answer is to sit down and come up with it together. In fact, ideally you say, Hey, let's come up with some limitations for both of us about this stuff. And you have to keep me honest and I'll keep you honest. And like you make it a joint thing. Don't just dictate to the kid,

make it something where you work on it together and they feel like they have a voice in it. And if they say, well, dad, I would really like to do some more social media stuff on this and that, then you talk it through and figure it out. What makes sense? Yeah. I'm agreeing with you a lot here, but, uh, that's essential. I remember to your point being a kid and my parents were not, well, I guess they were anti-guns too, but the big thing I remember was the anti-video games. Yeah. So what did I do? I went over thing I remember was the anti-video games. Yeah. So what did I do? I went over to my friend's house and played video games all day.

They didn't care. Like, as long as there was that firm barrier there, it was like a challenge for me as a kid to figure out a way around it. But as soon as we could have a conversation about it, it completely changes the dynamic. Yeah, well, it was funny with me and my friend. I know I don't want to dwell on this, but his parents wouldn't let him have guns. I him so he'd come over my house to play with my

guns and then when we'd go over his house anything he had was a gun it was a stick it was a lego whatever it was he turned into a gun i would even when i was a little kid i'm like man this guy really likes guns you know but the uh so maybe it was just him, you know, but the, uh, but I do think while working through this with your kids, honesty, cooperation, shared experience, um, you know, just dictating to them is not going to solve the problem. And this is going to be increasingly a challenge. You know, vision pro is one more example of this. The technology is going to get more and more tempting as time goes by. So we need to equip them, not just how to deal with TikTok, but how to understand distraction

and focus so they can bring those tools and muscles into whatever the world throws at them as they grow up. And then give them an opportunity to put in some reps, let them practice on the little things. So it's easier when they're out on their own with the big things. Yeah. I hope that helped you, Jason. Listeners, I'm sure have a lot of opinions on this as well. And I would love to hear them. We have a forum at talk.macpowerusers.com. There's a room there for it. Neither Mike or I are professionals. You know, we're not therapists. We don't, we're not child rearing experts. Although Mike might qualify because he has a flock of them. But that's just the common sense I would give you to deal with it. But I love that you're worried about it because I think focus is an issue for children. And those

children that have parents and grandparents and people in their lives that are worried about it and want to help them are the ones that are going to really benefit. You're already thinking about it, so you're already going down the right path. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by ExpressVPN. Go to expressvpn.com slash focused

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Expressvpn.com slash focus to learn more. And our thanks to ExpressVPN for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Mike, I need to talk about analog again. All right, what are you up to? So for those of you who have got lost on this journey with sparky and analog i continue to believe that there is a place for analog i like the idea of it and chris bailey our friend got in my head you know he meant he wrote that excellent book calm

and in it he at one point says something to the effect of digital is efficient and analog is meaningful. That's kind of the thing he makes. And he did a really excellent job of breaking them down where you'd say, if he can do, if something needs to be digital, he does a digital, something must be analog.

He does it analog, but where it could be either, or he prefers to do analog because he thinks it's more meaningful and it was like a little thing that just burrowed into my brain and it's been bugging me because i do almost everything digital i mean just to give some history here like currently and for 10 years now i've been using day One a lot. It's a journaling application for the iPhone and iPad and Mac, and it's amazing. I read books on the Kindle. I have many, many digital workflows in relation to things that could be either or.

So Chris's idea got in my head. I'm thinking, well, maybe I should try it again. Now, another piece of historical reference data here is I have done analog journaling in my head. I'm thinking, well, maybe I should try it again. Another piece of historical reference data here is I have done analog journaling in the past. For a year and a half, I only journaled in large size Levenger notebooks with the punch system. And then I would take a picture of it and put it into the day one journal. The reason I stopped that was because I felt like I

was getting more personal with the digital. And the reason for that is I love the dictation feature for journaling, where you sit down, you hit the microphone and you start talking. I felt like I was exposing more of myself to myself. Because journaling to me is at least partially a form of self-therapy. I read it after I write it or speak it, and then I say, oh, I didn't know you were thinking that, Spargy. So I found it useful for that. But Chris's book got in my head. I've been reading some books analog without my Kindle, and I've been doing a little bit

of digital journaling and also paper planning. And I've been carrying this guilt around my neck. When we did the big meetup that you and I did the week away with the team to talk about our mastermind stuff, I kind of laid low. I brought some paper with me, but I didn't bring the actual notebook with you because I didn't want to have to hear it from you. It's like, oh, come on, man. You're doing this again. But I think I had to come clean. Well, if I could enable you for a moment, I have this mind map that I created for How to Calm Your Mind. I'll share this with Focus listeners if they want to see my notes from this book.

There'll be a link in the show notes. But I'm looking at it. And one of the things that Chris said is that the best parts of the digital world save us time. So more efficient to your point. But the other two here, I feel like you have embraced this mindset. They add features to our analog lives and they connect us with others. So when you're talking about the digital journaling with like day one, let's say, and you're capturing audio memos, let's say, right? So that could be an audio of like something cute your little kid said and you want to remember it. Or it could be audio of you just dictating something. So it could be connecting, I would argue, with other people in your life, or even just connecting with yourself. I think all of the use cases that you kind of talked about,

an argument could be made that those are adding features to your analog life, but the act of reflection, that's something that we typically think of as analog. We just get alone with our thoughts. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, though, to use digital tools to supplement that, but it's recognizing and leveraging the benefit of the analog portion. in both areas because Chris has these like Venn diagrams, right? And all of our activities can be split into three categories, digital only activities, analog only activities, or things we can do in both worlds. And it's those things that we have options for where we just kind of default to the digital without any thought about how we're going to do it or what we want to get out of the experience or the app or the tool that we're going to be using that's where i get into trouble i think for me um a real powerful

word in this process is hybrid yep and once i gave myself permission to be a hybrid it almost like relieved some tension I was feeling because I get, I really respect Chris and a lot of people I know who are all into this analog stuff. I feel like, well, I'm missing something. I should be doing it that way. I want to be more meaningful. I don't want to be more efficient when it comes to journaling. And then I got thinking, well, why not do both? Why not have a hybrid system? Because I think I've always thought of it kind of in terms of absolutes, like I did the thing with the Levenger book, and that was really the only place I journaled. I took

pictures of it, and if I look in my day one archives, there's all these pictures of these pages, but I never really did a lot in day one when I was doing that experiment where now I'm kind of doing them both. Like I really enjoy at the end of the week going through my photo album and adding entries in day one and narrating them. Like this is a picture we took when we went to have dinner, you know, the night before so-and-so left town and, you know, blah, blah, blah. I'm not going to do that very well with an analog journal. Whereas with a digital, it's very efficient, and I actually get a more meaningful description of what happened because I can just speak it.

And part of it for me is also the real benefit of that recording and dictation stuff, which got a lot better, by the way, with the latest Mac stuff coming out. So that's the way I look at it as a hybrid. So what's going into the analog journal? There are several things that I do every day. I pick a primary goal. Every day for me starts with what's the one thing today, and then a moment of gratitude and a moment of meditation. And when I say meditation, I say, I take a quote from something I've read that is important to me. I write it out and then I explain below why it's important or what I think about it. So that, that takes a little bit of time.

And I've done that digitally for a long time, but I moved all that into the analog book because I think the process of writing that by hand is useful. And I think it somehow encodes it a little bit harder for me than just typing it or looking at it on the screen. So that's an example of a hybrid. I start with that, but I still may do some entries in the digital journal. I think that's the perfect approach. You kind of hit on the key there is identifying what benefit you're going to get from doing the activity in the desired medium. I guess if I could condense

it down, kind of the approach I would take with this stuff, and I'd argue as the approach that I have taken to my own version of figuring out where my hybrid lines are drawn is, okay, let's say I'm going to read this book. Why is reading an analog book better? Or why is reading a digital book better? And the only thing I would add to that is you can't use, well, it's all digital, so it's all searchable as a justification, because that's where things fall apart. Collecting all the things and dumping them into an archive somewhere and then never thinking about it again until you go and search for it. The trick is to encode it more deeply like you were talking about because then it bubbles up to the top of your consciousness or even

unconscious thinking and then it provides additional value in the future assuming that these are things that you want to do again. An argument could be made for journaling just as a release valve and just writing the things down and then discarding them but I don't think that's what you're talking about. Yeah. I mean, well, let me finish the loop on journaling and then let's go to books because that's the next analog digital battleground of my life. But so the journal is like, I do write down the things in the morning.

There's an element of planning to it. To me, I like the idea of, I don't know who came up with the idea. It might've been Cal Newport, but I'm not sure. But the idea of writing the hours down the center of the page, putting the blocks of the plan and then on the right side showing how the day went down. Was that Cal Newport who did that first? I don't know. Pretty sure, because he's the one that I came across in terms of time blocking. And then he

had the plan as he intended it on the right, and then the actual plan on the left or what how it actually played out was on the left side well over the years i've done that digitally and it never landed i find it very very useful analog it's for whatever reason it just works better with me with a pen and paper that that kind of thing and i do kind of a hybrid version of bullet journaling we had writer carol on show, I just kind of logging the day. And I find that useful where I I've tried in the past to do that with day one. It's very easy to add additional entry. We just recorded the show.

These are some quick thoughts on it or whatever. And I find that doing that with analog works better, but more of the like long form stuff. I, I generally do digitally using my voice. One of the things that occurred to me throughout this process of journaling is that it really matters what your intended use of your journal is. And we've talked about this before on the show, but for me, the journal is not, I'm not leaving a relic for future generations. You know,

maybe to a certain extent, some of this could be to them. I don't know if they'll even care. You know, I, I, I always think about, um, these people that wrote these journals years ago and they died and their family threw them away, you know, and you can't assume that won't be the case for you too. But I, my goal of a journal is really self-reflection and improvement during my lifetime, not to pass wisdom down. So I don't get hung up on preserving it in a way, well, it all has to be in this one place so they can find it and they can understand. I don't care. I would hope that the people that matter to me know my feelings based on my conversations with them, not what they read after I'm dead.

But I think that really does affect people, right? That you get hung up on that and you shouldn't. I think you should look at journaling as a way to get better at what you do. Now, there's different kinds of journals. You know, there's people who do like scrapbooking things and they are creating kind of like an archive of events and that's a different situation. But for the kind of journal we're talking about, I really think you should be self-centered with your journaling and that gives you a lot of freedom. So that's kind of where I'm at and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it. I've got a little hybrid system. If you want to know, I've been using the tote books from Studio Neat, which I really like. They're small. And in my Studio Neat pen,

I've kept it really simple and that's been working for me now let's go over to books okay so I've read like four books now analog books the workflow I've been using is I just have a pencil and I draw in the book which is so so delightful for me I know that you hate that Mike but I just I write all over the book. I actually don't mind that. I just could never do that myself. I know a lot of people who, they actually create like their own index in the book and they're writing in the margins. And I actually aspire to be able to do something like that, but there's just something about actually marking up a book that my brain can't get over. Well, I was alive before digital books and that's how I did it. So I just go right back to that. And for whatever reason, I do it in pencil. I think my dad told me I had to do it in pencil

because he saw me doing it in pen as a kid and it stuck. So I keep a couple of pencils by and I go through them and I'm marking them. The thing that you were talking about earlier about reading a digital book and never like going back to it, if pay for ReadWise, you go back to it because it's a system that forces that on you through the Kindle highlights. It's very clever. We've talked about it before. So the four books I've read in this interim period as I've been exploring with this, the analog books, I've just been going in and typing in to ReadWise. And I don't think that's really the right solution for me in the long term. But I do have this weight of all of these Readwise

highlights and books that I've read on Kindle and a bunch that I've bought that I haven't even read yet on Kindle. So I don't know where I am. I think with books, I'm going to go hybrid as well. I think there's some books that definitely need a physical book, but some that are just fine without a physical book. But I still like the idea of reading them on Kindle versus anything else because it's just so unit tasker. And the combination of Kindle highlights with Readwise is pretty golden. But that's kind of where I'm at with that. But it's a hybrid solution as well. I definitely understand the appeal of Readwise. I'm still using my Onyx books for the journaling stuff, and I have been tempted to use it for

the reading stuff. I still really do like the mind maps that I create for the books that I read. That just kind of seems cemented at this point as my thing so there's definitely inertia there maybe that's holding me back from just going all in with capturing things to readwise but i definitely like the readwise service um you've got me thinking about taking those mind map files because i do occasionally i'll batch them I'll process them and put them into obsidian where all of those notes eventually reside but I do like to use readwise reader on my onyx books as well for reading articles and things like that it integrates

so well with the standard readwise app it probably wouldn't be a whole lot more effort for me to just copy paste certain things that I really want to review via ReadWise when I'm bringing that stuff over. I think that makes sense. But I am reading more physical books than I have in the past, but I'm not on the all physical book bandwagon either. So I'm kind of in the middle. I'm hybrid there as well. And then the last piece of this that I've been exploring is hybrid planning. And like we,

I talked about writer Carol earlier in his bullet journal method, and that is like a whole system. If you want to look into that, people run their whole task system and they have future planning pages and they've got threading where they thread pages together. And there's a whole system to that. And that doesn't really appeal to me, but writing down the tasks for the day in the journal that I put the daily priority and things like that, I think that works, but I still have a digital underpinning, you know, OmniFocus still holds all the tasks and does all the automation stuff for

me. So I only see what I need when I need to see it. But, uh, there is something to take in a minute to write them down and check them off as you go through the day. So, uh, I am, uh, I have secretly become a hybrid dude. Welcome to the club. My version of the hybrid, I guess. I also do hybrid for planning, but it is on the Onyx books again, simply because I really like the pen and pencil feel, but the searchability of having all those PDFs.

I am still using the template that we created with the New Year calendar. That has worked really well for me. And yeah, I could write them out on my actual paper. I did that for a long time with my fancy fountain pens. But I like having that template. And until we make a custom planner, I think that's where I'm going to be.

Yeah, that would be fun. I have thoughts if we ever do that. But that's so my confession is complete. Planning, journaling, reading books. I'm using paper and pen again. Awesome. I hope it sticks this time. This episode of Focus is brought to you by Indeed.

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Yeah, so Craft and Commerce is a creator conference, I guess, put on by ConvertKit. It's hard to put an exact title on this because I looked up some other creator conferences. And most people who think of creator conferences think of like Social Media Expo or the big video ones. And that's not really what Craft and Commerce is. It's a pretty small conference. There's like 300 people there. And it's a two-day conference that's held in Boise, Idaho. Which, have you ever been to Boise? I have not, but I'm told it's very pretty. It's very pretty. It's pretty small, but it has a pretty cool vibe. So it's definitely smaller than a city like Austin, but it has that same kind of energy, at least for the couple of weeks that I was there. Creators running all

around, but there are some really cool people there doing some really cool things. In fact, one of the people that I ended up staying with, I shared an Airbnb with our buddy Mike Vardy and a couple other people. One of them was a former chef. I'm actually trying to get him to come on the Focus podcast, who now creates courses and things for like kitchens and line cooks, kind of improving the productivity of restaurants. And he had a friend who was a couple blocks from where our Airbnb was and they did a pop-up dinner at our our house one night and it was it was really really cool some of the best food that I've ever had and I met a bunch of people that are just from that area and just doing some some cool things it's a small town but it's a it's a fun town i feel like that there should be a study like

you look at even though i don't drink coffee the number of like bespoke coffee shops per capita is like a good indicator of how how geeky the town is and how much i would fit in even though i don't drink coffee i think that would be a good number to pay attention to yeah you're probably right uh there are definitely quite a few good coffee shops there. In fact, I was giving Mike Vardy a hard time because one morning he went for coffee without me and went to one of the run-of-the-mill places. And I was like, Mike, how could you go there? But it was a fun experience, a couple of days. It was a fun experience, a couple of days.

The conference itself is kind of set up so that the first day they have this big welcome party. And there's some meetups and things that are happening before that. But nothing really official happens until you go check in. And then they've got hors d'oeuvres. And it was at this place called Western Social, I think. It was kind of a, they had like mini bowling and arcade games and stuff like that. So you're just kind of hanging out and you're meeting people. Not really my scene, but I did get to meet Justin Moore, who is the sponsorship coach guy during that party. And I kind of had some additional follow-up with him throughout the rest of the conference.

And that's kind of the cool thing, is that there are some pretty big names there because they're presenting on the main stage. I got to see Justin Moore. I got to see Sahil Bloom. Nathan Berry, the CEO of ConvertKit, presented. Jay Klaus presented. And there have been people who have been there before. I know James Clear has presented at Kraft and Commerce. So it's a small conference,

but they really do it right. And they bring in these speakers. Amy Porterfield was there this time. I think I probably mentioned to you about the most recent book that she wrote was a two weeks notice basically about quitting your job. And I happened to be reading it when we were in Lake Arrowhead right before I quit my job. So they gave everybody a copy of that book who attended, you know, stuff like that. And if you just went for the talks, it would probably still be worth it. But what was really cool about it was just how small it is in the sense of community that is there. With only 300 people at the conference, you kind of are bumping into the same people all the time. And there are additional workshops that are happening outside of the main keynote talks and things like that. But you kind of show up,

you bump into some people, you meet some people. Even for an introvert like me, it's pretty easy to do. And then you kind of are just with your friends, even if you've just met them for the rest of the time. And in between, you're going to lunch together. There's always groups of people doing different things. On Friday morning, I went for a run with one of the guys that was staying with us. And the group that we ended up running with was like 20 or 30 people. And I got to meet some people from a company called Genius Link, which is a tool for affiliate linking, giving people choices. So if I wanted to promote a book in my newsletter, for example, I could create this choice page and people could say, I want to buy it from Amazon, I want to buy it from

Barnes & Noble, any of these other companies, then you have the buttons. You've probably seen stuff like that before. I had no idea that was a thing until I was running with Julian from GeniusLink on Friday morning. So there's a lot of aha moments and things that come onto your radar just from being in the place at the right time. It's not even the information that's shared from the stage. But it's a short conference. Boise is really easy to get in and out of. I think it was eight minutes to get downtown from the airport. And it was a lot of fun. I've already bought my ticket for next year. And I think anybody who has free agent leanings or anyone who has a creative side project could really benefit

a lot from this conference. Well, you've definitely inspired me to go. The only problem is they always overlap with Apple's WWDC events. They're always around the same week every year. But if they don't overlap, I am going to go next year. Awesome. One of the cool things about it, because it was so small, I was able to meet a couple of people who listened to Focused. So shout out to Preston and Joe. I actually got to get coffee with Preston.

That was a lot of fun. And just making those connections, I feel like it put a whole bunch of wind in my sail. And it's a different experience than the mastermind group that meets regularly. And I get a lot of motivation from that as well. But being around a larger group of people who are all doing different versions of this online creative stuff. And kind of what makes this work is ConvertKit as a company. I really respect Nathan Berry, the CEO, and just the way that the company has set up their mission. And I feel like this comes through if you've used the product at all, is that they exist to help creators make a living online. And that influences the design choices that they make. I mean, they're essentially an email marketing platform, but they're different than MailChimp and Aweber

and ActiveCampaign and all the other ones that are out there. There's not necessarily one that's better than the other, but you can totally tell when you sit down to use ConvertKit why they made things certain ways. Like one of the features that they kind of announced when I was there was this creator network. So the whole idea is you meet other people who have similar audience sizes that are talking about similar things and you kind of partner together to recommend each other's newsletters. And they've put together this creator network where the tool that they use to do that helps everybody grow together. If I had to summarize the mindset of what is so appealing with this community specifically, it's just that. It's that there's no scarcity mindset here everyone understands that a rising tide lifts all boats it's not well you got a subscriber and that's one less subscriber for me

or you sold something so no one's gonna buy that person isn't gonna buy something from me it's very much everyone is very supportive and they want to see everybody win together. And it's really cool. One of the things that Nathan talked about in his talk was this idea of flywheels, which you kind of hit on in the first section. Now, ConvertKit has for a long time partnered with a specific town. I don't remember the name of the town, but it's a smaller community in Africa and they wanted to give them clean water. So they actually put in infrastructure to help them do that. And Nathan talked about how when they first started looking at that, they had a couple of options. They had

the standard hand pump, you know, where you push down on the lever and then the water comes out. But what they ended up using was a flywheel. And then he kind of talked about that flywheel model in terms of creativity and specifically creator growth. Because with a flywheel, once you get it going, each turn becomes a little bit easier and each turn produces a little bit more. So it's not constantly pushing down on the lever. And yes, it takes more effort to get it going. But once you do, then there's momentum there. And I feel like that momentum, it's really easy to get that when you are in a community. And what's cool about the craft and commerce community is you can literally just show up and you're in the community. And what's cool about the craft and commerce community is you can literally just

show up and you're in the community. You don't have to jump through any hoops. There's no exclusivity there. And I feel like with the creator economy online, the people who are doing the types of things that you and I are doing, people who are trying to not buy an island in the Caymans, but they want to provide for their family doing what they love and helping people at scale. It's really a cool culture. Everyone is very open. Everyone is very accommodating. It reminded me a lot of the first time that I walked into the Apple community. The difference here being that with the creator economy, people are going above and beyond almost to make sure that you're able to make it. It's like they want to see you succeed and they'll go out of their way to help you do so. It's almost like, I don't think this is the intention, but it sort of feels that way.

If you try to deconstruct, why are they being so nice to me? It's like they know that if they help you, then you're going to pay it forward and eventually it's going to come back to them. And eventually it's going to come back to them. It's this whole undertone of good karma, I guess. And that really got me thinking about the value of community and specifically with focus because I made the decision to leave my day job several weeks ago and I'm scrambling and we have our mastermind and that's been great. There's been a ton of support that I've gotten from that, but that's once a week. And the rest of the week, I'm building things on my own. I'm doing things on my own. There is no creator community where I live in Appleton, Wisconsin that I can just plug into. just plug into. So it's easy to slip back into that mindset of, is this really going to work? But the minute that I showed up in Boise, I instantly felt energized because there were a whole bunch of people here doing similar things. And when I got there and I got around those people,

it produced motivation and energy to make stuff. Whereas before that, even on the plane on the way there, and it's probably just the stage that I'm in in my journey, but we kind of talked about this in the first segment too, I'm still trying to figure things out. It kind of feels like I'm building the plane on the way down. So there's a lot of doubt swirling around and what are you even making this trip for? The voice in my head is telling me it's not going to work. And just by surrounding myself with the right people, they don't even have to say anything to me. That voice is instantly silenced. So one of my big takeaways from this conference and really just thinking about this idea of community is it's really important who you surround yourself with.

And if you could do it in a physical location every year by going to a conference, that's great. I mean, you got to have something in between there. That's not going to be enough to sustain you every 12 months, I don't think. But there are opportunities to connect with other like-minded people online. And I just really feel coming back from this, I want to do that as much as I possibly can. I feel like the benefit can't even be measured in terms of the standard productivity stuff. If you're just going to look at the output or the tasks that get done, the projects that are executed, it's not going to show up there. done, the projects that are executed, it's not going to show up there. But the clarity will. The knowing what to do next will. The excitement about building the thing will. And really what I just want to leave people with is I kind of had this moment of realization that we all need a little bit of help. We all need other people who are in our corner,

who are pulling for us, who are going to tell us that we can do it. And I would encourage everybody listening to this, doesn't matter if you're a free agent, if you're thinking about making the leap to full-time independent creator or not, even if it's just a side hustle thing, or you got an idea for someday I want to do this project, find your people, find people who are on

that same journey as you. And it will be a huge boost to you. It'll, it'll be an injection of life into not just the project, but I believe to you as an individual, it does something inside your soul. It creates this joy that's hard to describe. You can get caught up in the struggles and the difficulties of the day to day, you can get kind of beat down by that stuff. But when you've got a, a why, when you've got a reason and that, that just becomes more polished,

it becomes more bright. It becomes more, more pointed when you go to an event like this and you connect with that, that community that can sustain you. I don't have anything to add to that. I agree with it all. I will say, if you are, there's two kinds of people. There's the people that think that the pie is only this big and every slice you take is one that somebody else can't take. Or more appropriately, the slice the other guy takes is one I can't take.

If you find that when you look in your heart, that's what you think, try to change that. Try to realize that the pie gets bigger. If you can change that about yourself, surround yourself with people like that, your life gets a lot easier and more fulfilling. Amen. And on that note, we will wrap up this episode. Thank you to our sponsors at Squarespace,

ExpressVPN, and Indeed. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us at relay.fm slash focused. For the Deep Focus members, we're going to be talking about Slow Productivity Day. So stick around if you're a Deep Focus member.

Otherwise, we'll see you next time.