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Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets.
I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz.
Hey, Mike.
Hey, David.
How's it going?
Good.
Good.
Looking forward to today's show.
This is one we've been talking about for a while.
You know, the focus of this show is focus.
See how I did that.
But I do think that media plays a part in it.
And I think we, we kind of talk around this topic whenever we talk about a new
book or whatever, but I thought it would be fun to spend some time just talking
about how we choose to consume media in a, in a focused life.
And I hesitate to say that.
I mean, I'm trying to be focused,
but I'm not always focused.
But you know how we consume media,
how we bring some mindfulness to it,
and some general ideas that we've come up with.
That you and I have a bit of different directions on this,
but hopefully we can inspire folks listening
to come up with their own media consumption
and of strategy and help you on your road to focus.
So that's the goal for today.
Where do you want to start?
Well, I think you mentioned that we've got
kind of different approaches to some of this
and the media that we choose to consume is different
and it's probably gonna be a different mix of things
for everybody who listens to this.
I guess the one common denominator would be
that everyone who listens to this is listening to podcasts. Yeah.
But, um, I think maybe the,
the place to start is kind of the general philosophy because I don't think there's
a prescriptive one right answer to this.
And when you think about media,
the thing that comes to mind a lot of times is social media or news and we've
kind of railed against some of that stuff in the past and the reason is that
it can just hijack your attention and your mood and it can make you very
unproductive. It's not really all that helpful and so I think that's kind of
the framing that I like to use with this is what of this is going to be useful for me.
I like the metaphor for this of an information diet.
I don't know where I first heard that, but essentially garbage in, garbage out.
You can't just eat junk food all the time.
We don't necessarily think about that in terms of the
information that we consume,
but if you just have a little bit different perspective on the
stuff that you're consuming,
it doesn't mean that you're cutting off all the social media
and you're not able to do the fun things that you used to do
anymore. But I think it's important
to recognize that that stuff does feed how you think about things and how you see the world.
In the what we're reading section later on, I'll talk a little bit about this book,
Hidden Genius, but Polina Marinova-Papiano is the author there. And she had this quote that she shared
in one of the chapters in that book that I really liked.
And it was just who wrote the software
that is running in your head.
So if your brain is the hardware,
really the thoughts that you have, that's the software.
And that is being programmed
by the information that we feed it.
For people like you and me who create things for a living,
it's maybe even more important
because I remember hearing Sahil Bloom talk about this
at the Craft and Commerce Conference
about how everything that you create is downstream
from something that you consume.
So it's not saying that you have to avoid all this stuff
and it's going to destroy your
mental wellbeing if you go check the news or anything like that, but just recognizing
that you're in control.
And for me, this means that I'm not trying to keep up with everything, even with the
tech podcast.
Like I don't like that pressure of I need to find out what happened.
That's a red flag for me.
And really as I'm picking the things that I'm going to be adding to my information diet,
there's a couple of questions that stick out to me. Number one is, is this useful? And number two
is, is this fun? I kind of stole that from Ali Abdal in his Feel Good Productivity book. He kind
of talks about how what would this look like if it were fun? And I recognize that a lot of the things that I like to information that I like to consume,
it is enjoyable. I like reading the non-fiction books. I like listening to the podcasts. So it's
not the elimination of the time wasters, so to speak. There's a middle ground here. Things
can actually be enjoyable and they can also be useful. That's the stuff that I'm trying to optimize for with, uh,
with my approach to consuming media and information. How about you?
Yeah. I mean, I think we're on the same page. The, um,
I really am mindful about what I consume and media.
We're going to apply very broadly throughout the show,
but things that affect me negatively,
I'm very careful about consuming those.
Like I'm not trying to put my head in the sand
and not see what's going on in the world at the same time.
I just don't like what I consider to be kind of bad media.
When I wrote the outline for this,
I first wrote things that are like too violent.
And that is a thing I've noticed, I guess as I've got older, that I'm much less willing
to watch things where people get shot and blown up and all that stuff.
When I was younger, I did watch action movies and I enjoyed them, but now I don't for whatever
reason.
I think what is even more toxic to me is media where people are horrible together.
And I feel like a lot of these mini series type,
epic cable shows are like that.
There was one, and I know a lot of people loved it.
It was called, it was where the old guy
owned the media company and his kids were all fighting
for the right of succession.
It was called succession.
It was a huge deal.
The kids were watching one day.
I sat in and watched like 10 minutes of them.
This is terrible.
I can't watch this.
It's just everybody being terrible to each other.
I don't like that stuff.
Maybe that's me being a little too flowery, but I just choose not to consume media
that is like that anymore.
I've really kind of leaned into philosophy, art, educational.
Some of the stuff I do social,
like I will watch media with the kids
that isn't something I normally watch
because of the social element of watching it with the kids.
But in general, I'm pretty careful about what I watch.
We'll talk about news and other things later, but I do think that my general philosophy is
I watch people in fictionalized media that I want to emulate, not people that I want to be repelled by. I just watched a movie recently about a Japanese toilet cleaner
that made me so happy and he was so inspirational, you know. So that's the kind of stuff I lean
toward and I guess we need to kind of get into the details to make sense of it.
Yeah, I think we can get into the details, but I think one more thing that maybe adds some additional context to this is that
it's not as simple as things are either good or bad, positive or negative. There's a spectrum when
it comes to this stuff. And I remember our friend Chris Bailey in his book, Hyper Focus, he talks about the different... he's got like this X and Y
axis where is this enjoyable and essentially is it useful? And you go way... let's say the Y
axis, the vertical one, is the useful one and then the X axis is the enjoyable one. And at the
the useful one and then the x-axis is the enjoyable one and at the the top of the y-axis but not very far along the x-axis you've got the things like
TED Talks and stuff like that and I enjoy watching TED Talks every once in a
while but it's not something that you just naturally are are drawn to has a
lot of educational value but maybe it's not that enjoyable for you and then as
you go down the X-axis,
as things become more fun, maybe there are things that are a little bit less useful in terms of the
educational value. So you've got maybe non-fiction books and then from there you've got comics or
you know all the way down to the really just trashy, this is completely useless, but it feeds the dopamine
hit cycle. And if there was one takeaway, I think, from both of us sharing our approaches here to
to media consumption, it's to eliminate that stuff at the very end of it that is just completely not
benefiting your life. It's not saying you have to now embrace Jocko Willink style discipline and only do
the really hard stuff. We're just trying to make a little bit of an improvement here by recognizing
that the things that are really not useful and maybe eliminating some of that stuff.
Yeah, and I wouldn't even say eliminate entirely. There is pulpy type media in my life.
I wouldn't even say eliminate entirely. Like there is pulpy type media in my life.
Star Wars is it, I grew up with it,
so pretty much anything they make.
Star Wars I'm going to eventually get around to watching
and I kind of choose that, right?
This is some downtime, I'm gonna watch this
and I know that there's not a lot of
necessarily benefit to this, but I'm gonna watch it.
But honestly, if they made a Star Wars survey,
it's terrible, I probably'm gonna watch it. But honestly, if they made a Star Wars or everybody's terrible,
I probably wouldn't watch that either.
But I think my goal would be that you mindfully choose
that kind of stuff, that you choose it
because you want to watch that one thing,
you don't default into it
because you're sitting on the couch and you're bored.
And I know that's a bit of a thin line there,
but it does make sense to me at least.
Yeah.
What you're talking about is intentionality.
As long as you are choosing the media that you want to consume with intention, I think
that is a okay.
It's the defaults that we don't recognize are defaults that can end up getting us in
trouble.
And that's where just asking a couple simple questions, like you kind of alluded to,
what effect is this having on me?
If your default is just to check the news and every time you check the news,
you feel terrible afterwards, but there's nothing you can do about it.
Then really that's not all that, that useful.
Maybe you should check the news less. Yeah.
And I'm generalizing here, like you can figure out for yourself,
what are the things that are actually giving you value and create your own
information diet. But being,
being aware of what's going on and the impact that the information that you're
consuming is, is having on you is the first step.
It's kind of like stepping on the scale. And maybe you don't like the number that you see consuming is having on you is the first step. It's kind of like stepping on the scale.
And maybe you don't like the number that you see at the beginning.
Well, you can change your diet.
You can move that in the right direction.
Right being whatever you decide that it should be.
Just be careful what you pour into your brain.
How's that?
Yep. Sounds good.
So let's start with books.
The frequent topic on this show. Uh,
I have a few inklings of how Mike likes to consume books, but,
but give us the details, Mike. Oh boy.
This is a rabbit hole. So, um,
I'll walk through my approach to this.
This is the nerdiest place to start for me.
And if you really want
all of the details, I actually did a three hour workshop on this. So I'll put the link to that
in the show notes that people are interested in that. But when it comes to books, I have started
reading fiction and I, that one's a simple one. So let's start there. I just read.
I have a physical book and I read it and I do not write anything down from those fiction books.
Now my nonfiction reading workflow, which is probably 95% of my reading,
that is the one where it gets a little bit complicated maybe
So with fiction the question I have is not whether you write anything down, but how do you choose?
What fiction to read?
That's a work in progress. I
Don't really know I have a couple recommendations. So I've got a couple books that I'm reading. I'm still reading the third
Third body problem, but I did read the Alchemist. I read that one actually in like one sitting, so I really enjoyed that one.
The third body problem is taking a little bit longer to get through, obviously.
Yeah.
And that series gets even more like heavy science, the deeper you get into it.
But I do think like one of the ways you find good fiction
is to read fiction and then start looking
for similar authors or, you know, if you go online,
you'll find resources that can help kind of steer you
towards good authors and the genres that you like.
So, you know, you're on your way,
but I do think there's something to it.
I'm gonna talk about my fiction as well.
I am careful about fiction.
Again, I don't want something
where everybody is terrible to each other.
It's like, I used to read a lot of John Le Coré,
who was a spy fiction stuff,
and I realized every time I finished a John Le Coré book,
I am just like melancholy for like a week, you know,
because it's sad, you know.
His stories are more realistic spy stories
where everybody kind of loses.
And I realized that maybe I shouldn't read those books.
I don't get enough joy out of it
to justify the effect of my mood, you know.
And I'm very conscious of fiction
and what kind of direction it points me.
Because I feel fiction is more valuable than I think you do.
I really like the ability to walk in somebody's shoes through fiction.
And I like the transfer of empathy.
But that's probably for another day.
It's a long discussion.
But I think that's something that we need to keep in mind.
But recently, I had an experience with fiction
that was enlightening for me.
The book Dune I read when I was a teenager,
when I was a kid, there weren't a lot
of great science fiction books,
but of course I read Lord of the Rings and I read Dune.
And they never had made a good Dune movie
until a few years ago.
That one that came out a few years ago was really good with, was it
Timothy Chalamagne?
And then that just came out with the second one.
I was looking forward to watching it.
And I watched the second one and I think they did a great job making the movie.
But I also realized that Dune is just not really a story that I like very much.
You know, and I remember being a kid reading it, and I went through and read the whole Frank Herbert series,
and it just got weirder and darker the longer
you go into the books, and somebody said,
oh, they're gonna make another one.
I'm like, well, I don't know how they're gonna do that,
because it's only gonna get worse for these characters.
And it led me to the question, well,
what was the fiction as a kid that I read that I really enjoyed
more than something I liked doing that wasn't so dark?
Even when I was a kid, I think I was sensitive to this.
And I remember Lord of the Rings left me feeling great
when I was a kid.
So I went back in the last month
and I just reread Lord of the Rings.
I got the Andy Serkis audio book and listened to it as well.
And then I'm now in the process of watching the movies.
And it was just great.
You know, those books really resonated with me and it just reminded me that.
Yeah.
I am careful with fiction too, in the sense that I like certain types of
stories, stories with hope in them and characters with virtue.
If you have a book where there's no character with virtue,
it's really hard to hold my interest.
So that's kind of my filter when I'm picking fiction.
And I do pulp fiction too, more than Mike.
I like sci-fi space operas and I like Star Wars,
expanded universe stuff.
But I don't read a lot of them, but I do enjoy them
and I have certain authors that I know
kind of deliver the goods for that.
And I do read those on occasion,
but when it comes to fiction,
I'm actually pretty careful with that too.
Nice.
Yeah, you've got a more developed fiction filter than I do.
Yeah, well hopefully that gets better.
Yeah.
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support of the focus podcast and all of Relay FM. All right. So let's talk about nonfiction.
You're red meat. Right. Yeah. So as mentioned in the previous section, I do have a three hour
workshop that I did on this, but I'm going to try to condense that into just a couple of minutes
here and explain kind of the philosophy behind this. But essentially it's the product of many
years of reading nonfiction books for the Bookworm podcast that I do.
So over the years I have discovered that when it comes to reading nonfiction,
for me,
I absolutely have to have a physical book,
a digital version just is not going to cut it.
And I don't know why this is other than when I first started
reading these books I was getting them from the library and I was bringing them with me whenever
I had to go somewhere. So I recall bringing kids to piano lessons downtown and I'm sitting there
waiting for them and having a physical book and that being enough of the cue for me to read a couple pages instead of picking up
my phone and scrolling social media. So maybe there's just a little bit of nostalgia that's
attached to the physical books, but there are physical books all over my house. I probably have
about 1,500 of them now. I've got a bookshelf in my office, but literally in every nook and cranny
of our house, even in the windowsills in the living room, there are books,
there are piles of books everywhere.
And some people will look at that and be like, Oh gross clutter.
But I love it. I don't know.
And there's always something that I have kind of precurated because whenever
someone that I respect,
I think they have good taste in books makes, in books, makes a recommendation for me.
I will buy that book on the spot. I will take up my phone, open up Amazon,
and it will be there tomorrow.
So I've amassed a collection of things that I actually have not read,
but people have recommended to me over the years and they're just kind of all
over the place. So having a filter,
that's kind of my filter for nonfiction. And as a result,
whenever I get done with the book, what should I read? I don't have filter for nonfiction. And as a result, whenever I get
done with the book, what should I read? I don't have to look very far. And there's, there's
something that's, that's on the pile there. Now, when it comes to how I actually read the books,
I am reading the physical books, like I said, but I am capturing notes in a way that I hope is helping
me to retain more of the information.
And I have kind of a weird way of doing this
because I capture everything into my node on my iPhone.
Now, I have made the mistake of taking notes
in books previously and the mind map format
kind of freed me from this.
But when I first started taking notes
for Bookworm, for example,
I think the very first book we did was Getting Things Done, and I was just jotting down everything that David Allen said that
sounded like it might be important. And I was like, this is a ridiculous amount of work. And then
afterwards, I realized I basically just like recreated the entire structure of the book,
almost word for word. And I was like, that's kind of pointless, because I can't even review this and
get the big ideas. I'm just left with a whole bunch of notes, and's kind of pointless because I can't even review this and get the big ideas.
I'm just left with a whole bunch of notes and maybe some of it stuck.
But I remember feeling kind of overwhelmed.
Like there's too much here.
And so my perspective has shifted now that when I capture things from books that I'm
nonfiction books that I'm reading, I'm looking for the things that resonate.
And I like that word resonate because I grew up playing the violin.
That's an acoustic instrument that resonates.
Like the wood vibrates, that's how the sound is made.
The picture I get is when I'm going through these books,
I'm looking for those things that are resonating.
And to me, that means it's kind of like reverberating
off of my soul.
Peaks my curiosity.
Something goes off inside me
because of something that I just read.
There's a kind of a whole philosophy that goes along with this that I talk about in
the workshop with Mortimer Adler's four levels of reading where you're trying to
understand the arguments that the author is making, but you're not trying to create
the structure of the book.
You're just trying to understand what arguments they're making so you can respond
to them and decide for yourself what you think of it. So that's kind of the things that I'm looking for when I say that
things resonate is, oh, this, this, I see this connects in this way, or this actually
I disagree with, you know, some of those are notes that I'll, I'll capture. I'll snap
pictures with my camera on my iPhone of like important visuals
Like the the graph that I was talking about earlier from Chris Bailey's book like that. That's a visual that's in a mind map for hyper focus
And then I over the years I've created this whole emoji system for kind of tagging the different things that I I
create I
use a light bulb icon for things that are kind of inspiring to me.
Like, I never really thought about that before. I use a key icon for, you know,
this is really something that's important. The author just keeps hitting on, so this seems to
be something that is fundamental to their arguments that they're trying to make. I'll
use a quote bubble for a quote that I want to remember. I like collecting quotes and a lot of those come from these nonfiction books.
Let's see, I use a mind blown emoji for something that just completely blows my mind like then the hidden genius book that I mentioned.
They share an updated statistic that people pick up their phone on average 344 times per day.
Last I heard it was like 180. so it's like twice as much now.
I'm like, whoa.
So that got a mind blown emoji.
And then for the bookworm,
I use a talking head emoji,
which are kind of like,
this is a point I wanna bring up when we do the podcast.
So essentially just by looking at the mind map
when I'm done,
I have the talking points for the episode.
Now from there we get to obsidian,
but any thoughts or questions about the mind node part of this?
No. Um, it all makes sense.
I would like to wind back a bit and just ask part of this.
I think people are going to be asking is how do you decide what books to read
and how do you decide?
There's a couple of ways, I guess. With Bookworm, we read a different book every couple of weeks,
and either I pick it or Cory picks it. And sometimes Cory will pick a book that I would not
have picked and we'll read it. And sometimes some of those are my favorite books. I didn't realize I was going to be interested in
that book but I really enjoyed it once we got done with it. The ones that I'm picking to read,
at this point, it's really just the ones that have been recommended to me that I have probably
already bought. Occasionally there will be a new book that comes out from an author that I really like
Like Ryan Holiday just came out with a newer book the third one in his stoic virtue series not too long ago
So when that happens those things will be bumped to the top
Oliver Berkman is coming out with a new book and I really liked 4,000 weeks.
So that one will be bumped to the top.
But otherwise, I'm just kind of always having my antenna
for when someone that I said earlier,
I respect their opinion.
Maybe that's not the right way to say it,
but you kind of know after a while,
you develop a taste for certain types of books and that information that you can apply from these books.
And so I kind of have people that I trust and when they recommend a book that I will instantly buy it. I'll just double click on that for a second because that's one of the pieces of advice that I always give people is if you want to read more,
you need to have better things to read.
And one of the best ways to get quality things to read
is when someone that you look up to recommends a book,
buy it on the spot, and then you've got it at home.
And the next time you're thinking, well, what should I read?
Oh, there's that book on my nightstand,
and you can pick it up and start going through it.
So I've done that enough that I probably have a couple hundred books that at any given moment I could pick up and read and pass
me has decided that this was an interesting topic that I wanted to learn more about.
I guess that's another thing is sometimes I'll be looking for a book because I'm facing a specific problem or obstacle and I feel like a book may speak
to it in a way that's helpful. One of the best examples of that
probably is something like Atomic Habits by James Clear. I mean you could at the
beginning of the year decide I'm done with New Year's resolutions, I hear David
and Mike talking about habits, how the heck do I actually apply these to my life? And then you would maybe go look
for a book on habits and you'd see that James Clear's book has been at the top
of the the bestsellers list for three years. Well I guess I'll get that
one. You know I've done that sort of thing before as well. But basically if I
think there's any chance that something is going to be useful, I will buy the
book because I just like having these artifacts around my house. There's this concept of an anti
library. I think I heard Ann-Laurel Kumpf talk about this first, but I don't think she's the
one that came up with it. And it's essentially, you've got all these books around that you haven't
read, but they're still contributing to the general knowledge library that you have.
Pkm is a big topic of fascination for me, obviously with obsidian and connected notes.
So I'm trying to make sense of all this stuff and connect all these ideas from all these different books anyways. And just having those around,
I feel like that adds more value
than just having something to read.
Yeah, and that's kind of one of the arguments
for buying paper books as opposed to digital books.
That's more in your face.
Yep, exactly.
All right, so then after the MindNode stuff, just to put a period on this,
I'll transfer all those notes over to Obsidian, which is where things will get connected. When I
started reading nonfiction books, I realized that what was happening was I was collecting these dots and that was actually showing up in a lot of the things that I was creating.
So podcast episodes, video courses, I realized that if I could just consistently read these nonfiction books that were speaking to some of these topics that were important to me,
then I kind of never ran out of ideas for things to create.
And it wasn't until years later that I started thinking about why that was and
the whole process and came up with the creativity flywheel concept, which I
actually just wrote a newsletter about.
So I'll put a link to that in the show notes that people want to see what I'm
talking about with that, but a obsidian and a lot of these other connected notes apps,
what I love is that it's visually showing me
what I believe has been happening in my brain
for a long time.
As I was reading all these different books,
I was slotting them alongside each other,
like Habits, for example.
We had Bob Dotto on, we talked a little bit about this.
How I never really liked the Q routine reward habit cycle that Charles Duhigg talked about. I couldn't really figure
out why. And then I read Atomic Habits. Oh, there's another stage here that James Clear
inserts that makes more sense. And well, what determines whether you follow through with
the habits and we insert some information from Tiny Habits and how it all kind of ties
together. Well, when you are
not just clicking the button to link every instance of this word that appears in my entire vault,
but you're intentionally creating the links between the different notes and ideas that you
have that you've added. And then you also embrace this idea of like the atomic notes. So you're
drilling down and this single idea from this book, this is the smallest component piece of this. I'm going to make that its own note so I can connect it to other
things. There's a lot of cool insights that come from that and Bob did a great
job of explaining how the whole Zettelkasten system could actually be a
framework that you could use to make some of those connections and insights.
So go check out that episode if you're interested in that
and Bob's book specifically, I think it's really well done.
But the Obsidian piece I think is kind of the last mile.
So I'll take that mind node
and I'll export it a couple of different ways.
First, I'll export it as an image,
which is just a PDF of the mind map itself.
I'll embed that in the note so I can pull up the note
and I can see the mind map right there.
But I will also export it as Markdown.
So from my note, you can export the actual text
and then I'll copy that text and paste it
into my Obsidian note.
I've got a plugin called List Callouts,
which will recognize all those emoji codes and add
like a colored banner behind it so they're easy to see.
And then at the very top, I will put a three sentence summary.
And that's an important piece.
You know, you can read a book and take all these notes and be like, oh man, that was
so good.
But then try to condense it down into three sentences.
It's a lot harder than you think it is.
And this is really, I think, one of the things that solidifies this in my brain. This is how I
take the stuff home is you're essentially like, how would I explain this to someone who has no
concept of all of the information that I just consumed from this book? Someone comes up to you
and says, what's this book about? How do you explain it three sentences?
When you can distill it down like that,
that's when you really know it.
So I do that, I add the ratings so that I can go back
and I can sort them by four stars, five stars,
all that kind of stuff.
And at that point, you know, I've done the work
and I kind of don't think about it again
unless I'm trying to create something
and then one of those connections that I made surfaces.
Otherwise, you know, if I think about it again, great.
If I don't think about it, it's in the archive
and those are quality dots that my brain
will be connecting at some point.
That's a lot of work, Mike.
It's a lot of work.
It is a lot of work.
It is a lot of work.
I think it's worth it. Um,
obviously everyone's going to draw their own lines and I'm well aware that maybe
80% of the focus listeners are like, that's ridiculous.
Why in the world would you ever do that? Uh, if you want to see it, actually,
it sounds worse than it really is.
So if you want to actually kind of see it in action,
I've also got a YouTube video on my reading workflow
and kind of get a little bit more
into the philosophy behind it.
So I'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
Yeah, I struggle with that.
I feel like one of my goals as Max Sparky
is to help people access technology and productivity
in ways that make sense to them.
And I think that a lot of times the stuff we talk about can lead people to become
obsessive about stuff that they don't need to be and get in the way of actually
doing the hard stuff. So it's like, that's always a challenge for me.
So when I share my workflow, you'll see it's a little, it's softer, but I, you
know, I think we all have to do what works for us. That's really what it comes down to.
But for non-fiction books for me,
an important piece of it for me is again,
the filter of deciding what do I read.
And I don't have a podcast where I have to read a book
every two weeks that eases it for me a bit,
but I actually do try to read two books a month.
But I don't make that a hard and fast rule because to me it's more important that I kind
of consume it properly than speed.
But it does help me budget more time to read when I do that.
So I find that generally helpful.
I've really evolved over the years.
When I was in college, I read a lot of classical and modern philosophy.
Now I've kind of gone back and really revisited
classical and Hellenistic philosophy to a great degree.
I have a lot of books here from Greeks and Romans.
I tell all my friends that are into this stuff,
I'm like, I'm more interested in happiness
not whether or not we live in a simulation.
You know, and by that, I I mean a lot of the modern philosophy stuff goes down weird rabbit
holes. And I'm not interested in that stuff. I'm more interested in the human condition
and how we can live more fulfilling lives. The fact that the classic guys back then
The fact that the classic guys back then were so interested in virtue,
the idea of arete and living a good life
didn't just mean getting all the good things,
it also meant having integrity and living a life of virtue.
That really resonates with me.
So I wanna read as much as these people have to say about it.
And I've even kind of like straight into kind of,
there's a lot of books written about these books.
So I guess you'll call those secondary sources.
I just picked up one,
The Morality of Happiness by Julia Annis.
It's like 500 pages and it's,
I'm not gonna read that in a month. It's gonna take a while, it's like 500 pages, and I'm not gonna read that in a month.
It's gonna take a while, it's deep.
But the, so I do a lot of reading for that.
That's kind of the first filter.
I feel like those books, especially the old ones,
really just somehow speak to me because they're so old.
I had the same experience when I was in London
and looking at the Parthenon pieces
and it just hit me that the artist that made those pieces
did that 24 centuries ago.
And here I'm sitting at it and looking at this thing
that someone made 24 centuries ago
and it has value now too.
And I want my art to be like that. You know, I
want it, you know, I don't know anybody's going to know who the
heck I am in 24 centuries, but I will, in my own mind, I want it
to be good enough that if somebody did read it in 24
centuries, it would be of value to them. So I'm on this weird
journey. I'm kind of giving myself another degree in
Hellenistic philosophy. And I do a lot of reading around that topic.
So that's the first filter.
The second one for me is self-help.
I think self-help books are great,
but there's always an asterisk for me.
Some of the self-help authors to me are snake oil salesmen.
There's no other way to put it,
and I hear them talk and I read their books
and it just feels to me like,
it's just such a bill of goods.
To actually live a good life is hard work.
And everybody who tells you
they're gonna make it super easy with you
in five easy steps, that stuff repels me.
Like it really does.
So much so that I almost didn't make this podcast
because I didn't wanna to be in that,
categorized in that.
But we try to do it right.
But there's a good self-help.
There's really like what my kids would call bangers.
And you talked about a bunch of them,
Ryan Holliday, Kyle Newport,
what's the 4,000 weeks guy, Oliver Berkman.
Oliver Berkman, yeah.
I mean, there are some really good self-help authors
out there and I make a point of reading those.
I mean, the best self-help book I read recently
was the Rick Rubin book and he's a music producer,
but I feel like it is the kind of book
that can change your mindset.
So I do read some of the modern authors
and I use Mike Schmitz as my primary filter for that.
You know?
So like, you know, you have the Bookworm Podcast
but also we text each other once in a while.
You'll tell me, hey, this is a book you should read.
You kind of know my taste
and you know the stuff that repels me.
So I'm fortunate to have a book connoisseur
to help me with this.
And so I do read self help,
but not nearly as much as you do.
The digital versus analog divide is mushier for me
than it is for Mike.
Because of law school,
I really never wanted to read a paper book again,
because they're just so heavy
and I carried them for so long.
But I have kind of come around on that.
But not necessarily always.
Like I'm going to Scotland.
It's a long story,
but all of a sudden I'm going to Scotland.
And I'm gonna be in Edinburgh where Robert Burns lived
and there's a museum there.
And they've got like his writing desk and stuff.
Robert Burns is one of my favorite poets.
So I can't wait.
This is one of my highlights of the trip.
I've got two weeks before I leave.
I decided, well, I'll read his poetry again.
And I got on Amazon, I was gonna order the book.
And I realized, oh, wait a second.
I can buy the poetry book at his house,
when I go visit it in Scotland.
So I wanna buy it there. So I want to buy it there.
So I didn't have any compunction about just buying
the Amazon Kindle version of his poems,
which I'll read on the plane.
And then when I get there,
I'll buy the hardback book to bring home with me.
So I'm a little more soft about it.
And I purchased a lot of Kindle books over the years,
and I still read them.
As a man of a certain age, sometimes I find at night when I'm tired,
bumping up the font and the Kindle is kind of nice.
But the thing that I like most about the paper books,
now that Mike's got me back into it, is that my whole workflow for reading
these these books has become a lot easier.
So my system is is a number two pencil, largely.
And so when I read a book, I have a pencil in my hand,
and if something really strikes me,
I'll comment on it in the margin.
I have some coded checkboxes, check marks,
and exclamation points.
But I also just like, if something really resonates with me,
I'll write in the margin or at the bottom of the page
why it resonates with me. I just kind in the margin or at the bottom of the page why it resonates with me.
I just kind of address it right at the source.
The other thing I do is I enhance the table of contents,
so any concepts that resonate with me,
I will add an entry in the table of contents for them
so I can go back later and just look at the table of contents
and say, oh, here's that part
that I really thought was good,
I'm gonna go to that page. And then I write in the table of cards and say, oh, here's that part that I really thought was good. I'm gonna go to that page.
And then I write in the back of the book,
I write a list of tasks or questions to be answered
or things to be done that are inspired by the book.
And this is true with everything,
with Plato and Cal Newport, you know,
I'll do it in either one.
So when I'm done with the book,
it's written all over on the inside.
It's not as efficient as putting all this stuff
into Obsidian, but I do have kind of
my operating system in Obsidian.
A lot of times reading a book will inspire me
to write an essay or something into that,
but it's not really indexed the way Mike does it.
So I keep it pretty simple.
Which is completely fine
and probably the right move for most people.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, one of the things you're doing
is you have a podcast about books.
I mean, you've got to have a lot of notes
to talk about on the show.
Most of us read a book,
we don't have to talk about it
for an hour and a half into a microphone.
So that is something to be aware of.
But yeah, in fact, this system of working
with the paper books is superior to what I was doing before.
I would highlight and kindle,
and then I would go back and fiddle around with that.
I feel like actually for getting more out of a book,
the paper book method that I use
of just writing all over it is way better.
So as a result now, I largely buy books.
So you'll be happy to hear that, Mike.
I am.
Other thing I just wanna hit on is you mentioned
that there are certain self-help books
that you will read and most of them
you won't because it feels like snake oil.
And I think that that is probably, sadly accurate for a lot of the types of books that I tend
to read.
And I shared how I have to finish some of these for the Bookworm Podcast.
However, the thing I want to leave people with is that if you pick up a nonfiction book and you don't like it, you don't have to finish it.
So I would, there's lots of great nonfiction books out there. Lots of great personal development, productivity, self-help books out there.
out there. A lot of business type books even are those are the ones that I kind of like. I like to think about things in terms of systems and business operating systems is kind of one of
those topics that I'm weirdly interested in. But if you pick something up and it's just not doing
it for you, there's lots of other options. So don't feel like you have to finish a book.
If you're trying, especially at the beginning when you're trying to get some momentum,
maybe to reading more nonfiction books,
look for the stuff that you actually enjoy.
The things that are both fun and useful and build some momentum first.
Yeah. And I will, I'll make my pitch for classics, you know,
just because you had to read them in school doesn't mean they're bad.
Maybe as you get older,
you get a little more perspective on them
and maybe go back and look at some of the classics too.
Those are very, there's a reason why a book written
thousands of years ago is still printed.
So maybe you should read those too.
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Movies and television.
This is one I'll take the lead on
because I think I do more of it than you do.
Yes.
I like movies and television.
I like stories.
It does kind of go through the personal filter I have, like I said.
I don't try to watch stuff where everybody's terrible.
Another one that comes to mind is the, what is it, the House of Dragons on HBO.
Somebody told me about that and I said,
that sounds like everybody hates each other and they're mean.
And I'm like, yeah, not for me.
And I know they're great shows, very dramatic, very well produced,
but I'm pretty careful about what I pick.
One of the things I have about media consumption
on the television, and for me it's largely television,
I don't go to the movies very often,
but what I call the fully engaged role.
And I think that's a wonderful thing
about going to the movies, is that when you go to the movies, the only thing you can really do is stuff your face with popcorn and watch
a movie.
And that is a fully engaged consumption.
I think that's good.
At home, it's so tempting to get the iPad out or play with the dog or do whatever where
you're only half engaged with whatever you're watching.
And in my experience, it never works.
Like you don't really get much out of the media
because you're not really watching it.
You don't really get much done.
Like if you ever like try to answer email
while you watch a movie,
actually count how many emails you answered
by the time the movie's over.
Just do that the next time you,
you'll find that it is very few.
And all that happened was you didn't really watch the movie
So for me, I don't watch any media. That's not worth being fully engaged if I watch I'm like, ah, this is something
I'll just get my iPad out with
Then I just don't watch it. Like my wife loves the Hallmark movies, you know, they're a little predictive
You know, I kind of know where it's going once you all sit next door and watch it
But more often I will sit because I just want to be with her. I'll sit at the table
in the room where the TV's to my back and I'll work on something without actually watching
the thing. And that's the fully engaged role in action for me. I try to only watch stuff fully
engaged and I also try to watch only one show at a time. So if there's something that I decide to watch,
usually we'll wait till it's made its run
and then we'll watch it over a course of a month or so.
So I don't watch a lot,
but I do try to mindfully watch media when I watch it.
Again, I lean towards things that are uplifting.
Like when I was a kid, one of my favorite movies was ET and I still watch it every
year on my birthday because it reminds me of growing up and that's an uplifting
movie.
I mean, it's like, there's not even a villain in that movie.
So, you know, even as a kid, I kind of like found my way to that kind of media.
You know, I talk all the time about shows like Doc Martin
or the Detectorists, and it's the same thing.
There's shows about people that you wanna root for,
and that's kind of what I do,
and I try to actually watch them.
And it makes me feel good and I enjoy it, so there you go.
Star Wars is my pulp, like I said.
Pretty much anything Disney Plus does with Star Wars,
I'll at least try.
YouTube is another type of media that I consume.
And I try to be pretty intentional about that because YouTube's algorithm is very good
about sucking you in.
So usually what I'll do is I'll make a list of videos
I wanna watch and I just capture their links
and then I just click the links.
It's a very, and there's apps for this,
but I don't use any of them.
It's like if I want to solve a problem,
I mean, an example with Woodwork,
because I hand cut a lot of the joinery,
and if there's a Japanese joint I want to cut,
I'll find two or three videos of people cutting it,
and then I'll just watch all of them in one sitting.
So that's kind of how I consume YouTube.
Most of my stuff on YouTube is woodworking
or jazz music. Some productivity stuff, but again, I feel like YouTube productivity again
is a large source of snake oil. There's some really good people on there, but I think there's
a lot of people there that are just trying to keep you busy and not really help you get
the hard stuff done.
And my favorite media consumption is social media.
And that's because I have the greatest system
for social media consumption.
Like my kids have figured out what I like.
Usually it involves dogs or little kids being cute.
And so what they do is when they're social media consumption,
anytime they see something in one of those two categories,
they flag it.
And then once every week or two, we all sit on the couch
and they just feed them up to me
and I just laugh for like an hour.
And I just love it.
And I don't have an account with any of these services,
but I still get the parts that I wanna see the most
and my kids curate them for me.
So that's my social media strategy.
Nice. Well, if you can have a personal curator, I think that's probably the best case scenario. Yeah. Right. What about you?
So I don't really watch video at all. I think that there is,
at all. I think that there is a hearing you describe how you, how you watch it and kind of the filters that you use. I recognize that there are occasionally some new movies that we'll watch. Usually they are musical related because I have four kids now who are into drama and so things like Newsies and The Greatest Showman,
there's a lot of those types of shows that I just really wouldn't be on my radar and then they want
to watch them so we'll watch them together But that doesn't happen all that often.
And the rest of the time I'm really not watching television.
The movies that I do end up watching tend to be the ones that I've watched like a
hundred times. When we were in London, for example,
Rachel was with me and part of our evening routine every night at the hotel room was that we would watch
a movie. So we watched like the whole back to the future trilogy just because we had the time to
do it that we typically wouldn't have at home with five kids. I create videos for YouTube.
I actually don't watch a whole lot of YouTube. I create videos for YouTube based on
a lot of my stuff is just based on like the Obsidian stuff. I will occasionally watch videos
when I have a specific problem I'm trying to solve or a question about something. There are
some great tutorials out there. Like I'm trying to
figure out how to incorporate this thing into my workflow. But for the
most part I'm posting every couple of weeks but I'm not really consuming
things via YouTube. I do pay for YouTube premium but I almost never go in there.
And when I do interact with the stuff that I publish on YouTube, I'm
using the YouTube Studio app. So I'm not actually going in and watching the
videos. I'm not looking at the comments on the pages themselves. YouTube has
tools that kind of bring it all into a creator dashboard, which maybe that kind
of gets into the whole idea of social media.
But yeah, I don't watch a lot of video, but I think I'm probably doing a lot
of audio instead. So I'm interested to see. I think this is one of the
places where the types of things that we consume maybe are a little bit flip-flopped.
Yeah, and you also read a lot of books,
so you probably don't have as much time.
That's true, that's true.
But yeah, I enjoy watching movies and television
so long as it, like I said, qualifies through the filters.
And again, all of this stuff is just,
you don't want to do it the way Mike or I do it.
You just wanna find a way that mindfully makes sense
for you.
Podcasts and audiobooks is the next category.
Audiobooks for me are normally where I consume fiction.
I don't do any of the self-help or non-fiction books
in audiobook.
I find that frustrating,
because I do want to take notes and go deeper
with it.
And with an audiobook, it just kind of blows past.
Certain books, fiction books even, don't really work for me.
When I listened to the Andy Serkis reading of Lord of the Rings, I went ahead and finished
it, but Tolkien writes so poetically that I wanted to capture and
notate some of his, his sentences. Cause he just, it's a wonderful author, you know? And
so I actually bought the books and went back. I've been going, you know, went through them
again and got some of the great lines that I love out of it. And, and I put them in my
list cause I love some of the stuff he wrote.
Do not weep for not all tears are an evil, you know? Gandalf, right?
Tolkien.
Anyway, so I generally read fiction with audiobooks
and that's about it with audiobooks and podcasts.
I subscribe to a lot of the same ones you do.
I'm looking at your list here,
you can go through in a minute,
but I am not a completionist at all.
One of the things I've been more mindful of myself is
I don't always need something pouring in my ears.
Like I had that realization,
I talked about it on a prior episode,
how like working in the shop with TV or
audio book on took away from the experience for me.
And even something as simple as walking the dog, I find sometimes I just don't
want, I don't want to listen to anything.
I just want to be there and walk the dog.
And so I'm more careful now about when I listen to audiobooks and podcasts. So I don't,
I don't do as much like you and YouTube, I guess I make them. I don't listen to them as much as
you would think. All right. Well, I definitely do listen to podcasts, but I also like you,
I'm not a completionist. I think podcasts are probably the,
when I have some time to fill, whether it's,
I'm at the gym and I don't wanna be aware
of everything else that's going on around me,
just wanna focus on what I'm doing,
or if I'm in the car and I'm driving somewhere,
I will always have a podcast on.
That is the background noise, I guess,
and I hesitate to use the word noise,
but it does bring up an important point for me
when I'm listening to podcasts.
The majority of them, my mindset going into it
is simply this is gonna be entertaining.
I am not trying to take away anything
specific from a podcast other than to be inspired and to be entertained. What that
means is I'm not using those apps that allow you to mark the clips or trying to
furiously take notes on something that that was said. I'm glad that a lot of the
podcasts that I listen to
do put some effort into the show notes.
So they provide the links to things.
And if someone mentions something that is interesting,
particularly a book, I'll pull that up right away
if there's a link in the show notes
and I'll buy it right away.
But I'm not trying to capture things from podcasts
and connect them with other things.
This is kind of more entertaining, a little bit less useful, but there's still some,
some useful things that can come from those podcasts and really whatever I get from the,
the first listen, that's, that's good enough for me. I'm not trying to go back and pick up
everything that I can from every episode that I listened to. I do tend to pick things that I do think are going to be useful to me.
So I do listen to a couple of tech podcasts, but over the years, I've kind of dropped a lot of the
tech podcasts that I was listening to.
And I've been filling that podcast time with some other productivity related
podcasts I guess, not necessarily specifically productivity, but like one of my favorites
recently is the Deep Life by Cal Newport. Cal's a really bright guy and you could definitely
take that podcast and try to take notes on it and it would be just about as useful as
taking notes on one of his books I would argue argue he definitely puts a lot of work into the podcast themselves.
But for me, it's just, I enjoy listening to Cal talk about these things.
And another one is creator science by Jay Klaus got to meet Jay at a craft and
commerce. I'm a member of the lab now.
And sometimes I'll get inspired by some of the conversations that he has with,
with other creators and I'll go down a rabbit hole and try to figure out, you know, some some new system to add to my business.
How I write by David Perrell.
Again, he's just talking to all of these people who write all these books.
And so it's it's inspiring to hear about how Morgan Housel, his writing process, and Ali Abdaal and all these people. And then
the most recent one is Good Work by Barrett Brooks. This one is probably the one that
is least relevant for most people listening to this because it's a kind of business ops,
but Barrett Brooks was the second in command at ConvertKit. He left to do his own thing
and now he's a business consultant.
And again, I just like hearing these people
talk intelligently about these topics
that I'm interested in.
And I'm not trying to take notes,
I'm not trying to, you know,
I gotta get something from this.
It's really just in the background.
I'll occasionally listen to audio books,
but not very frequently.
I do think that generally speaking that fiction or kind of
biographical type of books like Creativity Inc. for example, those are great candidates for audiobooks
but when I listen to audiobooks a lot of times they are books that I have already read and I
really enjoyed them. So I've got the the audible plan where I get a credit every couple of months and
those will stack up eventually.
And then they'll have one of their sales and I'll get a whole bunch of,
a whole bunch of books. And a lot of times they're,
they're books that I've read already. And if I'm on a long trip,
like when we were flying to London, for example,
is a big stretch of time I'm going to be in the airport or on the plane or
something,
then I'll load up an audiobook and go through it that way.
But again, I'm not trying to ring value out of this.
This is purely entertainment for me.
All right.
Let's move on to social media.
This is a category that you added to the outline.
Hey, yeah. Well, I think that this is probably an important topic and I think
it that it's worth unpacking a little bit because the general narrative around social media is probably just stay away.
It's bad. And I don't think that's necessarily true.
And I think part of it, part of my perspective on this is that I am a creator. And as a creator,
you need to reach people with the things that you are creating. And YouTube is the primary way I'm
doing that. That could technically be, I think that's probably still classified as social media.
But most people think of social media, it probably the the scrolling infinite feeds so that would
be Twitter or X, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Instagram, etc. and I think that if you just go scroll through
whatever the algorithm thinks you might be interested in, then that's probably gonna be frustrating
and have a negative impact on your mood.
But if you can curate some of that stuff,
then you can actually find some useful things there.
There are people who I like what they make
and they talk intelligently about things
on these different platforms.
The one that I am most active on currently
is still Twitter or X. And I still
get value from that. The biggest way that I do that is I've created a list that is just
PKM. So it's specific people that I'm following around the topic of PKM, the
PKM hashtag, a couple other PKM related sources all combined into a single list.
And that helps me find stuff
that people are doing that looks interesting, primarily around Obsidian, but just the whole
area of personal knowledge management I think is fascinating. So even the stuff that's talking about
Tana or Kraft or different approaches to how we handle information, I still find that interesting
and inspiring. And occasionally that'll turn into ideas
for newsletters I wanna write and things like that.
The trick is to go look at that list every once in a while
instead of just going to the For You tab
and scrolling because you have time to fill.
And that is definitely a rabbit hole
that you can get sucked into.
So the way that I post to social media and hopefully provide some things that are helpful and useful to people without getting pulled into that vacuum myself is to use tools that allow you to post to multiple places.
The one that I'm using currently is called Hype Fury. And what that allows me to do is create and even schedule these posts or threads, and then I
can write something once and I can post it multiple places. I'm still not great at this. I feel like
this is the next step for me in terms of my creative workflows. I've nailed down the newsletter
every week at this point.
That was a heavy lift to figure out a workflow that allowed me to do that
consistently. And then I still need to get a little bit better at producing
videos for YouTube consistently. But a lot of those all have writing as a
basis. There's information there that either ends up as a newsletter or as a
script for a video and 80% of the work is done at that point.
I can repurpose that other places
and I could do that a little bit more consistently
but using a tool like hype fury allows me
to take the newsletter, break it up into a thread,
have that appear on LinkedIn, et cetera.
You can even take some of the shorter social media content
you know, like the one or two sentences and have
that appear on the text based platforms. And also they've got a thing that'll turn it into an image.
You can post it to Instagram. So really, I just want to be part of, I want to be a positive voice
in these spaces and having a tool that allows me to send without necessarily going in there to see is a important
distinction for me.
That doesn't mean that I never go check the mentions or the messages that people will
send me, but I'm not that fancy.
I don't have that big a following that I'm not getting that stuff all the time so about once per week, I'll I'll go see if anyone has replied to something or
Take part in a conversation, but I'm not getting notifications on on any of that stuff
It's always on my schedule and I guess that would be
What pull versus push, you know, I'm choosing when I go get those as opposed to the apps saying,
Hey, you got a new mention.
You should come engage with our platform again, because that's when I get,
get sucked in and I spend 15 minutes scrolling when I didn't intend to.
Yeah.
I don't really have any social media workflows.
I don't really have any social media work folks. I don't really do it anymore. I I was an early member of
Twitter back in the like early days when it first premiered and I did that for a while and I just looked back on it
I just don't think I really got much out of it
It was it was nice being able to kind of water cooler talk with some friends
It was nice being able to kind of water cooler talk with some friends, but overall it's more important
I think that I get my work done.
And I've got a lot of commitments now,
three podcasts, the Max Parkey Labs,
and the other things I do.
And I really wanna focus on those,
and then having time for myself,
for my crafts and my family.
And so social media just kind of fell away.
And it's not one of those things where I'm like,
I'm too fancy for you, I'm not into social media.
It's just, it just was kind of a practical decision.
And I know that it does hurt me a bit
because there are people who make stuff like I do
who effectively use social media to bring in new people
and share the stuff they've done.
But it's just to me, it's just like one of the things
that just got cut off and I've never found time for it.
Someday, maybe if I get successful enough,
I'll hire somebody to help me with it or something,
I don't know, but it's just not really high on my radar.
The closest I come to social media is I'm very interested
in doing more free YouTube stuff.
I make like 150 videos a year for YouTube,
but they're all behind the Max Sparky Labs paywall.
So I'd like to do some more free stuff.
I think that's kind of, you said it, social media.
I think you're kind of right,
but it's not in the sense that, you know, Twitter is right.
The other thing I do, I do have a, um, a Instagram account and again, it's full of saxophone
players and woodworkers and maybe once a month I'll go in there and kind of flip through
it and I see how sticky it is when I go in there because time does kind of vanish and suddenly I've been doing it for 30 minutes.
But the good news is I just don't really think
of going there ever.
So social media for me just never stuck.
Maybe it's a Gen X thing, I don't know.
But for better and worse,
I'm just not that into social media.
Which is completely fine.
Yeah.
Again, the question to be asked here is, is it useful?
And for me, I'm still trying to build my audience.
My newsletter is at the moment we're recording this, just under 6,000 subscribers.
And I know that things get a lot easier
when that number goes up.
So that's kind of what I'm optimizing for.
And for me, social media is a business tool
with the intention of taking borrowed attention
because recognizing when you do go into social media,
you are seeing essentially
most of the time what the algorithm has decided you should be interested in. And occasionally,
you know, you can make a connection with somebody and you've really piqued their interest. At that
moment, you know, asking them to join your newsletter is a favor to both you and them
because they don't have to wade through things to find more of the thing that you make that they particularly like.
So I'm not trying to just get as many people as I can, but I'm trying to be authentic and this is who I am.
You want more of this? This is the place to do it. Because when you're on the email newsletter, I know that when I send out a newsletter, you will receive it.
send out a newsletter, you will receive it as opposed to even YouTube where if you are a subscriber, I think there's a better chance that it shows up in your feed, but it's not
guaranteed.
So it's fine to put stuff out there.
Maybe you can get some attention, but I also don't want to rely on the social media aspect
of it as the driver for the business.
If there's really a link here,
if there really is a connection to be made,
then why don't you come over,
join the email newsletter list,
and then we can continue a more regular conversation.
And I know that what I'm sending, you're going to receive,
and you've also indicated that what you have
is something that I want.
I mean, that's a win-win.
Yeah, agreed. The only other media I could come up with that I consume, well, I guess
there's the whole question of music, but I don't think that's really kind of in the
ball. We all have music we listen to. In fact, the reason I don't consume as much media is
because I do like listening to music, so I have a lot of music playing. But the other one I was thinking is comics,
and I got the digital comics app from Marvel years ago,
and occasionally I'll go down that rabbit hole.
When I do, it's usually Star Wars,
but I also stumbled into a comic that I really love,
which is kind of along the theme of media I like to consume
is called Usagi Yojumbo.
It's a little Ronin in Japan,
feudal Japan, looking around trying to help the world
and he happens to be a bunny rabbit.
So that's great reading for me at the end of the day.
He just does good stuff for people, makes you feel good. Nice way end of the day. You know, he just does good stuff for people. Makes you feel
good. Nice way to end the day. Nice. That sounds pretty cool. I haven't gotten into any of the
other media that you've got listed here like the comics or anything like that. But when I was in
Woodstock for the Macstock conference a couple of weeks ago, went to my favorite book store there and we did end up getting a couple of graphic novels.
There was the Lord of the Rings one itself when we were there.
But I do like that format.
It's just not something that I've really worked
into my workflow yet.
Yeah, and that for me is influenced by my kids.
A couple years ago they got me a graphic novel
called Blue Giant, which is about a kid in Japan
who was trying to make it as a jazz player.
And of course that worked for me.
And then they made a movie of it.
So I was able to watch the movie as well.
Yeah, I enjoy media.
Yeah, I don't think the point of this episode
is to try and tell you you should only work
and never watch fun and brainless things.
It's all about being mindful
and also being aware of the
stuff you do watch.
What is its effect on you?
And if you, if you know what it is, then you can make smart choices.
Yeah.
And the other thing I would add to that is that there's a lot of stuff out there
and the amount of satisfaction, enjoyment and usefulness that you get from any single piece of media is going to vary.
Yeah.
So if I could encourage people with one thing as we wrap up this part of the show, it's just that you should decide for yourself what provides you the biggest return on the time that you
would invest and do more like that.
Don't feel like you have to keep up with whatever the latest thing is.
Try it if you want, but then feel free to decide that, you know, I don't really like
this all that much.
And then go find something
else that hits the mark for you. Yeah. The joke in my family is nobody in my family would ever
have me as a fellow game show contestant, you know, game shows that focus on popular culture
trivia. I would, I would be terrible at that. And that's okay. You know,
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What are you reading these days, Mike?
I mentioned this at the top of the show, but I am reading a book called Hidden Genius by Polina Marinova-Pompliano.
This is someone that I heard as an interview guest on the Good Work podcast by Barrett Brooks.
And I really enjoyed the conversation, so I saw that she had a book and picked it up.
And it's interesting. It's different than a lot of the self-help
productivity type books that I've read in that she does a good job of packaging a bunch
of things that other people have said. She interjects her own stories and her own points
as well. But it does not read like an I'm the guru and you should just listen to everything
that I say type of book, which is kind
of refreshing. And there's, there's 10 different chapters, not the three separate parts that
talk about different kinds of leadership topics. The information diet that I mentioned at the
beginning, that was an idea that was inspired by this. So if that's part of the conversation
was interesting to you, then you may wanna go check this one out.
I'm actually between books right now.
I have finished the books I was reading.
I am going to pick a new one before I head off on my trip.
I'm reading lots of Robert Burns poetry this week,
but I'm open to suggestions, Mike.
Anything you think I should read for my trip? Any good books out there you really dug lately?
Ah, great question.
Are there any specific topics that you are interested in?
Like what's kind of at the top of your mind?
What have you been thinking about lately?
The stuff I've been thinking about I have books about.
I don't know. I was just kind of thinking.
Something you said during the show, maybe I need to read that book by the
ConvertKit marketing guy. I know he has a podcast. He also has a book, right?
Yes. That was a good one. Simple Marketing for Smart People by Billy Boris.
Maybe I need to read that book, you know?
I can't just put my head in the sand all the time.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's not your standard marketing book.
So if you are recognizing that you probably could
use a little help in the marketing area,
but you want something that is not your
your typical you got to do these types of things that's a that's a great one it
really talks about kind of crafting your your message and speaking to the the key
beliefs that you want to to share which are either going to get people to say, yeah, we're on the same page
regarding this, or they're going to write you off and say, oh, that's not for me. But
that's kind of the point with marketing. It's not just to get as many transactions as possible.
I would argue it's to make the biggest impact that you can in the lives of the people that
you're trying to help.
So that's a great one for crafting that message.
All right, I'm making my order as we speak.
If your trip was a little bit later,
I would recommend Oliver Berkman's new book
is coming October 8th, and it is Meditations for Mortals.
So maybe this is a topic that you know more about this
than Oliver does,
because you've been doing it for such a long time.
But this is one I'm personally looking forward to a lot
because it's a book, I believe, on meditation
from the guy who talked about
cosmic and significance theory.
Well, anything Oliver Brookerman writes, I'll read.
So I'm gonna definitely get that one too.
But my trip is too soon
and that will be something I read later.
All right, we are the Focus Podcast.
Hopefully we gave you some inspiration
and some food for thought today
about how you consume media and what your media strategy is.
Let us know what you think.
We have a forum over at talk.macpowerusers.com.
There's a special room there for Focus listeners.
Love to hear your strategies.
Maybe you guys have got some ideas I may want to adopt.
In the meantime, thank you to our sponsors.
That's our friends over at Squarespace, Vitaly and Indeed.
If you are a subscriber to Deep Focus,
which is the ad-free extended version of the show,
stick around, Mike and I are gonna be talking a bit
about our trip to London, and I'm gonna talk about
my insight in the British Museum.
But otherwise, we'll see you next time.