Focused - 249: What if This Were Easy? with Ernie Svenson

Episode Date: February 10, 2026

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast, but more than just cranking widgets. I'm Mike Schmitz. I'm joined by my fellow co-host, Mr. David Sparks. Hey, David. Hello, Mr. Schmitz. How are you today? Doing great. How about you?

Very excited. We've got a guest on the show. My personal little Yoda is here, gang. Welcome to the show, Mr. Ernie's Svinson. Ernie's shaking his head note. Hey, good to be here. As always. Ernie, you've been a guest on the show a few times in the past.

And every couple of years, we've got to have you in just to check out what you are up to and check on with your thoughts on focus. Ernie is a former attorney. And him and I met a long time ago when we were speakers at the American Bar Association together. And Ernie is also, we're going to talk about that, by the way, in deep focus about recovering attorneys and being former attorneys. That'll be a fun topic. but Ernie is currently running a business called Law Firm Autopilot,

where he helps coach lawyers to get the most out of their technology and be more focused. And Ernie is definitely at the sharp end of the stick when it comes to focus. So I'm really happy to have you on the show again, buddy. Yeah, good to be here. Good to talk to you guys, always. I guess we should just check in a bit because Law Firm Autopilot's new since the last time I talked to you.

Yeah, no, it's doing well. That's the name of the company. I guess more people know it as inner circle. That's what I call my platform on circle. I know Mike knows about that because he uses Circle as well. And it's a great platform. It's a great way to have a community online. And I didn't really think I was planning to build a community so much as try to help

lawyers of technology. But it turns out that the best way to help people is to give them ongoing guidance. And the best way to do that is through a community. and the best things about communities are that they help each other. And so I've really enjoyed hanging out with good lawyers who are doing good things. I jokingly tell them occasionally that if I had been around that many good lawyers on a day-to-day basis, I might still be practicing law. but I don't think it would have been possible to do that

a basis as a practicing lawyer, so I built the next best thing. Well, I felt like when I was a lawyer, there were so few lawyers that actually got it, you know? And I participate in your community on occasion, and it's like, this is a group of lawyers that get it. And you're right. I really wish I had that fellowship back in the day,

not only just about technology, but about focus. and life priorities. You've really made something special, Ernie there. I'm really happy for you. But, you know, one of the things you do is, as this coaching these lawyers, is, you know, let's just talk about lawyers as a breed.

Like, that profession drags you in a thousand different directions. I remember as a litigator, and it just feels like you can't escape. And, like, you listen to a show like this. And it's not just lawyers. There's people that have jobs that do that to you. You listen to a show like this, you're like, yeah, that's all fine and dandy for Mr. Content Creator. But there is a way to bring these principles to bear in a life where you're stretched in

different directions. And you are dealing with people every day that face that. How do you approach that? How do you answer that question? I think I don't answer it with words as much as I just let people see how I think about it, what I'm doing. And then if they say, well, how would I do that? I say, well, here's how I did it. Here's how I've observed other people doing it. I don't think there's a formula for getting what you want out of life. I think there's a way to approach it that will spare you a lot of the agony,

maybe, or maybe not a lot, maybe, but any amount of agony that's spared is good. And I think a lot of times people want to believe that there's a very clear path that somebody else has taken. taken that they can take exactly the same way. And I just don't think that's realistic. So I tell lawyers that. I say, you know, you can get to where you want to be, but I can't give you a template for me. I can tell you my thought process and externalize it so you hear it. And what they hear a lot is like I didn't have a plan for a lot of things, which for lawyers, you know, of course, it's like, you know, garlic to a vampire. They want to hear there's a plan. Even if I don't have a plan, they want me to make one up or tell them retroactively what my plan would have been.

And I think that all sounds great, but the reality is you just have to do things and try. It's creativity. This is how I look at it. It's creativity. What is creativity? You try things. They don't work. You try something else and keep doing that until you get what you want.

And John Cleese, by the way, has a great book on creativity. And he was a trained lawyer, but he didn't practice. He went on to Monty Python. Obviously, you know, that's all about creativity. but he talks about what creativity in the book. He talks about what it is in the book, and it's basically just try things. And don't be so uptight that when something doesn't work the first time,

you go, oh, well, that was a failure. I'm out of here. So if you can tolerate a little uncertainty and discomfort, you can improve in whatever realm in life, including, you know, being a lawyer. Yeah, that book, by the John Cleese book, you can read that book in a couple hours. Like the next time you have a flight,

I would recommend buying that book and just read it. It's so good. I have read that book on Ernie's recommendation and really enjoyed it. I want to unpack if you're okay with it, the topic there of curiosity and community, because you said something about how you don't tell people this is the template, this is the way. And I feel like that is the message from a lot of, quote unquote, productivity gurus. So how do you think your approach being different? And that whole idea of kind of chasing your curiosity has helped you foster the community.

And maybe how is that different than a lot of the groups that you would see show up in this productivity space? Well, I think that the reason I say that, and I feel confident saying it now, is because I feel like I was frustrated. And kind of a lot of times when I would follow some recommendation and then realize, and I wasn't mad at the person who was making it as much as myself for thinking, like, why did you fall for this? It's like, you know, Charlie Brown kicking, you know, the ball. He never gets to kick the ball, but he keeps trying. And then I realized, like, well, it's not going to work for me.

And then I thought, well, does that work for anybody? And then I looked around and I feel like it can work for some people or some people will say it works for them. But, you know, you can't. I think if you're trying to help people, you need to be brutally honest as much as possible about everything that you can be brutally honest about so that they know what they're getting into. And I think a lot of the so-called gurus, they're just slick marketers and they leave out the messy parts that people don't want to hear. And of course, that increases their sales

in the short run. But over the long haul, especially if they're running a community, I'm sure they're going to have drop off because eventually people are going to realize they're not getting the results or they were misled into believing the results were easier to obtain than they, you know, were told. And so if you just tell people, look, this is going to be kind of hard, it's going to feel awkward, and here's how it's going to feel awkward, then they're more willing to try it, especially if they're in a group of people who have all tried it and said, yeah, I felt the same way. What are you saying is right? But, you know, you just got to power through it. So if it was just me saying that in the void, I don't think it would be as successful.

But when you say it amongst a group of people who are all going to acknowledge, yeah, it was hard. And that's true for everything you do. I'll recommend a tool like Whisperflow, which I think is great. It's highly recommended my community. And I started recommending it and people like, I don't know. And then eventually they try. Like, oh, my God, this is the greatest thing in the world. even some of the people who gave me very explicit, detailed reasons why it wasn't suitable for them.

And I'd say, well, okay, if it's not suitable for you, fine. But then they'd see everybody else talking about it. They had FOMO. They tried it. And then they tell me it was amazing. So that resistance to trying new things, I think it's kind of like to pick another book, The War of Art by Stephen Presfield, which is ostensibly only about writing. But it's really about doing anything creatively.

Like there's resistance. It's uncomfortable. That's just how it is, right? And I think it's only uncomfortable to adults because as we get older, we expect perfection. Kids don't think that way. You know, that's why they're so creative. But we can all be creative if we can just suppress that nitpicky, naysaying voice that some comes into our heads as we get older.

Yeah. And I think there's a couple of things there. So there's the authenticity piece, right? I don't know at all. And people are drawn to that. But I think at a fundamental level, people still want to pull. push the easy button and find the thing that is just going to make their life go, right? They remove the resistance.

And it's a different kind of person, I think, who is going to seek out that resistance to borrow another book, The Obstacles, The Way, and be okay with discomfort as part of the process of figuring things out. And I think if you get a bunch of people with that mindset together, that's really where the magic happens. And it took a while for that to unfold. And I think an ingredient that over time worked out was me saying, I don't have the answers,

and saying it's going to be hard. Because, you know, went against the grain, you know, the gurus don't do that. And then I thought, well, maybe people won't like that. And they didn't. But then in the end, when they got a result and they realized my description of how it was going to be obtained, which included the statement,

In the beginning, it's going to feel awkward. You're not going to like the uncertainty. But then when they got through, they realized, okay, he tells me true things. And if he tells me it's worth the pain, then I'm more willing to do it the next time than I was the first time. Plus, I see all these other people that think the same way. So the community has come together, you know, the people who didn't like that and they wanted a clear path and, you know, wanted a quick win or whatever. They bounced off the windshield and moved on their own way. but the people who stayed are the ones who are thinking that that same way and once you have a

critical mass of that kind of thinking you know magical things happen yeah i like to refer to it um when i teach around these topics of faith and then evidence like if you're interested in this at the beginning you just have to have faith and give it a shot and then afterwards you can look at the evidence but you're not going to get the evidence until after you have the faith and it is a journey. And like a thing you said that I think really people need to hear is that it's a personal journey. Like every person has their own way through this to a fulfilling life. And as someone who for a long time felt like I didn't even have the ability to get there. And like Ernie, I read the books back in the day. You know, I remember the seven habits. And I thought, boy, if I just

do these seven habits, then everything's going to. to fix itself. And like, and then you get to this despair like, well, none of this works for me. So then apparently I'm not allowed to, to have like unintentional life. And my argument is everybody can, even a litigation attorney or someone with that kind of craziness. But it takes work and it takes some faith and then evidence. It's interesting. The faith statement, I now have a different context for that or related context. And it's because I am reading this book. It came out in the 70s by a fellow named Peter Elbow. It's called Writing Without Teachers. And he went to Oxford. He was somebody who's smart, wrote well, but he struggled to write. And he struggled to write

his PhD. And he just had all this resistance and trouble. And the book is about free writing. And it was, I think, recommended by Oliver Bergman, who said, you know, people think writing is easy. it's not as hard. Why is it hard? Because it just is. And he recommended this book and said it had been a, you know, a big influence on him or he regarded it as something people should check out. And I thought, okay, you know, I've read a lot of books about writing. But because it's Oliver Bergman, I will take a, you know, a winger on maybe this is one that's worth checking out. And sure enough, it was. And it's kind of like the Julia Cameron artist's way. You know, you just get down, write freehand, for however long.

In the case of this book, he recommends starting with 10 minutes, so it's not a three-page thing. But his explanation of why it works, it was really interesting. Because he said, you know, people have this self-critical voice, which we've already talked about, but he said part of how you get over that

is you believe in things, even though you don't have a reason yet. Like you believe it's going to work out. And then you even believe kind of irrational things, and he uses the quote from, from Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland, you know, I've believed as many, you know,

impossible things in a day as whatever that quote is. And it's funny, I read that, I thought, I can understand that now. And he says, you know, you have to believe in things

that you don't think are going to work until, because what you're doing is working out what part of them are going to work. And if you say to yourself, it's not going to work, well, then you're not going to examine anything. But if you are open-minded,

in the face, of, you know, serious and reasonable doubt even, that's the only way you get to that other place. And I've never heard anybody say that. And he's obviously rational. He went to Oxford. And he's not saying you just make stuff up. But he's saying it's a mindset. It's a habit you have to cultivate in your mind.

And when you said that about believing, even though you don't know, having faith, that to me is what he was saying as well. one of the points that you've made to me personally and that even how I saw it on your blog site is that the pursuit of what you're trying to teach is not efficiency but freedom. Explain that. Well, I've now had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people about what they wanted or what they thought they wanted. I make people fill out an assessment form and tell me what they're trying to get and what tech they use and all much of other things. And at the end, it's like, you know, if there's a magic wand, you could wave it, what would you want? There's another question, like, which of these things do you want automation,

whatever? And I've come to the conclusions, and this is for the people that I can help. So maybe this is like a self-selecting cohort. But I think most people, most reasonable people, sensible, well-balanced people, once they have enough money, which is different for different people, but, you know, enough so you're not financially struggling and you know, you feel certain confidence, they don't want more money. What they want is freedom, freedom to enjoy their family, freedom to explore, freedom to help other people. You know, that's what I think is built into most people, you know, that's my spirituality. I think people want that more than they want other things that they think they want. And for a lot of people, you have to go after those things, get them, realize they don't make you

happy or maybe even make you miserable, realize that they don't make anybody else happy and make them miserable. And then you kind of think, wait a second, why am I doing this? And I fell into that trap. You know, I went to work in a, you know, medium-sized to big firm in New Orleans and the people were great. It was a great firm. And I have no problem with the firm. But collectively, you know, in an organization like that, it's all about making money, improving profits, you know, all that chest puffing stuff that lawyers get involved in and I fell into it because when you're surrounded by it it just becomes the air you breathe and it infects your mind and when I got away from it um which was you know I didn't do it intentionally in the way that I would have wished I had but whatever you know

a bomb went off and I was blown clear of the crater and you know I busted myself off and that's where I was and then I realized like wait a minute I was miserable every day of my life in that building, I was miserable. How did I not realize how miserable I was? And it was because I wasn't doing anything that fulfilled me in any deep sense. And then I realized, like, well, I need to optimize for feeling good about what I'm doing. And forget about the money, you know, the money will come later. And when it comes, it'll be, you know, the right amount.

I always go back to that David Foster Wallace quote about the goldfish, but it bears repeating. Oh, yes. You know, the two goldfish are swimming and the old goldfish swim. by and says, hey, fellas, how's the water? And the young goldfish say, what in the hell is water? And you get yourself in these places where you're putting yourself under this tension and stress without even realizing it. And you have no ability to even acknowledge it until you're free of it. It occurs to me when you're talking about freedom that there's a couple different kinds. and maybe the reason that people get stuck is they want freedom from something.

They feel that they can escape the uncomfortable feeling that we were talking about previously in regards to curiosity. They just want to be safe and not have to worry about things anymore. And every time I've fallen into that trap in my life, I've ended up in the place that you guys were just describing. It's like, what am I doing here? And the other kind, I think, is freedom too. And that requires some self-advocacy, some self-determination, some intentionality,

which is both exciting and terrifying at the same time, I think. It's easy to follow the default path. And when you decide that I'm going to set my own course, you maybe are surprised stuff first at how much you can actually influence that, but then the results are up to you. And if you don't get good results, it's your fault, nobody else's. Right. Yeah. No, that's it. Exactly. One of the books that I've read about that, which helped me a lot when I was trying to decide what to do in terms of the digital marketing agency that I was working at before going independent, was the pathless path by Paul Millard. I know I've mentioned that to you guys. Have either of

you read that book? Yeah, on your recommendation. In fact, he has a new edition coming out. He made a hard. Yeah, I bought it. It's amazing. It's really, really nice. I'm glad to see that message get some traction.

And you do have to go into it realizing that there are some things about his situation where he had some, I guess, privileges. I don't know. Like, he was in a better spot to make that decision. than I was when I made it. So on the one hand, you can look at it and be like, well, it's easy for you to get to that decision because you had this big nest egg or whatever. But that's excuses for why it can't work for you.

And ultimately, you just got to accept the responsibility that I'm the captain of my own ship. I can chart my own course. Yeah. And honestly, when you grab the tiller, you start with a one degree course correct. that's how you get there. But at some point you have to grab the tiller. And I spent my entire 30s adrift without even realizing it like Ernie. I think lawyers are particularly susceptible to this and people like lawyers.

Because you're right, the career gets in your head. And like you get so obsessed with winning cases and moving up the ladder and all the thing, all the metrics of being in that life that you forget that you are an individual and you just, I don't know, you just lose yourself in it. And I think as a young lawyer, I absolutely just dove straight in without thinking. Yeah, and lawyers worship rationality too much, which is, I mean, that's what, it's this built-in assumption that everything can be solved with rationality. And there's a great quote by or saying observation by Rory Sutherland, whose book Alchemy, I highly recommend.

I don't remember if he said it in that book, but he says it often. He says, not everything that works makes sense and not everything that makes sense works. And it's true. Like some things work and you can't explain why they work. They just do. But then what do we need to break it down until it makes sense? why do we have to have everything make sense in a rational way? Sometimes it makes sense in some oblique way and why are we going to waste time if it's working? Like great. But then other times

things that we think, well, this should work because this is rational and then it doesn't. And it keeps not working even though it's rational. And people who worship that rationality just keep thinking, well, I just got to come at it from another rational angle. When sometimes you got to come at it from a non-rational angle. And then it makes, you know, then it'll work. It won't make sense, but it'll work. So I don't know. I just think that's another discovery for me, was realizing it's okay that many things work and aren't rational. I like rationality, but I don't want to like obsess about it. This episode of Focused is brought to you by Incogni. Almost everyone experiences robocalls from time to time. And if you ever wondered how they keep getting your number, the answer is data

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I-N-C-O-G-N-I-com slash focused. Our thanks to Acogni for their support of the Focus Podcast and all of Relay. So we've been talking about curiosity

and creativity, but one of the things that you have been known for on the internet, Ernie, is the 80-20 principle. I know you've gone hard on that,

and I'm kind of curious, how do you balance those two? Because they're kind of competing ideas, right? Curiosity, and I'm going to go try all the new things in 80-20.

I'm going to just stick with the thing that works and get the results. Well, to me, they're not contradictory at all. They actually are complementary, but it's not, it's hard to see. So the thing about the 80-20 principle and other things like this are, there are things that we observe at the surface and there are like first order effects and there are things like that. And our brains are really good at picking out the obvious connection between certain things, especially if it's explicit, if it happens all the time,

if it happens with the regularity of, you know, pool balls bouncing off each other and following the laws of physics. Our brains are good at picking that stuff up. What our brains are less good at picking up, but it's still important, is detecting very powerful patterns that are more subtle, right? So when we talk about the 80-20 principle people all say, you know, Pareto said that, you know, 20% of the people owned 80% of land. And, you know, that's not useful. that's just kind of like a description of the disparity between some things and other things. But when you talk about trying to get a result and you say, well, what do I need to do to get that result? You know, somebody says I need to do these 10 things.

And if you do these 10 things, you're going to get that result 100%. But what if you only need to do two of them and you get 80% of the result? So what, are you going to spend the rest of the time and energy doing the other eight things to get an additional 20%? that doesn't seem valuable, especially if you can then go get a result somewhere else. And it's not that you don't want to be a perfectionist if you can. It's just that it's not worth it. And there's an example I think of a lot in the book, Influence by Robert Chilini, where he talks about how we can influence other people and persuade them.

And he uses the example of a turkey mother. And a turkey mother will protect your young from foxes or, whatever the threat is the turkeys have. And so they will take, you know, extreme action. Everybody tries to go after their young, you know, baby. So they isolated, well, what is it that, so if we replace an actual turkey baby and have the turkey mother protected, what are the things that lets the turkey mother know it's protecting something worth protecting?

So they created an animal smelled like the turkey, that you chirped like the turkey, that had the same external feeling and texture of a baby turkey, all those things, and they would protect it. Then they started removing them. And it turns out that it's like one little thing, a cheap, cheap sound. And you could put like a brick in there. I'm exaggerating. But it was like, it's something ridiculous.

And then the cheap, cheap sound was the thing that the turkey mother isolated on. And his point, and he uses this in the beginning of the book, because people think that they're persuaded and swayed by a bunch of different factors when in reality, they're usually swayed by just a few. And that goes for yourself, right? So if you're spending all this time trying to get yourself to do something, when really you only need to do these one or two things, and you're going to get most of it.

And if nothing else, maybe that's the thing that generates momentum. And then you can add other things later. But trying to do all of those things at once as though they're all equally important, not a good idea. Yeah, definitely not a good idea. So how do you personally find that balance? Do you have a certain amount of time that you give yourself to play with new things? Do you follow your energy and just like, I'm curious about this.

So this is what I'm going to do. Yeah. Well, what has evolved into, and this is not a linear path, but by any means, a lot of failed experiments. Not failed experiments. Just things I tried. It's the creative process. In the end, what I think makes the biggest difference, you know, the 20% that drives everything else the most, is getting up in the morning and not trying to rush into the day, spending some time reflecting by, without a purpose, just kind of like I have a notepad, start writing some notes, maybe journaling, whatever seems right at the moment.

So it's mostly the same, but not exactly the same every day. and some days something will come up and you know like my wife and i have moved to florida and she's busy doing a lot of things and she'll say oh we need to do this and i'll realize oh i don't have enough time to finish journaling and instead of obsessing about it i just go okay okay well today's the day i don't journal and i just let that go and the letting it go i think is the thing that's key right it's just letting things be the way they're going to be and just absorbing what you can and doing what you can. How do you teach that? I don't know. I couldn't have taught somebody else to do it. I don't know who came up with the term daily-ish. It might have been Kourash Dini,

but I'm not sure. But I love the term because it's so farine. Like all these nerds now, we get these apps, these habit apps. It's like, I'm going to journal every day. And it does a great job of showing your streak. And God forbid you break your streak for a day. And, it turns you into just a robot. And I think we all need to give ourselves that kind of forgiveness. You don't have a thing that you do daily, but a thing you do daily-ish. And when you miss a day or two, it's okay so long as it's a thing you do. And I think so many people lose track or give up on really good daily practices simply because they missed a day. And the habit tracker app made them feel bad about themselves.

I do have to confess that there is one thing where I'm on a streak where it's not so much about maintaining the streak, but I think it was Ali Abdal who was the tripwire for this. But I journal with my hand, and I like that, just very thoughtful. But then I wanted something where I was capturing at least something of what happened every day. And so I started using day one. And so I've been using it for, I don't know, four years, five years, whatever it is. I have a huge street going. And if I missed a day in day one, which is rare, I mean, like, as in I just didn't open it up that day and fire up a new template, I will just go back and create that day.

And the most important thing that has to get done in each day is to say one thing I'm grateful for. And I've gotten really good at coming up with some interesting things because I can't use the lame old big ones. I have to come up with, no, I have to, but I want to come up with. with something that says, oh, yeah, yeah, I'm grateful for that person whose name I just remember that I hadn't thought about it in a long time. So that is what the day one journalist for. And then, of course, if I'm traveling or whatever I'm doing, and I want to look and see, you know, on this day, a year ago or five years ago, what did I do? I can look at that. But it's easy because it's on my phone and I can just open it up and create a new entry. And if I, if all I do

is put in a picture, that qualifies. That specificity, I think, is the, they key to making gratitude work. I also capture gratitude daily and for a long time I had trouble getting it to stick and got that piece of advice is don't express gratitude for the same thing twice. And if you go back and look at my entries, you'll probably find some repeats. But what it does is that it forces you to find something new about your situation that is actually going well. maybe it's just me or my personality. I'm not sure I'm not the only one, but I tend to focus on all the things that are broken

in the systems of my life. And I'm like, these need to be fixed right now. And it's a good reminder sometimes that it's not all broken. There are some things that are working well. Yeah, exactly. You know, Ernie, you talk about 80-20 a lot,

and I feel like this is a role that I find constantly proven true in my life, but I often forget it exists and fall in the trap of chasing the 80. And so often the 80-20 rule to me is hindsight as opposed to proactive, if that makes sense. It's like I finish something. I'm like, why did I do all that when I only needed to do just that tiny bit of it to get the result I needed?

And yet I find trouble learning that lesson. When I go into new projects, I don't have the 80-20 filter installed in my operating system, I guess. It just, I still go at it whole hog and, you know, help me, Ernie, Juan. You're my only hope. Well, I'll use words you used earlier. I think the trick is, especially if you've been reflecting on, okay, well, this is an example where I did too much. Overthought it, overshot the mark, whatever. then when you encounter something new, say to yourself, I mean, this is a Tim Ferriss quote,

like, what if this were easy? Like, what if I could, all I had to do was this. And then, here comes the part that you talked about earlier, and then believe it. Truly believe that that could work out and see what happens. So the, what if this were easy? That question, I love that question. And I think that kind of leads us. kind of naturally into the whole topic of AI and maybe your approach to it.

Now, context here, you and I have been having calls every month for a while just to talk about the interesting ways that we're using AI, and I have learned a lot from you in those calls. So I really like your approach to this. I feel like your balance of curiosity and what's new and the focus on the results with the 80-20 kind of gives you a unique perspective to this. but how are you approaching the use of these AI tools in your life and business? Well, I'm experimenting with, you know, all the foundation models, right? So perplexity, Claude, chat, GPT, notebook LM, those are the main ones.

I might be missing one, Gemini, you know, notebook LM is Gemini. But those are the frontier models, and they all do some things that are overlapping, but then they have things that are maybe unique or that they do better. And as I use them all, I know they're all changing. So I experience changes in capability, temporary outages, temporary frustration that the users have with something that, you know, they didn't like. But when you're evaluating all of those things at the same time, it is, it can be difficult. But you start to see what's common.

You start to see some patterns. And, you know, I don't think you can understand AI. by listening to people talk about its use. I mean, I don't think you understand anything that way. I think you have to use it. And then you ask yourself, okay, what did I learn there? What am I experiencing? And so, yeah, I'm just using it and trying things.

And it's always evolving and it evolves very quickly. So I don't feel like I've ever got a steady hand. And I can just kind of say, okay, I'm coasting now. I'm always going, oh, crap, they just release some new thing. I got to go check that out and see if that makes it. any sense. And a lot of times they'll be like, well, it doesn't really make sense, or I don't have the patience to tolerate it's learning it right now. But that's what's great about being in a group of other people. And in my case, it's lawyers. But anybody who's interested in learning to

use AI, we just talk about this. And we say, okay, what did you learn? And I learn as much from them as they might say that they learn from me. And of course, they learn from each other, too. So we're all learning together. And I think that's the other thing that's important if you're learning it. I get in a group of people who are not naysaying and nitpicking it, but using it and talking about where it tripped them up and where it helped them and what they hope to get out of it. That's really useful. And then how are you using these sorts of things? I'm kind of guessing that with the emphasis on what if this were easy, there's certain things that you have to do. And those would probably be prime candidates for using AI tools and automation in general, correct?

Well, I mean, the first skill with AI is prompting, which is just asking it a question. And when people, I'm sure there are people out there who haven't used it yet. But if you haven't used it, you know, the first thing you're going to do, because your brain is going to make you do this, is you going to think of it as a search engine. Oh, I have a question. I'll ask it a question. He gives me an answer. Instead of like, oh, we're going to have a conversation.

All right. what's that conversation going to be like? Now this is where I think for lawyers, especially litigators, I can coach them through something that they understand, which is when you go into a deposition or you're going to examine a witness, especially if it's a witness that's adverse to you, you have to think about how to get them to give you the information that they have that's not controversial first while they're cooperative.

And then when you start to become difficult with them and insistent that they give the answers you need, you know, things are going to get ugly and they're not going to be so cooperative. So you have to think through which questions need to come first and then move on. And another part of it is like doing legal research with computers, you would say, I'm going to ask the broadest possible question and then I'm going to narrow it. Because the thing is, once you ask a narrow question, if there was another pathway you could taken or that the AI would give you some information about that would be helpful, you're not going to know about that.

So it's about having the right kind of conversation. That's the skill. But overall, it's the skill of reasoning, you know, critical thinking, but I call it critical reasoning because thinking is just, you know, thoughts floating through your head. Reasoning is like, how does this make sense? What else do I need? What context is missing? What did I assume that now I realized I shouldn't have assumed?

You have to be mentally alert when you're using AI. If you're dull, you're going to get dull results, and that's not going to be that useful. But in the group of lawyers, it's been interesting to watch the ones come in who were thinking as a search engine. And then as they evolve, they realize, oh, no, no, I need to, you know, monitor it, ask it questions in the right way, not assume it's always going to be right. but as long as you are going to be thoughtful and not, you know, take everything it says as gospel truth, it's going to be a very helpful tool. It's only not helpful or not that helpful to people that are not thinking at a certain level. Yeah.

And unfortunately, those are the people that are going to be most disrupted by it. Yeah, I remember a while back you shared the Clayton Christensen talk, what are the jobs to be done? and I've applied that to all of the tools that I use, and it's what I teach with the PKM stack concept, is what are the jobs that you're hiring these apps to do? And I had a bit of an aha moment, as I was thinking about what is the job that I am hiring the AI agents

to agents is the wrong word. I was using Claude a couple of weeks ago, and I've always wanted to build these personal dashboards inside of my obsidian vault, which used the DataVue.js code to scrape all of the data from all my daily notes and show me all of the charts and the graphs and all that kind of stuff. Problem is I don't know DataVu.js at all. And I found somebody who did, and I looked at the blog post they put together, and they explained it very well, but it was still over my head. So I knew that this was possible, but I had no idea how to do it. And I just started chatting with

cloud. I'm like, this is what I want to do. I want to create these dashboards. And it was really helpful, not just in giving me the code that did what I wanted it to do, but helping me actually think of other dashboards that would be useful. It's like, okay, so now that we got that one, what do you want me to build next? I'm, geez, I don't know. What do you suggest? And it gave me four or five other ones.

And I've kind of gone crazy with it now. And I'm building all these dashboards with all this data. And I love it. It's kind of opened up with these tools. And obsidian is not the only one that you can do this sort of thing. I know Claudebot is the new hotness right now. And you can kind of build your own productivity system, even your own productivity apps,

if you can just think about it the right way and guide it to do what you want it to do. Yeah, and it's just a conversation. So you don't have to have it all worked out in advance. It helps if you have a plan of some sort. But, you know, if you don't, that's fine. As long as you're able to react to what it gives you, in a thoughtful way.

And that's why I say, I think the people that are not doing well with it are people who truly, they just want the answer and they just want the formula. And if it's given to them, they follow it slavishly and they maybe get the result, but then they can't reproduce that result themselves.

You need to be able to work out how things might be working. And I guess that's part of it. It is a black box. That's true. But it's not indescentive. decipherable. Like you can make assumptions in real time and be reasonably certain that most of those assumptions are correct. And if they're totally incorrect, then you have to realize, okay, that didn't

work, but that's wrong. But people who need certainty on an ongoing basis in a really powerful way, I feel bad for them because they won't be able to take as much advantage of these tools as other people can. And indeed, these tools create more uncertainty than they're used to. So it's actually a net loss if you're not willing to be flexible with this stuff. Exactly. I think that's the overall theme here today is be okay with things, maybe not being okay. And just kind of ride the wave. Yeah, being okay with things that you don't understand or that are not. determined. I think being okay with them being not okay, some people will push back and, you know, the nitpickers and the naysairs will say, we see, but no, if it's not okay, you can't be okay

with that. That's true. You don't want to be okay with failure, but it's not failure. It's that feeling of uncertainty and awkwardness or confusion. And the thing is, you know, look, I mean, how many things, if you could chart, and no one could, but if you could chart through your life, the number of things you've been confused by or felt awkward with, which eventually you went on to master or feel completely at ease with, it's a lot of stuff. Okay. So if you've already done it that many times, you can keep doing it. Just like, just ignore the uncertainty part. Just let it go. Don't worry about it because it's just what, it's the price you pay for getting to the part where it doesn't feel uncomfortable. And it's not a big price. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by Squarespace.

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Ernie, we always like to wrap these up talking about a good book we've read recently. I'm not going to put you on a spot. We'll go first to give you a minute. Mike, what are you reading these days? I actually just finished the Overthinkers Guide to Making Decisions, kind of relevant for the topics we've talked about today. I don't know what to think about this book. There's some good stuff in the first part, but then there's a whole bunch of exercises,

which didn't really click with me. I like that kind of stuff, but this one just didn't quite fit. I think there's probably quite a few people in the focused audience who would really dig it, though. It's a really short book. It's one of those like woven cover books, like the Derek Sivers books.

And the actual text that you're just going to read it like a standard book is probably 80 pages at the most. And then the rest of it is kind of like a workbook to help you think through things and decide for yourself what is actually important. A lot of the same things we talked about here, you know, deciding for yourself what you're going to focus on and taking control of your decisions and not trying to please everybody and all that kind of stuff. It's decent. Yeah. It's got a Zen Buddhist bent to it, which just doesn't jive with me. but okay okay mike it's rare you find a book that just really doesn't hit with you that's good to know

i've got one i really enjoyed i think one of our guests recently turned me on to nicholas bait who writes these tiny books in um in kendall and he just released one of the new year called tools of excellent and um he just made a list of all the tools in his life that are excellent and made a little essay about each one. And they're not just tools. Like, one of them is emergency cash. One of them is the three by of five card. One of them is the concept of no.

But these are all tools that he has that he gets through life with. And you can read this book in an hour. It's not long. But you're going to get a bunch of ideas going through it. And then I have now started in Obscity in my own Tools of Excellence project, you know, where I'm starting to note my tools of excellence. I don't know if I'll ever publish it, but just for my own reference to know

what are the things that I rely on. And I really enjoyed it. I think it's a great book. I think it's like all of like $2. And it's inspiring, not necessarily that you're going to use all of his tools of excellence, but maybe it'll give you some food for thought as to which yours are.

All right, Ernie. How about you? You got a book for us? I have a book. but I have, well, I have two books, really, because they kind of go together in my brain. Nobody else's brain, but my brain. And the first one is called The Science of Storytelling by a fellow named Will Stor, the last name spelled S-T-O-R.

And he breaks down why we need stories, why we create stories, why we especially like fiction. And in the course of it, he'll reference some books. of them was Kazuishiguru's book, The Remains of the Day. And I think there's a new book he wrote, not I think, there is a new book that he wrote called Clara and the Sun, which my wife had read and said it was great. She said, you should read this. And she said, you'd really like this book. And then I never got to it. But then because of reading Will Stores book, I said, okay, I'm going to read this book and I'm going to think about what he's saying. And what he basically says, and I experienced it with Clara and the Sun, which is about fictional people, like A,

i. Bots and in the future take care of humans. And the humans, of course, disregard the AI bots. And there's a lot of empathy and emotion. But in the book, The Science of Storytelling, he says, the reason why fiction is so powerful, and I'm going to try to convince Mike to read fiction now, is because... There's new developments here, Ernie. I read fiction.

Oh, okay. Well, then think about this when you do, because he... And I know this is true for me as a kid, why I like to... fiction as a kid, but it's why people like fiction, is that it allows you to see the world from the perspective of somebody else in a way that you could not otherwise do. And movies can't let you do this because you can't get inside the inner dialogue. And when you do, you start to work out things for yourself or understand things in a way you really can't, because nobody can share their inner world with you other than through a book and specifically through fiction. So as a result of that,

said, okay, I'm going to read one of these, you know, authors that he recommends. And when I was reading Clara and the Sun, I was observing how he constructs this person that I'm able to understand who's completely fictional and even fictional in the world she lives in because she's not a real human and make me feel something for that person. And oh my God, you know, it's just incredible that we're able to do this. And so his book, I highly recommend, he's got a substack now as well. He's He's just a very thoughtful person. So the science of storytelling is definitely worth checking out. I think you'd like that.

And it maybe help you appreciate the fiction that you read even more. Because now when I read any work of fiction, I'm constantly looking at how the construction is happening. Like how are they letting me understand somebody by saying just enough, but not too much? Because you have to give people room to let them create their own, you know, use their own imagination. So, yeah, it's a pretty cool thing that we're able to read fictional accounts and create them.

I mean, I think of all creatures, digital and organic, humans are the only one capable of empathy. It's a unique trait that we have, and I think we should embrace it. And fiction is an empathy machine. Yeah, it's true. Yeah, so I've read a couple of... Fiction books. The first one was Ready Player 1, which was okay as a fiction book, but lots of 80s nostalgia, which was fun. Fun ride. Yeah, fun ride. Yeah. And then I just finished Red Rising, the first one by Pierce Brown. And that, I can see the elements of the storytelling that you were talking about as you're

figuring out who this Darrow character is. I like that one a lot. I've got the second one ready to go, but I'm currently reading, I've even got it within arm's reach here. Classic fiction, the great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I'm about 30, 40 pages into this one. We're actually going to go see that at the Performing Arts Center in March or April. So I'd never heard the story before. I'm liking that one. All right, Ernie, let's do an audible here. Ernie, let's both give Mike some fiction recommendations. Let's both pick one for him. Okay. Okay. This is, again, it's light fiction, but it's really enjoyable. And I think Mike would like it. It's a series of books by Naomi Novick. And she used to write for video games, but she turned into a novelist. And she wrote this series called Timmerer, T-E-M-E-R-A-I-R-E.

And the first one, I'll give you the setup, Mike. It starts with this English captain in the Napoleonic Wars. He's out at sea. And the difference in this universe is that they have dragons. and the dragons can talk. And so there's a separate, like, dragon corps in the military. And this captain is a sea captain. He's very happy with his career.

They capture a French boat that has a dragon egg on it. And the dragon is going to hatch before they can make it to port. And it's a huge deal because the dragon bonds to somebody when it's born. So they, like, try to get someone on the ship so it can bond to one of the the air core people and the dragon is born and it's very intelligent and it decides to bond itself to the captain who has to then give up his naval career and become the kind of captain and and you know the the accompanier of this or the you know the the caretaker of this dragon and it's a very special dragon and from there she goes into a series of novels and it's very

very much escapism, but it's just a delight to read. I think, Mike, you would enjoy it. I think you could read it with Toby. I think he would dig it. I think your kids would dig this one. Nice. That sounds fun. I'll check that out. Yeah. All right. What do you got from Eurney? I'm going to go with Clara and the Sun. And I'm going to tell you that one way that I will read a book now, and I did this with Clara in the Sun, and I will recommend that you do this unless you don't want to, is because it's so oblique in places, there's certain things. There's certain things that he does where he you know they're talking about things that you don't know that what those terms mean and he doesn't make it easy for you like you're supposed to figure it out and i got impatient i was like

i know i'm supposed to know what this means but i don't quite and i'm not quite sure so i just asked chat chabit you know like in the book they're talking about this what does that mean and it kind of knew i think it's gotten better at this point of going like i'm going to tell you everything but you know But since you tell it you're starting out, you know, you don't give me the plot. And it helped me in a couple of different places with that. And then at the end, after I had read it, I said, give me some things to think about from this book. And it gave me a bunch of different ideas. And this is where I was like, you know, I mean, I'm not saying you don't need teachers.

You do. But the teacher's role is going to be to take what you ask at the moment you ask it. But if you just want, you know, the questions at the end of the book that you should be asking yourself, you can create that with, you know, one of these AI tools. And I do that all time. And I'll ask the AI, like, what does a word mean? Give me examples of how it contrasts another word that I know the meanings of, but I just want to be reminded of how they work together. So Clara and the Sun, I think you would really like it. And, yeah, that's the one. All right. Just added it to my audible cue.

All right. I got some homework. All right. I'd love to hear. what you think of those books, Mike. We are the Focus Podcast. You can find us over at Relay.fm slash Focus. You can go there to sign up for the membership, so you can deep focus, get the ad for extended version of the show. Thank you to our sponsors today. That's our friends over at Incogni and Squarespace. Ernie, where do people go to find what you're up to? If you just search Ernie, the attorney on the web, you will be led in the right direction. I think Ernie was the first attorney blogger on the internet. Yes.

But also, if you're a lawyer out there, I really recommend you check out Ernie's community. Like I said, if I was practicing, I would be haunting it daily. I just think you've made something very special, Ernie, and really happy for you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Like I said, we're the folks' podcasts. We'll see you next time. Have a great day.

And you deep focus members, stick around. Ernie and I are going to talk about being recovering, and lawyers. See you next time.