Modern Wisdom - #199 - Taylor Pearson - Discover Your Life’s Core Values & Operating Principles

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

Taylor Pearson is an investor and writer. Your life is highly controlled by your values and principles, even if you haven't written them down, or even know what they are. I fell in love with Taylor's blog post on this topic at the start of 2020 and just had to bring him on to discuss it. Expect to learn why defining your values & principles can change your life, the importance of aligning your intentions with your actions, how values & principles relate and differ, how to identify & create your own list and much more... Sponsor: Shop Eleiko’s full range at https://www.shop.eleiko.com (enter code MW15 for 15% off everything) Extra Stuff: Taylor's Core Value List - https://taylorpearson.me/core-values-list/ Taylor's General Operating Principles - https://taylorpearson.me/principles/ Follow Taylor on Twitter - https://twitter.com/taylorpearsonme Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. My guest today is Taylor Pearson and we are talking about yet another blog post which I fell in love with at the beginning of the year and tracked the author down online to force him to come on to modern wisdom. Your life is directed by the core values and operating principles which underpin it, whether you've written them down or not, whether you even know what they are or not, they are the wind in the sales of your life. And upon reading Taylor's blog posts at the start of the year, I realized just how much of a

profound effect it had on me to force myself into purposefully manifesting, actually getting them out of me. And I just wanted to bring it to you guys. If you're in the right place to hear this, I genuinely believe that the exercises which Taylor takes us through today can really, really impact your life in a massively positive direction and they're free. My advice would be that once you've finished listening to this episode, head to Taylor's website, check out the exercises and give them a crack yourself. I'd love to find out if they have as brilliant of an impact on you as they did on me. But for now, it's time for the wise and wonderful Taylor Pearson.

Before we get into today's podcast, I have to put a disclaimer out, it is absolutely sweltering in Newcastle, so I'm wearing a vest. Got loads of stick last time or a vest, but it's not a lack of care about this podcast, I'm super excited to sit down with Taylor Pearson. It's just too warm, you know, I'm in under a bunch of lights and it's challenging today, but Taylor, man, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here, glad you're saying cool. And, right, well, the problem is in the UK,

it's only hot for like five days of the year. So no one has aircon. But to not have aircon in a house in America would be ridiculous, right? But over here, it's like, why would you have aircon? It's cold, like seven and a half months out of the year. And so, here's what it is. So today we're going to talk about core principles and values. You've got a couple of blog posts which just

blew me away when I read them at the start of this year and a bit of huge influence on me. And I just wanted to give you the opportunity to tell the audience about why core values and operating principles are so useful, why they're so important, and then kind of give us some insight into your thoughts on them. So to begin with, do we all have core values and operating principles? Because you got this big list on your site, 37 operating principles and your five core values and all this stuff. If someone hasn't written them out, do they still have them guiding their actions?

Yeah, I think it's some other way. You all have intrinsic real face decisions every day. You have like whatever mundane decisions and you're going to have a salad for lunch or a burger for lunch. You have, you know, who are whatever? Who am I going to marry? Who am I, you know, what am I going to do with the rest of my life all of all of all of all of all of all of all of all of all of all way where you're like waiting what's going on in a decision and choosing it one way or the other. So yeah, to me, it's something that I think everyone has to send. I said internally, I found externalizing them, you know, sort of like making them explicit where I can kind of read them one, can like help me be a little bit more self-reflective? Is this actually something that I think is important? Do I want to do this?

Oftentimes, I find out I'll treat one area of my life one way, another area of my life and other way. When I put all those things out on paper, it forces me to be a little bit more like, oh, this is a bit hypocritical. I could apply this to there and that to there. So you use the learnings from certain areas of your life to progress your understanding and insights in different areas of your life? Yeah, I think to start maybe the general operating principles, the way that kind of like

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

and kind of what am I gonna prioritize what it's about to make, and I'll read through that, and you know, very frequently, it's like, oh, like I'm about to make that mistake. Again, you know, for the 14th time kind of thing, but if you know, if I have it there in a written, and I can look at it, I go, ah, like this, you know, I can notice that I'm doing a thing again,

and I can be a little bit more deliberate about it. So having those externalized sort of written down has been really helpful for me. You've touched there on the fact that it's avoiding mistakes rather than kind of expediting successes. Is this a focus on not being stupid rather than trying to be clever? I think you can go either way. I guess I probably spend more time trying that to be stupid than trying to be clever. Yeah, I see if you can, you know, whether survival is the first rule, right?

You know, if you can sufficiently not make up any mistakes, and I think it's interesting, I've read a lot of books that I can invest in, businesses and, you know, there's many, many ways to get rich and there's only a few ways to go broke. And if you can just avoid all the ways to go broke for long enough, like you can probably make it work out, okay, you know, like there's a lot of ways to do it right, but only a few ways to do it wrong.

And so I guess my bias, I tend to focus on like, if I can just not make any major mistakes here, I'll probably be okay. Don't multiply by zero, man. No one wants to multiply by zero. Exactly, yeah. So why core values and operating principles so useful? Is it just this sort of compounding of wisdom

across different areas of your life? Is it just making decisions less arduous? Yeah, I think it is, I think it's just, yeah, for me at least, it's sort of like being able to be consistent. And I think part of it's, I think you feel, it feels good when you're sort of,

quote unquote, in alignment. There's this story, I was like, there's an author, Mikaeli, Chink sent me high, I'm sure I'm mispronouncing his name. But I've read a couple of his books and he has this great story talking about, there was a study done in the 1990s where they were looking at geneticists and journals.

They were sort of a bunch of different professions and they're basically seeing like, who likes their job the most and why, like what makes someone like their job. And journalists were like the most unhappy with their jobs. And geneticists were the happiest. And basically what they're, you know, their conclusion as to why that was was,

the way the incentives were structured with the geneticists is everything was aligned. The Genesis really believed that if they were just doing the best science they possibly could, that was most likely to be about the drugs or the pharmaceuticals or whatever that were going to help the most people and would make the pharmaceuticals more money. So everyone, if I can just do the best science, I possibly can. Everyone else, this is the best thing for everyone. And the 90s was when journalism had started, a lot like big conglomerate should

come in and bought these media companies until a lot of people that started journalism careers because they were like, I want to report the truth and tell important stories and all this kind of stuff for writing, you know, whatever the 1990s version of Buzzfeed kind of quick bait headlines were. And that was what got the most told the most newspapers and search and advertising revenue but they were like deeply unhappy doing that as a job and so in the same way like I think you know I certainly go through periods where like I just kind of get off course you know I just start like working on

things or I start doing things and it's like there's actually like I'm not really enjoying I'm not super happy about this I'm not super happy about this. I'm not kind of enjoying it. So, I almost think about the way a plane navigation system works. It's always going slightly off course. The plane is never directly on the right. You're flying from Austin to London or whatever. You're always going to be slightly off course, but it's always just sort of error correction, right? It's always just making it move back. And so in practice, it's close enough to a straight line that it works well. And so the same way here, I think the principles

or the core values are sort of that navigation system is just like, hey, you know, actually, you want it to go here. And like, if you want to change your mind and go to Belarus or whatever, like you can do that, but like, let's be deliberate about the decision. I love that. I love the idea of being deliberate as well. Recently, you had Kylesian Rodeur on talking about working out what you want to want. And so much of that is that the things that people do are not done by design. No, it's the way that you dealt with

past traumas, societal norms, genetic programming, natural predisposition, whatever, all of these different things. Very easily, that can lead to you ending up in a place that you didn't want to be or even mean to end up in. And looking back on a life that you regret is like, that's what we all are trying to avoid. So hopefully today we can give the listeners some tools that will help them to not lead a life that they regret. So first up, what's the difference between core values and operating principles? Is there a difference? Yeah, so actually the concept I've got is from a business book called Work the System, and it talks about this like in the kind of sort of companies.

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

or you can make charts better or kind of whatever it is. And so, you know, I think, I guess it's maybe the easiest to think it's sort of like a level of abstraction, like a value, like one for me would be something like courage. It's a fairly abstract concept, right? It's not like super clear in most areas how you would apply, how would you be more courageous in your relationship,

how would you be more courageous at work? And there's like lots of different ways that could go. Whereas to me, like, principles are a little bit less abstract and like closer to where the sort of rubber meets the road. So like, you know, I always have time for a good friend, right? Like that's that's a much cleaner, simpler thing. Like if one of my best buddies from high school calls me, like whatever's going on, I can like make time to like talk to him about whatever's going on. So that's the sort

of the more explicit, um, be calling like, here are the sticks like a rule of thumb, right? Like if this and that, if this happens, then I do that is kind of operating principle where is a value is going to be more like, yeah, like a courage or integrity is a bad one, I think, because like everyone should probably have integrity, but that's sort of level of abstraction. Yeah, there's some core values which shouldn't be able, they shouldn't be listed as a core value. There should just be an accepted entry requirement

for being a human. And that's someone that says honesty is a core value. It's like, well, what's the fucking opposite? It's like, what? How's honesty? Honesty isn't a core value. Honesty is just the thing that you do. It's like, one of my core values happens to be breathing. Like no, it's just how you literally, how you continue within the world. I like the idea of the levels of abstraction. I think that's a good way to sort of split the two apart. It's a little bit like core values are the ingredients and operating principles are the meals that you can make from those ingredients, right? You can make multiple different meals from

some of the ingredients that you've got, but the ingredients do actually influence, you know, if you've not got any dough, you can't make a pizza. You might not be a pizza guy, but if you've got. But the ingredients do actually influence, you know, if you've not got any dough, you can't make a pizza. You might not be a pizza guy, but if you've got tons of whatever it might be, you can make a different sort of a meal. Sure. Can you tell us what your core values are? That would be quite cool. Yeah, I have, now I have them written down because I actually forget them, which I think is a case in point about writing them down, but, you know, I think one for me is like agency, and that's just kind of like, it's important

to me, it's a provider that I have a lot of control over sort of how I live my life. You know, I guess a lot of the ways these things sort of developed to me is just noticing things that like bothered me or just ways in which you behave differently. And so I just felt like most, most like most people could put up with a bad job or someone they didn't like. I just couldn't put up with it. I was just like 15 minutes in a conversation with someone I didn't like.

I just couldn't suck it up and deal with it and talk to them for the next hour at the conference or whatever. I just had to get out of there. And whatever would just do the Irish goodbye and walk out of the conversation and uh, and go for it. Um, so agency sort of choosing how I live and uh, and helping others. You likewise, um, like self development and some capacity and I kind of like learning has always been like very important to me. Like I, I, if I don't read for long enough, I get like

very cranky. My wife will tell me to like go away and like take some time just like do a little bit of reading. Taylor Tell it, leave the kitchen. Go and grab a book. You're on the naughty step with your book for 15 minutes until you come back. Yeah, that's right. But then I'm in a much better route. I'll come back and I'm just like,

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

I think, sorry, sorry, I'm sorry. Am I right in saying that courage was one of the ones that you put where you didn't feel like it was something you necessarily didn't naturally, but was a guiding value which helped you to operate more effectively when you had it. Is that that one? Yeah. I don't know how typical that is to me or in general, but as you face some challenging decision, you're like, maybe I'd rather not make this decision or I'd rather make the

easier path, but at some point it became clear, like if I reflected on past decisions, typically the more courageous choice I was happy with in retrospect. That's really interesting. So I remember reading the blog post the first time I read it, I ran about Christmas time, and thinking that was a really clever way to identify one of your values, because what it's quite easy to do here is to reverse engineer. This is the sort of person that I am. Therefore, these are the five values which are most close to the person that I am. It's like, I am a person that is, you know, if your list of 67 was a list of 5,000 and it had all the bad stuff in there as well, it's like, I am a person who is shy and timid and easily irritated and blah, blah, blah, you know, quick to judgment and all this sort of stuff.

What you've done is you've set a North Star for something that you want to be, not necessarily an existing disposition that you have, you know? Like that's the agency thing is something that is inherent and inbuilt into you, whereas the courage thing is something that you are looking to try and put more of into your life, right? Yeah, and I think, you know, I guess those two, just as we're talking, I'm thinking about it. There's something that's been sort of very influential on me. There's a guy named Joseph Campbell, you know,

a touch, tighter and before he's a, he was a professor, I think in like the 70s and 80s, but he wrote a book called, He wrote a thousand faces, and then he kind of became well-known, but he wrote a book called, Hear With A Thousand Faces, and then he kind of became well-known, or to be extent he was well-known. He was kind of the influence on George Lucas of the writing of Storr Wars, that he had studied all these sort of like ancient myths, religious stories, like Bible, Northwestern, Native American, et cetera, et cetera. And this idea of The hero of the thousand faces is all these myths across all these different cultures

you're actually telling a very similar story. There's a certain structure underlying the story. And the reason that's evolved in all these different cultures is because it's a way of sort of teaching people how to deal with various things in their life. You can read these stories, you read a good fiction book, or it's interesting. And you can see how it can apply to your life. Oh, I'm not dealing with this exact problem, but something like that. And one of the key, and so he broke it down into 12 stages of this, the hero's journey, that, you know, the hero can find you problem. They set off on a challenge, they overcome difficulties, and they come back, and then they bring their knowledge to the world

and they're sort of like teaching, right? You can see this in Star Wars, you can see this in the Bible. This is a very sort of like universal mythology. But at the moment, I think it's like the third stage, and the way he describes it, is what he calls the refusal of the call, that you have something that's calling you. If you're like Luke and Star Wars, it's like he's being called by Obi-Wan to go on this quest and do this thing.

He's like, no, I have to stay on to the hero. I'm unwilling to hero, yeah. Take care of my parents and I can't go off with you. And then eventually you have the crossing of the threshold, where the hero accepts the call to adventure and they step into this new world of, you know, at the start of the Star Wars, it's like if you remember the scene where Luke goes to, it's like a weird bar,

there's like all these aliens there and it's like crazy and he's like never seen all these different, sort of things, but you can think about that as sort of like a metaphorical. Thanks anyway, going about this idea of like, agency and courage, right? It's that, you know, I realized in retrospect, those times when I sort of approached the threshold, you know, there were times I had turned away and there were times I had chosen to cross

the threshold that I had had some courage to stand a step into the sundown world and do something. And you know, sometimes the end of the world is something that's seemingly quite small, like, you know, going to a different school, whatever it's gonna be. But in all those cases, that was meaningful. And so, I sort of could reflect on those past experiences, and say actually this thing, when I sort of have courage in this capacity,

when I accept this call to adventure, that ends up working out very well for me. And in retrospect, I can look at major life turning points and they all sort of had that archetype in common. Yeah, so that's a pre-disposition before making a good choice. Tends to be something which comes just before a prelude to that. So, okay, we've got the first three. What else have you got?

So, Soul in the game is another one for me, and I guess this one is a bit unique. I got this from, there's a guy named Nisim Talab who's written a few books, probably the most famous is a book called The Black Swan, he was a financial trader, but he talks about this idea of, you know, there's skin in the game, which is kind of like homerobby's code, right? It's like, it's an eye for an eye. It's like, if you're going to, you know, the way in like ancient Babylonia, there are certain rules. Like if you built a house and the house collapsed and killed the people inside, you would also be killed, right? So you were very incentivized to make sure the house was a good house, right? Or, you know, if you're the architect building the bridge,

you have to live under the bridge, right? You want to make sure that the bridge does, you know, what you say, the bridge. Money what you're going to do. Yeah, and it's the idea is there should be a symmetry and risk, right? Like, you shouldn't be allowing others to take risk for you, right? You should have the same experience. If I'm building houses, like it's not fair, that I'm going to live in a house built by someone else that's better at than me, and I'm not put everyone else in my crabby house, that I don't know what I'm doing, and, and you know they're going to be at risk or whatever.

And so Soul in the game is kind of an extension of that kind of just when you take on risk for others, right? And I think you know you do this with a friend or people in your family or whatever is it's day you know they have something going on and you bear some of that that burden or that that risk for them. So that's that's kind of the idea of soul in the game. And again, that was sort of a, I got that from his book and I really liked it. And then I sort of, again, kind of reflect on it. I was like, you know, when I sort of do this,

when I'm, when I have skin in the game, when I have soul in the game and have that risk there, I just feel better. You know, I can, I just feel better about it, right? Like I just feel confident what I'm doing. That's cool. And what's last, is it five you've got? Five, yeah. And last one is this rest-approcity. To create more value than I capture. I got that from, and you know, you can see a lot of these,

I basically barred from other people and they resonated for some reason or another, and and I put them down, but Tim O'Reilly from from Moreilie Media is a big, they've just do sort of like tech publishing books, and they had some funny moment, I think they had published a book on like C++ programming language, and they got an email from this guy that was like, I just sold a $5 billion company based on your like $50 book on C++ that I read and then built this software and they were joking. They were like, well, at least we create more value than we capture, right? Like, you know, we found this five-banded company's made $50.

And that's an extreme example, but I could say, yeah, that to me seemed like an important principle, right? Like, I want there to be sort of more value created than I'm just capturing myself. You wanted to be a sort of net positive. That's beautiful, man. I mean, you know, if you've got those things as the foundation to your life that sits below the building, you build on top of it, or as the ingredients that are going in, you know, if those are the ingredients, I challenge you to make a shit meal out of that.

I think it's going to be challenging to have a shit meal as long as you stick to those good ingredients and you build out of those. So mine, I did mine when I followed the exercise that you have on your blog and everyone that's listening, it will be linked in the show notes below. I really, really, highly suggest that once you finish listening to this podcast, you go and do the five, the core values exercise. Take, you said 15 minutes which it might take some one 15 minutes, but it took me a couple of days because getting it down to five. It wasn't hard finding them. It was

reducing it down to five. I can't get rid of that one. I can't get rid of that one. That's the one. But anyway, I managed to get it down and mine spelled out an acronym, which actually helped me to bypass the forgetting them. That's smart. Yeah. I know. So it spells out cases, C-A-S-E-S. So curiosity, to be curious, to explore myself and the world around me to meet new people, A, adventure, to see new places, do new things.

I want to live a life to the fullest. S was actually a steal from you about the soul in the game, which was where you'd taken a concept and then reworked it, and it was selfless development. So it was to improve myself, learn how to operate effectively, and then teach others what I have learned. E. Excellence, to make the most of minutes, I want to be precise with my thoughts, words words and actions. I want to fulfill my potential.

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

because you understand that the balancing act is quite important as well. If you're gonna have a maximum of five, so for instance, for me, excellence actually is really, really applicable to a lot of the different things, but curiosity kind of guides the direction. So excellence can kind of be how curiosity and adventure are in motion.

And finding that balance, but yeah, everyone that's listening, you need to go and do the values exercise. If you can do it in the space of an hour, I'll be really, really impressed. Maybe you just happen to look upon it, but you give it's like a big chunk of like 70 potentials and then other people can add their own in. But dude, I think it's a really lovely way to kind of just reset the way that you operate within the world, right? Ensure that you are aligned, as you said, that your thoughts, words, and actions are aligned with actually who you want to be, who you are. Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know. I'm curious. I know I found a sort of set time to do these ones. And I I remember I'd particularly like the soul in the game one

I kind of remember kind of coming to that and like actually I see this is really important to me And I find when I when I was sort of write these down that as I said like I would I would sometimes be applying them to one part of my life but not others I just remember I should have like I would have to I would reprocess everything. I like oh like I'm doing this over here in this relationship But I'm doing this over here in this relationship, but I'm doing this over here at work. And I'm doing this other work project. And it can grow in here, but it's not can grow in one of these two places.

And so having it external, I'm every time I would write one of these down. I'd be like, oh, I now think through everything again a little bit, just sort of reprocess. Like, oh, the reason I'm unhappy about this is actually because, you know, I'm avoiding you know, some difficult conversations that have been courageous about whatever it is. That third party perspective makes a big difference, right? Treating yourself as if you're someone you're responsible for helping. Yeah, I think it is a useful kind of construct,

right? As you can sort of separate yourself, the thinker from yourself, the actor to some extent. Yeah, that one and two. It's just, it's so interesting to me to see how this rolls forward in people's lives, because everyone that's listening knows what their mums or their sisters or their partners core values are. Sometimes they're actually living really, really bad core values. Like, I constantly concern myself with what other people think of me. Like, so that would be like a hyper awareness or a hyper kind of self-consciousness or whatever it might be. And if you, by writing them out and having them there, it's almost like a checklist, right, that you got to go through. How are you doing

this? Are you being courageous? Are you having soul in the game, etc, etc. So moving on to the operating principles of which you've got 37 and these are so cool. And I absolutely love the idea of creating this kind of compounding library like iterating on lessons and things principles that you can do so could you talk about sort of where you started with this can you remember that story as well from was it we in Vietnam or Thailand or something like that Yeah, I want I was a friend of mine. I was actually my roommate at the time. I think again, like one of these sort of daily decisions, it was like, I think Friday afternoon, like 3pm, and he was like going to the beach, and he was like, do you want to go to the beach? And this was

like agonizing, because I was like, well, yeah, I kind of want to go to the beach, just like hanging out and like chill out and have a drink and whatever. But I also like have this like work project have this work project that I was going to do on Saturday. I haven't worked out this week, so I should probably stay and work out tomorrow. I was just from 3 to 4 p.m. on Friday. I'm saying, it doesn't matter that much. This individual decision doesn't matter. But I compounded it does matter. If you miss one workout,

it doesn't really matter if you miss every workout. It matters a lot. And so I started, I was like, okay, I need to have some way to make these decisions better. I mean, I'm spending an ordinate and out of time deliberating on these these sorts of things. And again, like it's this one in

particular doesn't matter, right? And I think I ended up not going to the beach, but had I done to the beach. Like it's not the trajectory of my life would not have been meaningfully different at all. It's really the thing state the same. And so I sat down that weekend. I think I wrote the first version at the time as maybe like six to 10 sort of operating principles. And there were just things that at that point in my life, I had in my head, right? I think one of them was sort of, say, a idea of kind of like an integrated life. And like my bias is I tend to just get really sucked

into usually my work and like what I'm doing professionally and like I mean it's it happens to me all the time that two months ago I like I track sort of my how many work hours and I was like doing 80 and 90 hour weeks and I was just like at the computer all the time and I was like I can't you know I can't do this right like this is not this is not sustainable and then what I would do is I just put the I have them in an Excel spreadsheet and I'll look at them usually like every Saturday morning, I sort of plan my weeks out.

I sort of do a weekly review and weekly planning. First things Saturday morning. And I would just notice, you know, I would again, like these certain mistakes, right? I would just do the same dumb thing over and over and over. And I'd be like, oh, I should like stop doing, I stopped doing that dumb thing. Or the inverse, it's like, I, when I do this thing,

like I'm really happy about it. And it like works out really well for me. I should just do that thing kind of more consistently. So periodically weeks when those things came up to me, I would sort of add into the list of like you, sort of another kind of operating principle that I find. I can look in multiple instances in my life where we're following this was beneficial. So we've touched on the integrated life, which is one of your operating principles.

What's some of the others that stand out to you as the most important or that you rely on the most? Or just ones that you love? Yeah, you know, the other one I just talked about this idea of the heroes journey and the crossing the threshold. There's a book called The War of Arc that I really like by a guy named Steve Pressfield. He's, he wrote the Legend of Badagger, Van, Camer movie about the golfer. He has a couple other famous books about like I think Sparton, sort of Sparton War, whatever. But he wrote this book about his sort of journey to becoming a writer.

And he talked about this idea of the resistance, right? That we all have this voice in the back of our head whenever you're sitting out to do something new, new. This says, you know, you can't do it right whether you're going to start exercising or doing yoga or start a business or write a book or have a relationship whatever it is. You just like, you know, you can do this, like this is going to suck. So you talked about sort of his own journey as a writer of like having this resistance in the back of his head, that he would be basically bumping around and like waiting tables and doing a bunch of odd jobs for a decade.

And he was like, this was just the resistance kind of kick in my ass, right? Like I just was getting beat down by this thing. And so part of this thing is, you is, we all need to sort of fight by the resistance. You go to war with the resistance. You have to see where in your life there's kind of that resistance, where is the resistance, and how can you sort of lean into that,

lean into whatever that thing is that you can fill yourself avoiding. And so that was a good thing, because I haven't read that book. This sense for what you mean by the resistance. And that doesn't mean that in a normal context. But hadn't read that book. This sense for what even by the resistance, that word doesn't mean that in a normal context. But if you read the book, you get this sense for like, I can feel that, right?

And that's a question I ask myself every week. Where am I avoiding the resistance? Where are the areas that I'm avoiding the resistance? And it comes up very frequently. I'm avoiding a difficult conversation with a business partner, or I'm avoiding letting go of a client because of what whatever it is. That one changes up to... That's awesome, especially because our evolutionary predisposition is to avoid change, right?

We try actively, we don't want to do the new thing because the new thing might have a tiger in it Or the new thing might have a snake hiding under it or whatever it might be plus it's expensive You know energy wise and cognitively and I always use this same example, but um I Posted about your Uda loop log Yeah, a while ago, dude. I've nearly finished I've nearly finished the book on John Boyd as well, one of the biogas. The rubber quorum?

Yeah, no, great massive though, it's so long. I just keep some going. Anyway, this particular way of doing decision-making and kind of reflecting on the way that you operate within the world. And I can pull some stuff up about that, which is a game changer, right? I really love it.

I love the idea of that. Post that up, no one cares. Every time that I post up me using Alphabrain by Onit, which is a Neutropic, my inbox gets expo. Oh, dude, is this any, I'm like, that's the resistance there. The resistance is that the trick is the five minute booty blaster ab at home DVD for six pack abs in 20 seconds. That's what that's what because, uh, Hey man, I'm really struggling with my

motivation on my procrastination to get this thing done for university. Okay. Um, what's what's the best productivity app? Should I use rescue time, or should I actually be doing freedom, tied in with pomodoroes and blah, blah. And I'm like, do you have your phone out at your desk? Yes. Right.

Is that another thing? You know, it's staring you in the face. But again, it's the resistance, right? And it's often the things that we don't want to do. And then when you layer on top of that, that a lot of what we do is just signaling both to ourselves in terms of self-deception and to other people to make them think that we're doing a thing

and that we're actually in control, it is, increasingly as I read more and more revolutionary psychology, I realize that externalizing the way that we operate is almost mandatory, because like if you make a decision based on just like what you think at the time, it's almost definitely gonna be wrong.

Like the fact that we don't get hit by open traffic on a daily basis is a bit of a miracle. You know, like why we just, you decision making is awful at the time. Yeah. It's terrible. I'll tell you one of the ones that I absolutely adore which I've started using. Number 20, I go into Terminator mode at 85% complete.

Once I get to 85% complete, I start obsessively focusing on the project that's 85% complete. The mind will play all sorts of tricks on me if I let it. Trying to seduce me into doing something unrelated on you. I never give in to that. I get hungry and focused when I get to 85% complete, I get it done, Sebastian Marshall. Yeah, I mentioned that I got that from, from my friend Sebastian, but I liked that.

You know, I was kind of placing the resistance button and I feel like everyone deals with this. You get, when you start thinking about, you get the stage of the project, what you're talking about, other people judging it, right? Like other people thinking about it. Your head just starts to play all these little tricks on you. It's like, well, maybe this isn't the appropriate thing for you to do at this point with where

the brand is going and you know, maybe just put this on the shelf a little while and like do the, you know, the thing I even, you know, I notice I write like a weekly newsletter and maybe from the time I start writing to time, I'm done, maybe it's two hours, you know, it's not that long. But at like 90 minutes, I'm like, nah, I don't know, I don't know if this one's good. Like maybe I'll just skip this issue, this one kind of sucks. And I'll just like wait and do the next issue. And it's like, I don't know how many, I published 300 something articles on the internet. And it's like every article basically was the exact same thing.

Like maybe there was like two. Yeah, like maybe two of us is like, oh, that was really good. But like most of them, like, no, it's probably sucks. Like, I don't know. I could just kind of like go for it kind of thinking to that again. Like, that was a mistake. I saw myself making it over and over and I was like, okay. And then I was talking to the best.

I was like, that's a great rule. Right? Like, it gets to 85%. if you get that close to getting it done, you just do it, right? And all the way I've heard it phrased is, take the roast out of the oven or take the turkey out of an oven. If you cook a turkey 80% of the way, it's totally useless, you can't eat an 80% of the way cooked turkey. It's all be raw.

It's like, just finished cooking the turkey. And like, even if it's not the best turkey, like that's okay. Like you can just use it to make soup or something. You've got something you can start with. That's awesome, man. What else you got? What else are some of your favorites

from your operating principles that stand out? Yeah, I think another one that I come back to a lot is this idea of kind of like power laws or sort of how you frame decisions. I think like the we tend to think of, you know, you talk to you about like resistance to change, but like we tend to think of things in like as like relatively incremental, right? Like I'm doing something this way. Maybe I can make it like five or 10% better. And the idea of a power lot, power lots, like a 10X improvement, right?

And so as this force and function, it's like, what would it look like if this was like 10 times better? Or 10 times more, whatever the thing you want it to be is. And as a, it forces you'd think about it differently, right? You know, if you're running a business and you get your customers because you go to meetups in your local city or whatever, you can't go to 10 times as many meetups, right?

Like, it just won't, there's no way just doing more, you can't just do 10 times more of what you're doing. There's not enough time. So you have to think about, it forces you to be here and it's like, well, okay, should I hire people to go to meet them? Do I also do this other thing? It forces, I think, this sort of deforestation function

of how to think about things differently. I find that's often my biases to just kind of like grind away. Like I'll just keep running away at this and like maybe to get 5% better this year and whatever. And you know, there's something we said for that at some point, but you know, you also need to not have this thing. Like, you know, what would it look like to sort of make this thing 10 times better in some capacity?

And usually that means kind of reinventing the thing from the ground up. Yeah, it's challenging that though. We often, I often talk about this at work that the boys, I run a nightclub events company, I've done for 14 years and a lot of the boys will come in and continue to grind away with the same strategy that got them a shit score for their team last week and the week before and the week before and the week before

and I'm like, man, like if anything, what you've done is proven to yourself that this particular strategy is ineffective achieving the goal that you want. Like, this is an identifier. This is you constantly stepping on a mine, then getting an artificial limb refitted neck at each week and then go, wow, that mine. I know, I know the last like five times I've done it, that's happened, but this time might be different. And it is, is that just that there's a cost, there's a challenge with that orthogonal lateral thinking? Do you think that's a big part of it?

Do we like to retainize stuff therefore we continue to grease the groove we've already in? Yeah, I don't know why. I mean, I wonder part of it's like, as you said, just there's such a resistance to change. You know, the way you're doing it's not working, but it's not working in a fairly predictable way, right?

I know this isn't working. I know this isn't. But it's not gonna fail in some spectacular embarrassing terrible way. It's just gonna fail in a very normal, predictable way. And I guess that's true, right? Like, a lot of times it's like, I would rather, people would rather fail in some, you know,

they would have to go badly in some predictable way than like take some risks. Like, well, if I try doing it this, we are different way. It could, it could, spectacularly go wrong, right? Like, this could end really badly. This is, this is why I think people have a

aversion to driverless cars or self-driving cars. I think people would much sooner be killed at the behest of a human than survive at the mercy of a robot. Like they just think, I don't understand. Like there's a lot more. Look at every single start that you've got.

Every single statistic about how many road deaths are, especially in America, it's crazy. Total number of road deaths that occurs, like it's a real big number. You think if we had all of the appropriate technology moving forward, we think we could reduce road deaths by, and it's some stupid margin. That's like 80%, 90% something like that.

But there's an aversion to it. It's like 80%, 90% something like that. But there's an aversion to it. It's like, why? Well, like, you know, the deaths that we do have, like the mistakes that I do make, at least I know that it's like mine to bear. I don't know. But I think that's, I think that's a lot of it. It's that sort of existing paradigms, right? People don't like new. Yeah. I did visit, I was like the evolution of ecology that take theirs and she writes, like, if did visit, I, there's like the evolution of ecology they take

there as an issue. I'd say, if you go, if I go forage over here, it kind of sucks. And I just barely got enough food to, to live. But like, there's no lions hiding in the bushes over there, right? Whereas like, I go to this other place, it could be way better, but like, there could be a lion in the bush or there could be like poisonous snakes or like whatever it is. So like, maybe, and I think there's, I think that's, it's hard to parse out because like there is some wisdom in that, right? Like, give it is going to fail. Don't multiply by zero. We said we studied the salt. Right. If there's a, there's a lion hiding in the bushes, like, you shouldn't go there, right? Like it doesn't matter how delicious the berries are on the other side of the lion.

Like, it's not worth, you know, don't go't go through the lion. You don't go through the lion. But I think there is, you know, particularly for myself, I think this is genuinely true. Like, you know, you get hung up on other people's perception of whatever it is, right? Like the quote unquote lion is something more like, you know, my friend is gonna think I'm dumb or the people at this, and you're gonna think I'm dumb

or whatever it is. And like that's scary. Again, I think the evolution of college, the explanation here makes them sense. If you get thrown out of the tribe and you're left on this, they all lie yourself like you're screwed. Even if you're not the best thing, you got to make sure that the tribe kind of likes you. One of the nice things about the present day, and the internet is you kind of get to pick your tribe. You kind of get you and I think one of the nice things out the present day and the internet is like, you kind of get to pick your tribe, right? You kind of get to figure out who you want to hang out with. Yeah. How should people so the core values we've got that in an exercise

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

What should they do? I think, I mean, you can link to the article, but like read mine, read other people's and like maybe you get some idea. And I like, as a lot of mine, as you know, you quoted the Terminator one from Sebastian, like that actually wasn't my idea, right? Like he just said that and I was like, oh yeah, actually, like if I did, that things would work out better for me. And I should kind of just start doing that. So I think, yeah, you can use it for other people. And then I think having just some sort of reminder, I don't know, once a week, once a month,

where you sit down and you read over whatever you have and you think about, like, is there something else that I would add to this lesson? That's my, I think mine, I sort of have my internal version that's maybe like 45 or 50 now, but not on it, maybe every year I find like three to five, right? Like it just kind of slowly and incrementally grows as, you know know new things come up for me. That's awesome. I'm going to give you a couple of mine. So I've only been working on that. I haven't taken any of yours although a lot of yours are phenomenal. But I've been building mine up in preparation as soon as we put this

podcast in. So one of them is from Ethan Subli, guy that was in the butterfly effect and my name is early was on the podcast two weeks ago. And he's got this thing from a coach that taught in martial arts called No Bad Reps. And basically, it's that you're always drilling something in a very, very real way from a neurological perspective, everything is a habit.

Whether you choose to continue to do an existing good habit, break the good habit, do a bad habit, break the bad habit, everything you do is building an action which is more likely to occur in future. And there's this, the partitioned brain approach, which is in, why Buddhism is true by Robert Wright. And he talks about the, modular brain, sorry. And he talks about that as well, that it's like which module wins? Does the IE to cookie module win or does the, I don win or does the IE to decide to go to the do it or not? And Ethan's coach from martial arts is saying,

like, you're going to do this movement. You can either drill it and make the next time that you do it compound on something that's better, or you can do it with poor technique, and next time you've got to undo that, plus then try and get yourself better again. So no bad reps. And I thought that was just like a sick operating principle. And it was quite cool that it was just sort of three words. And then another one from Navale, and this is linked with Tiago Forte, who is most successful tweet of all time. Navale's escape competition with authenticity, no one can beat you at being you. Navales is escape competition with authenticity. No one can beat you at being you.

And then Tiago has, you can't compete with someone who's having fun. But escape competition with authenticity, no one can beat you at being you is just, it ties in so much of the stuff that I've learned from doing this podcast and speaking to cool, interesting people like you. And the fact that your competitive advantage is your unique mix of background and talent

and the funny way that you pronounce the letter T and all the stuff, the fact that you wake up and you're back hurt, everything that you have, coalesces to become your unique offering to the world, and that is your competitive advantage because it's your ability for authenticity. So those are my the two that I've got for now, the No Bad Reps and the Escape Competition with Authenticity.

I like that. It is beautiful to sort of borrow them from, like the No Bad Reps, right? I like how that's applying to like, more larger exercise or whatever, but it's fairly easy to sort of like generalize that to other things, right? You know, whatever you're working on a podcast or an article, like you don't sort of everything as like some level of focus, right?

Like I'm not going to just like mail it in on this one. Yeah, no, I agree. And so one of the things I wanted to touch on before we finished was, you got this really interesting article about the truth about working smarter, not harder. Could you take us through that? The, I think you, you say that there's five, there's only three ways to work smarter, not harder,

but then when you read the article as five. Well, there you go. Truth and advertising. That's fun. Well, that's, that's what, how you sign up and you think you were just getting three. But it's fun. Well, that's that's what how you sign up and you think you would just get in three. But actually, he's the DVD extras. So prioritize tasks by energy level. What's that mean? Yeah. So I think like one way you think about like sort of how many I'm going to have this much time, this much work. And we tend to tune it tune it up into time.

I think it's it's probably more useful to think about it in terms of energy. So I got it for me, like 9 a.m. to 12 p.m. in the morning. Like my productive output at that time, relative to say 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. at night is like a factor of 10. Like it's vastly better. Like I've never in my life created anything useful

after 10 pm. Nothing good happens there. Like basically everything has been between nine and and 12 kind of thing. And so most people don't, you just wake up in the morning and you're just like, I just start kind of doing the things I gotta do, right? And like, you know, for example, like for me, it's like if I started and I just like do a bunch of administrative stuff at the first thing in the morning, now like my best energy when I like my head was clear and everything was straight, I just spent like, shorting out my bookkeeping or, you know,

that I'm trying to set an appointment with someone that really know isn't coordinating well, or whatever it is. And you know, it's just like it's a bad use to that time. And so that kind of thing is like, I'll do that at like five o'clock in the afternoon because like I'm tired, you know, it's already done a bunch of stuff the day. I can like call the FedEx guy and like coordinate the delivery. And like that's fine. It's not sort of energy.

So thinking about like what are the things you want to do, you know, writing for me is a big one that's like a high energy thing. I try to, I'm looking at sort of how I'm organizing my time, right, like I want to have that in big blocks in the morning. Protect that. And then I want to sort of organize everything else around that kind of stuff. Cool. Okay. I really like that idea, man. I think it's one of the, it's a unifying, no matter whether you're coming in from GTD or whether you're a new dilute guy or whether you're the optimizing for optionality dude or whatever it might be,ifying no matter whether you're coming in from GTD or whether you're an ood aloop guy or whether you're the optimizing for optionality dude or whatever it might be.

Like no matter what your approach is prioritizing matching the task with the energy level is definitely right. And you know, someone else might be, I've never created anything useful in my life before 3pm. Everybody, Alex or Connor. Alex or Connor that runs the Cosmic Skeptic YouTube channel. And his university, like, sleep and wake cycle, makes me feel physically ill.

Like, he starts writing his Oxford University Theology and Philosophy essays at 10.11 pm. It's like, he starts winding up for work at that time. And then we'll go to bed at like 5am or 6am. But he'll go into his halls of residence so whatever in Oxford. And he'll go to his hallmates down the hall. 2am and play piano as a break for 30 minutes.

His hallmate will also be up at that time and it'll do a bit of piano and I'm thinking to 30 in the morning, got a bed, got a bed, but that's for him, that's the cadence that works right. So he's matching his energy with the tasks that he's doing, even apparently playing the piano. So your second one is learn new skills. How can that help us work smart and at heart? Yeah, I think, and this one is maybe the simplest

or the most obvious, but like being deliberate about it, you've got this idea of like, of no bad rap. I was thinking about this. My first job was in marketing. That's my original professional background. And I would meet these people that had, you know, quote unquote, five years of marketing experience. And would just do people that had, you know, quote unquote, five years in marketing experience. And we'd just do like, really, you know, something that not someone would, you wouldn't know like off the street or whatever, but like, if you'd been

working in a career for five years, like, you should have learned some things about like how things work there. That is the quote, that is the quote that I want to take away from this podcast. If you've been working in a career for five years, you should have learned some things. Right. Like, that's it. You should have learned some things. And yet, the same people that have been in a career for five years, and are just like

a slightly less shit version of the person that they were when they joined. Right. And if you, it's, like, in any kind of, like, mark, like, there's like, I don't know, five or ten books, maybe, that you could like read on marketing. And like, that's like probably 70% of the stuff you need to know. Like, it's not like, at least this sort of like fundamentals are the basics kind of thing. So just like, you know, I think, particularly if you, whatever you're doing, like if you're reading about something and you're doing it at the same time, you get that really tight

feedback loop, right? You're like, I'm reading about how to do some email marketing or whatever. And then I'm like working on doing the email marketing. I think, oh, actually, what about this problem that I just ran into? And then you can go back and forth and that sort of loop of practicing and reading. It's much more productive than either of those in isolation. Got you. The third one, use popular productivity hacks,

which everyone on this podcast will be very, very familiar with. What's your current productivity setup in terms of the apps that you're most reliant on? I wrote, there's an app called FocusedMate, but I like a lot, which is basically virtual co-working. And so you basically pick a time, whatever 11 a.m. and then matches you with someone somewhere else in the world that wants to do

a 50-minute work session. And it's basically just like a video call. You get on there and they have some like protocols that they ask you to follow on the platform, but it's matches you with somebody. So like, hi, my name's Taylor. I'm going to be working on, you know, writing the first of my newsletter in this session. And I find that at various times, it sort of had writing buddies where we'd go meet and we'd sit in a coffee shop for two hours or they'd come to my place, so I go to theirs. And that social pressure is just like,

I mean, I think it works for all of us, everyone, but it certainly works for me. When I know that person in like 50 minutes is gonna say, like, did you do the newsletter? And I felt like, no, it's I'm like, I should just do the newsletter because I don't want to like tell them I didn't do the newsletter. So yeah, that's a big one for me. Right now, I do, if that's kind of like a version, you know, I think you mentioned should like the Pomodoro technique is sort of like breaking things down into chunks, right? So that's a 50 minute chunk.

I think typically Pomodoro is like 25 minutes,oro technique is sort of like breaking things down into chunks, right? So that's a 50 minute chunk, I think, to believe paladoro is like 25 minutes, but having this sort of like deliberate blocks and then I'll go whatever go for a walk stretch Have a chat with someone. That's cool. I like the idea. I like the idea of that guy Next up you said use software and automation. How can you use that to be smart and hard? Yeah, I, again, some of this stuff seems sort of obvious, but like computers are much more reliable than humans for doing things, you know, generally including yourself, right? And so if you can get a computer to do something for you, that will usually work better. So like as a simple example, I use a text expander app and what that is is you type in like one of the ones I use is a comma, chat, chat, and it pulls down to the thing and says, hi, I'd love to set up a time to talk with you,

let me know it just some times that are convenient, are you for it? If you'd like to go ahead and book a time, I have my availability here, right? And because I do that whenever, twice a day, every day, forever. And then it sends, and then it's like, spending five emails back and four or trying to figure out time to work, they have all these calendar apps now. I use one called Calendly, there's a bunch of them.

But it just like syncs up with my Google calendar. And the person can say, you know, Taylor's free at these times and they book. You talked about whatever time they want. You talked about Upwork and like Tiny Hands as well. Do you do you outsource much of the stuff that you do or are you quite sort of siloed? I do. Yeah. There's an app called fancy hands.

It's like I think you pay like five minutes per 20 to 30 minute tasks kind of thing. So I do try and use use, there's just like a lot of stuff that like they just I just can't figure out a good way to get up like I don't know, you got to call the credit card company to discuss it's like it has to be you, right? Like it has to be a social security or whatever. Like so many things you can basically they'll call and they'll wait on hold for you and they'll get the operator and they'll just dial you in as soon as they have the person. And then it's like a two-minute thing, right?

Because you're like, hi, you know, my name is Taylor. This is my social security number, my information or whatever, like I want to change this thing. And so, yeah, I do try to do that stuff. I, um, I guess I increasingly I had sort of like, um, somebody didn't actually find them through app work, but just a person that worked me out on an ongoing basis that like helps manage a bunch of those kind of things and also higher levels sort of project management type stuff. Dude, you know what?

I tweeted about this the other day and tons of people replied to me and said that they have the same challenge. There needs to be a how to find, train, and work with a PA or VA course for entrepreneurs. There may be some out there if you're listening and you've got one or you know one, please send it to me because I desperately need it. But like, it's getting to the stage now where leveraging a personal brand is starting to hit some scaling limitations. Sure. And which is great because I love being in control of it, of it being me. And there's tons of people out there, zoo beam, my buddy, he's the same like he's,

he has like billions of impressions on Twitter every month. And all of these different things, trying to sell a book and sometimes I do coaching for people and I do this that and the other and I'm just like it's just him and he replied to me about I need to learn how to find train and work with a PA or VA and he replied to it and he was like I am listening desperately like as he needs it too so at someone as anyone just please love, make a course on how to work with one because you are right, it's a challenge with that stuff. There's a website called gethuman.com, which allows you to use a service that will wait on the phone until an operator picks up for you. I don't know if that's available in America, but it works in the UK.

And I found out about that on the life hacks first episode of second season that we released the other week. So that came out. Final one, fifth, the fifth way to work smarter, not harder, develop courage. What does that mean? You mentioned it as one of your core values. Yeah, and this is, I think like, like many people, I love a good life hack, right? You know, you know, it's like, ah, here's this thing. And it's, you know, you know, your example of like the on it supplement, life hacks are kind of like the supplements of productivity or something, right? It's like, I just like do this one quick thing and like, everything like typing, right? Like my

typing speed, I'm making it up by like 20% and then like everything's going to be like way faster and did it. And I have done that many times and still do that. And I, I, it seemed to love that I mentioned from the, the soul in the game had a tweet called Use Courage in Wisdom, Not Labor, to make money. I thought that just like so succinctly captured kind of the idea of productivity for me, that usually it's like, I'll just like work harder at it, or I'll come up with like some trick, right?

Like I'll find some like hack that I'll make this better, but evidently for me at least, like usually it's some sort of act of courage that ends up being more productive, right? It's this hard conversation with my business part that I've been avoiding having that is causing me to do all this extra work. I'm angry about it and I start getting worse and to fall whatever. If I will just sit down and have that uncomfortable conversation for 15 minutes, does it take any time at all?

Everything will go better. The other example I think of when you're in high school and the pretty girl or the pretty guy or whatever, you obsess about them right in the call there's like, they'll never like me and they're like so cool and whatever. And you spend all this time like they can you're about to worry about it.

And like you could just like figure out real quick, right? Like you just walk up and you say like, hi, I think you're cool. Like do you want to go to the movies or whatever? And like they say, yes, are they saying no? And like that's the end of it. And then like you go on with the rest of your life, but, you know, like I like everyone in high school, I suppose, but like I did a two right.

I said, there's some girl I was like, oh, she's so cool and she's smart and funny and did a done and just gonna think about this for four years or whatever. And I was like, I couldn't, could have sorted it out in two minutes. It was a two minute job. Like, it could have been in a, you know, there was no reason to draw that away.

But it was, it was a cursed thing. I was like, oh God, like, what is she gonna say? Well, I go talk to her, is she gonna like say that I'm dumb or, you know, whatever the thing is? That could be an operating principle. In fact, I think it might be one of yours that you take in from David Allen where you say, just always look for the next action. Like, what is the way that I can act on this thing immediately? And another way to look at that, man, I've been thinking about that sort of situation a lot, that there's an opportunity cost to

ruminating about anything. Such an opportunity cost with tons of stuff. So I got this thing, this modern wisdom academy, which I'm super excited about launching, which is just going to be a partner for the podcast. So every day that a podcast episode goes live, which is three days a week at the moment, you get a curated summary of all the key learnings from that episode on a partner blog and delivered in your email inbox. So you're never going to forget anything again. It's like, we could even down the line look at trying to build space repetition into it. So you know, you listen to this podcast and in three months, you can't quite remember all the stuff you said.

You have to go and listen to it again. No, you don't. You do this. I've been thinking about it for ages. And I said, you know what it is. I've been thinking about this for so long. It would be simpler and quicker to just launch the fucking business so that I don't have to think about it anymore. Tarlie. And that's the same as the girl, right? It's like, if you're gonna think about that girl and maybe not go out with any other girls

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

if you're looking for something a little bit new that you maybe haven't heard of before, here's a couple of examples. Yeah, I think, I think the fighter pilot who changed it out of four by Robert Corum is the John Boyle, which is awesome. I use it very rarely. I kind of just like chug along with books, usually I'll start and I'll pick it up and put it down. And that one, I think it was like three days, like I just picked it up and just like,

crush the thing. It's like this is so good. Yeah, I mentioned the War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. I don't know how well I'm known that is, but I like down a lot. And then I guess my shirt off the wall are underrated. I'm probably, I don't know, read four or five times now, is finite and infinite games by James P. Carson. Yeah, I think that would be a new one, but he is a professor at, I think he was, and he

may have passed away now, but he was a first philosophy professor at New York University, I think in like the 70s and 80s. And wrote this book called, Find Out Infinite Games and the premises, there are two types of games in life, finite games and infinite games. And finite games are played according to known rules towards a specified end. And infinite games are played by reinventing the rules with the purpose of extending play.

And that's basically the summary of the whole kind of books. Like for example, when a father is playing catch with his son, he's not trying to win catch. There's rules to catch, and I'm trying to throw it the hardest in win catch. You want to make catch fallout, you're trying to invent new rules to catch. So you can keep playing catch with your son, and that's my American baseball analogy,

but you can use the football analogy or whatever you want. It's an infinite game. The success is like we just get to keep playing catch into the future. And I think that's true of so many different areas of life. You can approach like, well, once I get to this thing, then I will have one in the finite game, whether that's the sport or the whatever it is.

But yeah, there's this whole other way of looking at it, which is like, how could I reinvent the rules of this game in a way that just made it interesting and able to be able to, you know, to continue extending play. So I come back to that book and just that really, you really need to read the first chapter, like the rest of the book is good, but like the first 30 pages, you get the whole, he lays, I mean, he lays out the whole idea, maybe even only the first 15 or 20, but the first chapter of that book is phenomenal. That's awesome. It's a much cooler, less cliche version of, like, the path is the destination. It's about progress, not perfection and stuff like that. I actually prefer that. I prefer talking

about the way that the game gets played and being able to continue playing the game as well. I think that's a, that's a cool way to do it. And we made it, we did it. Great success. We made it through everything that we've gone through, the phenomenal blog, which like you say 300, 300 posts from the last God knows how long. What's next? Is there any other stuff that you want to plug? Any stuff that people should go and have a look at? to plug any stuff that people should go and have a look at. No, yeah, check out the blog. I have a newsletter. I write random things on there, so if you're into that stuff, you know, go for it. That's awesome, man. Thank you so much for your time, Taylor. I've really, really enjoyed this. Cheers, Chris Pleiser.

Yeah, oh, yeah, oh, yeah