Something You Should Know - The Art and Benefits of Wasting Time & 45 Billionaires Share Their Secrets to Success

Episode Date: May 17, 2018

You know what is one of the most common decorating mistakes people make? It is hanging art on the walls incorrectly – usually too high. I’ll explain a simple rule that art galleries and museums use and you should too. (https://www.bobvila.com/articles/how-high-to-hang-pictures/) Imagine asking 45 successful, billionaire entrepreneurs what made them successful. That’s exactly what Robert Jordan did for his groundbreaking book, How They Did It: Billionaire Insights from the Heart of America (https://amzn.to/2rNN18u). Robert joins me to discuss how we can all put these principles to build our own success. What if I told you that one-third of the fish in your store could be mislabeled? And that you may not be getting what you think you are? That is just one of the interesting facts about supermarkets I share in this episode. (http://www.thedailymeal.com/11-secrets-supermarkets-dont-want-you-know-slideshow) How often have you been told to stop wasting time? Well it turns out that is often really bad advice according to Professor Alan Lightman author of the new book, In Praise of Wasting Time (https://amzn.to/2ImyFHj). Alan explains the problems created by scheduling every moment of the day as well of the benefits of simply doing nothing. And those benefits are pretty impressive! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, one of the most common decorating mistakes you may be making and how to fix it. Then ask 45 billionaire entrepreneurs what's their secret to success and you get a lot of answers. I'll tell you the biggest one that surprised me. You hear about this a lot now, but I have to tell you it's never plan A. Everybody can get passionate around their first idea. It tends to be that success for all these folks was not the original idea. Also, you'll be shocked to know how often fish is mislabeled in the store. And I know you're busy, but there are some real advantages to just wasting time. Well, by wasting time, I mean doing something that is unstructured, where there's no goal. It has been documented that a mind that is wandering and unstructured is a more creative mind.

All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about Ted Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done Ted Talks. Well, you see, Ted Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new Ted Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes.

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And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Something You Should Know. And we start today with one of the most common decorating mistakes people make. And you know what that is?

It's hanging art on your walls too high. About three inches too high seems to be most common. Art looks better when it's hung lower at eye level or slightly below. The rule of thumb that a lot of art galleries and museums use is to position a picture so that it is 57 inches on center, meaning the center of the frame sits exactly that far from the floor. By following the rule of 57 inches,

you wield the power to turn any picture into an accessible focal point in the room. And that's why art galleries and museums do it. And if you're hanging a group of pictures that go together, you should arrange them on the floor first and determine where is the center of the pattern. And then your mission is to get that center 57 inches above the floor. And that is something you should know. Everybody has their own idea of what success is for them.

If everything in your life and your career went exactly the way you wanted it to, you probably have a pretty good idea of what that would look like. But what does it take to get there? How do you achieve that? While there's no one answer, one way to get a sense of what it takes to achieve success is to ask several successful people how they did it and see what they have in common. That's what Robert Jordan did. He got 45 of the most successful entrepreneurs from America's heartland to discuss how they achieved what they did. And then he analyzed the data and put it in a landmark book a few years ago called How They Did It, Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America.

Hi, Robert. Thanks for joining me. And so how did you pick these 45 people, first of all? I mean, this was a pretty exclusive club. There were very set criteria in order to be interviewed for the book. A founder had to launch, grow, launch from scratch, grow and sell a company for $100 million or more, or go public at $300 million or more. I had help from over 100 volunteer organizations, venture funds, Dow Jones, Goldman Sachs, William Blair. And I thought with that kind of definition of success, everyone would have been, you know, on easy street. And, you know, the stories would be pretty uniform and nothing could be further from the truth.

Almost to a man and woman, those founders faced incredible odds in a number of cases. Their businesses completely tanked before they finally succeeded. And I had not expected that at all. That is the image I think so many of us have of these really successful people that it's almost effortless for them, that everything they touch turns to gold, that they have some special knack for just hitting it out of the park every time. And clearly that's not true. Yeah, completely the opposite. I think it's more the Babe Ruth kind of paradox, which is he hit a lot of home runs. He also was one of the leaders in strikeouts, you know, in the history of baseball. And for a lot of company founders, when you dig in and you don't have to scratch very far if they want to tell you, they're going to tell you

stories of trial and struggle and failure that will curl your hair. You know, I remember stories like Rock Mackey, the founder of Tomotherapy. At the time when I talked to him, it was already a successful IPO valued at over a billion dollars. But his story started, and this was MRI technology, his story started with the launch of the company pretty much having to, it collapsed and they laid everyone off right from the get-go because they had a partner, GE was their partner, and GE backed out of the partnership. And so I was thinking, where's this going to go? I mean, how did you get to IPO at a billion dollars when the start of the business is telling

me you had to lay everybody off? And what was the answer? Well, in his case, he was a professor at the University of Wisconsin. He and his partner had a little bit of money themselves, and they regrouped. They figured out a way to start without a big partner because they were believers in their technology. There were other amazing stories. One of the most amazing guys just passed away. His name is Dane Miller. He was the founder of Biomet. Biomet is, that was one of the original creators of artificial hips and knees.

Dane had an idea that titanium was a safer material for the human body than stainless steel. And at the time, this is going way back, everyone laughed at him. So, you know, there's a long story in the book about how he convinced a surgeon to implant a piece of titanium in his arm. And he left it there for 10 years to prove to the industry and the medical community that titanium was a safe material. That's how far people go to prove themselves. Well, that's certainly commitment to an idea, to plant titanium in your body. But how much of this that you're talking about could be, I don't want to call it chance, but, you know, it was the right idea,

the right guy at the right time. You couldn't do it again. You couldn't recreate it. It's kind of like the Beatles. You couldn't do it today. But there was this perfect storm of people, idea, money, whatever. And there's not much to learn from it other than there was this perfect storm. You know, there's this famous expression from Benjamin Franklin, chance favors the prepared mind, and that is true. I think it can look lucky from the outside, but that's because somebody is going to bat so often, even if they are striking out a lot, to the rest of the world,

it looks like, oh, he got lucky. So when the dust settles from all of this and you look at these people, what are the takeaways? What can we learn from them collectively, if anything, that I could then put into practice in my life? Sure, it's a great question, and I'll tell you the biggest one that surprised me. You hear about this a lot now, but I have to tell you it's never plan A. Everybody can get passionate around their first idea, and that's great. It tends to be that success for all these folks was not the original idea. But there was an example in the book of a guy named Bill Merchants, and he had a software company, and it was going along okay, and he was doing software for organizations like the New York subway system. And one day,

the software crashed, and it was a disastrous failure. And he had to fly to New York, and of course, it was on a weekend, and he only had one engineer with him. And they had to write this software on the fly to recover from the disaster. You know what's coming. The original company didn't do so well, but that disaster recovery software, that became the home run. The second thing, the commonality among people who are successful is they have a lot of curiosity. And I think a lot of us don't give ourselves enough free reign to be curious, to question what's around us, and to see a circumstance that may be really bad and normally we might just complain about. But instead, what these folks did was take that curiosity and think about how could you make something better.

That was generally the foundation for their success. I think related to that is the idea of viewing what we're working on as experiments. I see too much around me in myself, my children, friends, that if something goes wrong, we take it too personally. It's, you know, you tried something, it didn't work. Oh, gee, it must mean I'm a bad person. That's not the way these folks chose eventually to look at their work. They chose to view what they were doing as experiments and to not take it personally and simply realize that if one thing failed, okay, that was a good data point. Now try something new. I think another point, it gets back to what we were talking about with Dane Miller,

is you better have commitment. If you're trying something and it's half-hearted, and we heard this from multiple company founders who tried to stay safe. They tried, for example, to keep their day job that they didn't like at the same point as they launched, and it rarely, if ever, worked. Dane's an example of extreme commitment, right, by putting a piece of titanium in his arm. But it was a commonality that the level of commitment was off the charts. And to your friends and family, it may look like you're crazy, but that's what it takes.

But there is that potential that what you're doing is crazy, that you may be really committed and really go the extra mile over a really bad idea. You're bringing up a great point, and this is the flexibility of mind that we all need to cultivate, these two opposites. On the one hand, you have to be stubborn enough to see your vision through. Look at a successful company founder like Elon Musk, right? In the early days, SpaceX, that had to look crazy, right? You know, we wanted to eventually have a mission, you know, a rocket to Mars. So you have

to have this stubbornness. And at the same point, you have to have enough openness and flexibility of mind to be able to listen to other people and to take feedback from the marketplace. And that is a dynamic. That is a skill we can practice and get better at. Robert Jordan is my guest. The name of his book is How They Did It, Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America. You know, I don't think there's a man alive who hasn't worried about hair loss. And with good reason. 66% of men lose their hair by age 35. So you start looking in the mirror and wondering,

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4hymns.com slash something. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology.

That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series

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podcast to the Go Kid Go network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, Robert, one of the things you could take away from what you've said so far? Because you've mentioned Elon Musk, and you've talked about some pretty high-tech-y stuff and disaster recovery software, and people think, well, you know, I don't have that kind of smarts. Maybe what the big secret is is these guys know something most people don't know. You could. I mean, we were looking for examples that we could point to in the marketplace that were real and that were dramatic. But I think the same thing applies if you've got a sub shop,

you know, if you're running a store or if you're running a small business. I think the same principles apply. And you could find this easily, I think, in all different walks of life, where to just go that one extra step. You know, I remember one point talking to the owner of a construction company. A terrible recession hit, and these were not award-winning, you know, kinds of company owners, but they had a good business, and the recession hit, and everybody stopped building. And I asked the owner, what did you do? How did you survive this? And he had a really hard time articulating the answer.

But these elements we're talking about were clearly all there, even if he could not fully express it in terms of his commitment to continually pressing forward to this idea that even if his first line of business wasn't right, he would try other things, that he would have a sense of experimentation about what he was doing. And I think it applies for all of us. Well, I remember when you and I spoke years ago when the book first came out, and I listened back to that before we talked today. And, you know, one of the characteristics that you mentioned back then was that these guys were not rocket scientists. That

was your term. And yet today, it seems more like being a rocket scientist is important. I mean, Elon Musk is in the rocket science business. I mean, it's more important to have that extra technological advantage more today than perhaps back when you wrote the book. Well, technology does play in a lot of businesses. That is true. I do believe more than ever, though, one of the things we found from talking to the original founders was that attitude trumps skill all day long. None of the founders came into their businesses knowing everything that needed

to be known. Generally speaking, what happened was they did learn, they did acquire skills. Even more than that, they attracted other people. None of us do this alone. There were no founders who ever said, yeah, it was me, I didn't have any help. I mean, you look at somebody like Brian Sullivan. He invented the pure water filter, right? All of our refrigerators, we got pure water filters. You got the pitchers, right? He was a liberal arts grad. He got out of school and he got interested in the idea of pure water and he made it his business to team up with an engineer who was good at thinking technically about this. So I think for most of us, I'll take a quote from Dan Sullivan.

He runs a program called Strategic Coach, and he'll always tell company founders it is not how, it's who. When we encounter a problem or a challenge or something great in front of us, if the first question in our heads is, gee, how am I going to do that? It tends to be a roadblock because we think, oh my God, I got these five things, or I don't have the money, or I don't know how to do this. But instead, if you can first fire up this question in your head, which is,

who could help me with this? Who could do this piece of it? Who could do that piece of it? That really is the essence of successful entrepreneurship. It is who, not how. Yeah, I agree with that. I've seen so many cases where business people who don't have the creative skills and creative people who don't really have the business savvy try to go it alone and not necessarily do too well. But you put those together, and you get the right chemistry, and the creative person and the business person, and good things often happen. Yeah, I agree with you. I mean, as you're saying that, I'm thinking of the story of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer,

and I got to tell you, I don't think any of us would have ever heard Bill Gates' name. He might have been a brilliant programmer, but his real genius in terms of figuring out how to be a businessman was in attracting and teaming up with other people, like in his case, Steve Ballmer, and the nature of what that partnership looks like. You know, the thing I've read about them is the number one way they were a resource for each other was coaching each other on what they did with their time. So I think it's critical, one element, which is anybody engaged in any effort which is going to grow in any way, whether it's a business, a nonprofit, is who else you can enlist, who could become your trusted partners.

And when you have those people that you're constructively working with each other and your highest priority is how are you each using your precious time. Well, and I've noticed, too, that one of the things that a lot of people with an idea or a business idea, one of their, I don't know, characteristics, you could call it a fault, is that they do want to do it themselves. They want to, because, you know, if you want something done right, you do it yourself mentality, and if you bring in other people, they're just going to screw it up. Yeah, that is common thinking, and that's how you end up burned out. That's when you walk into the sub shop, the hamburger stand, and you see the guy who started it, and 20 years later,

he's still behind the counter because he can't trust anyone else to handle the money, and he's looking over at the people who are handle the money. And he's looking over at the people who are flipping the burgers and he's still there with the one store and he's tired. And he's not earning a lot of money, of course, because he could never get out of his own way. Another thing I hear a lot is people don't want to bring other people in because they want to keep their idea secret. They don't want it to get out because somebody could steal it. I think that's a recipe for disaster, for failure. I don't care how top secret someone thinks their idea is, it will improve by going to friends and knowledgeable

people. Only once in my life have I ever heard of anyone directly trying to steal an idea. And even that didn't work. Because generally speaking, the energy and the time it's going to take to make something succeed is going to be in the years. And no one else other than that founder tends to have the passion to pursue it. So we've talked about not being afraid to fail, that it's usually plan B, not plan A, and people don't go it alone. What else? I do want to emphasize what I started to say a little before, which is attitude trumps skill every day of the week.

You can't minimize this, that the mindset of going into something is so much more important than whether or not you think you have enough of the skills, the knowledge, the education. Yeah, and we've talked about this on other episodes of this podcast, the idea that you have to follow your passion, that the only way to be successful is to that, that there are a lot of people who don't have passions that can be turned into businesses or careers. And a lot of business and career people who are very, very successful aren't necessarily so passionate about the type of business that they're in, but they're good at what they do, and that it's important to be good at what you do, even if you don't necessarily have a passion for it. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you have this experience, but a lot of times, you know, folks will approach me, and they may be looking for a job, and you'll ask them, well, is your better home a big company or a small company? And they'll say, could be either. Like're like, where do you want to be? Do you want to be, you know, California? Is it New York?

Where's ideal? Like, well, I'll go anywhere. You know, you go on through this list, and that sense of kind of I can do anything, be anywhere, I don't think any of us are really wired for that. I think the more honest self-discovery we can go through, just telling ourselves the truth about ourselves, the better off we are. And to focus on those unique abilities that we each have, because we each have them.

Well, I agree with that. I think people say those things like, oh, I can do anything and I can go anywhere, because they don't want to potentially miss an opportunity. But I think by saying those things, that's exactly what they do is miss opportunity. You're completely, you're 100% on the money. Well, I like that you talk about achieving success in a way that isn't all roses and sunshine and all glossed over. That in fact, people who are successful, and by your definition, really, really successful, have struggles and problems, and it's overcoming those problems that seems to make them successful. Robert Jordan has been my guest. He is the author of the book How They Did It, Billion Dollar Insights from the Heart of America, and there is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.

Thanks, Robert. Thank you, Mike. It's been a pleasure to talk to you again. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest.

Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior

due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named the Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong?

Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.

From the time you were a child, you were told not to waste time. That wasting time is wrong. Just the term wasting time makes it all sound so horrible. You can't waste time. Time's a wasting. Today, there are so many devices and apps and systems all designed to make you more productive, to make better use of your time so you don't waste it. Well, hold on. Perhaps there's a flaw in the basic premise that wasting time is a waste of time. Alan Lightman is a physicist, a novelist, and he's tackled this subject in depth for his book, In Praise of Wasting Time.

Hey, Alan. Very nice to be with you, Mike. Where did this whole idea start, do you think, of when people weren't being obviously productive, that they were somehow wasting time? Do we have any sense, or has that always been here? Well, wasting time, at least in the United States and in England, it was associated with slothfulness. There was a religious connotation. I think there's some passages in the Bible that talk about that it's a sin to be idle. So I think that in our country and in England, that there's a Puritan ethic that says that if you're spending time that's not productive, that you're actually sinning against God. Yeah, so this is not a new thing, but technology has certainly made it a bigger issue, and

even someone like me who is all on board with what you talk about, it's hard not to fall into that, you know, we need to be productive, we need to get, because you get swept up into everybody else's productivity. And it's hard to say, wait, stop, put on the brakes, let's just take some time and do nothing. Well, the internet and the high-speed communication devices and the smartphones and so on has certainly made the issue of time use much more critical, because the ability to work at all times through our smartphones has really robbed us of our quiet time for reflection. And so what? So what's the problem? What's wrong? There are plenty of people who would say, I can't imagine not taking my phone with me in the woods, and to which you would reply, well, here's the problem. There are several problems. One is that it's damaging our creativity, and psychologists have long known that creativity is enhanced by unstructured times.

There's something called divergent thinking where you just let your mind wander. The composer Gustav Mahler took three-hour walks in the countryside after lunch where musical ideas came to him. And actually, there's a study, there's a creativity test called the Torrance Creativity Test that's been used for over hundreds of thousands of people for the last 50 years. And it has shown that the creativity in children has actually been decreasing since about 1990, which is around the time the Internet became public. Then I think that the mind just needs time to replenish, and that's been recognized for thousands of years. And then finally, probably the hardest to describe, the most subtle, but maybe the most important, is that we need quiet, reflective time to nourish our inner selves, to consolidate our self-identity, to think about who we are

and what's important to us. And you can't do that kind of thinking and reflection when you're plugged into the grid and surrounded by the noise of the internet and the outside world. Could it be, could it just be that this is like any other new technology, like when television came out? People were screaming that, you know, this is horrible, it's going to rot our children's brains, that this is terrible. There's always naysayers when there's new technology that it

is somehow going to destroy civilization. And maybe you're just being a naysayer, and maybe this is really nothing to worry about. On the cover of Time magazine just a little over a year ago, there's a picture of a very young girl, teenager, maybe 16 years old. She's looking down, cast her eyes are down, and she looks like all the life has been taken out of her. And the title on the cover of Time is Anxiety, Depression, and the American Adolescent. And the psychologists Psychologists have noted an increase in depression among young people over the last 25 years. And, of course, there are a lot of causes for this. But one of the leading causes, as announced by psychologists and sociologists, is the Internet and the frantic pace of life that we live. And if there are more studies of that type,

which I would compare to the studies on cigarette smoking that showed that cigarette smoking is harmful to your health, I think that that might cause a change in our lifestyle and our relationship to technology. Well, using your cigarette comparison there, cigarette smoking and disease is a direct link. You know, if you smoke cigarettes, your chances of getting cancer go up significantly. If you use a smartphone, yes, some kids are getting depressed and maybe that's partly the result of the internet. But there are plenty of people who use the internet and their smartphones who don't get depressed. So it isn't quite as clear a connection.

So except for a percentage of the population that maybe is affected by this, a percentage of the population is affected by everything. So what's the harm? What's the big harm, culturally or sociologically, to being busy and always being connected? It's all a matter of degree and proportion. And certainly, the internet and the communication technologies have benefited us in many ways. So it's not an all or nothing thing. First of all, I would say that to begin with. But one of the harms is the anxiety and depression among young people who are

looking at their smartphones every three minutes and always being afraid that they're not keeping up. There's a syndrome called FOMO, F-O-M-O, fear of missing out. And that is the psychological syndrome of our young people, many of our young people, who feel that they have to be connected to the grid all of the time. They're not able to keep up, and they suffer psychological problems. So that is one of the harms. And if that syndrome continues and is documented by more and more credible studies, I think that people will take note. The other damage which I talked about, which is the lack of quiet time to reflect on who we are and where we're going and what our values are, that is much, much harder to measure. It does seem to me, though, that this even started before there were smartphones,

before there was the Internet. There was, you know, in an industrialized society where, you know, businesses open at 9 and close at 5, that there's always been this don't waste time, as long as I can remember. Clearly, it's much worse now than before, but there's always been this, keep your eye on the clock, and in school you don't waste time, and it had nothing to do with technology. Right. Well, you're absolutely right, and I think it's part of our religious ethic, our moral ethic, that wasting time is a sin, even if you're not conscious of that. It's

sort of built into the Puritan origins of our culture. There are other countries, for example, in India, where the relationship between people and time is completely different, where people don't live by the clock. They live more by events, and there's a much more leisurely pace of life. But certainly in this country, with our cultural traditions and origins, it has been a sin to waste time for, well, since the Puritans came over in the 17th century. So far we've mostly talked about the problems faced by people who were constantly connected and constantly on their phones and all that. But what are the benefits of wasting time? What good comes of it?

Because it appears, I think, to many people to be more of a don't do that, and then do what instead? What does wasting time even look like? Well, by wasting time, I mean doing something that is unstructured, where there's no goal. And I think one of the benefits of just letting your mind wander without a goal is that you have creative thoughts. It has been documented that a mind that is wandering and unstructured is a more creative mind. Another benefit is just resting your mind. This is part of what happens when we dream at night, that we are sort of organizing and making sense of the day's events. There's so much external stimulation during the day that we need some time to just organize and throw out what's not important. And I think unstructured time during

the day is very similar to what happens when we dream at night. And then I think there's a benefit of being able to quietly think about what our values are, what is important to us, who we are, what do we want to do with our life, remembering certain events in the past, some that we were proud of, some that we regret, which is all part of our self-identity. And you need a certain amount of quiet and solitude for that. I'm sure that when you remember going away for a couple of days decades ago and nobody knew where you were and you were not plugged in, that you probably did think about yourself in a certain way. And we need to be unplugged to do this kind of thinking. Children, when they're playing without instructions, they find new uses for objects.

They take objects, random objects, and they make them into toys. And psychologists have said that that kind of play, unstructured play of children, is very closely related to creativity. That's what we want to preserve. We want to leave room, allow room for play, both as children and as adults. And that's all part of what I call wasting time. Well, I know for myself that my best ideas, my creative ideas, my ability to solve problems often comes when I'm not trying to work on it, when I'm wasting time, whether maybe it's in the shower,

or maybe it's on a walk, or just lying on the couch. But that's when the good ideas seem to come for me, and I imagine it's true for other people as well. My guest has been Alan Lightman. His book is called In Praise of Wasting Time, and there is a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Alan. Okay. Thank you very much, Mike. I'm always fascinated by all the things that go on in the supermarket. I don't know why I'm fascinated by that, but it fascinates me. So this caught my eye and I thought would be interesting to share from thedailymeal.com. First of all, you know how supermarkets spray water on their vegetables and their fruit every once in a while

so it all looks like it's wet and glistening? Well, there's two reasons they do that. One is to make them look pretty, and two is to add weight to them so they end up costing you more. It has nothing to do with keeping things fresh. In fact, all that water helps them rot faster. Fresh fruits and vegetables are really, really filthy. You know when you pick up a peach to see if it's ripe and then you put it back down?

Well, so does everybody else. And so do their kids. So really, when you buy produce at the store, you really need to wash it well when you get it home. And just rinsing it for three or four seconds under the faucet probably isn't enough. Did you know that a lot of fish is mislabeled? According to a study a few years ago, they found that a third, a third of all fish on the market is mislabeled, with expensive fish like tuna being replaced by others that look similar.

Vegetables at the supermarket are always by the front door. The fresh smell and the bright colors of produce make you feel good. Plus, if you buy all your healthy stuff when you first walk into the store, which you're likely to do because the produce is right there, psychologists say you're more inclined to spend more on junk food later, because you bought all your healthy food already. Shelves are stocked strategically. You probably have heard this, but here's the thing.

You're more likely to purchase items you see first. So the most expensive items in any aisle are usually at eye level, with the less expensive ones above and below. And that is Something You Should Know. That's the podcast today. You can reach me if you like by email. I'm at mike at somethingyoushouldknow.net, and I appreciate you listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle.

On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this.

No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a wish coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one.

So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.