The One You Feed - How to Focus on the Most Important Things with Charlie Gilkey

Episode Date: February 1, 2023

In This Episode You'll Learn: How we can learn to align our inner and outer stories to create changes we want Why we need to give ourselves permission to dream and see what's possible The imporance of identifying the story that's keeping you from seeing what's possible How we can learn to structure our work and life so that we can enjoy it Implementing the "5 Project Rule" so you're able to focus on the right things To learn more about Charlie Gilkey, click hereSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Some of us have just not gotten to the place where we see the possibility that's right in front of us with these humans that we otherwise love and care about. That's the opportunity I want to want to present. Like, make that better. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking.

Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure,

and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Charlie Gilkey, an author, speaker, and founder of Productive Flourishing, a website that helps creatives, leaders, and entrepreneurs start finishing the stuff that matters. Charlie is routinely featured, showcased, or highlighted in places like BNET, Time, Forbes, The Guardian, Lifehacker, and more. Today, Eric and Charlie discuss a host of topics, including his upcoming book.

Hi, Charlie. Welcome to the show. Eric, I'm so delighted to be back and to be talking in this context. Yeah, last time we had you on, it was a great conversation. I loved your book, but you and I's relationship was just sort of getting to know each other. We have since worked with you for a couple years, really, as sort of Jenny and I's coach. I would say business coach, but that doesn't really get to the depth that we go to. So business slash mindset slash life coach. And that's been a wonderful relationship. And so when we were thinking about like, okay, new year stuff, what are topics, you know, you just came to mind as somebody who with your book, start finishing with all the work that you do that, you know, I thought we could make a

conversation that'd be really useful for people as they are thinking about kind of the rest of the year. So here we are. Here we are indeed. And so glad you thought of me. So we'll start like we always do with a parable. There's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. There's a funny story here. In 2015, I wrote a post called, which wolf will you feed? That is the parable. And then if you look down at the bottom, I was talking and joking with one of my teammates about it. It's like Eric Zimmer started a podcast on this, right? I don't know

if you remember that back in the day, but we go way, way back. And so two things pop up for me, a question that I will often ask myself when I'm in a situation of uncertainty or maybe discomfort, especially when it comes to other people, is I always go with like, what's the most abundant possibility we can co-create together? What is the most abundant possibility we can co-create together? Because if we focus on that, it gets us out of zero-sum games. It gets us out of feeding bad wolves of I win, you lose, or like it has to be manipulation. And it really gets us into a sense of that sort of partnership. And it's a way of actually guiding me to go to, you know, the good wolf as it were, right. And to go that way. And there's a second aspect where, you know, I'm a motorcycle rider

and in motorcycle riding and in driving, there's a rule, right? You always look where you want to go. You don't look at what you're trying to avoid because that's the best way to crash into it, right? And so when you ride a motorcycle, you look through the curve, you look through the curve. And so for me, as I'm steering and navigating through life, even in those scenarios to where like I hear and feel the bad wolf as it were, right? I'm always looking at the good wolf and say, how do I steer towards that? And I might get it wrong. I might make a dumb choice. But in my experience, even before the parable and just the way that I roll with things, I'm like, I don't

know that I have ever regretted steering towards the white wolf. I've never regretted at least trying to build the most abundant possibility with other people. And so I just sort of like steer that way. And over enough decisions, over enough days of our lives and interactions, it's one of those things. I think you end up in the place where you don't have to ask the question anymore. You're just always steering that direction. And so it's always useful to come back and, you know, when, when I'm in those points where I do need to steer, I'd be like, oh, that's what I need to do. But that's a long answer for just saying that, like, that's how I roll with the question and integrate it and just use it on a day to day.

It's interesting. I am preparing to go surfing later in December with my son. I am so excited. And, you know, I've been learning, you know, how do I learn more about surfing? So when I get in the water, I can spend more time up on a wave. And that idea of looking where you want to go is so key there. You know, it's just, that is a fundamental lesson of surfing. You've got to be looking where you want to go. And if you do that, your body fairly naturally will follow, you know? So I think that idea of, you know, looking at where we want to go. And I think there's a bunch of ways you've been really helpful to us, but that's one is we've started to look more at where we want to go, where I had a tendency to look a little bit, like you said, at the thing I don't want to hit,

you know? So for me, a lot of the work has been around getting into more of, I don't even like these words because they have echoes to me of things that I think are kind of new agey, like the secret and stuff. But this idea of an abundance versus a scarcity mindset, Again, I don't love those phrases, but there really is something that has changed in me as I've looked more and more at what are the good things that are happening here in the business? What are the positive things that could be happening instead of going, well, it's gone well up till now, but surely we're going to wreck this

thing soon. I just remember a fundamental conversation where you're like, well, why don't you just assume that since you figured it out up till now, that there's no reason that's going to change. And I was like, well, I guess given that I'm making up what's going to happen in the future anyway, we don't know why not make it up in a way that turns out to be empowering versus a way that keeps me looking at the obstacles I don't want to hit. Yeah. And thanks for putting that down. And I agree with you. There are a lot of words in the broader industry that we're in that I don't love. Like, I don't even really love

business coaching, but it's what everybody knows, right? So, I'm like, okay, I'll do that. That's fine. Right. Thought leader is another one of those that kind of makes me digital marketer, right? But manifestation, and it can take that vibe. But really, the insight is what we're talking about. And so many of us don't allow ourselves space to dream about what's possible and where we can go. And so we just stay stuck in this world of what's the least bad thing that can happen to me right now? Right? And how do I avoid the least bad thing? And I'm like, how about we at least dream and say, this is what life could look like. And just settle with that it's possible first. And then that it's plausible, right? There's a pathway to there

that doesn't require us being aliens. And, you know, it doesn't require hustle culture. It doesn't require burnout and maximum effort and all that sort of jazz. Like we can go that direction and start finishing on the book that you referenced earlier. I talk about our head trash and I talk about sort of the no win scenarios that we talk about. Right.

And when we admit this is possible to, there's a way for us to get there. That lets us roll into the third question, which a lot of people will struggle with. Well, what's the story that's keeping me from seeing that what's possible and what can be actualized is in front of me? And that is actually where a lot of people get stuck. Right? So we'll deal with that head trash sort of scenario. actually where a lot of people get stuck. Right? So we'll deal with that head trash sort of scenario. There's a fourth piece that you didn't sort of mention out there is like, okay, now,

once we've done all that, we have to do the hard inner work of prioritizing that, that it's okay for us to have that abundance, that it's okay for us to live in that world. And for many, many people, the idea of taking a month off and traveling when you've got a business and all of those types of things, it's like, that's not something that someone like me does. Yeah. And then it's like, oh, let's unpack that. Why? Because if you fundamentally think that you don't deserve that, or that it's not possible or not relevant for you, you're going to keep creating this very thing of burnout, of frustration, of not having meaning in work, of not feeling fulfilled, not expressing yourself.

Not because you can't do it, because you're unwilling to permit yourself to do it. That's where a lot of the work comes from. Yeah. And that statement, I think this is where insights from certain things like self-help, you know, the fundamental insight is there, right? So when we say you don't permit yourself to do it, when I hear you say that, what I know you're saying is there's a whole lot of things to unpack underneath that. It's not a simple like, well, I give myself permission, there's a whole lot of things to unpack underneath that. It's not a simple like, well, I give myself permission, right? Like this is not, you know, just say the word and it'll happen, right? It is a way of orienting everything that we do. But I was thinking about something the other day and I was thinking about, we'll come up on nine years for this podcast in January.

Congrats, by the way. Thank you. And if you had told me a decade ago that my life would look like it looks, I would not have had any frame of reference at all. I hadn't even thought of the podcast 10 years ago, right? I was coming up on thinking about it. I interviewed a guy named Benjamin Hardy recently, and his book is about future self. And it's really about imagining that your future self could be in a dramatically different place than it is. Because we tend to assume that in a decade, we're going to be fundamentally like we are today. And very often, that is not at all true. And so the other thing that I think about is I think I first met you

probably at Camp Good Life that Jonathan ran. And that was the first time I allowed myself to say out loud and dream that I would be able to do the podcast as a full-time thing. Up till that point, I just didn't see that that was a possibility. I mean, in my heart, I occasionally would allow myself to peek at it, but I wouldn't go so far as to say like, I'm going to make that happen. And that was the first time where I went, okay, I'm going to do this. And it still took me, I don't know, two years, three years. I don't know how long it took me after that moment to make it happen. But as soon as I knew that was what I wanted, then I could start to make plans towards that. I could start to say, all right, well, what would it take for that to happen? Okay. All right. Well, now if I know that's where I want to get, if I know that's what it's going to take, and this is what so much of your work is really

good at is then saying, all right, now let's start deconstructing that into what I need to do to get there. What are the things that are going to get in my way that are both internal, my own obstacles, the way I think about the world, my limitations, they are external, the people around me, the structures I have in my life, all that different stuff. But I am more of a believer than I've ever been that, you know, there are real possibilities for ourselves. But I agree with you, a big one is starting to even say, this could be possible. And I may not know how to get there. I may not even be ready to say like, ah, by damn, I'm going to make it there, but I can at least go. That's where I want to be.

Now, let me start to work with that a little bit more. Yeah. And the coach in me is going to want to add two words to what you said. Yeah, do it. This is what's possible. This is what's possible for me. Those two words, for me, become really powerful. Because oftentimes, you know, you're talking about podcasting, like you're listening to JLD, John Lee Dumas, you're listening to all those folks, and they're talking about all these podcasting businesses,

like, that's great. And people are like, ah, that's possible. But there are a smaller segment of those people that say, actually, that's possible for me. Like, me, this person, now. Not some other idealized version of myself. Not some, you know, it's great for John, it's great for Eric, it's great for Charlie, and, you know, great for Tara, and all the people, right? For me.

Okay. If it's possible for me, and there are some levers that I can press to get there. Thanks for unpacking the permission slash permit thing. Cause it's not at all like you just say it's going to happen and it happens. Now that's some serious horseshit. What actually it becomes an organizing principle for how you look at that. In my world, if your dream is not on your schedule, it's just an aspiration. And that's okay. Call it an aspiration. Don't call it a priority. Right? Don't call it a project. Don't call it something you're working on. It's an aspiration. Cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Right? But when you start talking about it as a priority

or as a project, it has to live on your schedule. And I know that sounds super simplistic, but when you want to look at so many people that come to me, like I'm trying, I'm working on the thing or I want to do a thing. And for me, it becomes a prayer simple, like, so where's it live on your schedule? And they're like, well, I've been thinking about doing it. I was like, you've been doing that for years. Okay. Probably enough thinking time. Where does this live on your schedule? And it's like, well, but see what happened was I can't do that because my job. And then this other person like, okay, well, you know, I talked about this and start finishing where, you know, projects, especially best work projects, these projects that are going

to create your future self, what we're talking about here, that really lights you up, that only uniquely you can do. They're both mirrors and bridges. Okay. They're both mirrors and bridges. Okay. They're mirrors because they reflect your internal landscape, what you think about yourself, what you believe is possible, who you think you are, but they also mirror what's happening in your external world.

So many people take like bite off a best work project. They'll go to the conference or listen to Ted talk and maybe a podcast or like, I'm going to do the thing. And they decide to do the thing. And immediately, they're confronted with their head trash and limiting beliefs. They're confronted with their competing priorities. They're confronted with all these things. And then they look at their schedule and like, I can't do this new thing. I was already overloaded with the old thing. How am I going to do the new thing? They're just mirrors. But they're bridges because they are the bridge towards your future self, that future work that you're going to do. And then the fun thing about it, you have to trust that it's fun. I know

some people listen to it and it's like, Charlie, that sounds terrible. The great thing is the bridge that you're building takes you further than you think you're going to go. You can't imagine when you really do this type of work, where all it's going to go. You just think it's just going to get me over this little river, but all of a sudden you keep building. And to your point, Eric, you wake up one morning, and I do this a lot with clients, like you've been in conversations where like, let's roll back two years ago and let's examine what we're talking about now based upon what two years ago you would think about this. Like they can't understand this conversation,

right? Because the best work project you've been building has led you here, right? So I say all of this because when people start thinking about making a big or small change in their life, I think the first thing, aside from permission, like giving themselves doing it, it's like, okay, now it is just a matter of alignment. How are we going to align the inner story with the outer story? How are we going to do this? How's it live on the schedule? I can go through a lot of that stuff, right? But yeah, not at all about the permission. Because if you give yourself permission, and then you don't do the follow one bridge building work, you probably haven't given yourself permission, right? Yeah. You probably are

still stuck in the, like, I'll get to it when I get there or it's possible, but you haven't gotten to the, it's possible for me and I'm going to start building it. Last thing I'll say on this is when you really commit to the path, it's okay that it can take you longer to get there than you originally thought. At the same time that many people get there faster than they thought they would be able to get there. Yeah. And in many ways, the unrealistic version of me thought I would be where I'm at faster or thought that if I wasn't there faster, I wasn't going to get there, right? That's the one I fall prey to very often is like, well, if this thing really had any legs, right, it would have taken off by now. We would have been here by now, instead of realizing like that whole thing

about it's such a cliche at this point that like overnight success is not overnight success. You know, I look at some people that I admire and when I really start looking at like, when did they start what they were doing? I'm like, oh my goodness, they got a decade on me, right? Like they've got a decade on me doing some of that stuff. And it does take longer, but I love that idea of, you know, the bridges go further than you think, because we are at a point, we are doing well enough that we are starting to have a business that supports us and is giving us a little bit of the lifestyle that we want to have. And that's another really important thing that I think you have helped with has been us really orienting to, for me, it's been getting away from that hustle culture mentality that more, better, we need to be bigger, we need

to do more, we need to make more money and really asking in the context of my life, what do I want? Then going, you know what I want? I want to be able to take a month off. I've never been able to do anything. I've never had time in my life for that. And, you know, thinking, A, that's not possible, but B, then going, okay, it is possible. And here's what the trade-offs for that will be because nothing is free. You know, it's been a very different orienting process's real, right? Like, if my goal is to make as absolute much revenue as we can make this year, that is a competing priority to taking a month off, perhaps, right? And so for me, it's a matter of going, okay, well, which of those things is more important, you know, and there are ways that we've seen into, you've helped me see into, like, well, maybe not, right? Maybe taking a month off is not a limiting

factor to you making money. Maybe it's an enabling factor in a way that I never would have seen, right? Like I came back from a month off and I was like, I am ready to interview some people. I am ready to do some podcasting, like in a way that I hadn't been in a couple of years. You know, I didn't notice that I was burnout, but I think I was a little bit. And so I came back and our growth since doing that has been really good. And some of that was just, I feel like I came back with a new spirit that I never would have predicted. You know, I would have thought I'll come back from a month off. Things are going to be in shambles. I'm going to dread getting back to work. I mean, just all sorts of stuff. And I just continue to sort of be amazed by how things continue to unfold. And so much of it, I think, also is this thing that we talk about on this show

all the time. And it's the heart of the Spiritual Habits Program, which is little by little, a little becomes a lot. It's little by little, this thing has built. And it's all these little activities that have been strung together over a long period of time that start to really create sort of these results that continue to grow in ways that are difficult to understand or predict. Yeah, I love that for so many different reasons. So this is true of any business scenario or career scenario. At a certain point, when you've been in the game long enough, unfortunately for newcomers, you learn to sort of wait to see how many of the newcomers are going to stay in it past the bright, shiny object aspect of it, right?

Yeah. Past like whatever thing that bought them in that, you know, the month long or quarter long, you're going to be like, come back to me in a year, right? Come back to me in a year or two. Right. And I know, especially if you're a newcomer, you're like, Hey, Charlie, that sucks because I really need people's attention now. Right. But fundamentally what happens is there are a lot of people who just don't make the long-term little by little gain. And so, not speaking for all folks who've been around for a while, but there's some heartbreak that goes on. It's like, we can't invest in so many people to have 90% of them fall off. Different ways of handling that. I'm sure I'm going to get some

emails about that. But partially in your case, like nine years is a long time to be rocking a podcast. It sure is. It's a long time. And so there's like. An episode a week, you know, like we, even when I'm not here for a month, episodes are coming out. Yeah. And so it becomes one of those things to where like in any industry, we're just talking about sort of a mediapreneur industry. I was like, oh yeah, I've heard of Eric.

Oh yeah, I've heard of Eric. Oh yeah, I've heard of that podcast. By the time you hear about it, you know, for a year or two, you're like, oh, that's a real thing at this point, right? It's not a starter project anymore. That's like a full on pro thing. So that works for everyone. And so when we start talking about, you know, I mentioned projects earlier and in Start Finishing, I talk about really sitting with the reality that a significant life-changing, career-changing project, it's going to take you about five years to really see all the way through. Right?

Yeah. And people are like, that seems like a long time. I was like, it's a short time. It's a short, short time. Yeah. And there's only so many of these that you can do at a time, turns out. Right? And so when we look at that future self and are you able to commit to something that long,

by the time you're in it two or three years and you're still trucking along and you're still doing that, you've developed enough sovereignty, talent, expertise, contacts, and just overall momentum that you start to be able to do a lot, right? And so I think, you know, in your case, when you're talking about taking a month off, there's a way in which all of the possibilities that you end up creating, you're just not present to because you don't realize you've built them, right? They're like right in front of you.

And sometimes taking that step back and be like, wait a second, I really built this great thing. And then you'll have the scenario that you had where you come back and not only is it you're fired up to do the podcast, but you're also fired up to do the new secret project. Right? I see a direct line between those two, right? Yeah.

And it's hard to say, hey, I need you to take a month off. So do you go get recharged and come back with a secret project? And oftentimes that's exactly what happens. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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My secret project is the Charlie Gilkey Fan Club. I don't know if we've talked about that yet, but it's going to be launching in January. No, I'm kidding. You take Bitcoin for that too, right? in January. No, I'm kidding. You take Bitcoin for that too, right? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, that thing about a five years for a life changing project. And now as I've been in it, I feel like, okay, you know, it was about five years before the podcast truly changed my life on the external level. You know, it was about five years before I was able to do that as a full time thing, right? Now, there were good things happening way before that from it, right? Like the benefits it had to me, the people I was meeting, the conversations I was having, but for it to actually get to the point where it changed

my life enough that it changed like what I got to do for a living, that took me five years. The really sobering thing as I was going back through your work was this idea of take the number 85, subtract your current age from that, which in my case is 52, which leads you to 33 years. Divide that by five years per project, you go, okay, I've got six and a half really big life-changing projects to take on. That is a sobering thing. There are certain things that people talk about, like you only have 4,000 weeks. I'm like, well, I've still got 1,700. That's just too big a number to rationalize. But it reminds me of something else that has happened to me, which is you think about somebody that you care about, but you don't see very often.

Let's say you live on the other side of the country from your mother and you're like, well, I see her twice a year and she's probably know, let's say 10 years at the outside. It means I might see my mom 20 more times in my life. That is a sobering thing that causes you to work on the competing priority thing, right? Which is what it takes to do a life-changing project. You have to go, oh, I've only got six of them left, assuming I'm still really firing on a lot of cylinders at 85, which is definitely not the case for a lot of people. You know, I mean, Jenny's mom by 77, you know, there was no more life changing projects. So for me, that was a really sobering thing to really think about what am I really going to work

on? And I think that's another thing I've gotten a lot from the work with you, maybe more than anything else, is simply been what are you doing that is standing in the way of your important work? Back to that Benjamin Hardy interview, he quoted a guy named Robert Brault, who I actually don't know who that is, but he said, we are kept from our goals, not by obstacles, but by a clear path to a lesser goal. And I was like, wow, that resonates. Because very often I would take the clear path to the lesser goal because I can see my way there. It's not as hard. It's easy without realizing what I was sacrificing. Absolutely. And I know a lot of listeners right now are going to want to like negotiate about that five years or how many projects can I put into a time? Right. We're going to start doing some accounting that way. I get it. I get it. And maybe you're a superhero

that can do a whole lot of different things at once. But for many people, when they really look at that, because not only in my world, our projects is sort of the career or business projects we're talking about, but it's also the work of your life as well. So those run parallel to that. So it's not, so you might be like, oh, he's just talking about career projects. Nah, nah, I'm not talking about just that, right? Because taking care of kids and aging elders and pets and moving across country and all those things count as projects, right? That you're doing in between. And I think people don't really think about that,

about why life can seem so full. It's like, well, part of it is the work of your lives. You're not counting as projects. Yeah. I mean, that was a really big thing that when we started looking at, for listeners, the reason I'm referencing this is not because I want to be self-referential. I just think it's helpful

to give actual real life examples of this stuff, right? Is that when we started looking in our life and we went, okay, well, Ginny runs the household, right? Not that like she does everything. We have some division of labor, but when it comes to making sure that there are groceries in here, when it comes to making sure, you know, she likes to cook, there's a lot of things that she does. That's a project. So to expect her work output to be equal to mine, it's not fair because that's a real project. And then we looked at her mom and said, okay, her mom has Alzheimer's. That's a project that Jenny has on her plate.

Do we wish it wasn't? Of course. But given the way that we're going to step up to the plate on this, that's a project. way that we're going to step up to the plate on this, that's a project. And so again, it allowed us to have this way of thinking about our lives holistically that really worked. There's another line you have about many people end up with their days filled with projects they aren't counting. I mean, that's a really big thing. It's a really important thing to get all that laid out so that we can be realistic about what else can go on the plate. You know, what else am I able to do? You know, New Year's resolutions are a classic time of the year for this, right? I am going to start working out for

an hour and a half a day. Well, maybe, but where's that time coming from? Like, we can't take that out and just go, well, we tend to isolate things. Well, I can do that. I can do an hour and a half. That's not too hard. Well, no, it's not in a vacuum. It's not too hard in a life with a full-time career and two children and an aging parent. Well, okay. Now we need to really think about that. And a lot of times what that does, in addition to allowing us to prioritize, I think is allow us to stop feeling bad about ourselves all the time. That like, I'm not accomplishing

what I think I should be accomplishing because we're not taking into account all the stuff that happens in life and then making decisions. Do I wanna continue to do that? And then realizing that when we do choose that, I'm choosing my children. Good, great choice. Give yourself credit for that choice.

Precisely. You know, so many people come to me at Productive Flourishing and they're like, the priming that they get from just everywhere is I want to do more, more, more, more, bigger, better, right? It's a challenging marketing thing for us, to be honest, because on the one hand, we don't want to like say, yeah, we can help you do more. But the reality is starting with, we're going to make sure you're focusing on the really best and right things first, which for many people means doing and committing to fewer things. Yeah. Because we start talking about, you mentioned, so thanks so much for loading up projects. We have at PF and then start finishing, we have what's called the five project rule. The long nerdy way of saying it is no more than five active projects per time perspective.

Easiest way to unpack that is the time perspective and time horizon does the work. So think about, we're recording this in December, right? You might hear this in January, but whatever, right? So for December, looking at Eric is like, you got no more than five active top of deck, top of mind projects per month, month size projects, because most of us can kind of feel what a month size project feels like quarter and year gets kind of wonky. But I'm saying like, when you look at the wonderful Jenny Gay, like in what she's going through, I'm like, she's grieving because she lost her mom, you know, all those things, right? Going on vacation, she's got the meditation training. Okay. So those are three projects that we've got right there, right? If anything are

going on with the pups, right? given her role, that becomes another thing. And she's got this sort of vacation, slowcation, or she's in Lisbon right now, right? When we're recording this, she is, yeah. All right. She's living the high life. That's a project. Left me at home with the dogs. Well, now we know who let the dogs out.

Anyways. Indeed. I've been letting a lot of dogs out. Yep. And so, like, if Jenny were coming or if you were coming, I'd be like, okay, that's five projects. Like, what else are you going to put in that? And without getting into the game where we stuff, and we stuff, and we micro crunch, and we make things so stressful, that even as we're getting things done, we're so stressed out about it that we can't enjoy it. Like I've

been working with another client who, and I see this pattern a lot. So working with her on the intensity of her work, she's done a great job of minimizing the amount of work that she needs to do to power her life and her business. But she's made the work that she does and the pace she has to produce so stressful that she'd rather work an extra day with less stress than to work the way that she's been working. Yeah. Yeah. And so it ends up in this counterintuitive sort of thing where the main question for me,

a lot of times when it comes to people doing their best work and how they get it done is, how do we structure this in a way so that you can actually breathe and enjoy it as you're doing it? Because if it's always just about crunching it and getting it done and doing it in the minimum amount of time and get the maximum results, all those things that we hear, at a certain point, for many people, that becomes really, really unsatisfying. Like, think of, like, if you had your favorite dessert and then I'm like, great, I'm going to go make your favorite dessert for you. And I put it down in front of you and then pull out a stopwatch and say, you've got 15 seconds, go. Enjoy it, maximize it, get it,

right? If you take five minutes, you're wasting time. It makes no frigging sense. We want a certain amount of savoring it when it comes to so many things that truly matter to our life. If I did the same thing with you and your son, I'm like, okay, Eric, you're going surfing. Like, look, you don't need a whole lot of surfing time. You need like three hours. So what we're going to do is we're going to get you there. And that afternoon, we're going to have you surf from one to four. One to four, that's your window. We've got it optimized exactly for you. You're like, yeah, nah, that's not, that's not really the vibe we're going for. Yep.

Right? It's not a surfer vibe, Charlie. It's not. I know. It's not. It's why surfing is such an unlikely hobby for me because surfers are so like, you know, good vibes only, man. That's a good energy for me to be absorbing. Look, it's the same way with riding my motorcycle. Like I can look at Google Maps and then be like, this will take you three hours in a car. And I'm like, that's going to take me three hours and 45 minutes on the bike because I'm going to stop and want to get off and like all the

things you have to do on a motorcycle. But I don't choose not to do it because it's going to take me 45 minutes longer. Right. Because the quality of the ride itself, like I don't want to get on the bike and be like, okay, I can ride three miles faster than the speed limit. I can cut out a few stops. I can do all that because not only would it compromise my enjoyment of the experience, it's also dangerous, right? And so I've got two things going forward. And when so many people look at their work, I think we're talking directly to people who have a lot of autonomy in the work

that they do and how they get it done. Right? So I want to be clear about that. If you work in an organization where they're tracking you down to the 30 seconds, that's a different context. Big love to you for that, right? I know you're going through a different thing than what we're talking about right now. We might come back to that in just a second. But for those who do have much more autonomy, which is really a lot of us, especially in the hybrid work world that we work in now, there's not so often that manager that's like looking at your computer, seeing what you're doing in that amount of time. What I've seen time and time again across our audience is that because we have made work so stressful,

the doing of work so stressful, we end up in these distractions and time wasters and filler stuff just to give ourselves a little bit of emotional reprieve. That if work wasn't so stressful to start with, we wouldn't need that reprieve to begin with. So we don't end up on social media or email or whatever your thing is. Right. And so I'm like, what if we say, you know what? I talked a little bit about focus blocks earlier, 90 minutes to 120 minute blocks of time. What if we decide to get off the sort of clock time, you have an exactly an hour to work on

things or whatever that is and say, you know what, I'm going to carve out my morning so that it's roughly 90 to 120 blocks of time. And if I work 75 minutes, and I'm just kind of done, because I've put in the hard yards and I need to walk the dogs or I need to sort of get some coffee. Allow for that. Allow that spaciousness. Allow for that. Because what will end up happening, as much like we were talking about you with your trip, is you'll create enough space such that you come back recharged and able to really think about whatever problem you're going on or have novel insights or be able to like be a better human with the other teammates that you're with because you're not so compressed and snippy. All of those when taken as a habit, taken as a

practice, we might slide into team habits here in a little bit, Eric, but when taken as a practice, dramatically change the quality of your work and your day every day, every day. So yeah, the winds can come, You can pat yourself on the back. You can do your victory lap and all that kind of whatnot, but you're not just holding out through a slog of painful work for a win. You can go to work engaged, energized, expressing yourself, feeling a sense of meaning and purpose while you're doing the work, which is a win no matter what happens. So let's orient this more towards people who have a little bit less autonomy. Let's not go so far as to be like you're working in a call center and they're monitoring every

minute. Let's say the average white collar person who's got some degree of autonomy in their job. They also have a bunch of stupid meetings. They've got a lot of pressures on them. How does someone like that start to think about making the work experience less stressful? Because I think you're absolutely right in that for a lot of people, if we were to look at how our time is actually spent, we would see that a lot of it is with coping strategies that don't accomplish anything, you know, whether it's ESPN or it's solitaire or it's Facebook or Instagram or whatever your thing is. One of my favorite phrases ever is from this guy, Tim Urban. I think you probably know who that is, who wrote about procrastination. He called these things the dark playground. And that is my favorite phrase because that's exactly what they feel like, right? You

know you should be working, but instead you're on Instagram, which might be an enjoyable experience, but it's not that enjoyable because you know you should be working. So what are ways of taking the little bit of autonomy we have and starting to change our relationship to what we're doing so that maybe more of the time at work is spent on work so that we free up time for more things that matter. Yeah, I love this question. It's one of the guiding principles of my next book, which is called Team Habits. And the chief difference between sort of the scenario we were just talking about when you're mostly an individual doing the work and you have a lot of autonomy and working in a team is that working in a team is by definition, working with other humans, which means you end up with social overhead. You end up in negotiation.

Like if I block off my schedule, that might impact you, Eric, if we're coworkers, because now I'm not available to you for different things. And so that's just part of working in teams as you end up with a social overhead. So given that there are two different axes of approach here. One is to really reclaim the time, the open time that you do have and use that more purposefully. And most companies, unfortunately, there's like the stated values of what's going on and the stated priorities. And then there's like the shadow values and priorities. There's like this other game that you've got to play, right? To be successful. In really well-aligned organizations and really high performance ones, there's not so much of the shadow game. Like it's just on the table, people know how to win. So I come from a

military background. I was an army army joint force, military logistics coordinator. What I loved about working in the army is by and large, there wasn't a shadow game, right? You knew what it took to get to where you were trying to go, right? Found out the hard way that most of corporate America is not like that, right? So be conscious of that shadow game. You know what I'm talking about? If you're listening, you're working in that environment because you have to win that one, right? More than anything else. But within the confines of that game, be thinking about like, okay, how do I ship the most valuable work that pushes my team forward? And there are going to be trade-offs, right? You may not be able to fill out the TPS

report, right? There may be awkward conversations about the TPS report. And in most scenarios, if you're shipping the really important work, you'll get a pass, right? Like you're not going to get fired, right? And in fact, you're probably going to end up with teammates that are going to be able to cover for you for that over time because the organization itself will value the high output, the high quality work that you're doing over the TPS report. I've started sending a couple of text messages after each podcast listener with positive reminders about what's discussed and invitations to apply the wisdom to your life. It's free and listeners have told me that these texts really help to pull them out of autopilot and reconnect them with what's important.

When you get a text from me during your day-to-day life, it's one more thing that helps you further bridge that gap between what you know and what you do. Positive messages when you need them, from me to you. So if you'd like to hear from me a few times a week via text, go to OneYouFeed.net slash text and sign up for free. to the floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us. How are you two? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging.

Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found this to be absolutely true in my life because probably the first number of years I was in software startup companies, it was kind of an all-in

kind of thing. But the last 10 years, I was in corporate America, you know, big corporations, I was primarily a consultant coming in. But for all intents and purposes, I worked there, you know, I was project manager, product managers, that sort of thing. And all that time, the first five years of it, I was running a solar energy company. And the last five, I was running a podcast. So I've got very serious about, I don't have 40 hours for that and 40 hours for this. I don't have 80 hours on top of being a family person, right? So what I started to do is be like, what do I have to do to be successful in these jobs, these corporate jobs? What really, really matters? And so I got really good at just narrowing down to what really matters. And what I found was that A, it actually freed up time. But B, to your point,

like, I was seen as a star. Now, I didn't have quite so much of the I have to get promoted mindset, right? So it's not exactly a one-to-one comparison. Although when I was at Gap, actually, I was an employee. But that fundamental focus on what really matters here, what is this group, team, organization, division trying to do? What at the end of the year will be like? This was successful. And ruthlessly focusing on that allowed me to get time to do the things I wanted to do and to actually be seen as successful.

Now, I wasn't necessarily maybe seen as always the most compliant, right? But at the end of the day, to your point, I got a lot of passes because our projects were succeeding. Our products were coming out. The things that mattered were happening. And it's an uncomfortable process, right? It was an uncomfortable process to be like, well, I'm just not going to those meetings. You know, I'm going to decline them and see what happens. You know, I'm going to say, I'm sorry, I have a conflict. I'm going to not respond to emails that don't need me to respond. My whole career up to then had been like, I want them to know that I'm valuable. And I'll show that by responding to every email, being in every meeting. And I was misguided. I was misguided, you know? And so I say all that just because I had this actual experience really happen right in the heart of kind of corporate America and what we would normally think. And again, this isn't going to work in every scenario in every place. Sometimes to your point, the shadow games are so bad. I found that the shadow

games did start to fall away when you got done what was most important. Precisely. And look, I did this in the army, right? And if I could pull it off in the army, the very thing you're talking about and being like, look, I can't do all the army, right? And if I could pull it off in the army, the very thing you're talking about and being like, look, I can't do all the things, right? I did the math well before other people did the math. I was like, this is literally impossible for me to win this game. All the things are not going to happen. However, I happen to know what my battalion commander wants. And I happen to know what my brigade commander wants. And I happen to know, because I did the research, like what are the general, like military general objectives and

what are we trying to do? And I'm going to orient my company when I was a commander, I'm going to orient my units to be the best at that thing, right? Whatever they said we were trying to do, let's do that. So when it came time for us to opt out of things or to not be present or to do something like that, I'd be like, hey, sir, so I'm sending a representative to do this, right? They're going to take notes for us, but my unit is over here doing this other thing. Unless you have strong preferences to the otherwise, unless we are absolutely required to be there and they'd be like, go ahead and do what you're doing, Captain. Because when it showed up, like I knew the game, I was an army officer, you get that, right? I knew the game where it was

like, I want to be the person when it came time to give updates and status reports about my unit that talked the least because I didn't have to talk a whole lot, right? Whatever the metrics were, whatever it was, here's where we are. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Good job, captain. Next. That's what you wanted to hear. Right? It reminds me of at one job, I was running the biggest software project in the entire organization. It was hundreds of millions of dollars project. And my boss almost never talked to me. And originally I was like, why is he not like, what, does he not like me? Does he like, this is the biggest project under his purview. And what I realized after a little while was he wasn't talking to me because he didn't need to, right? He wasn't talking to me because I was giving him the information he needed.

And he knew that I had it under control. And if I didn't, I would come to him, you know, instead of suddenly feeling like I was left out. I just realized like the complete lack of attention from him in my case turned out to be a real positive. Same here, same here. And so that's, that's just what we did. And so what we have to put on here on deck though, is you got to ship, you have to hit those numbers. You have to hit whatever the things are, because you can't really beg off and be like, Hey, I went off the meetings. I'm going to do not going to answer the email because I'm doing X by the end of time period. And then the end of time period comes and you haven't done X. Because then it just feels like you're shirking.

Yeah. Right? You have no leverage, right? But if you can say, look, I'll use the military language. Sir, I can attend that, or I can do this other thing that's really important to you. Yes. I can't do both. My default is going to be to do this thing. Do you agree? I found that to be the exact magic question too, was, okay, I have these two things that are back to our terms about competing priorities. When you have more autonomy, you have to solve this yourself. But in that environment, I was able to go, here's these two things, pick, you know, which do you want the focus on? And that was tremendously empowering, you know, to just sort of constantly, my dog Beans is rolling around like a lunatic behind me. I'm sure it's coming through the microphone, Christopher, sorry. Beansy has made a ninth inning comeback and I think is going to play some

extra innings. Good. I love it. Anyway, she's back there rolling around, which is always a sign that she's doing well when she's acting silly like that. But it was interesting because things like status reports and such, we often see as such a negative. And I actually found them to be really positive for me. I love them me when I use them right, you know, because I could go and I could say, here are the five things. Are these the five most important things? Are they? Okay, good. Then I know and I can focus and asking the people who were above me to make priority decisions was a really empowering thing. Because I think what happens in a lot of cases, and I do this, I tell like people on my team now, and I told people on my team then, I don't have a very good brain for

how much I'm putting on your plate. Like, I just have a tendency to be like, this needs done, this needs done, Nicole this, Nicole that, Nicole that, right? You need to tell me when we are exceeding your capacity. I don't know your capacity. I'm not keeping track of your capacity. And so when I was able to do that up to my superiors to say, okay, I need some help sorting out because we've got nine things here and there's time for five. Help me pick, you know, in a respectful, not a rebellious way, but a very respectful, like, I want to make sure that I've got your back. Yeah. So what's most important? That unlocked a lot for me in the corporate world because then I was able to go, okay, good.

I've got a pass on these other four things. I mean, I think these days because self-managed work has evolved because of where we are, I would add the slight tweak of saying, rather than I can't do these and which, like, say something along the lines of, I think these are the five most important. Because do you agree or not? Yeah. Right? Am I correct about that? And if they're like, you're correct, okay. Because it shows that you've done that work of actually doing their job of translating it for them. And you're not just like, ah, too many things, pick for me. And here's what I'm going to do. Right. And so one last thing, I guess on this, well,

when we work in teams and we're talking about that individual side of things, we're still on the individual back, by the way, right? It's this understanding that you write your own performance report, whatever the form is, whatever the performance schema is, figure that out. Preemptively write what you're going to be like doing and like what your win thing looks like and use that as a gauge because if you walk in

and have done some of this work and walk into your boss or manager and be like, okay, performance review time. Here's what I've done over the last six months, right? Here are some of the things I know I need to work on because we've talked about them, right? Here's my plan of action for doing that. You have a very short performance conversation, right? Unless you're just wildly misreading things. the conversation about dreaming and putting out where you want to be going is here in your very performance eval. We're like six months from now. What do you want your manager or your boss to be praising you on? Put it on there.

What projects have you done? What KPIs, whatever your corporate language is, what have you done? Is it sales? Is it customer service? Whatever. It doesn't matter, right? And then make that the organizing principle for how you make decisions, right? Because in a weekly, like, hey, new project, because bosses be bosses, right? New project. You're like, okay, well, I was going there. Is this new project adding to my scope of responsibilities that I need to update? Which is fine. You might be getting one of those shadow promotions, right?

Or is it a distraction that's going to keep you from doing some of those things that you might need to tell your boss? Like, hey, hey, hey, like I can do that. But these things here, I think you want done more, at least in all of our other conversations. Yeah. Am I the right person to take on this and compromise some of these? You have a lot of different conversations, but you get those conversations when you're doing the co-creative work of like driving your work towards that.

Yep. Yep. So much of this, I think, comes back to the core idea of being proactive versus reactive, right? Precisely. Like to do any of what we're talking about, take some time of planning, of thinking, of looking at competing priorities. You list sort of five challenges that get in the way of this, right?

And these all happen right in an alignment here, right? Like what are my competing priorities? What is my head trash? The beliefs that are holding me back. Do I not have a realistic plan, right? If I don't have a plan, then I'm just working, but to what and how, you know, too few resources. And then finally, the last one is, you know, sort of poor team alignment that you've talked about. And again, those may not all apply in your environment, but I think more of them do than we often think, right? Team alignment,

all that sort of stuff. I've been able to, I won't say overcome a bad boss, but create a team environment that is better than the leadership we're getting. Absolutely. You know, there's a saying in organizational development and recruiting and sort of workforce management that people don't leave bad companies. They leave bad bosses. Right. And so over on the team side of things. So when I say team, I mean the four to eight people you work with like day in, day out. Like most teams are actually decomposed to about that size.

Not that like we're the development team that's got 60 people. Like, no, that's an org. Like that's a, that's a no work. Like, that's a group. Your team. In your team of four to eight people, turns out you have an incredible amount of autonomy. Or not autonomy. You have an incredible amount of rapport and influence and conversation. It's not like some other rando over there.

It's like Eric. You like mess with Eric all day, right? You're trading stuff. You're getting each other coffee. Like you're, you're batting. Like, it's not like asking Eric, like, Hey, Eric, um, can you cover for me at the meeting and take notes and sort of, you know, here, here's where my status update is. Like, I really need to focus on this and I'm struggling and I can't go to that meeting. I can be like, yeah, I could probably do that. I'm struggling and I can't go to that meeting. Eric would be like, yeah, I could probably do that, right?

I'll cover for you next time. Okay. Well, that team habit of being able to cover for each other becomes a way in which you can all start to unpack and be like, wait a second. If we can all like give each other updates and someone else can carry the message, can we like, I don't know, have a Google doc where we just put our updates on and maybe we don't as a team have that meeting to where we sit around for an hour telling each other stuff that we could read. And I'm not averse to meetings.

I'm not that guy of just like meeting suck, get out of them. But I think when we're more purposeful and we operate as a team and we create team habits. Now, the difference between an individual and a team habit, there's a nuance here. A few individuals on a team doing a habit does not make it a team habit, right? It makes a few individuals doing an individual habit. When the team as a whole moves and operates in a certain way, and that's just how the team rolls, then you have a team habit. This is where a lot of the magic unlocks because there are bad team habits that exist, such as one that's a pet peeve for me, and let's get real, a lot of people, is the idea that if your calendar is open, you're immediately available for a meeting.

Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Well, that means Tuesday night, you go home from work, and you're like, great, I got a plan tomorrow. I'm going to get stuff done, because I got an open schedule the next morning. A teammate sees that you have an open schedule, and they're like, oh, I need to talk to Eric. And then another teammate see that and you show up to work. You had a plan. All of a sudden you have two meetings and that work that you could have done different things with is now evaporated into meetings, right? The funny thing about team habits is they are oftentimes implicit and unconscious agreements we make with each other. And we just sort of do them like any habit. And like when I'm out talking in the field to people, I'm like, hey, did you choose

the whole open schedule equals you can schedule a meeting thing? And they're like, nah. And then you go down the list. No one agreed to this. So I get the opportunity to talk to executives like, hey, so this is going on. Did you all agree with this and make this edict? And I'm like, no, we hate it too. And I'm like, the entire organization hates this. And none of y'all have thought to change this. What's it going to take here? But that's the beauty in the team of four to eight people. You don't have to have higher ups approve this. You can come up with novel ways to solve some of these problems. Take the CC thread from hell. Y'all know what I'm talking about, right? You don't know who to send it to. So you have some message and you send it to everybody. And then everybody sends it to everybody. And then you spend most of your days reading CC threads

where you're not sure if you need to pay attention, but you know that you can't be left out, right? How much of our time goes for that, right? We could, as a small team, decide, you know what? Today is Eric's day. He covers the CC threads. His job is to read the CC threads and let us know if there's actually something relevant in that jam. Right. And if so, to let us know and sort of like speak on our behalf, Hey, my team is doing X, Y, and Z. Why don't you know about it? He can be the liaison for the CC thread today. Maybe Charlie does it tomorrow. That gives the entire team of four to eight people, like only one person has to read this thread to figure out what's going on. The seven other of you can get to work. Yeah. Right. It's an easily available

solution. Yeah. We just don't think because of the unconscious way team habits work, we don't think of a way to get out of that situation. So a lot of what I'm talking about on there, not to go too much into that, but you asked the question of how do we, when we work in corporate America, get better about this, is one, start thinking about how are we as a collective going to solve some of these problems and make them so habituated that like, we know how to respond to certain things. But we're going to get out of the idea that we need management and senior leaders to figure this out for us. Because it turns out, I'm going to say what you all know, change management programs have an abysmal success rates when they come down from the top down. Between two thirds and three quarters of change management projects don't work. They fail. So when's the

last time from high up someone's created a policy that has actually made your life better? I know I sound perhaps political on this one. I don't mean to, right? But in our small groups of four to eight people, we have an incredible amount of thing. And here's the thing, much like what we were talking about on the start, finishing and individual side, when your small team takes better care of each other, builds that trust and belonging, does better work. You know, if you work with these people, 85% of the time, if you spend the majority of your time working with the people, your work life has just gotten better significantly. Yeah.

Right. Significantly better. And all it took was a few of you coming together and deciding, here's how we're going to try some things together. Because it turns out if your team wins in the same way that you as an individual win, if your team wins, they get a lot of say about what they get to opt in and out of, right? They get the green light when it comes to like, oh, well, we can't really put that team on it because they're really working on these really important things and they got it going on. So let's not mess with them.

Yeah. Or you get the high priority projects where you get additional resources to get behind it. Right. Because they know you're going to get it done. You get a lot of the perks when your team wins. Yep. Right. So win as a team, which means create team habits. I'm as excited about that because most of us spend the majority of our waking lives working in teams. Let's be real.

Yeah. If we can make our day-to-day interactions with our team, these people, like, I don't know, it breaks my heart to some way. Cause I'll talk to people and they'll be like, I don't know, Charlie, like as an individual, I love or really dig the people that I work with, but I hate working with them. And I'm like, we can fix that. That is such an easy thing to fix, right? Some of us just have to stand up and feed the wolf of being better as a team, creating better team habits and thinking, what's it going to take for us to not show up and have these same setbacks day in, day out. We talked about proactivity.

The thing about being proactive versus reactive is being proactive takes courage. You might pick wrong. You might spend three months or six months working on the wrong damn thing, leaning the ladder against the wrong wall. It's much easier if someone comes to you and says, here's the ladder, there's the wall, lean it against it. Like I need it done by the end of the day. But having that courage with your team and as an individual to really say, here's where we're trying to go. Let's organize ourselves to get there. It makes such a dramatic difference because you don't end up in this place of resignation and quiet quitting and what happens

in the workplace when we disengage. We disengage, again, partially it can be bad cultures and bad bosses. I get that. But I've done this work long enough to know that some of us have just not gotten to the place where we see the possibility that's right in front of us with these humans that we otherwise love and care about. That's the opportunity I want to present. Make that better. Yeah. I'm so excited to learn about the book and my team now is a very small team, but that was one of the things I loved and I miss about the work I used to do. And I think it was why I was successful to the extent I was in the career that I was, was I somehow had some knack and intuitive sense that the team, that small eight to 10 people right around me, that I could influence that. And that if I did, it would have outsized results,

you know, and that that group really working well together and caring for and caring about each other was a great protective against a lot of the other BS that's floating around. And so I think what you're on is an incredibly important and valuable piece of work. Appreciate that. Yeah, I'm a team guy. You know this. I think when we're in a team

where we have great performance and great belonging, it is one of the most sublime human experiences. It is so hard to beat. I miss being in the army because again, I'm not moving so many different people and just seeing organizations and seeing like all the things play out, right? I have wonderful clients, so I get to see it on that side of things. And so that's where I want us to remember, just like with start finishing,

the whole point of start finishing is helping people get on a pathway to do that work that makes their work sublime and makes the experience of doing it sublime and just really mundanely magical. I think the same thing can be applied in teams. And I'm really excited to do that. And actually team habits came because as I was talking about start finishing, enough managers and teammates would be like, how do we apply this to the team? Because that sounds like a good idea, Charlie. How do we get more focus blocks? Like, we see it, how do we do it? And I'm like, so you mean to tell me, as your little squad over here, each of you can't carve out three 90 to 120 minute blocks of time to really do deep work? Like, that's impossible for all of you. And for most of them, like,

they kind of squirm and then give me the evil eye. And then finally, you'd start to see someone be like, yeah, we can probably do that. Right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. There's our possibility for change. Well, Charlie, thank you so much for coming on. It's always a pleasure to talk to you in any capacity.

And I'm just happy to have had you on. Thanks for having me. And listeners, like, I know we had a ranging conversation here, but when this airs, we have been going through a few years of pandemic stuff and disruption, and there's a lot of uncertainty in the air. I just hope that in the midst of all of it, you sort of point your attention and your heart and your dreams to where you really want to go and use that as the organizing principle for how you set your goals in the new year and look at your schedule and not just be in a place to where you're accepting the givens that are right in front of you. Because if you do that, you're

going to keep getting what you're getting. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks so much. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. Thank you. make a donation at any level and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor,

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