The One You Feed - Joel Zaslofsky

Episode Date: October 22, 2014

Joel Zaslofsky is the founder of The Value of Simple website and podcast. He is an author, speaker, and curator. He the author of Experiencing Curating: How to Gain Focus, Increase Influence and Simplify You Life. He is the creator of The Continuos Creation Challenge and The Digital Launch Playbook.   In This Interview Joel and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.Doing something selfless.How we are all the same under it all.The sacrifices of starting your own business.Keeping your head up during hard times.The value of rituals.The power of gratitude.Setting up systems to deal with a bad memory."Chaos was the law of nature, order is the dream of man".The value of curation.The Continuous Creation Challenge.How the bad wolf feeds on passivity.The power of momentum.Focusing on the goals instead of the tools.Doing what we planned, not what we feel like. Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

that good wolf wants to be fed and I want to have a really, really big good wolf by the time I'm done on this earth. 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 really no really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The really no really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or

wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us today. Our guest on this episode is Joel Zaslavsky. Joel is a speaker, author, and self-proclaimed obsessive spreadsheet creator. With his website, valueofsimple.com, Joel provides guidance on simplifying and organizing life's details while having a blast doing it. Here's the interview. Thank you for being with us today, Joel. As you know, our podcast is called The One You Feed, and it's based on the old parable that goes something like this. There's a grandfather who is talking with his grandson, and he says to him, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always battling each other. One is a good wolf, stands for love and kindness and joy. The other is a bad wolf, you know, stands for

greed and anger and self-pity. And the grandson stops and thinks for a second and says, Grandpa, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So our podcast is really about how people feed the good wolf in their life. So my first question for you would be sort of what comes to mind when you hear that parable and what do you sort of first resonate with? Yeah. Well, first of all, I want to say thanks, guys, for having me on the show. You two are up to some pretty cool stuff, and I appreciate the opportunity to chat. As for what comes to mind first when I hear that parable, I've had a pretty charmed life. I'm 34 years old and a lot of things have been really easy for me. They've

been handed to me. I'm the kind of guy who used to think that I got to third base and I hit a triple, but in reality, I was born on third base. So when I think about the good wolf, it's very different for me now than it was four years ago before I started what I call my personal renaissance. And I won't get into that unless you want to know more. But feeding my good wolf now, the first thing that comes to mind is doing something that's selfless, doing something that's beyond me, that builds to a community, whether it's my local community, whether it's the English-speaking community that I can reach on the internet personally or through my business. It's really

about a legacy. And I realized that a legacy takes a really long time to build. And so that good wolf wants to be fed. And I want to have a really, really big good wolf by the time I'm done on this earth. So it's how can I build my legacy? How can I generate value for other people? One of the themes that's come up a couple of times, and I think it's a really interesting one, is sort of the concept of selflessness versus selfishness. And selfishness in a sense of sometimes the people around you may not be thrilled in the short term with the time that you need to devote to the things that you think are important. Do you run into any of those sort of challenges?

I don't because one of the reasons or one of the ways in which I add value, I feel, is through relationships. So I actually block off hours of my week to do what I call peer development. And peer development, my version of a peer is any other human being. Because I feel like as humans, we're all equal, regardless of how much success you've had in life, whatever that looks like, whatever that means. We're all pretty much the same. So I actively am seeking out ways to help other people. And if anything, people ask me, where do you find the time to help me

as opposed to folks coming to me saying, how come you didn't return my call? How come you didn't get back to my email? What's the deal, man? I don't understand why you're being so reserved. So that's really not a problem for me. I actually have the opposite problem, which is I'm too eager to put myself out there and help sometimes that it may hold me back in terms of being able to spend time with family. And I think that was sort of the question really

more sort of around family. One of the musicians we talked about, he's a musician and author, and he was talking about how, you know, he has to find time to sort of devote to his art, even though in the short term, it may not make his wife always happy. It's the best long term thing, because it feeds him, it makes him happy, makes him a better husband, and that there's always sort of a little bit of challenge there in determining the best way to spend his time. Yeah. And I feel that too. The last 19 months of my life, which is March 2012, it's now October 2013 as we're talking, I quit my job back in March 2012. And I was making a cushy six-figure income and things were great and comfortable and stable, which was one of the reasons why I decided to move on because I didn't want that stability anymore. I wanted to embrace risk. I wanted to feel a level of uncertainty.

And what I've been doing for the last 19 months, from at least the outside, doesn't look like it's best for my family. I've made very, very little money. And my wife especially has made a major sacrifice for me. And she's cut me a ton of slack these past 19 months. So I know that I can build something big, but it's slow going. And therefore, I'm really happy and grateful that I have the support from my wife and from my family to allow me to do things that are really slow building, but hopefully will gain momentum. How do you sort of feed your good wolf in times like this that, that are challenging? I heard one, you know, describing on one of your

recent podcasts, how things are, you know, some of the things that you had hoped would be happening by now in your business are not happening. How do you keep yourself, how do you keep your head up? How do you keep, you know, sort of on the positive side of that? And how much does doubt plague you as you make this transition? I have a lot of doubts, but I also have a lot of confidence. Perhaps too much confidence because I'm not quick enough to adjust course. At least that's the way that I felt. But it's pretty easy for me to keep my head up because one, I'm an optimist. And two,

I have rituals throughout the day, gratitude rituals. So for example, the first bite of food that I eat through every meal, I close my eyes and I think about what I'm grateful for. Or when Melinda, my wife and I at dinner, we will verbally express gratitude as we take our first bite and we will tell each other what we're thankful for. It could be, you know, the fact that I maybe slept through the night the previous evening. It could be the wonderful gift that our family provided to us. It could just be something as the small gesture that we gave each other. So I feel if you can incorporate rituals, habitualize certain small things throughout the course of your day, it's really easy to keep your head up and to keep positive and to continue to experience contentment and see the abundance that's in front of you, even when you're feeling like what you're doing is not enough. Having those little habits throughout the course of the day help keep me centered.

very organized person. So, and that's interesting the way you talk about ritual and organization as a way that sort of keeps you going and keeps you strong. Can you elaborate a little bit more on how organization is important to you and the ways you do some of that that you think relate to kind of what we're talking about? Yeah. Well, there's so many different facets of organization. There's your physical environment, which I don't have to try too hard because I'm a minimalist, meaning I don't need a lot to be happy. And in reality, the more that I have around me, the more uncomfortable I feel. So I like to keep my physical environment pretty Spartan. And the less you have, the easier it is to organize. So the physical challenge is a lot of people talk about decluttering. I don't ever declutter.

I don't need to declutter. And that kind of makes me happy. The bigger challenge from an organizational perspective is in my brain. Because I have a leaky brain. I have a really, really bad memory. And I've had to set up systems for remembering when's the last time I contacted somebody. Other folks will know, oh, it's been 31 days since I last contacted my best friend. Well, I can have months go by without realizing that I haven't talked to my best friend.

So I set up reminders in Google Calendar, or I'll set up certain categories of people within my contacts saying that these are the AAA people that I need to make sure that I reach out to once a month. These are the folks who I want to reach out to every few months. So I have all of these systems that kind of build on each other that keep me organized so that I've basically outsourced the memory portion of my brain to my wife, to spreadsheets, and to various technology things that are all synced together. It's kind of a groovy little deal. Yeah, I don't think I'm nearly probably at the level of

systematizing all that that you have. But I certainly, several years ago, sort of came to the conclusion that my brain was the wrong place to keep anything. It just doesn't work. I got to get it down somewhere. And I really like that, you know, sort of a leaky brain idea. And because I think that's one of the things that when I think about sort of feeding the good wolf or staying away from negativity or being positive is reminding myself to do that and reminding myself that I have that choice, that I can sort of choose how I think. And I think it's interesting to put things sort of in your way, in your case that you're describing, that sort of keep bringing you back to that. Because it is easy to just sort of spin off into normal life and forget sort of the things that are important or fetus. At least that's,

you know, my experience and a lot of people I know. Yeah, it kind of reminds me, one of my favorite quotes is one by a guy named Henry Adams. And he said, chaos is the law of nature. Order was the dream of man. So I believe that the default in life is chaos. The default in life could be feeding your bad wolf. So we need to actively work against ourselves, against our primal nature to feed that bad wolf. And I do it with systems. I do it with organization. I do it with habits. But it's a constant challenge to fight that battle against yourself to try to combat what I feel is our default mode, which is just chaos and having things go nuts. So another, I think, passion of yours,

and I think you're writing a book on it, is around curation. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. I've got this kind of nutty concept I call experience curating, where, again, the foundation or the origins of it, I should say, are my leaky brain. For over 30 years, I let it hold me back. It was a source of laughter. I joked and poked fun at myself that I can never remember someone's name or I can never remember an experience. Who did I go to that restaurant with? What did I eat?

Was it a good value? What neighborhood was it in? What city was it in? And I got so tired of not remembering my best experiences in life that I thought, okay, how can I curate meaning? And there's a, if you guys want to know more, there's a six-step process I call focus. Filter, archive, organize, context, access, and share. It's through those six steps where, as of a couple years ago ago when I basically instituted this practice I call put in a spreadsheet. If it's important to me, if it was a great experience, I put it in a spreadsheet that are categorized and organized and it's an archive that I can access wherever there's electricity and I have my laptop or a smartphone. So the main point is, if you're going to spend 99% or more of your life putting

yourself in position to have wonderful experiences, why don't you spend about 1% of the rest of your existence consolidating those gains and using them for your own benefit or for the benefit of others on whatever it is that you care about. For me, I love simplicity and organizing and personal finance and curation and spreadsheets and nerdy things. Being able to curate my existence, my best experiences in each of those topics allows me to be useful to other people when they need a resource related to them. From a curation perspective, what's your process of going through what's important to keep and what's not. It's really subjective. There's no checklist that says, okay, if this experience just met eight out of these 10 things, then put it in a spreadsheet.

It's mostly a gut feeling where there's a recipe that I've wanted to try for a while, and it was a dud. Well, I know I told you that for the most part, I curate my best experiences, but I also curate the ones where I have high expectations and they don't meet them because I don't want to reattempt to have the same experience, which I will do because of my leaky brain. So it could be recipes, it could be books, it could be movies, it could be conversations with friends. It's just this feeling that I have that there's something significant. Out of the two hours of a conversation, let's say the talk that we're having with you guys, you and I will hopefully both say at least a couple of cool things that people will think, you know what, that's interesting.

I should do something as a result of it. So normally what I curate is something that could be action-oriented where I can use it to achieve a certain outcome later in life, whether that's to become a go to resource on a topic that I care about, or maybe to help somebody develop a website and have a technical resource. It's basically just a gut feeling. And I've and I really don't know anyone who does curate that has an objective method of identifying that was worth filtering, that was worth keeping. I was going to ask, you know, spreadsheets is an interesting way to do it. And I was thinking about, you know, what do you think about other, you know, Evernote or a variety of other tools

like that? Or do you feel like spreadsheets are the optimal? Well, I won't get into spreadsheet salesman mode, which I try to sell everybody on the benefits of Microsoft Excel because it's all super amazing. Perhaps it is from my corporate days. I worked in financial services for over a decade and every other email that I got had a spreadsheet attached to it. So it's just been ingrained in me like this is the way that my brain operates. But for most people, no, Excel spreadsheets is not the way to do it. And although it works great for me, there's no right way to curate. I know a way and I can help people do it in a similar way. But I also my goal is to not necessarily tell people I want to be prescriptive, do this. It's more of here's a descriptive method.

Take these principles, take these best practices and apply them to your unique situation and your needs because you're not me. I just want you to have the benefits that I've experienced with curation. 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. 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 today. How are you, too? 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. 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.

The forces shaping markets and the economy are often hiding behind a blur of numbers. So that's why we created The Big Take from Bloomberg Podcasts, to give you the context you need to make sense of it all. Every day in just 15 minutes, we dive into one global business story that matters. You'll hear from Bloomberg journalists like Matt Levine. A lot of this meme stock stuff is, I think, embarrassing to the SEC. Amanda Mull, who writes our Business Week buying power column.

Very few companies who go viral are like totally prepared for what that means. And Zoe Tillman, senior legal reporter. Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. What's the Continuous Creation Challenge? The Continuous Creation Challenge, or the CCC as I call it, is something that I thought up about a year

and a half ago. I was planning on fasting for 72 hours. And I know that sounds like an incredibly long period of time for people. I'm an experimenter. I like to say that I'm the mad scientist of my own life. And I do something called the paleo diet, which allows me to intermittent fast, to go without food for 24 hours, for example, easily. And I thought, what would it be like if I fasted for 72 hours? And then I thought, okay, if I'm not going to consume food for 72 hours, maybe I should just not consume anything and channel all of my energy and all my focus into creating. Because for that first month and a half after I became an entrepreneur, all I did was consume. I consumed videos and blog posts and podcasts about how you set up your podcast and how you do online marketing and how you set up WordPress and all these things. And I wasn't

actually generating any value. I wasn't creating anything. So I went on a creation binge with my own set of rules that I never thought anyone else would do. And for those 72 hours, I created birthday cards. I created blog posts. I created a whole host of things. And after those 72 hours were over, I thought, wow, I felt wonderful. You'd think that I would have been drained without reading or listening to music or eating or watching videos, but I felt so energized and wanted other people to experience this binge of creation because so much of our existence is spent consuming. I feel like everybody has something to add to the world. And if you can have a framework, if you can have a

continuous creation challenge where I can give you some guidelines for you to apply to your own situation, people can achieve some really cool things and realize that they can be their own creative force. And that's what I would like people to do is realize that despite the fact that for 30 years, I didn't think that I was a creative guy. All I could do was draw stick figures. I had no way to channel my creativity. But once I gave it a shot, I realized I had a lot to add. And by giving people the opportunity to reduce or eliminate consumption and focus on creation, I feel like it's a gift. Back to the good wolf. There is something about creating things that is really empowering. things that is really empowering. And I'm kind of amazed by, as I've grown older, the various ways you can create. That it's far broader than we tend to think of when we think of creative work.

There are so many opportunities to be creative. And it's, you know, a lot of times it seems like it's a mindset more than an activity. It totally is. And at least in America, as we go through the public educational system like I did, we're trained to not use our creativity as we progress through the school system. We're trained to conform. We're trained to consume in a certain way. So again, I'm a rather unconventional guy, if you didn't notice before. But realizing that creativity expresses itself in a whole bunch of ways that you might not have thought about before is a really cool thing. Well, how about you two? You probably experience this when you're passive.

There's a greater temptation to feed your bad wolf, at least I feel like. But when I'm active, when I'm being intentional with what I do, and when I'm being creative, normally that's being channeled into my good wolf. Do you guys feel the same way? Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. There's an old phrase that says, depression hates a moving target. And, you know, being active is is really key. And the thing that I find so interesting about all this stuff is one of the principles I found is one of momentum, you know, that if you can just get going with something, it's so much easier to keep it going. But boy, once once you're at rest, it takes a lot more effort to kind of get back into the game with

whatever that that thing is for you. And so momentum is one of those things that I really think a lot about. How do you, and how do you, how can you help people get to momentum? Because then it's, it's a lot more self-sustaining. Yeah. It's a principle of physics. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in motion. And I want to be an object in motion. I want, like you guys, to be a catalyst for other people to get in motion, whatever that may look like. Hopefully, it's by simplifying their life, by removing a lot of the excess, physical, emotional, spiritual, mental, whatever it is that's holding them back and preventing

them from leading an intentional life. But as long as you're moving forward in a positive direction, I love seeing the way that people are sparks for other folks. And I think you guys are too. Like I said, I enjoy what you're doing here. Thank you. Let's talk about simplicity for a second, because that is sort of the title of your website and, you know, sort of seems to be one of the key foundational things. What are some of the things that people can simplify in their lives? I know everybody's different, but some general thoughts on things people can simplify in their lives that allow them to do more of the things that feed their good wolf. Oh boy. You're probably going to have to cut me off at some point in time because the things that

you can simplify, it's this huge umbrella and it means different things to different people. But I'll just rattle off some things. Technology. So using the fewest number of technology tools possible to achieve an end goal. So instead of having a process that involves 10 different things, each of which are dependent of each other, can you do that same process in the same amount of time with two tools? I only use Dropbox and spreadsheets to curate my existence. Other people might use an intricate lever or series of digital levers and pulleys to do the same kind of thing. For parents, the simplicity in the gifts that you give or that you receive, the number of toys that you have your children play with, and their expectations that they set in terms of how much

they need to be happy. Kids can be really, really happy with a very minimal amount of things, and you can exhibit a lot of simplicity there. Decluttering, we've talked about physical decluttering for a lot of people. There's a lot of ways to simplify there. Emcluttering, you know, we've talked about physical decluttering for a lot of people. There's a lot of ways to simplify their emotional attachments, sentimental items. It's a big barrier for a lot of folks. They've got boxes in their basement that they've moved from house to house or apartment to apartment and they can never part with them. Well, if you can exhibit some simplicity in your life, you can break some of those chains that bind you to the things that are holding you back a little bit. Again, I could go on, guys.

We could talk about healthy relationships with money. We could talk about work and entrepreneurship. Yeah, I could just go on and on. But it's huge. There's so many things that you can simplify. huge. There's so many things that you can simplify. One of the things I think people fall into a trap with, you know, we've sort of got a, you know, particularly in certain sections of the internet, a culture of productivity, where people spend all their time fussing with their tools and their methods. You know, you're clearly very focused on tools and methods. How do you know where to

draw the line on that so that you're not spending all your time thinking about being productive, but actually being productive? Wow, that is a seriously good question. And a big question right there. Boy, I have to admit, I struggle with this. And there are probably people who can answer this one a lot better than I can. I won't say that I'm constantly seeking the new best tool, but there's shiny object syndrome the more time you spend on the internet. It's like every single web page you go to, ooh, squirrel, I need to go in that direction. You need to chase that squirrel and go down that rabbit hole. I do that a lot, guys. A little more than I'd like to admit. So when it comes to

drawing boundaries, sometimes I have to realize from a productivity perspective whether something is going to give me an incremental gain or whether something could be potentially transformational and revolutionize a system or a process or some kind of outcome that I have. So that's the primary lens in which I view the tools and methods that I use is I try not to chase the things that seem like they might be one or two percent better than what I'm currently using or what I'm doing. I normally try to focus my time on new things or new tools on the things that seem like, wow, that could be huge and here's why. If I can't conceptualize and explain to myself why it is that I would benefit from it, then I know that that's a bad symbol and then I'm going after the shiny object syndrome and I should probably just cut myself off.

I don't know if that answers your question, but that's one of the ways that I stop myself from just spending so much time not being productive and remembering you should actually be doing something and contributing something as opposed to chasing things that don't matter. Yeah, I love your insight on the continuous creation challenge because that is the that is so easy to do. Spending time consuming things that seem to be about what you do. So you talked about starting a podcast and reading about podcasts and learning and learning about WordPress. And it's so easy to spend so much time doing that stuff and not the time on actually doing. How often do you do the continuous creation challenge? And then how do you take that from a principle

that you apply for 72 hours and how do you distill that down to one that is useful for you kind of day to day? Yeah, well, I have done three full-on continuous creation challenges. So the first one I did was 72 hours. Then I did an 120-hour one in September of 2012. I did. I thought maybe I could make it five days. I couldn't. Actually, the first time around, three days was easy. But the second time

around, after two days, my stomach and my brain were just in full on revolt. And they're like, dude, if you do not do something for me this second, I'm just blowing up the whole plan. So I caved after 48 hours. It's easy to focus on the things that seem really hard. Like for some people, they can never give up reading or they can never give up music or they can never give up food or they can never give up whatever it may happen to be, whatever things that they love to consume. You know, I last did a 72 hour one back in April of this year. And then I realized I was doing it in part to prove something to myself and to other people. Maybe I was doing it not for the maybe for some bad wolf reasons to impress people like

look at how extreme I can be. Look at this challenge that I made and how far I can go. Yeah, there could have been some alternate reasons why I was doing it as opposed to just the benevolent ones that I thought I was doing. But I created, if people want to check it out, they can go to valueofsimple.com slash CCC. So that stands for Continuous Creation Challenge. And I have the origin story. I have other people's experiences with the Continuous Creation Challenge. They can get a couple of different things. They can get

a checklist if they like checklists, or they can get a planning guide on how they can do their own. So I don't like to focus so much on me and what I've done with Continuous Creation Challenge. Initially, it was just for me and it was a personal experience. But now I want other people to experience this. I want to have other people be talking about it and not have this be about me. This is about other people

and just simply creating a tool and a resource for other folks to do it. So with your permission, guys, I'll stop talking about me. And if you want to hear about what other people have done, some cool things that they've done with the Continuous Creation Challenge, I'd love to talk about them because it's pretty cool what other folks have done and what kind of rules they've applied to themselves because it looks totally different for everybody. And that's part of the rad part.

Let's hear one story about that. And then I want to get your thoughts on how you apply the principles of the Continuous Creation Challenge, how you apply that principle of it's important to be creating and not always consuming. And how do I do that besides for the 72 hours or whatever it is every few months that you do the challenge? Yeah, most people start with 12 hours or 24 hours. That's a lot more manageable. 12 hours is the minimum that I recommend because this is intended not to be extreme, but it's intended to get you out of your comfort zone. It's intended to make you break your routine and to reestablish some things that you might not have done since you were a kid. When all you

wanted to do is just build sandcastles and snow forts and all these kinds of things, which we scoff at as adults. That's not worth our time. Play is really important, and play can be a pretty big part of a continuous creation challenge. There's one woman. Her name is Jane Robinson. She's an amazing artist. She's an inspiring creator. I've known her for a couple of years. And she painted and painted and painted some more. She walked her dogs in the countryside.

She did yoga and meditation. Like this is what Creation Challenge looked like. And it was only for 24 hours. I've had people who you've got the artist. And then there's another guy, a friend of mine named Amit. He's a hardcore happiness researcher. If it's not empirical, it's junk to him. And so he spent a ton of time creating comprehensive blog posts on the science of happiness. And he did that for two days before he crashed and burned. Actually, he was trying

to go five days and then he realized he couldn't do it. So there are some people who, at least their first time around, they attempt it and then they realize, I can't do this. And that's cool because people should be testing their boundaries and their limitations. But when they hit them, they should stop and they should pull back and not try to complete something just because they originally set out to do it. So those are a couple of examples of other people in terms of what they've done, how long they've gone, and in terms of what people have abstained from. Some people will abstain from the various categories that I was talking about. Nobody except for me is crazy enough to try to do it without food, though. I'll say that. 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. 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. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? 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 really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign Jason bobblehead. It's called really no really and you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. How do you keep yourself in creation mode between challenges? Well, it's, it's difficult. I tend to do what my calendar tells me to do. So, of course, I'll shift things around if something comes up. If one of my sons is sick and I need to take care of him or a friend is in town and they stop by and they're like, hey, I'm in the Twin Cities. You want to go to lunch? Well, of course I want to go to lunch with one of my good friends who's in town. But whatever my Google Calendar says, what I do is every Sunday night, I will schedule my week of activities. And sometimes I'll even go out and I will schedule a lot of creation time, whether that's blog posts, whether that's new products and services, whether that's some kind of simplicity event that I'm planning. By the way, that was a not so subtle hint that there's a simplicity event that I'm planning, guys.

Pretty excited about that. But I block off at least 12 to 15 hours in the traditional business hours, Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to just create. And I don't have an internet browser open at that time. I just have a single window on my laptop because pretty much everything that I create is digital since I have an online business. And I just get to it because my calendar told me I should.

And I'm not going to argue with my calendar because old Joel, the one who is thinking about his good wolf on Sunday night and what it was going to take to feed that good wolf, he knew best. And if he said on Tuesday afternoon from two to four that I should be creating a podcast for next week, that's what I'm going to do. Good strategy to stick to what you've planned, not what you feel like. Old Joel knows a lot better than current Joel does. So I tend to trust him a little bit more than I trust current Joel. What would happen if Google suddenly disintegrated tomorrow? Would you be doomed? Give me some context, guys. Why do you ask that question?

Because your life is all in a Google calendar. Well, I feel like, of course, in a spreadsheet, all of the various reoccurring business tasks that I do, there's 88 of them that I do anywhere from daily to annually. And I have everything that is in my Google calendar in a spreadsheet. So if Google goes poof one day, at least I can put it into a different system. I have backup or redundancy, if you will. Although I'm a PC guy and I love Google products and services, I actually don't like Google search results. I feel like they're commercially driven. There's so many inherent biases against the little

guy and in favor of big business and big entities. So I try to stay away from Google search as much as I can. I would much rather rely on curators, for example. If there's a specific topic or niche in which I want to get into, I will look for an expert on that outside of Google, whether it's by tapping a friend who knows something about it and having them recommend a specific website or resource for me. I would be okay if Google went poof tomorrow, but only in some of the things that they do. Hopefully the Google Calendar and some of their other cool services will stick around.

Is there anything that you feel like we should cover in regards to this topic that we haven't touched on? I have trouble feeding my good wolf all the time. And there are lots of times where my bad wolf wins for a day, for a week, maybe even a month. I have a lot of issues with sugar. I have a sugar addiction, for example, and there have been times where I've binged. That doesn't feel good. Physically, it doesn't feel good emotionally. And that's me feeding my bad wolf. That's me doing something for the moment, for a periodic sensation that I will resent for a long time to come. So when it comes to feeding your good wolf, I guess it's getting back on track quickly, developing some kind of resiliency, whatever that means to you, because we're all going to feed our good wolf. We're all going to feed our good wolf we're all going to feed our

bad wolf plenty but when you start feeding that bad wolf you need yourself or you need someone else or some kind of system to snap you back out of it and to get you back on the path to that good wolf so basically what i'm trying to say is that's why i feel like the habits that i have are so beneficial because i can do things that are self-destructive or aren't in someone else's best interest on any given day or at any given moment. But then I have a certain system in place to tell me, this is what you should be doing instead. And like I said, I trust my rituals that I've established over the years to guide me back towards that good path.

that I've established over the years to guide me back towards that good path. Let's wrap up with, you know, if you were to give, say you could give one piece of insight to one of your boys about feeding their good wolf, what would it be? I guess it would be... Not to put you on the spot too much. No, I like being put on the spot. It would be to be curious and to try new things because so many of us just get stuck in the status quo and in a rut. And again, it's going back to that inertia thing and that momentum is when you experiment, when you're curious, when you try new things, you're not nearly as frustrated. And if you can go through life having it take a really

long time before you get frustrated with something, then I think you're going to be going down the path towards feeding that good wolf. So I would tell them to be adventurous, to be curious, and to blow stuff up. Not literally, of course, but to blow up paradigms that I've established for them or that they've established for themselves and just try something completely different and see what happens. Great. Well, thank you very much, Joel.

We've enjoyed the conversation. We will put links to your website and all that stuff in the show notes and we will talk again with you soon. Thanks for taking the time to be with us this evening. Thanks so much. Thanks, guys. This has been a treat.

You can learn more about Joel Zaslavsky and this podcast at oneufeed.net slash Joel.