The Tim Ferriss Show - #144: How to 10X Your Results, One Tiny Tweak at a Time

Episode Date: March 5, 2016

If you've enjoyed my previous in-between episodes , then this might be your favorite episode ever. It's one of the most actionable, information-packed interviews I've ever done. This time, it's Joel Stein (@TheJoelStein) asking the questions. Joel is one of the funniest writers I have ever read, and he's great at leading an interview. Here's how it all happened: Joel wanted me to help him figure out 5 areas he could improve for an upcoming series he was going to create. I have many different conversations with journalists. It can be painful when I have a 1-2 hour conversation, and then it's cut to a single sentence as a quote in a piece. And it's often a misquote. So how do you fix that? Well, you record it yourself, which is what we did. (With Joel's approval, of course.) This way, you don't "lose" the content, and you cover your ass with media and journalists. In this episode, we discuss a wide variety of topics, including: How I choose what to improve from infinite options How you can subtract your way to success The genius of Ben Franklin Why self-improvement doesn't mean self-centered How I say no to time-consuming lunches, coffees, and other meetings How I tackle cold introductions How I surmounted Lyme Disease My 100% complete break from start-ups (read this for more) My podcast process Tools and tactics for reversing email overwhelm Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by 99Designs, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. 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So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss

Show. I'm garbling words late at night, whispering in a hotel room in New York City. Outside of my window is a Christmas tree with white lights on it. And all the children are snug in their beds with visions of sugar plums dancing in their heads. But I digress. This episode is a special one. And if you've enjoyed Inbetween-a-Sodes in the past, this is not a long form interview. Actually, it is kind of a long form interview. Then this might be your favorite episode ever. Might end up really being your top pick for most actionable information packed into one interview that I've ever done. And it came about in part because I have many conversations with journalists and the pain

always strikes me when I have a one to two hour conversation and then it gets cut down to a single sentence as a quote and a piece, oftentimes a misquote. And then the one to two hours just never get used. And then furthermore, I can't use it. If they have a recording and they have a boss who has a boss, who has a boss, it just turns into a huge headache and it makes me sad. So how do you fix that? Well, you record it yourself on your side, which doubles as a way to cover your ass with media and journalists. You say, well, Hey, I'll record it on my side via Skype with Ecamm call recorders backup. Cool. And if they're recording and you're recording and you all agree, then you're not breaking any laws and it sounds good and fantastic. And I actually spoke to, uh, Joel

Stein, who is one of the funniest writers I have ever read. And I'm not alone in this. There are many, many, many, many people who would agree with me and you have to check them out. I asked him if I could use this audio. He very graciously said, yes, go for it. Do whatever you want with it. And his site is the Joel Stein, S T E I N.com. And on the Twitter, you can check them out. One of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, hilarious, right up there with Patton Oswalt is, uh, the Joel Stein. So twitter.com forward slash the Joel Stein, please say hi to him. What do we cover in this episode? We cover how I choose what to improve. How do I pick the one single thing to tweak out of infinite options? How you can subtract your way to success. The genius of Ben Franklin,

uh, why self-improvement doesn't have to mean self-centered and tactical tips for fulfilling that, how I say no to time-consuming lunches, coffees, and so on, which is a massive time suck, how I tackle and others might tackle the bane of so-called cold introductions. God, do I hate those. The last few things I've improved in my life, Lyme disease, some of the ways that I was able to surmount that by making hypotheses. A couple of notes, mostly taking a break from startups is something I say in this that is now 100% true. I am off completely as of six months ago, out of the game completely. I did write a public piece called why I'm taking a long startup vacation or how to say no when it matters most. If you just search Tim Ferriss or Ferriss to our S2S is in startup vacation, it'll pop right up.

If you are interested in reading the entire manifesto, which applies to almost every possible area of life, my podcast process, we get into how I thought about automating and really streamlining my podcast process. And this was recorded in 2015. This is about a hundred episodes ago. So you get to see the early thinking, which hasn't changed that much. So that might be fun for some of you. Tools and tactics for reversing email overwhelm.

A couple of notes on that. Number one, Slack. I mentioned that once pops up again. This is 2015 and Slack folks. This one notes on that. Number one, Slack. I mentioned that once pops up again, this is 2015 and Slack folks. This one's on me. Hope it makes you a million bucks. Okay. Next time, give me some money. Thanks. IBM man who eliminated email. I mentioned this. I'm not sure if it's IBM man or Intel woman. I'm not sure, but I believe it was someone at IBM. If you know the name, please let me know via Twitter at T Ferris. Let me know. This was all initially recorded for five episodes that Joel hoped to use

to improve himself each time picking an important area. And he wanted to talk to me first about how to select those damn areas in the first place, among other things, when you dig into everything and he wanted me to promise something that I couldn't deliver. So I'm not going to do that, but I came up with a substitute. I implore each and every one of you to watch or rewatch the movie Idiocracy. It might have some relevance for our current presidential election slash process slash theater debacle could help you out. So check it out. Idiocracy, treat it as a documentary, but with some time travel involved. And last but not least, please check out Joel. You will be so happy that you did. TheJoelStein.com and on Twitter

at TheJoelStein. So Twitter.com forward slash TheJoelStein. T-H-E-J-O-E-L-S-T-E-I-N. And as I always say, but seldom comply with, without further ado, please enjoy my conversations about 30 minutes with Joel Stein. Okay, so the idea for this podcast, I'm just doing five episodes, is that I'm going to improve myself in some way in each podcast. Like I'm going to become a better husband and I'm going to maybe find a new job and become more assertive, things like that. But we haven't even picked all five yet. So I wanted to turn to you. And first of all, how do you get started in self-improvement? Well, I think self-improvement is a dicey term and area because there are a lot of charlatans, a lot of motivational speakers who are light on daily practical tactics,

things like that. I would just say that you should identify your pain points. And an easy way to do that is to sit down with whatever it might be. You could use an application like Evernote or Word or whatever is comfortable for you or Notepad and do an 80-20 analysis to identify the 20% of, make a list of the, say, 20% of activities, relationships, people, whatever it might be, that cause 80% of your negative emotions and negative outcomes, right? So it'd really just go through a brain dump as an exercise. And then you can start to identify the changes that correlate to removing those sources of stress. And I think that one of the failures of most self-help recommendations is that number one, they don't really have a solid grounding in, um, behavioral change and the, the, the science and research behind that. And secondly, they focus on always

adding additional things and not creating a not to do list. So I think the, the subtraction can be just as valuable as the addition. So the 80, 20 analysis is a good place to start. I think, you know, okay. One, this is a very small pain point, but it points to something larger. And I feel like you deal with this so much more than me, which is like people you know and kind of like who ask you to lunch and just become a time suck, even though they're nice and interesting and everything, how do you say no to them when you, I always say I'm busy that day, but then they just pick three more days.

Right. Then it just gets punted to pain further down the line. I, I have a couple of different approaches I use and there are many different coping mechanisms for this. Uh, some work better than others. Uh, I will, I will say either categorically I'm avoiding, um, certain types of activities. So for instance, I'm taking largely a break from startup investing at the moment for a host of reasons that we can get into if you want, but I won't bore you with it right now. And I'm very highly concentrated in that kind of asset class. So when I respond to, say, an introduction from a venture capitalist to a CEO, which is the hardest to turn down because you're now going to offend two people, not just one. And requests for lunch related to kind of categorically that type of activity, I will just respond with heads down on deadlines or on other projects,

taking a break, taking a quote, startup vacation, end quote, for the next X period of time. And I've noticed that, uh, there are many people who use this busy people, uh, you know, in, in some cases worth hundreds or hundreds of millions or more who will use this vacation in quotations for many different things. I'm taking a meeting vacation for X period of time to focus on a and B I'm taking a fill in the blank vacation for X period of time. And that way you're not pushing it off and basically giving, you're not putting a bandaid solution on it. That's just going to rub off and come back to you in a month's time. And they'll say, Hey, following up just like you suggested. And then you're going to really paint yourself into a corner. So that's one approach, uh, making sort of public, uh, announcements about policies, writing. I mean, you're a writer, so this works perfectly for you. So I will probably be putting out something public soon about, for instance, cold email introductions where someone doesn't ask permission to email you and they introduce you to fill in the blank type of person who can then reply and CC all of their co-founders or whatever it might be.

It's a huge problem, but you have the leverage of a platform and the ability to write. So that actually gives you a very easy out in some sense because you can write about tackling these issues. Yeah, I thought it was a general rule. You have to ask someone's permission before you introduce them. That's like an Adam Grant rule. Yeah, it's a very good rule, but it's violated all the time. Uh, and it's, it's, I think it's particularly rampant in the early stage startup investing world. Uh, but it's, it's, it's true in, in many, many, many other places as well.

Uh, but the, the, the, the, the crux of, uh, self-improvement, I think, and there are differing opinions on this, could be echoed by, say, Peter Drucker, the management theorist. So what gets measured gets managed. I think that nebulous goals produce very, at best, mediocre returns. So you have to, for instance, like learning Spanish is not a great goal because it's not measurable. Um, becoming a better husband, uh, in the abstract, a great goal, but in the implementation, uh, a terrible objective because you don't really have, it's not granular enough and you don't have metrics, right? So you'd have to decide how you're going to measure your before your baseline and how you're going to measure your before, your baseline, and how you're going to assess your progress or your after.

And that's something I feel very strongly about, and I'm kind of militant about that aspect when I try to tweak variables in my own life, which are oftentimes associated with some type of performance goal, but not always. So what are the last few things you improved in your life? So I can get an idea of what's measurable. Sure. I had about nine months of my life removed by Lyme disease. I had a very severe, it's very severe symptoms of Lyme disease. And it was confirmed. I, I, I contracted it on long Island, which has one of the highest. My dad got Lyme disease twice. He lives in, yeah, he lives right near you actually lives in quad. Yeah. It's, it's a, it can be a very debilitating, uh, disease with a lot of neurological symptoms and joint pain and so on. Uh, so I started experimenting with various diets based on hypotheses that I had, right? So you have to start with any scientific experiment, which is what I would view what

you're doing as you have a hypothesis. So, you know, doing X will make me a better husband. Or in my case, I thought potentially Lyme is similar to say like herpes simplex that it can lay dormant and then neurotoxins. I don't know anything about herpes whatsoever. Yeah. Well, first of all, all you need to know is that people talk about chronic Lyme as a recurring condition, right? So there are a couple of hypotheses. One is that there could be common triggers like artificial, certain artificial sweeteners that I should remove. And then I could assess sort of the severity of symptoms as they correlate or

don't correlate to that. The other thing is, and I won't go too deep here, but is I have a theory, right? Hypothesis that Lyme may interfere with carbohydrate metabolism in some way. So I tested the ketogenic diet, which is like the Atkins diet and had a device called the precision extra, which is intended for diabetics, but it allows me to measure my ketone levels in a millimolar concentration. And lo and behold, my cognitive symptoms and everything else effectively vanished when I got to a certain ketone level. Now, is that causal? Is it just correlative? Are there other variables?

Sure, but it's a very promising start. So that would be one way that I might measure it. You could do this in a less technical way where you either assess or someone else assesses you on a zero to 10 point scale. So for instance, I have a friend, he's in a older gent, he's in his sixties. He has a, he has a very good, uh, marriage, has a very good relationship with his wife, very good relationship with his kids. Every quarter, his wife grades him on a 10 point scale in four categories, father, husband, provider, and lover. And what's, what's, what was so fascinating. And I thought smart about how they did this is that he doesn't have to maintain a certain ranking in each category. He has to maintain a certain total.

So let's just say for the sake of argument that it's a 30 point scale. Well, he might be traveling a lot for business and not spending a lot of time on the phone or otherwise communicating with his wife for a given quarter. So you might have a very high provider score, say eight, nine, 10, a very low husband score and probably a low lover score, but he could make up for that by being a good father, right? Really focusing on the father category. And that would ultimately give him the total number of points necessary to check the, I am being sort of a, a, a good version of myself for my wife and my family. So that's, that's a simple non-technical way to approach something like that, for instance. Yeah, that sounds like a good way to have an excuse to buy your wife's love.

Well, it's also, I think, underscores something else, which is you shouldn't take advice from anyone who has not been able to implement the same advice successfully for themselves. And in this case, I was not talking to someone who had been married for a year. I was talking to someone who had been married for 20 plus years. And it works. Yeah. At least. And again, that isn't necessarily the only contributing factor, but he felt very strongly that it was. And all that means is you have a hypothesis worth disproving, right? It gives you something to test. That's it. So one thing I've thought about as far, because I've done things like I'm in really good shape

now because I did a story for GQ where they had me get in really good shape. I've done things where I've kind of changed myself. And I always wonder with self-improvement, as I improve myself and really focus on myself, am I actually just doing more damage by making me a bad person because I'm not focusing on other people, you know, my family? I think it depends exactly or entirely, I should say, on what you're focusing on. And I don't think improving oneself and improving either or both your interactions with other people or the world at large are mutually exclusive, right? So I think it might be a false dichotomy in so much as if you look at, say, Ben Franklin and his 13 virtues, you had humility, sincerity. These are things that affect other people and ostensibly would improve his ability to interact with the

world around him. And I think that it depends entirely on the objectives that you choose, whether you're focusing on self-improvement or not. I think that your focus determines how selfish, self-interested or otherwise you are. So I think, I think that it can cut both ways and it just, it depends a lot on what targets you choose. But have you found that people who follow your advice sometimes become self-oriented in a bad way? Uh, that's a good question. I, uh, I would imagine that is the case. I would imagine it has to be the case. You know, if I have whatever it might be, you know, 2 million people or so per month coming to the blog as unique visitors, I would imagine that you have all sorts of interesting patterns in the data, including

people who end up focusing on themselves to the exclusion of others. Now, I would emphasize or I would propose that it's possible. I'm not saying this is altogether the case, but it's possible just in the way that it's easier for I'm not saying this is altogether the case, but it's possible just in the way that it's easier for people to focus on, say, improving the world and philanthropic work, like Bill Gates, for instance, after they have amassed a certain amount of capital and satisfied the majority of rungs on Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I think it's possible that to be as selfless as possible, to be as selfless as you are capable of, you might focus very selfishly on yourself for a period of time, coming back to what you asked earlier about saying no to people, right? So saying no to a thousand things so that you can

focus on the one most important, highly leveraged, uh, project in your life may in the longterm allow you to do the greatest good. So I think it's a calculus you have to run. Uh, but is it possible that someone could be a selfish bastard by focusing on, uh, you know, reading a thousand self-help books and never lending a helping hand to other people. Sure. I'm sure those people exist. And what are the things people most want to improve upon? I mean, I have my guesses, but what does it turn out to be? Stuff they can actually measure. Uh, I think that, uh, you know, the modern, the, the fears of modern men and women can kind of be boiled down to getting fat and getting too many email. I think that those are, those are two that crop up continually. I mean, there are many fears,

fears of death and so on. So you have the Peter Thiel's and others here in Silicon Valley trying to crack the code of immortality. But if we really want to focus on the daily, the daily grind and the basics. I think that fat, having too much fat, eating too much fat, whatever it might be, and email overwhelm or the general state of kind of digital overwhelm are two things that most people seem preoccupied with. And fortunately, they both provide a lot of different metrics you could potentially use. I thought you were going to mention in addition to fat money and sex. I'm sure people worry about those things and they're, they're also both measurable. Um, you know, I mean you could, you could say, uh, you could compare, you know, Tinder to other dating profiles. You could, you could use data use data to take five or six profile photos

and put them up on OkCupid using a service they offer called My Best Face, which allows people to vote on your photos so you determine which get the highest click-through rates. These can all be broken down to measurables. My measurable would be

cutting down on my time spent on emails and stuff it would be great but so the measurable is what there well the measurable could be uh the number of email answered right so so aiming to answer fewer email total which i think is a good metric, simply because if you listen to people like, say, Robert Scoble, who's a technologist, his hypothesis, which it's not really a hypothesis, it's based on his experience, is that for every email he sends out, he gets, I think, 1.75 on average in return, right? So the goal should not be to just do more things, right? Because it's, it's possible to be very efficient, i.e. do things quickly, but focus on things that are unimportant. So my, my goal is always to try to, in this case,

for instance, focus on being effective, which is doing the right things. And in the case of email is having say an auto response, a piece of public writing that allow you to safely ignore 70 or 80% of your email, as opposed to simply responding to those emails in a faster fashion. Now, um, the, there, the, the metrics you should, you can come up with a laundry list and then pick one or two that are kind of your key metrics. And this goes for behaviors as well. And what I mean by that is you want to try to pick the variables in your life that have a cascading positive effect. So for instance, if your goal is to drink less coffee, you should ask yourself, well, why do you drink so much

coffee? Well, it's because I wake up and I feel tired. Well, why do you drink so much coffee? Well, it's because I wake up and I feel tired. Well, why do you wake up and you feel tired? It's because I go to bed really late. Well, why do you go to bed really late? It's because I habitually go out three or four nights a week and have drinks with friends. Okay. Why do you go out to have drinks with friends three or four nights per week? If it makes you feel so shitty because I have a tough time saying no to their invitations. Okay. We can kind of track back to an initial snowball that leads to these other things. So if you just try to cut back on your coffee, it won't work unless you address kind of the, the earlier cascading effects. And I think that's true with, with variables, right? It's, it's possible to improve your speed ranking in answering email, but if

that's just leading to you answering more trivial email as opposed to the critical few, you're playing the wrong game. But I mean, for email, for instance, a tool that I think is very easy to implement if you're using Gmail is Boomerang, which allows you to schedule emails to be sent in the future. It allows you to automate followup so that if someone doesn't reply, it brings it to your top, to the top of your inbox. It removes a lot of the cognitive load of email processing. Uh, and, uh, those would be a few examples. Um, I mean, there are many more. The one, one of the few things I ever fixed about myself was being late, which I fixed in my late 20s. And basically, I had to do all the work you just described, which was figuring out, oh, I'm really self-conscious if I get somewhere early and I don't know what to do physically with myself.

It was before you could play with your cell phone. I had to train myself to go in public and stand there and not feel self-conscious. And then I was able not to be late anymore. Right. So I think what you're saying about email is the same thing. Like I am afraid of confrontation and being thought of as a jerk. So I'm afraid not to respond. So I have to fix that.

Yeah, exactly. Uh, being afraid of confrontation. Well, you know, I mean, you could,

and we don't have to necessarily go into a psychoanalysis session now, but I mean, you could even, you could go back. That may not be the end of the story or the beginning of the story, right? I mean, you could even, you could go back. That may not be the end of the story or the beginning of the story, right? I mean, you could go back even further and say like, why am I afraid of people thinking ill of me or thinking of me as rude? And it would be very helpful. I know I'm digressing very briefly here. I will sit down in the morning after I meditate for 20 minutes, which I think is a huge

kind of force multiplier for a lot of these behaviors, and sit down and journal for five minutes and basically try to take all of my anxieties, whatever those might be, and put them on paper. And that will oftentimes sort of empower you to make decisions when you see how groundless most of them are. But how do you, it can take the, it can take many forms, right? I mean, you could, it takes number one, there's like the fact gathering mission, right? So is this assumption actually based in fact, right? So can you find examples where that's the case? And in my, in my particular instance with the startup world and VCs, venture capitalists are introducing me to founders without asking me first. And then those

founders say, hey, great to meet you, Tim, looping in my five co-founders or whatever the hell, it would turn into a mess. And then I looked at my most successful deals and you could look at the most important pivotal projects in your life, just say pieces of writing, whatever it might be that led to positive inflection points in your life. Were any of those the direct response to saying yes to invitations you otherwise wanted to turn down, right? And in my case, I realized none of my best startups, if I look at again, 80, 20 analysis, what are the 20% of the deals I've invested in that have produced 80% or more of my returns? None of those deals came from code email introductions from VCs, not a single one. So I think that decreasing anxiety and tackling some

of these thorny or psychological issues starts with testing assumptions and fact finding. Wow. Okay. This is all incredibly helpful. Uh, I'm going to ask my producer Shara. Hi Shara. Anything else we should ask him? Um, yeah, well, this is a very specific question, but, um, I know that there was a Buzzfeed writer who recently got rid of his email altogether. And I mean, like, what do you think of that? Because we have so many different forms of communication now. Why just, you know, maybe we should just be eliminating some of them and that could reduce some of Joel's potential anxiety and the true people who want to get in touch with him, get in touch with them. I agree with that. I agree that email is a tool that has been misappropriated for a lot of tasks for which it was not initially designed. And there are many

people who have gone off, I shouldn't say many, but more than a handful of people. There's another gent from IBM who has banished email from his toolkit and has done so for several years. There are many different tools in the toolkit, right? So I think that some of the options worth examining could be, number one, some type of project management software, whether that's Asana, Basecamp, Trello, for instance, for assigning tasks with deadlines so that email does not become a follow-up system is very helpful. Identifying, and not to sound like I'm beating a dead horse, but doing an 80-20 analysis of your inbox, right? So who are, say, the top five, who are the five to 10 people who communicate with

you most via email and trying to identify, asking yourself what other tools could do this job better than email. And I think you'd find that project management software, very helpful. But on top of that, you could look at say,, within any given organization, using a tool like Slack. Slack has become extremely popular in fast-growing startups who might be hiring 10, 50, 100 people over the course of several months. It becomes more and more important as you scale. And I think that if, for instance, you're trying to, I'm just using a hypothetical, but in my case, rather than say training multiple people to help me moderate comments on the blog, I could use a tool like ScreenFlow, which allows you to record your screen and your voice while you're moderating comments, I take that video,

I put it into Dropbox and I never have to teach that skill again. Now I have a link that I can send to anyone I need to train to do that. I never have to explain it again. Uh, so for any repetitive task, if you're thinking about this, like an engineer, engineers abhor repetitive tasks. That's why they write scripts and get good at programming and so on. If you start thinking about your life in that way, and sort of for a repetitive task, if you only could do this once and never again, what system would you have to put in place? You can cultivate this kind of tool agnostic problem solving mindset. And wait, just because I'm going to go do this as soon as we hang up, the 80-20 analysis is I figure out what the 20, what the things are that 20% of my things that are using up

80% of my time are causing me 80% of my pain? That would be one implementation. And it doesn't have to be, the 80-20 is a guideline, right? So it could be that 1% of the people who email you produce 99 or more or 100% of your email. But in general, using it to find my pain points. Yeah, using it to find both the good and the bad. So for instance, if you're running a company or let's just say from an income standpoint because you mentioned money. So it's like what are the 20% of the projects that you work on that produce 80% or more of your income?

This will allow you to separate the trivial many from the critical few. If you're trying to kind of replicate your successes while avoiding the noise as much as possible. I find it helpful for people because people seek out self-help typically, not because everything is working great and they just want to make it perfect. It's because they have pain points or sources of stress that are causing them some type of overwhelm or self-doubt. In that case, I find it helpful to start with, what are the 20% of activities in my life that are causing 80% of the stress or negative emotions, insomnia, et cetera? Who are the 20% of the people I spend time with who are producing 80% of the headache, the anxiety, the anger, the insomnia, etc.? And that gives you a not-to-do list around which you can build routines and habits that you can test to assess how those feelings go up or down, for instance.

And besides the ketones, what are you working on right now on yourself? Let's see. Besides my ketones, I'm working on podcast process. So production process, post-production process. And the first thing that I'll do is I put together Google Doc and we have maybe, I don't know what, 10 to 12 steps, discrete steps that I'm currently using to take a podcast from kind of planning stage to booking a guest to recording to post-production. First thing I'll do is try to eliminate as many steps as possible. So rather than just asking how do I do all these things faster, like which of these steps are redundant, unnecessary, or just unimportant? I think they're really important, but they're not actually that important. Uh, such as putting up a blog post, like how important is it to put up a corresponding blog post? How, and the way you assess important is how is that affecting my,

my, my metric. And my metric is, uh, let's just say, uh, number of downloads or listens per episode, right? Uh, then, so let's let's say I take that 12 steps and I break it, I cut it down to eight. I decide that, and I'm in the middle of doing this right now. So with someone else trying to cut down 12 to eight or seven or whatever it is at that point, then I ask, you know, what can I automate here? So I'm kind of defining things. Then I'm asking automating, what can I use technology to automate here? So for instance, like as soon as I put up a blog post, um, if I decided to do that, that could, I could use a program like if this, then that, uh, which I think is just I F T T T or I F T T to automatically put a promotion up on Twitter and Facebook. So I don't have to think about it.

I don't have to delegate it. So it's kind of definition, elimination, removing as many steps as possible, automation, choosing tech to automate things so that people aren't involved. And then last is the sort of delegation piece. So if at that point, what is remaining and what of those can I delegate? So if I need artwork, for instance, for a thumbnail for each podcast, which I don't, but let's say I did, I could go to like a 99designs or a Fiverr or one of these sites and have someone else manage that process for me.

I feel like there are six or seven apps you haven't even mentioned yet. There are, you'd be surprised, I don't actually have that many apps on my phone. I think that it's, technology is a wonderful tool and a terrible master. And a lot of people confuse amassing tools or motion with progress. And I, that's, it's a very seductive, easy path to take because we're constantly sold the, the hype of downloading this one new app and it'll change your life. Download this other new app and it will streamline a, B or C. And I think that most people are drowning in a glut of tools. And, uh, the reason for that is that they don't have any precise goals. They don't have precise goals and measurable goals. I have one more question, Tim. So one thing with this podcast that we've been thinking about is

that we have these bigger ideas. And one of the topics that we want to tackle too is assertiveness. So for using assertiveness as an example, we would do the 80-20 for assertiveness and see what the pain points truly are for Joel in what is making him more passive than assertive. 80-20, well, assertiveness is, to be honest, I would have to think on that. I don't want to give you a knee-jerk response that isn't helpful. But the assertiveness, I would start with Joel sitting down and journaling and kind of going backwards and asking three or four whys about why he has trouble being assertive, right? So if it's, I am straight, he could do an 80, 20 analysis on his sources of stress. This is a general, uh, broad 80, 20 of, as I described the sources of stress, I would start there. Um, cause maybe being assertive or assertiveness is not the problem you need to fix, right? I'm not, I will take your word at for it, but it's, let's start with just 80, 20 to identify

the 20% of activities, people, et cetera, that are causing 80% of the negative emotions that he wants to avoid from there. Then he could sit down and journal, meaning just kind of freehand stream of consciousness, right? You know, why trying to answer the question, like, why do I feel I'm not assertive enough and just write for five to 10 minutes. And whenever he thinks he's reached a conclusion, ask why, right? So if it's, I don't answer, you know, I answered more email than I should. I feel, I feel compelled to answer more email than I should. Why answer that? Well, it's because I feel ABCD, right? Well, why do you feel those things? Because this, this, this, and at the end of it, looking at that and asking, right? Well, why do you feel those things? Because this, this, this. And at the end of

it, looking at that and asking, you know, which of these assumptions have not been tested? That's, that's where I would start. And I don't want to make it seem like assertiveness is a very big, broad word. And I get anxious when people are trying to fix anything that is very broad. I think you have to get very specific. But those, so the age 20 analysis, the journaling, and then I would ask, okay, what would the, how could I test these assumptions, right? How could I test these assumptions? And one of them might be, you know, I need to respond as quickly as possible or I'll lose the respect of my, my coworkers. And that will end,

you know, why do you care about that? Well, because it'll have this effect. You could just test that. And I'm not saying this is what you do, right? Because certain jobs are suited to this and some are not, but you could test an autoresponder. And to give you an example, this is one of dozens of potential tools, but let's just say that's how you test the assumption. I had this radio station manager come up to me at South by Southwest. At one point, he said, you know, I'd love to try an autoresponder, but there's no way I could do it because my boss, my boss would probably fire me. I mean, I need to be responsive at all times, especially during the conference.

And I said, well, that's, that may or may not be true, but it's an assumption you can test. So why don't you set up an autoresponder that you can turn off literally with the click of a button if your boss gets upset and know, I think you're underestimating your value during a busy conference. He's not going to hire you or fire you and hire someone new in the middle of the busiest season. It would be a stupid managerial decision. So he put up an autoresponder and he sent me a follow-up and he said, I thought you'd love the response. And his boss wrote to him who was managing multiple stations and said, love this approach. I wish more of the managers would use this and cc'd all the

other managers because this boss was getting cc'd on every bit of minutiae and his problem was 10 times worse than those other managers and so his assumption was completely unfounded in fact the way his boss felt was exactly the opposite so um that's a lot but i'm just saying 80 20 analysis as i described journaling why this why that why why going back, identifying assumptions that you haven't tested, determining how you can test them. And I can't, I can't spoon feed you the answers to that. You have to just sit down and do some hard thinking and then determining the metrics, the numbers that you could assign or, or use as a measurement for testing those assumptions. And then at that point, you can form the hypothesis, if I do this, then desirable outcome X, right?

And at that point, then you're moving into behavioral change. But before you change something, you want to assess your current state of matters. And so this final question is, after talking to me right now, what do you think my likelihood of success is? Impossible to answer. If you follow the prescription that I have put out

and focus on measurable, uh, measurable objectives, changing as few variables as possible. Don't try to change 10 behaviors at once, uh, and rigging the game in that way so that it is possible to win. Um, and you have a timeline that is, has been rationally thought through. I think, I think the likelihood of success could be very high. Now I will tell you, I understand this piece has to be entertaining and I'm not sure if it would be entertaining if your path to success were very clear. So I'm not, so to that extent, that's an unknown in my head. But I mean, you're a smart guy. You've changed behaviors before.

I think that there's a very high chance of success if you kind of follow a framework that has worked for thousands, tens of thousands, probably millions of people. Because a lot of these principles go back hundreds or even thousands of years. These are not new principles. Well, I can't thank you enough. I didn't mean to take this much of your time. We took 45 Tim Ferriss minutes, which you're that's four human hours. Yeah. Got to measure it and measure it in dog years. But, uh, any, any friend of Neil's is a friend of mine and, uh, I, I, I enjoy your work. So I'm happy to, happy to chat. Oh, I'll definitely put that in the podcast.

And I will call you when this whole thing's over just to ask some wrap-up questions. Sure thing. And ping me anytime. Thank you so much, Tim. Of course, guys. Take it easy. Bye. Bye. Hey, guys.

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