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Because we re kind of like, ah, it s good.
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If nothing s imploding or exploding, we re just good.
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We re coasting, man, we re good.
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And then, yeah, you get down the road and you re like, oh, no, actually, things really are not good.
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This actually takes nourishing along the way.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today, we re talking with my friend, Jonathan Fields, author of How to Live a Good Life, A Practical Guide to a Life Well-Lived.
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There s a lot in this book.
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It s almost like a workbook instead of just a regular read-as-you-go kind of novel or text, but we re talking about the concept of buckets.
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There s different buckets, connection, relationships, contributions, vitality.
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There s laws that go in with the buckets, and this is really an interesting practical episode on making sure we re not ignoring
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vital areas of our life, we re gaining purpose in our work, gaining connection in our relationships, there s a lot of practical snapshot exercises in order to get us out of our autopilot reactive life and make sure that we re getting a lot of ROI, especially in terms of our sanity.
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And by the way, if you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the AOC toolbox where we discuss things like reading body language and having charismatic nonverbal communication, the science of attraction, negotiation techniques, networking and influence strategies, mentorship,
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persuasion tactics, and everything else that we teach here at The Art of Charm.
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In the US, you can text the word charmed to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash podcast, you can find the full show notes for this and all previous episodes of the show.
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Alright, here s Jonathan Fields.
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Jonathan, great to have you.
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Is it back on the show or is this the first time you ve been on the show?
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I m drawing a blank here.
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I m trying to remember.
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It s like we ve known each other for so long.
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I think it s the first time, though.
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It might be the first time we ve done something that s airable.
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Because I was on your show and it was just like delete quietly.
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Man, that was like six, seven years ago.
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That was a long time ago for both of us.
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And I remember it so well, because I use it as an example.
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I was in the worst, terrible emotional state for some reason.
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I don t know if I d just gone through a breakup or something, and I just moved.
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Oh, we d gotten robbed.
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We d just moved to L.A., and I was like, I don t even know.
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There was something else going on.
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And I use it as a classic example of how you can t do things that require high performance when there s something else going on that you re not taking care of.
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Yeah, so agree.
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We think we can, though.
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Very apropos your book, actually.
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I spent years being like, oh, it s cool if I hate every second of my working life because I m dealing with problems.
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Oh, it s cool if I haven t been paying attention to my health and I ve been neglecting my social life in this respect or the other respect.
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It s fine because I m working on my business or something like that, and then just talk about something that s contrary to the message of AOC in general, and then I realized
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this is not working out.
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The reason I realized this is because I had hit some weird wall where I just decided, screw it, I need to take care of myself, I don t even care if we go out of business.
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And the day I decided to do that, everything took off.
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Yeah, isn t it crazy?
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I mean, it s so funny, you know, you and I probably both spend a lot of time talking to people who are in business and entrepreneurs.
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and they re constantly looking for the big lever that exists outside of themselves, or like, tell me the marketing tactic, or the website, or the app, or show me the exponential growth lever that exists outside of me so that everything takes off, never realizing that, like, the single biggest propulsion factor for your growth in life, in business, whatever it may be, it s you, it s, you know, it s what exists between your ears, and, but that s hard, and we wanna find something where we can just buy it, or, you know, like, turn it on outside of us.
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Right, these internet marketer guys that you and I both know, a lot of them are like Facebook ads and all this stuff, and it s great, look, I get it, that s great lead gen, but if your hair is falling out because you re maxed out on every other area of your life and you re not taking care of your health and your wife is leaving you or something like that, or your husband s leaving you.
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then you can have a great Facebook ads campaign, but I m betting the rest of your business is in the toilet, and rest of your life for that matter.
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And I think that that s really an interesting point, and leads to my first question, which is who is your book for?
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Because one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because I ve known you for so long, interesting, sharp guy, really good coach, but who s the book for?
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Because I feel like whenever I see books like this, they re written for ourselves.
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Yeah, you know, it s really funny is that, you know, I had somebody in mind when writing the book, and it was somebody who in the middle season of their lives, somebody who s kind of, they re doing okay, but they ve been kicked around a lot, they have probably sacrificed a whole lot of their identity, who they were in the name of
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a lot of other things and a lot of other people.
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They re doing okay by outside metrics, but inside they re kind of dying a little bit every day, and they feel like they re living life on somebody else s terms.
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They re massively reactive, and not in sort of like this metaphysical woo out their way, but like in a very practical way.
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You wake up and you re like, you know what, I m largely flatlined.
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And that s become, sadly, the experience of so many people.
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You kind of figure like you hit a certain point in your life and you re like, oh, I ll just push a little harder because
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I ll get there to that place where everything s gonna be good, and then I ll cruise.
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I have no problem with working hard and doing big things and building, but we have tended to surrender a sense of intentionality and agency, and just increasingly living these mindless, hyperreactive existences.
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And I think that s massively destructive to so many of us.
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And that s the person that I really wrote this for, which is, like you said, it has been me, you know, at various moments in my life.
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And, you know, I m not a guru up on high.
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I m very much along the journey with everyone else.
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It probably will be me again at some point.
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So it s almost like, you know, at some point I ll probably reflect back on my own work and say, maybe you should start taking your own lessons again.
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I think anytime you are saying take your own advice, it s a good sign.
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I know most people think that s a bad thing, because you re supposed to have everything in order, but I think it s a good sign, and the reason I think that is because in order to even recognize that you need to take your own advice, you re already on the way to that awareness that requires you to be introspective enough to apply something or to learn something new.
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Jen loves this more than I do.
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She loves saying take your own advice.
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advice, but it s good because when I hear that, I kind of go, oh good, not only am I aware enough to realize that I need to do that, but I already have the solution.
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I mean, that s a really good place to be versus for those of us that don t know what advice to get because we don t understand the problem and we don t know where to go and if we do understand the problem, we don t know how to fix it.
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That s much worse than, hey man, take your own physician, heal thyself, right?
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That s a much better place to be in.
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Yeah, and I think when you kind of get to a point where you re unwilling to actually take your own advice or anybody else s advice for that matter, it s like that s the point where you stopped growing.
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It s like if I never stumble, then I never have the opportunity to find my next treasure, like sort of using Campbell s frame around the hero s journey.
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It s like if I m constantly just going sideways and I m never feeling that struggle or the stumble, it s like okay, so there s no growth happening here, which means that there s no possibility happening either.
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So I would rather get to a point where I m like, ah, I have to reset, like things aren t going right, I have to get back into doing what I need to do to make them go right, because if I m never there, I m never moving forward.
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If you re not growing, you re dying, or something like that.
0
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Yeah, it s Bob Dylan.
0
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Something like, those who aren t busy living are busy dying, yeah.
0
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Get busy living or get busy dying.
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It s along those lines.
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I probably didn t just quote Dylan on purpose, but I think it was... Oh sure, you didn t.
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One of the things that I thought was really interesting that stuck out of this book right away was the different buckets idea that you have, and I thought this was cool and very simple, and I would love it if you can teach us about the different buckets, because I d never actually thought of things this way before, and I see a lot of people who are having serious issues in one area of their life, and they re mystified as to why.
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It often does come down to the idea of the buckets.
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Yeah, and it s almost like it s this deceptively simple idea.
0
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And I didn t want to create a book that people read and they re like, well, that was nice and move on.
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I really wanted to create more of like something that people did.
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And one of the questions I asked is like, there is no lack of material or information in the world of self-help personal development.
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So I didn t want to just add to this massive abyss of stuff.
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So I was really asking myself, it s kind of like a lot of what you do with the work that you do.
0
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It s like, well, if so much of this has been out there for so long, why aren t so many people taking action on it?
0
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And I think a lot of it is, it s delivered in a way that requires you to buy into dogma or big belief systems or create mass disruption in your life.
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And my goal was, okay, how can I create a really simple model that is visual, where you hear it once, you remember it for life, and you can actually act on it.
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It guides your behavior on a day-to-day basis.
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helps you make decisions, and that s where I ve, over a period of years, I just, I kept exploring all different ways to share it, and eventually, just a really simple idea of life as three buckets came to me, and then I started, I spent a few years testing this with our different communities, because I wanted to know if it was robust enough.
0
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Like, would it actually make a difference?
0
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So the idea is really simple.
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Think of your life as three buckets.
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One is called your vitality bucket.
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That s about optimizing your state of mind and body.
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The second is called your connection bucket.
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That s about cultivating deep and meaningful relationships.
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The third is your contribution bucket.
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That s about how you bring your strengths, your gifts, your beliefs to the world.
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It s about how you contribute.
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to the world around you.
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And that may be the way that you also earn your living, but interestingly, it may also not be the primary source of income for you too.
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So a good life then is when you basically do the work to make all three buckets as full as you can get them.
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and then develop a daily practice of basically every day taking a quick look and saying, okay, so how full is each one of these three buckets and what can I do today to fill them?
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Or if one feels like it s exceedingly low, which very often happens with people, what do I need to focus my energy so that I can actually bring that one back up a little bit?
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So can you take us through the bucket exercise, because I know there are people right now who are like, yeah, yeah, I get it, buckets, I need to fix this, because I know that my relationship life is in the toilet, but I m working really hard and I got promoted, why do I feel like crap, right?
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It s that kind of thing that we re gonna be dealing with here.
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Yeah, so step one for me is let s get really objective because we love to be delusional about the state of our life, what s good and what s not good, and that includes the state of our buckets.
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We love to pretend that actually certain buckets are full when they re sort of like bone dry.
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The perfect example of this is when we re working, we ll kind of be like, well, I m going all in because I m building my career, I ve got a company, whatever it is.
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I ll sleep when I die.
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I ll take care of my body and my health when I need to.
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Not realizing that actually, or we ll just tell ourselves, well it s really not so bad.
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It s like everything s okay.
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I m young, I can handle it.
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I m still in pretty good shape.
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And then all of a sudden we crash and burn because we just were not being truthful.
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What I found is it s really helpful to take a snapshot of how full your buckets are or how empty these three buckets are on any given day.
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I like to do this as a 10 second scan in the morning.
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I think it s good to do it in more detail once a week and then in even more detail once a month.
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And it keeps you honest, you know, because we love to tell lies about the state of our lives, both good and bad.
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Or just blow it off, right?
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Like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know I haven t been working out, but I ve been working on the Carter deal, and once this closes, man, I m gonna be good, right?
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Because you d never do this in your business, right?
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You d never say, look, I don t have a prototype, I don t have my website up, my email account is down, but look, I ve been going to the gym like five days a week, I m good.
1
SPEAKER_03
You would never say that about your own business, but you will sacrifice everything else.
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because of your business, right?
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Yeah, you ll sacrifice your health, you ll sacrifice your state of mind, you ll sacrifice your relationships.
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I mean, many people blow them up because they feel like those are the recoverable things.
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You only have one shot at building this business and it s so funny because very often it s the exact opposite, you know?
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So I m a big fan of creating mechanisms to actually be as objective as you can on a regular basis.
1
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It s kind of like the idea of the research around weight loss.
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If you want to actually lose weight and sustain weight loss, the research at least that I ve seen is pretty clear that you have to take some sort of metric and actually measure yourself on a really regular basis.
1
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That could be a scale, it could be clothes, whatever it is.
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that if you actually are checking in, it forces you to be honest, and it stops you from going off the rails a lot sooner, and it lets you correct course a lot more quickly, because we will either blow it off, or we ll just tell the story that we wanna tell that enables us to continue the behavior that we re engaged in.
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True, and God, man, I ve done this just so much, it s painful.
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I m raising my hand also.
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That s like what we do.
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What sort of buckets do you see that most people are ignoring?
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Is it really health, or is it relationships?
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Where are most people falling short?
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Yeah, so this is really interesting, because we actually have data on this at this point.
1
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So, along with the launch of the book, which was a couple months, we launched this tool called the Snapshot 360, where people would go online, and they would answer 30 questions, and it gives you numerical values for each of your three buckets, a snapshot in time.
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And behind that, we ve been able to actually gather aggregate data now on thousands and thousands of people.
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So we can actually start to really see how are people on a larger scale doing with the different buckets and where do people need help.
1
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What we re seeing is fascinating and a little bit upsetting, which is that
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The average number, let s say out of a 10, the average bucket is five point something across all three.
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So, you know, on average, that means that most of us are walking around with all three buckets somewhere around a little better than half full, which is we d like to think that we re better than that.
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So it s really eye opening to think that.
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And then what we re seeing when we get deeper into the data that we re gathering within the buckets is that vitality bucket is definitely, it s a major challenge for a lot of people.
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What s interesting to me is that it s not so much in the way that we would think.
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So a lot of us would think, okay, so if vitality bucket is about optimizing your state of mind and body, you know, and most people blow off exercise because they re like, I don t have time for it.
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That s gotta be the thing that s really the biggest problem.
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That s what s dragging the scores down.
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What we re finding is that actually the bigger challenge, the bigger negative in the data is mindset.
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People are really struggling with mindset, with resilience, and with handling uncertainty, and with optimism.
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We re not, again, we re not talking about delusional positivity.
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We re talking about actually just being able to cultivate sustainable optimism and positive states.
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but also really, and also being mindless.
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This is a huge, huge issue.
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People are really struggling with figuring out how to be present in whatever it is they re doing.
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They re constantly spinning and massively distracted.
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So it s interesting to see that that seems to be a much bigger challenge in the vitality side of things.
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in the contribution side of things.
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This is really interesting also.
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I would have guessed that most folks would really struggle with not having a sense for what their strengths were and what they were capable of.
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And what we re seeing is actually that a lot of people are sharing that they actually do have a really strong sense
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of what their strengths and their beliefs and their skills are.
1
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But at the same time, we re seeing a really, really low rating on a sense of purposefulness.
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Like, they feel like the way that they re contributing to the world, there s a very low level of meaning and purpose in what they re doing, which kind of tells you, those two things together tell you that you kind of know what your character strengths are and what your skills and abilities are and what lights you up, but you have a really low sense of meaningfulness and purpose that means that you re not actually engaging them.
1
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You re not doing them.
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So, okay, that makes sense, because I was just gonna say, if you know what lights you up, how do you not have purpose?
1
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Oh, because you know what lights you up, and you re like, yeah, someday, maybe I ll get to do that, but right now, I gotta file these TPS reports.
1
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Right, which also reflects back on the mindset issue, which is that if you actually do have a sense for what lights you up, and you re not doing it, that s gonna be a hit to your state of mind, too.
1
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It s gotta be worse, right?
1
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Because if you just think everybody s like this, this is all there is, you re like, ah, well, but if you re like, there s more, but I m stuck here, that s so much worse.
1
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I totally agree, because it contributes to a sense of futility and fatalism.
1
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And I think that, so you take another sort of like secondary hit to state of mind.
1
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One of the things that I saw that I loved, it wasn t just, there s different buckets.
1
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The end, it was, you have laws of the buckets.
1
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And these are brilliant, because these are what allows you to do this exercise and then not totally just lie to yourself about the results of the exercise.
1
SPEAKER_03
And also, it s about the way the buckets interact with each other, which makes it even more important than just, because otherwise, the buckets are, hey, there s different areas of your life that need attention, thanks for buying my book, bye, right?
1
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This is, in my opinion, probably the most important part of the whole thing, the way that the buckets interact with each other.
1
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Can you guide us through this a little bit?
1
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Yeah, so three simple laws.
1
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One is that all the buckets leak.
1
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The earlier you are in life, the shinier they are, the more sealed they are.
1
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You fill them up and they re pretty solid.
1
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But over time, they get banged around, they get dented a little bit, and they all start to leak.
1
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And so there s this idea that, hey, I m gonna fill my vitality bucket, be totally healthy, optimal state of mind, massively resilient, and then I m good.
1
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But it doesn t work that way because that bucket leaks.
1
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So if you start to ignore it over time, the level drops and drops and drops and it gets bone dry.
1
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So all three buckets leak all the time.
1
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So there never is a point where you can just top them all off and say, I m done and walk away from them.
1
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You gotta be invested.
1
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This is an interesting concept because it s so obvious when it comes to some buckets, and it s so elusive when it comes to others.
2
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For example, nobody would go to the gym for six months or a year and go, great, lost a bunch of weight, I m in really good shape, never going to the gym again, I m done, right?
2
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You wouldn t do that.
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But what a lot of men, including myself, will do sometimes, and I catch myself doing this, of course, whenever possible, is I ll be like, great, got a great relationship, I m good,
2
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She s over there, she s in her office doing her thing.
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I can check off the box where it says good girlfriend.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, six months later, it s like, what s wrong with her?
2
SPEAKER_01
Why is she being weird?
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh, because I ve been ignoring this bucket for six months because I checked her off like a to-do list.
2
SPEAKER_01
Maybe I should look into maintaining this a little bit, you know?
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_03
And that s the one actually where we see the biggest hit.
2
SPEAKER_03
That s exactly it.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know, we all kind of get that.
2
SPEAKER_03
You can t stop working out.
2
SPEAKER_03
You can t stop doing the work on your health and your nutrition and stuff like that.
2
SPEAKER_03
But the relationship, especially like with an intimate other or a partner, that is the one where we tend to be the most delusional because we re kind of like, ah, it s good.
2
SPEAKER_03
Like if nothing s imploding or exploding, like we re just good.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know, we re cozy, man.
2
SPEAKER_03
We re good.
2
SPEAKER_03
And then
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, you get down the road and you re like, oh, no, actually, things really are not good.
2
SPEAKER_03
This actually takes nourishing along the way.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and that can be a scary realization, especially if you figure it out because you re looking into an empty bucket, which could be the huge blowup.
2
SPEAKER_01
It could be emotional affairs or other types of affairs.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that s what happens when the bucket s been empty for a while, right, on both sides.
2
SPEAKER_03
No, totally.
2
SPEAKER_03
I had this great conversation a couple years back with Brad Felt, who most of the world knows as this legendary venture capitalist, but he s also, he s just a really deep thinking, really smart guy, who s also deeply wise about life and relationships, and he s madly in love with his wife, Amy, and also like this
2
SPEAKER_03
crazy, crazy, busy guy who was flying around, working insane hours, and there came a time where they kind of said, okay, we need to actually very deliberately create mechanisms to invest in our relationship on a recurring basis if we want to be okay, if we want to use my language.
2
SPEAKER_03
They do these two things.
2
SPEAKER_03
They have, I think they call it three minutes in the morning.
2
SPEAKER_03
So it s like every morning, no matter what, they sit down and they have three minutes, like, hey, what s up?
2
SPEAKER_03
Literally, they re just, they make sure that they check in every morning with each other.
2
SPEAKER_03
And then once a month, they have these things called life dinners, where they pick a restaurant, they go to dinner, they exchange gifts, doesn t have to be big, sometimes it s really big, sometimes it s just really something that said, I m thinking of you.
2
SPEAKER_03
They order a bottle of wine, and they have a nice long dinner, and they spend hours, and they just really talk about their life together.
2
SPEAKER_03
And he shared that some days they re laughing,
2
SPEAKER_03
Some days it s not all that heavy, it s light and fun.
2
SPEAKER_03
Some days it s really deep and there are tears at the table.
2
SPEAKER_03
But the bigger point being that they acknowledge the fact that you can t coast when it comes to the connection bucket, to relationships.
2
SPEAKER_03
So I love the fact that he s created like recurring mechanisms that they ve both agreed upon that sort of like make sure that they re continuing to fill the bucket.
2
SPEAKER_03
There s an additional thing that he does which I think is super cool which is
2
SPEAKER_03
He s also built in an allowance for breaking those rules.
2
SPEAKER_03
I can t remember what it is, but he said something like he s allowed to sort of like 13% of the time, he s allowed noncompliance.
2
SPEAKER_03
So like over the course of a year, he can miss like 2.5 of those like life dinners or something like that.
2
SPEAKER_03
So that it also makes it human.
2
SPEAKER_03
So it kind of accounts for the fact that okay, sometimes stuff comes up out of nowhere and actually like you just can t do this.
2
SPEAKER_03
But over the longer term, like this is our commitment to each other.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, that s good, because otherwise it s easy to miss one because you re out of town, and then you re like, yeah, we ll do the next one, and the next one you re just like, we re good on this, we don t need to do this, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
We re both tired, let s not bother.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it s also seemingly very important to do, especially when you work
2
SPEAKER_01
or live together full-time, like I do.
2
SPEAKER_01
I work with Jenny all the time.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, we re together 24-7 a lot of the time, but I m not mentally there.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m in my studio right now.
2
SPEAKER_01
She s downstairs working on some accounting.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it s really easy for me to say, oh, I don t need to do stuff like that, because we re together so much.
2
SPEAKER_01
but it seems like it s probably a quality over quantity thing when it comes to the time, right?
2
SPEAKER_01
Because you can spend 24-7 with somebody, but if all you re talking about is reconciling bank transactions and oh, we ve gotta figure out how to get food and what time are you going to the gym, you re not really filling up that relationship bucket.
2
SPEAKER_01
You re just navigating logistics with the other person.
2
SPEAKER_03
Yeah, I mean, it s one thing to be there, it s another thing to be present.
2
SPEAKER_03
And I work with my wife, and we re married, it ll be 20 years this year, and we ve been working together for a chunk of years.
2
SPEAKER_03
And so we re around each other 24-7, similar to you and Jen, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
But yeah, just because we re around each other, just because we re physically in the presence of each other all the time, doesn t mean we re actually really there, doesn t mean we re engaging with each other.
2
SPEAKER_03
So we will try and create mechanisms where we re like, okay, so we re gonna go somewhere, we re gonna go out to dinner, we re gonna go away.
2
SPEAKER_03
We re not talking about business.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know, like there s stuff that just has to be sacred.
2
SPEAKER_03
And especially if you re building something with people that you really care about and it s mission driven and you re both really invested in it.
2
SPEAKER_03
And this can be an intimate partner, but it can also be a team of friends.
2
SPEAKER_03
You know, it can be something that s really important to kind of pull yourself out of it sometimes and continue to build a relationship that is actually just healthy outside of that.
2
SPEAKER_01
So the buckets leak, they need to be consistently refilled.
2
SPEAKER_03
What s the second law of the buckets?
2
SPEAKER_03
The second law is, this is maybe the most important one, which is that the height of any bucket will always be artificially capped by the height of all the others.
2
SPEAKER_03
So the perfect example of this is, let s say you re working really hard.
2
SPEAKER_03
You re like, okay, so I m gonna try and fill my contribution bucket.
2
SPEAKER_03
I m building something really cool, totally invested, and you re working like crazy.
2
SPEAKER_03
And you re working really hard, but still you feel like, you know what, I m succeeding, but I m not there.
2
SPEAKER_03
I can tell within me there s this wellspring of potential that I m not figuring out how to tap.
2
SPEAKER_03
So the first thing that people turn to is like, well okay, so I m working really hard, I can t work harder.
2
SPEAKER_03
the answer must be I need to work smarter, right?
2
SPEAKER_03
That s gonna get me from where I am to feeling like I m fully leveraging what I m capable of doing.
2
SPEAKER_03
So they retune their workflow and they optimize, like, okay, so now I m working harder and smarter.
2
SPEAKER_03
It fills a contribution bucket from a seven to an eight.
2
SPEAKER_03
But they still feel like, huh, no matter how smart I work, no matter how hard I work,
2
SPEAKER_03
I m just, I m not able to tap my potential, my ability, my strengths, my beliefs, my skills.
2
SPEAKER_03
Just, I know that I have more and I can t access them.
2
SPEAKER_03
It s like it s out there somewhere.
2
SPEAKER_03
What they re not realizing is that the height of that bucket has been capped and no matter how much harder they work, no matter how much smarter they work, they will never take it from an eight to a 10 because the thing that s stopping them is that they ve let the other buckets run dry.
2
SPEAKER_03
And those other buckets, as long as they stay low, they will always artificially cap
2
SPEAKER_03
your potential in the contribution bucket.
2
SPEAKER_03
So the answer, counterintuitively, is to actually stop working so hard, pull back, reallocate some of your bandwidth to rebuilding your health, to rebuilding your relationships, to rediscovering belonging, and to develop practices that nourish your state of mind.
2
SPEAKER_03
And when you start to do that, what happens is the artificial cat that you ve placed
2
SPEAKER_03
on your contribution bucket just dissolves and all of a sudden you find yourself rising from an 8 to a 10 without even working harder or smarter because that was never the problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
Right, so basically the emptiest bucket just drags the rest of the buckets down.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so instead of being empty, it s basically filled with lead.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think one example of this that I thought of when I was reading the book was I found, and I still find, often a lot of difficulty when I look at business stuff, and I m like, oh, well this person, they re doing so well with Facebook ads, and this other show is growing so large because they re doing this other thing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Oh man, we should have started this, and oh man, this other company has a YouTube channel, I d really like to emulate that stuff, and it gets, I worry about it, and I feel like I gotta double down on certain projects, and I m hiring people to get this stuff done just to plug up these perceived holes in the system, but the answer is not.
2
SPEAKER_01
constantly work on your business even more so that you re outworking everybody, which is a great strategy that I did all through law school and all through my legal career that eventually wore me down into nothing, down to a nub, but really backing up and going, actually, why don t I study Chinese more and spend more time with my friends and stuff like that instead of
2
SPEAKER_01
going and worrying about the business stuff and constantly plugging those holes up, I was actually having a lot more fun, felt a lot more balanced, and I m still able to work hard on the business, don t get me wrong, I m not just ignoring the problem, but I don t lose sleep at night because I don t have a great YouTube presence or something like that because it s,
3
SPEAKER_01
become less important to me to be super anal and controlling about every aspect of the business because I m balanced out in these other areas of life.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I had no idea that would happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I resisted going out more and relaxing more because I thought, I don t have time for that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I gotta work on my stupid YouTube vignettes or whatever it was that was distracting me from my core work.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I found the show got better.
3
SPEAKER_01
because I was less worried about all these little extraneous things and I was like, you know what, I m actually just going to enjoy reading the books and talking with the guests and stuff like that and talking about the show with my friends while we re out at dinner.
3
SPEAKER_01
It made the whole business better and it was super counterintuitive.
3
SPEAKER_01
To the outside observer, it kind of looks like, so what, you distracted yourself with having fun with your friends?
3
SPEAKER_01
Like, I can do that too.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it s not the same thing as distracting myself.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s more along the lines of, wow, business sure feels like it s going a lot better when I work out four times a week.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, no, totally.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I ll give you a really fascinating, another super practical example for everybody of this also.
3
SPEAKER_00
A guy I sat down with a couple years ago, Sean McCabe, young guy, late 20s, building a design and media firm.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he saw the TED Talk by Stefan Sagmeister, who s this legendary designer.
3
SPEAKER_00
And in his talk, he talked about the fact that every seven years, he would take a one-year sabbatical, like literally a one-year sabbatical, and not do any work at all.
3
SPEAKER_00
And during that year,
3
SPEAKER_00
every great idea for the next seven years would come to him, and he would come back massively renewed, and he would spend the next years creating genius work.
3
SPEAKER_00
So Sean said, huh, I m not ready to do that, but what if I did my own version?
3
SPEAKER_00
And what he committed to is he does a one-week sabbatical every seven weeks.
3
SPEAKER_00
And his rule is, every seven weeks, I m gonna take a week off.
3
SPEAKER_00
And the only rule for that one-week sabbatical is it can t work.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s like, I can t think about work, I can t do work, I can t check in, I have to do something that completely dissociates me from work.
3
SPEAKER_00
He said the first time it came up, he was like, okay, I can do this, I committed to it.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he did it, he said it was amazing.
3
SPEAKER_00
He came back massively renewed, he was there, and he was like on fire.
3
SPEAKER_00
He had tons of ideas, and he was so rejuvenated that he got done
3
SPEAKER_00
a tremendous amount of work.
3
SPEAKER_00
And then when it came time for the second one, he s like, you know what, things are just crazy busy at work right now, we re in this really big building mode, maybe I should just skip this one.
3
SPEAKER_00
Then he realized, he s like, you know what, if I do this, I basically just give myself permission to do this constantly.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s like, this needs to be a sacred commitment.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he basically, when he made that commitment, what he realized was that he would start to work on a level where he was able to get done in those seven weeks whatever he needed to get done in order to set himself up so that he would be able to take that next week off and completely unplug from work.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he did it, and he came back, and he said, basically, this has become absolutely sacred to him, and it is the thing that is fueling really rapid growth in his company.
3
SPEAKER_00
Not only that, but he feels amazing doing it.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s experiencing life.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s traveling with his life partner.
3
SPEAKER_00
He s doing all these incredible things, and he s building this business now, where now that has become actually part of the company culture.
3
SPEAKER_00
So every employee in his company now is mandated to take a week off every seven weeks, and it s paid time.
3
SPEAKER_01
Wow, what do they do during this time?
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it s probably kind of sad that I can t think of what I would do if I didn t have any work.
3
SPEAKER_00
I don t know what they do, but I know Sean does a lot of traveling.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he ll pick up and he ll go somewhere.
3
SPEAKER_00
When I recorded this conversation with him, he was in New York, and they were just hanging out.
3
SPEAKER_00
They were just bopping around, having a great time seeing the sights.
3
SPEAKER_00
So he does a lot of traveling, but he actually just shared a greater vision for this company, which is that they re also planning on launching a non-profit that does all these really big, powerful service projects around the world.
3
SPEAKER_00
And he s also said that as they build their company, he s planning on instituting the seven-year sabbatical within the company as well, so that the employees will get a paid year off as well.
3
SPEAKER_00
And very likely, he wants to make an opportunity for them to spend that year being of service through the foundation, like really deeply devoting themselves to this outside cause.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s really fascinating.
3
SPEAKER_00
what you can create when you commit completely to the idea of honoring this and making it sacred, and the impact that it has.
3
SPEAKER_00
So like you said, counterintuitively, you re like, well, if I do that, I m gonna have to play catch up for all this other time, and it s gonna put me way behind.
3
SPEAKER_00
But counterintuitively, it actually, you function at such a higher level, you re so much more optimized and energized and ready to go.
3
SPEAKER_00
that when you come back from that, you re like, you can t wait to hit the ground running because you re filled with energy and ideas, and you re massively more effective and productive.
3
SPEAKER_01
I like that idea.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m guessing, Jason, you approve?
3
SPEAKER_01
I approve 1,000%.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, I bet, I bet.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll take a week of paid vacation.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think, for me, it makes sense to do something like this, and it makes sense to offer this for people who are heavily
3
SPEAKER_01
stressed out or finding themselves treading water the whole time with their workload and things like that.
3
SPEAKER_01
I like to think I do a pretty good job of balance.
3
SPEAKER_01
However, again, my gut instinct says if I had a week off every two months, I would use it to catch up on work.
3
SPEAKER_01
It must be hard to resist doing that.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and I think that s the plight of somebody who actually really enjoys what they do.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that in fact was Sean s big challenge, because he s like you and me and probably a lot of other people, I love what I do.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s scud work of course with anything, but fundamentally I m lit up by my work.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that for him too, it s actually hard to unplug, not because you re under deadline or because you have some thing that you have to do for someone else,
3
SPEAKER_00
when you really are lit up by your work, part of it is your play too.
3
SPEAKER_00
So it s almost like you have to proactively think about other things to do that you know will add to and enrich your life that are outside of that.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now last but not least in terms of the buckets, buckets never lie.
3
SPEAKER_01
That s the third law of the buckets.
3
SPEAKER_01
Tell me about that because that s kind of the point of the exercise, right, is that they re illustrative.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, that s kind of where we started the conversation to a certain extent, which is we love to be a little bit delusional.
3
SPEAKER_00
But there s two sides of this, right?
3
SPEAKER_00
One is that when things aren t going great, we love to kind of like pretend that they are and tell ourselves that they are.
3
SPEAKER_00
There s a second part, which is that, I don t know, this is something that you ve talked about with a number of guests and that I think we ve talked about too, is that our brains are wired with this thing called the negativity bias.
3
SPEAKER_00
So we tend to always default towards the negative when there s sort of an uncertain space.
3
SPEAKER_00
And we also tend to not acknowledge what s going right at any given time.
3
SPEAKER_00
We focus on what s gone wrong.
3
SPEAKER_00
So to counter on one side the delusion of ignoring stuff that s not going right, on the other side, the negativity bias, which doesn t acknowledge the flip side, what s really working, the buckets will always tell you the truth.
3
SPEAKER_00
We can pretend one way or another, but at the end of the day, if your vitality bucket s on a zero, you re gonna end up in a world full of hurt and probably pain and probably sickness and disease and a really negative, bad state of mind.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you can tell yourself it s not so bad, but the buckets don t lie.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Once you start doing the exercise, there s a tool that we created called the Snapshot 360 tool.
3
SPEAKER_01
Great.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
We ll link to that in the show notes.
3
SPEAKER_01
People can go and click on that and do the exercise.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like an assessment.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it ll take you basically five minutes and it may be kind of eye opening for you.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and I think it s important because the problem is we think we have our buckets handled until we realize one is empty.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s very rarely like, hey, I gotta make sure I m maintaining this.
3
SPEAKER_01
We find out we need to do that when something breaks, generally.
3
SPEAKER_01
We ll link to that in the show notes as well, of course.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it is important to evaluate, especially if we re running a business or we re working really, really hard, especially as us younger folks, young and old, we too tend to live an autopilot, reactive life where
3
SPEAKER_01
We re constantly diving into different things and different activities without really evaluating our ROI in terms of sanity.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
3
SPEAKER_00
To me, if there s one really huge takeaway, it s that the good life metaskill is awareness.
3
SPEAKER_00
Living a good life is a life that you live by choice.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a life that s intentional.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s a life that s deliberate.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s not a life where you just default mindlessly to whatever comes in front of you.
3
SPEAKER_00
But we can t be intentional until we re aware.
3
SPEAKER_00
Like you can t choose to say yes or no to something until you re actually aware of sort of your internal environment, your external environment, what matters to you, what doesn t matter to you, who you are, what you believe, what the truth of the opportunity is.
3
SPEAKER_00
Until we actually cultivate a sense of awareness, we have no ability to be intentional.
3
SPEAKER_00
with the way that we craft our lives.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, to me, it s sort of like cultivating awareness.
3
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there are a variety of ways that you can go about doing that.
3
SPEAKER_00
That is the meta skill that allows all of the other stuff to happen.
3
SPEAKER_01
Explain the meta-skill idea, because I think a lot of folks are like, wait, what are you talking about?
3
SPEAKER_01
And we ve heard this before, it s kind of, awareness is a great meta-skill, but it s something that most people, I don t think, may be familiar with this concept.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, it s sort of the skill that unlocks all other skills.
3
SPEAKER_00
You think of it as the prerequisite class if you re trying to get a degree in school.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s like you don t get access to all the other classes to get your degree until you take this one thing.
3
SPEAKER_00
The thing about it is,
3
SPEAKER_00
In life, we don t get access to having some sense of control over the way we want our lives to unfold until we develop even a baseline sense of awareness.
3
SPEAKER_00
And that s internally and externally.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s awareness of how we feel, awareness of who we are.
3
SPEAKER_00
That s internally.
4
SPEAKER_00
awareness of our outside environment, you know, like the circumstances that we live in, our constraints, our resources, our abilities, the opportunities that are around us.
4
SPEAKER_00
And interestingly, you know, awareness is something that is, it s a topic of focus in Eastern culture.
4
SPEAKER_00
But in Western culture, there s really no emphasis on cultivating awareness, and there s no training, unless you go out and seek it.
4
SPEAKER_00
One of the big buzzwords over the last five years or so is mindfulness.
4
SPEAKER_01
Mindfulness?
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the buzzword.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s the synergy.
4
SPEAKER_01
As synergy was in the 90s, mindfulness is right now.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And sadly, it s probably as a term, you know, close to jumping the shark, which is really unfortunate because the concept is actually astonishingly important and powerful, which is really just, it s the opposite of mindless.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, it s actually like being mindful, being present, present enough to notice the truth of whatever it is that you re going through, whatever it is you re thinking, you re feeling, you re doing.
4
SPEAKER_00
so that you can choose, like, does this matter to me or does it not matter to me?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is this gonna enhance my life or is it gonna take away from my life, you know?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is this relationship gonna fill me up or is it gonna empty me out, you know?
4
SPEAKER_00
Is this job opportunity or this project, is it something that s gonna make me feel alive or is it something that s gonna deaden me and just like crash my buckets?
4
SPEAKER_00
Making those decisions is the difference between living a good life and living a completely flat-lined, numbed-out life.
4
SPEAKER_00
But we can t make any of those decisions until we actually know how we feel, until we re actually aware of the fact that there s a decision to be made.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s why you call awareness the meta-skill, because it s sort of like you don t have access to choice until you re aware of the things you would choose between.
4
SPEAKER_01
That s a really interesting point, right?
4
SPEAKER_01
It doesn t exist until you have a non-binary set of options.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think developing this, it s important as well to not reject this because it sounds woo-woo.
4
SPEAKER_01
I don t know if you re doing this on purpose, but you definitely took your woo hat off for Art of Charm today.
4
SPEAKER_01
I know you outside of this, and I m like, I might have to corral him a little bit.
4
SPEAKER_01
I haven t had to do that at all.
4
SPEAKER_00
So I m deep down in research in journals, and if there is research behind something, I wanna know that, because my rational brain is like, well, tell me how this works, so I can understand it, and so I can replicate it, and so I can turn around and figure out is it teachable and shareable in a way where people will buy into it and do it.
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, and I think we have that in common as well, where we re super science-based, research-based as much as possible.
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SPEAKER_01
We wanna make sure that it s not just somebody selling us an idea, but yeah, you do definitely speak woo when needed, which I can appreciate.
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Who knows, maybe in 10 years, the show will be radically different and I ll be on the playa or something.
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I wonder if the fact that we both have in our past lives training as lawyers, I wonder if part of that is what makes us both also kind of default to, okay, let s go into what s really happening here, let s do the research, let s be able to explain it in a rational way.
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Well, I think it s because when you re going to law school, people are trying to attack your arguments, whereas in the world of self-help, it s kind of bad manners to say, well, that s cool that you said that that works, but I don t think it does, and you gotta prove it to me.
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Because if you do that to somebody who s
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parroting some crap from The Secret.
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They re just gonna be like, well, if you don t believe, it s not gonna work.
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And I m like, ah, yeah, no thanks.
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I want a refund on this one, right?
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Also, the fact is, your clients, AOC clients, folks who come to our boot camps and stuff, these are smart people.
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We can t just say, take it on faith.
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They re like, no thanks.
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I was raised in a cult, not taking anything on faith, or whatever people s backgrounds are.
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They re like, no thanks, I m an engineer.
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I m not taking this on faith.
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Yeah.
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And I think there are also like a lot of the folks who are in our communities are, we have limited bandwidth.
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So if we re asking them to try something, it means that they re probably going to have to say no to something else for a fixed window of time.
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Right.
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And for them to do that, to make that calculation, we got to give them something to like say, okay, I understand.
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Here s why, you know, here s some validation that would allow me to say, okay, I m willing to actually try this thing and see how it works.
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That s a really good distinction, actually.
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People who are in our audiences are generally high performers, so they re going to go, hey, I d love to do this, but in order to do that, I have to go to the gym less, or start this other thing later than I d like.
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Yeah, it s always a matter of choice.
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Very few people listening to you or I are probably wondering which Netflix show to binge that day.
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It s probably a little bit more on the other side of the coin.
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trying to figure out how to balance their basic life necessities.
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I want to wrap with some gratitude stuff, because as much as I hate the other buzzword, which is gratitude practice and all this stuff, it gets a little bit metaphysical a lot of the time.
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In the book, you explain a different type of gratitude practice that, is it called Zeligman gratitude, or did I just write that down in my notes?
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Yeah, so it actually, it came in part from Martin Seligman, who s considered sort of like, you know, the father of positive psychology.
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But, yeah, gratitude has absolutely been one of the other big buzzwords.
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And one of the reasons is because it s one of the best research positive psychology interventions.
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It s really well known and established that it actually makes a tremendous difference in your state of mind and in your level of positivity and resilience.
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But a lot of the focus has been around what people call gratitude journaling.
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And that s great, but there s another intervention that is insanely powerful, that takes a little bit more effort, so you re not gonna do it as frequently, but it s so effective that I think it s really interesting, and that s what I share in the book, and it s called the Gratitude Visit.
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And the instructions are really simple.
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Think about somebody from your past.
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who in some ways made a really meaningful difference in your journey, but you never really went back and told them.
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And it might have been a moment in time where they gave you permission to do something.
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It might have been like they were mentoring you or guiding you over a long period of time.
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Whatever it was, they really made a difference and you never told them.
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how they made a difference and why and what it s done.
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So you bring that picture into your mind and then you sit down and you literally write one side of a page, write it in handwritten.
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You say, hey listen, this is what happened.
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This is what happened between us.
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This is what you did.
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This is how it made a difference in my life.
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This is how it changed me.
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And I want to say thank you.
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It was really meaningful.
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Then what you do is you take that and you call the person up or you text them or email them, whatever, and this works when it s somebody here where you can actually have physical access to them.
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Say, hey, listen, I d love to swing by.
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You find the time.
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You don t tell them why.
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Maybe you re dropping off something or whatever it may be.
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Maybe it s been a while, I m in town, I just thought I d say hi.
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And you go and when you re with them, you take out that letter and you both sit down or you stand if you want and you literally read the letter out loud to them.
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And what Seligman found, what the research shows, is that not only is this an incredibly moving and uplifting experience for the person you re actually sharing it with, but as you, the person who s offering gratitude, it s called a gratitude visit, the reader of this letter, it profoundly changes your state of mind and the shift in your state of mind actually stays with you for a pretty extended period of time.
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It s about the most effective.
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booster of gratitude and the changes in mindset that s out there.
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A lot of people don t talk about it, they don t do it, because it takes a little bit more investment than the standard, hey, at the end of the day, write down three things you re grateful for.
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Which is great, too, but this is really, really powerful.
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And the awesome thing about it, too, is that it helps fill your vitality bucket by really boosting your mindset.
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But at the same time, it also, it has carryover effect into your connection bucket.
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So, you know, now you re actually,
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somebody who s really meant a lot to you, you re reaching back out to them and sharing this, and you re basically sometimes reconnecting with them for the first time in a long time.
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And it can be incredibly effective at filling your connection bucket as well.
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I ve done this, and I like this practice.
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How often do you do this, by the way?
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Because it s probably not a daily thing, right?
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Not as often enough.
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Probably like every few months, you know?
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And it s funny, I ve just been thinking about this.
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I was like, we turned the page, and you know, I want to commit to doing this as sort of a once a month thing now.
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So that s kind of one of my commitments for 2017.
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I like that.
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I like the idea.
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In fact, I m going to write down right now, monthly.
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gratitude, visit, and I ll put it on my calendar.
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That way it gets done with all my other monthly stuff.
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Almost like a task, but it ll be fun instead of dumb, like defragging my hard drive or whatever else I have there for the first of the month.
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Because on my calendar, the first of the month is all this weird stuff.
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It s like, click on these things and make sure your whatchamacallit is empty and add salt to the water purifier.
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It s all that stuff, right?
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But this should go in there too.
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I did a gratitude visit a while ago, and I had reached out to track down this professor.
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It was the week we started the show, or the month we started the show anyway, which is funny, because this is our 10-year anniversary month as well.
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So, almost exactly 10 years ago, told me, hey, you know what?
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You should be a teacher of some kind, because you re really good at talking about these different concepts, because I had to come up and teach the class something about law.
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And he told me that in front of the whole class, and I was like, what are you talking about, man?
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Whatever, and then after class, he told me, no, no, no, really, I mean it.
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So I reached out to him maybe a year ago to thank him and not to be a Debbie Downer.
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He had the worst response.
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He asked me to like donate money to the university or something like that in his reply.
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And I was just like, ugh.
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But I m still a big fan of the practice because I felt really awesome for having done it.
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and his response didn t even matter, actually.
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And I think that s an important note, because I think a lot of people are gonna go, well, I did that once, but they didn t even reply.
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Or, you know, I did it, but then they were kind of like, okay, cool, man, bye.
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You know, and it s not about their response, right?
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Yeah, it s about what it does to you.
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It would be wonderful if it landed on their ears and in their heart, and it like really just, it made a really emotional impact.
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And at the same time, if it doesn t, it s about what it does to you when you take the time to express it.
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Exactly, and I wanted to highlight that because for me, that was really discouraging, and I didn t do it again for a while, and then I thought, well, who cares about his response?
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This isn t about him.
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I didn t assign this to him.
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I m doing it for me, and it s not about what can I get from this random professor or random dean at a law school that I haven t attended and will never donate to, obviously.
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It has to do with me getting something out of it.
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And I got the positivity and the feelings as soon as I wrote the letter and knew he got it.
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It didn t even matter what came back.
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He could have written like, I don t remember you at all, sorry bud.
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I wouldn t have cared, really.
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It only affected me in the moment because I thought like,
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oh, I m gonna make him feel great and he s gonna love it, and it didn t matter at all.
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It actually did much more for me.
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So I wanted to highlight that sort of negative example so that when people reach out to their high school teacher and they re like, yeah, I can t say I remember anything about you, glad I had such an impact on your life, not to get discouraged and to stop the practice because it really doesn t matter.
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This isn t for them, it s for you.
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You ve got a great drill slash exercise to create deep friendships very quickly.
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It s something that we do that s very similar to AOC bootcamp, one of the exercises we do at our bootcamps, and it involves these 36 questions.
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Can you tell us a little bit about that?
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It s a little bit of homework for the listener here.
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Yeah, it was really interesting research done in a lab in Stony Brook University where the researchers were trying to figure out, can we actually construct a series of questions that would let total strangers sit down in a room and after 45 to 60 minutes kind of fall in love with each other in a remarkably short period of time?
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Could it develop a level of intimacy that was really compelling?
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So they did that.
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They constructed these questions.
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There are three sets of questions that add up to 36 total questions.
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And the idea behind the questions is that they start kind of superficial, kind of topical, and progressively they keep getting a little bit more vulnerable and they keep requiring a little bit more disclosure until you re going into these really deep, deep questions.
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And what s so interesting is this.
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is that they actually showed that in remarkably short period of time, they were able to create a level of intimacy and friendship where people left and a substantial people in this experiment said that they felt closer to the people that they hadn t known an hour ago than they did to many friends that they ve known for years and years and years.
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And in fact, at least one couple from the original cohort ended up getting married.
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That s crazy.
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So they start off with, like, did you have any pets as a kid?
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What was your favorite subject in school?
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To, like, what s your deepest fear of yourself?
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Yeah, or, you know, like, do you have some sense of how and when you re going to die?
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Cool.
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You know, some really sort of, like, deep questions, or they were questions that really kind of made you reveal stuff about yourself and be vulnerable.
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And what they found was they weren t really trying to make people fall in love with each other, but what they were trying to create was a sense of
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genuine friendship-based intimacy, and they re really effective at doing it.
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And that s on your website.
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We ll link that in the show notes as well.
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You can do this with, maybe not strangers on the subway, but maybe start with your significant other and see what shakes out, and then do it with some of your close friends if they re down for this, right?
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Nothing like a little bit of homework at the end of the show.
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Jonathan, thank you so much, man.
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Really appreciate this.
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The book is loaded with practical exercises.
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It s almost more of a workbook than it is some kind of
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treatise on self-care.
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There s a lot of exercises in every single chapter, and I think that s something I d like to highlight because I think a lot of folks are long on theory and short on work.
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Yeah, and that was a real focus for me.
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I was like, you know what, I want to put out something that really did feel more like a workbook than anything else, so I appreciate that, and thanks so much for having me on.
5
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It s been, I love the conversation.
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Great big thank you to Jonathan Fields.
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The book is called How to Live a Good Life, A Practical Guide to a Life Well-Lived.
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Of course, we will have that linked up in the show notes as we always do.
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And if you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Jonathan on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes as well.
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Remember, you can tap your phone screen if that s how you re playing the show, and the show notes should pop up right on the screen of your phone there.
5
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I m also on Twitter, so don t be a stranger, at The Art of Charm.
5
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It s one of the best ways to get ahold of me, to engage with the show, and I love to hear from you.
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Boot camps, our live program details.
5
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We run these things three weeks a month.
5
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They re sold out a few months in advance, but check it out, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com to see people become part of the AOC family, see their growth.
5
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It s hugely rewarding.
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I love for you to join us in there.
5
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I want to encourage you as well to join us in our AOC challenge at theartofcharm.com slash challenge or just text the word charmed.
5
SPEAKER_01
to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
5
SPEAKER_01
That works in the U.S., everywhere else, just go to theartofcharm.com slash challenge.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that challenge is about improving your networking and connection skills, developing relationships with people for personal and professional reasons.
5
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We ll also send you that fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, and I do regular videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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It ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and of course,
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as per AOC standard, a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text the word charmed in the US to 33444.
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For full show notes for this and all previous episodes, head on over to theartofcharm.com slash podcast.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to The Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.