Focused - 213: Developing Skills

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Welcome to Focus, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my fellow traveler, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? Good. Good. We haven't recorded for a few weeks because of things and I was just thinking how fun

it is talking to you about this stuff. So I'm very happy to be on the microphone with you today. We've got a good show planned today in response to an interesting feedback question we got. We're going to be talking about developing skills. But before we do that, Mike, it's September. And you know what that means? Relay for St. Jude.

Exactly. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And this is one of my favorite things that Relay does. I am thrilled to be a partner with them in fighting childhood cancer. And it's personal for us because we have a friend who's been affected by this, him and his family. But there are lots of people who are affected by this. And what's great about St. Jude is that they take care of everything for these families. And I haven't had to go through this myself, but I can put myself in that situation.

Thinking about how you're going to pay all those medical bills, that's the last thing you want to be thinking about when you're dealing with childhood cancer. So this is really a great mission and proud to partner with the folks at St. Jude. Yeah, I mean you give them money and they help children with cancer. It just, that's the deal guys. There's nothing better than that. It makes you feel really good. And you know what? You don't have to give a big contribution. If you're in a spot where $5 is what you can afford, that $5 will matter.

So please, please check it out. We've got a link in the show notes. Relay has raised millions over the years for St. Jude, and we'd like to continue to do that in every penny help. So please check it out. Link in the show notes, give them money, help children with cancer. It's really that easy. It is. And the money, you know, that's just an example of kind of where this goes. They've done

a lot on the campus to just go beyond the basic treatment and care that these kids receive. So for example, they have this thing now called the Domino's Village, which was built in 2023. And it's one of four housing facilities that are available to St. Jude's patients. And St. Jude treats patients from all across the United States, all around the world. And this basically makes housing for those patients and their families easy. It's a critical need, right? You're gonna take your kid to this hospital. Where are you gonna stay? Well, St. Jude provides free housing to any patient who needs treatment requiring an overnight stay

and his family travels 35 miles or more to the campus. So this Domino's Village, just some details here, it's six stories tall, it has 307,000 square feet and it has 140 fully furnished apartments. So parents and families can spend quality time together in places like an arts and crafts room, a community kitchen. There's an outdoor activity space. It has a big LED movie screen for movie nights.

There's a toddler room with a beach themed play space designed for little ones. Walk in lighthouse, colorful mural with sea creatures, sailboats, beach umbrellas, all that kind of stuff. So they want to make it feel like it's not a hospital. I think putting myself in the position of one of these kids that's dealing with this stuff. I mean, you want an environment like that. You don't want something that's cold and sterile. you, you want a place that's going to make you feel comfortable and at ease. And so I love that St. Jude pays attention to these, these little details and goes above and beyond in order to create that,

that environment for these kids and their families. I mean, just imagine, I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's a hard thing to imagine, but your sweet little child has cancer and, you know, you don't know what to do. These people from St. Jude say, come to us. We will house you. We will treat you. We will nurture you. That's what they do. I'll tell you, it feels so good writing a check to them every year. We save for it every month. Every year in September, we send a nice donation. One of the nice things for us, and I keep saying this, but it just blows my mind, is we get Mickey Mouse,

doubles our contribution, because my wife's employed by Disney, and they will double a contribution to an organization like St. Jude. So every penny we give them, they match, and it feels really good. Now we're able to really throw a lot of money at St. Jude each year between us and Mickey.

So check that out too, if you've got an employer that does matching. But like I said, there's a link in the show notes. Check it out, it's September. It feels really good, gang. And whether you're giving $1 or $1,000, it helps and we thank you. Yeah, that's one other thing

I just wanna hit on real quick. There have been some really great big donations on the leaderboard and it's awesome to see people who are able to donate six figures to a cause like this. But not everyone's in a position to do that. I'm not in a position to do that. But that doesn't really matter because the thing that really moves the needle with with this stuff and the reason that relay has been able to raise so much money is that everybody gets involved and they do what they can so don't look at some of those big donations be like oh well I've only got five bucks that I can contribute and that's not really gonna make a difference it is gonna make a difference

so whatever you've got to donate wholeheartedly recommend this this cause and ask that you would join David and I. Once again, you can go to stjude.org slash relay to donate or create your own campaign. Now if you've got co-workers or family members that would love to contribute to a cause like this, you can set up your own campaign and raise money yourself if you wanted to do that as well. I have something else to announce and I think it's really important. Mike has a new thing and it's one of my favorite things you've ever made. Mike, tell us about Life HQ.

Yeah. So, uh, Life HQ is a done for you obsidian vault, basically. Uh, it's all of my workflows for everything that I have ever done inside of Obsidian packaged into a single resource. So you've got all the journaling stuff, you've got all the personal retreat stuff, you've got all the task and project management stuff, you've got all the book notes. And you basically just download the Obsidian Vault, open it in your Obsidian and all of the plugins are pre-configured for you. All of the community plugins are pre-installed. All of the additional CSS snippets are pre-installed and it's kind of like this no code interactive app. And it basically is my life's work inside of Obsidian. I've been working really hard on this for several months. It

started off as a vault with some workflows that I shared with people who attended my last cohort. Since then, I've taken it a lot further and kind of created an interactive app to explore everything productivity and creativity related that has ever existed inside my brain. So for example, I've got all of the personal retreat stuff and it's got the templates and things so you can create a new personal retreat, you don't have to configure anything and it'll pull in the links to the life theme and the core values. All of my documents are in there as examples, but then there's how tos and deep dives. I actually wrote over 50,000 words

for this thing, which kind of walk you through the process if you wanted to nail down your own life theme and your own personal core values and then those get pulled in. It really is everything that I've ever done packaged up for you in a couple different versions. So there's the one that has all of the instructional material and I've even done stuff like created buttons which will mark things as red so you know as you're working through the how to's. I've looked at this one already, this one I haven't paid attention to yet, but then there's also a blank one which is just the the workflows so you can just take it and you can start running with it. You don't have to have everything else that you're not going to use there.

It's basically all the bones and then you can just bring in all of your notes. So that's the general idea. It's going to be $197 when it releases on October 1st. And if you buy it in the first week, I'm actually going to do a onboarding call. So it'll be like a free webinar that people in that first week, I'm actually going to do a onboarding call. So it'll be like a free webinar that that people in that first week, they can they can hop on and we can walk through all the specifics together. But yeah, it's it's a lot. And I'm hoping that people like it.

I think this is maybe one of the best things you ever made, Mike. It's just really great. There's a lot of people out there who are struggling, right? You want to kind of get a system together that lets you do things and pursue your goals. And this thing you've done is perfect because it gives you all the table stakes you need to get started.

So it's got a journaling system. So like if you want to start journaling, it's a journaling system and it's an obsidian, which is end to end encrypted. So you're good. It's got a habit tracker built in and it's done in the Mike Schmidt's way. It looks really pretty and it's really easy to use. There is a task management system and why not have a task management system tied to your journal and all those other things.

And then it's got Mike's multi-scale planning. And then the icing on the cake is all of your book notes because Mike has been reading so many productivity books over the years and he makes these great outlines and mind maps. All that stuff is in there. I mean, you get like the whole Mike Schmitz download, but it really gives you the bones of a system that you can build your own kind of productivity

and operating system out of. And because it's an obsidian, this is not like a hard coded app. You can go in and make changes to it. You know, you don't have to stick with it exactly the way Mike outlines it for you, but he gets you going. And then maybe after a few months, you're like,

well, I want to change this about my journal prompt, or the Momentum Ori plugin isn't for me. You can go through and just adjust it to the way you want it to be. And like I said, Mike, when I heard you were doing this, I was interested, but then as we're getting closer to launch and I see exactly what you've done, I'm like, this I heard you were doing this, I was interested, but then as we're getting closer to launch and I see exactly what you've done, I'm like, this is gonna be so helpful to so many people.

And I'm really glad you're putting it out in the world. And I really encourage everybody to go check out. So what is the website? Is it practicalpkm.com? That's where they go for this? Yep, practicalpkm.com Yeah. And they go for this. Yep, practicalpkm.com slash life HQ. Yeah. And that will give you a taste for it.

If you are hearing this before October 1st, that has just like a promo video and then further down the page, there's some FAQs and also like a 22 minute walkthrough where you can actually see a bunch of the workflows in action. But after October 1st, that will be the sales page for people who want to buy this. And you kind of hit on something I want to just reiterate for people.

I've created all these systems, but it's probably not... I mean, for certain people who are maybe new to Obsidian, all of the Obsidian 101 stuff is going to be in there too. So it'll explain how notes work and what the core plugins do. But you're probably not going to just use everything that I've done. So I designed the how to's in a way where at the top of each note, there's a workflow summary. So this is, you know, the four bullet points you need to know about how to actually use this. And if you want to dive deeper,

then there are explanations on all the different settings that I've used to configure this. So if you want to take it and tweak it, you don't have to dig and figure out what do I actually want to change. I try to explain everything that I've set up and exactly why I've set it up that way. So you can decide for yourself, yeah, this is the way that I would do it or actually I want to change it a little bit. Yeah. And just the way you designed it, it's very user friendly. It's not at all really intimidating and Obsidian can be intimidating if it's not done right. So yeah, congratulations, Mike. I know there must have been a ton of work that went into this. And I'm really, I hope a lot of people take

advantage of this because I think you're going to be able to help a lot of folks out. people take advantage of this. Cause I think you're going to be able to help a lot of folks out. Awesome. Well, I hope so too. Um, this is my, I've been using the term signature products. Like if I want to be known for one thing, this is it. So the intention with this is not to publish it, hope it goes gangbusters and then move on to the next thing. This is, uh, like I said, my life's work and I want to continue to build

this out. In fact, I've actually got a roadmap of about 12 months worth of stuff that I want to build and add to this, including video courses on like the practical PKM stack model and the creativity flywheel stuff like that. That's all going to be tied to this system. I guess it's not really a, you know, completely done for you system. It can be used that way. But like I said, really, the intention is you understand how the things work and then you craft your own PKM stack. And hopefully there's some stuff in here that helps you tie all the pieces together

so that information flows into and out of your PKM system more effectively. And can get more out of your notes and ideas that you keep in Obsidian. But it's not necessarily designed to be like, oh, this is the one place, the one app for everything. Like part of the process is you figure out how this fits and you figure out what workflows add value to the way that you're currently working. And yeah, because there's so much stuff in there, there is likely to be something there for for everyone. But maybe some people are just interested in the journaling stuff.

Maybe some people are just interested in the personal retreat stuff. Right now, it's all packaged together and you can pick and choose the individual pieces that you want. But I'm trying to price it accordingly. Like I said, it's going to be $197. And I feel like with all of the stuff that I'm putting in here, that's probably too low, but I also want this to be as accessible to people as it

can be. That kind of felt like the sweet spot for me with the amount of effort that I put in here. You know, I couldn't really justify charging less than that, but I want this to be the best obsidian resource out there for people who want something that they don't have to figure out how to build it themselves. They want like a quick start manual. That's kind of what I'm hoping that this can be for people and help them to not

just be more productive and crank more widgets, but kind of the whole focus of the show, do more of what matters, right? Live a life in alignment with your vision and your values. That's the goal here. I think you're right on track and this is the perfect signature product for you. So once again, gang, everybody go check it out. If you know anybody that is at all curious about this stuff, please spread the word and that URL one last time, practicalpkm.com slash. Life HQ.

Life HQ, yes, Life HQ. Okay, we are going to talk today in the deep focus session about Obsidian More because gang, for the first time, we are running this podcast out of Obsidian. And I'll tell you all about it when we get to the end of the show. In the meantime, let's get on with developing skills.

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And then put the slash focused on there, that helps us out. Zocdoc.com slash focused and our thanks to Zocdoc for sponsoring the Focus Podcast and all of Relay FM. We got some feedback from listener Chris who said, I love the show. I wanted to hear your perspective on how to approach nurturing and developing skills. A lot of your conversations are around managing time and priorities to facilitate some kind of output. Maybe it's writing a book or running workshops or creating presentations, but I'm curious what you would do differently if anything when practicing an instrument or training

for some athletic endeavor. In my case, I'm pursuing improving at illustration, but the idea of measuring skill or output is vague and difficult to apply compared to did I do the thing or not, or maybe I'm just thinking about it wrong. I thought this was a great question, and as I started unpacking, you know,

how I would respond to this, I realized, we've got a whole episode here. Yeah, yeah. So let's dive in. Yeah, well, I think one of the things Chris nails here is that there are different types of skill development. And it's not always about how can I make more money or advance my career.

Sometimes skill development, as Chris talks about, is just getting better at drawing and illustrating. And I think there's a disconnect there because when it is like economic value, like something you're doing for work, there is a clear measure of your success at it. But when it's something to make your life better, personal development, I think it's difficult to measure that. And, uh,

and maybe that's something we should talk about. Yeah, I think it can be difficult, but it doesn't necessarily have to be difficult. Um, so I think there's, there's really two types of skills that can be developed that Chris is hitting on here and we should probably unpack both of these separately, but I think there's a lot of overlap between these. So the first type of skill here is I want to get good at this thing

because it's valuable. I think that's what Chris is hitting on when he's describing our traditional approach to discussion of developing skills. Yeah. But what do you mean by valuable there? What do you mean by the word valuable? When I'm thinking of a valuable, I'm thinking of it's sort of rooted in a Cal Newport. So good. They, they can't ignore you. You know, valuable to the marketplace.

You've developed a valuable skill that you can earn money from. And I think it was Derek Sivers talked about money being like a neutral indicator of value. If you are able to do something and people are willing to pay you for it, then that is an indication of value that you are bringing in that specific scenario. I guess that's what I'm thinking of when I'm, when I'm saying valuable, it's like a marketable skill, but that's also not entirely accurate because the other one is I want to do

this because it's fun. And I think there is value in that as well. It's just a different kind of value. Yeah. I keep coming back to this word lately, humanness like exercising our humanness is something that I think we can lose track of in the modern world. There are so many demands on our time, and there are so many ways to get lost in the mix that we need to exercise our humanness.

Does that make sense? And this is one thing Chris is tapping into. I wanna become a better illustrator because it brings me joy and it is me exercising being human. I think about that Rick Rubin book and so much of what he argues is that the creative act is something that is uniquely human and especially in the modern world and in the context of the growth of AI and just in general, the demands on our time. I don't think we spend enough time thinking about the creative act and what it means for us

in our human experience. Agreed, yeah. That's kind of going down a rabbit hole, but I agree with you that I think that people are more creative than they give themselves credit for. And the act of creating is something that we should all strive to, to embrace and live out and whatever our vocation or job happens to be. And sometimes I guess the, that creative output in your case and in my case, it does have monetary value. We do this for a living. But if you're not making money from the art

that you make or the you're developing a skill with with an instrument and you're not doing paid gigs, you know, there's there's still value that's that's there. I found a book a while back called Peak by Anders Ericsson that I thought kind of spoke to the approach for these these different kinds of of skill development very, very accurately. skill development very, very accurately. The whole book is based on kind of this, this belief that, you know, the 10,000 hours is what it takes to become an expert in something. And it sort of debunks that and mentions that that 10,000 hour rule, you know, there's nothing magical about those 10,000 hours. It's kind of attributed to this study, I think, is introduced by Malcolm Gladwell, where these violinists put in that much time. And that's about how, how, how many hours they had to put in before they reached a level of proficiency that they were considered masters.

But when you dig into that, only about half of those violinists at age 20 had put in that much time. And there's no distinction there between the practice that they did and what Anders Eriksson describes, deliberate practice. So the deliberate practice, I feel like applies to the valuable skills in terms of economic value. But I don't want to go there just yet. I want to talk about purposeful practice first. Purposeful practice is the stuff that you would do that's just for fun. You mentioned personal development. It doesn't necessarily translate to increased pay in my job, but it's something that I want to become better at. And just because you do something for a length of time does not guarantee improvement

or that you're going to become proficient in that. So even if you are going to be developing a skill that is not professional, I think it's important to pay attention to how you approach that practice. Because the development of those skills is important. Kind of what you're talking about, the creative act, it's part of what makes us human. We want to become better at these things.

And it's not just going to happen because we put in the time, we have to approach it the right way. Yeah. Agreed. I mean, and I think that is something you should take seriously just because it's not something that you're going to make more money on. If your goal is to become better illustration, one of the challenges you're going to have is that it's not something you're doing for a living. So this is something you're doing in your free time. And, you know, drawing the same

Snoopy figure, you know, over and over again, the same way is not going to improve your, your, your ability to be an illustrator. Whereas like taking a class, you know, deliberate practice in the sense of looking at what you're doing and how to improve upon it. That's the kinds of acts you want to do to become better at a thing. Challenge yourself, pay attention, you know. Yeah, exactly. So maybe that's the the spot to jump into. I guess what we're labeling in the outline here as purposeful practice, just for fun. Yeah. Yeah, because this is the the approach towards the things that you

don't have to become a master at. You don't have to pass a test. This is just stuff that that you want to do. And like I mentioned, getting good at something is fun. In fact, if you enjoy doing something but you do it for a long time and you never see any growth in your ability or skill. I would guess that eventually you're going to become disheartened and you're going to lose the enjoyment that you're getting from those types of things. We all have our different ways of expressing this and we're going to share some of our, our ways that we are approaching this in a little bit.

But how you practice these things is important. Like you said, you're not just drawing the same Snoopy figure over and over and drawing it. I have to admit that's a little bit outside my domain. So I don't know a great recommendation for this is the type of skill or technique that you would actually have to embrace in order to get better at the skill of drawing. But you need to have that specific thing that you're trying to improve. I think one of the mistakes that we can make when we go into this purposeful practice just for fun and we just do the thing is we don't have a set intention. There's not a specific thing that we're trying to get better at. And so when we have this like great big bucket drawing music, whatever, as long as we don't get super specific and identify something that this is the thing

I'm going to focus on, and this is the whole focused angle to this, you can't just take this general area and say, well, I'm going to play music three hours a day. I'm going to play my guitar for three hours a day. That's great. But unless you are specifically trying to do scales or learn a piece, start slow with a complicated passage of music and then get better at it, you're going to find yourself doing the same things over and over again, and you're not going to be getting any better over time.

And if you don't get any better over time, like I said, that that is the thing that kind of makes it lose its appeal loses its its magic. So you don't have to strive to achieve a certain level of proficiency, but I do think it's important to set an intention when you are approaching the thing that you want to get better at. I think music is a great example because it is really easy with music to learn a couple of songs on an instrument and

then, you know, quote unquote, practice by just playing those songs repeatedly, it feels good like you've got them under your fingers and it sounds good, but you're not actually improving, all you're doing is playing the same songs over and over again and the experience of becoming a better musician is the hard stuff.

Like Mike said, playing scales on a saxophone, you have to play long tones or you sit there and you just play one note for 30 seconds and then you play the next note for 30 seconds. It sounds super boring, but it's how you develop a tone. You learn new songs and you learn chord changes. It's fully engaged brain work, but this is the good part. and you learn new songs and you learn chord changes. It's fully engaged brain work, but this is the good part.

When you do that stuff, it is fully engaged brain work. So it means that your enjoyment, your self-development skill is actually helping you reset your brain every time you do it, and it becomes fun. But I think a lot of people struggle with just wanting to play a couple songs they learned. Yeah and another thing that helps move this along and make progress faster is when you incorporate some sort of feedback. Now feedback can be scary because

when you are first starting with something there's a high probability that you're not very good at it. So you don't want to record your first saxophone solo and throw it on the internet and say, hey, what do you guys think? But you do want to pay attention to the areas where you could improve. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about involves feedback with this

is it's not that you've got a coach or a mentor who's pointing out all the mistakes that you made so that you can fix them. We'll actually talk about that later when we get into the deliberate practice stuff. You really want to develop a quote unquote valuable skill. But even if you're not trying to go pro at something you should pay attention to the finished product and

You don't have to have you know a bunch of bullet lists reflecting for 30 minutes on every single Piece of art that that you make but just considering you know, how did I actually do with that? I know one of the things that helped me over a long period of time, I remember the first podcast episode that I recorded and I was also responsible for the editing. So I was on a podcast with one other person and it was about a 30-minute episode and I think I spent about six hours editing out every single um that I said. And I learned from that because I went back and I listened to it, you say um a lot, you should really try to clean that up a little bit.

So I joined a Toastmasters group and it helped out a ton, but, that wasn't, you know, something that I kept metrics on. It was just because I had a feedback loop, I was able to notice, Hey, here's an opportunity for improvement and so I focused on fixing that thing removing the ums and over time I've gotten a lot better at that. That's a an example of the the feedback loops here that can help purposeful practice create the the progress that you're after but you do need to stretch yourself a little bit too. You got to get outside of your comfort zone.

So for me, actually recording the podcast was already outside of my comfort zone, but actually listening back to the audio and recognizing all the ums that I had spoken. That was really uncomfortable. You can look at that from a perfectionist mindset and be like, oh, you're terrible at this. You should never record another podcast, but that's not the right approach. You're not trying to become perfect at a thing. You're just trying to become better at a thing.

The feedback loop has served its purpose. If you are able to look at the outcome, identify an area where you can improve, and then you use that as the focus for your next purposeful practice session, however long that session happens to be. Yeah, and I would note that when Mike talks about a feedback loop, he talks about looking at your own development in relation to you. I think one of the real dangers in the modern kind of world is that there are so many excellent people

putting content out there. I'll just use two examples for me. Playing jazz music and woodworking, those are my two kind of like things I do for joy. That's my creative acts that have no compensation attached to them. They're just things I do because I want to do them. And if I go on Instagram and look for woodworkers and jazz players, they are all better than me. Like every single,

I don't think I've ever found someone that plays worse than me on those things. Right? So, you know, that wasn't true in the, in years past you would develop these skills and you wouldn't have exposure to all the amazing people doing it better than you, but now you do. And you have to be careful about that, right? Don't let that intimidate you. You know, you're on your own journey here.

Don't compare yourself. The other thing with that is you can look at those people who are beyond you skill wise. The easy thing to gravitate towards is the tools that they're using. Yeah, I know for for playing guitar specifically, it's like, oh, well, if I had a nicer guitar or I had these specific effects pedals, then think about all the things that I could do with that. And that's true, but improving your tools is kind of a distraction from developing the skill.

It's sort of a placebo. You can feel like you're getting better because you upgraded your tools and you need to have good tools. I'm all for that but I guess I'm just trying to share. I've fallen into this trap before so hopefully it's helpful to other people. The real value comes when you use the tools that you have. You start where you are with what you have and then you just try to get a little bit better with those things and eventually if you put in a bunch of hours and this becomes a satisfying pursuit for you, that's the point where you can update your, your tools,

but don't do it at the beginning, thinking that the right tools are going to all of a sudden unlock this thing for you. And it's going to become this magical experience. You got to get some momentum first. Yeah. That's like on saxophone players, it's going to become this magical experience. You got to get some momentum first. Yeah, it's like on saxophone players, it's mouthpieces. It's like, wow, if I just had that $300 mouthpiece, I would sound so much better. Well, Charlie Parker, the patron saint of the saxophone played on a cheap plastic mouthpiece. They didn't have computer systems to design mouthpieces when he was playing.

And I will never sound as good as him. And just kind of remember that, right? That is a distraction. It's never the tools. Yeah, you're not going to ever sound as good as him, but that's okay. That's not the goal. The goal is that you're able to do something that you love and you're able to get better at it. Yeah. that you're able to do something that you love and you're able to get better at it. So I guess just an example of some purposeful practice

just for fun for me, I've mentioned guitar a couple times but about a year, maybe a year and a half ago, I actually switched from playing guitar on the worship team at our church to playing bass, which is a very different instrument. And I had to learn a different approach to the instrument. So I had lessons every week where for a while what we were focused on were scales and concepts. These are the patterns. You know, this is your root, this is your third, this is your fifth, major, minor, etc. so that you can use

these concepts when you are playing with the band. And I would have weekly lessons and I would be given these exercises. And then when I started the lesson the next week, first thing my teacher asked was, okay, show me what you got. And I would have to do the scales or do the exercise. And one of two things would happen at that point. Either I had put in the work and I had mastered the skill and I would get the not of approval and then we would move on to something else or he would say, you know what

you got more work to do. But that's okay. You know, it forced me to do some things that I never really wanted to do back when I was playing guitar instead of bass, he was forcing me to do like solo stuff. I was really a rhythm guitarist. That was my comfort zone. That's where I just ended up just strumming the chords. That's what I always defaulted to.

And so it took somebody who was going to push me a little bit further to isolate some specific things. But once I did that for a little bit, I began to recognize how it worked. And then I was able to do it on my own. I was able to look at, you know, this is the thing that I need to improve for next time and where I'm at right now. Not that I don't need the lessons, but he's a missionary who got got busy with stuff down in Costa Rica.

So we haven't had a lesson in a while. Um, doesn't mean that I'm not improving though, because I've adopted the mindset. And now when I'm working on a piece for a worship team, there's always going to be a spot that, you know, that's what I need to, to focus on. It's just having that, that thing to focus on. That's, that's important where you can concentrate the effort when you do practice. That's the thing that leads to skill building. Yeah.

I think one of the themes of this answer to Chris is that if you want to do something for the joy of doing something, do it right. Yep. Do it right and don't feel like you have to go pro with it. It's okay to not want to be an expert in something. It's okay to use your jazz saxophone example, David. You don't have to become the next Charlie Parker. It's totally fine to do something just because you like doing the thing.

I'm reminded of the process that I went through when I was learning how to how to run. You know when I first started running, I told the story before so I'll keep it short, but I had this goal in mind. I was gonna run a marathon. It was personal development. The ultimate test of mind over matter for me. If I could do this, I can do anything. And then I hurt myself. I over trained and I had to learn a new way to run. And I kind of embraced James Clear's identity based approach where I'm just a runner. What does a runner do? They run doesn't matter how fast doesn't matter how far just learn to love the process. And when I do races now, I do them because I enjoy the, the, uh, the event. I enjoy getting around other people who are doing that. I never win.

I come home, my kids asked me, did you win? And I'm like, no, I wasn't even in the top half. Like I'm not fast, but I enjoy it. So it, I do it and it's totally fine. I don't have to look at the results page or the scoreboard as a validation for my effort. The enjoyment from the process is reward enough. Yeah, and I think that's a theme that comes out of this type of practice because for me, that's kind of switching over

from jazz to woodworking. I almost pride myself at being slow at it. I don't look for the most efficient ways of doing things. I don't buy the big power tools that make it really fast. I'm much happier with a chisel and a saw and a hand plane and taking hours at doing something that I could do with a power machine in a few minutes, because for me, it is the enjoyment of the process.

I like the thing that I get at the end of the work, but I also like looking at it and know that my hands are what made it. And that's something to that. I think with illustration, you would have the same experience. The process of doing it is the reward in itself. This episode of Focus is brought to you by our friends at Vitaly. Vitaly is bringing in new era for customer service productivity with their all- friends at Vitaly. Vitaly is bringing in new era for customer service productivity with their all-in-one platform. Vitaly's collaborative workspace combines your customer data

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vitaly.io slash focused, F-O-C-U-S-E-D. That's vitaly, V-I-T-A-L-L-Y dot I-O slash focused and get a free pair of AirPods Pro when you schedule a qualified meeting. Our thanks to Vitaly for their support of this podcast and all of Relay. Let's get back to the idea of valuable skills, you know, things that that move the needle on your career, help pay the bills. How are those different? Yeah, well, they're actually very similar. But before I answered

that question, I want to actually just call out that it's okay to want to develop these valuable skills. We spent the last segment talking about all the reasons why you might want to just do stuff for fun. But if you decide this is something I want to get serious about, that's totally fine. The big difference here, I think the approach is basically the same. You want to have well-defined specific goals of what are you trying to improve. You want to be focused in your approach. There needs to be some feedback. You need to get out of your comfort zone. But when you are really trying to level up in an area, it's really important for you to become better at something. I think it's even more important that you pay attention to your progress. So this kind of gets into in that book peak I

mentioned, Anders Ericsson talks about the difference between purposeful practice, which is what we just talked about with the Just For Fun stuff, and then the deliberate practice. And with the deliberate practice, you are very specifically trying to advance a skill as quickly as you can. Now, there's no shortcuts with this, and you still have to put in the work. And the thing with the deliberate practice that he talks about in that book is really the addition of a coach or a mentor, somebody who is watching you do the thing that can point out things

that you don't see when you do it for yourself. It's basically someone who can see your blind spots. Now, do you actually have to have a person in that role? Probably not. I mean, but there's, there's another level of commitment that's involved here. Like I remember when I was playing tennis in high school and college, I would have a coach that would tell me you need to fix this on your form for your, your forehand or your backhand and okay yeah yeah I get it I'm gonna do that but it was I would have trouble getting it to

stick until I took out a video camera and filmed myself hitting a forehand or a backhand and then I could actually see what they were were seeing so once you don't necessarily need a, to go hire a coach who's, who's going to work through this stuff. But I think that's probably a great accelerator in terms of developing these skills. Having someone who can help you see the things that you don't see yourself can be a big boost to developing these skills.

Agreed. When it involves your livelihood, maybe you need to take it a bit more seriously. I don't know. I feel like the fun stuff you could take pretty seriously too. In fact, maybe that's a warning sign if you're only working on the fun stuff

and you're just treading water in the day job. I feel like that would be a way to have an unfulfilled life. I mean, I think you should go at the thing that pays the bills with the same vigor. But yeah, getting a coach helps. I mean, I think that argument really could have applied earlier to the earlier segment about fun stuff too. I mean, if you can afford a coach for something

that isn't going to pay the bills, but you wanna get better at it faster, why not? Yeah, why not? But also I think when you're talking about deliberate practice for valuable skills, it's an investment that is easier to make. So, and then also you probably have more clarity on what specific thing you need to improve and why you want to improve it. So like in

in the book there's a whole section where Anders Ericsson talks about the difference between deliberate practice and purposeful practice. He talks about how purposeful practice is pushing yourself hard to improve but deliberate practice is purposeful and informed So those feedback loops that I kind of mentioned in the first section Those are sort of informal feedback loops and I feel like at this point with purposeful practice. I'm sorry with deliberate practice It's more formal. You have accountability mechanisms that are built in and you have somebody who is sort of holding your feet to the fire. Now, if you just want to start writing, for example, you probably don't want someone who is going to call you at 5 a.m. to make sure that you're up and you are writing for an hour

before you go into the office because that's what you said you wanted to do. But if you really want to become a professional writer, then that maybe isn't an investment that you're willing to make. You're willing to go through some of that uncomfortable stuff because getting to that professional level is so important to you. And arguments could be made, I guess, as opposed to like what, how you define what is, what is important. But with this deliberate practice, you kind of need to have a specific field that is reasonably well developed, as how Anders Ericsson puts it. So you got to know, like writing is a good example because writers have been around for a long time.

And if you want to become a good writer, there are lots of examples that you can look at there. And then you need a teacher who can provide practice activities that are designed to help you improve your performance. So a teacher or a coach, a mentor is able to say, you know, you think that this, this particular piece of the process is the thing holding you back, but actually I've been around longer than you have. I've worked with other people and it's this other thing that is thing holding you back. But actually I've been around longer than you have. I've worked with other people and it's this other thing

that is really holding you back. This is kind of the value of like mastermind groups too, where you get so sucked into this is the next thing in front of me that I need to be working on. And then someone can make a comment. It's actually like, well, you know, I think it's this other thing that you haven't yet considered. That is really the thing that's holding you back. That's, I guess that's the, the way that I would

summarize it is, um, the, the coach or the mentor, they're the person who can see more clearly what are the roadblocks that are slowing, slowing you down and not necessarily that you want to remove them. You know, the obstacle is the way, but this is the thing to focus on, not this other thing. Yeah, yeah. And I don't really have a lot to add to that. I do think it's really easy. This kind of also goes back to playing the songs you already know.

I mean, in your own professional development, there's always things to fall back on that you're already doing to make yourself feel like you're getting better at it when actually you're treading water. And that's a question to ask yourself in this process. You know, where am I bad at this? And what does it take to get better at it?

And put your effort there. I mean, that's the difference at the end of the day. The people who are willing to go to the uncomfortable place and work on the stuff that they're not good at are the ones that are going to move the needle. Yep. I can give you an example, I guess, of one of the ways that I've tried to improve a deliberate skill. So I mentioned writing and I've actually gone through a couple different writing cohorts. I've gone through Ship 30 a couple of times. I'm actually going to be a part of Rite of Passage shortly.

And what makes those writing cohorts effective for a lot of people is that you receive feedback from others on your writing itself. Now you don't have to go through those those cohorts. You can throw stuff out there, but and just look at, you know, make noise and listen for signal and figure out what are the things that people actually want to hear me talk about and use those as clues as to this is this is what I should actually write about. And these are the things that I can improve with my writing. But it is a lot easier when you have people who've been doing this for a long time and they can say, actually, this is the thing that you got to focus on right here. And what I've learned from going through those cohorts is what is the stuff that I'm good at writing about.

You know, we mentioned at the beginning the Life HQ product that probably never exists if I don't go through these cohorts because it was going through those cohorts that helped me to realize that, you know, when I write about Obsidian and PKM, I get about 10 times the likes, 10 times the comments, the engagement, the conversation comes when I talk about 10 times the likes, 10 times the comments, the engagement in the conversation comes when I talk about that stuff, not anything else. So that kind of helps me zero in on this is this is the valuable thing. Now, I like writing about creativity. I like talking about productivity.

But the thing that most of the people who follow me online want to hear me talk about is Obsidian and PKM. So that's where we're going to lean into. And from there, you can refine it even further. So my goal now is I've been focused on improving my writing for my newsletter. I've gotten that pretty consistent now. And I feel like that's in a good spot. That's a specific type of writing though. Now I'm already writing these newsletter articles. So are these essays? The next step is to take that content that I'm already writing, those ideas that I've already formed and reef, re

not reform them, but kind of repurpose them, repackage them into writing for social media or other places like chopping it up differently. And that's hard for me. Like the long form writing is fairly easy. I have no trouble sitting down and writing when I know that the topic in front of me, but breaking it all up into these little bite sized chunks. That is the thing that is difficult for me. So that is the next step for me. And that's kind of an example of how I've been able to, to use that. That outside perspective to help me dial in this stuff. And it's, it's, I, this is, I'm motivated to do this.

And the reason that it's in this section is because essentially writing is what I do for a living. Yeah. I've got the YouTube channel and we do the podcast, but really the, the processing of the ideas and things like that, that all is based off of my ability to write, right? Is the writing is the way that I make sense of things. If I don't have the ability to do that,

it hinders all of the other creative output. Yeah. I mean, my whole career has been about improving my writing. And when I decided to go to law school, I changed my major from engineering to political science because I wanted to write a lot. And when I worked for a judge, I got tons of feedback on my writing

and throughout my legal career and even the Max Sparky stuff, I work with other people. So I, like you, writing has been a foundational skill for me that kind of feeds into everything else. The same, I would say for oral presentation skills I've done. I've been on debate teams. I, you know, even I would look for jobs that would help me improve it. When I went through college, I was a jungle crew skipper, partly because it

was fun, but partly because it gave me an opportunity to give a presentation to a group of people every 14 minutes. And that stuff has just been wired into me. So I think there's something to that. Look for opportunities to get better. Look for opportunities to get feedback. But you know, what a great way to live your life, honestly. If you're listening to this and it sounds dreadful,

it's not, it means that you're just fully engaged and you feel yourself improve and that gives you a self-confidence that you really can't get any other way. Exactly, this is the way. This is the way. All right, so should we just kind of condense everything that we've shared here? Like if you want to improve a skill, kind of the basic steps to go through, because we talked about a lot. Okay. Give it a shot. Okay. So I think the first thing that I would recommend for not just Chris, but anybody who is wanting to develop a skill is to decide how seriously you want to get better at something. And if it's just for fun then find a way to push yourself. If it's

something that is really serious, find a way to get a coach, mentor, outside perspective, someone who can help you see what you're not seeing and say, this is the thing to focus on. But regardless of that, once you understand this is what I want to improve, then get clear about one small thing that you're going to focus on and try to master. So if you're trying to learn an instrument, focus on a single scale. Not, I'm going to get good at my scales, but maybe you just want to master the pentatonic blues scale in the key of C. I don't know, but that's how specific you want to get. Then you want some way to record or chart your progress, and this does not need to be a

formal you know track everything in Obsidian but you do want to be able to look at what you were able to do and you want to be able to see the improvement over time. And then the last thing I would recommend is that you only focus on one skill at a time. So if you decide you wanna learn an instrument, that's not the time to decide that you also want to learn to paint and you also want to train for a marathon.

Focus on one thing, get some traction with that. Basically just test it, see if it's gonna give you the enjoyment that you want and if not, feel free to change your mind and pursue something else. But I feel like if you try to do a bunch of things at once, you're spreading yourself too thin and you're not going to be able to apply the deliberate or purposeful practice principles that we talked about in this episode and you're just going to get frustrated. All good advice. All good advice.

I would say on the point of charting your progress that don't turn that into its own job. If that makes sense. I think as nerds, we hear this and we're like, oh, excellent. I'm going to spend three hours getting the perfect habit tracking system to do this. No, keep it simple. For me, when I'm trying to make progress on something, I just write it down in my journal and I follow up in the review process.

I don't do a lot of charts and graphs. I was like, well, this month I'd like to get better at this song, or this month I'd like to be able to cut a half-blind dovetail that looks decent. And then at the end of the month, I check in on myself and see how I did on that. It's really that simple. Yep, exactly. I've got a different way of tracking habits

inside of Obsidian, which you kind of alluded to when you were talking about life HQ earlier. But essentially what I do with that is I don't try to track all my habits. It's the couple of habits that I'm really focusing on and graining. So currently I have a habit that I'm tracking on my daily note every day of writing.

Now it just says writing, but what that actually means as I shared earlier is different for the, over time. So for a while it was just, am I writing stuff for the newsletter? Currently what it means is just am I writing stuff for the newsletter. Currently what it means is am I writing stuff for smaller short form social type stuff. And I will check the box if I did the thing and then I have a plug-in which will show me my streaks and it'll show you know the dots on the days that I actually did the thing and it doesn't have the dot on the days that I missed and I can

look at that and be like well you know I hit it more often than I've missed it so that's good for me but I'm not so hung up on you know I'm not gonna break the the streak I'm gonna do this every single day but I do recognize that the consistency is the thing that helps me to develop the skill so I've already got the intention I want to focus on this small aspect of it. Now I just got to do it consistently. And that helps me to see whether I am putting in the reps. So when I get to the personal retreat, I can look back and say, did this work? Did this not work?

And usually if it didn't work, it's tied to, I wasn't able to put in the effort that I needed to really move the needle in this, this particular area. This episode of the focus podcast is brought to you by express VPN. move the needle in this particular area. Netflix has more than 18,000 titles globally, but only like 6,000 of those are available in the US. You might be missing out on literally thousands of great shows unless you use ExpressVPN. When you use ExpressVPN, you can change your online location, which can change where streaming services think you're located. They have almost 100 different service locations,

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Got any shiny new objects, David? I just want to double down on last month's new object. I am so loving my plotter analog system. It's just, this is the one. This is the one for me. Like the, you know, a ring binder is what I've always wanted because like I write down thoughts on, you know, a passage from Seneca. I write down a daily kind of note. I do, you know, I have so many different things. It always felt weird to me trying to figure out how to make that fit into a bound notebook, whereas now I can just pull the pages out,

put them in the binder where I want them to be. And the little like anal retentive, organizational part of my brain is so satisfied. The paper is really good. Yeah, it's like, it's just the kind of fiddliness that I like, and I'm enjoying like figuring out where it fits between my analog and digital systems. Because one of the nice things about a ring system

is you can pull out a page and stick it on your desk and scan it to your app really easily. So yeah, plotter is still bringing me joy. Nice. I have a shiny new object, which is again an UG monk object, but it's not what you think. It is a pen and I never would have bought this pen to be honest, but it was given to me when I went

to Kansas City for Sean Blank's Focus, like a Boss Sessions. Sean is a great host and he had these gift packages that he put together for the people that were there and it included a book and some stickers and things like that and an Uggmonk and an Uggmonk NR1 pen, which has this twist cap on the top. It's a ballpoint pen. It uses the Schmidt refills. So kind of the same thing as like the, the retro 51 tornadoes. Yeah. So it's a really great refill, but this is just a really cool looking pen. And, um, I have to, I have to tell a short story with this. On the end of the first day, we were going around

and sharing gratitude at the end of the session. And one of the things that I shared was that I really liked this pen. And I shared publicly, you know, Sean, when you said that you gave us your current favorite pen, I was a little bit skeptical because I'm a pen snob. I'm in a different pen bracket. But I'm like, this pen is really, really nice. Just like all the other Uggmonk stuff, it's really well built. It's got this hexagonal barrel. So it's kind of like a number two pencil from back in the day, which is really comfortable and it just is weighted really nice and the screw cap at the top is almost like a fidget toy. I just sit here and I twist it back and forth and it's a really nice pen and I was kind

of surprised at how much I enjoyed this. But I'm using it right now as we're taking notes. You know, I have a clicky keyboard. So if there's something I need to jot down, time code for something, I will do that on a note card and I'll use a pen to do it. And that is the pen that I've been using this whole episode. I love this pen. It's great. You know, it's funny cause I have over the last couple of years really embraced pencils and I just largely use pencils.

But I did get a mechanical pencil recently. So here's a bonus. The Uniball Kuru Taga. K-U-R-O-U-T-U-O-G-A. Yeah, I bought one of these on a whim and this is a very nice mechanical pencil. But yeah, I've gone to pencil. I don't know. It's kind of weird, right? I mean, you use pencils when you're in school, but usually when you get out, you never use them again. But I like them. I like the practice of sharpening a pencil and sitting here thinking about it and then starting to write. And so I have several just standard pencils,

but I also have just this mechanical that I like. Nice. What are you reading these days, Mike? I am currently reading story worthy by Matthew Dix. And this was a book that came on my radar because Ali Abdaal was raving about it several years ago. Um. I've had it for a long time. I've read a different Matthew Dix book. I forget the name of it, and I really enjoyed it. This one is all about telling stories, which is sort of related

to the getting better at writing. It's not necessarily the specific skill I'm tracking currently, but I want to get better at telling stories. And from everything that I have heard this is the the book to read about that topic so I'm excited to dig into this one we're gonna be covering this one for for bookworm so you can hear all my thoughts about it in a couple weeks yeah I am not actually currently reading a book I'm in the middle of production on a new field guide

and that's kind of taking all my time. But I did recently finish Richard Reeve's book called Of Boys and Men, which is, I think, really good, especially if there's a boy in your life that you have some say over his raising. I would recommend reading this book. Boys have some unique problems in the modern world and I think this book does a good job of identifying them

and giving you some good suggestions on how to make it a little easier for them. So I wanted to call that one out, but I'm not actually currently reading it. I finished it a few weeks ago. Sounds interesting. I will check that one out. We are the Focus Podcast.

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It's gonna be fun. Otherwise, we'll see you next time.