Interview: Manage Your Day to Day + Make Your Mark + Maximize Your Potential with Jocelyn Glei

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I'm thrilled to be chatting with Jocelyn Glei. Jocelyn is the best selling writer and editor of three great books that we featured with Philosopher's Notes. Manage youe Day to Day, make your Mark and Maximize your Potential. They're all really, really great. I recommend each and we are going to talk about some of my favorite big ideas from each. Jocelyn did those books in partnership with 99U, where she was their founding editor in chief and created an incredible resource there. Check it out at 99U. And again, manage your day to day, make your mark, maximize your potential. Jocelyn, this is the first time I've ever chatted with one author about three books. Thanks for the great books and thanks for taking the time.

Thanks for having me, Brian.

All right, so let's just. What was your favorite book? Out of those three, did you have a favorite?

I think Manager Day to Day was probably my favorite. That was also the first in the series. So I think, you know, the first time that you do anything, the book was kind of or the series was designed as a series of books to go together. And I think, you know, sort of that first time you do anything is always kind of the most fun in a certain way.

Right on. Well, Jocelyn worked with a ton of extraordinary writers and thinkers and teachers and kind of collected their wisdom and then kind of thread the needle of the theme of each of these books. But in Manage your Day to Day you talk about how important routines are. Can you tell us about that?

Yeah, there's this quote I really like from the writer Stephen King. He has a sort of regular daily routine where he sits down his desk and he has a glass of water and he has his vitamin and he does certain things and he talks about how it prepares your mind to dream. And I think when you do things in this regular rhythm on a daily basis, both your mind and your body kind of start to become alert to those rhythms. And so it becomes easier to do certain things like if you write whatever your creative activity is, if you write every day in the morning, if you do that at the same time every morning, you, your mind almost comes sort of pre prepared right for that activity. So I think it's really powerful on that level. On another level, I think routine is really important in terms of aligning with your circadian rhythms. So aligning with the natural rhythms of your body when your body naturally has a lot of energy and when you naturally experience an energy dip. And those rhythms are unique to everyone, but there's a pretty common kind of arc to them. And you can kind of align, you know, when you do your very demanding tasks with when your energy is highest, and you can align your sort of more mindless tasks with when your energy dips. And then I think the last thing that makes routines so important is setting expectations for everyone around you. We have so much information that we're navigating constantly, you know, from people. So much communication, right? Emails and texts and tweets and phone calls and on and on and on and how we respond to all of that incoming communication and at what rhythm people really pick up on it, you know. So every time you email me, I respond within five minutes you start to expect that. Right? And so I think we set those expectations with our daily routines. And that's becoming increasingly important because there's so many people sort of, you know, trying to get a little piece of our attention.

No doubt. And I want to hear, just tell me more about your routine. So what do you do? And I'm also tempted to already go into your next book, which is unsubscribe. I want to talk about that a little bit later though, but you're already tempting me to go there because it's such an important topic. But I'd love to learn more about what you've learned as a writer. How do you structure your days to kind of connect with that muse, as Steven Pressfield would say.

I mean, I have so I pretty. Pretty rigorous routine. Rigorous, I should say, just very, you know, very same, very much the same from day to day. And it does try to align with those circadian rhythms. So most people have kind of the most amount of energy and mental alertness for most people is sort of between about 9 and 11am So I do my writing for about three hours in the morning, typically between 9am and 12pm I. And you know, just kind of in two sort of, you know, 90 minute, ish sessions with a break in between, which is also, you know, as you probably know, something that we talk about and manage your day to day, Tony Schwartz talks about it, is that 90 minute sprint is kind of like an optimal amount of time to try and focus. And then you need a break, you know, you can't really, you know, you're kind of going to see diminishing returns when you try to focus for longer than 90 minutes typically. So I try to do this sort of two 90 minute sprints with a little bit of a Break. And then in the afternoon I always focus more on projects that are less demanding for me, creatively speaking. So most people experience kind of an energy dip after lunch between like 2 and 4pm so during that afternoon time I just try to do things that don't demand maximum attention and maybe are things where if I get interrupted while I'm doing them or I need to do an interview or I need to have a meeting, it's not going to trouble me to kind of get back into the flow of those things. So that's kind of the general idea of that.

That's awesome. I appreciate you sharing and it just obviously you unpack that a lot more in the book on a general level. And interviewed Scott Adams, a Dilbert creator, and he says the exact same thing, right. Match your energy to what needs to get done. And he says exactly the same thing a little earlier for him is when he feels most alive and when I feel most alive. And he does the kind of mindless stuff in the afternoons. And then I just interviewed Anders Ericsson as well, the 10,000 hour researcher. And just amazing. And the idea that you can only do so much of that great work a day. Right. His idea is four hours. If you try to do it at the end of the day, good luck. Right?

Yeah. And I think that's, it's so hard because that's what so many people end up doing. You know, you don't prioritize the meaningful work or you don't book time on your calendar for it. You know, maybe in the morning when you have the most energy and attention. And so, you know, all these things creep in, all these requests, you know, over email or your co worker comes and taps you on the shoulder and then, you know, it's 3 or 4pm when you turn your attention to that stuff, that's really important. And then you just, you just don't have the energy for it yet.

I remember another, just to go back to Stephen King and on writing he talked about the fact that the hardest time for him in his career was when he just started and he was teaching and he loved teaching. But at the end of the week he felt like he had jumper cables to his brain and he just couldn't sit down and think. And I just love that image. And that's what I feel. If I don't create first thing in the morning, it's really hard for me to tap into that true, pure kind of flow, you know, before I blow my brain up with everyone else's ideas, you know.

Yeah. And I Mean, I think there is a, you know, there's a kind of background processing that starts to happen, you know, the minute that you open your email. Even if you, you know, or like, I'm not going to deal with any of this stuff until later. I'm sure you've experienced this, right? You open your email and you check your inbox and, you know, maybe there's a certain level of anxiety around certain messages, and it's really hard to just like, push that aside and say, okay, well, now I'm gonna just focus and go to my Zen place and start writing, you know, So I think it's. It's really important to just, you know, say, okay, well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna push that off two hours and do my writing.

Yeah, yeah, we like to call that be creative before you're reactive. Yeah, that's super good. And then the next. The next idea, again, tangentially touches the cornerstone of your next work. But you talked about wealth of information and poverty of attention. Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, that comes from sort of famous quote from the economist Herbert Simon. And he was the creator, really, of the idea of an attention economy, which you hear sort of bandied about fairly frequently these days. That was actually back in the 70s as he sort of originated that concept. And the idea is that a wealth of information will result in a scarcity of whatever that information consumes. And of course, what information consumes Attention. And, you know, there's so many things competing for our attention every minute of every day. And as new technologies and new apps come online, that that competition keeps growing. And I think it's so. I think it's just a really challenging setting that we live in right now to kind of stay focused and to be productive and to be creative.

Let's. Let's go down that a little bit more and talk about. We'll come back and talk more about make your mark and maximize your potential as well. But tell me more about your focus right now. Unsubscribe. I can't wait to hear more about how to deal with that. What are you suggesting or what are you kind of researching and presenting in that book?

Yeah, well, unsubscribe is really about my kind of current obsession, really is the topic of distraction. And obviously sort of that's the. The competition for attention, of course, which we were just talking about. And I think that unsubscribe really focuses on email and kind of after that, social media and email is really our number one distraction in the workplace right there's like, some crazy numbers. Like, the average person checks their email, reads a response to 122 emails a day, checks their email 11 times an hour, and spends 28% of their work week on their email, right? So it's over a quarter of your work week that you're spending on email, which is insane. And I think that we all. Kind of. The funny thing about email, right, is we all kind of, like, just already hate it so much that we kind of don't even think about it anymore. We're just sort of like slaves to it a little bit, I think. And so unsubscribe is really about why are we. First, it gets into the psychology of email and social media and these other things that are really random reward systems and talks about why those are actually really addictive for our brains, and then goes into sort of different other psychology about email and social media and all these other distractions that we contend with and sort of unpacks why we get so addicted to it and why, you know, having an overflowing inbox makes us feel so guilty and why we feel the need to, like, always respond to other people's emails. Because there's a lot of actually quite interesting psychology behind those things. And I think once you understand that psychology, you can kind of disarm those temptations a bit and be a lot more conscious moving forward. And so that's kind of the first part of the book is really talking about the psychology of addiction and then kind of getting into, okay, now that we understand why we're so addicted to the. This thing, how can we, you know, create goals and routines and understand what's really important versus what feels urgent in order to, you know, stay more focused on the work that truly matters, the work that's really meaningful, rather than, you know, letting our inbox dictate what we do with our day.

I cannot wait to read that. That's great. Cal Newport inspired me with deep work and then his little Harvard Business Review article on a world without email. And three months ago, I just left email. And my assistant just puts emails that I get, which are considerably lower than before. I'm like, if it's really important, let me know. I'm here. You know, Otherwise, I'm out of email. I'm a hermit right now. And it's crazy. I didn't know the stats, you know, but I'm sure I was spending close to that amount of time in email, you know, the 26 or whatever it was.

Percentage. Yeah, it's crazy. And I Think that the interesting thing about email and why I devoted, you know, the better part of a book to the topic is that it's kind of right. If distraction is our biggest challenge today, which I really think it is, and I think it's going to be the biggest challenge at least for the next decade or so in terms of sort of being productive and, you know, creating really valuable work. You know, you have to write, learn how to harness your attention and, and avoid distractions. And email is almost like the sort of perfect object lesson in how you deal with distraction. Like if you can deal with your email successfully and sort of resist that temptation, everything that you apply there kind of carries over to anything else, whether it's your co workers interrupting you or how you deal with social media. So I think it's this kind of interesting, almost like in the book, I call it kind of a pop quiz for your attention. If you pass that test, if you're able to kind of not let your email really inveigle its way into stealing all of your attention, then you're going to be in a good place for being able to stay focused on your work. And if you're the type of person who just can't figure out how to not be distracted by your email, then you're really in trouble. Probably.

Yeah. And of course, I'm sure the book will give us some tips on how to manage that and take those next steps. But it's an addiction. I mean, mean, it's. There's no question about it. That dopamine hit and, and yeah, again, okay, so we're going to talk about that more, but seed planted. And I cannot wait to check out unsubscribe. Yes. Well, let's go back to Manage your Day to Day and just check in there. We obviously only talked about a, you know, the daily routines, poverty, retention, etc. Is there anything that like your favorite idea in that book that you want to chat about?

Well, one of them is the one that I just mentioned, which was this notion of random rewards, which kind of came up when I interviewed the behavioral economist Dan Ariely. Oh yeah, that was Manager Day to Day. And I won't. I'm not going to go too deep into that because that actually kind of launched me on this path towards unsubscribe and getting deeper into distraction and understanding random rewards. But the other concept, I think that's super powerful and so simple is one from Cal Newport, who you mentioned earlier, the author of Deep Work, who contributed to Manage youe Day to Day. And it's just a very simple concept of focus blocks. You know, I think that. And he talks about basically, you know, okay, whenever you want to be doing. We were just talking about daily routines, right? And finding time to do the important work maybe before you check your email in the morning. And Cal's a big advocate of really blocking that time out on your calendar. So blocking out an hour or two hours or three hours in the morning so that you have these kind of focus blocks in order to really kind of defend your time against interruptions. And I think that it's something that sounds sort of so obvious, but I think so many of us fail to do it. And particularly if you're someone who's working, you know, in an office where you have a public calendar where any one of your co workers can potentially just put a meeting on your calendar at any time when you're working in that setting, blocking out meeting time for yourself as well, for you to do the work that you need to do becomes incredibly important, right? Because if you don't do that, all these other little meetings and calls and things just kind of slip in and you're sort of left with these, you know, crappy little 20 or 30 minute windows of time in which to do your most important work. And you just can't really, you know, get any momentum or get any kind of get into that deep creative flow place when you're working in those tiny time blocks. So I think it's, you know, really, it's just so important to be proactive about, you know, blocking out that time in the same way and then respecting it in the same way that you would a meeting with someone else. I think it's kind of crazy how much people in office settings and coworking settings will respect a meeting you're having with someone else, but they completely do not respect your space or your focus when you're just trying to actually do something on your own that you need to do for yourself.

Well, even. Yeah, And I love that idea too. And just that idea of having these blocks and systematizing them so you don't need to redo it every day. It's just you do this like you were saying you're writing, right? 9 to 12. It is funny for me to notice how I don't respect my own blocks as much as I could, you know, let alone other people kind of intruding. It's just, it's. It's a challenge to say no, right? To have that deep, deep yes of this is what I'm going to do and have the courage to say no to other things that are, you know, kind of sort of nice to do, but not necessarily the most central. It's.

I mean, I think it's huge. And I think you constantly have to be doing. I kind of do this thing that I call sort of zooming in and zooming out, you know, which is kind of, you know, zooming in would be like, okay, what do I have to do today? Right? Like today's to do list. But the zooming out is, you know, for me here in my office, I have this. I have a calendar on the wall, and then I have a list of my goals. And I have my goals for the next six months and I have a few projects and for each project I have what the goal is. And then I have the sort of key actions that I need to take to reach that goal. And that's right, the zoomed out perspective, like, where am I trying to go in the big picture? You know, and then, so then when I zoom in and I think about today, I like actually have very clear concept of what the. Of where I'm trying to go. And I think, because I think what happens so frequently is that, you know, we're all just so sucked into the now. There's so many things that are really based on instant gratification. You know, looking at your Twitter notifications or looking at Instagram or watching Netflix Instant or, you know, really getting into this world of instant gratification and just completely living in the now. But I think that, you know, right, if you only focus on the now, it's like what seems appealing in this moment is usually not the hard work.

You know, especially when it's reactive now. Right?

Precisely, precisely. And so I think, you know, but we're all kind of living this very zoomed in space. And so I think we kind of have to constantly oscillate between sort of zooming in, okay, what am I trying to do now? But zooming out, like, where am I trying to go? And I think that it's really easy not to sort of ever zoom out because we have so many things that are kind of there to entertain us in the moment. But you have to become very adept at doing that.

Right on. That goes back to distraction. And the biggest challenge for the next decade at least. That's awesome. And that also is a perfect segue into make your mark. So make your mark. The creatives guide to building a business with impact. The place I wanted to start that chat was kind of the ultimate zoom out. And you talk about purpose and how it all starts with purpose. Can you talk to us about why? And then I want to drill into some practical ways to help us get more clarity.

Yeah, I mean, I think purpose is so important, right? We're talking about the context of a business here, but it could also be, you know, you as a person, you as a person. So kind of what's your, what's your personal purpose or what's your personal mission? And I think we see that increasingly as a way that companies are organizing themselves, right? So you know, you think about, you think about companies like Google, you know, where, well, part of their purpose is do no evil, but the other is to organize the world's information, right? And that is extremely flexible purpose. And I think that's really important because with the pace that technology is advancing, what you need to do or what you need to be as a business is changing so rapidly. And so purpose allows a business, rather than say organizing your business around just a specific product, we'll say organizing your business around a purpose allows you to kind of pivot very quickly and move into different spaces while still being true to yourself without feeling like you're kind of locked down into this one particular product or one particular approach when technology and people's needs and wants are changing so quickly. And of course you see that with companies like Google started out as a search engine and now they're making self driving cars and who knows what they'll go on to next. And that all aligns with their IT all aligns with their mission, but allows them to be extremely flexible and adaptable. And I think that is also very important on a personal level. Whereas you kind of used to see people organize more around a specific job, now you see people organizing a bit more around a mission. And again, it's because it allows you to be flexible and adaptable. You have to be constantly changing and updating your skill set based on technology, based on what's happening in the market. But the mission can kind of guide you through all that.

So I'm curious if you're open to share kind of how you frame your own purpose as a writer. Solopreneur, however you would describe your kind of business entity, I'll start by sharing ours every. Not every morning, but every morning. Either look at what I wrote or write it again. Our purpose with our main businesses in theos is it's to help people optimize their lives. We help people. Next line, optimize. That's just what we do. And then to your point, there's a lot of different ways that that has manifested and will continue to manifest from the wisdom, some community stuff, et cetera. But how would you frame your purpose?

For me, it's really about helping people find more meaning and creativity in their daily work. So, you know, right now that relates largely to writing books and, you know, to writing blog posts and. And doing a newsletter. But obviously that can expand, right? It's sort of very flexible. Can expand to lots of different. Different things, you know.

Right on then. For people who are maybe looking to discover more clarity on their purpose, what's your number one favorite tip to help them do so?

You know, I think it's pretty. Honestly, it's pretty basic. I think it's thinking about what, you know, your sort of specific skills and talents are, you know, on the first level, and then secondly, thinking about how those skills and talents really align with the marketplace and what people actually need. I think that a lot of the classic career advice, you know, sort of focuses only on that first part, you know, is thinking about, like, you know, that idea of, like, finding your passion and. But, you know, you really need to, like, take it to that second level beyond, like, okay, but what do people actually need? And how can I meet that need? You know, that's sort of like the important second step for it not to be a very quixotic activity. And one of the things I think is interesting, too, is to think about the things that you did when you were a kid or a teenager that you were kind of naturally drawn to, you know, particularly if you're sort of like, you know, really kind of struggling to figure out what that thing is for you. You know, for me, I've always been obsessed with publishing. So even when I was, like, 15 or 16, I was, like, making a zine by hand and passing it out at my high school, you know. And I think you see people who are entrepreneurs, like, always have stories about, you know, like, selling chocolate bars at school or just weird, like, things that are related to, like, selling things, you know, um. Whereas, like. And I'm like, I would have never. It would have never occurred to me to, like, try to make money. Something. When I was 16, you know, I was like, I want to write some things and share it with you, but you.

But you can feel it. You can feel the energy of you creating your own little, you know, magazine or whatever it was when you were that young in your book. Because the style of the book, the feel of it, you know, it's. It's a. It's art Right. And there's. From my experience of it anyway, and the consistency of the brand. You can totally feel that coming through. That's awesome.

Thank you.

What else in make youe Mark favorite idea that we haven't talked about yet?

You know, I think my favorite moment in that book is actually the last essay, which is by Seth Godin. And it's sort of a rallying call to starting a business. And he says that if you wait until you're ready, it's almost certainly too late. And that's a quote that I think about a lot. You know, I think I myself am certainly guilty of this. And I think most people are of kind of, you know, you're sort of waiting for a sign or waiting for everything to be perfect, to kind of get going on a project or a business, you know. And I think in actuality, you know, you never get that moment. And you kind of only feel that moment, that moment of readiness, you know, like one third of the way into the project or 2/3 or maybe even when it's finished. You know, you're like, oh, I was ready. But, you know, you can't actually feel that until you've already kind of got that momentum behind you.

I think that's awesome. I love that essay, too, and love Seth and just the idea of shipping it. Right. And if you feel ready, that's the sure sign that you waited too long. Like, just go for it. It's kind of funny. The next class I'm going to be teaching, which do a bunch of Optimal Living 101 classes, is on Conquering Perfectionism 101. We're going to talk about that. If you don't, just being willing to get out and starting before ready. That's awesome. Well, let's go to the third in our trilogy, Maximizing your Potential. This book has four key areas for maximizing our potential. I want to talk about two of them. The first one is how do we cultivate our expertise over time? Talk to us about that.

Cultivating expertise over time. I'm literally like, opening up. Maximize your potential. Let's go there as we talk about it. I mean, one of my favorite concepts from that section is the essay from Heidi Grant Halvorson, who's an author and a researcher. She actually studied with Carol Dweck, who's the author of Mindset I Believe. And she talks about the importance of focusing on getting better versus being good. And she talks about sort of the being good mindset versus the getting better mindset. And it really ties back into what you were just talking about, about perfectionism is that it's very limiting when you're kind of in this being good mindset. So, like, for me, I might say, like, it's. And it's a lot around how you frame your goals. So I could say, well, I want to be a good public speaker. Right? That could be my goal. But it's actually very kind of limiting to frame the goal in that way and also kind of leaves a lot of room open for me to maybe fall short or critique myself if I'm not at. I don't immediately get to that goal. And so she talks about kind of framing things more in terms of getting better. So, you know, instead of saying, I want to. I want to be a good public speaker, I want to be the best public speaker, you know, say, well, I want to improve my public speaking ability. You know, So I kind of put myself on a timeline of learning, which is, you know, sort of much more forgiving and also much easier to see progress rather than just kind of focusing on this very rigid kind of being good goal. And I think, you know, to me, that's. I told you, I have a list of goals here on the wall. And to me, that's really powerful. And especially if you're susceptible to perfectionism, is kind of trying to stay in that getting better mindset and frame your goals and your actions in terms of that getting better mindset, to be a little bit more forgiving and just kind of allow yourself to take some baby steps and get motivated.

That's awesome. I really like the way you described that. I love Heidi's work too, but I hadn't. You just framed it in a way that really helped me see it more powerfully, because right when we're. When we're. Our goal in our mindset is to be good as a perfectionist, and I am certainly still a recovering perfectionist. There's that. Your data you're going to find is all the evidence that you didn't do it as well as you wanted to. Right?

Yeah.

Oh, no. It didn't hit my potential at any given moment, of course, because it's. You were never going to do that. Right. Whereas with the getting better, the data hunt is for, you know, data that shows, wow, okay, I did do that a little bit better than I did before. You know, that needs some work still. But I did that better than I did, and that's awesome. I'm gonna go do a little bit better next time. And there's just such a healthier opportunity to actually express ourselves and to evolve. Right?

Yeah, I think it's incredibly important. And also, if you are a perfectionist type of person person, then I think, you know, it's extremely likely, maybe 100% likely, that you have a very powerful critical facility.

And in that context, she says diplomatically.

Well, I know I am. I am one of those people, you know. So in that context of knowing you're going to be the type of person who's going to be hard on yourself, framing things in a way where you can, you know, give yourself a little more room to see progress is really important, I think.

Well, that ties perfectly to the final idea I wanted to talk about in that book, which was the willingness to take risks. And one of the things that Carol Dweck talks about, that Heidi talks about as well, of course, is that idea that when we have a fixed mindset or a be good mindset, we're not willing to take risks because we never want to look anything perfect. Right. So can you talk to us about, if we want to maximize our potential, why it's so important to be willing to embrace risk?

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the. One of my favorite moments in that particular chapter of the book was this conversation that I had with Tina Selig, who's a professor at Stanford. And she talks about. She talks about thinking about how she makes her students think about their risk profile. So I think that one of the. The things that makes people a little bit afraid of risk taking or concerned about risk taking is they think that it's more sort of like this fixed quality, like, he's a risk taker, she's a risk taker, you know, like just sort of globally, when in fact, she talks about everyone having sort of a different risk profile. So, you know, you might like, be the type of person who's really into doing, you know, risky activities like skydiving, you know, and to you, like, that doesn't seem scary at all, but you would never go to a huge party by yourself. Right. Whereas I have, like, no problem, say, socially taking risks. I'm totally fine on my own. I'm happy to chat up a random stranger. But, you know, risks that involve bodily harm or jumping out of airplanes, you know, seem terrifying to me. So I think it's kind of interesting to break down that topic of risk and the idea of risk taking and think about, you know, where are the areas in which you are okay with taking risks and what's kind of your risk profile. And then one of the other activities that she has her students do, which I think is awesome, is she makes them do a failure resume. And. All right. Because of course, most resumes, we just list our accomplishments. We don't think about the things that we failed at. And, you know, I think she says the students at first are always kind of like, what? Like, they're very resistant to the idea. But. And I've done this for myself. I did a piece, I think, for 99 years ago about one of my greatest failures. And I think what's interesting about going through that process of doing the failure resumes, usually all the things that you put on there, a lot of them, like, don't seem like that big of a deal when you kind of look back on them, you know, or maybe it was a big deal, but you learned something that was so valuable that it feels like it was certainly worth the risk that you took. And I think so. I think kind of doing that activity as well and kind of reflecting on where you took risks and what you learned or where you thought something was a particularly big risk and actually maybe you failed, but it wasn't that big of a deal, or you succeeded and it wasn't kind of as scary as you expected. So I think doing that failure resume is an interesting activity to kind of, let's say, demystify risk taking a little bit.

That's awesome. And even as I do that, in my head, you can just see that the lines that go from this risk, that failure, to this growth, this opportunity that never would have existed had I not been willing to. You know, for me, dropping out of law school was the most horrible thing I could have done when I did it. And it just absolutely sucked at the time. And. But that was the seed from which I created my first business I never would have done if I hadn't done that. And all the, you know, and I can, up to the most recent ones. It's just really cool to be able to have that arc to. To kind of see the hero's journey that requires us to be willing to go up against those mythical dragons, right?

Yeah, 100%. And I think that a lot of times it's just not as. It's just not as big a deal as we think it'll be. Kind of heading into it, you come out on the other side and you're like, ah, you know, it wasn't that bad.

Yeah. And then you do it enough times, and it's like, okay, well, now in the moment of experiencing that, oops, can we look back and see the pivots that we went through before failures, whatever we want to call them and see that they're just. They're part of the process and hopefully navigate it with more grace and power this time around. So good.

That makes me. There's just one other point from that particular section of the book that's really stuck with me is this essay by Michael Schwalb. And he talks about some of the research around the way other people perceive are failures. And, I mean, I think one of the studies that he recounts actually was one in which people were made to wear a Barry Manilow T shirt, like when they went to hang out with their friends or something like that. And, you know, it kind of talks about how, like, when they were, they were like, oh, my God, like, people are going to judge me so hard, you know, like, it's going to be so embarrassing. And then, you know, it turns out, and they, you know, they talk to the people who are present and it's like, oh, well, no one else. Actually, you know, maybe 1 out of 10 people, like, even noticed you were wearing a Barry Manilow T shirt. And, you know, the kind of basic takeaway from that study was that we kind of tend to blow up the impact of our failures or our shortcomings or embarrassing things that happen to us and how they'll. How they'll be perceived by other people. We tend to sort of really blow that up. But what we fail to think about is how much other people are really just concerned with whatever they have going on. You know, like, they're just. It turns out they actually have their own worries and thoughts and problems and things they're excited about, and they're really just not as focused on you as you thought they were.

Yeah, totally. I love that. And then it's Brene Brown style, too, of what we want to most see in people is their vulnerability. But what we least want to do is show our vulnerability.

Yeah.

So that willingness to kind of be honest and be open and to be willing to show off that failure resume. Right. Is what opens the doors for True connection and all that good stuff. As long as you don't need to wear a Barry Manila T shirt, we're okay.

They're probably hard to find these days. Exactly.

Well, again, we so barely scratched the surface. I appreciate you being willing to bounce through three different books in such a brief conversation. And I'm so excited about Unsubscribe. And just to go back, though, on manage your day to day, make your mark, maximize your potential. I highly recommend all three. They go really well Together they're kind of like beautiful little coffee table books. As I said, Jocelyn introduces different themes and then invited just an amazing selection of world class thinkers to share their thoughts and very concise, more wisdom and less time style. So check those out. And then when can we look forward to unsubscribe?

It's coming out on October 4th I think. It's already available for pre order on Amazon. And I have a I have some more information on my website@jkg l e I.com subscribe.

That was my next question. So then tell us the website again.

It's jkg l e I.com perfect.

Subscribe for more and then I cannot wait to get the book, have another one of these chats and dive in even more deeply there. So Jocelyn, thank you so much.

Thanks for having me Brian. It's a pleasure.

Isn't it a bit odd that we went from Math to Science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up. Then imagine that guy who me connecting those ideas to other great books and helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101 business 101 meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer. I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient Wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson.

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