What Simple Systems Are For | Mike Michalowicz

[0:00] I'm kind of in this liminal state. Like, um, I, I, I'm questioning the future. I think I have a vision going forward, but I'm afraid of bulldozing through it and not being present in what's going on.

[0:14] This is episode 100 of the Unfolding Thought Podcast. This show has been growing quickly in just the last week. Our views, plays, listens, and downloads have increased five times over our prior averages.

[0:30] And in just the last five days at the time of this recording, we've had 36,000 plays on this podcast. If you are one of the people who found it recently or you're one of the people who's been here for quite a while, I really want to say thank you. It means a lot whether you spend just 30 minutes on this show or you come back episode after episode. Really, I do mean it. Thank you very much.

[0:55] Now, I have one request of you. I would really appreciate it if you would take just 10 seconds to leave a like, rating, or review in whatever channel you're listening to this in.

[1:07] When other potential listeners see signals like that, it shows them that maybe there's something worthwhile going on here, so maybe they'll check it out too. And with that, here's episode 100 with Mike Michalowicz.

[1:21] Mike Michalowicz, thank you for joining me. I really appreciate you being here. As I said, before we started recording, or actually I didn't say this part, but I will say this part. I've read most, if not all of your books. Yeah, sorry to surprise you here. I've read most, if not all of your books and I have my copy of Profit First here. That was what I said before we started recording because that's my favorite book that you have written. So I appreciate you being here. Where does today's recording find you?

[1:50] Well, thank you. um Physically, I'll say where it finds me. It finds me in my home office with a glitchy computer, so the screen's going glitch. But it also has me wearing my travel shirt. So I went to school at Virginia Tech. And it was so funny. I'm flying out for a speaking engagement. Right after this, I'm taking heading into the airport.

[2:07] What found funny is when you wear the gear. I mean, this is from 30 years ago that you find a family out there every single time. Go Hokies. that's where it finds me physically, but emotionally, um I'm kind of in this liminal state.

[2:23] Like, um, I, ah I, I'm questioning the future. I think I have a vision going forward, but I'm afraid of bulldozing through it and not being present in what's going on.

[2:33] So that's where I am mentally. Mike Michalowicz has built and sold two multi-million dollar companies. Today, he runs two companies and is a partner in many more, which he describes as laboratories for testing the ideas he teaches.

[2:49] His books include The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, The Pumpkin Plan, Profit First, Surge, Clockwork, Fix This Next, Get Different, the children's book, My Money Bunnies, All In, and most recently, The Money Habit.

[3:05] One thing that attracts me to Mike's writing is that his ideas tend to arrive inside metaphors that do not always make sense when you hear the name, but then become shorthand once you're familiar with them.

[3:18] So things like toilet paper, giant pumpkins, small plates, toothpaste tubes, and clocks. Like my recent discussion with Geoffrey Moore, Mike's metaphors help with a deep and useful function.

[3:33] They narrow the field, whether you want to talk about the field of possible causes for something or maybe the field of things we have to think about, work on, or consider.

[3:45] They reduce the money available for expenses, the customers a company tries to serve, the problems an owner tries to solve, or even the owner's own availability to the business, which is a topic of some of his writing.

[4:01] What I like most about this is that the simplicity that Mike brings to his writing and to his consulting serves as actually a positive constraint.

[4:12] Mike and I only had a little more than 20 minutes together due to our schedules, and rather than try to summarize all of his books, I wanted to understand when that method of simplification works,

[4:27] when it becomes maybe too simple, and whether it offers anything useful in a moment like today, when artificial intelligence is creating both opportunity and paralysis.

[4:40] But before we reached any of that, I asked Mike to introduce himself. For the listener's context, would you mind telling me a little bit about yourself? So you're you're talking to an author guy who loves entrepreneurship more than anything on this planet, particularly small business. I call them hot dog stands. You know, businesses under half million, under 250,000.

[5:01] two hundred and fifty thousand These are people that have courage to start something and have visions to have great impact. um I too historically am an entrepreneur. I've I've run the journey. like I currently own many businesses, but my passion is learning and discovering what we want to work that's not technically working and finding out the technical solution and then empowering people to use that.

[5:26] Well, you made it easy for me to ask the first big question because of what you just stated about figuring out what's not working and how to get it working. So one of the things that I really like about your writing is that you do a spectacular job of simplifying things that are complex or for one reason or another, very difficult to understand.

[5:52] and Yet I imagine that having, and I believe your company calls it an immutable law of profound simplicity, then Mike, with all the writing that you've done, with all of the speaking, consulting, you know being an entrepreneur, how do you tell when you've overly simplified something and maybe lost some important detail?

[6:20] It's interesting. It's rarely the case. It does happen. I think humans, we all have a propensity toward complexity. When something is hard to achieve, an excuse for not achieving it is is too complex to get there. I think it's a human tendency.

[6:37] So let me start off with how simplicity works. um I struggle to understand complex ideas, and that's why I've, I guess, subconsciously or consciously built tools to make things simple. I remember sitting in

[6:51] school and the teacher trying to explain, you know, how algebra works or some chemistry thing. And I'm like, I cannot comprehend this. And there I am sitting, you know, using my hands and fingers to make connections and finding these effectively shortcuts.

[7:07] I can't remember who have it someone said, but someone famous said something to affect, make things simpler, but don't make it simple. And I think there's a difference. that There's a concept of Occam's razor where we we condense the idea to the meat. But in that process, we are losing maybe nuance. It's the 80-20 rule that 20% of a solution will yield 80% of the benefit. So I try to move toward that.

[7:34] There's no question things get too simple. And I think those become almost like axioms, like um just established belief that we just know it to be true, but it's so simple that we live by that guideline.

[7:46] I think with Profit First, yeah you were kind of to show the book there. If people just took it at face value, many people have reached out to me and said, love your book. And I said, well, if you read they said, well, the title, Take Your Profit First.

[7:59] They don't understand that Profit First is not the system is the catalyst for finding the system. When you take your profit first, you pay yourself first, it catalyzes you to find out what's flawed in your business and in those elements where the nuances are fixed.

[8:13] So I think the challenge I've had is if if people believe that one sentence explains the entire solution for something, it can be oversimplified and then misconstrued. And then people say it's not working because I took my profit first. I'm not profitable. I can't do this.

[8:28] And they haven't dug into the next level. So perhaps I've kind of weaved my way into that simplicity done right, in my opinion, is peeling an onion. There's multiple stages to it.

[8:39] And that someone needs to be engaged in the very first stage. and has to inspire them enough to take the next step to the next step. So maybe it's more of a ladder effect in doing simplicity effectively. But if it's only one rung in that ladder, that's where I've failed people.

[8:53] So that last distinction matters. A simple phrase can be the first rung of a ladder, but it is not the entire ladder itself.

[9:04] So take your profit first is a memorable enough phrase to interrupt an old habit. It does not by itself, though, tell an owner whether the underlying problem is price, margin, staffing, unnecessary expense, or maybe a business model that never really worked in the first place.

[9:29] The phrase itself can get someone to act. The fuller system, however, is supposed to make the consequences of that action unavoidable.

[9:40] And it also helps to resolve an apparent contradiction between Mike's earlier and later books. In The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur published in 2008, Mike argues that nobody will care about a young company as much as its founder.

[10:00] And therefore, the founder alone bears responsibility for making sure everything is cared for and moving forward. In his later book, Clockwork, though, he asks almost the opposite question.

[10:15] Can a business achieve the size, profitability, and impact its owner imagines without that owner doing all or maybe any of the work?

[10:26] In his book, All In, he adds the team to this progression. The work everyone does is not merely to make the owner less necessary.

[10:37] It is to recruit people who fit, create a place where they belong, and give them the conditions to contribute at a high level. So, if you read these just as simple slogans, the earlier and later points clearly conflict.

[10:57] But read as a progression, responsibility ends up changing form. The founder remains responsible, but responsibility no longer means personally doing or ensuring the delivery of every task.

[11:12] It means designing a company in which the work, decisions, and knowledge no longer stop at the founder. Keeping this in mind helped me make sense of something Mike then said to me about Profit First.

[11:28] He said a couple of things in there that were really sort of eye-opening to me or helpful mile markers in just thinking about you know, ah complex situations generally, but one of them was that I think initially I heard from you that all things being equal, you are often going to, you being anyone out here, you're often going to be well-served by trying to get down to the core of whatever the issue is that you're dealing dealing with. And yes, while there might be

[12:06] an edge over which you you tip or a line over which you step, and you do lose some nuance or detail that's important. I think you said that that almost never happens. So we're probably well served by trying to figure out what's at the core of this thing.

[12:26] And forgive me for continuing with now a a second point, but I felt like this was really important. You said something like, Profit First is the catalyst for finding the system.

[12:40] I think it was. And I feel like that is really important framing because It feels like it it shifted in my mind to the idea of Profit First from being the framework itself to instead being more like a positive constraint that, you know, there's a story that I've told on this podcast before of, think it was J. J. Abrams giving this TED talk called the mystery box. And essentially what he says is had ABC asked me for anything, a show about anything.

[13:14] I either wouldn't have produced something or it would not have been very good. But because they narrowed it down to it has to be about a plane crash and you can have to produce it in 11 weeks or something like that, then I actually was very creative with the show because all of these options were off the table.

[13:35] And so when you said it's the catalyst for finding the the framework of the strategy or whatever it was, that reframed things and helped me at least in this brief time here to see Profit First in a different way. So I appreciate that.

[13:49] but you very welcome. I have a investor, our investment business and our lead investor, his name is Greg. um we we Every business we invest in, we deploy Profit First. And he says, oh my gosh, Profit First doesn't fix a business.

[14:03] It identifies what needs to be fixed within a business. And that was like out the catalyst moment. I said, oh my gosh, you know even though the framework had been out there for quite a few years already when he said this, that's when I realized.

[14:14] It's interesting to your point, We need to have something that invokes us an awareness. We need something that turns on the lights. And I think, because I only work with entrepreneurs, that most entrepreneurs are ah running in the dark, just constantly trying to find what the problem is.

[14:32] Profit First illuminates it. And there's usually five or six usual suspects. The margins are off, pricing's wrong, inefficiencies, costs are too high. My brother-in-law retired now, but he was a professional firefighter.

[14:46] And he says, one of the edicts, when you go into a room full of smoke and there's a fire going on, and there's a space you've never been in he goes, right turns only. And I said, I don't understand. He goes, when you go to space, you go right and you follow the wall. You keep on going right. And he goes, by always going right, you will so navigate the entire space and get back out because it keeps you on the edge.

[15:08] He goes, the mistake that a rookie firefighter makes is you go in and you try to find the heat and you're you're trying to listen for noise. You're doing all these things and it's it's smoky. It's so disorienting. There's a danger there.

[15:20] So there's a simple catalyst or rule. And it's interesting how, to your point, humans, we excel under constraints. And when we when we follow a simple rule, um It allows us to ensure that we're addressing the components that need to be addressed, even though naturally we may want to run one way and instinctually do another, and we avert or avoid doing what we need to do.

[15:42] So that is a narrower and I think more defensible promise than saying a framework just fixes a company. Profit First changes the order in which money is allocated and removes some of it from easy reach.

[15:59] When the operating account cannot support the current expenses, the owner has to investigate why. Mike's The Pumpkin Plan removes low-fit customers and concentrates attention on the best ones.

[16:14] The point of that approach is not simply to have fewer customers. It is to create enough capacity to understand what the best relationships have in common and build around them.

[16:27] Mike's book, Clockwork, asks an owner to prepare for a four-week absence. That time is not just a reward or well-deserved vacation.

[16:39] It is a test that clarifies every decision, process, and relationship that still depends on one person, as many things tend to in small founder-led businesses.

[16:53] Mike's book, Fix This Next, describes an approach that narrows attention. Instead of trying to improve sales, profit, operations, impact, and legacy simultaneously, Mike asks the owner to identify one vital need and work on that first.

[17:14] In his book, Get Different, Mike turns marketing into an experiment with a defined audience, investment, and single response to measure.

[17:25] And then, in The Money Habit, he brings the same environmental design into personal finance. Instead of asking people to become unusually disciplined or to track every penny, he gives money a purpose before it can become undifferentiated spending cash.

[17:44] which for most of us results in the founding entrepreneur of a business working twice as much as anyone else and often taking home less pay than those with much less of a stake in the business.

[17:59] Across many of Mike's books, his consistent approach is to change the environment before demanding we simply adopt a new personality or set of behavior ourselves.

[18:12] These systems reduce the number of choices, expose consequences, and give the user something specific and, as a result, often much simpler to examine.

[18:25] One of the things I like the most about Mike's approach is the limits each of his books advocate for. A constraint, and therefore any one of Mike's books alone, does not diagnose the business for you.

[18:41] It does not determine the right price, identify the dispensable expense, repair a damaged culture, or tell you which work should remain human.

[18:53] It does, however, create pressure and visibility, on which you then have to exercise your judgment as the leader. The methods Mike describes in his books are iterative.

[19:07] Put a simple system into use, observe where behavior changes or the system breaks down, and revise it around what people actually do. Being familiar with this as a result of reading his books gave me a way into the part of our conversation where we began discussing artificial intelligence.

[19:29] That's really helpful. So now, Mike, I'm hoping that... being at least in my eyes, such a great simplifier of complex or confusing situations.

[19:40] We're in some uncharted territory, whether we talk about writing, strategy, analysis, entrepreneurship, coding, any number of things, artificial intelligence.

[19:51] As someone that writes, thinks, consults, invests in business, what are you thinking about artificial intelligence right now? Yeah, that's why I mentioned that liminal state. And before we went on air too, I was mentioning your AI.

[20:05] It's interesting that there's so much conversation about it. It's taking that it's consuming so much media that I see many business owners reverting to it. And I'm seeing almost possibility polarization of attitudes some folks are like this is our savior and the next few years I guess some kind of universal income coming in and everything's taken care of so just gotta see through a few years and then other extremes of like it's all over it's done why it even exists and um I just see this polarization I I have I wanted to share this with you and this is not staged just keep this here because I believe it so much

[20:41] I have this picture, and I just want to show you. So folks that are looking at the this is ah Picasso. This picture was taken in the 1950s. um It was subsequently modified in the 1970s by a famous artist. The original picture did not have this around his neck, though Picasso always used a camera.

[20:58] So why do I have this picture? So a quick history lesson. Picasso was born in, think, 1891. The camera, the commercially viable camera, comes about in 1899. It's called the Kodak one On that year, in that year, there was a collapse of artistry. In fact, the media was talking about artistry is dead because the portrait artist was done. The camera could do better picture.

[21:19] But Picasso grows up with this. He embraces the technology and was famously carrying a camera with him all the time and capturing it. And what it is, it brought about this creativity of the abstract artist. He was able to see things that we couldn't see in a portrait, but we could only see when we examined something and looked at it in a unique new way.

[21:37] I think that's what AI is going to be. And this this is my reminder is AI is this new tool. And I I think some of us are screaming that intelligence is over. The computers have it. No, the the human creativity is going to be sparked and inspired.

[21:51] I think that's what's coming. And I hope I hope to embrace that myself and I hope everyone else embraces that. Do you feel like whether it's companies that you're already invested in or that you own in one respect or another that you're running entrepreneurs that you are counseling, do you feel like you are encountering generally one sentiment or another, or is the market split in, in your experience on, on the fears, the optimism or anything else about artificial intelligence?

[22:26] Yeah, I'm seeing it ah almost a this is not the right politically correct word to use, but bipolar kind of response. And I know that's not correct. just can't think of any other term. And what it is is oh, this isn't affecting me until the first call comes in and a client says, I'm leaving your company's services whatever because I'm using an AI model. And then it's like, it's all over.

[22:48] Um, so I have some businesses that I invested in that are professional services, I think accounting firms, law firms and so forth. And, uh, consumers are using AI to do the tax review or to prepare a legal contract.

[23:05] And these attorneys are getting a call saying, I don't I don't need you now. And the attorney's like, oh, I guess it's all over. No. um Be the law firm that embraces AI and says, hey, what's the creativity we can bring about? Maybe there's nuanced language in regards to culture and things that the computer can't see.

[23:22] Legally, maybe it's perfect, but maybe it's not culturally. So what's there? Conversely, I see businesses that say, well, I'm not being affected. So we're in quite a few like manufacturing type businesses. and They say, yeah, let's talk about robots, but there's no robots our industry until the day comes. So they think they're immune to this until the day comes three to five years from now or three to five days from now. I don't know when, when the first automation comes that affects them directly. And they're afraid they're going to flip to it's all over.

[23:48] It's this these swings from it's fantastic to it's, it's abysmal. And, uh, I think the story we tell ourselves is very important. and And listen, I, I fall in this same space too, at times I'm like, I don't, I just don't know. And that's okay. That's normal. But I think what we have to realize that um we We are by nature, very creative.

[24:12] um We have elements of us that computers don't emulate, which is like storytelling, like really good storytelling, not computer storytelling and empathy. And the biggest thing that computers will never do is proximity, just you being with other people.

[24:24] um There's a lot of this old school Neanderthal days around the fire pit stuff that humans thirst for that the computers I don't think will ever be able to do. Maybe approximate, but not really authentically do.

[24:35] and so I think any business that embraces that has an opportunity to kind of do a Picasso thing and go abstract to to springboard off of AI. I'm less certain than Mike is about what computers will never be able to approximate.

[24:51] But we don't have to settle the outer limit of artificial intelligence to see the immediate business problem. If a client can cheaply generate something they regard as a usable first pass, part of a professional service has already changed.

[25:10] And that changes what a client may still be willing to pay a professional to do. The mistake would be to confuse one substituted task with the disappearance of an entire profession, or in the other direction, to use the survival of the profession as proof that its economics and daily work will always remain intact.

[25:37] My concern during the interview was that uncertainty itself could create the separation. A relatively small number of companies would experiment, learn, and move forward.

[25:54] while larger or more cautious organizations remained stuck in argument, procurement, fear, or maybe even indifference. Mike, given your perspective that you just shared, but also you know the fact that you do consult other businesses, I would love to get your reaction to this.

[26:17] It feels to me like There are a lot of businesses that are having and will continue to have a very difficult time adjusting to using artificial intelligence because there're it's just uncharted territory. There are so many questions about, well, how do we use it? How do we pay for it? Are people actually using, are they making use of it? Or are we just paying hundreds of dollars a month for licenses and so on that are going to waste. And you end up with a company that has 50 or 100 or 10,000 people.

[26:50] And we have entrenched cultures, behavioral norms. it's We have certain types of people that have no interest in trying something new.

[27:01] And then, but then we go to the solo entrepreneur and you have some potential solo entrepreneurs or two person teams or whatever that maybe they look at this complex space and they're not able to just sort of say, I'm going to, I'm going to follow this path. I am doing what I believe is best because they find artificial intelligence to create so much uncertainty.

[27:28] And then you have other people, much like your typical entrepreneurs, who say, I believe that this is the right thing. And I'm going to go and figure it out. And it feels to me like this time, whether it's a year or whether it's a 10-year period in humanity,

[27:44] That I feel like it's like the crest of a wave that we're going to see very, very few companies and individuals shoot ahead and everybody else is going to slide down the backside of the wave because of all of this uncertainty and this this ah paralysis, you know, this not fear necessarily, but just not knowing what to do or inability to change.

[28:06] Yeah, I agree with half of that. I think there's some will shoot ahead. I don't know if maybe you're going slide back down the curve. So here's my argument is I think we're in a classic adoption curve where you have the early, know, the early minority, the early majority. I remember with electric cars, I think it's recent enough.

[28:23] There was the the Nissan Leaf. I remember the first one going down the road. I'm like, what the F is this thing? It looked clunky. It was slow. It was a golf. It truly was a golf cart made to to your car.

[28:34] And the folks that adopted that were kind of the mavericks or wanted to make a statement. You know you ever saw Hollywood actors, particularly when the Prius came out, like driving that around, so because they were making a statement.

[28:46] But then there was like a kind of a normalizing moment and that was facilitated, I think, by Tesla. When Tesla came out at certain point, it was like, ah, it's just another Tesla. Oh, it's an electric car. And now there's these hybrid integrations and more and more manufacturers are bringing it in. And it's becoming what's normal, um where I think five or 10 years prior to that, people say electric your car, are you kidding me?

[29:11] I think AI is the same way. the a lot of people think LLMs are AI. That's one form of AI. But if you use Microsoft Word or Google Docs, AI is integrated into that. You just don't even know.

[29:22] When it's doing ah grammar suggestion, like maybe you should change a sentence to that sentence, that's AI doing that. But it it becomes almost normalized. I think the majority, just like the classic adoption curve indicates, is the majority will find it in existing technology that kind of naturally leans more and more AI oriented.

[29:42] The early adopters will be the ones that are using the LLMs or more advanced and the more technically oriented stuff. I agree. Businesses will spring up and sprint ahead that we never expected.

[29:53] But I don't think there's going to be this big fall off. And I think that's that's a general sentiment. I think a lot of people are like, oh my gosh, I'm so far behind A I. I give up. No, no, no. Don't worry. If you're using some form of technology, if you have, I can't and say the word anymore, A-L-E-X-A, because everyone's things will illuminate.

[30:11] If you have one of those, has AI integrated. if If you're using any kind of major apps for spreadsheets and so forth, AI is in there. It'll become more and more in there. Any app you're using, they probably have an AI feature.

[30:23] So it's becoming integrated. um Don't worry about being on the the cutting edge. It can overwhelm you. Now there's opportunity there. If you have the willingness and the there' an fortitude to learn it, understand it, become creative, a Picasso with it, my gosh, it can be a massive opportunity.

[30:40] But I don't think you're going to lose out just because that's not your penchant, know? Mike's answer locates the risk differently than I did. He expects much of AI adoption to arrive quietly inside tools people already use, just as electric vehicles became less exotic when the technology appeared in more ordinary forms.

[31:08] That in my mind does not remove the advantage available to people who are willing to put up with going down a lot of dead ends in order to learn and take advantage of something new as early as possible.

[31:24] It does suggest though, that we're not faced with a binary choice between master everything now or just be left behind forever.

[31:36] And this is where Mike's book Surge belongs in his larger body of work. It tells an entrepreneur to choose a market cove, watch it closely for a movement in demand, and position yourself to be ready for that movement.

[31:54] Applied to AI, the first choice is not to predict the whole future. it is to ask three smaller, more narrow questions.

[32:07] What task just became cheaper or easier? What problem or bottleneck does that expose? And what still requires judgment, accountability, trust, or human presence?

[32:24] So, In our conversation, I shared with Mike that while I often try to be as measured as possible when speaking about potential positives and negatives, I have learned that I tend to leave people thinking more about the negatives that I shared.

[32:46] I appreciate the optimism there and the positive note. you know I do I don't think of myself as a pessimist, but honestly, Mike, there are lots of things where I feel like I'm being measured.

[32:58] And I believe that my audience ends up hearing pessimism when I am trying to say, you know I'm I'm trying to be measured in my presentation. And optimism, isn't who knows how the story will play out? Like five to 10 years from now, we will all reflect on this and say, ah, this person said something that that came true or not.

[33:19] But no one can predict it. No one can predict what's coming. And um I think we just have to do the best with where we are and we'll see how it plays out. I do generally choose the optimism story because it makes me excited for each day and and it brings more...

[33:38] more energy to what I'm doing. You have to have a positive vision of the future to make the hard work worthwhile. And I feel like or for what it's worth, Mike, you know, when I listened to the audio book version of Profit First, and think I recall it in some of your other books, you can hear it in your enthusiasm to to narrate the book.

[34:01] And that may very well be something that makes you an entrepreneur and some others of us struggle with it. Maybe. Yeah. You think about the absurdity of starting a business. Like if you really knew what you're getting into, would you have done it?

[34:15] um It helps for sure. This is where I return to the first thing Mike said that he is in a liminal state questioning the future and afraid of bulldozing through it without being present for what is happening right now.

[34:34] That could, of course, sound like a separate personal concern, but if you read Mike's books in sequence, I think it is closer to the question underneath all of them.

[34:47] Across The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, Profit First, Clockwork, Fix This Next, and All In, the definition of responsibility expands.

[34:59] First, carry the work, then build a company and a team in which the work can continue without you. And his book, Fix This Next, gives the end point of all of this a name, legacy.

[35:18] The systems are supposed to remove a kind of noise, financial panic, operational dependence, scattered attention, uncertainty about the money or what the business can support.

[35:37] But when the noise recedes, a second question appears. What will you pay attention to now? And as Mike tells in some of his writing, the purpose of all of this for him and the legacy that he hopes he leaves behind is paying attention to some of those other things that many of us only have so much time with in this world.

[36:04] In Mike's case, that's being, at least in part, a part of his children's childhood. My reading of Mike's evolution is not that the early founder was wrong to feel responsible.

[36:21] It is that responsibility eventually has to include building conditions in which other people can move the work forward without him, and then resisting the urge to fill every bit of the resulting freedom with just more work.

[36:40] At this time, there is no framework that I am aware of that permanently solves that last problem, unfortunately. And Mike's opening answer in our conversation makes that clear to me.

[36:55] He spent years building systems around money, work, and attention, and he's still trying not to bulldoze through the moment that is in front of him right now.

[37:08] Well, today's a brief conversation, but hopefully we left listeners wanting more. So if somebody wants to learn about you or ah they want to go somewhere after this, where would you direct them?

[37:21] Thanks for inviting me to share that. ah My website, which is, well, there's mikemichalowicz.com, but don't go there because I can't spell my own last name, let alone others. Go to Mike Motorbike. It's a nickname from grade school as a motorcycle, mikemotorbike.com.

[37:35] There's a little... Golden goose egg when you go there. so it's kind of funny, but go to Mike motorbike.com. um All my books, you can get free chapter for downloads. I used to write for the Wall Street Journal. you can get that content there too, for free. Plus I have a new podcast called Becoming Self Made, which I'm so proud of. It's a video cast and you can get information about there too.

[37:54] Awesome. Well, thank you for being here today. Thank you for that. I really appreciate it, Mike. Appreciate you, Eric. That was Mike Michalowicz. You will find links to his work along with the book and historical sources used in this episode in the show notes.

[38:13] My thanks to Mike for making time for this conversation before heading to the airport. And thank you for listening to the 100th episode of the Unfolding Thought Podcast.

[38:24] If even one person came to mind while you were listening to this episode, send them the episode. That is one of the best things you can do to help this show grow. I'm Eric Pratum.

[38:35] This is the Unfolding Thought Podcast.