042: Contextualizing your To-Do List with Ben Elijah

By July 29, 2016Podcasts

 

Ben Elijah says: "When you're capturing information, you're not there to do quality control. Your job there in that moment is to get the stuff out of your head."

Popular productivity blogger Ben Elijah of inkandben.com fame teaches how to form effective habits and provides pro-tips on determining optimal contexts to rock your to-do list.

You’ll learn:

  1. The importance of context in your day-to-day to-do list, and how you can use it most effectively
  2. How Ben jots down ideas while in the shower (and now I do too)
  3. How to ingrain new habits by using the habit loop

About Ben
Author of The Productivity Habits, Ben studies how our relationship with information affects the way we live and work. As a writer who straddles science and the arts, Ben has a uniquely analytical approach to problems such as information overload, life goals, and well-being.

Items Mentioned in the Show

Ben Elijah Transcript

Pete Mockaitis
Ben, thank you so much for appearing here at the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Ben Elijah
My pleasure. Great to be with you.

Pete Mockaitis
So we were just chatting earlier. You say that there are rains of biblical proportions right now in London.

Ben Elijah
Yeah. London is not a dry city, as you may be aware. But today’s been a little damp, to put it mildly, and yes, I feel like a drowned rat, but never mind.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve heard that rats are actually very good at swimming. So at least you’re surviving.

Ben Elijah
There’s an urban legend which is something along the lines that in London you’re never more than about seven feet away from a rat on average. I’m not entirely sure how true that is. But at least I hope it’s not true, given I live in the first floor. But it wouldn’t surprise me. I’ve seen rats in London that are about the size of cats.

Pete Mockaitis
I’m just going to say for the sake of that statistic that they’re including sort of underground sewer rats within the calculation to make London seem more tidy.

Ben Elijah
It’s fascinating. I have this theory, this sort of pet theory that certain cities have a certain character which you can’t describe in a very logical way. It’s just a kind of feeling that you get. So you go to a city like Prague, which is beautiful, and there’s still this sort of sense of darkness about it, this sort of ghosts of the First World War or ghosts of 1968 or whatever. And you go to somewhere like San Francisco, which still even now, even though it’s being massively gentrified, it still feels a bit like a port city. And London, to me, it’s sort of death and decay and filth on one side and then sort of grandeur and rebirth on the other. It’s sort of a very paradoxical city.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s fun. So Ben, you write a lot about productivity, but you’ve also mentioned that you don’t even really like the word productivity itself. Can you share a little bit about that?

Ben Elijah
Yes. I wish I’d had that realization before having the title conversation with my publisher. Productivity. I don’t know. It means different things to different people. And perhaps I’m being unfair. I don’t know. To me, I hear about productivity and I get some sort of mental image about being pistol whipped in some sort of North Korean sweatshop.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s very vivid.

Ben Elijah
I’ve said this before, but I think it’s a good line. You can be great at a job that you hate, but I don’t think that’s necessarily very effective. Okay, fine. If you love flipping burgers for a living, and I don’t say that to sound demeaning because a lot of people rely on that stuff now, and that’s cool. If you love it, or if you’re clear about the purpose that that job is serving for you, then that’s cool. But if you want to put all of your attention into flipping more burgers per hour… I have no idea how that job works, so that’s probably… Loads of people are really angry at me now. But I think you get my meaning. None of those widgets that you crank out per hour. But if it’s not something that you deeply care about, or it doesn’t serve some deeper purpose in your life, then I kind of think that you’re wasting your effort.

Whereas I think that if you are absolutely rubbish at something that you adore, then I actually think that’s probably being more effective. Would I rather spend two hours working late on a project at work that I don’t really care about, or would I rather spend that time with my friends? That sounds like, just strictly speaking, if you look at it in terms of what you’re selling to your employer, one of them is useful and one of them isn’t. But if you think of it in terms of personal effectiveness and your own happiness and wellbeing as a human being, then you’ve got to consider the stuff that seems like a waste of time. Did that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. So I like this. This is kind of profound, kind of thought-provoking, getting into some meaty life matters here, as opposed to just cranking more widget matters. I think that makes a lot of sense, and I think at the same time, there is a beautiful intersection that if you love what you’re doing, you are kind of naturally energized by it, engaged in it, you come up with more focus and creativity, and you’re also more productive in the kind of greater output sense of the word.

Ben Elijah
It’s very difficult to get worse at your job. You’ve got to really put some effort in to get worse. Like if you love what you do… For example, I discovered that I love writing when I was really young. I’m talking about sort of seven and eight. And I always wrote, and it’s become sort of a daily habit for me. And I guess I realized… I went through a really tough time in my late teens. And really, after that point, I wanted to become a scientist, specifically an astrophysicist, which remained a passion of mine. But my inability to do calculus kind of screwed me up a bit. But just having this sort of daily practice of something that I adored, and it developed, and suddenly a hobby that you started getting better and better at, because you love it, has become a career for me.

And what’s quite interesting is that I guess I look back on the stuff that I did in the past. In writing, it’s very easy because you can very easily inspect the work that you’ve done in the past. I guess if you’re a gardener, that’s a little bit more difficult. But I look back at the stuff I wrote. Hell, I even look back at the writing I put into “The Productivity Habits,” and for various reasons, at some of the bits I cringe. Some of them are editing issues which were ironed out in later programs. It’s a painful topic for me.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve been there.

Ben Elijah
Yeah. But I look back on the stuff and I cringe. Not because I think I did a bad job, but because I’m a better writer than I was two years ago. And I think in two years’ time, I’ll look back on what I’m writing today and I’ll think it sucks. And that’s good because it means I’m getting better.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, this is good. I totally agree with that, and that’s the story. And you can’t just sort of wait forever and do nothing until you’re a super master. Then you’ll never become a super master. So there’s a fun kind of duality, if that’s the word, or yin-yang. There’s a fluidity to what you’re saying there, and that’s cool. So tell us then, you’ve shared eight habits inside the productivity habits. What would you say are some of the most essential in terms of they’re very powerful and yet they’re also rarely practiced?

Ben Elijah
Actually, I disagree that they’re rarely practiced. I think that they’re not practiced necessarily in the right way and they’re not practiced consistently, and that’s the problem. The most important one, and if you want a quick and dirty habit that you can implement which will have a big impact on your effectiveness, and it’s the first one, which is capturing, which is getting stuff out of your head. And I’m not the only person to talk about this. David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” was a massive inspiration, and I credited that in the book. I don’t want the book to feel derivative because there’s a lot of original research and thinking in there. But honestly, David Allen, read him.

Getting stuff out of your head. Everyone knows how to write a list. Most people who can write can make a list. This isn’t difficult. But to get to a point where you’ve habitualized it, that’s difficult. So if you have an idea and you want to get it out of your head, not because you know it’s the right thing to do, but because you can’t do anything else, you’re almost compelled to do it because it’s become a habit. Well, that’s what you want to aim for. And I’ve said this before. To me, I feel almost naked if I don’t have some way of capturing information on my person at all times. I actually installed a waterproof notepad in my shower.

Pete Mockaitis
Love the intensity. That’s cool.

Ben Elijah
But you have to. And I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s just like one tends to shower shortly after waking up and you’ve had a chance to sleep on something. I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with the sensory experience of being in a shower. But you come up with tons of ideas. Everything from small “Buy this thing for my friend’s birthday,” or “This is a great line of dialogue for my novel,” or whatever. And I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels this way, but one of my biggest frustrations is when you have a fantastic idea, and then 30 seconds later or a minute later, it’s gone, it’s lost, and you spend the next 10 minutes trying to go through your brain, trying to reconstruct this great idea, and sometimes you just have to let it go. I think that’s a waste.

And what’s quite interesting is when you start capturing information, and then crucially afterwards you get consistent at reviewing it and processing it, and as David Allen said, sort of adding meaning to it or clarifying it, the effect is very interesting. It’s almost like adding the capabilities of your past brain to your present brain. It’s a very weird and almost cliché way of describing it, but it’s the best I can do.

Pete Mockaitis
I don’t think I’ve heard it before, so I’m either out of the loop or it’s not–

Ben Elijah
Well, maybe. It’s the sort of thing that could be a cliché. Yeah. You have this wonderful effect of rather than relying on what you’re doing right now to then form your own creativity and anything that you happen to have internalized in your memory, if I capture literally everything, then I’ve got a way of retrieving it when I need it. That’s bloody powerful because it means that I’m no longer relying on my head. My brain is now absolved of its responsibility to store information. The job of my brain at that point then is just synthesizing new information, and that’s what the human brain evolves to do.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good. And I love absolution. I just went to confession this morning.

Ben Elijah
Awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s beautiful, that piece there. So I want to touch base on something before we dig into some follow-ups. First of all, this waterproof shower notepad situation. How do I get my hands on one of them?

Ben Elijah
AquaNotes on Amazon.

Pete Mockaitis
AquaNotes. Okay. Beautiful.

Ben Elijah
I just buy like half a dozen at a time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Very good. I got you. So there are some essential habits, and the key is to do them with regularity and completion, such that you’re not kind of half and half. It’s like it’s completely out of your brain and it’s getting reviewed regularly. Go ahead.

Ben Elijah
I was going to say if you want another book to read as well, check out “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. His work was one of the biggest… One of the biggest? Yeah, probably. One of the most significant bits of research that I did prior to writing “The Productivity Habits.” And I did a little research as well other than that, but the process of forming habits, or rather, the way that human beings form habits. And I think it’s all very well to describe this stuff. Everyone knows that your memory is soluble. I don’t think that’s a great revelation for many people to say that your memory sucks and a piece of paper will do a better job than any human’s memory. We can all agree with that, but then nothing changes.

So the way I try to structure “The Productivity Habits” was identifying the three stages of the habit loop as it relates to those eight habits in the book. So what are the triggers? What do you need to look for? What are the behaviors that you then need to implement? And then what do you get out of it? What’s your reward? What’s the craving that drives the trigger?

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I thought a lot about some of those triggers, behaviors, rewards pieces, and I think it’s a great way to deconstruct it and to really get things going. I think I’ve got an easy time with the trigger and the behavior, but the trickier part for me is the reward. Somehow, just throwing some chocolate in the mix doesn’t do it for me so much. What have you found to be effective in some of these habits?

Ben Elijah
It’s tricky because there’s a lot of subjectivity to it, and I think I’m not fully qualified to answer the question because there’s a lot of stuff in cognitive behavioral science, which is still a relatively new field, which is exploring this stuff in really great detail, and I’m not an expert in that. So I wanted to say that as a preface because I don’t want to sound like I’m some sort of authority because I’m not.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ben Elijah
Anecdotally, I find that just focusing on a positive emotion that comes out of performing an activity as a result of the trigger, do that often enough and it’s not easy. There’s no denying that. But doing that often enough allows me to form a connection between the trigger and the reward. So for example, to write stuff down once an idea has come to my head, I focus on the feeling of just sort of panic and paralysis because I’m desperate to make that piece of information safe. And then I focus on the feeling of relief once I’ve written it down, and that sense that I can just relax and trust my system, which is very important because I know that I’m not… Imagine you’re sitting on a chair and you’ve been standing up for eight hours, and that feeling of relief in your leg. And that’s the equivalent positive emotion in my brain that I try to focus on. And that suddenly becomes a really nice reward which drives the trigger.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s powerful. And it’s so simple because all it can mean is just spending an extra couple of seconds taking a breath, sighing, and just reveling in that, and it reinforces it in and of itself.

Ben Elijah
It ain’t rocket science. But equally, you also have to forgive yourself. Forgive yourself is a strong term. I don’t mean to put it in quasi-religious terms, but you have to allow yourself to capture utter rubbish alongside the good stuff because your job in that moment is not to filter. When you’re capturing information, you’re not there to do quality control. Your job there in that moment is to get the stuff out of your head. And then later, when you come to clarify it and process it and add meaning to it or whatever verb you’d want to use, that’s when you start saying, “Do I want to do this? Yes or no? Do I need to do this right now? Yes or no?” and all the other questions that you might ask yourself to determine how you’re going to defer it or how you’re going to delegate it and so forth.

Pete Mockaitis
So I’m curious to hear. It sounds like you’re taking some work of giants, like Charles Duhigg and David Allen, and you’re making sort of sense of it in terms of putting it in practical terms and context and thinking of how it works for you. I’d love to hear because I’ve had my own experience of this while writing books. You’re kind of doing a lot of good synthesizing of other pieces and adding meaning and context to them, and there are other things in the book that’s just like, “Whoa. I’m not quite sure where that came from. It came from the depths of me. It’s original and fresh and beautiful and unique.” Could you share with us, what are some of those nuggets, some Ben Elijah originals that are in your work?

Ben Elijah
So I am really interested in the idea of context in the getting things done sense, this idea of an environment which enables you or constrains you.

Pete Mockaitis
Be it calls or computer or office, you have to be this in order to do it.

Ben Elijah
Exactly. Now, I have a constraint which some people might not have, which is emotional or mental. I have bipolar affective disorder, and I’m very fortunate that I have a relatively mild case of it, so there are people out there that have it far worse than I do. But the result is that, for me, my emotional state isn’t much a part of my reality as space and time. And what’s quite interesting when I was doing the research for “The Productivity Habits” is that actually mood or thoughts will manifest itself in very different ways for different people, but it’s a variable which is there for everybody, or at least almost everybody.

And when I think about context, I think about really it’s an interplay of three things, which is space, time and thought. So any situation that you find yourself in is a function of space, time and thought. And that led me to develop a concept called the context triangle, and it’s my attempt to really build a sort of unified field theory of context, if I could use those terms. And I actually put a blog post up on my site, if you want to take a look at that. You don’t have to buy the book to get into the concept. But if you want to buy the book, I won’t stop you.

And what it allows you do is say “Okay, I’ve got space, time and thought.” So let’s say space and time define the resources that I’ve got available to me. So a resource can either be fixed or floating. So chances are my smartphone is probably a floating resource. It’s with me at all times.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Floating with you, not attached to a particular location.

Ben Elijah
Yeah, floating. I’m sort of recycling computer science terms. So a floating resource is something that I’ve got with me at all times, or is available to me at all times, or most times. And there are degrees of floating and fixed. So it’s like a continuum. Whereas let’s say my father is a fixed resource, because if I need to do something which depends on the presence of my father, then I’ve got to be with my father, and I’m not with my father at all times. I’ve got to get around to his house, or I’ve got to arrange to meet him or whatever. So that’s quite an interesting thing.

But as far as thought and time are concerned, these can define things like the amount of information in your environment, and they can define your mood. They can define a lot of things. And that can relate to the amount of creativity that you can throw at a problem. And you can look at space and thought as well. That can determine other things about your environment that relates to your attention. So you can then start thinking of availability being fixed or floating. You can then start thinking of creativity being like open or closed. You should Google for a John Cleese talk on creativity, by the way, which is worth looking at to think about open modes of creativity and closed modes as well. And your attention can be deep and shallow.

So we’ve got availability, creativity, and attention. Any task that you can define can be described in those terms. So any task that you might have, everything from “Buy a box of chocolates for mum,” or “Write the next great novel,” they’ll all have a particular requirement of availability, creativity, and attention. And if you can then relate all of the situations that you find yourself in in your life, everything from five minutes in the café to sitting in the office to date night with your partner, each of those has a particular combination. So if you can match up your tasks to your situations, the context triangle basically allows you to make that connection. Does that make sense?

Pete Mockaitis
Make the connection of what’s most appropriate to be done here?

Ben Elijah
Yeah. Exactly. I’ve used this example before, but if I’ve got a really important phone call to make, that requires a working phone. It requires probably a certain degree of closed creativity because I need to be maybe quite focused on it rather than being open and associative. And it requires deep attention. So I’m on a plane, and that plane has just taken off. Might be a really important phone call, but what can I do about it right now?

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Ben Elijah
Very little. So I might then say, “Okay, well, in four hours, I’m going to be sitting in a café near the airport or in the airport with half an hour to kill. Great. That’s probably an appropriate time to make that call.” So I can then start relating my task list to my schedule based on the context that I’m going to be in, and that suddenly becomes incredibly powerful because if you know that you need to be making a whole ton of phone calls, but you are not going to be in situations that facilitate that, then you need to start making some changes.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I hear you. And that’s interesting. It’s funny. I think sometimes I think that I just want to be able to, at will, shift the nature of my attention, shallow or deep, or my creativity, closed versus open, but sometimes it’s just not in the cards. You’re in the space you’re in.

Ben Elijah
Some people can. I guess some people can’t. I mean, if I’m feeling really appalling, I can’t reasonably expect myself to do something which requires that I feel fantastic. So sometimes, you just have to accept that and not beat yourself up. In my case, I’ve learned not to beat myself up about it and I pick stuff that I can do in whatever situation that I’m in, because if I can do it and still at least do something positive, then that can only be good for me.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. And it’s great if you have that list to be populated and organized in advance. It’s just right there for you to pick things off and make it happen.

Ben Elijah
A hundred percent.

Pete Mockaitis
And so you also had some cool, unique perspective when it comes to doing the review and making that an effective time. What’s your take on the review?

Ben Elijah
Are we talking about reviewing your whole task system or just the way that you review different channels of information?

Pete Mockaitis
I think about sort of the weekly review, or let me just touch point, recollect with all that is and has been organized thus far and then what happens.

Ben Elijah
Right. I’m with you. The review is, in my opinion, one of the most neglected parts of anyone’s attempt to become more productive. And if you accept that in order to become… I’m using the P word again. I apologize. More effective. If you accept that in order to become more effective, you have to start externalizing your thoughts, capturing them on a bit of paper or some sort of system, and then reviewing them at the right time. So it’s this algorithm of capture-review-capture-review-capture-review. If you accept that it’s necessary to store stuff outside of your head, then the review, with some sort of interval, becomes absolutely critical, and it’s something which is quite difficult for people to adopt simply because it takes a lot of effort and there’s no immediate payoff. So I guess, hey, we’re all mature, intelligent adults. We’ve got to do it.

What you do is very simple. You’ve just got to go through all of your projects that are outstanding and make sure that there is at least some task in there which means that it’s alive. If there’s a project which is stale, in other words, there’s just nothing left to do, or there are tasks that are overdue perhaps, or you’re not given a situation to do any of them and yet the project needs to be moved on, then being able to just sort of zoom out and take a view of your whole life and how many projects you’re doing and their status, that just means that you can make sure that the system is clean and it’s tidy and that it accurately matches the work that you need to be doing, because if it doesn’t, then the system itself will become a source of friction for you. And you don’t want that because that means you won’t be able to trust it.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. It’s good.

Ben Elijah
Sorry. Go on.

Pete Mockaitis
Sorry. You go on.

Ben Elijah
I guess I was just saying that, again, this isn’t rocket science. Most of this is just advanced common sense.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. Well, before we shift gears into the fast faves segment, is there anything else you want to make sure that you put out there, or any other tidbits of advanced common sense that you’ve got to make sure we hear?

Ben Elijah
To be honest, I think that for your audience, it’s very important, in my opinion, to make a distinction. And I’ve said this, again, right at the beginning. Make a distinction between what it is to become better at your job and what it is to decide what job you ought to be doing. I mean that in a specific sense and a very general sense, because you could be great at a job that you’re not enjoying or that isn’t right for you, but sometimes you might just have to ask, “What job am I hiring my job to do?” If I’m building a career as a writer, it’s perfectly acceptable for me to go flipping burgers because that’s going to pay the bills and that’s going to keep a roof over my head, but am I going to invest a huge amount of effort, come home physically and emotionally exhausted from that job? Well, in that case, if that were to be the case, then that’s not going to work for me. So you need to be thinking about the job that you’re hiring your job to do for you.

Pete Mockaitis
The job you’re hiring your job to do for you. That’s fun.

Ben Elijah
That’s a good line, isn’t it?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s a Ben Elijah original. Very good.

Ben Elijah
You should write some of these down.

Pete Mockaitis
Absolutely. Well, it’s going to be transcribed, so you’re covered.

Ben Elijah
Marvelous.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear a few of your favorite things, then. Could you open us up with a favorite quote, something that you turn to again and find inspiring?

Ben Elijah
Oh, God. I’m really bad at quotes. There’s a wonderful Winston Churchill quote. It’s something along the lines of a woman said to him once, “If I were your wife, I would put poison in your coffee,” to which he replied, “Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it.” And it’s the witty bon mot, and I’ve always found that rather charming.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun. Thank you. And how about a favorite study or piece of research you find yourself thinking about or referencing often?

Ben Elijah
It’s got to be the discovery of the Higgs boson. Seriously, it’s the human race at its absolute finest. Honestly, you could look at the rest of the human species with a degree of cynicism that perhaps comes from living in a big city for a period of time, and you get to see the whole species as basically talking monkeys with nuclear weapons. But the fact that we have it within us to dig a gigantic hole in the ground in the middle of Switzerland to test for a subatomic particle which is the basis of all mass, there’s something rather wonderful in that. There’s something that’s quite poetic. And I find the study completely inspirational, even if I don’t have a bloody clue what it means. There’s something in what we do and how we still, as a species, with all of our problems and all of our issues, we still have this very childlike sense of curiosity. And I find that that is so inspirational, and it’s something that I try to apply in my daily life.

Pete Mockaitis
Fun. Thank you. This has come up before. I’m going to have to research this a little bit more. So that’s exciting. How about a favorite book?

Ben Elijah
It’s “1984” by George Orwell.

Pete Mockaitis
That is a good one.

Ben Elijah
By a country mile. The way that guy writes, or wrote, I should say. Actually, he wrote an essay called “Politics and the English Language.” I think he wrote it just before the end of the Second World War, or maybe even beforehand, maybe during the early part. I’m not quite sure. And it is quite UK-centric, but I think the message is really clear. Plain English and language in general to be used as a tool for clarity and truth rather than obfuscation and deflection.

Pete Mockaitis
Agreed.

Ben Elijah
And it’s something which modern business language is infested with unclear, vague, euphemistic nonsense. And I actually feel that there’s a relationship between the clarity of language and productivity, but that’s another story. You’ve all probably sat in meetings where you just end up hearing the same corporate buzzwords and you end up trying to restrain the urge to truncheon someone in the face. It’s just awful. And if you use corporate English, shame on you, because our language has the ability to be so incredibly precise and thoughtful and to contain such a vast amount of information, and we lose it when we start using this prefabricated IKEA language.

Pete Mockaitis
IKEA language. That’s good. Thank you. How about a favorite nugget of yours that when you share it, folks tend to retweet or take notes or highlight it a lot in the book, Kindle version? What’s a quotable gem coming from you?

Ben Elijah
I’m not sure I do that many quotable gems, but I think people seem to really take a lot of value over the context triangle, and I think that that’s one thing that if someone were to take away from “The Productivity Habits” beyond its core message, which is capture and review, then I would say that would be it. Thinking about the way your life and the way your lifestyle affects the work that you’re doing. And if you want to change the work that you’re doing, then you also have a tool that you can use to change the way you live. And I think people seem to respond quite a lot to that.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. And what would you say is the best way to find you? If folks want to learn more and check out your stuff, where should they go?

Ben Elijah
So my website is inkandben.com, and I tweet: @inkandben. And actually, I would love for people to contact me because I’m looking for some interesting stories really for my next book. Could I talk about that?

Pete Mockaitis
Take it.

Ben Elijah
Cool. Thank you. So I’m writing a book about… Actually, it’s based on my dislike of the word productivity. It’s more about what I mean to be effective. So how do you find things in life that you really care about, and then how can you then turn that into the next five minutes of your life? And I’ve come to realize that while smart, engaged, professional people might take that for granted, it is actually a learned behavior, and it’s not something that should be taken for granted because I realize I’m very lucky with my education to have been taught this sort of stuff. How do I analyze what I care about and then turn that into a plan? And my book is an attempt to kind of codify that. So I’d love to hear from people who’ve got interesting stories about how they found things in life that they adore, a kind of calling in life, as it were, and then how they turned that into a reality. But I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who struggle with it, because I find struggle far more insightful than success.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, hopefully, you’ll get some good stories coming your way. Absolutely. So mosey on down to inkandben.com and share some of that, please.

Ben Elijah
Tweeting me is probably easier for that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, @inkandben. And any sort of final parting thoughts, a call to action, or a challenge for folks seeking to become more awesome at their jobs?

Ben Elijah
Get stuff out of your head, and get almost religious about getting stuff out of your head. It’s as simple as that. It’s not difficult. You’ve just got to turn it into a habit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, Ben, this has been a real treat and some really fun food for thought I could just sit with and chew on for a while. So thanks so much for taking this time, and we wish you tons of luck.

Ben Elijah
My pleasure. Great to speak with you.

Pete Mockaitis
You too.

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