1194: How to Finish What Matters with David Kadavy

David Kadavy
Pete, it is so good to be here. I’m so comfortable.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. Well, I’m delighted that we are chatting again. You’ve been working away on a book for six years, so congrats on, you finished it. I guess it mattered.

David Kadavy
Yes. Well, the book is called Finish What Matters. I think the last time we talked, we ended the conversation saying, “Oh, well, maybe we’ll talk in five years.” Well, it’s been six but, sometimes, finishing stuff just takes a long time if it matters to you.

Pete Mockaitis
Completely agreed. So, tell us, during this six-year journey, or Odyssey, did you have any particularly surprising or fascinating discoveries about finishing what matters while you’re writing this thing?

David Kadavy
When I was going into it, this is the third book in a trilogy for me about creativity and creative productivity, and I went into it thinking, “Oh, this is going to be easy. I know how to finish things. I’ve written, this is my fifth book. I’ve had a podcast for hundreds of episodes,” things like that. And it’s like, “I already know everything about finishing.”

And that didn’t turn out to be the case at all. I actually learned a lot about this because that word matters really stuck with me, and it really made me think about, “Am I just finishing projects? Do I get too stubborn about finishing the things that I start?” that it’s important to finish the things that do matter to you and also that kind of fit your risk profile. They’re like, “What kind of bets do I want to make?”

And so that is where I ended up learning a lot, because I had a lot of self-searching to do, and I came to realize that I can sometimes be too stubborn about finishing the things that I start, I will definitely be more discerning in how far I take ideas from now on and which ideas I decide to follow.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that sounds like an important lesson for all of us, our finite time on this earth. Can you share with us what’s, perhaps, the big idea or some key criteria or principles you use to make these calls?

David Kadavy
If I connect it to being awesome at your job, like when you’re being awesome at your job, you’re probably delivering results. And you’re probably, to do that, doing things that you expect to lead to results. And these are going to, generally, be things that are expected of you.

But there’s this kind of other category of things where you have ideas about how you might, say, improve a process, or start a task force, or do something that if you don’t do it, nobody’s going to complain to you about it, nobody’s going to notice.

And maybe you get a little bit of energy to explore one of these things, tinker with one of these things on a Friday afternoon for an hour or two. But then come Monday morning, the priorities take over and you end up forgetting about the thing.

And so I think that we are all aware of the second quadrant on the Eisenhower Matrix, the things that are not urgent but important. I’m kind of advocating for a fifth quadrant, if you will.

Pete Mockaitis
Is it still a quadrant? Or is it a quintet?

David Kadavy
I guess it’s not.

Pete Mockaitis
Quintrent?

David Kadavy
The fifth quintent. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well. But the things that are not urgent, but unknown, unknown outcome. So how do you find the time and energy to build that task force for incorporating AI tools in the company when you need to prepare that deck for Thursday’s meeting, or to tinker with that process when you need to fill out that self-assessment for your performance review, or submit that proposal to talk at that conference when you need to study for that certification exam, these things that something might come of it?

But we’re having this conversation because you and I, 10 years ago, decided to go to a conference. And what’s going to come from the conference?

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Podcast Movement in Chicago. What? What?

David Kadavy
Yeah, and you think at a conference, okay, you’re going to meet some folks, maybe you’ve got some objectives, but one of them is not, “Oh, so I can have a conversation about my book on somebody’s podcast 10 years from now.”

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

David Kadavy
Right? But these are the things that kind of steer your career in a satisfying and gratifying and innovative direction, are these things that you have an idea, and maybe you have some kind of vision for how you’d like for the thing to turn out, but you don’t really know what the next step is.

And also if you were to follow the thing, it probably wouldn’t lead you to that destination that you have in mind. It might lead you to some other place completely surprising.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, that’s really fun, because when you say unknown, I’m enjoying that. I get excited by that. The thrill of exploration and discovery is a real good time. And I’m thinking about, like, video game designers, they know it, you know? It’s like, “Ooh, I found a thing. Yay!” It’s really intriguing.

And I imagine there are probably some dangerous temptations on either side of this. One is that you don’t do anything at all unknown because there’s a ton of things, and four quadrants is enough quadrants with all the bullet points on all the quadrants.

David Kadavy
We don’t need a fifth quadrant.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like there’s no capacity for anything else or it’s so much fun to explore and play around with all the nifty new little AI tools and the things and the models and what can they do, that it’s all not really what you “should” be doing with your time in order to make results happen.

David Kadavy
Yeah. Well, you definitely don’t want to be spending all of your time exploring, unless somehow that is your job. But I think that it’s helpful to set aside, like, a certain amount of time and energy for one. And then, two, like, be deliberate about scoping these things, not necessarily viewing them as big giant projects.

Like, I think of it as this thing I call the fortress fallacy. And that is that, I don’t know what it’s like for you, but whenever I have an idea, it’s always the fortress. It’s always this big giant thing that I don’t actually have the skills or resources to carry out. Resources including time and energy, right, because there’s other priorities.

And when I think about taking that first step, it’s really intimidating. What I like to do is what I call the cottage test, is that when I think of that fortress, when I have a big idea, I actually keep a spreadsheet of ideas where one column is called Fortress and another is called Cottage.

And I’ll write down that fortress idea, it’s like, “Oh, I’m going to write this 700-page book.” And then I will come up with the cottage version of that, which is it’s not breaking the thing down because that kind of requires more foresight than is often possible when doing creative things or when innovating. I think of it more as like, “What’s the smallest version of something resembling this idea that I can do?”

So, like, for example, let’s say that you did want to start a task force in your company for working with AI tools, and you’re thinking about like, “Oh, well, what’s the impression going to be amongst my colleagues about me automating them out of their jobs?” or, “Who’s going to be on the force? And how are these supervisors going to react to it?”

And it becomes overwhelming and you realize, “Oh, I’ve got more important things to do.” But if, instead, you’re thinking of it as like, “Well, let’s look out for a colleague that I could ask to have lunch with, and we can do some brainstorming and share notes and that’s the end of that.”

Well, and then maybe that becomes more of a regular thing. And then maybe slowly, over time, things start to happen. You see what I mean? It’s like starting off with a well-defined little experiment that you can carry out, and that you might have some kind of expectations for, but they’re far different from the initial, like, pie-in-the-sky or castle-in-the-sky, if you will, vision that you have. And you can budget your time and energy that way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool to think about and well said with regard to the fortress feeling intimidating and so much so that, perhaps, we’ll just look elsewhere.

David Kadavy
I mean, I can actually feel it in my body when I’m looking at those two columns and I write that fortress idea. I can feel myself start to tense up, like, “Ah, I just don’t have time for that. I don’t have the resources.”

And then as soon as I write down that cottage idea, it’s like, “Okay, instead of writing that book, maybe I’ll just record that 30-second reel or something like that.” I can start to feel myself relax and start to get excited about, “Oh, well, what’s going to happen? That unknown, what’s going to happen?”

And that’s something that can make work a lot more fun and enjoyable is not really knowing what’s going to happen with some portion of what you’re doing.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, if I could piggyback off of that, I’d love to get your hot take on, if we’re doing something kind of repeatedly, like, I’m doing my, I don’t know, 1,198-ish episode of How to be Awesome at Your Job, I mean, I think it’s fun because, you know, new person, new ideas, new stuff, we get into it.

But then there are certain portions of it in terms of like, “Okay, now I got to package it up and publish it, you know?” That feels less fun because it can seem a bit more repetitive.

Do you have any thoughts on how can we bring some of that enthusiasm, excitement, exploration, unknown into our repetitive corners of work life?

David Kadavy
I think when you’re doing something repetitive, one, there’s something exciting about it because it is an opportunity to continuously improve on something. And that’s something that I’ve always gotten excited about.

When I’m doing something repetitive is that I can create a process and formalize it and see, “Well, what if I tweak this part or that part?” And then the next time around I get to do it differently.

Or, as I develop that process, then I can start to offload or automate things. And then I can start to ask myself, “Okay, what is my value-add here?” So in the case of a podcast, because you have automated so many things and offloaded them, delegated, you can now bring more of your own creativity to the process, and you can start to experiment with things there.

So I think it’s important to, if you’re doing something repetitive and you’re not able to decide to not do that thing anymore, it helps to find something that you’re learning from the process.

You and I are both podcasters. I know when I started my podcast, it was because, by forcing myself to do an episode a week, I figured, “I’m going to grow in these ways. I’m going to get to talk to mentors of mine. I’m going to get to practice talking about my own ideas. I’m going to force myself to read more books than I might have otherwise.”

And so there becomes, like, these kind of aspirations that you’re able to push yourself along with better by setting up obligations for yourself. But during that, you’re also asking yourself, “What do I want to get out of this?”

Because, eventually, you reach this point where maybe you’re not learning at the same pace that you were. And then it becomes a choice of like, “Can I offload parts of this to somebody else?” or, “All good things must come to an end, and so I’m not doing this particular thing anymore.”

And for myself, I did over 300 episodes of a podcast. And I reached a point where I said, like, “This is great.” I mean, I do miss it, but I just was reaching the point of diminishing returns on growing the way that I wanted to.

And that was, you know, one of the things that I faced as I wrote this book and learned was like that, “Oh, it actually…” especially with these things that can go on forever, you’ve got to define a finish line at some point.

And that can also be part of the reason why we maybe put off trying some of these ideas that we have is because it’s a little bit of a fear of success thing. It’s like, “If I set up this task force, and now I’m in charge of that, and like now that’s my responsibility, is that something that I’m going to enjoy?”

And so it can help to, early on, define some kind of finish lines for yourself. So, like, again, talking about a podcaster. A friend of mine, Drew Ackerman, when he started his podcast, he had a history of not finishing things.

And so he looked at the statistics and saw that, “Oh, you know, after the first two episodes, 50% of podcasts or 80% of podcasts don’t do anymore after.” So he said, “Okay, I’ll do two episodes.” And then after that it was five, and then after that it was twenty.

And he’s on over 1300 episodes of his podcast, which is called Sleep With Me. It’s like bedtime stories for adults, helping people get to sleep.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I’ve listened to it.

David Kadavy
Yeah. And so when you are facing this project that, if it turns out well, you’re going to have this ongoing obligation, you can end up learning a lot from just sort of defining how much of it that you are going to do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Okay. Tell us a little bit about your Leonardo and Raphael analogy.

David Kadavy
Yeah, one of the things that I came across while writing this book that really captured my imagination was about Leonardo da Vinci and Raphael. So Leonardo da Vinci, I feel like, is more famous now than Raphael. Raphael was, like, the quintessential Renaissance painter.

I mean, he was awesome and he had a ton of output. He’s got the Raphael rooms in the Vatican, those are giants. I mean, if it wasn’t for the ceiling down the hallway, Michelangelo’s ceiling, then that would be the greatest accomplishment in Renaissance painting. There’s entire walls of palaces that are lined with his finished paintings.

By contrast, Leonardo da Vinci, we have, like, a dozen finished paintings to his name, attributed to him. And there’s a lot of unfinished paintings as well. And you think, “Well, Leonardo must have really lacked discipline or just not been able to follow through on things.”

Except, when we realize that, for Raphael to paint the way that he did, he learned from Leonardo da Vinci. There’s actually a period of time they call the Florence period when Raphael’s career, where he spent a lot of time in Florence, and he spent a lot of time with Leonardo da Vinci, they might as well call it the Leonardo period.

And you can see that his paintings changed dramatically. And he was more influenced by Leonardo than any other painter. But Leonardo has this reputation as being a little ADHD, as being distracted, as we’ve got these thousands of pages of his notes on everything from metallurgy to geology to paleontology, which didn’t even exist at the time.

And there’s this reputation that, “Oh, he was just… he painted on the side, but he was distracted by science.” No, painting was the most important thing to Leonardo da Vinci, more important than anything. And his pursuit of science, his interest in all these different topics, were all to just feed his skills in painting.

For example, Leonardo made some pretty prescient observations about the moon. And this is an experiment that everybody listening can conduct, and he described it in his notebooks.

It was that if you look at a crescent moon up in the sky and you put your hand or some other more distant object as he describes it, over the illuminated part of the moon and look at the dark part of the moon, the shaded part, you’ll notice it’s not totally dark. There’s kind of a lighter area within it.

Now there were all these theories at the time about why that might be. Like, people thought maybe the moon was made of some sort of translucent substance. But Leonardo da Vinci correctly theorized that, “Oh, that is, at night the sun, the sun at night, reflecting off of the oceans of the earth into the shaded part of the moon and illuminating that.”

And so he had that understanding of light as, like, bouncing off of things. And you can see that under the chin of the Mona Lisa. And then there’s another painting by Raphael from that Florence period where he was learning from Leonardo that looks it’s the exact same composition as the Mona Lisa.

I mean, he copied the Mona Lisa. It’s a different subject. It’s a young woman with a unicorn in her lap, which is pretty cool. And he’s got that illuminated thing under the chin. You can look at his earlier work, it’s not there.

And so, oftentimes, we see this where somebody has to tinker and experiment before their innovations can really be implemented. Sometimes, it’s the same person, but a lot of times, it is somebody taking an innovation that was arrived at through experimentation and then executing on it, and that is what Raphael did.

And so I know for myself, some people think more like Leonardo and some people think more like Raphael. Where Leonardo had what I would call an inductive process in that he’s tinkering with stuff and making observations.

And it all kind of, like, piles into his knowledge about the world, and through that he paints something like the Mona Lisa, which took 15 years and he never really finished it and the client never got the painting. It was kind of never finished.

Some people have like a deductive approach, which is more like Raphael’s approach, where they take an idea or a concept and they just execute on that. And I think that we need to be careful with how we compare ourselves to colleagues or heroes that we are trying to emulate because we can very quickly make ourselves feel like we’re not accomplishing much when, really, it’s just that we have a different approach or we’re attracted to different problems.

I know that I’ve found that for myself that I had an a friend who was a writer who was writing on one subject all the time and I was just like, “It’s tough to keep up with this guy.”

And so when he pointed out, well, he’s deductive, you’re inductive. I’ve written about a whole bunch of different subjects. He’s written about one thing for 20 or 30 years and that suits him. He can do that.

And once I started to embrace that, “No, I’m just interested in a lot of things, but I need to be a little bit more deliberate about sizing my experiments and maybe trying to formulate for some some plan of what direction I’m going in,” that’s when things have gotten a lot more comfortable for me.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s lovely. Well, I’d also love your take on when we’re in the midst of things and pursuing a project and it’s not as fun, interesting, rewarding as it was when it was fresh and shiny and new at the start. Do you have any pro tips on, indeed, finishing what matters here?

David Kadavy
Yeah, because they’re actually, especially when it comes to something that is creative and fun in the beginning, you can sort of naturally be coming up with ideas while you you’re taking a shower or having lunch with a colleague and you get these new ideas, you can integrate them into it.

But actually finishing something, you have to step away from that sort of inductive process. And that can be difficult if you’re somebody who is attracted to thinking in that way, somebody who, I guess the personality traits would be somebody who is low on need for closure or high on openness to experience, like, they want to be constantly taking in new things. And finishing is the exact opposite of that.

So I think of it like finishing displacement theory, that your life and your work is filled to the brim, and you can work on your project and it will fit into your life and your work. But then we reach this point where we say, “Well, we got to finish this thing. How are we going to finish this thing?” and it becomes very difficult.

The thing is it just takes extra energy and time to be able to make that mental shift from just taking in information to actively saying, like, “Nope, we can save that for V2,” things like that.

And so you kind of need to make some space, see what sort of obligations you can put off to the side for some period of time until you finish this thing. For me, like working on this book, there was all this talk about all these AI tools, and I was interested in that but I had a not-to-do list.

“Can you make for yourself a not-to-do list? Here is an idea that has come to me. I’m very excited about this, but this is on my not-to-do list until this project is complete.” And that way you can start to give yourself some of that extra mental energy to do that sort of gritting of your teeth that needs to happen to actually get a project done.

Pete Mockaitis
So extra energy in the sense that, because you really want to do these things and your not-to-do list is growing and is interesting, it becomes a source of energy like, “Ooh, let’s get this thing done because, then, I’ve got this whole pile of interesting stuff just waiting for me.”

David Kadavy
Well, that’s part of it. That’s part of what can motivate you. That can also help because, oftentimes, when you get into a long-term project that is kind of all consuming, part of why that can be scary to finish is what you have waiting for yourself when you’re done, which is you don’t necessarily know.

Or you’re comfortable working on this project, you’re excited working on this pro project, you’ve reached a point where it feels very natural and fluid. I think of it, like, the stand-up comedians that they work on an hour and then they release it on Netflix and now they never tell those jokes again. And you hear them talk about that and they all feel very lost.

So there’s this void that you’re kind of scared to find yourself in when you’re finished with this project. And so, yeah, that not-to-do list can make you excited, can give you something to look forward to when you do finally finish this project.

But, at the same time, I think it is balancing that Leonardo and that Raphael in that I know, I personally find it much easier to stay in a certain mode, whether that is the exploration mode where I am taking in new ideas, where I am tinkering with things, or that execution mode where I call it, while I was finishing this book, I call it devastating focus.

I’m like, “I’m not going to watch movies, putting all my screens on black and white, doing everything I can to reduce the amount of distraction or extra stimulation that I’m attracted to that is not related to this project.”

And I find that when I’m finishing a big project, you’ll find that you’re finishing a lot of other stuff at the same time because you’re in that mode. So you have this sort of season where you’re going to get this thing done. And then after that, you can have that season where you get to the stuff on the not-to-do list and then you’re taking in information again, taking in new ideas.

Pete Mockaitis
Devastating focus. That sounds cool.

David Kadavy
Well, you think about it, like, when you are about to finish a project, what’s difficult about that, when it’s like a career-defining project, is that you have to kind of accept a new version of reality before it exists. You kind of need to puncture into this new version of reality.

And if you imagine, like, a piece of fabric between you and that new version of reality, and if you were to, like, press it with your finger, like, it would move. But if you were to concentrate that same pressure into a needle, it would puncture through that cloth, into that new version of reality.

And so I think of devastating focus as, like, it’s kind of the same amount of effort. It’s just that you’re focusing that effort on a very small point that you are using to step into this new reality.

Pete Mockaitis
The word devastating is so intense, it feels like it has implications all over the place. Do you mean you’re devastating the project ahead of you, or you’re going to feel devastated by how much you’re sacrificing in order to knock her out or both?

David Kadavy
A little bit of both. Like, when you get into a really big project, like you’re going to need support from the people around you. You got to talk to your spouse and say, like, “Look, can we work out this, that, and the other thing? Like, can we just not watch movies for the next couple months while I finish this? Or, can you help me with this part of the chores or something?”

I interviewed one reader who, she was writing a book, and her in-laws helped her out by renting a house that she could write in for a couple months. You need to rally your resources.

And there’s also an element to it that is meant to be self-motivational and self-inspirational, too. If that’s the posture that you like, I think that it works for me. It sounds a little what the kids call thirsty, you know?

It’s like maybe a little too ambitious, but it’s only so often in your life that you’re, like, really driving forward on a huge project that takes you years, and it takes that level of motivation sometimes where you got to psych yourself up a bit.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, tell us, any other top tips before we hear about some of your favorite things?

David Kadavy
Well, I would like to tell a story about this academic named Niklas Luhmann, who showed up on the first day of his professorship and said, “I have a project in mind. I’m going to write a theory of society, a theory of everything. It will take me 30 years.”

And he went on to write this two-volume, 1200-page theory of society, how everything in society works from romantic relationships to business, to politics, to finance. And it took him 30 years.

Now it sounds really amazing that somebody could show up on their first day of work and put forth a 30-year plan, and then actually carry it out. But the way that he did it actually looked kind of fun and was incredibly interesting.

And I think it’s something that we can learn from when we have that castle-in-the sky or that fortress in our minds, is that along the way, Luhmann published not just this 1200-page theory of society, he published 500 times. He published over 400 articles and over 70 books.

And the way that he went about that was by just taking little notes as he read. He created this database of notes of 90,000 notes. It’s the subject of a research project at the University in Germany that he was doing his research at.

And from the special way that he has organized these notes, we can see the way that he went about these projects, was that he started with these notes. And he used this thing that I call BESS, which stands for, we know the acronyms, right? BESS – breaking, expanding, stacking, and surrounding.

And so breaking is, when you are working on something larger, finding some insight that you can break off and create your own little project with. So you might be putting together the quarterly report, and there’s one slide in there that, “This is pretty interesting. I’m going to take this to the team meeting.”

And so for Luhmann, that would have been there was a presentation that he put together. And they can see from the way that he arranged his notes, that as he was writing that presentation, he added notes to his database, that he had new insights as he was working on this presentation, and they went into the database.

Next is expanding. And that is when you’re working on, you create something smaller and then you expand it into a larger thing. So, maybe you have that slide from the quarterly report and you bring it up in the meeting, and then that actually becomes a lunch and learn, and you end up giving a presentation, you expand it into a lunch and learn.

For Luhmann, his use of expanding was taking that presentation, which he later turned into a book on the exact same subject. So he expanded it into a book.

So next up is stacking. Stacking is just taking smaller projects and then stacking them together to create something larger. So let’s say you do that lunch and learn, and then you do another lunch and learn, and then you do another lunch and learn. And now you have this new onboarding process or course that you can put together for training people in the company.

For Luhmann, that was, his notes was one thing, and then also as he did these presentations, he would stack the notes together. He’d take them out and arrange them on a table, and that would be an article. And that’s how he published hundreds of times was by stacking things together.

And then surrounding is basically conquering larger, more ambitious projects by taking on smaller projects that don’t seem related at all to that larger, more ambitious project. It’s sort of dissolves the defenses, so to speak, to use some more tough language along with devastating.

So it really devastates the defenses, is by doing a little project here and a little project here that builds some skills that will help you conquer this larger project. So let’s say you are in charge of organizing the company offsite and, because of that, you have to negotiate with vendors.

Well, that’s an opportunity to work on your negotiation skills. And now when it comes time to negotiate your salary, you’ve gotten some practice with that. This can often come from outside of your work life. Like, if you take improv classes, you do a little bit of stand-up. Well, now you’ve gotten some practice thinking on your feet, and you can use that in talking with clients.

For Luhmann, that first day when he said, “I have this 30-year project idea in mind,” he was able to set forth such an ambitious plan because he had already spent a couple decades doing that thing where he’s taking notes as he reads and organizing them.

And maybe publishing an article here and there, such that when he began doing that, he wasn’t even thinking about sociology. He was thinking about something completely different. He was working on organizational structure, just for an example.

And so that is something that, I think, is useful, a story that could be inspiring for our listeners as they think about the ambitious things that they would like to take on, is, “How can you use BESS – breaking, expanding, stacking, and surrounding – to find little opportunities to break off projects, to expand those little experiments into larger things, to stack them together to create larger things, or to take on projects that aren’t necessarily related to that target project to surround them?”

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Cool. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

David Kadavy
Yeah, I love this one by Ford. I think is really underrated, which is that, “Many inventors fail because they do not distinguish between planning and experimenting.”

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

David Kadavy
Yes, there’s this economist, David Galenson. And like a good economist, he wanted to study the prices of paintings. And he thought he would find this neat pattern that say the younger painters have more valuable paintings, or the older painters have more valuable paintings.

But instead, he’s found two separate patterns. There were the young geniuses who peaked early, and later on, their paintings were not as influential, not as valuable. And then there were the old masters, those who, as they went on, they got better and better.

The two archetypical examples would be Picasso and Cezanne. Picasso peaked at 26. Cezanne peaked at 67. And, like we were talking about earlier, Cezanne was Picasso’s hero.

So if people remember from art history class, Cubism, and it’s basically representing a four-dimensional world on a two-dimensional canvas where you see the nose twice from different angles and there’s all these rectilinear forms and stuff. Picasso really picked that up from Cezanne. And Cezanne spent decades experimenting with kind of breaking down the natural world into different planes of color.

And Galenson has found this pattern over and over again, where there are these people who are more executors like Picasso, who become successful very quickly, and there are those who are more experimental where it takes a lot longer to build that foundation.

And that is a really fascinating study to me. And that’s also where you see Leonardo as an experimenter and Raphael as an executor.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite book?

David Kadavy
I really enjoy Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. I think that we could all benefit from conducting more tiny experiments in our lives.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

David Kadavy
I like iOS shortcuts, specifically using iOS shortcuts for idea capture. Just making a little widget, to just, whenever you have an idea, tap on that widget, write it down, and it will put it in that sheet, and then you can later go through and and evaluate that.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

David Kadavy
I really enjoy this thing called TRE. This is going to get a little weird. TRE stands for tension and trauma releasing exercise. And you can look it up on YouTube, and it’s this sort of thing where you lay on the floor, and you do a certain series of exercises, and it sort of causes you to tremble a little bit, and it releases all this tension like in your back and your hips and stuff.

Check it out on YouTube. I will warn you, be careful with it. It is way more powerful than it looks. You might want to talk to a TRE practitioner if you’re going to try it out or do it at your own risk. But it is very cool, and I’m very glad that I discovered it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, my mind is blown a bit because I have zero frame of reference for this. And so that’s exciting and it’s unknown, and I like exploring unknown.

David Kadavy
Dr. David Berceli, it’s his idea and it’s really cool, and there’s starting to be a budding population of people online interested in it, and it’s really cool.

Pete Mockaitis
So maybe just one more minute here. If I were to do cardiovascular exercise, I know what kind of adaptation I might get. My heart and lungs are able to deliver oxygen and blood circulation more effectively. Cool.

If I do strength training, I’m pumping some iron, it’s like, “Oh, now I am stronger. I’m able to lift more weights or more reps or longer sessions. Cool.” What kind of adaptation or benefit do I get from doing TRE?

David Kadavy
Releasing of tension. And I don’t want to sound New Age-y here. There’s also, like as you do it, these memories pop up and they can be traumatic memories if you’re somebody with a history of trauma. But they can be just, like, that time that somebody cut me off, or that time that somebody interrupted me in a meeting, and I wanted to say something but I didn’t.

And so the best explanation I could give is that it’s almost like, in those moments where you’re resisting some kind of a reaction, an emotional reaction, that you tense your muscles, and then that muscle ends up kind of being tense all the time.

And so TRE releases that tension, and it’s something you have to do kind of like repeatedly over and over to get the benefits of it. And then you sort of reintegrate into your new tension patterns, and then you sort of find maybe things that might have upset you before don’t, or tension that you had in your body, like back pain, neck pain, things like that. You might see those dissipate.

Pete Mockaitis
Nifty. Okay.

David Kadavy
I decided to go with something really different.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks, they quote it back to you often?

David Kadavy
I find that that fortress fallacy people find very resonant when they’re trying to take on a big project and they realize that they’re dreaming of the fortress and they should consider the cottage.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

David Kadavy
I would point them to Kadavy.net. Or, if you’re on a mobile and you want to type it quick, you’d just be kdv.co. Go there, sign up for my newsletter, “Love Mondays.” That is a weekly newsletter, and I’m not going to tell you which day it comes out on.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome with their jobs?

David Kadavy
Yeah, I think when you have an idea, capture it, and then later, triage it. And, in fact, I have put together a special tool that I personally use to triage my ideas. And you can find that at Kadavy.net/awesome.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool. All right. David, thank you.

David Kadavy
Thank you so much. It’s been so great to reconnect.