Hello, and welcome to another episode of the conversations with Coach’s podcast. Special lessons minisode. I’m your usual host, Kevin, and I have another quote for you. Surprise, surprise, surprise. It’s another one that came to me first that I can remember again, if it could have come to me before this, but it came to me first or a podcast, and has also come to me from other people since then, in various forms, including coaches I’ve gotten to speak to for the podcast, and it’s something that I am. I want to say constantly back I guess constantly, rather than say constantly thinking about, I would say that the message of this quote is always with me. I’m not always thinking about it. But it’s wisdom is always with me. It’s a it’s actually a question that I carry with me, which I feel like is where most great wisdom lies not in the answers you carry with you, but your questions that you bring with you. Which is something we’ve talked about on the podcast before, both here and the solo. So it’s and with guests. We could talk for hours for days about that we will spend the rest of our lives talking about that, we probably will. But today, this quote came to me from of all places the Tim Ferriss show, Tim Ferriss is someone you’re probably all at least tangentially familiar with. Been around for a while for our we guys got a very, very, very popular podcast that frequently goes for hours, plural. But with some of the most fascinating guests, the kind of people that you spend hours talking with, and it feels like minutes and you wish it were days, just because it’s you there’s so much there to talk about. But I first encountered this quote that I can remember, while listening to an episode of the show, and it’s something that Tim Ferriss himself in various other conversations, he’ll bring up himself, and you could tell that it really stuck with him when he first came to it. When it’s about. It’s about ease. Or it’s about the concept of easy and the concept of hard and how we look at things now.
I’ll just read you the quote. And it’s a question. It’s a pure question. Again, it’s another one, it’s up on my whiteboard. And it’s something I’ve learned different ways to ask it of myself, that illuminate different truths things, I basically learned how to use it in ways that I didn’t know when I first encountered the quote, and the question I should accurately call it, which is something I love about it. It’s it’s, it’s a, it’s agility, and the way it’s kind of growing along with me, or at least my understanding of it is growing. Anyway, the question in question is this. And this can this could be spoken into just about any circumstance, wherever you’re talking about something that needs to be done. The task initiative or project really in anything, when you’re thinking or talking about this, whatever it is, ask yourself, or the people who are with you. What would this look like? If it were easy? Now that can sound like and I do believe the first time I encountered this question, I kind of bristled a little bit at this because I’m not looking for easy, you know, got this sort of like hard work ethic, which I’m it’s kind of, you know, driven into me from an early age. And it’s something I like about myself, I’ve never been one to shy away from hard work. And based on who I talked to, for this podcast, based on the coaches I’ve spoken to. None of you are afraid of hard work, none of you shy away from rolling up the sleeves and getting down to business. Most of you are here because you love what you do. And you’ve worked hard to be here. And so I bristled at least a part of me bristle a little bit when I first heard this question. And sitting with it, that I could feel something there. And so sitting with it for a time, bringing it to other people and seeing how they react to it and how they respond to it. It’s really a lot more about intention.
And looking at a thing, a process, a project, a task, a business endeavor, an idea, whatever it is an invention. Something we do every day, maybe, maybe you’re just like re examining something and just ask yourself, whatever this thing is, I’m doing like recording this podcast right now. What would this look like if it were easy. I’m not in a studio right now. But I have a nice mic, I have a nice computer setup. I’m just speaking into it into a zoom camera. I have zoom open, I’m recording, wearing a hoodie, some comfortable pants, I wrote some notes down. Like I want I knew I wanted to talk about this quote with you guys. So I just kind of wrote some notes about what I wanted to say. And just hit record. And this is how I do it now because I asked myself, you know, a little trepidation about being on camera about sharing my thoughts and feelings and sharing some of the gifts I’ve gotten, you know, it’s always struggle with putting myself front and center in any way, which is a conversation for a different time. But I asked myself what but this this is a good thing, right? Like I taught, you know, talking with, you know, Michael, the managing partner and boxer and other people here a boxer about you know what other things that we can do with this podcast feed. And we decided this is a pretty good idea. And so I decided to do it, we decided to do it. And so I asked myself as I was starting what would this look like if it’s easy For me, and so I was like, you know, doing things the way that I basically do it now where it’s like I have, I let good ideas, good thoughts, good feelings, good quotes, good messages, good systems, I let good people bring me great things, which is just a big part of what this podcast is turned out to be all about. For me, selfishly speaking, I get all these gifts. Every time I talk to one of these coaches, when you coaches, it’s lovely. But then thinking about, okay, what is it like, for me, when this is easy, still valuable, still work, it still requires effort.
But let’s not make this harder than it needs to be. That’s another like sort of tangential quotes, I have something similar to that written up on my drive, my dry erase board, like don’t make this and this is just kind of underlined, don’t make this whatever it is, don’t make it harder than it has to be, or harder than it actually is. It’s one of those things where it’s like, you know, love the hard work. But also see if you could figure out what this looks like, if it’s easy. If it feels easy, if it goes smoothly, you know, looking at obstacles, friction, there’s going to be some friction in certain places, but you really want to look at things in such a way where you’re, and this is a bit of a, I don’t like using this word in this context. But I actually think it’s pretty relevant. Optimizing, I know that has a lot of optimizing has kind of, you know, been borrowed by, you know, sort of self improvement hacks or whatever. And also, optimizing is a word gets thrown around a lot for you know, it’s a little bit of maybe a marketing mumbo jumbo word, but it’s probably what my my hesitancy in using it is I try to stay away from like branding and marketing jargon whenever possible. But this is kind of about optimizing. But I like the challenge that the question, what would this look like if it were easy? I like the way it challenges me. I like the way the Challenger brings to the table, because you’re not trying you’re not looking for an easy way out, you’re looking for the best weight in. And I change that the best because sometimes the best way in is sometimes easy. Sometimes it just flows. Sometimes it’s not. Ask the question though. Ask yourself the question. Ask your colleagues the question, ask your partners the question. And quite frankly, you’ll be amazed. Maybe you won’t be I was amazed by how, how my vision of things, how my process of going about doing things, how it has changed and continues to change and evolve as I allow myself to be asked that question. So wanted to share it with you. I think I’ve rambled long enough. I’ll probably come back to this at some point in some other way. I’m almost certain that they will but for now, I will talk to you again very soon.