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We discuss three essential books that help us break through uncertainty and focus on the most important work. If you want to get better at designing products and building companies, we think you should read:
- Getting Real by 37signals, for how to get real about what matters
- Good Strategy Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt, for how to give your business an unfair advantage
- Deep Work by Cal Newport, for staying focused and actually doing the work
On episode 11 of Jake & JZ, we also talked about:
- Why your business needs an enemy
- Insights from the “survival days” of successful companies (like the Startup Wayback Machine)
- Crafting strategy based on your unique advantages
- Why strategy is a hypothesis
- How to summarize an entire book in 25 words
- More lessons from journalism
- Bad graphic design
📩 Get an email about every episode at JakeAndJZ.com
💸 Learn more about our seed fund at Character Capital
Creators and Guests
What is Jake & JZ?
Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓
Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.
Jake (00:00)
Hey John, what are you reading right now?
JZ (00:01)
I am still reading against the gods, which is this book that I mentioned a few weeks ago. That's about risk, which is like such a weird topic to read a book about. but it's really fascinating because I didn't realize until reading it and I didn't think about it that until a couple of hundred years ago, people didn't really have any, language or math or frameworks for
Jake (00:10)
yeah.
JZ (00:27)
for Things just kind of happened in the world and there were games, of course, that people would play, but there wasn't this idea that we have today about probability and odds and even the concept of an average, which is like a mathematical concept, it didn't exist. That had to be invented. That's not a natural phenomenon. So it's been, I can't say it's been practically useful.
But it has been very interesting. And it's the book that I'm reading like before I go to bed. So I'm only reading like 10 to 15 pages at a time. So it's going slow, but I'm almost at the end. It started in like the, I don't know, 1500s and now I'm up to the present day. So I can tell I'm getting toward the end.
Jake (01:11)
Well, it's a lot of processing to do right before you go to sleep thinking about the transformation of the human perception of reality.
JZ (01:17)
Yeah, yeah, I probably should have not
chosen it as my bedtime book, but here we are. What about you?
Jake (01:22)
Strange dreams.
I just started reading the new Haruki Murakami book called The City and Its Uncertain Walls. it's, the beginning's cool and weird as his writing is. And the cover is designed by Chip Kidd because I think he might design many or a lot of the book covers for this publisher. He's he's graphic designer and he has a very
JZ (01:32)
yeah.
Yeah, cool.
Jake (01:55)
distinctive style that I would characterize as almost terrible, but like great. I'll say this, has a book that he wrote called A Kid's Guide to Graphic Design. And spoke at an event one time that he was at and my son Luke was there and
JZ (02:11)
Okay.
Jake (02:18)
really loved his talk. mean, he gave a great talk and we got his book and it's called A Kid's Guide to Graphic Design, but it's not like, it's not necessarily for kids. just his last name is Kid, Chip Kid. But he, but it's a really, it's a really cool book that like visually shows some of the key concepts of graphic design, you know, as, as you go through and, my younger son, Flynn, just found it and like thought it was amazing and, and, and tore through it.
JZ (02:28)
very clever.
Yeah.
Jake (02:44)
And so anyway, not to make the whole book about review about the cover, it's just like, somehow he pulls this thing off. We're like, the cover is like a stone wall and it's like a texture of a stone wall in the background. And he's, and you can tell if you've ever used Photoshop that he's taken like half of it and then like flipped it. So it just like repeats in a way that's kind of crappy, but like just somehow he just like, it kind of works.
JZ (03:03)
huh, yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (03:09)
And yet I can't tell if I'm like, am I just giving him credit because I know he's really good? And if I, you know, I don't know, it's kind of a kind of a funny thing. But anyway, book so far is good.
JZ (03:19)
You're at the point in the book where it is fair to think and talk mostly about the cover. You're at the beginning.
Jake (03:25)
That's right. That's right. I'm in
like the first, I'm in the first 10 to 15 pages. So.
JZ (03:29)
balance of your inputs
from the book are mostly cover at this point.
Jake (03:34)
That's right.
That's right. Every day, like when I pick it up at night, I'm kind of like, what's this thing about again? You know, taking clues from the cover. yeah. Yeah. Well, should we just record a whole podcast episode about books?
JZ (03:42)
Studying the cover. Well, time to go to bed.
We could, yeah. I mean, we do love books. Yeah, let's give it a shot.
Jake (03:54)
Let's do it.
Okay.
JZ (04:20)
Welcome to episode 11 of Jake and Jay Z, the weekly podcast about startups, design, technology today, books, and other stuff that we are thinking about. That's Jake over there. I'm Jay Z. We are the founders of Character Capital, the authors of Sprint, Make Time, more books. And this is our podcast. If you want to get our weekly newsletter that has the latest episode and other cool stuff we found in the previous week, go to Jake and Jay Z.
dot com sign up there. we go any further, I do have a very quick favor to you're listening in, wherever you're watching this, scroll down and press the buttons. Please subscribe, like comment, feel free to send us an email. If you have a question, hey at jakenjay-z.com and we can answer it on an upcoming episode. Okay. So we're going to make a whole podcast about books. where should we start? How, how about this Jake?
What's your, I know this is a hard question, what is your most essential book? What do you think is like the one book that has influenced the way that you work and you think more than any other?
Jake (05:29)
I,
I've been thinking about this a bit over the last 24 hours because, you know, maybe to let the cat out of the bag, this is not just something we just decided to do. We were talking about doing an episode about books. So, the theatrics in the intro side, I've been thinking about it and I don't think I can give a single answer to that question, but I decided that one that would be interesting to talk about that was very
JZ (05:39)
You
The jig is up.
Okay.
Jake (05:58)
impactful was getting real by 37 signals. how it was sort of framed at the time. It's by Jason Fried and David Hanemeyer Hansen and...
JZ (06:05)
Yeah.
And
who's 37 signals for anyone watching who doesn't know about them?
Jake (06:14)
Yeah, 37 signals. Are they called 37 signals again? Or is it base count? Yeah. Okay. Well, regardless, I guess it doesn't matter. If you're unfamiliar, the point is they are a design agency that became a software company. Is that accurate? And like a design agency.
JZ (06:19)
I think they changed their name to Basecamp, but they might have changed it back.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they did change your name back to
37 signals for what it's worth. Yeah.
Jake (06:38)
They did. Okay.
Okay. So they were design agency called 37 signals in maybe the nine nineties even but like early two thousands and they became
JZ (06:48)
Yeah, definitely Heyday was
the early 2000s because when I was learning web design, which started around like 99, 2000, I remember really admiring them, really looking up to their work.
Jake (06:59)
Yeah, great. And they, I think started to build tools that they needed for their agency. And then we're like, let's just do this. And so they've created software like most notably Basecamp and other tools as well. also the two co-founders, Jason Fried and David Hennemeier Hansen are like firebrands who, you know, really
JZ (07:05)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (07:25)
really did well in the era of social media and always have like provocative things to say and often very thought provoking things to say as well. But pre social media, this book goes, this is pre Facebook, pre Twitter. made this book about how they were making software. The book was called Getting Real. the thing that's interesting about it is you would get the book.
just on their website. It was just a series of, not even really blog posts. had like web pages with like text on it and you would just read it. It's still on their website. Yeah.
JZ (07:59)
It's still on their website. You can still go to basecamp.com
slash getting real. And the whole book is there. It's just free. It's just on the web.
Jake (08:06)
It's free.
It's a free book. in fact, actually John, would you, maybe you could share your screen and show what, what it looks like today. here it is. basecamp.com slash getting real. And you can find it and it's just John's scrolling through the page. It's just a.
JZ (08:14)
Yeah, yeah.
Jake (08:25)
page full of links, chapter 10, chapter 11, chapter 12, each one a link. And if you click on those links, you go to a page that has, kind of blog post or less length thing. This particular chapter, chapter 21, build half a product, not a half ass product. It is four paragraphs. And we're not talking about big beefy paragraphs like paragraph four has two sentences. So.
JZ (08:37)
Yeah.
This is Seth Godin
style. This is super concise, but really laden with meaning and insight.
Jake (08:59)
It's, it's a remarkably punchy, concise, It's, it's those things that are short to the point and high powered. And I read this and read it again and read it again. I would read it on the bus going back home from my job at Microsoft. And I would just think, wow, this is so different because the, the 37 signals guys were writing about building.
JZ (09:19)
Yeah.
Jake (09:24)
apps for the web, building software for the web at the era when that was just dawning, when it was just possible to make a webpage change. What was on the webpage change while you were there so that you could interact with what was going on on the page. You weren't just going to a page to read or view what was there sort of permanently. Ajax, right. What did Ajax stand for? Did it stand for something?
JZ (09:30)
Yep.
Yeah. What we used to call Ajax. Yeah.
asynchronous JavaScript and XML.
Jake (09:53)
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And that was dawning at this time when I'd been working on software that you shipped on CD raw, totally different world. And also not only was the technology different, but they're these guys, their way of seeing the world was different. And they were talking about what we would today say is like, the lane startup or like MVPs or something without those words. That's what they were talking about. Just build, just build the thing, just get it out there. Like cut down, say no, do less.
JZ (10:00)
Right.
Yeah.
Jake (10:22)
Don't talk about it, build it. And these ideas as I read them and reread them and reread them, they just started to like poison my brain in a good way, I think. And I think it's very hard to unwind the way the world now from without thinking like that started to really change it. And it pushed me toward what I was already kind of ended up being curious about Google.
JZ (10:24)
Yeah.
you
Yeah.
Jake (10:49)
there was
a push there of like, that's Google's doing it more that way. Google's doing that kind of technology and, maybe they're working in a different way. I want to go see what that's like. And, and then when I got to Google and it, and sometimes things weren't as fast or as clear, I think just this general idea of like questioning the way things were done before might not make sense. The way that you're doing things now, it might not actually make sense. And I had up until that, I don't know, maybe
JZ (11:00)
Yeah.
Jake (11:17)
I have to admit, I had noticed that the way things were done at Microsoft did not always make sense. But that was just such an encouragement that, yeah, you're not wrong. It doesn't make sense.
JZ (11:23)
Yeah.
Totally. Yeah.
So I, I read getting, getting real a long time ago if you had to put it into like a paragraph, how would you describe it?
Jake (11:39)
Getting real is about building software and working with a team of people to do that In a way where you cut out the nonsense. So there's kind of a definition of what nonsense is, I suppose. And you get right to the heart of the matter. What matters, what's important to your customer,
What do you believe is important? You build that thing and nothing else. You do that work and nothing else. There's a huge category of activities that the authors consider nonsense and they are actively fighting against the nonsense. And I think that's the, that's the essence of it is to make you, to shake you and say, wake up. Everything you're doing is nonsense.
JZ (12:22)
Yeah. Get real.
Jake (12:26)
Figure out what's not nonsense, just do that. I think that's the essence of it.
JZ (12:28)
Yeah. Yeah. And you have
a hard copy, so leaped off the screen and into the real world at some point.
Jake (12:35)
Yeah,
at some point in time, well, you can't do this anymore than I know of, but at some point in time they've sold, you can buy a printed copy from them and it's, it's really poorly printed. It's like, I mean, I don't know if you can pick up the gleam on the, on the, the finish on this, but it's like, it looks like you printed it at Kinko's or something. And it's got, and it actually has a quote by Seth Goodman on the back. So, and, ignore this at your peril.
JZ (12:56)
Yeah.
Amazing. that's cool.
Jake (13:05)
which I think is an essential kind Seth Godin blurb. Yeah, but if you're,
JZ (13:09)
I mean, yeah, even his blurbs are short.
And you can buy it
by the way, Jake. If you go to their website, if you go to 37signals.com or Basecamp.com, they sell it at Amazon and all the other booksellers.
Jake (13:25)
they still have it. Okay. And maybe they even
have a better version now. This version does, it does feel very much like a, independent poetry book that you'd buy at a, you know, like, to denigrate poetry or anything, but like that's, it does have that, it has that feel, but the, actually flipping through it as I am now, it looks a little bit more substantial than it looked when we were just on the webpage. Like there, there's a good hundred and
JZ (13:33)
Right, yeah.
Yeah.
Interesting, huh? Maybe this is
the abridged and extended edition.
Jake (13:53)
Yeah, I wonder, I mean, there's a 186 pages here and it actually there's texts on almost all the pages. So there's more to it than I we gave it credit for test in the wild. You can see, have a sticky note here. Test your app via real world usage. There's no substitute for real people using your app in real ways. Get real data, get real feedback, then approve based on that info.
JZ (14:10)
Yep.
Jake (14:18)
I mean, it's kind of funny to think that that was. Contrarian, a contrarian opinion. And some of these things actually, to be honest, they may not have been contrarian opinions. think one of the great gifts of, these authors is to make something sound country. And no matter what comes out of their mouth or out of their keyboard, they, they pick a fight at all times. And in fact, one of the most memorable chapters in here is pick a fight.
JZ (14:23)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (14:44)
So here it is. I've found this chapter, have an enemy and, and then pick a fight. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm sure I'm plagiarizing from this, you know, in the depths of my mind, but sometimes the best way to know what your app should be is to know what it shouldn't be. Figure out your app's enemy and you'll shine a light on where you need to go. Yeah. This is pretty interesting. And then they talk about building software where Microsoft project.
JZ (14:48)
yeah. interesting. This is something we talk about a lot. I didn't realize it came from. Yeah, I didn't realize it came from getting real. Interesting.
Yeah.
Jake (15:11)
was the enemy and you know, it's yeah, it's there's just a lot. Yeah. There's a lot of things in here that are thought provoking and, and, fun. getting real by 37 signals, that's a, that's a gym and this book eventually became rework. So there's a lot of the same content in this is in rework, which they publish traditionally and, you know, sold traditionally and you can get a traditionally printed version of that. But for my money, the better version is getting real.
JZ (15:12)
Yeah.
okay, I didn't realize that.
Yeah.
Jake (15:40)
Even though a lot of the examples it talks about and the way it talks about building are antiquated because they're, you know, from this dawn of, of sort of web software, it's still, I just find it, I find it always interesting to go back to the time when the company was more in a survival mode or is, is closer to the survival mode and they're capturing the survival mode a bit more because those insights are, they're so fascinating, right? And then if you.
JZ (15:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yep, totally.
Jake (16:09)
from these guys now, it's not that they still don't have really interesting ideas. They still absolutely do. But I think it gets harder and harder to separate how you make decisions from the success that you've had and the skill and expertise that you've gained over the years. And you get into this unique position and the advice of someone who's as masterful at their work as, you know, say Jason Fried is at, you know, this point in his career.
It's harder to relate to in some ways, whereas like getting real to me, it's like closer to the source of when they were, they were becoming, when he was becoming Jason Fried, this is how he did it. And this is how he survived.
JZ (16:45)
Yeah. Yeah, that's such a good point.
Yeah. It's like when you see the, the Apple marketing principles from the late seventies or you read a shoe dog and you see like the early Nike principles, those are such gold nuggets because yeah, like you said, it gives you, it's like the startup way back machine. talked about in an early episode, it gives you an opportunity to go back to before they became super successful and understand a bit of.
what motivated them and maybe understand what led to that success. What did they do when they had to survive? They weren't acting from a place of success and luxury. They were acting from a place of survival and desperation. Those are much more useful lessons than looking at the lessons of successful companies today.
Jake (17:38)
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, so do you have a favorite book that you want to talk about?
JZ (17:46)
one of my favorite books, which I, I only just read in the last couple of years. So it's a recent entrant to the hall of fame as far as I'm concerned, although it's not a, not a super new book. It's called good strategy, bad strategy. It's by Richard Rummelt. think I'm saying that correct. and you have it there, further evidence that this was not an impromptu.
Jake (18:07)
I'm acting like I didn't know.
JZ (18:10)
topic.
this was the first book that I read that really got me to think about strategy
in a specific way because strategy is a general thing that, you know, people talk about, I've heard about, I thought I was thinking about it, but I wasn't, you know, was like, cause I didn't really know what it meant, you know, it's like, I just figured it was sort of a fluff word, sort of a stand in word for some other ideas. But this book really helped me understand that it is a specific thing
companies and all sorts of organizations really need to come up with if they want to be successful and if they want to be successful in a sustainable way and in kind of a long-term way. a few of the key things, and this is like not a great summary of the book. This is more of like the summary of what stands out to me in my brain like after a few years one, that strategy
is like a response to a situation. the situation might be like, our, business is in trouble. You know, we're, losing customers. We're losing money. might be a situation like, there's a lot of really strong competitors. might be a situation like we're, we're entering a market where we're starting a new but strategy is not like a steady state thing. It's, it's a reaction or a response to something that you're sort of fighting against. You're competing against.
the second thing that, that really stands out to me is that a strategy must be translated into specific actions that you do. And those actions must be consistent, like internally, like everything that you do should be pulling on this, you know, pulling the strategy in the, in the same direction. it should also really be linked back. It should be linked back to what the strategy is. You shouldn't do like random things that are.
Are good ideas. They're perfectly fine and good ideas on their own. If they're not related to, to the strategy. I also really remember thinking that strategy requires making hard decisions, like making trade-offs and saying, we're not going to do this. We're going to do this other thing because it's, it is how we put our strategy into action. And then finally, the, probably the biggest, like lesson for me or takeaway from reading this book is that.
Good strategies are based on competitive advantages. you know, whatever your advantage is as a team, like you may have some special capabilities, you may have a set of experiences that another team doesn't have. know, you might have a position or a scale in the market, but the best strategies are going to build on those unique competitive advantages and they're going to actually strengthen them over time. They're going to make them better over time. So.
Those were just a few of the big ideas, but it's a really thought-provoking book. similar to Against the Gods. It's not super, super directly actionable, but it's very, very thought-provoking. And I took a ton of notes while I was reading it.
Jake (21:18)
I first heard about this book from my friend, Jonathan Courtney, our friend, Jonathan Courtney, who he runs an agency in Berlin and the agency does everything from product design. They've worked with companies like Lego and Adidas and Mercedes-Benz and also marketing and training and education stuff. Just ton of cool stuff with AJ and Smart.
JZ (21:23)
Yeah, yep.
Jake (21:45)
and he likes to read every book in a category that he can find and then pick the one that's gonna be his Bible for that topic. And that's sort of his approach to learning. He's really into books and he thinks that in any given category you can find a Bible and then you have that person, you have an opinionated.
sort of Bible. you might look, he might pick up some things along the way from the other books, but he wants one opinionated Bible. And this was the result of that exploration for him in the topic of strategy. He read a bunch of books about strategy and decided good strategy, bad strategy is going to be my strategy Bible. Richard P. Ruhmelt is going to be my, you know, strategy. expert, go to, go to guide.
JZ (22:23)
Yeah.
Jake (22:35)
And so that was kind of, I thought, quite a vote of confidence for it. And I also found it pretty interesting. do you want to share some of your favorite passages, quote or two?
JZ (22:39)
Totally.
Yeah, yeah,
let me share my screen.
So I read this book on Kindle and so this is Kindle's web reader, which I don't read in, but it's kind of handy to be able to go back. These are all of my annotations. So I'm just going to flip through these.
A little aggressive, but it's, it's, it's interesting to think about use your relative advantages to impose out of proportion costs to the opposition and complicate his problem of competing with you. when I read this and I highlighted it, I was thinking about, about character capital, our, VC firm and the.
Unique advantage that we have is that we created the design sprint and more recently the foundation sprint and that we've run these sprints with more than 300 startups at this point and nobody else has done that. And so if we can continue to do that and run sprints with startups and, furthermore, can sort of shift the world, shift the market into thinking that that is a, a good and important thing.
We're essentially imposing an out of proportion cost onto other VC firms who can't do that. Right. they didn't create the design sprint. They don't have the, they're, aren't set up to provide that kind of support. And so they're going to, you know, maybe they'll try to do something like it, or they'll spend a bunch of money and a bunch of time doing something else. That's, that's different, you know, to try to compete directly. know, maybe this won't work at all, but it's at least it's a good strategy in the sense that it.
take something that's unique to us and if it works, forces the competition to react in a way that kind throws them off their balance. They're sort of acting from a position of weakness instead of strength.
Jake (24:29)
more likely, I mean, just to not compete in that, in that field, right? Like if it's unlikely somebody else is going to, when we talk about running sprints, you know, we were, we ran two sprints last week and we kind of talk about shifting into that mode because we've done it a lot and it feels pretty comfortable to get into that mode. And I could imagine if I had to follow someone else's script for
JZ (24:32)
Right.
Jake (24:53)
running a week long thing, shifting out of the mode of like investing with companies and chatting with companies and getting into that other mode, it would be really taxing and to do it again and again and again would be really taxing where I think for us, it feels like second nature at this point. And so the cost of that probably means that no, no firm would be likely to, no small firm would be likely to even do it to pay that cost. And for a big firm, it's
JZ (25:09)
Yeah.
Right. Right.
Jake (25:21)
the costs to get to a point where they were competing with us, it just probably wouldn't make sense. So it's a nice way of framing, yeah, if you do this thing, you're probably gonna just own that little tide pool.
JZ (25:35)
Yeah, and lot of Rommel's examples are, they're like military based or they're related to like geopolitics. they're, like a little
Jake (25:43)
Yes, he does sort of violate
the rule of like not using military or like sports analogies. I he's just like, nope, I'm just doing it.
JZ (25:51)
No,
and his aren't, they're not even analogies because they're like case studies. he's consulted with like the State Department and the Pentagon. he doesn't use these as like generalities. He uses these as like, when I was helping the State Department, like during the Cold War, like here's what we did. It's a little hardcore for like my normal taste, but certainly credible.
Jake (25:55)
Row right
JZ (26:15)
this is where I was mentioning earlier that like, strategy is a way through difficulty and approach to overcoming an obstacle or response to a challenge. If the challenge is not defined, it's difficult or impossible to assess the quality of the strategy. So just that simple point that a strategy is a response to a problem or an obstacle. you can see here. Yeah.
Jake (26:32)
It's super interesting
because this idea, headline is failure to face the problem. And we have seen again and again, how easy it is for a team and how easy it is for ourselves when we're coming up with our own strategy to be acting, to be trying to solve a problem before the problem has actually been defined because we have a general sense of the problem that we haven't gotten crisp about what really is the problem we're trying to solve here. I think that.
JZ (26:54)
Right. Yep.
Jake (27:02)
That statement, which if you say it in a meeting, you're, you're likely to sound like a jerk, but it's, can be very helpful. Like what is the problem we're trying to solve here? And you will ask me that question, you know, and I've probably asked you that question on occasion. And if, if you can accept that the person asking it is not just trying to be a jerk, not just trying to look smart. It's a, it's a great question. And the core often of.
JZ (27:12)
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Yeah.
Jake (27:30)
of bad strategy or soft strategy or a vague, diffuse strategy is that, you know, it's so obvious to us what the problem is that we haven't actually gone to the trouble of defining it.
JZ (27:41)
Yeah, yeah, I might argue that most teams don't know what the real problem is, or they at least haven't written it down in a really clear way. So this had a big impact on me. You can see here as I scroll, I made a ton of highlights. These are all different sections of the book that I highlighted.
Jake (27:48)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
yeah. I mean, if you're not
watching on video, John is scrolling through dozens. There's gotta be 50, 60, maybe a hundred highlights. You've got a ton of highlights. I'm surprised there's much of the book that's not highlighted given how many there are here.
JZ (28:10)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Let me see if I can just find maybe one more.
maybe, okay. I don't know if I can do just one more. love Grow by 50 % is classic bad strategy. It's the kind of nonsense that passes for strategy in too many companies. Setting a goal, not designing a way to deal with the company's challenge.
Maybe the one more thing I want to pause on here is just, I actually highlighted a headline. So, you know, it's a good headline. Strategy is a hypothesis. I love this way of thinking about it. you know, hopefully at some point you'll know that it worked. You will have tested the hypothesis, but, and it may be true, know, the hypothesis may be true for a period of time, but probably not forever. And this, I just found this like a really good reminder.
especially for startups that you have an idea, you see a problem in the world, you have an idea for a solution, you have essentially a strategy. You're basically saying, I think if we build this for this customer, design it so it's different from the competition in this way, that's going to work. That's going to solve the problem. This is going to turn into a big business. That may well be a sound strategy, but it is just a hypothesis until you test it.
that I found that to be just a really helpful way of thinking about making decisions in business.
Jake (29:38)
Awesome. Well, good strategy, bad strategy.
JZ (29:41)
Yeah.
Jake (29:42)
a good, I think, yeah, I think those two are a good pair actually, getting real and good strategy, bad strategy, know, very, very different in their ways. But, but, you know, this is almost like a pinnacle of kind of, he's a consultant. You know, this guy, like, there's a quote from McKinsey quarterly on the cover of the, of the book.
JZ (29:42)
A landmark book.
Totally. Yep.
Right. Right.
you
Jake (30:05)
And this is the category of thing that I would usually not pay attention to. In fact, I don't think I ever would have paid attention to it had Jonathan Courtney not recommended it. This is sort of a, the top of the mountain of stuff that I'm like, that's not for me. That's consultant stuff. That's MBA stuff. And this is like the opposite of that, right? This feels like the gritty,
JZ (30:23)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (30:27)
These are the tech guys who are really doing it. These are the sort of fire brands kind of a thing. And yet there's actually a lot of sort of similar counter conventional wisdom in both of these that's really great. So.
JZ (30:31)
Right, yep.
Yeah.
We also talked about one more book that I think we both share as a little bit essential, kind of a really important book that we both read and have talked about a You want to introduce it, Jake?
Jake (30:57)
And if you're watching on video, I'm going to show you this book, Deep Work by Cal Newport. Of course, if you're, if you are watching, you'll see this is just a blank, a blank book. But there's the spine, Deep Work by Cal Newport. Yeah. So the dust cover, I, I took the dust, check it off because I can't stand the cover of this book. it's, it's the, the, says deep work really big. And I just don't like, I just, I, way that
JZ (31:06)
What happened to the dust cover? the dust jacket?
Hmm. What does it look like? I can't picture it.
It says the title of the book.
Yeah, I just looked it up. it's a garish.
Jake (31:27)
typography is done, I just don't like it. It just bugs me. It just bugs me. You know, it's
just me. It bugged me. And it's true of most books, by the way, you haven't ever played around with this, if you take the dust jacket off, they look pretty cool by and large. This one is really good.
JZ (31:46)
Also, we should give
credit where it's due, Cal Newport's newer books have really nicely designed covers. Digital Minimalism has that really cool pinstripe cover. Slow Productivity is this beautiful forest scene. definitely leveled up his cover design game.
Jake (31:54)
Yes. Yes, they do. Yes.
Yes, I think he's gone upmarket a bit with the later covers. The earlier ones are a bit more punchy in the face. Let's see, I don't try to remember what his first books were like. So good, they can't ignore you. And there's another one that's almost like a click baity kind of title. And I feel like Deep Work is the transition point of the covers where it starts to get a little more refined and...
JZ (32:15)
You
right. Yep. Yep.
Jake (32:35)
philosopher, king sort of guy. but this book, I'll tell you, it's, it was, it's, it's a really interesting read. It talks about the importance of focused work, which is something that when, I don't remember if you told me about this book, I think that's likely, but it's, it's obviously, it's been a huge hit. So there's a good chance if you know, you're, you're listening to this, you've already heard of it, but if you haven't read it or haven't gone back to it in a while.
JZ (32:37)
Yeah.
Jake (33:05)
I always find his writing so reassuring and reinforcing of the importance of doing something that again is, is counter conventional wisdom or counter the default of the way our culture works, which is to be responsive, to do lots of small things. And Calc import is a, is a very well informed, very well considered proponent of doing things slowly.
with deep focus, with a lot of time, without interruptions. And he works this way himself to radical degrees. And it's a lovely book. What's your sort of take on it?
JZ (33:47)
I was thinking about it and I realized in looking back at it that
Deep work gave me the vocabulary and the concepts to talk about a lot of these things and think about these things. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about the highlight method and the distraction-free phone, which come from our book, Make Time, which came out a couple of years after deep work. But yeah, I just remember like...
Jake (34:08)
Yeah. Yeah.
JZ (34:19)
Before Deep Work, was sort of like, you know, we talked about these things and we thought about them. And then Deep Work was like very important in the sense that it crystallized the ways that we talked about it and gave us a new vocabulary, like Deep Work versus Shallow Work. Even that just as like one example, I just found really, really helpful. also wanted to one other thing I noticed if you maybe you could bring up the
the again, Jake, the table of contents, the structure of this book is like, it's really good. It's really inspiringly clear.
Jake (34:56)
Let's take a look.
JZ (34:58)
it's all like on one page. Yeah, part one, the idea. Part two, the rules. I love that.
Jake (35:01)
Yeah.
man, it really
is great. says under part one, the idea chapter one, deep work is valuable. Chapter two, deep work is rare. Chapter three, deep work is meaningful.
JZ (35:23)
It's like even the names of the chapters are arguments. They are unconventional, non-consensus points of view, opinions. Like that is, it's amazing. Like I just love the clarity of it.
Jake (35:37)
Part two, the rules. Rule one, work deeply. Rule two, embrace boredom. Rule three, quit social media. Rule four, drain the shallows. And that's it, then there's the conclusion. The book, this is great. Like right here in half of a page, essentially, you've got an entire manifesto. And if you stopped there,
But you could apply it if you were able to consciously apply it without the background. It's so inspiring, actually. I'm thinking about how much effort we've put into books in the past and thinking about the outline and the structure. How he got it down into that.
JZ (36:08)
Yeah.
Jake (36:23)
The simplicity is misleading because it takes a lot of effort and thought to get to the point where an idea is condensed down to that. You have to exclude a lot of, a lot of stuff that's not as important to cut it down to seven chapters and to cut it down those, to divide those chapters into just two parts and each one to give it a headline to say, well, there are these other 150 ideas.
JZ (36:31)
All the way.
Jake (36:51)
But no, and then at some point there might have been like 20, like, nope, not those. And lots of books, it's easy for a book to have 20 chapters or 11 chapters, or I'd still feel like mission accomplished if I cut a book down to nine chapters, you cut it down to those seven. It's a big deal. And actually I think an argument for the kind of like slow, contemplative, careful work that he
JZ (37:14)
Yeah, I don't think you can come up
with this if you don't embrace the idea of deep work. If you don't structure your life to have hour upon hour of uninterrupted thinking time to distill an entire book into, you know, what is this, 20 words, something like that, 25 words. I also really liked this because I love outlining. I studied journalism in college and I worked at a newspaper.
Jake (37:33)
Yeah,
JZ (37:43)
when you study journalism, you have to take like news writing classes. It's like a class that is incredibly practical class where they're like, this is how you write a news story. And I'll never forget. one of the first things they teach you is the first sentence in every paragraph should contain the point of that paragraph. And then if you need a few more sentences, but like the evidence, the quote, you want a little transition into the next one. Fine. Great. But
If you cut it down to just the first sentence, you should be able to read one sentence for this paragraph. That's the point. Next point is one sentence. Next point, one sentence. I was 19 or whatever when I, when I learned that it just like really set into my, brain at that point. so when I see something like this, it really makes sense to me. It's inspiring.
Jake (38:30)
really cool yeah well deep work getting real good strategy bad strategy if you were if somebody hadn't read any of those three which one would you say is is the the one to start with or the the most bang for your for your buck for most people
JZ (38:49)
Hmm.
I guess it really depends on who they are. If I knew nothing about them, I'd probably say deep work because it is more of a foundational book. think it's hard to imagine anybody not finding something valuable in that book. It's hard to imagine no matter what your job is, how old you are, what you do, where you live. I assume you would read the book and
there would be something really useful. You would change your life in a good way. I don't know if that's true for getting real and good strategy, bad strategy. There probably is, but it's less of a sure thing.
Jake (39:26)
Yeah.
I was also thinking that even if I was talking to someone who is in the perfect situation to benefit from good strategy, bad strategy, or getting real, like I'm imagining one of our startup founders might be in a situation where they're like, would really benefit from those. But if they hadn't read Deep Work, I probably would want them to read that first. I think that's got so many structures for thinking about and approaching.
JZ (39:41)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (39:57)
your life every day or trying to approach it every day, that it'd be really good starting place.
JZ (40:05)
It's also a multiplier on everything else. think you can get all the tactical advice on how to build your business, how to design products, how to create a strategy. But if you don't have the time to think deeply about those and apply them, put them into action, do the work, do the deep work, then it's probably going to be wasted effort.
Jake (40:09)
Right. Right.
It's an interesting contrast to me to the book, Getting Things Done, which we did not talk about today, but you and I both considered talking about today. And I think we should on a future episode because, yes.
JZ (40:40)
Yeah. Also a foundational book for both of us, but in a,
in a slightly different way, which I think is where you're going with this.
Jake (40:48)
Yes, and I won't get into getting things done right now, but what's interesting about it is that I became a professional in an era when that was my Bible for how to do work, the meta foundational, like how do I approach my work? And getting things done teaches you to get everything done.
how to get everything done and manage everything and stay on top of everything. And there are some really powerful philosophical points in it, which we'll save for another day. But that was the mode that I associated with. Work nirvana was when you're on top of everything. And now, deep work, it's the opposite. Well, it's not exactly the opposite, but it says the nirvana, it comes from
JZ (41:12)
All the things.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (41:40)
not getting everything done, not being on top of everything, doing these like one at a time things with a lot of intention and shutting down a lot of what is inessential, which also is a theme in getting real. But that shift from what matters, it really rang true when I read Deep Work because Deep Work came out in 2016, same year that Sprint came out. It came out.
JZ (41:55)
Yeah.
Jake (42:07)
months before Sprint, but obviously Sprint was already written in like in the presses when it came out. Sprint is a book about deep work, you know, and this came out after you and I had started the Time Dorx posts that would later become Make Time, which is also about deep work. So I think it both struck a chord with us like, wow, this guy has labeled and named this thing that we saw as as important but didn't have a way to talk about or didn't know.
I felt like it relieved the tension that I had been under the, the sort of script of getting things done for, you know, 15 years or something at that point. And it was like releasing those chains and saying like, no, like here's somebody who's makes a really, a really clear, a really compelling argument for letting go of, of everything.
JZ (42:43)
Hehehe.
Jake (42:59)
letting go of the noise, those things that you're doing in sprints, those things that you're doing, those experiments with taking apps off your phone and everything. Here's a really intellectual, well-researched explanation for why that's better. And that's something I loved about it.
JZ (43:01)
Yeah.
Yeah. Awesome. Well, should we wrap it up here? Okay. Thanks everybody for listening. This has been episode 11 of Jake and Jay Z. You can get a weekly email with the latest episode and some other cool links at jakenjayz.com. Send us your questions at hey at jakenjayz.com. Please, if you liked the episode, subscribe, like, share it with a friend and we will see you next time. Thanks everybody.
Jake (43:22)
I think we should.
Bye guys.