258: You Can Just Do Things by Cate Hall

Bookworm

The hosts discuss Cate Hall's book, 'You Can Just Do Things,' which focuses on developing personal agency through practical tactics. They ex

Key takeaways

Cate Hall's background includes Yale Law, professional poker, and co-founding Alvia.
The book posits that self-deception is more energy-intensive than simply telling the truth.

Main topics

Personal Agency
Overcoming Fear of Failure

Notable quotes

You must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a motivational guide for individuals looking to

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) All right, Mike, we're back. It's time to talk about agency. It's time to talk about doing things and getting what you want out of life. But before we do that, we have some follow-up items, or at least I have some follow-up items. Some of Speaker 2 (0:16) us have follow-up items. Let me just say, I did have a follow-up item, which I kind of left off because it had nothing to do with reading books. Okay. But... This is the first podcast I am recording since we moved in the new studio. So people watching the video version of this podcast are hopefully getting a treat. I'm very happy with the way that this turned out. That was like the biggest action item I could have possibly ever had. And I got it done, I think, Sunday night. Nice. I was putting the finishing touches on things. So we had to delay this recording so I could finish it. That feels like something that I achieved in the last Speaker 1 (0:58) fortnight. Yeah, for sure. It's a huge win and it looks great. I mean, it absolutely looks great. So good work. Good work on that. I'm glad that you're happy with it now that it's done. Speaker 2 (1:07) Woody Walls for the win. Yeah, Woody Speaker 1 (1:09) Walls. I asked him, so Mike sent me a message before we recorded or before we were scheduled to record this one. And he's like, hey, studio's not done. I need more time. And I was like, no problem. And then my first or one of my first questions was. was it the Woody Walls? And the response was, no, they've actually been quite seamless. Like the Woody Walls have worked out really great. So good job, Woody Walls. Not a sponsor, but we'll take it if you want to, right? But should be. But you should be. All right. So I had two action items because I'm bringing an action item forward from two episodes ago. One, it was write my eulogy. Okay. And while I didn't formally write it, I thought about it. So I'm putting this in the yellow box of not a green check mark, but it's in the, I actually took some time to think about this and what I want to be in my eulogy. And let me tell you, Mike, I still don't like this. I didn't like it before. I don't like this now. I just don't like it. And I think part of the reason why I don't like it. So I'm going to get a little bit vulnerable here with you, Mike, and vulnerable with the audience is. I feel like I'm setting myself up for failure. Like I know that it's an aspirational thing and like I want to shoot for this thing, but it's like sometimes I dream too high and I'm going to say like, oh, I really would love for that to happen by the time I die, but I don't know if it's going to. Like I don't know if that's realistic. And this is partially my wife, her realism coming in, and she knows I do this too because she is my voice of reason. I will bring ideas up to her and Katie will look at me and she'll go, Corey, come on. That's never going to happen. So like I'm doing this to myself as I think about this eulogy and what I would want to write down. So yellow. It's a yellow stoplight. It's not a green checkmark. We're okay. Speaker 2 (3:01) Can we can we talk about that for a minute? So like let's come back and revisit this as we talk through this this episode, because I feel like Kate Hall would have some specific advice for you around what you just what you just said about that. Dreaming too big. I honestly don't think that's possible. Second of all, you're worried about letting yourself down at the end of your life. Like you'll be dead. What do you care? Speaker 1 (3:25) Okay. All Speaker 2 (3:26) of what you're Speaker 1 (3:27) saying is accurate and all of what you're saying is good. And none of that helped me when I was thinking about the eulogy that I would want to write as I drove to and from places in the car and went, I don't like thinking about this. I don't like thinking about this. So like this, like you are the reason why this is on my. to do my follow-up action item list. And I'm still not happy about it. Like I don't, I don't like it, but for some reason I feel very convicted that I need to do it. Like it's important enough. It's an important enough activity that I actually need to do it. So not Speaker 2 (3:56) everyone is a weirdo who likes to think about death. I get it. Not that, that, that sounds a little bit weird. That's not what I meant. Is your memento mori? Is it still Speaker 1 (4:06) on your desk? Did you keep it on your, on your desk? Or where is it at now? My obsidian? Yeah, yeah, it's there. Okay, good. I thought you had a coin. Didn't you have the coin or do you have a different coin? Speaker 2 (4:14) Oh, it's a different one. What does that say? Amor fati basically is like enjoy the journey. So like the suffering is part of it. I knew you had one Speaker 1 (4:25) of those Speaker 2 (4:25) coins. Speaker 1 (4:25) Yeah, okay. Speaker 2 (4:27) Yeah, I'm like the closest thing to a stoic without being a stoic that you can possibly get to. It's so Speaker 1 (4:31) funny how much you didn't like the stoic book and you have all these stoics. All right. So my second one was ask the change, the three change questions from the goal, which was our last book and develop the details of each of them. So the three change questions were, what do we change? What do we change to? And then how do we cause the change? And what I'll tell you is I am not at liberty to go into many of the details here. It was part of my action item, develop the details, but like, what do we change? Speaker 1 (5:04) We at a university need to think about more hands-on, more doing, less lecturing to students. There are times when we need to communicate ideas. There are times when we just need to actually teach them the way we always think about teaching. But students these days really want to do stuff. Employers really want them to have done stuff. So we need to be... exponentially more hands-on. And this was a big deal even like 20 years ago when you and I went to school, right? It was a big deal for a curriculum to be hands-on. It's even more so now. So that's the, what do we change? We need to be more hands-on. Two, what do we change to? Well, that would look like more project-based learning. That would look like more internships, more apprenticeships, more doing, like learning by doing. And we get industry clients and we get all those stuff. So those are the two, right? Like those are two, check, check, check. How do we cause the change? Yeah. How do we cause the change? Like that's, that's where this one fizzled. I'm still counting this as a green check mark because I, I did what I said I would do, but I will tell you that's a hard one. And that's the one that like, there's four different ways that we could do this. None of them are great. All of them are okay. They all will be like turning the Titanic when it comes to actually making the. you know making the change happen in real life so i'm taking this one as a green check mark i'm saying action item complete i always feel good when i get those action items complete Speaker 2 (6:37) Nice. But you know, Corey, you can just do things. I can just do things, which, by the Speaker 1 (6:42) way, let's talk about today's book. This guy, he's a pro. So the book today is You Can Do Things. Is it You Can't? Yeah, You Can Just Do Things. How High Agency People Get What They Want Out of Life. It's by Kate Hall and Sasha Chapin. Now, Mike, help me understand something, because as I was making the notes and as I was getting ready for today. I read this book and didn't get Sasha Chapin. I got Kate Hall. Like, does it ever explain to us or did you read anywhere? Like, how is Sasha Chapin part of this? Because it's I mean, it's literally on the front cover, Kate Hall with Sasha Chapin. And it's like, yeah, I don't know what Sasha's role was. Do you? Speaker 2 (7:27) No. But when I come across a book now with more than one author. This sounds terrible, but I basically just attribute the whole book to the first author There was another one I read recently not recently maybe like a year ago Noah Kagan What is it million dollar weekend or something like that the green one? Okay, and it was Noah Kagan with Taj Taj Hall or something like that Taj Hall. It was like is like the best Speaker 2 (8:03) copy editor in the world. I'm mixing up the terms now. I remember him talking about it though. He was on some podcast I was listening to. He was like, why did you co-write this with this particular person? And it was like, because this person has been the brains behind like all of these massively successful Speaker 1 (8:21) books that you have heard of. Speaker 2 (8:24) And the podcast was so long ago that I can't remember which ones they were. I want to say like, The Four-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I have no idea if that's the specific one or not, but that's the type of success level that we're talking about with these. So it was basically just like, this guy really knows what he's doing. If you're going to write a book, this is the guy that you work with. Speaker 1 (8:45) But Speaker 2 (8:46) he's so good at his craft that he basically has a clause in his contract that his name has to be on the front cover as well. Speaker 1 (8:52) Got it. Got it, got it, got it. I looked up Sasha Chapman real quick. That's where I kind of... Got distracted by it. And coach. So they are a coach. They are an award-winning journalist and recovering chess enthusiast. So that's what we know about. Because the book tells you a lot about K-Hall. Wait, wait, Speaker 2 (9:11) wait, wait. Speaker 1 (9:12) Recovering Speaker 2 (9:12) chess enthusiast? You Speaker 1 (9:14) don't need to recover Speaker 2 (9:15) from being a chess enthusiast. Speaker 1 (9:17) This individual wrote a book called All the Wrong Moves, which looks like it's a lot about chess. So Speaker 2 (9:26) in Speaker 1 (9:26) 2019, Speaker 2 (9:27) all the wrong moves. I would say respect, but it sounds like he's dialing that back. An enthralling journey into the world Speaker 1 (9:35) of chess. Okay, sorry, we have to move on. But that is who Sasha Chapman was. Sasha Chapman was not talked about in any of the books. Kate Hall was talked about a lot. So I was curious about that. So thank you for helping me work through that. All right, now we move on to the actual introduction, if you're ready. Are you ready to intro this book? Yes, let's do it. All right, so the whole book is about agency, right? It's an intro, a conclusion with 17 chapters. The 17 chapters are broken into five different sections. These sections have a non-uniform number of chapters within them, right? Because 17 doesn't get divided by five cleanly, which is fine. That's no big problem. But really, this book seemed like it came out of Kate Hall's experience. And she had a very dramatic experience. She talks about it very early in the book with drug addiction. And it seems like it came out of that experience that she had. That basically, she was in a situation where she's like, okay, if I don't fix this, no one's going to fix it. And I'm going to stay in this world. So therefore, this idea of agency and this idea of personal agency came out of the book. So the intro chapter. I can't remember how much of her backstory she gets into in the intro chapter. But what I can tell you is that she does a really thorough job. I think it's thorough of going through the idea of agency and responsibility and basically encouraging us or motivating us to say like, hey, if you want to make a change, get off your butt and do it. Like make that change. You know, she quotes in here, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Like why, if you want to do something, just go do it. Like, you know, I mean, the title, you can just do things, right? So she hits you hard right away with essentially, this is the nature of this book. And this is what I'm trying to get at with this book. That's kind of my big overview of introduction before we move into section one. What do you want to add, Mike? Speaker 2 (11:36) I really like how she had the two different versions of her background. And she called them the LinkedIn version and the imposter version. So I actually Speaker 1 (11:47) wrote these down. This might Speaker 2 (11:48) be my favorite part of the whole book, to Speaker 1 (11:50) be honest. Speaker 2 (11:50) The LinkedIn version, she graduated from Yale Law. She landed a job at a prestigious DC law firm and worked on cases for the Supreme Court. She left to play professional poker, became a top-ranked female player in the world. She co-founded a pandemic medicine company called Alvia. She became CEO of Astera Institute, a multi-billion dollar private foundation focused on the best ways to use philanthropic money to drive technological progress. That's really impressive. The imposter version is she burned out during college and law school. She developed a drug addiction playing poker, didn't know anything about pandemic medicine, but wanted to do something. So this is kind of interesting because they're both true. And which story do you tend to tell? I think I tend to focus on the imposter version a little bit myself. And I have a real hard time whenever, because I will occasionally speak at conferences. Like I've spoken at MaxDoc, I'm speaking at CEX this year, and they'll ask for a bio. And I hate writing my bio because I feel like I have nothing useful or important to put there. And then when I like force myself to sit down and write it, I look at it and I'm like. That's like I feel the imposter. The imposter syndrome is like, well, that's that's just all the highlights. That's not the real thing. I have so much trouble doing this. Speaker 1 (13:25) But it's not true. Right. Because you you have a ton of accomplishments. Right. Like I mean, so it makes sense. I felt a similar thing to you, Mike, when so in the academic world, we write CVs. We don't write resumes. Speaker 1 (13:40) and essentially like how many pages can it be? Because the more pages is the more stuff you did. And as I'm learning this in graduate school, it kind of got beat out of you of like, well, did you do that thing? Yeah. Put on your CV, right? Did you do that thing? Yeah. We'll put it on your CV. And it's like, well, hold on. Like my CV is already like, you know, whatever, 13 pages long. And they're like, yeah, it needs to keep going. And I'm like, oh, this is so weird. So it's like, you have all that stuff. A lot of, a lot of people that are in your position, meaning creator on the internet, right? We'll have the like now page or like the page of like past projects or whatever it might be. Like, I bet you, if you did that, that thing would be stacked. Like that would be super deep. I've heard you talk about it a bunch of times. And I even interviewed you about it, right? Way back, way back when. But like, it's there. So I don't know why the imposter syndrome. I don't know. It Speaker 2 (14:32) definitely does though. Speaker 1 (14:36) Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay. So this, the, one of the key takeaways from this section for me is she, I love it when an author tells you what their book is doing and what their book is meant to do. So she's got a section in here says, this book is my attempt to take agency cultivation. So, okay, we're going to do, how are we going to cultivate agency out of the realm of chance and distill it into the most. practical tactics or a series of practical tactics. And that's where we're going. We're going into 17 chapters of practical tactics, according to our author, that will help us become more agentic, if you will, or have higher agency. At this point, Mike, I'm ready to move on to section one. Let's do it. Okay. So section one is wake up and move. There are four chapters in section one. Stare into the abyss, become your own crisis manager. Quit living in movie logic and then seek real feedback. So these are the chapters. So we're going to basically, Mike and I talked earlier, we're going to rapid fire these chapters. Some of the ones we'll have more to talk about. Some of the ones we'll have less to talk about, but we're just going to hit them chapter by chapter. So stare into the abyss. Essentially, the nature of this is you're going to look out. It's going to go, oh my gosh, there's this big black hole. I don't know what to do. I'm so scared. What should I go out there and do? And she's saying, don't run away. Don't look at the abyss and then turn around and say, I want nothing to do with that. She's saying, get out there and just be okay with the fact that it's scary. And life might hit you. And don't fall for the psychological trap that there's a whole bunch of downsides out there that I shouldn't go after. That was my takeaway from Staring to the Abyss. Speaker 2 (16:18) Yeah, I like the... metaphor here of staring into the abyss because the idea behind this is you have to look at the things that are uncomfortable, right? And she talks about how the human default is to voluntarily accept constraints, convincing ourselves that they are mandatory. So staring into the abyss is intentional, intensive, self-questioning. And I feel like this is a something that I sort of do every quarter with the personal retreat stuff. It's the reason why I don't have the issue that you shared with me during the follow-up about writing the eulogy and memento mori and all that kind of stuff. I guess I've long understood the value of this. And when she was talking about this at the very beginning, I was completely on board. So we're starting off real strong here with this book. The key idea as it pertains to the argument she's going to lay out here is that self-deception is the thing that will keep you from being able to just do things. And self-deception requires more energy than telling the truth. That is essentially the case she's making for this is like, just deal with it. Just stare into the abyss because the alternative of trying to hide all this stuff is actually... much harder and is going to take more out of you. Speaker 1 (17:49) Yep. She, she, we said in the introduction that it's practical tactics. She lists, Mike, I don't remember how many questions there were here, but she gives you a list of questions to ask. Are you currently accepting something as self-care that is in fact an addiction? Uh, if you could go back to college and start over, what would you like? So these are very practical, a series of questions. Are they the right questions? It depends. Are one of those probably applicable to you? Yes. One of those is probably applicable to you to think through. And it's a good list. It's a pretty thorough list of questions. So there's her practical. Let's talk about those questions Speaker 2 (18:22) real quick. I didn't actually write any of them down. And you know, I love me a good question. And this is a theme throughout the book. She has these lists of questions at different points. And I didn't think any of them were bad, but I also didn't think any of them were great. It's like a good starting point if you've never done this sort of stuff before. But they're not the questions I would have chosen for a book Speaker 1 (18:45) like this. I agree with you completely. The reason I wrote them down is because we are doing a podcast on the book, right? Like if it was up to me, none of these stuck so much that I was like, oh, I need to roll that into a question I ask myself semi-regularly and think through something. I don't know if that's because of the nature of her questions or just because of, you know, I'm just in a different place where I've got a series of questions that I ask myself already. You, I mean, in your daily reflection, right? Like, so you've got daily reflection, you've got... all these things built into your system, it would make total sense to me that you've already got this nailed down. Speaker 2 (19:21) It's always a work in progress. I'm always modifying things based on inspiration from books like this. So it's a little bit of a curiosity that I didn't write any of them down and didn't apply any of them other than, yeah, I just didn't like them. Speaker 1 (19:37) All right, let's move to chapter two. So chapter two is become your own crisis manager. A crisis manager is somebody who throws away the old task, is what Kate would say, and simply ask, what is the most important priority and what is the next thing required to achieve it? Mike, I love this idea. I don't do this enough. Like, I don't go, hey, it's 8 a.m., I'm getting ready to roll into the workday. What's the most important priority for today and what's the next thing I need to do? Because I know, and we've read in a bunch of other books, we've read in a bunch of other places, Once the snowball starts rolling downhill, it will keep rolling downhill and it will keep picking up snow. Like I know that is true, but I'm not good at being my own crisis manager. Like I come in and I sit down and I'm like, oh, there's 400 things that are either hitting me or on my brain or there's a calendar full of stuff. And I don't go into crisis mode and go, stop. What's the most important priority? What's one thing I can do to move that forward? And if I did that. I would be better off. I know from chapter two, Kate Hall reminded me of it. I would be better off if I did that, but I still don't do it. And that's a me. Well, okay. Speaker 2 (20:49) So becoming your own crisis manager, I actually had a little bit of a different approach to this. Speaker 2 (20:57) I interpreted this as the person who made the decisions that got you into the mess that you're in right now. That person is a different person. So crisis manager isn't, from my perspective, when I read this, I wasn't thinking of crisis manager as the person who's deciding, okay, the beginning of every day, what's the most important thing to do? I actually didn't like this section a lot because of the word crisis. I maybe it's the season I just just got out of, you know, just real briefly. My wife broke her leg. She's been on crutches for six weeks, still has a boot. Right after that, I got sick. Two weeks after that, we moved. I got thrown into the high school coaching position when the previous head coach kind of spur of the moment decided, yeah, I'm not going to coach this year. Like it was always, I'm going to take over this role, but then it was like, oh, we're doing this now. Well, I guess we got to figure all this stuff out. Speaker 1 (21:59) Yep. Speaker 2 (21:59) So like really, really crazy season that we're in. And I have been in crisis management mode. I mean, the last screencast online module that I did, I had to write three separate times. I'm like, I'm sorry, I'm not going to get it done this week. I'm sorry, I'm not going to get it done this week. I'm sorry, I'm not going to get it done this week. You just have to like roll with the punches. It's a really stressful. way to live. So if you're going to become your own crisis manager, this has to be, in my opinion, like a once in a great while sort of a thing. This is not something that you are