Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:00:09] Hi and Welcome to the High Functioning Hotspot with me Dr. Chloe Carmichael today's episode is super special. Today I have David Allen, the author of getting things done, the old classic, and he'd gone on to write a multitude of other fantastic books that are about productivity and getting things done.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:00:30] But what they're also about, which I love is the idea that the better we get at creating, you know, whatever productivity or organization methods that we need in our lives, the more able will be to just relax and feel creative and let go. That for him, this productivity, it's not about just getting on some kind of a hamster wheel where we just do more and more and more and more and more.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:00:59] It's really about learning how to take good ideas or whatever's going on in our life. And getting it out of our head and into a system so that we don't have to worry in track and think about it so much anymore. And that, that actually frees us to just relax. And so I absolutely loved every moment of my interview and I hope that you do too.

 

David Allen[00:00:59] Good afternoon for me. Good morning for you.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:00:29] Well, good afternoon to you. Thank you so much for joining me, David. So I'm Dr. Chloe Carmichael. I know this is actually our first time meeting and this is the High Functioning Hotspot. And thank you so much for agreeing to, to come and share with me today. It's really such a privilege.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:00:49] So, yeah, I mean, so with that said, you know, I'm a clinical psychologist and, I do have a book coming out through Macmillan called Nervous Energy Harness the Power of your Anxiety. And it's about my work with high functioning people and so I just, I found your books and your body of work to be so interesting.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:02:10] Because it does exactly what I am interested in doing, which is helping high-functioning people to just really embrace their energy. And I love the points that you make, about how, when we take those tools and structure ourselves, that's really how we actually get in touch with our big free creative energy.

And actually find relaxation. so I think that's so fabulous and I'm sure that you just get inundated with requests of people that want to talk to you. and you know, I'm nowhere near on that level myself, but you know, with my book and you know, some TV and stuff, I do personally get overwhelmed myself even sometimes with these types of requests.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:02:56] So my first question to you, David is a high functioning person yourself who must be beyond inundated with these types of requests. How do you decide when to say yes and when to give a polite decline?

 

David Allen[00:03:11] Well, I trust my gut, my intuition, my spirit, my liver, whatever it is I trust to make a good, intuitive choice in the moment, but that's not Willy nilly and freeform to be able to trust my intuitive choices.

I have to do some regular review and uplifted  view of my world and renegotiate with myself, you know, what's up and get present again so that I'm able to make better intuitive, quick choices. So you don't have color. You don't have time to think. You need to have already thought if you've already done sufficient thinking, then you can trust your intuitive judgments on a moment to moment basis, because you don't have time to think on a moment to moment basis.

 

David Allen[00:03:53] You need to make a quick judgment call as do the high-performing people. It's just that. Oftentimes, they make those judgment calls out of hope, not out of trust. So you want to move from hope to trust in those judgment calls, but that's not free. You actually have to do what you need to do to make sure you're making more good, intuitive, trusted choices.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:04:15] Right. So you're saying that you move from hope to trust by having a good system that you're doing already so that you're already very aware and centered throughout your day when those traces arise?

 

David Allen[00:04:28] Correct. See your brain is a crappy office, and if you're trying to manage your life and your brain, you will not, you will be driven by latest and loudest, and then not move into the trust point.

So, you know, your brain didn't evolve to remember or remind or manage priorities or manage relationships between more than four things. That's new cognitive science data. I discovered that 35 years ago, just on the street in terms of how we work the best and how I work the best with a clear head. But now they've proven that so most people are still using their head as their office.

 

David Allen[00:04:59] They're trying to use their mind to remind, remember, prioritize, manage whatever. And it's like playing pinball in a bad pinball machine.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:05:11] Yeah. Yeah. I mean to that point as well, personally, I love having the right administrative support. I know my assistant, I think, coordinated this with your assistant and that's one of the things I'm always trying to get high-functioning people to do exactly, as you said, is to really unburden themselves from as much of the admin and office type stuff, as they can.

 

David Allen[00:05:33] I am my own assistant, by the way, I haven't had an assistant for 25 years.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:05:35] Gosh, I don't know how you do it. So how, I mean, since given what you just said then where you have, you know, we have this kind of limited bandwidth as to how much we can really keep track of.

You're saying that you also manage your own calendar as well on top of everything else that you're doing?

 

David Allen[00:05:52] I do. I do not trust anybody else. Frankly, and I've got to make too many changes too fast. That includes too many other variables that it would take me longer to try to get somebody to do it right then for me to do it.

Now, I know that's one of those gee, I can do it better myself on, I understand people who have larger organizations or enterprises or that need, you know, the help of other people to be able to manage either scheduling or other stuff. That's quite understandable. I'm just telling you personally, you know, I don't, I love that freedom.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:06:22] Yeah. So I'm just curious, have you actually ever tried having an assistant and you found that it just actually wasn't assisting you or like it's just been something you've never tried.

 

David Allen[00:06:33] There've been times when I had an assistant, but instead of having them manage things like my travel schedule, which I had to change quickly a lot.

Which was just too much trouble for them to try to manage all of that really well, unless you've been with it, they'd been, unless they've been with you for five years, they know exactly what you need and exactly. And you do the same kind of trips to do the same kind of stuff. I never had my life that stable.

 

David Allen[00:06:54] So given to be able to stay clear about that. So my assistants became more small project managers. I need you to hand, I need you to handle this whole thing over there. Could you go handle that? Could you, or could you do go research that could you do not, but not that nitty gritty, you know, day to day stuff, that's actually easier for me.

As a matter of fact, that's often a way that I relax. My brain is cleaning up my email and making travel arrangements. It's just because, you know, it's easy to do. I can complete it. I do my own finances. I do. I manage my own books. I do all, I do all that because that's actually a way for me to relax, given all the other, thinking that I'm doing, you know what? I'm not doing that.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:07:32] Yeah, that's incredible. I was actually curious about that too. So when you say that you manage your own books, a lot of people, I think listening to this show either have a book or they want to have a book as well. And obviously I do so for my own selfish reasons, even, what does that mean when you say that you're managing your own books?What is that?

 

David Allen[00:07:51] My financial books. My accounting books. I do have. Yeah. And while I manage that too well, yeah, no, no penguin manages my books, so. And my agent. So, you know, that's all there is. Yeah. I just manage writing.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:08:07] Right that's a big one and of course now you're at this level where you're this, you know, multi-multi New York times bestselling, you know, thought leader and I'm sure Penguin manages your books very carefully  but I'm curious when you were first starting out and you were just having your first book on the market. What kinds of things did you personally do to make sure that that book was launched correctly and handled correctly?

David Allen[00:08:38] I had no idea. I'd never done a book before, so I just trusted, you know, I got good advice from some people in the industry to find a good agent if I wasn't well-known. And I thought if I thought I had my book that I thought my book was not so niche focused, but it was quite universally focused. Then, and if I didn't have a name, best thing to do is get an agent.

So I did, I got a good one. She's still my agent. She was an ex editor, you know, from New York. So she knew the game. She knew the trade. And she knew a lot of people in the business already. So, you know, she's been a great partner, you know, from a business standpoint to make that happen. So I didn't really know how to write a book.

 

David Allen[00:09:16] You know, I spent 25 years trying to figure out what I'd figured out and then finally got some coaching that I should probably write the manual. And so, okay. Let me see if I can write a book about it. And it took four years from the time I pulled the trigger on a collated to the time it got actually on a shelf.

Because it took a long time to figure out, should I go directly to an editor or to whatever it is, should I get an agent and writing the business, you know, the business plan, you know, I needed to write a business plan for the book because no publisher is going to publish a book just out of a whim. They need to say Willis, make me money.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:09:49] Right, right.

 

David Allen[00:09:51] So how am I going to do this? So who, what's a unique, what's your new unique message who you're going to target this to? Why is this not being done out there already? You know, there's a lot of really good and hard questions that you need to answer. So that was one of the hardest things to do is write a business plan for the book.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:10:06] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but once you get over that hurdle, it is. It's such a thrill. I'm super excited, you know, for that to be happening soon for me. And it's, I know it's happened many times for you, and I'm glad you mentioned a business plan. I know that you mentioned a business plan really kind of about the books specifically, but another thing I wanted to ask you about is that you are obviously so much more.

Then, like just a successful author, you know, your, your books have mushrooms in a beautiful way into an entire industry and I'm curious for you as David, the business person, did you kind of have a certain things that maybe you tried as you were growing your business that didn't go quite the way that you planned?

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:10:56] Or how did you find your way of connecting the dots from growing yourself, from being an author into a tycoon of, of the business and the thought world. I mean, I'm, I'm so curious, honestly, from a personal level, as well as a psychologist that works with high functioning people. you know, you're kind of at the King of the Hill but it's one thing to see someone at the top. But then I always like to hear about the journey and it's so easy for high-functioning people to look at someone like you and say, Oh wow, he's just got it all together. But did you just naturally know where and how to grow? Or did you have bumps along the way?

 

David Allen[00:11:41] Yes. All the above Chloe. I mean it. I, I didn't really, I'm not been, I'm not been particularly aspirational or even entrepreneurial in terms of what I'm doing. I've been more of an educator and a researcher, and also wanting to keep a good job and loving to help people and, you know, so discovering best practice methodologies that could that did nothing but improve people's condition and then finding ways to make that part of a business.

So I could do that with just a one foot in front of the other. I didn't really have many big either visions about this. I mean, I started this, I started my own after, come on. I had so many jobs before I was 35. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was just helping a lot of other people with their businesses.

 

David Allen[00:12:27] And then I discovered they paid people to do that. They call them consultants. So I said, okay, start my own consulting practice. I said, I guess I'll just hire myself out on a project by project basis, 1991. Right. And. So I started doing that, but again, I had a reference point about being, you know, clear and balanced and I'm a freedom kind of guy.

I don't like being distracted by stuff. I like being present, you know, had a martial arts training and meditation stuff and spiritual explorations and so forth. So that sort of coached me into myself in terms of how do I stay clear as my life got more professional, more complex, more busy. And so I discovered techniques for myself, turned around and use them with my clients.

 

David Allen[00:13:10] And it turned out that those techniques produce the same results they did for me, more focused, more balanced, more structure, more, more sense of control or sense of most importantly space to think about the most important things in the most strategic way and creative way. And so I started doing that with them at work, everything I discovered for me worked for them.

Wow. I guess I uncovered something really cool. And then somebody in the corporate world saw what I was doing and they said, gee, David. We need that those kinds of results in our whole culture. Can you design some sort of a training or format around this so we can reach a lot of people instead of you just doing one-on-one with folks.

 

David Allen[00:13:45] And so I did, and it was quite successful. We created a pilot program for a thousand executives and managers and Lockheed in 1983, 84, and it worked so well. I suddenly found myself thrust into the corporate training world. Could have fooled me. That was not a plan. That was not a plan. Believe me.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:14:02]  I mean, but so to me, that's an interesting moment because that's a breakthrough moment in your career, right?

I mean that, I know that for you at this point in your career now, it's probably not a big thing to say like, Oh yeah, it was a thousand executives that, you know, were doing my program. But at that point in time, that was the first time. So do you recall even exactly how that came about that somebody said, Hey, we want to take what you're doing and have a thousand executives trained in that.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:14:32] I mean, did you say to yourself, Oh my gosh, how much do I even charge for this? Like, how do I put this together? Like how, tell me that.

 

David Allen[00:14:41] All of that. It was like constant. Oh my God. You know, and, you know, the first day I had a partner I was working with at the time and, you know, and so I did deliver my first program and, you know, the head of human resources who had brought me in to do this, call me in and said, we need to talk, Oh my God, what we did talk about, Oh my God, you know, screwed up and, you know, we're dead or whatever.

And, you know, I walked into his office and he had a pile of, you know, memos like this, this is pre digital time and a pile of memos. He said, these are all requests for people that were in your first program, that they want all of their staff to go through your program. Again, he said, I don't know how to deal with all that.

 

David Allen[00:15:25] That's when we decided to do okay, let's do a big rollout, you know, with this and so forth. So it was, it was quite, I had no idea. I had no idea how much that I had no idea, even how much uptake there would be on getting things done when I wrote it. You know, and in, in, you know, 2000, because I was just trying to capture this stuff that I uncovered, but see, Chloe I've never had any formal traditional education in business psychology or time management.

All of this stuff just came out of experience. And my own use of it and the, my own use of it with other people to watch the results of it. So I was really kind of, I guess that's why it took me 25 years to figure out that what I'd figured out was unique, then nobody else had done it. I thought that was the last guy in the world to figure this out.

 

David Allen[00:16:12] There were a whole lot of people making a lot more money than me that I thought they'd already figured this out and wrong. As a matter of fact, the more senior people were and the more sophisticated they were and the busier they were, the more they absolutely needed this and were hungry for it. So that was kind of a big surprise.

So then I wound up in for mostly, for the most part. I mean, this was just, you know, I had a couple of partners by that time and it was mostly just a lifestyle business. There's a while it's just, it's a good job and people still want us and let me do that and figure out how to, how to sell it, how to price it, you know, and what to do about it.

 

David Allen[00:16:45] And it was a constant re thinking. There was no big magic formula or magic strategy that we had other than follow our nose and just follow, just pick up the phone. We never did any marketing. It was all referral based stuff. So then it was just a lot of discovery. What happened when we did that and the social security administration.

What happened when we did that at Lockheed? What happened when we did that at SmithKline? What happened suddenly thrust into this world of a whole lot more. I was never been in the corporate world myself, you know, as an employee or in that way. So that was all kind of new to me. It called what those worlds were like and how people operate in those worlds.

 

David Allen[00:17:23] But they were the hungriest for this. As a matter of fact, when we first, the first edition of getting things done published, you know, we got on the shelves in 2001, you know, working with the editor and, you know, Penguin and so forth. How do you promote this? And so even titling it and positioning it, it was positioned for the fast track professional because they were the people first hitting with being hit with a tsunami of email and speed of change and speed and volume and velocity of stuff that was coming at them, you know, in, in the digital world, particularly. And so we figured, well, that was the ripest audience for what I had to say, that that had been true pretty much for, you know, 20 years of my career. And so that's how the book was positioned.

 

David Allen[00:18:05] You know, I wrote it, sorry, I've ordered a new edition for it in 2015, the methodology didn't change. The audience did. I even knew when I first wrote this, this work, because I'd done this work for kids and for students or for stay-at-home dads and for clergy and for physicians and for anybody around there, anybody who's got a busy life can use this methodology.

I came up with and give them more sense of clarity and freedom and focus. And so I knew what it was then, but we positioned the book for that group and that audience and that target market, because they were the ones who were the hungriest fart and had the money to pay for training and coaching about it.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:18:43] Yes. Yes. I actually, my business grew in somewhat similar way. So when I was starting my private practice and I didn't even know if I'd be able to pay my rent, you know, part of, I thought about the way I would, the audience I would serve that I knew I had to be targeting clients that at least could afford to have, you know, private paid  therapy sessions, but now as, as I'm so excited to have the chance to share my book with the world. And by the way, similar to you also, I, I share in the book about how I use a lot of the techniques on myself as I was building my business to just, you know, manage my own anxiety, but. Now the point of the book is to take it out of just that one-to-one space with people who can pay lots of money for one-to-one and bring the message that there are high functioning people everywhere.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:19:33] Right? And that it's so wonderful to be able to share those techniques with people. As you've said, you know, it, it may be a stay-at-home dad and he doesn't have to be the CEO of a big company, a stay at home Dad could absolutely be a super high functioning person. I wanted to circle back as well to something else that you mentioned that you have had a very interesting career path, like so many interesting jobs.

And for me, as well as a former yoga teacher, I really, respect and relate to a lot of those jobs. I know you even were a minister at one point as well. And one of the things with a resilience in psychology is that we've found that religiosity is a protective factor to the point where it doesn't even matter what the religion is, or even if it's meditation, but that it helps people, as you said, to be centered and to be resilient.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:20:28] So I'm curious if you wouldn't mind sharing anything about your current Spiritual or meditative life and how you do that, how you get that centered feeling.

 

David Allen[00:20:43] Well, if you've done this for 50 years, as I have, it starts to become just sort of second nature that you just relax, take a breath, you know, let go, let God, you know, that's, that's my screen-share, you know, so it's a truly, it's a matter of letting go.

You know, we get too invested in our thoughts, our emotions and our physical materiality. And so anything you can do to kind of relax from that, it doesn't mean you have to give those up. It just means you don't let them run.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:21:14] That is so true. And I really think for high functioning people, that is the name of the game because we tend to have such high drive.

We're so engaged. The mind never stops and it's going a million miles an hour. And so sometimes as you said, You know, learning how to let go. And I have to admit, I'm sort of secretly relieved to hear you say that you don't have some big fancy protocol because I actually don't either. I feel like it almost comes intuitively to me sometimes.

And to the point where I almost wonder if I'm cheating. So I'm glad to know that you actually have the same experience.

 

David Allen[00:21:46] Well, it does help, you know, sometimes we'll spend 30 minutes to 60 minutes and step back and go inside to my reference points for my spiritual stuff. And, you know, I personally have coaches on the other side.

And so being able to stop and listen to them and listen to that, you know, you can call it your inner voice, your intuition of whatever. I just know there's a team on my side on many different levels. So that's my working hypothesis. And actually I have real experiences of that. And so given that it's true, all I have to do is relax and listen and stop and then, you know, there's, I've never gotten any bad advice.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:22:29] Yeah. So when you say that you have coaches on the other side, do you mean like that you have coaches where you're a client or do you mean something different?

 

David Allen[00:22:41] No, in spirit.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:22:42] Ah, and so they're like, are they like a particular known kind of entity to you and you have a few of them? Would you please share David? I would love to know more.

 

David Allen[00:22:59] Well, if you want to know, I'm still, sort of, I'm still an ordained minister in the movement of spiritual, inner awareness MSIA. So MSIA.org. You'd see, you'd see all of what that's about.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:23:11] Okay, well, thank you. I would love to know more and I love that you shared that.

So I also wanted to ask you, because you know, you mentioned that a lot of this stuff for you is actually rather intuitive and that you didn't even need to take any training for it. and so obviously this is an area of passion for you, and I'm always curious, you know, where passion comes from. So when you were say 12, where you like

just intuitively good at time management and very driven, or did this passion arise maybe out of like a need to learn how to focus all that energy of yours?

 

David Allen[00:23:48] Well, I'm going to give you a counterintuitive answer. I think passion is highly overrated. I'm just the laziest guy you've ever met. So my passion was to not have to work any harder than I needed to, and to be free, to focus on what I wanted to focus on without a distraction.

 

We can call that a passion if you want. I just say that's just a standard that I held, you know? And so if I was ever off the episode, how do I get back to that? So passion is overrated or overrated. I know it's kind of like as excited as you get emotionally, that's how depressed you're going to get. So, you know, step by step, you know, small little things.

I like the word instead of, I like the word satisfaction. Because you can have a, you can have a wonderful day where you never smiled or laughed at all, but you were totally satisfied at the end of your day. And I think that's much more sustainable than happy, you know? So even happiness is overrated. A great book of mine.

 

David Allen[00:24:50] I read a couple of years ago, which I highly recommend is called the antidote by Oliver Berkman. And he goes into a lot of, kind of, sort of the hippie let's be happy about everything. Be totally off optimistic and how absolutely, unfunctional that is. and so a lot of his stuff, he actually explores a lot of what the, the, the Stoics were about, which most people don't understand.

It was a lot about acceptance of reality. If you don't accept that you're, that you're stressed or that you're in anxiety, you're going to what you resist. You're stuck with, you got to say, I am totally stressed and anxious right now. Now what?

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:25:35] That is so true. That is so true. Sometimes people..

 

David Allen[00:25:36] you must know that, you know, people have to accept what's true before they can move past it.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:25:42]  Well, it's so true. I mean, sometimes people will come to me and they'll say, well, how do I get rid of my anxiety? And I always try to explain to them that a person without anxiety would be dead. The healthy function of anxiety is to stimulate preparatory behaviors. So the idea is that we want to take that awareness that something's making us uncomfortable and we don't necessarily even want to get rid of it.

It can actually give us a healthy tickle to kind of make us rise to the challenge of whatever it is that we need to engage with.

 

David Allen[00:26:18] That's why, that's why you got breasts. That's the way that's why you got, you know, that's why you had breakfast. That's why you got dressed. That's why he got out. That's how you got out of the room.

I just call it cognitive dissonance. It's not anxiety. Anxiety has a negative spin on it. I call it anxiousness. Well, it depends on how you define the term, but it's like, there's a dissonance. There's a Delta between me being where I am and being out of the room. Hmm. Okay. As long as I'm appropriately engaged with getting out of the room, there's no anxiety.

I'm appropriately engaged. If I go, I want to be out of the room, but I want to sit here, but I want to be out of the room. Now you're in anxiety because you've now created inner conflict. That's unresolved and you're not appropriately engaged with. Well, as long as you're appropriately engaged with those things.

 

David Allen[00:26:55] So, you know, as soon as you create any kind of vision or goal, that's not true yet you've created that kind of dissonance. You've created a Delta between where you are and where you're going to be or where you want to be. And that's what creates movement, as long as you're moving and in appropriately engaged with it.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:27:09] That is so true. That is exactly the message of my book, a Nervous Energy Harness the Power of your Anxiety. So that is exactly what I'm, what is the message I'm trying to share with people.

 

David Allen[00:27:23] Good work.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:27:24] So, but with you and your career, I have to ask as well, because as you said, you know, you, you even mentioned breakfast a few minutes ago and it was actually one of my questions, even I was thinking like do these ideas just come to David, like over breakfast.

And so I was also curious, and some of this is so intuitive for you. Do you have like all of the next stages of your career and your business planned and mapped out or does it, does it come to you kind of in a more intuitive type of a manner?

 

David Allen[00:27:59] Yes. Both of those. I mean, it's wonderful to have goals because goals and vision, by the way, the goals envisioned the value of them is not the future that they define.

It's how those visions affect your current behaviors and perceptions.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:28:18] Can you day that again, please. I, that was really rich. I just want to hear that again. Can you say that again?

 

David Allen[00:28:22] If you had a five-year vision right now, totally where you want to be five years from now. How you'd like to be seen and perceived what you'd like to feel where you'd like to be, what their career and lifestyle and all of that.

If you had that clear vision, that's only as good as you can see, given where you are right now and your maturity and your experience move two years down toward that, that vision will change. So don't beat yourself up that that vision changed, that you didn't stick to that. Do you use that vision to get you going?

 

David Allen[00:28:59] But have two years down, you're now more mature, more sophisticated. You're going to see another vision. So your visions are going to mature as you do, but you don't beat yourself up because you didn't get them. You know, you use them, you use them to engage appropriately with the directionality. See we're telling the logical you can't stop wanting to be somewhere, do something, whatever you couldn't stop.

If you try it. As long as you're conscious, you're always trying to do something. Even if you're trying to do nothing, that's still a trying to do. Right. So you're still, you, you can't stop that. So what you want to do is direct that am I directing that appropriately? And it doesn't have to be fun. See, I'm not a motivational speaker.

 

David Allen[00:29:33] I'd sleep as long as I can. I'm being as lazy as I can. I don't, you know, I just want to get, I just want to have a clear head. So I just do whatever I need to do to get clear again. So I'm present with whatever I'm doing. So I enjoy the glass of wine. I enjoy cooking spaghetti. I enjoy walking the dog with my wife.

 

I enjoy, you know, so I'm just present with whatever's there and present to take advantage of good ideas that show up at random ad hoc moments that I capture whenever they happen. That's why a lot of what I teach is capture whatever and don't lose good ideas. I don't, I, I taught, Hey. Cause as soon as you have a good idea that you think you might want to do, but you haven't captured and clarified and organize it appropriately, it's going to keep spinning in your mind and wake you up at three o'clock in the morning

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:30:22] When hundreds truer words were never spoken.

So David, I promise you, I wouldn't keep you too long, and I know that we are coming up on the half hour. So I want to thank you for sharing so much that you have.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:30:37] Wow, an amazing interview. It was truly such a privilege to be able to talk with David. I think that the thing that he said that really stuck with me the most is that your brain is not for holding ideas.

Your brain is for having ideas. And that that's what his system is really about is about taking all the great ideas and creativity that is in your brain and learning how to just get it out there and get it organized. So that you can really free your bandwidth to keep having and cultivating and growing your ideas rather than trying to keep everything, you know, managing all those balls in the air happening in your mind.

 

Dr. Chloe Carmichael[00:31:15] And so I, that was my, one of my takeaways, but there were so many because really he's, he's such a treasure trove, so thank you so much for joining me for that. And I'm looking forward to the next time. I hope if you want to connect with me before the next time. You can certainly just queue up another episode or you can find me on social media.

I'm on YouTube. All of my video. I have video logs if I take all my blogs and I read them and share them on video. Of course, I'm also on Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, everywhere else online. So thanks again for connecting with me today. And I'm looking forward to connecting with you again.