Ep. #422: Pat Flynn on the Life-Changing Benefits of Generalism

Mike: Hello again, Mike Matthews here, and welcome to another episode of the Muscle for Life podcast. So this one is a change of pace, an interesting conversation I had with the author and educator Pat Flynn from Chronicles of Strength, and it is about the topic of generalism. And so what is that? While there are many ways to thrive in many sectors of today’s modern economy, there is no arguing that it is getting harder and harder to identify and capitalize on these opportunities.

We have robots and AI that are eliminating jobs and threatening to eliminate many more in the near future. We have globalization and the democratization of high quality education that is expanding the talent pool. And we have customers who are becoming much more selective, sophisticated, and stipulating harder to sell and retain.

Now, to overcome these obstacles, we are often told to specialize, to focus all of our energies and efforts and resources on becoming really good at one thing to the exclusion of basically everything else. And this isn’t entirely wrong headed, but for most people, it is not likely to lead to long term success and fulfillment.

But, disappointment, burnout, and failure instead. And this extends beyond merely money making as well, it really applies to just about every endeavor you could want to undertake. The bottom line is, the reign of the hyper specialist is coming to an end, and the rise of the skilled generalist is at hand.

What does that mean though? As the author of the book, how to be better at almost everything and the owner and writer over at chronicles of strength. com, Pat Flynn shares in this episode, generalism refers to acquiring a variety of know hows and abilities. And he argues this is a smarter and more practical approach to winning in today’s world.

Generalism, Pat explains, is one of the keys to making more money, to getting in better shape, and becoming more successful, effective, and happy in just about every aspect of your life. And Pat’s personal approach to generalism starts with developing skills that’ll serve you no matter where the red thread of fate takes you.

Meta skills, as Pat refers to them. All that and more in today’s episode. This is where I would normally plug a sponsor to pay the bills, but I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in, so instead I’m just going to quickly tell you about something of mine. Specifically my fitness book for men, bigger, leaner, stronger.

Now this book has sold over 350, 000 copies in the last several years and helped thousands and thousands of guys build their best bodies ever, which is why it currently has over 3, 100 reviews on Amazon with a Four and a half star average. So if you want to know the biggest lies and myths that are keeping you from achieving the lean, muscular, strong, and healthy body that you truly desire.

And if you want to learn the simple science of building the ultimate male body. Then you want to read bigger, leaner, stronger, which you can find on all major online retailers like Amazon, Audible, iTunes, Kobo, and Google play. Now, speaking of Audible, I should also mention that you can get the audio book 100 percent free when you sign up for an Audible account, which I highly recommend that you do if you’re not currently Listening to audio books.

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BLS, and that will take you to audible. And then you just click the sign up today and save button, create your account. And voila, you get to listen to bigger, leaner, stronger for free. Alrighty. That is enough shameless plugging for now. At least let’s get to the show. Mr. Pat Flynn has arrived. Welcome.

Welcome, sir. Yeah, it’s great to be here, Mike. Thanks for having me on. Yeah. Thanks for taking the time. So I thought it would be good to get you on to discuss really what you talk about in your book, which came from what you have been talking about over on your. Websites and, I get your emails and this concept of generalism versus specificity, or that’s actually not the word that you use, right?

It’s a generalism versus you actually use specifism last 

Pat: time we talked and I like 

Mike: that. What would the word there be a neologism? That’s a made up word, right? But it conveys the point. So yeah, it definitely does not exist, but hey, Shakespeare made up a bunch of words. So why can’t I? 

Pat: Yeah, no, I totally dig it.

And it’s stuck with me since we last spoke. So I think once we get around to editing the book for hopefully the second issue, maybe I’ll have to quote you in it. Do it. 

Mike: Now, just swipe, just deal it. I don’t care. That’s your thing. Okay. According to a medical dictionary, specifism is curative technique that advocates selecting homeopathic remedies without regard to a particular person’s reaction to the illness, but simply by the organ.

Hey. So that’s definitely what I’m not talking about. So actually it’s not inventing a word. It’s just inventing a definition. That’s not as bad. Yeah, which is sure. Fair enough. But anyways, yeah. So what do you mean 

Pat: by generalism? Yeah. So the general argument that I make in the book is this, and then we can go in whatever direction we want with it.

I say that for most people, most of the time in today’s economy, you’re probably better off getting good to great, or at least fairly competent. At a wide array of skills and then learning to combine those skills or stack those skills to form competitive and creative advantages in life. And that will behoove you more than trying to be a hardcore lifelong specialist.

That’s where the idea of specifism was appealing to me or really rather than trying to just be the best in the world at any one thing. And that’s my launching 

Mike: point. Yeah. And I would say that just right off the bat, yeah, I would tend to agree, especially if we’re talking about becoming the best in the world, because let’s face it, what does that mean?

Then you’re in the top. One hundred maybe of something like I think of golf, right? So at any given time, I think there’s only 120 card carrying PGA members, something like that. So you’re really just looking at those are the pros, those are the best golfers in the world. And then you have the best of the best is like whatever the top 20 or 30 to try to reach that level.

Yeah. Is for most people, it’s just not going to happen. Period. My book is not for Michael Phelps. That’s correct. Yeah, exactly. And there are a number of reasons for that. Gladwell touches on a few of them in outliers. And so I would agree, but. I would say also, though, you definitely do not need to be the best in the world at anything to live a good life and by live a good life, not only achieve professional success or financial success, but also achieve a level of skill and produce things that you’re proud of, right?

And that matters as well as it definitely in terms of personal satisfaction, because money is not very satisfying. It doesn’t matter how much you make it, but unless you’re like a huge narcissist, you’re not going to get that much satisfaction out of money. It hits diminishing that point of diminishing turns very quickly.

But what you can get a lot more satisfaction out of is doing something that is meaningful to you, doing something that you are getting. Good at and doing something that allows you to have produced something you’re proud of, right? And that the other people appreciate, and you don’t have to be the best in the world.

You have to reach the level of very good, yeah. 

Pat: That was wonderfully and beautifully said. And in terms of. A happy life or a good life. That’s a question I’m very interested in. People may not realize this, but my education background is actually not at all in fitness. That was something that I just got into on the side.

My undergrad was in economics finance, my master’s program, systematic philosophy. So what a good life means is a question I’ve always been deeply interested in, and I try to give at least a, an introduction to thinking about that question from a standpoint of virtue ethics and natural law at the beginning of the book, even though that isn’t the primary point of the book.

But it talks about a lot of the things that you just brought up is that people who’ve thought seriously about this question, almost none of them, except for maybe some nihilists here or there would say that money or fame or power or glory or any of those things constitute a good or happy life. Most of them look at virtue and character traits and dispositions that are objectively better than not.

In that sense, the answer is yes. Even if you just go back to Aristotle and read his ethics, it isn’t just one virtue, right? It’s a multitude of virtues that ultimately constitute a good life. So even there, I think you can make a strong case for generalism. My book, however, affirms what you say.

And just to give a little bit of context, I’m somebody who grew up and I think a lot of us do with this idea that specialization is an ends, but the argument that I make and present is it’s, it should be more of a means like a good generalist is a short term specialist.

I’m not saying try and do everything at once or stay sucky at most things. I want you to go all in on certain areas and really master. These areas of your life really master these skills, but then make sure that you’re rotating these skills and developing a wider base of skills or habits or dispositions or whatever you want to call it, because once you start to put those in combination, you’ll find that they’re often far more powerful and advantageous than if you just keep going deeper and deeper in a single direction.

And I learned this originally as a musician, I cut my teeth on ACDC. I wanted to be Angus young. And then as I got older, started being more serious about my guitar playing, I wanted. To be like Joe Satriani and Steve Vai and all these really pyrotechnic guitar players. Turns out most people didn’t care about how fast I was on the fret board.

Most people, when I was doing these various battle of the bands competitions, which I would always lose, they liked the guy with the Dave Matthews haircut who wasn’t as good of a guitarist as me, but he was still a good guitarist, but he could also do things that I couldn’t, he could sing, he could dance, he could entertain a crowd, he could tell jokes.

And. The lesson didn’t stick with me right away, but there was more competitive advantage for what I wanted, which was just recognition as a musician that these other guys had being more generalist in their musicianship than me trying to be a hyper specialist, most pyrotechnic Fastest on the fret board.

And like, how do you even define best is a difficult question. You gave an example in golf. I think we can winnow an idea of what that might look like, but even that is very difficult. But despite playing seven, eight hours a day, trying to be the best at what I thought was something I might be able to be the best at was not a winning strategy.

For me. So I think when you start to put it in some context, hopefully it becomes a little bit more clear if you stay. To abstract with it. It’s hard to get a handle on, but that was when I first started to think about it. Yeah. 

Mike: That, that was my next, my follow up question was going to be like, okay, let’s get specific on an example of how this might play out in life, like something practical.

So you gave that example. Let’s talk about making money, something that is on most people’s minds. What’s an example here of how generalism can. Trump specifism or how a situation that where specifism, I’m just going to continue using the word might just has a lower probability of success than a more generalist type of approach.

Yeah. I just don’t want people to take them like a naturopath or something 

Pat: like that with all the specifism. 

Mike: It was 

Pat: homeopathy. That’s you. At the homeopathy. Yeah. The homeopathist? What would be the word for that? I don’t know. Probably. Anyway. So it actually is the complete reverse story of my kind of failed career as a musician, which I still record and play music all the time.

So that’s still a big part of my life. It just isn’t what I wound up doing as a career. So when I first started going to school, Mike let’s backtrack a little bit. So I was a real fat, lazy kid growing up, right? I would play guitar. And then I would just play a bunch of video games and eat animal crackers and Chinese food and hang out with my friends.

I was very overweight, very unhealthy. I’m shocked that didn’t create the life of your dreams. Surprisingly, it did not, but it kept me distracted from sort of those existential pains of reality for a while until I had to wake up to the world, which eventually did happen through various. Social pressures and doctors telling me can’t be healthy at any size.

This was back when you couldn’t be healthy in any size. Apparently, I think you can be now. I’m still trying to catch up on that, but this was back at a time when you weren’t allowed to be healthy at any size. And my doctor told me that. And she said that if I kept carrying on like this, I might have a heart attack by the time I’m 50.

So that started to wake me up. You’re like, yeah, but I’m not 50. So why should I care? That was my first initial reaction. But at the same time, I’m like, you know what, maybe like this isn’t a very good life to be living right now. And I guess I did some deep reflection for a 13 year old at the time, I was able to think forward enough and realize just really the trajectory that I want to carry for the next 10, 20 even if I lived 80, 90 years old, like this, would that be a good life?

And ultimately I decided it wasn’t. I was way too timid to go to the weight room because, all my friends would have been like, Oh, it looks like Pat took a wrong turn trying to get to the custard stand or whatever. So I was like how do I start trying to exercise without having a bunch of egg on my face?

And I found a taekwondo studio. So I snuck my way in there. And it ended up radically transforming me in a lot of ways. It taught me self control, taught me discipline, introduced me to, to weightlifting, eventually got me to kettlebells, truly like fundamental in my fitness development. So that pushes me forward in that area of my life that once I start going to school, the way I’m paying my bills is I’m training people.

So I became a trainer and started getting all my certifications. I was actually the youngest person to ever. past the RKC cert at the time. So I was ruling the kettlebells and martial arts and all that stuff. But what happened is I started blogging about this and writing articles and whatnot, and I started getting a lot of attention.

What surprised me is I was quite aware at the time that I wasn’t the biggest or the strongest or the fastest. I wasn’t the leanest. Like I was generally very fit. But I’d never won any body building comps or figure competitions or power lifting meets or whatever. So I would think why am I standing out in a way where a lot of people who I know are just like better than me at any of these one things, and often a lot better than me are struggling to get attention.

And I realized that it ultimately came down to. My other love for music growing up was writing. So I’ve always had, I figured maybe if I didn’t become a musician, I would become a writer of some sort. I’ve always had a passion for that. So it’s my background in writing the skills I had in writing communication combined with my fitness skills, even though I was certainly not the best at any particular fitness thing, but that combination of skills and the ability to communicate fitness to people in a way that was relatable, sometimes entertaining, educational, valuable That’s what allowed me to really start to stand out, even though I wasn’t the best.

And that ultimately blossomed into the career that I have today. So it’s ironic in the sense that it was completely, I stumbled into it for one. This wasn’t anything intentional, but it was the opposite way that I approached music. And I ended up having far more success with it. 

Mike: Interesting. When you talk about writing and communication, I.

can relate to that, where all the things that I have my hands in now started with writing a book and from there, writing other books and writing articles and then recording podcasts and just communication in general, just communicating clearly to people, here’s how to get fit and people liked it. It worked.

And here I am. So when I hear that. I don’t necessarily think oh it’s just important to be good at multiple skills. What I hear is that there are certain skills that are going to be conducive to success and certain skills that are not. I could imagine people listening, thinking maybe resonating with this idea that, yeah, it doesn’t quite make sense to go all in on one thing because unless you can truly become one of the best people in the world at it, and also then leverage that correctly.

All that’s going to happen is you’re going to, you’re going to end up getting very good at something that it doesn’t really turn into much. It just doesn’t pan out. So I could see people going, yeah, it makes more sense to like, good enough, which in some cases might be very good, depending on what we’re talking about, but to get good enough at enough things that together produce the types of results that we all want from life.

And as far as writing and communication goes, I would say that’s probably one of the, that’s a skill that if you can get good at, I would say it’s like a force multiplier of sorts that over the course of my life met quite a few very successful people. I’m talking about professional success mostly here, and that doesn’t always necessarily mean financial success.

Sometimes. There’s some level of financial success, but for example, if somebody is very successful as a, as an artist, maybe I know a woman who she does done very well. I think it’s not blowing glass. I think it’s like she, it was almost like a foundry, but it’s with glass. She makes these glass sculptures and she’s done very well for herself and really made a name for herself.

And achieved a certain level of financial success, but as far as the money goes, it pales in comparison to some of the entrepreneurs that I’ve met, some of the business owners who have astronomical net worth. But one of the things that a lot of the very successful people that I’ve met have in common is they are good.

Communicators and often good salespeople, but that goes hand in hand. They’re good at communicating. They’re good at persuading. And so I would say that no matter what you want to do in life, that’s one of those things. Active literacy, being able to communicate well, being able to persuade people to sell them on not just the Nicknacks, but also yourself, your ideas, it’s going to serve you well in every aspect of your life.

So how much of your success, I’m semi familiar with your fitness business and what you’re doing, but would you agree that a lot of that is because you’re a good writer and you’re a good communicator? Yeah, 

Pat: I think we probably could have co authored my book because you’re getting right into it, and a lot of what I do in the book is I search out what I call these meta skills.

You use the term force multiplier, that’s a great way to describe them, where, look, not all skills are created equal, let’s be honest, that there are some skills in life that no matter what you’re doing or practicing, Pretty much no matter what you’re doing, if you can get a good command of these skills, like writing, like persuasion, I also would argue for logic and a few other things as well.

If you can just get a decent command of these, you don’t have to be the best in the world, but if you can just get good at them, generally good, they’re just going to make anything better. Everything you do that much better and that much easier. So I don’t even know if I can really expand upon much of what you said, because I think that you said it so well, but that’s it.

And so I explore these sort of like basement level skills or foundational skills, meta skills, force multiplier skills, whatever you want to call them and make the case that. Just as a human, no matter what you’re interested in, like these skills, at the very least, they’re not going to hurt anything they’re interesting in and of themselves.

And chances are when you attach them to the things that you’re interested in, your chances of success are going to skyrocket. And yeah, writing communication and persuasion or salesmanship are like top two. That just should be glaringly obvious to any business person 

Mike: despite that. And I totally agree. A lot of people find those things unpalatable, or at least they try to pretend like they’re, as opposed to, and this is again, me just speaking from experience, is my experience dealing, having conversations with people who were wanting to become more successful, usually business related conversations where.

They’re saying like, Oh, I just don’t really like selling or it just feels dirty if I just have a really good product or service, doesn’t that kind of sell itself when I hear that kind of stuff is they just don’t want to do the hard work. It’s easy to sit in, geek out on something that you’re into and put together.

It’s maybe not easy, but it’s fairly straightforward to geek out on something and put together a product or put together a service, especially. If we’re talking about a trinket, it’s easy to set up the logistics of, let’s say a business where it’s like, cool, I have this trinket and I’m going to sell it.

And so I opened my corporation and I came up with a name and I paid someone to make a website, all the foundational level stuff. But the hard work is how do I get people to care? How do I rise above the competition? How do I communicate effectively? How do I persuade? So that’s just one of the things.

I get asked fairly often. Usually people emailing me asking for business advice, and I don’t know how many people have reached out to me, and I’ve given that pitch, and I’m trying to sell them on becoming a good marketer, becoming a good communicator, becoming a good salesperson, and I don’t know how many times I’ve recommended, like I’ve read over the years many books and taken quite a few courses back in the Frank Kern days, the big, yeah, old Riding in the video with the camera pointed at his face.

Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve studied a lot of Kearns material, Eben Pagan back when he was doing that kind of thing, studying his material, just internet marketers who are still around, but that business model is dead. And because no one’s willing to pay 3, 000 for a course when you could just read a couple books instead.

But my point is, so I send people a list. I’ll be like here, they start with these 10 books. These here are the classics. This is really going to give you a great crash course in marketing. Maybe I’ve heard back a few times, but basically never even heard back. And then I was like, okay, maybe 10 books is too much.

I’ll just recommend five. Isn’t that silly? 10 books is too much. I’ll recommend five. I’ll recommend five books. Here are the five, huh. Scientific advertising, influence, breakthrough advertising. Just if you just read these, I promise you, read these. And. Pull out the nuggets, the practical principles and just start doing them.

And yeah, you’re going to be bad at first, but just work at it and you will start making sales. You will, I promise. Even with five books, I rarely hear back. And 

Pat: it’s a good litmus test though. Isn’t it Mike? Because if you aren’t willing to read 10 books on something, you’re just not serious about it.

You’re not anything that I’ve been seriously interested in that I want to get better at 10 books is that’s nothing. It’s 

Mike: nothing 

Pat: I used to 

Mike: start with telling people, okay, whatever it is that you want to get good at, if you actually care, commit your first thing. Commit to reading 25 books on it and go find the classic books.

Not the later, not the more recent stuff, which are, yeah, not Pat Flynn’s book not go back. Go way back, . There’s something to be said for that though. I think, not in your case, but in general where a lot of new books are just embroider upon past stuff. It’s literally somebody who just went and read.

Maybe 10 books, 15, maybe they broke 20. If they’re really doing their research, quote unquote, and they just, of the classics of the books that have withstood the test of time for a reason, and then it’s just spun around and put into different words and, maybe modernized and that’s fine, but I prefer when I’m getting into something like when I got into golf, that’s what I did.

I read, I ended up reading. Dozens of books on it, but I went back. I started with Hogan’s books. I started with I’d have to look. I don’t remember. I remember Hogan’s clear. There were some other older ones as well. And then worked my way forward, but I found that I can’t remember a single person when I told them that they responded positively, it was always like immediate sag in emotion Oh, 

Pat: Oh, so you didn’t have that one like quick trick that was going to do it all for me.

Okay I’ll go email the next guy I can find then. Who’s going to pitch me on joining his mastermind to show me the secrets. You made a ton of good points in there, so I’ll see if I can hit on a few of them. The first going way back, the idea is a lot of people have this wrong impression of sales or persuasion in their mind of some dude at a, Use car dealership with an oversized suit.

So you just got to, first off, knock that off of your head. 

Mike: Maybe a better example or archetype is a politician these days. Exactly. Yeah. They’re hardly indistinguishable at this point, but the political class, we don’t have to go down that road, but I have so little respect for the political class and this applies to both sides of the aisle.

Just. Politicians in general, I have so little respect for them. 

Pat: We can go there if we want, but we’ll stay on this track for at least a little bit until we digress enormously. You read the best on persuasion and read people like Carnegie or many of the books that you talked about. And what they’ll quickly get you to understand is a, a lot of it comes down to building a relationship with people.

So there has to be a, first off, I don’t think that’s something that can be done in, A not genuine way and be sustainable. Like you really do have to care about the people you’re serving and what you’re doing. If you want to have any chance at being persuasive, I think you’d have to be something of a sociopath to make it successful.

The books you recommended are all great. And I would say, in my book, you’re going to come out with a pretty hefty reading list. I’m not there to teach you the ins and outs of copywriting, but I am there to tell you why copywriting is an important skill. And where are some really good places to start with that?

You brought up the good ones, but Kern, let’s go to Kern’s man. Back further than current. Let’s go to Kennedy. Let’s go to Gary Halbert and these guys read the Boron letters, read the ultimate sales. Like those should be in your pile of books. But fundamentally, I think what you’re saying is that business success is really a by product of skill.

And that’s a huge point that I’m trying to make in my book. And if we go to Halbert, one of his favorite quotes of mine. That always stuck with me when I was young. And I first read this by him. He’s look, the skill that I have as a communicator, as a copywriter prevents me from ever being poor, I can never be poor.

I might be broke if I act irresponsibly with my money, which. We all know he did more than one occasion, but he can never be poor because he is possessed of such a rich and powerful skill that at any point he was determined enough, he could write those sales letters and he could generate himself income.

That’s 

Mike: something I also try to explain to people is if you’re going to be in business in any capacity, Just become a good marketer. Do yourself the favor. It’s great to, to have a product or service that you’re proud of and that you stand behind. And that really is something worthwhile. But if you’re not a good marketer, you’re just never going to do well.

You just won’t. Or if you do, it’s like you’re Going to be by the grace of God, like it’s going to be that Kim Kardashian stumbles on your product or service. And it’s Oh my God, everyone needs to know about this and starts tweeting about it every day for a month straight. And that’s still marketing.

So it’s not like you avoided marketing. You just got lucky with it. Yeah, but maybe, whatever it is that you’re selling, let’s say you didn’t do a good job selling it, but for some reason, the right person stumbled on it. And often what happens with those kinds of things, though, is good marketers stumble upon products and services, go to the people and say, Hey, I could help you, but then you’re gonna have to give up one.

I would never count on that. Cause it doesn’t happen often, but two, if it did happen, you have to give up. But anyway, sorry to interject, but. 

Pat: No, it’s a great point. It’s you might have an awesome trinket to go back to one of my favorite terms, and once somebody gets ahold of that, or once somebody sees that, like the value might be glaringly obvious, but unless you’re doing something to get eyeballs on that, to make your unique selling proposition and the unique value of that trinket overwhelmingly clear, you’re at the very best putting yourself at an enormous and unnecessary disadvantage.

Yeah, man. I so deeply agree with, I don’t want to get in like to the mutual admiration society here, but I so deeply agree with everything that you’ve been saying. So I don’t want to reiterate the points too much, but if nothing else, think of these as force multipliers, you do need a fundamentally good product and a good service.

Cause then if you have good marketing on top of crap, you’re just speeding up the rate at which everybody discovers that you sell crap. And that’s not a good thing either. 

Mike: And you’re just doing people a disservice. You’re Treating people in a way that you would not like to be treated. And the more you do that, I do believe that the more pain you’re going to experience in your life.

You can call it karma. You can call it, I don’t know. I actually don’t know what the Christian version of that would be. 

Pat: Sure. Sin. Yeah. Just being straight up deceitful. You’re lying, right? You’re lying. You’re being deceitful. That’s wrong. Whatever you again, unless you’re like a nihilist or something, then like most people just inherently realize that’s not a good thing to do.

We don’t want to do that. It’s not good for you either. People won’t find fulfillment or contentment lying. So it doesn’t matter how much money you bring in. You’re never going to be able to buy yourself that good night’s sleep, right? With maybe with an evalium or something. Yeah. Chemically, you might be able to induce it.

Mike: Yeah.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. What are some of these other meta skills, these force multiplier skills that you talk about?

Pat: So writing and communication is a big one and persuasion is the other one and they aren’t technically the same, right? So you can have somebody who’s a good writer, but a poor salesperson and a poor copywriter. There’s a number of good examples of people who are great copywriters, but they’re terrible writers.

And then you also have people who are great writers, but terrible copywriters are terrible at persuasion. So just because somebody is an awesome, fiction author doesn’t mean that they’re going to be able to write a sales letter and just because somebody can write a sales letter doesn’t mean they’re going to be able to write the Lord of the Rings.

Even nonfiction, even how to stuff, 

Mike: just because you can write a good sales letter doesn’t mean that you could write a good how to book. 

Pat: Yeah, this is absolutely true. So I think the shining examples, like people like Gary Halpert, right? Somebody who is a good writer in his own regard, like he’s got an awesome pro style.

He’s funny. He’s witty. He’s entertaining. You would just read him for entertainment. But then is Absolutely. So compelling when he writes copy. So I would say you need to study these independently and Halbert would say the same thing. And he would tell you exactly what to do, how to do it. Like you need to sit down and you need to copy by hand the writing of other great writers.

Just as a musician, you need to sit down and you need to listen to that ACDC song and you need to try and figure out these passages and ingrain it into your system. Absolutely. And it goes back to what you’re saying before. Yeah, there’s some grinding here. There’s some hard work we have to do, but if you want to be great, you have to emulate people who are also great.

So I just want to say, we blended those two, but they are technically different skills. You have writing and communication and you have persuasion. And when you put them together, that’s where you get. Copywriting in its most golden form. The other one I try to make a strong case for is logic.

Obviously this is something that I think society is severely lacking today. Logic is just being able to reason in straight channels. It’s making the rules of good reasoning, explicit, having a study of that, I think will help you enormously in everything you do because writing itself is thinking on paper.

So if you can’t think straight, you’re probably going to have difficulty writing straight. It’s also going to help you just make better decisions in your life in general, not be suckered in by these specifics. on people or whatever, be able to weigh arguments, be able to weigh positions and guide your life according to good reason, also enlighten other people along the way.

I make a pretty strong case for that. If nothing that I’m just so dismayed to see at how lacking it is in today’s society, but I do really believe that it’s something that again, as a force multiplier, that will just magnify and benefit people in ways that far extend beyond the specific study of that discipline itself.

Mike: Could you talk a little bit more about that? What are some of the, maybe it could be myths or maybe it could be mistakes or just key practical insights that you share in terms of logic and reason? 

Pat: Yeah, it’s there’s only nine or so laws of rules of logic.

It’s not like an, it’s enormously complicated, at least. Starting off. If people can just understand some of the basic fundamental differences, say between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning, and we can go into some detail here, if you want, maybe just for the sake of defining. Yeah. So deductive reasoning, then if.

By the way, let me give another reading recommendation here as we get into this. There’s a great book called Socratic Logic by Peter Kreeft. He was at Boston College for a while and he’s actually got a two page cheat sheet. It’s a huge textbook and it’s really good, but he’s got a two page cheat sheet that will summarize it.

It’s all of logic in two pages. I wish I had it in front of me because it would make it more concise here. Inductive reasoning is what we use into science is that gives us sort of probabilities, right? We go out, we gather data points. And from those data points, we reason upward to some type of general theory.

And then this is how science works, right? Once we gather data and we reason up to some general theory, we then reason deductively down to, this is the arch of science to making predictions, testing hypotheses, et cetera. So deductive reasoning then is where you have a series of premises. And if All of the premises are true and the logic is valid.

So if you have formal validity and soundness, then the conclusion follows necessarily. So the classic logic one on one that you have there is, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man. If you believe those two premises are true, then it follows with certainty. That Socrates is mortal, right? So that’s one type of reasoning.

The inductive is where we actually go out and we make observations. We see swans and it seems like every swan is white. So we reason up to a general theory that all swans are white, but that doesn’t give us certainty. It only ever gives us. Probability, right? So it’s different because there might always be that case, the classic case that we go somewhere and then we discover that black swan and we have that one counter example, and then the theory is just blown to rags and bits.

This is just important. So people have a correct understanding of not just how logic works, but also how science works and how it interacts with philosophy and this discipline, so they’re just not taken in by a bunch of crap, especially online. Science can give us extremely strong probabilities and extremely strong predictive success.

But you might want to, be a little wary of people who’s so flagrantly, talk about settled sciences and things like that. It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what science does. 

Mike: Yeah. Or a study proves blah period done as if this one study is the entire weight of the evidence, which is never the case, really.

But that’s obviously common to where I’d say, Hey here’s how this works. And here’s this one study that shows that I understand sometimes for the purpose of brevity sometimes, or it may be implied, like if I’m saying, Oh, research shows that this is how energy balance works, for example. And I might cite a study or two, if people want to kind of fact check me on it, but I think it’s implied that.

There is more to the evidence here. It’s not just these two studies for someone who wants an unusually in those cases, I’m trying to link to like reviews or meta analyses for the people who really want to dive into it. But it’s common though, for people to see often not even read the study. I’m thinking of some social media, quote unquote, influencers who will just share media headlines, really like study shows that marijuana actually raises IQ.

Done as if everybody just done. That’s it. I 

Pat: settled science hashtag because science is always my favorite one. So yeah, I know you make great points and like none of this is to at all degrade the scientific enterprise. It’s just having a proper understanding and context of what it is. Science gives us enormous amounts of knowledge when properly done and ethically conducted and enormous amounts of predictive success, but it’s also abused by nincompoops, charlatans, wannabe influencers and stuff like that.

So logic can help. you chop that up because if you might actually have great research and a lot of really good data, but people might be making bad inferences from it as well. So it’s important to be able to analyze things from a couple of different perspectives. If nothing else, especially in the fitness and nutrition industry, where everybody’s trying to push so many different angles and arguments, just having some type of grass on what logic is, how to study it formally, being familiar with at least some of the more common.

fallacies that you typically see, ad hominins, non sequiturs, red herrings, things like that. Just because so much of it, Mike, as is so personality driven and some of the worst people to argue with. And some of the worst people to deal with are like comedian types because they’re funny and they’re rhetorically effective and people are attracted to them.

But just because somebody is rhetorically effective and funny, it doesn’t mean they’re making a good argument. Just because somebody has six pack abs doesn’t mean they’re making a good argument. Maybe they aren’t, but their abs have nothing to do with it. 

Mike: Humor is especially effective as one of those influence hacks, so to speak.

Science is one of them. History is another. If you can appeal to science and history persuasively, you can greatly increase the chances of people listening to you. And humor is huge, too. If you can make people laugh for some reason, it just cuts right through critical filters. And it makes it much easier to influence people.

And those three things are agnostic and morally agnostic or amoral in my mind, because they can be used positively. And I try to use them, it’s a blend, like I lean heavily on science and a lot of my stuff. And then sometimes I guess if The spirits will me, I’ll try to mix in some humor as well.

And some history, if it seems applicable. So I use them myself, but I’m not trying to sell people on bullshit, but if I were, it definitely makes it easier. 

Pat: It goes back to the generalist thing. If you’ve reasoned your position through and you feel like I have really good information, that’s going to really benefit people then taking advantage of those rhetorical devices can do a great service to humanity, right?

Because now you’re not going to be boring. You can present. Your case reasonably, but also in an entertaining way that people will be enriched by and enjoy reading. So you’re absolutely right. I love humor. I know if I would call myself an inherently funny person or not, but I do try to use humorous devices when presenting my material because I genuinely believe that my material is entertaining.

Helpful. It’s reasonable. So I want to make it as palatable as I possibly can. So you can start to see the synergy between just even the three things that we talked about, where if you can start to stack these things together, you’ll be able to make a really quite compelling case. And even in the sales process, we know that a lot of people act first on emotions and storytelling and humor and things like that. And then they’ll try and rationalize or justify things by logic afterward. So if you at least have the logical structure and good arguments for why a position is correct or why it’s worth investing in a certain thing, you’re just going to.

Help that part of the sales process automatically anyway. So even if we just take it from a pure business standpoint, ethically conducted, of course, it certainly would not contend anything other than that. There’s immense harmony and immense utility in just those three skills. We’ve already talked about right there.

Totally 

Mike: agree. Are there any other. Force multiplier meta skills that are in the book that are top of mind or that stand out that it would be worth discussing. 

Pat: They’re maybe not as sexy in their own right because they don’t get talked about. I love talking philosophy and logic because there’s so many ways we can go with it, but I think there’s certain other skills like just being able to focus.

Mike, like just being able to focus on a task and really developing that skill, either through specific practices like meditation, or there’s a number of ways that we can do it. There’s various active meditations. I think I first really learned to focus by being a musician and just being so single mindedly intent on one activity at a time has made me an effective.

Craftsmen really, because I can sit down and I can get something done without always having to feel like I need to check my phone or my inbox or see what somebody else is up to or doing. And when I look out at people today, trying to get things done, even at the gym, like they can’t go a set without texting somebody, they can’t even start until they find their precious jam on their iPhone.

And that to me is, seems like a fundamental problem where if we could just get some focus, some like real good old fashioned focus. So you can single mindedly attack something that is definitely a force multiplier. And that’s something that even though I think I learned it primarily as a musician, I didn’t really learn to apply it elsewhere until martial arts, where there’s a huge emphasis on focus, intentionality, precision, control, not being distracted, all these types of things.

So again, maybe not the sexiest thing to talk about, but sometimes the fundamentals are a little boring, a little 

Mike: obvious, but they’re never The fundamentals are never sexy. And that’s one of the downsides of selling fundamentals. I think it requires above average marketing skills to make the fundamentals sexy enough to sell.

And it’s how do you package them? It comes back to some of those things that like what I’ve tried to do since the beginning is include. So there’s always. Science, if I can include science and talk about studies and interesting experiments that have been done anecdotes, right? And sometimes they’re historical anecdotes.

People in the past, especially other people will immediately defer to because Oh, if Benjamin Franklin wrote about it or Benjamin Franklin went through a similar situation, I better pay attention. And then humor as well, trying to make it entertaining. But I totally agree that focus is one of those Especially now more so probably than ever before is a meta skill that if you can’t get it and I would say, what would you think?

I would say getting it is you have to be able to do at least 20 to 30 minutes of focused work at a time before maybe needing to take a break. And as you get even better at it, I’ll speak for myself. I drink water throughout the day. So inherently like probably every 30 to 60 minutes, I’m getting up to pee, honestly.

I probably don’t go much longer than an hour and a half focused on something before even if I’m like completely in that deep focus flow state where my bladder pulls me out of it, but I would say what, if you can go for an hour without checking your phone, without flipping around on the internet or social media or whatever, you can do well, I think it was from.

Erickson, whose research was misrepresented in Malcolm’s some Gladwell’s outliers, the whole 10, 000 an hour rule, which is not that cut and dried. Yeah. But in, in his research, he found that even among the highest performers of multidisciplinary, there were musicians, there were business people, there were scientists, there were academics.

I think it was about two hours of true deep focus. Work per day is really, that was their limit and thought they didn’t do additional work, but the most high value, fully focused, really flow state work was a couple hours a day. And so Cal Newport and his book, deep work, I think his number is about four hours a day.

He says for himself, like he knows if he can get four hours of real focused work done per day, he can achieve the things that he wants to achieve. And so the reason I bring those numbers up is those have just stuck with me as like a good benchmark. How am I doing? Can I go two to four hours a day of some of the more focused work for me is writing, obviously researching doing podcasts to some degree, because like I’m not on my email when you’re talking, I’m focused on the conversation.

I’m really trying to be the best interviewer I can and things like that. And then lower focus work is email meetings. Your random administrative things. Yeah, 

Pat: no, I think two to four hours is really just about right. And I think the things that I focus on most throughout the day is writing. And there’s times like when I’m writing a book where yeah, maybe I’ll write for seven hours a day, but it’s so painful that would not be 

Mike: sustainable.

You’re grinding in the end. And I’ve been there myself and I’m sure we’re the same in that. Like I keep going past that point where I know there’s diminishing returns, but I am going to get more words on the page and it is going to get done faster. It may not be my best work. My best work is going to be that first couple hours, but I know that the next couple hours are not going to be shit.

I’m not just going to delete it the next day. It might just need a bit more editing and it’s not as good, but Hey. Yeah, and we’ll call 

Pat: it a strategic overreach. And every once in a while, those can be quite useful, whether in the gym or in writing or music. But yeah, I would say, most days I’m writing between two to four hours a day and my guitar playing isn’t quite as extensive as it used to be, but I do try to get somewhere between 40 minutes to an hour of really good practice in per day.

And the funny thing is when you actually set restrictions and this is one of the. Principles I talk about my book, it often increases practice efficiency. So a question that I think is useful for people to ask, I borrow this from Dan. John and I were just talking about this on my show yesterday is just a little thought experiment.

People can run is if you only had three days a week, 15 minutes a day to reach your goal, what would you do? What are those vitally few activities that you would do to reach your goal? I look back when I was young. Yeah, I would play guitar seven, eight hours a day, but how productive was that seven to eight hours a day?

Really? Honestly, really. And the answer is not that productive. So my practice sessions are shorter now, but they’re very focused, very productive, same thing with the gym. I’m not in the gym for as much time as I used to be in college, but I’m fitter, stronger, and way more focused and productive with the time I do spend in the gym now.

So yeah, two to four hours on the biggest task of the day. The most important thing sounds about right to me. And then, you have these other kind of pockets of. Other skills or areas of your life that you’re focused on that can maybe they won’t be as much as that primary thing, but they should still be dedicated.

They should still be an area of 

Mike: focus. That’s a Parkinson’s law, right? The work expands to fill the time available, basically. So as far as focus goes, what are some tips you have for people to improve their ability to focus? 

Pat: I would have two things. One is just finding something you’re interested in enough that you actually want to focus on it.

That’s tip number one. That’s worth 

Mike: emphasizing. As far as reading goes, for example, don’t read stuff that you don’t like, unless you have to, unless it’s something like, occasionally for work, I do have to slog through things where it’s boring, but I need to get some information. So it just is what it is.

But outside of that, I always am trying to. Find stuff to read that genuinely interests me because yeah, that makes it a lot easier. 

Pat: Yeah. So I’ll read through a ton of books, really dense ones. And it’s not that difficult because I just, I’m so interested in the material. Same thing. Like when I was young, it’s not that I was like a super discipline focused kid.

I actually wasn’t, I had trouble focusing on pretty much everything except the guitar and video games, but I focused on guitar and video games because I loved them. I was really interested, but. The problem was then when I had to start trying to do things that I wasn’t interested in, then I had to deepen my focus abilities and be able to expand them because let’s be honest, there’s areas of life where you’re going to have to focus on things you don’t want to do, and you’re not all that interested in if you want to get past a certain point.

And that’s where martial arts was really helpful for me and getting into meditation and various meditation practices and just actively working on forming a new relationship and response to your thoughts that often come in automatically and uninvitedly into your head to various feelings and emotions that also come in automatically and uninvitedly and learning to respond to them in a way rather than react just out of Pure disposition.

So much of our distractions are so unconscious. So we’re like studying logic makes the rules of good reasoning, explicit practicing meditation makes all of these like unconscious or below the level of awareness distractions explicit. So we can begin to identify them. Become aware of them and start to change our dispositions in relationship to them.

Start to change our entire relationship to our thoughts, to our feelings. And this has enormous benefits far beyond focus. We’ve talked stress, anxiety. I probably don’t need to make much of a case for the benefits of meditation in general. 

Mike: What’s funny about meditation is sorry, just to chime in is promoted as meditation in the mainstream is really just.

Being there comfortably for 10 minutes. That’s actually all we’re talking about. We’re not talking about what Buddhist monks are doing to try to achieve Nirvana. 

Pat: Yeah. I’m not like saying you need to go join a transcendental meditation group. I’m just saying it’s just basic mindfulness practice.

Now there are a lot of if you go in like the Zen tradition, that’s where you’ll find Buddhism is a interesting collection of different beliefs and practices, but in Zen, you’ll find a lot of what we’re talking about. Basic mindfulness. Just being present, being aware, paying attention to what’s going on.

Exactly what you just said. It’s just like being here rather than 

Mike: somewhere else. And again, we’re just talking maybe 10 to 20 minutes a day of what you might call it a breathing exercise or body scan or whatever. Really? All we’re talking about is just be. Present and be comfortable for 10, 15, maybe 20 minutes and control your attention.

Just put it on something like your breathing or, different parts of your body or whatever. And then, of course, you get better at that. You’re going to get better at putting your attention on your work for 20 minutes and just keeping it there as opposed to having it constantly. Being pulled in all directions.

Yeah, 

Pat: that’s absolutely right. So I think while finding things that are of great interest to you can help get you started. I think putting a little extra attention energy into something like meditation, something like a mindful and I say something like because I don’t want to restrict people to too narrow of a window here, but something like a basic mindfulness meditation practice is what can help bridge that gap.

Mike: I like it. I agree. Sam. I think this might be a good place to just wrap up the discussion because I’m sure there’s quite a bit more in the book, but think people can go get the book if they want to learn more. I’m going to put the title of the book in the intro, cause I realized we haven’t even mentioned it yet.

So I want people to know coming into it. What book we’re talking about, but for people who maybe skip the intro, what’s the name of the book? Where can they get it? And then where can people find you and what else do you have coming? What’s new and exciting? 

Pat: Yeah, thanks Mike. So the book’s called How to Be Better At Almost Everything.

It’s green, it’s got a green cover, so you can’t miss it if you say it somewhere. You can get it anywhere, find it in probably most bookstores, but Amazon would be the easiest and probably most efficient place for most people. So I would just recommend that me as for where to find me a couple of different places.

My website chronicles of strength. com as Mike hinted earlier, I communicate most frequently through email. So I think I share some of my best content through that platform. You can join that through my website, or I have a page. 101 kettlebellworkouts. com. That’s the numbers. One zero one kettlebellworkouts.

com. So you’ll compendium of Pat Flynn style kettlebell workouts, and that’ll put you on my email list. And that’ll disseminate all the other places that I’m doing stuff. The other primary one being my podcast, the Pat Flynn show, which you can find on iTunes or Stitcher or Google play or wherever you listen, so those would be the primary ones.

The primary places. Awesome. 

Mike: Thanks for taking the time, Pat. I appreciate it. It was a great discussion. Pleasure, Mike. Thanks. Hey there. It is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick review of it on iTunes or wherever you’re listening from.

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