How to build good habits and change bad ones

The Jason Clause Show

I get in the car, start the engine and an hour later, I’m at work. I don’t remember the trip.

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I’m not alone, chances are the same thing happend to you. It’s a habit and when you think about it, that’s a little scary. Driving a car is not a simple thing to do. Research suggests that some huge percentage of our day is nothing more than a series of habits, complex routines that are triggered by a cue and reinforced with a reward.

In his book, “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg helps us understand the mechanics of a habit and ultimately provides a framework for creating new habits as well as changing existing ones.

In this episode my guest Samuel Hatton and I talk about:

• The habit loop
• How one Ad Man used the habit loop to change everyone’s behavior and make himself stinking rich!
• The fuel that drives a habit
• Much much more

Show Notes:

• Author Charles Duhigg
• The Power of Habit on Amazon
• The Power of Habit on Audible – Free Trial
• Pepsodent Except from the book on www.slate.com
• Josh Carroll’s Ice Bucket Challenge

Samuel Hatton’s contact information:

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Website

Transcript

Jason Clause: Well hello everybody and welcome to The Jason Clause Show. This is our Season One, Episode Four, so we’ve actually created four episodes now officially. My name is Jason Clause. I am a small business manager. Most of you probably know me as the sales guy at Endsight. What you might not already know is that I also manage a small team. I have four really great guys that work for me and this audio cast or this podcast, is really aimed at people like me. People that are individual contributors and also managing a small group of people as a team leader or as a manager, the idea being that we need a place to share ideas that are tailor made for us because it’s hard to find. So the podcast is intended to bring you continual sort of ideas, strategies, tactics, things that you can put to use almost immediately without having to go through a whole bunch of additional work.

Jason Clause: Today I’m going to be talking about a book that I’ve actually re-read. This is my second time through. It’s called The Power of Habits. It’s a New York Time bestseller by Charles Duhigg. I’ve got a whole bunch of links included in the presentation and on the show notes for you. And this is a first for the Jason Clause Podcast. We have a guest. Samuel Hatton. Welcome Samuel.

Samuel Hatton: Thank you. I’m really happy to be here.

Jason Clause: I’m happy you’re here too because we’re not doing anything else. We’re in the offices here at Endsight and we’ve got the room set up to do podcasting. Engineers are walking by kind of looking at us, wondering what’s going on. So when this gets posted we’ll make sure everybody knows about it. We’re doing a podcast. Samuel works for me on the Sales and Marketing team. It was almost four years now, right?

Samuel Hatton: Right. Coming up on four years.

Jason Clause: Yeah. And Samuel produces all of our videos, does all of our blog development, writes most of them but but also edits the ones that are written by other folks. Just a great guy. The reason I asked him here isn’t because he’s a great guy. It’s because Samuel is a habit machine. I’m going to get to that in a minute. I actually have a different word for you that you already know, but everyone else doesn’t know. What we’re going to do on this podcast, the book is too big, there’s too much to go through, we’re just going to bite off a little bit, maybe review some of the key concepts about how you create and build habits, how you change habits, things like that. And then I’ve got some announcements to go through. So moving onto to to Samuel’s bio. Sammy, instead of me doing it, why don’t you just kind of introduce yourself.

Samuel Hatton: I think you’re much better at introducing me honestly.

Jason Clause: All right, I’ll introduce you then. So I’ve already kind of done it right? You work for me. You’re awesome. I’m calling you the habit engineer and you really like that, right?

Samuel Hatton: You know, actually I think habit machine is even better.

Jason Clause: You like habit machine better?

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: Well there’s no time to change it for this one, but maybe we’ll put that on your business card. So we’ll have habit machine.

Samuel Hatton: All right. That’s not a bad idea.

Jason Clause: But what I mean by that is that from the day that Samuel got to Endsight, I noticed he’s continually applying the concepts from this book and I don’t think you had read the book yet. Or had you?

Samuel Hatton: I have no idea. I go through lots of books, but this is one that I have read for sure.

Jason Clause: But Samuel has a, and it doesn’t matter, like in almost every aspect of his life, Samuel is deliberately trying to create habits from stuff. Like the one, I don’t even know if it’s a habit, but maybe the habit is to avoid this, but for a while Samuel was giving himself cold showers in the morning.

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: Talk about that-

Samuel Hatton: Yeah, that was a habit, yes.

Jason Clause: That was deliberate. He wasn’t trying to punish himself. Talk about that a little bit. Because I would never do that.

Samuel Hatton: Right. So, I was trying a lot of natural ways to to wake up early without coffee and that was really difficult. So one of those things that I incorporated in my morning routine is an ice cold shower and that definitely wakes you up. It’s like a splash in the face with cold water, but over your whole body. It’s funny because the ice bucket challenge was going around when I was first doing that, and I was like, “You know what? I do ice bucket every day. Come on.”

Jason Clause: You know what we need to do? We need to include Josh’s ice bucket challenge in the show notes.

Samuel Hatton: Oh yeah. That would be great.

Jason Clause: One of our owners here at Endsight did an ice bucket challenge, Samuel produced it and recorded it and put it up. It’s pretty good.

Samuel Hatton: Yeah, we had help from the whole company with that one.

Jason Clause: Yeah. So we’ll include that. Well cool. Just a disclaimer here. I’m not advocating cold showers as a way to be a better manager. I mean it might work, but I certainly don’t do it. I’m also going to include, if you want to connect with Sam … Sam, you’re actually doing life coaching too.

Samuel Hatton: Yeah, I have a few clients to actually build habits.

Jason Clause: Okay. You want to plug your website or anything like that?

Samuel Hatton: Yeah. It’s samuelhatton.com and I’ll make sure to put a button there for-

Jason Clause: Okay. Yeah, we’ll include all of Sam’s contact stuff in the show notes so you can connect with him directly.

Samuel Hatton: Thank you. That’d be good.

Jason Clause: Yeah. All right, so getting right into it. The book that I want to cover tonight, it’s called The Power of Habit. It’s written by Charles Duhigg. We’ll include a whole bunch of other links. What I really like about a lot of the books that are coming out now is the companion websites because there’s all these study guides and aids and so I’ll include some links there. What we’re going to talk about today is actually in the study guide off of Charles’ website. The book was published by Random House and it’s a Bestseller. So we’re not the only ones that are saying it’s good. Other people are saying it’s good too. Smarter, brighter, more influential people are saying it.

Jason Clause: So we’re going to start off with just kind of getting into the case of why the book’s a good book. Charles does this incredible job of really kind of breaking down a habit into its component pieces and then helping the readers to understand how you can manipulate existing habits or create new habits. And he starts off with a whole bunch of really cool science about how habits get formed and in what part of the brain they get formed in. And the first bullet point I’ve got is who is EP? EP stands for a patient that was studied, and I can’t remember the guy’s name, I’m spacing on it right now, what his real name is, but he had a brain injury that disrupted his short term memory. So he had no short term memory.

Jason Clause: And where I’m going with this is that memory has very little to do with habit forming. Habits happen without us knowing about it. The other thing that’s really interesting is that some grand percentage of what we do every day, we think that we’re in complete control of it and we are in control of our habits, right, but a lot of what we’re doing is autopilot. It’s a bunch of compact habits put together.

Samuel Hatton: I hear for most people it’s 40% of their entire day.

Jason Clause: Yeah. It’s some huge percentage. Way more than what I thought. Because we like to think that I’m in complete control. But when you think about it, most of us are commuters. How many times have you gotten in the car and ended up at work and not really remembered how you got there?

Samuel Hatton: Right. Not even thinking about it.

Jason Clause: Right. You were just on autopilot. The habit took over. And what was really cool from the beginning of this book and kind of looking at this patient who had lost the ability to have his short term memory, it was gone, he only remembered his life up to the accident, and then everything after that he would forget in a couple of minutes. What was really interesting about this story was one of the researchers that was working with EP came to realize that he was still developing habits even without the memory. So the example that hit me really hard was because of his injury, his wife had to move him to another place. And so now every day, as far as he was concerned, it was a brand new living room and he would watch TV. And to begin with, someone would have to help him figure out where the bathroom was, but over time, the researcher began to notice that EP was, you know, he needed to do his business, and he would get up and go to the bathroom and then come back and not need to be instructed as to where the …

Samuel Hatton: Bathroom was.

Jason Clause: Where the bathroom was. So he was forming habits and that’s because the part of the brain that does this is part of our most primitive brain. It’s called the basal ganglia. And it’s-

Samuel Hatton: Or aka, reptilian brain [inaudible 00:00:09:41]-

Jason Clause: Or reptilian brain I guess is another way to look at it.

Samuel Hatton: … name on the street.

Jason Clause: Yeah, and when you think about the fact that our brain just sucks energy from our bodies, right?

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: So the idea that we’ve got this mechanism that goes way back in our evolution, whose sole purpose is to try to conserve energy, that’s really what a habit is, right? You have this behavior that once it’s encoded and the neuro pathways are created, it just exists and it doesn’t require as much energy or willpower or requires no conscious effort on the brain’s part, freeing up that energy for all other parts of the body, which I just think is amazing. So the idea being the more that I can habituate, the more good habits I can create for myself, the more I can get done, the more brain power and willpower I’m going to have to handle tougher decisions throughout the day. It’s just really fascinating to me.

Samuel Hatton: Right. You can spend a lot of time developing a lot of different types of habits, but the ones that are best, what I hear from you, the ones that are best are the ones that set you up for the better habits. So like a solid morning routine would be a great example of a good habit that you’d want to develop to affect the rest of your entire day.

Jason Clause: Right. And I think we’ll get to some examples maybe a little bit later on. I think what I want to talk talk about now is kind of the mechanics of a habit because what is it exactly? Duhigg does a great job of just kind of diagramming a habit for you. There’s three component pieces to it. There’s a cue, and so an example of a cue might be, I get in the car and turn the key on, headed to work. There is a behavior, there is me driving, or routine, me driving to work., And then there is a reward, I arrive at work, right?

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: So the cue let’s the basal ganglia, the neural pathway, know, okay here, this is the beginning of the routine. I do the routine, the encoded routine, and then there’s some sort of reward that you get. And it can be all different kinds of things. Sugar water, or a feeling of self worth, or just getting accomplished what you want to get accomplished. And when you think about it, that’s really, really simple, right? You have cues, you have rewards, and then in the middle you have the routine or the behavior that’s habituated. Just on the face of that, I found that very powerful because knowing that, I can manipulate different parts of that model to change the desired outcome, or at least that’s what I thought initially. It turns out that there’s a specific way to do it.

Jason Clause: I want to use an example from the book and I don’t know how many of us are familiar with the toothpaste Pepsodent. I wasn’t, I had to go look it up, I did some Google searches and found some really cool vintage ads about Pepsodent. But here’s the really interesting thing, people didn’t always brush their teeth. I didn’t know that. I mean, I know they didn’t do it in Britain, they still don’t do it in Britain apparently. But in the United States, there was a time when less than 10% of the population did brush their teeth. That’s not really a world I want to live in, to be honest.

Samuel Hatton: Wait, you’re saying that less than 10% of the population did?

Jason Clause: Did brush their teeth, right.

Samuel Hatton: Oh my gosh.

Jason Clause: Lots of tooth decay.

Samuel Hatton: That sounds horrible.

Jason Clause: And it wasn’t until an ad man named Claude Hopkins came along to change that. And he made a fortune changing that but he also made life, I think, a lot more pleasant for us. So thank you Claude Hopkins, for preying upon the public and taking advantage of them to get them to brush their teeth. But what’s cool about this example is, is that he used the classic habit model to sell toothpaste. He spent a lot of time doing research and discovered, I can’t remember what it’s called, he called it the film. You know, you wake up in the morning and you’ve got that film-

Samuel Hatton: The plaquey film.

Jason Clause: Yeah, on your teeth, right? People just lived with that. He decided to name it. He named it the film, and he started to draw attention to it. So that was his cue, right? You wake up in the morning, a lot of the ads say, “Just run your tongue across your teeth. Do you feel that? Do you feel the film? Wouldn’t you like to make that go away and have a clean mouth?” So he was creating a cue for, you know, “Okay, I’ve got the film, I need to brush my teeth,” and that’s the habit, and then the reward is I’ve got a clean mouth. And this habit worked. He got America to, we all … I mean, I wake up in the morning, I brush my teeth, before I go to bed, I brush my teeth. It’s a habit that was given to me by Claude Hopkins that prior to his campaigns we didn’t do, which I thought was …

Jason Clause: And I just think that’s, I mean, it’s just such an awesome example of how somebody applied this. He didn’t know he was doing it, at least not in the power of habit parlance, but I think it’s a really powerful example of how you can use these things to change your life and to change the lives of the people around you. This is a podcast about management ideas, right?

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: I deliberately try to create habits for us that-

Samuel Hatton: All the systems and processes that exist in a company are-

Jason Clause: Like the huddle, right? I mean, the huddle is, we do … Why don’t you share a little bit about the huddle?

Samuel Hatton: Yeah. So the example of the cue is 8:55 means get on the phone. Well, that’s what it means for you. For me it means 9:00. But yeah, so get on the phone and and call in for the huddle, and then we have our routine, right? Do you want me to go all the way into that?

Jason Clause: I mean, meeting rhythms are a really important part of managing a team I think, right? Particularly for me because I’m in the field all the time. I do sales and so I need to have that daily connection point so that I can keep tuned into what’s going on. And we struggled, right, to begin with. We struggled, and it was me, I was the one struggling because you guys would be on the call and I’d call in five minutes late or something like that. So for me, I actually had to create a cue and it’s alarm. I have an alarm that goes off at 8:59 every day and that’s how I know I need to dial into the huddle.

Samuel Hatton: So, you know, there’s actually something that I do to prepare for the huddle sometimes, and that is at the very end of the work day, I have a cue to write out my summary because if I don’t have a summary to give you, then you come to me and you’re like, “Hey, where’s the summary?”

Jason Clause: Because you know I’m going to ask you for that. That’s funny. All right, this is just an overview, right? There’s an entire chapter devoted to this, to this piece of the book. I actually found an excerpt on slate.com, I’m going to include a link to it in the show notes. It’s two and a half web pages worth of detail on the Pepsodent case study. So if you want more information, I’d encourage you to go check that out. There’s a piece that I did leave out, kind of this part of it, and it’s the fact that some habits stick and others don’t. This Pepsodent example was a good one because it turns out that while the three components, or the three pieces of the habit, there are lots of cues and routines and rewards that don’t actually turn into habits. I can’t give an example right now, but what Duhigg was getting to, was there’s another piece, there’s a fuel to making the habit happen.

Samuel Hatton: Willpower or?

Jason Clause: Desire.

Samuel Hatton: Okay.

Jason Clause: Right? Again, the ad guy, he didn’t know this. He just happily stumbled into this and made millions of dollars. So the craving, right? That’s the desire. The craving. That’s the fuel that powers these things. So going back to his example, you had your cue, the film, the dirty teeth. You had your routine, brush your teeth. And you had the reward, a clean mouth. But there was another piece here. And we feel it today. When you brush your teeth, there’s a tingling sensation that goes with brushing your teeth. And we just assume that’s the way it is, right? The foaming, the tingling. The toothpaste doesn’t necessarily need that. And in fact, there’s toothpastes that don’t have that. In World War II, the toothpaste didn’t have any of that. But that tingling sensation turned out to be something that you crave.

Jason Clause: And then if you think about it, it’s kind of what tells you that your mouth’s clean, right? So kind of grafting that over top of the model, you see when the cue happens, you’re not necessarily craving a clean mouth. That’s the end game. That’s kind of what you want and that’s your reward. What you’re craving is that tingling sensation. So in giving that example, that’s how Duhigg gives us this complete sort of model for how a habit is created and its key components. There’s a cue or a trigger, there’s the core behavior or the routine that sits in the middle, and then there’s your reward all reinforced by an emerging craving for some part of that reward.

Jason Clause: Is that making sense the way this whole thing is structured?

Samuel Hatton: Yeah, it’s making sense.

Jason Clause: It makes it a little bit more difficult to digest, but-

Samuel Hatton: Right. Immediately, I’m trying to check it against some of the other habits we’ve already discussed like the huddle. But something that’s really interesting about the huddle is there actually is a craving, for us anyway, on the employees’, not the manager’s side of things, but we go and play ping pong right after our huddle.

Jason Clause: I didn’t know that. That’s cool.

Samuel Hatton: It’s like once the huddle’s over, now we can play ping pong. So, I mean, we’ve always looked forward to it.

Jason Clause: I know what mine is because I thought about it too.

Samuel Hatton: What is it?

Jason Clause: It’s this desire to connect. On the days that it doesn’t happen, it’s noticeably absent.

Samuel Hatton: Oh, right-

Jason Clause: I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t know where you’re at. I don’t get to joke with you or any of that. Right. That’s-

Samuel Hatton: You’re probably going to get into the huddle in a later podcast, but one of the components of the huddle is good news, and that’s another thing that’s really important for bringing us together and just knowing that there’s some good things happening either professionally or personally.

Jason Clause: Cool. All right. So what, right? This is all kind of kind of interesting stuff and yay habits, but how do you apply this? And I guess we’ve kind of, you know, the huddle’s a great example. Here’s what I want to do. If you could share an example of a way that you’ve created a habit for yourself that’s benefited you professionally, you think you could share one? Does one come to mind? If not, maybe maybe something else would be okay.

Samuel Hatton: Yeah, I’d say that being diligent and sticking to an Inbox Zero is definitely something that has helped me professionally.

Jason Clause: Okay. Can you talk through its evolution and like what is the loop? What’s the habit loop?

Samuel Hatton: So the habit loop, the cue, is there’s stuff in my inbox, but I have another cue because that happens all day long, right? So at the very end of the day, actually I have two cues at the start and the end, but I’ll start with the end first. The very end of the day I make sure that I process my entire inbox, and I make sure I do that before I go home. The reward would be going home. And then so the routine is actually processing the inbox. I do one of three things. I delete it, or I put it in the to-do list, or I just process it, you know, if it’s a quick thing I just respond or I mark it as reference, and then the … What was right after the routine? The reward?

Jason Clause: The reward.

Samuel Hatton: All right. The reward is I get to go home. So I mean-

Jason Clause: And can you think about what’s the desire or the craving that fuels it?

Samuel Hatton: The craving is knowing that the next morning I don’t have to come to an awful inbox. It’s more of like a fear thing, you know, it’s like, “Oh no, this inbox is just hairy and-“

Jason Clause: So it’s almost like what you desire is to avoid something.

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: Right. So it’s almost like I’m trying to get away from something.

Samuel Hatton: Right. But

[inaudible 00:23:43]

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Jason Clause: That’s interesting because he never talked about that.

Samuel Hatton: It’s also craving of having that clear inbox.

Jason Clause: Oh, I know the feeling.

Samuel Hatton: Oh, I crave that. I crave that all day long.

Jason Clause: So I mean the sense that you’re not missing anything. That’s what I like about having an inbox that’s … And I guess we’ll do a podcast about that too. I mean, so many people, like the engineers have these massive inboxes and it works for them because a lot of what’s in there is technical in nature and they have to have a place for it. They don’t have necessarily the same deadlines that I think we have sometimes.

Samuel Hatton: Do you have Inbox Zero right now?

Jason Clause: When I walked in I was at zero. I don’t know if-

Samuel Hatton: That’s very impressive. I don’t. I don’t. So that’s actually a habit I’m struggling with a little bit, but [inaudible 00:24:32]-

Jason Clause: Well I think that that’s a great topic for future shows because there’s tools to help and-

Samuel Hatton: Right, right.

Jason Clause: Feeling organized is empowering.

Samuel Hatton: Really is.

Jason Clause: Yeah. Well, okay, so that was a great example. I think the one I want to give, I actually wrote a blog about it a long time ago on my personal blog. I started running almost three years ago? It’s three years ago, because that was the first 5k that I ran and I have small kids so there is no way that I’m going to be able to do it during the day or when I come home from work. I needed to do it in the morning and I was really bad at getting up in the morning. So the habit that I had created for myself was the alarm clock goes off at 5:00, I get up, I hit the alarm clock, my clothes are already laid out the night … I guess that’s part of the habit, my clothes are laid out the night before, I go for a run, and then I jump in the shower.

Jason Clause: And so the cue was the alarm goes off. The routine was getting into my gym clothes and going out the front door, going for my run, and then coming home and jumping in the shower. The reward was the sense of satisfaction that I got.

Samuel Hatton: Runner’s high also.

Jason Clause: The runner’s high, and I think that the desire was that sense of accomplishment. I really felt like I was getting some … The other thing too was that the run, the 5k was actually for a cause that I felt really passionate about, still feel really passionate about, and so I felt like I was actually doing something other than just scratching a check to a cause or something. And I know it’s really stupid and trite, you know, the gravity of the charity just because oh I’m running for whatever and I don’t want to get into that, but it was something, right? And you know, for the suburban dad, it’s what I got. And I still do it, to this day, I’m still waking up, not every day, the routine has changed. I give myself a break on Tuesday and Thursday, but I run the rest of the time.

Samuel Hatton: Good job. That’s good.

Jason Clause: Not very far and not very fast, but I do it. So that’s mine. I think what I wanted to cover, once I started to understand how a habit works, I started to see the bad ones for what they were and I started to feel some hope in my ability to influence them. And we haven’t even gotten into how you do that. And we’re not going to do that on this podcast. There’s tons more to this book. And in fact, there’s a golden rule that Duhigg talks about to changing habits. I’m not going to do it justice here, but basically what he says is, “To change a habit, you have to change the routine in the middle. You really can’t muck around much with the cue or the reward. They have to stay the same. To be successful, you really have to look at changing the encoded behavior in the middle.” And he devotes a lot of time to that.

Jason Clause: He also talks about the concept of keystone habits and there’s an awful lot out there on the Internet. If you Google keystone habits, you’ll find a lot of really cool stuff. But the core of this is, you might have a lot of things that you want to change, but there are some things that if you concentrate your energy on changing that one thing, it fuels your belief system and actually creates the ability to make future changes. One of them, for example, happens to be exercise. Another one happens to be goal setting. So I don’t know what experience-

Samuel Hatton: Set your priority for the day [inaudible 00:28:29].

Jason Clause: But I thought that was really cool and in fact I think I’m a testament to exercise has really had a profound impact on things I’ve then gone on to change as well. He talks about engineering habits and how you can do that to conserve willpower. He’s got a whole chapter devoted to that. He does a case study about Alcoa and how their CEO set the idea of safety and making safety the number one priority and then what impact that had on the rest of the organization. This company went on to experience unprecedented growth and success. It was this vision and this habit. There’s a chapter about how Target among other places use habits, and our habits, and pregnant mothers’ habits, to predict buying behavior and then also to manipulate it. It’s pretty Machiavellian and a little frightening, but it’s worth delving into because it’s instructive because it’s happening out there. I don’t know what you do with it other than just listen-

Samuel Hatton: Know about it, unless you’re [inaudible 00:29:55]-

Jason Clause: Unless you’re a statistician and a database marketer, then you tell all your friends not to listen to this podcast I guess or read that book. And then it ends with, it characterizes the civil rights movement and kind of graphs that over habits and how not just how individuals have habits but disjointed non organizations have habits and loosely knit together social networks. Really, really cool stuff.

Jason Clause: Short of it is that you may end up being like me and rereading this book because it’s that good, there’s that much to it. Anything you want to add Samuel or anything that you remember from reading the book?

Samuel Hatton: It has been a while since I read the book, I’m just happy to come along.

Jason Clause: Well, I’m glad you’re here too. I think this has been fun.

Samuel Hatton: Yeah.

Jason Clause: Oh, okay. So maybe you don’t have time to read books. I don’t know. Like I said, most of us have commutes. I have found it incredibly helpful to get my hands on as many audio books as I can. Nonfiction audio books. It’s been helped along. Our CEO, Mike Chaput and our Director of Client Services, John Grover, they have lived and breathed this for a decade. They’ve always been bringing great books. I’ve always had that. We have a library here that I’m actually able to tap into. You may not have that. If you don’t, you don’t have to go out and buy these things. You can use a platform called Audible. I’m not being sponsored by them or anything. This is just a good idea, I think. Sammy, you use Audible.

Samuel Hatton: Yeah, I use Audible.

Jason Clause: You can basically rent these books, download them onto your iPhone or your smartphone and then listen to them in the car, and Audible has a 30 day trial, so if you want to listen to this book, you could actually do it for free and wouldn’t take you more than a … you know, it takes about a week probably if you’ve got a 45 minute commute or so you could probably get it done in about a week, you know, there and back. Or on the train or whatever. If you want to, I’m also including a link to the book on Amazon. Interestingly enough, I found out, I didn’t know this, Audible was bought by Amazon. So either way Amazon’s getting their pound of flesh from you and I would bet they also do analytics and understand your buying habits so they may know you’re going to buy already. Who knows. Anyway, as far as ideas go, this is I think, you know, using audio books and maybe podcasts, hint hint wink wink to supplement your commute and turn it into an opportunity to get some training, I’ve gotten nothing but benefit from it.

Jason Clause: All right, last thing. I told you we were going to have an announcement. So in the last podcast it was really just an announcement of a survey I was doing. This podcast, Episode Four, is the last one I’m doing flying blind. Most of you should have already have gotten an email from me with a link to a survey. What I think would probably be best is to start making these podcasts about topics that you think are most important, and the best way to do that would be to just get a list together. So here’s what I’ve come up with on my own research. Communicating, listening and decision making, developing talent, team building, leading, planning and organizing, creating structure, performance monitoring, budgeting and accounting, and negotiating were sort of the top 10 things that I’ve seen other people in management talking about as important topics to sharpen your skillset on.

Jason Clause: I’ve already gotten a lot of response. Thank you to everyone that’s responded. It’s really, really helpful. And so the order that I mentioned these topics in, is the order that we’ve got so far based on your force rankings. Survey’s only two questions long. It takes less than five minutes to complete. Sammy, you took it. How long did it take you to complete it?

Samuel Hatton: Two minutes.

Jason Clause: Two minutes. So it’s really short and it’d be really, really helpful just to make sure that the episodes that we’re producing here are things that, you know, they’re topics that you at least want to listen to. Hopefully it will be information that’s worth listening to as well. So I’m going to include a link to the survey in the show notes so you can just click it from there. It’s also accessible from the Jason Clause website. I’ve actually got an episode up there and I think that it’s embedded too, so-

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: If you could help me out, I’d be really grateful. So that’s it. Episode Four is done. Thank you Sammy.

Samuel Hatton: You’re welcome.

Jason Clause: Again, anyone that’s listening, mom, thank you. I’m going to listen, Jason, thank you. Samuel, I hope you listen, thank you. Anybody else, thank you. If you liked it, maybe head over to iTunes and rate us. Only if it’s a good rating. If you’re going to just say nasty things, I don’t want to hear about it. Just tune out. That’s okay. I give you permission to tune out. Don’t forget to try to take the survey. You can actually get to it, if you aren’t going to go near the show notes, it’s jasonclause.com/survey.

Jason Clause: Samuel, I’m a Ruby on Rails programmer, software developer, hobbyist, hobbyist, trying to figure out how to get those vanity URLs. Took a little bit of work, but I figured it out. So-

Samuel Hatton: Very cool.

Jason Clause: We’ve got it. And if you’re not already getting an email, someone maybe forwarded this to you and you want to sign up to find out when new podcasts are being posted, why don’t you head on over to jasonclause.com/contact, or pretty much from anywhere on the site you can sign up for the email.

Samuel Hatton: Just look for the subscribe button.

Jason Clause: That’s right. It’s blue. Okay, so next time item number one, topic number one, communication. I found, oh actually I got a great email from a gal, Heather Chaput, actually our President and CEO’s wife sent this out. It wasn’t really management focused, it was about how Facebook, we’re always putting our best foot forward [inaudible 00:36:22] and Facebook kind of turned us into a bunch of liars and that’s what got me thinking, right. What we mean versus what others hear or what others see. The idea of I encode a message, I send it to you Samuel, or I say it to you, the way you perceive it may be entirely different from the way that I put it together. And I think that happens a lot.

Samuel Hatton: That happens with us-

Jason Clause: I mean, not between you and me-

Samuel Hatton: Well no, it does.

Jason Clause: Oh, it does, oh it does? Oh, here. That’s a great example. Right. Tune in. We’ll talk about how you alleviate that.

Samuel Hatton: Right.

Jason Clause: All right. Thank you again for tuning in. Until next time, I’m Jason Clause.

Samuel Hatton: I’m Samuel Hatton. Thank you for letting me be on the show.

Jason Clause: My pleasure. We’ll talk to you real soon. Take care.

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