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Back to Work

Episode 309: Hard Pass

Back to Work

5by5

Business, Society & Culture, Barriers, Dan Benjamin, Careers, Communication, Merlin Mann, Creativity, Work, Productivity, Constraints, Technology

4.7 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2017

⏱️ 77 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

TOPIC: Celebrating your successful failures.

This week, Dan and Merlin kick off with discussion of night bears, the ascendance of Netflix, and some very nice emails from listeners. Merlin also shares an important life hack for Twitter.

Merlin brings in a new thought technology via Jen Kirkman guesting on John Moe's wonderful podcast, The Hilarious World of Depression: learning how to talk back to the voices in your head.

Dan gives some big updates to his (theoretical) project to build a (theoretical) Hackintosh. Huge week.

Finally, Merlin shares a thought on how to potentially find success in your miniature failures. What happens when you decide to keep doing something not because you want to succeed at it…but just because it's a thing that you do?

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hello. Hey, Merlin. Good afternoon, Dan. How are you? I'm doing great. How are you doing?

0:05.7

I'm doing very well. I wouldn't think to complain. Good.

0:14.7

It doesn't any way.

0:17.6

Who had an espresso?

0:20.5

How are you doing? Pretty good.

0:24.3

Pretty good. Yeah, I can't complain. Who'd listen? Who would listen anyway?

0:28.6

Everybody's got problems. Everybody hurts sometimes.

0:32.4

So we, you know, on the times when my daughter wakes up before...

0:37.6

Do you have a... Is your daughter asleep until you wake her up or does she wake up on her own?

0:41.6

She does now. It used to be... We never had a cash situation.

0:45.9

Yeah. It used to be... The rule was... You can't get out of bed till 6.

0:52.0

And now she's been reading till very late and she is very loggy at 6.31 when we shake her.

0:58.4

Yeah. Yeah. Too much... Too much snickered. Yeah. Well, I was snickered.

1:05.5

Well, recently my daughter, MJ, has... She's usually pretty good about waking up consistently,

1:12.4

but sometimes she'll wake up for no reason in the middle of the night.

1:16.8

And we don't want her instantaneous reaction if she should wake up for any reason,

1:22.4

was to immediately hit the ground running in sprint and wake us up and say,

1:29.5

I'm awake, you know. So we've been trying to teach her not to do that, to go back to sleep.

1:35.7

And what we had to... What we had to come to is, of course, she can't... She's five.

1:40.4

So she can't really tell time per se. And we wanted her not to get up before 6,

1:48.0

or whatever, 5.36 whatever time she's waking up now. And my wife had the idea that we would put

1:54.1

a little nightlight in there on a timer. And when the nightlight comes on, if the nightlight's on,

...

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