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Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.

Today's episode is going to be a longer one, part of the series where I

interview fascinating people about how they take their days from great to awesome and any

advice they have for the rest of us. So today I am delighted to welcome Charlie Gilke to Before

Breakfast. Charlie is the owner of productive flourishing. He is also the author of the book's

team habits and start finishing. So Charlie, welcome to the show. Laura, thanks so much for

having me. I'm excited to be here today. Yeah. Well, why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about

yourself? So I'll try to keep this brief. I am one of those polymathic folks that like fall in a lot of holes and figure out how I fell into it and then tell people how not to do that and then get back out of it.

You know, I've been, I'm kind of a dinosaur now on the internet, turns out, been doing this since the mid 2000s, you know, writing about a variety of things from personal productivity to teaming better

to leading better. And so the span of my work actually goes through all of those. And it may or

may not come up today given the format of the show, but at heart, I'm more of a philosopher

figuring things out than an entrepreneur

or sort of writer in that sort of way. So most of this sort of stuff is just me grappling with

paradoxes and hard problems and trying to make sense of it all. Yeah. Well, how did you land in this

field of productivity, though? I mean, one can follow all sorts of rabbit holes.

And maybe you can weave into this because I understand you also had a military career

before all this as well.

I wonder if that had anything to do with all this.

Well, that was very definitely how I got into this.

So I deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004 and 2005, and I was a logistics officer.

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