Michael Lopp - Author - Managing Humans + Rands in Repose

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Michael Lopp, the author of Managing Humans, Rands in Repose.com, and his latest book, The Art of Leadership, Small Things Done Well. And we discussed the payoff of having patience over the long term, what people aren't thinking about when it comes to leadership, and the concept of anti-flow. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:27) This is the Modern CTO podcast. It's Michael. It's Joel. Oh, I'm so excited. Your audio, amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) Your video. Have you done this before?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:00:47) I have done this before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) And is that Slack plaid pillows behind you?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:00:53) It's a blanket. It's a Slack blanket.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:54) Oh, it's a blanket. Yeah. Yeah. It's beautiful.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:00:58) Well, thank you. It tests very well. Everyone notices it, so I just leave it there because everyone's like, that's cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:04) You're going to laugh at this. So I follow you on LinkedIn. I follow your content on LinkedIn.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:01:11) Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:11) For a while now, probably about two or so years.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:01:14) Uh-huh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:15) And then I also have been a member of the Rands Slack, and I have one of your books.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:01:24) It's on a bookshelf. Aw.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:26) Yeah. Managing Humans. But I didn't connect that Michael Lopp was Rands in Repose until ten minutes ago.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:01:37) It's a funny story. I left Slack late last year, and the gentleman who replaced me, who I just met recently, he was having some issues with meetings, and he sent the Rands in Repose meeting blog to my ex-team, not knowing that I was the former VP of engineering there. And they all thought it was kind of a joke. They're like, "This is funny that you're sending this. We've been working for this guy for four years." And he's like, "What do you mean?" They're like, "That was our boss." He's like, "What?" So it's a common error that Rands and Michael Lopp are not necessarily tightly bound, and by design, by the way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:18) So what does Rands mean?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:02:20) It's my wife's maiden name. About a million years ago, I was logging into a chat room or something, and you needed—back when we made up names for online—and I was like, oh, I need a name here, something short. And I was dating this lovely woman whose last name is Rands, my wife now. And I was like, Rands. And I just—it was one of these decisions you just threw away immediately, but it turned out to be sort of the name that I'm associated with online.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:47) Oh, well, it sounds good. It's short. It's simple. It's memorable. And now you have two identities.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:02:53) Yeah. Yeah. It's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:56) You're like a superhero now.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:02:58) Not really. But yes, there's multiple identities. It's useful, though. When people say Rands to me back when we actually hung out in places together, I knew what they're talking about. They're talking about that guy on the Internet. But if you call me Lopp, it means we work together. So, physically working—I mean, actually work together. So it's kind of a handy index to kind of know which person they think that I am.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:20) So when did you start writing?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:03:22) I've been writing since I was a kid. I have journals, a garage full of journals. But I really started writing online probably late nineties or so. But back before there were blogs, I was really frustrated by leadership and sort of things that I thought were obvious that people weren't doing. And so I'm like, I'm going to write this down, and I started sharing it. And it turns out a lot of folks were similarly concerned about these leadership things and, especially for engineers, basic habits not being done well. And that's kind of how it got started. I just started saying obvious things, writing them down in sort of semi-coherent ways, and it kind of took off from there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:06) So did you go right into doing a blog, or did you just start writing notes or interesting things?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:04:12) It was mostly the blog. Yeah. The blog was just sort of a personal thing for me, and then I don't remember which article it was. It was something around one-on-ones or something. And I thought there were seven people reading the blog or eight. And suddenly, 200,000 showed up that Wednesday. And I was like, oh, there's a lot of people on the Internet. So it was that feedback of the content being received well that kind of guided me. And every time I talked about leadership pieces or management or this sort of thing, everyone would show up. So I'm like, okay. Cool. This is a nerve here that I've struck. So let's just focus on this.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:53) Well, you're a fantastic storyteller.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:04:55) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:56) I thought I was going to be late to the interview because I was just reading through some stuff. I connected that Managing Humans—I look over on my shelf, I'm like, I know that book. And there it is on my shelf. And then I grab it. I was like, oh, I wonder if there's any good content to talk about in here. And I was like, oh, he's too succinct and good of a writer. There's 76 topics to cover. I was like, there's no way. And then I put down the book and I was like, oh, it's time. Let's go talk to him. But where did you pick up this—obviously, so you start writing. I'm just trying to build this map in my timeline. So you start writing, you realize that you have a knack for it and there's people reading.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:05:34) Right. Right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:35) At what point, if ever, did you say, okay, I'm a writer, and so I'm going to start researching writing and become better at writing?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:05:44) There's two questions there. There's choosing to invest and getting better at it and sort of officially calling yourself a writer. To this day, after writing three books, I still don't always consider myself a writer. So, you know, imposter syndrome, blah blah blah. But I think if you publish a book, I think you can probably say you're a writer. I'm just going to go out on a limb there. But I mean, I was writing—again, I've been writing my entire life. But the book was there. It's sort of this milestone in life, and you're kind of holding it in your hand. You're like, cool. I think the world thinks I'm a writer or someone does at least. So that's that. But the second part of getting better at it, the inflection point there for me was when I started getting an editor for my pieces. Someone on the Internet was like, "Hey, Lopp, your—Rands, whatever your name is—your stuff's good, and you're just horrible at grammar and spelling. It would be really—I would happily edit these things for you." And that started a process. I actually paid an editor for a long time to edit my stuff. I'd send it to her, and she'd edit it and send it back. That, just over the years, I got better and better at sort of doing that myself using Grammarly, just going through that process and understanding that the writing process is delightful and a ton of fun and inspirational. The editing process is not as much fun, but it's as important, if not more important, to getting a piece to be world-class. It's not the stuff you like to do because I write a piece and it's cool, I brought this amazing thing into the universe and it's perfect. And no, never is that the case. It needs a lot more work. And, again, I think the editing, which is harder work, is the difference between a good piece and an amazing piece. And that's the thing that I continue to work on, is that editing process and how to take a piece, a partially formed idea, and make it a fully formed idea.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:39) Yeah. It's not easy. I set out and did a book about two and a half years ago. Yeah. I learned so much because there's all of that that you're talking about, actually putting it together, and then I think I went through six revisions with the editor, just making sure the grammar and everything was right. And then, you know, you have to step away, let your mind clear, and then come back in. So hard. Yeah. It's just—it's an intensive process. And then you put it out there. And I just did the self-publishing through to the Amazon.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:08:09) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:09) But it was such an experience to put writing out there, and for me to say one thing and then for the world to read it, and I'll do talks and I'll meet them in person and they'll say, you know, "Oh, this was so helpful. I took this from your book." And I was like, that is not in the book at all. It's so interesting how people apply their lives and their experiences on top of your writing.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:08:34) Yeah. No. I had this—I was doing a—I used to go to South by Southwest, and I was doing a talk there with some friends. And I wrote this piece called "The Nerd Handbook," which was a handbook for keepers of nerds, if you will. So, these are certain habits that I have. And I started writing the piece, just me kind of listing things. And then I'm like, oh, no way. I'm going to invert this. I'm going to make it how my wife views my habits in sort of a humorous way. And it was just so much fun to write and therapeutic. But at this, after the South by Southwest talk, this woman came up to me and she said, "Hey. That article"—I'd written five years earlier or something like that—she's like, "That saved my marriage." And I'm like, "That's great." She's like, "No. You don't understand. It saved my marriage." And I was like, oh, that's amazing. And that was not the intent of the piece, but it was one of those things that you get your writing out there, people are going to fill the spaces between your words with their own experience, and they can learn fascinating things maybe that you're not even intending to do. But it was very gratifying. I love getting things out there and hearing about how people are reacting to it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) And what type of reactions are you getting from your new book?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:09:43) The best compliment I received was on Twitter a couple days ago. I struggle with a lot of the leadership work because it's very abstract. How do you know you're actually—this is the problem new engineers have with leadership is you move from this world of write code, fix a bug, very concrete things, to sort of "make sure that humans are okay." It's like, what the hell does that mean? So it always feels a little disingenuous to me to be writing these things without saying, "This is your action plan," or "These are the concrete things that you can do." But it's just part of the gig of leadership—some of it is really abstract and subjective. So the compliment for this new book was, "This is the most actionable leadership book I've ever read." And I'm like, whew. Because that was the design for the third book. "Small Things Done Well" was, okay, don't worry about the big huge leadership things. Go focus on the little tiny things and the value of doing those small little tiny things. And it's—go read it. I literally, the first or the second chapter is, "Here are the 30 things that you should do." And some of them are a little bit vague or a little bit subjective, but many of them are just really, really straightforward, like do one-on-ones, really, really all the time, or show up on time. I mean, simple things that, you know, collectively can have a lot of effect on how you're perceived as a leader, how you're viewed as a leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:10) Yeah. I was thinking about athletes watching different documentaries.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:11:15) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:15) And it's so amazing. They're at the height of their career, making unlimited money. Everyone knows their last name, and they're just drilling the fundamentals in different ways with coaches all day. They just drill the fundamentals. There's only so many things you can do.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:11:30) Yeah. No. It's—I think it's exactly right. And that's the thing that was the epiphany of the book, was, you know, I think a lot of people think that leadership is like this genetic thing or you're predisposed. And there's some truth to that. But I think at the end of the day, it's the set of small things that you do on a daily basis that creates trust. It creates communication. It makes you reliable. Blah blah blah, all those things that I think is handy. So, and it's different for every person because every person is a beautiful chaotic snowflake.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:00) Yes. That's the full quote I want for this interview. You're exactly right. And I think what, you know, when people say that, "Oh, they're born leaders," I think what they do is they sort of cherry-pick one aspect or vector. Maybe it'll be communication. Obviously, I see a lot of people doing that when someone can speak well. They're like, "Oh, they're a natural leader." It's like, no. Their communication skill level is high, but you don't know. There's so many more other dynamics to being a leader.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:12:31) Yeah. I totally agree. Totally agree.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:34) What's the biggest takeaway or the thing that you wish stuck with people the most from your latest book?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:12:44) I think probably patience. The intro of the book is "pick a thing and then do it a thousand times," which you're like, "What? I want to read this book and get to be a better leader tomorrow." And it just doesn't work like that, especially whether you're an athlete or a leader or any sort of complex skill, if you want to think about it like that. It takes a lot of work, and it's not just the repetition of doing that thing over and over again. It's being open to learning why you're doing it. I'll give you an example. It's in the book. My number one thing is do one-on-ones. And great. Why? Connect with the team. Okay. Learn from the team about how they're feeling about things. Oh, that's interesting. Use it as a means to get early warning about things going sideways. Oh, this is getting better. Use it as a time to admit when you're screwing up something and admit failure. Oh, we're suddenly building trust and respect. Suddenly this thing, which is having a one-on-one meeting, is turning into this practice which is building trust and respect amongst humans. And that's a big deal. Right? But it doesn't come from doing one one-on-one. It comes from doing it a lot and learning from it and understanding why I'm choosing this practice and reflecting on it. And almost all of the things in the new book are like that.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:14:04) I think I should just do that. Great. Awesome. You're a third of the way there or a tenth of the way there. After a hundred times, you'll be halfway there.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:14:13) And after a thousand times, you'll be pretty good about understanding why this practice is important, and you can learn from it and why it's part of your leadership sort of instinct or something. That's the thing. And it's just patience. It's knowing that it's gonna take a long time to learn this complex skill.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:31) But that's difficult, and I want it now. You're in...

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:14:36) You're in very good company because that's most people on the planet Earth. It's a very quick and dirty hack sort of, like, you know, fast track, you know, seven effective habits of a leader sort of world right now. And it's not. It's just gonna take a long time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:52) It's a tough struggle. So we got into the leadership business right after this podcast. And I had never been in there before. And so how that's relevant is it brought up this concept of how you monetize it and how you sell it, and when you're doing that, you see your customers and how people think about it. And it's a tough struggle, you know, personally for me because I would say 80% of the customers want the quick fix and they just want it now. And if I purchased this product and do one or two things, I'll be good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:27) But then you're also justified by the 20%, you know, someone's gonna come in here and they're gonna implement it and have some success, and that's gonna be like a little ember to a fire that will then start. So I guess I'll take it back to when I do public talks. I always go into it with the mindset of there's one person in the room that's going to find something useful and that's a win.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:15:47) Yeah. My version of that is, when I do a talk, there's only one slide in here out of the 50 that actually matters, and it varies depending on the person. But if they get one thing out of this deck of 50 slides, I'm super happy. Although I've taken to actually, when I do talks now, I'm taking to saying, like, this is the only thing that matters in this 50-minute talk is this one slide here. If you do this, you've gotten all of it.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:16:11) I've actually declared it now because I just want people to be super clear about the point.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:16) And back to patience too, because you know when I was a kid, my dad had said, you know how parents will say something to you? They don't even remember saying it, but somehow it sticks with you forever. So the thing my dad said to me, he doesn't remember because I've asked him as an adult, but he told me when I was young, he said, patience is a virtue. Like, you're gonna have to learn patience. And that's just something that has repeated throughout my entire life.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:39) And what I noticed is, as I'm 32 now, but as I have got older, specifically in my late twenties, I noticed that I could see the people who were executing consistently and had patience. And I could see them getting better results on a gradient or on a spectrum of those who did not. And so what happened is that changed my desires, almost like the palate, like the taste in my mouth. It changed it to doing difficult things over long periods of time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:13) Right. That will give me a better life. And so you can kind of fall in love with that. And that's something that I've been experiencing the past five years. It's really changed my life.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:17:24) Yeah. Agreed. It's hard to sometimes, especially when the sky is falling or everyone's yelling. A practice of patience in that moment is precisely the right thing to do, but it feels a little tone deaf when everyone's like, oh my God, the site's down or whatever the crisis is, but it's still exactly the right strategy. And actually people respond to it well, and they're like, cool.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:17:45) Alright. Well, Lopp's not freaking out, so maybe we shouldn't freak out. I'm like, yeah. That's right. Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) That's true because as a leader, they look to you for how to react.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:17:57) That's exactly right. Exactly right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:00) So how has the writing helped you as you've gotten to work on these great projects? You've had an amazing history. You've gotten to work at awesome companies throughout your career. And I'd say, I think I saw like five to six different cool companies that you've gotten to work for. And so the transition point between those, did the writing have any impact on that?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:18:22) I don't have to write a resume anymore, which is really nice. That's a plus. The writing, here's the thing about writing that I say: writing makes me smarter because the act of finding an idea and going, oh, that's interesting, is interesting. But the act of passing it through my fingers and getting it written down and sitting and staring at it teaches me more about how I feel about the idea and gives me more vision and strategy around it.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:18:54) So it literally makes me smarter about that thing. And it's usually, when I'm talking, I'm almost always quoting myself from something that I've written. So if I sound at all smart to you, it's because I literally wrote it down and I said it. Like, literally what I'm saying right now is a thing that I've written as well. And it's because I've taken that time to really refine the idea and to edit it and to make it more coherent or clear, hopefully.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:19:23) So that's the biggest value. So when someone asks me a question like you just asked me or a question about one-on-ones or about, you know, it's gonna sound like I'm just echoing this wisdom right out of my head. I'm not.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:19:38) I'm reading you the article that I wrote four years ago on the topic of feedback or this or that or blah blah blah, whatever it is. So that's the thing I really like about it. And I think there's leaders out there that just do that naturally. They're just kind of ad-libbing, kind of just YOLO amazing, and I wish I was that person. I'm not.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:19:55) I'm a writer, so I have to write it down first to truly see how I feel about it and how I'm organizing it or what the right way to tell the story is. So it's incredibly valuable. It's given me just about every successful thing, including my marriage, is a result of me writing. Really, really.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:16) I like that because, you know, a couple months ago, originally the podcast was all about leadership. From day one, I was just figuring out how people thought. And then after two years of that and hundreds of episodes, I was like, okay, I'm getting into this repetitive. So I wanted to start talking about newer things like the future and Elon Musk and Neuralink and just, you know, bring those up and then also mix in leadership. And what happened to me was I would have this idea or this thing I wanted to think about, and I would just put the bullet point in there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:47) And then when it came up in a conversation, I realized I didn't have any substance, like, what's the word? Substantive thoughts?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:20:57) Substantive. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:58) Yeah. It's a hard word to say. I got the Invisalign in too now. So, you know, to have good solid thoughts around something. And then what I realized is one day by accident, I had a thought and I was writing it down in my Evernote.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:11) And I sat there for 20 or 30 minutes articulating it. And then the next time I had that conversation, I had a good thought to share. And so I said, alright. Well, now this has to come into my habits.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:21:25) Yeah. It's at the point now when I was in a meeting before this and someone said something, I'm like, oh, that's a blog post right there. I heard the line. I'm like, oh, that's a good line.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:21:37) And in my head, I'm like, oh, this. But it's not really a blog post. But I can see that there's an article there. That's a delight when you have, when you've worked on that muscle enough to be like, oh, God. Give me like three hours with this sentence, and I'm gonna have 700 words that are gonna be just amazing.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:21:54) That's another thing that comes with practice as well. That piece is a joy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:00) It's like if I'm on your team, I'm almost nervous that it's like Katy Perry when she breaks up with a boyfriend, a song comes out. It's like you get fired from Michael and a whole book comes out.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:22:14) It's a tricky thing because I have to obfuscate a lot of things when I write about leadership stuff. I'm not talking about, I have to really mix things up so people don't. And I try to remove it from the situation, but it's not obvious that I'm talking about this situation at a prior company or something like that. Because that'll be uncool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:39) Of course. Now, the Slack that you have. It's probably by far the most popular leadership technology Slack out there.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:22:48) I think so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:49) Yeah. I had sent you, and I don't know how you manage your invites, but I think I joined two years ago on your Slack because it was an invite, I had email or something.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:22:58) Yep. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:58) And I think it was actually from, I found it from reading one of your books now that I'm thinking about it.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:23:02) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:03) But what have you learned from running that community?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:23:08) It's about, well, let's check right now. I think it's like 15,000. This is great radio. Oh, this is under 14,000. Let's see.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:23:18) What have I learned? Number one, you just mentioned this. Having friction, a little bit of friction to get in their community is a really, really good thing. You just mentioned you mailed me. To get in, you still have to mail me.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:23:31) And as you hopefully saw, I respond relatively quickly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:34) Mhmm.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:23:35) But I now have people ask them, say, hey. Answer these questions or say some things here. That keeps the flotsam and jetsam out. The folks that just wanna kind of come in and say, oh, this is cool. It takes a little bit of work, and it takes a little bit for you and for me to get you in there.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:23:52) So that means I think I'm prequalifying humans in there a little bit higher. Number two is, should be obvious. It's a leadership community. I'm not talking about video games or, like, you know, baking or anything like that. So there's, I think, a higher bar for the community to kind of treat each other as, it's a leadership Slack.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:24:12) Because, like, let's be leaders together. So I get some benefit of that sort of space that we're all existing in. But that's still, the other thing I've learned is having a really clear dynamic and code of conduct is actually really, really important. Even with 14,000 leaders, we've had just things go sideways, misunderstandings, or just people that are whatever that exist. I resisted it.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:24:39) I'm like, we're leaders. We don't need a code of conduct for like a year or so. I'm like, oh, boy, do we ever. And it's not like a weekly thing, but it happens frequently enough that we, and I just go back to the code of conduct. I look here and I say, this behavior or this whatever it is, it's not the law.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:24:58) It's just a code of conduct, but it's there to kind of give us guidance when things get a little strange. And it's incredibly helpful. And we've built an admin community. I think I got like six admins now. And, again, it generally just takes care of itself.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:25:11) It's generally every day. There's nothing that admins have to do. But having that there has been a really good backstop. And it also shows people that when something goes sideways, we are actively taking care of the community. And I think that gives people a sense of, hopefully, a sense of safety and that we're handling things.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:25:31) So it's not perfect, but it's one of my favorite things I've built. And I built a lot of things, mostly because I don't do a lot there. And it's just a lot of people self-serving and taking care of each other and answering questions and getting their resumes reviewed and getting jobs now. There's a lot of people that are finding jobs there. So, like, if you told me whatever it was many years ago when it started that that was gonna be the case, I would have giggled.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:25:59) It's amazing. What inspired you to start it? I ran the blog post. The blog has been around for years and years, and I surveyed folks and said, hey. What are some other ways that we should be learning from each other?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:26:14) And the CEO of Mailchimp, a friend of mine, acquaintance of mine. I was like, I was thinking, hey, I wanna do a mailing. She's like, what about this, this is before I worked at Slack. She's like, what you should just get a Slack going. I'm like, oh, yeah.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:26:28) That makes a ton of sense. So, this is before I worked there. I went and did a talk at Slack for the engineering team about stuff that we're talking about right now. And then when I was done, I'm like, hey. Can I get a pro bono, like, comp, sort of Slack?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:26:44) And they're like, yeah. Sure. No problem. They don't do this anymore. So I got this comped one and just, you know, opened it up and just flood.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:26:54) It's been a flood. It's just been constant growth. It's not crazy growth. It's not like millions of people, but it's 10 to 50 people a day or so, something like that, which is nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:04) That is nice. Yeah. And they're there to learn, and then they contribute, and all the beautiful things that come out of a community.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:27:12) Well, and it's also an interesting thing to me is there's channels where the same question's been asked a thousand times, and everyone just keeps on answering. There's a lot of popular channels there, and people come in there with the same question, and people are saying the same thing. I always thought there'd be like a Wiki or something created with sort of the repeated knowledge. Nope. People are just fine with in the vet my resume channel answering the same questions over and over again.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:27:39) So it's got a real-time sort of personal feel as well. You're always talking with another human, which I love.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:44) Yeah. There's something different about that. There's something, especially I noticed it, this principle or this feeling when presales sometimes with a product. Like, I could go into the whole FAQ with the chat and there's a human right there, and they're gonna give me so much more back than just going and reading one of the static FAQ posts.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:28:07) Yeah. It's one of the things, it's there and it's these channels. Some of these channels have thousands and thousands of people. So you get a lot of diverse perspective too, which is really cool. It's like on a day-to-day basis, I do nothing there.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:28:20) But on a day-to-day basis, the aggregate value being created is phenomenal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:26) So how do you handle situations where—I was talking about this with Reid, who's the CTO of TravelBank. That was a really cool episode. He had a background in the military, and so we got to talk about how he learned leadership from the military and then applied those lessons.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:28:46) Mhmm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:46) And so one of the things we were discussing were how to handle situations where your teams get discouraged. And I was curious what your thoughts were on that.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:28:54) Well, it's one of those "it depends" questions. Discouraged how? I'll pull something from recent world when we're all now trapped in these boxes during a pandemic. I am twisting your question a little bit. I am deeply worried about the lack of the infrequent, low signal that we get just by hanging out together in the same physical space.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:29:20) I can learn a lot from a staff meeting or from just bumping into you in the hallway about how you are doing. And that is so much harder in this new video conference world that we are living in and we'll be living in for a long time. As an introvert, I'm generally okay because I can hide in my cave and, you know, people at work. But there's folks that are extroverts right now that I think are really suffering because they get so much energy from being together and jamming together on stuff. So trying to bring it back to your question.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:29:55) There's a despair in terms of us not being able to connect. So we now have a daily standup with my staff, end of the day, and there's no work. It's just us shooting the breeze and giggling about things. And it was super weird for the first couple weeks, and now it's just part of what we do. And it's us connecting, and it's hopefully lifting us up a little bit and making us feel connected when we are so terribly not connected. So that's a slightly different version of what you're saying.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:30:25) But that's the thing that I—when I thought about where am I worried about my team, that's an investment that I'm making right now in a time that we're deeply disconnected to feel connected and not get into despair in the first place, which is maybe the other answer to your question. Don't let them get to despair. Head it off at the pass. Learn about how things could go. And I mean, you don't get rewarded for disasters that didn't happen, but that's actually your job—is to make sure it doesn't get there in the first place.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:55) That's a good answer. I like that. I was reading your Twitter, and I saw someone had tweeted at you and said, "Hey, thank you for giving a name to those thoughts that pop into your head while you're running." Can you describe that a little bit for me?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:31:11) The name of the thing is a little confusing, but I love it. So we all know what flow is. Flow is, you know, you're sitting down at your computer and you've got a very hard programming problem or engineering problem, and it takes a while to get your brain kind of context-switched into the complexity of the problem. And then you're just there. And you're in this flow state where you can just see it all and the code is just coming out. You're like, "This is amazing." There's a term that I call antiflow, and it's probably better called, like, shower thoughts. I'm a biker. I bike a lot, and I do some of the best work on my bike. And if I told you what I was gonna work on when I go ride my bike later today, I would be lying because I have no idea.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:31:57) What happens is I just get on the bike and I'm kind of sitting there and I'm riding. It's, you know, ten, twenty miles or whatever it is, and things just pop in my head. And it's this wonderful gray matter that we have just kind of doing its pattern-matching thing. But I'm literally on this bike and going, "That's what I should do about Alice. That's exactly the right solution."

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:32:17) And it's letting go of the focus and all the things and all the stimulus and letting your brain just kind of wander through. And the story that I tell myself is that it's sort of this interesting—it's kind of just knocking things together that are front of mind. Alice, the performance thing, the reorg, the book we're writing, whatever it is. And it kind of just jams things together, and then those sometimes spark, and you're like, "Oh, there's a great article there. Oh, I know what that talks about, or I know what to say about that thing." I love being on my bike because of that antiflow.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:32:51) I had to develop a system to kind of keep track of all the things I'd think of because I'm on my bike. Right? So I start to remember the word. So at the end of a ride, I have this sort of sentence that makes no sense, which is bookmarks to everything that I thought of on the ride. And by the way, 50% of them, I never do anything. But the other 50% is gold. So that's antiflow is what I call it. And I think it sounds negative, and that's why people have some of the issue with it. But it's not negative. It's just sort of the inversion of the structured creative process. It's the unstructured creative process.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:33:22) Well, that's a good answer.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:26) Well, we're recording it too, so we can play back. No, I liked that. When I was listening to the description, so I'm a runner, so I run. And then—

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:33:34) Yeah. Same thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:38) Yeah. You get the same thing. And so I've made a couple of rules. The first rule is I can't stop the run to write a note.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:33:44) Yeah. Same here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:45) Yeah. And the other time when I have those thoughts—I guess I interpreted it a little bit differently. So I interpreted it as the things I labeled distractions. I get new ideas all the time while I'm going through the process of achieving an existing idea. And so the only way for me to complete the existing path I'm on is to label everything else that comes up a distraction and push it off to the side, put it into a bank until I complete my current goal. And so that's something that I've been learning a lot the past couple years.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:34:20) Yeah. No, it's—I have one, two, three work notebooks, two work, one fun here, and then I have a big notebook down here. These will all be filled over the next week or so with a whole process of capturing those distractions that you're talking about and putting them somewhere that I go look at them later. Enough that I honor them and I get them down, but I need to focus on this thing that I'm doing right now. But I often go back and, "Oh my god, that's amazing." It's—but as we've been talking about, I write everything down. And it's super useful because later when I need it, it's sometimes just sitting there waiting for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:01) And sometimes I'll take the energy. I'll siphon the energy from that burst of creative thought and idea that's brand new and so fresh and giving you those dopamine hits and all those things. And then I'll try to catch it as quickly as I can to then reallocate all of that energy and excitement to complete something I'm already in the process of doing.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:35:21) That's smart. That's super smart.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:22) It's a new little hack. I like to look at our brains as—I mean, more and more, especially after having kids, boy, are we like AI algorithms? We totally are. Yeah. So I'm just trying to create a good environment, you know, for not only for the kids, but for myself. I'm curating my environment as—I'm a big fan of recurring event reminders. So I have these every two months or every three months, I have these little things go off in my phone. It's like, "Make sure you're doing—you're happy with the way you're spending your time. Make sure you curate your environment to get the outcomes you're after." And then recently I got into—have you ever come across James Clear with Atomic Habits?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:36:03) Yes. I have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:04) Yeah. So I bought one of the habit journals. Basically, a habit tracker. So I normally have just notes, either grid or dot grid and then a pen. And that's how I structure my stuff. But this had basically the first half of the empty notebook was dot grid stuff. And the second half was this, you know, spreadsheet-style, very beautiful-looking habit tracking system. And so—

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:36:28) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:30) That's pretty useful.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:36:30) Yeah. Yeah. It's—I just need the paper and the pen, my favorite pen, and that's enough for me to kind of get it structured. And also having habits in the morning. I do a morning sort of like, "What's going on here? What am I doing? What do I need to prep?" Look at the notes. And in the evening, I do a sort of a coalesce, pull through everything, go through it, cross off unimportant stuff, rewrite stuff that needs to be captured. That piece to me, the morning and the evening scrubs are key to kind of a healthy cadence around all the work that I'm doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:04) I like that. I do that with my Evernote where I'll put the six top things that have to get done, and then I revisit at the end of the day and move things off to the next day. But these little processes that I've played with, I've probably tried a hundred things and then one or two I find is effective, and then it sticks with me throughout the years. Yeah.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:37:27) Yeah. It's like productivity systems. I've tried every single one for a month. Yep. And I've always gone back on pen and a paper. It's just the thing that works for me. So I think things and—I mean, I do reminders in Slack too. But in general, my—it's the spine, the central nervous system of the Lopp corporation are notebooks.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:48) Yeah. I find that putting time into stuff is important. My wife and I started tracking our financials.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:37:54) Uh, yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:55) And we found it wasn't about the tool. Right? You can get Mint and it kind of does. And it wasn't about anything other than us both sitting down on a Saturday and spending an hour just going through our goals. And, you know, it doesn't matter what type of spreadsheet. It's just that you're allocating thought processing time to it.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:38:13) Yep. Totally. Yeah. Our version of that is my wife and I every night we hang out. We have a hot tub here. Sounds weird, but we just go take a hot tub and it's great, you know, kind of relax. But the most important part is sort of like we get decompressed from the day. Like, "What's going on? What are you doing here?" Blah blah blah. Like, as marriage advice, having twenty to thirty minutes every day where we're just kind of walking through sort of what's going on. And sometimes it's just boring stuff. And sometimes it's like, "Woah. What are we gonna do about the daughter or this sort of thing?" So, again, small things done well. Bring it back to book. It's a daily investment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:49) What was that like for you? Can you talk me a little bit through about the mindset and the decisions going into retirement and then the thoughts and everything coming? Can you just describe that period of time in your life?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:39:00) Yeah. Totally. The last three gigs, which were Slack, Pinterest, and before that, Palantir. And the role was very similar between all three. It's different, but the same thing—the same set of work was going on, which was we're about a hundred or so engineers, and let's go make it 2,000. So it's rapid growth of an engineering team or company of culture, of all sorts of hard things. And I did it three times in a row. So lots of opportunity to fail, lots of opportunity to learn, but ultimately a huge amount of stress. In two of those cases, I was the VP of engineering, so the buck stopped with me, which means every day, everything that's getting on your plate is usually a prequalified disaster because your team's all tried with it and blah, blah. The things that are getting to you are usually the hardest problems, which is your job. I'm exaggerating only a little bit.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:39:59) So doing that for eight and a half years was exhausting. So the pro leisure circuit, I never really thought about it as retirement because I mean, I did. But it wasn't—I called it that deliberately because I was just like, "Cool. I just need a break." Every day being a fire drill and every day the stakes being—the stakes feeling incredibly high was just exhausting. So it was nice to not have, you know, this constant sort of fire drill going on. And it was good. I've never really taken any time off, and this was about four months or so. And I was kind of telling my wife I was gonna take a year or so because the last few companies have done well. And so I'm blessed to be able to have that opportunity. But I really like working. I really enjoy it. I've been working since I was 14. I got a job at a little local store. So I've been employed for a great many years. It's not—I don't know if it's a self-worth thing or just a sort of tension or I like working or whatever it is. I really like building things. And so it was, yeah, you know, about two months in and there was an opportunity to come talk to Apple and to do things there. And I really debated that I didn't give myself enough downtime, but they were cool about starting a little bit later. So I had a good four months off, so it was nice.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:41:23) But I really enjoy that. I like—there's no other simpler way to say it. It's like I like working. I like working with people. I like understanding culture. I like having impact. I like going in places that people know about whether that's an Apple or Pinterest or Slack or Palantir, Netscape, Portland. There's just a long litany of things, companies I've been at. And that was so that was the thing. That was sort of the arc there—was it was time to relax. I relaxed. Perhaps not enough. Maybe I should have done a little bit more. And then it was time to kind of get back to work.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:41:57) But in a very different context, Apple is not a startup. It's a very—and I was there before. So I was curious about all of these lessons that I'd learned on my journey around tech. What it would be like to go back to a place that I love and see what Lopp at this age, this level of experience, how I would do there. So that's a work in progress.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:21) Yeah. I like how you refer to yourself like that. You do it in a very—it's a very unique way, and I enjoy it quite a bit because I have an internal dialogue that often says, "Oh, Joel, I like this." And that's because in order to improve myself and to study myself, I've just had to constantly objectively consider myself, you know?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:42:45) Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I talk about myself in the third person probably too much, though.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:50) I think the perfect amount.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:42:53) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:55) Oh, man. This is good. I'm so excited that you kept coming on and hanging out with us. You're the best. Yeah.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:43:01) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 00:43:02) Yeah, I appreciate it. So I'm curious on a couple of things here. So what do you think is something that, you know, in leadership that people aren't thinking about?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:43:15) Yeah. Which chapter do I want to recite here? I think we're generally paying a lot of — I think we're cognizant of inclusion and diversity as an important thing, but I don't think we're doing enough at all. I think we understand the problem set. We probably heard some important people tell us what to do.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:43:37) But when it comes down to making that hire as a leader who is responsible for making that hire, am I doing enough or not doing enough in terms of talking to enough people, having a healthy pipeline, and really investing in that? And I got really lucky going to Slack because the founders there really decided from day one to make it a really diverse workforce. And you walked in and it was just obvious. You go around — I have never seen so much diversity in an engineering team. And that was because they chose from day one to make that, and they developed a reputation.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:44:14) That's really, really hard to reverse engineer that into other companies if you're not built it in from day one. So that's a thing that I think about a lot. And you were asking what, but I think that's a thing that you have to — and it's not just about hiring. It's about being inclusive in a meeting, making sure the smallest voices have an opportunity to be heard. And it's super hard now that we're all stuck in these Zoom calls. But that's a thing that I think is — it's weird because I know everyone cares about it and they're saying the right thing, but what are they actually doing on a day-to-day basis?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:44:45) Like, what is the thing that they can point at and say, "I did this differently because I want to build a more diverse team"? So that's the thing I think we need to be working on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:54) Yeah. You know, I think I like the point you make about they built it in from day one. They spent time and they cared about it. And because of that, they have a more nuanced understanding of what it is versus if you're just trying to implement it because it's the thing that needs to be implemented now, you sort of oversimplify. Because I take it far beyond — I take diversity beyond gender and skin color to thoughts, style of thinking. Different people think different ways.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:26) Right. And so it's like, how does your processor work? You know, how do you compute data? And let's make sure we have a variety of people who compute data in different ways so that we can get a better result.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:45:40) No, it's ideas get better with eyeballs, man. And the more diverse the eyeballs, the better the idea. Right? This is the competitive advantage that a diverse team has. As you said, I'm getting all of these different perspectives about my dumb idea, and it's going to make it better.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:45:57) And if you like building software for humans, the better your ideas, the more people that it can apply to, the more successful your business. So that's the thing about diversity. And I get — people get it, but that's the — and it's hard. By the way, what we're talking about is actually a fundamentally harder thing because in a more diverse team, you're going to have more discord. You're going to have more debate because you're going to have ideas which are totally different and challenging to whatever your sort of norms are.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:46:26) But even that, that ability to have a debate, to kind of rationalize totally different perspectives — that's a muscle that you want in any engineering team, by the way. The fact that so-and-so can raise their hand and say, "I totally disagree, and here's my perspective." And you're like, "I don't get that at all, but explain it to me." Right? Like, these are characteristics of a culture that you want to be in.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:46:48) Right? And it's going to be safer, all the other important things, but also more productive, better ideas. Like, yes. Check. Check. Check. Check. Let's do that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:58) Yes. 100%. Yeah. You're so good at — it's like, I would license you as my leadership AI.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:47:10) Maybe I am. This could be completely CG right now. You don't know, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:15) I purchased some time from the lab corp. Oh, but alright. So I've got a couple — here's a good topic, and then it'll introduce the next one, which is good because sequence is amazing. Have you tried, beyond your books and your career, have you done monetization of the community at all or with leadership content at all?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:47:39) No, I haven't. And you know, it's crossed my mind, but I haven't done anything there. And early on, I was like, I'm definitely not going to do it. And we got super aggro in our code of conduct about commercial activity in the Slack just because, number one, we were lucky that Slack's comped it, so there's no bill for that. So thank you, Slack. But also, the moment that you start to do that, it changes the vibe and the place. So there's a couple channels that are explicitly looking for jobs and that sort of thing. But we're pretty aggro about shutting down other things because — I mean, just think about it, man.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:48:19) It's 14,000 leaders. Maybe two or 3,000 of those a day are in there doing something. These are prequalified leaders. How many people are interested in that demographic? The answer is a lot. And we've really drawn a clear line about keeping it not monetized at all. So yeah. I thought about it early on, but given the luckiness that I had in terms of getting this thing from Slack, it just seems like a thing that we've sort of built a pretty strong wall around it. And it's getting harder because there's so many people there now. You know, there's folks that are sneaking in through the Lopp email invite and spamming folks saying, "Hey, by the way, this is an amazing site you should see."

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:49:00) The good news is that the community is so used to it not being that way that they immediately go, "Whoa, this is a problem." And then an admin jumps in there and cauterizes. So as long as Slack is paying the bill, then that's our current strategy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:15) Yeah. Well, so I felt like that answer is a little bit more towards advertisers and — Yeah. Where I was coming from is a little bit more towards you making premium content. Oh, me? Yeah. Like, you making content for the community.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:49:29) Oh, I see what you're saying.

(Joel Beasley at 00:49:30) Because your content's so good. And here's the thing — here's what I found too. Because I was super against monetization of the podcast and everything until I found a different way to frame it. Because by offering something that's premium, then cash comes in and we can hire people to make content that's even better and then that's useful to people. And I mean, it's definitely an undertaking, but I was just curious if you had done that at all.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:49:58) I've thought about it, but here's my slippery response. The amount of opportunity that has been given to me over the last ten years because of my writing being available to anyone — I mean, you can buy the book. That's one thing, but that's not a lot of money at all. The amount of opportunity which has actually turned into monetization in terms of being at companies that have been reasonably successful is amazing.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:50:26) And the value that I'm getting from my writing right now — yeah, there would be a way to create more dollars. Sure. But by having it as broadly available to everyone, I think I'm already getting max value. Yeah. Maybe I'll change my tune in a world where I'm not working. Because I also feel like the act of working is always giving me good content. So I feel like it's partly giving back when I'm like, "Oh, this is a weird political — oh my God, there's an article here." Getting that back as part of my therapy is also — but also kind of sharing what's going on with as many people as possible. So I've been really lucky in that I've had good jobs, and I've never really wanted to create it.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:51:10) And I don't really have a desire to kind of operationalize it in terms of getting other people in. I mean, I had an editor and, you know, that sort of thing. I don't see a scale thing that I want to actually go do. But maybe, you know, in a post-Apple world, I've built up the Rands Leadership Consulting Group. There's something to do there. But right now it feels very balanced to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:33) Nice. And that's the important thing, right? You go with what you feel is right. That's the beautiful part about setting up your life, right? And the discipline gives you freedom. And okay, so now I've got a thing that popped into my head that I would like your insight on. So going into this, I'm going into a second book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:51:51) And what I have so far is we're calling it Tech Titans. And we've got basically the best advice extracted from 400 interviews. But they're two-minute — two-paragraph if you translate them into text — insights. And so then you have them organized by topics. So you go to culture and you get all these different CTOs. And what I was struggling with was how to put the book together structurally. Because — I'll just tell you one or two of the ideas, and then that'll give you a better understanding. So the first idea was, like, let's take a chapter, culture, would be for me to write some sort of consolidated experience slash a story included. And then after that, maybe that's a page or two at the beginning of the chapter culture.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:39) After that, you get four or five, six pages of, you know, here's a CTO of NASA, Microsoft, Verizon, you know, saying their thing on culture. Right. The other way was to put all of my thoughts upfront, and then just have — split the book in half like Radical Candor did where she put — did you read that book, Radical Candor?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:52:58) I did.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:58) I think Kim. The front was all her narrative, and then the back half was a bunch of actionable frameworks.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:53:11) I would go with the following rule. Attention spans are short. So I would say — I don't know, here's another version. Okay, I didn't say this one, which is — so you've got — you already have the chunks. You know what the chunks are? Okay. Maybe it's let the experts teach first. So lead with your things. So you have the title, culture or something.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:53:36) Then you have your end chat stories or distilled wisdom, and then finish with what you learned from that. I kind of like that because you can see — here is — you want to capture the wisdom of all these leaders and your insight and what you learn from it is interesting. But I feel like if you lead with your thoughts from that, it's sort of — it's not what your intent of your book is. Right? Does that make sense?

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:00) That actually is way better. That's why I'm so glad I asked you this question. That is the best way and it follows — yes. That is good. And then there's just the fear of — you know, it's like your book Managing Humans. When you were doing this —

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:54:17) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:18) It feels like it's not only a reference book, but it's also you could just read right through it. How did you intend it?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:54:26) Well, well, number one, this is the third edition you have in your hands. So it's gotten better each time. So editing, back to our first topic. It was 60% of it was existing stuff that I kind of shaped into a narrative. But the other thing is the last two editions, and there's a fourth edition coming out in January, by the way.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:54:46) I've been able to — I've been lucky enough to be able to kind of shape it, move it around, and kind of make it an arc. But it was — the direct answer to your question, it's intended to be you can just go in and say, "Oh, cool. I want to read about feedback." It was intended to be standalone chapters because it was really inspired by the blog. But it — I'm glad you said that it can be a narrative there. It is — I do try to kind of make it sort of a progression. It's something I really tried to do in the third book as well is really have it be sort of more of a book even though it's still — the third book is still you can just read a chapter and it's kind of like a blog post. But there's a little more connective tissue there. But the answer to your question is, it was intended to be just go grab a chapter and read it, and it can stand alone by itself.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:30) And did you do an Audible for Managing Humans?

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:55:33) I think so. I keep on getting asked this question by the publishers. I think there's a — I think it's out there. I'll double check. I don't know right now. I always — someone told me I should do the — for the third book, I should be the person who's reading it, which I like that idea, but that sounds like a lot of work. And finishing a book — writing a book is, as you know, a ton of work. And when you're done with it, you don't want to see it for about a year or so. You're like, "I never want to see this. It's awful."

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:56:00) "It's a horrible book. I never want to see it again." And then you're like, "Oh, no. It's actually pretty good." But I'm about six months into that sort of detox. So then I don't even want to think about the book.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:08) Yeah. It's like for me with writing software, I come back to the book and I'm like, "This could be so much better."

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:56:16) Yeah. This is — so this is the fourth edition.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:21) Oh, there's a fourth coming.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:56:23) Yeah. But this is the actual third edition, but this is the fun part. What I'm doing right now is I'm just rereading it with a pen, and I can go and be like, "Oh, that's garbage," or "Nuke this chapter." "I'll say this thing here." So it's this really awesome opportunity to take something which people generally like and kind of like, "Cool. I can even make this better." And also more relevant. I'm thinking I'm going to actually — I know I'm going to write some work-from-home chapters for it and get a little bit more into this world of us being trapped in these boxes behind these screens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:56:52) Yes. And you had a great post, and we'll link to it in the show notes. Tips for your audio/video quality and work-from-home blog post. That was really good one too.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:57:01) Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. It was fun to write. That was one of those, "Oh, I got to write this post," and it just happened. It was done. Great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:06) Yes. Amazing. Beautiful. I knew today was going to be an amazing conversation. Michael, you are the man. Thank you so much.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:57:14) Absolutely. Appreciate it. Great questions. Thank you very much.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:18) Awesome. Thank you so much, Michael.

(Michael Lopp (also known as "Rands") at 00:57:20) Absolutely, sir. You have a great day, okay? And be safe.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:22) You too. Take care. Thank you so much for listening, and if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected].

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:44) Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.