Unlock the power of clear and concise communication. Learn how to communicate effectively, minimize noise and distractions, and engage in "Deep Work." In this discussion, Mike Lerario speaks with Joe McCormack, the author of the books "Brief," "Noise," and "Quiet Work." Joe also leads the Brief Lab in Southern Pines, NC, where he teaches U.S. Special Operations forces how to become the most effective communicators in the world.
Unlock the power of clear and concise communication. Learn how to communicate effectively, minimize noise and distractions, and engage in "Deep Work." In this discussion, Mike Lerario speaks with Joe McCormack, the author of the books "Brief," "Noise," and "Quiet Work." Joe also leads the Brief Lab in Southern Pines, NC, where he teaches U.S. Special Operations forces how to become the most effective communicators bin the world.
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Check out Joe's books Here.
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The Objective Arete Podcast
Episode #5. Be Brilliant, Be Brief – Be a Master Communicator
Transcript
Mike: Joe, great to meet you. I have to say that I'm having kind of a fan moment here that I got to really fight back because since I first read Brief, I've been a big fan of that book and the other two to follow, although I haven't read Quiet Work yet. Nearly met you in 2018 or 19. I was doing the Young Lions program with you, Sasak, and, uh, For some reason, the trip out here didn't, didn't happen.
But, uh, big fan. I think that, uh, next to my books and Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, your book, Brief, is the one I've given to more people than any other book. so much. Oh, you're welcome. It's a great book. So, you wrote your books, Brief, Noise, Quiet Work, in that particular order. Is there a different order you'd recommend people read them in?
Joe: I mean, you could certainly read them in that order. I would read noise first, because noise sets up the environment that we live in. It really does describe the whole issue of focus and communication and clutter and distraction, and where people tend to focus or misfocus their attention and squander it, and just how hard it is to kind of stay on a thing.
That really does kind of get a person starting to think about how difficult and competitive it is. In the world, like in the competition of attention, there's a lot of noise that's winning people's attention and with nothing to show for it. So I would start with noise first, and then brief, and then quiet work.
And those two books really relate to each other in a very deliberate way because what I've learned in the last 10 years starting and running the Brief Lab is that clear and concise communication is It's super valuable, across the table from a client, or your boss, or with your co workers, or whatever, and to be able to say what you need to say, and not have an economy of that, and not get lost in, like, the words, can give people a lot of power.
I'm establishing a plan, priorities, and there's clarity in that delivery, and it's very deliberate, it's incredibly powerful. What I've found, though, over the years, is that people will, will learn the skills, learn the tools, and then they'll kind of plateau out of it. So they'll be like, oh my gosh, this is so good, and I'm learning the before and afters.
But, but you start to see like, it's not, they're not getting better over time. Communication's a perishable skill, so people can get worse at it, or better at it. But they can also kind of just sort of stay at the same level. It's kind of like learning a language. You're like, hey, I'm pretty Proficient in French, but I haven't gotten any better at it.
So I'm pretty much having the same conversations And I and I started thinking about why that was the case and when it was one when I was writing noise That I started really thinking about the absence of quiet during the work day to give people time to prepare So I spend a lot of time training people in special operations.
It's not the only people that we train. We train corporate corporations like American Express and eBay and Microsoft and companies like that, but what's lacking in their day is any time To prepare the meeting that they're going to go into. Well, we all know, like, if you don't prepare before you do something, you're kind of showing up, and nobody wants to say, I'm winging it, but we're kind of winging it.
In communication, when you wing communication, it sounds scattered, and time alone makes the collaboration, which is brief, brief is teaching that better. So I would say noise, brief, and then quiet works.
Mike: Okay. I would have thought you would have recommended them in the opposite order. So I'm glad I asked that question because it's kind of like you
Joe: could do.
It's like food, you know, maybe you want to start with dessert. You want to, I don't know. I'm not comparing one to dessert either, but now you can, I would, that would be an order you could put either one.
Mike: I like that. I mean, I think that that's, uh, I heard you recently on, uh, one of the, uh, From the Green Notebook podcast episodes with Joe Byerly, who I think is brilliant, and to hear you talk about it as, you know, in this story, noise is the villain, and quiet is your shield, and brief is your sword, I think that's, those are great visuals and a great way to kind of frame this issue of, Hey, communication is the foundation to everything we do.
Get it right or, or get things wrong. I mean, everything that follows will go wrong if you don't get the communications right.
Joe: Absolutely. I think that, you know, for your listeners and anybody thinking about leading, managing, being a professional, people spend a lot of time communicating. But most people, that's not going to be their moment.
Like standing in front of a podium or on a stage so like how to do like a Ted Presentation or whatever is a lot of like energy to like I've used that thing very very Rarely, I think where people spend an enormous amount of time are like hey You got a minute over here, and I'm sending email over there and like all during the day There's a lot of squandering of that and what I've spending a lot of time thinking about is You're creating noise for people, for yourself, and you're like, I don't know what to do.
I don't know what to think. I don't know what's important. It all just sounds like information. That's a fixable problem, but you got to start to think about like, well, how do I fix that communication? And I think we learn a lot from manufacturing, believe it or not. Like the whole movement of Six Sigma and Lean, you know, like process improvement.
Like back in the day where Manufacturers were just like taking excess steps out of process to create like really deliberate, like cars back when I was a kid were like, they would always break. I don't know, like, what was your experience, but like, cars were, my parents were like, we'd turn the car on and like, oh, the starter wouldn't work and the thing would stop on the side of the road and like, and we had constant car problems.
And it wasn't because like. We were abusing the cars, it was just they weren't made very well. Nowadays, it's like the cars, generally speaking, are like made significantly better. Like you buy a car and it, you know, for the first four or five years, it's probably not going to just randomly just not work for you.
And a lot of that because they designed the whole, that whole process in a lean, deliberate, efficient way. Communication is the most undeliberate, inefficient thing that's going on in the workplace today that nobody even looks at.
Mike: Yeah. I think with a lot of my clients I've found it very helpful to remind them that everything they do is a performance.
Write an email, you're performing. Giving a PowerPoint presentation, you're performing. Getting on stage with a musical instrument is clearly performing. But so is that letter or memo you're going to write. And every performance has four stages in the cycle. Plan, prepare, execute, review. Right? Most people don't do the review to get better the next time they have to plan, prepare, execute.
Most people jump right into execution. And what I love about your books is the attention given to plan and prepare. Like, put that effort in up front. To make sure that you are clear and concise, not wasting people's time. You have to be informative, tell people something they don't know. You have to be interesting.
And so this is the storyteller's thing. Maybe it's Carmen Gallo. I don't know, but you have to be interesting. You have to grab their attention. Attention is the point you make with noise. Then you have to be concise. Clear and concise and I borrow that from you and then you have to be compelling which is the Henry Kissinger thing, right?
It's not enough to be right. You have to move somebody to action. I think this is where most people miss out and it's not a Usually a problem with execution. It's a problem with planning and preparation.
Joe: So it's I2C3? I2C2. Clear, concise, and compelling. That's the third. I mean, I'm not sure there's another number there, but like, hey, you know.
I'll take it. It
Mike: just became I2C3.
Joe: So, the thing about, um, I mean, I'm going to challenge you on a couple of those things. Not because there's a right or wrong, but I think there's just a way of looking at it. I heard, I was reading a magazine. An airline magazine on Southwest Airlines years ago. And I'll never forget this article.
This woman in this article is this, like, Jewish woman from New York. And she, she told her son, It's better to be interested than interesting. And I'm like, number one, that's a great line, right? But I'm like, alright, so I unpacked that a little bit. And what, it turns out that one of the most underrated skills in communication is listening.
To be interested makes you interesting. Because so many people spend all the time talking and not enough time listening. If I'm interested, I know about you and what motivates you and what you care about. And like everybody says, it's all about your audience when you're in this performance, you talk about, well, I don't even know what my audience wants because I'm too busy performing for my audience.
Begs the question in planning and preparation is, is this need to be interesting? Starts with like, it's not about me, it's about the person I'm talking to and what, what do they really care about? Now I'm speaking to what they care about. Now, that, so that's one, I'm not saying, you know, I think what you're saying about interesting is like, compel people, like get their attention.
Which is, which is absolutely spot on. I think a lot of that has to do with your intention. Like, I don't want to compel you to do something. I'm not gonna, so we have a line that we teach at the Brief Lab called, Tell me, don't sell me. And most people are like, well, I gotta, I gotta sell a person on this idea.
And then what happens to the person is they shut down. They're like, they're not listening anymore. Cause they're like, are you trying to convince me to do something? I don't want to do that. I, I sense that you're, you're trying to be persuasive. And. My, my, my perspective is be clear, be concise, and you will be compelling, but don't try to convince the person.
That is, that, that, that decision lies in them, and it's the payback for you being clear and concise. So I think the C3 thing, I think you're onto something.
Mike: I, for me, it's the compelling part is it's a call to action or it's you, you move them to do something. Why would I send you an email if it wasn't for you to Either be more informed or to make a decision.
One of those two. And I should tell you that up front. I'm a big fan of using subject lines, every subject line in every email audit have one of these three words, cause there's only four types of email. Uh, it should either be info decision. If to a boss, usually, Hey boss, we need decision or request if I'm.
To somebody else that I need help with, right? The fourth one is spam. And you shouldn't be sending spam anyway. But like, those are the only kind of info, or the only kind of emails that anybody should be sending out. So if you put that in the subject line, you're, you're helping them out immensely. But the compelling part for me is, why, why did I ask you, why did I send this to you?
It's to, for you to do something, either to gather this information, to have this bit of information, to make a decision, or to help me with something I'm, I'm putting out a request for, or something I need help with. If it wasn't to ask you to do something, again, I'm probably wasting your time.
Joe: If you, if you, if you do, if you communicate well, it's easy for a person to go there.
So you don't have to, like, try that hard to do it. It's, like, I, one of the lines that I have in giving people advice about this is, like in emails and things like that is, ask people questions that end in the word yes. Can I send you more information? Yeah. Can I give you some feedback? So it's simple questions with simple answers.
And I, I would write an email and like, Okay, well how does the reader read the email? Is it easy to respond to this thing? Is it easy to follow the thing? Sure. That becomes in and of itself compelling. Like, oh my gosh, that was effortless. It was so easy to understand what you said. And it was so easy to reply to what you needed from me.
Is something that a lot of people struggle with.
Mike: We're sitting here in the brief lab in, in Southern Pines, North Carolina, and it's a beautiful space. It really is. My question is, did you envision this when, because you were working in marketing, right? And then the, the call for help came from Fort Bragg and the special operations community to get better at how they communicate.
And so if I understand correctly, the brief lab you put here in Southern Pines because of that work.
Joe: Yeah, so I, I was, I had a full blown marketing agency, which doesn't exist anymore. But, um, I, I had account executives and creative directors and video producers and writers and all that in Chicago to North Carolina to Fort Bragg to teach.
You know, certainly it's kind of cool to be on a military base. I've never been in the military, so you go on a military base and you, you know, you get badged in and you get, you know, go through security, security checks and stuff and you meet a lot of cool people and it's, it's pretty amazing. The environment was wrong.
A lot of the way people learn. Is a lot of it's based on the environment. You think about like a dingy classroom with like terrible chairs and like, and this is no offense against the military for anybody listening to the military, but the coffee in a military base is terrible. You're like, hey, you want a cup of coffee?
And I'm like, sure. And then you hear like, let me see what I can find. That's never a really good answer. And then you open up a drawer and you see like a thousand sugar packets, but no, there's no spoon. It's just like, all right, I'm going on to these bases teaching these classes. And then people are pulling out of the class because I've been tasked with something, and then I'm losing people, and they're not really paying attention because some dignitary just walked down the hallway.
And I just had this impulse. This is like, this is like the year before Brief came out, it was like 2013. Like, I just want to build a place that's near enough to the base that people can come to. But the environment would be so different than anything that they've ever been in that I just, and my art director at the time, who actually does some work with Oprah, who's really good at interior design, she did set design for Oprah, and we're like, let's just build a really cool classroom with like a kitchen and a lounge area and we just lucked out.
I mean, guys came in there like, it's a little bit like I was like anticipating the need, but I'm like, if it's really that important, it should have its own place. And that's the site built. I built it. And the first groups that came in first impression, you walk in, you're like, Oh my gosh, this place is awesome.
And I'm like, I built it for you so that you can learn this thing. And that went a long way. I think two part question.
Mike: So the first one is, is it, is it safe to say that the brief lab or what brought about the brief lab was a side hustle
Joe: that turned into your main gig? It was not supposed to be a side hustle, but it kind of was, it was a request.
That started multiplying like they wanted more of it when they found that it was like not what they thought it was gonna be what they were learning is public speaking and like Briefing like it was this very mechanical thing that didn't help anybody.
Mike: Never less than 18 font point on your font on your right
Joe: Exactly.
It was just it was not it was training that was not helping the thing at all Yeah, so when I started teaching the courses the response was like, oh, can you do another one another one? Well, that meant that was you know, stopping running this marketing agency, which was you know, I'd buy 25 people working there To come down here and it's the frequency was increasing To the point that I'm like, all right, this is actually a thing.
So when I wrote brief, brief wasn't my idea. Brief was a request of somebody in the class. It wasn't even called brief. It was called strategic communication, whatever name they gave it. They gave it some army name, extra comms or some, some fancy name like that. And it was just me teaching. What I did with my clients, like how do you speak to the board of directors and how do you pitch Forbes magazine and how do you talk to an analyst and like all the stuff that I would do with corporations and tech companies and stuff.
When I came up with the idea of Brief, it was because people in the class were like, we need something to read. And this is what's cool about Special Operations Community in particular, is they really are learners. Like they really lean into learning and if they see something valuable, they want more of it.
So it was a compliment to me, but I realized, well, I gotta, and then at some point, some guy's like, man, I'll write a book. So I wrote Brief, which was hard because I had a day job, and it wasn't like they gave me an advance. There was no advance. It was just a deadline in, you know, 40, 000 words or whatever it was, and I had to do it on the side.
So it was a side hustle. Until it became too difficult to manage, too different, and then I let the BriefLab grow to replace that marketing agency.
Mike: So what does that, what did that look like if you could think back to it at the time? And what were you thinking when you were making the decision about, do I stay with the marketing or do I go with this thing that seems to be
Joe: Okay, so this is, I don't, I know enough about flying because I've taken some flight lessons and enough about aircraft.
Um, to be dangerous, but maybe this is a good or bad analogy, it was like having two engines on a plane, and one was outpowering the other one, and the plane started yawing. It started, it was flying weird. And I thought I was a great manager. Like I can just get the left engine to operate just like the right engine was.
Well, the right engine, the Brieflab, was more powerful, it was more needed than the other one. And the other one was good. But the plane started flying sideways. I don't know if that's a good analogy, but it was just kind of like, and I'm like, at some point I can't do both. The one was exceeding the other one, and that was very difficult for me to do because I had to let one business decline while the other one was growing inside of it, simultaneously.
And it was among the most difficult things I've ever done. I would never want to do it again, actually. I probably could do a business case study on it, but it was just like how you, they were similar. But one was like a marketing agency and was a training company and they were similar in what they talked about But very different in delivery.
Mike: We're thankful that you, uh, you decided to go with the right engine.
Joe: Every time I get asked back, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's still working.
Mike: So real quick then I guess, uh, kind of circle back on your, your books, the three books you've written. One or two tips on either the combined volume of work or each piece of that.
Someone who hasn't read your books. What would you say to them just to either move them in that direction or say, okay, we don't have time. Here's the most important thing. Well, the first
Joe: disclaimer is I never, I've never been and I never will be in the business of trying to sell books. Because I do it because they were needed and I would never do it if I didn't want.
Like, I was a reluctant author and I still am and so in each book there's something and I'll just, so in brief, the core idea in brief is something called an executive summary. And I asked this question to everybody that I teach. And the question is, have you ever heard, it's a three part question. Have you ever heard of an executive summary?
They're like, yeah. And you know, in the military, they call these exoms. Have you ever heard? Yeah, I heard. Have you ever had to deliver one? Yeah. Has anybody ever taught you how to build one? I've asked this question to thousands of people. Not at once, but like over years. And I always get yes, yes, no. These are intelligent people.
These are not people that just showed up yesterday, just like roll out of bed. They've heard this term in an executive summary. It's a pretty broad term. They've delivered them all the time, but nobody's ever taught them how to build them. So, the, the, the, the core idea in brief as an executive summary is In order.
What are you saying? Like, what is the point of what you're saying? You're making a recommendation? What's the recommendation? Next question is why are you making it? Like, why would I care? Then there might be some information and there's a so what? Okay, so, so what should we do? And you look at that form.
That's an executive summary form that I learned in marketing. Working for a big agency. And I started my own marketing agency. That's a very predictable, clear form that nobody's ever been taught. You'll hear books like Start With Why by Simon Sinek. They're good books, but they're good titles, but that's not actually the form.
You don't really, you need to know what your why is, for sure. But anything that you want to be brief is, first, what are we talking about? I'm in a meeting. What is the point of this meeting? Why are we meeting now? What are we going to cover and what's the so what of the meeting and the so what could be a payoff could be an Action it could be an ending and be good request And that leads to the next engagement.
So you follow that, and that's the core brief. Now people know it, then you apply it. You do that, and it becomes significantly different when a person who knows how to do that versus a person who doesn't. The person who doesn't, the listener's got to figure that out. They've got to figure out that the executive summary is on their own and rebuild it in their head.
It's exhausting. If you do that form, it's called a pre assembled message. I can say the same thing in half the words, and it's organized in an order that makes sense to the listener. They don't have to reassemble it. That's basically brief. What noise is, is the environment that we live in is incredibly competitive.
And a lot of the things that are competing for attention aren't worth our attention. But yet we spend a lot of time on it. And I'm not gonna like hate on technology or social media because I can go through dooms, scrolling dooms like everybody else and go through like TikTok, you know, what Instagram reels is like my guilty pleasure and stuff.
But at the end of the day, it's like having a diet of like popcorn and Diet Coke. It's very filling but it has no value. So noise is like, if you're, the point of that book is if you're not managing noise, it's probably managing you. If you're not brief, you're probably creating noise for somebody too, which is making them focus on the least important thing.
Or, like, in the military they say the bluff is at the bottom, which spells blab actually, bottom line at the bottom. So, you're creating blab, you're blabbing and you're creating noise for people, so that's the point of noise. If you're not managing it, it's managing you. And then quiet works, and I'm not saying this because it just came out, that is the most important thing.
That's missing in people's day. Time alone. And AI is only going to talk about this more. It's only going to play it out. People need to be spending more time alone than they do. And I'm not talking about like six hours a day and, but it's this balance between how I collaborate, how I work together, is driven by how well I work.
And people don't spend enough time working alone. And it could be five minutes here, a 15 minute appointment in the morning, first thing when I start my day. It could be, I show up to meetings, this is the thing I talk about late, like, I show up for meetings five minutes early, like a conference call, and nobody's on it.
Like, I just, I'm on like a Zoom call or a Teams call. I just like mute the mic, turn the camera off, and I'm by myself. And I use that five minutes of quiet to get ready for the conversation I'm going to have. Most people are showing up late. It's just five minutes of quiet. It makes any, it's like, I call it the secret ingredient.
It's like a little piece of your day that goes so far in your day. And people don't spend enough time because they're too busy. They're running around like crazy and that's so the big idea in in in the quiet works Is that it actually works, but you have to have you have to actually give it a chance
Mike: awesome kind of little foreshadowing there I'm going to ask you to make a prediction.
Will AI make us better or worse communicators?
Joe: My answer is better, but the safe, safe answer would be both. It'll make us better communicator. AI is like a bullet train. I don't know how fast bullet trains go. Let's say they go 280, 300 miles an hour. When you're on a bullet train, you're not trying to go fast.
You're already going fast. So the irony when you're on a bullet train is to slow down, sit down. And when you're prompting AI, you need quiet. Because you're having the conversation with the smartest person you've ever talked to. I can write some amazing things with AI. That makes my writing so much better.
If I'm writing it without thinking and I'm having it doing for me, it's gonna sound There's a, there's a, a paint and it's, it took, it took the market world by storm about 5, 10 years ago called Agreeable Gray. If you look it up, it's like everybody who designs houses, designs houses in agreeable gray. It's like, it's between like beige and light gray.
It matches with everything. AI writes in agreeable gray. It sounds about, it sounds like AI. If you haven't thought about it, it sounds generic. It's, it's grammatically correct. It's well structured. It's got bullet points, but it's super predictable. If you read enough of it, you can tell it's AI. You're like, that's AI.
Nobody's even thought about it. So it will make us much better writers if we take some quiet in our promptings, in our thinking, in our editing, in our reviewing. And it'll make people just like, immediately everybody's a good writer. You can't be a bad writer with AI, but it'll be a little bit beige.
Mike: See, I look at it as a tool.
Like, I wouldn't turn off spell check on my Word documents because I'm a lousy speller. I don't use AI yet for things like that, probably more pride than anything else. I think it will have the, the possibility of making us lazier. And the quiet will most definitely help because I can't see how quiet doesn't help us, that reflection time, that thinking.
But the planning and preparation, I think, even with AI has got to be a piece of it. I mean,
Joe: it's, I mean, the thing about it is, it, and we're in a very, very early, early stages of, of AI. A really, really close friend of mine who actually wrote The Forward to Noise is the chief futurist at Deloitte. This guy's name is Mike Bechtel.
Really, really smart guy. Venture capitalist, tech guy, anthropologist, teaches at Notre Dame's grad school. Really, really smart guy. He talks a lot about AI. And that's one of his biggest things. It's like, the market's just yearning, like, what does this thing mean to humanity? And its power is breathtaking.
It's absolutely breathtaking, but you got to play with it. I played with it and it literally blew my mind. And I'm a writer, so I had to write a three act play of two characters I'd never met before. And it, it was so good on a first draft, and it took 30 seconds to, so it's way more than a tool. It's literally, the thing about language and what it's done, there's a natural, beautiful design of language.
Like the way God designed language, it's this massively beautiful formula of how words connect to each other and make meaning. It's mapped the entire, all of language. In there, there's embedded intelligence in that. And it's now, It makes it immediately accessible so people don't even know how to it's like a black box.
You don't have to know how it works But when you start to play with it I'm doing stuff in finance right now like just going through like like I'm talking to like the smartest financial advisor ever It's incredible the responses and I'm like, all right, you just said that So let me tell me a little bit more about this other thing and it just it's like you're talking this person It's it's it's so it are our lives in the next 5 10 15 years are gonna just be absolutely significantly different if we Take the time, though, to slow down, to sit with it, to talk with it, to prompt it, because prompting is what you do.
You prompt it. You make comments to it. You make adjustments. It's, it's like the smartest research assistant you've ever had.
Mike: So instead of asking better questions, it's, well, prompts a question, you're asking better prompts. It's like that's the
Joe: Yeah, it's like, imagine if you're having a conversation with Elon Musk or some person who's like really, really, really smart.
You wouldn't show up to that conversation like, I haven't even thought about what I'm going to talk about. Like, you're, you're talking to a brilliant person, like a PhD in like, whatever, and you're having that kind of access. And I've tested this with my kids. Uh, my kids, most of them are graduated college and they've, you know, one of my daughters is a civil engineer, another one's a nurse.
So I'm like, do you guys, do you use, do you use ChatGPT, do you use AI? And, um, they're like, I don't know really, I've heard of it, I mean, I've played with it, whatever. And I'm like, alright, so I asked my daughter who's a nurse, okay, so what are you working on right now? So if you were, give me something that if you had, like, you were treating a patient recently, and you were stuck with a treatment recommendation.
She told me something, and I just said, okay, just say it to the end of the interface. But ask it a question. She looked at me like, That's exactly what I recommended. But I never thought about the other thing. My daughter's a civil engineer. She's doing like traffic, road traffic. Like technology. I'm like, what are the top five firms in Raleigh?
In MTA. You know. How would you get to the next level of certification in your career? And it was like, the answer was like, done, done. And she was like, whoa. And my son's at Kentucky right now studying kinesiology. He's like, he uses it to prepare for exams. His friends make fun of him, but he's like, it helps me study.
So now he's getting smarter, which just makes me happy because I'm paying for his tuition.
Mike: So no, no cyborgs no, no, no, no, no. It's just gonna make
Joe: us faster and smarter. Okay,
Mike: well, I feel better now. I'll be able to sleep tonight. All right, this is a wrap up with this. This is what I'm considering as my final question, my favorite question.
And because we're talking about. And this excellence through virtue, I think a big piece of that is dealing with adversity, working through the obstacles. Can you tell us about a time when you wanted to quit but didn't? Where were you physically? Where were you mentally?
Joe: Quitting is like a It's a, that's a harsh thing.
You're like, I'm going to quit. I'm not, I'm going to stop doing this. I'll be, so I, I, I suppose I quit during the day on things. I quit on things. Like quitting of the whole thing I'm on right now. I've never gotten to the point where I'm going to quit. Like I'm going to stop doing it. Because I feel like what I'm doing is, is, it's, it's needed.
But man, have I getting frustrated because it's hard. And what I'm working on right now is it really challenges your belief. And what I'm trying to do right now. It's taken me three years to do and it's really, really hard. It's, so it's not the quitting part. It's the fact, it's kind of like when you guys in the military, you're climbing, like you're doing these things and you're like, damn, this is so hard.
And keep on doing this thing. I gotta just kind of plug away. It really calls you into your belief every day. And I'm trying to build this thing called a quiet workplace and reimagine how people work. Working alone, working together, combining brief, quiet works, like in a, in a, in an environment that actually is designed for The different types of work we do and I'm building one here in Southern Pines and it's taken me three years to do it While I'm running a business and I can't tell you how many times today included that I'm just like this is just absolutely Brutal, this is so hard, but it's so important.
Anytime you're doing something that's really important. You feel like It's endurance like stay in the fight kind of thing You're like, oh my gosh I got it I got it because I'm trying to do this for the betterment of the people that I'm teaching brief to Which is, one of the problems I'm asking people is, when you're trying to be a better communicator, I ask them a question.
In your work environment, where do you go and when do you go for quiet? And the answer is, I don't. That's a problem. It's a huge problem. Especially when you start to think about these really great problem solvers that are communicating. If you haven't thought about it because you have no place to think about it alone, Because everybody's always constantly bumping into you, then it really starts to mess with your ability to think through a problem before you start collaborating with somebody.
And it's an environmental problem, like the, the, the setup of the space is wrong. I've never, I didn't grow up in the furniture industry, and now I'm thrust into like how things are laid out next to each other. And what I'm building in Southern Pines is, it's the first quiet workplace, and it'll be open by the end of this year.
And people, I'm going to teach people immersive work, learning experiences for a week. Come for a couple days and learn some, a little bit of brief, a little bit of quiet, and then work on stuff together and alone for an entire week in this environment. It's taken me three years to do it. Out of the whole business.
And man, I can't tell you, I haven't thought about quitting, but taking a nap a couple of times. It's a great question.
Mike: Well, great. Um, Joe, I can't thank you enough for your time, your insights, highly recommend all of your books to anybody out there who's listening, uh, a growing audience. We're planning on it being how do people reach you?
Where's the best place to come find you to get some quiet?
Joe: The I mean, directly, I can give you my email. My email address is jmccormack, so it's j m c c o r m a c k at sheffieldcompany. com, which is the company I own. And Sheffield owns, sheffieldcompany. com is where you can go to the Reef Lab or the Quire Workplace and see some of our sites, but send me an email directly.
Mike: Awesome. That's very generous, too. Absolutely. I hope you get a million emails.
Joe: And all the first ones, like, informative, insightful, but not spam, or whatever the fourth one was. Yeah, no spam.
Mike: Well, thank you.