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so I'm a captain but I am not a pilot and I'm a doctor but I don't practice medicine um but it's fun to know people who are captains and they actually fly planes and doctors who actually fix people I guess I fix people in a different way but one of my friends is a pilot and it's so interesting when I meet someone who has deep knowledge in something that I'm completely ignorant about I I just pepper them with questions and a lot of times my friend Jared eastley some of you know him he he's a pilot he has to go to all these trainings and everything and it's just very fascinating to me and so I always ask him these questions which I'm sure are really dumb but to me they're not because I'm completely ignorant about the topic and so one of the things I asked him I said you know what it seems like a lot of the training that you do is about how to respond to emergencies when I think of you know from my background in programming if I was hired to write code to take over a plane for good not evil to fly it as intended um I think a lot of the challenges would be in abnormal situations when things go wrong and so that's just sort of naturally how I imagine the the the bulk of the struggles with this would would lay and I said do you ever have you ever had training to on on how to prevent emergencies like do they train you on how to notice things and how to improve things and I was expecting kind of a short answer or maybe something that wasn't super informative just because I don't know what I'm asking uh I don't know about the topic and it's always a surprise when you find a gold mine and he sent me back this me message that was awesome I took a bunch of notes because it was so surprising to me how relevant this was to life and so it' probably be better if he made a video about this but here we are um not to say he won't but I I pecked him with the question he gave me the answer and so maybe it's it's up to me to share the the Nugget here so he said that in his mind the number one thing that they do is they just drill and drill and drill on Sops and checklists and if you've been in the military or some other field that has them I know they do this at hospitals but sop you can kind of get into a holy war about exactly what that acronym means but one of the possible meanings is standing operating procedures and this is when something is pre-planned I mean you you get hit with this every time you you call tech support and that person is reading off a script they probably have it memorized because they go through it so often on how to deal with people and triage problem and what responses and everything else it turns out Pilots have tons of checklists too and it's interesting to think about who makes these so hopefully a lot of time and effort goes into defining best practices and reducing Behavior down to rules because if it's common enough or anticipated accurately enough you can do this and you can Define how to respond in certain situations and if you can simplify it down to just following a checklist and that covers almost all the possibilities of when that would happen that's great you never have to use your brain you just turn into an automaton go down the list and whatever and I'm going to go through each of these and then we'll just try to apply it to life a little bit so the complications come when something happens that's not on the checklist or maybe it's on a checklist and your brain just kind of Skips a bead and you don't remember and so in these cases your response is going to fall in this gradient of sort of General judgment from your experience and your capabilities your reason your reasoning capabilities and interacting with other people so it turns out that Pilots have this ecosystem that they're in between the people they can reach on the radio whether that's their team or the tower whatever other I don't know if they can reach other Pilots if it's like a CB with a with the truckers but but there are people they can talk to and in fact there are people in the cockpit so the there's a pilot and a co-pilot and typically there's a there's an experience difference between them and uh Jared told me I think so don't quote me on any of this like I might just be making up things so if I say something that that is off base don't think Jared's an idiot just because I'm I'm messing it up here with my recollection but um I think I asked him once and he said that typically it's the least experience of the two that's flying and the the other person is is there to supervise and in case something goes wrong but the and I know this from the military a lot of times we try to always delegate things to increase the experience of the person that you supervise and I think it's that way in a lot of jobs where you you do that whenever you can to increase the experience of your subordinates anywh who so there's someone right there who has more experience than you that that you can ask and there are also people that you can ask on the radio and then this is a two-way street because sometimes surprises come that way too where you're moving around an airport and someone will call you and say hey we need to make this change to your flight plan or you're flying already or whatever and you have to respond to that and know how and so hopefully some Bells Are Ringing here in terms of how similar this is to life but there are also some differences and I think we can learn a lot by being more like Pilots so let's get through this lat um he said it's really important to have a plan and maybe for flying that's not such a surprise you can't just well fly by the seat of your pants but in life that becomes really important too I guess we'll come back to that but you decide a determined outcome and then you decide what the best way is to get there and then you execute and all along you're kind of scanning to see if there are relevant changes that need to filter back to your original planning process now if you've heard basically anything I've ever said but especially if you've read the book I wrote called Joy on purpose hopefully this is setting off some bells that should be part of your operating system in life there's also an element of knowing when to ask for help so obviously there's a whole host of things that could happen on the plane that are just completely within your purview as a pilot of things that you have to handle and there's a whole list of things that you need to inform others about even if you're going to handle them and there's a whole list of things that go beyond your pay grade and they're problems that you just can't solve or issues that lie without uh lie outside of your ability to address and so a big chunk of the job is is learning how to evaluate how emergent a situation is and to triage that and to do what is wise to handle it so like for example if something were to happen is there a checklist you're supposed to run through do you need to react in the moment and then go to a check list to make sure you didn't miss anything is it that emergent that you have to or I guess in that case urgent is it that urgent that you need to drop everything and handle it is there time to look at a checklist do you go back to it later who do you have to talk to after that what other things are changed now and it's a life or death situation sometimes obviously so the whole time you need to be paying attention to changes and noticing them and then and then realizing how deeply you need to go back into your planning process and again there there are overtures here that are that are very much in line with joy on purpose so how does this apply to life if it's not super obvious well we we all face things that we have to react to that's no surprise however I think we could all be a little better at noticing the need to make changes this is a really important idea and it comes down to Faith one facet of faith is an implicit belief that things can always be better and you kind of have to prove yourself wrong with that in every moment now how much you dedicate to that search you know if you're old enough you remember the show Night Rider and that car kit it had that red light that was just sort of always bouncing back and forth on the hood and now we have Siri and whatever else and with with Siri you have to tell Siri that you want it to do something I refuse to say he or she it's a program you have to tell Siri you want it to do something but it's always listening for that Siri thing or I don't even know how to activate it CU I don't use it or Okay Google for a while that that was a thing I don't even know if it exist anymore but life doesn't do that life doesn't well I guess technically it does slap you and say hey pay attention something needs to change but most people can't interpret that language and so they may as well be life may as well be speaking Greek because we're that ignorant about the signs the signals that we need to change something they're all around us quite frequently but one step to get closer to this is to always assume that something could be better and have the search for something better in your list of things that you're considering now what priority that takes it just depends on everything else that's going on and in a way the more urgent the other things are the less you're going to be thinking about how much better things could be but in another way the more urgent things are the more you're going to be thinking about how much better things can be some people just sit around until they're in massive pain and then they say well what could be better here I guess I'll get off my butt and change something but it's really good to have it at a higher priority than that because a lot of times you can avoid a whole bunch of suffering a lot of suffering is not avoidable but most of the suffering that most people go through is it's almost like you have to graduate to the stuff that you can't avoid and the good news is that the the more of that you do the more your suffering will be coupled to deep meaning a better way of saying this is the more the pain you go through will be directly connected to things you want out of life whereas the avoidable stuff you don't get too much out of that except learning how to be a better person and a lot of times that's learning how to look for ways to make things better before you feel like you have to and that's an unfortunate lesson that most people don't learn they get out of here without figuring that out so what are the Sops and checklists for life so you might think if this were Sunday school you'd put up your hand and say this script shares well yes and no one of the things that really limits what we get out of the scriptures is assuming they're more processed than they are now what do I mean by that if you go to the grocery store you buy a bunch of raw ingredients you know there's a process ahead of you of turning that into a fine meal if you go through the drive-thru it's already done if you think the scriptures of the drive-thru you're really not getting much out of them at all the Bible is not an instruction manual for instance it's a collection of stories for the most part so there are levels of processing that need to be done for you to distill the principles that are in the scriptures now some verses do it for you but that's just a verse it doesn't give you the whole map and a huge percentage of the scriptures don't do that at all you really have to work at it to distill what the the principles that are Illustrated there and the more you put into it the more you'll get out of it so who's giving you the SOP in the checklists for the most part today you kind of have to do it yourself will that change in the future I think so I think so I think it's changing in real time Joy on purpose is an sop and a checklist absolutely it is and it might be the best one that exists right now what about changes as you go what about interrupting signals so when you're on the plane and the tower calls in and says hey we we've got a plane that's coming in before you you need to change course whatever what in life is like that well a whole ton of things you know uh months ago we were out chasing some cows that got out of a fence and one of my kids ran right into this really thick branch that was broken off boom right into his his face actually landed on his cheek and it ripped a hole right up his eyeball well in the in the in the crevice there and um that interrupted what we were doing suddenly the cows weren't the most important thing so how do you notice emergent things because very few of them will grab your attention like a kid who just collapsed on the ground feet away from where you are how do you notice what needs your attention during my my education in computer science there were times where we had projects in class to modify an operating system and we got to learn all about that but you may or may not know this but your phone your computer whatever you're using that's a computer it's got a whole bunch of programs running all the time and someone at some point programmed instructions to decide which program gets the attention of the processor because simplifying it because the architecture gets a little complicated essentially your computer can only do one thing at a time and everything boils down to one single instruction at a time and so the the program that's running your computer operating system it has to decide how to divide its attention and it has to do this in a in a mathematical way a a perfectly explicitly defined way so uh there are instructions for that and it's really informative to think about because our lives are like that we have zero some resources and you can only focus on one thing at a time and and I mean that in the a very very specific sense even when you're doing multiple things you're really just doing one thing at a time and you're switching between them very quickly which has overhead so you need to have a system for helping you notice things that you wouldn't otherwise notice and make adjustments to your priorities and again I'm just going to point to this book I wrote Joy on purpose there's a system in there for that and when I say system everything in that book is a framework meaning you get to insert your own ideas into exactly how to implement it but the scaffold is there and it's extremely thorough and it's extremely granular meaning you can apply it a little or a lot and it you just pick the level at which you want to do it now I didn't set out to make this video as a plug for Joy on purpose I I didn't even think about it until I started recording but it it does happen to have whole lot in there that directly overlaps on this now what about appealing to the experience of others do you have a co-pilot you do it's called the Holy Ghost and so anything you do God will absolutely have a better idea of how to do it than you do I promise I'm I'm very confident in that promise the question is how effectively will you be able to figure that out there are layers of limits that we impose on God's ability to communicate with us it takes a great deal of time and experience and choices to minimize that those layers and to maximize the bandwidth between us and God you'll see quite a bit about this in a book that I'm about to publish on honesty it's a really important book one shortcut a lot of times we talk about the limits of how many shortcuts there are or how effective they are but in this case we get to celebrate because there is a shortcut there is a shortcut to minimize or mitigate the limits of the limits you impose on what God can communicate to you what are they other people other people are the shortcut now I say it's a shortcut it it's not a bypass it's not a bypass there's nothing you can do ever to alleviate the personal responsibility you bear for what you choose to do but other people who have different or greater experience those can be separate just to be clear they are a wealth of information that you might not have and it is extremely important for you to make use of whatever resources you have in figuring out better things than you already understand this could be the set of options you're thinking about the cost and benefit of each what matters and by how much and what the relative ranking of that is it's extraordinarily important and other people can be a very valuable resource in that now no other person can tell you what to do that is a decision that you have to figure out for yourself and it's a process that happens internal to you and that's the part that God's going to hold you accountable for but the the heed and diligence that you exercise the common sense and rational capability that you use in seeking out and processing information from other people whether that's an article on the Internet or a book someone wrote or just asking a person it absolutely factors into that process and when Paul talks about how no temptation has ever taken a person where God didn't prepare a way for them to overcome or avoid it included in that promise is absolutely the resource of other people and if you're not paying attention to that I promise you that you're getting into trouble in life in ways you may not be totally clear on you know that that in ways that are totally avoidable but might completely train wreck your life because you're taking the resources you have lightly you know I I remodeled a house for two and a half years the the last house we lived in which was the first house we bought and I had a grandfather who had worked construction his whole life and I called him before I did anything and sometimes it was just a checkin hey I did the math on this and this is what I'm thinking about doing did I miss anything and maybe he'd say no sounds good go for it or he'd say um did you do this thing yes okay you're good or no oh well look into that let me know if you have any questions bye right and sometimes it was a big I remember I I knocked down a loadbearing wall and it was like it was nerve-wracking I wanted to fly my grandfather out to just tell me but we didn't have the the money and we didn't have the time and it needed to happen and video wasn't what it is today and he said go up in the attic and he asked me like a million questions and he said do this do that do this and then you'll be fine I said okay and uh got the family out of the house when I knocked down the wall just in case um if I never see you again yeah so but it worked out fine um the the problem that we we face in life is we don't check in at least now it's interesting because we could we could talk about prayer with this this is very much a prayer kind of topic you should always at least check in with God there's scriptures about this don't do anything without checking in with him and the more important the thing seems the more time you should take to do your homework before you do it like you'd never meet with an executive about an important investment if you wanted to raise money for a company and some rich guy was willing to have lunch with you so that you could pitch your company to him you wouldn't go unprepared you practice what you're were going to say you might have a presentation that you spend hours and hours on you wouldn't just show up and shoot the breeze and say give me money and how much more should we prepare for our conversations with God the a guy Brian Stone he made a really interesting video about this on his YouTube channel where he used the analogy of working out if you're going to do a heavy lift you sure as heck better do warm-up sets and you better stretch first you don't just jump into the heaviest lift of your life and talking with God is something you should always do that's we talked about an operating system that should be running all the time but when you really want to say thanks for something or you really need to know something or you need need to know something that's way above your pay grade or you need help with something that's super duper hard and more than you can bear more than you can can accomplish or there's something you're going through it's more than you can bear or at least it feels that way do your do your homework don't this is the creator of the universe you don't just take lightly a conversation with him prep you know and and some people I know do such a good job with this and I know it because they do a good job with it with me and if they're willing to put that kind of time into an email that they send me really thinking about and processing things down to succinct questions and explaining where they're coming from and you know predicting counter arguments and stuff how much more do they do with God and that's a wonderful thing it's it's up the right alley so have a map of the the people in your life and who you can go to to get help or even just a sanity check on things and you base it on their track record and you base it on what their experience in life is or their General wisdom on on things if you just have a random question um I was in an airport not too long ago and we were in a hurry but man it was so hard for me to not stop because they had an information booth but it was it was really simplified and it was just a little death des and it it had a giant question mark on it and it said um ask me anything or something like that but it was just an information desk and they were trying to be cool with the little non-traditional thing and there was some poor woman sitting there completely oblivious to what I was about to do if I had more time which is ask her some deep question about life in fact I was going to recruit other people to to it would have been the funniest thing in the world to get this on video but to like five people in a row with maybe a two-minute wait to ask some profound question or like I really like this girl and I think she's the one but how can I know for sure you know or uh I'm in this job and I've been there for five years and it's great I love my boss but I mean when should I look for another job um anyway so no when to ask and know who to ask and know what to ask is very important and how can you tell how emergent the situation is this is so hard a lot of times opportunity flies right by or we get peppered with signs that things could be better in life and we we just totally miss them and and sometimes we miss them on purpose we we don't want the added load of having to worry about that there's a solution to that it's prioritization you'll find it in Joy on purpose so I'm just scanning through my notes here to to see if I've forgotten anything I think that that pretty much covers it who's your who's your Tower in life who's going to tell you that the things around you have changed in a way that affect you who's your co-pilot in life who's you know are you are you treating your co-pilot like a co-pilot like do you really involve the spirit in your life because remember you can't turn that off and on it's it's always on and so you can either turn it up or turn it down but don't think you can do so in the moment you can turn it down in the moment but it's not easy to turn it back up it's a lot easier to turn it back down to turn it down your awareness Rises and falls all at once if there are things that you're trying not to pay attention to in life you're absolutely going to pay attention to less things to other things involuntarily I don't know if that makes sense if you intentionally ignore things in your life you will absolutely ignore things unintentionally those go hand in hand and so the more you pay attention to life and the more you think about Improvement the more important it becomes to have a system to do this in a way where you don't go crazy because it's overwhelming it's overwhelming to open the floodgates and basically the way this works I'll tell you is you say I'm thirsty I want a glass of water and God says here's a here's Hoover Dam if you want one water I'm going to open the floodgates and here's a cup get ready to catch it and so you need a system to handle all that water Joy on purpose gives you that system maybe there's a different system but it's probably some modification of what's there if it exists you have to have a way of handling this flood and it's impossible to get closer to God without increasing that flood he said that he will make the spirit an eternally bubbling spring bubbling up to eternal life God is everything the closer to him you you come the more you're bombarded with you can't separate the two of them so you need to to to have better systems of noticing the Need For Change better systems for capturing those potential improvements better systems for how to identify and process information from other people and it might sound clunky and un unwielding unyielding unwieldy it's a lot but it's totally doable and the amazing thing about it is is as overwhelming as it all seems when that successfully motivates you to implement systems of managing all of this the end result is a million times easier than the life that most people face that's the surprising conclusion is you look at what people struggle on in Easy Mode and you have ways of dealing with it in impossible mode because you have the cheat code which is Jesus