#47 Dean Bokhari | Balancing Work, Values, and Fulfilment: A Life's Manual

00:00 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Welcome to Self-Directed. We are your hosts, cecilia and Jesper Conrad, and now it's time to welcome this week's guest. So today we are together with Dean Pokhari, who I reached out to because he is a person who have given me so many books during his project Flash Books, and we would love to talk more about that. But first, this podcast is called Self-Directed and normally we talk a lot about unschooling. And then it's because to live a self-directed life, you need to be able to do that from your born, guided by your parents. So that's why we like all down with unschooling and we love it ourselves. But our podcast is called Self-Directed because it's all so will unfold into how can you live a self-directed life also as an adult.

00:55
But first we want to free the children. We have done a lot of that. So now we want to talk with you and Dean. To put it very shortly for the people who haven't heard about your project and the books Then you are making Flash Book versions of a lot of self-help books. That's the intro I have to you. I know that you are more than that Sure yeah.

01:17
We'll talk about that as well. But how did it start you finding a good book and saying this is so long, I cannot stand it. Let me get down to the point. How did it start? You know?

01:30 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
it was actually the opposite. So I'm a voracious reader and I really enjoy reading and what I naturally tend to do whenever I'm reading a book, I have a pad of paper or a notebook next to me, because I love jotting down ideas. And just naturally those ideas ended up turning into these long bulleted, actionable insights that I would glean from the books that I was reading. And one day I just shared those notes with a friend and that friend shared those notes with another friend and before I knew it I had people I didn't even know emailing me and contacting me, asking me for notes on random self-help and business books and I thought, well, wow, maybe there's a business idea here. And that's sort of how Flash Books was born and I've been doing it ever since.

02:33
It's been a good eight years, now almost nine, and you know we've steadily grown. It's sort of a labor of love. We now have a very good-sized team that helps me and all of the audiobook recordings. I do because in my background I have a background as a speaker, like a motivational type of speaker. I talk on topics like motivation, psychology, productivity, things of that nature. I'm also an author, so I stay pretty busy, to say the least. But that's pretty much my background in a nutshell.

03:15 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
And my intro to you was through Sik-Sikler, who have the original format might have been a talk he gave. That became a book, if I understand it correctly. Maybe I don't, but I heard your version and it has, almost in periods of my life, been a. So, first of all, thank you for summing it up so precisely as you have done and also taking it up to date, because the original work is from a different time. But I heard that book almost at a daily meditation, together with my yoga, in a period where I had some stuff I needed to work through and I Right around quitting a job as a CEO in a position that was wonderful but didn't fit me. I wasn't happy in the room and there's so many nuggets of wisdom in it. And then I was like, okay, I like Dean's version of this, let me try to go back to their original work. And I couldn't stand it.

04:30 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah that you know. It's funny, jesper, because I was looking at my calendar this morning and I thought, okay, you know what, let me let me review my own notes on CU at the top, and I listened to and it can be a little weird listening to your own voice, but I do it because the notes jog my own memory. So I was like, let me get my own refresher and listen to my own audiobook so we can talk about it today. But I'm so glad, jesper, that it's been helpful for you and I appreciate you reaching out for us to have this conversation. I'm looking forward to digging in.

05:09 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
So do you want to talk about CU at the top, or is it just?

05:13 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
No, it was a starting point for the conversation because that it was brought me to you, but I also would like to hear more about Dean himself. Yeah, Because, is it a weird kind of job to have, because you have read so many people with your versions but I don't know if many people know what you have done. Is there like an ego difference standing and saying why is this short version I made so popular and I would like more to read my own words? How are you dealing with that, Right?

05:50 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
You know, to be honest with you, I rarely ever think about it, not because it's not reality, because, of course, you know, some of these books are written by people that I myself look up to, people that have changed my own life, like helped me change my own life, that have created incredible paradigm shifts for me for the way I see the world.

06:22
And so, you know, I see it as a way of honoring the original author that has inspired me and a way to really, you know, when you teach something, you learn it best. Right, you're learning as well. When you're teaching, and whenever I'm doing a summary, or, you know, narrating a summary, or you know, taking notes and things of that nature, I myself am learning and retaining all of that stuff also. So it's not only just a service that we provide to others but, quite frankly, also a way for me. It's self serving as well. It allows me to enjoy learning the material that inspires me and it allows me to fulfill my personal mission of inspiring as many people across the world as I possibly can to achieve their own goals and, you know, live their own best life, whatever that may be for them. So, yeah, but rarely do I compare myself and Jesper, that's an interesting, you know, thought experiment to really to get into. I don't think about it much, I really don't.

07:38 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I think it's maybe the best yeah.

07:41 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
We have a friend who always says when you compare, you die.

07:45 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, yeah.

07:47 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
That's a motto in our family. Sometimes you kill your own enthusiasm and sometimes we just say it's like in what's the English word? In monopoly. You know, you go back to start when you start comparing.

08:01
Yeah, yeah, it's, I was thinking that the mission that you have to inspire people to live their best lives and achieve their own goals is, you know, that's exactly our business as well, that we want. We call our podcast self directed and we are very much freedom people. We believe in personal freedom as that's the rock you have to stand on and keep fighting for if you are to live a life when you reach your own goals.

08:35 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Right.

08:36 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
You know you can't move. If you can't move, you can't move in your own direction. So you think that your project and our project and they have the same end in a way that we need that. But that makes me think about. I have not listened to a lot of your or read I did do it six Eklah because it was almost like a religion for my husband. That some point.

09:03 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah.

09:05 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I have a. Yeah, I have another reading style.

09:10 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, he's got he's got a beautiful philosophy. Just, you know, my one of my all time favorite quotes, just that I think about regularly, is and Jesper, I'm sure you can echo this, but you know it's a you can get anything you want if you can help enough other people get what they want.

09:29
Yes, that's like a guiding principle for me like it and it makes so much sense because if you provide enough value to other people for instance, like you both are doing with this podcast, right, I'm sure that there are many, many families across this, across this globe, that would love to, to have this nomadic family lifestyle that you both and your family have and if you provide the information, the guidance, the inspiration, your own stories, god knows how many people are making the decision to do that because of you, right, like, and that's to me is a form of helping enough other people get what they want Right.

10:22 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
And the value that that we want to provide always has to. This is maybe I don't know if it comes from six Eglah. I'm like second layer six Eglah over here listening to him.

10:35
But if the value that I provide for those listening or those paying me for my, my mentoring, it should hopefully be worth more than the actual price. So spending the hour listening to this podcast should hopefully give you more than you could have, you know, thought about yourself for that hour or, and if you pay me some money, I should hopefully it should feel like a bargain. So I'm happy and you're have has to be a good deal on both sides and that's because there should be more value than than the first investment.

11:13 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
No, but actually that quote I re heard it again this morning your voice in your voice in my years during yoga has inspired me to how we look at we are doing and part of why I've started what I call the better that Institute, which the goal is in the name. It is to get as many dads as possible to become better at being that. I think that we fathers have a lot of work ahead of. There's not a culture of sharing between men. In the same way, there's not a giant culture of dads talking with their sons when they're stepping into fatherhood about how you can prepare yourself for what you're going through and what how you can work with.

12:05
How did the quote change what I started here?

12:10
It was that in a long time I was like almost missionary about on schooling, because I we have found so much value in on schooling and we really believe deeply in our heart that this is very wonderful way to learn as a young person, also an adult.

12:31
I took the quote and tweaked it a little and said to myself but if I wanted to be able to help as many people as possible, then I need to help people also outside, those who want to homeschool on school because for some people it's not an option. For some people it's not a choice they believe they can make. I know my wife will say it's an option for everybody, but in the life people have decided upon, they have ruled out that. But then there's so much of what we have learned of this style of parenting and true, being immersed into thinking about learning and parenting and and all this for the last 20 years or more, that we can help all of the people with where. If I only wanted to help the people who want to on school, then it's not such a big crowd I get to help. So that's how I've used that quote in my own professional life to say, hey, maybe I should help even more people, that would make the world a better place?

13:35 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Have you already did you say that you had already started a group of of dads and gathered a group together that were already doing the homeschooling and no, the the the better that institutes is separate.

13:49 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
For the podcast, it is Okay. It is a project I'm doing together with another world schooling dad called Martin Cook and we will kick off with a summit in the spring where we will get a lot of different speakers to come and talk about fatherhood and the idea is to have that circles two times a month and then maybe a wordly wordly, not monthly workshop when the first one will be passed when this episode is I believe it will be on Christmas actually, because this evening is no no, family my cause a few problems.

14:32 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Many, many angry wives from different parts of the world.

14:36 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I would have to really agree that this is a shitty dad and he's to do something about it for that timing to work. But it will be about Martin, like many of us, has like a weird feeling about Christmas because it's made up to be this now everybody needs to get together and be happy and then people just like said and many dads out there, don't know what's in the presence when they are being opened as well. You know, there's so many things where we can step up and do better around.

15:07 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Christmas. It's nice to talk to you now that we're recording.

15:12 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Often I don't I get more surprised than that.

15:16 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I didn't know that you were making a holiday.

15:20 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
No, we will do it. Wow, that's you know. I'd love to learn more about that as well. You know, because I, you know, we, I'm involved in this men's group where we meet on a biweekly basis. You know, it's just a bunch, just a group, a small group of other dads, and they're also, you know, we're all sort of entrepreneurs, we're all sort of leaders in our own domains and we just kind of learn from each other and we pick a different topic every two weeks and we just dig in and it's usually their parenting related, business related, or we'll talk about something like vulnerability as it relates to being a man in modern society today. And man, I mean they get heavy. I mean they're beautiful conversations and I thoroughly enjoy them Because I, like you said, jesper, you know, now more than ever, I feel, at least you know, men are unable to really be their true selves because of all this funny stuff that's happening in our culture today.

16:32 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
It's happened for a few generations.

16:35 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah.

16:36 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I'm sorry to interrupt you. Please go.

16:37 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
No, please go ahead.

16:39 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
No, it's just because I used to be a fierce feminist and my mother was a fierce feminist and in you know, I you'd get along well with my wife.

16:52
I said. I know that I used to be, I'm not really anymore. I think it was a very one sided point of view. It I'm not going into criticizing feminism. I've just learned over the years that there there has been, we have sacrificed the boys and the manliness, and the way that the women's liberation unfolded and the way it created a new kind of childhood for boys from more or less our generation were more or less 50 years old, so that's from the 70s onwards. The childhood of boys and the way they could mature into to manhood was suffering severely and this means that at this point we're all suffering in our gender identity and our ways to unfold who we are, based not only on our gender, but also and I find that we really have a crisis with the boys. I'm very worried about the boys. I'm very worried about the men I think they are. They are in a context not very friendly to them.

18:19
And and I find it I'm very supportive of yes, this plan not plan, his project that he's working on for for just carving out a way for men to become better dads, because that will eventually save the childhood of the next generation of boys. And we really need one of. Our children's legal name is brother and our language.

18:46
It's so cool yeah it's not the name that we used for him, but that's a long other story. But when I was carrying him he's our fourth child, our miracle child. I had him. We had him after I beat cancer and was told we couldn't have any more children. We had one. And I had this little boy inside of me in a very vulnerable time in our life because we didn't know if the cancer was gone or not. So we were just praying for every day to pass so that he could come out alive and he was brother. He was brother and he was brother because manhood is brother, love and brotherhood. And to have you know to share I don't know you say that in English to share like a brother.

19:38 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, to say that in English.

19:40 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah, we call it to act like a sibling, you know?

19:43 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, we call it like a bond?

19:47 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah, so, but this is actually just a little snippet of words that we would put together in my language. You share like a brother, which is you know, your way of acting in social life is to be like a sibling to the people around you.

20:03 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Ah yeah. So here we say we say treat them like family.

20:07 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah, but okay, but brother is in the wording in my language. So anyway, it was because we wanted to enhance all the good sides about masculinity. Because obviously there was problems before the women liberation thing. Obviously it has been an ugly thing before and the way it unfolded in many cultures. But I just think that the good part has somehow it's as if anything masculine. We have to wipe it out, it's dangerous or top of the table, and that means that there is what? Is there only one gender left, or what's the point I?

20:50 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
mean it's the absurdity of it all. I mean truly. I mean there's that line of thinking I think does more damage than anything else that they're imposing on our children, like there's nothing wrong with embracing your masculinity, there's nothing wrong with being a man and acting like a man and embracing that, especially when you're around other men, where you can have that be yourself, act like yourself, let out a roar if you need to. So we just in an effort to kind of help our children be the best versions of themselves. So we've got an eight year old, nora, and we've got a two year old, my son, rumi, and he hasn't started school yet. But we kind of just made a big move about a month and a half, two months ago where we went from like a very busy city in Orange County, california, irvine, to a five acre farm and you know.

22:08 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Also California.

22:09 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, here in California, just an hour away from where we used to live, but a completely different lifestyle, and it's so incredible. I mean, it's just a dream come true for me, because I've always wanted to be around nature and things like that. And not only did we shift where we are living, but also. So I was talking with Jesper prior to us getting started and we were discussing how we've got our child in a Waldorf school and you know the school that she was going to, our daughter, nora, when we moved, when we decided we were gonna move, we're like, okay, well, there's no Waldorf here. I mean, what are we gonna do?

22:58
So it was so accommodating such that they were able to provide us with a hybrid plan where my wife, for the first time, is homeschooling Nora for the majority of the week and then two days a week we make that long hour drive to actually take her to the physical campus. And you know it's we're still learning and we've got a lot to learn and a lot to unlearn as well, you know. But it's been so fun and I think that we need to protect the future and to have a future that we can all be optimistic about, one in which is healthy and loving and allows people to be themselves. We gotta let our kids be themselves. I would love to get some tips from you guys on that right.

23:56 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Watch out if you get us started. Yeah, and I think we're actually in Irvine, around Irvine.

24:04 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I was thinking but we're recording right now about being a little off topic. We're coming up to California in February.

24:11 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
So you know my swing by, you know.

24:13 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Oh, wow. Mexico at the moment. So, yeah, we could maybe even sit down with a team and talk about it, but for this conversation I find it's a hard balance because you're still invested in the school. I hear and I will be honest, I'm very much against schools, all of them, including Waldorf schools.

24:34 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Wow.

24:35 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
If you want to have your child in a school, if you really believe in that, then I think a Waldorf school is probably one of the better options, but it is still a school. I might as well you know, risk to offend you or annoy you no, no, no.

24:52 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
hey look, we were just talking about. We were just talking about being real. I mean, this is beautiful. I want to know, I'd love to learn.

25:00 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
So what I think is the problem with a school and also with homeschooling, which we don't do is that you put yourself, as a parent, in the position of knowing better how your child should spend her time, and I don't think you have that knowledge.

25:22
And I think that by trying to possibly succeeding in focusing the children's time into something specific decided by someone else, we are removing their focus from what is truly important for them and teaching them on a meta level that they don't know what is important for them, that we know better how they should distribute their time and attention, and that is wrong, I believe. So that is wrong on a philosophical level and it leaves teenagers very, very far away from their soul, if you want to call it soul. It leaves them far away from knowing who they are and far away from being able to make good decisions for their own life, because they have no experience making good decisions for their own life. If an eight-year-old decides to eat candy and watch YouTube videos all day, she will feel like shit after six hours and she will know, and she will not do it the next day.

26:27
She will ask for apples and go out and play. Might take more than one day, and you might not be courageous enough to let the child eat candy and watch YouTube all day, because you just can't have it, which is fair enough. I can't have it either. Everyone has. You know we have to navigate this field, but the truth is, at the end of the day, if we let our children do whatever the F they want, they will be able to evaluate their own choices and make better choices the next day.

26:57
When we focus their energy into things that we chose for them, maybe we let the school choose it for them, but they didn't choose it themselves. We teach them that they are not allowed, they're not competent and nothing good will come from making your own choices. And then they become 15 or maybe even 19, or maybe they go through college before they make a real decision for their own life, and if it's the wrong one, they don't know how to handle that either. They have no way of evaluating. So it becomes a very vulnerable person, and this is why any school in my objective is a problem, because any school will tell the child what to do and what not to do. What do you need to learn now? And it can look very beautiful, made of wool and wood and with open bonfire, but still there's a teacher. And the teacher is telling you today we will study this beautiful poem and draw butterflies. What if the child wants to play Minecraft and learn Japanese?

28:07 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Or run around in the forest.

28:09 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
In the forest or play monopoly, he or she will be told no, it's butterfly and poems today, and butterfly and poems are beautiful. I think this is the meta problem, and the longer you let it go, the worse it becomes.

28:26 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Right, right, yeah, that's a fascinating perspective. So how do you all incorporate? So, is there any guidance at all, or is it just total freedom? Learn as you go, do what you gotta do.

28:46 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
So there is. We say unschooling is not un-parenting. And this is how it comes together again, of course, we don't leave them. We don't tie them to a tree somewhere and run away. We don't leave them in the wild, and neither do we If they're running towards the highway.

29:10 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
We are not just letting them run out into the highway without trying to stop them and say, hey, maybe that's not a good idea, and that's, of course, a metaphor for whatever they choose in their life. We are observant, talk with them and talk about there's so much talking involved. That's, if you wanna unschool or homeschool, yeah, man, you're talking so much.

29:32 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Talk to your children for about four hours every day, yeah.

29:35
Yeah, it's fascinating, isn't it? I cannot imagine my own. Like my father, he didn't really talk much when it came to the parenting part of it with me and the amount of talking that we do with our kids, and I look at it as not just talking really, though, but because that talking eventually leads to connecting, and I think of it as like peeling back, like layers, to really understand my child when they're going through it, because there's no to me, from my perspective, it's hard to understand what's going on unless I sit there If there's something wrong, for instance, if she is from the outside, if it seems like my daughter's acting irrationally, or something like that.

30:32
Wow she's how do I know if she's acting irrationally? And how do I know what's going on inside? How do I know what all the things that triggered it are, unless I actually sit down and say, hey, what's up?

30:44
I'm here, I got you. You can tell me to leave, you can tell me you wanna be alone, and that's cool, but I'm gonna be here for you whenever you're ready to chat, whenever you're ready to talk, and I have been amazed myself at how just a little bit of patience and gentle prodding can open up things that I never would have learned about my kids. I think it's fascinates me. This whole area of parenting is just this fascinating journey to me.

31:17 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
It is an amazing journey and probably the most important one that we will embark on in our lives, and I think you're spot on with the conversation and the relation that that is basically. I mean, that's the core also for our parenting, that the most important thing is that our kids, they trust us and they would choose us as a conversational partner if they had something they needed to talk about, and that they know how to communicate about whatever is going on. Now your children are two and eight. It's one situation that we have been in, except we had a few more. Now our children are 12, no 11, 15, 17 and 24. So we're in a different phase of life, but the point is the same that we need to really spend enough time being patient.

32:21
I think that's the key that we have enough time to talk about everything and nothing and not push and this is the same as my rampage about the schooling not push our own agendas, as you said. You see something irrational going on, but might not be so. If you come to the conversation with the child without an agenda, I want her to change this behavior. Or you know, I know what's going on and now I'm going to tell you why that is irrational. That's not useful for anyone and it will hurt the relation. And the relation is basically the only card you have on your hand as a parent, isn't it? You have one card, couldn't?

33:06 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
agree more. I couldn't agree more and you know this was. This is a tough shift for me to make personally, because I come from the background of effectiveness, efficiency, personal development, motivation. Let's be productive, you know, and it's like go, go, go, and I have had to work at, you know, building the muscle of slow down. Now, dean, you know like it's you're dealing with your child now. This is not like a training seminar for it with, you know, 400 executives or something like that.

33:45 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
So it's, it fascinates me that that whole dynamic, it's that was actually a question I was building up to ask in the beginning, and then we took the Ziegler dance. But I'm just thinking about this whole efficiency and personal development scene that we have these days. It's amazing that people want to work with and on themselves. But I also I don't know if you know, but I'm a trained psychologist, so I did not know.

34:15
I'm in the field myself, I mean, but from a different perspective, and I see a pitfall I think it's called in English, a problem which is that well, this one that in particular I want to talk about is the risk that we're just having an overconsumption, that it becomes like some sort of candy, that we read yet another book or listen to yet another series of podcasts about whatever it's love, or get up at five o'clock in the morning and you just bombarded with all of these actionable insights and they are actionable insights, which is a beautiful headline for it, but still okay. So, okay, okay, I get up at five. I stare at the sun. Oh shit, it's not up yet. What do I do? Okay, I get up at five and then I remember to stare at the sun an hour later, and then I meditate and do yoga and breathwork, and then I have the grounding, remember the ground and then also I have a smoothie with all these things and except I only have one meal a day, so I push that smooth.

35:19
It becomes this cacophony of and if I just do things a little bit faster, what was that book again we read at some point it's been 20 years the do it, ditch it, delegate it. The efficiency thing. I like it because I have a lot to do and I want to even more. I want to do, but somehow it becomes and I'll even let the it can drive.

35:46 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
it can drive a lot of people crazy, and it can also set you back more than you were when you started on the self improvement journey. Because what ends up happening is, you know we were talking about comparison earlier. That's one part of it as well where people will say, oh well, you know, if so, and so is doing it, or my friend is doing it, or a colleague or somebody I look up to, I should be able to do this too, and they get all pumped up and they get all inspired and they might start doing all these cool things for a few days or a few weeks, or maybe a month or two if you're lucky. But bombarding yourself with so many things that you want to change at once can have a severely negative impact on your overall well being.

36:38
And so I, in my opinion, you know that that in some ways it's kind of like productivity porn, where there are people that just keep on reading productivity books and keep on downloading productivity apps and, you know, doing all this stuff, they're consuming all this information so much so that they forget what the purpose behind it was in the first place, which is I just need to get some things done and a lot of people already know what they need to get done. They're just addicted to the next trick, the next strategy, the next tip, which ultimately doesn't matter if you're not willing to take action. And so you know, it's the self help. There's a dark side of self improvement and you kind of hit the nail on the head, cecilia, with it where people just consume, consume, consume and they don't take action on the stuff, and part of it is also just being like, yeah, they don't take that, so it would have been better actually to not read the book.

37:44
In some cases you'll see that you're not meditating at five o'clock in the morning while staring at the sun Exactly, yeah, yeah, it's the biggest driver in my experience with when it comes to people being unwell in that area or feeling guilty or ashamed of themselves for not being able to do something that someone you don't even know that you saw on social media is doing, Might be doing.

38:09 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Who knows if they're even doing it Exactly. Like you know, there's one.

38:14 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, did one time, maybe right. Like you know, it's that comparison, that feeling of guilt. It's incredibly unhealthy and my advice when folks come to me about that kind of stuff is like you know, what do I do? I can't seem to get myself to do it or I feel really bad, I feel depressed about it and maybe I'm just unable to do it.

38:38 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
That's not the case.

38:38 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
It's not that you're unable to do it, it's not that you can't do it or that you're incapable, it's just that you know that sort of graphic. If you guys ever seen the iceberg where they show the tip above the water and there's the huge, you know all the ice below it, below the sea line.

38:59 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
It's attributed to Freud in a sort of wrong way that he said that our mind, is only the tip of the iceberg. He didn't really, but doesn't that?

39:10 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
mean it? Yeah, so like it's. You know, I think of it like that, where a lot of times, people see the result of what people have done and they don't take into account how it was done or how these habits were incorporated, because really, what we're talking about is just, ultimately, all of self-help ultimately comes down to building healthy habits, whether that's the habit of getting up in the morning and you know, exercising, or whether that's the habit of getting up in the morning and just taking a few deep inhales and exhales and just being with yourself and doing nothing, right.

40:01
Like it's ultimately about habits, and habits aren't always built overnight. I think we have this quick fix sort of let's get it done immediate. You know same-day delivery lifestyle these days and people think they can apply that same idea to the habits they want to build. But we don't build healthy eating habits overnight. We don't build a loving and caring marriage overnight. We don't build, you know, muscles and the physique of our dreams overnight, or the career that we want overnight. We need to install several powerful, simple habits that we're willing to execute on a daily basis to get us there, and it's not always easy.

40:51 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I have one about the habits, because it reminded me of one of the six-seq quotes about the first step to getting good habits is not starting on the bad habits. Yeah, yeah, or how it was put, and it actually made me think about Brian Johnson. I don't know if you have looked into him, this American tech guru who is measuring his life and working on that. Yeah, yeah, he has the blueprint and he inspired me with it was just his way of framing it, and sometimes it's fun that you can hear the same argument or good idea many times, but sometimes it's take one person to say it. That might be the 14th time you heard this good advice. But he said if you really want to increase your lifespan, stop doing the stuff. You know that kills you. And I was like, okay.

41:54
And the other thing he said that was really fun was he had decided to fire evening Brian, because morning Brian makes good decisions. He's like I want to practice, I want to exercise, but evening Brian he likes a glass of wine and some crackers and something you know. And when I looked at my calorie intake it was like, oh, I can be super healthy until eight o'clock in the evening. So I myself have. I can relate to that guy. Yeah, I myself have fired eight o'clock Jesper. He's not allowed to intake calories because he cannot figure it out. It just goes so far wrong so fast. But about the habits it is really, really powerful to get into those habits, but it sometimes takes so long times to see the results.

42:50 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah, so that's why we have to talk about something else, which is values. If we want to change, it could be because we have some sort of I mean, if we're doing efficiency or self improvement and like personal development is probably because we want something to change. And we want that because we don't think what we have now is perfect. But sometimes I find that could have been a very good idea to point out exactly what is wrong and how would it look if it was right? And where do I want to go? Because it can be this restlessness of knowing I could be a little better. I don't feel exactly I need to get on track, but I don't think that track comes from the books. I think the track needs to come from decisions we make about our own life, about from knowing what is truly important. And if these truly important elements were actually balanced in my life, how would my life look? If I have that vision in place, I can pick the right advice to use in my life.

44:08
Whereas I'm not just. You know, if I want to change direction, it matters what direction, it matters whether I go right or left. Sometimes any change is a good change. I will say that even as a professional any change. But if we're talking not, you know, working with people who acutely suffer, but just working with improving at a relatively good life, we need to know where will that improvement take me? Where do I want to go? Is it worth one third of my waking hours to be more fit and lean? Is it really worth it or is something else taking sense at the moment? That could be having, in my case at some point, four small children at the same time. So you know, it's just having this negotiation with yourself and friends and partner and whoever you trust to talk with, and maybe you can flash a book that you know is there one that you think would be helpful to have, a process about values and how they balance. Then you can think of.

45:21 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
You know there are several, but you know a great one that I think appeals on a broader level might be a book called Mindset by a professor named Dr Carol Dweck. She's a psychologist as well. I'm sure you may have heard of her. No, no, it's a book called Mindset.

45:49 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I've heard about everything.

45:50 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yes.

45:52 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
But I like the title already. I always say that you know, when we talk about and with people who say they couldn't done school or they couldn't home school, it's impossible for them, then I only have one word to say, and that is mindset.

46:04 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
It is mindset, really and truly, because, you know, my wife hasn't had no experience with homeschooling, she had never done a day of homeschooling in her life. But we embraced it, we decided we were going to do it and we knew in our hearts, based on our values, that this was the right thing to do. And if we delayed it anymore, it wouldn't happen. I mean, it would just be more and more difficult, right, the longer we wait, the harder it is to do just like anything else.

46:39 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
So yes, we were going to say something, yeah it's because I was considering that maybe not all the listeners are down with the word flashbooks and we have talked about your work, so if you can give like the elevator, talk about sure, yeah, so flashbooks what we do at flashbooks is we're essentially a nonfiction book summary service.

47:01 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
So we take top self improvement and business books, especially the ones that are 300 pages, that have been gathering dust on your nightstand, that haven't had time to read. We take those, we condense them down to 10 page summaries or 20, 30 minute audiobook summaries. So that's basically what we do.

47:25 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
And you have this wonderful way of putting them where you have actionable insights.

47:30 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, actionable insights. Yeah, that's sort of our focus, because to me, you can read, all, digest all the information in the world, but if it doesn't inform your way of life or your way of thinking, or it doesn't generate some sort of, you know, inspiration within you or something actionable where you can actually go out there and say, okay, this is step one, step two, step three. Some people need that. And if it doesn't do one of those things, if it doesn't inform you or it doesn't inspire some sort of action, then what good? What good is it? And so that's why we focus very much on how can we extract the actionable stuff here, because this is a nonfiction book. Right, these are all nonfiction books. People go to nonfiction books oftentimes to either inform themselves or to figure out how to take action of some sort, and so that's that's our focus when we're condensing these books.

48:30 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
But you have consumed so many of these books I have and you have summed them down to actionable insights. How much of it have you been able to implement and how have your life changed based from? If you look from before you started doing this? You said in the start you started doing it just for yourself, and then a group from there which gave me goosebumps because I just love the original stories. Yeah, it's like wow, cool, but what have changed in your life, dean, after you started this?

49:11 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
A lot, because my my thing is you know, I don't even believe you should I want to be careful how I put this now because I don't want it to come off the wrong way. But, like, my sort of philosophy is that I won't pick up a book unless there's like something I'm trying to learn from it. Or sometimes I'll do this sort of funny fufu thing where I'll stand in front of my library and I'll like let a book call, call to me. I'll just see which one I can sort of you know, like my gut tells me to reach for, because sometimes in my view, they kind of just stand out more based on whatever situations I'm experiencing in my life, like a sort of somebody that I know passed away recently.

50:12
The next day I'm walking, I'm walking to my, my library, my office, and I see a book that says the denial of death and it's about. It's about coping with death, and you know I and I reached for it and it brought me a little peace. I like reading books with intention, otherwise I won't read them. If I don't have an intention behind it, I don't find it particularly useful, or unless I feel curious about it. Right, and to me that counts as intention, curiosity to me is To me as well.

50:48
Yeah, and so you know, that's sort of the way I look at it. Where were we going with this?

50:58 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
You were good.

50:58 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yes, I think you had a double question.

51:00 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yes, I do, I'm trying to get you to say which habits or changes has been most profound.

51:05 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Right, yes, which ones have been most impactful you?

51:07 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
were also trying to ask you how, in general, it had changed you. But I think it was very broad questions.

51:14 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
That's how I wrote. That's how I wrote. It's always how I wrote.

51:18 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
But I get. Why you get a little lost. Because it's basically I don't know, is it?

51:24 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
asking you it is the first question I would actually like to hear which is the? Which values have you taken with you?

51:32 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Values or habits.

51:34 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Habits, everything With regard to habits, these books have helped me tremendously, because now I don't install them all at once. So I am that crazy guy that gets up at five o'clock in the morning and I am that crazy guy that spends two hours slow juicing pounds and pounds of vegetables every Sunday so I can have enough for the week. And I drink green juice in the morning, take my vitamins, I go, and I do the meditations and the nature walks and the exercise and the visualization and the journaling. And if it tires out your listeners just hearing me say all this stuff, I totally understand, because if I tried to implement all that stuff into my life at the same time, I wouldn't be here, I'd be sitting in a rehab center somewhere, you know, because it's very difficult.

52:37
So my philosophy is sort of like success is sequential, not simultaneous, and I picked that up from a book called the One Thing, and it's one of my favorites, favorite ideas, because I think of it like okay, I'm going to put all my energy into this one thing right now that I want to focus on in life, whether that be patience, whether that be a new health habit, whether that be my marriage or meditation, whatever it may be. I have a hard line where I just do one big thing at a time because I want to give something the respect that it deserves, I want to give it the energy that it deserves and, of course, I want to succeed at whatever it is that I'm trying to do. And I can only do that when I have singular focus. And sometimes folks will be like you know, how are you doing all this crazy stuff? And I say I'm not doing it all together.

53:38
I didn't install these habits at the same time. I did them one by one and then I figured out okay, what part of my life do I want to improve now? And I also, broadly speaking, look at things from the framework of physical, mental, emotional, spiritual. I want to touch on those things in my own life on a daily basis, and many years back I kind of came up with this thing where if I can slowly get myself to a place where I can nourish my physical, mental, emotional and spiritual needs before I begin my official workday, then it'll be a smoother day for me and that works for me. It doesn't work for everybody, but it works for me because those are top priority for me.

54:37 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
So and maybe it works for you now also.

54:41 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, and who knows what the future may hold.

54:43 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Could look different in 10 years now.

54:45 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, in 10 years I may be the one who's talking about hey, don't have any goals.

54:53 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
And I'm not even saying that we're wrong when we change or that. I'm just saying that this works now and I think that's a very important thing to remember. When we try to better our lives. And maybe we're thinking should I implement a new habit about my health or my work or my finances or whatever feels a little out of balance and you think maybe this habit will help, then I believe they need to change. You will probably not get up at five o'clock in the morning for the rest of your life. There might be some stages where another rhythm of the day will make more sense, and that didn't make it wrong to get up at five this morning.

55:42 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Exactly yes. So, you have to make the mosaic.

55:48 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
That makes sense now, which is sending me back to my big other thing. I always talk about values and you said vision. I think you said you visualize, but I talk about how we have to get clear on our values, and that means that we have to get clear on how would my life look if it was just amazing, if it was just perfect.

56:11
But this picture of the perfect life. It changes what I want right now, what I would dream of to be. This would just be the perfect spot. It would be for a while, but I'm sure that some time after I would need to paint a new picture, and they can both be perfect. Yes, we realize Well, you get sequential right, Sequential success.

56:39 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yes, I like that. Now we realized recently that we felt a little bland maybe you can call it where we were like what is it? We are not really sure. And then we figured out that the goals we set five or seven years ago, we have succeeded on all of them, but we had not made new goals, which was a weird realization that we were like, hey, what is the next thing we want to strive for?

57:09 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
We are living our dream life. It's just that the dream is a little old. Yeah, and it is our dream life, but it sort of needs a new dream on top of the old one, not to replace the old one. It's not that there's nothing wrong with what we've done the past five, seven years. It's just that somehow we need.

57:32 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yes.

57:33 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Sometimes I actually question myself if I'm just not good enough. And sitting down meditating, I know I'm not good enough, but sitting down meditating, being all happy in the here and now, you know the whole ecotolip present in the moment, whatever, because I really like to have projects, I have some, like to have something to strive for, and it can be the same, maybe, with self development. Sometimes that is like, oh, and I can just be in doubt if there's this productivity value installed in me that I think I need to be productive to be worth something as a human. I know I for myself, I need small tick boxes to be happy. When I go to bed, sometimes mentally, sometimes on paper, I'm like I did that, I did that, I did that.

58:27 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
I'm a good enough boy, I can relate, I can absolutely relate. That's tough, right, because sometimes you know there's different camps and I don't necessarily believe I think most of life is in the gray, not in the black or the white, and oftentimes we're sort of made to think that you need to pick a side, like you need to polarize yourself, either in the crazy morning rituals, self help, you know, wake up at five and cranking out everything on your to-do list, and then you know you're working on doing all these things, and then there's the other side which is like just do nothing and just be present in the moment and do nothing, seek nothing. My view is we can take a little bit of both, depending on what our own unique needs are. And, as you were saying, cecilia, like your stage in life, like different life is like we've got different seasons in life, we've got different stages in life and you know what I need today may not be what I need to work on in two decades, right, and that's okay.

59:59 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
But I think also the productivity, the efficiency, the being focused and goal-orientated, being able to tick some boxes, get some things done. It really has a place on the shelf of everything. It's an important thing that when we do invest our time and energy in some, whatever project it is, that we get somewhere with it, that we don't let ourselves be distracted, we don't go down in rabbit holes of nothingness where we come out three weeks later and all we do is basically scratch a little paint. It matters.

01:00:42 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
It does matter.

01:00:43 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
And it also matters to be able to be at peace with ourselves and clear our minds and have patience, and if you would call that the other side, I think to me a very interesting. So the thing is we have to apply these strategies on the right times places, relations and projects, or you would say maybe zones of life. That makes sense Right. And that's an important way to look at it. I wouldn't want to be efficient in my morning conversations with my teenagers.

01:01:22 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Exactly.

01:01:24 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I'm not going anywhere with it basically, but I do want to be efficient. Let's say, when I'm doing my yoga, I could spend three hours doing it, but I actually do not want to spend more than an hour and a half tops on my yoga mat per day because there are other things I want to do. So I don't want to be distracted. I don't have my phone in the room. I don't let myself do others than just yoga when I do yoga. So I think in some because I don't want to talk about work right now. I picked yoga because work is an annoying thing to start with. It's a Pandora's box. I think if we start that one, I pick the right strategy for the right element of life or project in life. That's an important little insight that we can pin from the box, even dimension of life.

01:02:21 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
If you think of it in different dimensions or different parts of your life, you can be efficient with your time, but you can't be efficient with people. If I tried to be efficient in the middle of marriage counseling, it would be incredibly detrimental to my marriage.

01:02:43
It would not be good for your marriage If I tried to be efficient while trying to understand why my little son, rumi, had a breakdown, is not going to work out very well, but I can be efficient when it comes to project management. I can be efficient once I've decided what my outcome, what my vision, what I'm after, is. Then I can efficiently put together a plan, knowing that I can still be flexible and change course if necessary. Yeah, there's a time, there's a place, there's an approach for everything, but I do think it's very important also yeah, don't do it willy-nilly and don't do it directionless, but have a place to start from.

01:03:31
A lot of times, that's a foundation of values, ideally knowing, which, of course, informs your purpose, which then leads you to deciding whether you're going to go after certain goals or you're just going to filter them out, because we're constantly getting opportunities and ideas every day. All of us are. For me, personally, I like to use my values and my purpose as a filter for those opportunities. That makes it so easy for me to choose, because I can just decide right there, on the spot. Okay, is this going to help me inspire people to become better and to achieve their goals and live the best possible life that they can live? If no, I'm not doing it.

01:04:18 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Exactly.

01:04:18 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
It's plain and simple.

01:04:20 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Exactly You've asked several times isn't it hard to think so much, to make so many of your decisions on your own? You're having all the responsibility for it. You don't even know where you're living next month. You have to make that decision as well. You make it up all the time. You have to think and think and think. But actually, because we've done the base thinking work, that we know what's important, we know why we're doing what we're doing. Yes, it's not that hard. Yes, okay, right now I'm trying to book accommodation for the holidays, which might have been smart to do a few months ago. Sometimes it is hard, but then we know this is the price tag that comes with the lifestyle that I chose, and I know that if I had chosen another lifestyle, there would have been a price tag too. It would have looked different. But everything, all choices, come with a price tag and I'm okay paying it. And the day I'm not okay paying it is the day I need to change the lifestyle. So it actually becomes very easy once you start thinking for yourself.

01:05:32 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yes.

01:05:32 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Maybe not the first getting the whole.

01:05:36 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
There's a struggle involved, right, it can be tough at first trying to figure it out, but then eventually, once you make the decision I mean the root meaning, rather, of the word decision fascinates me because it means, quite literally, like an incision to cut off, to cut off other options, to cut off other things, the noise.

01:06:03 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yes.

01:06:03 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Right so to make a decision, if you really take that word seriously. I mean, you're cutting off the things that don't matter for the thing that does For the one thing that does matter to you in that specific moment, right so? And that starts with again, like sitting down, writing down. We've got this cool thing that we have in our kitchen, for instance. We call it our Family Values Board and we sort of every year we'll look at it. Well, we look at it every day, but we revise it once a year where my wife and I will sit down. And now we are also involving our daughter, nora, because she's old enough and she contributes and has a say. And we just talk about, we just go over that board and we say, hey, are we still in line with these values? Is this still congruent to us and do these still matter? A representation of us as a family. And sometimes we'll revise it.

01:07:19
And I look at life that way. Life is like a constant revision. We're constantly learning and becoming different versions of ourselves. The version of me right now isn't the same Dean from a year ago. It's different. I've learned different things. I've experienced different things. So I think that if you start from the base of values and purpose and you have an idea of where you want to go. The other stuff takes care of itself. And also I like to ask people what are you willing to? What struggle do you enjoy?

01:07:59 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
That's a good one.

01:08:02 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
I enjoy the struggle of just lifting things and exercising and pushing myself and being totally out of breath. I enjoy that struggle, but a lot of people don't. Another person may enjoy the struggle of painstakingly practicing the same notes on the guitar until they get it to that point of satisfaction where it sounds beautiful to them. It can be a struggle. It's like a beautiful struggle, a beautiful pain that you choose yourself.

01:08:41 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
It's a bit like you said before, that curiosity can be one of your. What was the other word? You used good reasons or intentions.

01:08:50 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Intentions yeah.

01:08:52 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Curiosity is sort of also this itch, this pain. I just need to know. I just I don't have to read this thick, boring book in German, but I need to know what it says. I really need to find out. That's another sort of that we. I think curiosity ties into that.

01:09:18
There are struggles that we like I usually say when I coach or talk about unschooling that parents obviously they are scared their children will learn nothing if they pull them out of school. And I know I understand, I have been there myself. What happens if I let go? What happens if I'm not teaching them the alphabet or telling them to study? I don't know geography or history of the world. Math is the big one and I usually say no one is interested in being bored, no one enjoys watching paint dry. Everybody likes to be in a situation that's stimulating and that will spark your curiosity. And the curiosity it's because there's something you don't know, which means embarking in leaning into curiosity will be a learning journey. There is no way you get up in the morning and you're not smarter when you go to bed at night. The question is just Is it an organized, orchestrated learning journey Someone else put there for you, or is it your own?

01:10:38 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yeah, I don't see that there's long from self-development to self-directed learning, also for children. I think it will be interesting to talk with you a year or two down the line when we have tried to manipulate you a little more.

01:11:00 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Indicative, because that would be a secret agenda. I also do respect your idea to make your own choices.

01:11:13 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
I'm super curious about if it's okay to ask what's on the value board. What's on the value board.

01:11:26 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
The first thing that comes to mind to me from the values board is that no one is better than you and you are not better than anybody else. No one is better than you and you are not better than anybody else. Because it serves as a way to humble us as individuals, because everybody has an ego. Sometimes we let that ego inflate and I love the idea of reminding myself, my family, my kids hey, nobody is better than you and you are not better than anybody else either. So keep that in mind and carry that with you. That's one. Inspiring is another one. Some of them are sentences, some of them are just single words. Humility, wealth, success those standard self-help things are on there as well Curiosity, be curious, be humble in those things, love. It's quite a long board. I almost want to.

01:12:52 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
You did only ask for some of it.

01:12:54 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yeah, and what are you, as you are in this During your work, is a part of your work. Let me rephrase that Do you need?

01:13:08
a moment, breathe in, do my bread work here. So the work you do with flashbooks is literally reading business books and self-help books and then distilling them down to great summaries, which I like a lot. There's a lot of information going in and it can be, as we talked about, a little fear-provoking. Sometimes it's like, okay, should I also master this area, this area and this area, but of course you must take some of it in. So what are you working on right now? How are you working to improve Dean right now? Is there something where you're like I'm in the process of? This is a goal I'm moving towards and this is what I'm working on.

01:13:54 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, that's a great question. So right now, as I mentioned earlier, we just made a major move. We moved residences. So there are a number of things that we're sort of getting used to right now, just settling into this awesome new lifestyle, this awesome new journey that we're sort of embarking on, where there are certain things that are a little tough and there are certain things that are incredible.

01:14:25
One tough thing is we're pretty far away from everybody, which means those things that I used to do like hop in the car and takes five minutes to get to the gym, or we just go grocery shopping on a whim and there's a bunch of different restaurants. No well, now we need to learn how to live life without DoorDash or Postmates. We got to start cooking. We need to cultivate the kind of environment that lines up with our family values in our new residence, in our new home, especially with the new home we need to be with this new homeschooling thing that we are doing, and so there's several things, if I'm being honest and also not losing focus on my different businesses and those initiatives. So it's really sort of a pretty busy and hectic period of my own life right now that we're in the middle of, but it's an incredible one, and it's an exciting one.

01:15:46 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
It also touches on. I'm sitting on a theme that I would like to touch on, and then I think we also. I forgot to wear my watch, but the time is really flying, isn't it?

01:15:56 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Yes.

01:15:59 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I was just thinking about this. You know the efficiency that I talked about before. How it can? It has a new. Obviously, you know it has its dark side.

01:16:09
I had some great insights from a conversation I had with my oldest daughter she's in her 20s when she had just been at lecture. I think it would be from someone talking about feminine economy and I'll try to do it short, but the point is that the masculine economy is the one that we can measure with money. This comes in the whole, all theories about state economy and most of what we talk about. When we talk about economy, we talk mostly about money, and money are, in my opinion, great. They are a great leveler and they are very democratic and they go everywhere and trade is amazing. I'm not against at all, but money can only go so far in measuring value. Some things have never been, not really monetized. Some things that are really valuable cannot be measured in how much money they make and they can especially not be measured. They will never have an impact on the. Is it BNP in English as well? Yep.

01:17:31
The way we measure the some of the production of the state. You know, you make this and then you divide it by the inhabitants and then you have this measurement of the wealth of the state. How is it going?

01:17:45 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, yeah.

01:17:46 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Okay, yeah.

01:17:47 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, same thing.

01:17:49 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah, okay, so you have this measurement and we can hold states up against each other and the state can measure against itself Is it going better, or is it through our production and how much wealth we're building? And you mentioned wealth. It's not about money, but the thing is that it's also about something else, and I think that this mix up we make between value and money is a very unhealthy thing and it hits all of us adults, especially those who are self employed, who just make up their own life, and you know, I don't go home from work at any point in the day, so I and no one's telling me to be ready at eight or anything like that. So there is, I don't have weekend and I never go on vacation.

01:18:51
My life is just my life, and some of it attracts money and some of it's it's not, and you know I'm sure you know that you know when are you officially working? Most of the time probably, but this can sometimes make it hard for us adults to do things that don't have value, and the thing is that I had personally a great insight into basically the revolutionary sort of or at least rebellious act it will be to do something that has no financial value, and how to get trapped into with our efficiency plans that we also have in everyone. You know it's normal and it's good, but we get trapped into trying to do things the majority of the time that has financial value or can attract financial value. And I find it that when I look at my value system and what is truly important in life, the time that I waste staring at the bats or walking a distance, I could have driven in a car or talking to my kids, while maybe I should work. But I'm having this conversation because now the thing came up.

01:20:17 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah.

01:20:18
And there's value there. Like you cannot, you cannot measure, I can't, I couldn't put into. There's not a single number in the world that can adequately and sufficiently represent the value that I place on my mother for raising me. There's not a single number in the world to how valuable I know that is and to how valuable just any mother is Right you can't. That's an insanely important job that is harder than the majority of other professional jobs out there that are generating other types of value. So I don't necessarily look at it as like GDP or profit or business. Success is the only type of value that you can generate.

01:21:20
My daughter is constantly generating value by drawing beautiful pictures and sharing them with me and to me. One example that I share a lot is if I'm working from home, the door is cracked, my daughter comes in and I'm in the middle of something like I'm really focused. That is going to. That I know was going to pay off in financial terms big time, let's just say. But she buzzed through that door and she's excited to show me this drawing that she just made or this rock that she just found outside.

01:21:55
I'm going to stop because I want to stop, because I know that like that interaction that I have with her. And of course it's not always appropriate, I can't always do that, but when I can I'm taking that moment, like I call them magic moments, like you can't get those back. You know what I mean. I'm never going to get that back. I can get back to this because I have, so I can get back to my project that I'm working on because I've so efficiently handled it, like I've got a plan and it's very efficient and it's very organized and blah, blah, blah. But when my child walks in and she wants to show me something cool that she made with her hands for me, I can't not be there in that moment Like I want to be there, you have to look at your calendar and look at the time slot.

01:22:47 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
It's valuable, yeah you can't.

01:22:49 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
I can't be like, hey, come back in 15 minutes and we'll schedule something and put it on the calendar. You can't do that.

01:22:56 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
You can sometimes do that with teenagers. I'll just let you know that.

01:23:00 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, and I'll cross that one when I get there, that's where I can say can it wait 15 minutes? Because I would very much like.

01:23:07 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
But that's different from an eight-year-old, and I'm so happy to hear that you are, and I'm not surprised that you're making these decisions and you have these strategies in place.

01:23:20
I just wanted to you know, for the sake of the full picture of this conversation talk about how important it is to be able to navigate the balance between the things that usually end up on the to-do list and where we have strategies to be more efficient, and the other things that are also important and very valuable in our lives and how we still have. I mean, that was just basically my point. And then you said what you're working on right now is to navigate the field of your home being different and you need to learn to live in a new way with your family and also maintain your businesses. That's working with the masculine and feminine economy at the same time and balancing the two, and I think what I see not in you at all, but in many people that I talk to is that it's sort of the feminine economy, the other side, everything that we cannot put it into the language of money.

01:24:25 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Right.

01:24:26 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
But it's still valuable. It has second place. I mean you still sometimes, and I love you, but sometimes you still say I was working for 20 years while you were at home with the children.

01:24:40 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
You did nothing for 20 years.

01:24:44 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
You call it. What you did work and what I did, I don't know. You hung out with the kids, the language that we these things is as if it's not a learning journey to learn to cook all your meals at home, and it used to be an education to be able to plan out the right calories and nutrients for an entire family. I had a habit of collecting books on this topic Back when I had a house with a bookshelf. I highly envy your situation you talked about in front of your bookshelf.

01:25:19 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
I don't have one anymore.

01:25:21 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I can't let my books choose me in that way and I have to use an imagination. Anyway, when I had a bookshelf, I was collecting books from past eras of women's lives handbooks for housewives and handbooks for young women. I don't know how interesting it is, how it's changed. What was real and what was the official advice? It was self-help books, help, books, help books, self-help books, yeah. I can't say it For women back then. So I had them back from the beginning of the century and, of course, into the 70s and 80s.

01:26:06 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Wow, that must be so interesting to look at and like compare it to today.

01:26:13 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
It's so interesting what was real. But in those books there were like charts and plans and how to plan the meals for a week and how to make sure everyone got the nutrients. And now we say it as if everyone just has to magically figure that out, and I think and it has no real value to figure that out because you're not going to make money off it afterwards, it's not an education.

01:26:43 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, such nonsense in my view that real like not what you're saying the idea that people are she was like dare you Get back in? The kitchen. No, not what. You're not what you were saying, Cecilia I got that.

01:27:04 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
I heard it come out really nonsense.

01:27:06 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
We agree the idea that, like I mean, there's just as much value in that work. That's also work. You know, when we see our like my wife does this very wonderful thing that I love, where, you know, if one of our kids is focused on something right, like my boy, rumi may be like building a block tower as high as he can and it's like it's as high as it's ever gotten in his whole life, and she'll be like you know, just don't, don't disturb him, he's working, yeah, and she's like, just like you are working, he's. He's working right now too, because I might want to be like, hey, buddy, go pick up your toys that you left in the living room, but my wife will be like, hold on, he's working Okay.

01:27:59 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah.

01:27:59 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
And I'm like you know what that's such a nice perspective? Because you know he's creating his own value at two years of age. My daughter, nora, is creating her own value at eight years of age and me at 36 years of age, and creating different types of value for based on my values, and so is my wife, and so are you both. You know, and there's a beauty in that, as long as you're congruent and you don't compare yourself to what you think the outside world Is in, you know, like what you think you need to be based on what everybody else is telling you, I think, as long as you, as long as you have a self directed life Right and the and the like the core, the core of it, or you're working on it, right, then these differences, like they don't even you don't even think about them.

01:28:58
Is is my? Is what I'm doing here valuable just because it doesn't generate profit and doesn't put money in my bank account, versus this project that will? It's not like one is valuable and another one isn't. They're both just different, not degrees, but variations of value. Right, very green.

01:29:19 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
That's how I see it, and what you're saying there reminds me of a sentence I'm still learning from and still unpacking, which I heard on the no not a six C this time, but it can feel quote. I have met him through the Canada, who have written a book called the passion test. I've worked with her for many years and, on a call with him, he said one sentence and I'm still like unpacking it in my own life and he said self development. A major part of that is removing the layers of you that aren't you. And I'm still sometimes looking at what have I put on based on my idea of what I think people want me to be or what I think I need to be to be loved and accepted. Still working on removing layers yeah, I like that.

01:30:18 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
I like that a lot too, and it's you know, I think we all sort of have a little bit of that in us where maybe even throughout this conversation, where there are layers of us, that of all three of us, that maybe we've got up, that we haven't fully peeled back and that's, that's cool, we're working on it, right, we're all work. It's just one big, long, hopefully long beautiful process of discovering yourself and peeling back different layers and entering different stages, and it's very lively.

01:30:54 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
That struggle that we enjoy.

01:30:56 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah Right, that's a good one.

01:31:00 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Dean, with all the books. I have a finishing question with. It says with all those books you've read and all the things you're working on with your own motion rational speaker career, where should people listening to this start? How, if you want to make a change in your life based on what you have consumed in your life, where's your? Where's a good place to start?

01:31:32 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
If you want to make a change in your life, if we're broadly speaking, the first step starts with making a real decision. A real decision, like we touched on earlier, where you're cutting off, because people love making sort of decisions they don't really fully commit. You know, and I'm sure you can pull examples from your own lives, where when you fully committed to something, it worked, it worked out to your benefit. And once, if you were fully committed, maybe it took you down a different path, maybe it took you down an unforeseen path, but you can't go wrong with really deciding and fully committing Because, best case scenario you achieve your outcome, whatever it is that you wanted. Worst case scenario you learn something along the way which further informs your path.

01:32:38 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Yeah, maybe you make a new decision, that is.

01:32:41 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Yeah, you make a new decision that informs you further. I think that's the key is deciding. What do I want? What is my ultimate outcome here? And then patiently, persistently, passionately working towards that outcome.

01:33:00 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
For people out there who wants to get to know more about what you do, dean, if you can present where to find you how to figure out what you're doing, Best place to find me is go to deanbacaricom.

01:33:16 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
That's D-E-A-N-B-O-K-H-A-R-Icom, and that'll lead you to all of my other things, so I'll just leave it at that.

01:33:25 - Cecilie Conrad (Host)
Thank you for joining us.

01:33:27 - Dean Bokhari (Guest)
Thank you both for having me. Jesper Cecilia, it was a pleasure having this conversation with you.

01:33:33 - Jesper Conrad (Host)
Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and if you liked it, then please share it with all your friends and family. We would also love it if you gave our podcast a review. Thanks, and if you want to support our podcast and work, then you can find us on patreoncom. We will continue to travel full time and if you want to tag along, then please follow us on Facebook and Instagram at the Conrad family, and you can also read more than 100 blog posts on our website, theconradfamily. Until next time, make a wonderful day, thank you.