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Matt Deseno is the founder of multiple award winning marketing businesses ranging from a attraction marketing to AI appointment setting to customer user experience. When he’s not working on the businesses he teaches marketing at Pepperdine University and he also teaches other marketing agency owners how they created a software company to triple the profitability for the agency. Our Sponsors: * Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.com * Check out Mint Mobile: https://mintmobile.com/tmf * Check out Moorings: https://moorings.com * Check out Trust & Will: https://trustandwill.com/TRAVIS * Check out Warby Parker: https://warbyparker.com/travis Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy…
Content provided by The Art of Manliness. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The Art of Manliness or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Content provided by The Art of Manliness. All podcast content including episodes, graphics, and podcast descriptions are uploaded and provided directly by The Art of Manliness or their podcast platform partner. If you believe someone is using your copyrighted work without your permission, you can follow the process outlined here https://player.fm/legal.
Pornography is more prevalent and accessible than ever before, yet its effects on relationships, mental health, and human development aren’t popularly well understood. Discussions on the topic are often engaged in from an emotional or religious point of view; less typical is a discussion of pornography from an empirical frame. My guest today, Dr. Brian Willoughby, a social scientist who has spent the past 15 years studying porn’s impacts, will unpack what the research actually says about how it affects personal well-being, relationship satisfaction, and sexual expectations. We discuss the latest data on porn use across different demographics, how porn impacts religious versus non-religious populations differently, and how exposure affects kids. Brian shares whether using porn causes erectile dysfunction and depression, what parents should know about talking to their kids about porn, the main risk of porn that’s typically under-discussed, and more. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM’s series on porn and how to quit it (also available as an ebook ) NYT article that Brian was interviewed for: “It’s Time to Talk About Pornography , Scholars Say” Most People With Addiction Simply Grow Out of It NYT article: “The Teen Trend of Sexual Choking” Brian’s research Connect With Brian Willoughby Brian’s faculty page Brian at the Wheatley Institute Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a Borders bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my Moleskine out of my pocket and jotted down some notes, like potential names — I considered things like “The Manly Arts” before settling on “The Art of Manliness” — categories of content, and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out. That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something Roland Allen explores in The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper . Today on the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian zibaldone to the friendship book to the modern bullet journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today, and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM Article: 100 Ways to Use Your Pocket Notebook AoM Article: The Manly Tradition of the Pocket Notebook AoM Article: The Pocket Notebooks of 20 Famous Men AoM Podcast #194: The Field Notes of Theodore Roosevelt AoM Article: The Right and Wrong Way to Journal AoM Article: Finally Understand How to Keep a Bullet Journal Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks Charles Darwin’s notebooks John Locke’s Method for Commonplace Books Connect With Roland Allen Roland’s website Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. The idea for the Art of Manliness came to me 17 years ago as I was standing in the magazine section of a boarder’s bookstore. As inspiration struck, I took my moleskin out of my pocket and jotted down some notes like penitential names. I considered things like the manly arts before settling on the Art of Manliness categories of content and initial article ideas. Almost two decades later, the fruits of those notebook jottings are still bearing out. That’s the power of a pocket pad’s possibilities, something. Roland Allen explores in the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Papers. Today in the show, Roland traces the fascinating history of notebooks and how they went from a business technology for accounting to a creative technology for artists. We talk about how famous figures from Leonardo da Vinci to Theodore Roosevelt used notebooks, the different forms notebooks have taken from the Italian Zibaldone to the Friendship Book to the modern Bullet Journal, and why keeping a personal diary has fallen out of favor. Along the way, we discuss ways you can fruitfully use notebooks today and why, even in our digital age, they remain an irreplaceable tool for thinking and creativity. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. All right, Roland Allen, welcome to the show. Roland Allen: Hi. It’s nice to be here, Brett. Thank you. Brett McKay: So you put out a book called the Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. And this is a history of the humble notebook. And I think hopefully by the end of the show we’re going to find out it’s not so humble because if you look at any advancement in art, technology, economics, there’s typically a notebook involved. I’m curious, what got you to take this deep dive into the history of the notebook? Roland Allen: Well, I guess there are two questions. There’s where did my interest come from in notebooks? And then what made me take the deep dive? The interest came from keeping a diary myself, essentially, which I did for years. I started in my mid-20s, and quite quickly it became a really important part of my life, and it still is. And keeping a diary, I started just to notice other people’s notebooks. And in my work, I’m a sales guy. I’m not especially creative. But in the publishing companies where I worked, the really creative people always had sketchbooks and notebooks which they would use to design things or write books or generally be enviably creative. So I would sort of notice them and always sneak a peek at them if I could. How did the book come about? I guess one day it just occurred to me that this absolutely universal, omnipresent, really simple object had in fact been invented at some point like anything else. And so I thought, well, where was it invented? And it was really hard to find out, by which I mean Google didn’t help. So that was what set me looking. And yeah, and it sent me off on this sort of wild journey which turned into a book pretty quickly. And you have the results in front of you. Brett McKay: Yeah. And what I loved about this book, it really captured, I think, the love and the mystique that I think people have around notebooks. I know for me there’s something about buying a new notebook. You open it up and it just. You feel good. What do you think is going on there? Why, why do you think people are so drawn to notebooks and keeping a notebook and buying new notebooks even though they already have unfinished notebooks at home? What’s going on there, you think? Roland Allen: I think partly there’s a promise. There’s potential, isn’t there? It’s like any vaguely improving thing. It tells you that you can be a better version of yourself. I think you can be a bit more creative, you can be better organized, you can write that novel or you can start keeping a journal or you can get really on top of your workload. I think that promise is in the blank pages, I think. But also you find it inviting. A lot of people actually, particularly who aren’t long term notebookers, do find it a little bit intimidating, almost the blank page and they get a bit frightened of it. Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve known people like that. They’ll buy a really nice journal and they won’t write in it, like, well, I just want to make sure what I write in it is good. Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s got to be perfect. And that’s not the right attitude at all. Brett McKay: Yeah. So let’s talk about the history of the notebook. What did humans use to keep track of notes before paper notebooks existed? Roland Allen: There were three main things and we’re talking about Europe here. It’s largely a European story that I tell in the book, although I’m not arrogant enough to think that that’s the entire world. But they used parchment, which is very tough. It’s very expensive. It’s very tricky to write on. It’s very hard to use parchment if you’re not sitting at a desk and in effect you’re painting onto the page when you write on parchment. So it’s not the most practical medium. Brett McKay: For those who aren’t familiar. What is parchment? I’m sure people have heard, like, oh, this is parchment. But, like, what is parchment made out of? Roland Allen: A parchment is basically a kind of leather. It is animal hide, which has been stretched very thin, so it’s been tensioned while it’s been, I guess, cured. But it is leather and it’s made out of the same stuff as your boots are, and it does therefore last forever. It’s incredibly tough, it’s very robust, but it’s very thick pages. So if you have a parchment book with 100 pages, it’s like a brick, but it’s a very tough material. And as I say, if you can sit down on your desk, it’s a great material. Then you have papyrus, which came out of Egypt, which the ancient Egyptians famously used, but also the ancient Greeks and ancient Romans used a lot of papyrus, and it’s much easier to use for sort of quick and dirty writing. And it was very cheap, but it falls apart over time. It’s very, very hard to keep papyrus together, which is why it basically only survives in Egyptian tombs, which are sort of the driest, stillest places in the entire world. So the Romans had a lot of literature on papyrus, but it’s all gone. And then the third thing, which is, in a way the most interesting, were these little wax tablets which people all over the Mediterranean used and the Middle east used for thousands of years. And these were very much the notebooks of their day. You’d have a little pair of wooden frames, if you like, which opened, like those little picture frames with a hinge in the middle, and you’d have wax on the insides, which you could scrape into with a stylus. And so you could fill up these pages with scratched writing. And then when you filled the page or didn’t need it again, you could just wipe it clean. Now, obviously, that’s really, really useful if you want to just make a shopping list or keep a quick list of something that’s going on. But it’s not so practical if you’ve got something like a contract, which you want to preserve forever and never change. So all of these mediums had their advantages and disadvantages. Brett McKay: I thought that was interesting, the handheld wax tablets. There’s actually mosaics of a woman, and it looks like she’s using almost like a PalmPilot. It was really bizarre to see. Roland Allen: Yeah. Brett McKay: It’s like, wow, this is like thousands of years old, but it looks like she’s got a little PDA in her hand. Roland Allen: Yeah. And they were absolutely used everywhere for maybe 2,000 years or probably more. They were really, really good. Little bit of technology, and then they vanished with paper, basically, because paper was so much more practical. Brett McKay: Yeah. And during this time, what did people keep track of? I mean, today we use a notebook for all sorts of things. What were people keeping track of on their handheld tablets or parchment or papyrus? Roland Allen: Well, one of the interesting things which I found out during the book is really that people’s lives back then were as complicated almost as ours are now, or rather that they were certainly as varied. So people had shopping lists, they had anything to do with their businesses. If they were buying and selling or making, they inevitably had to take notes about their customers or the money that they borrowed or lent, et cetera. And so any kind of business, it was very important. But also, people were writing down prayers and poems, any kind of what we would call literature. But obviously they didn’t have printed books in those days. So if you wanted to have poems or any kind of writing in your house, you had to have it basically in a notebook or something like that. Brett McKay: Okay. So these three mediums, parchment, papyrus, tablets, they allowed you to get stuff down and keep it there. But they all had their downsides. Parchment too heavy, too expensive. Papyrus didn’t last very long. The wax handheld tablets good for shopping list, and very ethereal type things that you could just erase at the end of the day. But you talk about. There was a big change that happened in the 1200s in Italy that basically revolutionized the notebook and created almost the notebook that we have today. So what was going on in Italy in the 1200s that led to the development of the paper notebook? Roland Allen: They… It was a really important moment in history, I think, and it was a real technological leap forward. So they got hold of paper from the Spanish, and the Spanish got hold of paper from the Arabs or the Islamic occupiers of what is now Valencia. And for hundreds of years, they’d been making paper there as part of the Islamic caliphates, and they got really, really good at it. And then when the king of Catalonia, who was a guy called James II, wanted. He wanted it, basically, he went out and conquered them, and he got hold of the paper, and the paper makers kept hold of them, treated them very well, and started exporting paper everywhere. Now, the Italians, what they did was they realized that it could transform their business because suddenly they had this medium which they could do business on, which was permanent and therefore secure. So if you had a business ledger and you wrote something down in it, you knew it could not be forged. Brett McKay: Yeah. Why is that? What is it about paper you talk about in the book, that parchment? That was one of the key difference between parchment and paper. Paper was permanent. What was it about paper that made it permanent? Roland Allen: If you write on paper with ink, the ink goes into the middle of the paper and it sticks there and you can’t get rid of it without destroying the page. If you write on a parchment sheet with ink, it just sits on top a bit like paint, and it’s very easy to scrape it off and replace it with something else, which people who used parchment did all the time because it was so expensive. So if they’d finished with a book, they wanted to reuse the parchment, they just scraped off the writing and it was as good as new. So. But merchants suddenly had this secure way of recording transactions, debts, deals. And of course, that enabled them to have much more interesting, complicated businesses because they could suddenly trust their information technology. Brett McKay: And this allowed the development of paper and paper books. This led to the development of… What’s that? Accounting. Double book accounting… Roland Allen: Double entry bookkeeping. Brett McKay: Double entry bookkeeping. I mean, maybe people have heard this, but for those who aren’t familiar, what is double entry bookkeeping and why is it such a big deal? Roland Allen: Right. Among your listeners, you’re going to have, I hope, plenty of accountants, plenty of people who’ve got double entry bookkeeping degrees or qualifications, people who have trained in any kind of money management. And I just want to salute them because they’re the real heroes of the story. Double entry bookkeeping is tricky, but it’s a very, very useful way of managing money. And it enables you to create a profit and loss picture out of quite a complicated array of deals. So when you talk about a company’s balance sheet today, you’re talking in terms of double entry bookkeeping, balancing credits and debits. When you talk about the profit and loss account, which every company does to this day. This was invented in Italy around the year 1300. When you talk about an annual statement or an annual statement of a company’s accounts, that was invented in Italy. They invented limited liability partnerships, they invented futures markets, they had very sophisticated insurance and modern banking, and they invented the company. So if you’ve ever worked for a company, you can thank these Italians. Back in the year 1300, they invented all of these things in probably around Florence. Brett McKay: And it was all done in paper notebooks. Roland Allen: And that was their technology. Yeah. And because there was so much cash flying around, Florence became one of the richest places in the world, despite the fact that it’s a small city with very few natural resources of its own. They were so good at money management that their bankers basically ran European business for 100 years or more. And their merchants and manufacturers were among Europe’s leading tradesmen, so basically because they were incredibly good at managing money. And that people from all over Europe would look at them enviously and say, oh, they’re doing it the Italian way. But they couldn’t quite understand it because looked at from the outside, double entry bookkeeping is quite opaque, a little bit difficult to get your head around. So it took quite a long time for other people to do it. But the northern Italians learned how, the Germans learned how, then the Dutch and the French and eventually even the British learned how to do double entry bookkeeping. And that is where the sort of the whole European economic model capitalism really comes from. Brett McKay: And something that happened at the same time is you had these Italian accountants basically with their notebooks, their ledgers. And there were the artists around the same time, looking around like, oh, these guys have got this cool thing that’s. They got this medium. Roland Allen: This is handy, yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah, they got this medium where they can just look at things. It’s lightweight, it creates a permanent record. Maybe we could use that for our art. So how did Florentine artists co opt paper accounting books and then turn them into sketchbooks? Roland Allen: I think it really was that simple. Imagine if you are an artist in a time before paper, then you can paint on the walls, you can paint on parchment or canvas, which are both inconvenient and expensive. You could carve wood or stone, but you couldn’t casually go out and just sketch something. And today’s artist, whether or not they’re a hobbyist or a pro, good or bad, can take it absolutely for granted. You can pick up a pencil, just go out and sketch whatever you want, or draw a picture of a person or of a rabbit or of a tree. But this is actually again, a sort of surprising development which people weren’t always able to do. So I think there was like a generation of artists in Florence basically, who saw their contemporaries using these notebooks, which were quite cheap by this point, for quite interesting business things. And they just picked it up and started drawing in it. And they realized or they discovered that if you draw a lot, you get good at drawing. And suddenly they were better artists than they would have been without these notebooks and turned into really great artists. A generation, I think, of great artists. Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s when you see the development of perspective. Like there was an artist you highlight and you can actually see how you develop this perspective, where things. Because before that time when people drew things people have always seen those sort of like Byzantine type paintings where they’ll just basically stack people on top of each other. And maybe they might. The person that’s supposed to be far away looks smaller, kind of, but then it’s still not in perspective. Well, the notebook, the sketching allowed these guys to figure out, oh, if we do it this way, we can actually provide some visual depth to our art. Roland Allen: Yeah, and they could try and try and try again, which is really important. You know, if they produced a drawing which wasn’t very good, all they had to do was turn the page and try again. And that was never really available to previous generations of artists. But this movement from business technology to creative technology, we’ve seen in our own time, because we’ve seen computers go from IBM to the Apple Mac and then you have Pixar and you have these amazing digital artworks which no one could have conceived of 50 years ago. And it’s a very similar story. It’s information technology being co opted by creative people and used in crazy new ways. Brett McKay: And the other thing that the notebook allowed artists to do was not only could they just draw a whole bunch, but because it was lightweight, they could share things with other artists. So it allowed artistic ideas to spread faster than before. If you wanted to see a painting, you had to like, go visit a church or go look at this mosaic wall. Now, the notebook, you could just hand someone your sketchbook. Hey, what? I’m doing this thing with perspective or two point perspective. You should check this out. And then it just started spreading faster and faster. Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. And there was definitely training going on in artists studios which worked exactly like that, where they would have some really good drawings of feet in the studio. Notebook. Studio sketchbook. And then you would just practice drawing feet using those. And you would get good at feet, and then you’d move on to the next piece of anatomy. Brett McKay: And during this time too. So you had the artists using paper notebooks for sketchbooks. You had accountants keeping the ledger. During this time in the Renaissance, you also had this development in Italy of a notebook called the Zibaldone. Did I say that right? Roland Allen: I guess so, yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. All right, so tell us about the Zibaldone. What is the Zibaldone? What was that? Roland Allen: Zibaldone seems to have meant at the time salad. And it was a kind of notebook which was exactly like a salad in that it was all mixed up, it was all different kinds of things. It was basically just what you fancied having. So remember that, again, people didn’t have printed books to rely on. If you wanted to have literature in your house of any kind, it had to be in a notebook, it had to be handwritten. And a Zibaldone was your own personal collection of your favourite book bits of writing. So very commonly it was prayers, but it could also be songs, poems, Aesop’s Fables, translations of Ovid or other classical authors, or just the business of the town, proclamations from the town authorities and so on. Anything which was going to be fun or useful, people just wrote down in their own notebooks. And they were called Zibaldoni because they ended up as hodgepodges. You know, they were completely mixed up like a salad. And these are great because they’re a real insight into what people actually were interested in. And so some of them are a bit smutty, but most of them are very just enjoyable. They wrote down the fun stuff. It’s a bit like a kind of mixtape, if you like people copying down their favorite tracks back in the ’80s, as I’m sure you did, or I certainly did, and making these unique mixes. And no two were ever the same. Brett McKay: I thought was interesting too, about the Zibaldone was that they were oftentimes intergenerational. Like a father would pass on his notebook to his son and then the son would pick up where his dad left off. Roland Allen: Exactly, yeah. They were like a family asset. And you see it in people’s wills when they died, quite often even. And this was in a time when, outside of Florence, most people couldn’t read by really, the vast majority of people couldn’t read. But in Florence, where this went on, the vast majority of people in their wills would leave two or three books behind, and those were mostly Zibaldoni, which they would leave, as you say, to their sons or their daughters, and they would just be carried on in the next generation. Brett McKay: All right, so they were writing things like poems, prayers, catchy quotes. Did anyone do any drawing or sketching in the Zibaldone? Roland Allen: Yes, they did. And this is one of the things that makes them so fun, because these people aren’t by and large, trained artists. So when they draw, for instance, a scene from the story, like an Aesop’s Fable or something, it’s a bit haphazard. It’s clearly the work not of a trained artist. It can look quite childish, but therefore it’s really fun and charming. And again, it really brings the people to life who actually used them. Brett McKay: Did they keep to do list or grocery shopping list in their Zibaldone, or was the Zibaldone was like, no, it’s only for things we want to keep for a long time. Roland Allen: Yeah, I think that’s right. I don’t think I came across one which had anything like a grocery list in it. They would have things like recipes in them, though, which are pretty functional. You know, people would have cures for baldness, for instance, which would involve mushing up various grains or herbs or produce in olive oil and then smearing it on your head, that sort of thing. So they had that kind of list. But anything as casual as a shopping list, they probably just put on a bit of scrap paper, I guess. Brett McKay: And there was no. Again, there’s no rhyme or order to the Zibaldone. Roland Allen: No. Brett McKay: It’s just, you just whatever you want to write, I’m gonna write in there. Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah. Brett McKay: And I think that’s a difference from the commonplace book, which we’ll talk about here in a bit. So it was just. It was like. It was like a tossed salad. Roland Allen: Yeah, exactly. Brett McKay: Okay, well. And one of the most famous notebooks keepers during the Renaissance, I don’t know if you’d call his notebooks or zibaldonis. They’re kind of like that was Leonardo da Vinci. How many notebooks did this guy go through during his life? Roland Allen: Ah, no, we can’t know, but thousands and thousands of pages. I think we have surviving 1,300 pages of his notebooks, and they estimate that that’s maybe a quarter of what he produced in his lifetime. So what’s that, about 5,000 pages? Brett McKay: Wow. Roland Allen: Which I guess is. Oof. That’s 20, 25 big fat moleskins. But some of his notebooks were oversized. Some of them were pocket sized. He actually wrote about how he used notebooks for sketching. He said he always had one tied to his belt. He never went anywhere without a notebook. If he ever had a thought, he could write it down. If he ever saw something interesting, he could sketch it. And he never stopped. He basically just never stopped. He filled pages of notebooks and sketchbooks every day. Brett McKay: So give us an idea. What did he keep in his notebooks? Like, what kind of things was he writing down? Roland Allen: Oh, Lord, where to begin? He had lists, for instance. He wasn’t super well educated, Leonardo. The education he got was pretty. You’d call it elementary. And then he went off to work in an artist studio when he was a teenager, but he was very keen on learning Latin. So for instance, he kept lists of Latin words. He did keep shopping lists and traveling lists, for instance, packing lists in his notebooks so that we know when he moved house, what he took with him, we know who he owed money to, who owed him money, etc. And then sort of these very mundane everyday things go up to incredible anatomical drawings, which he made from drawing dissected cadavers. He was way ahead of his time as an anatomist. But then there are mathematical sketches. He was obsessed with geometry and polyhedrons, so 12 sided things, tetrahedrons, that sort of thing. He was obsessed by mechanics. He designed things like ball bearings, we don’t know if they were ever manufactured. And then he designed these crazy machines which look like flying machines or tanks. I don’t think that they were necessarily ever built. One Leonardo expert said to me that you’ve got to think of his sketchbooks as kind of him showing off a little bit, because his job was basically to be a genius. He didn’t actually do anything very productive apart from painting. And he actually didn’t paint very many paintings either. But he was kind of like a public court genius. And therefore the Duke of Milan or the King of France or whoever would want to pay him to be around. And his sketchbooks and his notebooks were really important for that because he could show off all of his crazy ideas, just turning a few pages and people would have their minds blown. So, yeah, so Leonardo’s notebooks are undoubtedly some of the best ever. And he didn’t really see any boundaries. He just wanted to write or draw everything that he thought of. Brett McKay: The thing that stood out to me when you’re describing Leonardo’s notebooks was how much drawing he did in it. This is not like a Zibaldone, where people are just keeping prayers and writing things down. He did a lot of drawing, I think you pointed out. What he was doing is he was like the title of your book says, thinking with paper. He was taking these abstract thoughts that he had in his head and he was trying to make them more concrete by drawing them out. Roland Allen: Yeah. And so, for instance, very famously, he was obsessed by drawing running water. So he could put him by a stream or by a watermill and he would draw the water moving over the rocks very, very happily. Must have done it for hours and hours. He was obsessed by hair as well, by drawing curly hair and looking for similarities between it. But he was always looking, for instance, when he was drawing the water moving. He was also thinking about fluid dynamics and he was trying to work out why the water moved the way it did, what forces were working on it and so on. So he never stopped asking why. And I think that’s what’s kind of inspirational about Leonardo’s career is he just never ever stopped asking why, why, why, why? Like a really irritating five year old why, why? And of course, because he was always looking for answers. He found some. Brett McKay: The thing about Leonardo’s drawing, it inspired me because I’m not much of a drawer. I’m trying to become more of a drawer in my notebooks because I think there’s something to that idea of thinking with paper and like drawing things to help you understand things. In your experience with your notebooks, do you do a lot of drawing? Have you found any benefit to adding sketches along with your writing in your notebook? Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Funny enough, I used to keep separate sketchbooks and diaries. I never really drew in my diary, but I always love seeing people who can draw doing a visual journal. You see so many of them online, people who go traveling and then they sit in the town square with the coffee and they sketch the town square and then write about it around the page. And I think those are so beautiful. I think those are wonderful. They’re really inspiring. But I just don’t feel confident enough in my own drawing to do that. But drawing is a great thing to do and you never look at anything as closely as when you’re drawing it. You never really concentrate on a scene until you’ve got a pencil in your hand, I find. So if you want to really experience a place, then drawing it is the best thing to do. Brett McKay: Yeah, I’d agree. One of my favorite presidents, US Presidents was Teddy Roosevelt and he was a naturalist. He kept journals where he talk about his adventures he went on and his observations of nature. And he did a lot of drawing and I was, I was pretty impressed, like how, well, how good of a drawer this guy was. Roland Allen: Yeah, I did not know that. I missed him. But this is the, the hazard of doing such a wide ranging book. You, you miss all of the ones which you wish you found. Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to have a notebook like Leonardo, just write anything and everything that you come across do you think is interesting and do more drawing. I think that’s a good takeaway from that. Roland Allen: That’s my takeaway. Yeah, yeah. Draw more. You’ll be very happy with yourself. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So this was a Renaissance period. Eventually notebooks started spreading across Europe and then you see this development of something that’s kind of like the Zibaldone but different, the commonplace book. What is a commonplace book and how is it different from a Zibaldone? Roland Allen: So you should think about this as a reaction to the age of print arriving. So Zibaldone you have. Because you can’t have printed books, basically, commonplace books arrive about 100 or 60, 60 odd years after print and suddenly there are books everywhere. And suddenly, for the first time in Europe anyway, there are more books than you can ever hope to read because of this explosion in print. So everyone’s busy reading more and more books, which are cheaper than ever, and therefore it’s hard to remember what’s going on. Commonplace books are a really good method of taking the best bits out of what you read, organising it, and therefore you end up making your kind of own encyclopedia, which is thematically arranged. So, for instance, if you’re a legal student, if you’re studying to be a lawyer, then all of the law books you read, when you go through them and you come across a concept like, I don’t know, divorce or murder or justice or sentencing, you take a little quotation out, you take a snippet out on that topic, you collect all these snippets from different authors and you end up with your own little law encyclopedia. But that could work equally well if you’re studying to be a priest or if you were just reading generally, or studying Latin or Greek or anything. So they’re much more organized than Zibaldonis and they’re quite hard work to make and they’re definitely less fun. But commonplace books are very, very good way to educate yourself to a high standard. Brett McKay: So who were some famous commonplace bookkeepers? Roland Allen: More or less anyone you’ve heard of between about the year 1500, 1550 and say the mid Victorian period? So Shakespeare, undoubtedly, that generation of dramatists with definitely massive commonplace bookers in their youth, that’s how their education worked, that’s how they were taught. But basically anyone who had any kind of education in the period would have kept a commonplace book at school. And then if they carried on keeping them into adulthood, often they became quite serious, weighty tomes. John Milton kept a commonplace book into adulthood. Isaac Newton used his stepfather’s as a kind of sketchbook, but he also would have kept his own when he was a student. So it was a really important part of education at that time. Brett McKay: I think John Locke was another famous. Didn’t he write a book or a treatise on how to keep a commonplace book? Roland Allen: He did, yeah. And this is quite a common thing because people recognized that it was quite hard work, so they’re always trying to make it slightly easier for each other. So Locke published this, as he said, treatise on how to commonplace, which seems to have been fairly popular. People seem to have listened to him. Brett McKay: I thought was interesting about the development of the commonplace book. You saw people borrowing again from accounting. So I think accountants had different types of books that they kept. There’s like the main ledger and then there’s like a waste book. There’s things that were like, temporary and you shifted it over to more permanent records in the. The accounting books. And people who had commonplace books had a similar system. They’d have like a work a day notebook that they would carry with them all the time, write down things they came across during the day and they would get home and then they’d go to their main book and then synthesize and organize everything and that they track down that day into the main commonplace book. Roland Allen: Yeah, absolutely. They would always be organizing their thoughts. And if this is one of the most important things you can do to help you understand things better or think more creatively, always try and organize your thoughts. It’s just a really, really good process to go through. It’s the same when you’re drafting a piece of writing or making preparatory sketches for a painting or a drawing, or just trying to work through what you’ve seen. A really good example of that is Darwin when he was on the HMS Beagle, going to the Galapagos and places like that and looking at tortoises. The notes he made on the spot were absolutely minimal, completely illegible to anyone but him. Very, very, very sketchy, in tiny little notebooks, which he could just put in his pocket when he was out and about. But every evening when he went back to the ship, then he would break out the big notebooks, he would organize his thoughts, he would write a proper journal and he would pull in facts from his reference library, which he had with him on the boat, and create something much more sophisticated. And then in turn, that goes on to be the foundations of the rest of his career on the evolution of species by natural selection. Brett McKay: Do you keep a commonplace book? Roland Allen: Do you know what? Literally two weeks ago, I thought I’m going to have to do this. I started one and what I did was I went and got a little Moleskine address book. I’m holding it in my hand now. You know, the sort which has the tabbed pages. Brett McKay: Yeah. Roland Allen: Because what I wanted to avoid was having to go through and if I would need to write down the Alphabet and all the head words hundreds of times. So, yeah, so I’ve got those little tab pages down the side and I’ve made a few entries, but really, I should be making more. You’ve reminded me. But like I say, keeping a commonplace book is hard work. Brett McKay: It does sound hard. And I think part of the reason why a lot of people don’t do okay, it’s hard. And I think instead, what a lot of modern people do, instead of writing things out by hand and taking the time to organize things manually, is they’ll use digital tools where if I highlight text on the web, it’ll go to this app that will then organize the notes. And I’ve. I’ve experimented with those things. I don’t find them particularly useful. Roland Allen: No. And the reason they’re not that useful is because they’re really easy. So your brain doesn’t have to engage too much. You just. It’s no more complicated than, oh, that’s interesting. Copy, click, pi. Brett McKay: Yeah. Roland Allen: And then you move on. Whereas if you’re actually writing something down in a notebook, you have to pause. You have to take five, 10 minutes to write it down. And when you’re writing it down, you’re concentrating on every word because you want to make it an accurate record. So. Yeah, so it goes into your mind, it goes into your brain. The work is very much the point. Brett McKay: Yeah, the work. It’s not the writing itself. It’s the work you have to do to organize. Roland Allen: Yeah, it’s the mental work you’re doing. Yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. That reminds me of when I was in law school. In class, you would take notes, lecture notes, but the thing that really helped the most was after class, I’d have to go and take those notes and then put them into my outline, which I guess you call my commonplace book for that law class. Roland Allen: Exactly, exactly. There you go. Yeah. Brett McKay: Okay. So if you want to do a commonplace book, you probably recommend, get yourself an actual physical analog notebook and make that your come. Don’t try to do this digitally. Roland Allen: But I would also say, like, when I was a teenager. Making mixtapes, if I heard a song and I particularly liked the lyrics, I would always write the lyrics down. I had a notebook which was just nothing but snippets of Bob Dylan and things like that and which actually I didn’t know, but that was my Zibaldone and I would recommend that, really, if just anything you read, which you like, just write it down in a notebook. Keep it. Brett McKay: Yeah. So after you talk about the development of the commonplace book, what I love, you take these little side journeys and different fads that notebooks went through throughout Western history. And one you talk about was the Friendship Book. What was the Friendship Book? Roland Allen: Oh, these were lovely. Yeah. So these, these started off as a kind of autographed book in Germany, and students who were particularly impressed by their professors would take them up to Luther or to Melanchthon and get these little notebooks signed and autographed by their professors, who were their stars, and then they would go off and study at another university. Because in those days when you studied at university, you were expected to travel from place to place quite a lot. You didn’t really root yourself in one place. And when you arrived in your new town, you would whip out your autograph book and you would show it to professor so and so, and you would say, look, I am friends with professor such and such over in that other town. And he would say, ah, well, you must be a clever young chap. So this is what Germans did, and then the Dutch got hold of it, and this is around the year 1600 or so, and they made it into something much more fun, which was the Friendship Album. So it wasn’t just for students and professors anymore, it was for anyone. And when you went out for dinner with new people, you would take your friendship book, your album Amicorum in Latin, and if you met someone interesting, you would whip it out and say, it’s so nice to meet you. Could you dedicate yourself into my book? You would give them a page of your book, they would write down a little prayer again, or a snippet of poetry, or a motto of proverb, or they would do a sketch of something and hand it back, and that would be a little record of your friendship. And you can see thousands of these things have survived in Holland. They were hugely popular. And you can see people making these little social networks in these notebooks and recording their friendships for again passing down through generation after generation. And of course, you have people like Rembrandt or the other great Dutch painters would leave sketches in people’s notebooks. So these are now incredible little works of art in their own right. But they’re lovely. I mean, really, really nice things, really. Strangely, no one ever did it, apart from the Dutch. We don’t really know why they did it. For a couple hundred years and then they kind of just stopped. It petered out. But it was such a nice habit to be in for those couple of centuries. Brett McKay: Yeah, it sounds like it was like the 1600 version of Dutch Facebook. Roland Allen: Yeah, it exactly was. You’re exactly right. Yeah. Brett McKay: That’s funny. Another thing you talk about in the book is do a chapter about the role of notebooks in traveling. What role did the notebook play in the lives of travelers? Roland Allen: Well, it’s really interesting. People seem to have an impulse when they go traveling to write a diary, to keep a journal. It seems very natural. But people did this when they would never have dreamt of keeping a diary at home. So you have people like Marco Polo, for instance, who kept an amazing travel journal when he was in China, but then any kind of traveler afterwards would. And then these became a kind of literary sub genre, because when people went traveling, they would keep notes, expecting it to be published when they got back if their journey was particularly remarkable. So, yeah, travelers notebooks are always great, and particularly if they are filled as well with sketches and things like that. There are so many wonderful, wonderful examples. Brett McKay: Well, yeah, going back to Teddy Roosevelt, there’s actually records of his travel journals that he kept as a boy when he did this European tour. And I think he also went to Egypt, and he drew pictures of the things he saw in Egypt and writing about how it was boring on the ship and that sort of thing. It was really cool. Roland Allen: Yeah, that’s amazing things. Brett McKay: Yeah. And then I guess the most famous travel journal would be or travel notebook keeper, Charles Darwin. You mentioned him earlier. He kept, like, a notebook with him all the time where he just kind of wrote slipshod notes that he could later transcribe in his main notebook and that eventually. And what’s crazy, on these little notebooks, you can see him develop the theory of evolution in real time. Roland Allen: Yeah. And also, he seems to have been a really nice guy, Charles Darwin. He was very chatty. He was not secretive at all. He would share his ideas with whoever he met, but he would also whip out his notebooks, and if anyone said anything interesting, he’d be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I get that. And he would make a little note of their conversation, and then that would get fed into his. His writing later on. So he absolutely never stopped taking notes. Brett McKay: Wasn’t there. There’s like an excerpt from one of, I think, maybe a diary or a notebook that he had about marriage. Like he was doing this pro and con list of whether or not to get married. Roland Allen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he sort of weighs up the cost of his independence against the sort of the benefits of companionship and not being lonely and things like that. In the end, he plumps to get married. And fortunately he made a very happy marriage and it worked out well for him. But he did have to think it through before. He did. Brett McKay: Yeah, you talk about too, the history of the diary. And I thought, this is interesting. So notebooks had been around, like the paper notebook around since about 1200s. And people had commonplace books, the Zibaldones, they had ledger books, they had sketchbooks. There weren’t a lot of people who were using their notebooks to write about their thoughts and feelings. Roland Allen: They really didn’t. It’s so, so strange when you think of people who buy moleskins these days. They’re doing it basically to write journals, a lot of them, and it’s a completely normal thing to do, but for hundreds of years no one did it. And when I was researching, I’d keep on coming across mention of a notebook which was called the Diary of so and so. And then I’d go and look at it and it wouldn’t be a diary at all. It would be an account book or it would be a business notebook, or it would be a town chronicle or something like that. It would never be a personal diary. Like, here’s what I did today. I got up, I had this breakfast and how did I feel? Brett McKay: Yeah, and it was funny too. Even if you look at these notebooks from the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, people would sometimes talk about children dying, but it’s almost like they were just keeping track of livestock. They never talked about, like, oh, I felt sad, I’m grieving. You know what most people do today with a notebook, if a child died? They didn’t do that. Roland Allen: Yeah, no, it was very much because it was to do with accounting. And I don’t mean that in a cold way, but they viewed it as that. Rather, they wrote about these terrible events and wonderful events. They wrote about the birth of children as well. They would mark the day, but again, there was no emotion really. Sometimes they would, for instance, write a prayer or they would write a little formula saying how sad they were. But then two years later, another child would die and they would write exactly the same thing. So it was a formula rather than a genuine feeling pouring onto the page. Brett McKay: So when did diary keeping, the way we know it today, is the sort of self reflective notebook. When did that come to be a thing? Roland Allen: Well, this is England’s moment to shine. So for most of the story, England is this terrible backwater inhabited by thugs, very poor education and muddy roads and all that. But for some reason, around the year 1600, in England, they do invent the diary, the daily diary as we know it. We don’t really know why. Various theories out there, but I’m not convinced by any of them. I can’t think of any explanation myself. But by the year 1600, it was definitely a fashion which, for instance, people in plays could refer to. So there’s a play by Ben Jonson from 1604 in which one of his characters writes a diary and people take the piss out of him for it, and he’s very humiliated. And everyone’s familiar with that. I think the idea that some stranger reading your diary is a terrible humiliation. So by then, by 1600, people were keeping diaries. We know that, but where it came from, we have no idea. Brett McKay: And you talk about. They kind of went out of style in the 1940s. What do you think was going on there? Roland Allen: I think time, actually the mass media comes along. Imagine 120 years ago. Imagine in 1900, you don’t have radio, you don’t have any Internet, you don’t have the movies, don’t have any tv. What do you do in the evenings? You read. Okay. You chat, you talk, you sing, you play instruments. But you’ve just got quite a lot of time, particularly in the Northern hemisphere with long, cold winters when it’s dark. You know, diary keeping is a good way to fill that time. And then over the 20th century, you have more and more distractions. You have the cinema, you have the radio. You then have the tv, and then you have the Internet. And every time, it chips away at people’s evenings, essentially. So it became harder and harder, I think, to find the time just to sit down and think, okay, I’ll think about what I did today for half an hour. And I find it difficult to carve out the time. Brett McKay: No, I agree. And something else you point out in the book is that keeping a diary has declined in the west because we live in a peaceful time. And you can see that in the 19th and 20th centuries, it was during times of war that sales of diaries or journals would spike. Roland Allen: Yeah. And this is, I’m sure, true to this day. Whenever there is some upsetting, traumatic event, your world turns upside down. People start keeping diaries, which is why teenagers keep diaries, because their lives are in turmoil automatically because of hormone poisoning, as someone said to me. So teenagers keep diaries and people in war zones keep diaries for the same reason. And I think anywhere you’ll see it now, I’m sure in Ukraine, for instance, there’ll be a lot of people keeping diaries who didn’t before. Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve seen that in my own life. I was a big journal keeper in high school and then the early part of young adulthood, and then I remember. And if I look back at what I wrote, it was a lot of the. Just ruminating over, oh, here’s this problem, here’s this big decision I got to make. I’m feeling anxious about test scores if I’m going to get a job. And then I remember I kind of reached this point in my 30s career established, had a house, kids. I just didn’t really have the itch to write in a journal anymore. And I, I stopped doing it. But I’ll notice whenever I have a problem going on in my life, I will bust out the journal to write. Roland Allen: Very healthy habit. Really healthy habit. Yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. When you talk about this. There’s research that backs this up of. It’s called expressive writing, where you just write, kind of stream of conscious what’s going on in your thoughts and your emotions. Roland Allen: Yeah. And this, I think, was the single most surprising thing I came across in the whole project. You know, three year project, whatever it was, that writing your emotions down on the page then helps your body heal from physical wounds because it reduces the levels of stress in your body so much that your body is able to recover from, for instance, an operation or an injury or a burn more quickly simply if you write down your emotional trauma. And this is now they’ve researched it and researched it and researched it, tested it, all kinds of experiments. It holds up completely. And this blows my mind every time. If you go for a cancer biopsy, you will heal more quickly if you have written your diary beforehand. It’s absolutely baffling to me how powerful it is. Brett McKay: Yeah. You talked to the researcher, James Pennebaker, who sort of the father of expressive writing. Roland Allen: Yeah. Brett McKay: And I think one of the things he noted too, is that in order to make expressive writing effective, you don’t have to do it all the time. Like you don’t have to journal every day to get the benefits, basically. So just do it when you feel like you need to do it. Roland Allen: Exactly. And when I asked him about that I said to him, do you ever keep a journal? He said, yeah, yeah, when I’m feeling low or when I’ve got something to think about some problem. And I said, do you keep it all the time? He just laughed. He said, no, why would I do that? I’m fine. Brett McKay: He also has some advice on how to get the most out of it. I think one problem that people run into, I’ve run into this problem when I’ve kept a journal, when I’m trying to sort through problems, is I end up doing a lot of ruminating, just bellyaching. And it’s not very productive because I’m always asking, why is this happening? And why that one bit of advice? Instead of asking why in your journal, ask how and what? Because that’ll give you better, more concrete answers. Roland Allen: Interesting. Okay. Yeah. Brett McKay: Yeah. Because it’s often hard to pinpoint why something happened. And then also what writing does in general is it forces you because it’s very logical and linear. You have to call in your prefrontal cortex. So it calms you down if you’re really emotional. So it gets you to think more clearly and turns your emotions into actual thoughts. Roland Allen: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Brett McKay: You have this fun chapter on bullet journaling and I’m sure our listeners, if they’ve been on Instagram, they’ve seen pictures of people’s really cool looking bullet journals. Tell us about the history of bullet journaling. When did that get started? Roland Allen: So I guess people have been keeping lists obviously, and checking them off since they were able to write anything down. Ryder Carroll, however, sort of taken the list and turned it into a kind of, I wouldn’t say art form, but a very sophisticated way of organizing your thoughts and feelings. And the reason he felt driven to do this was because he had very pronounced ADHD, which made school life for him impossibly difficult. He couldn’t concentrate, he couldn’t focus, he couldn’t get anything done. He was constantly being shouted at by his teachers, et cetera. And school was miserable for him until, I think at college, I want to say he started just writing things down in lists in bullet pointed lists. And he did it with everything. And this kind of had a transformative effect on how he was able to approach his day because it helped him to focus. It helped him break big, unmanageable tasks down into small, actionable little things and therefore complete things. And he went from being this sort of constant headache for his teachers and his parents to being super, super productive, very entrepreneurial. I’ve got to say, he’s a lovely guy anyway, but he’s also incredibly productive and gets a lot done with his time in a really interesting way. And he invented the Bullet Journal thing, which is essentially a really ingenious way of creating lists that organize your thoughts and organize your day. And it took off. He wrote a couple of books and has thousands of hundreds of thousands probably of people who have gotten his little method now and use it to organize their lives and benefit from it. Brett McKay: What I think is interesting about the Bullet Journal is the visual aspect of it. Whenever you look at them, there’s lists. People just kind of keep it to a list. But sometimes people get really fancy and they add in little pictures and drawings and they kind of look like Zibaldonis sometimes when you look at the pages. Roland Allen: Yeah. And again, the feeling of making something with your hands, I think, is really powerful. So every time you fill up a page of a notebook like that and tick everything off and you can look back and think, yeah, I’ve really accomplished something. Brett McKay: Have you experimented with bullet journaling in your notebooking? Roland Allen: Not formally, but all of my notebooks are full of lists. Brett McKay: Yeah. Roland Allen: Full of lists. So I’m a great believer in lists and therefore I’m a kind of bullet journaler. But I never had the ADHD type issues, which Ryder did. Brett McKay: So after your deep dive into the history of the notebook, what do you think is the future of the notebook? Roland Allen: I don’t think it’s going to go away. I think a conversation I often have is people sort of waving their iPads and saying, oh, aren’t these things going to take over? But what we’re seeing, I think, is a reaction to it. When people like you, you’re saying that Evernote or whatever doesn’t seem to work for you as well as a commonplace book does. So you’re going back to keeping a commonplace book or a written notebook. That’s quite a common experience. People are realizing now, certainly the scientists all know, the psychologists all know, that writing by hand is better in terms of learning and it’s better in terms of thinking things through than typing all the time. So I don’t think that notebooks are going to go away anytime soon. People are always experimenting as well, with these clever kinds of half notebook, half iPad things, the remarkable tablet, things like that. And they have their place, I think, particularly in the office. But I don’t see the next Leonardo da Vinci using a notable tablet. Brett McKay: How do you combine your use of an analog notebook with digital tools? Roland Allen: I try and go through a handwritten phase with every project. I mean, not when I’m bashing out emails for work, because I have a day job as well, but When I’m doing anything creative for work or anything kind of strategic or trying to do any kind of deep thought, then I pick up a pencil first rather than go straight to typing. And then when it’s my own creative work, anything I’m writing, I’m writing another book at the moment and thinking about the book after that. It’s all in notebooks to begin, and they’re full of spidergrams and little charts and graphs and lists and notes from what I’m reading. And I’ve become more organized over time with that. So now I keep a notebook, basically, or a series of notebooks for every chapter I’m working on. Then my notes are pretty organized, which they certainly weren’t six years ago when I started writing about notebooks. My notes from then that time are really haphazard, but now they’re very organized. Brett McKay: Do you refer back to your notebooks from old projects at all? Roland Allen: Ha! That’s interesting. Yeah, I did. I had a quick flick through the notebook ones once fairly recently, and they were just horrible. It was so like the ones I use, the ones I make now are so much better organized. And it’s interesting that I sort of really educated myself on the journey and I found so many examples of really good note taking which I could essentially copy. Yeah. So my old notebooks, my old writing notebooks are pretty horrible. The ones I make at the moment now I like a lot. I’m sure I’m going to hold on to them for a long time. Brett McKay: Well, Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Roland Allen: Well, the book is out in the States. It’s published by Biblioasis, who are a fine Canadian independent publisher. And it’s available everywhere. Your Barnes and Noble or your local independent bookstore, or even online if you’ve got no other choice. But yeah, so seek it out. The Notebook by me, Roland Allen. I’d be really grateful. Brett McKay: And when you pick up the book at the Barnes and Noble, you got to check out the moleskin section. Get yourself a moleskin too, while you’re at it. Roland Allen: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Brett McKay: Roland, it’s been a great conversation. Thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Roland Allen: Thanks very much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed it. Brett McKay: My guest here is Roland Allen. He’s the author of the book The Notebook, A History of Thinking on Paper. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website, roland-allen.com also check out our show notes @aom.is/notebook. You can find our links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time’s Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast but to put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship — from tangible things like childcare and chores to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going — is supposed to be divided equally. The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness. And that seems sensible and rational. But, my guest says, it actually sabotages relational happiness. Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of The 80/80 Marriage: A New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship . Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to a relationship, what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of “radical generosity” can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’s respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success. Resources Related to the Podcast AoM article and podcast on how to hold a weekly marriage meeting AoM Article: Towards a Philosophy of Household Management AoM Article: Beware the Tit for Tat Trap Connect With Nate Klemp 80/80 Marriage website Nate’s website Nate on LinkedIn Nate on IG Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!) Listen to the episode on a separate page. Download this episode. Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice. Read the Transcript Brett McKay: Brett McKay here. And welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. A lot of people go into marriage with a 50/50 mindset. Everything in the relationship, from tangible things like childcare insures to intangible things like the effort and energy needed to keep the partnership going, is supposed to be divided equally. The 50/50 approach to relationships is all about fairness, and that seems sensible and rational, but my guest says it actually sabotages relational happiness. Nate Klemp is a former philosophy professor and the co-author, along with his wife, of the 80/80 marriage a New Model for a Happier, Stronger Relationship. Today on the show, Nate shares how cognitive biases skew our perception of our contributions to relationship what happens when couples get stuck in the 50/50 mindset of domestic scorekeeping, and how shifting to an 80/80 model of radical generosity can create an upward spiral of connection and appreciation. And we discuss practical ways to divide household responsibilities, decide how much time to spend with each spouse’ respective parents, and establish values that will guide your partnership as you navigate life changes and work towards a spirit of shared success. After the show’s over, check out our show notes @aom.is/8080. All right, Nate Klemp, welcome to the show. Nate Klemp: So good to be here with you, Brett. Brett McKay: So you co authored a book called the 80/80 Marriage with your wife, and in this book you both propose a new framework for thinking about marriage. And you start off the book with a story of what kickstarted the idea of the 80/80 marriage. Tell us that story. Nate Klemp: Yeah, well, I’ll give you maybe even a more complete story than what we say in the book, which is to say that when we first got together, we had this fairytale, like, beginning to our relationship. So we met in high school. We were both seniors in high school. We were chemistry lab partners. We went to senior prom together. And then we pragmatically broke up before we went to college. And seven years later, it magically came back. We started dating again, we got married, and if you had asked our friends at the time, they probably would have told you we were like the perfect couple. And in some ways, that ended up becoming a trap for us because a year or two into marriage, as anybody who knows who’s been married knows, like, things got real. And for us, that looked like I was in my final year of getting a PhD, struggling to get a job as a professor. I had a serious bike accident. We were just locked into all sorts of conflict to the point where we almost got divorced at the time. Luckily, we didn’t we were able to push through that. But over the decades, it’s now been 19 years since then, we started to just ask this question, like, what was the fundamental essence of our conflict? And what we arrived at is that essentially we were fighting over whether it was fair and the it being all sorts of things like childcare and housework and finances and all the different things that go on in our life. And so we decided to see were we the only people experiencing this? Were there others out there locked in this battle for fairness? And that’s what ultimately led us to write the book. And we interviewed a number of different couples, and what we found is that on some level, most modern couples seem to be stuck in this conflict over fairness for what is or isn’t fair. This practice of keeping an elaborate mental scorecard of all the wonderful things you do juxtaposed against all the things your partner doesn’t do. Brett McKay: And, yeah, you call this framework of thinking about fairness in a marriage. You call it the 50/50 marriage. And on paper, it seems like that should be a good idea. But you found that it doesn’t work. It just makes things worse. Why doesn’t it work? Why does focusing on fairness in a marriage make things worse? Because people might be thinking, that doesn’t make any sense in a 50/50 marriage. You’re trying to be fair. And isn’t that a good thing? Nate Klemp: Yeah, well, and. And this is so surreptitious. Like, it’s happening all the time, mostly under the radar of awareness. For example, just the other day, I think it was last night, actually, I was unloading the dishwasher, and I thought to myself, man, this is like the third time in a row I’ve unloaded the dishwasher, and I could feel the agitation. And. And that’s just a micro example of how this shows up. It’s this thought things aren’t fair, which is then followed by some experience of anger or resentment. And the reason this doesn’t work, it’s actually kind of interesting. There’s this, like, really cool science coming out of the field of marriage research, where they do these time survey studies. And they found a couple things. The headline here is that we’re basically really bad at assessing what is or isn’t fair. So if you’re saying, man, I contribute 60% or 70% to my relationship, that number is based mostly on pure delusion. And there are, like, two things that contribute to this. One is what psychologists call availability bias, which is basically just A fancy way of saying, in my marriage and my relationship with my wife, Kaley, all of the wonderful things that I do, like all those contributions are available to me. I see them happening in real time when I’m taking our daughter to her violin lesson or whatever it might be. When it comes, though, to what Kaley’s doing, all of a sudden things get a little bit blurry and foggy, like she’s contributing. But I don’t really see any of that happening in real time. And most of it I don’t see happening at all, and I don’t even know about it often. So there’s this tendency, then, to systematically underestimate what our partner is doing. You add on top of that, one other cognitive bias, the overestimation bias, where they found in researching couples that people tend to radically overestimate the amount of time they spend on household labor and on childcare. So what that means is if I say, like, hey, I spent an hour yesterday cleaning up the kitchen. It was probably more like 30 minutes. And you put these two together, and you start to see, okay, we’re systematically underestimating what our partner does. We’re systematically overestimating what we do. And then we’re having this conversation about trying to make things fair. And you start to see that the numbers are just based on delusion. And that’s why we think this idea, this mindset of 50/50 fairness just doesn’t work, and it leads to perpetual, constant conflict. Brett McKay: Yeah. So we’re keeping a mental scorecard when we have a 50/50 marriage. But the problem is the scorecard is probably not accurate. Nate Klemp: Yes. Wildly inaccurate is the way I would put it. Brett McKay: Yeah. And you talk about some of the reoccurring problems or conflicts you see in couples that you interviewed when they try to do everything. 50/50. You mentioned one in your own marriage, the domestic scorekeeping fight. It’s like, well, man, I’ve done dishes three nights in a row. What’s going on here? What are some other common areas in a marriage where people try to do things? 50, 50. And it just causes a lot of tension. Nate Klemp: I’m so glad you asked that, Brett, because it was really interesting when we would ask couples, do you fight about fairness? Most couples said, no, we never have a fight like that. And then we would ask them about things like who does the chores around the house or money, and they would reveal all of these different conflicts that were, in essence, conflicts over fairness. So that’s what I was saying earlier. Often this is happening beneath the Radar of awareness. So seeing the kind of classic archetypes of this fight can be really useful just as a way of cultivating awareness. So, yeah, you mentioned domestic scorekeeping. That’s one way it shows up. Another way it shows up often for couples is trying to make the balance of time spent with each extended family or each set of friends equal. So, for example, in our life, we used to live in Los Angeles, and we’d come back to Colorado, where both sets of parents lived for the holidays, and we would have these epic, explosive fights over trying to figure out the right balance of time spent with my family and then spent with Kaley’s family. And many couples that we’ve interviewed have something similar going on. There’s also a fairness fight for many couples around money. So a lot of couples fight over who’s saving more, who’s spending more. And then another way this shows up, especially with couples who have children, is as anyone who knows who has a kid, once you have a kid, all of a sudden free time and leisure time becomes like, we like to call it domestic gold. It’s this insanely scarce resource. And so we were interviewing one woman, and she was telling us about how she went to Target. Right. And she spent an hour at Target, and she got home and her husband was like, oh, cool, you had your hour of free time. Now I’m going to go to the gym. Which of course, triggers this huge fight over again, this balance of the amount of leisure time that each person in the partnership gets. Brett McKay: Yeah. And for the wife, she. She’s probably a Target. Not for leisure. She’s probably buying stuff for the house. So, like, for her, it’s just a chore. Nate Klemp: Exactly. Yeah. For her, it was a chore. And that was the essence of the fight that she was talking about, is that she’s like, that wasn’t leisure time. Like, that was me buying a bunch of crap for the family. Are you kidding me? And you can imagine then how that fight would ensue from there. Brett McKay: Yeah, the 50/50 split on time with in laws or family. I remember when we first had kids, that. That can actually get exhausting. Because you do try to be fair because you want your parents to see the kids and you want your wife’s parents to see the kids. But then trying to do two Christmases in one day, it was exhausting. Just, like, wore you out. I mean, we were fair, but in the end, it was like, I’m tired. That was not fun. Nate Klemp: It’s funny that you mentioned that we had a similar experience I’ll never forget it. We were. Had just gotten through the holidays, and our system was my parents got Christmas Eve and Christmas, her parents got the next four days because they didn’t get the real holiday. They got a bonus two days after. And we got to the end of that one year. And I remember we had the same experience of just, like, this is exhausting. Like, this is just torture. Brett McKay: Yeah. And what’s interesting is that everyone’s definition of fairness is going to be different because everyone’s got a different calculus going on in their head. So you’re like, well, we didn’t get to spend Christmas Eve and Christmas with my family, so we get to add an extra two days. And then the other person’s like, well, no. Why would we do that? I only got to spend two days with my family. So you only get to spend two days with your family. Like, that’s fair. Nate Klemp: Yeah. Well, and what’s also interesting is that it’s not just you and your partner generally. The families are also in on the whole game. Right. There’s a lot of guilt and a lot of pressure coming from each set of families or each set of parents saying, like, hey, we need you. How could you miss Christmas this year? So it becomes this very complicated thing to navigate. Brett McKay: Yeah. And this can also happen with friends, too. It’s like, well, we spent time with your friends. Now it’s time to spend time with my friends. And then there might be this negotiation that goes on back and forth and just causes conflict. Nate Klemp: Yeah. And I think it’s just important to mention here that there is nothing inherently wrong with this effort to achieve fairness. I mean, it really is a noble goal, but the problem is that it can become such a pervasive mind state that it really starts to pit people in relationship against each other, and it starts to create a culture in a relationship that’s very individualistic. That’s very me versus you, what I want versus what you want. Right. It. It kind of turns the relationship into a negotiation which ultimately isn’t very loving, isn’t very sexy. So that’s why I think it starts to break down for most couples. Brett McKay: And one of the things that heightens the conflict over fairness In a modern 50/50 marriage is that there’s a lot of role confusion. When you talk about this in the book, like in an older model of marriage, like a 1950s model of marriage, it had its downsides, but it also had its benefits in that everyone knew what they’re supposed to be doing. It was like, well, mom, does this. Dad does this. And there was no confusion. Now, today, most people, they want a more egalitarian relationship. Both spouses might be working, Both are taking part in childcare. But then the question becomes, okay, well, how. How do we divvy all this stuff up? There are any set roles, and they’re just kind of winging it, and then this just causes all this conflict. Nate Klemp: Yeah. So one of the big shifts to our current state of relationships and this mindset of 50/50, is that we are now both equals in this relationship. And that means we’re both equally capable of being a rock star or an amazing scientist. But it also means that we’re both equally capable of cleaning the dishes or unloading the dishwasher or doing the laundry. So what that creates, to your point, is this state that we like to call role confusion, where it’s like, wait, we could both be doing all of these different things, so whose job is it to do them? And when we would interview couples about this, it was really interesting because we’d ask them how did you decide on your structure of roles in your relationship? And basically, everyone we talked to had the same reaction. They kind of looked confused for a moment, and then they said some version of, I don’t really know. I guess we just are kind of winging it. And we actually started to call this the wing it approach to roles, which is the standard approach that most couples take to creating a structure of roles. You know, one guy I remember I talked to, he was like, somehow I’m the toothbrush guy with our daughter. Like, every night when it’s time for us to put her to bed, I’m the guy who brushes her teeth. I don’t know how that happened. I don’t know how I ended up in that role, but that’s just, like, the role that I ended up in. And there’s not necessarily anything wrong with this accidental approach to roles, but we think there’s a better way to think about this, and that is this shift from accident to something more like design to actually having a conversation with your partner. And most couples have never done this, where you take a step back and you say, like, hey, let’s look at the structure of what we do. Let’s look at what we enjoy doing, what we don’t enjoy doing, what we’re good at, what we’re not good at, what we might be able to outsource, and let’s actually, like, design this thing to work for us. So that can be a huge thing for most couples to do. Brett McKay: Yeah, we’re going to talk about some questions you can ask to figure this out. But before we do, let’s talk about the 80/80 marriage. So you and your wife proposed. Instead of looking at marriage through the rubric of 50/50 fairness, we need to have an 80/80 marriage. So what does an 80/80 marriage look like? Nate Klemp: The first thing you’ll probably notice is that the math doesn’t work. There’s no such thing as a 160% hole. That’s just a mathematical impossibility. But the basic idea behind 80/80 is shifting the expectation or shifting the goal from just doing your 50%, which locks us into that mindset of fairness, to striving to contribute at something more like 80%. And that’s a mindset shift from what we call fairness to what we like to call radical generosity. And we know that it’s not going to work. Right. There is no way that you and your partner can both contribute at 80%. But it’s kind of this radical, illogical goal that’s really meant to uproot this habit in our thinking that most of us have developed. And the idea is that if we approach our life and our marriage together with this goal of striving for 80%, all of a sudden we start to radically change the underlying culture of the relationship. And I will say here that usually when I get to this point, there are many people who start voicing objections, like, wait a minute, you’re saying I should do 80%. That is just a recipe for my partner to totally take advantage of me. Why would I do that? And so I think there’s a really important response to that objection that I just want to get to briefly, which is we like to say, and this is validated by psychology, that your mindset is contagious. So if you’re operating in that 50/50 mindset where there’s a lot of resentment and a lot of anger and a lot of scorekeeping, your partner will generally mirror that back to you at every turn. You’ve created a kind of contagious atmosphere of resentment. If, on the other hand, you and just you shift to something more like the 80/80 mindset of radical generosity, that is also contagious. Your partner might be like, what is happening? Are you on drugs? Like, did you go to a yoga retreat? What is wrong with you? But what also tends to happen is that your generosity opens up a space for your partner to also be a little bit more generous, and you can start to create this Virtuous Upward Spiral. Brett McKay: Yeah, the 50/50 mentality can get you stuck in a tit for tat trap. It’s like, I’ll do this if you do that. And if that’s how you approach the relationship, your spouse is going to. Is going to start syncing up with that pattern you set up, and it just becomes this vicious downward cycle. And it. And it’s all just unsolvable conflict. Try to make things exactly fair, because how do you decide if work done outside the home is weightier than work done inside the home or if this chore is harder than that chore? I mean, it’s, it’s all just unsolvable conflict. So instead of trying to make your responsibilities and contributions mathematically equal, just operate with an attitude of generosity, and then that can become contagious. It’s like, well, if you do that, then your spouse will see it and she’s like, oh, wow, he’s doing a lot. I appreciate that. I’m going to do something for him. And then it becomes a positive tit for tat. Nate Klemp: Totally. And it’s kind of a fun experiment to do. If you’re listening to this podcast and it’s just you without your partner, try the experiment of taking a day or a week where you just really consciously start to live into this mindset of radical generosity and just see if your partner’s behavior doesn’t. Doesn’t change in subtle ways. We call it, like stealth 80/80. It’s a fun experiment to try. Brett McKay: And one of the big takeaways I got from the idea of the 80/80 marriage, or the overarching principle, is that it’s about, if I win, we both win, or if you win, I win too. It’s like you see your marriage as a team effort, whereas the 50/50 marriage, you’re mostly thinking like, well, what can I get out of this relationship? Like, how can this marriage help me become a better me? Which, I mean, marriage can do that, but like, that, if that’s your goal, then you’re just going to get stuck in this. These tit for tat traps. But when you kind of approach it from like, hey, we’re on the same team. What can we do so that we can both succeed? Everything just goes so much more smoother. Nate Klemp: That’s exactly right. I mean, it’s really interesting that many couples do get stuck in this trap of basically thinking, like, what can I do for me? How can I stand up for number one here? And I don’t think it’s an accident that this happens. You Know, we are raised in a culture that celebrates individual excellence. For me and Kaley, we went to college, and the message we received was, you need to do something amazing. You need to achieve success as an individual. And so then we got married, and the expectation becomes, okay, now you’re supposed to shift from individual success to this collective project together where you’re sharing your life and your space and your money. And that shift is really radical. And most people aren’t really able to make that shift quickly. So that’s where there is this more conscious effort that I think we all need to make in our relationships to see if we can shift the emphasis in our own thinking from individual success or how do I win alone, how do I win in my career, in my life, to a goal that’s more like shared success. How do we win together? Brett McKay: Yeah, I love that because, like, sometimes it might mean one person gets to achieve, like, their personal goal because it helps the family out in the long run. And then sometimes it means the other person gets to do that. And, like, you just, maybe you take turns. It’s not like fairness, but it’s just like you kind of intuitively know, okay, well, it’s time for me to do this thing, or it’s time for you to do this thing. Let’s marshal the our resources. We make this happen. And then it can change as the relationship progresses. Nate Klemp: Exactly. Yeah. You can alternate between whose background, who’s foreground. And that’s a really cool thing to do. Kaley and I do that a lot. You know, if I’m writing a book, I’m foreground. When it comes out, if she’s doing a big engagement, she’s foreground and I’m background, kind of holding the house together and our daughter together. And so that alternation can actually be really quite fun and just a way to grow together. And I would say, like, the main shift to try to aspire toward is when your partner has a big win, even if there is, like, a little tinge of jealousy or envy, which happens in a lot of partnerships. See if you can really celebrate that, because ultimately, if your partner wins big, that is a win for both of you. And so. So it’s like that shift of just trying to celebrate the wins together rather than as individuals. Brett McKay: As I was reading about the 80/80 marriage, it made me think about pioneer days in America, like living out on a farm on the prairie. You know, back then a couple had to be this real unit the husband and wife. They had roles, the kids had roles. Everyone had responsibilities. But everyone pitched in with everything. I mean, if one person couldn’t do something, then the other person had to pick up the slack. It wasn’t about fairness. It was just like, okay, what do we need to get done to survive? Let’s all work together here. Nate Klemp: I love that. It’s actually funny. I was just interviewing a couple in Australia. We’re writing a new book on busyness and love, and they were farmers in rural Australia, and they were basically living what you described. Like, the guy was telling me his calves had pink eye, and they were out there trying to get the pink eye treated while they were feeding the calves and getting them ready for taken down for purchase or whatever it was. And it’s a cool analogy. The other analogy that I really like here is if you can imagine your family as something like a business. We like the name Family Inc. For this. In fact, this was something we ended up cutting from the book. But the reason I think that’s helpful, and some people resist that because they’re like, no, it’s about love and spontaneity. And I don’t want to think of my family as a business. But what’s helpful about that is just thinking, hey, if we were a kind of collective business, then it doesn’t really matter who’s making more money or who’s achieving more success. What matters is that we’re lining up what we each do such that we maximize the success of the collective enterprise. And that’s a really different way of thinking of it. You know, we also use the analogy of basketball sometimes, right? Like 50/50 is kind of like playing basketball where you and your partner are on the same team technically, but you’re both trying to drive up your stats and maximize your individual numbers, win the MVP award or whatever. Whereas when you shift to 80/80, the goal is just like, how can we win this game? And if that means that I’m shooting more three pointers than you are, that’s okay, right? If that means you’re passing more or I’m passing more, that’s okay. It’s a very different way of thinking about a partnership together. Brett McKay: We can even go further back. I like this business analogy. So if you go back to the ancient Greeks, Aristotle, he talked about household management and our word economics oikos, comes from that. But for the Greeks, it wasn’t like economics, like businesses and countries trading for them. Economics was centered in the home. And so he wrote a lot about, like, how do you manage a home properly so that everyone in the family can flourish? And so he talked about there’s. There’s a lot of practical stuff when it comes to home management. You have to manage resources, know where your stuff’s at. You have to think about the income coming into the household so that you can buy things, that you can continue to grow the household. But then also part of economics or home economics for Aristotle is it was like, how do we rear our children so that they can become productive, active participants in Athenian democracy? So I like that idea because the husband and wife. And for Aristotle, there was a lot of gender disparity, of course, because, like ancient Greece. But he did see the husband and wife, they had to work together on this thing to make sure the home had good oikos or good economics, so you could achieve this eudaimonia, or flourishing for the family. Nate Klemp: Can I just say, you talking about Aristotle is like the highlight of my year so far. I don’t know if you know this, but my background is in political philosophy. That’s what I got my PhD in. And my wife actually cut. I had some passages on Aristotle that I was going to put in the book, and she’s like, nobody cares about Aristotle. We’re cutting that. Right. So that was one of our conflicts in the book. But to get to the content of what you were saying. Yeah, totally. And the other piece of Aristotle that I think is really interesting here is if you think about his conception of the ideal political regime he was the one who came up with our typology of monarchy, oligarchy. And what was his other name for it? Polity, I think was the. Or democracy, I guess was the third one. Brett McKay: Democracy yeah. Nate Klemp: And as I recall him, the key distinction between good and bad regimes in politics was really about is this focused on the individual’s interest or is this focused on the common good? And I think that’s another way of thinking about what we’re trying to aspire toward here. In the 80/80 model, in 50/50, we are focused on individual interest, individual success. It’s all about me. But when we shift to something more like 80/80, we’re looking at, like, the common interest. How do we win together as a collective, the two of us? Or if we have kids, maybe it’s the three, four, five of us. Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so let’s talk more about the 80/80 marriage. You say there are three elements to an 80/80 marriage. What are those three elements? Nate Klemp: Yeah, so that mindset of radical generosity is kind of an overarching term for a way of thinking about the world, a way of seeing the world. And the question then becomes, how do you operationalize that? If you just say I’m going to be radically generous, that doesn’t really give you much to do practically. So the three pieces to this, the first is about what you do, and that’s contribution. Contribution is really in many ways the essence of generosity. And I like to think of contribution in a marriage. The most useful forms of contribution as these small micro acts that are just reminders to your partner that you’re thinking about them, that you care about them, that you love them. So it’s great to like get your partner a trip to Fiji or get them concert tickets for some amazing artists. Those big acts of contribution are fine and definitely useful. But the essence of contribution is really about what are the daily acts of contribution you can do that are small but significant in terms of building connection. So things like writing I love you on a post it note, putting it on your partner’s computer, things like just getting them a cup of coffee in the morning, filling their car up with gas. Right. These are very simple things. Brett McKay: Yeah, the filling up your car with gas. So a long time ago on our website when we had comments, someone left a comment. This is like 15 years ago. It was like always fill up your wife’s car with gas to bless her. And so I always, that stuck with me for some reason. So I’ll. Whenever I see the, the car it’s almost empty. Like I got to bless my wife. Going to, going to go fill up the car with gas at QT. Nate Klemp: I love that. Yeah. And it’s just like such a simple thing. It takes you what, five minutes on your way home? Brett McKay: Yeah. Nate Klemp: But it’s just one of these actions that reminds your partner, like, wow, there’s a spirit of love happening here. So that’s the first one. The second piece is appreciation. And we like to think of this almost like the response to the call of generosity. So in music there’s this idea of call and response. And generosity is an amazing thing. It’s a contribution. But it often is sort of asking for some sort of response. And that is what we call appreciation. The other thing I would say about appreciation is that this is really counter habitual that most of us have this tendency of seeing our partner through the lens of what they’ve done wrong. Seeing where they fell short or seeing where they didn’t quite do what they said they were going to do. And appreciation is basically just flipping the glasses that we wear in our relationship so we’re actually looking for what our partner did. Right. And then we’re expressing that, like, hey, I noticed that you did this amazing thing with our kids. You took them out yesterday afternoon and took them on an adventure. Thank you. Right. So that’s the act of appreciation. And there’s all sorts of research in the field of marriage science showing that appreciation is perhaps the most powerful thing you can do to create more connection in your relationship. The final thing, the third piece of radical generosity is what we call revealing. And what we mean by revealing is basically just expressing your full truth in your marriage. There’s two sides to this. So on one side, it’s expressing what’s happening in your inner world. So there was this interesting study they did at UCLA. They found that the average couple with kids spends 35 minutes a week talking to each other. And they didn’t really study what they were talking about, but if I had to guess, they were probably talking about logistics or, like, the news or the weather. And so one aspect of revealing is just shifting the way you talk to one another, such that when you’re at the end of the day updating each other on your day, you’re revealing what’s actually happening in your inner world, like, what’s really going on with you. The second piece to revealing is when you have those moments of disconnection or misunderstandings or somebody’s feelings got hurt, using that as an opportunity to reveal as a way to get closer. And that’s not that easy to do for most couples, but it ends up being really powerful. If you can start to transform those moments of disconnection into opportunities to get closer. Brett McKay: How do you reveal that second thing? Because oftentimes, if you try to tell your spouse, like, hey, you did this, it can just. It’s an opportunity to get resentful. Nate Klemp: Yes. Brett McKay: Any ways to do that where it doesn’t cause more bad feelings? Nate Klemp: Yeah, absolutely. And this is another one of those areas where we want to see if we can shift from our accidental habits, which mostly aren’t that skillful, to a more skillful way of approaching it. So let’s say Kaley’s late for dinner. She said she was going to be there at 6:00, and she’s not there till 6:15. The actual dental way of approaching that is. Is for me to just lash out at her, Right. To just Be like, are you kidding me? I’ve been sitting here for 15 minutes. Like, who do you think you are? You think you’re more important than I am? Right? And you can imagine I could continue that conversation. She’ll get defensive, we’ll get in a big fight, It’ll be a terrible dinner together. So that’s kind of how things go down by accident. What we recommend is an approach that we call reveal and request. And the basic idea is to start by just revealing what we like to think of as your inarguable truth. So what’s really going on with you? What emotion are you feeling in that moment without blame? Just like, hey, I’m feeling X. And then offering some sort of request for how they might be able to make it right in the future. So that would look something like, hey, I’ve been here for 15 minutes and I noticed that I’ve just been feeling kind of frustrated because you didn’t text me to let me know that you were late. In the future, would you be willing to just send me a text if you’re going to be 15 minutes late? So it’s a pretty significant difference if you just start to think about how the other person’s going to respond to those two approaches. Brett McKay: Okay, so 80/80 marriage. The overarching principle is radical generosity. It’s like, hey, we’re a team. If you win, I win. Three attributes. It’s contribute. So find little ways you can contribute to your wife throughout the day. It could be small things. Fill up the gas tank, write her a note, pick up her favorite drink from QT on the way home. Show more appreciation throughout your week, and then reveal. So could be problems that are coming up. Or reveal. Hey, this is what I’m doing. This is what’s stressing me out. Here’s what I’m thinking about. Let them know. One thing you talk about too, in sort of being more intentional about creating a culture in your marriage is establishing common values for the family. Just like any team or any business. I love this business analogy. They have a mission statement, for example, that guides all the actions within the business. You argue a family, a marriage should also have something similar. So how do you recommend couples establish sort of this overarching mission statement, or going back to Aristotle, an overarching telos for the family? Nate Klemp: Yeah, the family telos. I like the sound of that. Yeah, absolutely. That’s a really important thing. And it’s really interesting actually to notice that almost every business has a very clear set of values and yet most relationships don’t most relationships are winging it, doing it by accident. So we think that’s really important. And it was interesting, actually, when we had all of these interviews with various couples, what we discovered is that there are no better or worse values for a marriage. So the expanse of different possibilities is really wide. We would talk to some couples where their value was adventure. So there was one couple we talked to, they basically lived out of a van for seven years and just drove around the country, going to different national parks and having adventures. That was their value, and they were aligned on it, so it worked for them. Other couples were more concerned with things like building wealth or security. And you could imagine if you took a partner from the wealth couple and you put them in the adventure couple, where they had, like, quit their jobs in New York and were living out of a van, they totally freak out. But all that’s to say values aren’t better or worse. What is a problem is when you’re in a relationship and you’re not aligned on your values. That’s where a lot of conflict comes from. So we think it’s really helpful to just sit down and think about as a couple. What are the three to five values that we want to guide our life together? The way we parent, the way we show up with each other, the way we show up at work. We think it’s really cool, once you’ve done this, to actually make an artifact out of it. So we have our values right on the outside of our kitchen table on another counter, and we put them on a little whiteboard. And so it’s something we see all the time. And I think that’s important because some couples will actually do an exercise like this. They’ll come up with values, and then the values won’t actually be used in their relationship. So you want to see if you can use these values for, like, big decisions around money or big decisions around your career. And what’s cool about that is instead of getting into that trap we’ve been talking about of what’s best for me versus what’s best for you, values give you a different way to make decisions. They give you a kind of rubric for running your life decisions through, where it’s like, well, in terms of that career move, what’s going to align most closely with our values? That’s a really different question than what’s best best for me versus what’s best for you. Brett McKay: And these values or this telos, it can change as the family progresses or as the marriage progresses. So Keep having that conversation about your telos and your marriage and your family. It’s an ongoing thing. Make sure it’s front and center there as you’re making decisions that affect the entire family. Let’s talk about some more brass, tax things. So we talked about one of the biggest sources of contention in a 50/50 marriage is role confusion. No one knows who’s supposed to be doing what. There’s a maybe a sense of unfairness and how things are divvied up. You mentioned most couples, the way they divvy up roles in a marriage, to wing it just sort of like, I’m the toothbrush guy for some reason. I don’t know why I’m toothbrush guy, but I’m toothbrush guy. Or you’re the grocery person. Any advice on how to be more proactive in assigning roles in a marriage so that it’s a win-win for everybody? Nate Klemp: Absolutely. We actually in the book have a pretty elaborate practice that you can walk through with your partner. But here’s the shorthand version of that that you can do. It’s as simple as take a couple pieces of paper and step one is just write down all of your roles as individuals. And this is a really interesting step because a lot of times we’re not even clear on what our roles are. Right. Like, most couples couldn’t tell you really quickly off the top of their head, hey, yeah, I do these 20 different things. So that exercise is really important. There’s a trap there, which is there can be a tendency when you write those down to start to get into that fairness mindset and compare. Wow, like, your list is really long and my list is really short. This is unfair. That is not the goal at all. Right. The goal in that first stage is just like, get it all down on paper, create awareness of what’s happening today. And then the second step to this is get out two more pieces of paper and have a conversation about, hey, like, if we were to actually design this and not just do this by accident, what are the things you enjoy doing? So, for example, I have like a weird enjoyment for taking the trash out. It’s just not a thing for me. My wife has an enjoyment of folding laundry and doing laundry. It’s just like not a thing for her. So those are obvious no brainers. Like, those should be on each of our respective lists. But that can be a useful process because you start to ask, well, what am I good at? What do I enjoy? And then importantly, what can we outsource? So for some couples There are things that nobody wants to do. Like in our house, nobody wants to clean the toilets. And we’re fortunate that we have the resources that we’re able to bring somebody in once a week who helps us clean our house. And it’s amazing. And actually in our budget that’s under, like marital, like a contribution to marriage, not cleaning. I mean that’s, that’s how we think of it. Like this is a contribution to us because it saves us from all sorts of conflict and fights around who’s going to clean the toilets. Brett McKay: No, I love that we’ve done that in our own family. Like for me, a weird one. I like going to the doctor’s office or the dentist’s office. I don’t know why I like doing it. Like filling out the forms. Nate Klemp: Yeah. Brett McKay: And so I’m the guy, I’m the one who takes the kids to the, the dentist and the doctor and make appointments for them. That’s my, my wife hates it. She hates going to the doctor, hates going to the dentist. [0:40:13.0] ____ I’m like, hey, yeah, I’ll take that one. It’s great. So I like that. So talk about what you’re good at, what you enjoy, and then delegate. And that delegate piece you talked about, this is really important because sometimes what often happens, let’s say your wife delegates something to you because it’s important to her, but she doesn’t have the time for it or something like that. But then you just keep putting it off and you have these check ins. Your wife’s like, hey, have you done that thing? You’re like, no. And the reason why you don’t do, it’s like for you it’s just not that important. It’s like, I just don’t, it’s not that in the grand scheme of things and important, but it’s important to her. And that can be a big source of tension because, like it’s really important to her. And it feels like you’re disrespecting her because you’re not doing it because it tells her, like you don’t think it’s important either. So the solution to that is just outsource that to somebody else, like a third party so it gets done. Nate Klemp: Yeah, if it’s possible. That’s such a great solution because you can have a conversation that goes like, hey, I know this is really important to you. It’s hard for me to complete for whatever reason, or it’s not very important to me. Can we bring somebody else in who can help you? You know, like in our house. My wife is really like, it’s important to her that our yard looks really good and I could care less. And I hate mowing lawns and all that sort of thing. So that’s one of those areas where it’s like, I want to honor that. It’s really important to you that our yard looks great. I also just like, that is not on my priority list at all. So maybe we can see about getting somebody to come in and help us with that. Brett McKay: One issue you talk about in a marriage, that can be a source of conflict. And the 80/80 approach to marriage can help with this is this idea of over functioning and under functioning. What is over functioning and under functioning? How does that cause conflict? Nate Klemp: Yeah, this is a dynamic that shows up in a lot of relationships where there’s an over functioning or over contributing partner, statistically speaking, that’s probably usually the woman, but that’s not always the case. And then there’s also often an under functioning or under contributing partner, which statistically speaking is often the man. And a couple things about this. First of all, it seems like it would be awesome to be the under functioning partner, the under contributor. But I was that partner in our marriage for probably a decade. I’ve interviewed a number of people who have found themselves in that role. And what I hear consistently is that it actually sucks. Like you think, oh, it’s cool, I don’t have to do as much. But it sucks to be in a position where it feels like you’re not actually contributing. Nothing you do is right. And so what often ends up happening is there’s a gap between how much each of these partners is doing. The under contributor feels like nothing I do is right, so I’m just going to stop doing anything. So the gap just starts to widen and widen and widen. And when you approach that kind of a distinction between over contributing, under contributing partner from a 50/50 mindset, it actually makes the inequality grow, paradoxically because like the more the over contributor is begging the under contributor to contribute, the more they just sort of pull back, the more they withdraw, the less they do. So that strategy just doesn’t really work very well. What does work we found is for the under contributor or the under functioning partner, there’s a responsibility there to really see if you can lean in and see if you can contribute, knowing that you might do it wrong, knowing that it might not be perfect. But then the more interesting role is for the over contributor, the over functioning partner. A lot of times they’re stuck in that position unconsciously because there’s like this weird gift that comes from being the over functioning partner, which is that you have control. Like, you know when all the play dates are where all the money goes, you know that you’re getting the right brand of dishwasher cleaner from the grocery store. And so from the perspective of the over contributor, the unlock there is you actually do have to start letting go of control. And your partner might do it wrong, they might get the wrong thing at the store. But that’s kind of like the movement of each partners that you have to make to start to dissolve that dialectic between the two. Brett McKay: Let’s circle back to something we talked about earlier that I know caused a lot of tension in a marriage. And that’s how to decide whose family to spend the holidays with or how often to visit each spouse’s parents and stuff. Do you have any advice on how to navigate that conflict? Nate Klemp: This is such a huge source of tension for a lot of couples. Certainly it has been for us. I think the first thing to notice is that many times when we’re having this argument, we’re having this argument as our parents, kids. What I mean by that is we’re having the argument from the perspective of I’m my parents, kid, my parents really want to spend time with us. We need to make sure that the amount of time we spend with my parents and with your parents is fair. And what that does is it totally takes out of the conversation what’s best for you and your partner. Right. And so there’s almost like a shift here from being your parents kid to being the adults. And if you approach this question from the perspective of, hey, now we’re the adults, then I think there’s a really different perspective, which is rather than thinking of this question of how are we going to divide the holidays from the perspective of what’s best for our parents, like, how do we make our parents happy? How do we be good kids? To shift to a different question, which is what’s best for us as a couple? So in other words, you’re putting your priority on you as a couple rather than on pleasing your parents. And when you’re able to do that, all of a sudden the answers might really change to these questions. So for example, you might say, hey, yeah, let’s go back and visit our parents, but let’s stay in a hotel this time, or let’s make sure that we have a few hours every day that’s for us. You might also notice that from that perspective, you actually end up with A somewhat unfair solution, like you may voluntarily say, hey, let’s actually spend less time with my family, because that’s not what’s best for us. So there’s a way in which you can make that fairness fight almost dissolve by just shifting the priority from what’s best for your parents and how do we satisfy them to what’s best for us as a couple and really stepping into that position of we are the adults, we get to decide what’s best for us. Brett McKay: I like that. I imagine that’s a tough shift for people to make. Nate Klemp: Yeah. And I think particularly early on, Kaley and I got married when we were 26, and we really took on the role of our parents, kids. And that caused so much conflict between the two of us because it was almost like we were each the representative of our respective family. And we were having these fights where we were sort of like the proxy representative for our family. And that started to dissolve the moment we said, wait a minute, we’re actually the adults here. We’re going to create our own life. We’re going to do what’s best for us. And that doesn’t mean we’re never going to visit our parents. Doesn’t mean we don’t care about our parents. Just means that we’re going to act like we are adults and autonomous rather than being our parents, kids. Brett McKay: So at the end, you talk about some rituals that you can take part in to sort of bolster this 80/80 marriage. What are some of those rituals that you recommend? Nate Klemp: Yeah, we have five essential habits that I think are worth trying out as a way to just build habits of connection versus habits of disconnection in your relationship. And they’re all based on this idea of living in a more 80/80 structure and mindset in your relationship. So the first one is just creating more space for connection. I mean, when I talk to couples these days, the primary thing I’m seeing is that there’s no space. And so thinking about ways where you can have space together as a couple. And we think about this in three ways. One is just like daily micro habits of connection, some sort of check in every day. Another is having some sort of medium habit of connection. So it might be going on a date night or going on a date hike. That’s our favorite, like something you do every week. And then there are more macro habits of connection where maybe you take a weekend together once every quarter, once every year, maybe you go away for a week. So that’s number one. The second is what we’ve been talking about throughout the podcast, which is this idea of really leaning into radical generosity, so contributing that whole idea of daily acts of contribution. They can be really small, seemingly insignificant, but then also creating a habit of appreciation. My wife and I, we do this every night before we go to bed. It takes like three minutes. It’s just like such a great way to end the day. The third thing is what we were talking about with revealing. So when issues arise, revealing what’s going on for you, revealing that you’re feeling that disconnection and seeing if you can turn those into opportunities for connection. The fourth piece is what we call the shared success check in. So this is basically an idea of having some sort of. Maybe it’s a weekly or a monthly check in where you’re able to talk through all of the complicated logistics of your life, think about what’s working well, what’s not working so well. We found that couples that do this, they save date night from being all about logistics because if you don’t do this, then you end up on date night or whatever your time together is, and you’re talking about, like, who’s going to pick up the kids next week. And then the final piece is creating space from digital distraction. And this I think is really important because when I talk to a lot of couples these days, what I hear is not that they’re in like, really deep conflict or they’re having affairs or things like that, but there’s this, like, subtler force of disconnection where they’ll talk about. At the end of the day, one of us is sitting on one side of the bed going through Instagram. The other person is doom scrolling the news. And there’s this way in which our devices are just like subtly pulling us away from each other. So really seeing if you can create those spaces from digital distraction. Maybe you kick your cell phones out of your bedroom, maybe you kick them out of your dinner, maybe you buy a case safe so you can lock them up for like two hours at night. Whatever you need to do. That can be like a really powerful unlock. Brett McKay: No, I love that. A ritual that my wife and I have been doing for a long time now. And we’ve talked about this on the podcast before. We’ve written an article about it. But it’s been a game changer for us. And I know the people who have done it has been a game changer for them. It’s having a weekly marriage meeting. Nate Klemp: Yeah. Brett McKay: This was introduced by this marriage therapist named Marcia Berger. And you have this Meeting once a week. And there’s a few parts of the meeting. The first part is you spend time appreciating each other. So you just talk about all the things that you noticed throughout the week that your spouse did. Appreciate that, hey, I saw that you took the kids to this thing. I appreciate you doing the laundry. I appreciate you, whatever. And then you do to do’s. So you talk about all the stuff that you have to do in the household just to make sure the household’s running smoothly. You assign tasks. You follow up on assignments. The next part is plan for good times. So you’re planning for good times as a family or as a couple or even planning individual good times. So it’s like, hey, I want to go to this thing with my friends this weekend. Are you available to watch the kids? Is that okay? So you can kind of coordinate good times. And then the last part, it’s problems and challenges. So you talk about. This is when you bring up like, oh look, Johnny is misbehaving in school. What do we do about it? Like, who are we going to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas with? It’s stuff like that. And it only takes about 20 minutes. So it’s sort of our weekly family business meeting that just makes sure we’re staying connected and are both on the same page. Nate Klemp: I love that it’s such a great idea. And I’m sure you find that by having that meeting, then when you have time together outside of that, you can actually just be together and not have to, like, go through all those logistics all the time. Brett McKay: Oh, it’s great. Well, Nate, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work? Nate Klemp: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Best place to go is 8080marriage.com. So that’s 8080marriage.com. That’s where we have a lot of information about the book. Also, you’ll find there that we have a newsletter called the Klemp Insights Newsletter, which goes out once every couple weeks. And that’s really designed to give couples tools that they can use in the midst of everyday life. And we just try to make it fun. We were talking last week about how to use ChatGPT in your relationship. And so just kind of like practical tools for being more skillful in your relationship. Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Nate Klemp, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. Nate Klemp: Thanks so much, Brett. Brett McKay: My guest today was Nate Klemp. He’s the co-author of the book the 80/80 Marriage. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about the book at the website 8080marriage.com. Also check at our show notes @aom.is/8080, where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website @artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives. And check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up @dyingbreed.net It’s a great way to support the show. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to AoM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action. This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.…
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