Sam Carpenter: Work the System and Escaping the 100-Hour Week

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 702 with Sam Carpenter, author of Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less.

Meet Sam Carpenter

Sam Carpenter: Hi, this is Sam Carpenter, and I am the author of Work the System, the Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less. And I'm very happy to be with Tom Rowland on his podcast today. Looking forward to talking to you, Tom.

Tom Rowland: Sam, how are you?

Sam Carpenter: Very well today. Talking to you from Southeast Kentucky.

Tom Rowland: Southeast Kentucky? Okay. You're spending a lot of time in Oregon, though. Right?

Sam Carpenter: Well, I spent forty-five years in Oregon, and my wife Diana is from here, rural Southeast Kentucky. It's wild out there. I lived in Oregon, skied and mountain climbed and rode my bike and did all kinds of mountaineering. Diana and I met in Washington, D.C. about six years ago, and going back and forth was no good, so we had to live somewhere. She has family here, and I don't have family back there. I'm an Easterner anyway, from rural Upstate New York, a long time ago, fifty years ago. So we moved here, built a nice house. It's not a real big house, but it's beautiful, it's quiet, and I love the people here. It's great.

Tom Rowland: Nice. So is Upstate New York where you learned how to fly fish and became interested in fly fishing?

Sam Carpenter: It is. Black River, Moose River, up on the western fringe of the Adirondack Park. Little town, a little poor former industrial town, really part of Appalachia, which, of course, this is Appalachia here too. In the late seventies, we all know what happened with timber and coal and manufacturing, it all went overseas. The same thing happened way up there, 950 miles from here. So these are my people.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, very small town. I know just a little bit about Upstate New York. We had the Great Outdoor Games up there in February 2001. We were fishing the Ausable River, and we were right there in Lake Placid, and it's such a beautiful place. I had this picture of what it was going to be like, and I went there, and it was not that way at all, I just thought Lake Placid was one of the coolest little places I had ever seen. And to think the Olympics were there at one point. I was a fan of the movie Miracle, that whole story about the Americans defeating the Russians in hockey. I was able to go into that hockey rink, which is literally the size of a high school hockey rink, and to imagine that was going on there, that must have been one of the greatest sporting events you could have ever gone to. It would be like seeing the Rolling Stones in a small little amphitheater. So much power and emotion, and you're just right on top of the hockey rink. I just sat in there and thought, wow, I can't believe that happened right here in this little tiny place. Anyway, I loved Upstate New York, I need to go back and eat again.

Sam Carpenter: I've spent a lot of time in Lake Placid. In fact, I'm what they call a 46er. Are you familiar with that?

Tom Rowland: No, I don't know what that is.

Sam Carpenter: Well, there are 46 peaks that exceed 4,000 feet. To a Westerner, that doesn't sound like much, but it really is, the Western peaks may go to 12,000, but you start at seven or six thousand feet there. So there are 46 that exceed 4,000 feet, and a lot of them are a 3,000 vertical-foot hike. I love climbing and mountaineering, so I've climbed all 46 of them. There are thousands and thousands who have done it now, I wasn't one of the first by any means, but when I was 46, I decided to climb them all, and I did.

Tom Rowland: That's very cool. Well, that's a nice segue into the reason I'm having you on the show. Obviously, when you were 46, you had already created businesses and structured your life in a way that you could have a lot of time to go climb 46 peaks. Right?

Sam Carpenter: Well, I'll tell you, I hadn't really put it together yet. I was headed in that direction, but I didn't know how or why. I was doing the things I needed to do that I talk about in the book, but I didn't really have my insight until 1999. I kind of had it in my head, and I just went. I had good people in the office, but I didn't get a clue about how to get as free as I am now until I was 50, actually.

Tom Rowland: Well, that's pretty good news for a lot of people, that you don't have to have this figured out super early. What we're talking about is I read your book, and it was recommended to me by somebody I have a lot of confidence in. They said, you should really read this book, it's called Work the System. And you basically create systems in all parts of your life that help you work more efficiently and create more time and more money. Right?

Everything in Life Is a System

Sam Carpenter: Well, yeah, sort of. This is a good place to start, because there's a very important nuance in what you just said. All our lives are systems, we either manage them or we don't.

Tom Rowland: Hold on, we lost you there for a second. You were saying our lives are all systems?

Sam Carpenter: Yes. Our lives are the results of the systems in our lives. For instance, you had to set up with your engineer today, you needed to get from A to B, and we're at point B now. You had to go step by step by step. If you weren't organized, and I can see by your back wall that you're a very organized guy, if you weren't organized, you'd go here, then there, and oh, I forgot this, and we forgot to do that. I could give you examples of my personal experience with businesses that operated that way. But the point is, everything in our life is a system. Should I expound on this a little?

Tom Rowland: Yeah, absolutely. Please.

Sam Carpenter: So I'm sitting here, you can't see my hound dog down here, Pearl. She's been with us about two years, and we started with point A: we wanted a little female beagle. There she is, two years later. But we went through a process of getting her, we drove over to Bowling Green, a several hours' drive, picked her up, brought her home, took her to the vet, did all the things you need to do. A million steps between that point and where we are here. Well, there she is, she's a beautiful little girl, and she's got a brother. So that's a system. What you did in setting up today was a system. Diana, my wife, told me you have seven minutes, you better change your shirt, that was a process too. I walked in the closet, put the shirt on. Here I am, from A to B.

Sam Carpenter: Most people don't manage the systems in their businesses, so let's go to a business. If you've got a dozen people and you haven't documented your processes, everybody's going to do the process a little differently. You explain to them how to do it, but over time, Mary does it this way, Jonathan does it that way. What you need to do is get these recurring tasks to be 100% efficient and 100% of your people performing those tasks every single time. These are called, of course, you know this, Tom, working procedures. But you need a strategic objective so you know where you're going, and it has to be written down. Boring but true. And you need some general operating principles, we have 30 of them. There will be no rats' nests, figuratively or literally, that's one of them, and then there are 29 others, basically what a person believes. Then you have the working procedures, which are the systems in your business.

Sam Carpenter: How do you want to answer the phone? You've got four people in your office answering the phone. Well, Jonathan answers it this way, Mary answers it that way, no, no, no. Put Jonathan and Mary and the other two together and figure out, all of you, the very best way to answer the phone. Hello, this is Jonathan, you've reached XYZ Company, how can I help you today, it depends on your comportment. The first step is to put a smile on your face so you answer in a cheerful way. If you can imagine doing that for all the hundreds or even thousands of processes within anybody's business, will you have a perfect business? I didn't know the answer to that when I had this mini-awakening in the middle of the night. I thought, it's worth a try, I'm going to lose my business anyway. I document all of that in my book. But the answer to that question, this was 1999, when I had this mini-enlightenment, was: would my business be a perfect business if all my systems were perfect and executed perfectly every time? And the answer to that is yes.

Tom Rowland: It's easy.

Sam Carpenter: Really, yes. So I make way more money than I need with my business. I have a call center on the side, and I work maybe four hours a month. My people are very highly paid. I get a lot of satisfaction. The product is the best in the country, there are 800 answering services in the United States, and there's no question ours is the best. We charge a good dollar for what we do, we don't lose accounts, and I have people who've worked for me for thirty years, literally, several who've worked for me twenty-four or twenty-five years.

Sam Carpenter: So that's an important point, Tom, and let me nuance that a little about creating systems. We're all operated by systems, whether we manage them or not, the nuance is, do you manage your systems or not? I have a system where I could get up right now and go into the other room and get a glass of water, it would go from A to B. I could go in and change my shirt again, A is where I decide to do that, B is I put it on, and then I'm back here again. Your college education, somebody who goes to four years of school, it starts at freshman year, but it really starts before that, because the college-bound student knows they're going to college, so they prepare in junior high, they go look at schools. Everything, every result in your life, I don't care what it is, even the headphones you put on your head, started with you picking them up at A and putting them on your head at B. So everything happens over time, and every result in your life in this moment is the result of an executed system that created a result.

Sam Carpenter: And the problem is, in most businesses, I'm not saying your business was this way, Tom, but you like my book, so I know you're getting what I'm talking about, and I want to gear this up for the audience, if you have a business and there are all kinds of systems in it, everything in your life is a culmination of a variety of independent systems that don't necessarily have anything to do with each other. How you answer the phone in the office, you've got four people, they all answer it a different way, but they're all terrific people. What you do, for the systems mindset, is you put all four people down at a table and figure out among the four of them the best way to answer the phone. Hello, this is ABC Company, this is John, how may I help you today, or this is John at XYZ, there's a variety of ways you could do it. So you get your four people to agree on the very best way to answer the phone, and then everybody answers it that way. Now expand that to all the systems in your business, including the sales presentation, the marketing plan, the payroll, who does the payroll? You get everything documented, boring but true, and you execute it, and all your people climb on board. And if you got everybody climbing on board, you will have a perfect business.

Sam Carpenter: Because the question I asked myself at the beginning was: if I had all my systems perfect, my mini-enlightenment was that every system in my business is independent from the others. There are all these separate entities. What if I went in and took the most dysfunctional system and fixed it, and then took the next dysfunctional one, like they were coming in on a conveyor belt, and I made them all perfect, perfectly executed every time? Well, you take all your systems in your business, and it didn't take me that long to do it, you document them, you get everybody to climb on board, and the question is, if all your systems are perfect, will you have a perfect business? And the answer to that question is yes. So I make way more money than I need to make, I give a lot of it away, and I work four hours a month. I have 60 people spread all across the United States and Europe who work for me, and I just keep things going in the right direction. We had to navigate COVID, so maybe I worked six hours a month during that. All my people buy into the systems mindset, and everybody in management in my business works on systems all day long, including improving processes. So many systems gurus out there, I wrote the book in 2008, it's in the fourth edition now. I'll be the godfather of system strategy in business, you can give it to Michael Gerber and The E-Myth, but he never really explained how to do it. I did. If you can get everybody to climb on board and run your business in a systems way, you will have everything you want in your life, the time you want, the peace you want, everything you need in your life you will have if you work on the processes that create the results. It's only common sense, really, but most people don't. They're going this way, they're going that way, everybody's answering the phone in a different way, everybody's giving the sales pitch in a different way, everybody's handling complaints in a different way. So all your managers do is get together with you and decide the best way to handle it. A key here is that these working procedures are documented, and they can be changed in the snap of a finger if you can improve them, working procedures are flexible, but you work on your systems all day long. And then you go fishing, you have some fun. Right?

Empowering Employees to Own the Systems

Tom Rowland: Well, that's the idea, you become more and more efficient in what you're doing, which leads to more and more time. One of the things I've noticed as I start to implement this into the business, and we have a lot of different types of business. We've got charter service, we've got Waypoint TV, we've got SE Multimedia, which produces TV shows and their sales and all kinds of things that go along with that, all the way down to what we're doing right now, this podcast, we have procedures and different things we're doing, as you see right now. So all of those different systems are important. But what I've noticed is that when you're talking to the employees about these things, there's really an empowering sense to the employee. For example, Jake inherited this job and the book that goes with it from Connor, who was here before. Connor did a great job, but the way Connor did it may not be the best way. So Jake and I have gone through these systems, and it's been about empowering Jake to say, if there's a step in here that's not necessary.

Sam Carpenter: Oh, yeah.

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about it and become more and more efficient about this, so it takes less and less time to do what we're doing, and it's better and better. So that has been really good for my businesses, empowering the employees.

Sam Carpenter: You're working the system.

Tom Rowland: Trying to.

Sam Carpenter: And the key to empowering employees, a lot of people make this mistake. They read my book and say, I'm going to do all these systems, and then the owner of the company does all the working procedures himself. First you do this, second, there's a lot of paperwork there. The way to take the load off the owner or CEO's shoulders is to empower their people, insist that their people write up the written procedures. If you don't have them written down, they're going to be what I call organic processes, they'll kind of flow depending on somebody's mood or who's doing it. You get the people to create the written procedures under your tutelage, and then they're bought into it. I could give you examples of how great that works. My guy who handles our consulting, Josh, my partner, Josh Fonger, and I have run across a lot of business owners who insist on doing it themselves because it will be done the very best way, but then the employees don't look at the procedures, and they never get used. We had a guy in California with a whole shelf, we finally visited him, a whole shelf full of three-ring binders full of procedures that had been sitting there for three years, and nobody had ever looked at them, because he spent two years writing them up himself.

Tom Rowland: Oh, man.

Sam Carpenter: You've got to have your people do it.

Tom Rowland: Let's talk about that. So let's say you spend the time to read your book, you have this epiphany like you did, and you're going to go through each one of these systems in your business, you write all this stuff up, and you spend all that time. Now how do you get the employees on board?

Sam Carpenter: Well, let's talk about Jake. Jake has a better way, first of all, you have him write up the protocol for doing a podcast, for example. There might be 20 steps: you've got to have the right microphone, this has to be charged, you've got the Ethernet cable over here, where's your headset, is it charged, whatever it is. So you have him write it up, or you write it up yourself because you know it better than him, since he's a new guy. Then they give it to Jake and say, Jake, and I love this term, punch holes in it. Make it better. So Jake spends his time saying, we don't need to do this, there's no reason for that, this is good, let's enhance this. Pretty soon it might be 24 or 16 steps, or it might be 50, depending on his style, but that's Jake's now. And then when somebody else comes in, he can hand that to them, and they just follow the procedure. Honestly, that does work, because you write up your procedures: number one, do this, number two, do this, because remember, everything happens over time. You want to get from A to B, and every result in our life is the result of steps executing over time. So it's easy to write them up, number one, number two, number three. People say, well, we need special software, we do have special software, but the truth is you could write this up on Word or use Excel and get the steps down. For instance, our procedure to answer the phone at my headquarters in Bend, Oregon, is seven steps: put a smile on your face, number two, number three, number four. And then anybody who sees a way to improve it, or maybe times change and something isn't the way it should be anymore, is at liberty to recommend an improvement. That improvement goes to the manager with an argument for changing it, and then you change it. People don't walk around the office reading what to do next, step 13, well, they do if they're new and it's technical, but nobody walks around reading working procedures day to day. The fact that they're on a hard drive somewhere, or maybe even on paper on a wall in the equipment room for some special outage situation, they're always kept up to date, and they're always there. Everybody operates in their head like that, A to B, over time, what are the steps? You get the steps perfect, and then you move on to the next system, because, remember, all these systems are independent of each other.

The 1999 Awakening That Started It All

Sam Carpenter: I talked about it extensively in the book, the enlightenment I had back in 1999. I saw, and I don't know if it was a dream or a vision or what it was, but I saw a table, as I lay there exhausted after one-hundred-and-ten-hour work weeks, seven days a week, for nine months. I had this vision, this dream, or, God, it was almost metaphysical, separate items on a table. Like, I have this, what was on the table, these glasses, I put them over there, you can't see them on the screen, these sticky notes, I put them there. But what I saw was that every system in my business was a separate item on the table. It wasn't a big mass of sights, sounds, and events. My company, Centratel, wasn't just this big conglomeration of swirling, although that's the way I was operating. So what I did was I took the biggest problem, and it took us about eight hours, I talk about it in the book, three of us, to figure out how to solve the problem, and I instantly saved two hours a week of my time.

Tom Rowland: Okay.

Sam Carpenter: Multiply that by twenty-three years. And then we did that with the next biggest system, the biggest problem, it might be small, but whatever your biggest problem is, you document it, you get your people together, you hash it out, and you get it perfect. And then you do the next one, like they're coming in, as I mentioned, on a conveyor belt. And here's something, what is the single difference, Tom, between a small struggling business and a large successful business? What is the one thing that, without exception, holds true for one but not the other?

Tom Rowland: Profit.

Sam Carpenter: Well, what it is, is documented systems.

Tom Rowland: Documented systems. Okay.

Sam Carpenter: Boring but true. The big organization has everything documented, and they're always working on the processes. We handle small to medium-sized businesses, but believe me, if it's a big successful business, they've got the documentation down. Oh, you could have market permutations, you're making buggy whips and the horse came along, but if you are documented, you are super efficient, and not many people in small or medium-sized businesses even do that. What's the definition of a medium-sized business? I'd say anything from 20 employees to a hundred, and then you're getting into a larger business. There could be a cultural change needed anywhere from a two-person outfit all the way up, but we don't work with many very large businesses, we work with some in a kind of subsystem strategy. But the big business CEO knows this. They may not be able to talk about it the way I'm talking to you about it, but they get it in their head, they have a system-strategy mind. My background is engineering, so it's not surprising that I'm at this place, but it has to do with being able to see the separate systems.

Sam Carpenter: When I give a presentation, I run the audience through a little four- or five-minute process where I say, okay, you can close your eyes if you want, let's get all new age here, but listen carefully to what I'm saying and think about it. It might help to close your eyes, but if you're in a room with me and an audience of 400 people, I want you to identify the different systems around you. And then I give them a hint: well, first of all, the person next to you is a system. And the person on the other side, plus there's heating and air conditioning going on, plus there's lights, plus you can hear me because there's a system to amplify my voice. How many can you think of in your head? And then I say, that's what I'm talking about. When you're driving a car, when you're walking around the house, when you're giving a presentation, if you can see all the separate systems and not just this massive confusion out there, that's the systems mindset. And it doesn't take long to get it.

Sam Carpenter: My guy Josh, I remember he worked for me about three weeks, and he's been with me twelve years now, and he does the consulting. About three weeks after I hired him, he came in one morning, I had to remind him of this a couple of weeks ago, he's newly arrived down in Tennessee after a move from Hawaii, he came in and said, Sam, I'm going crazy. I said, why? He said, it's just driving me crazy because I'm seeing all the separate systems in my life, like, I see you, I see the telephone, I see you've got a Diet Pepsi on your desk, maybe not the healthiest thing, he said, I'm standing in this room and I'm going out of my mind because I never saw the world this way before. And I said, you're seeing the world one layer deeper, Josh. This is the way the world operates, and you can forget all the new-age stuff and even forget your religion and your politics and all that, the way the world mechanically operates is: you, Josh, right now, at 29 years of age, are a summation of all the processes in your life, including standing here in front of me telling me about your problem, and you've been thinking about it since when? He said, oh, kind of last night. I said, okay, so last night you started this process of trying to understand the problem, and here we are, and I'm telling you it's not a problem, you have just realized the systems mindset. And he said, well, that sounds really good, but how long am I going to feel crazy about this? I said, I don't know, a couple of weeks, a couple of days, it just depends. Me, it was instant, and I was never confused, because I realized intuitively, common sense, that everything at Centratel, let's take my business, everything at Centratel was the culmination of different processes that weren't managed. No wonder I was going to miss the next payroll. No wonder I couldn't keep people. I had 12 people at the time, and in the previous year I had gone through 60 people, 12 people total in the business, and there was nobody at the end of the year who was there at the beginning of the year. That's how crazy it was, because I had no control over the processes. This will go to miss a payroll, bounce payroll checks, forget to make a deposit, it was just a nightmare of systems that weren't managed.

Sam Carpenter: So one night, just before I was going to lose the business, this came to me, what the problem was, and I had to make the next payroll, a payroll I didn't think I could make. But I was so enthusiastic, I talk about it in the book, and we were able to make that payroll and move on. And that was 1999. Here I am now, it didn't take long to get things fixed, and my life has been very good. I've been in politics, I've been doing other things, we've got a little property management company going, I'm an author, I'm on my fourth book. Life has been good because I've got a grip on the handles.

Mowing the Lawn vs. Running the Rototiller

Sam Carpenter: I like to say this is kind of a cool analogy. You can mow the lawn, okay, or you can run a rototiller. When you mow the lawn, it's kind of going along and everything's smooth, in fact, you hire somebody to mow your lawn. Or you can run a rototiller, and you know how those are, it's all over the place. And so your business is all over the place. You want it to run smoothly, with the hired guy running your riding lawnmower, the oil's been changed, you've got workers' comp on the guy, all that stuff. So you get control of the different systems, and you can only do that if you pay attention to the system, and first, you have to see them. That's the first part of my three-part book: how do I get the systems mindset? And, by the way, you can buy the book on Amazon, it's in Kindle, it's in Audible, and it's a nice hardcover, the fourth edition just came out last year. But the website is workthesystem.com, and I encourage your viewers to go there and get on my mailing list, because that's what I talk about.

Tom Rowland: Every week you send out?

Sam Carpenter: Yeah, every Thursday there's a video. Anybody who signs up starts with number one, in this new effort I'm doing, I think we're up to number 15. But if anybody goes there and signs up, they'll get that first welcome video, and then they'll get one, two, three, and they're all very carefully put together. These first fifteen summarize what's in the preface and introduction of the book, to give a good idea of what the systems mindset is, which is what I'm trying to do with you right now, in this limited time. And they're all two or three minutes long, they're not big and long.

Tom Rowland: Well, I'll definitely do that, because I'm interested in learning even more. And one of the things I'm interested in is your own personal experience with this, at Centratel, your call center, you have this epiphany, you go in and take the biggest system, make some changes, it works, you get excited about it, and then you do that throughout the entire business until it's running like a top. Right? It's running perfect, which gives you some time to think about other things you might want to do in your life, like share this with other people. So how do you share this with more people than just writing a book? So my question is, after you've had this experience with your own business, and then another thing I want to talk about is physical fitness, I know you're into that, and you see this in your business, and you say, okay, I'm going to write a book about this, you're going to create systems around writing a book. Like, how did you take your experience at Centratel, which is about answering the phone and doing payroll, and apply it to something different in your life, like writing a book? I think a lot of people might get confused on this, it's like, yeah, I can see that answering a phone is a system, but how do I get up and write a book, how is that a system?

Applying the System to Writing a Book

Sam Carpenter: Well, I'll tell you what I did, I studied a couple of books on writing, Stephen King's On Writing.

Tom Rowland: That's a great book.

Sam Carpenter: Yeah, and a couple of other writing books, and I found out how to write a book. One thing you do is work on the table of contents first, take months to do it. You cannot just start plowing into a book and vomit it all out, I call it verbal vomit, just typing, typing, typing because you're so brilliant. It doesn't work out very well. You really need to start by learning what the process is for successful writers, and follow that process, and tweak it as you go. One of the tweaks is: when do you write? Stephen King writes in the middle of the day with heavy metal music in the background. I get up at three in the morning, when it's totally quiet, and write for two to four hours, and then I'm done for the day, because I need the mental refresh. There are other methods, but you have to learn what the process is from other people and not create the wheel from the beginning. I try to write a thousand words in a session if I can, pretty much done, but you're going to go back and edit it over and over, and you create your own process. That's what I did. When Diana sleeps in a little bit, till six, I've got to feed the dogs, feed the cats, turn the air conditioning up or down depending on the time of year, and you get a routine. I didn't write this down, you don't need to always write these things down in your personal life, but if you have a system, you get really efficient. There's this whole thing of being dogmatic, you want to dogmatically do it at the same time every day, in the same way, and try not to get interrupted. What I love about getting up at three in the morning is that nobody's interrupting me, and by the time the rest of the world wakes up, at say 8 a.m., I'm done for the day with my big project, whatever book I'm writing. Does that make sense? I hope I'm answering your question.

Tom Rowland: Yeah, it does make sense. But still, if you take answering the phone, for example, you're going to determine the best way to do it. So I'm assuming that in your writing, you just went through your system there, you're going to wake up at a certain time.

Sam Carpenter: That's it.

Tom Rowland: You're going to create a certain amount of time for yourself, and if you prepare for that and do that, it's a can't-miss. You're going to sit down and you're going to write.

Sam Carpenter: That's right. And you tweak it every time, well, that didn't work so well, so I'll do this instead.

Tom Rowland: So when you're doing something like that, in your own deal, something outside of Centratel, a new venture for you, you're saying, okay, well, that didn't work so well. Are you writing that down? Is that important?

Sam Carpenter: No, it's not important to write it down at that point. I encourage people who are starting a business: don't worry so much about the documentation, kind of get the general stuff, is there a market, do you have the resources, because you're going to be going over here and you're going to make errors. You go over here and make an error, you come back, and those errors get smaller and smaller as you go on. Once you've got a machine operating and there's money coming in, even on the verge of your first client, then you start writing it down. I don't want to sound like some kind of crazy guy about documentation, it is important, but you don't want it to become the center of your life. You want it to be the center of your business, but not your life. So would I, if I was going to write a new book, write down all my steps? No, I wouldn't, because this is the real world. But at some point, in running a business, especially when you've got other people, you need to do the documentation, boring but true.

Sam Carpenter: John Steinbeck also wrote a book, Working Days, a great book, even for somebody who's not an author, about how he wrote The Grapes of Wrath in the thirties, about the Dust Bowl. He decided he was going to write 2,000 words a day, this guy was an alien genius. He was in Carmel, California, and he had one hundred days to write it for a deal with his publisher, it's a long book, I think about 140,000 words. And he did it, he got up every day and wrote 2,000 words no matter what, and he had a process for doing it. If you get the hardcover, used or the softcover, there's a page in there with a photo of one of his manuscript pages, long, longhand lines, beautiful handwriting, and there was one word scratched out on the whole page. This is not word processing, where you can go back and fix things, I'm pretty sloppy, I make a lot of changes. John Steinbeck wrote that book, 2,000 words a day, probably reread it once or twice, changed a preposition here or there, but that whole page had one change on it.

Tom Rowland: Wow.

Sam Carpenter: That's what I'd call alien-intelligence book writing. The way most people write, the way I write, is you write a draft and go through it over and over again. It's got to meld with the rest of the book, it's got to be in the right sequence, sequence is everything, and that's why you have to start with a table of contents. That's so important. Some fiction writers, like J.K. Rowling, I guess, will just flow through and see where it goes, and I think Stephen King is that way too. But that's my process, and I write nonfiction, so that's the way I have to do it to make it make sense. If you get too far into your book and you've missed a major point that should have been in the introduction, it gets messy trying to fix that. You really need to take, I'd say, a month or two to put your table of contents together and then start. What Abraham Lincoln said: if I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I'd spend six hours sharpening my saw. That element of being patient and dogmatic, and not getting in a rush, is very important, because we're all in a rush, aren't we?

Tom Rowland: Yeah, for sure.

Sam Carpenter: TV and media, our attention spans are really bad. Another thing I do, in writing a book and in my daily life, is I read a lot, Tom, I try to go through one or two hardcovers. I'm deep into my Louis L'Amour collection right now, but I also read a political book a couple of weeks ago, The Bodies of Others, a new book by Naomi Wolf. I read all kinds of stuff, and it keeps my mind and my attention span longer, even though I've lost my way here a couple of times in this interview, because my mind does tend to wander. I wrote in the front of my book that I wrote it as a handbook for my Centratel call center because I'm flaky, I tend to be flaky. So I wrote this book, discovered this methodology, and got my head straightened around so I could go in one direction for more than, I like to say most people, and the way I was, had the attention span of a gnat. And so reading lengthens your attention span, and that's very necessary to do the work I'm talking about. There's a book out there called The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr, not Nicholas Cage, these are two great books, Tom: one is The Glass Cage, and the other, which came first, is called The Shallows. He talks about the beauty of reading, he's a college professor, down at a big university in Atlanta, I think. He wrote about lengthening your attention span just by reading, and it doesn't take long, if you have an attention-span problem, you can read dogmatically for three or four days, and it's hard to focus the first few days, but it takes about four or five days to get your attention span back, even if you spent twenty years losing it. That is very important for writing a book or doing anything else, the ability to sit down and contemplate, rather than going here and there.

Tom Rowland: And that's so pervasive right now, it's getting even worse. When Twitter came out, it was like 150 characters or 75 characters, and now it's even smaller chunks. But I think it's interesting, because at the same time you have so much interest in that, you also have a lot of interest, I mean, the world's most popular podcast is three and a half hours long, and audiobooks are probably as popular as they've ever been. A lot of that has to do with the convenience of having your phone right there, you can listen to an audiobook very easily, in the car and everything. But it seems like as people get more interested in tiny little bites of information, they also get more interested in the long form. It's almost a reflection, it seems like more people are interested in the tiny bits, but the reflection is that a lot of people are interested in longer-form podcasts.

Sam Carpenter: Well, if you see this happening in your own head, not you, but anybody, you say, I have to counteract this, I'm going to do what I need to do to stretch out my attention span. And reading a book is one of the easiest pathways to doing that. Plus it's fun, and you learn new stuff, I do it as therapy almost. Louis L'Amour, it's about being a man, good and bad, and I love the guy.

Tom Rowland: A prolific writer, how many books do you think he wrote?

Sam Carpenter: I think he wrote a little over a hundred. I have a collection of, I think, 50 or so of them, and I'm wading through them, they're easy to read, 30,000 to 50,000 words, and it's a good break for your head, not to worry about sociology and politics or even your next big deal. It's good to just go over there and refresh your brain. I'm a fan of that too.

Tom Rowland: We even have a book club right here on the podcast, where we put your books in there. Let's talk about the application of your systems mindset to fitness. That's something you talk about in the book, and I think it's a very easy way for somebody to kind of get their head around what we're talking about, if somebody wants to lose weight or get in shape or has a goal, they want to run a 5K. You go through this in the book about your own personal fitness journey, how you saw that as a system too. So how do you apply this to fitness?

Systems Applied to Fitness and Health

Sam Carpenter: Well, let me turn the tables a little bit. We talked, you and I, just before we started recording, and I said I'd bet you, having read my book, have some ideas about how that applies to fitness. I'd like to hear your scheme, and then I'll tell you mine. How's that sound?

Tom Rowland: Sure, absolutely. I think that, first of all, I had to create a way that fitness was an enhancement to my life rather than a burden. This is one of the things we talk about a lot, if you're trying to work out at dinner, bath, and bedtime, and you're a young parent with young kids, and you get home from work and try to cram this in because you feel like you need to be the provider and the leader of your family, all great reasons to be healthy, but you're trying to do it at the wrong time of day, it's never going to be something you can consistently stay with. So, in my opinion, consistency is number one, you have to find a time that works for your life and your family, and then you have to create a way that your life basically revolves around that time. That's a number-one priority. For me, that time is not available at night, I don't like to do it after the kids have gone to bed. So the most logical time for me is first thing in the morning; in the middle of the day I'm out on the water. So first thing in the morning, I'm just going to get up earlier than everyone else, this is my time, I'm going to create that. So my system is: get up early enough that I have my allotted amount of time, and that is the priority for the day, I'm going to win the day right there by getting up and working out at that time. Now the system comes into play the night before, it starts the night before. I'm going to lay my clothes out, I'm going to have my water ready, I'm going to have a plan of exactly what I'm going to do, I'm going to know exactly where I'm going. If I'm on the road, I've already scoped out the gym or the parking lot, so when the alarm clock goes off, I put my clothes on, I walk out the door, and I already know what I'm doing, there's no wavering back and forth. It might be raining outside, I don't know, it's something, but it all starts the night before. And so when it actually comes to the time the alarm goes off, it's a can't-miss, just like you're talking about in your book, you've set up the system so you've already mentally prepared, physically prepared, prepared with the workout, prepared with everything, and you've set the alarm early enough that you've allotted yourself enough time so you're not going to miss the doctor's call or your first appointment or whatever it is. So it's all kind of reverse-engineered: I need to wake up at this time, and I need to have all this stuff prepared and ready to go the night before. That's it, that's a system.

Sam Carpenter: Right. That is a process, and it starts the night before at A and ends up with your last effort in your workout, at B. And then you do that the next day, and if you can make it easy on yourself, it'll actually happen, you won't make excuses.

Tom Rowland: Exactly.

Sam Carpenter: Yeah, and I could see from your office how organized you are, and I sense you didn't do that just for the podcast.

Tom Rowland: Well, you know, it's funny, in some parts of my life I'm extremely organized, and in other parts, not so much. That's why your book was very interesting to me: I'm already so locked down in certain areas of my life, so why is it that I'm not applying these systems into other areas?

Sam Carpenter: Managing systems, managing them, right.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. So I think it's important, just like you were talking about with Josh, that you realize it's not just chaos, all of this chaos is created by not managing any systems. If you have a room, like when Jake first started working here, the room behind us was an absolute wreck. It had sponsor gear from every company I've ever worked with in there, knee-high, you couldn't walk through it, it was such a wreck. And I just said, okay, I'm going to clean this up, and now it's super tight, and we keep it that way, it's a system: when we're finished with this, we put all this stuff away, and it stays clean, and that's how it's going to stay. But it's about being aware, I think, first, that there is such a thing as a systems mindset, and that all the things in your life are basically a bunch of little processes that all work together to give you the result you're getting right now. So I don't know, I've got it locked down in certain areas, my diet, my fitness, my sleep, my relationship with my wife, my relationship with my kids. It's like, okay, what did it take to create this habit of fitness that I have? And I never miss a day, I don't want to miss a day, because I've also built into the system that it's fun and I enjoy it. And if that stops being true, I'm going to change the system and do something I am enjoying. So I don't know, is that the answer you expected, or how does yours compare?

Sam Carpenter: Well, no, it's exactly right. There's a formula I put in this fourth edition: number one, with an arrow to number two, an arrow to number three, an arrow to number four, equals a result. That's what you just described, you're seeing the mechanical reality of your life. You've got to do it in the morning, sequence is everything, and then you lay everything out. I really can't add to that. I will add a couple of nuances, because that's precisely what I teach, what you just described. One thing I call clustering: you have a family, and you have two kids.

Tom Rowland: Three.

Sam Carpenter: Three kids. So you've got the kids, you've got the family, that's very important, priority number one. But your fitness is priority number one. You've got to create income to support your family, that's priority number one. Most people have five or six priorities in their life, and for some people it might be some hobby or passion, fishing. These are all important to make Tom a performing, contributing person, especially, we've got to contribute value to others. While I'm fishing, I'm not taking care of my kid who has a ball game; if I'm doing this, I'm not making any money, and they're all important, and I don't know what to do. So I have this concept called clustering: they're all important, try to do every one of them every day if you can, some need to be every other day, maybe, but spend time with your family and don't feel guilty that you're not guiding a fishing trip, at your workout don't feel guilty you're not home with the family, and when you're with the family don't feel guilty that you're missing something else. Just try to do a little bit of them every day and cluster it, in other words, don't prioritize. You have your six important things, just hit every one of them every day if you can, and stop feeling guilty about doing number one when you think you should be doing number four, because when you go do number four, you'll feel guilty you didn't do number one. So stop feeling guilty.

Sam Carpenter: And then the other thing, I talk about it extensively in the book, and you'll remember this, is blood tests. I'm a big fan of going to the doctor and getting a full-screen blood test. When I did that in '99, when I was so physically sick and my business was failing, I had three or four different hormones that were like zero, and I was terribly dehydrated because I had a bit of a kidney problem, I have to drink a lot of water. My doctor at the time said, you don't need blood tests, you just need to take this antidepressant. I went through about six antidepressants, and then he had me on Adderall. Finally I went in and said, give me the blood test. He said, no, you don't need a blood test. I said, I'm just going to have to get another doctor, Steve, this is an old friend of mine, come on, just give it to me, I'm not asking you for drugs. About a week later, he called me personally, his nurse didn't call, he called me, you've got to get down to the office right now. I got down there, and he said, I don't know how you walked across the waiting room to get back here and talk to me, but you're all messed up, man, this is bad. There were really serious problems, and through a combination of over-the-counter and prescription supplements, it took two years to get my body straightened up. But if your chemistry is off, because we are chemicals, aren't we, that's what we are, even our bones are chemicals. I did ask him that: aren't we made up of chemicals? And he said yeah. Well, why don't you test my chemicals? So it took me two years, and until I got my body straightened around, my head never got to where I needed it to get to. I had blood tests done last week, everything was perfect, my cholesterol's at the high range but not over, everything is perfect. And if you take the full-screen blood test, there are hundreds of things you can test, go to the doctor, get them all done, and see if there's a problem there, because otherwise you'll have a doctor telling you that you need antidepressants. I'm really against antidepressants, I'm like Tom Cruise, I'm not a Scientologist, but he was onto something when the problem was that my basic chemistry was all screwed up from stress and overwork. I was going out at two in the morning on my mountain bike and hammering for three hours up the hills and down the hills, I was working out too much and not getting enough sleep. I had to learn how to sleep all over again, but I had to get my blood chemicals right as a normal human being before I could accomplish any of that. So I'm a big fan of blood tests. But your description is exactly right, and I could tell you read my book, though I think you would have figured this out on your own without it. What you do is set up systems that are super efficient, and here's another mantra, Tom: automate, delegate, delete. If you have a task in your business, can you automate it? Can you delegate it? Can you just get rid of it? And that's the most delightful of all, to drop something. I have at least one example in the book of something we got rid of, we were spending so much time, over a decade, doing this task, and we never used the results of it. So we just eliminated it and never missed it since. And that's true in personal life too, like, why do you drink? Not you, but I say to people, how does that contribute to your life? Well, it relaxes me. No, it gives you a hangover the next day. I used to drink, and I did all the drugs, I was at Woodstock, the whole thing, so I can speak to this. But if you're trying to get somewhere, why put barriers in front of yourself? Why self-sabotage? Drugs, are you crazy? You can't smoke dope and expect to get here. Well, all my friends, well, where are they? Nowhere. So I have some pretty strict rules about self-discipline. I'm not so dogmatic that I won't let anybody in the house who does any of those things, but I'm pretty dogmatic about how I operate my health and everything else.

Sam Carpenter: As far as my health goes, besides what you mentioned, I'm a rucker, I like to go rucking with a heavy pack, thirty pounds for me, I'm not a huge guy. I take my two dogs out, and we climb up and down the canyons, it's the best workout, and I think you mentioned you do that too.

Tom Rowland: Yep, yeah.

Sam Carpenter: That is the best thing. I'm on the Cumberland Plateau, and the most vertical you can get, and I'm a mountain climber, I like climbing 4,000-footers, I have to go down into the Blue Ridge to get that, but up here you can't get more than 500 feet, so you always climb down into a canyon and back out. What the dogs and I do is climb down one side, up the other, there's five or six hundred vertical feet, so I can get 600 in one hike, and then we come back down and climb back up again. It's eleven or twelve hundred vertical feet with a heavy pack, and it's a really good workout. Now I'm older than you, and I need at least one rest day, preferably two, if I have a really long hike, say ten miles with my pack and the dogs, up and down over logs, it just takes me longer to recover, and I've worked that in, because I was working out every day too. You're in your forties?

Tom Rowland: Fifty-four, almost.

Sam Carpenter: Wow, you don't look it.

Tom Rowland: Thanks.

Sam Carpenter: Well, I had to slow down in my sixties, I'm 72 now, but I'm as fit as pretty much any 30-year-old out there.

Tom Rowland: That's awesome. But you get that way because of the systems mindset. Right? Maybe it's a priority for you and you enjoy it, but maybe that's part of the system too.

Sam Carpenter: It is. It's part of the system that keeps me okay, I can write, I can be a reasonable person around my family, all that stuff. I've been an athlete since I was 11, downhill skiing, cross-country skiing, soccer.

Tom Rowland: This is exactly how your book was recommended to me. I was talking to somebody about something in my life, and I said, well, yeah, I just decided to lose 20 pounds, so I lost 20 pounds real fast. And they said, that's incredible, if you can do that, why couldn't you do this in these other things you're talking about with your business? And I said, well, I don't know, I've been an athlete all my life, so I don't know why. And they said, you should really read this book about Work the System, because what you did is you followed a process, an unconscious process, that you've been following for whatever reason, and you know how to do this. So you set a goal, you developed a plan, you followed the plan, and 20 pounds down. That's a process. And so all you've got to do is do that in your business, and all you have to do is do it in your personal life, most people already know some sort of process, even if it's a bad habit. There are processes that are bad habits, like you wake up, you grab your pack of cigarettes, you go have a cigarette, that's how you get up, that's how you start the day. Is that the healthiest way? No. Is that contributing to long-term health? No, but delete it. That's a system, or a process, that unconsciously is in your life, and if you can do that, then you could do any system, any process. You just have to think about it that way: oh, well, I wake up, I do this, okay, well, I just have to apply that over here to answering the phone, or to a time that I'm going to do emails, whatever it is. And I didn't even think about that until right now, but that is how your book was suggested to me, because of the physical fitness aspect, and someone realizing I've got that locked down, that's just an unconscious kind of thing I'm doing. But it's the same as everything else you're trying to do in all these different businesses.

Sam Carpenter: You start at A, you go to B over a period of time, and there are steps in there, and you just follow the steps. This really is the opposite of a lot of modern philosophy in the West, in that you start with the mechanical. So, I want to lose 20 pounds, okay, I'm going to buy into this method, there are a lot of ways to lose weight, of course, but whatever method you buy into, you say I'm going to follow this and I'm going to do it. Step one, step two, substitute, support, and the 20 pounds is gone. You have to look at the mechanical execution of the system rather than wait to get motivated. Oh, I just can't get motivated to lose the 20 pounds, well, let's just say you got motivated, how would you do it? Well, I never thought of that, I'm just waiting to be motivated, you're going about that backwards. The motivation will come. As you kind of referred to a little while ago, Tom, you get a system fixed in your business, I talk about this in the book, and you get so excited about it, because you took the mechanical and eliminated a problem, and you think, what else can we do? It doesn't take much to get super excited. And as you, I'll bet, lost your first few pounds, you got really excited because you could see that what you were doing was working. It's the same in a business or in a family, you get a clue that watching the mechanical part of it, and leaving your emotions aside, just following through with the mechanical everyday stuff, and then the great emotions follow. I mean, what's not to like about having more money than you need and more time than you know what to do with? That's my life now, and it was never that way, it was always paycheck to paycheck, I was a single parent of two kids, and it was a mess. So it doesn't guarantee happiness, when people ask me, will I be happy if I get a life like yours? Well, I'm not happy every minute, there are things out there I could talk about that don't make me happy, nothing to do with my marriage, just things out there. But I'll tell you, having enough money, or more than enough money, and having all the time you need, goes a long way toward reaching happiness.

Control, Happiness, and Advice for Anyone Starting Out

Tom Rowland: Sure. And what I think is very inspiring about you is that this happened fairly late in your life, around 49 or 50, as you were saying. So for people who are 30 and feeling like, man, I just haven't done it yet.

Sam Carpenter: Well, you still can. That's crazy, right? There are so many opportunities out there, so many goofy little businesses, like an answering service, I run an answering service. There are so many businesses out there that are poorly run, you can walk into a poorly run business, take over their lease, they just walk away, and fix it using a system strategy. If I wanted to, if I had the time, I have opportunities come by every day, and I just push them away, because you can only be in one place at one time, and I don't need any more money, I don't need the satisfaction anymore, I get it every day. But my point is there are so many opportunities for somebody out there. If you're climbing the corporate ladder, that's a tough one, because there's so much politics involved. I really encourage people to try to start their own business, where you have control, you've got your hands on the rototiller, and you're not underneath it. Working in a corporate environment is a tough thing. And if you want to work for the same corporation for forty years and get a gold watch at the end, and that's your peak experience, go for it, but I don't understand it, I would like to leave something behind.

Tom Rowland: In a lot of situations like that, you really have very little control. And that's one of the things you talk about in your book, control, and how that contributes to happiness. I'd like to touch on this as our last topic: when you have the systems mindset and start to apply it in all different parts of your life, how does having more control over your life, your destiny, whether you're a fire-killer, as you say in your book, or you're preventing fires through preparation, how does that contribute to happiness? And you've certainly seen it in your own life.

Sam Carpenter: Well, yeah, there are over 20 chapters in the book, and the first chapter is entitled Control Is a Good Thing. Because there's this thing in our society: oh, you're a control freak. No, I'm not a control freak, I am in control of my own processes and my business, and if you want to call me a control freak, go ahead, but it's not going to go fluttering all around, because my life would be a nightmare. So you take the things you can control and you get them under control, you can't always control the people around you, but, for instance, for an employee: I'll give you X number of dollars if you perform in this way, go for it, here's the written procedure for your job description, go for it, and I'll tell you, if you don't perform to my satisfaction, I'm going to let you go, or maybe you'll quit. You don't take everybody's rights away, but you get yourself under control, and then you create a working environment for the people you hire, a working environment that will bring in the best people, and you pay them a lot of money. I pay my people a lot of money, they stay with me forever, and I give them a working environment where they can be themselves, and I don't have to manage that rototiller. You don't want to be doing this with your employees. So you control the things you can control, one thing you can control is the systems mindset in your own head, and getting the documentation done in your business in concert with the people who work for you. But if you try to micromanage, I will not micromanage, I will not go over any of my people's heads, I have these 30 principles I talked about earlier. You control the things you can control. And here's what I say to people who say, well, you're a control freak, I say, okay, what's the opposite of control? And they'll say, well, being out of control. And I say, tell me how that's a good thing, just tell me what the good elements of being out of control are. And they can't, because there is no answer. But, again, you don't want to get too wrapped up in it and turn into a control freak, but there are certain things you can control, and certain things you're required and expected to do as a leader, and that's providing a good working environment where people know what's going on and don't have to read your mind. That's why people stay with me forever, I stay out of their faces, I listen to them, and the frontline people in sales or operations come up with the procedures and write them down to my specifications, I never look at them anymore, they do it from scratch, because they all have the systems mindset. Over the years, it didn't take long for the people who didn't have the capacity for that mindset to move on, and now I'm surrounded by long-term management people who've been with me forever, because it works, it really works. They all make way more money working for me than they would anywhere else, we have people across about five states. We don't even hire anybody in Oregon anymore, because nobody can pass a drug test, and we're strict on drug tests, but we have people in Idaho, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas, and even Romania and Italy. I love these people, they're all super great, but it took a little while for them to show up, and we had to go through a process of having the people who weren't getting the systems mindset move on, they were dismissed or they left on their own.

Sam Carpenter: But anyway, that's pretty much it. We've talked about the systems mindset today, Tom, a lot, and that's part one of the book. Part two of the book is the documentation, very specific, and the third part is kind of the fun part, all the odds and ends, do-it-now, point-of-sale, and perfection is imperfection, you want to be 98% correct. There's a whole bunch of chapters in there about that. I wrote it as a guidebook for my staff, and it turned into a book back in 2008.

Tom Rowland: Nice. Well, it's helped a lot of people, including me, and I certainly wanted to share it with my audience, because I know we have a lot of CEOs and business owners and all kinds of people who listen to this. You had a really interesting story about a fishing charter captain in your book too, which as soon as I read it, I thought, man, I've got to reach out to this guy.

Sam Carpenter: That is a true story too, there's not a line of BS in the whole book, and I'm very proud of that. There was a little section about how we bring coffee in for everybody on Monday mornings, and I don't know how many hours I spent interviewing the person who was bringing the coffee, and my CEO, to get it exactly right, because there was a whole process to it. It was just my final little thing that I wasn't sure about in the whole book, but there isn't any BS in it at all. That was my final touch, and in the fourth edition it had changed a little bit, and I talk about that in there. But it all has to do with systems. I invite your CEO listeners to go to workthesystem.com and get on my mailing list, once a week you'll get a video from me, two or three minutes long, one was four minutes. I know from the statistics that a lot of people will start a fifteen-minute video and not get very far. Now, a podcast is different, because this is in-depth, but these are little nuances about the systems mindset, I get up in front of the camera, rattle it off real quickly, and then I'm done, and people can pass those on.

Tom Rowland: Yeah. Alright, cool. Well, Sam, thanks so much for your time today, I really appreciate it, and thanks for writing your book, I've put it to use myself, and I think others will do the same.

Sam Carpenter: Well, I'm flattered, Tom. You're an accomplished man, and I love hearing that accomplished people like my book, I mean, that's just ego on my part, but thank you for embracing it and having me on your show.

Tom Rowland: Thank you. Alright, that's it for today. We'll see you next week.