Kelly connects with Joe Sanok, host of the popular The Practice of the Practice podcast and the author of Thursday is the New Friday: How to Work Fewer Hours, Make More Money and Spend Time Doing What You Want.

This book calls for a less strenuous work week and you start by showing us how this started historically in America.

“When I looked back at how people lived in the late 1800’s and 1900 and the rebuilding of Chicago after the fires, all these people moved from Europe for a better life. And they find their life is actually worse. They're working 10 to 14 hour days, six to seven days a week. And so you look at that, it's a farmer's schedule, but you're not a farmer. You know, you're just working all the time.”

And the seven day week is even our invention?

“How do we even have a seven day week? You go back 4,000 years and the Babylonians just made it up. They looked up and they saw the sun and the moon and Mercury and Venus. They looked down and they saw the Earth, Mars and Jupiter. And they said, all right, there's seven major celestial things that we can count. Why don't we have a seven day week? You know, the Romans had a 10 day week. The Egyptians had an eight day week. It's important to look backward and say, okay, we made up the seven day week. There's nothing in nature that even points to the seven day week.”

So you do improv and you talk about how its good practice when exploring incongruence and ability to see things differently.

“I have a seven-year-old and a ten-year-old: two daughters. And we often do improv games just around the house. And I'll just say to them, how do you make this weird? How do we flip this? How do we look at it from a different angle? How do we put someone in a situation that you would never expect them to be in and to see how natural a seven and 10 year old can do that? I mean, when they're playing with their dolls or their toys, they're just doing improv and they don't even realize it. But at some point we as adults start to get self-conscious and we pull back on that, we worry about what other people think. But the effective leaders are the ones that stay curious that are able to kind of ask those questions and dive into the incongruence.”

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