Solved in Seven Minutes: How Jim Sholler's Book Saved a Life and Un-Retired the Fixer

In this episode of Author Hour, Eric Jorgenson sits down with Jim Sholler, author of Solved in 7: The Power of Disciplined Problem-Solving, the Fidelity Investments "fixer" who turned twenty-seven years of untangling other people's problems into a method anyone can run.

Jim spent twenty-seven years at Fidelity, where his brand was the fixer: when something broke, they pulled him in whether or not he had experience in it. In 2000, after thirteen years in which two of the best hematologists in the world could not diagnose his wife's rare bleeding disorder, he asked for a whiteboard and a marker and ran his own process instead. Seven minutes later they had a diagnosis. That is where the title comes from. He talks with Eric about the Ned Johnson "verify the facts" story from Fidelity, why 70 to 90 percent of problems get solved in fact verification, the six-foot hoagie method for starting an intimidating book, the thousand-words-a-day technique that took him from outline to published in nine months, and the reader who used the book to save his father-in-law's life.

Jim Sholler: Don't get overwhelmed thinking about writing the book. Think about an outline. Think about your team.

And, you know, step one in my process is build a team. So, you know, that works for this, is, okay, who's your team going to be? Because you don't want it to just be you.

If you've ever done it before, it's not going to be just you. Who's your team? You know, I had my sister, some family, scribe.

So, okay, I got my team. My step two is educate the team. In this case, the team was educate me.

So, it was a little different. And then work on, you know, the problem statement, create your problem statement as step three. In this case, it was the outline.

Just take a month, you know, take however long you need the outline. Because writing the outline really kind of forces you to go, you keep revisiting and going back, you know, to find things. And it just winds up being a much fuller outline if you give it the time it deserves.

Eric Jorgenson: Well, Jim, thank you so much for making the time and joining us.

Jim Sholler: Oh, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

Eric Jorgenson: By way of introducing the book, why don't you introduce yourself and just start with a little bit of background to lead up to the initial decision to write this?

Jim Sholler: You bet. Thanks. So, as I say in the book, I'll start it kind of at birth.

I'll give you the short version, but I'll start at birth. Basically, I was always referred to as, how come Schuller? I just, I had to know.

Anytime someone, you know, tried to propose a fact to me, I'd say, how come? How come? It drove my mother absolutely crazy.

And that kind of carried through, you know, high school, college, into the workplace. And it evolved into organizing things. I found that if I organized things and tried to sit back without an emotional take on things and just kind of put all the cards on the table, that I could get to the how come much faster.

And that kind of evolved into this, the brand I had at Fidelity where I was for 27 years as the fixer. You know, when things broke, didn't matter if I had experience in it or not, they would pull me over and say, this isn't working. We need you to fix it.

And the approach, you know, started from the beginning. It refined over time, which is what's in the book. But over time, it basically began, okay, let's, you know, let's lay this out and figure out how come.

And that's kind of what, you know, just how my brain has always worked.

Eric Jorgenson: It seems in like reading your bio and background and everything, you're just, you're like a real life fixer. Like your, your job is just fix problems, figure things out. Can you give me a little more, like what's, what are the most common things or what are some of the bigger problems you've solved?

Like, this sounds like a very fascinating, almost like, you know, the wolf who shows up, but I assume it's not quite that dramatic.

Jim Sholler: No, I mean, it was, you know, it was just something that I enjoyed doing. And it usually was first in more in the tech space where I wasn't a developer, but I was frequently doing project management or managing IT resources, managing developers. And it started in a frustration of wasted time and inefficiency.

And it just amazed me to think that for all the brilliant technologists that Fidelity had, you realize that in school, they're really not trained in formal problem solving. They might be analytical, but that's more from an engineering degree. And it just was born out of frustration of seeing the time people were wasting.

So I would start to kind of casually dig in, had to earn the respect of people much more technological than me, and really just start to, you know, figure out how to poke and prod and ask some questions. And eventually you develop a reputation when something they've been working on for three days, you come in and after 30 minutes of discussing it, they have a solution, you know, which started at kind of dismissing me like, Oh, you know, what do you know about this? And 30 minutes later, it's like, son of a gun, you know, we figured this out.

And, you know, so I, then I just started to formalize it more and more over time. And I started to see the more I formalized it, the more I saw that there were applications, not just in technology, but across process, across people, you know, just dealing with human resource issues. So I'll give you a kind of an issue that crosses all three, which is one of my favorite.

So you asked for an example. So there's what I refer to as the, the Ned said issue. So Ned Johnson was the founder, basically creator, brilliant, brilliant man of most of what Fidelity is known for.

And we had the situation where I was brought into this meeting because we were going on weeks of people trying to solve this problem where apparently Ned said that he wanted a specific page to be the default lockdown homepage for all of Fidelity employees. That was fine with most companies, but the company that was retail, which has 7,000 phone reps at the time, and they use a web based application to do their job said absolutely not. They are literally all their training, everything has them, you know, finishing hitting home, which takes them their homepage is the application for retail, not some welcome to, you know, Fidelity today, here's the news for the day type of page.

So they brought me in to say, you got to fix this. We're at a stalemate. No one can figure out what to do.

So I walked in and I said, okay, you know, what's, what's the challenge here? Well, Ned said, this has to be the lockdown homepage. So I said, okay, hold on.

And they were all starting to argue after that. I said, hold on, hold on, hold on. Time out.

Does anyone have the memo or the email or anything from Ned so I can see the request in writing? Because anything you say up until you have demonstrable proof is a proposed fact. I needed to see the actual fact.

So all these proposals are interesting, but where's the fact. So someone had to do some digging and they went back and eventually found from Ned. The request was actually, we would like to know that every employer, I want to know that every employee sees this homepage at least once a day.

So I've now, I've been in this room, this meeting for about three minutes at this point. And I said, okay, so retail, would you be willing to use a registry setting to have this page come up as the homepage so that they see it first thing, and then they click home and they're back to where they are today. They just continue to do the job, but they will see that page and retail said, yeah, absolutely.

So I said, okay, it's been nice.

Eric Jorgenson: I'll send you my bill.

Jim Sholler: And I mean, that was often when you just, it's amazing. I help you anywhere between 70 and 90% of problems are solved actually in the stage of verifying the facts, not even problem resolution, but verifying the facts. And that's what solved so many problems like that.

Eric Jorgenson: That's really interesting. I've spent a lot of time studying Elon Musk and he's, of course, has the algorithm and the first step of the algorithm is make your requirements less dumb. And so I definitely see the rhyme of like, when you closely examine the problem, it may not even exist really.

Jim Sholler: I've been reading the book of Elon, I'm about halfway through it. And that was the first thing that resonated with me.

Eric Jorgenson: I was like, yes, exactly. Amazing. Thank you.

That's very cool. Very cool. Thank you.

So when did this become like, you've been a curious and an organizing person your whole life. When did it become like a formalized process for you? Because that's what really the book is.

The book is like your process that you run each time now that gives you the superpower. I imagine it was sort of an organic evolution. Is that how it unfolded?

Jim Sholler: That's exactly right. There was organic up to aha moment. The organic was 20, maybe about 15 or so years of fidelity.

But it was always just still like something I do at work. I never really thought about how powerful it was. It was just, if anything, I was kind of glad that I had a thing that's going to keep me at fidelity.

I'm going to survive here because I got a thing. And I did training to show other people because I didn't want it to just be mine. I wanted other people to see the benefit.

And really, my war was on the inefficiencies of problem solving. So I wanted to kind of train minions, but it was still just kind of a thing, a way I did things. In 2000, the aha moment happened, which is my wife had been, as I talk in chapter seven of the book, my wife was dealing with a very, very rare bleeding disorder for 13 years.

Her doctors were the head of hematology at the Dana-Farber and Brigham and Women's in Boston, two of the best hematologists in the world. And they could not, for 13 years, they couldn't figure out what it was. So finally, one night they gave her an ill-advised plasma transfusion, which caused her a flatline.

And they fortunately resuscitated her. And I came in the next morning and I said, so you killed her last night. Fortunately, you brought her back.

So now what do we do? And they said, well, we're going to test for factor 13, which is hemophilia. And the aha moment hit me like a brick on the head.

They're trained in diagnosis, not problem solving. And I think it was the organic growth of it and finally having the confidence that, wait a second, I know how to do this better than they do. They're doctors, but they don't know how to problem solve.

So I said, guys, I need a whiteboard and a marker and I'm taking over. And they said, sure. And they got me a whiteboard, got me a marker.

And the title of the book comes from the fact that after 13 years of failure, seven minutes into the discussion, we had a diagnosis. And that's really when I realized, all right, this process works. At some point when I leave Fidelity, I need to document this.

I have to write this down for my own good and for others.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, it's impossible not to ask what happened in those seven minutes.

Jim Sholler: So it was exactly the process that I go through in the book. The first step is build a team, train the team just to gain some credibility, explain to them how the process is going to work, state the problem. So we clearly stated the problem.

Then you just go through, you draw a T-structure and you list the facts and the questions. So the facts that we had were that she had surgery or major blunt trauma, like a ski accident on these certain dates that she had listed and she had meticulous records. Then on the right, we listed next to each of those dates, we listed when she had massive internal hemorrhaging, which was her bleed, not external, it's only internal massive hemorrhaging.

And I said, okay, these are all facts. Then you always have to go back and confirm, does everyone, do all your experts agree to these facts? Yep.

We agree. So then I said, okay, now we'll do math. Math is an acceptable fact.

The difference between every one of these dates is two and a half to three months. Now we get to the question part. You keep testing for hemophilia, which is a month one issue.

When you bleed, you have to clot. We have nothing that indicates that she has a clotting problem. There's no sense to spend more than seven seconds on a clotting problem.

So here's a question. And I wrote up on the whiteboard, what happens in month three of the clotting process or the healing process? And they said, well, we're four minutes into the discussion now.

And they said, well, in month three, you have to dissolve the clot. And if you don't, you'll have massive clotting, you'll have strokes, you have risks of clots going to your lungs and things like that. So I said, okay, for the record, we're about four minutes in, and this is the first time in 13 years that anyone has ever mentioned the word dissolving to me.

Just thought I'd put that out there. So then I erased everything and I said, new fact. And in month three, the body has to dissolve the clot.

So now my questions, what does the body need? And again, I'm not a medical professional, so I don't enzymes, proteins, sugars. What does the body produce to dissolve a clot?

And they said, well, you produce plasminogen activator, which is PA and plasminogen activator inhibitor, which is PAI-1. And at that point to shorten the version, they said, at this point, you're beyond what we know. You need to go speak to this expert in Michigan who discovered all of this.

A little bit of luck plays into problem solving too. This gentleman interned under them in Boston, and that's why they're familiar with his work. So they sent us out to him.

We met him and he was able to diagnose that my wife has a plasminogen activator inhibitor deficiency, which is only known to exist in the Amish and the Mennonites. And her family were Germans that led to Switzerland to the town of Tammins, converted to be Mennonites for one or two generations. The genetic mutation started in the town of Tammins where her family lived.

Then they moved to the U.S., converted to Christianity and went on. But sadly, genes don't care what religion you are. Wow.

And it's completely, it is manageable, not treatable. In other words, you can't eliminate it. But when it happens, she takes a certain amount of pills and it has been a complete non-event.

Her medical bills in 2000 were over a million dollars and it is now a complete non-event.

Eric Jorgenson: Wow. And like no ongoing, no change of sort of life expectancy or anything like that.

Jim Sholler: So every year I continue to research in AI to see what new discoveries there are. And it's funny you asked that because the most recent research actually potentially, it's hard to research because it's so rare. I mean, like eight people at any given time have it, but just logically they're starting to link it to increased longevity because it prevents clotting, which in older years can actually be a major problem.

Eric Jorgenson: Oh, which causes strokes and yeah. Yeah, exactly. Wow.

Jim Sholler: So if anything, it's actually linked to, it might be, it might turn out to be her superpower. And I mean, we went through being blamed for doing this. The stories I put in the book, chapter seven, I put chapter seven in, which is very personal, but I wanted it to be the compelling chapter that makes people say, Holy crap, there's this, it was okay up until now.

Like, yeah, maybe I'll use it. Maybe I won't, but Holy crap, this, like, I know someone who has a medical issue. I want those people using this to help them.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, if I was your editor, I'd say make that chapter one, but you know, that ship has sailed a few years ago. The general rule of thumb to just, you know, open with your best, open with your hit, your biggest song.

Don't make them wait for chapter seven for the good stuff, but that's, that's for anybody listening. Who's writing a book now, not, you know, if you've already written your book, just, just ignore me. Interesting.

Okay. So this, thank you for explaining that and telling that story and kudos to you for putting in the personal hard thing, because that is what really hits home. And that's what, you know, makes this when someone has an issue like this makes this the most important book they can possibly read.

And that is a really, that's a powerful place for a book to occupy. And a method like this can change lives and good on you for going so far on your way to, you know, and investing in, in putting it out into the world. It, it casts, I'm, I'm casting into sharp relief, my inability to solve problems at the moment.

And I'm like, yeah, this is, it is really fascinating how given that it's, it's all we do is basically wake up and deal with problems every day. The fact that it's never part of any curriculum, it's not just a medical school problem. It's a, it's an everything problem.

We should be learning, being trained in problem-solving techniques since we're five years old, but it doesn't happen. I've yet to attend that class.

Jim Sholler: I've always said, if you, if you want to choose a marketplace that will never expire, will never be outdated solving problems, the universe just continues to throw them at us every day.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. David Deutsch has two kind of etched in stone maxims, which are problems are inevitable and problems are solvable. Like it's, you know, this is, there's a great piece that comes with that as, as your personal mantra.

It's like, don't be mad at the problem. There's always going to be a problem, but the good news is, you know, you'll solve it and, or at least it's solvable.

Jim Sholler: Well, and that's, you know, what part of what having a confidence to, to, so the book really forced me to put the, the process in place, tested. I actually went back to work afterward. I thought I was retired, but I went back to work because after writing the book, it was not only cathartic, but it kind of had me, you know, pumping to go back to work and prove that it, it actually works.

And that's a big thing. When you, when you have confidence, you can solve problems. You're not, you don't fear anything.

You know, we, we do all kinds of things in life and people say, well, what if this happens? What if that happens? And I always laugh and I go, I'll figure it out.

I don't lose sleep over what if, why would you worry about what if, if you can deal with everything?

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. The next, the next problem is solvable. Tell me about the writing process.

Cause this is, this is an interesting one in that you sort of, it was such an organic evolution. And I imagine it's very difficult to put something that's so intuitive and organic down that translation into black and white is sometimes very challenging.

Jim Sholler: Absolutely. I mean, the, the, you know, the quintessential plug for, for scribe here is, you know, I could not have done it. There's just no way I had some good advisors.

My sister, God bless her was just, you know, absolutely critical. She was the one who gave me the first feedback year, read the first draft and said, are you writing a memoir or do you want to train people? And I said, no, no, no, it's not a memoir.

And she goes, all right, we have to start over. So that, you know, then I, I worked with scribe and the, just the, the editors and the advisor, everything was invaluable. One of the key things that you think about, and I've seen people mention it in other of your other, our podcasts is the champagne moment.

You know, when they tell you it, it's not in terms of dollars, it's not in terms of book sales, you know, what makes you jump up and down? And for me, it was easy to answer. I have to write this book.

And the thing that will make me jump up and down is the first person who contacts me to say, Hey, I read your book and it helped us solve this major medical issue. And I'm happy to say I've actually had that happen with someone who saved their father-in-law's life. Um, you know, as a, as a married male to, to pull the card out where you save your father-in-law's life, you're like, you're golden after that.

You can't do better than now.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. You're looking forward to Thanksgiving at that point. You know, this is to me again.

Okay, fine.

Jim Sholler: So that was really just helping me, you know, the, the book process, it was everything. It was not only writing, which I'm not a writer, you know, it was, it was putting me into an area I'm uncomfortable doing, which I wanted to do. I wanted to challenge myself to do something I've never done before.

And it really helped me. That part became actually less of a challenge than the challenge of, you know, can I remember everything that I did with this and how I did it and all the tricks. And, you know, that became the hard part, the writing part with, with you guys helping me, it was, it was easy.

Eric Jorgenson: Fantastic. That's a, that's not everybody's story, but I'm glad to hear it. And that is, I mean, our big mission is to just remove the friction, like unlock the books that are in so many heads, like yours after an incredible career and all of this, you know, important information I'm taking.

Cause I'm sure a lot of what you learned, you picked up by, by reading the books that, you know, people had written before you. And so just contributing back to that pool is, I think, I think a moral duty actually.

Jim Sholler: Absolutely. I mean, there were things that my, my editor suggested, you know, here at the end of this chapter, you know, you kind of want to recap it. That was the biggest thing for me was the recap.

You know, I'm verbose when I speak, but when I write, I write nothing. It seems redundant to me to recap. So I took her advice.

I, you know, I do this kind of recap. Then I step away for, you know, a day, I go back and read it. And I'm like, wow, this is really good.

This is she really like, I'm so glad I did that. Cause it's really good.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's a, it's a good feeling when you are, when your present self is proud of your past self's work, it doesn't always go that way, but that's a good sign that you're making progress. You, you mentioned the champagne moment and that's as noble of one as I've ever heard.

Were there any other surprises or just unexpected good things that have come as a result of this book being out there as we record this, we're a little more than four years out for launch for context. The book is incredibly well reviewed, but I hope you've had some good, some good instances that have come from readers.

Jim Sholler: So, yeah, I mean, I think probably the, you know, one of the biggest things for me was the using it as a, when I, as I said, I finished it, I had to go back to work now. So, you know, I go back to work and I mentioned the book in the interview process. I can't say it got me the job, but it definitely helped, but that wasn't really the biggest part.

I thought that would be the biggest part, like, well, the book, you know, helped me get the job, but then I started to work and it was to build a problem management team and put the process in place. So I had the team read the book, you know, we, I did the training based on the book and the, I never really thought about kind of the author credential that comes with that, you know, and I don't, I, I just, I, I'm not helpful because I was never a writer saying, you know, I'm an author, you know, I wrote a book. It was more, you know, very kind of casual, you know, I, I am so passionate about this.

I wrote this book. You might want to take a look at it. And people would come back in and be like, oh my God.

So how are we? And now they're looking at me to say, so you tell us, how are we implementing this? What, what are we going to do?

How to like, this is great. What do we do? So to be able to, you know, to write it, put it down and then to be able to use that to, you know, as a, as a leverage to go forward and build credibility was, I just had not really even thought about that.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's, it's very interesting as you described that I'm, I'm also thinking about how it's kind of, uh, it breaks up this like potential ego log jam when you're sitting there, when you're telling somebody what to do or how it's supposed to be done, there's that kind of weird, like hierarchical thing. I hate telling people what to do.

I don't like it. And when you, when you have the ability to just sort of hand them a book or refer them to a book, you're like, look, I, I wrote everything. I know down all my experiences, all my stories, all my frameworks, it's in this book.

They can kind of go off on their own and, and make it their own, uh, and, and sort of come back and say, I agree with this framework. I want to implement it, but there's not this sense of like, you know, sit down, I'm going to tell you how it is. We're going to do it my way.

It's like, look, I just, I put it in writing, I put it in black and white, and, you know, we can have a discussion about this, this object, this, you know, what, what's down there, sort of you and me together against this, which is also a thing Rick Rubin talks about. He's like, I don't want to talk about your creative ideas. I want to, I want to hear the thing that you made, and then we can talk about the fit, how to change the thing.

Right. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. So how was it going back to work? How long was your, was your encore?

Jim Sholler: It's, it was supposed to, I was going to start my own consulting business. So I've never done that before. I always worked for, you know, large companies.

So I was going to start my own consulting business. So I figured I don't have much of a network because everyone I knew worked at Fidelity. So I said, well, let me find a company looking for a problem manager and I'll apply for the job.

And I, in the application from LinkedIn, I took a lesson from the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza realizes that he needs to do the opposite of his, you know, of his intuition every time because it's always been wrong his whole life. So I do the opposite. So at the end of the application, I said, I really don't want this job.

And I went on to explain that, you know, I want to start consulting. So I will join for six months. I know what you need to do.

I'll put the, I'll hire the people. I'll put the process in place. I'll put the technology in place with ServiceNow and I'll get you set up.

And then after six months I'm done. And I just hit submit and kind of laughed and said, well, I'll never hear from them. And then the next morning they called me back in true Costanza format and said, you know, we really want to talk to you.

And so had a discussion. They convinced me to join full-time, not to do contracting. And I said, all right, you know, what, what's the harm?

I could do a year. And after a year I said, what's the, you know, I'll do two years. I really like it here.

And it wound up being two and a half years. And then I said, that's it. We're moving to Spain.

I'm done. So it was two and a half years. And it was a great experience.

We solved a significant number of major enterprise-wide issues affecting their global clients that people weren't resolving for years. And in matters of minutes, we were, we were knocking these things out. Very rewarding.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Unbelievable. Yeah.

I would think you'd have the world beating a path to your door. How did you decide to use Scribe when you, what was the journey, you know, from the idea from, from book to manuscripts to publisher? Like, I imagine that that took a few years.

What was the process there?

Jim Sholler: Yeah. So it's, it was just referral. So people, I was talking to a gentleman who continued on after I took the early voluntary buyout from Fidelity.

I was talking with one of my friends who was still at Fidelity. And he said, what are you going to do? And I said, well, you know, because he knows I'm not one to just go hit golf balls all day, you know, I got to do something.

So I said, well, you know, a lot of people, I'm sure this probably comes up a lot in your podcast. I had told people the story about my wife so many times and people would always, it would always end with, oh my God, you have to write a book. So when I was leaving Fidelity and my friend said, what are you going to do?

I said, well, apparently I have to write a book. So that's, that's what I'm going to do. So he said, and it was kind of half jokingly.

And he said, well, he had a friend, I forget the friend's name, unfortunately, but he had a friend who had worked with Scribe and he said, his friend could not speak highly enough about it. You have to check them out. So that was really, I, I looked into it.

I loved everything I saw, had my first meeting and it just, it went from there. Nine months later, I was, I was published.

Eric Jorgenson: No higher compliment by the way, than a friend telling you, oh my God, you should write a book. You know, they're not throwing that around too, too lightly. That's, that's fantastic.

Did you start writing on your own or did you wait until you had the publishing figured out? Okay. So you just, you just sat down and cranked.

Jim Sholler: I hate, I, I started, I wrote again, just by the way my brain works, I, I can't say I started writing. I started outlining, you know, and really doing an outline of how is this going to look? How is this going to flow?

Then when I started to work with Scribe, it kind of, you know, some of the training kicked in. So it, it kind of all came together right when it had to, because I was ready to start writing. And I think I was doing so much with the outline because I was afraid to start writing that like, you know, I could spend two years working on this outline.

I was like, dude, start writing. Enough, shut up, start writing.

Eric Jorgenson: It's so much less stressful to write bullet points than to write prose. Yeah. Yeah.

And then you had to kind of make that, that adjustment from your sister to be like, all right, we gotta, we gotta pick a path here, whether it's memoir or, or instruction with, you know, some personal anecdotes from that frame of mind. But, and how long did, how long was that process between when you maybe wrote the first sentence of your outline and published your book?

Jim Sholler: So it was, it was published nine months after I retired from Fidelity. So it was probably only about seven months to actually start writing. It was kind of what one month I'm not doing anything one month I'm going to, you know, work on, start outlining this at the end of that started to connect with scribe and then it was seven months and done.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's a, that's a, that's a quick path. You're as advertised and effective and effective, man.

Thinking of that time period, do you have advice for people who are in that position right now? Or kind of like, man, people keep telling me I should write a book. I don't really know where to start.

It seems like an intimidating mountain to climb. How do you solve that problem?

Jim Sholler: I would, I can only speak to what, what worked for me, but I would recommend really to anyone else is the, if you haven't done it before or sitting down to write a book is the analogy I use. It's kind of like someone walking into your kitchen with one of these super bowl, six foot long heroes or hoagies, depending on where you're from. And you can look at that and go, Oh my God, I can't eat that whole thing.

Eric Jorgenson: And I, I, I, I'm not afraid of it. I can eat a six foot hoagie. Just turn the lights off.

We'd be alone with this thing. I'll take care of it right now.

Jim Sholler: You have to come up. All right. First, you know, we, we need a methodology here.

We're going to cut it into pieces. We might have to invite some people over, you know, that's really, you know, kind of don't, don't get overwhelmed thinking about writing the book. Think about an outline.

Think about your team. And you know, step one in my process is build a team. So, you know, that, that works for this is okay.

Who's your team going to be? Cause you don't want it to just be you. If you've ever done it before, it's not going to be just you.

Who's your team. You know, I had my, my sister, some family scribe. So, okay.

I got my team. My step two is educate the team. In this case, the team was educate me.

So it was a little different and then work on, you know, the problem statement is create your problem statement of step three. In this case, it was the outline. Just take a month, you know, take however long you need the outline because writing the outline really kind of forces you to go, you keep revisiting and going back, you know, to find things.

And it just winds up being much fuller outline. If you give it the time it deserves.

Eric Jorgenson: Love it. Fantastic. And then from the outline, once you shifted into writing mode, it just kind of, just kind of happened.

Did you use dictation or tools or anything like that? Did you structure your schedule? What was it like tactically?

Jim Sholler: No, I, I'm a, a, uh, I pride myself on my typing abilities. So I typed it, but my approach was, I think that scribe is the, is where I got the advice of something along the lines of a hundred words a day should be your target. You know, don't think you're going to write the book tomorrow.

And so I did two things that were critical for me. One is I had a definite limitation, no matter where I was in my head, I had a definite limitation on roughly about a hundred I think it was a hundred words per day. It might be a thousand.

Maybe it was a thousand. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm sorry. Yeah. So a thousand words a day, definitely a thousand.

Sorry. So after a thousand, I would stop, but then the next key thing was every, and I don't know if this is for many people, but every day when I started, I started from the beginning of chapter and read all the way up to where I was. And by the time I got to where I last left off, my hands were just, the keyboard was smoking.

And I, you know, next thing I knew I was done with a thousand words and it was only, you know, an hour and a half or two hours later. And I tried that one day and it worked. And literally I did that for seven months and then I was done.

Eric Jorgenson: Wow. Interesting. That's a great technique.

I love that. I hope we taught that to you. I don't remember if we did or not, but I love that technique and I'm going to tell other people about it.

Jim Sholler: I actually, I've read the book a painful number of times now.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It's, it's, it's part of it. It's, you know, I think there's somewhere where you can tell when some authors haven't really read their own book.

And there's some authors I talked to that they go to read their audio book and they're like, Oh my God, I'm catching all these mistakes. It's why we recommend everybody do a read out loud edit, because when you slow down and when you read it out loud, you force yourself to articulate each word. You really evaluate each word through a new lens where your eyes just like skim over, especially on a computer.

If you're never, if you've never printed it out, you'll catch more things. And then if you're reading it, you'll catch more things, but it's just a matter of reps. So you got to read the thing a lot of times, a surprising number of times.

Jim, this has been amazing. I feel like I could, I could interrogate you for hours and keep unpacking this. I want to hear all the stories.

I want to osmosis your, your life's experience into my head so that I become a better problem solver. But I suppose that's what the book is for. So I'm going to go by the book and read it and try to become a better person.

I appreciate you very much. Where should people follow you, check you out, attempt to un-retire you again, anywhere you'd send people other than the book, of course, which is Solved in Seven, The Power of Disciplined Problem Solving.

Jim Sholler: Yeah. So thank you for sending people there. And the easiest way to contact me at this point is just solved in seven that with the number seven, not the word solved in seven at gmail.com and I'll get any, I get any notifications from there immediately. And I usually respond within hours.

Eric Jorgenson: Okay. Solved in seven at gmail.com. Fantastic.

Thank you so much for taking the time to write this book and to talk with us today. And I look forward to bringing you a success story of applying your method in the years to come.

Jim Sholler: Excellent. Thank you so much. I'm going to go finish reading the book of Elon now.