For those of you quiet blog readers, I know there are a handful of you who are faithful…here is the introduction to my upcoming podcast. The podcast is not officially available anywhere else but here for now, but Ill start pushing it out once we get a better feel for how to do this. Learning tons about podcasting. (And BTW- Amazon won’t allow me to post The Efficiency Playbook for whatever reason, hence its release has been delayed until they get the bugs worked out.)

Im hoping to make this a regular thing, maybe every other day, maybe more. Im getting some of the formatting and platers worked out and we whittled it down to soundcloud and a custom built site and I wanted to get your feedback on both the player as well as the content (though this is just an introduction). I already have about 45 episodes recorded, with another 30-40 planned, and feedback is appreciated!

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Pod Cast Show Notes:

– Meet Michael The Maven
– Learn Michael’s background
– What Michael hopes to bring with this podcast

Ladies and gentleman, good morning! My name is Michael Andrew. I am also known as Michael the Maven online. I am a photography instructor and I sell training videos in terms of how to make great pictures with your Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, Sony or Olympus cameras. I have been doing camera gig for about 10 years but this is a new thing for me, the podcast thing. I’ve never done it before. I have no idea how it’s gonna go.

At the time of this recording, I think there are probably about 5 or 10 people who are genuinely interested in what I have to say. But I have a feeling that this is something I should try out. I’ve recently published a book called “The Efficiency Playbook“. In the beginning of the book, I basically made a promise to my readers that if I get certain number of reviews on Amazon, I would launch the podcasts. What I’m doing now is preemptively starting it prepare because I promised I would publish on a daily basis and sometimes my schedule wouldn’t allow me to do that.

The book at this time has not been popped out through the mainstream. It’s not even published on Amazon yet because we are getting some marketing materials ready. Probably within a couple of weeks.

The Efficiency Playbook is an accumulation of 25 years of observation, testing, measuring, study, and recording on the topic of efficiency. How to become more productive. In the book, I talked about the difference about effectiveness which is getting something done and efficiency which is getting something done at a cost savings. There is a very important distinction.

If you are not aware of your own personal efficiency, you are at a disadvantage those who are aware and are making changes on a regular daily basis to the personal workflow, how they earn their income, how they even travel or prepare for work or school. If you are not aware of the concept of efficiency, it will greatly benefit you to read the Efficiency Playbook as wells as listen to this podcasts.

The goal is to have the very short podcasts chapters. I’m really going to aim between 5 to 10 minutes for most of them. Sometimes less, sometimes more.

If in any event we have a guest and I do an interview, I would imagine it would be up to an hour. I have 1 guest committed to coming to the show for now. Let me give a little bit of a background about myself so you know who I am, where I come from and how I got to the place that I am now today.

To make the long story short, I was raised in Northern California, in a little town called Rohnert Park. My freshman year in high school, I spent in Oslo, Norway at a Norwegian speaking school. My mother is Norwegian so I lived with my grandparents there for a year. That was really a life shaping event. I was between the years of 13-14 years old.

When I came back, I started playing football. I played 3 years of football in high school. Graduated. I did very well in school after being in Norway because in Norway I was required to concentrate so much to understand to what people are saying. It really taught me concentration. Before Norway, I was an average student, talking Cs and Bs in school, I was really terrible. After Norway, everything was As, I think I only got one B in my Senior year. I was invited by the Brigham Young football team as a walk-on. That is the first time I went up the stairs that I talked about in the book.
So I was thinking how this is playing to efficiency? Two steps, three steps and I found the answer and that is in the book. Went on to a Mormon Mission to Moscow, Russia.. another life shaping event between the years of 19 and 21 years old. I came back, walked on again at the BYU football team.

I played football at BYU for 5 years, at a Red Shirt year, at JV year and 3 Varsity years. One of the best experiences of my life: Norway, mission, BYU football. It was very life shaping. As a walk on, I often found myself as a prep team player, that is Rudy. If you have seen the movie Rudy, tackling dummy.

I was the only walk on from my freshman year to play or to make it on the team. I believe that was a very life shaping event. I think it made me really tough because you are basically hitting guys who are much more bigger than you sometimes. It makes you tough especially if you are not on a scholarship.

Graduated from Brigham Young with a degree in Zoology and Russian, minor in Chemistry and I had a full scholarship to the University of Alabama for grad school where I studied Molecular Biology, got a Masters in that. I ended up getting an MBA in Biotechnology and almost a PhD in Developmental Genetics. The problem with PhD was when you’re studying something called RNAi at that time, very similar to what is now known as Crisper, basically something that goes around and chops genes up based on RNA sequences. The problem with my project was that fruit fly embryos do not express what we are trying to test. Therefore, the test was a wash. Sometimes it works, sometimes it didn’t. We couldn’t reproduce it. My committee wanted me to do is restart my project, but at that point I have 13 years of college and felt that “I’m done.”

I went fulltime to become a wedding photographer. I had done some shooting on the side but I dropped out, became a wedding photographer and started applying some of my observations about efficiency. DId that for a couple of years as a wedding photographer. I started migrating back west, first in Utah for 8 months and then Arizona for about 2 years. And then I finally decided to move to Hawaii where my family was and I’ve been here ever since. I love living in Hawaii. I travel all the time for work. Sometimes I’m in Arizona, I spent a long time in 2015 about 8 months in Utah. I’m very flexible to where I’m working and what I’m doing. I haven’t purchased a home yet. I rent a very small, minimalist, it’s called an Ohana unit in Maui. It’s all I need. I’m a single guy, never been married, no kids. I’m able to devote an enormous amount of my time to the study of efficiency as well as production. I had been a producer for 2 independent films. One is called Love Everlasting, the other is called Sacred Vow. I was a cinematographer on that. I have a Youtube channel under the name of Michael the Maven. I teach photography and new camera reviews.

That is basically the summary of who I am. Oh! The disaster aid stuff. I have been on 6 or 7 international disaster aid trips. One of them was a follow up visit so I kind of call it as a half. I’ve been to Haiti, Japan, the Philippines, Vanuatu, Nepal and I have been back to some of those places which is why I say 6 or 7. I’ve done lots of disaster aid work all over United States. Katrina and Ivan hurricanes as some of my first, when i really got interested in it. I love doing disaster aid work. I love it. I can’t get enough of it. My bags are packed 24/7. If there is a disaster tomorrow, I can be on a plane the next day heading out. That is how insanely love doing disaster aid work. I know I’m good at it. I go in there and help find the packets of people who are not getting aid.

That is the round up of who I am. What I’m going to do in these podcasts is share with you many of the chapters that didn’t make it into the book. I have about 40 chapters listed that would probably make it onto the podcasts. Just things that I’ve learned and I couldn’t really fit them in the book because the book is getting long. And i kind of have it listed down. That is where we are going to start with this podcast. My main goal is to feed you, is to make you better, that’s my “why” is to share with you and to edify you and to teach you the things that I’ve learned the hard way so that you don’t have to learn them the hard way. I have no idea what I’m doing. I have no idea if this is going to be interesting to you but thank you for coming and visiting. I really look forward to sharing what i know about efficiency with you.

Thank you for listening. Come back again tomorrow and we’ll get started!